UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY Class Book Volume Ja 09-20M Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. A charge is made on all overdue books. U. of I. Library Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Alternates https://archive.org/details/englishlandslett02mitc_0 ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS 3from i£li 3 abetb to Bnne BY THE SAME AUTHOR American Lands and Letters. The Mayflower to Rip Van-Winkle. With 94 Illustrations. Square 8vo. $2.50. American Lands and Letters* Leather - Stocking to Poe’s ** Raven.” With 115 Illustrations. Square 8vo. $2.50. English Lands, Letters and Kings. From Ce by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS TROW’8 PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANV, NEW YORK. PREFATORY LETTER. [To Mrs. J. C. G. Piatt, of Utica School, N. Y.] My Dear Julia, — We have both known.^ in the past, a certain delightsome comitry home ; you — in earliest childhood, and I — in latest youth-time : and I think we both relish those reminders — perhaps a Kodak view, or an atitumn gentian plucked by the roadside, or actual glimpse of its woods, or brook, on some summer'^ s drive — which have brought back the old homestead, with its great stretch of undulating meadow — its elms — its shady lanes — its singing birds — its leistirely going big-eyed oxen — its long, tranquil days, when the large heart of June was pulsing in all the leaves and all the air : Well, even so, and by these light tracings of Lands and Icings, and little whiffs of metric music, I seek to bring back to you, and to yotir pupils and associates (who have so kindly received previous and kindred reminders') the rich memories of that great current of English letters setting steadily forward amongst these British lands, and these sovereigns, from Elizabeth to Anne» But slight as these glimpses are, and as this synopsis may be, they will together serve, I hope, to fasten attentioji •where I wish to fasten it, and to quicken appetite for those fuller and larger studies of English Literature and History, which shall make even these sketchy outlines valued — as one values little flowerets plucked from old fields — for bringing again to mhid the summers of yotith-time, and a world of sum- mer days, with their birds and abounding bloom^ A ffectionately yours. EDGETVOOD ; MARCH, 1890. D, G. I\L s CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PA09 Preliminary, . • 1 The Stuart Line, . 4 James L, 6 Walter Ealeigh, .11 Nigel and Harrison, . . . • . .19 A London Bride, 23 Ben Jonson Again, 26 An Italian Eeporter, 29 Shakespeare and the Globe, . , , . . 32 CHAPTER 11. Gosson and Other Puritans, . ^ 42 King James’ Bible, .... r * 44 Shakespeare, , 56 Shakespeare’s Youth, . . . . o .61 Family Relations, . . . , . • ^ 67 Shakespeare in London, ....«• 73 Work and Reputation, . . . • , .77 His Thrift and Closing Years, ... .81 CONTENTS. viii CHAPTER m. Webster, Ford, and Others, , PAGS 88 Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher, . 93 King James and Family, . 99 A New King and some Literary Survivors, , 105 WOTTON AND WALTON, . • • • . . 109 George Herbert, • . . . • . 115 Robert Herrick, . . » • • • . 12G Revolutionary Times, o . 126 CHAPTER IV. King Charles and his Friends, . 9 . 132 Jeremy Taylor, • r . 135 A Royalist and a Puritan, . • . 140 Cowley and Waller, • . 144 John Milton, . . 150 Milton’s Marriage, . • . . • . 157 The Royal Tragedy, . . . • . . 161 Change op Kings, .... . . 167 Last Days, • . 174 CHAPTER V. Charles II. and his Friends, . • . 182 Andrew Marvell, « . 189 Author op Hudibras, « • . 193 Samuel Pepys, . . 198 A Scientist, John Bunyan, . 209 CONTENTS. IX CHAPTEE VI. PAGE Three Good Prosers, 221 John Dryden, 227 The London op Dryden, 234 Later Poems and Purpose, 240 John Locke, ........ 248 End of the King and Others, .... 255 CHAPTEE VII. Kings Charles, James, and William, . . . 261 Some Literary Fellows, 268 A Pamphleteer, 272 Of Queen Anne, 277 An Irish Dragoon, 280 Steele’s Literary Qualities, .... 285 Joseph Addison, 288 Sir Eoger De Coverley, 291 CHAPTEE Vni. Royal Griefs and Friends, 301 Builders and Streets, 306 John Gay, 308 Jonathan Swift, 312 Swift’s Politics, 324 His London Journal, 328 In Ireland Again, ....... 333 ENGLISH LANDS, LETTERS, & KINGS. CHAPTER L E take outlook to-day from the threshold of * » the seventeenth century. Elizabeth is dead (1603), but not England. The powers it had grown to under her quickening offices are all alive. The great Spanish dragon has its teeth drawn ; Cadiz has been despoiled, and huge galleons, gold-laden, have come trailing into Devon ports. France is courteously friendly. Holland and England are in leash, as against the fainter-growing blasts of Pope- dom. In Ireland, Tyrone has been whipped into bloody quietude. A syndicate of London mer- chants, dealing in pepper and spices, has made the IL— 1 2 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. beginnings of that East-Indian empire which gives to the present British sovereign her proudest title. London is growing apace in riches and in houses ; though her shipping counts for less than the Dutch shipping, great cargoes come and go through the Thames — spices from the East, velvets and glass from the Mediterranean, cloths from the Baltic. Cheapside is glittering with the great array of gold- smiths’ shops four stories high, and new painted and new gilded (in 1594) by Sir Eichard Martin, Mayor. The dudes of that time walk and ‘‘ pub- lish” their silken suits there, and thence through all the lanes leading to Paul’s Walk — which is, effect- ively, the aisle of the great church. There are no- blemen who have tall houses in the city and others who have built along the Strand, with fine grounds reaching to the river and looking out upon the woods which skirt the bear-gardens of Bankside in Southwark. The river is all alive with boats — wherries, barges, skiffs. There are no hackney carriages as yet for hire ; but rich folks here and there rumble along the highways in heavy Flemish coaches. Some of the great lights we have seen in the in- ADVENT OF JAMES. 3 tellectual firmament of England have set. Bur- leigh is gone ; Hooker is gone, in the prime of his years ; Spenser gone, Marlowe gone, Sidney gone. But enough are left at the opening of the century and at the advent of James (1603) to keep the great trail of Elizabethan literary splendors all aglow. George Chapman (of the Homer) is alive and ac- tive ; and so are Ealeigh, and Francis Bacon, and Heywood, and Dekker, and Lodge. Shakespeare is at his best, and is acting in his own plays at the newly built Globe Theatre. Michael Drayton is in full vigor, plotting and working at the tremendous poem from which we culled — in advance — a page- ful of old English posies. Ben Jonson, too, is all himself, whom we found a giant and a swaggerer, yet a man of great learning and capable of the de- licious bits of poesy which I cited. You will fur- ther remember how we set right the story of poor Amy Eobsart — told of the great Queen’s vanities — of her visitings — of her days of illness — and of the death of the last sovereign of the name of Tudor. 4 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, The Stuart Line. Henceforth, for much time to come, we shall meet — when we encounter British royalty at all — with men of the house of Stuart. But how comes about this shifting of the thrones from the family of Tudor to the family of Stuart ? I explained in a recent chapter how the name of Tudor became connected with the crown, by the marriage of a Welsh knight — Owen Tudor — with Katharine, widow of Henry V. Now let us trace, if we can, this name of Stuart. Henry VH. was a Tudor, and so was Henry VHI. ; so were his three children who succeeded him — Edward, the bigot Mary, and Elizabeth ; no one of these, however, left direct heirs ; but Henry VHI. had a sister, Margaret, who married James IV. of Scotland. This James was a lineal descendant of a daughter of Kobert Bruce, who had married Walter Stuart, the chief of a powerful Scotch family. That James I. of whom I have spoken, who was a delicate poet, and so long a prisoner in Windsor Tower, was great-grandson of this Stuart-daughter of Robert Bruce. And from ROYAL STUARTS. 5 him — that is from James I. — was directly de- scended James IV., who married the sister of Henry VHL James IV. had a son, succeeding him, called James V. who by a French marriage, became the father of that Frenchy queen, poor Marie of Scotland, who suffered at Fotheringay, and who had married her cousin, Henry Darnley (he also having Stuart blood), by whom she had a son, James Stuart — being James VI. of Scotland and James I. of England, who now succeeds Eliz- abeth. This strong Scotch strain in the Stuart line of royalty will explain, in a certain degree, how ready so clannish a people as the Scotch were to join in- surrection in favor of the exiled Stuarts ; a readi- ness you will surely remember if you have read Waverley and Redgauntlet And in further con- firmation of this clannish love, you will recall the ever-renewed and gossipy boastfulness with which the old Scotch gentlewoman, Lady Margaret Bell- enden, in Old Mortality^ tells over and over of the morning when his most gracious majesty Charles n. partook of his disjune at Tillietudlem Castle. But we have nothing to do with so late affairs 6 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. now, and I have only made this diversion into Scot- land to emphasize the facts about the Stuart affi- liation to the throne of England, and the reasons for Scotch readiness to fling caps in the air for Enng Charlie or for the Pretender, James I And now what sort of person was this James Stuart, successor to Elizabeth? He was a man in his thirty-eighth year, who had been a king — or called a king, of Scotland — ever since he was a baby of twelve months old ; and in many matters he was a baby still. He loved bawbles as a child loves its rattle ; loved bright feathers too — to dress his cap withal ; was afraid of a drawn sword and of hobgoblins. He walked, from some constitutional infirmity, with the uncertain step of a child — sway- ing about in a ram-shackle way — steadying himself with a staff or a hold upon the shoulder of some attendant. He slobbered when he ate, so that his silken doublet — quilted to be proof against dag- gers — was never of the cleanest. He had a big head and protruding eyes, and would laugh and JAMES L 7 talk broad Scotch with a blundering and halting tongue, and crack unsavoiy jokes with his groom or his barber. Yet he had a certain kindness of heart ; he hated to see suffering, though he had no objection to suf- fering he did not see ; the sight of blood almost made him faint ; his affection for favorites some- times broke out into love-sick drivel. Withal he had an acute mind ; he had written bad poems, before he left Scotland, calling himself modestly a royal apprentice at that craft. He had a certain knack at logical fence and loved to argue a man to death ; he had power of invective, as he showed in his GounterUast to Tobacco — of which I will give a whiff by and by. He had languages at command, and loved to show it ; for he had studied long and hard in his young days, under that first and best of Scotch scholars and pedagogues — George Bu- chanan. He had, in general, a great respect for sacred things, and for religious observances — which did not prevent him, in his moments of pet- ulant wrath or of wine-y exaltation, from swearing with a noisy vehemence. Lord Herbert of Cher- bury — elder brother of the poet Herbert, and 8 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, English ambassador to France — wittily excused this habit of his sovereign, by saying he was too kind to anathematize men himself, and therefore asked God to do so. This was the man who was to succeed the great and courtly Elizabeth ; this was the man toward whom all the place-hunters of the court now di- rected their thoughts, and (many of them) their steps too, eager to be among the foremost to bow in obsequience before him ; besieging him, as every United States President is besieged, and will be besieged, until the disgraceful hunt for spoils is checked by soma nobler purpose on the part of po- litical victors than the rewarding of the partisans. There was Sir Eobert Cary — a far-away cousin of Elizabeth’s — who was so bewitched to be fore- most in this agreeable business that he dashes away at a headlong gallop, night and day — before the royal couriers have started — gets thrown from his horse, who gave him a vicious blow with his heels, which he says made me shed much blood.” But he pushes on and carries first to Edinburgh the tidings of the Queen’s deatL Three days of the sharpest riding would only carry the news in those JAMES /. 9 days ; and the court messenger took a week or so to get over the heavy roads between the Scotch capital and London. It does not appear that James made a show of much sorrow ; he must have remembered keenly, through all his stolidity, how his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had suffered at Fotheringay ; and remembered through whose fiat this dismal trag- edy had come about. He hints that perhaps the funeral services had better not tarry for his com- ing ; — writes that he would be glad of the crown jewels (which they do not send, however) for the new Queen’s wearing. Then he sets off at leisure ; travels at leisure ; receiving deputations at leisure, and all manner of prostrations ; stopping at Berwick ; stopping at Belvoir Castle ; stopping at York ; stopping wher- ever was good eating or lodging or hunting ; flat- terers coming in shoals to be knighted by him ; even the great Bacon, wanting to be Sir Francised — as he was presently : and I am afraid the poets of the time might have appeared, if they had pos- sessed the wherewithal to make the journey, and were as hopeful of fat things. 10 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. Curiously enough, the King is grandly enter- tained in Huntingdonshire by one Oliver Crom- well, to whom James takes a gTeat liking ; not, of course, the great Cromwell ; but this was the uncle and the godfather of the famous Oliver, who was to be chief instrument in bringing James’ royal son, Charles, to the scaffold. Thence the King goes for four or five days of princely entertainment to Theo- balds, a magnificent seat of old Burleigh’s, where Elizabeth had gone often ; and where his son, Ce- cil, now plies the King with flatteries, and poisons his mind perhaps against Ealeigh — for whom Ce- cil has no liking ; — perhaps representing that Kal- eigh, being in Parliament at the time, might have stayed the execution of Queen Mary, if he had chosen. The King is dehghted with Theobalds ; so fai* delighted that a few years after he exchanges for it his royal home of Hatfield House, which magnifi- cent place is still held by a descendant of Cecil, in the person of the present Earl of Salisbury. That place of Theobalds became afterward a pet home of the King ; he made great gardens there, stocked vrith all manner of trees and fruits : every great stranger in England must needs go to see WALTER RALEIGH, II the curious knots and mazes of flowers, and the vineries and shrubbery ; but the palace and gar- dens are now gone. At last King Jamie gets to London, quartering at the Charter-house — where is now a school and a home of worn-out old pension- ers (dear old Colonel Newcome died there !) within gunshot of the great markets by Smithfield ; — and James is as vain as a boy of sleeping and lording it, at last, in a great capital of two realms that call him master. Walter Raleigh. I said that his mind had been poisoned against Ealeigh ; ^ that poison begins speedily to work. There are only too many at the King’s elbow who are jealous of the grave and courtly gentleman, now just turned of fifty, and who has packed into those years so much of high adventure ; who has written brave poems ; who has fought gallant- ly and on many fields ; who has voyaged widely in Southern and Western seas ; who has made discovery of the Guianas ; who has, on a time, be- friended Spenser, and was mate-fellow with the Sir Walter Raleigh, b. 1553 ; executed 1618. 12 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, gallant Sidney; who was a favorite of the great Queen ; and whose fine speech, and lordly bearing, and princely dress made him envied everywhere, and hated by less successful courtiers. Possibly, too, Ealeigh had made unsafe speeches about the chances of other succession to the throne. Surely he who wore his heart upon his sleeve, and loved brave deeds, could have no admiration for the poltroon of a King who had gone a hunting when the stains upon the scaffold on which his mother suffered were hardly dry. So it happened that Sir Walter Ealeigh was accused of conspiring for the dethronement of the new King, and was brought to trial, with Cobham and others. The street people jeered at him as he passed, for he was not popular ; he had borne himself so proudly with his exploits, and gold, and his eagle eye. But he made so noble a defence — so full — so clear — so eloquent — so im- passioned, that the same street people cheered him as he passed out of court — but not to freedom. The sentence was death : the King, however, feared to put it to immediate execution. There was a show, indeed, of a scaffold, and the order issued. Cobham and Gray were haled out, and given last WALTER RALEIGH. 13 talks with an officiating priest, when the King or- dered stay of proceedings : he loved such mum- mery. Kaleigh went to the Tower, where for thir- teen years he lay a prisoner ; and they show now in the Tower of London the vaulted chamber that was his reputed (but doubtful) home, where he compiled, in conjunction with some outside friends — Ben Jonson among the rest — that ponderous History of the World, which is a great reservoir of facts, stated with all grace and dignity, but which, like a great many heavy, excellent books, is never read. The matter-of-fact young man remem- bers that Sir Walter Raleigh first brought potatoes and (possibly) tobacco into England ; but forgets his ponderous History. I may as well finish his story here and now, though I must jump forward thirteen and more years to accomplish it. At the end of that time the King’s exchequer being low (as it nearly always was), and there being rumors afloat of possible gold findings in Raleigh’s rich country of Guiana, the old knight, now in his sixty-seventh year, felt the spirit of adventure stirred in him by the west wind that crept through the gratings of his prison bringing 14 LANDS, LETTERS, (Sr» KINGS, tropical odors ; and he volunteered to equip a fleet in company with friends, and with the King’s per- mission to go in quest of mines, to which he believed, or professed to believe, he had the clew. The permission was reluctantly granted ; and poor Lady Raleigh sold her estate, as well as their beloved country home of Sherborne (in Dorset) to vest in the new enterprise. But the fates were against it : winds blew the ships astray ; tempests beat upon them ; mutinies threatened ; and in Guiana, at last, there came dis- astrous fights with the Spaniards. Keymis, the second in command, and an old friend of Raleigh’s, being reproached by this latter in a moment of frenzy, withdraws and shoots him- self ; Raleigh’s own son, too, is sacrificed, and the crippled squadron sets out homeward, with no gold, and shattered ships and maddened crews. Storm overtakes them ; there is mutiny ; there is wreck ; only a few forlorn and battered hulks bring back this disheartened knight. He lands in his old home of Devon — is warned to flee the wrath that will fall upon him in London ; but as of old he lifts his gray head proudly, and pushes for the capital RALEIGH^ S DEATH, 15 to meet his accusers. Arrived there, he is made to know by those strong at court that there is no hope, for he has brought no gold ; and yielding to friendly entreaties he makes a final effort at escape. He does outwit his immediate guards and takes to a little wherry that bears him down the Thames : a half-day more and he would have taken wings for France. But the sleuth-hounds are on his track ; he is seized, imprisoned, and in virtue of his old sentence — the cold-hearted Bacon making the law for it — is brought to the block. He walks to the scaffold with serene dignity — greets old friends cheerfully — dies cheerfully, and so enters on the pilgrimage he had set forth in his cumbrous verse : — “There the blessed paths we’ll travel, Strow’d with rubies thick as gravel ; Ceilings of diamonds, sapphire floors, High walls of coral and pearly bowers. From thence to Heaven’s bribeless hall, Where no corrupted voices brawl ; No conscience molten into gold, No forg’d accuser bought or sold, No cause deferr’d, no vain-spent Journey, For there Christ is the King’s Attorney, Who pleads for all without degrees, i6 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. And He liatli angels, but no fees. And when the grand twelve-million jury Of our sins, with direful fury, Against our souls black verdicts give, Christ pleads his death and then we live.” Again to his wife, in a last letter from his prison, he writes : — “You shall receive, my dear wife, my last words in these my last lines: my love I send you, that you may keep when I am dead ; and my counsel, that you may remember when I am no more. I would not with my will, present you sorrows, my dear Bess : let them go to the grave with me and be buried in the dust. And seeing that it is not the will of God that I shall meet you any more, bear my destruction patiently, and with a heart like yourself. “I beseech you for the love that you bear me living, that you do not hide yourself many days ; but, by your labors seek to help my miserable fortunes, and the rights of your poor child. Your mourning cannot avail me, that am but dust. I sued for my life, but, God knows, it was for you and yours that I desired it ; for, know it, my dear wife, your child is the child of a true man, who in his own respect, de- spiseth Death and his misshapen and ugly forms. I cannot write much (God knows how hardly I steal this time when all sleep), and it is also time for me to separate my thoughts from the world. Beg my dead body, which living was de- nied you, and either lay it in Sherborne or Exeter church, by my father and mother. “My dear wife, farewell; bless my boy; pray for me; and let my true God hold you both in his arms.” WALTER RALEIGH. 17 It is not as a literary man proper that I have spoken of Ealeigh ; the poems that he wrote were very few, nor were they overfine ; but they did have the glimmer in them of his great courage and of his clear thought. They were never collected in book shape in his own day, nor, indeed, till long after he had gone : they were only occasional pieces,* coming to the light fitfully under stress of mind — a trail of fire-sparks, as we may say, flying off from under the trip-hammer of royal wrath or of desperate fortunes. Even his History was due to his captivity; his enthusiasms, when he lived them in freedom, were too sharp and quick for words. They spent them- selves in the blaze of battles — in breasting stormy seas that washed shores where southern cypresses grew, and golden promises opened with every sun- rise. * Unless we except Tlie Ocean to Cynthia^ piquant frag- ments of wliich exist, extending to some live hundred lines ; the poem, by the estimate of Mr. Gosse, may have reached in its entirety a length of ten thousand lines. See Atlie- nmum for January 2, 1886 ; also, Raleigh (pp. 44-48) by Edmund Gosse. London, 1886. II.— 2 1 8 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. And when I consider his busy and brilliant and perturbed life, with its wonderful adventures, its strange friendships, its toils, its quiet hours with Spenser upon the Mulla shore, its other hours amidst the jungles of the Orinoco, its lawless gal- lantries in the court of Elizabeth, its booty snatched from Spanish galleons he has set ablaze, its perils, its long captivities — it is the life itself that seems to me a great Elizabethan epic, with all its fires, its mated couples of rhythmic sentiment, its poetic splendors, its shortened beat and broken pauses and blind turns, and its noble climacteric in a bloody death that is without shame and full of the largest pathos. When you read Charles Kingsley’s story of West-^ ward, Ho ! (which you surely should read, as well as such other matter as the same author has written relating to Ealeigh) you will get a live glimpse of this noble knight of letters, and of those other brave and adventurous sailors of Devonshire, who in those times took the keels of Plymouth over great wastes of water. Kingsley writes of the heroes of his native Devon, in the true Elizabethan humor — putting fiery love and life into his writ- FORTUNES OF NIGEL. 19 ing ; the roar of Atlantic gales breaks into his pages, and they show, up and down, splashes of storm-driven brine. Nigel and Harrison. In going back now to the earlier years of King James’ reign, I shall make no apology for calling attention to that engaging old story of the Fortunes of Nigel. I know it is the fashion with many of the astute critics of the day to pick flaws in Sir Walter, and to expatiate on his blunders and shortcomings ; nevertheless, I do not think my readers can do bet- ter — in aiming to acquaint themselves with this epoch of English history — than to read over again Scott’s representation of the personality and the surroundings of the pedant King. There may be errors in minor dates, errors of detail ; but the larger truths respecting the awkwardness and the pe- dantries of the first Stuart King, and respecting the Scotch adventurers who hung pressingly upon his skirts, and the lawless street scenes which in those days did really disturb the quietude of the great metropolis, are pictured with a liveliness which will 20 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. make them unforgetable. Macaulay says that out of the gleanings left by historic harvesters Scott has made ‘‘a history scarce less valuable than theirs.” Nor do I think there is in the Fortunes of Nigel a de- viation from the truth (of which many must be ad- mitted) so extravagant and misleading as Mr. Free- man’s averment, that in Imnhoe “ there is a mistake in every line.” There are small truths and large truths; and the competent artist knows which to seize upon. Titian committed some fearful ana- chronisms, and put Venetian stuffs upon Judean women ; Balthasar Denner, on the other hand, painted with minute truthfulness every stubby hair in a man’s beard, and no tailor could have ex- cepted to his button-holes : nobody knows Denner ; Titian reigns. Among those whom Scott placed under tribute for much of his local coloring was a gossipy, kind- ly clergyman, William Harrison * by name, who was ♦William Harrison, b. 1534; d. 1593. It is interesting to know that much has come to light respecting the personal history of William Harrison, through the investigations of that indefatigable American genealogist, the late Colonel J. L. Chester. WILLIAM HARRISON. 21 born close by Bow Lane, in London, who studied at Westminster, at Oxford, and Cambridge (as he himself tells us), and who had a parish in Kadwiii- ter, on the northern borders of Essex ; who came to be a canon, finally, at Windsor ; and who died ten years before James came to power. He tells us, in a delightfully quaint way, of all the simples which he grew in his little garden — of the manner in which country houses were builded, and their walls white-washed — of the open chimney vents, and the smoke-burnished rafters. ‘‘And yet see the change,” he says, “for when our houses were builded of willow, then had we oken men ; but now that our houses are come to be made of oke, our men are not onlie become willow, but a great manie, through Persian delicacie crept in among us, altogether of straw, which is a sore alteration.” When the old parson gets upon the subject of dress he waxes eloquent ; nor was he without full- est opportunities for observation, havmg been for much time private chaplain to the Earl of Cobham. “Oh, how much cost,’’ he says, “is bestowed now-a-daies upon our bodies, and how little upon our soules ! How many sutes of apparel hath the one, and how little furniture hath 22 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. the other ! How curious, how nice are the men and women, and how hardlie can the tailer please them in making things fit for their bodies. How many times must they be sent back again e to him that made it. I will say nothing of our heads, which sometimes are polled, sometimes curled, or suf- fered to grow at length like woman’s locks, manie times cut off above or under the ears, round, as by a wooden dish. Neither will I meddle with our varieties of beards, of which some are shaven from the chin like those of the Turks, not a few cut like to the beard of Marquess Otto ; some made round, like a rubbing brush, others with a pique devant (O fine fashion ! ). “In women, too, it is much to be lamented that they doo now far exceed the lightness of our men, and such star- ing attire as in times past was supposed meet for none but light housewives onelie, is now become an habit for chaste and sober matrons. What should I say of their doublets with pendant pieces on the brest, full of jags and cuts, and sleeves of sundrie colors. I have met with some of these trulles in London, so disguised, that it hath passed my skill to discerne whether they were men or women.” If this discerning old gentleman had shot his quill along our sidewalks, I think it would have punctured a good deal of bloat, and stirred up no little bustle. The King himself had a great liking for fine dress in others, though he was himself a sloven. Lord Howard, a courtier, writes to a friend who is hopeful of preferment : A LONDON BRIDE, 23 ** I would wish you to be well trimmed ; get a new Jerkin well bordered, and not too short : the King liketh it flowing. Your ruff should be well stiffened and bushy. The King is nicely heedful of such points. Eighteen servants were lately discharged, and many more will be discarded who are not to his liking in these matters.” And again, speaking of a fa- vorite, he says : — “Carr hath changed his tailors, and tire- men many times, and all to please the Prince, who laugheth at the long-grown fashion of our young courtiers, and wish- eth for change everie day. A London Bride, One other little bit of high light upon the every- day ways of London living, in the early years of King James, we are tempted to give. It comes out in the private letter of a new-married lady, who was daughter and heiress of that enormously rich mer- chant, Sir John Spencer, who was Lord Mayor of London ; and who, in Elizabeth’s time (as well as James’), lived in Crosby Hall, still standing in the thick of London city, near to where Thread and Needle Street, at its eastern end, abuts upon Bish- opsgate. Every voyaging American should go to see this best type of domestic architecture of the fifteenth century now existing in London ; and it will quicken his interest in the picturesque old pile 24 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. to know that Eichard HI., while Duke of Gloucester, passed some critical days and nights there, and that for some years it was the home of Sir Thomas More. The Spencer heiress, however — of whom we began to make mention — brightened its inte- rior at a later day ; there were many suitors for her hand ; among them a son of Lord Compton — not looked upon with favor by the rich merchant — and concealing his advances under the disguise of a baker's boy, through which he came to many stolen interviews, and at last (as tradition tells) was successful enough to trundle away the heiress, covertly, in his baker’s barrow. Through the good offices of Queen Elizabeth, who stood god-mother to the first child, difficulties between father and son-in-law were healed ; and when, later, by the death of Sir John Spencer, the bridegroom was assured of the enormous wealth inherited by his bride, he was — poor man — nearly crazed. Among the curative processes for his relief may be reckoned the letter from his wife to which I have made allusion, and which runs thus : — “ My sweet Life, I pray and beseech you to grant me the gum of £2,600 [equivalent to some $30,000 now] quarterly ; A BRIBERS PIN-MONEY. 25 also, besides, £600 quarterly for charities, of which I will give no account. Also, I would have 3 horses for my own saddle, that none shall dare to lend or borrow. Also ; 2 gen- tlewomen (lest one should be sick) — seeing it is an inde- cent thing for a gentlewoman to stand mumping alone, when God hath blessed the Lord and Lady with a great Estate : Also, when I ride, a hunting or a hawking, I would have them attend : so, for either of those said women there must be a horse. “Also, I would have 6 or 8 gentlemen ; I will have my two coaches — one lined with velvet to myself, with four very fair horses, and a coach for my women lined with cloth, and laced with gold ; — otherwise with scarlet and laced with silver, with four good horses. Thereafter, my desire is that you defray all charges for me, and beside my allowance, I would have 20 gowns of apparel a year — six of them excellent good ones. Also, I would have to put in my purse £2,000 or so — you to pay my debts. And seeing I have been so reasonable, I pray you do find my children ap- parel, and their schooling, and all my servants, men and women, with wages. Also, I must have £6,000 to buy me jewels, and £4,000 to buy me a gold chain. Also, my desire is, that you would pay your debts — build up Ashley House, and lend no money as you love God ! When you be an Earl [as he was afterward in Charles I. ’s time] I pray you to allow £2,000 more than I now desire and double attendance.” Happy husband ! 26 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Ben Jonson again. We must not forget our literature ; and what has become of our friend Ben Jonson in these times ? He is hearty and thriving ; he has written gratulatory and fulsome verses to the new sover- eign. He is better placed with James than even with Elizabeth. If his tragedy of ‘‘Sejanus” has not found a great success, he has more than made up the failing by the brilliant masques he has writ- ten. The pedantic King loves their pretty show of classicism, which he can interpret better than his courtiers. He battens, too, upon the flatteiy that is strown with a lavish hand : — “ Never came man more longed for, more desired. And being come, more reverenced, lov’d, admired.” * This is the strain ; no wonder that the poet comes by pension ; no wonder he has “ commands,” with goodly fees, to all the fetes in the royal honor. Yet he is too strong and robust and learned to be called a mere sycophant. The more I read of the liter- * Speeches of Graiiilation on King’s Entertainment. BEN JONSON 27 ary history of those days the more impressed 1 am by the predominance of Ben Jonson ; — a great, careless, hard-living, hard-drinking, not ill-natured literary monarch. His strength is evidenced by the deference shown him — by his versatility ; now some musical masque sparkling with little dainty bits which a sentimental miss might copy in her al- bum or chant in her boudoir ; and this, matched or followed by some labored drama full of classic knowledge, full of largest wordcraft, snapping with fire-crackers of wit, loaded with ponderous nuggets of strong sense, and the whole capped and booted with prologue and epilogue where poetic graces shine through proudest averments of indifference — of scorn of applause ~ of audacious self-suffi- ciency. It was some fifteen years after James’ coming to power that Ben Jonson made his memorable Scotch journey — perhaps out of respect for his forebears, who had gone, two generations before, out of Annandale — perhaps out of some lighter caprice. In any event it would have been only a commonplace foot-journey of a middle-aged man, well known over all Britain as poet and dramatist, 28 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. with no special record of its own, except for a visit of a fortnight which he made, in the north country, to Drummond of Hawthornden : — this made it memorable. For this Drummond was a note- taker; he was a smooth but not strong poet; was something proud of his Scotch lairdship ; lived in a beautiful home seated upon a crag that lifts above the beautiful valley of Eskdale ; its picturesque ir- regularities of tower and turret are still very charm- ing, and Eskdale is charming with its wooded walks, cliffs, pools, and bridges ; Koslin Castle is near by, and Koslin Chapel, and so is Dalkeith. The tourist of our time can pass no pleasanter summer’s day than in loiterings there and there- about. Echoes of Scott’s border minstrelsy beat from bank to bank. Poet Drummond was proud to have poet Jonson as a guest, and hospitably j)lied him with strong waters ; ” under the effusion Jon- son dilated, and Drummond, eagerly attentive, made notes. These jottings down, which were not voluminous, and which were not published until after both parties were in their graves, have been subject of much and bitter discussion, and relate to topics lying widely apart. There is talk of Petrarch AN ITALIAN REPORTER. 