^. 
 
 «.^ 
 
 ^^ "^a? 
 
 
 IMAGE EVALUATION 
 TEST TARGET {MT-3) 
 
 1.0 
 
 I.I 
 
 2.0 
 
 !2.2 
 
 : 1^ 
 
 IL25 i 1.4 
 
 1.6 
 
 Photographic 
 
 Sdences 
 Corporation 
 
 23 WEST MAIN STREET 
 
 WEBSTER, N.Y. MS80 
 
 (716) 872-4503 
 
 // 
 
 W 
 
 ^ .<^4f. 
 
 c// ^ s'*^ 
 
 
 
 
 Z 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 r\ 
 
 N> 
 
 

 ,% 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 CIHM/ICMH 
 
 Microfiche 
 
 Series. 
 
 CIHM/ICIVIH 
 Collection de 
 microfiches. 
 
 Canadian Institute for Historical IVIicroreproductions / Institut Canadian de microreproductions historiques 
 
Technical and Bibliographic Notes/Notes techniques et bibliographiques 
 
 The Institute has attempted to obtain the best 
 original copy available for filming. Features of this 
 copy which may be bibliographically unique, 
 which may alter any of the images in the 
 reproduction, or which may significantly change 
 the usual method of filming, are checked below. 
 
 n 
 
 D 
 
 D 
 
 n 
 
 n 
 
 Coloured covers/ 
 Couverture de couleur 
 
 n~| Covers damaged/ 
 
 Couverture endommagie 
 
 Covers restored and/or laminated/ 
 Couverture restaurde et/ou peiliculie 
 
 I I Cover title missing/ 
 
 Le titre de couverture manque 
 
 I I Coloured maps/ 
 
 Cartes giographiques en couleur 
 
 □ Coloured ink (i.e. other than blue or black)/ 
 Encre de couleur (i.e. autre que bleue ou noire) 
 
 I I Coloured plates and/or illustrations/ 
 
 Planches et/ou illustrations en couleur 
 
 Bound with other material/ 
 RellA avec d'autres documents 
 
 rri Tight binding may cause shadows or distortion 
 
 along interior margin/ 
 
 La re liure serr6e peut causer de I'ombre ou de la 
 
 distortion id long de la marge int^rieure 
 
 Blank leaves added during restoration may 
 appear within the text. Whenever possible, these 
 have been omitted from filming/ 
 II se peut que certaines pages blanches ajout^s 
 iors d'une restauration apparaissent dans le texte, 
 mais, lorsque cela itait possible, ces pages n'ont 
 pas 6t6 film^es. 
 
 Additional comments:/ 
 Commentaires supplimentaires; 
 
 The 
 tot 
 
 L'Unstitut a microfilm^ le meilleur exemplaire 
 qu'il lui a M possible de se procurer. Les details 
 de* cat exemplaire qui sont peut-Atre uniques du 
 point de vue bibliographique, qui peuvent modifier 
 une image reproduite, ou qui peuvent exiger une 
 modification dans la methods normale de filmage 
 sont indiqufo ci-dessous. 
 
 I I Coloured pages/ 
 
 K 
 
 D 
 
 Pages de couleur 
 
 Pages damaged/ 
 Pages endommag6es 
 
 Pages restored and/oi 
 
 Pages restaurtes et/ou pellicuides 
 
 Pages discoloured, stained or foxei 
 Pages d6colo'6es, tachet^es ou piqu6es 
 
 I — I Pages damaged/ 
 
 I I Pages restored and/or laminated/ 
 
 nri Pages discoloured, stained or foxed/ 
 
 The 
 pos 
 of 
 filml 
 
 Ori( 
 beg 
 the 
 sior 
 othi 
 first 
 sior 
 ori 
 
 □ Pages detached/ 
 Pages d6tach6es 
 
 Showthrough/ 
 Transparence 
 
 I I Quality of print varies/ 
 
 Quality in6gale de I'impression 
 
 Includes supplementary material/ 
 Comprend du materiel supplAmentaire 
 
 Only edition available/ 
 Seule Mition disponibia 
 
 The 
 she 
 TIN 
 whi 
 
 IMai 
 diff< 
 enti 
 beg 
 righ 
 reqi 
 met 
 
 Pages wholly or partially obscured by errata 
 slips, tissues, etc., have been refilmed to 
 ensure the best possible image/ 
 Les pages totalement ou partiellement 
 obscurcies par un feuillet d'errata, une pelure, 
 etc., ont 6tA fiim^es A nouveau de fagon d 
 obtenir la meilieure image possible. 
 
 This item is filmed at the reduction ratio checked below/ 
 
 Ce document est filmA au taux de rMuction indiquA ci-dessous. 
 
 10X 14X 18X 22X 
 
 26X 
 
 30X 
 
 
 
 
 
 •' 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^zx 
 
 16X 
 
 20X 
 
 24X 
 
 28X 
 
 32X 
 
aire 
 
 > details 
 |ues du 
 t modifier 
 iger une 
 I filmage 
 
 The copy filmed here has been reproduced thanlte 
 to the generosity of: 
 
 Hamilton Public Library 
 
 The images appearing here are the best quality 
 possible considering the condition and legibility 
 of the original copy and in keeping with the 
 filming contract specifications. 
 
 L'exemplaire film4 fut reproduit grftce A la 
 g6nAro8itA de: 
 
 Hamilton Public Library 
 
 Les images suivantes ont 6X6 reprodultes avec le 
 plus grand soin, compte tenu de la condition et 
 de la nettetA de l'exemplaire fiimi, et en 
 conformity avec les conditions du contrat de 
 filmage. 
 
 j^es 
 
 Original copies in printed paper covers are filmed 
 beginning with the front cover and ending on 
 the last page with a printed or illustrated impres- 
 sion, or the back cover when appropriate. All 
 other original copies are filmed beginning on the 
 first page with a printed or illustrated impres- 
 sion, and ending on the last page with a printed 
 or illustrated impression. 
 
 The last recorded frame on each microfiche 
 shall contain the symbol -^ (meaning "CON- 
 TINUED "). or the symbol V (meaning "END"), 
 whichever applies. 
 
 Les exemplaires origineux dont la couverture en 
 papier est imprimie sont filmAs en commen^ant 
 par le premier plat et en terminant soit par la 
 derniire page qui comporte une empreinte 
 d'impression ou d'illustration, soit par le second 
 plat, salon le cas. Tous les autres exemplaires 
 origineux sont filmAs en commen^ant par la 
 premiere page qui comporte une empreinte 
 d'impression ou d'illustration et en terminant par 
 la dernlAre pege qui comporte une telle 
 empreinte. 
 
 Un des symboles suivants apparaftra sur la 
 dernidre image de cheque microfiche, selon le 
 cas: le symbols — »- signifie "A SUIVRE ". le 
 symbols V signifie "FIN". 
 
 ire 
 
 Maps, plates, charts, etc., may be filmed at 
 different reduction ratios. Those too large to be 
 entirely included in one exposure are filmed 
 beginning in the upper left hand corner, left to 
 right end top to bottom, as many frames as 
 required. The following diagrams illustrate the 
 method: 
 
 Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent dtre 
 film6s 6 des taux de reduction diff^rents. 
 Lorsque le document est trop grand pour dtre 
 reproduit en un seul cliche, il est filmd 6 partir 
 de I'angle sup^rieur gauche, de gauche 6 droite, 
 et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre 
 d'images nicessaire. Les diagrammes suivants 
 illustrent la mithode. 
 
 ly errata 
 Bd to 
 
 nt 
 
 ne pelure. 
 
 ipon d 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 1 
 
 2 
 
 3 
 
 4 
 
 5 
 
 6 
 
 32X 
 
s 
 
 I 
 
'to 
 
 Edited by John RiCHARD GreeN, MA 
 
 .4 
 
 ENGLISH 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. STOPFORD BROOKE, M.A. 
 
 TIIIKD EDITION. 
 
 Sforonto: 
 CANADA PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 (limited). 
 
 ♦ i860 
 
 '■"^M^.w^''v^:^5t^mm 
 
 1 
 
Cnterftd accordinr to the Act of the Parliament of Canadft, in th« year 
 thousand eight hundred and seventy-seven, by James Campbell 
 & SoN| in the Office of the Minister of AghcuUurtt. 
 
 ~.> 
 
 JAN 4 1965 
 
 HAMiLT 
 
 <^ *> S 
 
 n 
 
 u 
 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
Contents. 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQttfiSt, 670- ^^ 
 1066 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, I066-I400 . 19 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 FROM CHAUCER, 1400, TO ELIZABETH, 1 559 . . 4, 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603 eg 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION, 
 
 1603— 1660 ' ^, 
 
 94 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FROM THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. 1660— 
 
 ^760 ,^g 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 PROSE LITERATURE FROM GEORGE IIL TO 
 
 VICTORIA, 1760—1837 ,25 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 POETRY, FROM 1730-1832 ^ ^ j-^ 
 
i #■ A ' 
 
 f - < 
 
 
 J 
 
 -t 
 
 i 
 
PRIMER 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 670—1066. 
 
 1. Enjrlish Literature begins in England about 670. 
 
 2. War Voems.—Bei lau/y, and Fi^^ht at Finncsburg before 600. 
 
 Song of Hrunanburh^ 937. i'^'ghi ^^ Maldon, 991. Odes 
 in A. S. Chronicle. 
 
 3. Religious Vo^m%.—Q^^vciOVi% Paraphrase of the Bible^ eTOt 
 
 Poems in the Exeter and the Vercelli book. 
 
 4. The Traveller's Song— the Lament of Deor — inserted into 
 
 Exeter book from pagan MSS. 
 
 5. Prose.-— Baeda's /rrt«j/rt//<7« ^6*/. >^w, 735. King iTJfred*8 
 
 literary and historical work during his two times of peace^ 
 880— 893 and 897— 901. /Elfrie's Translations, 990— 
 995, The English Chronicle, ends 1154. 
 
 I. What Literature is, — Before we can enter 
 on the story of our English Literature we must try to 
 understand what literature itself is. By literature we 
 mean the written thoughts and feelings of intelligent 
 men and women arranged in a way which will give 
 pleasure to the reader. Literature has to do therefore, 
 so far as its subject goes, with all the things about which 
 we learn, and think, and feel. As to its form, it has two 
 large divisions — one of which is called Prose Liter9,t;urQ 
 
 <ind th^ other Poetical l.iterature»^ 
 
E KG I IS If LITERATURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 2. Prose Literature. — There are many kinds of 
 prose literature. Men write in prose about philosophy, 
 or history, or art, or religion, or science, or manners, 
 or the lives of men. Prose literature then means 
 
 ythe written thoughts, learning, and feelings of men 
 (on all these subjects. Every tiling in fact that is 
 (written of any kind, except poetiy, may be called 
 prose. But we must not think that everything that is 
 called prose is literature. We cannot say, for instance, 
 that a ship's log, or a catalogue, or the daily journal of 
 a traveller, is to be called literature simply because 
 it is written in prose. Writing is not literature unless 
 it gives to the reader a pleasure which arises, not only 
 from the things said, but from the way in which they 
 are said, and that pleasure is only given when the 
 words are carefully or curiously or beautifully put 
 together into sentences. To do this in a special way 
 is to have what we call style. As much art must 
 be used in building sentences up out of words as in 
 building houses, if we wish the prose we write to be 
 worthy of the name of literature. And just as in look- 
 ing at different kinds of houses, we say that one is 
 built in a strong way, another in a simple way, another 
 in an ornamental way, so we say in reading books 
 written by different men that one is in a simple style, 
 another in a grand, another in an eloquent style. 
 Again, in looking at a large building, we see not only 
 the way in which it is built, but also the character and 
 the mind of the builder. So also in a prose book which 
 is fit to belong to literature we ought to feel that there 
 is a distinct mind and character who is speaking Xo us 
 through the style, that is, through the way in which 
 the words are put together. Prose then is not litera- 
 ture unless it have style and character, and be written 
 with curious care. 
 
 3. Of Poetical Literature we may say the 
 same thing. Poetry must be tried by rules more 
 l^vere even th?in those by which we judge prose, £^nd 
 
I., EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST, 7 
 
 unless it satisfies tlio e rules it does not take rank as 
 literature. There must be more care taken, more 
 beauty, more nmsical movement in the arrangement 
 of the words than in prose \ and the way in which the 
 thoughts and feelings of the poet are put together into 
 words will always be, in true poetry, wholly different 
 from the way in which they would be put together by 
 a prose writer. Poetry speaks to us of all that belongs 
 to Man, and of all that man feels or sees when he is 
 delighted with the beauty or grandeur of the Natural 
 World. These are its two chief subjects in literature ; 
 and it writes of them in different kinds of poetry, in 
 all of which we English have done well. There is 
 epic poetry, like Milton's great poem Paradise Losty 
 dramatic j^Qciry^ like Shakespeare's ])lays ; /yr/^ poetry, 
 or short pieces on one subject, like the songs in his 
 plays ; narrative poetry, like Scott's Lady of the 
 Lake; descriptive poetry, like Thomson's Seasons, 
 which describes nature ; and allegorical poetry, which 
 tells a story with a hidden meaning in it. Of this 
 last the best example is Spenser's Faerie Queen. 
 These, thenj^are the two main divisions of literature. 
 4. The History of English Literature, then, 
 is the story of what great English men and women 
 thought and. felt, and then wrote down in good 
 prose or beautiful poetry in the English language. 
 The story is a ^ong one. It begins about the year 
 670, and it is still going on in the year 1875. Into 
 this little book then is to be put the story of 1,200 
 years. No people that have ever been in the world 
 can look back so far as we English can to the 
 beginnings of our literature ; no people can point to 
 so long and splendid a train of poets and prose writers ; 
 no nation has on the whole written so much and so 
 well. P>ery English man and woman has good reason 
 to be proud of the work done by their forefathers in 
 prose and poetry. Every one who can write a good 
 book or a good song may say to himself, " I belong 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [CHAF. 
 
 to a great company, which has been teaching and 
 delighting the world for more than i,ooo years." And 
 that is a fact in which those who write and those who 
 read ought to feci a noble pride. 
 
 5. The English and the Welsh. — This litera- 
 ture is written in English, the tongue of our fathers. 
 They lived, while thii island of ours was still called 
 Britain, in Sleswick, Jutland and Holstein ; but, either 
 because they were pressed from the inland or 
 for pure love of adventure, they took to the sea, 
 and, landing at various parts of Britain at various 
 times drove back, after 150 years of liard fighting, the 
 Britons, whom they called Welsh, to the land now 
 called Wal' s, and to Cornwall. It is well for those 
 who study English literature to remember that in 
 these two places the Britons remained as a distinct 
 race with a distinct literature of their own, because 
 the stories and the poetry of the Britons crept after- 
 wards into English literature and had a great influence 
 upon it. The whole tale of King Arthur, of which 
 English poetry and even English prose is so full, was 
 a British tale. Otherwise we English have nothing to 
 do with I ho old dwellers in our country. We drove 
 these Britons, as the Primer of English History will 
 describe, utterly away. 
 
 6. The First English Poetry. — When we 
 came to Britain we were great warriors and great 
 sea pirates — " sea wolves " as a Roman poet calls us ; 
 and all our poetry down to the present day is full of 
 war, and still more of the sea. No nation has ever 
 written so much sea-poetry. It was in the blood of 
 our fathers, who chanted their sea war-songs as they 
 sailed. But we were more than mere warriors. We 
 were a home-loving people when we got settled either 
 in Sleswick or in England, and all our literature from 
 the first writings to the last is full of domestic love, 
 the dearness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. We 
 were a religious people, even as l^eathen, still more 
 
 i* 
 
 ■J3S 
 
 id 
 
[chap. 
 
 ing and 
 " And 
 ose who 
 
 is litera- 
 fathers. 
 11 called 
 It, either 
 and or 
 the sea, 
 various 
 :ing, the 
 nd now 
 3r those 
 that in 
 distinct 
 because 
 pt after- 
 ifluence 
 f which 
 ull, was 
 hin J to 
 drove 
 ory will 
 
 en we 
 great 
 ills us ; 
 full of 
 s ever 
 ood of 
 s they 
 
 We 
 either 
 ; from 
 : love. 
 
 We 
 
 more 
 
 I.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 9 
 
 so when we became Christian ; and our poetry is as 
 much tinged with religion as with war. Whenever 
 literature died down in England it rose again in 
 poetry ; and the first poetry at each recovery was reli- 
 gious, or linked to religion. V. e shall soon see that 
 our first poems were of war and religion. 
 
 7. The English Tongue. — Of the language 
 in which our literature is written we can say little 
 here ; it is fully discussed in the Primer of Eng- 
 lish Grammar. Of course it hay chrnged its look 
 very much since it began to be written. The 
 earliest form of our English tongue is very different 
 from modern English in form, pronunciation, and 
 appearance, and one must learn it almost as if it 
 were a foreign tongue ; but still the language written 
 in the year 700 is the same as that in which the 
 prose of the Bible is written just as much as the tree 
 planted a hundred years ago is the same tree to-day. 
 It is this sameness of language, as well as the same- 
 ne*' , of national spirit, which makes our literature one 
 literature for 1200 years. 
 
 8. Old English Poetry was also different then 
 from what it is now. It was not written in rime, 
 nor were its syllables counted. The lines are short ; 
 the beat of the verse depends on the emphasis given 
 by the use of the same letter, except in the case of 
 vowels, at the beginning of words ; and the emphasis 
 of the words depends on the thought. The lines are 
 written in pairs ; and in the best work the two chief 
 words in the first, and the one chief word in the 
 second, usually begin with the same letter. Here is 
 one example from a war-song ; — 
 
 j ** W^arrior of wnnters young 
 I With w/ords spake." 
 
 After the Norman Conquest there gradually crept 
 in a French system of rimes and of metres and 
 regent which w^ find full-grown in Chaucer's wprka, 
 
 (( 
 
 IVx^M 7/^ntriim geong 
 ^ordum maelde." 
 
xo 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 But unrimed and alliterative verse lasted in poetry to 
 the reign of John, and alliteration was blended with 
 rime up to the sixteenth century. The latest form 
 of it occurs in Scotland. 
 
 9. Our Greatest Early Poems remaining are 
 two — Beowulf 2sA Ccedmon's Paraphrase of the Bible, 
 The first is on the whole a war story, the second is 
 religious; and on these two subjects of war and reli- 
 gion EngUsh poetry for the most part speaks till the 
 Conquest. Beowulf was brought into our land from 
 the Continent, and was rewritten in parts by a 
 Christian Englishman of Northumbria. It is a story 
 of the great deeds ana death of a hero named 
 Beowulf. Its social interest lies in what it tells us 
 of the manners and customs of our forefathers before 
 they came here; its poetical interest lies in its de- 
 scriptions of wild nature, of the lives and feelings of 
 the men of that time, and of the way in which the 
 Nature-worship of our people made dreadful and 
 savage places seem dwelt in — as if the places had a 
 spirit — by monstrous beings. For it was thus that 
 all that half-natural, half-spiritual world began in 
 our poetry which, when men gre^ gentler and the 
 country more cultivated, became so beautiful as 
 faeryland. Here is the description of the dwelling- 
 place of the Grendel, a man-fiend that devoured 
 men, and whom Beowulf overcomes in battle : — 
 
 i 
 PI 
 
 wl 
 
 o{ 
 F 
 hi 
 
 hi 
 
 U 
 wi 
 
 
 ** A lonely land 
 Won they in ; wolf-caverns, 
 Wind-U-aversed nesses, 
 Perilous fen -paths, 
 Where the mountain flood, 
 Under the mists of the ness, 
 Downwards is moved ; 
 Flood under feld. 
 Not further from hence 
 
 Than a mile's space 
 Is the place of the mere ; 
 Over which frown 
 And rustle the forests. 
 Fast-rooted the wood 
 The water that shadows ; 
 There deadly the wonder 
 One may watch every iiiglit ^ 
 Fire in the flood." 
 
 T}ie lov^ Qf wil4 nature ii^ our poetry, and thg 
 
[CHAP. 
 
 )oetry to 
 led with 
 ist form 
 
 ning are 
 he Bible. 
 icond is 
 ind r-eli- 
 
 till the 
 nd from 
 s by a 
 > a story 
 
 named 
 
 tells us 
 
 s before 
 
 I its de- 
 
 ellngs of 
 
 hich the 
 
 [fill and 
 
 ;s had a 
 
 us that 
 
 gan in 
 
 md the 
 
 tiful as 
 
 welling- 
 
 ivoured 
 
 11 
 
 nere; 
 
 lows ; 
 Inder 
 night ^ 
 
 \^ tUg 
 
 EARLY WRITERS TQ THE CONQUEST 
 
 eopling of it with wild half-human things, begins in 
 ork like this. After the fight Beowulf returns to his 
 wn land, where he rules well for many years, till a 
 ire-drake, who guards a treasure, comes down to 
 liarry his people. The old king goes out then to fight 
 his last fight, slays the dragon, but dies of its flaming 
 breath, and his body is burned high up on a sea- 
 washed Ness or headland. 
 
 10. Caedmon. — The poem of Beowulf has the 
 grave Teutonic power, but it is not native to our soil. 
 It is not the first true English poem. That is the 
 work of C^DMON, and is also from Northumbria. 
 The story of it, as told by Baeda, proves that the 
 making of songs was common at the time. Caedmon 
 was a servant to the monastery of Hild, an abbess of 
 royal blood, at Whitby in Yorkshire. He was some- 
 what aged when the gift of song came to him, and he 
 knew nothing of the art of verse, so that at the feasts 
 when for the sake of mirth all sang in turn he left the 
 table. One night, having done so and gone to the 
 stables, for he had care of the cattle, he fell asleep, 
 and One came to him in vision and said, "Caed- 
 mon, sing me some song." And he answered, " 1 
 cannot sing ; for this cause I left the feast and came 
 hither." Then said the other, " However, you shall 
 sing." " What shall I sing ? " he replied. " Sing the 
 beginning of created things," answered the other. 
 Whereupon he began to sing verses to the praise 
 of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had 
 sung and added more in verse worthy of God. In 
 the morning he came to the steward, and told him 
 of the gift he had received, and, being brought to 
 Hild, was ordered to tell his dream before learned 
 men, that they might give judgment w^hence his verses 
 came. And when they had heard, they all said that 
 heavenly grace liad been conferred on him by our Lord. 
 
 11. Csedmon's Poem, written about 670, is for 
 § the beginning of English poetry, and the stgry 
 
13 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [chap* 
 
 of its origin ought to be loved by us. Nor should 
 we fail to reverence the place where it began. Above 
 the small and land-locked harbour of Whitby rises 
 and juts out towards the sea the dark cliff where 
 Hildas monastery stood, looking out over the Ger- 
 man Ocean. It is a wild, wind-swept upland, and 
 the sea beats furiously beneath, and standing there 
 one feels that it is a fitting birt. place for the 
 poetry of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of 
 the first poet without the stormy note of the scenery 
 among which it was written. In it also the old fierce 
 war element is felt when Caedmon comes to sing the 
 wrath of the rebel angels with God and the overthrow 
 of Pharaoh's host, and the lines, repeating, as was the 
 old English way, the thought a second time, fall like 
 stroke on stroke in battle. But the poem is religious 
 throughout — Christianity speaks in it simply, sternly, 
 with fire, and brings with it a new world of spiritual 
 romance and feeling. The subjects of the poem were 
 taken from the Bible, in fact Caedmon paraphrased 
 the history of the Old and New Testament. He sang 
 the creation of the world, the history of Israel, the 
 book of Daniel, the whole story of the life of Christ, 
 future judgment, purgatory, hell, and heaven. All 
 who heard it thought it divinely given. " Others 
 after him," says Bseda, *' tried to make religious poems, 
 but none could vie with him, for he did not learn 
 the art of poetry from men, nor of men, but from 
 God." It was thus that English song began in 
 religion. The most famous passage of the poem 
 not only illustrates the dark sadness, the fierce love of 
 freedom, and the power of painting distinct characters 
 which has always marked our poetry, but it is also 
 famous for its likeness to a parallel passage in Milton. 
 It is when Caedmon describes the proud and angry 
 cry of Satan against God from his bed of chains in 
 hell. The two great English poetr, may be brought to 
 
 ,^eti"iqr ovsr a space of ^ thgusand years in anol^her 
 
 •wa 
 wa 
 
 hi 
 
[chap* 
 
 for should 
 
 n. Above 
 
 litby rises 
 
 :liff where 
 
 ' the Ger- 
 
 land, and 
 
 ding there 
 
 J for the 
 
 e verse of 
 
 le scenery 
 
 old fierce 
 
 sing the 
 
 overthrow 
 
 as was the 
 
 e, fall like 
 
 s religious 
 
 ly, sternly, 
 
 if spiritual 
 
 )oem were 
 
 .raphrased 
 
 He sang 
 
 [srael, the 
 
 of Christ, 
 
 ven. All 
 
 " Others 
 
 us poems, 
 
 not learn 
 
 but from 
 
 began in 
 
 he poem 
 
 :e love of 
 
 :haracters 
 
 it is also 
 
 1 Milton. 
 
 ,nd angry 
 
 :hains in 
 
 ought to 
 
 anoU^^T 
 
 I] EARL Y WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST. 13 
 
 ray, for both died in such peace that those who 
 ratched beside them knew not when they died. 
 12. Lesser Old English Poems.— Of the 
 poetry that came after Csedmon we have few remains. 
 But we have many things said which show us that 
 his poem, like all great works, gave birth to a number 
 of similar ones. 'I'he increase of monasteries where 
 men of letters lived naturally made the written poetry 
 religious. But an immense quantity of secular poetry 
 was sung about the country. Aldhc/fft^ a young man 
 when Caednion died, and afterwards Abbot of Malmes- 
 bury, united the song-maker to the religious poet. 
 He was a skilled musician, and it is said that he 
 had not his equal in the making or singing of English 
 verse. His songs were popular in King yfi^lfred's time, 
 and a pretty story tells, that when the traders came 
 into the town on the Sunday, he, in the character of 
 , a gleeman, stood on the bridge and sang them songs, 
 . with which he mixed up Scripture texts and teaching. 
 Of all this wide- spread poetry we have now only the 
 few poems brought together in a book preserved at 
 Exeter, in another found at Vercelli, and in a few 
 leaflets of manuscripts. The poems in the Vercelh 
 book are all religious : legends of saints and addresses 
 ' to the soul; those in the Exeter book are hymns and 
 sacred poems. The famous Traveller's Song and the 
 Lament of Deor inserted in it, are of the older and 
 t)agan time. In both there are poems by Cyne- 
 wuLF, whose work is remarkably fine. They are all 
 Christian in tone. The few touches of love of nature 
 tin them dwell on gentle, not on savage scenery. They 
 are sorrowful when they speak of the life of men, 
 tender when they touch on the love of home, as tender 
 as this little bit which still lives for us out of that old 
 world : *' Dear is the welcome guest to the Frisian wife 
 [when the vessel strands ; his ship is come, and her hus- 
 [band to his house, her own provider. And she wel- 
 comes him in, washes his weedy garment, and clothes 
 
H 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURM, 
 
 [CttA*. 
 
 him anew. It is pleasant on shore to him whom his 
 love awaits." Of the scattered pieces the finest ai e two 
 fragments, one long, on the story oi Judith^ and another 
 short, in which Death speaks to Man, and describes 
 " the low and hateful and doorless house,'' of which 
 he keeps the key. But stem as the fragment is, with its 
 English manner of looking dreadful things in the face, 
 and with its English pathos, the religious poetry of our 
 old fathers always went with faith beyond the grave. 
 Thus we are tofc that King Eadgar, in the ode on 
 his death in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, " chose for 
 himself another light, beautiful and pleasant, and left 
 this feeble life." 
 
 13. The War Poetry of England at this time 
 was probably as plentiful as the religious. But it was 
 not hkely to be written down by the writers who lived 
 in religious houses. It was sung from feast to feast 
 and in the halls of kings, and it naturally decayed 
 when the English were trodden down by the Normans. 
 But we have two examples of what kind it was, 
 and how fine it was, in the Battle Song of Brtinan- 
 burh^ 937, and in the Song of the Fight at Maldon, 
 991. A still earlier fragment exists in a short ac- 
 count of the Battle of Finnesbiirg, probably of the 
 same time and belonging to as long a story as the 
 story of Beowulf. Two short odes on the victories 
 of King Eadmund, and on the coronation of King 
 Eadgar, inserted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle^ com- 
 plete the list of war poems. 
 
 14. The Songs of Brunanburh and Maldon 
 are fine war odes, the fitting sources, both in their 
 short and rapid lines, and in their almost Homeric 
 simplicity and force, of such war-songs as the ** Battle 
 of the Baltic " and the " Charge of the Light Brigade." 
 The first describes the fight of King ^thelstan with 
 Anlaf the Dane. From morn till night they fought 
 till they were "weary of red battle" in the "hard 
 
 1 five young kings and seven earls of 
 
 » 
 
whom his 
 St are two 
 d another 
 describes 
 of which 
 s, with its 
 the face, 
 try of our 
 he grave. 
 2 ode on 
 chose for 
 , and left 
 
 this time 
 
 5ut it was 
 
 vho lived 
 
 : to feast 
 
 decayed 
 
 Normans. 
 
 it was, 
 
 Bninan- 
 
 Maldon^ 
 
 short ac- 
 
 ly of the 
 
 ry as the 
 
 victories 
 
 of King 
 
 cle^ com- 
 
 Maldon 
 
 in their 
 Homeric 
 
 '; Battle 
 Brigade." 
 itan with 
 y fought 
 e "hard 
 earls of 
 
 -^ 
 
 t.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST. 1% 
 
 Anlaf's host lay in that fighting place "quieted by 
 swords," and the Northmen fled, and only " the 
 screamers of war were left behind, the black raven 
 and the eagle to feast on th^ white flesh, and the 
 greedy battle-hawk, and the grey beast the wolf 
 in the wood." The second is the story of the 
 death of Brihtnoth, an ealdorman of Northumbria, 
 in battle against the Danes. It contains 690 lines. 
 In the speeches of heralds and warriors before the 
 fight, in the speeches and single combats of the chiefs, 
 in the loud laugh and mock which follow a good 
 death-stroke, in the rapid rush of the verse when the 
 battle is joined, the poem though broken, as Homer's 
 verse is not, is Homeric. In the rude chivalry which dis- 
 dains to take vantage ground of the Danes, in the way 
 in which the friends and churls of Brihtnoth die one 
 by one, avenging their lord, keeping faithful the tie of 
 kinship and clanship, in the cry not to yield a foot's 
 breadth of earth, in the loving sadness with which 
 home is spoken of, the poem is English to the core. 
 And in the midst of it all, like a song from another 
 land, but a song heard often in English fights from 
 then till now, is the last prayer of the great earl, when 
 dying he commends his soul with thankfulness to 
 God. 
 
 15. Old English Prose. — It is pleasant to think 
 that I may not unfairly make English prose begin 
 with BiEDA. He was born about a.d. 673, and was, 
 like Caedmon, a Northumbrian. From 683 he spent 
 his life at Jarrow, in the same monastery, he says, 
 " and while attentive to the rule of mine order, and 
 the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay 
 in learning, or teaching, or writing." He long enjoyed 
 that pleasure, for his quiet life was long, and from 
 boyhood till his very last hour his toil was unceasing. 
 Forty-five works prove his industry, and their fame 
 over the whole of learned Europe during his time 
 proves their value. His learning was as various a9 
 
t6 
 
 ^ArCL/SJ/ LITER A TORE, 
 
 tCMAP. 
 
 it was great. All that the world then knew of science, 
 music, rhetoric, medicine, arithmetic, astronomy, and 
 physics was brought together by him ; and his life was 
 as gentle and himself as loved as his work was great 
 His books were written in Latin, and with these we 
 have nothing to do, but his was the first effort to 
 make English prose a literary language, for his last 
 work was a Translation of the Gospel of St. John^ as 
 almost his last words were in English verse. In the 
 story of his death told by his disciple Cuthbert is 
 the first record of English prose writing. When the last 
 day came, the dying man called his scholars to him 
 that he might dictate more of his translation. "There 
 is still a chapter wanting," said the scribe, " and it is 
 hard for thee to question thyself longer." " It is easily 
 done," said Baeda, ** take thy pen and write quickly." 
 Through the day they wrote, and when evening fell, 
 "There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master," said 
 the youth. " Write it quickly," said the master. " It 
 is finished now." " Thou sayest truth," was the reply, 
 "all is finished now." He sang the " Glory to God" 
 and died. It is to that scene that English prose looks 
 back as its sacred source, as it is in the greatness 
 and variety of Baeda's Latin work that English litera- 
 ture strikes its key-note. 
 
 i6. iElfred's Work.— When Bseda died North- 
 umbria was the home of English literature. Though 
 as yet written mostly in Latin, it was a wide- spread 
 literature. Wilfrid of York and Benedict Biscop 
 had founded libraries and established monastic 
 schools far and wide. Six hundred scholars gathered 
 round Baeda ere he died. But towards the end of 
 his life this northern literature began to decay, and 
 after 866 it was, we may say, blotted out by the 
 Dane^. The long battle with these invaders was 
 lost in Northumbria, but it was gained for a time by 
 iElfred the Great in Wessex ; and with ^Elfred's lite- 
 rary work loarmng changed its seat from the north 
 
 i 
 
 to 
 
[CMAP. 
 
 science, 
 >my, and 
 1 life was 
 as great 
 these we 
 effort to 
 
 his last 
 
 John^ as 
 
 In the 
 
 hbert is 
 
 1 the last 
 
 to him 
 
 "There 
 and it is 
 is easily 
 luickly.'* 
 ing fell, 
 :er," said 
 jr. " It 
 le reply, 
 o God" 
 se looks 
 reatness 
 ;h litera- 
 
 North. 
 Though 
 e- spread 
 
 Biscop 
 nonastic 
 gathered 
 end of 
 ay, and 
 by the 
 ers was 
 time by 
 d's lite- 
 e north 
 
 1.] EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1 7 
 
 to the south. But he made it by his writings an Eng- 
 lish, not a Latin literature ; and in his translations he, 
 since Baeoa's work is lost, is the true father of English 
 prose. As Whitby is the cradle of English poetry, so 
 is Winchester of English prose. At Winchester Alfred 
 took the English tongue and made it the tongue in 
 which history, philosophy, law and religion spoke to the 
 English people. No work was ever done more eagerly, 
 or more practically. He brought scholars from different 
 parts of the world. He set up schools in his monas- 
 teries "where every free-born youth, who has the means, 
 shall attend to his book till he can read English 
 writing perfectly." He presided over a school in his 
 own court. He made himself a master of a literary 
 English style, and he did this that he might teach his 
 people. He translated the popular manuals of the 
 time into English, but he edited them with large 
 additions of his own, needful, as he thought, for 
 English use. He gave his nation moral philosophy in 
 Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy ; a universal his- 
 tory, with geographical chapters of his own, in the 
 History of Orosius; a history of England in Bceda's 
 History^ giving to some details a West Saxon form ; 
 and a religious handbook in the Pastoral Rule of 
 Pope Gregory. We do not quite know whether 
 he worked himself at the English or Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle^ but at least it was in his reign that it 
 rose out of meagre lists into a full narrative of 
 events. To him, then, we English look back as the 
 father of English literature. 
 
 17. The Later Old English Prose.-^The im- 
 pulse he gave soon fell away, but it was revived under 
 King Eadgar, when ^thelwald. Bishop of Winchester, 
 made it his constant work to keep up English schools 
 and to translate Latin works into English, and when 
 Archbishop Dunstan took up the same pursuits with 
 eagerness. -^Ethelwald's school sent out from it a 
 scholar and abbot named ^Elfric. He takes rank as 
 
I8 
 
 ENGLISH LITERA TIRE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 the fir^t large translator of the Bible, turning into 
 English the first seven books and part of Job. VVe owe 
 to him a series of Homilies^ and his Co/loqny, after- 
 wards edited by another /Elfric, may be called the first 
 pjiglish-Latin dictioiiary. But this revival had no 
 sooner begun to take root than the Northmen came 
 again in force upon the land and conquered it. During 
 the long interweaving of Danes and English together 
 under Danish kings from 1013 to 1042, no English 
 literature arose. It was not till the quiet reign of 
 Edward the Confessor it again began to Hve. But 
 no sooner was it born than the Norman invasion 
 repressed, but aid not quench its life. 
 
 18. The English Chronicle. — One great monu- 
 ment, however, of old English prose lasts beyond the 
 Conquest. It is the English Chronicle, and in it our 
 literature is continuous from iElfred to Stephen. At 
 first it was nothing but a record of the births and 
 deaths of bishops and kings, and was probably a 
 West Saxon Chronicle. Alfred edited it from various 
 sources, added largely to it from Baeda, and raised it 
 to the dignity of a national history. After his reign, and 
 that of his son Eadward, 901-925, it becomes scanty, 
 but songs and odes are inserted in it. In the reign of 
 iEthelred and during the Danish kings its fulness 
 returns, and growing by additions from various quarters, 
 it continues to be our great contemporary authority 
 in English history till 1154, when it abruptly closes 
 with the death of Stephen. ^' It is the first history of 
 any Teutonic people in their own language ; it is the 
 earliest and the most venerable monument of Englisli 
 prose." In it old English poetry sang its last song, 
 in its death old English prose dies. It is not till the 
 reign of John that English poetry in any extended form 
 appears again in the Brut of Layamon. It is not till 
 the reign of Edward the Third that original English 
 prose again begins. 
 
 1 
 
\ [CHAP. 
 
 ung into 
 
 We owe 
 
 rwjv, after- 
 
 d the first 
 
 I had no 
 
 len came 
 
 t. During 
 
 together 
 
 o English 
 
 ; reign of 
 
 ive. But 
 
 invasion 
 
 sat monu- 
 eyond the 
 [ in it our 
 )hen. At 
 )irths and 
 robably a 
 m various 
 
 raised it 
 reign, and 
 
 J scanty, 
 le reign of 
 ts fulness 
 s quarters, 
 ' authority 
 )tly closes 
 
 history of 
 
 ; it is the 
 5f English 
 last song, 
 
 ot till the 
 ided form 
 
 is not till 
 al English 
 
 [n.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 19 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FPOM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066 — 1400« 
 
 aynmon's Prut, 1^05- — Ormin's OrmnJum^ 1215. — J^ir 
 John Mandcvillo'K Travels^ 1356- — W.llinm Langland's 
 Vision coucrniii/i^ Piers the P/mvmnn^ 3 texts, 1362, 77. 93. 
 —John Wyclif's Translation of the Bible^ 1380.— John 
 Gower's Confessio Amantis^ 1393 — 4' 
 
 ^Geoffrey Chaucer, born 1340, died 1400- — Dethe of Blaunche 
 the Duchesse^ 1369. — Troylus and Creseide, — Parlament 
 of Poules. — Compleynt of Mars. — Anelida and Arcite. — 
 lious of Fame. 1374 — 1384- — A<.'^wrf^ f*f Good Women^ 
 1385- — Piose Treatise on Asttolabe^ \Z^\, —Canterbury 
 
 ' Tales, 1373 to 1400- 
 
 19. General Outline.— The invasion of Britain 
 by the English made the island, its speech and its 
 literature, English. The invasion of England by the 
 Danes lefl our speech and literature still English. 
 The Danes were of our stock and tongue, and we 
 absorbed them. The invasion of England by the 
 Normans seemed likely to crush the English people, 
 to root out their literature, and even to threaten their 
 Speech. But that which happened to the Danes hap- 
 pened to the Normans also, and for the same reason. 
 They were originally of like blood to the English, 
 Jtnd of like speech ; and though during their setile- 
 inent in Normandy they had become French in 
 manner and language, and their literature French, 
 et the old blood prevailed in the end. The Nor- 
 an felt his kindred with the English tongue and 
 spirit, became an Englishman, and left the French 
 tongue to speak and write in English. We absorbed 
 the Normans, and we took into our literature and 
 Speech some French elements they had brought with 
 them. It was a process slower in literature than it 
 
 B a 
 
80 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 was ill the political history, but it began from the 
 poliiical struggle. Up to the time of Henry II. the 
 Norman troubled himself but little about the English 
 tongue. But when French foreigners came pouring 
 into the land in the train of Henry and his sons, the 
 Norman allied himself with the Englishman against 
 these foreigners, and the English tongue began to 
 rise into importance. Its literature grew slowly, but 
 as quickly as most of the literatures of Europe, and 
 it never ceased to grow. " The last memoranda of the 
 Peterborough Chronicle are of year 1154. the last 
 extar English Charter can scarcely be earlier than 
 1 155." There are English sermons of the same 
 century, and now, early in the next century, at the 
 central time of this struggle, after the death of Richard 
 the First, the Brut of Layamon and the Ormuhim 
 come forth within ten years of each other to prove 
 the continuity, the survival, and the victory of 
 the English tongue. When the patriotic struggle 
 closed in the reign of Edward I., English literature 
 had risen again through the song, the sermon, and the 
 poem, into importance, and was written by a people 
 made up of Norman and Englishman welded into one 
 by the fight against the foreigner. But though the 
 foreigner was driven out, his literature influenced and 
 continued to influence, the new English poetry. The 
 poetry, we say, for in this revival our literature was 
 only poetical. All prose, with the exception of a few 
 sermons and some religious works from the French, 
 was written in Latin. 
 
 20. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the 
 two main streams into which this poetical literature 
 divides itself. The religious poetry is entirely English 
 in spirit and a poetry of the people, from the Ormulum 
 of Ormin, 12 15, to the Vision of Piers the Plowman^ 
 in which poem the distinctly English poetry reached its 
 truest expression in 1362. The story-telling poetry 
 is English at its beginning but becoiii^es more and 
 
[CHAP. j^] j:^Qj^f 7^//^ COKQUEST TO CHAUCER. 21 
 
 ore influenced by the romantic poetry of France, 
 ndin the end grows in Chaucer's hands intoapoelry 
 if the court and of high society, a hterary in contrast 
 ^ith a popular ])oetry. But even in tliis the spirit of 
 he poetry is JCnghsh, though the manner is French, 
 haucer becomes less French and even less Italian, 
 ill at last we find him entirely national in the 
 juterbury Talcs, the best example of English story- 
 elling we possess. The struggle "then of England 
 against the foreigner to become and remain England 
 finds its parallel in the struggle of English poetry 
 llgainst the influence of foreign poetry to become and 
 temain English. Both struggles were long and weari- 
 some, but in both England was triumphant. She 
 became a nation, and she won a national Hterature. 
 It is the steps of this struggle we have now to trace 
 tlong the two lines already laid down — the poetry 
 of religion and the poetry of story-telling ; but to do 
 «o we must begin in both instances with the Norman 
 Conquest. 
 
