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 WHOSE ASSISTANCE IN THE PREPARATION 
 
 OF THIS WORK 
 HAS BEEN INVALUABLE
 
 HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 REUBEN POST HALLECK, M.A. (YALE) 
 
 NEW YORK : CINCINNATI : CHICAGO 
 
 AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY
 
 COPYRIGHT. 1900, BY 
 REUBEN POST HALLECK. 
 
 ENTERED AT STATIONERS' HALL, 
 
 HAL. ENG LIT. 
 W. P. 6
 
 PREFACE 
 
 IN the following pages the author aims to furnish a 
 concise and interesting text-book of the history and devel- 
 opment of English literature from the earliest times to the 
 present. Especial attention is paid to literary movements, 
 to the essential qualities which differentiate one period 
 from another, and to showing the animating spirit of 
 each age. It is more important to understand the rela- 
 tion of the age of Pope to that of Wordsworth than to 
 know these two writers merely as individuals. It is bet- 
 ter for the student to catch the general drift of literary 
 thought than to study a large number of comparatively 
 unimportant authors and to ignore the law of the sur- 
 vival of the fittest. The majority of people never have 
 time for the study of any but the masters. Such people 
 need a guide to tell them what to select from each age, 
 just as much as travelers in England require a guidebook 
 to indicate the most interesting places. 
 
 The writer has made no attempt to minimize the study 
 of authors as individuals. One of the features of this work 
 consists in devoting a special section to summing up the 
 general characteristics of each of the greatest individual 
 authors. The theory that it is wise to teach the general 
 before the special is now happily going out of fashion. 
 But the moment we know two authors we ought to begin 
 to compare them, to note their likeness and their differ- 
 ence. For the cultivation of the thinking powers, the 
 
 5
 
 6 PREFACE 
 
 study of the development of English literature may be 
 made as serviceable as mathematics. The individuality 
 and general characteristics of one author present them- 
 selves in sharpest outline only in comparison with those 
 of another author. For instance, Spenser's subjective 
 cast of mind will impress the student more forcibly when 
 contrasted with Chaucer's objective method of regarding 
 the world (see pp. 130-132). 
 
 During a long period of teaching English literature and 
 of superintending the instruction of others in that branch, 
 the author has repeatedly found that pupils who have not 
 had consecutive instruction in the history of English litera- 
 ture have the most vague ideas of its development and of 
 the relation of its parts. Various masterpieces seem like 
 unconnected islands in an unexplored ocean. There is no 
 way of making these masterpieces seem otherwise except 
 by teaching the history and development of the literature 
 of which they form a part. Mental association is based 
 primarily on contiguity. Ideas must be grasped by the 
 mind at the same time before they can be known to be 
 related. It is difficult for young minds to knit into one 
 fabric ideas which are presented at considerable intervals 
 and under associations so different as occur in the study 
 of various masterpieces. 
 
 In so far as the limits of his space would allow, the 
 author has endeavored to justify his criticisms by quota- 
 tions that show the characteristics attributed to authors. 
 Since it is the object of this work to enable students to 
 read English literature for themselves more intelligently, 
 there have been indicated at the end of each chapter defi- 
 nite Required Readings from the works of the authors 
 discussed. To guard against discouraging students, the 
 writer has tried to call for no more than they may be
 
 PREFACE 7^ 
 
 expected to read as they study this work. There have 
 also been added questions which, it is hoped, will stimulate 
 pupils to do some original thinking and to make a com- 
 parison of different ages and representative authors. 
 
 The optional list of Works for Consultation and Further 
 Study has been prepared to guide those who wish to make 
 a more extended study of certain periods and authors. A 
 Supplementary List of Minor Aiithors and their Chief 
 Works is given on pp. 485-491 for the purpose of aiding 
 those who wish to read the best work of minor authors, as 
 well as for the purpose of serving for convenient reference. 
 
 On account of the extent of the field to be covered, the 
 treatment of American literature is left to works dealing 
 especially with that branch. 
 
 The pronunciation of difficult names is indicated suffi- 
 ciently in the index. 
 
 The student should refer to the Literary Map of Eng- 
 land, pp. 8, 9, to familiarize himself with the location of 
 the birthplaces and homes of eminent authors. Whenever 
 he reads of the Quantock Hills or of the Lake District, of 
 the Exeter Book or of Stoke Poges churchyard, he ought 
 immediately to turn to the map to find the place indicated. 
 
 While the writer owes much to the great masters of 
 criticism, he has written this work only after long and 
 careful original study of the authors under discussion. 
 From one source he has received such valuable assistance 
 as to demand emphatic mention. During three years of 
 the time in which this work has been in preparation, he 
 has had the constant assistance of his wife, a critical stu- 
 dent of English literature. To her is due the entire treat- 
 ment of certain authors in periods that she has made the 
 subject of special study.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 . 11 
 
 II. FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S 
 
 DEATH, 1400 47 
 
 III. FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400, TO THE ACCESSION OF 
 
 ELIZABETH, 1558 89 
 
 IV. THE LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH . . 103 
 V. THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 . 184 
 
 VI. THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 . . . 213 
 
 VII. THE FIRST FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CEN- 
 TURY, 1700-1740 232 
 
 VIII. THE SECOND FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH 
 
 CENTURY, 1740-1780 262 
 
 IX. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 . . 305 
 
 X. THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1901 385 
 
 CONCLUSION .......... 479 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF MINOR AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF 
 
 WORKS 485 
 
 INDEX . 491 
 
 TO
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 The Subject Matter. The history of English literature, 
 is a record of the best thoughts that have been expressed 
 in the English language. Literature appeals especially to 
 the imagination and the emotions. Literature aims not so 
 much to state a fact after the manner of a text-book on 
 science as to start imaginative activity and to appeal to 
 the emotions. When Macbeth says of the dead King : 
 
 " After life's fitful fever he sleeps well," 
 
 our feelings are touched and the door is opened for 
 imaginative activity, as we wonder why life is called a 
 fitful fever and try to realize the mystery of that long and 
 restful sleep. True literature calls for such activity. 
 
 If we would broaden ourselves and increase our capacity 
 for appreciating the manifold sides of the life of the spirit, 
 we must become familiar with the thoughts and ideals of 
 those who have given us our inspiring literature. For 
 nearly fifteen hundred years the Anglo-Saxon race has 
 been producing the greatest of all literatures. The most 
 boastful of other nations make no claim to having a 
 Shakespeare on the list of their immortals. 
 
 ii
 
 12 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 The Home and Migrations of the Anglo-Saxon Race. 
 Just as there was a time when no Anglo-Saxon foot had 
 touched the shores of America, so there was a period when 
 the ancestors of the English lived far away from the Brit- 
 ish Isles, and were rightly looked upon as foreigners there. 
 For nearly four hundred years prior to the coming of the 
 English, Britain had been a Roman province. In 410 A.D. 
 the Romans withdrew their legions from Britain to pro- 
 tect Rome herself against swarms of Teutonic invaders. 
 About 449 a band of Teutons, called Jutes, left Denmark, 
 landed on the Isle of Thanet (northeastern part of Kent), 
 and began the conquest of Britain. Warriors from the 
 tribes of the Angles and the Saxons soon followed, and 
 drove westward the original inhabitants, the Britons or 
 Welsh, i.e. foreigners, as the Teutons styled the natives. 
 
 Before the invasion of Britain, the Teutons inhabited 
 the central part of Europe as far south as the Rhine, 
 a tract which in a large measure coincides with modern 
 Germany. The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons were different 
 tribes of Teutons. These ancestors of the English dwelt 
 in Denmark and in the lands extending southward along 
 the North Sea. 
 
 The Angles, an important Teutonic tribe, furnished the 
 name for the new home, which was called Angle-land, 
 afterward shortened into England. The language spoken 
 by these tribes is generally called Anglo-Saxon or Saxon. 
 
 The Training of the Race. The climate is a potent factor 
 in determining the vigor and characteristics of a race. 
 Nature had reared the Teuton like a wise but not indul- 
 gent parent. By every method known to her, she endeav- 
 ored to render him fit to colonize and sway the world. 
 Summer paid him but a brief visit. His companions were 
 the frost, the fluttering snowflake, the stinging hail. For
 
 THE TEUTONIC RACE 13 
 
 music, instead of the soft notes of a shepherd's pipe under 
 blue Italian or Grecian skies, he listened to the north wind 
 whistling among the bare branches, or to the roar of an 
 angry northern sea upon the bleak coast. 
 
 The feeble could not withstand the rigor of such a cli- 
 mate in the absence of the comforts of civilization. Only 
 the strongest in each generation survived ; and these trans- 
 mitted to their children increasing vigor. Warfare was 
 incessant, not only with nature but also with the surround- 
 ing tribes. Nature kept the Teuton in such a school until 
 he seemed fit to colonize the world, and to produce a lit- 
 erature which would appeal to humanity in every age. 
 
 The Early Teutonic Religion. Our ancestors were 
 heathen for some time after they came to England. Their 
 principal deity was Woden, the All-father, from whom 
 Wednesday is named. Thunor, the invincible god of 
 thunder, has also given his name to a day of the week. 
 In the old Norse mythology, to which the old Teutonic 
 religions are closely allied, heaven was called Valhal. 
 Woden's daughters were called Valkyries, and it was 
 their mission to ride their cloudlike steeds over earthly 
 battlefields, to note the bravest warriors, and to conduct 
 to Valhal such as were selected to fall. Death while 
 courageously fighting on the battlefield made the hero 
 sure of being taken to Valhal to become Woden's guest. 
 There at the table of the gods, the warrior ate of the flesh 
 of the magic boar, drank from a river of ale, and indulged 
 to his heart's content in the sword game. This old Norse 
 religion was instinct with a gloomy fatalism. Upon Val- 
 hal and the throng of heroes whom Woden summoned 
 to help him fight his foes, could be seen a ravenlike 
 shadow, growing ever larger and threatening to wrap all 
 in lasting darkness. Loki, the spirit of evil, was fated to
 
 14 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 break his chains, and he, with the life-destroying giants of 
 the frost, would devour the very gods. 
 
 We cannot say exactly how much of this belief was held 
 by our ancestors in England. They certainly worshiped 
 some gods of the same names and were imbued with the 
 same fatalism. In Beowulf there is allusion to Wyrd (fate), 
 and the web of destiny is mentioned in several old poems. 
 
 Somber Cast of the Teutonic Mind. The early religious 
 beliefs of the Teuton received their gloomy coloring from 
 the rigor of nature's forces, from the frost giants with 
 whom he battled. The winter twilight fell upon him in 
 his northern home about three o'clock in the afternoon. 
 During the long evenings he would often think how the 
 world had promised him much and given him little, and 
 the gloom of this life would cast its shadow upon the next. 
 Even in summer days, his leaden sky was often obscured 
 with rain clouds driven by the restless winds. In wintry 
 nights the hours would drag wearily as he listened to the 
 hail or heard the half-human moaning of the fir trees. 
 
 We must remember this cast of the Teutonic mind in 
 order to understand its literature. We find Shakespeare 
 likening life to a fitful fever, and considering the gloomy 
 problem of existence in the person of Hamlet. We listen 
 to Gray, singing that everything we prize "awaits alike 
 the inevitable hour " ; to Burns, comparing pleasure to a 
 snowflake falling in the river ; to Poe, singing the melan- 
 choly song of the Raven ; to Tennyson, sighing : 
 
 " He will not hear the north wind rave, 
 Nor, moaning, household shelter crave 
 From winter rains that beat his grave." 1 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon Language. Our oldest English liter- 
 
 1 The Two Voices.
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE 15 
 
 ature is written in the language spoken by the Angles and 
 the Saxons. This at first sight looks like a strange tongue 
 to one conversant with modern English only ; but the lan- 
 guage that we employ to-day has the framework, the bone 
 and sinew, of the earlier tongue. Modern English is no 
 more unlike Anglo-Saxon than a bearded man is unlike 
 his former childish self. A few examples will show the 
 likeness and the difference. " The noble queen " would in 
 Anglo-Saxon be seo ceflele cwen ; "the noble queen's," flare 
 ceflelan cwene. Seo is the nominative feminine singular, 
 flare the genitive, of the definite article. The adjective 
 and the noun also change their forms with the varying 
 cases. In its inflections Anglo-Saxon resembles its sister 
 language, the modern German. 
 
 After the first feeling of strangeness has passed away, 
 it is easy to recognize many of the old words. Take, for 
 instance, this from Beowulf: 
 
 ". . . fly he "Sone feond ofercwom, 
 gehnsegde helle gast." 
 
 Here are eight words, apparently strange, but even a 
 novice soon recognizes five of them : he, feond (fiend), 
 ofercwom (overcame), helle (hell), gast (ghost). The word 
 "done, strange as it looks, is merely the article " the." 
 
 . . . therefore he overcame the fiend, 
 Subdued the ghost of hell. 
 
 Let us take from the same poem another passage, con- 
 taining the famous simile : 
 
 ". . . leoht inne stod, 
 efne swa of hefene hadre seine's 
 rodores candel." 
 
 Of these eleven words, seven may be recognized : leoht
 
 16 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 (light), inne (in), stod (stood), of, hefene (heaven), sclneS 
 (shineth), candel (candle). 
 
 ... a light stood within, 
 
 Even so from heaven serenely shineth 
 
 The firmament's candle. 
 
 Some object to using the term "Anglo-Saxon," and 
 insist on substituting "Old English," because it might 
 otherwise be thought that modern English is a different 
 language and not merely a growth. They might with equal 
 justice claim that " grown boy " should be used in place 
 of a new term " man," to emphasize the fact that the boy, 
 who has grown into a man, is still the same person. 
 
 Earliest Anglo-Saxon Literature. As in the case of the 
 Greeks and Romans, poetry afforded the first outlet for 
 the feelings of the Teutonic race. The first productions 
 were handed down by memory. Poetry is easily memo- 
 rized and naturally lends itself to singing and musical 
 accompaniment. Under such circumstances, even prose 
 would speedily fall into metrical form. In addition to these 
 reasons, poetry is the most suitable vehicle of expression 
 for the emotions. Unlike modern writers, the ancients 
 seldom undertook to make literature unless they felt so 
 deeply that silence was impossible. 
 