29 and of Queen Elizabeth — of Marston and of Over- bury — of Drayton and Donne — of Shakespeare (all too little) — of King James and Petronius — of Jonson’s “ shrew of a wife ” and of Sir Francis Bacon ; and there are more or less authentic stories of Spenser and Ealeigh and Sidney. Throughout we find the burly British poet very aggressive, very outspoken, very penetrative and fearless : and we find his Scotch interviewer a little overawed by the other’s audacities, and not a little resentful of his advice to him — to study Quintillian. An Italian Reporter. It was in the very year of Ben Jonson’s return from the north that a masque of his — ‘‘Pleasure is Keconciled to Virtue ” — was represented at White- hall ; and it so happens that we have a lively glimpse of this representation from the note-book of an Italian gentleman who was chaplain to Pietro Con- tarini, then ambassador from Venice, and who was living at Sir Pindar’s home in Bishopsgate Street (a locality still kept in mind by a little tavern now standing thereabout called “ Sir Pindar’s Head ”). 30 LAA^DS, LETTERS, KINGS. This report of Busino, the Italian gentleman of whom I spoke, about his life in London, was buried in the archives of Venice, until unearthed about twenty years since by an exploring Englishman.* So it happens, that in this old Venetian document we seem to look directly through those foreign eyes, closed for two hundred and seventy years, upon the play at Whitehall. “ For two hours,” he says, ‘‘ we were forced to wait in the Venetian box, very hot and very crowded. Then the Lord Chamberlain came up, and wanted to add another, who was a greasy Spaniard.” This puts Busino in an ill humor (there was no good-will between Italy and Spain in those days) ; but he admires the women — “all so many queens.” “There were some very lovely faces, and at every mo- ment my companions kept exclaiming : ‘ Oh, do look at this one ! ’ ‘ Oh, do see that other ! * ‘ Whose wife is this ? ’ ‘ And that pretty one near her, whose daughter is she ? ’ [Curious people !] Then the King came in and took the ambassador to his royal box, directly opposite the stage, and the play began at 10 P.M.” There was Bacchus on a car, followed by Silenus on a barrel, and twelve wicker-flasks representing * Rawdon Brown. A MASQUE AT WHITEHALL, 31 very lively beer bottles, who performed numerous antics ; then a moving Mount Atlas, as big as the stage would permit; scores of classic affectations and astonishing mythologic mechanism; and at last, with a great bevy of pages, twelve cavaliers in masques — the Prince Charles (afterward Charles 1.) being chief of the revellers. “These aU choose partners and dance every kind of dance — every cavalier selecting his lady. After an hour or two of this, they, being tired, began to flag ; ” whereat — says the chaplain — “the choleric King James got impatient and shouted out from his box, * Why don’t they dance ? What did you make me come here for ? Devil take you all — dance ! ’ ” What a light this little touch of the old gentle- man’s choleric spirit throws upon the court man- ners of that time ! Then Buckingham, the favorite, whom Scott in- troduces in Higel as Steenie — comes forward to placate the King, and cuts a score of lofty capers with so much grace and agility as not only to quiet the wrathy monarch but to delight everybody. Afterward comes the banquet, at which his most sa- cred majesty gets tipsy, and amid a general smash- ing of Venetian glass, continues the Italian gentle- 32 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, man, went home, very tired, at two o’clock in the morning.” Ah, if we could only unearth some good old play-going chaplain’s account of how Shakespeare appeared — of his dress — of his voice — and with what unction of manner he set before the little audience at the Globe, or Blackfriars, his part of Old Adam (which there is reason to believe he took), in his own delightful play of ‘‘ As You Like It.” What would we not give to know the very attitude, and the wonderful pity in his look, with which he spoke to his young master, Orlando : — “ Oh, my sweet master, what make you here ? Why are you virtuous ? Why do people love you ? Oh, what a world is this, when what is comely Envenoms him, that bears it ! ” Shakespeare and the Globe, Neither our Italian friend, however, nor Ben Jonson have given us any such glimpse as we would like to have of that keen-witted Warwick- shire actor and playwright who, in the early years of James’ reign, is living off and on in London ; having bought, within a few years — as the records SHAKESPEARE KING JAMES. 33 tell us — a fine New Place in Stratford, and has won great favor With that King Jamie, who with all his pedantry knows a good thing when he sees it, or hears it. Indeed, there is some warrant for be- lieving that the King wrote a commendatory letter to the great dramatist, of which Mr. Black, in our time, makes shadowy use in that Shakespearean ro- mance of his,* you may have encountered. The novelist gives us some very charming pictures of the Warwickshire landscape, and he has made Miss Judith Shakespeare very arch and engaging ; but it was perilous ground for any novelist to venture upon ; and I think the author felt it, and has shown a timidity and doubt that have hampered him ; I do not recognize in it the breezy freedom that be- longed to his treatment of things among the Heb- rides. But to return to “ Judith’s father ” — he is part proprietor of the Globe Theatre, taking in lots * Judith Shakespearey bj William Black. The story of the royal letter appears to rest mainly on the evidence of William Oldys (not a strong authority), who says it originated with Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham, who had it from Sir William D’Avenant. Dr. Drake, however, as well as Far- mer, fully accredit the anecdote. II.— 3 34 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. of money (old cronies say) in that way ; was hon- ored by the Queen, too, before her death, and had written that “ Merry Wives of Windsor,*’ tradition says, to show Queen Bess how the Fat Falstaff would carry his great hulk as a lover. We might meet this Shakespeare at that Mermaid Tavern we spoke of ; but should look out for him more hopefully about one of the playhouses. Go- ing from the Mermaid, supposing we were putting up there in those days, we should strike across St. Paul’s Churchyard, and possibly taking Paul’s Walk, and so down Ludgate Hill ; and thence on, bearing southerly to Blackfriars ; which locality has now its commemoration in the name of Playhouse Yard, and is in a dingy quarter, with dingy great warehouses round it. Arrived there we should learn, perhaps by a poster on the door, that the theatre would not open till some later hour. Black- friars* was a private theatre, roofed over entirely * The Globe was the summer theatre, the Blackfriars the winter theatre — the same company playing much at both. The hour for opening in Elizabeth’s time was usually one o’clock. Dekker {Horne Booke^ 1609) names three as the hour ; and doubtless there were occasions when — in the pri- BLACKFRIAR^S THEATRE. 35 and lighted with candles ; also, through Elizabeth’s time, opening generally on Sundays — that be- ing a popular day — hours being chosen outside of prayer or church-time ; and this public dramatic observance of Sunday was only forbidden by ex- press enactment after James came to the throne. At her palace, and with her child-players, Sunday was always Queen Elizabeth’s favorite day. This Blackfriars was at only a little remove down the Thames from that famous Whitefriars region of which there is such melodramatic ac- count in Scott’s story of where Old Trapbois comes to his wild death. If we went to the Globe Theatre, we should push on down to the river — near to a point where Blackfriars Bridge now spans it — then, a clear stream free from all bridges, save only London Bridge, which would have loomed, with its piles of houses, out of the water on our left. At the water-side we should take wherry (fare only one penny) and be sculled over to Southwark, vate theatres — plays began after nightfall. Fletcher and Shakespeare were at the head of what was called the Lord Chamberlain’s Company. By license of James 1. (1603) this virtually became the King’s Company. 36 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. landing at an open place — Bankside — near which was Paris Garden, where bear-baiting was still car- ried on with high kingly approval ; and thereabout, on a spot now swallowed in a gulf of smoked and blackened houses — just about the locality where at a later day stood Eichard Baxter’s Chapel, rose the octagonal walls of the Globe Theatre, in which Mr. Shakespeare was concerned as player and part proprietor. There should be a flag flying aloft and people lounging in, paying their two-pence, their sixpences, their shillings, or even their half-crowns — as they chose the commoner or the better places. Only the stage is roofed over; perhaps also a narrow space all round the walls ; from all otherwheres within, one could look up straight into the murky sky of London. There is apple-eating, nut-cracking, and some vender of pamphlets bawl- ing ‘‘Buy a new booke;” such a one perhaps as that Home Booke of Gulls — which I told you of, written by Dekker — would have been a favorite for such venders. Or, possibly through urgence of the Court Chamberlain, King James’ Gounterhlaste to Tobacco may be put on sale there, to mend man- ners ; or Joshua Sylvester’s little poem to the same GLOBE THEATRE. 37 end, entitled Tobacco battered and the Pipes shattered about their Eares that idly idolize so base and barbar^ ous a Weed^ by a Volley of hot shot, thundered from Mount Helicon. “ How juster will the Heavenly God, Th’ Eternal, punish with infernal rod In Hell’s dark furnace, with black fumes to choak Those that on Earth will still offend in Smoak.” But hot as this sort of shot might have been, we may be sure that some fast fellows, the critics and CBsthetes of those days, will have their place on the stage, sprawling there upon the edge, before the actors appear ; criticising players and audience and smoking their long pipes ; may be taking a hand at cards, and if very ‘‘swell,” tossing the cards over to people in the pit when once their game is over — a showy and arrogant largess. Perhaps Ben Jonson will come swaggering in, having taken a glass, or two, very likely, or even three, in the tap-room of the Tabard Tavern — the famous Tabard of Chaucer’s tales — which is within practicable drinking distance ; and Will Shakespeare, if indeed there, may greet him across two benches with, “Ah, Ben,” and he — tipsily in 38 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. reply, with ‘‘Ah, my good fellow. Will.” Those prim youEg men, Beaumont and Fletcher, who are just now pluming their wings for such dramatic flights as these two older men have made, may also be there. And the play will open with three little bursts of warning music ; always a prologue with a first representation ; and it may chance that the very one we have lighted upon, is some special exhibit of that great military spectacle of “Henry V.” which we know, and all the times between have known; and it may be that this Shakespeare, being himself author and in a sense manager of these boards, may come forward to speak the prologue himself ; how closely we would have eyed him, and listened : — “Pardon, gentles all ; The flat, unraised spirit, that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object : Can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France ? or may we cram Within this wooden O, the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt ? Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts, Into a thousand parts divide one man ; Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them GLOBE THEATRE. 39 Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth, For His your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times ; Turning the accomplishment of many years Into an hour-glass.” And then the play begins and we see them all : Gloucester and the brave king, and Bedford, and Fluellen, and the pretty Kate of France (by some boy-player), and Nym, and Pistol, and Dame Quickly ; and the drums beat, and the roar of bat- tle breaks and rolls away — as only Shakespeare’s words can make battles rage ; and the French Kate is made Queen, and so the end comes. All this might have happened ; I have tried to offend against no historic data of places, or men, or dates in this summing up. And from the doors of the Globe, where we are assailed by a clamor of watermen and linkboys, we go down to the river’s edge — scarce a stone’s- throw distant — and take our wherry, on the bow of which a light is now flaming, and float away in the murky twilight upon that great historic river — watching the red torch- fires, kindling one by one along the Strand shores, and catching the dim outline of London houses — 40 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. the London of King James I. — looming through the mists behind them. In our next chapter I shall have somewhat more to say of the Stratford man — specially of his per- sonality ; and more to say of King James, and of his English Bible. CHAPTER n. E have had our glimpse of the first (Eng- t t lish) Stuart King, as he made his sham- bling way to the throne — beset by spoilsmen ; we had our glimpse, too, of that haughty, high-souled, unfortunate Sir Walter Raleigh, whose memory all Americans should hold in honor. We had our little look through the magic-lantern of Scott at the toi- let and the draggled feathers of the pedant King James, and upon all that hurly-burly of London where the Scotch Nigel adventured ; and through the gossipy Harrison we set before ourselves a great many quaint figures of the time. We saw a bride whose silken dresses whisked along those bal- usters of Crosby Hall, which brides of our day may touch reverently now ; we followed Ben Jonson, afoot, into Scotland, and among the pretty scenes of Eskdale ; and thereafter we sauntered down 42 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Ludgate Hill, and so, by wherry, to Bankside^and the Globe, where we paid our shilling, and passed the time o’ day with Ben Jonson ; and saw young Francis Beaumont, and smelt the pipes ; and had a glimpse of Shakespeare. But we must not, for this reason, think that all the world of London smoked, or all the world of London went to the Globe The- atre. Gosson and Other Puritans. There was at this very time, living and preaching, in the great city, a certain Stephen Gosson* — well-known, doubtless, to Ben Jonson and his fel- lows — who had received a university education, who had written delicate pastorals and other verse, which — with many people — ranked him with Spenser and Sidney ; who had written plays too, but who, somehow conscience-smitten, and having gone over from all dalliance with the muses to extrem- est Puritanism, did thereafter so inveigh against Poets, Players, Jesters, and such like Caterpillars of {he Commonwealth '' — as he called them — as made him rank, for fierce invective, with that Stubbes * Gosson was an Oxford man ; b. 1555 : d. 1624. PURITANISM. 43 whose onslaught upon the wickedness of the day J cited. He had called his discourse, ^^pleasant for Gentlemen that favor Learning, and profitable for all that will follow VertueP He represented the Puri- tan feeling — which was growing in force — in re- spect to poetry and the drama ; and, I have no doubt, regarded Mr. William Shakespeare as one of the best loved and trusted emissaries of Satan. But between the rigid sectarians and those of easy-going faith who were wont to meet at the Mer- maid Tavern, there was a third range of thinking and of thinkers; — not believing all poetry and po- ets Satanic, and yet not neglectful of the offices of Christianity. The King himself would have ranked with these ; and so also would the dignitaries of that English Church of which he counted himself, in some sense, the head. It was in the first year of his reign, 1603 — he having passed a good part of the summer in hunting up and down through the near counties — partly from his old love of such things, partly to be out of reach of the plague which ravaged London that year (carrying off over thirty thousand people) ; it was, I say, in that first year that, at the instance of some good Anglicans, 44 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. lie issued a proclamation — ^^ Touching a meeting f of the hearing and for the determining things pretended to he amiss in the GhurchJ^ Out of this grew a conference at Hampton Court, in January, 1604. Twenty-five were called to that gathering, of whom nine were Bishops. On no one day were they all present ; nor did there seem promise of any great outcome from this assem- blage, till one Eainolds, a famous Greek scholar of Oxford, ‘‘ moved his Majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible, because previous ones were not answerable altogether to the truth of the Original.” King James^ JBihle. There was discussion of this ; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London, venturing the sage remark that if every man’s humor should be followed, there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may well believe that King James nod- ded approval of anything that would flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would make call for a loosening of his purse- stringa But out of this slumberous conference. KING JAMES' BIBLE. 45 and out of these initial steps, did come the script- Ural revision ; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of the Christian faith, sometimes called “ King James’ Bible,” though — for anything that the old gentleman had to do vi- tally or specifically with the revision — it might as well have been called the Bible of King James’ tai- lor, or the Bible of King James’ cat. It must be said, however, for the King, that he did press for a prompt completion of the work, and that “ it should be done by the best learned in both universities.” Indeed, if the final dedication of the translators to the most High, and Mighty Prince James ” (which many a New England boy of fifty years ago wrestled with in the weary lapses of too long a sermon) were to be taken in its literal significance, the obligations to him were immense ; after thanking him as principal mover and author of the work,” the dedication exuberantly declares that ‘‘ the hearts of all your loyal and religious peo- ple are so bound and firmly knit unto you, that your very name is precious among them : Their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts, as that sanctified person, who, 46 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. under God, is the immediate author of their true Happiness.” The King’s great reverence for the Scriptures is abundantly evidenced by that little tractate of his — the Basilikon Doron — not written for publication (though surreptitiously laid hold of by the book-makers) but intended for the private guidance of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in that time heir to the throne. The little book shows large theologic discretions ; and — saving some scornings of the ‘‘vaine, Pharisaicall Puritaines” — is written in a spirit which might be safely com- mended to later British Princes. '‘When yee reade the Scripture [says the King] reade it with a sanctified and chast hart ; admire reverentlie such obscure places as ye understand not, blaming only your own capacitie ; reade with delight the plaine places, and study carefully to understand those that are somewhat difficile: preasse to be a good textuare ; for the Scripture is ever the best interpreter of itself e.” Some forty odd competent men were set out from the universities and elsewheres for the work of the Bible revision. Yet they saw none of King James’ money, none from the royal exchequer ; which indeed from the King’s disorderly extrava- KING JAMES' BIBLE. 47 gances, that helped nobody, was always lamentably low. The revisers got their rations, when they came together in conference, in Commons Hall, or where and when they could; and only at the last did some few of them who were engaged in the final work of proof-reading, get a stipend of some thirty shillings a week from that fraternity of book- makers who were concerned with the printing and selHng of the new Bible. When the business of revision actually com- menced it is hard to determine accurately ; but it was not till the year 1611 — eight years after the Hampton Conference — that an edition was pub- lished by printer Barker (who, or whose company, was very zealous about the matter, it being a fat job for him) and so presently, under name of King James’ version ‘‘appointed (by assemblage of Bish- ops) to be read in churches,” it came to be the great Bible of the English-speaking world — then, and thence -forward. And now, who were the for- ty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old translators ; who came to their offices of revi- sion with so tender a reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into their 48 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. own emendations of this book as to leave it a mon- ument of Literature ? Their names are all of rec- ord : and yet if I were to print them, the average reader would not recognize, I think, a single one out of the twoscore.* You would not find Bacon’s name, who, not far from this time was -writing some of his noblest essays, and also writing (on the King’s suggestion) about preaching and Church management. You would not find the name of William Camden, who was then at the mellow age of sixty, and of a rare reputation for learning and for dignity of character. You would not find the name of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who though writing much of religious intention, was deistically inclined; nor of Eobert Burton, churchman, and author of that famous book The Anatomy of Melan-- * Among the more important names were those of Bishop Andrewes (of Winchester, friend of Herbert, and Dr. Donne) — famous for his oriental knowledges : Bedwell (of Totting- ham), a distinguished Arabic scholar : Sir Henry Savile, a very learned layman, and warden of Merton College : Rain- olds, representing the Puritan wing of the Church, and President of Corpus Christi, Oxford ; and Chaderton, Master of Emmanuel, and representing the same wing of the Church from Cambridge. THE BIBLE TRANSLATORS. 49 choly — then in his early prime ; nor of Sir Walter Ealeigh, nor of Sir Thomas Overbury — both now at the date of their best powers ; nor yet would one find mention of John Donne,* though he came to be Dean of St. Paul’s and wrote poems the reader may — and ought to know ; nor, yet again, is there any hearing of Sir John Davies, who had com- mended himself specially to King James, and who had written poetically and reverently on the Jmmor- tality of the Soul f in strains that warrant our cit- ing a few quatrains : — ‘ * At first, her mother Earth she holdeth dear, And doth embrace the world and worldly things : She flies close by the ground, and hovers here, And mounts not up with her celestial wings. Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught That with her heavenly nature doth agree ; She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought. She cannot in this world contented he : * John Donne, son of a London merchant, h. 1573, and d. 1631. There is a charming life of him by Izaak Wal- ton. The Grosart edition of his writings is fullest and best. f From his poem of Tfosce Teipsum, published in 1599. John Davies b. in Wiltshire about 1570, and d. 1626. II.— 4 50 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. For who, did ever yet, in honor, wealth, Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find ? Who ever ceased to wish, when he had health ? Or, having wisdom, was not vexed in mind ? Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall. Which seem sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay ; She lights on that and this, and tasteth all. But, pleased with none, doth rise and soar away 1 This is a long aside ; but it gives us good breath to go back to our translators, who if not known to the general reader, were educators or churchmen of rank ; men of trained minds who put system and conscience and scholarship into their work. And their success in it, from a literary aspect only, shows how interfused in all cultivated minds of that day was a keen apprehension and warm appreciation of the prodigious range, and the structural niceties, and rhythmic forces of that now well-compacted English language which Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, each in his turn, had published to the world, with brilliant illustration. And will this old Bible of King James’ version continue to be held in highest reverence ? Speak- ing from a literary point of view — which is our KING JAMES* BIBLE. 51 stand-point to-day — there can be no doubt that it will ; nor is there good reason to believe that — on literary lines — any other will ever supplant it. There may be versions that will be truer to the Greek ; there may be versions that will be far truer to the Hebrew ; there may be versions that will mend its science — that will mend its archae- ology — that will mend its history ; but never one, I think, which, as a whole, will greatly mend that orderly and musical and forceful flow of language springing from early English sources, chastened by Elizabethan culture and flowing out — freighted with Christian doctrine — over all lands where Saxon speech is uttered. Nor in saying this, do I yield a jot to any one — in respect for that modern scholarship which has shown bad render- ings from the Greek, and possibly far worse ones from the Hebrew. No one — it is reasonably to be presumed — can safely interpret doctrines of the Bible without the aid of this scholarship and of the ‘‘ higher criticism ; and no one will be hence- forth fully trusted in such interpretation who is ignorant of, or who scorns the recent revisions. And yet the old book, by reason of its strong, 52 LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS. sweet, literary quality, will keep its hold in most hearts and most minds. Prove to the utmost that the Doxology,* at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, is an interpolation — that it is nowhere in the earlier Greek texts (and I believe it is abundantly proven), and yet hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thou- sands who use that invocation, will keep on saying, in the rhythmic gush of praise, which is due maybe to some old worthy of the times of the Henrys (per- haps Tyndale himself) — “ For thine is the King- dom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen ! ” And so with respect to that splendid Hebraic poem of Job, or that mooted book of Ecclesiastes ; no matter what critical scholarship may do in am- plification or curtailment, it can never safely or surely refine away the marvellous graces of their * Dr. Shedd {Addenda to Lange’s Matthew) says — “Prob- ably it was tbe prevailing custom of the Christians in the East^ from the beginning to pray the Lord’s Prayer, with the Doxology.” It certainly appears in earliest Syriac version {Peschito, so called, of second century). It does not appear in the Wyclif of 1380. It will be found, however, in the Tyndale of 1534 — which I am led to believe is its first appearance in an accredited English translation. THE BIBLE BEAUTIFUL. 53 strong, old English current — burdened with ten- der memories — murmurous with hopes drifting toward days to come — “or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.” The scientists may demonstrate that this ancient oak — whose cooling shadows have for so many ages given comfort and delight — is overgrown, un- shapely, with needless nodules, and corky rind, and splotches of moss, and seams that show stress of gone-by belaboring tempests; they may make it clear that these things are needless for its sup- port — that they cover and cloak its normal organic structure ; but who shall hew them clean away, and yet leave in fulness of stature and of sheltering power the majestic growth we venerate? I know the reader may say that this is a sentimental view ; so it is ; but science cannot measure the highest beauty of a poem ; and with whose, or what fine scales shall we weigh the sanctities of religious awe? It must be understood, however, that the charms of the “ King James’ Version ” do not lie altogether 54 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. in Elizabethan beauties of phrase, or in Jacobean felicities ; there are quaint archaisms in it which we are sure have brought their pleasant reverbera- tions of lingual sound all the way down from the days of Coverdale, of Tyndale, and of Wyclif. A few facts about the printing and publish- ing of the early English Bibles it may be well to call to mind. In a previous chapter I spoke of the fatherly edicts against Bible - reading and Bible- owning in the time of Henry VUI. ; but the reign of his son, Edward VL, was a golden epoch for the Bible printers. During the six years when this boy-king held the throne, fifty editions — princi- pally Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s versions — were issued, and no less than fifty-seven printers were engaged in their manufacture. Queen Mary made difficulties again, of which a familiar and brilliant illustration may be found in that old New England Primer which sets forth in ghastly wood-cut “ the burning of Mr. John Eog- ers at the Stake, in Smithfield.’' Elizabeth was coy ; she set a great many prison-doors open ; and when a courtier said, ^‘May it please your Majesty, there be sundry other prisoners held in durance, OF BIBLE PRINTERS. 55 and it would much comfort God’s people that they be set free.” She asked, ‘‘Whom?” And the good Protestant said, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” But she — young as she was — showed her monarch habit. “Let us first find,” said she, “if they wish enlargement.” But she had accepted the gift of a Bible on first passing through Cheapside — had pressed it to her bosom in sight of the street people, and said she should “oft read that holy book” — which was easy to say, and becoming. In the early days of her reign the Genevan Bible, always a popular one in England, was completed, and printed mostly in Geneva ; but a privilege for printing it in England was assigned to John Bod- ley — that John Bodley whose more eminent son. Sir Thomas, afterward founded and endowed the well-known Bodleian Library at Oxford. In the early part of Elizabeth’s reign appeared, too, the so-called Bishops’ Bible (now a rare book), under charge of Archbishop Parker, fifteen digni- taries of the Church being joined with him in its supervision. There were engravings on copper and wood — of Elizabeth, on the title-page — of the 56 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. gay Earl of Leicester at the head of the Book of Joshua, and of old, nodding Lord Burleigh in the Book of Psalms. But the Bishops’ Bible was never so popular as the Geneva one. During the reign of Elizabeth there were no less than one hundred and thirty distinct issues of Bibles and Testaments, an average of three a year. It may interest our special parish to know further that the first American (English) Bible was printed at Philadelphia, by a Scotchman named Aitkki, in the year 1782 ; but the first Bible printed in Amer- ica was in the German language, issued by Chris- topher Sauer, at Germantown, in 1743. But I will not encroach any further upon biblical teachings : we will come back to our secular poets, and to that bravest and finest figure of them aU, who was born upon the Avon. ShaJcesjpeare. I have tried — I will confess it now — to pique the reader’s curiosity, by giving him stolen glimpses from time to time of the great dramatist, and by putting off, in chapter after chapter, any full or detailed mention of him, or of his work. Indeed, SHAKESPEARE. 57 when I first entered upon these talks respecting English worthies — whether places, or writers, or sovereigns — I said to myself — when we come up with that famous Shakespeare, whom all the world knows so well, and about whom so much has been said and written — we will make our obeisance, lift our hat, and pass on to the lesser men beyond. So large a space did the great dramatist fill in the de- lightsome journey we were to make together, down through the pleasant country of English letters, that he seemed not so much a personality as some great British stronghold, with outworks, and with pennons flying — standing all athwart the Eliza- bethan Valley, down which our track was to lead us. From far away back of Chaucer, when the first Ro- mances of King Arthur were told, when glimpses of a King Lear and a Macbeth appeared in old chroni- cles ~ this great monument of Elizabethan times loomed high in our front ; and go far as we may down the current of English letters, it will not be out of sight, but loom up grandly behind us. And now that we are fairly abreast of it, my fancy still clings to that figure of a great castle — brimful of life — with which the lesser poets of the age con- 58 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. trast like so many out-lying towers, that we can walk all round about, and measure, and scale, and tell of their age, and forces, and style ; but this Shakespearean hulk is so vast, so wondrous, so peo- pled with creatures, who are real, yet unreal — that measure and scale count for nothing. We hear around it the tramp of armies and the blare of trumpets ; yet these do not drown the sick voice of poor distraught Ophelia. We see the white banner of France flung to the breeze, and the English co- lumbine nodding in clefts of the wall ; we hear the ravens croak from turrets that lift above the chamber of Macbeth, and the howling of the rain- storms that drenched poor Lear ; and we see Jes- sica at her casement, and the Jew Shylock whetting his greedy knife, and the humpbacked Eichard raging in battle, and the Prince boy — apart in his dim tower — piteously questioning the jailer Hu- bert, who has brought “ hot-irons ” with him. Then there is Falstaff, and Dame Quickly, and the pretty Juliet sighing herself away from her moon- lit balcony. These are all live people to us ; we know them ; and we know Hamlet, and Brutus, and Mark An- SHAKESPEARE. 