 2 1. The Religious Poetry. — The religious re- 
 vival of the nth century was strongly felt in Normandy, 
 and both the knights and Churchmen who came to Eng- 
 land with William the Conqueror and during his son's 
 teign were founders of abbeys whence the country was 
 ivilized. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of England 
 as further quickened by missionary monks sent by 
 ernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to rebuild 
 Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well-watered 
 ialleys of the North. The English citizens of London, 
 and the English peasants in the country received a 
 laew religious life from the foreign noble and the 
 foreign monk, and both were drawn together through 
 common worship. When this took place a desire 
 rose for religious handbooks in the English tongue. 
 Ormin's Ormulum is a type of these. We may date it, 
 though not precisely, at 12 15, the date of the Groat 
 .Charter, It is entirely English, not five French words 
 
 from the 
 y II. the 
 e English 
 J pouring 
 sons, the 
 ,n against 
 began to 
 lowly, but 
 rope, and 
 da of the 
 , the last 
 dier than 
 the same 
 y, at the 
 f Richard 
 Ormiiliim 
 to prove 
 ictory of 
 : struggle 
 
 literature 
 n, and the 
 
 a people 
 i into one 
 lOugh the 
 meed and 
 try. The 
 •ature was 
 1 of a few 
 le French, 
 
 ry are the 
 literature 
 ly English 
 Ormulwn 
 Plowman, 
 •eached its 
 ing poetry 
 more and 
 
 % 
 
 HAMILTON PUBLIC LIBRARY 
 
S2 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 ll.l 
 
 are to be found in it. It is a metrical version of 
 the service of each day with the addition of a ser- 
 mon in verse. The book was called OrmiUum^ " for 
 this that Orm it wrought," Orm being a contraction 
 for Ormin. It marks the rise of English religious 
 literature, and its religion is simple and rustic. Orm's 
 ideal monk is to be " a very pure man, and altogether 
 without property, except that he shall be found in 
 simple meat and clothes." He will have "a hard and 
 stiff and rough and heavy life to lead. All his heart 
 and desire ought to be aye toward heaven, and his 
 Master well to serve." This was English religion in 
 the countiy at this date. . 
 
 22. Literature and the Friars. — There was 
 little religion in the towns, but this was soon changed. 
 In 1 22 1 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and 
 they chose the towns for their work. Their influence 
 was great, and they drew Norman and English more 
 closely together on the ground of religion. The first 
 Friars were foreigners, and they necessarily used many 
 French words in their English teaching, and Normans 
 as well as English now began to write religious works 
 in English. In 1303 Robert of Brunne translated a 
 French poem, the Manual of Sins (wriiten thirty years 
 earlier by William of Waddington), under the title of 
 Handlyng Sinne. William of Shoreham translated the 
 whole of the Psalter into English prose about 1327, and 
 wrote religious poems. The Cursor Mundi^ written 
 about 1320, and thought "the best book of all" by 
 men of that time, was a metrical version of the Old 
 and New Testament, interspersed, as was the Hand- 
 lyng Sinne^ with legends of saints. Some scattered 
 Sermons, and in 1340 \\\^ Aycnbite of Inwyt (Remorse 
 of Conscience), translated from the French, mark how 
 English prose was rising through religion. About the 
 same year Richard RoUe of Hampole wrote in Latin 
 and in Northumbrian English for the " unlearned,'* 
 t poem called the FrUkc of Conscience^ and some 
 
 HAMILTON PUBLIC LlBRA'^Y 
 
 
 'Ci- 
 
 AV, 
 
 m 
 
 
i 
 
 
 II.] fA'OAI THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 23 
 
 ])rose treatises. The poem marks the dose of the 
 religious influence of the Friars. They had been 
 attacked before in a poem of 1320; but in this 
 poem there is not a word said against them. It is 
 true the author, living far in the country, may not 
 liave been thrown much with them. Twenty years 
 later however all is changed ; and in the Vision of 
 Piers the Plowman^ the protest its writer makes for 
 purity of life is also a protest against the foul life and 
 the hypocrisy of the Friars. \\\ that poem, as we 
 shall see, the whole of the popular English religion 
 of the time of Chaucer is represented. In it also 
 the natural, unliterary, country English is best repre- 
 sented. It brings us up in the death of its author 
 to the year 1400, the same year in which Chaucer 
 died. 
 
 23. History and the Story-telling Poetry. — 
 The Normans brought an historical taste with them to 
 England, and created a most valuable historical litera- 
 ture. It was written in Latin, and we have nothing 
 to do with it till story-telling grew out of it in the 
 time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself of such 
 importance that a few things must be said about it. 
 
 (i) The men who wrote it were called Chron- 
 iclers. At first they were mere annalists — that is, they 
 jotted down the events of year after year without 
 any attempt to bind them together into a connected 
 whole. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I., 
 another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scat- 
 tered monasteries, but in the Court. Living at the 
 centre of political life, their histories were written in a 
 philosophic spirit, and wove into a whole the growth 
 of law and national life and the story of affairs abroad. 
 They are our great authorities for the history of these 
 times. They begin with William of Malmesbury, 
 whose book ends in 1142, and die out after Matthew 
 Paris, 1235—73. Historical literature in England is 
 only represented after the death of Hemy III, by « 
 
 1, 
 
 
 
' !• 
 
 ^4 
 
 ENGLISH LITEST A TURE, 
 
 [citAP. 
 
 few dry Latin annalists till it rose again in modern 
 English prose in 15 13, when Sir Thomas More's 
 Life of Edzmrd K aud Richard IIL is said to have 
 been written. > ; • 
 
 (2) A distinct English feeling soon sprang up 
 among these Norman historians. English patriotism 
 was far from having died among the English them- 
 selves. The Sayings of Alfred about 1200, were 
 written in English by the English. These and some 
 ballads, as well as the early English war songs, inter- 
 ested the Norman historians and were collected 
 by them. William of Malmesbury, who was born of 
 English and Norman parents, has sympathies with 
 both peoples, and his history marks how both were 
 becoming one nation. The same welding together of 
 the conquered and the conquerors is seen in the 
 others till we come to Matthew Paris, whose view of 
 history is entirely that of an Englishman. When he 
 wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, Norman 
 abbot and English priest, were, and are in his pages, 
 one in blood and one in interests. 
 
 24. English Story-telling grew out of this his- 
 torical literature. There was a Welsh priest at the 
 court of Henry I., called Geoffrey of Monmouth, 
 who took upon himself to write history. He had been 
 given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to translate 
 which told in verse the history of Britain from the 
 days when Brut, the great grandson of ^neas, landed 
 on its shores, through the whole history of King 
 Arthur and his Round Table down to Cadwallo, a 
 Welsh king who died in 689. The Latin translation 
 he made of this he called a history. The real his- 
 torians were angry at the fiction, and declared that 
 throughout the whole of it "he had iied saucily arid 
 shamelessly." It was indeed only a clever putting 
 together of a number of Welsh legends, but it was 
 the beginning of story-ieiling in our land. Every- 
 one who read it was delighted vviih it; it made, at 
 
 11.1 
 
[citAP. 
 
 nodern 
 Mores 
 3 have 
 
 ang up 
 riotism 
 I them- 
 
 were 
 I some 
 
 inter- 
 llected 
 )orn of 
 s with 
 h were 
 ther of 
 in the 
 ^iew of 
 hen he 
 orman 
 pages, 
 
 lis his- 
 at the 
 
 [QUTH, 
 
 i been 
 anslate 
 m the 
 landed 
 King 
 lIIo, a 
 slation 
 al his- 
 i that 
 y arid 
 utting 
 it was 
 Every- 
 ^le, at 
 
 l] pi^om tnk cos^qvest to chavcer, 25 
 
 ^we should say, a sensation, and as much on the 
 Continent as in England. Jn' it the Welsh had in 
 some sort their revenge, for in its stories they invaded 
 English literature, and their tales have never since 
 ceased to live in it. They charm us as much in 
 Tennyson's Idylls of the King as they charmed us 
 in the days of Henry I. But the stories Geoffrey 
 of Monmouth told were in the Latin tongue. They 
 were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar. 
 They got afterwards to France and, added to from 
 Breton legends, were made into a poem and decked 
 out with the ornaments of French romance. In that 
 form they came back to England as the work of 
 Wace, a Norman trouveur, who called his poem the 
 Bnd, and completed it in 1155, shortly after the 
 accession of Henry H. 
 
 25. Layamon's ** Brut.'* — In this French form 
 the story drifted through England,and at last falling into 
 the hands of an EngHsli priest in Worcestershire, he re- 
 solved to tell it in English verse to his countrymen, 
 and doing so became the author of our first English 
 poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say that 
 its date is 1*205, ^^^ years or so before the Orniu- 
 lum was written, ten years before the Great Charter. 
 It is plain that its composition, though it told a 
 Welsh story, was looked on as a patriotic work 
 by the writer. " There was a priest in the land," he 
 writes of himself, " whose name was Layamon ; he 
 was son of Leovenath : May the Lord be gracious 
 unto him ! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on 
 the bank of Severn, near Radstone, where he read 
 books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest 
 :^lhoughtthat he would tell the noble deeds of England, 
 what the men were named, and whence they came, 
 I who first had English land." And it was truly of great 
 I importance. The poem opened to the imagination of 
 I the Kni^lish peonle an immense past tor the history of 
 I the island they dwelt in, and made a common bond 
 
 
 IaI 
 
 '1 
 
 
^6 
 
 ENCUsH LlTER.'i TURK, 
 
 tCHAP. 
 
 of interest between Norman and Englishman. Though 
 chiefly rendered from the French, there are not fifty 
 Norman words in its more than 30,000 lines. The 
 old English alliterative metre is kept up with a few 
 rare rimes. As we read the short quick lines in which 
 the battles are described, as we listen to the simpte 
 metaphors, and feel the strong, rude character of the 
 poem, it is as if we were reading Csedmon ; and what 
 Caidmon was to early English poetry, Layamon is to 
 English poetry after the Conquest. He is the first of 
 the new singers. 
 
 26. Story-telling grows French in form.— 
 After an interval the desire for story-telling increased 
 in England. The story of Genesis and Exodus was 
 versified about 1250, and in it and some others about 
 the same date rimes are used. Many tales of Arthur's 
 knights, and other tales which had an English origin, 
 such as the lays of Havelok the Dane and of King Horn 
 (about 1280) were translated from the French ; Robert 
 of Gloucester wrote his J^iining Chrofiide, 1298, and 
 the Ro7nance of King Alexander, about 1280, originally 
 a Greek work, was adapted from the French into En- 
 glish. As the dates grow nearer to 1300, seven years 
 before the death of Edward I., the amount of French 
 words increases, and the French romantic manner of 
 telling stories is more and more marked. In the Lay 
 of Havelok the spirit and descriptions of the poem 
 still resemble old English work ; in the Romance of 
 Alexander, on the other hand, the natural landscape, 
 the conventional introductions to the parts, the gor- 
 geous descriptions of pomps, and armour, and cities, 
 the magic wonders, the manners, and feasts, and 
 battles of chivalry, the love passages, are all steeped 
 in the colours of French romantic poetry. Now this 
 romance was adapted by a Frenchman in the year 
 1200. (?) It took therefore nearly a century before the 
 French romantic manner of poetry could be natural- 
 ised in English \ and it was naturaiizedi curigus to 
 
11.] - FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. n 
 
 say, at (he very time when England as a nation had 
 lost its French elements and become entirely English. 
 Finally, the influence of this French school in England 
 is seen in the earUer poems of Chaucer, and in poems, 
 such as the Court of Love ^ attributed to him. It came 
 to its height and died in the translation of the Romaunt 
 of the Rose^ the last and crowning effort also of French 
 romance. After that time the story-telling of England 
 sought its subjects in another country than France. 
 It turned to Italy. 
 
 27. Englis^h Lyrics. — In the midst of all this story- 
 telling, like prophecies of what should afterwards be 
 so lovely in our poetry, rose, no one can tell how, 
 some lyric poems, country idylls, love songs, and, 
 later on, some war songs. The English ballad, sung 
 from town to town by wandering gleemen, had never 
 altogether died. A number of rude ballads collected 
 round the legendary Robin Hood, and the kind of poetic 
 literature which sung of the outlaw and the forest, and 
 afterwards so fully of the wild border life, gradually 
 took form. Ab »ut 1280 a beautiful little idyll, called 
 The 07vl and the Nightingale, was written in Dorset- 
 shire, in which the author, Nicholas of Guildford, 
 judges between the rival birds. In 1300 we meet 
 with a few lyric poems, full of charm. They sing of 
 springtime with its blossoms, of the woods ringing 
 with the thrush and nightingale, of the flowers and the 
 seemly sun, of country work, of the woes and joy of 
 love, and many other delightful things. They are 
 tinged with the colour of French romance, but they 
 have an English background. We read nothing like 
 them, except in Scotland, till we come to the Eliza- 
 bethan time. After this, in 1352, the war lyrics of 
 Laiirejice Minot sing the great deeds and battles of 
 Edward III. 
 
 28. The King's English. — We have thus traced 
 the rise of our English literature to the time of Chaucer. 
 We must now complete the sketch by a word or iwo 
 
 ill' 
 
 '■m 
 
 \ I 
 
 'A 
 4 fill] 
 
 ill 
 
 ■' ^'A 
 
 = r 
 
 
i- ■ 
 
 I 
 
 n 
 
 I 
 
 I'? 
 
 r 
 
 HI 
 
 iB 
 
 English liter a ture. 
 
 [ctlAt*. 
 
 on the language in which it was written. The hterary 
 EngUsh language seemed at first to he destroyed by 
 the Conquest. It lingered till Stephen's death in the 
 English Chronicle ; a few traces of it are still found 
 about Henry III.'s death in the Brut of Layamon. 
 But, practically speaking, from the 12th century till 
 the middle of the 14th there was no standard of 
 English. The language, spoken only by the people^ 
 fell back into that broken state of anarchy in which 
 each part of the country has its own dialect, and each 
 writer uses the dialect of his own dwelling-place. All 
 the poems then of which we have spoken were written 
 in dialects of English, not in a fixed English common 
 to all writers. French or Latin was the language of 
 literature and of the literary class. But towards the 
 middle of Edward the Third's reign English got the 
 better of French. After the Black Death in 1349 
 French was less used; in 1362 EngUsh was made the 
 language of the courts of law. At the same time a 
 standard English language was born, It did not over- 
 throw the dialects, for the Vision of Fiers the Plowman 
 and Wyclif 's Translation of the Bible are both in a 
 dialect ; but it stood forth as the literary language in 
 which all future English literature had to be written. 
 It had been growing up in Robert of Brunne's work, 
 and in the Ro?nance of Ring Alexander; but it was 
 fixed into clear form by Chaucer and Gower. It was 
 in fact the English language talked in the Court and in 
 the Court society to which these poets belonged. It 
 was the King's English, and the fact that it was the 
 tongue of the best and most cultivated society, as well 
 as the great excellence of the works written in it by 
 these poets, made it at once the tongue of literature. 
 
 29. Religious Liiterature in Langland and 
 Wyclif. — We have traced the work of "transition 
 English," as it has been called, along the lines ot 
 popular religion and story-telhng. The first of these, 
 in the realm of poetry, reaches its goal in the work of 
 
n.] FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 19 
 
 William Langland ; in the realm of prose it reaches 
 its goal in Wyclif. In both these writers, the work 
 differs from any that went before it, by its extraordinary 
 power, and by the depth of its religious feeling. It is 
 plain that it represented a society much more strongly 
 moved by religion than that of the beginning of the 
 fourteenth century. In Wyclif, the voice comes from 
 the university, and it went all over the land in the 
 body of preachers whom, like Wesley, he sent forth. 
 In Langland's Vision we have a voice from the centre 
 of the people themselves ; his poem is written in a 
 rude English dialect, in alliterative English verse, and 
 in the old English manner. The very ploughboy could 
 understand it. It became the book of those who 
 desired social and Church reform. It was as eagerly 
 read by the free labourers and fugitive serfs who col- 
 lected round John Ball and Wat Tyler. 
 
 30. Causes of the Religious Revival. — It was 
 originally due to the preaching of the Friars in the last 
 century and to the noble example they set of devotion 
 to the poor. When the Friars however became rich, 
 though pretending to be poor, and impure of life, 
 though pretending to goodness, the religious feeling 
 they had stirred turned against themselves, and its two 
 strongest cries, both on the Continent and in England, 
 were for Truth, and for Purity, in life and in the 
 Church. • 
 
 Another cause common to the Continent and to 
 England in this century was the movement for the 
 equal rights of man against the class system of the 
 middle ages. It was made a religious movement 
 when men said that they were equal before God, and 
 that goodness in His eyes was the only nobility. 
 And it brought with it a religious protest against the 
 oppression of the people by the class of the nobles. 
 
 There were two other causes, however, special to 
 England at this time. One was the utter misery of 
 the people owing to the French wars. Heavy taxation 
 
 '*< 
 
 
 ^ ■■■ 
 
 Ui 
 
30 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE, "^"^y^^^ [CHAP. 
 
 fell upon them, and they were ground down by severe 
 laws, which prevented them bettering themselves. 
 They felt this all the more because so many of them 
 had bought their freedom, and began to feel the delight 
 of freedom. It was then that in their misery they 
 turned to religion, not only as their only refuge, but as 
 supplying them with reasons for a social revolution. 
 The other cause was the Black Death, the great 
 Plague which, in 1349, '62, and '69, swept over England. 
 Grass grew in the towns ; whole villages were left 
 uninhabited ; a wild panic fell upon the people, which 
 was added to by a terrible tempest in 1362, that to 
 men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their terror 
 then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion. 
 
 3 [. Piers the Plowman. — AH these elements are 
 to be found fully represented in the Vision of Piers the 
 Plowman, Its author, William Langland, though we 
 are not certain of his surname, was born about 1332, 
 at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. His " Vision " 
 begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern 
 Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in 
 the country in 1362. At the accession of Richard XL, 
 1377, he was in London. The great popularity of his 
 poem made him in -that year, and again in the year 
 1393 send forth two more texts of his poem. In these 
 texts he added to the original Vision the poems of Do 
 Wel^ Do Bet, and Do Best. In 1399, he wrote at 
 Bristol his last poem, The Deposition of Richard //., 
 and then died, probably in 1400. 
 
 He paints his portrait as he was when he lived in 
 Comhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men called Long 
 Will ; clothed in the black robes in which he sung 
 for a few pence at the funerals of the rich ; hating 
 to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the 
 lords and ladies that rode by in silver and furs as he 
 stalked in observant moodiness along the Strand. It 
 is this figure, which in indignant sorrow walks through 
 the whole poem. 
 
 Pit I 
 
n.l FROM THE CONQUEST CO CHAUCER, 31 
 
 32. His Vision. — The dream of the "field full of 
 folk," with which it begins, brings together nearly as 
 many typical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do 
 In the first part, the Truth sought for is righteous deal- 
 ing in Church, and Law, and State. In the second 
 part, the Truth sought for is that of righteous life. 
 None of those who wish to find Truth know the way, 
 till Piers the Plowman, who at last enters the poem, 
 directs them aright. The search for a righteous life 
 is a search to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the 
 three titles of the poems which were added afterwards. 
 In a series of dreams, and a highly-wrought allegory. 
 Do Well, Do Better, and Do Best, are identified with 
 Jesus Christ, who appears at last as Love, in the dress 
 of Piers the Plowman. The second of these poems 
 describes Christ's death. His struggle with sin, His resur- 
 rection, and the victory over Death and the Devil. And 
 the dreamer wakes in a transport of joy, with the Easter 
 chimes pealing in his ears. But as Langland looked 
 round on the world, the victory did not seem real, and 
 the stem dreamer passed out of triumph into the dark 
 sorrow in which he lived. He dreams again in Do 
 Besty and sees, as Christ leaves the earth, the reign of 
 Antichrist. Evils attack the Church and mankind. 
 Envy, Pride, and Sloth, helped by the Friars, besiege 
 Conscience. Conscience cries on Contrition to help 
 him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, all but 
 despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to 
 wander over the world, praying for lucfe and health, 
 *'till he have Piers the Plowman," till he find the 
 Saviour. 
 
 This is the poem which wrought so strongly in 
 men's minds that its influence was almost as great 
 as Wyclif 's in the revolt which had now begun against 
 Latin Christianity. Its fame was so great, that it 
 produced imitators. About 1394, another alliterative 
 poem was set forth by an unknown author, with the 
 title of Pieice the Plowman's Cr:de, and the Plowmar^s 
 
 ■1 
 
 M\ 
 
 H 
 
 
32 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 
 Tale^ wrongly attributed to Chaucer, is another witness 
 to the popularity of Langland. 
 
 33* Wyclif. — At the same time as the Vision was 
 being read all over England, John Wyclif, about 1380, 
 began his work in the English tongue with a nearl}' 
 complete translation of the Bible, and in it did as 
 much probably to fix our language as Chaucer 
 did in his Tales. But he did much more than 
 this for our tongue. He made it the popular lan- 
 guage of religious thought and feeling. In 1381 
 he was in full battle with the Church on the doctrine 
 of tran substantiation, and was condemned to silence. 
 He replied by appealing to the whole of England 
 in the speech of the people. He sent forth tract after 
 tract, sermon after sermon, couched not in the dry, 
 philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in short, 
 sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words 
 used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all 
 the doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the 
 Church of Rome. He was our first Protestant. It 
 was a new literary vein to open, the vein of the pam- 
 phleteer. With his work then, and with Langland's, 
 we bring to the year 1400 the English prose and 
 poetry pertaining to religion which we have been 
 tracing since the Conquest. 
 
 34. Story-telling is the other line on which we 
 have placed our literature, and it is represented first 
 by John Gower. He belongs to a school older than 
 Chaucer, inasmuch as he is never touched by the 
 Italian, only by the French influence. He belongs 
 to a different school even as an artist ; for his tales 
 are not pure story- telling like Chaucer's, but tales 
 with a special moral. Partly the religious and social 
 reformer, and partly the story-teller, he represents a 
 transition and fills up the intellectual space between 
 Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Saviour, 
 at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his 
 three great works, the Speculu7n Meditatitis^ the Vox 
 
U.) FROM THE CONQUEST' TO CHAUCER. 33 
 
 ClamanttSy the Confcssio Amantis, 1393. It marks 
 the unsettled state of our literary language, that each 
 of these was written in a different tongue, the tirst in 
 French, the second in Latin, the third in English. 
 
 The third is his English work. In 30,000 lines or 
 more, he mingles up allegory, morality, the sciences, 
 the philosophy of Aristotle, all the studies of the day, 
 with comic or tragic tales as illustrations. We have 
 seen that Robert de Brunne was the first to do this j 
 Gower was the second. The tales are wearisome and 
 long, and the smoothness of the verse makes them 
 more wearisome. Gower was a careful writer of Eng- 
 lish ; and in his satire of evils, and in his grave reproof 
 of the follies of Richard II., he rises into his best 
 strain. The kmg himself, even though reproved, was a 
 patron of the poet. It was as Gower was rowing on the 
 Thames that the royal barge drew near, and he was 
 called to the king's side. *' Book some new thing,'' 
 said the king, " in the way you are used, into which 
 book I myself may often look ; " and the request was 
 the origin of the Confession of a Lover. It is with 
 pleasure that we turn from the learned man of talent 
 to Geoffrey Chaucer — to the genius who called Gower, 
 with perhaps some of th^ irony of an artist, "the moral 
 Gower.'' 
 
 35. Chaucer's French Period. — Geoffrey Chau- 
 cer was the son of a vintner, of Thames Street, London, 
 and was born, it is now believed, in 1340. He lived 
 almost all his life in London, in the centre of its work 
 and society. When he w^as sixteen he became page 
 to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, and con- 
 tinued at the Court till he joined the army in France 
 in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but ransomed be- 
 fore the treaty of Bretii;ny, in 1360. We then know 
 nothing of his life for six years ; but from items in 
 the Exchequer Rolls, we find that he was again 
 connected with the Court, from 1366 to 1372. It 
 was during this time that he begaji to write. His first 
 
 ^|!; 
 i>.l 
 
 1 
 
 ■.| .1 
 
 If 
 
 
I 
 
 34 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURM, 
 
 [citAt*. 
 
 I 
 
 poem mny have been the A, B, C, a prayer Englished 
 from the French at the request of the Duchess Blanche. 
 The translation of the Romaunt of the Rose has been 
 attributed to him, but the best critics are doubtful of, 
 or deny, his authorship. They are only sure of 
 two poems, the Cojnpleynte to Pity in 1368, and in the 
 next year the Dcthe of Blaunche the Dtwhesss, whose 
 husband, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's jxatron. These, 
 being written under the influence of French poetry, 
 are classed under the name of Chaucer's first period. 
 There are hnes in them which seem to speak of a 
 luckless love affair, and in this broken love it has been 
 supposed we find the key to Chaucer's early life. 
 
 36. Chaucer's Italian Period. — Chaucer's 
 second ]:)oetic period may be called the period of 
 Italian influence, from 1372 to 1384. During these 
 years he went for the king on no less than seven 
 diplomatic missions. Three of these, in 1372, '74, 
 and '78, were to Italy. At that time the great Italian 
 literature which inspired then, and still inspires, Euro- 
 pean literature, had reached full growth, and it opened 
 to Chaucer a new world of art. If he read the Vita 
 Nuova^ and the Divina Commedia of Dante, he 
 knew for the first time the power and range of 
 poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, and he 
 lecarnt what is meant by "form " in poetry. He read 
 the tales of Boccaccio who made Italian prose, and in 
 them he first saw how to tell a story exquisitely. 
 Petrarca and Boccaccio he may even have met, for 
 they died in 1374 and 1375, but he never saw Dante, 
 who died at Ravenna in 132 1. When he came back 
 from these journeys he was a new man. He threw 
 aside the romantic poetry of France, and laughed at 
 it in his gay and 'kindly manner in the Rime of Sir 
 ThopaSy afterwards made one of the Canterbury Tales, 
 His chief work of this time bears witness to the influ- 
 ence of Italy. It was Troylus a7id Creseide, 1382 (?), 
 which is a translation, with many changes and addi« 
 
 .••s < 
 
 
tl.] PKOM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 35 
 
 lions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. The additions 
 (and he nearly doubled the poem) are stamj)ed with 
 his own peculiar tenderness, vividness, and simplicity. 
 Hif. changes from the original are all towards the side 
 of purity, good taste, and piety. We meet the further 
 influence of Boccaccio in the birth of some of the 
 Canterbury Talcs, and of Petrarca in the Tales them- 
 selves. To this time is now referred the tale of the 
 Second Nun, that of the Doctor, the Man of Law, 
 the Clerk, the Prioress, the Squire, the Franklin, Sir 
 Thopas, and the first draft of the Knight's Tale, 
 borrowed, with much freedom, from the Teseidc of 
 Boccaccio. The other poems of this period were the 
 Parlament of Foidcs, the Complcynt of Mars, Anelida 
 and A rate, Boece, and the Former Age, all between 
 1374 and '76, the lines to Adam Scrivener, 1383, and 
 the Hous of Fame, 1384 (?). In the passion with 
 which Chaucer describes the ruined love of Troilus 
 and Anelida, some have traced the lingering sorrow 
 of his early love affair. But if this be true, it was 
 now passing away, for in the creation of Pandarus in 
 the Troilus, and in the delightful fun of the Parla- 
 ment of Foules, 2l new Chaucer appears, the humorous 
 poet of the Canterbury Tales. In the active business 
 life he led during this period he was likely to grow 
 out of mere sentiment, for he was not only employed 
 on service abroad, but also at home. In 1374 he 
 was Comptroller of the Wool Customs, in 1382 of 
 the Petty Customs, and in 1386 Member of Par- 
 liament for Kent. 
 
 37. Chaucer's English Period. — It is in the 
 next period, from 1384 to 1390, that he left behind 
 Italian influence as he had left French, and became 
 entirely himself, entirely English. The compara- 
 tive poverty in which he now lived, and the loss of 
 his offices, for in John of Gaunt's absence he lost 
 Court favour, may have given him more time for 
 study, and the retired liie of a poet. At least ia 
 
 c a 
 
 
 
 '^\ 
 
 ■«,1 A' 
 
 f 
 

 I 
 
 ,'fl: 
 
 i \' 
 
 3« ENGLtsn LITKRATURE, tCHAA 
 
 hia Le^ende of Good Women, the prologue to which 
 was written in 1385, we find him a closer student than 
 ever of books and of nature. His appointment as 
 Clerk of tlie Works in 1389 brought him again into 
 contact with men. He superintended the repairs 
 and build ini; at the Palace of Westmin-ster, the 
 'J ower, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, till July, 
 1391, when he was superseded, and lived on pensions 
 alloited to him by Richard and by Henry IV., after 
 he had sent the King in 1399 his Complcint to his 
 I^ursc. Jiefore 1390, however, he had added to his 
 great work its best tales, those of the Miller, th-e 
 Keevo, tlie Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, 
 the Friar, the Nun, Priest, Pardoner, and perhaps 
 "•he Sompnour. The Prologue was probably written 
 \\y 1388. In these, in their humour, in their vivid- 
 ne.-.s of portraiture, in their ease of narration, and in 
 the variety of their characters, Chaucer shines supreme. 
 A few smaller poems belong to this best time, such as 
 2 ruth md the Alodcr of God, 
 
 During the last ten years of his life, which may be 
 called tlie period of his (iecay, he wrote some small 
 poems, and along with the Co)npIeytite of Venus, and 
 a prose treatise on the Astrolabe, four uiore tales, 
 the Canon's-yeoman's, Manciple's, Monk's, and Par- 
 sone's. The last was written the year of his death, 
 1400. Having done this work, he died in a house 
 under the shadow of the Abbey of Westminster. 
 Within the walls of the Abbey Church, the first of 
 the poets who lies there, that " sacred and happy 
 spirit " sleeps. 
 
 38. Chaucer's Character — Born of the tradesman 
 class, Chaucer was in every sense of the word orte of 
 our finest gentlemen : tender, graceful in thought, 
 glad of heart, humourous, and satirical without 
 unkindness ; sensitive to every change of feeling in 
 liimself and others, and therefore full of sympathy ; 
 brave in misfortune, even to mirth, and doing weU 
 
11 
 
 II.1 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 37 
 
 and with careful honesty all he undertook. His 
 first and great delight was in human nature, and 
 he makes us love the noble characters in his poems 
 and feel with kindliness towards the baser and ruder 
 sort. Me never sneers, for he had a wide charity, 
 and we can always smile in his pages at the follies 
 and forgive the sins of men. He had a true and 
 chivalrous regard for women, and his wife and he 
 must have been very hai)py if they fulfilled the ideal 
 he had of marriage, lie lived in aristocratic society, 
 and yet he thought him the greatest gentlem-an who 
 was " most vertuous alway, prive, and port (open), and 
 most entendeih aye to do the gentil dedes that he 
 can." He lived frankly among men, and as we have 
 seen, saw many different types of men, and in his 
 own time filled many parts as a man of the world and 
 of business. Yet, with all this active and observant 
 life, he was commonly very quiet and kept much to 
 himself. The Host in the Tales japes at him for his 
 lonely, abstracted air. "Thou lookest as thou wouldest 
 find a hare. And ever on the ground I see thee stare." 
 Being a good scholar, he read morning and night alone, 
 and he says that after his (office) work he would go 
 home and sit at another book as dumb as a stone, till his 
 look was dazed. While at study and when he was 
 making of songs and ditties, " nothing else that God 
 had made " had any interest for him. There was but 
 one thing that roused him then, and that too he liked 
 to enjoy alone. It was the beauty of the morning and 
 the fields, the woods, and streams, and flowers^ and 
 the singing of the little birds. This made his heart 
 full of revel and solace, and when spring came after 
 winter, he rose with the lark and cried, " Farewell my 
 book and my devotion." He was the first who made 
 the love of nature a distinct element in our poetry. 
 He was the first who, in spending the whole day 
 gazing alone on the daisy, set going that lonely delight 
 in natural scenery which is so special a^ wark of ouy 
 
 
 ,i '^ 
 
 
 i 
 
 
 t il 
 
 i 
 
38 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 later poets. He lived thus a double life, in and out 
 01 the world, but never a gloomy one. For he was 
 fond of mirth and good-living, and when he grew 
 towards age, was portly of waist, *'no poppet to 
 embrace." But he kept to the end his elvish coun- 
 tenance, tL': shy, deHcate, half mischievous face 
 which looked on men from its grey hair and forked 
 beard, and was set off by his dark- coloured dress and 
 hood. A knife and inkhorn hung on his dress, we 
 see a rosary in his hand, and when he was alone he 
 walked swiftly. 
 
 39. The Canterbury Tales. — Of his work it is 
 not easy to speak briefly, because of itb great 
 variety. Enough has been said of it, with the ex- 
 ception of his most complete creation, the Can- 
 terbury Tales. It will be seen from the dates given 
 above that they were not written at one time. 
 They are not, and cannot be looked on as a whole. 
 Many were written independently, and then fitted 
 into the framework of the Prologue in 1388. At 
 that time a number more were written, and the 
 rest added at intervals till his death. In fact, the 
 whole thing was done much in the same way as Mr. 
 Tennyson has written his Idylls of the King. The 
 manner in which he knitted them together was very 
 simple and likely to please English people. The 
 holiday excursions of the time were the pilgrimages, 
 and the most famous and the pleasantest pilgrimage 
 to go, especially for Londoners, was the three or four 
 days' jcurney to see the shrine of St. Thomas at 
 Canterbury. Persons of all ranks in life met and 
 travelled together, starting from a London inn. 
 Chaucer seized on this as the frame in which to set 
 his pictures of life. He grouped around the jovial 
 host of the Tabard Inn men and women of every 
 class of society in England, set them on horseback 
 to ride to Canterbury, and made each of them tell a 
 tale. No one could hit off ft char^ict^r better, and W 
 
:iiAP. 
 
 out 
 
 was 
 
 grew 
 
 let to 
 
 coun- 
 
 face 
 
 forked 
 
 >s and 
 
 |ss, we 
 
 )ne he 
 
 k it is 
 great 
 he ex- 
 i Can- 
 given 
 time, 
 whole, 
 fitted 
 58. At 
 ind the 
 ict, the 
 ' as Mr. 
 r. The 
 as very 
 I. The 
 images, 
 grimage 
 or four 
 >mas at 
 let and 
 n inn. 
 1 to set 
 e jovial 
 f every 
 rsehack 
 m tell a 
 
 and in 
 
 «.] FI^OM niE CONs^EST TO CHAUCER, 
 
 39 
 
 1 
 
 his Prologue, and in the prologues to the several Tales, 
 the whole of the new, vigorous English society which 
 had grown up since Edward I. is painted with as- 
 tonishing vividness. " I see all the pilgrims in the 
 Canterbury Tales," says Dryden, " their humours, their 
 features, and the very dress, as distinctly as if 1 Iiad 
 supped with them at the Tabard in South wark." 
 The Tales themselves take in the whole range of the 
 poetry of the middle ages ; the legend of the saint, 
 the romance of the Knight, the wonderful fables 
 of the traveller, the coarse tale of common life, 
 the love story, the allegory, the satirical lay, and 
 the apologue. And they are pure tales. He has 
 been said to have had dramatic power, but he has 
 none. He is simply our greatest story-teller in 
 verse. All the best tales are told easily, sincerely, with 
 great grace, and yet with so much homeliness, that 
 a child would understand them. Sometimes his 
 humour is broad, sometimes sly, sometimes gay, 
 sometimes he brings tears into our eyes, and he can 
 make us smile or be sad as he pleases. 
 
 He had a very fine ear for the music of verse, and 
 the tale and the verse go together like voice and music. 
 Indeed, so softly flowing and bright are they, that to 
 read them is like listening in a meadow full of sun- 
 shine to a clear stream rippling over its bed of 
 pebbles. The English in which they are written is 
 almost the English of our time ; and it is literary 
 English. Chaucer made our tongue into a true means 
 of poetry. He did more, he welded together the 
 French and English elements in our language and 
 made them into one English tool for the use of 
 literature, and all our prose writers and poets derive 
 tlidir tongue from the language of the Canterbury 
 Tales. They give him honour for this, but still 
 more for that he was the first EngHsh ardst. Poetry 
 is an art, and the artist in poetry is one v/ho writes 
 for pure pleasure and for nothing else the thing he 
 
 
 Hi 
 
 *1 
 
 
I 'I 
 
 40 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 writes, and who desires to give to others the same 
 fine pleasure by his poems which he had in writing 
 them. The thing he most cares about is that the 
 form in which he puts his thoughts or feeHngs may- 
 be perfectly fitting to the subject, and as beauti- 
 ful as possible — but for this he cares very greatly ; and 
 in this Chaucer stands apart from the other poets of 
 his time. Gower wrote with a moral object, and 
 nothing can be duller than the form in which he yjuts 
 his tales. The anther of Fiers the Flnwmaii wrote 
 with the object of reform in social and ecclesiastical 
 affairs, and his form is uncouth and harsh. Chaucer 
 wrote because he was full of emotion and joy in his 
 own thoughts, and thought that others would weep 
 and be glad with him, and the only time he ever 
 moralizes is in the t^les of • the Yeoman and the 
 Manciple, written in his decay. He has, then, the best 
 right to the poet's name. He is our first English artist. 
 40. Mandeville. — I have already noticed the prose 
 of Wyclif under the religious class of English work. 
 I have kept Sir John Mandeville for this place, 
 because he belongs to light literature. He is called 
 our " first writer in formed English." Chaucer him- 
 self however wrote some things, and especially one 
 of his Tales, in rhythmical prose, and John of 
 Trevisa translated into English prose, 1387, Higden's 
 Folychroriicon. Mandeville wrote his Travels first 
 in Latin, then in French, and finally put them mto 
 our tongue about 1356, "that every man of the 
 nation might understand them." His quaint delight 
 in teUing his " traveller's tales," and sometimes the 
 grace with which he tells them, rank him among the 
 story-tellers of England. 
 
 ■li 
 
 •^ 
 
III.] 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO EL2ZABETH. 
 
 41 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 FROM CHAUCER, 1400> TO ELIZABETH, 1559- 
 
 Thomas Occleve (Henry V.*s reign) ; J. Lydgate, Falls of Frincei 
 (in Henry VI.). — Sir John Fortescue's prose work, and Sir T. 
 W'3\Qxf's> Alorte d^ Arlhur (Edward IV. ). — Caxton prints at 
 Westminster, 1477.— Paston Letters, 1422— 1505.— Hawes' 
 Pastime of Pleasure^ 150C. — ^John Skelton's poems, 1508 — 
 1529.— Sir T. More's History of Richard III., 1513.— 
 Tyndale's Translation of the Bible, 1525. — English Prayer- 
 Book, 1549. — Ascham's Toxophilus, \^l^^. — Poems ol 
 Wyatt and Surrey, in TotteVs Miscellany, 1557. 
 
 Scottish Poetry, begins with Barbour's Bruce, 1375-7 J James 
 \S King's Quhair, 1424. — T. Henryson dies, 1508- — Dun- 
 bar's Thistle and Rose, \ 503 . — Gawin Douglas dies, 1522- — 
 Sir D. Lyndsay born, 1490 ; Satire of Three Estates^ 1535 ; 
 dies 1555. 
 
 41. The Fifteenth Century Prose.— The last 
 poems of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to 
 the year 1400. The century that followed is the most 
 barren in our literature. History sank down into a 
 few Latin chroniclers, of whom Thomas of Walsing- 
 ham is best known. Two Riming Chronicles were 
 written in Henry V.'s time by Andrew of Wyntoun, 
 a Scotchman, and John Harding, an Englishman. 
 John Capgrave wrote in English, in Edward IV. 's 
 reign, a Chronicle of England which began with 
 the Creation. Political prose is then represented 
 by Sir John Fortescue's book on the Differejice 
 between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, |t is our 
 second important book in the history of English 
 prose. The religious war between the Lollards 
 and the Church went on during the reign of 
 Henry V. and VI., and in the reign of the latter, 
 Reginald Pecock took it out of Latin into homely 
 English, He fought the Lollards with their owi| 
 
 i 
 
 I ; 
 li 
 
 ♦■t 
 
 i'.i 
 
 . *i I 
 
 f I 
 
 li 
 
4a 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 weapons, with sermons preached in English, and with 
 tracts in English; and after 1449, when Bishop of 
 Chichester, published his work, The Repressor of 
 <yvermuch Blaming of the Clergy, It pleased neither 
 party. The Lollards disliked it because it defended the 
 customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen 
 burnt it because it agreed with the " Bible-men," that 
 the Bible was the only rule of faith. Both abjured 
 it because it said that doctrines were to be proved 
 from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the 
 Church theologians who wrote in English, and the 
 book is a fine example our early prose. < 
 
 42. Poetical Lite iture. — The only literature 
 which reached any strength was poetical, but even that 
 is almost wholly confined to the reign of Henry VI. 
 Th-e new day of poetry still went on, but its noon 
 an Chaucer was now succeeded by the grey afternoon 
 «of Lydgate, and the dull twilight of Occleve. John 
 ILydgate, a monk of Bury, who was thirty years of a^e 
 when Chaucer died, v/rote nothing of importance 
 till Henry VI.*s reign. Though a long-winded and 
 third-rate poet, he was a delightful man ; fresh, 
 natural, and happy even to his old age when he 
 recalls himself as a boy, "weeping for nought, 
 and anon after glad." There was scarcely any 
 literary work he could not do. He rimed history,, 
 ballads, and legends, till the monastery was delighted. 
 He made pageants for Henry VI., masks an 1 
 May-games for aldermen, mummeries for the Lord 
 Mayor, and satirical ballads on the follies of the day. 
 Educated at Oxford, a traveller in France and Italy, 
 he knew the literature of his time, and he even 
 dabbled in the sciences. He enjoyed everything, 
 but had not t*he power of adequately expressing his 
 enjoyment. He was as much a lover of nature as 
 Chaucer, but cannot make us feel the beauty of nature 
 as Chaucer does. It is his story- telling which brings 
 \m PlQs^st \o Cb^ucer. His three chief poems 
 
in.] 
 
 FROM CHAUCER 10 ELIZABETH. 
 
