SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE •Tlg?>^o- A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH ' But it needs happy moments /or this skill." — The Scholar Gipst Neto gark THE MACMILLAN COMPANY . LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. I9IO All rights reserved Copyright, 1898, Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped September, 1898. Reprinted August, 1900; September, 1905; November, 1907 ; January, 1910. STortoooli 53«ss J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith Norwood Mass. U.S.A. PREFACE The object of this book, which was undertaken more than four years ago, is to give, from the literary point of view only, and from direct reading of the literature itself, as full, as well sup- plied, and as conveniently arranged a storehouse of facts as the writer could provide. The substitution of bird's-eye views and sweeping generalisations for positive knowledge has been very sedulously avoided ; but it is hoped that the system of Inter- chapters will provide a sufficient chain of historical summary as to general points, such as, for instance, the nature and progress of English prosody and the periods of prose style. No part of the book has been delivered as lectures ; and the sections of it con- cerning the EHzabethan period and the Nineteenth Century are not replicas of previous work on those subjects. None but a charlatan will pretend that he has himself written, and none but a very unreasonable person will expect any one else to write, a history of the kind free from blunders. The sincerest thanks are owed to Mr. W. P. Ker, Fellow of All Souls and Quain Professor of English Literature in University College, London, and to Mr. G. Gregory Smith, Lecturer in English in the University of Edinburgh, for their great kindness in reading the proofs of the book, and for their most valuable suggestions. But the author is wholly responsible, not merely for all the errors ▼ VI A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE of fact that may have escaped their scrutiny, but for all the critical opinions put forward in the volume. Nor has his object been to make these opinions prominent, but rather to supply something approaching that solid platform, or at least framework, of critical learning without which all critical opinion is worthless, and upon which such opinion can be more easily built or hung afterwards. Reading of the books themselves is the only justification pre- cedent in such a case on the part of the writer; and his only object should be to provoke and facilitate reading of the books themselves on the part of his readers. Edinburgh, z^th July, 1898. CONTENTS BOOK I THE PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER I THE EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY PAGE IVidsith — Beoivulf — Waldhere znd i\\c Fight at Finnsburg — Deor , i CHAPTER II r C.EDMON, CYNEWULF, AND THOSE ABOUT THEM Anglo-Saxon poetry mostly sacred — MSS. — Csedmon and Cynewulf — The Scriptural poems — Csedmon — Judith — The Christ — The Lives of Saints — Other sacred poems — Secular poems — The Huin — The Wanderer and Seafarer ... . . . . . 9 CHAPTER III ANGLO-SAXON PROSE The works of King Alfred — The Boethius — The Orosius — The Bede — The Pastoral Care — The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — Elfric — Wulfstan 19 CHAPTER IV t;ie decadence of anglo-saxon 29 INTERCHAPTER I 32 vii Viu A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BOOK II THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER I THE TRANSITION FACE The sleep of English — Awakening influences — Latin — French influ- ence — Geofi"rey of Monmouth — Latin prosody in the Early Middle Ages — The Hymns — Alliteration and rhyme — Rhythm and metre — French prosody — Syllabic equivalence in English — Helped by Anglo-Saxon — Law of pause in English 39 CHAPTER II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 1 200-1250 Layamon's Brut — The Ortnulum — Its spelling — Its metre — The Ancren Riwle — The Moral Ode — Genesis and Exodus — The Bestiary — The Orison of our Lady — Proverbs of Alfred and Hetidyng — The Owl and the Nightingale ..... 48 CHAPTER III SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 1300- I 360 Robert of Gloucester — Robert Manning — Lyrics — The Ayenbite of Inwyt — The Northern Psalter — Manning — WilUam of Shoreham — The Cursor Mimdi — Hampole — Adam Davy — Laurence Minot — Cleanness and Patience — The Pearl .... 62 CHAPTER IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL Sir Tristretn — Havelok the Dane — King Horn — King Alisaunder • — Arthour and Aferlin — Richard Cceur de Lion — The Seven Sages — Bevis of Hampton — Guy of Warwick — Ywain and CONTENTS IX Gawain — Lybeaus Desconus — The King of Tars — Emare — Sir Orpheo — Flore^ice of Rome — The Earl of Toulouse — The Squire of Low Degree — Sir Cleges and Le Fraine — Ipomydon — Amis and Amiloun — Sir Amadas — Sir Trianiour — King Athel- sione, etc. — The Thornton Romances — Charlemagne Romances . 82 CHAPTER V EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE Gawain and Ike Green Knight — The Awti/yrs of Arthur — William of Palerne — Joseph of Arimathea — The Thornton Morte d'Arthure — Th^ Destruction of Troy — lihe Pistyl of Susan . . .102 INTERCHAPTER II 109 BOOK III CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES CHAPTER I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS Life — Probably spurious Tales — Other questioned work — The argu- ments for and against it — Admittedly genuine work — The three periods — The Romaiint of the Rose — The Minor Poems — Troiliis and Cressid — The House of Fame — The Legend of Good IVonien — The Canterbury Tales . . . . . . • I'S CHAPTER II LANGLAND AND GOWER Piers Plo7uwan — Argument of the B Poem — Gower — The Confessio Amantis — Gower's reputation ....... 131 CHAPTER III Chaucer's prose — wyci.ik, tkkvisa, mandeville Turning-point in prose — Chaucer's prose tales — His Boethius — The Astrolabe — • Wyclif — John of Trevisa — Sir John Mandeville — The first prose style ......... 143 INTERCHAPTER III 152 X A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BOOK IV THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY CHAPTER I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS — LYDGATE TO SKELTON PAGE Contempt for fifteenth-century literature — Lydgate — Occleve — Boke- nam — Audelay and Minors — Hawes — The Pastime of Pleasure — The Example of Viriue — Barclay — The Ship of Fools — The Eclogues — Skelton — His life — His poems ..... 157 CHAPTER II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND MINOR Lateness of Scottish Literature — Barbour — Wyntoun — Blind Harry — Minors — Lyndsay — His life — His works — The Satire of the Three Estates — Minor poems lyi CHAPTER III THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS The King^s Quair — Henryson — The Testament and Complaint of Creseide — The Fables — Kobene and Makyne — Minor poems — Dunbar — The Twa Maryit IVemen and the Wedo — Other large poems — Gawain Douglas — His life — His original poems — His Aeneid 180 CHAPTER IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE Sir Generydes, etc. — Sir Launfal — The verse Morte Arthur — Gola- gros and Gawane and Rauf Coilyear — Malory — Lord Berners — Caxton's translated romances , 193 CONTENTS XI CHAPTER V MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS PAGE Date of Ballads — The Nut-browne Mayde — " I sing of a maiden" — The Percy Folio — Graysteel 200 CHAPTER VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE Importance of fifteenth-century prose — Pecock — His style and vocab- ulary — Fortescue, Capgrave, Fabyan — Caxton — Fisher — His advances in style — More — Latimer — Coverdale — Cranmer . 205 INTERCHAPTER IV 215 BOOK V . ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO THE DEATH OF SPENSER CHAPTER I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA Unbroken development of Drama from Miracle Plays — Origin of these — The Miracle-Play cycles, etc. — Non-sacred episodes — Morali- ties — The Four Elements — Other Interludes — John Heywood and The Four PP — Thcrsites — Other Interludes — Their drift — Bale's King John — Ralph Roister Doister — Gammer Gurton's Needle — Gorhoduc — Other early attempts — The demand and the supply — Early plays by Gascoigne and others — Disputes as to plays — Difficulties in their way 219 CHAPTER II PRELIMINARIES — PROSE Elyot — The Governour — Cavendish — Lcland — Cheke — Wilson — Ascham — II is Letters — Toxophilus — The Schoolmaster — Their characteristics ........... 234 xil A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER III PRELIMINARIES VERSE PAGB The state of poetry c. 1530 — Good effect of Italian — Wyatt's life — Surrey's — Wyatt's forms and subjects — Those of Surrey — The main characteristics of the pair — Wyatt's rhyme and rhythm — Surrey's metrical advance — ToiiePs Uliscellany — Other miscella- nies — Verse translations — Churchyard — Whetstone — Tusser — Turberville — Googe — Gascoigne — His Ittstruciions — His poems ■~'Y\\Q Alirror for Magistrates — Sackville's part in it . . . 242 CHAPTER IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES The Leicester House circle — Sidney — His life — The sonnets — The Defence of Poesy — The Arcadia — Spenser — The " classical metre " craze — Other poets of Sidney's circle — Watson — Greville — Warner — The sonneteers of 1 592-96 — Constable — The satirists 260 CHAPTER V THE UNIVERSITY WITS The general drama of 1570-90 — The University Wits — Lyly — His plays — Peele — Greene — Marlowe — Kyd — Lodge — Nash — Their vi'ork — Its kind in drama — Its vehicle in blank verse — Peek's plays — Those of Greene, Lodge, Nash, and Kyd — The lyrics of the group — Marlowe's plays 280 CHAPTER VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, PAMPHLETEERS, AND CRITICS Ascham's prose — Defects of the type — The ebb and flow of style — Euphuism — Eiiphues — Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit — Euphues and his England — Their style — Its ancient instances — Its ver- nacularity — Its unnatural history — Hooker — Contemporaries of Lyly and Hooker — The translators — Their characteristics — The pamphleteers — Martin Marprelate — The critics .... 294 INTERCHAPTER V 307 CONTENTS xni I BOOK VI LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE CHAPTER I SHAKESPEARE PAGE The luck of Jacobean literature — Concentration of the great drama in it — Shakespearian chronology — The life — The work — The poems — The Sonnets — Their formal and spiritual supremacy — Probable divisions of plays: the earlier — Their verse and phrase — Their construction — Their characters — The middle division : the A/c'rry Wives — The Romantic comedies — The great tragedies, Roman and Romantic — Last plays — Doubtful plays . . . 313 CHAPTER II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA Disposition of the subject — Chronological and biographical cautions — Ben Jonson — His and other " humour " — His plays — His verse — The three masterpieces — Later plays — The Mas(jues — Beau- mont and Fletcher — Their lives — Their characteristics — And merits — Specimen plays — Shadowy personality of other dramatists — SulTiciency of their work — Chapman — Marston — Dekker — Middleton — Hey wood — Webster — His two great plays — Day — Tourneur — Rowley 33° CHAPTER III THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY Drayton — The PolyoIMon — Other poems — Daniel — Sylvester — Sir John Davies — Minor poets — Chapman — Fairfax — Campion — The Spcnserians : minor poets — The Fletchers — Giles — Phineas — W. Browne — Wither — Basse — The lyrical impulse — Jonson's poems — Donne 350 XIV A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR PAGE Bacon — His life — His writings — His style — His use of figures — His rhetorical quality — Jonson's prose — The Discoveries — Their essay-nature — Protean appearances of essay — Overbury's Charac- ters — The Character generally — Burton — The Anatomy — His " melancholy " — His style — Selden — The Authorised Version — Minors 369 CHAPTER V THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — I Great pulpit oratory necessarily late — Function of sermons, 1600-1800 — Andrewes — Ussher — Hall — Donne 382 INTERCHAPTER VI 387 BOOK VII CAROLINE LITERATURE CHAPTER I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET The central period of English prosody — Distribution of Caroline poetry — Milton — His life — The earlier poems — Camus — The blank verse — Lycidas — Sonnets — The longer poems — The blank verse — Their matter — Milton's place in English prosody — Cowley — His couplets — The lyrics — The Pindarics — Denham — Waller — The " reform of our numbers " 39I CHAPTER II THE METAPHVSICALS — THE LYRIC POETS — THE MISCELLANISTS, ETC. Meaning of the term " metaphysical " — Crashaw — George Herbert — Vaughan — Herrick — Carew — Randolph — Habington — Cart- wright — Corbet — Suckling — Lovelace — Cleveland and others — Marvell — Bishop King — Sherburne, Godolphin, Stanley, Cot- ton, Brome — Quarles, More, Beaumont — Davenant — Chamber- layne — Miscellanies 411 CONTENTS XV CHAPTER III THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES PAGE Massinger — Ford — Shirley — Randolph — Suckling — Davenant — Brome — Nabbes and Davenport — Glapthorne .... 432 CHAPTER IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT II Jeremy Taylor — Fuller — South — Barrow — Baxter, Chillingworth, Hall, and others 439 CHAPTER V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE Milton's prose — Its faults and beauties — Sir Thomas Browne — Religio Medici — Vulgar Errors — Urn Burial — The Garden of Cyrus — Clarendon — Hobbes — Felltham — Howell — Walton . . 447 CHAPTER VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE Reformation verse — Alexander Scott — Montgomerie — Sir Robert Ay- ton — The Earl of Stirling — Drummond — Prose — The Complaint of Scotland — Knox and Buchanan — King James — Sir Thomas Urquhart ' 458 INTERCHAPTER VII 467 BOOK vin THE AUGUSTAN AGES CHAPTER I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY The term "Augustan" — Its use here — Dryden — His life — His earlier poems — The satires, etc. — The I-'al'lrs — His verse — But- ler — Restoration lyric — Satires of Marvell and Oldham . -47' xvi A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA PAGE The stage at the Restoration — The Heroic play — Dryden's comedies — Etherege — Shadvvell — Sedley — Mrs. Behn — Wycherley — The Rehearsal — The great artificial comedy — Congreve — Van- brugh — Farquhar — Gibber — Mrs. Gentlivre — Restoration tragedy — Dryden's Heroic plays — His blank-verse plays — His play-songs and prologues — Growne and Settle — Otway — Lee — Southerne and Rowe ........... 483 CHAPTER III THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE Tendency of Restoration prose — Its pioneers — Cowley's prose — Dry- den — Temple — Tillotson — Halifax — Sprat — The Royal Society and style — Bunyan — His four chief things — The English Rogue — Thomas Burnet — Glanvill — The Diarists — Evelyn — Pepys — Roger North — Minors — Locke — Degradation of style at the close of the century — L'Estrange — Collier — Tom Brown — Dunton . 506 CHAPTER IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE i Swift — His life — His verse — His prose — His quality and achieve- ment — The Essayists — Steele — His plays — Addison's life — His miscellaneous work — His and Steele's Essays — Bentley — Middle- ton — Arbuthnot — Atterbury — Bolingbroke — Butler and other divines — Shaftesbury — Mandeville — Berkeley — Excellence of his style — Defoe 528 CHAPTER V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE Divisions of eighteenth-century verse — Pope : his life — His work — His character — His poetry — His couplet and paragraph — His phrase — His subjects — Garth — Blackmore — Congreve, etc. — Prior — His metrical importance — Gay — Young — Parnell — Lady Winchelsea 549 INTERCHAPTER VIII 564 CONTENTS xvii BOOK IX MIDDLE AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE CHAPTER 1 THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE PAGE Thomson — His life — His minor poems — The Seasons — The CasHe of Indolence — Dyer — Blair and Green — Shenstone — Collins — Gray — Byrom, Savage, and others — Akenside — Resurrection of the Ballad : Percy and others — Dodsley's Miscellany — Smart — Mason — Falconer — The Wartons — Churchill — Chatterton — Beattie — Langhorne and Mickle — Cowper — Crabbe — Blake — Burns — His predecessors from Ramsay to Fergusson — His poetic quality 567 CHAPTER II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL Richardson — Fielding — Smollett — Sterne — Minor novelists — Wal- pole — Beckford — Mrs. Radcliffe — Lewis 598 CHAPTER III JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS Writers-of-all-work — Johnson's life — His reputation — Work — And style — Goldsmith — His verse — His prose — Other essayists . 613 CHAPTER IV THE GRAVER PROSE Lateness of history in English — Hume — Roljertson — Minors — Gib- bon — The Atttolnography — The Decline and Tall — His style — iiurke — His rhetorical supremacy — Qualities of his style and method — Theology and Philosophy — Warhurton — Paley — Adam Smith — Godwin — I lis importance and position .... 622 xviii A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER V EIGHTEENTH-CENTUKV DRAMA PAGE The conundrum of the drama — Fading of eighteenth-century tragedy — Minor comic writers : the domestic play — Goldsmith — Sheridan — His three great pieces 636 CHAPTER VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS The letter-writers — Lady Mary — Chesterfield — Horace Walpole — " Junius " — Boswell 642 INTERCHAPTER IX 649 BOOK X THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE CHAPTER I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS The turning-point — Coleridge — His criticism — Wordsworth — His inequality — His theories — His genius and its limitations — Southey — Scott — His poetical quality — Byron — His reputation — And contribution to English poetry — Shelley — His poems and his poetry — Keats — Landor — Moore — Campbell .... 653 CHAPTER II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN The novel, c. 1800-1814 — Scott's adoption of it — IVaverley and its successors — His general achievement — Miss Austen — Miss Edge- worth — Miss Ferrier — Gait — Ainsworth and James — Lord Beaconsfield — Bulwer-Lytton — Others : Lockhart — Peacock — Lever — Marryat — Michael Scott — Hook and others . . . 677 CONTENTS XIX CHAPTER III THE NEW ESSAY PAGE Progress and defects of the earlier essay — Magazines and Reviews — The Edinburgh: Jeffrey — Its contributors: Scott's criticism — Brougham — Sydney Smith — The Quarterly — The new Maga- zine — Black-wood' s : " Christopher North " — Lockhart • — The Lon- don — Lamb — Leigh Hunt — Hazlitt — De Quincey — Landor's prose — Cobbett .......... 691 CHAPTER IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE Southey's prose — Historical writing: Mitford, Roscoe, and others — Hallam — Milman — Arnold, Grote, and Thirlwall — Mackintosh and Bentham — Macaulay ........ 706 CHAPTER V THE MINOR POETS OF 180O-183O Rogers — Leigh Hunt and Hogg — A group of minors — Elliott, Mrs. Hemans, and " L. E. L." — Hood — Praed — Macaulay — Hawker and Barnes — Hartley Coleridge — Sir H.Taylor — Home — Bar- ley — Beddoes 715 INTERCHAPTER X 724 BOOK XI VICTORIAN LITERATURE CHAPTER I TENNYSON AND BROWNING Tennyson: his early work and its character — The volumes of 1842 — His later life and worlds — The Princess — In M^ernorio/n — Maud — The Idylls of the King, etc. — Robert Browning — Periods of his work — His favourite method — His real poetical appeal — Edward FitzGerald — Elizabeth Barrett Browning ..... 727 XX A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL PAGE Dickens — Thackeray — His early work — Charlotte Bronte — Mrs. Gaskell — Charles Reade — Anthony TroUope — George Eliot — Charles Kingsley — Others — R.L.Stevenson .... 740 CHAPTER III HISTORY AND CRITICISM Carlyle — His life and works — His genius — His style — Kinglake — Buckle — Freeman — Green — Froude — Matthew Arnold — Mr. Ruskin — Art in English literature — Symonds — Pater. . . 758 CHAPTER IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY Matthew Arnold — The " Spasmodics " — Clough — Locker — The Earl of Lytton — The Pre-Raphaelites — Their preparation — Dante and Christina Rossetti — William Morris — O'Shaughnessy — Others . 774 CHAPTER V MISCELLANEOUS J. S. Mill — Mansel — John Austin — Others — Newman — Borrow — Others — Science — Darwin — The Ves/iges — Hugh Miller — Hux- ley 787 CONCLUSION 795 INDEX 799 • BOOK I THE PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE O^-^ '"^ '' CHAPTER ^ THE EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY WidsM — Beowulf — Waldkere and the Fight at Finnsburg — Dear The oldest document which has a possibly authentic claim to be English Literature,^ if but English Literature in the making and far off completion, is the poem commonly called Widsith, from its opening word, which some take to be a proper name.'- Others simply see in it the designation of a " far-travelled " singer, who here recounts his journeyings in 143 lines of no great literary beauty, and only interesting as sketching the gainful and varied life of a minstrel in the Dark Ages, were it not for the proper names which 1 Fuller English treatments of this matter will be found in Mr. Stopford Brooke's History of Early English Literature ; in Mr. H. Morley's English Writers, vols. i. and ii.; in Professor Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature; and in the translation of Ten Brink's English Literature, vol. i. The texts discussed in this chapter form the first five numbers of Grein-Wul(c)ker's Dibliothek der angels&chsischen Poesie, vol. i., pp. 1-277, which gives two texts oi Beowulf. This latter has been frequently edited and translated ; Professor Earle's Deeds of Beowulf is a good translation without text. 2 Some high authorities, looking upon Widsith as a " made-up " thing, hold it to be later, and would assign the priority to the Finnsburg fragment or others. No opinion one way or the other is expressed here ; indeed, the writer holds that the evidence is insufficient for adopting any. But it may be convenient to make the point an occasion in limine for a respectful request to readers not to take absence of mention of theories of this kind, or statements in the text apparently antagonistic to them, as proof of ignorance on the writer's part. This book attempts to be a history, not of the latest or any opinions about literature, but of that literature itself. The practically endless questions of authenticity, integrity, date, and so forth must be, as a rule, left to special study. B I 2 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i bestrew the piece. Not a few of these occur, or seem to occur, in other early verse, and have the interest of the "parallel passage." But three are, or seem to be, those of persons well known to history — Eormanric or Hermanric,^ King of the Goths ; A^tla. or Attila, the Scourge of God and the King of the Huns ; and, lastly, a certain ^Ifwine, whom some think identical with Alboin or Albovine, King of the Lombards, the husband, the insulter, and the victim of Rosmunda. It is, of course, obvious at once that though it is not impossible for the same man to have been contemporary with Her- manric, who died in 375, and Attila. who died in 433, no con- temporary of either could have seen the days of Alboin, who felt his wife's revenge in 572. Therefore either ^Ifwine must be somebody else or the poem is doubtful. Into such discussiofts this book will never enter, unless there is the strongest reason of a purely literary character for them, and there is none such here. It is sufficient to say that (f Eormanric is the Hermanric known to history, and z/" '' Widsith " saw his day, this document dates within the confines of the fourth century, at a time when no other modern language can show proofs of having had even a rudimentary existence. The MS., the famous Exeter Book'^ of gehwilciim \>ingu7n (" things of sorts "), which Bishop Leofric gave to his Cathedral some 700 years later than Hermanric's day, and which still remains there, could, of course, not be expected to give us the original form of the " word-hoard," of which in his first line ^ the Far-Traveller declares the unlocking. Yet it shows us a language very remote indeed from English in appearance (though this same word " word-hoard," which appears with the omission of a single letter, shows the remoteness to be more apparent than real), but also different from Continental Old-Saxon, and from Icelandic, its nearest relations, neighbours, and contempo- raries. This language — a point more important to literature — is arranged, or can be arranged, in lines of not strictly regular length, and obeying no law of rhythm that apparently resembles those of any modern or classical prosody, except that there is a sort of far-off echo of trochaic cadence, and that the lines approach the ordinary octosyllable or dimeter more than any other form. There is no rhyme, for though it is by no means uncommon for two or more adjacent lines to end in the same syllable, this syllable is one on which the voice would lay no stress. Neither is there assonance or vowel-rhyme, the preliminary 1 See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chap. xxvi. 2 Ed. Thorpe (London, 1842) ; in course of re-editing for the Early English Text Society by I. Gollancz (vol. i. London, 1895), in both cases with translations. Its contents will be noted later. 3 Widsith matholade : word-hord onleac = " Widsith spoke, (he) unlocked (hisj word-hoard." CHAP. I EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 3 to rhyme itself in most of the Romance tongues. But there is a very curious, though, in Widsith, elusive and irregular, system of allitera- tion, by which certain words, often, though far from always, two in the earlier half of the line and one in the later, begin either with the same consonant or with a vowel. And it is further usually arranged that the stress, accent, length, or whatever word be preferred, shall fall on these alliterated syllables whether it falls on others or not.^ As for the purely literary characteristics, the nature of the piece, which, as has been said, is little more than a catalogue of names, gives very small scope. Imaginative critics have, however, discovered in it that specially English delight in roving which has distinguished many of our race — as well as, for instance, such hardly English persons as Ulysses and Sindbad. There are names in Widsith — Heorot, Hrothgar, and others — which connect the poem, so far as they go, with one of much greater extent, interest, and merit, though, if the furthest age which each can reasonably claim be assigned, decidedly younger. This is the famous Beowulf , according to some the first on the beadroll of substantive and noteworthy poems in English, using that word in the most elastic sense, and according to all who have given themselves the trouble (now minimised by scholarly assistance, if the help of the scholars be taken and their snares resisted) to acquaint themselves with it, a saga of undoubted age, originality, and interest. Adopting the same system which we adopted in the case of Widsith, that of selecting the earliest dated name that can be reasonably identified with one mentioned in the poem, Beowulf , so far as subject goes, would be as old as the second decade of the sixth century, 520 or a little earlier, when a certain fairly historical Chochilaicus raided the Frisian coast, according to Gregory of Tours. This Chochilaicus is plausibly conjectured to be the Hygelac of the poem. But beyond this it will not be safe to go. for scholarly conjecture, or perhaps it were better to say conjectural scholarship, has for the better part of a century let itself loose over the date, scene, meaning, and composition of the piece. Whether it was brought from Jutland by the Saxon invaders and Anglicised or was composed in Erkgland itself; whether the scenery is that of the east or the west coasts of the North Sea ; whether it is an entire poem or a congeries of ballads ; whether it is a literal history embellished poetically, a deliberate romance, or a iThis account of prosody is based in the first place on Widsith, and is not intenrled as controversial against those who, with Dr. Sievers, insist on the exact character of the .Anglo-Saxon scheme such as it was. It acquired, no doubt, a good deal of such exactness in time ; though any one who will reflect on the conse- quences of tlic fact that the texis exist almost invariably in single MSS., will be slow to accept any but wide conclusions. PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i myth — -all these questions have been asked with the pains, answered with the confidence, and the answers all poohpoohed with the disdain usual, if not invariable, in such cases. We shall only say here that the date, admittedly uncertain, is somewhat unimportant ; that the ques- tion "History, fiction, or myth?'' is not of the kind here dealt with; and that while some have been hardy enough to pronounce with confidence that the scenery must be Northumbrian and no other, ^ the present writer would undertake to find twenty coast districts in Eng- land, and feels certain that there are twenty times twenty and more i.!so out of it, which would perfectly fit. To the student of literature who can be content to pretermit the unnecessary, Beowulf presents itself in a manner which may be sum- marised as follows : It is a poem, in rather less than 3200 lines, which must of necessity be very old, and which, for reasons to be mentioned presently, is in its original form very likely as old as, or older than, all but the first invasion of Britain by the Saxons The history of its unique MS.,^ though too long to be given in detail here, adds to its interest. This is part of one (Vitellius A. XV.) of those famous treasures of Sir Robert Cotton's which form almost the most precious part of the British Museum Library, and one of those which were only saved so as by fire in 1731. It is not known where it came from, and though it was catalogued by Humphrey Wanley a quarter of a century before the fire, he unfort- unately mistook its subject, and the interest which then still pre- vailed as to Anglo-Saxon literature (though it afterwards waned for the greater part of the century) was not immediately directed to it. Its supposed connection with Denmark, in Wanley's description, attracted the learned Icelander Thorkelin to it, and, after vicissi- tudes, his version appeared in 181 5, since which it has been con- stantly re-edited and translated. Meanwhile the MS. hjid been going from worse to worse ever since the fire, and the superstructure of com- mentatorial editing has been constantly adding more and more super- fluous matter. One of the few if not facts yet opinions which seem worth holding fast is that in its present form the MS. is probably not older than the tenth century, and that the poem had by that time under- gone divers changes in shape and dialect. Another fact of the first literary value is that the chief incidents of its first part reproduce themselves in the most curious way in one of the five great Icelandic sagas, that oiGrettir the Strong. ^ 1 For is there not a Bowlby Cliff close to Staithes in Yorkshire? and is it not the tallest on the English and Scottish mainland? and does not Bowlby = Bow- wowlby = Beowulfby? And did not Caedmon live at Whitby, a few miles oflf? Indeed, for a commentatorial sorites the logic is rnther unusually perfect, 2 Which also contains Judith ; see next chapter. 3 Englished by Morris and Magnusson, London, 1869. CHAP. I EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 5 As for its subject, there is, as is very usual in poems of its class, a sort of genealogical prologue wherein there is a confusion of Beowulfs. The proper action does not begin for a hundred lines or so, when we hear of the happiness of Hrothgar, a king whose court is at Heorot, and its marring by a monster named Grendel who enters the hall by night and slaughters the thanes. This continues for twelve years, till Beowulf, our Beowulf, a thane of King Hygelac's, who dwells over the sea, hears of the nuisance and determines to end it. He journeys towards Heorot, and, after some demurs by the coastguard thereof, arrives and is hospitably received by Hrothgar and his queen, though there is some jealousy among the nobility. The adventure is committed to Beowulf, and Grendel does not fail to come at night. Indeed, he has seized one warrior before Beowulf grips him. Then begins the first and not one of the worst of the fights of English poetry — which has good fights. The monster is not vulnerable by steel, so that Beowulf's men cannot help him ; but the chief tears off the fiend's arm, shoulder and all, and he flies to die in the mere where his den is, making it boil with his blood. There is much triumph, feasting, singing, gift-giving, and the like. But after all Something renews the attacks on Heorot, and an etheling of high blood is carried off". Beowulf is not in the hall, having been guested elsewhere, but he soon hears from the King that his adventure is not done, and determines to finish it in the mere itself. He dives fearlessly in, and on reaching the bottom is caught by a water-hag, Grendel's mother, who has killed the etheling. The fight is fiercer than that with her son ; the hero's earthly weapons are useless against the hag, and he is actually beaten by her in wrestling and for a moment at her mercy. But his byrnie (mail- shirt) is better as a defence than his sword in offence, and hard by him, on the cave floor where the fight takes place, he sees a mighty falchion within reach. He gains it, draws it, and cuts the hag's head off, doing the same afterwards to the dead body of C/rendcl, which he finds near by ; but the blood of the fiends is so venomous that the sword itself, though it had strength to slay, melts in the poison. Meanwhile Beowulfs men above on the bank have given liim up for lost, and Hrothgar's men have gone away. But his own comrades remain, welcome him as he swims up triumpliantlv with Grendel's head, and escort him m triumph to court with the head and the hilt of the sword. The most interesting part of the poem is over, but only just half its length is exhausted. Proper ceremonies at Heorot follow, and a long report of Beowulf to Hygelac. This king falls \n battle (perhaps, as said above, historically), and Beowulf succeeds him, to be plagued in his turn not by a water fiend l)Ut by a land 6 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i dragon, whose hoard has been rifled, and who in revenge lays waste the country, burning all houses, even the palace, with his fiery breath. Beowulf determines to meet him single-handed and does so, all his men but one flying in terror. He slays the dragon, but is mortally injured by the teeth and fire-jets of the enemy. The poem finishes with laments, condemnation of the cowardly fliers, and the rummag- ing of the dragon's hoard. The vehicle of it is a line of the same kind (with minor variations) as that described under IVidsith, but the different nature of the sub- ject (and, no doubt, also the greater genius of the author, and the wider scope afforded) raises it much above that composition as poetry. As is the case with all the pieces in this section, it has been rather wildly and unreservedly praised, and has been made to bear all sorts of meanings and messages which the unilluminated may fail to dis- cover. But it is a good verse-saga, spirited in incident, not destitute of character, and showing, though an early and rudimentary, yet a by no means clumsy or puerile system of poetic phrase, composition, and thought. The fights are good fights ; Beowulf, though, as we should expect, something of a boaster, is a gentleman and a tall man of his hands. Hunferth, Hrothgar's jealous courtier and "orator," is, after his fashion, a gentleman too — it is he who lends Beowulf a sword for the second encounter; the appearance of Hrothgar's queen is gracious ; the pictures of the sea and the mere (its waters over- shrouded by trees with writhen roots), and the spear-stalks in the hall, ash-staved and gray-steel-tipped, are not to be despised. This is the verdict of the strictest criticism of intrinsic merit, putting 'the historic estimate aside altogether. And if, as we are surely entitled to do in a history, we do not put the historic estimate aside — if we take into consideration the fact, which is all but a certain fact, that Beowulf is the very oldest poem of any size and scope in any modern language, that it has no known predecessors,^ and has the whole literature of romance for successors — then without attribut- ing to it merits which it cannot claim, or muddling it up with myths which simply minish its interest, we shall see that it is a very venerable document indeed, well worth the envy of the nations to whom it does not belong. Even if it were no older than its MS., Beowulf would be the senior of the Chanson de Roland by nearly a century, the senior of the Poema del Cid by two, the senior of the Nibelungen Lied by two or three. In reality it is possibly the elder of the eldest of these by half a millennium. Some of those who love 1 There are, of course, those who say that it had many. But, if so, these many "have the defect of being lost," and perhaps it may be said also that of not being known ever to have existed. The text speaks only of known and existing work oi epical form. CHAP. I EARLIEST ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 7 England least have been fain to admit that we have the best poetry in Europe ; it is thanks mainly to Beowulf that our poetry can claim the oldest lineage, and poetical coat-armour from the very first. The other remains which certainly or probably belong to the same class chronologically with Widsith and Beowulf are of much shorter length, and, with one exception, of less interest. The fragment (about sixty lines) called W'aldherc ("Walter") would seem to belong to an old, if not oldest, edition, so to speak, of that cycle of Burgun- dian sagas of which the Nibeluneen Lied presents us with , 11- 1 11- • 1 r 1 IValdhere a later handhng, though this particular fragment has and the nothing to do with that poem. So, too, the Fight at p^-fJl^^^' Finnsburg (fifty lines), another fragment, has for its main, if not its sole, English interest, besides the language, the fact that the subject is mentioned in Beoiuulf as the theme of song, though, of course, not necessarily of this song. But the third, the fifth of the whole group as usually arranged, has greater attractions. This is the so-called Cotnplaint of Deor, which in the first place is, though a short, a complete piece ; in the second, has not merely unity as a composition, but individual spirit and interest as a poem ; and in the third, shows us an immense advance in poetical form. Deor is a minstrel who has fallen out of favour with his lord, his supplanter being a certain Heorrenda, skilled in song. The fifty- two verses of the poem are individually like those already noticed, but they are arranged in a different fashion, being divided into stanzas of irregular length by a refrain — Thses ofereode : thisses swa mseg. That was got over : so may this be. The instances which he alleges to confirm himself in his hoc olitn meminisse juvabity the trials of VVayland the great smith, the betrayal of Beadohild, with other woes of Geat, of Theodoric, of Hermanric, have some attraction of curiosity, and the general tone of pluck facing luck is manly and interesting. But the advance in form is the real charm of the poem. If Deor is really very old, its author had attained, though only in a rough and rudimentary fashion, to some of those secrets of lyrical poetry which were as a rule hidden from Anglo-Saxon bards even of a much later day. He had grasped the stanza, the great machine for impressing form upon the almost form- less void ; ^ and he had grasped the refrain, which is not only a mighty set-off to poetry in itself, but has the inestimable property of naturally suggesting rhyme, the greatest and most precious of all poetical accidents. When tho ear has once caught the charm of 1 There is a theory that the stanza came first; but here again all the other examples are lost, and none arc known to have existed. 8 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i repeated sound in this way, the brain ahnost inevitably suggests the multiplication of it without damage to sense, by repeating not the whole line but part of the line only. We have not in Deor reached really exquisite poetry, but we are safely on the way towards it. We have the passionate interpretation of things felt and seen ; we have the couching of that interpretation in rhythmical utterances subjected to and equipped with arrangements and ornaments beyond those of the mere integral line ; and we have the confinement of the utterance within a reasonable length. When you have these things in poetry, you have not yet everything, but you are on the way to have it. The reserved point, in reference to this batch of poems, which has been more than once mentioned above is this : that in no one of them is there the slightest evidence, apart from their existence in more or less antique forms of Anglo-Saxon, of any connection with England. The supposed indications of scenery are, as has been said above, and must be very seriously repeated, the shadow of a shade, the dream of a dream ; no one who has had any share of training in the apprecia- tion of evidence will attach the slightest importance to them. There are passages in Widsiih, in Beowulf, in Deor, which seem to argue a knowledge of Christianity ; but all of these may be interpolations, and none of them is decisive to a balanced judgment. And such historical or quasi-historical references ( the more important noted above) as we do find seem to carry us back to periods about the fourth and fifth centuries ; while there is nothing in any of them, except the quite indecisive Alboin identification, which suggests a date later than 500, and nothing, even this, that goes later than 600. Therefore it has seemed to no bad wits not impossible, or even improbable, that this group may represent the documents, certainly not "fifty volumes long," or at least the traditions, which the Anglo- Saxon-Jutes carried with them as " cabin-furniture" in their invasion of the Greater England, and may actually be the workings up of such documents, or at least such traditions, not so very much later. We cannot prove this, and we should very carefully abstain from the large generalisations from supposed characteristics in these poems which have sometimes been made as to the English spirit. Indeed, we should rather say that ascertained or imagined characteristics of the English spirit are in these exercitations carried back to the poems, and discovered there after having been carried. But we cannot dis- prove either the antiquity or the relationship, and it would be a great pity if we could. CHAPTER II CiEDMON, CVNEWULF, AND THOSE ABOUT THEM Anglo-Saxon poetry mostly sacred — MSS. — Caedmon and Cynewulf — The Scriptural poems — Casdmon — Judith — The Christ — The Lives of Saints — Other sacred poems — Secular poems — The Ruin — The Wanderer s^v^A Sea- farer. It would seem likely that the whole of the work mentioned in the last chapter, though it may have been here and there rehandled in a Christian sense, is heathen in origin. But the bulk of Anglo-Saxon poetry,' a bulk which is not itself very large, is entirely , , „ ^, . . . , . , - . , ,. . . , . Anglo-Saxon Christian in tone, and is definitely religious in subject, poetry mostly Probably not a twentieth part of the Corpus Poetiaan sacred. in oldest English, putting Beowulf aside, has for subject anything but paraphrases of the Bible and Lives of Saints, which in their turn are paraphrased or translated from Latin originals. Although the texts are handled in some cases with sufficient freedom, it is undeniable that this fact communicates to Anglo-Saxon poetry not merely a cer- tain monotony, but also a very distinct want of first-hand interest — a want which extends over its whole period, and to prose as well as to verse. Yet it would have been extremely surprising if anything else had l)een the case. In the first place, it is always necessary to remember — especially in face of the extravagant eulogies of which it has been the subject, as a revulsion from the equally extravagant, and because more simply ignorant much more discreditable, contempt which it had undergone before — that this literature is, after all, the literature of a childhood, the lispings of a people. No vernacular writings other than their own can have been before these ancestors of ours, for none existed. Although, after the welter of the Saxon Conquests had a little subsided, culture of no such beggarly kind was to be found in England, it was necessarily, if not confined to, yet centred in, the 1 Most of the texts referred to in this chapter will be found in Grein-Wul(c)ker or the Exeter Book, or both; where to fiiul the others will be noted. y 10 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i clergy and the monasteries. More classical knowledge, not merely in Latin but in Greek, undoubtedly survived during the darkest of the Dark Ages than the sciolism of the eighteenth century used to allow ; but there is also no doubt that the tide — the incalculable, inexplicable tide of knowledge and thought — receded steadily all over Europe from the fifth century to the tenth'. In the first years (which in such an age are the first centuries) of conversion to a new faith religious zeal thinks no subject but religion worthy of attention, and in the contented reaction therefrom professional guardians of religion think nothing but religious matter worthy of preservation. It is more wonderful that we have any profane poetry at all — not for the present to mention prose — from this time, than that we have so little. The verse, profane in small proportion, sacred in large, which dates from the period succeeding the comparative settlement of the Saxon realms, and which, though almost the whole, if not the whole, of it is West Saxon in its present form, seems by pretty common consent to have been originally composed in Northumbria, survives to us for the most part in four unique MSS. Of these three are the aforesaid Cottonian, which, besides giving us Beowidf, contains an incomplete poem on Judith ; the so-called Junian Manu- script, now at Oxford, which contains the poems attributed to Caed- mon, four in number, three of which are paraphrases of the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, while the fourth is a composite piece to which the title of Christ and Satan has been given ; and the Exeter Book, containing, besides IVidsith and Deor, a poem or poems on Christ, others on Azariah (one of the Three Children), St. Guthlac, and St. Jidiana, a large collection of verse-riddles, and not a few smaller poems, sacred and profane, the complete list being given in a note.^ The fourth, called the Vercelli Book, from its rather unex- pected place of discovery sixty years ago, gives among Homilies a variant of one of the poems (the Address of the Soul to the Body) in the Exeter Book, two very interesting Lives of Saints, St. Andrew and St. Helena, the Dream of the Rood, which is at least of the highest interest as a puzzle, a short poem on the Fates of the Apostles, and a fragment on Human Falsehood. Some notice of the more remarkable contents and characteristics of these poems will be given presently. As to their authorship, which has been much discussed, we practically know nothing whatever i First come a score of pieces arranged by the Germans and Mr. Gollancz, as Christ; then Guthlac, Azarias, The Fhcenix, Juliana, The Wanderer, The Endow- vients of Men, A Father's Instruction, The Seafarer, A Monitory Poem, IVidsith ("TheSc&p"), The Fortunes of Men, Gnomic Verses, Wonders of Creation, The Rhyming Poem, The Panther, The Whale, The Soul to the Body, Dear, Riddles (in three batches), The Exile's Complaint, A Fragment (sometimes interpreted differently), 'J he Ruin, and a few minor pieces. CHAP. II C^DMON, CYNEWULF, ETC. Ii about it in any case. But the Venerable Bede, in a charmingly told and commonly known story, has related how a certain Caedmon, who towards the end of the seventh century was a servant of the monastery of Whitby, under the great abbess Hilda, and having had to leave festive meetings owing to his inability Cynewulf. to use and accompany with song the harp which was handed round, was miraculously inspired to write sacred poetry. And the contents of the Junian MS. were, from the first attention paid to it in Milton's days, identified with this, while much later the discovery on the Ruthwell Cross, some miles from Dumfries, of the words " Casdmon made me," forming part of a Runic inscription (the rest of which coincided pretty closely with part of the Dream of the Rood above mentioned), was for a time thought to confirm the idea. Again, examiners of the poetry of the Exeter and Vercelli Books found in some of them Runic charades or acrostics which compose the name '* Cynewulf ; and out of these dead runes a great poet who wrote not merely the poems in which they appear but others has been resolutely manufactured and equipped with a life, sentiments, and experiences extracted by critical imagination from the poems in ques- tion. Further, the work formerly attributed to Ctcdmon has been taken to pieces with the usual industry and dexterity of the Sepa- ratists, and a considerable portion of it heaped upon Cynewulf, with the corresponding industry and dexterity of the Agglomerators ; the Dreatn of the Hood has been confidently assigned to the new favourite ; and the poems in general have been divided into A's and B's, credited or debited with interpolations, dated, redated, and undated. In particular, much stress has been laid on the recent dis- covery of corresponding Old-Saxon fragments of a Genesis version in the Vatican. But with these things we do not busy ourselves. The testimony of so trustworthy a historian as Bede establishes the existence of a Whitby poet named Caedmon, who, miraculously or otherwise, dis- played sudden and unexpected faculties for song, and composed poems on the Creation and several other Biblical subjects before the end of the seventh century. The Ruthwell Cross ^ and a leliquary preserved at Brussels show phrases and passages taken, or very slightly altered, from the Dream of the Rood. From the well-ascertained historical facts iThis extremely interesting monument is now well ca\ed for and enshrined conveniently for inspection in an apse built for it in Ruthwell Parish Church. It was ordered for destruction in the evil days of the seventeerah century (1642), but only broken into three pieces and left in the churchyard, where it remained till 1802. It was then set up in the manse garden, and in 1887 put in its present place. There is a facsimile of the cross (which is nearly 18 feet high, and may date from the end of the seventh century) in the Museum of Science and Art, Edinburgh. 12 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i of the superiority of Nortliern to Southern culture, and of the complete, or almost complete, destruction of both, but especially the former, by the Danish fury at the end of the eighth century and later, it is reasonable to conclude that these poems were written in Northumbria, and before 800. But of the exact date and the exact authorship of no one of them can anything be said to be certainly known ; and if the rune-charade of Cynewulf is correctly deciphered, this signature cannot be accepted as going more than a very little way to establish even the most shadowy personality. As for their autobiographic character, it will be time to take this seriously when it is shown that the author of Maud, who, it may be pointed out, certainly did visit Brittany like its hero, also shot his beloved's brother in a duel, and passed some time in a madhouse afterwards. We are therefore left with the poems themselves, and they will afford us quite sufficiently interesting study. In the all-important point of prosodic form they resemble those mentioned in the last chapter, except that in some at least the alliteration is still more precisely managed ; while in others, especially in the poems first attributed to Csedmon, the line is almost indefinitely extended at times by the admission of unaccented syllables, so that it becomes more impossible than ever to adjust the whole to any rhythmical swing tunable to modern ears. Even the comparatively rudimentary metrical nisus of Deor does not seem to have agitated any of these singers, and if it were not for the accented and alliterative syllables, the whole would bear the appearance of embryonic rhythraed prose, for which it was actually taken until the scheme of Anglo-Saxon prosody was discovered. Of their subjects, and of the extent to which they display such non-metrical properties of poetry as phrase, arrangement, and poetic spirit, there is naturally more to be said. In regard to subject, they may be divided into three groups, — the directly sacred poems with a fringe of allegorical verse, in which the fantastic zoology of the Dark and Middle Ages is adjusted not unhapjaily to religious use ; a very small but very precious body of poetry without a purpose, or with only a subordinate one ; and a miscellaneous collection of riddles, charms, gnomic verses, and " oddments " of different kinds. The last group is chiefly, if not wholly, interesting to the philologist and the student of manners and civilisation, though some of the riddles have not a little poetical merit ; the others are of wider appeal. ^ 1 Anglo-Saxon poetry in translation is best represented by a very close render- ing, stave for stave, with the words kept as far as possible and their order like- wise. Straightforward modern prose may come next; any modern English verse- form last, the resemblances and the differences of language and rhythm ahke making it dangerously misrepresentative. CHAP. II C^DMON, CYNEWULF, ETC. 13 The sacred poems may again be subdivided into three classes, — paraphrases from the Scriptures or poems directly based on them, Lives of Saints, and miscellaneous devotional work. Of the first subdivision, the chief interest, if not the chief merit, belongs to the Csdmonian Genesis and Exodus, especially to the passages in the former which respectively bring to mind the Bede story, and the supposed indebtedness of Milton in 'pj,g Scriptural Paradise Lost to the eldest of his poetical forefathers, poems. with whose work he might actually have been acquainted through his friend Junius the editor. With regard to the first point, no actual English equivalent of Bede's Latin abstract or paraphrase (he warns us that it is only this) occurs in Caedmon ; but there is in one MS. of the History a very old and possibly original Northumbrian version, transHterated into West Saxon in King Alfred's English Bede. Neither of these agrees in wording with the opening of the so-called Genesis A, but the meaning is sufficiently near to suggest different wordings of the same original draft. As for the Miltonic parallels, some of which are extraor- dinarily close, they come chiefly but not wholly from the other part or Genesis B, where the paraphrast is drawing on apocryphal or mediaeval legend (and himself) for a description of the sufferings of the Fallen Angels. Both parts of Genesis and Exodus have, when the subject gives opportunities, bursts of poetry by no means con- temptible, and by no means wholly due to the original ; and the first named is a poem very considerable in bulk. It runs, taking it as a whole, to nearly 3000 lines, of which not a few are of enormous length. Exodus (the best part of which is naturally the crossing of the Red Sea) has not quite 600. Of the others, Daniel has seldom been praised ; Christ and Satan, which includes a fine description of that very favourite subject the Harrowing of Hell (interesting as possibly the first to compare with Langland's, certainly the best in any like poetic dress), is much better. About Judith doctors differ much, and its authorship is sheer guess. We have only the end of it, but that, giving in some 350 lines the slaughter of Holofernes and the triumph of the Jews, is the most interesting part of a story wliich has generally inspired both pen and pencil well, and which certainly does not fail to do so here. The Cynewulfian poem, or group of poems, which opens the Exeter Book, and which it is for the present the fashion to call Christ, certainly contains fine passages, the finest being inspired by that fruitful parent of mediaeval poetry the adoration '^ "^" " of the Cross. In Mr. Gollancz's arrangement it has nearly 1700 lines. 14 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURfe book i Of the four important Lives of Saints, — Andreas, Elene, Guthlac, Juliana, — all ascribed by some to Cynewulf, the palm may lie between the first and the third. Andreas is a legend of St. Saint" ° Andrew, tellino; how he was miraculously inspired and miraculously helped to cross the sea in order to release St. Matthew from prison in " Mermedonia " ; how he succeeded, and how he punished the violence of the heathen to himself. The stormy voyage, always a favourite subject with Anglo-Saxon bards, and the rage of the elements on the doomed heathen city are fine passages. St. Guthlac has perhaps fewer lines of the " show " variety ; but the description of Guthlac's conflict in his loneliness with the powers of evil, and that of his death, are curiously fascinating, and worth com- paring with Si. Simeon Stylites. Elene (the English saint St. Helena, mother of Constantine and finder of the Cross) has admirers ; Juliana fewer, owing to a long and rather tedious wrangle between the saint and a fiend who is sent to temjjt her. But the recurrence of the name "Juliana" as a hemistich by itself, and in apposition rather than as direct object or subject, has almost a refrain effect, and soothes the ear marvellously. Indeed, though only occurring now and then, and on no system, it produces an effect not unlike that of the similar word " Oriana " in Tennyson's poem. The short Fates oj the Apostles has little merit, but, as it is signed, some have wished to tack it on to the imsigned Andreas — a process slightly suggestive of what is said to be occasionally practised on violins. In so far as positive poetic beauty goes, the third subdivision, small as it is in bulk, has no reason to fear comparison with either of the others. The Dream oJ the Rood has, like Genesis, the adven- titious interest of its connection with the Ruthwell Cross °'poems"^'^ inscription, but could do without it. The Rood itself speaks, and speaks to the purpose. The Address of the Soul to the Body, existing in two parts, ^ the speakers being respec- tively a cursed soul and a blessed one, is the earliest of a long line ; - and the speech of the reprobate has that peculiar grimness which is one of the most unquestionable gifts of Anglo-Saxon verse. The Phoenix, the Panther, and the IVhalc, adaptations of Latin verse or prose in the allegorical " bestiary " kind, are all fine, and the first has a famous and really exquisite passage, one of the few in this poetry to which the word can be applied, describing, after Lactantius, the beauties of paradise. "The Phoenix" itself, of course, is Christ; as is the " Panther," the sweet-breathed, lonely, harmless beast ; 1 The first occurs in the Exeter and in the Vercelli Books ; the second only in the latter. 2 See the interesting collection in the Appendix of T. Wright's Poems of Walter Mapes (Camden Society, 1841). CHAP, n C.^DMON, CYNEWULF, ETC. 15 while the " Whale " (based upon the well-known Greek-Eastern story of sailors landing on the whale's back) is the Devil or Hell. These, as well as a mere fragment believed to be part of a similar poem on the Partridge, evidently came from some earlier Greek or Latin Physiologus or collection of zoological allegories ; of the P/icenix, the original, by or attributed to Lactantius, is, as has been said, known. It is quite a long poem of nearly 700 lines ; th^ others are much shorter. The small group of secular poems above referred to is of much greater interest, not at all because of any general or necessary superiority of profane to secular poetry — a point upon which two such great and dissimilar critics as Dr. Johnson and Mr. Matthew Arnold seem to have been led wrong by Secular different but equally fatal fallacies — but because, the poems being in all probability original instead of pretty certainly translated or paraphrased, we can see much better what the real strength of the poets was. The Ruin, the Wanderer, the Seafarer, the (so-called) Wife's Complaint, the (so-called) Husband's Message, make a very small bundle of verse. Even in the Grein-Wiil(c)ker edition, with editorial apparatus, corrected versions of te.xt, and the like, they do not fill thirty pages ; yet, for these thirty, one could cheerfully resign almost all but the few just named passages of the sacred books (with perhaps a riddle or two) of the poetry mentioned in this chapter. For they are real documents ; it is excessively unlikely that they had any originals in another language, and if they had, we at least do not possess these originals. Even "common form " was not, so far as we know, furnished to them by any prede- cessors, as it inevitably was to homilists and hagiographers, practi- tioners of sacred allegory, and paraphrasers of the Scriptures. Here, and perhaps here only, Anglo-Saxon poetry shows what it could do with a commonplace — the best subjects of poetry are all common- places — but without a common form; and it comes out of the test with no small credit. The best of the five is in my judgment beyond all question the Ruin. Indeed, I do not know any other Anglo-Saxon poem which in conception, composition, and expression so nearly deserves the name of a masterpiece. As we have it, it is in a state which strangely corresponds to its title and subject — a ^ """' broken mass of some five and thirty lines, which the painful ingenuity of editors has got into about five and forty, rather more regular in some parts, but much wounded in others. Conjecture thinks that it may have been originally intended for the wreck, after Saxon devastation, of no less a Roman colony tlian Bath ; there is, at least, nothing contrary to reason in accepting it as relating to one i6 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i or other of the many stately creations of the first invaders which were reduced to ruin by the second. The corruption of the text makes a certain rendering practically impossible. But nothing can obscure the genuineness of its poetry, or (as it seems to me) its enormous superiority to the possibly contemporary Welsh lament over the destruction of Uriconium with which Mr. Stopford Brooke rather unfavourably compares it. The Welsh piece shows a further advance in poetical form, more cliches ready for use, more tricks of trade and manners of behaviour. The English shows actual poetry. Perhaps the deepest and noblest of all emotions, not merely personal and sensual, the feeling for the things that are long enough ago, finds expression, and worthy expression, as the poet looks on the masonry shattered by fate, the crumbling mortar gemmed with hoar-frost, as he imagines the once stately heights reduced to ruinous heaps, the warriors, high of heart and bloody of hand (for though Shakespeare never knew the Ruin, we may borrow his phrase), who sat there long ago, the hot baths (this is the ground for the identification with Bath) boiling in their lake-like cistern, the busy market-place silent, the merry mead-halls overwhelmed by the fiat of Destiny. He could see, this poet of the Ruin, and he could tell what he saw. We shall hardly come to any one like him for several hundred years in England. The majority of critics, I believe, assign higher rank to the Wanderer and the Seafarer. The Wanderer also contains a passage of merit about a ruin, but is chiefly a study of " Weird " (Fate or Destiny), and the way in which a man is " hurled from Wanderer change to change unceasingly, his souPs wings never and furled" — as the most Saxon of nineteenth-century Eng- Seajarer. , , , , ./ o lish poets has it — his comradeships incessantly broken, and only the Weird constant in its inconstancy. The idea of the poem is undoubtedly fine, and its lines give fair scope ; but that poetic imagery which is so great a part of poetry seems to me not so well managed as in the Ruin. The Seafarer, longer still, and perhaps composite, is a much more difficult poem, as may be guessed from the fact that the critics are not agreed whether it is a monological reflection upon its subject or a dialogue between an old sailor and a young sailor, or only colourably occupied with sea- faring at all, its real purport being an allegory of human life. It may be observed that this last interpretation, which seems to me much the most probable, is only to be avoided by the device, at once easy and violent, of supposing the close of the poem to be a Christian forgery, or at least addition. The chief literary merit of the piece is to be found in the earlier part, where the description of a wintry storm at sea, attributed by some to the old sailor, has CHAP. II C^DMON, CYNEWULF, ETC. 17 much of the merit already noted in Anglo-Saxon handlings of this subject. The remaining pair, the so-called Wife's Complaint and Husband^s or Lover^'s Message, have a more personal note than the others. The first appears ^ to some to be the utterance, real or dramatic, of a woman who has been falsely accused and banished from her hus- band's presence. The second is an agreeable piece, in which, with a pleasant seventeenth-century touch, the wooden tablet bearing the lines of the message is made (like the " book " addressed by later singers) itself to carry the tale to the beloved (or at least addressed) one. Neither is long, but both have an unpretentious and sincere feeling, if not exactly passion, and both stand interestingly at the head of a class of similar poems, in which English has since been richer than all other languages put together. They date too from a period long antecedent to that of either troubadour or minnesinger. The arrest of Anglo-Saxon poetry by the Danish fury seems to have been very nearly total. The verse, other than mere sacred paraphrases, w-hirh we have of a later date than Alfred is but scanty even in total bulk, and only four pieces of it can be said to have much literary attraction, though, curiously enough, two of these are much better known than any of the older and better work. These are the short poem inserted in the Chronicle (rude infra), on the triumph of Athelstan at Brunanburgh over the Scots and Danes, and the very late, gloomy, but fine Grave Poem familiar to almost every Englishman who cares for poetry, with its beginning, " For thee was a house built." ■•^ In this latter the idea and the grim, direct uncompromis- ing delivery of it are the chief merits. The Brunanburgh poem, though a spirited war-song, perhaps attracted more attention by its setting of the stock Anglo-Saxon reference to the raven, eagle, and wolf, " that grey beast the wolf of the weald," as spoilers of the dead, than would have been the case if the earlier examples from Beowulf and the Finnsburg poem downwards had been known. Of the two remaining pieces, one has the attraction of subject, the other that of form. The Battle of Maldon or the Death of Byrhtnoth has a less happy subject (a defeat not a victory) than the Brunanburgh piece, but it is more genuine, contemporary, and fresh. The pro- 1 It ought perhaps to be said that the usual interpretations of these pieces are more than half guesswork. There is really nothing in what Thorpe more pru- dently calls The Exile's Coviplahit to identify the speaker as a wife, nor any- thing in the other piece (his as prudently named Fraginoit) to point to a husband or even lover. 2 Text in Guest, English Rhythms, and ed. p. 369, or in Thorpe's Analecta, ed. i868, p. 153. Longfellow translated it not long, I think, after Conybeare first made it known. It is thought to be as late as the twelfth century, and shows signs of metrical influence in its rhythm. c i8 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i duction known as the Rhyming Poem, or Conybeare's Rhyming Poem, is found in the Exeter Book. This, though far inferior in intrinsic and poetical interest, has great historical importance. It is probably a Biblical paraphrase, like so many others, and as it is in the Exeter Book, it must be as old at least as the tenth century, or the very earliest eleventh. Now, not merely at that time, but much later, Anglo-Saxon was rebel to rhyme ; ^ even two hundred years after, in Layamon, the appearances of that instrument are but occasional and very rudimentary. In the Rhyming Poem, however, though there is still alliteration, and the general structure of the lines is not very different from the staple of Anglo-Saxon verse, they are arranged in couplets, or sometimes even larger groups, not merely tipped with end rhymes, but endowed with leonine or middle rhymes as well. Some- times the rhyme is not much more than assonance, but oftener it is full rhyme, and not seldom it adopts the kind which later English poetry discourages, though it is allowed in other languages, the actual repetition of the same complete words or group of letters, onwrah, onwrah, hiwum, hiwum, etc. Once there is a batch of seven lines with the same rhyme — ade, varied a little by ide and ede — in the middle and at the end of each ; in another place one of five lines similarly equipped with words in iteth ; and sometimes the couplet shrinks to a single line with leonine adjustment. Of course this is inartistic and overdone : the poet is thinking so much of his new toy of rhyme that he has not much time to think of his poetry. But he is ahead of his fellows by two centuries if not by three, and that is something and much.^ 1 There were, however, other outbreaks, or rather z'wbreaks of it. See espe- cially the remarkable verse-fragment in the Chronicle (A. 1036, edited in Grein- Wul(c)ker, i. 384-85), describing Godwin's outrages on the "guiltless etheling" Alfred and his men. 2 This tour de force, whith is only partially intelligible, and in which there is good reason to suppose the invention of words for the purpose, has been thought to be imitated from Icelandic. A few things of little literary interest — para- phrases of the Psalms, a dialogue of Solomon and Saturnus, a piece on Dooms- day, etc. — complete the tale of Anglo-Saxon poetry. CHAPTER III ANGLO-SAXON PROSE The works of King Alfred — The Doethius — The Orosius — The Bede — The Pastoral Care — Th& Anglo-Saxon Chronicle — Elfric — Wulfstan The prose division of Anglo-Saxon literature is of less literary interest than the verse ; but it is more abundant in quantity, and it is not separated from the later developments of the language by any such sharp gulf as that which cuts off the prosody and rhythm of Anglo- Saxon from the prosody and rhythm of English. We maj^, indeed, observe in it that curious, yet, when considered, very far from unin- telligible combination of earliness and immaturity, rapid development up to a certain point and inability to go beyond that point, which meet us in the poetry ; but there is not the bar to any further devel- opment which existed in that case. In all languages poetry as literature comes before prose, the immortal jest of Moliere owing its piquancy to exactly this, that though prose is more obviously natural to man in conversation, he never, till after considerable experience, seems to understand that it is fit to be made a medium of recorded thought or formal writing. But it would appear that it was, in Anglo-Saxon, pretty early. Professor Earle speaks^ of *• obscure but well-evidenced remains of the fifth and sixth centuries," but as so enthusiastic an authority does not himself dwell much on these, or on the laws of Ina attributed to the seventh, we may afford to pass them over. It is in the eighth century that Mr. Earle claims something like literary competency for the earliest English prose, and the examples which he chooses are a deed cf remission of port dues by King Ethelbald of Mercia, and the some- what famous passage of the Saxon Clironicle relating the death of King Cynewulf (^not the poet), the first of these dating a little before and the second a little after the very middle of the eighth century itself. With the later passage, too, Mr. Sweet begins the prose speci- 1 English Prose, London, 1890, p. 370, «9 20 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i mens in his Anglo-Saxon Reader, ^ and it seems to be generally allowed the position of the earliest distinctly spirited piece of prose * literary composition in the language. To such spirit, or, in other words, to the motive power of sty ley laws, title-deeds, and similar documents can, in the very nature of the case, seldom lay claim. It would, in fact, be decidedly out of place in them, and the bare enumerations, specifications, common forms of legal and other speech, etc., which they contain could be of little illustrative use, even if they were not, as in most cases they may be suspected to be, pretty closely copied from Latin originals. But .the story of the attack made by the atheling Cyneheard on the King Cynewulf, when the latter had imprudently left most of his guard behind while visiting a lady-love, gives better opportunities. The incident is told at no great length, and without much personal char- acterisation, except in the notable answer of the thanes to Cyne- heard's offers of bribes and arguments from kinship, that " no kinsman was dearer to them than their lord, and they never would follow his bane." Except that the piece seems contemporary, one would imagine a rough prose "unrhyming" of some ballad or romance. But if we are to consider the thing as prose merely,- it may give us some pause to find that of the two authorities above cited, Mr. Sweet, though giving it the high distinction of being " by far the oldest historical prose in any Teutonic language," thinks the style "of the rudest character . . . abrupt, disconnected, obscure, and full of anacolutha," while Professor Earle discerns, and thinks that every one must discern, the evidence of "a literary tradition already of mature standing," and "a syntax not more rugged than that of Thucydides. " Thucydides has, of course, a sort of traditional repute for crabbed syntax, so that the eulogy is, after all, not unqualified. By the next century (the ninth), however, there is no doubt about the plentiful production and the at least relative accomplishment of Anglo-Saxon prose. Of the three writers of it who alone may be said to have a personal reputation, King Alfred, Elfric, and Archbishop Wulfstan, the first belongs to this century, the last third of which was covered by his glorious and beneficent reign. The Saxon Chronicle, in its continuous and fairly accomplished shape, may be a little older than Alfred himself, though it is thought to have taken final form under him. The King and the Chronicle will at any rate well deserve separate and independent notice. Alfred's works are, with the exception of some original insertions, wholly translation — indeed, as we have seen with the verse, so we 1 Oxford, 7th ed. 1894, CHAP. Ill ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 21 shall see with the prose, and to an even larger extent, that the merit of originality in matter is about the last that Anglo-Saxon as a literature can claim. But in the special circumstances this makes far more for the King's honour than for his dishonour. King^A^fred. His literary work was in.spired aot by any desire of fame, nor by any need of satisfying a peremptory personal craving to write, but wholly and solely by the wish to benefit his people, to do some- thing that might help England out of the slough of barbarism into which she had been plunged by the Danish ravages and the efforts necessary to check them. To this end it would have been not merely presumptuous, but, in the circumstances and at the time, posi- tively silly to have attempted original composition, when there was plenty of good Latin work lying ready to hand. From this Alfred selected a book in what may be called general practical science, the History and Geography of Orosius ; one in domestic history, the unrivalled Ecclesiastical History of Bede ; the most popular ethi- cal and philosophical treatise of the Dark Ages, the Consolation of Boethius ; and an ecclesiastical book, the Cura Pastoralis of Pope Gregory. The first of these is not precisely a work of genius or one of much authority, but it was a popular manual of its day ; the second and third could hardly have been bettered for the purpose, inasmuch as they were the work of two men who represented the best character and ablest intellect of the age immediately preceding, and whose thought, style, and tone were in complete harmony with the spirit of the actual age ; the fourth was a respectable book, well suited for the purpose, and having some special claim on the attention of English- men. The most interesting of the four,i in so far as actual matter goes, IS the Orosius, because of the additions which Alfred made from in- formation supplied to himself; but the most interesting as literature is unquestionably the Boethius. There are many greater books in the literature of the world than the De Con- solatione ; but there are few that have had a more interesting literary history, and still fewer that seem to have, with such strange prescience, gauged the literary and philosophical requirements not merely of their own time but of times that were to follow for almost a millennium. One of the first documents in English prose is this translation of King Alfred's ; probably the very first document in the earliest development of the Romance tongues, Provencal, is the ver.se-para- phrase which gives us tlic majestic if slightly monotonous harmony of 1 The Boethius and the Orosius are easily obtainable in Anglo-Saxon (old- printed) and Enplish, in Hohn's "Antiquarian I^ibrary." The E.E.TS. has given critical editions of the Orosius and the lit-de and the Pastoral Care. A version of St. Augustine's Soliloquies is probably also Alfred's. 22 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i the langue d'^oc a century or two after Alfred. When Anglo-Saxon and the Middle language have at length given place to complete English, the most accomplished piece of prose that the all-accom- plished muse of Chaucer admits among his greater verse is again a translation of Boethius ; and yet another translation, this time partial, is attributed to Queen Elizabeth, at the very time when the far-off heralding of Alfred, the directer promises of Chaucer, were about to be fulfilled. As "the last of the Romans" is not now in every one's hands, it may not be superfluous or impertinent to say that Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, as his barbarically assorted travesty of the old Roman nomenclature went, was born somewhere about the beginning of the last quarter of the fifth century. He is said to have studied under Proclus at Athens, which is possible, but barely possible, if the death of Proclus be taken at the ordinary date of 485. He attained distinction at Rome, and having been consul in 510, attracted the notice of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and was for some time in favour with him. But being accused of fomenting or conniving at an Italian conspiracy against Gothic rule, he was imprisoned at Ticinum, and brutally put to death (clubbed, it is said) in or about 524-525. The De Consolatione Philosophiae is supposed to have been written in prison. It was not his only contribution to mediaeval knowledge, for he exercised an immense influence on scholastic logic by his commentaries on Aristotle and Porphyry and Cicero ; but it was perhaps his most popular and non-technical. It consists of a medley of dialogue be- tween Wisdom and the author, interspersed with metrical insertions. Two versions of Alfred's translation exist, in one of which the metrical portions are rendered into prose, while in the other they are versified. Although there is difference of opinion on the subject, there does not seem to be any insuperable difficulty in admitting both forms as authentic, though very likely the King had help from others. If the " metres " in their Anglo-Saxon form are really his, they are of the greatest interest to the literary historian, because they show that at this time Anglo-Saxon was proof against the temptations of rhyme, classical metre, and the like, to which in its enfeebled Early Middle English or " Semi-Saxon " stage it afterwards succumbed. The trans- lation is by no means .slavishly executed ; indeed, the reproach of want of originality against Anglo-Saxon generally is largely mitigated by the fact that the translations are much more paraphrases with » interpolations ad lib. than simply faithful versions. It is quite possible that deficient scholarship may to some extent account for this free- dom, but it would be as uncritical as it would be illiberal to take this as the sole, even as the chief, reason. Alfred's moral pu rpose in the Boethius, like his scientific and practical purpose m the 0? osius, CHAP. HI ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 23 induced him and authorised him not merely to rearrange, but to add gloss and comment here and there. It is a pity that, in the edition of the Boethius most accessible, a rhymed and sophisticated English- ing by the late Mr. Martin Tupper takes the place of the rendering into rhythmical prose which alone can give any proper equivalent for Anglo-Saxon verse in modern English. The Orosius, it has been said, has, or rather would have, nothing like the intrinsic interest of the Boethius, were it not for the insertions, which in the Boethius itself have chiefly the interest of curiosity. Paulus Orosius was a Spanish priest, who was a disciple of St. Augustine's in the second decade of the fifth century, an antagonist of Pelagius, and a friend of St. Jerome. He wrote, as befitted an Anti-Pelagian, a book about free-will, and other matters ; but his name has been chiefly preserved by the work which Alfred translated, the Historia adversus Paganos, one of the numerous summaries of universal history which the decline of classical times and the Dark Ages saw, but differentiated by a special intention to refute the Pagan argument that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire were due to the neglect of the ancient deities. It is, for the most part, a mere compilation from previous compilations, and in no part a work of any literary merit ; but like all books of the kind, not hopelessly incompetent, it has the advantage of keeping the general course of history before the reader. It would, however, be folly to suppose tliat Alfred had any philosophical consideration of this kind in view when he chose the book. It was an orthodox and popular manual, it gave opportunities for insertions of a kind specially inter- esting to himself and specially useful to his people, and he took it and altered it accordingly, displaying, as in the Boethius, no great reverence towards the text, but in the nature of the case making somewhat smaller alterations in arrangement, and rather fewer addi- tions of reflection and suggestion, though in parts a good deal more reduction to the character of an epitome. Tlie interesting parts, to us, are the insertions in the earlier chapters on the geograpliy of Northern Europe, beginning " Othere told his Lord King Alfred," and '• Wulfstan said," these being either known, or reasonably taken to be, reports of voyages either dis- tinctly made under the King's commission, or at any rate indicating his desire for the best and latest direct information. Othere tells of a voyage to Lapland and the Wliite Sea; Wulfstan of an explora- tion of the Baltic, and especially of tlie Esthonians, the folk about the mouth of the Vistula. It should be olxserved tliat both the liocthiiis and the Orosius are abundantly furnished with vernacular ''contents" to facilitate their reading and understanding by the people. 24 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i Alfred's translation of Bede's History has yet again a different kind of interest ; and to us it is especially welcome because it brings the Venerable one within the compass of a history of English literature. Invaluable as Bede in his Latin dress is to the historian proper, he would have been dearer to the literary historian if he had lived a little later, so that he might have been tempted to write in the vernacular. That he could have done so there can be no doubt, for he was. as the famous and charming description of his death by his reader Cuthbert says, " learned in our poetry," and on his death-bed summed up the situation — the vanity of all knowledge but such as will guide a man's soul right at the last — in a memorable stave of five Anglo-Saxon verses. But in his day — he was born in 673, entered the monastery of Wearmouth at seven years old, was soon transferred to that of Jarrow, and lived his whole life there, dying in 735 — it was more important to digest learning, both sacred and profane, in Latin for popular consumption, and this Bede did. Even as it is, the interesting story of Caedmon referred to above may be said to be the beginning of English literary history, and here Alfred's translation (or another's if it was not his) is particularly important, because, while Bede's account is in Latin, it has preserved to us what may possibly be the very words of Caedmon's actual inspiration. At any rate, the translation of Bede shows us that Alfred was not so anxious merely to instruct his people in general and foreign learning that he wished to divert their attention from " things of England " ; and it is impossible not to take it in conjunction with the great enterprise of the Saxon Chronicle, of which, as an aspirant to learning once remarked in an examination (probably taking the Chronicle for a daily paper), " Alfred was editor." The fourth book has, at the present day, the least interest for us in itself. Gregory's Regula or Cura Pastoralis, as far as its intrinsic claims are concerned, must be studied in the original ; and, ^ore- over, Alfred, either out of respect or otherwise, has Care. here translated much more exactly than in the other cases. But fortunately he prefixed an original introduc- tion, and this introduction contains a constantly quoted and extremely important account of the state to which polite learning in England, in the middle of the ninth century, had been reduced by the Danish invasions. "There was a time," quoth Alfred, "when people came to this island for instruction, now we must get it from abroad if we want it." " There were," adds the King, " very few on this side Humber who could so much as translate the Church Service or an ordinary Latin letter into English [for "Englisc" has taken its place once for all as the general name of the tongue], and not many on the other side" CHAP. Ill anClo-saxon prose 25 (there being still apparently remnants of the old Northumbrian cul- ture). There was not, he ends, with a gentle and more than pardon- able boast, one such south of Thames, when he himself took the kingdom. It has been well pointed out that though this decay of' culture may have been lamentable in itself, yet it was fortunate in a way for English, inasmuch as it stimulated translation, and so gave practice in the vernacular, instead of tempting men, as Bede had been tempted, simply to abstract and compile in Latin itself, and even when they wrote original work, to write it in Latin. The trans- lations may not be of first-rate literary importance, but they are at any rate better than the Latin summaries ; and precious as the Historia Ecclesiastica is, it would have been ten times more precious had it been in English, if only because the actual original text of Caedmon could then have been given. Other works of Alfred are spoken of — especially a Commonplace- book or book of Table-talk — which should have been interesting; but they have not survived. The so-called Proverbs of Alfred^ in Middle English, to which we shall come in due time, have value, and may to some extent represent work of the King's, but they can hardly be accepted even as a direct modernised version thereof. It is, how- ever, at least possible that the Chronicle itself in part represents his work, as it certainly represents his influence, and it „, is m any case by far the most nnportant monument of Saxon Anglo-Saxon prose, carrying us, with at least only par- Chronicle. tially broken sweep, in contemporary vernacular history from the middle of the eighth century to the middle of the twelfth, preserving amid drier annals some exceedingly interesting fragments of composi- tion of the more original kind, both in prose and verse, manifesting an ability to manage the subject which was only much later shown in other vernacular languages, and bridging for us, with a thin but distinct streak of union, the gulf between the decadence or ruin of Anglo-Saxon even before the Conquest and the rise of English proper more than a century subsequent to it. Like other works of the kind, and indeed necessarily, the Chronicle'^ was the work of monkish labour — one of those things by which the lazy monks, the drones of the Dark Ages, earned the polite and intelligent contempt of the philosophers of the eighteenth century. And it followed from this that it should not present a single text, or even sequence of texts, but should exist in more versions than one, as the work was carried on at different centres. The first of these centres was, as might have been expected, Winchester, for the historical use of English prose had not been discovered in the palmy 1 The Chronicle was printed as early as 1643, and has been repeatedly re- printed, re-edited, and translated since. 26 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book I days of Northumbrian literature, and Winchester was by far the most important place in Wessex, when the balance of power had been definitely shifted thither. The Winchester Chronicle is vigorous and full for the days of Alfred himself and Edward the Elder, but becomes rather meagre for the second and third quarters of the tenth century. It makes up for this, however, by inserting verse, the most important piece by far being the already referred to poem celebrating the battle of Brunanburgh. By the end of the century the tradition of chronicling seems to have died out in the Hampshire capital, and to have shifted to the metropolitan city of Canterbury, to Worcester (the main bulwark of England against the South Welsh border, and far from Danish reach), and to the rich and important abbey of Abingdon. The Winchester series extended a little beyond the Con- quest, but the latest batch of English chronicle comes not from here but from Peterborough, in the neighbourhood of which the national, as opposed to the Norman, spirit was always strong. One of the very best known passages of the whole — the constantly quoted description of the sufferings of the country under Stephen's robber- barons and in their castles — comes from this last batch, and indeed represents the final utterance of English historical writing for the time. It was stifled by the brilliant, but in the history of English literature irrelevant and interpolated, outbursts of Latin chronicle-writing which the middle of the twelfth century saw, and which only gave place later to the verse of Robert of Gloucester, and later still to the now fully English prose of Trevisa. , It would be more than a little unreasonable to expect that such a conglomerate, or batch of conglomerates, as the Saxon Chronicle should present any uniform literary features. The variations of hour and man make that quite imiDossible. At first, and indeed at intervals throughout, we get the barest annals, sometimes mere obituaries or calendars of translations, consecrations, coronations, and the like, only interrupted occasionally by less jejune accounts of the founding of a monastery, of such events as the assassination of Cynewulf at his leman's house, etc., where accident, personal interest, the chance possession of a poem or a deed, filled the writer's pen. Then, again, the wars of Ethel red and Alfred and Edward against the Danes inspire something like a regular history. The Peterborough part, as might ^e expected from its later date, has, in so far as we possess it, still more of this irregularity. The two remaining known and distinctive writers of Anglo-Saxon prose come under the disqualification which attaches from the purely literary point of view to religious writers, in all cases but those of a very few periods and a few individuals outside them — the disquali- fication not at all that they are religious, but that they are second- CHAP. Ill ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 27 hand. But the first of them, Elfric, is undoubtedly the greatest prose writer in the language. The influence and example of King Alfred, if it had not founded English prose, had at least gi\tn a great impetus to the founding of it, and this impetus was followed up throughout the tenth century, which has even, by some enthusiasts, been hailed as one of the great prose periods of the whole English language in its widest sense. Essential importance is assigned to the work and teaching of Ethelwold, Bishop of Win- chester, a pupil of Dunstan's, in the middle part of the century, not much of whose own writing is preserved, but who is thought to have had a wide influence, the earliest and extensive proof of which is the collection of Anglo-Saxon sermons, called the Blickling Hofiiilies ;'^ while the greatest and most lasting is the work of Elfric, which in parts spreads beyond merely ecclesiastical or theological limits. Elfric,' wlio was a pupil of Ethelwold, as Ethelwold had been of Dunstan, began to write in the last decade of the tenth cen- tury, and first executed a large set (some eighty) of Catholic Homilies, which he followed up later with a series of homiletic Lives of the Saints in an alliterative rhythm, distinct from prose, but not quite reaching the limits even of Anglo-Saxon verse. His other writings were numerous, and include an interesting little set of books for the instruction of Englishmen in Latin— a grammar, a glossary, and an agreeable, interlined, Latin-English colloquy, which is the earliest example of the Hamiltonian-Ollendorfian method as applied to Eng- lish. Elfric, of whose life not much is known, though he became abbot of Ensham near Oxford, and whose death-year is uncertain, is accused by some of having been rather too fond of alliteration even in his undoubtedly prose work, which includes translations of parts of the Bible. But his style is distinctly clear, flow'ing, and vigorous, and though only the enthusiasm above referred to could possibly see in it a medium suited for general literary exercises, it probably carried Anglo-Saxon as far in that direction as the immature character of the language itself permitted. Elfric's life considerably overlap])ed that of the third writer referred to, Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, at whose consecration in 1014 Elfric himself wrote one of his tractate-sermons by command. Wulfstan. who was for many years Archbishop of York, and during part of the time Bishop of Worcester 1 Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S., 1874, sq. Tlie exact date assigned is 971. 2 To be distinguished from an archbishop of the same name with whom he was long confused, and from his own pupil, Elfric Bata, who re-edited the Colloquy. An Elfric Society was formed more than fifty years ago to publish him ; and its work has been resumed by the E.E.T.S. There is a pretty full selection in Thorpe's Analecta, 28 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book l also,^ has left over fifty homilies,^ and a letter to the English people, or those of the province of York, which has interest. It is, however, quite impossible to grant the title of " fine prose " which Professor Earle postulates, either to his or to Elfric's, much more to the passage from another, to which the Professor especially refers, a figurative description of the Lord's Prayer i^ "And his thought is more springing and swifter than twelve thousand holy ghosts, though each and every ghost have sundrily twelve feather-coats, and every several feather-coat have twelve winds, and every several wind twelve victoriousnesses sundrily." The conceit is vigorous and pleas- ing, and the compounding power of the language, which it has left to its heir, is observable in sigefcestniss, " victoriousness." But the arrangement and construction are of the very simplest kind, clauses of the same model being merely agglomerated. In Wulfstan we find more attempt at periodic prose than here ; but the periods are inartistically arranged, and that fault which was later to mar so much seventeenth-century prose, the inability to resist the temptation of adding and piling up epexegetic clauses, already appears.* 1 Distinguish again from the much later Bishop Wulfstan under the Con- queror. 2 Ed. A. Napier, 1883. 3 Op. cit. p. 382. The piece is from a prose form of the Solomon and Saturn dialogue. 4 The list of A.S. prose is, of course, by no means exhausted in the examples given. There are laws, " leechdoms," short tales, Biblical translations, etc. The most interesting are, for their connection with later and romantic literature, the story of Apollonius of Tyre (the original of Pericles), ed. Thorpe, 1834; a version of the episode of Alexander and Dindimus, and the wonders of Ind, from the great legend history of Alexander (ed. Cockayne in his Narratiunculae) ; and for its matter. Bishop Werfrith's translation (with a Preface by King Alfred) of the Dialogues of St. Gregory. If there is much in them like the plea of the devil by whom a nun was possessed (see Professor Earle, Anglo-Saxon Literature, p. 197), " Ic saet me on anum laehtrice, tha com heo and bat me!" ("I sat me on a lettuce, then came she and bit [ate] me ! ") the sooner these dialogues, which are still unedited, become accessible the better. CHAPTER IV THE DECADENCE OF ANGLO-SAXON It was long, and very naturally, a popular opinion that the Norman Conquest sufficiently accounted for, and directly caused, the practical disappearance of Anglo-Saxon literature. But the revived study of that literature itself, though it may in some cases have produced rather an exaggerated estimate of its intrinsic interest and merits, helped, and was helped by, the previous study of political historians to correct this delusion. Just as it was seen that the Norman Con- quest, mighty as were its eifects, was no absolute political cataclysm sweeping away the first England and replacing it with something else, to the same extent and in the same manner as those in which the Saxon Conquest had swept away Roman Britain, so it was discerned that the Conquest only helped and turned to good a process in lan-_ ^age which had" been independently begun, which was going on ^pidly, and which, but for the Conquest itself, might have had more disastrous results. _ In other words, it has now for some time been recognised that Anglo-Saxon, as a literary language, was, if not slowly dying, at any rate slowly passing into soiiie other form, long^ before WilHam landed at Pevensey. It is impossible to mistake the significance of the facts thaVit had produced at that date no poetry that can be called great, and little of any kind, for some two hundred and fifty years ; that its prose, though vigorously started under the highest auspices, and though brought to some measure of relative perfection by men like Elfric and Wulfstan, was itself failing, and had never, except in the form of generally meagre chronicle, produced any original non- sacred literature. There must have been something wrong, some want, some coldness in the literary constitution, to account for this. A language by weakness, by accident, by ill luck, may never produce literature at all. But if it produces things like the Ruin and the P/ia'tiix, like the best parts of the poems attributed to Caedmon, and those thought to be signed by Cynewulf, and then does nothing 29 30 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i more — if it practically limits its prose energies to homilies and para- phrases and strictly business jottings, then undoubtedly it wants a change. In the second place, it is admitted that the language itself was showing signs of a complete " break of voice," of an important biological alteration. Its inflections were getting loosened and weakened, whether from inherent old age or from the attraction and competition of the rival inflections of French and Latin must be matter of conjecture. But it appears that a similar change was taking place in its Continental kin. That its warring dialects had very much to do with this may be doubted. The West Saxon had after the down- fall of Northumbria taken a distinct lead ; and it does not seem that at any time the dialectic variations constituted ah insuperable bar between Englishman and Englishman. But they must have helped a little, though they no doubt did less than the constant and age-long effect of the practically bilingual education of every man who aimed at learning in Latin as well as in English, and than, latterly, the estab- lishment of French as a second, if not a first, court language in the Confessor's Palace. The fact, however, seems to be beyond dispute, and the inevitable literary consequence of the fact still more so. You cannot write literature in a language which is not sure of itself, which is jcrum blinof d ay by day. lo which we may^dd that the signs of senescence ancTTte^radation are as evident in prosody as in the other parts of grammar proper. We have, as has been said, very little late Anglo-Saxon" poetry, and the dates of what we have are extremely uncertain. But we can be nearly sure that in all of it s trict allitgration was bre ajang..,jd»wiVJ±yme__^vvas_Jj^reaking in, and that for a time the contemptuous term absurdly applied to the true English prosody which emerged later, that of a " jumble," might have been applied without much injustice. Our ancestors at this time had lost grasp of their own rhythm and not learned metre ; I just as they were getting to mumble Anglo-Saxon, and had not learned to speak English. The old order was changing in every way, but it was some time before the new could get into regular form. This is the rational and sufficient, the only rational and sufficient,- explanation of the whole matter, that the time had come for Anglo-Saxon to die, that it died, and that it would have had to die if Harold had been as victorious at Senlac as at Stamford Bridge, though probably the result would have been less fortunate for England, as it would pretty certainly have been quite infinitely less fortunate for France. For it must never be forgotten — though it would be hardly an exaggeration to say that it has seldom been remembered — that France had little or no literature to give England, CHAP. IV THE DECADENCE OF ANGLO-SAXON 31 and that what she had (a chanson de geste or two, and some verse saint-lives rather less formless than England's own) were things of little importance and less influence. It is an amiable but entirely unhistorical imagination to suggest that French literature was brought to England by the Conquest. There was little or none to bring; and what arose later would have been equally brought by the increasing popularity of the French language and its vigour in face of Anglo-Saxon decay. Nay more, some of the greatest things in Old French were written under English influence, in districts which, though not English in soil, were under English rule, on subjects which were supplied by England from Teutonic as well as from Celtic stores. It is not insignificant that in the oldest French literature, the Chansons, " Normans " are spoken of with as much dislike, and some- times in the same terms, as the perfidious Englishman of a later date has enjoyed. It is of even more significance that, although the original texts of the great Arthurian legend were, no doubt, all written in the French language, they are written on a " British matter," and partly by Englishmen. We had lost the key of our word-hoard: we had indeed never possessed any, had simply been fumbling for one, in regard to the largest and richest part of it. Latin and French, Latin even more than French, helped us at last to forge the proper keys of language, of style, and best of all, of prosody. But they did not put the treasurej here, th ey only helped us to find it and use it. \ INTERCHAPTER 1 To the short, but it is hoped not absolutely insufficient, account of Anglo-Saxon literature contained in the foregoing Book, there will now, according to the system explained in the preface, be subjoined a general summary of its accomplishments and character, disengaged from the previously necessary survey of individual facts. We have seen that in its comparatively scanty bulk, and under the disadvantages of a political history not indeed short in time but very unsettled, and but scantily equipped and supplied by civilisation, Anglo-Saxon succeeded in producing work both in prose and verse which has not only intrinsic merit and inte rest, which has not only the additional historic^ clainr of being 'the ancestor of one of the greatest literatures~or the world, "but which has the~?urther attraction, also historic, but surely not negligible, of being^for its time unii^e, or having only Icelaiidlc foi "aT dou5Ffur_competitor. Icelandic itself was probably some two cerftufies^behind Anglo-Saxon in the use of vernacular prose. But it is exceedingly important to take stock of the exact literary value of the accomplishments of this language both in themselves and in relation to its great descendant. One thing that Anglo-Saxon did is fortunately beyond all dispute. It "unlocked the word- hoard" — a word-hoard still very much in the rough, and with some disadvantages which will be considered more specially below. Like some metals, it needed blending with others before it became thoroughly useful. j'But in native strength, in backbone, in the power oT standing rough usage and being the better for it, it had perhaps no superiors^ and it possessed certain valuable, or rather invaluable, qualities. • I In particular, it had that gift which some lan- guages almost wholly lack, of forming compounds freely. Caedmon's famous heolster-sceado, holster-shadow, '^ cover or sheath of dark- ness," gives at the second opening of the literature a measure of its capacities in this way, and they can hardly be exaggerated, A language that cannot combine thus, or can do it only with difficulty, is a poor thin thing, the worst stuff possible for poetry, and fit 32 BOOK I INTERCHAPTER I 33 only for decent, perhaps elegant, but uninspired and uninspiring prose. In prose itself, however, Anglo-Saxon did not do very much, and it could hardly be expected to do very much. It had not the subject s ; its writers had not the demand ; and if by any chance any man had both subject and demand, there was the fatal mistress Lat in tempting him away from the homely English wife. For almost every man of letters was an ecclesiastic, and almost every man of letters, ecclesiastic or not, looked to the public not merely of his own burg or realm, but of Latin Christendom, which had its own universal tongue. Moreover, the fully-inflected condition of Anglo-Sa.xon has to be taken account of, and its dialects, and above all the extreme insecurity and instability -of political and social conditions at the time. War and ruin may sometimes — they do not by any means always — repay in song what they have exacted in suffering ; but prose as a rule requires prosperity, business, leisure for its cultivation. However this may be, it is certain that, as literature, the achievement of Anglo- Saxon in prose is very much less than its achievement in verse, though there may be a less abrupt separation between this achievement and what follows in the same medium. In poetry it did more, and there are few points of more import- - ance for the general study and comprehension of English literature as a whole than a comprehension of the general poetical equipment and accomplishment of Anglo-Saxon. And as estimates of these points have too often varied between the extremes of passionate and partisan appreciation on the one hand, and complete ignoring or unfair, perhaps sometimes ill-informed, depreciation on the other, such a general view has not been very easy to obtain. Yet there is no real difficulty in taking it. Anglo-Saxon poetry, then, as we see it in the sufficient if not very plentiful remains of its best period before the end of the eighth century, dis plays m erits of what we may call poetical intention con- siderably surpassing those shown by most literatures in their early ■stye's, and at least equal to those which some literatures have shown ^ ab stages far more advanced. Ithas passion — not so much in the conventional and limited sense ofTlTS passlon of love, with which it deals very little, as in the general sense of subjective intensity — of evidence in song that the poet has felt, seen, thought, or at least wondered, with a deep and genuine movement. And much of this P actio n of thought and feeling is directed to natural o bjects , in a fashion agaTiTT ui v la ie in iiiiist lili'i.iUiies, and ali nTCT~entirely absent from some. Yet again, though tlie resources of form, of art at the poet's command are undeniably scanty and rude, yet, such as they are, they are used witli care and skill. In other words, and this is no 34 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book mean praise, the Anglo-Saxon poet at his best, and that pretty frequently, has no mean portion of the poetic spirit, and has a just reverence for what he knows of the poetic art. In the first respect the author oi Beoivulf'i?, at least not less richly and variously endowed than even the author of the Chanson de Roland ; in the second, the author of the Fhosnix is very far ahead of the author of the Poema del Cid. But valuable, or rather invaluable, as are these equipments, every Anglo-Saxon poet from first to last during the Anglo-Saxon period proper suffers from two drav^acks which hamper him cruelly — monotony of suLyect and clumsiness of form- In both respects his limitation s are hardly even in the smallest degree a reproach to him. When we remember that, so far as is known, absolutely no great literature except Greek has ever been produced without other pattern literatures before it ; when we remember what was the comparative civilization of England up to the eighth century after Christ, and of Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ ; when we remem- ber further that Anglo-Saxon culture never had so much as a single century of quiet development on the great scale under favourable political and social conditions, and that hardly any profane patterns were before any but" a very few writers, we shall certainly not feel inclined to indulge an ignorant and conceited contempt of the limitations of subject to religion in the main, and out of religion to a little legend, a little contemporary war-song, some rudimentary science, and the thinnest surplus of other matters. Take any poet from Chaucer to Tennyson and strip him only of what he owes in subject — putting other debts, and they are large, out of sight — to his predecessors, and a terrible reduction would have to be made. Caedmon, if Casdmon it was ; Cynewulf, if Cynewulf there was ; and ail the anonyms, had practically no predecessors to oblige them, except the Bible, a few hymn- and homily-writers, the Fathers, and a small, a very small, part of the profane classics which had not gone utterly out of fashion or of reach. Of what, under this immense, this to us simply incalculable, dis- advantage they accomplished much must have perished, while what has perished may have largely exceeded what we have, not merely in bulk but in variety. On this head at least there is no fault to find, but rather infinite credit due to our ancestors, that while no, other — Icelandic, perhaps, excepted — of the modern European languages had yet found its tongue at all, or had found 'it only to let the results disappear, they did what they did. Nor is there exactly any " fault to find " with the defects of art and means which also beset them, but in this respect somewhat harsher language must be used. In the first place, putting enthusiasts INTERCHAPTER I 35 aside, I do not tliink that any one can call Anglo-Saxon, in familiar phrase, a " pretty " language. Though not without a grave undertone of music in it now and then, it has a distinct uncouthness. Its inflections give it monotony without music ; the rough consonant terminations give the word-structure an air rather of a dry-stone wall unwrought by hand than of cunning masonry. Afterwards, when this roughness was blended with softer forms and matter, it was to give the most perfect poetic medium — more perfect even than Greek — that has ever existed; at this time the destined completion had not been reached, and the language, full of forms in one way, was still formless ; crammed with possibilities, was still void, chaotic, rudimentary. That it chose the prosody most suited to it is no doubt true. Every language has, and must inevitably have, the prosody that it deserves, the prosody of which it is capable, whence is clear the folly of those who desperately attempt to force it into prosodic forms other than those into which it naturally goes. And that Old EngUsh pros- ody has limitations and shortcomings, probably inseparable from Old English vocabulary, there is little if any doubt. . But there is no doubt at all that the limitations and the shortcomings are of the most serious character. With some of the objections made to the Anglo- Saxon Ars poetica we need by no means concur. The common com- plaint that there are no similes may be called almost silly. In the first place, there are similes ; and in the second place, if there were none, why should there be any? The only possible answer that suggests itself turns upon such a childish argument, or no argument, as this, " Homer is a great early poet ; Homer is rich in similes ; therefore early poets who have no similes are not great." Moreover, simile or no simile, Anglo-Saxon poetry, like its cousin Icelandic, is admittedly rich in metaphor, which is only simile in the making. When a poet has once called the sea the " swan's path," and thought the " breast- hoard," he has shown himself perfectly competent to write a simile in twenty lines — a simile like that at the end of the Scholar Gypsy itself — if he chose to do it. So too we shall not, if we are wise, shake our heads because it is rather long before we come to epanaphora or antithesis in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The absence or the slow coming of epanaphora and antithesis is no doubt very disheartening, but, as Deor himself has it, this also mav we overeo. The real faults of Anglo-Saxon poetry from the formal point of view lie in, and indeed are inseparable from, its staple of accented alliterative verse, it may be discretionary, it may be quite carefully and cunningly arranged as to syllables, but divided by a hard and fast section or middle pause. That fine effects in certain limited kinds may be and have been got out of this arrangement need not 36 PRELIMINARIES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book be denied ; that it was a great advance on mere systemless chaos is of course undeniable. It lent itself with ease to that parallelism which is the most natural note of half-civilised poetry. The accents gave something of a " stand-by," something of a backbone, to save the rhythm from becoming merely prosaic. The aUiteration supplied a musical charm which has never died out of Enghsh poetry, and therefore never can die out of it. The sections helped the paral- lelism, acted as stays to the prentice poet, and assisted the accent and the alliteration to give something like a real poetic form, as opposed to the form of prose. For a certain meditative kind of poetry, like that of the Ruiii and the great Phcenix passage, the whole scheme is well fitted, and it does not do badly for romantic narrative, whether in its earliest form, as in Beowulf, or in its latest and almost last, as in Layamon. Nay more, it seems by no means absurd to find in it, as I believe some even of its specialist students are beginning to do, the germs not indeed of later English poetical rhythm, but of that wonderful English prose rhythm which, aimed at half-blindly from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, found, whether consciously or not, in the seventeenth, but never deliberately practised, much less deliberately analysed, till within the last hun- dred years, has given something almost as much a pure hybrid between poetry and prose in form as drama is a hybrid between them in spirit. But the defects of its qualities are many and great. When the normal scheme, with few unaccented syllables, is kept, it is excessively apt to become dull, monotonous, sing-song. When, in the poet's need for a longer line and greater variety, it receives the Caedmonian extension, it becomes perilously suggestive of the " patter " which has been consecrated in more modern times to burlesque and grotesque. The excessive and regular alliteration not only becomes wearisome to the ear, but also, and inevitably, occasions the selection of words not because they are the right words, but merely because they begin with the right letter. And the sectional pause is the worst of all. It will always remain the most astonishing thing in that extraordinary monument of learned and ingenious paralogism, Dr. Guest's English Rhythms, that he should have failed to perceive that the beginning of great English poetry is synonymous with the abolition of the com- pulsory middle pause, and should even have endeavoured to convict Shakespeare and Milton of Use-poesie because they do not obey it. That the middle" pause is wanted in very long lines may be freely granted ; in short ones and those of moderate length it cannot with- out disadvantage be more than a rule which admits the freest and most frequent exception. It is probably due to these faults and disabilities, rather than to INTERCHAPTER I 37 any want of genius, that the Anglo-Saxon poets did not do more than they did, and it is again and again to be repeated that it is surprising how much they did. But their poetry, indeed their whole literature, is a rudimentary literature, a literature in statu pupillari, and one which has not passed any but the lower stages even of pupilship. Even if the most elaborate theories of its prosody be admitted, the case will not be altered : for a certain etiquette of detail is consistent with a very early novitiate. It can manage simple prose very well, but it cannot achieve argument, elaborate narration, or anything that in the proper sense requires style. In the poetry we have been briefly reviewing we find some noble passages, especially of a serious and reflective cast, a few more showing the joy of battle well, still fewer, but some, evincing accurate observation and the power of putting it into words. But the class of poetical effects attained, and to all appearance attainable, is exceedingly limited, and excludes altogether those of the lighter kind. There is practically no lyric — a want which would of itself and at once relegate any poetry to a position below, and far below, the highest, (in short, we have here a juvenile effort, as we may call it, of immense interest, but doomed in itself to failure, because the person or people making it has not come to its full strength, has not entered into possession of its full property, and is using clumsy methods and tools on a scanty material, instead of employing the results of the experience of the past in method on the gathered treasures of the past in stuff. \ BOOK II THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER I THE TRANSITION The sleep of English — Awakening influences — Latin — French influence — Geoifrey . of Monmouth — l^atin prosody in the early Middle Ages — The Hymns — Alliteration and rhyme — Rhythm and metre — French prosody — Syllabic equivalence in English — Helped by Anglo-Saxon — Law of pause in English To say that English literature ^ dives underground some time before the Conquest, and does not einerge again till about the year 1200, would be an exaggeration ; but it would only be an exaggeration of the truth. As a matter of fact, we have nothing certainly dating from any part of this long period of a hundred and fifty years except the later passages of the Worcester and Peterborough Chronicles, the latest of which does not go beyond the oT'En'tith year 1155, though just before this there are pages of merit, especially that famous one already referred to as to the sufferings of the English people under Stephen. It is probable that the Grave J'liem, and perhaps some other fragments in verse, date from this time ; it is tolerably certain that some of the Anglo-Saxon Homilies and Saints' Lives which we possess, either as more or less original compositions or refashionings of older ones, date from it. But these I 'I'here is unfortunately no adequate literary history of the Middle English period. Vols. iii. and iv. and the earlier part of vol. v. of the late Professor Morley's English H'riters deal with it, but are chiefly occupied with a crowd of extraneous matters. Ten Brink (vol. i. Books ii. and iii.) is much better, but not all-sufficing. There is ample information in vol. ii. of the Variorum VWirton (London, 1871), but it is necessarily chaotic and indigestible. Luckily the texts tliemselves are now fairly, though not fully, accessible; unluckily tliey have too ofiirn been edited from the merely linguistic point of view. 39 40 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book i- things only touch the fringe of literature, and there are extremely few of them.i Yet during this long sleep, so scantily broken, a process was going on analogous to, but far more momentous and thorough than, the ordinary refreshment by the "season of all natures." We have said that the powers of English, not merely as a literature but as a language, were obviously failing even within the very restricted circle in which they had walked before the Conquest itself; it remains now to indicate as briefly as possible what the influences were which came to transform and refresh these powers, and how they went to work. The actual instruments were two, Latin and French ; and their working was directed to three different points of attack — the alteration of the language as such ; the suggestion of new subjects and forms of literatui'e ; and, above all, the construction of a new prosody. The notice of literatures and literary works not English has been limited, according to the plan of this book, to the strictest necessities, and among these necessities the present occasion must be counted. We can, moreover, economise under the first head of the last divi- sion, for the mere linguistic side of the matter but faintly concerns us. It is sufficient there to say that the diff"erent inflection of French and Latin (as, it is thought, the different inflections of Danish had already done) helped the already displayed tendency of the language to shake off" inflection almost if not altogether, though this was a work of time ; and that the swelling of the vocabulary with Latin or Romance words, though inevitable, is not, as we shall see when we come to actual literature once more, very noticeable in the first place. The effect of the exhibition of new forms and subjects was much more momentous, and to understand it we must try a " Pisgah-sight " of Latin and French literature as each then was. In considering the effect on English of Latin, we must not assume, as used to be assumed, that cjaasicalLatin was out of the Jjeji or knowledge of the early Middle AgesT IT was not ; and there were . , then Englishmen, such as Joseph of Exeter, who could Awakening . '^ ^ . , -^. ... , influences. Write excellent hexameters on a fairly Virgilian or at least Latin. Claudianic model, though they might sometimes con- descend to leonine or middle rhyme ; while, as we need not go beyond Chaucer to show, large parts of the classical poets, especially Ovid, were distinctly familiar. Indeed, it may perhaps be said with safety 1 For instance, Mr. Morley ekes out the assumption that " no doubt " there was verse, with the well-known Canute Poem, Merry sang the tnonks of Ely, the verses attributed to Godric of Finchale, and Sumer is icumen in. But if the Canute Poem has any interest of authenticity it must be much older, and Sumer is icumen in is pretty certainly much younger, than 1050-1150. Godric (d. 1170) is more to the point. His verses are but the meagrest scraps, but they show rhyfne and inetre. CHAP. I THE TRANSITION 41 that of all classical writers Ovid had most influence, though others had some. But the singular and still slightly puzzling thing in con- nection with this subject is that readers, even readers of considerable education and great ability, seem to have observed no critical pro- portion whatever in their relative estimate of authorities, either from the point of view of matter or from the point of view of form. They preferred in the '* Tale of Troy," not merely to Homer, whom they knew but little, but to Virgil, whom they knew fairly, and to Ovid, whom they knew well, two beggarly abstracts assigned to a certain Dictys and a certain Dares, for which they had absolutely no external authority, and which bore internal marks of absolute worthlessness as literature, if not of absolute untrustworthiness as history. They swallowed, though they had abundance of fairly sober abstracts of history, if they had not all original authorities, huge farragos of mere fairy tales about Alexander. And, generally speaking, the actual classics exer- cised, naturally enough, much less direct influence upon them, espe- cially in the point of form, than the writers of the decadence and the darkness from the fourth century downwards. And, as was yet more natural, they attached more importance still to the Services of the Church, to the devotional writings of ecclesiastics in verse and prose ; while by degrees they began to elaborate for themselves an almost entirely new system of philosophy, which the natural clearness and precision of Latin enabled them to make admirably systematic and scientific in terminology, though the terms might be barbarous in form. With Anglo-Saxon failing, and no other vernacular except the distant and thoroughly isolated Icelandic come to full maturity, the practice of history-writing became for a long period entirely Latin, and the usage of that tongue in the schools further established it as the language not merely of philosophy but of general science. The spoken influence of French, or at least Anglo-Norman, was naturally even greater, for it was for centuries the only court language, the language of superior business, and to .some extent at any rate the necessary vehicle of communication between the upper and lower classes, though not between the jnVuence lower classes themselves. But its literary influence was very considerably less. What has been already said must be re- peated, that at the time of the Conquest, and much more, therefore, at the time of the first influence of French at the court of Edward the Confessor, the foreigners had little, or practically no, literature to offer as an example to England. They had no prose; their great national epics were only beginning ; it is improbable that they had any finished lyric in durable form ; the romances proper were in the British division not yet written (they had pretty certainly to come from England itselQ, and in the case of the classical division were 42 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii only beginning to be written. French drama was lisping or still inarticulate ; the great French genre of the fabliau was hardly born. In short, French literature could exercise no influence, because it as yet was merely struggling for existence itself. No doubt, when it once began it made gigantic strides, while it so happened that the parts of France where some of these kinds saw the light were directly under the rule of or closely connected with the Kings of England. Proven9al led the way, though probably not by much, in formal lyric ; and more than half the Proven9al-speaking districts were sooner or later brought under English rule by the accession of the Angevins and the marriage of Henry II. with Eleanor of Guienne. The British and Roman " matters " were specially Norman in place of treatment, and from England itself came a book which, though in Latin, had such an enormous influence upon English literature that it must receive exceptional treatment here. This is the Historia Britomim of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which was probably written almost simultaneously with — at least within a decade or two of — the last gasp of pure original Anglo-Saxon in the Annals of Peterborough. Not much is known of Geoffrey, who must, however, have either been one of the most superlatively lucky persons in literary history or an original genius of the greatest mark. He was certainly con- secrated Bishop of St. Asaph in 1152, and must have Mo°n'!!m>uth'^ died about two years later. His book is dedicated to Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who died in 1147, so that it cannot be later than that date, while some have put it back ten or fifteen years earlier. He himself claims (with almost transparent "make- believe " as it seems to some) to have had a British original brought to him out of Armorica by a certain Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. But nothing has ever been seen or heard of such a book, and even " Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford," is difficult, if not impossible, to identify. Nor have any other materials for Geoffrey's History been traced, save that in the case of its most famous, though far from its largest episode, the story of King Arthur, certain germs, excessively meagre in substance and very uncertain in date, can be found in certain documents attributed to Gildas, a monk of the fifth century, and Nennius, an unknown person who may have written in the seventh, the eighth, or the ninth, if not later, together with a Life of Gildas, which is certainly not much, if any, earlier than Geoffrey.^ 1 Geoffrey himself, Gildas, and Nennius will be found conveniently trans- lated in one volume of Bohn's " Antiquarian Library," entitled Six Old English Chronicles. I do not know any translation of the Vita GilJae (ed. Stevenson) , and the Latin published half a century ago for the English Historical Society is not very accessible. The texts of Nennius vary a good deal. CHAP, I THE TRANSITION 43 The debt which English Hterature owes to this curious book is not limited to the Arthurian part, for Geoflfrey has given us the original story of King Lear, the most heartrending of English, or any, tragedies ; the ending at least of Co)?ius, the most exquisite of English, or any, masques; and other things. But in magnitude, in interest, and as a literary origin, the Arthurian invention dwarfs all other things in the book. It should be observed that by no means the whole story of Arthur, as we familiarly know it from Sir Thomas Malory's greatest of all compilations, is in Geoffrey. He represents the treason of Vortigern to Britain as partly repaired by two brothers, Ambrosius and Uther. The latter, reigning alone, falls in love with Igraine, wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, gains her by the help of the enchanter Merlin, who has already played a great part in the story, and becomes the father of Arthur, who succeeds him, crushes opposition at home, marries a noble lady of Roman de- scent, Guanhumara (Guinevere), joins issue with and defeats the Romans on the Continent, is recalled by the treason of his nephew Madred, whom Guanhumara has married, returns, defeats and finally slays the traitor, but is mortally wounded, and gives up the crown, being carried to the Isle of Avilion to be healed of his wounds. The Middle Ages, despite what we hear and talk about their defects of communication and the like, are famous for the almost unintelligible rapidity of their literary diffusion in some cases. But in none is this so remarkable as in the case of the Arthurian story, which, if not entirely invented on the meagre basis of Nennius by Geoffrey himself, can at most have some other basis of Welsh legends, chiefly about Merlin. We have seen that the book cannot have been written much earlier than 1130, and may not have been written till a few years before 11 50. It appears that before the later date it was already turned into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar, whose version is lost ; and shortly after Geoffrey of Monmouth's own death by Wace of Jersey, whose version remains. Fresh legends or sheer invention furnished Wace with some important additions, and, as we sliall see, he handed it on to the first English handler of the story, the poet Layamon. But the development of the whole into a real romance occupied pens in verse and prose during the later part, prob- ably the third quarter, of the century, in a manner the exact account and distribution of which is still a mystery. The chief credit used to be assigned, and tlie present writer is still inclined to assign it, to Walter Map or Majjes, a native of the Welsh marches, and the author not merely of a very curious and interesting Latin miscellany called De IVugis Curialium, but, by possible attribution at least, of a still more interesting collection of student poems, satires on church 44 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii dignitaries, etc., issued under the general nom de guerre of "Golias."^ At much the same time, later or earlier, Chrestien de Troyes, a French poet, gave poetical versions of many parts of the legend. But the complete execution of this in verse or in prose belongs, in language at least, to French not to English literature, till it was magnificently vindicated for its native soil by Malory three centuries later. The probably earliest English version after Layamon will be found noticed in the next chapter but one, as that of Layamon will be found in the very next. The opportunity of an example of unmatched pertinence has taken us a little way from the actual stream of English literature to illustrate the manner in which that literature drew its subjects from literatures other than English. This was all the more desirable because at this very time such new stocks of subjects were simply pouring in from East and West and North and South alike. We must return to show how a change greater far than any mere introduction of subject — the introduction of the true and universal prosody of English instead of the cramjoed and parochial rhythm of Anglo-Saxon — came about, showing at the same time how the surviving virtue of that rhythm itself differentiates English metre, as it was to be, from that of other modern languages. It appears probable, and the reasons which make it so have been already partly set forth, that it was Latin even more than French that effected this transmutation. It is therefore unnecessary for even the most sensitive patriot to be jealous of what has been rather absurdly called "the rhythm of the foreigner." Latin, to the Middle Ages, wa's Lati d "°^ foreign in any country, just as it was mother tongue in the early in none. It was in Church and State alike the common ' ^ ^"' speech, the common literary stock of Christendom ; the very Italian himself, and still more the Goths and Franks who spoke the other Romance tongues, had hardly more part in it than the Anglo- Saxon. And the Latin prosody, as well as the Latin vocabulary, that affected English poetry once for all in the centuries between looo and 1400 A.D. was Latin enormously changed by influences which may have been themselves barbarian in origin. It is improbable that we shall ever exactly know the causes of the change which we first observe in Prudentius, and which becomes ever more noticeable. It may be that, as some will have it, the elaborate classical prosody of Latin was a mere interlude, that " the rhythm of the foreigner " was introduced from Greece, and for a time superimposed with crushing 1 Both edited for the Camden Society by Thomas Wright, whose services to Middle English literature were inferior to those of no man, dead or living, in his numerous editions of texts, and in his Diographia Britannica Literaria (2 vols. London — Anglo-Saxon Period, 1842; Anglo-Norman Period, 1846). CHAP. I THE TRANSITION 45 weight on a natural accentual prosody such as we see partly indi- cated in "Saturnian" fragments. But what is certain is that, from the end of the fourth century onward, there is observable a movement (whether of innovation or reaction is not here essential) which not only alters to the most material extent the quantity of syllables, but also, as a consequence or independently, conditions the structure of verse. And this change is seen more especially in the compositions which were certain to exert most effect upon the vernaculars, the Hymns of the Church. For not only were these sure to resound in millions of ears, the eyes corresponding to which were very * ymns. unlikely to read written literature, secular or sacred, but the music by which they were accompanied was equally certain to familiarise the ear, and with the rhythm to impress it on the brain, and make it likely to be reproduced in vernacular composition, especially when the prosodic forms more specially belonging to that composition had gone almost entirely out of use. Now, the characteristics of this kind of verse were chiefly two, and each of these was in direct and striking contrast with the corresponding characteristics of Anglo-Saxon. In the first place, though alliteration might by accident appear ^n'^'r^'^" in them, its regular presence as a distinguishing poetic form, a regulator and mainspring of rhythm, was entirely absent, and was replaced by rhyme ^ both middle and end, but especially the latter. And in the second place, the requirement of a certain number of "accented" syllables, not even itself insisted on with absolute rigidity, and accompanied by the vaguest ^'^J^'etre^"'^ and widest license of inserting syllables that were unac- cented, was replaced by the system of definite metre, composed of syllabic integers either identical or equivalent. This influence had already exerted itself on the so-called Romance languages, and so in the case of the second foreign influence — French — Anglo-Saxon found itself confronted with an ally of Latio, or let us say with a pupil who had already passed his freshmanship. But French had received the Latin influence and instruction in its own way. One of those strange and infinitely interesting, though also infinitely mysterious, idiosyncrasies of Ian- prosody. guage, which students of philology and phonetics too often neglect, had brought it about that French should be a language in which the distinction of syllabic value (call it "long" or '-short," * "Rhyme," not "rime" "Rime" in English means "hoar-frost," and we need not introduce an unnecessary ambiguity, against the practice of all our greatest writers, save, perhaps, one. Nay, the suggested etymology of fivdfiSs, if false, shows the instinctive recognition of the fact, first formulated by Mitford, that " rhyme is a time-beater," not a mere tinkling tag. 46 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii " accented " or " unaccented," " heavy " or " light," or by any op- position of words which may be preferred as least controversial) is, and seems always to have been, less marked than in almost any other. It followed from this that trisyllabic feet — that is to say, feet in which one syllable is intrinsically strong, long, heavy, or what not, enough to take two weaker, shorter, lighter ones on its back and preserve them distinct from others — were never prevalent in French, and for many centuries have been non-existent. And it followed from this again that "syllabic equivalence" — that is to say, the principle by which one strong, long, heavy syllable may be .substituted for two weak, short, light ones, and vice versa — has in the regular prosody of France never had any place, while even in doggerel, in comic songs, and the like, syllables, if they are not to count at full, have to be simply slurred or omitted, as may be seen in the printed works of the lighter French songsters. Now there was, and from what has been said it will be seen that this also was natural, something of a reflex tendency in Latin non- classical verse to imitate this chaiacteristic of the Romance tongues, which showed itself also in Provencal, in Italian, and to a less degree in Spanish. And undoubtedly the crucial question was whether English would follow it and them in this respect. For centuries, as „ „ . . we shall see, the question was undecided — nay. at the Syllabic 1 , r y • 1 equivalence in present day there are some persons ot distinction who English. ^yj]j ]^ave it that there is no syllabic equivalence in English, and who resort to slurring, to " extrametrical syllables," and to all manner of strange devices to twist out of this great, this cardinal, this supreme feature of our poetry. For it is this — the possibility, namely, of substituting almost anywhere, with due precautions, dactyl or tribrach or anapaest for iamb or trochee ^ — which, when the example of Spenser to some extent, and the inestimable license of the great dramatists far more, had given it an unquestioned right of place in literature, and when it had allied with itself the shaking off of the rigid caesura or pause, endowed English verse with that astonishing and unparalleled variety of music which puts it at the head of the poetry of the modern world. And we should be doing Anglo-Saxon a grave injustice if we did not recognise that one of its main poetical features undoubtedly helped to bring about this blessed result, and that was the old license of putting in unaccented syllables almost ad libitjtm. Indeed, .some authorities would recognise a formal and regular equivalence in Anglo-Saxon itself. The sectional arrangement of Anglo-Saxon 1 Strictly speaking, of course, only the tribrach corresponds to the trochee or iamb. Fiut, as in Greek itself, dactyls and anapaests (though not, I think, cretics or anijihihrachs) claim a place. CHAP. I THE TRANSITION 47 was less beneficial, and would, if maintained, as there was for some centuries a blind effort to retain it, have been very mischievous. But here too the dramatists, with Shake- Helped by Anglo-baxon. speare at their head, came to the rescue, and, with the aid of their mighty follower Milton, once for all established the following law : — III an English heroic line, as well as in any shorter one^ the patise may fall after the first or any subsequent syllable to the penultimate, while there need not be any distinct pause hrEngirsh.'^ at all. But we must now see in detail what the actual history of Middle English literature was. 1 In the Alexandrine and longer lines a pause is necessary, somewhere about the middle, when they are used continuously, though not always in isolated applications like Spenser's. But it is a question whether these lines are not more or less disguised disticks, a fact of which the sixteenth-century practice of printing them in halves was a clumsy recognition. CHAPTER II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD I 200-1250 Layamon's Brut — The Ormulum — Its spelling — Its metre — The Ancren Riwle — The Moral Ode — Genesis and Exodus — The Bestiary — The Orison of our Lady — Proverbs of Alfred and Hendyng — The Owl and the Nightingale The dates of the books — not numerous, but, in some cases at least, both important and interesting — which compose the first growth of Middle English literature, or what used to be called " Semi-Saxon," are known with very little certainty. But a circa of reasonable probability can generally be attached to them, and there seems very little doubt that about the close of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries something like a distinct first-crop made its appearance. It is natural that the subjects of this new literature should, like those of the old, be at first mainly religious. But they soon ranged more widely, and, as it happens, the most important of all in bulk and in contents, if not also in actual literary quality, is secular. This is the famous Brut ^ of Layamon, which we possess in two forms, one assigned by scholars to the earliest and the other to the latest years of the half-century which has been subsumed for this chapter. The differences between these two versions, ^^^B^ut^ though occasionally, as in the case of the name of the author's father,^ a little puzzling, are of great value for linguistics, and they are by no means unimportant for hterary history proper, inasmuch as we perceive in the later version the distinct enlargement of the intrusion of rhyme, which is already noticeable in the earlier. But in mere contents the later version is, somewhat con- trary to the wont of mediaeval times, shortened rather than watered ^ Ed. Madden, 3 vols. London, 1847. 2 In the earlier text we have " Layamon the son of Leovenath," in the later " Laweman the son of Leuca." 48 CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 49 out ; and it is also in much worse condition, having suffered by that too famous fire in the Cottonian Library which plays in Early English literary history an actual and historical counterpart to Caleb Balderstone's thunderstorm in fiction. Fortunately for the student of letters, both are contained in one of the best, as in one of the handsomest, editions which have fallen to the lot of any Early English classic.^ Layamon, the son of Leovenath, of whom we know nothing save from his own words, appears to have been a priest at Arley or Ernley (a village near Bewdley, on the Severn), into whose hands Wace's translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth fell. He combined with it, as he tells us, Bede, historical works by "Albinus" and "Austin," which have not been identified, though the first may have been some lost Latin original of Bede's own,'-^ and (but this he does not tell us) apparently either traditions of the Welsh marches, near which he lived, or some imaginations of his own. The result is a Brut, or British History, of great length,'' displaying occasionally no small literary power, very interesting as the first English book on the great legendary history of England, and absolutely priceless as showing the inroads which the influences described in the last chapter were making upon the effete rules and weakened powers of Anglo-Saxon. In mere vocabulary the change is by no means great. Authori- ties differ as to the number of French words used, but none sets it above an almost infinitesimal proportion.* Yet the forms of the language are unmistakably altering, and the forms of prosody are altering more unmistakably still. The general structure is still the unrhymed alliterative line of two short sections. But an absolutely perfect example of the older form — four accents, three alliterations, no rhyme whatever, and a rhythm often not marked at all according to any metrical system, and only vaguely trochaic when sensible — is the exception, an exception appearing at long intervals. Constantly the alliteration is broken down. Very frequently rhymes appear between the line-halves — rhymes of a simple and obvious kind, " brother "' and '• other," " king " and " thing," " night " and " light," etc., but for that very reason all the easier, all the more tempting, 1 Sir Frederic Madden's Layamon, like Thorpe's Ccsdmon and Exeter Book, was published by the Society of Antiquaries, which unfortunately did not find encouragement to go further. 2 " Albinus " of Canterbury was one of Bede's authorities. 8 Text A contains over 32,000 lines or half-lines; Text B seems to have had about 24,000, of which more than the odd 4000 are lost or damaged. The older practice of printing Anglo-Saxon verse in half-lines is distinctly preferable here, because tlie change of rhythm and the inroad of rhyme are more clearly shown. ^Madden allows about 50 in A, about 80 in B; Professor Skeat puts the total at 170. 50 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii and all the more frequent in occurrence. Most important of all, the unmetrical or vaguely trochaic cadence tends steadily towards, and sometimes readies, the full and exact octosyllabic couplet, rhymed and complete. When we come across such a couplet as — Tha answersede Vortiger, Of elchen ufel he was war ; still more when we find that in the fifty years' interval between the two versions the terminations " Appollin " and " wel iwon " have been changed into "Appollin" and "of great win," the inference is unmistakable. Rhymed metre has challenged on rhymed rhythm, and is slowly driving it out. As for the substance of Layamon, it may be regarded from two points of view : his additions to his predecessors, as far as we have these latter, and his handling of his subjects, original or added. The list of the former given by Sir Frederick Madden fills two large pages, and includes among its more important items the legend of Oriene (the name which Layamon gives to St. Ursula of the Eleven Thousand Virgins), a much fuller account of Rowena's appearance as Dalilah, the all-important additions to the Arthurian story that " elves " figured at the King's birth and took him to Avalon,i the foundation of the Round Table, and numerous details of Arthur's wars with rebels and invaders and Romans. From the latter point of view particular attention may be directed to the whole of the Rowena story, which Layamon works into a much completer romance-episode than any previous writer whose work has come to us,^ and the .whole of the Arthurian passages. These latter have not indeed received the immense addition to their interest which is given (possibly by Layamon's earlier contemporary and neighbour by birth, Walter Map) in the Anglo-French romances on the subject, but it is in itself a much greater advance upon Wace than Wace is upon Geoffrey, and it displays much more poetical capacity than the Jerseyman's. Indeed, when we give fair weight to the fact that Layamon was like an animal which is struggling out of its old shell or skin into a new one. and has not half completed the process, the poetical merit of his work deserves to be set far higher than it has usually been put. A " chronicler," as he is sometimes called, he is not, though he may 1 Their queen is here "Argante," of course the same as the " Morgane " of the more usual stories and the " Urganda " of Peninsular revival in Amadis. 2 It is luckily accessible to those who do not possess the whole in Morris and Skeafs Specimens of Early English, part i. p. 64. I could wish that (instead of the whole of King Horn, of which a fifth, or ten pages, would well sufifice) much larger extracts from Layamon were given in this invaluable book. There is plenty to choose from. CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD $1 have thought himself one. He is really the first writer of romance in English of whom we know. The second great poetical work — or at least work in verse — of this time, the Or>niiliim,^ is far inferior in interest of subject to the Brut, for it is simply one of the numerous and always more or less larae homiletic paraphrases of the Scriptures — in this case ^^^ busied with the Gospels for each day. We have not Ormulum. the whole set, but a considerable part of it, extending to some lo.ooo lines of fifteen syllables each, or double that number if the poem be divided into couplets of eight and seven. The author, of whom nothing is known except from this work, was one Orm or Ormin, an Augustinian monk, probably resident somewhere in the east of England, or in Northern Mercia. He addresses a cer- tain Walter, whom he terms threefold his brother — in the flesh, in faith, and in monastic order. Of actual poetical merit it is not too much to say that Orm has nothing, and it is at the same time not paradoxical to add that his work is much more valuable by reason of certain characteristics which it possesses than one of much greater poetical merit without these characteristics could have been to us. The first of his peculiarities lies in his spelling. It would have been in any case probable that the jostling of English by French and Latin should have effected some confusion in English pronunciation, while this confusion would also be assisted by the variety . ,, A i'^ spelling. of dialects still prevalent in •• Semi-Saxon." At any rate Orm, who seems to have been a purist in the matter, and to have liad a sensitive ear, was offended by this, and determined to adopt a plan which should at least prevent .short vowels from being sounded long and vice versa. In order to do this he seized upon the prin- ciple — sound English to this day, and fatal to what is called American spelling — that caeteris paribus, and in the absence of special know- ledge to the contrary, a vowel before two consonants will be pro- nounced short in English, a vowel before one consonant long. And regardless of the extraordinary effect produced to the eye — indeed ♦his was of less consequence before the days of printing, and of least in the days when reading was not so much reading as recitation — he steadily doubled the consonant after every short vowel, even when there could, as in the case of the infinitive hrinngcmu " to bring." be practi- cally no danger. The effect in appearance is naturally hideous and grotesque ; as a monument in literary, or at least linguistic, history the practice (the observance of wliich the author solemnly enjoins on any scribe wlio sliall copy his work) is priceless. As valuable, and more strictly literary, is Orm\s metrical arrange- 1 Ed. White and Holt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1878. 52 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii ment. His prosody is distinguished from Old English by being neither accentual nor (at least regularly) alliterative, nor tolerant of extrametrical syllables. It is distinguished from classical metre, ^atin by having no syllabic equivalence nor any tri- syllabic feet. If its metre — a strict iambic form of tetrameter catalectic, or alternate dimeters acatalectic and catalectic — occurs anywhere in Latin hymns, it must be very rare, and Orm has no rhyme. The general opinion is that he adapted it from the hymns, in principle, whether from an actual example or not. But I suspect also the influence of French, v^^here strict syllabic prosody had long been established. Now nothing can be more reasonable as a matter of expectation, or more valuable as a matter of fact, than that in this period of groping and experiment, of endeavouring to suit the old bottle to the new wine, some one should have selected, as Orm apparently did, the method of hard-and-fast syllabic prosody, unhelped, uninfluenced even by rhyme. It is not a success ; it is contrary to the genius of English, though strangely enough there are even now persons who cling to the idea. But there is no doubt that the attempt was one of the experiments which had to be made, if partially to fail, and that in the very failure it did good by curbing and restraining the English tendency to slipshod doggerel with rhyme to match. Nor ought we to put the actual value of the Ormulnm too low. It is stiff, monotonous, bolstered out here and clipped there to suit e hard-and-fast rhythm, occasionally of a most prosaic and prp- voking sing-song. But it ought to be remembered that sing-song was exactly what English wanted. It was the defect in cadence, the substitution of rhetorical for strictly poetical effect, which was the greatest shortcoming of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Here at least there was no such defect, though the verse not unnaturally tumbled into the 'opposite fault of too monotonous ictus, of an effect like that I'^j 'a, which has been whimsically transferred from the King of France in f,,pJ the rhyme to French verse, of marching up the hill and then march- '^t ing down again with remorseless alternation. In morals to go into one extreme in order to cure the other is a dubious recipe ; but in other matters it is the one most familiar, most generally applied, and perhaps most generally effective. That something better ought to come and would come than the half-alliterative, half-rhymed, half- rhythmical, half-metrical jumble of Layamon was clear; that it would be something also different from, and much better than, the stiff rhymeless cadence of Ormin was clear likewise. But this was the necessary tack in one direction as that was in the other, and between them, with other minor veerings to help, they brought the ship through the troublesome middle passage of the thirteenth and early fourteenth CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 53 centuries safe into the open sea where Chaucer took command, and where she has sailed since, and may sail, we hope, for evermore. The third capital work of the earliest period of Middle English is not like the Brut and the Ormidum in verse, but in prose, though it resembles the Ormulutn in belonging to sacred not to profane litera- ture. It is thus less important than either in the history of literary form, though as an example of pleasant, easy prose-writing it shows a considerable advance on any Anglo-Saxon prose that we possess, and its interest of subject, of tone, and temper is very considerable. This is the Ancren Riivle ^ or Rule of Anchoresses, xhe written by an unknown person for the guidance of three ■^"ff"' ladies who had taken the vows, but belonged to no order, abiding in a free female hermitage at Tarrant Keynes in Dorsetshire. This book is partly a devotional manual, six of its eight books, or '• deals," being devoted to what the author calls the Inner Rule — the cultivation of the soul by guarding against sin and practising piety. The first handles services and ceremonial matters ; the last, the daily life of the recluses. The characteristic of these practical parts is a curiously wide and liberal spirit of charity, informed by good sense and human feeling. The hermitage of Tarrant Keynes was no Abbey of Theleme : its motto is fats ce que dots, not fats ce que voiidras, and the writer is perfectly well aware of what comes of the unlimited indulgence of sense and will. But he not only does not advise, he distmctly reprobates and forbids, exces- sive austerities, and is never weary of dwelling on the contrast between the Inner and Outer Rule, and the superior importance of the former. The strictly devotional parts are animated by a mysticism which is of the kindly order likewise, and the illustrations, parables, and the like are frequently of considerable literary interest, while the style shows at least possibilities of splendour as well as an actual command of ease. The rhyming productions of this period are of less individual bulk, but in almost every case (except those of the Homilies and Lives of Saints) they possess literary as well as linguistic importance. One or two of these, if we could believe some authorities, preceded even Lay- amon and Orm by the greater part of a century. But this, as will be seen, is nearly inconceivable. 1 Extracts of this appeared in Wright and Halliwell's Reliquiae Atitiquac in 1841-43. It was completely published by the Rev. James Morton for the Camden Society in 1853. The authorship is quite uncertain : it has been assigned to two Bishops of Salisbury ; Simon of Ghent, who died too late, 1313, to have written a book probably of the earliest years of the thirteenth century; and Richard Poore, who was certainly born and lived at Tarrant, and whose time (he died in 1237) suits well enough. But there is no evidence of his having written it. It was widely popular, and was translated both in prose and verse. 54 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii The most important, perhaps, and according to the authorities just mentioned the oldest, is the somewhat celebrated Poeina Morale, or Moral Ode, published at the beginning of the last century The.i/<'/-rt: jjy Hickes.^ This, which answers to its name, is a dis- quisition in verse on the rapid passing of life, on the fact that growth in years and in goods does not always, or often, mean growth in wisdom or in grace, on the importance of good works, the certainty of Judgment, and the like. It is, though necessarily dealing with commonj^laces, good literature, and its metrical form is very re- markable ; while the language, for all its age, is in parts so modern that scarcely anything more than the slightest alteration in spelling is necessary to make the first four lines intelligible : — I am elder than I was in winter (s) and eke lore; I wield more than I did: my wit ought to be more; Well longe I have child ibeen in worke and eke in deede; Though I be in winters old, too young am I in rede. It will be seen that this form is different from anything hitherto noticed, and that it is identical, not only almost but altogether, with the most insignificant differences, with the swinging "fourteener" which was almost the staple verse of English literature at the end of the early and middle sixteenth century, and which has never gone out since. Now Professor Ten Brink not only thinks that this metre is all but identical with Orm's, but believes that the poem may be as early as the reign of lienryl. The first position is, I think, a clear mistake. It is tme that occasionally the lines of the Odegwt us the full Ormulum fifteener with iambic cadence, while the feminine termination which distinguishes it is rigidly maintained. But as a rule, as the already given example will show, the first syllable is cut off, the cadence becomes trochaic, and what is more, there is a distinct tendency, if not to the definite insertion of trisyllabic equivalents, to a hop, a slur, a quaver, breaking the steady "thid-thud" of Walter's excellent brother. Nor is the rhyme a less important or a less disturbing addition. This, however, is one of those points which it may not be easy to make clear to a foreigner's ear — a fact which no doubt should render all foreigners chary of committing themselves on prosodies not their own. The other position is more arguable. How is it possible when we find after 1200 (the certainly earliest possible date of the Br7ct), even up to 1250 (that of the Owl and Night ittgale, etc.), metrical as opposed to rhythmical scansion 1 It has been several times reprinted, and will be found complete in two differ- ent texts (which are supposed to represent about the same difference, 1200 and 1250, as those of the Brut), in Morris and Skeat, op. cit. i. 194, sq. \ CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 55 barely struggling in, that not long after iioo a perfect metrical swing of the modern kind should have been attained by one poet, and should somehow or other have failed to appear in any other? Observe too, that the rhyme is not middle-rhyme, the earlier, but end-rhyme, the later kind ; that the author keeps it up with ease, in- stead of using only the most obvious and recurrent rhymes, and lapsing continually, as Layamon, much later than iioo, did. Of the language I do not profess to speak as an expert in even a slight degree. But of the metrical form I will say boldly that it is rather astonishingly advanced even for the middle of the thirteenth century, which is the time most probably assigned to it. And it would be almost equally astonishing if the rhymed Paternoster which we also have, and which Ten Brink assigns to the later half of the twelfth century, were of that date, couched as it is in the regular octosyllabic couplets which again we only find struggling into existence in Layamon. There will be few occasions in the course of this history on which we can allow ourselves even as much discussion of controversial points as this. But the ord^r of the change in prosody is too important to dispense with it wholly here. As it so happens, however (and here, as in the case of Layamon, the possession is precious not merely for philological but for true literary reasons), we possess more versions than one of the Poema Morale, and the comparison of them establishes the unlikelihood of an early date for its more finished metrical form. The sober and even yet hardly disputed authority of the late Dr. Morris does not venture to put even the elder of these earlier than "^before 1200," the later he dates more plumply as "1250." And even in the 1200 version we see that the proper metrical form is only struggling out of the shell, which it has not thoroughly chipped till later. In the earlier we find such a line as this — Elche time sal l>e man of-)>unche his misdade; which becomes in the later — On hwuche tyme so euer the mon of-J>inkeJ> his mysdede^ an almost perfect fourteener such as might have been written (were it not for the /// letter) in the early sixteenth, or for the matter of that in the late nineteenth, century. And generally it may be laid down with the utmost confidence that the procession from rhythm to metre is astonishingly regular, and perhaps affords as good a test of date as any other. Here and there, of course, individual study or genius will make a start in front; individual clumsiness or the un- favourable nature of surroundings will cause another to lag behind. 56 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii But generally the procession is as regular as the growth of a tree ; and it cannot be said to be in the least interrupted — it is at the most for a time paralleled and accompanied — by the curious alliter- ative revival which we shall have to notice in the fourteenth century. A considerable part of the literature of this time is only literature by courtesy, Homilies and Lives of Saints, with rare exceptions, being merely refashionings of previous matter for present consump- tion. These are found both in prose and in verse, the latter gradually taking the form either of the rudimentary " fourteener " just noticed, or of the octosyllabic couplet, which, as we have seen, crops up even in Layamon. The so-called Saivles Warde,'^ a prose homily, has a certain interest because in one of those fits of agglomeration which have been and will be noticed, and which alternate with segregation in the philological ague, it has been sought to unite its authorship with that not merely of the Ancren Riwle, but of Hali MeidenJiad^^ the Wooing of Our Lord^ and the prose lives of St. Margaret,^ St. Juliana,*'^ and St. Katharine. Identi- fications of this kind can at the best be conjectural, and are always exceedingly rash, but they may fairly be supposed to argue on the part of those who make them the apprehension of a certain literary unity in the styles as well as in the mere language of the different books. Even this is exposed to the objection that in matter which more than any other lends itself to the adoption of " common form," which is constantly based on similar Latin originals, and which must pre- sumably have been written in schools of conventual practice, even a great similarity is probable without an identity of authorship being fairly to be inferred ; while mere agreement in grammatical and dialectic forms is the very slenderest and most treacherous of clues. There is much more purely literary interest in a verse translation or paraphrase of the books of Genesis and Exodus^ which appears to have been executed about the middle of the thirteenth ^'Rxodu^.^ century, and which has great attraction not merely for its extremely sharp contrast of language and form with those of the Caedmonian paraphrases, but for the intrinsic character of the form itself. Here is a passage : — For sextene get Joseph was old Quane he was into Egipte sold; He was Jacobes gunkeste sune, 1 In full ed. Morris, Old English Homilies (E.E.T.S.) ; part of each given in Morris-Skeat Specimeris, vol. i. 2 Ed. Cockayne, E.E.T.S. 8 Ed. Morris. E.E.T.S. CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 57 Brictest of wasme and of witter wune;^ If he sag hise brethere misfaren, His fader he it gan un-hillen and baren. Now it must be evident here to the most careless reader who has any ear that we have stumbled upon one of the most famous of English measures, the great Christabel metre itself, or in other words, the iambic dimeter with wide license of trisyllabic substitution, catalexis, and metrical truncation so as to interpose trochaic chords. The enormous influence of this (through Scott's hearing part of Christabel before it was published) has long been a commonplace of literary history ; and it has been also often pointed out, though less often, that it was only developed, not invented, by Coleridge, in- asmuch as it occurs in Spenser's The Oak and the Brere {Shep. Kal. Feb.), and in other places, including even Co?nus. But not much attention has been called - to its occurrence practically full-fledged, though not with all its tricks of flight yet learnt, in the middle of the thirteenth century. And it cannot, I think, be necessary to point out how vain are efforts to make out an Anglo-Saxon ancestry for it. Except on the very rarest occasions, and then in the most distant and halting fashion, there is not even an accidental resemblance to it in any Anglo-Saxon verse from Beowulf to Briinatiburgh. And there could not be, for it depends for its unmatched combination of freedom and harmony on exactly the two eff'ects which Anglo-Saxon poetry lacked — metrical, not rhythmical, cadence and final rhyme. Only the first could give the freedom without doggerel license ; only the second could give *' time beat" — the warning bell which prevents that license from being overstepped at the same time that it gives harmony to the verse. A Bestiary ^^ of the same date or thereabouts — in itself one of the numerous mediasval renderings of the fantastic mystical zoology which was so popular, and which has already met us far earlier in the Whale and Panther of the Exeter Book — possesses , interest of the same kind though rather less. This interest ^ " "^n- lies in the fact that it oscillates between unrhymed accentuation and rhymed metre ; for we shall almost invariably find (and it is 1 " Brightest of form and of wise wont" (habits); ger, of course =" year " ; gunkeste = " youngest " ; sag = " saw " ; unhillcn — " unAult" = " discover." I have taken the text from the Specimens as more accessible, and also because some of the MS. asperities are softened, but the whole poem ought to be read to justify the above remarks. 2 In the E.E.T.S. edition the metre is noticed, briefly, by Professor Skeat. But no attention is drawn to it in the Specimens, and it has, I tiiink, been generally ignored in literary histories. 8 Ed. Wright, Reliquiae Antiquae, i, 208 ; ed. Morris, Old English Miscellany, p. I. Some in Specimens. 58 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii surprising that poets like Campion and Milton centuries later failed to discern the fact) that rhyme and metre are in modern languages almost indissolubly bound together— English blank verse being mainly a "sport," though as we shall see later, an extremely interesting and valuable sport. At one time in the Bestiary we find somewliat irregular and broken-down alliteration, not very dissimilar from the non-rhymed parts of Layamon. At another we come upon wandering and uncertainly octosyllabic couplets, fairly constant in their rhymes, but as " wobbling " in point of syllabic constitution as the nearly contemporary examples of the same metre that we find in Germany and Spain. Anon will come a series (evidently inspired by some hymn) of very respectable eights and sixes rhymed in quatrains, and a good deal better than Tate and Brady, but with the same tendency to sevens instead of sixes which we find in the un- rhymed Onmiluvi, and which may be accounted for by the still over- inflected state of the language. And yet again the unrhymed couplet of the Onntihim itself meets us to show the staggering state of the writer or writers. For even if — which would be rather improbable — the book were a composition from more hands than one, the absence of any prevailing metre would be equally noticeable aad equally striking by contrast, especially with the almost tyrannous predominance of the regular octosyllable in all but strictly lyrical work in France at the same time. Most noteworthy of all perhaps is the fact that these quatrains or couplets are mixed, the writer sometimes, it would seem, being unable to hit upon rhyme, though he would if he could. Nor does the same fruitful source of interest fail in an earlier production of the sacred kind — the so-called Orisoti of our Lady^ to which as early a date as 1210 is assigned. This is in couplets and very fairly rhymed, but the lines have not settled down '^o«rZ.a^^.''^^"^o anything like even length. They range from the fourteeners and fifteeners of the Ormiilum and the Moral Ode to — and this is where the importance of the poem comes in — examples of no less famous a form than the decasyllable itself.^ It has always been matter of surprise that this famous form, the earliest staple of French, and in one way or another, as decasyllable or hen- decasyllable, making its appearance early in the other Romance lan- guages, should have been so late to appear in English. I do not tiiink that a complete decasyllabic couplet can be found in the Orison — the writer's grip of his metre, or rather his conception of what he means to grip, is too loose for that. And indeed, though attempts 1 Whole in Morris, Old English Homilies, i. 191 ; more than half in Sped' ment. 2 Cristes | milde | moder | seynte | Marie — Al is j the heouen | e ful | of thin | e blisse. CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 59 have been made to find couplets in Hampole, it is extremely doubtful whether they are not merely accidental in all cases before Chaucer — the tendency either to the short octosyllable, the long line halved, or the composite fourteener being apparently irresistible. But that the decasyllable should appear at all (as it does later in Langland's alliteration) is the important thing. There is no simile or metaphor that suits these metrical appearances so well as the old one of the coral island, which first makes uncertain show just awash, witji a few points, and in the course of ages establishes itself as a complete and continuous reef or atoll. The metrical uncertainty of the Bestiary and the Orison displays itself also in the curious Proverbs of Alfred^ to which, in their present form, no older date than the middle of the thirteenth century is assigned, but which must be far older in substance, and which may not quite fancifully be connected with the King's Ephemeris noticed above. They may be most conveniently taken in com- parison with the somewhat later, but not much later, A^Tdlnd Proverbs of Hendyng^- attributed to a mythical person Hendyng. of that name, son of the equally mythical "Marcolf," who in scores of different forms holds colloquy with Solomon in mediaeval writings. The same familiar saws make their appearance in both with little variation — "A fool's bolt is soon shot," "Spare rod and spoil child," etc. This has of itself a genuine literary interest, because these products of the wisdom of many and the wit of one, thus passing through all English literature, act as tie-rods to maintain its con- tinuity. ^ But the form has interest as well as the matter. The later or Hendyng proverbs are in regular six-lined stanzas of the so- called Romance form, rhymed aabaab. In those assigned to Alfred we have over again, but with a distinctly greater tendency toward the predominance of rhyme, the Layamon jumble of regular rhymed or even assonanced couplet, and of equally regular alliterated stave. Some of the sections, each introduced with a " Thus quoth Alfred," are rhymed throughout in couplets of a somewhat staggering dimeter ; some show no rhyme at all ; and in some it emerges and sinks again after much the same fashion as in the Bestiary. In fact, the moral to be drawn from all these poems, even singly but much more to- gether, is that rhyme and metrical equivalence of verse, struggling still at the beginning of the thirteenth century, had by its middle got 1 To be found, like the Bestiaiy, both in Reliquiae Aiitiquac, i. 170, and in An Old English Miscellany, two texts (102, 103, sq.). Part again in Specimens. 2 AV/. Antiq. i. 109. Extracts will be found in the second part of Morris and Skeat's Specimens, where the work is dated 12J2-1207. 8 So, I may note in passing, the pet Elizabethan antithesis of " Wit " and " Will " appears at this time in a short piece given by Morris, Old English Miscellany, p. 192. 6o THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii so distinctly the better that everybody turned to rhyme, that most people tried to write pretty regular metrical verse, and that very fair success crowned both attempts. Such success was especially re- markable in the last poem of this period which will claim detailed notice, a poem which is at the same time one of the best. This is The Oiul and the Nightingale^ a poem of some 2000 lines in fairly regular octosyllabic couplets, which is attributed to one Nicholas de Guildford, who lived at Portesham in Dorset- shire, and which cannot be much later than the middle and the of the thirteenth century. The form of it is the very Nightingale, common mediaeval one of the dibat, as it is called in- French — a metrical disjiute between two persons or things, which mav range from a mere exhibition of their several qualities, in- tended to instmct the reader and show the poet's learning, to a "flyting" of the kind popular much later in Scotland. The general scheme is, of course, a contest and conflict between " crabbed age and youth," between gravity and gaiety, but the Nightingale is the aggressor and the more violent in her language, while the poet seems rather to incline to the side of the Owl. Certainly the Nightingale indulges in the greater personality, and makes on the whole less ingenious use of her case. It is, for instance, a distinct hit of the Owl, when her rival has pleaded that she teaches priests to sing, and increases the joy of man, to retaliate that there are numerous countries where the Nightingale does not go at all, and that she had better make up for this by going and teaching the priests, in Ireland and Scotland, in Galloway and Scandinavia, to do their duty. And the bird of Pallas has also a good " flyte " on the moral side (one which she could have justified abundantly from French and Proven9al poetry) in his suggestion that the principal effect of the Nightingale's song is to make women false to their husbands, and to get them into various sorts of trouble. This passage contains an allusion which seems to tie the poem dowQ to the reign of Henry III. On the whole, this is the best example of the octosyllabical couplet to be found before the fourteenth century. The poet (who, by the way, quotes " Alfred " repeatedly, and little else) occasionally commits the fault — specially unpleasing to modern English ears, but natural at his early date, and probably connected with the 1 I use Wright's ed. for the Percy Society, 1843. The piece (of which there are large pieces in the Specimens) was printed earlier (1838) for the Roxburghe Club by Stevenson, and later (1868) at Krefeld by Stratmann, the compiler of the completest M. E. Lexicon. Wright's ed. contains some interesting shorter poems, perhaps by the same author, and these with others (but not the Owl) reappear in an Old English Miscellany. The last of the latter is a Love-Rune, a (religious) Love Song, assigned to Thomas of Halys, and apparently versified from part of the Ancren Riwle. CHAP. II FIRST MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 6i indifference of his French originals to identical rhymes — of making the same rhyme do for two successive couplets ; but this does not occur often enough to interfere seriously with harmony. His variations from eights to sevens are not more than the genius of the language specially allows. His style is easy and his poetical imagery and apparatus gen- erally, though comparatively simple, well at command, and by no means' of a rude or rudimentary order. We cannot, of course, say that he may not have been directly indebted to a French original, for the theme is one which must almost certainly have tempted the tireless inge- nuity of the troubadours and trouv^res of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in France and Provence. But we have no direct original, and in such a case it is only fair to credit Nicholas) or whoever he was) with independence. It should be observed that the name occurs in the poem as that of the referee selected by the birds and their audience-arbiter, the Wren. He is very handsomely spoken of, and the bishops are reproached because he has only one " wonning " — and tithing, which has made some think that the author cannot have referred to himself. But this argument, which is a sound one at the date and in the circumstances of the Shepherd'^s Calendar, has not much weight in reference to a "finder" of the thirteenth cen- tury, at which date and in which class men were by no means wont to be troubled with excessive modesty. Moreover, there is a not impossible touch of humour in the passages relating to " Maister Nichole" — Through [whose] mouth and through [whose] hand It is the better into Scotland ! It should be remarked also, before concluding, that in this poem, as in all others of the time, the language is by no means freely gallicised. At no long time in front of this period romances must have begun to be written in English, and three of not the least interesting that we have, Havelok, Horn, and Sir Tristrem, are allowed even by jealous literary chronologists to be probably older than the year 1300. But the advantage of treating the Anglo-French romance together is so great and obvious, that it will be better to relegate these to a future chapter.^ ^ The /ailiau of Dame Siriz (Wright's Anecdota Literaria, 1844), The Vpx [Fox] and the Wolf (Reliquiae Antiquae, ii. 272-8), an interesting and early English version of Reynard, and others, might be added. The Christabel varia- tion occurs in these also ; but Genesis and Exodus appears to be much the earliest and most considerable example thereof. CHAPTER III SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 1 300- 1 360 Robert of Gloucester — Robert Manning — Lyrics — The Ayenbite of Inwyt — The Northern Psalter — Manning — William of Shoreham — The Cursor Mundi — Hampole — Adam Davy — Laurence Minot — Cleanness and Patience — The Pearl The last quarter of the thirteenth century is not a very fruitful period of English literature — so far at least as attributions that can be called in any way certain, or even probable, are concerned. We have glanced at possible roinances. Of other work we have, dating from the extreme end of the thirteenth century and the earlier half of the fourteenth, a very considerable body of theological literature of the old kind, exhibiting characteristics frequently of linguistic and occasionally of literary interest ; at least one named and known writer of such literature, Richard Rolle of Hampole, who, though his importance has, as usual, been exaggerated, is of some mark ; at least one individual religious poem, the Cursor Mundi, which, though its authorship is unknown, is remarkable not merely for size ; two most interesting and important new developments — the verse-history of more or less contemporary events, and the accomplished lyric in the new prosody ; and (to mention only work of distinction) at the extreme close of the period, or a little beyond it, a group of companions of very remarkable poetical merit, which have been thought to be of common authorship, the Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, to which some would add the very attractive alliterative romance of Gawain arid the Greene Knight. This latter will be most conveniently dealt with later, the others had best be handled here. All four pieces were at any rate connected with a very curious literary phenomenon, the resurrection of alliterative verse, which had some good consequences, and but for Chaucer might have had many more bad ones. 62 CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 63 The earliest of these works, or group of works, in point of time, and not the least interesting in literary history, if not of the first intrinsic literary merit, is the batch of verse-histories, of which Robert of Gloucester's is tlie oldest. This is dated about two years before the close of the thirteenth century, while Robert Manning, or Robert of Brunne, comes some thirty years later. Robert of Gloucester ^ is a very interesting person, and a much better poet than it has been the fashion to represent him, though his first object was not poetry, and though, had it been so, he was but ill- equipped. It is not known when he was born, but he did not write, or finish wrilinj^^, till quite the close of pl^ulssttfrT the thirteenth century, though he had personal remem- brance of the civil wars in the latter part of Henry III.'s reign and carried his own chronicle to the year 1272. He was not superior to the odd craze which induced most of the historians of this time to begin with the Siege of Troy, and he abstracts Geoffrey of Monmouth for a considerable part of his book with that docility which, though it may seem singular in the transferred sense of the word, was universal as far as almost all his contemporaries were concerned. With Anglo-Saxon history he deals slightly, and despite his ardent English patriotism — his book opens with a vigorous panegyric of England, the first of a series extending to the present day (from which an anthology De Laudibtis AnglicE might be made) — he deals very harshly with Harold Godwinson. From the Conquest onward he does his best to draw on French, Latin, and English sources alike, reinforcing them in the later years with personal recollections of reminiscences, as in the case of the Oxford town-and-gown row of 1263. Although, however, Robert is in many places agreeable to read for the story and for his spirited temper, yet the main interest in him for the literary historian is still connected with his form and vehicle. This is the long swinging verse, half-trochaic, half-anapeestic, which we have already watched in its development, as the new metrical prosody beat it out of the ancient alliterated and unmetrical stave, and which was to be ever improved and suppled from this date to that of Mr. Morris's Sii^urd the Volsioii:^. This line may be said to have two normal varieties, towards wliich it unconsciously directs itself. Of one of these, Robert's first line, hardly altered — Enge I land is a | right good | land, I | ween of all | lands the | best — is a very fair average example, and the poet not unfrequently equals it. But he has also some inclination towards the other form, which ' I'"irst printed by Hearne, with Manning, etc., in 1724. I use the i8iQ reprint (4 vols.) of these. 64 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii in its perfection is simply the iambic fourteener so much spoken of in the last chapter — By her | he had | a daugh | ter sweet | the goo | d'} queen | f Maud | . But, as miglit be expected, he not merely oscillates between these two cadences, but frequently rolls or staggers into others — sometimes considerably less musical ; while he is by no means free from the tendency to cut the line so short that with a slight change in pronunciation it would become neither more nor less than a decasyllable, as in — And took | him hos | tage good | at his | own will | where no doubt the contemporary value of some words would disguise the length. Nor is this the only possibility which his uncertain move- ment develops, for again elsewhere we have approaches to the pure anapaestic tetrameter, also to become a favourite metre later — An house | of reli | gion of ca | nons ywis ] though in the same manner here the full syllabic value of " religion " would obscure for the time the cadence. The point has, however, been dwelt upon here because it is an interesting help towards the comprehension of the manner in which a/l the stock English metres resulted from the clash of the strict French syllabic prosody, of the Latin syllabic equivalence, and of the Anglo-Saxon tolerance of extra- metrical, or rather extra-rhythmical syllables. That the French deca- syllable itself helped the English analogue to emerge is perfectly true, but there is no need to regard the latter as atforeign importation. The peculiarity of this metre (which it is a sad mistake to regard as by any means the same as our hymn common measure, a strict iambic metre without trisyllabic liberties, and never shifting the foot to trochaic rhythm) is very closely reproduced in a large body of Lives of the Saints of about the same period, which accordingly good authorities have regarded as being also the work of Robert of Gloucester. Mr. W. H. Black, who edited one of them, that dealing with Becket, more than fifty years ago,^ was very positive on the subject, and the latest authorities ^ seem to have no objection. The beautiful Celtic legend of St. Brandan » has also been edited from this collection, as well as others. It must, of course, be obvious that the 1 Percy Society, 1845. 2 Morris and Skeat (Specimens, ii. i)reprint selections from the Chronicle and the Life of St. Dunstan as Robert's. 3 Exi. Wright, Percy Society, 1844. The whole collection has been issued by the E.E.T.S., ed. Horstmann. CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 65 adoption of the form for things so popular as Saints' Lives both testifies to its own popularity and would help to coniirm and spread this. And it is perhaps not rash to add that there are points in it which would rather encourage the relapse on alliteration which we shall have to notice at the end of this chapter. In the first place, the extreme looseness of the verse — almost the » most mobile of all English forms — tends that way ; and in the second the great distance of the rhyme-safeguards from each other makes them more likely to be overpowered, if not overlooked. From this same point of view the interest of Robert's forty years later successor, Robert Manning, is well sustained, though in other respects it falls short. This second Robert, whom we shall meet again in this chapter, was a Gilbertine canon, and derived his surname ^ from the place of his birth, Brunne or Bourn in Lincoln- Ma°i!'ning. shire. The authorities are generous to him in the matter of life, supposing that it may have extepded from about 1260 to about 1340, or even later; but this is mere guesswork. It seems that his history was not finished till 1338. Unlike Robert of Gloucester's, it was a translation, or rather, as all mediaeval translations are, an adaptation, of a single work, the chronicle written in French, but by an Englishman, Peter Langtoft, canon of Bridlington, with ampli- fications from Wace and other sources. Historically he has not much importance, nor can his work be said to equal the other Robert's in direct literary attraction. ^ But for the study of the history of English metre it is very valuable. Langtoft had written in the ordinary measure of the later chansotis de geste, monorhymed laisses of twelve-syllabled lines, and Manning was clearly under the im- pression that he must get as near to this as he could. In his prefatory remarks he employs the regular octosyllabic couplet, the earliest of all our metres ; but this would not have done for the body of the work. He accordingly, having none of his namesake's swing, con- tented himself with a very prosaic line, which at its best is the fourteener, at its worst an indefinite number of .syllables which some might call a "verse of four accents" because of its rebelliousness to any more accomplished arrangement. It was about rhyme, however, that Robert Manning seems to have been most careful and troubled. Sometimes he is content to let these shaml^ling lines of his rhyme in couplets. But ever and anon his conscience seems to prick him, and he either adds middle rhyme or attempts the, in English almost hopeless, task of emulating the continued rhymes of his original. Of these he achieves sometimes 1 It oupht to be s.iid that important authorities, Sir Frederick Madden nnd Dr. Furnivali, have thought better of Manning's poetical power, but chiefly, I think, as shown in Handlyng Synne, F s^ ^^ ic« 66 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book il as many as a score, but always with a result equally cacophonous and lame. To those, however, who are not satisfied with merely formal interest, the next division to which we come will have far greater attraction, while to those who can appreciate both form and spirit it will have altogether exceptional charm. This division consists of the first blossoming of English lyric properly so called. The ^ _ " famous Sumer is ictwKji in, the Cuckoo-Song long ago printed by Sir John Hawkins, and made popular by Ellis in his Specime)is for more than a century past, has generally had, as observed above, the credit assigned to it of being the actually oldest piece of the kind, and though such attributions are always rather temerarious, there is no need to disturb this particular one if the date is not carried back too far. The poem is in very short lines and of a simple and almost rude structure, besides being more noticeable for its fresh and genuine observation of nature than for any very poetical spirit. Rhyme is quite established in it, but it may easily be of the thirteenth century, and perhaps as early as its middle. It is not, however, till the close thereof that we get any considerable collection of lyrics of great merit on profane subjects.^ This is the collection taken from the MS. known as 2253 Harl., preserved in the British Museum. Its prettiest piece, Alison, was also printed by Ellis, whose taste in these matters, though just a little touched with eighteenth-century Voltairianism, was excellent ; but the whole collection did not appear till Thomas Wright, that benefactor of our literature, printed it for the Percy Society on ist March, 1842, a particularity of date which may be pardoned in consideration of the exceptional charm of the work and of its importance in English literary history. For though there must have been other poems of the kind written, and though we actually have a few, they have not been collected as they should have been into a corpus, and the total does not appear to be very large. / It is obvious, though it is not the less important for its obvious- ness, that these poems, like all the lyrical work of Europe during the thirteenth century, were composed not in slavish imitation, but in generous yet none the less distinct following, of the troubadours of Provence and the trouv^res of Northern France.'^ In the course ' probably of the twelfth century, certainly by its end, these poets had 1 The shorter poems mentioned in the last chapter (p. 60, note i) must not be forgotten, but they are almost entirely sacred. At the same time, as the maiden asked the author of A Love Rune for an actual love-song, love-songs must have been written. ^ The direct influence of Provence was probably very small. But it has been sometimes assumed on the strength of the marriage of Henry HI. q CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 67 almost exhausted the possible combinations of lyric so far as strictly syllabic prosody went, and within the limitations of dissyllabic feet which the structure of both languages imposed. There are vestiges of trisyllabic arrangement in Northern French, but they disappear early. The English minstrel and the German minnesinger took these models and adapted them, but in each case gave more or less scope to the irrepressible craving of Teutonic lips and ears for the triple movement. This Romance influence is plainly evidenced in the collection before us by the very fact of its being bilingual. Of the forty-two pieces printed by Wright, the three first and others later are in French. But the fourth, beginning • Middelerd for mon is made, is in English, and at once introduces us to a complete and distinctly elaborate lyrical arrangement. There is still, as in almost all Middle English poetry — even in Chaucer himself — a great deal of alliteration, but it has no influence on the actual form. This consists of an eleven-line stanza, which proceeds as far as the octave in regular ''eights," admitting catalexis, rhymed abababab, and completes itself with a six, eight, six coda or "bob " rhymed cbc. The next has ten-lined stanzas monorhymed in the octave, which consists of heavily alliterated " four-accent " doggerel tipped with a decasyllabic couplet differently rhymed, and approaching more closely to a regular decasyllabic. This is not a good piece, but the next, the Alison, which is, or ought to be, as famous as Sinner is iciimen in, is quite delightful — the first perfectly delightful thing in English poetry. The lovely intertwined music of its twelve-lined stanzas, composed of an eight and six quatrain, an eight triplet, a six, another eight triplet, and another six, rhymed ababbhcdddc, is not too good for the simple but fervid passion and the charming imagery of the piece. It is no exaggeration to say)) that the promise of Donne and Herrick, of Burns and Shelley, is in/ Alison. ' A careful study of the various metres of these poems will show that, in spite of occasional lapses from strict metrical propriety, there was practically no secret of English prosody which was not at least ready to be unlocked for English poets. Even their greatest license, the shrinkage of the octosyllable to seven or even six, which is so \ freely allowed, had this of merit in it, that it served as an additional safeguard against the cast-iron syllabic uniformity of their Romance models, which would have fatally hampered the varied music of English. There is as yet less tendency to extend, and the influence of the same models as yet checks anapaestic movement. But even 68 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii this appears, and it was certain to be encouraged by that beneficent process of regular dropping of inflections, and the final ^ in particular, which went on without cessation till the fifteenth century. When one man gave a word the value of three syllables and another that of two, it was practically impossible that an absolute mould like that of a Latin Alcaic, or a French scheme of any sort, should be adopted. Nor is the fact that in these poems we occasionally find polyglot French or Latin lines in alternation with English to be regarded as a matter of little consequence. For it cannot be too often repeated that what English wanted now was exactly that " madman to mix it" who, according to the proverb (of Spanish origin, I think), is required to make a good salad. The three tongues, with their different cadences, their different structure, their different prosodic ideals, could not be shaken up against each other too much in order to produce that matchless blend the English poetic language, with its unequalled combination of freedom and order, and its inexhaustible resources of varied melody. The most noticeable metre, though not the best, that emerges from this pleasant welter of experiment is that rom ance sestet or douzain, as the case may be, which, as we shall see m the next chapter, by degrees rivalled, and again by other degrees even out- did, the regular octosyllabic couplet as the favourite vehicle of narrative poetry. Its great drawback, the danger of a sing-song monotony, which Chaucer brought out in the memorable but rather unfair burlesque of Sir Thopas, appears at once. ) But English literature owes it a distinct debt. If it is more exposed to this danger, it is less exposed to that of undistinguished fluency than the couplet, the " ungirt " character of which did much harm to French poetry and (till Chaucer showed how it might be strengthened and varied) to English. And it provided what was now specially wanted, a go-cart of fairly accomplished but not in the least difiicult metrical stanza in which the growing language could practise itself. The earlier stages of no literature can be properly understood unless this function of exercise is apprehended. And such stages have the immense and untiring attraction of future, of promise, joined to that, more delicate but even more poignant, of antiquity and of the past.^ Although, as has been pointed out, the sacred division of this literature forms much the larger part in bulk, it is, for reasons already also indicated, of less literary importance than the profane. Linguis- tically, however, it helps very largely to build the bridge over what would be otherwise in most cases the unbridged gulf between the 1 Four of the best of these pieces, including Alison and the only less charming Lenten is come with love to town, will be found in Morris and Skeafs Speci- mens, CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 69 Anglo-Saxon of the eleventh century and the accomplished Middle English of the fourteenth ; and in so far as it is in verse, it supplies many useful links and tell-tales in that surpassingly interesting examination of prosodic change which, as has been said, really constitutes, for literature, the chief attraction of this period in English. Of this attraction the prose part of this division of literature is necessarily divested, and its principal monument, the Ayenbite of Inivyt 1 of Dan Michel of Northgate (a translation from the same treatise, the Somi/ie des Vices et aes Vertus of a French monk named Laurence, which afterwards served as the ^^g/\nwyu' stuff of Chaucer's Parson'' s Tale), is, with some sermons by the same author, of little or no interest as literature. Indeed it is almost the worst possible even of translations, executed with no intelligence, and simply beaten out, word for often mistaken word. Its quaint Kentish dialect, far more uncouth than that of much earlier work, and surprisingly so when we remember that it was probably written as late as the year (1340) of Chaucer's probable birth, consti- tutes an attraction for the philologist. With its ^•'s for j's and other peculiarities, it suggests the original of the kind of composite patois^ now chiefly suggesting to us that of the extreme south-west, which we find in Shakespeare and in other literary English up to the present century. Nor is the contemporary Northern prose ascribed to Ham- pole or his disciples (of whom more infra) without a certain interest of curiosity, while it is distinctly less archaic and more literary than the Ayenbite. But in strictness there is no English prose that really deserves much attention from the literary point of view until the latter half of the fourteenth century. " Let the Ancren Riivle be saved alone by its flavour," as Saint-Evremond says of the snipe among brown meats. With verse — still, as always in the Middle Ages, the maid-of-all- work of literature — the case is different. The verse Homilies and Lives of Saints steadily continue, and furnish us from time to time with fresh examples of the manner in which the ordinary versifier handled his tools. Of much greater interest is a certain Metrical Version of the Psalms'- in Yorkshire or Northumbrian dialect, which is sometimes stated to be of the thirteenth century, but which the devotees of Hampole assign to their favourite, in which case it would 1 Ed. Morris, E.E.T.S. The eccentric-looking title only requires a minute's consideration to explain itself as the "again-biting" ( = "re-morse," cf. Pecock's vocabulary in Book iv. tn/rii) of inner wit ( = conscience). 2 First published by the Surtees Society in 1843; *o be found in vol. ii. pp. 129-273, of Dr. Horstmann's great Hampoiian Miscellany, London, 1896. Some examples in Specimens. 70 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii be thirty or forty years younger at least. The present writer has np pretensions to decide on Hnguistic grounds, and is not of the Ham- pole fanatics. But the metrical arrangement of the '^''psaher^^'^" Psalter certainly seems to favour rather the later than the earlier date, and in any case to argue a writer distinctly above the common in literary and poetical gifts. The metre is the octosyllable, seldom or never shortened to less than sevens, but often extended into that form which I have taken to be the probable original of the heroic couplet. The slight harshness (not going beyond an agreeable astringency) of the Northern dialect is compatible with, and here attains, a considerable dignity ; the feeble fluency which is the curse of the octosyllable couplet seldom or never appears ; the expletives which are almost a greater curse not merely of the couplet but of stanza-writing at this time, and from which even Chaucer did not entirely free himself, are mainly absent ; and the phrase and arrangement possess that grave stateliness which is so suitable to religious poetry, and which, except in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it has too often lacked. There is not so much dignity, though there is rather more freedom and engagingness, in the Handling Sin i of Robert Manning, already mentioned as a historian. There is much significance for literary history in the fact that this, like Manning's secular Manning. ' 7 a work, was a translation from the French work of an English predecessor, in this case the Manuel des Pdches of William of Waddington. This work, containing, after homiletic fashion, stories of the pious fabliau kind, gave some practice in tale-telling, and is not unimportant among the ancestry of Chaucer. Contem- porary with Manning, but in the South not the North, was another named writer of religious verse, William of Shoreham (the Kentish not the Sussex Shoreham), who lived and wrote in the first quarter of the fourteenth century at Leeds and Chart Sutton, in the district between Maidstone and Canterbury. Shoreham ^ dealt in verse with the Sacraments, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments, the service of Our Lady, and even the higher questions of theology, such as immortality and the existence of God. The curious Shoreham. thing — though it would not have seemed ' curious to any- body then — is the selection of lyric metres for such subjects. Thus, for instance, the Poem on Baptism, which is the most easily accessible of his works, being given in Morris and Skeat's Selections, is couched in a seven-line stanza, rhymed xaxabxb, in which X stands for unrhymed lines of ad libitum ending. And the unsuitableness of the form to modern ^yes and ears is completed by 1 Ed. Furnivall for the Roxburghe Club, 1862. 2 Ed. Wright for the Percy Society, 1849. I CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 71 the fact that while the first quatrain is of Orinuluiii eights and sevens, and the last couplet of the same, the fifth line is a " bob " or short catch of two or three syllables only. But there was nothing incon- gruous in this then to the reader or hearer, while the invincible patience of the mediaeval scriptorium made it no doubt easy enough to the writer.^ We have, as has been said, for this time a fair supply of verse homilies, usually in octosyllables ; but by far the most interesting verse divinity of the period is contained in the huge poem or collection called the Cursor MimdiP- This enormous, but by no means tedious, production has been put at the service of every reader by the more than mediaeval diligence of the late Dr. Morris, in four parallel texts exhibiting different forms of dialect and substance, with ^ ^^f, .. ° . . ' Cursor Mundi. appendices contaimng parts of others. The longest ver- sion just falls short of 30,000 lines, and the total in all forms cannot be much below five times this amount. The poem, however, is of real interest and value. The author, who writes in octosyllabic couplets of considerable ease and spirit, begins by acknowledging the general desire for rhymes and romances of Alexander, of Troy, of Arthur, of Sir Isumbras and Sir Amadas, and of Charlemagne, most of which deal with earthly love. But earthly love fails, the love of Our Lady (in whose honour he writes his book) dies not. He intends to tell the whole of the Bible history — Into Inglis tong to rede, For the love of Inglis lede (people) — and he does so. But the way in which he does it is the true mediaeval divagation. Not merely does he dilate on .such incidents as please him with perfect freedom ; not merely does he comment on them in the homiletic manner, letting the narrative stand still, but in the arbitrary, uncritical, to us now inconceivable, but always charming, fashion of the time, he incorporates with the Scriptural narrative itself any fragments of hagiology, any traditional stories — sometimes of a more or less mundane character — and any, it mav be. inventions of his own, that come into his head. The fall of tlie angels, the Creation, the loss of Paradise, are expanded with rather less than the amplifications u.sual in these cases, until we come to that delightful legend, the Story of the Three Trees, which plays such an important 1 The Athanasian Creed may be found paraphrased in sixains of eights and fours at p. 139 of Wright's edition. * Ed. Morris (E.E. T.S.), in seven parts. 72 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii part in the earlier stages of the Arthurian cycle. Afterwards, we pass few of the Biblical data without finding them enriched by fresh details, as that Lame'ch's daughter Noema was the first " webster," and that man became carnivorous after the Deluge only, because the earth had so much of the goodness washed out of it by the water that its fruit was not strong enough to support man, whose own constitution was likewise debilitated. Among the pains least lost upon this interesting book, those spent upon the classification of its materials may perhaps be counted. Much seems to have been taken from the History of Petrus Comestor in the twelfth century, something from poems of Wace, who, as we have seen, was much in the hands of English writers, together with a good deal from Grostete's Castle of Love, the apocryphal Gospels of Matthew and Nicodemus, and the works of Isidore of Seville. The fact is that, at first or second hand, the books at the disposal of an ordinary mediaeval writer were pretty constant; and the frequent reappearance of the same or similar legends is not at all difficult to account for. The important thing, however, in this as in all cases, is not the information which was at a writer's disposal, but the use he makes of it. The author of the Cursor Mundi — The best book of all, "The Course of the World" men do it call — (as one enthusiastic copyist prefaces it) — knew very well indeed how to use his materials. Long as the book is, and familiar as is the main substance, if not the occasional settings-off, it can be read with ease and pleasure from beginning to end by any one who has time, and can be dipped into with satisfaction by those who have not. The Cotton version is perhaps, on the whole, the best to read, though there is not very much difference. The satisfaction comes from the easy but not at all slipshod way in which the writer manages his metre, the simple but by no means contemptible art with which he mixes and varies his materials, and the shrewd but kindly sense of his comments and observations. In speaking of the destruction of the Cities of the Plains — a subject generally exciting to mediaeval imagination — he cannot rise to the indignant passion of the later poem called Cleanness {vide infra), but he acquits himself very well, and never falls into the falsetto of moral indignation. The "Three Trees " story above referred to is told very effectively ; and the Life of Christ, varied and heightened as it is by the additions from apocryphal story, makes a religious romance of high merit. He is proverbial without being over-sententious, good in description with- CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 73 out descending to too much detail (an excellence rare in mediaeval times, perhaps not common in any) ; he has throughout his immense narrative a distinct sense of proportion. It is really a pity that we do not know his name, for if not exactly a great man or a genius, he must certainly have been a person of no ordinary ability. Yet in the ignorance of the name of an author there is a certain consolation, inasmuch as he is less likely to be made the theme of uncritical criticism. This latter has been the lot of the one named author of importance who falls to be noticed in this chapter, Richard RoUe of Hampole, the author certainly of the Stimulus , ^ ^ . , Hampole. Conscientiae or Prick of Consciefice, the author, more or less probably, of a considerable number of other works both in Latin and English, and the reputed author of many more still. Rolle is the first Middle English author of whom we have anything approaching to a full biographical account (we have even a portrait of him which may be authentic), and his history as told by himself is certainly not uninteresting. He must have been born about the meeting of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, at Thornton, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, not far from Pickering; his death is set by the author of his Vita, with more exactness, at 2gth September 1349. It will have been observed from one or two scattered notices already, that the literary effacement of the North, which had been begun by the Danish fury in the ninth century, and had been renewed by the devastations of the Conqueror and the Scottish wars in the eleventh and twelfth, had shown signs of ceasing, and Richard Rolle seems to have had every advantage of education. His father, William, was a friend of Sir John Dalton, and may have been connected with the great family of Neville. At any rate Richard, after some home instruction, was sent to Oxford by Thomas Neville, Archdeacon of Durham. In the second decade of the fourteenth century there were no colleges but Merton, Balliol, Exeter, and University, nor does there seem to be any record of Rollers con- nection with any of these. But the University itself was at the height of its vogue : halls and hostels were innumerable. Richard appears to have become fairly competent in the schola.stic philosophy which was the chief study of the place, but, Hke other devotional mystics, to have mistrusted merely intellectual teaching, and is said to have left Oxford and returned to Yorkshire in his nineteenth year, determined to adopt the life of a hermit, not "• unholy of works," as Langland was to put it a generation later. The way in which, still to borrow from his successor, he "shope hrm a shroud" was slightly grotesque, for he borrowed two of his sister's gowns, a grey and a white one, cut off the grey sleeves, then put on the white gown first and the grey over it, completed his uniform with one of his 74 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii father's hoods (black, it may be presumed), and ran away. It is not surprising to hear that his injured sister thought him mad, and cried out that he was so. He had known the young Daltons at Oxford, and this or some other reason induced him to make for their father's estate, supposed to be near Thirsk (an easy day's journey from Pickering), where he appeared at church, and entered the Daltons' pew. He was recognised, and allowed first to sing, then to preach — an illustration of the easygoing ways of that mediaeval Christianity which has been represented by and to the ignorant as a tyrannical and hidebound system of ceremonial. After he had been for a time an almost unwilling guest of the Daltons, the father gave him a cell, an allowance, and, with the proper dress, the recognised status of a hermit. 'These details have been given because, with the exception of the Ccedmon story, they are almost the first fragments of literary biography in English. The accounts of the remainder of Richard's life are less picturesque. He remained for some years in the hermitage which Sir John Dalton had given him, attaining at last complete "conversion," and it would appear, converting others, sometimes travelling to do so. From the Thirsk hermitage he seems to have transferred himself to one in the Richmondshire district of his native Riding. We hear something of his friends here, especially an anchoress named Margaret Kirkby. But at last he made another move to Hampole, near Doncaster, in the extreme south of the county, and abode there for the rest of his life in the neighbourhood of a Cister- cian nunnery, where he seems to have had disciples. He may have died of the first outbreak of the Black Death, which coincided with the date above given, and his sepulchre, which was carefully tended by the nuns, became famous for miracles. The works of Hampole ^ are, as has been said, both Latin and English. The former do not directly concern us, but it is notice- able that the alliteration of which we shall presently hear so much is very obvious in them as well as in the English. They also contain perhaps the clearest exhibitions of his religious opinions. These centred round that mystical clinging to Divine Love which was the frequent, and no doubt the natural, reaction from the intense but hard intellectuality of scholasticism. Although Hampole has all the mediaeval terror of the "soft mystery" of woman's love, though he cannot reach the noble directness and passionate sanity of the author of Cleanness, he had an odd aversion to "rules," to the regular 1 The Prick of Conscience was edited by Morris for the Philological Society (1863). The E.E.T.S. added some English Prose Treatises (ed. Perry). Dr. Horslmann's Hampolian Thesaurus above referred to is entitled Yorkshire Writers, 2 vols., London, 1895-96. ciL\p. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 75 monkish institutions, which explains, or at any rate is a very early symptom of, the deterioration of monarchism apparent in England. His principles also appear in his English works, but it is not with his principles that we are here concerned. The study of him would have been facilitated if his latest, most extensive, and most enthusiastic editor, Dr. Horstmann, had indulged his readers with the usual compliment of a table of contents, the absence of which is at all times troublesome, but positively bewildering in the case of a thousand large pages of small print, arranged, as far as the verse is concerned, in double columns, and consisting of scores and hundreds of separate pieces of all lengths. This edition, moreover, does not contain the Prick of Conscience, Hampole's chief work. This is a poem containing nearly 10,000 lines, dealing with the Life of Man, its uncertainty, and the Four Last Things. The matter has a sort of shuddering intensity which is very noticeable, and which sometimes gives direct picturesque force. The form is the octosyllabic couplet with distinct trisyllabic admixture in the Christabel direction. It has been pointed out already that this scheme constantl}i tends towards something that may be indifferently scanned as a "four-accent" verse with trisyllabic sections and a heroic of five iambs. Such things, e.g. — . • The b(o)ugh | es are | the ar | mes with | the handes And the | legges | with the | fete | that standes | are, or are like, heroic couplets, and accordingly it has not been very unusual to claim for Hampole the use, or even by a singular want of understanding of the facts the invention, of the metre before Chaucer. This is uncritical. His prose treatises contain nothing very remarkable as literature, though they may, with care, be taken as further stages in the chain which leads from the Ancren Riwle to Chaucer's Parson'^s Tale. But his minor poems, if they be his, have much more merit, and excel in this respect the Prick of Conscience itself. They are all sacred ; but they show that the " soft mystery " of human love was not absent from, and indeed had probably, for ill or good, inspired Hampole's Love Divine. To say, as a too ardent editor has said, that their beauty and melody have never been surpassed, is unlucky ; this is the kind of thing which brings discredit upon literary history and hopelessly mars its usefulness. But Unkinde man, give kepe til me, and Lo leman sweet, now may thou see, 76 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii have the " unction " of our most successful hymn-writers, and certainly the poem beginning — My treuest treasure so traitorly taken, So bitterly bounden with bytand band(e)s, How soon of thy servants wast thou forsaken, And loathly for my life hurled with their hand(e)s! has a rhythm which is no common one, and which curiously reminds us of another Northumbrian poet 500 years later than Hampole — that is to say, of Mr. Swinburne.^ Nor can any one of these canticles of Divine Love, according to Richard Hampole, be spoken of otherwise than with admiration, while of the remaining pieces of verse attributed to him most have a certain individuality of form or spirit or both. But for the attribution to him of the revival of strictly alliterative verse there is little if any more warrant than for the ascription to him of the invention of the heroic. We can at the most (and also at the least) allow that this revival was a very reasonable consequence of the increased stimulus to literary composition in the North — always fonder of alliterative rhythm, and more rebel to strict metrical ways, than the South — of which he certainly was one of the lights and leaders. Two other named writers, one a little earlier, one a little later than Hampole, have obtained representation in English literary history, though they are decidedly less interesting, even when we take the hermit who I'obbed his sister of her gowns somewhat less seriously than he has sometimes been taken. *The first of these, Adam Davy, occupied the rather mysterious office of ^^' "Marshal of Stratford-atte-Bowe " about the year 1312, and no doubt spoke good French of the local pattern to the persons whom he marshalled. He happened, while many worthier writers escaped it, to attract the attention of Warton, who not merely attrib- uted to him divers sacred poems found in the same manuscript, but also the excellent romance oi Alexander, which is probably earlier, and certainly by a much better writer. Davy's undoubted work consists of Visions of Edward I/., which have been re-edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr. furnivall. Laurence Minot had a likelier subject than Adam Davy, inasmuch 1 Swallow my sister, O sister swallow, How can thy heart be full of the spring ? Itylus. and the great stanza of the Triumph of Time. The final es of Hampole's alternate lines would soon have dropped. There is no other weak ending. Cf. also the pretty lines of Eve in the second Coventry Play, "Alas I that ever the speech was spoken." CHAP. HI SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 77 as he celebrated not Edward IL, but Edward IIL in his earlier glories. His subsequent fortune has been correspondent, for he has had the honour, most unusual for a Middle English poet even of higher rank than himself, of being four Mij^ou* times edited, and five times printed in full — by Ritson in 1795 and 1825, by Mr. Wright in his Record Office Political Poems, by Dr. SchoUe in a German periodical, and by Mr. Joseph Hall for the Clarendon Press. The fact is the best possible evidence of the superiority of subject to form as means of gaining general atten- tion. Minot, who wrote in 1352, who seems to have been a Northerner from his dialect, but of whom we know nothing more, is a fair, but no more than a fair, specimen of the English trouvfere-of-all- work of the period. His subjects are : Halidon Hill ; the capture of Berwick, which he takes as an avenging of Bannockburn ; the entry of Edward, our comely king, into Brabant; the battle in the Swin-, the leaguer at Tournay ; the march to Calais ; Crecy and the battle there ; the siege of Calais ; Neville's Cross ; the sea-fight with the Spaniards ; and the taking of Guines. The forms of the poems that compose this cycle of the deeds of Edward — for that is what, with all its formal variety, it comes to — are various. Halidon is told in octave eights admitting catalexis, rhymed alternately with a title couplet which is found in all the poems and a final quatrain. The Berwick sack is in sixains rhymed aaaabb, the lines hovering between anapaestic fours and iambic fives as so often noted ; the entry into Brabant in octosyllabic couplets followed by romance sixains 886886 rhymed aabaab ; the battle of the Swin or Sluys in the above hovering couplets ; Tournay in octaves of sixes, to the three last of which " bobs " and couplets are added, making the Tristrem stanza {vide infra) ; Crecy in octaves like Halidon with a couplet prologue ; Calais in similar staves without prologue ; Neville's Cross in long sixteen-lined stanzas of very short lines, which perhaps should be octaves of longer lines ; the Spaniards in twelves of the same kind, and the Castle of Guines in the same. These poems have historical and patriotic interest 1 in no small degree ; but for literature their chief value is perhaps the way in 1 Their patriotism, as is not unnatural or uncommon, becomes a little abusive now and then. It may perhaps be usefully observed in connection with them that the employment of the vernacular for political satire, etc., is a sure gauge of its literary standing. In Wright's first collection of Political Songs for the Camden Society in 1839 — a collection extending from the reign of John to that of Edward II. — not one of the four pieces for John's reign is English, only one of the fifteen for Henry III.'s, but nearly ^a//" (eight out of seventeen) of those for the Edwards. In his later and much larger collection from Edward III. to Richard III. for the Rolls Series (2 vols. 1859-1861J any language save English becomes more and more the exception. 78 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book II which they show that a fairly sufficient and satisfactory medium, a ready-made poetic diction and cadence, was now at last at the dis- posal of the verse-writer. There is nothing in Minot's poems, though some have spirit, especially the Neville's Cross piece, and that on the naval victory over the Spaniards, with its apostrophe to the Boy with the black beard ! that can be said to show any very special or peculiar poetical talents in the author. He is given to expletives, he seldom or never succeeds in giving us a distinct visual picture ; his very variety of metre, etc., looks more like the absence of any distinct grasp and command of one form than like a sense of general mastery. But, as has hardly been the case for three hundred years and more, he has a fairly settled tongue and a generally accepted prosody, with its peculiarities of lilt and swing all ready to his hands ; and he manages to make very tolerably good use of them. Indeed, though it may seem rather ungracious, it is not impossible to say that his chief use in literature proper is that he explains Chaucer — shows how the tools were ready for the workman. Last in this chapter falls to be noticed a very remarkable group of poems, which, with another reserved for the Romance division, have been attributed to a single author by their editors, who have also in some cases indulged in much hypothesis as to that author's identity. As in all cases, the reader is here simply referred to the discussions in question on the latter point. As to the former, I should be disposed to admit as extremely probable the common authorship of Patience, Cleanness, and The Pearls Gawain and the '"patience" Gt'^ene Knii^kt {j)i(ie chap, v.) seems to me to be much more dubiously their brother ; for the fact of their being found in the same MS. is really no argument at all, considering the almost invariable mediaeval habit of transcribing, straight on, the most hetero- geneous and unconnected work. And it is also very possible to allow too much weight to the alleged linguistic resemblances. But it is not impossible that the four poems may have had a common writer, and it is certain that all are much above the average in merit. In the three that are to be noticed in this place, the alliterative reaction, which has been already referred to, shows itself (as it does also in the Greene Knight^ very strongly, though in differing measure and degree. Cleanness and Patience, two poems, the first of rather over 1800 lines, the other of rather over 500, each of "^ Early English Alliterative Poems, ed. Morris (E.E.T.S.), [The} Pearl separately edited by I. Goilancz, London, 1891. CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 79 which begins with the title-word, are written in alliterative blank verse, observing for the most part the old rule of two alliterations in the first section and one in the second, very closely though not rigidly equivalent in syllabic length, precise in the middle pause, and though not metrical, yet exhibiting a general set of rhythm towards anapaestic cadence in the first half, and trochaic in the second. This, in fact, was the general scheme of the new alliteration at its best t'me, as here and in Langland. Later, especially in Dunbar and Douglas, the alliteration is exaggerated, and the lines lengthened accordingly. The Pearly on the other hand, though very strongly alliterated, does not depend on alliteration for its system of scansion, but is in twelve- lined octosyllabic stanzas rhymed abababahbcbc, these stanzas being further grouped in divisions generally of five each, the last line of each stanza in the group being a sort of refrain, which is more or less repeated throughout. "Jhe characteristics of matter and spirit are more uniform. All three poems are pervaded by a singular and very impressive mixture of devotional feeling, with poetical apprecia- tion of things mundane as well, and by a solemn melody rare in earlier verse. In Cleanness the mediaeval worship of purity, enforced by vigorous paraphrases and commentaries on the Parable of the Marriage Feast, the Fall of the Angels, the Deluge, the Destruction of Sodom, the Incarnation, and the story of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, is yet entirely free from the almost insane exaltation of virginity in and for itself which is so common. There is no nobler or more passionate appreciation of the delights of lawful love in English poetry than a passage in Jehovah's denunciation of Sodom to Abraham — Milton's famous apostrophe is a coarse and diffuse example of rhetorical commonplace in comparison — and the whole poem, though quaint now and then, is full of sombre energy, mixed, as in the destruction of Babylon and of the fire from Heaven, with description of great power. Patience has an apparently less inspiring subject ; but the story of Jonah, with which the poet chiefly fills it, gives him good opportunities of which he avails himself well. The storm in particular is very good. It must no doubt be admitted that the slightly grotesque effect of continuous and regular alliteration, and the way in which it compels even poets very fertile in resource to choose the wrong word instead of the right for the mere sake of an initial . letter, receive some illustration here. But the result is by no means fatal. As a whole, however. The Pearl is undoubtedly the pearl of the three. As too often happens, the well-mentioned and very amiable partiality of its latest editor has set some against it; but f^f pfarl. this is always indefensible. It need only be read — and it is by no means difficult to read — to show its real beauty. There So THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii can be no reasonable doubt that it describes the loss of a daughter, probably in early age, who may very likely have borne the actual name of Margaret, beloved by the Middle Age because of the charm- ing and popular legend of the patroness saint, because of its own harmonious sound, and because of the endless plays on the meanings "pearl" and "daisy" which it suggested. ^ This Pearl pleasant to princes' pay — (the first line) — this Privy pearl withouten spot — which, with slight changes, is the refrain of the first group — is first dealt with as a gem richly set, but dropped by the owner on the ground. The father (probably) visits the spot, almost avowedly a grave, and, falling asleep of pure sorrow, is carried off to a strange resfion. Following a stream he sees a white-clad maiden, whom he at first partly, and then seeing a mighty pearl set on her breast, wholly recognises. He asks her whether she is really his Pearl, since the loss of whom I have been a joyless Jeweller. She says "Yes." But she is not lost, though he cannot now come to her. He must wait God's will awhile ; she is a queen in Heaven, which (he proving dull of understanding) she explains, adding the Parable of the Vineyard and an account of the Brides of the Lamb. He has a distant vision of the Heavenly City and the worship oCthe , Lamb, and rashly endeavouring to cross the water, wakes. It is easy to see that this poem is not faultless. The fault does not lie, as some would vainly speak, in the allegory : for allegory is always a natural and frequently a powerful ally to poetry, while it is never dangerous if kept in its own place. The only faults of The Pearl in connection with allegory are that there is, as is the case with the vast majority of narrative poems of the kind in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, far too much of a single common form — that of the Romance of the Rose, the following of which is actually con- ducted to the point of walking down the river before the adventure, such as it is, is met. But beyond this, beyond an occasional expression a little beyond reason in carrying out the minor points of 1 Although Saint Helena and Saint Juliana have, by accident probably, the precedence of her in our earliest A.S. documents, Saint Margaret has probably a fuller series of extant Old English lives of nearly all periods than any other saint. No name was commoner, and of none do the abbreviations so often occur in familiar writing. Est mea mens mota pro te speciosa Magota ! as the doggerel leonine has it. CHAP. Ill SECOND MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD 8i allegory (it is in this that Spenser and Bunyan so far excel their brother allegorists), and beyond an occasional succumbing to the temptations of alliteration, there are singularly few weak points in The Pearl. The exceeding beauty of its descriptive passages, especially that of the strange region where the poet awoke, its Crystal cliffs so clear of kind, and the mystic woods hanging down them, with their purple trunks and silver foliage ; the melancholy clangour of the verse, never de- scending to a mere whine, but always maintaining dignity and sanity in the midst of its sense of the pity and the loss of it, — these can escape no fit reader. The poet who could give such expression to pathos in The Pearl, to passion in Cleamtess, and who had such a mastery of the descriptive faculty as appears in all three pieces, was no mean poet. G CHAPTER IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL Sir Tristrem — Havelok the Dane — King Horn — King AUsaunder — Arthour an^ Merlin — Richard Caeur de Lion — The Seven Sages — Bevis of Hatnpton — Guy of Warwick — Ywain and Gawain — Lybeaus Desconus — The King of Tars — Emare — Sir Orpheo — Florence of Rome — The Earl of Toulouse — The Squire of Low Degree — Sir Cleges and Le Fralne — Ipomydon — Amis and Amiloun— Sir Amadas — Sir Triamour — King Athelstone, etc. — The Thornton Romances — Charlemagne Romances There has, perhaps, never been such a capital example of the danger of indulgence in literary satire by a man of the first literary genius as the comparative disrepute into which the ever (and most justly) increasing estimate of Chaucer has thrown the Early English metrical romances.^ That Chaucer himself, in the Rhyme of Sir T/iopas, intended to pour any real discredit on the class in general, I do not 1 It may be convenient to give at once in a note the titles and contents of the chief collections of these romances — collections which in themselves fill one of the most satisfactory of book-shelves : — {a) Ritson (J.). Ancient Engleish Metrical Romancees (spelling was one of Ritson's numerous manias), 3 vols. London, 1802, containing a long and still, for all its errors and crazes, valuable dissertation, with Ywain and Gawain, Launfal, Lybeaus Desconus, King Horn, The King of Tars, Emare, Sir Orpheo, A Chronicle of Englelond, Florence of Rome, The Earl of Toulouse, The Squire of Low Degree, The Knight of Courtesy and the Lady of Faguel, with, in the Ap- pendix, another form of Horn — Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild. (b) Weber (H.). Metrical Rotnances of the I'ith, 14th, and x^th Centuries (3 vols. Edinburgh, i8ioj, containing a less valuable introduction, with King AUsaunder, Sir Cleges, Le Frayne, Richard Coeur de Lion, Ipomydon, Amis and Amiloun, the Seven Sages, Octavian, Sir Amadas, and the Hunting of the Hare. (f) Utterson (R.). Select Pieces of Popular Poetry (2 vols. London, 1817). The first contains Sirs Triamour, Isenbras, LJegore, and Gowghter. (d) Hartshorne (C. H.). Ancient Metrical Tales, containing among other things King Athelstone, King Edward and the Shepherd, Florice and Blanche- flour, and part of the alliterative William of Paler ne. {e) Hallivvell (J. O.). The Thornton Romances — Sirs Perceval of Gales, Isumbras, Eglamour of Artois, and Degravant (Camden Society, 1844). (/) Hazlitt (W. C). Ecirly Popular Poetry of England (4 vols. London, 82 CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 83 myself in the least believe. He probably had at most two or three "awful" examples (upon one at least of which it would not be difficult to put the finger even now) before him. And it is permis- sible to be equally sceptical in respect of his alleged contempt for the matter, especially the Arthurian matter, of these romances — the passages usually quoted will not bear the construction put on them. Chaucer's own adoption of different styles and treatments and sources of material is, at best, the most negative of arguments. It is as natural for some men of genius to prefer to take new ways, to strike into the path worn by the feet of none, as it is for others to produce masterpieces in kinds already tried by their contemporaries and predecessors. However, all that can be said positively is that if Chaucer did despise the romances, he merely exhibited that not infrequent in- firmity even of noble minds which makes men unjust to their imme- diate forerunners — which made Coleridge talk absolute foolishness about Gibbon's style, and which induced even Dryden, with his admirable critical catholicity, to imagine that Restoration verse was not merely a good thing in another way from that of the Elizabethans, but a positive improvement upon them. No such mistake can prej- udice our judgment. It is very difficult to place with any exactness the earlier, still more the earliest, examples of this fascinating form of composition in English. What is certain is that the Anglo-Saxon genius — for reasons too hastily pronounced upon by some, but for some reason or other — had very little inclination towards it. The admirable saga of Beowulf, though well enough known to have been modernised and copied long before the Conquest, seems to have found no imitators, or, at least, none that have survived — for the chance of an English original of Havelok is very strong. The enormous pre- ponderance of attention given to sacred subjects, both in Anglo-Saxon itself and in early Middle English, must have had something to do with this; but the general decadence of Anglo-Saxon poetry after the eighth century must have had more. For in no country of Europe, except Iceland, was prose ready for the task until far later. It has therefore to be admitted fully that the known beginnings of romance in English all came from French in point of substance, while their forms could not be evolved till the '-shaking together" 1864) contains, among a great many other things, Robert the Devil and Robert of Cisylle [Sicityl. {^) Hales (J.W.) and Furnivall (F. J.). Bishop Percy's Folio MS. (3 vols. London, 1867) contains many variants of romances named, and some new ones, notably b.gcr and Grime. Separate editions are noted infra ; for collections of Alliterative Romance see first note to next chapter. 84 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii of English, Latin, and French itself had provided the new prosody. The earliest examples of the result now existing, and perhaps the only ones which can be reasonably attributed to a period before the year 1300,' are the three romances of Sir Tristrem, of Havelok the Dane, and of King Horn; and it is practically admitted that though the first and second at least must almost certainly have sprung from British soil, they only appeared in the English language as translations or adaptations from the French. Each' is of interest enough for separate consideration at such length as is here possible. In sheer intrinsic literary merit Sir Tristrem ^ is far from being the best of the three ; in fact it is certainly the worst. But its adventitious attractions are of the most unusual kind. It is, in all probability, the first English romance in the great "matter of Britain" — m. ^j^^ ^^j^ rival, Arthour and Merlin, is, I think, later. It tells a story which, however it may seem to some to yield in poignancy, as in nobility of interest, to the companion loves of Lancelot and Guinevere, was even more popular in the joint days of the two, and which has maintained itself. It is identified — perhaps, indeed probably, by mistake, but stiH it is identified — with the interesting, if legendary, personality, and the certainly early vernac- ular productions of "Thomas the Rhymer." And last, but by no means least, in almost the earliest day of the revival of Romance, it had the honour to be ushered once more to public knowledge by Sir Walter Scott. With some of these attractions we must deal here in cruel brevity. The argument as to the question of authorship must be sought by those who are curious about it in the editions cited in the notes. It is enough to say that the "Thomas" cited by Gottfried of Strasburg, the chief continental handler of the story, can hardly have been Thomas of Erceldoune ; that the story of Sir Tristrem was certainly current in French long before the date either of the "Rhymer" or of this rhyme; and that it is, all things taken together, a little improbable, to say the least, that, considering the absence of any certain Scottish poetry till nearly the end of the fourteenth century, anything so elaborate as this should have been composed in such "Inglis" by a Scot before the end of the thirteenth — and according to the dates usually assigned to Thomas the Rhymer 1 By fifty years after that date many, probably most, of our verse romances must have come into existence. The famous Auchinleck MS., which contains a good score, is of this time ; and in the Cursor Mundi, which is perhaps as early as 1320, we find reference not only to these but to others, such as Sir Isumbras, of which our existing copies are later. ■^ Scott's memorable edition of this can never, in a sense, be obsolete ; but more modern apparatus and knowledge are added in those of Kolbing (Heilbronn, 1882) and M'Neill (Scottish Text Society, 1886). CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 85 (c. 1280) considerably before it. At any rate, the poem in its present form can hardly have come from any one who wrote north of the Tweed. That it is, as its latest Scottish editor holds, a southernised version of a work of Erceldoune does not seem to me entirely impossible. But it rests on no evidence. The form would lead us to believe it not much, if at all, anterior to the fourteenth century, the stanza used being one of those compli- cated and bizarre ones which, as has been explained in the last chapter, came from the attempt to adjust Provenqal-French metres to English rhythm. It resembles one previously mentioned in the arrangement of the rhymes alternately in an eleven-lined stanza broken by a short fresh-rhymed bob at the ninth line. The best ar- gument for its being older than 1300 is that the staple line is of six not of eight syllables — for, as we have seen, the six-syllabled line or half-hne somewhat anticipated its longer and more convenient amplification into eights. After the plump statement that the author was at Erceldoune and spake with Thomas, hearing a geste of Tristrem (which, by the way, is an odd fashion of signature, but very likely a shift to father work on a well-known name indirectly), it passes to a stanza of gnomic reflexion, very common, as we shall see, in the earliest days of English romance, and then plunges into its story, the Tristram-saga proper — the famous and fatal loves of Tristrem and Yseult being preceded in true saga fashion by a history of the unhappy contest of Rouland Rhys, Tristrem's father, with Douk Morgan. The rather unsuitable nature of the stanza for narrative is occa- sionally relieved by a middle rhyme — They ne raught [recked] how dear it bought, and on the whole does fairly well; but the earliness of the piece finds a certain support in its crudity. The repulsive story of the fashion in which Yseult would have paid her maiden Brengwain's self-devotion is not in the least softened, and the poet does not show himself able, as his German predecessor had been able, to bring out the unmatched attractiveness of the sylvan life of Tri.strem and the Irish princess. But there are good touches, at least not lost if not actually invented by the minstrel, such as that when the luckless, if unamiable, .Mark discovers his queen and Tristrem with the sword between them — A sunbeam full bright Shone upon the queen, At a bore [hole] On her face so sheen — And Mark rewed therefore. 86 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ll It is not always that later poetry has succeeded in achieving or retaining a phrase so simple, sensuous, and passionate as that last line, which is almost the equal of Sappho's lyo) 8c fiova Karevoio. Horn ^ and Havelok ^ are in less elaborate metrical form. The metre of both comes under the general designation of the octo- syllabic couplet — in Havelok lengthened and "swung" by the ad- mission of trisyllabic feet, in Horn shortened so as to show that the poet was still hovering, as many did for a time, between sixes (or sevens) and eights. There is also some similarity between the general subject of both, which is that favourite romance donnee of the heir kept out of his own. The palm, both for individuality of story and for spirit of narration, decidedly belongs to Havelok, the^Dane which has all the notes of a genuine local saga, and not merely of a literary composition on accepted romance lines. There is in it a double wrong done — the innocent Havelok, the heir of Denmark, being excluded by his guardian Godard, while Goldborough, heiress of England, is similarly treated by her tutor Godric. But Havelok, being as a male heir more dangerous, is exposed to greater personal danger than his destined bride, for Godard, determining to make away with him altogether, hands him over to the fisherman Grim to drown. Grim treats him roughly enough, but a night fortunately intervenes, and before the actual immersion the fisher's wife sees the sacred flame-aureole, sign of kinghood, on Havelok's brow, and her husband, having also prudently ascertained by a trick that he was like to have traitor's wages for his crime, gives it up and escapes oversea to England, where he lands at the future Grimsby. Havelok, brought up as a mere fisher boy, seeks service at Lincoln Castle, and distinguish- ing himself by strength and athletic proficiency as one of the " kitchen knaves" dear to romance, is chosen as Goldborough's husband by the usurper Godric, who, milder-minded or more economical in crime than his Danish counterpart, only plots to degrade not to slay his charge. Goldborough is naturally enough displeased at having to marry a scullion, but at night the mystic flame reconciles her to her lot. Right thus meets right, a party is formed for the young pair, and the two traitors receive their proper doom. In this, of course, there is a certain amount of romantic stock-matter, the humours and promotion of the scullion Havelok being a very favourite and early device found even in the ancient and brilliant French chanson 1 Two versions, as noted above, in Ritson ; there are also three or four more modem editions, and the whole is given in Morris and Skeat's Specimens, vol. i. 2 Ed. Skeat, E.E.T.S. CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 87 de geste of Aliscans. But the general tenor is, as has been said, unusually vigorous and fresh. The poet strides along like a man who has a real story of his own to tell, and is not merely compounding one out of dried or bottled materials. In fact, there is no doubt that the tradition as to the origin of Grimsby was an old one in Lincoln- shire; and we find Robert Manning,^ a Lincolnshire man, in a rather quaint state of dubiety" between his early familiarity with the story and the silence of his graver historical authorities on the matter. For, as has been, and will be again hinted more than once, the mediaeval mind — naturally enough, considering the vast surround- ing and invading seas of nescience which bounded its islands of knowledge — rarely seems to have had any distinctively critical power of distinguishing fact from fiction, and could at most attain to surprise at not finding the former in places where no trained historical crit would dream of looking for it. Horn, though a good poem, and preserved in various forms which have made it one of the best known of its kind, is less racy either of any particular soil, or of any special poetical faculty. A certain King Murray — the locality of whose kingdom is ^.^^ ^^^^^^ described with sufficient vagueness as '• biweste " — and his wife Queen Godhild had a son Horn, who was a very beautiful child. Fairer was none than he wjis,» ^ He was bright as the glass, He was white as the flour, Rose-red was his colour — lines which, not unfairly, give the key-note of the real, but rather conventional, prettiness which marks the poem. As Murray was riding by the seashore he met with fifteen shiploads of Saracens keen, who frankly avowed their intention — The land-folk we shall slay, and began with the king. Horn's extreme beauty saves him from slaughter, but he is put in a boat, with his two companions Athulf and Fikenild, and .set adrift. By luck and pluck they come safe to the coast of Westernesse, where the king gives him protection ; the king's steward, Athelbrus, instructs him in knightly ways, and the king's daughter Rimenhild falls deeply in love with him. Indeed Horn Child and Maiden Rimnild is tiie title of one of the actual 1 In a long passage (ed. Hearne above cited, i. pp. 25, 26) ; given also in Prof. Skeafs Introduction, ix., x. Manning, after duly translating Langtoft, who barely refers to Havelok, bitterly complains that neither Gildas, nor Uede, nor Henry of Huntingdon, nor William of Malniesbury, nor Pierce of Bridlington {j..e. Langtoft himself) says anything about the incidents of the romance. 88 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii versions of the story. Athulf is a good friend, even withstanding the awkward temptation of a moment when Rimenhild, mistaking him for Horn, makes the most undisguised advances ; Fikenild is a traitor, but his machinations, though nearly successful, are defeated, and Horn, of course, comes to his own in love and kingdom. The fifteen hundred short lines of the poem do not allow time for it to be tedious — the great danger of these somewhat identically con- structed stories — and there are passages of directness and vigour which deserve all the more recognition in that the piece, though probably translated from the French, is still very early, and can have had very few English originals to furnish the writer with stock phrases and passages. One of the straightest and best is when Horn, with his beloved's ring on his finger, meets the slayer of his father — Before him saw he stand That driven him had from land And that his father slew. To him his sword he drew. He looked upon his ring, And thought on Rimenhild, He smote him through the heart That sore him- gan to smart, which, though the last line is a little superfluous, cannot be called contemptible in so early an attempt. It is worth while to notice the assonance in ring and hild. Assonance does not suit the English ear, and is rarely attempted in English ; but it was so prevalent in the French models of the writers of the thirteenth century, and it is such a help to a novice in rhyming, that it would be strange if it did not sometimes occur. We may conveniently take next a group of romances, in all probability not much junior to these, that is to say, dating at latest but a little within the beginning of the fourteenth century, and attributed by a German scholar, who is honourably distinguished for the union of philological and literary competence. Dr. Eugen Kolbing, to the same hand. I cannot say that I myself see any strong probability of this, but at the same time I cannot see any very serious argument against it ; and its admission would add to the list of English poets a figure anonymous indeed, but more considerable in quantity of work than any other before Chaucer, and certainly not inferior to any except the equally shadowy personage, to whom, as has been said in the last chapter, the other quartette of The Greene Knight, The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience has been similarly gifted. At any rate the four romances themselves. King Alisaunder^ Arthour and , 1 Ed. Weber, as above. CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 89 Merlin^ Richard Costir de Lion,''' and the Seven Sages,^ are each and all among the most interesting of their kind, among the oldest, among the most considerable in scale and subject ; and whether they had a common author or not, they are equally worthy of con- sideration. The history of the formation and transformation of the mediaeval legend-history of Alexander belongs to another story than that of English literature. It is sufficient to say here that the English romance in question follows generally the lines of the great French Roman d' Alixandre, but assigns AUsaunder. greater proportionate space and credence to the initial fables about Nectanebus (Neptanabus in the English), the Egyptian enchanter-king who revenged himself upon Philip by seducing Olympias in the guise of the god Ammon. The wonders and episodes of the later part, the Fountain of Youth, and the rest are, on the other hand, curtailed, but as it is the poem extends to more than 8000 lines in o ctosyllabic couplets of a good stamp. These coup- lets, which form the measure of all the romances now in question, and supply one of the arguments for their common authorship, show a considerable advance in ease and grip over the respective kinds of Horn and Havelok. The writer in all rejects, or, if the phrase be thought more appropriate, has not arrived at, the hard and fast French octosyllable, and allows himself Christabel equivalence in a very satisfactory manner. Another very noticeable peculiarity shared by some, though not all, of the group is the interposition — in such a manner as justified Weber, the poem\s editor, in taking the phenomenon as implying chapter or " fytte " division — of short gnomic or descriptive prefatory remarks, which have nothing whatever to do with the narrative, as thus — Merry time is the wood to sere, The corn ripeth in the ear, The lady is ruddy in the cheer, And maid bright in the lere, The knights hunteth after deer, On foot and on destrere, 1 Ed. Kolbing, Leipzig, 1890. It had already been printed for the Abbots- ford Club (1838) by TurnbuU, and like many of the romances in this chapter, abstracted still earlier by Ellis in his famous Spfcimens of Early English j\felrical Romances, which (despite a tone of persiflage sometimes though seldom inappropri- ate) is still the best introduction to the subject, and easily procurable in Bohn's Library. ■'■ Ed. Weber. 8 In two forms, one given by Weber, and the other by Wright for the Percy Society (1845) with a valuable introduction. 90 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii which comes, apropos of nothing whatever, between the story of Alexander's coronation, as Prince Expectant and King-coadjutor, and his knighting. The whole poem is one of the most spirited of the romances, and Webers claim for it, that it is less burdened with expletives than others, is just, and even within the mark. These nuisances, which appear with the very rise of the style, which are not absent even in Chaucer, and which in fifteenth-century work like that of Lonelich become a mere abomination, are quite rare in it, and the author's faculty of description is extremely vivid and good. Where he fails, as all English and most mediaeval poets before Chaucer do fail, is in character. Arthotir and Merlin is still longer than Alisaunder, extending to not much fewer than 10,000 lines, not dissimilar in character from those just noticed, bat less regularly and abundantly provided with gnomic introductions or "fytte" headings. It is ^'"'^^^'^J^.