59 tony, and the witty, coquettish Eosalind ; even the poor Mariana of the moated grange. We do not see enough of this latter, to be sure, to give ster- eoscopic roundness ; but the mere glimpse — al- lusion — is of such weight — has such hue of reab ness, that it buoys the dim figure over the literary currents and drifts of two hundred and odd years, till it gets itself planted anew in the fine lines of Tennyson ; — not as an illusion only, a figment of the elder imagination chased down and poetically adopted — but as an historic actuality we have met, and so, greet with the grace and the knowingness of old acquaintanceship. If you tell me of twenty historic names in these reigns of Elizabeth and James — names of men or women whose lives and characters you know best — I will name to you twenty out of the dramas of Shakespeare whose lives and characters you know better. And herein lies the difference between this man Shakespeare, and most that went before him, or who have succeeded him ; he has supplied real characters to count up among the characters we know. Chaucer did indeed in that Canterbury Pil- 6o LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. grimage whicli he told us of in such winning num- bers, make us know by a mere touch, in some un- forgetable way, all the outer aspects of the Khight, and the Squire, and the Prioress, and the shrewish Wife of Bath ; but we do not see them insidedly ; and as for the Una, and Gloriana, and Britomart, of the ^‘Faerie Queene,” they are phantasmic ; we may admire them, but we admire them as we ad- mire fine bird-plumes tossing airily, delightsomely — they have no fiesh and blood texture : and if I were to name to you a whole catalogue of the best- drawn characters out of Jonson, and Fletcher, and Massinger, and the rest, you would hardly know them. Will you try ? You may know indeed the Sir Giles Overreach of Massinger, because ‘‘A New Way to Pay Old Debts” has always a certain relish ; and because Sir Giles is a dreadful type of the un- natural, selfish greed that maddens us everywhere ; but do you know well — Sejanus, or Tamburlaine, or Bellisant, or Boadicea, or Bellario, or Bobadil, or Calantha ? You do not even know them to bow to. And this, not alone because we are unused to read or to hear the plays in which these characters ap- pear, but because none of them have that vital SHAKESPEARE^S YOUTH. 6i roundness, completeness, and individuality which makes their memory stick in the mind, when once they have shown their qualities. We are, all of us, in the way of meeting people in respect of whom a week, or even a day of inter- course, will so fasten upon us — maybe their pun- gency, their alertness, or some one of their decided, fixed, fine attributes, that they thenceforth people our imagination ; not obtrusively there indeed, but a look, a name, an allusion, calls back their special significance, as in a photographic blaze. Others there are, in shoals, whom we may meet, day by day, month by month, who have such washed-out color of mind, who do so take hues from all sur- roundings, without any strong hue of their own, that in parting from them we forget, straightway, what manner of folk they were. You cannot part so from the people Shakespeare makes you know. Shakespeare^s Youth. And now what was the personality of this man, who, out of his imagination, has presented to us such a host of acquaintances ? Who was he, where 62 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. did he live, how did he live, and what about his father, or his children, or his family retinue ? And here we are at once confronted by the awkward fact, that we have less positive knowledge of him, and of his habits of life than of many smaller men — poets and dramatists — who belonged to his time, and who — with a pleasant egoism — let drop little tidbits of information about their personal history. But Shakespeare did not write letters that we know of; he did not prate of himself in his books ; he did not entertain such quarrels with brother authors as provoked reckless exposure of the family ‘‘ wash.” Of Greene, of Nashe, of Dek- ker, of Jonson, of Beaumont and Fletcher, we have personal particulars about their modes of living, their associates, their dress even, which we seek for vainly in connection with Shakespeare. This is largely due, doubtless — aside from the pleasant egoism at which I have hinted — to the circum- stance that most of these were university men, andl had very many acquaintances among those of cult- ure who kept partial record of their old associates. But no school associate of Shakespeare ever kept track of him ; he ran out of sight of them alL SHAKESPEARE'S YOUTH, 63 He did study, however, in his young days, at that old town of Stratford, where he was born — his father being fairly placed there among the honest tradespeople who lived around. The ancient timber- and-plaster shop is still standing in Henley Street, where his father served his customers — wheth- er in wool, meats, or gloves — and in the upper front chamber of which Shakespeare first saw the light. Forty odd years ago, when I first visited it, the butcher’s fixtures were not wholly taken down which had served some descendant of the fam- ily — in the female line * — toward the close of the eighteenth century, for the cutting of meats. Into what Pimlico order it may be put to-day, under the * The allusion is to the Harts, whose ancestress was Shake- speare’s sister Joan. A monumental record in Trinity Church, Stratford, reads thus: “In memory of Thomas Hart, who was the fifth descendant in a direct line from Joan, eldest daughter of John Shakespeare. He died May 23, 1793.” A son of the above Thomas Hart ‘ ‘ followed the business of a butcher at Stratford, where he was living in 1794.” Still another Thomas Hart (eighth in descent from Joan) is said to be now living in Australia — the only male repre- sent! ve of that branch of the family. 64 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. hands of the Shakespeare Society, I do not know \ but it is understood that its most characteristio features are religiously guarded; and house, and town, and church are all worthy of a visit. The town does not lie, indeed, on either of those great thoroughfares which Americans are wont to take on their quick rush from Liverpool to London, and the Continent ; but it is easily approachable on the north from Warwick, in whose immediate vicinity are Kenilworth and Guy’s Cliff ; and from the south through Oxford, whose scores of storied towers and turrets beguile the student traveller. The country around Stratford has not, indeed, the varied pic- turesqueness of Derbyshire or of Devon ; but it has in full the quiet rural charm that belongs to so many townships of Middle-England ; — hawthorn hedges, smooth roads, embowered side lanes, great swells of greensward where sheep are quietly feed- ing ; clumps of gray old trees, with rookeries plant- ed in them, and tall chimneys of country houses lift- ing over them and puffing out little wavelets of blue smoke ; meadows with cattle browsing on them ; wayside stiles ; a river and canals, slumberous in their tides, with barges of coal and lumber swaying STRATFORD LANDSCAPE. 65 with the idle currents that swish among the sedges at the banks. On the north, toward Warwick, are the Wel- combe hills, here and there tufted with great trees, which may have mingled their boughs, in some early time, with the skirts of the forest of Arden ; and from these heights, looking southwest, one can see the packed gray and red roofs of the town, the lines of lime-trees, the elms and the willows of the river’s margin, out of which rises the dainty steeple of Stratford church ; while beyond, the eye leaps over the hazy hollows of the Ked-horse valley, and lights upon the blue rim of hills in Gloucester- shire, known as the Cotswolds (which have given name to one of the famous breeds of English sheep). More to the left, and nearer to a south line of view, crops up Edgehill (near to Pilot-Mars- ton), an historic battle-field — wherefrom Shake- speare, on his way to London may have looked back — on spire, and alder copse, and river — with more or less of yearning. To the right, again, and more westerly than before, and on the hither side of the Eed-horse valley and plain, one can catch sight of the rounded thickets of elms and of orcharding II . -5 66 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. where nestles the hamlet of Shottery. Thence Shakespeare brought away his bride, Anne Hatha- way, she being well toward the thirties, and he at that date a prankish young fellow not yet nineteen. What means he may have had of supporting a fam- ily at this time, we cannot now say ; nor could his father-in-law tell then ; on which score there was — as certain traditions run — some vain demurral. He may have been associated with his father in trade, whether as wool-dealer or glover ; doubtless was ; doubtless, too, had abandoned all schooling ; doubt- less was at all the wakes, and May festivals, and entertainments of strolling players, and had many a bout of heavy ale-drinking. There are stories too — of lesser authenticity — that he was over-familiar with the game in the near Park of Charlecote, whereby he came to ugly issue with its owner. We shall probably never know the truth about these stories. Charlecote House is still standing, a few miles out of the town (northeasterly), and its de- lightful park, and picturesque mossy walls — dap- pled with patches of shadow and with ivy leaves — look charmingly innocent of any harm their master could have done to William Shakespeare ; but cer- FAMILY OF SHAKESPEARE. 67 tain it is that the neighborhood grew too warm for him ; and that he set off one day (being then about twenty-three years old) for London, to seek his fortune. Family Relations. His wife and three children ^ stayed behind. In fact — and it may as well be said here — they always stayed behind. It does not appear that throughout the twenty or more succeeding years, during which Shakespeare was mostly in London, that either wife or child was ever domiciled with him there for ever so little time. Indeed, for the nine years immedi- ately following Shakespeare’s departure from Strat- ford, traces of his special whereabouts are very dim ; we know that rising from humblest work in con- nection with companies of players, he was blazing a great and most noticeable path for himself ; but whether through those nine years he was tied to the shadow of London houses, or was booked for up-country expeditions, or (as some reckon) made * Susanna, the eldest, baptized 1583 ; Hamnet and Ju- dith (twins), baptized 1585. In 1596 Hamnet died ; in 1607 Susanna married Dr. Hall ; and in 1616 (year of Shake- speare’s death) Judith married Quiney, vintner. 68 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. brief continental journeyings, we cannot surely tell. In 1596, however, on the occasion of his son Hamnet’s death, he appears in Stratford again, in the prime of his powers then, a well-to-do man (buying New Place the year following), his London fame very likely blazoning his path amid old towns- people — grieving over his lost boy, whom he can have seen but little — joerhaps putting some of the color of his private sorrow upon the palette where he was then mingling the tints for his play of ‘‘Eo- meo and Juliet.” Oh, mj love, Death that hath sucked the honey of thy breath Hath had no power yet upon thy beauty. Thou art not conquered ; Beauty’s ensign yet Is crimson in thy lips, and in thy cheeks, And death’s pale flag is not advanced there. Why art thou yet so fair ? ” His two daughters lived to maturity — both marrying ; the favorite and elder daughter, Su- sanna, becoming the wife of Dr. Hall, a well-estab- lished physician in Stratford, who attended the poet in his last illness, and who became his ex- ecutor. Shakespeare was — so far as known — watchful and tender of his children’s interest : nor SHAKESPEARE IN HIS FAMILY. 69 is there positive evidence that he was otherwise to his wife, save such inferences as may be drawn from the tenor of some of his sonnets, and from those long London absences, over which it does not appear that either party greatly repined. Long ab- sences are not prima-facie evidence of a lack of do- mestic harmonies ; do indeed often promote them in a limited degree ; and at worst, may possibly show only a sagacious disposition to give pleasant noiselessness to bickerings that would be inevitable. It is further to be borne in mind, in partial vindication of Shakespeare’s marital loyalty, that this period of long exile from the family roof en- tailed not only absence from his wife, but also from father and mother — both of whom were living down to a date long subsequent,^ and with whom — specially the mother — most affectionate rela- tions are undoubted. A disloyalty that would have made him coy of wifely visitings could hardly harden him to filial duties, while the phlegmatic indifference of a very busy London man, which made him chary of home visitings, would go far to explain the seeming family estrangement. * His father died in 1601, and his mother in 1608. 70 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. But we must not, and cannot reckon the Strat- ford poet as a paragon of all the virtues ; his long London absences, for cause or for want of cause — or both — may have given many twinges of pain to his own mother (of Arden blood), and to the mother of his children. Yet after the date of his boy’s death, up to the time of his final return to Stratford there are evidences of very frequent home visits, and of large interest in what concerned his family and towns-people. His journeyings to and fro, probably on horse- back, may have taken him by way of Edgehill, and into Banbury (of "‘Banbury-Cross” buns) ; or, more likely, he would have followed the valley of the Stour by Shipston, and thence up the hills to Chipping-Norton, and skirting Whichwood Forest, which still darkens a twelve-mile stretch of land upon the right, and so by Ditchley and the great Woodstock Park, into Oxford. I recall these names and the succession of scenes the more distinctly, for the reason that some forty years ago I went over the whole stretch of road from Windsor to Stratford on foot, staying the nights at wayside inns, and lunching at little, mossy hostelries, some of SHAKESPEARE^ S ROAD, 71 which the poet may possibly have known, and look- ing out wonderingly and reverently for glimpses of wood, or field, or flood, that may have caught the embalmment of his verse. It was worth getting up betimes to verify such lines as these : — “ Full many a glorious morning have I seen Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy ; or those others, telling how the gentle day ** Dapples the drowsy East with spots of gray.” Again, there was delightful outlook for “ a hank whereon the wild thyme blows Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows ; ” or, perhaps it was the ‘‘ Summer’s green, all girded up in sheaves” that caught the eye ; or, yet again, the picturesque hedgerows, which. Like prisoners overgrown with hair Put forth disordered twigs ; and these flanked by some even mead, which erst brought sweetly forth The freckled cowslip, burnet, and green clover.” 72 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. What a wondrous light upon all the landscape^ along all the courses of his country journeyings! Nor can I forbear to tell how such illumination once made gay for me all the long foot-tramp from Chipping-Norton to Stratford — past Long Comp- ton, and past Shipston (with lunch at the “Koyal George ”) — past Atherton Church, and thence along the lovely Stour banks, and some weary miles of grassy level, till the spire of Trinity rose shim- mering in the late sunlight; afterward copses of elms, and willows clearly distinguishable, and throw- ing afternoon shadows on the silvery stretch of the Avon ; then came sight of lazy boats, and of Clopton bridge, over which I strolled foot-weary, into streets growing dim in the twilight ; coming thus, by a trav- eller’s chance, into the court of the Eed-Horse Tav- ern, and into its little back-parlor, where after dinner one was served by the gracious hostess with a copy of Irving’s ‘‘ Sketch Book ” (its Stratford chapter all tattered and thumb-worn). In short, I had the rare good fortune to stumble upon the very inn where Geoffrey Crayon was quartered twenty odd years be- fore, and was occupying, for the nonce, the very parlor where he had thrust his feet into slippers, SHAKESPEARE IN LONDON 73 made a sceptre of the poker, and enjoyed the royal- ties of ‘‘ mine inn.” Shakespeare in London, But how fares our runaway Shakespeare in London? What is he to do there? We do not positively know that he had a solitary acquaintance established in the city ; certainly not one of a high and helping position. He was not introduced, as Spenser had been, by Sir Philip Sidney and by Raleigh to the favor of the Queen. He has no lit- erary backing of the colleges, or of degrees, or of learned associates ; nay, not being so high placed, or so well placed, but that his townsmen of most respectability shook their heads at mention of him. But he has heard the strolling players ; perhaps has journeyed up in their trail ; he has read broad- sides, very likely, from London ; we may be sure that he has tried his hand at verses, too, in those days when he went courting to the Hathaway cot- tage. So he drifts to the theatres, of which there were three at least established, when he first trudged along the Strand toward Blackfriars. He gets somewhat to do in connection with them ; 74 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. precisely what that is, we do not know. But he comes presently to be enrolled as player, taking old men’s parts that demand feeling and dignity. We know, too, that he takes to the work of mending plays, and splicing good parts together. Sneered at very likely, by the young fellows from the univer- sities who are doing the same thing, and may be, writing plays of their own ; but lacking Shake- speare’s instinct as to what will take hold of the popular appetite, or rather — let us say — what will touch the human heart. There are poems, too, that he writes early in this town life of his, dedicated to that Earl of South- ampton * of whom I have already spoken, and into whose good graces he has somehow fallen. But the Earl is eight or ten years his junior, a mere boy * The dedication of Vemis and Adonis (and subsequent- ly of Tarquin and Lucrece) to the Earl of Southampton is undoubted ; nor are intimate friendly relations doubted ; but the further supposition — long accredited — that the ma- jor part of the Sonnets were addressed to the same Earl — is now generally abandoned — entirely so by the new Shake- spearean scholars. William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke) — to whom is dedicated the 1623 folio — is counted by many the “begetter” of these, and the rival of the poet in loves of SHAKESPEARE^ S FIRST POEM, 75 in fact, just from Cambridge, strangely attracted by this high-browed, blue-eyed, sandy-haired young fellow from Stratford, who has shown such keenness and wondrous insight. Would you hear a little bit of what he wrote in what he calls the first heir of my invention ? ” It is wonderfully descriptive of a poor hare who is hunted by hounds ; which he had surely seen over and again on the Oxfordshire or Cotswold downs : ‘ ‘ Sometimes he runs among a flock of sheep, To make the cunning hounds mistake their smell, And sometime sorteth with a herd of deer ; Danger deviseth shifts ; wit waits on fear. “For there, his smell, with others being mingled, The hot-scent snuffing hounds are driven to doubt, Ceasing their clamorous cry, till they have singled With much ado, the cold fault clearly out ; Then do they spend their mouths : Echo replies As if another chase were in the skies. “ By this poor Wat, far off upon a hill. Stands on his hinder legs with listening fear. the “dark-eyed ” frail one, whose identity has so provoked inquiry. A late theory favors a Miss Fitton, of whom a descendant, the Rev. Fred. Fitton, has latterly made himself advocate See AtfiencBU7n for February 20, 1886. 76 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. To hearken if his foes pursue him still ; Anon, their loud alarums he doth hear; And now his grief may he compared well To one sore-sick, that hears the passing bell.” It must have been close upon this that his first play was written and played, though not published until some years after. It may have been “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” it may have been the “ Two Gentle- men of Verona ; ” no matter what : I shall not enter into the question of probable succession of his plays, as to which critics will very likely be never wholly agreed.^ It is enough that he wrote them ; the merry ones when his heart was light, and the * A very good exhibit of best opinions on such points may be found briefly summarized in Stopford Brooke’s little Primer of English Literature ; see also Mr. Fleay’s recent Chronical History of Shakespeare; and fuller discussion (though somewhat antiquated) in Dr. Drake’s interesting dis- cussion of Shakespeare and his Times, I name this book, not as wholly authoritative, or comparable with the mass of newer criticism which has been developed under the aus- pices of the different Shakespeare societies, but as massing together a great budget of information from cotemporaneoua authors and full of entertaining reading. In America, the Shakespearean labors of Hudson, Grant White, and Dr. Kolfe are to be noted ; and also — with larger emphasis — the beginnings of the monumental work of Mr. Furniss. SHAKESPEARE'S EARLY WORKS. 77 tragic ones when grief lay heavily upon him. And yet this is only partially true ; he had such amazing power of subordinating his feeling to his thought. I wonder how much of his own hopes and pos- sible foretaste he did put into the opening lines of what, by most perhaps, is reckoned his first play: — “ Let Fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs, And then grace us in the disgrace of Death ; When, spite of cormorant-devouring Time, The endeavor of this present breath may buy That honor, which shall bate his scythe’s keen edge And make us heirs of all Eternity ! ” Work and JRejputation. And what was thought of him in those first days ? Not overmuch ; none looked upon him as largely overtopping his compeers of that day. His Venu^ and Adonis^ was widely and admiringly known: so was hiB Lucrece ; but Marlowe’s “sound and fury” in “ Tamburlaine ” would have very possibly drawn twice the house of “ Love’s Labor’s Lost.” * Seven editions of this poem were published between 1593 and 1602. 78 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. He had no coterie behind him ; he was hail-fel- low with Jonson ; probably knew Peele and Mar- lowe well ; undoubtedly knew Drayton ; he went to the Falcon and the Mermaid ; but there is, I believe, no certain evidence that he ever saw much of Ka- leigh, or of Spenser, who was living some years after he came to London- It is doubtful, indeed, if the poet of the Faery Queene knew him at alL Sidney he probably never saw ; nor did he ever go, so far as appears, to dine with the great Francis Bacon, as Jonson without doubt sometimes did, or with Burleigh, or with Cecil. His lack of precise learning may have made him inapt for encounter with school-men. But he had a faculty of apprehension that transcended mere scholastic learning — apprehending everywhere, in places where studious ones were blind. I can im- agine that Oxford men — just up in town or those who had written theses for university purposes, would sneer at such show of learning as he made ; — call it cheap erudition — call it result of cram- ming — as many university men do nowadays when they find a layman and outsider hitting anything that respects learning in the eye. But, ah, what SHAKESPEARE. 79 a gift of cramming ! What a gift of apprehen- sion ! What a swift march over the hedges that cramp schools ! What a flight, where other men walked, and were dazed and discomfited by this unheard-of progress into the ways of knowledge and of wisdom ! Again, these Shakespeare plays do sometimes show crude things, vulgar things, coarse things — things we want to skip and do skip — things that make us wonder if he ever wrote them ; perhaps some which in the mendings and tinkerings of those and later days have no business there ; and yet he was capable of saying coarse things ; he did have a shrewd eye for the appetites of the ground- lings ; he did look on all sides, and into all depths of the moral Cosmos he was rounding out ; and even his commonest utterances, have, after all, a cer- tain harmony, though in lowest key, with the gen- eral drift. He is not always, as some of his dra- matic compeers were, on tragic stilts. He is never under strain to float high. Then, too, like Chaucer — his noblest twin-fellow of English poesy — he steals, plagiarizes, takes tales of passion, and love, and wreck, wherever in human 8o LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. history he can find them, to work into his purposes But even the authors could scarce recognize the thefts in either case, so glorified are they by the changes they undergo under these wonder-making hands. As with story, so it is with sentiment. This he steals out of men’s brains and hearts by wholesale. What smallest poet, whether in print or talk, could have failed to speak of man’s journey to his last home ? Shakespeare talks of “That undiscovered country, from whose bourn no trav- eller returns,” and the sentiment is so imaged, and carries such a trail of agreeing and caressing thoughts, that it supplants all kindred speech. “This life,” says Shakespeare, “is but a stage and the commentators can point you out scores of like similes in older writers — Erasmus among the rest, whose utterance seems almost duplicated ; duplicated, indeed, but with a tender music, and a point, and a breadth, that make all previous related similes forgotten. Such utterances grow out of instincts common to us all ; but this man, in whom SHAKESPEARE. 8i the common instinct is a masterful alembic, fuses all old teachings, and white-hot they run out of the crucible of his soul in such beauteous shapes that they are sought for and gloried in forever after. Many a Hamlet has soliloquized — you and I per- haps ; but never a Hamlet in such way as did Shake- speare’s ; so crisp — so full — so suggestive — so mar- rowy — so keen — so poignant — so enthralling. No, no ; this man did not go about in quest of newnesses ; only little geniuses do that ; but the great genius goes along every commonest roadside, looking on every commonest sight of tree or flower, of bud, of death, of birth, of flight, of labor, of song ; leads in old tracks ; deals in old truths, but with such illuminating power that they all come home to men’s souls with new penetrative force and new life in them. He catches by intuition your commonest thought, and my commonest thought, and puts them into new and glorified shape. His Thrift and Closing Years. Again, this Shakespeare of ours, singing among the stars, is a shrewd, thrifty man ; he comes to have an interest in all those shillings and sixpences II. -6 82 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. that go into the till of the Globe Theatre ; he makes money. Where he lived in London,* we do not definitely know ; at one time, it is believed, on the Southwark side, near to the old Bear-garden,f but never ostentatiously ; very likely sharing chambers with his brother Edmond, who was much time an actor there ; J he buys a house and haberdasher's shop somewhere near Blackfriars ; and he had pre- viously bought, with his savings — even before Queen Elizabeth was dead — a great house in Stratford. This he afterwards equips by purchase of outlying lands — a hundred acres at one time. * The Nation (N. Y.), of March 7, 1884, has this: “In an indenture between the Hon. Sir Rich^ Sal ton- stall, Knt., Lord Mayor of London, and 2 others, Commis- sioners of her Majesty (fortieth yr of Queen Elizabeth), and the parties deputed to collect the first of these subsidies granted by Parliament the yr preceding — (bearing date Oct. 1598), for the rate of 8^ Helen's Parish, Bishopsgate ward — the name of Wm. 8ha1ce^eare is found as liable, with others, to that rate.” This, if it be indeed our William who is named, would serve to show residence in “ S* Helen’s Parish” — in which is the venerable Crosby Hall. f See Halliwell-Phillips (vol. i., p. 130; 7th ed.). X Edmond Shakespeare was buried in St. Saviour’s in 1007. CLOSING YEARS OF SHAKESPEARE, 83 and twenty and more at another. He has never forgotten and never forgotten to love, country sights and sounds. These journeyings to and fro along the Oxford and Uxbridge road (on horseback prob- ably), from which he can see sheer over hedges, and note every fieldfare, every lark rising to its morning carol, every gleam of brook, have kept alive his old fondnesses, and he counts surely on a return to these scenes in his great New Place of Stratford. He does break away for that Stratford cover, while the game of life seems still at its best promise; while Hamlet is still comparatively a new man upon the boards ; does settle himself in that country home, to gather his pippins, to pet his dogs, to wander at will upon greensward that is his own. I wish we had record of only one of his days in that retirement. I wish we could find even a two- page letter which he may have written to Ben Jon- son, in London, telling how his time passed ; but there is nothing — positively nothing. We do not know how, or by what exposure or neglect his last illness came upon him and carried him to his final home, only two years or so after his return to Strat- ford. Even that Dr. Hall, who had married his fa* 84 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. vorite daughter, and who attended him, and who published a medical book containing accounts of a thousand and more cases which he thought of con- sequence for the world to know about, has no word to say concerning this grandest patient that his eye ever fell upon. He died at the age of fifty-three. No descend- ant of his daughter Susanna is alive ; no descendant of his daughter Judith is alive.* The great new home which he had built up in Stratford is torn * 1 append table from French’s SJiakespea/reana Genealo-' gica: W“ Shakespeare, b. Apr, 23, 1664 ; m. Anne Hathaway, b. 1556, dau. of Rich^ and Joan Hathaway, of Shottery. Susanna, b. May, Hamnet, twin with Judith, bapt. Feb. 1583, d. July 2, Judith, bapt. Feb. 2, 2, 1585, d. 1661 ; m. 1649 ; m. Jno. Hall, 1585, d. s. p. 1596. Thos. Quiney. physician, b. 1576. ! I Shakespeare Quiney, Rich^. Quiney, Thos. Quiney, Elizabeth Hall, b. 1608 ; b. 1616. b. 1618. b. 1619. d. s. p. 1669. Elizabeth Hall was twice married : 1st to Thomas Nash — 2d to Jno. Bernard (knighted by Charles II.), and had no issue by either marriage. Of the Quiney children, above named, the 1st (Shake- speare), d. in infancy ; the 2d (Richard Quiney), d. without issue, in 1638 ; the 3d (Thomas Quiney), died the same year, 1638 — also without issue. SHAKESPEARE. 85 down ; scarce a vestige of it remains. The famous mulberry-tree he planted upon that greensward, where, in after years, Garrick and the rest held high commemorative festival, is gone, root and branch. Shakespeare — an old county guide-book tells us stolidly — is a name unknown in that region. Unknown ! Every leaf of every tree whispers it ; every soaring skylark makes a carol of it ; and the memory of it flows out thence — as flows the Stratford river — down through all the green val- ley of the Avon, down through all the green valley of the Severn, and so on, out to farthest seas, whose multitudinous waves ” carry it to every shore. CHAPTER m. E were venturing upon almost sacred ground » » when — in our last chapter — we had some- what to say of the so-called King James’ Bible ; of how it came to bear that name ; of those men who were concerned in its translation, and of certain literary qualities belonging to it, which — however excellent other and possible future Bibles may be — will be pretty sure to keep it alive for a very long time to come. Next, I spoke of that king of the dramatists who was born at Stratford. We followed him up to London ; tracked him awhile there ; talked of a few familiar aspects of his life and character ; spared you the recital of a world of things — con- jectural or eulogistic — which might be said of him ; and finally saw him go back to his old home upon the Avon, to play the retired gentleman — last of all his plays — and to die. TPVO GREAT TITLES. 87 This made a great coupling of topics for one chapter — Shakespeare and the English Bible ! No two titles in our whole range of talks can or should so interest those who are alive to the felicities of English forms of speech, and who are eager to com- pass and enjoy its largest and keenest and sim- plest forces of phrase. No other vocabulary of words, and no other exemplar of the aptitudes of language, than can be found in Shakespeare and in the English Bible are needed by those who would equip their English speech for its widest reach, and with its subtlest or sharpest powers. Out of those twin treasuries the student may dredge all the words he wants, and all the turns of expression that will be helpful, in the writing of a two-page letter or in the unfolding of an epic. Other books may make needful reservoir of facts, or record of theories, or of literary experimentation ; but these twain furnish sujBScient lingual armament for all new conquests in letters. We find ourselves to-day amid a great hurly-bur- ly of dramatists, poets, prose-writers, among whom we have to pick our way — making a descriptive dash at some few of them — seeing the old pedant 88 LANDS, LETTERS, RINGS. of a king growing more slipshod and more shaky, till at last he yields the throne to that unfortunate son of his, Charles I., in whose time we shall find some new singing-birds in the fields of British poesy, and birds of a different strain. Webster^ Ford, and Others. All those lesser dramatists going immediately be- fore Shakespeare, and coming immediately after or with him, may be counted in literary significance only as the trail to that grander figure which swung so high in the Elizabethan heavens ; many a one among the lesser men has written something which has the true poetic ring in it, and is to be treas- ured ; but ring however loudly it may, and how- ever musically it may, it will very likely have a larger and richer echo somewhere in Shakespeare. Among the names of those contemporaries whose names are sure of long survival may be mentioned John Webster ; a Londoner in all probability ; work- ing at plays early in the seventeenth century ; his name appearing on various title-pages up to 1624 certainly — one time as “merchant tailor;” and JOHN WEBSTER. 