/ ■ ^^^==^\ University Extension if Manuals l/lj ////' ./I / V N il— - \ / \ \ /\ A A ffY ^^- y \ \ A , ..^: '' \ ■^ '■\ UNIVERSITY EXTENSION MANUALS EDITED BY PROFESSOR KNIGHT THE JACOBEAN POETS GENERAL ELAN OF THE SERIES. This Series is primarily designed to aid the University Extension Movement throughout Great Britain and America, and to supply ihe need so widely felt by students, of Text-books for study and reference, in connection with the authorized Courses of Lectures. Volumes dealing with separate sections of Literature, Science, Philosophy, History, and Art have beeii assigned to representative literary men, to University Professors, or to Extension Lecturers connected with Oxford, Cambridge, London, and the Universities of Scotland and Ireland. The l\Ianuals are not intended for purposes of Elementary Educa- tion, but for Students who have made some advance in the subjects dealt with. Tlie statement of details is meant to illustrate the working of general laws, and the development of principles ; while ihe historical evolution of the subject dealt with is kept in view, along with its philosophical significance. The remarkable success which has attended University Extension in Britain has been partly due to the combination of scientific treat- ment with popularity, and to the union of simplicity with thorough- ness. This movement, however, can only reach those resident in the larger centres of population, while all over the country there are thoughtful persons who desire the same kind of teaching. It is for them also that this Series is designed. Its aim is to supply the general reader with the same kind of teaching as is given in the Lectures, and to reflect the spirit which has characterized the move- ment, viz. the combination of principles with facts, and of methods with results. The Manuals are also intended to be contributions to the Literature of the Subjects with which they 7-espectively deal, quite apart from University Extension ; arid some of them will be found to meet a general rather than a special want. The Jacobean Poets By EDMUND GOSSE HON. M.A. TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE SECOND IMPRESSION LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET 1899 LONDON : PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS. UBRAUY ^^ . ^^^^f SIT^ OF CAUFORNIA^ V ^ feAiMA iiARBAKA PREFACE. In this volume, for the first time, an attempt has been made to concentrate attention on what was produced in English poetry during the reign of James I., that is to say, during twenty-two years of the opening of the seventeenth century. It is hoped that a certain freshness may be gained by approaching the subject from this empirical point of view, rather than, as hitherto has been the custom, by including the poets of James, and even of Charles, under the vague and conventional heading of " Elizabethan." It would not be wise, doubtless, to make a general habit of regarding literary history through artificial barriers of this kind; but for once, and in dealing with a fragment of such a hackneyed period, it is hoped that it may be found beneficial. The unparalleled wealth of English poetry during the reign of James I. will certainly strike the student, and in many cases he may be surprised to find that " Elizabethans " of the hand- vi Preface. books had not emerged from childhood, or published a single copy of verses, when Elizabeth resigned the seat of kings to her cousin of Scotland. This litUe volume, then, is an attempt to direct critical attention to all that was notable in English poetry from 1603 to 1625. The scope of the work has made it possible to introduce the names of many writers Avho are now for the first time chronicled in a work of this nature. The author believes the copious use of dates to be indis- pensable to the rapid and intelligent comprehension of literary history, and he has forced himself to supply as many as possible ; the student will, however, not need to be reminded that in the dramatic chapters these must in large measure be regarded as conjectural. When we consider the vagueness of knowledge regarding the detail of Jacobean drama even a generation ago, it is surprising that scholarship has attained such a measure of exacti- tude, yet the discovery of a bundle of papers might at any moment disturb the ingenious constructions of our theoretical historians. In selecting illustrative passages for quotation, the aim has been to find unfamiliar beauties rather than to reprint for the thousandth time what is familiar in every anthology. E. G. CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE Preface ... ... ... ... ... v I. The Last Elizabethans ... ... ... i II. Ben Jonson — Chapman ... ... ... 23 III. John Donne ... ... ... ... 47 IV. Beaumont and Fletcher ... ... ... 68 V. Campion — Drayton — Drummond — Sir John Beaumont ... ... ... ... 89 VI. HEYWOOD — MiDDLETON — ROWLEV ... ... Il6 VII. Giles and Phineas Fletcher — Browne ... 137 VIII. Tourneur — Webster — Day — Daborne ... 159 IX. Wither — Quarles — Lord Brooke ... ... 181 X. Philip Massinger ... ... ... 202 Index ... ... ... ... ... 219 THE JACOBEAN POETS. CHAPTER I. THE LAST ELIZABETHANS. Queen Elizabeth died on the 24th of March, 1603, and was conducted to the grave by the poets with in- numerable " mournful ditties to a pleasant new tune," as one of the frankest of the rhymsters admitted. There were "elegies" and "lamentations," '■'■liictus" and ^'t/ire?iodia" at the disappearance from so large a scene of so dread a sovereign ; and then, with the customary promptitude, there succeeded " panegyricks," and "congratulations," and " welcomes," and " wedding garments " addressed by humble eager versifiers to *' serenissimum at poten- tissium Jacobum beatissimse Ehzabethce legitime et auspicatissime succedentem," Before we consider what poetry was to be throughout the reign of the Scottisla monarch so radiantly conducted to the throne of England, we may glance at what poetry had ceased to be by the time his predecessor died. B 2 The Jacobean Poets. [Cn. l. There is a danger which, of course, must be faced and admitted, in our recognizing a hard-and-fast line of demarcation between one epoch and another. Eliza- bethan faded silently into Jacobean, and no curtain descended in 1603 which divided the earlier age from the later. But we may with safety assert that certain general features marked English poetry under the one monarch, and did not mark it under the other. To compare selected passages is notoriously unjust; but without special unfairness it may be advanced that such a stanza as the following is characteristically Elizabethan — Hark ! hark ! with what a pretty throat Poor robin-redbreast tunes his note ; Hark ! how the jolly cuckoos sing, Cuckoo ! to welcome in the spring ; and this no less characteristically Jacobean — Who ever smelt the breath of morning flowers, New-sweeten'd with the dash of twilight showers. Of pounded amber, or the flowering thyme, Or purple violets in their proudest prime, Or swelling clusters from the cypress-tree ? So sweet's my love, aye, far more sweet is he, So fair, so sweet, that heaven's bright eye is dim, And flowers have no scent, compar'd with him. Of the two writers from whom quotation is here made, the later possessed the stronger genius, but in straight- forwardness and simplicity the former has the advantage. What were lost were the clear morning note, the serenity the coolness, and sober sweetness of poets who had no rivals in the immediate past. What were gained were passion, depth of thought, a certain literary cleverness (which was in itself a snare), and a closer pertinence to Cii. I.] The Last Elizabethans, 3 passing events. Bohemia lost its seaports, the reahiis of the Fairy Queen disappeared, when James I. came to the throne. His subjects knew more than their fathers had done, spoke out more boldly, were more boisterous and demonstrative. Romance ceased to rule their day, and in its place a certain realism came to the front. In poetry, that tended to become turbid which had been so transparent, and that conscious and artificial which had been so natural and unaffected. Erudition became more and more a feature of poetry, and the appeal to primitive observations and emotions less piquant than references to the extraordinary, the violent, and even the unwhole- some. In this way, even in work of the magnificent first decade of James I., we can see the sprouting of those seeds which were to make a wilderness of poetry thirty or forty years later. It will be desirable to examine as closely as we can the aspects of the two schools of verse at the arbitrary moment which we have chosen for the opening date of this inquiry. The mere knife-cut of a political event across the texture of literature is not often of much use to those who study literary history. But, as a matter of fact, the year 1603 forms a more convenient point at which to pass into a new condition of things than almost any other neighbouring year would form. It is impossible, of course, to pretend that a distinct line can be drawn between EHzabethan and Jacobean poetry; but it is a fact that while certain influences had by that year almost ceased to act, other influences began, about that same year, to make themselves felt. Before entering upon the discussion of purely Jacobean verse, that is to say, of 4 Tlic Jacobean Poets. [Cii. I. the verse produced during the reign of James I., it will be well to glance at what had been characteristic of Elizabeth's reign, and had ceased to exist before the time of her death. In the first place, the primitive poetry which had flourished at the beginning of her reign was all wasted and gone. It had scarcely left behind it a trace of its transitory charm. It had given way to firmer and more brilliant kinds of writing. Three of its proficients lived on, in extreme old age, into the reign of James. Of these one was the venerable Bishop of Bath and Wells, John Still (1543-1607), who, more than half a century earlier, had opened the dance of English drama, with his "right pithy, pleasant, and merry comedy entitled. Gammer Gurtoiis Needled Another was William Warner (1558-1609), whose extremely popular Albion's EnglanJ, a rambling historical poem, first published nearly twenty years earlier, was still in good repute among the lower classes, and frequently reprinted. The third was " old hoarse Palamon" of Spenser's Colin Cloiif, Thomas Churchyard (i52o?-i6o4), now at the very extremity of his enormous life, but still pouring forth his doggerel publications, three of which celebrated events of the new reign. But all this primitive verse was utterly out of fashion among educated people. The first clear running of the pure pastoral sweetness had also ceased. • The deaths of Sidney and of Spenser, before the sixteenth century had ended, had brought this beautiful and genuinely Elizabethan poetry to a close. In all of that body of verse, the imitation of ancient work, conducted through a bright romantic medium, by Ch. I.] The Last Elizabethans. 5 men who had before them the task of moulding the ■ language, as well as enlivening the imaginations of their readers, had led to the creation of something very lucent, fresh and delicate. The light of daybreak was over this unsullied and almost boyish pastoral poetry. It was, above all, chivalrous and impassioned, full of the pride and glory of the times, a little artificial, a little strained and unnatural, but crude and brilliant with the unchecked iire and colour of adolescence. With the removal of its two great pioneers, this school of poetry was bound to decline. But the accidents which led to its entire dis- appearance before James ascended the throne are curious. The dramatists whose lyrics are of this class will presently be referred to. But Lyly must be mentioned here as the most pastoral, the most affectedly limpid of them all ; he was still alive, but completely silent, and soon, in 1606, to die. Sir Edward Dyer (i55o?-i6o7) was in the same plight, and so was the " Ambrosiac Muse " of Henry Constable (1562-1613). In Watson had long ago passed away a talent still more trivial, ingenious, and innocent. All those writers were wholly unlike the coarser, opaquer and profounder Jacobeans, The only link between these men and the latter Spenserians, of whom we shall have much to say in a subsequent chapter, was the morbid and Italianized Richard Barn- field (15 7 4-1 6 2 7), who, though he outlived James, wrote no verse after the death of Elizabeth. Less easy to define, as an element closed up within the reign of Elizabeth, was the first plaintive fervour of religious poetry, Catholic or high-church. The reign of Elizabeth had not been, as that of her successor was 6 TJie Jacobean Poets. [di. I. ultimately to be, rich in fine, devotional verse. But it had produced the martyr Robert Southwell (1562-1595), whose vivid and emotional canzonets and hymns had introduced a new element into English literature, an element not to be taken up again until nearly twenty years after his death at Tyburn, but from that time onward to be carried on and up till it culminated in the raptures of Crashaw. The first outburst of simple lyrical writing, too, had come to an end. After the reign of Elizabeth, there was no longer a bird singing lustily and sweetly in every pamphlet or broadside bush. Francis Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, 1602, was the latest of those successive anthologies which for nearly half a century, from the pubhcation of Totter s Miscellany in 1557, had formed so prominent and so charming a feature in English poetical literature. This series of anthologies had culminated in England's Helicon, 1600, one of the richest and most inspired collections of miscellaneous verse ever published in any country, or at any time. In this divine volume the peculiar lyric of the Elizabethan age had found its apotheosis, and after this it very rapidly declined. Master Slender showed himself characteristically a man of his time, when he said, " I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of songs and sonnets here." The subject of James I., although he bought abundant reprints of these Elizabethan song-books, produced none that were new for himself, except as accompanied by, or written to music. The decline of universal lyrical gift is marked in the Jacobean period, and the songs which we come across in this volume will mainly be found to have been the work of belated Elizabethans. Ch. I.] TJie Last Elizabethans. 7 Still more complete was the disappearance of the earliest school of EUzabethan drama, the coherent and serried body of playwrights, now generally known as the Precursors of Shakespeare. These men formed a school, the limits of which are clearly defined. Their leader and master was that noble genius, Christopher Marlowe ; the other names best known to us are those of Greene, Peele, Kyd, and Nash. The biographies of these men are in most cases vague, but it seems certain that all four of them died, prematurely, during the last decade of Elizabeth's reign. Their solitary survivor, Lodge, lived on until the year of James I.'s death, but published no new verse or drama during the sixteenth century. Lyly, the Euphuist, too, was an active dramatist of a still more primitive class, who survived, but in entire silence. The first play-harvest was completely garnered before the new reign began, so completely that Shakespeare, and perhaps Dekker, are the only really transitional figures which are more Elizabethan than Jacobean. Another class of production which had left its mark strongly on our literary development, and had stopped, or at least slackened, by 1603, was that of the great poetical translators. Early in Elizabeth's reign there had been a flock of semi-barbarous translators of the classics. If any one of these was still alive, it must have been Thomas Twyne, who continued the y^neids of Phaer. Later in the life of the same monarch, a far more literary and accomplished set of men enriched our language with versions of the Italian poets. Sir John Harington (15 61-16 12), aided by his brother Francis, translating Ariosto in 1591, and Tasso being carefully 8 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. I. interpreted by Richard Carew (1555-1620) in 1594, and brilliantly by Edward Fairfax (i57o?-i635) in 1600. Homer, first attempted in 1581 by Arthur Hall, had been nobly conquered by Chapman in 1598, and this last-named poet continued, as we shall see, through the reign of James, to annex first provinces of Greek poetry. But he was, by age and in spirit, an Eliza- bethan, and no true Jacobean was a great translator. Even Sir Arthur Gorges' Lucan, though not published until 16 14, was in all probability written twenty years earlier. One or two very early precursors of the Jacobeans were still alive in 1603. Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, whose gloomy and magnificent Induction is far more Jacobean in style than any of those compositions of Spenser's which succeeded it, was made Earl of Dorset by James I., and survived until 1608. His most famous poem, repeatedly re-issued after his death, continued to exercise an influence on the younger writers. Sir Walter Raleigh was not executed till 1618, but his later work as a versifier is largely conjectural. Sir John Davies, whose philosophical poems were among the most original and beautiful literary productions of the close of Elizabeth's reign, was suddenly silenced by the admiration James I. conceived for his judgment in practical affairs, and was henceforth wholly absorbed in politics. But an examina- tion of Davies' work, had we space for it here, would form no ill preparation for the study of several classes of Jacobean poetry. He was eminently a writer before his time. His extremely ingenious Orchestra, a poem on dancing, has much in it that suggests the Fletchers on one Ch. t,] TJie Last ElizabetJians. 9 side and Donne on the other, while his more celebrated magnum opus of the Nosce Teipsum is the general pre- cursor of all the school of metaphysical ingenuity and argumentative imagination. In Davies there is hardly a trace of those qualities which we have sought to dis- tinguish as specially Elizabethan, and we have difficulty in obliging ourselves to remember that his poems were given to the public during the course of the sixteenth century. To the exquisite novelty and sweetness of his Hymns of Asircza, critical justice has never yet been done. But we have no excuse for lingering any longer on the works of a poet so exclusively of the reign of Eliza- beth. Barnaby Barnes (1559-1609), too, that isolated Ronsardist among our London poets, published no lyrics after 1595. His plays, perhaps, were Jacobean, but we possess only one of them, T/ie Devil's Charter, not printed till 1607, which seems to belong to the school of Marlowe. Joseph Hall, the satirist of the Virgide- miarum, becoming Bishop of Exeter, wrote no more verse, and died at length in 1656, by far the last survivor of the Elizabethan choir. Of all the writers of the age it is the laureate, Samuel Daniel, whom it is most difficult to assign to either reign. His literary activity is accurately balanced between the two, and it seems impossible to decide whether he was rather Elizabethan or Jacobean. It may therefore be convenient to come first to a consideration of his poems, to which, however, from his historical position, the prominence they discover must not here be awarded. He was born near Taunton, in Somerset, in or about 1562, was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, lo The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. I. resided at Wilton, and began to publish verses — the Delia sonnets — in 1592. He went to Italy, where he met Guarini and other leading men of letters, and deepened the academic and literary tincture of his taste. On his return to England, volume after volume, published in quick succession, and collected as the Poetical Essays of Sam. Daniel in 1595, testified to the fertility of his fancy. These were lyrical, gnomic, and dramatic, sonnets, odes, historical epics, and tragedies. When the new king and queen were descending on tlieir capital, Daniel met them in Rutlandshire with a Panegyric, which, although it was curiously blunt and unflattering, secured him their cordial favour. He was made licenser of plays, salaried master of the revels to her ]\Iajesty, and unofficial laureate to the court of James I., where he was to the end a peculiarly favoured personage. He retired at length to his native Somerset, and rented a farm near Beckington, trying, if Fuller is to be believed, to practise farming by the rules of Virgil's Georgics. He died at the close of 16 19, and was buried in Beckington Church. "\\^hen the PaJiegyrick at Burleigh Harrington was published in 1603, there were included with it not merely a prose Defeiice of Pyme, which is of high in- terest and merit, and has remained, more or less, the code of English prosody, but also a series of Certain Epistles in verse. The Panegyric, which extends over more than seventy stanzas of ottava rima, is a stately and didactic piece of reflection on the moral conditions of the moment, very interesting in its way, especially to an historian, but somewhat prosaic. Ch. I.] TJie Last Elizabethans. ii The pulse of England never more did beat So strong as now ; nor ever were our hearts Let out to hopes so spacious and so great As now they are ; nor ever in all parts Did we thus feel so comfortable heat As now the glory of thy worth imparts ; The whole complexion of the commonwealth, So weak before, hoped never for more health. Couldst thou but see from Dover to the Mount, From Totnes to the Orcades, what joy, What cheer, what triumphs, and what dear account Is held of thy renown this blessed day ! — A day which we and ours must ever count Our solemn festival, as well we may ; And though men thus count kings still which are new, Yet do they more, where they find more is due. The Epistles, on the other hand — with the exception of his Elizabethan Musophibis (1599) — form Daniel's most attractive contribution to poetry. It is his fault to persist when he has ceased to be exhilarating, and these Epistles — they are six in number — are all short. They are essays on set moral themes addressed to persons of nobility, in curiously novel and elaborate measures, and their sustained flow of reflection, without imagery, without ornament, is singularly dignified. The Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland is probably the best-known of Daniel's poems ; that to the Countess of Bedford, in terza rima, is perhaps even more gracefully conducted to an academic close — How oft are we forced on a cloudy heart To set a shining face, and make it clear, Seeming content to put ourselves apart, 1 2 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Cn. I. To bear a part of others' weaknesses 1 As if we only were composed by Art, Not Nature, and did all our deeds address To opinion, not to a conscience, what is right, As framed by example, not advisedness, Into those forms that entertain our sight ; And though books, Madam, cannot make this mind, Which we must bring apt to be set aright, Yet do they rectify it in that kind, And touch it so, as that it turns that way Where judgment lies ; and though we cannot find The certain place of truth, yet do they stay And entertain us near about the same ; And gives the soul the best delight that may Encheer it most, and most our spirits inflame To thoughts of glory, and to worthy ends. In 1605 Daniel published a short but unusually sprightly lyric in dialogue, called Ulysses and the Siren. The plays of Daniel, as Mr. Saintsbury has noted, occupy the curious position of being the only English tragedies of the age " distinctly couched in the form of the Seneca model," which was so abundantly em- ployed in France. But we can scarcely dwell upon them here, since Cleopatra was already printed in 1594, and Philotas, though not published until 1605, was unquestionably written, in the main, at least three years before the death of Elizabeth. The four masques or entertainments of Daniel remain, as distinctly Jacobean work, to be considered. The Vision of the Ttvclve Goddesses, 1604, shows a hand unaccustomed to these trifles, and is not a little dull. Much more skilful and poetical is The Qiieeiis Arcadia, 1605, which is entirely in verse, blank and rhymed, inextricably interwoven ; this is rather a romantic tragi-comedy in five acts, than Ch. I.] The Last Elizabethans. 