 43 
 
 were the Falls of Princes^ The Storie of Thebes^ and 
 the Troye Book, The first is a translation of a book 
 of Boccaccio's. It tells the tragic fates of great men 
 from the time of Adam to the capture of King John of 
 France, at Poitiers. There is a touch of the drama 
 in the plan, which was suggested by the pageants of 
 the time. The dead princes appear before Boccaccio 
 pensive in his library, and each relates his downfall. 
 The Storie of Thebes is an additional Canterbury 
 Tale, and the Troye Book is a version from the French 
 of the prose romance of Guido della Colonna, a Sicilian 
 poet, if the book be not in truth originally French. 
 The Complaint of the Black Knighty usually given 
 to Chaucer, is stated to be Lydgate's by Shirley, the 
 contemporary of him and Chaucer. I should like to 
 be able to call him the author of the pretty Uttle poem 
 called the Cuckoo and the Nightingale^ included in 
 Chaucer'p works. But its authorship is unknown. 
 
 Thomag Occleve, who wrote chiefly in Henry V.'s 
 reign, about 1420, was nothing but a bad versifier. 
 His one merit is that he loved Chaucer. With his 
 loss "the whole land smartith," he says, and he 
 breaks out into a kind of rapture once : — 
 
 
 4 
 
 f 
 
 
 
 ** Thou wert acquainted with Chaucer ! Pardie, 
 God save his soul, 
 The first finder of our faire langage." 
 
 And it is in the MS. of his longest poem; The 
 Governail of Princes that he caused to be drawn, with 
 " fond idolatry," the portrait of his master. With this 
 long piece of verse we mark the decay of the poetry of 
 England. Romances and 1 ys were still translated; 
 there were verses written on such subjects as huntmg 
 and alchemy. Caxton himself produced a poem ; but 
 the only thing here worth noticing is that at the end 
 of the century some of our ballads were printed. 
 
 43. Ballads, lays, fragments of romances, had been 
 §ung in England fron^ th^ earliest times^ and popul^j 
 
 ';*»h, 
 
 
 I/'' Ml 
 
 '■n 
 
 .'I 
 
44 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 15 
 
 i ;i^i 
 
 Ki 
 
 tales and jokes took form in short lyric pieces to be 
 accompanied by lausic and dancing. We have seen 
 war celebrated in Minot's songs, and the political ballad 
 is represented by ihe lampoon made by some follower 
 of Simon de Montfort on the day of the battle of Lewes, 
 and by the Elegy on Edward L*s Death, But the ballad 
 went over the whole land among the people. The trader, 
 the apprentices, and poor of the cities, the peasantry, 
 had their own songs. They tended to collect them- 
 selves round some legendary name like Robin Hood, 
 or some historical character made legendary, like 
 Randolf, EcU 1 of Chester. Sloth, in Fiers Flowmaiis 
 Vision^ does not know his paternoster, but he does 
 know the rimes of these heroes. A crowd of min- 
 strels sang them througli city and village. The very 
 friar sang them '* and made his Englissch swete upon 
 his tunge." A collection of Robin Hood ballads 
 was soon printed under the title of A Lytel Geste oj 
 Robin Hood ^ by Wynken de Worde. The Nut Brown 
 Matdy The Battle of Otterbiirn^ and Chevy Chase, may 
 belong to the end of the century, though probably not 
 in the form we possess them. It was not however till 
 much later that any collection of ballads was made ; 
 and few, as we possess them, can be dated farther back 
 than the reign of Elizabeth. 
 
 44. Growth of interest in Literature. — This 
 was then the literature of this century. Little creative 
 work was done, and that little was poor. There 
 was small learning in the monasteries, and few books 
 were written. But a good deal of interest in litera- 
 ture was scattered about the country, and it increased as 
 the century went on. The Wars of the Roses stopped 
 the writing, but not the reading, of books. We have 
 in the Jraston Letters, 142 2- 1505 — the correspondence 
 of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry VH., 
 pleasantly, even correctly written — passages which 
 refer to translations of the classics, and to manuscripts 
 being sent to and fro for reading. Henry VL, 
 
til.) 
 
 PROM CHAUCER TO ELlZABETn, 
 
 45 
 
 Edward IV., and some of the great nobles were 
 lovers of books. Men like Duke Humphrey of 
 Gloucester made libraries and brought over Italian 
 scholars to England to translate Greek works. There 
 were fine scholars in England, like John Lord Tiptoft, 
 Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the schools 
 of Italy. Before 1474, when Caxton finished the first 
 book said to have been printed in this country, The 
 Game and Playe of the Chesse, a number of French 
 translations of the Latin authors were widely read. 
 There was, therefore, in England, a general, though 
 an unir formed interest in the ancient writers. 
 
 45. First Influence of the Italian RevivaL — 
 Such an interest v;as added to by the revival of 
 letters which arose at this time in Italy, and the 
 sixteenth century had not long begun before many 
 Englishmen went to Italy to read and study the 
 old Greek authors on whom the scholars driven 
 from Constantinople by the Turks v;ere lecturing 
 in the schools of Florence. Printing enabled 
 these men on their return to turn the classic books 
 they loved into English for the English people. 
 We began to do our own work as translators ; 
 and from the time of Henry VIII. onwards, 
 there is scarcely any literary fury equal to that with 
 which the young English scholars fell upon the 
 ancient authors and tilled the land with English 
 versions of them . It is, then, in the slow upgrowth 
 during this century of interest in and study of the 
 ancients that we are to see che gathering together at 
 its source of one of the streams which fed that great 
 rive-r of Elizabethan literature which it is so great a 
 mistake to think burst suddenly up through the earth. 
 
 46. Influence of Caxton's Work. — We find 
 another of these sources in the work of our first 
 printer, William Caxton. The first book that bears 
 the inscription : " Imprynted by me, William Cax- 
 ton, at Westmynstre '' is 2he Dictes and Sayings of 
 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 1i 
 
 
 r ii| 
 
 =1^ 
 
 AT 
 
 ti 
 t 
 
!? f 
 ill 
 
 til 
 
 ^ 
 
 £MGUS!i LITER A WRE, 
 
 [CttA^. 
 
 FJdl^ophe'rs. Caxton did little or nothing forclassica. 
 learning. His translation of the ^neid of Vergil is 
 from a contemptible French romance. But he pre- 
 served for us Chaucer, and Lydgate, and Gower, with 
 zealous care. He printed the Chronicles of Brut 
 and Higden ; he translated the Golden Legend : and 
 the Morte d Arthur^ written by Sir Thomas Malory 
 in the reign of Edward IV., and one of our finest and 
 simplest examples of early prose, was printed by him 
 with all the care of one who loved "the noble acts of 
 chivalry." He had a tradesman's interest in publish- 
 ing the romances, for they were the reading of the 
 day, but he could scarcely have done better for the 
 interests of the coming literature. These books 
 nourished the imagination of England, and supplied 
 poet after poet with fine subjects for work, or fine 
 frames for their subjects. He had not a tradesman's, 
 but a loving literary interest in printing the old 
 English poets ; and in sending them out from his press 
 Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry. 
 The poets after him at once began on the models 
 of Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate ; and the books 
 themselves, being more widely read, not only made 
 poets but a public that loved poetrj. If classic 
 literature then was one of the sources in this century 
 of the Elizabethan literature, the recovery of old 
 English poetry was another. 
 
 47. Prose Literature. — Witn the exception of 
 Caxton's work all the good prose of the fifteenth 
 <:entury was written before the death of Edward IV. 
 The reigns of Richard III. and of Henry VII. pro- 
 duced no prose of any value, but ^lie country 
 awakened from its dulness with the Accession of 
 Henry VIII., 1509. A band of new scholars who 
 had studied in Italy taught Greek in Oxford, Cam- 
 bridge and London. John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's, 
 with John Lilly, the grammarian, set on foot a school 
 '-^'here the classics were tau^-ht in a new and practical 
 
lit.l 1^'kOM CHAVCM to ELU^AQl^Tir, ifl 
 
 way. Erasmus, who had all the enthusiasm which 
 sets others on fire, came to England, and with 
 Grocyn, Linacre, Sir Thomas More, and Archbishop 
 Warham formed a eehtrfe I'rom which a liberal and 
 wise theology was sjpread. The tiew learning which 
 had been borh iti Italy came to England. It 
 stirred and gave life to everything, and it woke up 
 English Prose from its sleep. Much of the new life 
 of English Literature was due to the patronage of the 
 young king. It was Kcnry VIII. who supported 
 Sir Thomas Elyot, and encouraged him to write 
 books in the vulgar tongue that he might delight his 
 countrymen. It was the king who asked Lord BernerS' 
 to translate Froissart, a book which "made a landmark: 
 in our tongue," and who made LeLnd, our first Englishi 
 writer on antiquarian subjects, the " King's Antiquary."* 
 It was the king to whom Roger Aschaji dedicated 
 his first work, 1545, and the king sent him abroad to 
 pursue his studies. This book, the Toxophilus^ or the 
 School of Shooting, 1545, was written for the pleasure of 
 the yeomen and gentlemen of England in their own 
 tongue. Ascham apologizes for this, and the apology 
 marks the state of English prose. "Everything has 
 been done excellently in Greek and Latin, but in the 
 English tongue so meanly that no man can do worse." 
 He has done his work well, and in quaint but charm- 
 ing English. 
 
 48. Prose and the Reformation. — But the 
 man who did best in English prose was Sir Thomas 
 More in our earliest English history, the History of 
 Edward V, and Richard III, The simplicity of his 
 genius showed itself in the style, and his wit in the 
 picturesque method and the dramatic dialogue that 
 graced the book. English prose grew larger and richer 
 under his pen, and began that stately step which fu- 
 ture historians followed. The work i said to have been 
 written in 1513 but it was not printed till 1557, The 
 most famous book More wrowc, The Utopia^ was not 
 
 
 'HI 
 
 
 ■W 
 
 i 
 
 ■I 
 
 
 V~' 
 
 ill 
 
HI 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 f. !J 
 
 1 
 
 i 
 
 i 
 
 ■ 
 
 
 4« 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 Written in English. The most famous controversy he 
 had was with John Tyndale, a man who in his tnins- 
 latioii of the New Testament^ 1525, " fixetl our tongue 
 once for all." His style was as pureljr English as 
 More's, and of what kind it was may be read in our 
 bibles, for our authorized version is still in great 
 part his translation. In t! is work Tyndale was 
 assisted by William Roy, a runaway friar, and his 
 friend Rog.rs, the Trst martyr in Queen Mary's reign, 
 added to it a translation of the Apocrypha^ and made 
 up what was wanting in Tynckile's translation from 
 Chronicles to Malachi out of Coverdale's translation. 
 It was this Bible which, revised by Coverdale and 
 edited and re-edited as CromwelPs Bible, i539> ^^'^^l 
 again as Cranmei''' s Bible, 154O) was set up in every 
 parish church in England. It got north into Scotland 
 and made the Lowland English more like the London 
 English, and after its revisal in 16 11 went with the 
 Puritan fathers to New England and fixed the 
 standard of English in America. There is no book 
 which has had so great an influence on the style of 
 English literature. In Edward VI. 's reign also Cran- 
 mer edited the Eiiglish Prayer Book, 1549-52. Its 
 English is a good deal mixed with Latin words, and 
 its style is some times weak and heavy, but on the whole 
 it is a fine example of stately prose. Latimer, on the 
 contrary, whose Sermon on the Ploiighers and others 
 were delivered in 1549 and in 1552, wrote in a plain, 
 shrewd style, which by its humour and rude directness 
 made hirn the first preacher of his day. 
 
 49. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century under 
 the Influence of Chaucer. — We shall speak in this 
 section only of the poets in England whose work was 
 due to the publication of Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate 
 by Caxton, and go back also to the Scotch poetry which 
 owed itself to the impulse of Chaucer. After a short 
 revival that influence died, and a new one entered 
 from Italy into English verse in the poems of Surrey 
 
 . /' 
 
nh] 
 
 FROM CHAUCER 10 ELIZABETH, 
 
 
 
 and Wyatt. The transition period between the one 
 inrtuence and the other is of great interest. We see 
 how the old poets had been neglected by the way in 
 which the new poets speak of them, as of something 
 wonderful, and by the indignant reproach a man like 
 Hawes makes when he says that people care for nothing 
 but ballads, and wiU not read these old books. iUit 
 the reproach was unwise. It is better for the interests 
 of literature to make a new ballad than to read an old 
 poem, and the ballads of Kngland kept up the original 
 vein of poetry of the land. It is one of the signs of 
 a new poetic Ufe in a nation when it is fond of poetry 
 which, hke the ballad, has to do with the human 
 interests of the present : and when that kind of human 
 poetry pleases the upper classes as well as the lower a 
 resurrection of poetry is at hand. 
 
 50. Hawes and Skelton. — At such a time we 
 are likely to find imitators of the old work, and in the 
 reign of Henry VII. Stephen Hawes recast a poem 
 of Lydgate's (?) The Temple of Glass, and imitated 
 Chaucer's work and the old allegory in his Pastime 
 of Pleasure, 1506. We shall also find men who, 
 while they still follow the old, leave it for an ori- 
 ginal line, because they are more moved by human-- 
 life in the present than in the past. Their work will 
 be popular, it may even resemble the form of the 
 ballad. Such a man was John Skelton, who wrote 
 in Henry VII. and Henry VIII. 's reii/n, and died 
 1529. His earliest poems were after the manner of 
 Chaucer, but he soon took a manner of his own, and 
 being greatly excited by the cry of the people for Church 
 reformation, wrote a bitter satire on Wolsey for his 
 pride, and on the clergy for their luxury. His poem 
 Why come ye not to Court '^ was a fierce satire on the 
 great Cardinal. That of Colhi Clout was also the 
 cry of the country Colin, and of the Clout or me- 
 chanic of the town against the corruption of the 
 Church. Both are written in short "rude rayling 
 
 'I; 
 
 'I 
 
 t 
 
 H 
 
 \ 'Ml 
 
 ( 
 
 \ I 
 
50 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [CHAT. 
 
 rimes, pleasing only the popular ear," and Skelton 
 chose them for that purpose. Both have a rough, 
 impetuous power; their language is coarse, full even 
 of slang, but Skelton could use any language he 
 pleased. He was an admirable scholar. Erasmus 
 calls him the "glory and light of English letters," and 
 Caxcon says that he improved our language. Colin 
 Clout represents the whole popular feeling of the time 
 just before the movement of the Reformation took a 
 new turn by the opposition of the Pope to Henry's 
 divorce. It was not only in this satirical vein that 
 Skelton wrote. We owe to him some ])retty and new 
 love lyrics ; and the Boke of Fhyllyp Sj>arowe, which 
 tells the grief of a nun called Jane Scrope for the 
 death of her sparrow, is one of the gayest and most 
 inventive poems in the language. Skelton stands quite 
 alone between the last flicker of the influence of 
 Chaucer, whose last true imitator he was, and the rise 
 of a new Italian influence in England in the poems of 
 Surrey and Wyatt. In his own special work he was 
 entirely original, cxnd standing thus between two periods 
 of poetry, he is a kind of landmark in English litera- 
 ture. The Sliip of Fooles^ 1508, by Barclay is of this 
 time, but it has no value. It is a recast of a work 
 published at Basel, and was popular because it at- 
 tacked the follies and questions of the time. It was 
 written in Chaucer's stanza. But far better work in, 
 poetry was being done at this time in Scotland than 
 in England. 
 
 SCOTTISH POETRY. 
 
 51. Scottish Poetry is poetry written in the 
 English tongue by men living in Scotland. These 
 men though calling themselves Scotchmen are of 
 good English blood. But the blood, as I think, was 
 mixed with an infusion of Celtic blood. 
 
 Old Northumbria extended from the Humber t& 
 
III.] 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZA i:ETH. 
 
 the Firth of Forth, leaving however on its western 
 border a line of unconquered land, which took in 
 Lancashire, Cumberland, and Westmcreland in our 
 iMigland, and over the border most of the western 
 country between the Clyde and Solway Firth. This 
 unconcjuered country was the Welsh kingdom of 
 Sirathclyde, and it was dwelt in by the Celtic race. 
 The present KngHsh part of it was soun conquered 
 and the Celts driven out. Bat in tlie part to the north 
 of the Solway Firth tlie Celts were not driven out. 
 They remained, lived with the EngUshmen who were 
 settled over the old Northumbria, inter-married with 
 them and became under Scot kings one mixed 
 people. Literature in the Lowlands then would have 
 Celtic elements in it ; literature in England was 
 purely Teutonic. The one sprang from a mixed, the 
 other from an unmixed race. I d'aw attention to this, 
 because it seems to me to accouut fo** certain peculi- 
 arities in Scottish poetry which colour the whole of it, 
 which rule over it, and are specially Celtic. 
 
 52. Celtic Elements of Scottish Poetry. — 
 The first of these is the hwe of wild nature for its 
 own sake. There is a passionate, close, and poetical 
 observation and description of natural scenery in 
 Scotland from the earliest times of its poetry, such 
 as we do not possess in English poetry till the time of 
 Wordsworth. The second is the love of colour, x\ll 
 early Scottish poetry differs from English in the extra- 
 ordinary way in which colour is insisted on, and at 
 times in the lavish exaggeration of it. The third 
 is the wittier^ more rollicking humour in the Scottish 
 poetry, which is distinctly Celtic in contrast with that 
 humour which has its root in sadness and which 
 belongs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really 
 more different than the humour of Chaucer and the 
 humour of Dunbar, than the humour of Cowper and 
 the humour of Burns. These are the special Celtic 
 elements in the Lowland poetry. 
 
 ' D 2 
 
 *l 
 
 t 
 
 ti 
 
 
 ' '■I 
 
 
 if Ml 
 
 k^ 
 
 ii 
 
gi 
 
 ENGLim LITERATURE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 53. Its National Elements; came into it from 
 the circumstances under which Scotland rose into 
 a separate kingdom. The first of these is the strong, 
 almost fierce assertion of national life. The Eng- 
 lish were as national as the Scots, and felt the 
 emotion of patriotism as strongly. But they had no 
 
 , need to assert it ; they were not oppressed. But for 
 nearly forty years the Scotch resisted for their very life 
 the efforts of England to conquer them. And the 
 war of freedom left its traces on their poetry from 
 Barbour to Burns and Walter Scott in the almost 
 obtrusive way in which Scotland, and Scottish liberty, 
 and Scottish heroes are thrust forward in their verse. 
 Their passionate nationality appears in another form 
 in their descriptive poetry. The natural description 
 of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton, is not dis- 
 tinctively English. But in Scotland it is always the 
 scenery of their own land that the poets describe. 
 Even when they are imitating Chaucer, they do 
 not imitate his conventional landscape. They put 
 in a Scotch landscape, and in the work of sUv . men 
 as Gawin Douglac the love of Scotland and the love 
 of nature mingle their influences together to make 
 him sit down, as it were, to paint, with his eye on 
 everything he paints, a series of Scotch landscapes. 
 It is done without any artistic composition ; it reads 
 like a catalogue, but it is work which stands quite 
 alone at the time he wrote. There is nothing even 
 resembling it in England for centuries after. 
 
 54. Its Individual Element. — There is ore 
 more special element in early Scottish poetry which 
 arose, I think, out of its political circumstances. 
 All through the struggle for freedom, carried on 
 as it was at first by small bands under separate 
 leaders till they all came together under a leader 
 like Bruce, a much greater amount of individuality, 
 and a greater habit of it, was created among the 
 Scotch than among the English. Men fought for 
 
V 
 
 til.] 
 
 FliOM CtiAVCER TO BUZ A BETH, 
 
 %% 
 
 their own land and lived in their own way. Every 
 little border chieftain, almost every border farmer 
 was or felt himself to be his own master. The 
 poets would be likely to share in this individual 
 quality, and in spite of the overpowering influence of 
 Chaucer, to strike out new veins of poetic thonglit and 
 new methods of poetic expression. And this is what 
 happened. Long before forms of poetry like the short 
 pastoral or the fable had appeared in England, the 
 Scottish poets had started them. They were less docile 
 imitators than the EngUsh, but their work in the new 
 forms they started was not so good as the after English 
 work in the same forms. 
 
 55. The first of the Scottish poets, omitting 
 Thomas of Erceldoune, is John Barbour, Arch- 
 deacon of Aberdeen. His long poem of The Bruce 
 represents the whole of the eager struggle for 
 Scottish freedom against the English which closed 
 at Bannockburn; and the national spirit, which 
 I have mentioned, springs in it, full grown, into 
 life. But it is temperate, i^: does not pass into the 
 fury against England which is so plain in writers 
 like Blind Harry, who, about 1461, composed a long 
 poem in the heroic couplet of Chaucer on the deeds 
 of William Wallace. Barbour was often in England 
 for <:he sake of study, and his patriotism though strong 
 is tolerant of England. The date of his poem is 1375, 7 ; 
 St never mentions Chaucer, and Barbour is the only 
 early Scottish poet on whom Chaucer had no influence. 
 In the next poet we find the influence of Chaucer, 
 and it is hereafter continuous till the Elizabethan time. 
 James the First of Scotland was prisoner in England 
 for nineteen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer, 
 and fell in love with Lady Jane Beaufort, niece of 
 Henry the Fourth. The poem which he wrote — 
 The Kin^s Quhair (the quire or book) — is done in 
 imitation of Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined 
 Stanza, which from James's use of it is called Rime 
 
 4 
 
 ! '. 
 
 
 I 
 
 
 f !■* 
 
 
 
 
ENGLISH LITER A TURR, 
 
 [CHAh 
 
 \ 
 
 Royal. In six cantos, sweeter, tenderer and purer than 
 any verse till we come to Spenser, he describes the be- 
 ginning of his love and its happy end. '* I must write, 
 he says, " so much because I have come so from Hell 
 to Heaven." Nor did the flower of his love and 
 hers ever fade. She defended him in the last ghastly 
 scene of murder when his kingly life ended. There 
 is something especially pathetic in the lover of 
 Chaucer, in the first poet of sentiment in Scotland 
 being slain so cruelly. He was no blind imitator of 
 Chaucer. We are conscious eX. once of an original 
 element in his work. The natural description is 
 more varied, the colour is more vivid, and there is a 
 modern self-reflective quality, a touch of spiritual feel- 
 ing which does not belong to Chaucer at all. The 
 poems of The Kirk ofi the Green and Peebles to the 
 Flay have been attributed to him. If they be his, 
 he originated a new vein of poetry, which Burns after- 
 wards carried out — the comic and satirical ballad 
 poem. But they are more likely to be by James V. 
 
 Robert Henryson, who died before 1508, a school- 
 master in Dunfermline, was also an imitator of Chaucer, 
 and his Testament of Cresseid continues Chaucer's 
 Troilus, But he set on foot two new forms of poetry. 
 He made poems out of \\\q fables. They differ entirely 
 from the short, neat form in which Gay and La Fon- 
 taine treated the fable. They are long stories, full of 
 pleasant dialogue, political allusions, and with elabo- 
 rate morals attached to them. They have a peculiar 
 Scottish tang, and are full of descriptions of Scotch 
 scenery. He also began the short pastoral in his 
 Robin and Makyne. It is a natural, prettily turned 
 dialogue ; and a subtle Celtic wit, such as charms us 
 in Duncan Grey^ runs through it. " The individuality 
 which struck out two original lines of poetic work in 
 these poems appears again in his sketch of the graces 
 of womanhood in the Garment of Good Ladies ; a 
 poem ot tne same type as inos(i moughtful lyrics which 
 
nij 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH. 
 
 55 
 
 describe what is best in certain phases of professions, 
 or life, such as Sir H. Wotton's Character of a Happy 
 Life, or Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, 
 
 But among lesser men, whom we need not mention, 
 the greatest is William Dunbar. He carries the in 
 fluence of Chaucer on to the end of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury and into the sixteenth. Few have possessed a more 
 mascuUne genius, and his work was as varied in its 
 range as it was original. He followed the form and plan 
 of Chaucer in his two poems of The Thistle and the 
 Rose, 1503? and The Golden 2erge, 1508, the first on the 
 marriage of James IV. to Margaret Tudor, the second 
 an allegory of Love, Beauty, Reason, and the Poet. In 
 both, though they begin with Chaucer's conventional 
 May morning, the natural description becomes Scottish, 
 and in both the national enthusiasm of the poet is 
 strongly marked. But he soon ceased to imitate. 
 The vigorous fun of the satires and the satirical 
 ballads that he wrote is only matched by their coarse- 
 ness, a coarseness and a fun that descended to Burns. 
 Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still higher in a wild poem 
 in which he personifies the seven deadly sins, and 
 describes their dance, with a mixture of horror and 
 humour which makes the little thing unique. 
 
 A man almost as remarkable as Dunbar is Gavvin 
 Douglas, Bishop of Dunkeld, who died in 1522, at 
 the Court of Henry VI XL, and was buried in the Savoy. 
 He is the author of the first metrical English transla- 
 tion from the original of any Latin book. He trans- 
 lated Ovid^s Art of Love, and afterwards, with truth 
 and spirit, the /^//^/V/ of Vergil, 15 13. To each book 
 of the /Encid\\t wrote a prologue of his own. And it is 
 chiefly by these that he takes rank among the Scottish 
 poets. Three of them are descriptions of the country 
 in May, in autumn, and in winter. The scenery is 
 altogether Scotch, and the few Chaucerisms that appear 
 seem absurdly out of place in a picture of nature whicli 
 is as close as if it had been done by Keats in his early 
 
 i 
 
 11' 
 
 
 
 
 
# 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [ghap. 
 
 : iM 
 
 time. The colour is superb, the landscape is described 
 with an excessive detail, l3ut it is not composed by 
 any art into a whole. Still it astonishes the reader, and 
 it is only by bringing ir the Celtic element of love of 
 nature that we can account for the vast distance 
 between work like this and contemporary work in 
 England such as Skelton's. Of Douglas's other original 
 work, one poem, The Palace of Honour, 1 501, continues 
 the influence of Chaucer. 
 
 There . were a number of other Scottish poets 
 belonging to this time who are all remembered and 
 praised b^^ Sir David Lyndsay, whom it is best to men- 
 tion in <i.is place, because he still connects Scottish 
 poetry with Chaucer. He was born about 1490 and is 
 the last of the old Scottish school, and the most 
 popular. He is the most popular because he is not 
 only the Poet, but also the Reformer. His poem The 
 Dreme, 1528, connects him with Chaucer. It is in the 
 manner of the old poet. But its scenery is Scottish, 
 and instead of the May morning of Chaucer, it opens 
 on a winter's day of wind and sleet. The place is a cave 
 over the sea, whence Lyndsay sees the weltering of 
 the waves. Chaucer goes to sleep over Ovid or Cicero, 
 Lyndsay falls into dream as he thinks of the " false 
 world's instability,^' wavering like the sea waves. The 
 difference marks not only the difference of the two 
 countries, but the different natures of the men. 
 Chaucer did not care much for the popular storms 
 and loved the Court more than the Commonweal. 
 Lyidsay in the Dreme and in two other poems — 
 the Complaijit to the Kin^^ and the Testament of 
 the Ki?ig's Fapyngo'' — is absorbed in the evils and 
 sorrows of the people, in the desire to reform the 
 abuses of the Church, of the Court, of party, of the 
 nobility. In 1539 his Satire of the Three Estates^ 
 a Morality interspersed with interludes, was repre- 
 sented before James V. at Linlithgow. It was first 
 acted in 1535, and was a daring attack on the ignor- 
 
111.] 
 
 FkOM CHAUChR TO Mj^I^ABETH, 
 
 57 
 
 ance, profligacy and exactions of the priesthood, on 
 the vices and flattery of the favourites — "a mocking 
 of abuses used in the country by diverse sorts of 
 estate." A still bolder poem, and one thought so 
 even by himself, is the Monarchies 1 553, his last work. 
 Reformer as he was, he was more a social and political 
 than a religious one. He bears the same relation to 
 Knox as Langland did to Wiclif. When he was 
 sixty-five years old he saw the fruits of his work. 
 Ecclesiastical councils met to reform the Church. 
 But the reform soon went beyond his temperate 
 wishes. In 1557 the Reformation in Scotland was 
 fairly launched when in December the Congregation 
 signed the Bond of Association. Lyndsay had died 
 three years before; he is as much the reformer as he 
 is the poet, of a transition time. "Still his verse 
 hath charms," but it was neither sweet nor imaginative. 
 He had genuine satire, great moral breadth, much 
 preaching power in verse, coarse, broad humour in 
 plenty, and more dramatic power and invention than 
 the rest of his fellows, and he lived an active, bold 
 and brave life in a very stormy time. 
 
 56. Italian Influence : Wyatt and Surrey. — 
 While poetry under Skelton and Lyndsay became an 
 instrument of reform, it revived as an art at the close 
 of Henry VII I. 's reign in Sir Thomas Wyatt and the 
 Earl of Surrey. They were both Italian travellers, 
 and in bringing back to England the inspiration 
 they had gained from Petrarca they re-made Eng- 
 lish poetry. They are our firs4; really modern poets ; 
 the first who have anything of the modern man- 
 ner. Though Italian in sentiment, their language 
 is more English than Chaucer's, that is, they use 
 fewer romance words. They handed down this 
 purity of English to the Elizabethan poets, to Sackville, 
 Spenser, and Shakespeare. They introduced a new 
 kind of poetry, the amourist poetry. The "amourists," 
 as they are called, were poets w1m> composed a series of 
 
 5'iti 
 
 :!:f 
 
 .♦;i. 
 
 
 
 I 
 
il- 
 
 S8 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 poems on the subject of love — sonnets mingled with 
 lyrical pieces after the manner of Petrarca, and in 
 accord with the love philosophy he built on Plato. The 
 Hundred Passions of Watson, the sonnets of Sidney, 
 Shakespeare, Spenser, and Drummond, are all poems 
 of this kind, and the same impulse in a similar form 
 appears in the sonnets of Rosetti and Mrs. Browning 
 of our time. The subjects of Wyatt and Surrey were 
 chielly lyrical, and the fact that they imitated the same 
 model has made some likeness between them. Like 
 their personal characters, however, the poetry of Wyatt 
 is the more thoughtful and the more strongly felt, but 
 Surrey's has a sweeter movement and a livelier fancy. 
 Both did this great thing for English verse — they chose 
 an exquisite model, and in imitating it " corrected 
 the ruggedness of English poetry." Such verse as 
 Skelton's became impossible. A new standard was 
 made below which the after poets could not fall. 
 They also added new stanza measures to English 
 verse, and enlarged in this way the " lyrical range." 
 Surrey was the first, in his translation of VergiFs 
 /Eneid to use the ten-syllabled, unrimed verse, which 
 we now call blank verse. In his hands it is 
 not worthy of praise ; it had neither the true form nor 
 harmony into which it grew afterwards. Sackville, 
 Lord Buckhurst, introduced it into drama ; Marlowe, 
 in his Ta^nbwlaine, made it the proper verse of tlie 
 drama, and Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Massinger 
 used it splendidly. In plays it has a special manner 
 of its own ; in poetry proper it was, we may say, not 
 only created but perfected by Milton. 
 
 The new impulse thus given to poetry was all but 
 arrested by the bigotry that prevailed during the 
 reigns of Edward VI. and Mary, and all the work of 
 the New Learning seemed to be useless. But Thomas 
 Wilson's book in English on Rhetoric and Logic in 
 ^."^SSj and the publication of Thos. Tusser's Pointesof 
 Jtiuibandric and of ToUel's Miscellany of Uncertain 
 
ivj 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 59 
 
 Authors^ i55*7> in the last years of Mary's reign, 
 proved that something was stirring beneath the gloom. 
 The latter book contained the poems of Surrey and 
 Wyatt, and others by Grimald, by Lord Vaux, 
 and Lord Berners. The date should be remembered, 
 for it is the first printed book of modern English 
 poetry. It proves that men cared now more for the new 
 than the old poets, that the time of imitation of 
 Chaucer was over, and that of original creation begun. 
 It ushers in the Elizabethan literature. 
 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. , 
 
 Sackville's Mirror of Magistrates ^ 1559. — Lyly's Euphues. — 
 Spenser's Shepheardes Calender^ 1579' — Sidney's Arcadia, 
 1580- — Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 1594- — Bacon's 
 Essavsy 1597. — Spenser born, 1552 ; Faerie Queen, 1590- 
 1595 ; died, 1598 — W. Warner's, S. Daniel's, M. Dray- 
 ton's historical poems, 1595-1598- — Sir J. Davies's. and 
 Lord Brooke's philosophical poems, 1599-1620. 
 
 The Drama. —First Miracle Play, lllQ. — Interludes of J. 
 Heywood, 1530-— Fiist English Comedy, 1540?~First 
 English Tragedy, 1562-— First English Theatre, 1576.— 
 Marlowe's Tamburlainc, 1587- — Shakespeare born, 1564; 
 Lorve's Labour's Lost, 1588 ; Merchant of Vence, 1596 ; 
 Hamlet, 1602; Cymbeline, 1610; Henry VLLL, 1613; 
 died, 1616. — Ben Jonson begins work, 1596 ; dies, 
 1637- — Beaumont ancl Fletcher in James I. reign. 
 
 Webster's first Play, 1612- -Massinger begins, 1620; dies, 
 lQ39._Tqhn Ford's fist play, 1629 —James Shirley, last 
 Elizabetnan Dramatist, lives to 1666 > Theatre closed, 
 1642 ; opens again, 1656. 
 
 57. Elizabethan Literature, as a literature, 
 may be said to begin with Surrey and Wyatt. But 
 as their poems were published shortly before Elizabeth 
 ume to the throne, we date tlxe beginning of the 
 
 1 
 
 I- 
 
 ■■■iji 
 
 \ i 
 
•at' 
 
 ) 
 
 tfo 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [citAP. 
 
 early period oi Elizabethan literature from the year of 
 her accession, 1559. That period lasted till 1579, 
 and was followed by the great literary outburst, as it 
 has been called, of the days of Spenser and Shake- 
 speare. The apparent suddenness of this outburst has 
 been an object of wonder. Men have ^jearched for 
 its causes, chiefly in the causes which led to the revival 
 of learning, and no doubt these bore on England 
 as they did on the whole of Europe. But we shall 
 best seek its nearest causes in the work done during 
 the early years of Elizabeth, and in doing so we 
 shall find that the outburst was not so sudden after 
 all. It was preceded by a very various, plentiful, but 
 inferior literature, in which new forms of poetry and 
 prose-writing were tried and new veins of thought 
 opened, which were afterwards wrought out fully and 
 splendidly. All the germs of the coming age are to 
 be found m these twenty years. The outburst of a 
 plant into flower seems sudden, but the whole growth 
 of the plant has caused it, and the flowering of 
 Elizabethan literature was the slow result of the 
 growth of the previous literature and the influences 
 that bore upon it. 
 
 58. First Elizabethan Period, 1559-1579. — 
 (i.) The only literary prose of this time is that of the 
 6<rW^w^j/^/* of AsciiAM, published 1570. This book, 
 which is on education, is the \^K)rk of the scholar of 
 the New Learning of the time of Henry VIII. who 
 has lived on into another time. It is not, properly 
 speaking, Elizabethan, it is like a stranger in a new 
 land and among new manners. 
 
 (2.) Poetry is first represented by Sackville Lord 
 Buckhurst. The J///'nv' of Magistrates^ i559) foi" which 
 he wrote the Induction and one tale, is a poem on 
 the model of Boccaccio's Falls of Princes^ already 
 imitated by Lydgate. Seven poets, along with 
 Sackville, contributed tales to it, but his poem is the 
 only one of any value. The Induction paints the 
 
IV.] 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 61 
 
 L. 
 
 :t 
 
 m^ 
 
 vi 
 
 poet's descent into Avernus, and his meeting with 
 Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose fate he 
 tells with a grave and inventive imagination. Being 
 written in the manner and stanza of the elder poets, 
 this poem has been called the transition between 
 Lydgate and Spenser. But it does not truly belong 
 to the old time ; it is as modern as Spenser. George 
 Oascoigne, whose satire, the Steele Glas^ 1576, is our 
 first long satirical poem, is the best among a crowd 
 of lesser poets who came after Sackville, They 
 wrote legends, pieces on the wars and d'scove/ies of 
 the Englishmen of their day, epitaphs, epigrams, 
 songs, sonnets, elegies, fables, and sets of love poems ; 
 and the best things they did were collected in a 
 miscellany called the Paradise of Dainty Devices, in 
 1576. This boc^', with Tottel's, set on foot in the 
 later years nf Elizabeth a crowd of other miscellanies 
 of poetry which were of great use to the poets. 
 Lyrical poetry, and that which we may call " occa- 
 sional poetry,'' was now fairly started. 
 
 (3.) Frequent translations were now made from the 
 classical writers. AVe know^ the names of more than 
 twelve men who did this work, and there must have 
 been many more. Already in Henry VIII.'s and 
 Edward VI.'s time, ancient authors had been made 
 English; and before 1579, Vergil, Ovid, Cicero, 
 Demosthenes, and many Greek and Latin plays 
 were translated. In this way the best models were 
 brought before the English people, and it is in the 
 influence of the spirit of Greek and Roman literature 
 on literary form and execution that we are to find 
 one of the vital causes of the greatness of the later 
 Elizabethan literature. 
 
 (4.) Theological reform stirred men to another 
 kind of literary work. A great number of satirical 
 ballads, and pamphlets, and plays issued every year 
 from ol3scure presses and filled the land. Poets like 
 George Gascoigne, ard still more Bamaby Googe, 
 
 
I 
 
 J •,:• 
 
 •'■'.I 
 
 IMi 
 
 62 
 
 UNGLISff LITERA '^URE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 represent in their work the hati-ed .ne young men had 
 of the old religious system. It was a spirit which did 
 not do much for literature, but it quickened the 
 habit of composition, an-d it made it easier. The Eible 
 also became common property, and its language 
 glided into all theological writing and gave it a literary 
 tone; while the publication of John Fox's Ads and 
 Monuments or Book of Martyrs^ i5^3> g^ve to the 
 people all over England a book which, by its simple 
 style, the ease of its story-telling, and its popular 
 charm made the verv peasants who heard it read 
 feel whac is meant by literature. 
 
 (5.) The love of stories again awoke. The old 
 English tales and ballads were eagerly read and 
 collected. Italian Tales by various authors were 
 translated and sown so broadcast over London by 
 William Painter ia his collection The Palace of 
 Measure 1566, by George Turbervile and others, that 
 it is said they »vere to be bought at every bookstall. 
 K great number of subjects for prose and poetry 
 were thus made ready for literary men, and fiction 
 became possible in English literature. 
 
 (6.) The history of the country and its manners was 
 not neglected. A whole class of antiquarians wrote 
 steadily, if with some dulness, on this subject. 
 Grafton, Stow, Hoh'nshed and others, at least sup- 
 plied materials for the study and use of the historical 
 drama. 
 
 (7.) The masques y pageants^ interludes, and plays 
 that were written at this time, are scarcely to be 
 counted. At every great ceremonial, whenever the 
 queen made a progress, or visited one of the great 
 lords or a university ; at the houses of the nobility, 
 and at the court on all important days, some obscure 
 versifier, or a young scholar at the Inns of Court, at 
 Oxford or at Cambridge, produced a masque or a 
 pageant, or wrote or translated a play. The habit of 
 play-writing became common ; a kind of school, one 
 
ivj 
 
 FROM I5S9 TO 1603. 
 
 63 
 
 might almoi^t say a manufacture of plays aiose, which 
 partly accounts for the rapid producticn, the excellence, 
 and the multitude of plays that we find after 1579. Re- 
 presented all over England, these masques, pageants, 
 and dramas were seen by the people who were thus 
 accustomed to take an interest though of an unedu- 
 cated kind in the larger drama that was to follow. 
 The literary men on the other hand ransacked, in 
 order to find subjects and scenes for their pageants, 
 ancient and mediaeval and modern literature, and 
 many of them in doing so became fine scholars. The 
 imagination of England was quickened and educated 
 in this way, and as Biblical stories were also largely 
 used, the images of oriental life were added to the 
 materials of imagination. 
 
 (8.) Another influence bore on literature. It was 
 that given by the stories of the voyagers^ who in the 
 new commercial activity of the country, penetrated 
 into strange lands. Before 1579, books had been pub- 
 lished on the north-west passage. Frobisher had made 
 his voyages and Drake had started, to return in 1580 
 to amaze all England with the story of his sail round 
 the world and of the riches of the Spanish Main. We 
 may trace everywhere in Elizabethan literature the 
 impression made by the wonders told by the sailors 
 and captains who explored and fought from the 
 North Pole to the Southern Seas. 
 
 (9.) Lastly, we have proof that there was a large 
 number of persons writing who did not publish their 
 works. It was considered at this time, that to write 
 for the public mjured a man, and unless he were 
 driven by poverty he kept his manuscript by him. But 
 things were changed when a great genius like Spenser 
 took the world by storm ; when Lyly's Eiiphues en- 
 chanted the whole of court society; when a great 
 gentleman like Sir Philip Sidney became a writer. 
 Literature was made the fashion, and the disgrace 
 being taken from it, the production became enormous. 
 
 •IS 
 
 ^" 
 
 £ •I- 
 
 
 H 
 
ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 Manuscripts written and laid by were at once sent 
 forth ; and when the rush began it grew by its own 
 force. Those who had previously been kept from 
 writing by its unpopularity now took it up eagerly, 
 and those who had written before wrote twice as 
 much now. The great improvement also in literary 
 quality is easily accounted for by this — that men 
 strove to equal such work as Sidney's or Spenser's, and 
 tliat a wider and sharper criticism arose. 
 
 59. The Later Literature of Elizabeth's 
 Reign,i579-i6o2, begins with the pubHcation of Lyly's 
 Etiphues and Spenser's Shepheardes Calender y both in 
 1579, and with the writing of Sir Philip Sidney's Area- 
 dia and his Defe7ice of Poetrie^ 1580-81. It will be best 
 to leave the poem of Spenser aside till we come to write 
 of the poets. Ti)e Etiphues and the Arcadia carried 
 on the story-telling literature ; the Defence of Poetrie 
 created a new form of literature, that of criticism. 
 
 The Etiphues was the work of John Lyi.y, poet and 
 dramatist. It is in two parts, Euphiies and Etiphues^ 
 England. In six years it ran through five editions, so 
 great was its popularity. Its prose style is too poetic, 
 but it is admirable for its smoothness and charm, 
 and its very faults were of use in softening the rude- 
 ness of previous prose. The story is long and is 
 more a loose framework into which Lyly could fit his 
 thoughts on love, friendship, education and religion 
 than a true story. The second part is made up of 
 several stones in one, and is a picture of the English- 
 man abroad. It made its mark because it fell in with 
 all the fantastic and changeable life of the time. Its 
 far-fetched conceits, its extravagance of gallantry, its 
 ^ endless metaphors from the classics and natural history, 
 its curious and gorgeous descriptions of dress and its 
 pale imitation of chivalry were all reflected in the life 
 and talk and dress of the court of Ehzabeth. It became 
 the fashion to talk " Euphuism," and, like the Utopia 
 of More, Lyly's book has created an English word. 
 