89 there are other intimations that he may have held some church “ clerkship ; ” but we know positively very little of him. Throughout the eighteenth cen- tury his name and fame* had slipped away from people’s knowledge ; somewhere about the year 1800 Charles Lamb gave forth his mellow piping of the dramatist’s deservings ; a quarter of a cen- tury later Mr. Dycef wrote and published what was virtually a resurrection work for Webster; and in our time the swift-spoken Swinburne transcends all the old conventionalities of encyclopaedic writ- ing in declaring this dramatist to be “hardly ex- celled for unflagging energy of impression and of pathos in all the poetic literature of the world.” Webster was not a jocund man ; he seems to have taken life in a hard way ; he swears at fate. Humane and pathetic touches there may be in his plays ; but he has a dolorous way of putting all the *The extreme limits of Ms life and career would prob- ably lie between 1575 and 1635 ; StraliarCs Biographical Dictionary of tbe last century makes no mention of Mm ; nor does the Biographic TJnwerselle of as early date. f Works of John Webster ; with some account of the Author, and Notes, by Rev. A. Dyce (original edition, 1830). 90 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. humanities to simmer in a great broth of crime. At least this may not be unfairly said of his chiefest works, and those by which he is best known — the “ Vittoria Corombona” and the ‘‘Duchess of Malfi.’" There are blood-curdling scenes in them through which one is led by a guidance that is as strenuous as it is fascinating. The drapery is in awful keep- ing with the trend of the story ; the easy murders hardly appal one, and the breezes that fan the air seem to come from the flutter of bat-like, leaden wings, hiding the blue. There are, indeed, won- drous flashes of dramatic power ; by whiles, too, there are refreshing openings-out to the light or sin- lessness of common day — a lifting of thought and consciousness up from the great welter of crime and crime’s entanglements ; but there is little brightness, sparse sunshine, rare panoply of green or blooming things ; even the flowers are put to sad oflSces, and “ do cover The friendless bodies of nnburied men.*’ When a man’s flower culture gets reduced to such narrow margin as this it does not carry exhilarat- ing odors with it. JOHN FORD. 91 John Ford^ was another name much coupled in those and succeeding days with that of Webster ; he was indeed associated with him in some of his work, as also with Dekker. He was a man of Devonshire birth, of good family ; — a little over- boastful of being above any want for money ; ’’ showing traces, indeed, of coarse arrogance, and swaying dramatically into coarse brutalities. He, too, was borne down by enslavement to the red splendors of crime ; his very titles carry such fore- taste of foulness we do not name them. There are bloody horrors and moral ones. Few read him for love. Murder makes room for incest, and incest sharpens knives for murder. Animal passions run riot ; the riot is often splendid, but never — to my mind — making head in such grand dramatic ut- terance as crowns the gory numbers of Webster. There are strong passages, indeed, gleaming out of the red riotings like blades of steel ; now and then some fine touch of pathos — of quiet contemplative brooding — lying amid the fiery wrack, like a violet on banks drenched with turbid floods ; but *Ford, b. about 1586, and d. 1640. Works edited by Gifford ; revised, with Dyce’s notes, 1869. 92 LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS. they are rare, and do not compensate — at least do not compensate me — for the wadings through bloody, foul quagmires to reach them. Marston — another John* — if not up to the tragic level of the two last named, had various talent ; wrote satires, parodies ; his Image of Pyg- malion had the honor of being publicly burned ; he wrought with Jonson on Eastward Hoe ! won the piping praises of Charles Lamb in our century, also of Hazlitt, and the eulogies of later and lesser crit- ics. But he is coarse, unequal, little read now. I steal a piquant bit of his satire on metaphysic study from What you Will; it reminds of the frolic moods of Browning : “I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh, Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept ; And still I held converse with Zabarell, Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws Of antique Donate : — still my spaniel slept. Still on went I : first, an sit anima, Then, an’ ’twere mortal. O hold, hold I At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears Amain [pell-mell] together — still my spaniel slept. * John Marston, b. 1565 (?) ; d. about 1634 ; believed to have been a Shropshire man, and one while of Brasenose College, Oxford. MASSINGER FLETCHER. 93 Then, whether ’twere corporeal, local, fixed, Ex traduce ; but whether ’t had free will Or no, hot philosophers Stood banding factions, all so strongly propped, I staggered, knew not which was firmer part ; But thought, quoted, read, observed, and pried, Stuffed noting books, — and still my spaniel slept. At length he waked, and yawned, and by yon sky, For aught I know, he knew as much as 1.” Massinger^ Beaumont^ and Fletcher. Some dozen or more existing plays are attribut- ed to Philip Massinger,* and he was doubtless the author of many others now unknown save by name. Of Wiltshire birth, his father had been de- pendant, or protege of the Pembroke family, and the Christian name of Philip very likely kept alive the paternal reverence for the great Philip Sidney. Though Massinger was an industrious writer, and was well accredited in his time, it is certain that he had many hard struggles, and passed through many a pinching day ; and at the last it would appear that * Philip Massinger, b. 1584 ; d. 1640. His works were edited by Gifford, and on this edition is based the later one of Col. Cunningham (1870). 94 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. he found burial, only as an outsider and stranger, in that old church of St. Saviours, near to London Bridge, where we found John Gower laid to rest with his books for pillow. If Massinger did not lift his lines into such gleams of tragic intensity as we spoke of in Webster and in Ford, he gave good, workman-like finish to his dramas ; and for bloody apparelling of his plots, I think there are murder- ous zealots, in his Sforza * story at least, who could fairly have clashed swords with the assassins of ‘‘Vittoria Corombona.” It is a large honor to Massinger that of all the dramas I have named — outside some few of Shakespeare’s — no one is so well known to modern play-goers as the ‘‘ New Way to Pay Old Debts.” The character of Sir Giles Overreach does not lose its terrible significance. In our times, as in the old times, “He frights men out of their estates, And breaks through all law-nets — made to curb ill men — As they were cobwebs.” When Massinger died tradition says that he was thrust into the same grave which had been opened • “ The Duke of Milan. BEAUMONT FLETCHER. 95 shortly before for John Fletcher; if not joined there, these two had certainly been fellows in lit- erary work ; and there are those who think that the name of Massinger should have recognition in that great dramatic copartnery under style of Beau- mont and Fletcher.* Certain it is that other writers had share in the work ; among them — in at least one instance (that of “ Two Noble Kins- men ”) — the fine hand of Shakespeare. But whatever helping touches or of outside journey-work may have been contributed to that mass of plays which bears name of Beaumont and Fletcher, it is certain that they hold of right that brilliant reputation for deft and lively and winning dramatic work which put their popularity before Jonson’s, if not before Shakespeare’s. The coup- ling together of this pair of authors at their work has the air of romance ; both were well born ; Fletcher, son of a bishop ; Beaumont, son of Sir Francis Beaumont, of Grace-Dieu (not far away from Ashby-de-la-Zouch) ; both were university men, and though differing in age by eight or nine * John Fletcher, b. 1579 ; d. 1625. Francis Beaumont, son of Sir Francis Beaumont, b. (probably) 1585 ; d. 1616. 96 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. years, yet coming — very likely through the good oflSices of Ben Jonson — to that sharing of home and work and wardrobe which the old gossip Aubrey * has delighted in picturing. They wrought charm- ingly together, and with such a nice welding of jointures, that literary craftsmen, of whatever as- tuteness, are puzzled to say where the joinings lie. In agreement, however, with opinions of best critics, it may be said that Beaumont (the younger, who died nine years before his mate) was pos- sessed of the deeper poetic fervors, while Fletcher was wider in fertilities and larger in affluence of diction. The dramatic horrors of Ford and Webster are softened in the lines of these later playwrights. These are debonair ; they are lively ; they are jo- * Aubrey, who died in 1697, and who is often cited, was an antiquary — not always to be relied upon — an Oxford man, friend of Thomas Hobbes, was heir to sundry coun- try estates, which, through defective titles, involved him in suits, that brought him to grief. He was a diligent 'col- lector of “whim- whams” — very credulous; supplied An- thony a Wood (1632-1695) with much of his questionable material ; and kept up friendly relations with a great many cultivated and literary people. BEAUMONT &- FLETCHER, 97 cund ; they tell stories that have a beginning and an end ; they pique attention ; there are delicacies, too, and — it must be said — a good many indelica- cies ; there are light-virtued women, and marital infelicities get an easy ripening toward the over- ripeness and rottenness that is to come in Kestora- tion times. These twain were handsome fellows, by Aubrey's and all other accounts ; Beaumont most noticeably so ; and Fletcher — brightly swarthy, red-haired, full-blooded — dying a bachelor and of the plague, down in the time of Charles L, and thrust hastily into the grave at St. Saviours, where Massinger presently followed him. I must give at least one taste of the dramatic manner for which both of these men were sponsors. It is from the well-known play of “ Philaster ” that I quote, where Euphrasia tells of the tender dis- covery of what stirred her heart : — ‘ ‘ My father oft would speak Your worth and virtue : And as I did grow More and more apprehensive, I did thirst To see the man so praised ; hut yet all this Was but a maiden longing, to be lost As soon as found ; till, sitting in my window Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god 98 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. I thought (but it was you) enter our gates. My blood flew out, and back again as fast As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in Like breath. Then was I called away in haste To entertain you. Never was a man Heaved from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, raised So high in thoughts as I : I did hear you talk Far above singing ! After you were gone, I grew acquainted with my heart, and searched What stirred it so. Alas, I found it Love I ** Nothing better in its way can be found in all their plays. One mentioning word, however, should be given to those delightful lyrical aptitudes, by virtue of which the blithe and easy metric felici- ties of Elizabethan days were overlaid in tendrils of song upon the Carolan times. I wish, too, that I had space for excerpts from that jolly pastoral of The Faithful Shepherdess — bewildering in its easy gaieties, and its cumulated classicisms — and which lends somewhat of its deft caroling, and of its arch conceits to the later music of Milton’s ‘^Comus.” Another foretaste of Milton comes to us in these words of Fletcher : — “Hence, all you vain delights, As short as are the nights KING JAMES AGAIN 99 Wherein you spend your folly ! There’s nought in this life, sweet, If man were wise to see’t, But only melancholy, O sweetest melancholy ! Welcome folded arms and fixed eyes, A sigh that piercing mortifies, A look that’s fastened to the ground, A tongue chain’d up without a sound I Fountain heads and pathless groves. Places which pale passion loves I Moonlight walks, when all the fowls Are warmly hous’d save hats and owls ! A midnight hell, a parting groan, These are the sounds we feed upon ; Then stretch our hones in a still gloomy valley ; Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.”* King James and Family. Meanwhile, how are London and England getting on with their ram-shackle dotard of a King ? Not well ; not proudly. Englishmen were not as boast- ful of being Englishmen as in the days when the virgin Elizabeth queened it, and shattered the Span- ish Armada, and made her will and England’s power * From the “Nice Valour or the Passionate Madman.” By Seward this comedy is ascribed to Beaumont. lOO LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. respected everywhere. James, indeed, had a son, Prince Henry, who promised far better things for England, and for the Stuart name, than his pedant of a father. This son was a friend of Ealeigh’s (would, maybe have saved that great man from the scaffold, if he had lived), a friend, too, of all the high-minded, far-seeing ones who best represented Elizabethan enterprise; but he died, poor fellow, at nineteen, leaving the heirship to that Charles L whose dis- mal history you know. James had also a daugh- ter — Elizabeth — a high-spirited maiden, who, amid brilliant fetes made in her honor, married that Frederic, Elector Palatine, who received his bride in the magnificent old castle, you will remember at Heidelberg. There they show still the great gateway of the Princess Elizabeth, clad in ivy, and the Elizabeth gardens. ’Twas said that her ambi- tion and high spirit pushed the poor Elector into political complications that ruined him, and that made the once owner of that princely chateau an outcast, and almost a beggar. The King, too, by his vanities, his indifference, and cowardice, helped largely the discomfiture of this branch of his fam- KING JAMES. lOI ily, as he did by his wretched bringing up of Charles pave the way for that monarch’s march into the gulf of ruin. In foreign politics this weak king coquetted in a childish way — sometimes with the Catholic powers ; sometimes with the Protestant powers of Middle Europe ; and at home, with a ridiculous sense of his own importance, he angered the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Puritans of England by his perpetual interferences. He provoked the emigra- tion that was planting, year by year, a New England west of the Atlantic ; he harried the House of Com- mons into an antagonism which, by its growth and earnestness was, by and by, to upset his throne and family together. His power was the power of a blister that keeps irritating — and not like Eliza- beth’s — the power of a bludgeon that thwacks and makes an end. And in losing respect this King gained no love. Courtiers could depend on his promises as little as kingdoms. He chose his favorites for a fine coat, or a fine face, and thereafter, from sheer indolence yielded to them in everything. In personal habits, too, he grew more and more unbearable ; his doub- 102 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. lets were all dirtier ; his wigs shabbier ; his coarse jokes coarser ; his tipsiness frequenter. A foulness grew up in the court which tempted such men as Fletcher and Massinger to fouler ways of speech, and which lured such creatures as Lady Essex to ruin. A pretty sort of King was this to preach against tobacco ! James had given up poetry-writing, in which he occasionally indulged before coming to England ; yet he had poetical tastes ; he enjoyed greatly many of Shakespeare’s plays ; Ben Jonson, too, was a pet of his, and had easy access to royalty, cer- tainly until his quarrel with the great court archi- tect, Inigo Jones. But, as in all else, the King’s taste in poetry grew coarser as he grew older, and he showed a great liking for a certain John Taylor,* called “the Water-Poet,” a rough, coarse creature, who sculled boats across the Thames for hire ; who made a foot-trip into Scotland in rivalry of Ben ♦ John Taylor, b. 1580 ; d. 1654. Various papers and poems (so called) of his are printed in vol. ii. of Hindley’s Old Book Collecto7'’'s Miscellany, London, 1872. The Spenser Society has also printed an edition of his works, in 5 vols., 1870-78. JOHN TAYLOR. 103 Jonson, and who wrote a Very merry wherry Voyage from London to Yorhy and a Kecksy-Win- sey, or a Lerry-cum-twang, which you will not find in your treasures of literature, but which the leering King loved to laugh over in his cups. Tay- lor afterward was keeper of a rollicking, Eoyalist tavern in Oxford, and of another in London, where he died at the age of seventy-four. Tobacco, first introduced in Ealeigh’s early voy- aging times, came to have a little fund of literature crystallizing about it — what with histories of its in- troduction and properties, and onslaughts upon it. Bobadil, the braggart, in ‘‘Every Man in his Humor,” says : “I have been in the Indies (where this herbe growes), where neither myself nor a dozen gentlemen more (of my knowledge) have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but Tobacco only. Therefore it cannot be, but ’tis most Divine.” There were many curious stories afloat too — taking different shapes — of the great apprehen- sion ignorant ones felt on seeing people walking about, as first happened in these times, with smoke 104 LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS, pouring from their mouths and noses. In an old book called The English Hue and Crie (printed about 1610), it takes something like this form : “ A certain Welcliman, coming newly to London, and be- holding one to take Tobacco, never seeing the like before, and not knowing the manner of it, but perceiving him vent smoak so fast, and supposing his inward parts to be on fire, screamed an alarm, and dashed over him a big pot of Beer.” King James’ Gounterhlaste to the Use of Tobacco, had about the same efficacy with the Welshman’s beer-pot. But to show the King’s method of argu- ing, I give one little whiff of it. Tobacco-lovers of that day alleged that it cleared the head and body of ugly rheums and distillations ; “But,” says the King, “ the fallacy of this argument may easily appeare, by my late preceding description of the skyey * meteors. For even as the smoaky Vapors sucked up by the sunne and stay’d in the lowest and colde region of the Ay re, are there contracted into clouds, and turned into Raine, and such other watery meteors : so this nasty smoke sucked up by the Nose, and imprisoned in the cold and moist braines, is by their colde and wet faculty, turned and cast forth againe in watery distillations, and so are you made free and purged of nothing, but that wherewith you wilfully burdened yourselves.” A NEW KING. 105 Is it any wonder people kept on smoking ? He reasoned in much the same way about church mat- ters ; is it any wonder the Scotch would not have Anglicanism thrust upon them ? The King died at last (1625), aged fifty-nine, at his palace of Theobalds, a little out of London, and very famous, as I have said, for its fine gardens ; and these gardens this prematurely old and shat- tered man did greatly love ; loved perhaps more than his children. I do not think Charles mourned for him very grievously ; but, of a surety there was no warrant for the half-hinted allegation of Milton’s (at a later day) that the royal son was concerned in some parricidal scheme. There was, however, no- where great mourning for James. A New King and some Literary Survivors. The new King, his son, was a well-built young fellow of twenty-five, of fine appearance, well taught, and just on the eve of his marriage to Henrietta of France. He had a better taste than his father, and lived a more orderly life ; indeed, he was every way decorous save in an obstinate temper and in absurd io6 LANDS, LETTERS^ KINGS. notions about his kingly prerogative. He loved play-going and he loved poetry, though not so ac- cessible as his father had been to the buffoonery of the water-poet Taylor, or the tipsy obeisance of old Ben Jonson. For Ben Jonson was still living, not yet much over fifty, though with his great bulk and reeling gait seeming nearer seventy ; now, too, since Shakespeare is gone, easily at the head of all the lit- erary workers in London ; indeed, in some sense always at the head by reason of his dogged self- in- sistence and his braggadocio. All the street world * knows him, as he swaggers along the Strand to his new jolly rendezvous at the Devil Tavern, near St. Dunstan’s, in Fleet Street — not far off from the Temple Church — where he and his fellows meet in the Apollo Chamber, over whose door Ben has writ- ten : “ Welcome, all who lead or follow To the oracle of Apollo ! Here he speaks out of his pottle On the tripos — his tower-bottle,” etc. Of all we have named hitherto among the Eliza- bethan poets, the only ones who would be likely to * London was not over-large at this day ; its population counted about 175,000. JAMES HOWELL. 107 appear there in Charles L’s time would be George Chapman, of the Homer translation ; staid and very old now, with snowy hair \ and Dekker — what time he was out of prison for debt ; possibly, too, John Marston. Poor Ben Jonson wrote about this time his last play, which did not take either with court- iers or the public ; whereupon the old grumbler was more rough than ever, and died a few years thereafter, wretchedly poor, and was put into the ground — upright, tradition says, as into a well — in Westminster Abbey. There one may walk over his name and his crown ; and this is the last we shall see of him, whose swagger has belonged to three reigns. Among other writers known to these times and who went somewhiles to these suppers at the Apollo was James Howell,* notable because he wrote so much ; and I specially name him because he was the earliest and best type of what we should call a hack- writer ; ready for anything ; a shrewd salesman, too, of all he did write ; travelling largely — having * James Howell, b. 1594 ; d. 1666. He was son of a min- ister in Carmarthenshire, and took his degree at Oxford in 1613. io8 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. modern instincts, I think ; making small capital — whether of learning or money — reach enormously. He was immensely popular, too, in his day ; a Welshman by birth, and never wrote at all till past forty ; but afterward he kept at it with a terrible pertinacity. He gives quaint advice about foreign travel, with some shrewdness cropping out in it. Thus of languages he says : “Whereas, for other Tongues one may attaine to speak them to very good purpose, and get their good will at any age ; the French tongue, by reason of the huge difference ’twixt their writing and speaking, will put one often into fits of despaire and passion ; but the Learner must not be daunted a whit at that, but after a little intermission hee must come on more strongly, and with a pertinacity of resolution set upon her againe and againe, and woo her as one would do a coy mistress, with a kind of importunity, until he over-mas- ter her : She will be very plyable at last. ” Then he says, for improvement, it is well to have the acquaintance of some ancient nun, with whom one may talk through the grated windows — for they have all the news, and they will entertain discourse till one be weary, if one bestow on them now and then some small bagatells — as English Gloves, or Knives, or Eibands — and before hee go over. WOTTON &» WALTON. 109 hee must furnish himself with such small curiosi- ties.” The expenses of travel in that day on the Conti- nent, he says, for a young fellow who has his ‘‘ Bid- ing and Dancing and Fencing, and Eacket, and Coach-hire, with apparel and other casual charges will be about £300 per annum ” — which sum (allow- ing for differences in moneyed values) may have been a matter of $6,000. He says with great apt- ness, too, that the traveller must not neglect letter- writing, which ‘ ‘ he should do exactly and not carelessly : For letters are the ideas and truest mirrors of the mind ; they show the in- side of a man and how he improveth himself.*’ Wotton and Walton. Another great traveller of these times — but one whose dignities would, I suspect have kept him away from the Devil Tavern — was Sir Henry Wotton.* He was a man who had supplemented his university training by long residence abroad ; who had been of * Of an ancient county family in Mid-Kent : b. 1568 ; d. 1639. no LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. service to King James (before the King had yet left Scotland) by divulging to him and defeating some purposed scheme of poisoning. Wotton was, later, English ambassador at the brilliant court of Venice, whence he wrote to the King many suggestions respecting the improvement of his garden, detailing Italian methods, and forwarding grafts and rare seedlings ; he was familiar with most European courts — hobnobbed with Doges and with Kings, was a scholar of elegant and various accomplish- ments, and the reputed maker of that old and well- worn witticism about ambassadors — that they were honest men, sent to lie abroad for the good of their country.” He was, furthermore, himself boast- ful of the authorship of this prickly saying, ‘‘ The itch of disputation is the scab of the church.”* There is also a charming little poem of his — which gets place in the anthologies — addressed to that Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, whom we encoun- tered as a bride at the Castle of Heidelberg, and who became the mother of the accomplished and * In his will he suggested this epitaph to be put over his grave : '' Hie jacet hujus sententice primm auctor, Disputandi Pruritus EcclesuB ScahiesT IZAAK WALTON. Ill daring Prince Eupert. Such a man as Wotton, full of anecdote, bristling with wit, familiar with courts, and one who could match phrases with James, or Charles, or Buckingham, in Latin, or French, or Italian, must have been a god-send for a dinner-party at Theobalds, or at Whitehall. To crown his graces, Walton ^ tells us that he was an excellent fisherman. And this mention of the quiet Angler tempts me to enroll him here, a little before his time ; yet he was well past thirty when James died, and must have been busy in the ordering of his draper’s shop in Fleet Street when Charles I. came to power. He was of Staffordshire birth, and no millinery of the city could have driven out of his mind the pretty ruralities of his Staffordshire home, and the lovely far-off views of the Welsh hills. His first wife was grandniece of Bishop Cranmer ; he was himself friend of Dr. Donne, to whom he listened from Sunday to Sunday ; a second wife was sister of that Thomas Ken who came to be Bishop of Bath and Wells ; so he was hemmed in by ecclesiasti- cisms, and loved them as he loved trout. He was * Izaak Walton, b. 1593 ; d. 1683. II2 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, 'warm Eoyalisfc always, and lived by old traditions in Church and State — not easily overset byEeformers. No fine fioral triumphs of any new gardeners, how- ever accredited, could blind him to the old glories of the eglantine or of a damask rose. A good and quiet friend, a placid book, a walk under trees, made sufficient regalement for him. These, with a fishing bout (by way of exceptional entertainment), and a Sunday in a 'village church, with the Litany well intoned, were all in all to him. His book holds spicy place among ranks of books, as lavender keeps fresh odor among stores of linen. It is worth any man’s dalliance with the fishing-craft to make him receptive to the simplicities and limpid- ities of Walton’s Angler, I am tempted to say of him again, what I have said of him before in other connection: — very few fine 'writers of our time could make a better book on such a subject to-day, with all the added information and all the practice of the newspaper columns. What Walton wants to say, he says. You can make no mistake about his meaning ; all is as lucid as the water of a spring. He does not play upon your wonderment with tropes. There is no chicane of the pen ; he has IZAAK WALTON. some pleasant matters to tell of, and lie tells of them — straight. Another great charm about Walton is his child- like truthfulness. I think he is almost the only earnest trout-fisher (unless Sir Humphry Davy be excepted) whose report could be relied upon for the weight of a trout. I have many excellent friends — capital fishermen — whose word is good upon most concerns of life, but in this one thing they cannot be religiously confided in. I excuse it ; I take off twenty per cent, from their estimates without either hesitation, anger, or reluctance. I must not omit to mention his charming bio- graphic sketches (rather than “ lives ”) of Hooker, of Wotton, of Herbert, of Donne — the letterpress of all these flowing easily and limpidly as the brooks he loved to picture. He puts in very much pretty embroidery too, for which tradition or street gossip supplied him with his needs, in figure and in color ; this is not always of best authenticity, it is true ; ^ but who wishes to question when it is * Statements about George Herbert, in the matter of the Melville controversy, are specially to be doubted. Of Ben Jonson he says : “ He lived with a woman that governed LANDS, LETTERS, 6^ KINGS. 1 14 the simple-souled and always honest Walton who is talking ? And as for his great pastoral of The Com- plete Angler — to read it, in whatever season, is like plunging into country air, and sauntering through lovely country solitudes. I name Sir Thomas Overbury* * — who was the first, I think, to make that often-repeated joke re- specting people who boasted of their ancestry, say- ing “ they were like potatoes, with the best part below ground” — because he belonged to this pe- riod, and was a man of elegant culture and literary promise. He was poisoned in the Tower at the in- stance of some great people about the court of James, who feared damaging testimony of his upon a trial that was just then to come off ; and this trial and poisoning business, in which (Carr) Somerset and Lady Essex were deeply concerned, made one him, near Westminster Abbey, and neither he nor she took much care for next week, and would be sure not to want wine ; of which he usually took too much before he went to bed, if not oftener and sooner — all which shows a pretty accessibility to gossip. * Overbury, b. 1581 ; d. 1613 (poisoned in London Tower). Eimbault’s Life, 1856 ; also Strahan’s Biographical BicUon- ary, 1784. GEORGE HERBERT. 115 of the greatest scandals of the scandalous court of King James. Overbury’s Charax)ters are the best known of his writings, but they are slight ; quaint metaphors and tricksy English are in them, with a good many tiresome affectations of speech. What he said of the Dairymaid is best of all. George Herbert. This is a name which will be more familiar to the reader, and if he has never encountered the little olive-green, gilt-edged budget of Herbert’s ^ poems, he can hardly have failed to have met, on some page of the anthologies, such excerpt as this about Virtue : “ Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky. The dew shall weep thy fall to-night ; For thou must die. * George Herbert, b. 1593 ; d. 1633. The edition of his poems referred to is that of Bell & Daldy, London, 1861. Walton’s Life of him is delightful; but one who desires the whole story should not fail of reading Dr. Grosart’s essay, prefatory to the works of George Herbert, in the Fuller WorthieB' Library^ London, 1874, Ii6 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. “ Sweet rose, whose hue, angry and brave. Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye, Thy root is ever in its grave, And thou must die. “ Only a sweet and virtuous soul, Like season’d timber, never gives ; But though the whole world turn to coal, Then chiefly lives.” And now, that I have quoted this, I wish that I had quoted another ; and so it would be, I suppose, were I to go through the little book. One cannot go amiss of lines that will show his tenderness, his strong religious feeling, his gloomy coloring, his quaint conceits — with not overmuch rhythmic grace, but a certain spiritual unction that commends him to hosts of devout-minded people everywhere. Yet I cannot help thinking that he would have been lost sight of earlier in the swarm of seventeenth-century poets, had it not been for a certain romantic glow attaching to his short life. And first, he was a scion from the old Pembroke stock, born in a great cas- tle on the Welsh borders, and bred in luxury. He went to Cambridge for study at a time when he may have encountered there the grim boy-student. GEORGE HERBERT, 117 Oliver Cromwell, or possibly that other fair-faced Cambridge student, John Milton, who was upon the rolls eight years later. He was a young fellow of rare scholarship, winning many honors ; was tall, spare, with an eagle eye ; and so he wins upon old James I, when he comes down on a visit to the University (the Mother Herbert managing to have the King see his best points, even to his silken doublets and his jewelled buckles, of which the lad was fond). And he is taken into favor, bandies compliments with the monarch, goes again and again to London and to court ; sees Chancellor Bacon familiarly — corrects proofs for him — and has hopes of high preferment. But his chief patron dies ; the King dies ; and that bubble of royal inflation is at an end. It was after long mental struggle, it would seem, that George Herbert, whom we know as the saintly poet, let the hopes of court consequence die out of his heart. But once wedded to the Church his re- ligious activities and sanctities knew no hesitations. His marriage even was an incident that had no worldly or amorous delays. A Mr. Danvers, kins- man of Herbert’s step-father, thought all the world ii8 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. of the poet, and declared his utter willingness that Herbert ‘‘ should marry any one of his nine daugh- ters [for he had so many], but rather Jane, because Jane was his beloved daughter.” And to such good effect did the father talk to Jane, that she, as old Walton significantly tells us, was in love with the poet before yet she had seen him. Only four days after their first meeting these twain were married ; nor did this sudden union bring such disastrous result as so swift an engineering of similar con- tracts is apt to show. At Bemerton vicarage, almost under the shadow of Salisbury cathedral, he began, shortly thereafter, that saintly and poetic life which his verse illustrates and which every memory of him ennobles. His charities were beautiful and constant ; his love of the fiesh, his early “ choler,” and all courtly leanings crucified. Even the peasants thereabout stayed the plough and listened reverently (another Angelus !) when the sounds of his “ Praise-bells ” broke upon the air. It is a delightful picture the old Angler biographer gives of him there in his quiet vicarage of Bemerton, or footing it away over Salisbury Plain, to lift up his orison in symphony with the GEORGE HERBERT. 119 organ notes that pealed from underneath the arches of Salisbury’s wondrous cathedral. Yet over all the music and the poems of this Church poet, and over his life, a tender gloom lay constantly ; the grave and death were always in his eye — always in his best verses. And after some half-dozen years of poetic battling with the great problems of life and of death, and a further battling with the chills and fogs of Wiltshire, that smote him sorely, he died. He was buried at Bemerton, where a new church has been built in his honor. It may be found on the high-road leading west from Salisbury, and only a mile and a half away ; and at Wilton — the carpet town — which is only a fifteen minutes’ walk be- yond, may be found that gorgeous church, built not long ago by another son of the Pembroke stock (the late Lord Herbert of Lea), who perhaps may have had in mind the churchly honors due to his poetic kinsman ; and yet all the marbles which are lavished upon this Wilton shrine are poorer, and will sooner fade than the mosaic of verse builded into The Tern* pie of George Herbert. 