^f'"' a verse rendering of what is called the "Vulgate" Merlin, an early history of the court of Arthur, pr.a- ceded by an account of Merlin's own birth, and of the adventure of Uther with Igraine, which seems to have been thrown into French prose before the end of the twelfth century, or not much later, and of which, besides other verse renderings, including one by the above Lonelich, only published in part (see Book iv.), there is a good prose English version published by the Early English Text Society. The most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are not here, and, as in all the Merlins, a vast amount of space is taken up by battles with the Saxons and with Arthur's rival kings, which Malory's extraordinary literary instinct led him to omit or cut short. But, on the other hand, there are things in these Merlins which we miss in Malory, especially the earlier and comelier version of the enchanter's enchantment by his lady-love. Apart from the subject matter, the piece deserves commendation, inferior indeed to that allotted to the Alisajinder, but not small. Still, if they had the same author, he had either not yet learnt in the Arthour to do without expletives, or had in it succumbed to a bad habit which he had earlier resisted ; and the catalogues of names are rather tedious. The great interest of the piece is that it is the first setting of the romance of Arthur (for Layamon supposed himself to be telling history), that we possess in English — the king of all stories of the land having at last come to his own after linguistic exile for a century and a half in French. Indeed there are touches about the piece which might justify a conclusion that it is decidedly older than the Alisaunder, and may even belong to the thirteenth, not to the fourteenth century. Richard Coeur de Lion, the third of the group, is pretty certainly the best. It has not merely the general interest of being "matter of CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 91 Britain," but the more direct appeal of being the geste of a great English prince, told at a time near enough to his own to have the relish and"* savour, of popular fancy and fondness. It is rather more than 7000 lines long; and the metre *'^ dTuon^'*^ is managed with a spirit of which we find few exam- ples in Arthoiir and Merlin^ and though more, yet fewer than here in Alisannder itself. Even the finale, " common form " as it is, will show* this — Thus ended Rychard our King, God give us all good ending, And his soul rest and roo, And our souls when we come thereto ! Here is the real diable an corps of the ballad-romance style — the combined faculty of speaking simply and straight, and metring with vigour and variety. Nor is the matter of the poem inferior to the manner. Sir Walter Scott has made it better known than most of our romances through his quotations in the Talisman notes, referring to the grimly humorous episodes of the cooking of the Saracen's head instead of a pig's jowl, and of the king's ferocious banquet, on the same material, to the Paynim ambassadors. A recent French historian who cried affrightedly over a certain letter of Troubridge to Nelson, " This is the laughter of cannibals," might be better justified here ; yet the humour of the thing and the spirit of it quite carry off the savagery. Here too, almost for the first time (save in that very likely con- temporary proem of Robert of Gloucester which has been quoted), appears really English patriotism, the triumph in the Lion-heart's exploit as a king of England, which (call him Angevin or anything else) he was. The refrain " Richard our King" obviously comes from the heart ; the malison on his traitor brother — his brother John That was accursed, flesh and bone — is equally hearty. Never before in English do we find the real dare- devil tone, rightly associated with Romance, as here — He [Richard] gan cry, As arms! Gare! Cceur de Lyon — how they fare ! Anon lept King Richard Upon his good steed Lyard, And his English and hisTempleres Lightly lept on their destreres, And flings into the heathen host In the name of the Holy Ghost. 92 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii On few things would it be pleasanter to dwell than on this poem of reiil flesh and blood, which is good in its overture as to the fair fiend '' Cassodorien " (who takes the place of Eleanor as Henry's wife and Richard's mother, with, no doubt, a remembrance of the Angevin house-fairy iMelusine), better in the "lion's heart" episode, but best in its fighting scenes. Indeed it is the first and best fighting poem in Middle English. But we must pass on, only observing that here also the heroic couplet, and that curious English fancy for winding up with it at a marking or turning point which is so noticeable in Shakespeare, make their appearance — And swore | by Je | su that | made moon | and star | Ayenst | the Sa | racens he | should learn | to war | (unless indeed this is an embellishment of the editor's). The gnomic insertion occurs now and then in this poem. The Seven Sages is the shortest of the four, not much exceeding 4,000 lines, and like all the versions, prose and verse, of the famous Eastern collection or collections from which it is derived, it is in fact a mere series of short tales bound together by one Sazes!" of ^^^ usual Straps — in this case the stories are told by a wicked queen to support her false accusation of her stepson, and by his Seven Wise Masters on his behalf. The general literary interest of these things, and their far travel from the East, is great ; but though in the piece, and still more in the later Gesta Romanorum, they produced noteworthy books in English,^ their special attraction for us is less, inasmuch as they were but transla- tions of translations of translations, having been beyond all doubt decanted through Latin and French, and perhaps Greek before either, on their way from their Eastern homes to their English receptacles. They are, however, interesting as the earliest, or among the earliest, instances in our language of the short verse-story itself — the fabliau which, in a couple of generations or so, Chaucer was in the Canterbury Tales to make the vehicle of one of the capital efforts of European poetry. Although there is no doubt some general resemblance, of the kind almost unavoidable, to the other three, the Seven Sages seems to me even less likely than Arthour and Merlin to be the work of the same author as Alisaunder or as Cmir de Lion, for there is much less spirit in the verse, and there is present that indefinite, but to careful observers very noticeable, inability to distinguish between prosaic and poetical incidents which marks off the born prose-writer 1 The actual English Gesta may not be very early, but authority seems to favour the English origin of the Latin original. CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 93' (in the bad sense) from the born poet. That some of the stories in the Seven Sages are disgusting does not so much matter ; the Saracen's head episodes of Richard are not precisely delicious. But the poet of Richard knew how to carry these off, the poet of the Seven Sages did not know how to carry off the others ; and the differ- ence, though not very easy to prove by example, is at once felt in the reading. All the metrical romances hitherto noticed are beyond doubt either actually of the thirteenth century, or only a very little younger. But it is a matter of difficulty and guesswork to decide which of the much larger number that remain should accompany them, and which should be postponed till we come to the fifteenth or the late fourteenth century, from which probably the larger number of the actual manu- scripts date. Thus, as noted above, we have a notice of Sir Isiimbras in the Cursor Mtmdi, or about 1340 at latest; but our text of it — that in the Thornton MS. — is a full century later. On the whole, the best plan will probably be to notice here all the metrical romances, which may possibly be older in their original forms, if not in their present texts, than the death of Chaucer, and to keep for the com- pany of Malory those which, like Sir Laiiiifal in Chester's version, and the work of Henry Lonelich, distinctly belong to the later time by authorship if not in substance. It is probable, but not certain, that all the English romances — even those which, like Havelok and Horn among those already men- tioned, like Bevis of Hamptoji and Guy of Warwick among those to come, rest upon English traditions and deal with English scenes — were directly translated from French originals. Sometimes, as in the just mentioned case of Sir /siimbras, we have no knowledge of such originals, and sometimes, as in the case of Sir Atnadas, there is oppor- tunity for confusion. 1 There may have been exceptions to the general rule of translation from French ; but there is no reason to think that the rule was not general. And it was probably the exigencies of the transla- tion — the termination of the original sense, leaving part of a line still to be filled up, and the like — which encouraged, and to some faint degree excused, that practice of stuffing and padding with expletives and stock phrases that brought the whole class into really undeserved disrepute. Only brief observations can be made on each of these romances, but except by oversight none shall be passed over ; and in face of the difficulty, not to say impossibility, of dating them with any certainty, they shall be mentioned for the most part in the company 1 The Cursor Mundi mentions this too, but with the addition of the heroine's name, Idoine. This identifies if for us with an existing French romance of the double title, quite different from our English Sir Amadas, 94 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii and order in which they appeared in the printed collections of Ritson, Weber, and others. Guy of Warwick and Bev/s of Hampton^ which were the first except Sir Tristrem to enjoy the honours of separate publication, owed those honours in all probability rather to their traditional fame, to their great size, and to the fact that both are found in the precious Auchinleck MS. — which Boswell's father gave to the Faculty of Advocates, and which is not merely the largest but one of the oldest of existing Romance MSS. — than to their intrinsic merit either as poetry or, except for the mere adventures, as story. In these last respects — to speak with all the tenderness due to such famous names — they are rather poor things, inferior to the majority of their com- panions, and owing almost all their charm to the mere common forjn, the ready-bottled herbs and essences, of the average romance of chivalry. Neither has anything specially English about it except the names, and the adventures of both are carried on mostly Hampton ^"^ couutrics Other than England. Bevis of Hampton, the better of the two, owing to the lively characters of Josiane the heroine and Ascapart the giant,^ rests upon the well-worn theme of a faithless wife, a murdered husband and father, a disin- herited son, and an intruding tyrant. There is some interest in Bevis's vengeance on his father's murderer and his own wrongdoer, appropriately named Sir Murdour ; and his horse Arundel and sword Morglay rank well among those favourite properties of Romance. But the kindness (somewhat " coming " and forward, but legitimately imitated from the conduct of all Paynim princesses in the chansons de geste) of Josiane, her courage, her fidelity, are really the salvation of the piece. Guy of Warwick (another and still longer tale of adventures ail over the Romance world, with a huge coda telling those of Rembrun or Raynburn, the hero's son) lacks this attraction. Felice, the heroine here, is a cold and capricious mistress Warwick, (the pattern doubtless of the Polisardas and Miraguardas of Spanish fiction), who is indeed useful to the story by constantly requiring new exploits from her suitor. It is true that he for- gets all about her by the way once, and only the sight of the wedding- ring that he is about to put on another's finger reminds him at the 1 They were both edited for the Abbotsford Club by TurnbuU, Bevis in 1838 and G«V (a mighty quarto of black letter) in 1840. The eccentric C. K. Sharpe furnished both with frontispieces in the Retzsch style, one of which, that to Bevis, is very comic. Guy has been re-edited, in both fourteenth and fifteenth century forms, with immense care by Dr. Zupitza for the E.E.T.S., and Bevis by Dr. Kol- bing for the same society. 2 Ascapart now quietly guards the gates of Southampton with his victor and benefactor ; but he was not a good giant to the end, and was killed after turning traitor. CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 95y? fifty-ninth minute and second of the eleventh hour. And she is' justly, though by no means interestingly, punished when Guy after marriage is seized by a craze of chastity, and determines to desert his wife and unborn child, spending the rest of his days as a palmer and hermit. There is plenty of fighting (for he has not abjured that pleasure) in the sequel, including the famous combat with Colbrand ; and Guy, at last coming home, is not recognised by Felice till at thc/V point of death he sends her ring to her, and she receives his last / breath and dies after him. The story appears to have been almost without exception the most popular of all the romances in England from a very early time, and its immense length and varied incidents ^' give, of course, abundant scope for successful treatment. But in none of the versions which have come down to us (Ellis would make^^ . an exception for the Colbrand part) does it seem to have fallen into^'^ ,^ the hands of a poet of any power. The crowning moment of the^:- meeting of Guy and Felice, the latter unknowing, the former con- scious, is blundered with a completeness which makes us think vividly of the admirable success of the Scottish poet Henryson at the somewhat similar meeting of Troilus and the lazar Cressid. The sheer silliness which dogs the footsteps of Romance shows itself in Guy's forgetful ness, which is as absurd as his conscious succumb- ing to new charms could have been made natural. Almost every chance throughout the long record is consistently missed, and the undoubted popularity of the thing in verse and prose, in MS. and print, in recitation and reading, can have been due to the adventures alone. 1 Of Ritson's collection,^ the Chronicle does not here concern us, Sir Laimfal we postpone, and the interesting Lady of Faguel (Fayel) is rather a ballad than a romance. Yivain and Gawain is a free adaptation of Chrestien de Troyes\s Chevalier ail Lyon, one of the earliest poems of the Arthurian cycle, cawaln. which, having been also paraphrased by Hartmann von Aue, has the advantage of appearing in English, French, and German. The English poet, though unknown (that prolific eidolon, iThe point where the poet fails least is perhaps the short passage describing the revulsion of feeling which causes Guy to quit his wife, and which comes from the sudden thought, as he gazes on his fair heritage from the towers of Warwick, of the carnage and devastation he has wrought — AU for the sake of woman's love, And not for the sake of God above. But even this is not very well done. Guy, it should be said, is partly in couplet, partly in twelve-line romance stanza. Bevis has the same partition, but the stanzas take the shorter six-line form. 'See note, p. 82. 96 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii the supposed author of Arthour and Merlin, has been credited with this also), does not compare ill with his famous fellows. The poem, which is about 4000 lines long, in couplets, has spirit ^^^'co^us^"' ^"'^ merit throughout. Lybeaus Desconus (which strange appellation is only Le Beau Decontiu with its Old French form misspelt) is also a Gawain poem, dealing with a son of that courteous knight. It is about half the length of the last, in stanzas of twelve six-syllabled lines. This is not a very good romance medium, but the poem is above the average. Its story is a variant of the " Daughter of Hippocrates " ; but Sir Lybeaus is not exposed to the danger of refusing to kiss the worm's mouth, for she takes the initiative, and the transformation scene is very gracious. The King of Tars (same stanza, but in fairly regular eights for "^^^Tarf"'^ I 2 4 5 7 8 10 II, and sixes for lines 369 12) gives a Christian and Paynim fighting story of average interest in not quite 1200 lines. But Emare (trisyllabic, Emarh), in the same stanza, but 200 lines shorter, is one of the best. The verse is good ; the description of the cloth embroidered in the four corners with the stories of Amadas and Idoyne, Tristrem and Iseult, Florice and Blanchefloiir, and the Sowdone of Babylone is one of the best stock-passages of mediaeval upholstery, and the character of Emare is touched with a distinctness and a tenderness which are none too common in these poems. It is one of the class of stories in which fathers fall in love with their daughters and are resisted. That Emare should be set afloat in a boat by her father, blown to a friendly shore, married to the king, plotted against by her mother-in-law, again floated forth with her little child, once more succoured by good Samaritans, and finally restored to her proper place and to the chastened affection of her repentant father, is all common form, if not commonplace. What is not commonplace is the graceful fashion in which the tale is told, and the writer's abstinence from the long-windedness which is so r-- ^ ., frequent a fault. Sir Orpheo is Orpheus arid Eurydice With a happy endmg, for which the Middle Ages had a possibly childisli, but certainly healthy liking. It has some 500 lines in couplets. 1 Florence of Roine (over 2000 lines in the twelve- lined stanza) is the daughter of the Emperor. She is "RTme. "^o^^ unseasonably courted by Sir Garcy, Emperor of Con- stantinople, who was a hundred years old, and whose disqualifications are spiritedly told in this stanza — 1 The Auchinleck version of this, which Laing printed (see first note of next chapter), is called Orfeo and Heiirodu. Both contain charming descriptions of Fairyland, which, with the parting of husband and wife and other passages, make the piece one of the most delightful of the whole class. CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL 97 His flesh trembled with great eld, ^-^^ His blood cold, his body unweld, y^ His lippes blue forthy; ' He had more mister of a good fire, Of right brands burning shire. To beik his bones by, A soft bath, a warm bed, Than any maiden for to wed. And good encheason why — For he was bruised and all to-broken. Far travelled in harness and of war wroken, He told them readily. Florence and her father naturally object. Sir Garcy, who is not too old to fight, attacks Rome and brings it to great straits. Florence, to spare bloodshed and misery, offers to sacrifice herself, but her father will not hear of it, and dies in a sally. Two brothers, Sir Miles and Sir Emere, get the better of Garcy, and Florence marries Emere ; but his brother plays the traitor during Emere's absence, carries off the faithful Florence after a false report of Emere's death has proved useless, hangs her to a tree and beats her, like the Counts of Carrion in the Cid story. Nor is this the last of her trials, though, of course, all comes right. This piece is rather unequal, and the Earl of Toulouse (1200 lines in the same stanza) is rather slight. But the Squire of Low Degree (# happy '^^roulZL"-^ title, and one which made its fortune) comes, in about the same length of couplets, up to its promise. The famous distich with which it opens — It was a squire of low degree That loved the king's daughter of Hungary — ' obeys, unconsciously no doubt, the maxims of authority as to the ad- vantage of plunging the reader straight into the subject, and he is never let go. The introduction of the valiant 1^^fi,"pj{ squire (who, for all his '-low degree," was marshal of the king's hall) is cunningly managed, not too soon after the opening nor too late for the refrain to rinsr in the ear — 't« And all was for that ladye — The king's daughter of Hungary ! The garden, with the favourite mediaeval catalogues of trees and flowers, and the references to other romances, follows, and still The king's daughter of Hungari^ ! rings agreeably now and then. The squire tells his love, and the 98 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii lady accepts it in all honour, with stated conditions, and a warning against the steward — stewards are generally wicked. But cautious as she is, she ends with " kisses three " — one less than the pale knight gave La Belle Dame Sans Merci, but not made more lucky by their sacred number. The steward sees them, and vows mischief. The king will not believe his calumny, but the steward undertakes to show the lovers together, and unluckily the squire, after taking leave of the king to seek adventures, returns under cover of night — To take leave of that lady free, The king's daughter of Hungary ! The interview takes place, but the enemy is upon them. The squire cuts the steward's throat, but is overcome by numbers and im- prisoned, his lady thinking him dead, because her father's men have cunningly changed his clothes with the dead steward's at her door. Her father offers her a curious catalogue of delights^ if she will leave off mourning ; but she will not, and after seven years the relenting king sends the squire to make him a name in Lombardy and gives him his daughter at his return. A fairy tale without fairies, but a pleasant one and well told. The chief constituents of the next collection (Weber's, in 1810), Alisaunder, Coeur de Lion, and the Seven Sages, have been already noticed ; but it contains others which must not be passed over, and one at least which is of great merit. The makeweights of the great Alexander poem in the first volume are Sir Cleges, a short piece in not quite fifty twelve-lined stanzas — respectable, but of no ^Le^Frain7. gt'cat notc — on the favourite mediaeval motive of the knight who spends his all, not in riotous living, but in generous housekeeping, and recovers it. This in the present case is partly by divine mercy (which gives him cherries at Christmas), and partly by his own shrewd wit and stout heart, avenging him on the court officials, who strive to hinder or blackmail his present of these cherries to the king. The other is a translation of the Lai le Fraine of Marie de France, rather a fabliau than a romance. The second volume, which contains Richard Coeur de Lion, contains also two romances of great excellence, Ipomydon and Amis and Amiloun. The former is one of the best stories, and not the worst Ipomydon. i i r i , , , . told, 01 the whole class. It is m some 2400 hnes of couplets, and bears a remarkable analogy to the at present untraced "Sir Beaumain's" episode of Malory. The hero is the heir of Apulia 1 This list of all the things the Middle Ages loved best — finery and music, wines and foods, sports and pastimes, castles and yachts, with crews singing heyho and rumbelow, " gentyle pottes with ginger green," and " blankets of fustyane " — fills over 100 lines. CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES— METRICAL 99 (" Pouille " or " Poile," as it meets us in French and English romance), the pupil of Sir Tholomew, one of the good old knights so common, and the suitor of the heiress of Calabria. He deter- mines to rest only on his own merits, visits her court incognito, makes himself conspicuous and attractive by the usual mediaeval virtue of lavish giving and skill in the hunting art, and then retires to let his charms work. After a time he goes to the (then) adjacent court of Saxony, obtains the post of honorary and honourable lover to the queen, and from this point of vantage enters for the tourna- ment which is to decide the spousals of the Calabrian Princess. He puts on daily fresh disguises of white, red, and black armour, with all tnings to suit ; overcomes, of course, but, in true romance fashion, is not satisfied with so easy a victory. Difficulties with foes or un- known friends, Sir Camys and Sir Campanys, have to follow before all is as it should be. As for Amis and Aviilotm, no Middle Age story is the superior of this for pathos and beauty ; but it is only an adaptation of a much older French chanson de geste, and so interests us less here than those romances which are either English by origin, or have no known French original, or are adapted with AntiUon some special difference. The third volume, which con- tains the Seven Sages, contains also Odovian Imperator (a story of some liveliness, but a very bad poem, in 317 six-lined stanzas, syllabled 888484 and rhymed aaabaU), Sir Amadas, and The Hunting of the Hare. This last, like the Tournament of Tottenham and some others, is a burlesque of some, but no extraordinary, merit. Sir Arnadas, which has nothing to do with Amadas and Idoyne, but is found, as we shall see, in another version, has rather less than 800 lines in the twelve-lined stanza. It is a sort of variant of Sir Cleges, but the knight recovers his fortunes not by shrewdness _.. . but by his charity to a dead corpse which he finds in ghastly conditions, it having been kept from burial by a brutal creditor. The general poetical merit of Sir Amadas is not great, but the situation is good, and there is one couplet which only wanted a little trimming to make it a sublime one. The knight, having seen the festering debtor, is at a feast of much splendour — [But] Sir Amadas made little cheer, For the dead corse that lay on bier Full mickle his thought was than [then]. The first three of the Utterson Romances — Sir Triamour, Sir Isenbras, Sir Degorl — are taken from early printed copies and are in very lamentable state — the twelve-lined stanzas of Sir Tria/nour, loo THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii for instance, appearing by the grace of the copyist or the printer in irregular batches of threes, varying from six lines to eighteen. And the curse of prose, which, with such rare exceptions, tr riamour. ^^^^^^^^^ jj^ ^\^^ fifteenth century, is heavy on it. But the story, which is one of the class of queens wronged by stewards, is touching.^ Still better in this respect, though even worse off in others, is the beautiful legend of Sir Isenbras or Isumbras, who in his domestic happiness and worldly pride forgot God, and was punished by the successive loss of possessions, children, and wife, to have them restored after he was purified by much suffering and gallant daring in deed. Sir Degori (supposed to be = L'^gare, but unfortunately responsible for " Diggory ") is a short romance in about looo lines of couplets celebrating the prowess of a '"love- child." Sir Gow^hter, which Utterson was the first to print, is a very interesting and spirited variant of the story of "Robert the Devil," in between fifty and sixty twelve-lined stanzas. Hartshorne's book, containing much interesting matter, and possessed of all the attractions of the Pickering Press, has always been a trial to students from its confused arrangement, its present- ment of shreds and patches, and its careless editing. But it gave from different Cambridge MSS. King At heist one, a spirited story of the ordeal by fire, dating from the fourteenth century, King Athel- jj^ j-j^g twclvc-lined stanza; King Edward and the stone, etc. ' <=> Shepherd, one of the innumerable variants of the favourite donnee of a king guesting incognito with his subjects ; an extract from Florice and Blancheflour, nearly the most popular of all medieval stories ; one from William and the Werewolf, which being alliterative is reserved for the next chapter; and a great number of small burlesques or fabliaux, the Tournament of Tottenham, the Boy and the Basin, the Cokwolds' Dance, etc. The Thornton Romances - give the English version, not a very valuable or extensive one, of the great story of Sir Percevale (143 twelve-lined stanzas) ; another version in better condition of Sirlsum- bras; Sir Eglajnour (also twelves), the nearest to Sir Thopas of all the romances in faults, and chiefly salvandum because it contains the name " Christabel" ; and Sir Degravant, in the same stanza, but 1 Mr. Halliwell printed a MS. version for the Percy Society, and there is another in the Percy Folio. The editors of this last seem to think better than I do of the execution of this tale of King Aradas and Queen Margaret and the wicked steward Marrock; but I quite agree with their praise of its spirit and substance. 2 So called from their transcriber, a Yorkshireman, who a little before the middle of the fifteenth century included them (with much of the most noteworthy work of or attributed to Hampole, and other things) in one of the omnium gatherum MS. books so fortunately fashionable in the Middle Ages. It belongs to Lincoln Cathedral. CHAP. IV EARLY ROMANCES — METRICAL loi an altogether rougher, older, and less mawkish composition. The companion Camden Society volume by Mr. Robson, which is chiefly noteworthy for the alliterative Aiintyrs of Arthur (see next chap.), also contains a different version of Sir ^RomanTJs™ Amadas, and a non-alliterated Arthurian romance in sixty stanzas of a rather peculiar metre, sixteen-lined, each quatrain consisting of a monorhymed octosyllabic triplet and a six. Lastly, we may mention a group of Romance which in subject has least interest of all, while of its most attractive members the alliter- ative story of Raiif Coilyear belongs to the next chapter, and Lord Berners's Huon of Bordeaux (prose) to the next Book but one. These are the English Charlemagne Romances, of which some at least, if not most, in their earlier form must date from our present period. These are Sir Feriimbras, a long version of the SRomlnce^^ French Fierabras in some 9000 lines of the six-lined stanza ; the Sowdone of Babylone, another version of the same in an early kind of the ballad quatrain of eights and sixes — early and long (3000 and odd verses) for this form ; the Siege of Milan and Roland and Otiiel, each in the twelve-lined stanza and each about 1600 lines long; a fragment of an English Song of Roland. All these, with Caxton's prose Charles the Great and Four Sons of Aymon, which will fall like Huon to be noticed hereafter, have been printed for the Early English Text Society. None of the romances just named is of the first merit or interest. Indeed, the Carlovingian epic, when stripped of the intense idiosyncrasy of the chanson form, hardly tolerates any other save prose. CHAPTER V EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE Gawain and the Green Knight— The Awntyrs 0/ Arthur — William of Palerne — Joseph of Arimathea — The Thornton Morte d ' Arthur e — The Destruction of Troy — The Pistyl of Susan The interesting phenomenon of the revival of alliteration, the facts and causes of which in the early fourteenth century have been 'more than once referred to, naturally had its chief exercising ground in the field of Romance. The most remarkable of all English alliterative poems later than Anglo-Saxon times, the Vision co/icertiitig Piers the Ploivinan, falls for treatment in the next Book, and a good many others date only from the fifteenth century. But not a little interest- ing work belongs to the time of this chapter. The most intrinsically interesting examples of Alliterative Romance ^ 1 The greater part of the work mentioned in this chapter will be found in the following collections, some of which include much else. One or two pieces which occur by themselves will, as before, be noted later: — (a) Pinkerton (J.). Scottish Poems, Edinburgh, 1792, which gives a version, with altered title, of the Awntyrs of Arthur. (i) Laing (D.). Ancient and Popular Poetry of Scotland, Edinburgh, 1822, and tlirice reprinted since, including the Pistyll of Susan and the Awntyrs. {c) Madden (Sir Frederick). Sir Gawayne (Bannatyne Club, 1839), giving Gawayne ar i the Green Knight, the Awntyrs, etc. {d) Robson (J.). Three Metrical Romances (Camden Society, 1842), con- taining a third text of the Awntyrs. (n of Falerne or VVilliani and the Werewolf. The former may, like the latter, have had a French original, but none such is . ' , , ^ . . Gawain ana known, and it stands at the head of an interestmg group i/ie Green of Gavvain Romances, which it is not fantastic to asso- f<^"'i''i- ciate with Cumbrian rather than Welsh or Armorican traditions, but which are certainly Celtic in character.- Of Gaivain I have already observed that the identity of its author with him of the interesting Pearl group is not, according to my notions of literary evidence, proven; but it is not impossible. The poem consists of rather more than 2500 lines, in a curious irregular sort of stanza, consisting of an uncertain number (from sixteen to twenty), mostly unrhymed, unmetred, but somewhat dactylically rhythmed "four-accent" lines regularly alliterated, terminating with what Guest has made it usual to term a " bob and wheel," that is to say, a single foot iambic and an eight- or six-syllabled quatrain — the five rhymed ababa. This scheme, which, with variations, is not uncommon, seems to show that some revivers of alliteration themselves felt that it could not be depended upon entirely alone — that it must be backed by the charms of metre and rhyme. Even in this poem, the best of its kind, the fatal dancrer of allitera- tion — that the selection, or at worst invention, of the "rhyme-words" is too often solely determined by their sound, not their sense — makes itself painfully felt. But the author's power is very much greater than that of most of his competitors in metre or in alliteration, and the story is one of singular interest and force. It opens with a few touches suggesting the very old and popular piece (also a Gawain or Hugues) has been erected into a great poet of the thirteenth century, the earliest (or the earliest next to Thomas the Rhymer) of known Scottish poets, and has been endowed with all, or more, or fewer of such early alliterative poems as are known to be or may possibly be of his time, the amplest appanage including Gawayne and the Green Knight, the three alliterative religious pieces noticed at the end of chap, iii., the Pistyl, the Awntyrs, an alliterative Morte d'Arfhure, also contained in the Thornton MS., and what not. In argument for and against this the stores of dialect, allusion, diction, and the like have been literally ransacked, with the most contradictory results. Those interested in the matter may be referred to the introductions in question. We may here safely say three things — (i) Nothing is known of " Huchowne " save from Wyntoun, and VV^yntoun does not say whether he was Frenchman, Englishman, or Scot, nor in wliat language he wrote; (2) It is not impossible that he may have written some of the poems in question, especially the extant Pistyt 0/ Susan, which {vide infi-a) is at least as old as 1380 ; (3) There is no evidence that he wrote this or any other. 1 Re-edited after Madden by Professor Skeat for the E.E.T.S. 2 Gawain, unlike Lancelot, appears in the earliest handling of the story; and Welsh authorities always strive to put him above his rival. This is most curiously illustrated in the late Welsh version of the Graal story, Y Seint Greal (London, 1876). I04 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book n one) of the Chevaliey an Lyon or Ywain, but soon all resemblance ceases. Gawain (who in all this group, as in the earlier romances generally, is not represented as the light o' love which the French "aful Uermans made him) unciertaKes, when others quail, the "adventure of a perilous " Greeir Knight " who enters Arthur's hall unbidden and challenges any one to give him a buffet and bide one in turn. The king's nephew fetches a swashing blow with his battle-axe and beheads the knight clean, but the trunk picks the head up, mounts the green steed with it in hand, and departs, after the lips of the severed head have given Gawain his venue at the Green Chapel on NevvJYear's Da^^tw elvemoj rth. When the appointment draws near Gawain arms himself splendidly and rides alone through England to North Wales in quest of his doom. He is royally guested at a castle where the knight welcomes him warmly, and the lady even more so, and where he is told that the Green Chapel is close at hand. His host proposes a bargain — that they shall exchange whatever they gain in hunting or otherwise — and Gawain grants it. The host hunts with great success, but Gawain stays at home, He is tempted by the chatelaine, but resists so far as only to take a kiss. He keeps his word on receiving the host's game by giving him a kiss, though he will not (as indeed he need not) tell him where he got it. A second day witnesses the same events ; but on the third the lady, who now very nearly overcomes the knight's steadfastness, forces on him her girdle, which has the virtue of making the wearer invulnerable. This temptation is too much for him when he thinks of his perilous adventure, and he takes it (with "kisses three") under promise of secrecy. Accordingly when swapping-time ^ comes he gives his host the kisses, but says nothing about the girdle. The reader anticipates the result. The host is the Green Knight, though not even at the last, when in his fantastic garb he meets Gawain and deals the deadly blow, does he reveal this. Gawain flinches ("shunts") at the first stroke, but manfully bides another, which only gives him a flesh wound. He draws his sword, prepared to fight it out as the wager is accomplished, but the knight leans calmly on his axe and reveals the truth. He and his wife agreed to tempt Gawain, who came out scatheless except in his acceptance, through caution, if not exactly cowardice, of the girdle-lace, and his failure to give it up according to compact. Therefore he saved his life, but lost his blood. The knight, Bernlac de Hautdesert (who is one of Morgane la Faye's), forgives him, gives him the lace, and all ends happily. The high and yet not mawkish morality of the piece is well matched by the telling, and the romance is certainly one of our very best. 1 This is no slang — the word " swap " is in the text. CHAP. V EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE 105 The still more curious, though as literature inferior, Antiirs or Awntyrs (adventures) of Arthur at the Tame Watheling (Tarn Wadling in Cumberland), but for its strong and regular alliteration, might have been put in the last chapter. ^^ ^A^thiV For here the unrhymed tirades of the Green Knight become regular nine-lined stanzas, rhymed (rather imperfectly, it is true) abbababc. There is no " bob," but the '' wheel " consists of a triplet and singleton rhymed dddc. The story opens in a strange and promising manner with the apparition to Gawain and the Queen of a specially loathly spirit, the ghost of Guinevere's mother, to give her good advice, and this is told with some power ; but the romance then declines into an ordinary fight between Gawain and Sir Galleron of Galway. We have three texts of it in the Douce, Thornton, and Ireland-Blackburne MSS. respectively ; and all three have been printed in the collections referred to in the note at the beginning of this chapter. The language is in no case "Scots" — indeed, as we shall see later, it could not be ; but it is in all Northern, like that of almost the whole of the poems of this group, and in at least one form, that of the Ireland-Blackburne version, it is distinctly uncomely, not to say barbarous, though this rather suits the grisliness of the ghost. William and the Werewolf, or William of Palerne^ less original, so far as we know, than the Greeti Knight, but pretty freely adapted from its extant French model, is in plain and unadulterated " four-accent " verses, directly comparable with Piers Plowman, of the oldest version of which it may be ten ^^Paier^f^ or fifteen years the elder. The story of a missing heir fostered by a werewolf, who is himself the victim of machinations, is interesting, and the execution sometimes capital. Indeed, it is superior to the Green Knight itself in one point, the rejection of uncouth or manufactured words for the mere sake of alliteration. Two important Arthurian poems, one certainly and the other very probably dating from this period, belong to the plain unrhymed and unstamped variety of alliterative verse. One of the.se is on Joseph of Arimathea,^ and the other is the long alliterative Morte d'Arthure of the Thornton MS., which AHmathla. has had its claims put in as the " great geste " of Huchowne. The date of this manuscript is, as has been said, much later than our present period ; but in view of its other contents this is no argument. The Joseph is contained in the Vernon MS., and there- fore certainly ours here. It is of no great length — about 700 lines — and does not seem, 1 Ed. Skeat, E.E.T,S. io6 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book ii though it is incomplete, to have been ever much longer ; it is only a paraphrase of the constantly reworked legend of its subject, and it has no special literary characteristics. Yet it has interest for us, like so much else, because it shows the set of the tide — not in this case the main set but an important "overfall " — in the alliterative direction, and the way in which the great " matters " of mediaeval interest were being at the moment handled in England. / The alliterative Morte tVArthjire'^ is a much bigger thing, ex- tending to over 4000 lines, and possessed of distincter literary char- acter. It belongs in point of matter to what may be generally called The Thornton ^^'^ " ^''"'- " rather than the romance type of the Arthurian Morte story, and busies itself, like the older versions of that story generally, with the king's wars against the Romans chiefly, ignoring the more romantic, and even the more mystical, parts of the legend almost or altogether. But it is a vigorous piece, employing its somewhat rugged and clumsy implement of verse with a sort of sword- or rather axe-play which is refreshing and effective, and calling to its aid a vocabulary well suited to the subject and style, and sufifi- ciently individual. Few will wish for a complete literature of such poems ; but we could endure several more as good as this Morte \d' Arthiire. Among its actual companions it seems to have had pieces dealing with both the great classical subjects of mediaeval romance, Alexander and Troy ; but the alliterative poems on the first subject which can The ^^ probably referred to this period are but fragmentary. Destruction It is Otherwise with the great Destruction of Troy^ which '^''^' we possess in plainly alliterated verse, and which is not impossibly older than 1400. This is a huge poem of over 14,000 lines, translated with a certain amount of freedom from the popular compilation on the subject by Guido Colonna, written in a Northern or North Midland dialect, and containing no sort of identification of author or time of composition, though attempts have been made to father it on the usual Huchowne. It is less rugged than the Morte d^ Art/litre, and a good deal less picturesque, though appearances are unfairly against the poet when he says in his penultimate line " Now the proses is put plainly to end," for he only means '• process." On the whole, it is by no means unreadable, long as it is, and every now and then, in some of the interminable fighting, in some storm passages, in the account of the death of Ulysses at the hands of Telegonus, and in the Troilus and Briseida^ episodes, the writer contrives to 1 Ed. Perry, E.E.T.S, 2 E.E.T.S., ed. Panton and Donaldson. 8 The retention of this form of the name is perhaps an argument for an early date. For by 1400 the authority of Chaucer would most probably have CHAP. V EARLY ROMANCES — ALLITERATIVE 107 acquit himself very fairly. But it does not compare well with its chief rival in the same " matter " on the metrical side, King Alisannder . And so we come to the Pistyl of Susan, one of the smallest in bulk, but, for reasons already given and others, one of the most remark- able. It is a versification of the pleasant piece of poetical justice which, as "not found in the Hebrew '' of the Book of Daniel, was turned out from the Canon into the Apoc- 1/SuTS/ rypha of the English Bible, but is still to be found there, and was, until recent tamperings with the Lectionary, regularly read as First Lesson at Even-song in the Church of England on 22nd November. The earliest version (there are four others dating from the fifteenth century) is found in the great Vernon MS. of the Bodleian Library, one of the hugest of its kind, containing some 800 very large pages filled with religious compositions, and put by experts at not later than 1380. Susan contains exactly 366 verses (a number perhaps not fortui- tous) arranged in one of the varieties (the eight-line with bob and wheel) of the peculiar alliterated and rhymed stanzas already described. The alliteration is heavy — four alliterated words being often, and I think five sometimes, crowded into a not very long line. But it is very well managed, and the poem is distinctly above the average not merely of its class, but of mediaeval verse generally. The author follows the Vulgate narrative closely as a framework, but amplifies and embroiders in the usual fashion, and occasionally breaks in with a completely original addition. The two chief of these (of unequal value) are one of the stock mediaeval gardens, with apples and pomegranates, parrots and goldfinches as serenely mingled as in the Swiss Family Robinson, and a most beautiful stanza describing the parting of Susanna and her husband Joachim : — She fell down flat on the floor, her fere when she found, Carped [spoke] to him kindly, as she full well couthe (could) : " Iwis I thee wrathed never at my witand (witting), Neither in word nor in work, in eld nor in youth." She cowered up on her knees and kissed his hand — " For I am damned, I not dare disparage thy mouth." Was never more sorrowful segge (man) by sea nor by sand, Ne never a sorrier sight by north ne by south. Then there They took the fetters off her feet, And ever he kissed that sweet. " In other worlds shall we meet," Said he no mair. whelmed " Briscis " and " Briseida " once for all in ' Cressid." Yet some think that Chaucer's Troilus is referred to. io8 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BOOK I] Huchowne or no Huchowne, the man who wrote that was a poet in form and in fact. Nor does his dealing "disparage" the mouth of Daniel when that youthful prophet comes to judgment and ad- dresses the elders (indeed they richly deserved it) in language of extreme directness. INTERCHAPTER II The incorrectness, or at least the insufficiency, of that view of literature and literary criticism which despises the historic estimate, and bids us look only to " the best and principal things," is perhaps nowhere illustrated in a more complete and damaging fashion than by the period of which I have endeavoured to give some account in the foregoing Book. With exceptions, rare in number and almost infinitesimal in proportional bulk, it contains nothing that can, by the widest inclusion and the kindliest judgment that retains critical competence, be described as " best " or •' principal " in relation to literature at large. Whether ev en these exceptions — a lyric gr two o f the calibre of yl/isoti, a passage here and there in Layamon and t he l^lliMiiL'fcsT^he fl ashes of intensity in__ lhe auth or of Cleanness , tlie melancholy'music of Tlie Pearl and some of the Harnpolian ppe ms, the simple and palhetic parting of Susanna and Joachim quoted just now — whether even theyTeach the fringe of the best things may be questioned without excessive severity. Under a still lower and more accommo- dating standard this Early Middle English literature demands, in order to enjoy much of it as literature, a kind of pre-established harmony of taste in the reader, not a little acquaintance with other letters, and a certain though not a very great amount of patience and preparation in the mere rudiments. Every now and then, especially in the alliterative poems, the strange combination of elaborate pains and insufficient accomplishment or taste will posi- tively disgust ; in almost every case an impatient temper must know how to avoid, or a patient one how to endure, vast overdoses of ill- baked bread to a modicum of sack, vast stretches of literary desert to a few not always quite paradisaical oases. I And yet there is no portion of English literature the study of which can be wholly pretermitted with greater danger, none the study of which is repaid by greater increase of understanding, and even of ; enjoyment, in regard to the rest. It is desirable, no doubt, that the student — even that tlie reader, who. though he may not call ; himself a student, wishes to read intelligently — should read Anglo- , 109 ' no THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book Saxon literature ; but it can hardly be said to be necessary. In certain points, and those of the most importance, some acquaintance with Middle English literature before Chaucer may be said to be an absolute necessity. Fortunately we now only preach to the converted when we insist on the necessity of understanding Chaucer in order to understand what follows him ; before long, let us hope, it will be equally unnecessary to dwell much on the hopelessness of understand- ing Chaucer unless we have some understanding of what he followed. Let us see, then, what the three hundred years which passed since the date of our last summary, in the first of these interchapters, had done for English literature, what they had put ready as accomplished facts for acceptance or rejection in the way of materials and in the way of tools for any one who felt the vocation of writing about, or a little after, _the middle of the fourtee nth centu ry. In the first place, thmigir this concerns us least, and is moreover a now generally accepted fact, they had provided a language which, disguised a little by the occasional retention of obsolete forms of letters, by unsettled and capricious spelling, and by d^ectic variations, possessing still a considerable number of obsolete Wrds, and lacking as yet some of the terms of art and thought which the translators, and especially the prose-writers, of the fifteenth century were to add, was to all intents and purposes English — not Old English, not Middle English, but English, with still a chip or fleck of shell in the shape of an inflection only half discarded upon it, but about to cast even these off. The notion of Chaucer as having flooded the language with French words ip^-cSntradistinction to the sound Saxon vocabulary of his contemporary Langland died hard, and perhaps simulates life even yet ; but its obstinacy in surviving is merely Partridgean. / If less general adhesion be given to the proposition that English metre was also, in the rough at least, fully created, that, I believe, is chiefly due to the much inferior attention which has been given to the subject. It is true that the formative period of prosody had not yet ceased, and that the genius of the four masters, Chaucer himself, Spenser, Shakesj^eare, and Milton (to whom it is perhaps but just to add Surrey and Marlowe), had to be applied before all the resources of English in this respect were at the command of whosoever chose — and chooses — to use them. It is true that at the actual time a revolt, and a rather formidable one, was being made by alliterative rhythm against metre.. This went some way, and if Langland had had variety, flexibiHty, range, equal to his intensity — especially if he had had anything like Chaucer's command of phrase — it might have gone farther. But the truth is that alliteration, with its tyrannous restriction to the word which must be, not the word which ought to be, chosen, n INTERCH AFTER II iii is the deadly foe of phrase itself, and consequently of style, and could not have triumphed. On the other hand, English metrical writers themselves had to unlearn something and to learn much. They had to get rid of the final e, a live thing once, but now somewhat like a half- dead but not severed branch on a tree. They had to get rid of the superstition of the central pause, and of strict syllabic number, which they derived, though they fought against both, from their French models, and in the first case from the grasp of the "dead hand" of Anglo-Saxon itself. But 150 J-ears at least of steady\ practice, of constant pressure of metrical form, on the yielding but by no means merely passive body of older rhythm, had got the poetical capacities of the language into real shape, had made not a merely mechanical junction, but a true graft. The o rtosyllab le and iecasyllable, with the trisyllabic variance in each, were already established, a crowd of ballad and romance combinations of eights and sixes was in existence, the rhymed, loose-pivoted line of the Moral Dde and Robert of Gloucester, with the unrhymed double stave 0?^^ alliterators, were ready between them to produce a family of me^^ of greater compass than the decasyllable — the Alexandrine, the iambic or trochaic fourteener, the tetrameter anapaestic. It is true that the actual production of these in any satisfactory form was postponed for a century and more ; but that is merely one of the constant accidents of literary history, and we shall perhaps be able to give some explanation of it when we come to sum up the fifteenth century itself. Of advance in the direction of kinds and subjects we have to speak with more reserves and allowances. In some cases there is even a falling back ; thus Early Middle English is entirely destitute of the sound and valuable, if not extremely accomplished, original historic prose that we find in Anglo-Saxon, t gdeed.^ in *hp ^^^i^ domain of prose there is at best a stationary state, at most and mor e commonly a distinc t decline ! Nor is this in the least surprising. Prose IS , lar more than ver.se, a matter of practice and copy ing; and by the tentTi century — the Tjest age of Anglo-Sa xon prose — that language had had experience plentiful in bulk and extensive in time, if a little restricted in kind. The disorganisation which necessarily attended the remaking of the language made this practice to at least some extent useless and obsolete, while there were no models for the new tongue except Latin, inasmuch as none of the modern vernaculars (except Icelandic) had any prose worth speaking of to^ give it. We shall indeed see that no really good Englisli prose appeared till a long apprenticeship in translating Latin and French had supplied this want. Meanwhile, such prose as there was, was more than ever exclusively religious. 112 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE book This meant in its turn that all new kinds and subjects, whether suitable or not, had to be treated in verse, and they were so treated. It has been often enough pointed out that, to compensate for its drawbacks, verse had at least one merit, that in a non-reading age it was better suited for reading or reciting aloud to others. At any rate, its predominance is an undisputed fact, and one on which it is not necessary to dwell. Homilies and paraphrases of the Bible, narrative historical and narrative fictitious, rudimentary science, political satire, anything and everything found a vehicle in verse of kinds nearly as various as the subjects, but with the skipping oct osylla ble or the swinging, if not yet very smoothly swinging, fourt gene r for preference. Much of this verse (and that not merely in the Romance section) is pleasant and profitable to read even now. But comparatively little of it can be said to be fully accomplished as literature, and almost the whole of it is pervaded by a characteristic not new (for it confronts us almost equally in Anglo-Saxon) ; not in the least surprising, for it was practically inevitable ; but necessarily aflfecting the interest and merit of the whole in an unfaveurable way. This characteristic comes from the fact that the great majority of the literature of the period is certainly, and that all but an infinitesimal gaiiLiiLit is probably, not original literature at all but jtranslation. It is true that translation was not then so entirely unoriginal a thing as it is — as it prides and boasts itself upon being — now. Unkind critics have suggested that at least one reason why the medizeval translator allowed himself such liberties was that he had not the scholarship to be faithful ; kind ones may prefer to see in it at least some- thing of native literary aspiration, and the desire not merely to tread in the exact footsteps of another. But what is certain is that in Eijglishand at this time really original writing — writing "out of a man's ow^n head" — is so rare as to be, in important instances, almost unknown. When a man did not, as the enormous majority of the romance-writers and not a few others certainly did, merely translate more or less loosely a single precedent work, he either compiled from several or (as must have been the case with even the more original religious writers from him of the Ancren Riivle downwards) wrote on subjects which had been so frequently handled, and which had such a large stock of prescribed and expected commonplaces and common forms appertaining to them, that his work has almost the character of a translation, or at least compilation. Nothing is more singular, more characteristic, or more puzzling in mediaeval literature than the immense mass of its additions to the literary stock of the world, not merely in mere bulk of writing, but in new themes, new touches, new handling of all sorts — - contrasted with the almost impos- II INTERCHAPTER II 113 sibility of attributing any large original increments of the kind to single persons. It is not made, it grows. The great Arthurian legend itself is only the crowning example of the kind. In a few years this passes from the barest and most unpromising scantlings first, and then from an ingenious but -not specially poetical sham history like a hundred others, to the stateliest and most elaborate structure of romance that exists. And how, from whom, exactly when, exactly where all this comes nobody knows, though in the desperation of craving for knowledge men have constantly thought and asserted that they knew. Nor is this the only point of the kind in which the Middle Ages resemble the enchanted forests of which they were so fond. Nothing happens as it might be expected to happen : the land which pretty certainly furnished the materials of the legend does not furnish the language in which it is first told ; the language decoys the investigator away from the real fatherland of the story. '' Everything is somebody else's," as the pathetic-humorous J complaint of later fiction has it. Yet to those who can be content to acquiesce in ignorance of an authorship which is, after all, a matter of very little consequence, and in whom the artificial thirst for Quellen, for origins, does not master the natural one for the water or wine of literature, whether fresh- drawn from spring, fresh-pressed from grape, or transfused through a dozen vesseLs, provided only it be clear and well-tasted — there is little disappointment and much satisfaction in the literature, even the English literature, of this period. If the writers seldom absolutely created for themselves, they are as a rule careful never to leave any capital that may come into their hands entirely unimproved, if it be " only by fresh borrowings and combinations. And it is perhaps not less reasonable and more fair to suspect that their additions were, in many cases at any rate, not borrowings at all but original gifts — that the creative fancy, too shy and distrustful of itself to go alto- gether alone, took its opportunity of exercise under cover and with the assistance of what existed already. At any rate, till we know to the contrary, there is no harm, for instance, in giving Layamon the credit of Argante and the elves ; and if it should unluckily turn out after all that he does not deserve it, why, we can at worst transfer that credit to somebody else, frhe thing is important in literature, not the man. If V Arcreover, for those at least who are fortunate enough to take interest not merely in the thing, but in the way in which it is treated, the manner in which it is done, this Middle English period has plenty of attraction besides that chief one of prosody, which has been sufficiently brought out. Not only is the mere word- hoard regularly, if at first slowly, increasing, but the uses of it are I 114 THE MAKING OF ENGLISH LITERATURE BOOK 11 varying, multiplying, acquiring deftness and artistic value with every author and in every book. Here we have the rough draft of a word- play or a conceit familiar in Elizabethan writers. There we see (in a pamphlet published by Wynkyn de Worde, and translated from the French, it is true, but no doubt much older in both languages) an early form of the trap by which Goldsmith for once avenged himself on Johnson, and actually obtained an acknowledgment of his victory. Here again a familiar cadence in verse, there (it is true very rarely as yet) a memorable rhythm in prose, connects itself, for those who have the fortune to recognise the connection, with better things, or at least other things, to come. We are still in the workshop, and hardly any master workman has yet appeared, but opus fervet and the master himself is at haad. z' BOOK III CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES CHAPTER I Chaucer's life and poems Life — Probably spurious Tales — Other questioned work — The arguments for and against it — Admittedly genuine work — Tlie three periods — The Roinaunt of the Rose — The Minor Poems — Troilus and Cressid — The House of Fame — The Legend of Good li'omen — The Canterbury Tales It was somewhat past tlie middle of the fourteenth century when the long process of incubation and experiment which we have followed from the cessation of the Anglo-Saxon C/ironicle to Hampole, Minot, and the revival of alliterative verse, culminated in a generation of positively accomplished, and in some cases positively known, poets and prose-writers. Chaucer is not the earliest of these ; he is not, as is sometimes still openly said, and perhaps much more frequently thought, the only one worthy of attention. But he is by so much the greatest figure, that he deserves to give, as he has always given, name to the period, and to have precedence of those who, like Gower possibly, Langland, if Langland it was, and Wyclif pretty certainly, had the start of him in literary performance. The life of Chaucer has fo*" the greater part of a century had its full share of that touching, if not always intelligent, devotion which justifies the theory that tlie human race is not after all indifterent to its heroes. We know indeed very little about him that has even the slightest connection witii literature; and we are bidden to give up the idea that he once beat a Franciscan friar in F"leet Street — which is picturesque and not impossible. We know that Cecilia de Chaumpaigne pardoned him or released him de raptu nteo ; but we have no portrait of Cecilia, we know >i5 Ii6 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book iii nothing about her, and there is no more interesting probability about the matter itself than that raptus metis was one of those abductions of heiresses for purely mercenary reasons which were extremely common in mediaeval times and later, perhaps as late as the days and experiences of Henry Fielding. We know the pots of wine assigned as Chaucer's allowances, the details of his court suits as a page, and a great many other even less interesting details ; but for the real Chaucer, the man, the poet, we are left to the poems and our own imagination, being perhaps not the more unhappy therefor. There is no positive evidence of the date of Chaucer's birth ; ^ for that of his death, 1400, we have not only tradition but the strong circumstantial proof that his pensions ceased to be paid at that time. The birth date used to be fixed at 1328, and is now shifted to 1340, for reasons which must be sought in the biographies. The older date suits better with the acknowledged fact that Chaucer was an old man when he died ; the new with most known circumstances of his life. He was pretty certainly the son of John and Agnes Chaucer, the former a citizen and vintner of London, who had a house in Thames Street. The separation between Court and City was not in mediaeval days by any means sharp or total, and John Chaucer was not only a citizen and vintner, but held a post in the Royal House- hold which necessitated his accompanying King Edward and Queen Philippa to the Continent in 1338. Nor is there any doubt that Geoffrey Chaucer himself was in close and constant connection with the Royal Family. The first link of this connection has been presumably found in some accounts for the household of Lionel, Edward's son, which record the provision of cloth, etc., and money allowances to a Geoffrey Chaucer in 1357. Two years later he served in the army which invaded France, was taken prisoner, and ransomed in March 1360. In 1367 he had a pension of 20 marks as valet of the King's chamber. In 1370, 1372, 1377, and 1378 he was employed on diplomatic missions abroad, the second and fourth extending as far as Italy, with practically certain results on his literary work. We cannot find space here for the successive grants, from pitchers of wine to pensions, which he received for those and other services, with their cessations, restorations, diminutions, and augmentations, all which the biographers record to the uttermost farthing. The most important and interesting of these details are that in 1374 he received from the Corporation of London a lease for life of the gate-house at Aldgate, which he actually held for many years ; and that a little 1 Editions are extremely numerous ; the standard library form is that of Pro- fessor Skeat's work (Clarendon Press), in six volumes, with a seventh containing what modern philological scholarship regards as the Chaucerian Apocrypha. CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 117 later he was appointed Comptroller of Customs in the port of London. His prosperity ebbed and flowed with that of the sections of the royal house to which he was more particulaily attached, and was at its worst during the predominance of the Duke of Gloucester under Richard II. But though Chaucer was faithful to the latter, the accession of Henry of Bolingbroke did him no harm, as he had been attached of old to John of Gaunt. It seems that he probably died at Westminster, where he had taken a house not long before. He was certainly married; his wife pretty certainly died in 1387; and he had a son named Lewis, to whom in 1391 he very agreeably dedicated his Treatise on the Astrolabe. But his wife, whose name was apparently Philippa, is rather a shadowy personage, her identification as sister to Katherine Roet or Swinford, last wife of John of Gaunt, being rather probable than proved. Nor is there much positive evidence of Chaucer's formerly alleged connection with Woodstock or of his fatherhood of the Thomas Chaucer who became a person of wealth and importance later. ^ Nor is it superfluous to add a word of caution on the attempts made to take the personal descriptions in the Prologue to Sir Thopas as authentic. Nothing apparently will cure commentators of this rashness, not even the diminutive figure which Thackeray has subjoined to his own pretty faithful delinea- tion of the face of Michael Angelo Titmarsh. What manner of man Chaucer was mentally we can see, with infallible certainty from his work; what he was physically is quite unimportant and utterly uncertain, though there is a fair chance that the so-called Occleve portrait, occurring in a MS. of that writer's work, may be genuine. On the work itself (and in this case much more reasonably) infinite pains have also been spent ; but here also we meet with difficulties. There was, of course, in Chaucer's time no regular " publication " of literature ; and not only in that time, but for long afterwards, precise dating of work was an exception and an accident, while precise attribution of it was rarer still. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, both in MSS. and early printed copies, a very heterogeneous mass of material came to pass under Chaucer's name which it has been the business of the last century to sift. This mass may be conveniently found in Chalmers's Poets., and it may- stopping short for the moment of all controversial matter whatever, be divided into four classes : — 1 At the same time, it is not to be too lightly rejected, for the authority is Thomas Gascoigne (the author of the Liber Veritatum, partly edited by the late Mr. Thorold Rogers), who was born but a year or two at most after Chaucer's death, was later Chancellor of Oxford, in which University he resided almost all his life, and was a man interested in letters, inquisitive, and usually well-informed. Ii8 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book iii I. What is certainly, or so probably as to amount to certainty, Chaucer's. II. What is certainly not Chaucer's. III. What, on grounds which can be admitted by strictly literary and comparative criticism, is probably not Chaucer's. IV. What, on grounds doubtful to such criticism, has been rejected by some. With the matter contained in the second class, such as Lydgate's Tale of Thebes and Henryson's Testametit of Cressid, we need not trouble ourselves. It never had any business where it was, and such of it as deserves notice will have that notice elsewhere. The third Probably division, though containing some interesting work also, spurious may be briefly dismissed. The Tale of Gamelyn, a ^"" capital ballad-romance in rough but spirited eights and sixes, containing a version of the story on which Shakespeare founded As Voti Like It, is the best of the division and an excellent thing. But neither metre, language, dialect, style, nor anything else about it is in the very slightest degree Chaucerian. It belongs distinctly to the class of poetry which, whether he contemned it or not, he certainly eschewed ; and it could only be his as a literary toiir de force entirely out of character with the age. So too the less excellent Plowman's Tale, in eight-lined stanzas of eights rhymed ababbcbc, though less good than the Gamelyn, is equally or even more un-Chaucerian. It is a half-mystical satire, evidently written by some one who had both Chaucer and Langland before him, and who chose to throw the matter (as far as he could catch it) of the one into the form (as far as he could conceive it) of the other. Here again Chaucer could only have written the thing as a tour de force, as a kind of parody, in the spirit of the nineteenth, or at farthest back of the eighteenth, century, not of his own time. There is no such strong and absolute improbability about the Pardoner and the Tapster or the Tale of Beryn, but their external attribution to Chaucer is late, and the internal evidence is far from strong. The case is very different with another class of work, which, unlike this last, passed the vigilant and eminently literary scrutiny of Tyrvvhitt, but has during the past thirty years been black-marked owing to the operation of a class of argument which questioned was, I believe, started by the late Mr. Henry Brad- *°''''- shaw, and which has been perfected by Dr. Skeat. The power of literary, or at least bibliographical, divination which Mr. Bradshaw possessed does not seem to have been exaggerated, any more than the " magnetic " force of his personal character. And it is impossible for any one who has the slightest knowledge of the immense erudition and the unwearied kindness of the present CHAP. 1 CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS Ii9 Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge to speak of him witli dis- respect. Furtlier, there is the difficulty that the class of argument in question, itself resting on extremely minute points of linguistics, pho- netics, and other '■ sciences of the border," as we may perhaps call them, seems to demand an equal specialism from those who would attempt to meet it. Yet the criticism which would exclude from the Chaucerian canon such things not merely as the Court of Love and The Flower and the Leaf but in whole or in part the existing English version of the Romance of the Rose, which we know that Chaucer did translate, cannot be allowed to pass quite unchallenged by those whom it does not satisfy.^ This criticism rests, as I understand it, upon two points — alleged differences of language, which, in the Court of Love especially, is said to be much later than Chaucer's time ; and still more, alleged dilTer- ences of rhyme. Few can lay much real stress on such arguments as that The Flower and the Leaf must have been written by a woman because the supposed narrator is addressed as "daughter" — an argument which would prove, among ten thousand other agreeable absurdities, that Fathna was not written by the author of Locksley Hall, and that Sir David Lyndsay was a four-legged creature. It is said more seriously that Chaucer in his certain works never rhymes such a word ?i?, grene, in which the final e still existed, to such a word as been, where it was not ; that he never rhymes y and ye, and .so forth. And upon pleas of the kind an injunction against ticket- ing the incriminated poems as even possibly Chaucer's has been sought, and commonly taken as granted. This question, of course, cannot here be argued at length, but it is far too important to be passed over altogether. And as similar arguments, mutatis mutandis, are applied to much in- teresting work of others before the Restoration, I may arguments be allowed briefly to state three demurrers, in ascending agJi^"t''it_ order of what seems to me cogency, which justify, again as it seems to me, suspension of judgment in all the cases where these arguments are brought. A. The first and weakest (being merely ad homines, hut still stronger than others) is that the black-markers should agree a little better among themselves. The English Rose, for instance, has been split up, and the very parts which are granted to Chaucer by one critic 1 It docs not seem necessary to dwell on all the Apocrypha, many of the pieces having very small interest. T/i/- Cuckoo and the A'ij^/itii/i^a/e has a little, chiefly from its possible connection with T/ie Owl and the A'ighlin^ale, and its possible influence on Milton's first sonnet later. It is now attributed by the Separatists to one Sir Thomas Clanvowe. 120 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi on these principles are denied to him by another. A calcukis which brings out contradictory results is not quite a calculus to accept with- out reservation. B. The second and much stronger is that the malcontents practically beg the question. They exclude certain work from con- sideration to get at Chaucer's rhymes ; they draw an inference from the remainder ; and then they argue back to the excluded parts and declare them not genuine, when they have not themselves been allowed to give evidence. We might as well exclude the "classical" experiments in the ajDpendix to Enoch Arden, because there is no trace of such scansion in the • mass of Tennyson's voluminous work. But the third argument, and by far the strongest of all, is this : — C. If a poem be in metre, rhyme, or language distinctly older than its alleged author's time, then it may fairly be pronounced not his, unless the habits of the age permit the supposition of deliberate archaism. But if it be younger, no argument can be founded upon that fact alone, because copyists may always have been responsible for the modernisation. And as a matter of fact we have but one MS. for the Court of Love and none for The Flower and the Leaf — facts of which the importance cannot be exaggerated. These arguments do not appear to me to have received sufficient answer, and they are therefore put on record here, with the caution that I do not by any means assert that Chaucer wrote the English Rose, or The Flower afid the Leaf or the Cotirt of Love. There is not evidence enough for that.^ Moreover, Chaucer can do more than well without the poems, and the poems are quite pretty enough to stand by themselves. '-^ If The Flower and the Leaf is middle fifteenth century, the Court of Love early sixteenth, as the prevailing opinion holds, supported by at least a general consensus of the chief authorities in the philological treatment of English, then there are two unknown English poets of those two dates who have each left nothing else, and who were not every-day poets. The works which, by the severest modern criticism, are left as indisputably Chaucer's are as follows: — 1 There is even evidence, of a much stronger kind than that on which the Separatists rely, against it. For instance, it may fairly be questioned whether Chaucer would have compared grass to "green wool," as the author of The Flower and the Leaf is made to do. He was the less Chaucer for the time if he did. 2 The Flower and the Leaf is put by the Separatists about 1440, in the dead waste and middle of the night of English poetry ; the Court of Love at about 1500, when that night saw only the broken dreams of Hawes and the cockcrow of Skelton. CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 121 A translation (whether it be in whole, in part, or in no part, that still existing) of the Roman de la Rose. A considerable body of Minor Poems, original and translated — The Book of tlie Duchess, The Complaints of Mars and Venus, The Farliament of Fowls, An{7i)elida and Arcite, g^'uine^ with about a score of short pieces, ballads, and what not. ^°^^- The House of Fame. The Legend of Good Women. Troilus and Cressid. The Cattterbury Tales. Besides the prose translation of Boethius and the Treatise on the Astrolabe, which will be dealt with in the next cnapter bui on*. Further, an ingenious, and by no means improbable, though not absolutely certain, theory has divided all this work into three Periods — in the first of which, represented by the Romaunt of the Rose and most of the minor poems, French influence predominates ; in the second of which this is exchanged for Italian, as shown in Troilus (adapted from Boccaccio), the House of Fame (at least possibly suggested by Dante), and the first draft of the Knighfs Tale (again from Boccaccio) ; while in the third, of which ^triods^*^ the Canterbury Tales are the great outcome, the poet, except for themes and motives merely, discards all foreign influence and becomes substantially English, though retaining his literary scholarship, both in the modern literary tongues, French and Italian, and the ancient, his proficiency in the latter as far as Latin is con- cerned being very considerable, and extending not merely to the com- pilations of the Dark and Middle Ages, but to a very fair share of the Classics proper. This arrangement corresponds very well with the known procession of the facts of Chaucer's life and with the probabilities of the case, but it is, to use the word which Mr. Matthew Arnold godfathered in English, " facultative," it can be taken or left ; the examination of the work itself is necessary. The translation of the Roman de la Rose, though it is incomplete and stops far short of the enormous length of the French original, yet extends to the very respectable number of 7700 lines, in octo- syllabic couplets. One great literary reason for accepting it as Chaucer's lies in the nature and conduct of these octosyllajjles. We have seen that, as was unavoidai)le, they were early imitated from French, and were for some time the favourite romance-metre, tliough they gradually gave place to more complicated arrangements, especi- ally the six- or twelve-lined stanza, with sixes at regular intervals between the eights. Before Chaucer, however, the octosyllabic couplet, in its stricter form, had not been well mastered by English writers, who either availed themselves more or le.ss of the license of 122 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi equivalence (which at its full stretch gives us the Christabel rhythm) or else fell, as indeed most French mediaeval writers themselves fell, into a staccato stiffness on the one hand or an over-fluent and in- significant sing-song on the other. We shall find that Chaucer's exceedingly ingenious and scholarly contemporary Gower did not avoid this latter danger. But in the English RoDiaunt of the Rose a distinct command of the measure is observable, not "^i/Mriw' ^"'^^^'^ 1"'*^ *° ^^^ same extent as in the probably later House of Fame (one of the capital examples of the metre in English), but sufficiently like that and sufficiently unlike others to justify the attribution of the two to the same hand. Fortu- nately the English includes the whole of the first part of the original — that written by William of Lorris — and it renders very well the exquisite touch of that original, uniting as it does the languid charm of moonlight and dream with the fresh vividness of morning and movement. Nor need we very bitterly regret the loss of a version of the far more prosaic pedantries and pleasantries of Jean de Meung. Of the Minor Poems, all display in various ways the learning, and in different stages and degrees the accomplishment of language and metre, which make Chaucer so delightful, while some have interest certain or probable of a biographical or historical kind. Poems'"^ The Book of the Duchess, for example, which is cer- tainly on the death of Duchess Blanche of Lancaster, first wife of John of Gaunt, gives us a date — she died in 1369 — and has been — on the 1340 theory of the poet's birth — plausibly enough conjectured to be one of his earliest works, the Complaint of Fit y (which appears to enshrine some unlucky love affair) being perhaps earHer still. The Book is in octosyllables much less perfect than those of the Roviaunt, and evidently the work of a novice, while its substance is rather clumsily made up of classicism and allegory in the less happy manner of the Rose itself. Chaucer'' s A B C (a sort of acrostic in which each stanza opens with a letter of the alphabet in order) is said to have been written for the same Blanche. These stanzas are eight-lined {ababbcbc), religious in tone, and of no great poetical merit. Much better in the eyes of literature, if not in those of morality, are the Complaints of Mars and Venus. In the first, and probably in both, the well-known story is applied to personages who are pretty certainly identified with John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon and Duke of Exeter, and Isabel of Castile, daughter of Peter the Cruel, and wife of Edmund Duke of York, son of Edward III. Isabel was more famous for beauty than for strict propriety of conduct. But there is no open attribution in the poem, and the "Venus" part at any rate was translated or adapted from a French original by Otes de Granson. The Complaint of Fity, Queen CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 123 Annelida, and the Parliament 'of Fowls are all mainly in the seven-lined stanza ababbcc, which was Chaucer's favourite among these combinations, and which acquired the name of rhyme-royal perhaps from that circumstance, though the usual explanation is that it was because of the use of the stanza in the King's Quair. Of these three poems, the Complaint, though the least accomplished in form, is genuine in tone ; and Queen Annelida, though ostensibly fiction, rings as of a personal sorrow. But the Parliament or Assembly of Fowls is by far the best of the three, and indeed of all the minor poems. Here in the very opening — The life so short, the craft so long to learn, The essay so hard, so sharp the conquering, The dreadful joys always that flit so yerne [eagerly], All this mean I by love — we feel at once the grip, the thrill, the sense of mastery and mystery which are so rare in earlier poetry. And the rest of the piece, which some would have to show already Italian influence, announces Chaucer quite unmistakably in the catalogue of trees afterwards copied by Spenser — The builder oak and eke the hardy ash — and that other of the birds themselves. These catalogues he was fond of applying afresh in various forms and matters, and they dis- play his then unexampled, and seldom since approached, still seldomer outdone, faculty of making the epithet fit the noun, and transforming the bald enumerations which are one of the curses of mediaeval poetry into broad and varied examples at once of keen observation and masterly expression. The smaller poems do not seem to require any very special notice. Some of the ballads, such as the newly recovered one To Rosamond, are pretty ; the late and sad Flee from the Press has dignity and truth ; and others are interesting. But Chaucer, who was for so great a poet curiously deficient in strictly lyrical gift, shows better in long poems than in short, and better in narration than in reflection. Indeed, it is scarcely wrong to say that, as regards the tone and substance of his work, he is rather a dramatist and a novelist than a poet, though he applied to the subjects which, there being as yet no novel and no play, he treated in poetic form, an unsurpassed and rarely equalled power of poetic expression. His expression is the exprL'ssion of the poet ; his thought the thought" Hence it is — a matter rare and certainly not to be grumbled at — that, ns has been just remarked, his long poems are better than 124 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi his short. In the long poems of his supposed middle period he was indeed still hardly out of leading-strings — or rather he chose to wear them, for Troilus and Cressid is translation in little ^'crissiT"^ more than name, the House of Fame owes nothing more than hints to its original, and the Legend of Good Women handles the classical stories, which it takes chiefly from Ovid, with nearly as much freedom as that shown in the Canterbury Tales themselves. Each of the three has a charm of its own, and Troilus has the additional one of forming a link in a chain of writing on the same subject by a succession of writers all eminent in the history of litera- ture, and most of them possessing far more than merely historical importance. The figure of Cressida (Briseida, Griseida, etc.), which the trouvere Benoit de Sainte-More had extracted from the dustbin of Dares and had partially, but only partially, vivified, passed, a very little further modernised, into the Historia Trofana (mostly pillaged from Benoit) of Guido Colonna or delle Colonne at the end of the thirteenth century. Hence Boccaccio in his Filostrato, applying his genius as a novelist and his talent as a poet, took Cressid, but made her something far more interesting than the passive love- thrall of Benoit. Chaucer, in turn taking her from Boccaccio, softened and complicated her traits a little, but added to the story the wonderfully vivid and individual figure of Pandarus. Chaucer's Scottish follower, Henryson, not meddling with his master's actual matter, completed the story unequally, but with marvellous touches in parts, by the Testament of Cressid in the fifteenth century ; Shake- speare in the sixteenth dramatised, with variations, the Chaucerian part ; and Dryden in the seventeenth refashioned Shakespeare. Perhaps there is no other instance in literary history of so many persons of such distinction taking and handing on the same torch so long. Nor need we hesitate to give Chaucer's own contribution to the series the credit of the most accomplished long poem yet written in English. The rhyme-royal stanzas are thoroughly beaten out; the passionate side of Cressid's character is fully developed, yet with a delicacy which is not always associated with the idea of Chaucer; the comic, and yet not farcical presentation of Pandarus is the first of its kind in English ; and the scene where the lovers are made happy, though somewhat too much elaborated (as indeed is the whole poem) with the " Court of Love " scholasticism of the time, is a masterpiece. Nothing but want of technical originality and a certain absence of incident could be charged against Troilus, and the first of these charges, as we have seen, is more formally than really true. The House of Fame, a much shorter poem, in rather more than 2000 lines of octosyllabic couplet, adds to the presentation of CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 125 Chaucer as master by this time of whatsoever metre he chose to adopt, and strengthens the suggestion (already given by Pandarus) of his peculiar and hitherto unexampled humour. The piece is one of the dreams, curiously compounded of The //okj^- of learning, satire, and other things, which flowed from the never-failing fountain of the Rose for some three centuries ; and it affords opportunity for much shrewd criticism of life. But the most Chaucerian touches of all, perhaps, are put in the mouth of the eagle who carries the poet up to Heaven to see the House. This eagle is a very humorous as well as powerful fowl, and his remonstrances with the wriggling bard at his being so " noyous " to carry, together with his cool, dry comfort and reassurance against any danger of his burden's being made cupbearer to the Gods, or '• stellified " or other- wise inconveniently honoured, exhibit the English thing called Humour in almost as full development as the Canterbury Tales themselves. The LegendMf Good Women, besides the general interest of all Chaucer's verse, besides its own intrinsic attraction (for the "good women " are the most hapless and blameless of Ovid's Heroides^, and the remembrance of its suggestion of what is perhaps, all things considered, the most perfect example of Tenny- "^GZd'fvlmei. son's verse,^ has the additional charm of presenting to us Chaucer's first experiment in ^the h eroic coup let, the mair withblankyerse, of later English poetry, and the medium own greatest work. The faint foreshadowings of this in earlier verse, the ways in which the uncertain crystallisation of our prosody,, now takes this form, now loses it again, have been already indicated. But, as is generally the case when a poet of the first genius hits upon a metre of the first importance, the thing, after being almost unbodied, certainly embryonic, in its first appearance, presents itself practically full-grown. The pathetic subjects of the Legend do not indeed give the author much opportunity for showing that marvellous suitableness of the form for comic portraiture and description which the Canterbury Tales display. But it is noticeable that he opens the collection with one of those ironic or agnostic, rather than positively scejjtlcal, references to things beyond the present life which are found elsewhere {e.g. in the Kniglit^s Tale), and which indeed may be said without parodox to form not so much a reaction from the piety of the iMiddle Ages as a complement or even an integral part of it. After this and 1 I read, before my eyelids dropt their shade, , " The Legend of Good Women," long ago Sung by the morning star of song, who made His music heard below. A Dream of Fair Women, id Women. in pillar, i n of his/ 126 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book in some of that passionate praise of the Daisy which, common as it is in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century poetry, always, or almost always, hides or discloses affection for some living Margaret, one of the usual allegorical overtures (here specially interesting because it refers to the poefs own works) conveys a rebuke to him from the God of Love and Alcestis his servant for the sacrilegious remarks contained in the Kose and in Troihis. So he undertakes a palinode, and tells in turn of Cleopatra and her faithfulness to Antony, of Thisbe and Dido, of Hypsipyle and Medea, how true they were to the false Jason, of Lucrece, Ariadne, Philomene (Philomela), Phillis, and Hypermnestra — all examples of truth, deserved or undeserved, in woman. It is pleasant, as it always is, to receive the old classical stories set out with the new romantic charm, but the chief attraction of the poem is the new-born metre — the strength, command, and freshness which Chaucer shows in it, his penetration at once of the secrets of enjambe- nient or overlapping, of paragraph arrangement, of the merits of a fijll stop at the end of the first line of a couplet, his mastery of lift and swing, the eddying internal swirl, and yet the constant onward progress of his whole rhythm. The most like in tone to the Legend of all the minor poems are the chief " doubtfuls," the Court of Love and The Flower and the I^eaf, though they are in the Chaucerian stanza or rhyme-royal, not in heroics, and though the Court of Love expresses the libel as well as the palinode. It is difficult to say which of the two is the more charming — the Court of Love with its statutes half ironical, half passionate, and the delightful concert of the birds at the end, with their amorous descants founded on psalm-motives ; or the dreamlike vision of The Flower and the Leaf with the white and green parties of Diana and Flora, and the fantastic allegory of a not extravagant virginity. Of the two, the sentiment is the more Chaucerian in the Court of Love., the expression and arrangement in The Flower ajtd the L^eaf. Perhaps the best argument for the non-Chaucerian author- ship is that if they be later they take away the almost unintelligible reproach of England during the ensuing century. There is, however, no doubt that common fame has even more than that measure of reason which (to do her the justice too seldom done) she often, though not always, has in such cases in considering Chaucer as the poet of the Canterbury Tales. In these ^tr/ra/^r ^^ ^^^^ "°^ °"^y ^^^ "^^^^ considerable work (even if the English Rose be .wholly his) in bulk; not only his latest ; not only work which includes in one part or another of it all the merits and beauties which can be discerned elsewhere, but work dis- playing a variety and a vigour nowhere else to be found, as well as evidences of original genius which do not appear even in the best of CHAP. I CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 127 the other works. Although the Decameron may have furnished the bare suggestion of alternate tale-telling, although many, perhaps most, of the tales are founded in subject, and even in some details of treatment, on previous work, classical, Italian, or French, yet the whole as a whole is distinctly •' new and original " in a very different sense from that of the play-bills. The entire framework, and very much of the inset tales, is studied directly from the English life of the time : the gracious lunar rainbows of the Rose have given place to sunlight ; the abstractions of scholastic philandering retire in favour of beings of flesh and blood. For Dangler and Bialacoil, even for Cressid, the fair, frail type, and Troilus, the amoiireux transi of all time, we have the bouncing Wife of Bath and the mincing Prioress, the stout carle of a Miller, and the Summoner as full of reality as he is wanting in delicacy. Even the pieces like the famous Knights Tale, which, like the earlier poems, are taken from others, and deal with literary tradition rather than with English contemporary fact, wear a new guise and breathe a new spirit. We pass from con- vention to direct impression and expression, from pageantry to conduct, from allegory to fact. There is not less art; there is, in fact, more art than ever, but there is infinitely more matter, and the matter and the art have not the slightest difficulty in joining hands. We must neglect as usual, or at least notice only by reference, a great deal of the matter which a praiseworthy zeal has accumulated in reference to the Canterbury Tales. It is evident on the face of it that they were not finished, and it is very probable that the successive instalments were never arranged even in a provisional order by the author. Industrious editors have accordingly, by the help of the Prologue, the interpreted introductions, and other real or imaginary hints, regrouped the tales, calculated how many more were to be told, and adjusted the stages of the journey. This is good matter for whoso likes it ; whoso does not, may neglect it without scathe or demur. It is, however, not unimportant to bear in mind that, as the sure evidences of style and metre show, the book represents work of very different periods, and probably includes not a little which was originally composed without a distinct view to the whole scheme as we have it. The simplest literary facts, as distinguished from what classical scholars call '• hariolations," are that the Canterbury Tales consist of about seventeen thousand and odd lines of verse, and two pieces, the Tale of Melibee and the Parson's Tale, of prose, the former hav- ing, in parts, odd indications or remnants of blank verse in it. The poetical part is, with the exception of the burlesque romaunt of Sir Thopas, either in rhymed couplets of the kind just described or 128 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book in in stanza. It is divided in point of matter into a prologue, which describes tlie cavalcade of the Pilgrims to the shrine of Becket, and depicts each in a series of wonderful vignettes or kit-cat portraits. There are, besides Sir TJiopas and the two prose tales, twenty-one tales in verse of very different lengths, ranging from the two thousand lines of the Knighfs Tale to mere fragments like the Cook''s. Between the Tales there are lesser prologues which keep up the framework, and very commonly, if not invariably, display the dramatic power of the author, and his intensely vivid observation of contemporary life at their highest. In point of subject, the Tales now vary in the widest and freest manner. The Knighfs Tale is a regular romance of chivalry, not on the smallest scale, and belonging to the antique matter. So is the Man of Law's Tale, which handles in rhyme-royal a variant of the story of Emare (p. 96). So is the Clerk'' s, which tells the story of Griselda (rhyme-royal) ; the Squire'' s, which " leaves half told The story of Cambuscan bold." The Prioress, the Monk, and the Nun sedately tell legends of Saint Cecilia, of Hugh of Lincoln, or moralised stories of Scriptural or classical lore. All the rest 2Xt fabliaux oi one kind or another — that is to say, Englishings, in the most original and least second-hand fashion, of the peculiar verse-stories, often, but not always, distinctly " free " in incident and language, and almost always containing a more or less satirical criticism of life, which had become popular in France about two centuries before. The prologues are equally various in length and in immediate subject, though the tone is pretty much the same in all. The longest, the most famous, and on the whole the happiest, is the celebrated discourse of the Wife of Bath, which suggested Dunbar's only less brilliant (though more bitter) The Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, and which, like it, is bitter satire on women put into the mouth of a woman, and arranged there with the curiously artful faculty of making the speaker unconsciously a self-satirist. All these prologues are full of direct and personal touches, and, with their prior, the opening piece, contain such a gallery of pictures from the life as no mediaeval writer had ever attempted. The last Shakespearian touch — that which at once makes a character personal and individual for all time, and conveys to it the abiding characteristics of humanity which belong to no time in particular — is indeed not quite Chaucer's. His characters are rather astonishingly brilliant types, individualised by the freshness and sharpness of the impression, than absolutely individual persons. It was indeed almost impossible, till the clutch of allegory had been finally shaken off, that the complete tyranny of the type should be shaken off likewise. But no poets' characters that still partake of the type are so free from its drawbacks and blemishes as Chaucer's; CHAP, i CHAUCER'S LIFE AND POEMS 129 and many as are the great English humourists who have followed him, hardly one has succeeded in making more out of humour. This naturally shows itself in the comic tales and in the prologues, but it is not absent anywhere — not in the stately chivalry of the Knighfs Tale, not in the pathos of the stories of Constance and Griselda. Next to this almost omnipresent humour the great feature of the Canterbury Tales is the extraordinary vividness and precision of the pre- sentment of images, whether complicated or simple. Of the former, the poem bears in its very forefront — in the figures of the prologue and the temple-descriptions of the KnighVs Tale — unsurpassed instances. And in such phrases as the famous Smiler, with the knife under the cloak, we meet, and meet almost for the first time, that gift of putting Multum in parvo which only the greatest men of letters, perhaps in perfection only the greatest poets, possess. Pursuing this faculty still closer, we can bring it down, in at least some instances, to that unsurpassed power of making the epithet suit the noun which has been noticed already. It is evident, and interestingly evident, that this magical power of Chaucer's own words impressed, as it deserved to impress, his contemporaries and scholars more than anything else. His astonishing command of " rhetorique " (which the next age unluckily endeavoured to rival by searching for the most "aureate" words instead of the most appropriate), his "gold dewdrops of speech," were then the things that struck them most. It is true that, even in the Canterbury Tales, he has not quite escaped the curse of the cliche, of the expletive. But he has it far less than his predecessors, and often for long passages he escapes it altogether. Lastly (for even Chaucer must be handled summarily here), we perceive in the Canterbury Tales the completion of his command of verse. On the subject of this verse there are many opinions, which often depend on preconceived theories. The old seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notion that he could not scan is, of course, now held by no instructed person. But there are some who hold that Chaucer allowed himself nine-syllable lines, and others, or the same, that he adhered to a strictly decasyllabic basis, as, it is pretty certain, his immediate successors tried (in their floundering attempts to follow him) to do. My own opinion is that, although Chaucer had not, as till after the great dramatic period it was practically impossible for any man to do, realised the full powers of equivalence in the English decasyllabic, and the full advantage derivable from extending the license of pause to every place, he had yet made great strides in this direction. I believe that wherever only nine syllables, even with the I30 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book iii final e, occur, there is probably ^ a fault in the reading ; that there are occasional Alexandrines; and that, although in many instances "the" or " to " was intended to coalesce with a succeeding initial vowel, there are also instances of unquestionable trisyllabic feet. I am quite sure that the balance of the verse is managed with an almost (not perhaps a complete) freedom from that prejudice about the middle pause which, derived from the antediluvian prosody of Anglo-Saxon, and accidentally strengthened by the caesura of French and Latin verse, weighed even upon some Elizabethans, and has never been entirely shaken off by a few, even among artists and scholars in verse, to the present day. And I am sure also that this mobile and sensitive prosody is the second, just as the inexhaustible freshness and propriety of his phrase is the first, great secret of the fact that Chaucer is the earliest English poet who can, without reservations and allowances, be called great, and, what is more, one of our greatest, even to the present day. 1 I insert this " probably " because, though I think that the nine-syllable line is never, even in Chaucer or in Milton, a success, I think it just possible that Chaucer, as it is most probable that Milton, may have tried it, deceived by the analogy of the octosyllable. Jpjf\ rrv^Uya^AU.^ CHAPTER II LANGLAND AND GOWER Piers Plowman — Argument of the B Poem — Gower — The Confessio Ama?iHs — Gower's reputation Almost exactly contemporary with Chaucer were two other poets, both of more than ordinary mark — one of them Chaucer's own equal, if not superior, in intensity, though far his inferior in range and in art, both curious contrasts in more ways than one with him, and with each other. The first was the author of the Vision of Piers the Plowman ; the second was John Gower. The now generally accepted identification of the first with William Langley or Langland (the latter being the preferred form) rests on no very definite evidence, but it has fair probability in its favour. And the adoption of it (with a caution) saves us from the incon- venience of constantly using a clumsy periphrasis for a person who will have to be often named. It is well, however, to stop short of the further adventurousness of identifying all the personal details that can be got out of the Vision with Langland himself— of giving him a wife named "Kitty," and a daughter named "Calote" (Colette ? Nicolette ?), of placing him in London, of conferring on him those minor orders which did not necessarily comport celibacy, and so forth. Once more the "prosaic heresy," as we may conveniently call that which takes poetic and dramatic utterances for statements of biographical fact, is to be sedulously eschewed. The allusion to Malvern Hills in the opening of all versions of the poem is less questionable, though it is even here to be observed that the famous and almost proverbial extent of the view therefrom would make it a fitting imagined scene for the sort of survey of England which was coming. }5ut fair presumption, though not certainty, may be drawn from the facts that the varying legends about Langland's birth locate it either at Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire, or at Wychwood in Oxfordshire, both of which, though at opposite sides, may be said i3> 132 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi to be in the remoter Malvern precincts, and that the dialect of the poem is said to be West Midland. Its extreme popularity is shown by the great number of MSS. which remain of it,^ and by the earliness, if not the number, of the printed editions. 2 It went out of favour in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, neither more nor less than other books of its Ph'uman. ^"^^^ ^"^ time ; but it was recalled to attention rather earlier than most of them by Whitaker''s edition (1813), the editio princeps of the " C " or longest text. Not, however, till the more thorough study of it during the last thirty years, in which Professor Skeat has been the main worker, was it discovered that this " C " text was not the only variant on the accepted or " B " text which had up to that time been printed. ^ There are, in fact, three families of MSS., comparison of which has established, as fairly as such things can be established, the fact that the poem was rehandled by its author with remarkable thoroughness at two separate times after the appearance of the first version ; that that first version itself was not the receptus or B, but an earlier, shorter A ; and that this earliest version, from allusions in it, may very probably have been written as early as 1362. The B or main text is similarly assigned to 1377 or there- abouts, and the C or longest to 1393, or thirty years after text A. Yet further, if Langland was, as seems extremely likely, the author of the alliterative poem on the deposition of Richard II., which Dr. Skeat calls Richard the Redeless, he must have been alive in 1399. This would give him a literary life of not much less than forty years, and assuming, as we may fairly do (for there are no marks of extreme juvenility even in the first version), that he was about thirty when he wrote it, this would carry his life from about 1330 to about 1400. The latter, it is to be remembered, is the year of Chaucer's death pretty certainly, while if the first version of Piers Plowman dates 1 The " A" form {vide infra) appears in the great Vernon Collection (see p. 107). Professor Skeat — whose repeated studies and editions of the poem culminated in the issue (2 vols. Clarendon Press) which is uniform with his Chaucer, and ranks as the standard — enumerates nearly fifty others. 2 1550, in three different forms, and 1561. Spenser, who refers to the poem in the Shepherd's Calendar, must have read one of these, unless his allusion at the end of December is, as some have thought, to the Plowman's Tale. This is to the last degree unlikely, as, if he knew this at all, he would have known it as Chaucer's with whose works it was then printed, and Chaucer has been already disjunctively referred to in the preceding line. 3 Among others by Wright 1842, revised 1856, and again reprinted 1887, This edition (to which Professor Skeat does that justice by which he is so admi- rably distinguished in comparison with too many so-called scholars when they deal with predecessors) would be the best of all for general reading, if it were not Drinted in half lines. It also contains Piers Ploivman's Creed, an ill-tempered but vigorous Wyclifite lampoon in some 850 lines, which the critics will not allow to be Langland's, though they put it as early as 1394. CHAP. II LANGLAND AND GOWER 133 from the year mentioned above, it is earlier by some years than any- thing that we can date with probability as among the still existing works of Chaucer. At first sight nothing can well be more different, not merely from the Canterbury Tales, but from all Chaucer's work, than the Vision concerning Piers the Plowman. It is in alliterative verse, according to the revived form of that rhythm so often mentioned in the last Book. The lines are tolerably equal in length, and they not un- frequently fall — urged by the inevitable pressure of the growth of the language and the literature — into Alexandrines, fourteeners, and other constructively metrical shapes. But they do not aim at any such structure, they rigidly abstain from rhyme, and they derive their whole poetical form from the middle pause, the fairly corre- sponding accents, and the three alliterated words, two in the first half and one in the second.^ The appearance of much greater antiquity than Chaucer's which this gives, and which used to mislead the unwary, is assisted by a somewhat greater allowance of archaic words. But it is entirely false that, as used also to be said, Langland is more '• Saxon " in his vocabulary than Chaucer. It has even been calculated by patient industry that his percentage of Latin and Romance words is, if anything, a little larger than Chaucer's ; it is quite certain that if both were printed in modernised spelling, it would be at once seen not to be smaller. The poem, despite its merit and the pains that have been spent on it of late years by interpreters, is by no means a very easy one to understand ; and there are few that are more in need of an argument or a running marginal commentary. This arises from the fact that it is not one vision, nor even two, but a series of visions dissolving one into the other, often without any more attempt at coherence — of completion even in the dream-integer, such as it is — than actual dreams exhibit. It would seem as if the author, whether owing to his mysticism and its accompanying vagueness, or to his satiric intent, and the wholesome sense of danger which accompanied that, deliberately avoided rounding off his chapters and driving home his meanings. But the general scheme of the poem, which is divided '\w\.o passus'^ or cantos, is as follows in the central or B text. A prologue of rather more than two hundred lines tells how the Dreamer, in " a summer season when soft was the sun," put on a 1 Langland sometimes indulges in four, but I think never puts himself out of the way for them, or for the extravagant and overloaded alliteration of five or even six words which we find elsewhere. 2 Of these A has twelve (perhaps originally only eight), B twenty, and C twenty-three ; but even where the three, or two of them, coincide there are often great variations. Wright's 13 text— Professor Skeat does not number his con- tinuously — has 14,696 short or half lines. 134 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi shepherd's smock like "a hermit unholy of works," and wandering on Malvern Hills, slept by a brook side, and saw a strange vision — a high tower (Heaven) on one side, a deep dungeon (Hell) fheTlw beneath, and a " fair field full of folk " between (Middle Earth). And he describes the folk and their occupations with much veri'c, digressing, in the bewildering kaleidoscopic fashion which characterises the whole poem, to a very shrewd and early vision of the " Bell-the-Cat " story. Indeed, no simile is at once so apposite or so illuminative for Piers Plowman as that of the kaleidoscope, in respect of the way in which elaborate arrangements of word and thought suddenly and without warning fall into something as elabo- rate, but quite different. The first passus proper opens with a promise, not too exactly kept, to expound the meaning of the tower, dungeon, and field ; and their obvious interpretations are given by a lovely lady in linen clothed, who is Holy Church. Her speech is allegorical and digressive in the Rose manner — indeed, diflferent as is his spirit, Langland is as full of the Rose inspiration as Chaucer himself. The second passus introduces — in sharp contrast to this figure, and in answer to the Dreamer's request to be told of Falsehood as she has said so much of Truth — another lady far more gorgeously clothed. This is "Meed the maid" — reward in the good sense, bribery, etc. in the bad — daughter of False (Falsehood), and betrothed to Favel (Fauvel, the hero of an allegorical French romance of the preceding age, and here signifying Flattery). Here Holy Church vanishes, and the current of the story is deflected in the usual odd manner to the marriage of Meed, which it is decided ought to take place in London. The bridal party set out thither under the escort of Simony and Civil Law, but Soothness anticipates them, tells Conscience, who tells the King, and a warm reception being prepared for the party, they dis- perse, leaving Meed the maid, who stands her ground, weeping. She is at the beginning of the third passus courteously taken by the middle and brought before the King. The natural seductiveness of Meed, and the fact that she fiiay be honestly gained, are here glanced at. She confesses her sins, uses great largesse to the court generally, and the King promises that she shall marry Conscience, who, however, refuses utterly, giving his offered bride the worst pos- sible character, and belabouring her with Latin quotations, against which she very naturally and indignantly protests. At the beginning of the fourth passus this uncompromising knight declines even to kiss her, "but Reason rede me thereto." The King thereupon bids him fetch Reason, who comes, supports Conscience, and brings over the King, who at the end of the fytte says "As long as our life lasteth live we together." At the beginning of the fifth passus the dream is broken and CHAP. II LANGLAND AND GOWER 135 once more joined. A notice of the Rule of Reason leads or falls, after the mediaeval fashion, into a long and vigorous passage on the Seven Deadly Sins, containing one of the most famous and brightly coloured passages of the poem, the description of a London tavern and the bibbers there. Only at the end of this passus, which includes some curious anticipations of Puritan nomenclature, does the personage who gives name to the poem, Piers the Plowman, make his appearance ; and even then he has a double portion of the floating phantasmagoric character that marks the whole. At one moment he is a simple plowman who digs and delves, and does what Truth might, who has often an acre to ear, and cannot leave his work. But he is also a guide to Godliness, and has a wife Dame Work-while-it-is- time, a daughter " Do-right-or-thy-dame-shall-beat-thee," and a son with a longer title still. After dialogues and doings in the sixth with Hunger and others, he emerges in the seventh passus as Christ Himself, opposing the venal priests of the day, and teaching a better way to salvation. This is a sort of epilogue to the passus, and to the first part of the poem, which resolves itself in the Dreamer's own words into a counsel to seek the help of " Do-well." But where is " Do-well " to be found? That is the question with which the eighth passus ^ opens, and the second part of the poem. Certain friars, though they are quite sure he dwells among them, give no help, and a fresh dream brings to the poet's side Thought, who informs him that not only Do-well but " Do-bet "(ter) and Do-best must be sought. But he cannot tell where to find them, though Wit may. Wit in the ninth passus is prodigal of information about the three, about their relation to Lady Anima, and about the fact that Do-well is Obedience, Do-bet Love, and Active Benevolence Do-best. In the tenth passus Study the wife of Wit takes up the tale and con- fuses the Dreamer "sternly staring" with more theology, sending him moreover to Clergy, who talks still more (" This is a long lesson," says the Dreamer, " and little am I wiser. Darkly ye show where Do-well is or Do-bet "), and to Scripture, who similarly occupies the eleventh. Kind and Reason follow, and at the end of this passus the Dreamer, thoroughly bemused, meets one of the most original characters of the whole shadowy procession, Ymaginatif — his own mother-wit apparently, or human reason, not antithetic to but stopping short of theology. The thirteenth adds others, especially "Hawkyn- the Active Man," who cannot keep his clothes unspotten for his daily work — an allegory more open than some. Hawkyn discourses with Patience throughout this passus and the next, the 1 The numbers, it must be remembered, ace those of the B text : in A this passus is the ninth, and in C the eleventh. 2 Hawkyn=Henrykin = Harry. 136 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book III fourteenth, but the Dreamer, waking yet again at the beginning of the fifteenth, renews, and with reason, his wailing how it was wonder long ere he could kindly know Do-well. Nor ip the long fifteenth passus, though according to the title " Do-well " is finished and " Do-bet " begun, can' the process be said to be at all clear or satisfactory. We find, however, that the scholastic allegory of the last five passus is passing into simple Scripture-history and Christian teaching, and in the sixteenth Piers Plowman reappears, while both this passus and the seventeenth shape themselves more and more into a plain life of Christ Himself, leading in the eighteenth to the finest poetry of the whole — a splendid paraphrase of the Entry into Jerusalem, the Passion, and the Harrowing of Hell. This completes Do-bet = Love = Christ, and " Incipit Do-best,'''' which also occupies the last or twentieth. But this is the vaguest and most unfinished part of the whole, Piers Plowman after Christ's death seeming to become the Church, and the two cantos leading to no conclusion whatever. The so-called A text is much shorter than this. Not only are there but twelve passus, the work stopping at the end of the so-called Vita de Do-well, but the individual treatment of the different points is much less developed. Not a few of the more striking episodes of the B text, svich as the Bell-the-Cat fable, do not appear. On the other hand, there are some things in A which were afterwards left out or completely refashioned, including almost the whole of the last passus. C is longer even than B, tliough the extension to twenty- three passus is rather misleading, the old Prologue now ranking as Passus /., and some of the earlier divisions of B being split up and redistributed. And there are again some omissions. These, however, are compensated by long insertions, sometimes of the perhaps treacherously biographical kind, especially one in Passus VI. on which the biography-builders do much rely for Langland's London life ; sometimes on " Lolling " and Friardom ; sometimes of the more abstract philosophical kind. Indeed this later tendency has dis- tinctly got the upper hand in C, as where, for instance, the quaint and vivid personality of " Hawkyn the Active Man " is changed into a Lorrisian abstraction called " Activa Vita." On the whole, the presence of this abstraction in Piers Plowinan has been too little allowed for by some of its eulogists, who have been seduced by the pictorial and dramatic force of the opening of the "Meed" scenes and others to put it rather in competition with the Pilgrim's Progress ^ than with the Roman de la Rose. There is 1 Guillaume de Deguillevile, from whose Pilerhiage de V Ame Humaine Banyan, through whatever channel, certainly did derive not a little, was as a dreamer before Langland also, just as he was before Chaucer, who adapted from him the ABC. CHAP. II LANGLAND AND GOWER 137 vivid portraiture in it, and there is a good deal of sharp and practical satire. But even in the vision proper to some extent, and in Do-well^ Do-bet, and Do-best to a very much greater, the reflective, theological, and allegorical side gets altogether the better of the dramatic and pictorial. To use the image suggested by the change between B and C just noted, Hawkyn the Active Man, who is not always present even in the early part, is hardly present at all in the second ; and in his place we have pale abstractions arguing and jargoning about matters of the first importance in themselves — but ill suited for such treatment. We cannot therefore put Langland by the side of Chaucer either for i:^no-e, or for dirsetness, or for artistic sense. To say, according to the common antithesis of the books, that he is a poet of the people, Chaucer one of the court, is very idle. The author of the Reeve's and Afiller's Tales is hardly to be charged with ignorance in respect of the people; and the author of the passns about Meed the Maid would certainly not have thanked his eulogists for presuming him to be unfamiliar with the court. But it is true that Chaucer, to some extent, represents the Humanist a nd c osmopolitan distaste i^ x politics and for ccyitroversialtheology, while~Langland represents a stro ng turn for both7 It is true aTso, though he himself seems to have been no Wycliffte or Lollard, that much of the tendency after- wards known as Puritan appears in him, and that, to our sorrow, the iconoclastic spirit, which was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to be the disgrace and curse of England, shows itself in angry remarks about church building and the putting up of paihted windows. Tnt ensp, but narrow; p ious, but a little Philistine-- so we must pronounce him. Nevertheless he had a great literary talent, which perhaps amounted to genius. The literary craftsmanship which succeeds in impressing on a form so uncouth as the unrhymed and only faintly metred alliterative verse the combination of freedom and order, of swing and variety, which marks Piers Plowman, is of that kind which must have distinguished itself whatsoever the form it happened to adopt. And although the architectonic gift, which might have en- abled the poet to present a real whole instead of a series of dissolving views, is not present, yet it is astonishing with how little repugnance the reader who has once "got his hand in" accepts this apparent 1 The politics of Piers Plowman itself are pretty distinct; those of Richard the Kedclcss, the attribution of which to Langland is one of the least doubtful of such things, are open to all. The poem (which is to be found in Professor Skeat's edition, and as "The Deposition of Richard II." in Wright's Political Poems, Rolls Series, i. 368) is incomplete but extremely vigorous, though marred by the " Philistine " and ungenerous radicalism which is too frequently English. 13S CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi incoherence, and resigns himself to see the visions rise and blend and melt, the bubbles swell and gleam and break. While as for the force of individual passages — the Prologue, the Fable, the best Court scenes, the London Tavern, the Harrowing of Hell — these have never been mistaken by any competent critic who has read them.^ Beside the shadowy and in part apocalyptic figure of Langland, the solid, well-authenticated, somewhat prosaic personality and literary w'ork of John Gower- present a contrast which has its interest. Gower, after being wrongly connected by tra- dition with more than one family and county, was definitely established by Sir Harris Nicolas as John Gower, Esquire, of Aldington, in Kent, and of other places. His birth-year is not certain ; he died, old and it is said blind, in 1408, and his tomb is one of the numerous literary illustrations of the great and recently reljuilt church of St. Saviour's, or St. Mary Overy's, Southwark, with which Gower seems to have been connected in various ways. Indeed, though married, he appears to have been in minor orders. His literary work even as we have it is considerable, but part of it is lost. Part also, both of what exists and of what doeg not, only indirectly concerns us here, being written in languages other than English. Gower is the last of the probably not small class of English men of letters between 1200 and 1400 who were trilingual — writing, and probably speaking, French, Latin, and English with equal facility. The principal existing piece of Gower's French is a set of fifty Ballades, the favourite French {fiot Provencal) form, with intertwisted identical rhymes, a recurrent refrain, and (generally) an envoy. But he also wrote in French one of the three divisions of his capital work, the Speculum Meditantis, a moral poem, in twelve divisions, on Vices and Virtues, which, after being long lost and sometimes misidentified, has been at length found and is being edited. Another part of this, the Vox Clamaniis, also exists, but is in Latin. It is a lively political poem in elegiacs with internal rhyme, dealing with the disturbance of Richard the Second's reign. Gower was a favourite of the unlucky but not unlettered king, and deserted him for the rising sun of Bolingbroke. This poem contains a very striking sketch of Wat Tyler's rising. ^ Later, as a Lancastrian, the poet wrote 1 The best commentary on the via/fer of Langland is, and is long likely to be, M. Jusserand's L' Epopee mystique de W. Langlaiid. r 2 Gower has never been edited as a whole, and it is to be wished that Professor Skeat would complete with him the set of Chaucer and Langland. At present the Con/essio is in Chalmers's Poets, in a separate edition by Dr. Pauli, and cheaply in Professor Morley's Carisbrooke Library. But the Cinquante Ballades and the Vox Clamantis are in Roxburghe Club editions with the Tripartite Chronicle, the last being also, with other pieces, in Wright's Political Poems (" Rolls Series," vol. i.), and the Ballades (72) in a German edition by Stengel (Marburg, 1886). CHAi'. II LANGLAND AND GOWER 139 another poem of the same kind in leonine hexameters, which is called the Tripartite Chronicle, and is a strongly partisan account of Richard's errors and downfall. .This is almost wholly historical : the Vox diverges into a good deal of miscellaneous matter (satire on the friars, etc.), which reminds us of Piers Plowman. The Cotifessio Amantis, the third and English part of Gower's opus magnum, is much less vigorous and spirited than either of these Latin poems ; but while they have no significance for English litera- ture, it has much. It was undertaken at the hapless Richard's suggestion. ^ It is an immense poem, or Amantis"" collection of poems, in (with infinitesimal exceptions) octosyllabic couplets, accomplished to the point of extreme fluency, but curiously lacking in backbone and vigour. It fills, in Chalmers's Poets, some five hundred and fifty columns, each of which at its fullest holds nearly seventy lines ; but Latin arguments of the various sections take some room. Probably there are between thirty and forty thousand lines in all. The author declares his purpose of writing in " the middle way," of composing a book half of pleasure and half of learning. After a long historical and miscellaneous prologue, he opens his first book with one of the stock complaints of the woes of lovers, and proposes to make his own confession to Genius — 3. Rose personage, of course. The confessor, after a sermon, appropriately or inappropriately illustrated as usual, begins to hear his confession, and succeeds in making of it a frame for a huge series of tales from classical and mediaeval sources alike. Actaeon, Perseus, and Ulysses are succeeded by the tale of Florent, the subject of Chaucer's IVife of Bath's Tale ; Narcissus jostles a king of Hungary ; Alboin and Rosmunda have their place not far from Nebuchadnezzar. The beautiful story of Constance (Emari, see supra), which Chaucer probably borrowed from Gower, appears ; the original of Pericles ; the tale of " Rosiphele," perhaps the original of 77ie Flower and the Leaf ; and dozens of others from all sources and of all sorts. The poem ends gracefully enough, though not altogether cheerfully, by Venus at once hearing the poet's prayer, and dismissing him from her court as too old for love, with a rosary of black beads hung round his neck inscribed Pour Rcposer. _ Grace, indeed, Gower cannot be said with justice at any time to\ lack ; his faults are the want of strength, of definiteness, in his con- ceptions and deliveries, the insignificant fluency of his verse, and above all, the merciless and heart-breaking long-windedness which results from it. Even this conclusion, which is full of true and touching things (as where Venus after her operations asks the forlorn 1 Its exact date is matter of guesswork. It probably took a good many years to write, but may have been begun as early as 138J or thereabout. I40 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book iil poet laughingly what love is, and he cannot answer her), is prolonged to such an extent that all the shock is expended, all the race and spirit watered down. In his own time, by himself and by Chaucer, Gower was specially called "moral." Venus, with her kindly scorn, acknowledges this gift in him, and dismisses him to its enjoyments now that he is unfit for hers. In recent days a slight imputation, not exactly of immorality, but of morality of a low kind, has in turn been cast on him. The truth seems to be that he was moral enough in the special contemporary fashion, which consisted in illustrating every point by some approved extract from authority, and by sub- jecting it as far as possible to the process of allegorical homilising. Although Chaucer casts, directly or dramatically, blame on his selec- tion of such stories as those of Apollonius and Canace, this, if serious, would be rather a hypercriticism. But Gower has no passion, the " cold ointment " which Venus puts on his heart at the end of the Confession must, one would think , have been applied to some extent /even before the beginning of it ; and in his most pathetic serious [stories (the humorous he hardly attempts) the sinewy directness of I Chaucer, the mystical fire of Langland, are things to which he does mot even try to attain. I Yet it would be a very great mistake to minimise or, like many, to pass by as negligible the contribution of Gower to English litera- ture. Even in itself, if it has not the very highest qualities, it is far above contempt. Coleridge's rather pettish wish that reputation. Chalmers had given Lydgate instead, must have been caused either by very excusable ignorance of Lydgate's actual worth ; or by a complete failure to recognise the formal superiority of Gower and the importance of his priority in time ; or perhaps, and even probably, by that capriciousness which too often mars Coleridge's criticism. The contemporaries of Chaucer and Gower, and the immediate successors who entered into their labours, made no such mistake, though in the fifteenth century they some- times, and not quite unjustly, promoted Lydgate himself to the actual company of his masters. That, historically and as a master, Gower had a real right to be ranked with Chaucer, is as unquestionable as that Gower is vastly Chaucer's inferior as a poet. We need not attach great value to the supposed and indeed probable priority of Gower to Chaucer himself. It is sufficient that they were certainly fellow-pioneers, fellow-schoolmasters, in the task of bringing England to literature. Up to their time, as we have established by actual survey, the literary production of the country, whether in the suc- cessive vernaculars of Anglo-Saxon and Early Middle English, or in the half-naturalised foreign tongues of French and Latin, had been exceedingly rudimentary and limited. All but a very small part of , CHAP. II LANGLAND AND GOWER 141 it had been purely religious or ecclesiastical ; of the small " profane " portion the whole of the belles lettres division had been in verse; and again all but a very small part of this verse had been directly translated romance. It was the function of great writers now to establish the form of English as a thoroughly equipped medium of literature, and to furnish it further, as far as they, could, with matter various in kind, and with varieties, of style. JEven Langland, a much more interesting and striking figure than Gower to us, could have been much better spared by his own generation than Gower himself. InJiiemry form Lajiglajid-Jiad -nothing tn teiich : he was in fact merelyrowuTg ' off-stream,, if JiQL,agaijlst-Jt|^ up a backwater which -litPliowliTtRer. In substance he was powerfiir~rattTer than profitable, offering nothing but allegory, of which there was already only too much, and political-ecclesiastical discussion, a growth always nearer to the tares than to the wheat of literature. In other words, and to vary the metaphor, he gave the workmen in the new workshop of English letters no new or improved tools, he opened up to them no new sources of material. jHe was a genius, he was a seer, he was an artist; but he was neither master nor stock-provider in literature. I Gower was both. The want of zest and race in his literary style (though he has style), and still more in his poetical medium, must not be allowed to blind us to the fact that both show an enormous improvement on such immediate predecessors as Hampole, as the author of The Pearl, as the author of Cursor Mnndi. H^Jcnov^sJiis crafty faj:-4 ^tter thag -tb^v-'did ; he has better tools; he can teach others to turn out work that can be depended on, while they them- selves, and all those who followed them, were constrained either to have touches of genius or to be frankly inadequate if not simply in- tolerable. Gower, unlike Chaucer, was apparently no master of prose, and his faculty in verse was strictly limited to the octosyllable in English — in Latin, as we have said, he could write more vigorously, if also more barbarously. BuL_so_Jar_as__he_ w-ent^he^ was distinctly an pv^-'p^Q of Hta r .' iry n rr jimplishment — and examples of literary accomplishment were what England then wanted first of all. What she wanted next Gower also saw, and this too he also, as he could, provided. It was a want which the plain common sense of Ca.\ton saw still existing nearly a hundred years later, and which was never really supplied till a hundred more had passed ; a want which explains the dearth and dulness so often charged against the Afpurteenth century ; a want which no exceptional genius could supply. /l1ie English Muses simply did not know enough to do much : they anted feeding, training, educating; they were in their nonage. /Now the, to us, odd and cumbrous medley, the "marine stoi'e " of 142 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi the Confessio Arnantis, was an attempt to supply these wants, to give matter and models at once : to write a book, as Gower says in the interesting exordium, which only his fatal fluency prevents from being quite excellent — After the world that whilome took Long time in olde dales past. And to touch also The world that neweth every day. That his efforts were not vain, the genuine gratitude of his immediate successors for his lessons in " rhethorike " — in form — testifies ; and Chaucer and Shakespeare are perhaps sureties after whom it is un- necessary to produce any others as to the value of his contributions in matter. 1 1 Chaucer dedicates his Troilus to Gower and to the philosophical Strode — identified fairly well with Ralph Strode, who flourished about 1370, and seems to have written a good deal in Latin and English prose and verse. An attempt, ingenious but purely fanciful, has been made to find the " Pearl poet " (pp. 79- 81) in this Strode. CHAPTER III CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF, TREVISA, MANDEVILLE Turning-point in prose — Chaucer's prose tales — His Boethius — The Astrolabe — Wyclif — John of Trevisa — Sir John Mandeville — The first prose style The prose of the late fourteenth century in England is not to the mere literary taster, with one notable exception, at all comparable in interest to the verse of the same time. But it is hardly less impor- tant. For this time was in fact the beginning of English prose properly so called. Before 1350 it may be doubted "in pfji^°'°' whether there is a single English work in prose, with the exception of the Ancren Riwle, which unites the bulk and the literary quality of a book proper ; and while the Ancren Riwle is still almost more Saxon than English in language, it belongs in subject to the division of sacred literature, which, though it is one of the noblest of all divisions, yet of necessity is less national, less idiosyn- cratic, than any other. At the great turning-point, however, which, though it must have come sooner or later anyhow, was undoubtedly determined to no small extent by the concentration of English patriotic sentiment, owing to the conquests of Edward III., prose did not merel}-, like verse, make a fresh start, it made a start almost for the first time. From the later years of Edward and the reign of Richard II. date four writers of prose, each noteworthy in his own way, and three out of the four notable in something more than his own way — Chaucer the poet, Wyclif the controversialist, Trevisa the chronicler, and the shadowy personage long known, and perhaps even yet not entirely exorcised, as "Sir John Mandeville." All were translators in less or greater degree, but all also were originals of English prose writing. The interest of Chaucer's prose works, the Treatise on the Astro- labe, the translation of Boethius, the Parson's Tale, and the Tale of Melibee is almost entirely an interest of form ; and in the last that • 143 144 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book in interest is minimised and almost confined to the fitful and straggling emergence of blank verse, or something like it, at the opening. So too the Parson's Tale, a translation and a theological Chaucer's translation, does not advance us very much further than prose a es. ^^^ prosc treatises by or attributed to Hanipole and his followers in the first half of the century. It is good straightforward English, but shows no attempt at style, while the well-worn and strictly prescribed common form of its matter expresses further limitations. The Boethius and the Astrolabe are superior. The version of the first, even if it were intrinsically less attractive, would inevitably invite comparison with Alfred's at the dawn of Saxon as this at the dawn of modern English prose, and the often noble, never contemptible, matter of the original could not and did not fail to stimulate an artist like Chaucer. But the most valuable point of the Boet/iiiis as an exercise for the pioneer in a new prose uiis. .^ ^j^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^j^^ ^^ Metres," which, especially when rendered by such a poet as Chaucer into a language with such illimitable latent possibilities as English, must needs result in far more ambitious and far more successful attempts in "the other harmony" than had yet appeared. Accordingly some of the metre passages in Chaucer's version, though quite legitimate and sound prose, attain a rhythmical as well as verbal dignity, which English prose was hardly to know again save in a few passages of Malory, Fisher, Berners, and the translators of the Bible, till late in the sixteenth century. And the whole shows that, if it had suited Chaucer to write more originally in prose, he might have effected a revolution therein at least as great as that which he did effect in verse, nay greater, seeing that he had practically no forerunners. The attractions of the Treatise on the Astrolabe are different, but perhaps they are not less. The specially pleasant and easy address to " little Lewis my son," for whom the treatise was compiled, and of whom, unluckily, we know no more, does not so much Astrolabe. Contrast with as supplement the interest of the piece as an early scientific treatise by one of the greatest of men of letters. The astrolabe was a small pocket instrument, somewhat of the sextant kind, for taking the altitudes and positions of the heavenly bodies ; and though the object of its use was astrological rather than astronomical, it has, I believe, been admitted by " scientists " of the severest stamp that the treatise itself shows an exactness of scientific acquirement up to a certain point which certainly would not be easy to parallel in any but a specialist of modern times. ^ And it is not perhaps superfluous or impertinent to 1 Astronomy {" Ast. edit astra") was part of the regular mediaeval Quadrivium. CHAP. Ill CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF AND OTHERS 145 add that astrology, a study which may be defined as rather extra- scientific than anti-scientific, and which at least attained a complete rigidity of scientific method, has an almost unsurpassed traditional interest for literature. To the time of Chaucer's great moderniser Dryden, it held the belief of the best-informed and least generally credulous of men, and even since it went out of fashion, it has been splendidly celebrated in prose and verse by Scott and Coleridge. But in this treatise of Chaucer's, the great interest is the spectacle of an early example of the scientific application of literature and the literary handling of science.^ The work of Wyclif,'- a prose writer only, and a "sacred" and philosophical prose writer only, is less novel, less attractive, but not less important. Little, despite his fame and the violent partisanship for and against him, is really known of the author. We ^^ ^^.j. do not know when John Wyclif was bornr or where, though the probabilities connect his birth with the place of Wycliffe- on-Tees and the time of 1320-1325. He was certainly Master of Balliol (a northern college) at Oxford, in 1360; and by the confession of his opponents, was a recognised expert in theology and scholastic philosophy. He had, after giving up Balliol on his appointment to a college living, become Warden of Canterbury Hall, now merged in Christ Church ; but was deprived of this post by the next Archbishop but one of Canterbury. Other preferments came to him, and in 1374 he received the Crown benefice of Lutterworth, which he held till his death, ten years later. The best-known event in his life was his 1 A thing of more length than merit, the Testament of Love, used to be included in Chaucer's prose works, and may be found, by those who want it, in Chalmers and in Professor Skeat's Supplement. For once the exorcists are justified of their spells. Not only does the thing (which is an allegorical-religious treatise on the author's quest for a " Margaret," wlio is less doubtfully than usual a mere eidolon of Grace, or spiritual truth, or the Church) contain internal evidence that it is not Chaucer's in its reference to him, but, as any one who, knowing the Boetliius, reads it will see at once, it pillages that book and others of his in a way which, barefaced in another, would be unintelligible in himself. It is now put down (a kind of signature being discovered) to a certain Thomas Usk, a busy Londoner, who was executed with a good deal of barbarity by the triumphant Gloucester faction in 1388. Usk did not quite deserve " hanging for his bad prose "; but it is not good. 2 Wyclit's English work, outside the Bible, with some not his, is to be found in Mr. T. Arnold's Select Riiglish Works of Wyclif {j, vols.). Clarendon Press, and Mr. F. U. Matthew's /inglish Vl'orks of Wyclif hitherto unprinted (E.E.T.S.). The whole Bible, a composite work of Wyclif and others, was edited in 4 vols. 4to by Forshall and Madden, Oxford, 1850; the Gospels (very conveniently printed in parallel columns, with the early Gothic and A.S. versions and Tyndale's) by fk)Sworth and Waring (3rd ed. London, 1888). His very voluminous Latin works, philosophical and ecclesiastical, have been tackled by a special Wyclif Society. L 146 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi summons to appear in St. Paul's on a charge of heresy in 1377, on which occasion the court was practically broken up by the turbulence of Wyclifs partisan, John of Gaunt. Into the nature and extent of his heresies we are here precluded from entering. On '' Dominion," on Transubstantiation, and other points, they reached the extreme of scholastic subtlety ; and perhaps the most practical part of his tenets was the establishment of an irregular order of "poor priests," who took the field at once against the corrupt friars and the extravagantly endowed prelates of the time. These poor priests, more definitely than Wyclif himself, were responsible for the " LoUardy " which, though its first-fruits in the Wat Tyler insurrection came in Wyclifs lifetime, developed later, and did not call for sharp repression till the reigns of Henry IV. and Henry V. Much of Wyclifs tendency in politics ecclesiastical is observed in Langland, but the latter shows no sign of any doctrinal heresy. The English literary work of Wyclif and the Wyclifites (for a large part of the University of Oxford was saturated with his doctrine, and the complete body of Wyclifian literature is rather an earlier " Tracts for the Times " than the work of any one man) consists on the one hand of a new and complete translation of the Bible, on the other of a considerable mass of tracts and sermons intended for popular consumption. In some respects these latter are not very delightful or profitable reading. We find already in them the hard, narrow intolerance of contrary opinion and the refusal to believe in its honesty, the savage, churlish hatred of all the beauty of holiness — music (the "knacking of new songs," as the Wychfite catchword has it), painted windows, fair architecture, and all that makes the mediaeval church gracious and precious in our eyes — the almost Iscariot-like grudging of all expense on divine worship that is not " given to the poor," the rage, at least as much political and social as theological, at wealthy and exalted bishops and abbots, the sectarian jealousy between "poor priests" and friars, — all the ugly Philistine sourness, in short, which disgraces the extreme Protestant party of the sixteenth century and the extreme Puritan party of the seventeenth. There is little room in this furious cudgel-play of partisan hatred for the serene exercise in elaborate prose which Chaucer gives us in the Boethius, for the scientific precision of the Astrolabe., for the gay and varied garrulity of Mandeville. A few lively touches of manners, a few of the less merely "teeth-gnashing" flouts of satire, a quaint phrase here and there, a racy translation of antiquity — these are the principal attractions which the Wyclifite tracts have to offer; while as for the Translation of the Bible, as it cannot compete as literature with that produced some two centuries later, so it has merely the same attraction as matter. It should be observed that there are CHAP. Ill CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF AND OTHERS 147 later and earlier versions of it, the former much the more advanced in grammar and style. Nevertheless both, as much the one as the other, were most important as contributions to English prose. Wyclif and his coad- jutors brought to both their tasks — that of translation and that of tract-writing — a combination of education and of " object " which has been very rare in literary history. They were all trained in the severest science of scholastic study, the most thorough perhaps that has ever been seen. Even a Bachelorship of Divinity represented four years training in arts, three more in the quadrivium of mediaeval science, music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy ; and seven more still in theology. Every man who had gone through this had been in the habit of constant disputes with opponents, on the watch to note the slightest vagueness of definition, the slightest illicit process of argument. Yet these accomplished scholars were in their new venture addressing the common people first of all. Their training compelled them to be precise ; their object compelled them to be forcible. In the translation of the Bible they had a wide range of the most various kinds of literature, history, poetry, oratory, philosophy, parable, — matter which still retained, after being passed through the Latin sieve, large admixture of its original Oriental elements to colour and diversify the English result. In their tracts they had above all things to be exact in aim to meet their enemies, and to be forcible to attract disciples. No better exercising ground for an infant prose, in at least some ways, could have been provided, than this combined one of translation and polemic. We do not, indeed, find in Wyclif, or in any of the immediate Wyclifites, the full consequences, which we shall find fifty years later in Pecock's Repressor, of a vocabulary and arrangement varying between extreme scholasticism and extreme vernacularity, but we find approaches in both directions. The third prose author of this time owes his position to reasons rather different from those which have preferred Chaucer, Wyclif, and Mandeville. He is neither a great poet who was an almost equally great all-round man of letters, nor an eager con- troversialist who has linked his name with one of the Trc"is°. great versions of the Bible (there seems to have been an idea in Caxton's mind that Trevisa did translate the Bible, but nothing else is known of it) nor an interesting if shadowy personality whose name is attached to a charming piece of literature. He simply produced an English version of tlie Latin Clironicle or Poly- chronicon of Ralph Higden, which had been written not so very much before his own day. Higden was a West countryman, who was born about the last decade but one of the thirteenth century; 148 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi became a monk of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Werburgh at Chester; perhaps (it is necessary to lay stress on that "perhaps") had something to do with English literature directly in the matter of the Chester Plays, and certainly wrote this Polychronicon, one of the usual historical surveys, " beginning at the beginning," narrow- ing to a rather more particular survey of Jewish and Roman his- tory with others, and ending with that of England continued to the writer's own time. Higden is said, on the not altogether trust- worthy authority of Bale, to have died in 1363. Not very long after this his book was Englished 1 by John of Trevisa, who, as the " Tre " shows, was a Cornishman, but seems to have been chiefly connected with Berkeley in Gloucestershire. He is said to have died in 1 41 3, but liis History was finished as long before as 1387. The piece has more interest for its matter, which includes much early (indeed the earliest) description of England in English, and for the evi- dence it gives of the now unrestrainable impulse to write about English matters generally in the English tongue, than for any special literary merit or savour. Trevisa, who seems to have been no great scholar in Latin, for he confesses that he could not always understand his original, was no genius in English. But his style is racy from its age, and agreeable for its want of pretension. In his day a man deserved almost more credit for undertaking a long work in English than most men would deserve now for abstaining from it. The last name to be mentioned in this chapter is by far the most interesting in the special connection of English prose. But the dis- cussion of it is complicated, and obstructed by a more than ordinary amount of those teasing and extra-literary squabbles about authorship and authors which meet us so frequently. Nay, in consequence of the doubts which have been raised as to the existence of Sir John Mandeville, and the proofs (not invalid as such things go) that the real author was a French or Flemish physician of Liege, proposals have even been made to oust the book '^ altogether from English literary history and give it to French. These proposals cannot for one. moment be admitted. The French version of Mandeville may be — very likely is — the oldest. It 1 Edited, with the Latin, in the " Rolls Series." As with nearly all the early historians, the interest of the work for literature can be almost sufficiently gauged by sample, and a dozen pages of extract will be found in Morris and Skeat, Part II. 2 There is no thoroughly satisfactory edition. Wright's, in the Bohn Library (among Early Travels in Palestine), is too much modernised; Mr. Warner's, for the Roxburghe Club, is not generally accessible; Halliwell's, more than once reprinted, is the best edition; and Mr. E. B. Nicholson, Bodley's Librarian, is the best authority on the disputed points, which he has treated in the Eticylopadia Britannica and elsewhere. vjHAiMii CHAUCER'S PROSE — \\^CLIF AND OTHERS 149 may have been — it very likely though by no means necessarily was — written by some one who was not an Englishman. But it is a book which, in the history of literature, has very little impor- tance. French prose had been written currently on all sub- Mandeville. jects for two centuries before it ; and there was nothing remarkable in its existence. No one has contended that the French author can for a moment vie with Villehardouin, or Joinville, or his own contemporary Froissart, as a prose writer. The book has had no influence on French literary history — no great French writer has been inspired by it, none of its " notes " in the least corresponds to any mark of French. The contrary of all these things is the case in regard to the English version. Even the infidels do not place that version much later than 1400, and it may be permitted to doubt whether it is not older ; for though the prose shows an advance in ease and resource on Wyclif, a great one on Trevisa, it is not much, if at all, in front of Chaucer. It is quite an admirable thing in itself; it shows, if it be a translation, that some third person must be added to Malory and Berners to make a trinity of such English translators, as the world has rarely seen, in the fifteenth century. It expresses with remarkable fidelity the travelling mania of the English, and in the stories of the "Watching of the Falcon," the "Daughter of Hippocrates," and others, it has supplied romantic inspiration for generation after generation. As French it is little or nothing to Frenchmen or to France ; as English it is a great thing to England and to Englishmen. The facts as to authorship and contents are as follows. The book purports to have been written by Sir John Mandeville of St. Albans, who began to travel on Michaelmas Day 1322, journeyed in the East for thirty years and more, and after obtaining leave from the Pope, and coming home a sufferer from gout, produced his book in Latin and P>ench and English in 1356. Later accounts have it that he was buried at Li6ge. Against this are the facts that no other notice of any such Sir John Mandeville exists; that the arms quoted as on the Liege monument have nothing to do with any family of the name; and that, as we have mentioned, the French version seems to be much anterior to the English, if not also to the Latin. Further, before any more serious doubts had been started about Mandeville's personality than those which arose from the marvels narrated in his book, and which had almost from the first caused it to be regarded as a capital example of a "traveller's tale," — it had been observed that its contents were very far from original. A certain Friar Odoric may have travelled in "Cathay" (Chinese Tartary), and had ills travels written down by a brother of his Order, as early as 1330. Now the resemblance between Mandeville and Odoric is striking. Further 150 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book hi borrowings, certain or extremely probable, have been indicated from another Franciscan friar, from an Armenian named Hayton, from a German knight named Boldensele, and from others. Part, it is true, is not accounted for, and seems to be direct personal experience ; but the whole is very like a blend of such experience with matter from earlier books. And the compiler has been identified with a certain Liege physician, John of Burgundy or John of the Beard, who is said to have revealed his personality on his deathbed to a third John, John of Outremeuse. Perhaps we may not impertinently, like Prince Henry, take leave of all these withered old Johns and Sir Johns, whose identity is shadowy in the extreme and of no importance. Once more the book is the thing; and the importance of the book, by whomsoever written, at whatsoever time anterior to the latest (the beginning of the fifteenth century) at which it can possibly have appeared, and whether translation or original, remains for the history of English prose immutable and inexjDugnable. The title of " Father of English prose," which used to be given to Mandeville, is indeed ^rather silly, as are all such titles, if only in that they provoke the chronological and other squabbles from which literary study has suffered so much. No one man could be " the Father of English Prose " at any time ; and as a matter of fact it had, as we have seen, at this time at least four simultaneous fathers. What the Voyage and Trai/aile really is, is this — it is, so far as we know, and even beyond our knowledge in all probability and likelihood, the first considerable example of prose in English dealing neither with the beaten track of theology and philosophy, nor with the, even in the Middle Ages, restricted field of history and home topography, but expatiating freely on unguarded plains and on untrodden hills, sometimes dropping into actual prose romance, and always treating its subject as the poets had treated theirs in Brut and Mori d'' Arthur , in Troy-book and Alexandreid, as a mere canvas on which to embroider flowers of fancy. It is the first book of belles lettres in English prose, and this is such a priority as the most ambitious of authors, identified or unknown, might be content with. And being such, it deserves a brief handling of its material and formal characteristics, such as we have given to its verse predecessors in the same supreme, and indeed only purely literary, department of literature. The extreme attractiveness of the matter, and the delightful illustrations of old attached to it, have perhaps a little drawn away attention from the fact that the form of the book is well worthy of the substance. A summary of the life of our Lord (for it must be remembered that the book is primarily a road-book for the Holy Land) leads to a description of Constantinople and a prdcis of the tenets of the Greek Church. Then we cross the " Brace of St. CHAP. Ill CHAUCER'S PROSE — WYCLIF AND OTHERS 151 George " (Sea of Marmora) and come to Asia Minor, where Cos gives us the " Daughter of Hippocrates," and Rhodes another wild tale, and Cyprus an account of hunting leopards. Jerusalem itself follows, and "Babylon" (which it must be remembered is always Cairo in the Middle Ages), and a long account of Egypt and of Arabia, and how roses came into the world, and of Jerusalem again, and of whole Palestina. Only after this do we get into the true Utopian El Dorado of Mandeville, with the "Watching of the Spar-hawk" in an Armenian castle (what time the Ark still was visible on the top of Ararat), and the customs of Ind, and the great Cham of Cathay, and the royal State of Prester John, and the four floods that come from the Paradys Terrestre. There is hardly a page in the book which is not full of interesting detail, of romantic suggestion, of fact sublimed and opalised by imagination, or by the mere process of continuous report from lip to lip and book to book. But the great interest for us is that here, and here for the first time distinctly, the subject and the idiosyncrasy of the author pro- duce between them a style. There are approaches to a style in Chaucer; but he was kept too close to his text in Boethius, to his subject in the Astrolabe. Wyclif might have reached one ; Trevisa probably could not : Mandeville did. His object being to produce his effect by the accumulation of interesting marvels, with few models before him except the arrangements of the Bible, he mostly affects short sentences, and has a trick of beginning each with " And." This conjunction is dear to the story-teller, because it has a sort of arresting and exciting effect upon the hearer, by promise of something fresh ; while the long periodic sentence, besides requiring greater practice, is apt to weary hearers as opposed to prose style, readers. The vocabulary is simple and rather modern, with few obsolete or archiac words, as indeed might be expected, whether the book was really the work of a cosmopolitan traveller or that of a mere homekeeping forger of letters. Few books of the time, when the spelling is completely modernised, have so little uncouthne.ss about them. And one thing (rarely to be said of any author, rarest of one mediaeval in time) is that this author knows exactly when he has said enough. Nothing tempts him to the fatal loquacity of nearly all writers between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, and he will even apologise for the Sparrowhawk discus- sion which tells the reason of the woes of Armenia. " This is not the right way to go to the parts that I have named, but for to see the marvel." To see the marvel of the rising of literary pro.se style in English there is no better way than to read Mandeville. INTERCHAPTER III Short as is the period which has been covered in the preceding Book, and few as are the names which it contains, we have at last reached in it one, the importance of which has, in great part at least, not to be pleaded for. At no time during the present century — at no time, indeed, during the last five centuries, except, and that not universally, for a short interval during the eighteenth — would the right of Chaucer to a place, and a great one, in English literary history have been contested ; while, silly as the title of *' Father of English Prose" may be, the fact of its having been long ago awarded sometimes to Mandeville, sometimes to WycHf, is a piece of evidence in itself. Yet there is no need for this to break the good custom of these interposed summaries ; indeed, one at the present juncture may have special value. For it is impossible to appreciate too clearly the exact position of Chaucer in poetry, while that of himself and his contemporaries in prose certainly has not always been appreciated with even the least clearness — if Professor Earle had any justification for saying, not more than a few years ago, that "there exists a general impres- sion among educated Englishmen that our prose dates from the sixteenth century." ^ Even to appreciate Chaucer with exactness and propriety is by no means a matter of course ; yet without such an appreciation it is impossible to get the parts of the history into true proportion and connection. At no time have competent readers failed to perceive his abounding humour, the shaping faculty which enables him to make every character at once an individual and a type, the " gold dewdrops of his speech," the sweetness of his music. Perhaps we have outgrown (there is at any rate no excuse for us if we have not) the idea entertained even by Dryden that this sweetness is "rude," that there is something untutored and infantine about it. But it may be doubted whether even yet, whether even among persons who may 1 English Prose, p. 369. 152 BOOK III INTERCHAPTER III 153 boast some acquaintance with him, an accurate estimate of his posi- tion in regard both to the past and the immediate future prevails. It so happens, oddly enough, that the first part of this has been expressed with extreme propriety of fact, and in words that could no.t be bettered in another language in reference to another person, by a writer who probably had never heard of Chaucer, and would have regarded him as a savage if he had. Boileau's famous couplet — Villon sut le premier dans ces siecles grossiers Debrouiller I'art confus de nos vieux romanciers — is, as it stands, a sort of Helot among critical utterances. The sikles were not grossiers ; Villon was not the first to '' disembroil " poetical art of any kind ; and what he did had nothing whatever to do with the vieux romanciers, but was the infusion of a modern spirit into fo.-ms already arranged for him as exactly and neatly as any art could be arranged. But the second line expresses precisely what Chaucer did in English, and what gives him, if not his chief title to admiration as a poet, his chief place in literary history. He, in fact and in deed — Debrouilla I'art confus de nos vieux romanciers. It already existed in plentiful quantity, and now and then in no incon- siderable degrees of accomplishment. But it was all in the shape of broiiillon — of rough draft. Men had practised the octosyllabic couplet for centuries, but they had never succeeded in writing it with a sure mastery at once of vigour and of variety, of smoothness and of strength. They had got safely through very intricate stanzas, but no one of them had any stanza so under his command as to write anything at all approaching the best passages — indeed prac- tically the whole — of Troilus. They had now and then stumbled upon the great heroic couplet itself, but they had hardly known it when they saw it, and had invariably let it slip again, even if they per- ceived its character. Nay, in his own day, some men were even relapsing from the point that art had reached on the earlier stage of "rim ram ruf" — on the rhythmical prose of alliteration either simple of itself or awkwardly bedizened, like a true savage art, with feathers and gawds of inappropriate stanza and rhyme. All this Chaucer debrotiilla — set straight, copied out fair, and left the copy so transposed as a testimony for ever, and a point to which men might return, but which, once gained, they never could really lose. He was no doubt powerfully backed on the more artistic side by Cower, but Gower liad, in English at least, little strength; and he was far more powerfully backed on the otlier by Langland, but Langland had, or chose to have in this respect, an inferior and 154 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES book antiquated art. In the union of the two Chaucer stood alone, and fortunately he was quite able to stand alone. To such an estimate the demur may be made, " If he did so much, how was it that outside his own work so little resulted — that nearly a century and a half had to pass after his death before any real advance was made? " To this, of course, no absolutely complete answer can be given. The most philosophical view of the philosophy of history never pretends to explain all the facts, especially in regard to " the times and the seasons." The best explanation why there is no poet in English — even in Scots — who is the equal of Chaucer, between Chaucer himself and Surrey, is that, as a matter of fact, no such poet appeared. But we can give some side-explanations, some, as it were, marginal notes on this, and we can at any rate see that things were much better as they were. If Chaucer had not appeared when he did, the language might have got into ways too slovenly for it to acquire a real Ars poetka at all, might have succumbed to the rigid syllabic prosody of French (there was some danger of this for a long time to come), or have gone off "rim-ram-ruffing " into the wilder- ness. But since he appeared when he did, his work was necessarily exposed to the drawback that it was composed in a language which had still not acquired its complete modern form. The final e, a troublesome and by this time a useless thing, which meant anything and everything and nothing, had to be shed ; some other structural changes had to be gone through. Above all, the language had to pass under certain modifications of sound which have never yet been fully explained. In this welter Chaucer could not be equalled ; Spenser could not come till it was over. But through it all Chaucer's work remained, above the welter itself, a pattern and a beacon at once. The influence of Gower, infinitely less as is his value for us, was probably not so very much less than Chaucer's for his own contem- poraries. The third great poetical figure of the time exactly reverses these conditions. Langland is for us a true, nay a great, poet ; his reactionary aberrations in form can do us no harm, and his apoca- lyptic obscurity adds something of a zest to our reading of him. These would not have been the best of influences on his own age, which was urgently in need of formal correction, and was not at all in need of incitements to allegorical meandering. But, as a matter of fact, he does not seem to have exercised much, if he exercised any, influence, and what he had was in the direction of political and other satire, not that of poetry proper. Even the alliterators did not usually follow his straightforward reliance on alliteration and accent, but confessed their sense of insufficiency by calling in more and more the aid of stanza and of rhyme. HI INTERCHAPTER III 155 The formal importance of the age in prose is hardly less, though its productions have far less intrinsic interest. The excursion of prose beyond the narrow limits of theological matter which had so long confined it was one great thing ; the use of it to address the common people, who had hitherto been only accessible by verse, was another. That the third limit — translation — which had been im- posed upon it still remained, was no drawback for the time. Very much more importation of vocabulary.; very much more experiment, like that of Pecock in the next age, with term-forging; very much more copying of the more accomplished prose forms of French and Latin, were necessary before the resources of style could really be at the command of the English prose writer in miscellaneous subjects. But the return to vernacular writing in history, more than two hundred years after the pen had left the hand of the last annalist of Peter- borough, meant a very great deal ; the application of the genius for letters of such a man as Chaucer to scientific exposition in the Astrolabe, to philosophical exposition in the Boethius, meant a great deal more ; perhaps the example of prose narrative of the easy, interesting, not first of all instructive kind in Mandeville meant most of all. This fascinating shadow, whatever else he was, and whatever else he did, was the spiritual father of Malory and Berners, of Lyly and Sidney, of Defoe and Fielding, of Miss Austen and Scott. They were still long to be " bodiless childfuls," but they were now " bodiless childfuls of life," and Sir John, if ever any other, gave them that life. Lastly, we must not forget, though considerations of weight have necessitated a mere allusion to it as yet, that the third great kind, the kind which is not essentially prose nor essentially verse, but partakes of both — to wit. Drama — was by this time certainly born in English. It was as yet in swaddling clothes ; perhaps we must not be too absolutely certain that any single piece now actually in our possession existed in the form in which we have it now.^ But there is no reason for doubt that this momentous and important kind — which was to absorb the greatest genius of the first really complete age of English literature, which was to confer inestimable benefits upon both prose and verse, and was to be the first literary kind to engage, apart from some consideration of profit, the attention of a great audience — had for some time left the use of Latin and become common in the vernacular. It was still, as has been said, in swaddling clothes, it was performed and composed in ways unfavour- able to a rapid, accomplished literary development, it was limited in subject, awkward in form ; but it was the drama — the direct ancestor 1 The well-known Harrowing of Hell is possibly as early as Alison, but it is faintly dramatic, and there is a long interval between it and other things. »56 CHAUCER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES BOOK III of the great Elizabethan drama itself — and its presence in the list of literary kinds is a matter of the first importance. In short, the literary work of the Middle Ages proper in England was now complete, and, with a good fortune rare and almost un- paralleled, what they had given was caught up, summed, uttered in perfect form by a poet of the greatest genius, and a prose writer of no small talent. Perhaps this good fortune had in a manner to be paid for by the relapse in poetry which the next century saw. But even this was a rest as well as a relapse, and meanwhile prose the unresting, if also the unhasting, was making advances as steady as they are unmistakable. BOOK IV THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY CHAPTER I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS — LYDGATE TO SK.ELTON Contempt for fifteenth century literature — Lydgate — Occleve — Bokenam — Audelay and Minors — Hawes — The Pastime of Pleasure — The Example of Virtue — Barclay — The Ship of Fools — The Eclogues — Skelton — His life — His poems Few sections of English Letters have been more abused or more disdained than the literature, and especially the purely English poetry, of the fifteenth century. The contemptuous ignorance of M. Taine extended even to the Scottish poets, who have ^ , r \ . , Contempt for been more generally excepted from condemnation ; and fifteenth cent- less excusable under-valuation of these same has been ""^^ iterature. made by critics, at least to the language born, such as Mr. Lowell and Mr. Lounsbury. Even those who do not commit the unpardonable or inexplicable error of belittling or ignoring Uunbar and Henryson have usually a short shrift and a long drop for the English writers of the time, and especially for the English poets. Of these disdains literary history knows nothing; and nothing is to be passed over by her unless it is at once devoid of intrinsic attraction, and of no importance as supplying connections and origins. Even from the first point of view, slighting of the Tiua Maryit Wenien and the IVedo, of the Testament of Cressid, of the A'tuifs Quair, of Malory and Berners, of the Ni(t-brow7ie Maid, and the carol " I sing of a maiden," must convict the slighter either of invincible bad taste, or of ignorance that cannot be too soon corrected. From the second, the period which shows us the progress m, and the final stoppage of, the blind alley of alliteration, the strange '57 15S THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv failure to make the improvement that might have been expected on the magnificent advantages given by Chaucer, the process, slow but sure, of elaborating the machinery and amassing the capital of English prose, the probable beginning of the ballad, the spread and popularising of the drama.^ and the certain and glorious ending of romance, need not be ashamed of itself in any company which knows and observes the laws of literary history. The poets, both Scotch and English, of this century were wont to leash with Chaucer and Gower in the triplet of masters whom they acknowledged and hailed with reverence John Lydgate the "Monk of Bury." Very little is known of the life of this voluminous, some- wliat undistinguished, but by no means unpleasant or uninteresting writer, who has had decidedly hard measure in the way of presentation to modern readers, though the Early English Text Society has begun to devote a portion of its too small resources and its too largely drawn upon labour to the task.^ The latest certain date in his life is 1446. As the dates of his orders are — sub-deacon, 1389; deacon, 1393; and priest, 1397. he may have been born about 1370. He appears to have enjoyed the advantages of the three greatest European Universities of his day — Oxford, Paris, and Padua — and his knowledge both of ancient and modern literature must have been pretty complete for the time. He taught rhetoric at Bury St. Edmunds, and it must be remembered that Rhetoric, which had for many centuries, legitimately or illegitimately, extended itself in the sense of the Art of Prose Literature, had by this time absorbed poetics likewise, and that in the fifteenth century especially " rhetorike " and (in French) rhetoriqiieur are words almost inter- changeable with " poetry " and " poet.'" Unluckily, as from the days of Martianus Capella'' downwards rhetoric and ornate diction had been closely connected, this also became confounded with poetry, and the main objection to fifteenth-century verse next to, or indeed connected 1 For reasons given post it has seemed better to reserve the dramatic matter, which might have made some appearance even earlier, and has a fair claim to a place here, for the next Book, so far as the main text is concerned. See also Interchapters iii. {supra) and iv. (infra). 2 Until this reissue, which has already given the Temple of Glass and other things, was begun, Halliwell's edition of the Minor Poems for the Percy Society, and the Story of Thebes, and some smaller pieces given by Chalmers in his Chauceriana, formed the accessible' Lydgate, illustrated by four and twenty pages of bibliography, which Ritson devotes in his Bibliographia Poetica (London, 1802) to "this voluminous, prosaick, and drivelling monk," as the critic, with his usual sweetness, describes his subject. 3 This crabbed, but to fit tastes not unpleasing, writer paints the breast of Rhetoric as exquisitissimis gemmarum coloribus balteatum, gives her arms which clash velut fulgoreae nubis fragore colliso bovibis dissultantibus, and assigns to her a vox aurata — all transparent allegory. CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 159 with, its prolixity and dulness, is its addiction to " aureate " terms — that is to say, bombastic classical or pseudo-classical phraseology. In this Lydgate is not quite such a sinner as some of his con- temporaries and still more his successors. He could now and then catch something at least of the propriety of language which is one of his master Chaucer's glories, and he was also less to seek than any other of that master's purely English followers in versification, though he too shows some signs of that curious confusion of poetic tongue which came upon his time. The early printers, Caxton, Pynson, and Wynkyn de Worde, in whose time Lydgate still ranked as one of the di majores of English literature, were not unkind to him ; but the mania for early printed books as such has made these editions entirely inac- cessible, save in public libraries, to the lover of litera- ture who is not a millionaire. Fortunately, the pieces noted above appear to be very fair specimens of his work, much of the current abuse of which is only an echo of the violence of Ritson, a critic seldom to be undervalued when he praises, but too often merely to be neglected when he blames. The Thebes poem, which was obviously intended as a pendant to the Knight's Tale, gives the more canonical history of the wars which are taken for granted as pre- cedent in Chaucer's poem, consists of between four and five thousand verses in couplets (vide infra), and begins as a Canterbury Tale with a prologue, references to Ospringe and other localities, and an invitation by the host to "Dan John "to tell it. In this piece the characters of Statins and those of Boccaccio are both drawn upon, and the story is sufficiently well told, though with too many speeches and involutions, and with little share of Chaucer's orderly and artful action. The most noteworthy thing about it, however, as about most of the poetry of Lydgate, of Occleve, and even of Hawes, not to mention smaller men, is that strange loss of "grip" in versification which has been more than once referred to. How far this is due to careless or ignorant copying or printing cannot be said with con- fidence until a much larger amount of Lydgate's enormous work has been competently edited from the MSS. ; but it is very improbable that this can ever he made to bear the whole blame or any large part of it.i The truth would rather seem to be that Chaucer was too 1 If Lydgate is really responsible for the following lines in an account of Henry VI.'s entry into London (Afinor Poems, p. 3), no bathos and no bad verse can have been inaccessible to him — Their clothing was of colour full convcnable: T/tf noble Afayor clad in red veleivet ( !) The SherifTs, the Aldermen, full notable, Infurrid clokys the colour Scarlett. Observe that " In furred clokys, scarlet in colour," is an obvious change, and makes a very fair line. 36o THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv far in advance of his time both in ear and in perception of the capabilities of the language ; that his followers, while ignorant of the real powers of the decasyllable, improperly attributed to it that license of shortening as well as lengthening by equivalence which, as we have seen, had generally prevailed in regard to the octosyllable ; or else that they were bewildered by the old go-as-you-please liberty of alliterative rhythm, while the confusion was worse confounded by rapid and uncertain changes of pronunciation and accentuation in the language, as English finally shook off all dependence upon French, as its dialects mixed and blended, and as other influences were brought to bear. Certain it is that in Lydgate, still more in Occleve, and more or less in all the others of this chapter, while the line sometimes loses all rhythmical sufficiency, though it does yield ten syllables to the finger, it at any other time fails to respond even to this mechanical test, and simply sprawls — a frank and confessed nondescript or failure. These faults appear, but somewhat less, in the Complaint of the Black Knight and the other smaller poems caught in the great "Chauceriana" net. The rhyme-royal of the Complaint seems to have acted as a sort of support and stay to the backboneless writers of this time. In the other shorter poems, and in the pleasant piece of London Lickpenny — which is one of Lydgate's best and best-known things, and which describes the woes of a penniless (or one-pennied) man in Westminster Hall and in London shops and streets — there is naturally much more variety and liveliness than in the longer and more conventional efforts. Not that there is a lack of convention even here. It is exceedingly rash to take the confessions of youthful follies and peccadilloes which Lydgate makes in his Testament, just as Occleve does in his Male Rdgle, and many other poets of this and other ages elsewhere, for solid biographical documents. The chief of Lydgate's other works are the Temple of Glass, the very title of which is redolent of fifteenth-century allegory ; the Falls of Princes, perhaps his most popular book in his own day, adapted from Boccaccio, and itself serving as model to the famous miscellany of the Mirror for Magistrates in the sixteenth century ; a Troy Book, one of the numerous versions of Guido Colonna's plagiarism from Benoit de Sainte-More ; Proverbs; the Court of Sapience ; a Life of Our Lady ; a Chronicle of English Kings ; Lives of his patron at Bury St. Edmunds; and so forth. These are but a few of the enormous number of works attributed to him. But the general value of Lydgate is not hard to fix. He is a scholar, not a master, a versifier rather than a poet ; an interesting figure in a time of groping and transition, and perhaps not so very unlike other figures in other times. CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS i6i Thomas Occleve ^ (there seems to be as good authority for this as for the somewhat uglier form " Hoccleve ") is, and probably will continue to be, inseparably connected in literary history with Lydgate, of whom he is a rather less voluminous and rather less accomplished double. He was often given to auto- biographic details of the preciser kind, and from two of these we gather that he must have been born about 1368 {where is guesswork, the nearest locality in spelling being Hockcliffe in Bedfordshire). He entered the Privy Seal Office when he was about twenty, and we have abundant records of payments to him for parchment, ink, and wax used, as well as of salaries and pensions. He was always expecting a benefice or " corrody " (annuity cliarged on ecclesiastical revenues) ; but nothing came till 1424, when he was quartered, to an extent not exactly defined, on the Priory of Southwick in Hampshire. We may have something of his as late as 144S, and he may have died a little later, say 1450. Occleve's principal work is an English version o'r adaptation in rhyme-royal of one or more Latin originals, under the title of De Regwiine Frincipmn,'^ preceded by a long introduction, partly auto- biographic and wholly moralising. The enthusiastic address to his "master dear" Chaucer, of whom, be it remembered, one of his MSS. preserves the most probably authentic portrait, is the most interesting thing in this lugubrious and desultory work, of which tlie versification frequently sprawls and staggers in a fashion beside which even Lydgate's is well girt and neatly moving. Among the smaller pieces attention has chiefly been given to the above referred to piece, entitled La Male Rtgle de T. Occleve, which seems to have been written when the poet was coming to forty years, after which age of wisdom, however, he married — for love, he says. This poem has the invariable characteristics of such regrets for lost youth, together with the less usual peculiarity that the poet represents himself as not merely a ne'er-do-well, but a very poor creature — a valetudinarian, " letting I dare not wait upon would " in his very escapades, a coward, a glutton, vain, weak, lazy, but with none of the nobler vices. If the thing had been better done we might have taken it for his humour ; but the poorness of the verse,'' witli a Chaucerian flasli or two such as — Excess-at-l)oar(l has laid his knife with me, 1 The first volume of an edition of him has been issued by the E.E.T.S. under Dr. Furnivall's editorship. 2 Edited for the Roxburghe Club by Wright in i860. 8 Occleve, says Dr. Furnivall, " is content so long as he can count the syllables on his fingers." This is generous rather tlian severe. .M i62 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv is rather a warrant for truth. A singularly weak Complaint of Our Lady before the Cross, where the subject strikes no spark out of Occleve's flabby nature ; a feebly violent onslaught on Sir John Old- castle and the Lollards ; certain ballades, pious or political, which are no ballades at all, Occleve being apparently too weak to keep up to the rhyme-and-refrain scheme, may be noticed. The Letter of Ctipid to Lo7>ers is a little better. Not so much can be said of Occleve''s Com- plahit and Occleve's Dialogue, though the latter may have an attrac- tion for some in its querulous garrulity. But the tale which it introduces — a versification from the Gesta Romanorum about the Emperor Jereslaus's wife — and a later Story of Jonathas, are not bad of their kind, while the poem which comes between them, and which is connected with all that have been mentioned since the Coinplaint, Ars Utilissihia sciendi mori, is, in a different vein, their equal. It is, like most of the work of this time and of this poet, merely a translation, though of what original is not quite certain. But there is a much healthier and manlier tone in it than in the puling regrets of the Male Rile for wasted health and feeble follies gone. The fifteenth century thought much of Death, and the thought was here, as elsewhere, tonic. The whining poltroon of the retrospect of life faces the prospect of death with no sham philosophy, and if not without fear, yet in humility and faith. For those, and perhaps only for those, who desire to appreciate at first hand the strange paralysis of humour and harmony, of grace and strength, which came upon the successors of Chaucer and Langland, it may be worth while to turn over the work of Osbern Bokenam (= probably Buckenham),^ whose Legends of the Saints, in some 10,000 lines of decasyllabics variously arranged in Chaucerian fashions, have had the very undeserved honour of two reprints,''^ chiefly, it would seem, because they represent the not very common dialect of Suffolk. Bokenam, who, as we learn from a note in the MS., was a Suffolk man, a Doctor of Divinity, and an Austin Friar of Stoke Clare, tells the lives of Saints Margaret, Anne, Christina, the Eleven Thousand, Faith, Agnes, Dorothy, Mary Magdalene, Katharine, Cecily, Agatha,^ Lucy, and Elizabeth of Hungary, in verse of rather more smoothness than some of his contemporaries could manage, but of a saltlessness, an absence of flavour, sparkle, piquancy, bite, which is desperate and almost inconceivable. Not St. Margaret and the Dragon, not St. Katharine and the Wheel, not even that lovely legend of St. Dorothea, which might draw poetry from an expert in phonetics, can inspire 1 " Dr. Bokenham of Bury " occurs, however, in Roger North. 2 By Stevenson for the Roxburghe Club, and by Horstmann (Heilbronn, 1883). 8 " Agas " in the English, a form identical with the original of " haggis," CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 163 Bokenam with anything beyond the mildest prettiness of expression, and this he very seldom reaches. The most interesting thing in the whole book is the statement in the same end-note that Thomas Burgh had the poem copied in Cambridge in the year of Our Lord 1447, at the cost of thirty shillings — which sum can seldom have been either worse spent or more hardly earned either by town or gown in that locality. Indeed, after making every allowance for the attempts, estimable if not delectable, of Lydgate and Occleve to keep English poetry alive during the first half of the fifteenth century, it is impossible not to be struck, not merely with the extremely moderate success of their own efforts, but with the paucity of any attempt to support them among their contemporaries. What we may call the Apocrypha of Piers Flow/nan, the Creed, and the Tale {vide supra) may belong to the beginning of this century as well as to the end of the last. So may the verses of the Shropshire poet, Aude- "nlnM-s^" lay,^ who, like Langland himself, was a reformer without being a Wyclifite. To the first quarter of the fifteenth century belong William of Nassington, a Yorkshire writer of sacred verse, who perhaps belongs to the tradition of Hampole ; and Hugh Campden, another translator, the author of the moral romance of Boctus and Sidrac. The hapless Prince Edward, son of Henry VL and Margaret of Anjou, before Clarence stabbed him in the field by Tewkesbury, underwent the minor pain of having a moral poem on the Active Policy of a Prince written for him by a certain George Ashby, Clerk of the Signet to his mother, and an aged Chaucerian. One of Caxton's books is a verse translation of Cato's Morals, by Benedict Burgh, done about 1470; and the last quarter saw some curious alchemical verses by George Ripley and Thomas Norton. But this, and perhaps a little more of the same kind, purely curious and appealing only to the robuster kind of curiosity, is all that bridges in England the space between Lydgate and Occleve in the early part of the fifteenth century, and Hawes and Skelton in the beginning of the sixteenth. There is, it is true, some anonymous matter of far greater interest which may represent this interval, and which will be dealt with in a later chapter. But even this is but scanty in amount.^ Very little is known of Stephen Hawes, and that little does not include the date either of his birth or of his death. He is said to ' Ed. Hallivvell, Percy Society, 1844. A selection only. The MS. is dated 1426, and Audelay lived and wrote as late as the reign of Henry VI. He has "bob and wheel" stanzas, sometimes alliterated and sometimes not, Romance sixains, a system composed of triplet octosyllables separated by single lines, monorhymed throughout the poem, etc. 2 I know the writers mentioned in this paragraph, after Audelay and Nassing- ton, only at second hand. i64 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv have been a gentleman of birth, an Oxford man, a pretty considerable traveller, a master of modern languages, a man of great memory (seeing he could repeat by heart the works of Lydgate), and the possessor of a critical faculty somewhat smaller, inasmuch as he made that voluminous person equal in some respects with Geoffrey Chaucer. It is said with probability that he was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII.; he certainly wrote verses to congratulate Henry VIII. on his accession; and it seems likely that he died in Suffolk in early middle age, certainly before 1530, and probably about 1523. Wynkyn de Worde printed collections of the poems of Hawes — the Pastime of Pleasure, by which he is now almost solely known, in 1509, with some more pieces and the Example of Virtue in 15 12. The Pastime was reprinted by Wright for the Percy Society,^ un- luckily with some omissions. Mr. Arber's long-promised reprint of his other poems has, still more unfortunately, never appeared. But the text of the Pastime, and the abstract of the Exafuple contained in Professor Henry Morley's English Writers,'^ make an estimate easy enough. Hawes has been said to belong to "the Pro- o/Pteasur'/. venqal school," a statement of course entirely erro- neous, and due to the confusion between Proven9al and French, which was at one time excusable, but has long ceased to be so. He is, in fact, a Chaucerian who has deepened one particular colour of Chaucerism by recurrence to the Romance of the Rose itself, and still more to the heavier following of its allegory in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by French and English writers. The Pastime of Pleasure, or the history of Graund-Amour and La Bel Pucell, is, like Gavin Douglas's contemporary King Hart, simply an allegory of the life of man. The hero passes the meadow of youth ; chooses the path of Active Life, neglecting the Contemplative or Monastic ; is introduced to the Seven Daughters of Doctrine (the Trivitun and Quadriviuni) ; meets La Bel Pucell, determines to obtain her, but is exposed to some danger by the misguidance of a comic slanderer of women, Godfrey Gobilive ; destroys a three-headed giant and non- descript monster, so forcing his way to La Bel Pucell ; is received by the Virtues, and married to his beloved by Law. He lives happily with her till Age strikes him with infirmities and the vice of Avarice. Contrition comes in time, however, before Death, and he is buried by Mercy and Charity and epitaphed by Fame. Thus presented in its bare scheme or skeleton, the poem may well seem (to use a Drydenian phrase) but a cool and insignificant thing. Nothing is more dead to us, hardly anything perhaps seems 1 1845. 2 vii. 7S-8I. CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 165 more certain of no resurrection, than this bald yet childish form of allegory, which lacks alike the vivid passages, the attractive, dreamlike transformations, and the fiery intensity of Langland, the gorgeous romance of Spenser and his perfect poetic skill, the amiable humanity and vivid novel-interest of Bunyan. In the two last of these cases — perhaps even in the first — the allegory, though ever present, is present in the background ; it will come when called, but does not obtrude itself; in Hawes it is pitilessly obtrusive at every step. Further, the poet is singularly ill-provided with the means of his art. He is far from being such a " dull dog " as Occleve ; he has perhaps more flashes of poetry than Lydgate. But either the venerable Wynkyn was false to the central principle of all good printing, " Follow copy even if it flies out of the window," or else Hawes was less able to keep up any standard of correct and musical versification than even these his predecessors. Both his rhymes-royal and his couplets (both are used in the Pastime) are subject to the strangest lapses, to fits of a kind of verse-giddiness or epilepsy. The Exa)iiple of Virtue, entirely, it would seem, in rhyme-royal, appears from the abstract above referred to to be even more nakedly allegoric than the Pastime of Pleasure. The usual invocation of the unequal three — Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate — is fol- lowed by the usual dream. Youth is escorted by Dis- "^^J- ^,y%"f ''' cretion, voyages over the sea of Vain Glory to an island where are the castles of Justice, Nature, Fortune, Courage, and Wisdom ; is engaged to Cleanness ; is tempted by Lust, Avarice, and Pride ; fights with a three-headed dragon (Hawes cannot spare the three-headed dragon) ; is new dubbed by Virtue ; marries Cleanness, and is finally translated with her to Heaven. The three are once more invoked, and the poem ends. Of course, in both these poems there is a certain faint adumbration of the Faerie Queen — its outline with- out its glorious filling-in, its theme without its art, its intellectual reason for existence without any of its aesthetic justification thereof. It is not improbable that Spenser did know Hawes ; but if so he owed him a very small royalty. The merit of this poet is that he manages occasionally to lighten his darkness with flashes, to refresh his desert with flowers, of by no means mediocre poetry. We owe to him one of the oldest forms, if not the oldest form, of the beautiful saying — Be the day weary, or be the day long, At length it draweth to evensong. Fur which and other things he may be forgiven such intolerablfe matter as the following, which deserves its place as a general example of tlic worse side of fifteenth-century poetry : -~ i66 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv And if the matter be joyful and glad, Like countenance outwardly they make; But moderation in their minds is had, So that outrage may them not overtake. I cannot write too much for their sake Them to laud, for my time is short And the matter long which I must report. Pasture of Pleasure, cap. xii. last stanza. It is between Hawes and Skelton that we may perhaps most con- veniently mention a third writer, who is even more of a mere curiosity than Hawes himself, but who is as characteristic of his time as either. This is Alexander Barclay,^ the Englisher of the famous arc ay. jVarretisckiff of Sebastian Brandt. As far back as Bale's time (that is to say, in the age just after his own, and partly overlapping it) there was a doubt whether Barclay was a Scot or an Englishman. The spelling of his name would incline to the former hypothesis, which also has early authority of the positive kind ; but no connection of any sort is known between Barclay and Scotland, all his associations are with the South and South-west of England, and the spelling (always a very untrustworthy guide) is after all merely the pronounced form of " Berkeley." His literary qualities are scarcely such that the two divisions of the island need light very keenly for him. He must have been born somewhere about the beginning of the last quarter of the fifteenth century, and pretty certainly had a University education. Tlie only allusion traced in his work is to Cambridge,"^ but Scots more often went to Oxford, and Oxford had more connection with the West country. He was certainly for some time chaplain of the College of St. Mary Ottery, in Devonshire (the future birthjjlace of Coleridge), and seems there to have translated the S/u'p of Fools,^ which Pynson published in 1508, dedicated to Bishop Cornish of Exeter. He may have had poetical employment at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was a monk at Ely, and after the dissolution of the monasteries obtained livings in Essex and Somerset under Edward VI., as well as later, just before his death in 1552, that of Allhallows, Lombard Street. Barclay's work was extensive, but chiefly translated. He " did " Gringore's Castle of Labor before the Ship, and after it some more, though not wholly, original Eclogues, of which the Citizen and 1 Warton has given a rather full account of Barclay (iii. 189-203, ed. 1871), and Ritson is as usual to the point in four pages of the Bibliograpliia Poetica. But the long introductions to the modern editions mentioned below are the things to consult. '^ Trumpington, also mentioned, would prove nothing, because Chaucer had made it a place of literature. 3 Very handsomely reprinted, with the woodcuts, by T. H. Jamieson (Edinburgh, 2 vols. 4to, 1874). CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 167 Uplandishman ^ is the only one easily accessible in full. Divers other works, some of them extant, are assigned to him, and he seems in one. Contra Skeltoiin/n, to have made a formal onslaught on a poet at Vt'hom his existing poems contain more than one fling. Barclay seems really to deserve the place of first Eclogue-writer in English, if any one cares for this fortuitous and rather futile variety of eminence. His Eclogues, moreover, are not merely more original, but, so far as they are accessible, seem to be less jejune than the S/iip. This latter owes its fame partly to its '^^'"fJoiL"'^ rarity before the reprint of five and twenty years ago, partly to the famous and really admirable woodcuts which it contains. The first "fole"' — the possessor of unprofitable books — has a certain savour of promise which is unluckily but seldom fulfilled afterwards. Still, mainly thanks to the illustrations and to the general sympathy with Puck in seeing and saying, " Lord, what fools these mortals be ! " it is possible to make one's way through the long catalogue which fills from two thousand to two thousand five hundred stanzas of rhyme- royal. The individual line is rather an interesting one, showing a sort of intermediate stage between the would-be rigid decasyllabic of Lydgate and Occleve and the long rambling twelves or fourteeners of the mid-sixteenth century poets. Sometimes Barclay permits him- self a full Alexandrine ; oftener (in fact, in the majority of cases) he lengthens out his line with trisyllabic feet, so arranged as sometimes to take very little keep of the iambic basis. This same line is found in the Eclogues, arranged mainly in couplets, but with . , 1 .1 • 1 1 M The Eclogues. insertions in stanza, such as the allegorical octaves describ- ing the Tower of Virtue in the Fourth Eclogue. In the first three (paraphrased from Aeneas Silvius) the speakers are Coridon and Cornix, in the fourth Codrus and Menalcas, in the fifth (the Citizen and Uplandishman [countryman]), Augustus and Faustus. They have for almost pervading subject that ratlier monotonous grumbling at the vices, follies, and ingratitude of courts which was the natural result of the Tudor concentration of the fountains not merely of honour but of profit in the sovereign, and of which we find more than an echo in Spenser. No more curious instance of literary contrast could possibly be provided than that which is .supplied by the writer who is always coupled with Hawes, and sometimes with Barclay, his enemy. Tiie birthplace of John Skelton - is given with the very sufficient variants of Cumberland and Norfolk ; his birth-year 1 I'"d. Fairholt, for the Percy Society, 1847. The introduction contains very full extracts from the other four. - A handy edition appeared in 1736. Chalmers included Skelton in his Poets, and Dyce re-edited him in 1843. i68 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv must have been somewhere about 1460, and so in a not uninteresting way he takes up in the cradle the torch which Lydgate and Occleve dropped in the tomb. He was pretty certainly a Cambridge man, and was M.A. in 1484. His earliest poem is thought to be one on the death of Edward IV., which is noteworthy, like Dunbar's Lament for the Makers, for a Latin refrain, melancholy in tone. Caxton in 1490, and in the preface to his Aeneid, speaks of Skelton's scholar- ship with reverence, and tells us that he was Poet Laureate in the University of Oxford. This title, which Skelton also enjoyed from Louvain and Cambridge, has caused mistakes which seem even yet not to be universally cleared up. Perhaps it is too much to speak of it as a " degree " ; it was rather, in old Oxford language, a " position " in rhetoric and poetics (then practically confounded) which necessi- tated a verse-thesis. It had nothing to do, except accidentally, with the modern sense of " Poet Laureate," which practically comes into existence with Ben Jonson and the seventeenth century. Skelton seems to have been one of the numerous \i\.&Y?i\:y p?-fltegis of Lady Margaret and her son Henry VII. ; he took orders in 1498, when he must have been no longer a young man, and was tutor to Henry VIII. At this time Erasmus follows Caxton as his encomiast. He became rector of Diss, in his (probably) native county, Norfolk, before 1504. Up to this time, when he was far advanced in middle life, he seems to have been continuously prosperous and well-reputed. He lived twenty-five years longer, during which he became a complete Ishmaelite. The beginning of his trouble seems to have been that he married. At any rate he was .suspended for this offence (or perhaps not for marriage at all) at some time not clearly known, and seems to have gone to London. The King favoured his old tutor, but either from jealousy or sheer quarrelsomeness, or, as his partisans maintain, reforming zeal, he fell foul of Wolsey, whose friend he had previously been. A series of satires on the minister made it necessary for Skelton to take refuge in the sanctuary of Westminster, where he died in 1529, probably near his full term of days, and only a year before the former friend, now foe, on whom his pupil, and Wolsey's master, somewhat ungratefully revenged him. One point which distinguishes nearly, not quite, all Skelton's verse from that of Hawes is that it is thoroughly alive. The Crown of Laurel, a. stately, sterile, eminently fifteenth-century piece, mainly in rhyme-royal and aureate language, does indeed meet us in the fore- front of his work and inspire doubt and dread — Aulas Gellius, that noble historian, Orace also with his newe poetry, Master Terence, the famous comicar, CHAP. I THE ENGLISH CHAUCERIANS 169 are lines likely to "strike a chill." But if Skelton was not equal to " new poetry " himself, he could at any rate rebel against the old ; if he could not write musically, he could at any rate take ^^.^ ^^^^ refuge in the doggerel of talent and almost of genius. Even this very poem, with its addresses to various young ladies of high birth, contains, in the short staccato metres that Skelton loved — to Margaret Hussey ("Merry Margaret As Midsummer flower"), to Isabel Pennell (" My maiden Isabel, Whose mammy and whose daddy Brought forth a goodly baby"), to Gertrude Statham (-'Mistress Gertrude, With Womanhood Endued"), — very pleasant examples of better things. The Bouge of Court retains the dim and dreary personages — Dread, Suspicion, Disdain, Favell, etc. — of allegory. The real Skelton, taking the order of his works as usually printed, emerges first in a very long, very boisterous, very rude, and in part rather childish and ignoble, but curiously spirited and fresh, ballad of triumph over the Duke of Albany, who ran away shamefully with a hundred thousand "tratland Scots and faint-hearted Frenchmen" beside the water of Tweed. Here — in almost the shortest possible lines, anapaestic in general character and for the most part of two feet only, rhymed in couplet, and with language sometimes almost inarticulate in its bubbling volubility, strongly alliterated, using the repeated beginning of the Hne freely — Skelton crows and whoops at the defeated enemy with a heartiness that may not be chivalrous, but is certainly unfeigned. Speak Parrot, in rhyme-royal, is an odd mixture of the author's favourite half-gibberish doggerel with "aureate" language and "rhethorike" — indeed, it is impossible not to see a deliberate satire on the second in both constituents. The above-mentioned Dirge 071 Edward IV. is, of course, quite serious, couched in twelve-lined stanzas of decasyllables decidedly Occlevian in their character, with the refrain (2iiia ecce nunc in pulvere dormio. Against the Scots, a song of triumph for Flodden, is a duplication of the other crow, but rather more ignoble because the triumph and the tragedy were both greater. This is partly in " Skeltonics," partly in octosyllables. Ware the Hawkel is pure doggerel satire; and then a few serious pieces introduce us to what is perhaps Skelton's most vigorous, though certainly not his most elegant, work, the Tunning of Eleanor Rumtning. This is a more than Hogarthian sketch, in language which might make Swift or Smollett squeamish, of the brewing and drinking of a certain browst of ale by a country ale-wife and her customers. This is wholly in the Skeltonian dimeter or monometer, which, it should be observed, has a tendency now and then to fall into six-syllabled iambics or seven-syllabled trochaics for longer or shorter breaks, the centre of the verse shifting precisely in the same fashion as in the Genesis and Exodus or Christabel metre, I70 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv of which, in fact, this is undoubtedly a shortened and doggerelised variant for satiric purposes. In this form it pervades Skelton's two chief political satires against Wolsey, JlViy come ye not to Court and the Book of Colin Clout, as well as the Book of Philip Sparrow, his most whimsical and graceful thing, a long desultory mourning for the pet bird of Mistress Joan Scrope. In these, and in Skelton's minor poems, the chief of which are a Lament on the Death of the Earl of Northtimberland and a morality called Magnificence, we see a fertile, restless, and ingenious spirit entirely unprovided with the proper means of expression, and just falling short of the intelligence and originality necessary to elaborate such means for itself. It is impossible not to recognise in the " Skeltonics " an attempt, crude and clumsy it is true, to get away from the intolerable dulness and dryness of the stanza-decasyllable, as it appears in Hawes and the earlier fifteenth-century poets. To this day it is difficult to see why this fit of stuttering should have come upon English. At the beginning and at the end of the 150 years of it (to pass over Skelton's younger contemporaries Wyat and Surrey for reasons) we find Chaucer before and Sackville afterwards making the seven or eight-lined stanza decasyllables the instrument of music, sweet or stately, merry or sorrowful, at their pleasure and with no sort of difficulty. Between them (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Swinburne of another matter) it seems almost impossible for an English poet to " clear his mouth of pebbles and his brow of fog." Probably at no time would Skelton have been a great poet in the serious and passionate way — probably, at all, his genius would have inclined to comedy and to satire. As it is, he holds a position with Butler as the chief English verse-writer who has deliberately preferred to be burlesque to the verge, and in his case considerably over the verge, of grotesque and doggerel. In comparing the two men, whose powers, natural and acquired, do not seem to have been very different, while their tempers were also not dissimilar (Skelton inclining rather to the jovial, Butler to the saturnine), it is impossible not to re- member that Butler came just after, as Skelton came just before, the enormous, the incalculable advances made by the Elizabethan period, not merely in language and metre, but in everything, small and great, that pertains to the business of poetry. And we ought to give the author of Thilip Sparrow and Eleanor Rumming and Why come ye not to Court a substantial allowance for the fact. CHAPTER II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL, POLITICAL, AND MINOR Lateness of Scottish Literature — Barbour — Wyntoun — Blind Harry — Minors — Lyndsay — His life — His works — The Satire of the Three Estates — Minor poems Although the literary eminence of the quartette of poets who will be discussed in the next chapter is unquestioned, even the earliest of them (taking him to have been James the First) was not the first known poet of Scotland. That position, assigned by tradition or imagina- tion, first to Thomas of Erceldoune, and then to the still more shadowy " Huchowne," belongs historically to John Barbour, Arch- deacon of Aberdeen, and author of the Brus, which was finished in 1375. The reasons of this extraordinary lateness, and , j. the still more extraordinary lagging of prose (of which, Scottish except laws, letters, and a few translations,^ etc., we Literature, have nothing till the Complaint of Scotland, hard on the middle of the sixteenth century), are too conjectural to be argued out here. Attention can only be called to the following facts, which (though some of them are even now sometimes attacked) are absolutely indis- putable. They are these : that the establishment of a separate kingdom in any sense corresponding to what we call Scotland was very late; that this kingdom when established consisted of, or rested on, the debris of four different nationalities and lansjuages — those of the Picts, of the Scots of Dalriada, of the Britons of Strathclyde, and of the Anglo-Danes of Northumbria; that the literary chances of the last, where only an English literature could have arisen, were ruined by the Danish invasion, and not recovered till, after the Norman conquest of England, English was everywhere undergoing a process of moulting which made literature impossible; that even in the comparatively halcyon times of the Alexanders, English (all the Scottish writers up to Douglas invariably call their language 1 It is not improbable that a version of the Bible now in hand for the Scottish Text Society may be of the early fifteenth century, but it is pretty certainly based on Wyclif. 171 « 172 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv "Inglis," and if they use "Scots" at all, mean Gaelic by it) was yet unformed ; and that from the latter half of the thirteentli to the latter half of the fourteenth century the War of Independence, and the turbulent state in which Scotland emerged from it, made literature Hiiprobable, if not actually impossible. At any rate, whether it be strange or not, that we have nothing earlier than Barbour, the author of the Bi'us^ is a fact and indispu- table. His identification with the Archdeacon rests on the testimony of his immediate successor, Wyntoun, and of the Arch- ^^ ''"'^' deacon we have divers documentary notices. These do not include the date or place of his birth. The former is guessed at as about 1320. Our first notice of him is thirty-seven years later, when in 1357 Edward III. granted him license to come, with three scholars, to Oxford to study, to stay there and exercise scholastic acts, and to return to Scotland, where, it must be remembered, there was as yet no University. Seven years later he had a similar safe- conduct to the same place, and at other times others to go to France, also for the sake of study. The other references, which are numer- ous, refer chiefly to payments of pensions, etc., and do not concern literature. He died in March 1395. Besides the Brns there have of late years been assigned to Barbour, and taken away from him by turns, a fragment of a Troy Book and a very large collection of Lives of the Saints.'^ In dialect and metre these are similar to the Brus itself; but they are naturally less interesting, being simply members of a very large class, and treating common matter in common form, while the Brus stands quite by itself. Even as a historical document — though it takes some remarkable liberties with fact, confusing Bruce with his own grandfather, making him refuse an offer of the crown from Edward, etc. — it is not despicable. It was written (we have the exact date in a passage of its own) less than fifty years after Bruce's death, and by a man who was probably nearly ten years old at the date of that death, so that he had ample opportunity for communication with direct wit- nesses. That Barbour takes, as every medieeval writer, almost without exception, invariably did take, license of embellishing, altering, supply- ing, omitting, to suit his own notions of the story, is not so much probable as certain, but it is not material. As a poet, Barbour, if not taking very high rank, is very far indeed from being despicable. His famous and often quoted outburst about freedom does not seem to be, by any means, a mere commonplace, and many of his descrip- tive passages (the pursuit of Bruce by John of Lorn being only one 1 Frequently edited. The Scottish Text Society's issue by Professor Skeat (Edinburgh, 1894) is the one I have used. 2 Also in the Scottish Text Society's issues. Ed. Metcalfe, Edinburgh, 1896. CHAP. II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 173 of them) fully rise to the level required. It would be absurd to compare Barbour to Chaucer or to Langland, but, with a little less elegance, he has more spirit than Gower. Poetry was not the strong point of his younger contemporary and immediate successor in the verse-chronicling of Scottish history, Andrew Wyntoun, Canon of St. Andrews and Prior of St. Serf in Lochleven. His birth- and death-dates are not known, but he certainly held his priory from 1395 (Barbour's v" o""- death-year) to 1413 at least; and he was alive six years later, for he notices the death of Robert Duke of Albany in 1419. 1350- 1420 would therefore (as he speaks of old age having mastered him) be a probable life-date. The title of '•Original Chronicle" which he gave to his work ^ does not, as Dr. Irving"^ seems rather oddly to have thought, claim " originality " in our common modern sense — indeed, Wyntoun very frankly quotes many authors down to Barbour. It signifies that he began at the beginning — origo — after the wont of the mediaeval chronicler. His verse is less poetical than Barbour's in spirit but a little more accomplished in form, attaining the trisyllabic swing of the Christabel metre sometimes with very good effect, as witness the line in his often quoted account of Macbeth and the Weird Sisters — Lo ! yon | der the thane | of Crum | bauchty | [Cromarty]. And another in reference to the Maid of Norway — To Nor I way and Scot | land both right | wise heir. He has not a few passages interesting for matter — as far as manner goes the interview between the Devil and St. Serf (Book v. chap, xii.) is a very fair specimen. It is from him that we have the well-known and interesting piece " When Alexander our King was dead," which, however, can hardly be contemporary with the event it commemorates. The transition, from Wyntoun's easy amble of manner (not seldom degenerating into a mere pedestrian verse) and his placid chronicling, to the next writer on this special list is not a little curious. Barbour had been patriotic beyond all dispute, and he had not been over-squeamish about dressing up the facts of his- '" ^^^' tory to better advantage in the garb of romance. Wyntoun, with more sense of history, had been patriotic too ; but ncitlicr showed any violent animosity against England, and an Englishman must compare with some compunction the international courtesy of Laurence Minot 1 Twice edited — in part by D. Macpherson (1795) and in whole by Laing (1872-79). 2 History of Scottish Poetry, p. 1 16. 174 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv and theirs. Both were cosmopolitan, and the method of Barbour himself was rigidly critical, as compared with Blind Harry,i or, as modern punctilio prefers to call him, "Henry the Minstrel," the poetical biographer of the other great hero of the War of Independence. The author himself is a very obscure person. The locus classicus about him is a passage of the same Latin-writing historian, John Mair or Major, who is our authority for the authorship of the King's Quair. Mair says that Henricus, blind from his birth, executed the poem in his (the historian's) infancy, which is judged to have been ci7-. 1460. We have only one MS. of it, and that is dated 1488, while we have some records of payments to Henry as late as 1492, and Dunbar includes him among the Dead Makers in 1508. The last three-quarters of the fifteenth century would therefore seem to have been his date, and the text of his poem, if not directly taken down from his dictation, to have been at least contemporary. Sir VVilliain Wallace consists of nearly 12,000 lines in heroic couplets, often very spirited, and generally correct enough in con- struction, but observing the sharp French caesura at the fourth syllable. It purports to be based on a Latin book by John Blair, Wallace's own chaplain ; but no such book is known to have existed, nor is it referred to by any authority, except such as have obviously derived their knowledge from Harry himself. Nor does it need more than the slightest examination of the poem to see that it is in substance, though not in form, a true chanson de geste, having only the remotest foundation in history, and weaving its story perhaps out of some popular traditions, but mainly out of the poet's own head or the heads of his unknown predecessors. It is well known that the authentic documents for Wallace's history are extremely meagre. Barbour never mentions his name. But Wyntoun, long before Harry, says that great gestes of him existed, and suggests that a "great buke " (the opposition is not unnoteworthy) might be written. It is by no means improbable that blind Harry took the hint directly from the good prior of St. Serf. By his time the national animosity between Scots and English, according to a custom odd at first sight but not unintelligible, had grown much more fierce than during the actual Wars of Independence in the previous century. And Harry's verses are inspired by the hottest flame of this. The presence of indignation and the absence of in- formation combine in him to make an exceedingly spirited romance, which was naturally and deservedly popular in Scotland from the very first, but which, of course, has the slightest — if the slightest — pretence to historical importance. The ghostly apparition of Faw- done, in the finest passage of all, is not more a thing of the imagi- 1 Scottish Text Society, ed. Moir. CHAP. II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 175 nation than the still more famous fishing story with which the poem opens, or the stock incident (very freshly and excellently told) of the visit of the Queen of England to Wallace, and her mediation with her no less cowardly than ferocious husband. But it was all«perfectly right and proper, according to the laws of the class of composition to which Blind Harry's work belongs ; and it is a compensation for the extreme lateness and comparative scantiness of Scottish literature that it was thus able to produce the latest, and very far indeed from the worst, example of the national folk-epic which blends traditions of all sorts, adds commonplaces from the general stock of fiction, and makes the whole thick and slab with original sauce, in order to exalt and consecrate the deeds of a popular hero. It may be not inconvenient here, before coming to the last of the batch of historical poets or verse-writers who form the staple of this chapter, and who in this case extend beyond the fifteenth century proper, to note very briefly the minor poets of this and the other class who complete the list of the makers of the fifteenth century itself, as we have them on the authority of Dunbar and others. The chief of these was Walter Kennedy, Dun- bar's contemporary and antagonist in the " flyting" {vide infra), who took his degree at Glasgow in 1476, and is spoken of not as dead but dying in the Complaint of the Makers, published therewith. There are poems of Kennedy's in existence, but mostly unpublished, and said to be of no great merit. Others who are not mere names are Richard, or Sir Richard Holland, a Douglas's man, who wrote about the middle of the century the Book of the Howlat^ alliterated and rhymed, describing a general council of the Birds, with the Pea- cock as Pope-President ; and Clerk of Tranent, who is spoken of as having made the "Anturs of Gawane" {vide supra). To him may be due the existing Golagros and Gawane, an alliterative rhymed poem of the Gawain Northern cycle (ante, p. 103, and post, p. 195). Mersar, two Rowls or Rolls, and others are but shadows, and only a single poem seems to remain by (2uentin Shaw, a poet who is not only mentioned by Dunbar, but picturesquely introduced by Gawain Douglas — Quentin with ane buttock ^ on his head — __^^__^-^^— ^^-^— 1 This is in the Scottish Text Society's Alliterative Poems, ed. Amours. Everybody knows the two short lines — O Douglas, Douglas, Tender and true ! which end the wheel of stanza 31, and the whole passage dealing with Lord James and the heart of the Bruce is good. Otherwise not much can be said for the poem, which is a mere variation of the Parliament of Fowls. * i.e. a hood, probably like that in Chaucer's portrait, ami copied from it by fifteenth-century poets, as those of the eighteenth copied Tope's nightcap. 176 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv as one of the Scottish poets worthy to show cause against even Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate. And to the poets who are thus without, or nearly without, poems, a list of poems at present un- attached* to poets might be added, showing more evidence of the literary working in Scotland which began so late and was to die away, all but completely, so soon. It is probable that among these forgotten, scarcely known, and too often still disdained writers, there was more than one who was a better poet in the strict sense of that term than " Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, Lord Lyon King of Arms," who, at the cost yn say. gf a slight stretch of chronology, may best be mentioned here. But Lyndsay is an interesting, and though not a fully yet a fairly known personality, while they flit as shadows ; he has left an abundant supply of work,i frequently interesting in itself, and gener- ally characteristic of his time; and in one particular he has the rare good luck to have left the only example, not merely in Scottish but in English literature, of an early sotie or political farce-satire in dramatic form. If he had given us nothing but the Satire of the Three Estates, Lyndsay would be a remarkable figure in English literature ; as it is, he has left much else. He is supposed, rather than known, to have been born at The Mount, near Cupar, in Fife, somewhere about 1490 ; but claims (also guesswork) have been put in for Garmylton or Garleton in East Lothian, an estate which certainly belonged to his father and to him. The family was an offshoot (whether legiti- mate or not is uncertain) of that of Lyndsay of the Byres. He may, rather than must, have been the " Da. Lyndsay " who was an incor- porated fourth-year student at St. Andrews in 1508-9. He cer- tainly had not merely a regular salary in the Royal Household, but a "play-coat of blue and yellow taffety'Mn 151 1, and played before King James IV. and Queen Margaret. He is said to have been present at the famous scene of the apparition to the King before Flodden, which is enshrined in Marmion. And he was master- usher, or master of the household, to James V. from his earliest childhood. In 1522 he was a married man, and his wife Janet Douglas was accustomed to sew the King's " sarkis " with double hanks of gold thread. James's very early nominal coming of age at his twelfth year caused the removal of Lyndsay, who retired to his estate of Garmylton and " commenced poet." But four years later James emancipated himself from his still real tutelage to Angus, and almost at once promoted his old master to knighthood and the office of Lyon King, which then involved very important diplomatic duties. 1 Ed. Laing, Edinburgh, 3 vols. 1879. CHAP. II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 177 In discharge of these Lyndsay went to England, France, the Nether- lands, and Denmark. He held a chapter of his heralds in January 1555, and seems to have died between that month and the following April. Lyndsay's works consist of the above-mentioned Satire of the Three Estates, of a Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier, and of the History of Squire Meldrum, all long poems, with a considerable number of shorter ones. Of the long poems. The Dia- logue (or The Monarchie) consists of more than 6000 lines, chiefly octosyllabic couplets, and gives the history of the world, with comments in the dismallest manner of the fifteenth cen- tury. The History of Squire Meldrum, in the same metre, is an exceedingly pleasant romantic biography of a real person, a sort of cross between Quentin Durward and the Admirable Crichton, whose prowess against Englishmen and others in the field, and his courtesy to ladies in the bower, are very lovingly depicted. The most note- worthy of the three, however (though, like them and Lyndsay's other poems, it is disfigured by the extraordinary coarseness of lan- guage which marks most of this early Scottish poetry, and which, except for a very brief time at the Restoration, and then chiefly in anonymous writings, has never been matched in England), is the Satire. This, as its length, not far short of 5000 lines, .j,. ^ .■ makes inevitable, is not a single piece, but, on the a/the model of the French compositions which no] doubt sug- Estates gested it, a set or pentalogy of five different pieces : the first part of the play proper, the First and Second Interludes, the second part of the play, and the Third Interlude, while there is a preliminary interlude of between two and three hundred lines more which has been thought spurious, but with no apparent reason, and which is certainly not less vigorous than the rest, though it is if possible even coarser. The main play is a " morality " of the familiar kind (see next Book), but with the allegory deflected from its usual ethical tenor to a political bent, Rex Humanitas being tempted by Wantonness, Placebo, and the Vices in the habit of Friars, and saved by Correc- tion, (iude Counsel, and the Virtues. It is in the second part that the Three Estates make a direct appearance; while the Interludes, not losing sight of the moral, enforce it with more farcical and general satire. It has been customary to regard Lyndsay as a partisan of the Reformation, and so, in the merely literal and grammatical sense, he certainly was. But it does not appear very certain that he was a partisan from any doctrinal side. This sharp satire on abuses in Church and State, perhaps mixed, as satire so often is, with some selfish consideration, appears N 178 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv also in all, or almost all, Lyndsay's minor poems, which, if not over numerous, are very interesting. They scarcely reach a dozen in number, and, as has been said, grace of poetic style and poems. thought is by no means their prominent characteristic. But they all have a certain accomplishment of phrase and form which is extremely noteworthy in contrast with the stagger- ing state of English in both ways at the time, and more noteworthy still when we remember that the Scottish Muse was about to fall almost barren for centuries, while the English was in some fifty years' time to become the fruitful mother of the best poetry in the world. And they are all interesting, more or less, »in matter. The Dream (which is in plain language a begging letter to the King) is in rhyme- royal, and the body of it is simply part of that vast and dreary common form of fifteenth-century allegory through which, as through- out this Book, we have to make our way. But the begging letter by itself has some very interesting biographical touches, reminding James how his master-usher had carried him in his arms and tucked him up in bed; how he had told him not merely "of Hercules the actis honorabill,''' and much other improving matter, but the Prophecies of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng, and tales of the Red Etin and the Gyre Carling, for which posterity would very cheerfully give twenty Dialogues between Experience and a Courtier. The Dream itself ranges from the centre of the Earth (^i.e. Hell) and the description of Paradise, to the relations between France and Scotland and the state of Argyle and the Out Isles, which would appear not to have been Paradise at all. The piece, with all its parts included, considerably exceeds 1000 lines, and ends with a direct Exhortation to the King's Grace (in nine-line stanzas, with a different one as coda) which is manly and sensible. In fact, both Dunbar and Lyndsay deserve the highest credit for the absence of " assentation " in their addresses to their patrons, James the Fourth and Fifth, though neither father nor son seems to have profited very much thereby. This manly tone is renewed in the Complaint of Sir David Lyndsay — some 500 lines in octosyllabic couplets — which is again biographical and again suppliant, but does not hesitate to mingle probably unpalatable advice with supplication. Nor is the Testament and Complaint of the Papyngo (the King's Parrot), which is about the length of the Dream, and chiefly, but not wholly, in rhyme-royal, very different, being directed largely against various abuses in Church and State, especially the former. The Answer to the King''s Flyting (the Flyting itself is lost) partakes of the studied coarseness of this singular form of poetical amusement. But Lyndsay's practical honesty makes him still more attentive to warning the " Red Tod of St. Andrews " against vice and disorder than to exercises in curious CHAP. II THE SCOTTISH POETS — HISTORICAL AND MINOR 179 ribaldry. Another court poem, probably not without special meaning, is the Petition of the King's old hound " Bagsche " to his successors in favour, Bawtie and others, for "ane portion in Uunfermling," concluding with good advice. The poet's most important attempt in pathetic poetry, the Deploration of Queen Magdalene, the fair and ill-fated French princess who was James's first wife, and to whom the climate of Scotland was almost at once fatal, is meritorious but hardly successful, Lyndsay being unable to extract from the rhyme-royal that plangent note which it so readily yields to true poets. He is happier, though still not consummately happy, in the comic handling of the Justing betiveeti Watsott and Barbour and the Supplication in Con- tempt of Side Tails (trains), as well as in the rather famous anti- clerical Kitty s Confession, to which the Description of Feddar Coffis 1 is a kind of pendant. Lastly has to be mentioned the Tragedy of the Cardinal, a ferocious attack on the dead Beaton in the style of the Fall of Princes. 1 i.e. " pedlar knaves," in senses both literal and transferred. CHAPTER III THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS The King's Quair — Henryson — The Testament and Complaint of Creseide — The Fables — Robene and Makyne — Minor poems — Dunbar — The Twa Maryit Wemen and the Wedo — Other large poems — Gawain Douglas — His life — His original poems — His Aeneid It has constantly been remarked as a most curious and partially unaccountable phenomenon, that while Chaucerian poetry, as soon as Chaucer's own hands failed, gave nothing but third-rate work or worse in England, it produced in Scotland work in some cases of very high quality indeed. Such account as is possible of the reasons for the general lateness of purely Scottish literature has been given in the last chapter. In this we shall give an account of the four chiefs of Scottish poetry when it did come — James the First, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gawain or Gavin Douglas. Criticism of the strenuously inert kind has played its usual games with the literary work of James Stewart, first king of the name in Scotland. After by turns attributing to him and taking away from him Chrisfs Kirk on the Green, Peebles to the Play, etc., it has recently attacked his claims, which for nearly four centuries had been undisturbed, on the Kingis Quair itself. Once more this history does not trouble itself with otiosities of the kind. It is sufficient that the Kingis Quair {quire, book) is attributed to James by John Major or Mair, not an impeccable historian, but fairly near the time, and likely to know ; that it is also given as his in the MS., which seems to be still more nearly contemporary ; that no other attribution of the poem has any early authority ; and that nothing is to be gained by disturbing the accepted tradition. It is indeed unwise to try, as other freaks of the same tricksy spirit have done, to force the dramatic details of the poem too closely, or closely at all, into line with the historical events of James's life, or to insist that the locality of the poem is Windsor, the heroine Joan Beaufort, and so forth. For us it shall be sufficient that the unbroken and till now unopposed tradi- i8o CHAP. HI THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS i8i tion of four centuries has given the Kingis Quair^ to James the First of Scotland, and that though we cannot say on, positive evidence that he did write it. absolutely no facts have been produced showing that he did not. With regard to Chrisfs Kirk on the Green and Peebles to the Play, two very lively and spirited, though slightly coarse, narrative ballads of a " Burnsish " cast, the case is dilTerent. Early attribution hesitates — a fatal thing — between James the First and James the FiftJi as the author of Chrisfs Kirk on the Green, and its tone is much more suggestive of the " goodman of Ballengeich " than of his fierce but knightly great-great-grandfather. Also, though it is very difficult to speak of the older Scots with any certainty, the language certainly seems more recent than the early fifteenth century. On the contrary, the King''s Qiiair, if not by James, must be by some unknown Scottish poet who was under the fresh and full Chaucerian influence. This James would naturally have been, seeing that he was born in 1394, captured at sea by the English in 1405, and kept in an honourable captivity '^^ouJir. in England till 1424, in which year, having married Joan Beaufort, Henry V.'s first cousin, he was allowed to ransom himself and return to Scotland. There he was crowned at Scone, ruled his turbulent realm with some justice, considerable ability and love of learning, and very great harshness, till 1436, when he was assassinated by not quite unreasonably wrathful rebels in the monastery of the Black Friars at Perth, despite (or not) of the heroism of "Kate Badass." There was, if a slight variation of dialect, a complete unity of literary sentiment between England and Scotland at the time, and the increasing study of the French rhetoriqueiirs had not yet, as it was to do in Scotland even more than in England, aureated the vocabulary with too cumbrous a garment of brocaded diction. The piece, which is in stanzas of rhyme-royal (said indeed to be so named from it), has the drawbacks from which even Chaucer's own minor poems are not free, of the common form of the Rose tradition — the sleep, the dream, the vision of Paganly divine personages, the Deadly Sins, the Wheel of Fortune, and the rest. It has none of tlie direct dramatic faculty of Chaucer in the Tales or of Dunbar, none of the inten.se romantic power of Henry- .son's Creseide, or the idyllic grace of his Robcne and Makync. But it has very much of the dreamy elegance of the Rose itself, in the passages describing how the weary dreamer looks out into the castle garden, and sees the gracious apparition of his love with golden hair, 1 Ed. Skeat, Scottish Text Society. The arguments against James's author- ship have been carefully examined and replied to by M. Jusserand; but it was really unnecessary, for not one of them is even plausible. i82 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv tricolour plumes in it, and a single ruby glowing on her breast ; the interview with Venus (that which follows with Minerva is a little owlish) ; the fine episode of Fortune ; and the final boon of red gilly- flowers brought him by the bird of Venus, the turtle-dove, with an encouraging inscription on the leaves. On the whole, if The Flower and the Leaf be not Chaucer's, it and the King^s Quair may be ranked as the two most graceful, scholarly, and elegant poems of the French-Chaucerian tradition to be found in English. The Ballad of , Good Counsel, which is also ascribed by good authority to James, and is the only other piece bearing such attribution, is also, though in another kind, strongly Chaucerian, its refrain being — And for ilk inch He will thee quit a span, and breathing the same mixture of pious humility and moral wisdom which appears in Flee from the Press, etc. Both pieces, the Quair and the Ballad, are thus distinctly " school-work," owing almost everything, as far as mere originality goes, to Chaucer. But they are school-work of the best kind, standing to their masters as Luini's to Lionardo's in painting, and showing the highest ability in execution. Few poems whose personality is certain, and whose work is both eminent in merit and not inconsiderable in bulk, have a more shadowy record than Master Robert Henryson, schoolmaster in Dun- fermline, as he is entitled in editions of his work printed some sixty or seventy years after his death. It may, in fact, be said that Dunbar's reference to that death in the Cotnplaint of the Makers, which was written about 1506 — In Dunfermline he has done down, Good Master Robert Henryson ^ — is the only certain and positive reference that we possess to him. For it is not certain, though it is highly probable, that he is the VenerabiHs vir Magister Robertus Henryson who was incorporated in the University of Glasgow (then scarcely ten years old) in 1462 ; and all attempts to identify him with the Henrysons or Hendersons of Fordell in Fife have quite failed. About his works,2 however, there is no reasonable doubt. They consist of two poems of some length, the Testament of Creseide and Orpheus and Eurydice ; of a collection, with prologue, of ^sopic fables in Scots ; and of rather more than a dozen miscellaneous minor poems, of which the chief is the somewhat famous pastourelle 1 Readings vary. 2 Ed. Laing (Edinburgh, 1865), a book now very scarce and dear, which the Scottish Text Society hopes to re-edit. CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 183 of Robette and Mahyne. The total bulk is not large, but the merit is, for the fifteenth century more particularly, very high, and the variety of the directions in which it is shown is extremely remark- able. Of the two long poems, Orpheus and Eurydice is partly in rhyme-royal, partly in couplets, with a ballade in ten-line stanzas interposed and a "morality" in couplets. If it stood alone it would not create any very special position for its author. There are much better Middle English poems on the same subject ; and this is only a fair Chaucerian exercise, not better than the best of Lydgate, though much better than the worst of Occleve. Very different is the Testament of Creseide'^ (sometimes sub- divided into a ''complaint" and a "testament" proper), which undertakes to complete Chaucer's Troilus, and, not ,- , ..1 1 • 1 I The Testa- adopting the story of the jilted prmce s speedy death, mentand to give that of Cressida's punishment. After a vigorous ^"c/J^f-'lf prologue, describing how the poet in middle age, and a cold night, mended the fire, " beikit him about," " tuik ane drink his spirits to comfort," and a book, the Troilus — To cut the winter night and make it short — he resolves to tell the sequel. Diomed, satiated with Cressida, deserts her as she has deserted his rival. She takes refuge with her father, Calchas, and will not show herself in public, but in '• ane secret oratoir " angrily reproaches Venus and her son. Cupid, highly indignant, summons the council of the Gods - to determine the punishment for this blasphemy, and it is referred to a committee consisting of Saturn and the Moon. Little mercy is to be expected from these two cold deities ; and there is singular force in the description of the sentence pronounced by Saturn. Passing down where careful Cressid lay, and placing a frosty wand on her head, he deprives her of all beauty and joy. Cynthia strikes her in addition with the incurable and loathsome signs of leprosy. The doom takes effect at once, and she has to seek the spital-house, where (in a nine- lined stanza) she makes her complaint. One of her wretched companions, not unkindly, bids her make virtue of necessity, give up useless wailing. And live efter the law of lipper-leid (= folk). So she goes forth with clapper and begging-dish. As she sits forlorn by the wayside, a gallant company rides by from Troy, 1 This can Vjc found in Chalmers's Poets and in Professor Skeat's Chauceriana. 2 It is not superfluous to say that Mercury is "full of rhetoric," and has "a hude Like to ane Poeit of the auld fashioun " ; see note on Qucntin Shaw in the last chapter. 184 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv Troilus among them. And then comes the crowning passage of the poem. Their eyes meet ; but her bleared vision does not recognise her former lover, and it is impossible for him to know Cressida in the ghastly creature beneath him. The stanzas describ- ing this situation are nearly perfect. She receives his guerdon, is told by one of her comrades who he is, utters one last complaint, and sending him a ruby ring he had once given her, dies. The two great passages of the doom of Saturn and the meeting would of itself give this poem rank with, if not above, the best work of its century, but the whole is not unworthy of them. Only in Sackville is the power of tragic effect which rhyme-royal eminently possesses brought out with equal fulness, and Sackville is less terrible than the Saturn piece, and less pathetic than the lovers' meeting. The powers of this remarkable stanza in the lighter way are not generally held to be as high as those in serious verse ; indeed, its great inventor or naturaliser in English usually deserted it for octo- syllables or heroics when he was bent on comedy. But Henryson has been not much less happy in his use of it for yCsop than in the Creseide poem. His prologue is again personal, though less vivid; his fables are — The Cock and the Jasp (Jasper) ; The Uplandish Mouse and the Burgess Mouse ; a Fox series — Sir Chantecleer and the Fox, The Fox confessing to the Wolf, The Parliament of Beasts; The Dog, Sheep, and Wolf; The Lion and the Mouse ; The Preaching of the Swallow ; The Fox, the Wolf, and the Cadger; The Fox, the Wolf, and the Moon's Shadow; The Wolf and the Wether; The Wolf and the Lamb; The Paddock (Frog) and tlie Mouse. Many of these are told at considerable length, extending to some hundreds of lines, and the moralitas of each, as we should expect in this moralising of all centuries, is prolonged to forty, fifty, sixty, or even more lines, but the general treatment is not at all heavy. There is, however, no doubt that Robene and Makytie = Malkin (" Maudkin " not "Marykin," as is sometimes said), the best known of Henryson's poem from its fortunate inclusion in Percy's Reliqiies, is, if not the best, superior to all except the Testa- MaJiyne. "t^itt. It is the Old French pastourelle, or shepherdess wooing-poem, with a difference. In the first part the usual order of things is inverted, and Makyne woos in vain the impassible and clownish object of her love. She is, in fact, '■'■Merry Makyne" by grace of the perpetual epithet only. But the God of Love avenges her : the moonlight and the " sweet season " work on Robin, and he in turn solicits her grace. But she has been heard and healed, and every fit reader of the poem has praised the simple but inimitably felicitous touches with which, in no undignified spirit CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 185 of " tit for tat," but with the straightforwardness of the heart-whole, and not without a touch of solemnity, she reminds him of the old saw — The man that will nocht when he may, Sail hauf nocht quhen he wald ; and to a second despairing plea of the soft dry night, the warm balmy air, the secret greenwood, replies — Robin, that world is all awa, And quite brocht to an end — and goes home no longer merely technically "merry," but blithe enough "among the holtis hoar," with (as we may supplement the description) chin no doubt slightly upturned in the moonliglit, leaving the luckless fool " in dolour and in care." The remaining: members of this small but admirable collection of verse are less interesting, though much above the standard of their time. The Gannond (Garment) of Good Ladies has been much praised, but its allegory — "Her hat should be of fair-having"; ^,. ,1111 r V .. r ^1 Minor poems. "Her sleeves should be of esperance" — too frequently takes an excursion beyond the agreeably quaint into the tediously grotesque. The Bliidy Serk — the shirt of a knight who was desperately wounded in rescuing a lady from a giant, worn by her after his death — is better, but it is not improved by the inevitable inoralitas (spared us in Robetie and Makyne), likening the lady to man's soul, the giant to Lucifer, and the knight to Christ. The Abbey Walk is interesting for its opening couplet — Alone as I went up and down In ane Abbaye was fair to see — and its possible association with the actual Dunfermline ; while it morals on the refrain — Obey and thank thy God of all — with a right musical and pleasant piety. The rest, except a rather coarse and not very clever gibe at Some Practice of Medicine, are mostly religious-philosophical, and the best of them is the Three Dead Pows, i.e. death's heads, which address man, warning him of his end. This is also given to Patrick Johnston. It is usual to rank William Dunbar as the chief of all this group, and in fact the greatest Scottish poet except Burns. Nor is there much reason for quarrelling with the estimate, since ^ , Dunbar, though he has perhaps nothing equal ni tlieir own kinds to the above-noted passages of the Testament of Creseide and Xo Robene and Makyne, has a larger collection to show, both of good i86 THE FirTEENTH CENTURY book it and of excellent work, a somewhat wider range, and above all, a certain body and fulness of poetical wine which is not so evident in the pensive though not uncheerful schoolmaster of Dunfermline. We know a little, if not very much, more about Dunbar than about Henry- son. He was certainly a Lothian man, probably allied not merely in name to the great family of the Earls of Dunbar and March, founded in the eleventh century by Cospatrick, and now chiefly subsisting in its northern or Morayshire branches. The year 1460, with the usual circa, is accepted as his birth-date. He went to St. Salvator's College, then the only one in the University of St. Andrews, took his B.A. in 1477, and his M.A. two years later, being, it seems, destined for the Church. He appears, both from his own account and that of others, to have been for a time a Franciscan friar, preaching and begging all over England and in France as well as in Scotland. But in the French phrase he " threw the frock to the nettles," and appears to have been employed by James IV. on diplomatic duty not merely in England, but in almost all parts of the Continent. One of his best and best-known poems welcomes Margaret of England on her coming to Scotland as the King's bride in 1503 — he was specially attached to her service ; and in 1508 he had some of his principal poems printed and pubhshed by the first Scottish printers, Chepman and Millar. Records of gifts and pensions to him exist up to June, 1513, and then we hear no more of him. Flodden came in September of that year, and it has been thought that he too may have fallen in the ''dark impenetrable ring" round his master. He was certainly dead in 1 530, for Sir David Lyndsay says so ; but this is all we know. The poems known to be by, or reasonably attributed to, him are tolerably numerous, but not very bulky, none exceeding some 600 lines, while most are quite short. The entire number in Dr. Small's edition 1 is loi, of which eleven are given as "attributed," while The Twa seven, having been, as noted above, printed in the poet's We'men o^^'" lifetime as his, have a higher degree of certainty andthe Wedo. than any of the others in text. The two most consider- able are The Twa Maryit Wenieii and the Wedo and the Friars of Berwick, the latter only "attributed," but displaying a verve and an accomplishment of form not known to be possessed by any other Scottish poet of the time. Both are very strongly Chaucerian, and the Friars is in Ciiaucerian " riding-rhyme " ; the other piece is perhaps the most accomplished specimen of that revived alliteration which has been previously discussed. Dunbar does not limit himself to three alliterations, often giving four or even five, and he is somewhat less distinct in his middle pause than Langland. On the other hand, 1 For the Scottish Text Society ; also editions by D. Laing and by Dr. Schipper. CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 187 his whole verse, which averages thirteen or fourteen syllables, has a distinctness and evenness of rhythm which are only found in parts of Piers Plowman. The matter of the poem is an ultra-Chaucerian satire on women. The three personages are represented as all young and all pretty ; they are drinking freely in a goodly garden on Midsummer Eve, and the poet achieves a triumphantly contrasted picture of physical beauty in scene and figure and of moral deformity in sentiment. The Wife of Bath, the undoubted model of these three young persons, is neither mealy-mouthed nor straight-laced, but she is always good-natured. Dunbar's wives and widow combine sensuality with ill-nature in a way not elsewhere to be paralleled in English literature till we come to the rakes of the Restoration. Yet the ugliness of the picture is half redeemed by the mastery with which Dunbar makes them expose their own shame, and sets their figures for us with a touch of grave irony worthy of Butler, and less purely caricatural in style than Hndibras. The Friars of Berwick is a version of a well-known fabliau., in which two friars, treated with scant hospitality by a woman who in her husband's absence has made an assignation with her lover, revenge themselves upon her (though not to extremity), taking advantage of the husband's unexpected return. It is therefore much less of an original and more of a commonplace than The Twa Mary it IVeinen, but the story is told with the true brio of the Canterbury Tales themselves. Next to these two may be ranked the Golden Targe., the Flyting of Dtmbar and Kennedy, the famous Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, and The TJnstle and the Rose. The first of these is a typical fifteenth- century poem, allegorical in tone and very " rhetorical " in language, with the usual praise of Chaucer, '•'■ Rose poem"^' of rhetors all," and " light of our Inglis," as well as of the "sugared lips and aureate tongues " of Gower and Lydgate. The Targe is in nine-lined stanzas ; The Thistle and the Rose, in rhyme- royal, is of the same stamp and style, but adjusted to convey a welcome full of grace, good sense, and good taste to the youthful Margaret, the "rose" married to the "thistle." Many who know nothing else of Dunl)ar's, know the Seven Deadly Sins from its early inclusion in anthologies. The vigour of its lurid pictures has not been exaggerated, nor the real command of metre (Romance eights and sixes) which the poet here as everywhere displays, and which contrasts so strikingly with the staggering gait and palsied grip of his English contemporaries. The Flyting, one of a group of such things, is a curiosity no doubt, but a curiosity of a kind which could perhaps be spared. Literary Scots at all times, up to the eighteenth century, admitted, as has been said, a coarseness of actual language which is rarely paralleled in literary English ; and these '' flytings" consisted of i88 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv alternate torrents of sheer Billingsgate poured upon each other by the combatants. There is not much doubt that many of the strange terms of abuse used are mere gibberish, coined for the occasion ; but there was considerable legitimate accommodation in Scots for the purpose, and the poem, like others of its kind, is at worst a quarry for lexicographers. Of the very numerous minor poems must be mentioned the touching and interesting Lament for the Makers, "when he was sick," with its passing-bell refrain of Timor Mortis conturbat me, and its list of poets, most of whom are shadows of shades ; the lively if irreverent Ballad of Kind Kyttok, and her reception at Heaven's gates ; the Testament of Mr. Andro Kennedy, a. macaronic pendant to the Flyting; two rhetorical pieces on the Lord Bernard Stewart, living and dead ; a sharp satirical description of Edinburgh Session ; a quaint contrast of merry Edinburgh and distressful Stirling ; the very vivid if not very decorous Dance in the Queen^s Chamber, which, with other poems to the Queen, shows that iVIargaret had the full Tudor tolerance of broad speech; the not unamusing Poem to ane Blackamoor — " My lady with the meikle lips " — a negress who, as a rarity, had been imported to be maid to the Queen. The rest are pious or profane, personal or general, rhetorical or direct. But they are nearly always out of the common way of literature of their time ; and the contemptuous fashion in which they have been sometimes spoken of is not a little surprising. The last of the four poets to be mentioned here is also the least, though he has an interest of his own. Gavin or Gawain Douglas was the third son of Archibald Douglas — " Bell-the-Cat " — fifth Earl of Angus, and of Elizabeth Boyd. It is not known at DougiTs. vvhich of the numerous seats of the Douglasses he was born ; but the date must have been somewhere about the juncture of the years 1474-75. He matriculated at St. Andrews in 1489, was a "determinant" (= Bachelor Elect) in 1492, Licentiate or incipient Master two years later. He took orders, and at once obtained various preferments, the chief being the benefice of Preston- kirk or Linton in East Lothian ; while in 1501 he was made Dean or Provost of St. Giles', Edinburgh. In this same year he finished the Palice of Honour. Between this and the year of Flodden, 15 13, in the summer of which he finished his Virgil, we hear little of him. As readers of Scottish history know, his two elder brothers fell in the battle itself, which broke the heart, though it did not actually see the death, of Bell-the-Cat his father ; while his nephew, son of the Master of Angus, killed at Flodden, very speedily gained the heart of Queen Margaret, who, though a widow and a mother, was not much more than a girl in age. By this marriage Gawain not merely CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 189 became in the future, through the Countess of Lennox and Darnley, a collateral ancestor of the whole royal house of Great Britain and Ireland, but was brought into very immediate connection ^^. ,., . , , , . r •, 1^ T. , His life, with the chief person in the state, the Queen Regent, who at once gave him the rich Abbey of Aberbrothock or Arbroath, and shortly afterwards the brevet-keepership, as we may say, of the Great Seal. But Margaret's hasty marriage to the head of a power- ful but dreaded house was extremely unpopular, and Gawain Douglas reaped from it more trouble than profit. He was never confirmed in Arbroath by the Pope ; an attempt of his niece by marriage to make him Archbishop of St. Andrews, and therefore Primate of Scotland, was frustrated by the address and interest at Rome of another candi- date ; and though Douglas, in 15 15, obtained the Bishopric of Dunkeld, this appointment also brought him endless trouble, and he was actually imprisoned by the new regent Albany for an offence apparently somewhat analogous to the English Praemunire, in ob- taining the Pope's letters without the King's, /.e. the Regent's, license. The Pope, however, resented this very decidedly, and as Albany's severities towards Queen Margaret were also attracting the dis- pleasure of her brother Henry VIII., Douglas was liberated, and after some further difficulty was consecrated to Dunkeld. He did not, however, enjoy it very peaceably — peaceable enjoyment of anything was hardly possible then in Scotland — and his death in London, where he was negotiating against Albany, coincided with hostile measures against him taken by Archbishop James Beaton, and re- moved him from evil to come. He died at the house of his friend Lord Dacre, and was buried in the Savoy. We have his will and a considerable number of public documents about him. Douglas was not an old man — forty-eight only — when he died ; and for the last ten years of his life he had been incessantly engaged in public and private business. But his work in literature — no doubt all composed in the quiet time between his ordination and Flodden — is not inconsiderable. Besides what we have, we know that he translated some Ovid, and it is possible that he did other things. His existing work^ consists of the Palic e of Honour, King Hart, and the version of the Aeneid. Critics of weight - have held up Douglas, on the strength of this Virgil, as representing, or at any rate anticipating, the new movement in poetry, that which incorporates the classical and modern tradition, and so as occupying a position at least historically more important than that of his more intensely and poetically gifted contemporary Dunbar. With all due deference, this 1 Ed. Small, 4 vols. Edinburgh, 1874. 