IV.] FROM 1 559 TO 1603. 6$ 
 
 The Arcadia was the work of Sir pHitrp SinNF.Y, 
 and though written in 1580, did not appear till 
 iiticr his death. It is more poeti'c in style than tlie 
 Ktiphues^ and Sidney himself, as he wrote it under the 
 trees of Wilton, would have called it a poem. It is 
 less the image of the time than of the man. Most 
 people know that bri|^;ht and noble figure, the friend of 
 Spenser, the lover of Stella, the last of the old knights, 
 the poet, the critic, and the Christian, who, wounded 
 to the death, gave up the cup of water to a dying 
 soldier. We find his whole spirit in the story of the 
 Arcadia, in the first two books and part of the third, 
 wlii'ch alone were written by him. It is a romance 
 mixed up with pastoral stories, after the fashion of the 
 Spanish romances. The characters are real, but the 
 story is confused by endless digressions. The senti- 
 ment is too fine and delicate for the world. The de- 
 scriptions are picturesque and the sentences made as 
 perfect as possible, A quaint or poetic thought or an 
 epigram appear in every line. There is no real art in it, 
 or in its prose. But it is so full of poetical thought that 
 it became a mine into which poets dug for subjects. 
 
 60. Criticism began with Sidney's Art of Foetrie, 
 Its style shows us that he felt how faulty the prose of 
 the Arcadia was. The book made a new step in the 
 creation of a dignified English prose. It is still too 
 tlowery, but in it the fantastic prose of his own Arcadia 
 and of the Eiiphues dies. As criticism it is chietly 
 concerned with poetry. It defends, against Stephen 
 Gosson's School of Abuse, in which poetry and plays 
 were attacked from the Puritan point of view, the nobler 
 uses of poetry. Sackville, Surrey and Spenser are 
 praised, and the other i>oets made little of in its pages. 
 It was followed by Webbe's Discourse of English 
 Podne written " to stirre up some other of nic«.^t 
 abilitie to bestow travell on the matter," Already the 
 other was travailing, and the Arte of English Poesie, 
 supposed to be written by George Puttenham, was 
 
 r : 
 
 'I 
 
 1, 
 
 i} 
 
 vt 
 
 
ENGLISH LlTP.kATVRk. 
 
 tCttAP. 
 
 published in 1589. It is the most elaborate book on 
 the whole subject in Ehzabeth's reign, and it marks 
 the strong interest now taken in poetry in the highest 
 society that the author says he writes it " to help the 
 courtiers and the gentlewomen of the court to write 
 good poetry, that the art may become vulgar for all 
 Englishmen's use/' 
 
 61. Later Theological Literature. —Before we 
 come to the Poetry we will give an account of the Prose 
 into which the tendencies of the earlier years of Eliza- 
 beth grew. The first is that of theology. For a long 
 time it remained only a literature of pamphlets. Puri- 
 tanism in its attack on the stage, and in the Martin 
 Marprelate controversy upon episcopal government 
 in the Church, flooded England with small books. 
 Lord Bacon e^ en joined in the Utter controversy, and 
 Nash the dramatist made himself famous in the war 
 by the vigour and fierceness of his wit. Over this 
 troubled sea rose at last the stately work of Richard 
 Hooker. It was in 1594 that the first four books 
 of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, a defence of 
 the Church against the Puritans, were given to the 
 world. Before his death he finished the other four. 
 The book has remained ever since a standard work 
 It is a J much moral and political as theological. Its 
 style is grave, clear, and often musical. Pie adorned 
 it with the figures of poetry, but he used them with 
 temperance, and the grand and rolling rhetoric with 
 which he often concludes an argument is kept for its 
 right place. On the whole it is the first monument of 
 splendid literary prose that we possess. 
 
 62. The Essay. — We may place alongside of it, as 
 the other great prose work of Elizabeth's later time, the 
 development of tlie Essay in Lord Bacon's Essays 
 1597. Their highest literary merit is their combina- 
 tion of charm and even of poetic prose with concise- 
 ness of expression and fulness of thought. The rest 
 of Bacon's work belpngs to the followii^ reign. The 
 
nrj 
 
 PROM ISS9 TO 1603. 
 
 67 
 
 splendour of the form, and of the English prose 
 of the Advancement of Learnings afterwards written 
 in the Latin knguage, and intended to be worked up by 
 the addition of the Novum Organum and the Sylva 
 Sylvarum into the treatise of the Instauratio Magna, 
 which Bacon meant to be a philosophy of human 
 knowledge, raises it into the realm of pure literature. 
 67,. History, except in the publication of the earliei 
 Chronicles by Archbishop Pai?lker, does not appear 
 again in Elizabeth's reign ; but in the next reign 
 Camden, Spelman, and John Speed continued the 
 antiquarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon 
 published a history of Henry VII., and Samuel 
 Daniel, the poet, in his History of England to the 
 Time of Edward in., 1613,18, was one of the first to 
 throw history into such a literary form as to make it 
 popular. Knolles* History of the Turks and Sir 
 Walter Raleigh's vast sketch of the History of the 
 World show how for the first time history spread 
 itself beyond English interests. Raleigh's book, 
 written in the -peaceful evening of a stormy life, and 
 in the quiet of his prison, is not only literary from the 
 ease and vigour of its style, but from its still spirit of 
 melancholy thou'ght. 
 
 64. The Literature of Travel was carried on 
 by the publication in 1589 of Hakluyt's Navigation, 
 Voyages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, cut 
 larged afterwards in 1625 by Samuel Purchas, who 
 had himself written a book called Purchas, his Pil- 
 grimage ; or, The Relations and Religions of the World. 
 The influence of a compilation of this kind, contain- 
 ing the great deeds of the English on the seas, has 
 been felt ever since in the literature of fiction and 
 poetry. 
 
 65. Translations. — There are three translators 
 that take literary rank among the crowd that carried 
 on the work of the earlier time. Two mark the in- 
 fluence of Italy^ one the more powerful influence o( 
 
 X 
 
 K a 
 
 'I 
 
 '1 
 
 ■1! ,. 
 
 1 
 
 4 -li 
 
 vii 
 
 'i ■) '■ 
 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 
 
 1 
 
68 
 
 ENGUsn UTERA TV RE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 I 
 
 m. !! 
 
 the r^rcck !-:pirit. Sir JoHxN Harington in 1591 trans- 
 lulc<l Ariosto's Grlatido Furioso, Fairfax in 1600 
 translated '\dj^?,o'% Jerusaletn^ and his book is " one of 
 the glories of Elizabeth's reign." But the noblest 
 tKinslation is that of Homej-'s whole work by George 
 Chapman, the dramatist, the first part of which ap- 
 pealed in 1598. The vivid life and energy of the time, 
 its creative power and its force, are expressed in this 
 poem, which is more an Elizabetlian tale written about 
 Achilles and Ulysses than a translation. The rushing 
 gallop of the long fourteen syllable stanza in which it 
 is written has the fire and swiftness of Homer, but it 
 lja,s not his directness or dignity. Its " inconquerable 
 quaintness " and diffuseness are as unlike the pure form 
 and light and measure of Greek work as possible. 
 Jkit it is a distinct poem of such power that it will 
 excite and delight all loverc of poetry, as it excited 
 and delighted Keats. John Florio's translatioji of the 
 Essays of Montaigne^ 1603, is also worth mentioning 
 because Shakespeare used the book, and because we 
 trace Montaigne's influence on English literature even 
 before his retranslation by Charles Cotton. 
 
 66. In the Tales, which poured out like a flood 
 from the dramatists, from such men as Peele, and 
 Lodge, and Greene, we find the origin of English 
 fiction, and the subjects of many of our plays ; while 
 the fantastic attempt to revive the practices of chivalry 
 which we have seen in the Arcadia found food in the 
 translation of a new school of romances, such as 
 A mad is of Gaul^ Palmer in of England ^ and the Seven 
 Champions of Christendom. 'vVe turn now to the 
 Poetry. 
 
 67. Edmund Spenser.— The later Elizabethan 
 poetry begins with the Shepheardes Calender of Spenser. 
 Spenser was born in London, 1552, and educated 
 at Merchant Taylor's School and at Cambridge, which 
 he left at the age of twenty-four. His early boyhood 
 ^as passed in London, and he went frequently to 
 
:1M 
 
 ire even 
 
 XV.] 
 
 FRO.)f 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 ^ 
 
 an English home among the glens of Lancashire. He 
 returned thither after he left Cambridge and fell in love 
 with a " fair widowe's daughter of the glen " whom he 
 called Rosalind. His love was not returned and her 
 coldness drove him southward. His college friend, 
 Gabriel Harvey, made him known to Leicester, and 
 probably, since Harvey was "Leicester's man," to Philip 
 Sidney, Leicester's nephew; and it was at Sidney's 
 house oi Penshurst that the Shcphcardcs Calender was 
 made, and the Faerie Queen begun. The publication 
 of the former work in 1579 at once made Spenser the 
 first poet of the day, and its literary freshness was 
 such tlrat men felt that for the first time since Chaucer, 
 England had given birth to a great poet. It was a 
 pastoral poem, divided into twelve eclogues, one for 
 each month of the year. Shepherds and shepherd 
 life were mixed in itS verse with complaints for his lost 
 love, with a desire for Church reform, with loyalty to 
 the Queen. It marks the strong love of old English 
 poetry by iis reference to Chaucer, though it is in 
 form imitated from the French pastoral of Clement 
 Marot. The only tie it really has to Chaucer is in the 
 choice of disused English words and spelling, a practice 
 of Spenser's which somewhat spoils the Faerie Queen. 
 The Puritanism of the poem does not lie in any attack 
 on the Episcopal theory, but in an attack on the sloth 
 and pomp of the clergy, and in a demand for a nobler 
 moral life. It is the same in the Faerie Queen. 
 
 68. The Faerie Queen. — The twelve books 
 of this poem were to represent the twelve moral 
 virtues, each in the person of a knight who was to 
 conquer all the separate sins and errors which were 
 at battle with the virtue he personified. In Arthur, 
 the king of the company, the Magnificence of the whole 
 of virtue was to be represented, and he was at last to 
 arrive at union w" h the Faerie Queen, that divine 
 glory of God to which all human thought, and act 
 aspiredt This was Spenser's Puritanism — the de^irQ 
 
 \*K 
 
 
 
 f 
 
 ■I 
 1 
 
 If 
 
 ! ? 
 
 K 
 
 '■•■ 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 J 
 
 J 
 
 I 
 
 
 1 
 
 
 J 
 
 
Ill 
 
 70 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 after a perfectly pure life for State and Church and Man. 
 It was opposed in State and Church, he held, by the 
 power of Rome which ha paints as Duessa, the false- 
 hood which wears the garb of truth, and who also 
 strves to represent her in whom Catholicism most 
 threatened England — Mary, Queen of Scots. Puritan 
 in this sense, he is not Puritan in any other. He had 
 nothing to do with the attack on Prelacy which was 
 then raging, and the last canto of the Faerie Queen 
 represents Calidore the knight of courtesy sent forth 
 to bridle " the blatant beast," the many-tongued and 
 noisy Presbyterian body which attacked tl)e Church. 
 
 The poem however soars far above this region of 
 debate into the calm and pure air of art. It is the 
 poem of the human soul and all its powers strugghng 
 towards the perfect love, the love which is God. Filled 
 full with christianized platonism, the ideas of truth, 
 justice, temperance, courtesy do not remain ideas in 
 Spenser's mind, as in Plato's, but become real personages 
 whose lives and battles he honours and tells in verse 
 so delicate, so gliding, and so steeped in the finer life 
 of poetry, that he has been called the poet's poet. 
 As the nobler Puritanism of the time is found in it, so 
 also are the other influences of the time. It goes 
 back, as men were doing then, to the old times for 
 its framework, to the Celtic story of Arthur and his 
 knights that Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Chaucer, and 
 Thomas Malory had loved. It represents the new 
 love of chivalry, the new love of classical learning, 
 the new delight in mystic theories of love and reli- 
 gion. It is full of those allegorical schemes in which 
 doctrines and heresies, virtues and vices were con- 
 trasted and personified. It takes up and uses the 
 popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, and 
 mingles them with the savages and the wonders of 
 the New World of which the voyagers told in every 
 company. Nearly the whole spirit of the English 
 Repaissance under Elizabeth, except its co^irser ;iud 
 
t'i 1 
 
 rv.l 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 7t 
 
 baser elements, is in its pages. Of anything im- 
 pure or u^iy, or violent, there is not a trace. Spenser 
 walks through the whole of this woven world of faerie 
 
 ** With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace." 
 
 The first three books were finished in Ireland, whither 
 he had gone as secretary to Lord Grey of Wilton in 
 1580. Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman 
 Castle, among the alder shades of the river Mulla 
 that fed the lake below the castle. Delighted with the 
 poem, he brought Spenser to England. The books 
 were published in 1590, and the Queen, the Court, and 
 the whole of England soon shared in Raleigh's de- 
 light. It was the first great ideal poem that Eng- 
 land had produced, and it is the source of all our 
 modern poetry. It has never ceased to make poets 
 and it will not lose its power while our language lasts. 
 69. Spenser's Minor Poems. — The next year, 
 1 59 1, Spenser being still in England, collected his 
 smaller poems and published them. Among them J/J^M^/* 
 HubbanVs Tale is a bright imitation of Chaucer, and 
 the Tears of the Muses supports my statement that litera- 
 ture was looked on coldly previous to 1580 by the 
 complaint the Muses make in it of their subjects being 
 despised in England. Sidney had died in 1586, and 
 three of these poems bemoan his death. The others 
 are of slight importance, and the whole collection 
 was entitled Complaitiis. Returning to Ireland he 
 gave an account of his visit in Colin Cloufs come 
 Home again, 1591, and at last after more than a year's 
 pursuit won his second love for his wife, and found 
 with her perfi-ct happiness. A long series of Son?iets 
 records the progress of his wooing, and the Epitha- 
 laminm, his marriage hymn, is the most glorio'is 
 love-song in the English tongue. At the close of 1595 
 he brought to England in a second visit the last 
 tliree books of the Faerie Queen. The next year he 
 speut iu London and published these books with 
 
 'HI 
 
 % 
 
 1, 
 
 
i 
 
 7si 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [CHAP, 
 
 his other poems, the Prothalamion on tne marriage of 
 Ldrd Worcester's daughters, and his Hymnes to Love 
 and Beauty, and to Hmvenly Love and Beauty^ in 
 which the love philosophy of Petrarca is enshrined. 
 The end of his life was sorrowful. In 1508 the Irish 
 rising took place, his castle was burnt, and he and his 
 family fled for their lives to England. Broken-hearted, 
 poor, but not forgoiten, the poet died in a London 
 tavern. All his fellows weftt with his body to the 
 grave where, close by Chaucer, he lies in Westminster 
 Abbey. London, *'his most kindly nurse," takes care 
 also of his dust, and England keeps him in her love. 
 
 70. Later Elizabethan Poetry, its Four 
 Phases. —Spenser reflected in his poems the spirit 
 of the Enghsh Renaissance. The other poetry of 
 Elizabeth's reign reflected the whole of English Life. 
 The best way to arrange it — omitting as yet the Drama 
 — is in an order parallel to the growth of the national 
 life, and the proof that it is the best way is that on 
 the whole such an order is a true chronological order. 
 First then, if we compare England after 1580, as 
 writers have often done, to an ardent youth, we shall 
 find in the poetry of the first years that followed that 
 date all the elements of youth. It is a poetry of love, 
 -and romance, and fancy. Secondly, and later on, when 
 Englishmen grew older in feeling, their unsettled 
 enthusiasm, which had flitted here and there in action 
 and literature over all kinds of subjects, settled down 
 into a steady enthusiasm for England itself. The 
 country entered on its early manhood, and parallel 
 with this there is the great outburst of historical 
 plays, and a set of poets whorp I will call the patriotic 
 poets. Thi?'dly, and later still, all enthusiasm died 
 down into a graver and more thoughtful national life, 
 and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare 
 and the poets whom I will call philosophical. These 
 three classes of Poets overlapped one another, and 
 grew up gradually, but on the whole their succession 
 
ivj 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 73 
 
 represents a real succession of national thought and 
 emotion. 
 
 A fourth and separate phase does not represent, as 
 these do, a new national life, a new religion, and new 
 politics, but the despairing struggle of the old faith 
 against the new. There were numbers of men such 
 as Wordsworth has fmely sketched in old Norton 
 in the Doe of Ry /stone, who vainly strove in sorrow 
 against all the new national elements. Robert South- 
 well, of Norfolk, a Jesuit priest, was the poet of 
 Roman Catholic England. Imprisoned for three years, 
 racked ten times, and finally executed, he wrote during 
 his prison time his two longest poems, St. Peter's Com- 
 ^.laint, and Mary Magdalen^ s Funeral Tears, and it 
 marks not only the large Roman Catholic element in 
 the country but also the strange contrasts of the 
 time that eleven editions of poems with these titles 
 were published between 1593 and 1600, at a time 
 when the Venus and Adonis of Shakespeare led the 
 way for a multitude of poems that sung of love and 
 delight and England's glory. To these we now turn. 
 
 71. The Love Poetry. — I have called it by this 
 name because in all its best work (to be found in the 
 first book of Mr. Palgrave's *' Golden Treasury ") it is 
 almost limited to that subject— the subject of youth. 
 It is chiefly composed in the form of songs and sonnets 
 and was published in miscellanies in and after 1600. 
 The mosjt famous of these, in which men like Nicholas 
 Breton, Henry Constable, W. Barnfield and others 
 wrote, are England's Helicon, and Davison! s Rhapsody 
 and the Passionate Pilgrim. The latter contained 
 some poems of Shakespeare, and he i'S by virtue of 
 these, and the songs in his Dramas, the best of these 
 lyriC writers. The songs themselves ure "old and 
 plain, and dallying with the innocence of love.*' They 
 have natural sweetness, great simplicity of speech, 
 and directness of statement. Some, as Shakespeare's, 
 possess^ " passionate reality ; " ot{aer$ a c^uuint pastor- 
 
 •■■'i 
 i-ii 
 : r 
 
 
 
 
 iw 
 
i! 
 
 if 
 
 fi 
 
 m 
 
 t mi 
 
 i 
 
 4 
 
 m 
 
 H 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURK. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 alism like shepherd life in porcelain, such as Marlowe's 
 well known song, "Come live with me, and be my love;'* 
 others a splendour of love and beauty as in Lodge's 
 Song of Rosaline and Spenser's on his marriage. 
 The sonnets were written chiefly in series, and I have 
 already said that such writers are called amourists. 
 Such were Shakespeare's and the Amoretti of Spenser, 
 and those to Diana b Co^ table. They were some- 
 times mixed with Cj r ^dj; s and Ballatas after the 
 Italian manner, and the ^" ■ ' of these were a series by 
 Sir Philip Sidney. A number ' other sonnets and of 
 longer love poems were .written by the dramatists 
 before Shakespeare, by Peele and Greene and Mar- 
 lowe and Lodge, far the finest being the Hero and 
 Leander, which Marlowe left as a fragment to be 
 completed by Chapman. Mingled up with these were 
 small religious poems, the reflection of the Puritan and 
 the more religious Church element in English society. 
 They were collected under such titles as the Handfnl 
 of Jloney suckles ^ the Poor Widow's Mite^ Psalms and 
 Sonnets^ and there are some good things among 
 them written by William Hunni's. 
 
 In one Scotch poet, William Drummond of Haw- 
 thornden, the friend of Ben J on son, the love poet 
 and the religious poet were united. I mention him 
 here, though his work properly belongs to the reign 
 of James I., because his poetry really goes back in 
 spirit and feeling to this time. He cannot be counted 
 among the true Scottish poets. Drummond is entirely 
 Elizabethan and English, and he is worthy to be 
 named among the lyrical poets below Spenser and 
 Shakespeare. His love sonnets have as much grace as 
 Sidney's and less quaintness, his songs have often 
 the grave simplicity of Wyat, and his religious poem^, 
 especially one solemn sonnet on John the Baptist, 
 have a distant resemblance to the grandeur of Milton. 
 
 72.^ The Patriotic Poets. — Among all this poetry 
 9I" Jiomancej Qhivalry, I^eligion, an4 I^Qve, rose ^ 
 
 il :i 
 
iv.l 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 75 
 
 poetry which devoted itself to the glory of England. 
 It was chiefly historical, and as it may be said to have 
 had its germ in the Mirror of Magistrates^ so it had 
 its perfect flower in the historical drama cf Shake- 
 speare. Men had now begun to have a great pride 
 in England. She had stepped into the foremost rank, 
 had outwitted France, subdued internal foes, beaten 
 and humbled Spain on every sea. Hence the history 
 of the land became precious, and the very rivers 
 and hills and plains honourable, and to be sung and 
 praised in verse. This poetic impulse is best repre 
 sented in the works of three men — William Warn e^v.. 
 Samuel Daniel, and Michael Drayton. Born wiLV'n 
 a few years of each other, about 1560, they all )' ''ci 
 beyond the century, and the national poetry they sti 
 on foot lasted when the romantic poetry died. 
 
 William Warner's great book was Albion's England^ 
 1586, a history of England in verse from the Deluge 
 to Queen Elizabeth. It is clever, humorous, crowded 
 with stories, and runs to 10,000 lines. Its popularity 
 was great, and the English in which it was written 
 deserved it. Such stories as Argentile and Ctiran^ 
 and the Patient Countess^ prove him to have had a 
 true and pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not 
 however better than that of " well-languaged Danie V* 
 who among tragedies and pastoral comedies and 
 poems of pure fancy wrote in verse a prosaic History 
 of the Civil Wars, ^595? ^s we have already found 
 him writing history in prose. Spenser saw in him a 
 new *' shepherd" of poetry who did far surpass the 
 others, and Coleridge says that the style of his 
 Hymen's Triumph may be declared '* imperishable 
 English/' Of the three the greatest poet was Drayton. 
 Two historical poems are his work — the Civil Wars 
 of Edward II. and the Barons ^ and England's If eroical 
 Epistles, 1598. Not content with these, he set him- 
 self to glorify the whole of his land in the Polyolbijn, 
 thirty bopks^ and niore than 30,000 lines, l\ \^ ^ 
 
 <« 
 * 
 
 r 
 
 / • 1 
 
 .». 
 
 I' 
 
 ' I! 
 
 -5f f 
 
76 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 
 w^ 
 
 I 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 m 
 
 i .11'^ 
 
 lir 
 
 description in Alexandrines of the ** tracts, moi^ntains, 
 forests, and other parts of this renowned isle of 
 Britain, with intermixture of the most remarkable 
 stories, antiquities, wonders, pleasures, and commo- 
 dities of the same, digested into a poem." It was 
 not a success, though it deserved success. Its 
 great length was against it, but the real reason was 
 that this kind of poetry had had its day. It r.ppeared 
 in 1 6 13, in James I.'s reign. 
 
 ' 73. Philosophical Poets. — Before that time a 
 change had come. As the patriotic poets came 
 after the romantic, so the romantic were followed 
 by the philosophical poets. The youth and early 
 manhood of the Elizabethan poetry passed, about 
 
 1600, into its thoughtful manhood. The land was 
 settled; enterprise ceased to be the first thing; men 
 sat down to think, and in poetry questions of religious 
 and political philosophy were treated with "senten- 
 tious reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed." Shake- 
 speare, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in 
 
 1 60 1, represents this change. The two poets who re- 
 present it are Sir Jno. Davies and Fulke Greville, 
 Lord Brooke. In Davies himself we find an instance 
 of it. His earlier poem of the Orchestra, ^59^, in 
 which the whole world is explained as a dance, is as 
 gay and bright as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is 
 compact and vigorous reasoning, for the most part 
 without fancy. Its very title, Nosce te ipsum — Know 
 Thyself — and its divisions, i. " On humane learning," 
 2. ^' The immortality of the soul " — mark the altera- 
 tion. Two little poems, one of Bacon's, on the 
 Life of Man, as a bubble, and one of Sir Henry 
 Wotton's, on the Character of a Happy Life, are in- 
 stances of the same change. It is still more marked 
 in Lord Brooke's long, obscure poems On Lliiman 
 Learnings on Wars, on Monarchy, and on Religion. 
 They are political and historical treatises, not poems, 
 ^pd all ii> them, says Lamb, "is made frozen and 
 
tv.l /veOiW 1559 r(9 1603. 77 
 
 rigid by intellect." Apart from poetry, " they are 
 worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit 
 on political science which was to produce the riper 
 £peculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke." We 
 turn row to the Drama, which includes all these 
 different forms of poetry. 
 
 r 
 
 THE DRAMA. 
 
 74. Early Dramatic Representation in Eng- 
 land. — The drama, as in Greece, so in England, began 
 in religion. In early times none but the clergy could 
 read the stories of their religion, and it was not the 
 custom to deliver sermons to the people. It was neces- . 
 sary to instruct uneducated men in t'le history of 
 the Bible, the Christian faith, the lives of the Saints 
 and Martyrs. Hence the Church set on foot 
 miracle plays and mysteries. We find the first of 
 these about mo, when Geoffrey, afterwards Abbot of 
 St. Albans, prepared his miracle play of St. Catherine 
 for acting. Such plays became more frequent from 
 thf* time of Henry II., and they were so comimon 
 m Chaucer's time that they were the resort of idle 
 gossips in Lent. The wife of Bath went to ** plays of 
 miracles and marriages." They were acted not only 
 by the clergy, but by the laity. About the year 
 1268 the town guilds began to take them into their 
 own hands, and acted complete sets of plays, setting 
 forth the whole of Scripture history from the Creation 
 to the Day of Judgment. Each guild took one play 
 in the set. They lasted sometimes three days, some- 
 times eight, and were represented on a great movable 
 stage on wheels in the open spaces of the towns. Of 
 these sets we have three remaining, the Towneley, 
 Coventry and Chester plays : 1300 — 1600. The first 
 set has 32, the second 42, and the third 25 plays. % 
 
 75. The Miracle Play was a representation of 
 some portioL of Scripture history, or of thfc life oi scmq; 
 
 (til 
 
 i'j! 
 ill' 
 
 1 
 
 > t 
 ii I. 
 
 V 
 
 Y 
 
 f 
 
 ji 
 
 1^ 
 
 ri 
 
A 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A WRB. 
 
 (CttAP. 
 
 Saint of the Church. The Mystery was a represen- 
 tation of any portion of the New Testament history 
 concerned with a mysterious subject, such as the 
 Incarnation, the Atonement or the Resurrection. It 
 has been attempted to distinguish these more particu* 
 larly, but they are mingled together in England 
 into one. From the towns they went to the Court 
 and the houses of nobles. The Kings kept players 
 of them, and we know that exhibiting Scripture plays 
 at great festivals was part of the domestic regulations 
 of the great houses, and that it was the Chaplain's 
 business to write them. Their "Dumb Show" and 
 their "Chorus" leave their trace in the regular drama. 
 We cannot say that the modern drama arose after 
 them, for it came in before they died out in England. 
 They were still acted in Chester in 1577, and in 
 Coventry in 1580. 
 
 76. The Morality was the next step to these, and 
 in it we come to a representation which is closely con- 
 nected with the drama. It was a play in which the 
 characters were the Vices and Virtues, with the 
 addition afterwards of allegorical personages, such as 
 Riches, Good Deeds, Confessior, Death, and any 
 human condition or quality needed for the play. 
 These characters were brought together in a rough 
 story, at the end of which Virtue triumphed, or some 
 moral principle was established. The dramatic fool 
 grew up in the Moralities out of a personage called 
 " The Vice," and the humorous element was intro- 
 duced by the retaining of " The Devil " from the 
 Miracle play and by making the Vice torment him. 
 They were continually represented, but becoming 
 coarser were finally supplanted by the regular drama 
 about the end of Elizabeth's reign. 
 
 77. The Transition between these and the 
 regular Drama is not hard to trace. The Virtues 
 and Vices were dull because they stirred no human 
 sympathy. Historical characters were therefore then 
 
tv.l 
 
 hS'OM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 ?* 
 
 the 
 
 rtues 
 iiman 
 then 
 
 introxluced, who were celebrated for a virtue or a vice ; 
 Brutus represented palriotism, Aristides represented 
 justice J or, as in Bale's Kynge Johan, historical and 
 allegorical personages were mixed together. The 
 transition was hastened by the impulse of the Re- 
 formation. The religious struggle came so home to 
 men's hearts that they were not satisfied with subjects 
 dr.twn from the past, and the Morality was used to 
 support the Catholic or the Protestant side. Real men 
 and women were shown under the thin cloaks of its 
 allegorical characters ; the vices and the follies of the 
 time were displayed. It was the origin of satiric 
 comedy. The stage was becoming a living power 
 when this began. The excitement of the audience 
 was now very different from that felt in listening to 
 Virtues and Vices, and a demand arose for a comedy 
 and tragedy which should picture human life in all 
 its forms. The Interludes of John Heywood, most 
 of which were written for Court representation in 
 Henry VIII.'s time 1530, 1540, represent this further 
 transition. They differed from the Morality in 
 that most of the characters were drawn from real 
 life, but they retained " the Vice '' as a personage. 
 The Interlude — a short, humorous piece, to be acted 
 in the midst of the Morality for the amusement of 
 the people — had been frequently used, but Heywood 
 isolated it from the Morality and made of it a kind 
 of farce. Out of it we may say grew English comedy. 
 78. The First Stage of the regular Drama 
 begins with the first English comedy, Ralph Roister 
 Bolster, written by Nicholas Udall, master of Eton, 
 known to have been acted before 1551, but not 
 published till 1566. It is our earliest picture of 
 London manners ; the characters are well draw-n ; it 
 is divided into regular acts and scenes and is made 
 in rime. The first English tragedy is Gorboduc^ 
 written by Sackrille and Norton and represented in 
 1562. The story was taken from British legend, and 
 
 .1 
 
 it 
 %, 1 
 
 jf. 
 
 "I* 
 
 i'i 
 
 m* 
 
 m 
 
 Ur 
 
 ! 
 I 
 
So 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 the characters are gravely sustained. But the piece 
 was heavy and too solemn for the audience, and 
 Richard Edwards by mixing tragic and comic ele- 
 ments together in his r)lay, Damon aJid Pythias^ 
 acted about 1564, succeeded better. These two gave 
 the impulse to a number of dramas from classical 
 and modern story, which were acted at the Universi- 
 ties, Inns of Court, and the Court up to 1580, when 
 the drama, having gone through its boyhood, entered 
 on a vigorous manhood. More than fifty-two dramas, 
 so quick was their production, are known to have 
 been acted up to this time. Some were translated 
 from the Greek, as the Jocasta from Euripides, and 
 others from the Italian, as the Supposes from Ariosto, 
 both by the same author, George Gascoigne, already 
 mentioned as a satirist. These were acted in 1566. 
 
 79. The Theatre.- — There was as yet no theatre. 
 A patent was given in 1574 to the Earl of Leicester's 
 servants to act plays in any town in England, and 
 they built in 1576 the Blackfriars Theatre. In the 
 same year two others were set up in the fields about 
 Shoreditch—** The Theatre" and "The Curtain." The 
 Globe Theatre, built for Shakespeare and his fellows 
 in 1599, may stand as a type of the rest. In the form 
 of a hexagon outside, it was circular within and open 
 to the weather, except above the stage. The play began 
 at three o'clock ; the nobles and ladies sat in boxes or 
 in stools on the stage, the people stood in the pit or 
 yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, was a naked 
 room with a blanket for a curtain. Wooden imitations 
 of animals, towers, woods, etc., were all the scenery 
 u'sed, and a board, stating the place of action, was 
 hung out from the top when the scene changed. Boys 
 acted the female parts. It was only after the restora- 
 tion that movable scenery and actresses were intro- 
 duced. No " pencil's aid " supplied the landscape of 
 Shakespeare's plays. The forest of Arden, the castle 
 gf Duncan, were " seen only by the intellectual eye." 
 
 
IV^ FROM ISS9 TO 1603. 8| 
 
 So. The Second Stage of the Drama ranges 
 from 1580 to 1596. It includes the work of Lyly 
 (author of the Euphues), the plays of Peele, Greene, 
 Lodge. Marlowe, Kyd, Munday, Chettle, Nash, and 
 the earliest works of Shakespeare. During this time 
 we know that more than 100 different plays were per- 
 formed by four out of the eleven companies ; so swift 
 and plentiful was their production. They were written 
 in prose, and in rime, and in blank verse mixed 
 with prose and rime. Prose and rime prevailed 
 before 1587, when Marlowe in his play of Tatnburlaine 
 made blank verse the fashion. John Lyly illustrates 
 the three methods, for he wrote seven plays in prose, 
 one in rime, and one (after Tamburlaine) in blank 
 verse. Some beautiful little songs scattered through 
 them are the forerunners of the songs with which 
 Shakespeare made his dramas bright, and the witty 
 *' quips and cranks," repartees, and similes cf their fan- 
 tastic prose dialogue were the school of Shakespeare's 
 prose dialogue. Peele, Greene, and Marlowe 
 are the three important names of the period. They 
 are the first in whose hands the play of human 
 passion and action is expressed with any true dramatic 
 etfect. Peele and Greene make their characters act 
 on, and draw out, one another in the several scenes, 
 but they have no power of making a plot, or of work- 
 ing out their plays, scene by scene, to a natural 
 conclusion. They are, in one word, without art, and 
 their characters, even when they talk in good poetry, 
 are neither natural nor simple. 
 
 Christopher Marlowe, on the other hand, rose 
 by degrees and easily into mastery of his art. The 
 ditference between the unequal and violent action 
 and thought of his Doctor Fausttis, and the quiet 
 and orderly progression to its end of the play of 
 Eihvai'd Jl.f is all the more remarkable when we 
 know that he died at thirty. Though less than 
 Shakespeare, he was worthy to precede hun. As he 
 
 ^^ii 
 
 1 
 
 I ( 
 
 F 
 
 1'^ 
 
82 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 may be said to have invented and made the verse of 
 the drama, so he created the EngUsh tragic drama. 
 His plays are wrought with art to their end, his 
 characters are sharply and Ltrongly outlined. Each 
 play illustrates one ruling passion, in its growth, its . 
 power, and its extremes. Tamhiirlaine paints the 
 desire of universal empire; \kiQ Jew of Malta ^ the pas- 
 sions of greed and hatred ; Doctor Faiistus^ the struggle 
 and failure of man to possess all knowledge and all 
 pleasure without toil and. without law; Edward IL^ 
 the misery of weakness and the agony of a king's ruin. 
 Marlowe's verse is "mighty," his poetry strong and weak 
 alike with passionate feeling, and expressed with a tur- 
 bulent magnificence of words and images, the fault of 
 which is a very great want of temperance. It reflects 
 his life and the lives of those with whom he lived. Mar- 
 lowe lived and died an irreligious, imaginative, tender- 
 hearted, licentious poet. Peele and Greene lived an 
 even more riotous life and died as miserably, and they 
 are examples of a crowd of other dramatists who passed 
 their lives between the theatre, the wine-shop, and 
 the prison. Their drama, in which we see the better 
 side of the men, had all the marks of a wild youth. 
 It was daring, full of strong but unequal life, romantic, 
 sometimes savage, often tender, always exaggerated in 
 its treatment and expression of the human passions. 
 If it had no moderation, it had no tame dulness. If 
 it w^as coarse, it was powerful, and it was above all 
 national. It was a time full of strange contrasts, a 
 time of fiery action and of sentimental contempla 
 tion ; a time of fancy and chivalry, indelicacy and 
 buffoonery; of great national adventure and private 
 brawls, of literary quiet and polemic thought ; of faith 
 and infidelity — and the whole of it is painted with 
 truth, but with too glaring colours, in the dram^a of 
 these men. 
 
 8t. William Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist 
 of the world, now took up the work of Marlowe, ai:d in 
 
nr.] 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 83 
 
 twenty-eight years made the drama represent the whole 
 of human life. He was born April 26, 1564, the son 
 of a comfortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. While 
 he was still young his lather fell into poverty, and an 
 interrupted education left him an inferior scholar. 
 " He had small Latin and less Greek." But by dmt of 
 genius and by living in a society in which all sorts of in- 
 formation were attainable, he became an accompHshed 
 man. The story told of his deer-stealing in Charlecote 
 woods is without proof, but it is likely that his youth 
 was wild and passionate. At nineteen, he married 
 Ann Hathaway, seven years older than himself, and 
 was probably unhappy with her. For this reason, or 
 from poverty, or from the driving of the genius that 
 led him to the stage, he left Stratford about 15S6-7, 
 and came to London at the age of twenty-two years, 
 and falling in with Marlowe, Greene and the rest, be- 
 came an actor and play-wright, and may have lived 
 their unrestrained and riotous life for some years. 
 
 82. His First Period. — It is probable that before 
 leaving Stratford he had sketched a part at least 
 of his Venus and Adonis. It is full of the country 
 sights and sounds, of the ways of birds and animals, 
 such as he saw when wandering in Charlecote woods. 
 Its rich and overladen poetry and its warm colouring 
 made him, when it w^as published in 1593, at once the 
 favourite of men like Lord Southampton and lifted him 
 into fame. But before that date he had done work for 
 the stage by touching up old plays, and writing new 
 ones. We seem to trace his "prentice hand" in many 
 dramas of the time, but the first he is usually thought to 
 have retouched is Tiius AndroniaiSy and some time 
 after the First Part of Henry VI, Lovers Labour's 
 Lost the first of his original plays, in which he 
 quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was fol- 
 lowed by the raj)id farce of the Comedy of Erf'ors. 
 Out of these frolics of intellect and action he passed 
 into pure poetry in the Alidsunimer-Nig/it's Jjream^ 
 
 F 2 
 
 
 1 ; i 
 
 ^ "; 
 
 1 \ 
 
 I ,r 
 
 
-t m 
 
 84 
 
 EN GUSH LITERATURE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 and mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, 
 the mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the 
 English mechanic. Italian story then laid its charm 
 upon him, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona preceded 
 the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet^ in 
 which he first reached tragic power. They complete, 
 with Lovds Labour's Won, afterwards recast as A/l's 
 Weil that Ends Well, the love plays of his early 
 period. We may perhaps add to them the second 
 act of an older play, Edward III. We should cer- 
 tainly read along with them, as belonging to the same 
 passionate time, his Rape of Lucrece, a poem finally 
 printed in 1594, one year later than the Venus and 
 Adonis. > 
 
 The same poetic succession we have traced in the 
 poets is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic 
 feeUng of England, also represented in Marlowe and 
 Peele, now seized on him, and he turned from love to 
 begin his great series of historical plays with Richard 
 JL, 1593 — 4. Richard III, followed quickly. To 
 introduce it and to complete the subject, he recast ^he 
 Second and Third Parts of Hejiry VI. (written by 
 some unknown authors) and ended his first period by 
 King John ; five plays in a little more than two years. 
 
 83. His Second Period, 1596 — 1602. — In the 
 Mej'chantof Fi:*///'^^ Shakespeare reached entire mastery 
 over his art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic 
 threads is brought to its highest point of colour when 
 Portia' and Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy fol- 
 lowed in his retouch of the old laming of the Shreiv^ 
 and all the wit of the world mixed with noble history 
 met nex<- in the three comedies of Falstaff, the first 
 and becond Hciwy IV, and the Merry Wives of Wind- 
 so^. The historical plays were then closed with 
 Hcn/y v.; !i splendid ''Iramatic song to the glory of 
 Engf IT vi. The Globe theatre, in which he was one of 
 the p^opietors, was built in 1599. In the comedies 
 he wroie Jo.; it Shakespeare turned to write of love 
 
IV.] 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603, 
 
 85 
 
 again, not to touch its deeper passion as before but to 
 play with it in all its lighter phases. The flashing 
 dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was followed by 
 the far-off forest world of As You Like It, where 
 '* the time fleets carelessly," and Rosalind's character 
 is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in 
 a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the 
 first touch we have of the older Shakspere who 
 had " gained his experience, and whose experience 
 had made him sad." As yet it was but a touch ; 
 Twelfth Night shows no trace of it, though the play 
 that followed, AiTx Well That Ends Well^ again 
 strikes a sadder note. We find this sadness fully 
 grown in the later sonnets, which are said to have been 
 finished about 1602. They were published in 1609. 
 
 Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind 
 changed with it. He had grown wealthy during this 
 period, famous, and loved by society. He was the friend 
 of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and William 
 Herbert, Lord Pembroke. The Queen patronized 
 him ; all the best literary society was his own. He 
 had rescued his father from poverty, bought the best 
 house in Stratford and much land, and was a man of 
 wealth and comfort. Suddenly all his life seems to 
 have grown dark. His best friends fell into ^ ^n 
 Essex perished on the scaffold, Southampton we 
 the Tower, Pembroke was banished from the C 
 he may himself, as some have thought, have beei 
 cerned in the rising of Essex. Added to this, w 
 conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry j 
 sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been betrayed 
 in his love by a dear friend. Disgust of his profes- 
 sion as an actor and public and private ill weighed 
 heavily on him, and in darkness of spirit, he retired 
 from the business of the theatre, and passed from 
 comedy to write of the sterner side of the world, to 
 tell the tragedy of mankind. 
 
 84. His Third Period, 1602— x5o8, begins with 
 
 to 
 .rt; 
 con- 
 may 
 
 the 
 
 
 
 i t« 
 
 A '■ ! 
 
 ■.i t'\ 
 
f is 
 
 i 
 
 •ii -)d 
 
 m 
 
 U I 
 
 i 
 
 t ' 
 
 M 
 
 ENGLISH LITEI^ATURE, 
 
 tcHAP. 
 
 the last days of Queen Elizabeth. It contains all the 
 great tragedies, and opens with the fate of Hamlet, 
 who felt, like the poet himself, that "the time was 
 out of joint." Hamlet^ the dreamer, may well repre- 
 sent Shakespeare as he stood aside from the crash that 
 overwhelmed his friends, and thought on the chan^^ing 
 world. I'he tragi-comedy of Measure for Measure 
 was next written and is tragic in thought throughout. 
 Julius CcBsar, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus and 
 Crcssida (finished from an incomplete work of his 
 youth), Antony and Cleopati'a, Coriolanus, Izmon, 
 (only in part his own), were all written in these five 
 years. The darker sins of men, the unpitying fate 
 which slowly gathers round and falls on men, the 
 avenging wrath of conscience, the cruelty and punish- 
 ment of weakness, the treachery, lust, jealousy, 
 ingratitude, mndness of men, the follies of the great 
 and the fickleness of the mob, are all, with a thousand 
 otlier varying moods and passions, pi.inted, and felt as 
 his own while he painted them, during this stern time. 
 85. His Fourth Period, 1608— 1613. — As Shake* 
 speare wrote of these things he passed out of them, 
 and his last days ar - full of the gentle and loving calm 
 of one who has known sin and sorrow and fate but 
 has risen above them into peaceful victory. Like his 
 great contemporary Bacon, he left the world and his 
 own evil time behind him, and with the same quiet 
 dignity sought the innocence and stillness of country 
 life. The country breathes through all the dramas of 
 this time. The flov/ers Perdita gathers in Wiuter's 
 Tale, the frolic of the sheep-shearing, he may have 
 seen in the Stratford meadows; the song of Fidele in 
 Cymbelifie is written by one who already feared no 
 more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor censure 
 rash, and was looking forward to the time when men 
 fihould say of him — 
 
 ** Quiet consummation have ; 
 Avid renowned he thv irravfi I * 
 
iv.l 
 
 FROM 1559 TO 1603. 
 