120 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Robert Herrick. I deal with a clergyman again ; but there are clergymen — and clergymen. Kobert Herrick * was the son of a London gold- smith, born on Cheapside, not far away from that Mermaid Tavern of which mention has been made ; and it is very likely that the young Robert, as a boy, may have stood before the Tavern windows on tiptoe, listening to the drinking songs that came pealing forth when Ben Jonson and the rest were in their first lusty manhood. He studied at Cambridge, receiving, may be, some scant help from his rich uncle. Sir William Herrick, who had won his title by giving good jewel bargains to King James. He would seem to have made a long stay in Cambridge ; and only in 1620, when our Pil- grims were beating toward Plymouth shores, do we hear of him domiciled in London — learning the town, favored by Ben Jonson and his fellows, per- ^ Robert Herrick b. (or at least baptized) 1591 ; d. 1674. The fullest edition of his works is that edited by Dr. Gro- sart, and published by Chatto h Windus, London, 1876. ROBERT HERRICK. 121 haps apprenticed to the goldsmith craft, certainly putting jewels into fine settings of verse even then ; some of them with coarse flaws in them, but full of a glitter and sparkle that have not left them yet. Nine years later, after such town experiences as we cannot trace, he gets, somehow, appointment to a church living down in Devonshire at Dean Prior. His parish was on the southeastern edge of that great heathery stretch of wilderness called Dart- moor Forest : out of this, and from under cool shadows of the Tors, ran brooks which in the cleared valleys were caught by rude weirs and shot out in irrigating skeins of water upon the grassland. Yet it was far away from any echo of the Mermaid ; old traditions were cherished there ; old ways were reckoned good ways ; and the ploughs of that region are still the clumsiest to be found in England. There Robert Herrick lived, preaching and writing poems, through those eighteen troub- lous years which went before the execution of Charles I. What the goldsmith-vicar’s sermons were we can only conjecture: w^hat the poems were he writ, we can easily guess from the flowers that enjewel them, or the rarer “ noble numbers ” 122 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. which take hold on religious sanctities. This preacher-poet twists the lilies and roses into bright little garlands, that blush and droop in his pretty couplets, as they did in the vicar’s garden of Dev- on. The daffodils and the violets give out their odors to him, if he only writes their names. Hear what he says to Phyllis, and how the num- bers flow : “ The soft, sweet moss shall he thy bed, With crawling woodbine overspread : By which the silver-shedding streams Shall gently melt thee into dreams. Thy clothing next, shall be a gown Made of the fleeces’ purest down. The tongues of kids shall be thy meat ; Their milk thy drink ; and thou shalt eat The paste of filberts for thy bread, With cream of cowslips buttered : Thy feasting table shall be hills With daisies spread and daffodils ; Where thou shalt sit, and Ked-breast by, For meat, shall give thee melody.” Then again, see how in his soberer and medi- tative moods, he can turn the rich and resonant Litany of the Anglican Church into measures of sweet sound : ROBERT HERRICK. 123 In the hour of my distress, When temptations me oppress, And when I my sins confess, Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! “When I lie within my bed, Sick in heart, and sick in head, And with doubts discomforted. Sweet Spirit, comfort me I “ When the house doth sigh and weep, And the world is drown’d in sleep. Yet mine eyes the watch do keep. Sweet Spirit, comfort me I ** When the passing bell doth toll. And the furies in a shoal Come, to fright a parting soul, ^ Sweet Spirit, comfort me ! “When the judgment is reveal’d. And that opened which was seal’d ; When to thee I have appeal’d, Sweet Spirit, comfort me I ” Now, in reading these two poems of such oppo- site tone, and yet of agreeing verbal harmonies, one would say — here is a singer, serene, devout, of delicate mould, loving all beautiful things in heaven and on earth. One would look for a man saintly of aspect, deep-eyed, tranquil, too ethereal for earth. Well, I must tell the truth in these talks, so far 324 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. as I can find it, no matter what cherished images may break down. This Eobert Herrick was a pon- derous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a great Koman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus.* It was such a figure as the artists would make typical of a man who loves the grossest pleasures. The poet kept a pet goose at the vicarage, and also a pet pig, which he taught to drink beer out of his own tankard ; and an old parishioner, for whose story Anthony a Wood is sponsor, tells us that on one occasion when his little Devon congre- gation would not listen to him as he thought they ought to listen, he dashed his sermon on the fioor, and marched with tremendous stride out of church — home to fondle his pet pig. When Charles L came to grief, and when the * Dr. Grosart objects that most portraits are too gross : I am content if comparison be made only with the engraving authorized by Dr. Grosart, and authenticated by his careful investigation and a warm admiration for his subject. ROBERT HERRICK. 125 Puritans began to sift the churches, this Royal- ist poet proved a clinker that was caught in the meshes and thrown aside. This is not surprising. It was after his enforced return to London, and in the year 1648 (one year before Charles’ execution at Whitehall), that the first authoritative publica- tion was made of the Hesperides, or WorkSy both Humane and Divine y of Robert Herrick , Esq. — his clerical title dropped. There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus ; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal feli- cities of Martial ; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels ; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fash- ioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The ‘‘more’s the pity” for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages ; things unreadable ; things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England. To what period of his life belonged his looser verses it is hard to say ; perhaps to those early days when, fresh from Cambridge, Ben Jonson patted him on 126 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. the shoulder approvingly ; perhaps to those later years when, soured by his ejection from the Church, he dropped his Eeverend, and may have capped verses with such as Davenant or Lovelace, and others, whose antagonism of Puritanism provoked wantonness of speech. At the restoration of Charles 11., Herrick was re- instated in his old parish in Devonshire, and died there, among the meadows and the daffodils, at the ripe age of eighty-four. And as we part with this charming singer, we cannot forbear giving place to this bit of his penitential verse : “ For these my unbaptized rhymes Writ in my wild unhallowed times, For every sentence, clause, and word That’s not inlaid with thee, O Lord ; Forgive me, God, and blot each line Out of my book, that is not thine I ” Revolutionary Times. I have given the reader a great many names to remember to-day ; they are many, because we have found no engrossing one whose life and genius have held us to a long story. But we should never NEW POETIC FORMS. 127 enjoy the great memories except they were set in the foil of lesser ones, to emphasize their glories. The writers of this particular period — some of whom I have named — fairly typify and illustrate the drift of letters away from the outspoken ar- dors and full-toned high exuberance of Elizabethan days, to something more coy, more schooled, more reticent, more measured, more tame.* The cunning of word arrangement comes into the place of spontaneous, maybe vulgar wit ; humor is saddled with school-craftiness ; melodious echoes take the place of fresh bursts of sound. Po- etry, that gurgled out by its own wilful laws of progression, now runs more in channels that old laws have marked. Words and language that had been used to tell straightforwardly stories of love and passion and suffering are now put to uses of pomp and decoration. Moreover, in Elizabethan times, when a great monarch and great ministers held the reins of power undisturbed and with a knightly hand, min- * Herrick is not an example of this ; hut Herbert is ; so is Overbury with his “ Wife so is Vaughan ; so is Browne. 128 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. strelsy, wherever it might lift its voice, had the backing and the fostering support of great tranquil- lity and gi'eat national pride. In the days when the Armada was crushed, when British ships and Brit- ish navigators brought every year tales of gold, tales of marvellous new shores, when princes of the proudest courts came flocking to pay suit to Eng- land’s great Virgin Queen, what poet should not sing at his loudest and his bravest? But in the times into which we have now drifted, there is no tranquillity ; the fever of Puritans against Angli- cans, of Independents against Monarchy Men, is raging through all the land ; pride in the kingship of such as James I. had broken down ; pride in the kingship of the decorous Charles 1. has broken down again. All intellectual ardors run into the channels of the new strifes. Only through little rifts in the stormy sky do the sunny gleams of poesy break in. There are colonies, too, planted over seas, and growing apace in these days, whither the eyes and thoughts of many of the bravest and clearest think- ers are turning. Even George Herbert, warmest of Anglicans, and of the noble house of Pembroke, was OVER Seas, 129 used to say, ‘‘ Eeligion * is going over seas.” They were earnest, hard workers, to be sure, who went — keen-thoughted — far-seeing — most diligent — not up to poems indeed, save some little occasional burst of melodious thanksgiving. But they carried memories of the best and of the strongest that be- longed to the intellectual life of England. The ponderous periods of Eichard Hooker, and the harshly worded wise things of John Selden,f found lodgement in souls that were battling with the snows and pine-woods where Andover and Salem and Newburyport were being planted. And over there, maybe, first of all, would hope kindle and faith brighten at sound of that fair young Puritan * “ Religion stands on tiptoe in onr land Ready to pass to the American strand. My God, Thou dost prepare for them a way, By carrying first their gold from them away ; For gold and grace did never yet agree ; Religion always sides with Poverty. ” — Herbert’s Tlie Church Militant. fJohn Selden, b. 1584; d. 1654. His Table-Talk, by which he is best known, was published in 1689. Coleridge said, “ It contains more weighty bullion sense than I have ever found in the same number of pages of any uninspired writer.” II.— 9 130 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. poet, who has just now, in Cambridge, sung his ‘‘ Hymn of the Nativity.” ^ But the storm and the wreck were coming. There were forewarnings of it in the air ; fore- warnings of it in the court and in Parliament ; fore- warnings of it in every household. City was to be pitted against city ; brother against brother ; and in that “ sea of trouble,” down went the King and the leaders of old, and up rose the Commonwealth and the leaders of the new faith. In our next talk we shall find all England rocking on that red wave of war. You would think poets should be silent, and the eloquent dumb; but we shall hear, lifting above the uproar, the golden lan- guage of Jeremy Taylor — the measured cadences of Waller — the mellifluous jingle of Suckling and of his Eoyalist brothers, and drowning all these with its grand sweep of sound, the majestic organ- music of Milton. * Jolin Milton : written 1629. CHAPTER IV. I DID not hold the reader’s attention long to the nightmare tragedies of Webster and Ford, though they show shining passages of amazing dramatic power. Marston was touched upon, and that satiric vein of his, better known perhaps than his more ambitious work. We spoke of Massinger, whose money-monster, Giles Overreach, makes one think of the railway wreckers of our time ; then came the gracious and popular Beaumont and Fletcher, twins in work and in friendship ; the for- mer dying in the same year with Shakespeare, and Fletcher dying the same year with King James (1625). I spoke of that Prince Harry who promised well, but died young, and of Charles, whose sad story will come to ampler mention in our present talk. We made record of the death of Ben Jonson — of the hack- writing service of James Howell — of 132 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. the dilettante qualities of Sir Henry Wotton, and of the ever-delightful work and enduring fame of the old angler, Izaak Walton. And last we closed our talk with sketches of two poets : the one, George Herbert, to whom his priestly work and his saintly verse were all in all and the other, Kobert Her- rick, born to a goldsmith’s craft, but making verses that glittered more than all the jewels of Cheapside. King Charles and his Friends, We open this morning upon times when New- England towns were being planted among the pine-woods, and the decorous, courtly, unfortunate Charles I. had newly come to the throne. Had the King been only plain Charles Stuart, he would doubtless have gone through life with the reputa- tion of an amiable, courteous gentleman, not over- sturdy in his friendships — a fond father and good husband, with a pretty taste in art and in books, but strongly marked with some obstinacies about the w^'ays of wearing his rapier, or of tying his cravat, or of overdrawing his bank account. Specially instanced in liis final desertion of Strafford. DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, 133 In the station that really fell to him those obsti- nacies took hold upon matters which brought him to grief. The man who stood next to Charles, and who virtually governed him, was that George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who by his fine doublets, fine dancing, and fine presence, had very early com- mended himself to the old King James, and now lorded it with the son. He was that Steenie who in Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel plays the braggadocio of the court : he had attended Prince Charles upon that Quixotic errand of his, incognito, across Europe, to play the wooer at the feet of the Infanta of Spain ; and when nothing came of all that show of gallantry and the lavishment of jewels upon the dusky heiress of Castile, the same Buckingham had negotiated the marriage with the French princess, Henrietta. He was a brazen courtier, a shrewd man of the world ; full of all accomplishments ; full of all profligacy. He made and unmade bishops and judges, and bol- stered the King in that antagonism to the Commons of England which was rousing the dangerous in- dignation of such men as Eliot and Hampden and Pym. Private assassination, however, took him off before the coming of the great day of wrath. You 134 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, must not confound this Duke of Buckingham with another George Villiers, also Duke of Buckingham, who was his son, and who figured largely in the days of Charles IE. — being even more witty, and more graceful, and more profligate — if possible — than his father ; a literary man withal, and the au- thor of a play * which had great vogue. Another striking figure about the court of Charles was a small, red-faced man, keen-eyed, sanctimonious, who had risen from the humble ranks (his father having been a clothier in a small town of Berkshire) to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. So starched was he in his High- Church views that the Pope had offered him the hat of a cardinal. He made the times hard for Non- conformists ; your ancestors and mine, if they emi- grated in those days, may very likely have been pushed over seas by the edicts of Archbishop Laud. His monstrous intolerance was provoking, and in- tensifying that agitation in the religious world of England which Buckingham had already provoked * “ The Behearsal.” Complete edition of his works pub- lished in 1775. George Villiers, b. 1627 ; d. 1688. JEREMY TAYLOR, 135 in the political world ; and the days of wrath were coming. This Archbishop Laud is not only keen-sighted but he is bountiful and helpful within the lines of his own policy. He endowed Oxford with great, fine buildings. Some friend has told him that a young preacher of wonderful attractions has made his appearance at Sfc. Paul’s — down on a visit from Cambridge — a young fellow, wonderfully hand- some, with curling locks and great eyes full of ex- pression, and a marvellous gift of language ; and the Archbishop takes occasion to see him or hear him ; and finding that beneath such exterior there is real vigor and learning, he makes place for him as Fellow at Oxford ; appoints him presently his own chaplain, and gives him a living down in Rutland. Jeremy Taylor. This priest, of such eloquence and beauty, was Jeremy Taylor,* who was the son of a barber at Cambridge, was entered at Caius College as sizar, * Jeremy Taylor, b. 1613 ; d. 1667. First collected edition of his works issued in 1823 (Bishop Heber) ; reissued, with revision (0. P. Eden), 1852-61. 136 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. or charity scholar, just one year after Milton was entered at Christ College, and from the door of his father’s shop may have looked admiringly many a time upon the ‘ ‘ rosy cheeks Angelical, keen eye, courageous look, And conscious step of purity and pride,” which belonged even then to the young Puritan poet. But Jeremy Taylor was not a Puritan ; never came to know Milton personally. One became the great advocate and the purest illustration of the tenets of Episcopacy in England ; and the other — eventually — their most effective and weighty oppo- nent. In 1640, only one year after Jeremy Taylor was established in his pleasant Eutland rectory, Archbishop Laud went to the Tower, not to come forth till he should go to the scaffold ; and in the Civil War, breaking out presently, Jeremy Taylor joined the Eoyalists, was made chaplain to the King, saw battle and siege and wounds ; but in the top of the strife he is known by his silvery voice and his exuberant piety, and by the rare eloquence which colors prayer and sermon with the bloody tinge of war and the pure light of heaven. He is wounded JEREMY TAYLOR. 137 (as I said), lie is imprisoned, and finally, by the chances of battle, he is stranded in a small country town near to Caermarthen, in South Wales. “ In the great storm,” he says, which dashed the vessel of the Church all in pieces, I was cast on the coast of Wales, and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which in England I could not hope for.” The little boat he speaks of was the obscure mountain home where he taught school, and where he received, some time, visits from the famous John Evelyn,* who wrote charming books in these days about woods and gardens, and who befriended the poor stranded chaplain. Here, too, he wrote that monument of toleration. The Liberty of Prophesy^ ing, a work which would be counted broad in its teachings even now, and which alienated a great many of his more starched fellows in the Church. A little fragment from the closing pages of this book will show at once his method of illustration and his extreme liberality : “ When Abraham sat at his tent door, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old man stopping by the way, lean- * John Evelyn, b. 1620 ; d. 1706. His best known books are his Diary ^ and Bylm — a treatise on arboriculture. 138 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. ing on his staff, weary with much travel, and who was a hundred years of age. He received him kindly, provided supper, caused him to sit down; but observing that the old man ate, and prayed not, neither begged for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of Heaven ? “ The old man told him he had been used to worship the sun only. “Whereupon Abraham in anger thrust him from his tent. When he was gone into the evils of the night, God called to Abraham, and said, ‘ I have suffered this man, whom thou hast cast out, these hundred years, and couldest thou not endure him one night, when he gave thee no trouble ? * Upon this Abraham fetched the man back and gave him en- tertainment: ‘Go thou and do likewise,* said the preacher, ‘and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abra- ham.’ ” * Jeremy Taylor did not learn this teaching from Archbishop Laud, but from the droiture of his own conscience, and the kindness of his own heart. He wrote much other and most delectable matter in his years of Welsh retirement, when a royal chaplain was a bugbear in England. He lost sons, * I have not been careful to give the ipsissima mrha of Taylor’s version of this old Oriental legend, which has been often cited, but never more happily transplanted into the British gardens of doctrine than by Jeremy Taylor. JEREMY TAYLOR. 139 too — who had gone to the bad under the influ- ences of that young Duke of Buckingham I men« tioned ; but at last, when the restoration of Charles II. came, he was given a bishopric in the wilds of Ireland, in a sour, gloomy country, with sour and gloomy looks all around him, which together, broke him down at the age of fifty-five. I have spoken thus much of him, because he is a man to be remembered as the most eloquent, and the most kindly, and the most tolerant of all the Church of England people in that day ; and because his trea- tises on Holy Limng and Holy Dying will doubtless give consolation to thousands of desponding souls, in the years to come, as they have in the years that are past. He was saturated through and through with learning and with piety ; and they gurgled from him together in a great tide of melli- fluous language. The ardors and fervors of Eliza- bethan days seem to have lapped over upon him in that welter of the Commonwealth wars. He has been called the Shakespeare of the pulpit ; I should rather say the Spenser — there is such unchecked, and uncheckable, affluence of language and illus- tration ; thought and speech struggling together 140 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. for precedence, and stretching on and on, in ever so sweet and harmonious jangle of silvery sounds. A Royalist and a Puritan. Another Royalist of these times, of a different temper, was Sir John Suckling : * a poet too, very rich, bred in luxury, a man of the world, who had seen every court in Europe worth seeing, who dashed off songlets and ballads between dinners and orgies ; which songlets often hobbled on their feet by reason of those multiplied days of high liv- ing ; but yet they had prettinesses in them which have kept them steadily alive all down to these prosaic times. I give a sample from his ‘‘Ballad upon a Wedding,” though it may be over- well known ; “Her cheeks so rare a white was on No daisy makes comparison (Who sees them is undone) : For streaks of red were mingled there Such as are on a Catharine pear, The side that’s next the sun. *John Suckling, b. 1609; d. 1642. An edition of his poems, edited by W. C. Hazlitt, was published in 1874. SIR JOHN SUCKLING. 141 Her feet beneath her petticoat Like little mice stole in and out As if they feared the light. But O, she dances such a way ! No sun upon an Easter day Is half so fine a sight ! ” He was a frequenter of a tavern which stood at the Southwark end of London Bridge. Aubrey says he was one of the best bowlers of his time. He played at cards, too, rarely well, and did use to practise by himself abed.” He was rich ; he was liberal; he was accomplished — almost an Admir- able Crichton.” His first military service was in support of Gustavus Adolphus, in Germany. At the time of trouble with the Scots (1639) he raised a troop for the King’s service that bristled with gilded spurs and trappings ; but he never did much serious fighting on British soil ; and in 1641 — owing to what was counted treasonable action in behalf of Strafford, he was compelled to leave Eng- land. He crossed over to the Continent, wandered into Spain, and somehow became (as a current tradition reported) a victim of the Inquisition there, and was put to cruel torture ; a strange subject surely to be 142 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. put to the torture — in this life. He was said to be broken by this experience, and strayed away, after his escape from those priest-fangs, to Paris, where, not yet thirty-five, and with such promise in him of better things, he came to his death in some mysterious way : some said by a knife-blade which a renegade servant had fastened in his boot ; but most probably by suicide. There is, however, great obscurity in regard to his life abroad. He wrote some plays, which had more notice than they should have had ; possibly owing to a re- vival of dramatic interests very strangely brought about in Charles L’s time — a revival which was due to the over-eagerness and exaggeration of attacks made upon it by the Puritans : noticeable among these was that of William Prynne * — “utter barrister” of Lincoln’s Inn. “Utter bar- rister” does not mean aesthetic barrister, but one not yet come to full range of privilege. This Prynne was a man of dreadful insistence and severities ; he would have made a terrific * William Prynne, b. 1600 ; d. 1669. He was a Somer- setshire man, severely Calvinistic, and before he was thirty had written about the TlnLovdinesa of Love Locks WILLIAM PRYNNE. 143 Bchoolmaster. He was the author, in the course of his life, of no less than one hundred and eighty distinct works ; many of them, it is true, were pam- phlets, but others terribly bulky — an inextin- guishable man ; that onslaught on the drama and dramatic people, and play -goers, including peo- ple of the Court, called Histriomastix, was a foul- mouthed, close-printed, big quarto of a thousand pages. One would think such a book could do lit- tle harm ; but he was tried for it, was heavily fined, and sentenced to stand in the pillory and lose his ears. He pleaded strongly against the sentence, and for its remission upon ‘‘ divers pas- sages [as he says in his petition] fallen inconsider- ately from my pen in a book called HistriomastixP But he pleaded in vain ; there was no sympathy for him. Ought there to be for a man who writes a book of a thousand quarto pages — on any sub- ject? The violence of this diatribe made a reaction in favor of the theatre ; his fellow-barristers of Lin- coln’s Inn hustled him out of their companionship, and got up straightway a gay masque to demon- strate their scorn of his reproof. They say he bore his punishment sturdily. 144 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. though the fumes of his book, which was burned just below his nose, came near to suffocate him. Later still, he underwent another sentence for of- fences growing out of his unrelenting and im- perious Puritanism — this time in company with one Burton (not Robert Burton,^ of the Anatomy of Melancholy), who was a favorite with the people and had flowers strown before him as he walked to the pillory. But Prynne had no flowers, and his ears having been once cropt, the hangman had a rough time (a very rough time for Prynne) in getting at his task. Thereafter he was sent to prison in the isle of Jersey ; but he kept writing, ears or no ears, and we may hear his strident voice again — hear it in Parliament, too. Cowley and Waller. Two other poets of these times I name, because of the great reputation they once had ; a reputa- * Robert Burton, b. 1576 ; d. 1639, was too remarkable a man to get his only mention in a note *, but we cannot always govern our spaces. His best-known work, The Anat- omy of Melancholy, is an excellent book to steal from — whether quotations or crusty notions of the author’s own. ABRAHAM COWLEY. 145 tion far greater than they maintain now. These are Abraham Cowley and Edmund Waller.^ The former of these (Cowley) was the son of a Lon- don grocer, whose shop was not far from the home of Izaak Walton ; he was taught at Westminster School, and at Cambridge, and blazed up preco- ciously at the age of fifteen in shining verses, f In- deed his aptitude, his ingenuities, his scholarship, kept him in the first rank of men of letters all through his day, and gave him burial between * Abraham Cowley, b. 1618 ; d. 1667. Edmund Waller, b. 1605 ; d. 1687. f I give a taste of these young verses, first published in the Poetical Blossoms of 1633 ; also sampled approvingly by the mature Cowley in his essay On Myself: “ This only grant me, that my means may lie Too low for envy, for contempt too high. Some honor I would have Not from great deeds, but good alone. The unknown are better than ill known ; Rumour can ope the grave. “ Thus would I double my life’s fading space, For he that runs it well, twice runs his race. And in this true delight. These unbought sports, this happy state, I would not fear nor wish my fate. But boldly say each night To-morrow let my sun his beams display, Or in clouds hide them ; — I have liv’d to-day I ’’ II -10 146 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Spenser and Chaucer in Westminster Abbey. He would take a humbler place if he were disentombed now ; yet, in Cromwell’s time, or in that of Charles n., the average reading man knew Cowley better than he knew Milton, and admired him more. I give you a fragment of what is counted his best ; it is from his “ Hymn to Light : ” “ When, Goddess, thou iift’st up thy waken’d head Out of the morning’s purple bed, Thy quire of birds about thee play, And all the joyful world salutes the rising day. “ All the world’s bravery, that delights our eyes, Is but thy sev’ral liveries, Thou the rich dye on them bestowest, Thy nimble pencil paints this landscape as thou goest. “ A crimson garment in the Kose thou wear’st ; A crown of studded gold thou bear’st, The virgin lilies in their white. Are clad but with the lawn of almost naked light I ” li I were to read a fragment from Tennyson in contrast with Cowley’s treatment of a similar theme I think you might wonder less why his reputation has suffered gradual eclipse. Shall we try ? Cow- ley wrote a poem in memory of a dear friend, and I take one of the pleasantest of its verses : COWLEY TENNYSON. 147 Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say, Have ye not seen us walking every day ? Was there a tree about, which did not know The love betwixt us two ? Henceforth, ye gentle trees, for ever fade, Or your sad branches thicker join. And into darksome shades combine, Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid.’^ Tennyson wrote of his dead friend, and here is a verse of it : ‘‘ The path by which we twain did go, Which led by tracts that pleased us well Thro’ four sweet years, arose and fell From fiower to fiower, from snow to snow ; But where the path we walk’d began To slant the fifth autumnal slope. As we descended, following hope, There sat the shadow feared of man. Who broke our fair companionship, And spread his mantle dark and cold, And wrapped thee formless in the fold. And dulled the murmur on thy lip, And bore thee where I could not see Nor follow — though I walk in haste ; And think — that somewhere in the waste, The shadow sits, and waits for me I ” 148 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Can I be wrong in thinking that under the solemn lights of these stanzas the earlier poet’s verse grows dim? Cowley was a good Kingsman ; and in the days of the Commonwealth held position of secretary to the exiled Queen Henrietta, in Paris ; he did, at one time, think of establishing himself in one of the American colonies; returned, however, to his old London haunts, and, wearying of the city, sought retirement at Chertsey, on the Thames’ banks (where his old house is still to be seen), and where he wrote, in graceful prose and cumbrous verse, on subjects related to country life — which he loved overmuch — and died there among his trees and the meadows. Waller was both Kingsman and Eepublican — steering deftly between extremes, so as to keep himself and his estates free from harm. This will weaken your sympathy for him at once — as it should do. He lived in a grand way — affected the philosopher; toas such a philosopher as quick- witted selfishness makes ; yet he surely had won- derful aptitudes in dealing with language, and could make its harmonious numbers flow where EDMUND WALLER. 149 and how he would. Waller has come to a casual literary importance in these days under the deft talking and writing of those dilettante critics who would make this author the pivot (as it were) on which British poesy swung away from the ‘‘ hyster- ical riot of the Jacobeans ” into measured and orderly classic cadence. It is a large influence to attribute to a single writer, though his grace and felicities go far to justify it. And it is further to be remembered that such critics are largely given to the discussion of technique only ; they write as distinct art-masters ; while we, who are taking our paths along English Letters for many other things besides art and rhythm, will, I trust, be pardoned for thinking that there is very little pith or weighty matter in this great master of the juggleries of sound. Waller married early in life, but lost his wife while still very young ; thenceforth, for many years — a gay and coquettish widower — he pursued the Lady Dorothy Sidney with a storm of love verses, of which the best (and it is really amazingly clever in its neatness and point) is this : LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. 150 “ Go, lovely Rose, Tell her, that wastes her time and me, That now she knows When I resemble her to thee How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her that’s young. And shuns to have her graces spied. That hadst thou sprung In deserts where no men abide. Thou must have, uncommended, died.” But neither this, nor a htmdred others, brought the Lady Dorothy to terms: she married — like a wise woman — somebody else. And he ? He went on singing as chirpingly as ever — sang till he was over eighty. John Milton. And now we come to a poet of a larger build — a weightier music — and of a more indomitable spir- it ; a poet who wooed the world with his songs ; and the world has never said him ‘‘ Nay.” I mean John Milton,* * John Milton, b. 1608 ; d. 1674. Editions of his works are numberless ; but Dr. Masson is the fullest and best ac* credited contributor to Miltonian literature. JOHN MILTON. 