2 See W. J. Courthopc, History of Eti^lish Poetry, i. 374, one of the few passages in this excellent book with which I cannot agree. 190 THE FIFFEENTH CENTURY book iv . . — — . • may well be deemed a mistake. Even in the selection of Ovid and Virgil, Douglas, though he may have been slightly further affected by the classical intiuence '• in the air," did not go very much further than Chaucer a century and more before him. And in the manner of his work, both original and translated, he is not modern at all. He is with Hawes, even with Lydgate ; not with Wyat and Surrey. In order to come to a just estimate of this, though the Virgil itself will give us sufficient data, it is before all things necessary to con- sider his original poems, the Palice and King Hart. Douglas, like his other countrymen just mentioned, is a better manager "p^"^!"^' of """!■ I»glis" (it is believed that he himself first uses " Scots " with the national differentia) than Hawes ; but the Palice of Honour and King Hart are in scheme and tone absolutely on a par with the Pastime and the Exa7nple. No later Renaissance sunrise-colour is on them : they are lighted only by the setting moon of the Rose. Indeed, neither in Hawes nor in Lydgate, neither in Occleve nor in the stiffer work of Dunbar, is there a more essentially fifteenth-century poem than the Palice of Honour. It has a prologue and parts ; it is written in " aureate " language of at least eighteen-carat "rhetorical" value; it has entire stanzas (nine-lined ones rhymed aabaabbab) consisting of mere catalogues of names. The May morning, the stock, though no doubt quite sincere, classing of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, with an interesting note of " Dunbar yet ondeid," the vision, the heathen mythology and the historical characters, the bare, childlike allegory everywhere intruding itself, are unmistakable. Nobody who knows the Romance of the Rose, as Guillaume de Lorris started it nearly three hundred years before Douglas's death, can possibly mistake the quality. As usual in these poems, the story, apart from the al legory , is slender. The poet offends Venus (whose lusty countenance and " topaz " hair have been thought to be a compliment to the youthful Margaret) and is sentenced to a palinode and a journey round the world in company ' with the Muses. They at last reach the slippery Rock of Honour with its Palace at the top, are introduced to much historical and allegorical company, and the poem ends abruptly by one of the common devices for waking. The common form for this is relieved not merely by the singularly abundant vocabulary which distinguishes all these Scottish poets, but by a distinctly poetical imagination and no small descriptive power. King Hart, the date of which Is unknown, is duller. The hero IS simply the Heart of man ; and the poem is one of the innumerable allegories of Life. He has five servants — the senses; is captured by Dame Pleasance, liberated by Pity, captures Pleasance in turn and marries her, is visited by Age, deserted by his wife, etc., and at last CHAP. Ill THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS 191 mortally wounded by Decrepitude. It is impossible to understand Mr. Small's assertion that this is '' a work which in its execution is quite original.'" The stanza is the Chaucerian octave. Undoubtedly, however, if Douglas had left nothing but his two ostensibly original poems, he would not stand nearly as high in historical repute as he does stand. It has been said that the idea of him as a strictly Renaissance writer, because he translates Virgil, is a mistake. Douglas, it is true, was no bad scholar; he certainly knew Latin well, and he may have known Greek. But Virgil comes out of his hands as he might have come out of those of ,^. , „, , 1-11 r 1 <- "IS Aeneta. Chaucer, almost as he might have come out 01 those or Benoit, with the sole exception that Douglas is faithfuller. He does not embroider on his text. But his version of that text looks back- ward and not forward. He accents classical names with an entire inditTerence to quantity. His vocabulary and phraseology are Romantic, not Classical. He substitutes the irregular charm of the Middle Ages for the exact, the impeccable, though the somewhat frigid, correctness of Virgil. Nor is this all. The fifteenth century, as we have seen, particularly affected prologues, and Douglas has given us a Prologue to each of the books of the Aeneid, as well as to the thirteenth Aeneid of Mapheus Vegius, which he also translated. And these prologues are, as indeed might be expected, by far the most interesting part of the work. The text is translated into riding- rhyme of very fair Chaucerian quality, and displaying Douglas's usual correctness of ear and his justness and colour of language. But in the Prologues he gives himself, as was natural and permissible, a much freer field. Their interest is not to be judged from the First, which is itself in couplets, and after a very " aureate " laudation of Virgil as " Chosen carbunkil " — Lanterne, lodesterne, mirror, and a per se — engages in a severe criticism, not very graceful in tone and most awkwardly clothed in verse, of Caxton's Aeneidos. This extends to several hundred lines. The Second is very short — three stanzas of rhyme-royal — and not very notable ; nor need much be said of the Third — five stanzas of nine lines each. It is not till the Fourth that the poet allows himself really to expatiate ; but he does so here, with good effect, in nearly forty " royal " stanzas on the strength of Love, the incommodity and remedy of the same — it has been observed that he translated the Rcmedium amoris, though it is lost. The very first stanza hits .successfully that clangorous note of the rhyme-royal which has been observed upon, and this note is well sustained throughout. The Fifth, short, nine-lined, and with another fling at Caxton, is less notable ; and the Sixth (octaves) is chiefly noteworthy for its matter, 192 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv a curious discussion of various poetical and philosophical accounts of Hell. But the Seventh and Eighth are each, in its different way, of very high interest indeed. The Seventh, in couplets, contains a vigorous description of Winter, attractive in itself and as an instance of that copious and vigorous vocabulary which all these poets show, and curious to contrast with Thomson. The Eighth has a curiosity still higher ; for here Douglas indulges in that very quaint combina- tion of alliterative and metrical prosody which was still sometimes attempted at this time, and has achieved, perhaps, the most remark- able example of it. The stanza somewhat resembles that of Gaivain and the Green Knight, but is regularly arranged in a form of thirteen lines bobbed and wheeled. The first nine are heavily alliterated, differing from those of The Twa Maryit Wemen by havmg strong not weak endings, and rhymed ababababc ; then comes a triplet, rhymed, of three iambics with equivalence, and then a final line c of four syllables only. The vocabulary of the piece is, outside the " Flytings," the most crabbed and fantastic even of these Scottish poems, and not a few of the words can merely be guessed at. The tenor of the whole is satirical on the state of the world. The Ninth, beginning in six-Hned stanzas, but soon passing into couplets, is still ethical in tone ; and the Tenth (in five-lined stanzas) theological ; while the Eleventh deals with chivalry, both sacred and profane. The Twelfth, " ane singular lerned prolog " of the descrip- tion of May, again ranks among the best, and is in couplets ; ^ and there is a similar one on June for the egregious Vegius his work. It is, let it be repeated, much more on these Prologues (where he has evidently set his mind upon giving specimens of his powers in various matters and forms) than on his two long pieces that the esti- mate of Gawain Douglas should be based. That estimate cannot be of the highest, for the poet has too little detachment frgmj:he^ mere literary forrns and fashions ofjiis time, and is far too much under the prevalent delusion of the identity of "rhetorike" and ^poetry. But it should be relatively and by allowance high. He has in a very eminent degree that feeling for nature by which the poets of his country have ever since been honourably distinguished ; he has a very good mastery of metrical form, and he perhaps shows the good side (it must be allowed that he also shows the bad) of the " aureate " or rhetoriqueiir language better than any poet, either in English or in French, of his time and school. 1 Here is a fine passage : — For to behald it was a gloir to see, The stabylit windis and the calmit sea, The soft scisoun, the firmament serene. The lowne illumynat air and fyrth amene. '> CHAPTER IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE Sir Generydes, etc. — Sir Launfal — 'Y\\& verse Morte Arthur — Golagros and Gawane and Rauf Coilyear — Malory — Lord Berners — Caxton's translated romances The difficulty in distinguishing the romances ^ of the fifteenth century from those of the fourteenth has been already referred to. With rare exceptions, it is doubtful whether we possess anything, originally of the fifteenth, in verse which is really of great merit. Beins of Harnploii, Guy of lVa?-wick, the Charlemagne stories, and the rest continued to be copied or rehandled ; and though it pleased Chaucer to make fun of the style, this does not seem to have had much effect on its popu- larity. In particular, the Arthurian legend, which, except in the Northern or Gawain division, appears not to have attracted very much attention in the fourteenth century, recovered, to our eternal advantage, much of its popularity in the fifteenth. The non- Arthurian romances, verse and prose, of the time are but of small interest. A fair example of them is Sir Generydes, which must almost to a certainty have been originally French, l)ut of which no French original is known, while two different English versions — one in octosyllabic couplets, printed by Dr. Furnivall for the Roxburghe Club, and one in rhyme-royal, printed by Mr. Aldis Wright for the E.E.T.S. — are in existence. Sir Generydes - is a fair example of the common form of the romance of chivalry, Generydes, but has little more (though certainlylio""Tess) individ^u- *^"^- ality than the average nineteenth-century novel. Torrent of Portugal,^ a sliorter story of the same class, is in Sir TJiopas metre ; Octoviafi, a wicked mother-in-law story, mentioned before as possibly earlier, is, as printed by Weber (there is another version), in a slightly modified 1 For the chief romance-collections, see notes, pp. 82 and 102. 2 I use the E.E.T.S. edition. 8 Ed. Halliwell, London, 1842. Re-edited for the E.E.T.S. by Dr. Adam. o 193 194 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv form of that stanza, rhymed aaabab, with the b lines shortened, instead of the usual aa long, b short, cc long, b short. The best romances in verse not strictly ballad-romance (see next chapter), and the worst, belong to the Arthurian division. At the head of the former we may put, despite its libel on Queen Guinevere, the beautiful poem of Sir Lautifal^ adapted and much im- proved by Thomas Chester, who probably lived in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, from a poem of Marie de France, centuries older and not improbably metamorphosed before it came into Chester's hands. The discredit of making the Queen play the part of Potiphar's wife, of which there is no trace in the better Arthurian legends, is not his. But the actual story of Launfal, with his fairy love, his unfortunate divulging of their passion, his punishment and his pardon, is one of the most exquKtt6'"oFaH mediaeval tales, and is quite charmingly told by Chester in the Sir Thopas metre doubled. The beauty of which this stanza is capable, especially in the doubled form, where the rhymes run aabccbddbeeb, each b line being short, is nowhere better shown, nor its complete freedom at its best from the ding-dong, sing-song monotony which beyond all doubt it often puts on, and which Chaucer has so wickedly immortalised. Not far below Laujifaljm poetical merit, and of the first interest as having almost demonstrably served as direct original to Malory {vide infra), is the Morte Arthur, which Dr. Furnivall Morte printed more than thirty years ago,- a piece of some 4000 Arthur. Jings, arranged in quatrains rhymed abab, which not uncommonly spread into sixains or octaves of the same arrange- ments. Laiicelot of the Laik^ a poem in heroic couplets, and in Scots or some other extremely northern dialect of English, is ascribed to the end of the fifteenth century, and if so, is the latest Arthurian poem of the genuine kind (before the legend began to be merely "trans- lated," as we find it in Spenser) that we possess. Meanwhile one of the most conscientious, but of the very dullest, of the vast army of dull versifiers of the time had busied himself with the great matter which, perhaps, at the same time, was taking in a sense almost final form in prose at the hands of a very different person. "Kerry" (Henry) Lonelich, skinner, a subject of King Henry the Sixth, was evidently as pious as his namesake and master, and in his different vocation as ineffective. His Merlin is not yet accessible in print, save for an extract of Dr. Kdlbing's.* His Holy Grail has been twice printed by Dr. Furnivall,^ and is one of the 1 Printed in Ritson's first volume. 2 London and Cambridge, 1864. ' Ed. Skeat, E.E.T.S. ■* In his edition ol Arthour and Merlin. 6 For tiie Roxburghe Club and the E.E.T.S. CHAP. IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 195 most curious books in existence, the wonderful interest and cliarm of the matter, which might have been thought likely either to stir a translator into genius or compel him to silent despair, being ap- proached with a cheerful doggedness of incompetency difficult, if not impossible, to parallel elsewhere. Hardly any other story could possibly survive such a translator ; no other translator, one would hope, could have failed to catch fire from such a story. But except from his matter, which flames like the infant Havelok in the rude hands of Grim, there is no spark of illumination in Lonelich, who thumps out his couplets by the help of " sikerly " and '* everidel," of " verament " and "echone," in a manner well-nigh intolerable. In the way of allit erative roman ce we have to put to the credit of the century in all probability, or rather certainly, two very interestipg poems in Scots, Golagros and Gawafie and Rauf Coilyear. ^ For neither of these have we MS. authority, though we know Golagros and that both did exist in the Asloan MS. ; and our printed '^^Z"/Coii^ Raiif Coilyear IS as late as 1572. But we have an allu- year. sion to this same poem by Gawain Douglas as early as 1503, and Golagros and Gawane was published by Chepman and Millar among the incunabula of the Scottish press in 1508. Both are in the thirteen-line alli terate^ , and rhymed stanza with wheel {y. supra^ p. 192). Golagros and Gawane belongs evidently to the Cumbrian branch of the Arthurian legend, and presents some very close resemblances to the latter part of the Aivntyrs of Arthur. Rauf Coilyear, on the other hand, belongs to the other great family, and, so far as we know, is the only original Charlemagne poem in English. It is one of the numerous and generally interesting family of the " King and the Tanner" class, the king's unknowing associate here being a ''collier" i.e. charcoal-burner), and the king, as has been said, no less a person than Charlemagne. It is a very spirited poem. Nobody has .succeeded in identifying the author of either tliis or Golagros; but it is not at all impossible that both may have one poet, and most probable tliat he lived at the end of our century, and was one of Dunbar's "makers." If so, he was by no means the worst of them, and not very far from the best, except Henryson and Dunbar himself. Practically nothing is known of the author of the greatest of all English romances, prose or verse — of one of the greatest romances of the world — a book which, though in mere material a compilation, and 1 Golagros and Gawane has been reprinted by Pinkerton in Scot/is/i Poems, 1792; by Laing (a great rarity) in 1827; by Madden, with otlier Gawaine pieces, in 1839; and by Mr. Amours in Scottish Alliterative Poems, cited above. There is also a German rt-priiit. Rauf Coilyear can be found in Mr. Amours's volume, in one of the volumes of the E.K.I'.S., Charlemagne Romances, and also in Laing's several times reprinted Ancient and Popular Poetry of Scotland (last edited by Small, Edinburgh, 1885). 196 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv sometimes cleaving rather closely to its multifarious texts, is, despite the occasional misjudgment of unhappy criticism, a great and original book. Caxton, the printer {vide infra, chap, vi.) — who, instead of, like most early printers, giving us early editions, and mostly bad ones, of the classics, which were quite safe, gave us, to the infinite advantage of England, early models of composition in English, and preserved to us. in this instance at least, an English text which might but for him have perished — tells us that the A forte Darthiir was trans- lated in the ninth year of King Edward IV. (that is to say, in 1470, fifteen years before he himself published it) by Sir Thomas ^°'^^' Malory, Knight. Caxton's follower, Wynkyn de Worde, in the second edition of 1496, makes the name " Maleore." Malory or Mallory is both a Yorkshire and a Leicestershire name, but there are absolutely no materials for identifying Sir Thomas ; the later suggestions that he was a Welsh priest, not an English knight, are baseless guesses, and we do not know in the very least why, when, or where he executed his book. What we do know, from the verse Morte and from Lonelich, is that a strong revived interest in the Arthurian Legend came in about the middle of the century, and this is to all appearances one of the fruits of it.^ If so, it is incomparably the most precious. It is probable that, though among the laborious and respectable, but rather superfluous, inquiries into origins, none has yet been discovered for the "Beaumains" story and for a few other things, Malory "did not invent much." The fifteenth century was not an inventive time, and there was much better work for it to do than second-rate invention. Then and then only could the mediaeval spirit, which was not quite dead, have been caught up and rendered for us with a still present familiarity, with the unconscious but unmistakable touch of magic which approaching loss reflects, and in English prose, which, unlike English verse, still had the bloom on it — the soon-fading beauti du diable of youth and freshness. Criticisms have been made on Malory's manner of selecting and arranging his materials — criticisms which, like all unsuccessful exercises of the most difficult of arts, come from putting the wrong questions to the jury — from asking, "Has this man done what / wanted him to do ?" or "Has he done it as / should have done it?" instead of "Has he done what he meant to do?" and " Has he done this well ? " Malory might perhaps, though in his time it would have been difficult to get all the texts together, have given an intelligent prkis of the whole Arthurian Legend, instead of which he selected his materials rather arbitrarily, and indulged in what looks to some 1 The book, frequently printed up to the seventeenth century, has also been repeatedly reprinted in this. CHAP. IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 197 critics like incomprehensible divagation, and not much more com- prehensible suppression. He might have arranged a regular epic treatment of his subject, instead of which it is often difficult to say who is the hero, and never very easy to say what special contribution to the plot the occasionally inordinate episodes are making. What he did do consists mainly in two things, or perhaps three. He selected the most interesting things with an almost invariable sureness, though there are one or two omissions ; and he omitted the less interesting parts with a sureness to which there are hardly any exceptions at all. He grasped, and this is his great and saving merit as an author, the one central fact of the story — that in the combination of the Quest of the Graal with the loves of Lancelot and Guinevere lay the kernel at once and the conclusion of the whole matter. And last (his great and saving merit as a writer) he told his tale in a manner which is very nearly impeccable. There is one practically infallible test by which all but the dullest and most incompetent can be convinced of Sir Thomas's skill in this last direction, the comparison of his narrative of the last scenes of all with that in the verse Morte d'Arthio'e above mentioned, which was in all probability his direct original, and which was certainly written just before his day. Take the death of Arthur itself, or the final interview of Lancelot and the Queen, in both ; compare them, and then remember that Malory has been dismissed as "a mere com- piler." It is possible that his art is mostly unconscious art — it is not much the worse for that. But it is nearly as infallible as it is either unconscious or thoroughly concealed. The pi ctorial powe r, the musical cadence of the phrase, the steady glow ofjchiyalrousTeeling through out^the noble niorality (for the condemnation of Ascham and others is partly mere Renaissance priggishness stupidly condemning things medijEval offhand, and partly Puritan prudery throwing its baleful shadow before), the kindliness, the sense of ho nour, the melaqchqly and yet never either gloomy or puling sense of the inevitable end — all these are eminent in it. It has been said, with perhaps hardly too great whimsicality, that there is only one bad thing about Malory — that to those who read him first he makes all other romances of Chivalry disappointing. But the fancy may at any rate be fairly retorted, for if any one is so unfortunate as to find other romances of chivalry disappointing, there is Malory to fall back upon. Merely in English prose he is a great figure, for although his medium would not be suitable for every purpose, it is nearly perfect for his own. Merely as the one great central storehouse of a famous and fertile story his place is sure. But apart from all these extrinsic considera- tions, it is surer still in the fact that he has added to literature an imperishable book. 198 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv The second great writer or translator of Romance in prose during this period, John Bourchier, Lord Be rners , was born a little before the probable date of the writing of Ma\ory''s Aforte d"" Arthur in 1467 and was the son of Humphrey Lord Berners, who fell on the Yorkist side at the battle of Barnet. He may have been a Balliol man ; he certainly saw much both of war and diplomacy in the later years of Henry VII. and the earlier of his son; he was Chancellor of the Exchequer in 15 16, and from 1520 onwards Governor of Calais. It would seem that his literary work all dates from this last period of his life, which closed in 1533. His Froissart began to appear in 1523, and he also translated (though the books did not in some cases appear till after his death) the great romance of Huon of Bordea ji2C3jhQ much inferior late Arthurian story Arthur of Little Britain, Guevara's Dial for Princes, a book which has been tliougHt, notl^thout some reason, to have had much influence on the development of Euphuism, and another Spanish allegoric-chivalrous romance, the Castle (originally Prison) of Love?- In his work from the Spanish he appears to have used not the originals but French versions. In a late stage of writing, prose, and indeed verse, translations have very little interest, and are merely or mainly makeshifts for the use of those who cannot read the originals. In the early stages, especially of prose writing, their value is very different, and this con- stitutes the attractions of our fifteenth and early sixteenth century prose, borrowed as it almost always is in matter. And Lord Berners raiiks__witli Malory as its most gifted practitioner. His P'roissart gives him the greatest opportunity, and he has availed himself of that opportunity to the utmost. His style would not, of course, be suitable for every purpose or even for many purposes, but in his combination of rhetorical and " aureate " language with s impl er forms, in his faint retention of poetic_diction with a perfect adjustment to those needs of prose fiction or of romantic history which are nearer to those of poetry than is the case with any other division of prose, he is certainly unsurpassed, and it may be doubted whether he has been equalled, though Mr. William Morris sometimes ran him hard. The Hiton, representing a late French rehandling of one of the most romantic of the chansons de geste, has 1 Not to be confounded with the very much earlier book of the same name translated from Bishop GrostSte's French a little before or a little after 1300, and edited by Dr. Weymouth for the Philological Society. This is religious, and of some linguistic, but very little literary, interest. As for Berners's own work, the Froissart \w».% reprinted by Utterson in 1812, and has been "reduced" and edited in modernised spelling, but otherwise well and faithfully, by Mr. Macaulay for the " Globe" Series (1895). Hiion has been edited by Mr. S. L. Lee for the E.E.T.S. Utterson also reprinted Arthur of Litiie Britain, but it is not common. CHAP. IV LATER ROMANCES IN PROSE AND VERSE 199 the fault common to most such rehandlings, of l ong-windedn ess and surpkisage ; but still it gives Berners good opportunity, and he takes it admirably. The part which Mr. Lee has isolated in his second volume as " The Story of Esclaramonde " might very well be taken as an introduction to this kind of romance by novices, and they are to be pitied if they do not go on. Between the Morte and the Froissart^CdiXton and his successors had made very large additions to the stock of romance in English. The Histories of Troy, more than ten years before the printing of Malory, Reyjiard the Fox, the Golden Legend, Paris and Vienne, the Life of Charles the Great, the Four translated Sons of Aymon, Blanchardyn and Eglantine, Godfrey of romances. Bulloigne, the Aeneidos, which so did vex Gawain Douglas — being Caxton's own contribution, a very considerable one, as most of them were translated as well as printed by himself. We shall speak of Caxton's prose style later : here we are chiefly concerned with the romance substance of his work. There is little doubt that these late romances, especially the prose ones, had an immense effect on the first generation or two of readers of printed books, while perhaps their diffusion in print, as well as the fact that the versions selected for reproduction or translation were nearly always late and very seldom of the best, may have also contributed to that strange disgust with them which is not entirely to be accounted for by the mere pedantry, innocently consequent on the revived study of the classics directly, or by the touch of religious and Puritan dislike of romance, which soon supervened. At the same time, this crop of romances, and the attention paid to it, had also beyond all question much to do with the heroic enthusiasm of Elizabethan days, and with that after-glow of chivalry itself of which the noblest and most undying monument is the Faerie (2ueene.^ 1 Although as much room as possible has been given to the romances, far more would be required to do them real justice. Indeed, the division branches off into almost infinite subvarieties — for instance, the curious series of Visions oi Hell and Purgatory, of which the Visions of Tundale (fifteenth century), ed. TurnbuU (Edinburgh, 1843) is a good example. The minor Proj^ romances are, as a rule, of much less interest, as may be seen from the standard collection of them by W. J. Thorns, 2nd ed. 3 vols. London, 1858. CHAPTER V MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS Date of Ballads — The Nut-browne Mayde — "I sing of a maiden " — The Percy Folio — Graysteel Bad as the reputation of the fifteenth century is for poetry in England (and indeed in most countries except Italy) it will have been seen that there are notable individual exceptions. And a still better face is put upon the matter when we come to what is called minor poetry and especially to Ballads. In a history, and especially a short history, of this subject disserta- tions on purely speculative points are out of place, and perhaps in no case is this more so than in regard to the origins of Ballad literature gener- ally and the date of English Ballad literature in particular. Ballads. There may be said to be here, as generally, three main opinions, or groups of shaded opinion ; the first assign- ing a remote, and if possible even contemporary, origin to ballads that have any pretence of history, and as ancient a one as possible to those which are purely romantic ; the second postponing the date to comparatively, or in some cases quite, modern times ; and the third, which endeavours to assign not merely a general middle term but a particular age in which the literary sentiment, as yet not absorbed by a literary class, existed fluidly and at large, and found its special bent in ballad-making. It may be observed in passing that the second, while disagreeable to sentiment, is also quite contrary to probability, and has scarcely any direct evidence to support it. Between the first and third, opinion rather than demonstration must decide, but it is not impertinent to remark that besides the opposition on their surface, a very important order of difference is involved, which may be indicated by the question, " Are romances and early epics conglomerates of ballad, or are ballads disintegrations of epics — romance-episodes worked up into ballad form ? " To the present writer the balance of probability, for reasons too numerous and intricate to be more than partially and generally stated 200 CHAP. V MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS 201 here, seems to incline to the supposition that the fifteenth century was the special time of ballad-production in England ; while not probability merely, but something like direct evidence, shows that during this time and the early sixteenth the romances, while they were lengthened in prose, underwent a pretty general process of shortening and modifying in verse. Among the facts pointing to these conclusions may be advanced the change during the fourteenth century from French and Latin to English as the vehicle of avowedly political poems dealing with the events of the day, and therefore dated ; the famous ballad of Chevy Chase, the oldest of its class, if not of all our ballads, which in its primitive form certainly dates within a decade or so of the battle of Otterburn itself; the general language and colour of the ballads, which is scarcely ever of a tone more archaic than that of 1400; and lastly, the testimony of the famous Percy Folio, the most important single collection of antique ballads that we have. It is known that, as far as actual writing goes, the folio is not older than the middle of the seventeenth century, and that some of the texts contained in it are not older than that date. But the majority are very much older, and yet pretty certainly not older than the fifteenth. In the balladised versions which this MS. contains of romances like Sir Laiinfal, Sir Degare, and a dozen others, which are pretty certainly of fifteenth or early sixteenth century date, we get not merely interesting direct evidence of the process which the romances themselves were at this time undergoing, but inevitable collateral suggestions of the ballad influence, which beyond all reasonable doubt was creating as well as reshaping. Like the oldest of our ballads, the oldest of our carols also date from this time ; and while in England proper formal poetry of substance is undoubtedly at a lower level than previously, regular as well as irregular lyric is at a distinctly higher. Except Alison and the best of its companions, there is indeed nothing so good in this division of English Hterature before the fifteenth century as the two best things of that century's own, while it has others not inferior. These two best things, both anonymous, are the famous ballad of the NiU-browne Mayde, and the less famous, but not less exquisite carol of Our Lady, beginning "I sing of a maiden." For the first of tliese we have a much earlier authority than Percy, ^h tv / indeed, as is generally known, it was modernised by broume Prior long before the publication of the Reliques, and had ^'''y^e. actually been reprinted critically in a very remarkable work, the Prolusions of Capell, the Shakesperian .scholar, in 1760. It appeared first in Arnold's Chronicle, a book published at Antwerp in 1502. It cannot be necessary to say very much about so well known a thing ; yet it has as a rule been rather under- than over-praised. 202 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv The ri ng a nd swing of the metre^ of which no previous example seems to exist, and which argues very considerable development of the language, the felicity of the alternate refrain, the singular skill with which the variations of equivalent feet, disyllabic and trisyllabic, is managed so as to prevent monotony, and the adaptation of the whole to the sentiment, imagery, and incident, are not less remark- able than the tenderness and sweetness, never^n the least mawkish, of that sentiment itself, the dramatic management of the story, and the modest cogency of the moral. The piece is, as Its~oWn time would have said, a very " margarite " of English verse for that time, and indeed a pearl of poetry for ever. Nor is the shorter, simpler, and far less known carol ^ inferior in charm ; indeed, in the quality properly called exquisiteness it is even superior. The best of the Caroline poets, our maidfn/'* chief masters in this quality, would have been in danger of over-elaborating it, or of faintly " smirching " the ineffable grace of the lines — He came also still Where his mother was, As dew in April That falleth on the grass. He came also still To his mother's bower, As dew in April That falleth on the flower. He came also still Where his mother lay, As dew in April That falleth on the spray. In no previous verse had this ^olian music — this "harp of Ariel" that distinguishes English at its very best in this direction, alike from the fuller but less unearthly harmonies of Provencal, Italian, and Spanish, from the sharper sound of French, and from the less elfish though still fairy sound of German — been given to the world. If there is nothing else quite equal to these things, there is not a little which comes fairly near them. We may with advantage compare the older part of the Percy Folio both with some other English things and with some minor and anonymous Scottish poetry of the time. A complete detailed analysis, even in the most 1 First printed by Wright for the short-lived Warton Club in 1855 (p. 30 of A Collection of Carols) ; reprinted by Mr. Bullen in his Carols and Poems (London, 1886J. CHAP. V MINOR POETRY AND BALLADS 203 compressed form, of the contents of the " Manuscript " ^ is impossible here ; but some remarks on the most important groups, and a few individuals among those of its contents which certainly or probably date from the period with which we are now percy Folio dealing, can hardly be without value. It contains, in the first place, a group of Robin Hood Ballads, which, of course, share in the general uncertainty pertaining to all notices of that cele- brated person or eidolon. It is possible that some of these are in the oldest form as old as the fourteenth century, but probable that most of them date from our time. In the second place, we have a large group of broken-up, modernised, and, it must be added, for the most part vulgarised, Arthurian ballads or short romances : — King Arthur and the King of Cornwall Sir Lancelot of Dulake, The Turk and Gowin (Gawaine), The Marriage of Sir Gaivain (the famous tale of the Loathly Lady), Sir Lambwell (Launfal), Merlin, Arthur's Death, The Green Knight. Closely connected with these is a still larger group, in which the same process has been applied to miscellaneous romances of adventure, some of which we possess in longer forms and some of which stand alone in the shorter. Such are Sir Cauline (one of the finest), Sir Degree (Sir Degar^), Sir Triamore, Sir Eglamour, Guy and A?narant, Guy and Colebrand, Joht the Reeve, and others. Another and extremely important class consists of the Historical Ballads, of which, as it happens, very importantly, the great majority concern the fifteenth and early sixteenth century : — The Siege of Rouen (Henry V.'s), The Murder of the Princes, The Rose of England, Bosworth Field, Lady Bessie, Sir Andrew Barton, Flodden Field, Scottish Field, Musselborough Field (Pinkie), and others. Lastly, there are the more romantic ballads, such as the Heir of Lynne, the Nut-browne Mayde itself, and many more, which gave Percy's book, extracted from this folio, its main charm. An interesting and not unfairly representative specimen of the contents of this invaluable collection is the once extremely popular romance of Sir Eger, Sir Grime (Graeme?), and Sir Gray steel, which, till the contents of the MS. were made public, had only been known from a printed and watered-down '^"^'^ " ' eighteenth-century version abstracted by Ellis. The piece is prob- ably not very early — we hear nothing of it before the end of the fifteenth century — but it is mosMjkely^one, and a happy_one. of those instances whereof several have been noTed in the last chapter and in this, in which the fifteenth century gathered up and reshaped for the last time the best traits of the earlier romance. Winglaine, the Belle Dame Sans Merci ; her opposite the Lady Loosepain (not * Ed. Hales and Furnivall, 3 vols, and supplement, London, 1867. 204 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv such a pretty name as Nepenthe, but not different in meaning), all graciousness and grace ; the well-meaning but rather venturous than strong Sir Eger ; his faithful friend Sir Grime ; the mysterious Graysteel in his Forbidden Country — all these make an excellent tale told in some fifteen hundred couplet verses, with no great poetical accomplishment (indeed, most of the Folio texts are degraded by centuries of careless and tasteless copying), but by no means ill. It is only by reading and re-reading (a very pleasing task) such books as this edition of the Percy Folio, as Laing's above cited Ancient and Popular Poetry of Scotland, as Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's Early Popular Poetry, as the (also above cited) works of Utterson and Hartshorne, and as Mr. Wright's Collections of Political Poetry for the " Rolls Series," and his Carols for the Percy and Warton Societies,^ that the general character and substance of fifteenth-century and early sixteenth-century poetry can be properly appreciated. Even after these gleanings, pretty abundant but frequently duplicated, there is probably not a little still in MS. ; yet what we have suffices. We see in it only occasional evidence of very distinct poetic gift, and still seldomer much command of accomplished poetic form ; but we also see that vernacular verse was thoroughly established by this time, that there was a popular taste for it, if a rough, uncultivated, and easily satisfied one ; and that it was being applied to all sorts of subjects in all sorts of spirits. In other words, the soil was being well stirred and the seeds were being plentifully and widely scattered. It did no harm that some time was to pass before anything more than a wilding harvest came.^ 1 See also J. A. Fuller-Maitland, English Carols of the Ffteenth Century (London, n.d.). 2 The Ballads, after much piecemeal editing for a hundred years, have at last been put in a standard edition by the late Professor Child's monumental col- lection, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols, in 10 parts, Boston (Mass.) and London, 1882-98. CHAPTER VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE Importance of fifteenth-century prose — Pecock — His style and vocabulary — Fortescue, Capgrave, Fabyan — Caxton — Fisher — His advances in style — More — Latimer — Co verdale — Cranmer The prose of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century — or, in other words, the prose from Fortescue to Fisher — supplies, with the almost sole exception of the work of Malory and Berners, which has been treated above, little or nothing that is delectable to the , ,. T-, 1 , ,. ,. Importance mere literary consumer. But to the student of literary of fifteenth- history it is one of the most important periods of the "^^"'""^ Pi^os^- whole subject. It is, in fact, the great exercising-ground — the great school-time — of English prose : the period in which the nearly unconscious experiments of Chaucer and Wyclif and Mandeville were expanded and multiplied, sometimes with an almost conscious purpose of developing prose style, and always with the practical effect of so doing, by writers in the most widely-diverging branches of literature — history and law, political and ecclesiastical controversy, sermons, letters, philosophy of a sort. Reginald Pecock, Bishop of St. Asaph and Chichester, and author, among much other work, Latin and English, of tlie Repressor of Over Much Bla»ii>iff of the Clergy^ is an interesting person from more points of view than one. His very life was dramatic enough, and mpralled the favourite moral of the century — the effects of the Wheel of Fortune — with singular force. As is usual with men of his time, we know neither his birthplace nor his birth-date ; Ijut the former was probably Wales, and the latter pretty certainly the end of the fourteenth century. He went to Oxford and became Fellow of Oriel in 1417, soon afterwards taking orders. There was no dispute about his erudition. In 143 1 he was made Master of Whittington College, London, and thirteen years later 1 Ed. Babington, " Rolls Series," a vols. London, i860. 205 2o6 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv appointed to the bishopric of St. Asaph. Up to this time, when we may suppose him to have been about fifty, all things had gone smoothly with him. But he was soon to experience the reverse of the wheel, which came about in a manner not entirely clear, and probably due as much to the violent party politics of the time as to his personal faults.^ It is, moreover, evident that Pecock, both in sermons and in his works, adopted that most perilous of all courses, the attempt to justify orthodoxy and authority by paradoxical and irregular kinds of reasoning. He met the complaints against the bishops by preaching at St. Paul's Cross that bishops were not bound to preach ; and the Repressor attacks Lollardy with arguments which his enemies either seriously thought, or affected for their own ends to think, as heretical as the views he combated. He had been befriended by the good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, but after Gloucester's murder he seems to have made friends with Margaret and Suffolk, and obtained, in 1550, his translation to Chichester. Suffolk was extremely unpopular, but as Pecock was not arraigned for heresy for seven years to come, it seems excessive to connect his fall with the favourite. However, it was distinct enough when it came, whatever the cause. He was accused of treating authority disrespectfully in his works, as well as of heresy in setting up reason (though on the orthodox side) as the criterion of religious truth. He was condemned, had the choice of recantation or the secular arm, recanted abjectly, handing his books to the executioner to burn, resigned or was deprived of his bishopric, and probably spent the short remainder of his life in jtrict confinement at Thorney Abbey. The extreme importance of Pecock's position in the history of English prose — a position which, from its original and representative character, will save us much repetition if it be dwelt on here — consists mainly in two points : tlip effpf t upon sty le_ which the vocalnilary. purpose of his books^ enabled, or rather obliged, him to attempt and partly produce, and his vocabulary. As regards the first point, it must be remembered that, though there may have been gross ignorance and intellectual sloth among the lower friars and monks, the educated and academic clergy of the fifteenth century were, with certain allowances, trained with much greater intellectual keenness and severity than any class of men at the present day, the much sneered-at scholastic discipline providing and enforcing an intellectual askesis to which there is no modern parallel. But all this training went on in Latin, and the problem was how to conduct a dispute on the same lines in English. Wyclif had been 1 He had, however, excited the most violent personal and religious antipathy. Gascoigne's Liber Veritatum {vide supra, p. 117) is permeated with a sort of refrain of execration of " Reginaldus Pecok. Wallicus origine, episcopus Assavensis." CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 207 an adept in scholastic argument, but when he had occasion to employ it he had mostly used Latin, and his English works were mainly, though not entirely, addressed to the vulgar. The lapse of more than half a century had made it not merely possible, but desir- able, to change the general veime from Latin to English, and to address clergy and laity at once. It is very probable that this divulgence helped to irritate Pecock's enemies against him : but that is beside our present point, which is that, having undertaken to conduct arguments of scholastic theology in the vernacular, he had to adapt that vernacular itself to the strictly accurate thought, and the precise terminology, required by scholastic habits. He did not entirely succeed, but he succeeded in a degree really surprising, and one which could not but enlarge the powers of English correspond- ingly. Beside the mere narrative of Mandeville and Trevisa, the popular scientific exposition of Chaucer's Astrolabe, and the popular invective ( for it is often little more) of the average Wyclifian tract, there now took its place downright argument in English, the setting forth in vernacular dress of the long-proved technicalities and terminologies of the schools in a tongue understanded of the people. The vocabulary which Pecock adopted or invented for this purpose has special interest. It is on the one side necessarily more technical than Chaucer's, and on the other hand it is deliberately more archaic and vernacular. In particular, we see in it abundant examples of a process of thoroughgoing "Teutonification" of Latin, Romance, and even Greek forms, which would have almost satisfied the champions of "ungothroughsomeness" for " impenetrability" in o\ir own times. Pecock lias " about-writing " for •' circumscription " of a coin; "aforebar" and "beforebar" for "prevent"; "alight" not in the modern sense, but = " alleviate " ; " apropre " for " appropriate " (an instance of a general tendency of his to cut off Latin suffixes) ; '•beholdable," an audacious Anglicising of "theoretic"; "closingly" for "inclusively"; "customable" for "habitual"; "endly" for " finally " ; nay, he even retains the old English " undeadly " for " immortal." And that these and a vast number of other vernacu- larities were deliberate is shown by the fact that he has no horror of foreign terms as such, where he cannot get a vernacular form, though when he can find or make the latter he always prefers it. In fact, though this compound of forms that never took permanent place in the laniiuage, with archaisms on the one hand, and Latinisms on the other, makes Pecock's pages look very harsh and obscure, it is clear that his scheme was a possible one ; that it actually did exercise English in form, and enrich it in matter, to no small degree; and that, though the classical reaction of the Renaissance prevented much of his vocabulary from receiving final letters of naturalisation, 2o8 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv a good deal more than has actually been naturalised might have been admitted with no disadvantage. No other of the early fifteenth-century prose writers — i.e. those born certainly or probably within the verge of the fourteenth, or but a little later — equals Pecock in original and representative character, or Malory in- charm. But John Capgrave and Sir John Capgrave," Fortcscue, at least, deserve to keep here their traditional tabyan. places, if Only because each admitted a new subject — law in the one case, original history in the other — to the liberty of English prose. For tescue, whose not certain birth and death dates are usually given as 1394 and 1474, was a member of the famous western family of his name, an Oxford man, a lawyer, and in 1442 Chief-Justice of the King's Bench. He was a Lancastrian through- out the war; but after Tewkesbury rallied to Edward IV., though he had to make a distinctly ignominious recantation in print. Of his very numerous works, some of which are in Latin, the most important in English is the rather well-known Gover nance of Englan d, one passage of which, the famous contrast between the unruly indepen- dence of the Englishman and the slavish cowardice of France, is equally notable and characteristic. Capgrave, born in 1393 at Lynn, died in 1464. He was a monk, an d wrote niost voluminouslyjn Jboth languages. His Chronicle of ^itglajid is his main Title to admission here. No two styles could well be more different than his and Pecock's, the former being not indeed incorrect, but devoid of character, singularly free from archaic obscurity and archaic relish alike, suited fairly for plain busi ness-like nar ration, but hardly for anything else, and on the whole more like Mandeville, with the zest and poetic quality taken out, but the short simply-linked sentences remaining, than like any other of his predecessors. Allow- ing for the advance of some fifty years, the style of the next historian of note, Robert_J^bj^n, who represents the second half of tjie century as the Prior of Lynn does the first, is not unlike Capgrave's.^ The importance of Caxton in English prose was by no means merely ministerial, merely limited to the fact that he was the introducer of Malory's immortal book, and of a little other good matter to the English reading public, or that he was the first practitioner of the great art of printing among us- For very much of his extensive work was not merely printed, but written by himself; and though it is perfectly true that the matter was, save in an infinitesimal degree, translated, yet that in the circum- 1 Fortescue's chief work has been edited by C. Plummer, 1885; his whole works by Lord Clermont. Capgrave's Chronicle is in the " Rolls Series," ed. Hingeston (1858); his long verse St. Katharine has been given by the E.E.T.S. The standard edition of Fabyan is Sir Henry Ellis's in i^il*^- 209 CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE . stances, as was pointed out before, does not diminish his claims. It was impossible for any one of intelligence to render Latin or French into English without exercising the youthful language in the airs, the graces, the crafts of its elder. There is no more interesting passage of its kind than that where Caxton, in the prologue to the Recuyell of the Histories .of Troye, tells us how " I, having no great charge of occupation, took a French book and read therein many strange and marvellous histories, wherein I had great pleasure and delight, as well for the novelty of the same as for the fair language of French, which was in prose so well and compendiously set and written, that viethoiight I understood the sentence, and substance of every matter^ One sees at once the sentiment and the aim not of Caxton merely, but of a dozen and a hundred known and unknown translators of French and Latin in these early days, seeing "the fair language of French," or the grave and stately language of Latin, reflecting how destitute English, at least in prose (for they had no doubt about their Chaucer, even if they did a little unadvisedly couple Gower and Lydgate with him), was of such fairness, such gravity, such stateliness, and determining, so far as in them lay, to give readers in the vernacular not merely the bare matter, but the matter with some art. Nor is Caxton himself to be by any means lightly spoken of for accomplishment in this respect. He tells us here and else- where of his difficulties in adjusting his broad and rude Kentish dialect (we know that Kent, near as it was to London, was up to the fourteenth century certainly farther from a literary dialect than Northumbria itself"), how he tried to make a prose style that should do for prose something not too far below what Chaucer had done for verse. To a very great extent he succeeded, though he some- times exceeded in the direction of literalness. Take him with Pecock, who was probably not twenty years his senior, and we see that his form, if not quite so interesting to the historian, is far more adapted for general literature ; take him with Malory, who was probably of his own age, and we find from a different point of comparison the same result. It is clear that Caxton was in at least two senses a man of letters, that he had the secret of literary crafts- manship. The middle third of the fifteenth century appears to have been less fruitful in the birth-dates of persons important in literature than any period of equal Icngtii for the last six hundred years at least. Indeed, between Caxton, wlio was probably born about 141 5, and Fisher, who was (again probably) born just aTjout half a century later, it would not appear that a single writer of the sliglitest importance- in the history of English prose first drew in luiglish air. But the last thirty or thirty-five years of the century did something to 2IO THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv clear away the reproach with Lord Berners (1467-1532), Fisher himself (1465-1535), Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Sir Thomas Elyot ( 1 488-1 546), and the early controversialists and Biblical trans- lators of the Reformation, among whom, from the point of view of prose, Cranmer probably and Latimer certainly take the first rank. Of Berners we have spoken ; the others . must have some notice here. Justice to Fisher's character as a man, an ecclesiastic, and (with allowances for a certain want of strength) a politician has been done for a long time ; indeed, even at the times when anti- " Popish " feeling ran highest in England, his fidelity to honour and con- science, and his hapless fate, had preserved him from obloquy. But it was not till the republication of his English works by Mr. Mayor for the E.E.T.S.^ that it was possible for justice to be generally done to his position in the history of prose. He was a Yorkshireman, was born at Beverley, and was educated at Cambridge, where, through his connection with Lady Margaret, the mother of Henry VH., he had much to do with the founding of Christ's and St. John's Colleges. His patroness made him her confessor in 1502, the next year he became the first incumbent of her professorship of divinity, while in another twelvemonth he was made Bishop of Rochester and Chancellor of his University. For many years he was an active bishop, a great friend to tlie new classical learning, and a j)ersona grata at the courts both of Henry VIL and his son. The affair of the divorce alarmed his conscience, and he seems to have been the dupe of the " Maid of Kent " ; while his election to the Cardinalate, after he had been imprisoned for treason, so irritated the passionate king that he beheaded Fisher as a practical repartee. Fisher's English works as yet published consist of a long Trea- tise, practically made up of Sermons, on the Penitential Psalms, a funeral Sermon on Henry VH., another on Lady Margaret, a third against Luther, and a fourth preached on Good 'fn\tyte."* Friday, with two little tractates written in prison, a Spiritual Consolation to his sister Elizabeth, and the Ways to Perfect Religion. Thus almost the whole of his work is orat orical at heast in profession. But this matters little, for the wKole literature of the time was so saturated with the idea of "rhetoric" that everything took more or less the rhetorical if not oratorical turn. And Fisher's rhetoric never has the very least touch of the impromptu about it. On the contrary, he is one of the very earliest 1 1876. Good judges had, however, always appreciated Fisher, and he duly figures in the remarkable Specimens of Prose Writers (3 vols. London, 1807) to which George Burnett gave his name, but of which Burnett's friend, comrade at Balliol, and fellow-" Pantisocrat," Southey, was the real inspirer. CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 211 English writers in whom we can discern the deliberate selection and practice of certain means and methods wholly to achieve style. He has got beyond the painful effort of Pecock to forge a vocabulary and arrange a syntax capable of conveying the effects of Latin argument in the vernacular. He is not, like Caxton. endeavouring dimly to get in English results (what, he does not quite understand) as pleasant as those of French. He has already discovered, and deliberately experiments for, rhetorical effect with the peculiar resources provided by the double dictionary — Teutonic and Romance — of English, as well as by the more general devices of cadence, parallelism, and the usual iigures of speech. The simple but extraordinarily effective plan of coupling a " Saxon " and a Latin word, which is so noticeable in the Authorised Version of the Bible, and which may have arisen before the rhetorical advantage of it was perceived, from the mere convenience of addressing one term to " lered " and the other to " lewed " folk, appear in him constantly. '' Wood " [mad] and "cruel," " horrible " and " fearful," " bruckle " [brittle] and " frail," "end" and "conclusion," and a thousand more stud his pages. Further, he has discovered the effectiveness — more dangerous and more likely to surfeit — of the triplet — "fasting, crying, and coming to the choir," "worldly honours, worldly riches, and fleshly pleasures." Inversion, a device so naturally suggested by the different order of Greek, Latin, and English, has no secrets for him, and, as inversion always does, suggests cadence. He is aware of the assistance given in colouring and varying prose effect by the admixture of long and short sentences ; and it is scarcely too much to say that we find in him, and for the first time, examples of the rhetorical, as well as of the logical, construction and use of the paragraph. Side by side with his classical grace he has something of the vcrnacularity of Latimer, and he makes use of the quaint mystical and allegoric comparisons, which the Middle Ages elaborated from Scriptural and patristic use, with a felicity which occasionally does not come much short of that of the greatest rhetoricians of the seventeenth century. In fact, were it not for the spelling and for the obligatory Latin quotations, he is altogether wonderfully in advance of his time. Fisher's great companion in misfortune, Sir Thomas More, holds a less distinguished position in the strict history of strictly English literature than is generally thought. His famous Utopia was never En{rlished l)y himself at all, nor bv others till some . " ^ . More. tune after his death. It is therefore quite preposterous to quote it under his name as belonging to KnL,'Iish prose; we might as well include Homer, Froissart, and Machiavelli as English writers. His extensive polemical writing is not remarkable in style, and is .spoilt by the violence which pervaded both sides in 212 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv Reformation controversy. To speak of him, therefore, as "the Father of English prose " is to apply a silly phrase in a fashion monstrously unhistorical. Even the History of Richard III., which is his chief claim, and (if his) a sound one, to a place in the story of style, has been much overpraised. The eulogies of critics like Hallam were probably determined by the fact that it is an early and not unhappy example of the rather colourless " classical " prose, of which a little later we shall find the chief exponents to be Ascham and his friends at Cambridge. It is, of course, a good deal better than Capgrave, and it is free from Pecock's harshness and crudity of phrase. But as it cannot on the one hand compare for richness, colour, and repre- sentative effect with the style of Berners, one of the two best writers of prose nearly contemporary with More, so it is not to be men- tioned with that of Fisher, the other, for nice rhetorical artifice and intelligent employment of craftsman-like methods of work. But it is much more " eighteenth century " than either, and this com- mended it to Hallam ; while More's pleasant wit and great intellectual ability naturally set it above the work of mere translators or com- pilers. Sir Thomas has a secure place in English history, and no mean one in that very interesting history of works of distinction com- posed in Latin, since the arrival of the vernaculars at years of discre- tion, which has yet to be written. But his jjlace in the strict History of English literature is very small, and not extraordinarily high. As Fisher occupies the most commanding position among the divines of the time in reference to original and skilful handling of English style, so the opposite side furnished the most remarkable and successful examples of what could be done by carrying out his principles. Tyndale, the next com- petent translator of the Bible to Wyclif, is more noteworthy for his hapless fate and for a vigorous controversial pen, than for distinct literary merit ; but Latimer, Coverdale, and Cranmer must be better spoken of. Hugh Latimer ^ indeed — who was born in 1489 of a family of Leicestershire yeomen, was educated at Clare Hall, Cam- bridge, became Bishop of Worcester in 1539, and was burnt in 1555 at Oxford — holds a very important and somewhat peculiar position, ranking with Bunyan, Cobbett, and in a lesser degree Defoe, as the chief practitioner of a perfectly homely and vernacular style. Such a style naturally connects itself with an intense egotism ; and Latimer is as egotistic, though not as arrogant, as Cobbett himself. He was a thoroughly honest and a thoroughly practical man, no partisan in the bad sense (that is to say, in the way of winking at practices by friends which he would have stormed against in foes), 1 Latimer is well presented in two little volumes of Mr. Arber's invaluable reprints. The Ploughers and Seven Sermons. CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 213 with all the taste of the common people for vivid homely illustration, and sometimes, as in the universally known description of the paternal household, capable of extraordinarily graphic presentment of fact. Beyond the range of personal description and shrewd, unadorned argument or denunciation his literary gifts would probably not have extended in any case very far. But as a popular sermon-writer in his own days, or as a popular journalist in these, he had in the one case, and could have had in the other, but very, few rivals and no superiors. Nor is it improper to notice that his raciness and vernacularity were specially useful as correctives of the rather monotonous correctness which the imitation of Ciceronianism in English was likely to bring in. The merits of Coverdale and Cranmer are rather matters of imputation and lending than of certain attribution by right, the claims of the one resting on his supposed principal share of the merits of the early Tudor translations of the Bible, those of the other partly on this, but still more on his reputed authorship of a large part of the Edwardian Liturgy. Miles Coverdale, who was born in Yorkshire about 1488, and educated at Cambridge, became a Protestant exile on the Continent, and was busy on more versions than one of the Scriptures, chiefly in the fourth decade of the sixteenth century. He became Bishop of Exeter in 1551, and though he suffered imprisonment in the Marian persecution, was not restored later, dying in 1569 as merely an incumbent. If (which does not seem to be absolutely certain) he was the actual translator of the Bible of 1535 which goes by his name, there is no doubt that some of the best phrasing, for sound and sense, of the great Authorised Version is originally due to him. His prologue and other editorial matter certainly seems to contain not a little of the peculiar music which has always been associated with the English Bible, and which the revisers of a few years ago showed such extraordinary ability in removing whenever they had an opportunity. It must, however, be said that even for this quality there are advocates of Tyndale's claims in opposition to Coverdale. The praise claimed for Cranmer — that of being the chief author of the Collects and Prayers of the Anglican Liturgy — is even higher, inasmuch as the matter, though necessarily showing common forms of phrase and common stocks of matter, is more • 1/^- 1 ■»»•! !•• Cranmer. origmal. Cranmer was born m Nottinghamshire in 1489, became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, took a great (at least large) part in the affair of the divorce, and without holding any bishop's see i)rcvi()usly, was ai)pointed direct to the Primacy at Warham's death in 1532. He was burnt at Oxford in 1556. His character as a man does not concern us. But it is only fair to say 214 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv that the considerable body of his doctrinal and controversial works displays, as far as the matter will admit, a command of melodious word-arrangement not much inferior to that which is to be found passim in the Liturgy. The truth seems to be that this peculiar style — the swan-song of Middle English transferred from verse to prose — was less the property of any individual man than abroad in the air at the time ; and that it found utterance whenever fit voice and fit matter came together, from Malory to Cranmer and from Berners to Coverdale. Hardly ever afterwards could the touch of archaism be attained without deliberate pastiche ; never before could the writers boast the possession of a JulLvqcabulary and a tolerably exercised practice. The rude vulgarity of partisan controversy, the learned dulness of argumentative exposition, often mar this music; but where, as in the Prayer-book, the mattfirjndited is of the best, ti»ef^the style is of the best likewise — of such a Kest as was never" agSin to be naturally proaOced^and hardly ever to be imitated by the most loving and delicate art. INTERCHAPTER IV The general lessons of the fifteenth century ^ are rather unusually easy to disentangle ; indeed, the very want of intrinsic, and so misleading, interest leaves these lessons all the more exposed. In poetry we have little or no progress to chronicle, and a sur- prisingly small amount of positive achievement, this latter being found almost wholly in the small group of the better Scottish poets and in the anonymous writers of ballads and carols. Negatively the century may be said to have done at least one very good thing — to have shown by the repeated practice of persons, sometimes pos- sessed of actual genius, that the revived alliterative schemes, even crutched and bolstered with rhyme and stanza arrangement, would not do. Also, in pursuing another branch of the same poetic maze of " passages that lead to nothing," it may be said to have shown very clearly the danger of a too stiff and elaborate poetic diction. Otherwise its poetical practice, in the higher and more regular poetic kinds, was a rather touching, but for the most part hopelessly unsuc- cessful, attempt to make one good custom corrupt the world, to continue Chaucerian form and Lorrisian matter long after the latter had lost any real connection with poetic power, and without the gifts of language, of humour, of study of nature and humanity, which had given value to the former. Yet there had more than possibly arisen during this very time — there had to a certainty come into far more extensive use than ever before, a kind of popular and only half-literary poetry, which was gradually to supply solvents for this stiffness, breath and life for this lack of inspiration, to stir the blood of the great new literary poets of the next age like a trumpet, to give Sliakespeare himself scraps worth decking his own fabric with, models for his own unapproach- able and inestimable lyrics, and last, but far indeed from least, by the very irregularity of its apparently artless art, to maintain and to •As in the case of Middle English, there is no single book to which the student can be referred for this period; and as there, Morley, Ten Brink, and the latest Warton do not completely supply the want. 215 2i6 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book extend that sort of liberty which is the* glory and the essence of English poetry. It is a curious thing that this liberty has been, throughout our history, in much more danger than the political freedom which has occupied historians at such length, simply because the attempts on it liave been made not by tyrants from without but by mistaken persons from within. Even now there are folk who will not face the plain fact that Chaucer allowed himself trisyllabic feet, but try to get him into the hard and fast dungeon of the decasyllabic by slurs and elisions and all manner of unnatural tricks. His own immediate successors no doubt tried to tell their syllables as exactly as they told their beads. But the blessed liberty of the ballad was beside them all the time, and served as an alternative to and a pro- test against their theory. Very closely connected with this matter is the already noted change of pronunciation which certainly went on throughout the century, though we are in the profoundest ignorance of its details, and can only dimly appreciate its results in the new verse of Surrey and Wyat afterwards. A good deal, no doubt, was due to the in- creasing disuse and at last total abolition of the final e, with the con- sequent substitution of plurals in s for es and the like, the dropping of the infinitive en., and all the rest of it. For it must be (though it is not always) remembered that a process of this kind is a very far- reaching one. You cannot merely cut a syllable off a word and leave the sound-value of the rest as it was. The lopping and topping, in at least some cases, must affect the balance of the word, shift its centre of gravity, alter its relations to other words in the verse or the sentence. The strange tricks played, for instance, by Wyat with the syllable eth., and his apparent belief in the propriety of rhyming it by itself, without any regard to what comes before, must have ultimate reasons of this sort, though we may, even as in a glass darkly, have difficulty in seeing what they were. So, too, the increasing isolation of the country and the language, as both strengthened the disuse of the glib trilingualism which distinguished such a man as Gower, must, with other subtle and obscure influences of the same kind, have had effect. We see something of this effect in the half-defiant, half-despairing doggerel of Skelton, as well as in the patient plodding of Hawes. The details of the uprising of the great hybrid between poetry and prose — Drama — we still, for the same reasons of convenient juxtaposition, reserve to the next Book ; but more even than in the last Interchapter it is important to observe that its earlier forms were now perfectly familiar to the English nation, if they had as yet (till the very close of the period) scantily commended themselves to the regular practitioners of English literature. The mystery and IV INTERCH AFTER IV 217 miracle-play had perhaps for centuries — certainly for some century and a half — been practiced by the not always rude mechanicals of prob- ably every great town in the kingdom. The farce-interludes, originally introduced to prevent the effect being too solemn, springing naturally out of such scriptural incidents as the Tower of Babel, or grafted without too much violence, as in the famous " Mak " scenes of the Second Shepherds'' Play, had gradually detached themselves, and con- stituted almost an independent kind. The Morality was simply the dramatisation of the Rose allegory — the favourite matter of the time thrown into what was fast becoming its favourite form. That re- ligious feeling after the Reformation exaggerated the dislike of Catholicism for dramatic performance as such, and did not maintain the exceptional tolerance for religious drama, mattered little. The excessive earnestness and sternness of the time required easement in some direction, and found it in this ; nor was it till nearly a century and a half after the close of our period that Puritanism could have its way with the drama. Of prose, as the details given in the last chapter sufficiently show, it is possible to speak with less allowance. That the period gives one of the best books in English literature may be partly, though it certainly is not wholly, an accident ; that the translations, not yet final, but substantively formed, of the Bible and the adaptations of the Liturgy at its close have supplied nearly four centuries since with models of exquisite cadence, of enchanting selection and arrangement of vocabulary, is, if not an accident, the result of a concatenation of circumstances not all of which — not even the most of which — are literary. But it is no accident, it is of the essence of the literary history and development of tlie time, that the resources, the practice, the duties, the opportunities, of prose continue during the whole course of the period steadily to expand, to .subdivide themselves, to acquire diversity, adequacy, accomplishment. That this is done for the most part through the medium of translation and compilation does no harm, but on the contrary does a great deal of good ; that a certain amount of the practice is in the nature of not always successful ex- periment is nothing to be ashamed of, or to be annoyed at, but, on the contrary, a fair reason for satisfaction and pride. No single secret of the greatness of English literature exceeds in importance the fact that Englishmen have never been satisfied to import or to copy a literary form bodily from any other language or country, as Spain adopted Italian artificial poetry, and as France adopted the Senecan drama; and this has of itself necessitated constant and very often unsuccessful experiment before the right kind or the right adjustment has been hit ujjon. 2i8 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY book iv It is scarcely too much to say that the fifteenth century, with a few years backward into the fourteenth and onwards into the six- teenth, plays the same part in regard to English prose that the thirteenth century, with probably (for our knowledge is dimmer here) a few years backward into the twelfth century and certainly more than a few forward into the fourteenth, plays in regard to English verse. The necessary stocks of material, some of which will have to be rejected, are accumulated ; the necessary plant and methods of working, not a little of which will have to be perfected, are slowly and painfully elaborated. Additional lateness in time, and perhaps less difficulty in kind, give us indeed a more perfect result in Malory's prose than we can find in the verse of any poet between Layamon and Hampole ; but mutatis mutandis the historical position is the same, and the historical gains and results not so very different. No single prose writer, not even Hooker, was in any near future to do for the one what Chaucer in the later fourteenth century did for the other, but that again was a consequence of the necessities of the case. It is not the least of the advantages and pleasures of that historical study of literature which has, with halting footsteps, it is true, at last followed the historical study of politics and social development, that it provides these "condolences," these "vails" in the seemingly dullest period of the actual literary course. The airy generahser may flap his wing disdainfully at the fifteenth century and hurry to pastures more succulent ; the merely indolent person may decline the labour necessary to acquaint himself with it. But both will do what they do, and decline what they decline, at their peril. Nor, while criticism accompanies history, is there any peril on the other side. There is not the least danger of any but pedants — that is to say, the same genus, but a different species of it. as the generalisers — neglecting Shakespeare or Spenser because they take the pains to read Barclay and Bokenam. Yet shall those who decline to take notice of Barclay and Bokenam run no small risk of not fiilly understanding even Spenser, even Shakespeare. BOOK V ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO THE DEATH OF SPENSER CHAPTER I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA Unbroken development of Drama from Miracle Plays — Origin of these — The Miracle-Play cycles, etc. — Non-sacred episodes — Moralities — The Four Elements — Other Interludes — John Heywood and The Four PF^ Thersites — Other Interludes — Their drift — Bale's King jfohn — Ralph Roister Doister — Gammer Gurton's Needle — Gorboduc — Other early attempts — The demand and the supply — Early plays by Gascoigne and others — Disputes as to plays — Difficulties in their way The outburst of En'glish Drama is so pre-eminently the glory of the Elizabethan period of literature proper, that it has seemed on the whole better to take no detailed notice in the preceding Books of the early experiments — not very early, not very numerous, and not of the first importance in literature — which we a^eKa^rrTent possess in that literary kind. Among other advantages of Drama of postponing the treatment of these to this special place, "^"piays^.^*^ ' not the least is the emphasis which can perhaps best be given by such an arrangement to a protest against certain sentences of the late Professor Morley's — sentences astonishing in so careful a student of literature and so attached a lover of the drama. "The Modern Drama," .says Mr. Morley,^ " did not in any way arise out of the Miracle Plays. Miracle plays did not pass into morality plays; nor did moralities afterwards pass into the dramas. The modern drama arose out of the study and imitation of classical plays in schools and universities." Of these assertions the first three must be directly traversed, and the fourth largely corrected. The modern 1 English Plays, p. 2. 219 220 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v drama did arise out of the Miracles. The Miracles did pass into the Moralities. The Moralities did pass into modern dramas. And though the imitation of the ancient classical drama, and its perform- ance in schools and universities, coloured, shaped, generally in- fluenced, the modern drama most momentously, this drama no more arose out of them than Spenser arose out of Virgil, or Hooker out of Cicero. According to the system adopted in this book, we need concern ourselves little with the thin and dubious subject of the earliest mediceval drama in Latin, and in the vernaculars other than English. It is sufficient to say that at last, probably about the these." tenth century, the extreme disapprobation with which the Church had always regarded dramatic performances — a disapprobation justified not only by the moral scandals of the ancient theatre but by its direct association with the persecution of Christianity — gave way very partially and very slowly, in obedience to the well-known principle of enlisting strong human tastes, as far as could be lawfully done, on the side of religion. Whether, as is sometimes and plausibly contended, this was partly the result of a natural and imperceptible development of the dramatic side of the Church services themselves may be left undecided. It is sufficient to say that we have from France Latin mystery or miracle plays which may be of the eleventh century, Latin mixed with a little French nearly as early, and plays wholly in French which are as old as the twelfth. It is possible, from notices that remain, that there may have been English, or partly English, plays, if not of this same century, at any rate of the thirteenth. But those that we have are much later, the earliest ^ of them not being older than the fourteenth. And whereas at least two famous examples remain of purely secular French plays from the thirteenth, nothing of the kind is found in English till the end of the fifteenth, if not even later. Further, though we have a few miracle plays proper — that is to say, plays the subjects of which are taken from the lives of the saints and the acts ascribed to Our Lady — the majority of them are mysteries, i.e. dramatisations of the sacred history. Those which were wont to be performed by the guilds or trades of the towns remain to us in four large collections and a few other batches and single examples. Of these some account may now be given. 1 This is usually taken to be the Harrowing of Hell, first printed by Halli- well, and assigned to the reign of Edward IL It is an interesting piece in not quite 250 lines of octosyllabic couplet, but rather rudimentarily dramatic. A prologue introduces it ; Christ and Satan interchange some half-score speeches of summons and refusal; the janitor runs away, and our Lord, binding Satan, is welcomed by, and graciously answers, the patriarchs in turn. CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 221 The four great collections,^ known by the names of their place of performance, are the York, Wakefield (also called Towneley, from the former owners of the MS.), Coventry, and Chester xhe Miracle- plays. The first extends to forty-eight pieces, and Play cycles, may go back to the middle of the fourteenth century ; the second to thirty, the MS. being a century later; the Coventry (same date) to forty-two ; and the Chester (of which we have no MS. older than the eve of the sixteenth) to twenty-four. We have also one of a Newcastle cycle, one of a Dublin, an East-Anglian version of Abraham and Isaac, one Norfolk " Sacrament Play," besides the so-called " Digby Mysteries," and the oldest of all, the Harrowi7ig of Hell,^\\\c\\\i2i?, been thought to be possibly as old as the first quarter of the fourteenth century. The details of the per- formance of these, though very far from uninteresting, concern the history not of literature but of the stage. It is enough to say that they were usually divided among the handicrafts of a town, and per- formed by them on large movable stages or storied waggons in different open places. Of their strictly literary character some account is necessary. As may be presumed from the great numbers contained in each collection, the individual play is very short as a rule, indeed rather an " Act " of the whole than a separate drama. But there is great diversity of length. For instance, the very interesting Second Slieplierds' Flay of the Towneley or Wakefield set has between 700 and 800 lines; the first of the York set does not go beyond 180. The metre in which they are written is extremely various. We find both rhyme and alliteration — the two being sometimes combined; long and short lines; lyrical stanzas 'of the most various and com- plicated kind, couplets, octosyllables alternately rhymed, and other variations — no single metre predominating with anything like the same distinctness as that shown by the octosyllabic couplet in the French analogues and originals. A very little examination of these plays will show the astonishing fallacy of the ])roposition that the modern drama did not grow out of them. Miss Toulmin Smith has drawn attention to the interest- ing fact tliat the York or Northern cycle of mystery plays bears a remarkable resemblance, in order and choice of subjects, to the 1 Tlu-se arc now accessible in the foliowinc; editions: — York, ed. Miss L. T. Smith, Oxford, 1885; Chester, ed. Ueimling. Tart I. E.E.T.S. 1892; Towneley. ed. England and Pollard, E.E.T.S. 1897 ; Coventry, ed. Halliwell, Shakespeare Society, 1841 (reprint in hand for E.E.T.S.) ; Digby, twice edited by Dr. Furni- vall for the New Shakespeare Society in 1882, and for the E.E.T.S. in 1896. A most excellent selection from all these, with others from the Harrowing of Hell to early sixteenth-century pieces like Tliersites and IJalc's King Jolin, will be found in Mr. A. W. Pollard's English Miracle Flays (Oxford, 1890). 222 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v invaluable Scripture-history paraphrase in verse called the Cursor Mtindi {j.ndc p. 71), also Northern, and probably not much anterior to the cycle itself in date. In fact, the development of epUodes^ verse-stories, sacred and profane, into prose tales on the one hand and dramas on the other, which we find exemplified in French, beyond all doubt took place after a similar fashion in English. And almost from the first in both languages we find the strict throwing of the Scripture history into narrative *' by personages," as the instructive French phrase has it, incessantly diversified by, and gradually breaking up into, episodes and inter- ludes of chiefly ftircical matter, which is only indirectly connected, or not connected at all, with the main subject. Instances of indirect connection are to be found especially in the story of the Ark and of the Tower of Babel, both of which were fixed on almost from the first as opportunities for comic by-play and digression. The great instance of the sheer addition is the famous Second Shepherds'' Play above referred to, where the. rogueries of " Mak," the sheep-stealer, are simply though not unnaturally superadded to the Gospel story of '* While shepherds watched their flocks by night." So the Magdalene legend gives the germ (of which authors eagerly av^ail themselves) not merely of comic, but of absolutely romantic treatment. In other words, Stcunda Pastoriim of the Towneley and the Digby Magdalene simply give us comedy and tragedy, or at least romantic drama, ready to hand, as additions in each case to the Bible matter. When these things, especially the farce parts, had once been given as zests and relishes, they were sure to be expected as a main element of the banquet, and by degrees to be presented by themselves. So again, nothing can be stranger or (except in so far as matters partly of opinion can never be said to be absolutely true or false) falser than the statement that the Morality did not arise out of the Miracle Play, and did not in turn hasten the modern. Drama, having by means of the miracle play, and the miracle play only, taken regular rank as a department of literature, and especially of popular literature, was bound to undergo in the order of its appearance the various changes which passed over literature generally. In other words, and descending from the general to the particular, it was certain to experience, and to show traces of, the overwhelming spirit of allegorising which came upon Europe in the late fourteenth and throughout the fifteenth century. It did show them very strongly indeed, and the result was the Morality. This naturally did not altogether supersede the Miracle Play proper; but it took place beside it, the Biblical personages of the older form giving place to personified abstractions exactly as the knights of romance proper gave way to the Grand-Amours and King CHAP. 1 PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 223 Harts of allegorical romance. The titles of the Moralities given in Mr. Pollard's excellent selection of this division of Drama — The Castle of Perseverance, Every Man, The Four Elements, Magnifi- cence— ^'^\\ without going further, suggest and almost fully explain the nature of this class of composition, and the list could be largely extended from French, and not a little from English, sources. Generally speaking, the Morality either morals the whole life of man after the fashion of Hawes and Douglas, or selects a particular vice or virtue for similar treatment. In form it does not differ much from a miracle play, though, being as a rule later, it shows the metrical and other changes of the time. Yet it maintains that singular indulgence in lyrical arrangement which has made some, hardly with exaggeration, call the Miracle Play itself the chief store- house of formal lyric in Middle English. This variety of drama has generally undergone, and must be said to a great extent to deserve, the reproach of being one of the very 'dullest divisions of literature. The fearful prolixity which attacked all letters during the fifteenth century did not spare it, and though English Moralities are perhaps shorter than French, the Castle of Perseverance above referred to extends to the very respect- able, or disreputable, length of 3500 lines. By degrees either the name began to carry a damaging connotation with it, or the thing was felt to require relief. At any rate, the Interlude — it is not known exactly how or when — arose in its place. There is no certainty as to the extent to which the proper meaning of the term " interlude " attaches to this class of composition ; but it continued, in name and substance both, to be composed for reading, if not for acting, in the remoter parts of England (especially Wales) till within the present century. Many interludes are simply moralities ; but the obviously correcter meaning of the word corresponds closely to the French farce, and is so used of the interludes in Sir David Lyndsay's great MoT^Wty -Sot ie {vide ante, p. 177). The farce-interlude naturally continued that farce-episode of the Miracles and Mysteries which has been already noticed; and though the regular French fashion of weaving mystery, morality, sotie, and farce in a tetralogy does not seem to have obtained with us, the Interlude gradually detached itself more and more from its companions.' We shall see this very distinctly if we take the plays contained in the two first volumes of Hazlitt's Dodsley,'^ most, if not all, of which 1 It is important and interestinfj to notice tliat in the work of the last of the "giant race before the flood," Shirley, we have actually subsisting examples of the Interlude proper, and its resultant play, in the Contention of Honour and Riches and ' Honoria and Mammon. 2 15 vols. London, 1874-76. 224 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v are of the Interlude kind. The Four Elements is of the kind nearest to a Morality, and indeed almost confusable with that. The characters are the Messeno;er (showing traces of classi- Elements. ^'^ influence). Nature (^Afatura N'aturata), Humanity, Studious Desire, Sensual Appetite, The Taverner, Ex- perience, Ignorance, "and if ye list ye may bring in a Disguising." As usual in this class of play, the dramatis personae so clearly betray the whole course of the action that one does not quite see what need there was for it, and rather understands the frequent disinclination of the early dramatist to provide these tell-tale drajnatis personae at all. Humanity is coached by Nature, and more in detail by Studious Desire ; becoming a little tired by this improving company, he is bewitched by Sensual Appetite, whom The Taverner seconds very zealously. Then come in Experience and Studious Desire, who talk Geography. Humanity is fought for by them on the one side, by Sensual Appetite and Ignorance on the other, and is left undecided, pleading his case with ambiguous arguments to the returning Nature. The whole of this piece, like most of the early dramas, is versified in a sort of doggerel which takes for basis sometimes a longer line, sometimes a shorter, and may be called, rather for convenience than strict exactitude, doggerelised heroic or Alexandrine and doggerelised octo- .syllable. The whole class of metre exemplifies the same influences which show themselves in Skelton and have been already discussed. The piece dates probably from the first or second decade of the sixteenth century. Calisto and Meliboea is a rendering of the famous Spanish satiric medley of the Celestina. Every Man and Hick Scorner are again moral interludes, but with a difference, the first inclining to the general lines of the Morality as above given, the Interludes, second a very early example (it was printed by Wynkyn de Worde) of the invective so frequent in English against the deboshed youth who returns from foreign travel all the worse for it. Allegorical characters, however, are almost as freely introduced in the one as in the other, and the metre is still doggerel. On the other hand, The Pardoner and the Friar, which is one of the works of John Heywood, the chief named author of this stage of drama, has nothing allegorical about it, and is simply a dramatised dialogue between the two characters, in which the stock satire on the occupations of both is introduced. The World and the Child and God's Promises are, the first a pure Morality, the second a cross between Morality and Mystery. But on The Four PP, another and the chief work of Heywood, we must make longer stay. John Heywood is said to have been a Londoner and possessed CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 225 of some property. He was educated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, which afterwards became Pembroke College, and is said to have been a friend of More. He seems to have been a , , „ , JonnHeywooQ consistent Roman Catholic, and after some trouble in and The Four P P Edward's reign became one of the few literary favourites of Mary, and exiled himself after her death, dying at an uncertain period some twenty years after Elizabeth's accession. His son Jas- per Heywood was also a man of letters. John, besides being a dramatist as far as his time admitted, was a writer of epigrams and proverbs. T/ie Four PP is a really amusing farce in doggerel shorts and longs, wherein a Palmer, a Pardoner, a Pothecary, and a Pedlar tell tales of their own and each other's trades, and compete whicli shall tell the greatest lie — the prize being won, as many know who never read the play, by the Palmer's assertion that he never saw a woman out of temper. The fun is rather infantine, and the literary merit not great ; but the advance on any previous dramatic matter in going direct to character for the interest, and the incidental allusion to places and manners, make it important. Another piece, trivial in itself but important for our purpose, is T/iersites, which seems by some allusions to the birth of Edward VI. to be dated pretty exactly at 1537. It is a sort of Morality of Boasting, in Interlude form and with concrete characters instead of abstractions — to wit, Thersites himself; Mulci- ber, a smith ; Mater, a mother ; Miles, a knight ; and Telemachus, a child. Mulciber, at Thersites' request, makes him arms, the dialogue including a great deal of play on the word "sallet," as, but much more briefly, in Shakespeare. 1 The braggart's mother begs him not to endanger himself, but he scorns her and brags ever more loudly. He engages in combat with a snail, and after much vaunting and horseplay claims the victory, because the beast draws in its horns. Miles, who has supervened, suggests himself as a worthier antagonist ; but Thersites runs away and hides behind his mother, who succeeds in protecting him. Then Telemachus brings a letter from Ulysses, and the mother is forced by her ungrateful son's violence to pronounce elaborate burlesque charms on the pair, till Miles returns and drives Thersites off. All this is, of course, excessively childish, but we must remember that it was the actual childhood of the drama, that the mere gain of live persons for abstractions was immense, and that, after all, these plays were still a mere expansion of the burlesque interludes and passages in the miracles. The drama was only in a go-cart, but it was learning to walk. The Interlude of Youth relapses upon general characters, but 1 2 Henry VI. iv. 10, Q 226 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v endows them with greater life and individuality than is usual in the Morality scheme ; and the same may be said of the not very differ- ently named Lusty Juventus, which, however, is both Interludes, longer and heavier. Jack Juggler forms a curious pair with Thersites. There we had classical names for a modern farce ; here a classical drama, the Amphitryon, is travestied, though only to the extent of the misfortunes of Sosia, not those of Amphitryon himself. The title-hero plays the part of Mercury out of mere mischief, to tease and annoy Jenkin Careaway. The piece is one of the liveliest of its class, and shows the beneficial effect which the imitation and engrafting of the classical drama on the native stocks was producing. But it also shows most unmistakably that the modern play did not arise out of imitation of the classical drama alone, or even principally. The Nice Wanton is noteworthy for being neither allegorical nor the dramatisation of any known story — for though the names Dalilah and Xantippe are used for the light heroine and the shrew her mother, no incident or condition associated with the names themselves is brought in. Xantippe has three children, Barnabas, Ismael, and Dalilah, of whom the first is a good child, and the two others ne'er-do-wells, who are easily seduced by the Iniquity 1 of the piece, and both come to the worst of ends. The History oj Jacob and Esau is simply the Bible story dramatised, no longer according to miracle-play conditions, but to those of the interlude-morality. And The Disobedient Child has once more an attempt at originality. It is the dramatised story of an imprudent marriage, by which the bridegroom offends his father, and only obtains a violent shrew for a wife. There is not much dramatic ability about it, but it displays more attention to style and literary language than most, and is, indeed, said to be the work of a Cam- bridge man, Thomas Ingeland. Lastly, the Marriage of Wit and Science returns to the pure Morality scheme as regards plot and personages, but is regularly divided into acts and scenes, and has some attempt at orderly dramatic presentation. The New Custom, the Trial of Treasure, and other pieces of the same kind do not add anything very new to the list of varieties obtainable from the above analysis. But we can see quite sufficiently from it how, just as the Morality is the Miracle or Mystery, with Qualities, Virtues, Vices, personified States of Life, and so forth substituted for Scripture jrift."^ characters, so the Interlude is the Morality, sometimes merely changed in name, more often lightened in the farce direction as regards handling, and adapted to a very wide range 1 Here a "Vice" in both senses — clown and tempter. The Vice, as is well known from the Shakespearian use, was often merely or mainly the former. CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 227 of subjects — scriptural, moral, classical, social, and what not — with a constantly increasing tendency towards the adoption of the regular classical division of acts and scenes, and towards the independent selection and working out of dramatic stories, invented or borrowed, in such a fashion that the resultants must fall, not into the arbitrary divisions of Mystery, Morality, or Interlude, but into the natural ones of Tragedy, Comedy, and that mixed kind which is perhaps most conveniently, though rather improperly, named "Drame" in French. There is still no reason for displacing from their position as early, if not certainly the earliest, representatives of comedy, tragedy, historical • drama, and farce, the famous pieces entitled Ralph Roister Doister, Gorbodiic, King John, and Gammer Gurton''s Needle. Romantic drama, an original kind and a high one, was naturally not so early, and we do not meet with real examples of it before Lyly and Peele. Of these, Bishop Bale's King John^ which has been dated about 1547, is the least important, and its right to be regarded as the first of our historical dramas has even been denied, on the plea that it is only a didactic interlude with a historical subject. This seems a little hard, for Bale is surely entitled to the ^""^jlkJ!"^ credit of seeing that the didactic interlude — that is to say, the play in the only state it had then reached — was capable of being applied to historical subjects, and so becoming the historic play in time. His object here, as in all his other literary work, was no doubt polemical — to advance the cause of the Reformation by exhibiting the patriotic objection to the power of the Pope ; and his play does not exhibit much dramatic grasp. But he had already written Protestant mysteries, and evidently had a pretty clear inkling of the popularity and possibilities of the drama. He chiefly employs the long slinging rhymed doggerel which, as has been noted, is the standard metre of this entire class of transition plays, as was natural at a time when blank verse had not, or had barely, been introduced, and when the unsuitableness of elaborate rhymed stanzas was becom- ing more and more evident, as the action of the plays became more and more intricately dramatic. The three others are of more importance. Ralph Roister Doister,''' 1 Ed. Pollard, op. cif. supra. Bale, a Suffolk man, born with Uunwich in 1495, went to Jesus College, Cambridge, took orders, married, fled to Germany in 1547, became Bishop of Ossory in 1552, fled again under Mary, and on return- ing received from Elizabeth a prebend at Canterbury. He died in 1563. Bale was not a very bright example of a Reformi.T in ail ways, but he wrote a good deal, including a bibliography (one of the first) of English literature, and no less than twenty-two plays, of which five only, in whole or part, survive. These, except Kiiii^ 7''^'". ^""c sacred-moral in type. 2 In Haziitts Dodsley, iii. Also separately in Mr. Arber's Reprints. 228 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v the oldest and most accomplished in its own class, is the work of Nicholas Udall, successively headmaster of Eton and Westminster, who must have written it about or- before 1550. ^'^^mhter"' Udall was a Hampshire man, and is supposed to have been about forty at his death in 1556. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and was a good scholar as well as a harsh master (he whipped poor Tusser, the doggerel-verse writer on husbandry, very much), a translator, and the author of some Latin plays on sacred subjects. But he would now be merely a name but for Ralph Roister Doister, the intrinsic merit of which is considerable, though it has been denied, and which as a point de reptre in English literary history is simply of the first importance. It is indeed almost by itself sufficient to correct erroneous notions as to the parts respectively played by the Interlude and the classical play in the formation of the modern drama. A man who wrote Ralph Roister Doister without knowing or having heard of Plautus would no doubt be a genius of extraordinary originality ; but a man who, knowing Plautus, and not having the traditions of the Miracle, Morality, and Interlude stage before him, imitated Plautus pre- cisely after the fashion of Ralph Roister Doister would be an unintelligible portent. The plot, though simple, is far more complex, and, above all, far more regular, than that of any mere Interlude, but the play is wholly built on Interlude lines. Matthew Merygreek, an ingenious improvement upon the " Vice " of the earlier plays, out of mischief induces Ralph, a brain- less braggart and simpleton beau, to pay court to Christian Custance, the betrothed of an absent merchant, Gawin Goodluck. The discom- fiture of the gull' who is actually beaten off" by Custance and her handmaids, the by-play of those handmaids themselves, the misunder- standing with Goodluck created by false reports, and the reconcilia- tion, make a very fair dramatic scheme, which is carried out in rhymed doggerel of the middle length, not so short as that of most Interludes nor so long as that of Gammer Giirtoti's Needle. This still more famous piece, ^ which contains (though some say it only borrows) one of the best convivial songs in the. English language, was acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1566. Its Gammer ^"^^^''O''' ^r Supposed author, John Still, was a member of Gurton's that College, and, is guessed to have been born at AT" til c> ^ ^ o Grantham about 1534, being thus a very much younger man than Udall, and, in fact, a member of another generation. In 1570 Still became a beneficed priest, in two years more Dean of Bocking, successively Master of St. John's and of Trinity, Vice- 1 Hazlitt's Dodsley, ibid. CHAP. I PRELLMINARIES — DRAMA 229 Chancellor of his University, and Bishop of Wells, where he died in 1608. He had lived to see the English drama (of which he had, ex hypothesi, written one of the first complete examples, and the first to be acted at either University) arrive at its highest perfection ; and it is said that when Vice-Chancellor he had to protest against the very practice, that of acting English plays at Universities, which he had initiated. The play, though a broad farce in tone, is arranged as a regular comedy, and the losing and finding of the needle which has been employed to mend the garments of Gammer Gurton's man, Hodge, is carried on by Hodge aiTd the Gammer; Tib, her maid; Cock, her boy ; Diccon the BedTam (mad beggiU"), the Vice or mischief-maker of the play ; a neighbour. Dame Chat, and her maid, Doll ; Master Baily, another neighbour, and his servant. Spendthrift ; Doctor Rat the Curate ; and Gib the Cat. The language is mainly dialect, and the vehicle, as observed above, is doggerel rhyme of the longest form — extending to fifteen or sixteen syllables. It is written with spirit and managed with skill, but unfortunately the language is of the coarsest kind — coarse even for this class of play, the authors of which are rarely refined. The magnificent drinking-song of "Back and side go bare, go bare," introduces the second act, has nothing particular to do with the action, and may be older than the play. It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast to this jovial piece than the tragedy of Gorbodiic,^ or, as it is otherwise called, Ferrex and Porrex, which was published, though surreptitiously, a year before GaDwier Gurto/i's Needle was performed, and had ^ , , itself been acted five years earlier, in 1561. In the second and authorised editions, which did not appear till 1570, the name was changed as above given. The authorship has generally been attributed to Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, and though some champions of Sackville have tried to claim the whole for him, this is rather a mistaken partisanship. The rich and stately melody of the Induction and the Complaint of Buckingham (vide infra) certainly neither .suggests nor requires to be eked out by the wooden dulness of this dreary play, which is simply of interest and importance (and it has a great deal of both) historically and not intrinsically. In structure Gorboduc is a .regular play on the strictest model of Seneca the tragedian, with a slight concession to the popular taste in the matter of " dumb shows." Gorboduc himself is King, and Videna Queen, of Great Britain. They have two sons, Ferrex and Porrex, who quarrel, and four dukes, Cornwall, Albany, Logres, and Cumberland. Each prince has a counsellor, and has a parasite. There is a messenger to tell Ferrex's death, and a messenger to tell 1 See Works of Thomas Sackville, ed. Sackville-West, London, 1859, ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v the Duke of Albany's rebellion. The chorus consists of four ancient and sage men of Britain, and there is a secretary and a counsellor to the King to make up the tale of pairs or quartettes. No action happens on the stage, and the whole play, with the exception of the chomses (the stanzas of which bear some marks of Sackville's hand), is couched in correct but ineffably dreary decasyllabics, in which the sense usually lapses with the line, and the whole stumps on with a maddening, or rather stupefying, monotony. The full importance of Gorboduc, and of the imitations of the Senecan drama generally, will be better seen later, when we come to the actual period of Elizabethan drama proper ; meanwhile it will be best to give some account of the productions of the "twilight" attern"ts.^ period — the first twenty or four and twenty years of the Queen's reign, when irregular and tentative experiments on the mixed lines of the Interlude in the broad sense and the classical play were frequent, and when the taste for dramatic enter- tainments was constantly growing, but when no one had as yet hit on a really promising vein to work. It is a division of literature which is not very easy for the historian. Little of it is of any intrinsic value ; a great deal has disappeared, or has never been printed ; of what is actually open to study most is anonymous, or practically so ; and the real dates of nearly all the plays are very uncertain, owing to the interval which usually elapsed between performance and publication, and the invariable habit of writing up popular plays from time to time by the stock poets of the different companies. Despite all the pains which have been spent on this very popular matter, the growth of the theatre proper — that is to sa}-, of an estab- lishment for the production of stage plays only — is still obscure. As generally happens in such matters, the most reasonable and t^he^supply. P^'^^ ^^ to acquiesce in uncertainty on non-material points, and to recognise and hold fast by the material ones. For some two centuries probably, the acting of plays in one way or another by town guilds, by " servants " at court, by " servants " of the great houses, which were in effect minor courts, by monastic and collegiate-clerical households, etc., had been constantly in- creasing; and from the beginning of the sixteenth century onwards the appetite of the population generally had been thoroughly awakened. By degrees the trade performances, though they did not for some time disappear, dropped ; and the monastic troops (if we may use the w^ord) were cut off by the Dissolution ; but the "children" — choristers of the great churches that survived the Reformation — and the " servants " of great houses remained. And yet. again, by degrees these " servants " formed themselves into regular companies, who, though they might retain for protection the CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 231 name of some nobleman, were not really any longer members of his household, but gave themselves up entirely to satisfying the demand for plays. This demand had to be met on the producing side as well as the performing, and so came into being the profession of the dramatist, generally combined with other literary functions, but some- times not so, and often including the vocation of actor, though sometimes also not. The most important name of the dramatists of the early part of Elizabeth's reign, ne.xt to that of Sackville, is that of George Gascoigne,^ some notice of whose life and other work will be found below. His dramatic production includes two pieces, ^^^.j |^ ^, both translations or adaptations from the Italian, The Gascoigne and Supposes — a prose comedy, the first of the kind in °' English, from Ariosto, and Jocasta, a tragedy Englished (with Francis Kinwelmershe) not from any of the classical plays of Laius' line, but from Lodovico Dolce's Giocasta. But many other persons known and unknown fell into the new way. The Cambyses of Thomas Preston, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Master of Trinity, is said to be as old as Gorboduc itself. It is founded upon Herodotus, but is written partly in eights and sixes, partly in doggerel, has a Vice or purely comic character named Ambidexter, three comic ruffians, Ruff, Huff, and Snuff, and is altogether a curious compromise between an interlude and a regular play. The Dai)ion and Pythias of Richard Edwards, acted three years later, and written by a Christ Church man, who was Master of the Children of the Queen's Chapel, is a more sober production in long doggerel, with hardly more than one comic episode or interlude, which turns on the favourite legendary character of Grim the Collier of Croydon. The short and curious Appii(s and Virginia by " R. B.," which has been thought to come between these, is not in doggerel but in regular fourteeners, or eights and sixes, rhymed sometimes in couplet, sometimes in quatrain ; and the inevitable admixture of comedy, or rather horseplay, is usually small. But the best piece of this kind and period is the Tancred and Gis- miind oi Robert Wilmot, which was acted before the Queen in 1568, and reiHiblished in 1592. The blank verse of this (which was originally rhymed in quatrain), though much "stopped," is less wooden than that of Gorboduc ; the fire of the original story in Boccaccio, which is so admiral)ly revived in Dryden's version, is by no means absent; and the chief fault is the al)sence of any really dramatic action, and the alternation of the dialogue between tedious set speeches of enormous length and snip-snap stichomythia. But with these drawbacks Tancred and Gismund is the most poetical play before Peele and 1 Gascoigne's Works, ed. Hazlitt, London, 1868. Most of the others mentioned are in his DoJsley, vols. iv. sqq. 232 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v Lyly, if not before Marlowe. Of somewhat similar character, though nearl}' twenty years younger, and therefore belated in the dawn of the drama proper, is the odd Misfortunes of Arthur, performed at Greenwich Palace in 1587, and composed by a society of wits, among whom was no less a person than Francis Bacon, though the chief writing is said to have been due to Thomas Hughes. The verse of this — and indeed the tone generally — bears a strong relation to that of Tniicred and Gisinund. It has a chorus in elaborate stanzas, dealing with the death of the King, as related by Geoffrey rather than Malory, but introduces Welsh names (such as Angharad), which must have been due to Hughes's reading in his native language, and is altogether, if not exactly a successful play, a respectable literary curiosity. The stately gloom which seems so natural to, or so well affected by, this period of the eve of greatness is, out of Sackville, nowhere better shown than here. Yet we have pretty certain evidence that these plays, and others, printed and unprinted, still extant, are but a small part of the actual theatrical production of the first twenty or thirty years of Elizabeth's reign. The lists of names that survive prove this, and '^^plaj^s.^^ *° prove further that almost every kind of literature, sacred and profane, classical and romantic, historical and imaginative, was being dramatised. But the historical bickerings about the whole question of stage plays prove it almost better. Full fifteen years before the appearance of the first plays of the University Wits in the early years of the eighth decade of the century, these bickerings appear. The Church had always suffered the theatre any- thing but gladly ; and though the Puritans disagreed with the Church in almost all ways, here they went beyond her. The Corporation of London, like its analogues in most other towns, distinctly inclined to the ultra-Protestant party ; and it was owing to the obstacles thrown by it in the way of stage-playing that the first regular theatres were, about 1576, built just beyond the City bounds, in the privileged district of Blackfriars, in Shoreditch, and elsewhere. And how strong the feeling ran both for and against plays at this time, from which we have no plays worth speaking of, is shown by the notable history of Stephen Gosson,i whose School of Abuse, an invective, partly delivered against poetry in general, but mainly against dramatic poetry, survives, though most of the literature which occasioned it is lost, w'ho was himself a " University Wit " of a generation before Peele and Lyly, who succumbed to the fascination 1 The plays of Gosson (1555-1624), Catiline s Conspiracies, Captain Mario, and Praise at Parting, must have been written long enough before 1579, the date of the School of Abuse, to allow for his conversion, and probably just after he took his B.A. at Oxford in 1576. CHAP. I PRELIMINARIES — DRAMA 233 of the stage, wrote plays, acted in them, was converted from them by religious denunciations, dedicated his pamphlet, it may be pre- sumed without permission, to Sir Philip Sidney, and thereby drew down on himself, though Sidney with characteristic courtesy does not name him in it, the famous Apology for Poetrie {vide infra, chap. iv.). Still, active as was the demand, plentiful in a way as was the supply, and high as feeling ran in regard to the theatre generally, the entire work of this long period — it must have been nearly forty years from Ralph Roister Doister to Tambiirlaine — is surprisingly rudimentary. The drama, though divesting Jhelrway.'" itself gradually of some of its extremer crudities, made remarkably little progress towards any really fresh, vigorous, and promising form. It is easy enough to see now that writers, even if they had possessed more genius than any of those of this date show, might naturally have been hampered and bewildered. The mediaeval forms, of which the latest phase was the Interlude, were slowly but inevitably passing into discredit, and were indeed quite incapable of serving as vehicles to any '' intricate impeach " of character-drawing, of romantic interest, or of plot. The classical, or at least Senecan, model which was forcing itself upon all Europe was alien from the English spirit, and unable to give voice or shape to English conceptions of drama. And what is more than this, even if thei'e had been a style of play to give, there was as yet no style of verse to give it in. The impossible doggerels, longer and shorter, were indeed, as well as the fourteener, giving way to blank decasyllabics ; but the right mould of these had not been found. The writers, bewildered at the absence of their usual guide-rope, rhyme, feared to drop into absolute prose if they did not pull the verse up short at the end of the line ; there was, moreover, owing perhaps to mistaken deduction from Chaucer's practice, perhaps to transferred classical teaching, the superstition about middle caesuras, that we find in Oascoignc. and long afterwards in Dr. Johnson. The Chaucerian tradition, though not fatal, was unfavourable to trisyllabic feet ; and altogether the measure lacked the spring, the variety, the characteristics of roll and break by turns, which suit the dramatic wave. There cannot, indeed, be very much doubt that if a generation of genius had come a little earlier than it did, perfected drama would have come with it. But it was fated that the last, not the first, years of the Queen's reign should see that generation ; and drama waited with the rest. CHAPTER II PRELIMINARIES — PROSE Elyot — The Cover nour — Cavendish — Leiand — Cheke — Wilson — Ascham — His Letters — Toxophilus — The Schoolmaster — Their characteristics The middle stage between that older literature which continues till a period well, but not very far, within the sixteenth century and Elizabethan literature proper is at least as clearly marked in prose as in verse or drama, and it contains matter of perhaps greater intrinsic interest than is the case with drama at least. We have seen how with Fisher English prose reached, and perhaps for the first time, the state of deliberate and conscious practice of the devices of style, and how yet farther advance, conditioned in the most momentous manner by the nature of their occupation, appears in the work of the early Tudor translators of the Bible. Contemporary with these latter were some other writers who have obtained a place, from which it is not necessary to oust them, in the history of English literature — Sir Thomas Elyot, Leiand, Cavendish, perhaps a few more. The attraction of the first is indeed rather one of matter than one of manner, and it might be difficult to give any reason except the fact that it has been twice reprinted in the present century i for the position held by The Boke named the Governour, still more difficult to account for the reprinting itself. Sir Thomas Elyot, who was born before 1490, was the son of a judge, and though not a member of the famous Cornish family of his name, appears to have been a West Countryman, his forebears having been connected with the district round Yeovil. He must have been well educated, but does not seem to have gone to either University, and though a student of medicine, is said not to have been a practitioner thereof. He came early into the possession of a good estate near Woodstock, and settled there ; but was made by Wolsey in 1523 Clerk of the Council — an office which seems to 1 In 1854 by Mr. A. T. Eliot, and in 1883 by Mr. H. H. S. Croft (2 vols. London). The latter is the edition used. 234 CHAP, n PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 235 have metaphysical connection with literature. He published the Governour in 1531, and seems to have been recommended by it to diplomatic employments, in which he spent the rest of his life. He died in 1546, having four years previously been elected M.P. for Cambridge. He wrote a medical work called the Castle of Health, a Latin Dictionary, some dialogues, and other things ; but his fame, such as it is, rests on the Governour. This is one, and in England one of the first, of those curious treatises, partly of politics, partly The Govern- of education, which the study of the classics, and more "'"'• particularly of Plato, multiplied at the Renaissance in all countries, and not least in our own. Ascham, Lyly, Mulcaster, and many others take up from their different points of view, more and less scholastic, the theme which Elyot set them the example of handling. Incidentally the book is remarkable, because it contains the earliest version yet traced of the famous, but too probably apocryphal, story of Chief-Justice Gascoigne and Henry V. when Prince of Wales — a pious invention very likely to flatter the powers that were. In the history of prose style Elyot is commendable rather than distinguished ; free from obvious and glaring defects rather than possessed of distinct merits. He is rather too much given to long sentences ; he has little or nothing of Fisher's rhetorical devices, and while the romantic grace of his net much older contemporary Berners is far from him, so also is the deliberate classical plainness of his not very much younger contemporary Ascham. He is principally valuable as an example of the kind of prose which a cultivated man of ordinary gifts would be likely to write before the definite attempts of Ascham and his school. George Cavendish, of the Suffolk Cavendishes, gentleman-usher to Wolsey, and the Cardinal's biographer, does the same service in showing the style of a contemporary less cultivated, bift perhaps of greater natural powers, than Elyot, and not possessed of the special literary gift of Berners. We might almost call Cavendish a prose Berners — and his account of the greatness, decline, and fall of the Cardinal lias something of Berners's charm. On yet another hand, John Leland continues for us the useful, and at this time really important, function of the " literary hodmen," as they have been contemptuously and ungratefully termed. He was a Londoner, born about i ;oo : and after being , , , thoroughly educated at St. Paul's School and at both Universities (Christ's College in the one. All Souls' in the other), he travelled for a long time on the Continent and assimilated all the learning of the day. This was the time, 1533, wlien Henry VIII. 's Renaissance fancy for learning had not been checked or stunted by 236 ELIZABEIIIAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH 13 k. v his own passions and the course of events ; and Leland, most fortunately, was furnished with a roving commission to examine the antiquities and libraries of England. His investigations anticipated the disorganisation in almost all cases, the ruin and destruction in some, that followed the Reformation, and his collections and records, touching not merely antiquities proper and topography, but literary history, are of inestimable value as regards matter. As regards form, Leland ranks with the two writers just mentioned, but below even Elyot so far as any particular charm of style is concerned. His phrase is sometimes quaint in itself, and always has the pleasant archaism of his time ; but it possesses no individual savour, and is once more only the literary vehicle of a man who sets down what he wishes to set down clearly and without any decided solecisms, so far as the standard of correctness of his own time is fixed, but who neither has been taught any kind of "rhetoric" in the vernacular nor cares to elaborate one for himself. Very different, and much greater, is the interest of a school or group of writers somewhat junior to these, who arose as practitioners of prose in the latest days of Henry VHL, but who attained their chief eminence in the reigns of his son and daughters. They were the direct and complete, as the others had been the partial and indirect, result of the new study of the classics, and especially of Greek, and as it happened, though that study had begun earlier at Oxford, they were all members of the University of Cambridge. These were John, afterwards Sir John, Cheke, Thomas, afterwards Sir Thomas, Wilson, and Roger Ascham. The last named is, for actual accomplishment in English, the most important of the three ; but all are of importance. Cheke was a Cambridge man not merely by education but by birth, and was slightly the oldest of the three, as Wilson was much the youngest^. He was born in 15 14, and after a Grammar School education became a member, and in 1539 a Fellow, of St. John''s College, while three years later he "taught Cambridge Greek" as Regius Professor, and two years later again, " King," or rather Prince, " Edward " as tutor. He was lavishly rewarded by his pupil or his pupil's ministers, and received abbey-lands, the Provostship of King's, knighthood, and a privy councillorship. He was implicated in the design to place Lady Jane Grey on the throne, and though after imprisonment he escaped abroad, he allowed himself to be caught, and had to disgorge at least some of his gains, and to recant his Protestantism under Mary. Nor did he survive to see the wheel turn again under Elizabeth. Like so many of his generation, he appears to have been a time- server, greedy, a sycophant, and of no personal sense of honour or CHAP. II PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 237 consistency; but a sincere lover of learning and an eager promoter of the above mixed scheme of mental education and political training. In philology and in English composition he had some crotchets and a good deal of innovating vivacity. He altered the pronunciation of Greek ; he tried to alter the spelling of English ; and (as we have seen from Pecock's practice) not exactly for the first time he endeavoured to introduce a " Saxon " diction at the same time that he shared, and perhaps caused, Ascham's predilection for the balanced Latinised sentence, adjusted rather to Greek than to Latin in its simple arrangement and order of words. Cheke's position in this history is rather one of influence than of per- formance, and his actual composition was mainly, though not wholly, in Latin. Thomas Wilson, a Lincolnshire man, passed through Eton to King's College, Cambridge, of which he became a Fellow in 1549* and was tutor to the sons of the Duke of Suffolk. He fled the country at Edward's death, and remained abroad during „ , , Wilson. the whole of Mary's reign, though he suff^ered actual torture and danger of his life from the Inquisition at Rome. Elizabeth showed him great favour, making him Master of St. Katharine's Hospital (which he is said to have robbed or tried to rob), Secretary of State, envoy to divers countries, and even Dean of Durham, though he had never taken orders. He became a knight and a Member of Parliament, and died in 1581, being then about fifty-five. His works are various, and all remarkable as examples of practice, but the chief of them, the Art of Rhetoric,^ which appeared in 1553. when he was about seven and twenty, combines practice with theory. It is, as a matter of course, in great part modelled upon Quintilian, and the rhetoricians of the School from Martianus Capella onwards, but part is original. And in this part Wilson expresses with great vigour sentiments similar to those of Cheke and Ascham, as to the importance of writing English matters in English, and for Englishmen, of avoiding strange "ink-horn" terms, and aftected Chaucerisms (this is a valuable date-point), as to the ''foolish fantastical who Latin their tongues." And he has also the strong moral tone which, though his own practice and Cheke's might be a little wanting in some respects, distinguishes the whole school. Neither Cheke, however, nor even Wilson can be called a great or even a distinguished writer; Roger Ascham'^ is certainly the latter, if not quite the former. He was a Yorkshire man, born in 1 This book ought to bo re-edited. 2 Works including Ixtters, sue Gilos, 4 vols, ("nominally 3), London, 1865. Tflxophiliis and the Schoolmaster are each separately accessible in Mr. Arbcr's Krpriiils. 238 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v 1 5 15, of a fair stock. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1530, and learnt Greek from his scarce elder Cheke, becoming Fellow of his college early, and before very long Univer- sity Reader in Greek and Public Orator. He dedicated ToxopJiilus, in 1545, to Henry VIIL, and under Edward became tutor to the Princess Elizabeth, and Secretary of an Embassy to Germany. Nobody quite knows how, without any overt recantation, he not only remained unmolested under Mary, but was actually made her secretary ; while he was also favoured by his old pupil after her accession. His second chief work, the Schoolmaster, was written late, and not published till after his death in 1568. Even this brief story shows that he must either have had extraordinary luck, or have been not entirely destitute of the " willow " character which infected almost all public men in Tudor days. There are also indications in his very pleasant Letters that he was by no means free from the rather shameless tendency to beg which was common to all but a very few scholars throughout the Renaissance. But these epidemic, or rather endemic, vices of the time excepted, Ascham appears to have been a very agreeable specimen of a good type of English- man : humorous, except for a touch of Puritan prudery in regard to art and literature ; learned, and much more ready to teach others than to pride himself upon his learning ; affectionate to his friends and family; zealous for his country and his country's language. The famous phrase in the Toxophihis about "writing this English matter in the English speech for Englishmen " is no mere figure of rhetoric or bit of jingle, but a sentence to which the author adheres as far as possible throughout his work, all the really important constituents of which, the Toxophilus, the Schoolmaster^ and the Letters^ have already been named. Each of the three has its separate interest in the history of English prose, and the three together give their author a very im- portant place in that history. The Letters, as is natural, rank lowest, „. , yet very far from low. In the first place, when we His Letters. ■' ■' , . , , t^ ,, . i i i compare them with the Paston collection/ the only really considerable body of English epistolary correspondence earlier, we find — not merely or mainly as a consequence of the fact that we are dealing with a professed scholar instead of with a family group of men and women of the upper rank indeed, and of fair education, 1 This famous and interesting series, first published by Sir John Fenn a century ago, and definitively edited in three vols, by Mr. Gairdner, has in literature rather less importance than it possesses in political and social history. In fact, it may be said to lack the one kind exactly because it possesses the other, consisting of sirnple straightforward communications of fact and business from entirely unliterary persons. CHAP. II PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 239 but of no special bent towards literature — a very distinct advance in command over the language for miscellaneous purposes. But we also find something more. At first the letters, even the familiar letters, even those to ladies and close personal friends, are written in Latin — the language which, as Ascham elsewhere candidly confesses, and as we can well understand from the general practice of the Renaissance, came much easier to him to write than English. But by degrees this changes. The same deliberate purpose which led him to write the Tox-ophilus in the mother tongue, assisted beyond all doubt by the same general unconscious "atmospheric" influence which was not peculiar to him, induces him by degrees to put his work, even of the most informal kind, in English, to write news of his German tour to his Cambridge friends in that language. He shows, in short, a sense of the fact — so slowly borne in upon English men of letters, even so much later and greater as Bacon and Hobbes — that English was not a mere makeshift, a mere engine of condescendence to children and grooms, but a vehicle of literature, not, indeed, perhaps quite so perfect (no man circa 1550 could be expected to admit that) as Latin or Greek, but capable of being immensely improved, and deserving of the pains necessary to improve it. But Ascham's chosen means of improvement, his aims, his ideal of English style, naturally appear best in his more formal and ambitious treatises. It is very lucky that there is so long an interval between the composition of these, and that their subjects are so different. Toxophilus is the work of a man of thirty, devoted to what was at once his own favourite recreation, and still one of the main- '^'"''^'"^"^■ stays of the national greatness. Of course there is a good deal in it which is very remotely connected with archery. The author would not have been a humanist, or even a human being, if he had not aired a good deal of his acquaintance with the new-found and certainly not too much prized Plato, if he had not allowed large scope to the passion for education which characterised all his literary generation, and himself very particulariy. There are many more tolerable gaps in English literature than the loss of that Book of the Cockpit, with which, much later in life, he intended to accompany it. But even by itself Toxophilus gives us a happy picture of that blending of instruction with pastime, which, by one of the greatest of the many pieces of good luck which have distinguished English history, occupied the minds and ideas of the men who superintended the transition from monastic to lay studies in England, and carried out the views of Walter of Merton, and the two WilHams of Wykeham and Wainfleet, in succeeding centuries, with a fortunate development. The Schoolmaster is naturally more serious, yet not too serious. Something of the old largeness appears in the first book, dealing as 240 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v it does generally with the bringing up of youth ; nor does this dis- appear by any means wholly in the second, with its preciser subject. On. the ready way to the Latin tongue Ascham may go ^^aster^^' wrong ; he does so go often, as in his polemic against romance, his fatal patronage of the pestilent heresy of imitating Greek and Latin prosody, not merely in feet but in metres, and other things. But in general he is an early and an eloquent defender and apostle of the true English education in classics, and in the vernacular for book-learning, in body-culture and healthy pastime, as well as in book-learning itself. And one at least of the errors just noticed was only a corruption of the best and central principle of his work in prose — the borrowing of all possible assistance from the classical tongues in the formation of a good English style. In doing this he stops rigidly "^^eristks.^*^ short of classicising the vocabulary. Cheke does not dislike a mere Latinism, or Wilson an " ink-horn " term, more than Ascham does. Like both, and even more than both, he hates the modern foreign languages, and seems to be actuated by a positive and almost personal jealousy — not entirely groundless, when we remember how great the influence of French had been, how great that of Spanish and Italian was, and was to be. both in verse and prose — of their colouring and guiding. He retains, and even a little abuses, the specially English device of alliteration, and has a fancy which sometimes almost approaches the puerile, for arranging his sentences in strings or piles of half-parallel, half-antithetic clauses, after a fashion which we also find far back in the Middle English period. Indeed, some have even argued for a kind of "Euphuism before Eup/mes^^ in Ascham himself; and some seeds of it are no doubt, and necessarily, to be found in him. But, on the whole, his ideal of an English clause, an English sentence, an English paragraph, is struck out on classical models — clear, not too long, but, on the other hand, not broken up into snip-snap, with no special rhetorical figure very apparent, and with the old poetical cadence and colouring carefully avoided, but sometimes fairly balanced, arranged not seldom with a weighty, yet lucid, sententiousness, and not very seldom rising, with some cunning, to a climax which permits the rounding off of the paragraph with real rhetorical effect. Ascham's is, in short, the first accomplished plain style in English — the first, that is to say, that, while deliberately aiming at a certain amount of rhetorical effect, rigidly eschews the production of that effect by any such means as elaborate, highly coloured, or quaint vocabulary, by unusual and invented tricks of arrangement, or by anything that can come under the phrases (often loosely used, but intelligible) of ornate, poetical, or impassioned prose. CHAP. II PRELIMINARIES — PROSE 241 The classical turn communicated to English prose by this knot of scholars more particularly, and encouraged by others from both Universities, was yet further promoted by the continuing habit of translating from the classics, and from modern writers in Latin. The authors of these translations, except in a few cases, mostly later than the present time, such as those of North and Florio (which had great direct influence on English prose, and were themselves notable examples of it) hardly fall to be noticed here. But the influence of their practice is unmistakable. The great innovation of Euphuism (vide htfraj chap, vi.) was rather an unconscious than a deliberate revolt against it ; the carrying out of the system produced in Hooker, perhaps the most accomplished writer of strict prose (as distinguislied from the half-poetical vehicle of Malory and Berners) that appeared in English up to the end of the sixteenth century ; and even the great authors of the first half of the seventeenth were deeply influ- enced by the tradition of classicising.^ 1 To this period belong the later Tudor chroniclers, the chief of whom is Holinshed (1525-1578), a Cheshire man, it is said, by birth, and a Cambridge man by education, certainly one of those printer's hacks, or gentlemen of the press, to whom literature has owed something. Holinshed's close connection with the matter of Shakespeare, the divulgation of large passages of him by Shakespeare's commentators, and perhaps the fact that his Christian name was Raphael, have conciliated to him an almost disproportionate amount of esteem. But though he has no extraordinarily literary qualities, the " race " and the archaic fashions of his manner are irresistibly pleasant to us. CHAPTER III PRELIMINARIES — VERSE The state of poetry c. 1530 — Good effect of Italian — Wyatt's life — Surrey's — Wyatt's forms and subjects — Those of Surrey — The main characteristics of the pair — Wyatt's rhyme and rhythm — Surrey's metrical advance — Tottel's Miscellany — Other miscellanies — Verse translations — Churchyard — Whet- stone — Tusser — Turberville — Googe — Gascoigne — His Instructions — His poems — The Mirror for Magistrates — Sackville's part in it The same character of transition and introduction which appears in the prose and the drama of the latest years of Henry VHI., of the short reigns of his son and elder daughter, and of at least the first half of the long one of his younger, pSr/'c!'t53o. appears likewise in the department of poetry proper. Nay, it is perhaps even more remarkable there, for reasons easily obvious to any one who has read the preceding Books and chapters with care. Up to 1580, at or about which year the History of Elizabethan Literature, in the great sense, begins, drama was, and had been from its very origin, merely though steadily in the making ; it had never reached any form that could be called artistically complete. Prose, with some examples far more absolutely excellent than any that drama could show, and with a much quicker and steadier progress, was in the making too, and had never reached perfection, save in partial and peculiar instances and forms. But poetry had, as we have seen, gone through curious successions of 9naxiiiia and vtinima. After it had assimilated the great blend of language and prosody fashioned during the earlier part of the Middle English period, it produced in Chaucer a poet of the first class, who stood in a sense, though not in all senses, practically alone. It made a curious relapse from metrical upon alliterative prosody, and had produced good work in that. It had seen the singular outburst of Scottish Chaucerian poetry. It had provided a sort of underground growth of ballad. But in England itself it had, after Chaucer, fallen off, as far as the production of literary poetry of great merit went, in a manner which has still rather to be accepted than accounted for; 242 CHAP, lu PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 243 and the inability of the poets to sing had driven them to endless and strange varieties of squeak and drone. However Ascham and his fellows might dislike and dread and denounce Italian influence, there is no doubt that the way of safety was first opened to English poetry in these its straits by Italy. The sonnet — not alone, but chiefly — was the means of inducing English poets to gird up their loins, to settle the poetical °itatian!'° accentuation of their language, to discard doggerel for regular metre, to arrange a poetic diction which should be neither stiff with the " aureate " verbiage of the rhetoricians, nor clownish with the vernacular of the doggerellists. Perhaps mere accident, perhaps the political and ecclesiastical stress of the years between the Reformation and the accession of Elizabeth, may account for the interval which elapsed between the composition and the publication of the chief documents exhibiting this new influence. But there is no explanation, except a purely fatalist one, for the fact that fully twenty years more elapsed between the actual publication and the following of the example to any good effect. If there has ever been any mistake about the order of the two poets who heralded modern EngHsh poetry, it must have been a very strange one, the dates and facts about Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, by courtesv, Earl of Surrey, being altogether , ., .' . . . Wyatt s life. too clear and (despite their occasional uncertainty) too relatively certain to excuse the slightest confusion. Both were short- lived ; and so it happened, not merely that Wyatt was considerably the elder, hut that he died when Surrey was still quite a young man. The father of Wyatt, Sir Henry, was a person of distinction in Kent (though it is not clear how he could have been, as some authors say, "a baronet"), and the poet was born at Allington Castle in that county, in the year 1503. He was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, at the prepos- terously early age which was one of the crotchets of the Renais- sance, entering at twelve, taking his Bachelor's degree at fifteen, and his Master's at seventeen. He seems to have married very early too, was a gentleman of the King's bedchamber, a friend of Anne Boleyn, and knighted in 1537. He had his share of the imprison- ments which were the lot of Henry's courtiers, and perhaps, if he had lived, might have shared Surrey's fate, liut he did a good deal of diplomatic work as anil)assador in Spain and in the Netherlands, and died, being undoubtedly removed from the evil to come, in 1542, on his way to Falmouth, where he had a mission to meet the Spanish Ambassador and convoy him to London. Surrey's birth-date is not known, but it is guessed at 15 17 or 1518, probably in the spring of the latter year. He was grandson 244 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v of the victor of Flodden, and his mother was Lady EHzabeth Stafford, daughter of that Duke of Buckingham who fell a victim to Wolsey's jealousy. He was thus of almost the noblest ^ ^' blood in England, and at fourteen he was nominally wedded to Lady Frances de Vere, of a strain nobler still. They came together in 1535, Surrey meanwhile having been a sort of companion to the King's illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. He seems to have been rather a lively youth and young man, and got into frequent minor difficulties with the law. But nothing at all serious is brought against him ; and his lamentable fate when he was barely thirty was due simply to the delirium of jealousy and blood- thirstiness which came upon Henry in his last days, and which, if he had lived a little longer, would have finished the English nobility. A ridiculous charge of high treason was brought against Surrey, and supported by more ridiculous charges of quartering the royal arms. He was condemned and beheaded in January 1547, nine days before Henry himself went to his own place. There is no certainty at all as to the order of the work either of Wyatt or of Surrey, though certain poems of both date themselves fairly by reference to known events. This matters the less, however, in the case of men whose lives, as has been seen, were short, who represent very clearly results of the same influences, and who, as not merely from probability, but from Surrey's lines on Wyatt's death, we know, stood to each other half in the relation of master and pupil, half in that of fellow-pupils in the same foreign and chiefly Italian school. It will be well first to give a brief account of the actual work of each, and then to make some remarks on their common or peculiar characteristics. It is not for nothing that a sonnet stands in the forefront of the collection — haphazard as that collection, no doubt, is — of Wyatt's poems. For, various and remarkable as are the points of novelty in the work of the pair, the intr oduction and pract ice of the or,^^".Kjo°™^ -Sonnet forms perhaps the most remarkable of these. And for some time the sonnets (with characteristics to be noted presently) continue — to give way at last to other (almost entirely love) poems in rhyme-royal, in octosyllabic couplets and quatrains, in a shortened rhyme-royal with an octosyllabic instead of a decasyllabic base, and in some fanciful stanzas, the base of which, following Skelton, though in more orderly fashion, goes as low as six syllables. A five-line stanza of heroics appears, and also eights and sixes, which may have been originally intended either for that form or as fourteeners with middle rhyme. Moreover, there appears also a curious form, which was very much favoured by all the poets of the mid-sixteenth century, though the objections to it are great, the CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 245 alternate Alexandrine and fourteener rhymed in couplets. There are also rondeaux and other lyrical forms, though few and cautiously attempted ; and last of all we find certain epistles of a satirical kind and certain translations of the Psalms, couched in heroic quatrains arranged with curiously interlaced rhymes, as well as sometimes in ottava rima. The forms and contents of Surrey's poems, with one notable exception, are not very different from those of his master's — sonnet, quatrains, interlaced heroic-couplets, the jog-trot fourteener and Alexandrine, in which he even translates Ecclesiastes and the Psalms. The subject is mostly love, and satire Surrey is absent. But the added item, which is of the very first importance, is a translation of the second Aeneid in blank verse, of which there are no known earlier examples in Lngllikll, 11)ul1^Ii,"sb," has been noted in its place, there are signs of something like it in Chaucer's prose Tale of Melibee. We can only guess how the idea came to Surrey or to some other unknown person, if (which there is no reason to suppose) he borrowed it. Although there is no blank verse in French up to this date (or indeed, except as a curiosity, since), rhymeless verses were attempted a little earlier than Surrey's date in Italian. It is, of course, very likely that these gave Surrey, as they gave the Spaniards, the hint ; but it is not quite impossible that this hint was not needed. It was a common and natural effect of the worship of the classics to look down on rhyme as a barbarous thing ; and it was not a very extraordinary audacity for a man, translating what was then thought the chief poetic achievement of antiquity, to resolve to imitate Virgil directly in not using this savage gaud. Nor, when alliteration had long been borrowing rhyme and stanza from metre, would it be unnatural for metre to borrow rhyme- lessness from alliteration. Nor is it absolutely impossible that Surrey would have gone the entire length of the next generation and have attempted not merely unrhymed English verse, but unrhymed English hexameters, if the language had been sufficiently under his command. It was lucky that it was not; for though it is impossible, as every fresh attempt shows, that the hexameter can ever rank in English as anything but a rather awkward totir de force, we might have had some trouble in getting rid of it, whereas in blank verse dccasyllaljles Surrey at once endowed the language with its most natural, tliough latest won, and for certain purposes most effective, variety of verse. '• If the language had been more under his command," it has been said ; and the words will aptly introduce one of the two chief points for notice in the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey. It has been repeatedly indicated in the last Book that either one cause or one con- 246 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v comitant of the weakness of fifteenth-century poetry in England was that the poets more and more lost this control of language. The The main char ''^^^ons are not positively known, and cannot be dogmat- acteristics of ically laid down ; they have little or nothing to do with = pair- individual genius, though it certainly would appear that Chaucer's English is in a state of premature and forced perfection to ' which his successors could not attain, and which, before any fit heir appeared, had become archaic. It would appear likewise that the completion of the constitution of English proper, the final severance from the Continent, and the changes of which the disappearance of the final uttered e is the most remarkable, had brought about, or had at least been followed by, some not clearly intelligible change in the whole tonality and vocalisation of the tongue. The new pronounced English was not adjustable to Chaucerian prosody, and it did not find what it wanted in alliterative verse. The results were that extraordinary stumbling and plunging, that driving of the chariot as if with locked wheels, which we have noted in Lydgate, in Occleve, and even in Hawes, and from which Skelton only escaped (when he did escape) by a series of clumsy gambades in doggerel. Yet this doggerel did good by teaching the language at least to move with some flexibility, if with little elegance, and now came Wyatt and Surrey v^^ith the severe manage of the sonnet and the rest to get it r(ito something like graceful movement in regular form. What hard work they had to do, and to what extent they were still beaten by the antinomianism of the language in its and rhythrru' State of flux, will best be shown by printing Wyatt's first sonnet (which is by no means a specially terrible example), with foot-divisions and a few quantifying accents : — The long | love that | in my | thought I | harber And in | my heart | doth keep | his re | sidence, Into I my face | presseth | with bold | pretence, And there | campeth | display | ing his | banner : She that | me learns | to love | and to | suffer, And wills | that my | trust and \ lust's 1 neg | ligence Be rein | ed by rea | son, shame, | and rev | erence, With his I hardi | ness tak | es displeasure, Wherewith | love to | the hart's ^ fo | rest he | fleeth, Leaving | his en | terprise | with pain | and cry, And there |him hi | deth and | not ^p | peareth. | What may | I do? | when my | master | feareth, But in I the field | with him | to live | and die, For good I is the | life | ending faithfully. 1 Printed inTotfel " luste's " and " harte's," but I do not think any metrical value was meant to be given to the e. CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 247 There are several things to be observed in this — the way in which the advantage, if not necessity, of a final couplet forced itself on these very earliest practitioners of the English sonnet, the remnant of the allegorical personification of the fifteenth century, and others. But the chief of all is the nervousness and uncertainty of the quantifi- cation and rhyme. We have already left the sheer verse-prose of Lydgate and Occleve at their worst, as well as the mere doggerel of Skelton at his best. But the poet still hobbles, at times painfully. In one line, as we see above, he is driven to make " takes " a dis- syllable, and to put an entirely non-natural quantification upon "hardiness," and "displeasure," which should simply change places in a nonsense verse. More surprising perhaps — for this liberty of stress is frequent in Chaucer, and continues to Spenser and even to Shakespeare — is the mistiness which seems to beset him in the matter of rhyme. It is clear that the first, third, and fourth rhymes of the sestet are on the Hh only, yet he cannot resist the double rhyme " feareth " and " appeareth," though it not merely conflicts with the single rhyme of " fleeth," but itself introduces a quite false rhythm into the lines, making them in effect feminine-rhymed nine-syllable lines, and not decasyllables at all. But these stumbles were inevitable in picking the way up the steep and stony path from the abysses to which English poetry had descended, and the very stumbles themselves are gain, inasmuch as they warn the stumbler to pick his way more carefully next time. Wyatt has the plain, straight (and also strait) ways of the sonnet and his other forms to guide him ; he has the enormous advantage of fresh models, different from the thousand times borrowed ones of a century and more past ; and above all, he has the gift of poetic phrase, which we meet again in him after many days. Into a bitter fashion of forsaking is perhaps better than any single line in southern English since Chaucer ; and wlien we meet with such single spies we know that they will come in battalions soon. Wyatt found an apt pupil in Surrey, and there is, in fact, more progress between these two almost contemporary writers than we find after them in the more than thirty years between Surrey's death and the ShephenVs Calendar. Henrv Howard perceived c u u 1 • r ' Surrey s the absolute necessity of accepting a certain rhythmical metrical standard for a word, and not varying its values and ^"'vance. balance entirely at the pleasure, or rather the need, ot the poet. There is even in him a rudimentary discovery, or rediscovery, of a matter of still greater importance, the power which an English poet possesses of varying the harmony and composition of his line by 24S ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v shifting the place of the pause. Neither he nor Wyatt, indeed, has arrived at the final secret, the license of trisyllabic substitution ; the most they can do in this way is a clumsy elision of the vowel in article and preposition. But it was just as well that too many liberties should not be taken at once, and that the decasyllabic as such should be reformed into melody before it was expanded by license into an hendecasyllable, a dodecasyllable, or even more. For the temptations of doggerel were still about, and were only too much in- dulged in the eights and sixes and in the " poulter's measure," ^ the compound of Alexandrine and fourteener just noticed. If any one had at this time indulged himself in the license of the dramatic or Tennysonian tribrachs, the result must pretty certainly have been chaos, and the language would never have had its period of discipline at all. As it was, there is reason still to marvel at the change which — no doubt half, if not all, unconsciously — these two " persons of quality" — one a busy diplomatist, the other a careless man, or rather youth, of pleasure — achieved. It maybe that neither Wyatt nor Surrey has left any perfect poem, that nothing of either's is as sheer poetry equal to the best work of Sackville ; but their gain in form is almost incalculable. The circumstances of the publication of the poems of the two were peculiar. It had become the habit of printers and working men of letters to make and issue, with or without permission, '* miscellanies" of poetical pieces, sometimes attributed to their authors. Miscellany, sometimes not, and sometimes again (as was sure to happen) attributed wrongly. In the middle of the seventeenth century especially this joint custom of MS. collection and miscellany publication led to a great deal of confusion. To this day some of the most famous pieces of English verse — Jonson's "Sidney's Sister," Bishop King's "Like to the Falling of a Star," and others — are in a state of contested, if not exactly dubious, title between two or more claimants, while in the same or other cases the genuine text is very much a matter of guesswork. The publication of the chief works of Surrey and Wyatt with pieces by other persons of distinction at Henry VIII. 's court — the unlucky Lord Rochford, Lord Vaux, Wyatt's friend Sir Francis Bryan, and others — was due to the printer Richard Tottel, and to a Huntingdonshire scholar, Nicholas Grimald, who has been thought to be an Italian and a Grimaldi. This is by no means necessary, for different forms of the name, ranging from Grimoald to Grimwald, are found in different coun- tries and tongues during the Middle Ages. Grimald, who was a 1 Said to be (cf. our "baker's dozen") so called from the habit of poulterers giving twelve eggs to one customer and fourteen to another, according to fear or favour ; see Gascoigne (p. 39, ed. Arber), who seems to have invented the name. CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 249 member of both Universities, lecturer at Christ Church, chaplain to Ridley, etc., was born in 15 19, and was therefore very little younger than Surrey, whom, as well as other authors of the famous TottePs Miscellatiy, he may have known. But the book itself 1 did not appear till 1557, eleven years after Surrey's death and fifteen after Wyatt's. The editor contributed (at least in the first edition, for he left most of them out in the second) no small number of pieces of his own, and there was in both a considerable contingent from " un- certain authors." Few of the uncertainties, or of the works of the minor lights mentioned above, are of great value ; and Grimald himself generally writes stuff which is only distinguished from the average work of the previous generation by being invariably serious in form, and by showing a metrical regularity which, if only sing- song and uninspired, is at any rate strictly observed. This is what is meant by the printer's apology for " the stateliness of style removed from the rude skill of common ears " — for '' style " was then generally, and here clearly, used as including " metre," and the context plainly shows that the contrast Tottel was thinking of was with doggerel and ballad measures. And he was quite right. It is true that for a very long time Wyatt and Surrey have held their proper place in general literary history and criticism ; but there have been occasional attempts, if not exactly to degrade them from it, to glance at them as mere reformers of form. The retort is, of course, quite obvious, and entirely fatal to the sneer. It was reform of form that was wanted, for the simple reason that for a century and a half form of any meritorious kind had practically ceased to exist. At first the " stateliness of style " may have been all too near to stiffness, and no one with absolute inspiration may have been ready to take the pre- pared instrument. But the instrument was at last prepared. The poetical work of the period, before the appearance of the Shepherds Calendar and after TotteVs Miscellany, divides itself naturally under three heads : i. Subsequent miscellanies ; 2. Individ- ual poets or translators of minor rank; 3. Sackville. An extreme purist might urge that the three, or at any rate the first and the third, are one. For Sackville's poetical work, which stands in such startling contrast to the wooden verse of Gorboduc, appeared in what was practically a miscellany, the Mirror for Ma^^istrates. But it will be better and clearer to divide the subject in the order above named, and not to mention tlie Mirror till we come to Sackville himself. The two first heads will not delay us long. It is somewhat curious that TotteVs Miscellany, the popularity of which we know from the rapidity with which the second edition 1 Ed, Arber. 250 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v followed the first (itself reprinted in six weeks or so), with fresh issues in 1559, 1565, and 1574, as well as others later, and from the imitations of it, waited some time for these imitations. Few things indeed are more significant than the long " waits " between the writing and the publication of the poems contained in it, and the still longer ones before any dared to emulate it, when we contrast them with the rush and huddle of new and ever new poetry in the last half of the Queen's reign. The first actual successor ^ was published nearly twenty years after Tottel, in 1576, and its name, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, followed as it was by others, showed the influence of Euphuism, the period of Lyly, as compared with the sober Songs and ^eifani^s! Sontiets of the earlier book when Ascham had repre- sented English prose. It was the work of a man then dead, the dramatist and musician Richard Edwards. It contains a mixture of work of the former and the then present generation. Lord Vaux figuring beside Lord Oxford, the courtier of the old King's time by the courtier of the still fairly young Queen. Kinwelmersh, Hunnis, and other respectable men of letters of Elizabeth's day also make show, and there is one piece the initials of which (not given in the first edition) may be Walter Raleigh's. The book, though very popular (it was reprinted once a year for three years, and repeatedly afterwards), was not much of a Paradise, nor its devices very dainty. But they were as their pretty if affected title might seem to warrant, better than those of the absurdly named and dully filled Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions which followed two years later, and seems to have been collected and partly written by Owen Roydon and T. P. (Thomas Proctor). The mania for alliteration which beset the writers of this time so strongly was particularly .strong in T. P., who, outdoing even Churchyard (^vide infra), distinguished himself by print- ing a production proclaimed to be " Pretty Pamphlets by Proctor." The willow song-- Willow, willow, willow, sing all of green willow — appears here. The later Elizabethan miscellanies are infinitely better, but they come after Spenser. Next to the miscellanies, the verse translations make a great 1 All the more important of these miscellanies up to the Queen's death were reprinted together by Collier in 1867 ; but the issue was private and very small, and the book hardly ever occurs in catalogues. Mr. Arber, besides Tottel, has given (in his "English Scholar's Library") Robinson's Hatidful of Delights; Mr. Bullen England's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Park's Heliconia (3 vols. 18 15) contains, besides the Handful, the Gorgeous Gallery, the Phoenix Nest, and the large and interesting anthology, rather than miscellany, of England's Parnassus. CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 251 figure in the poetical production of this time, though again it cannot be said that they attain to high poetical merit. In any case, no doubt, the popularity of the classics would have brought them about ; but the action of Surrey, whose authority transtatkins. was so great in other ways, made them certain. The translators,^ however, were by no means bold enough to follow his example of blank verse as a matter of course. They preferred as a rule the too often clumsy fourteener, which, just as it was much later going out of fashion, gave us the splendid Homeric paraphrase of Chapman. There was little splendour about the earlier examples, but the first of them had great influence in other ways, being a version of Seneca's Troades by Jasper Heywood, son of John, Fellow first of Merton and then of All Souls', and in Elizabeth's time a Jesuit. This play was issued as early as 1559, two 3'ears only after TotteVs Miscellany, and by the same printer. He followed it up with two others, the Thyestes and Hercules Furens^ and the example being caught at, the whole ten Senecan plays were issued together in 1 581. Rhyme-royal, the quatrain, and other stanzas are used for the chorus ; but the ambling fourteener serves as the staple. This was also the metre of Phaer's Virgil, which appeared, as far as the first seven books went, the year after Tottel, and was finished partly by the author, partly after his death in 1560 by another hand. Phaer was a Pembrokeshire man, a member of the University of Oxford, a lawyer, and a doctor. There is merit in his version (which shows a consciousness of trisyllabic substitution and its advantages), as there is also in the companion Ovid of Arthur Golding, a man of property and good connections, who was born about the middle of the fifth decade of the century, and lived till its close. He did prose as well as verse translations ; but the Metamorphoses was his chief book, and this appeared in 1567, again in fourteeners. The verse translators cannot indeed boast, as the prose can, that they had a distinct and important influence on the development of style in their own sphere, but the two helped in the practice, the exercise, which was the business and the benefit of this particular time. The individual authors of the period other tlian Sackville partake of that character of curiosity which distinguishes the whole of it, and which repels some tastes as much as it conciliates others. The chief names are Churchyard, Whetstone, Tusser, Turbervillc, Googe, and, above all, George Gascoigne, the type, and at the same time the most iThey have not li.id quite their share of the otherwise indiscriminate devotion of reprinters, Stanyhurst's rather later and extremely mad Acttcid having almost alone the honour to be recently given (in Mr. Arber's " English Scholar's Library"). The translators of Seneca besides Heywood were Neville, Studley, Nuce, and Newton. eminent, of the whole. It is almost enough to say, on the one hand, that to no single one of the six is ascribed even the smallest piece of verse which has made its way into the memory of the general. On the other hand, all have importance to the historian, and Gascoigne is, as has been said, very decidedly the typical man of letters of the first half of the great Queen's reign. Thomas Churchyard, first born and last to die of all the group, was a Shropshire man, born at Shrewsbury about 1520, and so not much younger than Surrey, a juxtaposition which makes all the more striking the fact that he did not die till the urc >3r . ^^^^ ^^^^ ^^ James I. It would appear that he took the portion of goods that belonged to him and went to court early enough to become " servant " to Surrey, in those conditions of honourable and gentle service and education which flourished for some time to come. The connection was continued long after his chief's death by his contributions to TottePs Miscellany . But long before the appearance of that book Churchyard had seen other and hotter service in the Netherlands (1542) and Scotland (1545), had been taken prisoner in a second Scotch campaign (1548), had travelled, had served in Ireland (1550), in Lorraine, in the Netherlands again, at Calais, or at least Guines, just at the period of its loss. He had begun a long series of mostly petty individual contributions to literature when he was about thirty ; but his historical importance begins with his contribution to Tottel in 1557, and to the Mirror for Magistrates (see below) in 1558-59. After several more years of fighting and writing he collected his work, or some of it, under the alliterative and exact title of Chitrc]iyard''s Chips, modestly accounting in prose for the selection of the same. Fighting he continued till the siege of Zutphen in 1572, just thirty years after he had first taken arms ; writing he never left off till the close of his long life, the later part of which was spent in court service. So late as 1604 his Good Will, a poem on the death of Archbishop Whitgift, preserved, in a manner which must have seemed odd enough to the hearers of Donne and the survivors of Spenser, the lolloping verse, the curious antithetic alliteration, the wooden scheme of the poets of this later transition. Churchyard has been affectionately taken up, more than once, by men of letters as a curiosity ; and it must be admitted that worse writers than he have had the honour of complete editions, which he has lacked.^ In George Whetstone, whose date of birth and death are both unknown, we have another example of the type so common at this '^ Heliconia contains some things of his — including the Whitgift piece, and there are a few other poems accessible in modern books; but little enough for a man whose bibliography fills nearly 10 columns in Hazlitt's Hd?idbook. CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 253 time, and of the characteristics of alliteration, of a sort of survival of allegory, and of a kind of composition which, though advanced beyond the mere rudiments, is still stiff and wooden. The .y^gj^^^jj^g earliest dated thing that we have of his is the Rock of Regard^ 1576, a miscellany mostly in verse; the latest is supposed to date from 1587, and is a pamphlet on the execution of Queen Mary " and other notable traitors." The only things of Whetstone's at all generally known are his play of Promos and Cassandra (a dull thing, but in Dodsley) and his Remembrance of George Gascoigne, which has commonly,^ though not always, accompanied reprints of that poet. He was rather fond of these poetical obituaries or remem- brances,^ of which about half a dozen are known ; and he also wrote prose tales, chiefly collected in a Heptameron (the title, of course, suggested by Margaret of Navarre) of Civill Dyscoiirses. These prose tales, indeed, which played so important a part in the furnishing of subjects to the dramatists, were almost as much a feature of the time as the poetical miscellanies and verse translations. The largest and best known is William Painter's Palace of Pleasure (alliterative again), which appeared in 1566-67.^ Of the two T's, Tusser and Turberville, the former is not a poet at all, but a verse-curiosity. He is our only, or almost our only, English Georgic poet, and his poetry frankly acquiesces in doggerel. His life, which seems to have dated from about 15 15 to 1580, began in Essex, was passed at St. Paul's and Eton (where Udall, as previously observed, beat him much), at Cam- bridge, at court, and lastly on a farm in Sussex, where he cultivated and rhymed. His /^"ive Hundred Poinis of Good Husbandry,'^ pub- lished in 1573, contains more than 2000 quatrains in anapaestic tetrameters, rolling, but with a regularity testifying to Udall's care. George Turberville, on the other hand, was a poet — certainly the best poet of the time (always excepting Sackville) next to Gascoigne, and perhaps Gascoigne's equal. He was a Dorsetshire man, who must have been born about 1530, and was not dead ten years before the end of the reign, who went to Winchester and New College, did some diplomatic work in Russia, and seems to have been of independent fortune. Like most of his contemporaries, 1 As, for instance, in Chalmers's Poets, vol. ii., and in Mr. Arber's Reprint of the Steel Glass. 2 Heliconia, vol. ii., contains one on the Earl of Bedford. 3 This huge compilation from the chief French and Italian novel collections has hud the honour of two reprints, one in 1813 by Haslcwood, and one in 1890 by Mr. Joseph Jacobs. •• It had appeared as "One Hundred" only in the year of Tottel. HeinR full of folk-lore and other extra-literary interest, it has been several times reprinted. 254 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v he was specially addicted to translation in prose and verse from ancients and moderns. But in 1570 he produced a volume of Epitaphs^ Epigrams, So figs, and Sonnets.^ Turberville has not much power of continued poetical flight, but there is in some of his lyrics a genuine and unforced sweetness which is extremely agreeable, and at this time very rare. His friend Barnabe Googe,- who is thought to have been born about 1540, and who died in 1594, cannot be complimented on much lyrical gift ; but some Eclogues of his have importance, and in his Cupid Conquered he has some of the appeal of a pred- °^' ecessor — though afar off — of Spenser. He came from Lincolnshire, and was a son both of Oxford and Cambridge, a client of Burleigh's, and a particularly active and miscellaneous trans- lator, of extreme Protestant tendencies in his selection of books to translate. The most obvious oddity of Googe's original poems, the extraordinary fashion in which the lines are divided — for instance, decasyllabics being split up into fours and sixes, and Alexandrines into quarters — is thought to have been due to the mere mechanical shiftlessness of the printer, who had a small ^age and large type. Googe, when he is not simply flat, often sins by the use of the bombastic and fustianish style, which was common, and at which Shakespeare laughs with such merciless good nature. Among these shadows and others more shadowy still, — the very "Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece" in English literature, — George Gascoigne gives us at least something like a sub- . stantive figure. ^ His life, though not so long as Church- °'^" ' yard's, was nearl)* as typical, and his work was much better. Like most of the men with whom he is here associated, but even more than most of them, Gascoigne was a person of birth, breeding, and education. He was the son of a Bedfordshire knight, Sir John Gascoigne, and was connected on his mother's side with Frobisher the seaman. He was a Cambridge man, his college being Trinity, and, like most University men perhaps for some three centuries, finished his education at the Inns of Court — in his case, Gray's Inn and the Temple. He was born about 1537, and can have been hardly of age when he entered Parliament, sitting for 1 Reprinted in Chalmers, vol. ii. 2 See Mr. Arber's Reprints. Of Googe's translations, the Popish Kingdom (from the Regnum Papisticum of Naogeorgus or Kirchmeyer) had the honour of an extremely handsome black-letter reprint in 1880, the editor being Mr. R. C. Hope. It is in fluent and freely alliterated fourteeners, but its literary interest is very small. 3 Poems in Chalmers, vol. ii., and more completely by W. C. Hazlitt; the Steel Glass, the Complaint of Philomene, and the Azotes in Arber's Reprints. There is a good study of Gascoigne by Dr. Schelling of Philadelphia. CHAP, in PRELIMINARIES^ VERSE 255 Bedford in 1557. He must have begun to write verse very early, but printed nothing for some years. His translated or adapted tragedy and comedy already referred to (p. 231) were acted in Gray's Inn Hall in 1566. He married in 1567, served in the Netherlands in 1573, and onwards to 1574, and in the first of these years pub- lished, or had published for him (there was often a little innocent make-believe about these things in those days), a collection of poems styled A Hundred Sundry Flowers, which in the later issue of 1575 was divided into Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds. He had to do with the Kenilworth Revels in 1575, and next year published his Steel Glass, a regular satire of considerable length in blank verse. He died in October 1577. Besides the works already mentioned, Gas- coio'ne is noted for the first translated prose tale from Bandello (a stvle so much followed by Painter and others), and for his very important Certain Notes or Instructions concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English. These Instructions, being criticism, not creation, escape the draw- backs of the other work in regard to intrinsic merit, and hold a secure position, comparable in English, — though, of course, with great abatement of scale and genius, — to that held by Dante's Dc P'uli^ari Eloquio in Italian. They are very short ; ^^ tilns!"^' and although Gascoigne had a long past of English behind him, it will readily be apprehended by intelligent readers of the foregoing pages that his actual knowledge of English poetry was not great. The study of Anglo-Saxon was indeed reviving in his time, but it did not affect ordinary men of letters for many genera- tions to come. Nor do Gascoigne or his contemporaries and followers seem to have been acquainted with any Middle English writers before Chaucer, though Piers Plowman was not an unknown book, (iascoigne himself only glances at alliterative metre in the terms of Chaucer's own scoff at it, does not mention a single poet by name except Chaucer himself, and as his followers, the later Elizabethan critics (see chap, vi.), also did, though still more decidedly, confines himself mainly to a rhetorical abstract of the Art of Poetry, dwelling successively on the necessity of fresh invention and the avoidance of commonplaces, on the importance of '* keeping the measure,"' and not (for instance) slipping from poulter's measure — Alexandrines and fourteeners — to fourteeners by themselves ; on quantity, accent, and metre generally ; on the disadvantage of polysyllables, and the impropriety of coining words for rhyme's sake ; on the danger (a caution very specially needed, as we have seen) of excessive allitera- tion and of inusitate word-inversion ; on the pause ; on rhyme-royal and other stanza forms; and on '* riding rhyme" (the heroic couplet). The most really noticeable thing about the whole is Gascoigne's 256 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. t assumption (all the more important because he is evidently not satis- fied with itj that the decasyllabic must be confined to strict iambics and to the middle pause. We have seen how this undue, but for the time salutary, restraint was arrived at ; we shall see how it was removed. Gascoigne's practice, as compared with that of his neighbours, certainly does not discredit the maxim that " every poet should con- tain a critic." Except Sackville, he is the best poet of the group, and he goes far beyond Sackville in the one point of variety. The blank verse of the Steel Glass is indeed marred by the at this time universal fault of staccato movement — the lines being far too often concluded within themselves in sense, and the monotony being increased by the poet's acceptance of the middle pause, and by his abuse of the practice of beginning successive lines with the same word.^ Yet though not vivid, it is generally vigorous, and sometimes even incisive. The lyrics and stanza poems escape this drawback, and, though the author recks his own rede about excessive alliteration but ill, attain very commonly to prettiness and not seldom to pathos. The same mark of a certain childishness is still on the verse ; but it very often has the grace as well as the immaturity of childhood. There is nothing childish about the few and noble verses of Thomas Sackville.^ They were published in a curious book which, except in the pages contributed by Sackville himself, has very small The Mirror Ji^eraiy, as compared with its historical, interest. The for Magis- Mirrov for Magistrates was jolanned in the reign of Queen Mary by William Baldwin, an Oxford man, a priest, a scholar, a schoolmaster, and a printer, who seems to have been born not long after the beginning of the century, and George Ferrers, a member of the same University, of Lincoln's Inn, .and of Parliament, a writer on legal and historical subjects, as well as of interludes, who died in 1579. The book, which was intended to be a sort of supplement to Lydgate's version of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes, is said to have been printed in part as early as 1555, but was interfered with by Gardiner and did not attain license for publica- 1 It is of the first interest to notice how this practice, which is so effective for good in the mobile-centred and complex-footed verse of Tennyson, aggravates the monotony of strict decasyllables with the immovable middle pause. 2 Sackville's drama has been already dealt with. His life only touched literature in those two early passages of it. He was born (his fathef, Sir Richard Sackville, was Chancellor of the Exchequer) about 1536, at Buckhurst, and is supposed to have been a member of Hart Hall, St. John's College, Oxford, and of the Inner Temple. He was made Lord Buckhurst in 1567, K.G. in 1589, Lord Treasurer in 1599, and Earl of Dorset in 1604. He died at the Council table four years later. CHAP, Hi PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 257 tion till 1559. It contained nineteen "tragedies " by Baldwin, Ferrers, and Phaer (?), Sackville not being yet a contributor. His two pieces, the Induction (not to the general work but to such '' tragedies " as he might write) and the Complaint of Buckingham, appeared in the second and enlarged edition of 1563, to which Churchyard also con- tributed. To complete the general story of the book, in 1574 John Higgins issued a fresh batch, taken from earlier times between Brutus and Caesar, and four years later Thomas Blennerhassett added pieces dealing with the first thousand years of the Christian era. Baldwin's and Higgins's, but not Blennerhassett's, parts were united, (still with new matter) in 1587, and at last, in 1610, the wfiole, again with additions, came together. Consisting, as the book does, entirely of tragical stories from English history, and covering, as its various issues do, almost the whole period during which, as we shall see, verse-history was a specially favourite form, it cannot lack a certain interest. But its merit as poetry is almost entirely confined to Sackville's contributions.^ They are short enough. The Induction and T/ie Complaint of Henry, Duke of Btickinghain (Richard lll.'s victim, not Wolsey's) occupy between them less than 200 stanzas in rhyme-royal, or rather more than 1300 lines. The language, as comports with the metre and with the design of tlie book to supply pa'j.t^n \u a sort of sequel to Lydgate, is a little archaic. There is even an attempt, doubtless also deliberate, to keep up fifteenth-century style both in personifying allegory and in a sort of modified " rhetoric." But hardly a single stanza, certainly no single page, can be read by a poetically minded reader without his being well aware that an entirely new music is sounding in his ears, a music of which per- haps a faint, far-off anticii)ation may be discovered in the " Cressid " stanzas of Henryson already so highly praised, but which is now fully organised in diapason. This is by no means due merely, though it is in part, to the fact that the writer has entirely shaken off the metrical palsy of the fifteenth century itself, and has, moreover, emerged from the swaddling-clothes of the transition prosody. Even his archaism does not make Sackville stiff; even such un- comely survival-catchwords of poetic diction as '"hugy" do not make him stale or flat. He has thoroughly saturated and in- formed his old stanza with the vigour and variety of the new line which the poets from Wyatt onwards had been gingerly and tenta- tively fingering at. He has not the slightest need of the clumsy stop-at-the-end with wliich they are wont to stay themselves like skaters in their novitiate, who bring themselves up by digging in a 1 Tlie allilctic Haslewood grappli-d witli tlio whok; in his 3 vol. rejirint (1815), but the adventure lias not been ro-attemptcd. S 2s8 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH BK. v pointed stick for fear of slipping, and never dare strike out. It can- not be expected that he should have mastered (as indeed nobody did till Shakespeare) the crowning secret of English verse, the glorious liberty of the ubiquitous pause. But he already knows how to vary it, is under no such superstition as Gascoigne's about the neces- sarily " middle " place, and rings the changes not merely upon it, but upon stopped and unstopped lines, with a master's audacity and sureness. Nor is this all. His merely formal improvements no doubt help him to attain, but by no means wholly account for, the new music referred to above. It has been said that the fifteenth century itself was strongly impressed, more strongly than the Middle Ages themselves, with the terror of death — that Timor mortis conturbat me was more than a mere literary catchword with it. But this mere terror is here changed, in English verse for the first time, to that greater and nobler Renaissance melancholy, the sighs of which served as wind to blow the organ music that distinguishes the best European poetry generally, and the best English poetry in particular, from about 1550 or later for a hundred years onwards, and the last echoes of which die away in the poetic prose of Browne and the Pindaric verse of the better part of Cowley. The Iiiduction, where Sorrow in person leads the poet to the infernal regions and shows him the doleful places ; the Complaint, with its story of civil war and public treason and private treachery and royal ingratitude, lend themselves, of course, very well to the play to be played on this pipe, but it must be remembered that they equally well invite the mere doleful dulness which the poets of the fifteenth century too often pei;mit themselves. Sackville is not quite so far from this in the Complaint, where the difficulty of telling actual historical details con- fronts him, as he is in the Induction, where poetry has free play; but he is far from it in both, and absolutely at the other pole in the first piece. Passages in it have been made familiar by many histories and anthologies, but the whole of its 500 lines or so ought to be known by every one who desires to acquaint himself with the full range of the powers of English poetry. Campbell, whose naturally excellent taste was still vitiated by eighteenth-century fallacies, could see little in it but gloom, though he admitted its poetry. The truth is that the poetry should make us forget the gloom, or rather remem- ber it only as the vehicle, the occasion by which the poetry is exhibited. Sackville never lets mere "dismals" get the upper hand; it is always the poetry of the dismal that he keeps before us. And this is the CHAP. Ill PRELIMINARIES — VERSE 259 gift that we find before perhaps only in Chaucer, the gift of making the subject, whatever it is, quite subsidiary — a mere cup in which to present to us the wine of poetry, a mere canvas on which to display its colours and forms. The cup and the canvas are indeed necessary ; we could not have the picture or the draught without them. But they are merely inseparable accidents ; the property is the poetry. CHAPTER IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES The Leicester House circle — Sidney — His life — The sonnets — The Defence of Poesy — "YYie. Arcadia — Spenser — The "classical metre" craze — Other poets of Sidney's circle — Watson — Greville — Warner — The sonneteers of 1592-96 — Constable — The satirists The gossiping and personal side of literary history has always attracted rather excessive than insufficient attention. And it has naturally not been neglected in the endeavours to account for the sudden transformation, about the year 1579-80, of English Ho^use^cird" literature from a rather dreary nursery ground, in which not very numerous and extremely unskilful workers were laboriously carrying out horticultural experiments, to a very garden of the Hesperides. A good deal will be found in some books about a certain " Areopagus " at Leicester House, the equivalent of the famous French cenacles of earlier and later times. We must not, of course, make too much of this. Spenser had certainly found his way, if not fully, before he was ever introduced to Leicester, and there is little or no evidence that the Leicester House influence counted for anything at all in the great dramatic development. But the coterie just mentioned did play a part, important, though not to be exaggerated, in the new development. It included Sidney, Spenser, the future Lord Brooke, Harvey, Dyer, and others, with the occasional accession of notable foreigners, such as Giordano Bruno, and the participation of ladies, of whom Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, was the chief. Nor is there any reason to doubt that Sidney was in reality, as well as in position and rank, its centre and head. His genius was indeed inferior to Spenser's by a long way. But it exceeded that of any other of the members, and it is peculiarly noticeable that it looked in more directions than one. For a young man — he was but just over thirty when he died — living in a time with, so to speak, no literary background, with no master to imitate, no blazing popularity to envy 260 CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 261 and seek to share, it is no mean thing to have left the Arcadia^ the Defence of Poesy, and Astrophel, with minor things accomplished, and with a sort of tradition of established influence which is inferior to that of few in our literature. The tradition might have been a fond imagina- tion or the work of flattering parasites, but the work is there to support and justify it. The work may be flawed, tentative, unequal, but the tradition is justly to be counted in as no mean makeweight. Philip Sidney was born in 1554. His father was Sir Henry Sidney, afterwards Depyty of Ireland ; his mother Lady Mary Dudley, sister of Leicester and daughter of the beheaded queen- maker, who was for a time Duke of Northumberland. He gave an early example of those public-school friend- ships which have counted for so much in English history, with Fulke Greville at Shrewsbury ; but the pair were not undergraduates together, for Greville went to Cambridge and Sidney to Christ Church. But it was probably owing to Greville tliat Sidney, when, after much foreign travel, he settled in London, came in contact, probably about 1578, with Gabriel Harvey, and through Harvey with Edmund Spenser. Sidney's heroic death at Zutphen did not take place till October 1586, and though his attention to literature must have been broken by more than one employment, he had the best part of ten years (for he returned from his travels in 1575) to work in. The actual achievement in his books ^ is high — much higher than has sometimes been allowed ; but the genius of Sidney was fine rather than vigorous. What is most eminently remarkable in him, and what most justifies the reputation he achieved with his contem- poraries, is the extraordinary way in which his performance, under all its disadvantages, covers almost the whole ground, in criticism or in creation, of Elizabethan literature. He wrote no dramas (unless the juvenile Lady of May - be called a drama), and in his Defence of Poesy he takes what we now see (witli the easy cleverness of pos- terity) to be the wrong side about the kind of drama to be cultivated. But he made no mistake about the fatal folly of Gosson's objection to drama and poetry generally, and in the immortal words about " Chevy Chase " he gave, all unknowing it, the motto of English poetry. Nay, he did more than this, for in his practice of verse, though comparatively scanty, occasional, and utterly unrevised, he indicated and essayed in many forms the lyric which was to be one 1 There is no modern edition, I think, of Sidney's whole Works. Dr. Grosart in 1873 collected the whole Poems ; Astrophcl and Stella has been several times separately reprinted. So has the Defence. Dr. Sommer in 1891 reprinted hand- somely the first edition of the Arcadia. 2 A sort of masque, said to have been written for Elizabeth at Hampstead in 1573, and appended to some editions of the Arcadia. 262 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v of the coming age's chief exploits, and he struck the note which was to be the note of the poetry of that age generally. So too, though his prose consists only of the tiny critical tractate of the Defence and the large but rather formless romance of the Arcadia, he managed here also to exhibit the coming events with a wonderful precision of shadow. In form this prose is not great ; the nearest approach to mere flattery in regard to him is the attempt, counte- nanced by no less a man than Drayton, to represent his style as a deliberate counterblast to the extravagances of Lyly. On the con- trary, there is nearly as much " Euphuism " in the Arcadia as in Euphties^ though it is Euphuism with a more definitely Spanish difference. But it is true that the Defetice exhibits a much more sober scheme of prose ; and it is also true that in throwing the Arcadia into the form of the prose romance Sidney was anticipating by generations, and almost by centuries, the shape into which certainly the most copious, and some of the most exquisite, developments of English prose were to be cast. The Apology for Poetry, or Defence of Poesy, as it was successively named, must, from the known date of Gosson's pamphlet, have been composed about 1580 or the next year. The same period, during which Sidney is known to have made a long stay at Wilton with his ^, sister, probably saw the composition of most of the The sonnets. .,.,.,.. . , Arcadia, which in its turn contains a very large propor- tion of the Poems. The date of the writing of the Astrophel and Stella sonnets is uncertain. Penelope Devereux, who was pretty certainly Stella, was already married to Lord Rich when Sidney married Frances Walsingham in 1583, but all attempts to date the sonnets exactly are guesswork. Their form is that specially English scheme in which the triumphs of Shakespeare were to be achieved, and which is arranged in three quatrains and a couplet ; while the rhyme arrangement vacillates. The uncertainty, however, of the period is shown in the occasional adoption of Alexandrines instead of decasyllabics as the base verse — an undoubted mistake, as the Alexandrine in English is too long a line to adapt itself in bulk to any complicated stave. Many minor details show, as this does, the immaturity of the writer, and the fact that he was writing, so to speak, in the dark, or only with the dim lights of Surrey. Wyatt, and Sackville to help him. But the stuff is of the best. The final line of the first sonnet — Fool ! said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write; the splendid soar of the opening of the seventh — When Nature made her chief work, Stella's eyes, In colour black why wrapped she beams so bright? CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 263 the famous " Moon " sonnet, familiar from many anthologies, and exhibiting in the most interesting fashion the superiority of the opening couplet — of the first jet — to what follows; the enigmatical " I might," on which many hypotheses have been built ; the various " Sleep " sonnets, exercises in a most favourite tourney of the age ; the interesting I never drank of Aganippe's well; the brilliant extravagance of the " Edward the Fourth " piece ; and the stately music of the hundred and seventh and hundred and tenth sonnets — Stella, since thou of right a princess art, and Leave me, oh love, which reaches but to dust, — these things, with many others, make up a tale which in the circum- stances is merely astounding. The songs included in Astrophel and Stella, with one exception, are a little inferior to the sonnets, but they are not less interesting, inasmuch as the effort to secure a lyric medium is obvious, and though not quite successful, is not wholly defeated. The heavy thud of the best work of Googe and Church- yard, even of Turberville and Gascoigne, is gone. We do not yet quite '* sing," but we have quite got rid of the fatal drop into unques- tioned " saying." And in all Sidney's verse — the Arcadia fragments, the Psalm versions, etc. — this sense of the broken ice, of the fleeing winter, of " Lent coming with love to town " at last, is the pervading charm. The virtues of his prose are different, and have been partly anticipated. The Apology ox Defence (first printed as the former in 1595) has so far an interest of style that it is in parts straightforwardly and vigorously written. But its interest of matter far outruns this. Gosson (see note ante) had exhibited the clash of the two cur- rents of the day which had most force in them — the scholarly and literary impulse on the one hand, and the Puritan " craving for righteousness," as some call it (the intense desire to make somebody else uncomfortable even at a slight sacrifice to yourself, as it is phrased by others). Sidney, a scholar, a poet to the bone, and an experienced politician, young as he was, must have felt the danger, and may have attempted a sort of fnodiis vivendi ; yet much of the Apoloi^Vs in its exaltation of the classical theories, is merely an echo of what had been said twenty years o/Poesy." earlier by the Pldiade in France, if not of the common form of the Renaissance in all countries. It is unlucky, no doubt, that he joins the heretics who say that verse is only an accident of poetry, and that he condemns that very mixture of tragedy and 264 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH ek. v comedy which at the moment in two different countries, Spain and England, was 'raising and to raise the drama to such a height as it had nevet previously attained. But no one can be more wise than destiny. The Arcadia is, except in scale, less interesting, if only for the tolerably sutficient reason that it is excessively difficult to make out exactly how much of it is Sidney's at all. He wished, it is said, on his death-bed, to burn it. But his sister would not consent, and as The Countess of Pembroke'' s Arcadia it was published in 1590. It is an obvious following of the late Greek romances and the Spanish Amadis series, in the spirit which was at the same time, or a little later, to bring forth Honord d'Urfd's Astree and the enormous roll of French imitations. It is thus principally noticeable in scheme as an instance of the impulse towards prose fiction which has affected all ages, though it never came to anything till long after Sidney's death. The high heroic spirit it displays capti- vated all good wits in its own and the following generation. But it is a " TeHdenz-hooV " rather than a book in itself, and it illustrates the eager striving which animated Sidney's circle with less success than Astrophel and Stella. The mannerisms of its style, which have puzzled and misled commentators, appear, as has been said, to be directly imitated from the Spanish.^ It may be thought that too much space is given to Sidney. Yet his personality does seem in some strange way to have rayed out more influence than that of any man of his generation. And his positive achievement has been more often belittled than exaggerated. Indeed, if Edmund Spenser himself had died when Sidney did, and if nothing of his survived but what was published before that date, there would be poetical justification for calling Sidney the greater, though the less accomplished, poet of the two. Very little is known, though a good deal has been laboriously inferred and conjectured, about Spenser's parentage and his early years generally. There is no reasonable doubt that he was of a family of Spensers settled near Burnley in Lancashire ; but he was .pens r. |^qj.^ Jj^ London about 1552. He appears to have been a Merchant Taylors' boy, and certainly matriculated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1569. He seems to have been poor, and was assisted from charitable funds. But if (and there can be no reasonable doubt of it) the translations from Petrarch and Du Bellay into Enghsh blank verse, which appeared in the same year in Van der Noodt's Theatre of Voluptjtous Worldlings, and which in 1591 were, with alterations from blank verse to rhyme, reprinted as his, be genuine, they are evidence 1 See p. 271 sq. of Mr. David Hannay's The Later Renaissance (Edinburgh, 1898). CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 265 that he was a very promising scholar. He remained at College for the then usual seven years, taking his Bachelor's degree in 1573, and his Master's in 1576. He was not fortunate enough to change his sizarship for a fellowship, and seems to have left Cambridge for the North with very dubious prospects. He had, however, made friends with a man somewhat older than himself, Gabriel Harvey, a Fellow of Trinity Hall. By 1578 Harvey had, in some way or other, secured the patronage of the powerful favourite Leicester, and he wrote to Spenser to come and share his good luck. Whether, as is at least probable, this was the origin of Spenser's introduction to Sidney, Leicester's nephew, or whether, as suggested above, Fulke Greville had made the Cambridge literary group known to his school-fellow, is impossible to say, and does not matter ; indeed, the two things are quite compatible. But Spenser was unquestionably from this time enlisted in the Leicester House set, and he seems to have been sent by Leicester to France in the autumn of 1579. Next year he was made secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton, Deputy of Ireland, and with him was present at the famous Smerwick business, where a crew of Spanish and Papal filibusters were put to the sword, on the loth of November. He did not leave Ireland with Grey, but received various offices there, and in 1588 obtained, or rather bought, an allotment of some three thousand acres of the forfeited Desmond lands in County Cork at Kiicolman, w^here he proceeded to reside, buying also the office of Clerk of the Council of Munster. In 1589 he went back to England, being now under the protection of another favourite, Raleigh. He spent at least part of two years in London, frequenting the Court and playing the part of suitor, not without some grumbling. But he obtained a pension of ^50 a year, a considerable sum for the time and sovereign, against, as tradition has it, the influence of Burleigh. Three years later, at the mature age of forty-two, but with poetical results worthy of twenty, he married a certain Elizabeth, probably Elizabeth Boyle. He went back again to London in 1595 ; but the end of his days was not far off. In 1597 he returned to Kiicolman with his wife and three, soon to be four, cliildren. He became Sheriff of Cork in September 1598, and immediately afterwards Tyrone's rebellion broke out, Kiicolman was burnt, and Spenser fled, first to Cork and then to London, where, in January 1599, he died, there is no trustworthy evidence from what cause. Spenser's life, though the facts are scanty, is not uninteresting, and it is not quite unimportant to know that he shared the strenuous and varied living of his great time; but he might not have done this and yet be one of the foremost figures of English literature. His plans and projects were numerous and early ; not a few of them 266 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. V seem to have been actually carried out, though no remains exist. But his exile in the hills of the North, though it seems to have witnessed an unhappy love-affair with the " Rosalind" of the Calendar, gave him time to exercise poetical genius. Nearly ten years had passed since he showed what he could do as a mere boy in Van der Noodt's book, when this his first real work appeared, ushered and commented on by one "E. K.," "from my lodging at London this loth of April 1579," dedicated to Sidney and addressed by the editor to Gabriel Harvey. About this "E. K." disputes have arisen. One monstrous theory has been started to the effect that it was Spenser in mask — a theory of which all that can be said is that, if it be true, Spenser, instead of being, as he is generally taken to have been, one of the noblest and most high-minded of English men of letters, was a shameless self-puffer. Further, the style and general tone are unlike Spenser's, and argue very little original genius or even talent in the writer. That Spenser may have supplied some of the information is very probable, and would not be in the least discreditable. Meanwhile "E. K." is identified, in fair likelihood, with a certain Edward Kirke, a contemporary and friend of Harvey and Spenser. He supplies a good deal of elaborate ushering, some not useless glossarial and other exposition, a few comments, harmless if nothing more. If he is to be believed, he wrote other commentaries on works of Spenser's which have not come down to us. As for the Calendar itself, it is a collection of twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year, and mostly, though not always, in dialogue. There is no prevailing metre, the first eclogue being in the six-line stanza ; the second in the famous metre which, as we have seen, is found as far back as the Genesis and Exodus of the thirteenth century, but which Coleridge thought himself to have invented, and certainly re-invented, in Christabel ; the third in another six-line stanza of shorter lines ; the fourth divided between elegiac quatrains and a lyric stave ; the fifth in Chaucerian riding rhyme ; the sixth in octaves ; the seventh in the rather lolloping eights and sixes which the earliest Elizabethan poets had loved ; the eighth partly in sixains, partly in eights and sixes, treated with more freedom than before ; the ninth again in the Christabel form ; the tenth in a different sixain; the eleventh again in quatrains and a sort of Pindaric ; and the twelfth in the sixains of the first. Each has at the end one or more " emblems " — a variety of the "posies" so much affected by the Elizabethans. The general scheme of the poem or poems was taken naturally from preceding eclogue-writers — Theocritus, Virgil, and the moderns, Mantuan, Marot, and so forth. The language (as ought to have CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 267 been seen from the first, and indeed was partly) is not a natural dialect of any kind or district, but partly imitated from Chaucer, partly seasoned with Northern words. It is much cruder and more unskilfully archaic than the exquisite vocabulary which Spenser was soon to work out for the Faerie Qtieene, and is chiefly responsible for Ben Jonson's too cavalier sentence that Spenser " in imitating the ancients writ no language." The Shepherd's Calendar''- does not contain any of the finest passages of its author's poetry, but it at least shows the existence of an instrument on which the finest passages of poetry could be played. For the next ten years Spenser was busy on other things as well as on poetry, and it was not till the ist of December 1589 that the first three books of the Faerie Queene were entered at Stationers Hall. They appeared in the following spring. In 1591 a volume containing The Ruins of Time, The Tears of the Muses, Virgits Gnat, Mother Hubbard's Tale, The Ruins of Rome, Muiopottnos, and the Visions, and including, as has been said, a revision of the twenty years earlier juvenilia, was published. It is worth noticing that Spenser here for himself, as Kirke had earlier done for him, gives a list of promised books which never appeared. This phenomenon is by no means uncommon in literature, and it may be set down with equal probability to an active imagination outrunning possibility, and to a ruthless critical temper which would not allow anything that it did not think perfect to appear. This volume was generally entitled Complaints, Spenser at this time being in melancholy mood, and Daphnaida, which followed, exhibits the same drift. His marriage changed his tone remarkably, and 1595 saw the Anioretti sonnets, the Epiihalamiufn, and Colin Clout's Come Home Again; while at the very earliest of 1596, the completion of the Faerie Queene, except the odd cantos, was published, with the glorious Four Hymns, and the Frothalamium, not like the Epithalamium on himself, followed. He published nothing more, his prose State of Ireland not appearing till long afterwards. There are no Spenserian Apocrypha worth mentioning, save Britain's Ida, a pretty poem, but quite obviously of a later cast, in the key of the imitations of Shakespeare's two earlier poems and Marlowe's Hero and Leander. Almost jthe whole of this later work (with, in the case of the 1 591 volume, exceptions for some evidently early things not quite perfectly revised) stands on the same level and deserves the same praise. The towering bulk and the substantive interest of the Faerie 1 The title was undoubtedly taken from a book extremely popular in divers languages with the generation before — a work of astrological, medical, moral, and miscellaneous information, the early English form of which has been reprinted by Dr. Sommcr, London, 1892. 268 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH BK. v Queeiie give it the necessary supremacy among its smaller peers. But if they stood alone without the epic and without the Calendar, we should undoubtedly be deploring the unkind fate which had prevented the poet who gave us these from giving us anything greater. The 1 59 1 volume and Daphnaida rank much nearer to the Calendar than the rest of the minor works ; their positive beauty is not of the absolutely commanding order. Yet there is a certain advance in the mastery of mere verse, in the faculty of communicating " cry " and echo. And in Mother Hubbard^s Tale there has been generally and rightly noticed the exhibition of a satirical faculty which is not subsidiary, which is complementary, to the faculties displayed in the Faerie Queene. But the others are of far higher quality. The Prothala7nmm for Lady Elizabeth and Lady Katherine Somerset is a delightful poem ; but it naturally lacks the personal passion of the Atnoretti and the Epithalamiiitn^ the former the best early sonnets in final couplet form next to Shakespeare, the latter by common consent unsurpassed in its own kind, as are the Four Hymns in theirs. These poems, which it is very desirable to take together, express a peculiar Renaissance note, the union of intellectual and sensual rapture, as no others do. And their form corresponds to their matter. The poet can by this time do anything he likes with rhyme and rhythm, with language and metrical scheme. No bead-roll of the greatest poems in English, which disregards conditions of mere bulk, can omit the Epithalaniirun and the Fotir Hymns. Nevertheless the Faerie Queene, the best known, is also the best of Spenser's work. In this great poem, which some have put first for actual greatness, and which can hardly in any competent estimate yield the place for charm, if not for majesty, among long poems in English, Spenser displays at the very full all the gifts and graces which he showed in his minor work, and more. The Calettdar and the Sonnets, the Epit/ialamium and the Hymns, are but the chapels and chantries of the cathedral of the Faerie Qjiee?ie. Rather strange attempts have sometimes been made to belittle the achievement, which is the most striking and the most pervading in the book, the invention of the Spenserian stanza. Some have even said that he "took it from the Italians," which in any sense which, is not next to nonsense is simply false. Others have dismissed it as a simple putting of an Alexandrine on to the eight-line stanza. The fact is that it is one of the crowning achievements of poetical inspiration in form. It stands alone in the combination of individual beauty and faculty, with suitableness to a long connected poem. Naturally, and it might seem inevitably, the latter quality is found in nearly all verse forms to exist in inverse ratio to the former. The Spenserian CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 269 almost alone combines the two ; and while the single stanza is often as complete and as beautiful as a sonnet, the whole flows with an evenness and absence of break which not the most ingeniously arranged "sonnet-sequence " has ever attained. The poet's success in language is certainly more contestable ; but not much diminution can be allowed in the credit due for it. The extreme and sometimes rather rugged archaism of the Calendar has been smoothed away, and Spenser's immense advance in melody at once makes it easy for him to select only beautiful words, and un- necessary for him to carry archaism beyond a slight degree. It is but now and then that there would be any difficulty in printing a stanza of the Faerie Queene in modern spelling without a single strange word, though no doubt the poet sometimes sees his account in using licenses both in vocabulary and spelling. With such a metre and such a lexicon marvels in verbal music become almost easy. Hardly any two stanzas of this enormous work will be found exactly to repeat each other in cadence. The secrets of varying the caesura of the line and of using or abstaining from enjafiibemeiit or overlapping, which have been by turns ignored, re- covered, and abused, and on which rests practically the whole art of rescuing any metre from monotony, were perfectly well known to Spenser, and as cunningly used by him as by any of his followers. Nor can he be said to be ignorant, though he employs them rather less, of the other two great metrical secrets, the use of trisyllabic feet and the distribution of words of varying weight and length over the line. As for subject, Spenser's was a great one ; and it was capable, even in his own time, of being regarded from curiously diverse points of view. Half told as the tale is, it is impossible to be certain how far Spenser had a fixed plan of adjusting the whole to that slightly concealed allegory of the state of England which, though too much attention may be paid to it, the poem does contain. There was more than the mere court iership of the time in the obvious glances at Queen Elizabeth, not merely in Gloriana, but in Belphcebe, and perhaps to some extent in Britomart. We may wish that there were less colour for the hint of Leicester in Prince Arthur, and of Queen Mary in Duessa, and it may seem rather idle curiosity to inquire whether Artegall really has anything to do with Lord Grey of Wilton, where Raleigh comes in, and so forth. There can, however, be no doubt that there is a certain amount of double meaning of the kind, that it interested contemporaries, and that it was intended to lead up to some sort of end. Indeed, the general story of the chief characters, though very slowly and with vast overlayings, does make some prog- ress even as it is amid tlic completer historiettcs of the adventures 270 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v of the several Knights of the Virtues, and the almost bewildering panorama of beautiful pictures which the poet calls up at every step, and which no doubt constitute the main interest and delight of the poem to modern readers. To Spenser, moreover, as to all the great men of his great genera- tion, virtue and vice were not commonplaces in any sense that ad- mitted of their being despicable or negligible. By a redoublement of his allegory — not so much the allegory, which had not yet entirely relaxed its very tyrannous hold on the later Middle Ages, as that which must always maintain its grasp on poetry — the Faerie Qiieene was also intended to be a picture of Life, of Conduct, worked out by the treatment of certain great Virtues or excellences. Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy are celebrated in the books actually existing. Magnificence, in the full Aristotelian sense (though he must rather have meant Magnanimity), was intended, we learn, at once to provide the special subject of another, and, as exemplified by Prince Arthur, to appear in and dominate them all. But of the actual distribution of the last six books no trustworthy testimony remains, and only tradition vouches for the fact that they, or some of them, perished in the sack of Kilcolman. Only the odd " cantos of Mutability," intended to be at- tached to a book of Constancy, survive ; and as they are not inferior (they contain the gorgeous procession of the Months and Seasons) to the very best of the earlier work, it is pretty certain that what we have lost would be no disappointment if it were found. Indeed it is, for many sound reasons of poetical criticism, extremely probable that Spenser proceeded on the plan of indulging his genius by the composition of great fragments such as this, and, instead of hastily cobbling up a context, left them till he could worthily work them into the larger whole. It is not true that such passages, though they are not perhaps very difficult to identify and separate nowadays, form the sole or even the chief attraction of the poem. On the contrary, they are never so beautiful as in their proper places ; and the Faerie Qjieene, more than almost any other poem, demands and deserves to be read as a whole if its full charm is to be comprehended and enjoyed. But there is no reasonable doubt that the accessories of Spenser's scheme have become of more importance in poetical appeal than those things which to him were perhaps the chief. We shall never, if we are wise, forget that he is, as Milton called him, " our sage and serious Spenser," but wisdom will still insist that we regard him first of all as the poet and prophet of Beauty — the beauty of heaven and of earth alike. This is perhaps the best place to notice a strange craze already referred to, which seems at one time to have been in danger of CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 271 seriously infecting Spenser — the projected "reform" of English verse by the production of actual classical metres, especially hexameters. This was a general and, strange as it may seem, a not quite unin- telligible mania of the Renaissance generally, and had been tried in other countries besides England. The reason of it is perfectly plain. The eager spirits of the day in both France and England had outgrown the good old verse of their respective meue"craz^c^ nations ; they thought (and rightly) that the recent verse was not very good, and being as yet novices in comparative criticism, they jumped to the conclusion that what they justly admired in Greek and Latin poetry might be reproduced, or at least rivalled, by the use of an identical prosody. It was certain that such a learned body as the Sidneian clique would at least not reject this notion ab initio, and for a time it seems to have received a favourable hearing there. Ascham, a delightful prose writer but of a most un- poetical turn, had advocated the thing long before, and a certain Thomas Drant, a contemporary of Ascham's, had left certain post- humous ''rules "' on the subject. This mania was taken up, either from crotchet or sincerely, by many inside and out Sidney's circle, including the meritorious critic Webbe (vide infra), and by none more than by Gabriel Harvey, who had become Fellow of Trinity Hall. Harvey is one of those intrinsically unimportant persons who by accident have acquired a very considerable place in literary history ; and there have even been fierce battles over the question whether he was a pedant or not. If not it is very difficult to know to whom the adjective can apply. He was a genuine scholar in his own way — pedants very often, though not invariably, are. He deserves much thanks for the way in which he put Spenser in the way of a preferment which enabled him to follow his genius instead of languishing as a poor scholar or hiding himself away as a country curate. It is not so certain that Harvey was wholly to blame for the distaste which he shov/ed to the London Bohemian school, which will be shortly noticed ; the great Marprelate dispute in which he was mixed up is still so mysterious in parts that it is very difficult to form any but the most guarded judg- ment on any matter connected with it ; and it is certain that his principal literary antagonist and reviler, Thomas Nash, was at least as unscru]nilf)us as he was clever. But Harvey is condemned out of his own mouth. It is not Nash but himself who informs us that he thought the Faerie Queene—the greatest poem that English literature had yet seen but one, if with that exception, and the greatest poem save three or four, if with these exceptions, that Englisli literature was to see — a fantastic trifle, much inferior to nine pseudo-classical "comedies," probably some- 272 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk.v thing like Daniel's later ones, which Spenser had also written, and which he had the good sense never to print. And again it is not Nash, nor any one who trusts to Nash, but Harvey who tells us that he believed in the hexameter craze, that he exemplified it in many preposterous examples, and that he tried to force it on his contem- poraries. It is not certain how far Spenser himself was seriously carried away by this lunacy. Some have seen nothing but irony in the somewhat guarded and fair-spoken replies which he makes to Harvey on the subject, and it is certain that his own attempts in the style are few and rather laboriously ineffective, with a touch of genius in them, than hopelessly mad and bad. But we may perhaps see in his attitude rather that of an honest perplexity striving to adjust itself to what his elders and betters seemed to like, but convinced of their error by native genius, than any deliberate persiflage. At any rate, he did little in the kind. Others were less wary, and Richard Stanyhurst, an Irish gentleman, achieved one of the most preposterous books of English literature in his version of Virgil. Nor did the craze die soon. It was formally revived after some years, and with some differences, by an exquisite poet in true English verse, Thomas Campion, and formally denounced by a true though less exquisite poet, Samuel Daniel. It animated, as we shall see, the interesting if limited body of Elizabethan critics. And the echo of it may be found long afterwards in Milton's curious heresies about rhyme — heresies which may be set down in part to an innate genius for blank verse striving to assert itself, but which, seeing that Milton could write as beautifully in rhyme as without it, may be more safely imputed to the singular cross-grained ness, the innate nonconformity, which mark the author of Paradise Lost in almost every relation of life and literature. Besides Sidney, Spenser, and their gracioso Harvey, the Leicester House circle included divers other men of letters. Sir Edward Dyer, a very great friend of Sidney's and one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, but an older man, has the accidental interest of S^dney'sclrcle!^ having been born at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, the birthplace nearly two centuries later of Fielding. He was an Oxford man, a traveller, a diplomatist and courtier, and he outlived Elizabeth, dying in 1607. He had a very great reputa- tion in his time as a poet, but his remains are small, and only one of them, the famous and excellent, but not superexcellent, My mind to me a kingdom is, has obtained much place in the general memory. Abraham Fraunce, a protegi of Sidney's, was a Shrewsbury boy and a Fellow of St. CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 273 John's College, Cambridge. His name occurs with fair frequency in the literature of the time, and he appears to have been a good scholar, but the most interesting thing about him is that he quoted the Faerie Queeiie two years before it was published. More important than Dyer, and much more important than Fraunce, was Thomas Watson, a rather short-lived bard who died in 1592 at the age of thirty-five, but who, save for a certain frigidity, would take a high place, and who perhaps, considering his earliness, deserves no low one as it is. Watson,^ who was a Londoner by birth and an Oxford man by education, translated the Antigone into Latin in 1581 ; but the next year he pro- duced an English verse book of great mark, the Hecatompathia or Pas- sionaie Century of Sonnets. This, it is important to observe, was the very first of the great Elizabethan sonnet-collections, for Sidney's, though written, did not appear till years afterwards, and it was the tenth, not the ninth, decade of the century which saw the regular sonnet out- burst. Watson was dead before this, but after his death another sequence, the Tears of Fancy., made its appearance, and he did other work. It is just possible that if Watson had lived a little longer (though he was outgrowing the ripest poetical age when he died), or if he had been born a little later, the frigidity above referred to would have been melted. It appears to be the result, not so much of any want of natural heat in the poet, as of his mind being somewhat sicklied o'er with learning. As was the case with all these early Elizabethan poets of the great age, except Spenser, he could not wear this learning lightly, and he hardly dared use a phrase or form a wish if somebody Greek or Roman, somebody French or Italian, had not authorised the pro- ceeding. That the sonnets of the Hecatompathia are not quatorzains, but a long eighteen-line form, of a class which the Italians had wisely rejected, does not matter much. The form is not so successful as the quatorzain, but neither Watson nor anybody else could tell that till he had tried it. It is more fatal that each piece has a prose commentary and discussion of itself, pointing out its originals and its special features, with parallel passages and all the most approved apparatus of classical editing. The Tears of Fancy are couplet- tipped quatorzains, after what is the specially English model ; but they do not gain much in freedom. Perhaps nowhere do we feel, so much as in reading Watson, the enormous benefit which was conferred upon English literature by the lawless excesses of the playwriglits — some of them, Shakespeare at their head, men of no University culture at all. It cannot be said that the last (and except Spenser and Sidney 1 Ed. Arber. T 274 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v by far the greatest) of this set who remains to be noticed offers any exception to this caution. Fulke Greville,^ who was exactly Sidney's contemporary, was born at Beauchamp Court, Warwick- shire, in which county his father represented a good family, while his mother was of the illustrious house of the Nevilles. He and " Astrophel " entered Shrewsbury together, and though they were parted during their University sojourn, the friendship continued, and the two served together, when they were twenty-three, on an embassy to the Palatinate. Greville was heir to great wealth, and increased it by buying lucrative offices. He was a favourite of the Queen — who, no doubt, did not like him less because he seemed to have no fancy for marriage. He was knighted in 1597. At the opening of the new reign, Greville, who had already received many gifts from Elizabeth, had Warwick Castle, which has remained with his descendants, bestowed on him. In 1614 he be- came Chancellor of the Exchequer; and in 1620 was ennobled as Lord Brooke of Beauchamp. Eight years later he was, it is said, stabbed by a servant in his house, the name and site of which are perpetuated by Brook Street, Holborn. In his youth he seems to have been the friend of most of the best men of his time from Sidney to Bacon ; in his age he appears, though not certainly, to have acquired a character for avarice and moroseness. Almost nothing of his considerable work was published during his lifetime, the chief exceptions being the play of Alustapha, 1601. Some of his poems appeared in 1633, his Life of Sidney in 1652, and more poems in 1670. He was thus a practitioner in all three kinds, poetry, prose, and drama, and it is probable, though not certain, that his best work was early. The plays Musiap/ia and Alahajn, which could not possibly be acted, show the influence of the coterie in their form, which is that of the Senecan drama chiefly, and have a double portion of that special characteristic of Greville which will be noticed presently, as have his longer poems or poetical tractates on Monarchy and other things. But Coelica is one of the earliest, and certainly one of the most remarkable, of the fashionable sonnet and song collections to a real or imaginary mistress. Some of the things in it are purely delightful, the best of all being that beginning I, with whose colours Myra dressed her head. But as a rule delight, except of a very peculiar kind, is not the sensation which Greville is apt to excite. Like Donne, his junior by some years, though with less exquisite exceptions to the rule of his 1 Works, ed. Grosart, 4 vols, privately printed, 1870. CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 275 incompleteness, he is an example at once of the immense capability and of the desperate dangers of the Elizabethan cast of thought, and (till the dramatists had broken down many of its trammels) of the Elizabethan conception of literature. Greville would not write for the vulgar, and, as has been seen, he scarcely condescended to give it any opportunities of judging his work. From first to last there seems to have been on him a sense that literature ought above all things to be scholarly in form and elegant in substance, that it ought not to deal with trivial things, that "words to the wise," cryptic raptures, enigmatical sentences, were the things to attempt. Not merely the " abstruser cogitations " in verse, in which Lamb had perhaps a slightly paradoxical though no doubt also a genuine delight, but his simplest prose works, exhibit this characteristic of laboured remoteness as do hardly any other things in English. In verse he is eccentric, unpopular, impossible, but not uncharming. A few individual poets and two interesting groups of poems have still to be noticed as properly contemporary with Spenser, Shake- speare and Drayton and Daniel being kept for later treatment. The chief of the former was William Warner, a poet who had his resurrection rather too early, and who perhaps on that account (he figures in Chalmers's Poets ^) has had rather less attention than he deser\-es. Warner, who was probably born in 1558, and certainly died in 1609, was born in Oxfordshire and educated at Oxford, became an attorney, attached himself in some way to Lord Hunsdon, perhaps translated the Menachfui, and certainly wrote Albion's England, 1586, and Syritix, 1597. The latter, a collection of prose stories, is not of much importance ; Albion's England has a good deal. At first sight it falls distinctly into the earlier and ruder class, being written in fourteeners, which, however, the poet did not divide, as his only modern editor has for convenience' sake ruthlessly divided them into eights and sixes. It anticipates Drayton and Daniel ; and it shows some similarity to Spenser, not in its verse, but in its attention to the history of England ; while it has a further likeness to Drayton in trying to do for the history very much what the Polyolbion does for the topography of the island. There is little of the new learned grace or of the new passion about the thing; but it has many vivid touches, some pas- sages of rhetorical force, and a general sense of power. The poets other than Warner, with two exceptions, were not better executants tlian himself, and were much smaller men. Thomas Howell, an outsider of the Sidneian group, who wrote from 156S to 1581 things almost sufficiently designated by their titles, — T/te Arbor of Amiiie, 1 Vol. iv. 276 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v his Devices^ etc., — belongs to a lower division of the same class with Turberville and Googe. Humplirey Gifford, whose Posie of Gilly- flowers appeared in 1580, has much more original force, could do the ballad measure well, has a spirited war-song, and some skipping anticipation of the Nyvtphidia measure. Much below either is Matthew Grove, whose poems were pubhshed in 1587, but must have been written somewhat earlier. Yet the care which has been expended in reprinting these ^ is not lost, because nothing can be more valuable than to have, at such periods as these, specimens of the ordinary run of verse. When such verse comes to be written, as in our own time and in others, by hundreds of volumes every year, it ceases to possess this interest altogether, and, except in the case of some singular cataclysm, is not likely to recover it. But some would except from these remarks the pair above referred to — Richard Barnfield (1574-1626) and Robert Southwell (i56o?-i595). The former,- a Staffordshire squire, wrote not a little, but his memory is chiefly attached to The Affectionate Shepherd (1594), an amatory poem of classical or Italian rather than English inspiration, some others of no very dissimilar character, and one exquisite thing, the famous As it fell upon a day, which used to be ascribed to Shakespeare. Southwell,^ a Jesuit priest, who was imprisoned and executed as a traitor, has also, but more certainly, left one splendid poem, The Bitrning Babe, and other re- ligious pieces, which, in spirit if not in form, are much above the average. The two groups which have been referred to above as necessary to complete the survey of poets strictly contemporary with Spenser are the sonneteers and satirists. Both, in their close connection with each other, and in their apparent adoption of fashionable styles, show that immaturity which is still characteristic of the time ; each in different ways shows that time's abounding faculty. It is not possible to decide with absolute certainty what induced the sonnet outburst of the last decade of the sixteenth century in England, and especially of its middle years. The form — " non moins ^1^^ docte que plaisante invention italienne," as Du Bellay sonneteers calls it — was no novelty in the colder climes of England o 1592-96. ^^^ France ; it had taken both by assault nearly two generations earlier with Wyatt and Mellin de Saint-Gelais. But it is perhaps the best testimony to Sidney's real importance in English literature, that it was not till after his death, and till his sonnets lAlI three appear in Dr. Grosart's Occasional Issues. 2 Ed. Arber. 3 Ed. Grosart. CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 277 were gradually divulged, that the sonnet outburst came. There was no mfstake about it when it did come. Sidney's poems became known to the general in 1591, and the earliest form of Constable's (see below) next year. In 1593 appeared three remarkable collec- tions, wholly or mainly in sonnet form, the Parthenophil and Parthenophe of Barnabe Barnes, the Licia of Giles Fletcher, and the Phillis of Thomas Lodge. ^ Lodge will reappear as a satirist, as a dramatist, and also as a pamphleteer. The chief achievement of Fletcher is to have been the father of two poets better than himself; and the sonnets of neither are very remarkable, though they testify to the powerful influence in the air. Barnes, though he did other work in prose and verse (a Treatise of Offices, a Divine Century of Spiritual Soiinets, a play called the DeviVs Charter) must stand or fall by Parthenophil. It has been variously judged, and can never by a sane judgment be set extremely high, seeing that the author has no measure and would sometimes be much the better for having some. But it is a good specimen of the poetical intoxication of the time, which contrasts so curiously with the unintentional sobriety of the Googes and even the Gascoignes.''^ These pioneers of the sonnet seem to have encouraged followers, for the next year, 1594, was very fertile in similar books. William Percy, a cadet of the house of Northumberland, and an Oxford man, published Ccelia (the trick of framing the set of sonnets as an address to a real or feigned mistress established itself at once). Two major poets, Drayton and Daniel, who will have separate notice later, issued, the first Idea, the second Delia. An anonymous collection, Zepheria, has not only intrinsic merit, but is one of the few Elizabethan books which represent very strongly and directly the French Pleiade influence. Willoughby's Avisa (nothing is known of Willoughby or of Avisa, but the book has been drawn into the Shakespearian comment-vortex), though not formally consist- ing of sonnets, belongs to the group in other ways. But this group's most characteristic constituent was the fuller form of Constable's Diana. We know a very little more about Henry Constable ^ than about most of the interesting and obscure personages of the time ; but we do not know very much. He was probably of the distinguished 1 All these, with most of those to be mentioned presently, except Zepheria, are in Dr. Grosart's Occasional Issues. Several, including Zepheria, are in Mr. Arber's Eus^lish Garner. 2 Barnes's birth- and death-dates are unknown. He was a friend of Gabriel Harvey's, and, as Harvey's friends were wont to be, much mixed up in the literary asperities of the time, being for instance bitterly lampooned by Thomas Campion. But we have no real knowledge about him. 8 Poems, ed. Hazlitt, London, 1859. 278 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. V family of his name, which is still seated in the Holderness district of Yorkshire; he may have been born about 1554; he seems to have taken his degree at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1579; and he was a friend of the Bacons; but he was a Roman Catholic, and as such, inevitably a member of an Opposition, which in those days was exposed to things more unpleasant than mere exclusion from office. How he can, as some say, have formed part of Queen Mary's household in Scotland is not clear, seeing that he cannot have been more than fourteen at the date of the battle of Langside ; but he certainly spent much of his middle life in exile abroad ; and when he revisited England towards the end of the Queen's reign, he was thrown into the Tower, whence he only emerged after James's accession, and then not at once. He is supposed to have died before 161 6. His verse was very highly esteemed by his contemporaries. It consists of the twenty-eight sonnets (twenty-two only had been printed in 1592) of Diana, the title of which, if it be necessary to seek any special origin for a thing which might have had so many, was probably suggested by the famous Diana of Montemayor ; of another thirty or more, obtained from MS. on profane, and some seventeen on spiritual subjects; of four prefixed to Sidney's Apology when it was printed, and of four contributions, not sonnets, to EnglancVs Helicon. The note of the whole of this work is a remarkable elegance and scholarly perfection, less " translunary " perhaps than the brightest comet or rocket effects of Elizabethan poetry, but steadier, more sustained, and in correcter taste. Alcilia, by "J. C." in 1595, contained sonnets by name which are as far from the sonnet nature as those of Avisa, but which are, as verses, sometimes pretty, though usually slim. And 1596 made up for the comparative sterility of its predecessor by giving not merely Spenser's admirable Atnoreiti, but three cycles by persons of whom next to nothing is known, Fidessa by Bartholomew Griffin, Diella by Richard Lynch, and Chloris by William Smith. Fidessa is the best of the three. Robert Tofte added Laura in 1597, and Alba in 1598. The general characteristics of these sonnets wUl be best given in the Interchapter summarising this Book. But the poetic impulse which they show was diffused over all the later years of the reign, and it is not least well shown in the last and best of the Elizabethan Miscellanies, England'' s Helicon (1600) and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody ( 1 602 ) . The tendency of the Elizabethans to write in schools, and after for some time neglecting a model that lay before them, to copy it in flocks, is only less exhibited in the curious group of .satires which coincided with the sonnet outbreak. Wyatt, if he had not quite CHAP. IV SPENSER AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES 279 hit, had gone very near to, the regular satire form, and Gascoigne had actually achieved it ; but their examples for a time produced no effect. It is still very uncertain what credence is to be attached to a MS. ascription of Donne's Satires to satirists. a date as early as 1593; and Donne's work will be best treated together and in the next Book. But Lodge, so often mentioned, and to be mentioned, most certainly issued A Fig for Momus, satirical in substance and in form couplets, as early as 1595 ; which makes the challenge of Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop, to " follow him who list, And be the second English satirist," a piece of rather ill-tasted jactation. Hall published his Virgideiniaruvi in 1597, and was followed by Marston the dramatist with Satires accompanying his Pygmalion^ s Image in 1598, and The Scourge of Villainy in 1599. Guilpin's Skialet/ieia, Tourneur's Transformed Metamorphosis^ and a few other things belong to the same school and nearly the same date.^ It is a school not to be contemned if we look at its members; less estimable, perhaps, if we look at this particular division of their works. Almost all are tainted with a very great coarseness, and injured by a singular and still not quite intelligible harshness of verse, which is most plausibly explained as coming from a corrupt imitation of Persius. The satire, like satire generally, has some value for its picture of manners, especially in Hall and Donne ; but even this is vitiated by an obvious and rather tedious exaggeration both of tone and detail, which reaches its acme in iMarston, as obscurity of thought and phrase does in Tourneur and roughness of versification in Donne. 1 Donne's and Marslon's satires are in all the editions of their work; Hall's are in Dr. Grosart's Occasiorial Issues, as is Skialet/ieia ; the Transformed Meta- morphosis is in Mr. Churton CoUins's edition of Tourneur. CHAPTER V THE UNIVERSITY WITS The general drama of 1570-90 — The University Wits ~ Lyly — His plays — Peele — Greene — Marlowe — Kyd — Lodge — Nash — Their work — Its kind in drama — Its vehicle in blank verse — Peele's plays — Those of Greene, Lodge, Nash, and Kyd — The lyrics of the group — Marlowe's plays The history of the English drama during the particular stage of evolution which preceded its fullest development is, except in one well-defined and interestingly peopled section, not so much difficult T,, , as impossible to trace. We have seen how the dramatic 1 he general ^ drama of work even of a person who stands out from the common 1570-90- j^gj.(^ gQ much as Stephen Gosson is (though it would have been to the interest of the actors and poets whom he deserted to publish it) entirely lost. We know that the " Marprelate " con- troversy {zn'de next chapter) was actually brought on the stage in the Armada year or thereabouts, and the fact that, as we should expect, the play was instantly stopped, does not entirely account for, still less reconcile us to, the loss of the piece. Above all, it must have been at this time, that is to say in the years between 1570 and 1590, that the early chronicle-plays and others which Shakespeare honoured by selecting them as the canvases or palimpsest parchments for his own work first saw the light and the boards. But such remnants as we have of these plays are almost invariably of later date in their existing forms. For the disappearance of this transition work more than one cause, probable a priori if not certain historically, is usually and reasonably assigned. Not only were the plays wanted for acting, not reading ; but it was in the first place the clear interest of the rival companies, strolling or fixed, to keep their repertoires as much as possible to themselves. Further, the constant demand for novelty by audiences, and perhaps also the operation, in a different form, of the just-mentioned wish to keep a monopoly, seem to have led to the working up from time to time of old favourite pieces with new 280 CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 28T material, either by members of the company or poets specially retained. The variations which (to take examples both from the beginning and end of the seventeenth century) we find between the quarto and folio editions of Shakespeare's Hamlet, between the quarto and the folio of Dryden's and Davenant's adaptation of the Tempest, show in the case of known men, who had an interest in keeping their work in some form, what must have happened in the case of unknown men, who were usually botching up, for a few shillings, matter which had not come to be regarded with even the smallest literary interest. Towards the close of this twilight period, however, we come to a group of dramatic work produced by known or at least named persons (for our positive knowledge of most of them is extremely small), distinguished from the doggerel of the inter- ludes and the starched sterility of the early blank verse jj^y wh"' plays by the presence in almost all cases of considerable, and in one or two of all but the highest, gifts, and exhibiting a very interesting community of circumstance, equipment, and even definite literary aim. All these men were probably, and all but one or two were certainly, of University training, an advantage less uniformly possessed by their immediate successors. For once the centre and source of a great literary movement in England was what it ought to have been — the two Universities. Not indeed that in all cases the \'arious sets which fostered, and the various schemes which carried out, the literary developments of the time were actually formed at Oxford or at Cambridge, though there is reason to believe that in most cases they were. But the va.st majority of the distinguished writers of the time (Shakespeare, it may be remembered, is not early) were University men ; tlieir friendships, which in the eager discussion of literary novelties always play so great a part, were in many cases University friendships ; and it is notorious that the mighty group of playwrights who founded the English drama were called, not quite amiably, by the players who employed and rivalled them, " University Wits."i In this honourable function Cambridge had a little (though not so much as very pardonable partisanship has sometimes endeavoured to make out) the priority and the predominance. Thus Harvey, the "regent" (in scholastic and French sense at least) of the Areopagus or Sidneian coterie, was a Cambridge man, and so was Spenser; but Sidney himself was of Oxford. Of the great early dramatic group Marlowe, Greene, and Nash were Cambridge men, but Lyly, Peele, 1 The locus chissicus for all this is The Return from Parnassus, an extremely interesting set of three plays, first completely printed by W. D. Macray (Oxford, 1886). 282 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v and Lodge were Oxonians, as Greene himself subsequently became by incorporation. But there is no need to urge this controversy. The important point is that both the Universities did now begin to play, and played as they never quite have done since, their proper part in the national literary life. The reasons for this are not diffi- cult to find, but they are interesting. The conversion of monastic property, and the shutting up of chantries, monasteries, etc., as outlets for private benevolence and piety, had made the founding of colleges, and of grammar-schools, the feeders of colleges, more than ever popular. The climbing of the secular clergy on the ruins of the regular, the permission of marriage to them, and their close con- nection with the collegiate system, established perhaps the happiest combined scheme of education and professional subsistence that any country has ever had — a scheme existing nearly untouched till our own day, when it was rashly upset. The various forms of new learn- ing made the Universities interesting, not least owing to their con- tests with the old ; the gradual opening of professional careers to laymen gave outlet and promotion from them ; and if the demand in this way for clever graduates was not so great as now, it was in- creased in a way not now open by the institution, bad or good, of great men's households, about which young men of education and promise were wont to hang in a fashion, vague and now not quite intelligible, but certain as a matter of historic fact. The oldest of the University Wits, though an outsider of the prin- cipal group, was probably John Lyly, and he deserves first mention not merely for this double fact, but because his chief literary perform- ance (to be mentioned in the next chapter) was, though ^ not in drama, considerably anterior to most of their work. Although we do not know very much about him even in his earlier dates, while his later are quite obscure, our knowledge is full and clear when compared to the " blanket of the dark " which surrounds such names as those of Kyd and, later, Dekker. Lyly was a man of Kent, and must have been born somewhere about 1553. He went to Oxford, his college being Magdalen (where he was probably a demy), took his degree in 1573, and tried a year later to obtain a fellowship through Cecil's interest. In the spring of 1579 he took his place once for all, though with an interval of obscuration, in English literature by EupJuies (jjide infra), and in the same year was incorporated at Cambridge. He furnished Thomas Watson (vide supra) with a letter commendatory in 1582, and between 1584 and 1594 (in the first year at least he was still battelling at Mag- dalen) furnished the Revels with nine plays, acted by the choristers either of the Chapel Royal or St. Paul's. These are Campaspe, Sappho and Phao, Endymion, Galatea, Midas, Mother Bombie, the CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 283 Woman in the Moon, the Maid''s Metamorphosis ( ?) , and Love'^s Meta- morphosis. A dismal petition to the Queen in 1593 sums itself up in one of its clauses: ''Thirteen years your Highness's servant and yet nothing." After this we know nothing of him positively, and even the entry which is supposed to be that of his death in 1606 is only connected with him by guesswork, for " Lyly " (Lilly, Lillie, etc.) has always been a common enough name, and there is little identification in *'John." Lyly's plays,^ like his person, stand quite apart from those of the rest of the group, with which they have nothing in common except the strong classicism, the presence of " University wit," the striking breach with the old tradition of horseplay interlude or wooden tragedy, tlie exquisite lyric which sometimes diversifies them, and their influence on the greatest dramatist of the next or any age. Written not for the public stage but as court amusements (or '-abridgments," as Theseus would say), they have a good deal in common with the Masque. The very marked, not to say conceited, style and the strong, almost bitter, satirical spirit which appear in Euphnes are also visible. But their most interest- ing historical characteristic is the way in which, uncertainly and tentatively, they strike out the way of Romantic Comedy, the most arduous and least frequently trodden of all dramatic ways, but when trodden successfully the way to the rarest and choicest of dramatic paradises. We must not say that if there had been no Endymion and Woman in the Moon there would have been no Midsummer Night's Dream and no As Yok Like It. But we may say boldly that before As Yon Like It and A Midsummer NighVs Dream it is vain to look for anything of their special quality elsewhere than in Lyly. At all events the difference between these plays and those of the other members of the group is most remarkable, and lies not merely in individual genius but in kind. The whole scheme and texture con- trast with the vast majority of the work from Peele to Shirley. They come nearer to the antique form of the Interlude, though with little or none of the crudity of this. Endyuiiou is a euphuistic allegory, where the loves of the hero, of Cynthia, and of Tellus, themselves but a shadowy centre or canvas, are fringed with humours more shadowy still. The accepted story of Campaspe and Apelles is treated in the .same manner; while those of Sappho and Galatea form mere start- ing-points, from wliicli the author diverges in directions not at all warranted by what may be called his authorities. It is much the same with Midas, while in the three last certain plays (the Maid's 1 Ed. Fairholt, 2 vols. London, 1858. 284 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. V MetajHorphosis ^ is not at all like Lyly) the writer trusts his fancy almost entirely, weaving, for instance, in the Woman in the Moon, out of the myth of Pandora a satire on woman, only suggested, and that in a most modern fashion, by the original. In short, the dramatic element in these plays is more than shadowy, it is phantas- magoric ; and the form does hardly more than serve as vehicle for the author's glittering, if somewhat cold, fancy, his melancholy satire, and the point-de-vice spruceness of his tyrannically mannered style. He "sits a little apart," like Claverhouse in Wandering Willie's Tale, and there is nothing in him of the " dancing and deray " of the rest. Of these George Peele ^ was slightly the eldest. He seems to have been of a Devonshire family, but may have been born in London about 1558. He was at any rate a Blue Coat boy and a member ol Broadgates Hall (later Pembroke College) at Oxford, where he took his degrees — B.A. in 1577, M.A. two years later. Peele remained even longer than the customary seven years at Oxford, and seems to have only left it on his marriage, when he went to London and at once fell among the literary set. But he did not break his connection with his University, and in 1583, having already distinguished himself as a playwright, superintended the production of Gager's Latin plays at Christ Church before Prince Casimir. In the same year he contributed commendatory verse to Watson's Hecatonipathia. Next year appeared his Arraignment of Paris, a sort of masque which had been written for the children of the Chapel Royal to play before the Queen. In yet another year, 1585, he was charged by the City with the disposing of the Lord Mayor's pageant, then no vulgar thing. These details are not otiose, because, though they cannot be said positively to disprove, they do not by any means fit in with, the tradition which makes of Peele a Bohemian reprobate, who died of debauchery and lived as a sort of the vulgar Villon in London taverns. The former scandal is due to a gibe of Francis Meres, the egregious person who spoke of Anthony Munday ^ as our best plotter (though there was possibly a gibe in this too) ; the second depends almost 1 This piece (which is not in Fairholt's edition, but will be found in the first volume of Mr. Bullen's Old Plays, London, 1882) is in couplets chiefly, whereas Lyly mostly affects blank verse or prose, and has been thought, with some prob- ability, to be an early work of John Day. 2 Ed. Dyce, in i vol. with Greene (London, 1885) ; ed. Bullen, 2 vols. (London, 1888). 