13 a masque. Tcthys^s Festival, 16 10, on the other hand, preserves the conventional forms of that kind of enter- tainment. It contains this song, very characteristic of Daniel's delicate manner of moralizing — Are they shadows that we see ? And can shadows pleasure give ? Pleasures only pleasures be Cast by bodies we conceive, And are made the things we deem, In those figures which are seen. But these pleasures vanish fast, Which by shadows are exprest ; Pleasures are not if they last, In their passing is their best ; Glory is most bright and gay, In a Hash, and so away. Feed apace, then, greedy eyes, On the wonder you behold ; Take it sudden as it flies. Though you take it not to hold ; When your eyes have done their part. Thought must length it in the heart. Hymen's Triitmph, 16 15, like The Queen's Arcadia, is a species of pastoral tragi-comedy, languid in action, but very exactly versified. This piece was highly praised by Coleridge, who was a great admirer of the author. " Read Daniel," he said, " the admirable Daniel ; " but in the pleasure he took in his Hmpidity it is possible that Coleridge underrated the aridity of the laureate. The almost unrelieved excision of all ornament and colour, the uniform stateliness, the lack of passion, which render Daniel admirable and sometimes even charming in a 14 TJic Jacobean Poets. [Cii. I. short poem, weary us in his long productions, and so invariably sententious is he that we are tempted to call him a Polonius among poets. Another transitional figure is that of Joshua Sylvester, whom few historians of literature have deigned to mention. He was, however, an active producer of successful verse in his own age, and he wielded, moreover, by means of his famous translation, a prodigious influence. He was born in 1563, in Kent. As early as 1591 he began that version of the Divine Weeks and Works of the French poet, Du Bartas, by which he is principally known. He had the custom, fortunately very unusual at that time, of not dating his title-pages, so that his bibliography is par- ticularly obscure ; but he seems to have gone on publish- ing, revising, and reprinting until close upon his death in 1 6 18. For the last six years of his life he lived at Middelburg, in Holland, as the secretary to the Company of Merchant Venturers there. The particular fate, there- fore, which he had most bitterly dreaded and deprecated fell upon him, for his fear had always been to die in exile. Into his translation of Du Bartas he had inter- polated this appeal — Ah, courteous England, thy kind arms I see, Wide-stretched out to save and welcome me. Thou, tender mother, wilt not suffer age, To snow my locks in foreign pilgrimage, That fell Brazil my breathless corpse should shroud, Or golden Peru of my praise be proud, Or rich Cathay to glory in my verse ; Thou gav'st me cradle ; thou wilt give my hearse ? But the prayer was unheard. Sylvester was ambitious of high distinction, but he was Ch. I.] The Last Elizabethans. 15 dragged down by poverty and by a natural turbidity of style. His original sonnets and lyrics are constantly striking, but never flawless ; his translations, as jooems, are full of force and colour, but crude. His talent was genuine, but it never ripened, and seems to be turning sour when it should be growing mellow. He does not fear to be tiresome and grotesque for pages at a time, and in Du Bartas he unhappily found a model who, in spite of his own remarkable qualities, sanctioned the worst errors of Sylvester. Milton was, however, at- tracted to Du Bartas, and approached him, almost un- questionably, through Sylvester, whose version was extremely popular until the middle of the century. Sylvester's vocabulary was very extensive, and he revelled in the pseudo-scientific phraseology of his French prototype. Nicholas Breton was an Elizabethan primitive, who went on publishing fresh volumes until after the death of James I., but without having modified the sixteenth- century character of his style. He was probably born in 1542, and lived on till 1626. His books are very numerous, most of them, however, being mere pamphlets. He wrote indifferently in prose and verse. The most notable of his little volumes of poetry first published during the reign of James, are The Passionate Shepherd., 1604; The Honour of Valour., 1605 ; and / would and yet I would ?tot, 1614; the larger part of Breton's Jacobean work being in prose. Of these short productions The Passionate Shepherd is by far the best, and ranks very high among Breton's contributions to poetry. It is a collection of pastoral 1 6 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. I. lyrics, in a variety of measures, very lightly, liquidly, and innocently thrown off, with no sense of intellectual effort and no great attention to style. Breton has a very pleasant acquaintance with nature, and can bring up before us such charming pictures as enable us to See the fishes leap and play, In a blessed sunny day ; Or to hear the partridge call, Till she have her covey all ; Or to see the subtle fox, How the villain flies the box, After feeding on his prey ; How he closely sneaks away. Through the hedge and down the furrow, Till he gets into his burrow ; Then the bee to gather honey ; And the little black-haired coney, On the bank for sunny place, With her forefeet wash her face. There is humour and ingenuity in his I would and yet I wojild not, a long statement of the attractions and the disadvantage of almost every walk of life, contrasted in this manner — I would I were a keeper of a park. To walk with my bent cross-bow and my hound, To know my game, and closely in the dark To lay a barren doe upon the ground. And by my venison, more than by my fees, To feed on better meat than bread and cheese. And yet I would not ; lest, if I be spied, I might be turned quite out of my walk. And afterwards more punishment abide. Than 'longs unto a little angry talk. And cause more mischief after all come to me, Than all the good the does did ever do me. Cii. r.] TJic Last Elizabethans. ly This is picluresque ; but the see-saw becomes tedious when extended over more than one hundred and fifty stanzas. Breton had the root of poetry in him, but he was no scholar, inartistic, and absolutely devoid of the gift of self-criticism. A small posy has been selected by Mr. Bullen from the wilderness of his overgrown garden. A similar writer, of perhaps as great general talent, but not SO' true a poet, was Samuel Rowlands. He was probably thirty years Breton's junior, and did not begin to write until within a few years of the death of Elizabeth. He passes out of our sight in 1630. His works consist of satirical characters in verse, mainly in the six-line stanza, describing those fantastical types of the day which so many of the minor writers delighted in caricaturing. They are often well-written, clear, pointed, and regular, never rising to the incisive melody of a great poet, but never sinking below a fairly admirable level, while for the student of manners they abound in realistic detail. Some of the most amusing of these collections come before our period, but Look to //, or Pll stab you, 1604, is as good as any of its predecessors. A Terrible Battle between Fire and Death, 1606, aims, not wholly without success, at nobler things, but becomes tedious and grotesque. As time went on, Rowlands' verse grew less senten- tious, and more broadly farcical, and The Whole Crew of Kind Gossips, 1609, is a favourable example of his " new humour." As we review his successive volumes, we find but slight further change, except that they grow a little coarser and heavier. The Melancholy Knight, 16 r5, c iS TJie Jacobean Poets, [Cii. I. is the best of his later productions. In all the verse of Rowlands we meet with the same qualities, a low and trivial view of life, an easy satire, a fluency and purity of language which never reaches elevation of style. A dull book of sacred prose and poetry, called Heavefi's Glory, Seek It, 1628, closes the long catalogue of the writings of Rowlands. When we turn to the dramatists, we meet at once with one name which, while it is mainly the glory of Elizabeth, belongs in part to the reign of her successor. It would be ridiculous, in this place, to attempt the smallest critical consideration of Shakespeare's writings, or even of that fourth part of them which may be thought of as Jacobean. I shall therefore confine myself to a bare statement of the latest opinion with regard to what plays were composed after the accession of James L, and in what form these were published. Just before the death of Elizabeth, as is generally admitted, a great change came over the temper of Shakespeare, and led him to the composition of his series of lofty tragedies of passion. To these succeeded, five or six years later, the quartet of splendid romances with which his dramatic activity seems to close, since, later than 16 11, we can scarcely with any certitude detect him actively at work. Among the plays belonging to our time, Hamlet can hardly be included, for there can be little doubt that it was written in its present form, and ready for the press, in July, 1602, when The Revenge of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was entered in the Stationers' Registers. It was not printed, however, until 1603, in an edition ot which but two copies survive, both imperfect. By that Cii. I.] The Last ElizabctJiaus. 19 time it had been acted by the King's Players, and " in the two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge." In this edition of 1603 Polonius is named Corambis, and there are certain very feeble passages which do not occur again. It has been supposed that these are remnants of the pre-Shakespearean Hamlet, with which it is now considered improbable that the great poet had any con- nection previous to 1602, when it was doubtless re- modelled by him for the stage. Five quarto editions appeared during Shakespeare's lifetime. The date of King Lear is pretty well ascertained. It must have been written after the publication of Dr. Harsnet's book in 1603, and before it was entered in the Stationers' Registers at Christmas, 1606. An attempt has been made, founded on the phrase, " I smell the blood of a British man," and other slight internal evidence, to tie the date of composition still more tightly down to the close of 1604 and opening of 1605. This is a highly probable hypothesis, but one which cannot, in the present state of our knowledge, be insisted on. There was printed in 1594 a chronicle-history of Lear, King of England, but this has disappeared, and we do not even know whether it was a play. A drama of that name, however, was issued in 1605, when the Lear of Shakespeare was probably already written ; it is of no great merit, and bears little resemblance to the real tragedy, of which two editions were published early in 1608. The early editors of Shakespeare, and Malone during his lifetime, declared Othello to have been written in 161 1. But Malone, in a posthumous publication. 20 TJic Jacobean Poets. [Cu. T. positively revised this date, and gave 1604, saying, "we know it was acted in " that year. What was the source of RIalone's information is uncertain, but it tallies with a mysterious entry in the Revels Book, which itself is forged, but which seems to have been copied from a genuine document, now lost, once accessible to Malone. Othdlo was not printed until 1622, a year before the first folio. To the dramas we have enumerated some degree of date-certainty is afforded by the fact that they ap- peared in quarto-form. Troilus and Crcssida, too, which may or may not have been in existence in 1603, was published in 1609. But of the eight magnificent performances which must now be mentioned no edition is known to exist earlier than the folio of 1623, and the dates of their being written are therefore very difticult to conjecture with assurance. It is, however, certain that Antony and Cleopatra was entered in the Stationers' Registers in May, 1608, and it was probably written during the preceding year. There is absolutely no evidence regarding Timon of Athens and Coriolanus, but the years 1607 and 1608 are usually assigned to them. Cymbelinewd.'s, possibly composed in 1609, or in 1 6 10 at the latest. Dr. Simon Forman saw Macbeth acted at the Globe on the 20th of April, 16 10, and The Tempest, apparently, in the course of the same year ; he saw The Wi liter's Tale on the 15th of May, 161 1, and these plays were, on these occasions, it is probable, of recent composition. This chronological arrangement is borne out by the changes in the structure of Shake- speare's verse, changes to which a too mechanical im- Cn, I.] TJie Last Elizabethans. 21 portance has been assigned, but which are none the less of positive value in the consideration of the succession of his plays. Pericles was published in quarto-form in 1609, and was doubtless written during the preceding year, when George Wilkins, who is believed to have collaborated on it with Shakespeare, brought out his prose tale in illustration of the plot of the play. Finally, it may be noted that the Sonnets, which, apparently, were not completed until 1605, first saw the light in the quarto of 1609. In the course of his elaborate monograph on the writings of the author of Old Fortunatus, Mr. Swinburne has confessed that " of all English poets, if not of all poets on record, Dekker is perhaps the most difficult to classify." This is in part due to the excessive redun- dancy with which he flung unacknowledged fragments of his work hither and thither, a father without a trace of parental instinct. Thomas Dekker was born, doubtless of Dutch parentage in London, about 1567, and did not begin to work until about 1590. Yet, before Elizabeth died, he was the author of eight plays of his own, and in nearly thirty he had combined with others. Of this mass of dramatic production the greater part has disappeared. During the Jacobean period he continued to write in the same casual way, ready to throw in his lot with anybody, but rarely producing a drama entirely by himself. He gradually turned away more and more from verse, and became famous as a pamphleteer and author of sensational tracts. He disappeared about 1632. The best of his plays is probably one in which he allied himself with Middleton in 1604, a second part appear- 22 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Ch. I. ing several years later. In this occurs the famous passage about patience, wliich lias been universally attributed to Dekker — I'atience l^why, 'tis the soul of peace : Of all the virtues, 'tis nearest kin to heaven ; It makes men look like gods. The best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer, A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ; The first true gentleman that ever breathed. The delicately humorous character of Orlando Friscobaldo is an example of work excellently done in a class rarely attempted by Dekker, who is unrivalled in short pathetic scenes, has a tenderness that is all his own, combines with a sweet fancy a rare lyrical gift, but is excessively unequal as a craftsman, and mars some of his finest efforts by his impatience, his incoherence, and his carelessness. It is difficult to understand how it can be possible that the author of the detestable stuff called If it be not good, the Devil is in it, could have turned away to contribute to Massinger's Virgin Martyr the exquisite episode between the heroine and the angel. This extravagant inequality, ever recurring, creates the standing difficulty about the literary position of Dekker. John IMarston is beHeved to have lived on until 163^, but his dramatic activity was almost entirely confined to the four last years of the reign of Elizabeth. In the first year of James I. he seems to have composed his Parasitaster, and to have resigned The Insatiate Countess into the hands of Barkstead to arrange and complete. Some trifling pageants and entertainments close his work, but Marston is to be considered as essentially Elizabethan. CHAPTER IL BEN JONSON — CHAPMAN. The death of Elizabeth was a turning-point in the life of Ben Jonson. When James I. came to the throne of England, there were few among the poets whom he welcomed with greater geniality than the rough young man of thirty, hitherto scarcely known except for a series of dramatic satires, and for a quarrelsomeness of temper which had led him into several ugly scrapes. He was selected for a new trade, that of masque-maker, and in June, 1603, he gratified the queen and Prince Henry by presenting The Satyr before them at Althorpe. The success of this exquisite trifle decided in part Ben Jonson's vocation. For the rest of James's reign, in spite of Daniel's and Dekker's jealousy, he was the favourite arranger of this class of entertainments. Busy as he was, however, with his duties as court poet, he found time before the close of 1603 to write Seja7ius his Fall, the earliest of his Roman tragedies. In this play Shake- speare acted, and, according to the general belief, added considerably to the acting version. When Ben Jonson, however, printed Sejanus, in 1605, he omitted all Shakespeare's lines, rather " than to defraud so happy a 24 TJte Jacobean Poets. [Cii. ii. genius of his right by my loathed usurpation." He got into trouble with Lord Northampton over Sejamis, and was imprisoned in company with Chapman. In 1605 Chapman and Jonson were once more in " a vile prison " for writing against the Scotch in Eastward Hoe ! It was on the occasion of their release that that Roman matron, the mother of Ben, so distinguished herself " After their delivery, he banqueted all his friends ; there was Camden, Selden, and others. At the midst of the feast, his old mother drank to him, and showed him a paper which she had (if the sentence had taken execution) to have mixed in the prison among his drink, which was full of lusty strong poison ; and, that she was no churl, she told, she minded first to have drunk of it herself." Late in 1605 Ben Jonson added a cubit to his literary stature by producing his noble comedy of Volpouc or the Fox. All these years he was not merely a frequenter of the wits' meeting at the Mermaid Tavern in Friday Street, but the very centre and main attraction of the club. In 1609 his comedy of Epicene, or the Silent Wo7Jia7i, was brought out, and in 16 10 The Alchymist. This was Ben Jonson's blossoming-time, and everything he now did was admirable. A second Roman tragedy, Catiline, dates from 161 1. Ben Jonson, who had been a Roman Catholic, presently embraced the Protestant faith, and, very shortly after, Sir Walter Raleigh selected him as travelling-companion to his young son Walter, who was "knavishly inclined." The poet continued for some time to be bear-leader to this youth, and seems, while in Paris, to have interpreted the anxious flither's directions somewhat lazily. There was a break here in the incessant Ch. II.] Boi Jonsoit. 