15 1 He is the first great poet we have encountered, in respect to whom we can find in contemporary records full details of family, lodgement, and birth, A great many of these details have been swooped together in Dr. Masson's recently completed Life and Thnes of Milton^ which I would more earnestly commend to your reading were it not so utterly long — six fat volumes of big octavo — in the which the pith and kernel about Milton, the man, fioats around like force meat-balls in a great sea of his- toric soup. Our poet was born in Bread Street, just out of Cheapside, in London, in the year 1608. In Cheapside — it may be well to recall — stood the Mermaid Tavern ; and it stood not more than half a block away from the corner where Mil- ton’s father lived. And on that corner — who knows? — the boy, eight years old, or thereby, when Shakespeare died, may have lingered to see the stalwart Ben Jonson go tavern -ward for his cups, or may be, John Marston, or Dekker, or Philip Massinger — all these being comfortably in- clined to taverns. The father of this Bread Street lad was a scriv- ener by profession ; that is, one who drafted legal 152 LANDS, LETTERS, 6 - ICINGS. papers ; a well-to-do man as times went ; able to give his boy some private schooling ; proud of him, too ; proud of his clear white and red face, and his curly auburn hair carefully parted — almost a girhs face ; so well-looking, indeed, that the father em- ployed a good Dutch painter of those days to take his portrait ; the portrait is still in existence — dat- ing from 1618, when the poet was ten, showing him in a banded velvet doublet and a stiff Vandyke col- lar, trimmed about with lace. In those times, or presently after, he used to go to St. Paul’s Gram- mar School ; of which Lily, of Lily’s Latin Grammar, was the first master years before. It was only a little walk for him, through Cheapside, and then, perhaps. Paternoster Kow — the school being under the shadow of that great cathedral, which was burned fifty years after. He studied hard there ; studied at home, too ; often, he says himself, when only fourteen, studying till twelve at night. He loved books, and he loved better to be foremost. He turns his hand to poetry even then. Would you like to see a bit of what he wrote at fifteen ? Well, here it is, in a scrap of psalmody : JOHN MILTON. 153 “ Let us blaze his name abroad, For of gods, he is the God, Who by his wisdom did create The painted heavens so full of state, And caused the golden tressed sun All the day long his course to run, The horned moon to hang by night Amongst her spangled sisters bright ; For his mercies aye endure, Ever faithful, ever sure.” It is not of the best, but I think will compare favorably with most that is written by young people of fifteen. At Christ’s College, Cambridge, whither he went shortly afterward — his father be- ing hopeful that he would take orders in the Church — he was easily among the first ; he wrote Latin hexameters, quarrelled with his tutor (not- withstanding his handsome face had given to him the mocking title of “ The Lady ”), had his season of rustication up in London, sees all that is do- ing in theatrics thereabout, but goes back to study more closely than ever. The little Christmas song, “ It was the winter wild, While the heaven -born Child,” etc., 1 54 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, belongs to bis Cambridge life ; tbongb his first public appearance as an author was in the ‘‘ Ode to Shakespeare,” attaching with other and various commendatory verses to the second folio edition of that author’s dramas, published in the year 1632. Milton was then twenty-four, had been six or seven at Cambridge ; did not accept kindly his father’s notion of taking orders in the Church, but had exaggerated views of a grandiose life of study and literary work ; in which views his father — sen- sible man that he was — did not share ; but — kind man that he was — he did not strongly combat them. So we find father and son living together presently, some twenty miles away from London, in a little country hamlet called Horton, where the old gen- tleman had purchased a cottage for a final home when his London business was closed up. Here, too, our young poet studies — not books only, borrowed where he can, and bought if he can ; but studies also fields and trees and skies and rivers, and all the natural objects that are to take embalmment sooner or later in his finished verse. Here he wrote, almost within sight of Windsor towers, ‘‘ L’ Allegro” and “II Penaeroso.” You know JOHN MILTON 155 them ; but they are always new and always fresh ; freshest when you go out from London on a sum- mer’s day to where the old tower of Horton Church still points the road, and trace there (if you can) “ The russet lawns and fallows gray Where the nibbling flocks do stray, • ••••• Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide. Sometimes with secure delight The upland hamlets will invite, When the merry bells ring round And the jocund rebecks sound To many a youth and many a maid Dancing in the chequered shade ; And young and old come forth to play On a sunshine holiday.*’ In reading such verse we do not know where to stop — at least, I do not. He writes, too, in that country quietude, within sight of Windsor forest, his charming “ Lycidas,” one of the loveliest of me- morial poems, and the ‘‘Comus,” which alone of all the masques of that time, and preceding times, has gone in its entirety into the body of living English literature. In 1638, then thirty years old, equipped in all 156 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. needed languages and scholarship, he goes for fur- ther study and observation to the Continent ; he carries letters from Sir Henry Wotton ; he sees the great Hugo Grotius at Paris ; sees the sunny coun- try of olives in Provence ; sees the superb front of Genoa piling out from the blue waters of the Med- iterranean ; sees Galileo at Florence — the old phi- losopher too blind to study the face of the studious young Englishman that has come so far to greet him. He sees, too, what is best and bravest at Rome ; among the rest St. Peter’s, just then brought to completion, and in the first freshness of its great tufa masonry. He is feted by studious young Ital- ians ; has the freedom of the Accademia della Crusca ; blazes out in love sonnets to some dark- eyed signorina of Bologna ; returns by Venice, and by Geneva where he hobnobs with the Diodati friends of his old school-fellow, Charles Diodati ; and comes home to England to find changes brew- ing — the Scotch marching over the border with battle-drums — the Long Parliament portending — Strafford and Laud in way of impeachment — his old father drawing near to his end — and bloody war tainting all the air. MILTON'S MALT/AGE. 157 The father's fortune, never large, is found crip- pled at his death ; and Milton, now thirty-two, must look out for his own earnings. He takes a house ; first in Fleet Street, then near Aldersgate, with garden attached, where he has three or four pupils ; his nephew Phillips among them. Milton’s Marriage. It was while living there that he brought back, one day, a bride — Mary Powell ; she was a young maiden in her teens, daughter of a well-established loyalist family near to Oxford. The young bride is at the quiet student’s house in Aldersgate a month, perhaps two, when she goes down for a visit to her mother ; she is to come back at Michaelmas ; but Michaelmas comes, and she stays ; Milton writes, and she stays ; Milton writes again, and she stays ; he sends a messenger — and she stays. What is up, then, in this new household? Mil- ton, the scholar and poet, is up, straightway, to a ^ treatise on divorce, whereby he would make it easy * John and Edward Phillips both with him ; the latter only as pupil. 158 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. to undo yokes where parties are unevenly yoked. There is much scriptural support and much shrewd reasoning brought by his acuteness to the over- throw of those rulings which the common-sense of mankind has established ; even now those who con- tend for easy divorce get their best weapons out of this old Miltonian armory. Meantime the poet went on teaching, I suspect rapping his boys over the knuckles in these days for slight cause. But what does it all mean ? It means incongruity ; not the first case, nor will it be the last. He — abstracted, austere, bookish, with his head in the clouds ; she — with her head in rib- bons, and possibly loving orderly housewifery : * intellectual affinities and sympathies are certainly missing. Fancy the poet just launched into the moulding of such verse as this : “ Hail, bounteous May, that dost inspire Mirth and youth, and warm desire ! Woods and groves are of thy dressing ” * More probably, perhaps, sulking for lack of her old gayeties of life in the range of Royal Oxford. Aubrey s ac- counts would favor this interpretation. MILTON'S HOME, 159 when a servant gives sharp rat-tat at the door, ‘‘ Please, sir, missus says, ^ Dinner’s waiting ! ’ ” But the poet sweeps on — “ O nightingale, that on yon blooming spray Warblest at eve, when all the woods are still, Thou, with fresh heat, the lover’s heart dost fill. Now timely sing, ere the rude bird of hate ” And there is another rat-tat ! — “ Please, sir, mis- sus says, ‘ Dinner is all getting cold.’ ” Still the poet ranges in fairyland — “ ere the rude bird of hate Foretell my hopeless doom, in some grove nigh. As thou from year to year hast sung too late For my relief, yet hadst no reason why ” And now, maybe, it is the pretty mistress who comes with a bounce — Sir. Milton, are you ever coming? ” — and a quick bang of the door, which is a way some excellent petulant young women have of — not breaking the commandments. There is a little prosaic half-line in the ‘‘Paradise Lost” (I don’t think it was ever quoted before), which in this connection seems to me to have a very pathetic twang in it ; ’tis about Paradise and its charms — “ No fear lest dinner cool ! i6o LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. However, it happens that through the advocacy of friends on both sides this great family breach is healed, or seems to be ; and two years after, Mil- ton and his recreant, penitent, and restored wife are living again together ; lived together till her death ; and she became the mother of his three daughters : Anne, who was crippled, never even learned to write, and used to be occupied with her needle ; Mary, who was his amanuensis and reader most times, and Deborah, the youngest, who came to perform similar offices for him after- ward. Meantime the Eoyalist cause had suffered every- where. The Powells (his wife’s family having come to disaster) did — with more or less children — go to live with Milton. Whether the presence of the mother-in-law mended the poet’s domesticity I doubt; doubt, indeed, if ever there was absolute harmony there. On the year of the battle of Naseby appeared Milton’s first unpretending booklet of poems,* containing with others, those already named, and * Poems of Mr. John Milton., both English and Latin, com- posed at several Times. London, 1645. A ROYAL TRAGEDY i6i not before printed. Earlier, however, in the life- time of the poet had begun the issue of those thunderbolts of pamphlets which he wrote on church discipline, education, on the liberty of un- licensed printing, and many another topic — cum- brous 'with great trails of intricate sentences, won- drous word-heaps, sparkling with learning, flaming with anger — with convolutions like a serpent’s, and as biting as serpents. A show is kept up of his school-keeping, but with doubtful success ; for in 1647 we learn that ‘‘he left his great house in Barbican, and betook himself to a smaller in High Holborn, among those that open back into Lincoln’s Inn Fields ; ” but there is no poem-making of importance (save one or two wondrous Sonnets) now, or again, until he is virtually an old man. The Royal Tragedy. Meantime the tide of war is flowing back and forth over England and engrossing all hopes and fears. The poor King is one while a captive of the Scots, and again a captive of the Parliamentary IT.— 11 i 62 lands, letters, KINGS, forces, and is hustled from palace to castle. What shall be done with the royal prisoner ? There are thousands who have fought against him who would have been most glad of his escape; but there are others — weary of his doublings — who have vowed that this son of Baal shall go to his doom and bite the dust. Finally, and quickly too (for events move with railroad speed), his trial comes — the trial of a King. A strange event for these English, who have venerated and feared and idolized so many kings and queens of so many royal lines. How the Eoyalist verse-makers must have fumed and raved ! Milton, then just turned of forty, was, as I have said, living near High Holborn ; the King was eight years his senior — was in custody at St. James’s, a short way above Piccadilly. He brought to the trial all his kingly dignity, and wore it unflinch- ingly — refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of the Parliament, cuddling always obstinately that poor figment of the divine right of kings — which even then Milton, down in his Holborn garden, was sharpening his pen to undermine and destroy. The sentence was death — a sentence that gave EXECUTION OF CHARLES, 163 pause to many. Fairfax, and others such, would have declared against it ; even crop-eared Prynne, who had suffered so much for his truculent Puri- tanism, protested against it ; two-thirds of the pop- ulation of England would have done the same ; but London and England and the army were all in the grip of an iron man whose name was Cromwell. Time sped ; the King had only two days to live ; his son Charles was over seas, never believing such catastrophe could happen ; only two royal children — a princess of thirteen and a boy of eight — came to say adieu to the royal prisoner. ‘‘ He sat with them some time at the window, taking them on his knees, and kissing them, and talking with them of their duty to their mother, and to their elder brother, the Prince of Wales,” He car- ried his habitual dignity and calmness with him on the very morning, going between files of soldiers through St. James’s Park — pointing out a tree which his brother Henry had planted — and on, across to Whitehall, where had come off many a gay, rollicking masque of Ben Jonson’s, in presence of his father, James I. He was led through the window of the banqueting-hall — the guides show 164 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. it now — where he had danced many a night, and so to the scaffold, just without the window, whence he could see up and down the vast court of Whitehall, from gate to gate,* paved with a great throng of heads. Even then and there rested on him the same kingly composure ; the fine oval face, pale but unmoved ; the peaked beard carefully trimmed, as you see it in the well-known pictures by Vandyke, at Windsor or at Blenheim. He has a word with old Bishop Juxon, who totters beside him ; a few words for others who are within hearing ; examines the block, the axe ; gives some brief cautions to the executioner ; then, laying down his head, lifts his own hand for signal, and with a crunching thud of sound it is over. And poet Milton — has he shown any relenting ? Not one whit ; he is austere among the most aus- tere; in this very week he is engaged upon his defence of regicide, with its stinging, biting sen- * In that day Whitehall Street was separated from Charing Cross by the famous gate of Holbeins ; and in the other di recti on it was crossed, near Old Palace Yard, by the King’s- Street Gate — thus forming a vast court. SECRE TARY MIL TON. 1 65 tences. He is a friend and party to the new Com- monwealth ; two months only after the execution of the King, he is appointed Secretary to the State Council, and under it is conducting the Latin cor- respondence. He demolishes, by order of the same Council, the Eikon Badlike (supposed in that day to be the king’s work) with his fierce onslaught of the Eikonoklastes. His words are bitter as gall ; he even alludes, in no amiable tone — with acrid em- phasis, indeed — to the absurd rumor, current with some, that the King, through his confidential in- strument, Buckingham, had poisoned his own fa- ther. He is further appointed to the answering of Sal- masius,* an answer with which all Europe pres- ently rings. It was in these days, and with such work crowding him, that his vision fails ; and to these days, doubtless belongs that noble sonnet on ♦Salmasius, a Leyden professor, had been commissioned by Royalists to write a defence of Charles I., and vindicate his memory. Milton was commissioned to reply ; and the result was — a Latin battle in Billingsgate. Milton calls his antagonist “ a grammatical louse, whose only treasure of merit and hope of fame consisted in a glos- sary.** 1 66 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. his blindness, which is worth our staying for, here and now : ‘ ‘ When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one talent, which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he, returning, chide ; ‘ Dost God exact day-labor, light denied ? * I fondly ask : But Patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies — ‘ God doth not need Either man’s work, or his own gifts ; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best ; his state Is kingly ; thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er land and ocean without rest ; They also serve, who only stand and wait.’ ” Wonderful, is it not, that such a sonnet — so full of rare eloquence and rare philosophy — so full of all that most hallows our infirm humanity could be written by one — pouring out his execrations on the head of Salmasius — at strife in his own house- hold — at strife (as we shall find) with his own daughters? Wonderful, is it not, that Carlyle could write as he did about the heroism of the humblest as well as bravest, and yet grow into a rage — over his wife’s shoulders and at her cost — CHARLES IL 167 with a rooster crowing in his neighbor’s yard? Ah, well, the perfect ones have not yet come upon our earth, whatever perfect poems they may write. Change of Kings. But at last comes a new turn of the wheel to English fortunes. Cromwell is dead ; the Common- wealth is ended ; all London is throwing its cap in the air over the restoration of Charles IL Poor blind Milton ^ is in hiding and in peril. His name is down among those accessory to the murder of the King. The ear-cropped Prynne — who is now in Parliament, and who hates Milton as Milton scorned Prynne — is very likely hounding on those who would bring the great poet to judgment. ’Tis long matter of doubt. Past his house near Bed Lion Square the howling mob drag the bodies of Cromwell and Ireton, and hang them in their dead ghastliness. Milton, however, makes lucky escape, with only a short term of prison ; but for some time thereafter he was in fear of assassination. Such a rollicking *His blindness dating from the year 1652. 1 68 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, daredevil, as Scott in his story of Woodstock, has painted for us in Eoger Wildrake (of whom there were many afloat in those times) would have liked no better fun than to run his rapier through such a man as John Milton ; and in those days he would have been pardoned for it. That capital story of Woodstock one should read when they are upon these times of the Common- wealth. There are, indeed, anachronisms in it ; kings escaping too early or too late, or dying a little out of time to accommodate the exigencies of the plot ; but the characterization is marvellously spirited ; and you see the rakehelly cavaliers, and the fine old king-ridden knights, and the sour- mouthed Independents, and the glare and fumes and madness of the civil war, as you find them in few history pages. Milton, meanwhile, in his quiet home again, re- volves his old project of a great sacred poem. He taxes every visitor who can, to read to him in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Dutch. His bookly appetite is omnivorous. His daughters have large share of this toil. Poor girls, they have been little taught, and not wisely They read what they read only by JOHN MILTON. 169 rote, and count it severe taskwork. Their mother is long since dead, and a second wife, who lived only for a short time, dead too. We know very little of that second wife ; but she is embalmed forever in a sonnet, from which I steal this frag- ment : — “ Me thought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me, like Alcestis from the grave ; Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shin’d So clear as in no face with more delight. But oh, as to embrace me she inclined I waked, she fled, and daybrought back my night.” The Miltonian reading and the work goes on, but affection, I fear, does not dominate the house- hold ; the daughters overtasked, with few indul- gences, make little rebellions ; and the blind, exacting old man is as unforgiving as the law. Americans should take occasion to see the great picture by Munkacsy, in the Lenox Gallery, New York, of Milton dictating Paradise Lost ; it is in it- self a poem ; a dim Puritan interior ; light com- ing through a latticed window and striking on the 170 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. pale, something cadaverous face of the old poet, who sits braced in his great armchair, with lips set together, and the daughters, in awed attention, lis- tening or seeming to listen. I am sorry there is so large room to doubt of the intellectual and affectionate sympathy existing between them ; nevertheless — that it did not is soberly true ; his own harsh speeches, which are of record, show it ; their petulant innuendoes, which are also of record, show it. Into this clouded household — over which love does not brood so fondly as we would choose to think — there comes sometimes, with helpfulness and sympathy, a certain Andrew Marvell, who had been sometime assistant to Milton in his official duties, and who takes his turn at the readings, and sees only the higher and better lights that shine there ; and he had written sweet poems of his own, (to which I shall return) that have kept his name alive, and that will keep it alive, I think, forever. There comes also into this home, in these days, very much to the surprise and angerment of the three daughters, a third wife to the old poet, after PARADISE LOST. 171 some incredibly short courtship.^ She is only seven years the senior of the daughter Anne ; but she seems to have been a sensible young person, not bookishly given, and looking after the house- hold, while Anne and Mary and Deborah still wait, after a fashion, upon the student-wants of the poet. In fits of high abstraction he is now bringing the “ Paradise ” to a close — not knowing, or not car- ing, maybe, for the little bickerings which rise and rage and die away in the one-sided home. I cannot stay to characterize his great poem ; nor is there need ; immortal in more senses than one ; humanity counts for little in it ; one pair of human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end of the telescope ; with gigan- tic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child’s book ; to place it in schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight between good and evil in this world, can we see in * This marriage took place on February 24, 1662-63, the age of the bride being twenty-five, and Milton in his fifty- fifth year. 172 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. proper perspective the vaster battle which, under Milton’s imagination, was pictured in Paradise be- tween the same foes. Years only can so widen one’s horizon as to give room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light and darkness. We talk of the organ-music of Milton. The term has its special significance ; it gives hint of that large quality which opens heavenly spaces with its billows of sound ; which translates us ; which gives us a lookout from supreme heights, and so lifts one to the level of his “ Argument.” There is large learning in his great poem — weighty and recondite ; but this spoils no music ; great, cum- brous names catch sonorous vibrations under his modulating touch, and colossal shields and spears clash together like cymbals. The whole burden of his knowledges — Pagan, Christian, or Hebraic, lift up and sink away upon the undulations of his sublime verse, as heavy-laden ships rise and fall upon some great ground-swell making in from outer seas. A bookish color is pervading ; if he does not steal flowers from books, he does what is better — PARADISE LOST. 173 he shows the fruit of them. There are stories of his debt to Caedmon, and still more authentic, of his debt to the Dutch poet Vondel,* and the old Proven9al Bishop of Vienne, f who as early as the beginning of the sixth century wrote on kindred themes. There is hardly room for doubt that Milton not only knew, but literally translated some of the old Bishop’s fine Latin lines, and put to his larger usage some of his epithets. Must we not admit that — in the light of such * Vondel, b. 1587 (at Cologne) ; d. 1679. He was tbe author of many dramatic pieces, among which were “ Jeph- tha,” “ Marie Stuart,” “ Lucifer ” {Luisevaar). Vondel also wrote *‘Adam in Exile, and ‘‘Samson, or Divine Ven- geance.^’ This latter, according to a writer in The Atlie' nmum of November 7, 1885, has suspicious points of resem- blance with “ Samson Agonistes.” Other allied topics of interest are discussed in same jour- nal’s notice of George Edmundson’s book on the Milton and Vondel question (Triibner & Co., London, 1885). Vondel survived the production of his “Lucifer” by a quarter of a century, and died five years after Mil- ton. f Avitus was Bishop of Vienne (succeeding his father and grandfather) about 400. His poem, “ De Initio Mundi,” was in Latin hexameters. See interesting account of same in The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1890. 174 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. developments — when the Puritan poet boasts of discoursing on “ Things unattempted jet in prose or rhyme,” that it is due to a little lurking stimulant of that Original Sin which put bitterness into his Sal- masian papers, and an ugly arrogance into his do- mestic discipline ? But, after all, he was every way greater than his forerunners, and can afford to ad- mit Csedmon and Vondel and Avitus, and all other claimants, as supporting columns in the underlying ciypt upon which was builded the great temple of his song. Last Days. The home of Milton in these latter days of his life was often changed. Now, it was Holborn again ; then Jewin Street ; then Bunhill Kow ; and — one while — for a year or more, when the great plague of 1665 desolated the city, he fled before it to the little village of Chalfont, some twenty miles distant from London on the Aylesbury road. There the cottage * may still be seen in which he The cottage is a half-timber, gable fronted building, and has Milton's name inscribed over the door. The village MILTON^ S LAST DAYS, 175 lived, and the garden in which he walked — but never saw. There, too, is the latticed window look- ing on the garden, at which he sat hour by hour, with the summer winds blowing on him from over honeysuckle beds, while he brooded, with sightless eyes turned to the sky, upon the mysteries of fate and foreknowledge. A young Quaker, Ellwood, perhaps his dearest friend, comes to see him there, to read to him and to give a helping hand to the old man’s study ; his daughters, too, are at their helpful service ; grate- ful, maybe, that even the desolation of the plague has given a short relief from the dingy house in the town and its treadmill labors, and put the joy of blooming flowers and of singing birds into their withered hearts. The year after, which finds them in Bunhill Row again, brings that great London fire which the Monument now commemorates ; they passing three days and nights upon the edge of that huge tem- is reached by a branch of the L. & N. W. B. B. American visitors will also look with interest at the burial place of William Penn, who lies in a “place of graves” behind the Friends’ Meeting House — a mile and a half only from Chalfont Church. 176 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. pest of flame and smoke which devoured nearly two-thirds of London ; the old poet hearing the din and roar and crackle, and feeling upon his forehead the waves of fierce heat and the showers of cinders — a scene and an experience which might have given, perhaps, other color to his pictures of Pande- monium, if his great poem had not been just now, in these fateful years, completed — completed and bargained for ; £20 were to be paid for it condi- tionally,* in four payments of £5 each, at a day when London had been decimated by the plague, and half the city was a waste of ruin and ashes. And to give an added tint of blackness to the pict- ure, we have to fancy his three daughters leaving him, as they did, tired of tasks, tired of wrangling. Anne, the infirm one, who neither read nor wrote, and Mary, so overworked, and Deborah, the young- est (latterly being very helpful) — all desert him. They never return. “ Undutiful daughters,’’ he says to Ellwood ; but I think he does not soften * The terms were £5 down ; another £5 after sale of 1,300 copies, and two eqnal sums on further sale of two other edi- tions of same number. The family actually compounded for £18, before the third edition was entirely sold. MILTON LAST DAYS, 177 toward them, even when gone. Poor, stem, old man ! He would have cut them off by will from their small shares of inheritance in his estate ; but the courts wisely overruled this. Anne, strangely enough, married — dying shortly after; Mary died years later, a spinster ; and Deborah, who became Mrs. Clark, had some notice, thirty years later, when it was discovered that a quiet woman of that name was Milton's daughter. But she seems to have been of a stolid make; no poetry, no high sense of dignity belonging to her ; a woman like ten thousand, whose descendants are now said (doubtfully) to be living somewhere in India. But Milton wrought on ; his wife Betty, of whom he spoke more affectionately than ever once of his daughters, humored his poor fagged appetites of the table. Paradise Begained was in hand ; and later the “ Samson Agonistes.” His habits were regular ; up at five o'clock ; a chapter of the Hebrew Bible read to him by his daughter Mary — what time she stayed ; an early breakfast, and quiet lonely con- templation after it (his nephew tells us) till seven. Then work came, putting Quaker Ellwood to help- ful service, or whoever happened in, and could IT-— 13 178 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, fathom the reading — this lasting till mid-day din- ner ; afterward a walk in his garden (when he had one) for two hours, in his old gray suit, in which many a time passers-by saw him sitting at his door. There was singing in later afternoon, when there was a voice to sing for him; and instrumental music, when his, or a friendly hand touched the old organ. After supper, a pipe and a glass of water ; always persistently temperate ; and then, night and rest. He attended no church in his later years, find- ing none in absolute agreement with his beliefs ; sympathizing with the Quakers to a certain degree, with the orthodox Independents too ; but flaming up at any procrustean laws for faith ; never giv- ing over a certain tender love, I think, for the or- gan-music and storied splendors of the Anglican Church ; but with a wild, broad freedom of thought chafing at any ecclesiastic law made by man, that galled him or checked his longings. His clear, clean intellect — not without its satiric jost- lings and wrestlings — its petulancies and caprices — sought and maintained, independently, its own relation with God and the mysterious future. MILTON^ S LAST DAYS. 179 Our amiable Dr. Channing, with excellent data before him, demonstrated his good Unitarian faith ; but though Milton might have approved his nice reasonings, I doubt if he would have gone to church with him. He loved liberty ; he could not travel well in double harness, not even in his household or with the elders. His exalted range of vision made light of the little aids and lorgnettes which the conventional teachers held out to him. Creeds and dogmas and vestments and canons, and all hu- manly consecrated helps, were but Jack-o’-lanterns to him, who was swathed all about with the glowing clouds of glory that rolled in upon his soul from the infinite depths. In the year 1674 — he being then sixty-five years old — on a Sunday, late at night, he died ; and with so little pain that those who were with him did not know when the end came. He was buried — not in the great cemetery of Bunhill Fields, close by his house — but beside his father, in the old parish church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where he had been used to go as a boy, and where he had been used to hear the old burial Office for the Dead — now in- toned over his grave — A^^hes to ashes, dust to duslT i8o LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. There was no need for the monument erected to him there in recent years. His poems make a mon- ument that is read of all the world, and will be read in all times of the world. CHAPTER V. S we launched upon the days of Charles L, in our last talk, we had somewhat to say of the King’s advisers, lay and ecclesiastic ; we came to quick sense of the war - clouds, fast gathering, through which Jeremy Taylor shot his flashes of pious eloquence ; we heard a strain of Suckling’s verse, to which might have been added other, and may be better, from such Royalist singers as Carew or Lovelace ; * but we cannot swoop all the birds into our net. We had glimpse of the crop-eared Prynne of the JSistriomastix ; and from Cowley, that sincere friend of both King and Queen in the days of their misfortunes, we plucked some Poetical * Carew, b. about 1589 ; d. 1639 ; full of lyrical arts and of brazen sensuality. Lovelace, b. 1618; d. 1658 ; a careless master of song, whom wealth and royal favor did not save from a death of want and despair. LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. 182 Blossoms;” also a charming ‘‘Rose,” from the or- derly parterres of that great gardener, and pomp- ous, time-serving man, Edmund Waller. Then came Milton with the fairy melodies, always sweet, of Comus ” — the cantankerous pam- phleteering — the soured home-life — the bloody thrusts at the image of the King, and the grander flight of his diviner music into the coui’ts of Para- dise. Charles II, and his Friends. Some fourteen years or so before the death of Milton, the restoration of Charles 11. had come about. He had drifted back upon the traces of the stout Oliver Cromwell, and of the feebler Rich- ard Cromwell, on a great tide of British enthusi- asm. Independents, Presbyterians, Church of Eng- land men, and Papists were all by the ears ; and it did seem to many among the shrewdest of even the Puritan workers that some balance-wheel (of what- ever metal), though weighted with royal traditions and hereditary privileges, might keep the govern- mental machinery to the steady working of old days. So the Second Charles had come back, with a CHARLES IL 183 great throwing up of caps all through the London streets ; Presbyterians giving him welcome because he was sure to snub the Independents ; the Inde- pendents giving him welcome because he was sure to snub the Presbyterians ; the Church of England men giving him welcome because he was sure to snub both (as he did) ; and finally, the Papists giv- ing him high welcome because all other ways their hopes were lean and few. You know, or should know, what manner of man he was : accomplished — in his way ; an expert swordsman; an easy talker — capable of setting a tableful of gentlemen in a roar ; telling stories inimitably, and a great many of them ; full of grim- aces that would have made his fortune on the stage ; saying sweetest things, and meaning the worst things ; a daredevil who feared neither God nor man ; generous, too — most of all in his cups ; and liberal — with other peoples’ money; hating busi- ness with all his soul ; loving pleasure with all his heart ; ready always to do kindness that cost him nothing ; laughing at all Puritans and purity ; yet winning the maudlin affection of a great many peo- ple, and the respect of none. 184 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, Notwithstanding all this, the country gentlemen of England, of good blood, who had sniffed scorn- fully at the scent of the beer-vats which hung about the name of Cromwell, welcomed this clever, swarthy, black-haired, dissolute Prince, who had a pedigree which ran back on the father’s side to the royal Bruce of Scotland, and on the mother’s side to the great Clovis, and to the greater Charle- magne. You will find a good glimpse of this scion of royalty in Scott’s story of Peveril of the Peak. The novel is by no means one of the great roman- cer’s best ; but it is well worth reading for the clear and vivid idea it will give one of the social clashings between the reserves of old Puritanism and the in- continencies of new monarchism ; you will find in it an excellent sample of the gruff, stalwart Crom- wellian ; and another of the hot-tempered, swearing cavalier ; and still others of the mincing, scheming, gambling, roystering crew which overran all the purlieus of the court of Charles. Buckingham was there — that second Villiers,* of whom I had George Villiers, b. 1G27 ; d. 1688. BUCKINGHAM ROCHESTER. 