3 Munday (1553-1633) was one of the busiest literary hacks of the time, a playwright, a constant botcher-up of pamphlets about crimes and executions (he had brought about some of the latter as an ex-Jesuit seminarist and informer against Jesuits), and a voluminous, but according to Southey unfaithful, trans- lator of the Spanish Romances of chivalry. CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 285 wholly on an apocn-phal farrago of stories, most of them centuries older than PeeleVs time, called the Jests of George Peele or George "Pyeboard" (a play on the name). There is absolutely no known fact in the case except a letter of Peele's to Burleigh in 1596 (two years before, according to Meres, he died), which letter pleads poverty and sickness. It is possible for a man to be poor and ill without debauchery being the cause of either inconvenience. Indeed, much of the stuff which has been talked about the loose lives of this group of men of letters may be brushed away here in liDiinc. It has been most insufficiently remembered — first, that the Puritan party, then growing always stronger and more unscnipulous, stuck at no libels against everybody and everything connected with the stage ; secondly, that quarrels and jealousies between men of letters, unfortunately, have not been unknown to any age ; thirdly, that the appetite for scandal in readers and the quest for " copy " in writers were not checked or corrected by any exact and regular attestation of fact. "Crowner's quests" were known, but it may be suspected that they were very irregularly held ; there was no regular system of police, still less any of medical inspection, registration of deaths, and the like. In short, though there is no evidence justify- ing us in regarding the life of the University Wits in town as a pattern of morality and self-restraint, the evidence to the contrary is of the flimsiest and most suspicious description. In any case, Peele suffered less from it than either Marlowe or Greene. Of this famous pair Greene, the less gifted, was the older. His birth-year is not known, but he may have been as old as Peele and can hardly have been born later than 1560. At any rate, he was admitted at St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1575, and took his degree four years later. He subsequently not only proceeded M.A. in his own University but was incorporated as such at Oxford. Meanwhile he had travelled in Italy and Spain, and on his return to England in 1580 had launched one of the so-called " Pamphlets," which will be dealt with in our next chapter, or rather he had obtained a license for it. For almost exactly a decade, from 1582 to 1592, he seems to have lived in London (for the attempts to identify him with a Robert Greene who during part of the time was in orders and held a living are quite gratuitous), and he certainly died in the year last named. For some time before his death he had been engaged in writing a series of pamphlets, some of which ajipearcd posthumously, and one of which, the GroaVs-worth of Wit, contains a famous passage about his friends and Shakespeare, or at least " Shakescene." These purport to be dying speeches of re- pentance from a man who was conscious of an evil life and wished to warn his friends. They were taken at more than the letter by others, 286 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v and a legend, due mostly to Gabriel Harvey, grew up of Greene's having died of a surfeit of "pickled herrings and Rhenish," and of his having lived in disreputable associations for some time previously. The Greene legend is still less lurid than that of Greene's greatest companion. Christopher Marlowe was of rather lower social status than Peele and Greene, both of whom seem to have been sons of per- sons of some position. His father was a shoemaker at Canterbury, a clerk of St. Mary's church there, and a free- man of the city. The poet was born in 1564, and at the age of seven- teen, after earlier education at the King's School of his native place, entered Benet (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge. Perhaps he was ^protege of the Chief Baron Manwood, a Sandwich and Canterbury magnate, on whom Marlowe perhaps wrote a Latin epitaph. But all these things are uncertain, and some of them share the uncomfortable doubts thrown on the trustworthiness of John Payne Collier. At any rate Marlowe (whose name occurs in the original documents in varieties — Marly, Marlen, Marlyn, and so forth — unusual even for that age of orthographic license) took his B.A. rather soon, in 1583, and his M.A. about the usual time from matriculation, in 1587. He must have gone immediately to London, for Ta//ibiirlaine was produced in the same year, or even in 1586, though it was not produced or published under his name. His career was extraordinarily short, and except from the legend we know nothing of it, while even the closing fact that he was stabbed in the eye by a certain Francis Archer in a tavern at Deptford on i6th June 1593, the blow being given by Archer in self-defence, is partly legendary, and the slayer's name is sometimes given as Ingram. Further, the occasion of the quarrel, if it has any evidence at all, rests on an allusion in a satire of Marston's, which has absolutely no verification. Further yet, some of the unlucky persons who have grubbed up every wretched docu- ment about our great men of letters of this time have unearthed an information by a person named Bame, who was afterwards hanged at Tyburn, charging Marlowe with disgusting vices, with loathsome blasphemy, and with the most offensive brag and chatter about both. It is not sentiment but a sound feeling which has led all true scholars to take refuge in the magnificent eulogy of Drayton, who must have had abundant knowledge, and who was no milksop, though we know that he held aloof from the Bohemianism of the gutter. This nauseous form of gossip fortunately gathers less about the rest of our group. Of the birth, fortunes, and death of Kyd next to nothing is known, though he may have been the Thomas Kyd who was at school at Merchant Taylors' after October 1565, ^ ' and so perhaps a school-fellow of Spenser's. Of Lodge and Nash we know a little more, but of the first even legend has CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 287 nothing grimy to say, and of the latter not much. Both were named Thomas. Lodge was the son of a Lord Mayor and went to Trinity College, Oxford ; while that he took to literature early ^ ^ is shown by his answering Gosson, viWe supra, 1579. It is thought that he was probably then about man's estate. He for some years pursued the way of play, poem, and pamphlet. But by a fortu- nate chance, which may partly account for his escaping the snares of London, he went to sea with Cavendish in 1591, and on his return, though he at first settled down to the old literary round, he seems to have soon had enough of it. He turned to medicine, took degrees at Avignon and Oxford, became a Roman Catholic, and died in 1625. Nash, the last of the group, was also the youngest. He was born in 1567, the son of a minister at Lowestoft, and entered St. John's College, Cambridge, as a sizar in 1582, when Greene had already made, and Marlowe was just about to make, a reputa- tion. He died in the year of the century, at the age of only thirty-three, having lived apparently rather a struggling than a jovial life, having stoutly defended his friends (he left Cambridge in 1589, and therefore had time to know Greene and Marlowe), having done much rather ephemeral but vigorous and interesting work, in prose chiefly, and having repented with a repentance not open to the suspicion which besets that of his master and model Greene. He had perhaps the least genius of all the set, but he had abundant talent, and was even more than any of them a type. But it is time to pass from the lives of these men, so little known, so idly chattered over, so unimportant except to themselves, to their perennially important and interesting work. The constituents of this have been summed up above — play, poem, pamphlet. . From Marlowe and Kyd we have no pamphlets ; from Lodge very little play ; from Nash not very much more, and hardly any non-dramatic verse worth speaking of. But the three classes were in this or that way the work of all. The prose will be dealt with in the next chapter; the non-dramatic verse — save in the case of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and the exf|uisite lyrics which most of the group with unpremeditated, certainly with unimitated, art could pour forth — is not of much importance. "The play's the thing" with the group as such. The devotees of explanation have wearied themselves over attempts to get at the origin of this play. Perhaps it cannot be got at. Dickens, with all his genius, was not a very literary person, and yet he settled the riddle of literary history once for all in his account of the origin of Pickwick. "I thought of Mr. Pickwick," drama.'" he says; but how he thought of Mr. Pickwick he does not tell us ; probably he could not have told. It will be enough 288 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v for the wise that to some man or some group of men in England somewhere about 1580 the kind, blended as usual, of English play suggested itself. It is related to the older developments of the interlude; it is related to the classical play; it is still more closely related to the curious subvariety of that play which was achieved in Nero's time by Seneca the tragedian, which affected all Renaissance Europe with so strange an influence, and which, as has been told above, had been already introduced into English. Kyd, one of the group, translated Cornelie, the most Senecan of the great Pleiade dramatist Garnier's imitations of Seneca. All his companions, it is clear, were students of Seneca. Fortunately, however, what ultimately attracted them most in this enigmatical writer was not the regular but the irregular side of him — not the stately iambic and the correct construction, but the lyric excursions of the chorus, the frequent tendency to the introduction of ghosts and supernatural agencies, the "blood and thunder," the bombast and the rant. It may seem a singular thing to give critical thanks for these last. Yet, so far as it is possible to decide upon such matters, it is practically certain that the period of violent fermentation for which these things served as yeast did actually give us, and to all appearance was needed to give us, the strong wine of the completed and perfected drama for some thirty or forty years after Marlowe's death. The earliest Elizabethan theatre had many faults, but the worst of them is its terrible flatness and woodenness. The drama of the Marlowe school may be called, if any one pleases, " a barbaric yawp " ; but it is, at any rate when it is characteristic, never wooden and never flat. Nobody ever innovates all at once and all of a piece ; and it would have been something like a miracle if all of this drama had been characteristic. On the contrary, a good deal of it approaches the older stamp, and this may be particularly said to be biank^'ve'rte." ^he casc with the work of the two eldest of the group, Lyly and Peele, though both informed it with far greater literary gifts and accomplishments than any earlier dramatist except Sackville had had it in him to show. This may be due, not merely to their age, but to the fact that, as has been said, both catered rather for court and other similar pageants than for the rough appetite of the popular theatre. But both did work strikingly good, and Peele much more than Lyly exhibits proficiency in that strange new vehicle of dramatic blank verse which is the triumph and glory of the school, which practically gave us Shakespeare, and which in isolated examples was fashioned — by Marlowe especially, but also by more than one other member of the school — with a majesty and music never since surpassed. This is one of the points in which Lyly stands apart. He has CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 289 blank verse, but it is of a different quality, and by far the greater part of his plays is in prose, — the natural instrument, though he could disport himself charmingly in lyric, of the author of Euphues. Where blank verse appears, as in The Woman in the Moon^ it is noticeable that the play is late, and that the fashion of the verse has nothing in it very individual. Peele, if Sir Clyomoii and Sir Clamydes be really his, wrote at least one play in the old fourteener which had been so popular, and which, as Shakespeare's Love''s Labour's Lost, to take no other example, shows, retained its hold upon writers and hearers pretty late. This play, which may be called a romantic interlude, — it has a " vice " and two or three allegorical characters besides Alexander the Great, the two knights, queens, princesses, etc., — is of great interest, marking as it does an experi- ment in transition. The very early Arraignment of Paris is part in fourteeners and in heroics, part in blank verse. Edward /. — a play which has been rather unnecessarily reviled, because it adopts a popular ballad-scandal against Eleanor of Castile — has prose, blank verse, and doggerel. The Old IVives' Tale, which, in more ways than one, comes close to Lyly, is in prose with blank-verse passages. The Battle of Alcazar and David and Bethsabe are in blank verse only. Taking these facts together, combining with them that of Peele's seniority to Marlowe, and then examining the texture and quality of his blank verse itself, we may probably assign to this writer the chief originating impulse in the great change which the group impressed upon the poem. His own, though it never attains to Marlowe's "might." is much sweeter than Marlowe's usual strain, and perhaps more equably good. He has not discarded all the tricks which we noticed in Gascoigne, being still fond (though not to the extent of the Steel Glass) of beginning batches or arrangements in verse with the same or nearly the same phrase. He has not quite emerged from the tyranny of the stopped line, though he seldom or never allows his feet to stump with the wooden tramp of Gorbodiic. But he has learnt modulation, variety, cadence, and occasionally he can even soar — the best gift that this group discovered in the unrhymed deca- syllabic. It would be hard to find, in any author born earlier, such a "tower" of verse as in this speech of Tamar, which yet is not one of Peele's stock beauties — Cast, as was Eva, from that glorious soil, Where all delights sat bating, winged with thoughts Ready to nestle in her naked breasts, To bare and barren vales with floods made waste — To desert woods and hills with lightning scorched, Where ^ death, where' shame, where' hell, where' horror sit. 1 The original has "with," but " where " is clearly needed. U 290 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH BK. v And he is sometimes almost Miltonic (Milton was a student of Peele) in such '' carryings over '' as — My sister Thamar, when he feigned Sickness. In fact, the blank verse of Peele v^^ould repay a far fuller study than it is possible to give it here. The minor members of the group are less remarkable in this respect. Greene,' especially in his best play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, succeeds occasionally in imitating both the soaring and the fluency of Peele ; but, as a rule, he is still somewhat too Greene, much addicted to the stopped line. Lodge, an agreeable ^and^K^d^^' P''°^^ writer and a charming lyrist, suffers still more from this old fault in his only known unassisted play, the IVounds of Civil War. Nash, a great pamphleteer, has but two plays to his credit, of which Dido is knovyn to be partly the work of Marlowe, while great part of Will Sumjner''s Testament is in prose, and the blank verse not merely shows a constant tendency to drop into couplet, but has no very distinct quality even when it is pure. Kyd, the last of the group, is much more important than any of these as a playwright. But Jeronimo, if it be his, constantly lapses into couplets ; the Spanish Tragedy shows something of the same tendency as well as much of the stopped line ; while the enormous speeches of Cornelia, overmastered by the monotony of their French original, succumb with too much regularity to the same malign influence. But side by side with the faculty for blank verse, all the poets hitherto mentioned have a lyric gift which certainly ought to have suppled and inspirited their "blanks," and perhaps, did so. The universally known " Cupid and Campaspe " of Lyly is of the group. ^"^7 ^^^ ^^ ^^^^ most regular, by no means of the most charming, of the songs scattered about his plays ; and here as in other respects Peele is even more than his compeer. Greene's lyrical work, which is fortunately obtainable'^ separately from his very inaccessible prose and not too common theatre, contains 1 His dramatic works, A Looking'- Glass for London (the history of Nineveh written with Lodge), jfames the Fourth of Scotland (quite unhistorical), Alphonsus of Arragon, etc., will be found with Peele as cited above. His complete works in prose are only accessible in Dr. Grosart's " Huth Library." The plays of Lodge and Kyd are in Hazlitt's Dodsley. 2 Dyce has included the poems in his edition of the plays, and there is a volume of Bell's Poets which gives Greene's poems with Marlowe's. Bell's Songs from the Dramatists, as well as, above all, Mr. Bullen's Lyrics from Elizabethan Romances and Lyrics from Elizabethan Dramatists, will also supply the texts for this paragraph. CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 291 nothing so exquisite as the best of these two men's work or of Lodge's ; but is more abundant, has a little less the character of the mere snatch, and seldom or never sinks below a level more than respectable. As for Lodge himself, it is in pure poetry, not in drama or in prose, that he can make his safest claim to a high position in English literature. His famous madrigal, " Love in my bosom like a bee," nearly the most charming specimen of a charming kind, then popular, is very closely approached by others of his achievements. Kyd and Nash seem to have had their lips less touched to song ; and Marlowe's taste does not seem very frequently to have inclined him to the lyric, though another world-renowned example, ''The Passionate Shepherd," shows what he could do when he chose. But his great contribution to poetry other than dramatic was the still more " passionate " narrative of Hero and Leattder, which ranks with Shakespeare's Juvenilia, and if it lacks the range and amplitude which, even at this early time, distinguishes the work of Shakespeare, exceeds them in intensity and flame. In Marlowe ^ himself the mighty line is so closely associated with the whole .spirit and tendency of his drama that we cannot but take them together. We have from him, besides the work just mentioned, and some translations of Ovid and Lucan, seven plays - — fhe two parts of Tar/iburlaine, Doctor Faust us, The piay^f* Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, the Massacre at Paris and Dido. The two last are the weakest, and contain little which we can feel sure that others may not have written. Of the remain- ing five Edward the Second is a regular clironicle-play, aiming at some unity of construction ; the other four romantic tragedies of the wildest kind. In the two parts of Taniburlaine the conqueror, in- vincible in fight, insatiable of bloodshed, and hardly human except by his love for his wife, " divine Zenocrate," sweeps slowly past, regardle-ss of all power and life and majesty but his own, trampling on Bajazet, putting man, woman, and child to the sword, ''show- ing" the virgins of Antioch "death" at the point of his lances, and only worsted by Death himself, who carries off first Zenocrate and then the tyrant. There is here no central action, only a dissolving series of scenes of terror and blood ; no character except the dim and gigantic one of Tamburlaine. If the poet's imagination were of a less grandiose magnificence, or if he were not able to interpret it to us by the unsurpassed splendour and majesty of his versification and phraseology, the thing would be simply dull. The scale is too vast, the personalities too vague, even to excite lively and poignant terror. It has not even " the fierce vexation of a dream," only the chaos of one. 1 Ed. Dyce in one volume ; ed. Dullcn in three. 292 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v This cannot quite be said of the Jew of Malta. Barabas, the hero, is very much more of a person than the huge and shadowy figure of Tamburlaine, and the action is concentrated, or at any rate confined, within a much more manageable area. But the illimitable, the apeiron, of Marlowe's imagination, intimates itself, for good and for evil, here also. Although the procession of the Jew's crimes is almost as little artistic as that of Tamburlaine's triumphs and butcheries, the intensity of the poef s personification of hatred and avarice and quasi- religious jealousy makes it far more alive. Yet perhaps no play makes us feel so acutely and distinctly the difference between Marlowe and Shakespeare, even if we take for comparison such possibly doubtful and certainly early and immature work as Tiins Andronicus. Aaron has not received the touches which make lago and Richard, Shylock and Macbeth, what they are. He has still much, and too much, about him of the mere horror-mongering which is characteristic of this middle stage of our drama, and he is, of course, much less magnificent than Barabas. But he is also much more of a human being. Although it is among the most chaotic, there can be little doubt that Doctor Faustus is the best of Marlowe's plays. For the chaos here is not quite out of keeping with the wild theme ; and that theme itself, in every other respect, is absolutely suited to Marlowe's genius. The whole spirit of the Faust story comports with — nay, positively requires — not so much a regular dramatic action as a phantasmagoria ; and its separate scenes are, most of them, well suited to stimulate the towering imagination, the passionate fancy, the tameless and restless energy of this wonderfully though partially endowed poet. That the Helen passage and the death scene contain, with the single exception — if with that — of the great purple patch of Tai/ibi/rlaine, as to "the pens that poets held," the most exquisite outbursts of sheer poetry in Marlowe is no more than we should expect from the coincidence of inspiring quality in the subject and formal competence in the worker. Edward the Second falls short, for the complement of the reason which makes Faustus so eminent a success. The history-play is not extremely exigent of order or of unity ; but to be good it must have something of both. Now order and unity were what Marlowe could never give. Nothing is more natural than that the foully-wronged Queen Isabel should transfer her affections to Mortimer. But Marlowe either cannot or will not take the little trouble necessary to bridge the interval which separates the loving and even forgiving wife from the rancorous adulteress. It might have been a little more difficult, but it was certainly feasible, to project the character of Edward himself so as to render the awkward facts credible and not CHAP. V THE UNIVERSITY WITS 293 disgusting. But here again Marlowe does not so much as attempt it. The petulant and unmanly fribble of the first acts might have passed into the tyrannical and arbitrary prince, the not unwarlike lord, of the middle, and he in turn into the almost majestic victim of the end. But "the flats are not joined," and the magnificent speech — Leicester, if gentle words might comfort me, sounds utterly out of place in the mouth of the abject to whom we have been earlier introduced. Yet in Marlowe two things never fail for long — the strange, not by any means impotent, reach after the infinite, and the command of magnificent verse. He may, as I have said, have learnt something of this latter from Peele, and he seldom approaches his master in sweetness, while he has some of the tricks of the whole school — the constant and sometimes very irritating habit of making the characters speak of themselves in the third person, the still too great tendency to stopped lines, and the like. But the weight and splendour which he impresses on his best passages made them famous at once, and have kept them so, except during the period when all these good things were forgot. And what is true of Marlowe eminently, of Peele in a not much lower degree, is true of the whole group, save perhaps Nash, who is only a poet and dramatist by accident. They all intend greatly; choose great subjects ; handle them, if sometimes with an almost childish want of common sense, yet with poetic imagination and creative force ; make them the occasion of passages distinguished by verse of a splendour and momentum, if less often of a lightness and easy movement, never previously known in English. For anything that resembles the echoing thunder of the best decasyllabics of these poets (not by any means of Marlowe only) we must go back to the hendecasyllable of Dante, to the hexameter of Lucretius, to the choric phrase of ^schylus, and there is no fourth parallel in any language before them. Their contemporaries might sometimes gird at the " drumming decasyllabon." But the rub-a-dub of a drum is a curiously weak and inai)preciative simile for the sound of the line of Marlowe, even for that of Peele and Kyd, of Greene and Lodge. It much better deserves one suggested by the words of that poet and critic of our own who has best appreciated it — The thunder of the trumpets of the night. CHAPTER VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, PAMPHLETEERS, AND CRITICS Ascham's prose —Defects of the type — The ebb and flow of style — Euphuism — Euphues — Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit — Eupkues and his England — Their style^Its ancient instances — Its vernacularity — Its unnatural history — Hooker — Contemporaries of Lyly and Hoolcer — The translators — Their characteristics — The pamphleteers — Martin Marprelate — The critics The prose of the great period of Queen Elizabeth's reign is one of the most interesting divisions, historically speaking, of all English prose. We left that medium of expression some years after the Queen's accession in a state which was best indicated by prose! * the work of Ascham, the principal prose-writer by far of the time, and one who embodied its dominant charac- teristics. The period of mere tentative, of experiments in stocking the vocabulary and arranging the syntax, had ceased, experiments in all directions had been made in point of subject, and at length a fairly normal style had been attained, suitable, as Ascham himself showed, for a good variety of literary purposes, if not for all. " Fairly," it has been said, but by no means finally. The style of Ascham was a pretty good style of all work ; but it was not capable of distinction in more than one or two kinds. It was per- fectly clear, very fairly advanced in balance and cadence, theType! ^"^^ possessing yet further capacities in that direction, well-proportioned, logical, and sane. But like the later plain prose style of the eighteenth century, it had two drawbacks. It was very ill fitted for fanciful, gorgeous, or passionate expression, and it was constantly liable, when not used with something more than ordinary scholarship and taste, to degenerate into tameness, commonness, insipidity. In its horror of "inkhorn" terms, it was in danger of becoming dull ; in its adherence to Latin arrangement and to certain stereotyped, or likely to be stereotyped,^ tricks of parallelism and antithesis, it was in danger of losing raciness and vernacular variety. 294 CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 295 Attempts to variegate it were certain, and they have been traced with more or less probability, or fancitulness, in the transition writers between 1560 and 1580. But these tendencies were carried so much farther, and the ideas which lay behind them were so much more brilliantly and importantly expressed in the famous book called Eiiphues^ that it is really unnecessary to look behind that, except in making a special study of the particular subject. And even such a study might perhaps wisely avoid cumbering itself too much on the question whether Lyiy's original is to be found through Berners in Guevara, or elsewhere, or in many elsewheres, or nowhere. The law of maxima and minima is more certain and constant in prose style than almost anywhere else. When the elements of such a style have been once got together, florid or plain style (it does not much, or at all, matter which) appears, and is in its measure and degree perfected. As it approaches perfection, men get tired of it and try something new, plain or florid, as the case may be, which ^j^^ ^^^ in its turn rises, flourishes, decays, and is superseded. and flow At hardly any time (though there are a few apparent ° ^ y e. exceptions) does either flourish quite alone ; in hardly any case can the innovation, whatever it is, be directly traced back to any single case or beginner. Flux rules all, and we can only note with any pre- cision the greater turns of the tide. Euphuism was certainly one of these. Like most things, it has been exaggerated as well as depreciated in importance, and objections have been taken to this or that use of the word — especially to the habit of employin": the term generally, as well as specifi- „ , . ^ -' " " -' ' 1 r Euphuism. cally. This seems hypercritical. Euphues was the first conspicuous example in English of the determination to achieve an ornate, variegated, and rather fantastic style ; and it is quite reason- able to allow the employment of the abstract terms formed from it as denoting, first, the specific characteristics of the book itself, and, secondly, in the usual transferred fashion, those of the genus to which it belongs, and which renews itself so constantly in species, with only minor differences. The life of Lyly has been already (p. 282) dealt with, but this book 1 preceded his plays. He was probably about six-and-twenty when its first part, Etiphues the Anatomy of Wit, appeared in the spring of 1579. He was certainly still resident at Ox- EuPhues ford, and an address to the " Gentlemen Scholars " of that University appeared in the second edition, which followed within the year. The second part, Euphues and his England, ap- peared next year (1580), and Ijoth were rapidly and frequently 1 Ed. Arber, London, 1868. 296 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v , ^ , reprinted. The influence of the book has been sometimes a little exaggerated, and sometimes more than a little pooh-poohed, while from a period tolerably early in the seventeenth century to the middle of the eighteenth it was forgotten, and from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth misrepresented. But there is no doubt at all that for at least twenty years after its first appearance, if not for thirty or forty, Euphuism was a living, an active, and in the usual way and with the usual limitations, a triumphant force. Almost the whole of the more literary art of the curious pamphlet literature of the time followed it ; it coloured, at least as much by direct imita- tion as by indirect revolt, Sidney's equally influential A)xadia ; it had a very great influence on the dramatists, especially Shakespeare him- self in his youth. This history guards most carefully against the undue interchange of posi and propter ; and we might have had, we should doubtless have had, Donne first and Browne later, with all the gorgeous language and quaint thought of which the two are the chief representatives in verse and prose, without Lyly. But in that case Donne and Browne, and all those about them, would have had to do for themselves something that, as it was, they found done to their hand. It is necessary (and it has not always been' done) to keep the matter and intention of Lyly's work separate from his manner. In the first point he was no innovator, and though it would not be correct to say that he was behind his time, he was not more than on a level with it, and was nearer obsolescence than innovation. His book is, in drift and thought, exclusively a Renaissance one ; it is concentrated upon Education, and takes that view of Education itself which the Renaissance derived from Plato, and conditioned with its own thoughts in politics, religion, art, and what not. Nominally Euphiies is a romance. Its first part, EupJuies. or the Anatomy of Euihues ^'^^' ^P^^^ at Naples, and treats of the courtship of the Anatomy the heroine Lucilla by the two friends, Euphues and ^ '■ Philautus — the Amadis and Galaor^ mutatis mutandis of the story — and by a third suitor, vastly inferior to either, named Curio. In all Lyly's work (whether for reason or not, we havd no evidence) there is a deep and heartfelt satire on woman, which quite transcends the mere stock railing of the Middle Ages ; and Lucilla, of course, chooses the unfittest. But the bulk of the book is not story at all, and is made up of various letters of Euphues. the longest being one to Philautus after he has quarrelled with his friend for 1 These contrasted (serious and light-o'-love) wooers of the great Portuguese of Spanish romance, themselves slightly altered copies of Lancelot and Gawain, produced an immense effect on the Renaissance, and were reproduced by hun- dreds of authors in different forms of poem, romance, and play. CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 297 Lucilla, and she has jilted them both ; an orthodox dialogue between Euphues and '"Atheos," the latter a person rather rife at this time ; and, above all, a very important tractate entitled " Euphues and his Ephebus," which is based on Plutarch's treatise of education, and contains a great part of the real gist of the book. This includes a rather sharp criticism of the condition of things at Oxford, to which Lyly plays " Terrae Filius " a hundred and fifty years before Nicholas Amhurst, though not from the political point of view. Euphues and his England lands the hero and Philautus in the author's own country, and after a short time at court. In this part Philautus is the chief actor. He pays his addresses to a certain Lady Camilla, a court beauty, who is unkind, and is, by Euphues the favour of another, Lady Flavia, permitted a platonic and his friendship with her niece Frances as "his violet," which "Sa^t at the close of the book seems to give promise of being turned into something warmer. Meanwhile Euphues, after another quarrel with Philautus, withdraws himself first to study generally, and then, after eulogies on the ladies of England, Cecil (Lyly's patron), and the Queen, to the mountain Silexedra ('' Flint-seat," in party Greek- Latin), whence the subsequent pamphleteers occasionally evoked his forlorn and somewhat priggish eidolon. The really noble aims and the somewhat romantic, but by no means unsound, views of love and life and learning which the age of Elizabeth held would hardly have saved this curious book from the fate of manv others not far its inferiors in such respects, . Their style. if Lyly had not been a great mannerist in style, as well as an active practitioner in thought, and if his style had not looked forward instead of backward, or at least merely at the present. It is evident that he was utterly discontented with the plain classicalised style of the Cambridge school. He was as classical as any of them, and he borrowed from them (or more probably from their originals) the practice of balanced sentences, in which some critics have erroneously seen his chief title to mention in the history of English prose. Here he was simply in the direct succession : he started nothing new as compared with Ascham or even Fisher. The point in which he was a pioneer, by which he caught the ear of the rising generation, and by which he has earned his real place in the story, is quite different. It is his revolt against the plain style, and the special means which he took for arming; and enforcing that revolt. These were two, or it may be three, which shall be mentioned in the order of their departure from the practices common before him. The first and by far the least original was a peculiar fashion of bringing in classical examples as similes or illustrations. Such examples in themselves had been commonplaces of the whole Middle 298 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v Ages, and had come thicker and faster in the fifteenth century and the early Renaissance. But Lyly used them with a diiference. " Bucephalus lieth down when he is curried," says he, insrances.' passiug over as known already the ancestry and birth of Alexander, his campaigns, his death, and a few particulars about his successors, which the genuine mediaeval taste would have thought Excusable, nay, desirable, at this juncture, while even writers like Brandt and his translator Barclay would have thought it sinful to dismiss Bucephalus in less than a paragraph or stanza. The second, in which he innovated a little more, though still he had numerous forerunners, was the introduction — byway of contrast, to enforce his meaning, or for other reasons — of distinctly vernacular phrases, " I am of the shoemaker's mind who vernacularity. caretli not SO the shoe hold the plucking on." Such phrases, as we noted, are not uncommon in Ascham him- self; but they are much more frequent in Lyly, who in this respect is as Ascham and Latimer rolled into one. To which head may be added his practice in alliteration — a common one, as again we have seen, at the time — • but in him far commoner, and far more of a deliberate artifice of style than with most. Yet here again we may say that had there been nothing else than this in Euphues, it had never attained the position it held and, after a long period of eclipse, now again holds. Its real differentia, its real quality, lies elsewhere, and under a third head, ^^story"*^^ that of the extraordinary similes drawn from all heaven and earth, but especially from the fanciful zoology of the Middle Ages, which it is hardly possible to open two pages of Euphiies without discovering in greater or less abundance. The usual efforts have been made to show that this curious and salient feature is not entirely original, and may be found before Lyly. No doubt it may ; no doubt any feature of any writer, except the last and highest strokes of the individual genius, may so be found, while even these strokes are sometimes only the result of slight changes on precedent matter. It is quite legitimate, if not supremely im- portant, to indicate, in this writer and in that of the third quarter of the century, the symptoms which are premonitory of every literary change, and therefore of this. But what entitles writers to a con- spicuous place in the story of literature is their use for the first time on a large scale, and with striking effect, of certain means to attain certain ends. Lyly was undoubtedly the first to lavish this peculiar kind of simile and illustration, especially with the definite end of heightening and variegating his style, so as to produce on the reader a distinct rhetorical effect, to make the common uncommon, to pro- duce style in and for itself, manner independent of matter. Before CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 299 Lyly, as we have seen, there had hardly been any one of whom this could be said, except Fisher, and Fisher's means were as different from Lyly's as was his aim. We do not know that Lyly deliberately and consciously set himself against the principles which Ascham and his set had enunciated thirty years earlier, and which they or others had faith- fully carried out ; but that the opposition was in effect diametrical is certain. '• Inkhorn terms" were no longer tabooed; the ambition to say things in a manner different from that of other people was not only not discouraged, but was distinctly and definitely encouraged ; conceit, quaintness, individuality, were reintroduced into literature. The whole bulk of the pamphlet prose, to which we shall come presently, expressed the understanding of this, which Lyly's juniors at once manifested. Meanwhile a contemporary of Lyly's was bringing the plainer style itself to a perfection which in this particular stage was the highest it ever reached, and which showed that in competent hands it need not lack a sober grace, almost beyond that which ornater orderings could attain. Richard Hooker was a native of Heavitree, a suburb of Exeter, and had been born in 1554 in poor conditions. He had, however, forebears and living relations better off, and his uncle, John Hooker, was an Oxford man, a continuator of Holinshed, and a person of consequence under the Elizabethan reconquest of Ireland. He is said to have recom- mended his nephew to Bishop Jewel, and Jewel assisted Hooker to go to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, procured him private pupils, and though he himself died when Hooker had not nearly completed his Oxford course, was the cause of his becoming first scholar and then fellow of his college, and reader in Hebrew in the University. He married very foolishly, and was henpecked ; but his friends were stanch to him, and he obtained first the living of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire, then the mastership of the Temple in 1584, then the living of Boscombe in 1591, and lastly that of Bishopsbourne in Kent, where he died in 1600. At the Temple he had become involved in an equally unsought and unseemly controversy with his subordinate, the lecturer Travers, a bitter Puritan. Hooker's views, when he was transferred once more to the quiet of the country, took form in the great treatise called the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity^ of which the first five books, as it now stands, are certainly genuine, while as to the last three it is as certain that they do not appear as he wrote them, Init not quite certain how far there was intentional garbling in the arrangement of their present form. 1 Ed. Keble. ;oo ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v We are here concerned with only one side of this great Apologia for the Anglican Church, which, written while the spirit and intentions of those who presided over its transformation were well known, has an authority that no later work could claim, and which in the most charitable spirit, and with absolutely no bitterness of feeling, utterly ruined, from the logical and historical side, the position of the English Puritans. Long after Hooker's death they achieved a brief victory bv calling in the secular arm, but Hooker's argument, and his history, remained unanswered and triumphant. We are not here further con- cerned with it than as a masterly piece of English prose, and in this capacity it can hardly be too highly praised. No one, speaking otherwise than at random, would give this praise unmixed. Hooker's style has the faults of its class — a classicism now timid, now unduly audacious ; an unnecessary fear of vivid and vernacular expressions. But its author handles the methods and means which he has received with original genius, attaining to a really exquisite balance of sentence, to a harmony sometimes quite ineffable, adjusting his longer and shorter constructions with almost infallible art, and affording a specimen never surpassed, and hardly ever equalled since, of argument maintained on abstract and scholastic points without the slightest dulness, of ornament which is never daubed or stuck on, but arises from the proportion of the phrase, and the careful selection of the vocabulary. Had it been possible to have all prose written by Hookers, nobody need have wished to seek much further experiment. Put this w^as clearly inipossible, and the constantly broadening and varying demands of the different subjects to which prose was applied helped the tendency in the air, the mere wish for change, to bring that change about. The Ecclesiastical Polity is at least ten years the junior of Eitphiies, but it is its elder by as much or more in the order of style. Accordingly, in the general work of the time, it is the influence of Lyly. not the influence of Hooker, that we find prevailing. The idea that Sidney intended the Arcadia as a protest against Euphuism has Contempora- ^^^^ dealt with above, and is almost beyond doubt riesofLyiy erroneous. Sir Philip is as great a Euphuist as Euphues himself. So, though his taste was much purer and he came nearer to the stately mannerisms of the Jacoljean and Caroline time than to the fantastic coxcombry of purely Elizabethan prose of the ornate kind, was Raleigh ; so was the difficult and sententious, but often striking, Fulke Greville. All these were almost exact contemporaries of Hooker and Lyly (Raleigh was born in 1552), and they present, as no others could do, the union of courtly practice, gentle blood, great talents, and a competent education. If Spenser, another contempo.-ary, shows a plainer style, we must remember first CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 301 that Spenser was a poet, and had the fuller harmony in which to express himself when he listed ; secondly, that we have but one piece of prose of his of any length ; and thirdly, that this piece is a sober State paper, tliough a very admirably written one. Historians like Camden (who, indeed, wrote chiefly in Latin) and Knolles and Daniel had also little temptation to indulge in ornateness, not to mention that Daniel, even in verse, prefers neutral tints to brilliant ones, and that Knolles (c. 1 544-1 610) belongs to a somewhat elder generation than that which we are now discussing, and, though he has a stately enough style of his own when he pleases, follows chiefly classical models. We should not expect much Euphuism, though there is some, in Philip Stubbes, the Puritan whose Anatomy of Abuses^ a characteristic but childish work, appeared in 1583; or in an enthusiast for practical education like Richard Mulcaster. Yet this latter's Treatise of Right Writing of the English Tongue, 1582, is quite to our purpose in subject if not in style. Mulcaster, an Eton boy, a member both of King's College, Cambridge, and of Christ Church at Oxford, Master of Merchant Taylors' School in 1561, High Master of St. PauPs from 1596 to within three years of his death in 161 1, and prebendary of Salisbury, is an interesting person, and was an admirable schoolmaster for the time, holding as he did a firm belief in the virtues of the classics for study, and in those of English for practice. But he was not himself a great man of letters, and he had not reached the promised land of English prose style to which he cheered others on.^ Still, it is not an exaggeration to say that when a man of this period and generation does endeavour at style, it is much more prob- able that his attempt will take the form of ornateness, whether in the smaller or in the larger sense of Euphuism, than that it will aim at the simpler graces of strict proportion and cadence. And this is specially to be observed in some groups of prose writers, who may be best noticed here, postponing to the next Book some further com- ment on some of the works glanced at in the last paragraph, wliich belong to the very latest years of the Queen, or to years later still. These are the translators and the pamphleteers, to whom the critics, as closely connected with both, may be usefully appended. The importance of the Elizabethan translators had never been 1 Raleigh and others will have further notice. The chief pieces of Greville's prose (see Grosart's edition of his works, 4 vols. 1870) are his Lt/e (which is not a life) 0/ Sidney, for matter, and his Letter to a Lady, for thought and style. The late Mr. R. H. Quick, an enthusiast for education, printed (London, 1888) Mulcaster's Positions, dealing with that subject, but not tlie other treatise, entitled also with a pleasant quaintness. The First Part of the Elementary. Richard Knolles's History of the Turks appeared in 1603, with subsequent editions in 1610 and 1621, which are not difficult to obtain. 302 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v wholly neglected, owing to their connection with Shakespeare ; but it is only recently tliat it has been fully recognised and the texts them- selves brought anew to general knowledge.^ We have translators, ^een that from almost the earliest mediaeval times to some extent, and more fully as the centuries passed by, each generation endeavoured to familiarise itself with at least some of the great writers of antiquity, as well as with those modern books, chiefly in French but latterly in ather tongues also, which supplied important literature. During the time, however, while English was simply in the making, it had more to receive than to give, and Caxton's naive and delightful admiration of the " fair language of French" is only an instance of what was going on. But now an original sap was mounting through the trunk of English prose, and the results were nowhere more apparent, were perhaps nowhere more influential, than here. For a century to come North's '-^ Plutarch and Florio's ^ Montaigne at least were read and re-read with an attention which few other English books (except the translation of the Bible) could command. The former, as all know, furnished Shakespeare witli no small proportion of his subjects, and Shakespeare's genera- tion, as well as at least that which followed it and another still, with their most familiar topics and instances of human conversation and political ethics. The latter helped to create the English Essay, de- termined to a large extent the course of English philosophy for a time, helped (not quite so fortunately) a certain ebb of the national character from romantic to sordid schemes of life, and by a cross of the French politique begat the English " trimmer." Nor were the minor translators in their own day and way less influential. Among these Philemon Holland, bom at Chelmsford in 1552, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, a doctor of medicine and a schoolmaster at Coventry, where he died in 1637, executed rather late in his life versions of Livy, Pliny, Plutarch (the Morals), Suetonius, and Xenophon; Thomas Underdowne did Heliodorus and Ovid ; Nicolls ventured on Thucydides, but Thucydides was beyond him ; William Adlington, of 1 In the very handsome series of Tudor Translations published by Mr. Nutt and edited generally by Mr. W. E. Henley, with introductions by various hands. Florio has also been given by Mr. Waller in a very pretty little edition (6 vols. I^ndon, 1897). 2 Sir Thomas North was of the family which became so notable later, and was second son of the first Lord North. Very little is known about him. His Plutarch first appeared in 1579, and he did other translations. 8 Of Italian extraction, but born in London about 1553. He was a member of Magdalen College, Oxford, and began as early as 1578 a series of handbooks in the modem languages, of which he was a teacher. The chief is his World of Words, an Italian-English dictionary. He was much patronised by Elizabeth's nobility, and held places in the Household of her successor. His Montaigne (licensed in 1599) first appeared in 1603, and he died in 1625. CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER — THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 303 University College, Oxford, took Apuleius ; " R. B." Englished some Herodotus ; Sir Henry Savile, the learned Provost of Eton, did Tacitus ; and Angel Day wrought Longus through Amyot into the vernacular. It will readily be understood that whatever interest these transla- tions possess arises to hardly the smallest extent from faithful repre- sentation of the original--. Savile certainly, Holland to some degree, one or two others more or less, were scholars ; but the most famous and popular of the versions were usually taken, characterLtics. not direct from the original, but from previous French or Italian translations, and it was hardly the object of a single one of these writers to give their author, their whole author, and nothing but their author, in rigidly classical English. Had it been so, they had been of far less interest and value to posterity. On the contrary, such community of design as is to be seen in them (and it is rather remarkable) consists in the effort to be at once as vernacular and as variegated as may be. They compress, expand, omit, or sometimes even insert, as no modern translator would dare to do ; they exhibit to the very fullest the double tendency of Euphuism to the finest and the most familiar expressions ; and following in this respect Lord Berners, if not earlier translators, they put English dresses on foreign words and terms in a way infinitely delightful and full of refreshment to the tongue, but such as would make our modern purists stare and gasp. To this day these translations are a repertory of slang that still exists, of racy but obsolete expressions which would else be lost, of Latinisms, Gallicisms — isms of every kind. No class of work is fuller of that most English of all idioms, the turning of any noun, adjective, or substantive into a verb. They had, no doubt, little idea of proportion, choice, grace ; but these were not the things the lan- guage needed at the time. It wanted to be thoroughly suppled, thoroughly vernacularised, and at the same time to be charged with store of good words, native and foreign, classical and modern, from which a standard vocabulary could be, as it was, riddled out after- wards. The late fourteenth and the fifteenth century writers had done their part in teaching English prose '' to go " ; Fisher and the Ascham school had given it a thorough grammar-school education. But these writers and others of Elizabeth's time were putting it to the university, practising it in all sports and arts at once, allowing it, it may he, raiher a full allowance of wild oats, but enriching it, exer- cising it, giving it possessions, memories, experience ; preparing it for its future business in a fashion as necessary as the more orderly and sedate processes of training which it had previously undergone. Exactly the same drift and tendency, though in more original matter, is shown by the curious and interesting range of pamphlet 304 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v literature which, connected very directly in point of authorship with the t^roup of University Wits, fills the last twenty years of Elizabeth, and extends into those of James and even Charles. This "hMeers touches all, or almost all, varieties of subject with a univer- sality which comes not so very far short of the modern newspaper ; while in some of its developments may be found a stage — a far-off and rudimentary one, it is true — of the great cliange which converted the romance into the modern novel. These pam phlets ^ — a form of publication which could hardly have come into being without the printing press, and which the printing press was almost certain to bring about — had been in their earliest shape either devoted to the controversies of the Reformation, or else shortened chap-book versions of medijEval literature, romances in verse and in prose, jests, books of saws and instances. The sharp discipHne of the Tudor Queen made the religious pamphlet a probable, and the political one an almost certain, short way to the gallows, or at least the whipping-post and chopping-block ; so it was little cultivated. Yet one famous outbreak, that of the Martin Marprelate Marprdate. Controversy, defied, though only for a time, these pre- ventive checks. It concerned (as indeed the pseudonym of the various writers on the aggressive side confesses) the anti-pre- latical movement in England, but was from the first strongly coloured by, and at last became almost wholly merged in, the flood of personal reviling which, to the great discredit of the Reformers, they had been the first to let loose. The defenders of orthodoxy and authority included some grave churchmen and more irresponsible men of letters, whom a not erring instinct told that Puritanism was as much the foe of literatul-e as of loyalty and order in religion and politics. Lyly, Nash, and the Harveys almost or quite to a certainty took part in it, and their lampoons, as well as some at least of those of their antagonists, display the revel and riot of words which has been indi- cated above at its very wildest. This, however, was only an episode in the pamphlet history ; and it was quickly stopped. ^ The pamphlet itself persevered in less 1 Until recently most of them were inaccessible except in large libraries, and even now they are best found in the privately printed issues of Dr. Grosart. His " Huth Library " contains Greene, Nash, Dekker, Harvey, and his " Chertsey Worthies" the enormous work of Nicholas Breton. The Marprelate tracts were printed half a century ago by the bookseller Petheram, and some more recently, with an invaluable account of the whole controversy, by Mr. Arber, whose English Garner contains a great number of scattered pamphlets. Lodge has been given by the Hunterian Club. 2 I may be permitted to refer the reader who wishes for more on " Martin " and the pamphlets generally to my separate history of Elizabethan Literature, pp. 223-252. These byways of history are almost closed to the general historian; at least he strays if he pursues them too far. CHAP. VI LYLY AND HOOKER— THE TRANSLATORS, ETC. 305 dangerous forms — novels, generally of a strongly Euphuist tinge ; personal reminiscences, true or feigned ; disquisitions serious or comic, not very different, allowing for the time, from those of the Addisonian Essay ; a very curious batch of sketches of the manners, especially the lower and looser manners, of the capital ; and lastly, literary criticism. In all these respects except the last, Robert Greene (see last chapter) was the most prolific, and on the whole the most gifted. His short Euphuist stories, often diversified by scraps of verse, not merely furnished subjects to Shakespeare and others, but undoubtedly helped to foster in readers a taste for imaginative fiction. His personal sketches are among the earliest of literary autobiographies, though they have to be taken with rather numerous grains of salt. Above all, his series on "coney-catching" ("rooking," card-sharping, etc.), though again not to be taken too literally, is a most amusing and, with caution, instructive collection, and continued as it was by Dekker in the next generation, gives us a panorama of the shady side of London life for nearly half a century. Nash, with less romantic gift than Greene, and with no poetical power, yet achieved in Jack Wilton, or the Unfortunate Traveller, a novel of merit, which "coney-catched" many generations as to the loves of Surrey and "Geraldine," and besides his " Marprelate" contributions, perhaps in consequence of them, engaged in a furious paper war, the other party to which was Gabriel Harvey. Later, Nash, like others, wrote repentant and pious pamphlets. Perhaps, except in bulk. Lodge is even the superior of Greene, in respect of the romantic tone of his prose and the exquisite lyric touch of the verse with which it is strewn ; while the enormous pamphlet work of Nicholas Breton, a step-son of Gascoigne and a voluminous writer in prose and verse, belongs, as does that of Dekker, rather to the next period than to this.^ Lodge, however, will bring us conveniently to the critics, of whom he was one, and who were very often the same persons just mentioned, engaged for the moment in literary controversies. The most important of these controversies were the Puritan ^, 1 he critics. attacks on plays and poetry generally, which was opened by the School of Abuse of Stephen Gosson {vide supra), and the other, longer, and more important controversy, first between metrical forms exactly corresponding to those of the classics, and then between "rhymeless rhythms adjusted more intelligently to the genius of 1 The titles of these pamphlets play a great part in them — those of the " Marprelate " set having a Rabelaisian extravagance, and often a wonderful length ; others abounding in favourite Elizabethan catchwords and word-plays, like that on "Will" and "Wit"; and the more romantic pieces attaining great prettiness, as in Lodge's^ Margarilc of America. X 3o6 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. v English. The earlier stage of this is best represented by the Four Letters of Spenser and Harvey, the later by Campion and Daniel. The little book of William Webbe, and the much larger one attributed to George Puttenham, both^^ especially the former, show the influence of the first part of this craze. The almost unknown William Webbe, who is thought to have been a member of St. John's College, Cambridge, and who appears to have been tutor to the sons of an Essex squire named Sulyard, published his Discojcrse of English Poetriein 1586. It contains enthusiastic praise of Spenser, "the new poet," "our late famous English poet who wrote the Shepherd's Calendar,'''' refers a good deal to the ancients, and rather superficially to the English poets, " scorns and spews out the ragged rout of our rakehelly rhymers — for so themselves use to hunt the letter," as " E. K.," for self or partner, had done before it, gives us some very comical hexameters for the two first eclogues of Virgil, and with more zeal than discretion turns Spenser's " Ye dainty nymphs " into a slipshod sort of slovenly Sapphics. But Webbe's enthu- siasm is pleasing, and his style typical. Puttenham, if he was the author of the Art of English Poesie which appeared in 1589, was more cautious about the new mania. His volume, which is of some length, is a rather orderly treatise on Poetics and Rhetoric mixed as commonly, divided into three books, the first of Poets and Poesie, the second of Proportion, and the third of Ornament — this last being almost entirely devoted to a very full list of the Figures of Speech. In dealing with proportion he does not dis- dain the fancy shapes — pyramids, etc. — which aroused the anger of Addison. As may be guessed from this, Puttenham, who quotes his own verse freely and seems to have written it fairly in the stiffer manner of the first half of the reign, is rather a formalist, but his judgment, when he can get it out of stays, is not contemptible. The book is very full, learned, and careful, the work of a scholar and a gentleman, and far exceeding in detail and scope anything of the kind that was written for ages afterwards. i Both in Mr. Arber's Reprints, INTERCHAPTER V Attention has often been drawn to the ambiguity of the title Elizabethan Literature, as commonly used. " Is it not," they say, " absurd to include under such a head the work of men who, like Milton and Browne, were not born till after the Queen's death, and did not die till the last quarter of the seventeenth century had arrived or was at the door?" "Is it not even the fact that most of the masterpieces of this literature were not produced at all till the reign of James ? " It is desirable to remember these facts ; but it is still more desirable to remember the others, first that all the seed of the whole period called Ehzabethan was sown, and that not a little of it had come up, before the Queen's death ; and secondly, that the quality of the period 1580- 1660 is essentially one and indivisible. There are differences between Milton and Spenser, but they are differences rather of degree than of kind. The differences between Milton and Dryden are differences at least of species, almost of genus. Our present arrangement has the advantage of keeping both sets of facts in view, and in especial of directing attention to the characteristics of the first generation of the period, the generation which, as typified by Spenser, ended a little before the last evil days of Elizabeth's own life closed. It is perfectly true that among the completed work of this time we find but one name, that of Spenser himself, which represents, undoubtedly and unquestionably, a star of the first magnitude and the widest orbit, and that perhaps two others, Marlowe and Hooker, are the only companions that can be assigned to him by a criticism which unites exactness with liberality. But it is not at all necessary to take refuge from this fact in another, the fact that, in the last date at least of the time, we have the wonderful beginnings of Shakespeare in drama, of Bacon in prose, of Donne and otliers in jiure poetry. There is a third aspect under which the period requires no allowance, no compensation of any kind, and which enables it to stand on the credit of its own capital and revenue. It is this aspect, too, which makes it peculiarly desirable to mark it off distinctly, though not too sharply, from its successor. It was the period 307 3o8 ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. of the remaking, in different degrees for the different departments, but in all of the remaking, and in one practically of the making, of English Literature. This process is most definitely and clearly mapped out in regard to Poetry. If the facts of the foregoing Books and the concentrated lessons of their Interchapters have been followed, the necessity for the remaking will here need little enforcement. Chaucer had gathered up all the stuff and all the methods of media;val work in English verse, had added much of his own, and had left poetry in a stage of relative perfection. But the succession failed. Even men who were of more than man's estate at the time of his death, like Lydgate and Occleve, could not manage what he left them ; and changes, obscure in process but obvious in kind and in result, increased the difficulty for their successors. Nor were Wyatt and Surrey in a position to undertake the reshaping with a view to the future, not the past. Both had genius, but it was genius rather fine than strong : both were shortlived ; and both came a little too early for their task. Nor did they for a long time find any seconds, and perhaps it was just as well. The obscure alterations of constitution, the changes of life, had to complete themselves before the new poetry could come. Then " the new poet " brought it. On the whole, what Spenser did has been rather under- than over- valued, and his greatness only depends in part, and hardly the largest part, on the personal opinion which this or that reader may form of the poetical merit even of the Faerie Queene. It may be, as some think, a venerable and in parts beautiful but tedious and out-of- date allegory, or it may be, as others think, by far the greatest long poem in English. It may be anything between these two estimates. But the aesthetic variation has no place in the clear verdict of history. It is indisputable (which is not the same thing as being undisputed) that Spenser practically created the diction and prosody of English poetry as both have subsisted in the main to the present day. He did not, of course, finish the creation. Shakespeare had to come, and Milton, at least, before that was done; but he did a great deal more than begin it. His versification had to receive not a little extension, and an infinite process — a process not yet ended — of permutations and combinations, but it has not to the present day undergone any fundamental change. His diction— correctly but short-sightedly condemned by Ben as "no language" — was in fact a bold recognition of the fact that merely the current language of the day or any common day can never be the diction of poetry, that poetry needs a diction cunningly and carefully, but always to a greater or less extent alienated, refined, distinguished from the diction of prose. The enormous dead-lift which he gave to poetry, and the INTERCHAPTER V 309 results of which were apparent in the ten last years of his life, and the fifty or more following it, was only in very small part due to direct imitation of his own work as such. It was due, even in the hands of Shakespeare, even in the hands of Milton, to the fact that Shakespeare first and Milton afterwards had in their hands the stock of language, the plant of prosody, which Spenser had first founded and set going. The kinds of sonnet and of satire, of history- poem and poem-philosophical, which sprang up so abundantly in his footsteps are interesting, but they are not really so interesting to history as this complete reorganisation of the poet's material and of his means, as this remaking of English verse. • ' The position of the age in Prose is hardly less important, though its achievement is much less decided. No single prose-writer of the time, not even Hooker, holds the same rank in prose that Spenser holds in poetry ; perhaps, indeed, no single writer, not even Dryden, ever has held that rank. For prose, the lower and less intense harmony, is the more varied and indefinitely adjustable instrument. And while it is conceivable that one man — indeed, Shakespeare has very nearly done so — should catch up and utter, in hint and intima- tion at least, the whole sum of poetry, no one could do the like in prose. Here, too, the comparative newness of the form had its inevitable effect ; even the period of sheer experiment and exploration was not over when the sixteenth century ended. Very great advances had been made in both, and, above all, the antinomy of prose, the opposition of the plain and ornate styles which was to dominate the rest of its history, was for the first time clearly posed and definitely worked out on either side. This could not have happened in the earlier period of mere or main translation as regards subject, of tentative accumulation of vocabulary and experimental adaptation of arrangement. Vestiges, or rather rudiments, of the antinomy would, of course, appear encouraged by nature of subject or temperament of writer. A Chaucer translating the metres of Boethius about the motion of the heavens was not likely to write like a Cap- grave in his chronicle. But the opposition was accidental and rudi- mentary first of all. Not till the weariness of the "aureate" diction of the fifteenth century — itself shown chiefly in verse — led the Cambridge .school to denounce inkhorn terms, and combined with their worship of the classics to devise a plain classical style, could the inevitable revolt and rebound array itself definitely with a purpose, a programme, a creed, and become, first in the hands of Lyiy and his followers, a striking grotesque, and then in those of Bacon and the great seven- teenth-century writers, a magnificent resurrection of rhetoric in a far more glorious form than she had ever known. But at any rate the quarrel was at last fairly put, the " dependency " distinctly established. 3IO ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE TO SPENSER'S DEATH bk. Henceforward the ebb and flow of prose style has reigned with only superficial change for three centuries, alternately seeking the correct and simple or the out-of-the-way and gorgeous as ideals, and falling into the tame or vulgar, the extravagant or gaudy, as excesses. In Drama, the third division, which deserves to be kept apart from poetry and prose, not only because it indifferently applies the form of both, but because by its importation of speech and action it introduces elements not strictly appropriate to either, the importance of the time has commonly seemed greatest of all. It is certainly somewhat different in nature. Here we have neither a reconstruc- tion and recovery in greater and more promising form of a state formerly reached and then lost, as in poetry ; nor a comparatively orderly extension of a campaign not yet crowned with complete victory, as in prose. But we most certainly have the sudden shaking together into their right places of elements which hitherto have been loosely whirling like the Lucretian atoms ; and it is at least arguable that we have the attainment of a final form. At any rate three entire centuries have failed to produce any new really fertile cross, or. to import, in conditions suitable to the climate, any foreign form capable of standing comparison with that Elizabethan play which shook itself into shape, a hundred minor hands besides those of Marlowe and Shakespeare aiding, by the date of the production of Every Man in his Humour. Much as has been written about this play, it has perhaps been insufficiently recognised that its idea, whether the matter be tragical or comical, whether it keep these kinds apart or mix them "as ingeniously as in the famous classification of Hamlet, is essentially the same — to wit, that the play shall be a piece of life, rendered as faithfully and separately as possible, with all its divagations, its in- terludes, its inconsistencies, its interruptions. This is, of course, diametrically opposed to the classical theory, and to the theory of almost every modern drama except the Spanish, even to a certain extent of that. Aristotle's at first sight odd, but, whether right or wrong, all-important comparison of a play to an animal ^ helps us, perhaps better than anything, to understand the difference. Nothing that is not vitally connected with the animal — with the central notion of the play itself — must appear; the Unities (not in their absurd seven- teenth-century caricature, but in their actual Greek limitation) follow naturally; second plots are impossible, for two-natured is no nature. We may have intensity and accomplishment ; but, above all, we must have limit. The Elizabethan idea is far more ambitious and grand, even if 1 I am aware that some of the latest authorities take ^(^ov in the sense of "picture," but I cannot agree with them, at least for an exclusive explanation. INTERCHAPTER V doomed to fail in all but the strongest hands. The poet does not attempt to isolate action or situation merely ; his play is but a piece of the life of the actors — their life is but a piece of larger and ever larger lives. Nothing is superfluous, irrelevant, common, un- clean ; everything may and shall go in. The intenser nature of the interests of tragedy may give to the vv'orking of tragic plays a closer unity than that of comic ; the majesty or the pathos of some particular character may dwarf in presentation as in attention the episodes and the interludes. But the principle is always the same. The touch with the actual is never loosed, the farrago of the play is the farrago of life. It is the just and abiding glory of Marlowe that, so far as one man could, he really seems to have hit, consciously or not, on this vast conception, and that he certainly perfected, or went far to per- fect, the only instrument of verse that could possibly serve as a medium of execution for it. But his own plays as plays are after all only the most magnificent of failures, and without a Shakespeare the possibility of the thing could never have been shown. Whether the possibility of it has ever been fully shown except by Shakespeare is a point on which it would be partly irrelevant and wholly anticipatory to dwell here. That the mere form of play which was strong enough and elastic enough to give shape to this mighty attempt developed itself out of the beggarly elements of the mystery and interlude, with the undoubted but only partial help and crossing of the classical drama, has been, I hope, shown, with less violence to fact and probability than other theories require. But it can never be denied that the trans- formation is astonishing. It was not so rapid, nor does it display such individual power of genius, as that which in a single man's hands evolved the relatively perfect poetical work of Chaucer from the interesting but in no single case perfect experiments of the hundred and fifty years before him. More tlian a generation had to pass, a vast company of men, unknown, half-known, and known, had to be continuously at work, before the childish puppet-plays — com- paratively speaking — of Udall and Sackvillc and Still passed into the completed work of Shakespeare. But as the process was slower, so the result was more sure. Chaucer's work, as we have seen, found no following except in a half-foreign country, and from men who were themselves unable to hand on the art in living condition. The thirty years of e.xperiment in drama, from 1560 to 1590, were succeeded by fifty more of the most abundant, varied, vigorous, and, for the best of the time, brilliant production that any literary form has ever enjoyed. BOOK VI LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE CHAPTER I SHAKESPEARE The luck of Jacobean literature — Concentration of the great drama in it — Shakespearian chronology — The life — The work — The poems — The Sonnets — Their formal and spiritual supremacy — Probable divisions of plays: the earlier — Their verse and phrase — Their construction — Their characters — The middle division: the Merry Wives — The Romantic comedies — The great tragedies, Roman and Romantic — Last plays — Doubtful plays It will have been seen already with what large cautions and provisos the familiar term Elizabethan Literature has to be taken. The phenomenon to which we apply it took its rise within the reign of the Queen, or — if we take that rise to be manifested by The luck of the publication and appreciation of the Songs ami Sonnets Jacobean — on the latest eve of that reign. But it grew very slowly. More tlian twenty years passed before anything really striking and decisive either in prose or poetry appeared ; nearly thirty before really characteristic and original drama emerged, and then not by any means completely, from the condition of experiment. Even after Enphues and the Shepherd's Calendar had distinctly fore- told great things in the two ordinary harmonics, another ten or fifteen years' schooling had to be undergone before the general time of production was reached. And the greatest work of all, putting Spenser, Hooker, and Marlowe aside, was mostly borne, though as noH sua porna, by the reign of James. Despite the extreme uncertainty of Shakespearian chronology, we do know that a considerable part of Shakespeare's work was done 514 LATER ELIZABEl'HAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi before 1603. But certainly the best part was not. Very little of Jonson antedates the Queen's death ; the meagre bundles of notes, interesting and pregnant as they are, which constitute the first edition of Bacon's Essays, would, had they never been augmented, have given us no idea whatever of his real literary powers ; the best work of men like Daniel and Drayton was to come. What is perhaps not more really surprising, but more startling at first sight than the slowness of the rise of this great literature, is the rapidity, in the case of its most notable and characteristic constituent, of the decline. Omitting the work of Marlowe, which ^°""f"the"°" was prematurely brought to a close, the early work of great drama Shakespeare, and a little more on the farther side, with a much smaller part of that of Ford, Massinger, and others on the hither — the whole bulk of the English drama was written between 1600 and 1625. Almost the whole bulk of it that has really commanding merit was written between 1590 and 1640 — periods of exactly a quarter of a century in the first case, of exactly half a century in the second. Fletcher died less than ten years after Shakespeare, and in the work of all the men who survived Fletcher, decadence is apparent. There are, of course, those who would say that it is apparent in Fletcher himself, even in those works of his which, being certainly, or almost certainly, in part due to Beaumont (who died before Shakespeare), are contemporary with the masterpieces of the class. But this is perhaps an extravagantly rigid and arbitrary scheme of classification. It is enough to say that between 1600 and 1625 all the best of our dramatists except Marlowe were working more or less simultaneously ; and that within this period all the known kinds of the great drama itself had been discovered and practised. What is more is that within this same time the great metrical effect of drama upon English poetry had been, for good, entirely accomplished, and was already beginning to turn to evil — an evil which was not limited to its own immediate form. Reference has already been made to the fact that an attack on the score of plagiarism and other misdemeanors had been made by Greene, before his death in 1592, upon a certain Shakescene. who _, , . has been naturally identified with William Shakespeare. Shakespearian t, . i ^ , . , . . • / . chronology. """^ '^^^ ^0 not know With any certam or satisfactory knowledge upon what work of Shakespeare's this attack was directed. All the more careful and reasonable accounts of his life and work mark the earliest play-dates, where they give them, with a tell-tale circa. It is only by guesses that anything is dated before the Comedy of Errors, at the extreme end of 1594; and the Comedy of Errors, unmistakably Shakespearian as it is here and CHAP. I SHAKESPEARE 315 there in character and versification, is so exceedingly crude both in these points and in composition generally, that the conjectural ante- dating of plays like Richard III., and still more A Midsttin?ner NigJifs Dreatn, becomes from the literary point of view almost utterly incredible. And it may not be improper to add a very earnest protest against the attempt to group plays and classes of plays according to successive supposed states of the poet's mind and temper. Where there is crudity of character, artlessness of verse, or very flagrantly chaotic composition (it must be remembered that Shakespeare's composition is not to be judged by the rules of any ancient abbe or modern journalist) then we may with a clear literary conscience ticket this as "probably early." Otherwise, in default of positive documentary evidence, there would not be much reason for putting The Tempest later than A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, or A 14 Ititer's Tale than Romeo and Juliet. A poet, especially a poet like Shakespeare, is not a vegetable ; you cannot count the years of his work by any real or fancied number of rings in his heart. Bad verse, inhuman character, clumsy composition — become after a time impossible to him ; in temper and choice of subject he abides supreme and free. The results of the almost ferocious industry spent upon unearth- ing and analysing every date and detail of Shakespeare's life are on the whole very meagre, and for literary purposes almost entirely unimportant, while with guesswork we have nothing to do. The certainties may be summarised very briefly. William Shakespeare was traditionally born on the 24th of April, and certainly baptized on the 26th of April 1564, at Stratford-on-Avon. His grandfather's name was Richard, that of his father, a dealer in hides, gloves, corn, wood, etc., was John, and the poet's mother was Mary Arden. He had two sisters and three brothers. The family, which through Mary Arden had some small landed property, was at one time prosperous, at others not. Shakespeare himself married early ; the date of the actual ceremony is not known, but a bond of marriage passed between him and his wife Anne Hathaway on November 1582, when he was little more than eighteen, and his wife, a yeoman's daughter, eight years older. They had three children, Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith, and there is absolutely no docu- mentary evidence of the slightest value as to the terms on which they lived together. Tradition there is — though of no great age, and of exceedingly slight authority — as to his leaving Stratford for London, perhaps in 1585, 1586, or 1587, and perhaps in consequence of a deer-stealing prank in the neighbouring park of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlccote. He perhaps began his connection with the theatre as a horse-holder, and was pretty certainly an actor before 3i6 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi long. In 1593 appeared his first work, the remarkable Venus and Adonis, and next year the rather less remarkable Lucrece. He was connected soon after the middle of the last decade of the century with divers theatres, became a shareholder in them, and by 1597 could buy a good house, New Place, at Stratford, where he afterwards enlarged his property. It is to be noted that his constant residence at London during these ten years, his desertion of his wife, etc., are all matters of guesswork founded on barely negative evidence. It is not in the slightest degree impossible that Anne Shakespeare was with her husband for the whole time, or that he made frequent visits home. But there are fair grounds for supposing that London was his headquarters during the decade from 1586 to 1596, his partial residence during the next, and only occasionally visited by him during the third — at the close of which, in 1616 on 23rd April, he died. The best-known detail about him perhaps, and a sample of the trivial things on which structures of gossip have been based, is his bequest of his second-best bed to his wife. Personal references to him are not numerous and rather vague, though except in the case of Greene's splenetic outburst (if it be meant for Shakespeare) always complimentary. His reputation, though it has steadily grown, has always been great ; there has never from the day of his death to this day been wanting testimony to his position from the greatest living names of the time in English literature. Shakespeare's works, in the generally accepted canon, consist of a comparatively small body of non-dramatic poems, the two pieces above mentioned, a body of 154 sonnets, and a very few shorter pieces somewhat more doubtfully genuine, on the one hand ; on the other, of about twenty times as much dramatic work divided into thirty-seven plays, which in the original edition, published seven years after the owner's death by his friends Heminge and Condell (this does not contain Pericles'), are classed as "tragedies, comedies, and histories." Before this edition, and during Shakespeare's lifetime, only a few of the plays had been printed in quartos of doubtful authenticity; the Fenus, the Lucrece, and the Sonnets appeared with his name and pretty certainly under his superintendence. The spelling of the name varies from Shaxper to Shakespeare. But if Greene's gibe at it is good for anything, it settles the pronunciation as nearest the latter form, and this is the spelling on the title-page of the Sonnets, the only book of his pub- lished in his lifetime, after he was famous, and obviously with his leave if not by him. In view of the extreme uncertainty of date of most of the plays before 1600, the certain attribution of the two larger poems to 1593- 94, and of the Sonnets (though they were not printed till 1609) to CHAP. I SHAKESPEARE 317 1598 or earlier, when they are mentioned in Meres's Palladis Tamia^ is very important and solid. These early dates, and the fact that all the three larger pieces or groups are concerned with love, show us in a more personal fashion than the scheme of the drama (always more or less impersonal, and in Shakespeare's hands extraordinarily so) what manner of man and poet Shakespeare was in his youth. The dominant tone in all three is passion, combined in the Sonnets with an intense and wide-sweeping thought. In some more general and obvious characteristics Venns and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece differ little from other members of a large class of Elizabethan poems referred to above (p. 267). They select, on the pattern of many writers of the French and Italian Renaissance, subjects at once luscious and tragical, and they apply the new melodious verse, of which Spenser had taught the secret, to the discussion of them in a manner which appeals at once to the sensual and the sentimental emotions. But if the class was the same, the individuals are very different. There were already many tuneful singers in 1593; but none of them except the master himself could raise such a pageant of voluptuous imagery, or accompany it with such a symphony of harmonious sound, as we find in Venus and Adonis. No one except Spenser and Sackville evoked the rhyme-clangour of the stanza ^ with such deli- cate art ; no one except these two had portrayed such vivid pictures as the arrest of Adonis by Venus, the captivity of Mars, the portrait of herself by the goddess, the escape of the courser, the description of the boar and of the hare-hunt, the solitary night, the discovery of the foolish youth who has fled from Love's arms to those of Death. But while none, save these, of men living had done, or could have done, such work, there was much here which — whether either could have done it or not — neither had done. In the first place there is, almost for the first time in English poetry since Chaucer, a directness of observation in the sketches from nature. Sackville, so far as his brief space and peculiar subjects allowed him, Spenser far more, are great painters and ^„ •1 V, 11, 1 The poems. describers. But even the later and greater poet rather displays a magnificently decorative convention in painting than a direct re-creative or reproductive touch. Shakespeare, even in these earliest days, has this latter — the horse and the hare, though the most famous and elaborate, arc only two out of many instances of it in llie Venus. In the second place, the slow movement, whicli is of 1 Meres's extremely interesting tliough singularly uncritical sketch of contem- porary and otiier Knglish literature will be found in Mr. Arbor's English Garner, ii. 94. '^ Venus and Adonis is in the six-, Lucrece in the seven-lined stave. 3l8 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi the essence of the poetry of Sackville and of Spenser, and which is certainly invited by the six-lined stanza in which the Venus is written almost as much as by the rhyme-royal and the Spenserian, cannot adjust itself to the infinite variety and the directly lyrical flow of Shakespeare's versification. It is not a mere accident which has made composers choose " Bid me discourse " and " Lo, here the gentle lark ■' for setting to song measures of the lightest quality ; and throughout the poet shows himself — even more than Spenser, how much more then than any one else! — the absolute master of his metre, the tregetour, to \i'hom all conditions of phrase and rhythm are merely materia prima out of which he can make whatsoever he will. And lastly, though of necessity in less measure and degree, that gift of indicating character, of opening up whole unending vistas of thought by a single phrase, which is Shakespeare's as it is hardly any one else's, is here. Of Adonis, the story forbade him to make much. But it would have been so easy to make Venus contemptible or disgusting or simply tedious; and she escapes all three fates so completely! The escape, no doubt, is effected partly, if not mainly, by the unfailing intensity of passion which the poet suffuses, but we are concerned chiefly with the means of suffusion. They are, I take it, mainly, if not wholly, comprised in that magic of the single phrase in which Shakespeare (for this is not Spenser's gift) reminds us of no predecessor but Chaucer, and in which he outdoes Chaucer more than Chaucer outdoes others. Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty — Leading him prisoner in a red-rose chain — Love is a spirit all compact of fire — He sees her coming and begins to glow Even as a dying coal revives with wind — Her two blue windows faintly she upheaveth — Was melted like a vapour from her sight — are mere specimens selected half at random from the things of this kind with which the piece swarms. "Conceited," "over-luscious," "unoriginal" — half a dozen other epithets the merely stop-watch critic may heap upon Venus and Adonis. One epithet, sometimes used in disparagement, it does deserve — it is young, but with the youth of Shakespeare. Much of what has been said will apply to Lucrece, which chiefly differs from its predecessor in having a seven-line stanza, and in dealing with criminal, and not merely unhappy and tragic, passion. It is, however, on the whole, inferior ; being not merely longer (and the style is not improved by length), but written with something more of an approach to the old fifteenth-century manner of allegoric and CHAP. I SHAKESPEARE 319 other padding. We should be sorry not to have it as well as the Venus, but it could not supply its companion's place. The Sonnets do not reveal to us a more exquisite or richly gifted poet than does the Venus ; but they take us to a higher range of subject, where sensuous imagery is indeed not absent, but where the poet's absorption in it has given way to a more direct domination of the ideal, to meditation upon passion rather than realisation of it. The endless discussions on the person- ages probably or possibly concerned must be sought elsewhere. The famous dedication ^ is, almost to a certainty, enigmatic of malice prepense ; but there is no reason to question the fact suggested by the text throughout, and explicitly asserted once in it, that "a man right fair " and '' a woman coloured ill " were the objects, either suc- cessive or simultaneous, of the poet's passionate attachment. That these two persons were live individual beings ; that the passion was actually felt, but for one, two, five, or fifty other persons quite differ- ent from those adumbrated ; or that the poems have no necessary connection with any particular person, will never be exclusively asserted or denied by any one acquainted with human nature. All these theories and others are possible ; none is proved ; and, for the literary purpose, none is really important. What is important is that Shakespeare has here caught up the sum of love and uttered it as no poet has before or since, and that in so doing he carried poetry — that is to say, the passionate expression in verse of the sensual and intellectual facts of life — to a pitch which it had never previously reached in English, and which it has never out- stepped since. The coast-line of humanity must be wholly altered, the sea must change its nature, the moon must draw it in different ways, before that tide-mark is passed. These Sonnets are written in the English form, which is some- times called from them the Shskespearian, and which, as already explained, is quite entitled to claim equality with the chief Italian or Petrarchian. Three quatrains, not connected by any xheir formal necessary or usual community of rhyme, are tipped with and spiritual a couplet ; and, generally speaking, though not invariably, ^"P'^'^'"*'^^- the opposition or balance of octave and sestet which the Petrarchian form naturally invites is replaced here by a steady building up of the thought through the douzain, and then either a climax or a quick anti- 1 " To the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr. W. H. all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet wisheth the well-wishing ad- venturer in setting forth. T. T." "T. T." is admitted to be Thomas Thorpe the puljlisher; the "ever-living poet" is open to no doubt, as the title-page has "Shakespeare's Sonnets." I5ut who "Mr. \V. H." was, that is the question. If matters extremely little, but general opinion and fair probability incline to Williana Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, Sidney's nephew. 320 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi strophe in the final couplet. The form is extraordinarily suitable to the subjects and may be said to be, for the sonnet meditative, actually pref- erable to the octave-and-sestet, though the latter may have advantages for the sonnet descriptive. No such samples of the peculiar phrase beauty of the So7inets can be given as those which \itxt possible in the case of the Venus, simply because of their bewildering abundance. Every sonnet, and perhaps a majority of the two thousand lines or thereabouts, contains them ; and among them are numbered no small proportion of the highest, the intensest, the most exquisite jewels of En"-lish poetry. But their general characteristic as verse is a steady soaring music, now lower, now higher, never exactly glad but always passionate and full, which can be found nowhere else — a harmonic of mighty heart-throbs and brain-pulsings which, once caught, never deserts the mind's ear. Like all the greatest poetry, this is almost independent of meaning though so full of it; you can attend to the sense or disregard it as you please, certain in each case of satisfac- tion. The thoughts are not so far-fetched, the music not quite so unearthly, as in some poems of the next generation, but they are more universal, more commanding, more human. The mastery which had been partially attained in Venus and Adonis is complete here. There is nothing that the poet wishes to say that he cannot say, and there is hardly a district of thought and feeling into which he does not at least cast glances of unerring vision. The faculty, which in this direction attained such early command, seems in the more complex and various departments of dramatic exercise to have developed itself, as might be expected, more slowly in proportion to the bulk and variety of its accomplish- diVision^'s'of ment. What really is Shakespeare's earliest dramatic plays: work is, as has been said, in the highest degree un- certain ; and of the pieces which are with more or less probability ascribed to his earliest period it is not definitely known how much is his own, how much supplied by or borrowed from others. From the beginning of the play, as distinguished from the interlude, the habit seems to have established itself, in England as in other countries, of constantly reworking old pieces by new hands ; and it is probably to some exceptional popularity of Shakespeare as a refashioner in this way that Greene's outburst refers. His early pieces, then, may be divided into anticipations, more or less original, of his special masterpiece, the romantic comedy, attempts in the blood- and-thunder melodrama of the time, and probably, in most cases, refashioned chronicle-plays or " histories," a kind, as we have seen, as old as Bale. To the first division belong Love''s Labour''s Lost, the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the Comedy of Errors (this touching the translated classical play), Measure for Measure ( ?), the series culminat- CHAP. 1 SHAKESPEARE 321 ing in A Midsummer Nighfs Dream ; to the second T/ius Atidroni- ciis ; to the last the majority of the great series of the English histories, while Romeo and Jidiet stands apart as what we may call a romantic tragedy corresponding to the romantic comedy, and promising almost greater things to come. In all this work, guessing as little as we can, and proceeding as gingerly as possible, we can see the poefs genius growing and settling itself in every possible way. In metre he begins with the lumbering fourteeners, not as yet quite spirited up even by him, the stiff blank verse which even from the first becomes and phrase! pliant in his hand, the richer but almost stiffer Marlovian hectoring style, the quaint fantasies and euphuistic devices of Lyly, all frequently lapsing into rhymed couplet and even stanza. But almost from the very first there are glimpses, and very soon there are much more than glimpses, of something that we have never seen before. Such a phrase, for instance, to take but the first that occurs, as the And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars From this world-wearied flesh, of Romeo and Juliet takes us a long way beyond IVIarlowe, a longer way beyond Peele. In both these masters there is a deficiency of vibration in the verse, and a certain poverty, or at least simplicity, of verbal music. " Native wood-notes wild " is rather truer of Peele than of Shakespeare. Even Shakespeare could not often outdo Marlowe in a sort of economy of majesty, the grandeur of a huge blank cliff-face, or of the empty welkin itself. But as his meaning is more complex, farther-ranging, mon; intricately developed than theirs, so are his versification and his form. The incomparable skill that was to achieve such things as Peace, peace ! Dost thou not see my baby at my breast That sucks the nurse asleep? or the famous Tempest passage about " the stuff that dreams are made of," confronts us in the making (and a very rapid making) quite early. We find in it the quaint euphuisms of Love'^s Labour^s Lost, in the unequal speeches of the Two GentleDten, even in such a partly farcical medley as the Comedy of Errors, and such an ill- mingled mass of farce and tragedy as Measure for Measure. The real Shakespeare cannot help showing himself, if only by a flash of verse here and there ; and then we are in i)resence of something new — of a kind of Englisli poetry that no one has hit upon before and which, as we cannot but feel, is revolutionising the whole Y 322 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi structure and character of English verse. He may rhyme, or he may not rhyme, or he may turn to prose; but always there is the new phrase, the new language, conceited to the despair of pedants, playing on words in a fashion maddening to dullards, not always impeccable from the stricter standpoints of taste, but always instinct with creative genius. In respect of construction and dramatic conception these early works, as we might expect, are less advanced. The chronicle play of its nature defies construction of the ordinary kind, though some- times, as in Marlowe's Edivard 11. and Shakespeare's struction.' ^^^ Ric/iafih, the actual story may be short and central enough to give something like definite plot. It is, how- ever, remarkable how Shakespeare contrives to infuse into these chronicles, or, as they may be not inaccurately termed, these dra- matic romances, something of the unity of the regular play or dramatic epic. He will do it by the most various means — sometimes, as in King John, by the contrasted attraction of the tragedy of Constance and Arthur and the comedy of the Bastard Falconbridge ; some- times, as in Henry /V., by the inclusion of a non-historical char- acter, like Falstaff, of the very first interest and importance, with the subsidiaries necessary to set it off"; sometimes, as in Henry V., by projecting an idea (in this case the patriotic idea of England) in such a fashion that the whole of the play, humours and all, im- poses it on the spectator. But in the miscellaneous plays there is much less unity of construction, and, as yet, the romantic attraction of character is not quite secured. The defeat of the project of seclusion from womankind in Love's Labour^s Lost might hardly, in any case, have been sufficient by itself, and is certainly not made sufficient ; the play, agreeable as it is, loses itself in humours, and episodes, and single combats of wit and love. The central story of the Two Gentlemen is not more than enough for an ordinary nonvelle, and it may be questioned whether that of Rotneo and Juliet is in itself much more. But this latter is quintessenced, and exalted to the heavens, by the pure and intense poetic quality of its verse, by the pity of it in the case of the hero and still more the heroine, and by the contrasted flashes of wit and gallantry in Mercutio and Tybalt and the rest. So in the other and lighter masterpiece, A Midsiwi- vier Nighfs Dream, which probably belongs to this period, the subtle fidelity to the dream-nature perhaps makes it unnecessary to give, but certainly as a matter of fact excludes, any elaborate character- drawing. Indeed, always and everywhere at this period, Shake- speare's character is far ahead of his plot. Some indeed, to whom critical adhesion can here by no means be given, would maintain that this was always the case, and that to the very last the dazzling CHAP. I SHAKESPEARE 323 and transcendent truth and mastery of the great personages help to blind the reader to the want of that " clockwork " excellence of con- struction which Jonson could perhaps already give, and was certainly to give before Shakespeare's death. Let it rather be said that Shakespeare at this time had not quite acquired the art of construct- ing up to his character-level ; that later, when he had learnt it, he never cared to give more construction than was necessary for his characters ; and that in this he was right. It may be questioned — heresy as the statement will seem to some — whether construction, pitched to the perfection of the Silent ll'of/ian or of Tom Jones, is not something of a tour de force, and whether it does not deserve Bacon's pleasant sneer in another matter, acters.*"^ "you may see as good sights in tarts." Life does not consider or contrive so curiously. However this may be, Shake- speare at this time was certainly not "our best plotter"; he was already at times an almost perfect artist in character, as he was a quite perfect poet. Even in such "more rawer" work as the Two Gentlemen, "Who is Silvia ?"does not more show us the master of lyric than Julia and Lance show us the master of the graver and the lighter, the more passionate and the more frivolous, psychology and ethology. Even in that unequal medley, Measure for Measure, the great scene between Isabel and Claudio so far transcends anything that English, anything that European, drama had had to show for nearly two thousand years, that in this special point of view it remains perhaps the most wonderful in Shakespeare. Marlowe has nothing like it ; his greatest passages, psychologically speaking, are always monologues ; he cannot even attempt the clash and play of soul with soul that is so miraculously given here. Yet, though the play (which some call a comedy!) is not known to have been acted till 1604, its general characteristics put it far earlier. The second or middle division of plays may be said to be con- nected with the first by the link between Henry IV. and Henry V.^ the latest and most matured of the early batch, and the Merry Wives of Windsor, probably the first of the .second. The The middle Merry Wives itself is a curious study. It has failed division: the to find favour with some, owing to a not ignoble dislike ' "^'^^ '^"' at seeing the degradation or discomfiture of Falstaff, hut it must be rememljered that Shakespeare, though never cruel with the morbid cruelty of the modern pessimist, is always perfectly awake to the facts of life. And, as a matter of fact, the bowls that Falstaff played involve the rubbers that are here depicted. It has also been a ' It is well to say nothing about Henry ]'I., because, though I have no doubt that this trilogy is, as we have it, in the main Shakespeare's, it is also beyond all doubt, and beyond all others, a refashioning of earlier plays. 324 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi common saying that the play is little better than a tarce. If so, it can only be said that Shakespeare very happily took or made the oppor- tunity of showing how a farce also can pass under the species of eternity. How infinitely do the most farcical of the characters, such as Sir Hugh and Dr. Caius, excel the mere "Vices" of earlier play- wrights ! Who but Shakespeare had — we may almost say who but Shakespeare has — made an immortal thing of a mere ass, a mere putf-ball of foolish froth like Slender? If Chaucer had had the dramatic as he had the narrative faculty and atmosphere, he might have done Mrs. Quickly, who is a very near relative, in somewhat lower life, of the Wife of Bath, and rapidly ripening for her future experiences in Eastcheap. But Shallow is above even Chaucer, as are also the subtle differentiation between Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford, and the half-dozen strokes which her creator judged sufficient for sweet Anne Page. As for Falstaff, it is mistaken affection which thinks him degraded, or " translated " Bottom-fashion. He is even as elsewhere, though under an unluckier star. This completeness exhibits itself, not perhaps in more masterly fashion, but in a somewhat higher and more varied material, in the great trio of Romantic comedies which is supposed to represent the work of the last year or two of the sixteenth century — ^^^ome^dies"'''' Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and As You Like It. Whether this order represents the actual com- position or not, it certainly represents an intellectual and literary progression of interest and value, though the steps between the three are not wide. Twelfth Night, like the Merry Wives though not quite to the same extent, is pure comedy with a leaning to farce. The exquisite delicacy of the character of Viola suffuses it with a more romantic tone ; but the disasters of Malvolio are even less serious than Falstaff 's, and the great appeal of the play lies wholly on the comical side, in the immortal characters of Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, in Feste, the first distinctly and peculiarly Shakespearian clown, in Maria, the " youngest wren of nine," in the glorious fooling of the plot against the steward, and the minor Comedy of Errors put upon Viola and Sebastian. There is no touch of sadness, though the clown's final song of " The rain it raineth every day " gives a sort of warning note; the whole is sunny, and if less romantically imaginative than A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, it is almost as romantically fanciful. Much Ado About Nothing changes us from pure comedy to the tragi-comic — indeed, to what threatens at one time to be tragedy undiluted. Perhaps here only, or here and in the Winter's Tale, Shakespeare has used tragedy to heighten his comedy, just as he habitually does the opposite ; and the effect is good. But it is for the CHAP. I SHAKESPEARE 325 lighter side — for the peerless farce of Dogberry, the almost peerless comedy proper of Benedick and Beatrice — that we love the play. And the attraction of this couple, anticipated very early in Rosaline and Biron, is used yet again and with absolutely supreme success in As You Like It, one of the topmost things in Shakespeare, the master- piece of romantic comedy, one of the great type-dramas of the world. Here, as in so many other places, Shakespeare borrowed his theme, and even no small part of his minor situations ; but this matters nothing. The Tale of Gamely n is pleasant and vigorous ; Lodge's Rosalynde is ingenious and fantastically artistic. But As You Like It is part of the little "library of La Quinte" — of the few books exhibiting imagination and expression equally married. Rosalind and Touch- stone stand, each in his or her own way, alone. The apparent change in the subject and temper of Shakespeare's work at the beginning of the seventeenth century has been the subject of much idle talk. There is no more reason to believe that he was specially and personally merry when he wrote this group of comedies, than there is to believe that he was tragedks^ sad or embittered during the period which produced Roman and Julius CcEsar, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra — to which some would add Troilus and Cressida, Timon, and even Measure for Measure, as well as Coriolanus. To the present writer it is pretty certain that Measure for Measure, Timon, and Troilus ajtd Cressida represent much earlier work, whether or no they had been actually produced. The three Roman plays, Julius Ca:sar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra, make an interesting section to themselves, which in Antony and Cleopatra almost passes into that of romantic tragedy, and so joins the supreme quartette, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, and Lear. In all the Roman plays Shakespeare applied his English-chronicle method pretty exactly to the material that he found in North's Plutarch, and, since his faculties both of stage-management and of versification were now in complete maturity, with the noblest effect. But in character he does not create much, he only interprets — till we come to the ''Serpent of old Nile " and her lover, who are neither the crowned wanton and besotted debauchee of uninspired history, nor the anti-Roman sorceress and victim of Horace's craven-crowing ode, but a real hero and heroine of romance, luckless though not blameless, sympathetic though not ill served. Much, however, even of Antony and Cleopatra is only chronicle, and like the other two, great as they are, falls beneath the magnificent creation of the four great romantic tragedies. In each of these, of course, Shakespeare had again his authorities, and, as his wont, he sometimes followed them closely. But the interest of the four 326 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi does not depend in the very least upon Cinthio or Saxo, upon Geoflfrey or Holinshed. Here, as in the great companion comedies, the dramatist breaks quite free ; his real themes are human passion and human action at large, caught and embodied for the nonce in individual character and fate. Nowhere else does even Shakespeare lavish his resources as he does in these four plays, and certainly in none does he manifest such a power of displaying the irony of life and fate. Viewed from one standpoint, all four are as well entitled to the motto " Vanity of vanities " as Ecclesiastes itself. The love, the heroism, and the great leading qualities of Othello and Macbeth, the filial duty and intellectual subtlety of Hamlet, the generous if reckless and passionate bonhomie of Lear, all make shipwreck against the rocks thrown in their way by inauspicious stars, and sought out too often by their own mistakes and crimes. With that supreme genius which distinguishes him from the common playwright, Shakespeare has never made his heroes or heroines types ; and this has puzzled many, and driven not a few to despairing efforts to make them out types after all. It is exactly what they are not. Shakespeare was no duped or duping preacher of the ruling passion like his second editor. Othello is indeed the simplest of the four ; but even here the character of lago, which is almost as complex as that of Hamlet, invites a great, from some the greater, part of the interest. Those who would make Hamlet a mere irresolute, a mere Waverley, not only do not supply a full explanation of him even in their terms, but forget that irresolution, at least such as his, is the most complex of qualities. The inability of the will to " let itself go " is partly caused by, much more complicated with, the inability of the intellect to decide. To compare Lear with the wretched other play^ on the subject, which is beyond all doubt anterior, or with Holinshed, or with Geoffrey's original, is perhaps the very best single means of appreciating the infinite variety and intricacy of Shakespeare's know- ledge and expression of humanity. Although the hapless King is always in the Latin sense impotent, — incapable of resisting the impulse of the moment, — this fault of his is conditioned, coloured, transformed at every instant by circumstances, many of them Shakespeare's own invention, and all rearranged with new effects by him. The gifting, the unexpected fractiousness of Cordelia (and let it be remembered that Cordelia is not a perfect character, that she is as hyper-frank as her sisters are hypocritical), the petty insults at Goneril's, the bolder outrage at Gloster's under the orders of Regan and Cornwall, the terrors of the storm, and the talk (dangerous to already tottering wits) of the sham madman, the rescue even as it 1 To be found, with other similar apparatus, in Hazlitt's Shakespeare' s Library. CHAP. I SHAKESPEARE 327 is too late, the second fall into the hands of his enemies, and the final blow in the murder of Cordelia — all these engines, all these reagents, the dramatist applies to Lear's headstrong petulance with the most unvarying precision of science, the most unfailing variety of art. We have the ungovernable king and ex-king in twenty different " states," in twenty different relations and presentments, all connected by the central inexorable story. And so in Macbeth the hero — ambitious, uxorious, intensely under the influence of nerves and of imagination, as different from the mere "butcher" of Malcolm's insult as his greater but not less complex-souled wife is from a "fiendlike queen" — passes before us whole and real, terrible but exact, before, at the crisis of, and in his criminal stage, at once with the fluttering and phantasmagoric variety of a dream, and with an utterly solid and continuous story-interest. The Macbeth who is excited by the prophecy of the witches is exactly the same Macbeth as he who shrinks from the visioned dagger, as he who is struck to a kind of numb philosophising by the cry of women that announces his wife's death. Of the numberless and magnificent passages of our poetry which these four plays contain it were vain to attempt to speak. It must be sufficient to say that in them the Shakespearian line, which, with its absolute freedom of shifting the pause from the first syllable to the last, its almost absolute freedom of syllabic equivalence, and the infinite variety of cadence which the use of these two main means (and no doubt some magic besides) allowed it to attain, is the central fact of English poetry — this line came to its very farthest. We only observe in the plays of the last six or seven years of his life one change, and that not a quite certain one, the inclination to greater indulgence in the redundant syllable which is so exceedingly noticeable in his successors in romantic drama, Beaumont and Fletcher. It is pretty certain that this license, which he had always used to some extent, would never in his hands have reached the excess which we find in them, and which in their followers simply disbands the line into loose ungirt prose, with some reminiscences of verse here and there. But it cannot be considered on the whole an improvement. The plays of, or probably belonging to, the last period of Shake- speare's life are fewer in proportion than those of either of the pre- ceding periods, but those of them that are certain present interesting characteristics. These are Cytnbelitie, the U'ln/er's Tale, and The Tempest, the others being Henry VIII. and ^^^'P^y^. Pericles. This last play, which was not included in the first folio of 1623 by Shakespeare's friends and colleagues, Heminge and CondcU, presents curious difficulties. Great part of it must be Shakespeare's ; there is perhaps no part that viight not be ; and the 328 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi general characteristics of story-management and versification are a very odd mixture of his earUest and his latest manner — a Love's Labours Lost blended with a Winter's Tale. Nor do I at least see reason for refusing any part of Henry VIII. to Shakespeare, though the prominence of the redundant syllable has made many ascribe it in large part to Fletcher. But about the other three there is no doubt, and certainly there is more excuse than usual for those who read in them a special index of the author's temper in these his last days — of the '* calmed and calming mens adepta " whereof Fulke Greville speaks. Cv^/'^^i^/^w^ partakes somewhat of the same character as the earlier Much Ado about Nothing. It is very nearly a tragedy — indeed, unlike Much Ado about Nothing, it contains accomplished tragic incidents in the deaths of the Queen and Cloten. But as far as the interesting personages — Imogen, lachimo, Posthumus — are concerned, the tragedy is averted, and the whole deserves the name of romantic drame in the French sense. This word, indeed, exactly describes these last three plays, and with ever-increasing appropriateness. Pedants of the bookish theoric of playwright craftsmanship have found fault with the construction of Cymbeline, which is admittedly loose, like its fellows — a chronicle or romance rather than an epic, but perfectly sufficient for its own object and purposes. The backbone of A IVinier^s Tale is a little more carefully and distinctly vertebrated, though no doubt the action is rather improbably prolonged, and the statue-scene, in which Hermione is restored to Leontes, does not entirely atone by its extreme beauty for its equally extreme improbability. But here, as always, Shakespeare has done what he meant to do ; and here, as always, it is the extremity of critical impertinence to demand from an author not what he meant to do but something that the critic thinks he might, could, should, or ought to have meant. The vivid truth of the Queen's frank courtesy, Leontes' jealous rage (so different from Othello's, yet equally lifehke), the fine lurid presentment of the "coast" of Bohemia, the exquisitely idyllic (a word much abused, yet here applicable) figure of Perdita, the inimitable brio of Autolycus, the pendant to Touchstone — to give all these and other things in a pleasing series was what the dramatist intended to do, and he did it. The splendour of sunset in the Tempest can escape no one, and the sternest opponent of guesswork must admit the probable presence of a designed allegory in the figure of Prospero and the burying of the book, the breaking of the staff, at the close. Even if this be thought too fanciful, nowhere has Shakespeare been more prodigal of every species of his enchantment. The exquisite but contrasted CKAP. I SHAKESPEARE 329 grace of Miranda and Ariel, the wonderful creation of Caliban, the varied human criticism in Gonzalo and the bad brothers, the farce- comedy of Stephano and Trinculo, do not more show the illimitable fancy and creative power of the master in scene and character than the passages, not so much scattered as showered over the whole play, show his absolute supremacy in poetry. Both in the blank verse and the lyrics, in the dialogue and the set tirades, in long contexts and short phrases alike, he shows himself absolute, with nothing out of reach of his faculty of expression and suggestion, with every resource of verbal music and intellectual demonstration at his command. The so-called doubtful plays ^ of Shakespeare form an interesting subject, but one which can be dealt with but briefly here. As attributed by older tradition and assertion or by modern guesswork, they amount to "some dozen or sixteen," of which only three, the Two Noble Kinsjnen, usually printed as piayL" Beaumont and Fletcher's, Edward III., and Arden of Feversham, have any serious claims, though some have seen such in the Yorkshire Tragedy, a curious little horror-piece which, however, a dozen other men might have written. Others again, Fair Em, Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, have absolutely nothing but unauthoritative though pretty ancient assertion to recommend them. As for the excepted three, the Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatisation of Chaucer's Knighfs Tale, has no suggestion of Shakespeare as a whole, but in parts shows extraordinary similarity to his versification. This has tempted some to think that Shakespeare may by chance have found his younger contemporaries (Beaumont, be it remembered, died in the same year with him) working at the play, have looked at it, and have mended or patched here and there for amusement or out of good-nature. Ed%vard HI. has the same similarities of versification, and in part, though a small part, of handling, but it is more suggestive of an extraordinarily clever piece of imitation or inspira- tion than of actual Shakespearian authorship. Arden of Fevershan:, on the other hand, has no similarities of versification, and does not, in its dealing with the murder of a husband by his wife and her base- l)()rn paramour, suggest Shakespeare's choice of subject, but is closer in some ways than any other play to his handling in character and psychological analysis. 1 A complete and cheap Shakespearian "Apocrypha " is much wanted. As it is, more or fewer of tlie doubtfiils are included in some of the old large library editions, some of them may he found in Hazlitt's Dodslty, others in Simpson's School of Shakespeare, and one or two, especially Arden of Fex'ersham, are accessible separately. Otherwise the edition of Warnke and Proescholdt (Halle, 1878-88) is the only good one. CHAPTER II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA Disposition of the subject — Chronological and biographical cautions — Ben Jonson — His and other "humour" — His plays — His verse — The three master- pieces — Later plays — The Masques — Beaumont and Fletcher — Their lives — Their characteristics — And merits — Specimen plays — Shadowy personality of other dramatists — Sufficiency of their work — Chapman — Marston — Dekker — Middleton — Heywood — Webster — His two great plays — Day — Tourneur — Rowley From more than one thing which has been said already, it will be seen that the arrangement of the great period of the English drama for treatment in a literary history is beset by various difficulties. The phases come so quick and overlap each other so of^thi'subject. intricately, that separate treatment is apt to create an entirely wrong general idea chronologically, while collec- tive treatment is in danger of confusing the successive stages. For our present purpose the best way will probably be to take here all or almost all the men who during Shakespeare's lifetime produced some- thing more than the mere beginning of their work, leaving even Massinger (though it is almost certain that he wrote before 1616), much more Ford, Shirley, etc., for the next Book ; but to preface the individual dealings with some warning remarks which may keep the general procession clear. Let it then be always remembered that the formative period of the University Wits was a very short one, and was contained, roughly speaking, in the >decade from 1585 to 1596; that Shakespeare overlapped them at the one end, and the first ten years Chronological ^^ Fletcher — the whole collaboration of Beaumont and biographical Fletcher — on the other; that Ben Jonson, beginning cautions. ,, ,^ , . ,,, 'o o before the Queen's reign ended, by some years, was the dramatist more especially of the reign of James, though he survived till near the outbreak of the civil dissensions ; that Fletcher's death coincided nearly enough with the accession of Charles, so that he represents one side of the purely Jacobean 330 CHAP. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 331 drama as Ben does the other ; and that most of the minor but still great men, Chapman, Dekker, Middleton, Heywood, Tourneur, Day, Marston, Webster, while often anticipating the end of Elizabeth's reign, and sometimes prolonging themselves into the beginning of Charles's, are still in the main ornaments more especially of that of the British Solomon, who, for all his Rewlis and Caittilis (jiide infra), certainly reaped where he had not sown. From what has been said already of this curiously tangled character of the subject, it will be understood that a strictly chronological arrange- ment of the writers enumerated, and others, is practically impossible. But it so happens that, without violating chronology in any important degree, we can arrange them in an order corresponding quite closely enough to their literary importance. Ben Jonson^ (whose non-dramatic poetry is in bulk, and still more in influence, so important that it must be treated separately in the next chapter, while his prose will also come in for handling in a third) was nearlv ten years younger than Shakespeare, „ ^ ,, .'t ,.', -• Ben Jonson. and was born in London in the year 1573, some time after the death of his father, who was in orders. There seems to be no reason for doubting that the family was a branch of the Annan- dale Johnstones. He was educated at Westminster, but probably at neither University, though he afterwards received honorary degrees from both. His mother married a master bricklayer or builder, and Ben appears to have tried the business, but naturally did not like it. He enlisted and served for some time in the Netherlands, but seems to have come home while still a boy and to have married very- early. The famous conversations with Drummond (see below), which though not the very best of evidence, are about the best we have, do not represent this marriage as a very happy one, though Ben gives his wife a somewhat ungracious testimonial on the most important point. He was certainly one of the most solidly read men of an erudite time. We do not know how he gravitated to the stage, but Meres's mention of him is so early (1598) that Every Man in his Hiimonr. Jonson's earliest known play, is sometimes put before this date. But we do not know that it \<-as acted till then, and Meres's commendation is for tragedy. The wild life of the actors and playwrights of the time had nearly made Jonson's own end tragically premature, for he fought a duel with an actor of Henslowe's, Gabriel Spencer, in this same year, killed him, was tried for murder, but escaped by pleading "clergy" and being burnt in the hand, with loss of goods and chattels, which were probably not extensive. During the early years of James we know little of him except from the Conversations and a few tradi- 1 Works, cd. Gifforil ami Cunningtiam (3 vols. London, «.j^j^ j^^g for theme the difficult and dangerous subject of the self-restraint, and — though not tolerance — charity of the betrayed husband Frankford. And Heywood has plucked safety and success from danger by the extreme pathos and tenderness with which he treats a rather impossible situation. Else- where, though never quite contemptible, he is seldom great. His chronicle plays {Edward IV. and The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, each in two parts) exhibit the want of unity which is the drawback of their kind, without the panoramic and historical-novel effect which can be got out of them by those who know how. His dramatisations of the Metamorphoses and other such things show a continuance of the earlier confusion as to what is and what is not matter for drama, which is rare after the beginning of the seventeenth century; while his masques and pageants entirely lack the grace and fancy, mixed with learning, which save spectacles in the hands of Jonson. He is, however, fairly strong in the comedy of London manners and humours, and very strong in the domestic drama, of which his already mentioned masterpiece may claim to be our chief instance. Nor has he small command of another, not the least agreeable of the sub- varieties of the plays of the time, the adventure-drama, of which he has left us some remarkable specimens. ^ He is not a great master of versification, and one is apt to be more convinced of the " prose " than of the " Shakespeare " in Lamb's dictum. Yet, as if to show in a single instance the truth well put in Scott's observation quoted above, some of the very finest things of the whole body are his. In all respects John Webster ^ is the direct opposite to Heywood. The work attributed to him is fairly voluminous, and we know that some, perhaps much, is lost ; but a good deal both of the extant and non-extant work attributed to him seems to have been ^ ^^"' done in collaboration, and very little of this, as we now have it, is worth much. But two very great plays, Vittoria Corombona, or the White Devil, and the Duchess of Malfy, and two lesser ones, the DeviVs Law Case and Appiiis and Virginia, are ascribed to him, without assertion or suggestion of any helper. Appins and Virginia is a classical tragedy, showing neither the learning and dignity of 1 The Fair Maid of the Exchange, the Fair Maid of the West, The English Traveller, A Challenge for Beauty, Fortune by Land and Sea, A Royal King and Loyal Subject, may represent these two classes. Indeed, we have between twenty and thirty plays of Heywood's reprinted (6 vols. London, 1874), and his actual production (much of it, no doubt, adaptation only) was some ten times as large. 2 Ed. Dyce, i vol. London. CHAP. II SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 347 Jonson's nor the universal humanity of Shakespeare's attempts in this style ; and the DeviVs Law Case, though attractive in parts, has a treble portion of the chaotic defect of the time. But the first pair would suffice to put Webster in the very first rank. All the four, as well as most of the remaining work attributed to him, and the titles of some that are lost, imply a remarkable tendency to gloom, and to supernatural as well as natural terror and horror. He has left us, in the ''Address to the Reader "of the White Devil, a curious apprecia- tion of the seven contemporary dramatists, whom he seems to have ranked highest, and though the language (especially taken with his own caveat) must not be strained too far, yet it may be suspected that his classification of Shakespeare with Dekker and Heywood, and the particular phrase^ he selects for them, may have something to do with the general, though not universal, cheerfulness which prevails in all three. Of cheerfulness Webster himself knows nothing; his comedy, wherever he attempts it, is a forced guffaw, his passion of love, though powerful, has nothing bright or ethereal about it, but shares the luridness of his other motives ; and he is most at home in the horrors, almost unmitigated, of his two great '^p'l^ys^'^'^' plays. The White Devil (printed 161 2) is founded with extreme closeness, and only a few dramatic and nobler embellish- ments, on the historical story of Vittoria Corombona (or rather Accoramboni), which may be found, told by the late Mr. T. A. Trollope, in an early number of Dickens's All the Year Round. The heroine is an Italian Helen, whose beauty and unscrupulousness bring murder and crime wherever she goes, and who is seconded or egged on in her evil deeds by her brother Flamineo, a ruffian who, though less human and natural than lago, De Flores, or even Aaron, in Titus Audronicus, completes the quartette brilliantly, and so stands far above all others. The action is so extremely compressed as to have the appearance of confusion, but it is in reality clear enough ; and many of the separate scenes and passages have a gloomy intensity of passion difficult to parallel elsewhere, except in the companion play. The mad scene of Cornelia, Vittoria's mother, with her dirge over her son Marcello, murdered by his brother Flamineo, has received deserved praise from all for its wonderful " eeriness " ; but perhaps Vittoria's own words after she has been mortally stabbed — My soul, like to a ship in a dark storm, Is driven I know not whither, 1 " Right happy and copious industry." He had assigned a " full and heightened style "to Chapman, "laboured and understanding work" to Jonson, and " no less worthy companions " to Beaumont and Fletcher. 348 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE ek. vl rank even higher for then- attainment of the greatest poetical effect with the simplest language and the least out-of-the-way imagery. The Duchess of Malfy (printed 1623), the story of which was no doubt taken from that usual storehouse of the Elizabethan dramatist, Painter's Palace of Pleasure, is of less concentrated attraction. The heroine marries her steward, and is persecuted for it by her brothers. They employ an instrument named Bosola, a second but weaker Flamineo, who plays the outspoken misanthrope. The real excellence of the play is almost confined to the fourth act, where the unhappy duchess is first imprisoned in a madhouse by her brothers, and then murdered. The fifth, at the end of which everybody kills off everybody else — the husband, the brothers, and Bosola — is no improvement, and shows Webster's lack of dramatic tact. But he had a great though confused imagination, and a wonderful power of phrase. The work of John Day ^ is a good example of the " intricate impeach " of these plays and playwrights generally. His life would appear to have extended practically over the whole of the dramatic period (1580- 1640), and from record it would seem that ^' in five of these years only (i 598-1603) he collaborated in twenty-one plays, of which only the odd one, the Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green, survives in accessible form. Besides these he wrote with others and alone in later years, Law Tricks, the Travels of Three Brothers (the Shirleys), The Isle of Gulls, Humour out of Breath, and his most famous work, the Parliament of Bees. Most, if not all, of these seem to have been produced in a space not longer than that taken by the earlier and mostly unknown batch. They display, however, or most of them do, a certain character which is distinct from that of most of the plays of the period, and comes nearest to Lyly's — that is to say, the presentation in dramatic form of a series of scenes or tableaux embodying a more or less fan- tastic satire of the ethical kind, rather than a definite play-story. This is especially noticeable in the Parliament of Bees, by which indeed, except to more or less thorough-going students. Day may be sufficiently known. For the last thirty years of his presumed life he appears to have written httle or nothing ; and indeed he would seem altogether to have been one of those men who were rather hatched and coaxed into production by the prevailing heat and inspiration of the time than driven to it by necessity of their own talent. A gay and graceful spirit of fantastic allegory is his chief note. Nothing that is gay and little that is graceful appears in the two grim plays of Cyril Tourneur,- though allegory had hold on him also, as is seen in his non-dramatic piece, the Transformed Metamorphosis. J Ed. Bullen, privately printed, 1881. 2 Ed. Churton Collins, 2 vols. London, 1878. CHAP. 11 SHAKESPEARE'S CONTEMPORARIES IN DRAMA 349 The Atheisfs Tragedy and the Revenger's Tragedy are the extremes of the kind of extravagant horror-mongering in drama which Marlowe ahnost dragged to success in the Jew of Malta, and ^ J-Ourncur which Shakespeare tried and left in Titus Andronicus. The Revenger's Tragedy is by far the better of the two, having a glimmering of plot and some noble though austere sketches of character, vk^ith abundance of magnificent though gloomy poetry. The Atheisfs Tragedy, with glimpses of the patlietic, and the strange bronze-medallion stamps of line here and there which these horror- mongers not seldom contrive to impress, is mere chaos and night- mare, beside which the Spanish Tragedy is an orderly attempt in serious drama, and the Insatiate Countess a well-arranged study of manners. From William Rowley, besides a very large amount of known or probable collaboration, we have two or three separate plays, such as A New Wonder and A Match at Midnight,^ which are very far from contemptible, and help us to mark off and appreciate his work with others. His special gift would appear to have been the arrangement of that humours-and-manners comedy of con- temporary London which, as has been said, played such a large part in the dramatic works of the first half of the seventeenth century. Of this he must have had no small command, for though his comedy is rather rough, and his construction seldom soars above a kind of rough-and-ready stage-craft, he has humour and po\ver of direct presentation. If any one will take one of his plays and a specimen from even the more commended writers of the next century, Mrs. Centlivre, Gibber, Mrs. Cowley, down to Foote and O'Keefe, he will begin to understand why the ordinary plays of the seventeenth century are ranked as literature, while those of the eighteenth are not. 1 This will be found in Hazlilt's Dodsley. A separate edition of Rowley has long been expected from Mr. Bullen. CHAPTER III THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY Drayton — The Polyolbion — Other poems — Daniel — Sylvester — Sir John Davies — Minor poets — Chapman — Fairfax — Campion — The Spenserians : minor poets — The Fletchers — Giles — Phineas — W. Browne — Wither — Basse — The lyrical impulse — Jonson's poems — Donne The division which has been here adopted, striking a line at the death of Spenser, and starting afresh from it, enables us in most respects to make cleaner work than if the death of Gloriana had been taken instead of that of Colin. We have behind us, and still freshly behind us, the remarkable school of the sonneteers — occasionally over- valued, but more often and more likely to be underestimated — the quaint batch of early satirists, a group artificial and transitory ; and the beginnings of the historical style of poetry. We have befo»e us three well-marked schools : those of Spenser, Jonson, and Donne ; in two cases with the heads of them living and exercising personal influence, in the third with the leader dead but none the less living in his work. We have, however, two remarkable writers in the strictly poetical way to deal with — one of them hardly a dramatist (so far as extant work goes) or prose-writer, though a very voluminous poet ; the other the author both of prose and of plays, but a poet chiefly — who began to write some decade before Spenser's death. Of these, one lived till six years before the accession of Charles I., the other till six years after it. Both were sonneteers ; both were historical poets ; but both, with quite admirable touches of poetic genius now and then, and an almost too plentiful vein, lacked at once the initiative and the perfecting wit of Spenser. These were Michael Drayton and Samuel Daniel. All former accounts of Drayton's life have been antiquated by Mr. Oliver Elton's capital monograph for the Spenser Society,^ yet 1 Privately printed. There is no complete edition of Drayton, but Chalmers has nearly the whole. CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 351 even now it cannot be said that we know very much about him. He came, like Shakespeare, from Warwickshire, and if not of gentle birth himself, was from the first attached in the honour- able fashion of service to gentle houses, and seems to "y'°"- have had some employment at court. His life nearly covered the full seventy years, for he was born about 1563 and died in 163 1. He seems to have had no permanent connection with the stage,i but he fell early into the custom of sonneteering, his Idea (1594) being very probably addressed to the daughter of the house which protected him. The notices that we have give the notion of a man of masterful and not very obliging temper, who perhaps did not reach the rank or position which he thought his due, and was unwilling to be hail-fellow-well-met with mere pot-companions. Yet he seems to have been widely known, and to have excited, if no vehement friend- ships, yet no sharp dislike. His poetical production is extremely voluminous ; in fact, it is probably the largest that we have from any non-dramatic poet of real merit during the period. Its largest and most famous single item, the Polyolbion (1613-22) was not early — it could, in- deed, hardly be so, for the idea of compiling a poetical pohoWion gazetteer of the whole of England would be unlikely to occur to a very young poet, and could not possibly, in the dearth of books on the subject, have been carried out by any one who had not had many years to observe and amass materials. It has long been, and probably will ever hereafter be, little read ; but those who read it doubt whether to reprobate the choice of poetic form (the Alex- andrine with middle caesura) for such a subject, or to admire the extraordinary resolution, resource, and, on the whole, success with which the work is carried out. It leaves, moreover, a considerable balance of work to Drayton's credit, a little of which is actually familiar to the choicer memories, while much deserves to be so. The sonnets, with the famous one — Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, which does not appear in all editions, and the authorship of which has been disputed; The SJiepherd's Garland (1593)1 which was also addressed to " Idea," and in fact preceded the sonnets, as did the 1 It was, however, busy while it lasted, during, as it seems, the last five years of the Queen, when Dr.-iyton was one of Henslowe's hacks, botching up, generally in collaboration, nearly a score of plays, almost all lost. William Loiii^sword , (price ^6, of which we have his receipt to Henslowe for forty shillings' advance) is the only one mentioned as his sole work. He had a fourth share in the pseudo- Shakespearian Sir yohn Oldcastle, the only certain play-work of his which sur- vives. The attribution to him of the much better Merry Devil of Edmonton is only guess. 352 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JA^BEAN LTrERATURE bk. vi sacred poem of The Har7nony of the Chirch (1591); Mortimeriados, which he issued in two forms and under two names, once in 1596 with the title just given, and once in 1603 as The Barons^ Other poems, ^y^^^.^ . ^^^^ EnglaniVs Heroical Epistles (1597), a batch of extremely vigorous historical pieces in miniature, — all came before the period at which, strictly speaking, we begin in this chapter. But Drayton did very much else besides these and the Polyolbion, being evidently much attracted to history. He wrote two poems on Agin- court. the one a slightly heavy narrative of length in ottava rima, the other the famous ballad beginning — Fair stood the wind for France, the excellence of which in itself, and its importance as a pattern, have long been recognised. The Barons^ Wars, the expanded form of the Mortimeriad, extends to six books. The Heroical Epistles deal in couplets with passages of English story that give romantic persons such as Fair Rosamond, Matilda FitzWater, Queen Isabel and Mor- timer, Queen Margaret and Suffolk, etc. etc., together with Surrey and Geraldine (a proof how Nash's fiction had taken hold) in pairs of epistles on the Ovidian model. The Miseries of Queen Mar- garet is an independent poem in octaves, and in the same metre Drayton executed four other historical legends on Robert Curthose, the above-mentioned Matilda, Gaveston, and Thomas Cromwell. Of a different kind are Nyt/iphidia, the most elaborate fairy poem in the language ; The Mooncalf an odd political and social satire in coup- lets ; The Owl, a long bird-fable ; and The Man in the Moon, a version of the Endymion story. Besides these Drayton has left a collection of odes in divers metres and some pastorals ; The Muses'' Elysium (this appeared in 1630, just before his death; he had col- lected many of the others in a volume three years before) in ten *' Nymphals," and some odd versifyings of the stories of Noah, Moses, and David. He can be sometimes flat ; but few English poets have grappled with a larger number of important poetic subjects more vigorously and with happier touches at times. The shorter life of Samuel Daniel,^ who was born near Taunton, in 1562, was mainly passed as tutor, "servant," or friend and inmate of divers noble families, the Cliffords, Wriothesleys, and Herberts. He received education at Oxford, and was Master of the Revels and Gentleman of the Chamber to James L, as well as groom thereof to his queen. His Delia and his Sen- ecan plays have been already noticed. Besides them he wrote in 1 Poems in Chalmers; complete works in a very handsome edition by Dr. Grosart (5 vols, privately printed, 1885-96). CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 353 prose the also noticed Defence of Rhyme, and a considerable History of Efigland (161 2-17). In verse he produced the History of the Civil IVars of York and Lancaster (1595-1609), in seven books of octaves ; a Funeral Poem in couplets on the Earl of Devonshire ; a Panegyric Congratulation to James ; verse-addresses to Lord Henry Howard, to the Countess of Cumberland, to the Countess of Bedford, to his pupil Lady Anne Clifford, afterwards a countess, to Lord South- ampton ; Musophiliis, a verse-defence of learning ; some minor poems ; and The Complaint of Rosamond, in rhyme-royal, the best of his narrative work.^ Daniel is less unequal than Drayton, less given to merely prosaic statements of fact, and possessed of a command of high ethical reflection which inevitably reminds us of Wordsworth, and of hardly any one else. But he is apt to be dull ; his lyrical power, though shown to great advantage in the choruses of his plays, in his masque Hyinen''s Triumph, and elsewhere, does not often pass into vivid or inspired verse in other kinds, and he almost entirely lacks Drayton's occasional fire, as well as his almost continuous sinewiness — the faculty which enables the author of the Polyolbion to grapple with and give a fair account of almost any subject. Daniel's meditativeness is apt to pass into languor, and except when he trans- ports us, which is not very often, he is apt to send us to sleep. An almost exact contemporary of both Drayton and Daniel in point of birth, and of one of them in death-date, was Joshua Sylvester'^ (1563-1618). Sylvester, though not exactly a successful man (he seems to have been engaged in business, and died secretary of a Company of Merchants at iMiddleburgh, in -^y^*^^"- Holland) was very popular in his own day. In the next generation or a little later he became a byword for " conceit " and extrava- gance, and later again was totally forgotten. It is improbable that he will ever reacquire any considerable number of readers, for his genius was in no sense original ; he had neither the sententious weight and occasional grace of expression of Daniel, nor the vigour and frequent force of Drayton ; and his chief work, a version of the Divine Semaiiie of the great French Huguenot poet, Du Bartas, was un- luckily not suited to correct eccentricities of taste and extravagance of diction. Besides this mighty task, which extends to some thirty thousand verses in couplets, he translated other pieces from the same and other writers in F" reach and Latin, and has left many thousand lines of more profuse and original work, usually in couplets or quatrains, but sometimes in lyrical metres. Of these last Sylvester has no effective control; he has neither "cry" nor song in him. 1 He collected his poems repeatedly in his lifetime, and in 1623 the wiiolc appeared. * Ed. Gros;irt, 2 vols, privately printed, i88o. 2A 354 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi But he is not destitute of a certain kind of poetical or at least verse rhetoric, which, if it had been accompanied by a somewhat greater critical sense, might have ranked him higher among poets than he now stands. Such eminent oddities as the much-ridiculed one about snow " periwigging the woods " are not so fatal as the flatness which too often surrounds them. A very much better poet than Sylvester was Sir John Davies, ^ whose business as a lawyer caused him to abandon poetry in James's reign, but whose work, though all of it probably composed under, and some of it actually addressed to, Elizabeth, is of the johnDavies seventeenth rather than the sixteenth century in tone. Davies was of a good family in Wiltshire, and was born about 1560, went first to Oxford and then to the Temple. He lived for some considerable time in his University, and seems to have written most of his poems there. But he entered Parliament in the last years of Elizabeth, was much favoured by James, and became Attorney-General in Ireland, writing during his long residence there one of the most valuable books of the time on the country. Then he returned home, practised at the Bar, and did a good deal of work on the Bench, though he was never regularly made a judge, and died in 1626. We have from him in the way of verse Nosce Teipsum (1599), a poem on the Immortality of the Soul, in quatrains, which connects itself backwards with much of the poetry of Spenser, and forwards with the philosophic verse of More and Beaumont ; a collection of acrostics in honour of Elizabeth, entitled Astrcea (1599) ; and a poem of Dancing called Orchestra (1596). All three may, from their general description, sound uninteresting ; all three, in fact, show both the extraordinarily diffused poetic power of the time and the large share of it which had fallen to this author. Nosce Teipsum is full of passages finely thought and expressed in a stately music ; the hymns of Astrcsa, the initials of each making '' Elizabetha Regina," and arranged in five-five-six lined stanzas of octosyllables, full or catalectic rhymed, aabab, aabab, aabaab, have a grace which is beyond artifice, and manage their frequent double rhymes with singular skill. And lastly Orchestra, which is a whimsical praise of ordered movement of all kinds, with examples from history, cosmogony, anatomy, and everything else, is one of the crowning instances of Elizabethan power, by dint of sheer poetry, to transform fantastic conceit into matter of real value. Indeed, little known as Davies is, except to students, he is one of the most useful poets in English to show how very little the subject has to do with poetry. 1 Poems in Chalmers ; with additions in Grosart, 3 vols. Capell's remarkable Prolusions (1760), the first attempt to edit old English poetry critically in the eighteenth century, contains Nosce Teipsum. CHAP, in THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 355 Another Sir John, Beaumont/ the elder brother of Fletcher's partner, died not long after Davies, but was a much younger man, as he was born in 1582. He was, like his brother, a 1 r 1 T /- /- Minor poets. member of Broadgates Hall and of the Inns of Court, but seems to have lived chiefly at home in Leicestershire. His title of baronet was given to him by Charles I . only two years before his death in 1628. His principal work. The Crown of Thortis, a sacred piece well spoken of by contemporaries, seems to be strangely lost ; his actual remains consist of Bosworth Field, a history poem, in couplets, not of the first merit, some translations from the Latin, and a few smaller poems on which his fame ought to be allowed to rest. They are mainly of a sacred character, with some topographical pieces, complimentary addresses, and the like. We can but name here for the second time the voluminous pam- phleteer in verse as well as in prose, Nicholas Breton^; for the first the writing-master John Davies of Hereford,^ who sometimes has wit ; Samuel Rowlands.-* who very seldom has any ; and the so-called "Water Poet," John Taylor,^ 1580-1659, a waterman, publican, and pedestrian, who composed a vast quantity of doggerel, became in his own time and since a " curiosity of literature," and has had the very undeserved honour, denied to better men, of full reprint in our own times. Superior to Taylor by far in birth, education, and talents, yet, with one single exception in the whole of his voluminous work, Hke him merely a curiosity of literature, is Richard Braithwaite, who has shared the partiality of antiquarian students for the miscellanists of this age.^ He was a Westmoreland man, born near Kendal about 1588, and seems to have died quite late in the latter half of the century (1665? 1677?) at his wife's house of Catterick, near the Yorkshire Richmond. He was a good Cavalier. In Braithwaite's voluminous work, which, if completely edited, would probably extend beyond Taylor's or even Breton's, there is no sense of criticism. The rare good, the frequent bad, and the usual indifferent, jostle each other without any apparent discrimination on the part of their author. He, like others of his time, was a member of both Universities, beginning at Oriel and moving thence to Cambridge. But he seems to have passed most of his life in his own north country. His journeys 1 In Chalmers. 2 Ed. Grosart. 8 Ibid. < Partially printed for the Percy Society, more fully for the Hunterian Club. 6 By the Spenser Society. 8 As examples (they are not the only ones) of this may be mentioned the edition of Harnahec's Jounia/, given by Haslcwood in 1820, and reissued by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in 1876, with a very elaborate memoir and bibliography; and that of the Utrappado for the Devil, and other poems by the Rev. J. W. Ebsworth, in 1878. 356 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi thither from sojourns in London form the subject of the odd and (from Southey downwards to all good persons) delightful Barnaba Jtinerarhitn or Barnabee's Journal, in bilingual doggerel, Latin and Eno-lish, arranged in six-lined stanzas of the trochaic rhythm, which revive the true doggerel spirit of Skelton with a really marvellous felicity. The morals are rather doggerel, too, but they can be taken dramatically. Chapman's work, as a poet and translator, seems to belong chiefly to the middle period of his life. He began to publish his Homer (seven books of the Iliad) in 1598, and issued the Odyssey in 1 61 6. Before the first date he had published his earliest poems, the Shadow of Night, Ovid^s Banquet of Sense, and the continuation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, while the rest of them were scattered over his last thirty years. The original poems of Chapman — the two first above mentioned, the Tears of Peace addressed to Prince Henry, An Epicede on the death of that Prince, Andromeda Liberata (an either very awkward or very shameless adjustment of the story to the divorce Chapman. ^^ Frances Howard, the murderess of Overbury, from Essex, and her marriage to Somerset), Eugenia (an epicede on Lord Russell), and some others — are by common consent among the obscurest in English. His metre is by no means so harsh as that of some of his contemporaries ; but his phrase is often extremely rugged, and his expression, especially in the Shadow of Night and Andromeda, is twisted, carried on, reinvolved, and subjected to every kind of unnatural manipulation, so that the sense is never easy to follow without extreme and constant effort, and sometimes escapes even this. Beauties are by no means lacking — on the contrary, it vi'ould not be easy to open a page of Chapman in search of a motto without finding some striking, though quaintly-put, conceit, or even some distinctly poetical expression. But lucid and finished combina- tion of thought and expression within reasonable limits is almost everywhere to seek. In his translations, on the contrary, these objections hardly apply at all. Besides the Iliad, and Odyssey, he did the minor works attributed to Homer, Hesiod, and some Juvenal. But these latter pieces are not equal to the Odyssey ; and the Odyssey, which is in couplets, is not nearly equal to the Iliad, done in a splendid swinging fourteener, better able than any other English metre to cope with the body as well as with the rhythm of the Greek Hexameter, and managed with extraordinary skill and success by the writer. For nearly a century it has been usual to quote Keats's sonnet as a sponsor for Chapman. The connection is interesting, but Chapman does not in the least require it. His translation remains, in the first CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 357 place, the only really good one of Homer into English verse ; in the second place, the best translation into English verse of any classic, ancient or modern, except FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam. This position would by some be challenged for the work of Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso, whose birth-year is unknown, but who died in 1635. He" was an offshoot of the great Yorkshire family of his name, and spent his whole life in that county, troubled by witchcraft (see Scott's Demotiology), on which he wrote a Discourse (1621) deserving to be associated with the great demonological work of the period, Reginald Scot's Dis- covery, though on the other side. His version of the Jerusalem appeared in 1600. It was, and long continued to be, extremely popular, receiving praise in the most diverse quarters from Waller to Collins, and while, from its subject and style, it was dear to students of romance, being credited with smoother versification than the Augustan ages would allow to most work of the "last age." It is a book 1 still to be read with pleasure, but, unless its praises be taken warily, with a little disappointment. Its style is rather flaccid; the very stamp of line which commended it to Waller impresses a touch of prose ; and Fairfax seldom has either the mazy beauty of Spenser's music or the panoramic power of his painting. Thomas Campion,''^ whose name not so many years ago would have conveyed to but few readers any distinct idea of poetic quality, was born at an unknown date, and though he was certainly a member both of Cambridge and the Inns of Court, frequented both in unknown times and circumstances. Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign he was a popular physician in London, and connected in friendship and enmity with divers men of letters. He was buried at St. Dunstan's, Fleet Street, on ist March 1620. He wrote, and wrote well, in Latin as well as in English, but his importance for English literature is of a double character, and the halves are curiously opposed to each other. Wc have from him, in the first place, besides some masques, certain collections of verses for music,^ which contain much of the most exquisite rhymed poetry of the time ; and, in the second place, a formal treatise * intended to show, by precept and example, that English poetry ought to be unrhymed, and arranged on ancient quantitative models. It is not fair, though it has sometimes been done, to regard Campion as an ' I use the edition of L'Esfrangc, London, 1682. 2 Complete works, ed. Biillen (London, 1889). Songs to be found in the same editor's Lyrics from P.lizabt'than Song-Books, two series (London, 1887-88), and in Mr. Arbor's luiglish Garner. '^ Hook 0/ Airs, 1601 ; Two Books of .iirs (1612?); Third and Fourth Books o/Airs (1617 ?). Observations on the .Irt of English Poesy, i6o3. 358 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi apostle of the preposterous hexameters, etc., which deluded Harvey, and all but seduced Spenser. He had seen the unsuitableness of these to English (which as he acutely observed is rebel to dactyls) ; and though he made some Sapphics, his own attempts are chiefly in very cunningly balanced iambic and trochaic unrhymed measures, some of which — such as the most often quoted, Rose-cheeked Laura, come — are at least the equals, if not the superiors, of Collins's " Ode to Even- ino-" in this unnatural kind of abstinence from the greatest charm of English verse. In his '-airs," on the other hand, he allows himself the full liberty of our poetical Sion, and with the very happiest results, literally dozens of his lyrics being among the most delightful of their kind. In fact, the difficulty is to find in the Four Books of Airs anything that is bad. All these, however, with the exception of Sir John Davies, who might, with justice, be classed in tone, though not in language, with the Spenserians, lie outside the three schools which have been referred to above, and which make Jacobean poetry so extremely interesting both in itself and as a transition to Caroline. Of these we may take the Spenserian first, both as in origin the oldest and as lacking a living head and master. The class contains some outsiders, anonymous and named, who come closest to Spenser on that side at which he himself touches the luxuriant style of such pieces as Shakespeare's first poems. ,„^ " Sage and serious " as Spenser undoubtedly was, there Spenserians: is also no doubt that both his Italian originals and his minor poets. ^^^ temper inclined him to the highly coloured pictures of natural loveliness which are abundant in the Faerie Queene. One of the very best poems of this class, Britain's Ida, a piece describing the loves of Venus and Anchises (" Britain's," because the legendary Brutus was son of Aeneas), used to be printed among Spenser's own works,^ though it did not appear till long after his death (1628), and is quite destitute of the allegorical and ethical purpose which always accompanied his most luscious imaginings. It has more recently, though not on any evidence or with much probability, been handed over to a disciple of his, Phineas Fletcher, of whom more presently. But it is best to take it as the work of an uncertain, though a very ingenious and agreeable poet. The Salt>iacis and Hennapliroditus of Francis Beaumont, the dramatist, the Myrrha of Barkstead, and some other pieces belong to the same school. The general characteristics of Spenser, however, his allegorical 1 It will be found in the useful one-volume Spenser, first published by Moxon and then by Routledge ; also in the Aldine. CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 359 / fancy on the one hand, and his ethical-pastoral tendencies on the other, with a certain copious and fluent diction which he introduced into poetry, are best represented by a group of Jacobean poets, two of them Cambridge men, two of tlie older university, who may be mentioned in • the order in whicli they diverge from their pattern, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, William Browne of Tavistock, and George Wither. The two first ^ belonged to the family already noticed, and were sons of the author of Licia. Giles, who, though he is said to have been slightly the younger, died first, was first known as a poet, and is usually mentioned before his brother, was probably ^^^ Fletchers born about 1585-88. But it is not certain that he was not older than Phineas, and even probable that he was, since he produced a poem on Elizabeth's death as early as 1603 at Cambridge, where he was a member of Trinity College. He took orders, and died vicar of Alderton, in Suffolk, in 1623. Phineas, who was educated at Eton, and proceeded thence to King's College, Cambridge, is said to have been born in 1582. He followed his brother's and father's profession, and was for very many years parson of Hilgay, in Suffolk, where he died at an uncertain date, perhaps not much before the Restoration. Giles takes his place in English poetry in virtue of a poem, not of the longest, entitled Christs Victory and Triuwp/i, in four books and some 250 stanzas of curious construction, and obviously modelled on the Faerie Qtteene. Fletcher has kept the Alexandrine termination, but left out one of the lines, so that the result is an octave of seven decasyllabics, and an Alexandrine rhymed ababbccc. The device is not in itself very happy, and in particular the triplet at the end comes awkwardly. But Giles has written it with such a glow and fire of continuous inspiration, with such splendour of language and imagery, and occasionally (indeed very frequently) with single lines and passages of such force and beauty, that few poems of the kind by any but the very greatest masters can be read with equal pleasure. The picture and speech of Justice in the first canto with the contrasted portrait of Mercy ; the description, in the warmest Spenserian style, and with a really exquisite insertion of oct()syllal)lcs ("Love is the blossom where there blows"), of the temjitress Pangloretta in the second; the overture of tlie third, which deals with the Crucifixion; and almost the whole of the fourth, with its glowing descant on Paradise, rank among the triumphs of the ornate and fanciful kind of poetry in English. The Pre-Raphaelite effect of the poem is striking. It constantly reminds us, with allowance for 1 Poems of both in Chalmers, and privately printed by Ur. Grosart. Christ's Victory, ed. Brooke, London, 11. d. 36o LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. VI the difference of centuries, of the work of the Rossettis, brother and sister, in its combination of vivid and elaborate pictorial effect with gorgeous word-music. Nor is the thought inferior to the expression. The work of the longer-lived Phineas is very much more volumi- nous, and very much more various — qualities which perhaps inevitably comport greater inequality. It is not easy to say that this poet was actually less pervaded with poetic spirit than his brother. He was, however, certainly less well inspired in the choice of his principal subject, The Purple Island^ which is neither more nor less than an excessively elaborate allegory — unwisely magnified from one or two, not in themselves happiest, sketches of Spenser's — of the physical body of man. As a vehicle for this he arranged a still further modified stanza, which retained his brother's final triplet with its concluding Alexandrine, but cut off the last line of the quintet, so as to make a septet of quatrain-and-triplet effect with three rhymes. Individually, the stanza is even less successful than Giles's, while the poem has the additional disadvantages of a very awkward subject, and of much greater length (there are twelve cantos). The first half is mere physiology; and of course, though sometimes extremely ingenious, constantly grotesque, sometimes nearly disgusting, and deserving, at the best, the praise of an ill- judged to7ir de force. The last six cantos, which shift to the moral and intellectual qualities, are much more Spenserian and much happier. But even in the earlier part an abundance of really fine passages may be discovered, and in overtures, episodes, and other ornaments of his song, the author shows, perhaps his sense that ornaments were sorely wanted, but certainly his skill in supplying them. Besides The Purple Island, Phineas wrote a masque, Piscatory Eclogues, in which the following of Spenser blends with that of Sannazar, a curious sacred poem called TJie Apollyofiists, well known, as indeed were all the poems of both the Fletchers, to Milton, and some miscellaneous pieces of divers kinds. Quarles called him the " Spenser of his age " ; and though the compliment was rather commonplace and slightly ambiguous, there was truth in it. William Browne,^ whose literary merits have been rather variously judged, was born at Tavistock, sometime about 1591, and seems to have been of a very respectable family. He went to Exeter College, Oxford, but took no degree before passing to the Inns of Court (Clifford's Inn and the Temple) in 161 1. He was twice married, his first wife dying when he was very young, and a considerable time (some fifteen years) passing before he married the second. Before the latter date he returned to Exeter as tutor to 1 Poems not completely in Chalmers. Completely in two volumes of the " Muses Library," ed. Goodwin, London, 1894. CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 361 a young nobleman, and somewhat late took the degree of M.A. After his second marriage he lived in Surrey, where both he and his wife had relations. He was dead in November 1645, when probate was granted to his widow, who had the odd name of Timothy, short no doubt for Timothea. But some say that his age, like his youth, was passed in Devon, and he pretty certainly was buried at his birthplace. The claim which was recently made of the exquisite epitaph, " Sidney's Sister," for Browne seems without a sufficient external foundation, and is entirely refuted by internal evidence. But his reputation did not need it. His chief work is Britannia's Pastorals, a desultory book in three divisions, which appeared (its first part at least) in 1613; The Shepherd''s Pipe, a pleasing collection of eclogues ; and The Inner Temple Masque, on the story of Circe and Ulysses, which opens with some verses of quite extraordinary beaut}-, the well-known '' Steer hither, steer," and includes others not far inferior to them. Besides these, he has a fair number of miscellaneous poems, thoroughly justifying the adjective — being serious, sacred, jocular, elegiac, and almost everything. Browne's extreme variety is conditioned by a corresponding inequality, and he is undoubtedly liable to a certain fluent prettiness, which lacks dignity, and some- times approaches too near to the namby-pamby. This touch of mawkishness, as well as better things, helps to bring about the singular likeness between Browne and Keats, which has been noticed by most good critics. And among the better things must be noted a great similarity in versification, the lines, whether couplets or other, being broken up and " enjambed," after the fashion which, after nearly two centuries, Leigh Hunt revived and taught to Keats ; while the way of looking at nature, and the ornate presentation of it — a presentation less stately than that of the Fletchers, but almost equally pictorial — give another point of contact. Browne is not nearly so great or so good a poet as Keats ; he had the disadvantage of coming after, not in the full tide of, the poetic energy of his time. But he has a large share of the special charm of this Spenserian group, its combination of habitual ornateness with occasional simplicity, its beauty of image and phrase, its love of nature, if of a nature " tricked and frounced " a little, its sensuous yet in no sense impure passion, and its occasional bursts of rare and elsewhere unlieard music. The inequality, which is almost inseparable from the methods of this school of poetry, is again more perceptible in George Wither^ - Only to be found completely (if there) in the priv-ite reprints of the Spenser Society. His best things, I'liilarete, Tlie Shepherd's Huntings etc., are in Mr. Arber's English Garner. Not much of his Hymns of the Church and Hallelujah, reprinted by Mr. 1£. Farr in the " [library of Old Authors" (London, 1856 and 1857)1 is of his best ; and most of his later verse and prose is rubbish. 362 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi than in Browne ; while unfortunately Wither, unhke Browne, continued to write verse for many years after the faculty of writing had left him. He was born near Alresford, in Hampshire, in the year 1588, and was educated (but did not take his degree) at Magdalen College, Oxford. Then he entered an Inn of Court, and hung about London. His first book, the satirical Abuses Stript and IVhipt (161 3) procured him, nobody has ever discovered why, imprisonment in the Marshalsea. His famous " Shall I, wasting in despair" is said to date from this sojourn, and from the next decade till 1623 come all, or almost all, his really good poems — The Shepherd's Hunting (1615), Fidelia (1615), Motto (1618), Philarete (1622), and the Hymns and Songs of the Chu7'ch. At the time of the publication of the Hymns he was exactly thirty-five. He lived to be nearly eighty, dying in 1667; and he constantly tried to " recapture his first, fine, careless rapture," but entirely failed except perhaps in some of the passages of his Hallelujah (1641). As his writing became worse and worse, and as in his later life, and during the parliamentary troubles, he became a Roundhead, his name (generally spelt Withers) was used as a sort of byword of contempt by the partisans of monarchy after the Restoration, from Dryden downwards, and the contempt was echoed from generation to generation afterwards by persons who probably had never read a line of his. Only when the work of the early seventeenth century was unearthed for serious reading at the end of the last and the beginning of this, was it dis- covered what an exquisite poet had been for some hundred and fifty years classed with Bavius and Codrus. Yet it must be admitted that in his very best work, which is to be found in Philarete^ though Fidelia and The Shepherd''s Hunting run this close, he is unequal. The easy, fluent, Keatsian note of verse and of nature-painting which is observable in Browne is even better found in him ; indeed, if genuine pastoral sweetness — the sense of the country and of country joys — is anywhere in English poetry, it is in Wither, who has much besides. But the very word fluency suggests the dangers which this verse coasts, and into which it sometimes falls. An addition to the poets of this school was made a few years ago by the printing for the first time of the works of William Basse,i who had been previously known, if at all, by some often-quoted lines about Shakespeare and Beaumont. Basse seems to have lived almost all his life in Oxfordshire as an honourable dependant of the families of Wenman of Thame and Norreys of Rycote. He may have been, though we do not know that he was, a member of the University, as well as an inhabitant of the 1 Ed. R. W. Bond, London, 1893. CHAP, m THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 363 shire. His initials, "W. B.," have led to some confusion with Browne, whose friend he was, to whose Pastorals he wrote commendatory verses, and whom he a good deal resembles in his own poems of the same kind, his Urania, his Polyhymnia (only surviving in fragments), and other pieces. But he is only a curiosity, and a very weak poet, though it may be a little stronger than any other outsider of the Browne-Wither group, Christopher Brooke, whose poems have also been printed. The Spenserians, however, though their work was to be continued even later in the great, or at least large, philosophical poems of More and Joseph Beaumont, and though we shall find a more profane echo of them in the most interesting Pharonnida of Chamber- layne, were in fact behind their time, and did not represent impul"e.^ anything like its characteristic tastes and impulses. These were to be found in two schools, or perhaps in one with two very different heads, who were Ben Jonson and John Donne. Both these men (we speak in this place, of course, of Jonson's non-dramatic work only) had an essentially lyric genius. It may seem strange that this should have co-existed with the rhetorical and declamatory tendencies of Jonson, and his bent to rough horseplay ; with the satiric tastes, in singularly rough verse, of Donne, and his gift of grave, stately, and involved prose-writing. But we have already seen that the whole inspiration of the Elizabethan age proper tended towards the lyrical — especially if sonnets be included in lyric. And as the Euphuist tendency in phrasing, and the ever-growing thought- fulness, inclining to melancholy in cast, of the later Elizabethan and Jacobean time disposed men ever more and more to conceit, lyric was also more and more the pet form in which they clothed their thoughts. Although the criticism of the time was not inclined o o openly to admit it, men of sense must have been more or less dimly conscious that a conceit in twelve cantos like The Purple Island, even in several pages of enigmatic couplets like The Shadow of Night, was somehow overparted. In a few stanzas of exquisitely tuned lyrical verse it to this day wins favour from all but the sternest judges ; it could not then fail to delight even the the sternest. Ben Jonson's strictly poetical production was continued over the greater part of his literary life, and perhaps most of it dates from the time when he ruled as dictator over his band of "sons," the poets of iiis own latest day and the next age. He attempted, out of drama, nothing large ; his plays at this time and his poem".^ masques at that proI)al)ly sufficed him, and, as has been pointed out in the last chapter, the masques, with The Sad Shepherd, are treasure-houses of ])oetry — dramatic only in a remote and unconnected fasliion, and constantly delightful. But his actual poems are of sufficiently various kind. Few good words have been bestowed upon, 364 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi and perhaps even fewer are deserved by, his epigrams, in which unkickily lie set a fashion followed by others, especially Herrick, who did worse than their master. Martial's foulness- without his wit, and too often without the least share of his "concinnity" of style ; the extravagant tone and temper of a section of the playwrights and satirists of the last days of Elizabeth ; and worst of all, an affected surliness and rude hectoring dogmatism which it pleased Jonson to assume, and for which posterity has too often justly punished him by taking it as genuine — these are the chief character- istics of the epigrams. The bad habit of ticket names — Lord Ignorant, Sir Voluptuous Beast, Doctor Empiric — which disfigures the plays, is even more obvious here. If we read any with satisfaction, it is those in which the author takes a wholly different tone, as in the excellent one to " Camden, most reverend head," in the charming epitaph on his first daughter, and the exquisite flattery of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, in the dirges on Salathiel Pavy and Elizabeth L. H. And these excepted poems at once show us in Jonson certain characteristics, which are much more generally noticeable in the far finer and more equal collections called The Forest and Underwoods. The piece with which TJie Forest opens ^ is perhaps as indicative as any other of the manner and the example which Jonson was to set to his contemporaries and followers. For centuries English had been striving, often blindly, to achieve the peculiar clearness, proportion, completeness of expression which are characteristic of the two classical languages. It had succeeded in other things as great as this, perhaps greater, but in this it had not succeeded. Now it did succeed. The thought in the verses quoted is only a conceit, and though a perennially natural one, yet for that reason not even new. But it is expressed perfectly, neither with the redundant ornament and imagery of the school we have just left, nor with the obscure, though precious flickers, the carbuncle-glimmer in darkness, of that to which we shall shortly come. The wording and phrasing are classical, rather of the late than of the early classics perhaps, but still classical, with nothing extravagant in their richness, nothing starched or prim in their grace. The quality of grace has often been denied to Jonson, but of a surety wrongly. The pieces referred to above in the epigrams, this, the " Ceha" songs, including the famous paraphrase from Philostratus, " Drink to me only," the magnificent epode " Not to know vice at all and keep true state," very much of the Charis collection, written when the poet was fully fifty, the song " Oh do not wanton with those eyes," the elegy in the In Aleinoriam stanza, and many others, dis- 1 Entitled " Why I write not of Love," and beginning " Some act of Love bound to rehearse." CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 365 play grace in the very strictest sense, and the list might be largely extended. Jonson is by no means the only poet who has thus united masculine and feminine characteristics, — indeed, the union is rather the rule than the exception in poetry, — but he is certainly an instance of it. The influence of John Donne ^ was even more potent, though it is extremely difficult to understand the precise manner in which it was exercised. This very great and very puzzling poet was born in London about the year 1573. and was connected on his mother's side with the Heywoods and Sir Thomas More. He appears to have been a member of both Universities and of Lincoln's Inn. It is not certain whether he was actually a Roman Catholic at anytime, but his family were of that faith. He travelled and served abroad, and perhaps spent his fortune in so doing. On returning to England he became a member of the household of the Chancellor, Sir Thomas Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, and having made a clandestine marriage with Anne More, a relation of the family, was sent to the Tower, but soon enlarged. He took up his abode with more than one other gentleman, and did some diplo- matic work. At last, in 161 5, when he must have been over forty, he took orders at the King's suggestion, but at first without any very lucrative result. His wife died in 161 7. After some more diplo- matic work, he was made Dean of St. Paul's in 162 1, and died ten years later in 1631. It seems on the whole improbable that any part of Donne's poems, * except a very small one (the Atiatoi/iy of the IVorld, a poem on Prince Henry, etc.), was ever printed before his death, and the earliest known edition of the larger part of them dates from 1633. On the other hand, it is perfectly certain that some of them must have been written nearly forty years earlier, and it is clear that many, if not most, were known to men of letters who cared about poetry during the whole of the last half of Donne's life and more. There is even probability, though not certainty, in the supposition that a fling of Drayton's (in a poem where he mentions almost every prominent poet among his contemporaries except Donne) at poems " which by transcription daintily must go Through private chambers," refers to Donne. At any rate, it is beyond controversy, from references in Jonson's Conversations, and from the poems written by Carew and others on Donne's death, as well as from internal evidence, that he was at least on a level with Spenser and Jonson himself as a master of Jacobean poetry, while in some ways his manner and matter 1 Poems in Chalmers, vol. v.; ed. Grosart, 2 vols, privately printed, 1873; ed. Chambers, 2 vols. London, 1896. 2 An alleged early edition of the S(ifire.<: cannot be traced. 366 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi are even more characteristic of that poetry and of its Caroline successors. The Spenserians had made conceit in a manner their own ; but as they had produced no poet who was at all equal in intellectual power to their master, they had mostly treated it from the outside, fantastically, though sometimes very happily, describing or dressing up no matter what subjects in a brocaded garb of gorgeous and (when they could manage it) harmonious phraseology. Jonson was setting beside this loose, florid romanticism a severer ideal of classical grace, and was perfecting lyric phrase ; but Jonson's imagination rarely soared into strange or distant regions, and in particular his love-poems, though sometimes warm, are never metaphysically passionate. Donne, on the other hand, seems to have been born to combine all elements of the Renaissance spirit — the haunting meditation on death, the passionate attention to love, the blend of classical and romantic form. And he added a peculiar mystical charm, the result of the taste for conceit spiritualised, refined, and made to transcend. This it is which we observe eminently in his later prose contemporary. Sir Thomas Browne, and which communicates their distinguishing peculiarity, though not by any means always their distinguishing charm, to his sons, the so-called metaphysical poets, many indeed of whom owe something of a divided allegiance to Jonson and himself, but who are generally nearer to him in spirit, to Jonson in form. The form of Donne is indeed the most puzzling thing about him. Some of its peculiarities are beyond all doubt due to the mere fact that he never printed most of his poems, and that of hardly any can we be sure that we have a definitive edition from his own hand. More perliaps should be charged to the certain fact that in his later life he repented much of the matter of his earlier poems, and the probability that he abstained with deliberation from publishing them. But this will not account for the whole phenomenon ; and the rough- ness was undoubtedly to some extent deliberate. That Donne had any intention of attempting a new prosody there is not the least reason for believing. In his Satires, where the roughness is most perceptible, there can be no doubt that the imitation of Persius, which is so noticeable in all the Elizabethan and Jacobean satirists, accounts for a good deal. In his other poems, when they leave the satire, the mere metre is as a rule correct enough. It is only that the intensity and fulness of the thought does not lend itself to actually smooth expression, without more labour than the writer seems to have cared to expend upon it. This intensity and this fulness appear with no very great, though with some, difference of degree in the various divisions of Donne's work — the Songs and Sonnets, the Elegies, the Epithalamia, the CHAP. Ill THE SCHOOLS OF JACOBEAN POETRY 367 Divine Poems, the Verse Letters, the Epicedes and Obsequies, the Progress of the Soul, the Anatomy of the World, and the Satires. The last named are, in consequence of Pope's rather blundering patronage, the best known, but they are the least interesting part of Donne's work, displaying the conventionality and exaggerated in- dignation of the whole class to which they belong. The Elegies are most remarkable for the undisciplined exuberance of feeling to which Donne, outspoken as were many of the writers of his day, gave more unhesitating voice than almost any of them. The Verse Letters are full of autobiographic interest, and in some of the more elaborate pieces, the " Storm " and " Calm," which rejoiced Ben Jonson, very remarkable exercises in elaboration. The Epicedes, Obsequies, etc., are notable examples of the special ability of the time in these things. The Progress of the Soul, which seems early, is a singular poem, a cross between The Purple Island and The Shadow of Night, deeply shot with Donne's own peculiarities, but not exhibiting them in the most amiable and profitable form. We are thus left with the Songs and Sonnets, and the Anatomy of the World, which, though the latter, in its two ''anniversaries," is certainly much later than most of the former, and serves to some extent as a pendant and palinode, yet. complete each other in the most remarkable fashion. The Songs' exhibit Donne's quintessenced, melancholy, passionate imagination as applied, chiefly in youth, to Love; the Anniversaries, the same imagination as applied later to Death, the ostensible text being the untimely death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, but the real subject being the riddle of the painful earth as embodied in the death of the body. The Songs are, of course, in different lyrical forms, and the Anniversaries are in couplets. But both agree in the unique clangour of their poetic sound, and in the extraordinary character of the thoughts which find utterance in verse, now exquisitely melodious, now complicated and contorted almost beyond ready comprehension in rhyme or sense, but never really harsh, and always possessing, in actual presence or near suggestion, a poetical quality which no English poet has ever surpassed. It is from these poems that the famous epithet " metaphysical " (which Jonson not too happily, and with a great confusion between Donne and Cowley, applied to the whole school) is derived ; and as applied to Donne it is not in- appropriate. For, behind every image, every ostensible thought of his, there are vistas and backgrounds of otlier thoughts dimly vanish- ing, with glimmers in them here and there, into the depths of the final enigmas of life and soul. Passion and meditation, tlie two avenues into this region of doubt and dread, are tried by Donne in the two sections respectively, and of each he has the key. Nor, as he walks in them with eager or solemn tread, are light and music 568 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi wanting, the light the most unearthly that ever played round a poet's head, the music not the least heavenly that he ever cauglit and transmitted to his readers. If this language seem more highflown than is generally used in this book or than is appropriate to it, the e.xcuse must be that every reader of Donne is either an adept or an outsider born, and that it is impossible for the former to speak in words understanded of the latter. CHAPTER IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR Bacon— His life — His writings — His style — His use of figures — His rhetorical quality — Jonson's prose — The Discoveries — Their essay-nature — Protean appearances of essay — Overbiiry's Characters — The Character generally — Burton — The Anatomy — His "melancholy" — His style — Selden — The Authorised Version — Minors The central figure in prose of the entire Jacobean period is un- doubtedly Francis Bacon. i He holds this position a little in spite of himself; for it was his own opinion, apparently deliberate and persistent, that English was an untrustworthy make- shift, likely to play tricks to any book written in it, and that the only secure medium for posterity was Latin. And he also holds it in spite of the fact that he had more than reached middle life at the date of the King's accession, and that his one contribution of unquestioned importance to English literature, as distinguished from English science and philosophy, was first published long before that time. For the really characteristic editions of the Essays — those which are not shorthand bundles of aphorisms, but works of prose art — date much later, and the whole complexion of Bacon's mind and of his matured style has the cast of Jacobean thought and manner. He was born in January 1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper under Elizabeth, and of Anne Cooke, whose sister married Lord Burleigh. His elder brother, Anthony, a man of weak health, who died in middle life, having talents and „. ,.. , , , , 1-11 His life. knowing Montaigne, has been thought not unlikely to have suggested the Essay to his junior. Francis was sent first, at the age of twelve, to Trinity College, Cambridge, then, when he was 1 The editions of Bacon, both complete and partial, are extremely numerous, those of the Essays, the work which here chiefly concerns us, especially so. Of thf-se latter may he singled out the " Harmony " of the various issues by Mr. Arber in his Reprints, and the excellent annotated library edition by the late Rev. S. H. Reynolds (Oxford, 1890). 2B 369 370 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi fifteen, to Gray's Inn, and spent three years, till 1579, at Paris in the suite of Sir Amyas Paulet. He was called to the Bar in 1582, and became a bencher of his Inn in 1586. Having his fortune to make, he had already entered Parliament as member for Melcombe Regis in 1584, sitting afterwards for Taunton and Middlesex. He had early been rather a favourite with the Queen, but he probably did not ingratiate himself further with her by elaborating arguments for toleration and comprehension in ecclesiastical matters, and in 1593 he actually took the Opposition side in the House. He had become the friend of Essex, but the favourite, either owing to Bacon's (want of courtiership or to secret opposition from Burleigh, who seems (or at least was thought by his nephew) to have been jealous of him, could not do much, though he gave Bacon a very valuable present of land. After Essex's disgrace, Bacon acted as counsel against him in each of the trials, for misconduct in Ireland and for rebellion. But this baseness, which, after much dust of argument, is now practically admitted, did him very little good, and it was not ;ill after the accession of James that he received any solid proofs of ■oyal favour. He was knighted, received a small pension, and in 1607 became Solicitor-General. This post he held six years, and became Attorney-General in 1613, a privy councillor some years later, and in 161 7 Lord Keeper. Next year (all these latter preferments came to him from the favour of Buckingham) he obtained the still higher dignity of Chancellor and a peerage as Baron Verulam. He was afterwards created Viscount St. Albans, but was never, as he was once commonly, and still is sometimes, called, "Lord Bacon." He held the Chancellorship for more than three years, and then fell a victim to the jealousy of the Commons, the enmity of Sir Edward Coke, the desertion of Buckingham, and, it must be added, his own malpractices. He was accused, and practically pleaded guilty to the charge, of taking gifts from suitors, or at least allowing his servants to take them, and the Peers sentenced him to a fine of ^40,000, im- prisonment, and exile from court. The fine was remitted, and he was not long kept in prison, but his banishment was maintained, and he lived thenceforward chiefly at his seat of Gorhambury. He caught cold in March 1626 and died at Lord Arundel's house near High- gate. His character does not much concern us, but there is little doubt that, though personally good-natured, he had in a rather eminent degree all the bad qualities of Renaissance politicians except de- bauchery, and perhaps vindictiveness. He was profuse and greedy, ostentatious and mean, a born intriguer and tuft-hunter, and though it is probably a mistake to represent him as completely sympathising with the Machiavelian doctrine of ihe right of the brave, bold, and .cunning man to attain his ends by any means, he had much too CHAP. IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 371 strong a tinge of this doctrine. Nor can it be said that, except scientific enthusiasm and a certain patriotism, he displays many of the nobler sentiments. The other vexed question, of the precise nature and amount of his philosophical acquirements, concerns us, if possible, even less, and we have to deal with him only as a great English prose-writer. In this capacity he published, in 1597, his first small batch of very succinct Essays (a work increased by suc- cessive instalments to fifty-eight of a much more elaborate character in 1625); the Advancement of Learning in 1605; and in the last years of his life, after his disgrace, the History of Henry F//., The New Atlantis, and some Apophthegms, besides some other chiefly minor works. His philosophical and scientific treatises were almost all written in Latin, in which language he even published an en- larged edition of the Advancement under the title of De Augmentis Scientiarnm. It is at once true of Bacon that no man has a more distinct style than he has, and that no man's style is more characteristic of its age than his. It has, indeed, been attempted to show that he had more than one style ; but this does not come to much more than saying that' he wrote on a considerable number of different subjects, and that, like a reasonable man, he varied his expression to suit them. Always when he is most himself — in the Essays as well as in the Advancement of Learning, in the Henry V/I. as well as in any other English work — we come sooner or later on certain manners which are almost unmistakable, and which, though in part possessed in common with other men of the time, are in part quite idiosyncratic. All Jacobean authors, and Bacon among them, interlard their English with scraps of Latin, and con- stantly endeavour to play in their English context on the Latin uses of words. All aim first of all at what is called pregnancy, and attain that pregnancy by a free indulgence in conceit. Few, despite the stateliness which they aff"ect, have any objection to those "jests and clinches" which even Jonson seems to have tliought of as interfering with the "noble censoriousncss " of Bacon himself. In all a certain de.sultoriness of detail, illustration, and the like — as if the writer had so full a mind and commonplace-book that he could not help empty- ing botli almost at random — is combined with a pretty close faculty of argument, derived from the still prevailing familiarity with scholastic logic. But Bacon, in addition to these characteristics, which he shares with others, has plenty of liis own. His sentences, indeed, do not attain to that extraordinary music wliich is seen in some of Brooke and Donne, which is not wanting in Burton, which is the glory of 1 372 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi Sir Thomas Browne, the saving grace of Milton's best prose, and the almost over-lavished and sometimes frittered away charm of Jeremy Taylor. He had begun, as we see in the earliest form of the Essays, with a very curt, stenographic, sharply antithetic form ; and though he suppled and relaxed this afterwards, he never quite attained the full, languorous grace of Donne or Browne. But he became gorgeous enough later, the glitter of his antithesis being saved from any tinsel or "snip-snap" effect by the fulness of his thought, and his main purport being by degrees set off with elaborate paraphernalia of ornament and imagery. In the successive versions of the Essays we see the almost skeleton forms of the earliest filling out, taking on trappings, acquiring flesh and colour and complexion in the later, while in some of the latest, the well-known ones on Building and on Gardens especially, the singular interest in all sorts of minute material facts which distinguishes him comes in with a curiously happy effect. Both the pieces just mentioned are much more like description of scenery in the most elaborate romance than like ideal suggestions for practical carrying out, drawn up by a grave lawyer, statesman, and philosopher. No point in Bacon's literary manner is more characteristic, both of his age and of himself, than his tendency to figure. Such a sentence as this in the Advancemetii, "Nay, further, in general and in sum, certain it is that Veritas and Bo nit as differ but as figure." the sea! and the print ; for truth points goodness ; and they be but the clouds of error which descend in the storms of passions and perturbations," — would show itself to any person of experience as almost certainly written between 1580 and 1660 in the first place, while in the second it would at least suggest itself to such a person as being most probably Bacon's. Although all the world in his day was searching for tropes and comparisons and conceits, the minds of few were so fertile as his ; and it is not un- worthy notice that even the apparently bold, even startling, change of metaphor from the "seal" to the "cloud" is in reality a much more legitimate change than it seems. It will stand to reason that such a style is displayed to the best possible advantage by bold and richly-coloured surveys of science in general, like the Advancement, or by handlings of special points, „. ^ . , like the Essays. Whether Bacon was really <^ deep," His rhetorical vu • i i , • i , , , , quality. either m knowledge or m thought, has been disputed; but he was certainly one of the greatest rhetoricians, in the full and varied sense of rhetoric, that ever lived. His kno w- j£dg£^eep _or not, was-Jieii--SLide, ever ready to his hand for pur- poses more often perhaps of djvagat]mi than of penetration. His command of phrase was extraordinary.^ No one knows better than CHAP. IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 373 he either how to leave a single word to produce all its effect by using it in some slightly uncommon sense, and setting the wits at work to discern and adjust this ; or how to unfold all manner of applications and connotations, to open all inlets of side-view and perspective. That he dazzles, amuses, half-delusively suggests, stim- ulates, provokes, lures on, much more than he proves, edifies, instructs, satisfies, is indeed perfectly true. But the one class of per- formances is at least as suitable for literary exhibition as the other, and Bacon goes through the exhibition with a gusto and an effect which can hardly be too much admired. Fertile in debate as almost all his qualities have proved, there is at least one of them about which there can be little difference of opinion, and that is his in- tense literacy facul ty. It was entirely devoted to and displayed in prose — Hewrote very Httle verse, and that little is nothing out of the way. ^ But in prose rhetori c — in the us P) tl-i^t- ig tn f^^y^ of Ian- . guage to dazzle and persuade, not to con vmcc; — he has few rivals an d no supenors^In Khglisli. His matter is som etimes n ot very great, arrd—jrhnest-ahvays seems better than it is, but this very facf is the ~ greatest glory of hi s manner. . In those characters of style which, not to the utter exclusion of chronological order, but with a certain prerogative right over it, determine the arrangement of literary history, three writers hold with Bacon in Jacobean prose the place which we have assigned to Donne, to Jonson, and to Spenser after his death in Jacobean verse. Of these Donne and Jonson again appear, a duplication of itself sufficient to prove the liigh and too long ignored position of these writers in English literature; the fourth is Robert Burton. But Donne, for sufficient reasons, will be kept to the next chapter. We shall deal with Jonson and with Burton here. The independence and the importance of Ben's position are shown, among other things, by the fact that, while in the general history of English prose he makes' a distinct advance, he appears among the writers of his own time as isolated, as, indeed, .... „, f r 1 1 Jonson's prose. almost reactionary. 1 he gorgeousness of Jacobean phrase, the involution of Jacobean thought, tlie tricks of both which al- most approach the heraldic sin of "colour upon colour," do not appear in him; he is of his time chiefly, if not only, by his learning and by the co mpression a nd_pregnancy of his styrerin which latter_ poTITTs lie" approaches and sometimes almost excels Bacon in his rt^est-serried and least ornate moments^ Unfortunately, • the amounF of^fonlTon'.^ prose that we have is by no means large, some having certainly, and much proljably, perished (with verse as well) in a fire which destroyed the contents of his study. Besides prefaces, dedica- tions, and the like, wc have only an /:;/!^//s/i Grammar^ valuable, but' 374 J-ATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi of course not for points of style, and the invaluable collection of notes, short essays, and fiensecs which, never having been published in his lifetime, goes by the alternative titles of Sylva, Expiorata, Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter — the most usual, and perhaps the best, appellation being simply l^iiumOML- These notes, 171 in number, each titled with a short Latin head- ing, and varying in length from three or four lines to the bulk of a good short essay, liiavemuch superficial and some rea2j:esem- blance to the work of Bacon, whose intimate and,_as far Vis^vertes. ^^ '^^ ""^'^^ i" ^^^ nature, admiring friend Ben was. But a minuter examination shows that, except the compressed and pregnant tendency mentioned above, there are few points of real likeness, and that Ben belongs to an entirely different school from that of the Chancellor. Tj}e_iicense of quip and jest is absfinjt ; the coruscating metaphors, more brilliant perhaps than luminous, but brilliant enough, are absent likewise ; the volleying antithesis, though present, is more heavily shotted and less often blank cartridge ; the unusual, and intentionally unusual, employment of Latin or Latinised terms is less for.jirnament and mora, for use. In short, Ben Jonson, allowing for his age and circumstances, belongs to the plainj_jiot the ornate, section of prose-writers ; he is at daggers drawn with Euphuism in the larger as well as in the smaller sense. Yet he does not revert to or imitate that kind of plainness which Ascham set in order, and which Hooker, by sheer genius for proportion and harmony, made more elegant than ornateness itself. I He advances upon it ; we find in him distinct shadows before, echoes in anticipation of, the plain style as it was to be reformed by Dryden, and to continue till the first quarter of the nineteenth century, with sentences of moderate length, symmetrically balanced, deriving little appeal from abundance of antithetic adjectives, but with the antithesis promoting, not obscur- ing, character and directness. I Not, of course, that Jonson wholly escapes the figurative passion 01 the time. When he speaks of man "making a little winter love in a dark corner," we hear the contem- porary and the friend of Shakespeare and Bacon. In such a sentence as "In being able to counsel others a man must be furnished with a universal store in himself to the knowledge of all Nature ; that is the matter of seed-plot ; there are the seats of all argument and inven- tion," we have the mixed style ; the first half might have been written by the other Johnson, or by any eighteenth-century writer of the higher class ; the second brings us back to the fanciful and dreamy seventeenth. But often for whole sentences, and not very seldom for whole passages, the nervous, uncoloured, to some extent sterilised, fashion of the prose of 1660-1800 appears with hardly a touch of archaism about it.' And we must remember that Jonsdn's CHAP. IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 375 influence continued mighty for at least two generations after his death ; that it was very strong with Dryden himself, the literary prophet not merely of the second of these generations, but of the whole eighteenth century. Moreover, the matter of these Discoveries, as well as the apho- ristic or axiomatic form of much of them, was such as was likely to impress in their style on the more thoughtful readers, those who were actual or possible writers themselves. They indeed illustrate (though they do not bear the name and contain essay-nature, one direct gibe ' at the form) the growing attraction and importance of the essay, which Bacon alone had as yet adopted by its own title, but which, as we shall see both in this chapter and in others, was, either under its own name or under others, gradually to absorb a greater and greater share of the attention of prose-writers and prose- readers. The farrago of the book is of the most miscellaneous character. Ethical remarks are, of course, numerous, — the seven- teenth century was nothing if not ethical, — -but they are found side by side with a body of discourses upon rhetoric, with valuable passages of criticism on individual writers, — Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Montaigne, and of course the ancients, — with a remarkable tractate in little on education, and with notes on arts, politics, history. Indeed, Ben is the essayist whom he affects to slight, and his adoption of the plainer style may without too much fancifulness be taken as a sort of pointing of the vane in the direction almost of Addison, cer- tainly of Dryden. The temptation of the essay, though under another name, shows itself as strongly, and with not less literary influence, though with far less literary accomplishment, in the famous C haracters of Sir Thomas Overbu ry.^ Their author was a man oy no means Protean specially estimable or specially amiable, but recom- appearances mended in the first place by his performance in a kind ° ^^^^y- which was of growing popularity, in the second by his miserable end. He was born of a respectable family in Warwickshire in 1581, went to Queen's College, Oxford, in 1595, took his Bachelor's degree, and passed to the Middle Temple. He travelled, and .seems to have been a prolixe of Robert Cecil, afterwards Lord Salisbury, but unluckily for himself became connected later witli the favourite Carr, afterwards Earl of Somerset. He was knighted in 1608, and 1 " Such {i.e. desultory and ill-digested] are all the essayists, even their master Montaigne." 2 Works, ed. Rimbault (London, 1856). The late Mr. H. Morley published in the " Carisbrooke Library " a very interesting collection of Character- Writers of the Seventeenth Century, including Overbury, Earle, Butler, and much minor matter. 376 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi attained a very great reputation for ability. But he set himself against his patron's marriage with Lady Frances Howard, the divorced Countess of Essex, one of the worst women of whom history gives record ; and having, as it seems, also contrived to offend Anne of Denmark, was sent in May 1613 to the Tower, nominally for refus- ing an ambassadorship. For about four months attempts, equally bungling and remorseless, were made to poison him, and after suffering horrible tortures from them he is said to have been finished by vitriol. The matter came to light some three years afterwards, and though the chief criminals, Carr and his wife, escaped with imprison- ment, divers under-strappers, including the Lieutenant of the Tower and Mrs. Anne Turner, famous for her yellow starched ruffs, were executed, Bacon conducting the prosecution. But a great deal re- mained unexplained, and suspicion, which has never been quite removed or at all confirmed, attached to the King's physician. Dr. (afterwards Sir) Theodore Mayerne, and to the King himself. / This, however, is matter of history, not matter of literature, and it As only mentioned here because Overbury's singular promotion first, / and his horrible and apparently mysterious fate afterwards, no doubt / helped the reputation of his works. Yet intriguing, braggart, and I insolent as he seems to have been, he must have had that art to I divine the tendencies of the time which frequently belongs to men \ of the world. His Observations on the Low Coiuntries (1609) is *Tr fair ordinary State paper of the old-fashioned kind ; his Wife, a poem in sixains, seems to have acquired interest from the probably false notion that it was written to discourage Carr from marrying Lady Frances ; his Crumbs fallen from King James'' s Table purport to be, and probably are, 'mere reports of the utterances of the wisest fool in Christendom. They are chiefly interesting because they con- tain the crude matter of Rochester's saying on the King's grandson : " Some men never speak a wise word, yet do wisely ; and some, on the other side, never do a wise deed and yet speak wisely." But he would now be entirely forgotten if it were not for his Characters. They were not — indeed, none of his works seem to have been — printed during his lifetime, and from the first they bear ascription to " Sir Thomas Overbury and his friends^'' while in successive impres- sions from 1614 they were increased in number from CharacUrs. twenty-one to a hundred, including divers specimens of the old " News from this or that place " which had been common in the Elizabethan pamphlet. The most famous pieces tliat are at least probably Overbury's own are the "Milk Maid," constantly quoted in anthologies, the ''Affectate Traveller," and the "Mere Fellow of a College." With the limitations to be observed of the Character generally, they are very closely CHAP. IV JACOBEAN PROSE — SECULAR 377 connected with the pamphlet ah'eady noticed, and were continued ' throughout this reign and later. But they have some characteristics which, when we compare them with Earle and other followers (see next Book), seem likely to be Overbury's own — a sharp observation expressed with antithetical conceit, a hard, presumptuous, unamiable wit, and a general superciliousness which accounts in part for Over- bury's fate. The introduction of the Character, however, is a very important thing. It came, of course, from Theophrastu s. and during the whole of the seventeenth century, in France as well as in England, indeed all over Europe, continued to be an exceedingly favourite ,j.^^ form of the essay, which was in so many ways over- Character running literature. " Hmnours " in prose de/ks lettres senera y. as well as in drama were the fashion of the time, and the very staple and substance of the Character is a "humour" in the seventeenth- century sense. The advantage of the style was that it at least invited, and, as we shall see in Earle's case, successfully, to accurate siudy and artistic reproduction of its sufeject ; the disadvantage that -it lent itself, to ha rdening of ty pes — An Amorist, A Braggadochio, A Pedant, and hundreds more — to dressing them up simply out of the writers own head, without any real induction from individuals, and also to certain conventionalities of expression./^ In Overbury partic- ularly the forcing of Euphuist imagery to enliven the phrase, and the abuse of antithesis to give it point and "snap," are unmistakable, and to readers not of the time excessively tedious. The only thing to be said is that these excesses in one direction or another are peculiar to no time, and that from each, bad as it is in itself, ingredients of universal style have been picked up. The antithetic _and pointed cliaracter helped to crisp styl e, to save it from languor and complexity, as well as constantly to invite the writer to study from the life. More generally recognised than these, and perhaps equally significant to the general tendencies of the time, but with less direct influence on tlie form, though he had enormous influence on the matter, of English prose, is Robert Burton. We do not 1 iri-, .,, . Burton. know as much of this author as might be expected, seeing that he was not of the elusive race of London Bohemians, but resident in a great University during almost the whole of his life, and that his work was at once, and with men of letters enduringly, i)opuiar. He was born in Leicestershire of a good family in 1577, and after education at tlie grammar sclioois of Nuneaton and Sutton Coldfield, went to Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1593. After six years he was elected to a studentship at Christ Church, which he held till his death in 1641, as well as tlic livings uf St. Thomas in the University town, 5/S LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE BK. vi and of Segrave in Leicestershire. He appears never to have resided out of Oxford after his entrance at Brasenose, so that he had some- thing like fifty years of uninterrupted study to provide him with the extraordinary learning that appears everywhere in his great and only work, The Anatomy of Melancholy,^ first published in 1621, and much altered and increased in successive editions during the last twenty years of his life. His death has sometimes been attributed to suicide, but on merely fanciful grounds, and without any direct evidence to that effect. The Anatomy of Melancholy has sometimes been thought to have been suggested by a book called The A fiat my of Httmours,- w Function of one part of the function of the modern newspaper, as sermons, the playhouse did others. They were also as a rule ' ^^°°' much longer than modern discourses in England, and they were far more used for reading than they have been for nearly a century. In fact, it may almost be said that the printed sermon, for some two hundred years, represented the whole modern furnishings of the cir- culating library to most women who had either education or character, and a large part of it to many men, even men of the world. We must therefore, from the beginning, proceed by selection ; and it so happens that in this particular department selection is less injurious than in any other, at any time save the Middle Ages. The subject-matter of sermons, though admitting the widest individuality of particular handling, must always be within certain limits the same ; and in hardly any kind of writing do famous and popular models tend to reproduce themselves so faithfully. From Hooker and Andrewes to Newman, the reader or hearer who knows the styles of the leaders knows those attempted, though no doubt often clumsily, by hundreds of followers, and except for special purposes he may therefore neglect these latter. In the present chapter we shall take as representatives Andrewes, Ussher, Hall, and Donne. The second division of the subject, to be taken up in the next Book, will be more populous. Lancelot Andrewes ^ was born at Barking in Essex in 1555, and was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and Pembroke College, Cambridge, of which he became Master. He was from the first much patronised, and successively became prebendary of St. Paul's and Westminster, Dean of the last-named cathedral under Elizabeth, and Bishop of Chichester, Ely, and Win- chester under James. He was very prominent at the Hampton Court Conference and in the translation of the Bible, and though, like most prelates of the time, he perhaps dabbled more in court intrigues (especially in that bolgia of crime the divorce and re- marriage of Lady Frances Howard) than might be desired, he has never been justly judged a sycophant. He died in 1626. Of his learning and of the strange fervency and intense eloquence of his Private Devotions there have never been two opinions ; his Sermons have excited more dispute. The charge against him is said to have 1 The standard edition of Andrewes is that in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, Oxford, 1841-54. The Greek and Latin Devotions have been frequently translated and given separately, most recently by Dr. A. Whyte (Edinburgh, 1896). 384 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vr been put early by "a Scotch nobleman," when the bishop preached in Holyrood Chapel. " He rather plays with his subject than preaches on it." The criticism was by no means unfounded, though it would apply to nearly the whole of the preachers of Andrewes's time, except Hooker himself, in England. Perhaps it may be put better by saying that the sometimes far-fetched and romantic symbolism and imagery wliich in Donne among the earlier, in Taylor among the later, preachere of the school produce such miraculous effects, are in Andrewes crude and not finally transformed by art. No doubt his immense learning, in which he excelled almost every one of that learned time except Ussher, aggravated the evil. James Usher (or rather Ussher) himself was more a writer than a preacher, the most erudite of an erudite time, and one of the most voluminous authors of a time when most authors were voluminous. But he cannot be omitted here, and he escapes the blame not quite unjustly passed upon Andrewes by never attempting flights or rhetoric at all. He did not wish his sermons to be published, though they were ; his great chronological and historical works, which gained him a practically enduring fame, are mainly in Latin. In English he wrote chiefly on Celtic Antiquities, especially those of an ecclesiastical complexion, as well as on the burning questions of the time — the Protestant-Papist controversy, divine right, and the like. His style, like that of so many men of his time, is largely conditioned by his method of argument, which consists, though by no means wholly yet very mainly, in appeals to authority and citations from the inexhaustible store of his vast reading. Only the idiosyncrasy of a Burton can infuse writing of this kind with any particular tincture of style. But Ussher is always plain and clear. Neither his temper nor his immediate purpose inclined him to any superfluity of ornament, and when he gets free from citation and has a paragraph or two to write, as the common phrase is, " out of his own head," he rather exemplifies the Ascham- Hooker tradition than the more conceited manner of his own day. He was born in Dublin in 1581, and was nephew of Stanyhurst, the eccentric translator of Virgil. He was one of the first alumni of Trinity College, Dublin, became Fellow, and gave himself up to .stud)', becoming Professor of Divinity in his University in 1607, Bishop of Meath in 1620, and Bishop of Armagh in 1625. When Ireland became convulsed by the Rebellion, he went to England, and was for some time preacher at Lincoln's Inn. Though a steady Royalist, he was not molested by the Parliament or by Cromwell, and died quietly at Reigate in 1656. With Bishop Hall ^ we get into a higher sphere of literary 1 Works, ed. Wynter, lo vols. Oxford, 1863. CHAP. V THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — I 385 accomplishment. His verse was entirely of the previous or strictly Elizabethan period, while his prose was entirely of this or the next. This early verse was purely secular ; but the suc- ceeding prose was by no means purely theological, though its most noteworthy division of the secular kind, the Cliaracters of Virtues and Vices, seems to have been composed (1608) with a view to use in sermons. These Characters precede Overbury's in point of time, and though they never became so popular, excel them in simplicity, being often quite as pointed, and as a rule not nearly so contorted and fantastic. Hall's subsequent writings during his long, busy, and (till the evil days of rebel- lion) prosperous life, were extremely multifarious — sermons, medita- tions, autobiographical pieces, controversial tracts (such as those, for instance, which brought upon him Milton's clumsy invective), expository matter. In his sermons and casuistical work he par- tic ilarly affects a plain but energetic style of attack on the consciences and hearts of his hearers ; and this element of direct- ness is also generally prominent in his politico-ecclesiastical polemic. In his meditations he is more flowery and figurative, as is reasonable enough. But at no time can he be said to share to the full the tendencies of his age in this particular direction, being too much of a fighter when he is not a mere meditative moralist. Perhaps also he may exemplify the rule to which his enemy Milton is one of the not many exceptions, and the great writer whom we are shortly to mention another, that those who write both poetry and prose usually write the latter with some restraint, while the very ornate or fantastic prose writers are chiefly those who cannot express themselves in verse. This, however, as has just been hinted, is by no means the case with our last and greatest exemplar. Few are more of a piece in poetry and prose than Donne, ^ and much of what has been said of his verse will apply equally to his prose. This consists of a large body — some two hundred — of Sermons, a consider- able number of Letters, a short and curious tractate to prove that in certain circumstances suicide may not be a sin, some Essays in Divinity, some Devotions, and a few miscellaneous treatises. All his work, however, even in prose, whatsoever it be called, essay, sermon, letter, or what not, is again strikingly like itself and strikingly unlike anything else, being, like the verse, saturated and pervaded by Donne's ])eculiar melancholy. The expression of this seems to be as easy for him in prose as in verse, or, to speak more justly and accu- 1 Ed. Alford, 6 vols. 1859. Unfortunately not at all a good edition and not complete. Dr. Jessopp's little edition of the Essays can sometimes be picked up. 2C . 386 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. vi rately, he succeeds in elaborating a prose style just as suitable for it as is his style in verse. He is clearer in prose than in verse except (curiously enough) in his Letters, which often display almost as much metaphysical conceit as the most recondite passages of his poetry. But he has the three great characteristics of Jacobean writing — the learning, the profundity, and the fantastic imagination. And the profundity is here not merely real, but of a depth rarely surpassed in English, while the fantastic imagination becomes something more than merely fantastic. The "kingship" which Carew ascribed to Donne is at least as noticeable in his prose as in his verse, and though the realm over which he rules is rather a Kingdom of Night than of Day, a place of strangely lit gloom rather than of mere sun- light, it is a kingdom of wonderful richness and variety. It may be questioned whether Donne's very best passages are exceeded, even whether they are equalled, by any English prose-writer in the com- bination of fulness and rarity of meaning with exquisite perfection of sound and charm of style. In these latter points he is at least the equal of Jeremy Taylor at his best, and though Jeremy Taylor is no shallow thinker, his thought is a mere pool to the oceanic depth and breadth of Donne's. There is a certain quality of magnificence, too, in Donne beside which the best things of Taylor are apt to suggest the merely pretty. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Donne knew when to let a great thing alone ; and few of them, for instance, would have been content to let such a phrase as the likening of the coming of God to the soul "as the sun at noon to illustrate all shadows, as the sheaves in harvest to fill all penuries," without frittering away its massive and complete effect into subdivisions and added epithets, into appendices and fringes of thought and expression. Moreover he, as Hooker in his very different style had had be- fore him, but as hardly any one else, had the sense of the paragraph — of the crescendo and diminuendo of cadence required to wind it safely and melodiously from start to finish. His sentences are sometimes too long, they are too often made to do the work of the paragraph itself; but this is often more a matter of punctuation than of real structural arrangement. And whether they be called sentences or be called paragraphs, there lingers round each of them the glimmer of an unearthly light and the notes of a more than earthly music. INTERCHAPTER VI It has been frequently pointed out that the connection of the present Book with the last and next is of a kind which will not be repeated, and which has not been earlier found between the successive divisions of this work. All three are wholly busied with what is usually and rightly, from one point of view, called Elizabethan Literature. All three are mainly busied with the productions of a not extraordinarily long lifetime — 1580 to 1660; while such a lifetime as that of Fontenelle would have taken a man from Wyatt's days almost to the publication of the Hespertdes, from that of Euphucs to the death of Milton, or from the birth of Shakespeare to the Restoration. Yet the separation into three, besides avoiding cumbrousness and con- fusion of arrangement in other ways, enables us to bring out the three divisions of rise, of culmination, and if not exactly of decadence, yet of a long and gorgeous sunset, in a very satisfactory fashion. There can be no real difficulty in according to our present stage the title of culmination. We have indeed lost two or three, but only two or three, of the very greatest names of the whole period. To the reign of James (though no thanks to James himself) belong the greatest work of Shakespeare, almost the whole work of Bacon, the great bulk of the more accomplished work of the minor drama- tists, a volume of exquisite non-dramatic poetry, and a body of most interesting, if still partly inorganic, prose. It is no doubt in the department of pure poetry that the period, partly by accident, partly not, contrasts least favourably both with its predecessor and its successor. That Spenser is dead at its begin- ning, and Milton a boy at its close, is itself not wholly accidental. For Spenser, thougli he could have added to the volume of our delight, would probably have given us something new in kind, had the Irish rebels allowed him to reach his seventy years in peace; and Milton would not have been quite Milton without the Jacobean period itself bdiind him. We have seen what the character of that period was in poetry, and how Spenser's own influence, with Donne's and Jonson's, was at work in it, shaping and preparing the forces, 387 1 388 LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN LITERATURE bk. accumulating the matter, which were to result on the one side in the massive structure of Milton, and on the other in the exquisite filagree of the Caroline lyrists. But we can here better perceive in the work of the three themselves, as in that of their followers, the special Jacobean profundity, its weight of thought, and its slight consequent weariness. The "bloomy flush" of the Elizabethan period proper has fled ; the conceit remains, but it is graver, less childlike ; the play of words continues, but it is changing into the play of thought, sometimes hardly to be called play, so laborious and Cyclopean is it. It follows that the actual poetry of the reign, that which exclu- sively or especially belongs to it, is somewhat less charming than that of the poets who owe more direct allegiance to Ehzabeth or to Charles. Yet the best of the songs of the dramatists date from this time ; the masques of Ben Jonson and others contain, in the good old phrase, " poetry enough for anything"; we cannot find out of Spenser and Rossetti more gorgeous things than the best passages of the Fletchers ; anywhere perhaps sweeter things than the best trifles of Ben, of John Fletcher, of Wither, of Browne ; anywhere at all such mysterious melody as that of Donne. Yet, since we find most of those who are thus gifted dating back from Elizabeth or persevering to Charles, we may be justified in reserving for the middle stage, here as elsewhere, he special qualities of weight and thought. There can be no doubt at all that this place is the proper one for its prose. As we have seen. Euphuism in the large sense, ornateness, gorgeousness, horror of the obvious, has altogether the upper hand as compared with succinctness, directness, appeal only to power of matter and proportion of arrangement. Yet Ben Jonson relies very mainly on these last, and no one, not even Bacon, succeeds in manipulating the dictionary like an organ after the fashion of the great Caroline writers, unless indeed it be Donne, to whom here as elsewhere the universal monarchy of wit is subject. But the prose of James's reign, putting aside the half-accidental magnificence of the Authorised Version, must rest its claims on the f antastic and sp lendid, but not fully o rgani sed, form of BaCfln-anxL^urton, o n the wei ghty and sTerling mattgf ot both tTiese and'si Jonson. In neither case had a perfection ot "style been reached. The author of the Essays and the author of the Anatomy have discarded the more childish things of Euphuism ; but they have not quite attained the full perfecting of its best things that Browne and Taylor were to show. Ben Jonson has recoiled from this same Euphuism ("always using the term as a sign and symbol rather than as a limited designation), and has sometimes achieved a plain style almost perfect in its way. But he had been busied with other things, and was perhaps not equipped with sufficient versatility to "make a prose VI INTERCH AFTER VI 389 writer absolutely of the first class. The others, except Donne, who did but transprose his verse and trans-hallow his profanities, are minors. Yet in both directions the period, especially for so brief a one, did more than its fair share in the mere furthering of style, in doing its stage on that circular but always interesting journey. And in point of kio^as distinguished from style that establishment of the Essay, in morelbrms than oiiS^ vvhiLii we have seen was a matteT of the very greatest importance, that development of the sermon which we have also seen, a thing of importance hardly lesser. The optiscle as opposed to the opus inagniim was thus, in matters sacred and in matters profane, promoted to distinct literary rank ; and in each case literature was carried from the study into other apartments of the house, if not even into the street. But undoubtedly the very greatest accomplishment of the time was its accomplishment in drama. After making every reasonable allowance for the obscurity which rests on so many of the exact dates of the Elizabethan theatre, we can be fairly certain that the larger number of its consummate examples date from the first quarter of the seventeenth century — most of the best work of Shakespeare, all, with one exception at each end, of the best work of Jonson, all the work of Beaumont, of Fletcher, and probably most of the best work of all the rest save Shirley, belong to it. Moreover, in what follows there is little or nothing new. The effects which have been achieved with such gigantic expenditure of genius, if not exactly of criticism, first by the University Wits and Shakespeare in his initial period, then by Shakespeare and his great contemporaries in this special time, are merely repeated, weakened, and at last frittered away. It would hardly be rash to say that of the really great plays included in the general list of the Elizabethan drama, not merely four out of five or nine out of ten, but nineteen out of twenty belong to this time. Yet we need, in this special place of summary, say less of it than we have said of the Elizabethans proper, and still less than we must say when, after the next Book, we sum up the whole great epoch of which it . forms a part. For the centre of any period partakes necessarily more of the characters of the two ends than they do of it. In so far as the Jacobean age deserv-es a description of qualities to itself, that description must Ije what has been more than once given. Qepth ' "\'\ \Yfig'^t irr'tir iiT —it-ni thpy_ji£j^p;ir in none other; yet does it not lack finish and grace. BOOK VII CAROLINE LITERATURE CHAPTER I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET The central period of English prosody — Distribution of Caroline poetry — Milton — His life — The earlier poems — Comiis — The blank verse — Lycidas — Son- nets — The longer poems — Their blank verse — Their matter — Milton's place in English prosody — Cowley — His couplets — The lyrics — The Pindarics — Denham — Waller — The " reform of our numbers " We have traced the gradual growth of prosody, which is the distinguishing feature of poetry, steadily onwards from the first appearance of English as a blend of Teutonic, Romance, and other elements ; and we have seen how, after the strange and not yet accounted for changes in the fifteenth century, period o? a fresh start was made about the middle of the third English quarter of the sixteenth. After this, for some fifty years, almost every style of poetry was tried. But one style — not of poetry proper but of the mixed kind called drama — had more effect than all the others put together, by adjusting metre to the exigencies, not of mere recitative, not of formal music, but of spoken language in every relation and circumstance of life, comic and tragic, impassioned and ordinary. This great period in drama was ih 1625 nearing its close, but its work was already done. And while, on the one hand, the pecul- iar influence of Jacobean thought and style in general, and of the three great poets in particular, resulted in a continuance of poetry difter- entiated from the Elizabethan only by an increased tendency to the metaphysical in tone and the lyrical in form, the dramatic current mixing with that of genera! poetry produced two things which were practically new — the use cf blank verse for non-dramatic purposes in 37» 392 CAROLINE LITERATURE Book vii original poetry, and the altered form of the couplet, which between them, gradually ousting in great part lyrics and the stanza, were to dominate English verse for nearly a century and a half. We can hardly do better than treat the poetry of the period under these two heads, but we shall have to deal with them differ- ently. The poets who are mainly distinguished for their work in „. ., . blank verse or couplet, with Milton at their head, show Distribution , ,.~ ^ '^ , . . ,. i i , of Caroline such differences from their immediate successors, headed poctT- i^y Dryden, that, save as far as Milton is himself con- cerned, we shall have ceased dealing with them at the accession of the second Charles. But, with some special and striking changes of tone, the poets, partly " metaphysical " in subject and mainly lyrical in form, persevere long beyond that date, and even, with Sedley and a few others, bevond Charles the Second's death and into the next century. We shall, therefore, in this and the next chapter, cover un- equal spaces of ground ; but the chronological inequality will be more than compensated by the logical exactitude which will be obtained, even though some of those with whom we shall deal belong in a manner to both divisions. Milton is at once an exquisite, though too little copious, poet of the school of Jonson and of Spenser (never quite of Donne) and an innovator in pure poetry who has none but dramatic masters. Cowley never entirely knows whether he is a metaphysical Pindaric, or a lyrist, or a common-sense coupleteer. Chamberlayne, to take still a different class, writes ex- clusively (or almost so) in couplets, but his couplets are not in the least of the new kind. We shall class them all according to the division to which each, either in the bulk of his work or in its main tone and temper, belongs, always noting when they cross the boun- dary line. But keeping the boundary itself will enable us, in a manner which could not be so well otherwise done without endless confusion and repetition, proviso and warning, to indicate the falling line and the mounting in English poetry during the last three-quarters of the seventeenth century. John Milton,^ who though his position as the greatest or not the greatest of English non-dramatic poets is open to question, occupies unquestionably the greatest place among such poets as an influence and model, was a Londoner by birth, and was born in Bread Street on gth December 1608; but his family belonged to Oxfordshire. His father, a money-scrivener (a profession now extinct, or rather absorbed, but then a cross between banking and law), resembled his son in combining Puritan sympathies in religion with strong literary and artistic tastes. The only other member of 1 Editions innumerable, but the larger (3 vols. London, 1890) and smaller (" Globe ") of Professor Masson stand before all others. CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 393 the family who is remembered was the poet's younger brother Christopher, afterwards Sir Christopher, who became a judge and was a very strong RoyaHst. Milton entered St. Paul's School in 1620, and went thence five years later to Chrisfs College, Cambridge, where his personal beauty and cor- rect moral character were observed, but where his insubordinate and unaccommodating temper seems to have got him into trouble with the authorities. He was once rusticated, but took his degrees in due time, becoming M.A. in 1632, at the end of the usual seven years. His fa':her had bought a property at Horton in Buckingham- shire, and there Milton remained in unmolested and unprofessional study for six years, during which he produced most (some is even earlier) of his early verse, and displayed, as some think, nearly his highest poetical genius, if not his full poetical power. The indulgence of his father next allowed him a tour abroad, and leaving England at the beginning of 1638, he spent the great part of two years chiefly in Italy. When he came home he settled in Aldersgate Street, and, having the full Renaissance interest in education, acted as school- master or tutor to his nephews and others. During the twenty years of civil commotion he wrote, except a few sonnets, no poetry, but was fertile in controversial prose, which will be dealt with in another chapter. He married in 1643 ; the un- lucky bride's name was Mary Powell, of a good Cavalier family in Oxfordshire, with which Milton had been long intimate ; but the marriage was extremely ill-assorted, and in a few weeks his wife left him and went to her parents. This desertion Milton construed into a reason for divorce, and argued this point out in several tracts, which naturally caused a good deal of scandal. She returned in 1645 •^^'^ died in 1652, leaving him three daughters, whose relations with him were not more happy than their mother's. Meanwhile his tract- writing, now devoted to purely political matters, and especially the defence of the execution of the King, procured him the post, under the Commonwealth, of Secretary of Foreign Tongues, that is to say, for diplomatic correspondence in Latin. He lost his eyesight in the same year in which his first wife died, and married a second in 1656, but she, the "late espoused saint " of his sonnet, died also in 1658. At the Restoration he hid himself, but was not molested, and settled near Bunliill Fields. He married a third time in 1663, this time more successfully in comfort and permanence. The publication of his great epic (see below) followed at no great interval, and he died on November 1674, and was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate. Milton's character was not amiable, and its harshness was no doubt accentuated, both in life and letters, by his singular want of humour; but it only concerns us in so far as it affects his writings. 594 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii These, as has been seen, fall under three unusually well-marked periods: the first inclu ding all the early_poems up to Ly a das ; the^ """second^ feTtile in prosepBut yfeTaing "no poetry except "^poems!" most of the Sounets ; the thirds-giving the two Paradises arid Samson Agonistes. We must say something about each of these periods and its reslJlts before endeavouring to touch briefly the whole question of Milton's place as a poet. His precocity has sometimes been admired, but this doubtful gift was not in any very great measure his. The few poems which we have dating earlier than his coming of age are scarcely better than a very large quantity of minor verse. The first unmistakable signs were shown by the grea t _<9^g o n the Nathu hiJ 1620) . About this there can be no doubt whatever, except in the minds of those who so dishke what is called florid poetry that they are blinded by the flowers. Both in the stanza-prelude, and still more when the actually lyric part begins, the n6te to ears that can hear is as *liew as it is exquisite. Even Spenser had not written'like it; even Spenser had not written anything more individual and more delightful in word-music ; while, if we compare it with what had been done or could be done by the best poets then alive, — Drayton, Chapman, Jonson, Donne, Wither, .the Fletchers, etc., — we shall find a note of witchery which only [Donne could have surpassed, while the soft harmony of the motion lis altogether different from Donne's less mellifluous touch. The Ode on the Nativity, as the herald's cry of a new great poet, is a test of the reader's power to appreciate poetry. It is perhaps sufiicient proof of Dr. Johnson's initial disabilities as a critic of seventeenth- century verse that he does not so much as mention it. For the famous pair, f Allegro and // Penseroso, no one has ever had any- thing but praise, though some have hinted that " Penseroso " is not very choice Italian. Even Dr. Johnson could feel their universal charm, nor is there much need of commenting on what is matter of universal knowledge and universal consent. But it is worth while to note that even at this early time Milton displayed his wonderful science of versificafion in the handling of the octosyllable, catalectic and full, and also his complete command of whatever expression he needs. He has little of the conceit of his contemporaries, but he has almost more than their average learning, and yet he manages to treat it as lightly as possible. These same characteristics are notice able in the few other \short pieces which we have from this time, especially the exquisite fragments of the Arcades. But before the poet took leave of the'muses for a less delightful mistress, he was to produce two substantive poems, Comus and Lycidas, either of which, but especially the former, would have settled'THS (|tiestion of his place in poetry. Comus was written in 1634 ^ ^ masque to be presented CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 395 (with music by Lawes) at Ludlow Castle before, and by the children of. Lord Bridgewater, President of Wales ; Lycidas not till just before Milton's departure for Italy, and nominally to celebrate the death of Edward King, a Cambridge contemporary and friend. The last is deeply tinged with the coming blackness of political and ecclesiastical faction ; the first is almost free from it, though not quite so free as L Allegro and // Penseroso. But both are of the very first order of poetry. Cofnus (not so called by Milton), though avowedly a masque, lies between that kind and the lyrical dramas of Jonson and Fletcher, of whom Milton was a diligent student. The scenery and decora- tions are of much less account in it than in the masque 11 ,1 11 • Comus. proper, and the story, though not very elaborate, is more solidly and substantively dramatic. The argument, suggested partly by the Odyssey, partly by Peek's Old Wives'' Tale, is extremely simple. Two brothers and their sister, wandering in a wood haunted by Comus, Circe's son and imitator, part from her in search of a guide and shelter. She falls, bewitched by art but pro- tected by her virtue from any real harm, into the enchanter's power, till he is driven off by her brothers and an attendant spirit (half Mentor and half Ariel), and the charm is reversed by Sabrina, the river-nymph of the Severn. But on this slight and little " incidented" jtheme, while treating even the characters symbolically and typically irather than as individuals. Milton has contrived to broider the most lexquisite tissue of poetry, both in blank verse and in lyric measures. INothing quite like the former had yet been seen. The author is much tinder the influence of that later form of the playwrights' blank verse which admits the redundant syllable very verse." frequently, and he has boldly borrowed the system of trisyllabic equivalence, which in them was certainly to a great extent, and may be suspected to have been almost wholly, based on the mere necessities of conversation. His own verse tirades, or passages which .are only in form dialogue, are really independent pieces of poetry. By these means and others he also elaborates t hat ^^ verse paragraph '^ the introduction of which was to be perhaps his greatest contribution to the English Ars Poetica. The redundant syllable is indeed rather abused, and it is in this, and perhaps in this only, that Comus is inferior to Paradise Lost. But it is difficult to use the word inferior in any connection with such incomparable work as the Spirit's overture and description of his discovery of the Lady's danger, her soliloquy before she meets Comus, the Elder Brother's fine if rather declamatory praise of chastity (saturated with memories of Marlowe's versification and homoeotelcitta^, the argument of Comus and the Lady, and the poet's account of Sabrina. But the lyric parts (which Sir Henry 396 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii Wotton in a letter to the author justly called ipsa niollities) are cer- tainly not inferior, and the last hundred and fifty lines repeat the success of L? Allegro and its fellow in metrical effect, with more variety and an even higher and more airy strain. Nor do the graver cast and the more disputable material of Lycidas injure, save to very unhappily constituted persons, its poetical effect. It s two_J iuniir£d-Iiaea--are'aTranged on a decasyHabic basis which is never exceed ed, thouglLJ t i s allow ed, ■^" '^^' sorne whatr rrrTTTe principle of a choric od€^to-4e&ee«d to ights, and even To sixes? Furllier;Though the piece rhymes through- ouT'^savefor a few lines left "in the air," and yet, by a perfect miracle of art, contributing to the music as their sound floats un- answered), the rjiynifia nrr ranged -aeither regularly in couplets nor retrula rly in stanzas, thou gh, for ins tance, the close isZaZmm^lete o^^s^fft^ abababci. T he whole has an extremely cunning system, not stnjfrtiTc but symphonic7 so that the mu"Srev though never broken, is never complete m any yecliun"^ill the wholeTias' closed. As an elegy trenvmg Irom ihe AlexaiiSriafiPSTCTiTa'nTcIiool, Lycidas has in its turn served as model to other English dirges of the first interest, espe- cially Adonais and Thyrsis', but it exceeds both in variety and uni- formity of merit, though it is not the equal of Adonais in loftiness of thought and in the poetical quality of certain passages. Vjo English poem exhibits a more exquisite harmony and variety of numbers, or a more extraordinary science of rhyme, while very few of anything like the same length have a greater number of signal phrases memo- rable for thought or music or both. \ Indeed, except the untimely speech of St. Peter, which is at the very best a vigorous piece of satiric verse, there is not a passage and hardly a line which is not^ me re and ^h eer poetry. The poem, moreovei,'7dds 10 liie knowledge -ofmilton's^j(5WLi»»in several minor ways, especially in regard to his extraordinary skill in the use of names. Something of this had been seen before, but not to the extent of the wonderful triplet — Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded mount Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold. We care nothing about Bellerus or Namancos or Bayona as persons or places, but we feel, we know, that as words they are right and indispensable. And the passage also exhibits two other main devices of Milton's, the putting of the adjective, especially a monosyllabic adjective, after the noun, and the cunning interchange of syllables in adjective and substantive by pairs. i 1 \ " Great vision," adj. = i syll., subs. = 2. < " Guarded mount," adj. = 2 syll., subs. = i. CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 397 The batch of sonnets which forms a bridge over the twenty middle years of Milton's life has varied interest. They are very few in number; they do not, even with those in Italian, which fall out of our purview, reach the end of the second dozen. The history of their reputation is strange, for even after making every possible allowance for the " point of view " and for the depreciation of the sonnet as a trifling thing, we cannot now under- stand the contempt with which the eighteenth century regarded them as not even good of their kind. They are historically of great importance, becaus e they mark that return from the true .Ln glish or "Shakespearian lorm ot th p fipnnpt tn thf P^tr-irr^i^ior. nii7'^ el wliic li has beei\ generally, though not universally, observed since. This, it must be repeated, tnougn a perfectly legitimate consequence of Milton's devotion to Italian, was in no sense a change from corrupt to pure. The one kind of quatorzain is from every point of view exactly as legitimate as the other, which was itself only the survivor of divers Italian kinds. Yet again Milton's sonnets are interesting because they are almost the first instance of perception, on the part of an English poet, of the unmatched suitableness of the sonnet form for the purposes of " occasional " poetry. Before Milton the sonnet had been very generally written in sequences, and almost invariably devoted to the subject of love — a subject for which it is no doubt supremely but by no means exclusively suited. Since his day, though, it has received further extensions, especially the topographical (the discovery of which is the great glory of Bowles), and the descrip- tive-pictorial, where Rossetti reigns almost alone. But Milton's innovation, or rather extension, invited not only these but almost all others of whatsoever kind, as will be seen from their subjects — The Nightingale, His own Twenty-third Year, The Imminent Cavalier Attack on London, To a Virtuous Young Lady, To Lady Margaret Ley, three political-controversial (one of them a twenty-lined ^"tail" sonnet), To Lavves the Musician, On Mrs. Catharine Thomson, to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane, On the Massacre in Piedmont, On his Blindness, To his friends Lawrence and Skinner, and On his Deceased Second Wife. Thus we have love, meditation, ethical compliment, epicede, polemic, and, in the most miscellaneous sense, "occasional" verse, all exemplified in this little handful. They are far from being of equal value, and the extreme badness of some may, though it never should, have caused the depreciation of others. The divorce and political sonnets, for instance, simply display ill-temper and pique, trying to masquerade as banter in doggerel verse. Yet even here Milton's irrepressible talent for melodious and majestic phrase will break out, as in the line — Which after held the sun and moon in fee, 398 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii and almost everywhere else the good gifts predominate altogether, or very nearly so. Even the very early and comparatively common- place "Nightingale"! is full of them. The stately cadence of the " Three-and-twentieth Year" hides, as is not always the case, the ^.^^u^T^T'^p.^^r.oc.o tn tn1rr himself very seriously indeed. "The Assault " is a pair to it ; the personal sonnets to or on others suit themselves to the dominant of comment or praise, or whatever it may be, with marvellous art ; and the two finest of all^thej^assacre " ■.a gnnet and the "Bli ndness," develop the form '"TJlT'The side of grandeur in a way whicill has never been excelled, and, even in the abundant and sometimes consummate sonnet-practice of the present century, very seldom equalled. With respect to the three great poems of his last fifteen years, it is noticeable as to their matter that we have from his own hand a long list of subjects for poems, of which the majority are taken from the sacred history and the rest from the early ^JoimT" chronicles of Britain, both South and North; secondly, as to the form of Samson Agonistes, that all these sub- jects appear to have been originally intended as tragedies in the Senecan form. We may reasonably connect this scheme with that curious dislike of rhyme and of modern poetical forms generally which made the admirer of Shakespeare and . the author of the exquisite rhymed early poems endeavour to reverse the course of the English genius both in respect of rhyme and in respect of dramatic arrangement. As for Paradise Lost, the subject, as we should expect, had already, independently of the Miracle plays, been treated dramatically, and the fact is proper to be taken notice of by those who busy themselves with the subject of Milton's alleged indebtedness to other writers. What is proper to be said here on that subject may here be said very briefly. Milton has borrowed from these supposed originals nothing that makes him Milton ; and the things that he may perhaps have borrowed are unimportant. It was, however, certain beforehand that so vast a subject as the Fall of Man, partic- ularly as it would present itself to one equally enamoured of theo- logical disquisition and stocked with profane learning, could not possibly be handled within the compass of an antique drama or even a trilogy. We do not know with any precision when the existing poem was begun, but it can hardly have been before 1656; and we do practically know that it was finished in about seven years from that time, though perhaps fear of bringing himself prominently before the public, and certainly the interruptions to all business caused by the plague in 1665 and the fire in 1666, hindered the 1 Interesting, as noted before, in connection with the Chaucerian or pseudo- Chaucerian Cuckoo and Nightingale. CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 399 publication. The continuation, or Paradise Regained, is said, though only on the authority of the person who derives credit from the truth of the story, to have been suggested by Ellwood, a Quaker, and, like many of the original Quakers, a person of some abiUty and originaHty. It is not known whether any reason besides the fellow-feeling of blindness made Milton select Samson from the large number of similar subjects which he had earlier thought of. But the community of situation is sufficient reason. The exclusive use of blank verse in the epics, and the predomi- nance of it iinne piay, come directl y irom th U Liai-L dgainol rhymr just referred to^ vdHeh is itselt not original in MTTTtJii, but, as Ira's been shown amply already, a common idol (in the Baconian sense) of the Renaissance, a fallacy derived from an, in the verse!" main reasonable, admiration of the ancients. Milton had too good an ear to attempt the miserable sapphics and hexameters of the generation before, but his very ear suggested to him that he could, merely by variety of cadence and arrangement, supply the want of rhyme itself, the objections to which, in narrative as well as in dramatic verse, were, as we can see from Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy (written, if not published, before Pjxradise Lost appeared), very much in the air at the time. For his own particular purpose, there is no doubt t hat blank verse exceptionally well suited his serried _ argume nt. Y i is spaci ous description , his fi ery and enero-et jr nnrntivr cAUlfl not, ITIce th^Tneandering tapestry work ot Spenser or the cloud- and-sky pa geantry """or~51feTley, Jiare endured a regular confinement, eveft-irrsuch comparatively roomy bounds as those of the Spenserian, much less in any smaller stanza. The couplet would have per- petually teased and cramped him. He needed and he achieved the la rge and Infinit ely varjpfl frppdnm of thp_ verse paragraph which onl^ bl3j»l f^groo"Tnio * VB ;-and which he him.self could punctuate and vary in cadence till it acquires almost the beauty_and the proportion oif tKe starr^ntselt. We~cahirot," "tTierefof e," regret thaT he made these experiments i^Dut it is entirely illegitimate to conclude from them that rhyme is a superfluity in non-dramatic, as it certainly is in dramatic, verse. A man may paint supremely with one finger, but he will do best to us'e the five that nature has given him. Considerable difference of structure is noticeable in the deca- syllaljic verse of the three poems, even independently of those general characteristics of Miltonic verse which had best be noticed togetlicr and presently. In Paradise Lost the tendency, which has been noticed in Co?ntis, to indulge too much in the redundant syllable is. on the whole, corrected. But the practice of etijaiitbe merit, or running on from one line to tlie other, is extended to tlie fullest dramatic license, and forms indeed the chief instrument (with the 400 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii variety of phrase which is contingent upon it) in the architecture of the verse paragraph. In Paradise Regained redundancy makes its appearance again ; and in Samsoti Agonistes — perhaps deliberately, the dramatic form inviting it, perhaps as a mere consequence of an uncon- scious tendency — it becomes very prominent indeed. There is a dilTerence. too, in phrase. The stately yet seldom over-gorgeous or over-stiff Miltonic diction reaches its acme in Paradise Lost; and, if a little less sweet and graceful than in the early poems, is still more accomplished, still more "inevitable," still more suited to con- vince all good judges that it cannot be better done at the time, for the purpose, and in the context. In the best passages of Paradise Regained there is no falling off in this respect ; but elsewhere there is, and the absence of splendour and succulence in the diction, joined to the occasional relaxation of the verse, makes that danger of the prosaic, which waits so constantly on blank verse, sometimes seem too imminent here. The process continues furtlier in Samson, where the great pathos and greater dignity of the action cannot hinder the blank- verse parts from being at once too dry and too loose. But here the choruses come to the rescue with their despised auxiliary rhyme and their exceeding beauty, while even their unrhymed Pindaric sections, though perhaps confessing a relaxing grasp of the paragraph- symphony, serve to vary the effect. The substance of the three needs no praise, little account, and only a hint that, though never below, it is sometimes either above or outside the most appropriate themes of verse. Light treatment is rarely called for, and is never successfully given. But matter. ^'''^ mere narrative is, in Paradise Lost at any jate. l ann g-^^ -^yit^ o^^f.