25 succession of Jonson's masques, and his next play was Bart/iolomctv Fair, acted late in 16 14. On the ist of February, 1616, the king appointed Ben Jonson his poet- laureate, with a salary of a hundred marks a year, and after bringing out The DeviVs an Ass, the playwright ceased for a while from his dramatic labours. In 16 16 he published a folio collection of his works, which contained not only the plays, which had already appeared succes- sively in quarto, but five new masques, several entertain- ments, a sheaf of epigrams, and the lyrical and occasional pieces known as T/ie Forest. The life of Jonson for the next few years is rather obscure. In the summer of 1618 he travelled on foot to Scotland, and remained away for about six months. In the first days of 1619, he paid his celebrated visit to Drummond at Hawthornden. Immediately after his departure, Drummond took the copious notes of Jonson's conversation, which are among the most precious relics of the age that we possess. The greatest nonsense has been talked about the " malice" and "perfidy " of the Scotch poet. No charge could be less deserved. An exceed- ingly interesting guest had been speaking to him with absolute freedom about that literary life of London, in which Drummond took an acute and somewhat wistful interest. Nothing could be more natural, and nothing for us more fortunate, than that the host, when Jonson had departed, should jot down what the guest had said. Drummond has shown great art in his notes j we seem to hear the very voice of Jonson. The latter returned to England, and found himself welcome at court, but we know little of his avocations there. In earlier years he 26 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Cii. II. had worked with the celebrated architect Inigo Jones, with wliom he had collaborated in the masques of Blackness in 1605, Hymen in 1606, and Qi/cetis in i6og. Jones had been abroad in France and Italy, but returned to be the Royal Surveyor in 16 15. In Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, two headstrong wills met in conflict, and the poet told Prince Charles " that when he wanted words to express the greatest villain in the world he would call him an Inigo." At last, after ten years, the two great inventors became friends again in 1622, when they combined in the masque of Tiine Vindicated (January, 1623), and they remained on terms of mutual toleration till 1631. Meanwhile, in October, 1623, there occurred the disastrous fire in Jonson's house, which is described in his poem, Ati ExecratioJi iipon Vulcan ; in this many of the poet's manuscripts, and perhaps a play, were destroyed. Just before the death of the king, Jonson produced another drama. The Staple of Nejvs, in 1625. Early in 1626 the poet, who was worn with labours, rather than years, suffered from a stroke of paralysis, and another followed in 1628. But in September of the latter year, having recovered health, he was able to succeed Thomas Middleton, the dramatist, as City Chronologer. In 1629 was "negligently played," and '' squeamishly censured," the comedy of The Nezv Inn, pubhshed in 1631 ; the epilogue tells us that "the maker is sick and sad." Ben Jonson arraigned the reception of this play, by writing an arrogant Ode to Himself, which created a considerable sensation, and was parodied or answered, in a tone uniformly flattering and gracious, Ch. II.] Ben Jonson. 27 by several of the young generation of poets, to whom Jonson was now an object of veneration. In 163 1, on occasion of the pubUcation of certain masques, the old quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones broke out again. Jonson was extremely violent, lost his position at court, and was superseded by Carew and Aurelian Townsend. Another comedy, The Magnetic Lady, was licensed in 1632, but so unsuccessfully acted that it was not published till 1641. The old unprinted play of A Tale of a Tub, which Mr. Fleay attributes to 1601, was revised in 1634, but all these late performances were complete failures, and Jonson broke down under such a mountain of misfortunes. He does not seem to have been in want during his latest years, and the young men of promise surrounded him and lavished their honours upon him. But he was sick and dejected, and without any philosophy to support him. He died on the 6th of August, 1637, at the age of sixty-four, and was buried three days later in Westminster Abbey. Rare Ben Jonson ! By universal consent, the three great comedies of Jonson's central period are his masterpieces. Coleridge could never be sure whether it was Volpone or The Alchy- w«/ which he thought the first of English comedies. Mr. Swinburne has expressed the general opinion of lovers of poetry when he says that " no other of even Jonson's greatest works is at once so admirable and so enjoy- able " as Volpone, grounding this judgment on the exist- ence in that play of something imaginative and even romantic, which is wanting in The Alchymist. The hero, Volpone, is a Venetian magniftco who feigns 28 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Ch. ti. sickness and the approach of death, that, like a fox, he may delude those who gather round him, and may observe them at his leisure. He is an amateur of covetousness, and it is his passion to fill his palace, like a museum, with specimens of the greedy and the obsequious. But Volpone is much more than a mere hunter after oddities ; he is himself the most glorious living example of the vice that he imputes. But he possesses wealth to excess, and though at the opening of the play we find him brooding in an ecstasy over piles of gold, plate and jewels, what now renders him the keenest pleasure is to see other men and women faw^n- ing upon him, in hope of soon dividing his possessions. Three types of legacy-hunters are introduced, Voltore, Corbaccio, and Corvino, each a shrewd rogue, but all easily gulled by the superior cunning of the fox. It is needless to tell the story of the plot, which contains one agreeable female character, Celia, and in the young Bonario one man of honour. All critics have united in praising the solidity of the architecture which has built up this splendid ediiice of satire, and placed upon it the tower or spire of its glittering fifth act, in which, lest the strain of our indignation should be too great, a fitting retribution is allowed to fall upon fox alike and the seeming-successful jackal that has waited upon and betrayed him. In construction The Alcliymist is perhaps finer still, and remains, in spite of its proved unfittedness for the stage, and its antiquated interests, one of the most splendid compositions written by an English hand. Lamb, with unerring instinct, hit upon the central jewel Ch. ti.] Ben Jonson. 29 of tlie whole splendid fabric when he selected for special praise the long scene in Subtle's house, where Epicure Mammon boasts what rare things he will do when he obtains the philosopher's stone. Here Jonson, running and leaping under the tremendous weight of his own equipment, perfectly overwhelms the judgment "by the torrent of images, words, and book-knowledge with which Mammon confounds and stuns " us. In The AlcJiytnist the voluptuousness of avarice, rather than its cruelty or cunning, occupies the poet's pencil. The borderland of tragedy is not here approached, as it was in the deeper savagery of Volponc. Neither Subtle, Face, nor Dol is other than a tame or farcical rogue by the side of the horrors who succeeded one another by the Fox's mock deathbed. But the intrigue is much more ingenious and yet reasonable in the later than in the earlier play, and indeed in mere strength and originality of elaborate in- vention no play ever written exceeded The Alchymist. Here, again, the winding-up of the plot is of the first order of felicitous art. The only charge, indeed, which can be brought against either of these magnificent and stately comedies is that art rules in them to the dispossession of nature. An intellectual cause determines the position of every scene, almost of every line. An emotional irregularity, proof of a less crystalline perfection of workmanship, would be welcomed by the reader, and while criticism can scarcely modify its praise of those two comedies, the heart is not touched in them, and their study but proves the curious figures which move so ingeniously in them to have been invented in the closet, not observed 30 TJic Jacobean Poets. [Ch. n. in the street. There is infinite wit and inteUigencc expended, but upon a scene which is never a reflection of life itself. Between the comedies came The Silent Woman, which is commonly named with them. But this is a work of inferior merit. It is a charming farce, but we cannot, as Dryden did, "prefer it before all other plays, as I do its author, in judgment, above all other poets." The eccentric Morose cannot endure the least noise in his house, and has never married, because he fears the loud clack of a woman's tongue. His nephew, Dauphine, produces a girl, Epicene, who never speaks above a whisper, nor otherwise than in monosyllables. But on the wedding-day the bride pours forth a perfect cascade of conversation, deafening the unhappy bridegroom, and it is only when he is reduced to the verge of despair, that his wicked nephew confesses to him that the marriage was void, and the Silent Woman a boy dressed up in girl's clothes. The general character of this lively play oddly resembles the lighter forms of comedy which, after the example of Moliere, were, sixty years later, to invade the English stage. The other plays of Ben Jonson which came within the Jacobean period are of inferior interest ; but the poet's attempt to teach Roman history by means of stiff blank- verse tragedies must not be overlooked. Coleridge wished that we had more than two of these Roman pieces, but the wish is one which it is hard to echo. Mr. Swinburne has excellently remarked, and it is peculiarly true of Sejanus and Catiline, that Ben Jonson " took so much interest in the creations that he had none left for the Cm. II.] Ben Jonson. 31 creatures of his intellect or art." The personages are drawn with extreme elaboration, and everything which is recorded of them by Sallust or Tacitus, even to their most trifling utterances, is woven into the dialogue ; but the dramatist never lets himself go, and never breathes the breath of life into the Frankenstein monsters of his learned fancy. At the same time, the art of Jonson is very purely displayed in these stiff tragedies. The verse marches with a certain heavy grandeur ; the language is as stately as the sentiments and imagery are magnificent. A studied prosiness, doubtless affected to protest against the purple patchiness of the school of Marlowe, affects the entire composition, and makes the continuous reading of these Roman plays a tedious exercise. Catiline's Conspiracy has the same faults, to greater excess. Certain parts of this tragedy — such as the long soliloquy of the Ghost of Sylla in Catiline's study, and the death-scene of the hero — are perhaps more striking as poetry than anything in Sejaniis ; but the later play is even more bombastic, wooden, and undramatic than the earlier. Choruses are introduced, in the manner of Seneca, but not felicitously. One in the second act, however, applauding the ancient virtue of the citizen, has a fine ring — Such were the great Camilli too, The Fabii, Scipios ; that still thought No work at price enough was bought, That for their country they could do. And to her honour did so knit, As all their acts were understood, The sinews of the public good ; And they themselves one soul with it. 32 TJie Jacobean Poets, [Cii. II, These men were truly magistrates, These neither practised force nor forms ; Nor did they leave the helm in storms j And such they are make happy states. Among the works which follow the great comedies the surprising farce of Bartholomew Fair, crowded with personages, takes a foremost rank. Here, with an astounding vitality, Jonson surrounds the conception of Roast Pig with a riot of contrasted figures, shouting, struggling, permeating the Fair with their superabundant animation. There is no dramatic work in English at all comparable in its own kind with this brilliant and be- wildering presentment of a comic turmoil, and, by a curious chance, it is exactly here, where it might be expected that the dramatist would be peculiarly tempted to subordinate all attempt at character-painting to the mere embodiment of humours, that one of Ben Jonson's few really living and breathing creatures is found in the person of the Puritan, Rabbi Zeal-of-the-Land. But after 1 615 the dramatic genius of Jonson underwent a sort of ossification, and few readers are able greatly to enjoy his later plays. Dryden roundly styled them all his " dotages," and it is certain that, although special study may discover beauties in each of them, the merits of Ben Jonson's style are seen to dwindle, and his faults to become more patent. There is certainly a want of interest and coherence in The Devil is an Ass / and though Mr. Swinburne, whose authority is not lightly to be put aside, claims special appreciation for the Aristo- phanic comedy of The Staple of JVezvs, it has not the charm of Ben Jonson's earlier plays. The romantic Ch. II.] Ben Jonson. 33 comedies of The New Inn and the Magnetic Lady, and the confused, boorish farce of The Tale of a Tub, possess the unmistakable features of Ben Jonson's style, but the life has evaporated, and has left only the skeleton of his too elaborate and self-conscious artistic system. Two examples of the dramatic blank verse of Ben Jonson may suffice to give a taste of his style. The first is a speech of Latiaris in the fourth act of Sejamis — Methinks the genius of the Roman race Should not be so extinct, but that bright flame Of liberty might be revived again (Which no good man but with his life should lose), And we not sit like spent and patient fools. Still pufiing in the dark at one poor coal, Held on by hope till the last spark is out. The cause is public, and the honour, name, The immortality of every soul, That is not bastard or a slave in Rome, Therein concerned ; whereto, if men would change The wearied arm, and for the weighty shield So long sustained, employ the facile sword, We might have soon assurance of our vows. This ass's fortitude doth tire us all : It must be active valour must redeem Our loss, or none. The rock and our hard steel Should meet to enforce those glorious fires again. Whose splendour cheered the world, and heat gave life No less than doth the sun's. The other is the magnificent burst of Sir Epicure Mammon's, with which the second act of the Alchymist opens — Come on, sir ! Now you set your foot on shore In Novo Orbe ; here's the rich Peru ; And there within, sir, are the golden mines Great Solomon's Ophir ! He was sailing to it U 34 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Cu. II. Three years, but we have reached it in ten months. This is the day on which, to all my friends, I will pronounce the happy word, Be rich ; This day you shall be spectatissimi. You shall no more deal with the hollow die, Or the frail card. . . . No more Shall thirst of satin, or the covetous hunger Of velvet entrails for a rude-spun cloak, To be displayed at Madam Augusta's, make The sons of Sword and Hazard fall before The golden calf, and, on their knees, whole nights, Commit idolatry with wine and trumpets. Or go a feasting after drum and ensign ; No more of this ! A very large section of Ben Jonson's work consists of his masques and entertainments, to which he gave a great part of his best ingenuity for twenty years. It was long held that these pieces were devoid of merit, and that the poet debased his genius in consenting to write them. Even Malone spoke of them as " bungling shows," in which "the wretched taste of those times found amusement." But the taste of our own day has reverted in many respects to that of the early seventeenth century, and now each successive critic speaks with greater admiration of the masques of Ben Jonson. The masque was a developed pageant, into which music and poetry had been imported to give a greater richness and fulness to the design. It had been conveyed into England from Italy early in the sixteenth century, but it was not until Ben Jonson took it in hand that it became noticeable as a branch of literary art. Serious as was the bent of his intellect, he did not disdain these elegant and charming diversions. He beUeved himself capable of rendering Ch. II.] Ben Jon son. 35 them immortal by his verse, and in the preface to one of them, the Hyinenaei of 1606, he says as much ; he claims to have given to the masque that intellectual vitality without which "the glory of these solemnities had perished like a blaze, and gone out in the beholders' eyes." He was right; for if we are familiar with the masques of James and Anne, and have forgotten the very names of those performed in honour of their pre- decessors, it is the literary art of Jonson and Daniel and Campion which has preserved alive for us what the Ekill of the architect, musician, milliner, and scene-painter could not contrive to immortalize. The most valuable part of these once gorgeous masques is therefore, of course, the lyrical verse fantastically strewn throughout them. This is of very various interest, some of it stiff and occasional, rough with oddities which no longer appeal to us, wanting in suavity and sweetness ; much of it, on the other hand, extremely delicate, surprising, and aerial. Sometimes, with his allusions and the copious learning of his notes, Ben Jonson turns a masque into a work of positive weight. The Masque of Queens, for instance, is an important poem on the subject of witchcraft, treated with exhaustive picturesqueness. The song which introduces the dance in Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, 16 19, is a happy example of Jonson's skill in the lyrical part of these entertainments — Come on, come on ! and, where you go, So interweave the curious knot, As even the observer scarce may know Which lives are Pleasure's, anrl which not. T,6 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Cii. ll. First figure out the doubtful way. At which awhile all youth should stay, Where she and Virtue did contend Which should have Hercules to friend. Then as all actions of mankind Are but a labyrinth or maze, So let your dances be entwined ; Yet not perplex men into gaze ; But measured, and so numerous too, As men may read each act they do ; And when they see the graces meet, Admire the wisdom of your feet. For dancing is an exercise. Not only shows the mover's wit, But maketh the beholder wise, As he hath power to rise to it. James I.'s taste for masques gave the poet great scope for a liberal invention. It is said that the king spent _;^4ooo in this way during the seven first years of his reign, for he and the queen each presented a masque at Christmas and at Shrovetide. In The Sad Shepherd, a pastoral fragment not published until 1641, Jonson attempted a higher species of enter- tainment; so far as we are able to judge, he had formed a false idea of the shape a bucolic drama should take, but the truncated scenes of The Sad Shepherd contain some beautiful writing. The opening lines form the most delicate example of his skill in blank verse which has come down to us — Here was she wont to go ! and here ! and here ! Just where these daisies, pinks, and violets grow ; The world may find the spring by following her ; Ch. it.] Ben JonsGu. 37 For other print her airy steps ne'er left. Her treading would not bend a blade of grass, Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk ! But like the soft west wind she shot along, And where she went, the flowers took thickest root. The miscellaneous poems of Ben Jonson present features of peculiar interest, but they are of the most bewildering inequality of merit. His Epigrams are not merely exceedingly bad in themselves, but they led to the formation of numberless imitations, and a baleful department of seventeenth-century literature. It is not to be wondered at that Sir Walter Scott should rise from the perusal of these nasty little pieces with the conviction that Jonson enjoyed "using the language of scavengers and nightmen." We turn with relief to The Forest, a collection of fifteen poems, mainly elegiacal, all of a high level of merit, all distinguished and vigorous, although none, perhaps, of superlative beauty. All Ben Jonson's other miscellanies find themselves jumbled together under the heading of Underwoods. Among these are to be found many copies of verses which are interesting as the work of so great a man, some which, though always rather stiff, are elegant and pleasing in themselves, and a majority which not even the vast prestige of Ben can induce us to read with enjoyment or even with toleration. The graces of the Jacobean age were rarely at the beck of Ben Jonson, and when he does not succeed in his own elaborate way, he ceases to succeed at all. The genius of Ben Jonson was long regarded with a sort of superstitious reverence. Even Dryden, who was 38 TJic Jacobean Poets. [Cii. II. the first to question his supremacy, admitted that he thought Ben Jonson "the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had," and acknowledged him ''the more correct poet," but Shakespeare "the greater wit." Although such language would now be held extravagant, and although Jonson is not any longer mentioned among English writers of the very first rank, he retains a firm and important place in our literature. Incongruous as his works are, and much as his style lacks fidelity to any particular ideal, the image we form of the poetry of Jonson is a very definite and a very striking one. He called those " works " which others call " plays," as Sir John Suckhng complained, and everywhere we find him laborious, strenuous, and solid. His writings give us the impression of a very bold piece of composite architecture, by no means pure in style, and constructed after a fashion no longer admired, nor naturally suitable to the climate, but rich, stately, and imposing. The character of the man is clearly reflected in Jonson's writings, and forms by no means their least interesting feature. They, like the fierce bricklayer's son, like the guest of Drummond and the enemy of Inigo Jones, like the master of "the mountain belly and the rocky face," are truculent, saturnine, direct, full of arrogance and sincerity, permeated with a love of litera- ture, but without human passion or tenderness. In spite of the fabulous wealth of imagination and eloquence which lie close below the surface of Ben Jonson's works, few indeed are those who dig there for treasure. He repels his admirers, he holds readers at arm's length. He is tlie Cii. II.] Chcxpnian. 