 87 
 
 Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived 
 in the house he had bought at Stratford- on- A von. 
 lie was reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays 
 he v.Tites speak of domestic peace and forgiveness. 
 The story of Marina, which he left unfinished, and 
 which two later writers expanded into the play of 
 'Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas. 
 The Two Noble Kinsmcji of Fletcher, a great part of 
 which is now, on doubtful grounds I think, attributed to 
 Shakespeare, and in which the poet sought the inspira- 
 tion of Chaucer, would belong to this period. Cymbe- 
 liiie^ IVinfer^s Tale, and the Tempest, bring his history 
 up to 1612, and in the next year he closed his poetic 
 life by writing, with Fletcher, Henry VIII. All these 
 belong to and praise forgiveness, and it seems, if we 
 may conjecture, that looking back on all the wrong 
 he had suffered and on all that he had done, Shake- 
 speare could say in the forgiveness he gave 10 men, and 
 in the forgiveness he sought from God, the words he 
 had written in earlier days: *'The quality of mercy is 
 not strained." For three years he kept silence, and 
 then, on the 23rd of April, 1616, on his fifty-second 
 birthday, he died* 
 
 86. His work. — We cah only guess with regard to 
 Shakespeare's life ; we can only guers with regard to his 
 character. It has been tried to find out what he was 
 from his sonnets, and from his plays, but every attempt 
 seems to be a failure. We cannot lay our hand or 
 anything and say for certain that it was spoken by 
 Shakespeare out of his own character. The most 
 personal thing in all his writings is one that has 
 been scarcely noticed. It is the Epilogue to the Tem- 
 pest^ and if it be, as is most probable, the last thing 
 he ever wrote, then its cry for forgiveness, its tale 
 of inward sorrow only to be relieved by prayer, give 
 us some dim insiijht into how the silence of those 
 three years was passed ; while its declaration of his 
 aim in writing "which was to please"— the true defini- 
 
 i! 
 
 
 w 
 
 .1 
 
 ■ u 
 
 ■4) 
 
 ,^t 
 
 
88 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TV RE. 
 
 tcMAf. 
 
 tion of an artist's aim — should make us very cautious in 
 our efforts to define his character from his works. 
 Shakespeare made men and women whose dramatic 
 action on each other, and towards a catastrophe, was 
 intended to please the pubHc, not to reveal himself. 
 He was altogether, from end to end, an artist, and 
 the greatest artist the modern world has known. No 
 commentary on his writings, no guesses about his life 
 or character, are worth much which do not rest on 
 this canon as their foundation — What he did, thought, 
 learnea, and felt, he did, thought, learned, and felt as 
 an artist. And he was never less the artist, through 
 all the changes of the time. Fully influenced, as we 
 see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and more philo- 
 sophic cast of thought of the later time of Elizabeth ; 
 passing on into the reign of James I., when pedantry 
 took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place of 
 imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the 
 place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves 
 to the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, 
 the sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful EJiza- 
 bethan poetry The Wintcr''s Tale is as lovely a love 
 ^tory diS Romeo and y^ulid, the 7>/;//ri"/is more instinct 
 with imagination and as great in fancy as the Mid- 
 summer-Ntg/ifs Dream, and yet there are fully twenty 
 years between them. The only change is in the increase 
 of power and in a closer and graver grasp of human 
 nature. In this unchangeableness of pure art-power 
 Shakespeare stands entirely alone. Around him the 
 whole tone and manner of the drama altered for the 
 worse as his life went on, but his work grew to the close 
 in strength and beauty. 
 
 87. The Decay of the Drama begins while 
 Shakespeare is alive. At first one can scarcely call it 
 decay, it was so magnificent. For it began with " rare 
 Ben Jonson," His first play, in its very title, Every 
 Man in his Humour^ 159^ 98, enables us to say in 
 wli^t the first step of this detay consisted. The drama 
 
IV.] 
 
 PkOM 1559 to 1^3. 
 
 89 
 
 in Shakespeare's hands had been the painting of the 
 whole of human natuie, the painting of characters as 
 they were built up by their natural bent, and by the 
 play of circumstance upon them. The drama, in Ben 
 Jonson's hands, was the painting of that particular 
 human nature which he saw in his own age ; and his 
 characters are not men and women as they are, but as 
 they may become when they are mastered by a special 
 bias of the mind or humour. " The Manners, now 
 called Humours, feed the Stage," says Jonson himself. 
 Every Man in his Humour was followed by Every 
 Man out of his Humour^ and by Cynthia's Revels, 
 written to satirize the courtiers. The fierce satire of 
 these plays brought the town down upon him, and 
 he replied to their " noise " in the Poetaster^ in which 
 Dekker and Marston were satirized. Dekker answered 
 with the Satiro-AfastiXj a bitter parody on the Poet- 
 aster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily defects. 
 The staring Leviathan, as he calls Jonson, is not a 
 very untrue description. Silent then for two yeais, he 
 reappeared with the tragedy of Sejanus, and shortly 
 after produced three splendid comedies in James I.'s 
 reign, Volpone the Fox, 1 he Silent Woman, and 77ie 
 Alchemist, 1605 o-io. The first is the finest thing 
 he ever did, as great in power as it is in the interest 
 and skill of its plot; the second is chiefly valuable as 
 a picture of English life in high society ; the third is 
 full to weariness of Jonson's obscure learning, but its 
 character of Sir Epicure Mammon redeems it. In 
 161 1 his Catilifie appeared, and eight years after 
 he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became poor 
 and palsy stricken, but his genius did not decay. The 
 most graceful and tender thing he ever wrote was 
 written in his old age His pastoral drama The Sad 
 Shepherd proves that, l:ke Shakespeare, Jonson grew 
 kinder and gentler as he grew near to death, and 
 death took him in 1637. He was a great man. The 
 power of the young Elizabethan age belonged to him ; 
 
 11 .i 
 
 r-* 
 
 ■ - 
 
 m 
 
' 
 
 I 
 
 1,1 KS 
 
 in 
 
 ■.11 
 
 i\.^ 
 
 t 
 
 I 
 
 I h 
 1)))'! 
 
 96 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 and he stands far below, but still worthily by, Shake- 
 speare, ** a robust, surly, and observing dramatist." 
 
 88. Masques. — Rugged as Jonson was, he could 
 turn to light and graceful work, and it is with his name 
 that we connect the Masques. Masques were dramatic 
 representations made for a fes-tive occasion, with a re- 
 ference to the persons present and the occasion. Their 
 personages were allegorical. They admitted of dialogue, 
 music, singing, and dancing, combined by the use of 
 some ingenious f^ble into a whole. They were made 
 and performed for the court and the houses of the 
 nobles, and the scenery was as gorgeous and varied 
 as the scenery of the playhouse proper was poor and 
 unchanging. Arriving for the first time at any repute 
 in Henry VIII.'s time, they reached splendour under 
 James and Charles I. Great men took part in them: 
 When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo Jones made the 
 scenery, and Lawes the music, and Lord Bacon, White- 
 lock, and Selden sat in committee for the last great 
 masque presented to Charles. Milton himself made 
 them worthier by writing Comtis^ and their scenic deco- 
 ration was soon introduced into the regular theatres. 
 
 89. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, 
 but out of more than fifty plays, all written in James 
 I.'s reign, not more than fourteen were shared in by 
 Beaumont, who died at the age of thirty in 16 16. 
 Fletcher survived him, and died in 1625. Both were 
 of gentle birth. Beaumont, where we can trace his 
 work, is weightier and more dignified than his comrade, 
 but Fletcher was the better poet. Fletcher wrote 
 rapidly, but his imagination worked slowly. Their 
 PhilasterdiXid Thierry and Theodoret are fine examples 
 of their tragic power. Y\Q\.Q\\Q.r^^ Faithful Shepherdess 
 is full of lovely poetry, and both are masters of 
 grace, and pathos and style. They enfeebled the 
 blank verse of the drama, while they rendered it sweeter 
 by using feminine endings and adding an eleventh 
 syllable with great frequency. This gave freedom and 
 
IV.] 
 
 FROM 1559 '^0 1603. 
 
 »t 
 
 elasticity to their verse and was suited to the dialogue 
 of comedy, but it lowered the dignity of their tragedy. 
 The two men mark a change in politics and society 
 from Shakespeare's time. Shakespeare's loyalty is con- 
 stitutional ; Beaumont and Fletcher are blind supporters 
 of James I.'s invention of the divine right of kings. 
 Siiakespeare's society was on the whole decent, and it 
 is so in his plays. Beaumont and Fletcher are 
 "studiously indecent." In contrast to them Shakespeare 
 is as white as snow. Shakespeare's men are of the type 
 of Sidney and Raleigh, Burleigh and Drake. The men 
 of these two writers represent the " young bloods ; " 
 of the Stuart Court ; and even the best of theii older 
 and graver men are base and foul in thought. Their 
 women are either monsters of badness or of goodness. 
 When they paint a good woman (two or three at most 
 being excepted), she is beyond nature. The fact is 
 that the high art which in Shakespeare sought to give a 
 noble pleasure by being true to human nature in its 
 natural aspects, sank now into the baser art which 
 wished to excite, at any cost, the passions of the 
 audience by representing human nature in unnatural 
 aspects. 
 
 90. In Massinger and Ford this evil is just as 
 plainly marked. Massinger s first dated play was the 
 Virgm Alartyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died "a 
 stranger," in 1639. I^ these twenty years he wrote 
 thirty-seven plays, of which the Neiif Way to Pay 
 Old Debts is the best known by its character of 
 Sir Giles Overreach. No writer is fouler in language, 
 and there is a want of unity of impression both in his 
 plots and in his characters. He often sacrifices art to 
 effect, and " unlike Shakespeare, seems often to de- 
 spise his own characters." On the other hand, his 
 versification and language are flexible and strong. 
 *' and seem to rise out of the passions he describes." 
 He speaks the tongue of real life. His men and 
 wonaen are far ntore natural than those of Bcaumuut 
 
 ! 
 
 f" 
 
 % 
 
IMAGE EVALUATION 
 TEST TARGET (MT-3) 
 
 1.0 
 
 I.I 
 
 1.25 
 
 ■so 
 
 1 2.5 
 1^ 12.2 
 
 us 
 
 Iti 
 
 ^ m 
 
 i.4 
 
 1= 
 1.6 
 
 
 ^' 
 
 /. 
 
 
 y 
 
 w 
 
 Hiotographic 
 
 Sciences 
 
 Corporation 
 
 33 WEST MAIN STREET 
 
 WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 
 
 (716) 872-4503 
 
 ^\^ 
 
 !> 
 
 :\ 
 
 \ 
 
 % 
 
 V 
 
 
 o^ 
 

 lA 
 
 <^ 
 
 {/. 
 
 i 
 
Ei^GUSfi UTkRA TV'RE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 and Fletcher, and with all hi.; coarseness, he is the 
 most moral of the secondary dramatists. Nowhere is 
 his work so great as when he represents the brave man 
 struggling through trial to victory, the pure wonian 
 suffering for the sake of truth and love ; or when he 
 describes the terrors that conscience brings on in- 
 justice and cruelty. John Ford, his contemporary, 
 published his first play, the Lover's Melancholy^ in 
 1629, and five years after, Perkin Warbeck^ the best 
 historical drama after Shakespeare. Between these 
 dates appeared others, of which the best is the Broken 
 Heart, He carried to an extreme the tendency of 
 the drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he 
 did so with very great power. He has no comic 
 humour, but no man has described better the worn 
 and tortured human heart. 
 
 91. Webster and other Dramatists.— Higher 
 as a poet, and possessing the same power as Ford, 
 though not the same exquisite tenderness, was John 
 Webster, whose best drama, The Duehess of Malfi, 
 was acted in 16 16. Vittoria Corombona was printed 
 ill 161 2, and was followed by the Devils Law 
 Case, Appius and Virginia^ and others. Webster's 
 peculiar power of creating ghastly horror is re- 
 deemed from sensationalism by his poetic insight. 
 His imagination easily saw, and expressed in short and 
 intense lines, the inmost thoughts and feelings of 
 characters whom he represents as wrought on by 
 misery, or crime, or remorse, at their very highest 
 point of passion. In his worst characters there is some 
 redeeming touch, and this poetic pity brings him nearer 
 to Shakespeare than the rest. He is also neither so 
 coarse, nor so great a king worshipper, nor so irreligious 
 as the others. We seem to taste the Puritan in his 
 work. Two comedies Westward Ho! and North- 
 ward Ho ! remarkable for the light they throw on the 
 manners of the time, were written by him along wiih 
 Thomas Dekkek. George Chapman is the only one of 
 
IV.] 
 
 FROM ISS9 TO 1603. 
 
 M 
 
 jr's 
 re- 
 rht. 
 md 
 of 
 by 
 lest 
 me 
 Irer 
 so 
 ms 
 Ihis 
 rth^ 
 the 
 
 .iih 
 
 of 
 
 the later Elizabethan dramatists who kept the old fire 
 of Marlowe, though he never had the naturalness or 
 temperance which lifted Shakespeare far beyond Mar- 
 lowe. The same power which we have seen in his 
 translation of Homer is to be found in his plays. 
 The mingling of intellectual power with imagination, 
 swollen violence of words and images wilh tender and 
 natural and often splendid passages, is entirely in the 
 earlier Elizabethan manner. He too, like Marlowe, to 
 quote his own line, " hurled instinctive fire about the 
 world." These were the greatest names auiong a 
 crowd of dramatists. We can only mention John 
 Marston, Heniy Glapthorne, Richard Brome, William 
 Rowley, Thomas Middleton, Cyril Tourneur, and 
 Thomas Heywood. Of these, " all of whom," says 
 Lamb, " spoke nearly the same language, and had a 
 set of moral feelings and notions in common," James 
 Shirley is the last. He lived till 1666. In him the 
 fire and passion of the old time passes away, but some 
 of the delicate poetry remains, and in him the Eliza- 
 bethan drama dies. In 164a, the theatres were closed 
 during the calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling 
 players managed to exist with difficulty, and against 
 the law, till 1656, when Sir William Davenant had 
 his opera of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. 
 It was the beginning of a new drama, in every point 
 but impurity different from the old, and four years 
 after at the Restoration it broke loose from the prison 
 of Puritanism to indulge in a shameless licence. 
 
 In this rapid sketch of the Drama in England we 
 have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth 
 to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be- 
 cause it keeps the whole story together. We now return 
 to the time that followed the accession of James I. 
 
 Note. — The dates and aiiangement of Shakespeare's plays 
 ^iven above are only tentative. They are so placed by the con- 
 jectuers of the latest criticism, and the conjectures wait foi 
 proof. Julius Cissar, e.g., is now dated 1601. , 
 
 
 •I 
 
 
94 
 
 ENGLISH UTERA TURE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 ,1 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FROM Elizabeth's death to the restoration. 
 
 1603-1660. 
 
 Lord Bacon, Advamement of Learning (two books), 1605 ; 
 expanded into nine Latin books, 1623 ; Noz'um Ort^-atton 
 (first sketch), 1607 ; finished, 1620 ; Historia naturalis H 
 expentnentulis^ 1 ■122. These three form the Instauratio 
 Magna ; last edition of Essays, 1625 ; dies 1626- — Giles 
 Fletcher's Temptation of Christ, 1610 — W. Browne's 
 Britannia's Pastorals, 1613, 16- —J. Donne's P>euis and 
 Satires, 1613-1635.-G. Wither, Poems; 14131622-1641. 
 — Gedrge Herbert, Temple, 1631— Jt^remy Taylor, Liberty of 
 Prophesying, 1647.— K. Herri.k, Hesperides, 1648— 
 Hobbe's Leviathan, 1651. — T. Fuller's Church History, 
 1656._J. Milton, born 1608 ; First Poem, 1626 ; H Allegro, 
 1632 ; Comus and Lycidas, 1634-1637 ; Prose writings and 
 most of the Sonnets, 1640-1660 ; Paradise Lost, 1667 ; 
 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, 1671 J dies 1674- 
 - Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 1678-1684. 
 
 92. The Decline of the Elizabethan Litera- 
 ture.^— Prose. — We have traced in the last chapter 
 the decline of the drama of Elizabeth up to the date 
 of the Restoration. All poetry suffered in the same 
 way after the reign of James I. It became fantastic 
 in style and overwrought in thought. It was diffubC, 
 or violent, in expression. Prose literature^ on the con- 
 trary, gradually grew into greater excellence, spread 
 itself over larger fields of thought, and took up a 
 greater variety of subjects. The grave national 
 struggle, while it lessened poetical, increased prose 
 literature. The painHng of short ^^ Characters'^ was 
 begun by Sir T. Overbury's book in 16 14, and car- 
 ried on by John Earle and Joseph Hall, afterwards 
 made bishops. They mark the interest in individual 
 life which now began to arise, and which soon took 
 
v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATIObT. 
 
 9S 
 
 form in Bioi^raphy. Thomas Fuller's Holy and 
 Profane State^ 1642, added to sketches of *' charac- 
 ters,** illustrations of them in the lives of famous per- 
 sons, and in 1662 his Worthies of England %\\\\ further 
 set on foot the literature ©f Bioj^raphy. 2 he historical 
 literature which we have noticed already in the works 
 of Raleigh and Bacon was carried on by Fuller in his 
 CliU'Tch History of Britain^ 1656. He is a quaint and 
 delightful writer ; good sense, piety, afid inventive wit 
 are woven together in his work. We may place to- 
 gether Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy^ 16.21, 
 and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, 1642, and 
 Pseiidodoxia as books which treat of miscellaneous 
 subjects in a witty and learned fashion, but without 
 any true scholarship. This kind of writing was greatly 
 increased by the setting up of libraries where men 
 dipped into every kind of literature. It was in James 
 I.'s reign that Sir Thomas Bod ley established the 
 Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton a library 
 now placed in the British Museum. A number of 
 bmall writers took part in the Puritan and Church 
 controversies, among whom William Prynne, a violent 
 Puritan, deserves to be mentioned for his Histrio- 
 Mastix, or Scourge of Players. 
 
 But there were others on each side v/ho rose above 
 the war of party into the calm air of spiritual religion, 
 Jrremy Taylor at the close of Charles I.'s reign 
 published his Great Exemplar and his Holy Living 
 and Holy Dying, and shortly afterwards his Sermo?is. 
 They had been preceded in 1647 ^Y his Liberty of 
 Prophesying, in which he claimed full freedom of 
 Biblical interpretation as the right of all, and asked 
 for only one standard of faith — the Apostles' Creed. 
 His work is especially literary. Weighty with argu- 
 ment, his sermons and books of devotion are still 
 read among us for their sweet and deep devotion, for 
 their rapidly flowing and poetic eloquence. Towards 
 the end of the Civil Wars Richard Baxter, the great 
 
 
 I 
 
 I n 
 
 
 
 1^ 
 
 4^ 
 
 1*' 
 
1! 
 
 EATGL/S// UTERA TURE. 
 
 [CHAf. 
 
 Pnritan writer, wrocC a good book which, as it still re- 
 mains a household book in England, takes its place 
 in literature. There are few cottages which do not 
 possess a copy of The Saint's Everlasting Rest ; and 
 there are few parsonc^ges in England in which Robert 
 liEiGHTON's book on the Epistle of St. Peter is not 
 also to be found. Leighton died in 1684, Archbishop 
 of Glasgow. In philosoi)hi(: literature I have already 
 si)oken of Bacon, and of the political writers, such as 
 Hobbes and Harrington, who wrote during the Com- 
 monwealth, I will speak hereafter in their proper 
 place. 
 
 Miscellaneous writing is further represented in the 
 literature of travel by George Sandys and Thomas Cor- 
 yat. Coryafs Crudities, 161 1, describes his journey 
 through France and Italy; Sandys' book, 1615, a jour- 
 ney to the East. We have also from abroad some in- 
 teresting letters from Sir Henry Wotton, and he gave 
 Milton introductions to famous men in Italy. Wotton's 
 quaint and pleasant friend Izaak Walton closes the 
 list of these pre Restoration writers with the Compleat 
 Angler, 1653, a book which resembles in its quaint 
 and garrulous style the rustic scenery and prattling 
 rivers that it celebrates, and marks the quiet interest 
 in the country which now began to grow up in England. 
 
 The style of all these writers links them to the age 
 of Elizabeth. It did not follow the weighty gravity 
 of Hooker, or the balanced calm and splendour of 
 Bacon but rather the witty quaintness of Lyly and 
 of Sydney. The prose of men like Browne and 
 Burton and Fuller is not as poetic as that of these 
 Elizabethan writers, but it is just as fanciful. Even 
 the prose of Jeremy Taylor is over poetical, and 
 though it has all the Elizabethan ardour, it has also 
 the Elizabethan fai'^s of excessive wordiness and 
 involved periods and images. It never knows where 
 to stop. Milton's prose works, whirh shall be men- 
 tioned in their place in his life^ are also Elizabethan 
 
•/.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION. 
 
 9? 
 
 in style. Their style has the fire and violence, the 
 eloquence and diffuseness, of the earlier literature, 
 but in spite of the praise it has received, it is in 
 reality scarcely to be called a style. It has all the 
 faults a prose style can have except obscurity and vul- 
 garity. Its bursts of eloquence ought to be in poetry, 
 and it never charms except when Milton becomes 
 purposely simple in personal narrative. There is no 
 pure style in prose writing till Hobbes began to write 
 in English, indeed we may say till after the Restora- 
 tion, unless we except, on grounds of weight and 
 power, the styles of Bacon and Hooker. 
 
 93. The Decline of Poetry. — The various ele- 
 ments which we have noticed in the poetry of Eliza- 
 beth's reign, without the exception, even, of the 
 slight Catholic dement, though opposed to each 
 other were filled with one spirit — the love of England 
 and the Queen. Nor were they ever sharply divided ; 
 they are found mixed together and modifying one 
 another in the same poet, as for instance Puritanism 
 and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in 
 Constable ; and all are mixed together in Shakespeare 
 and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry 
 became less and less after the Queen's death. The 
 elements remained, but they were separated. Poetry 
 was the bundle of sticks with the cord round it in 
 Ehzabeth's time ; in the time of Charles I. it was 
 the same bundle with the cord removed and the 
 sticks set apart. The cause of this was that the 
 strife, in politics between the Divine Right of Kings 
 and Liberty, and in religion between the Church and 
 the Puritans, grew so defined and intense that En- 
 gland ceased to be at one, and the poets, though not 
 so strongly as other classes, were separated into sec- 
 tions. A certain style, which induced Johnson to 
 call them " metaphysical J^ belongs more or less to all 
 these poets. They were those, Hallam says, "who 
 laboured after conceits, or novel turns of thought, 
 
 G 
 
 '% 
 
 ' 1 
 
 \ X 
 
 1' 
 
 m* 
 
 
li 
 
 ! 
 
 
 'I 
 
 98 
 
 ENGLISH UTERATLRE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 usually false, and resting on some ecjii vocation of 
 language or exceedingly remote analogy." This form 
 finds its true source m the fantastic style of the Euphues 
 and the Arcadia. It grew up again towards the close of 
 Elizabeth's reign and it ended by greatly lessening good 
 sense and clearness in English poetry. It was in the 
 reaction from it, and in the determination to bring 
 clear thought and clear expression of thought into 
 English verse, that the school of Dryden and Pope — 
 the critical school — began. The poetry from the 
 later years of Elizabeth to Milton illustrates all these 
 remarks. 
 
 94. The Lyric Poetry struck a new note in the 
 songs of Ben Jonson, such as the Hymn to Diana. 
 They are less natural, less able to be sung than 
 Shakespeare's, more classical, more artificial. But they 
 have no special tendency. Later on, during the reign 
 of Cha»*'^s I., and during the Civil War, the lyrics of 
 Will i Carevv, Sir John Suckling, Colonkl Lovk- 
 LACE, and Robert Herrick, whose Ilispcriilcs was 
 published in 1648, have a special royalist and court 
 character. They are, for the most part, light, pleasant, 
 short songs and epi'jjrams on the passing interests of 
 the day, on the charms of the court beauties, on a 
 lock of hair, a dress, on all the fleeting forms of 
 fleeting love. Here and there we find a pure or 
 pathetic song, and there are few of them which time 
 has selected that do not possess a gay or a gentle 
 grace. As the Civil War deepened, the special 
 court poetry died, and the songs became songs of 
 battle and marching, and devoted and violent loyalty. 
 These have been lately collected under the title of 
 Songs of the Cavaliers. 
 
 95. Satirical Poetry, always arising when natural 
 passion in poetry decays, is represented in the later 
 days of Elizabeth by Joseph Hall, afterwards Bishop 
 Hall, whose Virgidemiarum, 1597, satires partly in 
 poetry, make him the master satirist of this time. John 
 
v.] 
 
 ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION^, 
 
 DoNNK, Dean of St. Paul's, who also partly belongs to 
 *he age of Elizabeth, was, with John Cleveland (a 
 Prions royalist and satirist of Charles I.'s time), the 
 most obscure and fanciful of the poets absurdly called 
 Metai)hysical. Donne, however, rose far above the 
 rest in the beauty of thought and in the tenderness of 
 his religious and love poems. His satires are graphic 
 pictures of tiie manners of the age of James I. Ceorge 
 WiTHKR hit the follies and vices of the (\Ay so hard in 
 his Abiiu's Stript and Whipt^ 1613, that he was put 
 into the Marshalsea prison and there continued his 
 satires in the ShcpheriVs Huntiug. As the Puritan 
 and the Royalist became more opj)osed to oiie another, 
 satirical poetry naturally became more bitter ; but, like 
 the poetry of the Civil War, it took the form of short 
 songs and pieces which went about the country, as 
 those of Bishop Corbet did, in manuscript. 
 
 96. The Rural Poetry. — The /^j/t;^^/ now began 
 to take a more truly rural form than the conventional 
 pastorals of France and Italy out of which it rose. 
 In William Browne's Britannia's Pas-torais, 16 16, the 
 element of pleasure in country life arises, and from 
 til is time it begins to grow in our poetry. It appears 
 slightly in Wither's Shepherd's Huntings but plainly 
 in his Mistress of Phiiarete, a poem interspersed with 
 lyrics. In dwelling so much as he did on the beauty 
 of natural scenery away from cities he brings a new 
 element into English verse. Henceforth we always 
 find a country poetry set over against a town poetry, a 
 pretry of nature set over against a poetry of man. It is 
 still stronger in Andrew Marvell, Milton's secretary, 
 who, with the exception of Milton, did the finest work 
 of this kind. In imaginative intensity, in the fusing to- 
 gether of personal feeling and thought with the delight 
 received from nature, his verses on T/ie Emigrants in 
 the Bermudas and The Thoughts in a Garden, and the 
 little p'^em, The Girl describes her Fawn, are like the 
 work of Wordsworth on one side, and like the best 
 
 o a 
 
 
 V. 
 
 I !^l 
 
 1. 
 
 ii! 
 
 ^^ 
 
 ! . I 
 
 
I 
 
 li 
 
 
 100 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 Elizabethan work on the other. They are the last 
 and the truest echo of the lyrics of the time of Eliza- 
 beth, but they reach beyond them in the love of 
 nature. 
 
 97. Spenserians. — Among these broken up forms 
 of poetry, there was one kind which was imitative of 
 Spenser. Phineas Fletcher, Giles Fletcher, 
 Henry More in his Platonkal Song of the Soul^ 
 1642, and John Chalkhill in his Thealma^ owned 
 him as their master. The Purple Island^ 1633, of the 
 first, an elaborate allegory of the body and mind of 
 man, has some grace and sweetness, and tells us that 
 the scientific element which after the Restoration 
 took form in the setting up of the Royal Society was 
 so far spread in England at his time as to influence 
 the poets. 
 
 98. Religious Poetry. — The Temptation and 
 Victory of Christy 16 10, ot (liles Fletcher, is a lovely 
 poem and gave hints to Milton for the Paradise Re- 
 gained, It is one of the many religious poems that 
 now began to interest the people. Of all these The 
 Temple^ 1631, of George Herbert, rector of Bemer- 
 ton, has been the most popular. The purity and pro- 
 found devotion of its poems have made it dear to all. 
 Its gentle Church feeling has pleased all classes of 
 churchmen ; its great qiiaintness which removes it 
 from true poetry has added perhaps to its charm. 
 With him we must rank Henry Vaugh an, the Silurist, 
 whose Sacred Poems are equally devotional, pure, and 
 quaint, and Francis Quarles, whose Divine Emblems^ 
 1635, is still read in the cottages of England. On the 
 Roman Catholic side, William Habington mingled 
 his devotion to his religion with the praises of his 
 wife under the name of Castara, 1634 ; and Richard 
 Crashaw, whose rich inventiveness was not made less 
 rich by the religious mysticism which finally led him 
 to become a Roman Cntholic, published his Steps to 
 the Temple in 1646. On tlie Puritan side, we may 
 
v.] ELIZABETH TO THE /RESTORATION. loi 
 
 now place Gloroe Wither, M^bose Hallelujah, 1641, 
 a series of religious poems, was sent forth just 
 before the Civil War began, when he left the king's 
 side to support the Parliament. Finally, religious 
 poetry, after the return of Charles II. passed on 
 through the Daindeis of Abraham Cowley, and the 
 Divine Love of Edmund Waller to find its highest 
 expression in the Paradise Lost, We have thus traced 
 through all its forms the decline of poetry. It is a 
 poetry often beautiful, but as often injured by obscurity, 
 over-fancifulness, confusion of thought and of images. 
 From this decay we pass into a new created world 
 when we come to speak of Milton. Between the 
 dying poetry of the past, and the uprising of a new 
 kind of poetry in Dryden, stands alone the majestic 
 work of a great genius who touches the Elizabethan 
 time with one hand and our own time with the 
 other. 
 
 99. John Milton was the last of the Elizabethans, 
 and, except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all. 
 IJorn in 1608, in Bread -street, he may have seen Shake- 
 s])eare, for he remained till he was sixteen in London. 
 His literary life may be said to begin with his entrance 
 into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the accession 
 of Charles I. Nicknamed the "lady" from his 
 beauty and delicate taste and morality, he got soon 
 a great fame, and during the seven years of his life 
 at the university his poetic genius opened itself in the 
 English poems of which I give the dates. On the 
 Deatf^of a Fair Infant, 1626. At a Vacation Exer- 
 cise, 1628. On the Morning of Chris fs ISlativity, 1629. 
 On the Circumcision, The Passion, Time, At a Solemn 
 Mil sick. On the May Morning, On Shakespeare, 1630. 
 On the University Carrier, Epitaph on Marchioness of 
 Worcester, Sonnet, i., 7o the Nightingale, Sonnet, 2., 
 On Arriving at Age of Twenty-three^ 163 1. The 
 last sonnet, when explained by a letter that accom- 
 panied it, shows that Milton, influenced by the 
 
 !' 
 
 'I \ 
 
 4 
 
 li 
 
 54 t( 
 
 i 
 
 i * 
 
 i (K^ 
 
 
«'i;i 
 I " 
 
 h 
 
 
 tOi 
 
 ENGUSfT LITER A TURE. 
 
 fCHAP. 
 
 siifTennps of the Puritans, had given up his inten- 
 tion of becoming a clergyman. He left therefore the 
 university in 1632, and went to live at Horton, 
 near Windsor, where he spent five years, steadily 
 reading the Greek and T^tin writers, and amus- 
 ing himself with mathematics and music. Poetry 
 was not neglected. The A/le^ro and // Pcnseroso 
 were written in 1632 and probably the Arcades; 
 Comus in 1634, and Lycidas in 1637. They all 
 prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart, 
 his Puritanism was of that earUer type which 
 neither disdained literature, art, or gaiety, nor de- 
 spised the ancient Church, nor turned away from 
 natural beauty. He could still enjoy the village 
 dance, the masque, the lists, the music in the dim 
 Cathedral ; he could still mingle the learning of 
 the Renaissance with his delight in the fields and 
 flowers, with his feasting and his grief. He was as 
 much the child of the New Learning as Spenser was, 
 but his Puritanism was set deeper than Spenser's. 
 
 In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so 
 many of the English poets, and visited the great towns, 
 making friends in Florence where he saw Galileo, 
 and in Rome. At Naples he heard the sad news 
 of civil war, which determined him to return ; " inas- 
 much as I thought it base to be travelling at my ease 
 for intellectual culture, v/hile my fellow-countrymen 
 at home were fighting for liberty." But, hearing that 
 the war had not yet arisen, he remained in Italy till 
 the end of 1639, and at the meeting of the* Long 
 Parliament we find him in a house in Aldersgate, 
 where he lived till 1645. He had projected while 
 abroad, a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur 
 (again the Welsh subject returns), but in London 
 his mind changed, and among a number of subjects, 
 tended at last to Paradise Lost, which he meant to 
 throw into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics 
 and choruses. 
 
v.] ELIZA BETH TO THE RBSTORATIOhT, 103 
 
 100. Milton's Prose. The Commonwealth, 
 
 — Suddenly his whole life changed, and for twenty 
 years — 1640- 1660 — he was carried out of art into 
 politics, out of poetry into prose. Before T642, when 
 the Civil War began, he had written fi/e vigorous 
 pamphlets against episcopacy. Six more pan^)hlets 
 appeared in the next two years. One of these was 
 the Areopagitica; or^ Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
 Frintini!^^ 1644, a bold and elo(iuent attack on 
 the censorship of the press by the Presbyter'ans. 
 The four pamphlets in which he advocated conditional 
 divorce made him still more the horror of the Presby- 
 terians. When on the execution of the king, 1649, 
 England became a republic, Milton defended the net 
 in an answer to the Eikon Basilike (a portraiture of 
 the sufferings of the king by Dr. Gauden), and con- 
 tinued to defend it in his lamous Latin Defence for the 
 People of England (1651), in which he inflicted so 
 pitiless a lashing on Salmasius, the great Leyden 
 scholar, that lis fame went over the whole of Europe. 
 In the next year he wholly lost his sight. But he 
 continued his work when Cromwell was made Pro- 
 tector, and wrote another Defence for the English 
 People^ and a further defence of himself against 
 scurrilous charges. This closed the controversy in 
 1655. In the last year of the Protector's life he 
 began the Paradise Lost, about the date of the last 
 of his sonnets. The two years that cam^. before the 
 Restoration were employed in a fruitless effort to 
 prevent it by the publication of six more pamphlets. 
 It was a wonder he was not put to death, and he was 
 in hiding and in custody for a time. At last he 
 settled in a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that 
 Paradise Lost was finished, before the end of 1665, 
 and then published in 1667. • 
 
 loi. Paradise Lost. — We may perhaps regret 
 that our greatest poet was shut away from his art 
 for twenty years during which no verse was wi^ittea 
 
 11 
 
 V 
 
 ♦! I 
 
 
 •1 
 
 ■i 
 
 .i I 
 
 ft, 
 
 ^^ 
 
t04 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURB, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 .1 
 
 I 
 
 but the sonnets. But it may be that the poems 
 he wrote, when the great cause he fought for had 
 closed in seeming defeat but real victory, gained 
 from its solemn issues and from the moral grandeur 
 with which he wrought for its ends their majestic 
 movement, their grand style, and their grave beauty. 
 During the struggle he had never forgotten his art 
 "I may one day hope," he said, speaking of his 
 youthful studies, "to have ye again, in a still tinie, 
 when there shall be no chiding. Not in these 
 Noises," and the saying strikes the note of calm sub- 
 limity which is kept in Paradise Lost, It opens with 
 the awaking of the rebel angels in Hell after their fall 
 from Heaven, the consultation of their chiefs how 
 best to carry on the war with God, and the resolve of 
 Satan to go forth and tempt newly created man to 
 fall. He takes his flight to the earth and finds Eden. 
 Eden is then described, and Adam and Eve in their 
 innocence. The next four books, from the fifth to 
 the eighth, contain the Archangel Raphael's story of 
 the war in heaven, the fall of Satan, and the creation 
 of the world. The last four books describe the temp- 
 tation and the fall of Man, the vision shown by 
 Michael to Adam of the future and of the redemption 
 of Man by Christ, and the expulsion from Paradise. 
 
 As we read the great epic, we feel that the lightness 
 J^r}:! grace of Milton's youthful time is gone. The 
 Lv-auty of the poem is rather that of ideal purity, and 
 <A ^nblime thought expressed in language which has 
 the severe loveliness of the best Greek sculpture. The 
 interest collects round the character of Satan at first, 
 but he grows more and more mean as the poem goes 
 on, and seems to fall a second time, to lose all his 
 original brightness, after his temptation of Eve. In- 
 deed this second degradation of Satan after he has 
 not only sinned himself but made innocence sin, and 
 beaten back in himself the last remains of good, is 
 one of the finest motives in the poeni. At last all 
 
^^ 
 
 e poems 
 
 v.] BLlZABETti TO T^E kEStORATIOM, 105 
 
 thought and emotion centre round Adam and Eve, 
 until the closing lines leave us with their lonely niiage 
 on our minds. In every part of the poem, in every 
 character in it, as indeed in all his poems, Milton's 
 intense individuality appears. It is a pleasure to find 
 it. The egotism of such a man, said Coleridge, is a 
 revelation oT spirit. 
 
 102. Milton's Later Poems. — It was followed 
 by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, published 
 together in 1671. Paradise Regained opens with the 
 journey of Christ into the wilderness after his baptism, 
 and its four books describe the temptation of C'lnst 
 by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Re- 
 deemer. The speeches in it drown the action, and 
 their learned argument is only relieved by a few de- 
 scriptions; but these, as in that of Athens, are done 
 with Milton's highest power. The same solemn beauty 
 of a quiet mind and, a more severe style than that of 
 Paradise Lost make us feel in it that Milton has grown 
 older. 
 
 In Samson Agonistes, the style is still severer, even 
 to the verge of a harshness which the sublimity alone 
 tends to modify. It is a choral drama, after the 
 Greek model. Samson in his blindness is described, 
 is called on to make sport for the Philistines, and 
 overthrows them in the end. Samson represents the 
 fallen Puritan cause, and his victorious death Mil- 
 ton's hopes for its final triumph. The poem has all 
 the grandeur of the last words of a great man in 
 whom there was now " calm of mind, all passion 
 spent." He wrote it blind and old and fallen on evil 
 rlays. But in it, as in the others, blindness did not 
 prevent sight. No man saw more vividly and could 
 say more vividly what he saw. Nor did age make 
 him lose strength. The force of thought and verse in 
 his last poem is only less than in Paradise Lost Nor 
 did evil days touch his imagination with weaknes8| 
 
 n 
 
 I «if 
 
 1 
 • i 
 
 *\ 
 
 
 If 
 
 I 111 
 
io6 
 
 EmtlSH LITER A TORE, 
 
 [CHAfk 
 
 1 
 
 or make less the dignity of his art. Till the end 
 it was 
 
 * < 
 
 . ** An undisturbed song of pure concent, 
 Aye sung before the sapphire-coloured throne, 
 To Him that sits thereon." 
 
 It ended in his death, November 1674. 
 
 T03. His Work. — To the greatness of the artist 
 Milion joined the majesty of a pure and lofty 
 character. His poetic style was as lofty as his 
 character, and proceeded from it. Living at a time 
 when criticism began to purify the verse of Eng- 
 land, and being himself well acquainted with the 
 great classical models, his work is free from the 
 false conceits and the intemperance of the Elizabethan 
 writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, and as 
 various. He has their grace, naturalness, and inten- 
 sity, when he chooses, and he adds to it a sublime 
 dignity which they did not possess. All the kinds 
 of poetry which he touched, he touched with the 
 ease of great strength, and with so much weight, 
 that they became new in his hands. He put a 
 new life into the masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the 
 descriptive lyric, the song, the choral drama ; and he 
 created the epic in England. The lighter love poem 
 he never wrote, and he kept satire for prose. In 
 some points he was untrue to his descent from the 
 Elizabethans, for he had no dramatic faculty and he 
 had no humour. He summed up in himself all the 
 higher influences of the Renaissance, and when they 
 had died in England revived and handed tliem to 
 us. His taste was as severe, his verse as polished^ 
 his method and language as strict as those of the 
 school of Dryden and Pope that grew up v*^hen he was 
 old. A literary past and present thus met in him, 
 nor did he fail, like all the greaiest men, to make a 
 cast into the future. He began that pure poetry of 
 natural description which has no higher examples to 
 
 ■qn«4ln«4MHt*«a^«l*a 
 
v.] ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION. 167: 
 
 show in Wordsworth or Scott or Keats than his 
 V Allegro and // Penseroso, Lastly, he did not re- 
 present in any way the England that followed the 
 tyranny, the coarseness, the sensuality, the falseness, 
 or the irreligion of the Stuarts, but he did represent 
 Puritan England, and the whole career of Puritanism 
 from its cradle to its grave. 
 
 T04. The Pilgrim's Progress. — ^With Milton 
 the great Elizabethan age of imaginative poetry and 
 the spirit of the New Learning said their last word. We 
 might say that Puritanism also said its last great words 
 with him, were it not that its spirit lasted in English 
 life, were it not also that four years after his death, in 
 1678, John Bunyan, who had previously written much, 
 published the Pil^rim^s Progress. It is the journey of 
 Christian, the Pilgrim, from the City of Destruction 
 to the Celestial City. The second part was published 
 in 1684, and in 1682 the allegory of the Holy War, 
 I class the PilgrMs Progress here, because in its 
 imaginative fervour and poetry, and in its quality 
 of naturalness, it belongs to the spirit of the Eliza- 
 bethan times. It belongs also to that time in 
 this, that its simple and clear form grew up out 
 of passionate feeling and not out of self-conscious 
 art. It is a people's book and not the book of a 
 literary class, and yet it lives in literature because 
 it first revealed the poetry which fervent belief in a 
 spiritual world can kindle in the rudest hearts. In 
 doing this, and in painting the variou. changes and 
 feelings of the pilgrim's progress towards God, the 
 book touched the deepest human interests, and set on 
 foot a new and plentiful literature. Its language is 
 the language of the Bible. It is a prose allegory con- 
 ceived as an epic poem. As such, it admits the vivid 
 dramatic dialogue, the episodes, the descriptions, and 
 the clear drawing of types of character which give a 
 different, but an equal pleasure to a peasant boy 
 wxd to an intellect like Lord Macauiay's, . _ , 
 
 •lit 
 
 !1i 
 
 « iiiii 
 
 I i 
 
 ' 'If! 
 