-i.c^^iijj«n.-Tr d^iii • thQ ^personal touch es, in reference chiefly to the blindness, both here and in Sa/nson, giv£. p athos without i mpertinence ; the shorter, poetical jewels are innumer- "STSle; andeveimT?TWT^er passS^ges, many, il not most, ' of "vvTiTch could stand almost as substantive poems, would make a most formidable list. In blank verse out of drama we have few things that can approach, and nothing that excels, the picture of Pandemoniurn_ and its inhabitants; the scene wit h Sin _and Death. : the^Journey through Chao^ ; the ad dress J jf ^ ''g^''t -^^ ^'-"^ beginning of Book III.; Satan's vision of the Sin and his speech on Niphates ; the description of paradise ; the discovery by Ithuriel and the subsequent debate ; parts of the story of Raphael ; the Temptation ; the change of nature thereafter ; and the riot of names in the description of the view from the topmost mount of Paradise. All these are in Paradise L^ost, and the sequel adds, though fewer and farther between, the great confes- sion of Satan, "'Tis true I am that spirit unfortunate"; the dream of Christ, and the morning scene after it, with its traces of Milton's CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 401 reading in romance ; the second prospect from tlie mount ; the views of Rome and Athens ; the storm ; and, above all, the final moment on the golden spire of the Temple. Yet perhaps it is not in passages that Milton's greatness appears so decidedly as in the great achieve- ment and attainment of the general scheme of his poems on the one land, and the marvellous perfection of the single line and phrase on' ihe other. The extreme importance of Milton in English poetry has been already referred to, but must be now somewhat more fully, though still briefly, dwelt upon. He represents — and almost exhausts — the fourth great influence in English prosody. We have ^^^f^n's place already seen how Cha ucer ga thered together and put, in English with an immense contribution 6i Ris own, the results ^'^°^° ^' of the struggles of Middle English towards such a prosody, and how his example, followed blindly and with a tongue as stammer- ing as the eyes were dim, lasted for more than a century, till the changes of the language put it for the moment aside ; how Spenser, partly returning to it, partly gathering up de novo thelT!STTtm#lhe experiments of his immediate forerunners and the general influences of the Renaissance, gave poetry a fresh start; and, lastly, how the dramatists, and especially Shakespeare, supj^led and^aliogk out the texture of the d ecasyllabic li ne, varied its cadence, stocked it (on the principles of equivalence "Or slur) with a great number of new foot-combinations, while the lyric and stanza poetry of the fifty years between the Calendar and Milton's " Three-and-twentieth Year" sonnet almost exhausted the possibilities of less uniform verse. At the time which we have reached, as we have seen already, and shall see still more, the stream of original poetic thought was slacken- ing ; even the lyric composition, though almost more exquisite than ever, was dwindling in range, height, and strength, and tending to an exquisite prettiness rather than to passion or splendour; and, above all, the extreme laxity of structure into which the drama had degenerated was either rendering verse (as in the drama itself) mere hobbling prose, or by reaction was creating the sharply separated couplet, a form admirable for the lower varieties of poetry, not so admirable for the higher. Just at this time came Milton, a poet with an exquisite ear and extraordinary science of form, great learning in his own and other languages, and a predilection for the special form of non-dramatic blank verse which, managed as he manages it, at once counteracts the effect of the sharp snip-snap couplet and of the wandering, involved, labyrinthine stanza. He tightened up the metre without unduly constricting it; he refined the expression without making it jejune. And in particular his need of an extremely varied line to construct 402 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vil jhis paragraphs and supply the want of rhyme-music, made him^ [without adopting the sheer abandonment of the late dramatic verse, resort to every artifice of metrical distribution to avoid monotony. ' So intricate and constant is this artifice that some have even imagined the invention by him of a " new prosody " not reducible to ordinary laws, or have resorted to the supposition of extrametrical syllables. As to this last, it can only be said that the existence of an extrametrical syllable anywhere but at the beginning or end of a line proves the imcompetence of the poet. Extrametrical syllables are the " epicycles " of criticism. It is true that there are a very few lines in iMilton where no more than nine syllables can be made out by any artifice ; and we must here suppose, either that he has followed VirgiPs example in leaving these lines designedly incomplete, or else that he has, with rather doubtful judgment, borrowed from some other metres the license of making the initial foot monosyllabic, with strong stress and pause to serve for the missing half. It is tme also that, probably seduced by his affection for Italian (in which language the' prevailing cadence is always trochaic rather than iambic), he has substituted the trochee rather more freely than altogether suits the genius of English. But, with these two provisos, every line of his can be scanned with perfect strictness as an iambic of five feet in which the following feet are admissible, strictly speaking, in aiiy place — iambus, trochee, anapaest, dactyl, and tribrach — while a redundant syllable is allowed in the last. With such precision, and on the whole sucli judgment, did he apply these principles, that in a certain sense English prosody up to the present time has gone no farther. Very many new metrical combinations have, of course, been invented, and the eighteenth century for a long time discarded, or used very gingerly, his licenses of equivalence and pause. But he practically put English prosody on the footing which it has maintained ever since ; and, except in the few and always unsuccessful cases where poets have deliberately set themselves to attempt a new prosody, every poet from Dryden to Mr. Swinburne can be accounted for on the system applicable to him. His pattern of blank verse, admirable as a variation, is not a complete substitute for couplet or stanza ; his vocabulary, at least in his later poems, may be objected to as un- necessarily stiiT and loaded. But his prosody in the strict sense is exhaustive. No one up to his time (though Shakespeare had practically included everything) had deliberately and formally sys- tematised all things; no one since his time has added anything ^new in principle. The position now for two centuries assigned to Milton was during his lifetime held by Abraham Cowley. i This poet, whose 1 In Chalmers. More completely in Dr. Grosart's " Chertsey Worthies," CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 403 popularity, extraordinarily high and extraordinarily brief, was not quite so unreasonable as his loss of it, was a Londoner born ten years after Milton, in 1618. He went to Westminster, ^^^^^ and thence to Cambridge. He certainly wrote verse, °^^^" and good verse, very early, for some of it was published when he was fifteen; but whether his reading and emulation of Spenser really enabled him to produce some of these poems at ten years old must be left to the reader. He had but just taken his Master's degree in 1643 when Cambridge fell into the power of the Parliamentarians and he was ejected, went to Oxford, where he stayed for two years, and then going with Henrietta Maria to Paris, became her secretary. After some ten years' stay abroad, in 1656 he returned to England, and was arrested, but received his liberty on condition of some in- definite compliances which are vaguely and differently related. He returned to France till the Restoration, and was then, like many other Royalists, disappointed in hopes which Charles II. was perhaps not too careful to satisfy, but which he certainly could not in all cases have satisfied if he would. Nor was it very long before a beneficial lease of the Queen's lands gave him competence, if not affluence. He retired, however, in some dudgeon to Chertsey, and died there — not finding the country quite the poet's paradise — in July 1667. Cowley's remarkable prose may be for the present put aside. In his verse he is not merely a most curious bridge of communica- tion between the couplet poets, the " school of good-sense," and the metaphysicals, but almost more than Waller, and much more than Dcnham, the pair who usually go with him, a bridge between one whole period of poetry and another. He wrote in youth a play called The Gtiardian, which he did not then intend for the stage, but after the Restoration altered and acted as Cutter of Coleman Street. But this requires no special notice. His purely poetical works, which are by no means so easily to be distinguished by mere chronological order as might be thought likely, fall pretty easily into three classes when judged from the point of view of form — namely, couplet verse, lyrics and stanza poems of various kinds, and Pindarics. Of the couplet verse the most important piece in size, as indeed it is of the whole, is the curious sacred epic of the Davideis, much of which was written at Cambridge, though it was continued (it never was completed) later. Four books exist ; yet even this j^. ^^^ ^^^^ manageable length, assisted by Cowley's immense popu- larity, never made it generally read. There are unquestionably fine things in it — from the opening picture of Hell, earlier by much than that of Milton, through the sketch of the Priests' College, a favourite 404 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii theme with the author, and worked out by him also in prose, to David's account of Saul and of Jonathan. And the passages of length are as a rule inferior to the single lines and couplets, which are sometimes wonderfully fine. But the miscarriage of the piece as a whole may be accounted for many times over. It is true, as Johnson urges, that the story, being merely begun, has no time to justify itself, that its amplification of familiar Scripture is felt as impertinent, and that the decorations exhibit the fatal fault of the " metaphysicals " almost in the worst degree. But there is more than this. The very accomplishment of the couplets now and then jars with the phraseology and imagery, as would not have been the case in stanza or blank verse ; and, little story as the poet gives himself room to tell, he interferes with the interest even of what little there is by constant divagation. The book is a museum of poetic fragments tastelessly cemented together, not an organic whole. In his other couplet pieces, from quite early things to the trans- lations intercalated in the Essays, Cowley shows much better, or at any rate is much more accessible, as a pioneer in the path. The piece upon the " Happy Birth of the Duke of Gloucester " in 1640, though sometimes " enjambed," shows on the whole a great preference for, and a pretty complete command of, the authentic, balanced, self- contained couplet with the cracker of rhyme at the tail of it. We only want weight to give us Dryden, and polish to give us Pope : the form is there already. In his stanza-poems and lyrics proper Cowley shows the retro- spective side of his poetic Janus-head, though it is observable that even in Constantia and Philettis, one of the earliest of the Juvenilia, the concluding couplets of the sizain " snap " as they would not have done in Daniel or in Drayton. The lyrics are often quite Jonsonian, while sometimes they have a light- ness which Ben rarely achieved, and which is chiefly proper to his "sons," of whom Cowley was born just too late to be one. The famous Chronicle, his best-known thing, is the very best of poetic froth ; while the Anacreontics are often equal to Ben, and some- times not very far below Milton. One is frequently inclined to give Cowley a really high place, when something — his shallowness or his frigid wit, or a certain " shadow before " of eighteenth-century prose — interferes, especially in his once adored Mistress. Undoubtedly, however, Cowley's Pindarics are the most peculiar efforts of his talent, and those which, upon his own time, produced most of the effect of genius. They are little read now, and there The/'/«- can be no doubt that both their structure and the darics. presumed necessity of imitating Pindar's style of obscure conceit encouraged the metaphysical manner very treacherously. CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 405 But they would be interesting to us even were they far worse than they are intrinsically, because to the historian of literature nothing can ever be uninteresting which has, for a long time, supplied an obvious literary demand on the part of readers and provided employment for great writers. To Cowley we owe — in that sense of obligation which always presupposes remembrance, that the debt would have been due to another if this man had not been in ca§e to lend — the really magnificent odes of Dryden, Gray, and Collins pretty directly ; in- directly that still greater one of Wordsworth which is almost his solitary claim to have reached the highest summits of poetry ; and many great things of Shelley and Tennyson, not to mention lesser men. And the eager adoption of the form, which for more than half a century produced libraries full of unreadable Pindarics (the most interesting and nearly the most hopeless examples being those of no less a man than Swift), shows us what the time wanted, how it was sick of the regular stanza, how blank verse was still a little too bold for it, while it had not yet settled down or become satisfied with the regular tick of the couplet-clock. But as a matter of fact the things themselves are not contemptible. " Life and Fame," " Life," the " Ode to Mr. Hobbes," and others are, or at least contain, very fine things ; and the chief drawback of the whole is that descent to colloquial abbreviations ("I'm," etc.) which was due partly to the slow vulgarising of popular taste on such points which we shall have to record, partly to the still prevailing dread of slur and trisyllabic equivalence. On the whole, no doubt, Rochester was right when he said ("profanely," as Dryden very properly adds) that "Cowley was not of God, and so he could not stand." But the special reason of his fall was that he never could make up his mind whether to stand with the old age or with the new, with the couplet or with the wilder verse, with mystical fantasy or clear common sense, with lawless splendour or jejune decency. One splendid passage — which, by the way, did not appear in the first edition of the poem. Cooper'' s Hill, that contains it — has preserved to Sir John Denham ^ a little of the very disproportionate reputation which he earned during his life, thanks chiefly to his younger contemporary Dryden's generous eulogy of it. He was born in Dul^lin, and of Irish parentage on his mother's side, in 1615; had at Oxford and Lincoln's Inn a reputa- tion for idleness and extravagance, especially in gambling ; obtained some fame in 1641 by The Sop/iy, and published Cooper^s Hill soon afterwards ; lived chiefly at Oxford during the war, and chiefly in P'rance after it ; was knighted at the Restoration, and received a 1 In Chalmers. 4o6 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii valuable place, the surveyorship of the king's buildings ; was unlucky in marriage, became disordered in mind, and died on loth April 1668. Few, except for studious curiosity, are ever likely again to read Denham through, or even any considerable part of his not extensive work. The Sophy is a feeble tragedy ; Cooper's Hill, putting aside the patch Oh ! could I flow like thee and a few other fine lines, is chiefly a creditable, and tolerably though not very early, exercise in the new kind of couplet. A verse para- phrase of the Second Aeneid adopts the older and looser " enjambed " form of the same measure ; indeed, this enjambment is common in Denham, and is found in Cooper's Hill itself. Prudence, Justice, Old Age (of all odd things a verse handling of the De Senecti/te), The Progress of Learning, are preludes to the eighteenth-century concert of couplet tunes on things not tunable. The smaller poems, with occasional flashes, such as the happy transformation (for translation it is not) of Martial's JVon ego sum Curius nee Nutna nee Titius into I pretend not to the wise ones To the grave or the precise ones, and a few pieces of some nobility like the elegy on Cowley and the attack on Love in favour of Friendship, are apt to oscillate between the tastelessly fantastical and the merely gross. Moreover, Denham is an eminent sinner in the small matters of grammar, rhyme, and measure which disgrace so many writers in the middle and later part of the seventeenth century and are obviously due not to any imper- fect condition of the language, but to sheer carelessness and a down- at-heel fashion of literature. He has occupied the place between Cowley and Waller as the " three reformers of our numbers " so long, that he has established a title to it by prescription ; and as it has long been understood what this " reform of numbers " meant, there is the less reason for turning him out. But he is much less of a poet than Cowley, while it is an injustice to couple his slatternly muse with the neat and graceful, if not radiantly lovely or bewitching, muse of Edmund Waller. ^ This curious person, whose actual poetical achievements were helped by accidents of all kinds, including social position, wealth, long life, and the fact that the greatest English writer of his latest days Waller ^^^^ ^ "^^^ °^ singular modesty and generosity towards his contemporaries, was born in Hertfordshire, but of a family connected by property with the neighbouring county of Bucks, 1 In Chalmers, and recently in " The Muses' Library." CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 407 and by extraction with Kent, on 3rd Marcli, 1605. He succeeded as a mere child to a very large fortune, was educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, and early introduced to court. This was an age of precocity, but Waller's was certainly very re- markable, for he was not eighteen when he wrote his poem on Prince Charles's escape from shipwreck at Santander ; and there is no doubt that the cast of the couplets in which it is written is unlike anything before except mere scraps and fragments, and almost exactly like what was to prevail for an entire century, and, with Pope's refinements, for nearly two. When we remember that the time of his writing such couplets as With the sweet sound of this harmonious lay About the keel delighted dolphins play was the year of the publication of the first folio of Shakespeare, that it was seven years only after his death and seven more before the birth of Dryden, that Milton was a boy at school, that Drayton, Jonson, Chapman were alive and to be so for many years more, that Fletcher was not dead and Cowley a child of five years old, the thing is certainly surprising enough. Waller was to live sixty-four years longer, nor was his life unevent- ful. He increased his wealth by marrying a city heiress, who died very soon, and is said only in his widower state to have begun to court Lady Dorothy Sidney, — '• Sacharissa," — who would not have him. '•Amoret" is said by a less confident tradition to have been Lady Sophia Murray. He actually married a lady of less distinguished position, by whom he had many children. His fortune naturally opened Parliament to him, but his political career was not fortunate or creditable. In the Short Parliament he was an active member of the Opposition. In the Long, though he was a relation of Hampden, he became somewhat less antagonistic to the court, and though he continued to sit after the final breach, was in a m?inntr persona gm/a to Charles, with whom he was sent to negotiate. Had what is known as Waller's Plot — for the details of whicli we must refer to history — succeeded, or had he shown more fortitude at its failure. Waller's name might have been at least as favourably known in historical as in poetical records. Unluckily, on the plot's discovery and his own arrest he confessed everything in regard to himself, informed against others, urged them to do the like, was at least part cause of the execution of his own brother-in-law Tomkyns, and himself escaped with life, exile, a fine of ten thousand pounds, and a hopelessly damaged reputation, which was not much mended l)y his making his peace with Cromwell, his kinsman and the subject of one of his best poems. As he had wit and wealth he was welcome at 4o8 • CAROLINE LITERATURE BOOK VII Whitehall after the Restoration, sat in several Parliaments, and only missed the Provostship of Eton (for which he asked) because he was ineligible as a layman. He survived Charles IL, is said to have given his infatuated successor good advice, and died in 1687. Waller, as his own age would have said, wrote poetry like a gentleman ; that is to say, he neither published often nor attempted anything of great magnitude, but his very early beginnings and his very long life enabled him to put together a considerable poetical baggage. We have noticed his first couplet poem ; it was followed by others, of which the chief are that on the Duke of Buckingham's death, which is quite in Dryden's earlier manner forty years later ; a batch of complimentary poems to persons of the court of Charles I. from the Queen downward ; another, written at Penshurst and full of the " Sacharissa " affair ; the Battle of the Summer Islands (Waller's longest poem except the later Divine Love, and like it remarkable for the extreme shortness of the cantos, which contain only a few score lines each) ; and the Instructions to a Painter, on the fighting at sea in 1665. The panegyric on the Protector is in the quatrain, being written at the time when Gondibert {vide infra) had made that form fashionable, but the quatrains are merely pairs of couplets, and are not the equal of Dryden's somewhat later "heroic stanzas" on Cromwell's death, still less of Annus Mirabilis. Of the smaller lyrics, which, like his "reform of our numbers," made Waller's reputation with his own time, one, "Go. Lovely Rose," is universally known, and with the almost equally popular " On a Girdle " forms an almost sufficient sample for judgment. As was said above, Waller's muse always presents herself in irreproachable condition, not a curl out of place, not a spot or crease on her dress, the colours chosen with sufficient taste, tlie arrangement made with sufficient skill. Only, some critics think her features insignificant and her ex- pression quite devoid of air and fire. Once or twice, indeed, the spirit of lyric verse and of intense though fantastic poetry which was still abroad does descend on Waller, as in the famous comparison between Sacharissa and Amoret (" Sacharissa's beauty's wine," etc.), and better still in the really magnificent image (proving the truth of its own sentiment, for it seems to occur in his last work) — The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made. Not often was Waller so happily metaphysical. As something general was said of Milton's influence on the course of poetry, so we must also consider briefly the influence of these his contemporaries in a direction different indeed from his, but so far to be connected with it that they too were innovating, and were innovat- CHAP. I BLANK VERSE AND THE NEW COUPLET 409 ing in directions to be followed afar and freely by their poetical successors. A good deal has been written on the exact origin of this change in poetry from varied and rather loose measures to the tight, neat, heroic couplet — French influence being the point most hotly contested. It is undeniable that the court of Henry IV. did exercise certain j,^^ influences on that of James I., and that in the former, "reform of under Malherbe and Balzac respectively, the tide was """^ ""™ "^' turning from ornate and fantastic standards of verse and prose to more correct and more frigid models. But the phenomenon is much more one of coincidence than of imitation, though it is impossible to deny that the change had begun and been very conspicuous in France long before the earliest experiments of Waller. That poet, according to his own account, found his chief predecessor in Fairfax (see p. 357, afite) ; more recently an ancestor has been found for him in George Sandys,^ his senior at least. To insist, however, too curiously or too peremptorily on either connection would be only to vary the mistake in regard to French influence. In most cases literary changes are not initiated by any one person, or even by any one country. They are in the air. the wind scatters the seeds of them, and they spring up more or less simultaneously, and even with a certain appearance of spontaneity. Only later, when some very commanding genius gives them a home, as here in the case of Dryden, does deliberate imita- tion play a large part in their diffusion. Generally, the preference for and practice of the couplet may be said to be only one more instance of the eternal " see-saw," of that alternation between the plain and the ornate, between the vast and vague and the cabined and correct, which pervades the whole his- tory of literature in verse and in prose alike. In particular, the couplet accommodated itself better to the special poetical desires of the age, and still more to those which were coming to its successor. The time was ceasing (without complete knowledge that it ceased) to care for passionate and romantic narrative. Its love-poetry, though still retaining an exquisite sweetness, was sinking towards gallantry and badinage. Its leaning in didactic verse was shifting from the metaphysical and theological to the scientific and merely ethical. It was acquiring a strong craving for satire — political and other. Above all, it was becoming gradually less dreamy and more businesslike, while its critical tendencies in the lower sense were also being 1 Sandys (1577-1643), a traveller and a translator, who wrote good prose as well as verse, published rather late, translations of Ovid (1632), paraphrases of the Scriptures (1636 and later), a tragedy, Christ's Passion, etc. (cd. Hooper, 2 vols. London, 1872). Sandys uses various metres, but has a distinct and early com- mand of the couplet. 4IO CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii awakened. For all these purposes the stanza, the sonnet, and the other forms dearest to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans proper were extremely ill-suited. They all demanded oratorical point, clean hitting, and mathematical arrangement, for which the couplet was as well suited as the others were unapt. And though, even after nearly a century, it is difficult to get our ears to accept the fact, there is no doubt that to those surfeited with other sounds the sharp rattle, the regular tick, as it may be called, of this couplet was a grateful and agreeable change. We still have to make a positive effort to under- stand what four or five generations meant by saying that Waller had invented and Dryden perfected "harmony" and "smoothness of numbers." Mere study will indeed show us that the couplet had already acquired over these generations such a mastery that when they talked thus they were really thinking of the couplet itself only ; and no doubt the couplets of Waller, still more of Dryden, are vastly smoother and more harmonious than those of Drayton or Daniel. As for other metres, one reason why the eighteenth century was unjust is simply that it was ignorant. Except a few antiquarian students like Oldys in the first half and Warton in the second, very few men indeed in all probability had ever opened Christ's Victory or Philarefe, the songs of Campion or the sonnets of his contemporaries. Good wits who read Spenser did like him ; though it is clear, even from their imitations, that they had lost the key to his true music, that it was in more senses than one out of time to them. Great harm has been done in literary 'history, and much labour wasted, by refusing to accept facts of this kind, and persevering in a fruitless and too often misleading attempt to get behind them, to account for them. Simple acceptance, not from pusillanimity or laziness, but in a wise passive- ness, is the best attitude, and nowhere more so than here. CHAPTER II THE METAPHYSICALS — THE LYRIC POETS — THE MISCELLANISTS, ETC. Meaning of the term "metaphysical" — Crashaw — George Herbert — Vaughan — Herrick — Carevv — Randolph — Habington — Cartwright — Corbet — Suck- ling — Lovelace — Cleveland and others — Marvell — Bishop King — Sher- burne, Godolphin, Stanley, Cotton, Brome — Quarles, More, Beaumont — Davenant — Chamberlayne— Miscellanies It may seem unreasonable to have noticed the two most famous and characteristic of the school of poets whom Johnson dubbed meta- physical — namely, Donne and Cowley — before devoting any special explanation to that word and to the thing which it was intended to denote; but there are good reasons for the postponement. In the first place, Donne is anterior by nearly a whole generation to those who are usually classed with him ; he was some forty years older than Cowley, and it is probable that he wrote next to none of his characteristic work after Cowley was born. The lumping of the two together, and of both with others, has led to the most grotesque blunders, such as that which Wordsworth makes in representing Donne's style as a decadence and reaction from that of men who were actually younger than himself. In the second place, Cowley, though undoubtedly one of the chiefs of the school that Johnson meant to portray, is, as has been seen, but half a metaphysical, and has a common-sense face as well as a fantastic one. The very term " metaphysical " has been quarrelled with, and not quite unjustly, but there is also some justice in itself. We must not understand " metaphysical" here in its strict philosophical sense, nor in that of Shakespeare's "metaphysical aid" (that is to Mciningof say, "supernatural"), nor, of course, in that accidental " mc't.iphy'si- one which is said to have originated the actual word. But '••>'•" it is not inappropriately used for the habit, common to this school of poets, of always seeking to express something after, something be- hind, the simple, obvious first sense and suggestion of a subject. 411 412 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii Johnson has indeed not made so much of his term as he might ; for he himself only attributes to his " metaphysicals," as their differ- entia, learning, with a kind of misplaced wit, and the desire to say something that had never been said before. The metaphysical Caroline school had all these things, but these things were not peculiar to them. The Euphuists, in fact, had had them all. But until them- selves the quest after the remote, the search for the after-sense, for contingent and secondary suggestion, had been less marked. The Elizabethan "conceit" is very near it; you may find the meta- physical spirit (as indeed what may you not?) in Shakespeare. But between 1630 and 1660, with a certain belated set of appearances later still, this metaphysical tendency employed almost all poetry except that of Milton, whose intensity melted and transformed this as other peculiarities. Butler is a metaphysical humourist, Chamber- layne a metaphysical romance-writer, Herbert and Vaughan meta- physicals in spiritual poetry, Herrick and Carew, with all their minor train, metaphysical amorists of the decorative kind. Crashaw is perhaps the chief metaphysical, the type of the whole class ; Cleve- land, Flatman, Wild, and others belated and feeble laggards in the style. And this style is so much interwoven with the practice of the set of poets often called Cavalier Lyrists that it is difficult to dis- entangle the two. All, no doubt, owed much to that mighty influence of Donne, which was so strangely disconnected from any publication of his work. But Donne himself is metaphysical in the greater and wider sense. His thoughts, even his conceits, are never far-fetched, because his immense and brooding imagination reaches to them all without the trouble of fetching. The others have to fetch them ; they could in some cases hardly go farther, they could in many hardly fare worse. Let us therefore, for the sake of order and classification, make divisions in the abundant group of poets we have before us. Let us take the three great sacred metaphysicals, Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan, first ; then pass to the lyric group, Herrick, Carew, Habing- ton, Lovelace, Suckling, and others; next notice the three, oddly contrasted, of the Commonwealth, Davenant, Chamberlayne, and Butler ; and lastly give some account of the innumerable and curious collections of songs, ballads, and the like which succeed the Eliza- bethan miscellanies, and serve with less breach than in any other department of verse as a connecting chain between the poetry of the sixteenth century and the verse of the eighteenth. Richard Crashaw,^ who, if he could but have kept himself at his own best, would have been one of the greatest of English poets, was 1 See Chalmers. Also ed. Grosart, 2 vols, privately printed, 1872. CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 413 born in London either in 161 6 or, as has been made more probable, in 161 2. He was the son of a clergyman, whose extremely Puritan leanings may, as often happens, account for Crashaw's • Crsshaw subsequent inclination in the opposite direction. Richard was educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, where his college, Peterhouse, was as much the centre of High Church teaching and feeling as Emmanuel was of Puritanism. He refused the Covenant in 1644, was deprived of his Fellowship, and went abroad, quickly joining the Church of Rome. He died at Loretto, where he had been appointed canon, in 1650, and there were rumours that he was poisoned. Some of his poems were published during his lifetime, others in a posthumous edition, and a certain amount of matter certainly, probably, or possibly his has been added since from MS. But his best work in English (he was a pretty Latin poet, and is said to have been the author of a well-known conceit on the miracle of Cana, while he certainly wrote an elegant fancy on the '• Bubble ") has been known for two centuries and a half. Crashaw's poetry, more almost than any other in English, must underlie different and nearly irreconcilable judgments, according as the judge insists upon measure, order, and the steady working out of central ideas in poetry, or prefers casual and irregular bursts of expression and fancy. Pope, who rather liked him, expressed a typical judgment from the first point of view, the terms of which undoubtedly suggested Johnson's criticism of the whole metaphysical school. To the great apostle of correctness, '' all that regards design, form, fable, which is the soul of poetry, all that concerns exactness or consent of parts, which is the body," seemed wanting in Crashaw ; only "pretty conceptions, fine metaphors, stuttering e.x- pressions, and something of a neat cast of verse — which are properly the gems, dress, or loose ornaments of poetry " — are to be found in him and in his likes, who should be considered as versifiers and witty men rather than as poets. We may formulate a judgment from the extreme opposite point in very similar words ; for those who take it would doubtless say that in passionate conception (which is the soul of poetry) and harmonious metrical expression (which is its body) Cra- shaw is at his best very nearly supreme, while he need only be found wanting in bulk and arrangement of plan, orderly management of means, and self-criticism, which, though useful adjuncts to poetry, are common to it with all literature, and do not usually affect its special excellence. The right way, as usual, will be between the.se two extremes, but very much nearer to the standpoint of our anony- mous enthusiast than to that of Pope. By far the greater part of Crashaw\s work is devoted to sacred subjects, but some of his best and prettiest, if not his most sublime, pieces are secular. The best 414 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vil of these is the well-known IVishes to his Supposed Mistress, a decidedly whimsical but infinitely graceful thing ; and a version from the Italian beginning — To thy lover, Dear, discover. But it must by no means be inferred that Crashaw was only master of this exquisite trifling, and of the frail skipping measures that best suit it. He was at least an equal adept in Pindarics, and in the stateliest form of the contemporary couplet; and his noblest poems are composed in measures of this kind. They are also entirely devoted to religious subjects. Not indeed that this class of subject was, by or in itself, at all a guarantee of unmixed excellence in Cra- shaw. His very worst things — things as bad as can be found in the wide and various range of metaphysical absurdity — occur in the poem The Weeper, on St. Mary Magdalen, which unluckily stands in the forefront of his works. The eyes of the penitent are "sister springs, Parents of silver-forded rills"; they are "thawing crystal heavens of ever-falling stars"; their tears being "the cream of the milky way," cherubs sip of them, and their liquid is bottled by angels for new guests of heaven. Further, the eyes are the hour- glasses of time ; " walking baths, compendious oceans " ; " fertile mothers of simpering sons." Common sense may almost be excused if it is indignant and disgusted at these frigid ardours, these fustian imitations of brocade. Yet if we turn from this to The Flaming Heart, a poem in honour of St. Theresa, and to a hymn addressed to the same Saint, we shall find, though still the same pomp and prodigality of imagery, nothing frigid, nothing fustian, but an ever growing and glowing splendour of sentiment and diction, which culminates, in the first named of the two pieces, in the most unerring explosion of passionate feeling to be found in English, perhaps in all poetry. Crashaw often translated, sometimes from very second-rate models like Marino and Strada. He can be made, though by some- thing of a garble, the awful example of the style. But he as certainly displays its most splendid capabilities. An infinitely more popular poet than Crashaw, and certainly a more equable, though at the best of both Crashaw towers over him, was George Herbert,^ a member of the noble Norman-Welsh family of that name, and brother of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. HerbTt. He was born at Montgomery Castle on 13th April '593' went to Cambridge, became Fellow of Trinity in 1615, and Public Orator four years later, at the early age of twenty- six. He held the place for eight years with great distinction, though 1 Many editions. The " Aldine " was revised by Dr. Grosavt (London, 1890). CHAP. 11 THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 415 he was charged with the fault of haughtiness, and seems to have looked forward to a political career. But something led him to the course of saintly life as a country clergyman, latterly at Bemerton, near Salisbury, which he pursued for six years, till his early death in 1632. His verse (almost entirely included in the well-known collection called The Temple, which made Crashaw call his Steps to the Tonple) was not published till after his death, but very soon after, for though the date of the first edition is 1633, there are undated copies which seem to have been distributed in the previous year. The Temple con- sists of 160 pieces, arranged partly with a fancy of reference to the structural arrangement of a church, beginning with " The Porch " ; partly under the heads of the great festivals and services ; often under quite fantastic titles, "The Quip," "The Pulley," and so forth. There is no prevailing metre — couplets, stanzas, and regular and irregular lyrical forms being chosen as may best suit the poet's purpose, while occasionally he will even condescend, as in " Easter Wings," to that device of adjusting his verse lengths to artificial patterns which excited almost more horror than ridicule in the eighteenth century. And the note of fantasy is at least as much present in idea and in diction, though Herbert seldom pushes either to very extravagant lengths. In the "Church Porch," which is a string of ethical and religious maxims, tliis fantasy does not often pass beyond the almost proverbial imagery to which we are accustomed in such connections. But in the more abstract and doctrinal poems Herbert gives himself a much wider range, and ransacks art and nature for quaint similes, sometimes worked out in the fashion of the emblem-poetry then so popular. The Game of Bowls ; the real or fancied properties of the orange tree ; the Palace of the World, with Wisdom sweeping away its cobwebs. Pleasure adorning it with balconies. Sin splitting the walls with stealthy fig-tree growth, Grace shoring them, and Death throwing them down ; the imaginary peculiarities of the crocodile and elephant — Herbert presses all these and a myriad more into his service. Yet the unaffected piety, and perhaps still more the perfect charity, of his tone, his abstinence from anything like strife and crying, the heavenly peace that pervades him, have made his work tolerated by many who are not as a rule very tolerant of conceits. As a poet he is certainly not the equal of either Crashaw or Vaughan, and in his own quiet fashion he has in the present century been equalled by Keble and surpassed by Miss Christina Rossetti. He very seldom transports : the throb of response to the highest and happiest thoughts and expressions of the poets is very uncommon in reading him ; his is an cqual;le merit, a soothing and healthful pleasure, rather than the dazzling excellence, the contagious rapture, of the great ones. But he can never be mentioned with contempt 4i6 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii by any one who loves poetry, and he undoubtedly holds a high place among those who have attempted the exceedingly difficult task of sacred verse. If his successes are never so great as those of some others, it is -hardly too much to say that he never fails with the maddening failure too common in religious poets, and this is in itself a great thing. The contrast between Crashaw and Herbert is repeated in that between Herbert and Vaughan,^ but with certain variations. Henry Vau«^han — " Silurist," as he called himself, from the seat of his family in South Wales, " Swan of Usk," Olor Iscanus, from aug an. ^^ river on whose banks he lived — was born in or about 1622, at a place called Newton, St. Bridget. He and his twin brother Thomas (a poet likewise and a diligent writer on occult and "Hermetic" subjects) went to Jesus College, Oxford. He seems to have begun the study of law in London, but to have turned to that of medicine. He may have actually served in the Royalist forces during the Rebellion, and was certainly a strong partisan of the King's cause. He retired quietly to Brecon during the usurpation and there practised physic. Hardly anything is known of his long life. He may have had two wives ; he certainly had one, who survived him at his death, on St. George's Day, 1695. He was. the last of the Caroline school proper. His poetry as originally published is contained in four volumes — Poems, chiefly secular, in 1646; Silex Schttillans,h\s principal book, and wholly sacred, in 165 1 ; Olor Iscanus, also sacred, a year later; and Thalia Rediviva, many years afterwards, in 1678, which returns to the secular. There is no doubt (we have his word for it, and without his word there could not be any) that Vaughan was greatly influenced in all the more remarkable part of his work by Herbert, whose poems were published twenty years before Silex Scintillaiis. The relation between the two men is altogether that of master and pupil, but in divers ways. Often Vaughan copies Herbert directly. But the spirit of the two was different and resulted differently. Vaughan is not more or less pious than Herbert, but his piety is much more mystical ; his thoughts are deeper and farther brought. And his expression is much less equable. He is seldom fantastic to frigidity, but he is often meditative to dulness. He never disgusts, but he sometimes tires, because he has not cared, or has not been able, to give his thought clear poetic expression. 1 The Poems of Vaughan, after being completely accessible only in one of Dr. Grosart's privately printed editions, have been at last edited by Mr. E. K. Chambers in two volumes of " The Muses' Library " (London, 1896) . The Sacred Poems were provided long since in the Aldine series (ed. Lyte, often reprinted), and there is an edition of the Secular Poems by J. R. Tutin (Hull, 1893). CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 417 There was no real reason on the moral side for the compunc- tion which Vaughan, late in life, expressed for his early secular poems. But as a profane poet he has nothing above the average of dozens of half or wholly forgotten versifiers of his time, and is often below that average. His love-poems to Amoret and Etesia are sometimes pretty, though never distinguished ; and in octosyllables, where he chiefly follows the manner of Jonson, he is at about his happiest. His decasyllabic couplets are, as Mr. Chambers has justly observed, based on Donne, and on the worst part of Donne, the designedly crabbed form of the Satires and some of the Epistles. It is as the author of the Silex Scintillans that Vaughan holds his place. And the title itself, which is explained by the frontispiece — a heart of flint burning and bleeding under the stroke of a thunderbolt from a cloud — is appropriate in more than the pious sense. At times there is in Vaughan genuine blood and fire ; but it is by no means always, or even very often, that the flint is kindled and melted to achieved expression. His most famous and successful things, ''They are all gone into a world of light " ; " The World," with its magnifi- cent opening — I saw Eternity the other night Like a great ring of pure and endless light All calm as it was bright; " The Retreat," with its suggestion of Wordsworth's great ode ; " The Storm," with its intensely realised imagery; the quaint and pleasant piece beginning, " I walked the other day to spend my hour " ; the beautiful "Joy"; "The Garland," with its wonderfully .striking picture of youthful delusions, and the sharp turn, " I met with a dead man. Who thus to me began " ; " The Waterfall," with its Miltonic richness and appropriateness of epithet, and a marvellous adaptation of sound to sense — these and some other things are not merely in company unworthy of them as far as the achieved expression goes, but are even for the most part unworthy of themselves. But this inequality of expression is redeemed by the almost constant presence of a rare and precious tone of thought. The great age of the Church of England finds in Vaughan, at his best, its best poetical exponent. He stops short of the almost maudlin intoxication with divinity which carried Crashaw out of the Church altogether, and he far transcends the decent piety of Herbert. The pair chosen to follow this trio is in general character strangely contrasted with it. though a certain bridge of transition exists in Herrick's "Divine" poems. Both Hcrrick and Carew are far greater artists than any of the three just mentioned. But despite of tliis and of the fact that their temper is far more mundane, they are still alike. 2E 4i8 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vn Robert Herrick,* who belonged to a good Leicestershire stock, rather remarkably connected with literature through Quarles, Dryden, ^, . , and Swift as well as through himself, was born in London in 1 59 1. His father, Nicholas Herrick, a goldsmith, died very shortly afterwards by falling out of window. Robert was left subject to the guardianship of his uncle, a rich member of his father's trade, and by an accident, rare with men of letters of the time, we have some letters exchanged between ward and guardian, when the former was at Cambridge. Here he was a member, first of St. John's College, then of Trinity Hall, and it is thought that he had gone to the first-named from Westminster School. But despite these letters we still do not know much of him. He took his M.A. in 1620, when he was nearly thirty years old, and apparently orders in 1629, when he was not far from forty — an entrance into the Church nearly as late as Donne's, and even less accounted for. At any rate, in the year mentioned, he was presented to the living of Dean Prior on the skirts of Dartmoor, at which he rails much, and which he occupied till the triumph of the Parliament drove him out. His two books oi v&rst, A'oble Numbers (1647) and Hesperides (1648), are differently dated but appeared together. There is absolutely no mention of him from this time till 1662, when he was restored to Dean Prior; and again there is none till his death and burial in October 1674, at the age of more than eighty. Moreover, though gossip about men of letters was just beginning, there is a strange silence about Herrick. The two great chatterers of the time, Howell and Aubrey, never mention him, though the former at least must have been sometimes, probably often, in his company, as both were "sons" of Ben. The Sessions of the Poets and other literary comments of his day pass him by ; his work, contrary to the almost universal habit of the time, had no commendatory verses prefixed to it, and it seems to have remained almost unnoticed till the end of the last century. Since its recovery, however, there have been natural diversities of opinion, justified to some extent by the admixture of bad and good which it contains. The two divisions together contain rather more than fourteen hundred poems, to which a few doubtful pieces from miscellanies or MSS. have to be added. No one extends to more than a few pages, and most do not exceed a few lines. They fall naturally into three classes : epigrams imitating Jonson, offensively personal in tone and coarse in diction, with but seldom a grain of 1 Herrick, neglected from his own day till the end of the last century, has been repeatedly reprinted in the present. The latest editions are those by' Mr. Pollard in " The Muses' Library " (2 vols. London, 1891) and by the present writer in the " Aldine Poets " (2 vols. London, 1893). CHAP. 11 THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 419 real wit to keep them tolerably sweet ; Divine Poems of wonderful beauty at their best, which best is expressed by the " Litany to the Holy Spirit " and ''The White Island"; and lastly, an immense residue of secular poems, amatory, descriptive, occasional in the widest possible sense. It is on these last that the fame of Herrick really rests, and it is securely based. The Julia of the universally known " Night Piece " — " And when I meet, Thy silvery feet, My soul Til pour into thee " — is only one of a group of perhaps real, perhaps imaginary, mistresses — Althea, Electra, Perilla, Dianeme, and others — to whom the most exquisitely phrased love-poems are devoted ; the country sports and scenes (though he despised them), such as the " hock-cart," the maying, and the like, find the same celebration ; his maid Patience, his bread- bin, the daffodils, violets, primroses, cherry-blossoms, the very grass itself, find in him a singer, and he can be more ambitious and ab- stracted, as in the " Mad Maid's Song " and other things. But the subject of Herrick's verse never matters very much : it is the exquisite^ quality of his phrase an d his " number s " that exalts him to aplace^ all his owiT. "^ 'TTiTs' quality beggars definition, and is perhaps the greatest'justification in English literature of the " theory of the single word " — that one special word is the right thing in the right literary place, and that if you do not get it •' all's spent, nought's had." No one has ever been quite certain what the word " Protestant " means in the celebrated verse beginning, " Bid me to live and I will live, Thy Protestant to be " ; yet every one who knows poetry feels that " Protestant " could not be changed for any other word without loss ; and this is only an extreme and obvious case. In all his famous things, which a hundred anthologies have made known, and in others less divulged, this absolute and unerring perfection of word-selection appears. The thoughts are sometimes trivial, sometimes~Tiul ; but the expression gives them at once the freshness of the morning dew and the perennial character of marble. Herrick's images are not as a rule out of the way ; his mere vocabulary is, for his time and class, quite ordinary for the most part. But the choice and the collocation make it something absolutely unique. The art of Thomas Carew,^ narrower in range, much more spar- ingly exemplified, and more artificial in appearance, is of much the .same kind. Many details of his life are problematical, but he was certainly of a Gloucestershire or Worcestershire branch of the great western family of Carew or Carey, was per- haps born in Kent, perhaps went to Westminster School, and perhaps 1 Ed. Ebsworth, London, 1893. Like most of the poets in tliis chapter, Herrick and Vaughan l)oing ttic main exceptions, Carew is in the great collections of Anderson and Chahncrs. 420 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii thence to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. The University though not the College is certain, as also that he was known to most of the wits, especially the Oxford set of Falkland and Hyde, that he was Sewer (marshal of the dishes) to Charles L, that he was a "son" of Ben's. He died in or about 1638. Most other things about him are guesswork, but it is the merest uncritical partisanship to neglect or slight the testimony of his admiring friend Clarendon, that his life had been somewhat licentious, though his death was the death of the penitent. A masque of his. Caelum Britanni- cum, which is not unworthy to be ranked with Ben's all but best, had been published in 1634; but Carew's Poems appeared posthu- mously in 1640, and they did not include divers paraphrases of Psalms which are of no great value — a sentence which extends to divers attributed poems, fished out from MSS. or other sources by recent diligence. The volume of 1640, small as it is, still contains his titles to fame. This volume is small, and the contemporary malevolence or jest which attributed " hide-boundness " to Carew's muse was not subject to any such complete contradiction as Johnson's characterisation of Fielding as a " barren rascal." But the titles are indisputable. The best, — the "Persuasions to Love," to A. L., — with its at first play- ful octosyllables rising to a panting throb of passion seldom equalled ; the song, characteristic of Caroline triumph in such things, " Give me love or more disdain " ; the still more splendid " To my Incon- stant Mistress " — " When thou, poor excommunicate " ; the indig- nant and manly expostulation, " I was foretold, your rebel sex " ; the inferior but very pretty " He that loves a rosy cheek " ; the second " To Celia Singing " ; " Red and White Roses," with two or three other things the pattern-piece of the author ; the audacious but also admirable " Rapture " ; the beautiful group of epitaphs on Lady Mary Villers ; the stately elegy on Donne, so generous and yet so just ; and, to finish with what all admit, the splendid " Ask me no more" — these things by no means exhaust, but put at perhaps their very best, Carew's titles to high honour as an English poet. His consummate elegance has no doubt done him harm with some judges, according to the prejudice put in the well-known verses of his " father" Ben — Still to be neat, still to be drest, and so forth. But the " Rapture," the Donne Elegy, and the " A. L." verses are there to give evidence of intensity, of real passion on his part, which at once negatives the suspicion. And if we meditate a little on such a piece as " Red and White Roses," it will be very hard to refuse its author a place, apart it may be from, the greater CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 421 summits of poetry and lower than they are, but untouched, unapproached, by any peak in its own kind. Here, as in those best pieces of Herrick which have been noticed above, there is an absolute and final felicity in the style. The poets of this Caroline age are so numerous, they are so attractive, and their attractions consist so much in little separate bits and strokes, that there is danger, more than in almost any other of our compartments, of being seduced into prolixity dis- proportionate for such a survey as this ; and we must quicken the pace with a large group of singers. The order in which they are mentioned, though a certain rough chronological arrangement may be observed, is not very material. The lyric touch, which is the strong point of nearly all, distinguishes, with only slight changes, alike men who died before Milton left for Italy, such as Randolph, and men who saw the eighteenth century, such as Sedley. Thomas Randolph,^ who will be mentioned again for his plays, was born in 1605, of a gentle family. He went to We.stminster School and was of both Universities, belonging more originally to Cambridge, where he was a Fellow of Trinity. He died when he was only thirty. He is accused of rather free ^^ °p living, but this sort of vague and stock censure of poets goes for little, and certain elegiac verses by his brother Robert, a student of Christ Church, who outlived him many years, have a more genuine ring in their eulogy than is usual in such things. Randolph's non- dramatic verse, though not very copious, is fresh, vigorous, and dis- tinctly original. It is, especially in the couplet pieces, of the older cast of his time, and in stanza or octosyllable, rather Jacobean than Caroline. His best piece, perhaps, is the " Ode to Master Anthony Stafford to hasten him into the country," a thing somewhat in Ben's style. William Habington ^ was born in the same year with Ran- dolph, at Hindlip Hall, Worcestershire. He was a Roman Catholic, and so did not go to either University, but lived as a country gentle- man, marrying Lady Lucy Herbert, and dving in 1654. „,. u 1 /. ' 1 W Ai /■ . ^ 11 .• Habington. He left one play, T/ie Queen of Arragon, and a collection of poems, the bulk of which celebrates the charms and virtues of his wife under the title-name of Castara. Friendship as well as love inspired him, and he wrote many verses on the death of his comrade, George Talbot, with a few miscellanies. Habington is creditably distin- guished from too many of his contemporaries by a very strict and remarkable decency of tliought and language, and he has some very fine passages. On llic whole, however, he ranks rather with Herbert 1 Ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 2 vols. London, 1875. 2 Ekl. Arber, and in the collection of Chalmers. 422 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vij as a poet of few faults— he has not even the excess of Herbert's quaintness — than with Crashaw as one of magnificent bursts, or with Herrick as one of constantly exquisite felicities. William Cartwright ^ was born about five years after Randolph, in 1610, and died two years before Habington, in 1643, but the date and place of his birth are disputed. He certainly spent more than . half of his short life at Oxford, where he died during the war, and five years after he had taken orders. He left plays, too, and poems, the latter fairly numerous, but mostly short and always occasional. His couplets, like Randolph's, show little of the new form and pressure ; but his lyric verses, again of the Jonson tribe, are often good, aftd sometimes excellent. The more extrava- gant side of the school is shown in the lines on "A Gentlewoman's Silk Hood," the better in the lines ''To Chloe," to Bishop Duppa, and others. Richard Corbet,^ Bishop of Oxford, and then, just before Hall, of Norwich, was a much older man than those just mentioned, having been born in 1582; but he did not attain to his chief distinctions till a few years before his death, which happened in the same year as Randolph's. He too was closely connected with Ben, and is said to have procured him his degree from Oxford. He appears to have been an interesting compound of a sound divine and a good fellow, and his poetical pieces, which are quite occasional, were probably spread over the greater part of his not very long life, though many of them date from the latter part of it. The best and most poetical, a charming address to his little son Vincent, combining humour and tenderness in the best English fashion, certainly does so, having been written in 1630. At purely serious poetry Corbet was not very great, but in lighter and satiric verse he anticipates Butler, Swift, and even Prior, as in his Iter Boreale (a title copied after- wards), his Journey itito France, and (the strongest and bitterest of all) his " Exhortation to Mr. John Hammond " and " Distracted Puritan." Moreover, he has a charming piece on Fairies. There is a certain traditional and now inseparable bond between Lovelace and Suckling. Both were unlucky Cavaliers, both illustrate the poignant charm of Cavalier poetry at its best, and both, it must be added, illustrate also the slipshod faults of this poetry Suckling. . Ti 1 . r J at Its worst. Both, moreover, give us, better than any others, the link of transition from the first to the second lyrical Caro- line School, from Herrick and Carew to Dorset and Sedley. The short life of Sir John Suckling 3 is partly mythical. He was of a good though not great family, was educated at Westminster perhaps, 1 Chalmers, vol. vi. 2 gee Chalmers. 8 Ed. W. C. Hazlitt, 2 vols. London, 1874. CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 423 and Trinity College, Cambridge, certainly became early master of a great fortune, lavished it in travel, in court frivolities, and (at the breaking out of the war with Scotland) in equipping a troop of horse who did no credit to themselves and their leader, was a strong Royalist in the Long Parliament, and had to fly to the Continent, was perhaps a victim of the Inquisition in Spain, and perhaps poisoned himself at Paris in 1642. Suckling's excess of wealth over birth, and perhaps his careless living, seem to have excited some ill- feeling against him, but there is little solid proof that he was a cowardly prodigal and fribble, and we should certainly prefer not to think the author of the "Ballad on a Wedding" anything of the kind. Besides that charming piece and his plays (see as in other cases post), with some letters, etc., he has left a parcel of poems, occasional, satirical (his Session of the Poets, which not improbably earned him his bad reputation, was constantly imitated), and above all amatory, of a curious and original kind, indicated at once in the words — There never yet was honest man Who ever drove the trade of love, upon which text the poets and play-writers dwelt with unwearying iteration for the next half-century and more. Suckling, however, though neither a refined nor a very passionate writer, does not reach the dull brutality of loveless commerce which disgraces the worst writers of the next age and too often taints the best. His is the real " elfin laughter," the true tricksiness of Cupid, which even Rochester, even Congreve, turned to sordid treachery and ribald coarseness later. Everything with Suckling turns to a ripple of merriment. '• Love's World " reads like, and perhaps is, a designed burlesque of the metaphysical altitudes. 'Tis now since I sat down before That foolish fort, a heart, is the very triumph of the style, unless Out upon it ! I have loved Three whole days together; or the universally known Why so thin and pale, fond lover? demand the preference. The poet is not always quite so frivolous ; there are poems, and good ones, of his which might pass muster as serious, but one always suspects that they are not. 424 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii Richard Lovelace ^ derives his just immortality from two or three pieces of exactly the opposite kind. He was of a better family than Suckling, but like him very wealthy, being the heir to Sfreat estates in Kent. He was born at Woolwich in 1618, educated at Charterhouse and at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, was prevented from taking part in the Civil War by being committed to tbe Gatehouse and held to enormous bail in 1642, but contrived to help the King's cause with much money, fought abroad at Dunkirk and elsewhere, and returning to England in 1648, was again imprisoned. He was released, but as a ruined man, and he died in Gunpowder Alley, Shoe Lane, two years before the Restoration. Meanwhile his beloved Lucy Sacheverall — " Lucasta " — had married another under the belief that he was dead, and Lovelace, one of the handsomest men of his time, beloved by all, rich, well-born, and of rare abihties, died thus almost miserrifnus. He published Lucasta in 1649, and ten years later a brother added Posthuvious Poems. He wrote plays, but they perished. The greater part of his work is worthless, and some of it almost unintelligible, owing to the strange decay which came on verse about this time, and to very careless printing. But " On Going to the Wars " and " To Althea from Prison " defy the greatest things of the greatest poets in absolute achievement of their particular purpose, and there are charming passages in "The Grasshopper." From these two mainly, and especially from Suckling, proceed a school of songsters who, as has been said, did not absolutely cease till the death of Sedley in the year after that of Dryden. Dryden himself has some claims to belong to them, but there is still a differ- ence of cast, hard to define but easy to perceive, and all his work had best be handled in the next period. Marvell, at his best almost the equal of any in this chapter, Davenant, and that remarkable isolation. Chamberlayne, may be placed apart. For our purposes the group may be composed, again in loosely chronological order, of Sherburne, Bishop King, Stanley, Godolphin, Brome, and Cotton among the school more especially of Charles I. Rochester, Dorset, Sedley, and Mrs. Behn, the more definitely Restoration group, can be postponed. To these a fringe or fringes might be added very copiously, for the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century swarmed with poets and poetasters. Of these last may be mentioned John Cleveland, who was born at Hinckley in 1613, became a Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, took refuge at Oxford with other Cambridge Cavaliers, was imprisoned under the Commonwealth, and died of fever in 1658. Cleveland is rather unfairly known by some citations of conceits in Johnson's dis- 1 Ed. W. C. Hazlitt, London, 1864. CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 425 quisition on the metaphysicals prefixed to his Life of Cowley, and he has not recently been reprinted. Even Dryden soon after the Restora- tion sneers at him ; and his name became a byword for extravagances of style. He had, however, no little vigour, and others chiefly shown in his '' State " Poems, the longest of which is a furious onslaught on the Scots for their betrayal of Charles. It is at least curious to compare his elegy on Edward King with Lycidas, and in his outrageous debauch of figure and fancy we may charitably allow a suspicion of humorous and conscious exaggeration. Wild, author of a second Iter Borcale and the sharer of Dryden's sarcasm, was a very inferior Cleveland who survived the Restoration ; Flatman, a poet and painter with an unlucky name who wrote some charming songs, and whom Pope found "good to steal from." Flecknoe, notorious for Dryden's unceremonious use of his name in his satire on Shadwell, has a fine poem on " Silence " and some other good things. Patrick Carey's Trivial Poems and Triolets (1651) are pleasant for more than their form and the fact that Scott re-edited them. But of these, as still more of Beedome and Baron, Hall and Heath and Hooke, Tatham and Kynaston, Prestwich and Shepherd, no account in any detail can be given here.^ The life of Andrew Marvell - and his work both fall into two sharply divided and curiously contrasted sections. In the first he is a quiet student, a passionate lyrical poet of love and nature, and if of Puritan leanings and surroundings, gently inclined to what is noble in tlie other side ; in the second he is, perhaps an austere patriot, certainly a violent politician, and poetically a ferocious lampooner in rough couplets. We may confine our- selves here to his earlier, and as literature better, period. He was born in 1621 at Winestead, not far from Hull, and went early to Cambridge, where he took his Bachelor's but not his Master's degree. He seems to have travelled a good deal, but we find him in 1649 at home, contributing to the collection of elegies on Lord Hastings which saw Dryden's first work, and being the friend of Richard Lovelace. Indeed, the splendid lines on the execution of Charles I., and others, show him as at least partly Royalist at this time. In 1650, however, Fairfax made him his daughter's tutor, and for this reason or that IVIarveil seems to have changed his politics. He was long resident with his young pupil at Nun Appleton, in Yorkshire, and wrote there much of his most delightful verse. 1 For Cleveland I use Cleveland' s Genuine Poems, 1677 ; for Wild, the edition of 1671 ; for Fl.itman, the third edition, ^682. These and the rest liave been cruelly extruded from Mr. Ward's Poets, but Specimens of most, if not all, may be found in lillis, vol. iii., and Campbell, vol. iv., as well as in Mr. BuUen's privately printed Speculum Amantis and Musa Protcrva. 2 Ed. Aitken, 3 vols. London, 1892. 426 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii Becoming an admirer of Cromwell and a friend of Milton, he entered Parliament even before the Restoration, and sat for Hull till his death in 1678.. For some years he was abroad doing diplomatic work, but latterly he fell more and more into Opposition. His best, and indeed his only really, poetical work was done before he had reached middle life, and exhibits, with a form individual and in a type more chastened and classical, the best characteristics of the Cavalier poets. The exquisite octosyllables of the long poem on " Appleton House," and the shorter and still better known ones on '' The Bermudas " and " The Nymph regretting the loss of her Fawn," unite Jonson's art with Herrick's grace. "The Coronet," in style between Crashaw and Vaughan, is free from the rococo ornament of the first and the tongue-tied inequality of the second ; the passionate magnificence of the Amorists, whom Milton so tastelessly scorned, has no nobler examples than "To his Coy Mistress," and still more " The Definition of Love," with its splendid beginning — My love is of a birth as rare ' As 'tis for object, strange and high — It was begotten of Despair Upon Impossibility ; and the majesty in style of the " Horatian Ode " (to Cromwell, but containing the lines on his victim) is among the noblest and most individual of the kind in English. Nor can it be said that Marvell, like most of his school and time, wrote unequally ; so that it is only curious that he did not write more. But perhaps it is not fanciful to argue that the peculiar and indeed unique perfection of phrase charac- terising the best poetry of this period involved a kind of mental effort of gestation which could not be repeated very often, and which obliged the poet to be either unequal or else infertile. Henry King,^ a typical poet of this period (who is likely to keep his place in English literature by at least one exquisite piece of love- verse, " Tell me no more how fair she is," and by a part claim to " Like to the falling of a star," one of those sets of verses which so caught the fancy of the time that they exist in many different forms and are attributed as originally the work of more than two different men), was born at Worminghall in Bucks in 1592, was educated at Westminster and Christ Church, received preferment early (his father was Bishop of London), but justified it both by abilities and virtues, was the friend of Jonson, Donne, whose executor he was, and Howell the epistoler, became Canon of Christ- church, Dean of Winchester, and Bishop of Chichester, was much despoiled and ill-treated during the Rebellion, but recovered his see 1 Ed. (incompletely) by Rev. J. Hannah, Oxford and London, 1843. CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 427 at the Restoration, and died in 1669. His poems were partly- published in 1657. The influence of his great friend Donne is obvious, and though King had not anything like Donne's strength or the strangeness of his charm, yet " Tell me no more how fair she is " is perfect in its kind. Of the five Cavalier poets ^ mentioned together above, most were actively engaged in the war, or at least active members of the Royalist party. Edward Sherburne, afterwards knighted, and the son of a knight of the same name, was born in London in 1618, was educated abroad (he was a Roman Catholic), GJ,d''oiph"n'^ and became clerk of the Ordnance, but lost his place Stanley, ' and his liberty in 1642. On his release he joined the Brome! King's army, but chiefly studied at Oxford till the triumph of the Parliament, when he lost all his property. He recovered his Ordnance post at the Restoration, but lost it as a Roman. Catholic at the Revolution, and did not die till 1702. Much of his not extensive poetical work is translated from authors and languages ancient and modern. His originals, reminding us of Carew on the profane side, of Crashaw on the sacred, have sufficient charm of their own, yet perhaps never show quite at the best of the style. Thomas Stanley, a cousin of Sherburne's, has kept remembrance better as the author of the first English History of Philosophy, and as the editor of an excellent edition of Aeschylus, than as a poet, but, as was not uncommon at the time, great and genuine learning by no means extinguished poetry in him. He was the son of a rich man, and though a strong Royalist, does not seem to have 'been much incommoded. He was born in 1624, educated at Pembroke College, Oxford, and died in 1678, having lived chiefly in the Temple. He sang mainly of love, and well. Another of the group, Sidney Godolphin, uncle of the future Lord Treasurer, and himself celebrated by Clarendon, had the good fortune to die young and gloriously fighting in Hopton's triumphant campaign at Chagford in 1642. He was not much over thirty at his death, having been born in 1610. He had entered Exeter College. Oxford, at fourteen, and with Trevanion, Slanning, and Sir Bevil Grenvil, was the flower of the Cavaliers of the West. He, like his friends, was both translator and original writer, and though his work is not great in bulk, le has the ineffable ring of the time in many more places than this : — Oh love me less or love me more, And play not with my liberty; Either take all or all restore, Bind me at least, or set me free. 1 Sherburne, Cotton, and Brome are in Chalmers. 428 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii Brome and Cotton were of somewhat less limited production, but also of a less rare style. Alexander Brome (to be distinguished from Richard, the playwright, whose plays he edited) was a Londoner and an attorney. He was born in 1620 and died in 1666. It does not appear that he took any active part for the King, but very many of the songs and lampoons by which the Cavaliers kept up their spirits between Rebellion and Restoration are attributed to him ; he has Izaak Walton's good word, which could have been given to no bad man ; and some of his light and careless ditties have the true vein of jovial and not ignoble song. If he is sometimes coarse, he stopped far short of the unpleasant excesses of others in that direction, and there is tenderness in his love-poems, fire in his Bacchanalia, sincerity in his political songs, and wit, whim, and spirit everywhere. Charles Cotton of Beresford Hall, Staffordshire, is known to most people as Walton's colleague and pupil in the Complete Aiigler ; to some as the author of the admirable " New Year Poem," admired by Lamb ; to a few as the writer of many other pleasant verses, including the last rondemix that English saw for a century ; and to fewer still, it may be hoped, by the unworthy following of Scarron and Butler combined, called Virgil Travestie. As a prose writer he is kept in some memory by his translation of Montaigne, though it was not in the least wanted after Florio. His original poems, very numerous, very unequal, and often very slight, are sometimes at least very happy. Hardly one of the authors as yet mentioned in this chapter was voluminous ; we must now turn to those of their time who were. Butler, though really of it, is so mixed up with the history of Restoration Ouarles literature that he may be postponed, Davenant, Quarles, More, ' Chamberlayne, More, and Beaumont must find place. eaumon . Yowx of these Writers, very popular in their time, are now merely curiosities, the fifth has never been much known, but was a writer of singular talent. The most voluminous of all was Francis Quarles,^ who was born of a good Essex family near Romford, in 1592, was a member of Christ's College, Cambridge, and of Lincoln's Inn, and held divers appointments in court, city, and the lay offices of the Church. He just survived the breaking out of the Rebellion, and died in 1644. His work is enormous: he would versify anything from the Arcadia to the Lamentations. Little of his is now remembered except his famous Emblems; and he wrote prose, of which again nothing survives in the general memory but the Enchiridion. There are good things in Quarles ; but it requires a great deal of leisure to find them out, and they are 1 Quarles is reprinted in three, Beaumont in two, and More in one, of the quarto volumes of Dr, Grosart's privately printed " Cliertsey Worihies' Library." CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 429 so fragmentary as hardly to be capable of separate representation. Henry More and Joseph Beaumont carried the dubious Spenserianism of the Fletchers yet farther by writing immense poems on philosophical theology. More's enormous Song of the Snul in Spenserians, and even Beaumonfs more enormous Psyche in sixains, are not to be spoken of without respect, the first being certainly the work of a man who had poetry in him. But the choice of subject in each case was problematical, the choice of scale in both fatal. The middle of the century saw two other long poems of much more human interest. Both were the work of ardent Cavaliers ; both deserted alike the classical epic and the allegorical romance for a novel kind of story founded, no doubt, in each case (though the fact has not been always recognised) on the French heroic novel, but treated with independence. One, however, distinctly anticipated the change of taste which was coming, and was, either for that reason or because of its author's busy and not unamiable character, immediately, widely, and for some time popular. The other, except in scheme and subject, looked backward, and seems to have been almost entirely neelected. These are the Gondibert of Sir William Davenant and the Pharonnida of William Chamberlayne. Davenant 1 was born at Oxford in 1605, the son of an innkeeper, but had some connection with Shakespeare, wrote verses (and not bad ones) on his death, and was well educated at Lincoln College. He was taken up by Lord Brooke and others, and ^ ^ Davenant. produced his tragedy of Albovine in 1628, when most of the second school of Elizabethans, and some of the first, were still living ancl writing. Ten years later he succeeded Jonson as Laureate, became a playhouse manager, and both in these capacities and as a busy servant of the King, and still worse of the Queen, fell into very bad odour with the Puritan party. He served, was capt- ured, and thrown into prison. He even seems to have been in some serious danger, but is said to have been saved by Milton, whose kindness he afterwards returned in the time of the greater poet's own peril. If the stories are true, he thus knew the three greatest men of letters (for he was later intimate with Dryden) of the three generations of the century ; and he was in more ways than one an ingenious and interesting man of letters. He was not, however, a great poet, though his miscellaneous verse is sometimes pretty, and Gondibert is not a great poem. It was written on principle, and is ushered not by the usual crowd of com- mendatory verses from anybody and nobody, but by two copies only, from the great Mr. Cowley and the great Mr. Waller, and by letters to and from Mr. Hobbes. To this last Davenant explains his 1 Gondibert, with Davenant's other poems, is to be found in Chalmers. 430 CAROLINE LITERATURE Book vii principles at great length, and Hobbes replies that he never yet saw poem that had so much shape of art, health of morality, beauty of expression, as this Gondibert (which was not finished). It is a poem in three books, each of several cantos, and some 1700 or 1800 quatrains — a form which for some time marked, and very slightly arrested, the inevitable transition from the longer stanzas to couplet and blank verse. The scene is Lombardy, and especially Verona ; the theme the affections of the hero as tending towards Rhodalind or towards Birtha, two damsels equally '* bright of blee " with fighting and other things. But the stanza is not well suited for narratives of great length, and the verse, though occasionally weighty and dignified, is too often wooden ; while, except in Birtha, there is little attempt at character. Fkaronnida^ is a very much better thing, though by no means a perfect one. Of its author little is known. He was born about 1620, practised as a physician, and died in 1689, at Shaftesbury Chamber- in Dorsetshire. He was a good Cavalier and fought at layne. ^j-^g battle of Newbury. He tells us himself that he had few literary friends. Besides Pharomiida (published in 1659, and in its author's lifetime turned into a prose romance under the title of Ero/nena), he had a year earlier published a play, Lovers Victories, which seems to have been acted twenty years after, also with its title changed. It is a somewhat confused piece (see next chapter) of the Brome and Nabbes kind, more poetical, with some very fine flashes, but not worth much as a whole. Pharomiida, on the contrary, is worth a great deal, though as far as possible from being faultless. It is difficult to agree with Camp- bell (the first of the few who have praised it) that it is "one of the most interesting stories ever told in verse," for this story, such as it is, is extremely incoherent, and the personages are mere stock romantic types — Pharonnida, a virgin in danger; her lover Argalia, a compound of Joseph, Amadis, and Hector; and so forth. Further, the ugly colloquialisms which were then invading both verse and prose — especially that ugliest "to's" for "to his," and the like — deface it. But the versification, which represents a further develop- ment from Wither and Browne, is, though too much " enjambed," often charmingly melodious ; some of the episodes — especially that at Rhodes, with the fate of Janusa, which Campbell has given, not quite completely — are of great force and interest, and above all the spirit of romance pervades the whole, while the separate phrases and passages of beauty are literally innumerable. It has five books, each in several cantos like Gondibert, and must contain from twelve to fifteen thousand verses. But it is not rash to say that of the nearly 1 3 vols. {Love's Victories is in the third) London, 1820. CHAP. II THE METAPHYSICALS AND LYRIC POETS 431 five hundred pages which contain them hardly one can be read with- out finding some notable poetic fragment, and few without finding more than one such thing as we may search the whole poetry of the eighteenth century with little chance of paralleling. The Miscellanies and Song-books of the Elizabethan period proper continued, through its Jacobean and Caroline appendices, in slightly changed fashions, which must be at least glanced at here. The books of this class may be best divided into two varieties cellanies which often crossed each other. The ballad, ^ the rise of which was sketched formerly, received especial attention during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and certain individual fashioners of it, Thomas Delony, Elderton, Martin Parker, are known. The bulk of the examples preserved for us by the fortunate fancies of Pepys and other collectors is enormous, and from time to time bundles were printed under divers titles, some of them very pretty,'^ in which the word Garland is often conspicuous. But there were also more literary collections,^ in which not a little of the work of poets mentioned already occurs, with a good deal that is anonymous, this latter sometimes including charming things such as the famous "Phillida (Phillada) flouts me." At about the time of the Restora- tion these books were apt to assume the title of Drollery, which per- severed for a good many years, till Dryden stamped Miscellany with his seal. To judge the progress of literature one must read most of these things ; but the result of the reading is not easy to summarise. As the century went on, the coarseness (sometimes reaching brutality) which was provoked and fostered by Puritanism stains them. Yet even in the dullest and most offensive deserts, things like And the Star Chamber of her eyes Robs subjects of their liberties, make diversion and amends. 1 The labours of the Ballad Society, with the more especial help of Mr. Chap- pell, Dr. Furnivall, and Mr. P2bsworth, have laid these pretty well at our disposal. 2 There can hardly, for instance, be a prettier than The Crown Garland of Golden Roses, compiled by R. Johnson (Percy Society, 1842-45). The contents only sometimes correspond. 8 Musarum DcUciae, Wit Restored, Wit's Recreations, the Rump Poems (re- printed, London, n.d., 4 vols.), and the Covent Garden, Westminster, and C'loice Drolleries (ed. Ebsworth, 3 v(>ls. Boston, v.d.) may stand as examples, being those which the writer knows best. CHAPTER III THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES Massinger — Ford — Shirley — Randolph — Suckling — Davenant — Brome — Nabbes and Davenport — Glapthorne With due observation of the caution (which may seem tediously repeated, but is still necessary) as to the overlapping of periods in the brief, crowded, and intensely active years of the drama called Elizabethan, we shall find a more than sufficiently well-marked character in its third and last stage, though the best men — Massinger, Ford, Shirley — were not very young. Philip Massinger,! gQ^ of a gentleman-dependant of the Pembroke family, was born in 1583, went to St. Alban's Hall, Oxford, and seems to have remained at the University till about the usual age of five or six and twenty. We do not know how or when assinger. ^^ made his way to London and began play-writing, tnough he was, on documentary evidence, engaged in that occupation as early as 1614; but the earliest thing of his that we have is T/te Virgin Martyr, which was acted in 1622. He died seventeen years later, in 1639, and was buried in St. Saviour's, Southwark, a church of many literary connections. It was not that of his own parish, for he was entered as "a stranger." Thus he is nearly as little known to us personally as his colleague in The Virgin Martyr, Dekker himself. But in his literary character we know him very well. Of nearly twoscore plays recorded and ascribed to him, rather more than half are lost, but the eighteen that remain ^ exhibit him in suffi- ciently varied lights, and the total judgment of him would probably not be much altered if we had the rest, f The general ijnpression TyViirV. he- p;ivff^, wV>»n v> p js-c^un pared w it h his pr edecessors^jsjhat-e? — -^^ 1 Works, ed. Gifford, with those of Ford and an Introduction by Hartley Cole- ridge (" new edition," London, 1859). 2 With Sir John Van Olden Darneveldt {Old Plays, ed. A. H. Bullen, vol. ii.) as a not improbable addition, though there is no evidence of authorship. 432 CH. Ill THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 433 3. sl ightjnc rease of artific iality_accor npanied hy — anH no (ioyht Hup to — a correspon dine; decrease i ri original a nd spontaneous genius . Massinger's tragedies are never the mere blood-and-thunder muddles of which we have so many before him, and they have many noble scenes and passages, especially in T/ie Unnatural Cof/ibat, The Duke of Milan, The Bondman, The Picture, The Roniati Actor, The Fatal Dowry ; but with the exception of T he Virgin Martyr itself, where the difference is fairly set down to the hand of" Dekker, we find little or nothing of the ineffa ble snatch es of poetry of the earlier drama, and an ^nability to strik e out those fresTT an d not impossib le, if not always very probable^ types ot character which (not to mention Shakespeare) we find even in Beaumont and Fletcher. So also his comedies never quite descend to the level of those mere heaps of less or more amusing scenes compacted into no dramatic story, and not even connected by the thread of any one vivid character, which we find earlier in Middleton, and later in Brome, and Nabbes, and others of his younger contemporaries. But hardly more than twice, in the famous ' Neiv Way to Fay Old Deb ts (by far his greatest play, in which the" usurer and tyrant Sir_^Giles Overreach is worthy of Jonson at least)' and in The City Madam, does he rise to distinction in comedy. On the whole, however, tlie greatest of the great race cease with him, for he as far surpasses Shirley in intensity and in the goodness of his best things, as he does Ford — his superior in these points — in range, bulk, variety, and comparative freedom from the morbid. HTs blank verse is very good, less miisical" than BeatTTTiont and Fletcher's, but free from that perilous pressing of the " points " which is observable in the later work of the survivor of them, admir- ably suited for stately declamation, and yet of sufficient variety. And he has a certain indefinable faculty of giving a good account of almost any subject handled by him. That he has had few passionate admirers is due probably to the fact that he rather attains and keeps a high level of general cra ftsmansh ip than shoots to solitary heights oTlriiJt vidua l artistic^ success. But, since GlfTord, he has been generally set too Tow, and Gifford did not value him quite aright. He should indeed gain, not lose, by the contrast with his con- temporary, John Ford.^ Ford does go higher than Massinger; he has received warmer praise by far; it is considered as a mark of Philistinism to set any limitation to estimates of him. Yet it is noticeable that wherever Ford is at his best, he avails himself of illegitimate aids, y^is very best play, 'Tis Pity she''s_ a 1 1 'hurc, brings on the scene the ])assion ot a brother for a sister, and Ins next hest. The Broken Heart, piles up the agony ])y the most pre- posterous and improbable means. Ford cannot do with nature; he 1 Ed. Gifford and Hartley Coleridge, as above ; also Uycc, reprinted 1895. 2 F 434 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vil must ^Q against or beyond her to fetch effects of tragedy, and in doing tliis he stands condenioui Ulid ejfektded from the first order of poets of his owa time, .or in_deed of any.. The inspiration of the unnatural is the " Dutch courage " of poetry. ' ^ He was not, like most of his rivals, a writer for a living, though he seems to have worked pretty hard for those by no means lavish paymasters the theatrical managers. He wrote plays in the second, third, and fourth decades of the century ; but he was a member of a good Devonshire house, the Fords of Ilsington, was connected with others, was a member of Lincoln's Inn, though we have no record of his being at either University. As early as 1606 he celebrated the death of Lord Mountjoy, the last lover and, after a fashion, second husband of Sidney's Stella. When he ceased writing or when he died we do not know, and we have very few notices of him, the chief being the often-quoted one in a Drollery, which is not unpicturesque — Deep in a dump alone John Ford was got [gat], With folded arms and melancholy hat. Sixteen plays are attributed to him alone or in collaboration. We have lost Beauty in a Trance, destroyed by Warburton's cook, but entered in tl>e Stationers' books as late as 1653. The London Merchant, The Royal Co>nedy, and An III Beginning has a good End, also destroyed by this same evil cook, appeared still later in 1660, with apparently no collaborator in any. Ford and Dekker are re- sponsible for The Fairy Knight and The Bristowe Merchant (of which from Dekker we should have preferred the former), and Ford and Webster for The Murder of the Son upon the Mother, which from the authors of The Broken Heart and The Duchess of Malfy must have been full of horrors indeed. We have remaining the curious play of ^JThe Witch of Edmonton, in which Ford took part with Rowley, Dekker, and others; The Sun's Darling, by Ford and Dekker, and worthy of neither except that it has some of the charming lyrics which Ford could never manage alone, but which mark the passage of Dekker everywhere. The Fancies Chaste and Noble, Love's Sacrifice, The Ladfs Trial are all feeble, and Love's Sacrifice offensive ; so that the pieces on which his fame rests are the pair already mentioned, with The Lover's Melancholy and Perkin IVarbeck. This last has the perhaps not very high honour of being one of the best of plays on an English historical subject out of Shakespeare; The Lovers Melancholy, a graceful but rather feeble piece, is prin- cipally famous for one of the verse transcripts (Crashaw did another) of Strada's prolusion on the nightingale and the lute-player. But neither can enter into competition with the other two, and it is by these that Ford's reputation stands or falls. CH. Ill THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 435 The third of the most notable poets of Charles's reign, James Shirley/ was somewhat, but not very much, younger than Massinger and Ford. He was a Londoner, and was born in 1596 (thus vindicat- ing the right of the drama of which he was the last dis- tinguished practitioner to be called Elizabethan). He " ^' was educated at Merchant Taylors' and hence passed not merely to the natural university destination of its scholars, St. John's College, Oxford, but also to Catherine Hall, Cambridge. He was ordained in the Church of England but went over to Rome, and became a schoolmaster, between which occupation and the writing of plays he hovered for the greater part of his tolerably long life. He is said, as well as his wife, to have died of fright, and perhaps exposure, in consequence of the fire of London in 1666. Shirley's work, what with masques and what with plays, is very voluminous, extending to some forty pieces with a few non-dramatic poems. To the general reader he is hardly known except by the famous lyric, '' The glories of our blood and state," contained in one of the latest of his entertainments, T/te Contention of Ajax and Ulysses. Yet he was a playwright for some forty years, his first piece. Love Tricks^ having appeared in 1625. Other comedies are The Witty Fair One (1628), The Wedding, The Ball, Hyde Park, The Changes, The Lady of Pleasure. Among his tragedies we may name The Traitor and The Cardinal; the first named of which is his best in this way, as The Lady of Pleasure is his best in the other. Shirley, almost more than any other of the great race, has suffered both from over-praise and over-blame, as well as from the want of reading as a whole, which he especially needs. ^ In original power he is undoubtedly the least of the series which he ends : he has no great plays, hardly any great scenes, and not very many distinguished passages. In him, almost for the first time, we detect a cer t.iin dis- tinct imitation , the " litenvi y " not e. On the other hand his plays arc Hy^enerally re.1fRlble''a^wholcs, and have a certain gain in coherence and congruity, even though they, for the most part, belong to a very loo.sely constructed scheme of drama. He does not fall into the astonishing and almost inconceivable hodge-podge of prose that is 1 There is still but one edition of Shirley — excellent, but rather scarce and rather dear — that of Gifford and Dyce, 6 vols. London, 1833. Those who can- not attain to it will find six complete plays. The Wiffy Fair One, The Traitor, Hyde Park, The Lady of I'leasure, The Cardinal, and the Triumph of Peace, in a single volume of the "Mermaid Scries," edited by Mr. Gosse (London, 1888). This series also contains useful selections of complete plays from nearly all the chief Elizabethans. 2 This statement is not made at random, but after a consecutive reading of him for the purposes of this volume. It has distinctly raised the opinions formed years ago on a more piecemeal acquaintance. 436 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vil not prose, and verse that is not verse, which we find in men like r>avpnant and .Siirk ling , but can write more than fair verse wlien he chooses thisj^ and v ery fair prose when he chooses that. Indeed, now and then his verse rises to a melancholy sweetness which ad- mirably suits his best notes of character and tone — notes of a rath«r feminine grace and a slightly sentimental chival ry. As in tragedy he sfops short of horrors generally, so m comedy he abstains gener- ally from obscenity. After the Restoration he fell into disrepute — on the one hand Pepys sneers at his individual plays, and on the other the almost always generous Dryden takes Shirley as a type of dulness. But this is quite unjust, and he is even a direct link between Fletcher and the distinctive Restoration comedy in all its better and some of its worse ways. He was undoubtedly unlucky in coming just where he did, and may be said to have fallen between two generations. Yet he by no means unworthily ends his own great class. Even in these three greater men — certainly in Shirley — signs, if not of decadence, at any rate of impending change, are manifest ; in nearly all the minor playwrights of the period these signs become flagrant. The most promising of this group is Randolph,^ whose dramatic work, Artstippus, The Conceited Pedlar, The Jealous Lovers, The Muses'' Looking-Glass, Aniyntas, and Down with Knavery, all show the influence of the classics both directly and through Jonson. Amyntas and The Mtises'' Looking-Glass are the best, but no one is absolutely good, and all labour under the defect of being rather exercises in different schools of drama than original compositions. Sir John Suckling's ^ plays again, to continue with those dramatists who were also more or less considerable poets, form a curious contrast to his poems. The versification shows almost every fault of which dramatic verse is capable, and which has been or was to be shown by English dramatists. It is by turns as stiff as Gorboduc an"d as loose as the worst imitations of Fletcher's later redundances, while, like play-verse generally at this time and for some years to come, till Dryden tightened things up again, it very often slips and flounders about as if it never could make up its mind to be verse or prose, heroics or doggerel. The prettily named tragedies of Brennorali, The Sad One, and Aglaura (the last of which has two fifth acts, as fishing- rods have two tops) are strange nondescripts, blending echoes of Shakespeare, who was very popular at Charles the First's court, with imitations of the heroic novels. The Goblins^ a comedy, is rather amusing but wildly chaotic. 1 Edition as for Poems. 3 Ed. Hazlitt, 2 vols. London, 1874. CH. Ill THE DRAMA TILL THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES 437 Davenant's ^ verse in his plays is not much better than Suckling's, but, partly by accident, he is a more important person in the history of the stage if not of the literary drama. It has been said that he began as a playwright with Alboviiie (1628), The Cruel Brother, and other things, quite early, and he followed them up with others — The IVits, News from Plymouth, the Fair Favourite, The Unfortutiate Lovers, Love and Honour, etc., none of them very good plays and all of them in very bad verse — verse so bad that one suspects some convention of deliberate badness, as in the case of the satirists. But when Davenant, long after the theatres were closed, had secured his liberty through Milton, and perhaps also through him had become acquainted with Cromwell, he used his influence with the Protector to obtain permission (1656) for the performance of musical entertainments, which practically restarted the drama itself. Notice of these will come better in the next Book. The most prolific playwright, however, of this time was Richard Brome.'- We know next to nothing of Brome except that he was dead in 1653, and that at one time he was servant to Ben Jonson, who mentions him by no means unkindly, though others, to curry favour with Ben, or out of spite to Brome, spoke of his plays as the sweepings of Jonson's study. They are, as we have them edited by his namesake Alexander, fifteen in number, and they belong, without exception, to that rather nondescript class of plays of contemporary manners which has been already noted under the heads of Middleton, Jonson, and Fletcher. The best of them are The Northern Lass (in which Constance the heroine is made to speak a sort of Scots) and The Jovial Crew, a very merry picture of gipsy life. All the rest. The Sparagus Garden, A Mad Couple well Matched, The City Wit, The Lovesick Court, The Queen and Concubine, The Antipodes, The Novella, The Court Beggar, The Damoiselle, The English Moor, Covent Garden Weeded, The New Exchange, resemble each other curiously. We read them without too much belief in their pictures of manners, and yet recognising traits here and there as from the life. Of Thomas Nabbes,* a weaker Brome, we know even less — nothing, in short, except that he once drank some good strong beer at Droit- wich, and seems generally to have haunted Worcester- shire. His plays, Covent Garden, Tottenham Court p^y^"*", (names indicating the style), Hannibal and Scipio, a weak play of a more ambitious sort. The Bride, The Unfortunate Mother, 1 Ed. Maidment and Logan, 5 vols. Edinburgh, 1882. 2 Reprinted in 3 vols. London, 1873. 8 Nabbcs is given in two and Davenport in one of Mr. Bullen's " New Series" of Old Plays ; their best-known pieces are in Hazlitt's Dndslcy, 438 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii with the moral masque of Microcosmus, by which he has been most generally known, and which is perhaps his best thing — all seem to have been produced between 1638 and the closing of the theatres. Robert Davenport ^ was an older writer if not an older man, for he had a historical play, now lost, licensed in 1624, and another, Khig John and Matilda, his best thing, has been thought to be not much younger, though we hear nothing of it till 1639, and it was not printed till still later. The City Nightcap, which ranks with it, but is a comedy, must have been as old in years as the histories, and there is a third existing play of some merit, A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, which was published in 1639. Davenport certainly wrote other plays, and those which we have are good enough to make us wish for what we have not. A similar wish would perhaps ap orne. ^^ niore difficult in the case of Henry Glapthorne, of whom again so little is known that his editor ^ has thought it neces- sary to print some documents about a George Glapthorne, not known to be in the slightest degree connected with the dramatist. We have of his a certain number of poems, mostly in couplets, and in a feeble style, and five plays — Albertns IVallenstein (more interesting from its subject than from itself), Argalus and Farthenia, one of the numer- ous dressings up of the Arcadia, Wit in a Constable, The Lady^s Privilege, and The Hollander. Perhaps he wrote The Lady Mother. He is something of a poet, but very little of a dramatist. Besides these the fifteen years or thereabouts of Caroline drama provide the names of Shakerley Marmion, who besides a rather pretty poem, Cupid atid Psyche, produced at least three extant plays, the best of which is The Antiqiiary, long known from its inclusion in Dodsley ; Sir Aston Cokain, the author of The Obstinate Lady, Trappolin Creduto Priticipe, and Ovid', Thomas May, rival of Dave- nant for the Laureateship, and it is said from spite at his non-success afterwards a Commonwealth's man and historian of the Long Parlia- ment, who has left us The Heir and The Old Couple ; Cartwright, whose Ordinary has merit ; and Dr. Jasper Mayne, whose City Match has more. AH deserve respectable places in a separate history of the drama, and all deserve mention here.^ iSee note 3 on preceding page. ^2 vols. London, 1874. 8 Cokain and Marmion figure in volumes of the Edinburgh Dramatists of the Restoration ; the others will be found in Hazlitt's Dodsley. For yet other scattered plays of known and unknown authors during the three divisions of the " Elizabethan Period " which cannot find room here, I may be permitted to refer the more curious student to my Elizabethan Literature, pp. 423-427. CHAPTER IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — II Jeremy Taylor — Fuller — South — Barrow — Baxter, Chillingworth, Hales, and others Not the least admirable and remarkable division of Caroline literature is that peopled by the Sermon-writers. Indeed, taking advantage of the facts that of Hall and Donne, the chief ornaments of the earlier period, one survived Charles I. himself and the other saw the first ten years of his reign, and that, under Charles II., another and only less great race arise, with a slightly diflerent style, it has been not un- common to speak of the great divines in a body as Caroline. We shall here, as before, borrow from the Second Charles those divines who, under him, still exhibited the graces more specially attributable to English under his father, and postpone those who, like Tillotson, are rather eighteenth than seventeenth century in character. The greatest of the group thus provided are Taylor, Fuller, and South — the last a much younger man than the others, and a severe critic of them, as well as a survivor into the reign of the last Stuart who occupied the throne, but still distinctly Caroline and not Augustan in spirit; the midmost of the three, the wittiest of English divines except Sydney Smith, and much more of a divine than Sydne^; the first in almost all ways the chief of English orators on sacred subjects. These three display the characteristics of the time so well that a fairly careful survey of them will enable us to pass more rapidly over their fellows. Jeremy Taylor Mvas born at Cambridge in August 1613, and was the son of a barber. He was sent to Caius College, took his degrees there, and perhaps became Fellow, ..but by Laud's influence was transferred to O.vford, where in 1636 he became Fellow of All Souls. He obtained the rectory of Uppingham two years later, and married in 1639. ^^*^ '•'' guessed rather than known to have served 1 Moris, 3 vols. London, 1844. No/y Living and Dying exist in many separate forms, and The Golden Grove in some. 439 440 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii as chaplain in the King's army during the Rebellion, and dates are also very uncertain in regard to the death of his first wife, his mar- riage with a second, and his retirement (probably to her Ta'Xr^ property) in Wales. Here, after some time of poverty and school-keeping, he was patronised by the Earl of Car- bery, became tolerably prosperous, and during the twelve or fifteen years of his Welsh sojourn composed most of his greater works. Yet he was thrice imprisoned during this time for political and ecclesiastical malignancy. Even before the Restoration he received (rather unluckily) preferment in Ireland, being appointed by Lord Conway to a lectureship at Lisburn, and when the King came home he was made Bishop of Down. Connor, and shortly afterwards Dro- more, becoming also an Irish Privy Councillor and Vice-Chancellor of Dublin University. But he was by no means happy in Ireland, where, between Roman Catholics and chiefly Presbyterian Protestants, his Laudian Anglicanism was very uncomfortably placed, and where he had domestic troubles. He died on 13th August 1667, at Lisburn, and was buried in his cathedral of Dromore. Taylor's unique position as an English churchman of letters was attained not by erudition (for though it would ill beseem most men nowadays to belittle him in this, he was for that most learned of times by no means extremely erudite), nor by his theological power (for logic was not his forte, and he more than once approached heresy unawares), nor in that special product of the time, casuistry, for which his dialectics are not delicate enough ; but wholly and solely by his magnificent rhetoric. This rhetoric is so true to itself that he does not even show as a writer so well as he must have shown to his hearers, since some pretty obvious faults in the page would have been nearly imperceptible as they came from the pulpit, while all his beauties would be enhanced by actual delivery, especially as he is known to have had a handsome presence and an admirable elocu- tion. ' He began as a writer in 1642 with a defence of Episcopacy, but did not show his real quality till he was safe in Wales, under the wing of Lord and Lady Carbery, the latter the Lady of Comus, Alice Egerton. Of the numerous works then written. The Liberty of Proph- esying is an argument for toleration which would have been more effective if the author had been a closer reasoner, and perhaps also if he had not been on the losing side at the time. 1650 saw a Life of Christ and the famous Hal^LMimng, which was completed next year by Holy Dyi/i^ . A course of Sermons for the Christian Year was then b^giin, and finished in 1653. 1655 saw the devotional work called, from the seat of the Carberys, The Golden Grove; 1655 Uniim Necessarium, a treatise on Repentance, in some points dubiously orthodox; and in 1660 the Dnctor Dubitantiiim, his chief work in CH. IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — II 441 casuistry. In all these works, as well as in his numerous others, the chief of which, for our purpose, is the supplement of eleven extra sermons to the Eniaiiios, or Christian Year, it is almost a universal rule that Taylor is supreme in exhortation and rhetorical description, great (though more unequal) in meditation, and weakest in anything that requires close logical argument. It may be questioned whether his thought is ever very profound, and it is certainly never very original. We are not to look in him for anything like the infinite suggestiveness, the far-reaching vistas, of Donne. But, luckily for Taylor, his subject supplied him with depth and height enough in mere matter, and he had nothing to supply but the external graces of his inimitable expression. Almost everything that can fairly be said against this expression is summed up in the one word " florid," and it seems practically impossible for impartial criticism to deny that this word is applicable. The presence of the quality it denotes shocked the younger genera- tion of Taylors own time, and is commented on in a passage, not quite so unjust as harsh and unbecoming, by South ; it probably lessened Taylor's influence with the eighteenth century, and it certainly procured him abundant compensation at the time of the Romantic revolt. There can be no doubt that Taylor's flowers of speech are most exquisite and most lavishly provided. They hardly ever deserve from just criticism the epithet of tawdry. But they are something too lush in their growth ; they are strung with stock devices of phrase ("so have I seen," especially) which are irritating; and their extraordinary abundance gives an air of fulsome and some- what feminine languor and luxuriance to the style. The less good effect of this is increased by Taylor's confused grammar. Like most of his predecessors except Hooker, he never seems quite certain whether he is writing Latin or English, and abuses the license of both languages, as well as length of sentence. Yet to no person of fairly catholic taste can his defects come into any close compari- son with his beauties. If he is seldom deep he is never shallow; his subjects are always noble and always worthily handled ; even his plainer writing has a musical cadence and a pictorial effect. If we want something better still we can only go to Donne or Browne, and Donne, at least, if not Browne, will give it us in scantier measure, I and in manner harder to receive. A contrast, whicii is almost the full one between tragedy and comedy, exists between Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Fuller,^ who was born at Aldwinkle St. Peter's, the other division of the 1 There is no complete edition of Fuller, but most of the books mentioned are obtainable in various forms, and a collection of sermons appeared (ed. Bailey and Axon) in 1891. 442 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii village in which Dryden was born later, in the summer of 1608, his father being rector of the parish. He was sent to Queen's College, • Fuller Cambridge, from which he passed to Sidney Sussex, and in 1630 obtained a curacy from a third college. Corpus or Benet. His uncle, Dr. Davenant, who had been President of Queen's, was now Bishop of Salisbury, and made Fuller first a prebendary of his cathedral and then vicar of Broadwindsor, in Dorset. He wrote some verse of no merit early, and produced his Holy War, a history of the Crusades, in 1639, and his Holy and Profane States in 1642, with some sermons between them. Just before the war he was made preacher at the Savoy, and during it was an army chaplain. But his moderation, or, more probably, his humour, made him thought half- hearted by some. He printed at Exeter in 1645, when hope was almost gone, Good Thoughts in Bad Times, one of his very best books; and followed it in 1647 with Better Thoughts in Worse Times. Like some, though not many, sound divines and royalists, he was not absolutely persecuted during the usurpation, and though he was unable to keep a post at St. Clement's, Eastcheap, he was more fortunate with one at Waltham Abbey. In 1650 he published his Pisgah Sight of Palestine, a book on the Holy Land, in 1655 his great Church History of Britain, and in 1658 his Mixt Co)iiempla- tion for Better Times. At the Restoration he was made D.D. and chaplain to the King ; and a bishopric is said to have been designed for him, but he died of some sort of typhus or typhoid in August 1661. The largest and almost the most characteristic of all his works, the Worthies of England, was published posthumously. Fuller, like Taylor, was the darling of some of the great English- men of the Romantic revival, such as Coleridge, Southey, and Lamb. The last named avowedly doted on him, has made a selection of J some of his greatest phrases, and may be said to owe his style more :; to Fuller and Browne than to any one else. At the same time, he ijhas been by no means universally popular. The formidable South jfell foul of him almost more roughly than of Taylor just after his ' death ; the eighteenth century regarded him as a learned buffoon ; ^ and it is by no means certain that more modern judgments have •been wholly conciliated to him. Nor is this surprising, for, as has ibeen said, the knowledge of Fuller, except among a few students, is probably by no means extensive nowadays, and his temper is one not now commonly met, and regarded, when it occurs, either with sus- picion or positive dislike. Fuller's most heartfelt interests were all in .serious things. He was probably not intensely interested in politics, and except that he was strongly anti-Roman, the purely ecclesiastical quarrels of his day did not excite any very bitter feelings in him ; he was a true Royalist and Anglican, but not a keen CH. IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — H 443 one. Yet his Christianity was the very life of him ; he was an earnest student of history, especially in the lines of topography, genealogy, and heraldry. All these are of the class of subjects which — the world seems to take it for granted — ought to be treated ia what some one has called " the grave and chaste manner." But it was impossible for Fuller to be grave. No mind was ever freer from the slightest irreverence than his. But the quips and conceits of the Elizabethan time, the " metaphysical " fancies of the Jacobean, had been in some singular way seasoned in his case by an anticipation of the more purely satirical and jocular tone of the later seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, though without a trace of the coarseness, hardness, and impiety which too often accompanied this. It is absolutel) impossible for Fuller to resist a jest, whether on natural phenomena, as where he writes of wax. '• It being yellow by nature is by art made red, white, and green, which I take to be the dearest colours, especially when appendant on parchment " ; or in divinity, as when he observes of ejaculations or short prayers, that '• the soldier may at the same time shoot out his prayer to God and aim his pistol at his enemy, the one better hitting the mark for the other." This quaint quipping wit does not appeal to all readers, especially in modern days, and is no doubt extremely annoying to some ; but they are probably the wisest who can enjoy it, though it is not perhaps necessary for them to go to the extremes of laudation indulged by Lamb and Coleridge. The range of Burton and the depth of Browne are both denied to Fuller; his temper is a very little childish in the bad sense as well as childlike in the good. But if not for all tastes, or even for all hours, as these two are, in the case of those who love them, he is no mean ornament to English literature, and no scantily stored treasure-house of it. If Taylor is sometimes open to the charge of effeminacy and Fuller to that of childishness, neither fault can be found with Robert South, the most masculine of English seventeenth-century writers except Hobbes, and indeed a sort of orthodox pair to that great writer. He was born at Hackney in 1633, and passed through Westminster (which certainly did not at this time, under the rule of Busby, discredit Solomon's system of educa- tion) to Christ Church, where he became a student in 1651. He took orders before the Restoration, and when that event occurred, was made public orator of his University, chaplain to Clarendon, a prebendary of Westminster, and a canon of Christ Church. He lived to a very great age, and, at any rate after his earliest manhood, was always a very strong Tory ; but he was not a nonjuror, and lield his preferments to iiis death in 1716. He was a formidable contro- versialist, signalising himself in tiiis way against Sherlock; but his 444 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vil literary reputation rests upon his numerous and very remarkable sermons. 1 He was controversial enough even in these, as may be seen in the passages already referred to, where he makes strictures on Fuller and Taylor; and compliments have been paid to his vi^it almost equal to those bestowed upon Fuller himself. They are merited, always remembering that in using the word of seventeenth- century writers we must observe the sense, then more specially attached to it, of intellectual keenness, not necessarily, though very often, exhibited in relation to the ludicrous. South has still some- thing of Elizabethan conceit and word-play, and a great deal of Jacobean scholasticism. But the new style of restricted antithetical balance which was rising around him affected him a good deal, though not to the same extent as that to which it affected Tillotson or Temple or Dryden, so that he comes in best for notice here, and not with them. For he retains that fondness for luminous if also audacious imagery which, though certainly not absent from Dryden, or even from Temple, was to be more and more restricted both in them and in their followers. His famous sentence, "An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise," unites seventeenth-century splendour of fancy — the sudden blaze of the imaginative rocket — with eighteenth-century balance, antithesis, and point. It can be matched with hundreds of single things, hardly less ingenious and successful, while South is also able to build up larger sentences, till he reminds us, not so constantly, of Browne before and Temple after him in the two styles. Thus, while he never has the beauty of Taylor, while he lacks the easy lambent light of Fuller's wit, he is in better fighting trim, better balanced, less unequal and disquieting than either, and provides in almost all his work quite admirable examples of the more scholastic prose. Isaac Barrow,^ who was a little older than South, was also a Londoner, born in 1630, but his school was Charterhouse. Hence he passed to Felsted, in Essex, and to Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became Fellow in 1649. He was known " ^' as a strong Cavalier and Churchman, and this for the time prevented the further promotion which his extraordinary abilities, both on the literary and scientific sides, would have gained him, and he travelled much abroad. On the eve of the Restoration he became Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and after it a Fellow of the Royal Society, Gresham Professor of Geometry, and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, where Newton followed him. The King always greatly fancied his preaching, and in 1672 made him Master 1 4 vols. London, 1843. 2 Works (non-mathematical), ed. Napier, 9 vols. Cambridge, 1859. CH. IV THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE ENGLISH PULPIT — H 445 of Trinity, but he died five years later. Barrow's style is less severe than South's, but also a little less technically good, more disposed to long and wandering sentences, though in other respects perhaps more modern. We need pause less on some others. Bishop Pearson (1612- 86), though a longer liver than Barrow, was born much earlier, and his birth-date is reflected in the style of his famous treatise On the Creed and his other works. He was a Norfolk man, a son of Eton and of King's College, Cambridge, chiuing- a Royalist chaplain (though he does not seem to have ^an^'ot'herr' been much interfered with during the Commonwealth) ; and after the Restoration Master of Jesus, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity, Master of Trinity, and Bishop of Chester. Richard Baxter, one of the lights of English Nonconformity, was a little younger than Pearson, and lived a little longer (1615-gi). He was neither ill-born nor very ill-educated, but went to no University, and after some changes of mind, became a schoolmaster and took orders. His duty was chiefly at Kidderminster, with which town he was throughout his life most connected. He welcomed the Restoration, and might have had a bishopric, but scrupled, and "went out" in 1662. his recalcitrance to the law being, of course, followed by some inconveniences, but by nothing serious till the tyranny of James H. His Saints'' Rest (1650), his Call to the ^///fr^^wz/^/V^c/ (1657), and the agreeable posthumous work published in 1696 as Reliquiae Baxterianae, are perhaps the most important for us out of a very large total of work. Baxter, who is said ne\er to have altered or corrected his work, and whose style, thougli neither so vernacular nor so racy, has a certain approximation to Bunyan's, is a distinctly pleasant writer, if not very much more. This rich period contains in theology, as in other departments, much that it would be interesting to comment upon. John Hales (1584-1656), the '• ever memorable," was born at Bath and educated there and at Cambridge, but transferred himself to Oxford, where he became a Fellow of Merton and a lecturer in Greek In 161 9, or earlier, he was made a I'ellow of Eton College, and lived there all the rest of his life, though he was deprived of his Fellowship after the King's death. He was one of Falkland's set in Oxfordshire and of Jonson's in London, and a mighty admirer of Shakespeare. His repute is rather greater than his works, ' which consist of tracts, sermons, and letters from the Synod of Dort, where he went witli Sir Dudley Carleton. His chief single work is the tract on Schism and Schismatics, 1636. It and the rest of his works contain arguments 1 Ed. Dalrymple (Lord Hailes), 3 vols. Glasgow, 1765. 446 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vu for toleration, and for a sort of orthodox freethinking, expressed in a rather undistinguished style. It is supposed to have been written against, or at least in reference to, the Religion of Protestants of William Chillingworth, who was born at Oxford in 1602, was much favoured by Laud, became Fellow of Trinity in 1628, see-sawed a good deal in religion, but after an experience of Romanism returned to the Church of England, was Royalist in the Rebellion, and died soon after the capture of Arundel Castle, where he was taken prisoner in 1644. The principal merit of his style (and in his days it was no common one) is its extreme clearness. George Herbert wrote some prose very like his verse. Archbishop Robert Leighton (161 1-84) was born and educated at Edinburgh, where he was Principal and Divinity Professor in the University ; later travelled a good deal ; became Bishop of Dunblane in 1661 and Archbishop of Glasgow in 1669; resigned and died at Horsted Keynes in 1684. His character, in a position likely to attract slander, excited universal admiration ; his style (shown chiefly in Commentaries on the Scriptures, which had an immense influence on Coleridge) has been highly, though not always clearly, praised. It belongs to the class of the great imaginative styles of his time. Bishop Wilkins (1614-72), a man with a rather questionable record, who married Oliver's sister and contrived to make the best of both sides in the struggle between King and Parliament, and of both Universities, being Warden of Wadham at Oxford and Master of Trinity at Cambridge, was an early student of physical science, and member of the Royal Society. His works. Discovery of a New World, Discourse concemirtg a New Planet, Mathematical Magic and Essay towards a Philosophical {i.e. universal) Language, display in their very titles the survival of the fantastic. His style is simple and lively enough. Lastly, the famous school of metaphysical theologians, called the Cambridge Platonists, produced in Henry More, the poet, and still more in Ralph Cudworth, the author of the Tr7ie Intellectual System of the Uttiverse (1678), notable prose-writers. Cudworth, born 161 7, in Somerset, entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, in 1630, and becoming successively Master of Clare, Professor of Hebrew, and Master of Christ's, died 1688. Besides his great book, which is a sort of history of philosophy as well as a contribution to it, Cudworth wrote a treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality, and other things. Though he has nothing like the vigour and distinction of his enemy, Hobbes, as a prose-writer, Cudworth stands high among our early philosophers for his style, which, if not exactly elegant and never splendid, is solid and clear. CHAPTER V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE Milton's prose — Its faults and beauties — Sir Thomas Browne — Religio Medici — Vulgar Errors — Urn Burial — The Garden of Cyrus — Clarendon — Hobbes — Felltham — Howell — Walton The eminence of this remarkable period is certainly not least shown in the department of miscellaneous prose. After dealing with the theologians, we have still left the prose work of Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Hobbes, and Clarendon, together with not a , few minor prose writers of quality from Walton down- wards. Milton's prose work, as has already been said, was in the main, though not quite wliolly, comprised in the twenty years of his middle age, and is again inainly, though not quite wholly, controver- sial in character. The great bulk of it is an instance of the unwisdom of objecting to the distinction of matter and manner in literary history. If we look at the matter, it requires almost desperate partisanship to put [much of Milton's prose work high. Except the Areopagitica and the Letter to Education, almost all of it is more than question- able. The divorce tracts are dubious from the point of view of public morality, and ludicrously one-sided as expressions of private spleen. The rudeness, the sheer ill-manners of the political and educational pamphlets are allowed by all except those who decline to see any fault in the author of Paradise Lost. Even as a controversialist, all questions of taste and literary courtesy put aside, Milton is too one- sided, too passionate, and too weak in mere argumentative power to receive high praise from impartial criticism. But when we turn to the mere form of his prose the case is quite altered. It is true that even here praise cannot be indiscriminate, and that tliere have been some who, even on formal grounds, have denied to Milton very high rank as a prose-writer. But some trick of imperfect sympathy may in "such cases be suspected. It is true that Milton is by no means a faultless writer; he is, indeed, a very faulty one. Nothing is more curious than to see how he, the great 447 448 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii architect of the paragraph and the sentence in verse, seems to be utterly ignorant of the laws of both in prose, or at least utterly inca- pable or careless of obeying those laws. On many, perhaps on most, occasions the gorgeous harmonic phrases, of which in prose as in verse he is a master, entirely fail to adjust themselves to any kind of symphonic arrangement. They clash and welter against each other, or suddenly quaver off into some cacophony or insignificance of close which destroys their effect and value. The pleas that Milton''s writing was constantly not merely rhetorical, but oratorical^ and that we must give it the license of heard matter, as well as that his blindness latterly made correction difficult, have a certain validity as excuses, but not as defence. And the first, at least, can be only partially admitted as fact. There are sentences of Milton's which, though ugly on the page, would be harmonious on the platform or in the pulpit, but there are others, and many of them, which would be ugly any- where. The fact evidently is that Milton, to whom prose was not, as verse was, his native organ of speech, suffered exceptionally from the three vices of the prose of his age — the tendency to an unduly laboured vocabulary, that to an unduly Latinised syntax, and that and^eauiTes. ^^ enomiously long sentences. For the two first there was in his case, as all fair critics have acknowledged, not merely the excuse that men of letters read more Latin than English, but the particular one that it was the custom, and latterly the business, of this man of letters to write more in Latin than in English. And it seems strange that any one should be capable of denying the splendour of Milton's prose at its best. The gorgeous evocations of vision, how " for us the Northern Ocean, even to the frozen Thule, was scattered with the proud shipwrecks of the Spanish Armada"'; the thunder of single phrases, " the dateless and irrevoluble circle " ; the famous comparison between the poet, with his garland and singing robes about him, and the same sitting in the cool element of prose; and the almost more famous one as to the wandering of his younger feet among those lofty fables and romances ; the magnificent search for the Dead Truth in the Areopagilica, — other things, not much below these, are there to prove his quality. We could have had them from no one but Milton, for the best of them have a certain quality or inseparable accident of egotism, not to say arrogance, about them of which Shakespeare and Spenser and Shelley, and others of the greatest, could never have been capable, and which yet gives them the swell of their cadence and the thrill of their ring. So let us be thankful for even the egotism of Milton. The humour which Milton so profoundly lacked, together with a certain detachment which (for his and our good, no doubt) he CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 449 lacked likewise, were both present in the next writer to be mentioned, the greatest prose-writer perhaps, when all things are taken together, in the whole range of English. Thomas Browne,^ who gj^. became Sir Thomas in the last years of his life, was Thomas born in London on 19th October 1605. His father, ro^^ne. who was in trade but of a good Cheshire extraction, died when Thomas was a child, and his mother married a certain Sir Thomas Dutton. The boy was sent to school at Winchester, and thence to Broadgates Hall, Oxford, which, before he left it, was turned into Pembroke College. He took his Masters degree in 1629, and then studied medicine at Leyden, graduating there as doctor. After some years of travel and of practice in difterent places, he settled in the year 1636 at Norwich, with which city he was connected for nearly fifty years, marrying a Norfolk lady a few years later, and passing bad, worse, and better times (as Fuller's classification has it) in inoffensive and unmolested prosperity. His knighthood took place in 1671, and his death in 1682. Besides letters and a few minor miscellanies, we have from him five capital works, very difterent from each other in size, but of pretty uniform excellence as literature — Rcligio Medici, written, it would appear, pretty early (about 1635), but not printed till 1642; Fseudodoxia Epideiiiica, better known by its English title of Vulgar Errors, 1 646 ; Urn Burial and the Garden of Cyrus, published together in 1658; and the posthumous Christian Morals, which was not printed till 1716 and was edited forty years later by the great light of his college in the next century, and its great Christian moralist, Samuel Johnson. Every one of these works, from the mere pamphlets which contain the third and fourth to the bulky treatise on Errors, is of the very first importance in English literature. Religio Medici has perhaps been the general favourite, a position at least deserved by the fact that it contains the first-fruits of Browne's extraordinary style, that it is a sort of key to the others, and that it displays, as does no other book, the mental attitude of the older and better generation of the Me'Iici. Jacobean and Caroline time. This attitude may be taken as resulting from the following conditions. An immense but what we may perhaps call a somewhat lopsided erudition — ancient writers and modern writers in Latin being insufficiently lialanced by those in the modern tongues ; science, in the modern sense, conspicuous, but as yet unorganised; a wide and deep, Imt by no 1 Ed. Simon Wi!kin, in 4 vols., reprinted (not quite complcfelv) in three of Bohn's Library. Reli,!^io Medici, Christian Morals, Urn Burial, and the Garden of Cyrus, are accessible in two small volumes of the " Gulden Treasury," one edited with great care, and the other begun, by Ur. Gicenhill. ?.G 450 CAROLINE LITERATURE ^OOK vii means necessarily unorthodox, and scarcely at all scornful, scepticism ; and a gorgeous setting glow of poetical fancy. The result was an inevitable melancholy in all the choicer souls, except those where "cheerfulness would break in," as with Fuller; or those who were furiously devoted to the strife of the time and otherwise wrapt up in themselves, as with Milton — inevitable, though this melancholy might be erudite and discursive, as in Burton ; mystical and sensuous, as in Donne; hectically religious, as in Crashaw ; meditatively sc, as in Vaughan. In Browne it is, as melancholy, kept in the background. He has not merely, like Burton, his learning ever present, but a practical and busy art ; religious as he is, he does not become absorbed in religion like Crashaw or Herbert or Vaughan ; his blood is cooler, and his brain less trammelled with occult things than Donne's. And the result is the Religio, a confession of intelligent orthodoxy and logical supernaturalism couched in some of the most exquisite English ever written. The great medley of the Psendodoxia is more puzzling to modern ideas. Here Browne first discusses the general subject of delusion in a fashion singularly different from, though perhaps not less philosophical than, that which would suggest itself to Errirs niost people. Now and then he takes the errors one by one, but the fact is that " errors " is not quite the right word. Pseudodoxy, as opposed to orthodoxy, consists in the assumption, as positive truths, of things unproved, in the explanation of undoubted phenomena by wrong causes, at Jeast as much as in the belief in things certainly false. Very often he will not go beyond the position that the popular creed may be, with more reason, denied or affirmed ; sometimes he has possible explainings away of difficult facts ; and it will readily be anticipated that he very often advances hypotheses more difficult for modern science to admit than the facts he wishes to explain. He is himself, though profoundly sceptical, by no means obstinately incredulous ; and if he cannot believe the magical qualities of gems, and must admit that " it hath much deceived the hopes of good fellows what is commonly expected of bitter almonds," he declares " that an unsavoury odour is gentilitious or natural unto the Jews, we cannot well conceive." Yet he is by no means prone, as his great editor and fellow- collegian was, to deny things simply because they are strange ; and the result is that the Psendodoxia, written in a delightful style, ranging through a vast multitude of sometimes absurd but almost always interesting legends, anecdotes, beliefs, and lighted throughout with Browne's own special candles — his mild intelligence and his unaggressive irony — is one of the most charming books existing or conceivable. CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 451 The little tractates called Hydriotaphia, or Ur-n Bjirial, and The Garden of Cyrus contain, the first but some half-hundred, the other sgjne hundred small pages ; but between them they sho\ ^sITow the quintessence of Brau«e:s.^hought,~aTn*-the ^''" ^"'^'''^• palmary CAaiifpfe-©l-4«s'"styre. The first is pertiaps the chief in- stance of his melancholy, meditative, yet pious and not unhopeful mysticism, the second of his mysticism fantastic. Hydriotaphia, starting from the fact of the discovery of some sepulchral urns in Norfolk, considers first, in a sweeping yet punctilious generalisation, the various historic methods of sepulture, or rather disposal of the dead. Then it passes to the sepulchral antiquities of Britain, and thence to urns and their contents, with some considerations on the relative durability of different parts of the human body. A chapter on funeral ceremonials, beliefs in immortality or annihilation and the like follows, and leads up to the ever-memorable finale, beginning, " Now since these dead bones," which has rung in the ears of some eight generations as the very and unsurpassable Dead March of Eng- lish Prose. Every word of this chapter is memorable, and almost every word abides in the memory by dint of Browne's marmoreal phrase, his great and grave meaning, and the wonderful clangour and echo of his word-music. "Time, which antiquates antiquities," will have some difficulty in destroying this. And through all the chapter his style, like his theme, rises, till after a wonderful burst of mysticism, we are left with such a dying close as never had been heard in English before, '' ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content with six foot as w^ith the moles of Adrianus." The Garden of Cyrus, a study on the conveniences and delights of the quincunx ( [ • ; ) is a curious and no doubt a designed contrast, exhibiting, though without any FuUerian merriment, the lighter side of that seventeenth-century quaintness which disgusted and puzzled the eighteenth, and which, JJcyritsT perhaps, the nineteenth has not for the most part genuinely sympathised with. We start gravely with the fact (or assertion) that Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana, the fiftli day after their nativities, and so pass to the Gardens of Antiquity (for Browne is as much a lover of gardens as his younger contemporaries Cowley and Evelyn themselves), and to the quin- cuncial arrangement of those of Cyrus according to Xenophon, with some remarks on the mysteries of decussation and its results, the various kinds of crosses. It is finally pointed out that in Paradise itself, the first garden, the Tree of Knowledge appropriately supplies a centre of this decussation. But the (juincunx is far from limited to planting — architecture, crowns, beds, nets, tactics, and many 452 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii other things display it. It, or its number Five, is in the flowers in gypsum, in honey-combs, in the belly of the water-beetle, "though we found not what we expected in the cartilaginous parts of the weasand, and the discernible texture of the lungs of frogs." The excellence of planting in this form is returned to : rams' horns, by the way, will grow if planted at Goa. And lastly, with an apology, some other mysteries of Five are touched, till the whole ends again with another triumph of elaborate rhetorical art, " But the quincunx of Heaven runs low," etc. It is not at all uninteresting or unimportant that the posthumous Christian Morals, though as characteristic of Browne's thought, style, and vocabulary as any of the others, has somewhat less finished splendour, and indeed ends with a sort of duplication of the finale of the Urn Burial. For this, it must Be remembered, the author himself never published, and the fact shows (what indeed is certain from other evidence, both internal and external) that Sir Thomas was a very studious corrector of his own work. Nor could any one have improvised such miracles of execution in prose as the best things in the earlier books. Except in these respects, and in the somewhat more sober cast which its practical purpose imposes on it, the book is entirely of a piece with the others — the same gorgeously Latinised terminology, which somehow never becomes stiff or awkward ; the same sententious weight, which is never heavy or dull ; the same cunning construction of sentences and paragraphs ; and above all, the same extraordinary power of transforming a commonplace into the eternal idea corresponding to it by some far-reaching image, some illustration quaintly erudite, or even by sheer and mere beauty of phrase and expression. For this is the great merit of Browne, that, quaint or gorgeous, or even, as he sometimes may seem to be, merely tricksy — bringing out of the treasures of his wisdom and his wit and his learning things new and old, for the mere pleasure of showing them — thought and expression are always at one in him, just as they are in the great poets. The one is never below the other, and both are always worthy of the placid, partly sad, wholly conscious and intelligent, sense of the riddles of life which serves them as a back- ground. As if to justify Browne's own theory of the quincunx, there were at the same time with him, with Milton, and with Taylor, two other prose writers of the first class, though of different kinds, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, and Thomas Hobbes. Hyde,i whose name and extraction came from Cheshire, though he was a Wiltshireman by 1 Clarendon's works were presented by his heirs to the University of Oxford, and have always been issued by the University Press, which bears his name. CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 453 birth, was born in 1608, was educated at Oxford (Magdalen Hall), and then practised law. At first a younger son, he came into the prop- erty by the death of his brothers. His early Opposi- tion attitude in the struggle between the King and the ^'^^" °°' Parliament was, like that of other good lawyers, chiefly dictated by dislike of the few or false precedents adduced for some actions of the Crown. He was also a very strong Anglican, and irreconcilably opposed to Presbyterianism, and from 1641 onward he was the King's chief ostensible adviser, though unluckily his influence was more apparent than real. He followed first the King and then the Prince of Wales, becoming later chief minister to Charles H. in his exile and poverty, as well as father-in-law to the future James IL At the Restoration he still remained Charles's Prime Minister, but he became, partly no doubt by his own fault, unpopular, and being left in the lurch by the King, was impeached, and quitted England in 1667. He lived at Montpellier and Rouen for seven years longer, and died at the Norman capital in 1674. Nothing of his was published till the eighteenth century, but he had written much, beginning his famous history, in the narrow room of Scilly, as early as 1646. And this appeared in 1704. Later he wrote his own Life, but for literature his importance consists in the iiistory of the Great Rebellion. Clarendon's peT^uiial character and his political action have, as was inevitable, been judged rather too much according to the judge's political sympathies, and this fashion of judgment has extended even to his literary merits. On these last, however, 'there should be no serious difference. His demerits are sufficiently obvious — they consist first in an awkward syntax, secondly, and still more, in the most extraordinary sentences, piled up to appalling bulk by additions, parentheses, and a complete contempt of the humble art of punctua- tion. His merits, on the other hand, are, as regards the general scheme of his book, what has justly been called an epical composition — a sense of the central story and its unfolding ; and in regard to individual passages, a singular accomplishment and skill. Few historians, prolix as he seems to be, can describe a given event — a battle, a debate or what not — with more vividness than Clarendon. But not one in all the long list of the great practitioners of the art has such skill at the personal Character. This character, it has been already observed, was a favourite exercise of the time, both in France and in England; but Clarendon's are far the greatest. He is accused of partisanship by partisans, but this would matter little, even if the accusation were just. For what we want to see is how Clarendon can draw us the portrait he wanted to paint. Its justice concerns history : literature is only busied with its art. Thomas Hobbes was twentv vears older than Clarendon. He 454 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii came from the same county (where, at Malmesbury, he was born on 5th April 1588) and went to the same college. When quite a young Hobbe "^^^ '^^ became attached, as tutor, to the family of Cavendish, and remained a friend, and for the most part an inmate, of that family for almost the whole residue of his long life. He was acquainted with Bacon, and, it would seem, with most of the literary men of the capital in the days of James and Charles, but published nothing himself till 1628, and then only a translation though a very remarkable one — of Thucydides. He was much abroad, sometimes in charge of pupils, but published nothing of his own till 1642, when De Cive appeared. The more famous Leviathan did not appear till nine years later, in its author's grand climacteric. Hobbes was pensioned at the Restoration, but still lived chiefly with the Devonshire family, and died at their seat of Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire on 4th December 1679, having come well within a decade of seeing both the Armada and the Revolution. His work ^ is extensive, and much of it exists in duplicate, for Hobbes followed Bacon's plan of issuing his work both in Latin and English. His eccentric fancy of trying to translate Homer into verse, with an excessively wooden result, is of no importance for literature, nor are his generally mistaken mathematical works. But his books on political and other philosophy are the first things on the subject in English which unite very original thought with a masterly and individual style. The extreme nominalism of their metaphysics, the absolutism of their politics, and the rather inferential than declared freethought of their religion, do not concern us here, though all had a great effect on English philosophy, and through it, by way of answers, deductions, and the like, on English literature. Hobbes, however, might have been much less remarkable on these points, and yet have held a very important place in the history of literature itself. His style stands very much alone, and with the usual allowance for personal idiosyncrasy, seems to have been formed by two main influences. The first of these was his practice in translating Thucydides, whom he has followed, in the brevity and pregnant compression of 'his manner, without imitating the Thucydidean license of syntax. The second may be connected with his own philosophical doctrines, which made him regard words as things of stable and rigid signification, to be kept strictly to certain concrete meanings, and handled with the same absence of vagueness as if they were figures or coins. If there is any style before him to which his bears special resemblance, it is that of Ben Jonson, while there are also, and naturally, a few resemblances to Bacon. As a i Ed. Molesworth, 16 vols. London, 1839-45. The English works fill ten of these, with an eleventh for index. CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 455 whole, though devoid of ornament to a degree which may sometimes seem almost repulsive, it h^ nne nf n d mim l^l p viCTflirj _Hf;nrrif"7i_| and_ adaptability, especially for argumentative purposes. It shows at once "^soost popularly, and not to least technical advantage, in the wonderful little treatise on Human Nature^^^ At least five other prose^^iters of this period must receive a short detailed notice — Felltham, Howell, Walton, Harrington, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Of Owen Felltham {c. \(>oo-c. 1680), once more, "little or nothing is known." He was a Suffolk man, and wrote several things in prose and verse, but his fame rests entirely on his Resolves?- Although this book was so popular that a ninth edition at least ^ „ ^ , , . ,i,,.r. 1 1 !• Felltham. appeared durmg the author s lifetime, and an eleventh in 1708, after which it went out of fashion for a century, we do not know exactly when the first edition appeared. The second is dated 1628. It is, in fact, a book of Essays, showing the extremely strone nisus of the time towards that form. There are a hundred and eighty-five of them, the subjects and the general treatment being not unlike Bacon's, though far less magniloquent. Yet Felltham wrote well, thought wisely, and sometimes gives curiously fresh traits and touches of his time in manner as well as thought. His verses in the metaphysical kind are more curious than poetical, his observations on the Low Countries shrewd enough, and some letters agreeable. Felltham's letters, however, are few, and by no means the most noteworthy part of his work ; those of James Howell - hold one of the principal places in English epistolary literature, and being themselves considerable in bulk, have survived, almost alone, from a „ • • 11- 1 TT Howell. much larger body of compositions by their author. He was born at Abernant in Carmarthenshire about 1594., was educated at Hereford School and Jesus College, Oxford, and showing aptitude for business, had various commissions abroad of a commercial nature at Venice (to import glass workers), in Spain (to recover debts due in England), etc. At home he was one of Ben Jonson\s "sons," and had numerous patrons through whom he obtained divers employ- ments, ending in the important one of Clerk of the Council. This, however, was just before the outbreak of the Rebellion, and Howell reaped from it chiefly imprisonment. He became Historiographer Royal at the Restoration, and died in 1666. His Letters, which 1 Reprinted eaHy in this century by Cummings (London, 1820), hut in a somewhat garbled form. The contemporary editions are preferable. 2 Contemporary copies also numerous; indeed, editions continued to be multiplied till well into the eighteenth century. Mr. Jacobs lias edited a hand- some reissue (2 vols. London, 1890). 456 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii alone need concern us here, extend over a very long period, and in some cases certainly, in many probably, are not so much genuine letters as Essays thrown into epistolary form. At other times, however, and specially in those dealing with his foreign travels, there is no reason to suspect their trustworthiness, and the medley of their subjects, dealt with in a gossiping style, but by no means without knowledge, and with a curious profusion of details of the most various kind, has always been found agreeable by good judges. We still rise in the scale of general acceptance as we come to Izaak Walton,^ one of the most popular, and justly popular, of English writers. He was born at Stafford in August 1593, but became a Londoner, and carried on the trade of linen Walton. , ., ,, -T. ^ .r draper, "sempster," etc. His first wife was a great- grand-niece of Cranmer, and his second a half-sister of Ken, con- nections not more causing, than springing from, his intimate and deep affection and loyalty to the Church of England. He was the friend of Donne, of Bishops Morley, Sanderson, and King, and of Sir Henry Wotton, lived latterly at Winchester, where his son-in-law Dr. Hawkins was prebendary, and died there in 1683. He lives in literature by \\\f ^.ouMp.tp. Angler, the first editj on of which — it was afterwards mucHaltered and supplemented by Cotton — appeared in 1653, in the depth of Fuller's "worst times," and by five short but admirable biographies of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert, and San- derson. It is impossible to overpraise Walton's books, which are among the most unique and agreeable possessions of English literature, but it is possible to misprai.se them, and this has often been done. It is questionable whether he had any literary art ; his charm is exactly that of the conversation of one of the rare children who from time to time concentrate the charms of childhood. As he happened to live in the greatest of our literary ages ; as he had no vanity, no bad taste, great friends, and the luck to set out what he thought about them and about his favourite pastime quite simply, he is admirable and delectable, and stands by himself. The brother of one of his heroes, Lord Herbert of Cherbury,^ is as pretty and complete a contrast to Walton as can well be imagined. In Walton, for all his infantile grace, there is not a touch of the cox- comb. Lord Herbert is coxcombry personified. He was born early enough (1583) to take a strong cast of the Elizabethan character, but he displays only its foibles, or some of them. His poems, which are not numerous, display a tone which, though never religious and not always moral, is still that of his brother transposed ; their chief 1 Editions innumerable. 2 Autobiography, ed. S. L. Lee, London, 1886 ; Poe7ns, ed. J. C. Collins, London, 1881. CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 457 interest is the occurrence in them of the In Memoriam metre, with not a few instances of its well-known cadence, and of the mould of phrase and thought which, like the Spenserian, it imposes almost automatically on poets. He wrote in Latin De Veritate, Religio Laid, and other things which have the not covetable honour of having founded English Deism, and are, at any rate, expressions of the scepticism which in nobler contemporaries produced magnificent work. His English productions are a History of Henry VIII., printed the year after his death, which occurred in 1648, and his very astonishing and rather popular Autobiography, which did not appear till Horace Walpole printed it in 1764. Herbert behaved very badly in the Rebellion, and his own accounts of his personal prowess earlier are uncorroborated by external evidence ; but he is not inconsiderable as a man of letters. If Shakespeare knew him, which is quite possible, it is a thousand pities that he did not put him into a play. The counterfeit would have had, and deserved, all the literary graces of Adriano de Armado and of Polonius in his speeches ; in his actions he might have supplied a dignified pendant to Parolles. James Harrington,^ a much more agreeable person, and a better though quainter writer, may fitly close this chapter. He was the son of a knight in the county of Rutland. He was born in 161 1, and was a member of Trinity College, Oxford, came early into a fair fortune, and enjoyed the advantages of travel and court attendance. Though of republican principles, he sympathetically attended Charles I. in his captivity, and was with the King to the " memorable scene " itself. During the interregnum (1656) he wrote Oceana. At the Restoration he was imprisoned, but released,-and lived till 1677. Harrington was undoubtedly mad at certain times, and perhaps not quite sane at any. But his imaginary Commonwealth, Oceana,'^ makes the subject of a very delightful though excessively odd book, wherein the project for a doctrinaire republic is worked out with all the learning, all the quaintness, and almost all the splendour of these mid-seventeenth-century writers, and with a profusion of fancy that never comes very far short of expression suitable to it. His otiier works are mostly unimportant. 1 Not to*be confounded with the earlier Sir John Har(r)ington {1561-1612), godson of Queen Elizabeth, translator of Ariosto, and author of some serious litera- ture, and some curiosities thereof. 2 Ed. H. Morley, London, 1887. CHAPTER VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE Reformation verse —Alexander Scott — Montgomerie — Sir Robert Ayton — The Earl of Stirling — Drummond — Prose — The Complaint of Scotland — Knox and Buchanan — King James — Sir Thomas Urquhart Whe.v we last handled the special Scottish division of English liter- ature, it was up to the death of Sir David Lyndsay, and not long before the birth of James VI. and I. James had not been long dead, his son was but just executed, when definitely Scots literature came to an end altogether, or was continued, in poetry and belles lettres at least, only by a few stragglers like the Sempills of Beltrees,i to the time when the older part of it was revived as a curiosity by Watson and Allan Ramsay, and inspired some fresh attempts. To endeavour to account for this is not necessary ; indeed, all such accounts must be mainly guesswork. It is enough to say that, as in the other case of the dying out of Anglo-Saxon, the most obvious explanation is by no means the safest or most probable. As there would probably have been little more Anglo-Saxon literature if there had been no Conqueror in 1066, so there would probably have been little Scots literature had there been no Union of Crowns in 1603. Both lan- guages were ceasing to be equal to the literary demands on them, and both ceased to produce literature. The Reformation struggle itself contributed a little to Scottish verse, but it cannot be said to have contributed much to Scottish poetry. The famous Glide and Godlie Ballates'^ — perhaps due to the Vedderburnes or Wedderburns — and the miscellanies Reformation j„ogt|y attributed to Robert Sempill (not "bne of the Beltrees family), which have been collected as Satirical Poems of the Refortnation,^ are very rarely of poetical value. Hardly 1 See their Poems, ed. Paterson, Edinburgh, 1849. There is, however, some guesswork about the attributions. 2 Ed. Mitchell, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1897. 8 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S., 2 vols. Edinburgh, 1891. 458 CHAP. VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 459 anything in the former repeats the vigour and " go " of the celebrated " Hey, trix ! trim go trix ! " which Sir Walter, as far as he could, inserted in The Abbot. The other " Gude and Godlie " pieces art either pious but not specially poetical, or else smirched with the savage moroseness which is the disgrace of the Protestant party. This appears to a far worse degree in the " Satirical " poems. Some of these, which have very little to do with the Reformation, are simply ballads, rather ribald but not unamusing, yet hardly ever poetical. Still, we may congratulate ourselves that the authors wrote them rather than such serious and decorous work as that of John Rolland,' who is the chief named poet between Lyndsay and Scott.'- Holland, of whom very little is known, but who seems to have been a Dalkeith man, composed two poems of some length, both on merely mediaeval and, or at latest, fifteenth-century subjects, and in styles to match — the Seiiin Sages and the Court of Venice. It is perhaps enough to say that in the latter he very nearly clears away the shame of Eng- land when Lydgate and Occleve are compared with Henryson and Dunbar. He certainly provides the very dullest and most prosaic poetry, if not exactly the worst verse, of the entire school, whether northern or southern. The latest poets of distinction in the older Scots were, however, found, a little after these, in Alexander Scott and Alexander Mont- gomerie. Here also we cannot but be struck by the extreme antiquity of their forms as compared with those of their English contemporaries. Scott, who was in all probability still writing when Spenser began, is almost indistinguishable except philologically, if even so, from Dunbar ; The Cherry and the S/ae, Montgomerie's great work, is in the exact allegorical tone of the fifteenth and even of the fourteenth century, thougli its author does not seem to have died much before Shakespeare. Scott, however, redeems the poetical fame of the reign of Queen Mary. We know really nothing about him. We can even date only two of his poems, ^ the Lament of the Master of Erskine, who was killed at Pinkie, and the Welcome to Queen Mary in 1562. He seems to have been unlucky in his Scott." married life, and if he is the "old Scott" to whom Montgomery refers, he was apparently no more successful than most poets in acquiring a fortune. But all this, except the dates, comes to reallv nothing. From him, or attributed to him, we have "^ Sciitn .'i<7_!res, Ballantyne Club, 1837; Cour/ of Venus, ed. Gregor, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1884. 2 The Court of Venus, not printed till 1575, seems to have been written before 1560. 8 Ed. Cranstoun, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1896. 46o CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii just three dozen pieces, none of them long. Most are love-poems, the rest complimentary, satirical, or occasional in one way or another, with one or two sacred — in fact the usual tarrago of the poets of his time. Scott has no one favourite metre ; he will write in octaves with abundance of "aureate" terms— "genetrice," "celsitude," and the like — as in the address to Queen Mary ; in the popular Chrisfs Kirk on the Green metre, as in the "jousting and debate between Adam- son and Sym"; and in many other metres, mostly lyrical, and all managed with skill. He is not free from the excessive coarseness in phraseology which has already been noted, and, unlike Lyndsay, he does not accompany looseness of speech with any great preciseness in moral teaching. But he is a really agreeable poet of love in his way, playful, musical, and in the poem which bears the epigraph, '•When his Wife left Him," really pathetic, with a not unmanly revulsion later to the indignant resolve to " choose ane other and forget her," instead of continuing " to break mine heart and not the better," the last phrase forming, with slight changes, the refrain of the poem. Alexander Montgomerie ^ is a much more tangible person, and a rather more considerable poet than Scott ; yet even about him our personal information is by no means abundant. He is said to have . been born at Hazelhead Castle in Ayrshire, not later on gomerie. ^j^^^ 1550, and to have belonged to a junior branch of the Eglinton family. Another tradition identifies the scene of The Cherry and the Slae w'ith the junction of the Tarff and the Dee just above Kirkcudbright. He was in the service of the Regent Morton, and then in the King's about 1578. being called "Captain," with exactly what right is not known. James received sonnets from him, and quotes him in his Reivlis and Cautelis (vide post), but it does not appear that he ever did much for him, except giving him 500 merks a year, chargeable on the Archbishopric of Glasgow. He mentions many persons, some known, some unknown, as his friends. He got into some not clearly defined trouble, was dismissed from court, and lost his pension, but had it restored or confirmed by legal process in 1588, and we know that he was dead in 161 5. His works consist of one long and (at least by name) tolerably well-known poem, The Cherry and the Slae, a " Flyting " of the old kind with Hume of Polwarth, seventy sonnets, about as many more short miscellaneous poems, mostly secular, about half a score devo- tional pieces, and not quite a score versions of psalms and canticles. The Cherry and the Slae is allegorical, though there is not uni- versal consent as to what the allegory is. It turns at any rate on the lEd. Cranstoun, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1887, CHAP. VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 461 contrast between the cherry growing aloft and afar, the sloe beneath and at hand, the cherry sweet and precious, the sloe bitter and despised. A highborn love and a lowly one, virtue and vice, have been sug- gested, to which one might obviously add success and failure, learning and an idle life, and a hundred other pairs. The metre is peculiar, and became extremely popular in Scotland, so that it is better known by imitations than in the original, and may possibly have been com- bined by Montgomerie himself, though, as we have seen, northern poets in the alliteration + metre-and-rhyme stage had been extremely curious in their complicated arrangements. It is a quatorzain made up of the common sixain of 886886, rhymed aabaab, than a quatrain, 8686, rhymed cdcd, and then another quatrain of sixes, rhymed ef^ internally in the odd lines, and simply at the end in the even. Except that the complete separation of the rhymes of these three subdivisions rather interferes with the unity of the whole, it is a very artful and agreeable device. There are 114 such stanzas in the piece, making nearly 1600 lines, and Cupid, Hope, Experience, Reason, Will. Danger, and other old friends, from the days of the Rose downwards, take part in the conversation. But to modern readers the pleasant opening description (again the old Rose descrip- tion, but agreeably varied), the more original picture of the cherry- crowned crag and the effort to scale it, some well-expressed saws of mother wit, and a fine final stanza of praise, supply its attractions. The Flyting. alliterative, and of course foul-mouthed, is merely a curiosity. The sonnets, though not without a certain stiffness which we find in all the early attempts at that form in our language, have stateliness and even positive beauty, especially those to his mistress, who has been identified with his kinswoman. Lady Margaret Mont- gomerie. Many of his miscellaneous poems are to the same or other loves, though we have among them a burlesque Navigation, and some strictly miscellaneous matter. It is perhaps on these that Montgomerie's claims may be most surely based, for he shows in them more variety, as well as more strength, than Scott does. There is a quite fresh note in a piece which begins on an old string — Hay ! now the day dawis. The transition is curiously sharp to Sir Robert Ayton, who was more than a child at the probable date of the death of Scott, and a man far advanced in middle life before that of Montgomerie. He was a cadet of the family of Ayton of Kinaldie in Fife, and took his degree (having been born in 1570) at St. 'Aytm" Andrews in 1588. He travelled, but after the accession of James to the Englisli throne came to court, was knighted, and 462 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vil became private secretary to Anne of Denmark, a position which he afterwards filled in the household of Henrietta Maria. He had diplomatic employments abroad, and at home was familiar with all the English wits from Ben Jonson downward. He died in 1638, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. He wrote in a good many languages, but the important thing for us is that his English poems do not atfect the slightest Scots dialect. The most famous of them is the universally known I do confess thou'rt smooth and fair; while he has claims, inferior to those of Sempill, on the authorship of the original oi Atdd Lang Syne. The tendency which Ayton ^ thus shows to abandon the Scots altogether — a tendency which may be partly accounted for by the wish to get rid of the associated traditions of alliteration and allegory, partly by the temptations of a wider audience in Southern English — is shown much more strikingly, and in greater bulk and variety of illustration, by two poets who are usually linked, William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, and William Drummond of Hawthornden, to whom the great Marquis of Montrose may be added. The first named '^ was born at Menstrie, near Alloa, at a date not precisely ascertained — it used to be put at about 1580, but some hold that to be about a dozen years too late. He was well educated, and travelled with the seventh Earl of Argyll, to whose house stirlfng.° his family seems to have been for some time attached. And he published most of his work, the sonnets called Aurora and the curious Monarchical Tragedies of Crcesits, Darius, Alexander, and Julius Ccesar, so early that they were all done by 1607. He was knighted, became a member of the house- hold, first of Prince Henry and then of Prince Charles, had employ- ment in Scotland, and in 1614 began a poem on Doomsday, which he afterwards continued on a scale suitable to the subject. In 162 1 he was grantee of the whole of Nova Scotia, in 1626 Secretary for Scotland, and in 1633 was raised to the peerage as Viscount Stirling, the earldom being afterwards bestowed upon him. He died in London in 1640. Lord Stirling is a distinct Elizabethan. His strange monarchic tragedies were probably suggested by Fulke Greville, and their choruses and dedications contain much stately work. The Exhorta- tion to Pri?ice Henry, which some have called his best thing, belongs to the same class as much of the work of Drayton, Daniel, and Chapman, from which Doomsday and the less portentous Jonathan 1 Ed. Rogers, London, 1871. 2 Part in Chalmers : complete, 3 vols. Glasgow, 1870, CHAP. VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 463 are also not far. The Aurora collection of sonnets, songs, sestines, elegies, etc., in the same way resembles many pieces of the lyric yield of the last decade of the sixteenth century, and was but a few years later in publication (1604). The unfortunate thing for the poet is that he comes extremely late, and that his by no means inconsiderable beauties are scattered over such an enormous mass of work as to be discerned and enjoyed only by an effort even more considerable. In this as in other respects Drummond of Hawthornden ^ had the advantage over his friend. He was born at the much visited and beautiful seat of his family, on 13th December, 1585, was educated at the High School and University of Edinburgh, studied iii-ri • n TT Urummond. also in France, and succeeded his lather m loio. hie lived for forty years after this, chiefly at his own home, marrying twice, but losing his first wife after a year, and remaining eighteen years a widower; entertaining Ben Jonson (v. supra), enjoying the friendship of most distinguished persons in Scotland and many in England. His death in 1649 is said to have been hastened by grief for Charles I-, but he had submitted (unwillingly, it is true) to the Covenant. His notes of Ben Jonson's conversations have brought some obloquy on him, but the defence that he himself seems never to have intended them for publication has validity, and at the worst they are rather indiscreet than malevolent. Drummond was a very considerable man of letters, and perhaps the best-known Scottish poet between Dunbar and Burns. He began with elegiac verses on Prince Henry in 161 3, and altogether left a good deal, the chief items being Forth Feasting, a complimentary address to James in 161 7 on his return to Scotland; an amusing but not quite certainly genuine macaronic poem called Polevw-Middinia ; a prose tract entitled the Cypress Grove, which is a fine piece of musical and melancholy Jacobean prose; and a great number of miscellaneous poems, sacred and profane, sonnets, madrigals, and epigrams, trans- lations, elegies, hymns; and, in short, all the miscellanea of the Caroline muse. The extreme beauty occasionally recognisable in Drummond's verse is marred first by a certain tone of the literary exercise, by a suggestion, at least as strong as in the case of his friend Alexander, that he would not have written if he had not had the great body of Elizabethan and other poetry before him; and secondly (though, indeed, this is only the same fault in another form) by a distinct deficiency in spontaneity, ease, and flow. Yet he is a very charming poet, especially in his madrigals and some of his sonnets, possessed of an elaborate courtly grace that does not exclude passion, lAlso not quite completely in Chalmers. Sep.nrately by CunninKham and Turnbull, and in " The Muses" Library." Life by Professor Masson, 1873. 464 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii and though never reaching the consummate expression of the best of his English contemporaries, yet very little behind them. The verses which have made the special fame of Montrose are so few that they need but mention ; so delightful that mention of them could not possibly be avoided. "Great, good, and just" and "He either fears his fate too much " have secured their place and are never likely to be put out of it. They are contained in a hundred anthologies, but may be best sought in Dr. Hannah's admirable collection of Courtly Poets^ which, beyond its special purpose, serves as a thesaurus of much occasional work of the best kind during the period covered by this and the two preceding Books, including the whole of the probable poetical work, strangely beautiful at times, of Sir Walter Raleigh, the graceful and interesting copies of verses which we owe to Wotton, and many pleasing things by Wyatt and Vaux, Oxford and Essex, Tichborne and Southwell, Dyer and Sandys. We have previously considered the reasons of the lateness of Scottish poetry, and incidentally those of the still greater lateness of Scottish prose. But no reasons, however reasonable, will ever entirely remove surprise that The Complaint of Scotland (1549), which dates from the very eve of the middle of the sixteenth century, should be up to the present time, and should have every chance of continuing to be, the earliest known original ^ work of any importance in the kind. It is not a fresh surprise (on the contrary, the opposite would be one) that its style is as antique as its date is belated. It is not merely that the " aureate " term, the rhetoriqtieiir language, of the fifteenth century pervades and saturates it, but that the general scheme is scarcely more modern than — is scarcely so modern as — that of Chaucer's Boethins, more than a century and a half earlier. This curious mixture of archaism and pedantry continued to distinguish Scots prose until it ceased, as a characteristic and national language, to be written ; and as Professor Ker has well observed on this very subject, we see it at least as late as Sir Thomas Urquhart, who has it supremely. The Coviplaint itself, in substance and scheme a violent ^f^ifoT^w"^ "^i^t^be against England (not surprising, inasmuch as it was written just after Pinkie), is treated like a prose Romance of the Rose so far as the tendency of the author to digress, divagate, and make excursions in every possible direction is con- 1 In the " Aldine Poets," London ; constantly reprinted. 2 There had been, of course, translations, but even these are not very early. Bellenden, in the early sixteenth century, was the first important and consider- able translator into Scots. The standard edition of the Complaint is that of Dr. Murray, E.E.T.S., 1872-73. It includes some slightly earlier tracts. John Gau's Right Way to the Kingdom of Heaven (ed. Mitchell, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1887) was translated and adapted from the Danish as early as 1533. CHAP. VI SCOTS POETRY AND PROSE 465 cerned. The book is not solely a literary curiosity, but it is very mainly so. The Complaint is anonymous,^ and therefore borrows no interest from known or supposed authorship. The same cannot, perhaps, quite be said of the English writings of the two most famous of the author's countrymen and contemporaries, John Knox and George Buchanan.'^ The piquant title of the former's Buchanan, principal early work, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the iMoHstroiis Regiment of IVotnen, 1558, is the best part of it ; the History of the Reformation has something of the quaintness but little of the attraction of its time ; his tracts and letters have small literary interest. In fact, Knox was only in a very minor degree a man of letters at all. He was simply an ecclesiastical politician, using the press, which had become already one of the most powerful of political engines. His English writing is clear, vigorous, and not incorrect ; but it aims at nothing more. Buchanan, on the contrary, was a man of letters first of all, though he made a figure in politics. But his literary work was, in its greatest and by far its best part, written in a dead language. As we have seen, his own country, for fifty years and more after he was born, in 1506, had little or no prose literature, and her poetry was dropping off. He himself was more a Frenchman than a Scot by domicile for the greater part of his life, seeing that, from the time when as a young man he left St. Andrews till long past his fiftieth year, he, save for one short interval, was resident in France. His occupation was mainly pedagogic. Montaigne was under him at Bordeaux, and he wrote Latin plays and poems of real, though, even when every allowance is made, rather exaggerated, merit. His work in the vernacular is very small, and consists of political pamphlets, the chief of which is the savage but ingenious Chamcsleon, directed with a certain amount of reason against Maitland of Lethington. Buchanan is less " aureate " than the author of the Complaint, a little more florid than Knox, and on the whole, as indeed we should expect, holds the position of something like a Scottish Ascham in style, though with a stiffness and tendency to pedantry which may justly be charged, not merely upon his own more pedantic temperament, but on the infinitely less advanced condition of Scots as a literary language when compared with English. The polemic temper and purpose of these men reflects itself in 1 It has been attributed, like the Cude and Godlie Ballates, to the Dundee Wedderburns. 2 Mr. Arber has given The First lilast in the "English Scholar's Library," London, 1878. The best edition of Knox's Works is that of Laing. 6 vols. Kdinburgh. 1846, sq. The Enfjlish opiiscula of Buchanan have been edited by 1'. Hume Brown, S.T.S., Edinburgh, 1892. 2 H 466 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vn most of their contemporaries and successors, and the wide spread of it may indeed be fairly charged in part with the sterility of Scots in literature proper. Ninian Winzet, the chief pamphleteer on the Roman side, is early, was a learned and ingenious writer, and con- trasts very favourably with his opponent Knox in tone and temper; but still he is no great man of letters, nor are the Melvilles (Sir James, 1535-1607; Andrew, 1545-1622; James, 1556-1614), Spottis- woode, Baillie, and others later, such. They are interesting by their matter and by the racy quaintness which hardly failed any one then. The Reivlis and Cautelis ^ of King James have been ing James, ^^^^^^y i-eferred to, and are a not unimportant document in the history of English criticism ; the Counterblast to Tobacco, the Basilikon Doron, and the Detnonology are known, at least by their titles, to all, and there is a very large residue of chiefly theological work. But he is only a good plain writer, not equal to his own recorded powers in conversation, or those lent him by the greatest man of letters of the nation that he first ruled. Still, Scots prose was to produce one last delightful example, concentrating, heightening, embellishing, and preserving for ever all its own most racy character- istics, in Sir Thomas Urquhart,'^ Knight of Cromarty, and, Urmjhart^^ in far other sense than most of us, a descendant in lineal and specified genealogy from Adam. He was born in 1605, took a strong part on the Royalist side, shared in the " Trot of Turriff," was knighted in 1641, fought at Worcester, and died just at the moment of the Restoration. His known work consists of a trans- lation of Rabelais and of several most singular tractates on mathe- matics, linguistics, and what not, with wonderful Greek compound titles, and written in a language which is Eiip/ines and Sir Thomas Browne rolled into one, and extra-illustrated by national and personal peculiarities. It is impossible to read Urquhart without conceiving a strong liking for the man and a great admiration for his literary powers ; but it must be admitted that it was well he left no school. lEd. Arber, with Gascoigne's Steel Glass, etc. Not much else has been recently reprinted. 2 There is, unluckily, no complete edition of Urquhart. The Rabelais has been often reprinted; the Maitland Club collected his quaint treatises, Trisso- tetras, Logopandccteision, etc. ; but there is said to be other unprlnted matter. In fuller space the historian Pitscottie, the collectors Maitland and Bannatyne (more precious to literature than many men of letters), Scot of Scotstarvet, Mure of Rowallan, Alexander Hume, and Robert Ker, Earl of Ancrum (known by one fine sonnet), could claim notice, and even here they claim mention. INTERCHAPTER VII The present Interchapter must be so contrived as to pay a double debt, and to summarise not merely the Caroline sub-period but the entire literary age which is still, and justly, called Elizabethan by those who are not studious of innovation for innovation's sake. In the first respect our recapitulation in the three kinds should have been made unusually easy by the chapters which have gone before. In all three the mark, if not of decadence — that is a dangerous word — yet of completion of phase, is very distinct. There is not a touch of it, save for the most unessential things, in Milton ; but then Milton is one of those examples which come, fortunately, from time to time, to prove the folly of any strict " evolution " theory in letters, and the superi- ority of a theory of revolution tempered by permanence. He dwells apart ; but the rest, whether poets, prose-writers, or dramatists, tell of the future as much by their excellences as by their shortcomings. For delight Caroline poetry, in the characteristic form of it, has few superiors ; but no one who keeps his critical head can say that its charms have not a touch of the morbid. They consist in extreme strangeness, in quintessenced and preternatural art, rather than in the direct and simple appeal in transcendence to nature. We would not lose them for anything; but we feel that they are something of the kind of Ninon de.Lenclos, their contemporar)', who fascinated the grandsons of her first admirers. And then, side by side with them, there is the phenomenon, never known except ii} periods of eclipse, of a quite different school growing and flourishing. In these things there is no possibility of mistake. The fear or hope of change is hardly even perplexing, it is so clear. The same signs present themselves in drama, but more unmis- takably still, and with far less of compensation. Once more, we would not lose the best plays written after the accession of Charles I., but the loss would by no means be the occasion of such grief as we should feel if we had known and were suddenly, by some malignant power, forced to forget, except in vague recall of their charm, Herrick and Marvell, Crashaw and Carew. In this kind 467 468 CAROLINE LITERATURE book the sudden flight compensates less; and here — as not in poetry — we look in vain for any promise of a new style to take the place of that which is failing. Jonson and Chapman and Dekker belong to a far earlier time ; Massinger and Ford and Shirley, despite the ambition of the second and the industrious talent of the other two, leave us partly cold ; and there are no others that rise beyond a very moderate second class. Above all, the inability to raise any new form in drama, and the quite shocking laxity of the verse in which most of what is written shows itself, reconcile us to closing the chapter. When a man of undoubted talent like Davenant succumbs in this way there is clearly something wrong; but when a man who is at least parcel- genius like Suckling, who can write other verse quite excellently, follows suit, then no further doubt is possible : it is time for this kind of drama to go. The phenomena of prose are not entirely different, but show them- selves in a different and much more satisfactory way. Here also we see that there is a necessity, if only a temporary necessity, for a change. Prose — "the instrument of the average purpose" — has got very ill fitted indeed for any such thing. It has become, save in the hands of Hobbes, nearly incapable of directness, of plain business- like treatment. The protest which, as we shall see, was made in the beginning of the new period by Sprat was justified absolutely so far as the mere business requirements of the matter went, and was not entirely without justification even from the point of view of belles lettres. A general theory of style which could allow even Milton constantly to spoil his sentence, and which could not shepherd even Clarendon from wandering inextricably into a cul-de-sac at every few pages, obviously required at least the provision of something alternative if not an utter reformation. Yet here the actual condition of things provided condolences and vails of such magnificent quality that those are almost to be excused who would have had no reform at all. An English literature without Sir Thomas Browne is a thing so impoverished as to be appalling to think of, and the loss of Taylor and Milton in his prose, of Fuller and the not yet mentioned Glanville, and of not a few minors, would still be a hideous deprivation. Even these minors, and still more the eccentricities of the Urquhart type, have an engagingness which we look for in vain from Dryden to Southey ; while the great men of the time are simply unmatchable in any language. The close of the Apology itself is a very little, though only a very little, inferior to the close of the Hydriotaphia. Nor must we forget that this incomparable descant is the Ite 7nissa est of something more than Caroline prose or Caroline litera- ture — it is that of the whole great Elizabethan period. That VII INTERCHAPTER VII 469 period from beginning to end covered just eighty years — an ordinary lifetime ; indeed, Hobbes was born less than ten years after its beginning and outlived its close by nearly twenty. Yet into this ordinary lifetime it had compressed the literary events of a dozen ordinary generations. It had found English literature with scarcely more than one name which could pretend to the first class, with very few of the second, with but a scanty battalion of distinguished known writers, with a body of work, anonymous and assigned, which in its more notable examples would fill but a very small bookcase, with the list of styles and kinds either full of blanks or completed only by experiments and rough sketches, the great department of drama having nothing to show but these. It left a mighty library full of masterpieces, with the figures of Spenser and Shakespeare among dead, and those of Milton and Browne among living, men, showing as but the captains of scores and hundreds of poets and prose-writers and dramatists of almost every kind. Not one single department of literature except the prose novel was now in a rucfi- mentary condition, and no language was in this respect better oft" than our own. In not a single kind were we now unfurnished with champions whom we could oppose to the greatest of any literature, ancient or modern. This vast overrunning of the literary territory, this tumultuous peopling of the literary solitudes, is, no doubt, the chief general phenomenon of the time, and its minor phenomena should have been almost sufficiently indicated in the divisional summaries and the text which supports them. In all departments we can indeed observe (taking care not to make the generalisations too strict) a cliaracter of mgre or_ j^ess playful exubera nce in the strictly Elizabethan part, of recollection and sober weiglvfy^TlToiiglit Tir~"tTTe"" Jac obean , and a ftnther^tag e either of sheer extrav agance, ot melancholy mysticism, or~~nf~rjuTntessenced, arti ficial, ve rysttgl^tfy- fiivuloUs^ grace in the Caroline ; bllt these notes must not be forced. We can see the v ast jpipnr tannp- gfjJie. period in prosod y, with Spensei^ reshaDi n!|, and to iifTfjt c\tpnt fivin^j ^poetic dictiona nd its soun d value ; with Sjjake- T^peare and the dramatists loosening and suppling versification toTiie utmost possible exty nt ; AlUl With Mil tun nil JTio; ! Ttcle and^t+ie early coupK'tpTr s on tlic other p i-evpntin,(r it Irom hprrirnin.cr simj^ly l^^w-jpss. We see the P2u phuist protest against"want of colour in prose, at first merely fantastic and bizarre, losing little of its fantasy, but acquiring gi;avity, harmony, weight, in Jacobean hands, and at last giving us theilnsurpassable majesty and sweetness at once of the great prose- writers of the middle of the centoiy. The essay makes its appear- ance, and spreads itself subtly, and under all manner of disguises, in many directions. Lyric poetry of the true song-kind attains a 470 CAROLINE LITERATURE book vii luxuriance and a charm never before and seldom since attained. The sermon becomes one not merely of the great instruments of religion, but of the great achievements of literature ; the masque, a graceful if artificial and short-lived kind, comes into bloom. History and philosophy, cultivated sparingly before, receive consummate treat- ment at the hands of Hobbes and Clarendon. Above all, the drama, so long postponed, finds, in the course of a few years, expression in almost every possible variety, and, though it still has a sort of after- piece or set of afterpieces to present in Restoration comedy and the heroic drama, runs nearly its full course. If in such an abundance, such a riot almost, the principles of measure, of order, of limit, are not always sufficiently attended to, there can be little wonder. They could be, for a time at least, very willingly spared; they would almost certainly have deprived us of more than they could have given ; and those who regard them with special affection will not find reason to complain of their too sparing presence for something like 150 years, which now lie before us in the periods of the two following Books. BOOK VIII THE AUGUSTAN AGES CHAPTER I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY The term "Augustan " — Its use here — Dryden — His life — His earlier poems — The satires, etc. — The Fables — His verse — Butler— Restoration lyric — Satires of Marvell and Oldham Industrious attempts have been made to trace the origin of the phrase Augustan age in reference to English literature. The phrase itself has not always been used with the same denotation, being sometimes applied to the whole period during which Pope wrote, sometimes limited to the reign of Queen "AugVsl™." Anne, and sometimes extended backwards so as to in- clude Dryden. This last seems the best use if the term — which is a convenient one and not erroneous except by intention — be employed at all. For it connects itself well with Johnson's famous comparison, of Dryden's dealings with the English language and literature to those of Augustus w^ith the city of Rome, which he " found of brick and left of marble." We do not nowadays consider Shake.speare brick or Rowe marble ; but that does not matter. What is beyond controversy is that a change of the widest and deepest kind passed not merely over but through English literature, at a time corresponding almost exactly with the Restoration, and in consequence of influences of which for all but forty years , ^ , , ,^ , . , Its use here. Dryden was the supreme literary exponent — that the kind of literature then produced received its greatest polish, and came nearest to its own ideal, in some forty years more to the death of Pope — that for a furtlier ])eriod of not quite sixty years it was in office, though it was gradually losing power — and that it was driven 47 » 472 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii from both, after a preliminary summons to depart in the Lyrical Ballads of 1798, by the triumph of Romanticism in the early years of the nineteenth century. The history of this literature will occupy us during this Book and the next, and the present may best be occupied with the Augustan period, in the wide sense, of Dryden, Pope, and their times. The causes and necessity of the change have been indicated already; the course of it must occupy us here. Nor perhaps in any period is one single figure so prominent and exemplary as in the Dryden ^""^^ P^*"* ^^ *^'^" -^"P^ ^^^ nearly approached by others, and his greatness was in poetry alone, for he scarcely touched drama, and tliough a good prose-writer, was only such for pastime. But Dryden was the greatest poet of his own day and style by such a distance that no second can be placed to him. He was the chief agent in the shaping and in the popularising of the new prose. And if one or two tragedies of others have been thought, and several comedies certainly are, better than any play of his, yet no one did both so well, while he also exceeds all in the volume of his dramatic work and in the variety of its forms. John Dryden 1 was born in 1631 at Aldwinkle All Saints in Northamptonshire, of a family which certainly came from the North, and perhaps from beyond the Border, but which had been settled His life ^°' ^°™^ ^"^^ ^"^ ^^^ actual position with estates and a baronetcy. He was educated at Westminster, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. His connections on both sides were Puritan and Parliamentary, and his uncle on the mother's side, Sir Gilbert Pickering, was a close friend of the Protector, whose death Dryden celebrated in verse. But it is certain that he could never have been an anti-Royalist at heart ; and when the Restoration came he celebrated that too with as much good-will as vigour. We know extremely little of his beginnings in literature; but in 1663, having succeeded to a small property, he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and very soon afterwards was in active practice as a playwright. In 1670 he was made Poet- Laureate and Historiographer Royal in succession, respectively, to Davenant and Howell, but for ten years more he wrote little but plays. The ferments of the Popish Plot induced his great jjolitical satires. He had a pension in addition to his salaries, and his enemies have held that interest decided his change of religion when James II. succeeded to the throne and began proselytising. This imputation is not only ungenerous but improbable. Dryden did iThe standard edition of Dryden is Scott's (18 vols.), which has been re- edited, with a few additions and corrections, by the present writer. Mr. Christie's " Globe " edition of the Poems is not likely soon to be superseded. CHAP. I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY 473 much poorly paid work for the court, drudging at translations and writing The Hind and the Panther (the greatest poem ever written in the teeth of its subject), and when the Revolution came he was faithful to his cause, and lost everything but his small private fortune. He returned to play-writing, and after a time made inadequate but not inconsiderable gains by his translation of Virgil. His last and almost his best work was contained in the volume of Fables, which was published (1699-1700) very shortly before his death, from mortification of the toe due to gout, on ist May 1700. He had three sons, the youngest of whom succeeded to the baronetcy. Dryden's change of faith, the questionable shape of a good deal of his dramatic writing, and other things, have caused controversy about his private character; but all the available evidence leaves him a very fair specimen of humanity, amiable in private life, extraordinarily modest and generous to others m literary matters, a hard worker, sturdy in resisting misfortune, frank in confessing his own faults, and chargeable with very few except the coarseness and the adulation which were characteristic, not of his own personality, but of the manners of the time. His intellectual and literary greatness have seldom been denied, though estimates of them have, of course, varied. He did not show his great powers very early, and indeed the amount of work tliat we have from him till after his thirtieth year is extremely small. As a boy he contributed to the already mentioned volume of funeral poems on his schoolfellow. Lord Hastings, a piece in the most extravagant "metaphysical" style, but not without cleverness; his Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell's death (again showing careful attention to the fashion of the time in their choice of the quatrain metre of Gondihert) are stiff and unequal but fine in parts, and already display a certain craftsmanship which is very rare in the work of a beginner. The group of his poems on the Restoration — Astrcea Redux, a poem on the Coronation, zx\A one to Clarendon — is of singular inter- est. All three are written in the couplet, the metre that Dryden was born — not exactly to infroduce, seeing that it had been introduced in its new form by Waller and others before poemV.^'^ he was born, but — to strengthen, to perfect, and to instal in public favour for something like a century and a half. He is not yet at his best in it, or at anything near his best. His touch is un- sure ; his sense is sometimes not quite clear ; and he is often driven to clumsy inversions in order to get it expressed and concluded in the distich. But the inimitable ring which distinguishes his verse from all others — the ring as of a great bronze coin thrown down on marble — appears already, with something of the command of easy stately phrase and very much of the "energy divine" which was 474 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii justly attributed to him by his best pupil. In his next, and for many years only, important poem he relapsed into the quatrain. Annus Mirabilis (1666) is a poem which might be taken as a text or series of texts to show the difference between the old poetry and the new. The form is against it; the quatrain is meditative and impressionist, not historic. There are queer lapses into the meta- physical, oscillations between bombast and bathos, which had better not be there. And yet, as distinctly, though after a very different fashion, as in the almost contemporary Paradise Lost itself, there is the "wind of the spirit," the power of transforming, the evidence of command of that mysterious instrument, the measured word. It is a proof of the greatness of Dryden that he knew Milton for a poet ; it is a proof of the smallness (and mighty as he was on some sides, on others he was very small) of Milton that (if he really did so) he denied poetry to Dryden. Then, for fifteen years and more, Dryden did nothing of impor- tance in pure poetry, and his drama — verse and other — will be handled two chapters hence. He broke out again with the marvellous group of satires above referred to — Absalom and Achitophel satiresfetc. (Part I., November 1681), The Medal (March 1682), MacFlecknoe (October 1682), and the second part of Absalom and Achitophel (with important contributions from Dryden, though the whole is not his), a month later, with Religio Laid almost at the same moment. In these poems Dryden showed himself in a light which, though not perhaps surprising to careful students of his plays, could hardly have been anticipated by any one who knew his earlier poems only. In mere subject not one of the group is ab- solutely original — originality of the obvious kind is not Dryden's forte. But in the treatment, the form, the real essence of them, few things more oi-iginal have ever been seen in English literature. His long practice in rhyming plays had given him an absolute command of the form of couplet, of which in the Restoration group his grasp had been uncertain, and a secure handling of the widest diversity of sub- jects inverse. Nobody — hardly even Liicr&tius — has ever argued in verse like Dryden ; few have understood the ordonnance of a verse- narrative as he has. But over and above these gifts, Nature had endowed him with a still more special faculty for satiric and didactic verse — the faculty of keeping himself thoroughly above his subject in the sense of command. Dryden has been strangely called " phleg- matic," from the cool superiority which he observes in dealing with the most exciting themes. He is in reality no more phlegmatic than Shakespeare himself, though he is a lesser poet with lesser range. The phlegm of the great passage on Life in Aurengsebe, of the "wandering fires" in The Hind and the Panther, to mention no CHAP. I THE AGE OF D R YD EN — POETRY 475 others, is a very curious humour ; and it were much to be wished that more poets would run such humours upon us. But Dryden was not lightly moved by light things ; and while his adversaries howled and gnashed and gesticulated, he swam steadily above on an easy wing pouring molten iron upon them. The controversial verse of Religio Laid, with its tell-tale yearning for an infallible director, is less popular than the great satiric portraits of the Absalom pieces, The Medal, and MacFlecknoe, but it is not less good. Perhaps the very best of all — magnificent as are the '' Zimri," the " Og," the " Doeg," and the whole of MacFlecknoe — is the " Shimei" (Slingsby Bethel) of the first Absalom. Nowhere else is the easy wing-stroke of the couplet, at once propelling the poet through upper air and slapping his victim in the face at every beat, so triumphantly and coolly manifested. These things belong, no doubt, to one of the outlying districts of poetry, but poetry they are. TJie Hind and the Panther in strictness belongs to this series of poems, and despite the not altogether happy and, at the time, much ridiculed adaptation of the beast-fable to the controversies of the day, and the extreme weakness of the central argument, it contains some of Dryden's very finest things — the magnificent Confiteor above referred to being perhaps the best of the set passages, and the description of the Panther (the Church of England) — who Had more of Lion in her than to fear — the best perhaps of the single lines. But it was preceded and followed by much less happy compositions, on two of which the curse of Laureate verse lies something heavily — Tlirenodia Augustalis, a Pindaric on the death of Charles IL, and Britannia Rediviva, a poem in couplets on the birth of the luckless Old Chevalier. Yet even in these the magical beauty of Dryden's verse appears. For some ten vears after the Revolution Dryden was too much occupied with hackwork of various kinds — the chief being the Virgil'^ — to produce much original, or even semi-original, poetry ; but his genius haiDpily insi:)ired him, just before he died, to give ^, ^ ,, , .: . r 1 T"^ Fables. the most striking proof ever given by any poet that age and ill-health and the unkindness of circumstance had not affected his absolute pre-eminence over all his fellows. The so-called Fables were chiefly made up of some remarkable paraphrases — Dryden himself, with more modesty, called them '' translations " — from Chaucer 1 He had begun the practice of translation, chiefly in a series of Miscellanies by himself and others, even before the great sntircs, and dirl, besides tlie Viij^H (1697), much of Juvenal (1693) and a good deal of Ovid and Lucretius, witii some Horace and Homer. It is very great work in its kind of loose translation-para- phrase : but one had so much rather have the originals I 476 THE AUGUSTAN AGES BOOK VIII and Boccaccio. But they also contained an exquisite dedication to the Duchess of Orniond, some lines of which are the very flower of Dryden's magnificent versification ; a very fine address to his cousin, John Driden (the name had been very variously spelt, and the cousins retained different forms), whose still living sister Honor had been his own first love; Alexander'' s Feast, and other capital things. Macaulay, who, though politically and morally unjust to Dryden, retained the eighteenth-century admiration for his literary genius (which had been authenticated by the great Whig authority of Fox), has put the merits of the book with equal brevity, force, and truth in describing its verses as "such as no other living man could have written." We must define and emphasise this a little, for it is one of the most important points of this history. When Johnson, not in the Life of Milton but elsewhere, says that that poet ought not to be blamed for harshness, for he wrote as well as his time His verse, ^^^j^ allow, and would no doubt have written more smoothly if he had written after Dryden, too many people nowadays laugh with pity or derision, as the case may be. Johnson is indeed quite indefensible, not in preferring Dryden's verse to Milton's — for the things are incommensurable, and if a man cannot enjoy both and can enjoy one he takes the benefit of the statute De Gustibus — but as making a very gross historical error. Milton's versification is not of an older stamp than Dryden's ; it might even plead that it is youtiger, seeing that while Dryden's verse is now obsolete, the other is still fresh. The two are not older or younger, reformed or unre- formed, better or worse — they are different; they represent two inde- pendent developments of the same really earlier stage, the full-blown undisciplined blank verse of the middle and later dramatists, coming as it did on the heels of, or simultaneously with, the varied stanza metres of which the Spenserian is at once the great original and the unquestioned chief, and the loose enjambed couplet of which we find the last notable example in Chamberlayne. Milton, especially devoting himself to the good sides of these various lawlessnesses, created, to an extent not surpassed or sensibly enlarged to the present day, a form of blank verse at once infinitely various and extremely precise, capable, by the further elaboration of the verse-paragraph, of being made to subserve almost every purpose of poetry except the lyrical. (Dryden, revolting from the bad sides, and following the school of Waller, rejected blank verse for a time even for dramatic purposes (though in this he recanted), rejected it almost entirely for non- dramatic purposes, and produced a form of the couplet which, if not the best vehicle conceivable for all kinds of poetry, was at any rate a splendid carroccio for invective, for argument, and for narrative. He CHAP. I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY 477 could do much else. His little-read lyrics in the plays, and a few out of them, have extraordinary variety, and sometimes come not far short of the earlier Caroline charm. IJis Pindarics (the best of which is the unequal, but in parts unequalled. Ode to the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew) have almost limitless majesty and no small grace. But h is comjlet — the couplet which he left to none, for Pop e, not being abfe^foHm v. diverg ed — is undoubte dl y his grea f ^tla"ToJ aim^ For this, or for some other reason, it has been the fashion for a century to call him prosaic. " The most prosaic of our great poets," " a classic of our prose," and the like, are the judgments of critics who have not the excuse of the first revolters from his tradi- tion. This is idle. If the best things in even the Restoration pieces and Annus Mirabilis and the Conquest of Granada, much more the Aurengzebe patch and the Hind and Panther act of humilia- tion, and the opening of Religio Laid, and the address to "The daughter of the Rose whose cheeks unite The differing titles of the Red and White," as well as a hundred hardly lesser things — the songs in The Indian Et/tperor and CEdipus and Marriage a la Mode, the singing flames in which Shadwell and Settle roast for ever — if these things be prose, why, then, we must really have a new dictionary, and poetry, hard enough to define as it is, will become more impos- sible of definition than ever. If there is not in these things the transformation and sublimation, by the use of metrical language, of ideas so that they remain for ever fitted to transport and inspire, then such transformation and sublimation are nowhere ; they cannot, on anything but an unsafe criterion of will-worship and private judg- ment, be said to be in the Te/npest, in Comus, in Adonais, in La Belle Da?ne sans Merci. The administration is different, but the spirit is the same. We shall not use such language again in the present chapter. Dryden was not a prosaic poet, but he was a poet of a prosaic time. Nor perhaps does this appear anywhere more distinctly than in tlie work of Samuel Butler,^ whose life was about the same ' 1 J I Butler. length, since, though nearly twenty years older than Dryden, he died just twenty years before him. He was a native of Worcestershire, where he was born at Strensham in 161 2. He was educated at the cathedral school of the diocese, but he went to no university. Although details about him, till his death in 1680, are not exactly scanty, they are not very informing, and are sometimes ratlier contradictory. During the greater part of his life he seems to have 1 Poemt, ed: R. B. Johnson (" Aldine Poets ■') , 2 vols. London. 1893. The prose part of Thyer's Genuine Remains needs reprintinfj, wilh the MS. now in the British Museum. Morley's Seventeenth Century Characters gives some. 478 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii filled quasi-official or ministerial positions in the households of divers public or private persons, and it was pretty certainly in one of these that he picked up the facts for Hiidibras. After the publication and popularity of that great satire he seems to have been a disappointed man, but even tradition makes himself to blame. The first part of Hiidibras was published in 1662, the second next year, the third not till fifteen years afterwards. He published little else in his lifetime, and the so-called "posthumous works" are certainly for the most part spurious. But nearly eighty years after his death, in 1759, Mr. Thyer, Chetham Librarian at Manchester, issued Genuine Remains, which have an authentic pedigree from Butler's friend Longueville, and would authenticate themselves without any. Butler, by some direct and fairly trustworthy evidence and a consensus of tradition, is said to have been of a saturnine and rather disobliging temperament, which indeed is pretty obvious in his work. But there is absolutely no reason to suppose that Hiidibras is animated by personal spite at his hosts, masters, or companions during the Commonwealth. Every trait, though exaggerated for the particular purpose, is historically justified. It is clear that Butler, though by no means a very fervid pietist or "high-flying" Cavalier, was a convinced opponent of irregular " enthusiasm " in religion, and popular license in the State ; and the whole piece is treated with a largeness of handling irreconcilable with the idea of a petty wiping off of private grudges. He was evidently a born satirist, whose satire was not, like Dryden's, merely one development of an almost universal faculty of literary craftsmanship ; not, like Swift's later, a vain attempt to relieve the passionate melancholy and the " savage indignation " excited by the riddles of the painful earth. It was the offspring of a keen intelligence, a not too amiable temper, and one form of the hard, prac- tical, businesslike mood which was seizing the nation after its century of heroic flights. His minor poems, "The Elephant in the Moon," the piece to the Royal Society (then new, and much rallied by the wits), his " Claude Duval " ode, his delightful dialogue of Cat and Puss ridiculing the heroic plays, and many of the meditative scraps, are excellent ; but for posterity he is the author of Hiidibras. This curious composition, in about ten thousand octosyllabic lines, takes its ostensible theme, the adventures and misadventures of Sir Hudibras and his man Ralpho, from Don Quixote, and some things in its manner from the great French prose satire of the end of the sixteenth century, the Satyre Menippie, but in its real essence is quite original. The story, though some of its incidents and episodes are amusing, and have fixed themselves in the general memory, is of no importance ; we can see that the author neither cared about it himself nor expected his readers to care. The CHAP. I THE AGE OF DRYD EN — POETRY 479 characters, though trouble was taken to identify them, are types and nothing more. But the whole is so constructed as to pour a steady shower of pitiless ridicule on the Parliamentary party, and as this exactly suited the taste of the nation, which was rejoicing in its freedom from the sometimes bloodthirsty and always teasing tyrants who had domineered over it, the popularity of the piece is readily enough understood, while its great human wisdom and concentrated, if not very exalted, power of thought have made it matter for more than a time. It is indeed of the class of work which, as has been said of something else, "invariably displeases fools," and sometimes men like Samuel Pepys, who are not to be so called. Its bitterness is too cutting for some tastes ; its grotesque bewilders or disgusts feeble folk. Butler is, in fact, a true "metaphysical" in the way in which he produces, and heaps in the strangest juxtapositions, endless scraps of lore and quips of fancy ; but there is more of the coming than of the passing time in the intense common sense which under- lies, and (at no great height certainly) overarches, all his erudition and all his wit. His form too is of the most notable, and is a sort of companion species-by-itself to that of Skelton. The octosyllable, though capable of great melody, had always been a light and skipping form, but he taught it quite a new pace. There is nothing before that resembles, while everything of the kind that comes after imitates, the Hudibrastic couplet, now soberly plodding in designed doggerel to suit the sense, and now lifting itself into a sort of pirouette with one of the wonderful final rhymes which have impressed themselves more than anything else on tlie popular remembrance. The verse of Butler is scorn made metrical. Among the few poets who must be mentioned here with liryden, the group of belated and slightly degraded Caroline songsters holds the most important place. It consists of three " persons of quality." the Earl of Dorset, Lord Rochester, and Sir Charles Sedley, of one ancestress of the modern lady-journalist, Afra Behn, and of a vague ar^d shifting body of men of letters, who sometimes were able to do charming things, and generally did things anything but charming. Even Flatman, even Bancks, could sometimes turn out a song or a copy of verses with something of the fine rapture, with a good deal of the careless-ordered ease, which charm us in their predecessors on the other side of "the flood." But even the active and loving efforts of Mr. Bullen and others have not extracted from them any- thing equal to the best tilings of Dorset, Rochester, Sedley, and "Astr.xa," and they must therefore be regretfully excluded from a Short History. A paragraph will give the history of the four excepted persons, and another must suffice for their works. Charles Sackville, sixth 48o THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii Earl of Dorset (the holders of the title had changed rapidly since his greater poetical ancestor received it, not three-quarters of a century before he succeeded), was born in 1637, not thirty years after the death of the author of Gorbodnc, and, as Lord Buckhurst, was known not too creditably in the early days of the Restoration, though Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy shows how deep his interest in literature even then was. The tyranny, perhaps not more than the stupidity, of James II. sent him into opposition, and he became a great Williamite, but always was faithful to Dryden. He died in 1706, last, though born first, of the four. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, a still better wit and poet, was a worse man, being a coward, spiteful, and in almost every way ungenerous. He was born in 1647, and educated at Wadham College, Oxford, came to court as quite a boy, ^"lyric!'°" played the typical Restoration bully and rake in all points but spirit for some fifteen years, and died just after his three-and-thirtieth birthday, after being, it is said, converted by Burnet. Sedley, a better poet than Dorset, and not quite so bad a man as Rochester, was born at Aylesford in 1639, was like Wilmot a Wadham man, figured in Charles's court and in outside orgies with Buckhurst, accepted " Revolution principles," less it would seem from patriotism than from a grudge at James for having debauched his daughter, the witty and ugly Countess of Dorchester (Dorset's Dorinda), and died in 1701. Afra, Aphra, Aphara, or Ayfara Behn is said to have been born at ,Wye near Ashford in 1640, but her history is most imperfectly known. She went to Guiana somehow, married a Dutch merchant, was a widow at si.x-and-twenty, wrote both plays and novels, which will appear in the next two chapters, and died in 1689.1 This quartette lives and will live by songs, not always graceful in any sense, nearly always graceless in one particular ; but of wonder- ful ease, air, and fire. Dorset's universally known " To all you ladies now on land," and his less popular." Phyllis, for shame," with certain charming epigrams and snatches, the most agreeable of all, if not the most correct, being that in praise of " Bonny Black Bess," have an amiable and careless facility which is extremely pleasing. Rochester, many of whose pieces, genuine or attributed, are so foul that they never appear in any decent collection, has left others of somewhat ill-natured and rather roughly expressed, but singularly shrewd criticism, and a handful of really exquisite songs, " I cannot change as others do," "My dear Mistress has a heart," "Absent from thee I languish still," "When on these lovely looks I gaze," "An age in 1 Dorset and the producible poems of Rochester are in Chalmers; there are two last-century collections of Sedley 's work ; and that of Afra Behn has been reprinted in 6 vols. London, 1871. CHAP. I THE AGE OF DRYDEN — POETRY 481 her embraces past," and a few others, while he is at least the acknowledged father of the best epigram in the English language — Here lies our Sovereign Lord the King. Sedley (often spelt " S/dley " at the time) has fewer good things, but the splendid opening of one of his pieces — Love still has something of the sea, From whence his mother rose, is not ill followed up, and " Phillis is my only joy," the " Knotting Song," and others rank very high ; while Mrs. Behn provides at least one — Love in fantastic triumph sat — of quite bewildering beauty, suggesting the idea that some imp of poetry must have determined to upset all generalisations as to the verse of the time by inspiring it. Yet "Oh love that stronger art than wine " and others are not much below it. These pieces, with a few from the lesser hands glanced at above, are memorable as the last echoes of the marvellous song concert of the first half of the century. After the deaths of Dryden and Sedley in 1700 and 1701, a hundred years passed without anything like them ; nor perhaps has the gift been quite recovered since. Apart from these, from Dryden and Butler, and from the survivors of the elder age, whether vocal like Milton or silent like Herrick, not merely the five-and-twenty years of Charles's reign, but the seventeen of his brother's, and of that of William and Mary, are woefully barren of poetry. The satiric impulse which produced through Dryden the greatest verse-work of the time, in the others chiefly served to show by how far Dryden himself outtopped his fellows. The satires attri])uted to Marvell — divers "Instructions" and Satires of " Advices to a Painter," " Britannia and Raleigh," Marvell and " Dialogue between Two Horses," etc. — are partisan lam- ^'"' poons of e.xtraordinary ferocity and not devoid of real vigour, but for the most part clumsy in form, following, whether designedly or not, the roughness of Donne, and never advancing beyond Cowley or Waller. John Oldham ^ enjoys a sort of traditional Tame (due to his period, his early death, and the magnificent eulogy of Dryden) wliich he could hardly keep if many people read him. He was born near Tetbury in 1653, and went to St. Edmund Hall. Oxford, where he took his degree in 1674. He became usher in a school at Croydon, where Dorset, Rochester, and Sedley are said to have visited him, having been struck by his verses. They, or other patrons, recom- ^ Not in Chalmers, but very frequently reprinted in the late seventeenth cen- tury. Also ed. Bell, London, 1854. I use the sixth edition, 1703, 2 I 482 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii mended him to tutorships, and he died of the smallpox at Lord Kingston's seat of Holme Pierrepoint, aged barely thirty. His chief work was a satire, or rather several satires, on the Jesuits, which fed or caught the flame of the Popish Plot madness in 1679; ^^^ he wrote many other odes, satires, and translations. The roughness characteristic of Marvell is noticeable also in him, but he had learnt from Dryden's plays (he had no time to learn from his satires) to clench the couplet with a good hammer-stroke at the end. It is to be feared that the delusion that decency and dulness are somehow inseparably connected may have been favoured by Pope^s well-known compliment to Wentworth Dillon, Lord Roscommon : 1 — In Charles's days, Roscommon only boasts unspotted bays; for the absence of spot is about the only merit about them. The Essay on Translated Verse, which has given him an easy fame, is a very respectable exercise in a kind of couplet which, early as it is (written 1670, printed 1680), has already made great progress from the massive vigour of Dryden to the smoother but weaker elegance of Pope ; the rest of him is negligible. Another noble bard of the time, John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave and Duke of Buckinghamshire, wrote couplets inferior to Roscommon's, and lyrics very inferior to Rochester's, yet some of these latter are not despicable. An Essay on Satire, which is attributed to the joint efforts of Mulgrave and Dryden, is too rude, as well as mostly too rough, for the poet, and too clever for the peer ; it contains perhaps the best satiric couplet in the English language, outside of Dryden and Pope — Was ever prince by two at once misled, False, foolish, old, ill-natured, and ill-bred? the "two" being the Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth. The strange encomium of Johnson on The Choice of Thomas Pom- fret has excited the wonder of at least three generations, and nothing else of his has even titular fame. Stepney, a diplomatist and a translator, has left little to repay the explorer of him ; the four monosyllables, King, Smith, Duke, and Sprat, less; "Granville the polite," least. But that friend of Dryden and Pope who is yoked in the latter's couplet as " knowing " with Granville, William Walsh, rises at intervals (especially in "Jealousy" and the quaint " Despairing Lover") above his dreary class. His thought has the unconventionality of the earlier time, and his expression, though very unequal, is some- times not unworthy of it. 1 Roscommon, with all who follow, will be found in Chalmers. The State Poems, 3 vols. 1697-1704, contain much notable vyork of this time, in a range beyond their title. CHAPTER II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA The stage at the Restoration — The Heroic play — Dryden's comedies — Etherege — Shadwell — Sedley — Mrs. Behn — Wycherley — The Rehearsal — The great artificial comedy — Congreve — Vanbrugh — Farquhar — Gibber — Mrs. Cent- Uvre — Restoration tragedy — Dryden's Heroic plays — His blank-verse plays — His play-songs and prologues — Crowne and Settle — Otway — Lee — Southerne and Rowe The twenty years' deprivation of dramatic entertainments which the English people had suffered naturally did not decrease their appetite for these. But the plays which were presented to them — perhaps the plays that they demanded — were of kinds strikingly -phesta different from those which had been in vogue before at the 1640. Not indeed that we must assume a total R^^'o""""- exclusion of the pre-Restoration drama from the theatre. Fletcher and Jonson long continued to hold the at least titular place of greatest English dramatists in critical — perhaps in vulgar — estimation. Shakespeare himself was acted, and not always in the travesties of Ravenscroft, Davenant, and (one has to add) Dryden. Others held the stage more or less, and there was room even for new plays of the old kind, such, for instance, as Chamberlayne's Love's Victory^ under its stage title of Wits Led by the Nose, as late as 1678. But, as has to be so often repeated in literary history, facts of this kind are extremely delusive when taken by themselves. What we have to look to is the character of the plays of younger men, the theories advanced by younger critics, the mounting, in short, not the retreating, tide. It is because in literature ebb and flood always in this way overlap, instead of keeping apart with a clear interval between, that so many mistakes are made. The new currents did not make themselves distinctly perceptible immediately, and for a year or two the stage was supplied partly by old hands like Davenant (who, however, was himself a modern) and Shirley; partly by intermediate persons like Wilson, Tatham, Lacy, who are undecided in style and 4«3 484 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vin make no great mark in literature.^ But they became noticeable, as regards comedy, to some extent in The Wild Gallant of Dryden, which dates from 1663, and still more in the Love in a Tub of Etherege, just after; as regards tragedy, in the "heroic" drama which the first named and others began to put on the stage before long, and which kept it for many years. The change in comedy was naturally less than in tragedy, for all kinds of comedy diifer little and are closely akin. The humour- comedy of Jonson, indeed, was stoutly kept up by Shadwell and others, and was too English a product ever to pass away entirely ; and Dryden himself did not innovate so very much on the more distinctly romantic comedy of Fletcher. The comedy of the Restora- tion par excellence is a kind copied to some e.xtent from French and Spanish originals, and relying, first, on a more or less definite plot, intrigue, or whatever term may be preferred, — secondly, and still more, on witty dialogue. But the tragedy of the Restoration was a much more peculiar and anomalous phenomenon, and it is by no means equally easy to describe it in any terms at once accurate on the facts and likely to meet with general acceptance. It used to be complacently accepted, in common with many other literary symptoms of this special change, as a mere imitation of French models, fostered by the King's liking for everything French. That something in it was due to this is not denied ; but more careful, and at the same time wider-ranging, criticism has long refused to allow any paramount importance to this origin. Another French influence, that of the heroic romances, the most famous of which pla"°"^ are the work of Madeleine de Scudery, has also been exaggerated, but is also a true cause in part. These things, in the originals and translated, had been very popular in England for some time, had left their mark on poetry, popular and unpopular, as has been noted above in reference to Gondiberi and Pharonnida, and were in some cases actually dramatised in the heroic play. But this again will not do by itself, and cannot supply more than a small part of the required reasons. The greater part of the real cause may probably be found in certain changes already noticed, and to be noticed again, which were now passing by way of reaction over the national literary taste. As most of these changes were in a direction of increased sobriety, it may seem at first contradictory to connect with them a product like the heroic tragedy, which is one of the most extravagant in the whole 1 All three to be found in Maidment and Logan's Dramatists of the Restoration. Wilson, an Irish barrister, has no little power, but throws it into old forms. Other writers, older and younger — Howard, Killigrew, Take, Sir R. Fanshawe — would call for notice if space permitted. CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 485 history of literature. But this is only an apparent difficulty, not a real one. This singular growth, which flourished specially for some fifteen or twenty years, but did not disappear wholly from the stage till long afterwards, so that it furnished jokes to Fielding's Tom Thumb nearly three-quarters of a century after the Restoration, has for its main theme love aff"airs and affairs of war, in each of which the heroes (ably seconded by the heroines) set common sense and natural language at defiance ; and for form, a system of rhymed decasyllabic couplets, couched in the most emphatic style, and specially tending either to long harangues or to sharp interchange of single lines or distichs, something after the fashion of the stichojuythia of the ancients. It is probable that the vehicle had more to do with it than the theme, though both were curiously well suited for each other. The couplet was the darling of the moment, and if this form of it is not good, no other is in English possible, for dramatic use. After the extraordinary shambling union of bad prose and worse blank verse which has been noticed, the neat, sharply exploding couplets not unnaturally gratified the public ear; and rant as rant had never been abhorrent to an English audience. Nay, as lending itself well to recitative, it was a kind of necessity to the half-operatic entertainment ^ which, as has been said, Davenant cleverly used as a shoe-horn to draw on his plays proper. In fine, the couplet was the mode, couplet-plays almost naturally invited "heroic" subjects, and the thing took shape. It is curious and characteristic that Dryden, though at this time he had written very little, and had chiefly a vague Cambridge reputation of ability to go upon, was in the van of the new play movement with The Wild Gallant. And it is not less curious, and not less characteristic, that while the play comedks! is not a good one as it stands, it was apparently worse when it first appeared, and was damned. In its later form, which succeeded by the protection of Lady Castlemaine, it is a sort of Comedy of Humours, with a dash of Fletcher, more of the nondescript drama, which, as we have seen, had been popular from Middleton downwards, and a very little of the new repartee and fashionable slang. Dryden did much better than this in some of his numerous comic ventures,^ but it cannot be said that his comedy was ever at 1 In 1656 Davenant obtained leave to produce, at Rutland House in Alders- gate Street, an " Entertainment after the Nfanner of the Ancients," consisting of a verse prologue, and some Discourses by Diogenes and Aristophanes, a Parisian, a Londoner, etc., with songs and music. It was immediately followed by The Siege of Rhodes, a heroic play in operatic form. 2 The best are, the comic part of the tragi-comic Maiden Queen, 1667; The Mock Astrologer, 1668 ; Marriage li la Mode, again tragi-comic, 1672 ; and Amphitryon, 1691. 486 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book via the level either of his own powers or of the best performances of his contemporaries. His wit was not light enough ; his temper was too kindly ; and perhaps (for, though his birth was good and he married above it, he seems always to have been a home-keeping or tavern- haunting person, not desirous of gay society, nor shining in it) his habits too sedentary, for the airy, malicious genteel comedy which Etherege and Wycherley were to start, Congreve and Vanbrugh were to bring to perfection. One situation, that of the pair of lovers (it is characteristic again that with him, though with no one else of his time, they might be married) who are very fond of each other and not really very fond of any one else, but who do their very best to pretend indifference or faithlessness, he made something like his own. At other times he either went near failure, or at any rate achieved no striking success, and too often he tried .to make up for the absence of comedy by the presence of coarseness. For the typical Restoration comedy we must look elsewhere. "Gentle" George Etherege^ by the merest accident lost his due when Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and P'arquhap were collected ^ , by Leigh Hunt as " Dramatists of the Restoration," and Etherege. .,i, r ,,-■■,, in the usual way, after an mterval, the injustice has been more than made up to him. He was born somewhere between 1634 and 1636, but as we do not know the date of his birth exactly, so we know nothing certainly about his extraction or his education. We do not even know when he was knighted, but it must have been pretty late in the reign, and quite early in it we find him a courtier, a companion of Buckhurst, and in 1664 author of T/te Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub. Four years later he wrote She would if She could. In 1676 he brought out his best play, The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter, and got into a scrape with the watch at Epsom. In 1685 he was appointed English Resident at Ratisbon, an important post, because the Diet of the Empire was held there. From this time onwards we have letters of his, and the old story that he died by falling downstairs vino gravatus has no authority ; it is pretty certain that wherever he died it was not at Ratisbon, and there is fair, though not certain, evidence that it was at Paris before February 1691. In that case he had probably followed the fortunes of James II. Etherege's three plays are very interesting ; they are decidedly clever, and they have certainly some arrears of credit due to them in consequence of the priority too often denied on the strength of the gasconades of Wycherley. But their positive merit is perhaps some- what less than might be gathered from the remarks of some of their 1 Ed. Verity, I/Dndon, i888. CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 487 late panegyrists. Love vt a Tub is at least as formless a thing as The Wild Gallant itself, and, like that, is a sort of hotch-potch of Jonson, Fletcher, and others, though, unlike that, it has couplet pas- sages. The serious part (for there is a serious part) is beneath con- tempt ; we have Middleton's own fashion turned inside out, and worth- less tragic scenes tied to comic ones of some value. But even these last are very unequal, and the title-passages, those in which a French valet is imprisoned in a tub, are farce of the lowest. There is a good duel, and it is to Etherege's credit that the cloven foot of Restoration comedy — the passionless and malevolent licentiousness of too much thereof — does not appear. She would if She could is a great advance as a play, though the less said about its morals the better. It is thoroughly spirixed. The heroine is amusing but not individual ; her girl companions are rather good, but not better than Dryden's ; the Prince Charming of the piece has still not descended to Restoration level. In the third, Sir Fopling Flutter, the wit and the composi- tion are again improved as the ethics and aesthetics are lowered. Dorimant, the hero, has been variously said to be a study from Rochester and from the author himself; it seems pretty certain that Sir Fopling is a known character, Sir Car Scrope, and that Medley is Sedley. However this may be (and it is of small importance), the piece is a typical example of the style by an author who had made his debut earlier than any other practitioner. It has plenty of wit, a considerable advance in stage merits on the earlier comedy, and a much more direct presentation of manners. In 1668 appeared two other comic dramatists, neither of whom quite hit the new way of comic writing, but both of whom, as well as a third, the notorious Mrs. Behn, preceded Wycherley's certain appearance. Thomas Shadwell ^ was born of a good Nor- ^^ folk family in 1640. We know little of his life, nor ' any reason except politics (he was a violent Whig) for the sudden change of a friendship which had certainly existed between him and Dryden into the enmity which drew from him the virulent though ineffective libel entitled The Medal of John Bayes, and provoked the crushing retorts of MacFlecknoc and the " Og " passage in the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. He was rewarded at the Revolution with Dryden's forfeited laureateship, but died soon after- wards. Shadwell. who had a certain propensity to stimulants not merely alcoholic (he is said to have been an opium-eater), is said also to have been an agreeable companion, and of a wit much 1 The only complete edition of Shadwell (4 vols. 172c) is very scarce and dear, most copies having perished in a fire. But just after his death some sets of the current copies of all his plays, including the posthumous I'olunUcrs, wcie bound up in 2 vols. 410, and sometimes occur. I use this issue. 488 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vin lighter in conversation than in writing. His plays, however, though as mere literature deserving everything that Dryden has said of him, are yet by no means contemptible, and he himself provoked the oblivion which has fallen upon them. Of his seventeen pieces the first, The Sullen Lovers, both exemplified, and by its pref- ace explicitly heralded, the style of almost all — a style closely modelled on Jonson's, and devoted still to the setting forth of " humours," very loosely compacted into a play. Besides his in- ability to "write," Shadwell has the drawbacks of a coarseness, excessive even for the time, and an almost invariable inability to achieve witty dialogue. But by way of setting to his humour he had the good luck to fix upon, and the good skill very fairly to achieve, a much distincter portraying of the manners, places, etc., of the time than men far more distinguished simply as men of letters have managed. Scott and Macaulay have been almost wholly indebted to his Squire of Alsatia (1689) for their pictures of that certainly picturesque if not edifying locality; Epsom Wells (1676) and Bury Fair (1686) give us sketches of seventeenth-century watering-places and holiday resorts, which do not come much behind those of the great novelists in merit, and long anticipate them in time. Shad- well's playhouse scenes, for all their clumsy writing, have a nature altogether different from the brilliant artificiality which, if it became more brilliant, also became much more artificial in the progress from Etherege to Congreve. If Shadwell imagined little, he heard and saw much, and he enables us in turn to see and hear such things as the question and answer of his fops about town — (^•) What play are they playing? (/f.) Some d d play or other. We know this to be true ; and these truths relieve the bad con- struction, the want of distinct character, and the clumsy and ill-written dialogue of such plays as T/ie Miser (i6j2), The True Widow (1679), The Humourists (1671), The Virtuoso (1676), The Scowrers (1691), though when Shadwell attempts original drama as in The Royal Shep- herdess, botches Shakespeare, as in Timon, tries the terrific, as in The Libertine (the earliest English version of the Don Juan story), or mixes politics and Irish humours in The Lancashire Witches or Teague O'Divelly (1682), it may well seem to the reader that Dryden was rather too mild than too severe in the immortal castigations which he administered to his quondam friend and gratuitous libeller. As for Shadwell's strictly poetical qualifications, they simply do not exist. Sedley and Mrs. Behn ^ have been mentioned before as far as 1 Editions as above. CHAP, II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 489 their lives and poems go ; their plays recall them here. Sedley, who is selected in Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy {vide post) as repre- sentative of the extreme French party in dramatic taste, was also recognised by others as one of the best dramatic ^ ^^" critics of the time; but his actual plays are not great things. The Mulberry Garden, which had the same birth-year as The Sullen Lovers, presents the nondescript comedy, so often spoken of, charged with the new morals, or want of morals, of the time, and attempting repartee and Molieresque dialogue. Bellamira (1687), which made its appearance very much later, but seems to have been of no very different time in origin, is an adaptation of the Eumidius of Terence, in which the capabilities of the subject in certain directions are liberally developed, and in which there are some smart speeches. But it cannot be called a good play, and in particular abuses the license of dramatic improbability to the greatest possible extent. The Grumbler is even more of an adaptation ; and Sedley's tragedies do not deserve notice in the latter part of this chapter, but show that he had not unlearnt the shambling blank verse of earlier times. Sedley, a man of fortune and fashion, merely wrote because it was part of the fashion to write; Mrs. Behn had to write for her living. Her plays are not as such by any means so remarkable as her poems Cwhich mostlv occur in them) or her novels, ^irr 1-11 • Mrs. Behn. but they are numerous and far from despicable, nor is there much justification for Pope's singling them out as specially immoral. At the same time Afra, if not much worse than others, is quite bad enough, while, like Sedley, she requires no notice in respect of her serious or tragical work, though this sometimes gives occasion to her finest lyric. The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers (1677- 81), a double play in two long parts, is generally most praised, perhaps because it is really the best, perhaps because it comes first in the printed copies and many readers do not get farther. But The City Heiress is also a pleasant incident play of its own kind, and The Town Fop, The Lucky Chance, The Widow Ranter, Sir Patient Fancy, and others reveal themselves pretty clearly by their titles. It must at least be said for William Wycherley ^ (whose reputed claims to priority, it is fair to remember, we have not from himself but on bad and late authority) that whether he wrote first or not, he certainly wrote best of the comic authors of Charles 1 1. 's reign. He was the son and heir of a good old family in Shropshire, where he 1 The edition of Leigh Hunt, containing also Congreve. Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, has long been the standard for this quartette. All. however, in whole or in part, appear in the " Mermaid Scries," and have also been separately edited. 490 THE AUGUSTAN AGES BOOK viii was born about 1640. He resided in France, where he had the advan- tage of the salo7i of Julie d'Angennes, Duchess of Montausier, who, however, cannot have exercised upon him the purifying yc erey. jj^^ygj^^^g attributed in reference to her compatriot wits. After the Restoration he returned to England and resided some time at Queen's College, Oxford, though he does not seem to have matricu- lated ; and he found himself probably more at home at the Middle Temple. He had, according to Pope, his friend later, already written Love in a Wood; but no statement of Pope's is ever to be accepted without corroboration, and here we have none. The play did not actually appear till 1672, and attracted to Wycherley, who was very handsome, the spare attentions of Barbara Palmer, Duchess of Cleveland, which he shared with Marlborough and many others. For some years he was rather a prominent courtier, and he produced The Gentleman Dancing Master (1673), The Country Wife (1675), and The Plain Dealer (1677), in pretty rapid succession. It seems to have been after this that he married the Countess Dowager of Drogheda, a lady nobly born as well as connected, handsome and well dowered. But she is said to have been very jealous, and though she left Wycherley at her death, not very long afterwards, all the money she could, the legacy brought him only lawsuits and a long imprison- ment for debt. As a very old man he made the acquaintance of Pope, succeeded at the death of his father, who must have been a nonagenarian, to the family estate, married again and settled a jointure on his wife, and died immediately afterwards in 171 5. He seems to have earned the liking as well as the admiration of his contemporaries, and while they recognised The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherley, they do not seem to have attributed to him any of the ill-nature which we see in his own Manly. His ability is shown within a rather small compass. Love in a Wood is not superior, or very little superior, to most of the comedies mentioned in the last few paragraphs, and though it is unjust to call The Ge title man Dancing Master, as Hazlitt has called it, a " long, foolish farce," it has no great merit. But The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer (the latter an extremely free following of Moli^re's Misanthrope') are simply the strongest and wittiest plays of the comic kind produced in England between Fletcher and Congreve, that is to say, for more than sixty years. They are deeply tarred with the Restoration brush of coarseness, so much so that even the next century, little troubled as it was with squeamish- ness, had to adjust the plot of The Coutitry Wife to more decent and savoury conditions. Nor have they any prominent merit of con- CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYD EN — DRAMA 491 struction ; it has been said that no plays of this period have. But Wycherley has made great progress in the type-character of his French originals over all his contemporaries ; he has some very original figures, such as the Widow Blackacre of The Plain Dealer. And, above all, he has discovered and put in practice, to no small measure and extent, the particular forte of his own kind in his own time. Etherege, Sedley, even Dryden, though it was out of his way, had all been trying to hit off the smart repartee and sparkling dialogue which Moli^re had given in French. But Wycherley was the first who did this really well and pretty constantly. It is true that the fault of the style makes its appearance with the merits. It cannot be said that the action of The Country Wife, to take the earliest instance, at all requires, or is to any appreciable degree helped by, the hit-or-miss witticisms which Horner and his friends allow them- selves for pages in the very first scene of the very first act. But in hardly any Restoration play have we any better action, and here we, at any rate, have the tongue-fence to amuse ourselves with instead. Some of the writers chiefly noticeable as tragedians wrote comedies, but hardly anything of theirs deserves actual notice except the Sir Courtly Nice o{ Crovine. {vide infra). But there is one other famous comic work of the reign of Charles II. which must be , „ , II -1 . , • ^»-.7 »-. J 71 ^ ^ \ •! 1 The Rehearsal. dealt with, and that is The Rehearsal^ (1671), attributed to the Duke of Buckingham, but pretty certainly the work in the main of coadjutors, who included even the Roman hand of Butler himself. From the first the piece, which was for years on the stocks, was meant to attack a Laureate, whence the name Bayes, but Dryden was not Laureate at the time that it was begun, and it was aimed at Davenant. Nor, though there are undoubted strokes at Dryden personally, is he responsible for all the things ridiculed in it. The play is. in fact, a cento of extracts or parodies from heroic tragedies strun:r together and attached to a roughly sketched scenario of the same heroic kind. The idea is, of course, not entirely new, but had never been carried out in quite the same way, and naturally caused a great deal of amusement. It has been twice imitated in very ])opular pieces, the Tovi Thumb of Fielding and the Critic of Sheridan, and though the latter is certainly even better than The Rehearsal, The Rehearsal itself is admirably good. The glory, however — a glory by no means unmixed with shame — of this Restoration drama was not reached till long after the Restora- tion itself, and by a set of men whose knowledge of the brilliant brutal ways of that time was mostly traditional and literary. There is much less reality about Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar than about 1 Ed. Arber. 492 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii Shadwell and Sedley ; and it is this which gave such validity as it has to the whimsical attempt of Charles Lamb to excuse their want The great ^^ decency and of morals in every sense. But in fact no artificial excuses are possible, and the least valid of all is that come y. ^y}-,j(,]-| attempts to shield them under the mantle of the classics. The actual license of Aristophanes, in some directions of act and word, is very much beyond that of Congreve and Vanbrugh. But Aristophanes does not, like Vanbrugh and Congreve, make faithless- ness a distinction and brutality an order of merit. On this point there can be no •' transaction "' ; but having pronounced on it, we may proceed to do justice to the literary merit of these authors, which in some ways is of almost the highest degree. Their forte is still not composition, which in all the three (in Vanbrugh perhaps least) is weak, but, as before, in the amusing nature of the scattered scenes and characters and, far more than before or ever again, in the un- ceasing salvo of verbal wit which rings through their best pieces. William Congreve, the greatest of the three in their special greatness, was a cadet of a good Staffordshire family seated at a place whence it took its name, but was born (February 1670) in Yorkshire, at a house near Leeds which belonged to his mother's uncle. His father, a soldier, became a land- agent in Ireland, and Congreve was educated at its then best grammar school, Kilkenny, and at Trinity College, Dublin, whence he passed to the Middle Temple in London. He began in literature with a prose tale, Incognita (1692), which there have been few to read and not a soul to praise, but soon submitted his first play. The Old Bachelor^ to Dryden, who praised it highly, put it perhaps a little into stage shape, and got it acted in January 1693. Within the same year, for Congreve certainly had the precocity which Wycherley perhaps affected, came The Double Dealer. Love for Love came in April 1695, Tlie Mourning Bride two years later, and The Way of the World m 1700. This last, for what reason it is difficult to con- ceive, was not successful, and Congreve, who had already been annoyed by the protest of Jeremy Collier {vide infra') against his style, left the stage never to return. He received valuable Govern- ment places, wrote a masque or two and some very excellent lyrics in the artificial style, and died in 1729, leaving most of his money to Henrietta, Duchess of Marlborough. Congreve's tragedy will have its place later ; his four comedies advance with a singularly even and rapid progression. The Old BacJielor is not much, if at all, better than Wycherley, and its hero (not the title hero), Vainlove, is, with a young man's exaggeration, made to outdo all the other heroes from Dorimant downward, whom he copies, in loveless and joyless debauchery. The Dojible Dealer is CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 493 a very great improvement, though it is almost more of a tragi-comedy than a comedy, and might, indeed, with very slight alteration of incident and hardly any of language, have come to the sanguinary end which it very nearly reaches in fact. The characters of Lady Touchwood and of Maskwell, her nephew and gallant, have a touch not merely of villainy but of sombre sullenness about them, which cannot but be felt as rather out of place ; indeed, it is in this play and in The Way of the World, much more than in The Mourning Bride, that Congreve shows the tragic power he certainly possessed. This shadow entirely disappears from Love for Love, which is all pure comedy, albeit behind some of the merriment there is little real mirth. Probability and strict stage construction are still as much to seek here as elsewhere, and no one of the characters is a whole live personage like those of Shakespeare in the drama before, and those of Fielding in the novel later. But, on the other hand, there is hardly one who, as a personage of artificial comedy, is not a triumph, from Sir Sampson Legend, the testy father, though his sons Valentine (spendthrift and rake, but a better fellow than most of them) and Ben, the simple sailor, who was now becoming a stock stage figure ; through the sisters Foresight and Frail, whose simultaneous discovery of each other's slips is one of the capital moments of English comic literature ; and the foolish astronomer. Foresight ; and Tattle, the frivolous beau ; and Jeremy, the impossibly witty ser^'ant ; and Angelica, giving us the contemporary notion of a heroine who is neither heartless nor a fool; and Prue, the hoyden. All these are, for purely theatrical flesh and blood, perfect triumphs in their kind, and they move throughout in a perfect star-shower of verbal fireworks. Yet Congreve had not exhausted himself. The Way of the World, though in some points it returns to the mixed and semi- tragic, or at least serious, cast of 77/1? Double Dealer, is a better-knit play than Love for Love, and contains in Millamant, the coquettish heroine, the queen of all her kind. Congreve has indeed borrowed the lay figure for her — and something more — from an excellent play which nobody reads, Dryden's Marriage h la Mode, but he has given her a tenfold portion of air and fire, and indeed left nothing to be done in the same direction. Lady Wishfort, too, is another masterly personage, and the more sinister figures of Fainall and Mrs. Marwood are full of power, which indeed, in one way or another, few of the characters lack. What none of them lack is wit, the mere writing of the play being better than that of Lj)ve for Love itself. Sir John Vanjjrugh, at least the rival of Congreve at his best, but far more unequal, was born no one seems quite to know where or when. He himself, perhaps in joke, said that the place was the Bastille, and he was certainly much abroad, tliough his family .seems 494 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viil to have been long transferred from the Netherlands to England. The date is supposed to have been about 1666. He was a soldier, a herald (he became Clarencieux King-at-Arms), and Vanbrugh. jj^^jgj.jy ^ ^,g,.y ^yell-known architect, Blenheim and Castle Howard being only the greatest of his performances in this line, from which some structural advantages have been good-naturedly argued to his plays. We hear positively of him first in 1695, when he was appointed by Evelyn secretary to the Greenwich Hospital Commission ; and two years later, in 1697, his first play, T/ie Relapse, appeared. Next year came The Prorwked Wife, and the last on which his reputation rests, The Confederacy, in 1705. Vanbrugh wrote several others, but they were mostly translations or adaptations from Moliere and Boursault, and of little value, though his unfinished fonniey to London has stronger points. He was knighted in 1714, at the coming of the Hanoverians, and died in 1726. It is a little odd that The Relapse is an avowed continuation of a play by another dramatist, Colley Cibber (see below), produced the year before, and entitled Love's Last Shift. Vanbrugh kept the characters, but treated them in a style to which Cibber (who himself acted in the sequel) had no pretensions. Lord Foppington (the Sir Novelty Fashion of the earlier play) is the last and by far the best of the line begun by Sir Fopling Flutter ; indeed, he forms a better pair to Congreve's Millamant than anything of Congreve's own ; and his final resignation to his brother of the bride of whom that cadet has cheated him, " Dear Tam, since things are thus fallen aut, prithee, give me leave to wish you jay ! I do it de bon ccear, strike me dumb! You have married a woman beautiful in her person, charming in her airs, prudent in her canduct, canstant in her inclina- tions, and of a nice marality, split my windpipe!" reaches the sub- lime of the comic. The Provoked Wife and The Confederacy, though a little less witty, are perhaps better as plays, and certainly more original. Sir John Brute, the hero of the first-named, has been very highly praised, and deserves the praise, with the limitations already made, that he is rather a type than an individual, and that his life is stage life. The Confederacy is the most uniform, the best moving, and perhaps the best charactered, of all Vanbrugh 's plays, and it is particularly noticeable for the author's having dared to make It a middle-class play throughout. The lords and baronets so common in the Restoration drama vanish, to be replaced by a pair of money-scriveners (like the fathers of Milton and Gray), their wives and families, a dealer in old clothes and money-lending, and her son, etc. But with the loss in gentility there is a gain in liveliness, and Corinna, the heroine, if still a little stagey, has stage life to the full. George Farquhar, the last and youngest of the trio, was the son CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 495 of a clergyman, and was born at Londonderry in 1678. As his first comedy, Love and a Bottle, was produced the year after Vanbrugh's Relapse, he was on a level with, and almost in advance of, the rest of his group in early writing. He had previously '"^^ ^^' been an undergraduate of Trinity College, Dublin, an actor (he is said to have left the stage because he nearly killed a brother actor by accident in a stage duel), and an officer in the army ; nor did he give up this latter profession till just before his death, which happened in his thirtieth year. He had married, and, it is said, had experienced one of the tricks so common on the stage of his time, being deceived by his wife as to her fortune. But he is also said to have in no way punished her for her deceit ; indeed, the general tradition of him is of a good-natured and amiable, though slightly feather-brained, person. This tradition was possibly founded on, and is certainly not out of harmony with, the seven plays which (with some miscellanies in prose and verse) he left behind him. For these plays are much more good-natured than those of Congreve and Vanbrugh, though there is looseness enough in their morality. They also exhibit a steady improvement, which, considering the author's youth at his death, makes it probable that he would have done things even better tlian the Beaux-Stratagem had he lived. Lo7'e and a Bottle, the first, is no great thing, being almost undistinguishable, except that it has a little more of the new wit, from many plays of many writers. T/ie Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee, and Sir Harry Wildair, two plays connected after a fashion in which the time took pleasure as first and second part, and presenting some resemblances in scheme to Cibber and Vanbrugh's pair, have more merit. But they probably owed most of their popularity with their own and succeeding genera- tions to the impudent ease with which the favourite actress, Peg Woffington, in man's clothes, played Sir Harry. The Incofistant and The Way to win Him are far from achieving the excellence of the last pair, 7 he Recruiting Officer and The Beaux-Stratagent. There is a vividness and gusto about the scenes of the first, and the parts of Captain Plume and his sergeant Kite, which at least does not dis- courage the supposition that Farquhar drew on his personal experiences in recruiting and country quarters ; though, if " Silvia " be the damsel who deceived him, his magnanimity was certainly not small. The Beaux-Stratagem, which, though not much to boast of from the moral point of view, is one of the least morally objectionable plays of the whole set, also deserves the repute it has retained above almost all of them by the liveliness of the incidents and dialogues, the happy humour-characters of the servant Scrub and Boniface the rascally landlord, the ingenious imjiudence of Archer, and tlie well-written parts of Squire and Mrs. Sullen. 