39 least sympathetic of all the great English poets, and to appreciate him the rarest of literary tastes is required, — an appetite for dry intellectual beauty, for austerity of thought, for poetry that is logical, and hard, and lusty. Yet he did a mighty work for the English language. At a time when it threatened to sink into mere prettiness or oddity, and to substitute what was non-essential for what was definite and durable, Jonson threw his massive learning and logic into the scale, and forbade Jacobean poetry to kick the beam. He was rewarded by the passionate devotion of a tribe of wits and scholars ; he made a deep mark on our literature for several genera- tions subsequent to his own, and he enjoys the perennial respect of all close students of poetry. A name which it is natural to think of in conjunction with Jonson's is that of George Chapman, who resembled him in the austerity of his judgment, in his devotion to the classics, and in his distinguished attitude to letters. But while Jonson was a noble dramatist and a very bad translator, Chapman was one of the best translators that England has ever produced, and, if I may venture to state a personal conviction, a dramatist whose merits were exceedingly scanty. This latter opinion is one which it may perhaps seem foolhardy to express, for Lamb, who first drew attention to his plays, has praised them exuberantly, and Mr. Swinburne has done Chapman the honour of dedicating to a study of his works a con- siderable volume, to which all careful readers must be recommended. That no injustice should be done here to this poet, I will at once record the fact that Lamb has said, " Of all the English playwriters, Chapman 40 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Cu. ii. perhaps approaches nearest to Shakespeare in the descriptive and didactic, in passages which are less purely dramatic." It is rash to differ from Lamb, but I am bound in mere sincerity to admit that I find nothing even remotely Shakespearian in plays that seem bombastic, loose, and incoherent to the last extreme, and in \Yhich the errors of the primitive Elizabethans, due mainly to inexperience, are complacently repeated and continued through the noblest years of perfected art, in which Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher held the stage. Chapman was an admirable and sometimes even a great poet, but it is hard to admit that he was ever a tolerable playwright. George Chapman was born at Hitchin about 1559, and was therefore past middle life when James I. ascended the throne of England. He was educated at Oxford, but we know abs >lutely nothing about his occupations until he was nearly forty years of age. In the last years of Elizabeth he came to London, and was engaged in dramatic work from about 1595 to 1608. We know of eight or nine plays produced before the death of the queen, five of which have survived. His Jacobean dramas are Monsieur d' Olive, published in 1606, but acted earlier; Bussy (!A?nbois, printed 1607 ; Eastward Hoe ! of which mention has been already made, in which Chapman collaborated in 1605, with Jonson and Marston; The Widows Tears, acted about the same time, but not published until 161 2; The Revenge of Bussy dAmbois, printed in 161 3, but acted much earlier; Byroris Conspiracy and Byron's Tragedy, each of 1608. As late as 1631, there was published a tragedy of Ccesar Ch. II.] Chapman. 41 and Pompcy, evidently an old rejected play of Chap- man's youth. With these exceptions, and those of two tragic fragments which Shirley found, completed and published in the next age, all Chapman's dramatic work may be safely consigned to the age of Elizabeth. Webster commended Chapman more highly than any of his contemporaries, or, at least, in enumerating them mentioned his name first, and expressed his warm appreciation of "that full and heightened style" in which he considered Chapman's tragedies to be written. Such praise, from such a man, may not lightly be passed over ; yet Chapman's last and most friendly apologist finds himself forced to admit that "the height indeed is some- what giddy, and the fulness too often tends or threatens to dilate into tumidity." Of the four French tragedies, Bussy d'Atnbois is undoubtedly the most interesting, being full of soHloquies and declamatory passages that have a true ring of epic poetry about them, and being at least as nearly allied to a play as the essentially un- dramatic mind of Chapman could make it. Of the comedies two are certainly readable : Monsieur d' Olive, a whirligig of fashionable humours and base love, is undoubtedly put together with a good deal of spirit and some humour, and May Day, a " coil to make wit and women friends," is a still madder piece of extravagance. But even these prose plays, certainly the most coherent and amusing evidences of Chapman's talent as a dramatist, are in no sense thoroughly satisfactory. The estimate of women throughout is base to the last degree ; no dramatist of the period satirizes the other 42 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. II. sex \\\\\\ such malignant and persistent sarcasm as Chapman. It is a point that seriously militates against any claim he may put forward to greatness, since perhaps nothing displays the inherent littleness of an imagina- tive writer more than the petulance or affected indigna- tion with which he presumes to regard the world of woman. The whole series of Chapman's comedies and tragedies contains, so far as I know, not one woman whose chastity is superior to temptation, whose wit is adaptable to other purposes than those of greedy or amatory intrigue, or whose disposition presents any of those features of sweetness and fidelity which it is the delight of a high-minded poet to dwell upon and to extol, and which most of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, however base their fancy might take leave to be, never neglected to value. At the opening of his dramatic career under Elizabeth, Chapman had published some strange and obscure poems which it is not our place to speak of here. But when he ceased to write plays, he turned his attention to poetry again. He dedicated to Prince Henry, in 1609, The Tears of Peace, and to the memory of the same "most dear and heroical patron," his Epkedhim in 16 1 2. Eugenia, sen elegy on William, Lord Russell, appeared in 16 14, and Andromeda Liberata, an epithalamium on the scandalous nuptials of Robert Carr and Frances, Lady Essex, in the same year. As late as the summer of 1633 Chapman wrote, but did not con- clude, an Invocation against Ben Jonson. All these were composed in the heroic couplet. Of these poems The Tears of Peace is by far the most valuable, although Cii. II.] Chapman. 4 3 Eugenia contains some highly wrought description of natural phenomena. Here is a rising storm out of the latter poem — Heaven's drooping face was dress'd In gloomy thunderstocks ; earth, seas, arrayed In all presage of storm ; the bitterns played And met in flocks ; the herons set clamours gone That rattled up air's triple region ; The cormorants to dry land did address, And cried away all fowls that used the seas ; The wanton swallows jerked the standing springs, Met in dull lakes, and flew so close, their wings Shaved the top waters ; frogs croaked ; the swart crow Measured the sea-sands, with pace passing slow. And often soused her ominous heat of blood Quite over head and shoulders in the flood, Still scolding at the rain's so slow access ; The trumpet-throated, the Naupliades, Their clangours threw about, and summoned up All clouds to crown imperious tempest's cup. In all, as Mr. Swinburne has said, "the allegory is clouded and confounded by all manner of perversities and obscurities, the verse hoarse and stiff, the style dense and convulsive, inaccurate and violent," with occasional lucid intervals of exquisite harmony, which affect the senses strangely in the midst of balderdash so raucous and uncouth. It is, however, pre-eminently as a translator that Chapman takes high rank among the English poets. In 1598 he had published two small quartos. Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer and The Shield of Achilles ^ both dedicated to the Earl of Essex. In 1600 he completed Marlowe's exquisite Hero and Leander, 44 The Jacobean Poets. [Cu. II. keeping much closer to the text of Musseus. Prince Henry was among those who read and admired the Homer fragments, and he commanded Chapman to complete his translation. Accordingly, in 1609, in folio, appeared Bomer, Prince of Poets, a version of the first twelve books of the Iliad. This was identical with the text of 1598, but with five books added. The entire ///'^^ was not published until 161 1. In 1612, Chapman issued the Penetential Psalms of Petrarch. He returned, in spite of Prince Henry's death, to the translation of Homer, and published the first twelve books of the Odyssey in 16 14, and the remainder of that epic in the next year. The Iliad and Odyssey appeared in one volume in 16 16, and Chapman completed his version of Homer with the Batrachomyomachia printed, without a date, probably in 1622. Meanwhile, Chapman had been busy with Hesiod, and published a version of the Georgics, now extremely rare^ in 1618; the /us t Reproof of a Poma?i Smellf east, trans\a.ted from Juvenal, appeared in 1629. His violent quarrel with Jonson is, un- fortunately, the latest fact which has been preserved about him ; he died soon after, and was buried in London, at St. Giles-in-the-Fields, on the 12th of May, 1634. The noble and famous sonnet written by Keats in a copy of Chapman's Homer is a witness to all time of the merit of that translation. Busy as Chapman was in many fields of literature, it is by Homer that he lives and will continue to live. He threw such an incomparable fire and gusto into the long, wave-like couplets of his Iliad, that poet after poet has been borne upon them into a new world of imagination. Cm. II.] CJtapvian. 45 Here is an example from the fifteenth book — Then on the ships all Troy, Like raw-flesh-nourish'd lions rushed, and knew they did employ Their powers to perfect Jove's high will ; who still their spirits enflamed, And quench'd the Grecians' ; one renown'd, the other often sham'd. For Hector's glory still he stood, and even went about To make him cast the fleet such fire, as never should go out ; Heard Thetis foul petition, and wish'd in any wise The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes. From him yet the repulse was then to be on Troy conferr'd, The honour of it given the Greeks ; which thinking on, he stirr'd With such addition of his spirit, the spirit Hector bore To burn the fleet, that of itself was hot enough before. But now he far'd like Mars himself, so brandishing his lance As, through the deep shades of a wood, a raging fire should glance, Held up to all eyes by a hill ; about his lips a foam Stood as when th' ocean is enrag'd, his eyes were overcome With fervour, and resembled flames, set off" by his dark brows And from his temples his bright helm abhorred lightnings throws. Chapman " speaks out loud and bold," and the ancient world of Homer, with all its romantic purity and freshness, lies spread at our feet. It has often been noted with amazement that Chapman, whose original poems are perverse and cloudy to the last degree, should have been able so to clarify his style, and so to appreciate the lucidity of his original, as to write a translation of Homer which a boy may read with pleasure. The Odyssey of Chapman, which, like the Hymns, is in heroic couplet, has never been such a general favourite as the Iliad, where the rolling four- teen syllable line carried with it much of the melody and the movement of the Greek hexameter. His success, even here, is irregular and uncertain; sometimes he sinks 46 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Cii. II. into platitude or rushes into doggerel ; sometimes he is outrageously false to his original and careless of the text. But, on the whole, no later verse-translator of Homer, — and translators have been myriad — has sur- passed Chapman, and his Iliad remains one of the ornaments of our literature, and one of the principal poetical glories of the Jacobean age. CHAPTER III. JOHN DONNE, Among the non-dramatic poets who flourished under James I., incomparably the most singular and influential was the Roman Catholic scholar who became Dean of St. Paul's. John Donne was thirty years of age when Elizabeth died, and no small portion of his most characteristic work must have been written in her reign. But Donne belongs, essentially, to that of her successor. In him the Jacobean spirit, as opposed to the Elizabethan, is paramount. His were the first poems which protested, in their form alike and their tendency, against the pastoral sweetness of the Spenserians. Something new in English literature begins in Donne, something which proceeded, under his potent influence, to colour poetry for nearly a hundred years. The exact mode in which that influence was immediately distributed is unknown to us, or very dimly perceived. To know more about it is one of the great desiderata of literary history. The imitation of Donne's style begins so early, and becomes so general, that several critics have taken for granted that there must have been editions of his writings which have disappeared. 48 The Jacobean Poets. [Cn. ill. As a matter of fact, with the exception of two ex- ceedingly sUght appearances, that of ten sonnets con- tributed to Davison's Poetical Rhapsody in 1602, and of A71 A7iatomy of the Worhi in 161 1, the poems of Donne are not known to have been printed until 1633, a year or two after his death. Yet the refer- ences to them in documents of twenty years earlier are frequent, and that they were widely distributed is certain. This was doubtless done by means of more or less complete transcripts, several of which have come down to our own day. These transcripts must have been passed from hand to hand at court, at the univer- sities, in cultured country houses, and almost every poet of the Jacobean age must have been more or less familiar with their tenor. The style of Donne, like a very odd perfume, was found to cling to every one who touched it, and we observe the remarkable phenomenon of poems which had not passed through a printer's hands exercis- inof the influence of a body of accepted classical work. In estimating the poetry of the Jacobean age, therefore, there is no writer who demands more careful study than this enigmatical and subterranean master, this veiled Isis whose utterances outweighed the oracles of all the visible gods. For the secrecy with which the poems of Donne were produced no adequate reason is forthcoming. His conduct in other respects, though somewhat haughty, was neither cloistered nor mysterious. He was pro- fuse in the publication of his prose writings, and denied his verse alone to his admirers. That the tenor of it clashed with his profession as a Churchman Ch. III.] John Donne. 49 has been put forward as a reason, but it is not a very good one. Donne was not squeamish in his sermons, nor afraid of misconception in his Pseudo-Martyr. If he had had scruples of conscience about his secular poems he might have destroyed them, as George Herbert did his. It is idle to speculate on the cause of Donne's peculiar conduct. It suffices to record that having produced a quantity of poetry of extraordinary value, and intimately welcome to his generation, he would neither publish nor destroy it, but permitted, and perhaps preferred, that it should circulate among his most intelligent contemporaries in such a way as to excite the maximum of curiosity and mystery. John Donne was born in the city of London in 1573 ; his father was a Welshman, his mother descended from the family of Sir Thomas More. At an early age he showed precocious talents, and was educated with care at Oxford first, and then possibly at Cambridge. Before he was fourteen he had won the title of the Pico della Mirandola of his age. His father died when he was a child, and left him in the charge of a mother who was a Roman Catholic herself, and greatly desired to see her son converted. For a long time the young man hung undecided, between the Churches of Rome and England. While in this uncertain condition of mind, of which Izaak Walton has preserved a record, Donne wrote, or began to write, his Satires, which are understood to belong to the years 1593 and 1594. He threw in his lot with the Earl of Essex, and, in a brief heat of soldier- ship, took part in the expedition against Cadiz, and in the Island Voyage. From the Azores he passed into E 50 Tlie Jacobean Poets. tCii. III. Italy, and thence into Spain, making himself fiiniiliar with contemporary thought in those countries. Return- ing to England, he became secretary to the Lord Chancellor, and eventually fell in love with a young lady of quality who was Lady Elsemore's niece. This attachment lost for Donne the favour of his patron, but after romantic difficulties the marriage was performed in 1600, although the poet was immediately thrown into prison. He was soon released, but he found it impossible to regain his situation. His wife and he, however, were invited by their kinsman, Francis Wolley, to take up their abode at his country-seat of Pyrford, which they did. The next few years were spent in this retirement, absorbed in intellectual work of all kinds, and were in all probability those in which the radiating heat of Donne's genius first began to make itself felt On the death of Wolley, the Donnes retired to a house in ]\Iitcham in 1606, while the poet took lodgings in London for his more frequent communication with those who, from all parts of Europe, now began to gather to listen to his conversa- tion. In 1610, James I., who "had formerly both known and put a value upon his company, and had also given him some hopes of a state employment, being always much pleased when ]\Ir. Donne attended him," suddenly adjured him to enter the ministry. Donne declined to do so on the spot, but from that time forth he gave his special attention to " an incessant study of textual divinity," and in 161 5, at the age of forty-two, he took holy orders. He quickly rose to be Dean of St. Paul's, a post which he held for nearly nine years, Ch. TIL] John Donne. 51 dying on the 31st of March, 1631, of a consumption. At the tune of his death he was, beyond question, the most admired preacher in England. This brief sketch of the external circumstances of Donne's life may be sufficient for our purpose, but gives no idea of the mysterious dis- crepancies which existed in his character, of the singular constitution of his mind, or of his fiery eccentricity. With the trifling exceptions which have been mentioned above, the poems of Donne were not published until after his death. The first edition, the quarto of 1633, is very inaccurate and ill-arranged; the octavos of 1635 and 1639 are much fuller and more exact. Donne, however, still lacks a competent editor. We have no direct knowledge of the poet's own wish as to the arrangement of his poems, nor any safe conjecture as to the date of more than a few pieces. The best lyrics, however, appear to belong to the first decade of James I.'s reign, if they are not even of earlier composition. There seems to be no doubt that the Satires, an imperfect manuscript of which bears the date 1593, are wholly Elizabethan, These are seven in number, and belong to the same general category as tliose of Hall, Lodge, and Guilpin. Neither in date nor in style do they belong to the period treated of in this volume, and it is therefore not necessary to dwell on them at great length here. They are brilliant and picturesque beyond any of their particular compeers, even beyond the best of Hall's satires. But they have the terrible faults which marked all our Elizabethan satirists, a crabbed violence alike of manner and matter, a fierce voluble conventionality, a tortured and often absolutely licentious and erroneous 52 Tlic Jacobean Poets. [Cn. III. conception of the use of language. The fourth is, doubtless, the best written, and may be taken as the best essay in this class of poetry existing in English literature before the middle-life of Uryden ; its attraction for Pope is well known. " The Progress of the Soul," as named by its author " Poema Satyricon," takes its natural place after the satires, but is conjectured to have been written not earlier than 1 6 ID. De Quincey, with unwonted warmth, de- clared that " massy diamonds compose the very substance of this poem, thoughts and descriptions which have the fervent and gloomy sublimity of Ezekiel or /I^^schylus." It is written in a variant of the Spenserian stanza, and is a hyperbolical history of the development of the human soul, extended to more than five hundred lines, and not ended, but abruptly closed. It is one of the most diffi- cult of Donne's writings, and started a kind of psycho- logical poetry of which, as the century progressed, many more examples were seen, none, perhaps, of a wholly felicitous character. t~lt has the poet's characteristics, however, to the full. The verse marches with a virile tread, the epithets are daring, the thoughts always curious and occasionally sublime, the imagination odd and scholastic, with recurring gleams of passion^ Here is a fragment of this strange production — Into an embryon fish our soul is thrown, And in due time thrown out again, and grown To such vastness, as if, unmanacled From Greece, Morea were, and that, by some Earthquake unrooted, loose Morea swum, Or seas from Afric's body had severed Ch. III.] John Donne. 