 ■r «( ■ 
 
 , \ 
 
 ■\ \i 
 
 ! i 
 
toft 
 
 ENGLISH UTERATURB. ^w [CHA* 
 
 I ' . 
 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FROM THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE IIL 
 
 1680-1760. 
 
 Sir John Dcnhan's; Co'^per^s HVl, 1643- — Hobbe's Leviathan^ 
 1651— Butler's Hudibras, 1663.— J. Dryden, born 1631 ; 
 hi> Dramas begin, 1663 ; Absalom and Akitophd^ 1681 ; 
 hind and Panther, 1687 ; Fables and death, 1700- — 
 Wycherlev, Congreve, Farquhar, and Vanbrugh, Dramas, 
 from 1672-1726 —Newton's Principia, 1687.— Locke's 
 Essay on the Human Understanding, 1690- — Alexander 
 Pope, born 1688 ; Pastorals, 1709; Rape of the Lock, 1712 ; 
 Honur finished, 1725 ; Essay on Man, 1732-1734 ; Dun- 
 dad finished, 1741 ; dies, 1744.— Swift's Tale of a I'ub, 
 1704; Gulliver'' s Travels, 1726. — Defoe's Robinson Cruwe, 
 1719- — Steele and Addison, Spectator, 1711. — Addison's 
 Cato, 1713. —Johnson's Irene^ 1749. — Sheridan and Gold- 
 smith's /V^>'j, 1768-1778. 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION AND 
 
 REVOLUTION. 
 
 105. Poetry. Change of Style. — We have seen 
 the natural style as distinguished from the artificial in 
 the Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural 
 but artistic when it was used by a great genius like 
 Shakespeare or Spenser, for a first rate poet creates 
 rules of art ; his work itself is art. But when the art 
 of poetry is making, its rules are not laid down, and 
 the second rate poets, inspired only by their feel- 
 ings, will write in a natural style unrestrained by 
 rules, that is, they will pui their feelings into verse 
 without caring much for the form in which they do it. 
 Af long as they live in the midst of a youthful national 
 life, and feel an ardent sympathy with it, their stylQ 
 
1-^ 
 
 VI.I THE RESTORATION' TO GEORGE III 10$ 
 
 will be fresh and impassioned, and give pleasure be- 
 cause of the strong feeling that inspires it. But it 
 will also be extravagant and unrestrained in its use of 
 images and words, because of its want of art. This is 
 the history of the style of the poets of the middle 
 period of Elizabeth's reign, (2) Afterwards the na- 
 tional life grew chill, and the feelings of the poets 
 also chill. Then the want of art in the style made 
 itself felt. The far-fetched images, the hazarded 
 meanings, the over- fanciful way of putting thoughts, 
 the sensational expression of feeling, in which the 
 Elizabethan poets indulged, not only appeared in 
 all their ugliness when they were inspired by no 
 warm feelings but were indulged in far more than 
 before. Men tried to produce by extravagant use 
 of words the same results that living feeling had 
 produced, and the more they failed the more ex- 
 travagant and fantastic they became, till at last 
 their poetry ceased to have clear meaning. This is 
 the history of the style of the poets from the later 
 days of Elizabeth till the Civil War. (3) The natural 
 style, unregulated by art, had thus become unnatural. 
 When it had reached that point, men began to feel 
 how necessary it was that the style of poetry should 
 be subjected to the rules of art, and two influences 
 partly caused and partly supported this desire. One 
 was the influence of Milton. Milton, first by his 
 genius, which as I said creates of itself an artistic 
 style, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation 
 of the great classical models was able to give the 
 first example in England of a pure, grand, and 
 finisned style, and in blank verse and the sonnet, 
 wrote for the first time with absolute correctness. 
 Another infiuence was that of the movement all over 
 Europe towards inquiry into the right way of doirg 
 things, and into the truth of things, a movement we 
 shall soon see at work in science, politics, and religion. 
 In poetry it produced a school of criticism which 
 
 . i 
 ' I 
 
 1 >• 
 
 
 ifl 
 
no 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 [chap. 
 
 1^' 
 
 f i 
 
 first took form in France, and the influence ofBoileau, 
 La Fontaine, and others who were striving after 
 greater finish and neatness of expression told on Eng- 
 land now. It is an influence which has been ex- 
 aggerated. It is absurd to place the " creaking lyre " 
 of Boileau side by side with Dryden's "long re- 
 sounding march and energy divine " of verse. Our 
 critical school of poets have no French qualities in 
 them even when they imitate the French. (4) Further, 
 our own poets had already, before the Restoration, 
 begun the critical work, and the French influence 
 served only to give it a greater impulse. We shall 
 see the growth of a colder and more correct spirit of 
 art in Cowley, Denham, and Waller. Vigorous form 
 was given to that spirit by Dryden, and perfection 
 of artifice added to it by Pope. The artificial style 
 succeeded to and extinguished the natural, 
 
 106. Change of Poetic Subject. — The subject 
 of the Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the 
 Passions, and it was treated from the side of natural 
 feeling. This was fully and splendidly done by Shake- 
 speare. But after a time the subject followed, as we 
 have seen in speaking of the drama, the same career 
 as the style. It was treated in an extravagant and 
 sensational manner, and the representation of the pas- 
 sions tended to become, and did become unnatural or 
 fantastic. Milton alone redeemed the subject from 
 this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natural 
 manner of the passions of the human heart, and he 
 made strong the religious passions of love of God, 
 sorrow for sin, and others, in English poetry. But with 
 iiim the subject of man as influenced by the passions 
 died for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers, 
 turned to another. They left the passions aside, and 
 wrote of the things in which the intellect and the con- 
 science, the social and political instincts in man 
 were interested. In this way the satiric, didactic, 
 philosophical, and party poetry of a new school arose. 
 
 m 
 
VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE TIL iir 
 
 107. Transition Poets. — There 'were a few 
 poets, writing parJy before and partly after the Re- 
 storation, who represent the passage from the fantastic 
 to tLe more correct style. Auraham Cowley wus one 
 of these. His love poems, 71ie Mistress ^ i^47, are 
 courtly, witty, and have some of the Eliza l^ethan 
 imagination. His later poems, owing probably to 
 his life in France, were more exact in verse, at.d 
 more cold in form. The same may be said of Edmund 
 Waller, who " first made writing in rhyme easily 
 an art." He also lived a long time in France, and 
 died in 1687. Sir Jno. Denham's Cooper's Hill, 1643, 
 was a favourite with Dryden for the " majesty of 
 its style." It may rank as one of the first of our 
 descriptive poems, and its didactic reflectiveness, 
 and the chill stream of its verse and thought, link 
 him closely to Pope. Sir W. Davenant's Gondibert, 
 1651, an heroic poem, is perhaps the most striking 
 example of this transition. Worthless as poetry, it 
 represents the new interest in political philosophy 
 and in science that was arising, and preludes the intel- 
 lectual poetry. Its preface discourses of rime and the 
 rules of art, and represents the new critical influence 
 which came over with the exiled court from Fiance, 
 The critical school had therefore begun even before 
 Dryden's poems were written. The change was less 
 sudden than it seemed. 
 
 Satiric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was 
 made during this transition time into a powerful weapon 
 by two men, each on a different side. Andrew Marvell's 
 Satires, after the Restoration, represent the Puritan's 
 vrath with the vices of the court and king, and his 
 shame for the disgrace of England among the nations. 
 The Ilttdibras of Samuel Butler, in 1663, represents 
 the fierce reaction which had set in against Puritanism. 
 It is justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and 
 ingenious drollery, and in accordance with the new 
 criticism, it is absolutely without obscurity. It is 
 
 "U ! 
 
 J f 
 
 1 
 « 
 
 ,1 i l# 
 
 
ltd 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 (CRA^ 
 
 I !B 
 
 often as terse as Pope's best work. But it is too 
 long, its wit wearies us at last, and it undoes the force 
 of its attack on the Puritans by its exaggeration. Satire 
 should have at least the semblance of truth ; yet Butler 
 calls the Puritans cowards. We turn now to the first 
 of these poets in whom poetry is founded on intellect 
 rather than on feeling, and whose best verse is devoted 
 to argument and satire. 
 
 io8. John Dryden was the first of the new, as 
 Milton was the last of the elder, school of poetry. 
 It was late in life that he gained fame. Bom in 
 1 63 1, he was a Cromwellite till the Restoration, when 
 he began the changes which mark his life. His 
 poem on the death of the Protector was soon fol- 
 lowed by the Astrcea Redux which celebrated the 
 return of justice to the realm in the person of 
 Charles II. The Annus Alirabilis appeared in 1667, 
 and in this his great power was first clearly shown. 
 It is the power of clear reasoning expressing 
 itself with entire ease in a rapid succession of con- 
 densed thoughts in verse. Such a power fitted Dryden 
 for satire, and his Absalom and Ahitophel is the fore* 
 most of Enghsh satires. He had been a playwriter 
 till its appearance in 1681, and the rimed plays 
 which he had written enabled him to perfect the versi- 
 fication which is so remarkable in it and the poems 
 that followed. The satire itself, written in mockery 
 of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked 
 Shaftesbury as Ahitophel, was kind to Monmouth as 
 Absalom, and in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri 
 the poet avenged himself for the Rehearsal, It 
 was the first fine example of that party poetry which 
 became still more bitter and personal in the hands 
 of Pope. It was followed by the Medal^ a. new at- 
 tack on Shaftesbury, and the Mae FleeMoe, in which 
 Shadwell, a rival poet, who had supported Shaftes- 
 bury's party, was made a laughing-stock. After these 
 Dryden taught theology in verse, and the Religio 
 
 '■^^"^WgWWWB 
 
'mm» 
 
 VI.] r//£: RESTORATIOl^ TO GEORGE IIL IIS 
 
 Laid, 1682, defends, and states the argument for, 
 the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty 
 that drove him on the accession of James II. to 
 change his reHgion, and the Hind and Panther^ 1687, 
 is as fine a model of clear reasoning in behalf of 
 the milk-white hind of the Church of Rome, as 
 the Religio Laid was in behalf of the Church of 
 England, which now becomes the spotted panther. 
 As a narrative poet his fables and translations, pro- 
 duced late in life, in 1700, give him a high rank, 
 though the fine harmony of their verse uoes not win 
 us to forget their coarseness, and their lack of that 
 skill in arranging a story which comes from imagi- 
 native feeling. As a lyric poet his fame rests on 
 the animated Ode for St, Cedlia^s Day. His trans- 
 lation of Vergil has fire, but wants the dignity and 
 tenderness of the original. From Milton's death till 
 his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, and 
 round his throne in Will's Coffeehouse where he sat 
 as " Glorious John " we may place the names of the 
 lesser poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, and 
 Mulgrave, Sir Charles Sedley, and the Earl of Roches- 
 ter. The lighter poetry of the court lived on in the 
 two last. John Oldham won a short fame by his 
 Satires on the Jesuits^ 1679 ; and Bishop Ken, 1668, set 
 on foot, in his Morning and Evening Hymns ^ a new 
 type of religious poetry. 
 
 109. The Drama of the Restoration. — The 
 change that now passed over literature was ns great in 
 me drama as in poetry. Two acting companies were 
 formed on the king's return under Thomas Killigrew 
 and Davenant \ actresses came on the stage for the 
 first time, and scenery began to be used. Dryden 
 began his dramatic work with comedies, 1663, but 
 soon after, following Corneille, though he abjured 
 French influence, made rime instead of blank verse 
 the vehicle of tragedy. His tragedies, like the rest of 
 the time, were written in a pompous heroic style. The 
 
 i 
 
 ¥\ 
 
 I: 
 
 i 
 
 ft I' 
 
 i 
 
 
 ■ t 
 
]\r 
 
 114 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TVRE, 
 
 tcrtA^. 
 
 Duke of Buckingham ridiculed them in the Rehearsal^ 
 167 1, and sometime after Dryden changed his style, 
 and wrote in another manner, of which All for Love^ 
 and the Spanish Friar ^ are perhaps the best examples. 
 His plays have but little sentiment, for Dryden's 
 treatment of the emotions is always brutal, but they 
 have some neat intrigue, some fine passages. John 
 Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice, Nat. Lee's Rival Queens, 
 and two pathetic tragedies by Thomas Otway, 77ie 
 Orphan and Venice Preserved, are of the Restoration 
 time and kept the stage. 
 
 It was in Comedy that the dramatists of the Restora- 
 tion excelled. William Wycherley, whose gross 
 vigour is remarkable, introduced the prose Comedy 
 of Manners, in 1672, and Mrs. Behn, Sir George 
 Etherege, and others, carried it on to the Revolution. 
 The wit of their comedies is the wit of a vulgar and 
 licentious society. After the Revolution, William 
 CoNGREVE, Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Far- 
 QUAR made comedy more gentlemanly and its intrigue 
 more subtle. Though without truth to nature, their 
 plays sparkle with wit in every line. They exaggerate 
 the vices of the time, but their immorality is partly 
 forgotten in their swift and delightful gaiety. Poetry, 
 however, was less an important part of literature 
 during this period than prose. 
 
 no. The Prose Literature. — I have said that 
 towards the end of Elizabeth's reign men settled down 
 to think and inquire. Intellectual had succeeded to 
 active life. We have seen this in the poetry of the 
 time ; and the great work of Bacon, which was then 
 begun, represents the same thing in prose. He worked 
 at not only all subjects of inquiry, but also at the 
 right method of enquiry. The Advancement of Learn- 
 ing and the Novum Organum did not fulfil all he 
 aimed at, but they did stir the whole of English intel- 
 ligence into activity. In Science, the impulse he gave 
 was only partly riglit, and the work of Science in Eng- 
 land was behind that of the Continent The religious 
 
chearsal^ 
 lis style, 
 for Love^ 
 xamples. 
 Dryden's 
 but they 
 IS. John 
 / QtieenSy 
 way, 77ie 
 ^storation 
 
 3 Restora- 
 ose gross 
 ; Comedy 
 r George 
 evolution, 
 vulgar and 
 
 William 
 DRGE Far- 
 ts intrigue 
 ture, their 
 exaggerate 
 
 is partly 
 \f. Poetry, 
 
 literature 
 
 I said that 
 ttled down 
 cceeded to 
 fetry of the 
 1 was then 
 He worked 
 Jso at the 
 :/ of Learn- 
 ilfil all he 
 iglish intcl- 
 Ise he gave 
 ice in Eng* 
 he religious 
 
 VI.) t^^E ^RESTORATION' TO CEORGE UL 1 15 
 
 and the political struggle absorbed the country, and it 
 was not till after the Restoration, with two exceptions, 
 that scientific discovery advanced so far as to claim 
 recognition in a history of Literature. The Royal 
 Society was embodied in 1662, and astronomy, expe- 
 rimental chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, zoology, 
 botany, vegetable physiology were, all founded as 
 studies and their literature begun in the age of the 
 Restoration. One man's work was so great in science 
 as to merit his name being mentioned among the liter- 
 ary men of England. In 167 1, Isaac Newton laid his 
 Theory of Light before the Royal Society ; in the 
 year before the Revolution his Frinclpia established 
 with its proof of the theory of gravitation the true 
 system of the universe. 
 
 It was in political and religious knowledge however 
 that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most 
 shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active 
 and adventurous in a people, the first thing they will 
 think upon is the true method and grounds of govern- 
 ment, both divine and human. Two sides will be 
 taken, the side of Authority and the side of Reason 
 in Religion ; the side of Authority and the side of in- 
 dividual Liberty in Politics. 
 
 III. The Theological Literature of those who 
 declared that reason was supreme as a test of truth, 
 arose with some men who met at Loid Falkland's just 
 before the civil war, and especially with John Hales and 
 William Chillingworth. With them, J eremy Taylor 
 pleaded, as we have seen, the cause of religious liberty 
 and toleration, and of rightness of life as more important 
 than a correct theology. After the Restoration and Re- 
 volution, their work was carried on by Bishop Burnet, 
 Robert Boyle, the philosopher, Archbishop Tillotson, 
 and Bishop Butler, whose Sermons and Analogy of 
 Religion, Natural and Rei^ealed, to the Constitution and 
 Course of Nature^ 1736, endeavour to make peace be- 
 tween Authority and Reason* Many other divines o( 
 
 H 8 
 
 { 
 
 I 
 I 
 
 ill } 
 
 1" 
 
 
 J: ' 
 
 
 < at 
 
 1^ 
 
 r 
 
Ii6 
 
 tNGLlsn ItfERAttJR^. 
 
 tc*IAP. 
 
 the Engli.sh Church took one side or another, or 
 opposed the growing Deism. Isaac iiarrow is to be 
 mentioned for his sedate, Robert South for his fierce 
 and witty eloquence, and in them, and in men hke 
 Kdvvard Stilhnglleet and WilHam Sherlock, English 
 theological prose took form. 
 
 112. Political Literature. — The resistance to 
 authority in the opposition to the theory of the Divine 
 Rij^ht of Kings did not enter into Literature till after 
 it had been worked out practically in the Civil War. 
 During the Commonwe?lth and after the Revolution it 
 took the form of a discussion on the abstract question of 
 the Science of Government, and was mingled with an in- 
 quiry into the origin of society and the ground of social 
 life. Thomas Hobbes, during the Commonwealth, was 
 the first who dealt with the question from the side of 
 reason alone, and he is also the first of all our prose 
 writers whose style may be said to be uniform and 
 correct, and adapted carefully to tne subjects on which 
 he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan^ ^651, declared 
 (i) that the origin of all power was in the people, and 
 (2) the end of all power was for the common weal. It 
 destroyed the theory of a Divine Right of Kings and 
 Priests, but it created another kind of Divine Right 
 when it said that the power lodged in rulers by the 
 people could not be taken away by the people. Sir 
 R. Filmer supported the side of Divine Right in his 
 /^(C?/;7^n*//^, pubHshed, 1680. Henry Nevile in \(\% Dia- 
 logue concerning Governfnent^ and James Harrington in 
 his romance The Commonwealth of GceanUj published 
 at the beginning of the Commonwealth, contended that 
 all secure government was to be based on property, but 
 Nevile supported a monarchy, and Harrington — with 
 
 . whom I may class Algernon Sidney, executed in 1683— 
 a democracy, on this basis. 
 
 113, John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1689- 
 1690 followed the two doctrines of Hobbes in his 
 
 , treatise on Civil Government, but with these important 
 
 -i 
 
VI.] THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE ///. 117 
 
 additions — (i) that the people have a right to take 
 away the power given by them to the ruler, (2) that 
 the ruler is responsible to the people for the trust 
 reposed in him, and (3) that legislative assemblies 
 are Supreme as the voice of the people. This was 
 the political philosophy of the Revolution. Locke 
 carried the same s[)irit of free incjuiry into the realm 
 of religion, and in his three Letters on Toleration 
 1689-90-92, laid down the philosophical grounds for 
 liberty of religious thought. He finished by entering 
 the realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 ap- 
 peared his Essay concerning the Hitman Understanding^ 
 in which he investigated its limits and traced all ideas 
 and therefore all knowledge to experience. In his 
 clear statement of the way in which the Understand- 
 ing works, in the way in which he guarded it and Lan- 
 guage against their errors in the inquiry after truth, 
 he did as much for the true method of thinking as 
 Bacon had done for the Science of nature. 
 
 1 1 4. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart 
 from the great movement of thought, a good deal of 
 Miscellaneous Literature. Sir William Petty, in 
 1667, made the first efibrt after a science of political 
 economy in his Treatise on Taxes. Characters, essays, 
 letter-writing, memoirs, all came to the front. The paint- 
 ing of short '* characters " was carried on after the 
 Restoration by Saml. Butler, and W. Charleton. These 
 " characters ** had no personality, but as party spirit 
 deepened, names thinly disguised were given to 
 characters drawn of living men, and Dryden and Pope 
 in poetry and all the prose wits of the time of Queen 
 Anne and George 1. made personal and often violent 
 sketches of their opponents a special element in 
 literature. After the Restoration, Cowley's small 
 volume, and Dryden, in the masterly criticism on his 
 art which he prefixed to some of his dramas, gave 
 richness to the Essay. .These two writers began— 
 ^yith Hobbes — the second period of English pr^sf^ 
 
 H 
 l.i 
 
 I'" 
 
 i 
 
 4 I 
 
 •t 
 
 « •« 
 
 1 - 
 1" 
 
i |l|:ii 
 
 tiS 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 (chap. 
 
 
 R ' '^ 
 
 • 
 
 
 
 i 81 
 
 1 ■ 
 
 ill 
 
 |[ ' 
 
 iHB 
 
 H i,<,rj 
 
 ' ^^H 
 
 11 
 
 1 
 
 ifii 
 
 Hi 
 
 f Sts 
 
 H| 
 
 III 
 
 HjiI 
 
 ■L 
 
 in which the style is easy, unaffected, moulded to the 
 subject, and the proper words are put in their proper 
 places. It is as different from the style that came 
 before it, as the easy manners of a gentleman are from 
 those of a learned man unaccustomed to society. In 
 William Ill's, time Sir VV. Temple's pleasant Essays 
 bring us in style and tone nearer to the great class of 
 essayists of whom Addison was chief. Lady Rachel 
 Russell's Letiers begin the letter-writing literature of 
 England, in which Gray and Cowper, Byron and 
 Beckford, have done the best work. Pepys (1660-69) 
 and Evelyn, whose Diary grows full after 1640, begin 
 that class of gossiping me?noirs which have been of 
 so much use in giving colour to history. History 
 itself at this time is little better than memoirs, and such 
 a name may be fairly given to Clarendon's History oj 
 the Civil Wars (begun in 1641) and to Bishop 
 Burnet's History of his own Ti?n€ and to his History 
 of the Reformation (\^Qgxmm. 1679, completed in 1715). 
 Finally classical criticism, in the discussion on the 
 genuineness of the Letters of Phalaris, was created 
 by Richard Bentley in 1697-99. 
 
 115. The Literature of Queen Anne and the 
 first Georges. — With the closing years of William 
 III. and the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a litera- 
 ture aro$e which was partly new and partly a continu- 
 ance 6f that of the Restoration. The conflict between 
 those who took the oath to the new dynasty and the 
 Nonjurors who refused, the hot blood that it produced, 
 the war between Dissent and Church and between the 
 two parties which now took the names of Whig and 
 Tory, produced a mass of political pamphlets, of which 
 Daniel Defoe's and Swift's were the best ; of songs 
 and ballads, like Lillibullero, \vhich were sung in every 
 street ; of squibs, reviews, and satirical poems and 
 letters. Everyone joined in it, and it rose into im- 
 portance in the work of the greater men who mingled 
 inore literary studies with their political excitement, 
 
 
[chap. 
 
 td to the 
 iir proper 
 hat came 
 1 are from 
 :iety. In 
 nt Essays 
 Lt class of 
 ly Rachel 
 "rature of 
 yron and 
 (1660-69) 
 >4o, begin 
 i been of 
 History 
 :, and such 
 History oj 
 
 Bishop 
 is History 
 
 in 17/5). 
 
 1 on the 
 ,s created 
 
 and the 
 
 WilHam 
 j) a litera- 
 i continu- 
 between 
 J and the 
 Droduced, 
 tween the 
 Whig and 
 of which 
 of songs 
 in every 
 )ems and 
 into i ill- 
 mingled 
 
 citement, 
 
 VI.] Tim RESTORATION TO GEORGE III 119 
 
 In politics all the abstract discussions we have men- 
 tioned ceased to be abstract and became personal and 
 practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more 
 closely to the questions of everyday life. The whole 
 of this stirrin-g literary life was concentrated in London, 
 where the agitation of society was hottest ; and it is 
 round this vivid city life that the Literature of Queen 
 Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped. 
 
 116. It was with a few exceptions a Party Litera- 
 ture. The Whig and Tory leaders enHsted on their 
 sides the best poets and prose writers, who fiercely 
 satirized and unduly praised them under names thinly 
 disguised. Personalities were sent to and fro like shots 
 in battle. Those who could do this work well were well 
 rewarded, but the rank and file of writers were left to 
 starve. Literature was thus honoured not for itself, 
 but for the sake of party. The result was that the 
 abler men lowered it by making it a political tool, and 
 the smaller men, the fry of Grub Street, degraded it 
 by using it in the same way, only in a baser manner 
 Their flattery was as abject as their abuse was shame* 
 less, and both were stupid. They received and de- 
 se. ved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to 
 give them in the Duiiciad. Being a party literature, 
 it n«iturally came to study and to look siiarply into 
 human character and into human life as seen in the 
 great city. It discussed all the varieties of social 
 life, and painted town society more vividly than 
 has been done before or since ; and it was so wholly 
 taken up with this that couniry life and its interests, 
 except in the writings of Addison, was scarcely touched 
 by it at all. The society of the day was one in which 
 all subjects of intellectual and scientific inquiry were 
 eagerly debated, and the wit of this society was 
 stimulated by its party spirit. Its literature reflected 
 this intellectual excitement, and at no time in our 
 history was literary work so vigorous and masculine 
 on the various problems of thought and know- 
 
 ^!i 
 
 \\ 
 
 i 
 
 1; 
 
 I 
 
 ■IS 
 
 1. 
 
 * 
 
 « I 
 
 \ 
 
 ■a 
 
 tv 
 
120 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 
 I- 
 
 ell 
 
 ledge. Criticism being so active, Xht form in which 
 thought was expressed was now especially dwelt on, 
 and the result was that the style of English prose 
 became for the first time absolutely simple and clear, 
 and English verse reached a neatness of expression 
 and a closeness of thought which was as exquisite as 
 it was artificial. At the same time, and for the same 
 reasons, Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in 
 poetry. 
 
 117. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all 
 these elements. Born in 1688, he wrote excellent verse 
 at twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared in 1709, 
 and two years afterwards he took full rank as the 
 critical poet in the Essay on Criticism (17 11). The 
 next year saw the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the 
 ** epos of society under Queen Anne," and the most 
 brilliant play of wit in our language. This closed what 
 we may call his first period. He now became known 
 to Swift and to Henry St John, Lord Bolingbroke, a 
 statesman who was also a writer. With these, and with 
 Gay, Parnell, Prior, and Arbuthnot, Pope formed the 
 Scriblerus Club, and soon rose into great fame by his 
 Translation of the Iliad and Odyssey under George I. 
 (1715-1725), for which he received 7,000 pounds. 
 He now, being at ease, lived at Twickenham, where he 
 had completed his Homer. It was here, retired from 
 the literary mob, that in bitter scorn of the many petty 
 scribblers, he wrote in 1728 the Dunciad, afterwards 
 altered and enlarged, in 1741. It was the fiercest of 
 his satires and it closes his second period, which took 
 much of its savageness from the influence of Swift. 
 The third phase of Pope's literary life was closely 
 linked to his friend Bolingbroke. It was in conver- 
 sation with him that he originated the Essay on Alan 
 (1732-4), and the Imitations of Horace. The Moral 
 Essays^ or Epistles to men and women, were written to 
 praise those whom he loved, and to satirize the bad 
 poets and the social follies of the day, and 9JI ^Yho 
 
 ^ 
 

 VI.] T//E RESTORATION TO GEORGE III. I2L 
 
 disliked him or his party. In the last few years of his 
 life, Bishop Warburton, the writer of the Legation of 
 Moses and editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the 
 Moral Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man 
 formed part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend ; 
 but almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the 
 members of his literary circle were dead, and a new 
 race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he 
 died. He is our greatest master in didactic poetry, 
 not so much because of the worth of the thoughts, as 
 because of the masterly form in which they are put. 
 The Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor 
 and not his own, is crowded with lines that have 
 passed into daily use. The Essay ofi Criticism is 
 equally full of critical precepts put with exquisite 
 skill. The Satires and Epistles are also didactic. 
 They set virtue and cleverness over against vice and 
 stupidity, and they illustrate both by types of character, 
 in the drawing of which Pope is without a rival in our 
 literature. His translation of Homer is made with 
 great literary art, but for that very reason it does not 
 make us feel the simp.icity and directness of Homer. 
 It has neither the manner of Homer, nor the spirit of 
 the Greek life, just as Pope's descriptions of nature have 
 neither the manner nor the spirit of nature. The heroic 
 couplet, in which he wrote his translation and nearly 
 all his work, he used in various subjects with a cor- 
 rectness that has never been surpassed, but it some- 
 times fails from being too smooth, and its cadences too 
 regular. Finally, he was a true artist, hating those who 
 degraded his art, and at a time when men followed it 
 for money, and place, and the applause of the club 
 and of the town, he loved it faithfully to the end, for 
 its own sake. 
 
 118. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in 
 the first two-thirds of his life did not write in his manner 
 nor approach his genius. Thomas Parnell is known 
 by his ffermit^ and both h^ and John Gay, in his si^^ 
 
 k 
 
 ■if 
 
 \ 
 
 ji 
 
 \ I. 
 
 t ! 
 
 ff 
 ^ 
 
 I f ) 
 
t^a 
 
 ENGLISH IJTERA TURE, 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 pastorals, The Shepherd's Week (17 14), touched on 
 country life. Swift's poetical satires were coarse but 
 always hit home; Addison celebrated the battle of 
 Blenheim in the Cainpaign^ and his sweet grace is 
 found in some devotional pieces ; while Pkior's charm- 
 ing ease is best shown in the light narrative poetry 
 which I may say began with him in the reign of William 
 I J I. The Elack-eyed Susan of Gay, and 'J'ickeH's Colin 
 and Lucy diVid Carey*s Sally iii our Alley, siud afterwards 
 Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina mark the rise of the 
 modern ballad; a class of poetry wholly apart from 
 the genius of Pope. When we next speak of the 
 poets we shall see how during Pope's later hfe, an 
 entirely new impulse came on poetry, and changed it 
 root and branch. 
 
 119. The Prose Literature of Pope's time col-^ 
 lects itself round four great names. Swift, Defoe, 
 Addison, and Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit 
 those elements of the age of which I have spoken. 
 Jonathan Swift was the keenest of political parti- 
 zans. The Battle of the Books, or the literary fight 
 about the T^etters of Phalaris, and the Tale of a Tub, 
 a satire on the Presbyterians and the Papists, made 
 his reputation in 1704 and established him as a satirist. 
 Swift left the Whig for the Tory party, and his poli- 
 tical tracts brought him Court favour and literary 
 fame. On the fall of the Tory party at the acces- 
 sion of George I., he retired to the Deanery of St. 
 Patrick in Ireland an embittered man, and the JDrapier's 
 Letters (1724) written against Wood's halfpence, gained 
 him popularity in a country that he hated. In 1726, 
 his inventive genius, his savage satire, and his cruel 
 indignation with life, were all shown in Gulliver'' s 
 Travels, The voyage to Lilliput and Brobdingnag 
 satirized the politics and manners of England and 
 Europe; that to Laputa mocked the philosophers; and 
 the Inst, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, lacerated 
 ftu4 defile4 tbe wl;oIe bod^ of humanity. Nq Publish 
 
'■^^l 
 
 VL] 
 
 THE RESTORATION TO GEORGE IIL 
 
 ia3 
 
 is more robust than Swift's, no wit more scathing, 
 no I'fe in private and public more sad and proud, no 
 death more pitiable. He died in 1745 hopelessly in- 
 sane. Daniel Defoe was almost as vigorous a political 
 writer as Swift, but he will hve in literature by Robin- 
 son Crusoe (17 19). In it he equalled Gulliver's Travels 
 in truthful representation, and excelud them in inven- 
 tion. The story lives and charms from day to day. Witn 
 his other tales it makes him our first fine writer of 
 fiction. But none of his stories are true novels ; that 
 is, they have no plot to the working out of which the 
 characters and the events contribute. They form the 
 transition however from the slight tale and the ro- 
 mance of the Elizabethan time to the finished novel 
 of Richardson and Fielding. 
 
 I2C. Metaphysical Literature was enriched by 
 the work of Bishop Berkeley. His Minute Philoso- 
 pher and other works questioned the real existence of 
 matter, and founded on the denial of it an answer to 
 the English Deists, round whom in the first half of 
 the eighteenth century centred the struggle between 
 the claims of natural and revealed religion. Shaftes- 
 bury, Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and 
 Collins, on the Deists' side, were opposed by Clarke, 
 by Bentley, whose name is best known as the founder 
 of the true school of classical criticisnr^ and by 
 Bishop Warburton. I may mention here a social 
 satire. The Fable of the Bees, by Mandeville, half poem, 
 half prose dialogue, and finished in 1729. It tried to 
 prove that the vices of society are the foundation of 
 civilisation, and is the first of a new set of books 
 which marked the rise in England of the bold specu- 
 lations on the nature and ground of society which 
 the French Revolution aftei wards increased. 
 
 121. The Periodical Essay is connected with the 
 names of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Stesxe. 
 Thi-s gay, light, and graceful kind of literature, differ- 
 ing ixQxa. such J^ssays as Bacon'^ as g;ood convers^UQH 
 
 iii 
 
 I I 
 
 \k^ 
 
 % % 
 
Il 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 1 i 
 
 1 
 
 p 
 
 ; |i 
 
 ; ^ 1 
 
 j: 
 
 1 
 
 in> 
 
 
 li'.i 
 
 ;!!( 
 
 124 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [CHAP. 
 
 about a subject differs from a clear analysis of all its 
 points, was begun in P'rance by Montaigne in 1580. 
 Charles Cotton, a wit of Charles II/s time, re-translated 
 Montaigne's Essays, and they soon found imitators 
 in Cowley, and Sir W. Temple. But the periodical 
 Essay was created by Steele and Addison. It was 
 published three times a week, then daily, and it was 
 anonymous, and both these characters necessarily 
 changed its form from that of an Essay of Montaigne. 
 Steele began it in the Tatler, 1709, and it treated of 
 everything that was going on in the world. He 
 paints as a social humourist the whole age of Queen 
 Anne — the political and literary disputes, the fine 
 gentlemen and ladies, the characters of men, the 
 humours of society, the new book, the new play : we 
 live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of old 
 London. Aidison soon joined him, first in the 
 Tatler, afterwards in the Spectator, 171 1. His work 
 is more critical, literary, and didactic than his com- 
 panion's. The characters he introduces, such as 
 Roger de Coverley, are finished studies after nature, 
 and their talk is easy and dramatic. No humour is 
 more fine and tender ; and, like Chaucer's, it is never 
 bitter. The style adds to the charm : in its varied 
 cadence and subtle ease it has never been surpassed ; 
 and it seems to grow out of the subjects treated of. 
 Addison's work was a great one, lightly done. The 
 Spectator, the Guardian, and the Freeholder, in his 
 hands, ga\'e a better tone to manners, and a gentler 
 one to political and literary criticism. The essays 
 published every Friday were chiefly on literary sub- 
 jects, the Saturday essays chiefly on religious sub- 
 jects. The former popularized literature, so that 
 culture spread among the middle classes and crept 
 down to the country ; the latter popularized religion. 
 " I have brought," he says, " philosophy out of closets 
 and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs 
 ^1^4 ?i5s^mbUes, at t^a-tablcs and ia cofftje-houses/ 
 
Vt;l TME kESTORATItN TO CEOkGR III MJ 
 
 The next important series was Johnson's Rambler 
 (1750-2) and Idler^ but in the n lightness, the essence 
 of this kind of Essay, was lost Goldsmith's Citizen oj 
 the Worlds a series of letters supposed to be written 
 by a Chinese traveller in England, and collected in 
 1762, satirizes the manners and fashionable follies 
 of the time. Several other series followed but they 
 are now unreadable. One man alone in our own 
 century caught the old inspiration, and with a humour 
 less easy, as gentle, but more subtle than Addison's. 
 It was Charles Lamb, in the Essays of Elia^ and the 
 fineness of perception he showed in these was equally 
 displayed in his criticisms on the old dramatists. 
 
 122. The Drama. — During this time the Drama 
 continued. Jeremy Collier's famous attack on the stage 
 (1698) may have h^d some influence in purifying it, 
 but it was really the growth of a higher tone of society 
 which improved it. It grew dull in the stupid plays 
 of Steele, in Addison's ponderous tragedy of Cato 
 (17 1 3), and in the melancholy tragedies of Rowe 
 (1700-13), whose name is, however, to be remem- 
 bered as the first editor of Shakespeare, 1709-10. The 
 four folio editions of Shakespeare had been previ- 
 ously set forth in 1623, 1632, 1664, and 1685. llie 
 Beggar's Opera (1728) of Gay introduced a new 
 form of dramatic literature, and Colley Cibber carried 
 on the lighter comedy into the reign of George II. 
 Fielding then made the stage the vehicle of criticism 
 on the follies, literature, and politics of the time, 
 and the actors Foote and Garrick did the same 
 in their farces. Tragedy now trod the boards with 
 the heavy foot of Johnson in his Itejie (1749), 
 and Home's Douglas kept the stage. A number of 
 sentimental comedies written by Macklin, Murphy, 
 Cumberland and the Colmans still survive, but the 
 classic comedy can only be said to be represented 
 by The Goodnatured Man and She Stoops to Conquer 
 pf Goldsmith, by The Rivals and the School /of 
 
 Hi* 
 
 i I 
 
 t 
 I 
 
 * i 
 
 1 ■ 
 
 ■4 1 
 
 4' 
 
 %' 
 
 i 
 

 lift 
 
 Mmitsff umkA tuM. 
 
 MAt». 
 
 Scandal of Sheridan, all of which appeared between 
 1768 and 1778. Both were Irishmen, but Golvl.^mith 
 has more of the Celtic grace, and Sheridan of the 
 Celtic wit. With Sheridan we may say that the 
 history of the English drama closes* 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 PROSE LITERATURE FROM GEORGE 111. TO VICTORIA. 
 
 1760-1837. 
 
 Richardson's Pamelay 1740 — Fielding's yoseph Andrews ^ 
 1742. — Smollett's Roderick Random and Richardson's 
 Clarissa Harlowe^ 1748' — Fielding's Tom yones, 1749. — 
 Johnson's Dictionary J 1755- — Sterne's Tristra??i Shandy ^ 
 1759. — Hume's History of England^ completed 1761. — 
 Gok\sm\\.\i' s Vicar 0/ Wa kef eld, 1766.— Adam Smith's IVealih 
 of Nations^ 1776. — G'lhhon'?, Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 ^w/^V^, completed 1788- — ^os'WQlV&IJfeofyohnson, 1791* 
 — Burke's ll'ritings^ from 1756-1797- — Miss Axxsi^n*^ Novels ^ 
 1811-1817.-Scott's Novels, 1814-1831. 
 
 123. Prose Literature. — The rapid increase of 
 manufactures, science, and prosperity which began 
 with the middle of the eighteenth century is paral- 
 leled by the growth of Literature. The general causes 
 of this growth were — 
 
 ist, That a good prose style had been per- 
 fected, and the method of writing being made easy, 
 production increased. Men were born, as it were, 
 into a good school of the art of composition, and 
 the boy of eighteen had no difficulty in making sen- 
 tences which the Elizabethan writer could not have 
 put together after fifty years of study. 
 
 2ndly, The long peace after the accession of the 
 House of Hanover had left England at rest, and 
 given it wealth. The reclaiming of waste tracts, tl^e 
 
VII.] PkOSM PJ^OM CPORGk in. to iricfOktA, r^i 
 
 increased wealth and trade, made better communica- 
 tion necessary ; and the country was soon covered witli 
 a network of highways. The leisure gave tmie to 
 men to think and write : the quicker interchange 
 between the capital and the country spread ovei 
 England the literature of the capital, and stirred men 
 everywhere to write. The coaching services, and the 
 post carried the new book and the literary criticism 
 to the villages, and awoke the men of genius there, 
 who might otherwise hfeve been silent. 
 
 3rdly, The Press sent far and wide the news of 
 the day, and grew in importance till it contained the 
 opinions and writings of men like Canning. Such 
 seed produced literary work in the country. News- 
 papers now began to play their part in literature. They 
 rose under the Commonwealth, but became important 
 when the censorship which reduced them to a mere 
 broadsheet of news was removed after the Revolution 
 of 1688. The political sleep of the age of the two 
 first Georges hindered their progress ; but in the reign 
 of George III., after a struggle with which the name of 
 John Wilkes and the author of the letters of Junius are 
 connected, the Press claimed and obtained the right to 
 criticize the conduct and measures of Ministers and 
 Parliament and the King ; and after the struggle in 
 177 1 the right to publish and comment on the debates 
 in the two Houses. The great English Journals, the 
 Morning Chronicle^ the Post^ the Herald^ and the Times 
 gave an enormous impulse within the next twenty years 
 to the production of books, and created a new class of 
 literary men — the Journalists. Later on, in 1802, the 
 publication of the Edinburgh Re^new^ and afterwards 
 of the Quarterly Review and Blachvood'' s Magazine^ 
 started another kind of prose writing, and by theii 
 criticisms on new books improved and stimulated 
 literature. 
 
 4thiy, Communication with the Continent 
 bad increased during the peaceable times of Walpole, 
 
 % 
 I 
 
 •r 
 
 i ! 
 
 
 w 
 
t»8 
 
 kMGUSfi LITER ATVkE. 
 
 [chap. 
 
 .■.A 
 
 ill- 
 
 and the wars that followed made it still easier. With its 
 increase, two new and great outbursts of literature told 
 upon England. France sent the works of Montes- 
 quieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'AIembert, 
 and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were called the 
 Encyclopaedists, to influence and quicken English 
 literature on all the great subjects that belong to the 
 social and political life of man. Afterwards, the fresh 
 German movement, led by Lessing and others, and 
 carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse 
 to the poetical school that arose in England* along 
 with the French Revolution. These were the general 
 causes of the rapid growth of literature from the time 
 of George III. We turn now to the forms Literature 
 took — first in Prose, then in Poetry. 
 
 124. The Novel is perhaps the most remarkable. 
 It began in the reign of George II. No books have 
 ever produced so plentiful an offspring as the novels 
 of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett. The novel 
 arranges and combines round the passion of love and 
 its course between two or more persons a number ol 
 events and of characters which in their action on one 
 another develop the plot of the story and bring about 
 a sad or a happy close. The story may be laid at any 
 time, in any class of society, in any place. The whole 
 world and the whole of human life lies before it as its 
 subject. Its vast sphere accounts for its vast produc- 
 tion — its human interest for its vast numbers of readers. 
 