496 THE AUGUSTAN AGES BOOK viil The protest of Jeremy Collier (see next chapter) either produced, or more probably coincided with, a certain change of public taste in comedy, and though the plays from 1700 onwards are by no means remarkable, as a rule, for squeamishness, they are not merely freer from "immorality and profaneness," but distinctly humaner in tone, than those of the forty years between 1660 and 1700. They are also much worse as literature. Those of Steele and Addison had best be noticed with other works of their respective writers, but two drama- tists who belong to both periods — to the earlier in general style, to the later in a certain modification of the ranker features of the Restoration play — may be despatched here. One of them, indeed, Colley Cibber,^ has been mentioned already, and will be mentioned yet again in connection with Pope. He was born in 1671, the son of a sculptor of much note and some merit, and became an actor and playwright early, as well as later Poet- Laureate, being also long manager of Drury Lane. The usual edition of Cibber''s works contains sixteen plays, but he is said to have written nearly double that number. Love's Last Shift itself. The Careless Husband, and -The Nonjuror (an adaptation of Tartuffe) are the best known of them. Most are fairly lively, but hardly any is really literature. Very similar, though a little better at their best, are the nineteen pieces of Susannah Centlivre,^ who is believed to have been born about 1680. She was the daughter of a Lincolnshire gentleman named Freeman, but seems to have passed her girlhood Mrs. Centlivre. . . \ , i o u in poor circumstances, and as an orphan. She was thrice married, her third husband being, as her admiring female biographer calls him, " a French gentleman." Of him history records that he, being a connoisseur in cookery, obliged King William and Queen Anne by condescending to superintend their kitchen as yeoman, whence he is indeed called by some a cook. She died in 1722. The best of her plays are The Btisybody and A Bold Stroke for a Wife, from the last of which comes at least one universally known and quoted phrase, " the real Simon Pure." They are nearer literature than Gibber's, but they are chiefly interesting because they show the change of taste. The theme is still intrigue, but it is almost always unsuccessful. The tragic authors of the period and their tragedies occupy a position on the whole less important, though distinctly curious. With all their faults, there can be no doubt that comedies like Love for Love, The Confederacy, and The Beaux-Stratagem mark in certain directions an advance upon all English comic work before them, 1 Dramatic Works, 4 vols. London, 1760. 8 Works, 3 vols. London, 1761 ; reprinted, 1872. CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 497 except that of Shakespeare, with which they do not compare. On the other hand, All for Love and Venice Preserved, not to mention others, do come into pretty direct competition with Hamlet and Macbeth, and are, with all their merits, inferior not ^"agedy?" merely to these, but to many others. The difference is not in the least surprising. For poetry is not necessary to comedy, and is absolutely necessary to tragedy. And it is precisely in poetry that the second half of the seventeenth century is inferior to the first. The tragedy of the time divides itself, with the usual overlapping, into two parts — the Heroic drama, already discussed, which was triumphant between 1660 and 1680, and did not entirely disappear between 1680 and 1700; and the blank-verse tragedy, Dryden's altered in spirit rather than in intention from that Heroic " before the flood," which was not quite absent in the first time, and which prevailed once more in the second. In both periods and in both kinds the mighty craftsmanship of Dryden led the way. and despite the traditional repute of Venice Preserved, it is impossible here to admit that any examples surpassed The Conquest of Granada in the first kind, and All for Love in the second. The Rival Ladies, which is Dryden's first serious play, and which followed The Wild Gallant at no great interval, is neither wholly tragic nor wholly comic, neither whqlly rhymed nor wholly blank verse and prose. But the Indian Emperor (1665), following an Indian Queen, in which he had helped his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, was his first distinct and original venture wholly in the new style. The Maiden Queen (1667) is a blend of tragic, or at least serious, heroics and comic prose. But Tyrannic Love, or The Royal Martyr (1669), a dramatisation of the legend of St. Catherine, first exhibited the heroic style in perfection. The rants of the Emperor Maximin and the preposterous character of some of the incidents were bywords even in- their own day, but the splendid rhetoric of the best passages, the rattling single-stick play of the rhyming dialogue, and the really noble sentiment of much of it, almost excuse the enthusiasm of audiences for a style full of the most glaring faults. This is still more the case with the two parts of The Conquest of Granada (1670), which brought tlie kind to its highest perfection, purged it of some of the absurdities which were not, as most were, inherent, and certainly contains many of the best pieces of declama- tion, and not a few of not the worst pieces of poetry, in the English language. The Rehearsal came out very shortly, but it did not in the least "kill" heroics, which continued to flourish. For a time, indeed, Dryden chiefly wrote comedies or tragi-comedies ; but the most 2K 498 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii curious of all his experiments, the " tagging " of Paradise Lost into a drama, Tlie State of Innocence, which is half an opera and more than half a Heroic play, shows the undiminished popularity of the style. And in 1675 appeared the extremely fine Aiirengzebe, still heroic. This, however, contains both indirect evidence and a direct confession that the author was tiring of rhyme, the latter in a statement of the prologue, and the former throughout, in the constant preference of overlapped or enjambed lines to the strict couplet. Nothing can better show Dryden's literary peculiarities both in strength and weakness than the fact that, when he turned from rhyme to blank verse, he actually took a play of Shakespeare's for something more than the canvas of his new attempt. It is true that in the identity of subject of All fo?- Love and Antony and Cleopatra we verse pfays. i^iust not see too much. Not merely was it the habit of the time to refurbish old work, not merely had Dryden himself a peculiar theory about what he called "translation," but from the very infancy of the Elizabethan drama itself it had been the almost invariable habit to refashion older plays. The really extraordinary thing in All for Love is not that it follows Antotty and Cleopatra, but that, in following, it keeps so far from plagiarism ; not that its kind is inferior to Shakespeare's, but that it achieves such excellence as it does in that kind. The fact is that it is a great, and a very great, play, with more of the earth and less of the air in it than in its model. It stands on an entirely different footing from the travesty of Troilus and Cressida,yN\\\c}i\ followed it in 1679; but the scenes which Dryden contributed to Lee's CEdipus and Duke of Guise contain some of his very best work. When his apparent ruin at the Revolution drove him back to the stage, the first play he wrote, in 1690, was the very fine tragedy of Don Sebastiafi (which the older criticism put at the head of his work in this kind, though nowadays All for Love is mostly preferred) ; and while his last play of all. Love Triumphant, was a tragi-comedy, the last but one, Cleonienes, was a pure tragedy and a fine one. Dryden's all but invariable primacy was also well displayed in two adjuncts to the drama of the time, one of which it possessed in common with that of the last age, while the other was more, though still not quite, peculiar to it. The first of these consisted of the songs with which it was still customary to intersperse, and here, if he no- where quite equals the surpassing gems of Sedley and Mrs. Behn, he has a much larger number of very high average quality. The other lay in the Prologue and Epilogue, which, occasional if not rare before 1640, became after 1660 one of the most regular and popular appurtenances of plays. The fashion was no doubt much helped by the introduction of women on the stage, for the prologues CHAP. 11 THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 499 and epilogues were usually, though not invariably, spoken by the prettiest and most favourite actresses. By degrees it became cus- tomary for novices, or those who were not confident in jjj^ 1 their own powers of verse (these pieces were all but songs and invariably in the smartest style of the new couplet) to ^'^° og"<=s. get friends, for love or for money, to help them out, and Dryden's own scanty income was eked in no small degree by sums thus re- ceived, while his prologues and epilogues to his own and others' plays make a very considerable section of his work. Their matter is more unequal than their form, for, being addressed specially ad vulgus, they offered too great temptation to aim at popularity first of all ; and the political savagery of some of these pieces, the license of the language and imagery in others, must have counted for not a little in his sense of the necessity, if not the adequacy, of the anti- thetic excuse formulated by Johnson later — For we that live to please must please to live. Dryden's earliest and longest-lived rival, or rather contemporary, in tragedy was John Crowne — "starch Johnny Crowne," as Rochester called him from some real or imputed primness. Crowne ^ was a Nova Scotian, and is thought to have been born as early as 1640, and to have died as late as 1705. He supplied "^Scufe."" the stage for nearly thirty years with some eighteen plays, the best of which is the adapted comedy of Sir Courtly Nice, already mentioned, and said to have been, like other good plays and poems, due to the suggestion of Charles himself. Crowne was once utilised by Rochester's spite to vex Dryden, his masque of Calisto being preferred to something of the Laureate's for a court entertainment. He wrote a rhymed tragedy, Caligula, as late as 1698, and had an inclination rather to the tragic than to the comic muse. But he is the least notable of all the tragic writers of the time except one, putting merely insignificant figures out of question. This one is Elkanah Settle, the "Doeg" of the second part of Absalom and Achitophel. In the early furore for heroic plays. Settle, who was born in 1648, produced in 1673 one entitled The Empress of Morocco, which was thought by the younger sort quite to put Dryden in the shade, and was printed with elaborate engravings. It is curious that Dryden, losing for once his usual Olympian indifference, joined Crowne and Shadwell (the very man whom he was afterwards to couple with Settle) in attacking The E»iprcss. Settle wrote much else, became city poet and a puppet-show keeper, and died at an 1 Among Maidment and Logan's Dramatists of the Restoration, 4 vols. Edin- burgh, 1873. Soo THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii advanced age in 1724, half pitied, half jeered at, by the wits of the next generation. Somewhat younger, and very much better, were three other dramatists who with Dryden exhibit the tragic abilities of Charles II. 's time at the best — Otway, Lee, and Southerne. Their merits as play- Wrights follow the order of their birth, though Lee is far the best poet of the three. Thomas Otway ^ was born in 165 1. He was the son of a Sussex clergyman, and cannot have been ill off, since he entered Christ Church, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner. But the stage had more attraction for him than the Church, though he was quite a failure as an actor, and for the moment turned to the army, where he obtained a cornetcy, as some say, though others supposed him only to have enlisted. He certainly served more than one campaign. But the theatre continued to exercise its fascination, which was made stronger in his case by the charms of Mrs. Barry, a beautiful actress, who appeared in his first play, Alcibiades. He seems to have had Rochester for a rival, and certainly had him for a libeller. In 1676 he followed Alcibiades with Don Carlos, a rhyming play of some merit in its kind, and then turned to adaptations from the French and rubbishy comedies. But in 1680 he produced one of his two great plays. The Orphan, with a Cains Marias which is less good, and in 1682 his masterpiece, Venice Preserved. Three years later, having in the interval written a bad comedy. The Atheist, he died miserably, it is said by choking himself after semi-starvation. His misfortunes, however, like Chatterton's, have perhaps helped his fame. Both in his own time, during the eighteenth century, and even beyond it, Monimia and Belvidera, the heroines of The Orphan and of Venice Preserved, were among the most favourite parts both with tragic actresses and their audiences, while Venice Preserved at least has kept to the present day a traditional reputation as the best tragedy out of Shakespeare, the only tragedy of great merit subse- quent to the Restoration, and so forth. It is perhaps fortunate for Otway that the validity of these praises is not often tested by reading. There is certainly pathos in both plays, and a good deal of diffused tragic passion of various kinds. Nor should the utter worthlessness of the comic or semi-comic parts of Venice Preserved be charged heavily against Otway. But that prosaic element which is such a favourite objection to the time seems, to some at least, to appear here more than it does in Dryden, more than it does in Lee. Otway's verse has resonance but no melody, his sentiment pathos, but neither refinement nor strangeness, nor always strict tragic quality. Above 1 Works, 3 vols. London, 1757. CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 501 all, neither in sound nor in sense has he any suggestiveness. The declamation of Dryden and the rant of Lee pass in many passages into poetry ; it is difficult to put the finger on a single one of Otway's of which, putting the mere appeal to sentiment aside, as much can be said. With the elocution of the " star," the beauty of the actress, the accompaniment of the theatre, he may thrill ; in the study, and read, he does not. On that side, indeed, of the drama which is not literature but stage- craft, Otway has very strong appeals. It has been noticed by the late Mr. Roden Noel ^ that even his comedies are much better con- structed, and present a much more coherent fable to the audience, than most of the plays of the time. And this is still more the case vi'ith his two great tragedies. Unpresentable as is The Orphan to a modern audience, its pathos is perfectly true and just in itself, and much more tragic than that of Venice Preserved. Castalio. one of the two brothers who are in love with Monimia, has brought upon himself the punishment which he receives in the deceit practised on her by the other brother Polydore, first by his own braggart and libertine sneers at marriage, which make Polydore take dishonour- able designs for granted, and secondly by stealing a march upon Polydore himself. So too in Venice Preserved, though the unamiable and exaggerated rant of the time appears in the character of Pierre throughout, though Belvidera is stagey to the last degree, and Jaffier seems quite unreasonably to vent wrath for the ruin which is due to his own folly on the world at large, yet Otway has throughout a fast hold on his audience. It is on the literary side that he fails. His verse is not merely harsh and unmusical : he is deeply aflfected by the slovenly collo- quialisms and degradations of style which, as we shall see in the next chapter, were at this time jeopardising English style altogether, and which Dryden was almost alone in resisting. This drawback is of itself almost fatal. In the dying speech of Monimia. the climax of one of the most heartrending scenes and situations to be found, out- side the greatest examples of Elizabethan tragedy, there occurs this distich — Speak well of me, and if thou hear ill tongues Speak evil of my fame, donU hear me wronged. To any one with an ear this " don't "' (which cannot be helped away by resolving it into "do not" with a slur) means simply gnashing of teeth. But even this is not so fatal as tlie astounding absence in Otway of poetical expression to suit his poetical sentiment. In ail the 1 In his " Mermaid " edition of Otway, London, 1888. 502 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii famous passages of Venice Preserved, that between Jaffier and Pierre, the scaffold scene, and the rest, I cannot remember one phrase, one "jewel five words long," that gives the sudden blaze proper to poetry. In The Orphan there is nothing better than Polydore's speech as he drops his sword and runs on his brother's — Now my Castalio is again my friend; and though this is adequate and passable, we cannot help thinking how not merely Shakespeare, but half a dozen others, Middleton, Webster, Fletcher, Tourneur, Ford, even Shirley, would have phrased it, nay, how Dryden, and not only Dryden, among Otway's own con- temporaries, would have been equal to the occasion. The stars of Lee ^ were not much more auspicious than Otway's own, though they spared him the touch of squalor which lies on the luckless bard of Belvidera. Nathaniel, generally known as Nat, Lee was born in 1655, the son of a clergyman in Hertford- shire, and, like his great collaborator Dryden, was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He too became an actor early, and turned from acting to play-writing. But his mind was soon clouded by insanity ; he was for years at intervals an inmate of the madhouse, and when he died, it is said from injuries received in a drunken squabble, at the age of thirty-seven, in 1692, he was probably as much mad as drunk. ^ He was only twenty when his first play, Nero, came out. It is heroic, but bastard-heroic, the rhymes being not continuous, but interspersed with passages of blank verse and prose. Sophonisba, the next, on a subject which seems to have had a sort of hereditary attraction for all the more boisterous sort of tragedians, is entirely in rhyme, as is Gloriana, or the Court of Augustus Ccesar, produced in the same year. Next year, 1677, gave the Rival Quee7is, and the next again Mithridates. Both these plays, which were the most popular of the author (the " Rival Queens," Statira and Roxana, continuing for many years to be favourite characters on the stage), were in blank verse, with no prose, and with rhyme only used now and then in the old way at the end of scenes, or to top speeches where a clap was expected. Some of Lee's very best work is to be found in CEdipus, where he worked with Dryden on a very fair level. The other combination of the two in the Duke of Guise was not quite so successful, though the play contains fine things. In the rest of Lee's work, which is wholly confined to tragedy, and which comprises 1 Works, 3 vols. London, 1734. 2 Another story is that he escaped from his keepers on a snowy night, and died of exposure. CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYDEN — DRAMA 503 Theodosius, the Princess of Cle^e. the Massacre of Parts,. Ccesar Borgia, and Coiistuiitijie the Great, his defects are perhaps more obvious than his merits. But as his best work is not free from the former, so the latter are perceivable even in his worst. On the whole, Lee has been more harshly judged than any other English dramatist. His foible for rant early became a byword, and was no doubt exaggerated by the knowledge of his madness. The form in which he wrote at least part of his works — the heroic rhymed tragedy — is the very worst in the world for bringing out the contrast of bombast and bathos, which Dryden himself by no means very often escapes, and to which all others succumb. Lee's excitable brains were not, and could not be expected to be, critical ; indeed, he flings out fine things and foolish things with equal indifference, or rather with equal enthusiasm. Lastly, it must be confessed that he comes far below Otway, or rather hardly enters into competition with him, either as a constructor of plots or a creator of situa- tions. There certainly is pathos in Lee, but it is chiefly given him by his stories, or by a gift to be noticed presently, not by his power of appealing directly to the sympathy of the audience. His plots and his characters are all framed with a view to rapid superficial effect of sound and fury, and they nish across the stage in successive blasts which leave the spectator, or indeed the reader, not quite uninterested, not by any means cold, and not even wholly contemptuous even of the flatnesses and frigidities. But they make no appeal to symi)athy ; and, but for the one reserved point again, they are too unreal to inspire terror. That one reserved point, however, is that Lee is a poet. It is not merely that his versification, though unequal, is far better than Otway's. It is that he has the faculty (as the greatest critics have been driven to express it) of saying things "in a poetical way." His finest passage of all — one in Mithridates on Death — is not, any more than the finest passages of others, absolutely original in thought. He may have got it from Raleigh, he may have got it from Marston, with whom he has at least the connection that they both write Sophonisbas. But he has put it for himself and made it. or re- made it, poetry. Again take — To the driven air my flying soul is fastened. Nobody but a poet could have put '- driven " and '- flying " where they are. Otway never would have thought of it. And again — Oh pity that so fair a star should be The child of night. He not only has the word, "the lovely chance-word," as he says 504 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii somewhere himself, but he can arrange it in verbal and rhythmical arrangement, perfect in sense and sound. Thomas Southerne — the chief tragic dramatist of the reign of Anne — though a lesser man than either Otway or Lee, still claims place by right, and Nicholas Rowe perhaps by tradition. After Rowe, no one who owes his place in literature to drama will come in and Rowe! ^^^ ^^^Y ^^^^ Sheridan, though a few men of distinction in other ways also wrote for the theatre, and a few play- wrights pure and simple may find corners somewhere. Southerne ^ was an Irishman by birth, though not by extraction, and was born in Dublin county in the year 1659. Trinity College received him and sent him to the Middle Temple, whence, like other playwrights of the time, he proceeded not merely to play-writing, but to service for a time in the army. Although possessed of an eye to the main chance — Pope's well-known couplet, Tom, whom Heaven sent down to raise The price of prologues and of plays, glances on the one hand at Dryden's having doubled his tariff for prologue-furnishing in the case of Southerners Loyal Brother, on the other at the profits which the young dramatist himself made — as well as of literary talent, he was liked and respected by three generations of men of letters, from Dryden, who was on as good terms with him as with Congreve, through the Addison and Pope set, till nearly the middle of the eighteenth century, when he died at a great age in 1746, having made the acquaintance of Gray. Rowe, whose translation of Lucan obtained the, at first sight, astounding sentence from Johnson that it is "one of the greatest productions of English poetry," was of a good Devonshire family, but was born in Bedfordshire in 1673, his father being a lawyer of some note. Nicholas was sent to Westminster, but not to any uni- versity, his father thinking it better for him to enter the Middle Temple at once, that he might, it may be supposed, avoid the snares of the Muses. Yet, if he escaped the fate of Otway and Lee, it was not because Oxford and Cambridge had no part in him, but because he had independent means to which his father's death gave him early access, and because, instead of the rough days of Charles or the rougher ones of "Grub Street," the palmy time of Anne and the earliest George fell to his lot. He was five-and-twenty when his first play, the Ambitious Stepmother, appeared, and he followed it up with Tamerlane (a glorification of "The Deliverer," for Rowe was a Whig), 1702, and the Fair Penitent, 1703. Jane Shore, which had been 1 Works, 2 vols. London, 1721. CHAP. II THE AGE OF DRYD EN — DRAMA 505 preceded by others, appeared in 17 14. Rowe was made Poet- Laureate at the accession of George I., and received two or three other and more profitable posts, one of which, the surveyorship of the London Customs, brought him nearer Chaucer than his verse. He died in 1718. Pope said he had no heart ; others speak well enough of him. Johnson's description of Rowe's plays, which is not so extravagant as his. encomium of the Pharsalia, admits that there are not in them "any deep search into nature, any accurate discriminations of kindred qualities, or a nice display of passion in its progress. All is general and refined. But his reputation comes from the reasonable- ness of some of his scenes, the elegance of his diction, and the suavity of his verse." The elegance of all but the best Queen Anne diction, and the suavity of all but all Queen Anne verse, have long palled, and Rowe is therefore much forgotten ; nor need he perhaps be disinterred. Congreve's one tragedy is more often consulted to see what is the context which Johnson praised so highly than for any other reason. Few need go farther. Southerners two masterpieces. The Fatal Marriage (1694) and Oroonoko (1696), are perhaps more un- known still, despite the traditional fame of great actresses in Isabella and Imoinda, the constant references in contemporary and rather later literature to both, and the jokes made on the unlucky second title of The Fatal Marriage. They have much less elegance of diction than the work of either Rowe or Congreve, but much greater tragic quality ; being, in fact, Otway a little further prosed. The Appius and Virginia of John Dennis, the critic; the Dis- tressed Mother of Addison's friend Philips ; the Phadra and Hip- polytiis of his other friend, " Rag " Smith, owe such shadowy repute as they have to accident, and in the two latter cases to Addison's not unamiable habit of steadily puffing his friends. None of them, nor any tragedy written for generations afterwards for the stage, has real merit.^ 1 A dramatic growth of this time, the Opera, derived partly from the Masque, partly from the " entertainments " of Davenant, deserves notice. Dryden, here as usual, gave remarkable examples of it — Albion and Albanius {1685) and King Arthur (1691) — while most of his contemporaries down to D'Urfey affected it more or less. By degrees the serious and "heroic" Opera gave place, in tiie eighteenth century more particularly, to the comic, the partialities of Rich the manager, and the immense success of Gay's Beggar's Opera, helping this deter- mination not a little. The type produced, or gave a home to, some excellent songs, but was otherwise not of much literary moment. CHAPTER III THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE Tendency of Restoration prose — Its pioneers — Cowley's prose — Dryden — Temple — Tillotson — Halifax — Sprat — The Royal Society and style — Bun- yan — His four chief things — The English Rogue — Thomas Burnet — Glan- vill — The Diarists — Evelyn — Pepys — Roger North — Minors — Locke — Degradation of style at the close of the century — L'Estrange — Collier — Tom Brown — Dunton In the last two chapters the tone of the history has had to be too often apologetic. In poetry nothing but Dryden's own work and a few songs by others was added to our really precious possessions ; in drama the best tragedies have to be praised by allowance ; and though the best comedies need none in point of wit — and, indeed, in that respect occupy a position unsurpassed and hardly approached — they are far from invulnerable in point of construction, and absolutely at the mercy of their critics in tone, temper, and even presentation of nature. In the third department, that of prose-writing, the age can hold its head far higher. It is true that here also we cannot give it that absolute supremacy which some other periods, in this or that depart- Tendency of ^nent, may claim. We cannot say that its prose is in all Restoration ways and for all purposes the best prose ; we may and ^^'^^ ' must admit a regretful looking back to the prose of Browne and Milton, or a consolatory looking forward to the prose of Shelley and Landor ; we must confess that here as everywhere the fall of the poetic spirit, the neap of inspiration, the preference of the merely practical and the merely prosaic, is apparent. But there is to be set against these things a great practical achievement. Until 1660 it cannot be seriously maintained that England possessed, or ever had possessed, a prose style suited for those miscellaneous and average purposes which, after all, prose is chiefly meant to subserve. Of the style of no earlier English writer except Hooker can it be said that it is even conceivably applicable at once to plain narrative, to argu- mentative exposition, to the handling of practical business. We only 506 CHAP, m THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 507 know it in the second of these functions, and, admirable as it is there, we cannot quite tell how it might have adapted itself to the others. Of all other styles we can say positively that for this or that or the other function of general prose they were very plainly unfitted. Until Ascham, the language was not fully stored with words, not fully fur- nished with syntactic practice. The plain Elizabethan styles were too classical and not elegant enough ; the elaborate Elizabethan style could never have got a plain tale told plainly. The stately pregnancy of Bacon, the labyrinthine windings of the Anato/ny, the quips of Fuller, the dreamy harmonies of Browne, could never have been adapted to novel-writing, to scientific exposition, to historical, political, and philosophical writing without rhetoric. And of all such styles it remained fatally true that when they were not very good they were pretty sure to be very bad. There are, here as elsewhere, the usual disputes over the exact initiation of the change, and here as elsewhere the old caution that "accuracy must not be expected" is the true one. The manifesto of the change is no doubt an often quoted passage Mn ^ ^., ^o. , TT- , \~ ,7 r, 1 Its pioneers. Bishop (not yet Bishop) Sprat's History of the Royal Society (1667). But the change itself is manifest in the work of a group of men — Dryden, Tillotson, Temple, Halifax — who were Sprat's elders by five or six years. And from these it has been until lately customary to single out Tillotson, partly on the authority of a by no means decisive, and not certainly authentic, statement of Dryden's to Congreve that he had been influenced by Tillotson, partly from the fact that Tillotson, the first Whig divine of impor- tance, and a great apostle of toleration, common sense, and other eighteenth-century catchwords, or (if we may coin a much-needed term) czXch-thingSy was popular with Addison and the Queen Anne men generally. But we have examples of Dryden's prose at a time when it is next to impossible that he could have been influenced by Tillotson ; the change is evident in the work of Cowley and others earlier still ; and on the whole it is far safer and far more philo- sophical to take it as, like other literary evolutions or revolutions, a "flying spirit on the driven air," generally diffused and felt by many if not by all, rather than as a deliberately caused product of this or that person's idiosyncrasy, or study, or simple desire of innovation. Cowley has just been mentioned, and his case is a notable one. His small handful of extremely pleasant Essays displays many of the characteristics of the new prose, but it is most I'^oll^ noteworthy that they seem to date from the close of his life and after the Restoration. In his most brilliant piece, ihc Discourse • 1 It may be found in Sir H. Craik's English Prose Specimens, iii. 271. 5o8 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viu concerning Oliver Cromwell (1661), old and new jostle each other in a fashion ahnost startling, and the colour, form, and fire of the sinister angel who defends the Protector contrast with the almost eighteenth-century correctness of some passages. As in verse, Cowley is the Janus of the time, but his forward face is that which is here the most noticeable. What is certain is that Dryden himself again heads this list as easily as he does the others, and with the same masterly, unobtrusive, but far-reaching craftsmanship. The immediate stimulus to prose composition in his case was the interest which he felt in ^ ' dramatic criticism ; and the immediate models (for, as we have seen, he always took a model if he could) were Corneille's prose examens of his printed plays. But somewhere about 1665 he seems to have begun, and while absent from London at his father-in-law's seat at Charlton to have finished, a much more important thing than any of these, the famous Essay of Dratnatic Poesy,^ which has been more than once mentioned, and the cardinal position of which in English literary history has been more and more clearly recognised. For it is not only the manifesto of heroic plays, not only an extremely subtle and competent exposition of divers views as to the different kinds of drama, not even only a declaration, less one-sided than those which were afterwards to be made by the century that followed, of the " correct " notion of poetry, and of literature generally ; it is a model of the new prose, newer even than Cowley's, and removed almost by centuries from the style of such still living men as Browne and Milton. It contains, besides remarks on Fletcher and Jonson of only less excellence, that magnificent criticism which by itself sets Dryden almost at the head, in place as in time, of modern English critics, and vindicates England once for all from the silly charge of having been taught by foreigners to admire Shakespeare. Moreover, to complete the value of the thing, we have at least three separate editions of it, which Dryden seems to have carefully superintended at different times of his life, and which allow us to see the gradual progress of the movement that he himself directed. In the earliest form 'there are not a few vernacularities which — by no means always for the better, but always in the same direction of correctness, elegance, approximation to a certain general form of prose-writing — are altered in the later. One of the most noteworthy of these is the alteration of the old English idiomatic position of the preposition at the end of the sentence — "Such arguments as the fourth act of Pompey will furnish me with," to "those with which the, etc., will furnish me " ; " writ " becomes " written " ; a word occurring too soon 1 To be found in Scott's Works and Malone's Prose Works of Dryden, and separately edited by T. Arnold (Oxford, 1889). CHAP. HI THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 509 after previous use of it is changed for another ; colloquialisms grow fewer; the grammar throughout is corrected and straightened. These things are interesting not only because they show the direc- tion of the general literary current, but also as a protest against that exaggeration and degradation of the plain style itself which, as we shall see, set in during the later years of Dryden's own life, and necessitated the further " correctness " of Addison and Swift. Dryden's remaining prose works are very considerable, but except his translations (mostly hackwork in the Roman Catholic or Royalist interest) they almost entirely take the form of essays, and no doubt powerfully influenced the general taste for that class of composition. The last — the Preface to the Fables — is almost as much the capital example of his style in prose as the Fables them- selves are of his style in verse. And there is no doubt that for strictly prosaic purposes this style is one of the most admirable in English — correct, but not in the least thin or tame ; with a vocabu- lary itself almost daringly enriched from foreign tongues, and .seldom hesitating at an archaism or a colloquialism when necessary, but thoroughly organised and '' in hand " ; of extraordinary ease without either over-facility or slipshodness ; forcible without the slightest effort, eloquent without declamation, graceful yet thoroughly manly. That there are purposes for which it would not suffice, charms which it does not possess, atmospheres which it cannot give, is all perfectly true. But Dryden does not pretend to give us these things : he gives us what he has, and we can go elsewhere for what he has not. Meanwhile the purposes for which his own style is suited are perhaps more numerous, and the purposes for which it is distinctly unsuited fewer, than in the case of any other English prose-writer, save only Southey. Sir William Temple was a slightly older man than Dryden, having been born in 1628. He was a native of London, but had connections with Ireland, where his father was Master of the Rolls. He was educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and ^^^ ^^ fell in love early with Dorothy Osborne, daughter of the Royalist governor of Guernsey, who wrote him some of the most charming letters in English, and whom he afterwards married, though after much opposition, for his own party, or rather his father's, was the Parliamentary. After the Restoration he fell into political, especially diplomatic employment, was sent to Munster, negotiated the Triple Alliance, and did much other work, in the later years of Charles he was tried in home jxjlitics. but was less fortunate, being perhaps too squeamish and certainly too timid. For tiie last twenty years of his life, which ended unhajipily in 1699 (having been preceded by that of his wife and son, the latter in very painful circumstances), 5IO THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii he lived in retirement at Sheen and Moor Park in Surrey, acting sometimes as the adviser, though never as the minister, of William of Orange, harbouring Swift and " Stella," mixing, not too happily for himself, in the " Ancient and Modern " dispute, and gardening. Temple's works ^ are mainly occasional, and the best of them are letters and essays ; for he, like all his fellows, shows the strong bent of the time towards the essay form. His style, at its best extremely engaging, manifests the new form — plain, but carefully balanced and polished. From the agreeable nature of the subjects, and the air of gentlemanly but not too patronising condescension which it displays, it exercised great influence on a generation which thor- oughly respected " quality." Once (in the thousand times quoted close of his Essay on Poetry) Temple went higher than Dryden, higher than any one of his own school, in developing the music of prose ; in the context of this and in many other places he goes very high. John Tillotson^ was a Yorkshire man, the son of a violently Protestant clothier, and was born in 1630. He was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge, took orders, and after the Restoration ap- peared as a Presbyterian at the Savoy Conference, but was no extremist and did not '' go out." As preacher of Lincoln's Inn, prebendary of St. Paul's, and then Dean of it, he acquired a great reputation for eloquence as well as for moderate liberalism — as we should now call it — in politics and theology. But he was highly respected by all parties during the reigns of Charles and James, and he forfeited this respect with the Tories, not by his Whiggery, but by accepting Sancroft's archbishopric despite, it would appear, his own better reason and conscience. He died in 1694. It was mainly because the older style, in the hands of South, Bajrrow, and other great preachers, kept hold of the pulpit longer than of other departments of pro.se, that Tillotson acquired his reputation for style. Those who go to him now for that quality will probably be a good deal disappointed. He is very fairly clear and easy; but he has neither the strength and variety of Dryden, nor the music of Temple, nor the crisp elegance of Halifax. With respect to the last named it is proper to observe that the work 3 in virtue of which he appears here, though there is no reason- able doubt of his authorship of it, is not attributed to him on certain documentary evidence. George Savile, who was born of an old Yorkshire family in 1633, and succeeded to a baronetcy at eight years old, became a member of Parliament at the Restoration. He received a peerage as Lord Savile and Viscount 1 4 vols. London, 1757. 3 Works, 10 vols. London, 1820. ^ Miscellanies, London, 1704. CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 511 Halifax eight years later, was a great opponent of Shaftesbury and supporter (though in a moderate or "trimming" fashion) of the Crown, and was successively promoted to be Earl and Marquess. In the reign of James II. he was strongly in opposition, and held important positions in the interim government and in William's first ministry, but retired and died in 1695 as a private person. Halifax's political importance is known to all readers of Macaulay, and he is traditionally reputed as one of the greatest parliamentary speakers of his own, or any, time. But his literary fame rests upon a little volume of Miscellanies containing, besides Advice to a Daughter and some minor things, four political tracts which had been issued between 1680 and 1690, entitled respectively. The Character of a Trimmer, Letter to a Dissenter, The Anatomy of an Equivalent, and Catitiotis for the Choice of a Parliafnent-man. Of these the first had been earlier attributed to Sir William Coventry, and the second to Sir William Temple ; but the style of the whole is extremely homogeneous and quite different from anything of Temple's, while, published as the Afiscellanies were within a decade of Halifax's death, it seems extremely improbable that the attribution, if incorrect, would not have been challenged. They are all exceedingly important documents, showing first that inclination to the essay — to the short, forcible, not inelegant, and yet first of all popular, treatment of manageably limited subjects, which was such a feature of the time ; and secondly, the progress which was being made in the elaboration of a style suitable to such treatment in the special department of politics. It may be observed, from a comparison of many instances, that irony is an almost inseparable accompaniment and ornament of the plainer styles. For it not only does not require, but is positively repugnant to, flowing and florid periods, involved construction.s, and the like, and it gives the salt and savour of which the plain style is in especial need. Accordingly there is irony in Cowley, and plenty of it in Dryden. But Halifax's variety is different from that of either of his forci-unners — drier, more antithetic with a quiet antithesis, more suggestive of a " word to the wi.se." Not that Halifax by any means scorns a flight now and then — there is in the Character of a Trimmer a passage on Truth beyond doubt suggested by the famous text on that subject in the Areopagitica (which Halifax was almost or quite old enough to have read at the time of its publication), and very well w^rth com- paring with it. But these things are not his staple; that is the statement of the case to the plain man in a jilaiii way, yet with sucli a shrewdness and pungency as may give satisfaction to those who.se wits, though plain, are not absolutely sluggish. For political purposes such a style is the most valuable of all, and Halifax, beyond JI2 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii all doubt, showed the way to the greater but fiercer and less equable genius of Swift. Thomas Sprat, as was observed above, is more noticeable for the distinctness with which he puts the new demand than for any particular dexterity that he shows in following it. He was a Devon- shire man, born in 1636, and went to Wadham College, ^'^^ ' Oxford, where the example of the Warden Wilkins may have taught him the excellency of making the best of both parties. He wrote a Pindaric Ode in honour of Cromwell's death, but when the Restoration came he promptly took orders and became chaplain to Buckingham, his duties in that function being traditionally sup- posed to have included participation in the Re]iearsal. Science being fashionable, he became a man of science, and in 1667 published his History (it was then a short one) of the Royal Society, taking in that respect rather the views of Dryden, whom he was libelling, than of Butler, who joined in the libel. He was a great friend of Cowley, whose life he wrote in Latin and English, made a smart reply to a certain Sorbiere, a Frenchman who had travelled in England, and became Canon of Windsor in 1680, and Bishop of Rochester in 1684. His record under James was not too creditable, but, very luckily for him, he was made the object under William of a ridiculous charge of plotting by two professional perjurers, and reaped a good deal of credit from his manner of clearing himself. He died in 1713- Sprat no doubt heartily sympathised with, as he most ingeniously expressed, the public demand for a popularised style. He represents the Royal Society as " most solicitous against the luxury and re- ™ dundance of speech," as " beholding with indignation Royal Society how many mists and uncertainties these specious tropes an sty e. ^^^ figures have brought on our knowledge." He protests against " this vicious abundance of phrase, this trick of metaphors, this volubility of tongue." He calls it a *' beautiful deceit," and declares that the Society has " a constant resolution to reject all the amplifications and digressions of style." They have, he says, exacted from all their members " a close, naked, natural way of speaking — positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants before that of wits or scholars." And he practises what he preaches, though without forgetting scholarship. But we shall see, as we survey the progress of prose letters during the last forty years of the seven- teenth century, that by degrees this language of artisans, countrymen, and merchants was very near swamping literary English altogether, and that it had, again and again, in ways as different as those of CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYD EN — PROSE 513 Addison and Swift, of Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon, to be lifted bodily out of its " naked natural way " lest it should display all the bareness and ugliness of savagery. At such a period almost all writers are interesting to the historical student of literature, because we look to see how the change expresses itself in them. And this particular period is more than usually so, because a good deal of the unconquerable individuality of the earlier part of the century survives in it, and prevents monotony. After Addison everybody tries to write like Addison ; after Johnson almost everybody tries to write like Johnson. But after Dryden everybody does not yet try to write like Dryden ; the common influence is upon them, but they express it in different ways. In perhaps the very greatest prose-writer of the time, next to Dryden himself, the particular epoch-tendency shows itself but partially, and in ways socially differentiated. Like Latimer, like Cobbett, his two chief analogues in English prose-writing, John Bunyan ^ is less of his time in purely literary ""^ "' respects than of himself. Had there been no Puritanism he would have been different, or perhaps would have been nothing at all, as Latimer might have been had there been no Reformation, and Cobbett had there been no Reform, in their respective airs. But like them he would always have been chiefly himself. He was born at Elstow in Bedfordshire in the year 1628, observing the date, be it noticed — the late twenties and early thirties — of all these men. He certainly served in the wars of Rebellion, but whether as a rebel or a loyalist cannot be made out. He was "converted," married early, and began, in the time of the Commonwealth, to write against the Quakers. After the Restoration he was arrested for unlicensed preaching, and wrote a good deal. He had license for a time, but was again arrested, and is said then to have written the Pilgrim's Progress, the first part of which was published in 1678. In the last years of his life he was not much molested, and died in 1688. His work is very voluminous, but that part of it which belongs to literature is chiefly composed of his masterpiece, which was com- pleted in 1684, of the Holy IVar (1682), of the Life and Death of Mr. Bad/nan (1680), and periiaps of the earlier Grace Abotiuding (1660). Bunyan had no classical education, and it is improbable tliat he read at all in the work of any of his famous prose contemporaries. But he was a member of the first generation which had the unmatched English of the Authori.sed Version by heart, he could supply whatever was wanting there by his knowledge of the vernacular, and he had 1 Ed. Offor, 3 vols. London, n.d. 2L 514 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vill literary fire enough in him to have played a great part in any age, merely by adapting his genius to the current literary forms. He was a born novelist, but the prose novel was not in any honour at the time of his life, nor for many years after his death, and if he wrote it, it was because he must. And he could have been an admirable dramatist, indeed his stories are the nearest to the drama of all the great things of the kind in English. He is a great auto- biographer; he might have written great histories and still greater accounts of discovery of countries. He is not a great reasoner, though no ill one on his premises and in his method ; nor (being born when he was) a great poet. But he could see everything that was within the range of his sight, and tell what he saw infallibly ; he had an admirable wit, and one of the greatest gifts of phrase — of picking up the right word or the right half-dozen words — that man has ever had. In the four great books above selected, as well as more or less in all his work, Bunyan exhibits these gifts variously. Grace Abounding has the interest of autobiography, and though there can be no doubt that the inveterate Puritan habit of pious exaggeration chieFthings. i^"* describing a man's own shortcomings is there, yet it is made compatible with astonishing literary perfection. In the seventeenth century this passionate humility (or as some unkind judges have taken it, this form of spiritual pride which insists on being, if a sinner at all. the chief of sinners) meets us at every turn, and it has been sufficiently common since. But it is exceedingly rare to find it presented with such unconscious yet complete and Shakespearian artistry. The Holy War is a much more ambitious composition, though indeed ambition is an incorrect word, for that quality is quite absent from Bunyan. But while in Grace Abounding there is no deliberate literary form, the personal confession and the religious purpose not obliging the author to select any, here the important and difficult form of the allegorical romance is deliberately attempted. As usual, Bunyan's direct models here, and still more in the Pilgrini's Progress, have been hunted after with more zeal than wisdom. He may have had such ; the Progress is certainly very close to Deguileville ^ (see p. 136) in parts. The universal fondness for allegory in mediaeval times had been nowhere stronger than in England. The Renais- sance, as the Faerie Quecne shows, had only changed the manner, not the nature, of the tendency, and the omnipotence of the Bible among Bunyan's class at this time had intensified it yet further. But in the Holy War Bunyan has not co-ordinated his religious and 1 See The Ancient Poem of Guillaume de Guileville (the "de" should be doubled), ed. N. Hill and others, London, 1858. 5»5 CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE literary senses as he has in the Pilgrim's Progress, and he probably did not intend to do so. The piece is, like everything of his, fault- lessly written in its own style, and abounds with fine passages. But the subject is both too vast and too vague for the particular treatment, and except for the gusto with which the old soldier tells of the military operations against Mansoul, the personal note is wanting, or at best emerges fitfully. Although it may seem strange that the astonishing literary excellence of the Life and Death of Mr. Badman should have ever escaped any competent critic, yet it may be doubted whether many people knew it till the late Mr. Froude did justice to it fifteen or twenty years ago.^ It is not a very long dialogue between Mr. Wise- man and Mr. Attentive, divided into chapters, and recounting the ungodly but successful life of a hero who is the very opposite of Christian. It has been most unnecessarily and unreasonably regarded as a sort of third part by contrast of the Progress (which would argue an artistic sense in Bunyan as weak as we know his to have been strong), and as, in part at least, a second autobiographical fiction — which refutes itself. But to foist "problems" into a story of such perfect clearness is quite unpardonable. The style is perhaps Bunyan's best — less vivid than that of the Pilgrim'' s Progress, but with even more of the special excellences of prose. Although Mr. Badman deserves his name with almost superhuman thoroughness, yet Bunyan entirely escapes sheer exaggeration, and even resists the temptation to end with a lurid death-bed. Nay, though his sense of poetical and moral justice will not let him represent Badman as prosperous to the very end, yet he does not insist overmuch on worldly retribution. Short as it is, the piece is abundantly diversified with episodes and ornament — that story of "old Tod," told in twenty lines, and told perfectly, which Mr. Browning has characteristically amplified and exaggerated into "■ Ned Bratts," being only one of them. There are very strong suggestions of Thackeray (who had pretty certainly read it) in Mr. Badman, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say tliat, this once printed, the English Novel in its most cliaracteristic form, as opposed to the Romance, was founded. The little book itself is indeed rather the scenario in dialogue of such a novel than the novel itself, but all the essentials are there. From Bunyan to Defoe (who must have known his predecessor well) there is only a slight development of method, with a considerable drop in style ; from Bunyan here to Richardson and Fielding the advance is very much slighter than it looks. The allegorical form and the strongly religious purport of the 1 In his monograph on Bunyan for the " English Men of Letters" Series. 5i6 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii Pilgrivi's Progress itself have made some demur to its being ranked as certainly a link, and perhaps the very original link, starting the chain of the greater English novel ; but this seems to be a somewhat unnecessary scruple. A religious novel is still a novel, and though allegory is an old form of fiction, and the novel proper a comparatively new one, we must not rule out allegories as such from the latter class. Indeed, if, discarding arbitrary axioms, we confine ourselves to the real qualities of the novel, we shall find it very hard to discover one which is not eminently present in the Pilgrini's Progress. It has a sufficient and regular plot in each of its parts, the two being duly connected — a plot rather of the continuous or straight-line than of the interwoven or circular order, but still amply sufficient. The action and interest of this plot are quite lavishly supported by character; indeed, the Pilgriitt's Progress is the first prose work of fiction in which this all-powerful tool, which had hitherto been chiefly used by the dramatist, and to a less intense, but more extensive, degree by the poet, was applied. And Bunyan, with a bound, came very near perfection in it. There is hardly a trace (except in characters like Evangelist, where it is proper) of the misty generality which we find in the Holy War. Everybody — from main characters like Christian and Greatheart and Mercy to mere sketches like Atheist and By-ends and Brisk, and the delectable person who de- scribes the party at " Madam Wanton's," where they " were as merry as the maids" — is alive. The description and the dialogue are used to further the narrative, in the precise way in which novel differs from drama — the description being given by the author, not by the characters or the stage directions — and are mixed and tempered with an art only inferior to that shown in the projection of character which they help. If we are told that the Pilgrint's Progress is not a novel, it will be proper to ask what is a novel, that having obtained an admitted example we may compare it with Bunyan's work. The Pilgrint's Progress has long been, and it may be hoped will always be, well enough known in England. But for something like four generations after its first appearance, its popularity, though always great, was, so to speak, subterranean and almost contraband. It is probable that even when it was most sniffed at by academic criticism, it was brought by means of nursemaids to the knowledge of children. But it was not till quite the end of the eighteenth century, or even the beginning of the nineteenth, that it was made free of the study as it had long been of the cottage and the nursery. Orthodoxy objected to Bunyan's dissent ; dissent to his literary and artistic gifts ; latitudinarians to his religious fervour ; the somewhat CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 517 priggish refinement of Addisonian and Popian etiquette to his ver- nacular language and his popular atmosphere ; scholars to his sup- posed want of education. And so the greatest prose-book of the late seventeenth century in English had, for nearly a hundred and fifty years, the curious fate of constantly exercising influence without ever achieving praise, or even notice, from those whose business it was to give both. A curious fate certainly, but not an unenviable. The reluctance to acknowledge the place of Bunyan in the history of the novel has perhaps partly accounted for the undue importance sometimes attached to work so infinitely inferior, not merely in moral respectability but in literary value, to his as that of Richard Head, the author of the English Rogue?- This '^\jg£"'' book does possess a certain historical value. It forms a definite link between the pamphlet-novels of the Elizabethan time in the wide sense and (through the novelettes of Afra Behn) the work of Defoe. It represents the first elaborate attempt to transplant the Spanish picaresque novel, and such French imitations of it as SoreKs Francion, into English ; and it is also interesting as embodying the attractions of representation of foreign countries and manners with those of the delineation of manners at home. It shows further that extremely strong vernacular and popular, not to say vnalgar, element which we have had, and shall have, to notice so often in this particular period. But it has hardly any intrinsic merit ; and, if it had not followed the moral license of its origmals, it may be questioned whether it would have had many readers or any panegyrists. For its want of decency is almost the only feature which takes it out of the commonplace ; it hardly attempts plot, unless the rudimentary device of making the hero occasionally meet with persons he has met before may be dignified by that name ; it has no merits of dialogue or description, and it is entirely wanting in the virtue which, as we have seen, Bunyan possesses in so eminent a degree — the virtue of character-drawing. Thomas Burnet and Joseph Glanvill are the chief exponents of the gorgeous style in prose, who were born, later than Dryden himself, in the seventeenth century. Burnet (who must be very carefully distinguished from his namesake Gilbert) was a York- shire man, and his birth-year was 1635. He was Burnet! educated at Northallerton Grammar School and at C^are Hall, Cambridge, whence he moved to Christ's and became Fellow of that College in 1657. He took his share of University work, but also travelled much abroad as a private tutor, and in 1685 1 4 vols. London, 1665, sq. Reprinted recently, London, n.d. Head, who was a person of some education, and a copious bookseller's hack, is responsible only for the first part of it. 5i8 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii he became Master of the Charterhouse. He had already published in Latin (1680) and English (1684) his Theoria Sacra, with its sequel the De Conflagratione, and he did little else in literature, though he did not die till 171 5. His position at the Charterhouse gave him the opportunity, which he duly took, of resisting James Il.'s attack on the Church. Burnet's book ^ is a fanciful explanation of cosmogony and cosmolysis, in which the Deluge is the great event in the past and the final conflagration the great event of the future. From this point of view it is chiefly interesting as an attempt to combine the nascent interest in physical science with the expiring tendency to imaginative romance. Something of the same mixture appears in the manner, for there are touches of the vernacularity, and even the meanness, which was invading style. But on the whole the older magnificence prevails, and Burnet has a just, though probably rather a vague, repute as commanding real eloquence of description, marred at times by a tawdriness which reminds us that we are in the half-century of Lee, not in that of Shakespeare, but showing in prose not a little of the redeeming splendour which Lee shows in verse. Glanvill, whom the echoing magnificence of a sentence from him, prefixed to Poe's Ligeia, may have made known to many more than have read him in his originals, was born at Plymouth in 1636, went to Oxford in 1652, took orders at the Restoration, became Vicar of Frome, F.R.S., and Prebendary of Worcester, and died in 1680. His Scepsis Scieftttjica,'^ an extended edition of the earlier Vanity of Dogmatising (1661), appeared in 1665 ; Saddncistnus Tritimphatus, a defence of belief in witches, in 1666; and Essays in 1678. Glanvill is a weaker and less poetical Browne, upon whom it is probably not wrong to suspect that he modelled himself. He has, as a rule, neither the power nor the music of Sir Thomas, but sometimes he comes not too far oflf. One of the most remarkable divisions of prose at the time is that supplied by the Diarists and Memoir-writers, of whom Samuel Pepys occupies a position unparalleled in English, if not in any ^, ^. . tongue, with Evelyn and Roger North for considerable The Diansts. , , ,, iri • r^- t ■, seconds, and no small number or other writers — Sir John Reresby, Abraham de la Pryme, the somewhat earlier Mrs. Hutchin- son, Lady Fanshawe (indeed, the letter-writers proper might be here included), and others to follow. But Pepys, Evelyn, and North are those who have hold on history. The two first were friends, but Evelyn, far less distinctly original as a writer, was the elder in years and by far the higher in social position. He was born at the family seat of Wotton, in Surrey (of which, with 1 7th edition, 2 vols. London, 1759. 2 Edited by John Owen, London, 1885. CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 519 other property at Sayes Court, Deptford, he was afterwards to be possessor), in 1620, went to school at Lewes, and to college at Balliol, but was just young enough to escape actual participation in the Civil War. He was a consistent Royalist, and ^ey"- married the daughter of a still stronger one. Sir Richard Browne. But Evelyn was no Quixote, and was not molested during the Common- wealth. Both at that time and afterwards he devoted himself to gardening and arboriculture (of which his well-known, if not now much read, Sylva was the outcome), physical science (he was an early member of the Royal Society), and a good many other matters. He was a fervent Anglican and faithful to monarchical principles, though the dissoluteness of the Restoration gave him no small grief. He was nearly eighty-seven when he died, in 1706, and his work, published and unpublished, was very large. But even the Sylva has long ceased to be read, and the books most likely to keep his name in remembrance, his Diary'^ and his Memoir - of Margarcc Blagge (Mrs. Godolphin), were not published till more than a century after his death . The interest of these arises chiefly from their ma'tter. In them and in all his work Evelyn's style is that of a thoroughly cultivated gentleman who, on the one hand, has had the full education of his time, and on the other is familiar with the language of its best society. But he has little idiosyncrasy of composition or expression. He has neither the splendour of the old style nor the precision and telling point of the new. But in the little book giving the life and letters of Margaret Blagge (the first wife of Godolphin_ tlie Lord Treasurer to be, who passed unscathed through the contaminations of Whitehall, where she was a maid of honour, and died in the prime of her youth and beauty), a half-platonic, half-paternal affection has suffused warmth and colour over Evelyn's usually ratlier tepid and neutral fashion of writing. And the Diary, though there are many more amusing books of the kind, is justly famous for the fulness, variety, and fidelity of its record.s, while, not very rarely, in such passages as the well-known account of the Great Fire, and the still better known one of Whitehall just before the death of Charles H., the subject once more rouses the writer to real strength and effect. But even then he is hardly individual. There is no more individual writer in English than Samuel Pepys, his friend, though Evelyn patronised Pepys, as Pepys patronised Dryden. He was born in 1635, of a family settled in the district of Cambridge and Huntingdon, and, as was not uncommon in the seventeenth century, touching the peerage 1 Ed. Bray, 2 vols. 4(0. (2n(J ed. i8iq), and in divers forms since. * First published by Samuel Wilberforcc, and reprinted since. 520 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii and the landed gentry on one side, retail town trade and the lower middle class on the other. His connection with Montague, after- wards Earl of Sandwich, was the foundation of Pepys's fortunes, which, after being very humble before the Restoration, were mightily bettered by his appointment to the post of Clerk of the Acts of the Navy. He was Secretary of the Admiralty later, and Member of Parliament ; and though he lost his positions, once at the Popish Plot time and finally at the Revolution, he always enjoyed a great reputation as a scholar, virtuoso, and expert in matters naval. In fact, though he was not much (he was somewhat) superior to the loose ideas of his time as to what was and what was not malversa- tion of public money, Pepys was far more diligent, able, and patriotic than most of his fellows. He seems to have been in more than conventional phrase " universally respected " up to his death in 1703. He left to his college, Magdalene, at Cambridge (his school was St. Paul's), an invaluable collection of books, including ballads and old MSS., of which he was one of the earliest collectors; and his Mevioirs relating to the State of the Navy (1690) was and is a very meritorious production. Even his letters, of which we have considerable numbers, ^ though as yet no complete printed collection, present him in no other light than that of a man of business with rather versatile tastes for music, science, and (in part) literature, but of no special idiosyncrasy either of genius or character. In 1825, however, Lord Braybrooke, whose family was connected hereditarily with Magdalene, published in part a Diary "^ which Pepys had included in his bequest to that society. It had been kept in cipher by the author for about ten years from a period just before the Restoration, till anxiety about the state of his eyes broke it off, and probably the death of his wife checked its resumption. She was Elizabeth St. Michel, a pretty girl and of gentle French extraction, but penniless, ill-educated, apparently (though it must be admitted she was sorely tried) of no very sweet disposition, frivolous, and un- refined. They had made a boy-and-girl marriage, and, though a most unfaithful husband, he seems to have been, with perhaps one interval, never quite out of love with her. The Diary was published by Lord Braybrooke with very large omissions ; fifty years afterwards part of these were supplied ; and twenty years later again the whole, with some verbal blanks, pudoris causa, was issued. The successive 1 Chiefly to be found in Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. Smith, 2 vols. London, 1841, which also contains the Tangier Diary. By some mischance or misconduct the bulk of the letters did not reach Magdalene, and are scattered, while many, no doubt, are lost. 2 The latest and completes! (but still not quite complete) edition is that of Mr. H. B. Wheatley, London, 1893-96, 8 vols, of text, with a 9th of index, etc., to follow. CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 521 revelations have considerably blackened Pepys's character, and have increased the surprise of those who can afford any surprise at a constantly renewed phenomenon, that he should have not merely written but preserved, and with extraordinary precautions insured the preservation of, the document. But they have rather increased than lessened the estimate of his peculiar genius. In the place of, or rather inside of, the decorous, diligent official and virtuoso who was for forty years respected by the scrupulous Evelyn, and who majestically congratulates Dryden on the comfort afforded to Pepys by his Good Parson, '"after the sight of so many lewd originals," we have an almost entirely different person. The interest in some literature, in science, in music, in art, remains ; the diligence is seen to have been by no means merely affected ; the shrewd business-sense, and even the determination that, though Pepys shall be well paid for serving the King, yet the King shall not be ill-served, remain. But likewise many strange new things appear. We find a man insatiable of scandalj petty pleasures, frivolities of dress, and the like ; intensely selfish and sometimes even brutal, though good-natured in the main ; the arrantest of snobs; stingy to his wife and lavish to himself; a thorough libertine, and resorting to the specially bad trick of using his official position to gratify his libertinage ; sometimes almost cowardly, constantly jealous, petty in every way. Yet we never dislike Pepys, and we seldom despise him. Nor is this merely due to the fact that every rational person remembers and allows for the bearing of a certain text about casting the first stone. It is due first to the fact that Pepys is intensely human; secondly to the fact that within his limits (and they are many and sharply drawn, so that he could not like Shakespeare, could not like Butler, could appreciate neither poetry nor humour at the best of either) he was intensely sensitive to impressions ; most of all to the fact that, for whatsoever reason — perhaps because of the utter absence of restraint and respect of persons — he can express these impressions as no one else has done. The Diary deals literally with the entire occupations of a busy life for nearly ten years. Nothing is too small, nothing too mean, hardly anything even too disgusting, for Pepys to record; he does not know what tedium means, and yet — an almost unique instance — he never produces it. His innumerable morning draughts and evening suppers ; the oaths which at times interfered with them ; the books which he so diligently bought, if he did not always taste them ; his more or less unlawful amusements ; his friendships; his enmities; his very official business — all these things and many others acquire in passing under his hands a sort of varnish, or, more properly speaking, a sort of saturation of immor- tality. It is impossible to define with any accuracy how this is ^22 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book via communicated. Part may be due to the short, stenographic expression necessitated by his cipher, to the constant shock of surprise at his astounding frankness, to the raciness which his observation of the actual fashion of speech of the time imparts. But there is a residuum which cannot be accounted for by any of these things, or by the interest, intrinsic or accidental, of his subjects ; and this residuum is genius. About genius the less said the better. To acknowledge it and enjoy it is always the better part of criticism. The most interesting of the Memoir-writers, next to Pepys and Evelyn, — indeed, more interesting, if less important, than the latter, — is Roger North, a younger son of a family which made no small show in history and politics during the sixteenth, seven- Roger North, ^ggj^^j^^ ^^^ eighteenth centuries in England. Roger was born "about" 1650 (for, copious as he is, he neglects dates strangely), and lived till 1733, most of his written work being the fruit of his later years. It consists of Lives'^ of himself and his three brothers (the Lord Keeper Guildford, Dr. John North, Master of Trinity, and Sir Dudley, the Turkey merchant), and of the Examen,^ an important Tory vindication of the proceedings of Charles II.'s reign against the incoming Whiggery of the eighteenth century. The Lives are the more interesting; but the whole is written in a curious and very piquant style, strangely free from any of the new classicism, but as strangely crossed between the older conceit and the new slang. North is Harrington plus L'Estrange ; he will write " This was nuts to the old lord," "That flowed in on him like an orage^' "The Common Pleas thought to have nicked them," with no fear of Dryden earlier and Addison later, and much as his collateral ancestor Sir Thomas would have done. Which, together with the interesting things he has to say, gives him no mean position. He liked painting and yachting as well as the toughest quillets of the old law, and was altogether a character. Many other writers have obtained a more or less secure footing in histories, more or less elaborate, of English literature as represent- ing the prose of this time. The great, but never fully co-ordinated or developed, powers of Andrew Marvell showed themselves Minors. j^ j^jg ^^^^^^ ^^^ mainly satiric, stage in prose as well as inverse. Algernon Sidney (i620?-83) has received for his literature some of that bounty of praise which in politics has turned a venal partisan into a martyred patriot; but the genius of his family was not entirely lost in him. George Fox (1624-90), the first of Quakers, has been rightly selected as a sort of "prose Bunyan." The platitudi- nousness of the Honourable Robert Boyle (1626-91) celebrated, or J Ed. Jessopp. 3 vols. London, 1890. ^ 4to, London, 1740. CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 523 rather immortalised, by Swift, is an unintentional reduction to the absurd of the qualities which Sprat insisted on as necessary to the scientific man. Anthony [a] Wood (1632-95), author of the great Athenae Oxotiienses, was a Pepys who bestowed upon his mother University and her notables and notabilia what the diarist devoted to dinner, and supper, and the wives of shipwrights in the Deptford yard, and taverns, and theatres, and the Navy accounts. And Anthony's senior, survivor, friend, but inferior, John Aubrey (1626-97) was still more like Pepys, and has preserved much of such gossip as we have about great and small men of his own time and a little before. Edward Stillingfleet (1635-99) ^^^.s a strong divine and scholar, with a style inadequate to his learning and his logic. Gilbert Burnet (1643- 171 5) was a Whig Clarendon, without the genius and the art. The Scots prose of the time is, despite the decadence of Scottish litera- ture, not unworthily represented by Sir George Mackenzie (1636-91), a great lawyer and statesman, an old-fashioned but vivid writer, and, as we know both from Dryden and his own writings, an excellent critic; and by Fletcher of Saltoun (1653-1716), whose personality is embalmed by his saying or quotation about the ballads of a nation ; and by his not quite senseless crotchet about enslaving beggars. Of all these it would be interesting, but is impossible, to say more here ; but something in detail must be added of John Locke, and a few words about the growth of periodicals and the vulgarisation of style towards the close of the century, especially as shown in L'Estrange, Collier, Dunton, and " the facetious Tom Brown." Locke was born at Wrington in Somerset, under the shadow of the Mendips, in 1632. He too, like South and Dryden, was a pupil of Busby's at Westminster, and, like South, he went to Christ Church. He availed himself of his studentship to settle ^^^^^ down there in the study of medicine and philosophy. He lost this quiet haven through his friendship with Shaftesbury, but he had means and was able to live, chiefly abroad, till the Revolution restored him and provided him with divers offices, espe- cially a Commissionership of Trade and Plantations. He had pub- lished Letters on Toleration before the expulsion of James, but his principal works, the great Essay on the Human Understanding and the Treatise of Government, Ti^^^^iX^A just afterwards in 1690, and the Thoughts on Education in 1693. He died in 1704.1 With the matter of Locke's work, important as it is. we have here little or nothing to do. It concerns us mainly as showing the degradation, the general lowering of thought and ideal, which has so 1 There is no goorl complete edition of Locke, thouRli there are several lasi- century collections. The Kssay can be found cheaply in Mohn's Library, and with all necessary apparatus in Professor Campbell Fraser's edition. 524 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii much to do with the changes of literature at this time. Locke has abundance of common sense ; he is not (whatever his followers may have been) irreligious ; he is kindly and not ungenerous in tone and sentiment ; nor does it appear that he himself desired any violent changes in Church or State. But he is wholly, and in a slightly un- pleasant sense, practical. If he objects to innate ideas, it is not so much because his acuteness perceives certain obvious difficulties in admitting them as because they are above his range, out of his ken, something that does not come within the almost (not quite) pure sensationalism of his thought. If in the same way he objects to the high-flying theory of hereditary and absolute monarchy, it is not merely because absolute monarchy has been abused, or merely be- cause he sees objection to it, but because it is again " too high " for him, because its poetical and romantic attractions, as well as the logical merits of its theory, which appeal even to a person so little poetical as Hobbes, are quite out of his plane and orbit. Yet again, if he objects to the older and classical education, it is because it is in danger of interfering with business, because it puts flighty notions into men's heads. No very great figure of the age really expresses its banality as does Locke. The eyes of Dryden are still caught by the brave translunary things which all great poets must perceive ; the fresh attraction of the then novel mathematical and physical dis- coveries inflames Barrow earlier and Newton later ; there is an intoxication of satire in Butler, an intoxication of God, and of human- ity, and of the unseen in Bunyan, a kind of intoxication of physical pleasure and amusement even in Pepys. But Locke is nothing if not sober : he is eminently of such stuflf as dreams are not made of. And the style is, once more, the very man. It would be grossly unjust to despise Locke as a writer ; his merits of clear apperception and presentation, of exact adjustment of the method of appeal to the person appealed to, the range and fertility of his illustration, the cogency of his attack if the general principles of it are granted, the absence of pretension and quackery — these are things too rare and too good in themselves not to receive due acknowledgment. But it is certainly not wrong to see in him literary (we need say nothing more of his philosophical) influences which, while they may have been valuable at the time as helping to clear away some things once good and great, but now in their decadence, helped to bring about worse things in time to come. To no single man is that obstinate Philistinism of thought and expression, which is the besetting sin of eighteenth-century literature, due so much as to Locke. The dignity, indeed, of his subject, his genuine learning, his modesty, his in- tellectual acumen, kept him from being actually vulgar. But he was the cause of infinite vulgarity in others, and his style of itself incurs CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYDEN — PROSE 525 the fatal word. Not merely every spark of imagination, not merely every flight of fancy, but almost every flourish and curvet of rhetoric, humour, sympathy, sense of the double sides of things, are excluded from Locke's handling. He was, however, saved by his very matter-of-factness, even more than by his possession of scholarship, from the extreme degradations of style which appear in the periodical and controversial writers of the close of the century. The newspaper came slowly into form ; but it came, and it necessarily helped to exaggerate o^f^style'at" this degradation. It had to appeal to society at large, the close of ■and society at large, both high and low, had the mind to s^eiicanailler. Coarseness ruled from Wliitehall to Whitefriars ; court- ier, citizen, vagabond, had alike lost the last glimpse of anything unvulgar. L'Estrange, a Tory, a gentleman, and even something of a scholar, writes mere Billingsgate sometimes, and mere vernacular familiarity always. Jeremy Collier, a very learned man, a sound theologian, and a sincere and formidable defender of morality, has no more dignity in his style than L'Estrange himself. Tom Brown, the University Bohemian, and John Dunton, the middle-class shopkeeper, vie with each other, not indeed in technical impropriety, but in what can only be c'i.W^di commonness of expression — in a way of writing which is not merely easy but vulgarly slipshod, not merely vernacular but (once more) vulgar. Some little must be said about eacli of them, for they are notable people in literary history, which has not always done them justice , but the same taint is upon them all. Sir Roger L'Estrange, the eldest of the group and the highest in position, was born as early as 161 6, of the family of the L'Estranges of Hunstanton, in Norfolk, and, like his father Sir Hamon, was a zealous and active Royalist in the Rebellion itself. , ,^ . , . . , , . . , L Estrange. After the Restoration he mamtained his service, but changed his weapon, becoming Gazetteer and Censor of the Press, writing and editing many newspapers, the Public Intellii^enccr, the Observatot\ and so forth, and long surviving the downfall of the Stuarts. He even saw their partial restoration in the person of Anne, for he did not die till 1704, at the age of nearly ninety. Out- side periodicals and controversial pamphlets, L'Estrange's work was almost entirely translation, wliich indeed gave surprisingly large employinent to writers at this time, from the highest to the lowest. Joscplius, Seneca, Cicero, Quevedo,' and .r^isop were among the 1 The translation of Qucvcdo's Visions was one of the most popular, and is one of the most cluiracioristic, of L'Estrange's books. Soon after it appeared, and in the hurly-l)urly of the Dutch in the Medway, on 91)1 June 1667, l'ei)ys exiolli-d it as " the best [translation] he ever saw," and thought it impossible even to believe that it could be a translation. It reached its tenth edition in 1708. It is lively enough, and not immoral, but coarse almost beyond belief. 526 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii ' motley subjects of his efforts in this kind. L'Estrange had a vigorous intellect and a very ready and deft pen, which wounded his Whig adversaries very sorely, and caused them greatly to cry out. But he did much to introduce the colloquialism which distinguishes all the group, and against which, in the next chapter, we shall find Swift openly protesting, and Addison working by contrary example. Jeremy Collier, though as good a Tory as L'Estrange, was a very different person and a much younger man. He was not born till 1650, was educated at Caius College, Cambridge, and had for a time a living in Suffolk, being subsequently Lecturer at Gray's Inn. He not merely "went out" as a Nonjuror at the Revolution, but was thrown into prison for his Legitimist writings, and all readers of Macaulay know the appearance he made at the execu- tion of Friend and Parkyns. He lived till 1726, doing a great deal of work, including an Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1708-14) ; and under Anne he might have had good preferment, which with a loyalty to principle very rare in his time, and not common in any, he declined. But he lives in literature chiefly by his famous Short View of the Frofaneness and Inimorality of the English Stage, published in 1698, and already referred to in the dramatic chapter of this Book. The solid justice, despite the not infrequent crotchet and extravagance, of the View cannot be denied ; and though its ability has, for rhetorical purposes, been a little heightened by Macaulay, it is very considerable. But its chief interest, besides the effect it had on the drama, is the evidence it gives of the above- mentioned colloquialism. Collier, academic or nothing, is also as full of familiar contractions and cant phrase, as little regardful of formal and scholastic graces, as any gutter-scribbler of the time. Thomas (always called Tom) Brown, though little can be said for the morality of his life and writings, is a person of more importance in literary history than has usually been allowed him. He was born (1663) at Shiffnal in Shropshire, and was well educated, going to Christ Church, Oxford. His conduct obliged him to leave his first employment of teaching, for which he probably had very little taste, and from about 1688 to his early death in 1704 he produced a profusion of miscellanies in various forms, always ingenious as makeshifts for the periodical, and very often directly leading to that periodical itself. The great essayist who immediately followed him owed more to him than might be imagined, and in not a little of his work, especially in his Amuse/nents, Serious and Comical, which attempt an early " London from day to day," there is a vivid- ness of manners which anticipates the best of the later novelists. Any form that was popular suited Tom ; he wrote many letters and dialogues in the fashion of French imitations of Lucian ; lue took up CHAP. Ill THE AGE OF DRYD EN — PROSE 527 John Dunton's Athenian Oracle with a " Lacedaemonian " imitation which was much more amusing ; and he wrote poems, squibs, trans- lations, every sort of Hght work, with no small scholarship, with abundance of wit and humour, but unluckily with a contempt of decency beside which even the dramatists of his time look modest. The collections ^ of his work vary in bulk and contents, and it is probable that critical authentication of them is impossible. The last of the four, John Dunton, possessed perhaps the least purely literary capacity, but is not the least important in history. He was born in 1659, and was descended from a line of clergymen, but was recalcitrant to the succession, and became a bookseller. In 1682 he married Elizabeth Annesley, " dear Iris," daughter of a Nonconformist divine of some fame, and sister of Mrs. Samuel Wesley and Mrs. Defoe. Dunton was a strong Whig, a man with a genius for " rambling," which carried him to America and to the Continent, and deeply bitten with the mania of the time for " Projects," of which his brother-in-law Defoe has left an interesting memorial in his Essay thereon. Dunton's most remarkable Project that took effect was the already mentioned Athenian Mercury, collected and selected in book form later as the Athenian Oracle, which anticipated on a magnificent scale the "answers to correspondents" not yet quite obsolete. His most important book was his Life and Errors, 2 a book which only its long-windedness, and the fact that its author's eccentricity here and there diverges into clear madness, exclude from the brief list of English autobiographies of the first class. After the death of " dear Iris" he married "dear Valeria," a/wj- Sarah Nicholas, an heiress; but this union was less happy. He wrote and partly published a great amount of matter, a pamphlet against Harley and St. John, Neck or Nothing, being the chief item, and died as late as 1733, in obscurity and (apparently) distress. He is much less colloquial than those who have been mentioned before him, but is full of the curious domestic detail which also distinguishes the time, especially in Non- conformist writing; and he furnishes us with abundant and some- times interesting particulars about booksellers, printers, authors, divines, and public men generally. 1 1 use one in 4 vols. Dublin, 1778. 2 Ed. Nichols, 2 vols. 1818. The Athenian Oracle, Athenian ."r/or/, etc.. and their follower, the British Apollo, voluminous collections of question and answer, are useful and not unamusing documents. Those who fear to phmnc at larKO into them may content themselves with a well-edited selection from the first-named by John Underhill, London, 1892. CHAPTER IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE Swift — His life — His verse — His prose — His quality and achievement — The Essayists — Steele — His plays — Addison's life — His miscellaneous work — His and Steele's Essays — Bentley — Middleton — Arbuthnot — Atterbury — Bolingbroke — Butler and other divines — Shaftesbury — Mandeville — Berkeley — Excellence of his style — Defoe John Dunton, the eccentric bookseller mentioned at the close of the last chapter, refers to a certain "scoffing Tubman," with whose identity neither he, extensive and peculiar as was his knowledge of literary London, nor almost any one else, was then acquainted. The reference is, of course, to the Tale of a Tub, published anonymously in 1704 — the first great book, either in prose or verse, of the eighteenth century, and in more ways than one the herald and champion at once of its special achievements in literature. Jonathan Swift,^ its author, one of the very greatest names in English literature, was, like his connections Dryden and Herrick, a plant of no very early development. He had been born as far back as 1667, and his earlier literary productions had been confined to wretched Pindaric odes, some of them contributed to Dunton's own papers, and drawing down upon him that traditional and variously quoted sentence of his great relative, "Cousin Swift, you will never be a [Pindaric] poet," which is said to have occasioned certain ill-natured retorts on Dryden later. Swift's origin, like his character and genius, was purely English, but an accident caused him to be born in Dublin, and other accidents brought about his education in Ireland. His father died before his birth, and his mother was very poor ; but his paternal uncle paid for his education at Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin. He entered Trinity very early, in 1682, and seems to have been neither 1 Swift's Works have been frequently collected, but never quite satisfactorily. The best edition is still Scott's ; but a new, cheap, and useful one has been begun in Bohn's Library. All Lives have been superseded by Sir Henry Craik's — ist ed. in I vol. London, 1883; new ed. in 2 vols. London, 1894. 528 CHAK IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 529 happy nor successful there, though there may have been less disgrace than has sometimes been thought in his graduation speciali gratia^ and not by the ordinary way of right, in 1686. He was still under twenty, and for some years found no better occupation than a secretaryship in the house of his distant connection, Sir William Temple. In 1694 he went to Ireland, was ordained, and received a small living, but in two years returned to Temple, in whose house he met "Stella," Esther John- "'^ ''f^- son, his lifelong friend and, as seems most probable, latterly his wife. Temple died in 1699, leaving Swift a small legacy and his literary executorship. He once more returned to Ireland, acted as secretary to Lord-Deputy Berkeley, received some more small pre- ferments, though not such as he wanted, and spent the first decade of the century at Laracor, his chief benefice, and London, where he was a sort of agent for the Archbishop of Dublin. He had all this time been a kind of Whig in politics, but with a strong dislike to Whig anti-clericalism and some other differences; and about 1710 he joined the new Tory party under Harley and St. John, and carried on vigorous war against the Whigs in the Examiner, though he did not break personal friendship with Addison and others. His inestimable services during the four last years of Queen Anne were rewarded only with the Deanery of Dublin — it is said owing to the Queen's pious horror of the Tale of a Tub. Swift lived chiefly in Dublin, but with occasional visits to his friends in England, for more than thirty years longer, and the events of his life, the contests of "Vanessa" and " Stella " for his hand, or at least his heart, his interference with Irish politics, his bodily sufferings, and the end which, after five terrible years of madness, painful or lethargic, came in October 1745, are always interesting and sometimes mysterious. But we cannot dwell on them here, though they have more to do with his actual literary characteristics than is often the case. His dependency in youth, his long sojourn in lettered leisure, though in bitterness of spirit, with a household the master of which was a dilettante but a distinctly remarkable man of letters, his suppressed but evidently ardent affections, his disappointment when at last he reached fame and the chance of power, and his long residence, with failing health, in a country which he hated — all these things must be taken into account, though cautiously, in considering his work. This is of very great bulk, and in parts of rather uncertain genuineness, for Swift was strangely careless of literary reputation, published for the most part anonymously, and, intense as is his idio- syncrasy, contrived to impress it on one or two of his intimate friends, notably on Arbuthnot. It consists of " ^"*'- both verse and prose, but the former is rarely poetry and is at its 2M 530 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii best in easy vers de socUtt^ such as Cadenus and Vanessa (the record of his passion or fancy for Esther Vanhomrigh), '• Vanbrugh's House," the pieces to Harley and others, and above all, the Unes on his own death ; or else in sheer burlesque or grotesque, where he has seldom been equalled, as in the famous " Mrs. Harris's Petition," and a hundred trifles, long and short, of the same general kind. Poetry, in the strict and rare sense, Swift seldom or never touches ; his chief example of it — an example not absolutely authenticated, seeing that we only possess it as quoted by Lord Chesterfield — is a magnificent fragment about the Last Judgment. Here, and perhaps only here in verse, his characteristic indignation rises to poetic heat. Elsewhere he is infinitely ingenious and humorous in fanciful whim, and, sometimes at least, infinitely happy in expression of it, the pains which, no doubt partly owing to Temple's influence and example, he spent upon correct prose-writing being here extended and reflected in verse. For Swift, although not pedantically, or in the sense of manuals of composition, a correct writer, is so in the higher and better sense to a very unusual degree ; and we know that he was so deliberately. Several passages, especially one in the Tatler^ express his views on the point, and his dislike at once of the older luxuriance which it was impossible for a man of his time to relish, and of the inroad of slovenly colloquialism which we have noticed in the last chapter. Yet if Swift had been, like his patron, and perhaps in some sort exemplar, Temple, nothing more, or little more, than a master of form in prose, his position in literature would be very different from that which he actually holds. Hfcis first published prose piece, IS pr s . ^^ Dissensions of Athetts and Rome (an application, according to the way of the time, to contemporary politics), contains, except in point of style, nothing very noticeable. But the anony- mous volume of 1704 is compact of very different stuff. The Battle of the Books, a contribution to the " Ancient and Modern " debate on Temple's side and in Temple's honour, is not supreme, though very clever, admirably written and arranged, and such as no English- man recently living, save Butler and Dryden, could have written, while Butler would have done it with more clumsiness of form, and Dryden with less lightness of fancy. The Tale of a Tub has supremacy. It may be peremptorily asserted that irreligion is neither intended nor involved in it. For nearly two centuries the ferocious controversies, first, between Rome and Protestantism, then between different bodies of Protestants, had entirely blinded men to the extreme danger that the rough handling which they bestowed upon 1 27th September 1710. CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 531 their enemies would recoil on the religion which underlay those enemies' beliefs as well as their own. And this, as well as the other danger of the excessive condemnation of " enthusiasm," was not seen till lono- after Swift's death. But the satire on Peter (Rome), Jack (Calvinisn^ or rather the extremer Protestant sects generally), and Martin (Luther- anism and Anglicanism) displays an all-pervading irony of thought, and a felicity of expressing that irony, which had never been seen in English prose before. The irony, it must be added, goes, as far as things human are concerned, very deep and very wide, and its zio-zao- glances at politics, philosophy, manners, the hopes and desires and pursuits and pleasures and pains of man, leave very little unscathed. There is a famous and not necessarily false story that Swift, in his sad later days, once exclaimed, in reference to the Tale, " What a genius I had when I wrote that book ! " The exclamation, if made, was amply justified. The Tale of a Tub is one of the very greatest books of the world, one of those in which a great drift of universal thought receives consummate literary form. The decade of his Whiggery (or, as it has been more accurately described, of his neutral state with Whig leanings) saw no great bulk of work, but some exquisite examples of this same irony in a lighter kind. This was the time of the charming Argument against Abolishing Christianity (1708) and of Swift's contrijDutions to the Tatler, which periodical indeed owed him a great deal more than the mere borrowing of the 7ioin de guerre— \sdac Bickerstaffe — which he had used in a series of ingenious persecutions of the almanack-maker, Partridge. The shorter period of Tory domination was very much more prolific in bulk of work, but except in the \\on<^td\x\ Journal to Stella (i 710-13), which was never intended for any eye but hers (and the faithful " Dingley's "), the literary interest is a little inferior. The Examiners are of extraordinary force and vigour; the Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712), the Public Spirit of the Whigs (1714), and above all the Conduct of the Allies (171 1), which Johnson so strangely decried, are masterly specimens of the political pamphlet. The largest work of this time, the History of the Four Last i'ears of Queen Anne, is sometimes regarded as doubtfully genuine, tliough there is no conclusive reason for ruling it out. His very greatest prose work, however, dates from the last thirty years of his life, and especially from the third, fourth, and fifth lustres of this time, for the last was darkened by his final agony, and in the first decade he was too marked a man to venture on writing what might have brought upon him the exile of Atterbury or the prison of Harley and Prior. He began at once, however, a curious kind of Irish patriotism, which was in fact nothing but an English Fronde. In 1724 some jobbery about a new copper coinage in 532 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viir Ireland gave him a subject, and he availed himself of this in the Drapier''s Letters with almost miraculous skill ; while two years later came the greatest of all his books, greater for method, range, and quiet mastery than even the Tale^ that is to say Gulliver's Travels. The short but consummate Modest Proposal for eating Irish children, the pair to the Argianent against Abolishing Christianity^ as a short example of the Swiftian irony, came in 1729; and the chief of his important works later were the delightful Polite Conversation (1738), probably written or at least begun much earlier, in which the ways and speeches of ordinary good society are reproduced with infinite humour and spirit, and the Directions to Servants, almost as witty, but more marked with Swift's ugliest fault, a coarseness of idea and language, which seems rather the result of positive and individual disease than the survival of Restoration license. There is no doubt that on the whole Swift's peculiar powers, temper, and style are shown in his one generally known book as well as anywhere else. The absence of the fresher, more whimsical. His qualitv ^'^'^ perhaps even deeper, irony and pessimism of the Tale and of a Tub, and the loss of self-control indicated in the levemen . gj^y^gg misanthropy of the Houyhnhnms finale, are com- pensated by a more methodical and intelligible scheme, by the charm of narrative, by range and variety of subject, and by the abundance of little lively touches which that narrative suggests and facilitates. The mere question of the originality of the scheme is, as usual, one of the very slightest importance. Swift had predecessors, if he had not patterns, in Lucian and in scores of other writers down to and beyond Cyrano de Bergerac. The idea, indeed, of combining the interest and novelty of foreign travel with an obvious satire on " travellers' tales," and a somewhat less obvious one on the follies, vices, and contrasted foibles of mankind, is not beyond the range of an extremely moderate intellect, and could never be regarded as the property or copyright even of the greatest. It is the astonishing vigour and variety of Swift's dealing with this public stuff that craves notice ; and twenty times the space here available would be too little to do justice to that. The versatility with which the picture — it can hardly even at its worst be called the caricature — of mankind is adjusted to the different meridians of the little people, the giants, the pedants, the unhappy immortals, and the horses — the dexterous relief of the satirist's lash with the mere tickling of the humourist — the wonderful prodigality of power and the more wonderful economy of words and mere decorations — all these things deserve the most care- ful study, and the most careful study will not in the least interfere with, but will only enhance, the perpetual enjoyment of them. It only remains to point out very briefly the suitableness of the CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 533 style to the work. Swift's style is extremely unadorned, though the unfailing spirit of irony prevents it from being, except to the most poor and unhappy tastes, in the very least degree flat. Though not free from grammatical licenses, it is on the whole correct enough, and is perfectly straightforward and clear. There may be a very differ- ent meaning lurking by way of innuendo behind Swift's literal and grammatical sense, but that sense itself can never be mistaken. Further, he has — -unless he deliberately assumes them as the costume of a part he is playing — absolutely no distinguishing tricks or manners, no catchwords, and in especial no unusual phrases or vocables either imitated or invented. In objecting to neologisms, as he did very strongly, he was perhaps critically in the wrong ; for a language which ceases to grow dies. But, like some, though by no means all, similar objectors, he has justified his theory by his practice. In fact, if intellectual genius and literary art be taken together, no prose-writer, who is a prose-writer mainly, is Swift's superior, and a man might be hard put to it to say who among such writers in the plainer English can be pronounced his equal. It has been said that it is hard to settle the credit of the invention of the Queen Anne Essay, in which the characteristic of the later Augustan period was chiefly shown. For years before it appeared, the essay-writers, from Bacon to Temple on the one hand, and the journalists, of whom -the mo.st remarkable Essayists, were mentioned at the close of the last chapter, on the other, had been bearing down nearer and nearer to this particular point. The actual starting is usually assigned to the Review of a greater than any of these journalists, Daniel Defoe, who will, however, find a more suitable place later in this chapter. And it is noteworthy that Swift, whose fertility in ideas was not less remarkable than the nonchalance with which he abandoned them or suggested them to his friends, was most intimate with Steele and Addison just at the time of the appearance of the Tntler, lent it a mm de guerre, wrote for it, and may in different metaphors be said to have given it inspiration, atmosphere, motive power, launch. But it was un- doubtedly set agoing under the management of another person, Steele, and he need not be deprived of the honour. Richard Steele was born in Dublin in March 1672, but he had little to do with Ireland afterwards. His .school was the Charter- house, and from it he went to Merton College at Oxford, where he was postmaster. But though he made some stay at the ^^ University he took no degree, and left it for the army, beginning as a cadet or gentleman volunteer in the second Life Guards, whence he passed as an ensign to the Coldstrcams and as a captain to Lucas's foot. He became Gazetteer in 1707, and a 534 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii little later engaged, with more zeal than discretion, in Whig politics, being expelled from the House of Commons in the turbulent last years of Anne. The success of the Hanoverians restored him to fortune, or the chance of it, and he was knighted and made patentee of Drury Lane. But he was always a spendthrift and a speculator, and in his later years he had to retire to an estate which his second wife (an heiress in Wales as the first had been in the West Indies) had brought him near Caermarthen. He died there in 1729. His letters and even his regular works tell us a great deal about his personality, which, especially as contrasted with that of Addison, has occasioned much writing. Steele's desertion of the University for the army might not seem to argue a devotion to the Muses. But he began 1 while still a soldier by a book of devotion. The Christian Hero (1701), and it was not in him, whatever it might have been in another, at all inconsistent to turn to play-writing, in which occupation he observed, though not excessively, the warnings of Jeremy Collier. The Tatler (1709) opened his true vein, and in it, in the Spectator, in the Guardian, in the Englishman, Lover, and other periodicals, he displayed a faculty for miscellany more engaging, though much less accomplished, than Addison's own. In the political articles of this series, and still more in his political pamphlets, he is at his worst, for he had no argumentative faculty, and was utterly at the mercy of such an opponent as Swift. The Conscious Lovers, his most famous play, was late (1722), and is distinguished, amid the poor plays between Farquhar and Sheridan, for its mixture of briskness and amiability. There was a third ingredient, sentimentality, which is indeed sufficiently prominent in Steele's earlier comedies. The Funeral (1701), The Lying Lover (1703), and The Tender Husband (1705), and by no means absent from his essays. But, with a little allowance, it adds to these latter a charm which, though it may be less perceptible to later generations than it was to those who had sickened of the ineffable brutality of the time immediately preceding, can still be felt. Of the plays, though all endeavour to carry out Collier's prin- ciples, The Conscious Lovers is the only one which deserves Fielding's raillery, through Parson Adams, as to its being " as good as a sermon," which Hazlitt has rather unfairly extended to all. Even The Con- 1 No complete edition. The Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian essays are in the usual British Essayists; the others must be sought in original editions, or ed. Nichols, 4 vols. 1791. There is an excellent selection from the former set (Oxford, 1885) and an admirable monograph (London, 1886) by Mr. Austin Dobson. The plays are in the "Mermaid Series" (London, 1894), edited by Mr. Aitken, who has also written a long Life of Steele (2 vols. London, 1889). CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 535 scious Lovers contains, in the scenes between Tom and Phillis, pictures of flirtation belowstairs which, with all Steele's tenderness and good feeling, have nearly as much vivacity as any between the most brazen varlets and baggages of the '^ ^ ^^*' Restoration dramatists. The Lying Lover, an adaptation of Le Menteur, is of no great merit, perhaps because it also has a slight tendency to sermonising. But I'he Funeral, though very unnatural in plot and decidedly unequal in character, contains a famous passage of farcical comedy between an undertaker and his mates, and a good though rascally lawyer. The most uniformly amusing of the four is The Tender Husband, though the ap- propriateness of the title is a little open to question. The pair of innocents, the romantic heiress Biddy Tipkin and the clumsy heir Humphry Gubbin, are really diverting, and in the first case to no small extent original ; while they have furnished hints to no less successors than Fielding, Goldsmith, Sheridan, and Miss Austen. The lawyer and the gallant are also distinctly good, and the aunt has again furnished hints for Mrs. Malaprop, as Biddy has for Lydia. Steele, who always confessed, and probably as a rule exaggerated, his debts to Addison, acknowledges them here; and there is a certain Addisonian tone about some of the humours, though Steele was quite able to have supplied them. Fond as he was of the theatre, how- ever, and familiar with it, he had little notion of constructing a play, and his morals constantly tripped up his art. The essay, not the drama, was his real field. The almost inextricable entanglement of the work of Steele with Addison's, and the close connection of the two in life, have always occasioned a sort of comparison, now to the advantage of the one, now to that of the other, in literary history ; and there is probably more loss than gain in the endeavour to separate them sternly. We may therefore best give Addison's life, and such short sketch of his books as is possible now, and then consider together tlie work, still in parts not very clearly attributable to one more than to the other, which gives them, and must always give them, an exalted place in English literature. Joseph Addison 1 was born, like Steele, in 1672, but in May instead of in March. His father, Lancelot Addison, was a divine of parts and position, who Ijecame Dean of Lichfield. His mother's name was Jane Gulston. After experience of some country schools, at one of which he is said to have shared in a " barring-out." lie, like iMany editions of complete Works {X\\c. lies! by Iliird), which are still worth getlirif,' for the miscellanies. I\^ems in Chalmers. Kssays (most) in Uritish Essayists: Selected Essays by J. R. Green (London, 1880) and T. Arnold (Oxford, 1886). 536 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vni Steele, went to the Charterhouse and then to Oxford, where he was first at Queen's, then at Magdalen, holding a demyship, taking his Master's degree in 1693, and being elected to a Fellow- li'fe?"^ ship in 1697, at the latter college, where '^ Addison's Walk" preserves his name. He made early acquaint- ance with Dryden, but adopted Whig politics ; and, by the influence of Montague, obtained in 1699 a travelling pension of ^300 a year. He discharged the obligation loyally, remaining four years abroad, visiting most parts of the Continent, and preparing, if not finishing, his only prose works of bulk, the Remarks on Italy (1704) and the Dialogues oh Medals, not published till later. But when he came back in 1703, Halifax was out of favour, his pension was stopped, and, having broken off his University career by his failure to take orders, he was for some time in doubtful prospects. But his poem of The Campaign, in which he celebrated Blenheim (1704), with one fine passage and a good deal of platitude, gained high reputation in the dearth of poetical accomplishment, and the short summer of favour for men of letters, which followed Dryden's death ; and he was made a Commissioner of Excise. This was the first of a long series of appointments, official and diplomatic, which was not, thanks to Swift, entirely interrupted even during the Tory triumph, and which enabled Addison, who had been in 1703 nearly penniless, to layout, in 1711, ^^ 10,000 on an estate in Warwickshire. It culminated in 171 7, after the Hanoverian triumph, by his being appointed Secretary of State, which office he held but a short time, resigning it for a large pension. He had a year before married the Countess Dowager of Warwick, and he died of dropsy at Holland House in 1719, aged only forty-seven. His character has been discussed, not with acrimony, for no one can dislike Addison, but with some heat. He had none of the numerous foibles of which Steele was guilty, except a rather too great devotion to wine. But the famous and magnificent "Character of Atticus," by Pope, is generally supposed by all but partisans to be at best a poisoned dart, which hit true. His correct morality — the Bohemian philosopher Mandeville called him "a parson in a tie-wig" — has been set down to cold-bloodedness, and there has even been notice- able dissension about the relative amount of literary genius in him and in Steele. As noticed already, Addison's literary work outside periodicals is by no means small. His early Latin poems are very clever, and very . happy in their artificial way. Of his English verse nothing laneo^wor'k. ^^^ survived, except his really beautiful hymns, where the combination of sincere religious feelings (of the sincerity of Addison's religion there is absolutely no doubt, though CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 537 it was of a kind now out of fashion) and of critical restraint produced things of real, though modest and quiet, excellence. '' The Lord my pasture shall prepare," "The spacious firmament on high," and '' How are Thy servants blest ! O Lord," may lack the mystical inspiration of the greatest hymns, but their cheerful piety, their graceful use of images, which, though common, are never mean, their finish and even, for the time, their fervour make them singularly pleasant. The man who wrote them may have had foibles and shortcomings, but he can have had no very grave faults, as the authors of more hysterical and glowing compositions easily might. The two principal prose works are little read now, but they are worth reading. They show respectable learning (with limitations admitted by such a well-qualified and well-affected critic as Macaulay), they are excellent examples (though not so excellent as the Essays) of Addison's justly fiimous prose, and they exhibit, in the opening of the Medals and in all the descriptive passages of the Italy, the curious insensibility of the time to natural beauty, or else its almost more curious inability to express what it felt, save in the merest generalities and commonplaces. The three plays at least indicate Addison's possession, though in a much less degree, of his master Dryden's general faculty of literary craftsmanship. Tlie opera of Rosamond is, indeed, clearly modelled on Dryden in its serious parts, but is no great success there. The lighter and more whimsical quality of Addison's humour enabled him to do better in the farcical passages, which, especially the speeches of Sir Trusty, sometimes have a singularly modern and almost Gilbertian quality about them. The comedy of The Drummer, where a Wiltshire tradition is used to make a play on a theme not entirely different from Steele's Funeral (in each a husband is thought to be dead when he is not), contains, like Steele's own pieces, some smart '•words," but no very good dramatic situation or handling. It is, also like Steele's, an attempt to write Restoration drama in the fear of Jeremy Collier. Cato, the most famous, is at this time of day by far the least interesting. Its universally known stock-pieces give almost all tiiat it has of merit in versification and style ; as a drama it has an uninteresting plot, wooden characters, and a great absence of life and idiosyncra.sy. It is very different when we turn to the Essays. The so-called Essay which Steele launched in the Taller, which was taken up and perfected in the Spectator, which had numerous immediate followers, and a succession of the greatest importance at intervals j,;^ ^^^ throughout the century, and which at once expressed and Steele's influenced the tone and thought of that cfutury after a '"'***"'" fashion rarely paralleled, was not originally started in cjuitc the form 538 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii which it soon assumed, and never, for the greater part of a hundred years, wholly lost. Naturally enough, Steele at first endeavoured to make it a newspaper, as well as a miscellany and review. But by degrees, and before very long, news was dropped, and comment, in the form of special essays, of '' letters to the editor," sometimes real, oftener manufactured, of tales and articles of all the various kinds which have subsisted with no such great change till the present day, reigned alone. As Addison's hand prevailed — though literature, religion, and even politics now and then, the theatre very often, and other things were not neglected — the main feature of the two papers, and espe- cially of the Spectator, became a kind of light but distinctly firm censor- ship of manners, especially the part of them nearest to morals, and of morals, especially the part of them nearest to manners. Steele, always zealous and always generous, but a little wanting in criticism, not infrequently diverged into sentimentality. Addison's tendency, though he, too, was unflinchingly on virtue's side, was rather towards a very mellow and not unindulgent but still distinctly cynical cynicism — a smile too demure ever to be a grin, but sometimes, except on religious subjects, faintly and distantly approaching a sneer. This appears even in the most elaborate and kindly of the imaginative creations of the double series. Sir Roger de Coverley, whom Steele indeed seems to have invented, but whom Addison adopted, perfected, and (some, perhaps without reason, say) even killed out of kindness, lest a less delicate touch should take the bloom off him. This great creation, which comes nearer than anything out of prose fiction or drama to the masterpieces of the novelists and dramatists, is accompanied by others hardly less masterly ; while Addison con- stantly, and Steele not seldom, has sketches or touches as perfect in their way, though less elaborate. It is scarcely too much to say that these papers, and especially the Spectator, taught the eighteenth century how it should, and especially how it should not, behave in public places, from churches to theatres ; what books it should like, and how it should like them ; how it should treat its lovers, mistresses, husbands, wives, parents, and friends ; that it might politely sneer at operas, and must not take any art except literature too seriously ; that a moderate and refined devotion to the Protestant religion and the Hanoverian succession was the duty, though not the whole duty, of a gentleman. It is still a little astonishing to find with what docility the century obeyed and learnt its lesson. Addison died a little before, Steele not much after, its first quarter closed ; yet in the lighter work of sixty or seventy years later we shall find, with the slightest differences of external fashion, the laws of the Spectator held still by " the town " with hardly a murmur, by the country with- out the slightest hesitation. In particular, these papers taught the CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 539 century how to write ; and the lesson was accepted on this point with almost more unhesitating obedience than on any other. The magnificent eulogy of Johnson/ who had himself deviated not a little, though perhaps unconsciously, from Addisonian practice, would have been disputed by hardly any one who reached manhood in Eng- land between the Peace of Utrecht and the French Revolution ; and, abating its exclusiveness a little, it remains true still. Steele, though he has some rarer flights than his friend, is much less correct, and much less polished ; while, though he had started with equal chances, his rambling life had stored him with far less learning than Addison possessed. The latter, while he never reached the massive strength and fiery force of Swift, did even more than Swift himself to lift English prose out of the rut, or rather quagmire, of colloquialism and slovenliness in which, as we have seen, it was sinking. He could even, though he rarely did, rise to a certain solemnity — caught, it may be, from Temple, who must have had much influence on him. But, like Temple's, though with a more modern, as well as a more varied and completely polished, touch, his style was chiefly devoted to the " middle " subjects and manners. He very rarely attempts sheer whimsical fooling. But he can treat all the subjects that come within the purview and interests of a well-bred man of this world, who by no means forgets the next, in a style quite inimitable in its golden mediocrity — well-informed, without being in the least pedantic ; moral, without direct preaching (unless he gives forewarning) ; slightly superior, but with no provoking condescension in it ; polite, without being frivolous or finicking ; neat, but not overdressed ; easy, but, as Johnson justly states, never familiar in any offensive degree. It is easier to feel enthusiasm about Steele, who had so much, than about Addison, who at any rate shows so little ; and on the character, the genius, the originality, of the two there may always be room for dispute. But it seems incredible that any one should deny to Addison the credit of being by far the greater artist, and of having brought his own rather special, rather limited, but peculiar and admirable division of art to a perfection seldom else- where attained in letters. These three greatest writers were surrounded by others hardly less than great. Arbuthnot, Atterbury, Bentley, Boiingbroke, Mandeville, the younger Shaftesbury, Berkeley, Butler, Middleton, were all either actual contril)utors to the great periodical scries, or intimately connected with those who wrote these, or (which is of equal 1 " Whoever wishes to aUain an l-^nglish style, familiar, l)iit not coarse, and elegant, but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." But this is only the crowning sentence of the peroration, throughout laudatory, of the Life. 540 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii importance to us) at any rate exponents of the extremely plain prose style, which required the exquisite concinnity of Addison, the volcanic and Titanic force and fire of Swift, or the more than Attic stateliness and grace of Berkeley, to save it from being too plain. The order in which they are to be mentioned is unimportant, and few can have more than very brief space, but none must pass unnoticed. Richard Bentley, a very great classical scholar, and no mean writer of English, was a Yorkshireman, born in 1662, and educated at Wakefield. He went early to St. John's College, Cambridge, was taken as a private tutor into the household of Stilling- fleet, took orders not very early, was made King's Librarian in 1694, engaged, and was completely victorious, in the Ancient and Modern controversy, especially in reference to the Epistles of Phalaris ; was made Master of Trinity in 1699, and passed nearly the whole of his more than forty years of mastership, till his death in 1742, in a desperate struggle with his college, wherein, if his adversaries were unscrupulous, he was no less so, while the right was on the whole rather against him, though his bull-dog tenacity has won over most commentators on the matter to his side. There is at any rate no doubt of his learning, his logical power, and his very real, though gruff and horseplayful, humour. To merely English literature he stands ^ in two very different relations. His almost incredibly absurd emendations on Milton would, if the thing were not totally alien from the spirit of the man, seem like a designed parody on classical scholarship itself. But his writing, especially in the famous Phalaris dissertation, and in the remarks on the Deist Collins, is- extraordinarily vigorous and vivid. His birth-date, probably even more than a design to avoid the reproach of pedantry, made him colloquial, homely, and familiar down to the very level from which Swift and Addison tried to lift, and to a great extent succeeded in lifting, prose ; but his native force and his wide learning save him, though sometimes with difficulty, from the merely vulgar. Conyers Middleton,^ Bentley's most deadly enemy, was, like Bentley, a Yorkshireman, but was much younger, having been born at Richmond in 1683. He went to Trinity young, and was not only a Fellow thereof, but connected throughout his life with Cambridge, by his tenure of the offices of University Librarian from 1722 onwards, and Woodwardian Professor of Geology for a time. He was a man of property, was thrice married, and held several livings till his death in 1750, though his orthodoxy was, in his own times and afterwards, seriously impugned. This does not concern us here, though it may be observed that 1 Works in various editions. The Phalaris dissertation often separately, "^Miscellaneous Works, 5 vols. 1753. The Cicero has been often reprinted. CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 541 Middleton may be cleared from anything but a rather advanced stage of the latitudinarianism and dislike of " enthusiasm " which was generally felt by the men of his time, and which invited — indeed necessitated — the Evangelical and Methodist revolt. So, too, we need not busy ourselves much with the question whether he directly plagiarised, or only rather freely borrowed from the Scotch Latinist, Bellenden, in his longest and most famous prose work, the Life of Cicero (1741). Besides this, he wrote two controversial works of length — ostensibly directed against Popery, certainly against extreme supernaturalism, and, as his enemies will have it, covertly against Christianity — entitled A Letter front Rome, showing an exact Conformity betiveen Popery a7id Paganism (1729), and A free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have existed in the Christian Chu?-ch (1748) ; with a large number of small pamphlets on a variety of subjects, in treating which he showed wide culture and intelligence. His place here, however, is that of the most distinguished representative of the absolutely plain style — not colloquial and vernacular like Bentley's, but on the other hand attempting none of the graces which Addison and Berkeley in their different ways achieved — a style more like the plainer Latin or French styles than like anything else in English. John Arbuthnot,^ the "moon" of Swift, born 1667, came of the noble family of that name in Kincardineshire, but went to Oxford, and spent all the later part of his life in London, where he was physician to Queen Anne, a strong Tory, and an intimate friend of Swift and Pope. He died in 1735, much respected and beloved. Arbuthnot's literary fate, or rather the position which he deliberately chose, was peculiar. It is very difficult to identify much of his work, and what seems certainly his (especially the famous History of John Bull and The Memoirs of Scriblerus) is exceedingly like Swift, and was pretty certainly pro- duced in concert with that strange genius, who, unlike some animals, never took colour from his surroundings, but always gave tliem his own. It is, however, high enough praise that Arbuthnot, at the best of his variable work, is not inferior to anything but the very best of Swift. There is the same fertility and the same unerringness of irony ; and, if we can distinguish, it is only that a half or wholly good-natured amusement takes the place of Swift's indignation. Francis Atterbury.- born in Buckinghamshire in 1672, a dis-. tinguished Christ Church man, who, after being head of his house, obtained the Bishopric of Rochester and the Deanery of Westminster in succession to Sprat, was the divine and scholar of the extreme 1 Ed. .Xitkrn, 1892. 2 No complete or modern edition. 542 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii Tory party, as Arbuthnot was their man of science. He has been accused not merely of conspiring after the Hanoverian succession, but of denying it, and sailing too near perjury in his denial. Of this there is no sufficient proof, and we must remember that the political ethics of the age were extremely accom- modating. He was at any rate attainted, and banished (in 1723) to France, where he died nine years later. A brilliant and popular preacher, a pleasant letter-writer, a most dangerous controversialist and debater, and a good critic (though he made the usual mistakes of his age about poetry before Waller), Atterbury wrote in a style not very unlike Addison's, though inferior to it. The huge contemporary fame of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke,! and its rapid and lasting decline after his death, are among the commonplaces of literary history. He was born in T, .• ,. , 1678, passed through Eton and Christ Church, entered Bohngbroke. ^ ,. ^ T r. r -.-r • , Parliament very early, was Secretary for War at six-and- twenty, climbed with Harley to power, and contrived to edge his companion " out," but remained " in " himself only a few days, fled to the Continent, returned to England and recovered his estates, but not his seat in Parliament, in 1723, organised and carried on the English Frotide against Walpole, and died in 1751. His career — for he was as famous for " wildness " as for success — was of those which specially appeal to the vulgar, and are not uninteresting even to unvulgar tastes. He was beyond question one of the greatest orators of his day, and he was extravagantly praised by his friends, who happened to include the chief poet and the greatest prose writer of the time. Yet hardly any one who for generations has opened the not few volumes of his works has closed them without more or less profound disappointment. Bolingbroke, more than any other English writer, is a rhetorician pure and simple; and it was his misfortune, first, that the subjects of his rhetoric were not the great and perennial subjects, but puny ephemeral forms of them — the partisan and personal politics of his day, the singularly shallow form of infidelity called Deism, and the like — and, secondly, that his time deprived him of many, if not most, of the rhetorician's most telling weapons. The Letter to Wind/iajn (1716), a sort of apologia, and the Ideal of a Patriot King (1749) exhibit him at his best. Benjamin Hoadly (i 676-1 761), a pluralist courtier, and more •than doubtfully orthodox divine on the Whig side, held four sees in succession, in one at least of which he was the cause of much literature, or at least many books, by provoking the famous " Bangorian " controversy. He himself wrote clearly and well. Nor 1 Works, 8 voLs. London, 1809. CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 543 can the same praise be denied to Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) philosopher, physicist, and divine. There is more diversity of opinion about the purely literary merits, as distinguished from the unquestioned claims in religious philosophy, of ofhw^ivrnl Bishop Joseph Butler, who was born at Wantage in 1692, left Nonconformity for the Church, went to Oriel, became preacher at the Rolls Chapel, Rector of Stanhope, Bishop of Bristol, Dean of St. Paul's, and, lastly. Bishop of Durham, owing these appointments to no cringing or intrigue, but to his own great learning, piety, wisdom, and churchmanship, fortunately backed by Queen Caroline's fancy for philosophy. Butler's Sermons, published in 1726, and his Analogy of iVatural and Revealed Religion ten years later, occasionally contain aphorisms of beauty equal to their depth ; but it is too much to claim " crispness and clearness " for his general style, ^ which is, on the contrary, too often obscure and tough. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, the third of his names and title, the grandson of " Achitophel," and the son of the '•shapeless lump" (a phrase for which he never forgave Dryden), was born in 1671. His mother was Lady Dorothy Manners. He was brought up partly by a learned lady, and partly ^ '^^ ""^^ by Locke. He was for three years at Winchester, went to no University, and travelled a good deal abroad. He sat for a short time in the House of Commons, but made no figure there or in the House of Lords, where, during nearly the whole time of his tenure of the earldom (1699-17 13), politics, whether Whig or Tory, were of too rough a cast for his dilettantism. He died, after more foreign travel, in 1 71 3. His writings, scattered and not extensive, had been collected two years before as Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. - Shaftesbury was an original and almost powerful thinker and writer, spoilt by an irregular education, a sort of morbid aversion from English thought generally, an early attack of Deism, and a strong touch of affectation. Much harm has been done to him by Lamb's description of his style as "genteel," a word in Lamb's time and later not connoting the snobbishness which has for half a certury been associated with it. "Superfine," the usurJ epithet, is truer; though Dr. George Campbell, an excellent critic, was .somewliat too severe " on Shaftesbury's Gallicisms, and his imprudent and rather amateurish engagement in the Deist controversy of the time caused 1 Butler's Sermons and Analos^', which have long played an important part as text-books in the Oxford curriculum, have been well cared for in matter of reprints by that University. Clarke and Hoadly must be sought, if at all, in con- temporary editions. '^ New ed. 3 vols. London, 1749. » In his Philosophy of Rhetoric. 544 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii him to be broken a little too ruthlessly on the wheel, adamantine in polish as in strength, of Berkeley in AlcipJiron. His centra! doctrine, that ridicule is the test of truth, as well as his style, are in reality caricatures of Addison, though the dates preclude any notion of plagiarism. He is full of suggestion, and might have been a great thinker and writer. Shaftesbury's superfineness and his optimism seem to have had at least a considerable share in provoking the cynical pessimism of another remarkable thinker of this time, Bernard Mandeville, or de Mandeville,^ a Dutchman, born at Dordrecht about 1670, who came early to London, attained a singular mastery of English, practised physic, and died in 1733. There is some mystery, and probably some mystification, about the origin of The Grumbling Hive, better known by its later title of The Fable of the Bees. No edition earlier than 1705 is known, but Mandeville claimed a much earlier date for it. About nine years later a reprint, in 17 14, drew attention, and after yet another nine years another was "pre- sented" by the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and fiercely denounced by men of such importance as Law and Berkeley. The book, which was constantly enlarged, is in its final form a cluster of prose tractates, with a verse nucleus (the original piece) showing how vice made some bees happy, and virtue made them miserable. A good deal of other work, some certainly and some probably spurious, is attributed to Mandeville, who is the Diogenes of English philosophy. An exceedingly charitable judgment may impute to deliberate paradox, and to irritation at Shaftesbury's airy gentility, his doctrine that private vices are public benefits ; but the gusto with which he caricatures and debases everything pure and noble and of good report is, unluckily, too genuine. He thought, however, with great force and acuteness, despite his moral twist ; he had a strong, fertile, and whimsical humour ; and his style, plebeian as it is, may challenge comparison with the most famous literary vernaculars in English for racy individuality. If, however, Shaftesbury has rather too much of the peacock, and Mandeville a great deal too much of the polecat, about him, no depreciatory animal comparison need be sought or feared for George Berkeley, the best-praised man of his time, and among the most deserving of praise. He was born in 1685 near Kilkenny, and was educated first, like Swift and Congreve earlier, at its famous grammar school, and then at Trinity College, Dublin, where he made a long residence, and wrote his chief purely 1 Works never collected — some rare and some doubtful. The Fable of the Bees is common. I use the so-called ninth (Edinburgh, 1755) edition of its fullest form. CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 545 philosophical worlcs. In 1713 he went to London, and was intro- duced to the wits by Swift, after which he travelled on the Continent for several years. He was made Dean of Derry in 1724, went with missionary schemes, which were defeated, to North America, but returned, in 1731, and published the admirable dialogues oi Alciphron. He was made Bishop of Cloyne in 1734, and for eighteen years resided in his diocese. A few months before his death, in 1753, he had gone, in bad health, to Oxford, and he died there. Berkeley's principal works,' or groups of works, are first — The Theory of Vision (1709), The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), and the Dialogues of Hylas [Materialist] and Philonous [partisan of mind], in which, continuing the Lockian process of argument against innate ideas, he practically re-establi. ned them by a further process of destruction, and brought down on himself a great deal of very igno- rant attack or banter for his supposed denial of matter. The above- mentioned Alciphron ; or, the Minute Philosopher, is a series of dialogues, in which the popular infidelity of the day, whether optimist like Shaftesbury's, pessimistical like Mandeville's, or one-sidedly critical like that of the Deists proper, is attacked in a fashion which those who sympathise with the victims accuse of occasional unfair- ness, but which has extraordinary cogency as polemic, and extraor- dinary brilliance as literature. His last important book was Siris, an odd miscellany, advocating tar- water for the body, and administer- ing much excellent mysticism to the soul ; but he wrote some minor things, and a good many letters, diaries, etc., which were not fully published till the later years of the present century. Unusually good as a man, and unusually great as a philosopher, Berkeley would have stood in the first rank as a mere writer had his character been bad or unknown, and the matter of his writings un- important. The charm of his style is at once so subtle and so pervading that it is extremely difficult to separate "hit style, and define it. He has no mannerisms ; although he is a most accomplished ironist, he does not depend upon irony for the seasoning of his style, as, in different ways, do Addison and Swift ; he can give the plainest and most unadorned exposition of an abstruse, philosophical doctrine with perfect literary grace. And (as, for instance, in Lysicles' version of Mandeville's vices-and-benefits argument) he can saturate a long passage with satiric innuendo, never once breaking out into direct tirade or direct burlesque. He can illustrate admirably, but he is never the dupe of his illustrations. He is clearer even than Hobbes and infinitely more elegant, while 1 Editions are numerous, but for crilic.il purposes, and also as conf.\ining some previously unpublished maltL-r, Professor Campbell Fraser'c (4 vols. Oxford, 1871) is the standard. 2N 546 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii his dialect and arrangement, though originally arrived at for argumentative purposes, or at least in argumentative works, are equally suited for narrative, for dialogue, for description, for almost every literary end. Were it not for the intangibleness, and there- fore the inimitableness, of his style, he vi^ould be an even better general model than Addison ; and, as it is, he is unquestionably the best model in English, if not in any language, for philosophical, and indeed for argumentative, writing generally. Daniel Defoe,^ the link between the great essayists of the earlier and the great novelists of the middle years of the eighteenth century — one of the most voluminous and problematical of English writers, Def e ^^ ^^^^^ ^^ °"^ "^^ ^'^ ^^^ ^^^ greatest — a man, too, of very questionable life and character — could not be fully discussed in any compendious history of English literature. But luckily it is by no means necessary that he should be so discussed, the strictly literary lines of his work being broad and clear, and the problems both of it and of his life being such as may, without any loss, be left to the specialist. He was born, it would seem, in 1659 (not, as used to be thought, 1661) in the heart of London, St. Giles's, Cripplegate, where his father (whose name was certainly Foe) was a butcher. It is not known for what reason or cause Daniel, when more than fifty, assumed the "de," sometimes as separate particle, some- times in composition. He was well educated, but instead of becom- ing a Nonconformist minister, took to trade, which at intervals and in various forms (stocking-selling, tile-making, etc.) he pursued with no great luck. He seems to have been a partaker in Monmouth's rebellion, and was certainly a good deal abroad in the later years of the seventeenth century, but he early took to the vocation of pam- phleteering, which, with journalism and novel-writing, gave his three great literary courses. The chief among many results of this was the famous Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), a statement of the views of the extreme " Highflying " or High Church party, in which some have seen irony, but which really is the exact analogue in argument of his future fictions, that is to say, an imitation of what he wanted to represent so close that it looks exactly like fact. He was prosecuted, fined, pilloried, and imprisoned, but, in the growing Whig temper of the nation, the piece was undoubtedly very effective. 1 There is no complete collection, and hardly the possibility of any, of Defoe's enormous work. Partial collections, and lives, are rather numerous. The most recent of the former is Mr. Aiiken's (of the novels), the most accessible of the gen- eral works that in Bohns Library (7 vols.), the best Piazlitfs (3 vols. London, 1841). Mr. Lee's speculative but laborious Life and Uiipuhlished Writings (3 vols. London, 1869) is necessary for all thorough students; Professor Morley's selection of the miscellaneous works (not fiction) in the " Carisbrooke Library " is very cheap and useful. CHAP. IV QUEEN ANNE PROSE 547 For the greater part of the reign of Queen Anne, and at first in prison, Defoe carried on, from 1704 to 1713, his famous Review, the prototype to some extent of the great later periodicals, but written entirely by himself. Before he had been long in prison he was liberated by Harley, of whose statesmanship, shifty in method, and strangely compounded of Toryism and Whiggery in principle, Defoe became a zealous secret agent. He had a great deal to do with negotiating the Union with Scotland. Nor did Harley's fall put an end to his engagement in subterranean branches of the public service ; for it has long been known that under the House of Hanover he dis- charged the delicate, or indelicate, part of a Tory journalist, secretly paid by the Whig Government to tone- down and take the sting out of il//.f/'j /6'//r«rt/ and other Opposition papers. He lived for a good many years longer, and did his very best literary work in his latest period ; but at the last he experienced some unexplained revolution of fortune, and died at Moorfields, in concealment and distress, in 1731- Of Defoe's, in the strictest sense, innumerable works the follow- ing catalogue of the most important may serve : — Essay on Projects (1698), an instance of the restless tendency of the time towards com- mercial and social improvements, and of Defoe's own fertility ; The True-Born Englishman (1701), an argument in vigorous though most unpoetical verse to clear William from the disability of his foreign origin; the Hymn to the Pillory (1703), composed on the occasion of his exhibition in that implement, still more vigorous and a little less unpoetical ; the curious political satire of the Consolidator (1705); the xu.7if,\.^x\y Relation of Mrs. Veal, the first instance of his wonderful "lies like truth "; y>^r^ Dijnno (1706), worse verse and also worse sense than The True-Born Englishman. But the best of these is poor compared with the great group of fiction of his later years — Robi)ison Crusoe (171 9), Duncan Campbell, Memoirs of a Cavalier, a.x\A Captaiti Singleton (all produced in ijzo), Moll Flanders, the History of the Plague, and Colonel fack (all in 1722), Roxana (1724), and A New Voyage Round the World (1725). Besides these, he published in his later years, as he had in his earlier, a crowd of works, small and great, political, topographical, historical, moral, and miscellaneous. It is not of much use to discuss Defoe's moral character, and it is sincerely to be hoped that no more revelations concerning it will turn up, inasmuch as each is more damaging than the last, excf])! to those who have succeeded in taking his true measure once for all. It is that of a man who, with no high, fine, or poetical sentiment to .save him. shared to the full the partisan entlnisiasm of his time, and its belief that all was fair in politics. His literary idiosyncrasy is 548 - THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vin more comfortable to handle. He was a man of extraordinary in- dustry and versatility, who took an interest, subject to the limitations of his temperament, in almost everything, whose brain was wonder- fully fertile, and who had a style, if not of the finest or most exquisite, singularly well suited to the multifarious duties to which he put it. Also, he could give, as hardly even Bunyan had given before him, and as nobody has since, absolute verisimilitude to fictitious presenta- tions. He seems to have done this mainly by a certain chameleon- like faculty of assuming the atmosphere and colour of his subject, and by a cunning profusion of exactly suited and selected detail. It is enough that in Robinson Crusoe he has produced, by help of this gift, a book which is, throughout its first two parts, one of the great books of the world in its particular kind ; and that parts of Afoll Flanders, Captain Singleton^ and Colonel Jack, at least, are not inferior. Further, the "lift" which Defoe gave to the novel was enormous. He was still dependent on adventure ; he did not advance much, if at all, beyond the more prosaic romantic scheme. But the extraordinary verisimilitude of his action could not but show the way to the last step that remained to be taken, the final projection of character. CHAPTER V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE Divisions of eighteenth-century verse — Pope : his Hfe — His work — His character — His poetry — His couplet and paragraph — His phrase — His subjects — Garth — Blackmore — Congreve, etc., — Prior — His metrical importance — Gay — Young — Farnell — Lady Winchelsea The poetry of the eighteenth century can be classified with a com- pleteness and convenience uncommon in literary periods. In the first division we see the complete triumph of the " classical " and "correct," or conventional, ideal at once exemplified and Divisions of achieved in the work of Pope. This is followed by a eighteenth- ,.,,,. , century verse. rather longer period, in which the dominant poetry — the kind of verse admired and praised by almost all the vulgar and a few of the elect — is imitation of Pope, tempered more or less by that of Dryden. But side by side with both these (and even at the very earliest represented by Lady Winchelsea and one or two others) there is a party of mostly unintentional revolt which first, as represented by Thomson, reverts to nature in observation, but generalises still in expression ; then, as presented by Gray, while not neglecting nature, changes all the sources of its literary inspiration, seeking them always farther back and wider. In respect of form the two first schools are almost wholly busied, except in light and occasional verse, with the couplet ; while the third, in its endeavour not to be conventional, takes refuge in blank verse and stanza-forms. In the present chapter we shall have to do with the first, and one or two belated or precocious members of the third. The second and the main body of the third will occupy us in the next Book. Alexander Pope. ^ — within certain narrow but impregnable limits one of the greatest masters of poetic form that the world has ever seen, and a considerable, though sometimes over-rated, .satirist — was 1 The standard library edition of Pope is that of Elwin and Courthopc. with an exhaustive Life by the latter, ii vols. London, 1870-89. The "Globe" edition of the Poems, by A. W. Ward, is exceptionally valuable. S49 550 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii born in London in 1688, of a respectable tradesman's family. His parents were Roman Catholics, and Pope was rather badly educated in his early youth. From the time when his father ope. isie. j^^Q^,g(^ i^Q Binfield, on the outskirts of Windsor Forest, he seems to have educated himself. The bad health and physical deformity which marred his later life, and to which the disagreeable parts of his character have been traced, with a mixture of reason and charity, are said not to have been congenital. He wrote verse very early ; but his extreme untruthfulness makes it very uncertain how much before the date of publication any particular piece was com- posed. Still, the dates of the Pastorals (1709), when he was twenty- one, of the Essay on C?-iticisr>i, two years later, and of IVmdsor Forest, two years later still, establish beyond all question his early command of versification and expression. Even before the earliest of these dates Pope had been introduced to Wycherley and to Walsh, and through them he became acquainted with the rising prose lights of literature — Addison, Steele, and, above all. Swift. These (at least Swift) zealously furthered his scheme of translating the Iliad, which was started 17 13, began to appear next year, and was finished in 1720. This, like the Odyssey, which followed, and a good deal of which was done by assistants (Fenton and Broome), was published by subscription, and the two brought Pope in not much less than _;^io,ooo, a sum which, at the rates of interest then prevailing, and with some paternal property, was enough to put him in affluence for the rest of his life. That life presents little history except a record of disease, publications, and quarrels. It was in 1718 that he estab- lished himself at Twickenham, which as headquarters he never after- wards left, and here he died in 1744. The order of his later publications was as follows. The Rape of the Lock, published partially in 1712, reappeared during the time of his work on Homer in 1714. He produced an edition of Shake- speare, which could not well be good, in 1728. His '^ ^ "^ ' satirical powers, which had already been exhibited in fragments, at last took the form of The Dunciad (1728-29), a violent attack on the minor writers of the day, with whom Pope fancied that he had the quarrel of Wit against Dulness, while he really had that of an exceedingly irritable poet against reviewers and, in some sense, rivals. Thereafter he fell into a course of half-moral, half-satirical writings — Epistle to Lord Burlington, Essay on Man, Imitations of Horace, Epistle to Arbuthnot, etc. (1730-38), which, whether poetry or not, whether philosophy or not, are at any rate the most brilliant examples in English of one particular kind of verse and one particular kind of style. His last important work was an alteration and en- largement of The Dunciad (1742-43). Neither changes nor additions CH.v POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 551 were by any means always improvements, but the finale of the com- plete poem is one of the very greatest things that Pope ever wrote, and one of his strongest titles to the name of poet. That his claims to that name could be disputed probably never entered into the head of any of his contemporaries save his personal foes, nor perhaps into the heart and conscience of any even of these. They were sufficiently numerous, and Pope amply de- served them. His faults, from their evident connection with a sort of childish weakness, invite, and have received, compassion ; but to deny them is absurd. Nor were his virtues extremely con- spicuous. He is credited with sincere affection for his friends. But there were no two men whom he loved and honoured more than Swift and Bolingbroke, and yet he could not resist playing upon both some of the underhand literary tricks to which he was more addicted than any great man of letters except his contemporary and analogue Voltaire. He lampooned Addison, who had perhaps given him a provocation of which a magnanimous person would have made nothing, while it very possibly had no existence except in his own morbid fancy ; and though the lampoon, the '' Character of Atticus," is magnificent literature and not quite unjust, it is all the baser ethically for its genius and its justice. He made violent and foolish love to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and being, or thinking himself, snubbed, revenged the snub with vulgar insults which the pen of no gentleman could have ever allowed to flow from it at any time, except that of the literary bravos of his old friend Wycherley's youth. Even his partisans have allowed a feeling of revolt at the venomous and snobbish delight with which he dwells at once on the poverty and the dinnerlessness of his Grub Street foes. He was stingy in entertaining (a very rare fault for his time) ; he had, with no motive to save, odd tricks of writing on backs of letters and scraps of paper ; he had many minor faults. Yet those of his friends with whom he did not quarrel never quarrelled with him, and it would be unfair to ask whether it was policy or generosity which made him invariably favourable to rising young men of letters — Thomson and Johnson are the great and sufficient, though by no means the only, examples who made their appearance in his time — provided only they did not join the real or imagiried army of Diabolus in Grub Street. He was a very good son; his passion for Martha Blount — a passion which was not too well requited, though the object benefited by it most hand- somely — seems to have been faithful and intense; and though trouble- some to his inferiors and servants from his infirmities, he seems to have been liked by them. But his character, save for its close connection with his work, matters very little ; his literature matters very much. The greater 552 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii jars of the conflict over the question " Was Pope a poet ? " have mostly ceased. Hardly anybody now would dream of denying that he was a poet ; very few would assert that he was one isp ry. ^^ ^j^^ greatest kind. Some indeed have challenged for himself the phrase " Return to nature " which has generally been applied to the revolters from him. The argument, which lacks neither ingenuity or plausibility, is that from the Elizabethan time to the Pindaric imitators of Cowley a non-natural exaggeration had been a curse, if not the curse, of English poetry, and that Pope finally aboHshed this. Unluckily, however, Cleveland had been dead for fifty years when Pope wrote ; Dryden had "appealed to sense" long before he was born ; and the prevalent faults of the time imme- diately preceding were not those of unnatural conceit. Even had it been otherwise, the nature to which he returned was, in all but one respect, a nature of prose, not of poetry. He did refine, to the utmost possible e.xtent, one special kind of verse, and this — perhaps this only — establishes his claim to be a poet. Those who hold that though (to their sorrow) there may be verse without poetry, there cannot be poetry without verse, are not the least trusty guardians of Pope's position. He may be open to attack on other sides; here the defence may laugh at any assault. Pope's extraordinary mastery of a certain refinement on the Drydenian couplet, which, losing not a little strength and colour, and something of that portion of the poetic vague which Dryden retained, added an incomparable lightness and polish, seems to and paragraph, have been attained very early. In the Essay on Criticism it is nearly as advanced, if not quite as sure, as in the satires of thirty years later. The secret, .so far as there is a single one, is the bold discarding of everything but the consideration of the couplet itself — triplets and Alexandrines, the enjatnbement which even Dryden sometimes permitted himself, and the structure of the para- graph by any other than sense-methods. This last is, of course, an important exception, and it speaks volumes for Pope's skill that he can, by means of the sense merely, connect together strings of couplets of which, by no means infrequently, each is complete in itself in rhythm as in meaning. But he sacrifices every attraction of form to the couplet — light, bright, glittering, varied in^ a manner almost impossible to account for, tipped ever with the neatest, smartest, sharpest rhyme, and volleying on the dazzled, though at times at any rate satiated, reader a sort of salvo of fettx-d'' artifice, skip- ping, crackling, scattering colour and sound all round and about him. If we take a paragraph of Milton's with one of Pope's, and compare the apparent variety of the constituent stones of the one building with the apparent monotony of those of the other, the difference may CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 553 be at first quite bewildering. One of Dryden's, between the two, will partly, though not entirely, solve the difficulty by showing how the law of the prose paragraph, that of meaning, is brought to supply the place of that of the pure poetic paragraph, the composition of sound and music. Pope's other engine for attaining his effect was phraseology, in which he displays the same exquisite, though limited, perfection. Here, again, of the remoter and rarer graces of style there are none. Pope suggests little ; no conjunction of his words causes , ,, ., , .... Ill r r^i 1 His phrase. the "wild surprise given by the phrase of Chaucer, and by those of an unbroken succession from Spenser to Dryden. So also (in this point inferior to his friends Addison and Swift) he has little humour. But his wit is of the finest, and everything that he wishes to say, everything that comes within his purview as proper to be said, is expressed with unequalled propriety. It is impossible to improve on Pope ; to get something better you must change the kind. Nor can there be much doubt that, in the negative as in the positive sides of this perfection, he is indebted to that process of conscious or unconscious conventionalising which all his time adored and which he brought to its acme. The individual and particular graces of the literature before and after his century give a nobler gust, but it is hit or miss with them. Pope's process — of extracting and representing the best thought within his compass in the best words that his own genius (still careful of the common) could achieve — is lower but surer. He cannot (or can but very rarely when transported by private passion, as in the " Character of Atticus," or by the contagion of a greater genius, as in that conclusion of The Dunciad, which is Swift done into poetry) give the greatest things. But what he can give he gives quite unerringly; he is a secure and impeccable master of his own craft. With so peculiar a genius as this (for it would be absurd to stint Pope to the word " talent," though some logical defence might be made for it) his subject could not but be of the greatest importance, while even his treatment of matters was necessarily conditioned -^ ^ His subjects. by his knowledge. In the subjects of the Pastorals, 01 the Messiah, of U'itidsor Forest,"^ he was not really at home, and all these are in consequence mere pastiches — things immensely clever but no more. In the Essay on Criticism the subject itself was thoroughly congenial. Pope knew his own ideal of literature, could express . that ideal critically as few could, and express it constructively as could no other man in the world. But he was a very bad judge of other styles and other ideals, and his knowledge of literary as of other 1 Wordsworth, usually unjust to Pope, lias been too generous to this ixu-ni. It Rives literally nofhinp of the Forest or of the Thames Valley : a library and a poulterer's shop would furnish all its material. 554 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii history would have disgraced the meanest hack in his own fancied Grub Street. Consequently, here and wherever else he touches the subject, we get the most ridiculous statements of fact and the most absurd arguments based upon them, side by side with maxims and judgments worthy of almost any signature in sense, and expressed as no one but Pope could express them in form. And this difference holds throughout. The Iliad, for instance, a wonderful tour de force of literature, has long become merely a curi- osity, because if we want Homer we either go to himself or to a translator who has some sense of him. The Elegy on an Unfortutiate Lady and the Eloisa to Abelard, again, are both marred, though not ruined, by the prevalence of conventionalism in reference to subjects which, above all others, refuse and defy convention. But the Rape of the Lock, artificial as it is, is a perfect triumph of artifice, a piece with which no fault can be found except the frequency of the gradus- epithet, and in which the gradus-epithet is excused by its suitableness to the persons and the manners handled. Yet it is in his later Essay, his Epistles, his Satires, his Diinciad, that Pope's genius shows at its very greatest. They are no doubt mosaics — the " Atticus " passage was pretty certainly written twenty years before its insertion in the Epistle to Arbuthnot — but this is no defect in them. Their value for meaning varies according as Pope was copying optimism from Bolingbroke, pessimism from Swift, and a very remarkable kind of orthodoxy from Warburton, or was giving expression to his own keen, though, alas! limited, observa- tion of society, his personal feelings, and his narrow but clear theory of life and literature. Here he reigns triumphant. His philosophy may be always shallow and sometimes mere nonsense ; his satire may lack the large Olympian sweep of Dryden ; but he looked on society, and on humanity as that society happened for the time to express it, with an unclouded eye, and he expressed his views with a pen that never stumbled, never made slips of form, and always said the right thing in the right way, when we once accept scheme and time and man. Pope, a young man at his beginnings but very precocious, began to be copied, or to be revolted from, with almost unexampled earliness ; but the imitators and rebels may best be left for future treatment. We shall deal here with those of his contemporaries whom dates or other things excuse from the charge of being either, though some even of these may have felt his mighty influence. We have noted the poetical works of Swift and Addison under their names earlier ; we may here take Garth, Blackmore, Prior, Con- greve. Gay, Parnell, Young, a few minors, and — a friendly but, though she knew it not, deadly foe — Lady Winchelsea. CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 555 Samuel Garth/ a strong Whig, but popular with both parties, and of very great repute as a physician, was born at Bolam in Durham as early as 1660, went to Cambridge (Peterhouse), where he remained till he took his M.D. in 1691, and spent the *'^' ' rest of his life practising in London. He was the friend, physician, and mterrer of Dryden, was familiar with all the Queen Anne men, was knighted at George I.'s accession, and died in 1718. Garth owes his place in English literature, which ought to be no mean one, to the fact that his poem The Dispensary was published in 1699, before Dryden's death, and that its versification makes advances on Dry den's own in Pope's direction. Its subject, a doctors' quarrel, does not give us much amusement now, though it has some interest as starting a long line of more or less similar poems on less or more unpromising subjects during the century. Garth followed it up many years later, after he had strengthened The Dispensary itself with some of its best parts, by a poem on Clareniont, and translated some Ovid. But the help which he gave to the perfecting of the couplet in this form is his title to memory. The most notorious verse-writer, after Garth, of the interregnum between Pope and Dryden was the luckless Sir Richard Blackmore, one of the small and curious company who have been made immortal by their satirists. Born about 1650, at Corsham, in Wilts, he .spent a long time at Oxford, and afterwards took his M.D. at Padua. He had a good practice, and the "Quack Maurus " of Dryden, whom he censured and who hit back, does not appear to have had any special justification. He seems to have begun to write verse to pass the time as he drove from patient to patient,, and he published the long poems of Prince Arthur (1695), King Arthur {\6c)j),y()b {ijoo), Eliza (1705), and Creation (1712), besides e-ssays, psalms, etc. He died in 1729, having been still more unmerci- fully ridiculed by the wits of the second generation. Creation^- how- ever, was highly praised, not merely by Addison, to whom piety and Whiggery combined would have been an irresistible bribe, but by John.son, to whom the second quality would have neutralised the first. It is difficult for a reader of the present day to share their admiration. Creation supplies (as, for the matter of that, do the other poems, so far as the present writer knows them) tolerable rhetoric in verse occasionally not bad. But this is a different thing from poetry. Blackmore's couplets are often enjambed ; and it seems (indeed he boasted of it) that he knew little of the popular poetry of his day. Congreve^ deserves such a niche as lie lixs in jjurcly poetical 1 Garth and Congreve, with all the writers that follow except Lady Winchelsea, arc in Chalmers. - In Chalmers, vol. x. ; the rest must be sought in the original. 556 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii history as the producer of a few songs very much in the character of those mentioned earlier as the last product of the CavaUer muse, but ^ with more of the order and neatness of the eighteenth Congreve, etc. ^^ . . . i . i , i i-i century. He is sometimes impudent, but rarely, like the Dorsets and the Sedleys, merely coarse, and the note of the careless fine gentleman which he so much affected in his life does appear in his poems, especially by comparison with Prior, whom, though he falls far short of him in nature, tenderness, whimsical wit, and suspicion of higher and deeper feeling, he excels in that indescribable and sometimes denied, but quite real, quality called breeding. Ambrose Philips and Thomas Tickell were both friends of Addison and (whether of their own choice or as a result of Pope's irritable vanity is uncertain) enemies of Pope. The former — to be carefully distinguished from John Philips (i 676-1 708), author of the admirable Miltonic burlesque of the Splendid Shilling and of a good poem, or at least verse-essay, on Cider — was born in Leicestershire in 1 67 1, and died in London in 1749. His short sentimental verses to children gained him from Carey (the author of " Sally in our Alley ") the nickname of " Namby-Pamby," which has passed into the language as a common epithet. Tickell, a Cumberland man and a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford (1676-1740), is chiefly re- membered for two splendid couplet-elegies on Addison (whose devoted friend he was) and on Marlborough's lieutenant Cadogan. The majesty which this particular form could put on has seldom been better shown, except in the final lines of The Dunciad. But we must turn to men of more poetical substance. Matthew Prior,^ the king of " verse of society " in English, was born near Wimborne in 1664, and was educated at Westminster, going thence to Cambridge, but to St. John's, not, as usual with his schoolfellows, to Trinity. He took his degree in 1686, Prior , , and obtained a Fellowship, which he kept through life, and which kept him at some times of it. He wrote a bad parody of The Hind attd the Panther in conjunction with Montague, afterwards Halifax, but did nothing else till he was of middle age, though he enjoyed to the full the copious if transient stream of patronage of men of letters, which his coadjutor did much to set running. He was even Ambassador to France ; was deeply engaged in the still obscure intrigues which just failed to seat James HI. on the throne of England at his sister's death ; is suspected of having turned king's evidence, but was imprisoned for some years. He had published 1 In Chalmers, and common in editions from his own gorgeous folio down- wards. Mr. Austin Dob^on's Selected Poems of Prior (" Parchment Library," London, 1889) contains most things of much value but not all, the change of man- ners sometimes making Piior difficult to reproduce nowadays. CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 557 poems in 1709, and issued another collection in splendid form after his liberation in 1718. He did not long survive this, and died in 1 72 1. He was, though an intimate, somewhat of a detached intimate of the literary society of his time, and is said frankly to have preferred less distinguished associates. The works of Prior are rather numerous than voluminous, and they are very curiously assorted. The only pieces of any bulk are Alma, or The Progress of the Mind, and Solomon, or The Vanity of the World. The first, divided into three cantos, is an extremely fantastic, though, according to most (not all) critics, somewhat tedioMS poem in Hudibrastic verse, and quite openly imitating Butler in style as well as in metre. Although, however, the guise is burlesque, the subject-matter is by no means wholly so ; and Prior, the lightness of whose best-known work has perhaps rather obscured the fact that he was a scholar and a man of no small reading, has put a good deal of thought as well as of learning in an ill-chosen fashion. Solomon, which is also in three divisions (here called '•books"), is in heroic couplets of a rather Drydenian than Popian cast, with frequent Alexandrines. Here too the poem is mucli better worth reading than is usually thought ; but the author's inability to be frankly serious again shows itself. His treatment of Vanity has neither the bitter quintessence of Swift, nor the solemn and some- times really tragic declamation of Young, nor that intense conviction and ethical majesty which make Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes almost a great poem, and beyond all question a great piece of litera- ture. His next most important works in point of bulk are a handful of tales after the manner of La Fontaine, for which the rigid Johnson himself made a famous excuse, but which, though they contain some of their author's earliest and pleasantest writing, make their appear- ance not at all, or with considerable difficulty and adjustment, in modern volumes intended for general reading. Longer than these, indeed, are the Carmen Secnlare, a dull Pindaric to William the Deliverer, and Henry and Emma, an ill-judged modernising of tiie exquisite Nut-brown Maid, but they form no part nf Prior's title to fame. This, which is completely indefeasible, rests upon a cloud of bright triHes, or things pretty serious within but bright and tritiing in appearance, heterogeneous enough in subject and form, but all animated Ijy tlie same dainty, whimsical touch in metre, piirase, and poetic style. He can be merely sentimental and achieve mere senti- ment cliarmingly; imi)udently but triumpliantly caricaturing, as in his parody of Boilcau's fustian on the taking of Namur; arch, in tiie best sense of that almost ob.solete and long misu.sed but really useful word, as in a hundred pieces of which " Cloe and Kuphelia " .stands 558 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii perhaps first in order in his collected works ; deliberately but exquisitely trivial, as in " The Secretary." Prior has never been approached in the lighter love-poem of a certain kind, such as " The Lover's Anger," or " Dear Cloe, how blubbered is that pretty face ! " For all his easy morality, no juster, shrewder, and more good-natured life-philosophy was ever put than in " An English Padlock." What may be more surprising to those who do not see from the first that Prior was no mere wit but a true humourist is that his gaiety can, with an imperceptible turn, admit a real and a most melancholy wisdom, as in the beautiful and justly famous '• Lines written in the beginning of Mezeray's History of France." In the mere epigram, such as those on Dr. Radcliffe, on Bibo, and others, where only wit is wanted, he is supreme ; his verses to children, especially the famous "■Child of Quality," defy competition; the "Epitaph on Jack and Joan " shows, like some other things of his, how keen a knowledge of humanity underlay his apparently frivolous ways ; and in " Down Hall," the narrative of a trip into Essex, he set an example of lighter narrative verse in easy anapaestics which has been regularly followed and perhaps never improved upon, since. This last brings us to one of Prior's greatest historical merits. The tyranny of the couplet was severe enough on the eighteenth century as it was. But it would have been worse still if this poet, influential in position and friendships, attraC' important. ^^^^ ^^ subject, and of an exquisite skill in his art, had not evaded that tyranny by writing verse for lighter pur- poses in anapaestic measures, in the octosyllable, and in various lyric forms. The anapaestic tetrameter, in particular, may be said to have almost owed its matriculation in the list of permitted metres to Prior. Dryden had used it, but chiefly in compositions intended definitely for music, in which it was no novelty, having been used for ballads and songs time out of mind. But it had been regarded as a sort of " blind fiddler's measure " — good enough for " Drolleries " and " Gar- lands " and so forth, but scarcely worthy of "The Muses." Prior accomplished its presentation to these punctilious divinities once for all. Henceforward the correctest poet felt that there was no crime in now and then deserting couplet for these freer measures ; and as a matter of fact we find in them by far the larger part of the real poetry of the eighteenth century. Something of the same beneficent influence was exercised by John Gay,i who, though a far less exquisite and original poet than Prior, 1 Very popular in the eighteenth century; a little neglected in this. Amends, however, have recently been made in two very pretty editions, of the Fables by Mr. Austin Dobson (London, 1882), and of the whole Poems by Mr. Underhill (2 vols. London, 1893). CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONl'EMPORARIES IN VERSE 559 had perhaps more special sympathy for the country, as opposed to the town, than " Dear Mat." He was born in the same year (1688) with Pope, at Barnstaple, in the county which ^^^' contains the most exquisite mixture of scenery in England, but he seems to have thought himself more at home Where Catherine Street descends into the Strand than on the banks of the Taw or in the hill-solitudes of its springs. His family was no ill one, but poor, and he was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London. From this unpromising occupation he passed to that of secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth, Anne Scott, the "charming Annabel" of Dryden. In 1713 he published a poem on " Rural Sports," containing some description more vivid and direct tlian the age generally showed, and dedicated it to Pope. Introduction to the wits and the patrons followed, and Gay had a small share, and apparently might have had, but for laziness and inrliscretion, a larger one, in the golden shower still falling on men of letters. The same qualities prevented him from making his fortune in the South Sea Bubble — for Craggs gave him stock, he would not sell during the craze, and lost everything — and perhaps contributed to defeat his expectations from George II. But he was one of those fortunate, helpless persons whom everybody helps, and the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry took him into their household, managed his money for him (he made a good deal by the Be^s^ars Opera), and prevented him from having any need of it. He died at the end of 1732, too lazy even to make a will. The traditional character of him as of a kind of human lapdog, without any vice except extreme self-indulgence, has been little disturbed. His earliest poem. Wine, published some years before that above noticed, in 1708, belongs to the same class as John PhiJips's pieces, clever enough Miltonic parody. In Rural Sports he shifted to the inevitable couplet, which again he wrote well ; in fact, Gay did nothing ill, he only wanted initiation and distinction. The Sluphcrd's Week (1 714) relapsed on parody, the subject being now Virgil and Spenser, or rather the namby-pamby imitators of both. The mock-heroic couplets of this are often happy, if not very strong. But Gay's skill in this kind reached its acme in Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1715), which is one of the most vivid things of the sort ever done, and for all its rather teasing falsetto, remains a docu- ment for the subject and a pleasant poem in itself. His Epistles exhibit the same pleasing, if somewhat uninspired, accomplishment, and his Eclogues might sometimes be Pope and sometimes Young. It is more to his real credit that he had a lyrical gift possessed by neither 56o THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vni of these, his greater contemporaries. The immortal, if conventional, " Black-Eyed Susan," the more genuine " 'Twas when the seas were roaring," the most musical " Phyllida" song, and a great many others, have sometimes more sweetness than Prior, though seldom as much air and fire. His dramatic pieces, Acis and Galatea, and still more the Beggar's Opera, are yet unforgotten. He wrote Tales, again very like Prior's ; and lastly, there are his once universally, and still widely, known Fables. They have been for some time neglected, which is a pity, for they are perennial sense expressed in good, though not quite perennial, verse. Gay could do almost anything that his friends told him to do or that he had a model for; but he required these assistances. With Edward Young* we come to a poet of greater originality and force, but of much less equal achievement, than Gay, a poet who in more ways than one represents a development independent of Pope, and to some extent reactionary from the move- °""^' ment which Pope represented. Young was «ot merely Pope's senior ; he actually, in the Universal Passion (1725-28), pre- ceded that writer in his special form of satire, and did nearly, if not quite, as well in it as Pope himself at his very best. But the major part of his work is of a kind very different from Pope's. He was born in Hampshire in the year 1681, went to Oxford, and obtaining one of the then very rare Fellowships (at All Souls) which were not necessarily clerical, did not take orders till late in life. He is said to have at last done so from ambition, and disappointment in his hopes of preferment is credited with at least part of the gloom of the Night -Thottghts. He did not die till 1765, having published verse. Resignation, as late as three years earlier. He was a play- wright, and his play of The Revenge was long very popular. His non-dramatic verse is copious, and its merit varies in the strangest degree. Young's first poem was The Last Day, published in 1713. It, like The Force of Religion, which followed it a year later, is in couplets, and both poems display Young's peculiar and, to modern tastes, not very pleasant mixture of probably sincere, but gloomy and bombastically expressed, religious awe, together with an exaggeration of that flattery of " the great " on earth which seventeenth and eighteenth century feeling permitted, if it did not actually demand. There are, however, very fine things in The Last Day, and it is the best piece on any great scale that he did, except the Night-Thoitghts. The Force of Religion, on the story of Lady Jane Grey and her husband, is mawkish and sometimes ridiculous. There could be few 1 In Chalmers, but not recently edited as a whole. CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 561 greater contrasts than the seven satires of Love of Fame, or The Uni- versal Passion, which followed at about ten years' interval. As observed above, Pope is anticipated, and all but equalled, in these vigorous compositions, where the artificiality of the treatment is excused by that of the subjects, and where Young shows himself a past master, not merely of the crack but of the sting, of the couplet lash. Then we come upon Ocean, an Ode (1728), which, like all Young's other odes (^Impei-ium Felagi, 1729, etc.), affords examples, hard to be excelled in the works of the meanest writers, of the unintentional mock heroic, and then to The Complaint, or Night- Thoughts. It is difficult to give even a guess whether this remarkable poem will ever recover much or anything of the great reputation which it long held, and which, for two generations at least, it has almost entirely lost. It has against it, the application of phrase and even of thought, merely of an age, to the greatest and most lasting subjects, and a tone only to be described as the theatrical-religious. Its almost unbroken gloom frets or tires according to the mood and temperament of the reader. On the other hand, the want of sincerity is always more apparent than real, and the moral strength and know- ledge of human nature, which were the great merits of the eighteenth century, ajDpear most unmistakably. Above all, the poem deserves the praise due to very fine and, in part at least, very original versi- fication. If Young here deserts the couplet, it is, as we have seen, by no means because he cannot manage it ; it is because he is at least partly dissatisfied with it, and sees that it will not serve his turn. And his blank verse is a fine and an individual kind. Its fault, due, no doubt, to his practice in drama, is that it is a little too declamatory, a little too suggestive of soliloquies in an inky cloak with footlights in front. But tliis of itself distinguishes it from the blank verse of Thomson, which came .somewhat earlier. It is not a direct imitation either of Milton or of Sliakespeare, and deserves to be ranked by itself. The Night-Thoughts, which were late (1742- 44), were at once Young's best work and his last good work. Resig- nation is much weaker, but not quite dotage. Thomas Parnell ^ may also be classed as an unconscious rebel. He was of a good Cheshire family, but was born in Dublin in 1679; entered Trinity College, took his degree and orders, and in 1705 was made Archdeacon of Clogher. Swift introduced him to Harley and converted him to Toryism, but the change of dynasty made his conversion infnicluous, though .Swift procured furtlicr preferment for him from Archbishop King. He is 1 Ed. Aitken, London, 1894. 362 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book vin said to have felt the death of his wife very severely, and himself died young in 171 7. It is curious that, out of the small bulk of Parnell's poetical work, poetical criticism of the most various times and tastes has been able to pick quite different things to sustain his reputation. The famous "Hermit" has kept its place in all anthologies; Goldsmith extolled the translations, and Johnson endorsed his views, though he himself liked the '-Allegory on Man" best. And later censorship, which finds the '-Hermit" not much more than a smooth and ingenious exercise in verse, and the translations and imitations unimportant, has lavished praise on two small pieces, " The Night-Piece on Death " and the "Hymn to Contentment," the former of which cei'tainly displays nature-painting of a kind unknown in the work of any but one contemporary, while the return of the second to the Comus alternation of trochaic and iambic cadence is an almost equally important, though doubtless unintended, protest against the ceaseless iambs of the couplet. It is not possible to call Parnell a great poet as he stands ; but the quality and the variety of his accomplishment show that in slightly different circumstances and in other times he would probably have been one. The other exception, a notice of whom may fitly conclude this chapter and this Book, was Anne, Countess of Winchelsea. Lady Winchelsea was the daughter of Sir William Kingsmill, and was born in Hampshire about the time of the Restoration. She Wii!^hdsea. died sixty years later, in 1720, having been a friend of the wits (she is Pope's Ardelia) and herself a consider- able practitioner in verse. She wrote The Spleen, a Pindaric ode (1 701), The Prodigy (1706), Miscellany Poems (i7i4)> the publica- tion which, almost by a lucky accident, has revived her memory, and a tragedy, Aristomenes. The accident referred to was the mention of her by Wordsworth in his famous polemical essay appended to the Lyrical Ballads in 181 5, where he excepts her Nocturnal Reverie (with an odd companion, Pope's Windsor Forest) from his sweeping denunciation of the poetry between Paradise Lost and The Seasons, as '- not containing a single new image of external nature." The statement is not by any means true, or rather its exaggeration swamps what truth it has, but the commendation of Lady Winchelsea is deserved. It is a pity that her poems have not been reprinted and are difficult of access, for it is desirable to read the whole in order to appreciate the unconscious clash of style and taste in them.^ It is not a little noteworthy that Lady Winchelsea began as a Pindaric writer. The imitators of Cowley (unless Dryden is classed I The Reverie and some other pieces will be found in Ward's Poets, vol. iii. CH. V POPE AND HIS ELDER CONTEMPORARIES IN VERSE 563 among them) have been not altogether unjustly regarded as having furnished one of the most uninviting divisions of English poetry, and it is no doubt in part due to them that the couplet, as a revolt, obtained its sway. But Cowley, though even in him the high and passionate spirit of the earlier poetry was dropping and falling, still preserved something of it, and '' flights " were necessary to a Pindaric. Fortu- nately for Lady Winchelsea, natural taste and the opportunities of life seem to have inclined her to take natural objects as the source of her imagery. What place suggested the Nocturnal Reverie we cannot say, but it is clearly a corrected impression and not merely conven- tional. It is all seen: the waving moon on the river, the sleepy cowslip, the foxglove, paler than by day, but chequering still with red the dusky brakes, and the wonderful image of the horse, take u,i almost a century away from the drawing-rooms and the sham shepherdesses of her contemporaries. And she could manage the shortened octosyllable even better than Parnell. could adjust the special epithet (Pope borrowed or stole "aromatic p;iin" from her, though probably she took it from Dryden's ''aromatic splinters''). Altogether she is a most remarkable phenomenon, too isolated to point much of a moral, but adorning the lull of early eigliteenth-century poetry with images even more correct than Thomson's, and put in language far less artificial. INTERCHAPTER VIII In hardly any period of English literature (though the old caution as to the constant overlapping of tendencies, the constant or regular coincidence of the receding and flowing tides, has still to be repeated) are the general characteristics so distinct and so uniform as in that which has been surveyed in the Book just concluded. Survivors of the older poetry and prose reach, in actual life, to within a very few years of the birth of forerunners of styles not yet extinct — nay, by the help of a nondescript like Lady Winchelsea, it may be said that there is no breach of continuity, even in nature-poetry of the strictest kind, from Appleton House to Grongar Hill. But always the exceptions, though in the time, are not of it ; always those who are of the time show one complexion in poetry, in prose, and, at bottom, in drama. Yet even the nature of that complexion has not been entirely undis- puted, and the name of it has been the subject of much contest. We need not concern ourselves with such question-begging, clumsy, and yet incomplete appellatives as " Gallo-Classic." This is the really important question — Is it just to call the age from 1660 to 1740, eminently the age from 1660 to 1800, more or less an "Age of Prose " in the depreciatory sense, and to deny to Dryden and to Pope the title of classics of our poetry ? And we may answer it shortly. It is just to call the Augustan age, or ages, ages, by com- parison, of prose ; it is not just to deny to them, and especially to their greatest representatives, a share, though again by comparison, of poetry. At the Restoration the country unquestionably turned to business. It had not quite done with its religious, its constitutional, its dynastic strifes. It was not to have finished with the first, even generally, for .some years, with the second for some decades, with the third till a period actually later than the death of Pope and coincident with that of Swift. But it was in the mind to have done with them, to let " the great questions " alone, to turn to shop and merchandise, to " projects," to practical studies, and while by no means abandoning philosophy, to take the most practical branches of that art — ethics, 564 BOOK VIII INTERCHAPTER VIII 565 politics, the grosser psychology. It wanted literary media that would suit these purposes, that would accord with scientific treatises, histories, business accounts of voyage And travel telling where a man might traffic in bays and says, summaries of the news and the affairs of the day. It had no objection to poetry as such, but insensibly its poetry took the same complexion ; and after, by a sort of reaction, trying the most extravagant, though hardly the most poetical, kind of tragedy or drama ever seen, it relapsed upon a comedy artificial indeed, but artificial not in the least in the direction of the ideal. In all three departments the tendency was shown most of all by the creation of a new style — of a style in which poetry and prose drew together in an almost unnatural alliance. The quest of the unadorned becomes almost fanatical, and, as we have seen, some- times becomes a mere acquiescence in the down-at-heel. Only in the lower rhetoric is bedizenment sought — save for Irony, the sole one of the greater figures which almost necessitates simplicity. Fancy, pro- vided she knows her place, is tolerated; but Imagination is kept well at a distance ; a flight is perdition, a conceit at best danger. Above all, a sort of crusade is preached and practised against the individual ; and the general (which rapidly becomes the conventional) is alone orthodox. To understand the period, perhaps there is no better way than to read those papers of Addison's on the Imagination, which some persons have strangely taken as if the word were used as Coleridge might have used it. The Imagination, we find, is that which supplies images ; and her supply is to be strictly limited to what the senses prove and what correct tradition approves. These characteristics of the time are not really deniable : it cannot be seriously contended, except as a matter of rhetorical "colour," that in passing from Shakespeare through Dryden to Pope, we do not pass from the upper through the middle air to earth. But it is by no means necessary, while granting this, to belittle, much less to abuse, the Augustan ages. They had their own work to do and they did it — a good deal better perhaps than some ages which have announced more amJMtious tasks. They had, in the first place, to get English grammar settled for prose use at least; to establish .something like a recogni.sed dictionary, and to elaborate something like fixed rules of composition — something which would dissuade the greater writers from attempting the vagaries of Clarendon and Milton, and safeguard the smaller from the disasters into which men like Milton and Clarendon could never wholly fall. They had, even in poetry, to create a sort of etiquette which sliould prevent even really fine poetic frenzy from dcscriijing the eyes of the Magdalene as portable baths and compendious oceans; to add to the metrical exercises of English a course of the neat, smart, limited 566 THE AUGUSTAN AGES book viii drill which was the only gymnastic it had yet lacked ; to get, as a reaction from this, the wholly trisyllabic metres (hitherto neglected) into order for comic work first and then for serious. And all this they did. They did not (as Johnson thought in Dryden's case) " find Rome of brick and leave it of marble " ; but they did find the literary city ill-organised, unpoliced, with none of these contemned arrangements for '"gas and water" which add so much to the convenience of life. And they did leave it very fairly drained, paved, lighted, watered, and equipped with constables. Nor had they much to be ashamed of in regard to the actual edifices which they added. To speak of the verse of Dryden with any kind of contempt or belittlement is to go very near the absurd. The same may be said of the best" verse-couplet of Pope and the best light verse of Prior ; each, like Dryden, is .supreme in his own way. Nor must we say much less of the prose of Addison and of Berkeley, while we must say a great deal more of Swift. His life practically covered the entire time, and who shall say that a time throughout the whole of which Swift was living need vail its bonnet in the presence of any time ancient or modern ? Yet it may be admitted that, though it could produce great men and even greatest, this production was not its own special business. Its business was to do what has been described above, and moreover to extend the domains of literature, by opening up fresh provinces and arranging equipment for settling them. It allowed nothing to die, though it certainly left the drama in a state of perilously suspended animation. On the contrary, it saw, though only in the beginning, the revival of much and the positive admission of more. It got the Essay thoroughly into shape ; it left the novel and the regular history born, or just ready to be born ; it set flying new species of lighter verse ; and it saw at least several further developments of periodical literature, though not the fullest. , Above all, it shaped, to a degree not yet much bettered, the lighter form of English verse, and it arranged, in a matter not yet altered in essentials at all, the general form of English prose. It would be scarcely paradox to .say that, on the whole, we have rather reverted, and diverged from our points of reversion, than made any positive advances since the deaths of Pope and Swift. We have, at any rate, been much more indebted to the past, much less original in our apparently most daring innovations, than were the patronised, the pitied, the not seldom abused and despised, "ages of prose and sense." BOOK IX MIDDLE AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE CHAPTER I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE Thomson — His life — His minor poems — The_S^uis«ns ^ The Castle of Indolence — Dyer — Blair and Green — Shenstone — Collins — Gray — Byrom, Savage, and others — Akenside ^ Resurrection of the Ballad : Percy and others — Dods- ley's Miscellany — Smart — Mason — Falconer — The Wartons — Churchill — Chatterton — Beattie — Langhorne and Mickle — Cowper — Crabbe— Blake — Burns — His predecessors from Ramsay to Fergusson — His poetic quality James Thomson, the first Scotsman after the Union to contribute matter of very great value to English literature, was born in September 1700 at Ednam, in Roxburghshire. His grandfather had been only a gardener, his father was minister of the parish, and ^^^ ^^^^ had married Beatrix Trotter, daughter of a yeoman pro- prietor. Very shortly after Thomson's birth, his father was transferred to Southdean, a parish in the same county, but nearer the Border, in fact, on the Scottish slopes of the Cheviots. There is no doubt that much of Thomson's hardly excelled knowledge of natural aspects was oljtained here; the sterner part certainly was. He was educated at a school in Jedburgh, whence, at the age of fifteen, he went to the Uni- versity of Edinburgh ; and as his father soon after died, the family moved to that city. Thomson's stay at Edinburgh, as then usual in the case of divinity students, was a prolonged one — some nine years; but he had little vocation, and in 1725 went to London to seek his fortune. He had some initial dilTiculties. but iiis college friend David Malloch, or Mallet, helped him, and before long he became tutor in Lord Binning's family. IViuter was jjublished in March 1726, was 567 568 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix successful from the first, and brought him many friends (including Pope) and patrons. He continued The Seasons (Sumtner, 1727; Springy 1728), which were finished with Autumn in 1730, wrote some bad tragedies (especially Sop/ionisba, 1729), and went with a pupil on the Continent. His tour seems to have furnished him with the materials of his Liberty. It was in 1733 that Lord Chancellor Talbot, father of his pupil (who was now dead), appointed Thomson to a post in Chancery, which he only lost through negligence, and which was the first of a series of „■ ,f appointments, pensions, and the like (the chief being the surveyorship of the Leeward Islands), sufficient to keep him in comfort for the rest of his life. This was passed near Richmond, a literary neighbourhood as well as one congenial to a lover of nature. The extreme indolence which is the best-known feature of his later years sometimes exposed him to difficulties, and he was unfortunate in a late, and perhaps rather lukewarm, passion for a certain Miss Young. ''Amanda." He died in 1748. Like Gay and other men of letters of the time, both English and French, Thomson seems to have deserved Cowley's description of the grasshopper as an '• Epicurean animal." Initiative was not his forte, even Winter seems to have been suggested by similarly named poems of an early friend, one Riccaltoun. But no vice at all detestable seems to have been charged, much less proved, against him. The eighteenth century was a bad time for men of his temperament, and its early years, in which the brilliant luck of Addison and Prior, and the great money gains of Pope, served by turns to encourage and dishearten, were particularly bad for men of letters. If Thomson's inertia could be, as it has sometimes been, charged to Miss Young's unkindness, he might be a little more interesting, but it seems to have begun earlier ; and after all a want of energy, not improbably constitutional, is no unpardonable sin. Thomson's poetical works ^ are among the most important in the history of English poetry, though they cannot be exactly ranked among the best of English poems. Appearing as they did at the very same time with the most perfect and polished work of Pope, they served as an antidote to that great writer's " town " poetry. Couched as the best of them were in blank verse, or in the Spenserian stanza, they showed a bold front to the insolent domination of the stopped couplet. Becoming almost instantly popular, and retaining their popularity, they supplied for full seventy years a perpetual 1 Almost the whole of the poets of this chapter will be found in Chalmers, though not always (notably in the case of Smart's Song- to David) complete. Many are in the " Aldine Poets," and have been recently and well re-edited. Only important special editions will be noted. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 569 corrective to the least poetical tendencies of the poetry of the day. Nor can there be any doubt that their efficacy in this way was in- creased by a peculiarity which has lessened their influence and their vogue during the present century. Thomson stood apart from the Augustan school in his subjects of interest and in his selection of metres. But he shared, and rather went beyond, the predilection of that school for a peculiar stilted "poetic diction," partly founded on the classicalism of Milton, but largely tempered from less genuine sources. Nobody, who has the slightest tincture of catholic poetical taste, can defend such a phrase as — See where the winding vale its lavish stores Irriguous spreads, which is on a par with the worst fashionable faults of any time. But these phrases baited the hook for his own days, and they can be, except for historical purposes, neglected in these — just as we have already learnt to neglect, and sometimes to enjoy, mediaeval stock phrase, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century conceit, and as, no doubt, a future time will half neglect and half enjoy the tricks on which writers of our own time pride themselves. These works comprise three long poems, and a certain, but not large, number of smaller ones. Of the first class a merciful posterity has agreed to forget Liberty, though unwise partisans sometimes attempt to drag it out for judgment. The result, before . , 1,1 1 »• i His minor competent judges, can at best be a recommendation to poems, mercy. The piece is a Whig prize-poem, in five parts, dealing consecutively with Italy, Greece, Rome, Britain, and "A Prospect." The vehicle is blank verse of the same pattern as that in which the more artificial passages of The Seasons are couched. The sentiment is of that kind which was finally made hateful to gods and men by the orators of the French Revolution — a "dull-snuffling" compound of Brutus and Tully, and the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. King Alfred, and the Immortal Nassau. The Goddess of Liberty is the main speaker through the whole, and sometimes she .speaks well. Except by Dryden, the licensed flattery of friends and patrons has seldom been better put than in the exordium dealing witli the poet's dead pupil Talbot, and that pupil's father; the picture of the Campagna shows the poet of The Seasons; the passage on modern Italy beginning — What would you say, ye conquerors of earth ! is declamation become eloquence; the Ten Thousand piece is even better; and the sketch of Roman history in tlic third book is clever. 570 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE BK. ix But the whole is hopeless. Nor need much be said of the minor poems. Only the dehcate and charming, though artificial — Tell me, thou soul of her I love, and the graceful " Nuptial Song for Sophonisba," must be excepted from faint praise, or by no means faint condemnation. The Seaso7is and The Castle of Indoletice ^ are an entirely different matter. About neither is any mistake po.ssible to those who know poetry. In the successive editions of The Seasons Thomson made many changes, and his editors have e_ eas ons, ^^^ ^^^ ^^^ coped with them. But between the earliest Winter of 1726 and the latest complete Seasons there are not differences sufficient to interfere with the general position of the book and its author in English poetry. Thomson was not entireM above the cant and fashion of his time, either in thought or iri phrase. But his glory and his salvation lay in the fact that he was born with, and had cultivated, the gift of looking straight at nature,! j and of reporting the result of his observation in words. He never lost this gift. He saw the view from Richmond Hill, and the lazy luxuriance of the Thames Valley, just as inevitably and unmistakingly as he had seen the snow-storms of the Carter and the spates of the Jed. He had such a genius at the thing that, even in describing what he had never seen — the merely book-learnt scenes of foreign countries — he is not much, though somewhat less, convincing than when he touches off the wallflower, or the birds at the approach of rain, or the disturbance of the trout by sheep-washing. In a thou- sand casual strokes, as well as in the well-known set pieces of The Seasons, this infallible observation and this admirable if not always consummate expression show themselves. As compositions, all the four lie, no doubt, open to exception. There is a good deal of padding, and it is often weak. A certain amount of the matter has the cant common to declaimers, and a certain further amount has the sentimentality, the artificiality, and the other faults of the time. But even these, in the company where we find them, add a certain flavour. It is impossible to believe that The Seasons will ever be read without admiration and delight by fit persons. They have, if not the charm of the absolutely best and highest literature, yet that of the next, and still not too extensive, class, that which combines an excellent adherence to truth of fact with a more than competent skill in art. For their time, and therefore for history, they were of simply paramount importance, but they have a charm not merely of their time. 1 The best edition is that of Mr. J. Logie Robertson for the Clarendon Press. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 571 Poetically speaking, Thomson went far higher in The Castle of Indolence, which closed, as Winter had opened, his poetical career; and it so happened that its lesson was not much less im- portant for his time. Spenser had never wholly gone out ^'I'td^ien'"'^ of favour,! though both Thomson himself and Shenstone i^vide infra) thought it safest to imitate iiis ''Gothick" form with a touch of burlesque. But the virtue of the magnificent stanza almost completely conquered this; and the charms of The Castle of Indolence are not those of a parody, but those of a great poem, which happens to bear the image and superscription of a greater. Almost at once the poet is carried away, and the famous picture of the dale of Indolence is almost as noble a thing as we shall find anywhere in eighteenth-century poetry. The very spirit of the stanza, its long- drawn, sleepy, yet never sluggish melody, passes with the murmuring sound of it into the poet's song. Nor does it ever fully leave him, despite his occasional struggles to get back to falsetto. The Speech of Indolence, itself not wholly couched in this vein, is hardly over before we have the wondrous stanza — As when a shepherd of the Hebrid Isles — the picture of the Castle, almost worthy of Spensers self, the Mirror of Vanity (which shows that Thomson was not far behind Young or even Pope himself as a satirist), and the sketches of the guests. The second book is not so continuously good, because (to tell the truth) Thomson had no real sympathy with the Knight of Arts and Industry, while he had much with the fell enchanter; but it com- pletes the moral, without which the age would not have been contented. It is impossible to exaggerate the beneficent influence which The Castle of Indolence must have had in soothing, relaxing, and adjust- ing to true poetic feeling the ears and mind of a generation made half-deaf and half-nervous by the sharp scratch and rasp of the couplet. That its ^olian-harp music did not appeal to Johnson is not in the least surprising ; that something of its charm must have in some unexplained way kept him from expressing contom])t or blame is very interesting. For it was, in truth, the knell of the kind of poetry he himself loved and practised. Three short poems, two in octosyllables, one in blank verse, keep l-The nadir of the tasle for him seems to have been about the last thirty years of the seventeenth century. In i686 a "Person of Quality" "dcliverefl in Heroick numbers" (/.XiA that though partly it was not wholly or even mainly the fault of his time, there can be little doubt. His scholarliness has justly propitiated scholars; his nature, such as it is, has justly charmed the general; in "Spring," in "The Progress of Poesy," in "Vicissitude," even in the stagey and mannered "Bard," there are the fine things, the inevi- table, the always surprising and new. But they are not very common, and they are constantly jumbled up with the tawdry, the artificial, and the stale. We must now hasten the tale. John Byrom, spnmg of a good Manchester family, was born in 1692, went to St. Paul's School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became a Fellow, and cele- brated the charms of " Jug," or Joanna. Bentley (a daughter of the awful Aristarch, who seems to have charmed all his college), in some pretty verses, beginning — My time, O ye muses, was happily spent, which appeared in the Spectator. Byrom was later a physician, an industrious and successful teacher of the first really good system of shorthand, a strong Jacobite, and a mystic in religion. ,His works 1 consist of a voluminous and often interesting J. J 1 1 11 /- . Hyrom, diary, and a large bulk of very various verse, the best Savage, known and perhaps the best piece of which is the ="«^°'^'"- famous Jacobite epigram, "God bless the King, of Church and State Defender." His practice of throwing every possible subject into verse, very often of the swinging trisyllabic kind, of which he was a great lover and a very clever practitioner, has not improved the poetical merit of his work ; but he had much more diffuse poetry in him than all but one or two of his contemporaries, and his vohiminous work, which has had tiie good fortune to secure two admirable editors, is singularly interesting to read, and furnishes side-lights on the time only inferior to those of tiie greatest memoir- writers. No greater contrast to Byrom can be even imagined than Richard Savage (1697-1743), a profligate charlatan, who, partly by the accident of being a personal friend of Joiinson, and partly by the 1 Publisli(;d by the Clietham Society at Mancliestcr in two divisions. Kernains by R. Parkinson (4 parts or 2 vols. 1854, S(/.), and Poems, by A. W. Ward (4 parts or 2 vols. 1894, S(/.) 2P 578 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix claims he made to being a persecuted "love-child" cf persons of quality, obtained, and to some extent kept, a reputation quite dispro- portionate to his worth. His chief poem, The Wanderer (1729), is a rhetorical piece in five cantos, very difficult to follow, in which the idea of travel very thinly supports long " screeds " of moral declama- tion. Its metre is an attempt at the couplet, rather as Dryden left it than as Pope transformed ; its diction is admittedly Thomsonian. The Bastard, a year older, more forcible, and more like Dryden, puts, witli at any rate literary skill, Savage's claim to be Lady Maccles- field's son ; and the verses on Lady TyrconneFs recovery are also in a fairly imitative swing of Drydenian flattery. Savage rarely attempted lyric, and few of his minor verses of any kind go beyond the merits of the exercise. David Malloch, who, for reasons rather variously stated, changed his name to Mallet, was born about 1702, and, when not much past twenty, produced in " William and Margaret " a piece, in imitation of the ballad style revealed by Watson's and Ramsay's publications {vide infra), which had great influence. Mallet has disputed with Thomson the credit of " Rule Britannia," a piece of vigorous declamation and genuine patriotic sentiment, which, how- ever, owes more to the merit of it? music than to that of its poetry. His longer poems. The Excursion and Aniynior and Theodora, are quite open imitations of his friend, as his Verbal Criticism is of Pope. "Edwin and Emma," though not so good, was long as famous as " William and Margaret," and all but a few of Mallet's more numerous pieces in the lighter style show the grace and wit which belongs to the now too-much-neglected lighter verse of the eighteenth century. Mallet, who was more of a general man of letters than a poet, died in 1765. In his relations with Sarah Marlborough, Bolingbroke, and others he showed no very high standard of literary morality and dignity ; but it is rather absurd to blame him for writing against Byng, whose execution some very good judges have held to be not unjust, and distinctly beneficial. Conjoined with Mallet in the never executed task of writing a life of Marlborough, like him a Thomsonian in style, and like him a politician, though a more independent one, was Richard Glover, born in 171 2, who was all his life connected with business as well as with letters, and though for a time unfortunate in his city affairs, died prosperous in 1785. The contrast between the vigour of Glover's political ballad, " Admiral Hozier's Ghost " and the wastes of his stupendous and terrible blank-verse epics, Leonidas and The Athenaid, containing between them some 20,000 lines, presents in little the contrast of the whole poetry of the time. Two of the most interesting verse-writers of the middle of the CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 579 century, both illustrating the peculiarities of the time, were Armstrong and Akenside, the first a decided Thomsonian in at least the accidents of verse, the other a nondescript, but resembling other nondescripts of other times strangely. John Armstrong, the less important, was born in Roxburghshire in 1709, and educated at Edinburgh, but very shortly went to London, where he practised medicine till his death in 1779. Some of his early verse is whimsical and a little more, but in 1744 he published The Art of Preserving Health, which did not clash with the ideas of the age in poetry, and was quite within them as to personal conduct. He was the friend of Wilkes, and also of Smollett, whom he resembled in a perfervid temper and in occasional coarseness of literary expres- sion. No one now would write on Armstrong's subjects in Arm- strong's manner, but his grasp of the peculiar Thomsonian diction and versification was extraordinary. Mark Akenside was the son of a butcher at Newcastle, where he was born in 1721. He was at first intended for the dissenting ministry, but his studies at Edinburgh and Leyden drew him to physic. His Pleasures of Imagination appeared in the same year with Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health. Akenside was a very strong Whig of the Republican variety, and his principles inspired the brilliant "Epistle to Curio" (Pulteney) which, in accordance with an awkward habit of his, he afterwards rehandled and spoilt. He practised first at Northampton, then in London, having fortified himself with a Cambridge degree ; he attained considerable repute in his own profession, though his oddities caused him to be pilloried by Smollett as the physician who gave the "Roman dinner" at Paris; and even Johnson, who hated his principles, admits that he might have risen very high if he had not died in middle life (apparently of typhoid) in 1770. Akenside is a very fair touchstone of criticism. It is impossible to like or even to admire him very heartily; he belongs to a class of poets, represented in most days, who are plaster rather than marble, photograph rather than picture, pinchbeck rather than gold or even copper. And yet a reluctant confession must accompany all reason- able depreciation of him. It is a question whether Akenside wants much to have turned his statue into life, or at least liis stucco into alabaster. The Pleasures of the Imagination, often and jierhaps ex- cusably called tepid, constantly quiver or go near to quivering with the needed glow ; the "Hymn to the Naiads" has a strange frozen grace ; the Odes, at their best, fall not so far short of Collins, and not at all short of all but the best of Gray; and the "Epistle to Curio" is a most remarkable study. It has the sincerity, the throb, that 580 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix Pope's satire, except when tinged with personal hate, wants ; it has the hurry, the rise, the intense discipline, of the best satiric verse, and it only lacks the disengagement, the supremacy, of Dryden. It is a pity that Lord Macaulay, in a passage which has probably been read by a thousand to one who knows the poem, should have sneered at it. For, in truth, almost its only fault is an unpractical devotion to principle. It may not be party war; but it is not so very far from being magnificent ethically, and it is poetically fine. That most interesting and important thing, the Resurrection of the Ballad, and indeed of old poetry generally, was going on during the whole, or nearly the whole, of the first half of the century; and the effects of it are visible in some of the poets, notably of thrBaliad : Mallet and Shenstone, who have been noticed already. Percy and But though there may be, as Dryden says, " in epoches mistakes," if we endeavour to point them too closely, the appearance of Percy's Reliqties ^ in 1 765 is not likely soon to be dethroned from its place of vantage, and we may most conveniently here make a halt, a digression, or a parenthesis, in order to mention it and its preliminaries. The first of these saw the light (as was per- haps natural, seeing that old Scots poetry had died sooner than English) in Scotland earlier than in England. At the very time of the Union, in 1706, 1708, and 171 1, James Watson, the King's printer, printed in Craig's Close, opposite the Cross of Edinburgh, his Choice Col- lection,''' opening with Chrisfs Kirk on the Green, and containing pieces of Montgomery, Drummond, Ayton, and Sempill, with others of various ages and merits. There is no doubt that Watson's venture gave the hint to Allan Ramsay, whose Evergreen and Tea-Table Aliscellany, ^ on similar principles, but with more individual editing and addition, appeared later (1724-40). It is not probable that Watson had much direct effect -on England, but the "Scotch tunes," which had even affected Dryden, have no small influence on two most interesting collections which appeared in London before Ramsay's own gatherings, Tom D^Urfey's Fills to Purge Melancholy'^ (1719) and an anonymous assembly (1723) of Old Ballads^ "printed from the best and oldest copies." The former was still intended as an actual "Warbler" (though hardly a /////^Warbler) for use; the latter is professedly a literary collection. 1 Editions very numerous; that of H. B. Wheatley, 3 vols. London, 1886, is the best. Thomas Percy (1729-1801), who died Bishop of Dromore, a friend of Johnson and all the later eighteenth-century wits, and an excellent person, did much other literary work, original, editorial, and translating. He adulterated his ballads, but he knew no better. 2 Reprinted, Glasgow, 1869. « Reprinted, 4 vols. Glasgow, 1876. * Reprinted, 6 vols. London, n.d. 6 Reprinted, 3 vols. London, n.d. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 581 D'Urfey,^ who was old enough to have been among the later and lower rivals of Dryden, seems to have had much of the careless ringing song-faculty of the elder age. The compiler of the Old Ballads is chiefly interesting because of his idea, and because of the way in which (as the whole eighteenth century did till near its close) he mixes modern pastiches and risky trifles with his old matter. In 1737 appeared the first volume (there was no second) of The Muses'' Library, giving itself out as the work of Mrs. E. Cooper, but attributed to the antiquary Oldys. It is not quite what it calls itself, "A general Collection of almost all the old valuable poetry extant " — it could hardly be that in four hundred small pages of large type. But it contains no despicable anthology from Langland to Daniel. In 1760 came the remarkable Prolusions of Edward Capell, containing, as formerly noticed, not merely the Nut-browne Maid, but Edward III. and Davies's Nosce Teipsum ; and this was but five years before the Reliques themselves, which, planned by Percy and Shenstone, assisted by Lord Hailes and others, based upon the Folio MS., and supplemented from various sources new and old, give to this day one of the most delightful collections of " old valuable poetry " extant, and taught the next two generations to write valuable new poetry. Nor in atmosphere, subject, and, for good as well as for bad, style need we fear to yoke with it Macpherson's Ossian (1760-63), discarding altogether the question whether it was faithful translation, ingenious adaptation of fragments, or mere and sheer forgery. It gave, just as the ballads gave, something different — the necessary twist and alterative to the actual course of poetry — and that is enough. ^ Rut we must now take up the direct history. The poetry of Johnson is so intimately connected with his other work that it, like Goldsmith's, can hardly be noticed separately, but it is of the first importance to note that both represent a reaction from the reaction — a " neo-classic " halt, if not return. The grotesque odes and the pleasing hymns of Watts (1674-1748), the far greater hymns of Charles Wesley (1708-88), the safely recorded, if seldom consulted, 1 He was born about 1650, and died 1723. His production was immense, and has never been collected. In 1721 he published four hundred pages, closely printed, of verse under the title New Operas, with Comical Stories and Poems on Several Occasions. Here, in the quatrain poem of " Socrates and Timandra," is perhaps the most prosaic line in the English language — Uncommon and particularly rare. But Tom had merits. 2 Something more will be found on Ossian infra. Those who would plunge into the vexed questions resperting it. may most succinctly consult the old editions of the book itself, with Blair's l.iud.itory dissertation, Macgrcgor's Coniine h'emains of Ossian, L'"'*='y '" famous Gentle Shepherd (1725), a pastoral "by person- ages," in the Old French phrase, rather than a drama, contains some charming description and some pleasant painting of manners, Init is not strong, while most of his other work is distinctly weak. But he had some share, and not a few followers — Hamilton of Bangour (1704-54), Alexander Ross (1698-1784), John Skinner (1721-1807), Isabel Pagan (1740-1821), Lady Anne Barnard (1750-1825) — had 2 n 594 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix much more — of the strange, not easily analysed, and hardly at all literary, gift of folk-song, which it is perhaps academic to try to dis- tinguish rigidly from poetry. We are scarcely able — and perhaps we do not greatly care — to set down the exact debt of such things as Lady Anne's " Auld Robin Gray " and Isabel Pagan's " Ca' the yowes to the knowes" to the exquisite plaintive notes from which they can never be divided in memory. But the efficacy of such things in keeping alive a sense of the poetic " over-soul " cannot be exaggerated. Robert Fergusson (1750-74), Michael Bruce (1746-67), and John Logan (1748-88) approach literature nearer, but at the forfeit of poetry. The first wrote partly in dialect, was adopted by Burns as his master, and has been a good deal over-praised, though he has no small merit, especially in some Edinburgh pieces and in " The Gowd- spink " (goldfinch) . Another bird, the Cuckoo, acted up to its repu- tation by inspiring a good, though not consummate, copy of verses, which has been challenged by the champions of Bruce and Logan for both those writers. In such a quarrel, especially as the author- ship is of infinitesimal importance, no wise man takes a side. Bruce died young, and certainly wrote some pleasing verse ; Logan, his friend, hterary executor, and (as one theory holds) supplanter, died in early middle age, and seems to have had rather more talent than conduct. But all the poets of the paragraph must rest their main claim to historic interest on the fact that they exejnplify, and that they handed on, the vague poetic inspiration which was to take definite form in Burns. This he caught up, and with an intense and sovereign poetical power, fixed, without killing, all the floating folk-poetry of Scotland, effecting this to no small extent by the felicitous audacity (to which a writer of more academic cultivation could hardly have attained) of actually keeping much of the old, while he purged what he kept of dross, and added new gold of his own. Burns was a prose-writer as well as a poet, and took much pains with his prose letters. But, though clever, they are distinctly artificial, and their biographical value far exceeds their value as literature. This is also, though not so universally, the case with quality^ those of his poems which were written in literary Eng- lish. He had not proved this medium, and though nothing that he wrote could well be quite valueless, he has, when he has gotten to his English, not much more value than belongs to the usual eighteenth-century poet of the better class. In fact, here as elsewhere, he resembles Chatterton. With his poems in Scots the case is entirely different. Here he did not merely bring to bear the inherited attention to, and familiarity with, nature, which has been I noted throughout as characteristic of Scottish poetry ; indeed, though CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 595 he is strong in this, it is not his strongest point. What he brought was first of all the accumulated virtue of Scots verse and phrase, so different from English, and therefore so invaluable as an alterative ; and secondly his own special poetic gift. Even the mere fact that his favourite metres (especially the popular form which, coming directly, and by something of an excep- tion, from a Provencal original, established itself for good in Scots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) were constantly different from anything usual in English, must be allowed its importance. The dialect, so rich in quaint special words, that of themselves break through and transform the hackneyed generalities of eighteenth-) century diction; the sharply-observed and faithfully transcribed customs and characters; the peculiar imagery, — all these must be counted in to understand the charm and the value of The Twa Dogs and The Twa Herds, of The Brigs of Ayr and Death and Dr. Hornbook, of The Cotter''s Saturday Night and The Jolly Beggars, as well as of the innumerable scraps of song which, more than anything else, have earned Burns his immortality. But there is much in the poetry of Burns besides dialect and local colour, fresh versification, and special scenery^ and though this much is of the indefinable kind, of the kind that escapes all analysis, one thing about it can be said with confidence, that it was essentially lyrical, and another, that lyric was what was chiefly needed/, to melt the eighteenth-century frost. From the death or silence of the last Cavalier singers about a hundred years earlier, there had been in English no serious lyric of an impassioned kind that possessed the highest qualities of music in verse, there had not even been any approach to such verse. But it not only existed in Burns ; it was almost impossible for him to open his mouth, to dip pen in ink, without producing it. He had positively to constrain himself, to keep his eyes fixed on some false model, to cramp and force his voice into alien speech, before he could become prosaic, or even produce the kinds of poetry that are nearest to prose. They do him a great wrong and make a great mistake, who dwell upon his politics, his philosophy, or anything but his poetry. As a matter of fact. Burns felt and saw too much to have much time for tiiinking, even if he had been educated that way. And very fortunate this is. The lime did not want thought ; it wanted nature and song, and lie gave it both. \^ Except for these four great writers, the poetical production of the last two decades of the century, till the Lyrical Ballads themselves, was all but of the lowest order. The handful of .sonnets, meditative and topo- graphical, published by William ^owles^^ in 1789, liad extraordinary 1 Bowles (1762-18^0) published much verse later, but nothing of importance. His edition (and depreciation) of I'opc had some. 596 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix influence on Coleridge and on other poets, and show very strongly the nisHs, the still inorganic effort of the age towards local colour, the "proper word," the linking of nature-aspect to human feeling, and other characteristics of Romanticism. The unrhymed Pindarics of Sayers, not in themselves very good things, though they produced good work by the hands of his followers, Southey and Shelley, showed in the same way the revolt against the smooth tyranny of the rhymed couplet, the craving for something different, which shows itself at the beginning of each new poetic age. But the main bulk of the verse of the time, which has not passed utterly out of even historic memory, consists of satiric work. To this class belong the clever lampoons ^ of the Rolliad, directed against the younger Pitt, the more varied and bulky, but even less poetic, work of " Peter Pindar," and, above all, the triumphant, and, as literature if not exactly as poetry, wholly admirable, parodies and diatribes of the Anti-Jacobin, the chief contributors to which were Canning, Ellis, and Frere, while it was edited by William Gilford (i 756-1 826), a rough critic and a jejune versifier, but the author earlier of two extremely clever satires, the Baviad and Mceviad, and the editor later of some of the great dramatists and of the Quarterly Review. 1 But for the tyranny of space a chapter might be occupied, with pleasure at least to the writer, by the lighter verse of this century. As noted more than once, more than one poet, mediocre in serious work, has left charming light things. Of those who are light or nothing, the chief are Isaac Hawkins Browne (1706-60), whose Pipe of Tobacco (1736) is a delightful string of parodies on the chief poets of the day; Christopher Anstey (1724-1805), who in The New Bath Guide (1766) took the anapgestic tetrameter fromr Prior, gave it a new tune, and established it for a century and. a half to come as the best vehicle for certain purposes ; Sir Charles Hanbury Williams (1709-59), a coarse lampooner, whose poems, not published till 1822, have been rather overrated for wit and style ; and Sterne's disreputable friend John Hall Stevenson (1718-85), whose Crazy Tales, etc., are as coarse as Williams's but much cleverer, and who could see, as his description of the Scotch fir on the Cleveland moors — That waves its arms and makes a stir. And tosses its fantastic head — shows sufficiently. Of the persons named above, " Peter Pindar " was John Wol- col (1738-1819), who professed both physic and divinity, and during the last twenty years of the century lampooned George HI., the new Royal Academy, Tory ministers, and things and persons generally. George Ellis (1753-1815) gave his talent in satirical verse first to the Whigs in the RoUiad, then to the Tories in the Anti-Jacobin, but did his best service to literature in the Specimens of poetry, and romance, referred to earlier. Canning (1770-1827) belongs primarily to his- tory. John Hookham Frere (1760-1846) was a man of very great talent, chiefly spent on translations, " skits," and the remarkable burlesque romance (variously referred to as " Whistlecraft," from the nom de guerre assumed, " The Monks and the Giants," etc.) on King Arthur and the Round Table, which gave Byron the metre and style of Beppo and Don Juan, and is not exceeded by either in spirit and art. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO CRABBE 597 In serious poetry the standard names — -names, alas ! standing rather as marks for scorn than as objects of veneration — are those of Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) and WiUiam Hayley (1745-1820), the former, in his Botanic Garden (1789-92), the last and one of the most polished, but also one of the most frigid and unpoetic, of the descriptive couplet-writers, the latter a respectable and amiable dilettante, who wrote bombastic or namby-pamby verse with a fatal facility. Below them, if indeed in these regions of poetry higher and lower are predicable terms, we come to degrees of dulness or absurdity, ending in the so-called " Delia Cruscans," who were the object of Giflforcrs scorn, a group of versifiers at the head of whom was Robert Merry (1735-98), a man of good education and some parts, whose exploits in poetastry show better perhaps than anything else the poetical degradation, or rather exhaustion, of the time. CHAPTER II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL Richardson — Fielding — Smollett — Sterne — Minor novelists — Walpole — Beckford — Mrs. Radcliffe — Lewis Some reference has been made earlier to the differences, or rather the hesitations, of opinion in reference to the exact history of the English novel.i But for general purposes these may be neglected. The early prose romance, the Euphuist innovation, major and minor, the philosophical or Utopian fantasy, the brief Elizabethan tale, the long-winded translations or imitations of the Scuddry Heroic stor}-, the picaresque miscellany, and the like, are stages obvious as the general history unfolds itself. As to the exact position which the great names of Bunyan and of Defoe hold, difference may be agreed to with resignation. What is certain is that about the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the period immediately succeeding the appearance of Defoe's work, there began a develop- ment of the prose novel, and that this, partly though by no means wholly owing to one group of great writers in the style, had made very great progress by the beginning of the third, about which time we find Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy receiving boxes full of new novels from her daughter in England. It is so difficult to mark out the precise stages by which the modern novel came into being, that the wisest critics have abstained from attempting it. We can only say that, for the nearly three genera- tions which passed between the Restoration and the publication of Richardson's Pamela, there was an ever greater determination and concentration towards completed prose fiction; and that the use of the general form in two such different ways by two such different men as Swift and Defoe is sufficient proof how near, by the end of the second decade or so, that completed form was. But 1 This history has been put briefly, but with much knowledge and grace, in Mr. W. A. Raleigh's The English Novel (London, 1894). CHAP. 11 THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 599 there was not much general practice of it.i Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, women of no very good reputation, followed in the footsteps of Afra Behn, and achieved a certain popularity, but the novels of the former are thinly-veiled political libels. The earlier books of Mrs. Haywood are in seventeenth-century styles, and though she lived to do better in Betsy Thoughtless (1751) dind Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), these were not published till long after the three great re-creators of the novel had shown the way. To them, therefore, we may as well turn at once. Samuel Richardson, by a great deal the oldest, by a little the pre- cursor in actual publication, and i'ldirectly the inspirer of his greatest and nearest successor, was born in 1689 in Derbyshire, his father being a joiner, his mother of rather higher rank. He went to „. ^ ^ / , . , . , . Richardson. Charterhouse, and was apprenticed in 1706 to a printer, whose daughter he afterwards married. After setting up for himself he became very prosperous, had a house in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, and another, first at North End, then at Parson's Green, was Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and King's Printer in 1761. A year later he died of apoplexy. He was contented for many years to print books without writing them, and he was past fifty when a commission or suggestion from two well-known London pub- lishers, Rivington and Osborne, for a sort of Model Leitcrn, Tlie Adventures of an Atom. His health, between hard work ami the hard living then usual, broke down early, and making a second visit to Italy, he died at Leghorn in October 1771. Smollett's miscellaneous work, thougli almost always com]K'tenl, 1 Smollett's plays and poems are seldom rcprinlt-d with llic numerous editions of his novels, but may be found in Chalmers ; his History is on all the stalls ; his criticisms and miscellaneous works have never been, and are never likely to be, collected in full. The Travels, which are worth reading, have been more than once reprinted. 6o6 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix and sometimes much more, need not detain us ; his novels, excellent in themselves, are of the highest historical importance. It has been said that he fell back on the adventure-scheme. Plot he hardly attempted ; and even, as regards incident, he probably, as Thackeray says, " did not invent much," his own varied experiences and his sharp eye for humorous character giving him abundant material. In Roderick Random he uses his naval experiences, and perhaps others, to furnish forth the picture of a young Scotchman, arrogant, un- scrupulous, and not too amiable, but bold and ready enough ; in Peregrine Pickle he gives that of a spendthrift scapegrace, heir to wealth; in Fathom he draws a professional chevalier d''industrie. The strange fancy which made him attempt a sort of " New Quixote" in Sir Lancelot Greaves has seldom been regarded as happy, either in inception or in result; but in Humphrey Clinker we have the very best of all his works. It is written in the letter form, the scenes and humours of many places in England and Scotland are rendered with admirable picturesqueness, while the book has seldom been excelled for humorous character of the broad and farcical kind. Matthew Bramble, the testy hypochondriac squire who is at heart one of the best of men, and in head not one of the foolishest ; his sour-visaged and greedy sister Tabitha; her maid Winifred Jenkins, who has learnt the art of grotesque misspelling from Swift's Mrs. Harris, and has improved upon the teaching ; the Scotch soldier of fortune, Lisma- hago, — these are among the capital figures of English fiction, as in the earlier books are the Welsh surgeon's mate Morgan, Commodore Trunnion, and others. Besides this conception of humorous if somewhat rough character, and a remarkable faculty of drawing interiors which accompanies it, and in which he perhaps even excels Fielding, Smollett made two very important contributions to the English novel. The first was the delineation of national types in which he, almost for the first time, reduced and improved the stock exaggerations of the stage to a human and artistic temper. The second, not less important, was the introduction, under proper limitations, of the professional interest. He had, though less of universality than Fielding, yet enough of it to be successful with types in which he had only observation, not experiment, to guide him, but he was naturally most fortunate with what he knew from experience, sailors and " medical gentlemen." Until his time the sailor had been drawn almost entirely from the outside in English literature. Smollett first gives him to us in his habit as he lived, and long continued to live. To these great merits must be added one or two drawbacks — a hardness and roughness of tone approaching ferocity, and not more distinguished from the some- what epicene temper of Richardson than from the manly but CHAP. II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 607 kindly spirit of Fielding, and an extreme coarseness of imagery and language — a coarseness which can hardly be called immoral, but which is sometimes positively revolting. One element, however, or one special commixture of elements, remained to be added in fiction, and then (if we except such minor varieties as the terror-novel to be handled shortly) it remained with no important addition or progress until the day of Scott and Miss Austen within the present century. This was "^""' supplied, that the three kingdoms might be separately and proportion- ately represented, by Laurence Sterne,^ an Irishman by birth at least, and something of an Irishman in temperament. The Sternes were an East-Anglian family which, after a member became Archbishop of York in the seventeenth century, was chiefly connected with York- shire. Laurence was the son of Roger Sterne, a captain in the army, who was the younger son of Simon Sterne of EIrington, third ' son of the Archbishop, and he was born at Clonmell, where his father was quartered, in 17 13, was educated at Halifax, and went thence to Jesus College, Cambridge, of which, many years before, the Arch- bishop had been Master. He took his degree in 1736, and orders soon afterwards, receiving the livings of Sutton and Stillington as well as minor preferment in York chapter. He married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741. and for some twenty years seems to have felt, or at any rate indulged, no literary ambition. But on New Year's Day 1760 there appeared in York and London the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Cent. It was immediately popular, it made its author a lion in the capital, and it turned his attention definitely to literary work, society, and foreign travel. During the remaining nine years of his life he continued Tristram Shandy at intervals, issued some volumes of Sermons, travelled and resided abroad, and embodied some of the results of this travel in A Senti- mental four ney. This la.st appeared only just before his death, after .some previous escapes from lung disease, on i8th March 1768. Sterne's work — his Sermons even to some degree, his two novels to a much greater — is the most deliberately and ostentatiously eccentric in the higher ranges of English literature ; and being .so, contains an element of mere trick, which inevitably impairs its value. If a man will not, and does not, produce his effects without such mechanical devices as continual dashes, stars, points, and stopped sentences, even blank pages, blackened pages, marlilcd pages, and the like, he must lay his account with the charge that he cannot 1 The standard edition of Sterne — novels, sermons, and not quite complete letters — is in 10 vols. The work other than the novels has been often otnittod in reprints; but, as in the case of Holding, the present writer has arranged a selection from it in 2 vols. (London, 1894). 6o8 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix produce them without such apparatus. The charge, however, is in Sterne's case unjust; for though the "clothes-philosophy" of his style is fantastically adjusted, there is a real body both of style and of matter beneath. Tristram Shandy, the pretended history of a personage who rarely appears, is, in fact, a " rigmarole " of partly original, partly borrowed, humour, arranged in the style which the French z'aSS. fatrasie, and of which Rabelais' great books are the most familiar, though not quite the normal, type. Although Tristram himself is the shadow of a shade, Sterne manages to present the most vivid character- pictures of his father, Walter Shandy, and his Uncle Toby (the latter the author's most famous, if not his greatest, creation), together with others, not much less achieved, of Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby's servant and comrade in the Marlborough wars, Mrs. Shandy, Widow Wadman, Dr. Slop, and others. And he thus gives a real novel-substance to a book which could otherwise hardly pretend to the title of novel at all. The Sentunenial Journey, a pretended (and no doubt partly real) autobiographic account of a journey through France to the Italian frontier, is planned on no very different general principle, and has its own medallions of character, though they are less elaborately worked and less closely grouped- Both books depend for their literary effect on a large number of means — out-of-the-way reading, of which Sterne availed himself with a freedom which has brought upon him the charge of plagiarism ; very real though occasionally exaggerated pathos ; a curiously fertile though not extremely varied fancy ; and a considerable indul- gence, not in coarseness of the Smollettian kind, but in indecent hint and innuendo. But their main appeal lies in two things — a kind of humour which, though sometimes artificial and seldom reaching the massive and yet mobile humanity of Fielding, has a singular trick of grace, and a really intimate knowledge of human nature, combined and contrasted with a less natural quality, to which France at the time gave the name of " Sensibility " and England that of " Senti- ment." It was this last which gave Sterne his immediate popularity, though perhaps for a generation or two past that popularity has been rather endangered by it ; and it is still this which gives him his most distinct place, though not his greatest value, in literary history. For it, like the prominence of a less definite kind of the same quality in Richardson, shows the reaction from the rather excessive hardness and prosaic character of the earlier decades. This reaction was not yet directed in the right way. It was still powdered and patched, deliberate, artificial, fashionable. It bore to true passion very much the same relation which the mannerism of Ossian bore to true romance, and Strawberry Hill Gothic to real Pointed architecture. CHAP. II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 609 It was theatrical and mawkish ; it sometimes toppled over into the ludicrous, or the disgusting, or both. But it shows at worst a blind groping after something that could touch the heart as well as amuse the head. Perhaps it was the popularity of Richardson and Fielding, as early as the first years of the fifth decade of the century, but more probably the aura or prevalent tendency of general thought, which brought about a great expansion and multiplication of the novel about 1750.1 Few of the minor results of this noJeh°[s retain much reputation even ' with students of the subject, and most are not over-accessible. Some of them have obtained an additional prop from the mention and criticism of Lady Mary {vide supra et infra). We have mentioned Mrs. Haywood's books. Francis Coventry's Povtpey the Little (1751) was the most amusing, as Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760) was the most powerful, of a kind of personal fiction whereof a memorable example survives in the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, inserted (one regrets to .say for money) by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle, and doubtless rewritten by him from the materials of the beautiful and liberal Viscountess Vane. The too notorious Dr. Dodd attempted to combine Sterne and Smollett, and succeeded in combining the most objectionable parts of each without any of their genius, in The Sisters; Dr. Hawkesworth followed Dr. Johnson with steps of his usual inequality in Almoran and Hatnet (1761). But the most interesting work in fiction of the middle of the century is to be found in two books, eccentric in more senses than one, fohti B uncle (1750-66) and The Fool of Quality (1766-70). The first was the work, though by no means the only work, of a curious Irishman named Thomas Amory, who was born in 1691 and died in 1788, who assures us that he was intimate with Swift, and on whom it would be extremely interesting to have Swift's opinion. Amory began in 1755, with a book, not improbably composed on French models and called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. But this, though interesting, pales before the Life of John Liuncle, Esq. The hero is an enthusiastic Unitarian, the husband of seven wives of surpassing beauty, a man of letters in a way, a man of science, and distinctly marked witli the madness which no doubt existed in a temperate and intangible form in liis 1 Most of the books mentioned from tliis point to the end of the cluijiter will be foimd in the aliovc-nott'd collection of Harrison, or in .Scott's H.illanlyne novels, sometimes in both. The latti-r, in ten capacious but unwieldy volumes, contains all the four great novelists (includin^j Smolleil'!^ translations), the Adventures of a Guinea, Johnson's, Walpole's, and CJolilsmith's novels, Mackenzie, Bage, Mis. RadclilTe, Gulliver's Travels, Cumberland's Henry, and Clara Reeve's Old English Baron. 2R 6io MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix creator. The book, which is entirely sui generis, fascinated Hazlitt, and has been reprinted, but never widely read. A much more respectable and an almost equally interesting book, though a worse novel, seeing that it attempts innumerable things which the novel cannot manage, is The Fool of Quality. The author of this, Henry Brooke, was like Amory an Irishman, was born in County Cavan in 1703, and died at Dublin in 1783. He was, also like Amory, mad, and died so. He had money, education, and abundant ability, while in his earlier manhood he was familiar with the best literary society of London. • In 1735 ^e published a poem called Universal Boiitity, which is worth notice, though it has been too highly praised; four years later a play, Gustavus Vasa. The Fool of Quality, or The Adventures of Henry, Earl of Morland, is a wholly unpractical book and a chaotic history, but admirably written, full of shrewdness and wit, and of a singularly chivalrous tone. Nor must we leave out the really exquisite Peter IVilkins, of an almost unknown author, Robert Paltock, which appeared in 1751. In conception it was a sort of following of Gulliver, but Paltock has little satire and no misanthropy, and the charm of his book, which once was a boys' book, and now delights some men, depends on his ingenious wonders, and on the character of the flying girl Youwarkee, the only heroine (except Fielding's) of the eighteenth-century novel who has very distinct charm. The contributions of Johnson and Goldsmith to the novel will be best mentioned with their other work. But the history, as we can give it here, of eighteenth-century fiction proper is incomplete without ,„ , , a notice of the curious terror-novel which, anticipated by Horace Walpole, had its special time in the last decade of the century, the work of Fanny Burney, that of Mackenzie, and some others. Walpole himself will occupy us later. The incongruity of most of his work and character with the Castle of Otranto has always attracted and puzzled critics ; nor is there perhaps any better explanation than that the Castle, momentous as its example proved, was mainly an accident of that half-understood devotion to "the Gothick " which was common at the time (1764), and of which Walpole as a dilettante, if not as a sincere disciple, was one of the chief Eng- lish exponents. The story is a clumsy one, and its wonders are perpetually hovering on the verge of the burlesque. But its influence, though not immediate, was exceedingly great. Its nearest successor, the Old English Baron of Clara Reeve in 1777, imitated rather Walpole's Gothicism than his ghostliness. Nor can the extremely remarkable and almost isolated novelette of Vathek (1783) be set down to Walpolian influence though it undoubtedly did exemplify certain general tendencies of the day. CHAP. II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 6ir Its author. William Beckford, was the son of a rather prominent politician in the City of London, and inherited very great wealth. He travelled a good deal, leaving much later literary memorials of his travels ; he collected books ; he built two gorgeous palaces, one in England, at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and another in Portugal, at Cintra ; and he in many respects was, and perhaps deliberately aimed at being, the ideal English "milord" of continental fancy — rich, eccentric, morose, generous at times, and devoted to his own whimsical will. Such a character is generally contemptible in reality, but Beckford possessed very great intellectual ability, and Vatliek stands alone. Its debts to the old Oriental tale are more apparent than real , those to the fantastic satirical romance of Voltaire, though larger, do not impair its main originality ; and a singular gust is imparted to its picture of unbridled power and unlimited desire by the remembrance that the author himself was, in not such a very small way, the insatiable voluptuary he draws. The picture of the Hall of Eblis at the end has no superior in a certain slightly theatrical, but still real, kind of sombre magnificence, and the heroine Nouronihar is great. Mrs. Radcliffe (Anne Ward) — who was born in 1764, and did not die till 1822, but who published nothing after the beginning of the nineteenth century, though soAie work of hers appeared post- humously — produced in the course of a few years a series ^^^ Radcliffe of elaborate and extremely popular work, which has not retained its vitality so well as has Vathek — The Castles of AtJilin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), the celebrated Mysteries of Utiolpho (i795)' ^"d The Italian (1797) Mrs. Radcliffe is prodigal of the mysteries which figure in the title of her most famous work, of castles and forests, of secret passages and black veils ; but her great peculiarity is the con- stant suggestion of supernatural interferences, which conscientious scruple, or eighteenth-century rationalism, or a mere sense of art, as constantly leads her to explain by natural causes. Matthew Lewi.s, her successor, and (though he denied it) pretty certainly her imitator, had no such scruples, and in his notorious A/on/: and other stories and dramas simply lavished ghosts and demons. This department of the novel produced, unless ^^^.