53 And torn the hopeful promontory's head ; This fish would seem these, and, when all hopes fail, A great ship overset, or without sail Hulling, might (when this was a whelp) be like this whale. At every stroke his brazen fins do take More circles in the broken sea they make Then cannons' voices, when the air they tear ; His ribs are pillars, and his high-arch'd roof. Of bark that blunts best steel, is thunder-proof; Swim in him, svvallow'd dolphins, without fear, And feel no sides, as if his vast womb were Some inland sea, and ever as he went He spouted rivers up, as if he meant To join our seas with seas above the firmament. ***** t Now drinks he up seas, and he eats up flocks ; He jostles islands and he shakes firm rocks ; Now in a roomful house this soul doth float, And like a prince she sends her faculties To all her limbs, distant as provinces. The Sun hath twenty times both crab and goat Parched, since first launch'd forth this living boat ; *Tis greatest now and to destruction Nearest ; there's no pause at perfection, Greatness a period hath, but hath no station. Far less extraordinary are the Epistles, which form a large section of Donne's poetical works. All through life he was wont to address letters, chiefly in the heroic couplet, to the most intimate of his friends. These epistles are conceived in a lighter vein than his other writings, and have less of his characteristic vehemence. The earliest, however, " The Storm," which he addressed from the Azores, possesses his Ehzabethan mannerism ; it is crudely picturesque and licentious, essentially un- poetical. " The Calm," which is the parallel piece, is 54 TIic Jacobean Poets. [Cii. ill. far better, and partly deserves Ben Jonson's high com- mendation of it to Drummond. The epistle to Sir Henry Goodyer is noticeable for the dignified and stately manner in which the four-line stanza, afterwards adopted by Gray for his Elegy., is employed ; this poem is exceedingly like the early pieces written by Dryden some fifty years later. The school of the Restoration is plainly fore- shadowed in it. Many of these epistles are stuffed hard with thoughts, but poetry is rarely to be found in them ; the style is not lucid, the construction is desperately parenthetical. It is not often that the weary reader is rewarded by such a polished piece of versification as is presented by this passage about love in the " Letter to the Countess of Huntingdon." It is not love that sueth, or doth contend ; Love either conquers, or but meets a friend. Man's better part consists of purer fire, And finds itself allowed, ere it desire. Love is wise here, keeps home, gives reason Su'ay, And journeys not till it find summer-way. A weather-beaten lover, but once known, Is sport for every girl to practise on. Who strives, through woman's scorns, woman to know, Is lost, and seeks his shadow to outgo ; It must be sickness, after one disdain, Though he be called aloud, to look again ; Let others sin and grieve ; one cunning slight Shall freeze my love to crystal in a night. I can love first, and, if I win, love still, And cannot be removed, unless she will ; It is her fault if I unsure remain ; She only can untie, I bind again ; The honesties of love with ease I do. But am no porter for a tedious woe. Cn. III.] joJin Donne. 55 Most of these epistles are New Year's greetings, and many are addressed to the noble and devout ladies with whom he held spiritual converse in advancing years. The poet superbly aggrandizes the moral qualities of these women, paying to their souls the court that younger and flightier cavaliers reserved for the physical beauty of their daughters. The Epithalamia of Donne form that section of his work in which, alone, he seems to follow in due succes- sion after Spenser. These marriage-songs are elegant and glowing, though not without the harshness which Donne could not for any length of time forego. That composed for the wedding of Frederick Count Palatine and the Lady Elizabeth, in 16 13, is perhaps the most popular of all Donne's writings, and opens with a delicious vivacity. Hail, Bishop Valentine, whose day this is 1 All the air is thy diocese. And all the chirping choristers And other birds are thy parishioners ; Thou marryest every year The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove. The sparrow that neglects his life for love, The household bird with the red stomacher ; Thou mak'st the blackbird speed as soon As doth the goldfinch or the halcyon ; The husband cock looks out, and straight is sped, And meets his wife, which brings her feather-bed. This day more cheerfully than ever shine, — This day, which might enflame thyself, old Valentine. The ode within the rather stiff setting of the Allo- phanes and Idios eclogue is scarcely less felicitous. The miscellaneous secular poems of Donne are generically classed under the heading of " Elegies." We 56 The Jacobean Poets. [Cu. in. liave here some of the most extraordinary aberrations of fancy, some of the wildest contrasts of character and style, to be observed in literature. They are mainly Ovidian or Tibullan studies of the progress of the passion of love, written by one who proclaims himself an ardent, but no longer an illusioned lover, — hot, still, but violent and scandalous. The youth of the author is disclosed in them, but it is not the callous youth of first inexperience. He is already a past master in the subtle sophistry of love, and knows by rote " the mystic language of the eye and hand." Weary with the beauty of spring and summer, he has learned to find fascination in an autumnal face. The voluptuous character of these elegies has scandalized successive critics. Several of them, to be plain, were indeed too outspoken for the poet's own, or for any decent age. Throughout it is seldom so much what the unbridled lover says, as his utter intemperance in saying it, that surprises, especially in one who, by the time the poems were given to the public, had come to be regarded as the holiest of men. Even saints, however, were coarse in the age of James, and the most beautiful of all Donne's elegies, the exquisite " Refusal to allow his Young Wife to accompany him abroad as a Page," which belongs to his mature life and treats of a very creditable passion, is marred by almost inconceivable offences against good taste. Another section of Donne's poems is composed of funeral elegies or requiems, in which he allowed the sombre part of his fancy to run riot. In these curious entombments we read nothing that seems personal or Ch. III. J JoJiu Donne. 57 pathetic, but much about " the magnetic force " of the deceased, her spiritual anatomy, and her soul's " meri- dians and parallels." Amid these pedantries, we light now and then upon extraordinary bursts of poetic obser- vation, as when the eminence of the spirit of Mistress Drury reminds the poet of a vision, seen years before in sailing past the Canaries, and he cries out — Doth not a Teneriffe or higher hill, Rise so high like a rock, that one might think The floating moon would shipwreck there, and sink, or as when one of his trances comes upon him, and he sighs — when thou know'st this, Thou know'st how wan a ghost this our world is. These lovely sudden bursts of pure poetry are more frequent in the " Funeral Elegies " than in any section of Donne's poetry which we have mentioned, and approach those, to be presently noted, in the Lyrics. The spirit of this strange writer loved to dwell on the majestic and gorgeous aspects of death, to wave his torch within the charnel-house and to show that its walls are set with jewels. This may be taken as an example of his obscure mortuary imagination — As men of China, after an age's stay, Do take up porcelain where they buried clay, So at this grave, her limbeck (which refmes The diamonds, rubies, sapphires, pearls and mines Of which this flesh was), her soul shall inspire Flesh of such stuff, as God, when his last fire Annuls this world, to recompense it, shall Make and name them the elixir of tlii-< All. 58 The Jacobean Poets. rcii. ill. They say, the sea, when it gains, losetli too, If carnal Death (the younger brother) do Usurp the body ; our soul, which subject is To the elder Death, by sin, is freed by this ; They perish both, when they attempt the just. For graves our trophies are, and both death's dust. The presence of the emblems of mortality rouses Donne to an unusual intellectual ecstasy. The latest of these elegies is dated 1625, and shows that the poet retained his art in this kind of writing to the very close of his career, adding polish to his style, without any perceptible falling off in power. A large number of " Holy Sonnets," which Izaak Walton thought had perished, were published in 1669, and several remain still unprinted. They are more properly quatorzains than sonnets, more correct in form than the usual English sonnet of the age — for the octett is properly arranged and rhymed — but closing in the sestett with a couplet. These sonnets are very interesting from the light they throw on Donne's prolonged sympathy with the Roman Church, over which his biographers have been wont to slur. All these " Holy Sonnets " pro- bably belong to 161 7, or the period immediately follow- ing the death of Donne's wife. In the light of certain examples in the possession of the present writer, which have not yet appeared in print, they seem to confirm Walton's remark that though Donne inquired early in life into the differences between Protestantism and CathoUcism, yet that he lived until the death of his wife without religion. A pathetic sonnet from the Westmoreland manuscript, Ch. III.] John Donne. 59 here printed for the first time, shows the effect of that bereavement upon him — Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt To Nature, and to hers and my good is dead, And her soul early into heaven vanished. — Wholly on heavenly things my mind is set. Here the admiring her my mind did whet To seek thee, God ; so streams do show their head, But tho' I have found thee, and thou my tliirst hast fed, A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet. But why should I beg more love, when as thou Does woo my soul for hers, off 'ring all thine : And dost not only fear lest I allow My love to Saints and Angels, things divine, But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt Lest this World, Flesh, yea Devil put thee out ? The sonnet on the Blessed Virgin Mary, however, has probably been attributed to Donne by error; the more likely name of Constable has been suggested as that of its author. In his other divine poems, also, the Roman element is often very strong, and the theology of a cast which is far removed from that of Puritanism. In the very curious piece called " The Cross," he seems to confess to the use of a material crucifix, and in " A Litany " he distinctly recommends prayer to the Virgin Mary, " That she-cherubim which unlocked Paradise." All these are matters which must be left to the future biographers of Donne, but which are worthy of their closest attention in developing the intricate anomalies of his character. We have now, by a process of exhaustion, arrived at 6o TJie Jacobean Poets. [Ch. ill. what is the most interesting of the sections of Donne's poetry, his amatory lyrics. These are about seventy in number, and so far as the scanty evidence can be depended upon, belong to various periods from his twentieth to his thirty-fifth year. The series, as we now hold it, begins with the gross and offensive piece of extravagance called, "The Flea," but is followed by "The Good-Morrow," which strikes a very different note. As a rule, these poems are extremely personal, confidential, and vivid ; the stamp of life is on them. None the less, while confessing with extraordinary frankness and clear- ness the passion of the writer, they are so reserved in detail, so immersed and engulphed in secrecy, that no definite conjecture can be hazarded as to the person, or persons, or the class of persons, to whom they were addressed. One or two were evidently inspired by Donne's wife, others most emphatically were not, and in their lawless, though not gross, sensuality, remind us of the still more outspoken " Elegies." In spite of the alembicated verbiage, the tortuousness and artificiality of the thought, sincerity burns in every stanza, and the most exquisite images lie side by side with monstrous conceits and ugly pedantries. A peculiarity of the lyrics is that scarcely two of the seventy are written in the same verse-form. Donne evidently laid himself out to invent elaborate and far- fetched metres. He was imitated in this down to the Restoration, when all metrical effects tended to merge in the heroic couplet. But of the innumerable form- inventions of Donne and of his disciples scarcely one has been adopted into the language, although more Ch. III.] John Donne. 6i than one, by their elegance and melody, deserve to be resumed. This exemplifies one of the prettiest of his stanza- forms — If thou be'st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights, Till age snow white hairs on thee ; Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me All strange wonders that befell thee, And swear Nowhere Lives a woman true and fair. If thou find'st one, let me know ; Such a pilgrimage were sweet. Yet do not, — I would not go Though at next door we might meet, Though she were true when you met her, And last till you write your letter. Yet she Will be False, ere I come, with two or three. 'It now remains to examine this body of poetry in general terms, and, first of all, it is necessary to make some remarks with regard to Donne's whole system of prosody. The terms " irregular," " unintelligible," and " viciously rugged," are commonly used in describing it, and it seems even to be supposed by some critics that Donne did not know how to scan. This last supposi- tion may be rejected at once ; what there was to know about poetry was known to Donne. But it seems certain that he intentionally introduced a revolution into English versification. It was doubtless as a rebellion against 62 Tlie Jacobean Poets. [Cii. III. the smooth and somewhat nerveless iambic flow of Spenser and the earliest contemporaries of Shakespeare, that Donne invented his violent mode of breaking up the line into quick and slow beats. The best critic of his own generation, Ben Jonson, hated the innovation, and told Drummond " that Donne, for not keeping of accent, deserved hanging." It is difficult to stem a current of censure which has set without intermission since the very days of Donne itself, but I may be per- mitted to point out what I imagine was the poet's own view of the matter. He found, as I have said, the verse of his youth, say of 1590, exceedingly mellifluous, sinuous, and inclining to flaccidity. A five-syllabled iambic line of Spenser or of Daniel trots along with the gentlest amble of inevitable shorts and longs. It seems to have vexed the ear of Donne by its tendency to feebleness, and it doubtless appeared to him that the very gifted writers who immediately preceded him had carried the softness of it as far as it would go. He desired new and more varied effects. To see what he aimed at doing, we have, I believe, to turn to what has been attempted in our own time, by Mr. Robert Bridges, in some of his early experiments, and by the Symbolists in France. The iambic rhymed line of Donne has audacities such as are permitted to his blank verse by Milton, and although the felicities are rare in the older poet, instead of being almost incessant, as in the later, Donne at his best is not less melodious than Milton. When he writes — Blasted with sighs and surrounded with tears, Ch. III.] John Donne. 63 we must not dismiss this as not being iambic verse at all, nor, — much less, — attempt to read it — Blasted with sighs, and surrounded with tears, but recognize in it the poet's attempt to identify the beat of his verse with his bewildered and dejected con- dition, reading it somewhat in this notation : — Blasted | with sighs 1| and surrounded | with tears. The violence of Donne's transposition of accent is most curiously to be observed in his earliest satires, and in some of his later poems is almost entirely absent. Doubtless his theory became modified with advancing years. No poet is more difficult to read aloud. Such a passage as the following may excusably defy a novice : — No token of worth but Queen's man and fine Living barrels of beef and flagons of wine. I shook like a spied spy. Preachers which are Seas of wit and arts, you can then dare Drown the sins of this place, for, for me. Which am but a scant brook, it enough shall be To wash the stains away. But treat the five-foot verse not as a fixed and unalter- able sequence of cadences, but as a norm around which a musician weaves his variations, and the riddle is soon read — No token | of worth | but Queen's | man | and fine Living I barrels of | beef and ( flagons of | wine. I shook I like a spied | spy. | Preachers | which arc Seas I of wit | and arts, | you can then | dare Drown | the sins | of this place, | for, | for me, Which am | but a scant | brook, | it enough | shall be To wash I the stains | away. 64 TJie Jacobean Poets. \Q\\. ill. The poetry of Donne possesses in no small degree that "unusual and indefinable witchery" which Dr. Jessopp has noted as characteristic of the man himself. But our enjoyment of it is marred by the violence of the writer, by his want of what seems to us to be good taste, and by a quality which has been overlooked by those w'ho have written about him, but which seems to provide the key to the mystery of his position. Donne was, I would venture to suggest, by far the most modern and contemporaneous of the writers of his time. He rejected all the classical tags and imagery of the Eliza- bethans, he borrowed nothing from French or Italian tradition. He arrived at an excess of actuality in style, and it was because he struck them as so novel and so completely in touch with his own age that his immediate coevals were so much fascinated with him. His poems are full of images taken from the life and habits of the time. Where earlier poets had summoned the myths of Greece to adorn their verse, Donne weaves in, instead, the false zoology, the crude physics and philosophy, of his own fermenting epoch. The poem called " Love's Exchange," is worthy of careful examination in this respect. Each stanza is crowded with conceits, each one of which is taken from the practical or professional life of the moment in which the poet wrote. This extreme modernness, however, is one potent source of our lack of sympathy with the poetry so inspired. In the long run, it is the broader suggestion, the wider if more conventional range of classic imagery, which may hope to hold without fatigue the interest of successive generations. Cii. III.] JoJm Donne. 65 For us the charm of Donne continues to rest in his occasional fehcities, his bursts of melodious passion. If his song were not so tantalizingly fragmentary, we should call him the unquestioned nightingale of the Jacobean choir. No other poet of that time, few poets of any time, have equalled the concentrated passion, the delicate, long-drawn musical effects, the bold and ecstatic rapture of Donne at his best. In such a poem as " The Dream," he realizes the very paroxysm of amatory song. In his own generation, no one approached the purity of his cascades of ringing monosyllables, his For God's sake, hold your tongue and let me love, or, I long to talk with some old lover's ghost, Who died before the God of Love was born. or. Oh more than moon, Draw not thy seas to drown me in thy sphere, or, A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. In these and similar passages, of which a not very slender florilegium might be gathered from his voluminous productions, Donne reminds us that Ben Jonson esteemed him "the first poet in the world in some things." But this quality of passionate music is not the only one discernible, nor often to be discerned. The more obvious characteristic was summed up by Coleridge in a droll quatrain — With Donne, whose Muse on dromedary trots. Wreathe iron pokers into true-love-knots ; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, Fancy's maze and clue. Wit's forge and fire-blast, Meaning's press and screw. ^ 66 The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. III. In the use of these ingenuities, which it was once < the fashion to call " metaphysical," Donne shows an amazing pertinacity. He is never daunted by the feeling that his wit is exercised " on subjects where we have no right to expect it," and where it is impossible for us to relish it. He pushes on with relentless logic, — some- times, indeed, past chains of images that are lovely and appropriate ; but, oftener, through briars and lianas that rend his garments and trip up his feet. He is not affected by the ruggedness of his road, nor by our unwillingness to follow him. He stumbles doggedly on until he has reached his singular goal. In all this intellectual obstinacy he has a certain kinship to Browning, but his obscurity is more dense. It is to be hoped that the contemporary maligned him who reported Donne to have written one of his elegies in an intentional obscureness,l»but that he delighted in putting his readers out of their depth can scarcely be doubted-^' It is against this lurid background, which in itself and un- relieved would possess a very slight attraction to modern readers, that the electrical flashes of Donne's lyrical intuition make their appearance, almost blinding us by their brilliancy, and fading into the dark tissue of conceits before we have time to appreciate them. The prominence here given to Donne will be challenged by no one who considers what his influence was on the poetical taste of the time. It is true that among his immediate contemporaries the following of Spenser did not absolutely cease at once. But if a study on the poets of Charles I. were to succeed the present volume, the name of Donne would have to be Ch. III.] John Donne. 