 Samuel Rich ardson, while Pope was yet alive, wrote 
 in the form of letters, and in two months' time Pamela 
 (1740), and afterwards Clarissa Harlowe {i^j ^%)^ and 
 Sir Charles Grandison. The second is the best, and all 
 are celebrated for their subtle and tender drawing of 
 the human heart. They are novels of Sentiment; and 
 their intense minuteness of detail gives them reality. 
 Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett followed him 
 with the novel of Real life, full of events, adventures, 
 fun^ and vivid painting of various- kinds of life in 
 
H 
 
 'i I 
 
 [chap. 
 
 'ith its 
 [e told 
 
 ontes- 
 
 mbert, 
 
 Jed the 
 
 fnglish 
 
 to the 
 
 le fresh 
 
 and 
 
 ipulse 
 
 along 
 general 
 le time 
 erature 
 
 rkable. 
 ks have 
 J novels 
 ; novel 
 ove and 
 mber ol 
 
 on one 
 y about 
 
 at any 
 e whole 
 it as its 
 produc- 
 readers, 
 ^e, wrote 
 
 Pamela 
 1.8), and 
 , and all 
 iwing of 
 jnt; and 
 
 reality, 
 ^ed him 
 entures, 
 
 life iu 
 
 vn.] PKOSE FROM GEORGE III. TO VICTORIA, 129 
 
 England. Fielding began \\\\h/oseJ>h Andreivs ( 1 742), 
 Smollett with Roderick Random (i 748). lio^li wrote 
 many other stories, but in truth of representation of 
 common life, and in the natural growth and winding 
 up of the stoiy, Fielding's Tom Jones (1749) is our 
 English masterpiece and model. Ten years thus suf- 
 ficed to create an entirely new literature. Laurence 
 Sterne, in his Tristram SJbandy^ (1759) introduced 
 the novel of Character in which events are few. His 
 peculiar vein of labyrinthine humour and falsetto 
 sentiment has been imitated, but never attained. 
 We mention Johnson's Rasselas (1759) as the first 
 of our Didactic tales, and the Fool of Quality^ by 
 Henry lirooke, as the first of our Theological tales. 
 Under George III. new forms of fiction appeared — 
 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield (i^j 66) was the first, 
 and perhaps the most charming, of all those novels 
 which we may call Idyllic, which describe the loves 
 and the simple lives of country people in country 
 scenery. Miss Burney's Evelina (1778) and Cecilia 
 were the first novels of Society. Mrs. Inchbald's 
 Siinfh Story (1791) introduced the novel of Passion, 
 and Mrs. Radcliffe, in her wild and picturesque tales, 
 the Romantic novel. The interest kindled in political 
 questions by the French Revolution showed itself in 
 another, class of novels, and the Political stories of 
 Holcroft and William. Godwin opened a new realm 
 to the novelist, while the latter excluded love alto- 
 gether from his story of Caleb Williams, Mrs. Opie 
 made Domestic life the sphere of her graceful and 
 pathetic stories (1806). Miss Edgeworth, in her Irish 
 stories, gave the first impulse to the novel of National 
 character, and in her other tales to the novel with a 
 Moral purpose (1801-1811). Miss Austen, with " an 
 exquisite touch which renders commonplace things 
 and characters interesting from truth of description 
 and sentiment," produced the best stories we have 
 of Everyday English society. Sense and Sensibility^ 
 
 
 «1^ 
 
 i I' 
 
 \ 
 
 \ 
 
 •i'1> 
 
 a- 
 
 •1 
 
 \i 
 
 ^v; .*.•', 
 
 1 
 
 ,!* ii 
 
I jo 
 
 ENG'USII LlfEkATUk}^, 
 
 tdttXfi 
 
 1^' 
 
 t 
 
 ■Fi; 
 
 Pride and Prejudice^ Emma^ Mansfield Park^ and 
 Fersuasi^^ were all written between 1811 and 181 7. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, the great Enchanter, now began 
 the long series of his novels. Men are still alive who 
 well remember the wonder and delight of the land 
 when Waverley (18 14) was published. In the rapidity 
 of his work Scott recalls the Elizabethan time. Guy 
 Afanneringj his next tale, was written in six weeks. 
 The Bride of Lammermoorj as great in fateful pathos 
 as Romeo and Juliet , was done in a fortnight. His 
 National tales, such as The Heart of Midlothian, and 
 jthe Antiquary^ are written as if he saw directly all 
 the characters and scenes, and when he saw them 
 enjoyed t^^em so much that he could not helj) writing 
 them dowi:. And the art with which this was done 
 was so inspired, that since Shakespeare there is 
 nothing we can compare to it. " All is great in the 
 Waverley Novels," says Goethe, "material, effects, 
 characters, execution." In the vivid portraiture and 
 dramatic telling of such tales as Kenilworth and Quentin 
 Durivard, he created the Historical Novel. His 
 last tale of power was the Fair Maid of Perth in 
 1828; his last effort in 1831 was made the ye.ir 
 before he died. He raised the whole of the lite- 
 rature of the novel into one of the greatest inHu- 
 ences that bear on the human mind. The words 
 his uncle once said to him, may be applied to the 
 work he did, — *' God bless thee, Walter, my man 1 
 Thou hast risen to be great, but thou wast always 
 good." 
 
 John Gait and Miss Ferrier followed him in de- 
 scribing Scottish life and society. With the peace 
 of 18 1 5 arose new forms of fiction, and travel, which 
 became very popular when the close of the war with 
 Napoleon opened the world again to Englishmen, 
 gave birth to the tale of Foreign scenery and manners. 
 Thomas Hope's Anastasius (1819) was the first. Lock- 
 bart began the Classical novel in Valerius, Fashionable 
 
and 
 
 817. 
 egan 
 
 e who 
 land 
 
 pidity 
 Guy 
 
 weeks. 
 
 pathos 
 
 . His 
 
 ;;;, and 
 
 ctly all 
 kv them 
 
 writing 
 is done 
 there is 
 t in the 
 
 effects, 
 ^ure and 
 [ Quentin 
 ^el. His 
 Perth in 
 the ye.^r 
 the litt- 
 est influ- 
 le words 
 :d to the 
 ny man ! 
 5t always 
 
 m in de- 
 he peace 
 el, which 
 war with 
 glishmen, 
 manners. 
 }t. Lock- 
 shionabte 
 
 Vtl.] PMSk FkOM GkOkGB in. TO VICTORIA, IJt 
 
 society was now painted by Theodore Hook, Mrs. 
 TroUope, and Mrs. Gjre; and Rural life by Misa 
 Mitfordin Our Village. Edward Bulwer Lytton began 
 with the Fashionable novel in Pelham (1827), and fol- 
 lowed it with a long succession of tales on historical, 
 classical, and romantic subjects. Towards the close 
 of his life, he changed his manner altogether, and Ihe 
 Caxtons and those that followed are novels of Modern 
 Society. The tone of them all from the beginning 
 to the end is too high-pitched for real life, but each 
 of them being kept in the same key throughout has 
 a reality of its own. Charlotte BRONTii revived in 
 /ane Eyre the novel of Passion, and Miss Yonge set 
 on foot the Religious novel in support of a si)ecial 
 school of theology. We need only mention Captain 
 Marryatt, whose delightful sea stories carry on the 
 seamen of Smollett to our own times. Miss Martineaii 
 and Mr. Disraeli continued the novel of Politicnl 
 opinion and economy, and Charles Kingsley applied 
 the novel'.to the social and theological problems of our 
 own day* Three other great names are too close to us 
 to admit of comment : Charles Dickens, William M. 
 Thackeray, and the novelist who is known as George 
 Eliot. It will be seen then that the Novel cbims 
 almost every sphere of human interest as its own, 
 and it has this special character, that it is the only 
 kind of literature in which women have done ex- 
 cellently. 
 
 125. History, to which we now turn, was raised 
 into the rank of literature in the latter half of the 
 eighteenth century by three men. David Hume's 
 History of England^ finished 1761, is, in the import- 
 ance it gives to letters, in its clear narrative and 
 style, and in the writer's endeavour to make it a 
 philosophic whole, our first literary history. Of Dr. 
 Robertson's Histories of Scotland^ of Charles V., and 
 of Americay the two last are literary by their descrip- 
 Uv^ aud popular atyle, and show how our Jiistorical 
 
 I a ' 
 
 11 
 
 I ' 
 
 It' 
 
 
 14* 
 
 »..«, ■•• . 
 
I 
 
 \ 
 
 119 
 
 B:mUsH LTTMRA TVRE, 
 
 \t'Ak>i 
 
 interests Were reaching beyond our own land. Edward 
 Gibbon excelled the others in his Deciim and Fall 
 of the Roman Empire^ completed in 1788. The 
 execution of his work was as accurate and exhaus- 
 tive as a scientific treatise. Gibbon's conception of 
 the whole subject was as poetical as a great picture. 
 Rome, eastern and westc ..1, was painted in the centre, 
 dying slowly like a lion. Around it he pictured all 
 the nations and hordes that wrought its ruin, told 
 their stories from the beginning, and the results on 
 themselves and on the world of their victories over 
 Rome. The collecting and use of every detail of the 
 art and costume and manners of the times he de- 
 scribed^ "he reading and use of all the contemporary 
 literature, the careful geographical detail, the mar« 
 shalling of all this information with his facts, the great 
 iraaginati 7e conception of the work as a whole, and 
 the use of a full and perhaps too heightened style to 
 add importance to the subject, gave a new impulse 
 and a new model to historical literature. The con- 
 temptuous tone of the book is made still more re- 
 markable by the heavily-laden style, and the mono- 
 tonous balance of every sentence. The bias Gibbon 
 bad against Christianity illustrates a common fault ol 
 historians. The historical value of Hume's history 
 was spoiled by his personal dislike of the principles 
 of our Revolution. W. Mitford's History of Greece^ 
 completed in 18 10, is made untrue by his hatred of a 
 democracy; and Dr. Lingard's excellent History of 
 England, 18 19, is influenced by his dislike of the 
 Reformation. Henky Hallam was the first who 
 wrote history in this country with so careful a love of 
 truth, and with so accurate a judgment of the relative 
 value of facts and things, that prejudice was ex- 
 cluded. His Europe during the Middle Ages, 18 j8, 
 and his Literature of Europe, 1837-8, are distinguished 
 for their exhaustive and judicia;l summing up of facts ; 
 fUid his Constitutional History of England, 1827, set 
 
 
^VARD 
 Fall 
 The 
 
 :baus- 
 ion of 
 icture. 
 :entre, 
 fed all 
 told 
 ilts on 
 over 
 of the 
 he de- 
 iporary 
 e mar« 
 le great 
 )le, and 
 style to 
 impulse 
 he con- 
 lore re- 
 : mono- 
 Gibbon 
 fault ol 
 history 
 ■inciples 
 ^ Greece^ 
 red of a 
 istory of 
 of the 
 rst who 
 L love of 
 I relative 
 was ex- 
 s, 1818, 
 iguished 
 of facts ; 
 827, set 
 
 TO.] PROSE FROM GEORGE III TO VICTORIA. 133 
 
 on foot a new kind of history in the best way. Our 
 own history now engaged a number of writers. Lord 
 Macau lay's great work told the story of the Revolu- 
 tion of 1688 in a style sometimes too emphatic, often 
 monotonous from its mannerism, but always clear. 
 Its vivid word-painting of characters and great events, 
 and the splendid use in such descriptions of his vast 
 knowledge of details, gave as great an impulse to the 
 literature of history as Gibbon had done in his day, 
 and his Historical Essays on the times and statesmen 
 between the Restoration and Pitt are masterpieces of 
 their kind. 
 
 Sir Francis Palgrave gave interest to the study of 
 the early English period, and in our own day, a 
 critical English history school has arisen, of which Mr. 
 Freeman and Professor Stubbs are the leaders. 
 
 As the interest in the history of our own land in- 
 creased, our interest in the history of the world in- 
 creased. Dean Milman's History of Latin Christianity 
 well deserves, by its brilliant and romantic style, the 
 title of fine literature. Greece old and new found her 
 best historians in Bishop Thirlwall, George Grote, and 
 Mr. Finlay ; Rome in Dr. Arnold. The history of 
 events near at hand on the Continent was also taken 
 up with care. Among the books of this class, I 
 mention, for their special literary character and style, 
 Sir William Napier's History of the Peninsular War^ 
 and Thomas Q2Ay\€% History of the Freiich RevoltUion,^ 
 Both are written in too poetic prose, and the latter is a" 
 kind of epic, and full of his reaUstic, fantastic, and un- 
 equal power of representing persons and things. With 
 him we close this account of historical literature, and 
 return to the eighteenth century. 
 
 126. Biography and Travel are linked at many 
 
 points to History. The first was lifted into a higher 
 
 place in Hterature by Johnson's Lives of the PoetSy 
 
 1779-81, and hy BoswelPs Life of Johnson^ i79i' Since 
 
 %^\ time 9 multitude of biographies h^ve poured frow 
 
 •^1 
 
 IH I 
 
 t 
 
 \^^ 
 
 
 \k 
 
 
 ■I 
 
 
134 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [CHAIP. 
 
 - 1 
 
 the press, and have formed useful materials for his- 
 tory. Few of them have reached literary excellence. 
 Southey's Life of Nelsofi^ Lockhart's Life of Scott^ 
 Moore's Life of Lord Byroji ; or in our own days, 
 Forster's Life of Goldsmith^ and Dean Stanley's Life 
 of Artiold^ rise out of a crowd of inferior books. 
 
 The production of books of Travel since James 
 Bruce left for Africa in 1762 till the present day has 
 increased as rapidly almost as that of the Novel, and 
 there is scarcely any part of the world that has not 
 been visited and described. In this way a vast amount 
 of materials has been collected for the use of philoso- 
 phers, poets, and historians. Travel has rarely pro- 
 duced literature, but it has been one of its assistants. 
 
 127. Theological Literature received a new im- 
 pulse in 1738-91 from the evangelising work of John 
 Wesley and Whitfield; and their spiritual followers, 
 John Scott, Newton, and Cecil made by their writ- 
 ings the Evangelical school. William Paley, in his 
 Evidences y and Sydney Smith, well known as a wit 
 and an essayist, defended Christianity from the com- 
 mon-sense point of view ; while the sermons of Robert 
 Hall and of Dr. Chalmers are, in different ways, fine 
 examples of devotional and philosophical eloquence. 
 
 The decay of the Evangelical school was hastened 
 by the writings of Coleridge, whose religious philo- 
 sophy, in the Aids to Reflection and other books, 
 created the school which has been called the Broad 
 Church. Dr. Arnold's sermons supplied it with an 
 element of masculine good sense. Frederick Maurice 
 in his numerous woAs added to it mystical piety and 
 one-sided learning, Charles Kingsley a rough and 
 ready power, and Frederick Robertson gave it passion, 
 sentiment, subtilty, and a fine form. At the same 
 time that Maurice began to write (1830-32) the com- 
 mon-sense school of theology was continued by Arch- 
 bishop Whately's works ; and in strong reaction against 
 ttie llvangelicals, the High Church party rose intp 
 
i i-1 
 
 [chap. 
 
 3r his- 
 
 llence. 
 
 ScoHf 
 
 days, 
 
 s Life 
 
 James 
 ay has 
 el, and 
 as not 
 tmount 
 >hiloso- 
 ly pro- 
 itants. 
 lew im- 
 f John 
 lowers, 
 r writ- 
 in his 
 5 a wit 
 e corn- 
 Robert 
 ys, fine 
 lence. 
 istened 
 
 1 philo- 
 books, 
 Broad 
 
 i^ith an 
 laurice 
 ety and 
 jh and 
 lassion, 
 
 2 same 
 2 com- 
 r Arch- 
 against 
 
 5e iotQ 
 
 VII.] PROSE FJiOM GEORGE III. TO VICTORIA, 13.5 
 
 prominence in Oxford, and was chiefly supported 
 by the tracts and sermons of John Henry Newman, 
 whose work, with Keble's Christian Year, a collection 
 of exquisitely wrought hymns, belongs to literature. 
 
 128. Philosophical and Political Literature 
 were both stimulated by the great movement of thought 
 on all subjects pertaining to the natural rights of man, 
 which was led by Voltaire and Rousseau. In philosophy 
 the historian David Hume (1738— 1755) led the way, 
 and the transparent clearness of his style gave full 
 force to opinions which made utility the only measure 
 of virtue, and the knowledge of our ignorance the 
 only certain knowledge. An eloquent school of Scotch 
 metaphysicians came after him, and for the most 
 part opposed the ideal system on which Hume had 
 founded his famous argument on causation. Dr. Reid, 
 Dr. Stewart, and Dr. Brown carried this school on to 
 1820. The Utilitarian view of morals was put forth with 
 great power by Jeremy Bentham, and in our own day by 
 John Stuart Mill, whose name, with Sir W. Hamilton's 
 and Professor Whewell's, belongs to the literature of 
 philosophy. The philosophy of Jurisprudence may 
 be said to have been founded by Jeremy Benthali, 
 and law was for the first time made a little clear to 
 common minds by Blackstone's Commentaries. 
 
 129. In political literature, Edmund Burke 
 is our greatest, almost our only, writer of this time. 
 From 1756 to 1797, when he died, his treatises and 
 speeches proved their right to the title of literature by 
 their extraordinary influence on the country. Philo- 
 sophical reasoning and poetic passion were wedded 
 together in them on the side of conservatism, and 
 every art of eloquence was used with the maslery that 
 imagination gives. His Thoughts on the Cause of the 
 Present Discontents, i773) was perhaps the best of his 
 works in point of style. The Reflectio7is on the French 
 Revolution, 1790, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace, 
 X796-7, were the moot powerful. The first of thcso 
 
 
 «f 1 
 
 \ \, 
 
 i 
 
 ,1; , 
 
 I 
 
 I ■ 
 
 m 
 
 
 4fi 
 
 iJt'J 
 
 'I 
 
 
 
13^ 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 {chap. 
 
 •.ft; 
 
 two spread all over England a terror of the principles 
 of the Revolution ; the second increased the eager- 
 ness of England to carry on the war with France. 
 All his work is more literature than oratory. Many of 
 his speeches enthralled their hearers, but many more 
 put them .to sleep. The very men, however, who 
 slept under him in the House read over and over 
 again the same speech when published with renewed 
 delight. Goldsmith's praise of him — that he " wound 
 himself into his subject like a serpent" — gives the 
 reason why he sometimes failed as an orator, why he 
 always succeeded as a writer. 
 
 130. Before Burke, a new class f political writings 
 had arisen which concerned thei elves with social 
 and ecofiomical reform. Th immense increase 
 of the industry, wealth, and commerce of the country 
 from 1720 to 1770, aroused inqu-iry into the laws that 
 regulate wealth, and Adam Smith, a professor at 
 Glasgow, w4io had in 1759 written his book on the 
 Moral SmtimmtSy published in 1776 the Wealth of 
 Nations, By its theory, that labour is the source of 
 wealth, and that to give the labourer absolute freedom 
 to pursue his own interest in his own way is the best 
 means of in^^reasing the wealth of the country ; by its 
 proof that all laws made to restrain, or to shape, or to 
 promote commerce, were stumbling-blocks in the way 
 of the weahh of any state, he created the Science of 
 Political Economy, and started the theory and practice 
 of Free Trade. All the questior^s of labour and capital 
 were now placed on a scientific basis, and since that 
 time the Hterature of the whole of the subject has en- 
 gaged great thinkers. Connected with this were all the 
 writings on the subjects of the poor, and educatioiiy 
 and reform. The Methodist movement gave the 
 first impulse to popular education, and stirred men 
 to take interest in the cause of the pool. This new 
 philanthropy, stirred still more by the theories of the 
 French Revolution concerning the right pf naen to 
 
 ■•m\ 
 
ICHAP. 
 
 [iciples 
 eager- 
 i'rance. 
 [any of 
 yr more 
 r, who 
 i over 
 inewed 
 wound 
 '■es the 
 why he 
 
 I'ritings 
 social 
 [icrease 
 :ountry 
 ws that 
 ssor at 
 on the 
 'ulth of 
 rce of 
 eedom 
 e best 
 ; by its 
 , or to 
 he way 
 jnce of 
 )ractice 
 capital 
 ce that 
 has en- 
 all the 
 HcattoUy 
 ve the 
 d men 
 lis new 
 of the 
 
 VII.] PROSE FROM GEORGE IIL TO VICTORIA. I37 
 
 freedom and equality, took up the subjects of slavery^ 
 of prison reform, of the emancipation of the Catholics, 
 and of a wider representation of the people, and their 
 literature fills a large space till 1832, when Reform 
 brought forward new subjects, and the old subjects 
 under new forms. 
 
 131. Miscellaneous Literature. — During the 
 whole of this time, from the days of Johnson till 1832, 
 the finer literature of prose had flourished. With 
 Samuel Johnson began the literary man euch as we 
 know him in modern times, who, independent of 
 patronage or party, lives by his pen, and finds in the 
 public his only paymaster. His celebrated letter to 
 Lord Chesterfield gave the death-blow to patronage. 
 The great Dictionary of the English Language^ i755> 
 at which he worked unhelped, and which he published 
 without support, was the first book that appealed 
 solely to the public. He represents thus a new class. 
 But he was also the last representative of the literary 
 king who, like Dryden and Pope, held a kind of court 
 in London. When he died (1784) London was no 
 longer the only literary centre, and poetry and prose 
 were produced from all parts of the country. 
 
 The miscellaneous literature of the latter half of 
 the eighteenth century^ passing over Johnson and 
 Goldsmith, whom we have already touched on, includes 
 the admirable Letters of Gray the poet; Thomas 
 Warton's History of English Poetry which founded 
 a new school of poetic criticism ; the many collections 
 of periodical essays all of which ceased in 1787 ; 
 Burke's Liquify mto the Origin of our Ideas of the 
 Sublime and Beautiful; and the Letters of Junius, 
 political invectives written in a st} le which has pre- 
 served them to this day. 
 
 The miscellaneous literature of the early part of 
 the nineteenth century took mainly the form of long 
 essays, most of which were originally published in 
 tb^ R^vi^w.^ ^n4 Ma^azines^ \% was in Blc^ki/i^qgi^^ 
 
 i« 'I' 
 
 '"1 \ 
 
 
 
 fNli 
 
'1'! 
 
 
 
 138 ENGLISH LITERATUKR. < -', [CHAP. 
 
 Magazine that Christopher North (Professor Wilson) 
 published the Ncctes Amhrosianco — lively conversations 
 that treated of all the topic < of the day. It was in the 
 JEdinburgh Review that Macaulay and Sydney Smith 
 and Jeffrey wrote essays on literature, politics, 
 and philosophy. It was in Fraser's Magazine that 
 Thomas Carlyle first came before the public with 
 Sartor Resartus and the Lectures on Heroes, books 
 which gave an entirely new impulse to the generation 
 in which we live. Of all these miscellaneous writers, 
 Carlyle was the most original, and Thomas De Quin- 
 cey the greatest writer of English prose. De Quincey's 
 style has so peculiar a quaUty that it stands alone. 
 The sentences are built up like passages in a fugue; 
 and there is nothing in English Literature which can 
 be compared in involved melody to the prose of the 
 Confessions of an Efi^^ish Opium Eater. One man 
 alone in our own day is as great a master of English 
 prose, John Ruskin. He has created a new literature, 
 that of art, and all the subjects related to it ; and the 
 work he has done has more genius and is more original 
 than any other prose work of our time. Some of De 
 Quincey's best work was done on the lives of the poets 
 of his day; and indeed a great part of the miscellaneous 
 literature consisted of Criticistn on poetry, past and 
 present. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Campbell 
 carried on that study of the Elizabethan and earlier 
 poetry which Warton had begun in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury. Wordsworth wrote admirable prose on poetry, 
 and the prose of his Essays just now published, es- 
 pecially of that on the Cotivention of Cintra, is quite 
 stately. W. Hazlitt, W. S. Land or, Jeffrey, and a 
 host of others added to the literature of criticism, and 
 the ceaseless discussion of the works of the poets 
 made them the foremost literary figures of the day. It 
 is the work of the poets that we now take up, and 
 in tracing it from the time of Pope to 18^2 we shall 
 
 m 
 m 
 
"^^ 
 
 [chap. 
 
 Wilson) 
 rsations 
 LS in the 
 ^ Smith 
 politics, 
 me that 
 (lie with 
 , books 
 neration 
 ; writers, 
 le Quin- 
 
 aiNCEY'S 
 
 Is alone, 
 a fugue-, 
 liich can 
 je of the 
 Dne man 
 : English 
 iterature, 
 
 and the 
 e original 
 me of De 
 the poets 
 ellaneous 
 past and 
 
 ampbell 
 id earlier 
 ;enth cen- 
 n poetry, 
 ished, es' 
 is quite 
 y, and a 
 cism, and 
 the poets 
 le day. It 
 ; up, and 
 
 we shall 
 
 Vin.1 " POETRY FROM 1730 TO 183a. I39 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 POETRY, FROM 173O TO 1 832. 
 
 Ramsay's Genfle Shepherd^ 1725' — Thomson's Seasons, 1730. 
 —Gray and Collins, Poems, 1746T7 57- — Goldsmith's 
 Traveller, 1764.— Chatterton's Poems, 1770- — Blake's 
 Poems, 1777-1794.— Crabbe's Village, 1783-— Cowper's 
 Task, 1785.— Burns's first Poems, 1786- — Campbell's 
 Pleasures of Hope, 1799. — Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, 
 1798 ; his Prelude, 1806 ; Excursion, 1814.— Coleridge's 
 Christabel,\^'^^. — Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, Mar- 
 mion. Lady of the Lake, 1805-8-10. — V>yxovi% Poems, 1807- 
 1823.— Shelley's Poems, 1813-1821.— Keats' Poems, 1817- 
 1820.— Tennyson's /^^/ Poems, 1830- 
 
 132. The Elements and Forms of the New 
 Poetry. — The poetry we are now to study may be 
 divided into two pa-iods. The first dates from about 
 the middle of Pope's life, and closes with the pub- 
 lication of Cowper's Task^ 1785; the second begins 
 with the Task and closes in 1832. The first is not 
 wrongly called a time of transition. The influence 
 of the poetry of the past lasted ; new elements were 
 added to poetry, and new forms of it took shape. 
 There was a change also in the style and in the 
 subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall bring 
 together the various poetical works of this period. 
 
 (i.) The influence of the didactic end satirical poetry 
 of the critical school lingered among the new ele- 
 ments which I shall notice. It is found in Johnson's 
 two satires on the manners of his time, the London^ 
 1738, and the Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749; in 
 Robert Blair's dull poem of The Grave, 1743; in 
 Edward Young's Night Thoughts, 1743, a poem 
 on the immortality of the soul, and in his satires on 
 The U7iiversal Passioji of Fame; in the tame 
 WprH Qf Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend } ?t|l4 
 
 
 ■<^ 
 
 
 'i 
 
 •v 
 
 ^^ 
 
uo 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [CHAF. 
 
 
 in the short-lived but vigorous satires of Charles 
 Churchill, who died in 1764, twenty .years after 
 Savage. The Pleasures of the Imagination^ I744) 
 by Mark Akenside, belongs also in spirit to the time 
 of Queen Anne, and was suggested by Addison's 
 essays in the Spectator on imagination. 
 
 (2.) The study of the Greek and Latin classics re- 
 vived^ and with it a more artistic poetry. Not only 
 correct form, for which Pope sought, but beautiful 
 form also was sought after. Men like Thomas Gray 
 and WiuJAM Collins strove to pour into their work 
 that simplicity of beauty which the Greek poets 
 and Italians like Petrarca had reached as the last 
 result of genius restrained by art. Their poems, pub- 
 lished between 1746 and 1757, are exquisite examples 
 of perfectly English work wrought in the spirit of 
 classic art. They remain apart as a unique type of 
 poetry. The refined workmanship of these poets, their 
 manner of blending together natural feeling and natural 
 scenery, their studious care in the choice of words 
 are worthy of special study. 
 
 (3.) The study of the Elizabethan and the earlier poets 
 like Chaucer^ and of the whole course of poetry in 
 England^ was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare 
 and Chaucer had engaged both Dry den and Pope ; 
 but the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray like 
 Pope projected a history of English poetry, and his 
 Ode on the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new 
 interest. Thomas Warton wrote his History of English 
 Poetry^ 1774-78, and in doing so gave fresh material 
 to the poets. They began to take delight in the 
 childlikeness and naturalness of Chaucer as 'dis- 
 tinguished from the artificial and critical verse of the 
 school of Pope. Shakespeare was studied in a more 
 accurate way. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas Han- 
 mer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were 
 svicgq^d^d by Johnson's in i^6§ \ and G^rrigtf t^Q ^ctQr 
 
[chap. 
 
 Charles 
 sars after 
 
 ?;/, 1744, 
 ) the time 
 Addison's 
 
 '/assies re- 
 Not only 
 
 beautiful 
 MAS Gray 
 heir work 
 2ek poets 
 s the last 
 )ems, pub- 
 ! examples 
 e spirit of 
 le type of 
 >oets, their 
 ,nd natural 
 
 of words 
 
 tr Her poets 
 poetry in 
 iake:peare 
 md Pope ; 
 Gray like 
 y, and his 
 this new 
 of English 
 h material 
 ht in the 
 as dis- 
 rse of the 
 in a more 
 mas Han- 
 Deare were 
 
 Vllt.l 
 
 PO^TkV FkOM 1730 TO 18^2. 
 
 t4t 
 
 c gan the restoration of the genuine text of Shake- 
 speare's plays for the stage. 
 
 Spenser formed the spirit and work of some 
 poets, and T. Warton wrote an essay on the Faerie 
 Queen. William ^htnstoxio^s Schoolmistress^ 1742, was 
 one of these Spenserian poems, and so was the Castle 
 of Indolence, 1748, by James Thomson author of the 
 Seasons. James Beattie, in the Minstrel, 1774, a 
 didactic poem, followed the stanza and manner of 
 Spenser. 
 
 (4.) A new element — interest in the romantic past 
 — was added by the publication of Dr. Percy's 
 E cliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765. The nar- 
 rative ballad and the narrative romance, afterwards 
 taken up and perfected by Sir Walter Scott, now struck 
 their roots afresh in English poetry. Men began ta 
 seek among the ruder times of history for wild, 
 natural stories of human life ; and the pleasure in 
 these increased and accompanied the growing love of 
 lonely, even of savage scenery. The Ossian, 1762, 
 of James Macpherson, which gave itself out as a 
 translation of Gaelic epic poems, is an example of 
 this new element. Still more remarkable in this way 
 were the poems of Thomas Chatterton, the * mar- 
 vellous boy,' who died by his own hand in 1770, at 
 the age of seventeen. They were imitations of old 
 poetry. He pretended to have discovered in a muni- 
 ment room at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdin 
 md other poems by an imaginary monk named Thomas 
 Rowley. Written with quaint spelling, and with a 
 great deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them 
 a great controversy. I may mention as an instance 
 of the same tendency, even before the Reliques, Gray's 
 translations from the Norse and British poetry, and 
 his poem of the Bard in which the bards of Wales 
 arc celebrated. i 
 
 133. Change of Style, — ^We have seen how the 
 natural style of the Elizabethan poets had ended by 
 
 "1 I 
 
 II I 
 
 I'. 
 ll 
 
 \^. 
 
 fl- 
 
 \- llli 
 
t4£ 
 
 ENGltSff UTERATURE, 
 
 tcttAP. 
 
 producing an unnatural style. In reaction from thi& 
 the critical poets set aside natural feeling as having 
 nothing to do with the expression of thought in verse, 
 and wrote according to rules of art which they had 
 painfully worked out. Their style in doing this lost life 
 and fire ; and losing these, lost art which has its roots 
 in emotion, and gained artifice which has its roots 
 in intellectual analysis. Being un warmed by any 
 natural feeling it became as unnatural, considered as 
 a poetic style, as mat of tl e later Elizabethan poets. 
 We may sum up then the whole history of the style 
 of poetry from Elizabeth to George I. — the style of 
 the first-rate poets being excepted — in these words : 
 Nature without Arty and Art without Nature^ ha-d 
 reached similar but not identical results in style. 
 But in the process two things had been learned. 
 First, that artistic rules were necessary and secondly, 
 that natural feeling was necessary, in order that poetry 
 should have a style fitted to express nobly tlie emo- 
 tions and thoughts of man. The way was therefore 
 now made ready for a style in which t^.e Art should 
 itself be Nature, and it sprang at once into being 
 in the work of the poets of this time. The style of 
 Gray and Collins is polished to the finest point, and 
 yet is instinct with natural feeling. Goldsmith is 
 natural even to simplicity, and yet his verse is even 
 more accurate than Pope's. Cowper's style, in such 
 poerr>s as the Lines to his Mother's Picture, and in 
 lyrics like the Loss of the Royal George^ arises out of 
 the simplest pathos, and yet is as pure in expression 
 as Greek poetry. The work was then done ; but as 
 yet the element of fervent passion did not enter 
 into poetry. We shall see how that came in after 
 1789- 
 
 134. Change of Subject. — Nature. — ^We have 
 said at the beginning of this Prirner that poets worked 
 on two great subjects, — Man and Nature. Up to th'* age 
 of Pope the subject of Man v;aa alone treated, and we 
 
i m i I n >ii> ' i» , 
 
 tcttAl>. 
 
 'onl this 
 i having 
 in verse, 
 hey had 
 s lost Ufe 
 its roots 
 its roots 
 by any 
 dered as 
 m poets, 
 the style 
 ; style of 
 s words : 
 ture^ ha-d 
 in style. 
 learned, 
 secondly, 
 lat poetry 
 the emo- 
 therefore 
 rt should 
 ito being 
 z style of 
 )oint, and 
 dsmith is 
 ;e is even 
 -, in such 
 ■^, and in 
 ses out of 
 ixpression 
 e; but as 
 not enter 
 in after 
 
 -We have 
 ts worked 
 to th'^ age 
 :d, and we 
 
 Vlii.] 
 
 Pd^TRV Pl^OM 1730 TO 1832. 
 
 t43 
 
 have seen how many phases it went through. There 
 remained the subject of Nature and of man's relation 
 to it ; that is, of the visible landscape, sea, and sky, 
 and all that men feel in contact with them. Natural 
 scenery had been hitherto only used as a background 
 to the picture of human life. It now began to take 
 a much larger place in peltry and after a time grew to 
 occupy a distinct place of its own apart from Man. 
 It is the growth of this new subject which will engage 
 us now. 
 
 135. The Poetry of Natural Description.— 
 We have found already traces in the poets of a pleasure 
 in rural things and the emotions they awakened. This 
 appears chiefly among the Puritans, who because they 
 hated the politics of the Stuarts before the civil war 
 and the corruption of the court after it, lived apart 
 from the town in quietude. The best natural descrip- 
 tion we have before the time of Pope is that of two 
 Puritans, Marvel and Milton. But the first poem 
 devoted to natural description appeared while Pope 
 was yet alive in the very midst of a vigorous town 
 poetry. It was'the SeasojiSy 1726-30 ; and it is curious, 
 remembering what I have said about the peculiar 
 turn of the Scotch for natural description, that it 
 was the work of James Thomson, a Scotchman. It 
 described the scenery and country life of Spring, Sum- 
 mer, Autumn, and Winter. He wrote with his eye upon 
 their scenery, and even when he wrote of it in his 
 room, it was with " a recollected love." 1 he de- 
 scriptions were too much like catalogues, the very fault 
 of the previous Scotch poets, and his style wajs always 
 heavy and often cold, but he was the first poet who led 
 the English people into that new world of nature in 
 poetry, which has moved and enchanted us in the 
 work of Words.worth, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson, 
 but which was entirely impossible for Pope to under- 
 stand. The impulse he gave was soon followed. Men 
 left ^he town to visit the country and record their 
 
 *% 
 
 <'l 
 
 P 
 
 It 
 
 •■If. 
 
 W 
 
 titll: 
 
 1 
 
 If 
 
144 
 
 EMGUsn UTERATURE, 
 
 [c^MAP. 
 
 It ) 
 
 
 ■1.1 
 
 1 
 
 feelings. William Sonerville's Chase^ 1735, and John 
 Dyer's Grongar Hill, 1726, a descri^3tion of a journey 
 in South Wales, and \\\'i Fleece, i757» iire full of country 
 sights and scenes : even Akenside mingled his spurious 
 philosophy with pictures of solitary natural scenery. 
 
 Foreign travel now enlarged the love of nature. 
 Gray's letters, some of the best in the English language, 
 describe natural scenery with a minuteness quite new 
 in English Literature. In his poetry he used the de- 
 scription of nature as " its most graceful ornament," but 
 never made it the subject. In the ELgy in a Country 
 Cfiunhyard^ and in the Ode on a Distant Prospect oj 
 Eton College, natural scenery is interwoven with reflec- 
 tions on human life, and used to point its moral. 
 Collins observes the same method in his Oile on the 
 Passions and the Ode to Evening. There is then as 
 yet nx) love of nature for its own sake. A further step 
 was made by Oliver Goldsmith in his Traveller, 
 1764, a sketch of national manners and governments, 
 and in his Deserted Village, 1770. He describes na- 
 tural scenery with less emotion than Collins, and does 
 not moralize it Hke Gray. The scenes he paints are 
 pure pictures, and he has no personal interest in them. 
 The next steo was made by men like the two Wartons 
 and by John Logan, 1782. Their poems do not speak 
 of nature and human life, but of nature and them- 
 selves. They see the reflection of their own joys and 
 sorrows in the woods and streams, and for the first 
 time the pleasure of being alone with nature apart from 
 men became a distinct element in modern poetry. In 
 the later poets it becomes one of their main subjects. 
 These were the steps towards that love of nature for its 
 own sake which we shall find in the poets who followed 
 Cowper. One poem of the time almost anticipates it 
 It is the Minstrel, 177 1, of Thomas Beattie. This 
 poem represents a young poet educated almost alto- 
 gether by lonely communion with and love of nature, 
 «nd both in the spirit and treatment of the first part of 
 
VIII.] 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 183a. 
 
 X45 
 
 the story resembles very closely Wordsworth's descrip- 
 tion of his own education by nature in the beginning 
 of the Freiude^ and the history of the pedler 'v\ the first 
 book of the Excursion. 
 
 136. Further Change of Subject — Man. — 
 During this time the interest in Mankind, that is, in 
 Man independent of nation, class and caste, wliich we 
 have seen in prose, and which was stimulated by the 
 works of Voltaire and Rousseau, began to influence 
 poetry. It broke out into a fierce extreme in the French 
 Revolution, but long before that event it entered into 
 poetry in various ways as it had entered into society 
 and politics. One form of it appeared in the interest 
 the poets began to take in men of other nations than 
 England \ another form of it — and this was increased 
 by the Methodist revival — was the interest in the lives 
 of the poor. Thomson speaks with sympathy of the 
 Siberian exile and the Mecca pilgrim, and the Trav- 
 vdler of Goldsmith enters into foreign interests. His 
 Deserted Village^ Shenstone's Schoolmistress ^ Gray's 
 Elegy celebrate the annals of the poor. Michael 
 Bruce in his Lochlroen praises the " secret prim- 
 rose path of rural life," and Dr. John Langhorne 
 in his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor 
 and paints their sorrows. Connected with this new 
 element is ^he simple ballad of simple love, such as 
 Shenstone's Jemmy Dawson^ Mickle's Mariner's Wife, 
 Goldsmith's Edwin and Angelina, poems which started 
 a new type of human poetry, afterwards worked out 
 more completely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth. 
 In a class apart I call attention to the Song of David, 
 a long poem written by Christopher Smart, a friend 
 of Johnson's. It will be found in Chambers' " Cyclo- 
 paedia of English Literature." Composed for the 
 most part in a madhouse, the song has a touch here 
 aHd there of the overforcefulness and the lapsing 
 thoughts of a half insane brain. But its power of 
 metre and of imaginative presentation of thoughts and 
 
 1 1 
 
 i 
 
 I 
 
 
 #1! 
 
iff 
 
 
 h I 
 
 146 
 
 El^GLISH LITERATURE, v 
 
 [chap. 
 
 things, and its mingling of sweet and grand religious 
 poetry ought to make it better known. It is unique 
 in style and in character. 
 
 137. Scottish Poetry illustrates and anticipates 
 the poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not 
 mentioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for with the 
 exception of stray songs its voice was silent for a 
 century and a half. It revived in Allan Ramsay, a 
 friend of Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic 
 humour were followed by the Tea Table Miscellany and 
 the Ever-Green^ collections of existing Scottish songs 
 mixed up with some of his own. They carried on the 
 song of rural life and love and humour which Burns per- 
 fected. Ramsay's pastoral drama of the Gentle Shepherd^ 
 1725, is a purejjtender and genuine picture of Scottish 
 life and love among the poor aind in the country. 
 Robert Ferguson deserves to be named because he 
 kindled the muse of Burns, and his occasional pieces, 
 1773. are chiefly concerned with the rude and hu- 
 mourous life of Edinburgh. The Ballad, always con- 
 tii>uous in Scotland, took a more modern but very 
 pathetic form in such productions as Auld RobiJi Gray 
 and the Flowers of the Forest^ a mourning for those who 
 fell at Flodden Field. The peculiarities I have dwelt 
 on already continue in this revival. There is the same 
 nationality, the same rough wit, the same love of 
 nature, but the love of colour has lessened. With 
 Robert Burns poetry written in the Scotch tiialect 
 may be said to say its last word of genius, though it 
 lingered on in James Hogg*s pretty poem of Kilmeny 
 in The Queen's Wake^ 18 13, and continues a song- 
 making existence to the present day. 
 