^ yathek be ranked in it, nothing of very high literary value, but its popularity was immense, and it probably did sonic real good by enlarging the sphere and quickening the fancy of the novelist. There are more than a few names of note who might be criticised if space permitted, and who must at any rate be mentioned. Henry Mackenzie (1745-J831)! ^^'^'o followed Sterne in sentiment, though 612 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix not in other ways, drew floods of tears with The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World, and fulia de Rotibigne ; the political philosopher Godwin, who will reappear, produced, besides his still famous Caleb Williams (1794), other novels, St. Leon {\yc)()), Fleet- wood, Mandeville, etc.; Holcroft the dramatist (i 745-1 809) gave Alwyn, Hugh Trevor, and especially Anna St. Ives (1792) ; Robert Bage, a freethinking Quaker and a man of business, wrote no less than six fictions, some of them of great length ; Mrs. Inchbald (1753- 1821), a beauty, an actress, a dramatist, and a novelist, gave to her Simple Story a certain charm; Hannah More (1745-1833), who was petted by Johnson in her youth, and petted the child Macaulay in her age, wrote Coelebs in Search of a Wife, a moral novel not untinged with social satire. The Zeluco of Dr. John Moore (1719-1802) is not insignificant. But the most important, though far from the most gifted, novelist of the latter years of the century was Frances Burney (1752^1840), the daughter of a historian of music, who was the intimate friend of Johnson and most of the men of letters of his time, a pet of the great lexicographer and of the society of the Thrales, for some time a member of the household of Queen Charlotte, and then the wife of a French refugee. From him she took the name Madame D'Arblay, by which she is more commonly known as a diarist, though almost the whole of that delightful part of her work deals with her maiden years. Miss Burney wrote in Evelina (1778) a not very well-arranged but extremely lively picture of the entrance of a young girl into society; in Cecilia (1781) a much more ambitious and regular but less fresh story of love and family pride. Her later novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814), were, the former a partial, the latter a complete, failure. Her importance, however, consists in the fact that, at any rate in youth, she had a singular knack of catching the tone and manners of ordinary and usual society, and that by transferring these to her two first books she showed a way which all novelists have followed since. Her great predecessors of the middle of the century had not quite done this. Some of the stock ingredients of the older novel are indeed thrown in for Evelina's benefit, — the discovery of parentage, the bold attempts of unscrupulous lovers, etc., — but they are of no real importance in the story, which draws its entire actual interest from the faithful presentation of the most possible, probable, and ordinary events and characters. chaptp:r III JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS Writers-of-all-work — Johnson's life — His reputation — Work — And style- Goldsmith — His verse — His prose — Other essayists The establishment of the calling of man of letters as an irregular profession, and a regular means of livelihood, almost necessarily brought with it the devotion of the man of letters himself to any and every form of literature for which there was a public demand. Addison was enabled by his preferments to ^ai"'"ork!' confine himself mainly to the essay — the new popular form of the time — and to the old popular form, the drama ; and Pope's paternal means, with the profits of the Homer, in the same way enabled him to be nothing but a poet. But the more evil days of the central decades necessitated a greater distribution of talent. The essay, succeeded though not ousted by the novel, continued to be the most strictly popular form of writing. But the drama had not ceased to be the most easily profitable — a man might throughout the eighteenth century make three or four hundred pounds much more readily by dramatic writing than by any other kind. The poem, at least of the didactic kind dear to the time, continued to be the most dignified — the novice who, as most novices generously do, aspired to the praise as well as the pay, must still attempt a poem. And lastly, there was an ever-widening demand for those kinds of writing which may be hack- work or something more, according to the abilities and dispositions of their executants — for translation, historical and miscellaneous compilation, popular science. It became, therefore, almost ncccssar}' on the one hand, and comparatively easy on the other, for the denizen of "Grub Street " — that partly real, partly imaginary, wholly debatable abode of the average author from .somewhat before 1725 to considerably after 1775 — to be everything by turns and nothing long. The most distinguished members by far of the class were Johnson and Goldsmith, and it has therefore .seemed desirable to notice all their work together here. But since perhaps their best, 6i4 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix and certainly their most congenial, work partook of the essay kind, they have been set at the head of the essayist class more particularly. Samuel Johnson ^ was born at Lichfield on i8th September 1709. He was the son of a bookseller, and therefore had ample and early opportunity to become acquainted with books. And his education, though fitful, was sufficient. After private schooling, he ^°'li"e°"'^ was able to go to Pembroke College, Oxford, in his twentieth year, but his father, who, though of some posi- tion among his townsmen, had never been prosperous, died, and in 1 73 1 Johnson, whose actual career at the University was spoilt by his poverty, had to leave without a degree. For a time he tried school- mastering — the almost invariable refuge of the destitute with literary tendencies. But he had no degree, his temper was unaccommodating, and his strange physical defects — very bad sight, convulsive move- ments, and other scrofulous symptoms — were about the worst possible equipment for the task. In his six-and-twentieth year he married a widow some twenty years his senior (with a little money, but not for it, for he was dotingly fond of her), and set up a private academy. But it was not successful, and in 1737 he went to London with his pupil Garrick. Few details of his life for many years are known, for Boswell, his biographer later, could get at little. What is certain is that he suffered all the pangs and rebuffs of poverty ; what is not quite so certain is whether his curious fitful indolence and his irritable temper had not more to do with this than sheer " inauspicious stars." Before coming to London he had translated Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia; a year after he came he was a regular contributor to Cave's GentlemafC s Magazine, for which, from 1740 to 1743, he wrote half-real, half- imaginary debates in Parliament. In 1738 he had attracted the attention of Pope by publishing London, an imitation of Juvenal, which he was far to surpass later by another of the same kind, the sad and splendid Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). In 1747 he planned, and persuaded the booksellers to adopt, the scheme of his famous Dictionary, which was completed in eight years, and for which he received fifteen hundred pounds, a sum not inconsiderable in itself, and large for the time, but naturally amounting to little more than starvation wages when the expenses were deducted, and the time of composition taken in. In 1750, having already, in ways not entirely com- prehensible, attained a high literary reputation, he issued the Rambler in the revived Spectator vein, and when he had finished it his wife died, never to be forgotten. Later he followed the Rambler with the Idler (not separately published), and wrote, to pay the expenses of his 1 The best complete edition of Johnson is that of the " Oxford Classics," pub« lished three-quarters of a century ago. CH. Ill JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 615 mother's funeral, the tale of Rasselas (1759), less a novel than a grave satire on human life. At last, in the new reign (1762), he received a pension of three hundred a year, which to him was wealth. The last twenty-two years of his life are better known, and were happier, owing to his friendship with the Thrales and Boswell, his clubs, and his position as literary dictator. But he wrote little, his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotlatid (1774), an agreeable book, with one immortal passage, and his admirable Lives of the Poets (1779-81) being the chief exceptions. His health, which had never been good, gave him some respite in early old age, but became worse again later, and after suffering from paralysis, dropsy, and asthma, he died on 13th December 1784, being buried in Westminster Abbey, and commemorated by a monument in St. Paul's. During the later part of his lifetime, Johnson was undoubtedly regarded as a sort of unofficial head of English literature, and also as a great philosopher and sage ; while the reaction and oblivion which so often follow in such cases were pre- vented by the singular charms of BoswelFs Life (see last reputation, chapter of this Book). But the Romantic school bitterly disliked Johnson's literary principles and practice, though not his political and religious theories, while these latter have become unpopular since. It has thus been usual during the greater part of the present century to extol Johnson's moral character, and feel or affect delight in his biography, while assigning him no high place as a writer. It is true that with the not quite certain exception of the Lives of the Poets, Johnson can claim no single work uniting bulk with value of matter and originality of form. His work in verse is very small, and though all of it is scholarly and some elegant, it is universally composed in obedience to a very narrow and jejune theory of English versification and English poetics generally. ^ Nothing perhaps but the beautiful epitaph on his friend Levett. and the magnificent statement of his religious pessimism in the I'anity of Human Wishes, distinctly transcends mediocrity. His tragedy of Ire7ie is a not very good example of an entirely artificial and lifeless kind. Although his essays have been oftener under- than over- valued of late, they are far from original in conception, and tliose at least of the Rambler are too often injured by the cxces- ^^^^^ sively stiff and cumbrous style which has been rather unjustly identified witli Johnson's manner of writing generally. His Dictionary, though a wonderful monument of enterprise and labour, and though containing many acute and some witty definitions, is, as he well knew himself, but "drudgery," and his political pamplilels, though iThe poems on the Seasons are well worth study as instances of this. But it is fair to say that their authorship is not quite certain. 6i6 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix forcible and sensible, and his Journey to the Hebrides, though inter- esting, suffer also from "Johnsonese." His often beautiful prayers and meditations, his occasional work in inscriptions and the like, are, as well as the Dictionary, not easily classifiable literature, though, like that, they testify to the literary saturation of his mind and thought. Rasselas, an admirable though a mannered composition, and perhaps the chief document for Johnson's practical though melan- choly wisdom, must always underlie the objection that it holds itself out as a story, but has really no story to tell, nor even (save in Imlac, who is partly Johnson) any character to bring out. It is extremely fortunate that very late, and as it were acciden- tally, he was induced to leave an adequate and permanent monument of his powers in the Lives of the Poets. In these literary biographies, of which long before he had given an example in the Life of Savage, he practically struck into a new development of the essay — one to which Dryden had sometimes come near, and which he would have carried out with surpassing excellence had the time been ripe, but which had not been actually anticipated by any. It is no matter that Johnson's standards and view-points are extravagantly and exclusively of his time, .so that occasionally — the cases of Milton and Gray are the chief — he falls into critical errors almost incomprehensible except from the historic side. Even these extravagances fi.x the critical creed of the day for us in an inestimable fashion, while in the great bulk of the Lives this criticism does no harm, being duly adjusted to the subjects. Johnson's estimate of Chaucer doubtless would have been, as his Rambler remarks on Spenser actually are, worthless, except as a curiosity. But of Dryden, of Pope, and of the numerous minor poets of their time and his, he could speak with a competently adjusted theory, with admirable literary knowledge and shrewdness, and with a huge store of literary tradition which his long and conver- sation-loving life had accumulated, and which would have been lost for us had he not written. But it would be unjust to limit Johnson's literary value to this book, or even to this plus the Vanity of Htanan Wishes, Rasselas, and the best of his essays. It was far more extensive, and the above referred to Johnsonese, the "great-whale" style And style. , • , ^ , , . , ... , , 1 1 which Goldsmith so wittily reprehended, was only an exaggeration of its good influence. Of the alternate fashions of prose which we have already surveyed in some instances, and shall survey in more, the dangers are also alternate. The ornate and fanciful style tends to the florid and the extravagant, and needs to be restrained and tamed ; the plain style tends to the slipshod and jejune, and needs to be raised and inspired. We have seen how, during the earlier prevalence of this latter, Addison and Swift came CH. Ill JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 617 to its rescue from the mere colloquialism which distinguishes writers like L'Estrange. So Johnson in its later came (as in different ways did Gibbon and Burke) to its rescue from the jejuneness and lack of colour which distinguish writers like Middleton. His means may not have been perfect. His Latinising (not im- probably helped by some early work of his on Sir Thomas Browne), his somewhat ponderous swing of balanced phrase, his too mechanical antithesis, lie open to much easy ridicule and to some just censure. But even his more pompous and rhetorical style has nobility and dignity, while the vigorous conversational directness which he always maintained in speech, and by no means neglected wliolly in writing, served to preserve it from mere stilted bombast. And as this characteristic pervades all his prose work, all his prose work possesses, and to the true historic judgment will always retain, interest and value accordingly. As a poet he can only rely on a few trifles, playful or pathetic, and on the gorgeous declamation, rising to the level of true verse-eloquence, of The Vanity of Human Wishes. Oliver Goldsmith — "Dr. Minor" to Johnson's *• Ur. Major," a curious parallel, complement, and twin, almost as conventional in theory, but with wider and sweeter humanity, less massive in thought as in form, but more mobile, with less wisdom and ^, , , _ , . ' , Goldsmith. conduct, but far more grace, fineness, and range — was bom at or near Pallasmore, in County Longford, on loth November 1728. The same neighbourhood, though not the same county, furnished the village of Lissoy, in West Meath, which has been identified as the suggesting, rather than the actual, scene of The Deserted Village. His father, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland (as was afterwards the brother to whom he dedicated The Traveller), was curate of both places. Oliver was educated at various schools and at Trinity College, Dublin, which, however, had not much better success with him as a student than it had had with Swift. He succeeded in taking, his degree, but failed to qualify for orders, and after other failures went to Edinburgh to study physic. But after two years his restlessness sent him abroad, nominally to continue his studies at Leyden and Paris, really, it seems, to wander about the Continent, whence he returned with no money, some useful and stimulating experiences, and an exceedingly dubious degree of Baclielor of .Medicine in the University of Louvain, or of Padua, or perliaps of Weissnichtwo, on the strength of which he was " Dr. Goldsmith " ever afterwards and sometimes attempted to practise. On his return he became an usher, a printer's reader, a reviewer, and hack to Giitfiths the publisher. At last, in 1759, he attracted some attention hy liis Enquiry iuto the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, an e.xtraordinary 6i8 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix compound of good writing, bad taste, ignorance, mother-wit, and literary originality. He started The Bee, a short-lived periodical containing the earlier forms of some of his best essay-work, and wrote for divers others (it was in Newbery's Public Ledger that the " Chinese Letters," which became The Citizen of the World, first appeared). The exact date and origin of The Vicar of Wakefield form a curious bibliographical puzzle, for though not published till later, it had probably been finished by 1762. He also did, at all times of his life, a great amount of hackwork, at first anonymous and wretchedly paid, afterwards signed and very well rewarded, though his incurable thriftlessness always kept him in difficulties. The Traveller, which, small as it is, gave him a very high reputation, appeared in 1 764 ; The Vicar of Wakefield two years later ; and a third achievement in a third line, the comedy of The Good-natured Man, two years later still ; while after a similar interval The Deserted Village ratified his poetical, and in three more She Stoops to Conquer his dramatic, position. He died in April 1774 of fever, much in debt and disturbed in mind, but beloved and lamented by all the best and greatest men of his day. His foibles were numerous. The odd contradictions of Goldsmith's mind and temper have been a favourite subject with biographers and essayists. Garrick's femous line — He wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll — seems to have been generally justified, though occasionally Goldsmith was more than a match for his society. His work — not merely his hack compilations — abounds in the most ludicrous blunders and evidences of ignorance ; his critical faculties were utterly haphazard. As for moral traits, though the idleness of his youth certainly did not characterise his manhood, and though there is not much proof that after he became industrious he was, as he certainly was earlier, a gambler, he had none of the prudential virtues. With an income probably at least three times as large as Johnson's ever was, he died two thousand pounds in debt. But much of this seems to have been due to his generosity to others — a quality which, with his general kindliness of heart, has never been denied. And in literature he was, as Johnson himself emphatically said, "a very great man." His plays had best be left to give some savour and substance to that chapter on eighteenth-century drama, which, but for him and for Sheridan, would be indeed a thin thing; the rest of his work may be noticed here. The poetical part is surprisingly small in bulk, but full of quality, though not always of strictly poetical quality. It consists of The Traveller and The Deserted Village, each of rather more than 400 CH. Ill JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 619 lines ; of the pretty but not very strong ballad of The Hermit, better known as '• Edwin and Angelina '' ; of the two capital light poems in swinging anapaest, The Haunch of Venison and Re- taliation; of a quite unimportant Oratorio; and of a ^'^^^■■"• few pages of miscellaneous verse, the best things of which are the quaint yk-w d' esprit, ''The Description of an Author's Bed-chamber," '• The Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog," the famous Stanzas on Woman — "When lovely woman stoops to folly," the pathetic-humorous epitaph on Ned Purdon, and the sardonic elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize. This latter division, especially with the brilliant Retaliation, a string of consummate repartees on his mentors of the Club {except Johnson), displays, with the additional zest of verse, the qualities which we shall note more fully in Goldsmith's prose. His two serious and, so to speak, ''full-dress" poems are a curious contrast. It is certain that they enjoyed the benefit of Johnson's criticism, and not improbable that they underwent rehandling from him ; and they show not merely that rigid adherence to the older couplet as vehicle which he preferred, but a great similarity to his general ways of thought. They e.xcel the London and The Vanity of Hianan Wishes as much in grace, variety, and sense of nature as they fall short of the Vanity in grandeur and force ; but they are not in their own fashion devoid either of force or of grandeur. They were the last really great work of the artificial- conventional school of verse, and not far from its greatest. In prose-writing, when he did not endeavour to be critical of literature, Goldsmith was exposed to few disadvantages by his time and school, and he brought extraordinary gifts of his own. In the first place, he could be almost as sentimental as Sterne and even more pathetic, without Sterne's approaches '^ v^o'^- either to the maudlin or the grotesque. In the second place, he iiad a quite miraculous gift of seizing, in the re-creative fashion, touches and traits in humanity — a gift shared by no one else in his centurv save Fielding, and of a kind quite different from Fielding's. Lastly, and for the purposes of literature most important of all, he had the gift of an altogether charming style, which is impossible to analyse and very difficult even to describe vaguely ; so tiiat it has never been successfully imitated, though Thackeray has, by a different route, some- times reached very similar effects. Goldsmith put a little of this style in his merest hack com|)ila- fions, but he used it to the best effect partly in scattered essay productions loosely following the Spectator model, partly in The Vicar of IVakefeld, and partly in the book called The Citizen of the World. The ostensible scliemc of this last follows Montcs(|uicu and many others so as to satirise English .society by representing it as it aiij)e.irs to an Oriental. This scheme as .such was a liitlc stale; it had been 620 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix used again and again from Tom Brown downwards, nor were Goldsmith's powers of philosophic reflection or of social satire exactly those required for it. But in his hands it served as the opportunity for the creation and working out of the most delightfully live figures, of whom the shabby Beau Tibbs is only the most famous and hardly the best. Perhaps his most wonderful thing is the " Reverie at the Boar's Head," which, though some of it is cut-and-dried political or religious polemic, is unique in the work of the eighteenth century outside Swift, and possesses an easy lambent light of fancy which the fierce blaze of Swift's genius rarely allowed him to give. It was in the handling of the Essay — for all his important prose work really belongs to this class, even the Vicar having strong inclina- tions thereto — that Goldsmith's greatest importance in the history of English prose literature consists. Johnson had not carried the scheme or scope of his Ramblers and Idlers much, if at all, beyond the Steele-Addison model ; and though the contemporary revivers of this, who will presently be noticed, modernised the subjects a little, they did not much alter the style. But Goldsmith holds out a hand to Leigh Hunt on one side as he does to Steele on the other in point of selection of subjects and mode of treatment ; while he far excels both in that quintessential quality of style which is of more supreme importance in the Essay than anywhere else. The greatest of all miscellaneous writers on the lighter side in the eighteenth century, as Johnson is the greatest of its miscellaneous writers on the more serious — this is a title which Goldsmith cannot be grudged or denied ; and when it is remembered that he was also one of its best tale-tellers, the best, with only one possible rival, of its dramatists, and one of the most noteworthy of its poets, Johnson's verdict will hardly be thought undeserved. The Rambler and at least the earlier essays of Goldsmith were part of a second blossoming of the periodical or occasional essay, which appeared about the middle of the century, and continued with intervals to the very eve of the appearance of the essayists. "^^^^ reviews and magazines of the modern kind. There had indeed been things of the sort in the thirty years between the last attempts of Addison and Steele and the first of Johnson, but they had had little or no interest save such as is derived from the already mentioned fact that Fielding had a hand in some of them. The most noticeable except the Rambler and the Adventurer (a sort of imitation Rambler, edited by Hawkesworth, the great ape of Johnson, and contributed to by Johnson himself) was the World, which appeared between 1753 and 1756. This is noteworthy, because an attempt was made to make it a distinct "journal of CH. Ill JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, AND THE LATER ESSAYISTS 621 society." The editor, Edward Moore, was a man of letters of some ability, who played the main part of '-Adam FitzAdam "— the eidolon who, according to the etiquette of the scheme, was supposed to produce the paper — very fairly. Its interest for us consists in the fact that among the contributors were some of the very chief of those men of fashion, Chesterfield, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, Han- bury Williams, who at the time affected literature. It was in the World, for instance, that Chesterfield's well-meant, and in recent days rather unfairly treated, attempt to do a good turn to Johnson's Dictionary appeared, and drew from the nettled lexicographer the famous letter, which, though a magnificent piece of English, is not perhaps as magnanimous, or even as just, as it is magnificent. Soon after the World appeared, with a less brilliant staff, but still written "by gentlemen for gentlemen," the Connoisseur of Colman the Elder and Bonnel Thornton, where the eidolon was '"Mr. Town," and where Cowper produced the few examples of literature that we have from him before his terrible ailment and his long abstinence from writing. Another long gap, with nothing of importance except (and this is of very great importance) the work of Goldsmith, brings us to the two interesting periodicals, the Mirror (1779-80) and the Lounger (1785-87), issued at Edinburgh, not in London, by Henry Mackenzie, the '• Man of Feeling " {vide supra), and a knot of Scot- tish wits, lawyers, and literati generally. These periodicals give the usual direct and indirect information on costume, the manners of society, and the like, some vivid sketches of the Pitt and Fox struggle, some valuable literary criticism (Mackenzie's review of Burns, for instance), some interesting details about " nabobs," and, above all, numerous evidences of the growing taste for the picturesque. In the very last attempts to carry out the Spectator tradition, that have attained a sort of shelter from oblivion in the cavern of the British Essayists,'^ the Observer of Cumberland, and the Looker On of a clergyman named Roberts, there is little of interest except the proof that the form was really dead, though two respectable persons were trying to galvani.se it. The actual Essay was I)efore many years were over to break fresh ground in every direction, and with the novel to become the distinguishing form of the literature of the nineteenth century. But in this particular shape it had done its work. 1 It has been thought sufficient to confine notice here to the contents of llie standard collection of /Iritish Essayists liy Ciialmers (45 vols. 1808), ihoiigii it does not contain even the last and minor essays of Steele and Addison, or those of Fielding, much less the numerous attempts of less famous persons in the kind throughout the century. CHAPTER IV THE GRAVER PROSE Lateness of history in English — Hume — Robertson — Minors — Gibbon — The Autobiography — The Decline and Fall — His style — Burke — His rhetorical supremacy — Qualities of his style and method — Theology and philosophy — Warburton — Paley — Adam Smith — Godwin — His importance and position Although the separation of this chapter from the last may seem questionable, inasmuch as most things that Johnson at least wrote were grave, and as Goldsmith wrote copiously what he at least called history, there is sufficient justification for it in the fact that the Essay always and properly tends to lightness, to popular treatment, and that the historical school of the time is sufficiently important to have the principal place in a chapter which may also have other constituents. We may pass from it, taking the great figure of Burke as a point of junction, through writers on political philosophy to those on philoso- phy proper, and may also include the (for us and at this time) less important section of theology. The development of historical writing, as apart from mere chron- icling, is necessarily somewhat late, but it was later in England than in any other country. At the close of the seventeenth century Lateness of Raleigh, Knolles, and Clarendon stood practically alone history in jn English literature (nor was Clarendon yet printed) as historians who united bulk of work to historical sense and merit of literary style. Even of these Raleigh is chiefly qualified by the beauty of his purple patches. Nor for some time after the beginning of the eighteenth century itself was there much improve- ment. But towards the middle of it remarkable changes were made by two Scottish scholars, Hume and Robertson, while towards the end the greatest historian in every sense that England has yet seen arose in Gibbon. David Hume belongs to this chapter by a double title as philos- opher and as historian, while he might almost have appeared in the last as essayist. He was born at Edinburgh in 171 1, his father 622 CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 623 being of the border clan of Home or Hume, and a Berwickshire laird ; but David was not the eldest son. He went to the University of his native town, tried law, tried commerce in England, but liked neither, and had just sufficient means to enable "™^" him to fall back on private study. It was after a visit to France that he published (in 1739) his remarkable Treatise of Hitman Nature, and he followed it up two or three years later with Essays Moral and Political. But he still had no fixed employment, and for some years he tried tutorships, secretaryships, and the like. He competed in vain for more than one professorship in the Scottish Universities, but was appointed Keeper of the Advocates' Library. Before this he had published (1748) an Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and (1751) an Enquiry into the Principles of Morals. These later books were in some sort refashionings of the earlier. It was not till 1754 that he began his celebrated History of England m\.\\tvMAd\t by a volume on the two first Stuarts, which he afterwards extended forward to the Revolution and backward to the beginnings. The whole took eight years to finish. He also publislied Dissertations in 1762, and some posthumous work has to be added. His later years were as prosperous as his earlier had been uncertain. In 1763 he was made Secretary of Legation in Paris, where he was quite at home, and three years later he became Under Secretary for the Home Department. He died in Edinburgh (1776). Hume was an amiable and friendly person, with some slight foibles of vanity and epicure- anism. His religious scepticism, which was at least as much a fashion of his time as it was necessarily connected with his philo- sophical views, does not directly concern us here. This sceptical tendency, however, applied in other direction.s, made him very important in philosophy and history, while his gifts of expression as applied to these two subjects made him at least equally important in literature. In philosophy he applied his criti- cism to the furthering of the Lockian system, not in the idealist- constructive direction of Berkeley, but in an almost wliolly destructive way, abolishing the connection of cause and effect in favour of mere sequence, substituting a bare chain of thoughts for an independently thinking mind, and reducing everything to sensation; in history he applied himself to the dissolution of the Whig myths. His philosophical importance has lasted better than his historical, because his history, though full of ability, was written without access to many documents since laid open, and with a somewhat insuffi- cient attention to careful use of those that were accessible ; while his philosophy, needing nothing but the furniture of his own mind, and employing that in the best way on one side of perennially interesting and insoluble questions, remains a point de repire for ever. It is 624 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix indeed admitted to have practically restarted all philosophical in- quiry, being as much the origin of German and other theory as of the Scottish school and of later English negative materialism. Luckily, too, the value of literary work as such is far more enduring than that of either philosophy or history by themselves. For they may be super- seded, but it never can. And Hume's expression was for his special purposes supreme — perfectly clear, ironical, but not to the point of suspicious frivolity, and as polished as the somewhat dead and flat colour of the style of the time would admit. William Robertson, a man of less original mental force than Hume, but nearly as good a writer, and a more careful historian, was born at Borthwick in Midlothian on igth September 1721. His father was a minister, and he himself, after school and university education at Dalkeith and Edinburgh, became one. At about the age of thirty he became conspicuous in the General Assembly as leader of the " Moderate " or Latitudinarian party. And in 1759 he became joint minister of Greyfriars in Edinburgh ; his amicable differences with his Evangelical col- league Dr. Erskine are commemorated in Guy Mannering. He had just in the winter of 1758-59 published his History of Scotland viiih. very great success, and in consequence of it he became chaplain to the King in 1761, Principal of the University a year later, and historiographer-royal in 1764. His second great work, ten years later than his first, was his History of the Reign of Charles /., which brought him in a very large sum of money. He issued a third, the History of America, in 1777, and a Disquisition on the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India in 1791. Two years later he died. Robertson was a very popular man — even Johnson loved him, in spite of what might seem the three fatal defects of Scottish nationality, Whig politics, and Latitudinarian religion — - but his personal popu- larity had no unfair influence on his historical successes. His style is, in the merely correct, but not merely jejune, kind, singularly good ; his conception of history, though not answering to that of more modern times, and tinged with the idiosyncrasies of his age, is philosophical and shrewd ; and above all, he had, what modern historians, with all their pretensions and all their equipment, have too often lacked, a thorough sense of rhetorical fitness in the good, not the empty, sense, and could make his histories definite works of art and definite logical presentments of a view. Nor was he by any means careless of research according to his own standard, which was already a severer one than that of Hume. A great deal of history was written in the third quarter of the century, most of which has in due course become waste-paper. The most characteristic specimens of this are naturally to be found CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 623 in the historical work of Goldsmith and Smollett. The qualifica- tions, however, of neither were those of the historian proper. Both were writing rapidly as hacks ; and there is perhaps no department of literature which is so impatient of hack- work as history. But though neither had anything like the requisite knowledge, or gave anything like the requisite time and pains to his work, both had attractiveness. Goldsmith's exquisite style and singular instinctive knowledge of humanity, Smollett's faculty of narrative, and his strong, though not always impartial, sense, took their work out of the merely ephemeral as literature, though perhaps without giving it the qualities or the dignity of history. Of the numerous and sometimes not unnoteworthy writers of their own class and beneath them — the Psalmanazars, the John Campbells, and the rest — it is impossible to write here. But they lielped the vogue of history, and so may have given a little impetus to the greatest historical book of the century, if not of all time, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon was born at Putney in the spring of 1737. of a ^., , r -1 TT • 1 . Gibbon. good and rather wealthy family. He was a very sickly child (indeed, he never had very good health), and seems to have been as unhappy as Cowper during his two years at Westminster. Nor was his stay at Magdalen College, Oxford, more fortunate. He went up too young (in April 1752), disliked the place and the college, and took into his head to profess himself converted to Roman Catholicism. After an interval his father sent him to Switzerland to be reconverted by a Protestant minister at Lausanne, M. Pavillard, whose endeavours were crowned by the rather dubious success that Gibbon on Christmas Day "received the sacrament with Protestant rites, and suspended his religious inquiries." The tone of his sub- sequent work would seem to indicate that the pendulum remained in an abnormal deflection from the perpendicular. He remained, how- ever, at Lausanne for some five years, reading much, as well as falling in love, and, at his father's command, out of it, with Mile. Suzanne Curchod, the future Madame Necker, and mother of Madame de Stael, to whom she did not transmit her own delicate beauty. Gil)bon returned to England in 1758, writing French nearly as well as English, and witli strong but indefinite literary aspirations. He served in the militia for some years and then again went abroad, finally conceiving, as he has told in one of the magical sentences of his autobiography, the definite idea of his great work on the 15th of October 1764. But he was in no hurry, and twelve years of residence in Switzerland and at home, of business anxieties after liis father's death, of silent membership of Parliament, and, for a time, of tenure of office as a Commissioner of Trade and I'lantations, passed before 2 s 626 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix the first volume appeared in February 1776. Another twelve, great part of which was passed in Switzerland, saw the completion, the actual moment of which he has recorded in as stately a fashion as that accorded to its beginning. In 1794 he died in London. Gibbon's miscellaneous work, both in English and French, is not inconsiderable, and it displays his peculiar characteristics ; but the only piece of distinct literary importance is his Autobiography. This, upon which he seems to have amused himself by spend- Autobiography. i"& much pains, was left unsettled for press. Edited with singular judgment and success under the care of his intimate friend and literary executor Lord Sheffield, it has been for three generations one of the favourite things of its kind with all good judges, and is likely to continue so in the textiis receptus., for which the fussy fidelity of modern literary methods will probably try in vain to substitute a chaos of rough drafts. Even this, however, is a mere hors d''ce2ivre and kickshaw in comparison with the great History. According to the severest and most exacting conception of what history should be, it should satisfy three conditions. In the first place, the author should and Fa]"." ^^"^^ thoroughly studied and intelligently comprehended all the accessible and important documents on the subject. In the second, he should have so digested and ordered his information that not merely a congeries of details, but a regular structure of history, informed and governed throughout by a philo- sophical idea, should be the result. In the third, this result should, from the literary as well as the historical side, be an organic whole composed in orderly fashion and manifesting a distinct and meri- torious style. It was in the first of these requisites, and to some extent in the second, that Gibbon's forerunners, including Robertson and Hume, had been chiefly deficient ; it is in the second, and to some extent in the third, that his successors of the modern historical school have fallen short. In the first two points, by common consent of all the competent. Gibbon attains an excellence which, when his time and circumstances are considered, is simply marvellous, and which does not lose much of its wonder even when the proviso is withdrawn. The unceasing rummage of a hundred years has added, of course, much in bulk to the mass of his information, but it has added much less in substance. For, on the one hand, Gibbon has the gift of understanding the true sense of all that he read ; and on the other, the gift of divining much that he could not or did not read. But his faculty of getting at individual truths is of less importance than his faculty of historical •• architectonic," his grasp of the historic sense. Almost his only drawback in this respect lay in the peculiarity of which he was CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 627 probably, as men usually are of their weaknesses, most proud — his attitude of sceptical belittlement towards Christianity in particular, though not much more to Christianity than to all forms of "enthusiastic" religion. For, though he was far too acute a thinker and too much of a born historian not to see how great a part forces derived from this source had played, he was bound, on his own principles, to regard these results as merely due to folly and vanity, to something negative and false — a most unphilosophical theory, which Carlyle has executed in one of his greatest sentences about another matter. But Gibbon had no other fault as a historian (though as a man this lack of enthusiasm, and of comprehension of it, seems to have led him into some vanities and meannesses) than this, and even this was not fatal. Of his greatness as a man of letters there should have been even less doubt ; but it has not been invariably acknowledged. The strong reaction of early Romanticism involved him in the dislike with which it regarded all its more immediate predecessors of the eighteenth century ; and Coleridge, who gave the tone to all English criticism for many years, was particularly unjust to Gibbon's style. Even his own day was half-puzzled and half-repelled by the gorgeous- ness of it, just as the succeeding age was by its extreme stateliness and want of alert variety. For Gibbon, like Johnson, of whom we have spoken, and Burke, of whom we are to speak, was a most prominent representative of the attempt once more to rescue the plain style from its own plainness, to give it ornament, while not relaxing its general laws of almost compulsory balance and of a certain consecrated phraseology. He attained this effect, not like the one by a heavily classicised vocabulary and by exaggerated antithesis, nor like the other by accumulations of simile and metaphor and epexegetic statement. He was indeed not very unlike either, though he far surpassed both, in adorning his writing with set pieces of description ; but the most characteristic part of his style does not lie in these. It lies mainly in a peculiar roll of sentence, conducted throughout with a wavelike movement, and ending with a sound so arranged as to echo over the interval of sense and breath, till the next is well on its way. That this should be achieved without monotony is almost inconceivable ; and Gibbon has been accused of this fault, but not with much justice. Of his minor devices, the chief is a peculiar adaptation of the taste of the age for periphrases, which at once gives a more sounding plirase and sug- gests interesting associations to the mind. Constantius for him is '* the son of Constantine," the rostiiim is "the tribunal which Cicero had so often ascended" — a device much, and too often witli disastrous consequences, imitated since, but in him of admirable effect. 628 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix The transition from Gibbon to Burke is interesting and not fortuitous. They were not merely contemporaries, but (though hardly friends) members of the same society; nor is it a mere accident that Burke was instrumental, by his financial reforms, in depriving Gibbon of his comfortable sinecure. They were the two Englishmen of their century who wrote the most gorgeous English, and the two men of their century (with Vico and Montesquieu) who had most sense of historical continuity, of that philosophic union of all times and countries, one aspect of which Burke has celebrated in brilliant words. But personally there could hardly be a greater unlikeness between any two men than between Gibbon's sluggish nature, his intense self-centredness, not to say selfishness, his limited tastes and interests, and the enthusiastic manysidedness and impulsiveness of Burke. He was born at Dublin in 1729, and was educated in Ireland, graduating at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1748. He then went to London, exactly at the middle of the century, and kept terms at the Middle Temple, but was never called. We do not know much about his early manhood, but in the year 1756 he published two small but very notable treatises, A Vindication of Natural Society (following the style but ironically rebutting the argument of Bolingbroke) and A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, the first, and for a long time the only, important and original aesthetic essay in English. In this same year he married, and three years later he planned the well-known Annual Register, to which for the greater part of his life he was the largest contributor. He became private secretary, first to Gerard Hamilton, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, and then in 1765 to the Marquis of Rockingham. As this latter was Prime Minister, Burke was at once returned to Parliament, and continued till his death to make a very important, though a rather curious, figure in the State. In the merely partisan politics of the third quarter of the century he classed himself with the Whigs, and as the American Revolution was brought about under a Tory administration, he supported it as heartily as he after- wards opposed the French. His speeches were never very effective as delivered, but they had a great effect when printed, and he constantly, at all times of his life, supported them by pamphlets which are almost undistinguishable from the speeches themselves in kind. The first of these to attract great attention was the Observations on the Present State of the Natioti, in 1 769 ; but its follower, next year. Thoughts on the Present Discontents, was superior, and still ranks among the very best of the class of writings in which admirable literary quality and great intellectual force are put at the service of party. After representing Wendover for nearly ten years, he sat for CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 629 Bristol during six more, and many of his most important speeches and tracts were addressed to this constituency. Afterwards, losing Bristol owing to his support of Roman Catholic claims, he sat for Malton. When the North ministry at last fell, Burke was Paymaster of the Forces, in 1782-83; he never held any other office. Opinions differ as to the reason which made him, in 1788, join, and indeed head, the crusade against Warren Hastings ; but this, whatever may be thought of it, gave splendid openings for his rhetoric. And the almost immediate outbreak of the French Revolution at last supplied his true subject. Although he had sometimes been led astray by party, Burke's sympathies were always with order, humanity, the distribution to every class in the state, and not to one only, be it highest or lowest, of its fair rights, and above all, that continuity of institutions and of historical development which has been glanced at above. The riot, the bloodshed, the gross unfairness to classes, however unfairly privileged before, and above all, the mischievous and impossible breach with the whole history of the French nation, stimulated him not merely to the most strenuous action in Parliament, but to the publication of a series of works which, for combined literary merit and political effect, stand alone. The series began with the famous Refleclions on the French Revolution in 1790, and it was continued by A Letter to a Noble Lord (1790), An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), Thoughts on Fretich Affairs^ and the great Letters on a Regicide Peace, where in some cases no doubt Burke's passionate feeling and his wonderful command of language, not quite sufficiently restrained by a sense of humour, led him to exaggeration and bad taste, but which in the main are magnificent examples of his passionate love of justice and freedom. He died in 1797. Burke's amiable, thougii both excitable and irritable, character and temper, his various conversational ability, and his other personal qualities, are well known from Boswell's Johnson, Miss Burney's Diary, and other famous biographies and memoirs of the period. His work — though some of it excites the dislike of partisans in one way and some in the other — has, for this very reason, never wanted admirers of either party, while the fortunate impartiality of literature can admire tlic whole. The style of Burke is necessarily to be considered throughout as conditioned by oratory. For the last thirty years of his life this was inevitable ; and though in his earlier days he had not j^j^ the same constant practice in speaking, his undoubted rhetorical selection of Bolingbroke as model predisposed him in the same way. In other words, he was first of all a rhetorician,^ and 1 Using rhetoric in its best modern genera! sense as " the art of prose literature," but with the ancient specialising addition, "applied to the purpose of suasion." 630 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix probably the greatest that modern times have ever produced. But his rhetoric always inclined much more to the written than to the spoken form, with results annoying perhaps to him at the time, but even to him satisfactory afterwards, and an inestimable gain to the world. The ordinary orator's and debater's work, if preserved at all, constantly loses value : there is no danger of Burke being forgotten while English literature exists. In the Vindication (which is better Bolingbroke than Bolingbroke himself) the sentences are as a rule short and crisp, arranged within succinct antithetic parallels, which seldom exceed a single pair of clauses. In the Siibli7ne and Beautiful long and short sentences are more mixed, and there is even a distinct tendency to the former. And in this treatise we perceive, though not yet in anything like full development, the genuine properties of Burke's own style, which henceforward become more and more apparent. The most important of these, in so far as it is possible to enumerate them here, are as follows. First of all, and most distinctive, so much so as to have escaped no competent critic, Qualities ^^ ^ ^^^Y curious and, until his example made it imitable, of his style nearly unique faculty of buildins^ ufi an argfument or a and method. ^ y • r 1^ , picture by a succession of complementary .strokes, not added at haphazard, but growing out of and on to one another. No one has ever been such a master as was Burke of the best and grandest kind of the figure called, in the technical language of rhetoric, Amplification, and this, which in ordinary hands often, if not always, leads to tedious verbiage, is the direct implement by which he achieves his greatest effects. In the work which succeeds his entrance into political life, fresh devices of ordonnance appear, and the Thoughts on the Present Discontents present them in very interesting exhibition. The piece may be said to consist of a certain number of specially laboured paragraphs, in which the arguments or pictures just spoken of are put as forcibly as the author can put them, and, as a rule, in a succession of shortish sentences, built up and glued together with the strength and flexibility of a newly-fashioned fishing-rod. In the intervals the texts thus given are turned about, commented on, justified, or discussed in detail, in a rhetoric for the most part, though not always, rather less serried, less evidently burnished, and in less full dress. And this general arrangement proceeds through the rest of his works, with, in the latest and most brilliant (those on the French Revolution), a less orderly arrangement, compensated by a greater rush of thought and rhetoric. In his ornaments, whether of idea or of imagery, Burke is better worth studying than almost any other English writer. In simile and CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 631 trope generally, he is, though often wonderfully brilliant, distinctly uncertain, quite untrustworthy in the direction of humour, and in some of his more forcible images apt even to be positively disgusting. On the other hand, his grandeur seldom falls into the grandiose, and the magical effect of more imaginative passages (of which the famous one about Marie Antoinette is only the stock example) has never been exceeded in political writing. Epigram he can occasionally manage with great etTect, but it is not by any means so specially and definitely his weapon as imaginative argument, and the marshalling of vast masses of complicated detail into properly rhetorical battalions or (to alter the image) mosaic pictures of enduring beauty. The equally famous sentence-picture, in the Letter to a Noble Lord, of Windsor Castle, "girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers," is an instance, not excelled by any sentence in all the literatures from Greek to English, of words so used as to get out of them the very last possibility, the full triple effect — first of mere beauty of sound ; secondly, of conveying with the utmost force the immediate meaning and image intended ; and thirdly, of urging the intended argumentative application, not more by the general conduct of the sentence than by the very ornaments and accessories of the phrase. Only a great imagination would have been seized with this use of the inner and outer bailey and the keep of a Gothic fortress ; only a consummate faculty of expression could have so arranged it as at once to make a perfect harmonic chord, a complete visual picture, and a forcible argument. The minor rhetoric, the suasive purpose, must be kept in view ; if it be left out the thing loses, and this is one of the points in which Burke is far below Browne, who has no need of purpose. But he is the king of his own business-like century in point of prose. Theology and philosophy proper provide us with lesser, though in some cases by no means little, men. The former, indeed, contrasts very remarkably and unfortunately, as literature, with the work of the preceding age. The Sherlocks in one half of the century, and Samuel Horsley (i 733-1 806) in the other ^p''h^°os^h>"'^ half, have a certain traditional reputation, sustained occasionally by praise from those who have perhaps no very wide acquaintance with the profane authors of the period. The Deist controversy produced, chiefly from the ranks of the Nonjurors, who included a disproportionate number of the most learned and able of the English clergy, some great controversialists, notably the redoubtal)]e polemic Charles Leslie and the by no means unpractical mystic William Law. In Nonconformity and its fringes, the Wesleys and Doddridge were greater men at verse than at literary prose. Warburton earlier and Paley later may almost suffice for more 632 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix detailed mention in this particular brancli. So too the philosophers of the older kinds — Reid, Brown, Stewart — give little that is litera- ture after Berkeley and Hume, and in the newer sorts Adam Smith and Godwin may do duty as samples. For though no literary con- tempt is more unliterary than that so long and so widely entertained for the eighteenth century, this century does display a certain want of individual difference in the form of its writers. Their thought is often highly original, and their application of literary treatment still more so. But the qualities, for instance, which earned a place in literature for Sir WiUiam Blackstone (1723-80) and for Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92), men born in the same year with Adam Smith, were really literary. It is not for nothing, even from the mere bookish point of view, but of right as a man of letters, that Black- stone sits enthroned in the vast library of All Souls College. Yet the main interest of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765, sq.') for us, like the main interest of Sir Joshua's presiden- tial Discourses to the Royal Academy, lies in the application of a literary common form, at once easy and stately, to technical subjects. Earlier such subjects, if treated at all, would have been treated more probably in Latin ; later experience makes it scarcely unjust to say that increase in technical precision has not always or often been accompanied, in the sciences at least, if not in the arts, by increase of literary quality. But still all eighteenth-cen- tury writers have a certain community, and must be dealt with rep- resentatively. William Warburton was a rather typical divine of the age, who, after perhaps occupying too high a position in it, has been unduly depreciated in this. He was an older man than most who have been mentioned in this chapter, and was born at New- ark in 1698. He went to no university, and at first adopted law as a profession, but was ordained in 1723. His famous Divine Legatio7i of Moses, which would have been one of the most brilliant paradoxes in literature if the author had kept it down in size, and one of the most learned of works if he had attended a little more to accuracy, began to appear in 1738. Henceforward the prosperity of Warburton, who was accused by his numerous enemies of being as sycophantic in private relations as he was rough and rude in public controversy, was unbroken. An odd friendship with Pope gave him prominence in the world of belles lettres, his marriage with Gertrude Tucker, niece of Allen of Prior Park (the Allworthy of Fielding), supplied money, and a steady tide of professional advancement landed him in the bishopric of Gloucester, which he held for twenty years, dying in 1779. Warburton just came short of being a great theologian and a great man of letters. His con- CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 633 troversial manners cannot be defended, but we should probably have heard a good deal less of them if he had been on the unorthodox side. Something of the same character, with less arrogance, appears in William P.'^ley, who was born at Peterborough in 1743, was educated at Giggleswick School and Christ's College, Cambridge, was Senior Wrangler in 1763, obtained a Fellowship, and then a succession of preferments in the Church. He died Archdeacon of Carlisle and Rector of Bishop Wearmouth in 1805. His Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), his Horcs PatdincB (1790), his Evidejices of Christianity (1794), and his Natural Theology (1802), at once attained, long kept, and have by no means wholly lost, a great reputation. As an apologist and expositor, Paley has been accused of a too business-like and profit-and-loss view 'of religion ; but those who call him interested perhaps use an unfair presumption, and his popularity has no doubt suffered from his having served for generations as a pass-textbook in the University of Cambridge. As a philosopher in things divine and human, he has a little too much of the merely forensic competence of the advocate about him. But this same competence extends (it may be not in the most interesting manner) to his work as literature. Paley gets the full value out of tlie plain style, for purposes to which it is far better adapted than anything more imaginative could possibly be. His arguments, if far lower and less noble, are much more easily intelligible than Butler's ; his style is perfectly clear ; he sees his point and his method distinctly, and seldom or never fails to prove the one to the best of the other. Adam Smith, the first great political economist in Enghsh, and almost the founder of the study of that subject as understood in modern times, was born at Kirkcaldy in June 1723, and was thoroughly educated at his native place, Glasgow, and Oxford, c • i, where he went as Snell Exhibitioner to Balliol. He was an only and a posthumous child, and read quietly at home or in Edinburgh till, in 1751, he was elected to the Glasgow Chair of Logic, from which he passed to that of Moral Philosophy. His Theory of Moral Scntiineuts appeared in 1759, ^'''^ Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of N'ations not till seventeen years later, in 1776, the year of the death of Hume, Smith's greatest friend, and it would seem the greatest influence upon him. Smith lived in London for a time, and later at Edinburgh, where he had a Commissionership of Customs. He died in 1790. The far-reaching consequences of Smith's theories as to free trade do not here concern us ; it is sufficient that he possessed, and applied to two great subjects in not much sliort of perfection, that clear, rather 634 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk, ix colourless and passionless, but admirably business-like as well as artist-like, style which is the glory of the eighteenth century. There are others whom one would fain discuss, such as Abraham Tucker (1705-74), the author of the voluminous but fascinating Light of Nature Pursued (1765), a huge storehouse of thought that is not seldom original, put with constant vividness and much humour, though diffusely and without order. And the vulgar vigour of Thomas Paine (i 737-1 809), a great influence directly on popular thought, and a greater through his disciple Cobbett, must at least be mentioned. But we can give space to but one more name. William Godwin, the author of Political Justice, was born at Wisbeach in 1756, and spent most of his earlier years in the eastern counties. He was for a time a Nonconformist minister, but drifted • . from Christianity, took to literature, and did a great deal o win. ^^ early hackwork, much of it unidentified, and none of it now read. It was in 1793 that the Inquiry concerning Political Justice appeared, and the author only escaped prosecution (which befell not a few of his friends of less anarchic principles) because it was (no doubt wisely) judged that a very large and expensive book, written in a style not in the least likely to appeal to the vulgar, was not dangerous. Next year appeared Caleb Williams, in which some of the doctrines of Political Justice received illustration, but which attained great popularity, and has never lost some. In 1797 Godwin married Mary Wollstonecraft, herself a " she-philosopher," who died soon afterwards. He lived nearly forty years longer, marrying again, becoming Shelley's father-in-law, publishing, bookselling, and writing continually, but always an unprosperous man. He received a sinecure office when his Radical friends came into power after the first Reform Bill, and died in April 1836. Godwin is by far the most important instance, for the last quarter of the century, of the man-of-letters-of-all-work approaching, but not yet fully enlisted in, actual journalism, of whom we find the first and „. . greatest example in Dryden, and, during the middle tance and of the eighteenth century itseli, remarkable instances in position. Johnson and Goldsmith. He is also almost the last who does not avail himself, or avails himself only to a small extent, of the newspaper to spread his views ; and in this he differs from his contemporary Cobbett, who for this reason will not be noticed till the next Book. Godwin is essentially a prose-writer, and his style, though it has been over-praised, is of considerable merit. Although his exaggerated anarchism and determination to regard everything as an open question are absurd enough in principle and lead to the most unimaginable absurdities in detail, yet they give his thought always the appearance, and sometimes the reality, of CHAP. IV THE GRAVER PROSE 635 freer play than had been enjoyed by any English writer since Hobbes. His novels have been more than once referred to. His philosophical and critical writings are chiefly contained in the Political Justice (which he altered and made much tamer in subsequent editions), in the somewhat later Enquirer, a very interesting collection of essays, and in a second collection, published towards the extreme end of his life, called Thoughts on Man. His drama of Antonio, which produced an exquisitely character- istic piece from his friend Charles Lamb, has no merit, and his his- torical and biographical works, History of the Commonwealth, Life of Chaucer, Lives of the Necromancers, are compilations, though, at least in the first case, compilations much above the average. It was God- win, more than any one else, who introduced the mischievous but popular practice of bolstering out history by describing at great length the places and scenes which his heroes might have seen, the trans- actions in which, being contemporary, they might have taken an interest, and the persons with whom they either were, or conceivably might have been, acquainted. In this, as in other things, he belonged to the class of "germinal " writers. And his influence on the early, although impermanent, creeds and tempers of the most brilliant young men of his day was quite extraordinary. CHAPTER V EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA The conundrum of the drama — Fading of eighteenth-century tragedy — Minor comic writers: the domestic play — Goldsmith — Sheridan — His three great pieces If the suddenness of the rise of the English drama, though some- times exaggerated, is still one of the most striking facts in literary history, the suddenness, and the enduring nature, of its collapse are „, hardly less curious. For rather less than a hundred Iheconun- - i . i i i i r i • i drum of the and fifty years, from the eighth decade of the sixteenth drama. cgutury to the second of the eighteenth, there was no time, save that of the closing of the theatres under the Rebel- lion, when work at once of great literary merit and of acting value, according at least to the idea of the time, was not produced. For a good deal more than another hundred and fifty, from the second decade of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth, only two dramatists have appeared who have combined very high literary with distinctly high acting value in their plays, and these two both appeared during the first half of the time. To add to the puzzle, the popularity and the profits of the theatre have steadily increased, and the touch of discredit which once attached to writing for the stage has all but entirely disappeared. No plausible guess at the solution of this problem, on any of the grounds of so-called scientific criticism, has ever been made except the concurrent rise of the novel, and this, though not exactly nugatory, is clearly insufficient. We have, in short, here one of the capital instances of that fact which coinmuni- cates to the study of literature itself a vast proportion of its fascination and its value, the fact of incalculableness. One of the signs of this change was a curious separation which appeared early in the eighteenth century, and has maintained itself more or less ever since, between the literary drama, which was sometimes acted, but never with any real acting success, and the acting drama, which, though not immediately abandoning (as some- times later) all pretensions to be literature, yet practically does not aim at being read at all. At every time from Johnson's to 636 CHAP. V EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 637 Tennyson's, poets and men of letters, who were not to the manner born, have tried the stage. But with the exception (and hardly that) of the late Mr. Browning, there is not a single one of Fading of them whose dramatic work has kept any fame, or who is ^'fentur"*^" ever thought of as a dramatist. Young's Revenge, acted tragedy. 1721, connects itself rather with the older than with the newer school, and is perhaps the very last example of an acting tragedy of real literary merit, but it is to be feared that few even of those who have read the Night-Thoiighis and the Ujiiversal Passion have read it. The dramas of Thomson are far worse, and far more utterly forgotten ; hardly any edition of him for years has contained them. Johnson's Irene is a byword, not altogether justly perhaps, for it is a fine piece of writing ; and Mason's Elfrida and Caractaais are chiefly known, even to students of eighteenth-century literature, because they make some figure in the letters of their author's faithful and too indulgent friend. Gray. Of the work of men like Mallet, Glover, and others, so little of any kind is retained by the general memory that their dramas can hardly be said to be in exceptional oblivion ; but the gloom of this is never pierced even by these feeble gleams which faintly reveal "William and Margaret" and "Admiral Hosier's Ghost." A sort of affection, mingled with contempt, and connected with the universally known " My name is Norval," keeps in twilight rather than utter darkness the once famous Douglas (1754) of Home (i 724-1808). But it is pretty certain that most audiences, and almost all modern readers, would be affected by it with the same sort ol foil rire as that which Thackeray, by a slight anachronism, ascribes to General Lambert and Mr. George Warrington at an early performance of the play. The fact is that the whole cast of eighteenth-century thought and style was unfavourable, and almost fatal, to the composition of tragedy that should be at once practicable and poetic. Its conventions, its artificial poetical diction, and its dread of anytliing irregular, could at the best have produced something of the Racinian kind, a kind to which the English genius is utterly recalcitrant, and which does not suit itself to the English theatre. Alternate tameness and rant accordingly disfigure it, though no philosophical explanation quite attains to explaining the ineffable sham-tragic lingo which, from Rowe downwards, took firmer and ever firmer possession of the English stage, till it was finally driven therefrom, by literary satire and popular disgust, within living memory. Comedy, as is usually the case, was somewhat less unfortunate. To get tragic action adjusted to literary form requires not merely a rare talent in the playwright, but an atmos])here, an aura of recep- tiveness in the audience, which exists only at times few and far 638 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix between. The problem of the comic writer is far simpler, and his atmosphere, though it varies in fineness and freshness, always exists. „• During: the eighteenth century especially the general Minor comic ° o . writers: the tone of manners, and the clearly recognised divisions of omestic p ay. gQ(,jg^y^ jgj^j themselves to an easy adaptation of the perennial commonplaces of comedy. When the last minorities of the great comic school — Steele, Cibber, Mrs. Centlivre — ceased to write, the stage was by no means left bare of stuff, which generally showed familiarity with its own requirements and traditions, and which occasionally displayed tolerable literary form. There was indeed, between tragedy and comedy, and of the kind which, popular at the same • time in France, was called, according as it inclined to one side or the other, tragedie bourgeoise or coviidie larmoyaitte, a certain production during the time. Two or three pieces, the George Barnwell and Fatal Curiosity of Lillo (i 693-1 739) and the Gatnester of Edward Moore, held the stage with some tenacity, and made a sort of lodgment in literary history, but they can hardly be called of much importance. Yet George Lillo, as a curiosity at least, and because of the constant, and sometimes excellent, fiin, of which his chief play was long the subject, must always retain some interest. His editor,^ Johnson's friend and butt, Tom Davies, could find out very little about him, except that he " learned and practised the trade of a jeweller." His work is not extensive, but it is very representative. He adapted Pericles and Arden of Fever- sham, and spoilt both. His Silvia, or The Country Burial is an opera-bouffe of an incoherency which would be triumphant if it were intended. The Fatal Cjiriosity in verse and George Barnwell in prose (the latter, from the supposed usefulness of its moral to appren- tices, constantly acted) are the strangest muddles of broken, or sound but stiff, decasyllabics (^Barnwell itself is full of the former), the impossible lingo above referred to, action more impossible still, and, notwithstanding all this, touches of humanity, good feeling, and genuine, though awkward, pathos. Comedy, besides the two great exceptions, was but a little better off, though a great deal was written. Charles Shadwell, apparently a nephew of " Og," wrote some lively plays, one of them. The Fair Quaker of Deal, anticipating Smollett in studying the sailor from life. Fielding, as has been said, before he found his proper vocation, did much for the stage, and in the middle and later days of the century there were many playwrights who came nearer to the union of theatrical and literary competence than any tragedian of their time — or ours. George Colman (1732-94), a Westminster boy,^ 12nd ed. 2 vols. London, 1810. 2 To be distinguished from his son, George Colman the younger (1762-1836), CHAP. V EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 639 manager of Covent Garden, was a very prolific, if not exactly a very original, dramatist, and his Clandestine Marriage (1766) is the least forgotten of more than a score of plays. Garrick had a hand in it, as he had in others, and he did some work of the kind indepen- dently. Arthur Murphy, the biographer of Fielding and the friend of Johnson, also wrote plays with great freedom, and The Way to Keep Him survives in much the same relation to literature as that of The Clandestine Marriage. The Suspicious Husband (1747) of Benjamin Hoadly, a clever son of the Arian Bishop, who did other dramatic work, half original, half adapted, belongs to the same class, as does the False Delicacy of Hugh Kelly. Farce and comic opera, the latter stimulated by the great success of Gay, kept also near to literature, and Fielding's Tom Thumb was kept in company by the Chrononhotonthologos of Henry Carey, a son of Halifax and an ancestor of Kean, and author of the delightful " Sally in our Alley." Mrs. Cowley (1743-1809) produced some lively pieces, of which The Beliefs Stratagem (1780) has best kept name and (sometimes) the stage. Macklin's Man of the World (1764), Townley's High Life Below Stairs (1759), and several works, especially The Minor and The Mayor of Garrat of Samuel Foote, may join the catalogue. Towards the close of the century Richard Cumberland, a rather curious person, and better known to literature as Sir Fretful Plagiary, but a scholar, a skilful playwright, and no contemptible man of letters, represented the sentimental side of drama, John O'Keefe the wilder farce, and Holcroft, the friend of Godwin, a rather powerful variety of what the French call dratne. The Jl^est /ndian of Cumberland, which appeared in 1771, O'Keefe's Agreeable Surprise, and Holcroft's Road to Ruin (1792) are their chief remembered things. Goldsmith and .Sheridan stand far apart from these. Both, it will be observed, were Irishmen, like Farquhar, Charles Shadwell, Murphy, and O'Keefe. Goldsmith's dramas, as noted in the sketch of his life above, were the result of his later years. The ^ ,, ., . r.^i I'll 1 Goldsmun. Good-natured Man has admirable scenes and passages and some good character, but in all respects it is far the inferior of She Stoops to Conquer. In this delightful play Goldsmith may have taken some of the incidents (as he is said to have taken the central one) from real life, and some of the characters from Steele {vide supra, p. 535). But this is less than nothing. The bright, fantastic, yet not unreal atmosphere of whimsical incident, the gracious humanity of the characters generally, and the exquisite literary quality of the dialogue, compose such a thing as the English stage had not seen since it was reopened after the Restoration. The wit, if less like him, but in the next generation, a busy and clever playwright and comic misccUanist. His Heir-at-Law {\TSf]) is a notable piece. 640 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix volleyed and regular, was not inferior to Congreve's, the action was not really less probable, and while there was nothing mawkish about the sentiment (there was perhaps a little about that of The Good-natu}-ed Maji), its sweet and healthy good-nature contrasts, in a fashion inex- pressibly agreeable, with the loveless license and the brutal ferocity of the Restoration drama. The fame of Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan in literature is far more exclusively dramatic, for his theatrical and rather brassy oratory holds little place in literary memory. He was born in Dublin in 1751, and was the grandson of Swift's friend, Dr. Sheridan, a clergyman not much inferior to the Dean himself in a certain reckless wit, though possessed of little or nothing of his friend's magnificent intellect. His second son, Richard Brinsley's father, was a teacher of elocution, and one of Dr. Johnson's associ- ates and butts. This man, whose dulness was declared by the dictator to be beyond the reach of nature, unassisted by art and by patient and careful eflfort, married Miss Frances Chamberlaine, who contributed a novel {Sidney Biddnlpli) to the crop of fiction in the middle of the century. Sheridan himself was a Harrow boy, and attempted literary work very early. In 1773, at the age of twenty- two, he eloped from Bath, where his family were then living, with Elizabeth Linley, a very beautiful girl with an exquisite voice, which her husband very properly refused to allow her to use on the stage. But he himself turned to play-writing (which, indeed, he had attempted earlier), and in January 1775, when he was not four-and- twenty, produced at Covent Garden the famous farce-comedy of The Rivals, which at once (or almost at once) established his fame. He followed this up with the bad St. Patrick^s Day, and the better, though still hardly good, Diie7tna. Next year Sheridan, with some assistance from friends, bought first half and then the whole of the patent of Drury Lane, of which he became manager as well as owner. This provided him with an income, and ought to have pro- vided him with an ample one for the remainder of his life, but his whole money affairs, from the way in which he found the means to buy the theatre onward, are much of a mystery. In 1780 he entered Parliament, attached himself to the Whig Opposition, and, rather later, became very intimate with the Prince of Wales. He had office under the Rockingham ministry and the Coali- tion, and attracted great attention by effective but meretricious speeches against Warren Hastings. He was faithful to the extremer Whigs, and took the opposite side to Burke (whom he had previously followed) in regard to the French Revolution. In 1795, his wife having died some years earlier, he married again; and he survived till 1 816, when he died with bailiffs in his house. CHAP. V EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 641 An extravagant hyperbole of Byron's as to the relative excellence of Sheridan's plays has perhaps done him some harm, but his three best pieces are of extraordinary merit. They were all produced between 1775 and 1779; each is a master- gr^atpkces. piece in its kind, and the kinds are not identical. The Rivals is artificial comedy, inclining on one side to farce, and, in the parts of Falkland and Julia, to the sentimental. But it is, on its own rather artificial plan, constructed with remarkable skill and tight- ness ; and the characters of Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, Sir Lucius O'Trigger, and Bob Acres, with almost all the rest, combine fun with at least theatrical verisimihtude in a very rare way. Indeed, Sir Anthony and Mrs. Malaprop, though heightened from life, can hardly be said to be false to it, and though in the other pair the license of dramatic exaggeration is pushed to its farthest, it is not exceeded. The effect could not have been produced without the sparkling dialogue, but this alone could not have given it. The School for Scandal flies higher, but not quite so steadily. Pedants of construction fall more foul of it, and even those who do not accept their standards must admit that the characters are less uniformly alive. But they, like the play generally, aim higher; it is no longer artificial comedy with stock personages, but a great comic castigation of manners that is attempted. In The Rivals Sheridan had vied with Vanbrugh and had beaten him ; in The School for Scandal he challenges Moli^re, and is hardly beaten except in a certain universality. As for his third masterpiece. The Critic, it is simply a farce in excelsis, designedly extravagant and chaotic, but all the more successful. The mock -play is admittedly almost, if not quite, the best thing of the kind, and the by-play of Sneer, Puff, Dangle, and the immortal Sir Fretful Plagiary requires none of the illegiti- mate attraction of identification with real personages to give it zest. The Critic forms with The Rehearsal and The Rovers a triad of which English literature may well be proud. It is difficult, allowing for the scale of each, to choose between the three, but in variety and reach The Critic may be allowed frankly to carry it. Of the state of things in drama which followed Sheridan's time, and, as some hold, has lasted without much change to the present day, Joanna Baillie (i 762-1 851), whose life stretched from a few years past the middle of the eighteenth century to a few after the middle of the nineteenth, is an interesting illustration. She had some poetic faculty; but her Plays on the Passions (1768 and later) and others, though admired at the time, and sometimes acted, are neither great drama nor great literature, the author never seeming quite to know whether slv? is writing for the theatre or the study, and not producing the best things for either. 2T CHAPTER VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS The letter-writers — Lady Mary — Chesterfield — Horace Walpole — " Junius " — Boswell The heading of this chapter is not a mere capitulation to difficulties. Very little is gained by sorting out authors too exactly into d'visions and compartments, and something would be lost by omitting to indicate within the classification two distinct features of our eighteenth-century literature — the constant divergence and diversion of literary energy into new directions and efforts, and the increase of the practice of writing for amusement merely. Some of the most celebrated books of the century were never intended for publication at all — Lord Chesterfield's Letters certainly were not, though we cannot be so sure about those of Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Moreover, the diffusion of reading, the removal of the censorship of the press, and the mitigation of the legal tribulations to which authors and publishers were liable, encouraged the production of books of all kinds. The three writers named in the last paragraph themselves form a very interesting trio from many points of view. They as letter- writers, like Pepys and Evelyn earlier as diarists, supply the chief examples in English of that memoir-literature in which write"*!'^' our language is, as compared with French, rather poor, but which in their case, as in a few others, can very well hold up its head. The lady who bears in English literature the courtesy title of " Lady Mary," without any necessary addition, was, oddly enough, connected with Evelyn by blood and with Pepys by marriage. Her , , , maiden name was Pierrepont, and she was daughter of Lady Mary. , „ , - ^.. ,,., . , , , the Earl oi Kmgston, a Whig noble, who was suc- cessively raised to the Marquisate of Dorchester and the Dukedom of Kingston. Her extreme beauty as a child — beauty which continued till early middle life at least — made her the heroine 642 CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 643 of a well-known anecdote to the effect that she was, when eight years old, not merely toasted at, but introduced to, the Kit-Cat Club of Whigs and wits by her father. She seems to have been born in 1689, and at twenty-two eloped with Edward Wortley or Wortley Montagu, grandson of Pepys' relation and patron, the first Earl of Sandwich, and heir to the great Yorkshire estate of Wharncliffe. When George I. came to the throne Mr. Wortley Montagu had preferment, and in 1716 he went as ambassador to Constantinople, his wife accompanying him, and so obtaining the materials for her best-known, though not best. Letters. When she came back she brought inoculation with her — there is at least one story that the loss of her own beauty was due to smallpox — and made it fashionable in England. She lived at home for nearly the whole of the third and fourth decades of the century, became, for what cause is uncertain, an object of hate from Pope as furious as his admiration had formerly been fantastic, and in 1739 went abroad without her husband, with whom, however, she never seems to have had the least quarrel. She lived, in Italy chiefly, for some twenty years more, and returned to England in 1761 after her husband's death, to die herself of cancer next year. She had two children — a daughter, who married the famous Lord Bute, and a very worthless and probably insane son. Lady Mary might probably have attained distinction in several different kinds of literature.^ She was actually, and rather to her own misfortune, a very deft writer of light satirical verse, while much no doubt that she did not write was attributed to her. Her Tow7i Eclogues are distinctly good ; but the best thing she ever did in this kind is the famous piece beginning — and ending — Good madam, when ladies are willing A man can but look like a fool, The fruit that can fall without shaking Is rather too mellow for me. Her prose work is much more extensive and important. It consists of a large collection of Letters extending over some fifty years. There are some difficulties about their text and first publication, and the authenticity of some lias l^een doubted, perhaps with not much justice. They fall generally into four divisions — those before the Turkish journey, containing a very odd picture of a courtshi]) and some lively sketches of George L's iiousehold ; the Turkish and other continental letters of the first sojourn abroad, which are very lively and interesting, but a trifle artificial ; those of the middle period, few in comparison and "^Letters, etc., ed. Moy Thomas, 2 vols. London, 1861. 644 MIDDLE AND LATER iSTH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix too often distinguished by the ill-nature of a Queen of Society whose charms and power are passing ; and those of the last, mainly written to Lady Bute, and the most interesting of the whole, alternating as they do between curious pictures of Italian country life, the Jacobite society of Avignon, the tracasseries of the English colony at Venice and the like on the one hand, and on the other full, shrewd, and invaluable criticisms of the new novels of the day from Fielding and Smollett downwards. There is a certain hardness about Lady Mary, and she exhibits to the very full the indifference of her age to all high things in religion, poetry, and elsewhere. But her clever- ness is astonishing, and one can see, if only by glimpses, that she must have been lovable once. Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, the author of the most famous and widely known, if not the most voluminous or best, letters in English, was a few years younger than Lady Mary, having been born in September 1694. He too was of a Whig family, and went to the Whig University, Cambridge. After this experience and its completion of foreign travel (by which he profited a good deal more than most of the English tutor- conducted youths upon whom both he and Lady Mary are so severe), he sat in the House of Commons for ten years, until his succession to the earldom in 1726. For all his devotion to "the Graces," his gambling, and his other condescensions to the ways of his time, Chesterfield was a man of political ability, which did not fall far short of positive statesmanship, and he distinguished himself in various offices, the most important of which was the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland. But he became deaf, and perhaps disgusted, and retired from active public life about 1748. He had written earlier in the Craftsman, as he wrote later in the World. A few other minor things, "Characters " and the like, show the great literary ability and the thorough knowledge of part of human nature which he possessed. But his literary fame was derived from a publication which (unlike some letter-writers) he never intended, that of his correspondence with his illegitimate son Philip Stanhoj)e, printed by that son's widow. He also wrote a good many other letters, and within recent years a fresh batch of advices to the young, addressed this time to his godson and successor in the title, was added by the late Earl of Carnarvon. The hardness which has been noted in Lady Mary appears to a greater extent, as was natural, in Chesterfield ; and though Johnson's undying grudge exaggerated the immorality wliich accompanies it, that immorality certainly exists. But as a letter-writer, in his few excursions into the essay, and in such other literary amusements as he permitted himself, he stands very high, and the somewhat artificial character of his etiquette, the wholly artificial character of his standards CHAP. VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 645 of literary, aesthetic, and other judgment, ought not to obscure his excellence. Devoted as he was to French, speaking and writing it as easily as he did English, he never Gallicised his style as Horace Walpole did, nor fell into incorrectnesses as did sometimes Lady Mary. The singular ease with which, not in the least ostentatiously conde- scending to them, he adjusts his writing to his boy correspondents is only one function of his literary adaptability. Nor is it by any means to be forgotten that Chesterfield's subjects are extremely various, and are handled with equal information and mother-wit. He was not exactly a scholar, but he was a man widely and well read, and the shrewd- ness of his judgment on men and things was only conditioned by that obstinate refusal even to entertain any enthusiasm, anything high- strung in ethics, cesthetics, religion, and other things, which was characteristic of his age. Had it not been for Chesterfield we should have wanted many lively pictures of society, manner, and travel ; but we should also have wanted our best English illustration of a saying of his time, though not of his — "If there were no God, it would be necessary to create one." Lady Mary and Lord Chesterfield were persons of extreme and even talent, which never quite reached genius. In the third of the great trio of letter-writers we find a curious mixture of something by no means unlike genius, and of most undoubted origi- nality, with the qualities and the limitations of a very Walpole decided fribble and coxcomb. • Horace Walpole ranked as the third son of the great Sir Robert, to whose late and not fortunate title of Earl of Orford he — himself very late in his life — succeeded. He was born in London in September 1717, and after passing through Eton and Cambridge, travelled, as noted above, in Italy with Gray. After his return to England, and for long afterwards, he sat in Parlia- ment, but he had no political ability, and only partisan political interests. Being comfortably provided for by office and bequest, he was able to live very much as he pleased, and soon established him- self at Strawberry Hill, near Twickenham, where he built, affecting "the Gothick taste" more well than wisely, his famous villa. After a time he even set up a press there, and throughout his long life he maintained not merely a constant interest in literature, but a very considerable literary production. Besides an enormous number of letters, never yet fully collected, he wrote in the World, produced the wonderfully original, if not wonderfully good, novel of T/ie Castle of Otranto. and the strong, though again not good, tragedy of The Mysterious Mother, compiled Anecdotes of Painting, Catalogues of Engravers, Catalogues of Royal and Noble Authors, Historic Doubts, and other things, besides editing or reprinting Grammont, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and much else. 646 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix In literary history Horace Walpole has no small importance as the author of The Castle of Oiraiito, and is not quite devoid of it as the author of The Mysterious Mother. But to the reader, and not the mere reader only, his Letters give him far greater interest. Their enormous bulk is not marred, as is the case in some other collections, by a constant repetition of the same subject to different correspond- ents, and the variety of the subjects themselves is altogether extraor- dinary. For part of the politics, much of the personal history, and almost all the social gossip, chit-chat, manners, and what not of the middle of the eighteenth century, Walpole is an authority to be trusted indeed with caution (for he was extremely spiteful, and by no means scrupulous), but to be enjoyed almost without alloy or satiety. No matter whether it be the execution of the Jacobite lords, or a frolic to the public gardens with madcap ladies, who insist on cook- ing chickens in a china dish which is expected every minute to fly about their ears, whether it be bric-a-brac or scandal, Walpole con- trives to be always amusing and never silly, though he may sometimes be not wholly sensible. And it is only fair to admit that the intrinsic charm of his matter is very much helped by the peculiarities of his style. It is not by any means wholly natural — it would not have suited the hour or the man if it had been ; but its affectation and its frippery are exactly suited to the part which the writer wished to play, and seldom out of keeping with the matters he had to handle. There is plenty of ill-nature in Walpole, some snobbery, a good many other failings positive and negative ; but there is also genius, and the genius is of a distinctly literary kind. Of minor memoir- and letter-writers it would be possible to name not a few, from Lord Hervey, the friend of Lady Mary and the enemy of Pope, downwards ; but hardly any absolutely demands ^ . „ mention. There is, however, one writer who, from the mystery attending his person at least as much as from the excellence of his writings, has attracted in the past, and still to some extent attracts, a rather disproportionate attention, and this is the author of the Letters of Junius. Into the personal and identify- ing question there is not any need to enter deeply here, for it has no literary consequence, if indeed it has any consequence at all, and, as in all much-debated problems, the heat which the discussion of it excites is sometimes in inverse proportion to the importance of the decision. It is enough to say that the series of letters signed "Junius," and published by Woodfall, who himself was ignorant of the identity of his contributor, appeared in the Public Advertiser from January 1769 to a period some three years later. They attacked the king, the ministers (especially the Duke of Grafton), and a great number of things and persons connected with the admin- CHAP, VI MISCELLANEOUS WRITERS 647 istration of the day. They showed inside knowledge of official matters. They were, though repeatedly printed, never acknowledged by any one. They were attributed to Edmund Burke, to his brother Richard, to Lord Temple, to Lord George Sackville, to Lord Shelburne, to Barr^, to Wilkes, to Home Tooke, to Glover, to Wedderburn, to Gerard Hamilton, but especially to Philip, afterwards Sir Philip, Francis, an Irishman, the son of the translator of Horace, who was born in Dublin in 1740, entered the Civil Service, held a position in the War Office, was sent out to India as a Member of Council, became a bitter opponent of Warren Hastings, and fought a duel with him, returned, sat in Parliament on the extremer Whig side, and died in 1818.1 The evidence connecting Francis with ''Junius," though entirely circumstantial, and certainly not decisive even as such, is very strong, and at any rate far outweighs that advanced in favour of any other candidate for a rather bad eminence. For the Letters of Junhis, while they display some of the worst qualities of the human soul — arrogance, spite, jealousy, and hardly one really good or great quality, inasmuch as their very denunciation of abuses is evidently but personal, or at best partisan — are far less intellectually and artistically remarkable than it used to be, and some- times still is, the fashion to represent them. The immense impor- tance attaching to oratory in the eighteenth century — when a single fortunate speech might bring a man office, wealth, hereditary dignity, and almost everything most coveted — together with a rhetorical tradition starting at least from Bolingbroke, and possibly from Hali- fax, had made a certain rather stereotyped and very conventional fashion of writing the subject of constant practice and of not infre- quent attainment. Burke is the great example of this practice, carried beyond convention, beyond rhetoric, beyond even eloquence, into great permanent literature. "Junius "is the chief example of it in its lower and quite undivine form. An affectation of exaggerated moral indignation, claptrap rhetorical interro^tions, the use. clever enough if it were not so constant, of balanced antitheses, a very good ear for some, though by no means many, cadences and rhythms, some ingenuity in trope and metaphor, and a cunning adaptation of that trick of specialising with proper names with which Lord Macaulay has surfeited readers for the last half-century — these, though by no means all, are the chief features of the Junian method. But the effect is not in the least marmoreal, as Burke's is. It has, on the contrary, two qualities of the usual imitation of marble — it is plaster 1 Still other claimants of less mark, one H. M.Boyd, one Rosenliagcn, one Greatrakes, are mentioned by Wraxall {Own Time, \. p. 447, jj?.). The "anti- Franciscan " arguments have been recently urged once more in tiie Athenteum by Mr. Fraser Rae. 648 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix and it is hollow. As a man of letters the author has done well a conventional exercise not worth the doing. As a man of morals he has put talents great, if not consummate, at the service at best of party, at worst of self. Far different is the history and far higher the merits of a yet more famous book, some twenty years younger, which also belongs of right to this Book and chapter. James Boswell, younger of Auchinleck, was born in Edinburgh in October 1740. "' He was the heir to an old family and a good estate, had talents of various kinds, wrote a popular Account of Corsica in 1768, and in his later years (he died in 1795) made some bid both for political and professional success. But he is for posterity nothing but the author of the Life of Dr. fohnson, published in 1791, with its earlier complement, the Tour to the Hebrides (1773). Boswell had devoted himself to Johnson as early as 1763, and for the remaining twenty-one years of the sage's life, though not very frequently or for very long periods in his company, was in pretty constant communica- tion with him, was (though Johnson could not avoid rough treatment of his follies) on the whole tolerated by the great man as he tolerated no one else, took infinite pains both before and after his idol's death to procure all the information he could about him, and wove it into one of the most extraordinary books in literature — a book which from the day of its appearance to the present has been quarrelled over, accounted for in a score of different ways, given up as a hopeless enigma, but always read and rejoiced in. Those who like Boswell at first like him ever better ; those who do not like him at first (such cases have been known) with rare exceptions become converted to him afterwards. Some of his greatest admirers think him a whole fool ; nearly every one thinks him in large part foolish. Except Pepys, whom in not a few ways he resembled, there is perhaps no author whom we regard with so much affection mixed with so much contempt. And he h* written a biography of very great size, which is all but universally allowed to be the best, with but one rival, in literature, and which some hold to be best with no rival at all. Of many other writers, we may select Gilbert White of Selborne (1720-1793) and William Gilpin of Boldre (1724-1804), because of the immense influence upon literature of the tendency which the Natural History of Selborne (1789) and the series of "Picturesque Tours" ( The Highlands, 1778; The Wye, 1782; The Lakes, 1789; Forest Scenery, 1791 ; The West of England, 1798) expressed. White's volume is a plain but vivid record of observation of nature ; Gilpin's books, a little more florid in style, are elaborately illustrated in aquatint. Both exemplify the craving to get close to nature, the determination to " count the streaks of the tulip " and value its hues. INTERCHAPTER IX The actual contents of the foregoing Book require less classification and comment of the specific kind than has been the case with any of those preceding it ; but their general character, taken into conjunc- tion with that of Book VIII., and the lessons of the change to which we are now coming, require some larger notice. For we are once more approaching one (and up to the present day the last) of the great turning-points of English literature — a turning-point of a defi- niteness and moment which had been only twice equalled before, at the beginning of the Elizabethan great time with Lyly and Spenser, and at the Restoration. The Augustan ages, with their continuation in the mid- and later-eighteenth century, were closed in fact, though not in general opinion, by the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. But they had had notice of closing before. What these notices were we must now briefly indicate, concluding with a short summary and criticism of the main aspects of literature from the rise of Dryden to the death of Burke. The agencies of the change admit, of course, of very different appreciation, but by both in number and order the following summary will probably be not far from doing justice to them. Almost imme- diately after the beginning of the century there began also a certain indefinite but very perceptible '"harking back" to older literature in various forms — the antiquarian efforts of Oldys, the editorial labours of Theobald, the collection of ballads. English and Scottish, as definite curiosities. The poetical work of Thomson had more effect in the same direction than its author knew, or in any probability intended, and its own suffusion with conventionality did little harm and (by rendering it more palatal>le to the wits and the town) some good. A little later still the same mixture of conventional externals and Romantic spirit meets us in the scanty but intense poetical work of Collins, in the almost as scanty and less intense, but curiously anxious and "questing," poetical work of Gray, and in the wide, various,^ and far-reaching, though insufficiently productive, literary studies of the latter. The Thomsonian mixture is more perceptible still in Shenstone, because this latter, though an undeveloped and 649 650 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. irregular, is a decidedly germinal critic, whereas in Thomson there is little sign of the critical spirit. And then, at or about the year 1760, there meets us a whole group of important symptoms, or stimulants, or both — the Castle of Oiraiito, Percy's Reliques, Macpherson's Ossian — all expressing, and the two last at any rate powerfully helping on, the complete Romantic revival itself — a revival further expressed in curiously different ways a few years later by the rich work of Chatterton and the poor work of Beattie.^ Opinions may differ as to the cause of the still further postpone- ment of the Revival itself, and some will probably still take refuge in the apparently pusillanimous, but certainly prudent, and perhaps not really unsound, doctrine of " the Hour and the Man." But it does not seem quite foolish, or even very fanciful, to attribute to the enormous literary influence of Johnson an effect in keeping back the growth which (though such was very far from being his wish) had the beneficent effect of the "pinching"' process so well known to gardeners. That it was beneficent there can be no doubt, and more than one of the examples just referred to shows this amply. The general literary mind was as yet not nearly enough educated in the way in which it wished to go. As Percy, as Macpherson, as Chatter- ton, as Beattie showed in their different fashions, as was shown still more by the deplorable creatures of the last twenty years, the aims, the ideas, the conceptions of the new school were quite vague and very ill-informed. Only Gray really knew something of mediaeval English literature, and modern literature other than English ; and Gray's knowledge was divorced from power, further enfeebled (it may be suspected) by a divided allegiance, and rather sicklied o'er with its own learning. The robuster labours of the Wartons, the Tyrwhitts, the Ritsons, were needed to supply the actual stuff of knowledge, as well as the positive genius of a new generation to supply the power of using it. That powerful assistance was given by 1 Of especial interest in regaid to this matter are the Letters on Chivalry and Romance of Richard (not then Bishop) Hurd, published in 1762, before the Reliques, or the Castle of Otranto, or all but the first-fruits of Ossian. Hurd (1720-1808), successively Bishop of Lichfield and Worcester, was in character rather a pompous /arz/^w//, and injured his reputation by making himself a sort of bandog to Warburton. But his writings, at least the critical part of them, can be spoken of with contempt by no good critic who has read them. They are gropings rather than discoveries, marred by imperfect knowledge, by supercilious- ness, by mistaken attempts to adjust Classical methods to Romantic matter. But the man who in 1762 recognised that there was a Romantic Unity, distinct from the Aristotelian, was a critic if ever there was one. His Dissertations on Poetr)' are less good than the Letters, and his Commentaries on Horace are " old ^yle," with some modern touches. But his Dialogues probably gave Landor no slight hint for the Imaginary Conversations ; and any one who will compare Hurd with Blair will soon see which is on the right side in literature. IX INTERCH AFTER IX 651 two (for Blake exercised none, and Crabbe very little till later) of the four chief poets c. 1780 there can be no doubt. Both Cowper and Burns deepened the tendency to get out of the hbrary and into the fields and woods, to see directly and not through borrowed glasses, to express directly and not in phrase of common form ; while to some, at least, the mere alterative powers of Burns's dialect must always hold a high place in the calculation. The German influence of the very latest years of the century was also real, though much more alloyed, and working by no means wholly for good ; while that of the French Revolution, though it may easily be exaggerated, can no more be denied than can the influence of the three great changes at the junction of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries on the literary growths which followed them. It is not for nothing that the three leaders of the new movement were all deeply influenced by Godwin, that Godwin's philosophy shot into crystal at the touch of the Revolution itself, and that the essence of it was anarchy, in the sense of refusing accepted conventions, in everything. All three were to recoil from this eventually, but the two greatest of them never allowed the recoil to affect their literary position. They struck — Wordsworth rather blindly and instinctively, Coleridge with reason — at the whole convention of the period immediately behind them, and the literary practice of a hundred years has followed up their blows. What, then, was this convention, and to what does the crusade against it amount ? It is not a mere idle play on words to answer the first part of this question that the convention was Convention itself. Like most long-dominant creeds, this was not the work of a single man, or the definite and conscious expression of the opinions of a single mind. The four greatest exponents of it, Dryden, Addison, Pope, and Johnson, undoubtedly brought it about, but it may be questioned whether any but the last — perhaps whether even he — was a consciously convinced apostle of it. Dryden, its founder, was an explorer, an experimenter, to his very death-day ; his theories were in a constant condition of readjustment and flux, and they, as well as his practice, included a great deal of stuff which was not part of the classical-conventional creed at all. and suited it but oddly. In adopting and carrying out the demands of his time for a clearer, plainer, more business-like style in verse and prose, he was induced, as a makeshift, to take up with the French '' classical " theories to a certain extent, but tliis was chiefly in consequence of his curious pref- erence for adaptation over creation. His immediate successors, the two great lawgivers of the eighteenth century in verse and prose respectively, were men excellently suited for their own purposes, but rather unfortunately devised for the general good of literature. Addison was a man of good hut rather partial reading, with an intellect 652 MIDDLE AND LATER 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE bk. ix neat rather than powerful, a hater of exxess, but rather tolerant of de- fect and littleness. Pope was one of the very greatest artists that ever existed, but an artist pure and simple, a man of no learning, of no extensive intellect, and greater in his art than his art among others. Again, Johnson's chief characteristic was a conservatism just too obstinately tinged with mere common sense, a determination, a little too dogged and narrow, to adorn the Sparta he had got, and no other literary city. And so, the general taste assisting, a really haphazard, though seemingly orderly, convention of conventions came into exist- ence. Men praised " correctness " without having any more real standard of it than a misunderstanding by Pope of Boileau's mis- understanding of Horace, who had himself misunderstood the Greeks. They turned, instinctively rather than in theory, away from wild nature to civilised manners. They laughed at the Middle Ages, and filled their poems with personifications as unreal as those of the Romance of the Rose, and infinitely less attractive. They gen- eralised and abstracted ; they refused " to count the streaks of the tulip" — till their written imagery had the life and the outhne and the colour of a mathematical diagram. Feeling — and feeling rightly — that prose ought not to be like poetry, they consecrated one par- ticular limited kind of poetic diction as the proper uniform of verse, and (despite isolated attempts at truer metrical theory as well as practice) they clung to the separated couplet as the serious metre beyond which there was no salvation. All this, to borrow a famous phrase of Carlyle's, the new age " [not always] modestly, but peremptorily and irrevocably denied." It was right in the denial, not so right in undervaluing what, in pursuance or in spite of its theories, the period from 1660 to 1798 had given. For mighty things had been given and done. In the opening portion the work of Dryden is so great that only the greatest (and very few of them) can be put above him in art, not many even in literary spirit, hardly one in craftsmanship. And this high peak is followed in the chain by the volcanic magnificence of Swift, the graceful outlines of Addison and Pope, the massive strength of John- son and Gibbon, the varied and effective sky-line of Burke — with con- siderable minor heights to fill in the range. The eighteenth century by itself had created the novel and practically created the literary his- tory ; it had put the essay into general circulation ; it had hit off various forms, and an abundant supply, of lighter verse ; it had added largely to the literature of philosophy. Above all, it had shaped the form of English prose-of-all-work, the one thing that remained to be done at its opening. When an age has done so much, it seems somewhat illiberal to reproach it with not doing more. BOOK X THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE CHAPTER I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS ^ The turning-point — Coleridge — His criticism — Wordsworth — His inequality — His theories — His genius and its limitations — Southey — Scott — His poetical quality — Byron — His reputation — And contribution to English poetry — Shelley— His poems and his poetry— Keats— Landor— Moore— Campbell Some slight protest has lately been made against the fixing of the year 1798, and the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as the definite turning-point of English literature for its last great stage as yet. It is perfectly true that no immediate general effect was produced by the book, and ^^^ Tn"'"^ that no second book till The Lay of the Last Minstrel, seven years later, showed that any other great mind had been affected. But this is not in reality a damaging argument. In almost all revolu- tions, literary and other, the first onset is separated from the decisive charge by a greater or lesser interval ; at all turns of tide — While the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to {:;ain, Y^x back, through creeks and inlets making. Comes silent, flooding in, the main. The painful inch might seem not to be gained by even The Ancient Mariner, even by Tintern Abbey; but the main was flooding in all the same. 1 In these two last Books the abstinence from critical expatialion and the omission of minor writers, which have gradually grown more and more necessary throughout this history, will, as a rule, lie more than ever noticeable. In the same way, editions will only be given when there is special reason for it. 653 654 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x The most important single agent, or at least leader, in the trans- formation was undoubtedly Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was born „ , . at Ottery St. Mary, in Devonshire, on the 21st October, 1772. Although the best poetical work of Coleridge in poetry is extremely small in bulk, while scarcely a single prose book of his, save perhaps the Biographia Literaria, can be said to be successful throughout in both matter and form, yet his poetry at its best reaches the absolute limits of English verse as yet written, his prose is full of suggestion and germ.^ Moreover, his personal effect on the greatest men of his own generation was so great as to be almost uncanny. Till he knew Southey, Southey, though always fond of books, had shown little or no literary turn ; till he knew Wordsworth, Wordsworth produced, or at least published, hardly anything that can be called really poetry. It is impossible to estimate the effects of their boyish and lifelong friendship on Lamb. Hazlitt, the most arrogant of men, confessed that Coleridge was the only man who taught him anything. His revival and readjustment of the old trisyllabic variations on the octosyllable started Scott ; his philosophisings, not very systematic, changed the current of English philosophy. It is scarcely possible to find a movement, in verse creation or in prose criticism, between 1798 and his death, which does not directly or indirectly owe its impulse to Coleridge. It is perhaps more wonderful, when we consider this extraordinary expense of spiritual influence on others, that Coleridge produced as much and as good work as he did, than that he did not produce more and better. The virtue that went out of him was so great that little might well have been expected to remain. He seems indeed to have had only two periods of complete original energy, the one about 1797-98, when he was stimulated by physical and mental comfort (for he was then living with his young wife, of whom he had not yet tired, at Nether Stowey), and by the mental excitement of the com- panionship of Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy ; the other not quite twenty years later, when he had just settled with the Gillmans at Highgate. His work before the earlier of these periods yields nothing of the first merit ; that between them and later only scraps. At first his style was that of the usual verse-writer of the late eighteenth century, differentiated only by the inspiration of nature and topography which he had received from the sonnets of Bowles ; then (and just before the great time) he had a fit of stiff Odes in the Gray-and-Collins 1 It may be questioned whether the last, and quite recently published, book of this prose, Anima Poetce (London, 1895) vvliich his grandson collected from pocket-books and note-books yet unprinted, is not as important as any. In par- ticular, it contains more attempts in elaborate prose than any other. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 655 manner, varied by the intolerable platitudes, expressed in more in- tolerable bombast, of the blank verse of Religious Musittgs. Of the Odes themselves, that to the Departing Year has flashes, and that to France more; while after the critical period, in 1802, the really beautiful Dejection comes only below his greatest things. Of the later scraps the opening of Love, part of The Three Graves, the exquisite fragment of the Knight's Tomb, and a few other things alone deserve the exception recorded. For the most part he led a wandering and rather mysterious life, habitually consuming opium in excessive quantities, not presenting the spectacle of conduct in any way equal to his admirable ethical and religious principles, and always coming short of his own literary projects and designs. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, and thence went to Jesus College, Cambridge, which he left to enlist in a cavalry regiment. He was readmitted, but he never took a degree. In 1795 he married ''my pensive Sara," the sister of Southey's wife, Edith, and, after being for a time a Unitarian preacher, betook himself wholly — so far as he can be said to have betaken himself to any profession at all — to that of literature. He could, when he chose, be a very effective journalist, and as the market for journalism had now risen considerably from the starvation prices of the preceding century, he sometimes earned a fair income, though he was not above accepting, and even asking for, allowances from friends, and, at any rate for some time, leaving his family as a burden on Southey. He sojourned at the Lakes, in London, in Malta (where he was secretary to Sir Alexander Ball), in Wiltshire with some people named Morgan, and finally, as was said above, at the Gillmans', between Highgate and Hampstead, where the younger generation gathered round him, and he addressed them, in the manner described for all time by Carlyle, till his death in 1834. Although many of Coleridge's plans fell through altogether, and though his publication of what he did publish was very irregular, his actual works, if collected, even without his mere journalism, would fill many volumes. The Fall of Robespierre, which he and Southey published in 1794, before either had found his true vocation, is a mere curiosity, and not an interesting one. There is some, though still not very much, interest in the volume of Poefns which Joseph Cottle published for Coleridge two years later, while in these same years he lectured in prose on literature, the lectures apparently con- taining many of his favourite ideas and expressions, as well as by their intermittence illustrating his fatal instability. He at different times issued by himself, or with only the slightest hel]D, two i)eriodicals, the Watchman (1795) and the Friend (1809), which latter, as first printed, is very different from the book known under the same name. 656 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x His sliare in the Lyrical Ballads ^ included some of his best work, and the same time saw Kiibla Khan and Christabel (neither published till long after), the tragedy of Osorio, etc. During a subsequent visit to Germany (in company at first with the Wordsworths), he began the translation of Wallenstein^ which to all but Germans, and to some of them, seems a much greater thing than Schiller's own work. For about ten years he lectured a good deal, though very erratically, in London, and at the close of the decade, in the years 1816-18, he published Christabel, the Biographia Literaria, Zapolya, and the (book) Friend. His later published work was not extensive, and as published not very original, though valuable collections of Table Talk, marginal notes on books (to the making of which he was much addicted), and the like were published after his death. Coleridge's importance in English literature is threefold — first as an influence, in which character such brief justice as is here possible has been already done him ; as a prose-writer, especially in the de- partment of criticism, understood in its widest sense ; and as a poet. As a prose-writer his importance is limited to criticism, and to criticism rather of matter and spirit than of form and style. It has long been acknowledged that, inestimable as was the benefit he con- ferred upon English philosophy in the widest sense by His criticism. . . .[ i- • , i , . givmg it a new direction, he had no systematic con- structive faculty, and could at best — it is true that he could hardly have done anything better — -suggest an attitude. The attitude was that of a mediasvalism inspired by much later learning, but still more by that intermediate or decadent Greek philosophy which had so much influence on the Middle Ages themselves. This is, in other words, the Romantic attitude, and Coleridge was the high priest of Romanticism, which, through Scott and Byron, he taught to Europe, re-preaching it even to Germany, from which it had partly come. He more than any one else revolutionised the English view of literature, and though unjust to the eighteenth century, and not always trust- worthy in detailed remarks on earlier writers, set it on the whole on a new and sound basis. In the literary form which he gave to these and other exercitations of his he was not pre-eminently happy ; both Southey and Wordsworth were better prose-writers merely as such, and Southey was far better. But even here, as far more elsewhere, Coleridge was "noticeable," and his mission was to show what to iThis famous book was professedly to illustrate two different methods of poetic treatment, Wordsworth making the common uncommon, and Coleridge the uncommon credible and acceptable. The latter object, though less distinct, was much more fully achieved than the former, for the Ancient Mariner accepts its conditions and performs its feat, while the best things of Wordsworth's part do not deal with every-day conceptions, and are not couched in familiar language. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 657 admire and think, and in what temper to admire and think it. not in what special form to express the admiration or tlie thought. His accomplishment as a poet was different, but was also subject to the strange limitations which not only confined but marred his work throughout. The bulk of his verse is very far from small : it extends to 500 large pages of double columns pretty closely printed.^ But the most lavish tolerance of selection ^ has not succeeded in getting out of this mass more than half the number of small pages loosely and largely printed in single column ; and not a quarter of thie winnowed heap is really good grain. The Ancient Mariner and Christabel 2iX^ Coleridge's only great productions of any bulk. Knbla K/ian is very short, and elsewhere he has only passages. Yet the quality of the better part is such that no English poet can be put far above Coleridge when only quality and not quantity is demanded. This quality is perhaps shown as well as anywhere in the fragment of Knbla Khati itself, where there is no disturbing element of story or character to interfere with the purely poetical part of the matter ; but it is equally visible, and, of course, much more satisfactorily appreci- able by the general taste, in The Ancient Mariner, where these things are present, and in Christabel, where they are provided more abundantly still, though much less artistically and finally adjusted. Diction, metre, imagery, letter-music, suggestion — all the elements of poetry are here present in intense degree, and in forms, guises, and combinations entirely novel and original. It is scarcely too much to say that in these best poems of Coleridge the poetry of the nineteenth century is almost wholly suggested, and is, to a very great extent, con- tained after the fashion of the oak in the acorn. The collaborator of Coleridge in the Lyrical Ballads was, as very frequently happens in the more fortunate partnerships of life and literature, a remarkably different person from his helpmate. Born in Cumberland, but of Yorkshire stock, at the town of „, , ^. , 1 • « -1 ,,T.ii- ITT 1 1 Wordsworth. Cockermouth, m April 1770, William Wordsworth was the son of a lawyer and land-agent ; but his father died when he was thirteen, and for some years the family luck was low. This did not, however, interfere with tlie future poet's education at Hawkshead Crammar School and St. John's College, Cambridge, or with his early indulgence in a career of leisure, travel, and study, not commonly enjoyed by any but the favourites of Fortune. A sojourn in France affected him greatly, though in very recent days its effect has perhaps been exaggerated ; and lie underwent, like Southey and Coleridge, a measles of Republicanism which very soon cured itself. His first verse appeared, as became his slightly more advanced age, before 1 In the admirable edition of Mr. Dykes Campbell (London, 1893). 2 Mr. Stopford Brooke's Golden Book of Coleridge (London, 1895). 2U 658 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE Book x theirs in 1793; and like theirs it has no great merit. A legacy of not quite a thousand pounds having fallen to him, he established him- self in the south of England at different points of Somerset and Dorset, and here he fell in with Coleridge, with whom, after issuing the Ballads, he set out for Germany. On his return he settled at the Lakes, recovered the inheritance of which the injustice of his father's employer had deprived his family for nearly twenty years, married, and after a time received the lucrative sinecure, or practical sinecure, of Distributor of Stamps. The entire history of his life was literary and domestic, and for half a century he abode first at Grasmere, then at his well-known home of Rydal Mount, composing at leisure, pub- lishing at intervals, believing in his own poetry with an intensity only shared by Milton among true poets, and very slowly winning first the elect, or some of them, and then the crowd, to his belief. It was about the end of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century that the general conversion was ratified — on one side by the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford, on the other by a pension from the Crown. For the last seven years of his life he was Poet-Laureate in succession to Southey, and died on 23rd April 1850. It has been said that Wordsworth was very different from Cole- ridge ; there is, indeed, hardly more than one point of resemblance between them. Both were poets of the very highest power, the interval ,^. . ,. and inequality between whose best and worst poetry is His inequality. , , . . '^ ■' vast and very nearly mcomprehensible. It must be added that the incomprehensibility is greater in Wordsworth's case than in Coleridge's. The latter wrote badly or weakly, because he very seldom gave his genius a chance, because his habits were fatal to continued mental activity, because he was distracted between a dozen different literary objects, because he was at any rate very often writing, when he did write, for mere bread. In all these respects Wordsworth's lot and conduct were quite different. He devoted himself utterly and entirely to poetry, seldom thinking, hardly ever writing anything that was not either poetry or about poetry; he maintained himself by exercise and plain good living in the utmost mental and bodily health ; and he declined to be a bread-winner with such a magnificent steadfastness that Fate was from the first cowed, and maintained him without any effort of his own. His poetical pro- duction, accordingly, was never in the least hampered or hurried, and large as it is, the bulk is not in the least surprising, considering that it represents more than half a century of waking moments entirely given up to it. Yet, even deducting the work of the years when Wordsworth's powers were not come to maturity and engaged in their proper work, as well as that of the years in which his natural force was abated, there is absolutely no certainty in his poetic touch. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 659 Nor is this inequality to be accounted for, in any but a small degree, by his celebrated heresy about poetic diction. He had adopted, perhaps less consciously and deliberately than his prose manifesto on the subject in a preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads would have us believe, but to some extent both with consciousness and deliberation, a formula of reaction from the practice of the eighteenth century, which laid it down that poetry ought to be written in the simplest language of the common people, that even metre is an accident of it, and that the poetic essence consists wholly in fixing the result of an impassioned spirit- ual experience. His theory led him to the composition of some silly things, and never in the least helped him to the composition of fine ones ; but in practice he constantly neglected it. No poet has a more distinct poetic diction — a diction sometimes more really stiff and non-natural than that of any Augustan of the decadence — than Wordsworth. But his success and his failures have very little more to do with this diction than with his childishnesses and his peasantries. In both moods, with both dialects, he will sometimes soar to em- pyrean heights, and sometimes flounder along the moor of prose with the most exasperating shamble. And it is not by any means certain (though the contrary would seem almost incredible) that he was him- self fully or at all sensible of the difference. Only this of his pet heresy survived in him to the last — the conviction that the meaning, and the meaning only, was the poetry. And as it was his equally firm creed that William Wordsworth could not mean otherwise than nobly, so it was matter of breviary with him likewise that William Wordsworth could not write otherwise than well. There is now no difficulty, except to those who either do not possess critical power or decline to use it, in detecting, so far as such things can ever be detected, the secret of Wordsworth's poetical inequalitv. It is that his poetical power, though of „• ' . - ' . . "'s genius the intensest and noblest, was very narrow in its possi- and its bilities of application, and that, reinforcing a native arro- ™"*"°"s. gance with an acquired theory, he thought it capable of being applied almost universally. It was his mission to reverse the general ten- dency of the eighteenth century by averting the attention from towns, manners, politics, systems of philosophy, and directing them upon the country, nature, the inner moral life of man. and religion. Occa- sionally a sort of splash of that limited Init magnificent poetic genius of his has fallen beyond the usual circle ; more often he has en- deavoured to extend the circle at the expense of the power. Per- haps twice only, in Tintern Abbey and in the Ode on Intimations of /nnnortality, is the full. tl)e perfect Wordsworth, with his half- pantheistic worship of nature, informed and chastened by an intense 66o THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x sense of human conduct, of reverence and almost of humbleness, dis- played in the utmost poetic felicity. And these two are accordingly among the great poems of the world. No unfavourable criticism on either — and there has been some, new and old, from persons in whom it is surprising, as well as from persons in whom it is natural — has hurt them, though it may have hurt the critics. They are, if not in every smallest detail, yet as wholes, invulnerable and imperishable. They could not be better done. Elsewhere, in the great range of Wordsworth's work,^ we are in a perpetual series of ups and downs, of alternations between small things nearly as perfect as the great ones, small things imperfect or negligible, and great things in bulk which, except in solitary flashes and spurts of suddenly released genius, are dull and dead. The mighty poem of which The Prelude "^ and The Excursion are only fragments was fortunately never finished in its actual bulk ; yet lines like the famous one of Newton — Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone, with some passages in both portions certainly not far inferior, scarcely tempt any genuine lover of poetry to repeat his first wanderings through the estimable wilderness. The progress through the smaller poems is naturally less painful. The very early Evening Walk (written 1787-89) has all the author's veracity and nature-knowledge, though his style is still eighteenth-century. Poor Susan (written 1797) has an admirable sentiment, a clumsy metrical setting, and some capital phrase. A Night Piece (early 1798, and suggested doubtless by Lady Winchelsea, but not in any way copied) is valu- able as giving, deliberately, the process of poetic observation, which had been so long and so sadly neglected. The 1807 collection is full of great things, which in the famous Ode to Duty, and not only there, reach positive magnificence. And so we might go through the whole huge volume, everywhere meeting with strange and childish freaks, with instances still more fatal of the poet's inequality to the situation he has chosen, but now and again, and not too seldom, with that ineffable combination of thought and music which reaches its -■&' iThe chief issues of this work after 1798 were the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads in 1800, Poems in 1807, the Excursion in 1814, the White Doe in 1815, the Diiddon Sonnets in 1819, the Ecclesiastical Sonnets in 1822, and a collection in 1836. Of his best single things not printed in 1798, Hartleap Well appeared in 1800, most others in 1807. 2 The Prelude (finished 1805, not published till 1850) has nowadays more champions, who are not uncompromising Wordsworthians, than The Excursion. It possesses undoubted nobility, and a strong autobiographic interest; yet it may seem to some that much of it had been as well in prose. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 66i highest accomplishments in the bewildering and dazzling passages of the two poems above cited. When Wordsworth writes — The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion; or Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, even Shakespeare, even Shelley, have little more of the echoing detonation, the auroral light, of true poetry. No third poet in English, and therefore none in any language, has anything that comes near them, though Spenser from this point of view must, and Milton from that may, be put above Wordsworth. Not his least poetic merit, however, has yet to be noticed, and that is the firm and decisive manner in which he established the sonnet in its place. The reappearance of this form had been, as was noted in the last Book, one of the signs of the Romantic revival, and most of the poets of that revival practised it more or less. But Wordsworth was fonder of it than any of them, and his work in it was not, at its best, approached by any, until his years had increased and his strength diminished. He did not indeed take to it extremely early : his first evidence of a thorough command is the Skiddaw sonnet of 1801, the '• Westminster Bridge" (1802) following rapidly ; but from that time onward not many years passed without at least one masterpiece. Wordsworth's sonnets contain almost his best work, outside the two unapproachable pieces already noted, with perhaps a very few others. And in the famous series on the River Duddon he has grappled, and more successfully than most of his followers except Dante Rossetti, with the great difficulty of a sonnet- sequence, in its parts retaining the individual charm of the form, while, as a whole, giving something like the effect of those long poems from which, except in narrative, modern taste has more and more turned away. Modern taste has more and more turned away from the poetical work at least of the writer who, already mentioned more than once, was in the lifetime of Wordsworth and Coleridge invariably associated with them. It is certain that the strictly poetical power and value of Robert Southey were considerably inferior to theirs. Yet his verse,^ to those who will take the trouble to read it, still has, in large parts at least, no small attraction, wliile it was a very great influence in its time, and expresses the tendencies of tliat time as clearly, if not as supremely, 1 Those who fear the large one-volume edition of the whole will find an excellent selection by Professor Dowdcn in the " Golden Treasury " Series, 662 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x as any. He was the youngest of the trio, born at Bristol in August 1774, of a family entitled to write themselves ariiiigero in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, though his father was in trade and died young and nearly insolvent. Southey, however, was, by his mother's brother, educated at Westminster and at Balliol. He took no degree, and entered no regular state of life except that of marriage, which he undertook at an early age, and with no prospect of subsistence. A stay, however, in Portugal, repeated some years later, gave him a strong fancy for the languages and literatures of the Peninsula, and after some vicissitudes he gave himself up to literature, this being made possible by the generosity of his school friend Charles Wynn, from whom he received an annuity of ^160. He lived for the last forty years of his life at Greta Hall, near Keswick, where he, on very small means, collected a wonderful library, brought up not only his own family, but for some considerable time that of his erratic brother-in-law Coleridge, accomplished an astonishing amount of admirable literary work, for the most part very poorly remunerated, and died in 1843, having been for some years scarcely of sound mind. He had been made Poet-Laureate in 1 8 13, and from the time of the foundation of the Qiiarterly Review had been one of its principal contributors. Southey's Poems, on which he himself serenely based his hope of immortality, and which were very highly thought of by most good judges in his own time, even by some who disliked him and his politics, were collected in ten volumes in 1837, and after his death re-collected with additions in one. Besides the already mentioned Fall of Robespierre, in 1794, with Coleridge, he published Poems with R. Lovell, another future brother-in-law; Joan of Arc (1795); Poems in two volumes towards the end of the century ; Thalaba the Destroyer (iSoi) ; Tales, and the long poem of Madoc (1805) ; The Curse of Kehama (1810) ; Roderick the Goth (1814) ; and the Vision of Judgment (1821) ; with a Tale of Paraguay, Oliver Newman, etc., later. Much of Southey's work, especially his largest poems oi Joan of Arc, Madoc, and Roderick, is in a kind of blank verse, showing reaction from the couplets of the eighteenth century, but somewhat deficient in individuality and variety. Far more important, as well as far better, are the irregular and unrhymed stanzas of Thalaba, and the irregular but rhymed stanzas of Kehama. Although the unrhymed Pindaric (which Southey took from Sayers of Norwich) is pretty certainly a devout imagination merely, there are extraordinarily fine things in Thalaba, and its effect upon poets so different and great as Scott and Shelley is in no way hard to understand. Kehama is better still, and Southey's poetical fame seems at present likely to rest (though the revolutions of the past bid us have a care in saying this) on the best passages of CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 663 this very fine, though somewhat remotely and unpopularly conceived, poem, with a certain number of smaller pieces — "The Holly Tree," the exquisite '• My days among the dead are past," the popular, and not meanly popular, " Battle of Blenheim," *' Cataract of Lodore," '• Well of St. Keyne," "Inchcape Rock," '"Bishop Hatto," and the fine ballad of " Queen Orraca." But there are many great passages in the longer poems, even in the Vision ofjiidg/nettt, the fault of which is none of those indicated by Byron in his clever parody, but simply that it is panegyrical in substance and hexametrical in form. It is diiificult to write a good official panegyric in English, it is nearly impossible to write good hexameters in English ; and when a man chooses to encounter two such difficulties at once, it is no wonder if he be worsted. Southey had poetic gifts — even great ones — but his life was unfavour- able for their development, and they were probably not of that overmastering kind which makes the possessor independent of circum- stances. He thus ranks higher as a prose-writer than as a poet, and his prose will be better treated in another place. It is important to pay attention to the dates of these three careers. After 1798 and the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge published nothing of importance in verse for nearly twenty years ; and Words- worth, though he published, was not attended to. Thalaba and Madoc, on the other hand, appeared soon, and had no small popu- larity, Thalaba in particular being, as was said above, a most important poetical fact of its day. But for some seven years the public had very little poetry put before it (even Crabbe, the only veteran with a future, being silent), until The Lay of the Last Minstrel appeared . Walter Scott takes rank, so far as age goes, between Wordsworth and Coleridge, having been born a year later than the former and a year earlier than the latter, on 15th August 1771. A younger child of a junior branch of the great border clan of his name, he was born in Edinburgh (his father being a Writer to the Signet), and was himself educated for the same profession in its higher branch. His health was so bad in early childhood that it was hardly thought he would survive, and the lameness which after infancy disabled him for a time, remained, though not to a disal)ling extent, in youth and manhood, to become again a serious trouble in the disorders of his later years. Although always a reader, and fairly if not regularly educated at the High School and University of the Scottish capital, he was in no sense early noted for literary leanings, except that he published a tiny volume of translations from the German at five-and-twenty, and did some ballads a little later — ballads showing something of the rococo style of the late eighteenth 664 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X century, but with fire enough in them to burn all this up. He married at the end of 1799, and though he never attained, or showed much sign of attaining, an extensive practice, received the easy and comfortable, though not very lucrative, SheriiTship of Selkirkshire, which, with his wife's means and his own, gave him a tolerably good income. In 1802 he put forth, with some original and some con- tributed matter in verse and prose, the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and this suggested The Lay of the Last Minstrel. It was published in 1805, and was in some ways the most important original work in poetry, taking bulk, form, and merit together, that had appeared for generations, though poetically it could not vie with the Lyrical Ballads. This masterly metrical romance achieved at a blow the victory for the new poetry, by bringing its charms home to that body of general readers who might have been disposed to think The Ancient Mariner a pleasant but extravagant trifle, and to be puzzled or contemptuous over the Lines written above Tinterti Abbey. Scott followed up the Lay with a series of long poems — Marmion (1808), The Lady of the Lake {\%\6), Rokeby (1812), The Lord of the Isles (1813), beside the minor, later, and anonymous Bridal of Triermain and Harold the Dauntless, not to mention a great number of lesser and chiefly lyrical pieces. He was, though no musician, one of the best song-writers in English, and when he gave up poetry for novel-writing (see next chap.) his magnificent faculty for improvising verse still found vent in mottoes, songs, and snatches included in the novels themselves. The last literary com- position of his that is known is in verse, and though, written as it was in all but the final stage of his fatal disorder, it is incoherent in parts, it contains the fine distich — The shapes upon the dial cast, Proceed but pass not back again; and ends with the pathetic aposiopesis, strangely appropriate in sense and form — The blood glows warm, the nerves expand. The stiffened fingers take the pen, And His career, after the establishment of his fame by Marmion, was for nearly twenty years continuously prosperous. In his profession lie made no mark, but obtained, in addition to his Sheriffship, a comfortably paid and not hard-worked appointment in the Court of Session, which, with his other resources, made him independent of literature. And literature itself rewarded him in a way previously unknown. His poems brought him large sums, but these were insig- CHAP. 1 THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 665 nificant in comparison witli the returns of the Waverley Novels, which for a long series of years gave an income of from fifteen to twenty thousand a year, and after his death cleared off a balance of debt of about double that amount. He constructed for himself an elabo- rately Gothic country-house at Abbotsford on the Tweed, bought land round it at exorbitant rates, received the title of baronet in 1820, and, having married his eldest son to an heiress, had every prospect of " founding a family " — his admitted, and not ungenerous, ambition. Unfortunately he had, at an early period, secretly become partner with his friends and printers the Ballantynes in the printing concern itself, and this connection — • persevered in for reasons imperfectly comprehensible, since the profits of it were small and the trouble and risk great — resulted in absolute ruin during the great trade crash of 1825. Scott, refusing bankruptcy, set himself to work to pay off in full the enormous sum — over a hundred thousand pourvls — for which he was legally liable, and practically achieved the task, but the work and the mental distress brought on paralysis and softening of the brain, from which, after a vain visit to Italy, he died at Abbotsford in 1832. Scott's poetry, like that of all the more important poets, has to be considered under two aspects, that of its historical position and that of its purely intrinsic merits, though these can never, as some impatient critics have recommended, be wholly separated. From the historic point of view, hardly the greatest poets exceed Scott in im- portance. Without him it is extremely improbable that Byron would have done anything more than the Giffordian satires, which were most congenial to him, and which, though clever enough, are of no real moment. And without his influence, reinforced as it was a decade later by his own novels and Byron's poems, the complete conversion of the public taste could not, so far as we can see, have by any possibility been effected. Even as it was, the greatest poets of the new school — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats — had to wait a considerable time for their due acceptance ; and if the work had been left to them alone, it is pretty certain that the result would have been slower still, if it had ever been brought about at all. It may be said that the judgment of the multitude in regard to poetry may be neglected, and this is no doubt, to a certain extent, true. But it is very far from unimportant that the general tendency and taste of the time should be turned in a right direction, for then only has poetic genius a fair chance. We may therefore not merely pardon, but welcome, a certain touch of mere popularity, or of artistic imperfec- tion, in triumphant missionaries of tlie good cause. Further, the actually \ve;ilc points of Scott's poetry have for very many years been much exaggerated, and even more misstated. 666 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x Although possessed of a poetic faculty always real, often great, and sometimes quite consummate, there is no doubt that he was in the first place, and by natural kind, even more of a tale-teller quahty!^^ than of a poet in the modern sense, that he was a " maker " first of all. And for the purpose of tale-telling in verse, extreme and consummate felicity of poetic expression in concentrated form is even less necessary than it is for drama. Indeed, narrative almost discourages such expression, except in the dangerous form of episode or aside. Yet, again, Scott's irregular education and his lack of the minuter critical habit (though he was an excellent, if a rather too merciful, critic on the large scale) made him careless of minor details of phrase, construction, and sometimes rhyme. And yet again, though possessed of deep feeling and of the utmost shrewdness in human philosophy, he was by temperament extremely averse from exhibitions, either of passion or of apparently philosophical reflection. All this gave him the appearance, rather than the reality, of being a superficial and facile bard, and criticism, itself far more really superficial, has sometimes classed him as such. It will readily appear from what has been said in the last paragraph but one that this is a mistake. If the attempts of the four poets above referred to — Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats — some of them composed in direct rivalry with Scott, and in his very measure — be compared, it will be found that the superiority as poetry is by no means constant, and the inferiority as narrative invariable and most marked. Moreover, in the best passages even of his narratives — the finding of the Book in the Lay, the last stand at Flodden and the passing bell of Constance in Marmion, with not a few others — and still more in his lyrics and snatches, — among which, if mention were once begun, scores of things from " Proud Maisie " downwards would have to be included — Scott constantly reaches a very high level, and sometimes comes not so far off the very best passages of these four poets themselves. Above all, he is one of those poets, the rarest of all, who serve as channels to convey the enjoyment of what is real poetry to those vast numbers of the human race, the majority by something like ninety-nine to one, who are intolerant of poetical quintessence in unadulterated draughts. The benefit con- ferred by these can hardly be exaggerated. This " appeal to the people " was taken up before many years had passed by another poet, curiously different from Scott in personal character, and indeed in most other ways, but possessing, like him, the faculty of making poetry popular. George Gordon Byron, sixth Lord Bvron, was born in London on 22nd January 1788, the son of John Byron, a captain in the army and a great rascal, and Catherine Gordon of Gicht, an CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 667 Aberdeenshire heiress. The father squandered the mother's property, and had none of his own, while his uncle, the fifth holder of the title, disposed of or wasted the family estates, so that, despite a long minority, the poet (who succeeded his uncle at ten years old) came into no great fortune. He was educated at Harrow and Cambridge, and in 1807, when not yet twenty, published (after first privately printing) a book of very valueless verse entitled Hours of Idleness, which was much ridiculed in the Edinburgh Review. Byron, whose satirical faculty is perhaps that which divides his critics the least, replied (not very quickly) in a rough and crude but vigorous satire, following Pope through Gifford, and entitled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), took his seat, and set out on his travels to the Mediterranean. He came back in 181 1 with the first two cantos of Childe Harold, and published them in February 1812. The book, which came to a public "ground-baited" to full appetite by Scott, was immensely popular, and Byron became a lion at once of society and literature. In less than^ four years he had published his brilliant series of verse-tales, — The Giaour, the Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair, Lara (18 14), the Siege of Corintli, and Parisina (181 5), with other verse, — had run through much of his property and sold Newstead Abbey, had married a great heiress, Miss Milbanke, and had, after exactly a year, been left by her. The circumstances, though not even now positively known, were universally assumed to be discreditable to him, and he left England in the spring of 1816, never to return alive. He lived, however, for some seven or eight years longer, chiefly in Italy, and, engaging in the war of Greek Independence, died at Missolonghi on the 19th of April 1824. During these years he produced the last two cantos of Childe Harold, far exceeding the earlier ones in poetic force, wrote many pieces in dramatic form, and sometimes, as in Manfred and Sardanapalus, of much excellence as verse, but of no acting quality, added to his lyrics and shorter pieces (including by far the finest of them, The Dream and Darkness, written just after the separation), wrote Mazcppa, the last and most vigorous of his tales in the Scott style, and engaged in a new kind of satiric writing, the hint of which he took from a very clever writer, J. H. Frere, the companion of Canning in the Antifacobin. This vein at first produced Befipo, an unimportant though very amusing thing, and then gave the far greater Don fiian, a medley, which was not, and perhaps could never have been, finished, but which, though severely reprobated in its own day, and not likely to be ever very sincerely defended on the score of morality, is perhaps his most accomplished work in literary art, displays immense power of observing and " making," and has not a little real poetry. The chronicle of Byron's poetical reputation is a very important 668 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x passage of literary history. As has been said, his popularity, when he first showed his real strength, was immediate and immense ; and it continued to increase during his life. Even those who, His reputation. i- • i i i i- i t i-i i on political or moral grounds, disapproved, disliked, even detested him, seldom thought otherwise than very highly of his poetical abilities. Moreover, his influence, very great upon the literature of his own country, was almost greater abroad. The new Romantic schools of France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Spain owed nearly as much to him as to any other single influence, perhaps more. Abroad, too, this influence has proved lasting; and if a general vote were taken on the Continent of Europe as to the greatest English poet, it is questionable whether, even after the great revolu- tion which has taken place in foreign taste as to Shakespeare, Byron would not have the first place. In England, on the other hand, when the first rush of the rocket was over, the fall began at once, and has been, though not as rapid, almost as uninterrupted as the familiar simile suggests. It is true that Byron had never lacked admirers, and that several attempts, the most elaborate and vigorous of which is now in progress, have been made to reinstate, or at any rate to raise, his fame. But what- ever may be the case in the future, immediate or other, these attempts have certainly never yet succeeded, either with the majority of com- petent critics or with the majority of readers of poetry. No one denies Byron's power of appeal and excitement ; nor, now that time has disinfected his work, as usual, is there much necessity for any complaint against him on the score of morality. It is also not Andcontribu- ^^"^^^ ^'^^^ he brought into English poetry, and indeed tion to English into English literature, a vast and valuable stock of new ^""^"^^ imagery, new properties, new scenery and decoration ; that he employed the verse-tale scheme of Scott, if with no great novelty of form, yet with a novelty and intensity of at least apparent passion which made it quite a different thing. In the same way, in Manfred and other pieces, he caught from Goethe, and transformed into his own likeness, a kind of handling of emotion and scenery which was equally unfamiliar. His lyrics, though never possessing the exquisiteness of those of Keats and Shelley, have force and fire, and not uncommonly great sweetness as well ; his handling of the Spenserian stanza in Childe Harold, though it never attains to the dulcet dreaminess which is the true virtue of that form, has energy, picturesqueness, and a narrative motion very different from that of the original indeed, but for tlie purpose preferable. Don Jitan, as has been said, was original, and is still practically almost unique, as a medley of observations on life, tinged with sarcastic innuendo, but not to an extent sufficient to interfere with the milder graces of poetry. chXp. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 669 Many scattered passages in different poems, dramatic and non- dramatic, possess merits of very high and by no means single or monotonous kind ; while once, in the great poem of Darkness, Byron has attained to the true sublime, and in the companion Dream he has true pathos, unmingled in either case with the merely theatrical. And always he has the merit of changing the scenes, the characters, the temper of English poetry, of at least apparently widening its scope, of giving a dash of the continental, the cosmopolitan, to vary our insularity and our particularism. If, notwithstanding these allowances, which have been measured with a careful, but not grudging, hand, it is still difficult to assign to Byron the highest rank, the cause must be sought outside his minor defects of form, though these are undoubtedly rather numerous and very annoying. Similar defects exist not merely, as has been noted, in Scott, but in many other writers, and they can easily be pardoned. The fault in Byron can be best brought out by the familiar, not easily defined, but easily understood, contrast between rhetoric and poetry. It does not matter much whether the Byronic despair, the Byronic cynicism, Byronism generally, was sincere, as a few boldly maintain ; was utterly affected, as others perhaps not much more wisely assert ; or was a mixture of nature and affectation. In any case, the mood, and Byron's expression of it, almost invariably seem, to some persons, rhetorical in the bad sense; and rhetoric in the bad sense is of it.self, and necessarily, incompatible with the highest poetry. The two youngest poets of the great English romantic Pldiade stand in less close relation to each other, and to their immediate forerunners, than those who have just been mentioned ; and they are much more purely poets of the nineteenth century. In those there is still a very strong eighteenth-century leaven ; in these it has alto- gether disappeared. Their shadow goes wholly forward, except m such very minor matters as Shelley's following of Southey's unrhymed metres, Keats's adoption and im- ^ *^' provement of Leigh Hunt's "enjambed" couplet (see below), and a few other things. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born at Field Place near Horsham, in Sussex, on 4th August 1792, being heir to large property and a baronetcy. He was educated first privately, and then at Eton, whence he passed to University College, Oxford. He had already written two worthless romances in the Monk style. Zastrozzi and .S7. /riiyne, full of crude anarchical ideas borrowed from Godwin and the negative philosophers of the eighteenth century. The novels were pul)]ishc'd. one before, one after he matriculated at Oxford in 1810, and his literary work of this time also includes T/ie Wanden'nf[ Jew, the earlier form of Q?/ec>! Mah, and a puhlislied, but vanished, volume of J'oems by I 'iclor and Cazire. Later he 670 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X issued with T. J. Hogg, who was with him at the University, — a clever man, but a treacherous and mischievous friend, — yet another volume, The Posthinnoiis Fragtneiits of Margaret Nicholsoni the mad would- be murderess of George HI. In less than a year after he entered Oxford he published a pamphlet on The Necessity of Atheis7n, and was expelled. On 28th August of the same year he married Harriet Westbrook, a pretty girl, and a school-fellow of his sister's, very young, and of lower station. His later life must be told briefly. He wan- dered about England and Ireland, tired of his wife, and left her for Mary Godwin, the philosopher's daughter, whom, after Harriet's suicide in December 1816, he married. They had already travelled, and after a brief residence at Marlow, they went to Italy, where he was drowned in a storm off Spezzia on 19th July 1822, having in his later years been a good deal in contact with Byron. His literary production had been incessant. Queen Mab, in 1813, being followed by Alastor (181 5), Laon and Cythna, afterwards The Revolt of /slam (1817), Prometheus L/nbound, and The Cenci (1819), Adonats (1821), besides many other pieces concurrently with these, which were not published till after his death — Prince Athanase (181 7), Rosalind and Helen, and fulian and Maddalo (181 8), The Mask of Anarchy (1819), The Witch of Atlas (1820), Epipsychidion and Hellas (1821), The Trimnph of Life (1822). The very numer- ous smaller poems have, almost from the first, been arranged under the years of their composition. Shelley's peculiar poetical power is commonly said to have shown itself first in Alastor; but it is perfectly visible, to those who have eyes to see, in Queen Mab, and it grows ever stronger and stronger, ever brighter and brighter, till his death. ^/aj'/^^r, itself a "hii'p^t^r^."'^ study of the ill effects of solitude, is the best proportioned, and shows the nearest approach to what Shelley never in any long poem gave completely, a piece with a definite scheme definitely carried out. Prometheus Unbound is a dream cast in dramatic form, but with hardly any action, and consisting really of a series of the ineffable lyrics which Shelley alone could write. The Witch of Atlas is a similar dream, thrown into a form as narrative as the writer could manage ; Adonais, a following of the Greek elegy, which is really a shrine for separate passages, each of incom- parable beauty even for the author. It is here that we find the consummate and characteristic image — Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity. And so his other long pieces, and his very numerous shorter lyrics, might be distinguished in different ways. CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 671 All, however, are permeated by the same quite indefinable, but easily perceivable, spirit of poetry. The crude atheism of his earlier, and the misty pantheism of his later, years have not very much directly to do with this. His political and social heresies were also more or less accidental ; and it is probable that, in a time of triumphant Liberalism, Shelley would have been a high Tory and a mystical devotee. Except, indeed, in reference to the theory of poetry, of which (for his prose was in formal merit not far below his verse) he wrote an admirable Defence, his theories on no subject ever took orderly and philosophical form. If we reserve the passion of love, the beauty of nature, and, in his early and earlier middle stages, all revolts against titular and authoritative convention, it can hardly be said that any one subject, or kind of subject, attracted him more than another, or served better than another as canvas for his painting and theme for his music. Except comedy, in which his touch was very uncertain (for of his two efforts of the kind, Peter Bell the Third and Swellfoot the Tyrattt, the first is, in parts, as good as the second is almost entirely bad), there was nothing that he could not touch with the effect of communicating to it his own special poetical enchant- ment, an enchantment which may be most safely defined as that of indefinite, but haunting suggestion of beauty, in thought sometimes, in sound and visual effect always. On no poet is criticism so unsatis- factory as on Shelley, because in none is the poetry so pure, so independent of subject, so mere a harmony, in the early Greek sense of the word. Analysis of it is nearly impossible, and of little value when it can be made. Eulogy is possible, ad injinitwn ; but for eulogy there is here no space, and the worst utterance of Shelley himself is better worth reading than the best panegyric of his commentators. John Keats, the second of the pair in age, but the first to die, almost as great a poet as Shelley, and one far more directly in the line of English poetical development, was born in London in October 1795. He was the son of a livery-stable keeper, but had a fair education, was apprenticed to a surgeon, and by no means neglected his profession for seven years. But his real interests were entirely literary ; and, as he had some small means, he determined, about the year 1817, to indulge them. He had, not altogether fortunatclyfor himself, made the acquaintance of Hunt and Hazlitt. The first, indeed, taught him the rudiments of a new reformed prosody, while the second may have encouraged his love for our older poetry ; but the influence of neither was at all necessary for so original a poet, and while his discipleship to Hunt may have been the cause of a certain over-lusciousness traceable in his earlier work, his friendship with t)oth exposed him (most unjustly, for he had 672 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x no political creed) to virulent abuse from Tory critics, as a supposed member of the school of Cockney Radicals. His own first book, which does not display anything like his real powers, appeared in 1817. Next year followed the great, though still very immature and unequal, poem of Endymion, which had been principally written in the Isle of Wight. His health now began to fail, and consumption declared itself unmistakably. He had time, however, to publish, in 1820, a third volume, containing La>nia, Hyperion^ The Eve of St. Agnes, and other things far superior to his earlier work. Then, leaving his betrothed behind him, he set out for Italy, and died at Rome in the care of his friend, the painter Severn, on 13th February 1 82 1. The character of Keats is extremely attractive, and there can be little doubt that, had health and life been granted him, it would have constantly improved. Perhaps this is not quite so likely in regard to his poetry. He could not have improved, nor could any one, on The Eve, The Ode on a Grecian Urn, and La Belle Dame sans Merci ; but he could have given us more of them. His poetical characteristics, though, like those of all the greatest poets, not ponderable or numerable with exhaustive exactness, are easier to indicate than Shelley's. In particular, there is one formal peculiarity which, exuberantly present in Endyi/iion, is noticeable in all his work, the return to the highly " enjambed " couplet, which had for a moment fascinated poets like Browne, Wither, and Cham- berlayne in the early and middle seventeenth century. Of more importance still is the wide exploration of subject, mediaeval, classical, purely fantastic, and miscellaneous, in which Keats, as in other points, was the forerunner of Tennyson, his junior by sixteen years only, and through Tennyson of all English poets since, even of those who have seemed rebel to the influence. This special difference of nineteenth-century poetry will strike us if we compare Keats with Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Gray, in the last of whom the new style appeared dimly, to be more distinctly, but still not quite distinctly, present in the great earlier Romantics from Wordsworth to Scott. The poet presents his own poetic thought and style in the boldest relief, but, in order to do so, he ranges over antiquity and literature in search of subjects which serve him for the stuff, not so much of long narratives, though sometimes also of these, as of shorter lyrical, or quasi-lyrical, outbursts, idylls (or, as Professor Lushington wished to call them, "epylls"), ballads, what not, in which musical and pictorial effect are conjoined, and the conjunction further informed by the poet's own meaning and view. No poet has ever excelled Keats in this particular style, and no one except Tennyson has equalled him. His genius, at any rate in the still not quite mature condition in which we have it, does not CHAP. I THE POETS FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 673 seem to have tended to the shaping of epic or dramatic work, com- bining considerable bulk with exact proportion. But for taking an incident, a moment of thought, action, or sentiment, and presenting it vividly to the reader, with the richest assistance of colour, the most haunting accompaniment of verbal music, and something beyond and afar from both these things, though by no means wholly unconnected with them — such things as the poems already mentioned, and others (like the song, " In a drear-nighted December") begin, and very nearly fulfil, the promise of a new poetical era in England. In particular, Keats showed that curious power of entering into the thought and sentiment of other times, which has been so characteristic of our now closing age, and which distinguishes it from all that came before. He knew, it is certain, no Greek ; yet the Ode above referred to has been accepted by the severest scholars as probably the most Greek thing in English poetry. He could have known extremely little of mediaeval literature ; yet there is nothing anywhere, even in the far more instructed Pre-Raphaelite School, which catches up the whole of the true mediaeval romantic spirit — the spirit which animates the best parts of the Arthurian legend, and of the wild stories which float through mediaeval tale-telling, and make no small figure in mediaeval theology — as does the short piece oi La Belle Da»ie sans Merci. The new influences were expressed almost as strongly, though with much less immediate influence, by Walter Savage Landor, who is, however, so much more important as a prose-writer, that he will best receive his principal treatment in that class. Yet Landor, a man twenty years older than Keats, began with verse, the curious poem of Gebir (1798), which appeared in the very year of the Lyrical Ballads ; and he never deserted it, his poetical work, in a large variety of forms, being, in fact, one of the most vo- luminous that any poet of great merit can claim. His tragedy of Count Jidian has found even fewer admirers than Gebir ; but the Hellenics, and a great body of what may be called Imaginary Con- versations in metre, display a very noble, if slightly artificial and inanimate, form of blank verse. Among his innumerable shorter poems (which possess a curious similarity to Ben Jonson's) occur perhaps the best examples (with the doubtful exception of Ben's own masterpieces) of the e])igram in the proper Greek sense (that is, the short neat ix)cm on a single thought, incident, person, action, scene) to be found in English. " Dirce " perhaps deserves this description l)est, while the other peak of Lander's verse, " Rose Avlmer," though less classical, is even more perfectly poetical in its union of colour and music, presenting, or comi)ined with, an exquisite pathos and meaning. Neither in prose nor in verse had Landor any comic power, and even his pathos is not to be calculated upon with any 2 X 674 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x security. But no one has, as he has, united romantic suggestion, atmosphere, perfume, with classical perfection, elegance, limitation of means to the admitted and permitted. And no one possesses quite as he does a certain form of grace, which is rather elegance than grace unqualified. The first seven poets mentioned in this chapter are wholly, or almost wholly, of the revolt, though Byron affected to play Abdiel to it. Landor has a Janus-face in poetry. But two others, who must not be relegated to the future chapter of minorities, Moore and Campbell, have an indefinable, but very sensible, propulsion towards the older stamp, though not untouched by the newer. There can, in particular, be no greater contrast to Landor than Thomas Moore, who had little scholarship, and though not " incorrect," carried facility sometimes close to the trivial, but who was an admirable song-writer (Landor's singing was never for the lute, but only for the reader's ear), a satirist in verse of the very first class, and a tale-teller, in the same medium, of great excellence. He was born in Dublin on 28th May 1779, and was the son of a grocer; but was well educated, took his degree, after some political difficulties during that troubled time of " '98 " at Trinity College, Dublin, and then went to London to study law at the Middle Temple. Mistranslation oi Anacreon in 1800, and the Poetiis of Thomas Little next year, made him very popular, though not exactly with the grave and the precise. He was much patronised (though both now and afterwards he managed to retain his independence), and received a valuable appointment in the Bermudas (1803), which gave him no work and some profit, but, through the misconduct of his deputy, involved him later in serious pecuniary liabilities, which were honourably discharged. He produced another volume of poems in 1806, fought a duel with Jeffrey and made friends with him, began the Irish Melodies in 1807, and published the Twopenny Postbag (the most brilliant political verse since Canning, and the most brilliant political verse in English on the Whig side, except The Rolliad and Peter Pindar) in 1812. In 1817 appeared, with immense success even after Scott and Byron, the collection of Oriental-sentimental tales entitled Lalla Rookh, and next year a new satiric piece, The Fudge Family. His later verse (the chief of it The Loves of the Angels., 1823) was, except in small things, not so good, and as he grew older, after the brilliant Life of Byron in 1830, he did some book-making (a History of Ireland, etc.). But his prose romance oi The Fpicurean (1827) is not contemptible. He was pensioned in 1835, but, like Scott and Southey, suffered in his later days from mental disease. He died at Sloperton in Wiltshire, which had been his headquarters for thirty-five years, in 1852. CHAP. I THE POEl'S FROM COLERIDGE TO KEATS 675 Moore was somewhat overvalued during his lifetime, and has, as usual, paid the penalty by undeserved depreciation since. It was, indeed, inevitable that the preference on the one hand for '' thoughtful" poetry, whether of the style of Wordsworth or of the style of Browning, and on the other for poetry rich in far-brought and far-reaching beauty of suggestion, like that of Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, should in not very critical minds positively, as well as comparatively, cause distaste for Moore's light and easy songs (hardly separable from the music with which they are associated), for his sparkling jeux d'esprit in verse, and for the florid pageantry of Lalla Rookh in verse, and The Epicurean in prose. But criticism might have been expected to redress the balance of matters, and to remember that nothing can be asked of a man more than to be supreme in his own kind. Moore is supreme, or very nearly so, in his, and that in more kinds than one; yet the fact has too seldom been recognised. Because — as no doubt many, if not most, of us would now — one would rather keep one page of Shelley, and of other poets down to Rossetti, even if the preservation necessitated the loss of all Moore, it does not follow that Moore is despicable. Three or four things greater than any of Moore's, and a general aspect of higher seriousness, have protected Thomas Campbell against anything like contempt, and will protect him ; but his range is less, and his amount of good work very much smaller. He was born in July 1777 at Glasgow, and was educated ^'"^ ^ there. For some time his prospects — his father was a ruined mer- chant — were unpromising ; but he was lucky enough to publish The Pleasures of Hope in 1799, when England had little poetry of any kind, and had not yet recognised the Lyrical Ballads. Of no great bulk (about 1000 lines of Goldsmithian couplet), nor at all consummate in quality, it was much better than anything of the old kind that any poet then living (except Crabbe, who was for the time silent) could produce, and it made Campbell's fortune. This, maintained fairly by literary work, and never abundant, was always sufficient till his death at Boulogne in 1844. Most of the hackwork which he did is for- gotten ; but his Specimens of the British Poets (London, 7 vols. 18 19) are a most valuable point de rep&re, display, not merely critical acute- ness, but even remarkable critical catholicity for the time and school, and form the best book of their kind published up to their date, and for many years after. A visit to the Continent in 1800 gave him the material and inspiration of Hohenlindcn, and his best work was done in the next few years. In 1809 Gertrude of //}vw//;/i,'- appeared ; in 1824, Theodric ; and in 1842 The Pilgrim of Glencoe. He was for many years editor of the AWf Monthly Mac^azine. Campbell wrote some half a dozen short things which stand by 676 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x themselves — the three great war-songs of Hohenlinden^ The Battle of the Baltic, and Ye Mariners of England, " Lochiel," some lines on " A Deserted Garden," which are worth many long poems, and per- haps one or two more. In yet other pieces he showed the poetic flash ; but his depth is altogether out of proportion to his width, and most of his work has now merely historical interest. In theory, he set himself against the new school ; in practice, all his best things belong to it. CHAPTER II THE NOVEL — SCOTT AND MISS AUSTEN The novel, n Cri;i(^le''s Loi!^ :\.nide infra), but which fell more and more under the sole management of Wilson — sometimes into monologues or ordinary reviews, many of which were collected later as The Recreations of Christopher North. A large number of these last are literary in subject, but Wilson also contributed much literary criticism of a less mercurial kind in the four volumes of his Essays, Critical and Imaginative, especially in the fourth. Wilson had great powers, and his writings contain many admir- able things. In particular, he was one of the main pioneers in the new adventure of ornate prose which, as on other occasions, suc- ceeded the poetical outburst of the earlier years of the century ; and some of his efforts in this kind are not easily to be surpassed. He was also one of the first to record, in less formal language than Gilpin and his followers in the Picturesque, the effects of scenery, and quite the first to give literary form to field sports, while his talent for CHAP. Ill THE NEW ESSAY 697 weaving miscellanea of all kinds into dialogue owed little to any model, and displayed resource and dexterity not falling far short of genius. But tliese merits were accompanied, nay, inextricabJy blended with, and also to no small extent marred by, great faults, of which the violence, both personal and poHtical, common to the time was almost the least. The most important of these was, in the first place, an almost incredible and quite unparalleled infirmity of taste, which allowed him to slip into the trivial, the tedious, the idly extravagant, and now and then the simply disgusting. Even at his best he seldom knows that last secret, the secret where to stop, and his prolixity and inequality together make even " beauties " from him hard to select. Another and still worse fault was more moral than literary, though strictly on the literary side of morals — an inexplicable tendency to make always rude and sometimes venomous attacks, under cover of anonymity, on persons who not merely deserved literary consideration, but were in some cases his private friends and even benefactors. John Gibson Lockhart was also deeply tinged with the aggressive, and sometimes scurrilous, personality of the time, but his taste was seldom to seek, and he has no proven crimes of literary Ihe-majesti or personal ingratitude to atone for. He was born at Cambusnethan in July 1794, was educated at Glasgow "'^ *"' and Oxford, took a very good degree, travelled in Germany, and, returning to Edinburgh, practised at the bar. He began his connec- tion with letters by translating Schlegel's Lectures on History, joined heart and soul in the early sports and wars of Blackwood (which on more than one occasion nearly ended in bloodshed, and once did so, though he was not personally engaged), and in 1819 published, with some collaboration from Wilson, the amusing Smollett-like book on Edinburgh and its society called Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk} He married Sophia Scott in 1820, and for some years lived, when not in Edintjurgh, at Chiefswood, on the Abbotsford property, writing his four novels and his cliarming Spanish Ballads, with much miscel- laneous work for Blackwood. At the end of 1825 he was appointed to the editorship of the Quarterly, and, moving to London, wrote a great deal for the Review and a little for Leaser, began his famous Life of Scott in 1837, was made Auditor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1843, and died in 1854, his health broken, partly by work, partly also by family troubles, for his wife and both his sons died before him. No one would deny that Lockhart's most certain and enduring title to literary remembrance lies in his Life of Scott, a book which 1 The title was a play on that of Scott's account of his journey to the Con. tinent after Waterloo, Paul's Letters to his Kinsfolk. 698 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X indeed has an almost unmatched subject, and enjoys the half-illegiti- mate advantage of a great amount of matter from that subject's own hand. But unfortunate experience shows us how insufficient even such advantages are to make a good book ; and this is confessedly- one of the best books in the world. For Lockhart has not only written it admirably ; he has not only exhibited, in his admissions and exclusions, that good feeling which was, as a rule, denied him by his enemies ; but he has also exhibited taste, judgment, sense of pro- portion, in a matter where the exercise of such sense is most difficult, to an extent hardly paralleled in any other biograjDhy.^ He is by no means a born novelist, though there are good, and almost great, things in his novels ; and, though he had an exquisite touch both of humour and pathos in verse, he hardly pretended to be a poet. By far the greatest expense of his literary power was upon criticism and miscellaneous essay-and-article-writing, of the kind generally classed as journalism. No collection of these writings of his has ever been made ; and he was universally believed in his lifetime — nor has he been quite cleared of the charge since — to have strained the privi- leges of an anonymous critic tOj and sometimes beyond, their limit. It is certain, however, that even in those writings of his which his admirers most wish that he had not written, or hope that he did not write, an intellectual power and a faculty of sarcastic attack only surpassed by Swift appear. In less disputable matter Lockhart was always a competent, though sometimes a severe and rather prejudiced, critic. He accepted the earlier Romantic movement, but could never quite reconcile himself to its most luxuriant exuberance in Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson, while his taste in prose also set dis- tinctly against the floridity reintroduced in different ways by De Quincey, Wilson, and Landor. The other main early contributors to Blackwood were lesser men. William Maginn (i 793-1 842), an Irishman of extraordinary versatility, much wit, and some scholarship, but tinged with too many of the weaknesses and vices of Bohemianism, had much to do with Alaga, and more later with Eraser's Magazine, to which latter he bore much the same relation as Wilson did to Blackwood itself. Maginn, who served as a model for Thackeray's Captain Shandon, undoubtedly possessed powers which, if concentrated and chastened, would have enabled him to produce work of very high quality, and as it is, some of his stories and verses (^ Story without a Tail, Bob Burke^s Duel, The Pewter Qjiart, Maxims of Morgan CDoherty, etc.) come little short of genius. He gathered round him in Fraser a set of contributors 1 Lockhart exhibited the same qualities, on a smaller but not less difficult scale, in a long article, published later as a small book, on Theodore Hook, after the death of that ingenious Bohemian. CHAP. Ill THE NEW ESSAY 699 almost more brilliant than those of Blackwood or of the London itself, ranging from Coleridge to Thackeray, and including Carlyle. James Hogg was also one of Maginn's men, but was of much more importance as supplying the figure of " the Shepherd " in the Notes, a personage with most of Hogg's faults, but with much more than his merits.^ The London set, rather absurdly described by their Edinburgh rivals as " Cockney," was almost entirely independent, though De Quincey formed a kind of link between the two periodicals. The first editor of the London, John Scott, has only made ^ , , , mark by his lamentable death, an imbroglio between himself and Lockhart ending in an actual duel between Scott and Lockhart's friend Christie, in which the former, by the mismanage- ment or bloodthirstiness of his second, fell. But the London had Thomas Hood for its sub-editor at one time, it actually introduced Lamb and De Quincey to essay-writing, and it served for years as the chief organ, though Leigh Hunt had his own, of the writers — sometimes, but not by any means always, anti-Tory in politics, and almost always Romantic in literature — who had their headquarters in London itself. Others of these, besides Hunt, made their chief appearances elsewhere, but they may be most satisfactorily treated here and together. Charles Lamb, who is perhaps more nearly unique than any other English writer outside the great poets, was a Londoner born, bred, and, by predilection as well as fate, resident. His birthday was i8th February 1775, his father was a lawyer's clerk, he was sent to Christ's Hospital, where he first fell into the society of Coleridge, and he was early provided for by a clerkship in the East Indian House. But his circumstances were most unfavourably affected by hereditary madness, which indeed never in his own case (except for a very short time) went beyond eccentricity, but which afflicted his beloved elder sister Mary so sorely that she murdered her mother in one fit of insanity, and was subject to others, with increasing frequency as she grew older, for the rest of her life. Lamb devoted himself (there was another brother more prosperous, but more selfish) entirely to her, and never married. It would api^ear that, even independently of the influence of Coleridge (which, however, like all that wonderful person's associates, he felt deeply), he had been attracted to the study of the Elizabethan, and in an even greater degree to that of the Jacobean and Caroline, writers. He wrote some early poems of little merit ; essayed an 1 The sfory of Blackwood and its contributors, long partially and incorrectly known, has now been fully told in Mrs. Oliphant's House of Blackwood (vols. i. and ii. EcJinI urgh, 1897). 700 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x Elizabethan tragedy, John Woodvil, which has more ; composed, with his sister, some Tales from Shakespearej followed up in the same kind afterwards by the Adventures of Ulysses, which are admirable in a most dangerous kind ; and executed, with very brief critical notes which are jewels, two volumes of selections from the Elizabethan drama displaying wonderful sympathy and insight. It is, however, improbable that he would have been much more than a curiosity of literature — one of those not so very rare figures who make us say, ''What a pity this man never found his way! " — or that at best his real worth would have been known only from his letters, which are numerous and charming, if the establishment of the London Magazine followed as it was by his retirement from his clerkship on a pension, had not elicited from him the famous Essays of Elia. It is impossible to describe these ; in point of subject they are literally de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis, the quaint fancy of the writer evolving, as he handles each of his more tangible matters of thought, fancies that never were anywhere, that never were to be anywhere, but in his own writings. Nor is his style more capable of exact definition. That a certain amount of his material is derived from actual loans supplied by the quainter writers of the mid-seven- teenth century, especially Burton, Fuller, and Browne, is perfectly true, as also that the essayist's debt to these for manner and method is even greater than his borrowings of actual matter or word. But a great deal remains which is simply Lamb himself and nobody else. Not only is he thus unique among English writers, but he is equally unique among the smaller and specially national body of English humourists. Nobody has ever succeeded in imitating him, even in his most obvious quaintnesses, while the blending of these quaintnesses with a pathos which is never mere sentiment is a secret not merely undiscovered yet by imitators, but escaping even any complete analysis — a Proteus never to be bound by the most enduring Ulysses, but fortunately amiable enough to bestow his wisdom and his graces without any such process. Henry James Leigh Hunt, who was born in 1784, and like Lamb was a Blue-coat boy, had the same introduction to official life (in his case in the War Office), but gave it up under the double seductions of laziness and literature. He had a brother who was a better man of business than himself, and the two set up a newspaper — the Examiner — which took strong Liberal and Opposition views. Hunt himself was imprisoned — a mere restric- tion of movement — for a libel on the Prince Regent in 1812. He survived this for nearly fifty years (he died in 1859), during which his abode was, except for one visit to Italy, wholly London and its neighbourhood, and his occupation unceasing literary labour. I CHAP. Ill THE NEW ESSAY 701 Neither in verse, in which he wrote a good deal {vide infra), nor in prose, in which he wrote mucli more, was Leigh Hunt exactly supreme. Want of time (for he always wrote for bread) prevented him as it was ; while want of taste would jDrobably have prevented him in any case. But he was of the great miscelianists of English literature — a critic who, as far as the merely appreciative part of his business is concerned, has had few superiors ; and a writer of the purely general essay, the " article," which was more and more hitting popular taste, and which has never lost it since, after a fashion which owed little to any forerunners, and has taught much to scores, almost to hundreds, of followers. Hunt tried longer work in novel and otherwise, but was quite unfit for it : he was a journalist and essayist born. But he inclined towards the older rather than the younger types of these in being prone to write wholly of mainly by himself. He was the sole or the principal contributor to the Reflector (1810), the Indicator (1819-21), the Companion (1828), the New Tatler (1830-32), and the Londoti Journal (1834-35). His work in these and other things was at diiTerent times rearranged and diversified with fresh matter or presented for the first time in different forms — Men, Women, atid Books, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, Wit and Humour, Imaginatioti and Fancy, etc. He wrote a pleasing Autobiography, and an admirable book on London, The Town. But always, and first of all, he is a miscellanist and a writer of essays. Lamb was an exquisite, and Leigh Hunt a very agreeable, critic, the former in regard to a limited and rather haphazard group of personal predilections of his own, the latter in a sphere very credit- ably wide, though determined rather by instinct than by reason. The third great member of the '* Cockney " school, though even his criticism was too much vitiated by extra-literary prejudice, was far greater as a critic than either — was indeed one of the very greatest critics who have ever lived. He was also — unlike his companions — a critic, or at least an essayist, merely, though he wrote a philosophical book of no great merit at the beginning of his career, and a historical one of less at the end of it. William Hazlitt, who was ,, ,. r , . , . 1 A»-i • oTT Hazlitt. of Irish extraction, was born at Maidstone in 1778. He was rather early thrown into contact with Coleridge, bestowed when young much attention on art, but finally settled down to literary work in London, afterwards at Winterslow on Salisbury Plain, where his first wife had some property, and then in 181 2 in London again. Nor did he move liis headcjuartcrs till liis death in 1830. He seems to have enjoyed his life, hut it was not what would generally be called a fortunate one. Both his marriages were ufilucky, the first ending in a regular divorce, the second in his wife's leaving him after a short time. His temper, even by personal and political 702 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X friends, was found to be almost intolerable ; and though he only shared with some very amiable persons the abuse of violent partisans on the side opposed to Liberalism, he provoked, rivalled, and more than requited their acrimony, indulging in the most ferocious abuse not merely of personal literary foes, but of men like Scott and Wellington, who were entirely out of his sphere, and had certainly never provoked him in any way. This waspishness (to use an unfair word, for the wasp never stings unless meddled with) invalidates a small part even of his criticism, as, for instance, in reference not merely to Burke and other Conservative writers, not merely to contemporaries of Liberal principles, like Shelley, who were gentlemen, and therefore obnoxious to his democratic envy, but to inoffensive antiquities like the monarchical poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He was also rather insufficiently equipped with knowledge of other lan- guages and literatures. But, despite these drawbacks, his collected critical lectures and essays on English literature, as well as a good many independent essays, contain perhaps the very finest work of their kind — free from the tentative and experimental character of Dryden, from the limits and blinkers of the eighteenth century, from the scrappiness and vagueness of Coleridge, from the crotchet of Lamb, from the lack of intellectual quality in Hunt, and from the sometimes arbitrary eclecticism of Mr. Matthew Arnold. Besides this great accomplishment, Hazlitt was a very good critic of art, though in a less technical kind than that which has since become fashionable, and such a master of the miscellaneous essay that his faculty for this has by some been put even above his purely critical power. In his own time Hazlitt, though disliked and abused, was a writer of weight ; in the generation succeeding his death he was, save by a few of the best judges, such as Thackeray, rather undervalued and neglected ; and it is only of late years that he has been restored, and perhaps even yet not fully restored, to his proper place. Thomas De Quincey, the one link of great importance between the hostile camps, was born in the suburbs of Manchester in the year 1785. His father died when he was quite young, but left consider- ^ ^ . able property, his share of which De Quincey afterwards De Quincey. . . x, , got rid of in ways not discreditable so much as eccentric — by exercises of literary generosity (he gave Coleridge a large sum), by the most reckless anticipations, by neglecting to adopt any profession, and by such merely wilful oddities as disqualifying him- self for the valuable Hulme Exhibition from Manchester Grammar School to Brasenose College by running away from the former place of learning, and then going to Oxford after all at his own expense. CHAP. Ill THE NEW ESSAY 703 The college he chose was Worcester, where he resided for a long time, but where he took no degree. He settled after some years in the Lakes, married, and lived quietly for twenty years, after which he moved to Edinburgh, living there or at Lasswade till 1859, when he died, the last of his generation except Landor. The singular adventures of his errant youth, and the results of his habit of opium- eating, have been told by himself in various forms and places, specially in his Autobiography and in the earlier and more famous Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which first appeared in the London Magazine during the course of the year 1821. He had published nothing of any importance .before, though he had been a very deep and wide student, and had helped Wordsworth to prepare his " Note on the Convention of Cintra" for press. Having thus made discovery of his ability for literary composition, and being, moreover, urged by the insufficiency of his income, De Quincey, for nearly the last forty years of his life, devoted himself to writing with an untiring energy, the due rewards of which were to a great extent lost to him by his incurably unpractical ways in almost all respects. But towards the end of his life he made a very large collection of reprinted articles, which (further enlarged since his death) is perhaps the most important in bulk and the most varied in subject of any collection of Miscellanea in English. De Quincey's merits, indeed, were so numerous and so great that only the presence, side by side with them, of very serious defects of a peculiarly annoying character has kept him out of one of the very highest positions in literature — to which position, indeed, he has been actually admitted by some. He had a singular combination of exact scholarship with wide desultory reading; an entirely original faculty of narrative; a rare gift for exposition, either in summary of fact or concentration of argument ; an intensely individual, though fitful, humour ; and a hardly matched — a certainly unsurpassed — command of gorgeous rhetorical style. Of this last, indeed, he was very well aware, and was misled by il into the critical error of regarding all plain prose style as inferior, instead of, as it really is, in perfection the equal of the most ornate. On the other hand, De Quincey was liable to accesses of tedious digression and "'rigmarole," which make it sometimes impossible to read him through ; his ])urely critical faculty was singularly untrustworthy, and almost as likely to lead him wrong as to lead him right; his humour, when it cea.sed to be grim or dreamy, had a distressing habit of falling into clumsy jocularity and horseplay. Although, therefore, his works, voluminous as they are, have been very widely read, there have always been dissidents in the apprecia- tion of them, and this dissidence has rather gained strength recently. 704 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x It is not, however, of much importance ; for though sound criticism will never fail to take note of his weaknesses, such things as the Confessions and their appendices (especially the splendid •' Ladies of Sorrow"), the Autobiography, and the essays on TJie English Mail Coach, Murder as One of the Fine Arts,foanofArc, The Spanish Nun, The CcEsars, and a good many others, are quite sure of their place. De Quincey's historical position, however, depends less upon details than upon the fact that he was one of the very first to attempt, and one of the most successful in achieving, one of the great turns in the long race of English prose style — the nineteenth-century reaction from plain to ornate prose-writing. And it is significant and interesting that, as was also the case with another reformer, Landor, he found his easiest and most successful exercising ground in dreams. For a hundred and fifty years the effort of prose, even in the mouths and pens of men like Gibbon and Johnson, had been to be first of all practical — its aim was now to be first of all imaginative. No doubt part of the attempt was due to the Wordsworthian heresy, which De Quincey strongly shared, of the non-necessity of metre in poetry ; but this did not matter. The reformers may sometimes have intended to write prose-poetry, which is a bastard and tainted in blood ; but they really produced a true new cross in imaginative prose. Landor himself, technically no essayist, but, like some writers of the seventeenth century, illustrating the essay-w/j//^ in a slightly altered form, belongs to this chapter not merely on that ground. For with Wilson and De Quincey he is the earliest, and in some ways ' he is almost by himself the greatest, of the reformers, or, as some would say, revolutionisers, of prose style. His prose work was not early, and it took a form not very convenient, but maintained with characteristic obstinacy by the artist — that of Imaginary Conversations, reaching in their total a very great bulk. The first collection of these appeared in 1831, when their author was fifty-six, and this was succeeded by others, sometimes under the general title, sometimes specialised as Examination of Shakespeare (1836), Pericles and Aspasia, The Pentameroti. The formal and the material value of these things are very far apart, and they cannot be praised without qualifica- tion even in respect of form. For such conversations a dramatic command of character would seem to be necessary, and Landor had none ; humour likewise — and Landor's humour was " a terrible minus quantity"; detachment — and Landor was a bundle of prejudices, at times furiously voiceful and never quite silent. But his astonishing gift of style and, despite his crotchets and his too frequent silliness, his attachment to the great standard models of conduct in action and proportion in expression convey to them an extraordinary charm. CHAP. Ill THE NEW ESSAY 705 Standing as he does at the turning of the way in prose, and indeed in literature generally, he manages to combine classical grace, dignity, adjustment, and even not infrequently measure, with Romantic colour, suggestion, variety, to an extent wonderful and sometimes consum- mate. He never quite succeeds in being easy, and he never has the very least imaginative wizardry. He is stilted beside Addison, prosaic beside Browne ; but as much of either as would mix is in him, and the blend is not a little delightful. William Cobbett, older than most of these men, and a strong contrast, in his bringing-up and circumstance, to their mostly academic education and their usual position in society, gives a yet more special contrast with Landor, in his style, the perfection of the ^ , , , , ,. 11 • Cobbett. vernacular made literary — the last great representative of the line of Latimer and Bunyan. Cobbett was born in 1762, and died a member of the Reformed Parliament in 1835. He was the son of a farmer-labourer, served for some time in the army, where he became sergeant, but resided in America for the later years of the eighteenth century, beginning his newspaper experiences there with Peter Porcupine''s Journal, and writing fully up to his title. Soon after his return to England in 1800, appeared his Weekly Register, in which, under difficulties (including one imprisonment and another exile to the United States), as well as in a crowd of books little and big, he continued, for the rest of his life, to vent political ideas, some- times generous, often mischievous, nearly always unpractical, in ad- mirable English. Besides direct politics, grammar, Church history, the currency, potatoes (their badness), maize (its goodness), and a thousand other things, occupied Cobbett's pen ; while his Rural Rides give some of the most vivid, if not the most ornate, description in the language. The great names of Macaulay and Carlyle, hardly junior to most here, will be treated under another head, though both were essayists, and perhaps essayists first of all. Those of some others (of whom Hartley Coleridge (i 796-1 849), son of the poet, inheritor of his weaknesses, but not so very far removed from his ability both as poet and as critic, is the most important) belong to a fuller story than this. 2Z CHAPTER IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE Southey's prose — Historical writing : Mitford, Roscoe, and others — Hallam — Milman — Arnold, Grote, and Thirlwall — Mackintosh and Bentham — Macaulay It has seemed desirable to separate from the essayists, though in some cases they were the same persons, those prose-writers who in the older forms of elaborate composition — history, philosophical and scientific discussion, theological writing, and so forth — composed books of substantive importance during the first thirty years or so of the century. The newer styles, ornate, abrupt, and what not, were slower in making irruption into these dignified regions ; perhaps it may be said that a stouter resistance was opposed there by the publisher-guardians of the gates. Sartor Resarius could find no home except in a magazine, and was welcomed dubiously even there ; the Confessions of an Opium-Eater would certainly have appeared at its author's own expense or not at all, had it been compelled to appear as a book first. If we take Macaulay as the last popular author of an older type in style, though he lived far into the Victorian era, Carlyle as the first of the new. though he was born before Macau- lay and not much less than half a century before Queen Victoria came to the throne, we shall find the division useful as affecting this Book and the next. For Carlyle first broke, as Macaulay, among men of commanding literary position, almost last sustained, the exclusive prestige of the older academic style in matter of book -writing. Many of the essayists and journalists mentioned in the last chapter, notably Lockhart, were themselves indisposed to the more anarchic fashions of style. But the greatest practitioner of a style, not indeed old-fashioned, but of the older fashion, was prosed ^ undoubtedly Southey. It has sometimes been supposed that those who make much of style imagine the existence of some single individual form of prose-writing, to be kept, like the standard weights and measures, in a literary Tower of London, and 706 CHAP. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 707 not deviated from except under peril of tlie law. This, of course, would be an entire mistake. Almost every subject has a style of its own, and almost every writer has a style of his own ; though it is pos- sible to range them all in the two great divisions of plain and ornate, and perhaps in some minor ones. But few will dispute that, if there could be such a form of style, if it were possible, by segregating individuality, to arrive at the general idea, then Southey has come as near as any Englishman to the ideal of prose-writing on the less flamboyant side. Not that his own writing is by any means monotonous, or even extremely uniform, in character. He had to play many parts with his pen — his Histories of Brazil (1810-19) and of The Peninsular War (1822-32), his historical biographies of Nelson (1813 — his masterpiece), Cowper, Wesley (1820), and others, the vast mass of his articles and reviews, the enormous bulk of his private letters, of which the ten published volumes probably represent only the smaller part, the curious miscellany of The Doctor, and such different work as \\i?> Book of the Church (1824), his Colloquies (1829), his Oniniana, his Letters from Spain and Portugal, with the later Espriella (181 2), required, and duly received, different treatment. In the private letters and The Doctor (1834), a dtWher^iQ fatrasie, as the French called it in the sixteenth century, of reading, humour, and what not, he coins words liberally, and admits foreign languages with almost macaronic license. In his full-dress work he is almost Ccesarian in his refusal of the unusual word, and his adherence to the best (not the most colourless and invertebrate) tradition of eighteenth-century style. But always he has the much talked of, the indefinable, but the at once perceptible, quality of ''purity." He adjusts the scholarly and the vernacular, the business-like and tlie ornamental, with an unerring calculation. He is, in short, the Addison, and far more than the Addison, of the early nineteenth century ; and it is a distinct misfortune that more of its writers have not given their days and nights to the reading of him. Sir Humphry Davy in science. Dr. Chalmers in theology, and others in other ]:)mnches would claim notice in a larger space or in a more confined range than the present book allows ; but for our pres- ent purpose the important subject of history, which has ,,. . , , ' ' , , ' .,.',. ^ - . , Historical I)een as much the prevailing subject of the nmetcentn writinc: Mit- century, in prose on the great scale, as theology was of ^"^^^ others^' the seventeenth and philosophical speculation of certain kinds in tlie eighteenth, will probably suffice. It was not merely the example and the fame of (iibbon which tempted writers to this par- ticular branch — the exciting and important events of the French Revolution invited treatment of contemporary themes, and the new- 7o8 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X born passion for investigating the long-neglected archives of different nations necessitated the correction of the older current histories and facihtated the production of new. In the last half of the eighteenth century were born more distinguished historians than had been con- tributed by the whole course of English literary history. And there was a curious progression of excellence in the order of time. William Mitford ( 1 744-1 827) was a man of fortune and of rather unusual cultivation, who left the first really noteworthy book upon the theory of English metre. ^ His principal work was a History of Greece, written between 1784 and 18 14, and very well written, though injured somewhat by a very strong political prejudice and by some mistakes of fact. William Roscoe, who was born in 1753, and saw the reign of William IV., devoted himself to modern, not to ancient, history, and produced, in the Life of Loretizo de Medici (1796) and Leo X. (1805), handbooks of the Italian Renaissance which have not yet grown obsolete. Sharon Turner (1768-1847), John Lingard (1772-1851), and Francis Cohen, who took the name of Palgrave (1788-1861), and was knighted, turned their attention, as it was high time some one should, to English history from a somewhat less superficial point of view than Hume's. Lingard produced a general history of Eng- land far in advance of anything yet written in point of scholarly accuracy. Turner and Palgrave attacked the origins, which had hardly received any new light since the investigations of Elizabethan and seventeenth-century authorities. Turner taking chiefly Anglo- Saxon, Palgrave chiefly Anglo-Norman, times as his province. Sir James Mackintosh (i 765-1 832) bestowed a good deal of his some- what inadequately represented ability and learning upon history ; and Sir William Napier (1785-1860), with some passion and prejudice, but with the most intimate knowledge of his subject, and showing a command of vivid literary representation excessively rare, if not almost unknown, in a professional historian, gave, in 1828-40, his famous History of the Peninsular War. All these men produced historical work which deser\'es esteem, some of them work deserving of something much beyond it ; and the general appetite for history in readers, and readiness to gratify that appetite in writers, may be judged from the fact that the poets Scott, Moore, and Campbell, the critic Hazlitt, and other men whose voca- tion did not directly place them under the invocation of Clio, com- posed extensive books of the kind. But the art and science of the historian had not been so well represented in any man since Gibbon as they were represented in Henry Hallam (1777 or 1 778-1 859). He was 1 An Enquiry into the Principles of the Harmony of Language, and ed. 180^ Tl»e first, in cruder form, had been published some thirty years before, CHAP. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 709 a son of the Dean of Bristol, passed through Eton, Christ Church, and the Middle Temple, and became a bencher of his Inn; but he made no figure in practice, having private means, and becoming a Government servant pretty early. He had written for ^'"' the Edinburgh Review, being a decided, though not violent, Whig, for many years before he made his appearance as a historian with his View 0/ the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818). In 1827 he published his principal work, The Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry Vlf. to the Death of George II., and in 1839 ^^i^ Introduction to the Literature of Europe during the Fifteenth, Sixteettth, and Seventeenth Centuries. Besides his own work, and his wide literary friendships, Hallam had an additional and strong, though indirect, connection with literature through the fact that his son, Arthur Henry Hallam, who died in 1833, was the intimate friend of Tennyson, and by his death gave birth to In Metnoriatn. Hallam was a good deal over-praised during his life as a critic, for he was the oracle of one triumphant and self-satisfied party, and was less than usually obnoxious to the other. The strange slowness, moreover, with which English criticism mastered the comparative method, obtained for his literary judgments, both in his own and other literatures, not merely during his life but for many years after his death, an authority considerably greater than that which really belonged to them. For Hallam came a little too early to avail him- self of that rediscovery of its earlier treasures which every nation in Europe made as a consequence of the Romantic movement ; he was very partially in sympathy with that movement ; and though he could understand he could not love — a nearly fatal disqualification for a literary critic or even a literary historian. But this disqualifi- cation does not attach to the historian proper, whatever it may do to the historical biographer; and in his history proper Hallam's work was of extreme value. Even his Whig prepossessions did not interfere with this : because he was never unfair, and his prejudice merely gave him a solid and honestly confessed basis on which to take his stand, and from which to take his view. He never, like his great pupil Macaulay, succumbed to suppression or suggestion, and a simple allowance for the idola of the Wliig tradition will almost always extract from his work a trustworthy and reasonable statement of historic fact. He occupies among English historians a station much higher than that of Guizot, and not much below tliat of Ranke, among foreign, and his capacity for mere writing, though it did not give him l^rilliancy or cliarm, permitted him always a scholarly adequacy and competence. Very like Hallam, but something of a poet, and as a poet 7IO THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x possessing the touch of passion which Hallam rather fatally lacked, was Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868). Like Hallam he was an Eton and Oxford man, his college being Brasenose, Milman. , . . . -^ . ..i. , r, and in his University he became not merely Bampton Lecturer but Professor of Poetry. Not much general memory of his poems survives, but his tragedy of Fazio was perhaps the very best of the somewhat artificial school succeeding the alternate rant and drivel of the eighteenth century, and some of his hymns are among the best in English. His literary exercises included contributions to the Quarterly Review; but it was not till he was nearly forty (for he had had parochial work in addition to his other occupa- tions) that, in 1829, he published his first historical book. The History of the Jeius. He improved upon this in The History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism (1840) ; but both books were quite put in the shade by his History of Latin Christianity, which appeared in 1856, the year of his grand climacteric. In his earlier work he had relied too much on that uncritical adoption of German criticism which has been the origin, and the destruction, of the reputation of so many Englishmen. In the History of Latin Christianity he relied on solid reading, not of commentaries, but of text, on the inherent powers of a great subject, and on a style which, though it has no very salient mannerism, combines ease with dignity, and neither wearies nor irritates the reader. During the same decade were born three historians who busied themselves with classical history — Dr. Arnold (1795-1842), who devoted himself to the Roman annals; Mr. Grote (1794-1871) and A Id G te I^ishop Thirlwall (1797-1875), who busied themselves and ' with Greek. The first was born in the Isle of Wight, Thirlwall. ^^^ ^^^^ ^^ Winchester and to Corpus, Oxford. He became Fellow of Oriel at a very early age, took private pupils for some years, and was then made headmaster of Rugby, and later Professor of Modern History at Oxford. The last appointment was made too late for him to do much in it ; the earlier entirely revolu- tionised Rugby itself, and had a great indirect effect on all English schools. Historically he fell into the same pitfall which had ensnared Milman (while he did not, hke Milman, live to get out of it) by paying too much attention to Niebuhr. He was, however, a man of vigorous though prejudiced intellect, with a cramping theory that " everything was an open question " ; and in style he was not unworthy to be the father of the author of Essays in Criticism. Indeed, as far as style went, he stood ahead of both the Hellenists, and very far ahead of Grote. This latter, a London banker, a member of Parliament, and an extreme though rather theoretical Radical, was in the latter capacity chagrined by Mitford's unfavour- CHAP. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 711 able sketch of Greek democracy, and set himself to draw a counter picture. He had good knowledge, and was one of the earliest historians to '' realise " events in the modern manner, treating, for instance, the case of Cleon very much as if he had been backing that worthy for a seat in an English constituency. But the form of his work is ext.-emely defective, its scale is enormous and tiresome, and its perpetual advocacy makes the reader long for the time when the " hoarse Bar " will be silent and the Bench will speak. With a little more good luck the desideratum might have been sup- plied by Connop Thirlwall, whose History appeared before Grote's, and was in the popular estimate superseded by it, but who has all the qualities of the historian (except that of vivid realisation) in a far superior degree. Thirlwall, an extraordinarily clever child, a ripe scholar later, and to the end of his life a man of the first intel- lectual and moral excellence, was born in Stepney, was educated at Charterhouse and Trinity College, Cambridge, passed from the law to the Church, held a country living for some years, and in 1840 was promoted to the see of St. David's, which he held for half a life- time. That Thirlwall was not much less strong a Liberal than Grote, and, like Grote, that he imported some purpose, though less, into his history, did not do much harm, for his mind was almost as little partisan as Hallam's, and the same moderate correction for the longitude will set it right. But though his style is infinitely more correct than Grote's, and possesses dignity and even some grace, it is not in any sense inspiring, and no history that is to be more than document can afford to dispense with charm or vigour of style. And partly through this want, partly owing to the character of its writer, the book is far too destitute of the picturesqueness which, easily as it may be overdone, is a sine qua non of a great history. Three somewhat older men may be mentioned before we come to the final name of the chapter — Mackintosh, Bentham, and James Mill. Mill (1773-1836), the chief propagator of Bentham's philoso- phy, the historian (with great and, perhaps, deliberate Mackintosh inaccuracy) of British India, and the possessor of a style and as crabbed as his master's and as unamiable as his own *^" ^'"' character, deserves slight mention. Sir James Mackintosh was born in Inverness-shire in 1765, and was educated at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinl)urgh. He took his degree in medicine, but went to the London bar, and wrote politics for some time before his Vindicice Gallica — a Jacobin apology in his twenty-sixth year produced as an answer to Burke — attracted the attention of the extremer Whigs. He lectured at Lincoln's Inn in 1799, defended Peltipr, Bonaparte's enemy, in 1803, became Recorder of Bombay in 1804, returned, after spending eight years in India, to sit in Parlia- 712 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x ment and profess Law and History at Haileybury, and died in 1832, just too early to reap the fruits of the Liberal triumph. He wrote on philosophy, on politics, on law, on history ; and the worst things to be said about him are that he wrote on each too much like a pro- fessor or one or more of the others, and that his style, though with considerable mannered grace of its own, is too florid, and smacks too much of eighteenth-century thinness draped with Johnsonian phrase. He never concentrated himself either in subject or form, and has left nothing that does his reputation thorough justice. Yet the defence of Peltier is one of the very best and most literary of forensic pleadings in English, and the Dissertation on Ei/tics is a masterpiece of exoteric philosophical exposition. Jeremy Bentham, who died in the same year with Mackintosh, but was born much earlier, in 1748, was a Londoner, was educated at Westminster and Queen's College, Oxford, and entered an Inn of Court. His instincts and interests were indeed almost wholly legal, but he was dispensed by private means from the necessity of prac- tising, and, unlike most lawyers, perhaps because he did not practise, he advocated legal and other reforms of a mostly destructive char- acter. Opinion, very unfavourable to him at first, came round to a large extent, though the wheel is now turning again, and even his demonstration against the Usury Laws, long pronounced unanswer- able, is doubted now. But literature looks to the way in which he enforced his views, not to their nature or purport, their triumph or decay. Here he may be credited with vigour and clearness of thought, which very seldom finds a corresponding vigour or clearness of expression. Even in his most purely critical work, as where he deals with popular fallacies, the form is always below the occasion, and where he is expounding instead of pulling to pieces, the want of clearness and of style is still more painfully apparent. The last author of first-rate importance in the older prose, though he gave it a colour and form which made him more popular than any innovator, was Thomas Babington Macaulay, who played more than one part both in life and in literature, but was, on the whole and in his heart, more of a historian than of any- thing else. He was born at Rothley Temple, in Leicestershire, on 25th October 1800; his father, Zachary, was a very strong partisan of negro emancipation. Macaulay went to no public school, but was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he made many friends, took the Chancellor's Prize for English verse twice, and (though not without some obstacle, from his dislike to mathematics) a high degree and a Fellowship. He had been born to affluence, but his father was unlucky, and Macaulay had at first to look mainly to his Fellowship for actual, and to the Bar for future, support. He had, CHAP. IV THE LAST GEORGIAN PROSE 713 however, begun literature early, contributing, with Praed and others, to Knight's Quarterly Magazine. At about the age of five-and- twenty he caught the attention of Jeffrey by his famous " Milton " Essay and according to the tradition then still prevailing was eagerly welcomed by the Whigs, not merely as a useful literary hand, but as a political candidate of promise. He was put into the pocket borough of Calne, championed the Reform Bill, and might probably have had office at home ; but being both poor and prudent, he pre- ferred to lay a more solid foundation for his career by accepting the post of legal member of the Indian Council, which gave him a chance of large savings. He remained abroad about five years, and during that time made himself independent. On his return he became member for Edinburgh, and shortly after Secretary for War, while later he was Paymaster-General. He lost his seat for a time, but recovered it in 1852, became Lord Macaulay of Roth- well in 1857, and died of heart disease at the end of 1859, on 28th December. His verse, which is very noteworthy, if not absolutely of the first class, will be noticed in the next chapter; his essays, speeches, and History of England concern us here. All this prose work is permeated by a not very complex, but extremely interesting, im- portant, and distinct idiosyncrasy of character in spirit and in form. Macaulay "s thought and his style were even more intimately con- nected than is usual. The former only concerns us indirectly, and in so far as it helps to explain the latter. Macaulay was the very incarnation of the prevailing character of Englishmen between Waterloo and the Indian Mutiny — a hater of abstract principles, transcendentalism, the vaguer forms of poetry, ceremonial and tradi- tional religion ; a Whig-Liberal, less on any coherent theory than from a belief that the Whig-Liberal predominance during the eighteenth century had made England great, and kept her at once from the excesses of absolutism and of republics ; clear and trenchant but extremely narrow in thought ; contemptuous of all things and periods, such as the Middle Ages and even the Renaissance, which he had not taken the trouble to understand ; sure that all things worth understanding could be understood easily; incapable of admit- ting anything but downright estimates of character; an uncom- promising jjartisan, and strongly tainted by that vice of the practical politican which makes him a little unscrupulous as to the means by which his party wins ; not primarily interested in literature as litera- ture, but cultivated enougli to be enthusiastic about such things as appealed to him ; compensating his liberalism in politics by a rather obstinate conservatism in style, and even to some extent in i)hilos- ophy ; a little exposed to the charge of shallowness, and sharply 714 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x limited in almost every direction ; healthy but imperfectly developed ; acute but incapable of comprehending the intangible. In his essays, literary and political, and in the enormously pro- portioned history ^ which, intended to cover the period from the Exclusion Bill to a point not clearly signified, but apparently as late as the French Revolution, did not actually reach in its four large volumes the close of William's reign, this spirit finds its expression with a rare fidelity. He is not a consummate literary critic, for, though he liked almost all the best things from Shakespeare to Shelley, it was never for their actually literary characteristics that he liked them. But he has a wonderful power of representing historical events of the most complex kind ; and, subject to his own limitations, he can grasp and present a man nearly as well as a scene. No one before him had so well applied to history the combined forensic and debating gifts of putting a case intelligibly to the hearer in the way in which you wish him to decide it ; and it is fair to say that no one had given more untiring labour, or used his labour more felicitously, in mastering all details of place, time, and circumstance. And the mere style, learnt partly from Hazlitt, partly from Hallam, and with a little of Gibbon in it, in which Macaulay conveyed his meaning, was again absolutely faithful to his mode of thought. It was arranged with but few appliances except the consecrated antithetic balance, was " classical " in diction, and only ornamented as far as the vocabulary goes by a very liberal use of proper names, slightly fatiguing by its " snip-snap," as Brougham's sharp-sighted jealousy called it, but perfectly clear. On Coleridge's certainly inadequate principle that the whole virtue of style is to convey the author's meaning, no style can rank much higher. Suggestion it has none : it cannot, in the subtle way which the greater styles use, supply keys to unlock and power to set working, in the reader's mind, chambers of machinery supplemental to the author's own. But what Macaulay meant the reader under- stands at once and to the very full ; he feels with him or revolts against him with an instant response ; there is not a foot-pound of effort lost, not a stroke thrown away. And the general public, which was mainly in tune with him, answered by buying Macaulay as no his- torian had been bought before or has been bought since, and by making him, as essayist and historian together, the most popular and widely read prose author of England who has written other things than prose fiction. iThe Essays, all contributed to the Edinburgh, were collectively published in 1843 ; vols. i. and ii. of the History appeared in 1848, vols. iii. and iv. in 1855. Some speeches, biographies from the Encyclop(Bdia Britannica, etc., have to be added. CHAPTER V THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-183O Rogers — Leigh Hunt and Hogg — A group of minors — Elliott, Mrs. Hemans, and " L. E. L." — Hood — Praed — Macaulay — Hawker and Barnes — Hartley Coleridge — Sir H. Taylor — Home — Darley — Beddoes It has seemed worth -while to deal separately with the minor poets of the Romantic movement, both in consequence of the great length of the first chapter of this Book, and because some of them at least form a well-separated group of transition between the great school of the first quarter of the century and the Victorians proper. Of these were a few who almost deserve to have been mentioned earlier, and at their head may perhaps be placed the long overrated name of Samuel Rogers ( 1765-185 5). Had Rogers been a poor man of letters, his poetical claims would have received only the slightest attention. His first verse appeared in 1786, and showed absolutely nothing of the " false dawn " of that period ; his Pleasures of Memory, still quite antique, in 1792; and he followed these up at long and easy intervals with others, the chief of which is Italy (1822). Rogers was a rich man, he was hospitably given, and a great ''lioniser," and whether he was or was not as unamiable as he has been so^ietinies represented, he could and did use his tongue most formidably. In his later years, too, he became an interesting link, or rather bridge, covering one whole literary generation, and con- necting its forerunner and follower. Moreover, he had just enough of romantic interest to vary and freshen his subjects. But there was none of the new music in him, little of the new pictorial power, and absolutely nothing of the new spirit. Classification among minor poets would perhaps have been not much less disagreeable to the apparent nonchalance of Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) than to the uneasy vanity of James Hogg (1770-1835). and probably the admirers of both will resent '^Hogg.'^" it for them. Yet on general and comparative grounds, it is inevitable, and there are even major poets than either in this 715 7i6 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book X very chapter. Both have been mentioned before, more particu- larly Hunt. His only poem of any size is the Story of Rimini, written during his prison sojourn in 1812 and published after his liberation in 18 16. His pervading faults are obvious in it, and served as a main, if not an entire, justification for the violent attacks of the Tory critics on his taste and morals. But he had, from his study of seventeenth-century poets of the school that began with Browne and ended with Chamberlayne, revived enjambetnent, and with it a good deal of their florid ornament and narrative ease, so that he set on a promising path poets so much greater than himself as Keats and Shelley. And in some of his smaller pieces, scattered over different books and long ranges of time, he has enriched the anthologies with pleasant and occasionally excellent things in sonnet and snatch, in rondeau and romance. But though he is credited with some half-score volumes of verse, from the early (and worthless) Juvenilia to the Sto?'ies in Verse published in 1855, but four years before his death, the total does not make a large volume, and the really valuable things go in an extremely small one. Hogg (whose nom de guerre of "the Ettrick Shepherd " was justi- fied, for he was first a shepherd and then a sheep farmer during the whole of his life) was, in so far as his shorter life allowed, equally persistent and much more voluminous. Besides the extensive pro.se work already referred to, he published scattered verse early. The Mountain Bard in 1803, The Forest Minstrel in 18 10, The Queen'' s Wake in 1813, and later Mador of the Moor, The Pilgrims of the Suti, The Border Garland, besides some of his best things foisted as Jacobite ballads, songs in Blackwood, etc. His very best pieces — "Kilmeny," "The Boy's Song," "Donald MacGillavry," and a few more — would, if they were preserved alone, almost justify his own idea of himself as "King of the Mountain and Fairy School of poetry," though not his other idea, that he was master of poetry on the great narrative scale. Take these comparatively few things out, and the large remainder of his work is often scarcely third-rate, and some- times quite beneath criticism. But we must become briefer. The Montgomeries, James (1771- 1854) and Robert (1807-1855), belong to this group. James was the better poet ; but it is questionable whether Macaulay's famous martyrdom of Robert will not give him the longer life ofmbors. ^s ^ name. Bernard Barton (i 784-1 849) was an amia- ble and fairly long-lived Quaker versifier, Henry Kirke White ( 1 785-1 806) an amiable and very short-lived Anglican poet- aster. Tannahill (1774-1810), Cunningham (1785-1842), Motherwell (1797-1835), Tennant (1784-1848), Thom (1798-1848), D. M. Moir, the "Delta" of Blackwood (1788-1851), were Scotch poets of varying CHAP. V THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-1830 717 excellence ; the songs of Cunningham and of Motherwell put them a good deal above the others, though " Delta " has fervent admirers both in prose and verse. Two farmer poets, Robert Bloomfield (1766- 1 823) and John Clare (1793- 1864), rank as such in English literary history. Clare, like Christopher Smart, never acquired his full poetic power till madness seized him — as it had also seized Bloomfield, though with no such compensation. The Farvier's Boy of the latter is nothing but a not unpleasing versification of not uninteresting matter. Some pieces of Clare's (the best of which will be found in the second series of Mr. Palgrave's Golden Treasury) are poems. Barry Cornwall (i 790-1 874), whose real name was Bryan Waller Procter, was the friend of many good men but not a very good poet ; no better, perhaps, than the much laughed at Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839). But the critical ability which can distinguish between "The sea, the sea," and " Oh no, we never mention her " is difficult to attain, and perhaps debilitating when acquired. Henry Cary (1772-1844), the translator of Dante; Reginald Heber (1783-1826), Bishop of Calcutta, and author of one of the very best of university prize poems and more than one of the best modern hymns; Sir Aubrey De Vere (1788- 1846), a poet and the father of poets — are names which must not even here be entirely passed over ; but Ebenezer Elliott and Felicia Hemans must delay us a very little longer. Elliott (1781-1849) was a Yorkshireman, and by no means an unprosperous one ; but he early espoused the extreme views of social, economical, and political matters which infected the working classes between Waterloo and the middle of the century. As Elliott, might be expected, he is not happy in the poems with a '^^J?;.^^"?^"^,', purpose, some of which gained him the name of the "Anti-Corn-Law Rhymer," though sometimes even here, especially In the " Battle Song," his native vigour gets the better of his acquired unreason. He began to write before the end of the eighteenth century, and lived to see the triumph of Free Trade. Elliott's real strength, except in a very few things like the piece just named, where his poetry succeeds in aI)sorbing and transforming his crotchet, is as a poet of nature, in which character he has done some things not much less than excellent. Mrs. Hemans (1793-1835) was named, before her apparently unhappy married life, Felicia Dorothea Browne, arid was a native of Liverpool. She was scarcely past forty when she died, and had then written a great quantity of fluent and not unmelodious ver.se of a .strongly sentimental kind. It is fair ta say that the latest m date is the best. Slic was a little outlived by her junior *• L. E. L." — Letitia Elizabctli LandDU (1802-1H38), who to a prctl} tur;i tor wise atldcd great personal charm and the 7i8 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x mystery of an unhappy end, for she died, poisoned by mistake or otherwise, at Cape Coast Castle, where the husband whom she had just married was Governor. Thomas Hood was bo^n in the heart of the city of London about 1798-99, the son of a bookseller. His schooling was irregular, and his early employments varied, owing to his father's ill success in business, while his health was very weak. The con- temporary development of the press, however, was in time to provide him with his proper work, though not to give him the ample rewards for it which he would have received later. He became sub-editor of the London Magazine, and later edited others. But he was very unlucky in money matters, and the fault of others drove him to take refuge abroad, though he honourably met his creditors as soon and as fully as he could. Consumption carried him off in 1845, his ill-health and his ill-luck having been borne with an admirable gaiety which never degenerated into bravado. He was pensioned, but only just before his death. A good deal of Hood's work is mere hack labour- — jokes pumped up for a livelihood — and of his longer attempts, though C/p the Rhine is charming, Tilney Hall is not worth much. His fame rests upon about two volumesful of verse divided in a sharp, and to some it would seem disturbing, manner between the serious and the comical. From the very first the merit of the serious division has been recognised by the best judges, though ignored to too great an extent by the public ; and it seems that the efforts of the former have at last some chance of success. Hood had real disadvantages of education, and still worse ones of circumstance ; but to balance them, if not entirely to overcome them, he had two great gifts. One was that of genuine song-writing, whereby he produced too few but exquisite things, the poetry of the style in which Procter and Bayly were poetasters — ''Fair Ines," "It was the time of Roses," "Fare- well life, my senses swim," and others. The other was of a meditative and slightly " eerie " strain, best exemplified in The Plea of the Midsumtner Fairies and The Haufited House, but manifested in many other pieces. This latter gift, if fed by scholarship and fostered by leisure, might have done great things ; as it was it had hardly a chance. Nor ought it to be forgotten that Hood did do great things in a vein between pathos and humour, and that he succeeded in reaching popularity without forfeiting critical approval in the famous Song of the Shirt and Bridge of Sighs, both written so late in his career that he was evidently not in the least "written out." Winthrop Mackworth Praed was a much more fortunate man than Hood, with gifts similar in many ways, perhaps a little thinner, but touched by fortune and art to even finer uses here and there. He CHAP. V THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-1830 719 was born in 1802, the son of Serjeant Mackworth, who took the name of Praed, was sent to Eton and thence to Trinity College, Cam- bridge, entered Parliament rather early and continued in it for the best part of a decade, till his death in 1839. He had already his foot on the lower steps of office, and was thought likely, if not certain, to attain the higher had he lived. Praed's published work, like Hood's, contains a great deal of inferior matter, which he himself certainly would never have collected. The more valuable part consists of several verse-tales of an ironic-romantic character, very original and attractive, if not quite consummate ; of one or two serious pieces, such as ^" Arminius " and " My Pretty Josephine." from which possibilities may be augured ; of a splendid thing in the grim-grotesque style, " The Red Fisherman," better than any similar piece of Hood's ; and above all, of a handful of examples of the kind called ''verse of society," which are far the most charm- ing of their kind in English, or rather are unique. These things, "The Season," "The Letter of Advice," "The Vicar," "A Letter from Teignmouth," and others, have an indescribable grace and charm. The verse of Praed's college friend and rival Macaulay has been the occasion of curious dissent, not merely between critics and readers, but between one school of critics and another. It is not large in bulk, consisting of a few early pieces, and others written at different times, and of the well-known Lays of Ancient Rome, published in 1842. At first, and for years afterwards, these latter were favourably received both by critics and others. But it pleased Mr. Matthew Arnold, to whom Macaulay was the embodi- ment of his enemy the Philistine, and who did not like the ballad metre for ancient themes, to speak with the utmost contempt of them, and generation after generation of critics has echoed this contempt. Now, the poetry of Macaulay is not great: it is not the poetry of Tennyson or of Browning at its date ; it has neither exquisiteness of artistic suggestion nor volume and range of poetical thouglit. But it is poetry — poetry for the million perhaps, except in a very few pieces, but not the less poetry ; and those who do not recognise the poetic quality in it show that their poetical thermometer is deficient in delicacy and range. Barnes and Hawker, two West-country clergymen, have had strong partisans, in each case not numerous, but respectable. The claims of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875), a man of somewhat eccentric character, who retired early to the remote cure of Morwenstow, on the Devonshire border of Cornwall, and Barnes, held it for nearly half a century, and in articiilo mortis was received into the Roman Church, arre the safer of the two on 720 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x general literary grounds. His longest and most ambitious poem, The Quest of the Sangreal, perhaps just misses complete success, and is distinguished by that stately but somewhat lifeless character which is noticeable in more than one or two poets of this group. He is most widely known by an early and very clever pastiche in ballad, "The Song of the Western Men," which was taken even by good judges as an original. His best things, however, are short, and partly local, partly ecclesiastical, in inspiration — '• Queen Gwennyvar's Round," "The Bells of Bottreaux," "Morwenna Statio," and not a few others. Hawker had undoubtedly much and true poetry in him, but the hour had not come at his birth. Of William Barnes (i 800-1 886) one must speak more diffidently, for on the one hand it is impossible to take poets on trust, and on the other unsafe to provoke his not very numerous but enthusiastic admirers. He wrote wholly in Dorset dialect, and chiefly on gentle, domestic, and pastoral themes, two features which attract many, revolt some, and perhaps count little one way or other with the critic. We must not rule a man out because he writes " smilen feace " for " smiling face " ; but in those who are jaded with " smiling face " there is perhaps a dangerous readiness to take " smilen feace " as necessarily poetry. The foiled and marred genius of Hartley Coleridge (1796- 1849) tried verse as well as prose, and has left its best memorials in the sonnet. Few better things have been written than the sonnet to Shakespeare, '' The soul of man is larger than the sky " Coleridge (which preceded, and perhaps inspired, the better known one of Matthew Arnold), and that on his own wasted life — " When I survey the course that I have run " — where the peculiar clangorous rise of strain (which is found in Shakespeare's own and the other best Elizabethan examples, and which seems to belong specially to the Shakespearian as opposed to the Petrarchian form) is very noticeable. Sir Henry Taylor was a very popular poet with thoughtful lovers of poetry in the second quarter of the century, and Philip Van Arte- velde (published in 1834) at least keeps a high place by virtue of -. ^, ^ . traditional esteem, if not exactly of familiar acquaintance. air H.Taylor. , , , ,.i ,, i • rv i i. i Its author was born, like Macaulay, in 1800, but lived till 1888, being for the greater part of his life a Government servant. He began, with Isaac Comneniis, before Tennyson had published any- thing except Poems by Two Brothers, and continued with other things till the St. Clemenfs Eve of 1862; but by tha,t time his fashion of poetry was hesterna rosa. Taylor's blank verse, besides serving frequently as the vehicle of an excellent seriousness, is dignified in itself and sufficiently varied for his purpose, but it was not very well CHAP.v THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-1830 721 suited for any kind of poetry except the dramatic ^ and didactic. His lyric work, not abundant nor very varied, is good. Taylor, though hardly a dramatist, was mainly a dramatic poet, and the dramatic bent is curiously illustrated in most of the poets of this transition, especially in Richard Hengist Home, George Darley, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes. Home, who was born three years later than Sir Henry Taylor, and died two years earlier, was a copious and miscellaneous writer, and his most famous and best thing, Orion, a poem of most stately versification, and very original in thought, but deficient in action, is an epic — a " farthing epic," for its eccentric author published it at that price — not a tragedy. But Cosmo de Medici and the Death of Marlowe take the dramatic form, though, like almost all the plays of this period, they are literature without acting qualities. George Darley, born in the same year with Keats, was Irish, and of Dublin University, wrote on the London, and in later life was chiefly a critic. He was a good song-writer, in the same class with Hood, and his "• I've been roaming" was once exceed- ingly popular ; but his principal work is to be found in "^ ^' Sylvia (1827), and Nepenthe (1839). The former of these is a fairy play, unequal, full of superfluities and inequalities, and marred by awkwardly handled comic passages, but very charming in parts. It is spun of delightful lyrics, of octosyllabic couplets no less delight- ful, of other kinds of verse less uniformly charming, and of prose written too much in falsetto. It has, after many years, found a reprinter ^ and modern imitators, who, however, have not equalled iThe strange divorce between literature and drama which has marked the nineteenth century seems to make it useless to devote separate notice to this branch. The dramatic work of the greater men is best noticed with their poems. A characteristic example of the lesser is Sir Thomas Noon Taifourd (1795-1854, a judge, a friend of Lamb, and author of agreeable Memorials of him), whose half-famous Ion (1835) possesses a sort of icy beauty, or at least handsome- ness. The chief dramatists of George IV.'s and William IV. 's reigns were James Sheridan Knowles (1784-1862) and the first Lord Lytton. Knowles had a good practical knowledge of the stage, and Bulwer was wise enough to accept advice from those who possessed it, so that in acting qualities the plays of both excel those of most English play-writers of any literary pretensions since Sheridan. But Knowles, whose best-remembered things are Tke Hunchback ■axitX The Love Chase, had no literary genius, and not a very strong literary talent, so that his works, useful on the boards, are lumber on the shelves. Nor does the undoubted talent, the at least not peremptorily to be denied genius of Bulwer, show at its best in his plays. The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, Money, while the theatre naturally provoked an exhibition of his worst faults, floridness of expression and sentimentality. ■■'London, 1892. Nepenthe has also been republished, but not uniformly (London, 1897), and a privately printed edition of Poems was arranged in 1890 by Canon Livingstone. The Labours of Idleness and the plays musi be read in the originals. 3* >jii THE TRIUMPH OP^ ROMANCE Book x the curious attraction of its tangled brake of poetry. Nepenthe, a much shorter piece and not dramatic, is in two cantos, the first deal- ing with Joy, the second with Melancholy, and was intended to be completed by a third on Contentment. It is partly in octosyllables, partly in lyric measures, and though far more abstract and incoherent than Sylvia, has the same lovely snatches of poetry, contrasted with much bombast and stutter. The apostrophe, '' Oh blest unfabled incense-tree ! " and some other things are worthy of anybody. Earlier, Darley had published in 1822 a poem called The Errors of Ecstasie, and a very curious prose-and-verse medley. The Labours of Idleness, by "Guy Penseval" (1826), which contains in its last piece the germ of Sylvia. Later, he published two plays, Thotnas a Becket (1840) and Et heist an (1841), which have all his faults and hardly any of his merits. He is, on the whole, strangely premoni- tory of many of the poets of the century, both the " Spasmodics " of its middle period and others much later; but few of those who belong to his class have equalled his best things. The same attraction, but in higher degree and rarer kind, is to be found in Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who was born at Clifton in 1803, and died by his own hand in 1849 ^-t Basle. Beddoes, who was the son of a doctor of great repute, and of Maria Edgeworth's sister Anna, went to Charterhouse and Pem- broke College, Oxford, but spent nearly the whole of his manhood on the Continent, where he had gone to study medicine. He was undoubtedly mad in the later part of his life, and perhaps not entirely sane at any part of it ; nor did his mental disturbance take, as has often been the case with men of letters, an agreeable form. But among the small and interesting group of English poets whose great wits have suffered more than an alliance with madness, he is one of the most remarkable. Before going abroad he had published two very small volumes of verse, The Itnprovisatore and The Bride''s Tragedy, and he had shown a great interest in poetry, clubbing with Procter and others to publish (or guarantee the expenses of publishing) Shelley's posthumous work. But the best of his own verse was post- humous (185 1), and it has been reinforced since with some fragments and with Letters.' His chief performance, kept in hand for years and never fully completed, is a drama called Death''s Jest Book, or The FooVs Tragedy, in which he takes the wildest examples of the Elizabethan period, the plays of Tourneur, for model in more than the title. Composition Beddoes has none : his larger works are mere dreams, and mostly bad dreams, with but the thinnest thread of even romantic and subjective coherence, with a total disregard of prob- '^ Poems (2 vols. London, 1890), Letters (i vol. London, 1894), both edited by Mr. Gosse. CHAP. V THE MINOR POETS OF 1800-1830 723 ability in incident, and with the characters looming half-finished through darkness and blood-tinged mist. But they contain passages, especially lyrical passages, of the most exquisite poetical beauty, and these lyrics are joined by others independently composed. " Dream- Pedlary," " The Dirge for Wolfram," the '• Song from Torrismond," the " Song on the Water," " Love in Idleness," and not one or two but many others, are among the most consummate things in English. The only charge, valid as a charge, brought against them is that they are not original, and this is false as a fact. Beddoes did not copy the Elizabethan dramatists, he continued them in their own spirit ; and it may be questioned whether, though we have since had far greater poets than he is, we have ever had greater poetry than his. INTERCHAPTER X Those who have followed the narrative to this point will have small difficulty in anticipating the summary of the Book just concluded. Yet it is of the first importance to appreciate exactly what happened at the beginning of the period which it covers, for this is the last definite turn — the last of the innumerable revolutions and eddies which constitute the history of English literature. Only minor changes have taken place since. Between Johnson, who died in 1784, and Coleridge, who was then ten years old, there are differences of species, almost of genus ; between Coleridge and Mr. Swinburne, who was not born when Coleridge died, there are only the differences of the individual, and those of a certain accumulated experience and experi- ment in the same paths. From time to time bright spirits, intolerant of the traditional, try to alter the bournes of time and space in these respects, and to 'make out that the Classical, whatever the failings on its part, was always in its heart rather Romantic, and that the Romantic has always, at its best, been just a little Classical. There is, of course, a certain amount of truth in this : everything in the universe has its share (sometimes rather a small one) of universal quality, or it could not exist. But such observations are only of use as guards against a too wooden and matter-of-fact classification ; the great general differences of the periods remain, and can never be removed in imagination without loss and confusion. What then is this difference between " Classical " and "Romantic" ? What was it that for the time succumbed, and what was it that for the time prevailed, in the battle, of which the first artillery salvo was the Lyrical Ballads? The question is one still unsettled, one never likely to be settled completely. Yet, amid endless individual differences, there is perhaps much more general agreement than might be sup- posed. In the wide sense the debate between Classical and Romantic concerns the opposite sides taken on certain theses, of which the more important are — that poetry depends upon the subject; that every kind of poetry has a prescribed or prescribable form, outside which even beauties, as La Harpe said of the beauties of Dante and Milton, 724 BOOKX INTERCHAPTER X 725 are " monstrous " ; that convention, generalisation, abstention as much as possible from the fantastic, the individual, the abnormal are the best principles of literature ; that definiteness, proportion, exact solution of the problem proposed, are preferable to the suggestive, the vague, the incomplete, or the irregularly beautiful. And the English eighteenth century, with the later part of the seventeenth, had, besides taking very definite position on the Classical side in regard to these questions, added certain purely arbitrary and more or less accidental restrictions of its own. It had decided that, while human nature was to be attended to, in at least a good many of its aspects, with the most sedulous care, external nature was to be a little neglected. It had by practice always, and sometimes by precept, made curious and still more arbitrary limitations in such admittedly unessential points as metre, st3'le, literary forms and kinds. It had, again without any necessary or logical connection, decided that very nearly all non-dramatic English literature before the middle of the seventeenth century might be neglected, and that the dramatic authors of this neglected time were a set of inspired but too often ill-behaved babies. Without formally pronouncing any decree on the subject, it had shut its eyes to almost all foreign modern literature except French and a little Italian, and had studied the very classics themselves with a curious eclecticism, postponing Greek to Latin, and arranging Latin authors themselves according to its own good pleasure. The operation of the causes detailed piecemeal in Book IX., beginning, as usual, almost as early as the Convention itself, gradually broke it up; and though it would be extremely difficult to prove that even one of the great writers of 1 798-1 830 deliberately planned the change all round — though Wordsworth, who certainly did plan a change, went wrong in some imjiortant particulars of revolt, and even retained some of the most dui)ious points of the old creed — yet the results (which, rather than the efforts, are the things to look at) followed the lines indicated above. The immen.se performance of these thirty years in poetry was only in the smallest degree deliberate, and when it was deliberate, as in the case of Wordsworth's "silly .sooth," it was very often at its worst. The new wine shaped the bottles, when it did not burst them, by its own fermentation. Except in .some metrical points — the chief of which were the Christabel experiment and the gradual, though by no means universal, disuse of the sharply divided couplet — very little of the poetic change began at the formal end. Tiie accumulation of new subjects — Media>val, Eastern, and what not ; the crowd of new models — German, Old English, Celtic, true or spurious, and what not again ; above all. the diversity of new talents, broke ground in every possible way in verse. 