 The Form of Anglo-Saxon Poetry. Each line is divided 
 into two parts by a major pause. Because each of these 
 parts was often printed as a complete line in old texts, 
 Beowulf has sometimes been called a poem of 6368 lines, 
 although it has but 3184. 
 
 A striking characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is con- 
 sonantal alliteration, that is, the repetition of the same 
 consonant at the beginning of words in the 'same line : 
 
 " Grendel gongan ; Codes yrre baer." 
 Greauel going ; God's anger bare.
 
 FORM OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY I/ 
 
 The usual type of Anglo-Saxon poetry has two allitera- 
 tions in the first half of the line and one in the second. 
 The lines vary considerably in the number of syllables- 
 The line from Beowulf quoted just above has nine sylla- 
 bles. The following line from the same poem has eleven; 
 
 " Flota famig-heals, fugle gelicost." 
 
 The floater foamy-necked, to a fowl most like. 
 
 This line, also from Beowulf, has eight syllables : 
 
 " Nipende niht, and norSan wind." 
 Noisome night, and northern wind. 
 
 Vowel alliteration is less common. Where this is em- 
 ployed, the vowels are generally different, as is shown in 
 the principal words of the following line : 
 
 " On ead, on zeht, on eorcan stan." , 
 
 On wealth, on goods, on precious stone. 
 
 End rhyme is uncommon, but we must beware of think- 
 ing that there is no rhythm, for that is a pronounced char- 
 acteristic. Anglo-Saxon verse was intended to be sung, and 
 hence a fixed number of beats was necessary. There are 
 normally four accents in each line, two in the first half and 
 two in the second. In the first half, the two alliterative 
 syllables are accented ; in the second, besides the allitera- 
 tive syllable, the word corresponding to the most important 
 idea is accented. It should also be observed that allitera- 
 tion seldom falls on any but the most important words. 
 
 The Manuscripts that have handed down Anglo-Saxon 
 Literature. The earliest Anglo-Saxon poetry was trans- 
 mitted by the memories of men. Finally, with the slow 
 growth of learning, a few acquired the art of writing, and 
 transcribed on parchment a small portion of the current 
 songs. The introduction of Christianity ushered in prose
 
 1 8 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 translations and a few original compositions, which were 
 taken down on parchment and kept in the monasteries. 
 
 The study of Anglo-Saxon literature is comparatively 
 recent, for its treasures have not been long accessible. Its 
 most famous poem, Beowulf, was not discovered until the 
 close of the eighteenth century. In 1822 Dr. Blume, a 
 German professor of law, happened to find in a monastery 
 at Vercelli, Italy, a large volume of Anglo-Saxon manu- 
 script, containing a number of fine poems and twenty-two 
 sermons. This is now known as the Vercelli Book. No 
 one knows how it happened to reach Italy. Another large 
 
 EXETER CATHEDRAL 
 
 parchment volume of poems and miscellany was deposited 
 by Bishop Leofric at the cathedral of Exeter in Devon- 
 shire, about 1050 A.D. This collection is now called the 
 Exeter Book, and it is still one of the prized treasures of 
 that cathedral.
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON SCOP AND GLEEMAN 19 
 
 Many valuable manuscripts were destroyed at the dis- 
 solution of the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII., 
 between 1535 and 1540. John Bale, a contemporary 
 writer, says that " those who purchased the monasteries 
 reserved the books, some to scour their candlesticks, some 
 to rub their boots, some they sold to the grocers and soap- 
 sellers, and some they sent over sea to the bookbinders, 
 not in small numbers, but at times v/hole ships full, to 
 the wondering of foreign nations." Part of the valuable 
 Anglo-Saxon poem Waldhere was discovered in 1860 on 
 leaves of parchment which had been used in binding 
 another book. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon Scop and Gleeman. Our earliest poetry 
 was made current and kept fresh in memory by the singers. 
 The kings and nobles often attached to them a scop, or 
 maker of verses. When the warriors, after some victorious 
 battle, were feasting at their long tables, the banquet was 
 not complete without the songs of the scop. While the 
 warriors ate the flesh of boar and deer, and warmed their 
 blood with horns of foaming ale, the scop, standing where 
 the blaze from a pile of logs disclosed to him the grizzly 
 features of the men, sang his most stirring songs, often 
 accompanying them with the music of a rude harp. As 
 the feasters roused his enthusiasm with their applause, 
 he would sometimes indulge in an outburst of eloquent 
 extempore song. Not infrequently the imagination of 
 some king or noble would be fired, and he would sing of 
 his own great deeds. 
 
 We read in Beowulf that in Hrothgar's famous hall 
 
 "... '$j>er waes hearpan sweg, 
 swutol sang scopes." 
 
 . . . there was sound of harp. 
 Loud the singing of the scop.
 
 20 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 In addition to the scop, who was more or less permanently 
 attached to the royal court or hall of noble, there was a 
 craft of gleemen who roved from hall to hall. In the 
 song of WidstiS we catch a glimpse of the life of a glee- 
 man: 
 
 ' Swa scriSende gesceapum hweorfaft 
 gleomen gumena geond grunda fela." 
 
 Thus roving, with shape'd songs there wander 
 The gleemen of the people through many lands. 
 
 The scop was an originator of poetry, the gleeman more 
 often a mere repeater, although this distinction in the use 
 of the terms was not observed in later times. 
 
 The Songs of Scop and Gleeman. The subject matter 
 of these songs was suggested by the most common experi- 
 ences of the time. These were with war, the sea, and 
 death. 
 
 The oldest Anglo-Saxon song known is called WtdsiXfu/t 
 the Far Traveler, and it has been preserved in the Exeter 
 Book. This song was probably composed in the older 
 Angle-land on the continent, and brought to England in 
 the memories of the singers. The poem is an account of 
 the wanderings of a gleeman over a great part of Europe. 
 Such a song will mean little to us unless we can imagina- 
 tively represent the circumstances under which it was 
 sung, the long hall with its tables of feasting, drinking 
 warriors, the firelight throwing weird shadows among the 
 smoky rafters. The imagination of the warriors would be 
 roused as similar experiences of their own were suggested 
 by these lines in WidsiS's song : 
 
 " Ful oft of Sam heape hwmende fleag 
 giellende gar on grome tieode." 
 
 Full oft from that host hissing flew 
 The whistling spear on the fierce folk.
 
 THE SONGS OF SCOP AND GLEEMAN 21 
 
 The gleeman ends this song with two thoughts character- 
 istic of the poets of the Saxon race. He shows his love 
 for noble deeds, and he next thinks of the shortness of life, 
 as he sings : 
 
 " In mortal court his deeds are not unsung, 
 Such as a noble man will show to men, 
 Till all doth flit away, both life and light." 
 
 A greater scop, looking at life through Saxon eyes, 
 
 sings : 
 
 " We are such stuff 
 
 As dreams are made on ; and our little life 
 Is rounded with a sleep." 1 
 
 Another old song, also found in the Exeter Book, is the 
 Seafarer. We must imagine the scop recalling vivid expe- 
 riences to our early ancestors with this song of the sea : 
 
 " Hail flew in hard showers, 
 And nothing I heard 
 But the wrath of the waters, 
 The icy-cold way ; 
 At times the swan's song ; 
 In the scream of the gannet 
 I sought for my joy, 
 In the moan of the sea whelp 
 For laughter of men, 
 In the song of the sea-mew 
 For drinking of mead." 3 
 
 To show that love of the sea yet remains one of the 
 characteristics of English poetry, we may quote by way of 
 comparison a song sung more than a thousand years later, 
 in Victoria's reign : 
 
 1 Shakespeare : The Tempest, Act IV., scene i . 
 
 2 Morley's translation, English Writers, Vol. II., p. 21. 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 2
 
 22 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 " The wind is as iron that rings, 
 The foam heads loosen and flee ; 
 It swells and welters and swings, 
 The pulse of the tide of the sea. 
 
 " Let the wind shake our flag like a feather, 
 Like the plumes of the foam of the sea ! 
 
 In the teeth of the hard glad weather, 
 In the blown wet face of the sea." 1 
 
 Another song from the Exeter Book is called The For- 
 tunes of Men. It gives vivid pictures of certain phases 
 of life among the Anglo-Saxons. The notes of the harp 
 must have sounded sad, as the scop sang : 
 
 " One shall sharp hunger slay ; 
 One shall the storms beat down ; 
 One be destroyed by darts, 
 One die in war. 
 One shall live losing 
 The light of his eyes, 
 Feel blindly with fingers ; 
 And one lame of foot, 
 With sinew-wound wearily 
 Wasteth away, 
 Musing and mourning, 
 With death in his mind. 
 
 One shall die by the dagger, 
 
 In wrath, drenched with ale, 
 
 Wild through wine, on the mead bench, 
 
 Too swift with his words ; 
 
 Too lightly his life 
 
 Shall the wretched one lose. 1 ' 2 - 
 
 The songs that we have noted are only a small fraction 
 of scopic poetry, but they will, together with Beowulf, the 
 greatest of them all, give a fair idea of this type of verse. 
 
 1 Swinburne's A Song in Time of Order. 
 
 8 Morley's English Writers, Vol. II., pp. 33, 34.
 
 THE SONGS OF SCOP AND GLEEMAN 23 
 
 BEOWULF 
 
 Evolution of the Poem. The greatest monument of 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry is called Beowulf, from the name 
 of its hero. It is the oldest epic poem of the Teutonic 
 race. Beowulf was probably a long time in process of 
 evolution. Many different scops added new episodes to 
 the song, altering it by expansion or contraction under the 
 influence of the inspiration of the hour and the circum- 
 stances of place and time. Finally, some monk or monks 
 edited the poem, changing it in various ways, endeavoring 
 especially to introduce into it Christian opinions. 
 
 Time and Place of Composition. Critics are divided 
 about the time and place of the composition of Beowulf. 
 It is possible that some of the songs which enter into its 
 framework were sung by the scop on the continent before 
 any of our ancestors came to England ; that is, before 
 449 A.D. With regard to the form in which we now have 
 the poem, Ten Brink is probably right in saying that it 
 dates from about the beginning of the eighth century. 
 The places mentioned in the poem seem to indicate the 
 correctness of the following statement from Stopford 
 Brooke : " The scenery then is laid on the coast of the 
 North Sea and the Kattegat, the first act of the poem 
 among the Danes in Seeland, the second among the 
 Geats in South Sweden." 
 
 The student who wishes to enter into the spirit of the 
 poem will do well to familiarize himself with the position 
 of these coasts, and with a description of their natural 
 features in winter as well as in summer. Heine says of 
 the sea which Beowulf sailed : 
 
 " Before me rolleth a waste of water . . . and above me go rolling the 
 storm clouds, the formless dark gray daughters of air, which from the
 
 24 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 sea in cloudy buckets scoop up the water, ever wearied lifting and lift- 
 ing, and then pour it again in the sea, a mournful, wearisome business. 
 Over the sea, flat on his face, lies the monstrous, terrible North Wind, 
 sighing and sinking his voice as in secret, like an old grumbler ; for 
 once in good humor, unto the ocean he talks, and he tells her wonder- 
 ful stories." 
 
 The Subject Matter. This poem of 3 1 84 lines describes 
 the deeds of the Teutonic hero Beowulf. Hrothgar, the 
 King of the Danes, built a magnificent mead hall to which 
 he gave the name of Heorot. 1 While the Danes were eat- 
 ing and drinking their fill in this famous hall, Grendel, a 
 monster half-human, came from the moor, burst in upon 
 them, mangled thirty warriors, and then rushed off into 
 the darkness. For twelve years this monster harried the 
 warriors whenever they feasted in the hall, until the brav- 
 est were afraid to enter it. When Beowulf heard of this, 
 he sailed with his warriors to Heorot, and persuaded the 
 Danes to feast with him in the hall. After they had fallen 
 asleep there, Grendel burst in the door, seized a warrior, 
 and devoured him in a few mouthfuls. Then he grasped 
 Beowulf. The hero, disdaining to use a sword against 
 the dire monster, grappled with him, and together they 
 wrestled up and down the hall. In their mad contest 
 they overturned the tables and made the vast hall tremble 
 as if it were in the throes of an earthquake. 
 
 Finally Beowulf, with a grip like that of thirty men, tore 
 away the arm and shoulder of the monster, who rushed 
 out to the marshes to die. The next night a banquet was 
 given in fateful Heorot in honor of the hero. After the 
 
 1 The student will do well to note in his atlas the location which authorities 
 have assigned to this hall. Thomas Arnold says : " The view of Sarrazin and 
 Danish scholars that the site of Hrothgar's mansion must be placed in close 
 proximity to that of Leire, near the head of the Roskilde Fiord in Zealand 
 [Seeland] is now generally accepted."
 
 BEOWULF 25 
 
 feast, the warriors slept in the hall, but Beowulf went to 
 the palace. He had been gone but a short time, when in 
 rushed Grendel's mother to avenge the death of her son. 
 She seized a warrior, the king's dearest friend, and carried 
 him away. In the morning the king said to Beowulf : 
 
 " My trusty friend yEschere is dead. . . . The cruel hag has wreaked 
 on him her vengeance. The country folk said there were two of them, 
 one the semblance of a woman ; the other, the specter of a man. Their 
 haunt is in the remote land, in the crags of the wolf, the wind-beaten 
 cliffs, and untrodden bogs, where the dismal stream plunges into the 
 drear abyss of an awful lake, overhung with a dark and grizzly wood 
 rooted down to the water's edge, where a lurid flame plays nightly on 
 the surface of the flood and there lives not the man who knows its 
 depth ! So dreadful is the place that the hunted stag, hard driven by 
 the hounds, will rather die on the bank than find a shelter there. A 
 place of terror ! When the wind rises, the waves mingle hurly-burly 
 with the clouds, the air is stifling and rumbles with thunder. To thee 
 alone we look for relisf." * 
 
 This selection shows why the poetry of wild nature 
 was largely a growth of later times. Ignorance peopled 
 unknown places with monsters. Weird scenery, which 
 might to-day move the pen of the poet, was then looked 
 upon as the dwelling place of evil spirits. The very mists 
 took the shape of a Grendel stalking over the moor. 
 