 138. The Second Period of the New Poetry. 
 ' — The new elements and the changes on which I have 
 dwelt are expressed by three poets — Cowper, Crabbe 
 and Burns. But before these we must mention the 
 poems of William Blake, the artist, and for three 
 reasons, (i.) They represent the new elements. Thi 
 
[CHAP. 
 
 iligious 
 unique 
 
 icipates 
 ave not 
 ith the 
 t for a 
 
 ASAY, a 
 
 if rustic 
 my and 
 h songs 
 [ on the 
 irns per- 
 hepherd^ 
 Scottish 
 :ountry. 
 ause he 
 I pieces, 
 and hu- 
 lys con- 
 )ut very 
 '/;/ Gray 
 ose who 
 ve dwelt 
 ;he same 
 
 love of 
 With 
 
 tlialect 
 hough it 
 Kibneny 
 
 a song- 
 
 k^oetry. 
 :h I have 
 Crabbe 
 ition the 
 for three 
 Its. Thi 
 
 VIII.] 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 
 
 147 
 
 FottUal Sketches^ written in 1777, illustrate the new 
 study of the Elizabethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser,- 
 and in his short fragment oi Edward TIL we hear again 
 and again the note of Marlowe's violent imagination. 
 A short poem To the Muses is a cry for the restoration 
 to English poetry of the old poetic passion it had lost. 
 In some ballad poems we trace the iniluence repre- 
 sented by Ossian and given by the publication of 
 Percy's Reliques, (2.) We find also in his work 
 certain elements which belonged to the second 
 period of which I shall now speak. The love of 
 animals is one. A great love of children and the 
 poetry of home is another. He also anticipated in 
 1789 and 1794, when his Songs of hmocence and 
 Experience were written, the simple natural poetry of 
 ordinary life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical 
 Ballads, 1798. Further still, we find in these poems 
 traces of the democratic element, of the hatred of 
 priestcraft, and of the war with social wrongs which 
 came much later into English poetry. We even find 
 traces of the mysticism and the search after the 
 problem of life that fill so much of our poetry after 
 1832. (3.) But that which is most special in Blake 
 is his extraordinary reproduction of the spirit, tone 
 and ring of the Elizabethan songs, of the inimitable 
 innocence and fearlessness which belongs to the child- 
 hood of a new literature. The little poems too in the 
 Songs of Innocence^ on infancy and first motherhood, 
 and on subjects like the Lamb^ are without rival in 
 our language for ideal simplicity and a perfection of 
 singing joy. Tht Songs of Experience gWQ the reverse 
 side of the So?igs of Innocence, and they see the evil 
 of the world as a child with a man's heart would see 
 it — with exaggerated and ghastly horror. Blake stands 
 alone in our poetry, and his work coming where it 
 did, between 1777 and 1794, makes it the more 
 remarkable. We turn now to William Cowper who 
 represents fully and more widely than eith^^r Crabbe 
 
 I 
 
 »r 
 
 I'll 
 
 a\ 
 
 ■> , 
 
 i 
 
 a a 
 
IP 
 
 I'^k 
 
 f 
 
 148 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [CHAR 
 
 or Bums the new elements oa which I have 
 
 dwelt. **■ =v 'r^s^SA'V-;'--:' ^v\\'-^Ov : ^f•;v^v^^;^ «^\Vi'C 
 
 139. William Cowper*s first poems were the 
 Ohiey HymnSy 1779, written along with John Newton-, 
 and in these the religious poetry of Charles VV^esley 
 was continued. The profound personal religion, 
 gloomy even to insanity as it often became, which 
 fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a theo- 
 logical element into English poetry which continually 
 increased till within the last ten years, when it has 
 gradually ceased. His didactic and satirical poems 
 in 1782 link him backwards to the last age. His 
 translation of Homer, 1791, and of shorter pieces 
 from the Latin and Greek, connects him with the 
 classical influence, his interest in Milton with the 
 revived study of the English Poets. The playful 
 and gentle vein of humour which he showed \n John 
 Gilpin and other poems reminds us of Addison, and 
 opened a new kind of verse to poets. With this 
 kind of humour is connected a simple pathos of which 
 Cowper is our greatest master. The Lines to Mary 
 Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, with the 
 work of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free 
 from artifice had returned to English song. A 
 wholly new element was also introduced by him and 
 Blake — the love of animals and the poetry of their 
 relation to man, a vein plentifully worked by after 
 poets. His greatest work was the Task^ i7^5' It 
 is mainly a description of himself and his fife in the 
 country, his home, his friends, his thoughts as he 
 walked, the quiet landscape of Olney, the life of the 
 poor people about him, mixed up with disquisitions 
 on political and social subjects, and at the end, a 
 prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The 
 change in it in relation to the subject of Nature is v.ery 
 great. Cowper is the first of the ooets who loves 
 Nature 
 
 itirely 
 
 own 
 
 paints only 
 
 he sees, but he paints it with the affection of a child 
 
iieces 
 
 the 
 
 i the 
 
 ayful 
 
 Johfi 
 
 , and 
 
 this 
 
 i^hich 
 
 Mary 
 
 the 
 
 free 
 
 A 
 
 and 
 
 their 
 
 after 
 
 It 
 
 the 
 
 he 
 
 le 
 
 vni.] 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 
 
 H^ 
 
 for a flower and with the minute observation of a man. 
 lyie change in relation to the subject of Man is equally 
 great, The idea of Mankind as a whole which wc 
 have seen growing up is fully formed in Cowpers 
 mind. The range of his interests is as wide as the 
 world, and all men form one brotherhood. All the 
 social questions of Education, Prisons, Hospitals, city 
 and country life, the state of the poor and their sor- 
 rows, the question of universal freedom and of slavery, 
 of human wrong and oppression, of just and free 
 government, of international intercourse and union, 
 and above all the entirely new question of the future 
 destiny of the whole race, as a whole, are introduced 
 by Cowper into English poetry. It is a wonderful 
 change ; a change so wonderful that it is like a new 
 world. It is in fact the concentration into one 
 retired poet's work of all the new thought on the 
 subject of mankind which was soon to take so fierce a 
 form in Paris. And though splendour and passion 
 were added by the poets who succeeded him to the 
 new poetry, yet they worked on the tlioughts he had 
 laid down, and he is their leader. 
 
 ' 140. George Crabbe took up the side of the 
 poetry of Man which had to do witli the lives of the 
 poor in the Village, 1783, and in the Parish Register y 
 1807. In the short tales related in these books we 
 are brought face to face with the sternest pictures of 
 humble life, its sacrifices, temptations, righteousness, 
 love, and crimes. The prison, the workhouse, the 
 hospital and the miserable cottage are all sketched with 
 a truthfulness perhaps too unrelenting, and the effect of 
 this poetry in widening human sympathies was very great. 
 The Borough and Tales in Verse followed, and finally 
 the Tales of the Hall in 18 19. His work wanted the 
 humour of Cowper, and though often pathetic, and 
 always forcible, was too forcible for pure pathos.^ His 
 work on Nature is as minute and accurate, but as limited 
 in range of excellence as his work on Man, I may 
 
 ipi* 
 
 Jul . 
 
 
 I i 
 
 % 
 
 Ik 
 
 I 
 
t50 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 [CHAK 
 
 ;• \ ?*? 
 
 h ■ ■■ 
 
 mention here in connection with the poetry of the 
 poor, the work of Robert Bloomfield, himself a poor 
 shoemaker. The Farmer's Boy^ 1798, and the Rural 
 TaleSy are poems as cheerful as Crabbe's were stern, 
 and his descriptions of rural life are brighter and not 
 less faithful. The kind of poetry thus started long 
 continued in our verse. Wordsworth took it up and 
 added to it new features, and Thomas Hood in short 
 pieces like the Song of the Shirt gave it a direct bearing 
 on social evils. ^ ^ ' ^ :-^^'i-:>\i? y : 
 
 ' 141. One element, the passionate treatment of love, 
 had been on the whole absent from our poetry since 
 the Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns. 
 In his love songs we hear again, only with greater 
 truth of natural feeling, the same music which in 
 the age of Elizabeth enchanted the world. It was 
 as a love-poet that he began to write, and the first 
 edition of his poems appeared in 1786. But he 
 was not only the poet of love, but also of the ne.w 
 excitement about Man. Himself poor, he sang the 
 poor. Neither poverty nor low birth made a man 
 the worse — the man was "a man for a' that." He 
 did the same work in Scotland in 1786 which 
 Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cowper 
 in 1785, and it is worth remarking how the dates 
 run together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the 
 further widening of human sympathies is shown in 
 the new tenderness for animals. The birds, sheep, 
 cattle and wild creatures of the wood and field fill as 
 large a space in the poetry of Burns as in that of 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge. He carried on also the 
 Celtic C'Cments of Scotch poetry, but he mingled them 
 with others specially English. The rattling fun of the 
 /oily Beggars and of Tam o'Shanter is united to a life- 
 like painting of human character which is peculiarly 
 English. A certain large gentleness of feeling often 
 made his wit into that true humour which is more 
 English than Celtic, and the passionate pathos of such 
 
a poor 
 Rural 
 stern, 
 id not 
 I long 
 p and 
 I short 
 earing 
 
 f love, 
 ' since 
 urns, 
 greater 
 ich in 
 [t was 
 le first 
 lut he 
 e ne.w 
 g the 
 man 
 • He 
 which 
 owper 
 dates 
 , the 
 wn in 
 sheep, 
 fill as 
 hat of 
 so the 
 I them 
 of the 
 a life- 
 uliarly 
 often 
 more 
 )i such 
 
 viir.] • 
 
 POETRY MOM i'jzo TO 183a. 
 
 151 
 
 \ 
 
 s 
 
 poems as Mary in Heaven is connected with this vein 
 of 1 umoui, and is also more English than Scotch. 
 The special nationality of Scotch poetry is as strong 
 in Burns as in any of his predecessors, but it is also 
 mingled with a larger view of man than the merely 
 national one. Nor did he fail to carry on the Scotch 
 love of nature, though he shows the English influence 
 in using natural description not for the love of nature 
 alone, but as a background for human love. It was 
 the strength of his passions and the weakness of 
 his moral will which made his poetry and spoilt his 
 life. Of the three men he had most genius, but the 
 poetical motives he supplied us with are fewer than 
 those supplied by Cowper. 
 
 142. The French Revolution and the Poets. 
 — Certain ideas relating to Mankind considered as a 
 whole had been growing up in Europe for more than 
 a century, and we have seen their influence on the work 
 of Cowper, Crabbe, and Burns. These ideas spoke of 
 natural rights that belonged to every man and which 
 united all men to one another. All men were by right 
 equal, and free, and brothers. There was therefore 
 only one class, the class of Man ; only one nation, 
 the nation of Man, of which all were equal citizens. 
 All the old divisions therefore which wealth and rank 
 and class and caste and national boundaries had 
 made were put aside as wrong and useless. Such ideas 
 had been for a long time expressed by France in her 
 literature. They were now waiting to be expressed 
 in action, and in the overthrow of the Bastille in 1789, 
 and in the proclamation of the new Constitution in 
 the following year France threw them abruptly into 
 popular and political form. Immediately they be- 
 came living powers in the world, and it is round the 
 excitement they kindled in England that the work 
 of the poets from 1790 to 1830 can best be grouped. 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey accepted them with 
 joy but recod^d from them when they ended in the 
 
 I 
 
 r 
 
 I: 
 
 ;H' 
 
 m 
 
 
 
 f ■ 
 
 
 t' 
 
i'f 
 
 tS2 MNGUSH LlTERAWkE. '■ [chkp: 
 
 violence of the Reign of Terror and in the imperialism 
 of Napoleon. Scott hated them, and in disgust at 
 the present turned to wiite of the romantic past. 
 Byron did not express them themselves, but he ex- 
 pressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its 
 action against old social opinions. Sh»illey took them 
 up after the reaction against them had begun to die 
 away, and re-expressed them. Two men, Rogers and 
 Keats, were wholly untouched by them. One special 
 thing they did for poetry. They brought back, by the 
 powerful feelings they kindled in men, passion into its 
 style, into all its work about Man, and through that, 
 into its work about Nature. m > 
 
 143. Robert Southey began his poetical life with 
 the revolutionary poem oi Wat Tyler, 1794; and be- 
 tween 1802 and 1 8 14 wrote Thalaba, Madoc, The Curse 
 of Kehama, and Roderick the Last of the Goths. His 
 Vision of Judgment, written on the death of George 
 Til., and ridiculed by Byron in another Vision, proves 
 him to have become a Tory of Tories. Samuel T. 
 Coleridge could not turn round so completely, but 
 the wild enthusiasm of his early poems was lessened 
 when in 1796 he wrote the Ode to the Departing Year 
 and the Ode to France, poems which nearly reach 
 sublimity. When France, however, ceasing to be 
 the champion of freedom, attacked Switzerland, Cole- 
 ridge as well as Wordsworth ceased to believe in 
 her and fell back on the old English ideas of 
 patriotism and of tranquil freedom. Still the disap- 
 pointment was bitter, and the Ode to Dejection is 
 instinct not only with his own wasted life, but with the 
 sorrow of one who has had golden ideals and found 
 them turn in his hands to clay. His best work is but 
 little, but of its kind it is perfect and unique. For 
 exquisite music of metrical movement and for an 
 imaginative phantasy, such as might belong to a world 
 where men always dreamt, there is nothing in our 
 language to be compared with Christabel^ 1905, and 
 
Vlll.l 
 
 POErkV t^kOM 1730 To 1832. 
 
 iss 
 
 in 
 of 
 disap- 
 on is 
 h the 
 •ound 
 IS but 
 For 
 an 
 world 
 our 
 
 
 Kubla Khan^ and to th'e Ancient Mariner published as 
 one of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Ihe little poem 
 called Love is not so good, but it touches with great 
 grace that with which all sympathise. All that he did 
 excellently might be bound up in twenty pages, but 
 it should be bound m pure gold. 
 
 144. Of all the poets, misnamed Lake Poets, 
 William Wordsworth was the greatest. Born in 
 1770, educated on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved 
 the scenery of the Lakes as a boy, lived among it in 
 his manhood, and died in 1850 at Rydal Mount, 
 close to Rydal lake. He took his degree in ^791 at 
 Cambridge. The year before he had made a short tour 
 on the Continent and stepped on the French shore at 
 the very time when the whole land v^^as "mad with 
 joy." The end of 1791 saw him again in France 
 and living at Orleans. He threw himself eagerly into 
 the Revolution, joined the "patriot side," and came 
 to Paris just after the September massacre of 1792. 
 Narrowly escaping the fate of his friends the Brisso- 
 tins, he got home to England before the execution 
 of Louis XVL in 1793, and published his Desci-iptive 
 Sketches, His sympatliy with the Frencl; continued, 
 and he took their side against his own country, 
 bating the war that England now set on foot against 
 France. He was poor, but his friend Raisley Cal- 
 vert left him 900/. and enabled hi«m to live the 
 simple life he had now chosen, the life of a retired 
 poet. At first we find him at Racedown, wher^ in 
 1797 he made friendship with Coleridge, and then 
 at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where he and Coleridge 
 planned and published in 1798 the Lyrical Ballads, 
 After a winter in Germany with Coleridge, where the 
 Prelude waf begun, he took a small cottage at Gras- 
 mere, and there in 1805-6 finished the Prelude^ not 
 published till 1850. Another set of the Lyrical 
 BaUads appeared in 1802, and in 1 814 his philosopbi- 
 cal poem the Excursion, From that time till his 
 
 1 
 
 Ml' 
 
 I-: 
 i' 
 
 
 
 
 ■(iH 
 
 ;l 
 
ti4 
 
 ENGtISH LITER A TORE, 
 
 [CHAP.' 
 
 if 
 
 death he produced from his home at Rydal Mount 
 a great succession of poems. 
 
 145. Wordsworth and Nature. — The Prelude 
 is the history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a 
 child till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature 
 and of Man, His view of Nature was entirely different 
 from that which up to his time the poets had held. 
 They had believed that the visible universe was dead 
 matter set in motion like a machine and regulated by 
 fixed laws. Wordsworth, on the contrary, said that it 
 was alive. There is a soul, he said, in all the worlds \ 
 " an active principle subsists" in Nature, and entering 
 into all things, gives to each of them a distinct life 
 of their own. But the life which varied itself in each 
 thing was at the same time One Life. He gave this 
 Oi-e Life person '^lity, and he called it Nature, out in 
 fact it was in his view the one living Spirit of God, 
 who in ceaseless action made at each moment the 
 outward universe. This soul of Nature was entirely 
 distinct from the mind of man, and acted upon it. 
 It had powers of its own, desires, feelings and thought 
 of ^'^s own, and by these it gave education, impulses, 
 CO ort and joy to the man who opened his heart 
 to receive them. The human mind receiving these 
 impressions, reflected on them and added to them 
 its own thoughts and feelings, and that union of the 
 mind of man to the mind in Nature then took place 
 which Wordsworth thought the true end of the pre- 
 arranged harmony he conceived between Nature and 
 Humanity. This is the idea which runs through all 
 his poetry, and one thing especially followed from it, 
 that he was the first who loved Nature with a personal 
 love. He could do that because he did not mix up 
 Nature with his own mind, nor make her the reflection 
 of himself, nor look upon her as dead matter. She 
 was a person to him, distinct from himself, and 
 therefore capable of being loved as a man loves a 
 woman^ He could brood on .^er character, her wavs. 
 
CHAf.' 
 
 lount 
 
 Veliide 
 rom a 
 Mature 
 Terent 
 held. 
 > dead 
 ted by 
 [hat it 
 orlds ; 
 itering 
 ict life 
 n each 
 ^re this 
 out in 
 f God, 
 nt the 
 Mitirely 
 Don it. 
 h ought 
 pulses, 
 heart 
 r these 
 o them 
 of the 
 k place 
 he pre- 
 ire and 
 ugh all 
 rom it, 
 ersonal 
 mix up 
 flection 
 She 
 jlf, and 
 Loves a 
 
 VIII.] 
 
 her 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 
 
 tSS 
 
 words, her life, as he did on those of his wife or 
 sister. Hence arose his minute and loving observa- 
 tion of her and his passionate description of all her 
 forms. There was nothing, from the daisy's " star- 
 shaped shadow on the naked stone " to the vast 
 landscape seen at sunrise from the mountain top, 
 that he did not describe, that he has not made us 
 love. 
 
 146. Wordsworth and Man. — We have seen 
 the vivid interest that Wordsworth took in the new ideas 
 about man as they were shown in the French Revo- 
 lution. But even before that he relates in the Prelude 
 how he had been led through his love of Nature to 
 honour Man. The shepherds of the Lake hills, the 
 dalesmen, had been seen by him as part of the wild 
 scenery in which he lived, and he mixed up their life 
 with the grandeur of Nnure and came to honour them 
 as part of her l^eing. The love of Nature led him 
 to the love of Man. It was exactly the reverse order 
 to that of the previous poets. At Cambridge, and 
 afterwards in the crowd of London and in his first 
 tour on the Continent, he received new impressions 
 of the vast world of Man, but Nature still remained 
 the nrst. It was only during his life in France and 
 in the excitement of the new theories and their activity 
 that he was swept away from Nature and found him- 
 self thinking of Man as distinct from her, and first in 
 importance. But the hopes he had formed from the 
 Revolution broke down. AH his dreams about a new life 
 of man were made vile when France gave up liberty 
 for Napoleon • and he was left without love of Nature 
 or care for Man. It was then that his sister Dorothy, 
 herself worthy of mention in a history of literature, led 
 him back to his early love of Nature and restored 
 his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought 
 in the simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the 
 foundations of a truer view of mankind than the 
 theories of the Revolution afforded. And in thinking 
 
 1' 
 
 I'M 
 
 
 '1:1 ■ 
 
 fiii ■ 
 
 % 
 
 U 
 
 r 
 
 \\\ 
 
 III! 
 
IS6 
 
 BHGUSH UTEkA TURE. 
 
 tcHAP. 
 
 and v/riting of the common duties and faith, kindnesses 
 and truth of lowly men, he found in Mar once more 
 
 "an object of delight, 
 Of pure iniagiiiatioii and of love." 
 
 With that he recovered also his interest in the larger 
 movements of mankind. His love of liberty and 
 hatred of oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the 
 enemy of man. A whole series of sonnets followed 
 the events on the Coniinent. One recorded his horror 
 at the attack on the Swiss, another mourned the fate 
 of Venice, another the fate of Toussaint the negro 
 :hiet ; others celebrated the struggle of Hofer and the 
 r^rolese, others the struggle of Spain. Two thanks- 
 giving odes rejoiced in the overthrcvv of the oppressor 
 At Waterloo. He became conservative in his old 
 aige, but his interest in social and national movements 
 end not decay. He Wiott on Education, the Poor 
 Laws, and other subjects. When almost seventy he 
 took the side of the Carbonari, and sympathised 
 with the. Italian struggle. He was truly a poet of 
 Mankind. But his chief work was done in his own 
 country and among his own folk ; and he was the 
 first who threw around the lives of homely men and 
 women the glory and sweetness of song, and taught 
 us to know the brotherhood of all men in a more 
 beautiful way than the wild way of the Revolution. 
 He lies asleep now among the people he loved, in the 
 green churchyard of Grasmere, by the side of the 
 stream of Rothay,, in a place as quiet as his life. Few 
 spots on earth aie more sacred than his grave. ^ ^ - 
 147. Criticism must needs confess that much of his 
 work is prosaic in thought, but the form of it is always 
 poetic; that is, the thoughts are expressed in a way 
 prose never would express them. His theory about 
 poetic diction, that it should be the ordinary language 
 men use in strong emotion, may seem to contradict 
 this ; but as Coleridge has shown, Wordswcth did not 
 
tcH\P. 
 
 Inesses 
 e more 
 
 i larger 
 ty and 
 eon the 
 )llowed 
 
 horror 
 the fate 
 ! negro 
 ind the 
 thanks- 
 prciisor 
 his old 
 enients 
 e Poor 
 mty he 
 athised 
 poet of 
 is own 
 ras the 
 en and 
 
 taught 
 
 more 
 
 )lution. 
 
 in the 
 
 of the 
 Few 
 
 T of his 
 always 
 a way 
 about 
 nguage 
 itradict 
 lid not 
 
 VIII.] , ' POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 157 
 
 /Practise his theory, and where he did tl-w result was 
 not poetry. His style in blank verse is the likest ;o 
 Milton that we possess, but it is more feninine than 
 Milton's. He is like Milton also in this, that he ex- 
 celled in the Sonnet, which we may say he restored to 
 modern poetjy. Along with the rest of all the poets 
 of the time he revived old measures and invented new. 
 His philosophy of Nature we have explained : his 
 human i)hilosophy, of which the Excursion is the best 
 exam[)le, was no deeper than a lofty and grave morality 
 created, in union with an imaginative Christianity. He 
 believed in himself when all the world disbeheved in him, 
 and he has been proved right and the world wrong. 
 
 148. Sir Walter Scott was Wordsworth's dear 
 friend, and his career as a poet began when Wordsworth 
 firstcame to Grasmere, with theZ^^ of the Last Minstrel, 
 1805 Marmion followed in 1808, and the Lady of 
 the Lake m 1^10. These were his best poems; the 
 others, with the exception of some lyrics which touch 
 the sadness and brightness of life with equal power, do 
 not count in our estimate of him. He perfected the 
 narrative poem. In Marmion and the Lady of the 
 Lake his wonderful inventiveness in narration is at 
 its height, and it is matched by the vividness of 
 his natural description. No poet, and in this he 
 carries on the old Scotch quality, is a fmer colcurist. 
 His landscapes are painted in colour, and the colour 
 is always true. Nearly all his iiatural description 
 is Scotch, and he was the first who opened to the 
 delight of the world the wild scenery of the High- 
 lands and the Lowland moorland. He touched it all 
 .with a pencil so light, graceful, and true, that the 
 very names are made for ever romantic, 
 
 149. Scotland produced another poet in Thomas 
 Campbell. His earliest poem the Pleasures of Hope-y 
 1799, l^elonged in its formal rhythm and rhetoric, and in 
 its artificial feeling for Nature, to the time of Thomson 
 and Gray rather than to the newer time. His later 
 
 !!' 
 
 til, 
 
 |1: 
 
 inl 
 
 
 m 
 
 
rs8 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE, 
 
 [Cll AP. ' 
 
 poems, such as Gertrude of Wyoming ^ndiO^ Connor's 
 Child, were far more natural, but they lost the superb 
 rhetoric so remarkable in the Pleasures of Hope, 
 Campbell will chiefly live by his lyrics. Hohenlinden, 
 the Battle of the Baltic, the Mariners of England, are 
 splendid specimens of the war poetry oi England ; 
 and the Song to the Evening, Star and Lord Ullins 
 Daughter are full of tender feeling, and mark the in- 
 fluence of the more natural style that Wordsworth 
 had brc^iihf- 1*^ perfection. 
 
 150. Rogers at. J Moore. — Samuel Rogers is 
 another poet whose work is apart from the great 
 movement of the Revolution. In his long life of 
 ninety years he produced two octavo volumes. The 
 Pleasures of Memory, 1792, his first poem, Hnks him 
 to the past generation and has its characters. The 
 later poems added to it in 181 2, and the Italy, 1822, 
 are the work of a slow and cultivated mind, and 
 contain some laboured but fine descriptions. The 
 curious thing is that, living apart in a courtly region 
 of culture, there is not a trace in all his work that 
 Europe and England and Society had passed during 
 his life though a convulsion of change. To that 
 convulsion the best work of Thomas Moore, an 
 Irishman, may be referred. Ireland during Moore's 
 youth endeavoured to exist under the dreadful and 
 wicked weight of its Penal Code. The excitement 
 of the French Revolution kindled the anger of 
 Ireland into the rebellion of 1798, and Moore's 
 genius, such as it was, into writing songs to the Irish 
 airs collected in 1796. The best of these have for 
 their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland against 
 Eng;land. They went everywhere with hlai into 
 society, and it is not too much to say that they helped 
 by the interest they stirred to further Catholic 
 Emancipation. Moore's Oriental tales in Lalla Rookh 
 are chiefly flash and glitter, but they are pleasant read- 
 ing. He had a slight, pretty, rarely true, lyrical power, 
 
[chap. ' 
 
 otinor's 
 superb 
 Hope. 
 ilindeUy 
 ndy are 
 gland ; 
 Ullhis 
 the in- 
 Isworth 
 
 ;ers is 
 
 great 
 
 life of 
 
 The 
 cs him 
 
 The 
 1822, 
 d, and 
 
 The 
 ■ region 
 rk that 
 during 
 'o that 
 >RE, an 
 Moore's 
 ful and 
 itement 
 ger of 
 Moore's 
 e Irish 
 ave for 
 against 
 11 into 
 helped 
 'atholic 
 I Rookh 
 It read- 
 power. 
 
 VIII.] 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 
 
 159 
 
 and all the songs have this one excellence, they arc 
 truly things to be sung. - 
 
 151. The post- Revolution Poets. — ^We turn 
 to very different types of men when we come to 
 
 ^Lord Byron, Shelley and Keats, whom we may call 
 post-Revolution poets. Childe Harold^ cantos i. ii., 
 Byron's first true poem, appeared in 181 2, Shelley's 
 Queen Mab in 18 13, Keat's first volume in 18 17. 
 
 Of the three. Lord Byron had most of the quality 
 we may call force. Born in 1788, his Hours of Idleness , 
 a collection of short poems, in 1807, was mercilessly 
 lashed in the Edinburgh Review, The attack only 
 served to awaken his genius, and he replied with as- 
 tonishing vigour in the satire of English Bards and 
 Scotch Revie^uers in 1809. Eastern travel gave birth to 
 the first two cantos of Childe Harold^ to the Giaour zx^A 
 the Bride of Abydosva 18 13, to the Corsair and Lara 
 in 1 8 14. The Siege of Corinth^ Parisina^ the Prisoner 
 of Chillony Manfred^ and Childe Harold were finished 
 before 18 19. In 181 8 he began a new style in Beppo^ 
 which he developed fully in the successive issues of 
 Donjuan^ 1819-1823. During this time a number of 
 dramas came from him, partly historical, as his Marino 
 FalierOy partly imaginative, as the Cain. His life had 
 been wild and useless, but he died in trying to redeem 
 it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At Misso- 
 
 Jonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away in 
 April 1824. f , . ;, . 
 
 i; 152. The position of Byron as a poet is a 
 curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of 
 the present. Something of the school of Pope clings 
 to him; in Childe Harold he imitates Spenser, yet 
 no one so completely broke away from old measures 
 and old manners to make his poetry individual, not 
 imitative. At first, he has no interest whatever in 
 the human questions which were so strongly felt by 
 Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly 
 narrative poetry written that he might talk of himself 
 
 II 
 
 HI 
 
 'V 
 
 '•'I 
 
 It.' 
 
 % 
 
 (I 
 
 iwi 
 
i6o 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE. 
 
 [CHAf. 
 
 'Jii 
 
 JiiJ: 
 
 and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy 
 except that which centres round the problem of his 
 own being. CVr/>/, the most thoughtful of his pro- 
 ductions, is in reality nothing more than the repre- 
 sentation of the way in which the doctrines of original 
 sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We 
 feel naturally great interest in this strong person- 
 ality, put before us with such obstinate power, but 
 it wearies at last. Finally it wearitJ himself. As 
 he grew in thought, he escaped from ins morbid self, 
 and ran into the opposite extreme in Don Juan. It 
 is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revo- 
 lutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all 
 the conventionality of social morality and religion and 
 politics. It claimed for himself and for others abso- 
 lute freedom of individifal act and thought in oppo- 
 sition to that force of society which tends to make all 
 men after one pattern. This was the best result of 
 his work, though the way in which it was done can 
 scarcely be approved. He escaped still more from 
 his diseased self when, fully seized on by the new spirit 
 of setting men free from oppression, he sacrificed his 
 life for the deliverance of Greece. ' 
 
 As the poet of Nature he belongs also to the old and 
 the new school. We have mentioned those poets 
 before Cowper who had less a sympathy with Nature 
 than a sympathy with themselves as they forced her 
 to reflect them, men who followed the vein of Rous- 
 seau. Byron's poetry of natural description is often 
 of this class. But he also escapes from this posi- 
 tion of the iSth century poets, and with those of the 
 19th looks on Nature as she is, apart from himself; and 
 this escape is made, as in the case of his poetry of 
 Man, in his later poems. Lastly, it is his colossal 
 power and the ease that comes from it, in which he 
 resembles Dryden, that marks him specially. But it 
 is always more power of the intellect than of the 
 imagination. 
 
VIII.] 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO ^832 
 
 i6t 
 
 Li> 
 
 153. In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary, 
 the imagination is supreme and the intellect its servant. 
 He produced while yet a boy some utterly worthless 
 tales, but soon showed in Queen Mab, 18 13, the in- 
 fluence of the revolutionary era, combined in him with 
 a violent attack on the existing forms of religion. 
 The poem is a poor one, but its poverty prophesies 
 greatness. Its chief idea was the new one that had 
 come into literature — the idea of the destined perfec- 
 tion of mankind in a future golden age. The whole 
 heart of Shelley was absorbed in this conception, in 
 its fciith, and in the hopes it stirred. To help the 
 world towards it and to denounce and overthrow all 
 that stood in its way was the object of half of Shelley's 
 poetry. The other half was personal, an outpouring 
 of himself in his seeking after the perfect ideal he 
 could not find, and sadder still, could not even con- 
 ceive. Queen Mab is an example of the first, Alastor, 
 of the second. The hopes for man with which 
 Quee7i Mab was written grew cold; he himself fell 
 ill and looked for death; the world seemed chilled 
 to all the ideas he loved, and he turned from 
 writing about mankind to describe in Alastor the 
 life and wandering and death of a lonely poet. It 
 was himself he described, but Shelley was too stern 
 a moralist to allow that a fife lived apart from 
 human interests was a noble one, and the title of 
 the poem expresses this. It is Alastor—'' a spirit of 
 evil, a spirit of solitude." How wrong he fel-t such 
 a life is seen in his next poem, the Revolt of Islam, 
 181 7. He wrote it with the hope that men were 
 beginning to recover from the apathy and despair 
 into which the failure of the revolutionary ideas had 
 thrown them, and to show them what they should strive 
 and hope for, and destroy. But it is still only a mar- 
 tyrs hope that the poet possesses. The two chief 
 
 characters of the poem 
 
 slain in their struggle against tyranny 
 
 Laon and Cythna, are both 
 but their sacrifice 
 
 I 
 
 til 
 
 It 
 
l62 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE, 
 
 [CHAP 
 
 
 i 
 
 C5 
 
 is to bring forth hereafter the fruit of freedom. The 
 poem itself has finer passages in it than Aiastor, but 
 as a whole it is inferior to it. It is quite formless. The 
 same year Shelley went to Italy, and renewed Jiealth 
 and the climate gave him renewed power. Rosalmd 
 and Helen appeared, and in the beginning of \^iZ Julian 
 and Maddalo. The first tale circles round a social 
 subject that interested him, the second is a familiar 
 conversation on the story of a madman in San Lazzaro 
 at Venice. In it his poetry becomes more masculine, 
 and he has for the first time won mastery over his 
 art The new life and joy he had now gained brought 
 back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke out 
 into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound, 
 Prometheus bound on his rock represents Humanity 
 suffering under the reign of Evil impersonated in 
 Jupiter. Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated 
 from Prometheus, is the all-pervading Love which in 
 loving makes the universe of nature. The time comes 
 when Evil is overthrown. Prometheus is then delivered 
 and united to Asia; that is, Man is wedded to the spirit 
 in Nature, and Good is all in all. The fourth act is the 
 choral song of the regenerated universe. It is the 
 finest example we have of the working out in poetry 
 of that idea of a glorious destiny for the whole of 
 Man which Cowper introduced into English poetry. 
 The marriage of Asia and Prometheus, of Nature 
 and Humanity, the distinct existence of each for that 
 purpose, is the same idea as Wordsworth's differently 
 expressed; and Shelley and he are the only two 
 poets who have touched it philosophically. Words ^ 
 worth with most contemplation, Shelley with most 
 imagination. Shelley's poetry of Man reached its 
 height in Prometheus Unbound^ and he turned now 
 to try his matured power upon other subjects. Two 
 of these were neither personal nor for the sake of 
 man. The first was the drama of the Cenci^ the 
 gravest and noblest tragedy since Webster wrote, 
 
VIII.1 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1S32. 
 
 163 
 
 which we possess. It is as restrained in expression 
 as the previous poem is exuberant; yet there is no 
 poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought and 
 imagery are so wrought together. The second was the 
 AdanaiSy a lament for the death of John Keats. It is 
 a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a spirit, 
 belonging in expression, thought, and feeling to that 
 world above the senses in which Shelley habitually 
 lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of 
 his lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable, 
 but, to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the 
 finest poem he ever wrote. No critic can ever com- 
 prehend it \ it is the artist's poem, and all Shelley's 
 philosophy of life is contained in it. Of the same 
 class is the Witch of Atlas, the poem in which he 
 has personified divine Imagination in her work in 
 poetry and all her attendants and all her doings 
 among men. 
 
 As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily 
 great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some, 
 as in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wind, mingle 
 together personal feehngs and prophetic hopes for 
 Man. Some are lyrics of Nature ; some are dedicated 
 to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ; 
 others belong to the passion of love, and others are 
 written on the shadows of dim dreams of thought, 
 rhey form together the most sensitive, the most ima- 
 ginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible 
 lyrical poetry we possess. 
 
 As the poet of Nature, he had the same idea as 
 Wordsworth, that Nature was alive ; but while Words- 
 worth made the active principle which filled and made 
 Nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. As each 
 distinct thing in Nature had to Wordsworth a thinking 
 spirit in it, so each thing had to Shelley a loving spirit 
 in it ; even the invisible spheres of vapour sucked by 
 the sun from the forest pool had each their indwell- 
 ing spirit. We feel then that Shejley, as well as Words- 
 
[^4 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURK, 
 
 [CHA?. 
 
 worth, and for a similar reason, could give a special 
 love to, and therefore describe vividly, each thing 
 he saw. He wants the closeness of grasp of nature 
 which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the 
 power in a far greater degree than t ley of describing 
 a vast landscape melting into indefinite distance. 
 In this he stands first among English poets, and is 
 in poetry what Turner was in landscape painting. 
 Along witii this special quaHty of vastness his colour 
 is as true as Scott's, but truer in this, that it is full 
 of half tones, while Scott's is laid out in broad 
 yellow, crimson, and blue, in black and white. 
 
 Towards the end of his life his poetry became 
 overloaded with mystical metaphysics. What ht; 
 might have been we cannot tell, for at the age of thirty 
 he left us, drowned in the sea he loved, washed up and 
 burned on the sandy spits near Pisa. His ashes lie 
 beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor cordium, " Heart 
 of hearts," written on his tomb, well says what all who 
 love poetry feel when they think of him. 
 
 154. John Keats lies near him, cut off like him 
 ere his genius ripened ; not so great, but possessing 
 perhaps greater possibilities of greatness ; not so ideal, 
 but for that very reason closer in his grasp of nature 
 than Shelley. In one thing he was entirely different 
 from Shelley — he had no care whatever for the great 
 human questions which stirred Shelley ; the present 
 was entirely without interest to him. He marks the 
 close of that poetic movement which the ideas of 
 the Revolution in France had started in England, as 
 Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. Keats, find- 
 ing nothing to move him in an age which had now 
 sunk into apathy on these points, went back to 
 Greek and medissval life to find his subjects, and 
 established, in doing so, that which has been called 
 the literarv toetrv of Eindand. His first sublect after 
 some minor poems in 18 17 was Fjidymion^ 1818, his 
 last Hyperion^ 1820. These, along with Lamia^ were 
 
Viil.] 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 
 
 16S 
 
 poems of Greek life. Endymion has all the faults and 
 all the promise of a great poet's early work, and no 
 one knew its faults better than Keats, whose preface 
 is a model of just self-judgment. Hyperion^ a frag- 
 ment of a tale of the overthrow of the Titans, is itself 
 like a Titanic torso, and in it the faults of Endymion 
 are repaired and its promise fulfilled. Both are filled 
 with that which was deepest in the mind of Keats, 
 the love of loveliness for its own sake, the sense of its 
 rightful and pre-eminent power ; and in the singleness 
 of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats is especially 
 the artist, and the true father of the latest modem 
 school of poetry. Not content with carrying us into 
 Greek life, he took us back into mediasvai romance, 
 and in this also he started a new type of poetry. 
 There are two poems which mark this revival — Isabella^ 
 and the Eve of St, Agnes. Isabella is a version of 
 Boccaccio's tale of the Pot of Basil ; St. Agnes'' Eve 
 is, as far as I know, original ; the former is purely 
 mediaeval, the latter is tinged with the conventional 
 mediaevalism of Spenser. Both poems are however 
 modern and individual. The overwrought daintiness of 
 style, the pure sensuousness, the subtle flavour of feel- 
 ing, belong to no one but Keats. Their originality has 
 caused much imitation of them, but they are too 
 original for imitation. In smaller poems, such as the 
 Ode to a Grecian Urn, the poem to Autumn, and 
 some sonnets, he is perhaps at his very best. In these 
 and in all, his painting of Nature is as close, as direct 
 as Wordsworth's ; less full of the imagination that links 
 human thought to Nature, but more full of the ima- 
 gination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. 
 His career was short ; he had scarcely begun to write 
 when death took him away from the loveliaiess he 
 loved so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, 
 and there he died almost alone. He lies not far from 
 Shelley, near the pyramid of Caius Cest-ius. 
 
 155, Modern English Poetry.— Keats marks 
 
i66 
 
 MNGLISH L^TERA TURE, 
 
 [CHA^. 
 
 ''I 
 
 'I 
 
 
 the exhaustion of the impulse which began with Bums 
 and Cowper. There was no longer novv' in Englaird 
 any large wave of pub'x thought or feeling such as 
 could awaken poetry. We have then, arising afier 
 his death, a number of pretty littl'e poems, having no 
 inward fire, no idea, no marked character. They 
 might be written by any versifier at any time, and 
 express pleasant indifferent thought in pleasant verse. 
 Such were Mrs. Hemans's poems, and those of L. E. L., 
 and such were Tennyson's earliest poems, in 1830. 
 But with the Reform agitation, and the new religious 
 agitation at Oxford, which was of the same date, a 
 new excitement or a new form of the old, came on 
 England, and with it a new tribe of poets arose, 
 among whom we live. The elements of their poetry 
 were also new, though their germs were sown in the 
 previous poetry. It took up the theological, sceptical, 
 social, and political questions which disturbed Eng- 
 land. It gave itself to metaphysics and to analysis 
 of human character. It carried the love of natural 
 scenery into almost every county in England, and 
 described the whole land. Some of its best writers 
 are Robert Browning and his wife, Matthew Arnold, 
 and A. H. Clough. One of them, Alfred Tenny- 
 son, has for forty years remained the first. All the 
 great subjects of his time he has touched poetically^ 
 and enlightened. His feeling for Nature is accurate, 
 loving, and of a wide range. His human sympathy 
 fills as wide a field. The large interests of mankind, 
 and of his own time, the lives of simple people, and 
 the subtler phases of thought and feeling which arise 
 in our overwrought society are wisely and tenderly 
 written of in his poems. His drawing of distinct 
 human characters is the best we have in pure poetry 
 since Chaucer wrote. He writes true songs, and he 
 has excelled all English writers in the pure Idyll. The 
 Idylls of *^he King are a kind of epic, and he has 
 lately tried the drama. In lyrical measures as in the 
 
VIII.] 
 
 POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832. 
 
 167 
 
 form of his blank verse is as inventive as original. It 
 is by the breadth of his range that he most conclu- 
 sively takes the first place among the modern poets. 
 
 Within the last ten years, the impulse given 
 in '32 has died away. The vital interest in theo- 
 logical and social questions, in human questions of 
 the present, has decayed ; and the same thing which 
 we find in the case of Keats has again taken place. 
 A new class of literary poets has arisen, who have 
 no care for a present they think dull, for reli- 
 gious questions to which they see no end. They 
 too have gone back to Greek and mediaeval and old 
 Norse life for their subjects. They find much of their 
 inspiration in Italy and in Chaucer; but they con- 
 tinue the love poetry and the poetry of natural de- 
 scription. No English poetry exceeds Swinburne's in 
 varied melody ; and the poems of Rosetti, within their 
 limited range, are instinct with passion ?X once subtle and 
 intense. Of them all William Morris is the greatest, 
 and of him much more is to be expected. At present 
 he is our most delightful story-teller. He loses much 
 by being too long, but we pardon the length for the 
 gentle charm. The Death of Jason, and the stories 
 told month by month in the Earthly Paradise, a 
 Greek and a mediaeval story alternately, will long 
 live to give pleasure to the holiday times of men. It is 
 some pity that it is foreign and not English story, but 
 we can bear to hear alien tales, for Tennyson has 
 always kept us close to the scenery, the traditions, the 
 daily life and the history of England; and his last 
 poem, the drama of Queen Mary, 187 5, is written almost 
 exactly twelve hundred years since the date of our 
 first poem, Caedmon's Paraphrase, To think of one 
 and then of the other, and of the great and con- 
 tinuous stream of literature that has flowed between 
 them, is more than enough to make us all proud of 
 the name of Englishmen.