726 THE TRIUMPH OF ROMANCE book x As far as " orders of the day " went, the only order of importance, taken for granted if not formally pronounced, was that you might write as you liked ; that it was not necessary to imitate anybody in creation ; that in criticism what pleased yourself, and not what Aristotle, Horace, Pope, Johnson had laid down, was to be the rule. In so far as any one saying of any one person is the motto of 1798- 1830, it is the saying of Blake, poet and painter, that in painting, and no doubt in poetry too, "every man is a connoisseur who has not been connoisseured out of his senses." In point of genius the period is a period of poetry ; in point of mere form the remarkable change in it concerns not poetry but prose. It is possible that since the death of Milton there had never been alive in England a poet of the absolutely first rank ; but there had been many writers who might in prose have attained such rank if it had not been for the traditions of prose-writing. Prose even more than verse had expiated the short excesses of 15 80- 1660 by a period, nearly twice as long, of sober correctness, and it was now to have its fling, its series of flings, for nearly a hundred years from Landor and Wilson to Stevenson and Pater. But the rush of new or altered kinds is almost as noticeable as the plethora of genius and the changes of literary etiquette. In poetry the land, from possessing a few sober rills, becomes a land of springs and waters ; the novel, late found, develops enormously ; the essay almost outstrips it in development ; history fills whatever gap may be caused by the dwindling of philosophy and theology as contributors to literature ; fresh varieties arise every decade, almost every year. Undoubtedly there is something of Babel in all this ; the time, at any rate to living eyes, admits of no clear description; its characteristics, if they exist distinctly, have not yet emerged like those of earlier ages. But we know that it was an age of very great literature, and that it was not destined to be ill succeeded. BOOK XI VICTORIAN LITERATURE CHAPTER I TENNYSON AND BROWNING Tennyson: his early work and its character — The volumes of 1842 — His later life and works — The Princess — hi Metnoriam — Maud — The Idylls of the King, etc. — Robert Browning — Periods of his work — His favourite method — His real poetical appeal — Edward FitzGerald — Elizabeth Barrett Browning There is no contrast of contemporaries in English Literature, not even the half-imaginary one between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, so curious as that which for some two-thirds of the nineteenth century is provided by the poetry of Alfred Tennyson and that of Robert Browning. As in the former case, the men were friends ; as in that, their methods were at once curiously unlike and curiously com- plementary. Tennyson, the third son of a large family, the father of which, Dr. George Tennyson, was, though disinherited, the real head of an old house, was horn at his father's living of Somersby on the Lincolnshire Wolds in 180Q. His elder brothers, Frederick and Charles,^ „ , . ^ lennyson: his were also poetically given, and all three collaborated early work and in the so-called Poems by Two Brothers w hich appeared "^ "^ aracter. in 1826. Alfred was educated at tlie Grammar School of Louth, and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained the 1 Frederick, the eldest, who was born in 1807 and lived till 1898, published a volume of verse much above the averaije, Days and Hours, in 1854, and two or three more in the last decade of his long life. Charles, who was born in 1808, took the name of Turner, and died in 1879, was all but a very great master of the sonnet, and a large collection of his work in this kind appeared posthumously in 1880. 727 728 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi Chancellor's Prize for a poem which was altered in subject from the Battle of Armageddon to Timbuctoo. In 1830 he published a volume of Poems, of which all that he chose to save appear, with others, in the later editions as Juvenilia. These pieces, which were rigorously revised later, may perhaps include — with the capital exceptions of the "Ode to Memory," where the intensely accurate and yet thoroughly translated observation of the poet appears ; " The Dying Swan," which is a good early example of his command of concerted metre ; and " Mariana in the Moated Grange," which com- bines both — none of his best and most characteristic work, unless the ''Recollections of the Arabian Nights" be also allowed a place. But " Claribel," the opening piece, is characteristic and original, if not best, and the other ideal girl-pieces ('"Oriana" stands apart, and is better than any), the " Sea-Fairies," and still others, also appeal from this judgment. Astonishing power of visual presentation, and a still more astonishing skill of musical accompaniment, marked the poet already. But his touch was extremely uncertain ; he would constantly mar it with the mawkishness and gush which Keats had learnt from Leigh Hunt and handed on ; the jewelled and polished perfection of his work as we now know it simply did. not exist. At the end of 1832, but with the date of 1833, he issued another volume, where the same defects of detail were relieved by a far greater height of aim and range of delivery. This contained; and indeed took title from, the "The Lady of Shalott," not yet in its full perfection of tapestried scene and ringing, waving rhyme, but still beautiful already ; the wonderful " Lotus-Eaters " ; the great pair of picture-galleries, the Palace of Art 7m^ the Dream of Fair Women', the splendid, force- ful, new blank verse of " Oinone " ; " Mariana in the South " (the poet had made a flying visit to the Pyrenees the summer before), a wonderful pendant to the Northern ; the fiery " Fatima," one of his few excursions in the line of direct passion, but a great one ; the " Two Voices," a piece usually rated far too low ; and the inferior and popular, but pretty, " Miller's paughter " and " May Queen." But in this the faults of execution still remained ; and both volumes were savagely, but not quite unfairly, criticised for faults which in most cases were removed by the poet in consequence of these very criticisms. They acted, indeed, not as a killing frost, only as a frosty but kindly nip to a too precocious and exuberant growth, keeping tlie plant back and causing infinite improvement in flower and fruit later. For all but ten years Tennyson wrote a good deal, altered freely, but pulDlished nothing, and it was not till '^''of^is'"'"" ^^42 *^i^t he reappeared with two small volumes, one containing a selection of the earlier pieces thoroughly revised and enormously improved, the other a collection of new CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 729 "English Idylls and Other Poems." It is customary to fix on some of these latter as his first perfect work, and it has not been uncommon for judges of importance to put them above anything that he produced later. But nothing in the Tennysonian kind can surpass " Mariana," or the " Lotos-Eaters," or the " Dream of Fair Women." Still, it is not wonderful that such things as "Ulysses" and the first '' Morte d'Arthur " confirmed old admirers and obtained hosts of new ones for the poet. The "English Idylls" of the title, "The Gardener's Daughter," "Dora," "Walking to the Mail," and others were exxeedingly popular, though they cannot be called very great poetry, exquisite as are some of the pictures in the first named ; and "The Day-Dream," and "Will Waterproof's Monologue" (the latter the poet's best light thing) also fall short of the grand style. But this is perfectly attained in "Ulysses." in the "Morte d'Arthur," in "Love and Duty," in " Locksley Hall," in the batch of other pieces, perhaps to be called Ballads for want of any better name — " St. Agnes' Eve," " Sir Galahad," " Sir Lancelot and Queen Guin- evere " — in " The Vision of Sin," and the still more exquisite batch of songs and fragments, " Break, break," " Come not, when I am dead," "The Poet's Song," and others. In these, ears not origi- nally deaf to poetry, and not obstructed by any special prejudice, could not fail to detect the notes of a poetry newer, more individual, and richer than had been heard, except in the great writers of the generation immediately preceding, for the best part of two centuries. The main notes of this poetry, once more, were, first, the felicity of presentation of the visual picture, whether in the sharp, succinct fashion of the compartments of the " Palace " and the " Dream," or in larger groups or smaller touches ; secondly, the new modulation of vowel, syllable, word, line, and stanza, so as to produce a running musical accompaniment at once to the image and to the idea. Subsidiary to the first gift was the also mentioned faculty of obser- vation of small details of nature ; to the second, a rich, but not promiscuous, store of words both simple and compound, and a metrical gift which showed itself in many measures, but specially in a new and magnificent kind of blank verse, ranking below, if below, Milton's, only because it owes a certain amount of debt thereto. These gifts and others had not yet been set to the composition of any .long i)oem, but liad produced numerous and singularly varied handlings, in the special taste of the century, of things past and present, scenes, characters (tiiough character was not Tennyson's forte), emotions, incidents, thoughts — each placed for itself and for ever in an eternising frame and setting of poetry. Tennyson lived for exactly half a century after tlio ])ul)lication of the volumes of 1842, and increased immensely the bulk, the variety, 730 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi the scale of his productions ; but, as generally, though not always, happens with poets of the first rank, he produced little that was new in kind, and perhaps nothing that was at once new in kind and works* ^^^ '^^ ^hc Very first value. For this last estimate can certainly not be allowed either to his dramas or to his poems in Lincolnshire dialect, though the latter were very effective, and the former have received praise, higher than that generally accorded to them, from some good judges. But the success, not striking or popular, but certain, of the 1842 issue was in many ways a turning-point in his career. By degrees the sale of his verse gave him first a small, then a moderate, and latterly an ever-increasing income. Before this happened, and when his private means, which had always been very narrow, were threatened by an injudicious investment, he received a Crown pension which placed him above want. Neither at this time, nor at any other, did he ever desert poetry for lucrative avocations of any kind, even literary. He slowly elaborated the important collection of Elegies which was to appear as /n Memoriam, and he completed, and in 1847 published, the "medley" of The Princess — his first long poem, his The Princess or? 'longest, if we except the congeries of the Idylls — the consummate expression of his mastery in blank verse, and, at least in its second and slightly altered form, with inserted songs, one of the most charming, if not one of the greatest, poems in English. The exceedingly difficult kind of the playfully romantic, if not mock- heroic, in which it is written, is not universally relished ; it is too serious for some, not serious enough for others, and prejudices of various sorts have interfered with its reception. But it is as much at the head of its own division of poetry on the Romantic side as The Rape of the Lock is on the Classical, and it has appeals which are unknown to Pope''s glittering little masterpiece. Three years later, in 1850, Tennyson not only married, and was appointed Poet-Laureate in succession to Wordsworth, but published /« Me»toriam. This volume — composed of a large number of short /« Memo- pieces in the four-lined octosyllabic stanza rhymed abba, nam. -which had been sparingly employed by seventeenth- century poets, but out of which they had only by accident, and once or twice, got the full metrical value — has been often put forward as Tennyson\s greatest work, and has been hotly attacked and defended as not merely a rite of friendship, but a theological eirenicon between faith and scepticism. The first judgment is one of will-worship, and the second practice is merely an instance of the apparently ineradicable habit of shrinking from the judgment of poetry as poetry, and endeavouring to drag it into another court. As poetry /« Memoriam contains things which are equal to Tennyson's best ; but CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 731 it is necessarily less varied in subject, more sombre in hue and im- agery, and pervaded by an atmosphere which, when it ceases to be impressive — if it should happen to do so with this or that mood or character — becomes slightly oppressive. Its highest praise is that it applies and expresses in a new field those gifts of the poet which have been already described, and shows that, like all true poetic gifts, they are capable of universal application. His next two works, the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852) and Maud (1855) were rather violently attacked, as generally happens when a man has lately risen to any eminence. There is no nobler passage in the poetry of patriotism than part of the first. The second showed, and fortu- nately for almost the last time, that uncertainty and inequality of taste and touch, at the first time of asking, which had always distinguished the poet. Developing out of some earlier verses, " O that 'twere possible," which are still its central and most exquisite passage, it aimed at too much political and social satire in the style of Carlyle's contemporary Latter-day Pamphlets, denunciation of "peace at any price," commercialism, and the like, neglecting for these its legitimate theme of "love that never met its earthly close," despair, madness, and reconciliation. It was improved later, and contains some of the most passionate and echoing things that the poet ever did, but it is as far below The Princess in homogeneity and adjustment to its aim as it is above it in these parts. The detraction died, and the next volume, the Idylls of the King (1859), estated Tennyson securely for the rest of his life as not merely the official but the unquestioned head of English poetry. It was devoted to the Arthurian Legend, which it treated, not consecutively, but in four episodes — the Welsh story of JheKing'jL Geraint of Devon and his patient wife Enid, the less poetical version of Merlin's enchantment, a variant of that adventure of Lancelot which he had earlier touched in " The Lady of Shalott," and (greatest of all) the parting of Arthur and Guinevere. In later issues fresh episodes were added, and the whole was in a manner framed by a new "Coming of Arthur," and by the original and splendid " Morte " eked with less precious matter in a " Passing " to match. Next came Enoch Arden (1864), containing among larger but lesser things the lovely "Voyage," " Tithonus," "In the Valley of Cauteretz," and others, as well as the first of the dialect pieces alluded to. And in the nearly thirty years whicli remained to him Tennyson rounded otT the Idylls to an Arthuriad in twelve books, began in 1875 and continued a series of cliicfiy historical plays ^ "^ Queen Mary, \Z-]ij\ Harold, x^-jt, The Promise of May, 1882; Becket, 1884; The ('up and the Falcon, 1884 ; Tkc Foresters, 1892. 732 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi of more dubious value, and at intervals issued by themselves, or with instalments of the Idylls, volumes of miscellaneous verse,^ the last of which, the Death of QLnotte, was not published till after his own death on 6th October 1892. No one of these failed to contain things worthy of his best days, and that of 1880, called Ballads and Other Poems, was especially rich in them, while the last issued in his lifetime, Demeter, closed with the marvellous swan-song of "Crossing the Bar." He had added to English poetry a body of work which, though not the greatest contributed by any man, though falling short of Chaucer and Coleridge in fresh and original gift, of Spenser in uniform excellence and grasp of a huge subject, of Shakespeare in universality, in height and depth and every other creature, of Milton in grandeur and lonely sublimity, of Wordsworth in ethical weight and grip of nature behind the veil, of Shelley in unearthliness, and of Keats in independence and voluptuous spontaneity, yet deserves to be ranked with the best of these, except Shakespeare only, in virtue of its astonishing display of poetic art. Tennyson had never, no matter what his detractors may say, come short in poetic thought ; in poetic style he had shown a uniform mastery not elsewhere to be equalled, and a quality hardly elsewhere to be sur- passed. He had carried the special poetic mission of the nineteenth century in English — that of applying the powers of colour, form, and music to the investment of the largest possible number of themes with the imaginative suggestion of poetry — to a point not reached by any other, and in all his long and fertile career had never finally failed in a single application of them, putting the dramatic attempts, in which he was merely a stranger, aside. He, had justified that "return to nature" — of which the danger was that it should become as conventional, as cut and dried, as the generalising away from nature vC'hich had preceded it — to a pitch, not merely by an infinity of fresh and felt observations, but by invariably touching these observa- tions with the necessary point of generalisation itself. He is always real, but never realist ; never conventional, but also never photo- graphic. His music is more difficult to praise, because the ear is a more arbitrary sense than the eye. To those who have ears to hear there is absolutely no poet so inexhaustible and original in harmony as Tennyson. The story told in his Life of a hearer who knew no English, but knew Tennyson to be a poet by the hearing, is probable and valuable, or rather invaluable, for it points to the best, if not the only true, criterion of poetry. "^The Holy Grail, 1870; Gareth and Lynefte. 1872; Ballads, 1880; Tiresias, 1885; Locks ley Hall Sixty Years After, 1887; Demeter, 1889, were the chief of these. CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 733 The life of Robert Browning was as wholly devoted to literature as that of Tennyson, but he was rather more attracted by society ; much of it was spent abroad, whereas Tennyson never left England save for trips ; and it lacked the usual Browning introductory experiences of an Englishman. Browning was born in May 18 12, in the southern suburbs of London, went to no regular school, nor to Oxford or Cambridge ; and though his reading was wide and appreciative, it lacked throughout his life the touch of scholarship in the wide and liberal sense which distinguished Tennyson. Nor was this circumstance by any means unimportant in condition- ing the peculiarities of his poetical style. His first poem was Paiili7ie, written in his nineteenth and published in his twenty-first year; his next, Paracelsus, appeared in 1835. Paiilinc, though not consummate, is characteristic ; neither the verse, nor the style proper, nor the substance, could be affiliated on anybody, except perhaps Shelley, and on Shelley to a limited extent only. Certain passages have a regular beauty not common later with the author, and assuredly not to be found in any contemporary work except that of Tennyson ; but the chief interest of the piece is its early revelation of the breathless, intense, " monodramatic " manner, eschewing incident but delighting in analysis, which was to be one of the poet's points throughout and ultimately to prevail over all the others. Paracelsus has far more direct charm. Here the form is openly dramatic, at least the personages speak personally. The blank verse is still more breathless and peculiar ; there are lyrics showing some beauty and promising much, and the characters are projected in an entirely novel fashion. From this time the poet's vocation may be considered as fixed ; and though his public was at first smaller even than Tennyson's, and took far longer to increase, he always had his devotees, and never allowed detraction or neglect to check him. The play — a play in a manner actable and acted — of Strafford came hUwork. in 1837; then the poem of Sordello (less distinguished now among its author's work, perhaps, since his last thirty years of vogue, than it was as an " awful example " or a cherished idol during the previous thirty of contempt) and the collection called Bells and Pomegranates, which appeared between 1841 and 1846. After the publication of the pieces contained in this last, it was no longer permissible for any catholic judge of poetry to dismiss Browning's claim to the position of a poet, true certainly, and probably great. The plays, after his own strange mode, wliich were included, might still have left a doubt, and sometimes more than a doubt. But the pieces called Dramatic Lyrics, especially "In a Gondola" and " Porphyria's Lover," should have settled the question. The public 734 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi reception was, however, still cold or totally wanting. He married the poetess Elizabeth Barrett at this time. 1850, the year of In Mei/ioria/n, saw the great monodramatic piece of Christmas Eve ajid Easier Day; and 1855, the year of Maud, the still greater Men and Women. In these three books Browning had taken his place once for all ; and the poet of " The Last Ride Together " and " Love among the Ruins " could speak in the gate with any one, enemy or friend. He still wrote rather sparingly, and his next publication was prob- ably checked by his wife's death in 1861, after which he returned to England. In 1864, however, came Dramatis Personce, the last of his middle period, and the last volume containing his very greatest work. "James Lee," "Rabbi Ben Ezra," and " Prospice " are among the greatest poems of the century. This volume, and a collected edition of the previous work which had ushered it, produced a great effect on the generation which had been growing up for Browning ; and it was probably with some confidence, though with a defiant acknowledgment of his earlier, if not still existing, un- popularity, that he attempted to convert the public with one of the most audacious of advances. The Ring and the Book, a mighty collection of pieces in some twenty thousand lines, telling the same story over and over again so as to exhibit different personalities in a dozen different ways. The public " came to heel," and for the twenty years more during which his life lasted Browning, though still anathematised by a very few, was grudgingly tolerated by more, admitted by the general, and wildly and foolishly adored by a certain sect. He could not throw off things too rapid, too apparently crabbed, too really flimsy and ill-digested, for them ; and though he seldom during this time put out a book without something good in it, he did nearly as much to damage his fame as he had previously done to build it up. Fortunately, his lyric gift remained, showing itself at times charmingly, and in his last volume, Asolando (published at the very moment of his death in 1889), with sufficient volume and variety to end by reconciling those who had been for a time estranged by the verbiage, the pretentiousness, the real vacuity, of things like Red Cotton Nightcap Coutitry (1873) ^'^d The Inn Album (1875) ; not much charmed by the inequality and tapage of Balaustion's Adventure (its companion of the year 1871, Prince Hohenstiel- Schwattgau, is better), Aristophanes'* Apology (1875), La Saisiaz (1878), Dramatic Idylls (1879-80), Ferishtah's Fancies (1884), and Parley ings with Certain People of Importance (1887) ; and alternately reconciled and redisgusted by Fifine at the Fair (1872), Pacchiarotto (1876), zxidi Jocoseria (1883). Despite, however, this unfortunate inequality, or rather this unfort- unate yielding to temptation, even Browning's aberrations from the 735 CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING true poetic provide at least passages which are poetry. Their plan is, with an appearance of diversity, very much the same from Pauline to the Parleyings. The poet takes a character, an anecdote, sometimes little more than a name; and "me^thod"'' instead of focussing it from the outside, or making it speak in simple dramatic fashion, with such passages of ornament as he can give, he shakes it about, dissecting, or trying to dissect, its "soul," analysing its constituents, folding and unfolding it to get different lights and aspects, but never exactly summing up or giving us the whole. In this process — using as he does for the most part blank verse of great variety and vigour, but breathless, somewhat prosaic in rhythm and cadence, or else rhymed arrangements fluid enough, but with their fluency much chequered by verbal tricks, and rhyming in the most audacious, though rarely in any positively incorrect, fashion — he produces effects which perhaps seem even more formless than they are, but which certainly dispense with the exacter graces of form to an extent very unwise, and perhaps distinctly ille- gitimate for the poet. A green or a jaded taste may sometimes relish his phrase and period ; but the finer palate at once declines the labour that is required, and fails to rank very high the pleasure that results. But in his shorter, and especially in his lyrical, pieces, where the imperative melody of stanza and rhyme not merely sweetens his acerbity and makes his jejuneness succulent, but applies a positive check to his verbiage, his prolixity, his headlong readi- His real ness to accept the first word that comes, Browning is poetical usually a poet, very often a great poet, not seldom a ^pp^^- poet almost or quite of the greatest. Some surprise was expressed when a critic, soon followed by others, designated him at his death "the poet of love," for his later worshippers had been wont to extol his "thought" and philosophy, not his passion. But the conversion of at least some of the fittest was soon effected. It is always on this subject, and on a certain optimist view of the triumph of life, that Browning is happiest, while in connection with both he has the faculty of the century for giving what Dr. Johnson scornfully called "the streaks in the tulip." "The Last Ride Together," innumerable as are the great love-poems in English from "A'ison" to "Rose Mary," admits no superior and very few equals. "Rabbi ben Ezra," the praise of age, of failure, of approaching death, the triumphant assertion of — All I could never be, all men mistook in me, is practically unique, though no doubt it owed a certain suggestion and start, such as is common with poets, to passages of Fitz(ierald\s Omar Khayyam (see below). Of Browning we may say, Timor 736 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi mortis non conturbabat . In a hundred other pieces hardly inferior, in the browner shades of age as well as in the spring of youth, he sang, not like most poets, Love and Death, but Love and Life. That he was a great, a consummate master of poetic music, as well as of poetic thought and vision, meets more gainsayers. It is certain that he was dangerously prone to indulgence in discords, and that for long stretches of his verse, especially in his later lucubra- tions, he seems to be indifferent to any music at all except that of the horse-fiddle, or at best the hurdy-gurdy. But in the class of lyrics just referred to — and even in others — there is no softness that he cannot insinuate, no crash or clangour that he cannot reach. That he too often contemns the demand of his passenger to be " carried softly along in the melodious coach " is true likewise. But when he cared to use it he had a chariot of that kind which yielded in pure voluptuous caressing movement to none, and which is perhaps all the more enjoyed when the passenger is shot into it from the jolting tumbrels of his more ordinary rolling-stock. The almost unprecedented fashion in which these two poets at once lead and sum up the poetic production of two-thirds of a century has made it necessary to treat them at greater length than is usual in these later Books. We must now be briefer, yet not FhzGerald. t°<^ brief, wjth the most remarkable of their more imme- diate contemporaries, the wife of the one and a very early and intimate friend of the other, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edward FitzGerald. FitzGerald was born in 1809, at Woodbridge in Suffolk, a district which was his residence by choice as well as chance during almost the whole of his life. He was the younger son of a man of property, and spent great part of his childhood in France, but was sent to the Grammar School of Bury St. Edmunds, entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1826, and during his days there knew Tennyson only by sight, though he was intimate with Thackeray. Of independent though small means, and intolerant of general society and business, he entered no profession, and gradually settled down on the banks of the Deben, smoking, reading, dreaming, and at times using the sea a good deal, until his death on 14th June 1883. He had married, rather late in life, the daughter of Lamb's friend, Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet. FitzGerald's literary interests, though a little crotchety, were intense, and he was at different times an intimate friend of the three greatest men of letters of the Victorian age — Tennyson, Thackeray, and Carlyle ; but he published comparatively little, and that little had a rather false appearance of want of originality. His delightful letters, published after his death in two collections, first made him known to the general. He had written earlier an exquisite Platonic CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 737 dialogue, of deep if not wide or commanding originality, called Euphranor (1851), had translated divers plays of Aeschylus and Calderon (1856), and had in 1859 issued a version, also in appear- ance a translation, of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet, astronomer, and Epicurean, or rather Cyrenaic, Omar Khayyam. The first edition of this was published in small numbers, and did not become generally known, but its effect upon those who did become acquainted with it, and who were prepared for its reception, was extraordinary. It is not in the strict sense a translation at all, FitzGerald having combined, transposed, omitted, and even inserted, to such an extent that the thing is almost as much his own as another's. But the poetical value of it is extraordinary. The note, somewhat resembling that of the later English Renaissance as presented by Donne, but with a marked difference, showing its Oriental suggestion, is one of a musical sensuality, intensely fatalist, yet, with the usual inconsistency of fatalism, ringing the changes on Carpe diem as well. Nothing in English had been quite like the melancholy and voluptuous clangour of these rolling quatrains, rhymed as a rule aaba, with the b sound left ringing in the air, and not caught up in the succeeding stanza, but sometimes monorhymed throughout. His other renderings of Persian, Salai/ian and /Ibsal and the Bird Parliament, less known, are only less charming. FitzGerald did not admire Mrs. Browning. And indeed no two writers could be more unlike, m anything but devotion to literature and faculty of poetry. Elizabeth Moulton Barrett, the daughter of a wealthy West-Indian, was born in Durham on 6th March ,,,. , ., 1806, and brought up chiefly in Herefordshire, but Barrett afterwards lived much in London. She had, after rowmng. her first youth, very bad health, and was an eager though rather amateurish reader and student. She published poems at nineteen, but she was thirty-two before, in a second volume, entitled The Seraphim, she developed a distinct poetical character ; and it was not till the middle of the century was approaching, and her own fortieth year was past, that the pieces which really speak her talent appeared. In 1846 she married Robert Browning (somewhat after the fashion of an elopement). The pair lived chiefly at Florence, and had one child. In 1851 she published Casa Giiidi Windmvs, and in 1857 Aurora Leiffh, a verse novel-with-a-purpose. Poems before Compress came a year before, and Last Poems a year after, her death in 1861. Perhaps she had never done anything better than "The Great God Pan," which, written just before, api)cared in the Cornhill Magazitie during its brilliant opening year under Thackeray's editorship. There is scarcely any writer in English deserving the name of poet 3B 738 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi who illustrates by defect the importance of poetic style so well as Mrs. Browning. The word is constantly used in reference to poetry with a sense too general and even improper, but here it can be used with exact propriety. In all the qualities (with the exception of ear for rhyme) which distinguish the poet from the prose-writer she was a very considerable proficient, though even in these she lacked self-criticism. She could think as a poet, could feel, though rather too gushingly, as a poet, could see, sometimes with eminent clearness, as a poet should see, and in some respects had an equally eminent gift of poetic music. But in the qualities which the prose-writer shares with the poet, and the absence of which, because less common, is even more distressing in the latter, she was extraordinarily de- ficient. The dulness or falseness of her ear for consonance of sound was quite unparalleled, and she, with all the advantages of gentle birth, feminine sex, country breeding, and an almost scholarly educa- tion, confuses rhymes in a manner usually supposed to be limited to the lower class of cockneys. And this insensibility to pure sound finds its counterpart in slipshod and tasteless vocabulary, in awkward and solecising uses of phrase — in short, in a general slatternliness as regards all the minor, and some of the major, points that constitute style. This carelessness or numbness of feeling extends also to some things which lie deeper than style. At hardly any time, except when the beneficent restriction of the sonnet braces her up, is Mrs. Brown- ing's composition or her conception clear, well-knit, and orderly. This flaccidity is indeed a symptom in all the poets of the second Romantic school. It had been threatened in Keats ; there were dangerous appearances of it, fortunately exorcised by the kind cruelty of criticism and his own good sense, in Tennyson ; Robert Browning's verbosity, his lawless abundance, was perhaps in fact only a rather more healthy and vigorous variety of it. But over Mrs. Browning it ruled, except in the Sonnets from the Portuguese and a very few other pieces. Still, despite the constant imperfection, there is, on the whole, a pervading charm, the sense of the vision though sometimes not of the faculty. In " Cowper's Grave," in "The Rhyme of the Duchess May," in the "Lay of the Brown Rosary," in the "Romaunt of Margret " (where the different cadence given to the refrain " Margret ! Margret ! " by the form of the name adopted, contributes a marvellously new music to the piece, and where, terribly as the whole is in need of compression and concentration, the separate effects are sometimes quite miraculous), in the " Vision of Poets," in " The Soul's Travelling " and the " House of Clouds," in a hundred others, we never want more poetry, we only want more criticism. CHAP. I TENNYSON AND BROWNING 739 A paragraph of mention must suffice for some verse-writers more than one of whom may be justly called a poet, and who were nearly contemporary with these, or at any rate born between Mrs. Browning and Mr. Matthew Arnold : the too famous Martin Farquhar Tupper (1810-89), the enormous and almost incomprehensible popularity of whose worthless Proverbial Philosophy has secured him an uncom- fortable immortality, and who wrote much else ; Archbishop Trench (1807-86), a popular philologist of great acuteness, an admirable judge of Latin Mediaeval poetry, and himself a poet ; Thomas Gordon Hake (1809-94), author of much verse, rather too mystical and diffi- cult, but always high and often sweet ; Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton (1809-85), a friend of Tennyson and the immediate procurer, though at Carlyle's instigation, of his pension, a great figure in society, literary, poHtical, and other, a good critic and an admi- rable song-writer; Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), an Irish bard of humour as well as of romance ; " Father Prout," Charles Mackay, Mrs. Archer Clive ("'V") — but especially William Edmonstoune Aytoun (1813-65), joint-author of that admirable book of light verse, the equal of anything earlier and certainly not surpassed since, the B071 Gaultier ballads, and author of the Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, Firmilian, Bothwell, etc. Besides Bon Gaultier, though of a some- what different fashion, must be ranked the Ingoldsby Legends of Richard Harris Barham (i 788-1845), who by birth belonged to an older generation, but wrote the Legends late. In grotesque poetry no language holds their superiors. CHAPTER II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL Dickens — Thackeray — His early work — Charlotte Bronte — Mrs. Gaskell — Charles Reade — Anthony Trollope — George Eliot — Charles Kingsley — Others — R. L. Stevenson There can be little doubt that, great as have been its achievements in poetry and history, and not small as they have been in literary criticism and the essay generally, the nineteenth century, as a whole, will take future rank as the age of the novel. But there was a time, covering about the fourth decade of the century, when it might have seemed, and did seem to one very acute and well-informed judge (Lockhart), that the progress of fiction would be arrested. The immense impetus given by Scott appeared to be exhausted with himself; the hardly less real revolution introduced by Miss Austen was so quiet as to be very nearly imperceptible. Not a few of the novelists mentioned in the last Book were writing, and one or two, Lever and Bulwer especially, had their best work to come, in 1837, and even in 1850. But between 1814 and 1836 no one of absolutely the first class put in his titles. At this very time, however, there were breeding up, and not even in their very first youth, two of the very greatest writers of English prose fiction — perhaps, indeed, the only two who can pretend to rank with Fielding, Miss Austen, and Scott. These were Charles Dickeas and William Makepeace Thackeray, who were very nearly of an age, though Dickens, a little the younger of the pair, made his mark first. He was born in 1812 at Portsmouth, where, as subsequently at Chatham, his father was a clerk in the dockyard. This father, the original of the " Mr. Micawber " of David Copperfield^ a. novel in great measure autobiographical, lost his post in some departmental reconstruction ; and the family for some time experienced straits which have left their mark both here and elsewhere, especially in Little Dorrit (for Dickens senior, like old Dorrit, was a prisoner for debt in the Marshalsea). After a time, 740 CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 741 however, he found work on the press, as did his son, whose education was not more irregular than might be expected. Charles himself learnt shorthand and became a reporter at seventeen, but wrote, or at least published, nothing till his twenty-second year was nearly finished. At the end of December 1833 he began to contribute papers, of the descriptive-fanciful kind that Leigh Hunt had intro- duced, to magazines, and the Sketches by Boz were collected out of these and issued as a book early in 1836, while before the spring of that year was over Dickens began the Pickwick Papers and married. He was ever afterwards a prosperous man as far as money was con- cerned, and Pickwick immediately made him famous. He was soon able to leave off all work but book-writing ; he made, by his novels, by the periodicals of Household U'o?-ds and All the y^ear Round, which he edited, and by reading his own work in England and America, a very large fortune for a man of letters, and died suddenly in July 1870, the most popular author of his day, and with no failure of mental powers, though his actual death was due to brain disease. Dickens's work was very considerable, and the book part of it, after those just mentioned (^Pickwick was published at the end of 1837), appeared as follows: Oliver Twist, 1838; Nicholas Nickleby, 1839; The Old Curiosity Shop (this and the next at first appeared with a framework, afterwards discarded, as "Master Humphry's Clock"), 1840-41; Barnaby Pudge, 1841 ; American Notes, 1842; Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843; a series of Christmas Books between the latter year and 1848 (this was continued in a way later by his con- tributions to the Christmas numbers of his periodicals) ; Pictures from Italy, 1845; Dombey and Son, 1846-48; David Copperfield, 1849-50; Bleak House, 1852-53 ; The Child's History of England (his only worthless book), 1854; Hard Times, same year; Little Dorrit, 1855-57; A Tale of Two Cities, 1859; The Uncommercial Traveller (a better Bos), 1861 ; Great Expectations, same year; Our Mutual Eriend, 1864-65; and the unfinished Edwin Drood, which was ap- pearing when he died. Most of these, except those contributed to the two periodicals, came out in numbers with illustrations, a plan very popular in the middle of the century. Although from the first to the last there is unmistakable unity in 'Dickens, and although nobody who had ever read Pickwick could mistake Our Mutual Eriend for the work of any other author, his genius submitted to certain changes, though perhaps it never at- tained any great expansion. He had been as a child an enthusiastic student of Smollett, and Smollett's peculiar construction or absence of construction, was reproduced exactly in his earlier work, and did not di.sappear from his later. Nor, though this is less generally known, does he owe much less to Theodore Hook, who influenced his early 742 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi --■'■■'-■■ ' ' » ' novels as much as Hunt influenced his early essays. Pickwick itself is merely the picaresque adventure-novel in a modern, more good- natured, and slightly softened and exalted form — a set of scenes hardly connected at all except by the presence of the same figures in them. If Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby have some approach to greater unity, it is only because of the melodramatic interest of the fortunes of Nancy in the first case and the poetical justice of the downfall of Squeers in the second. Even Martin Chiizzlewit, nay, even David Copperfield, are chronicles merely. The Old Curiosity Shop is not even this ; it depends sentimentally upon Little Nell, really on the immortal Dick Swiveller. Doinbey and Son attempts something but does not succeed. From Bleak House onwards Dickens did make a strong effort at connected plots — plots some- times, as in the case of Little Dorrit and even Bleak House itself, so elaborate as to be in parts unintelligible. But, either as a conse- quence or as a concomitant of this, the separate scenes and characters lost a great deal of their early freshness and ease, though the real appeal, the real merit, of the books always lay in them. If we examine Dickens carefully, and without prepossessions, we shall find certain gifts the presence of which cannot reasonably be disputed, and certain grave faults or lacks nearly as certain as the merits. No writer has ever had a more marvellous faculty of depicting what may be called town-scenery than Dickens. He can give the interior of a house or room, the " atmosphere " of furniture, the general air of a street, as no one had given these things before him. Further, he can people these scenes with figures which at their best have a vivacity, an arresting power, again inferior to none. And he can adjust scenes and figures for several purposes, but above all for the purpose of humorous action tending slightly to the farci- cal, with a felicity in his earlier and better days almost unerring, and even in his later seldom far out. Yet it has been questioned whether the life with which his scenes and characters are provided is altogether human life — whether his world is not rather a huge phantasmagoria of his own creation. His main faults again are hardly denied, save by extravagant adorers. Dickens's range of character, though extensive, was also peculiar and strictly limited. He certainly did not draw, with any success, persons beyond the lower and the lower middle classes ; and the defence sometimes put, that he did not wish to do so, must be ruled out, for he tried and failed to do it. His characters of the upper and upper middle classes (with whom, it must be remembered, he had, in the time when he was " making himself." hardly associ- ated at all, while later he was too busy, too much set in one groove, and it may be too prejudiced, to study them with impartiality) have CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 743 not merely the fantastic quality, the doubtful reality, of his Sam Wellers and his Dick Swivellers. They are not creatures who, in another and slightly altered world, might be real and are still delightful, but monsters not suited to any conceivable scheme. The relations of the second Mrs. Dombey (except Cousin Feenix, who is at least a genial improbability), the society of the Dedlocks, the guests of the Dorrits in their prosperity, and some of those of the Veneerings, have hardly a touch of life — they are to the human species what the fancy birds and beasts, by creating which the late Mr. Waterton used to amuse himself and display his skill in taxidermy, were to the actual fauna of this earth. Nor is it reasonably deniable that Dickens had many irritating mannerisms, a lack of anything like real acquaint- ance or sympathy with great and high regions of thought, and an unfortunate proneness to talk about what he did not understand. But he remains the greatest fantastic novelist of England, and, with Balzac, the greatest fantastic novelist of the world ; and his three best books, which may be taken to be Pickwick, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations, are the masterpieces of their special kind. William Makepeace Thackeray was born at Calcutta (where his father, a' cadet of a family originally of Yorkshire, and grandson of a headmaster of Harrow, was a Company's servant) in July 181 1. His father died when he was five years old, and his „„ , mother marrying again, the boy was sent home, and, after living at Tunbridge Wells and afterwards in Devonshire, went to Charterhouse. He proceeded in 1829 to Trinity College, Cam- bridge, but took no degree. He contributed, however, to an under- graduates' paper, The Snob, and parodied Tennyson's " Timbuctoo," or at least wrote a burlesque poem in competition with it, the first couplet of which is a pleasant foretaste of his style all through life — In Africa — a quarter of the world — The men are black, their locks are crisp and curled. After leaving Cambridge he travelled in Germany, and began to read for the Bar ; but the loss of a competent, though not large, income which he had inherited, made some more speedily remunerative occupation necessary, and he took to journalism, sinking most of his remaining property in running, instead of merely writing for, papers. He went to Paris, where his mother and stepfather were living, to study painting, for he was much more set on art than even on litera- ture, and had, as his illustrations show, great, though curiously warped and incomplete, ability tlierefor. He married in 1836, and settled after a time in London, writing busily for all sorts of papers from the Times and Fraser downwards. Hut, after the birth of his 744 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book XI third child, his wife's mind gave way, and she never recovered, though she survived him for some thirty years. Despite what seems, on looking back, the unmistakable, and indeed unique, quality of Thackeray's most immature work, it was very long before it attained popular recognition, while it never at any time brought him anything like the substantial re- earl^work. wards earned by Dickens. But, while the latter never much excelled his first distinct essay, it was years before Thackeray gave his full measure. His first book, the Paj'is Sketch Book, published in 1840, and consisting of reprints of his work as a Paris correspondent for .newspapers, is extremely unequal, much of it mediocre, some poor, and very little of the best. It had no suc- cess, nor had the much more characteristic collection of Tales which followed next year, though this contained the Yellowplush Papers,^ the admirable extravaganza of Major Ga/iagan, and T/ie Bedford Row Conspiracy, a story owing a little to Charles de Bernard, but a master- piece in itself. Catherine, The Hoggarty Diamond, and The Shabby Gefiteel Story had the same inequality ; while Barry Lyndon, though it has long been fashionable to rank it very high, attracted no great attention at first, and to some of Thackeray's most fervent -admirers has always seemed chiefly noticeable as his first display of that extraordinary faculty of simulating, or rather re-creating, eighteenth- century thought and feeling which he afterwards showed. The Irish Sketch Book of 1843, though a book almost peerless in its kind, did not please greatly, nor the admirably From Cornhill to Grand Cairo, or Eastern Sketches of three years later. Thackeray had reached the full limit of thirty-five before thriving in any real literary sense seemed possible for him. But his luck was now turned by three different publications — the charming trifle of Mrs. Perkinses Ball (1847), which seems at last to have converted the public coldness into appreciation; the wonderful Book of Snobs (1848), published in Punch; and most of all the great novel of Vanity Fair (1848). This last, though at first coldly re- ceived, and perhaps not at first displaying its full quality, could not fail to win over whatever critics there may have been in England (which, by the way, as it happened, was at the particular moment by no means overstocked with that article). By the beginning of 1848, Thackeray was established, in the estimate of the best judges, as the greatest living novelist, and he had made himself popular enough to secure profit as well as fame. He lectured a little, and the lectures gave the admirable essays, rather than lectures, known as The English Humourists and The Four Georges (not pub- 1 The " Yellowplush Correspondence " had appeared even before the " Paris " book in 1838. CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 745 lished till later). He continued his Christmas books. But it was of more importance that he also continued his great series of novels. Peiidennis (1849-50), which followed Vanity Fair, was a more amusing and genial, if not a greater, book than its forerunner; and Esmond (1852), which followed Pendennis, is among the very summits of English prose fiction, exquisitely written in a marvellous resurrection of eighteenth-century style, touched somehow with a strange modernity and life which make it no pastiche, containing the most brilliant passages of mere incident, and, above all, enshrining such studies of character, in the hero and heroine in particular, but also in others, as not four other makers of English prose and verse can show. After a tour to America, Thackeray produced The Newcomes (1853-55), ^ book resembling Pendennis, with which it was con- nected by the reappearance of some personages, but with more pathos, though perhaps a little less freshness. He had a bad attack of Roman fever in the winter of 1855, and it is believed that his health was permanently affected ; but this stay at Rome saw the writing of The Pose and the Ping, the last and best of his extravaganza-romances. The Virginians, the novel of the next two years (in one of which he stood for Oxford and was beaten), exhib'ted something of the inequality of his earlier work, but has much of the excellence of the later. At the beginning of i860, he undertook the editorship of the new Cornhill Magazine, a task in itself very uncongenial to him. He contributed to it, however, the Poundaboiit Papers, which show him to the very last at his very best as an essayist ; and furnished it with the slight but amusing novel of Lovel the Widower, and the much longer but much less good Adventures of Philip. He gave up the editorship after two years, but began and carried some way a third novel, the unfinished Denis Dinuii. In this, the old faculty of re-creation, as regards scenes, manners, and speech, is unimpaired, but tlie book is hardly long enough to give ground for judging whether the old wizardry of character-drawing v/ould have been retrieved. He was found dead in his bed at his house in Kensington on Christmas Eve, 1863. Both in prose and in verse (for in a certain humorous-pathetic variety of the latter he displayed gifts which very nearly, if they do not quite, give him positive and high rank as a poet) Thackeray's characteristics, both of conception and expression, are wonderfully distinct and extremely original. During his lifetime some foolish persons called him cynical ; since his death, others not more wise have called him a sentimentalist. Both judgments were comple- mentary exaggerations of the fact just glanced at, that his is the extremest known development of that mixture of the pathetic and the 746 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi humorous which is latent in all humour, which Shakespeare had brought out occasionally — as he brought out everything — which had been driven in and turned to a furious indignation by unhappy fate in Swift, and which both the time and his own temperament had allowed only occasionally to appear in Fielding. An intense appreciation of the ludicrous aspects of actual human life exists in Thackeray, not so much alternately as side by side with an equally intense appreciation of " the pity of it." At times he may shock the weak, at times he may disgust the strong ; but hardly ever in his master-work is there a real excess in either direction. The verse, as usual with the higher form, gives the simplest and best expression of this mixture, as in such pieces as the " Ballad of Bouillabaisse," "The Age of Wisdom," "Vanitas Vanitatum," and others ; but it constantly suffuses the larger and better part of the prose with a " humanity " not so much " terrible," though FitzGerald called it so, as wonderful. This peculiarity of thought, however, he shares ; his peculiarity of expression is, as always with the greatest ones of literature, wholly his own. Owing to whatever cause — for his education was not irregular, and his literary taste was exquisite — Thackeray was at first a rather " incorrect " writer, in the school sense, and he never became a very correct one ; but this was of the slightest possible importance. We can see in his very earliest writings a peculiarity of phrase, of style in the greatest sense, which is nowhere discernible before him, though its easier and more tangible mannerisms have been copied by some after him. It is an extremely conversational style, and at even its highest pitches it always seems to be addressed to a listener, rather than, like some of the great literary styles, those of Shakespeare's soliloquies in particular, to be com- posed without reference to reading or hearing at all. Thackeray always presupposes an interlocutor or at least an auditor, and in so far as we can lay the finger on any really formative peculiarity of his style, it is this, that he is constantly meeting, as it were, the fancies, objections, assents, and the like which he supposes to arise in this double of himself. This peculiarity is observable not more in his elaborate digressions of "address to the reader" (suggested, as no doubt they were, by Fielding's more set exordia) than in the smallest turns of his phrase in novel or essay alike. His play on words, — a point in which he is again Shakespearian, — his broken sentences, the rapid zigzag turns of his thought and fancy, are all due, partly at least, to this intense excitement of brain, which overhears beforehand, as it were, the coming repartee, comment, annotation, and half annexes, half parries it ere it arrives. It follows from this that there is no phrase in English so nervous, so flutteringly alive, as CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 7^7 Thackeray's. It stands at the very opposite pole from such other phrase as Lander's, which is complete, majestic, imposing, but a very little dead — to be contemplated, to be even received with respect and admiration by the reader, but separated from him by a gulf. Whereas between Thackeray and his reader there is a constant pulse and current of sympathetic feeling and thought. The reader knows that the author is all attention to know what he will think, what he will feel, and he is all the more sensitive to the thoughts and the feelings of the author. If we find this anywhere before in English literature, we find it in the great fantasts — Burton and Browne — of the seven- teenth century, and just before Thackeray in Charles Lamb, from whom, if from anybody, he may have derived hints for it. It may also be noticed that he was a constant student of Howell, who has it in a far inferior degree, but after something the same kind as his greater contemporaries. These gifts, and that other singular one of simulating the style of former times, do not fully explain Thackeray's mastery, but they are historically noticeable. They would not have made him what he is, the recorder for ever of the higher English life in the middle nineteenth century, and the creator, in that period and out of it, of , Becky Sharp and of Beatrix Esmond ; but they helped him to be this, and they made him one of the very greatest of English writers. The determination of genius and talent towards the novel, of which these two great writers were the greatest and earliest expres- sion, affected, as we have said, older men like Bulwer and Lever, and extracted from them better work than they had at first produced. But it was, naturally, shown with more distinctness in younger men and women, who may in some cases have imitated Dickens or Thackeray directly, but who in most were not their children so much as their younger brothers and sisters. Among the earliest of these was Charlotte Bronte, a novelist whose life has received rather disproportionate and even unfortunate attention, but whose work is still very variously judged, and in fact, from its peculiarities of circumstance, will probably always remain a problem. She was born in 1816, the ^''r^n?-" daughter of a clergyman of Irish extraction, but beneficed in Yorkshire, and she had two younger sisters, Emily and Anne. The three in 1846 published a volume of poems under the names of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. It attracted no attention, and, so far as Charlotte's and Anne's verse was concerned, did not deserve any. But Emily had a narrow intense vein of poetry in her, and her " Kcmemljrance " and one or two other things are almost great. They then tried prose fiction, Charlotte writing The Professor, Emily, Wilt her ing Heights, and Anne, The 'Tenant of Wild/ell Hall and 748 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi Agnes Grey. These two last are ordinary things ; IVuthering Heights an extraordinary one, though its merits may be variously judged ; The Professor did not in the least give Charlotte's quality, and she could not get it published. Nor was she at first more fortunate with Jane Eyre., which, however, was at last accepted by Messrs. Smith and Elder, and issued in 1847. It was extravagantly attacked for '• impropriety " and other crimes, but was popular. Yet its author, though she lived seven or eight years longer, wrote little more, Shirley in 1849, and Villette in 1852, neither of them long books, being her only completed work. She married Mr, Nicholls, who was her father's curate at Ha worth, in 1854, and died next year on the 31st of March. The Professor also found its way at last into print, but her '■'■ remains " were quite fragmentary. It will thus be seen that the circumstances of Miss Bronte's work are rather peculiar. Critics have often to judge from a small amount of work, when the author has been precocious and has died young. But Charlotte Bronte published nothing of importance till she was past thirty, and though she was not far off forty when she died, and had a great success to encourage her, increased her work but little. In such a case it may at least be doubted whether longer life would have given much more work or whether there was indeed much more to come. But there are other and more intimate features which point to the same inference. Of the talent — in fact of the genius in a certain flawed and limited sense — of " Currer Bell " there can be no doubt. She followed no one, and many have followed her. Her work, however questionable it may be in itself, stands in the middle of the century, marking distinctly a transition period. It is distinguished as much from Thackeray and from Dickens by a curious spirit of irregular and stunted romanticism, as it is distinguished from the romantics proper by a realist touch no less unmistakable. And yet her limitations are extraordinary. It seems as if, unless in the grim-grotesque of parts of Jane Eyre, she could never get beyond her personal experiences. The exacter and less dreamy part oijane Eyre itself is merely a half-vindictive record of her sufferings as a school-girl and a governess. Shirley is, in the heroine, a portrait of her sister Emily ; Caroline, it is believed, was another, hardly less direct ; the curates and their chiefs are a series of almost libellous likenesses. Villette reproduces her stay in Brussels with the same audacious fidelity. Out of this circle of personal experiences she could never get, or could get out of it only into the imaginary and not very wo^rthy society of her Rochesters, in which she certainly created the ugly and unattractive hero. This indicates, if not a grave fault, at any rate a distinct want in CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 749 her artistic nature. The transcript of personal experience is not only a legitimate, but an almost invariable, part of the novelist's re- sources. We have it in Fielding as in Smollett, in Sterne as in Miss Barney, in Miss Austen as in Scott, in Dickens as in Thackeray. But the novelist cannot, like the poet, " look in his heart," and his memory, and write exclusively. The result, save in a person of almost supernatural experience and quite supernatural character, must be monotonous, and can hardly fail, even in its monotony, to be scanty. Every life (it has been said in many forms) will give one book if the liver knows how to write it ; but few lives indeed will give more than one. There are other things in this curious writer which might be noted as faults, as well as some which might be set to her credit. But her great merit is that she really did initiate. We had the picaresque novel, the romance of adventure, the prose comedy of manners and character, the extravaganza, the historical novel, the novel intensely domestic. She introduced a new cross and blend which was at once domestic and romantic, analytic and imaginative, pathetic and ethical — the novel neither namby-pamby nor goody- goody, nor idly handling sham terrors, nor clumsily, and without magic, trying to emulate the Great Magician's dealings with the past, nor decorating the present with mawkish sentiment and third-hand rhetoric. In a word, she showed the way, though in her own work she hardly discovered the country. She was followed, and pretty close, by a group of remarkable novelists, most of whom cannot be said to have owed each other anything, because they were very nearly of the same age. The eldest of the group, who became the biographer of Char- lotte Bronte herself, was not the most remarkable, though she has her partisans. This was Elizabeth Stevenson, a name in which few will recognise Mrs. Gaskell. She was born in 1810 at CheLsea, but was brought up at Knutsford, near Manchester, and in 1832 married a Unitarian minister of that city. Her first novel of importance, Mary Barton (1848), was almost the first attempt (though Disraeli had touched the subject in his meteoric way in Sybil, and others otherwise) to make the lower life of a great manufacturing town, faitlifully pictured, into tlie sul)stance of a novel, rather in the way in wliicli Miss Austen had used the life of English parsonages and manor-houses than in the fantastic manner of Dickens. It was a great and a deserved success. Ruth, five years later, develops the more theatrical side of the talent shown in Afary Barton, but Cran- ford, its contemporary (1853), is nearer to the actual subjects and manner of the mistress — for there can he very little doubt that it would hardly have been what it is if I-lvnna luid not been written, 750 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi though Mrs. Gaskell replaced the slightly merciless satire of the original with an amiable sympathy, less potent but hardly less agree- able. Of the books which followed, till her death in 1865, North and South (1855), and Syhna^s Lovers (1863), with the unfinished Wives and Daughters (1866), may be especially mentioned. In Mary Barton the labour-trcubles of her scene give her something of the extraordinary interest and excitement to which the elder novelists had thought it almost obligatory to have recourse ; but in most of her other work she dared the dangers of the obvious and found them vain. Next in order of birth was a slightly eccentric but very powerful tale-teller, Charles Reade, who tried all styles, and never did any- thing commonplace in any, though perhaps he never turned out an actual masterpiece. He was born in 181 4, at Ipsden in Read" Oxfordshire, of a family of the squirearchy, became a Demy and then in due course a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar, but neither practised nor took up any regular employment. After the manner of a French rather than of an English man of letters he began with play-writing, which he never gave up, though he was not more successful in pro- ducing literary drama than most of his contemporaries ; and he did not make his mark as a novelist till he was nearly forty, when, in 1852, he published Peg IVoffington. Thenceforward he was a frequent, but not too frequent, producer of novels, which he wrote on the modern system of " document "-collecting — gathering from news- papers and books every particular, about things past or present, that he thought might give principal or auxiliary interest to his tales, but infusing into each touches of remarkable idiosyncrasy. His best books beyond all question are // is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and the Cloister and the Hearth (1861) : the one a story, first of brutality towards prisoners in gaols, and then of the new Australian gold-fields ; the other a wonderful adaptation, in the special spirit of the later nineteenth century, of the Colloquies and other autobio- graphical or semi-autobiographical writings of Erasmus, which are drawn upon to give a romantic picture of that humanist's father. But it may be questioned whether the already-mentioned Peg IVoffing- ton and Christie Johnstone (1853), also an early piece, to which may be ?Ld.6.t6. Love me Little, Love me Long (1859), do not show him at his very best, if they are not his very best books, because they are less overladen than the others, and still less than his later works from Griffith Gaunt (1863) to A Woman-Hater (1877), with " purpose," with " document," with episode, and with digression. He died in 1884. Yet another year, and in 181 5 was born Anthony Trollope, a CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 751 novelist immensely prolific, popular for a time, though not quite till his death, a good deal underrated since, never perhaps rated or likely to be rated by good critics among the first, but sure with such critics, sooner or later, of recognition as xr"o'nop^ interesting and singularly typical. He belonged to a literary family, for his mother was herself a popular and prolific novelist, and his elder brother, Thomas Adolphus, was a miscellaneous writer of industry and merit, chiefly on Italian subjects. Anthony himself, though he went for a time to two great public schools, — Winchester and Harrow, — was rather irregularly educated on the whole, and entered the public service early, reaching a high position in the Post Office, and deriving not a few of his scenes and char- acters from his experiences there. He had also a rather wide know- ledge of different kinds of English upper middle-class society and of some of the lower, was an enthusiastic fox-hunter, knew London society, literary and other, well, and at the same time had a knowledge of the peculiar and characteristic life of cathedral towns which would not have disgraced Fielding or Miss Austen. After some initial experiments, in which he did not show himself at his full strength, he began in 1855 to make his mark with The Warden, and made it unmistakably a little later with Barchester Tcnvers, which wants only a. Je-ne-sais-qnoi to be one of the greatest English novels. The new development of magazines, with serials running through them instead of appearing separately in parts, exactly suited Trollope's business- like fashions of composition, and contributed enormously to his profit, though it may be doubtful whether it did not injure his fame by tempting him to over-production. He lived too long even for his profit, and he wrote far too much for his fame : but his truth to life, and not merely to external life, was extraordinary, his fertility in scene and character wonderful, and his positive power far greater than it has recently been usual to admit. As the prince of a whole class, of novelists who have flourished throughout the later nineteenth century, he at least must occupy a representative position when the rest of his tribe are forgotten ; and it is by no means impossible that some who go to him merely out of the curiosity aroused bv this representative position will continue to read him for his intrinsic merit. 1819 saw the birth of two greater writers, though the uncertainty of reputation which seems to affect the novelist more than any other class has attacked them too, especially the elder. Mary Ann Evans, later Mrs. Cross, known in literature as George Eliot, was born at Arbury, in Warwickshire, and till the age vxJoT of thirty lived in the same ncighl)ourlu)nd. She wrote, or at least published, nothing early, but having altered her religious 752 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi views, translated Strauss's Life of Jesus, and in 1849 went abroad to Geneva. When she returned she began writing for the IVestniinster Review, her essays, reviews, and some further translations of anti- Christian work showing ability, but no very great talent, and not even an approach to genius. But she met, was attracted by, and in a short time went to live with George Henry Lewes (1817-78), a somewhat Bohemian man of letters, of great attainments and remark- able critical power, who, though apparently unable to produce original work of merit himself, seems somehow to have discovered, developed, or accidentally started the faculties of his companion. The tales called Scenes of Clerical Life began to appear in Blackwood's Maga- zine at the beginning of 1857, and next year the more ambitious novel of Adam Bede was published. The humour, pathos, and un- copied distinction of this hit both the critical and the public taste of the moment, and the author (who retained her pseudonym, though attempts to claim the credit of her work made it necessary before very long to disclose her identity) strengthened her position by The Mill on the Floss (i860) and Silas Marner (1861). There are those who think that, had she died at this time, her reputation would have been less exposed to danger than it has actually proved to be ; and it is certain that in all her novels after this time there is a shift- ing of the ground from the humorous-pathetic treatment of the lower or lower-middle provincial classes, which had hitherto been her stronghold, and of which she had perhaps exhausted the capabilities. But public taste came for a time more and more to her, and Romola, an Italian Renaissance story (1863), Felix Holt (1866), and Middle- march (1871) were novels which brought in more fame and more profit than any of their time. Indeed, this last, appearing as it did just at the time when an engouement (as the French term it) for undogmatic religion, unconventional morality, and apparently free thought had set in, made her a sort of coterie-idol. It was for a time almost treason to "culture" not to admire her. Then the tide turned, and though her next and last novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), had a great sale, yet its rather preposterous subject (the delight of a supposed young English gentleman in finding out that he is really a Jew), and the appalling semi-scientific jargon in which it was written, turned most tastes against it. Miss Evans's only later work (her marriage with Mr. Cross took place after Mr. Lewes's death in 1878, and shortly before her own) was the Impressions of Theo- phrastus Such (1879), and was better than it seemed to be, but was not popular. Her posthumous memoirs (she died at the end of 1880) were rather instructive as biography than interesting as literature. In the years which have passed since her death, though her works are believed still to be widely read, her repute with the critics has CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 753 decreased out of all proportion to her real merits, tliough in pretty exact proportion to the extravagant heights to which the same critics or their likes had formerly raised it. This factitious height she can never recover in the estimate of a competent judgment. But it is probable that her four first books in fiction/ with passages in all her later, will gradually recover for her, and leave her safely established in, a high position among the second class of English novelists, those who have rather observed than created, rather unlocked a hoard of experience than developed a structure of imagination, who have no very good or attractive style, but write clearly and with knowledge. And the most saving grace of all will doubtless be found in her humour, a variety of that great gift which is not itself of the greatest, being partial, entirely absent at times, and never of the most abounding or original even at its best, but real, true, and at times singularly happy. The same description, though in a less degree, will apply to her pathos. Charles Kingsley, a little George Eliot's senior (he was born in the same year, but earlier, at Holne in Devonshire), might almost be described as the counterpart, complete in difference, of that remarkable woman. He had the poetry, the eloquence, the varied glow and colour, the interest in active life, sport, travel, Kingsley. adventure, which she lacked ; but he was destitute of the philosophical aptitudes which, not always to her peace, she possessed. And though it would be almost as untrue to represent him as desti- tute of the power of creating character as it would be to represent her as destitute of that of depicting incident, yet he is eminently the romancer, she eminently the novelist of their respective time, the features of which each reflected with uncommon though divergent fidelity. Kingsley went first to King's College. London, then to Magdalene College, Cambridge, obtained first the curacy and then the rectory of Eversley in Hampshire, and spent there a busy and happy, though not very long, life, which closed in 1875. Besides his living, he held at different times a canonry of Middleham, the Professorship of Modern History at Cambridge, canonrics of Chester and West- minster, and a chaplaincy to the Queen. And he was busy, all his life, with literary work rather unusually excellent, considering its variety in kind. His verse is not voluminous, but his Sti//if\- Trai^edy (184S) is much above the average of the .semi-dramatic work of tlie century, and tlie small volume, Andnuitcda and other Poems (1858), which chiefly contains the rest of his work outside 1 She wrote a good deal of verse, of very lillle merit as poetry, though touched occasionally with a certain fervour of undogmatism and other will worships. 3C 754 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi prose, includes in the title-poem the best, and almost the only good, continuous hexameters in the English language ; some of the most exquisite songs for music — " The Three Fishers," •* The Starlings," "The Sands of Dee," and others — that have ever become popular; ballads, from " The Last Buccanier " and " The Red King " down- ward, of extraordinary force and fire ; and not one single bad thing, nor hardly a weak one, in the whole volume. His sermons, in the plainer kind, are of singular goodness ; his miscellaneous essays of unusual interest and brilliancy, except when definitely critical, a function for which his prejudices, and his defect in logical power, together with a certain tendency to inaccuracy of fact, unfitted him. He was for the same reasons not very successful as a historical writer, and on one unfortunate occasion, engaging in controversy with nearly the most formidable controversialist of the century. Cardinal Newman, he experienced a discomfiture which was rather due to the blundering of his tactics than to the weakness of his case. But his special vocation was fiction, and though his failings and inequalities appear fully in his novels, those readers are to be pitied who are prevented by them from enjoying work which some- times approaches, if it does not actually equal, the very best in English, and never leaves the reader long without brilliant consola- tions for any disappointment it may have inflicted. Kingsley began life as an enthusiastic Carlylian, but with a belief in " the people " which he certainly did not learn from Carlyle ; and though his early crude " Christian Socialism " was a little toned down by experience, it left him to the last a politician more generous than exactly wise. At first, however, it helped to inspire, just after the great Chartist year of 1848-49, two novels — Alton Locke {i?>^()) and Veast (1851), the one embodying his experiences of University life and of the slums of London, the other touching on Tractarianism, English country life, sport, and passing politics, all blended with a passionate love-story — which will bear comparison with the first attempts of any writer. Indeed, prose fiction had never given anything like the splendid pictures of Veast, inspired partly, no doubt, by Mr. Ruskin, though Kingsley was far above mere copying. The power shown in these books was applied, in perhaps increasing measure, to a dangerous subject, the break-up of the Roman Empire, in Hypatia (1853), a book of extreme brilliancy, where the author almost entirely eluded the curse that rests on most classical novels. But the full range and reach of Kingsley's faculty was not seen till Westzvard Ho I (1854), a novel of Elizabethan adventure, written in the full glow of that return of patriotic fervour which came upon Englishmen with the Crimean war, exhibiting hardly any of his defects, and on a wonderfully sustained level of excellence. Some CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 755 have found it " dull," while others, or even the same, have been offended by its religious, political, and national enthusiasm. The last is not a literary objection ; the first can best be compared with Gabriel Harvey's opinion of '' that Elvish Queene." Kingsley was never again at his best, except in the best parts, which are not the whole, of the delightful fantasy of The Water Babies (1863), where his magnificent^ descriptive power, his poetic fancy, and his not quite trustworthy, but at best exquisite, blend of humour and pathos find scope. Two Years Ago (1857), a modern novel referring to the time of the Crimean war itself, mingles good and bad in an unsafe proportion; and Hereward the Wake (1866), a new rendering, with additions, of the adventures of the historical or legendary defender of the East Anglian fens against William the Conqueror, does the same thing in different material. In inequality Kingsley has few equals, in goodness not many more superiors. His brother! Henry (1830-76) had some of his merits, was a better humourist, and perhaps a better novelist, if not so good a romancer ; but he had to write for bread, ar\d never succeeded, save perhaps once in the Australian novel of Geoffrey Ha?/ilyn (1859), in doing himself justice so far as an entire book is concerned. But his best and most charming things are to be found in Ravenshoe (1862), which, chaotic as a novel, contains character, humour, and chivalry that would do credit to the very greatest. Wilkie Collins, who was born in 1824, and died in 1889, was the son of an estimable painter of the English school, was a friend and close follower of Dickens, and, during the time between 1850 and 1870 chiefly, composed novels. The Dead Secret (1857), The Woman in White (i860). No Name (1862), The Moonstone (1868). etc., which had a great deal of popularity, and may be said to stand about midway between Dickens's and Charles Readers in kind, but a good deal below both in humorous and romantic quality. Wilkie Collins, however, was in pure literary gift inferior to his brother, Charles Alston, who did various things, especially the Cruise upon Wheels, a sort of new ''Journey." neither wholly sentimental nor wholly humorous, which has a singular combination of truth with fanciful grace. Other novelist.s, Mrs. Craik, Major Whyte-Melville, "the author of Guy Livingstone'^ (that is to say, G. A. Lawrence), Frank Smcdley, can but receive the notice of bare inclusion. But a little more is due to Margaret Oliphant Wilson, .Mrs. Oliphant (1828-97), who is among women novelists the parallel to Anthony Trollope among men for prolific lA third brother, (jeorRC, was p.-irt .luthor with the Earl of Pembroke of .t remarkable record of their South Sea experiences, South Sea Buddies, or The Earl and the Doctor. 756 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi and popular production, for diffused talent, and for having at one period (in her case that of the Chronicles of Carlingford, 1863-66, as in his of the Chronicles of Barsei) shown something like genius. Mrs. Oliphant, too, like Trollope, but more copiously, wrote things outside fiction, and her last work, the posthumous House of Black- wood, was a singularly successful attempt in a very difficult kind. Many of the novelists born in the second quarter of the century, including their acknowledged chief Mr. George Meredith, are still alive, and therefore not to be noticed here. They have all exhibited, in different degrees and blends, that characteristic of the novel, as it was reconstituted towards the middle of the century, which has been noticed above — the preference (with occasional divergencies and flights into the historical, the fantastic, and other varieties) of strictly ordinary life. It so happened, however, that at a still later period, and when a third generation had grown or was growing up, popular taste veered somewhat round to the adventurous, and in the strict sense romantic ; and as it happens likewise, the most remarkable practitioner of this kind by far — a writer not less note- worthy strictly as such than as a teller of tales — has passed away and abides our censure. This was Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson, who dropped his third name on his title-pages. He was born on 13th November 1850, was educated at Edinburgh, and called to the Bar, but had tastes neither for science nor for the professions, and before long son?^^" took to wandering and literature, which remained his occupations during the too brief remainder of his life. He did not make himself very early known, and, perhaps because he was somewhat slow in settling to his real vocation of romance, the public did not find him out for some time after he actually presented him- self. Before 1883 he had published five volumes, partly reprinted matter. The first two of these were accounts of eccentric travels, An Inland Voyage (1878) and Travels with a Donkey (1879); ^^en followed two others of essays, Virginibiis Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1881) ; only at the tail (1882) came New Arabian Nights, which he had contributed earlier to a periodical called London. The first four were less noticeable for their matter (though a strong originality, a pleasant humour, and a great faculty of enjoyment were all evident in them) than for a style some- times curiously '' tormented,!' never entirely free from labour, but always of the most ambitious kind, and constantly on the verge of a success from which it was only debarred by the prominence of struggle and reminiscence. The last, with something of this also, showed a daring fancy, a command both of the grotesque and the CHAP. II THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 757 terrible, in short a liold on tlie true Romantic, which escaped the vulgar judgment, but was unmistakable to those who could see. Both appeals were combined, and forced home upon the most careless reader, in the famous story of Treasure Island^ which appeared at last in 1883, and established Mr. Stevenson's reputation. He lived eleven years longer, wandering, partly in search of health (he was hopelessly consumptive) and partly from natural errantry, all over the world, till he finally fixed himself in Samoa, where he became a sort of white chieftain, interested himself, with characteris- tic intensity and half-conscious whim, in native politics, and died suddenly in the winter of 1894. He had in the interval published, sometimes in ostensible collaboration, many volumes of prose, and three of verse. These last, A ChilcVs Garden of Verse (1885), Underwoods (1887), and Ballads (i88g), had the note of not always quite disengaged originality, which he could not help giving, but do not show him to the same advantage as does the prose of Prince Otto (1885), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1887), The Black Arrow (1888), the Master of Ballantrae (1889), and Catriotta, the second part of Kidnapped {\Zc)-^. This was his last completed story, and perhaps his best. At his death he was engaged on two others, which he left unfinished, Weir of Hermiston, an altogether masterly fragment, where the presence of his native soil, and the strong character of the apparently intended story, seemed likely to have got him free altogether from his trammels ; and St. Ives., a much inferior performance, which reads oddly like an imitation, not of him- self, but of some of his own imitators, who by this time were numerous. Mr. Stevenson presents for us, in a new and extremely interesting form, the problem whether it would not have been better for him to have been born in a period not " literary " at all. In such a case he miirht have written nothing ; but in such a case, had he written anv- thing, his native fund of humour and of imagination, his hardly surpassed faculty of telling a .story (though not exactly of finishing one), his wit. his command at once of the pathetic and the horrible, must have found organs of expression which would not have been choked and chained and distorted as they were by the effort to imitate — to make a style eclectic yet original. But we may very well be thankful for him as he was. and hope that the first great novelist of the coming century will be half as good as he, the last exclusively of the nineteenth. CHAPTER III HISTORY AND CRITICISM Carlyle— His life and works — His genius— His style — Kinglake — Buckle — Freeman — Green — Froude — Matthew Arnold — Mr. Ruskin — Art in Eng- lish literature — Symonds — Pater There is a certain advantage in taking the prominent departments of prose, in any given period, together ; that the prominent depart- ments, apart from fiction, of English prose, during the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century, have been history and criticism, there will be little question ; and, moreover, the two are connected by more than this chance link. As a matter of fact nearly all permanent historians of the time, Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, have been critics, even literary critics, while Mr. Ruskin, the most proininent critic, pure and simple, has paid constant, if sometimes fantastic, attention to history. Sometimes, indeed, we may meet with a historian like Mr. Freeman, whose taste is not mainly for literature, or with a critic like Mr. Arnold, who has a positive distaste for history. But these are exceptions which make, not unmake, the rule. As stated before, this chapter will be headed by Carlyle, who, though an older man than almost any mentioned in this Book, hardly made any definite mark till the thirties, and maintained his primacy during no less than forty-four years of the reign of Queen Victoria. Thomas Carlyle was born on 4th December 1795, at Eccle- fechan in Dumfriesshire. He was the son of a stone-mason, and both his father and his mother were persons of strong character, not a few of their famous son's phrases and ways of speech being, ^"^y^^- jt would seem, traceable to them. The parish school, the Academy or Grammar School of Annan, and the University of Edinburgh, which he entered in his fifteenth year, saw his education ; and then, having no fancy for the Church, and less for the Law, he became a schoolmaster, and practised that office, against the grain, for some years in different places. He did some hackwork for ency- clopaedias, etc., and wrotQ a little for the London Magazine, as he 758 CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 759 did later for Fraser and the Edinburgh. Blackwood, a more con- genial place than any of these, he seems never to have tried, and its Toryism would probably then have repelled him. He lived for a time in London, knew Coleridge, wrote (in the orthodox late Georgian style, as different from his later and characteristic way as a wax candle from a Roman one) his respectable Life of Schiller (1825), and in 1826 secured his future career by marrying Miss Jane Welsh, a young lady much his superior in position, possessed of a small property, attractive, though no beauty, in person, and albeit pro- vided, as became a descendant of John Knox, with a quick temper and an exceedingly sharp tongue, yet also endowed with something like genius, with extraordinary resolution and devotion, and with the prac- tical wits necessary to nurse or mother (for it very nearly came to that) a dyspeptic, desponding, and extremely unpractical man of genius him- self. The small, and probably not very exceptional, unhappinesses of the pair have been unfairly made known, and unduly exaggerated by comment. But it is not very certain that Mrs. Carlyle would have been happier with any one else, certain that she received, as none of her contemporaries except Mrs. Tennyson did, the position of "wife to a man of genius," which she coveted, and certain also that this genius would very likely have come to little or nothing but for her. Carlyle retired to his wife's farm of Craigenputtock, in his native county ; and between 1828 and 1834, at Craigenputtock, he digested (in so far as he ever did digest) the chaos of thought and doubt that had been seething in him for a third of a century, acquired his own style, and applied it in Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution (at least most of it), and by far the greater part of the articles and reviews which compose his Miscellaneous Essays. The first of these — one of the wildest books in appearance (so much so that it disgusted and frightened most of the subscribers to Fraser'' s, in which it appeared), but original and memorable as few are — contains, in the guise of an account of the German philoso])her, Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, and his " philosophy of clothes " (a notion borrowed from Swift, as much of the nomenclature is translated from Scott), a good deal of autobiography. Entepfuhl is Ecclefechan, and the spot of the revelation of the " Everlasting No," nominally the Rue St. Thomas de I'Enfer in Paris, has been authoritatively identi- fied with the junction of Leith Walk and Pilrig Street, on the outskirts of Edinl)urgh. But it also contained tlie first and almost the definite manifesto of Carlyle\s celebrated ''"Gospel" — a gospel very negative in general and not in detail very positive, hut wholly tonic and healthy in its denunciation of the shams which at no time in the world's history have been more prominent than in the nineteenth century. 760 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi In 1834 the Carlyles moved to London, and soon established themselves in the Chelsea house which continued to be their home. Tlie French Revolution, after being destroyed by acci- works!" dent and rewritten, appeared in 1837, and there could be no doubt about Carlyle after this. No such com- bination of historical research and vivid dramatic quality had been seen before. It stands, and ever will stand, alone — at once a history of remarkable accuracy (the errors detected since are all trifles) and a romance of hardly equalled splendour. Carlyle lect- ured a good deal in his early London years, but only one course was published by himself, the Heroes and Hero-VVorship of 1841. Between this and The French Revolution he had issued the short piece on Chartism (not his happiest) ; and with the Heroes, or nearly so, appeared the first collection of his admirable Essays. His peculiar historical method reappeared in Past atid Present (1843), the earlier part of which is an astonishing imaginative, yet not fabulous, reconstruction of the Middle Ages ; and then he set it to a new and severe task in The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (1845). These latter documents, many of which are written in the most obscure jargon that ever called itself English, are by Carlyle not merely woven up, after the fashion which Boswell had begun and Lockhart perfected, into a continuous biography, but interpreted with alto- gether marvellous patience, ingenuity, and devotion. He did not publish anything more till 1850, when the Latter-Day Pamphlets — things more like the Sartor in style than anything he had written in the interval, and among the greatest of political satires — appeared, while he followed them up next year with the quietest, and in the common sense most human, of all his books, the Life of his friend John Sterling. And then he grappled with the History of Frederick the Great, which practically exhausted even his energies for fourteen years. The result was a book as to which some extreme Carlylians are in doubt whether to wish or not that he had never written it. The hero is quite unworthy of him, the scale and scheme could not be made other than scrappy, and few of the incidents and characters are of the very first interest. Yet out of the vast miscellany, for that is what it really is, almost innumerable things of the first excellence may be picked. It was finished in 1865. Carlyle was soon after elected Rector by the students of his old University, and, again a little later, his wife died. He passed the remaining years of his life, which ended in 1881, in arranging his own and his wife's memoirs, publishing only a few things — Early Kings of Norway (1875) the best. His autobiographical remains were published after his death by Mr. Froude — in undoubted good faith, and not to the direct annoyance of any reasonable disciple, but with the certain eflfect CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM . 761 of for a time alienating the foolisher folk by their nature, and with the too probable one of deterring posterity by their bulk. Some day, no doubt, a Carlyle will arise for Carlyle himself, and do for him what he did for Cromwell if not for Frederick. About his genius there can be no doubt from the true com- parative and historical view, whatever temporary disturbances and displacements of opinion may have been or may be. It has three aspects — the first, which concerns us least, that of gen- eral tone ; the next, which concerns us more, that of hand- '^ 8="'"=. ling and treatment of subject ; and the last, which concerns us most, that of style. It is because of his peculiar handling and treatment that Carlyle almost alone, of persons born before the end of the eighteenth century, has been included in this Book. Whether the nineteenth has developed remarkable types of its own, in life and character, may be a question less confidently to be answered in the affirmative than most of its children seem to suppose ; that it has endeavoured to enter, and to a great extent has succeeded in entering, as no other has done, into types and characters of the past, is certain. And in this respect no writer has expressed its tendencies more pow- erfully than Carlyle. He may almost be said to have been the first to present historic characters "■realised" after the fashion of the novelist, but with limitation to fact. In other words, he wrote history as Shakespeare long before and Scott in his own time wrote drama or romance, though he tasked his imagination not to create but to vivify and rearrange the particulars. The style which he used for this purpose, and which undoubtedly had not a little to do with the success of the method, could hardly have come into existence except at the time of the revolt of prose, following that of poetry, against the limitations and con- r .1 • 1 , ,1 , Ti • • His style. ventions of the eighteenth century. Representing, as it did, that revolt pushed to its very furthest, it naturally shocked pre- cisians, some of whom are not reconciled to this day ; and it must be admitted that it was suscejitible of degradation and mannerism even in its creator's hands, and lias jiroved, almost without exception, a detestable thing in those of imitators. But Carlyle himself at his best, and sometimes to his last, could use it with such eflect of pathos now and then, of magnificence often, of vivid and arresting presenta- tion in all but a few cases, as hardly any prose-writer has ever excelled. His expression, like the matter conveyed in it, may be too strong for the weak, too varied and elusory in its far-ranging purport for tlie dull, too much penetrated with etliic.il gravity and clear-eyed recognition of fact for those who like mere prettiness and mere aesthetic make- believe ; but both are of the rarest and greatest. Its characteristics, like those of nearly all great styles, are partly 762 ^ VICTORIAN LITERATURE book XI obvious, partly recondite, or altogether fugitive, even from the most acute and persevering investigation. In the lowest place come the mechanical devices of capitals — a revival, of course, of an old habit — italics, dashes, and other recourses to the assistance of the printer. Next may be ranked certain stenographic tricks as regards grammar — the omission of conjunctions, pronouns, and generally all parts of speech which, by relying strictly on the reader's ability to perceive the meaning without them, can be omitted, and the omission of which both gives point and freshness to the whole and emphasises those words that are left. Next and higher come exotic, and specially German, construction, long compound adjectives, unusual compara- tives and superlatives like " beautifuller," unsparing employment of that specially English idiom by which, as it has been hyperbolically said, every verb can be made a noun and every noun a verb, together with a certain, though not very large, admixture of actual neologisms and coinings like "Gigmanity." Farther still from the mechanical is the art of arrangement in order of words and juxtaposition of clauses, cadence and rhythm of phrase, all of which go so far to make up style in the positive. And beyond these again comes the indefinable part, the part which always remains and defies analysis. The origin of the whole has been much discussed. It is certain that in his first published book there is, as has been said, no trace of it. The Life of Schiller is not very distinguishable from the more solemn efibrts of Lockhart or Southey ; while in Sartor Resartus, partly written almost at the same time, the style is full-blown and in its very wildest luxuriance. It used to be put down almost wholly to imitation of the Germans, especially Richter ; but though some influence from Jean Paul is not to be denied, it may be very easily exaggerated. Undoubtedly there are some reminiscences of Sterne, Jean Paul's master. Carlyle is said himself to have attributed much of it to family slang caught from his father and mother, and it is certain that there are strong resemblances in it to Scottish writing of the seventeenth century of the more fantastic kind, such as that of Sir Thomas Urquhart. But we find premonitions of Carlyle in many places, even .such unexpected ones as Johnson, and on the whole the manner may be most safely and accurately described as in the smaller part a mosaic from his immense reading, in the larger part due partly to the creative, but more to the arranging and transforming, power of his own genius. The historical production of the latter half or two-thirds of the century has been very considerable, but there are perhaps not more than four or five other writers who can secure a place here, while even in the case of one or two of these objections might be raised. Alexander Kinglake, not exactly a great historian, and a con- CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 763 spicuous victim of the temporary craze for devoting histories of enormous length to periods of short duration, occupies a very im- portant place in the history of English stvle. He was „. , , . ^ .1 r- '1 ^ 1-1 Kmelake. born in 181 1, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and, being a man of easy means, spent the rest of his life partly as a Member of Parliament, partly in travel abroad, and partly in London club-life at home, till his death in 1891. He set a certain note of style, with more distinctness and effect than has been always rec- ognised, in the brilliant volume of travel called Eothen, which appeared in 1844. Of the brilliancy, and to a great extent the novelty, of the style of this there can be no question. But of its positive goodness there may be much. The hard brassy flash of almost swaggering epigram, which Matthew Arnold later denounced in the History of the Crimean War, is already apparent, and is partly induced by the author's affectation of a sort of " tborn-crackling " persiflage over things in general, animated by a superficial and deliberate cynicism. Nor are the contrasted passages of fine writing more agreeable, being even more than Bulwer's (which they partly follow) gaudy and insincere, while in both keys there is a determination to write unlike other people, to be clever at all costs, to unite surprising epithets with unexpected nouns. The general effect is certainly "Corinthian"; but the length of the book is not sufficient to make it positively disagree- able, and Kinglake's influence, direct and transmitted, has been enor- mous. It was perhaps unfortunate for him that he ever undertook his vast History of the Crimean War (1863-87). He had many things in his favour — personal knowledge of part of the matter, almost unlimited access to documents, vivid interest, and, as Eothefi had shown, a pen which, to whatever dangers it was exposed, had almost superabundant energy, facility, and resource. But all the faults of his style and attitude (except that he exchanged that of a cynical flaneur for that of a prose epic-maker) reappeared in e.xaggerated form, and were aggravated further by two fatal faults of handling. In the first place, going beyond even his models Thiers and Macaulay, he mag- nified the scale of his book to a quite intolerable extent ; and, in the second, he allowed personal passion and animus to transform parts of it into laboured panegyric, and other parts into virulent lampoon. In short, great as are the powers which the book displays, it must be called, on the whole, an imposing failure. Another, though a very different, instance of the influence of the idols of the middle of the century is to be found in Henry Thomas Buckle, who was born in 1823 (or 182 1?). was privately educated, followed no profession, and died young at Damascus in j{„^,,j|j 1862. Apart from some unnoteworthy Miscellanies, his work is contained in his unfinished History of Civilisation in Europe, 764 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi of which two volumes (1857-61) only appeared. Buckle, who was a kind of disciple of French Positivism, emulated French writers even more in the audacious and fallacious sweep of his generalisa- tions, attributing eifects in bulk to the simple operation of certain physical causes, forcing facts to agree with his theories wherever an agreement, even in appearance, was possible, and unceremoniously neglecting them where it was not. His style is neither picturesque nor elaborate, but very clear and forcible, admitting no doubt about his meaning, and at the same time putting that meaning with a vigour which the extremely clear styles very often lack. He had no taste, not much judgment, a great deal of prejudice, and was almost entirely dominated by the unintelligent iconoclasm and anti-supernaturalism of the Ust and the early part of the present century. But his faults (except a certain violence) were not English, and he had merits which also are not the commonest in English writers, so that he may be treated by orthodox critics with more charity than he showed in his own unorthodox criticism. Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92) and John Richard Green (1837-83) stood to each other in the relation of master and pupil, while both, though they devoted their chief energies to a period which Macaulay despised, owed him a good deal — Green a very great deal — in method and style. Mr. Freeman, who as a boy was privately educated, but went to Oxford and became a Fellow of Trinity College, first distinguished himself by work on church architecture ; but this was in his case chiefly a means to the study of History, and he soon concentrated himself upon that of England before, during, and for a century or so after the period of the Norman Conquest. His History of that event, the pubhcation of which occupied the decade between 1867 and 1876, was not only the most thorough examination of the subject ever made up to its own time, but, whatever minor alterations or supplements it may require, is not likely to lose the position of classical work on the subject. Also Freeman, whose time was his own, and who was a very facile writer, produced largely in book form, and in contri- butions to newspapers (only a small part of which was ever collected), on the subjects of history, historical geography, historical politics, and architecture. He was a very learned, and generally, if not invariably, a very accurate writer; and the value of his writings for reference and as materials is not easily to be exaggerated. Unfor- tunately, he was both prolix and pedantic in his general handling, was extremely violent and unfair in the controversies in which he delighted, and, besides other defects of style, had almost from the first an irritat- ing habit of allusive periphrases partly caught from Gibbon, but used without any of Gibbon's matchless judgment. CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 765 He was, however, hardly to be called a picturesque historian by direct intention ; his pupil, John Richard Green, was this first of all. He was a native of Oxford, and educated first at Mag- dalen College School, and then at Jesus College. He ^''""' took orders, contributed a good deal to the Saturday Review, and did a certain amount of parochial work in London. His Short History of the English People appeared in 1874, and became more popular than any other historical work of the century except Macaulay's. This book he afterwards expanded somewhat, and supported with a series of monographs, which was probably only prevented by his early death from forming a valuable historical library. But his fame will rest on the Short History, which has, if not a few of the defects, all the merits of its popularity. As in Macaulay's case, the accuracy of fact is usually scrupulous, but, also as in Macaulay's case (and even to a greater extent, inasmuch as Mr. Green took further liberties of picturesque style), the facts are generalised, grouped, and rhetorically presented in a way not perhaps invariably tending so much to exact apprehension of the fact as to striking exhibition of it. An almost infinitely greater writer than either of these (who were his inveterate and hostile critics), not perhaps in reality much more of a partisan advocate than either, but unfortunately the inferior of both, to an altogether surprising degree, in accuracy of statement, was James Anthony Froude. He was born ^'■°"'^*- near Totnes in 18 18, and died near Salcombe, in the same county, in 1894. He was the younger brother of Richard Hurrell Froude, Newman's companion in the Oxford Movement, and was, after his brother's death, himself for a time much under Newman's influence. But the catastrophe of the movement sent him not to Rome but to freethought; he resigned his Fellowship and began to write for a living. He had already published two books. Shado^vs of the Clouds (1847) and the Nemesis of Faith (1849). His magazine and review contributions included the admirable Essays, afterwards collected as Short Studies (1867-83). But he had more ambitious designs, and being, like most of his contemporaries, bitten with the mania for history on an enormous scale, began a great History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada, which appeared in twelve volumes between 1856 and 1869, and. though attacked with almost frantic bitterness by Freeman and his disciples, made a great reputation. This was deserved, despite the faults of inaccuracy, of paradox, and of partisanship, which are undeniable, because of the merit — at times the transcendent merit — of the style, the novel and intense kind of patriotism, and above all, the wonderful gift of historic realisation which it displays. This last gift Mr. Froude perhaps got from his following of Carlyle, and he 766 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book XI possessed it as no other historian of our time except Carlyle has had it. For a time Mr. Froude edited Eraser's Magazine, and when his great book was done he undertook another, extensive but not so extensive, The English in /relami, which appeared in three volumes between 1871 and 1874. In this latter year, and again in the following, he was sent on a Government mission to the Cape, and he extended his journeys to other English colonies, with book results — Oceana (1886), The Bow of Ulysses (The English in the West Indies) (1888). In 1889 he published an Irish historical novel, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. At the death of his enemy Freeman, he succeeded him as Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and died holding the post, his lectures in which had given birth to his two last books — Erasmus (1894) and English Seamen (1895). Even in this list not a few books have been omitted, such as his admirable Bunyan (1880) and the less good Casar (1879). His discharge of his duties as Carlyle's literary executor from 1881 onward had brought on him much obloquy, and even some accusations of treachery to his friend and master ; but these latter were absurd, and it probably is for posterity to judge whether the apparently ruthless publication of private matter was judicious or not. It is indeed probable that in his own ironic and rather cynical mood,^ which had been brought about in his case, as in some others, by the shock of religious loss, Mr. Froude did not fully anticipate the effect which the disclosures would have on an age as sentimental in reality as it is pessimist in affectation,. This temper of his, which is well vouched for, and which escapes in a tell-tale manner now and then at corners of his books, by no means colours them as a whole, being for the most part subordinated to the intense enthusiasm for heroic conduct of all kinds which he had learnt from Carlyle himself, and which was of the utmost service to him as a historian. In the long run, however, he is certain to survive chiefly by virtue of his marvellous style, the greatest simple style among English writers of the latter half of the century, unless that position be accorded equally — it cannot be awarded alone — to his other master, and in a spiritual sense "lost leader," Newman. Mr. Froude's chief Oxford contemporaries, Arnold and Ruskin, were not historians, but the transition from historian to critic, and especially from this historian to these critics, is smooth and natural enough. Not only did all "feed their flocks upon the self-same Ijill," and in very nearly the self-same years, but all in different ways iThe best, or at least the pleasantest, expression of this is the quite charming Cat's PilgrUnage, published in 1870, and afterwards incorporatea with the Short Studies. CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 767 were products of that incalculable ocean-wave of English thought, not even yet half enough allowed for, called The Oxford Movement ; and it was merely an accident of individual temperament which led one to history, another to literature, and the third to art, as their special provinces — provinces from which, however, each diverged not a little widely, and in the cases of Arnold and Ruskin not a little disastrously. In all, too, whether nominally historians or not, reigned the dominant historical spirit of the nineteenth century — the unconquerable desire, even in those who think themselves most busy with the present, to know first of all what the past has said and thought and done, if only under the pretext of applying the discovery to their own times. The chief dates and events of Matthew Arnold's life will be given below in connection with his poetry. He was not very early known to the public as a critic or as a prose-writer on other than official subjects, though the Preface of 1853 revealed him in both these characters to those who could read. By Arnold* degrees his contributions to magazines, and his growing reputation at Oxford, widened the circle of those who could appreciate him, and the main doctrines of his Essays in Criticistn (1865) — the good influence of Academies, the "Philistine" tendencies of English thought and style, the necessity of adhering to the ancients and the grand manner, the deficiency of his countrymen in ideas, and the like — may be seen to some small extent in the writings of those who had read him before the publication of the book. That publication, however, established his position — a position which he held, and to some extent enlarged, during the next twenty years. He was, more- over, Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1857 and 1867, and his lectures took book form, principally in two very interesting works of criticism. On Translating Homer (1861) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). It cannot be said that at any time he was popular, or that any of his writings had a very wide sale. But, speaking as he did from the very first as one who had no doubt of his own authority, that authority was gradually accepted — never, indeed, without dissents — in his proper province of literature. Unfortunately, he was tempted, according to his own revival of the (ireek doctrine of the philosophic position, — which he practically identified for modern times with, that of "culture" or literature, — to stray from this proper domain into others. The quaint and long unreprinted Frienils/tip\f Garland (1871), in which, on the text of the Franco-Prussian war, he took occasion to reproach his country- men with their inferiority to Germany in ])()litics and practice gen- erally (just as he had reproached them with their inferiority to France in Ideas, Sweetness, Light, and so forth), redeemed, indeed, 768 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi an excessive affectation of tone and style, and some rather ephemeral jocularity, by great liveliness of rather mannered satire, and by a considerable undercurrent of truth. But a series of works, mainly on theological subjects, — Culture and Anarchy (1869), St. Paid and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873), ^^'^ ^''^ ^^^^ Bible (1875), — occupied too much of his time and was not fortunate. The air of jaunty infallibility, which had sometimes jarred even in matters where the speaker's competence could not be denied, and which, after all, were matters of taste or nothing, sat but ill on one speaking as an amateur on the gravest subjects. Fortunately, Mr. Arnold returned before his death to his proper sphere, and, in ways not always free from the defects acquired in this theological escapade, added not inconsiderably to his total stock in his real business. Mixed Essays (1879) and Essays in Criticism (second series, 1888) contained much admirable work; Irish Essays (1882) and Discourses in America (1885) contained some. This business was in effect the inculcation — by dint of exhortation in a very peculiar, slightly wearisome, and often very faultily mannered, but at its best incomparably dainty, elegant, and fascinating style — of a literary attitude which had perhaps always been too rare in England, and which, during the Romantic revolt, as well as during the Classical domination, had been almost unknown. This was what may be called the comparative attitude in literary criticism, the comparison taking in not merely the ancients but moderns of all times. By virtue of one of his characteristic crotchets, Mr. Arnold declined to infuse this comparison with the full historical sense which it, in fact, requires, and of which it is in reality the child. He erected certain standards and barriers, sometimes just enough, sometimes quite arbitrary, which he called " the grand style," " high seriousness," and so forth. We were to admire the Greeks and in a less degree the Latins ; but we were not to admire, save very moderately, the men of the Middle Age other than Dante. The French were held up as models in some ways ; but Mr. Arnold could not honestly recommend French poetry. Shakespeare had the grand style only by accident. Chaucer had not high seriousness. In short, no criticism, judged by individual utterances, is much more piecemeal, arbitrary, fantastic, and unsane than Mr. Arnold's own, austere demander though he be of order, law, and sanity in literature. Nevertheless, the general effect of this criticism was wholly useful and good ; and if it be somewhat unhistorical to say that it changed critical habits in England for the better, it is not in the least unhistorical to say that it was the first important symptom of such a change. The criticism of the Romantic school had been great, but by force of genius rather than learning, and it had, even in the hands of such men as De CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 769 Quincey, much more of Hazlitt and Lamb, been far too insular. The criticism of the second generation had not been great at all, or where it had possessed greatness, as in the cases of Macaulay and Carlyle, had not been strictly literary. Even French criticism (to which Mr. Arnold resorted for help, especially from Sainte-Beuve) was in his own time changing for the worse, and becoming, in the hands of Taine and his followers, a barren branch of pseudo-science, busying itself with question-begging and otiose problems of race, tendencies, and the like, instead of attending to the pure art of literary comparison. Accordingly his theory, if not his practice, especially at a time when study of the classics was being ousted from the place which it had so long rightfully held, was valuable. And though the style in which it was expressed was by no means faultless, yet it could not but gain from that style — one of almost impeccable correctness in formal points, glittering but not gaudy at its best, possessing the indescrib- able rhythm, which is never metre, of the best prose, pure without being pedantic in vocabulary, and at least sometimes attaining the very and mere salt of classical elegance. The other writer who has been specially mentioned (the only living writer who takes full place in this book) exhibits most excel- lent differences. Mr. John Ruskin was born in London on 8th February iSig, and educated at home chiefly, his father, ,. , ,. . ■' . . , ^ -^ . . Mr. Ruskin. who was a wine merchant and a man 01 means, having a house at Denmark Hill. He went to Oxford as a gentleman- commoner of Christ Church, gained the Newdigate for a poem on Salsette and Elephanta in 1839, and took his degree in 1842, being thus entitled to describe himself in his first work. Modern Painters, which followed next year, as " a graduate of Oxford." Mr. Ruskin was an ardent student of art, in which, as far as drawing, if not painting, went, he attained considerable proficiency ; but his real weapon was the pen, not the pencil. His first purpose in using it was the extolling of Turner above all painters of his own day and most of days past ; but the book, which extended to five large volumes and occupied seventeen years in composition and publication, turned to a vast assemblage of what the Middle Ages would have called "quod- libetal questions" — discussions on all matters connected, and some hardly connected at all, with art. Nor did the author confine himself to this ample channel for discharging his opinions and employing his unique style. A much shorter treatise. The Seven Lamps of Arclti- tecture, appeared in 1849, and The Stones of Venice, in scale and character almost as aml)ilious as Modern Painters itself, in 1851-53; while between 1855 and 18^9 Mr. Ruskin tor)k up, as he had done earlier, the cudgels for tlie Knglish Pre-Raphaelite school in a series of "Academy Notes." He issued two sets of Lectures on Architect- 77° VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi tire and Painting (1854), and began to diverge into somewhat alien paths with The Political Economy of Art (1857). He had also written, with other things, Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds (1851), the title showing an ingenious perversity which gained on him; a fairy story, The King of the Golden River, \n 1854, etc. In the succeeding decade or so he wrote no large books, but a crowd of small ones, most of them titled in the fashion above noted — The Ethics of the Dust and The Crown of Wild Olive, 1866; Sesame ana Lilies, 1865; The Queen of the Air, 1869; Unto this Last, 1862; Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne, 1867 — in which he applied his peculiar method, always intertwisting a strand of reference to morals and another to art, to almost every conceivable subject — literature, political economy, mythology, and physical science, in fact, the whole encyclopaedia, with the contents of any daily newspaper thrown in. Yet another decade saw him Slade Professor of Fine Art at his own University (1869-79), and witnessed the addition to his miscellanies of Munera Pnlveris, 1862-63; Aratra Pentelici, 1872; The Eagle's Nest, 1872; Love's Meinie, 1873; Ariadne Florentina, 1876; The Laws of Fesole, 1877-79, ^tc. ; while between 1871 and 1884 he issued what can perhaps best be called an autobiographic chronicle, with digressions, entitled Eors Clavigera. He established himself after a time at Brantwood, on Coniston Lake, and for the last few years no new publications have issued from him, though new editions, and more than one or two recastings of the mighty Modern Painters, his ?nagnum opus, have to be added to the list already given, which is of itself not nearly complete. An influence of such volume, of such peculiarity, and directing itself in so many ways could not but have great and manifold results ; and it is not entirely easy to separate those which directly concern literature from those which indirectly concern it. Mr. Ruskin has written a great deal on literature itself, and has said many very true and beautiful things, but also not a few rather false and silly ones. But he is most important for us, first and chiefly because of the unique character of his style, and secondly because of the way in which he not only once for all gave the subject of art a firm hold upon English literary treatment, but affected literature itself most powerfully by influences drawn from painting and sculpture. Up to the time of the appearance of Modern Painters, the arts of design had had but little literary treatment in England, and had exercised still less influence upon literature itself. Towards the end , of the seventeenth century Evelyn, Pepys, and Roger Art in English T,, .i i . , • / n. / • ,. , literature. North had shown an mtelligent connoisseurship, and Dryden had written a remarkable, if rather " outside," essay on the parallel of Poetry and Painting. Horace Walpole had CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 771 had for the subject not the least sincere of his many fancies, and Sir Joshua Reynolds's very remarkable Discourses had bestowed on it formal state and rank. The two greatest of the Romantic critics proper, Lamb and Hazlitt, had had a great love for, and the latter a considerable knowledge of, it ; while Hartley Coleridge, if not his father, had the same bent. But despite all this, and despite the further fact that it had been the fashion, ever since Charles I. set it, for men of rank and wealth to import objects and make collections, the subject had taken no real hold of literature ; and the general attitude of men of letters to artists was, if not one of posi- tively sneering superiority, yet one of patronising condescension. The position, the genius, and the intimate connection with letters and men of letters of Reynolds himself, with the establishment of the Royal Academy, and the favour (if not a very discriminating favour) shown by George III. to art, began to alter this; the half-mis- understood " Picturesque " of Gilpin and his followers helped the alteration ; and when, after the cessation of the Napoleonic wars, the English began to return to the Continent and investigate its treasures in a less conventional fashion than that of the old "grand tour," a much greater impetus was given to art-study. This also helped, and was helped by, the determination of the poetry of the younger Romantics — Shelley, Keats, and most of all Tennyson — to the visual effect. When Mr. Ruskin was a mere boy, the marvellous gallery of landscapes and figure-pieces in Tennyson's Palace of Art and Dream of Fair IVonten had definitely "placed" the new method in poetry ; while Landor, De Quincey, and, in his splashy and un- certain way, Wilson, with such minor and very different figures as Wainewright and Darley, had even earlier done the same for prose. But Mr. Ruskin gave the method an extension which could hardly have been dreamed of by readers of the men just mentioned. In his three great early books almost every aspect of natural scenery, almost every masterpiece of pictorial and architectural art, in Europe was described with a fervour, with a minuteness, with a poetic con- vincingness of imagination, and above all, in a style, whicli had never been known before. From that time the blending of the two arts, as far as literature was concerned, and the place of the younger sister or sisters in literary treatment, was assured. The most important agent in this, of course, was the style. Here, as so often in very great style, there is no single or obvious trick — no Lylyan antithesis and simile, no Johnsonian parallelism and balance, to put the finger on. Rlivthm, as in all the great prose artists, is, of cout^se, Mr. Ruskin's principal weapon ; and it is of a piece with the wilful lawlessness and ^ant of self-criticism which distin- guish all his work that he too often transgresses the boundary between 772 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi rhythm and metre. The imbedded blank verse is altogether too frequent in his prose. But the fault is rendered less apparent by the extreme length of his sentences. He is the first writer since the seventeenth century who has dared, not once or twice in a way — Burke did that — but constantly, to indulge in sentences of twenty or thirty lines, nay, of more than a whole page, in length ; and while the metrical passages act to some extent as buoys and corks to keep this length floating, they are also to some extent lost in it, and do not offend the ear as they would in smaller units. This extreme length is also partially justified by the fact that Mr. Ruskin, even when nominally arguing, is for the most part building up pictures for the eye by successive strokes, and that that faithful organ retains the earlier and accepts the later touches with docility. It is also to be said as one of his highest commendations that, magnificent and vari- coloured as is the effect, he is by no means a " fine writer " in the ordinary sense. He does not affect unusual words ; he is by no means prodigal of adjectives, unless they are, strictly speaking, wanted ; and, above all, he is entirely free from the besetting fault of the generation which has succeeded him — the quest for unusual and surprising conjunctions of phrase. That he learnt a good deal from Carlyle is not disputable ; but he used what he learnt in quite differ- ent material, and with a totally diiTerent literary, though not a very different moral, effect. Although, as usually (and negligibly) happens, Mr. Ruskin's ideas, when their first stage of unacceptance and their second of acceptance were over, came to be cavilled at and pooh-poohed, nearly all writers since have in some ways been affected ymon s. ^^ them. The two most noteworthy of these were Mr. Symonds and Mr. Pater. John Addington Symonds was born in Bristol in 1840. He was the son of a local'physician of very high repute, was educated at Harrow, whence he passed to Oxford (Balliol), and as a Fellow to Magdalen. He succeeded rather early to more than a competence, and, suffering from comsumptive tendencies, spent most of his later years at Davos in the Engadine. He died at Rome in 1893. He wrote both in verse and in prose, but in verse pro- duced nothing of real importance. Even in prose his work was marred not merely by an extremely flowery style, which did not attain to the higher characteristics of Mr. Ruskin's, but by a flux of verbose prolixity with which, copious as has been the production of the author of Modern Painters, no one could charge him. Even Symonds's chief and really important book, the History of the Renais- sance in Italy (1875-86), would bear much compression, and almost every one of his numerous volumes of essays imperatively calls for it. This could not justly be said of Walter Horatio Pater, who was CHAP. Ill HISTORY AND CRITICISM 773 Pater. born in London in 1839, "^^'as educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and passing to Oxford, became in due time a Fellow of Brasenose, which position he held for the rest of his life, though latterly he lived a good deal in London. He printed nothing except contributions to magazines till he was nearly thirty-five, and his Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which appeared in 1873, ^vas a very carefully selected, and still more care- fully revised, body of essays, scarcely exceeding two hundred pages in length. It displayed a most elaborate and novel style, and in its few words conveyed something like a complete life-philosophy, inculcating the cultivation of, and carefully measured indulgence in, aesthetic pleasures, as practically the one thing to be heeded. But the book rather attracted the attention (and not always the admira- tion) of the few than the worship of the many, and lAIr. Pater published no other for all but ten years. Afterwards he was a little more prolific, and some posthumous publications (he died in 1894), not always adjusted for press with his own anxious care, have appeared. His manner and matter are best seen in the Studies, afterwards reissued, with some slight alterations ; in Marius the Epictirean (1885), a longish novel, not at all of action, of the second century; and in the volume of essays called Appreciations, which opens with a deliberate essay on " Style." ^ On this last point Mr. Pater's theory and practice coincided with, but were hardly derived from, those of the great French novelist Flaubert, whose doctrine of the ''single word," or unique phrase which alone will express the author's meaning, he almost fully accepted, though he saw some of its dangers and (in fact) absurdities. His own practice included the careful building up of clause, sentence, and paragraph, the constituents and the total being equally regarded ; a cunning scheme of rhythm, which never transgres.ses the bounds of metre ; and an almost excessively sifted vocabulary, in which epithet and noun are chosen with attention to a certain effect of strangeness — a slight shock of not unpleasurable surprise. This is an old trick, to which, from its earliest important practitioner in their language, the French had applied the term Marivauda_s:e. Its general efli"ect in Mr. Pater's own best passages is one of extreme beauty; indeed, these passages rank with the choicest in English. But not very seldom in himself, and very frequently indeed in his imitators, there resulted a new Euphuism which is rather disastrous. 1 Mr. Pater's other works in his hfctime were Imaginary Portraits (1887), a book of remarkable imagination, more nearly approaching the creative than most of his work, but unequally written ; and Plato and Platonism (1893). CHAPTER IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY Matthew Arnold— The " Spasmodics " — Clough — Locker — The Earl of Lytton — The Pre-Raphaelites — Their preparation — Dante and Christina Rossetti — William Morris — O'Shaughnessy — Others There can be little hesitation in dating a change in attitude towards poetry from about the middle of the nineteenth century, when the powers of Tennyson and of Browning, if not universally recognised, were still thoroughly manifested. This change, which has resulted in verse, sometimes not far, if at all, below the level of the best of the first and second Romantic periods, exhibits, except in the single instance of Mr. Swinburne, a somewhat greater resort to extrinsic sources of interest — a kind of relapse upon the classics in Matthew Arnold, a double dose of Mediaevalism and Early Renaissance touches in the Pre-Raphaelites, and later still sporadic and spasmodic excur- sions or returns to science, to Wordsworthian gravity of expression, to this or that reinforcement or crutch. In other words, there is a slight want of confident originality and independence. The most interesting names, or groups of names, here, are those of Mr. Arnold by himself, of the abortive "Spasmodic School "a little later, and of the by no means abortive Pre-Raphaelite group later still ; while, though many of the later-born individuals, including the great poet referred to in the last paragraph, are alive, and so excluded from treatment, the " abhorred shears " have already given us but too many subjects. Matthew Arnold was the eldest son of a man less well known than himself, and already registered in this book, Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby, and historian of Rome. He was born in 1822, and educated at Winchester, Rugby, and Balliol, Arnold!' ^^°"^ which last college, having previously obtained the Newdigate, he passed to Oriel, where he was elected Fellow in 1845. He did not, however, take college work or remain in Oxford long, but after serving as private secretary to 774 CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 775 Lord Landsdowne, married, and accepted an inspectorship of schools in 1850. He had already — with ''By A "only on the title-page — published in 1849 ^^^^ Strayed Reveller a7id other Poet/is.^ The same initial appeared on the title-page of Empedocles on Etna, 1852. But it was in 1853, when he was just over thirty, that he gave, with his name, the measure at once of his creative and critical powers by a collection of verse, prefaced by an extremely noteworthy dis- cussion of poetry, the first of his attempts at critical disquisition. In this he took, and for the rest of his life never ostensibly abandoned, an attitude towards poetry which was partly a reversion to, and partly an extension of, the Aristotelian theory, making it depend wholly upon the choice, conception, and conduct of the subject. Mr. Arnold did not indeed, like Wordsworth, dismiss metre as merely facultative, but neither did he, on the other hand, like Coleridge, actually, if not explicitly, point out its necessity. And his criticism, like that of every one almost without exception of the same school, is accordingly vitiated by the glaring contradiction that, while as examples of poetry he invariably takes works of metre, there is not, on his principles, any reason why he should not take works in prose. His poetical practice displays something of the same inconsistency, or at least dichotomy. He is most consistent in employing, or at least endeavouring to employ, a severer kind of diction and versifica- tion, drawing itself back from the florid and flowing Tennysonian schemes toward the stiffer movement and graver tones of Words- worth, Gray, and (in his later years) Milton. He eschews — on principle or from a secret sense of inability to arrange them — the looser lyric measures, and sometimes seems to seek, especially in The Strayed Reveller, for a substitute in simple decasyllabics, broken up, for no sufficient reason, into fragments. He also attempts, here and elsewhere, unrhymed measures other than ordinary blank verse, and with the usual unsuccess. But, like his nearest master Wordsworth, he is seldom or never really successful except when he discards, or at any rate conveniently forgets, his theories. It is a little surprising that he did not oftener try the sonnet, which in itself meets his views better than most tilings, from the happy compromise it affords between importance of matter and beauty of form, and in which he gave one splendid example — that on 1 Since his death the Newdigate poem on " Cromwell " (as usual, in couplets), the still earlier " Alaric at Rome," a Rui:;bv prize poem in six-lined stanzas written in 1840, have been reissued, with all the poems up to 1853, Ijv Dr. (i.irnett (London, 1896). As for his later poetical publications, a second series of P.>eiiis followed in 1855, Merope in 1858; then prose absorbed iiim mainly till the Sew Poems of 1867, and he wrote little verse later, though some fine things. 776 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi Shakespeare — and others that are fine. But even here, and still more elsewhere, he is an unequal poet — a poet who frequently breaks down. And in the direct teeth of his theory he is, as much as any poet of the century, a poet of fine things, of passages, of fragments, sepa- rable to the greatest advantage from the wholes in which they appear. The splendid blank-verse perorations of " Mycerinus " and " Sohrab and Rustum " ; the outburst on " Isolation " — " Yes, in the sea of life enisled" — which, with some other things, redeems the inequality, and in parts the doubtful taste, of "Switzerland"; the beautiful snatch of " Requiescat " ; the gorgeous stanzas of " The Scholar Gipsy," " Thyrsis," " Westminster Abbey " ; the musical, if ever so little fantastic and insincere, melancholy of " Dover Beach " and " A Summer Night " ; and above all, the famous " Forsaken Merman," the one completely successful monument of his combined poetic feeling and art — all these are better on the theories he combated than on the theories he held. In all of them Mr. Arnold was different rather in intention, and in a certain deliberate, but not always maintained, dialect than in real kind, from the seniors or juniors whom he regarded with very lukewarm admiration, and whose way he did not hesitate to pronounce wrong. The elaborate simile at the end of " The Scholar Gipsy " — some twenty lines long — - might take place as well in a poem on " Timbuctoo," and could be transferred thence to one on the " Battle of Armageddon." His longer things — Merope, a stiff pseudo-Greek play ; Eiiipedocles on Etna, a chaotic and unequal medley with delightful bursts ; Balder Dead, a simple-seeming narrative ; Tristram and Is e nit, an un- achieved romaunt — besides those named, are always unsuccessful as wholes. But when we remember such bursts (and there are scores of them) as the distich — Still nursing the unconquerable hope, Still clutching the inviolable shade — then we know that Mr. Arnold was a poet of the true nineteenth- century fashion, and a great one almost against his will. He has the real throb and cry, the indispensable "moments," the faculty of transforming and transcending ; and if these gifts are beset with hesitancy and checked by theoretic rules, this is rather our loss than his disqualification. His criticism, invaluable as an intention and exhortation, will soon be, if it is not already, little more ; his poetry is poetry, and therefore immortal. The " Spasmodics " of the middle of the century — Mr. P. J. Bailey, the still living author of Festus (1839), Sydney Dobell, Alex- ander Smith, and perhaps a few others, such as Ernest Jones, the Chartist lawyer — included some men of talent, but they are chiefly CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 777 interesting because they show a premature and unsuccessful attempt to do in one direction what Arnold attempted in another — to improve, though in this case rather by advance than by reaction, on the form of Tennyson. Their desire was to be more ..Spas^modics." modern, more "thoughtful," and at the same time slightly more ungirt in form. Sydney Dobell, born at Cranbrook in Kent in 1824, was privately educated, succeeded his father as a wine-merchant at Cheltenham, and was well favoured by circumstance except in the matter of health. He pubhshed a closet drama. The Rovian. in 1850; and another. Balder, in 1853; a little later he pub- lished poems on, and inspired by, the Crimean war ; but nothing further, though he lived for twenty years, dying in 1874. His best and best- known thing is the ballad of " Keith of Ravelston '' (not called by that name), where, as sometimes elsewhere, he has touched a string of half-unearthly music, redeeming a total want of self-criticism in his general work, and a tendency to rant and gush and frigid triviality. In fact, to read Dobell as a whole (his works were posthumously published) is a disastrous experiment. Alexander Smith, who, born at Kilmarnock in 1829 or 1830, ended his days as secretary to the University of Edinburgh in 1867, began about the same time as Dobell with a Life Drama, also showing a slight tendency to rant, but truer and less unequal as a whole than DobeH's work though without its occasional " cry." He followed this with City Poems (1857) and Edwin of Deira (1861), his last consumptive years being chiefly occupied by prose. These men are rather more interesting historically than individually, but they do not lack indi- vidual interest. Arthur Hugh Clough bears some curious resemblances to Matthew Arnold, whose intimate friend he was, and who celebrated him in a famous following of Lycidas and Adonais. He was a slightly older man, having been born in 1819, and was educated at Rugby and Balliol, the ferment of the Oxford Move- ment .sending him into freethinking. He resigned, in 1848, a Fellow- ship to which he had been elected at Oriel, and betook himself first to teaching and then to Government work in the Education Office. He died in 1861. Clough was an odd mixture of Arnold and of the Spasmodics, with a kind of distorted and cankered Tractarian element difterentiating him still further. This .sort of distraction could find no .satisfactory poetic utterance. In his early work, Ambarvalia (1849) ^"^^ the Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848) (the latter written in bad hexameters), as in the later Amours de Voyat^c and Dipsychus, there are good bits, scraps, passages. But he has hardly written a single poem, however short, which can be said to l)c good as a whole, and perhaps his greatest title to poetic fame is the 778 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi one exquisite and exquisitely expressed image of the rising tide quoted at the beginning of Book X. p. 653. His "New Decalogue" and one or two other things seem to show that, with more detachment and self-command, he might have done better in satirical than in serious verse. No doubts choked or chequered, or were, at least in appearance, allowed to appear in, the sunny work of Frederick Locker-Lampson, who was born in 1821 and died in 1895. His books are two only. Locker ^'i^ion Lyrics (1857) and Patchwork (1879), while Patchwork is in part only a commonplace-book of verse and prose. In the original parts of it, and in the verse of London Lyrics. Mr. Locker obtained a secure position among the little band — half a dozen strong at most, if so many — of the writers, with capital effect, of verse and prose "of society" in English. Very much more ambitious and prolific was Edward Robert, the first Earl of, and second Lord, Lytton, long known in literature as "Owen Meredith." Born in 1831, and educated at Harrow, but not „, ^ , , at Oxford or Cambridge, he entered the diplomatic The Earl of • . i,, ,., ,., Lytton. service at an unusually early age, discharged its duties in various parts of the world, became Viceroy of India in 1876, and died at Paris, where he was Ambassador, in 1892. "Owen Meredith" published, under that name, Clytemnestra in 1855, followed it with The Wanderer (1859), ^^tcile (i860). Songs of Servia (1861), OrrW (1869), Chronicles afid Characters (same date). Fables in Song (1874), Glenaveril (1888), After Paradise (1887), while he had earlier collaborated with his friend Julian Fane in a poem on Tannhauser ; and after his death two remarkable volumes of posthumous poems. Mar ah and King Poppy, appeared. In this large bulk of verse many lyrics of great, though seldom quite unflawed, beauty are contained, the longer poems yield an abundance of inter- esting and not a few fine passages, and the author constantly displays command of two very excellent gifts — passion and satiric power. He had, however, a pair of drawbacks which sorely mar his work, and have sunk it in general estimation to an unfair degree — the first of Ihem a strange tendency to imitate and echo even when he had ample notes of his own ; the second an utter inability to criticise, retrench, and correct. As Tennyson is of all poets that one who has used knife and file with most advantage, so Lord Lytton is he who has rejected their use with worse effect. There can, however, be no comparison in point of historical importance between any of these figures, or the imperfect schools and tendencies which they represent, and the group which arose a little later. In calling this group "Pre-Raphaelite," certain guards and provisos must be appended to the designation. There is no other CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 779 term so convenient, or on the whole so appropriate ; but the Pre- Raphaelitism of poetry rather overlaps, or coincides with, than directly resembles the Pre-Raphaelitism of art. It is, however, a direct and legitimate development of the great Romantic Raphaeihes. revival in England. The chief notes of this third stage have been a generally, though not universally, mediaeval tone of thought, colour, and in part subject, with, in method, a still further elaboration of the two appeals to imagination — by the way of exact and vivid visual presentation and by that of subtle and varied musical suggestion of sound — which had been so largely carried out by Tennyson, and to some extent originated by Keats. These had had to educate themselves and their readers. Even Coleridge hesitated about Tennyson's prosody, even Wordsworth was uncertain about his fidelity to. nature; while, until a critical edition of his early work is presented, it cannot even yet, without great labour, be appreciated how much he had to do preparation, before he got his own style into perfection. But men who were born about 1830 or later found that style ready to their hand, they found its examples already brought to perfection, they found the public taste, if not fully yet partially, educated to it. So, too, even Tennyson, much more Scott and Coleridge and their generation, had entered only very partially into the treasures of Mediaeval literature, and were hardly at all acquainted with those of Mediaeval art. Conybeare, Kemble, Thorpe, Madden were only in Tennyson's own time reviving the study of Old and Middle English. Early French and Early Italian were but just being opened up. Above all, the Oxford Movement directed attention to Mediaeval architecture, literature, thought, as had never been the case before in England, and as has never been the case at all in any other country. The eldest poets of the school were brother and sister, Dante Gabriel and Christina Georgina Rossetti. They belonged to England wholly by birth and education, but only partially by blood. Their father, Gabriel Rossetti, was an Italian refugee, a teacher ^^^^^ ^^^ of his native language, a real though fanciful student of Christina literature, somethmg of a poet himself, and a man ot sterling character. He married a Miss Polidori, who was English half by blood and wholly by associations. His eldest son, Gabriel Charles Dante, who rearranged his Christian names for public use, was born in 1828; his second daughter (the eldest, Maria Francesca, wa^ also literary, as was the younger son, still .alive, William Michael) in 1830. The life of neither was in the ordinary and outward sense eventful, and it was almost entirely spent in London by both. Dante, who was married to a lady of great beauty, 78a VICTORIAN LITERATURE . book xi Elizabeth Syddall, but lost her soon after marriage, died in 1882. His sister, who was all her life a fervent member of the Church of England, survived him, and died unmarried at the end of 1894. The main, or at least the professional, occupation of Dante Rossetti's life was not poetry. He was educated at King's College School, but left it early to study drawing, and, young as he was, became one of the most enthusiastic members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which was at the middle of the century to convert England from conventional art. His own form of painting was, and remained, the most characteristic of all, never admitting reconciliation ■with convention, as did that of Millais, and in part of Mr. Holman Hunt, while it possessed far greater charm than that of any other. His drawing was always cavilled at ; as to the magnificence of his colour, no one with eyes could doubt. But these characteristics, and others which have the indefinableness of genius, found expression also in another art. Rossetti wrote verse very early ("The Blessed Damozel" itself dates in the first draught from boyhood), but the death of his wife in 1862 postponed for a time the publication of his original work. He had contributed, however, to the Pre-Raphaelite magazines, the Germ and the Oxford and Ca7nbridge Magazine^ and had in 1861 published a volume of translations from early Italian poems, which displays part of the source, and still more of the nature, of his manner. His Poe^ns appeared in 1870, with great acceptance from the competent,' though with coarse and foolish abuse from others. He issued another volume of Ballads and Sonnets the year before his death, and the contents of the two, with alterations and additions, have been collected since. Although the earlier publication of work by his sister, and by his friends Mr. Morris and Mr. Swinburne, had made the manner of his work familiar to the public before it appeared, there can be little doubt that it was most original in his case. Naturally, he put more of the pictorial element into it than any of the others could do, and perhaps naturally also, he paid less attention than some of them to the direct aspect of things in nature. No similar professional explanation, however, can be found for the almost equally remarkable mastery of mere resonance, of mere verbal and literal music, which his verse displays ; and this must be set down partly to the tendency " in the air," partly to individual gift, and partly to the new instru- ment afforded by the stately varied harmony of English to a genius prepared ancestrally by the sweet, intense, but slightly monotonous melody of Italian. ' Like the work of most of the greater poets of this century, Rossetti' s is not very easily or profitably to be classified, save perhaps as regards his very remarkable sonnets, in mastery of which form he cii. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 781 ranks with his sister and Wordsworth. It is possibly unfortunate, though in his case it was more than excusable, that he adopted the Pe- trarchian form, which is somewhat less suited to the genius of the English language, and not at all better suited to the genius of the sonnet, than the Shakespearian. But his excellence in it, like that of Milton and Wordsworth himself, justifies the indulgence. Of the two great divisions of the sonnet, the meditative and the pictorial, the latter, as we should expect from his double vocation, was his special forte. The " sonnets for pictures " of the first volume have never been excelled, if they have ever been equalled. But he was hardly inferior in the other — the great sonnet-sequence of "The House of Life" coming perhaps next after Shakespeare's as a sequence, while such single examples as " Refusal of Aid between Nations," and the marvellous " Monochord," are supreme. Another group might be formed of his ballads — longer and almost miniature romances in form, like Rose Afary, The White Ship, and The King's Tragedy ; or shorter, like Tfoy Town, Eden Bower, and Sister Helen. But the really important thing is to recognise in all these forms, from sonnet to ballad-romance, the imposing presence of a joint pictorial and musical appeal different from, and in parts intenser and stranger than, that of any other poet. He could also write things like The Burden of Nineveh and Jenny, very great poems of a simple cast in language and imagery, direct, with hardly any display of gorgeous colour or intricate music, almost satirical in a sense. But he seldom developed this vein, and chiefly wrote in one of mystical Romanticism, melancholy in tone, but suffused with such sunset splendour of hue, and charged with such a burden of elfin music, as only the greatest things of Coleridge and Shelley, and perhaps Keats, had shown before. "The Blessed Damozel" sets the key-note of tone and colour, and it is maintained throughout to the "beryl- songs " of Rose Mary and the last revised sonnets of " The House of Life." The colour was richer, though the drawing was less exact, than Tennyson's ; the music, less perfect and less varied, had even more of lialf-articulate charm ; and the younger poet was prodigal of those appeals to passion and to mystery of which the elder's more Northern nature had been, though far indeed from incapable, yet somewhat chary, and more than somewhat shy. That the charm of Rossetti is a morbidezza, a beauty touching on and partly caused by disease, is perhaps indisputable ; but it is still more indisputably beauty. The dreamy magnificence of " The Blessed Damozel." tiie soaring beat of " Love-Lily," the concentrated despair of " Tlie Wood- spurge," the reality, as of a picture actually hanging on the wall, in "The Wine of Circe," the etherealised description of the dead Rose Mary, and scores of other things, stand, and probably ever will stand, 782 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi as the furthest achievements of poetry in a certain direction. Only in a certain direction, of course, and leaving endless new paths open to the poet ; but final in that. The greatness of Miss Christina Rossetti's genius is best shown by the fact that while she naturally displayed a temper akin to her brother's, and for some time undoubtedly wrote to some extent under his inspiration, large parts, and some of the best parts, of her poetical accomplishment are quite distinct from anything of his. Nor is this distinction to be in the least sufficiently or reasonably accounted for by her sex, her piety, or any other conventional and obvious explana- tion. At points, of course, the brother and sister touch — they even overlap. The sonnet exercised its strong restraint, in the same Italian form, and with the same characteristics of colour, music, and meditation, on both : her sonnet-sequences are, with allowance for their different subjects, by no means unlike his. But her lyrics have a lighter, more bird-like, movement and voice than his stately descants ; she is less prone to an extreme regularity of metre, and her whole tone is often different. She began, as far as publication goes, with Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1861, followed it with another volume. The Prince's Progress, in 1866, and after a much longer interval with A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881. Later, her verse was collected more than once, and it was supplemented by a posthumous volume after her death. But a good deal of it remains in two books of devotion (partly in prose, of which she was an exquisite mistress, partly in verse), entitled Time Flies (1885), and The Face of the Deep (1892), which she issued in her later years. The poem in which, by order of publication and title, she announced herself, Goblin Market, though very pretty and almost beautiful, has too much of the deliberate and almost trivial fantas- ticality which Pre-Raphaelitism at first borrowed from the earlier Romantic schools. But other things in the same volume, such as "Dreamland," "Winter Rain," "When I am dead, my Dearest," " The Three Enemies," and above all, " Sleep at Sea," are quite free from this objection, and gave an astonishingly true and new note of poetry, which was sustained, and indeed deepened, varied, and sweetened, till the beautiful lines " Heaven overarches sea and land," which are understood to be her last work, or at any rate composed within a very short time of her death. Her range was distinctly wide. She had, unlike Mrs. Browning, and perhaps unlike the majority of her sex, a very distinct sense of humour ; she could sing, for music and in simple scheme, quite exquisitely ; her pathos has never been surpassed, except in the great single strokes of Shake- speare and a very few other Elizabethans. But her most characteristic strain is where this pathos blends with, or passes into, the utterance CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 783 of religious awe, unstained and unweakened by any craven fear. The great devotional poets of the seventeenth century, Crashaw, Vaughan, Herbert, are more artificial than she is in their expression of this ; and hardly even their art, certainly not the art of the last-named, strikes out rarer poetic flashes and echoes than those that we find from " Sleep at Sea " to " Birds of Paradise." ^ In bulk of work, however, and in popular (which does not mean vulgar) charm no writer of the school who falls within our limits of discussion can approach Mr. William Morris. He was born in 1834, the son of a wealthy merchant, and was educated . at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford. He did ' '^™ not take up any profession, though later he founded a famous shop or school of decorative art, which directly or indirectly helped to revolutionise the interior of English houses. It was in 1858 that the once neglected, but now famous, Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems appeared, a book almost as much the herald of the second school of Victorian poetry as Tennyson's early work was of the first. Nor did he, perhaps, ever surpass it in poetic note, though he improved very much upon it in some ways. As in Christina Rossetti's first book a little later, the quaintness was a little aggressive, and. unlike hers, the mediEevalism was more aggressive and exclusive still. But the charm both of picture and music was astonishing, and after forty years "The Blue Closet," "The Wind," and other pieces remain alone, in a poetic country neighbouring and friendly to the domain of the Rossettis, but independent of it — a country lit with lunar rain- bows and ringing with fairy song. He had previously written both prose and verse in the above-mentioned Oxford and Cambridge Magazine. Eight years later, in 1866, Mr. Morris addressed a larger public (for the Defence and its companions could perhaps never be enjoyed by any sucli) with a long poem. The Life and Death of fason. The subject was sufficiently familiar, the tone, though still archaic, made less extensive demands on natural or acquired sympathy, and the piece was couched in rhymed heroics of a new-old pattern, very much enjambed or overlapped, which carries the reader along with a singular combination of smoothness and freedom from monotony, and which, being quite different from most of tlie metrical media recently in vogue, had the attraction of freshness. It secured at once a wider audience tlian any long narrative poem had liad for many years, and in its turn prepared the public for the poet's next, and most ambitious, performance, which, all things considered, must, perhaps, be allowed to he his masterpiece. This was The I'.arthly Paradise, which appeared in four volumes, the first two published lAn early poem, but not printed till after her death. 784 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi together, between 1868 and 1870. This great book consists of four-and-twenty narratives, twelve of Classical, twelve of Romantic origin, allotted in pairs to the twelve months, introduced by a singularly spirited narrative of adventure, and set in a frame of equal beauty. The metres varied, and the poet showed himself an equal master of the couplet just described, of the octosyllable, and of stanza-forms ; nor, perhaps, have any verse-tales since the very beginning of the century equalled in combined merit such pieces as " The Lovers of Gudrun," the version of the Perseus story, " The Ring given to Venus," and, indeed, the majority of the sections. "Love is Enough" (1873) was less interesting in subject, and, with charming passages, made metrical experiments not too happy ; while the poet's later versions of the yEneid and the Odyssey dissatisfied merely classical scholars without greatly pleasing those who can taste romance. But in 1877 he showed that his muse was not ex- hausted by a magnificent version of the legend of Sigurd the Volsiing, clothed in a swinging anapaestic metre on which he had stamped his own individuality, and admirably suited to the subject. But, though even this by no means closed his issue of verse (for he afterwards published Poems by the Way (1891) and other volumes), the later years of his life were in preference given up to prose romance. He had early practised prose translation, rendering after his fashion, in company with a northern scholar, the Story of Grettir the Strong (1869), The Volsimga Saga (1870), and other Icelandic work. And his own earliest published work in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine had been an original romance. The Hollow Land, which he never reprinted. But in his last decade (he died in October 1896) he began a series of similar things — The House of the IVolfings (1889), The Roots of the Motmtains (1890), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), The Wood beyond the World (1894), The Well at the World's End (1896), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897), The Sundering Flood (1898),^ in which the vague romantic charm of his earlier verse was revived with wonder- ful effect. In all his prose work he used a dialect which may be described as English prose of the fifteenth century, strongly dashed with Scandinavianisms — a dialect which, like Spenser's, offended pedants and purists as " no language," but which was exactly suited for his purpose. On the whole, there is perhaps no poet of the century, since Scott, who has given such a volume of Romantic pleasure to his readers as Mr. Morris, while there is also none who at his own best is his superior in individuality and poignancy of charm. But his range was not over-wide, and the very bulk of his 1 Of this series the two first are the best as wholes ; of the others, The Well at the World's End and The Sundering Flood contain the best passages. CH. IV POETRY SINCE THE MIDDLE OF THE CENTURY 7S5 production prevented it from being always concentrated, or, to use an old but excellent phrase, "in beauty." The life of Arthur Edward O'Shaughnessy (1844-81) was short, and his period of poetical production was still shorter. In four years he published three volun^es of most remarkable verse — The Epic of Women (1870), Lays of France (1872), and Music and Moonlight (1874). But he did not follow ^'.fej'.y^^" them up ; his professional work lay in the Natural History Department of the British Museum, and the posthumous Songs of a Worker contained little of his very best, much of it being transla- tion and paraphrase, as the Lays of Fra}ice, an adaptation of those of Marie, had been earlier. The tale of " Colibri," his only attempt at a poem of length, is too much tinged with the personal sorrow which beset his last years, and partakes too much of the unsubstantial remoteness of Shelley's Alastor, to be quite a success ; and these same characteristics, together with importunate obtrusion of creeds or disbeliefs of various kinds, mar the posthumous volume, which, however, contains some exquisite sonnets, and one or two lyrics, " Love, on your grave in the ground," '' When the Rose came, I loved the Rose," and others, in his best style. But this style is chiefly found in The Epic of Women and Music and Moonlight, and here O'Shaughnessy has a quality which is almost all his own, though he owes a very little in form to Poe, a little more in thought and feeling to the French -poet Baudelaire, and perhaps a little also to George Darley. For strange and sweet music, " Exile," " A Neglected Heart," "Barcarolle," "The Fountain of Tears," the "ode" of Music and Moonlight, " Once in a hundred years," " Has summer come without the rose?" and others stand quite by themselves. The late Mr. Palgrave, who discovered O'Shaughnessy in time to insert some of his work in the second series of the Golden Treasury, justly applied to them Sir Henry VVotton's famous phrase of ipsa mollitit's ; but they have more than mere softness, they have mystery and magic. It is possible that this anthology may at last extend the enjoyment of them beyond the few who have from the first tasted their charm. A not much longer life, even greater unhappiness (in this case it is to be feared by his own fault), and far more unfavourable external circumstances, were the lot of James Thomson the Second, who was born, the son of a sailor, at Port Glasgow in 1834. and died in London after breaking a blood-vessel in 1S82. He was educated at the Caledonian Asylum, and became an army schoolmaster; Init was dismissed for insubordinate conduct, and after a wandering life for some time, turned journalist, and was this — as far as he had any regular occupation — till his death. Thomson's prose work which has been recovered is not inconsiderable, and displays undoubted ability 3E 786 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi of the critical kind, marred not merely by crude and violent views, and a sour rusticity of temper, but by the kind of half-knowledge, and the conventional priggishness, which are apt to beset self-educated men. His verse is very unequal, but at its best fully earns him a place here. Its capital expression in bulk is the almost famous City of Dreadfjd Night,, which first appeared in a freethought newspaper, the Natiotial Refortner, in 1874. Just before his death this was published as the title-piece of a volume, and another, Vane's Story, followed, with post- humous pieces, later. He is in much need of selection, which would display his narrow and somewhat sinister, but intense, poetical quality, at present too much lost and diluted in a mass of inferior work. Although, among dead verse-writers who published about or after 1850. there are not a few of interest, perhaps hardly one can pretend to a substantive place here. Coventry Patmore (1823-96), after being long chiefly known by The Angel in the House (1854 onwards), a domestic love-history of great beauty in parts, but too fluent, and sometimes a little pathetic, gave stronger notes in the last twenty years of his life with The Unknown Eros (1877) and other things. Sir Francis Hastings Doyle (1810-88), Professor of Poetry at Oxford, with no very great range of poetical power, showed himself, when touching the "heroic lyre" in "The Red Thread of Honour," " The Private of the Buffs," and other pieces, the equal of Drayton and Campbell in their small and worthy class. Lord De Tabley (1835-95 ; better known, if known at all, in his earlier years as Mr. Leicester Warren, and writing under the name of W. P. Lancaster) came, like Patmore, to his own only in his last years with two volumes of Dramatic and Lyrical Poems (1893-95), but had in much earlier work shown poetic power far above the average. Those others in whose case entire omission might seem most unjust are perhaps Ebenezer Jones (1820-60), whose Studies of Sensatioti and Event (1843) even antedated the 'Spasmodic school generally, but is an outher of it ; William Johnson or Cory, whose lonica has originality and classical charm ; Charles Stuart Calverley, whose parodies and whimsicalities generally are among the most amusing of the century, and possess that touch of scholarship which is more especially needed to save verse of this kind from vulgarity and to give it permanence ; and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-98), a learned mathematician, but the property of literature in virtue of his delightful verse and prose medleys, all published as " by Lewis Carroll" — Alice'' s Adventures in Wonderland (1866), Through the Looking-Glass (1871), The Hunting of the Snark (1876), etc. The rest must be silence. CHAPTER V MISCELLANEOUS J. S. Mill — Mansel — John Austin — Others — Newman — Borrow — Others — Science— Darwin — The Vestiges— Hugh Miller — Huxley The extension of literary treatment to subjects which had previously received little or nothing of it, on the one hand, and the contraction of literary effort in some where once it was busy and almost supreme, on the other, have been noted as characteristic of modern English writing. And both result, in the case of such a historical account as this, in the necessity of a sort of " pool " for the reception of handlings of new or old subjects which have scarcely attained, or have gradually lost, the proportions requiring separate treatment here. Philosophy and theology belong to the last category of inclusion, scholarship and physical science to the first, while the once all-iinportant name of drama must have been included, if it had not seemed better to give it no grouped treatment, and simply to mention the rather rare examples of it which have literary interest with the other work of their writers. In philosophical writing of the wide and '' applied " kind there have been five writers who dominate the second third of the century, while two of them lived nearly to its close — the younger Mill, his opponent Dean Mansel, Austin, Maine, and Stephen. John Stuart Mill, the son of James, was born in London on 12th May 1806, educated according to his father's unnatural fads, and early introduced by him into the East India House. But official duties were to him merely a profitable avocation : his ..,,.,- , .' , ,., „ J. S. Mill, vocation was entirely philosophic and literary. He was for some time editor of the Loudon and Westminster Rcvicxv, and his purely literary work in essay is not despicable ; but logic, ethics, and political discussion in the philosophical succession of Locke and Hume, with a strong dash of French ]iositivism, were what attracted him most. In 1843 ^^ published iiis celebrated System of Lope, Ratiocinative (the substitution for Deductive is important) and Indue- 787 788 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi tive ; in 1848 his scarcely less celebrated Political Economy — a new outlier of philosophy which, from the time of its English father Adam Smith downwards, has contributed much more than a respect- able share of English philosophy which is literature. He entered Parliament in 1865, and was a conspicuous though amiable failure there, was turned out in 1868, and died five years later at Avignon. He had always lived much in France, where he was partly educated, and there was a certain French strain, as well as a feminine one, in his style and thought. His minor works, some of them not so very minor, were Liberty (1859), Dissertations and Discussions (1859- 75), Utilitarianism (1863), a book on Comte (1865), an elabo- rate Examination of Sir William Hamilton'' s Philosophy (1865 ; much of this was an excited polemic against the religious philos- ophy of Hamilton's disciple Mansel), The Subjection of Women (1869), and posthumously, an interesting Autobiography (1873-74). With MilPs philosophical peculiarities we are hardly here concerned, more than to say that he was a rigid sensationalist in psychology, and in political economy and politics proper a believer in " Liberty," almost to the full anarchic impossibilities of Godwin, a Utilitarian in ethics, and an " Associationist " everywhere. His literary exposition of these tenets deserves all but the highest praise, and with a more inspiring creed would probably have merited the highest, being clear without shallowness, popular without vulgarity, and precise without any indulgence of that extravagantly technical jargon which has put so much recent philosophy out of court with literary judgment. The opponent just mentioned, Henry Longueville Mansel (1820- 71), a much younger man than Mill, died before him, and wrote very much less, while his subjects were, almost exclusively, not the exoteric and popular, but the esoteric and technical departments of philosophy. Yet he was as little of a "jargonist" as Mill himself, a far closer and deeper thinker, and the master of a style which, in his few excursions to the matter of the general reader, became literary in the finest sense, while even in his more abstract writings it has the most admirable quality. He re- ceived his education at Merchant Taylors' School and St. John's College at Oxford, became a Fellow of this latter, Bampton Lecturer, and first Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy in the University. He was long the leader of the Tory party in Oxford, and was made Dean of St. Paul's in 1868, but held the post only a short time, dying suddenly in 1871. His bookwork is not large: a volume oi Bampton Lectures (1857), which were violently attacked by freethinkers and others for their so-called Occamism (or Occamism turned upside down) on the relations of the Deity to the CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS 789 moral standard, but which stand almost alone as examples of really philosophical theology in our time ; a dissertation on Metaphysics (i860); and Prolegomena Logica (1851), his chief original contri- bution to philosophy ; besides some not individually bulky Lectures, Letters, etc. It is said that he cannot be found in German dictionaries of philosophy, which would seem to be so much the worse for those repositories of learning. After his death a volume, interesting but very partially representative of his powers, was pub- lished, containing a reprint of an extraordinarily brilliant University " skit ' in verse called Phrontisterion, and some Quarterly essays ; with another volume on The Gnostic Heresies (1875). As a man of letters he may be more than content with the exact and generous encomium of Mr. Pater (a critic as competent in the particular matter as alien from the Dean in general tone of thought and choice of subjects) that Mansel's works "illustrate the literary beauty that there may be in conciseness, and with obvious repression or economy of a fine rhetorical gift." And it is scarcely necessary to say that such rhetorical gift (which has not been scanty) as has existed in our century has too often not been repressed or economised. Austin, Maine, and Stephen earned their chief reputation by devoting themselves to the philosophic handling of law — a subject which Bentham has at least the credit of rescuing from the mere " text-and-margent " dealing of too many early Englisli' , , ' . , • / ox ij John Austin. writers on it. Austin (i 790-1 859) was a man old enough to have appeared in the previous Book, and his great work, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, appeared as early as 1 83 1. But his lectures were not published till after his death. More philosophical and more literary than Bentham, Austin had a harder and stronger intellect than MilPs, and is perhaps, on tlie whole, the greatest product of Utilitarianism. His clearness is partly the result of — is certainly accompanied by — limitations; and like all his school he has a not quite intelligent intolerance of the inex- plicable. But he was a great mental gymnast and gymnasiarch, and his style agrees with his gifts. Maine and Steplicn, a younger pair, belong distinctly to the later half of the century. Both depended very much, though by no means in matter of direct pupilage, on Austin, and both exhibit philosophy as it busies itself chiefly with politics or the political ^^^^^ sciences, Henry James Sumner Maine, born in 1822, was educated at Christ's Hosi)ital and at Pembroke College, Cam- bridge, whence he passed to Trinity Hall, of which he became at first Fellow and afterwards Master from 1877 til! liis death in 1888. He was made Professor of Civil Law at five-aiul-twcnty, and soon after Reader, at Lincoln's Inn; in 1862 he became Legal Member 790 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book XI of Council in India. He returned to a place in the Indian Council at home, and to the Professorship of Jurisprudence at Oxford. He was a rather copious contributor to the newspaper press, but his connection with literature depends mainly on four works of great importance and admirable style — Ancient Laiv, his masterpiece (1861), Village Communities (1871), Early Law and Custom (1883), and Popular Government (1885). His successor on the Indian Council, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was seven years younger, and survived Maine rather less than the same term. He was son of another Sir James Stephen, a very considerable person of his day as an Edinburgh reviewer, an official in the Colonial Office, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, and author of divers books, the chief being Essays in Ecclesiastical History. The younger Sir James was called to the Bar in 1854, and died, shortly after resigning a judgeship, forty years later. He was at Eton for a time, then at King's College, London, and finished his education at Trinity College, Cambridge. His main subject was that of his profession, and his treatise on the Criminal Law is a standard book, but he wrote much in theology, in which his thought inclined to the negative; history, Indian and other; and miscellaneous literature. His best literary mark, both in thought and style, was perhaps made in Liberty, Equality, and Eraternity (1873). Theology itself has contributed even less than philosophy to the permanent literary production of the century, and most of what it has given of this kind is due to the Oxford Movement. This not merely produced the massive scholarship and striking, if rugged, style of its great and never lost leader Pusey (1806-82), the exquisite Christian verse of Keble (1792-1866), the admirable literary balance and precision of Dean Church (1815-90), but was responsible, as matter of reaction and revulsion, besides the already mentioned Froude, for the strange, unattractive, but intensely characteristic work of Mark Pattison (1813-89), Fellow and latterly Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, who inadequately represented his great learning in humanist and Renaissance literature by studies oi Casaubon (1875) and Scaliger, wrote a great little book on Milton (1879), contributed to the once famous Essays and Reviews (i860), and left an autobiography showing with admirable literary finish, but with somewhat hideous veracity, the trials of a wounded soul, incapa- ble of earthly medication and rejecting heavenly. But the literary glory of the last two-thirds of the century in English theology was the other, the lost leader of the Tractarian movement, John Henry Newman, who is ranked by some with, and by most competent judges not far below, the greatest masters of English prose, and who had no small skill in verse, as is shown by CHAP. V MISCELLANEOUS 791 the Dream of Gerontius and many hymns and poems, of which the chief is the famous "Lead, Kindly Light." Newman was born in the year 1801, and in London, of an East-Anglian family. He was educated at a private school, and went to Trinity College, Oxford, early. He was not at first very successful, but obtained an Oriel Fellowship in 1823, whereby, at the age of five- and-twenty, he became Vicar of St. Mary's, the University church, an appointment of no pecuniary value, but as a vantage-point the equal at least of any cure in England. For some twenty years Newman delivered from this pulpit sermons unlike anything else of their kind ; and he also took all but, or altogether, the greatest part, certainly the greatest literary part, in the polemic of the Oxford Movement. His journey to the Mediterranean in 1832-33, and his resignation of St. Mary's shortly before he left the Church of England, were the most important events in his career, which lasted longer after this event than before it. He wrote much during his nearly fifty years of connection with the Roman Church, in which he rose to be Cardinal, but, except the Apologia of 1864, in which he eagerly availed himself of Kingsley's awkward attack, not much of the first importance. He died nth August 1890. Newman's work is exceedingly voluminous, and hardly even the briefest analysis of it can be attempted here. The Plain atid Paro- chial Sermons and the Apologia would suffice for an appreciation of his style, though nothing that he wrote in prose or verse can be called superfluous. In the main he is a representative of that perfected plain Georgian style whicli has been more than once indicated as the best, for all purposes in English. It is in him refined still further by an extra dose of classical and academic correctness, flavoured with quaint though never over-mannered turns of phrase, and shot in every direction with a quintessential individuality, rarely attempting (though never failing when it does attempt) the purely rhetorical, but instinct with a strange quiver of religious and poetical spirit. The theological school formally opposed to Tractarianism was not distinguished by literary merit ; but it so happens that one of the most remarkable literary figures of the century, and one who as in the strictest sense miscellaneous and nondescript, has the best right here, was violently anti-Tractarian, and indeed wrote one of his few books, and great part of another, almost directly against it. Tliis was Georf men, .ind the eccc iitiicity of his genins no doubt had something of atfert.ilion in it. Hiil it was genins at least ,is undoubted as that of any one nii-ntioncd m this chapter, .ind Ihe (l.ivour of his manner and style is as intense as il is imi(|ne. Close to most of the names mentioned in this chapter, and in others of this Hook, come yet other names which may seem to demand as.sociation with them: jowell by r.ittison; Professors 'I". II. (.leen and VV.dl.ice among tiie philosophers; .Seeley among the historians; Walter Hagehot ( i tho lamons thootios ot* Selootion ami l".voUi(ion wilh \vluil\ lus i\amo is oonnootod. ri\o Orixtti >^f' S/>ftii\\\ his most tamons book, appoatoil in 185V). ami was Iv^llowcd In otiiois. Oi\ smh views historical litriaiv iiitioism has no opinions: it Kioks at their authors, iVonj lloiavlitns to Parwiu. with .\\\ equal e\e, knowiui; that thov liaw u. and chain), and itiilate. ai\d I'all. .\\\d pass away, rotainin:>i little hut historical interest in themselves, unless they happen to have soui;ht and ohtaii\ed the aid of literature itsell in theii expiessiiuu Parwii; seenis to have son-^ht little, hut he obtained somethini; — ai\ absolute cleaitiess. a kind ot competency and snlhciemv lot his own needs, which can never pass unnoticed, and with then\ an imimation o\ liteiary pvnvor iu reserve, which cvuild have been displayovl it occasivui had served. A less scientilic. but n\oiX' definitely literary, anticipation o\ the l'"vi>lution iheorv, the / VaY/^v.v ,>*.///('«. which continued to be anonvmo\is lor some time, but was known lo be the wmk ot Robert V'hambers, a well known I'dinbui^h iniblisluM. h.ul appeared in \^.\.\, and had been oppiiseil bv man\. includini; .u\ interestiuii; sell made man ol science and letters. llni;h Miller ot I'liunartv. who. boi n seven ve.irs bi-toie Paiwin, bei;.»n lile as a stone-mason, became a journalist, and died b\ his 1 I • ... II- "I'j i> J .■ , .. \ 11 null Miller, own hand m i.Sq(>. I us ( ',./ A*./ .s.;//./,v.'.'///- 1^1.^41 ) unites scientitic \alne with popul.ir .i|>pe.d .ind lilei.ir\ miMit in .1 very unnsii.d w.u. .uid ahutvst .is much m,i\ be s.iid ol the lest ot his mimiMous wiilini;s ^especi.illv .l/r .V, //c'.'/.v .;//,/ S, /t,'i'/>fi>r\fi> s, iS^jV wliere their m.ittiM .idmits ol really literarv treatment. There c.in be nothing luore hopelesslv unliter.irv Ih.m lo nnderv.due 1 lugh Miller. Hut the ure.Uest man ol si ieme Iroin Ihe point ol view ol lileialnie duiimjtbe cenlurv .i m.in who must h.ue been lemaik.ible in an\ literarv prose exercise to which he h.ul given himsell, and ol whose perl'orm.mces it e.in onlv be regrelted th.it tliev too olten III I 1 .-" I • II- lluvlrv. had Ihe two most epnemer.il »>l sunjects plwsu.u scieme and anti theological inilemic — tor iheir themes, was Ihom.is llemy Huxley, born at l-'aling in iSii;, lie entered the n.ivv .is a doctor, and visited the South Seas, but he did not lind the .Admiralty sym- l^.itlietic, and lell the service, tlunigh he held m.my public appoint- ments l.Uei . Mis sliictlv scientilic woik w.is ot a mote speci.il char.ict(M th.m IVn win's. Hut he used his C(»\siderable enltme .iiid his undoubted liter.uv genius in a lopious and rather too .iggiessive abuml.ince ot lectuK-s, leviews. ess.ivs, bio^;iaphics, mostly detcndinj; 794 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book xi science by assuming the offensive, but always curiously alive, full of inspiration from the very sources — pure philosophy, pure theology, pure literature — which he would have had men leave for others, and displaying a vivid and forcible style, only deficient in the one grace of urbanity. If the good points of Huxley and those of Matthew Arnold could have been combined, and their weak, points eliminated, the best literary manner of the nineteenth century, and one of the best of all times, would have resulted. Even shorter and more eclectic notice must suffice for the more noticeable names of the department between science and literature, that of philological study in ancient and modern languages, which does not disregard literature altogether. This combination has been too much forgotten, yet some names of those who have not forgotten it emerge. The revived interest in old English literature as literature bore its fniit also in the study of English language, and of all the formal parts of English rhetoric and poetry. Some linguistic scholars have been noted above, as has the most important in the other class, the author of the one important book which exists on English Prosody, Dr. Edwin Guest. In the classics themselves not a little good work has been done. The most accomplished scholar, in the strict technical modern sense, who did not let slip his grasp of literature, was probably H. A. J. Munro of Cambridge, who produced an epoch-making edition of Lucretius ; the most literary exponents and professors of classical literature, who were also scholars, John Conington of Oxford and W. Y. Sellar of Edinburgh, the former famous for his edition of Virgil, the latter for his series of books on the Roman Poets of the Republic and the Early Empire. But the work of scholars in this kind must always be more ministerial than creative. They efface themselves in introducing others. CONCLUSION The peculiarities of the period immediately noticed in the preced- ing Book resemble those of the earlier part of the century in defying single or simple characterisation. Owing partly to the wide expatia- tion of literature in respect of subject, partly to the increasing rejec- tion of narrow or identical regulations as to form, the product is — at any rate when seen so close — a little chaotic ; and it would be a proof rather of rashness than of prescience to undertake to say how the firm perspective of the past will represent it to the future. Something, however, we can see and say. In poetry, that reliance on the combined appeal of poetic expression to eye and ear by extremely elaborate and vivid description and colouring, by cunningly adjusted symphony of letter and syllable, which in th^ first half disengaged itself from the turmoil of the Romantic revolt, has been more and more the special method of the second ; and though the Pre-Raphaelite school, which expressed this most fully, is probably past its prime, no other has really taken its place, and no poet of anything like commanding originality has appeared for many years. New singers are more and more echoes — sometimes direct, sometimes blended. We have our Crashaw and our Akenside ; we have even resurrections of voices so recent, and themselves so little perfected, as those of the Spasmodics. But there is no sign yet of a Tennyson or a Browning, even of a Morris or a Rossetti. Meanwhile. Tennvson himself has given to the century an example of a poet permitted by fortune to develop himself, using the permission as perhaps only two poets before him (Chaucer and Drydcn) had done, and leaving a life-work which, if it come short of Chaucer in originality and freshness, of Dryden in strength, possesses its own superiorities over both. And Browning has left us a figure unique, interesting in its very faults, Wordsworthian in the difference between its best poetry and its worst, antl at tiie opposite i)ole from Wordsworth's in its restless energy and all-attempting variations. In the matter of prose, the still further development of the novel, and in the wide sense of the essay, has been the main feature ; but 795 796 VICTORIAN LITERATURE book the form of prose, not a little affected by this very fact, has given us a somewhat more definite phenomenon — one fit to be classed with the greater phases of style during the history itself as a whole. The revolt from plainness which has been sketched in connection with the names of Landor in one direction, of De Qiiincey and Wilson in another, of Carlyle in a third, has never exactly subsided, even into a Provisional Constitution. But it has passed through at least two well-marked phases, corresponding to the second and last thirds of the century respectively. In the middle period, though prose of the very greatest was produced by Carlyle himself in the more revolu- tionary, by Newman in the more academic varieties, and by Froude in a style between them, the general tendency of writing was to a looseness and slipshodness, not indeed quite reaching the state of things which has been noticed at the end of the seventeenth century, but, in the different circumstances, not wholly dissimilar. Then, between i860 and 1870, but not much before the later date, there set in a reaction, not towards a plain style, but towards a sort of New Euphuism, very punctilious of detail, elaborately yellow- stockinged and cross-gartered, tremblingly alive to the least shadow of the obvious, irrevocably determined that none of its guests should take down to the banquet of words a partner in whose company it had ever found itself before. Sparely practised at first, this manner became common about the end of the eighties, and since the death of two of the chief practitioners, Mr. Pater and Mr. Stevenson (who raised it from a mannerism into a style), it has been held rather disgraceful not to follow it. Meanwhile it is quite the most distinct literary feature of the last quarter of the century, and one of the few such features which the century itself presents, comparable to those of the centuries before it. As we survey these centuries at the end of the strange Herculean task of sketching the literature of a thousand years in less than as many pages, we need attempt no Pisgah-sight forward. But the route behind us is, it may be hoped, fairly clear. All those who possess or claim the right to be guides in the journey will not agree with this particular road-book ; there must be differences on small points, and there may be differences, not unwarranted, even on some great ones. But, as it has been less the object to air crotchets than to write with what has been called a " reasoned orthodoxy," or with heresies repressed except where honour and conscience require protest, such differences may perhaps be made matter of agreement, of compromise, at least of suspended discussion. Those who — and this is the main purpose of the volume — use it to supply the necessary minutiae of useful information in guiding them- XI CONCLUSION 797 selves or others through the history of which it is a mere epiiome, may often find the opinions here expressed differing from other things that have been written about the books ; but they will, it is hoped, less often find difference with the books themselves. It is these books, and not the theories about them or the gossip about their authors, to which I have striven here to serve as usher, to make access to them a little easier, comprehension of them in the initial stages a little less arduous. To "do justice," in the common phrase, to such a theme is impossible ; the biggest book in tlie language, and the greatest genius among its writers, could hardly do that to English Literature. But even by as much as this is impossible, by so much is it the more to be wished that every one should be helped and encouraged to acquaint himself in his measure with the subject — to gain some knowledge, as far as concerns his own nation and language, of the grace and the glory of the written word that conquers Time. INDEX •#* Itt order not unduly to swell this index, entries are confined to those passages which contain substantive reference to, and not mere citation of, tLe persons, books, or matters indicated. The dates here have been adjusted to those in The Dictionary of National Biography, so far as that useful publication has appeared. Variation in the text is not accidental, but kept to show that authorities disagree. When it extends to one year only, the difference be- tween new and old style, as to the beginning of the year, will often account for it. ABBEY WALK, The, 185 ABC, Chaucer's, 122 Absalom and Achitophel, 474 sq. Abuses Stript and Whipt, 362 Adam Bede, 752 Adam Blair, 688 "Adam FitzAdam," 621 Addison, Joseph (1672-1719), 533-9 Adonais, 676 Adventurer , The, 620 Adventures of a Guinea, The, 609 Adventures of an Atom, 605 Aeneid, Douglas's, 188, 191-2 Phaer's, 251 Stanyhuist's, 251 note Affectionate Shepherd, The, '2r]b Against the Scots, 169 Aglaura, 436 Ainsworth, William Harrison (1805-82), 685 Aitken, Mr. J. A., 534 note, 546 note Akenside, Mark (1721-70), 579-80 Alastor, 670 Alba, 278 Albertus Wallenstein, 438 Albion and Albanius, 505 note Albion's England, 2:7^ Alboin, 2 Alchemist, The, 334 Alcibiades, 500 Ale ilia, 278 Alciphron, 545 Alexander, Sir William. See Stirling Alexander and Dindimus, a8 note Alfred, King (849-901), works of, 21-25, 28 note Alfred, Proverbs of, 59 Alice in Wonderland, 786 Alisaunder, King, 89 Alison, 66 sq. Allegro, L, 394 All for Love, 497-8 Alliteration, 3, 12, 36, 45, 102 sq. Alma, 557 Almoran and Hamet, 609 Alton Locke, 754 Amelia, 602 sq. Amis and Amiloun, 99 Amoretti, Spenser's, 268 Amory, Thomas (1691 ?-i788), 609 Amusements, Serious and Comical, 526 Analogy, Butler's, 542 Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 378-80 Anatomy of the World, The, -^S-j Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the, 653 sq. Ancren Riwle, The, 53, 69, 143 Andreas, St., 14 Andrewes, Bishop Lancelot (1555-1626), 383-4 Andromeda. Kingsley's, 753-4 Andromeda Liber at a. 356 Angel in the House, The, 786 Anima IWtae. 654 note Annual Register, The, 628 Annus Mirabilis, 474 Anstey, Christopher (1724-1805), 596 Anti-Jacobin, The, 596 and note 799 Soo A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Antiquary, The (play), 438; (novel), 679 -f?- Antonio and Mellida, 343 Antony and. Cleopatra, 325 Apollonius of Tyre, 28 note Apollyonists, The, 360 Apology for Poetrie, 233 Appius and Virginia, " R. B.'s," 231 Webster's, 346 Appieton House, 426, 564 Arbuthnot, John (1667-1735), 541 Arcades, the, 394 Arcadia, The, 264 Arden of Fever sham, 329 Areopagitica, 447-8 "Areopagus," the Leicester House, 260 Argument against Abolishing Christi- anity, 531 Armstrong, John (1709-79), 579 Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 766-9, 774-6 Arnold, Thomas (1795-1842), 710 Arraignment of Paris, 284, 289 Ars Sciendi Mori, 162 Arthour and Merlin, 90 Arthur, King, and the Arthurian Le- gend, 42 sq. Art of Preserving Health, 579 Ascham, Roger (1515-68), 237-41, 295 Ashby, George (15th cent,), 165 Astrcea, 354 Astrma Redux, 473 Astrolabe, Treatise of the, 144-5 Astrophel and Stella, 262 As You Like It, 325 Atheists Tragedy, The, 349 Athenian Mercury, etc., 527 and note Atterbury, Francis (1662- 1732), 541-2 Attila, 2 Aubrey, John (1624-97), 523 Auchinleck MS., the, 84 note Audelay, John (i4th-i5th cent.), 163 Aitgustine, St., Soliloquies of, 21 note Aurengzebe, 474, 498 Aurora Leigh, 737 Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 681-3 Austin, John (1790-1859)1 789 Authorised Version, the, 380-1 Autobiography, Gibbon's, 626 Avisa, Wilioughby's, 277 Awntyrs of Arthur, The, 105 Aye?ibite of Inwyt, The, 69 Ayton, Sir Robert (1570-1638), 461-2 Aytoun, William Edmonstoune (1813- 65). 739 BACON, Francis (1561-1626), 369-73 Bage, Robert (172S-1801), 612 Bagehot, Walter (1826-77), 792 Buillie, Joanna (1762-1851), 641 Bale, Bishop John (1495-1563), 227 and note Ballades, Cinquante, 138 note Ballad of Good Counsel, 182 Ballads, Tennyson's (1880), 732 Ballads, the, 200-204, 43^. S^o Bampton Lectures ( Manse! 's), 788 Barbour, John (13167-95), 171-3 Bar Chester Towers, 751 Barclay, Alexander (1475 7-1552) , 166-7 Barham, Richard Harris (1788-1845), 739 Barnard, Lady Anne (1750-1825), 593-4 Barnes, Barnabe (1569-1609), 277 Barnes, William (1800-86), 719-20 Barnfield, Richard ( 1574-1627 j, 276 Barons' Wars, The, 352 Barrow, Isaac (1630-77), 444-5 Barry Cornwall. See Procter, B. W. Bartholomew Fair, 335 Barton, Bernard (1784-1849), 716 Basse, William ( ?-i653 ?), 362-3 Battle of Alcazar, 289 Battle of Maldo7i, The, 17 Battle of the Books, The, 530 Baxter, Richard (1615-gi), 445 Bayly, Thomas Haynes (1797-1839)1717 Beaconsfield, Benjamin Disraeli, Vis- count (1804-81), 685-6 Beattie, James (1735-1803), 585-6 Beaumont, Francis (1584-1616), and Fletcher, John (1575-1625), 336-40 Beaumont, Sir John (1583-1627), 355 Beaumont, Joseph (1616-99), 4^9 Beaux-Stratagem, The, 495 Beckford, William (1759-1844), 610-11 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-49), 722-3 Bede, Alfred's, 24 Bede, the Venerable (673-735), 11, 24 Bee, The, 618 Beggar's Opera, The, 505 note, 559 sq. Behn, Afra (1640-89), 480-1, 489, 517 Bellamira, 489 INDEX Soi Bells and Pomegranates , 733 Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 712 Bentley, Richard (1662-1742), 540 Beowulf, 3-7, 8, 10 Beppo, 667 Berkeley, Bishop George (1685-1753), 544-6 Berners, John Bourchier, Lord (1467- 1533). 198-9 Beryn, Tale of, 118 Bestiary, the M. E., 57, 58 Bevis of Hampton, 94 Biograpltia Literaria, 654 sq. Blackmore, Sir Richard (1650 ?-i729), 555 Blackstone, Sir William (1723-80), 632 Blackwood's Magazirte , 695 sq. Blair, Hugh (1718-1800), 581 note, 650 note Blair, Robert (1699-1746), 572 Blake, William (1757-1827), 591-2 Bloomfield, Robert (1766-1823), 717 Bludy Serk. The, 185 Boadicea, 588-90 Boethius, Alfred's, 21-23 Chaucer's, 144 Boileau, 153 Bokenam, Osbern (15th cent.). 162-3 Bold Stroke for a Wife, A, 496 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount (i678-i75i),542 Bon Gaultier Ballads, The, 739 Book of Snobs, The, 744 Book of the Duchess, The, 122 Book of the Howlat, 175 Borrow, George (1803-81), 791 Boswell, James (1740-95), 648 Bosworth Field, 355 Botanic Garden, The, 597 Bouge of Court, The, 169 Bourchier, John. See Lord Berners Bovvlby Cliff, 4 note Bowles, William (1762-1850), 595 Boyle, Robert (1627-gi), 522-3 Bradshaw, Mr. H., 118 Braithwaite, Richard (1588 ?-i673), 355-6 Breton, Nicholas (1545-1626), 355 Britain's Ida, 267, 337, 358 Britannia s I'astorals, 361 Broken Heart, The, 433 Brome, Alexander (1620-66), 428 3P Brome, Richard ( ?-i652 ?), 437 Bronte, Anne (1820-49), 747-8 Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), 747-9 Bronte. Emily (1818-48), 747-8 Brooke, Henry (1703-83), 610 Brooke, Lord. See Greviile, F. Brooke, Mr. Stopford, i note, 16, 657 note Brougham, Henry, Lord (1778-1868), 693 Brown, Tom (1663-1704), 526-7, 600 Browne, Isaac Hawkins (1705-60), 596 note Browne, Sir Thomas (1605-82), 449-52 Browne, Willi'am (1591-1643), 360-i Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-61), 736-8 Browning, Robert (1812-89), 637, 733-6 Bruce, Michael (1746-67), 594 Brunanbjtrgh Poem, The, 17 Brus, The, \T2.-'3, Brut, Layamon's, 48 sq. Buchanan, George (1506-1582), 465 Buckhurst, Lord. See Sackville Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821-62), 763-4 Bulwer. See Lytton Bunyan, John (1628-88), 81, 136 note, 165. 513-17 Burgh, Benedict and Thomas (15th cent.), 163 Burke, Edmund (1729-97), 628-31 Burnet, Gilbert (1643-1715), 523 Burnet, Thomas (1635 ?-i7i5), 517-18 Burney, Frances (1752-1840), 612 Burning Babe, The, 276 Burns, Robert (1759-96), 592-5 Burton, Robert (1577-1640), 377-80 Bury Fair, 337, 488 Busybody, The, 496 Butler, Bishop Joseph (1692-1752), 543 Butler, Samuel (1612-80), 170,477-9 Byrhtnolh, The Death of, 17 Byrom, John (1692-1763), 577 Byron, George Cjordon Byron, Lord (1788-1824), 666-9 CADENl'S AND VANESSA, 530 Credmon, 10, 11 sq., 24 Caleb ll'illiams, 6^.\ Calendar, 'The Shepherd's, 266-7 Caligula, 499 8o2 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Calls to, 499 Calverley, Charles Stuart (1831-84), 786 Cambyses, 231 Camden, William (1551-1623), 301 Campaign, The, 536 Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844), 258, 430. 675-6 Campden, Hugh (15th cent.), 163 Campion, Thomas ( ?-i6i9), 272, 277 note, 357-8 Canning, George (1770-1827), 596 and note Canterbury Tales, The, 127 sq. Capell, Edward (1713-81), his Prolu- sions, 201, 354 note Capgrave, John (1393-1464), 208 Carew, Thomas (1598 ?-i639 ?), 419-21 Carey, Henry ( ?-i743). 556 Carey, Patrick {c. 165 1), 425 Carlyle, Thomas ( 1795-188 1), 705-6, 758-62 Caroline poetry, character and distribu- tion of, 391 sq. Carols, 202 sq. " Carroll, Lewis." See Dodgson Cartwright, William (1611-43), 422, 438 Cary, Henry (1772-1844), 717 Castara, 422 Castaway, The, 588-9 Castle 0/ Indolence, The, 571 Castle of Love, The, Berners's, 198 GrostSte's, 72, 198 Castle of Otranto, The, 610, 645-6 Castle of Perseverance, The, 223 Catiline, 335 Cato, 537 Cat's Pilgrimage, The, 766 note Cavendish, George (1500-61?), 235 Caxton, William (14227-91 ?), 196, 199, 208-9 Cecilia, 612 Centlivre, Mrs. (16807-1722), 496 Chamceleon, 465 Chamberlayne, William (1619-89), 430-1 Chambers, Mr. E. K., 417 Chambers, Robert (1802-71), 793 Champion, The, 601 sq. Changeling, The, 345 ChaTtson de Roland, 6 Chapman, George (1559 7-1634 ?), 342, 356-7 Character, the, 375 sq., 453 Characteristics, Shaftesbury's, 543-4 Character of a Trimmer, ^w Charlemagne Romances, English, 101 Chatterton, Thomas (1752-70), 585-6 Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340 7-1400), 22, 40, 68, 69, 75, 82, 83, 107 note, 110, 116-30, 142-5, and Book HI. passim, 152-4 Chaumpaigne, Cecilia de, 115 Cheke, Sir John (1514-57), 236-7 Cherry and the Slae, The, 459-61 Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of (1694-1773), 621, 642-5 Chester Plays, The, 'i'2.\ sq. Chevy Chase, 201 Child, Professor, 204 note Childe Harold, 667 sq. Chillingworth, William (1602-44), 44^ Chloris, 278 Chochilaicus, 3 Choice Collection, Watson's, 580 Chrestien de Troyes, 44 Christ, 10 note sq., 13 Chrtstabel, 57, 75, 89, 654 sq. Christ and Satan, 10 Christian Morals, 452 Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 734 " Christopher North," 695-7 Christ's Kirk on the Green, 181 Christ's Victory, 359 Chronicle, the Anglo-Saxon, 17, 18, 19, 24-26 Chronicles of Carlingford, 756 Chrysal, 609 Churchill, Charles (1731-64), 584 Churchyard, Thomas (1520 7-1604), 252 Cibber, Colley (1671-1757), 494, 496 Citizen and Uplandishman, The, 167 Citizen of the World, The, 618 sq. City Madam, The, 433 City of Dreadful Night, The, 786 Civil Wars, History of the, 353 Clare, John (1793-1864), 717 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Elarl of (1608-74), 452-3 Clarissa, 599 sq. Clarke, Samuel (1675-1729), 542 " Classical " metres, 271-2 Cleanness, 78, 79 Cleomenes, 498 Cleveland, John (1613-58), 424-5 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 750 INDEX 803 Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819-61), 777-8 Cobbett, William (1762-1835), 705 Cock Lane Ghost, The, 584 Caelia, 277 Coelica, 274-5 Cokain, Sir Aston (1608-84), 438 Coleridge, Hartley (1796-1849), 705,720 Coleridge, Samuel T. (1772-1834), 57, 83. 653-7 Colin Clout, Skelton's, 170 Collier, Jeremy (1650-1726), 496, 526 Collins, Charles Alston (1828-73), 755 Collins, Mr. Churton, 348 note, 456 note Collins, Wiikie (1824-89), 755 Collins, William (1721-59), 573-5 Colman, George, the Elder (1732-94), 621, 639 Colman, George, the Younger (1762- 1836), 639 and note Colonna, Guido, 124 Comedy of Errors, The, 321 Complaint, Lyndsay's, 178 Complaint, The, Young's, 561 Complaint of Buckingham, 229, 257-9 Complaint of Pity, 122-3 Complaint of Rosamond, 353 Complaint of Scotland, lyi, 464-5 Complaints of Afar s and Venus, 122 Complete Angler, The, 456 Comus, 43. 57, 394-5 Confederacy, The, 494 Confessio Amantis, 139-40 Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, 703, 706 Congreve, William (1670-1729), 492-3, 505. 555-6 Connoisseur, The, 621 Conquest of Granada, The, 497 Conscious Lovers, The, 534-5 Consnlidator, The, 547 Constable, Henry (i562?-i6i3?), 277-8 Constant Couple, The, 495 Constanlia and Philetus, 404 Contention of Ajax and I 'lysses. The, 435 Cooper's Hill, 405-6 Corbet, Richard (1582-1635), 422 Coriolanus, 325 Cory. See Johnson Cotton, Charles (1630-87), 428 Country Wife, The, 490-1 Courthopc, Mr., 189 note, 549 note Court of Love, The, 119 Court of Venus, The, 459 Coventry, Francis ( ?-i759), 609 Coventry Plays, The, 221 sq. Coverdale, Miles (1488-1568), 213 Cowley, Abraham (1618-67), 402-5, 507-8 Cowley, Mrs. (Hannah Parkhurst) (1743- 1809), 639 Cowper, William (1731-1800), 588-90 Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 590-1 Craik, Sir Henry, 528 tiote Cranford, 749-50 Cranmer, Thomas (1489-1556), 213-14 Crashaw, Richard (16137-49), 412-14 Crazy Tales, 596 note Creation, 555 Cressid(a). See Chaucer, Dryden, Henryson, Shakespeare, Troilus Crimean War, The, 763 Critic, The, 640-1 Crowne, John (i64o?-i703?), 499 Crown of Laurel, The, 168-9 Cruise upon Wheels, A, 755 Cuckoo and the Nightingale, The, 119 note "Cuckoo Song," etc., 66 Cudworth, Ralph (1617-88), 446 Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811), 621, 639 Cupid and Psyche, Marmion's, 438 " Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell." See Bronte Cursor Afundi, The, 71-3, 84 note, 93 Cymbeline, 328 " Cyneheard and Cynewulf," 20 Cynewulf, the poet, 11 sq. Cynthia's Revels, 333 Cypress Grove, The, 463 DAME SIRIZ, 61 note Damon and Pythias, 231 Dance in the Queen's Chamber, 187 Dance of the Sez'en Deadly Sins, 187 Daniel, Samuel (1562-1019), 277, 352-3 Daniel Deronda, 752 Darkness, 667 sq. Darley, George (1795-1846), 721-2 Danvin, Charles Robert (1809-82), 792-3 Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 597 Davcnani, Sir William (1606-68), 429, 430, 437. 485 note Davenport, Robert ( ?- ?), 438 8o4 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE David and Bctksabe, 289 David Copperfield, 740 sq. Davideis, The, 403-4 [355 Davies, John, of Hereford (1565-1618), Davies, Sir John (i569?-i626j, 345 Davy, Adam (14th cent.), 76 Day, John ( ?- ?), 341, 348 Death's yest Book, 722 Decasyllable, the, 58 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The, 625-7 Defence of Guenevere, The, 783. Defence of Poesy, Sidney's, 261 sq. Defence of Poetry, Shelley's, 671 Defence of Rhyme, Daniel's, 353 Defoe, Daniel (1659-1731), 546-8 DeguiUeville, Guillaume de, 136 note Dekker, Thomas ( ?- ?), 341, 343-4 Delia, 277 " Delia Cruscans," the, 597 " Democritus Junior," 378 Denham, Sir John (1615-69), 405-6 Denis Duval, The, 745 De Nugis Curialium, 43 Deo?-, The Complaint of, 7 Deploration of Queen Magdalene, 179 De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), •702-4 De Regimine Principum, 161 Deserted Village, The, 617 sq. Destruction of Troy, The, 106-7 De Tabley, Lord (1835-95), 786 Devil is an Ass, The, 335 Devil's Law Case, The, yj^ Dialogues on Medals, 536-7 Diana, orj-j Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 740-3 Dictionary, Johnson's, 614 sq. Diella, 278 Digby Mysteries, The, ■zi\ sq. " Dirce," 673 Directions to Servants, 532 Dirge ofi Edward IV., 169 Discoveries, Ben Jonson's, 374 Disobedient Child, The, 226 Dispensary, The, 555 Divine Legation of Moses, The, 632 Dobell, Sydney (1824-74), 777 Dobson, Mr. Austin, 534 note, 558 note Doctor, The, 707 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge (1832-98), 786 Dodsley's Miscellany , 58'2 and note Don Carlos, 500 Don yuan, 667 sq. Donne, John (i573?-i63i), 279, 365-8, 385-6 Don Sebastian, 498 Dorset, ist and 6th Earls of. See Sack- ville " Dotages," Jonson's, 335 Double Dealer, The, 492-3 Douglas, 637 Douglas, Gawain (i474?-i522), 188-92 Dowden, Professor, 66i tiote Do-well, Do-bet, and Do-best, 135 sq. Doyle, Sir Francis Hastings (1810-88), 786 Dratnatic Poesy, Essay of, 508-9 Dramatis Personce, 734 Drant, Thomas {d. 1578?), 271 Drapier's Letters, The, 532 Drayton, Michael (i563?-i63i), 277, 350-2 Dream, Byron's, 667 sq. Lyndsay's, 178 Dream of the Rood, The, 10 sq. " Drolleries," 431 Drumjner, The, 537 Drummond, William (1585 -1649), 331-2, 463-4 Dryden, John (1631-1700), 83, 152, 472-7, 485-6, 506-9, 524, 528, 555, 564-6, 580, 651 Duchess of Malfy, The, 348 Duke of Guise, The, 498, 502 Dunbar, William (i465?-i53o?), 185-8 Dunciad, The, 550 sq. Dunton, John (1659-1733), 527 D'Urfey, Tom (1653-1723), 580-1 and note Dyer, Sir Edward (d. 1607), 272 Dyer, John (i700?-i758), 572 Dykes-Campbell, Mr., 667 7iote EARLE, Professor, 1 tiote, 19, 20, 28 note, 152 Earl of Toulouse, The, gj Earthly Paradise, The, 783-4 Eastward Ho I 342 Ecclesiastical Polity, 299, 300 Edgeworth, Maria (1767-1849), 683-4 Edinburgh Review, The, 691-4 Edward /., 289 INDEX 805 Edward II., 292-3 Edward III., 329 Edwards, Richard (i6th cent.), 231,250 " E. K.," 266 Eleanor Rumm'mg, The Tunning of, 169 Elene, St., 14 Elfric (loth-iith cent.), 27 "Eliot, George." See Evans, M. A. Elliott, Ebenezer (1781-1849), 717 Ellis, George (1753-1815), 66, 89 note, 596 and note Elphin, The Misfortunes of, 688-9 Elton, Mr. Oliver, 350 Elyot, Sir Thomas (i490?-iS46), 234-5 Emari, 96 Emma, 682 Etnpedocles on Etna, 776 Empress of Morocco, The, 499 Endymion, Lord Beaconsfield's, 686 Keats's, 672 Lyly's, 283 England's Helicon, 250 note, 279 England's Heroical Epistles, 352 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 667 English Rogue, The, 517 Enoch Arden, 731 Enquirer, The, 635 Enquiry Concerning Human Under- standing, 623 Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe, 617-18 Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, 623 Eothen, 763 Epic of Women, The, 785 Epicurean, The, 674, 686 Epistles, Pope's, 550 sq. Epistle to Curio, 579-80 Epithalamium, Spenser's, 268 Epsom Wells, 488 Erceldoune, Thomas of (13th cent.), 171 Esmond, 745 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 508-9 Essay on Criticism, 550 sq. Essay on Man, 550 sq. Essay on Projects, 547 Essay on the Human Understanding, Essays, Moral and Political, 623 Essays in Criticism, -jfrj sq. Essays of Elia, 700 Etherege, Sir George (1635 ?-9i?), 484, 486-7 Euphues and Euphuism, 240, 295-9 Evans, Mary Ann (Mrs. Cross, " George Eliot") (1819-80), 751 Evelina, 612 Evelyn, John (1620-1706), 518-19 Every Man in [and out of] his Humour, 331-3 Evidences, Paley's, 633 Examiner, The, Swift's, 529 Leigh Hunt's, 700 Example of Virtue, The, 165 Excursion, The, 659 sq. Exeter Book, The, 2, 10 and note Exodus, A. S. and M. E. See Genesis Experience and a Courtier, Dialogue between, 177 FABLE OF THE BEES, The, 544 Fables, Dryden's, 473 sq. Gay's, 560 Henryson's, 184 Fabyan, Robert (late 15th cent.), 208 Faerie Queene, The, 267-70 Fairfax, Edward ( ?-i635), 357 Fair Quarrel, A, 345 Faithful Shepherdess, The, 340 Falconer, William (1732-69), -83 Farquhar, George (1678-1707), 494-5 Fatal Curiosity, 638 Fatal Marriage, The, 505 Fates of the Apostles, The, 14 F"elltham, Owen (i6o2?-68?), 455 P'erdinand, Count Fathom, 605 Sij. Ferguson, Sir Samuel (1810-86), 739 Fergusson, Robert (1750-74), 594 Ferrex and Porrex, 229 F'errier, Susan (1782-1854), 684 Fidelia, ■^61 Fides sa, 278 Fielding, Henry (1707-54), 601-5 Fig for Moinus, A, 279 Finchalc, Gocfric of (12th cent.), 40 note Finnshurg, The Fight at, \ note, 7, 17 First Blast of the Trumpet, The, 465 Fisher, John (I459?-I553), 210-n FitzGerald, Edward (1809-83), 736-7 Five Hundred Points of Good Hus- bandry, 253 Flaming Heart, The, 414 8o6 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Flatman, Thomas (1637-88), 425, 479 Flecknoe, Richard ( ?-i678), 425 Fletcher, Andrew (of Saltoun) (1655- 1716), 523 Fletcher, Giles, Elder (1549-1611), 277 Fletcher, Giles, Younger (1588-1623), 359-60 Fletcher, John (1579-1625), 336-40 Fletcher, Phineas (1582-1650?), 359-60 Florence of Rome, 96 Florio, John (1553-1625), 302 Flower and the Leaf, The, 119 " Flytings," 175, 178, 187, 461 Fool of Quality, The, 609-10 Fool's Tragedy, The, 722 Ford, John ( ?- ?), 433-4 Fortescue, Sir John (i394?-i476?), 208 Four Ele?nents, The, 224 Four Hymns, Spenser's, 268 Four Letters (Spenser's and Harvey's), 271, 306 Four PP, The, 224-5 Fox, George (1624-91), 522 Francis, Sir Philip (1740-1818), 647 Eraser, Professor Campbell, 523 note Fraser's Magazine, 698 sq. Fraunce, Abraham (i587?-i633), 272-3 Frederick the Great, Carlyle's, 760 Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823-92), 764 French Revolution, The, 760 Frere, John Hookham (1769-1846), 596 and note, 667 Friars of Berwick, The, 186-7 Friend, The, 655-6 Friendship's Garland, 767-8 Froissart, Lord Berners's, 198-9 Froude, James Anthony (1818-94), 765-6 Fudge Family, The, 674 Fuller, Thomas (1608-61), 441-3 Funeral, The, 534 Furnivall, Dr., 65 7iote, 161 notes, 194 GALT, John (1779-1 839), 684-5 Gamely n. Tale of, 118, 325 Game of Chess, A, 345 Gammer Gurton's Needle, 228-9 Garden of Cyrus, The, 451-2 " Garlands," 431 Garmond of Good Ladies, The, 185 Garth Sir Samuel (1661-1719), 555 Gascoigne, George (15257-77), 233, 254-6 Gascoigne, Thomas (1403-58), 117 note, 206 note Gaskell, Mrs. (Elizabeth Stevenson) (1810-65), 749-50 Gau, John (i6th cent.), 464 note Gawain and the Green Knight, 78, 103-4 Gay, John (1685-1732), 558-60 Gebir, 673 Genesis and Exodus, the Caedmonian, II. 13 Genesis and Exodus, the Middle-Eng- lish, 56, 57 Gentleman Dancing Master, The, 490 Gentle Shepherd, The, 593 Geoffrey, Gaimar, 43 Geoffrey Hamlyn, 755 Geoffrey of Monmouth (12th cent.) 42 sq. George Barnwell, 638 Gibbon, Edward (1737-94), 625-7 Gifford Humphrey (i6th cent.), 276 Gifford, William (1756-1826), 596 Gildas, 42 Gilpin, William (1724-1804), 648 Glanvill, Joseph (1636-80), 518 Glapthorne, Henry ( ?- ?),438 Gloucester, Robert of (13th cent.), 63-65 Glover, Richard (1712-85), 578, 637 Goblin Market, 782 Goblins, The, 436 Godolphin, Sidney (1610-43), 4^7 Godric of Finchale (12th cent.), 40 note Godwin, William (1756-1836), 612, 634-5 Golagros and Gawane, 175, 195 Golden Grove, The, 440 Golden Targe, The, 187 Golden Treasury, The, 785 Golding, Arthur (i536?-i6o5?), 251 Goldsmith, Oliver (1728-74), 114 and note, 613, 617-20, 623, 639 " Golias," 44 Gollancz, Mr., i, 2 note, 10 note, 78 note Gondibert, 429-30 Good-natured Man, The, 618 sq., 639 Googe, Barnabe (1540-94), 254 Gorboduc, 229 Gore, Mrs. (1799-1861), 690 INDEX 807 Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, The, 250 Gosse, Mr. Edmund, 575 note, 722 note Gosson, Stephen (1555-1624), 232 note, 305 Governance of England, 208 Governour, The 235 Gower, John (i32S?-i4o8), 138-42 Grace Abounding, 514 Grave, The, Blair's, 572 Grave Poem, The, 17, 39 Gray Thomas (1716-71), 575 Great Rebellion, History of the, 453 Green, John Richard (1837-83), 764-5 Green, Matthew (1696-1737), 572 Greene, Robert (15607-92), 285-6, 290, 305 Gregory, St., Alfred's Version, 24. 25 Gregory, St., his Dialogues, 26 note Grendel, 5 Grettir the Strong, 4 Greville, Fulke, Lord Brooke (1554- 1628), 274-5 Grimald, Nicholas (1519-62?), 248-9 Groat 's-worth of Wit, 285 Grongar Hill, 564, 572 Grosart, Dr., Books V., VI., and VII. notes passim Grote, George (1794-1871), 710-11 Grove, Matthew (i6th cent.), 276 Gryll Grange, 688-9 Gude and Godlie Ballates, The, 458-9 Guest, Edwin (1800-80), his English Rhythms, 17 note, 36 Guevara, 198 Guilpin, Edward (/. 1598), 279 Guthlac, St., 14 Guy Mannering, 624 Guy of War^uick, 94, 95 HABINGTON, William (1605-54), 421-2 Hake, Thomas Gordon (1809-94), 739 Hakluyl, Richard (1552 ?-i6i6), 381 Hales, John (1584-1656), 445 Halifax, George Savilc, Marquess of (1633-95), 510-11 Hall, Bishop Joseph (1574-1656), 384-5 Hallam, Henry (1777-1859), 708-9 Halliwell, J. O., 100 note, 148 note, 158 note Hamlet, 326, 327 Hampole, Richard Rolle of (14th cent.), 59. 62, 73-76 Handling Sin, 70 Hannah, John (1818-88), 464 Harrington, James (1611-77), 457 Har(r)ington, Sir John (1561-1612), 457 note Harrowing of Hell, The, 155 note, 220 note Harry, Blind ("Henry the Minstrel") (15th cent.), 173-5 Harvey, Gabriel (1545-1630), 271 Havelok the Dane, 83-87 Hawes, Stephen ( ?-i523 ?), 163-6 Hawker, Robert Stephen (1803-75), 719-20 Hawkesworth, John (1715-73), 609, 620 Hayley, William (1745-1820), 597 Hayward, Sir John (1564-1627), 381 Haywood, Eliza (1693 7-1756), 599 Hazlitt, Mr. W. C, Books IV., V.. and VI. notes passim Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 701-2 Head, Richard (1637 7-i686), 517 Heber, Reginald (1783-1826), 717 Hecatompathia, The, ■zy^ Heliconia, 250 note, 252 note Hemans, Mrs. (Felicia Dorothea Browne) (1793-1835), 717 Hendying, Proverbs of, 59 Henry IV., V., VI., VIII., 322-3, 328 Henryson, Robert (15th cent.), 182-5 Heorof, 3 sq. Heorrenda, 7 Herbert, Edward, Lord, of Cherbury (1583-1648), 456-7 Herbert, George (1593-1633), 414-16, 446 Hereward the Wake, 755 Hermanric, 2 Hermit, 'The, 562 Hero and I.eander, 290 Heroes and Hero- Worship, 760 Heroic Stanzas, 473 Herrick, Robert (1591-1674), 418-19 Hisperidrs, 418-19 Hcywood, Jasper (1535-98), 225, 251 Heywood, John (1497 7-1580?), 225 Heywood, Thomas ( 7-1650 7), 341, 346 Higdcn, Ralph (I3th-i4th cent.), 147-8 Hind and the Panther, The, 473 sq. 8o8 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Historia Britonum, 42 Historia Trojana, 124 History of England, Daniel's, 353 History of Latin Christianity, 710 Hoadly, Benjamin (1676-1761), 542 Hobbes, Thomas (1588-1679), 453-5 Hogg, James (1770-1835). 684, 687,698, 715-16 Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809), 612 Holinshed, Raphael ( ?-i58o), 241 note Holland, Philemon (1552-1637), 302 Holland, Sir Richard (15th cent.), 175 Holy Dying, 440 Holy Grail, Lonelich's, 194-5 Holy Living, 440 Holy War, The, 514-15 Home, John (1722-1808), 637 Homer, Chapman's, 356-7 Hobbes's, 454 Pope's, 550 sq. Honest Whore, The, 344 Hood, Thomas (1799-1845), 718 Hook, Theodore (1788-1841), 690 Hooker, Richard (1554-1600), 299, 300, 506-7 Horatian Ode, A, 426 Horn, Ki?ig (or Horn, Child) , 87, 88 Home, Richard Hengist (1803-84), 721 Horstmann, Dr., 64 7iote, 69 note, 74 note, 262 note • Houghton, Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord (1809-85), 739 Howell, James (c. 1594-1666), 455-6 Howell, Thomas (i6th cent.), 215-16 Howlat, Book of the, 175 Hrothgar, 3 sq. " Huchowne," 102-3 ^'^^^ Hudibras, 478-9 Hume, David (171 1-76), 622-4 Humorous Lieutenant, The, 340 " Humour " and " humours," 332 Humphrey Clinker, 605 sq. Hunferth, 6 Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 671, 700-1, 715-16 Hunting of the Hare, The, 99 Huo7i of Bordeaux, 198-9 Hurd, Bishop Richard (1720-1808), 650 note Husband's Message. The, xj Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-95), 793-4 Hydriotaphia,\^\, 468 Hygelac, 3 sq. Hymen s Triumph, 353 Hymn to Contentment, 562 Hymn to the Pillory, 547 Hypatia, 754 IDEA, 351 Idylls of the King, The, 730 sq. Imaginary Conversations, 704-5 Imaginary Portraits, 'j'j-3, note " Imagination," eighteenth-century idea of, 565 Inchbald, Mrs. (1753-1821), 612 Indian Emperor, The, ^gy . Induction, Sackville's, 229, 257-9 Inheritance, The, 684 In Memoriam, 709, 730 sq. Inner Temple Masque, The, 361 Instructions, Gascoigne's, 255 lonica, 786 Ipomydon, 98, 99 Irene, 615, 637 Irish Melodies, 674 It is Never too Late to Mend, 750 JACK JUGGLER, 226 Jack Wilton, 305 James, G. P. R. (1801-60), 685 James L of England (1566-1625), 466 James I. of Scotland (1394-1437), iSo 2 Jane Eyre, 748 Jefferies, Richard (1848-87), 792 Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 692-3 Jeronimo, 290 Jests of George Peele, 285 Jew of Malta, The, 292 John Bull, History of, 541 John. Buncle, 609-10 Johnson (or Cory), William (1823-92), 786 Johnson, Samuel (1709-84), 411, 449, 476, 504-5, 539, 555, 566, 574, 600,604, 613-17, 637, 648-52 Johnstone, Charles (1719 ?-i8oo ?), 609 Jonathan Wild, 602 sq. Jones, Ebenezer (1820-60), 786 Jonson, Ben (1573-1637), 331-6, 363-5, 373-5 Joseph Andrews, 602 sq. Joseph of Arimathca, 105-6 Joseph of Exeter, 40 INDEX 809 "Journal to Stella, 531 Journey from this World to the Next, 602 sq. Journey to the Western Islands, 615 sq. Jovial Crew, The, 437 Judith, 10, 13 Juliana, St., 14 Jiilius Casar, 325 Junian MS., 10 " Junius," 646-8 Jure Divino, 547 Jusserand, M., 138 note, 181 note KEATS, John (1795-1821), 671-3 Kehama, The Curse of, 662-3 Kennedy, Walter (1460 7-1508 ?), 175 Ker, Professor, 464 Ker, Robert, Earl of Ancrum, 466 note King, Bishop Henry (1592-1669), 426-7 King Alisaunder, 89 King and No King, A, 338, 340 King Arthur, Dryden's, 505 fiote King Athelstone, 100 King Edward and the Shepherd, 100 King Hart, 190-1 King Horn, 87, 88 King John, Bale's, 227 Shakespeare's, 322 King John and Matilda, 438 Kinglake, Alexander (1809-91), 762-3 King Lear, 43, 326-7 King of Tars, The, 96 Kingsley, Charles (1819-75), 753-5 Kingsley, George (1827-92), 755 note Kingsley, Henry (1830-76), 755 King's Quair, The, 180-2 Knolles, Richard (1550-1610), 301 Knowles, James Sheridan (1784-1862), 721 note Knox, John (1505-72), 465 Kolhing, Dr. Eugen, 88 Kubla Khan, 657 Kyd, Thomas (i6th cent.), 286, 290 LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI, 672-3 Lady of May, The, 261 and note Lady of I'lcasure, The, 435 Laing, David, 96 note Lalla Rookh, The, 674 Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 699, 700 Lament for the Makers, 175, 188 Lancashire Witches, The, 488 Lancelot of the Laik, 194 Landon, L. E. See L. E. L. Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 673-4. 704-S Langhorne, John (1735-79). 587 Langland or Langley, W. (14th cent.), 131-8, 165 Langtoft, Peter {d. 1307 ?), 65 Last Day, The, 560 Latimer, Hugh (1485-1555), 212-13 Latter-Day Pamphlets, 760 Laura, 288 Layamon (f. 1200), 18, 43, 48 sq., 50 Lay of the Last Minstrel, The, 663 sq. Lays of Ancient Rome, 719 Lear, King, 326-7 Lee, Nathaniel ( 1653 7-92) , 502-4 Lee, Mr. S. L., 198 note, 199 Le Fraine, 98 Legend of Good Wometi, The, 125-6 Legends of Saints, Bokenam's, 162 Leighton, Archbishop Robert (1611-84), 446 "L. E. L." = Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1802-38), 717-18 Leland, John (1506-52), 235-6 Leofric, Bishop, 2 L'Estrange, Sir Roger (1616-1704), 525-6 Letter to a Noble Lord, A, 629 sq. Letters, Ascham's, 238-9 Chesterfield's, 642 sq. Howell's, 455-6 Lady Mary's, 642 sq. of Junius, 646-8 Paston, 238 note Walpole's, 642 sq. Letters on Chivalry and Romance, 650 note Lever, Charles (1806-72), 689' Leviathan, 454 Lewis, Matthew Gregory (1775-1818), 611 Libertine, The, 488 Liberty, Thomson's, 569 Libert}' of Prophesying, The, 440 Liber Veritatuin, 117 note, 206 note Licia, 277 Life and Death of Jason, The, 783 Life Drama, A, 777 Life of liyron, 674 Sio A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Life of yohnson, 648 Life of Napoleon, 680 Life of Schiller, 759, 762 Life of Scott, 697-8 Life of Sterling, 760 Light of Nature Pursued, The, 634 Lillo, George (1693-1739) , 638 Lingard, John (1771-1851), 708 " Little, Thomas," 674 Little Dorrit, 740 sq. Lives of Saints, A.S., Bk. \. passim Barbour's (?), 172 Bokenam's, 162 M.E., 64,65 Lives of the Poets, Johnson's, 615 sq. V Locke, John (1632-1704), 523-5 [778 Locker- Lampson, Frederick (1821-95), Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 688, 696-8 Lodge, Thomas (i558?-i625), 279, 287, 290, 305 Logan, John (1748-88), 594 London, Johnson's, 614 London Lickpetiny, 160 London Lyrics, 778 London Magazine, The, 695 sq. Lonelich, Henry (15th cent.), 194-5 Looker-On, The, 621 Lounger, The, 621 Love and a Bottle, 495 Love for Love, 493 Love in a Tub, 484 sq. Love in a Wood, 490 Lovelace, Richard (1618-58), 424 Lover's Melancholy, The, 434 Love Rune, The, 60 note, 66 note Love's Labour's Lost, 321 Love's Last Shift, 494 Love's Victories, 430 Lushington, Professor, 672 Lybeaus Desconus, 96 Lycidas, 394-6 Lydgate, John (I370?-I45i?), 158-60 Lying Lover, The, 535 Lyly, John (i554?-i6o6?), 282-4, 288-9, 295-9. 321 [176-9 Lyndsay, Sir David (1490 ?-i555 ?), 119, Lyrical Ballads, the, 653 Lytton, Edward George Bulwer, Lord (1803-73), 686-7, 721 "note Lytton, Edward Robert, Earl of (1831- 9^). 778 MACAULAY, Thomas Babington (1800-59). 712-14, 719 Alacbeth, 326-7 MacFlecknoe, 475 sq. Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831), 611-12, 621 Mackenzie, Sir George (1636-91), 523 Mackintosh, Sir James (1765-1832), 708, 711-12 Madden, Sir Frederic (1801-73), 49 wo/^, 65 note Maginn, William (1793-1842), 698-9 Maiden Queen, The, 497 Maid's Metamorphosis, The, 284 note Maid's Tragedy, The, 338-40 Maine, Sir Henry James Sumner (1822- 88), 789-90 Mair or Major, John (15th cent.), 174 Malcontent, The, 343 Maldon, The Battle of, 17 Male Regie de T. Occleve, La, 161 Mallet or Malloch, David (17057-65), 578, 637 Malory, Sir Thomas (15th cent.), 195-7 Mandeville, Bernard de (1670-1733), 544 Mandeville, Sir John (14th cent.), 148-51 Manley, Mrs. (1672 7-1724), 599 Manning, Robert (i3th-i4th cent.), 65 and note, 87 and note Man of Mode, The, 487 Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-71), 788-9 Mansfield Park, 682-3 Map or Mapes, Walter, 43, 50 Margaret, Saint, 80 note Marlowe, Christopher (1564-93), 286, 291-3, 321 Marmion, 176, 664 sq. Marmion, Shakerley (1603-39), 438 Marprelate, Martin, 280, 304 Marriage of Wit and Science, 226 Marryat, Captain Frederick (1792-1848), 689 Marston, John (1575 ?-i634),his satires, 279; his plays, 343 Martianus Capella, 158 Marvell, Andrew (1621-78), 425-6, 481, 522 Mary Barton, 749-50 Mason, William (1724-97), 583, 637 Masques, Ben Jonson's, 335-6 Massinger, Philip (1583-1640)1 432-3 INDEX 8ii Maturin, Charles Robert (1782-1824), 690 Maud, 12, 731 May, Thomas (1595-1650), 438 Mayne, Jasper (1604-72), 438 Mayor of Queenborough, The, 345 Measure for Measure, 321, 323, 325 Medal, The, 474 Medal of John Bayes, The, 487 Melibee, Tale of, 143-4, 245 Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, 609 Men and Women, 734 Meredith, Mr. George, 756 " Meredith, Owen," 778 Meres Francis (1565-1647), 284 Merlin, Lonehch's, 194 Merlin, the prose, 90 Merry, Robert (1755-98), 597 " Merry sang the monks of Ely," 40 note Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 323-4 " Metaphysicals," the, 411 sq. Michel of Northgate,Dan(i4th cent.), 69 Mickle, William Julius (1735-88) 587 Microcosmus, 438 Middleton, Conyers (1683-1750), 540-1 Middleton, Thomas (i570?-i627), 341, 345 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 322 Mill, James (1773-1836), 711 Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 787-8 Miller, Hugh (1802-56), 793 Milman, Henry Hart (1791-1868), 710 Milnes, R. M. See Houghton, Lord Milton, John (1608-74), 392-402, 447-8 Minot, Laurence (14th cent.), 76-78 Minstrel, The, 585-6 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 664 sq. Mirror, The, 621 Mirror for Magistrates, The, 2C,6 sq. Miscellanies, Elizabethan, 248 sq. Miscellanies, mid-seventeenth-century, 431 Misfortunes of Arthur, The, 232 Mitford, William (1744-1827), 708 Mithridates, 502-4 Modern I'ainters, 769 sq. Modest Proposal, A, 532 Monarchical Tragedies, Stirling's, 462 Monarchic, The, Lyndsay's, 177 Monarchy, Grcville's, 274 Monks and the Giants, The, 596 note Monmouth, Geoffrey of (12th cent.), ^2sq. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley (1689- 1762), 598, 600 Montgomerie, Alexander (15567-1610?), 459-61 Montgomery, James (1771-1854), 716 Montgomery, Robert (1807-55), 716 Montrose, James Graham, Marquis of (1612-50), 464 Moore, Edward (1712-57), 621 Moore, John (1719-1802), 612 Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 674-5 Moralities, 222 sq. Moral Ode, The, 54 More, Hannah (1745-1833), 612 More, Henry (1614-87), 429 More, Sir Thomas (1478-1535), 211-12 Morley, Professor H., i note, 39 note, 40 tiote, 164, 219, 375 note Morris, Dr. R., 55 and Book U. notes passim Morris, William (1834-96), 783-5 Morte d' Arthur e, the alliterative, 106 the fifteenth-century rhymed, 194 Malory's, 196-7 Tennyson's, 729 sq. Mortimer iados, 352 Mother Hubbard's Tale, 268 Mourning Bride, The, 492 sq. Mr. Badman, Life and Death of, 515 Mrs. Perkins's Ball, 744 Mrs. Veal, Kelation of, 547 Much Ado About Nothing, 324-5 Mulberry Garden, The, 489 Mulcaster, Richard (15307-1611), 301 Mulgrave, John, Sheffield, Earl of (and Duke of Buckinghamshire) (1649- 1721), 482 Munday, Anthony (1553-1633), 284 and note Muses' Library, The, 581 Music and Moonlight, 785 Mysteries of Udolpho, The, 678 Afystcrious Mother, The, 645-6 NABBF-S, Thomas (1605?- ?), 437-8 " Namliy-Pamby," 556 Napier, Sir William (1785-1860), 708 Nash, Thomas (1567-1601), 287, 290, 305 Nassinglon, William of (15th cent.), 163 8l2 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Nennius (yf. 796 ?), 42 Nepenthe, 'jo.'Z Nero, 502 New Arabian Nights, 756-7 New Bath Guide, The, 596 note Newcomes, The, 745 Newman, Cardinal John Henry (1801- 90), 790-1 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A, 433 Nibeltmgen Lied, 6, 7 Nice Wanton, The, 226 Nicholas de Guildford (13th cent.), 60 Nicholson, Mr. E. B., 148 note Night-Piece on Death, 562 Night- 'Thoughts, 560-1 Noble Numbers, 418, 419 Nodes Ambrosianae, 696 Nocturnal Reverie, A, 562-3 North, Roger (1653-1734), 522 . North, Sir Thomas (i535?-i6oi?), 302 Northanger Abbey. 682-3 Northern Lass The, 437 Nosce Teipszim, 354 Nut-browne Mayde, The, 201-2 Nytnphidia, 352 OAK AND THE BRERE, The, 57 Observer, The, 621 Occleve, Thomas (i370?-i45o?), 161-2 Oceana, Froude's, 766 Harrington's, 457 Octovian Imperator, 99, 193 Ode 071 a Grecian Urti, (yj<2. Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 659 sq. Ode on the Death of the Duke of Welling- ton, 731 Ode on the Nativity, 394 Ode to Duty, 660 Odes, Akenside's, 579 Collins's, 574 Young's, 561 CEdipus, 498, 502 Old Bachelor, The, 492 Old Ballads (1723), 580 Evans's, 587 note Old English Baron, The, 610 Old Fortunatus , 344 Oldham, John (1653-83), 481-2 Old Wives' Tale, 289 Oldys, William (1696-1761), 581 Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret Oliphant Wilson) (1828-97), 755-6 Oliver Cromjuell, Letters and Speeches of, 760 Olor Iscanus, 416 Omar Khayyam, 357, 737 Opera, note -on, 505 Orchestra, 354 Ordinary, The, 438 Orfeo and Heurodis, 96 note Orion, 721 Orison of our Lady, The, 58 Orm or Ormin, {fl. 1200), 51 sq. Ormuluni, The, 51 sq. Oroonoko, 505 Orosius, Alfred's, 23 Orphan, The, 500-2 Orpheus and Eurydice, Henryson's, 183 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur Edward (1844- 81), 78s Ossian, 581 and tiote Othello, 326-7 Othere, 23 Otway, Thomas (1651-85), 500-2 Overbury, Sir T. (1581-1613), 375-7 " Owen Meredith," 778 Owl and the Nightingale, The, 60 Oxford atid Cainbridge Magazine, The, 780, 783 PAGAN, Isabel (1740-1821), 593-4 ' Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 634 Palace of Pleasure, 253 Paley, William (1743-1805), 633 Palgrave, Sir Francis (1788-1861), 708 Palice of Honour, The, 190 Paltock, Robert (1697-1767), 610 Pamela, 599 sq. Panther, The, 14 Paracelsus, 733 Paradise Lost, 398 Paradise of Dainty Devices, The, 250 Paradise Regained, 398 Pardoner and Tapster, The, 118 Paris Sketch Book, The, 744 Parliametit of Bees, The,'i^Z Parliame7it of Fowls, The, 123 Parnell, Thomas (1679-1718), 561-2 Parsoti's Tale, The, 144 Parthenpphil and Parthenophe, 277 Past and Present, 760 Pastime of Pleasure, The, 164-5 INDEX 813 Paston Letters, The, 238 note Pastoral Ballad, A, 573 Pastoral Care, The, 24 Pastorals, Pope's, 550 sq. Patchwork, 778 Pater, Walter Horatio (1839-94), 772-3 Paternoster, A.S., 28 M.E., 55 Patience, 78, 79 Patient Grissel, 344 Patmore, Coventry (1823-96), 786 Pattison, Mark (1813-84), 790 Pauline, 733 Pause, law of, 47 Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 688-9 Pearl, The, 78-81 Pearson, Bishop John (1613-86), 445 Pecock, Reginald (1395-1460), 205-8 Peebles to the Play, 181 Peele, George (i558?-97?), 284-5, 288- 90, 321 Pelham, 686 Pendennis, The History of, 745 Penseroso, 11, 394 Pepys, Samuel (1633-1703), 519-22 Percy, Thomas (1729-1811), 580-1 Percy, William (1575-1648), 277 Percy Folio, the, 201 sq. Peregrine Pickle, 605 sq. Pericles, 28 7iote, 327-8 Perkin Warbeck, 434 Persuasion, 682-3 Peter W ilk ins, 610 Petition, " Bagsche's," 179 Phaer, Thomas (d. 1560), 251 sq. Phalaris, Dissertation on, 540 Pharonnida, 430-1 Pharsalia, Roscoe's, 504-5 Philarete, 362 philaster, 338-9 Philips, Ambrose (1675 7-1749), 55^ Philips, John (1676-1709), 556 Philip Sparrow, The Book of, 170 Philip van Artevelde, 720 Phillis, orji Phoenix, The, 14 Phrontisterion, 789 Pickwick Papers, The, 741 sq. Picturesque Tours, 648 Piers Plowman, 132-8 Piers Plowman's Creed, 132 note Pilgrim's Progress, The, 513-17 " Pindar, Peter," 596 Pindarics, Cowley's, 404-5 Dryden's, 476 Sayers's, etc., 596 Pipe of Tobacco, A, 596 note Piscatory Eclogues, 360 Pistyl of Susan, the, 107-8 Plain Dealer, The, 490-1 Plays on the Passions, 641 Pleasures of Hope, The, 67 <, Pleasures of Imagination, 579 Pleasures of Afet?tory, 715 Plowman, Piers, 132-8 Plowman's Tale, 118 Poema del Cid, 6 Poema Morale, 54 Poems by Two Brothers, 727 Poetaster, The, 333 Poetical Justice, 634-5 [^79 Poetical Rhapsody, Davison's, 250 note. Poetical Sketches, 591-2 Polite Conversation, 532 Polyolbion, The, 351 Pomfret, Thomas (1667-1702), 482 Poiiipey the Little, 6og Poore, Richard (d. 1237), 53 note Pope, Alexander (1688-1744), 549-54, 564-6 Popish Kingdom, The, 254 riote Porter, Anna Maria (1780-1832) and Jane (1776-1850), 678 and note' Posie of Gillyfloivers, 276 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth (1802-39), 718-19 Prelude, The, 659 sq. Pre-Raphaelite School, The, 778-9 Prick of Conscience, The, 75 Pride and Prejudice, 682-3 Princess, The, 730 Prior, Matthew (1664-1721), 556-8 Procter, Bryan Waller (1787-1874), 717 Progress of the Soul, The, 367 Prologue and Epilogue, The, 498-9 Prologues, G. Douglas's, 192 Prolusions, Capell's, 201 Prometheus Unbound, 670 Proverbial Philosophy, 739 Proverbs of Alficd, 25, 59 Proverbs of Hendyng, 59 Province of Jurisprudence Determined, The, 789 8i4 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Provoked \ I 'i/e, The, 494 Psalms, Versions of the — A.S. 18; M.E. 69, 70 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 449-51 Purchas, Samuel (i575?-i626), 381 Purple Island, The, 360 Pusey, Edward Bouverie (1800-82), 790 Puttenham, George (i6th cent.), 306 Pygmalion' s Image, 279 QUARLES, Francis (1592-1644), 428 Quarterly Review, The, 662, 694-5 Queen Annelida, 123 Queen Mab, 669 sq. Queen Magdalene, Deploration of, 179 Queen Margaret, The Miseries (^i 352 Quevedo's Visiotis, L'Estrange's, 525 tiote RADCLIFFE, Mrs. (1764-1822), 611 Rae, Mr. W. Fraser, 647 note Raleigh, Mr. W. A., ^gSnote Raleigh, Sir Walter (i552?-i6i8), 300 Ralph Roister Doister, 228 Rambler, The, 614 sq. Ramsay, Allan (1686-1758), 580, 593 Randolph, Thomas (1605-35), 421, 436 Rape of Lucrece, The, 318, 319 Rape of the Lock, The, 550 sq., 730 Rasselas, 615 sq. Rauf Coilyear, 195 Ravinshoe, 755 Reade, Charles (1814-84), 750 Recreations of Christopher North, 696 Recruiting Officer, The, 495 Reeve, Clara (1729-1807), 610 Reflections on the Fretich Revolution, 628 sq. Reginald Dalton, 688 Rehearsal, The, 491, 497, 641 Relapse, The, 494 Religio Laid, 474 Religio Medici, 449-50 Religious Musings, 655 Reliquiae Antiquae, 114 notes Reliquies, Percy's, 573, 580-1 Remarks on Italy, 536-7 Renaissance, Studies in the, -j-ji Renaissance in Italy, History of the, 772 Repressor, Pecock's, 205-8 Resolves, Felltham's, 455 Retaliation, 619 Return from Parnassus, The, 281 note Revenge, The, 560, 637 Revenger s Tragedy, The, 349 Review, Defoe's, 547 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723-92), 632, 771 "Rhetoric," 158, and Book IV. passim Rhetoric, Art of , Wilson's, 237 " Rhyme," 18, 45 twte, 49, 58 Rhyming Poem, The, 18 Richard Cceur de Lion, 90-92 Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), 598- 601 Richard the Redeless, 137 7iote Ring and the Book, The, 734 Ritson, Joseph (1752-1803), 82 note, 158 note, 166 note Rival Ladies, The, 497 Rival Queens, The, 502 Rivals, The, 640-1 Robene and Makyjte, 184-5 Robert Manning (or of Brunne) (13th- 14th cent.), 65 sq., 70, 87 and note Robert of Gloucester (13th cent.), 63 sq. Robertson, William (1721-93), 624 Robinson Crusoe, 547-8 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of (1648- 80), 480-1 Roderick Random, 605 sq. Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 715 Rolland, John {fl. 1560), 459 Rolle, R. See Hampole Rolliad, The, 596 Romances, Collections of, 82 note, 102-3 note English Charlemagne, loi Minor prose, 199 note Romeo and Juliet, 321 Rosalynde, 325 Rosamond, 537 Rosciad, The, 584 Roscoe, William (1753-1831), 708 Roscommon, W. Dillon, Earl of (1633- 85). 482 Rose, Romance or Romaunt of the, or Roman de la, 119 sq.. Books IIL and W .passim Rose and the Ring, The, 745 " Rose Aylmer," 673 Rossetti, Christina Georgina (1830-94), 779-83 [83 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-82), 779- INDEX 815 Roundabout Papers, The, 745 Rover, The, Mrs. Behn's, 489 Rovers, The, Canning's, 641 Rowe, Nicholas (1674-1718), 504-5 Rowlands, Samuel (i57o?-i630?), 355 Rowley, William (i585?-i642?), 349 Rowley poems, the, 585-6 Ruin, The, 15, 16 Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, 340 Rural Sports, 559 Ruskin, Mr. John {b. 1819), 769-72 Ruthwell Cross, the, 11 and note SACKVILLE, Charles, Earl of Dorset (1638-1706), 479-80 Sackville, Thomas, Earl of Dorset (i536?-i6o8), 256 Sad Shepherd, The, 335 Sainte-More, Benoit de, 124 St. Ives, 757 Saint's Tragedy, The, 753 Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, 337 Samson Agonistes, 398 Sandys, George (1578-1644), 409 and note Sartor Resartus, 686, 706, 759 sq. Satire of the Three Estates, 177-8 Satiromastix, 344 Savage, Richard (1697-1743), 577-8 Sawles Warde, 56 Sayers, Frank (1763-1817), 596 Scholar Gipsy, The, 35 School for Scandal, The, 640-1 Schoolmaster, The, 239-40 Schoolmistress, The, 573 School of Abuse, The, 232 Scornful Lady, The, 340 Scot, Reginald (i538?-99), 357 Scott, Alexander (i525?-84?), 459-60 Scott, Michael (1789-1835), 689-90 Scott, Sir Waher (1771-1832), 57, 84 note, 91, 663-6, 677-81, 694 Scourge of Villainy, 279 Scud6ry, Madeleine de, 484 Seafarer, The, 16 Seasons, The, 567 sq. Second Shepherds' Play, The, 217 Scdley, Sir Charles (i639?-i70i), 480-1, 489 Sejanus, 334 Selborne, Natural History of, 648 Selden, John (1584-1654), 380 Sempills, the, 458 Seneca, the tragedian, and Senecan plays, 251, 288 Sense and Sensibility, 682-3 Sentimental Journey, A, 607 sq. Sermons, importance of, 382-3 Settle, Elkanah (1648-1724) , 499, 500 Seven Deadly Sins, The, 187 Seven Sages, The, 92, 93 Rolland's, 459 Shadow of Night, The, 356 Shadwell, Charles {fl.. 1718-20), 639 Shadwell, Thomas (1642-92), 487-8 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of (1671-1713), 337 Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), 313- 29 Sharpe, C. K. 94 note Shaw, Quentin (15th cent.), 175 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822), 669-71 Shenstone, William (1714-63), 572-3 Shepherd's Calendar, The, 57, 61, 132 note, 266-j Shepherd's Hunting, The, 362 Shepherd's Pipe, The, 361 Shepherd's Week, The, 559 Sherburne, Sir Edward (1618-1702), 427 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley (1751-1816), 639-41 She Stoops to Conquer, 618 sq., 639 She would if She could, 487 Ship of Fools, The, 167 Shirley, James (1596-1666), 223 note, 435-6 Shoemaker's Holiday, The, 344 Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 546 Short Studies, 765-6 Short View, Collier's, 526 sq. Sidney, Algernon (1622-82), 522 Sidney, Sir Philip (1554-86), 233, 260-4 Siege of Rhodes, The, 485 note Sievers, Dr., 3 note Sigurd the Volsung, 63, 784 Silent Woman, The, 334 Silex Scintillans , 416-17 Sir Amadas, 99, 101 Sir Beaumains, 98, 196 Sir Charles Grandison, 599 sq. Sir Cleges, 98 Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 289 8i6 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Sir Courtly Nice, 499 Sir Degore, 100 Sir Degravant, 100 Sir Eger, Sir Grime, etc., 203 Sir Eglamour , 100 Sir Ferumbras. loi Sir Fopling Flutter, 487 Sir Generydes 193 Sir Harry Wildair, 495 Sir Isumbras, 100 Sir Launfal, 194 Sir Orpheo, 96 Sir Percevale, 100 Sir Thopas, 68, 82, 83 Sir Tria^nour , 100 &> Tristrem, 84-86 &> William Wallace, 174-5 •S/rw. 545 Sisters, The, 609 Skeat, Professor, Bks. II. and III. notes passim, 118 Skelton, John (i46o?-i529), 167-70, 479 Skialetheia, 279 Smart, Christopher (1722-71), 582-3 Smith, Adam (1723-90), 633-4 Smith, Alexander (1830-67), 777 Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), 693-4 Smollett, Tobias George (1721-71), 605-7, 625 Snob, The, 743 Solotnon, Prior's, 557 Solomon and Saturnus, 18 note, 28 tiote Sommer, Dr., 261 note Songs of bmocence and Experience, S9I-2 Song to David, The, 582-3 Sonnets, 244 sq., 262-3, 276-8 Milton's, 397-8 Shakespeare's, 319-20 Wordsworth's, 661 Sonnets from the Portuguese , 738 Sophonisba, Lee's, 502 Marston's, 343 Sordello, 733 Soul to the Body, The, 14 South, Robert (1634-1716), 443-4 Southerne, Thomas (1660-1746) 504-5 Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 210 note, 661-3, 694, 706-7 Southwell, Robert (i56i?-95), 276 Spanish Gipsy, The, 345 Spanish Tragedy, The, 290 Speak Parrot, 169 Specimetis of the British Poets, 675 Spectator, The (1711-14), 537 sg. speculum Aleditantis , 138 Spenser, Edmund (i552?-99), 57, 81, 132 note, 165, 264-70 Spenser Redivivus, 571 note Spleen, The, 572 Splendid Shilling, The, 556 Sprat, Thomas (1635-1713), 507, 512 Squire Meldrum, 177 Squire of Alsatia, The, 488 Squire of Low Degree, The, 97, 98 Stanley, Thomas (1625-78), 427 Staple of News, The, 335 State of Innocence, The, 498 State Poems, The, 482 note Steele, Sir Richard (1672-1729), 533-9 Steel Glass, the, 256 Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames (1829-94), 790 Sterne, Laurence (1713-68), 607-9 Stevenson, John Hall (1718-85), 596 note Stevenson, Robert Louis Balfour (1850- 94). 756-7 Still, John (i543?-i6o8), 228-9 Stirling, William Alexander, Earl of (15677-1640), 462-3 Strafford, 733 Strayed Reveller, The, 775 Strode, Ralph (14th cent.), 142 note Studies of Sensation and Event, 786 Sublime and Beautiful, The, 628 Suckling, Sir John (i6o9?-i642), 422-3, 436 Sullen Lovers, The, 488 Sumer is icumen in, 40 note, 66 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of (1517?- 47), 243 sq. Susan, The Pistyl of, 107-8 Sweet, Mr., 19, 20 Swift, Jonathan (1667-1745), 528-33, 564-6 Swinburne, Mr., 76 Syllabic equivalence, 46 Sylvester, Joshua (1563-1618), 353-4 Sylvia, 771 Symonds, John Addington (1840-93), 772 INDEX 817 TABLE TALK, Selden's. 380 Tale of a Tub, A, 528 sq. Talfourd, Sir Thomas Noon (1795- 1854), 721 note Tamburlaine, 291, 292 Tancred and Gismund, 231 Tassso, Fairfax's, 357 Tatler, The (1709-11), 530 sq. Taylor, Sir Henry (1800-86), 720-1 Taylor, Bishop Jeremy (1613-67), 439- 41 Taylor, John, "the Water Poet" (1580- 1653). 355 Tears of Fancy, The, 273 Tempest, The, 328-9 Temple, Sir William (1628-99), S09-10 Temple, The, 415 Ten Brink, Professor, his History, i note, 39 tiote, 54 Tender Husband, The, 535 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord (1809-92), 727- 32 Tennyson, Charles (1808-79), 727 f'ote Tennyson, Frederick (1807-98), 727 note Testament and Complaint of Creseide, 183-4 Testament and Complaint ofthe Papyngo, 178 Testament of Love, The, 145 note Thackeray, William Makepeace (181 1- 63), 604, 743-7 Thalaba, 662-3 Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings, 264 Theobald, Lewis ( ?-i744), 649 Theoria Sacra, 518 Theory of the Moral Sentiment, 633 Thersites, 225 Thirlwall, Bishop Connop (1797-1875), 710-11 Thistle and the Rose, The, 187 "Thomas the Rhymer," 84 Thomson, James (ist) (1700-48), 567- 71, 637 Thomson, James (2nd) (1834-82), 785-6 Thorkelin, G. J., 4 Thornton MS., 100 sq. Thorpe, B., 2 note, 17 notes Thoughts on Man, 635 Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 628 sq. " Three Trees, Story of the," 71, 72 3« Tickell, Thomas (1676-1740), 556 Tillotson, John (1630-94), 507, 510 Tintern Abbey, 659 sq. ' Tis Pity she's a Whore, 433 Tom Jones, 602 sq, Tom Thumb, 485, 601 Torrent of Portugal, 193 Tottel's Afiscellany, 248-50 Toulmin-Smith, Miss L., 221 Tournament of Tottenham, 99, 100 Tourneur, Cyril ( ?- ?), 279, 341. 349 Towneley Plays, The, 221 sq. Toxophilus, 239 Transformed Metamorphosis, The, 279 Traveller, The, 617 sq. Treasure Islarid, 757 Treatise of Human Nature, 623 Trench, Archbishop Richard Chenevix (1807-86), 739 Trevisa, John of ( 7-1413), 147-8 Tripartite Chronicle, The, 138 note, 139 Tristram Shandy, (xyj sq. Trivia, 559 Trivial Poems and Triolets, 425 Troilus and Cressid, Chaucer's, 124 Dryden's, 498 Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 750-1 True-Born Englishman, The, 547 Tucker, Abraham (1705-74), 334 Tundale, Visions of, 199 note Tapper, Martin Farquhar (1810-89), 23, 739 Turberville, George (15307-90?), 253-4 Turner, Sharon (1768-1847), 708 Tusser, Thomas (i5i5?-8o), 253 Twa Mary it Wemen and the Wedo, The, 128, 186-7 Twelfth Night, 324 Two Gentlemen of Verona, 322-3 Two Noble Kinsmen, The, 329 Twopenny Postbag, J he, (yj^. Two Years Ago, 755 Tyndale, Matthew (14857-1536), 212-13 Tyrannic Love, 497 Tyrwhitt, Thomas (1730-86), 118 UDALL, Nicholas (15167-56), 228 Universal Passion, The, 560 I'm Kurial, 451 Urquharl, Sir Thomas (1605-60), 464 I'sk, Thomas (14th cent.), I45 »'"'' 8i8 A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE Ussher, James (1581-1656), 384 Utopia, 211 VALERIUS, 688 Vanbrugh, Sir John (i666?-i726), 493-4 Vanity Fair, 744-5 Vanity of Human Wishes, The, 557, 614 sq. Vathek, 610-11 Vaughan, Henry (1622-95), 4^6 Venice Preserved, 497, 500-2 Venus and Adonis, 317-18 Vercelli Book, The, 10 sq. Vere, Sir Aubrey de (1788-1846), 717 Vernon MS., 105-7 Vestiges of Creation, The, 793 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 618 sq. " Vice," the, of early plays, 226 note Village, The, 591 Villon, F., 153 Vindication of Natural Society, A, 628 sq. Virgide?niarum , 279 Virgin Martyr, The, 433 Vision of Judgment, A, Byron's 663 Southey's, 663 Visions of Tundale, 199 note Vita Gildae, 42 and note Vittoria Corombona, 347 Volpone, 334 Vox and the Wolf, The, 61 note Vox Clainantis, 138 Vulgar Errors, 450-1 WAGE, 43 Wakefield Plays, The, 221 sq, Waldhere, 7 Wallace, Sir William, 174-5 Waller, Edmund (1605-87), 406-8 Walpole, Horace (1717-97), 610, 621 Walsh, William (1663-1708), 482 Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, 42 Walton, Izaak (1593-1683), 456 Wanderer, The, A.S., 16 Savage's, 578 Warburton, Bishop William (1698- 1779). 632-3 Ward, Dr. A. W., 549 note Ward, Mr. Humphry, 582 Warner, William (i558?-i6o9), 275 War-songs, Campbell's, 676 Warton, Joseph (1722-1800), 583 Warton, Thomas (1728-90), 583-4; his History of Poetry, 39 7iote, 584 and note Water Babies, The, 755 Watson, Thomas (1557-92), 273 Waverley and The Waverley Novels, 678-81 Way of the World, The, 493 Wealth of Nations, The, 633 Webbe, William (i6th cent.), 271, 306 Weber, Henry, 82 note and sq. Webster, John ( ?- ?), 341, 346-& Wedderburns of Dundee, the, 458, 465 note Weeper, The, 414 Weir of Hermistoti, 757 Werfrith, Bishop (9th cent.), 28 note Westward Ho I 754-5 Whale, The, 14 What You Will, 343 Whetstone, George ( ?- ?), 252-3 " Whistlecraft," 596 note White, Gilbert (1720-93), 648 White, Henry Kirke (1785-1806), 716 White Devil, The, 347 Why come ye not to Court, 170 Widsith, 1-3 Wife's Complaint, The, 17 Wild Gallant, The, 484 sq. Wild, Robert (17th cent.), 425 Wilkins, Bishop John (1614-72), 446 William of Paler ne, 105 William of Shoreham, 70, 71 Williams, Sir Charles Hanbury (1709- S9),V)^note, 621 Willoughby's Avisa, itj Wilson, John (dramatist) (i622?-90?), 484 note Wilson, John (essayist, etc.) (1785- 1854). 695-7 Wilson, Sir Thomas ( ?-i58i), 237 Winchelsea, Anrre Finch, Countess of ( 1660-1720) , 562-3 Windsor Forest, 550 sq. Wine, 559 Winter, ^(yj sq. Winter's Tale, A, 328 Winzet, Ninian (1518-92), 466 Wishes to his Supposed Mistress, 414 Witch, The, 345 INDEX 819 WitcA of Atlas, The, 670 Wither, George (1588-1667). 361-2 Wolcot, John (1738-1819), 596 and note Woman in the Moon, The, 284 Woman Killed with Kindness, A, 346 Women beware Women, 345 Wood, Anthony (1632-95), 525 Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 553 note, 562, 657-61 World, The, 6201 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary (1689- 1762), 642-4 Wotton, Sir Henry (1568-1639), 381 Wright, Thomas (1810-77), 44 note, 53 note, 60 note, 66 Wulfstan, Bishop (nth cent.), 28 Wulfstan, explorer, 23 Wyatt, Sir Thomas (1503-42), 243 sq. Wycherley, William (i64o?-i7i5), 489- 91 Wyclif, John ( 13207-1384) , 145-7 Wyntoun, Andrew (i35o?-i42o?), 102 note, 173 YARDLEY OAK, 589 Yeast, 754 York Plays, The, 221 sq. Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 329 Yoimg, Edward (1681-1765), 560-1, 637 Ywain and Gawain, 95, 96 7.ELUCO, 6ia Zepheria, 2rjj and note Zupitza, Dr., 94 note WORKS ON THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. GENERAL OUTLINES. CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINES OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. By Frederick Ryland. i2mo. Cloth. $1.40. CHRONOLOGICAL OUTLINES OF AMERICAN LITERA- TURE. By Selden WHiTCOiMB. With an Introduction by Prof. Brander Matthews, Columbia University. i2mo Cloth. $1.25. DESCRIPTIVE. THE HISTORY OF EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. By Rev. Stopford A. Brooke. Large i2ino. Uniform with Bryce's " American Commonwealth." Cloth. $2.50. A brilliant presentation of the literature of England during the period before the accession of Alfred the Great. A work which makes it possible for the general reader to thoroughly acquaint himself with the earliest specimens of Anglo-Saxon and English poetry without a knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon language. " In this work we have the view of a real lover of literature, ami we have its utterance in a diction graceful enough to make the reading an intellectual pleasure in itself." — The Christian Union. " No other book exists in English from which a reader unacquainted with Anglo-Saxon may gain so vivid a sense of the literary quality of our earliest poetry." — The Dial, Chicago. " A delightful exposition of the poetic spirit and achievement of the eighth century." -~ The Tribune, Chicago. " In Mr. Stopford Brooke's monumental work he strives with rare skill and insight to present our earliest national poetry as a living literature, and not as a mere material for research." — London Times. " It is a monument of scholarship and learning, while it furnishes an authentic history of English literature at a period when little before was known respecting \\.." — Public Opinion. " It is a comprehensive, critical account of Anglo-Saxon poetry fi^m its beginnings to the accession of King Alfred. 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Conclusion — Bibliography — Index, " Mr. Gosse's book is one for the student because of its fulness, its trustworthiness, and its thorough soundness of criticisms; and one for the general reader because of its pleasantness and interest. It is a book, indeed, not easy to put down or to part with." — OswAULD Crawford, in London Academy. " Mr. Gosse has in a sense preempted the eighteenth century. He is the most obvious person to write the history of its literature, and this attractive volume ought to be the final and standard work on his chosen theme." — The Literary World. PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. A HISTORY OF NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE. By GEORGE SAINTSBURY. i2mo. Student's Edition, $1.50. Uniform with " A History of Elizabethan Literature," by the same author, and with " A History of Eighteenth Century Literature," by Edmund Gosse. COMMENT. " A work at once succinct, comprehensive, and authoritative on the literature of thi last hundred years would, it is plain, be an invaluable boon to students. Such a boon Prof George Saintsbury has endeavoured to provide in 'A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, 1780-1795.' But at once the most valuable and the least valuable portion of the book is the conclusion. The summary of what was done during the first seventy years of the century is masterly, and is in itself sufficient to give the student his cue."^ The Publishers' Circular, London. " I have examined with interest and pleasure Saintsbury's ' History of English Litera- ture of the Nineteenth Century.' It is certainly a work of rare merit upon this period of literature." — O. S. Moles, Instructor in English Literature, Denver High School, Denver, Col. " Such a book has long been needed, and no man could attempt the task of writing it with more hope of success than Mr. Saintsbury. 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