 Beowulf followed the bloody trail of Grendel's mother 
 to the terrible flood. Undaunted by the dragons and 
 serpents that made their home within the depths, he 
 grasped a sword and plunged beneath the waves. After 
 sinking what seemed to him a day's space, he saw 
 Grendel's mother, who came forward to meet him. She 
 dragged him into her dwelling, where there was no water, 
 and the fight began. The issue was for a time doubtful, 
 
 1 Earle's translation.
 
 26 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 but at last Beowulf ran her through with a gigantic sword, 
 and she fell dead upon the floor of her dwelling. A little 
 distance away, he saw the dead body of Grendel. The 
 hero cut off the heads of the monster and his mother and 
 hastened away to Hrothgar's court. After receiving much 
 praise and many presents, Beowulf sailed homeward with 
 his warriors, where he ruled as king for fifty years. 
 
 The closing part of the poem tells how one of Beowulf's 
 subjects stole some of the treasure which a firedrake had 
 for three hundred years been guarding in a cavern. The 
 enraged monster with his fiery breath laid waste the land. 
 Beowulf sought the dragon in his cavern and after a terri- 
 ble fight slew the monster, but was himself mortally 
 wounded, and died after seeing in the cavern the heaps of 
 treasure which he had won for his people. 
 
 So passed away the hero of the earliest epic poem of 
 any branch of the Teutonic race. Beowulf affords valu- 
 able insight into the characteristics of that age. We are 
 given the events of an entire day in the life of our fore- 
 fathers. In Beowulf 'we look upon the scenery with which 
 they were familiar ; we are brought face to face with their 
 hopes and fears, their ideas of duty, their manner of 
 regarding life, and the way they took their exit from it. 
 
 THE CEDMONIAN CYCLE 
 
 Caedmon. In 597 A.D. St. Augustine began to teach 
 the Christian religion to the Anglo-Saxons. The results 
 of this teaching were shown in the subsequent literature. 
 In what is known as Caedmon's Paraphrase, the next great 
 Anglo-Saxon epic, there is no decrease in the warlike 
 spirit. Instead of Grendel we have Satan as the arch- 
 enemy against whom the battle rages.
 
 THE C^DMONIAN CYCLE 
 
 Caedmon, who died in 680, was until middle life a lay- 
 man attached to the monastery at Whitby, on the north- 
 east coast of Yorkshire. Since the Paraphrase has been 
 
 ROINS OF WHITBY ABBEY 
 
 attributed to Caedmon on the authority of the Saxon his- 
 torian Bede, born 673, we shall quote Bede himself on 
 the subject, from his famous Ecclesiastical History : 
 
 " Caedmon, having lived in a secular habit until he was well advanced 
 in years, had never learned anything of versifying ; for which reason, 
 being sometimes at entertainments, where it was agreed for the sake 
 of mirth that all present should sing in their turns, when he saw the 
 instrument come toward him, he rose up from table and returned home. 
 
 ' Having done so at a certain time, and gone out of the house where 
 the entertainment was, to the stable, where he had to take care of the 
 horses that night, he there composed himself to rest at the proper 
 time ; a person appeared to him in his sleep, and, saluting him by his 
 name, said, 'Caedmon, sing some song to me. 1 He answered, 'I can- 
 not sing ; for that was the reason why I left the entertainment, and 
 retired to this place, because I could not sing. 1 The other who talked
 
 28 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 to him replied, 'However, you shall sing. 1 'What shall I sing?' re- 
 joined he. ' Sing the beginning of created beings, 1 said the other. 
 Hereupon he presently began to sing verses to the praise of God." 
 
 Caedmon remembered the poetry which he had com- 
 posed in his dreams and he repeated it in the morning 
 to the inmates of the monastery. They concluded that 
 the gift of song was divinely given and had him enter 
 the monastery and devote his time to poetry. 
 
 Of Caedmon's work Bede says : 
 
 " He sang the creation of the world, the origin of man, and all the 
 history of Genesis : and made many verses on the departure of the 
 children of Israel out of Egypt, and their entering into the land of 
 promise, with many other histories from Holy Writ ; the incarnation, 
 passion, resurrection of our Lord, and his ascension into heaven ; the 
 coming of the Holy Ghost, and the preaching of the Apostles ; also 
 the terror of future judgment, the horror of the pains of hell, and the 
 delights of heaven." 
 
 The Authorship and Subject Matter of the Caedmonian 
 Cycle. The first edition of the Paraphrase was published 
 in 1655 by Junius, an acquaintance of Milton. Junius 
 attributed the entire Paraphrase to Caedmon, on the author- 
 ity of the above quotations from Bede. 
 
 The Paraphrase is really composed of three separate 
 poems : the Genesis, the Exodus, and the Daniel ; and 
 these are probably the works of different writers. Crit- 
 ics are not agreed whether any of these poems in their 
 present form can be ascribed to Caedmon. The Genesis 
 shows too much difference in its parts to be produced 
 by one author, but some portions of this poem may be 
 Caedmon's own work. The Genesis, like Milton's Paradise 
 Lost, has for its subject matter the fall of man and its con- 
 sequences. The Exodus, the work of an unknown writer, 
 is a poem of much originality on the escape of the Chil-
 
 THE OEDMONIAN CYCLE 2Q 
 
 dren of Israel from Egypt, their passage through the Red 
 Sea, and the destruction of Pharaoh's host. The Daniel, 
 an uninteresting poem of 765 lines, paraphrases portions 
 of the book of Daniel, relating to Nebuchadnezzar's 
 dreams, the fiery furnace, and Belshazzar's feast. 
 
 Characteristics of the Poetry. No matter who wrote 
 the Paraphrase, we have the poetry, a fact which critics 
 too often overlook. Though the narrative sometimes 
 closely follows the Biblical account in Genesis, Exodus, 
 and Daniel, there are frequent unfettered outbursts of 
 the imagination. The Exodus rings with the warlike 
 notes of the victorious Teutonic race. 
 
 The Genesis possesses special interest for the student, 
 since many of its strong passages show a marked likeness 
 to certain parts of Milton's Paradise Lost (p. 202). Some 
 critics have concluded that Milton must have been familiar 
 with the Caedmonian Genesis. It will be instructive to note 
 the parallelism between the following passages from the 
 two poems. The earlier poem pictures the home of the 
 fallen angels as a place of 
 
 "... eternal night and sulphur pains, 
 Fulness of fire, dread cold, reek, and red flames." 
 
 It is further described as a land 
 
 " That was without light and full of flame." * 
 
 With this description we may compare these lines from 
 
 Milton : 
 
 "A dungeon horrible, on all sides round, 
 
 As one great furnace flamed ; yet from those flames 
 
 No light ; but rather darkness visible. 
 
 ... a fiery deluge, fed 
 
 With ever burning sulphur unconsumed." 2 
 
 1 Morley's translation. 2 Paradise Lost, Book I., lines 61-69.
 
 30 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 The older poet sings with forceful simplicity : 
 
 "Then comes, at dawn, the east wind, keen with frost." 
 
 Milton writes : 
 
 " . . . the parching air 
 Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire." 1 
 
 In the Genesis, Satan's description of his new home is as 
 strong as in the Paradise Lost : 
 
 "... Above, below, 
 Here is vast fire, and never have I seen 
 More loathly landscape ; never fade the flames, 
 Hot over Hell." 
 
 Here is the parallel passage from Milton : 
 
 " Seest thou yon dreary plain, forlorn and wild, 
 The seat of desolation, void of light, 
 Save what the glimmering of these livid flames 
 Casts pale and dreadful ? " 2 
 
 When Satan rises on his wings to cross the flaming vault, 
 the Genesis gives in one line an idea which Milton expands 
 into two and a half : 
 
 " Swang Saet fyr on twa feondes crasfte/' 
 
 Struck the fire asunder with fiendish craft. 
 
 "... on each hand the flames, 
 
 Driven backward, slope their pointing spires, and, roll'd 
 In billows, leave i' th 1 midst a horrid vale." 8 
 
 It is not certain that Milton ever knew of the existence 
 of the Caedmonian Genesis ; for he was blind three years 
 before it was published. But whether he knew of it or 
 not, it is a striking fact that the temper of the Teutonic 
 mind during a thousand years should have changed so 
 
 1 Paradise Lost, II., 594. * Ibid., I., 180-183. 8 Ii>id -> ! 222-224.
 
 THE CYNEWULF CYCLE 31 
 
 little toward the choice and treatment of the subject of 
 an epic, and that the first great poem known to have been 
 written on English soil should in so many points have 
 anticipated the greatest epic of the English race. 
 
 THE CYNEWULF CYCLE 
 
 Cynewulf 's Work. Cynewulf is the only great Anglo- 
 Saxon poet who affixed his name to certain poems and 
 thus settled their authorship. We know nothing of his 
 life except what we infer from his poetry. He was born 
 near the middle of the eighth century, and it is not unlikely 
 that he passed part of his youth as a thane of some noble. 
 It is improbable that he was a wandering gleeman. He 
 became a man of wide learning, well skilled in "word- 
 craft." Such learning could then hardly have been ac- 
 quired outside of some monastery whither he may have 
 retired. He shows a poet's love for the beauty of the 
 sun and the moon (fieofon-condelle\ aethelings among the 
 constellations, for the dew and the rain, for the strife of 
 the waves (holm-Brace^ for the steeds of the sea (sund- 
 hengestas), and for the " all-green " (eal-grene) earth. 
 
 The Christ^ the Elene, the Juliana, and the Fates of the 
 Apostles contain his runes, which prove that he is the au- 
 thor of these poems. The Christ is a poem on the Savior's 
 Nativity, Ascension, and Judgment of the world at the 
 last day. No other Anglo-Saxon poet better represents 
 the essence and spirit of Christianity. The description of 
 the Last Judgment is specially powerful and dramatic : 
 
 " Lo ! the fire blast, flaming far, fierce and hungry as a sword, 
 Whelms the world withal ! " > 
 
 * Brooke's translation.
 
 32 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 Cynewulf closes the poem with a picture of a happy 
 land. This conception would never have occurred to a 
 poet of the warlike Saxon race before the introduction 
 of Christianity. 
 
 "... Hunger is not there nor thirst, 
 Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun, 
 Neither cold nor care." 
 
 Elene, the story of the finding of the Cross, is a strong 
 dramatic poem. It tells how Constantine, frightened at 
 the number of his foes, falls asleep and dreams of seeing 
 the Cross with the inscription : " With this shalt thou 
 conquer." He then has a cross made and borne at the 
 head of his army, which is victorious. Seized by a desire 
 to recover the true Cross, he sends his mother, Elene, 
 with a large force to the Holy Land. The story pro- 
 ceeds in a dramatic way to the finding of three crosses far 
 beneath the surface of the earth. In order to ascertain 
 which is the Holy Rood, a dead man is brought in contact 
 with the first cross, but the watchers see no sign of its 
 power. The second is tried with like result, but when he 
 touches the third, he is immediately restored to life. 
 
 The Juliana also has dramatic elements. Juliana is a 
 beautiful maiden, whom her father tries to compel to 
 marry a persecutor of the Christians. She refuses and 
 is thrown into prison, where a being in the guise of an 
 angel appears and bids her worship her lover's pagan 
 gods. She prays, and her prayer compels her visitor to 
 assume his proper fiendish shape and gives her complete 
 power over him. The story of his discomfiture and the 
 task to which she subjects him, introduces an element of 
 humor. The action then proceeds to her martyrdom. 
 
 Andreas and Phoenix. Cynewulf is probably the author 
 of Andreas, an unsigned poem of special excellence and
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 33 
 
 dramatic power. The poem describes Andrew's voyage 
 to Mermedonia to deliver St. Matthew. The Savior in 
 disguise is the pilot. The dialogue between him and 
 Andrew is specially fine. The saint has all the admira- 
 tion of a Viking for his unknown Pilot, who stands at the 
 helm in a gale and manages the vessel as he would a 
 thought. 
 
 Cynewulf is also the probable author of the Phoenix t 
 which . is in part an adaptation of an old Latin poem. 
 The Phoenix is the only Saxon poem which gives us the 
 rich scenery of the South, in place of the stern northern 
 landscape. He thus describes the land where this fabulous 
 bird dwells : 
 
 " Calm and fair this glorious field, flashes there the sunny grove ; 
 Happy is the holt of trees, never withers fruitage there. 
 Bright are there the blossoms. . . . 
 In that home the hating foe houses not at all, 
 
 Neither sleep nor sadness, nor the sick man's weary bed, 
 
 Nor the winter-whirling snow. . . . 
 
 . . . but the liquid streamlets, 
 
 Wonderfully beautiful, from their wells upspringing, 
 
 Softly lap the land with their lovely floods." 1 
 
 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 
 
 Martial Spirit. The love of war is very marked in 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry. This characteristic might have 
 been expected in the songs of a race that had withstood 
 the well-nigh all-conquering arm of the vast Roman 
 Empire. 
 
 Our study of Beowulf has already shown the intensity 
 of the martial spirit in heathen times. These lines from 
 
 1 Brooke's translation.
 
 34 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 the Fight at Finnsburg, dating from about the same time 
 as Beowulf, have only the flash of the sword to lighten 
 their gloom. They introduce the raven, for whom the 
 Saxon felt it his duty to provide food on the battlefield : 
 
 "... hraefen wandrode 
 sweart and sealo-brun ; swurd-leoma stod 
 swylce eal Finns-buruh fyrenu wasre." 
 
 . . . the raven wandered 
 
 Swart and sallow-brown ; the sword-flash stood 
 
 As if all Finnsburg were afire. 
 
 The love of war is almost as marked in the Christian 
 poetry. There are vivid pictures of battle against the 
 heathen and the enemies of God. A selection from one 
 of the poems of the Caedmonian Cycle will show this : 
 
 " Helmeted men went from the holy burgh, 
 At the first reddening of dawn, to fight : 
 Loud stormed the din of shields. 
 For that rejoiced the lank wolf in the wood, 
 And the black raven, slaughter-greedy bird." 1 
 
 The poems often describe battle as if it -was an enjoy- 
 able game. They mention the " play of the spear " and 
 speak of "putting to sleep with the sword," as if the din 
 of war was in their ears a slumber melody. 
 