185 somewhat to say when the elder Buckingham came up for mention in the days of Charles L; this younger Villiers running before the elder in all accomplishments and all Yillainies ; courtly ; of noble bearing ; with daintiest of speeches ; a pattern of manly graces ; capable of a tender French song, with all his tones in exultant accord with best of court singers, and of a comedy that drew all the playgoers of London to the ‘‘ Rehearsal ; ” capable too, of the wickedest of plots and of the foulest of lies. And yet this Buckingham was one of the best accredited advisers of the Crown. To the same court belonged Rochester,* his great, fine wig covering a great, fine brain ; he writing harmonious verses about — ‘^Nothing” — or worse than nothing ; and at the last wheedling Bishop Burnet into the belief that he had changed his courses, and that if he might rise from that ugly deathbed where the good-natured, pompous bishop sought him, he would be enrolled among the moral- ists. I think it was lucky that he died with such good impulse flashing at the top of his badnesses. *Earl of Rochester (John Wilmot), b. 1647; d. 1680. LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. 1 86 Dorset belonged to this court, with his pretty verselets, and Sedley and Etherege ; also the Ports- mouth and Lady Castelmaine, and the rest of those venturesome ladies who show their colors of cheek and bosom, even now, in the well-handled paintings of Sir Peter Lely. When you go to Hampton Court you can see these fair and frail beauties by the dozen on the walls of the King William room. Sir Peter Lely * was a rare painter, belonging to these times ; a great favorite of Charles ; and he loved such subjects for his brush ; he drew the delicatest hands that were ever put on canvas — too delicate and too small, unfortunately, to cover the undress of his figures. But, at the worst, England was not altogether a Pandemonium in those days following upon the Kestoration. I think, perhaps, the majority of his- torians and commentators are disposed to over-color the orgies ; it is so easy to make prodigious effects with strong sulphurous tints and blazing vermil- ions. Certain it is that Taine, in writing of these times, has put an almost malignant touch into his Sir Peter Lely, b. (in Westplialia) 1617 ; d. 1680. RICHARD BAXTER. 187 story, blinking the fact that the trail which shows most of corrupting phosphorescence came over the Channel with the new King ; forgetting that French breeding was at the bottom of the new tastes, and that French gold made the blazonry of the chariots in which the Jezebels rode on their triumphal way through London to — perdition. Then, again, English vice is more outspoken and less secretive than that of the over-Channel neigh- bors. It is now, and has always been true, that when his Satanic majesty takes possession of a man (or a woman), he can cover himself in sweeter and more impenetrable disguise under the pretty pe- rukes and charming millinery of French art than in a homely British body, out of which the demon horns stick stark through all the wigs and cosme- tics that art can put upon a man. It is worth while for us to remember that in this London, when the elegant Duke of Eochester was beating time with his jewelled hand to a French gallop, Eichard Baxter’s* ever-living Saints' Best was an accredited book, giving consolation to many * Richard Baxter, b. 1615 ; d. 1691. His Saints^ Best published in 1653 (Lowndes). i88 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. a poor soul wrestling with the fears of death and of future judgment. It was published, indeed, some- what earlier ; but its author was still wakeful and earnest ; and many a time his thin, stooping figure might be seen threading a way through the street crowds to his chapel in Southwark, where delighted listeners came to hear him, almost upon the very spot where Shakespeare, eighty years before, had played in the Globe Theatre. The eloquent Tillotson, too, in these times — more liberal than Baxter or Doddridge — was writ- ing upon The Wisdom of Being Religious and the right Rule of Faith, and by his catholicity and clear- headedness winning such favor and renown ai^" to bring him later to the see of Canterbury. I would have you keep in mind, too, that Juhn Milton was still alive — his “ Samson Agonisies ” not being published until Charles 11. had been some twelve years upon the throne — and in quiet seclusion was cultivating and cherishing that x^erene philosophy which glows along the closing line of his greatest sonnet, “ They also serve who only st^nd and wnit I ” ANDRE W MAR VELL. 189 Andrew Marvell* When upon the subject of Milton, I made men- tion of a certain poet who used to go and see him in his country retirement, and who was also assistant to him in his duties as Latin Secretary to the Council. This was Andrew Marvell,^ a poet of so true a stamp, and so true a man, that it is needful to know something more of him. He was son of a preacher at Kingston-upon-Hull (or, by metonomy, Hull) in the north of England. In a very singular way, the occasion of his father's sudden death by drowning (if current tradition may be trusted) was also the occasion of the young poet's entrance upon greatly improved worldly fort- une. The story of it is this, which I tell to fix his memory better in mind. Opposite his father’s home, on the other bank of the Humber, lived a lady with an only daughter, the idol of her mother. This * Andrew Marvell, b. 1620; d. 1678. Early edition of Life and Works 'by CookQ^ 1726. (Later reprints. ) Dr. Gro* sart also a laborer in this field. 190 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. daughter chanced to visit Hull, that she might be present at the baptism of one of Mr. Marvell’s chil- dren. A tempest came up before night, and the boatmen declared the crossing of the river to be dangerous ; but the young lady, with girlish wilful- ness insisted, notwithstanding the urgence of Mr. Marvell ; who, finding her resolved, went with her ; and the sea breaking over the boat both were lost. The despairing mother found what consolation she could in virtually adopting the young Andrew Mar- vell, and eventually bestowing upon him her whole fortune. This opened a career to him which he was not slow to follow upon with diligence and steadiness. Well-taught, well-travelled, well-mannered, he went up to London, and was there befriended by those whose friendship insured success. He was liberal in his politics, beautifully tolerant in religious matters, kept a level head through the years of Parliamentary rule, and was esteemed and admired by both Puritans and Eoyalists. He used a sharp pen in controversy and wrote many pamphlets, some of which even now might serve as models for incisive speech ; he was witty with the wittiest ; was ANDREW MARVELL. 191 caustic, humorous ; his pages adrip with classicisms ; and he had a delicacy of raillery that amused, and a power of logic that smote heavily, where blows were in order. He was for a long time member of Parliament for Hull, and by his honesties of speech and pen, made himself so obnoxious to the political jackals about Charles’s court — that he was said to be in danger again and again of assassination ; he finally died under strong (but unfounded) suspicion of poisoning. Those who knew him described him as of mid- dling stature, strong set, roundish face, cherry- cheeked, hazel-eyed, brown-haired.” ^ There are dainty poems of his, which should be read, and which are worth remembering. Take this, for instance, from his Garden, which was writ- ten by him first in Latin, and then rendered thus : “ What wondrous life is this I lead ! Ripe apples drop about my head ; The luscious clusters of a vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine ; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach ; Aubrey. 192 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Stumbling on melons, as I pass, Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass. Here at the fountain’s sliding foot Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root. Casting the body’s vest aside My soul into the boughs does glide : There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and claps its silver wings, And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light.” And this other bit, from his Appleton House " (Nuneaton), still more full of rural spirit : How safe, me thinks, and strong behind These trees, have I encamped my mind, Where beauty aiming at the heart Bends in some tree its useless dart. And where the world no certain shot Can make, or me it toucheth not. “ Bind me, ye woodbines, in your twines. Curl me about, ye gadding vines, And, oh, so close your circles lace That I may never leave this place ! But, lest your fetters prove too weak Ere I your silken bondage break, Bo you, O brambles, chain me too, And, courteous briars, nail me through ! ” This is better than Eochester’s ‘‘Nothing,” and has no smack of Nell Gwynne or of Charles’s court. SAMUEL BUTLER. 193 Author of Hudibras. It is altogether a different, and a far less worthy character that I now bring to the notice of the reader. The man is Samuel Butler,^ and the book Hudibras — a jingling, doggerel poem, which at the time of its publication had very great vogue in Lon- don, and was the literary sensation of the hour in a court which in those same years f had received the great epic of Milton without any noticeable ripple of applause. For myself, I have no great admiration for Hudi- bras, or for Mr. Samuel Butler. He was witty, and wise in a way, and coarse, and had humor ; but he was of a bar-room stamp, and although he could make a great gathering of the court people stretch their sides with laughter, it does not appear that he * Samuel Butler, b. 1612 ; d. 1680. Editions of Hudi~ hras (his chief book) are many and multiform ; that of Bohn perhaps as good as any. His posthumous works, not much known, were published in 1715. No scholarly edi- ting of his works or life has been done. f Paradise Lost appeared 1667 ; first part of Hudibras, 1663 ; third part not till 1678. II. -^13 194 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. had any high sense of honor, or much dignity of character. Mr. Pepys (whose memoirs you have heard of, and of whom we shall have more to tell) says that he bought the book one day in the Strand because everybody was talking of it — which is the only rea- son a good many people have for buying books ; and, he continues — that having dipped into it, without finding much benefit, he sold it next day in the Strand for half-price. But poor Mr. Pepys, in another and later entry, says, ‘‘ I have bought Hu- dibras again ; everybody does talk so much of it ; ” which is very like Mr. Pepys, and very like a good many other buyers of books. Hudibras is, in fact, a great, coarse, rattling., witty lunge at the stiff - neckedness and the cropped heads of the Puritans, which the roistering fellows about the palace naturally enjoyed immensely. He calls the Presbyterians, ‘ * Such, as do build their faith upon The holj text of pike and gun ; Decide all controversies Bj infallible artillery ; And prove their doctrines orthodox By apostolic blows and knocks ; SAMUEL BUTLER. IQ5 Call fire and sword and desolation A godly, thorougli reformation, Which always must be going on And still be doing — never done ; As if Religion were intended For nothing else but to be mended. A sect whose chief devotion lies In odd, perverse antipathies, In falling out with that or this, And finding somewhat still amiss. That with more care keep holyday, The wrong — than others the right way ; Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to. The self same thing they will abhor One way, and long another — for : Quarrel with mince-pies and disparage Their best and dearest friend plum-porridge ; Fat pig and goose itself oppose, And blaspheme custard thro’ the nose.” It is not worth while to tell the story of the poem — which, indeed, its author did not live to com- plete. Its fable was undoubtedly suggested by the far larger and worthier work of Cervantes ; Hu- dibras and Ealpho standing in the place of the doughty Knight of La Mancha, and Sancho Pan- za ; but there is a world between the two. ig6 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Hudihras had also the like honor of suggesting its scheme and measure and jingle to an early American poem — that of McFingal, by John Trum- bull — in which our compatriot with less of wit and ribaldry, but equal smoothness, and rhythmic zest, did so catch the humor of the Butler work in many of his couplets that even now they pass mus- ter as veritable parts of Hudihras."^ Samuel Butler was the son of a farmer, over in the pretty Worcestershire region of England ; but there was in him little sense of charming ruralities ; they never put their treasures into his verse. For sometime he was in the household of one of Crom- well’s generals, f who lived in a stately country-hall * Some of the couplets in the two ran so nearly together as almost to collide. Thus, Butler says : “He that runs may fight again, Which he can never do that’s slain.” While Trumbull’s couplet runs thus ; “ He that fights and runs away May live to fight another day.” f This was Sir Samuel Luke of Cople-Wood-End, a Parlia- mentary leader and a man of probity and distinction, sup- posed to have been the particular subject of Butler’s lam- SAMUEL BUTLER. 197 a little way out of Bedford ; again, he filled some de- pendency at that stately Ludlow Castle on the bor- ders of Wales — forever associated with the music of lElton’s ‘‘Comus.” It was after the Eestoration that he budded out in his anti-Puritan lampoon ; but though he pandered to the ruling prejudices of the time, he was not successful in his search for place and emoluments ; he quarrelled with those who laughed loudest at his buffoonery and died neglected. His name is to be remembered as that of one of the noticeable men of this epoch, who wrote a poem bristling aU through with coarse wit, and whose memory is kept alive more by the sting- ing couplets which have passed from his pen into common speech than by any high literary merit or true poetic savor. His chief work in verse must be regarded as a happy, witty extravaganza, which caused so riotous a mirth as to be mistaken for valid fame. The poem is a curio of letters — a spec- imen of literary bric-a-brac — an old, ingeniously poon. His own letter-book, however (Egerton Magazine^ cited by John Brown in his recent Life of Bunyan^ p. 45) shows him to have been much more a man of the world than was Butler’s caricature of a “ Colonel.” 19 ^ LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, enamelled snuff-box, with dirty pictures within the Hd. Samuel Pepys. I had occasion just now to speak of the Pepy^ Diary, and promised later and further talk about its author, whom we now put in focus, and shall pour what light we can upon him.* He was a man of fair personal appearance and great self-approval, the son of a well-to-do London tailor, and fairly educated ; but the most piquant memorial of his life at Cambridge University is the ‘‘admonition” — which is of record — of his having been on one occasion “scandalously over-served with drink.” In his after life in London he es- caped the admonitions ; but not wholly the “ over- service ” in ways of eating and drinking. Pepys was a not far-off kinsman of Lord Sandwich (whom he strongly resembled), and it was through * Samuel Pepys — whom those well up in cockney ways of speech persist in calling “ Mr. Peps ” — was born 1633 ; died 1703. His Diary, running from 1660 to 1669, did not see the light until 1825. Since that date numerous editions have been published ; that of Bright, the best. See also Wheatley, Samuel Pepys and the World he lived in. SAMUEL PEPYS. 199 that dignitary’s influence that he ultimately came into a very good position in connection with the Admiralty, where he was most intrepid in his exam- ination of tar and cordage, and brought such close scrutiny to his duties as to make him an admirable official in the Naval Department under Charles 11. For this service, however, he would never have been heard of, any more than another straightforward, plodding clerk ; nor would he have been heard of for his book about naval matters, which you will hardly find in any library in the country. But he did write a Diary ^ which you will find everywhere. It is a Diary which, beginning in 1660, the first of Charles’ reign, covers the ten important succeed- ing years; within which he saw regicides hung and quartered, and heard the guns of terrific naval battles with the Dutch, and braved all the horrors of the Great Plague from the day when he first saw house-doors with a red cross marked on them, and the words ‘‘ Lord, have mercy on us ! ” to the time when ten thousand died in a week, and ‘‘little noise was heard, day or night, but tolling of bells.” Page after page of his Diary is also given to the great fire of the following year — from the Sunday night 200 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, when he was waked by his maid to see a big light on the back side of Mark Lane, to the following Thursday when two-thirds of the houses and of the churches of London were in ashes. But Pepys' Diary is not so valued for its story of great events as for its daily setting down of little unimportant things — of the plays which he saw acted — of the dust that fell on the theatre-goers from the galleries — of what he bought, and what he conjectured, and what his wife said to him, and what new dresses she had, and how he slept comfortably through the sermon of Dr. So-and-So — just as you and I might have done — never having a thought either that his Diary would ever be printed. He wrote it, in fact, in a blind short-hand, which made it lie unnoticed and un- detected for a great many years, until at last some prying Cambridge man unriddled his cipher and wrote out and published Pepys' Diary to the world. And it is delightful ; it is so true and honest, and straightforward, and gossipy ; and it throws more light upon the every-day life in Lon- don in those days of the Eestoration than all the other books ever written. PEP VS' DIARY. 201 There have been other diaries which have historic value ; there was Hyde, Earl of Clarendon,* with some humor and a lordly grace, who wrote a His- tory of the Rebellion — more than half diary — with sentences as long as his pages ; but it does not com- pare with Pepys’ for flashes of light upon the accidents of life. There was good, earnest, well- meaning John Evelyn, f who had a pretty place called Says-Court (inherited through his wife) down at Deptford — which Scott introduces as the resi- dence of Essex in his story of Kenilworth — who had beautiful trees and flowers there which he greatly loved. Well, John Evelyn wrote a diary, and a very good one ; with perhaps a better de- scription of the great London fire of 1666 in it than you will find anywhere else ; he gives us, too, a delightful memorial of his young daughter Mary — who read the Ancients, who spoke French and Italian, who sang like an angel, who was as gentle and loving as she was wise and beautiful — whose * Edward Hjde, Earl of Clarendon, b. 1609 ; d. 1674. He was a man of large literary qualities, and his History is chiefly prized for its portraits. t John Evelyn, b. 1620 ; d. 1706. 202 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. death “ left him desolate ; but John Evelyn is silent upon a thousand points in respect to which Pepys bristles all over like a gooseberry bush. Dr. Burnet, too, wrote a Hidory of his Own Times, bringing great scholarly attainments to its execu- tion, and a tremendous dignity of authorship ; and he would certainly have turned up his bishop’s nose at mention of Samuel Pepys ; yet Pepys is worth a dozen of him for showing the life of that day. He is so simple ; he is so true ; he is so un- thinking ; he is the veriest photographer. Hear him for a little — and I take the passages almost at random : “ November 9, 1660. — Lay long in bed this morning. “ To the office, and thence to dinner at the Hoope Tavern, given us by Mr. Ady and Mr. Wine the King’s fishmonger. Good sport with Mr. Talbot, who eats no sort of fish, and there was nothing else till we sent for a neat’s tongue. “Thence I went to Sir Harry Wright’s, where my Lord was busy at cards, and so I staid below with Mrs. Carter and Evans, who did give me a lesson upon the lute, till he came down, and having talked with him at the door about his late business of money, I went to my father’s, and staid late talking with my father about my sister Poll’s coming to live with me — if she would come and be as a servant (which my wife did seem to be pretty willing to do to-day) ; and he seems to take it very well, and intends to consider of it.” PEPYS^ DIARY. 203 And again : “Home by coach, notwithstanding this was the first day of the King's proclamation against hackney coaches coming into the streets to stand to be hired ; yet I got one to carry me home.*' Again : “11th November^ LorWs Day , — To church into our new gallery, the first time it was used. There being no woman this day, we sat in the foremost pew, and behind us our servants, and I hope it will not always be so, it not being handsome for our servants to sit so equal with us. Afterward went to my father’s, where I found my wife, and there supped ; and after supper we walked home, my little boy carrying a link [torch], and Will leading my wife. So home and to prayers and to bed.” Another day, having been to court, he says : ‘ ‘ The Queene, a very little plain old woman, and nothing more in any respect than any ordinary woman. The Prin- cess Henrietta is very pretty, but much below my expecta- tion ; and her dressing of herself with her haire frizzed short up to her eares did make her seem so much the less to me. But my wife, standing near her, with two or three black patches on, and well dressed, did seem to me much handsomer than she. Lady Castelmaine not so handsome as once, and begins to decay ; which is also my wife’s opinion.” One more little extract and I have done : “ Lord's Day^ May 26. After dinner I, by water, alone to Westminster to the Parish Church, by which I had the 204 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. great pleasure of seeing and gazing at a great many very fine women ; and what with that, and sleeping, I passed away the time till sermon was done.” Was there ever anything more ingenuous than that? How delightfully sure we are that such writ- ing was never intended for publication ! The great charm of Mr. Pepys and all such diary writing is, that it gives us, by a hundred little gossipy touches, the actual complexion of the times. We have no conventional speech to wrestle with, in order to get at its meaning. The plain white lights of honesty and common-sense — so much better than all the rhetorical prismatic hues — put the ac- tual situation before us ; and we have an approach to that realism which the highest art is always struggling to reach. The courtiers in their great, fresh-curled wigs, strut and ogle and prattle before us. We scent the perfumed locks of Peter Lely’s ladies, and the eels frying in the kitchen. We see Mr. Samuel Pepys bowing to the Princess Henri- etta, and know we shall hear of it if he makes a misstep in backing out of her august presence. How he gloats over that new plush, or moire>an- tique, that has just come home for his wife — cost FEPYS^ DIARY. 205 four guineas — which price shocks him a little, and sends him to bed vexed, and makes him think he had better have kept by the old woollen stuff ; but, next Lord’s day being bright, and she wearing it to St. Margaret’s or St. Giles’, where he watches her as she sits under the dull fire of the sermon — her face beaming with gratitude, and radiant with red ribbons — he relents, and softens, and is proud and glad, and goes to sleep ! This Pepys stands a good chance to outlive Butler, and to outlive Bur- net, and to outlive Clarendon, and to outlive John Evelyn. I may add further to this mention of the old diarist, that at a certain period of his life he became suspected — and without reason — of complicity with the Popish plots (of whose intricacies you will get curious and graphic illustration in Peveril of the Peak) ; and poor Pepys had his period of prison- ship like so many others in that day. He also be- came, at a later time, singularly enough, the Presi- dent of the Eoyal Society of England — a. Society formed in the course of Charles n.s’ reign, and which enrolled such men as Eobert Boyle and Sir Isaac Newton in its early days ; and which now 2o6 LANDSy LETTERS, ^ KINGS. enrols the best and worthiest of England’s scien- tists. I do not think they would elect such a man as Samuel Pepys for President now ; yet it would ap- pear that the old gentleman in his long wig and his new coat made a good figure in the chair, and looked wise, and used to have the members down informally at his rooms in York Building, where he made good cheer for them, and broached his best bin of claret. Nor should it be forgotten that Pepys had an appreciative ear for the melodies of Chaucer (like very few in his day), and spurred Dryden to the making of some of his best imita- tions. When he died — it was in the early years of the eighteenth century — he left his books, manu- scripts, and engravings, which were valuable, to Magdalen College, Cambridge ; and there, as I said when we first came upon his name, his famous Diary, in short-hand, lay unheard of and unriddled for more than a hundred years. ROBERT BOYLE. 207 A Scientist. Science was making a pusli for itself in these times. Newton had discovered the law of gravita- tion before Charles 11. died ; the King himself was no bad dabbler in chemistry. Kobert Boyle, the son of an Earl, and with all moneyed appliances to help him, was one of the early promoters and founders of the Eoyal Society I spoke of ; a noticeable man every way in that epoch of the Ethereges and the Buckinghams and the Gwynnes — devoting his fortune to worthy works ; estimable in private life ; dignified and serene ; tall in person and spare — wearing, like every other well-born Lon- doner, the curled, long-bottomed wig of Prance, and making sentences in exposition of his thought which were longer and stiffer than his wigs. I give you a sample. He is discussing the eye, and wants to say that it is wonderfully constructed ; and this is the way he says it : “To be told that an eje is the organ of sight, and that this is performed by that faculty of the mind which, from its function, is called visive, will give a man but a sorry ac* 2c8 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. count of the instruments and manner of vision itself, or ol the knowledge of that Opificer who, as the Scripture speaks, formed the eye ; and he that can take up with this easy theory of Vision, will not think it necessary to take the pains to dissect the eyes of animals, nor study the hooks of mathe- maticians to understand Vision ; and accordingly will have hut mean thoughts of the contrivance of the Organ, and the skill of the Artificer, in comparison of the ideas that will he suggested of both of them to him, that being profoundly skilled in anatomy and optics, by their help takes asunder the several coats, humors, muscles, of which that exquisite dioptrical instrument consists ; and having separately con- sidered the size, figure, consistence, texture, diaphaneity or opacity, situation, and connection of each of them, and their coaptation in the whole eye, shall discover, by the help of the laws of optics, how admirably this little organ is fitted to receive the incident beams of light and dispose them in the best manner possible for completing the lively representa- tion of the almost infinitely various objects of sight.” What do you think of that for a sentence? If the Fellows of the Eoyal Society wrote much in that way (and the Honorable Boyle did a good deal), is it any wonder that they should have an exaggerated respect for a man who could express himself in the short, straight fashion in which Sam- uel Pepys wrote his Diary ? yOHN BUNYAN. 209 John Bunyan. I have a new personage to bring before you out of this hurly-burly of the Eestoration days, and what I have to say of him will close up our talk for this morning. I think he did never wear a wig. Buckingham, who courted almost all orders of men, would not have honored him with a nod of recognition ; nor would Bishop Burnet. I think even the amiable Dr. Tillotson, or the very liberal Dr. South, would have jostled away from him in a crowd, rather than to- ward him. Yet he was more pious than they ; had more humor than Buckingham ; and for imagina- tive power would outrank every man living in that day, unless we except the blind old poet Milton. You will guess easily the name I have in mind : it is John Bunyan.* Not a great name then ; so vulgar a one indeed that — a good many years later — the * B. 1628 ; d. 1688. Editions of tlie Pilgrim's Progress are innumerable. Southey and Macaulay have dealt with his biography, and in later times Mr. Fronde (“ English Men of Letters ”) and John Brown (Svo, London, 1885). 11.-14 210 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, amiable poet Cowper spoke of it charily. But it is known now and honored wherever English is spoken. He was born at Elstow, a mile away from Bed- ford, amid fat green meadows, beside which in early May long lines of hawthorn hedges are all abloom. You will go straight through that pleasant country in passing from Liverpool to London, if you take, as I counsel you to do, the Midland Railway ; and you will see the lovely rural pictures which fell under Bunyan’s eye as he strolled along beside the hedge-rows, from Elstow — a mile-long road — to the grammar-school at Bedford. The trees are beautiful thereabout ; the grass is as green as emerald ; old cottages are mossy and picturesque ; gray towers of churches hang out a great wealth of ivy boughs ; sleek Durham cattle and trim sheep feed contentedly on the Bedford meadows, and rooks, cawing, gather into flocks and disperse, and glide down singly, or by pairs, into the tops of trees that shade country houses. The aspects have not changed much in all these years ; even the cottage of Bunyan’s tinker father is still there, with only a new front upon it. The boy JOHN BUNYAN, 21 1 received but little schooling, and that at hap-haz- ard ; but he got much religious teaching from the elders of the Baptist chapel, or from this or that old Puritan villager. A stern doctrinal theology over- shadowed all his boyish years, full of threatening, fiery darts, and full of golden streaks of promise. He was a badish boy — as most boys are ; a good- ly quantum of original sin in him ; he says, with his tender conscience, that he was “ very bad ; ” a child of the devil ; swearing, sometimes ; playing three old cat” very often; picking flowers, I dare say, or idly looking at the rooks of a Sunday. Yet I would engage that the Newhaven High School would furnish thirty or forty as bad ones as John Bunyan any day in the year. But he makes good resolves ; breaks them again ; finally is convicted, but falters ; marries young (and, as would seem, foolishly, neither bride nor groom being turned of twenty), and she bringing for sole dower not so much as one dish or spoon, but only two good books — The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven and The Practice of Piety, Even before this he had been drafted for service in the battles which were aflame in England — doubtless fighting for the Commonwealth, as most 212 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. of his biographers * allege. Very probably, too, he was under orders of that Sir Samuel Luke, who lived near by, and who — as I have mentioned — was the butt of much of Samuel Butler’s Hudibrastic satire. Next we hear of him as preacher — not properly sanctioned even by the non-conforming authorities — but opening that intense religious talk of his upon whatever and whomsoever would come to hear. Even his friendly Baptist brothers look doubtfully upon his irregularities ; but he sees only the great golden cross before him in the skies, and hears only the crackle of the flames in the nether- most depths below. He is bound to save, in what way he can, those who will be saved, and to warn, in fearfullest way, those who will be damned. Hundreds came to hear this working-man who was so dreadfully in earnest, and who had no more respect for pulpits or liturgies than for preaching- * Mr. Froude (“ English Men of Letters ”) entertains an opposite opinion — as do Offor (1862) and Copner (1883). Mr. Brown, however, who is conscientious to a fault, and seems to have been indefatigable in his research, confirms the general opinion entertained by most accredited biog* raphers. See John Bxinyan ; hia Life, Times, and Work, by John Brown, chap. iii. , p. 45. JOHN BUNYAN 213 places in the woods. It was not strange that he of- fended against non-conformist acts, nor strange that, after accession of Charles II. he came to im- prisonment for his illegal pieties. This prison-life lasted for some twelve years, in the which he still preached to those who would listen within prison walls, and read his Bible, and wrought at tagged laces (still a great industry of that district) for the support of his family, a separation from whom — most of all from his poor blind daughter Mary — was, he says, like ‘‘pulling the flesh from his bones.” Over and over in that reach of prison-life he might have been free if he would have promised to abstain from his irregular preachments, or if he would go over seas to America. But he would not ; he could not forbear to warn 'whomsoever might hear, of the fiery pit, and of the days when the heavens should be opened. He loved not the thought of over-ocean crossing ; his duties lay near ; and with aU his radicalism he never outlived a gra- cious liking for British kingly traditions, and for such ranking of men and powers as belonged to Levitical story. Finally, under Charles’ Declaration of Indulgence 214 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, (1672), which was intended more for the benefit of ill-used Eomanists than for Non-conformists, Bun- yan^S prison-doors were laid open, and he went to hia old work of preaching in public places. There may have been, as his more recent biographers intimate, a later (1675) short imprisonment ; * and this, or some portion of the previous prison-life, was certainly passed in that ancient Bedford jail, which, only a few years since, was standing on Bedford bridge, hanging over the waters of the river Ouse — whose slow current we shall find flowing again in our story of William Cowper. And if the whole weight of tradition is not to be distrusted, it was in this little prison over the river, where passers-by might shout a greeting to him — that John Bunyan fell into the dreamy * Reference is again made to Life, Etc., by Jobn Brown, Minister of the Church at Bunyan Meeting, Bedford. The old popular belief was strong that Bunyan’s entire prison- ship was served in the jail of the bridge. Well-authenti- cated accounts, however, of the number of his fellow-prison- ers forbid acceptance of this belief. Froude alludes to the question without settling it ; Mr. Brown ingeniously sets forth a theory that explains the tra- ditions, and seems to meet all the facts of the case. JOHN BUNYAN. 