67 constantly prominent. On almost everything non- dramatic published in the succeeding generation, from Crashaw to Davenant, from Carew to Cowley, the stamp of Donne is set. Dryden owed not a little to him, although, as time went on, he purged himself more and more fully of the taint of metaphysical conceit. So late as 1692, in the preface to Eleanora, Dryden still held up Donne as "the greatest wit, though not the best poet of our nation." His poems were among the few non- dramatic works of the Jacobean period which continued to be read and reprinted in the age of Anne, and Pope both borrowed from and imitated Donne. So far as we trace this far-sweeping influence exercised on the poets of a hundred years, we have difficulty in applauding its effects. The empassioned sincerity, the intuitions, the clarion note of Donne were individual to himself and could not be transmitted. It v/as far other- wise with the jargon of " metaphysical" wit, the trick of strained and inappropriate imagery. These could be adopted by almost any clever person, and were, in fact, employed with fluent effect by people in whom the poetical quality was of the slightest. Writers like Mildmay Fane, Earl of Westmoreland, or like Owen Feltham (in his verse), show what it was that Donne's seed produced when it fell upon stony ground. CHAPTER IV. BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. There is no body of poetical work which displays so characteristically — we may not add, perhaps, so favourably — the qualities of the Jacobean age as the mass of plays united under the names of Beaumont and Fletcher. These celebrated friends, who supply the most illustrious example of the art of literary partnership now extant, would probably be as little known to us as several of their scarcely less-gifted contemporaries, if they had not so exactly gratified the taste of their time, and of the generation which succeeded theirs, as to induce the players to preserve and revise their writings. Only ten of their plays were printed during their lives, but the folio of 1647 saved forty-two others from a destruction which may have been imminent. As the century proceeded, the writings of these friends advanced in popularity far beyond that of Shakespeare's or even of Ben Jenson's, and when the Restoration thought of the classic English drama, it thought principally of Beaumont and Fletcher. Dryden expressed the common opinion when he said that they reproduced the easy con- versation of gentlefolks more ably than Shakespeare, and Ch. IV.] Beaumont and Fletcher. 6g acquiesced in the common taste when he recorded that in his day " two of theirs were acted through the year, for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's." Beaumont and Fletcher preserved their vogue until the classic reaction was completed, and then their romantic plots and easy verse went suddenly out of fashion. Towards the end of the eighteenth century their fame revived, but it has never again risen to its first commanding height. Yet the richness and abundance of these dramatists, their very high level of merit, and their perfect sympathy with the age in which they flourished, will always save them from critical neglect. To praise them unreservedly is no longer possible ; but no one who loves poetry can fail to read them with delight. Of the famous Heavenly Twins of Parnassus, John Fletcher was the elder. He was born in December, 1579, at Rye, of which parish his father, Richard Fletcher, was then incumbent. Dr. Fletcher became successively Bishop of Bristol, of Worcester, and of London, dying when his son was seventeen, and an inmate of Bene't College, Cambridge. Fletcher's career is entirely obscure to us, until he began to be a dramatist, in his thirtieth year ; but it is probable that, though not rich, he never found himself so pinched by poverty as the majority of his dramatic colleagues were. Francis Beaumont was even more certainly in easy circumstances. Fie was born, the third son of the squire of Grace-Dieu in Leicestershire, towards the close of 1584. He was admitted to Broadgates Hall, Oxford, in 1597, and proceeded to the Inner Temple three years later. He was probably the author of Sal/Jiacis and HctDiaplirodiic, 70 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. iv. 1602, a luscious paia[)hrase of a story of Ovid told in heroic verse, a juvenile performance, but one of high poetic promise. Early in the century Beaumont became a prominent figure among the wits, and was little more than of age when Ben Jonson addressed him — How do I love thee, Beaumont, and thy Muse, in answer to the complimentary " religion " of a neatly turned copy of verses on Volpone. Fletcher wrote on the same occasion, and their names are thus for the first time connected. The famous meetings at the Mermaid may have begun soon after 1606, when Beaumont composed his Letter to Ben Jonson, 'Smtten before he and Master Fletcher came to London," He says in the course of this admirable epistle : — What things have we seen Done at the Mermaid ; heard words that have been So nimble and so full of subtle flame, As if that every one from whence they came. Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, And had resolved to live a fool the rest Ofhis dull life. From this same poem, in which he speaks of "scenes" which are not yet perfect, we see that he was already a dramatist. The first appearance he is known to have made was in the comedy of The Woman-Hater, written and anonymously printed in 1607. There is little doubt that this was the unaided work of Beaumont. It bears manifest signs of a young hand, and is a crude miscellany of prose patched with soft passages of romantic blank verse. The Woman-Hater is interesting as manifestly composed under the influence of Shakespeare. The Ch. IV.] Beaumont and Flctclicr. yi central figure is a hungry courtier, Lazarillo, who studies greediness as a fine art, and indulges in exquisite rhapsodies of longing for the head of an "umbrano," which fishy delicacy evades him to the last. The fair adventuress Orianais a species of Beatrice, and Gondarino an unseemly and extravagant Benedick. The scene is laid at Milan; the verse is primitive, and the knowledge of stage-craft as yet rudimentary. None the less, the germ of the whole Beaumont-and-Fletcher drama is to be traced in this lax and luxurious mixture of poetry and farce. In 1608 Fletcher is believed to have made his first essay in authorship with the pastoral tragi-comedy of The Faithful Shepherdess, which is admitted to be, from the purely poetical point of view, one of the best, if not the very best thing of its kind in English. There is no reason to suppose that at this point he had begun to combine with Beaumont, and this poem has all the air of being Fletcher's unaided composition, in spite of a phrase of Jonson's to Drummond. The Faithful ShepherdiSs was an attempt to introduce into English literature the art of Tasso and Guarini. It is an artificial and exotic piece, of little dramatic propriety, and even when it was originally produced, it made the audience angry by its substitution of renaissance fancies for " Whitsun-ales, cream, wassail and morris-dances." It is an excursion into the very fairyland of imagination ; but, unfortunately, Fletcher carries with him the grossness and the moral perversity which were his most unfortunate characteristics, and his wanton shepherdesses are scan- dalously indifferent to decorum. On the other hand, no 72 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Cn. IV. work of the period abounds with finer lyrical beauties, truer touches of sympathy with nature, or more artfully artless turns of exquisite language. Here are two fragments of the Satyr's speeches — See, the day begins to break. And the light shoots like a streak Of subtle fire ; the wind blows cold, As the morning doth unfold ; Now the birds begin to rouse, And the squirrel from the boughs Leaps to get him nuts and fruit ; The early lark, that erst was mute, Carols to the rising day Many a note and many a lay. Thou divinest, fairest, brightest, Thou most powerful Maid, and whitest, Thou most virtuous and most blessed, Eyes of stars, and golden-tressed Like Apollo, tell me. Sweetest, What new service now is meetest For the Satyr ? Shall I stray In the middle air, and stay The sailing rack, or nimbly take Hold by the moon, and gently make Suit to the pale queen of night For a beam to give them light ? Shall I dive into the sea, And bring the coral, making way Through the rising waves that fall In snowy fleeces? Dearest, shall I catch the wanton fawns, or flies Whose woven wings the summer dyes Of many colours ? Get thee fruit ? Or steal from heaven old Orpheus' lute ? All these I'll venture for, and more, To do her service all these woods adore. Ch. IV.] Beaitrnont and Fletcher. 73 The famous partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher began about 1608, and lasted until 1611. During this brief period they wrote ten or eleven of the plays which still exist, and without doubt not a few of their pro- ductions are lost. In 1608* they brought out on the stage Four Flays in One, Lovers Cure, and probably A King and No King. In 1609 The Scornful Lady ; in 1610 The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Coxcomb, Cnpid's Revenge 2.xiA Philaster ; in 161 1 The Tivo Noble Kinsmen, in which Shakespeare may have collaborated, The Maid's Tragedy, and perhaps Love's Pilgrimage. In 161 1 Beaumont, who seems to have always shrunk from the rough publicity of the stage, made up his mind to retire from play-writing ; he had never allowed his name to appear on a title-page. He probably married Ursula Isley at this time, and withdrew to the country. Perhaps his health began to fail ; at all events, on the 6th of March, 1616, at the early age of thirty-one, he died, and was buried, three days later, in Westminster Abbey. It is in the plays which have just been mentioned that the peculiar qualities of the two playwrights are seen to the best advantage. In later years, whether alone, or in collaboration with others, Fletcher produced many very fine works, but they scarcely have the charm of those which he wrote with Beaumont. When the posthumous editor of 1647 came to arrange the dramas, he placed The Maid's Tragedy at the head, Philaster next to it, and A King or No King third. In these three plays, and in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, too, the hand * The conjectural arrangement so ingeniously worked out by Mr. Fleay is here in ihe main adopted. 74 The Jacobean Poets. [Cn. iv. of Beaumont appears to be paramount. There is, at least, very marked, a certain element which does not reappear after the retirement of Beaumont, and which may safely be attributed to that writer. The seventeenth century admired The Maid's Tragedy to excess, and it is true that it is full of poetry which it would be hardly possible to overpraise, a poetry which is more delicate, more spontaneous than the declama- tory genius of Fletcher could produce unaided. Here is part of a speech by Aspatia in the second act — Then, my good giils, be more than women, wise, — At least, be more than I was, and be sure You credit anything the light gives light to, Before a man ; rather believe the sea Weeps for the ruin'd merchant when he roars ; Rather the wind courts but the pregnant sails When the strong cordage cracks ; rather the sun Comes but to kiss the fruit in wealthy autumn, V>'hen all falls blasted ; if you needs must love, Forc'd by ill fate, take to your maiden bosoms Two dead-cold aspics, and of them make lovers ; They cannot flatter, nor forswear ; one kiss Makes a long peace for all ; — but Man, Oh ! that beast, Man ! Come ! let's be sad, my girls ! The plot of The Maids Tragedy^ the only play of Beau- mont and Fletcher's which has been revived on the modern stage, is gross, painful, and improbable. Yet there is tragic interest in the distressing relation of Evadne and Amintor; while in the fifth act, where Evadne kills the king, a certain moral altitude of horror, unusual with these poets, is distinctly reached. In almost every way, for good and ill, The Maids Tragedy is a characteristic specimen of their theatre. Ch. IV,] Beatmiont and Fletcher. 75 Modern taste prefers P/iilaster, in many ways an enchanting performance. The beauty of the imagery and the melody of the language here become something veritably astonishing. Nothing in Jacobean poetry outside Shakespeare is more charming than the sweet companionship, in the second act, of Philaster and the boy-maiden, Bellario-Eufrasia. It is thus that Philaster describes Bellario — I have a boy Sent by the gods, I hope to this intent, Not yet seen in the court ; hunting the buck, I found him sitting by a fountain-side. Of which he borrowed some to quench his thirst. And paid the nymph again as much in tears ; A garland lay him by, made by himself Of many several flowers, bred in the bay. Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness Delighted me ; but ever when he turned His tender eyes upon 'em, he would weejj, As if he meant to make 'em grow again. .Seeing such pretty helpless innocence Dwell in his face, I asked him all his story : He told me that his parents gentle died, Leaving him to the mercy of the fields. Which gave him roots ; and of the crystal springs, Which did not stop their courses ; and the sun. Which still, he thank'd him, yielded him his light ; Then he took up his garland and did show What every flower, as country people hold. Did signify ; and how all, order'd thus, E.xpress'd his grief ; and to my thoughts did read The prettiest lecture of his country art That could be wished ; so that methought I could Have studied it. I gladly entertained him. Who was more glad to follow, and have got The trustiest, lovingest, and the gentlest boy That ever master kept. ^6 The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. IV. Bellario's final speech to the king sums up the essence of the play, and explains the prettiest of those rather awkward disguises of boys as girls and girls as boys, in which Sidney and Shakespeare had indulged, but which Beaumont and Fletcher observed in a posi- tive extravagance. Stronger than either of these graceful romances, is the tragi-comedy of A King and No Ki/ig, which sacrifices force less to sweetness than is usual with its authors, and proceeds with great spirit, Arbaces, a finely designed character, moves the accomplished type of a vaunting egotist, the man who is unshaken in the belief in himself. Magnanimous as well as braggart, there is a life-like variety in Arbaces more attractive than the too-Jonsonian figure of Bessus, whose almost professional cowardice is so incessant as to grow tiresome. Other plays of this first and greatest period which demand a special word are The Knight of the Burning Pestle^ with its extremely early proof of the popularity of Cervantes; Foia- Plays in One, two by Beaumont and two by Fletcher, which seems to represent their first efforts at combined authorship ; Love's Cure, a rattling, vigorous comedy of Seville manners, in which Lucio, a lad brought up as a girl, is contrasted with Clara, the martial maid, who dreams herself a man — Love curing them both, and bringing both back to nature ; the sparkling English comedy of The Scornful Lady, with its domestic scenes ; and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a stirring but ill-constructed dramatization of Chaucer, to which the shadow of the name of Shakespeare, and a certain indisputable strength in the first act, have directed a somewhat exaggerated amount of attention. Ch. IV.] Bcmimont and Fletcher. 77 The song with which it opens can scarcely but be by Shakespeare himself. Roses, their sharp spines being gone, Not royal in their smells alone, But in their hue. Maiden pinks, of odour faint, Daisies smell-less, yet most quaint, And sweet thyme true ; Primrose, first-born child of Ver, Many springtime's harbinger, With her bells dim ; Oxlips in their cradles growing ; Marigolds on death-beds blowing ; Lark-heels trim ; All dear Nature's children sweet, Lie 'fore Bride and Bridegroom's feet, Blessing their sense ; Not an angel of the air, Bird melodious or bird fair. Is absent hence. The crow, the slanderous cuckoo, nor The boding raven, nor chough lioar. Nor chatting pie. May on our bride-house perch or sing. Or with them any discord bring. But from it fly. Whether Beaumont withdrew entirely in 16 11, or lingered on until 1613, his influence seems to be very slight in the second period of the collaborated plays. Fletcher may have used hints supplied by his friend, but in the main the plays of the last years of Beaumont's life seem to be exclusively Fletcher's. In 161 2 he probably brought out The Captain. In 16 13 The Honest Man's 78 The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. IV. Fortune and The Nice Valour. In 1614 The Night- Walker, Wit tvithout Money, The Woman's Prize, and The Faithful Friend. In 161 5 The Chances. In 16 16 Bonduca, Valcntinian, and The Bloody Brother. In 1 61 7 The Knight of Malta and TJie Queen of Corinth. In 161 8 The Mad Lover, The Loyal Subject, and The Humourous Lieutenant. Of these sixteen plays there is not one which can be said to be so important, either poetically or dramatically, as several of the preceding series, nor did Fletcher fail, at a subsequent time, to rise to greater heights. The decline is so abrupt at first as to mark almost beyond question the sudden weakness i)roduced by the withdrawal of Beaumont ; Fletcher learned gradually, but not without difficulty, to stand alone. Here are one or two good tragedies — Bonduca, The Bloody Brother — but not a single comedy, unless it be The Chajices, which can be ranked among the best of Fletcher's. Aubrey's phrase, repeated from Earle, that Beaumont's " main business was to correct the over- flowings of Mr. Fletcher's wit," has often been quoted ; but, in the presence of the phenomenon before us, it can- not be credited. Something very much more positive than a mere critical exercise of judgment was removed when Beaumont ceased to write, and the versification alone is enough to assure us of the abundance of his actual contributions. The prose-scenes in the plays of the earliest period were undoubtedly Beaumont's, and they testify to a vein of fancy very difi"erent from Fletcher's. It is noticeable, however, that this group of imperfect plays contains almost all Fletcher's most exquisite and imperishable songs. Ch. IV.] Beaumont and Fletcher. 79 In Bonduca, a romance of Roman Britain, Fletcher composed a tragedy which only just missed greatness, in the manner of Shakespeare. The patriot queen is well contrasted with the soldierly graces of Caratach. T/ie Bloody Brother was greatly admired throughout the seventeenth century ; Dryden described it as the only English tragedy " whose plot has that uniformity and unity of design in it which I have commended in the French," but to a modern taste it seems crude and harsh. Valaitinian, another early favourite, told the story of Nero under the guise of new names and intrigues. This class of tragedies revealed the existence of masculine qualities of writing in Fletcher, and were composed with spirit and fervour. He was, however, to attain greater sureness of execution, and the plots of these melodramas display the results of haste and want of judgment. The individual speeches, and some scenes, possess great beauty; the general texture is improbable and dis- agreeable. The comedies of this group are marked by a sort of frenzied gaiety which is almost delirious, and which too frequently degenerates into horseplay. They seem all farce and whimsies, decked out, to be sure, in laces and ribands of very pretty poetry, but essentially volatile. At the very moment when we become certain that the judgment of Beaumont was completely withdrawn from censuring the productions of his friend, we are aware that another talent is summoned to Fletcher's assistance. About 1619 Philip Massinger, an Oxford man of mature years, adopted the profession of dramatist, and began to work in conjunction with Fletcher. The circumstances So The Jacobean Poets. [Cti. IV. of his life will be dealt with in a later chapter, when we come to treat his independent work. It is certain that at first he aimed at nothing more ambitious than the alteration and the completion of the plays of others. His collaboration seems not merely to have been welcome to Fletcher, but extremely stimulating, and for two years he and Massinger wrote with great assiduity a group of plays which appear in the so-called Beaumont-and-Fletcher collection. The main plays of this conjectural third group (1619-20) are Sir John van Olden Bartioveldt, The Lazvs of Candy, The Custom of the Country, The Double Marriage, The Little French Lawyer, The False Ofie, Woniai Pleased, and A Very Woman. Of these there is little to be said for the five first, in which Fletcher strikes us as careless and Massinger still timid. The three last deserve separate attention. In The False 0?ie, which deals with the familiar story of Antony and Cleopatra, the oratorical poetry of Fletcher rises to its sublimest altitude. The action of the piece is slow, and we are constantly tempted to regret Shakespeare's magnificent evolution. But of the grasp of character, the elevated conception of the principal figures, and the charm of broad and melodious poetry thrown like antique raiment about them, there can be no two opinions. Women Pleased, though the scene is laid in Florence, is a comedy of contemporary English life, full of agreeable humours. Bomby, the Puritan, who dances to " the pipe of persecution," and tries to stop the morris-dances, is a delightful creation, and is not too mechanically insisted on. The whole of the fourth act is very poetically conceived. A Very Cii. IV.] Beaumont and Fletcher. 