 One of the latest of Anglo-Saxon poems, The Battle of 
 Brunanburh, 937, is a famous example of war poetry. We 
 quote a few lines from Tennyson's excellent translation : 
 
 " Grimly with swords that were sharp from the grindstone, 
 Fiercely we hack'd at the flyers before us. 
 
 Five young kings put asleep by the sword-stroke. 
 Seven strong earls of the army of Anlaf 
 Fell on the war-field, numberless numbers. 
 
 1 Morley's translation.
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 35 
 
 " Slender reason had 
 He to be glad of 
 The clash of the war glaive, 
 
 The wielding of weapons 
 The play that they play'd with 
 The children of Edward." 
 
 Love of the Sea. The Anglo-Saxon fondness for the 
 sea has been noted, together with the fact that this char- 
 acteristic has been transmitted to more recent English 
 poetry. Our forefathers rank among the best seamen that 
 the world has ever known. Had they not loved to dare 
 an unknown sea, English literature might not have existed, 
 and the sun might never have risen on any English flag. 
 
 The scop sings thus of Beowulf's adventure on the North 
 Sea : 
 
 "Swoln were the surges, of storms 'twas the coldest, 
 Dark grew the night, and northern the wind, 
 Rattling and roaring, rough were the billows." * 
 
 In the Seafarer, the scop also sings : 
 
 " My mind now is set, 
 My heart's thought, on wide waters, 
 The home of the whale ; 
 It wanders away 
 Beyond limits of land. 
 
 And stirs the mind's longing 
 
 To travel the way that is trackless." 2 
 
 In the Andreas, the poet speaks of the ship in one of the 
 most charming of Saxon similes : 
 
 "Foaming Ocean beats our steed : full of speed this boat is ; 
 Fares along foam-throated, flieth on the wave, 
 Likest to a bird." 8 
 
 1 Brooke's translation. 2 Morley's translation. 3 Brooke's translation.
 
 36 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 Some of the most striking Saxon epithets are applied to 
 the sea. We may instance such a compound as dr-ge-bland 
 (dr, "oar"; blendan, "to blend"), which conveys the idea 
 of the companionship of the oar with the sea. From this 
 compound modern poets have borrowed their " oar-dis- 
 turbed sea," "oard sea," "oar-blending sea," and "oar- 
 wedded sea." The Anglo-Saxon poets call the sun rising or 
 setting in the sea the mere-candel. In Beowulf, mere-strata, 
 "sea-streets," are spoken of as if they were the easily 
 traversed avenues of a town. 
 
 Figures of Rhetoric. A special characteristic of Anglo- 
 Saxon poetry is the rarity of similes. In Homer they 
 are frequent, but Anglo-Saxon verse is too abrupt and 
 rapid in the succession of images to employ the expanded 
 simile. The long poem of Beowulf contains only five 
 similes, and these are of the shorter kind. Two of them, 
 the comparison of the light in Grendel's dwelling to the 
 beams of the sun, and of a vessel to a flying bird, have 
 been given in the original Anglo-Saxon on pp. 15, 17. 
 Other similes compare the light from Grendel's eyes to a 
 flame, and the nails on his fingers to steel, while the most 
 complete simile says that the sword, when bathed in the 
 monster's poisonous blood, melted like ice. 
 
 On the other hand, this poetry uses many direct and 
 forcible metaphors, such as " wave-ropes " for ice, the 
 "whale-road" or "swan-road" for the sea, the "foamy- 
 necked floater " for a ship, the " war-adder " for an arrow, 
 the " bone-house " for body. The sword is said to sing a 
 war song, the slain to be put to sleep with the sword, the 
 sun to be a candle, the flood to boil. War is appropriately 
 called the sword-game. 
 
 Parallelisms. The repetition of the same ideas in 
 slightly differing form, known as parallelism, is frequent.
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF ANGLO-SAXON POETRY 37 
 
 The author wished to make certain ideas emphatic, and he 
 repeated them with varying phraseology. The first sight 
 of land is important to the sailor, and hence the poet used 
 four different terms for the shore that met Beowulf's eyes 
 on his voyage to Hrothgar : land, brimclifu, beorgas, s&- 
 ncessas (land, sea-cliffs, mountains, promontories). 
 
 This passage from the Phoenix shows how repetition 
 emphasizes the absence of disagreeable things : 
 
 "... there may neither snow nor rain, 
 Nor the furious air of frost, nor the flare of fire, 
 Nor the headlong squall of hail, nor the hoar frost's fall, 
 Nor the burning of the sun, nor the bitter cold, 
 Nor the weather over-warm, nor the winter shower, 
 Do their wrong to any wight." 1 
 
 The general absence of cold is here made emphatic by 
 mentioning special cold things: "snow," "frost," "hail," 
 "hoar frost," "bitter cold," "winter shower." The ab- 
 sence of heat is emphasized in the same way. 
 
 Saxon contrasted with Celtic Imagery. A critic rightly 
 says : " The gay wit of the Celt would pour into the song 
 of a few minutes more phrases of ornament than are to 
 be found in the whole poem of Beowulf." In three lines 
 of an old Celtic death song, we find three similes : 
 
 " Black as the raven was his brow ; 
 Sharp as a razor was his spear ; 
 White as lime was his skin." 
 
 We look in Anglo-Saxon poetry in vain for a touch like 
 this : 
 
 " Sweetly a bird sang on a pear tree above the head of Guenn before 
 they covered him with a turf." 2 
 
 1 Brooke's translation. 2 LlywarcKs Lament for his Son Gwenn. 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 3
 
 38 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 If the Saxon repeats, the Celt exaggerates : 
 
 u More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her 
 skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands 
 and fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray 
 of the meadow fountain." 1 
 
 Sometimes, as in the foregoing passage, the Celtic exag- 
 geration is pleasing, but it is often ridiculous, as in the 
 account of the fight between the white-horned and brown 
 bulls. We are told that the "sky was darkened by the 
 turf thrown up by their feet and by the foam from their 
 mouths. The province rang with their roar and the in- 
 habitants hid in caves or climbed the hills." We might 
 expect from this the story of the Kilkenny cats. 
 
 In order to produce a poet able to write both A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream and Hamlet, the Celtic imagination 
 must blend with the Anglo-Saxon seriousness. As we shall 
 see, this was accomplished by the Norman conquest 
 
 ANGLO-SAXON PROSE 
 
 When and where written. We have seen that poetry 
 normally precedes prose. The principal part of Anglo- 
 Saxon poetry had been produced before much prose was 
 written. The most productive poetic period was between 
 650 and 825. Near the close of the eighth century, the 
 Danes began their plundering expeditions into England. 
 By 800 they had destroyed the great northern monasteries, 
 like the one at Whitby, where Caedmon is said to have 
 composed the first religious song. The home of poetry 
 was in the north of England, and these Danish inroads 
 almost completely silenced the singers. What prose there 
 
 1 Guest's Mabinogion, p. 219.
 
 BEDE ALFRED 39 
 
 was in the north was principally in Latin. On the other 
 hand, the Saxon prose was produced chiefly in the south 
 of England. The most glorious period of Anglo-Saxon 
 prose was during Alfred's reign, 871-901. 
 
 Bede. This writer (673-735) has slight claims to be 
 considered in a history of English literature, for all of his 
 extant work is in Latin. He is said to have translated the 
 Gospel of St. John into Saxon, but the translation is lost. 
 He wrote in Latin on a vast range of subjects, from the 
 Scriptures to natural science, and from grammar to history. 
 He has given a list of thirty-seven works of which he is 
 the author. His most important work is the Ecclesiastical 
 History,, which is really a history of England from Julius 
 Caesar's invasion to 731. The quotation from Bede's 
 work relative to Caedmon (p. 27) shows that Bede could 
 relate things simply and well. He passed a great part of 
 his life at the monastery of Jarrow on the Tyne. 
 
 Alfred. A king of England was its greatest Anglo- 
 Saxon prose writer. Alfred, who reigned from 871 to 901, 
 is rightly surnamed the Great from every point of view. 
 Although the most of his works are called translations 
 from the Latin, he has yet left the stamp of his own origi- 
 nality and sterling sense upon them all. He desired to 
 give his people text-books on all important subjects, and 
 he shrank from no labor in accomplishing his purpose. 
 He consulted all accessible authorities and made altera- 
 tions and additions to suit his plan. 
 
 He prepared a text-book of geography in this way. He 
 found a Latin work by Orosius, who was a Spanish Chris- 
 tian of the fifth century. Here was a mass of material, 
 much of which was unsuited to Alfred's purposes, and so 
 he omitted, changed, and added. He interviewed travelers 
 from the far North and inserted some original matter.
 
 40 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 These additions are the best material in the book, and 
 they are not uninteresting reading now. The work is 
 known as Alfred's Orosius. 
 
 There was extreme necessity for these text-books, since 
 none existed in the native tongue. He translated Pope 
 Gregory's Pastoral Rule in order to show the clergy how 
 to teach and care for their flocks. Alfred's own words at 
 the beginning of the volume show how great was the 
 need for such work as he was doing. Speaking of the 
 clergy, he says : 
 
 " There were very few on this side Hutnber who would know how to 
 render their services in English, or so much as translate an epistle out 
 of Latin into English ; and I ween that not many would be on the other 
 side Humber. So few of them were there, that I cannot think of so 
 much as a single one, south of Thames, when I took to the realm." 1 
 
 Alfred produced a work on moral philosophy by alter- 
 ing and amending Boethius's De Consolation* Philosophies. 
 Boethius was a Roman, who was thrown into prison and 
 wrongfully executed about 525 A.D. This work teaches 
 that a wise Power rules the world, that a fuller knowledge 
 of untoward events would reveal their wisdom, and that 
 temporal things are of slight worth in comparison with 
 eternal welfare. 
 
 A text-book of English history was made by translating 
 portions of Bede's Ecclesiastical History from the original 
 Latin. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This is the first history of 
 any branch of the Teutonic people in their own tongue. 
 The Chronicle has come down to us in several different 
 texts, according as it was compiled or copied at differ- 
 ent monasteries. The Chronicle was probably begun in 
 
 1 Earle's translation.
 
 THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE 41, 
 
 Alfred's reign. The entries relating to earlier events were 
 copied from Bede's Ecclesiastical History and from other 
 Latin authorities. The Chronicle contains chiefly those 
 events which each year impressed the clerical compilers as 
 the most important in the history of the nation. This 
 work is a fountain head to which writers of the history of 
 those times must turn. 
 
 A few extracts (translated) will show its character: 
 
 A.D. 449. "This year . . . Hengist and Horsa, invited by Vorti- 
 gern, King of Britons, landed in Britain, on the shore which is called 
 Wappidsfleet ; at first in aid of the Britons, but afterwards they fought 
 against them." 
 
 806. " This year the moon was eclipsed on the Kalends of Septem- 
 ber; and Eardulf, King of the Northumbrians, was driven from his 
 kingdom ; and Eanbert, Bishop of Hexham, died." 
 
 Sometimes the narrative is extremely vivid. Those who 
 know the difficulty of describing anything impressively in 
 a few words will realize the excellence of this portraiture 
 of William the Conqueror : 
 
 1087. " If any would know what manner of man King William was, 
 the glory that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord ; then 
 will we describe him as we have known him. . . . He was mild to 
 those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure to those 
 who withstood his will. ... So also was he a very stern and a wrath- 
 ful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept 
 in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed 
 bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices, and he imprisoned 
 thanes, and at length he spared not his own brother, Odo. . . . 
 Amongst other things, the good order that William established is not 
 to be forgotten ; it was such that any man, who was himself aught, 
 might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full of gold, unmolested ; 
 and no man durst kill another. . . . He made large forests for the 
 deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a 
 hind should be blinded . . . and he loved the tall stags as if he were 
 their father."
 
 42 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 The Chronicle continues until 1 1 54, when its last entry 
 was made to record the death of King Stephen. 
 
 The most flourishing period of Anglo-Saxon poetry was 
 between 650 and 825 A.D. It was produced for the most 
 part in the north of England, which was overrun by the 
 Danes about 800. These marauders destroyed many of 
 the monasteries and silenced the voices of the singers. 
 
 Among the poems of this age, we may emphasize : 
 (i) the shorter scopic pieces, of which the Far Traveler, 
 The Seafarer, The Fortunes of Men, and The Battle of 
 Brunanburh are important examples ; (2) Beowulf, the 
 greatest Anglo-Saxon epic poem, which was probably 
 composed on the continent and brought to England in 
 the memories of the singers ; (3) the C&dmonian Cycle of 
 scriptural paraphrases, some of which have Miltonic quali- 
 ties ; and (4) the Cynewulf Cycle, which shows the most 
 variety and lyrical excellence. 
 
 The subject matter of the poetry is principally war, 
 the sea, and religion. The martial spirit and love of the 
 sea, thus early shown, are typical of the nation that has 
 raised her flag in every clime. The chief qualities of 
 the poetry are earnestness, somberness, the consciousness 
 of the approach of the "inevitable hour," and strength 
 rather than delicacy or melody. Parallelisms and strong 
 metaphorical expressions abound. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon prose was written chiefly in the southern 
 part of England. The golden period of prose coincides 
 with Alfred's reign, 871-901, and he is the greatest prose 
 writer. His translations of Latin text-books for his peo- 
 ple contain excellent additions by him. The Anglo-Saxon
 
 SUMMARY 43 
 
 Chronicle is an important record of contemporaneous 
 events for the historian. There are also the Homilies 
 and Colloquium of ^Ifric, a tenth century prose writer; 
 but the prose as a whole is far inferior to the poetry. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon should be studied not only because it is 
 the foundation of the language in which Shakespeare 
 wrote, but also for its own intrinsic merits. We can 
 point to few other literatures which owe less to outside 
 influences, or which at a like stage in the development 
 of the race possessed as much power. A literature 
 which could accomplish so much under such unfavorable 
 conditions might justly have awakened great expectations. 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER I 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 In connection with the progress of literature, students should obtain 
 for themselves a general idea of contemporary historical events from the 
 pages specified in any of the following named works : 
 
 Gardiner's Students History of England, pp. 1-96; Green's Short 
 History of the English People, Chap. I. ; Underwood-Guest's A Hand- 
 book of English History, pp. 35-129; Guerber's Story of the English, 
 pp. 31-76; Robertson's Making of the English Nation, pp. 7-78 
 (Oxford Manuals of English History} ; Traill's Social England, Vol. I., 
 pp. 116-230. 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 The student who is not familiar with the original Anglo-Saxon 
 should read the translations specified below : 
 
 Scopic Poetry. 1 Widsift or the Far Traveler, translated in Mor- 
 ley's English Writers, Vol. II., pp. i-n. 
 