215 fashioning of that book which has made his name known everywhere, and which has as fixed a place in the great body of English literature as Shake- speare’s “Hamlet,” or Spenser’s Faery Queen — I mean the Pilgrim's Progress, But how is it, the reader may ask, that this tinker’s son, who had so far forgotten his school learning that his wife had to teach him over again to read and write — how is it that he makes a book which takes hold on the sympathies of all Christendom, and has a literary quality that ranks it with the first of allegories ? * Mr. Pepys told plainly what we wanted him to * There was a quasi charge of plagiarism against Bunjan at one time current, and particulars respecting it came to the light some sixty years ago in a correspondence of Robert Southey (who edited the Major edition of PilgrirrCs Progress) with George Off or, Esq., which appears in the Peminis^ cences of Joseph Cottle of Bristol. The allegation was, that Bunyan had taken hints for his allegory from an old Butch book, Duyfkens ande Willemynlcyns Pilgrimagee (with five cuts by Bolswert), published at Antwerp in the year 1627. Br. Southey dismissed the allegation with dis- dain, after examination of the Dutch Pilgrimage; nor do recent editors appear to have counted the charge worthy of refutation. 2i6 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, tell ; but he had nothing but those trifles which give a color to every-day life to tell of. If he had undertaken to make a story of a page long, involv- ing imaginative powers, he would have made a failure of it ; and if he had tried to be eloquent he would have given himself away deplorably. But this poor hrazier (as he calls himself in his last will), with not one-fourth of his knowledge of the world, with not one-twentieth of his learning (bald as the old diarist was in this line), with not one-hundredth part of his self-confidence, makes this wonderful and charming book of which we are talking. How was it ? Well, there was, first, the great compelling and informing Christian purpose in him : he was of the Bible all compact ; every utterance of it was a vital truth to him ; the fire and the brimstone were real ; the Almighty fatherhood was real ; the cross and the passion were real ; the teeming thousands were real, who hustled him on either side and who were pressing on, rank by rank, in the broad road that leads to the City of Destruction. The man vAo believes such things in the way in which John Bunyan believed iliem has a tremendous PILGRIMS PROGRESS. 217 motive power, which will make itself felt in some shape. Then that limited schooling of his had kept him to a short vocabulary of the sharpest and keenest and most telling words. Ehetoric did not lead him astray after flowers ; learning did not tempt him into far-fetched allusions ; literary habit had not spoiled his simplicities. And again, and chiefest of all, there was a great imagina- tive power, coming — not from schools, nor from grammar teachings — but coming as June days come, and which, breathing over his pages with an almost divine afflatus, lifted their sayings into the regions of Poetry. Therefore and thereby it is that he has fused his thought into such shape as takes hold on human sympathies everywhere, and his characters are all live creatures. All these two hundred and twenty years last past the noble Great-heart has been thwacking away at Giant Grim and thun- dering on the walls of Doubting Castle with blows we hear; and poor, timid Christian has been just as many years, in the sight of all of us, making his way through pitfalls and quagmires and Van- 2I8 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS, ity Fairs — hard pressed by Apollyon, and be- labored by Giant Despair — on his steady march toward the. Delectable Mountains and the river of Death, and the shining shores which lie Be- yond. CHAPTEK VI. T here were some unsavory names whicli crept into the opening of our last chapter ; but they were sweet in the nostrils of Charles H. Of such were Buckingham, Rochester, Etherege, Dor- set, and the Castelmaine. And we made a little moral counterpoise by the naming of Baxter’s Saints' Rest, and of Tillotson, and of the health- ful, noble verse of Andrew Marvell, by which we wished to impress upon our readers the fact that the whole world of England in that day was not given over to French court- dances and to foul-mouthed poets ; but that the Puritan leaven was still work- ing, even in literary ways, and that there were men of dignity, knowledge, culture, and rank, who never bowed down to such as the pretty Duchess of Portsmouth. We had our glimpse of that witty buffoon Sam- 220 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. ael Butler, who made clever antics in rhyme ; and I think, we listened with a curious eagerness to what Samuel Pepys had to say of his play-going, and of die black patches with which his pretty wdfe set forth her beauty. Then came Bunyan, with his great sermonizing m barns and woods, and that far finer sermonizing which in the days of his jailhood took shape in the immortal story of Christian and Great-heart. He died over a grocer’s shop, in Snow Hill, London (its site now all effaced by the great Holborn Viaduct), whither he had gone on a preaching bout in the year 1688, only a few months before James H. was driven from his throne. It is worth going out by the City Eoad — only a short walk from Finsbury Square — to the cemetery of Bunhill Fields, where Bunyan was buried — to see the marble figure of the tinker preacher stretched upon the monument modern admirers have built, and to see Christian toiling below, with his burden strapped to his back. THOMAS FULLER. 221 Three Good Prosers. In the course of that old Pepys' Diary — out of which we had our regalement — there is several times mention of Thomas Fuller ; * among others this : “I sat down reading in Fuller’s English Worthies; be- ing mucli troubled that (though he had some discourse with me about my family and armes) he says nothing at all. But I believe, indeed, our family were never considerable.” Honest Pepys ! Shrewd Dr. Fuller, and a man not to be forgotten ! He was a ‘‘ Cavalier parson ” through the Civil- War days ; was bom down in Northamptonshire in the same town where John Dryden, twenty - three years later, first saw the light. He was full of wit, and full of knowledges ; people called him — as so many have been and are called — ‘‘a walking library ; ” and his stout figure was to be seen many a time, in the Commonwealth days, striding through Fleet Street, and by Paul’s ♦Thomas Fuller, b. 1608; d. 1661. The Woi'thies of Eng- land is his best-known book — a reservoir of anecdote and witty comments upon “men and manners.” 222 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Walk, to Cheapside. There is quaint humor in his books, and quaintness and aptness of language. Coleridge says he was ‘‘ the most sensible and least prejudiced great man of his time.” Sir Thomas Browne,* a doctor, and the author of the Eeligio Medici and Urn-Burial, was another de- lightful author of the Civil- War times, whose life reached almost through the reign of Charles 11. ; yet he was not a war man — in matter of kings or of churches. Serenities hung over him in all those times wherein cannon thundered, and traitors (so called) were quartered, and cathedrals despoiled. He loved not great cities. London never magne- tized him ; but after his thorough continental travel and his doctorate at Leyden, he planted himself in that old, crooked-streeted city of Norwich, in Nor- folk ; and there, under the shadow of the stupen- dous mound and Keep (which date from the early * Thomas Browne, b. 1605 ; d. 1682. Full collection of his works (with Johnson’s Bohn, 1851. A very charm- ing edition of the Eeligio Medici — so good in print — so full in notes — so convenient to the hand — is that of the “ Golden Treasury Series,” Macmillan. Nor can I forbear reference to that keen, sympathetic essay on this writer which appears in Walter Pater’s Appreciations^ Macmillan, 1889. SIR THOMAS BROWNE, 223 Henrys) he built up a home, of which he made a museum — served the sick — reared a family of ten children, and followed those meditative ways of thought which led him through sepulchral urns, and the miracles of growth, and the Holy Scriptures, away from all the ‘‘ decrees of councils and the niceties of the schools ” to the altitudes he reaches in the Religio Medici, I must excerpt something to show the humors of this Norwich doctor, and it shall be this : ‘ ‘ Light that makes things seen makes some things invis- ible. Were it not for darkness, and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of Creation had remained unseen, and the stars in Heaven as invisible as on the Fourth day when they were created above the horizon with the Sun, and there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of Jewish types we find the Cherubim shadow- ing the Mercy Seat. Life itself is but the Shadow of Death, and souls departed but the Shadows of the Living. The sun itself is but the dark Simulacrum^ and light but the shadow of God.” If there were no other reason for our love of the best writings of Sir Thomas Browne, it would be for this — that in some scarce distinguishable way he has inoculated our ‘‘ Elia ’’ of a later day with 224 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. something very like his own quaint egoisms and as quaint garniture of speech. How Charles Lamb must have enjoyed him, and joyed in the medita- tion — of a twilight — on the far-reaching, mystic skeins of thought which so keen a reader would ravel out from the stores of the Urn-Burial ! And with what delighted sanction the later writer per- mits, here and there, the tender solemnities of the elder to shine through and qualify his own pe- riods ; not through imitativeness, conscious or un- conscious, but because the juices from the mellow fruitage of the old physician have been quietly as- similated by the stuttering clerk of the India House, and so his thought burgeons — by very ne- cessity — into that kindred leafage of phrase which lifts and sways in the gentle breezes of his always gentle purpose. Another name, of a man far less lovable, but per- haps more widely known, is that of Sir William Temple.* He was of excellent family, born in Lon- * William Temple, b. 1628 ; d. 1G99. His works, mainly political writings, were pnblisbed in two volumes folio, 1720 ; a later edition, 1731, including the Letters of Temple (edited, and as title-page sa,ys — published by Jonathan Swift), was dedicated to his Majesty William III. SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE. 225 don, highly cultivated, and lived all through the reign of Charles IL, and much beyond. He repre- sented England, in diplomatic ways, often upon the Continent, and with great success ; he negoti- ated the so-called Triple Alliance ; he also brought about that royal marriage of the daughter of the Duke of York (afterward James IL), with William of Orange, and so gave to England that royal couple, William and Mary. He had great dignity ; he had wealth ; a sort of earlier Edward Everett — as pol- ished and cold and well-meaning and fastidious ; looking rather more to the elegance of his speech than to the burden of it ; always making show of Classicism — nothing if not correct ; cautious ; keeping well out of harm’s way, and all pugna- cious expressions of opinion ; courteous to strong Churchmen ; courteous to Papists ; bowing low to my Lady Castelmaine ; very considerate of Crom- wellians who had power ; moulding his habit and speech so as to show no ugly angles of opinion anywhere, but only such convenient roundness as would roll along life’s level easily to the very end. You will not be in the way of encountering much that he wrote, though he had the reputation in II. -15 226 LANDS, LETTERS, 5 - KINGS. those days, and long after, of writing excellently well. ‘‘He was the first writer,” said Johnson, “ who gave cadence to English prose.” Among his essays is one on “ Ancient and Mod- ern Learning,” showing the pretensions of a scho- lastic man, whose assumptions brought about a controversy into which Eichard Bentley, a rare young critic, entered, and out of which grew event- ually Swift’s famous Battle of the Books. Temple also wrote on gardens, with a safer swing for his learning and his taste ; traces of what his taste was in such matters are still discernible about his old home of Moor Park, in Surrey. It lies some forty miles from London, on the way to Southamp- ton and the Isle of Wight, near the old town of Earnham, where there is a venerable bishop’s palace worth the seeing ; a mile away one may find the terraces of Sir William’s old garden, and the mossy dial under which he ordered his heart to be buried. Another interest, moreover, attaches to these Moor Park gardens, which will make them doubly worth a visit. On their terraces and under their trees used to pace and meditate that strange creature Jonathan Swift, who was in his young days a pro- JOHN DRYDEN 227 iege or secretary of Sir William Temple ; and there, too, in the same shade, and along the same terraces, used to stroll and meditate in different mood, poor Mistress Hester Johnson, the ‘‘Stella” of Swift’s life-long love-dream. We shall meet these people again. But I leave Sir William Temple, commending to your atten- tion a delightful little essay of Charles Lamb, in his volume of Elia, upon “The Genteel Style in Writing.” It gives a fair though flattering notion of the ways of Sir William’s life, and of the way of his work. Johi Dry den. Of course we know John Dryden’s name a great deal better than we know Sir William Temple’s ; better, perhaps, than we know any other name of that period. And yet do we know his poems well? Are there any that you specially cherish and doat upon? any that kindle your sympathies easily into blaze ? any that give electric expression to your own poetic yearnings, and put you upon quick and enchanting drift into that empyrean of song whereto the great poets decoy us? I doubt if 228 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. there is much of Drjden which has this subtle in- fluence upon you ; certainly it has not upon me. There are the great Cecilia odes, which hold their places in the reading-books, with their “ Double — double — double beat Of the thundering drum ; ” and the royal “ Philip’s warlike son, Aloft in awful state ; The lovely Thais by his side, — Like a blooming Eastern bride In flower of youth and beauty’s pride ; ” all which we read over and over, always with an ambitious vocalism which the language invites, but, I think, with not much hearty unction. And yet, notwithstanding the little that we recall of this man’s work, he did write an enormous amount of verse, in all metres, and of all lengths. All the poems that Milton ever published would hardly fill the space necessary for a full synopsis of what John Dryden wrote. But let us begin at the beginning. This poet, and important man of letters, was bom only a year or two later than John Biiuyan, and in JOHN DRVDEN. 229 the same range of country — a little to the north- ward, in an old rectory of Aldwinckle (Northamp- tonshire), upon the banks of the river Nen. And this river flows thence northerly, in great loops, where sedges grow, past the tall spire of Oundle — past the grassy ruins of Fotheringay ; and thence easterly, in other great loops, through flat lands, un- der the huge towers of Peterborough Cathedral. But the river singing among the sedges does not come into Dryden’s verse ; nor does Fotheringay, with its tragic memories ; nor do the noble woods of Lilford Park, or of that Eockingham Forest which, in the days of Dryden’s boyhood, must in many places have brought its spurs of oak timber and its haunts of the red-deer close down to the Nen banks. Indeed, Wordsworth says, with a little exaggeration, it is true, ‘‘there is not a single image from nature in the whole body of his [Dryden’s] works.” He was a well-born boy, with titled kinsfolk, and had money at command for good courses in books. He was at Westminster School under Dr. Busby ; was at Cambridge, where he fell one time into diffi- culties, which somehow angered him in a way that made him somewhat irreverent of his old college in 230 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. after life. There are pretty traditions that in ex- treme youth he addressed some very earnest ama- tory verses to a certain Helen Driden, daughter of his baronet uncle at Canons- Ashby ; ^ and there are hints dropped by some biographers of a rebuff to him ; which, if it came about, did not pluck away the cheerfulness and self-approval that lay in him. It was in London, however, where he went after his father’s death, and when he was twenty-seven, that the first verse was written by him which made the literary world prick up its ears at sound of a new voice. ’Tis in eulogy of Cromwell, dying just then, and this is a bit of it : ** Swift and resistless thro’ the land he past, Like that bold Greek, who did the East subdue, And made to battles such heroic haste, As if on wings of Victory he flew. “ He fought, secure of fortune as of fame : Still by new maps the island might be shown. Of conquests, which he strew’d where-e’er he came. Thick as the galaxy with stars is strown. * This old country home, very charming with its antique air, its mossy terraces, its giant cedars, is still held by a Sir Henry Dryden. JOHN DRYDEN 231 “ His ashes in a peaceful urn shall rest, His name, a great example stands, to show How strangely high endeavors may be blest, Where piety and valor jointly go.” A short two years after, you will remember, and Charles 11. came to his own and was crowned ; and how does this eulogist of Cromwell treat his corona- tion ? In a way that is worth our listening to ; for, I think, a comparison of the Cromwellian verses with the Carolan eulogy gives us a key to John Dry- den’s character : “ All eyes you draw, and with the eyes, the heart: Of your own pomp yourself the greatest part : Next to th" sacred temple you are led. Where waits a crown for your more sacred head : The grateful choir their harmony employ, Not to make greater, but more solemn joy. Wrapt soft and warm your name is sent on high, As flames do on the waves of incense fly : Music herself is lost, in vain she brings Her choicest notes to praise the best of kings ; Her melting strains in you a tomb have found. And lie like bees in their own sweetness drown'd.” No wonder that he came ultimately to have the place of Poet-laureate, and thereafter an extra £100 a year with it ! No wonder that, with all his clever- 232 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. ness — and it was prodigious — he never did, and never could, win an unsullied reputation for ster- ling integrity and straightforward purpose. I know that his latest biographer and advocate, Mr. Saintsbury, whose work you will be very apt to encounter in the little series edited by John Morley, sees poems like those I have cited with other eyes, and fashions out of them an agreeable poetic con- sistency very honorable to Dryden ; but I cannot twist myself so as to view the matter in his way. I think rather of a conscienceless thrifty newspaper, setting forth the average everyday drift of opinion, with a good deal more than everyday skill. Meantime John Dryden has married, and has married the daughter of an earl ; of just how this came about we have not very full record ; but there were a great many who wondered why she should marry him ; and a good many more, as it appeared, who persisted in wondering why he should marry her. Such wonderments of wondering people over- take a good many matches. It is quite certain that it was not a marriage which went to make a domes- tic man of him ; and I think you will search vainly through his poems for any indication of those home JOHN DRYDEN 233 instincts which, like the melting strains ” he flung about King Charles, “ Lie like bees in tbeir own sweetness drown’d.” The only positive worldly good which seemed to come of this marriage was an occasional home at Charlton, in Wiltshire — an estate of the Earl of Berkshire, his father-in-law — where Dryden wrote, shortly after his marriage, his Annus Mirabilis, in which he gave to all the notable events of the year 1666 a fillip with his pen ; and the odd con- ceits that lie in a single one of his stanzas keep yet alive a story of the capture by the British of a fleet of Dutch India ships : — “ Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, And now their odors armed against them fly ; Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die.” There are three hundred other stanzas in the poem, of the same make and rhythm, telling of fire, of plague, and of battles. I am not sure if anybody reads it nowadays ; but if you do — and it is not fatiguing — you will find wonderful word-craft in it, which repeats the din and crash of battle, and 234 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. paints the smouldering rage and the blazing power of the Great Fire of London in a way which certain boys, I well remember in old school days, thought represented the grand climacteric of poetic diction. The London of Dryden. But let us not forget where we are in our English story ; it is London that has been all aflame in that dreadful year of 1666. Thirteen thousand houses have been destroyed, eighty odd churches, and some four hundred acres of ground in the central part of the city have been burned over. The fire had followed swiftly upon the devastating plague of the previous year, which Dryden had gone into Wiltshire to avoid. It is doubtful, indeed, if he came back soon enough to see the great blaze with his own eyes ; ‘‘ chemical fire,” the poet calls it, and it licked up the poison of the plague ; but it did not lick up the leprosy of Charles’ court. There was a demand for plays, and for plays of a bad sort ; and Dryden met the demand. Never was there an au- thor more apt to divine what the public did want^ and more full of literary contrivances to meet it. GROWTH OF LONDON. 235 Dryden knew all the purveyors of this sort of intel- lectual repast, and all their methods, and soon be- came a king among them ; and to be a king among the playwrights was to have a very large sovereignty in that time. Everybody talked of the plays ; all of Eoyalist faith went to the plays, if they had money ; and money was becoming more and more plentiful. There had been the set-back, it is true, of the Great Fire ; but English commerce was mak- ing enormous strides in these days. There was a pathetic folding of the hands and dreary forecast- ings directly after the disaster, as after all such calamities. But straight upon this the city grew, with wider streets and taller houses, and in only a very few years the waste ground was covered again, and the new temple of St. Paul’s rising, under the guidance of Sir Christopher Wren, into those grand proportions of cupola and dome, which, in their smoked and sooty majesty, dominate the city of London to-day. Houses of nobles and of rich merchants which stood near to Cornhill and Lombard Street, and private gardens which had occupied areas there- about — now representing millions of pounds in 236 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. value — were crowded away westward by the new demands of commerce. In Dryden’s day there were ducal houses looking upon Lincoln's Inn Fields ; and others, with pleasure grounds about them, close upon Covent Garden Square. Ameri- cans go to that neighborhood now, in early morn- ing, to catch sight of the immense stores of fruit and vegetables which are on show there upon market-days ; and they are well repaid for such visit; yet the houses are dingy, and a welter of straw and mud and market debris stretches to the doors ; but the stranger, picking his way through this, and through Kussell Street to the corner of Bow Street, will find, close by, the site of that famous Will’s Coffee-house, where Dryden lorded it so many years, and whose figure there — in the chimney-corner, with his pipe, laying down the law between the whiffs, and conferring honors by offer- ing a pinch from his snuff-box — Scott has made familiar to the whole world. It was an earlier sort of club-house, where the news in the Gazette was talked of, and the last battle — if there were a recent one — and the last play, and the last scandal of the court. Its discussions WILLIS COFFEE-HOUSE. ^37 and potations made away with a good many nights, and a good many pipes and bottles, and was not largely provocative of domesticity. But it does not appear that the Lady Elizabeth — Dryden's wife — ever made remonstrances on this score ; indeed, Mr. Green, the historian, would intimate that my lady had distractions of her own, not altogether wise or worthy ; but we prefer to believe the best we can of her. To this gathering-place at Covent Garden Ether- ege and Wycherley found their way — all writing men, in fact ; even the great Buckingham perhaps — before his quarrel; and Dorset, fellow-member with Dryden, of the Koyal Society ; maybe But- ler too, when he found himself in London ; and poor Otway, ^ hoping to meet some one generous enough to pay his score for him ; and the young Congreve, proud in his earlier days to get a nod * Otway, b. 1631 ; d. 1685, son of a Sussex clergyman, was author of many poor plays, and of two — ‘‘The Or- phan” and “Venice Preserved” — sure to live. With much native refinement and extraordinary pathetic power, he went to the had ; was crazed by hopeless love for an actress (Mrs. Barry) in his own plays ; plunged thereafter into wildest dissipation, and died destitute and neglected. 238 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. from the great Dryden ; and, prouder yet, when, at a later time, he was honored by that tender and pathetic epistle from the Laureate : ** Already I am worn with cares and age, And just abandoning the ungrateful stage ; But you, whom every muse and grace adorn, Whom I foresee to better fortune born. Be kind to my remains ; and O defend, Against your judgment, your departed friend I ** I said that he wrote plays ; wrote them by the couple — by the dozen — by the score possibly. You do not know them ; and I hope you never will know them to love them. They have fallen away from literature — never acted, and rarely read. He could not plot a story, and he had not the dra- matic gift. One wonders how a theatreful could have listened to their pomposity and inflation and exaggerations. But they did, and they filled Dry- den’s pockets. There were scenic splendors, in- deed, about many of them which delighted the pit, and which the poet loved as accompaniments to the roll of his sonorous verse ; there were, too, fragments here and there, with epithet and char- acterization that showed his mastership ; and some* DRYDEN^S SATIRES. 239 times the most graceful of lyrics budded out from the coarse groundwork of the play, as fair in sound as they were foul in thought. In private intercourse Dryden is represented to have been a man of courteous speech, never low and ribald — as were many of the royal favorites ; and when he undertook playwriting to order, to meet the profligate tastes of the court, he could not, like some lesser playwrights, disguise double- meanings and vulgarities under a flimsy veil of courtliness ; but by his very sincerity he made all his lewdness rank, and all his indelicacies brutal. This will, and should, I think, keep his plays away from our reading-desks. Dryden’s satires, written later, show a better and far stronger side of his literary quality ; and Buckingham, long after his lineaments shall have faded from a mob of histories, will stand preserved as Zimri, in the strong pickle of Dryden’s verse ; you will have met the picture, perhaps without knowing it for the magnificent courtier, who wrote The Rehearsal : ” “ A man so various that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind’s epitome : 240 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong ; Was everything by starts, and nothing long, But in the course of one revolving moon Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon ; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, Besides ten thousand freaks that died in thinking. A man who writes in that way about a peer of England was liable to write of lesser men in a manner that would stir hot blood ; and he did. Once upon a time this great king at ‘‘Will’s" was waylaid and sorrily cudgelled ; which is an experience that — however it may come about — is not elevating in its effects, nor does it increase our sense of a man’s dignity ; for it is an almost uni- versal fact that the men most worthy of respect, in almost any society, are the men who never do get quietly cudgelled. Later Poems and Purpose. Far on in 1682, when our Dryden was waxing oldish, and when he had given over play-going for somewhat more of church-going, he wrote, in the same verse with his satires, and with the same ring- ing couplets of sound, a defence of the moderate DRYDEN^S RELIGION. 241 liberal cburchmansbip that does not yield to eccle- siastic fetters, and that thinks widely. A little later, in 1687, he writes in a more assured vein, assuming bold defence of Eomanism — as it existed in that day in England — to which faith he had become a convert. This last is a curiously designed poem, showing how little he had the arts of construction in hand ; it is a long argument between a Hind and a Panther, in the shades of a forest. Was ever ecclesiasticism so recommended before ? Yet there are brave and imforgetable lines in it : instance the noble rhythm, and the noble burden of that pas- sage beginning — like a trumpet note — “ What weight of ancient witness can prevail, If private reason hold the public scale ? ’’ And again the fine tribute to ‘‘ the Church : ” Thus one, thus pure, behold her largely spread, Like the fair ocean from her mother bed ; From East to West triumphantly she rides ; All shores are watered by her wealthy tides ; The Gospel-sound, diffused from pole to pole Where winds can carry, and where waves can roll ; The self-same doctrine of the sacred page Conveyed to every clime, in every age.'* 11. —16 242 LANDS, LETTERS, RINGS. I think Bishop Heber had a reverent and a stealthy look upon these lines when he wrote a cer- tain stanza of his Greenland’s icy mountains.” The enemies of Dryden did not fail to observe that between the dates of the two professions of faith named, Charles IL had died, summoning a Papist priest, at the very last, to give him a chance — and, it is feared, a small one — of recon- cilement with Heaven ; furthermore, these enemies remembered that the bigot James H. had come to the throne, full of Papist zeal and of a poor hope to bring all England to a great somerset of faith. Did Dryden undergo an innocent change? Maybe ; may not be. Certainly neither Lord Macaulay, nor Elkanah Settle, nor Saintsbury, nor you, nor I, have the right to go behind the veil of privacy which in such matters is every man’s privilege. How odd it seems that this Papist convert of James n.’s time, and author of so many plays that outranked Etherege in rankness, should have put the Vent, Creator, of Charlemagne (if it be his) into such reverent and trenchant English as carries it into so many of our hymnals. DRYDEN A TRANSLATOR, 243 ‘‘ Creator Spirit, by whose aid The world’s foundations first were laid, Come, visit every humble mind ; Come, pour thy joys on humankind ; From sin and sorrow set us free, And make thy temples worthy thee.” Nor was this all of Dryden’s translating work. He roamed high and low among all the treasures of the ancients. Theocritus gave his tangle of sweet sounds to him, and Homer his hexameters ; Ju- venal and Horace and Ovid were turned into his verse ; and Dryden’s Virgil is the only Virgil of thousands of readers. He sought motive, too, in Boccaccio and Chaucer ; and within times the oldest of us can remember his “ Flower and Leaf and his ‘‘Palamon and Arcite” were more read and known than the poems of like name attributed to Chaucer. But in the newer and more popular ren- derings and printings of the old English poet, Chaucer has come to his own again, and rings out his tales with a lark-like melody that outgoes in richness and charm all the happy paraphrases of Dryden. A still more dangerous task our poet undertook in the days of his dramatic work. I have in my lib- 244 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS, rary some half dozen of Diy den’s plays — yellowed and tattered, and of the imprint of 1710 or there- about — and among them is one bearing this title, The Tempest, originally written by William Shake- speare, and altered and improved by John Dry den ; and the story of Antony and Cleopatra underwent the same sort of improvement — dangerous work for Dryden ; dangerous for any of us. And yet this latter, under name of ‘"All for Love,” was one of Dryden’s greatest successes, and reckoned by many dramatic critics of that day far superior to Shake- speare. One more extract from this voluminous poet and we shall leave him ; it was written when he was well toward sixty, and when his dramatic experi- ences were virtually ended ; it is from an ode in memory of Mistress Kilhgrew, a friend and a poetess. In the course of it he makes honest bewaihnent, into which it would seem his whole heart entered : “ O gracious God I how far have we Profaned thy heavenly gift of Poesy ? Made prostitute and profligate the muse, Debased to each obscene and impious use, Whose harmony was first ordained above For tongues of angels, and for hymns of love ? ” JOHN DRYDEN. 245 And again, a verselet that is full of all his most characteristic manner : “ When in mid-air the golden trump shall sound, To raise the nations under ground ; When in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, The judging God shall close the book of Fate; And there the last assizes keep, For those who wake and those who sleep : When rattling bones together fly, From the four corners of the sky ; When sinews o’er the skeletons are spread, Those clothed with flesh, and life inspires the dead ; The sacred poets first shall hear the sound, And foremost from the tomb shall bound, For they are covered with the lightest ground ; And straight, with inborn vigor, on the wing, Like mounting larks, to the new morning sing. Then thou, sweet Saint, before the quire shall go, As Harbinger of Heaven, the way to show. The way which thou so well hast learnt below I ” We have given much space to our talk about Dry den. Is it because we like him so well ? By no means. It is because he was the greatest master among the literary craftsmen of his day ; it is be- cause he wrought in so many and various forms, and always with a steady, unflinching capacity for toil, which knew no shake or pause ; it is because 246 LANDS, LETTERS,