8i IVoman is now more commonly treated as mainly the work of Massinger. According to*Mr. Fleay's computation, the arrangement between Fletcher and Massinger was abruptly suspended from September, 1620, till March, 1622. If this be so, we may with a certain plausibility name a series of plays as having been written in those months by Fletcher unaided. These are Monsieur Thoi/ias, Thierry and Theodoret, The Island Princess, The Pilgrim, and The Wild Goose Chase. It appears, at all events, that no hand but Fletcher's was at work on these five plays, and they are of so high an excellence as to make us regret that his haste or his idleness led him so often to lean upon others, instead of trusting to his own admirable re- sources. Thierry and Theodoret is commonly admitted to be the best of Fletcher's tragedies. The childless King of France, who is warned to slay the first woman whom he meets proceeding at sunrise from the temple of Diana, is confronted with the veiled figure of his own beloved wife, Ordella. This Lamb considered to be the finest scene in Fletcher, and Ordella his " most perfect idea of tlae female heroic character." The Wild Goose Chase, in like manner, is one of the brightest and most coherent of Fletcher's comedies, a play which it is impossible to read and not be in a good humour. The central in- cident of Monsieur Thomas, a middle-class Don Juan brought to summary justice, is too gross for modern readers ; but the play is admirably worked out as a comical conception, and adorned with a bevy of pleasing and indignant girls. The final group of the plays which are commonly bound G 82 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Ch. IV. up together as the works of Beaumont and Fletcher is the most difficult to arrange and appreciate. Massinger may have returned to Fletcher in 1622, and may have been concerned that year in The Prophetess, The Sea Voyage, The Spaiiish Curate, and The Beggar's Bush. Of these the last alone is important; it is a very odd play, full of curious and fantastic stuff, and has had warm admirers. Coleridge said of The Beggai's Bush, "I could read it from morning to night; how sylvan and sunshiny it is ! " It is a Flemisli comedy, in which the ragged regiment are introduced using their cant phrases and discovering their cozening tricks. In 1623 Fletcher seems to have joined with some one who was not Massinger, but whom it would be hazardous to name with certainty, in writing Wit at Several Weapons and The Maid of the Mill, the first an English, and the second a Spanish comedy, trembling on the borderland of farce. At this point the career of Fletcher becomes in- distinct to us, but it is very interesting to observe that his genius seems to have deepened and brightened to the last, for his very latest plays, probably produced in 1624, are second to nothing of the same kind written through the long course of his career. These are the comedies of A Wife for a Month, and Puie a Wife and Have a Wife. These are much less farcical than the comic pieces which had preceded them, and rest on a solid basis of invention. When the poet composed Pule a Wife and Have a Wife, he must have been worn with a career of persistent and laborious in- vention, yet nowhere in the mass of his voluminous Ch. IV.] Beaumont and Fletcher. 83 writings is the wit more fresh, the language more ex- quisite, elastic, and unexpected, or the evolution of character more delicate. We may be permitted to hope that his anxieties were relaxed for some months before his death. But all we know is what Aubrey has retailed, that Fletcher died of the plague on the 19th. of August, 1625, and that, " staying for a suit of clothes before he retired into the country, Death stopped his journey and laid him low." He was buried in the Church of St. Saviour's, Southwark, in a grave which was opened fourteen years later to receive Philip Massinger. The epitaph of Sir Aston Cockayne relates that — Plays they did write togetlier, were great friends, And now one grave includes them in their ends ; Two whom on earth nothing could part, beneath Here in their fame they live, in spite of death. Aubrey relates of Beaumont and Fletcher that " they lived together on the Bankside, not far from the play- house, both bachelors, had the same clothes, cloak, etc., between them." Fuller tells a story of their joint com- position, probably in some tavern, and the ejaculation, '' I'll kill the king," being overheard and mistaken for high treason against James I. The aims which actuated Beaumont and Fletcher were so lofty, and their actual performance so huge in extent, and uniformly ambitious in effort, that we are bound to judge them by no standard less exacting than the highest. Their resolute intention was to conquer a place in the very forefront of English literature, and for a time they seemed unquestionably to have succeeded in 84 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. IV, so doing. For a generation after the death of Fletcher, it iniglit reasonably be mooted whether any British writer of poetry had excelled them. After the Restoration, although their popularity continued, their reputation with the critics began to decline, and no one will again name them with poets of the first class. They take, and will retain, an honourable position in the second rank, but in the first they can never again be placed. The conditions of their time seriously affected them. The highest point of poetic elevation had been reached, and the age, brilliant as it was, was one of decadence. It would have been possible to Beaumont and Fletcher — as still later on, when the incline was still more rapid, it yet was to Milton — to resist the elements of decay, to be pertinaciously distinguished, austere, and noble. But they had not enough strength of purpose for this ; they gave way to the stream, and were carried down it, con- tenting themselves with flinging on it, from full hands, profuse showers of lyrical blossoms. They had to deal with a public which had cultivated a taste for the drama, and liked it coarse, bustling, and crude. They made it their business to please this public, not to teach or lead it, and the consequence w-as that they sacrificed to the whimsies of the pit all the proprieties, intellectual, moral, and theatrical. It is a testimony to the talents of Beaumont and Fletcher that we do not compare them with any one but Shakespeare. Yet this is a test which they endure with difficulty. There are many scenes in which the superficial resemblance is so striking that we cannot hesitate to suppose that they were writing in conscious Ch. IV.] Beawnont and Fletcher. 85 rivalry with their greatest contemporary. But it would be hard to point to a single instance in which he had not a complete advantage over them. They move too suddenly or too slowly, they are too fantastic for nature, or too flat for art, they are " making up," while he seems simply painting straight from the heart. It may perhaps be said, without injustice to Beaumont and Fletcher, that they differ from Shakespeare in this, that he is true throughout, and in relation to all the parts of the piece, while they are satisfied if they are true in isolated instances. Their single studies of a passion are often just and valuable in themselves, but they are almost always false to the combination in which the poets place them. What could be fairer or more genuine than the virtuous enthusiasm of Leucippus, what more unnatural and ridiculous in relation to the other personages which animate the tragedy of Ctipid's Revenge ? The great twin-brethren of Jacobean poetry have many tricks which sink into conventions, and soon cease to please us. The incessant masquerade of girls as men, and boys as maidens, is one of them; we are fortunate when the girl disguised as a man (and, of course, acted, in those days, by a boy), does not assume a still further disguise as a woman. Beau- mont and Fletcher's violent statement of moral problems which they have not the imagination nor the knowledge of the heart needful to unravel is a constant source of weakness; the looseness of their desultory plots, their hasty scheme in which, as Hazlitt has said, " everything seems in a state of fermentation and effervescence," their brazen recommendation of purely 86 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Ch. iv, sensuous forces, their terrible facility and carelessness — all these are qualities which hold them back when they attempt the highest things, and it is sadly true that these eminent poets and all-accomplished playwrights have not left a single play which can be called first-rate. If, however, Beaumont and Fletcher are severely judged at the strictest literary tribunal, they are none the less poets of an admirable excellence. Coleridge wished that they had written none but non-dramatic poetry, an expression, no doubt, of his sense of the beauty and propriety of their serious verse as compared with the meretricious rattle of what they designed to tickle the groundlings. It is not merely that their lyrics — their songs and masques and dirges — are so peculiarly exquisite, but that their soliloquies, for pure poetry, are unsurpassed in English dramatic literature. The poetry does not always seem in place, nor does it aid the evolution of the scenes, but in itself, in its relaxed and palpitating beauty, its sweetness of the hothouse, it is a delicious thing. The germs of the ruin of English prosody, of the degeneracy of English fancy, are in it, and they soon begin to fructify, but in the meantime the perfumed exotic is charming. Few dramatists can be quoted from with so much effect as Beaumont and Fletcher, or in that form are more enticing, or excite curiosity more acutely. The air they breathe is warm and musky, their star is " Venus, laughing with appeased desire," to young readers they appear divinely satisfying and romantically perfect. But deeper study does not further endear them, and the adult reader turns from them, with regret, to cultivate sterner and purer students of the heart. They Ch. IV.] Field. 87 are not quiet enough ; we weary of their incessant " tibia orichalco vincta," and turn to simpler and serener masters. Yet even in their noisiness and their turbidity they were children of their age, and, when all is said, they were of the brood of the giants. It may be convenient to deal at this point with a dramatist who was brought into intimate and constant relations with Beaumont and Fletcher, as an interpreter of their plays and as an occasional collaborator. Of Nathaniel Field we form a more definite notion than of any of the other minor playwrights of his time. We possess at Dulwich a striking portrait of him, and the incidents of his career are well defined. He was born in London in October, 1587, his father dying six months later. In 1597 the child was apprenticed to a stationer, being meanwhile educated at Merchant Taylors' School ; but at twelve years of age we find that he was taken away to be an actor. In this capacity he came under the notice of Ben Jonson, who deigned to make the boy his scholar, and to read Horace and Martial with him. Field grew up with the instincts of a man of letters, and was proud of having acquired Latin. For the next ten years he played women's parts incessantly in the dramas of his great contemporaries, occasionally writing verses of his own. At length, in 161 2, he published an inde- pendent play, A Woman is a Weathercock, which had probably been acted two years before. This must have been immediately followed by Amends for Ladies, which, however, was not published until 1618. Field wrote a third play. The Fatal Dowry, which Massinger completed and published in 1632. 88 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. IV. Field was admitted to the Stationers' Company in 1611, and seems to have intended then to become a publisher. He carried out this design some years later, but remained upon the stage until about 1619. Chapman was his poetic " father," and Field seems to have won the affection of his associates. Of the close of his life nothing is known except that he was buried on the 20th of February, 1633. Field's two comedies are productions of very considerable excellence, composed with solid art, and combining some of the classic strength of Ben Jonson with the sparkle and bustle of Fletcher. Field is careful to preserve the unity of time. His A ]Vo?>ian is a Weathercock is a satire on the volatility of the sex ; in Amends for Ladies, as the title indicates, the author shows how firm a woman can on occasion remain. The second play, which is the better of the two, was en- livened by topical allusions to Moll Cutpurse, " the Roaring Girl," who was doing penance at Paul's Cross when the play was brought out. She was a favourite character with the Jacobean dramatists. In The Fatal Dowry Field attempted tragedy, and wrote the lugubrious story of the unburied Charalois with dignity and pathos. CHAPTER V. CAMPION — DRAYTON — DRUMMOND — SIR JOHN BEAUMONT. In this chapter we deal with certain poets, of very varied excellence, in whom the tradition of Elizabeth survived, although not in the Spenserian form. It may be convenient to begin with one who has been till lately almost unknown, but who, since 1889, and under the auspices of Mr. A. H. BuUen, has come to take his place at the forefront of the lyrical poets of the beginning of the seventeenth century. Of the exquisite genius of Thomas Campion there must in future be allowed no question. He was born about 1567, belonged in early youth to the society of Gray's Inn, practised as a physician, and ended as a professional musician. He published a volume of Latin epigrams in 1595. But it was not until 1601 that his first Book of Airs appeared, the forerunner of successive volumes of lyric verse set to music. He wrote a masque for Sir James Hay's wedding in 1607, and three more of these entertainments in 1 61 3. Two Books of Airs appeared in 16 10, and two more in 161 2. It is from these uublications., and from the song-books of his contemporaries, that Mr. 90 TJie Jacobean Poets. [Ch. v. BuUen has collected the rich harvest of Campion's poetical works. One of Campion's acute friends observed of his " happy lyrics " that they were " strained out of art by nature so with ease." These words very well express the adroit and graceful distinction which marks his verse. His taste was at once classical and romantic. So classical was it, that for a while he was beguiled away from rhyme altogether, and gave the sanction of his delicate accomplishment to those who, like the earlier Areopagites, desired to do away with the ornament of rhyme, and to write pure English sapphics and alcaics. Fortunately, this erroneous judgment did not prevail, and Campion returned to those numbers in which he had so eminent a skill. His knowledge of music and the exigencies of the airs to which he wrote, gave great variety and yet precision to his stanzaic forms and his rhyme-arrangements. In certain respects, he reminds us of Fletcher at his best, and as Fletcher was the younger man, it is probable that he wrote some of his lyrics under Campion's influence. But no other writer of the time arrived at anything approaching to Campion's throbbing melody in such pieces as that beginning — Follow your saint, follow with accents sweet, Haste your sad notes, fall at her flying feet, or his quaint, extravagant grace, as in — I care not for these ladies. That must be wooed and prayed : Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanion country maid. Ch. v.] Campion. 91 Nature art disdaineth, Her beauty is her own ; Her when we court and kiss, She cries " Forsooth, let go ! " But when we come where comfort is, She never will say " No ! " or his unexpected turns of metre, as in — All you that will hold watch with love, The fairy queen Proserpina Will make you fairer than Dione's dove ; Roses red, lilies white. And the clear damask hue Shall on your cheeks alight ; Love will adorn you. The songs of Campion are commonly of an airy, amatory kind, plaintive, fanciful, and sensuous. But not infrequently he strikes another key, and comes closer to the impassioned sincerity of Donne. The following song, from the first Book of Airs, is of a very high quality — When thou must home to shades of underground, And there arrived, a new admired guest. The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round, White lope, blithe Helen, and the rest, To hear the stories of thy finished love, From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move ; Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights, Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make, Of tourneys and great challenges of knights. And all those triumphs for thy beauty's sake ; When thou hast told these honours done to thee, Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me. 92 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. v. This may naturally be put by the side of " The Apparition " of Donne. The four existing masques of Campion are skilful and gorgeous ; they would be the best in English, if we could exclude the rich repertory of Ben Jonson. They give us an opportunity of judging that Campion would, had he chosen to do so, have excelled in the more elaborate kinds of poetry. His heroic verse, especially in the Lords' Masque, is full and stately, and deformed by none of those crabbed distortions of accentuation which many of his contemporaries affected. Campion's Observations in the Art of English Poetry, published in 1602, is a learned treatise on prosody, which has been unduly neglected. None of the experiments which it contains, however, — neither its "iambic dimetre," nor its "ana- creontic licentiate — " are fit to compare with the author's more conventional rhymed verse. If an exception is to be found, it is perhaps in the following lyric, doubtless the most successful copy of unrhymed measure which that age produced — Rose-cheeked Laura, come ; Sing thou smoothly with thy beauty's Silent music, either other Sweetly gracing. Lovely forms do flow From concert divinely framed ; Heav'n is music, and thy beauty's Birth is heavenly. These dull notes we sing, Discords need for helps to grace them, Only beauty purely loving, Knows no discord ; Ch, v.] Campion — Drayton. 93 But still moves delight, Like clear springs renewed by flowing, Ever perfect, ever in them- selves eternal. Campion died early in 1620, and was buried in the Church of St. Dunstan's in the West, in London. If Campion has hitherto been neglected, the poet of whom we have next to treat has enjoyed for two hundred years past a popularity, or, at least, a nominal prominence, which is somewhat in excess of his merits. During the eighteenth century, at least, no non-dramatic poet of our period was so much read or so often re- printed as Drayton. Joseph Hunter expressed no opinion shocking to his generation when he claimed for Drayton a place in the first class of English poets. His ease, correctness, and lucidity were attractive to our elder critics, and outweighed the lack of the more exquisite qualities of style. If Drayton can no longer be awarded such superlative honours as were formerly paid to him, he is nevertheless a poet of considerable originality and merit, whose greatest enemy has been his want of measure. His works form far too huge a bulk, and would be more gladly read if the imagination in them were more concentrated and the style more concise. Drayton attempted almost every variety of poetic art, and his aim was possibly a little too encyclopedic for his gifts. It is impossible to yield to Drayton the position in this volume which his pretensions demand, since a very important portion of his work lies entirely outside our scope. His career is divided into two distinct halves, 94 The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. V. and the former of these, as purely Elizabethan, calls for no detailed consideration here. Michael Drayton was born near Atherstone, in Warwickshire, in 1563. He came up to town while still a young man, and in the last decade of Elizabeth produced divine poems, sonnets in the fashion of the hour, pastorals, and, above all, certain epical studies in historical poetry, which were akin in nature to those produced during so long a period, and in such diverse manners, by the versifiers of the Mirror for Magistrates. He was forty years of age when James I. came to the throne, and was already one of the most prominent poets of the age. Drayton's earliest act in the new reign was an un- fortunate one. He hastened to be the first welcomer in the field, and hurried out A Gratulatory Poem to King James. His zeal, however, went beyond his discretion ; he was told that he should have waited until the mourning for the queen was over, and the new king refused to patronize him. Henceforth, a petulant note is discernible in Drayton's writings, the note of dis- appointment and disillusion. He was exceedingly active, however, and brought out, in quick succession, fresh and greatly revised editions of his old historical poems. The Baron's Wars, and England's Heroical Epistles. A new didactic and religious piece, Moses in a Map of his Miracles, 1604, added little to his reputation ; but the Owl, of the same year, is a lengthy and important com- position in the heroic couplet. The writer feigns, in the mediaeval manner, that he fell asleep under a tree on a May morning, and heard all the birds talk- ing in human speech. The opening of the poem is Ch. v.] Drayton. 95 of a Chaucerian prettiness. Among those birds who speak — The little Redbreast teacheth charity, but the Linnet and the Titmouse presently twit the Owl on his silence, and the fiercer birds fall upon him with beak and claw. They would kill him, did not the Falcon protect him, and the Eagle come swooping down to see what is the matter. Then the Owl speaks. He has looked through the windows of the Eagle's court, and seen all the evil that is done there. At last the Eagle, having listened to the Owl's long satire, flies away, and the Owl is applauded and comforted. This curious satirical fable has passages of great merit ; among them is this pathetic episode of the Crane : — Lo, in a valley peopled thick with trees, Where the soft day continual evening sees, Where, in the moist and melancholy shade, The grass grows rank, but yields a bitter blade, I found a poor Crane sitting all alone. That from his breast sent many a throbbing groan ; Grov'Uing he lay, that sometime stood upright ; Maimed of his joints in many a doubtful fight ; His ashy coat that bore a gloss so fair. So often kiss'd of the enamour'd air. Worn all to rags, and fretted so with rust. That with his feet he trod it in the dust ; And wanting strength to bear him to the springs. The spiders wove their webs e'en in his wings. Probably in 1606, Drayton issued one of the most charming of his books, Foetus Lyric and Pastoral, consisting of odes, eclogues, and a curious romance called The Man in the Moon. The Odes doubtless belong to his youth ; they are particularly happy in their varied 96 The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. V, \ersification, of which two brief specimens may suffice. This stanza exempUfies tiie " Ode on the New Year" — Give hei- the Eoan brightness, AYing'd with that subtle lightness, That doth transpierce the air; The roses of the morning^ The rising heaven adorning, To mesh with flames of hair. and this the " Ode to his Valentine " — Muse, bid the morn awake. Sad winter now declines, Each bird doth choose a make. This day's Saint Valentine's. For that good bishop's sake, Get up and let us see, What beauty it shall be. That fortune us assigns. These are fresh and lively, without any strong grip on thought. By far the best of the odes, however, is the noble Battle of Agi/uoiiri, which is Drayton's greatest claim to the recognition of posterity, and the most spirited of all his lyrics. In a bold preface to his " Eclogues," Drayton promises soijiething new ; but these pastorals are not to be distin- guished from Elizabethan work of the same kind, except by the fine lyrics which are introduced in the course of them. Of these the best is the very remarkable birthday ode to Beta in the third eclogue — Stay, Thames, to hear my song, thou great and famous flood, Beta alone the phoenix is of all thy watery brood, The queen of virgins only she. The king of floods allotting thee Ch. v.] Drayton. 