 1 In his Education of the Central Nervous System, Chaps. VII.-X., the 
 author has endeavored to give 'some special directions for securing definite 
 ideas in the study of poetry.
 
 44 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 The Seafarer, translated in Morley, II., 21-26, or in Morley's Illus- 
 trations of English Religion, pp. 13-15, or in Brooke's English Litera- 
 ture from the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, pp. 311, 312, or in 
 Brooke's History of Early English Literature, pp. 362, 363. 
 
 The Fortunes of Men, translated in Morley's English Writers, II., 
 pp. 32-37, or in Morley's Shorter English Poems, pp. 8-u. 
 
 Battle of Brunanburh, Tennyson's translation. 
 
 What light do these poems throw on (a) the life of the scop ? (b) the 
 subject matter of his songs? (c) the life and ideals of the Anglo-Saxons? 
 
 Beowulf. This important poem should be read entire in one of 
 the following translations : Earle's The Deeds of Beowulf, Done into 
 Modern Prose (Clarendon Press) ; Lumsden's Beowulf, an Old English 
 Poem, Translated into Modern Rhymes ; Morris and Wyatt's The Tale 
 of Beowulf', Hall's Beowulf, Translated into Modern Metres (Student's 
 edition, paper, 30 cents). Morley's English Writers, I., 278-310, and 
 Brooke's History of Early English Literature, pp. 26-73, contain trans- 
 lations of many of the best parts of Beowulf. 
 
 How does the sea figure in the action of the poem? Name as many 
 spithets as possible applied to the sea. How does nature figure in the 
 poem? What difference is there in the treatment of nature in the 
 poetry of to-day? What glimpses are given of the life of women? 
 Describe the three funerals in Beowulf. Is there any analogy between 
 the conflict of natural forces in the Norseland and Beowulf's fight with 
 Grendel ? In what ways does the poem show the ideals of our fore- 
 fathers? Does the poem teach any ethical lesson? 
 
 The Caedmonian Cycle. This has been translated by Thorpe, but 
 the translation is out of print. The student. may find some of the 
 strongest passages in Morley's English Writers, II., 81-101, or in Mor- 
 ley's Illustrations of English Religion, pp. 5-9, or in Brooke's History 
 of Early English Literature, pp. 290-340. 
 
 Compare these selections with the first book of Paradise Lost, and 
 note any likeness in imagery and thought. Did the introduction of 
 Christianity alter the character of the Saxon mind, or merely change the 
 direction of its energies? Quote passages from the Ccedmonian Cycle 
 to prove your conclusion. Compare this Cycle with Beowulf. 
 
 The Cynewulf Cycle. Many fine selections are translated in Mor- 
 ley's English Writers, II., 206-241 ; in Brooke's History of Early 
 English Literature, pp. 371-443 ; in Brooke's English Literature from 
 the Beginning to the Norman Conquest, pp. 163-202 ; and in the Exeter 
 Book, translated by Israel Gollancz for the Early English Text Society.
 
 READING REFERENCES 45 
 
 What new qualities are added to Anglo-Saxon poetry in this Cycle? 
 What old qualities are retained? Does the poetry seem more modern 
 in any respect? Why is the Phoenix (Brooke's History of Early Eng- 
 lish Literature, pp. 428-430; Gollancz's Exeter Book, Part I., pp. 201- 
 241) remarkable? 
 
 General Questions on Anglo-Saxon Poetry. What most striking 
 passages (a) in Beowulf, (b) elsewhere, show the Saxon love of war 
 and of the sea? 
 
 Instance the most striking parallelisms found in your readings. Give 
 a list of vivid metaphors. What conspicuous differences do you find 
 between Anglo-Saxon and old Celtic literature? (Morley's English 
 Writers, I., 165-239, gives a sufficient number of selections from old 
 Celtic literature to enable the student to answer this question. See also 
 this volume, p. 37.) What excellences and defects seem to you most 
 pronounced in Anglo-Saxon verse? 
 
 Prose. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Bede's Ecclesiastical His- 
 tory are both translated in one volume of Bohn's Antiquarian Library. 
 The most interesting part of Bede for the student of literature is the 
 chapter relating to Caedmon (Chap. XXIV., pp. 217-220). 
 
 In the Chronicle, read the entries for the years 871, 878, 897, 975, 
 1087, and 1137. What is there of interest in these selections? Why is 
 the Chronicle specially valuable for the historian ? 
 
 The qualities of Alfred's prose maybe seen in the passages translated 
 in Brooke's English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman 
 Conquest, pp. 221-241, and in Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature, pp. 186- 
 206. A translation of Alfred's Orosius entire is given in Pauli's Life 
 of Alfred (Bohn's Antiquarian Library). The most interesting part 
 of Orosius is the original matter describing the voyages of Ohthere 
 and Wulfstan, pp. 249-255. 
 
 What guided all Alfred's efforts in literature? What qualities are 
 most manifest in his prose ? Why is Anglo-Saxon poetry so vastly 
 superior to the prose ? 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Ramsay 's.The Foundations of England. 
 Freeman's Old English History. 
 Turner's History of the Anglo-Saxons.
 
 46 FROM 449 A.D. TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066 
 
 Grant Allen's Anglo-Saxon England. 
 
 Green's History of the English People. 
 
 Green's Making of England. 
 
 Green's Conquest of England. 
 
 Ten Brink's Early English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 1-115. 
 
 Brooke's History of Early English Literature to the Accession of 
 King Alfred, 500 pp., contains many metrical translations of specimens 
 of the best Anglo-Saxon poetry. 
 
 Brooke's English Literature from the Beginning to the Norman 
 Conquest, 338 pp. 
 
 Earle's Anglo-Saxon Literature. 
 
 Morley's English Writers, Vols. I. and II., contains translations of 
 many fine passages in Anglo-Saxon literature. 
 
 Azarias's The Development of English Literature. 
 
 Taine's English Literature, Book I., Chap. I. 
 
 Jusserand's Literary History of. the English People from the Origins 
 to the Renaissance, pp. 3-93. 
 
 Arnold's Notes on Beowulf. 
 
 The Exeter Book, edited and translated by Gollancz. 
 
 Gurteen's The Epic of the Fall of Man : A Comparative Study of 
 Ccedmon, Dante, and Milton. 
 
 Bosworth and Waring's Anglo-Saxon Gospels. 
 
 Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England, and The Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle, i vol., translated by Giles in Bonn's Antiquarian Library. 
 
 Bohn's Six Old English Chronicles. 
 
 Mabinogion (a collection of Welsh fairy tales and romances), trans- 
 lated by Lady Charlotte Guest. 
 
 Sidney Lanier's The Boy^s Mabinogion. 
 
 Cook's 77/i? Christ of Cynewulf. (The introduction of 97 pages 
 gives a valuable account of the life and writings of Cynewulf.)
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 FROM THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 1066, TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 
 
 1400 
 
 The Norman Conquest. The overthrow of the Saxon 
 rule in England by William the Conqueror in 1066 was 
 an event of vast importance to English literature. The 
 Normans (Norsemen or Northmen), as they were called, 
 a term which shows their northern extraction, were 
 originally of the same blood as the English race. They 
 settled in France in the ninth century, married French 
 wives, and adopted the French language. In 1066 their 
 leader, Duke William, crossed the English Channel 
 with an army, won the battle of Hastings, and became 
 King of England. 
 
 Characteristics of the Normans. The intermixture of 
 Teutonic and French blood had given to the Normans 
 the best qualities of both races. The Norman was 
 nimble-witted, highly imaginative, and full of northern 
 energy. The Saxon possessed dogged perseverance, good 
 common sense, if he had long enough to think, and but 
 little imagination. Some one has well said that the union 
 of Norman with Saxon was like joining the swift spirit 
 of the eagle to the strong body of the ox, or, again, that 
 the Saxon furnished the dough, and the Norman the 
 yeast. Had it not been for the blending of these neces- 
 sary qualities in one race, English literature could not 
 have become the first in the world. We see the char- 
 acteristics of both the Teuton and the Norman in Shake- 
 
 47
 
 48 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 speare's greatest plays. A pure Saxon could not have 
 turned from Hamlet's soliloquy to write: 
 
 "Where the bee sucks, there suck I." 1 
 
 CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 
 
 The Emergence of Modern English. The productions 
 of English authors during the three centuries after the 
 Norman Conquest are of more philological than literary 
 interest. The student should note the principal changes 
 in the language because the relation between literature 
 and its medium of expression is specially intimate. A 
 great literature demands a rich vocabulary capable of 
 expressing delicate shades of difference in thought and 
 feeling. A musician may possess the highest type of 
 ability, but if he is compelled to perform on a defective 
 instrument, his music will show the shortcomings of its 
 vehicle of expression. The period of growth of a litera- 
 ture and its language cannot be neglected by one who 
 wishes a broad comprehension of the literary masterpieces 
 alone. 
 
 Modern English literature did not suddenly make its 
 appearance like the fabled roses which sprang full-blown 
 wherever the feet of Venus touched the soil. The lan- 
 guage in which Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote was 
 formed in a conflict in which no quarter was given or 
 asked. Two great languages, the Saxon and the French, 
 struggled for the mastery. The contest terminated with 
 the survival of the fittest expressions from each. In 
 the same ranks beside the Saxon words "mother" and 
 "home," stand the French "duty" and "family." 
 
 1 The Tempest, V, I.
 
 CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 49 
 
 The student will the more intelligently comprehend the 
 great change in his mother tongue if he looks at the 
 transformation as an evolutionary process. Zoology 
 shows that when animal organs become unnecessary, 
 they tend to atrophy and to pass into the rudimentary 
 stage or disappear entirely, and that those organs best 
 adapted to further the welfare of the animal have de- 
 veloped. The reason why other branches of the Teu- 
 tonic language have not developed so far as English is 
 because their environment was not so favorable, since 
 both French and Latin exercised comparatively small 
 influence in their growth. 
 
 Three Languages used in England. For three hundred 
 years after the Norman Conquest, three languages were 
 widely used in England. The Normans introduced French, 
 which was the language of the court and the aristocracy. 
 William the Conqueror brought over many Norman 
 priests, who used Latin almost exclusively in their serv- 
 ice. The influence of this book Latin is generally under- 
 estimated by those who do not appreciate the power of 
 the church. The Domesday survey shows that in 1085 
 the church, with her dependents, held more than one 
 third of some counties. 
 
 In addition to the Latin and the French (which was it- 
 self principally of Latin origin), there was, thirdly, the 
 Anglo-Saxon, to which the middle and the lower classes 
 of the English stubbornly adhered. 
 
 The Loss of Inflections. Anglo-Saxon was a language 
 with changing endings, like modern German. If a Saxon 
 wished to say "good gifts," he had to have the proper 
 case endings for both the adjective and the noun, and 
 his expression would have been gode giefa. For "the 
 good gifts," he would have inflected "the" and made the
 
 50 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 case ending of " good " different from what it was when 
 " good " was not preceded by an article, and he would 
 have said, da godan giefa. 
 
 The Norman Conquest helped to lop off these endings, 
 which German has never entirely lost. We no longer 
 decline articles or ordinary adjectives. Instead of hav- 
 ing our attention taken up with thinking of the proper 
 endings, the mental powers are left free to attend to the 
 thought rather than to the vehicle of its expression. 
 With the exception of a few nouns like ox, oxen, or mouse, 
 mice, the sole inflection of nouns is the addition of 's, s, or 
 es for the possessive and the plural. Our pronouns are 
 still declined, and mistakes are frequent in their use. 
 
 It should be emphasized that Anglo-Saxon had already 
 begun to lose some of its inflections before the Conquest, 
 and that the coming of the Normans merely hastened a 
 development which would, to a considerable degree, have 
 ultimately taken place without their influence. Even 
 with this influence, the dropping of inflections was not 
 the work of a year, but of several centuries. 
 
 Change in Gender. Before any one could speak Anglo- 
 Saxon correctly, he had first to learn the fanciful genders 
 that were attached to nouns : " trousers " was feminine, 
 "childhood" masculine, "child" neuter. The Norman 
 Conquest helped to give the natural genders to objects. 
 The German still retains these fanciful genders. A critic 
 thus illustrates the use of genders in that language : " A 
 German gentleman writes a masculine letter of feminine 
 love to a neuter young lady with a feminine pen and 
 feminine ink on masculine sheets of neuter paper, and 
 incloses it in a masculine envelope with a feminine address 
 to his darling, though neuter, Gretchen. He has a mas- 
 culine head, a feminine hand, and a neuter heart."
 
 CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 51 
 
 Prefixes, Suffixes, and Self-explaining Compounds. 
 
 The Norman Conquest was instrumental in causing the 
 English tongue to lose much of its power of using pre- 
 fixes. A prefix joined to a well-known word changes its 
 meaning and renders the coining of a new term unneces- 
 sary. The Anglo-Saxons, by the use of prefixes, formed 
 ten compounds from their verb flowan, "to flow." Of 
 these, only one survives in our " overflow." From sittati, 
 "to sit," thirteen compounds were thus formed, but every 
 one has perished. A larger percentage of suffixes was 
 retained, and we still have many words like "wholesome- 
 ness," "child-hood," "sing-er." 
 