97 Of all the rest, be joyful thou to see this happy day, Thy Beta now alone shall be the subject of thy lay. With dainty and delightsome strains of dapper virelays, Come, lovely shepherds, sit by me, to tell our Beta's praise ; And let us sing so high a verse Her sovereign virtues to rehearse. That little birds shall silent sit to hear us shepherds sing, Whilst rivers backwards bend their course, and flow up to their spring. Range all thy swans, fair Thames, together on a rank. And place them each in their degree upon thy winding lank. And let them set together all, Time keeping with the waters' fall. And crave the tuneful nightingale to help them with her lay, The ouzel and the throstle-cock, chief music of our May. * » * » * Sound loud your trumpets then from London's loftiest towers To beat the stormy tempests back, and calm the raging showers, Set the cornet with the flute. The orpharion to the lute. Tuning the tabor and the pipe to the sweet violins, And mock the thunder in the air with our loud clarions. For the rest, these pieces present a vague but pretty im- pression of nymphs singing and dancing in the flowery meadows around a middle-aged swain who deplores to them his want of material success and courtly recognition. Passing, for the moment, the Poly-Olbion, we come in 1627 to a miscellaneous volume, consisting of seven independent poetical works not before given to the public. Of these two, The Battle of Agiiicourt (not to be confounded with the ode) and The Miseries of Queen Margaret^ are fragments of that epic in ottava rima which Drayton was always projecting and never completed. JSfimphidia, or the Court of Fairy ^ is a fantastic little H 98 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. V. romance, perhaps closer to being a masterpiece than any other which Drayton composed, deahng with the loves of Pigwiggin and Queen Mab in a style of the most airy fancy. The Moon-Calf is as clumsy as its pre- decessor is elegant and exquisite ; this is a kind of coarse satirical fable in the heroic couplet. The Quest of Cinthia is a long ballad, so smooth, and it must be confessed, so conventional, that it might almost have been written a century and a half later. The Shepherd's Sirena is a lyric pastoral of much lightness and charm, and the volume closes with some Elegies of various merit. At least as early as 1598, as we learn from Francis Meres, Drayton had designed a heroic and patriotic poem of great extent. It was to celebrate the kingdom of Great Britain with the exactitude of Camden, but with the addition of every species of imaginative ornament. At length, in 1613, a folio appeared, entitled Poly-Olbion, " a chorographical description of tracts, rivers, mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned isle." This original instalment contained eighteen " Songs " or cantos, and was enriched by copious notes from the pen of John Selden, and a map to each " song." Foly-Olbion was re- issued in 1622, with twelve new cantos, but Selden con- tributed no more notes. As the poet says, the composition of Poly-Olbion was " a Herculean toil," and it was one which scarcely re- warded the author. He had a great difficulty in finding a publisher for the complete work, and he told the sym- pathetic Drummond — "my dear sweet Drummond " — that the booksellers were " a company of base knaves." Ch. v.] Drayton. 99 The work is written in a couplet of twelve-syllable iambic lines, in imitation of the French Alexandrine, but with an unfailing coesura after the third foot, which becomes very tiresome to the ear. As an example of the method of the poem, may be selected the passage in which Drayton describes the habits of the aboriginal beaver of South Wales — More famous long agone than for the salmons' leap, For beavers Tivy was, in her strong banks that bred, Which else no other brook in Britain nourished ; Where Nature, in the shape of this now-perish'd beast. His property did seem to have wondrously expressed ; Being bodied like a boat, with such a mighty tail As serv'd him for a bridge, a helm, or for a sail. When kind did him command the architect to play. That his strong castle built of branched twigs and clay ; Which, set upon the deep, but yet not fixed there. He easily could remove as it he pleas'd to steer To this side or to that ; the workmanship so rare, His stuff wherewith to build, first being to prepare, A foraging he goes, to groves or bushes nigh. And with his teeth cuts down his timber ; which laid by, He turns him on his back, — his belly laid abroad, — When with what he hath got, the others do him load. Till lastly, by the weight, his burden he hath found ; Then with his mighty tail his carriage having bound As carters do with ropes, in his sharp teeth he gript Some stronger stick, from which the lesser branches stript. He takes it in the midst ; at both the ends, the rest Hard holding with their fangs, unto the labour prest, Going backward, tow'rds their home their laded carriage led. From whom those first here born were taught the useful sled. At the same time, it must be confessed that the entire originality of the poem, its sustained vivacity, variety and accuracy, and its unlikeness to any other work of the 100 The Jacobean Poets. [Cii. V. age, give an indubitable interest to Foly-Olbion, which will always be referred to with pleasure, though seldom followed from " the utmost end of Cornwall's furrowing beak," to the fall of Esk and Eden into the Western Sands. The confidence of Drayton in his own divine mission is sublime and pathetic. However unlucky he may be, he invariably takes the attitude of a poet of unquestioned eminence. In his Man in the Moon, the shepherds give Rowland (Drayton's accepted pseudonym) the office of their spokesman, because he was — By general voice, in times that then was grown, So excellent, that scarce there had been known. Him that excell'd in piping or in song. His popularity might account for, yet scarcely excuse this attitude ; but, in spite of this egotism, Drayton is a writer who commands our respect. He is manly and direct, and his virile style has the charm of what is well-performed in an easy and straightforward manner. He had studied the earlier poets to good effect. His critical knowledge of literature was considerable, and his acquaintance with natural objects exceptionally wide. His vocabulary is rich and uncommon ; he has a pleasing preference for technical and rustic words. His variety, his ambition, his excellent versification claim our respect and admiration ; but Drayton's weak point is that he fails to interest his reader. All is good, but little is superlatively entertaining. His most perfect poem was introduced by him, without any special attention being drawn to it, in what is supposed to be Ch. v.] Drayton. loi the sixth edition of his Poems, the folio of 1619. It is the following touching and passionate sonnet : — Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part, — Nay, I have done, you get no more of me ; And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart, That thus so cleanly I myself can free. Shake hands for ever, cancel all our vows. And when we meet at any time again. Be it not seen in either of our brows. That we one jot of former love retain. Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath, When, his pulse failing, passion speechless lies. When, faith is kneeling by his bed of death. And innocence is closing up his eyes, — — Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over, From death to life thou mightst him yet recover ! Drayton continued to write and to publish verses after the death of James I., and did not until the 23rd of December, 1631, as his monument in Poet's Corner has it, " exchange his laurel for a crown of glory." Ben Jonson, who had not appreciated Drayton in his lifetime, is said to have composed the epitaph graven in letters of gold beneath his bust in Westminster Abbey. Poetry had greatly declined in Scotland when James VI. became James I. of England. The monarch him- self, although in his own esteem more than a prentice in the divine art, abandoned the practice of poetry on coming south. There remained, among his northern subjects, but one poet of really commanding excellence, William Drummond of Hawthornden, a youth at that time still unknown to fame. Drummond belonged to T.tBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA I02 The Jacobean Poets. fCn. V. the class of artistic or cultivated poets, to that which is made by literature rather than born of spontaneous creation. In the earliest of his sonnets, Drummond admits as much : — " I first began to read, then loved to write." But among poets of this studious and literary kind, he ranks very liigh indeed. He possesses style, distinction, a practised and regulated skill, in a degree denied to many of his more spontaneously gifted fellows. It would be a grave error, in any estimate of Jacobean poetry, to underrate this admirable poetic artist. William Drummond was born of ancient Scottish lineage on the 13th of December, 1585. Upon his taking his degree in Edinburgh in 1605, he was sent to the Continent, and after a twelvemonth spent in learning law at Bourges, he seems to have resided three years in Paris. This residence has left its imprint on his writings. In Paris, at that time, Ronsard, who had died the year Drummond was born, was still regarded as an almost unquestioned master ; Pontus de Tyard, last survivor of the Pleiade, was only just dead. It is strange if the young Scotchman did not meet with the vigorous Agrippa d'Aubign^, a Protestant and Ronsardist like himself, for Drummond fell immediately into the manner of the Ple'iade. No one in English, except the feebler Barnaby Barnes, was so Gallic as Drummond, whose best pieces might have been translated into French of the beginning of the seventeenth century without raising any suspicion of a foreign influence. In 1609 the young man returned to Edinburgh, and in 1 6 10 withdrew to his romantic and now classic estate of Hawthornden. In 16 13 the death of Prince Henry Ch. v.] Drmnniond. 103 drew from him an elegy, his earliest published work, the Tears on the Death of Aloetiades, an artificial and ex- tremely Ronsardist poem in couplets of considerable mellifluousness, closing thus — For ever rest ! Thy praise fame may enroll In golden annals, whilst about the pole The slow Bootes turns, or sun doth rise, With scarlet scarf to cheer the mourning skies ; The virgins to thy tomb may garlands bear Of flowers, and on each flower let fall a tear. Moeliades sweet courtly nymphs deplore, From Thule to Hydaspes' pearly shore. Three years later Drummond issued a slender volume of Poems, consisting of sonnets, odes, sextains, and madrigals. His notion of the madrigal was a small irregular lyric, opening with a six-syllable iambic line. This is a characteristic specimen — This life, which seems so fair. Is like a bubble blown up in the air By sporting children's breath. Who chase it everywhere, And strive who can most motion it bequeath : And though it sometime seem of its own might, Like to an eye of gold, to be fix'd there. And firm to hover in that empty height, That only is because it is so light. But in that pomp it doth not long appear ; For even when most admir'd, it, in a thought. As swell'd from nothing, doth dissolve in naught. His sonnets, a form in which he is peculiarly successful, approach more nearly to perfection of rhyme-structure than any of those of his contemporaries, except perhaps Donne's; but he is rarely able to resist the tempting 104 '^^'■c Jacobean Poets. [Ch. v. error of the final couplet. One or two long and glowing odes of great merit he styles " songs." This first col- lection of his poems contains many lyrics that are ad- mirable, and few that are without dignity and skill. He uses flowers and pure colours like a Tuscan painter, and strikes us as most fantastic when he essays to write in dispraise of beauty, since no poet of his time is so resolute a worshipper of physical loveliness as he is. In Drummond's voluptuous and gorgeous verse there is no trace of the Elizabethan naivete or dramatic passion. It is the deliberate poetry of an accomplished scholar- artist. As he grew older, Drummond became pious, but without changing his style. His Flowers of Smi of 1623 are gnomic or moral, and not by any means exclusively religious. The famous sonnet to the Nightingale forms a part of this volume : — Sweet bird, that sing'st away the early hours, Of winter's past or coming void of care, Well pleased with delights which present are. Fair seasons, budding sprays, sweet-smelling flowers; To rocks, to springs, to rills, from leafy bowers Thou thy Creator's goodness doth declare. And what dear gifts on thee he did not spare, A stain to human sense in sin that lowers. What soul can be so sick which by thy songs, Attir'd in sweetness, sweetly is not driven Quite to forget earth's turmoils, spites and wrongs. And lift a reverend eye and thought to heaven ? Sweet artless songster, thou my mind dost raise To airs of spheres, yes, and to angels' lays. What are most remarkable, from the point of view of style, among these divine poems, are certain can- Ch. v.] Dnimuwnd. 105 zonets in which there is found such a sensuous ardour and fiery perfume as were not to be met with again in English rehgious verse until the days of Crashaw. In *' A Hymn to the Passion " we have one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, lengthy exercise in terza rima in our language, a tour de force carried out with surprising ease. More spirited is the ode on the " Resurrection," and it might be difficult to overpraise, in its own elaborate and glittering manner, the ode called " An Hymn of the Ascension." It opens thus — Bright portals of the sky, Emboss'd with sparkling stars, Doors of eternity, With diamantine bars. Your arras rich uphold, Loose all your bolts and springs, Ope wide your leaves of gold. That in your roofs may come the King of kings! Scarfd in a rosy cloud. He doth ascend the air ; Straight doth the moon him shroud With her resplendent hair ; The next encrystall'd light Submits to him its beams. And he doth trace the height Of that fair lamp whence flame of beauty streams. He towers those golden bounds He did to sun bequeath ; The higher wandering rounds Are found his feet beneath ; The Milky Way comes near, Heaven's axle seems to bend Above each turning sphere That, rob'd in glory, heaven's King may ascend. io6 The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. V. Wliat Drummond says is never so important as the way in which he says it, and it would be as absurd to look for any spiritual fervour or record of deep expe- rience in these Flowers of Sion as it would be to suppose them in any way disingenuous. The spangled style was the cassock which best suited the sincere but sensuous piety of this poetical preacher. To the Floivers of Sion was appended The Cypress Grove, a prose treatise to edification, containing some iQ.\v sonnets, not the author's best. In 1619 Ben Jonson came up to Hawthornden, and talked about his contemporaries. Of these conversations Drummond has preserved an invaluable report, bearing the fullest impress of veracity. The Scotch poet con- tinued to write after the death of James I., and survived until 1649. Of other Northern writers, Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling, will be treated in another place. Alexander Craig, of Rose-Craig (1567 ?-i627), was a sonneteer who possessed some measure of pedantic skill. His friend, Sir Robert Aytoun (1570-1638), was, like himself, a student of St. Leonard's College in St. Andrews. Aytoun long preserved a considerable reputation for the grace and delicacy of his verse ; but, unhappily, a doubt hangs over his most admired compositions, and it is not certain that we possess, as his, the verses which Dryden pro- nounced " some of the best of that age." Robert Ker, Earl of Ancrum (1578-1654), was a sonneteer; and, finally, the Scotch include among their poets Alexander Garden (1587 ?-i 645), who wrote A Theatre of Scotlish Worthies^ and other respectable volumes. Ch. v.] Sir John Beaumont. 107 An English poet to whose merit justice has scarcely been done is Sir John Beaumont, the brother of Francis, the dramatist. He was writing verses during the whole of James I.'s reign, but he did not publish them, and some of his most important work has perished. He was born, the second son of Sir Thomas Beaumont, of Grace- dieu, in 1583, and was educated at Oxford. In the last year of Elizabeth an anonymous poem was printed in London, entitled The Meiavwrphosis of Tobacco ; this is attributed to Sir John, and beg.rs all the impress of his rather peculiar versification. He was made a baronet in 1626, and, dying in April, 1627, was buried in West- minster Abbey. His son, Sir John, a noted athlete, afterwards killed at the siege of Gloucester — himself an accomplished versifier — edited his father's posthumous works in 1629, as Boszvotih Field : with a Taste of the Variety of other Poems ; but Sir John Beaumont's pre- sumed masterpiece, his long religious poem of The Croitm of Thorns, has disappeared, and may be regarded as a serious loss, for it was much admired by his con- temporaries. The versification of Beaumont is remarkably polished. No one, indeed, was in 1602 writing the heroic couplet so "correctly" as the author of The Metamorplwsis. This mock-heroic piece, which has been underestimated, is full of most charming fancies, and promises more than Sir John Beaumont ever quite carried out. Bosivorth Field is a carefully, and again a very smoothly, written historical poem, but a little arid and cold, the theme being one beyond the author's powers, which tended to lose themselves in the desultory and the unessential. io8 The Jacobean Poets. [Ch. V. This is a pathetic example of Bos7oortli Field — If, ill the midst of such a bloody fight, 'J"he name of friendship be not thought loo Hglit, Recount, my Muse, how Byron's faithful luvc To dying Clifton did itself approve : For Clifton, fighting bravely in the troop, Receives a wound, and now begins to droop ; Wiiicli Byron seeing, — though in arms his foe, In heart his friend, and hoping that the blow Had not been mortal — guards him with his shield From second hurts, and cries, "Dear Clifton, yield ! Thou hither cam'st, led by sinister fate, ^Vgainst my first advice, yet now, though late, Take this my counsel ! " Clifton thus replied : — " It is too late, for I must now provide To seek another life ; live thou, sweet friend ! " Beaumont's sacred and his courtly poems are lucid and graceful, without much force, the neatness of the tripping couplets being more remarkable than the freshness of the imagery. The death of his son Gervase wrung from Sir John Beaumont this touching elegy — Can I, who have for others oft compiled The songs of death, forget my sweetest child. Which like a flower crushed, with a blast is dead. And ere full time hangs down his smiling head, Expecting with dear hope to live anew, Among the angels, fed with heavenly dew? We have this sign of joy, that, many days. While on the earth his struggling spirit stays, The name of Jesus in his mouth contains His only food, his sleep, his ease from pains. O may that sound be rooted in my mind. Of which in him such strong effect I find. Dear Lord, receive my son, whose winning love To me was like a friendship, far above Ch. v.] Sir John Beawnont — Brathwait. 109 The course of nature, or his tender age, — Whose looks could all my bitter grief assuage ; Let his pure soul ordain'd seven years to be In that frail body, which was part of me. Remain my pledge in heaven, as sent to slaow How to this port at every step I go. So far as we can judge, he was curiously devoid of the lyrical tendency, and wrote little which was not in the couplet which he manipulated so cleverly. Richard Brathwait was born, as it is believed, near Kendal, in 1588. He died at Catterick on May 4, 1673, being therefore in existence from the prime of Spenser's life until after the birth of Addison. He became a commoner of Oriel College^ Oxford, in 1604, and, if we may believe his own words, about that time began the work that he was all his life polishing up, the Barnabae Itinerariuvi. Removing afterwards to Cam- bridge, he became a pupil of Lancelot Andrews, but distinguished himself more as an inveterate lover of dis- solute company than as a student or a thinker. He married in 16 17, became the captain of a foot-company of trained-bands, deputy-lieutenant of the county of Westmoreland, and a justice of the peace. The only other noticeable fact of his life was that he became the father of the gallant and unfortunate Sir Strafford Brath- wait, who died fighting the Algerines. His works range from The Golden i^/.?