 The power of forming self-explaining compounds was 
 largely lost. The Saxon compounded the words for 
 " tree " and " worker," and said treow-zvyrhta, " tree- 
 wright," but we now make use of the single word 
 " carpenter." We have replaced the Saxon boc-craft, 
 "book-art," by "literature"; Tzfen-gldm, "evening-gloom," 
 by " twilight " ; mere-swln, " sea-swine," by " porpoise " ; 
 eag-wrcec, " eye-rack," by " pain in the eye " ; leornung- 
 cild, "learning-child," by "pupil." The title of an old 
 work, Ayen-bite of In-wit, " Again-bite of In-wit," was 
 translated into " Remorse of Conscience." Grund-weall 
 and word-hord were displaced by "foundation" and "vo- 
 cabulary." The German language still retains this power 
 and calls a glove a " hand-shoe," a thimble a " finger- 
 hat," and rolls up such clumsy compound expressions as 
 Unabhangigkeitserklarung. 
 
 We might lament this loss more if we did not remember 
 that Shakespeare found our language ample for his needs, 
 and that a considerable number of the old compounds 
 still survive, as home-stead, man-hood, in-sight, break-fast, 
 house-hold, horse-back, ship-man, and sea-shore.
 
 52 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 Introduction of New Words and Loss of Old Ones. Since 
 the Normans were for some time the governing race, 
 while many of the Saxons occupied comparatively menial 
 positions, numerous French words indicative of rank, 
 power, science, luxury, and fashion were introduced. 
 Many titles were derived from a French source. English 
 thus obtained words like "sovereign," "royalty," "duke," 
 " marquis," " mayor," and " clerk." Many terms of govern- 
 ment are from the French, for instance, "parliament," 
 "peers," "commons." The language of law abounds in 
 French terms, like "damage," "trespass," "circuit," "judge," 
 "jury," "verdict," "sentence," "counsel," "prisoner." 
 Many words used in war, architecture, and medicine also 
 have a French origin. Examples are "fort," "arch," 
 "mason," "surgery." In fact, we find words from the 
 French in almost every field. "Uncle" and "cousin," 
 "rabbit" and "falcon," "trot" and "stable," "money" 
 and "soldier," "reason" and "virtue," "Bible" and 
 "preach," are instances in point. 
 
 French words often displaced Saxon ones. Thus, the 
 Saxon Hfelend, the Healer, gave way to the French Savior, 
 wanhope and wonstead were displaced by despair and resi- 
 dence. Sometimes the Saxon stubbornly kept its place be- 
 side the French term. The English language is thus espe- 
 cially rich in synonyms, or- rather in slightly differentiated 
 forms of expression capable of denoting the exact shade of 
 thought and feeling. The following words are instances : 
 
 SAXON: FRENCH: SAXON: FRENCH: 
 
 body, corpse, green, verdant, 
 
 folk, people, food, nourishment, 
 
 swine, pork, wrangle, contend, 
 
 calf, veal, fatherly, paternal, 
 
 worth, value, workman, laborer.
 
 CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 53 
 
 English was enriched not only by those expressions 
 gained from the daily speech of the Normans, but also 
 by words which were added from literary Latin. Thus, 
 we have the Saxon "ask," the Norman-French "inquire" 
 and "question," and the Latin "interrogate." "Bold," 
 "impudent," "audacious;" "bright," "cheerful," "ani- 
 mated;" "earnings," "wages," "remuneration ;" "short," 
 "brief," "concise," are other examples of words, largely 
 synonymous, from the Saxon, the Norman-French, and 
 the Latin, respectively. 
 
 The Changes Slowly Accomplished. For over a hun- 
 dred years after the Conquest, but few French words 
 found their way into current English use. This is shown 
 by the fact that the Brut, a poem of 32,250 lines, 
 translated from a French original into English about 
 1205, has not more than a hundred words of Norman-French 
 origin. 
 
 At first the Normans despised the tongue of the con- 
 quered Saxons, but, as time progressed, the two races 
 intermarried, and the children would be certain to learn 
 some Saxon words from their mothers or nurses. On the 
 other hand, many well-to-do Saxons, like parents in later 
 times, would have their children taught French because 
 it was considered aristocratic. 
 
 Until 1204 the nobles were going back and forth to 
 Normandy to estates held there, and it was necessary for 
 the nobles to speak French. In 1204 King John lost 
 Normandy, and in the next reign both English and 
 French kings decreed that no subject of the one should 
 hold land in the territory of the other. This narrowing 
 of the attention of English subjects down to England, 
 was a foundation stone in building up the supremacy of 
 the English tongue. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 4
 
 54 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 In 1338 the Hundred Years' War between France 
 and England began. In Edward the Third's reign 
 (1327-1377), it was demonstrated that one Englishman 
 could whip six Frenchmen, and the language of a hostile 
 and partly conquered race naturally began to occupy 
 a less high position. In 1362 Parliament enacted that 
 English should thereafter be used in law-courts, " because 
 the laws, customs, and statutes of this realm, be not 
 commonly known in the same realm, for that they be 
 pleaded, shewed, and judged in the French tongue, 
 which is much unknown in the said realm." 
 
 The Fallow Period. Sometimes a language increases 
 its strength during a period of rest from literary produc- 
 tion, just as land acquires new vigor from lying fallow. 
 If the Norman Conquest reduced the Saxon language 
 " almost to a peasant's dialect " and kept it for more 
 than two centuries in that position, even this condition 
 gave additional power to the resulting tongue. Like 
 Antaeus, who gained sevenfold strength every time that 
 he was thrown to the earth by his adversary, this 
 " peasant's dialect " was strong because it developed 
 in the soil of actual life. That tongue voiced no affecta- 
 tions. It was the language of common sense and of 
 the heart, and their vocabulary contained not a single 
 insincere or high-flown expression. 
 
 The qualities developed by contact with earnest life 
 were necessary requisites in a language with which Shake- 
 speare was to speak to the common heart of humanity, 
 and with which Scotland's plowman poet was to charm 
 the peasant's cot and the palace of the lord. In some of 
 Shakespeare's greatest plays, we shall find that eighty- 
 nine per cent of the words used are those which the Saxon 
 found sufficient to voice his hopes, fears, loves, and woes.
 
 CHANGES WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE 55 
 
 The authorized translation of the Gospels employs over 
 ninety per cent of words of Anglo-Saxon origin. 
 
 The Superiority of the Composite Tongue. While we 
 insist on the truth that Anglo-Saxon gained much of its 
 wonderful directness and power from standing in such 
 close relations to earnest life, it is necessary to remem- 
 ber that many words of Latin origin did, by an ap- 
 prenticeship at the fireside, in the field, the workshop, 
 and the laboratory, equally fit themselves for taking 
 their place in the language. Such words from Latin 
 roots as "faith," "pray," "joke," "vein," "beast," "poor," 
 "nurse," "flower," "taste," "state," and "fool" remain in 
 our vocabulary because they were used in everyday life. 
 
 Pure Anglo-Saxon was a forcible language, but it 
 lacked the wealth of expression and the flexibility neces- 
 sary to respond to the most delicate touches of the 
 master musicians who were to come. When Shakespeare 
 has Lear say of Cordelia : 
 
 " Her voice was ever soft, 
 Gentle, and low ; an excellent thing in woman," 
 
 we find that ten of the thirteen words are Saxon, but 
 the other three of Romance (French) origin are as neces- 
 sary as is a small amount of tin added to copper to make 
 bronze. Two of these three words express varying shades 
 of quality. When Macbeth asks : 
 
 " Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood 
 Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather 
 The multitudinous seas incarnadine, 
 Making the green one red," 
 
 the Saxon again preponderates, but "multitudinous " seems 
 in one sonorous word to include all the countless waves
 
 56 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 of the seas of every clime, and "incarnadine" to intensify, 
 far more than " redden," the idea of the penetration and 
 the magnitude of the stain. This line as a whole, coming 
 between two lines of pure Saxon, adds not only variety 
 but also sublimity. 
 
 Lounsbury well says: "There result, indeed, from the 
 union of the foreign and native elements, a wealth of 
 phraseology and a many-sidedness in English, which give 
 it in these respects a superiority over any other modern 
 cultivated tongue. German is strictly a pure Teutonic 
 speech, but no native speaker of it claims for it any supe- 
 riority over the English as an instrument of expression, 
 while many are willing to concede its inferiority." 
 
 It is true that the bone, sinew, and framework of this 
 composite tongue remain Saxon, but it is also true that 
 the English beloved by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton 
 was something more than bone and sinew. That English 
 was a creature of flesh and blood as well. With all her 
 sinewy strength, she possessed rare beauty, grace, and 
 perfection of rounded form. 
 
 LITERATURE OF THE TRANSITION PERIOD, FROM THE 
 NORMAN CONQUEST TO CHAUCER'S DEATH 
 
 A Literature of Dialects. During this period and even 
 until printing had helped to render the language stable, 
 not only was English undergoing a transition, but the 
 language in one part of the country was often difficult to 
 be understood by those living in another part. Even in 
 the fifteenth century, Caxton, the first English printer, 
 was sometimes puzzled to know which dialect to place in 
 permanent type. In one of his Prefaces he says that a 
 man went into a house at some distance from his native
 
 GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH 57 
 
 place and "axyd after eggys," but the good wife replied 
 that she "coude speke no frenshe." She had mistaken 
 his English dialect for French. He found an interpreter 
 who told her that the man wanted "eyren." She then 
 brought him eggs. 
 
 All works of the period treated in this chapter were 
 written in a dialect. In such a small country as England, 
 this fact had the effect of lessening the circulation of 
 books and the number of readers. There were three prin- 
 cipal dialects : the Northern, spoken north of the river 
 Humber; the Midland, from the Humber to the Thames; 
 and the Southern from the Thames to the English Chan- 
 nel. It was the Midland dialect which the genius of 
 Chaucer helped to raise from its provincial rank to become 
 the national language of England. 
 
 A Latin Chronicler. - One chronicler, Geoffrey of Mon- 
 mouth, although he wrote in Latin, must receive some 
 attention because of his vast influence on English poetry. 
 He probably acquired his last name from being arch- 
 deacon of Monmouth. He was appointed Bishop of St. 
 Asaph in 1152 and died about 1154. Unlike the majority 
 of the monkish chroniclers, he possessed a vivid imagina- 
 tion, which he used in his so-called History of the Kings of 
 Britain. 
 
 Geoffrey pretended to have found an old manuscript 
 which related the deeds of all British kings from Brutus, 
 the mythical founder of the kingdom of Britain, and the 
 great-grandson of ^Eneas, to Caesar. Geoffrey wrote an 
 account of all British kings down to Cadwallo in 689 with 
 as much minuteness and gravity as Swift employed in 
 the Voyage to Lilliput (p. 242). Other chroniclers declared 
 that Geoffrey lied saucily and shamelessly, but his book 
 became extremely popular. The monks could not then
 
 58 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 comprehend that the world's greatest literary works were 
 to be products of the imagination. 
 
 In Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of 
 Britain we are given vivid pictures of King Lear and his 
 daughters, of Cymbeline, of King Arthur and his Knights, 
 of Guinevere and the rest of that company whom later 
 poets have immortalized. It is probable that Geoffrey was 
 not particular whether he obtained his materials from old 
 chroniclers, Welsh bards, floating tradition, or from his own 
 imagination. His book left its impress on the historical 
 imagination of the Middle Ages. Had it not been for 
 Geoffrey's History, the dramas of King Lear and Cymbeline 
 might never have been suggested to Shakespeare. 
 
 Layamon's Brut. About 1155 a Frenchman named 
 Wace translated into his own language Geoffrey of Mon- 
 mouth's work. This translation .fell into the hands of 
 Layamon, a priest living in Worcestershire, and he pro- 
 ceeded to render the poem, with additions of his own, into 
 the Southern English dialect. Wace's Brut has 15,300 
 lines; Layamon's, 32,250. As the matter which Layamon 
 added is the best in the poem, he is, in so far, an original 
 author of much imaginative power. He is certainly the 
 greatest poet between the Conquest and Chaucer's time. 
 
 A selection from the Brut will give the student an 
 opportunity of comparing this transition English with 
 the language in its modern form : 
 
 " And Ich wulle varan to Avalun : And I will fare to Avalon, 
 
 To vairest alre maidene, To the fairest of all maidens, 
 
 To Argante Sere quene, To Argante the queen, 
 
 Alven swiSe sceone ; Elf surpassing fair ; 
 
 And heo seal mine wunden And she shall my wounds 
 
 Makien alle isunde, Make all sound, 
 
 Al hal me makien All hale me make 
 
 Mid halvveige drenchen. With healing draughts.
 
 LAYAMON ORM 59 
 
 And seoSe Ich cumen wulle And afterwards I will come 
 
 To mine kineriche To my kingdom 
 
 And wunien mid Brutten And dwell with Britons 
 
 Mid muchelere wunne." With much joy. 
 
 With this, compare the following lines from Tennyson's 
 The Passing of Arthur : 
 
 " . . .1 am going a long way 
 To the island-valley of Avilion, 
 Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, 
 Nor ever wind blows loudly ; but it lies 
 Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns 
 And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea, 
 Where I will heal me of my grievous wound. 
 
 He passes to be King among the dead, 
 And after healing of his grievous wound 
 He comes again." 
 
 Layamoh employed less alliteration thaji is found in 
 Anglo-Saxon poetry. He also used an occasional rhyme, 
 but the accent and rhythm of his verse are more Saxon 
 than modern. When reading Tennyson's Idylls of the 
 King, we must not forget that Layamon was the first 
 poet to celebrate in English King Arthur's deeds. The 
 Brut shows little trace of French influences, and not more 
 than a hundred French words can be found in it. 
 
 Orm's Ormulum. A monk named Orm wrote in the 
 Midland dialect a metrical paraphrase of those parts of 
 the Gospels used in the church on each service day 
 throughout the year. After the paraphrase comes his 
 metrical explanation and application of the Scripture. 
 
 He says : 
 
 " Diss boc iss nemmnedd Orrmulum 
 
 ForrSi "$att Ormm itt wrohhte." 
 
 This book is named Ormulum 
 For that Orm it wrote.
 
 6O FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 There was no fixed spelling at this time. Orm generally 
 doubled the consonant after a short vowel, and he insisted 
 that any one who copied his work should be careful to do 
 the same. We shall find on counting the syllables in the 
 two lines quoted from him that the first line has eight; the 
 second, seven. This scheme is followed with great preci- 
 sion throughout the poem, which employs neither rhyme 
 nor regular alliteration. Orm used even fewer French 
 words than Layamon. The date of the Ormulum is prob- 
 ably somewhere between 1200 and 1215. 
 
 The Ancren Riwle. About 1225 appeared the most 
 notable prose work in the native tongue since the time 
 of Alfred, if we except the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Three 
 young ladies had secluded themselves from the world in 
 Dorsetshire, and they wished rules for guidance in their 
 seclusion. An unknown author, to oblige them, wrote the 
 Ancren Riwle (Rule of Anchoresses). This book lays 
 down rules for their future conduct in all the affairs of life, 
 and it also offers much religious consolation. 
 
 The following selection shows some of the curious rules 
 for the guidance of the nuns, and furnishes a specimen 
 of the Southern dialect of transitional English prose in the 
 early part of the thirteenth century : 
 
 " 36, mine leoue sustren, Ye, my beloved sisters, 
 
 ne schulen hahben no best shall have no beast 
 
 bute kat one. . . . $e schulen but one cat. ... Ye shall 
 
 beon i-tlodded four si Sen be cropped four times 
 
 i5e 3ere, uorto lihten ower in the year for to lighten your 
 
 hcaued. . . Of idelnesse awakeneS head. ... Of idleness ariseth 
 
 muchel flesshes fondunge. . . . much temptation of the flesh. . . . 
 
 Iren Set HS stille gedere Iron that lieth still soon gathereth 
 
 sone rust." rust. 
 
 The keynote of the work is the renunciation of self. 
 Few productions of modern literature contain finer pictures
 
 THE ANCREN RIWLE 
 
 6l 
 
 of the Divine love and sympathy. Across the fierce storm 
 clouds of theology, which continued to sweep the heavens 
 for hundreds of years, the pages of the Ancren Riwle re- 
 flect the rainbow hues of the Galilean's compassion for 
 laboring and heavy-laden humanity. The following simile 
 affords an instance of this quality in the work : 
 
 " De sixte kunfort is "Set 
 ure Louerd, hwon he 
 "Set we beo^S itented, he plaieft mid 
 us, ase "Se moder mid hire junge 
 -deorlinge; vlifrS from him, and 
 hut hire, and let hit sitten one, 
 and loken jeorne abuten, and cleo- 
 pien Dame ! dame ! and weopen 
 one hwule; and "Seonne mid i- 
 spredde ermes leapeS lauhwinde 
 voro", and cluppeS and cusseft and 
 wipeiS his eien. Riht so ure 
 Louerd let us one iwurfien ofter 
 hwules, and wiSdraweS his grace 
 and his kunfort, "Set we ne ivincleft 
 swetnesse in none "Singe "Set we wel 
 do 1 ??, ne savur ofheorte; and ftauh, 
 iSet ilke point ne luve"S he us 
 ure leove veder never fte lesce, 
 auh he deft hit for muchel luve 
 Set he haveS to us." 
 
 The sixth comfort is that 
 our Lord, when he suffers 
 that we be tempted, he plays with 
 us, as the mother with her young 
 darling; she flees from it, and 
 hides herself, and lets it sit alone 
 and look anxiously about and cry 
 "Dame! dame!" and weep 
 awhile ; and then with out- 
 spread arms leaps laughing 
 forth and clasps and kisses it and 
 wipes its eyes. Exactly so our 
 Lord leaves us alone once in a 
 while and withdraws his grace 
 and his comfort, that we rind 
 sweetness in nothing that we do well, 
 no relish of heart; and notwithstanding, 
 at the same time, he, our dear Father, 
 loves us nevertheless, 
 but he does it for the great love 
 that he has for us. 
 
 Professor Sweet calls the Ancren Riwle " one of the most 
 perfect models of simple, natural, eloquent prose in our 
 language." The work occupies a prominent place in the 
 development of the English language. A philologist 
 says : " If it be true, as some tell us, that the mingling 
 of the Teutonic and Romance in our tongue makes a 
 happy marriage, we see in the author of the Ancren 
 Riwle the man that first gave out the bans." Among the 
 words of French origin found in it, we may instance :
 
 62 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 "dainty," "cruelty," "vestments," "comfort," "journey," 
 " mercer." 
 
 Lyrical Poetry. About the year 1250 an unknown 
 author wrote in the Southern dialect a fine poem entitled 
 The Oivl and the Nightingale. A nightingale is singing 
 upon a blossoming bough, when she spies an owl sitting 
 upon a dead tree, with ivy trailing around the trunk. The 
 sight of the lugubrious bird stops the nightingale's song, 
 and she calls to the owl to take her uncanny self away. 
 The owl defends herself and points out her own excellent 
 qualities. The nightingale then sings a beautiful song to 
 put the hooting owl to shame. 
 
 A debate on the respective merits of each bird follows. 
 In the course of the poem, the nightingale gives her 
 spring song, which shows that even then the poets were 
 beginning to appreciate the beauties of nature. It should 
 be noticed that the song employs the modern end rhyme : 
 
 " De blostme ginneS springe and sprede 
 Beofte ine treo and ek on mede ; 
 De lilie mid hire faire wlite 
 WelcumeS me, Sat Su hit wite, 
 Bit me mid hire faire bleo 
 Dat ich schulle to hire fleo; 
 De rose also mid hire rude, 
 Dat cumeS ut of fte iSorne wude, 
 Bit me 'Sat ich shulle singe 
 Vor hire luve one skentinge." 
 
 A free translation of this would be : 
 
 The blossom begins to spring and to spread 
 
 Both in the tree and in the mead; 
 
 The lily with her form so fair 
 
 Doth welcome me, you are aware, 
 
 With winsome face doth bid that I 
 
 On airy wings should to her fly ;
 
 ROBERT MANNING OF BRUNNE 63 
 
 The rose also with the blush of morn, 
 That cometh from a bush of thorn, 
 Now asks of me that I shall sing 
 For her own love one charming thing. 
 
 Another lyric, of uncertain date, likewise shows a study of 
 nature : 
 
 " Sumer is i-cumen in Summer is a-coming in, 
 
 Lhude sing cuccu Loud sing cuckoo, 
 
 Groweth sed and bloweth med Groweth seed and bloometh mead, 
 
 And springeth the wde nu. And springeth the wood now. 
 
 Sing cuccu, cuccu." Sing cuckoo, cuckoo. 
 
 Robert Manning of Brunne. We have now come to 
 fourteenth century literature, which begins to wear a more 
 modern aspect. Robert Manning, generally known as 
 Robert of Brunne, because he was born at Brunne, now 
 called Bourn, in Lincolnshire, adapted from a Norman- 
 French original a work entitled Handlyng Synne (Man- 
 ual of Sins). This book, written in the Midland dialect in 
 1303, discourses of the Seven Deadly Sins and the best 
 ways of living a godly life. 
 
 A careful inspection of the following selection from the 
 Handlyng Synne will show that, aside from the spelling, 
 the English is essentially modern. Most persons will be 
 able to understand all but a few words. He was the first 
 English writer to use the modern order of words. The 
 end rhyme is also modern. A beggar, seeing a beast laden 
 with bread at the house of a rich man, asks for food. The 
 poem says of the rich man : 
 
 " He stouped down to seke a stone, He stooped down to seek a stone, 
 
 But, as hap was, than fonde he But, as chance was, then found he 
 
 none. none. 
 
 For the stone he toke a lofe, For the stone he took a loaf, 
 
 And at the pore man hyt drofe. And at the poor man it drove.
 
 64 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 The pore man hente hyt up belyue, The poor man caught it up quickly, 
 And was thereof ful ferly blythe, And was thereof full strangely 
 
 glad, 
 
 To hys felaws fast he ran To his fellows fast he ran 
 
 With the lofe, thys pore man." With the loaf, this poor man. 
 
 Oliphant says : " Strange it is that Dante should have 
 been compiling his Inferno, which settled the course 
 of Italian literature forever, in the selfsame years that 
 Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest pattern 
 of well-formed New English. . . . Almost every one of 
 the Teutonic changes in idiom, distinguishing the New 
 English from the Old, the speech of Queen Victoria from 
 the speech of Hengist, is to be found in Manning's work. 
 We have had few Teutonic changes since his day, a fact 
 which marks the influence he has had upon our tongue. . . . 
 Robert of Brunne, the Patriarch of the New English, 
 fairly well foreshadowed the proportion of outlandish gear 
 that was to be the common rule in our land after his time. 
 He has six French words out of fifty ; a little later Chau- 
 cer was to have eight French words out of fifty ; this is the 
 proportion in Shakespeare's comic parts ; and it is also the 
 proportion in the everyday talk of our own time." 
 
 Mandeville's Travels. Sir John Mandeville, who is 
 popularly considered the author of a very entertaining 
 work of travels, states that he was born in St. Albans in 
 1300, that he left England in 1322, and traveled in the 
 East for thirty-four years. His Travels relates what he 
 saw and heard in his wanderings through Ethiopia, Persia, 
 Tartary, India, and Cathay. What he tells on his own 
 authority, he vouches for as true, but what he relates as 
 hearsay, he leaves to the reader's judgment for belief. 
 
 There is a difference of opinion among scholars in regard 
 to whether any such traveler as Mandeville existed. Parts
 
 JOHN WYCLIFFE 6$ 
 
 of the work attributed to him have been proved to be 
 a compilation from the writings of other travelers. A 
 French critic says wittily : " He first lost his character as 
 a truthful writer; then out of the three versions of his 
 book, French, English, and Latin, two were withdrawn 
 from him, leaving him only the first. Existence has now 
 been taken from him, and he is left with nothing .at all." 
 But no matter who the author was, the book exists. More 
 manuscripts of it survive than of any other work except 
 the Scriptures. It is the most entertaining volume of 
 English prose that we have before 1360. The sentences 
 are simple and direct, and they describe things vividly : 
 
 " In Ethiope ben many dyverse folk : and Ethiope is clept 1 Cusis. 
 In that contree ben folk, that han but o foot : and thei gon so fast, that 
 it is marvaylle : and the foot is so large, that it schadewethe alle the 
 body a3en 2 the Sonne whanne thei wole 3 lye and reste hem." 4 
 
 Mandeville also tells of a bird that used to amuse itself by 
 flying away with an elephant in its talons. In the land of 
 Prester John was a valley where Mandeville says he saw 
 devils jumping about as thick as grasshoppers. Stories like 
 these make the work as interesting as Gulliver s Travels. 
 
 The so-called Mandeville's Travels was one of the few 
 works which the unlearned of that age could understand 
 and enjoy. Its consequent popularity was so great as to 
 bring a large number of French words into familiar use. 
 The native " againbought " is, however, used instead of 
 the foreign "redeemed." 
 
 John Wycliffe. Wycliffe (1324-1384) was born at Hips- 
 well, near Richmond, in the northern part of Yorkshire. 
 He became a doctor of divinity and a master of one of 
 the colleges at Oxford. Afterward he was installed vicar 
 
 1 called. 2 against. 3 will. 4 them.
 
 66 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 JOHN WYCLIFFE 
 
 of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he died. In his- 
 tory he is principally known as the first great figure in the 
 English Reformation, preceding the others by more than 
 a century. In literature he is best known for the first 
 complete translation of the Bible, a work that exerted 
 great influence on English prose. All the translation was 
 not made by him personally, but all was done under his 
 direction. The translation of the most of the New Testa- 
 ment is thought to be his own special work. He is the 
 most important prose writer of the fourteenth century. 
 His prose had an influence as wide as the circulation of 
 the Bible. The fact that it was forced to circulate in
 
 PIERS PLOWMAN 67 
 
 manuscript, because printing had not then been invented, 
 limited his readers, but his translation was, nevertheless, 
 read by many. He wrote argumentative religious pam- 
 phlets to help the cause of the Reformation, and they are 
 excellent specimens of energetic fourteenth century prose. 
 
 Of his place in literature, Ten Brink says : " Wycliffe's 
 literary importance lies in the fact that he extended the 
 domain of English prose and enhanced its powers of 
 expression. He accustomed it to terse reasoning, and 
 perfected it as an instrument for expressing rigorous 
 logical thought and argument ; he brought it into the 
 service of great ideas and questions of the day, and made 
 it the medium of polemics and satire. And above all, he 
 raised it to the dignity of the national language of the 
 Bible." 
 
 The following is a specimen verse of Wycliffe's transla- 
 tion. We may note that the strong old English word 
 "againrising" had not then been displaced by the Latin 
 " resurrection." 
 
 " Jhesu seith to hir, I am agenrisyng and lyf; he that bileueth in 
 me, he, if he schal be deed, schall lyue." 
 
 Piers Plowman. About 1 362 a poem was written 
 by a man most commonly known as William Langland. 
 He was probably born at Cleobury Mortimer in Shrop- 
 shire about 1332, and was educated as a cleric, but he 
 never became a fully ordained priest, although he seems 
 to have performed certain offices in connection with the 
 church, such as singing at funerals. We know scarcely 
 anything of his life, except what we learn indirectly from 
 his Piers Plowman. 
 
 This poem opens on a pleasant May morning amid rural 
 scenery. The poet falls asleep by the side of a brook and
 
 68 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 dreams. In his dream he has a vision of the world pass- 
 ing before his eyes, like a drama. The poem tells what he 
 saw. Its opening lines are : 
 
 " In a Corner .reson whan soft was the jonne 
 I s/iope l me in .s^roudes 2 as I a j//epe 3 were, 
 In 7/abite as an ^eremite 4 unholy of workes 
 Went wyde in bis world wondres to here 
 Ac on a May ;//ornynge on J/aluerne hulles 5 
 Me by/el a/erly 6 of /airy me thou^te 
 I was wery forwandred 7 and went me to reste 
 Under a rode ank b\ a ornes 8 side, 
 And as I /ay and /ened 9 and /oked in he wateres 
 I ^lombred in a .rlepyng it svtey ved 10 so merye." 
 
 The language of Piers Plowman is a mixture of the 
 Southern and the Midland dialects. It should be noticed 
 that the poem employs the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative 
 meter. There is no end rhyme. Piers Plowman is the 
 last great poem written in this way. 
 
 The actors in this poem are largely allegorical. Ab- 
 stractions are personified. Prominent characters are 
 Conscience, Lady Meed or Bribery, Reason, Truth, 
 Gluttony, Hunger, and the Seven Deadly Sins. In some 
 respects, the poem is not unlike the Pilgrim s Progress 
 (p. 226), for the battle in passing from this life to the next 
 is well described in both ; but there are more humor, satire, 
 and descriptions of common life in Langland. Piers is at 
 first a simple plowman, who offers to guide men to truth. 
 He is finally identified with the Savior. 
 
 Throughout the poem, the writer displays all the old 
 Saxon earnestness. His hatred of hypocrisy is manifest 
 on every page. His sadness, because what is, is not what 
 
 1 arrayed. 2 garments. 8 shepherd. * hermit. 6 hills. 6 wonder. 
 7 tired out with wandering. 8 brook. 9 reclined. 10 sounded.
 
 JOHN GOWER 69 
 
 ought to be, makes itself constantly felt. He cannot 
 reconcile the contradiction between the real and the ideal. 
 In attacking the hypocrisy of the clergy and preaching 
 the excellency of a life of good deeds, in showing how men 
 ought to progress in the sphere of action from doing well 
 to doing better and doing best, " Do-well, Do-bet, Do- 
 best,"- he was one of those who helped to lay the foun- 
 dations of the Reformation. 
 
 In order to have a well-rounded conception of the life 
 of the fourteenth century, Langland must be read as well 
 as Chaucer. Langland was the poet of the lower, Chaucer 
 of the upper, classes. Langland's verse gives valuable 
 pictures of the life of the common people and shows them 
 
 working 
 
 " To kepe kyne in J>e field, J?e corne fro f>e bestes, 
 Diken * or deluen 2 or dyngen 3 vppon sheues, 4 
 Or helpe make mortar or here mukke a-felde." 
 
 Although Langland was the poet of the common people, 
 he used almost as many words of French derivation as 
 the more aristocratic Chaucer. This fact shows how 
 thoroughly the French element had become incorporated 
 in the speech of all classes. Langland revised his great 
 poem twice, and he has left three texts which differ con- 
 siderably, although the general tenor of all is the same. 
 
 John Gower. Gower, a very learned poet, was born about 
 1325 and died in 1408. He did not know that the Midland 
 dialect would become the language of all England. Gower 
 was, therefore, undecided in what language to write, and 
 so he tried each of the three languages used in England. 
 His first principal work, the Speculum Meditantis, was 
 written in French ; his second, the Vox Clamant is, in 
 Latin ; his third, the Confessio Amantis, in English. 
 
 1 to make dykes or ditches. 2 to dig. 8 to thrash (ding). 4 sheaves. 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 5
 
 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 The Confessio Amantis (Confession of a Lover} is a long 
 poem, in the nature of a dialogue between a lover and 
 his confessor, wherein the things tending 
 to further or hinder love are discussed. 
 But the poem is principally a col- 
 lection of tales about love. With 
 the exception of a very few tales, 
 the Confessio Amantis is rightly 
 noted for its dullness. 
 
 The Confessio Amantis con- 
 tains one hundred and twelve 
 short tales, of which not more 
 than three are interesting. The 
 story of KnigJit Florent is his 
 best. The Knight has forfeited 
 his life. He will not be spared unless he correctly answers 
 the riddle : "What do women most desire?" He promises 
 to marry any woman who will tell him. An ugly old hag 
 gives him the right answer, " mastery in love." A knight 
 must keep his word, and so he marries her. After the 
 ceremony she becomes a young and beautiful woman. 
 
 JOHN GOWER 
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER, 13407-1400 
 
 Life. Chaucer was born in London about 1340. His 
 father and grandfather were vintners, who belonged to 
 the upper class of merchants. Our first knowledge of 
 Geoffrey Chaucer is obtained from the household accounts 
 of the Princess Elizabeth, daughter-in-law of Edward III. 
 Chaucer, then in his teens, was a page in her family. An 
 entry shows that she bought him a fine suit of clothes, 
 including a pair of red and black breeches. Such evi- 
 dence points to the fact that he was early accustomed to
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 
 
 associating with the nobility, and enables us to understand 
 why the subject matter of his poetry should differ from 
 Langland's. 
 
 In 1359 Chaucer accompanied the English army to 
 France and was taken prisoner. Edward III. thought 
 enough of the youth to pay for his ransom a sum equiva- 
 lent to-day to about $1200. After his return he was made 
 valet of the King's chamber. The duties of that office 
 " consisted in making the royal bed, holding torches, and 
 carrying messages." Later, Chaucer became a squire. 
 
 In 1370 he was sent to the continent on a diplomatic 
 mission. He seems to have succeeded so well that dur-
 
 /2 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 ing the next ten years he was repeatedly abroad in the 
 royal service, and he visited Italy twice. He may thus 
 have met the Italian poet Petrarch. These journeys 
 inspired Chaucer with a desire to study Italian literature, 
 a literature that had just been enriched by the pens of 
 Dante and Boccaccio. 
 
 We must next note that Chaucer's life was not that of a 
 poetic dreamer, but of a stirring business man. For more 
 than twelve years he was controller of customs for Lon- 
 don. This office necessitated assessing duties on wools, 
 skins, wines, candles, etc. Only a part of this work could 
 be performed by deputy. He was later clerk of the King's 
 works, and while on his way to oversee the repairs on a 
 building, Chaucer was twice robbed. His repeated selec- 
 tion for foreign and diplomatic business shows that he was 
 considered sagacious as well as trustworthy. Had he not 
 kept in close touch with life, he could never have become 
 such a great poet. In this connection we may remark 
 that England's second greatest writer, Milton, spent his 
 prime in attending to affairs of state. Chaucer's busy 
 life did not keep him from attaining third place on the 
 list of England's poets. 
 
 There are many passages of autobiographical interest in 
 his poems. People noticed that he was a student of books 
 as well as of men, as these lines from the Hous of Fame 
 
 " For whan thy labour doom al is, 
 And hast y-maad thy rekeninges, 
 Instede of rest and newe thinges, 
 Thou gost hoom to thy hous anoon, 
 And, also domb as any stoon, 
 Thou sittest at another boke, 
 Til fully daswed l is thy loke, 
 And livest thus as an hermyte." 9 
 1 dazed. 2 hermit.
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 73 
 
 A passage from the Legende of Good Women emphasizes 
 another side of his life. He had a sympathetic apprecia- 
 tion for nature as well as for men and books : 
 
 "... whan that the month of May 
 Is comen, and that I here the foules l singe, 
 And that the floures ginnen'- 2 for to springe 
 Farwel my boke and my devocioun ! " 
 
 Chaucer was pensioned by three kings : Edward III., 
 Richard II., and Henry IV. Before the reign of Henry 
 IV., Chaucer's pensions were either not always regularly 
 paid, or they were insufficient for certain emergencies, for 
 he complained of poverty in his old age. The pension of 
 Henry IV. in 1399 was ample, and in that year Chaucer 
 leased a house in the garden of a chapel at Westminster 
 for as many of fifty-three years as he should live. He had 
 occasion to use this house but ten months. 
 
 One day, looking wistfully back upon the joys of youth, 
 he wrote : 
 
 "And on the ground, which is my modres 8 gate, 
 I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late, 
 And seye, 4 ' Leve 5 moder, leet me in!'" 6 
 
 In 1400 the mother heard his call, and he was laid at rest 
 in the Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Chaucer's Earlier Poems. Before Chaucer was forty, 
 he had probably not written more than one seventh of the 
 35,000 lines which, in round numbers, he left at his death. 
 Before forty he had not done his greatest work, for he 
 was hampered by too close an adherence to Latin and 
 French models. His Dethe of Blaunche the Duchesse, the 
 wife of Edward III.'s son, John of Gaunt, shows the 
 influence of Ovid and of the French school. 
 
 1 birds. 2 begin. 8 mother's. * say. 6 dear. 6 Pardoner's Tale,
 
 74 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 In his next period, Chaucer studied Italian models, and 
 gradually acquired that skill which enabled him to produce 
 the masterpieces of his third period. The influence of 
 Boccaccio and, sometimes, of Dante is noticeable in the 
 principal poems of the second period, the Troilus and 
 Criseyde, Parlement of Forties, Hous of Fame, and Legende 
 of Good Women. The Troilus and Criseyde is a tale of 
 love that was not true. The Parlement of Foules is an 
 allegorical poem, in which birds are represented as assem- 
 bling to decide to which of three suitors shall be awarded 
 a beautiful female eagle. This eagle represents Anne of 
 Bohemia, and the successful suitor is typical of King Rich- 
 ard II. Lines like the following from this poem show 
 what a loving observer of nature Chaucer was : 
 
 "The sparow, Venus sone, and the nightingale 
 That clepeth x forth the fresshe leves newe ; 
 The swalow mordrer of the flye's 2 smale, 
 That maken hony of floures fresshe of hewe ; 
 The wedded turtel, with his herte trewe, 
 The pecok, with his aungels fethres brighte." 
 
 The pleasing fancy of the song of the nightingale awaking 
 the buds from their sleep has not been surpassed by later 
 poets of nature. 
 
 The Hous of Fame is an unfinished poem, descriptive of 
 a vision of a vast palace of ice on which .the names of the 
 famous are carved to await the melting rays of the sun. 
 The Legende of Good Women is a series of stories of those 
 who, like Alcestis, were willing to give up everything for 
 love. In A Dream of Fair Women Tennyson says : 
 
 "'The Legend of Good Women, 1 long ago 
 Sung by the morning-star of song, who made 
 His music heard below ; 
 
 1 calleth. 2 bees.
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 75 
 
 Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath 
 Preluded those melodious bursts that fill 
 The spacious times of great Elizabeth 
 With sounds that echo still." 
 
 In this series of poems Chaucer learned how to rely less 
 and less on an Italian crutch. He next took his immortal 
 ride to Canterbury on an English Pegasus. 
 
 CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL 
 
 General Plan. The majority of the world has always 
 been more interested in stories than in any other form of 
 literature. Chaucer probably did not realize that he had 
 such positive genius for telling tales in verse that the next 
 five hundred years would fail to produce his superior in
 
 76 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 that branch of English literature, but he knew that he 
 enjoyed telling such tales. 
 
 All that Chaucer needed was some framework into which 
 he could fit the stories that occurred to him, and make 
 them something more than mere stray tales, which might 
 soon be forgotten. The great contemporary Italian story 
 teller, Boccaccio, conceived the idea of representing some 
 of the nobility of Florence as fleeing from the plague, 
 and telling in their retirement the tales which he used in 
 his Decameron. It is doubtful, however, if Chaucer ever 
 knew of the existence of the Decameron. 
 
 In 1170 Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 was murdered at the altar. He was considered both a 
 martyr and a saint, and his body was placed in a splendid 
 mausoleum at the Cathedral. It was said that miracles 
 were worked at his tomb, that the sick were cured, and 
 that the worldly affairs of those who knelt at his shrine 
 prospered. It became the fashion for all sorts and con- 
 ditions of men to go on pilgrimages to his tomb. As rob- 
 bers infested the highways, the pilgrims usually waited at 
 some inn until there was a sufficient band to resist attack. 
 In time the journey came to be looked on as a holiday 
 which relieved the monotony of everyday life. About 1385 
 Chaucer probably went on such a pilgrimage. To furnish 
 amusement, as the pilgrims cantered along, some of them 
 may have told stories. The idea occurred to Chaucer to 
 write a collection of such tales as the various pilgrims 
 might have been supposed to tell on their journey. The 
 result was the Canterbury Talcs. 
 
 Characters in the Tales. Chaucer's plan is superior 
 to Boccaccio's, for only the nobility figure as story tellers 
 in the Decameron. The Canterbury pilgrims represent 
 all ranks of English life, from the knight to the sailor.
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 
 
 77 
 
 The Prologue to the Tales places these characters 
 before us almost as distinctly as they would appear in 
 real life. At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, just across 
 
 Front an 
 
 TABARD INN 
 
 the Thames from London, we see that merry band of 
 pilgrims on a fragrant April day. We look first upon a 
 manly figure who strikes us as being every inch a knight. 
 His cassock shows the marks of his coat of mail. 
 
 "At mortal batailles hadde he been fiftene. 
 
 And of his port as meke as is a mayde. 
 He never yet no vileinye ne sayde 
 In al his lyf, unto no maner wight. 
 He was a verray parfit, gentil knyght." 
 
 His son, the Squire, next catches our attention. We 
 notice his curly locks, his garments embroidered with 
 gay flowers, and the graceful way in which he rides his
 
 78 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 horse. By his side is his servant the Yeoman, "clad in 
 cote and hood of grene," with a sheaf of arrows at his 
 belt. We may even note his cropped head and his horn 
 suspended from a green belt. We next catch sight of a 
 Nun's gracefully pleated wimple, shapely nose, small 
 mouth, "eyen greye as glas," well-made cloak, coral 
 beads, and brooch of gold. She is attended by a second 
 Nun and three Priests. The Monk is a striking figure : 
 
 "His heed was balled, that shoon as any glas, 
 And eek his face as he hadde been anoint. 
 He was a lord ful fat and in good point." 
 
 There follow the Friar with twinkling eyes, "the beste 
 beggere in his hous," the Merchant with his forked beard, 
 the Clerk (scholar) of Oxford in his threadbare garments, 
 the Sergeant-at-Law, the Franklyn (country gentleman), 
 Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, Tapycer (tapes- 
 try maker), Cook, Ship man, Physician, Wife of Bath, 
 Parish Priest, Plowman, Miller, Manciple (purchaser of 
 provisions), Reeve (bailiff of a farm), Summoner (official 
 of an ecclesiastical court), and Pardoner. These char- 
 acters, exclusive of Baily (the host of the Tabard) and 
 Chaucer himself, are alluded to in the Prologue to the 
 Tales as 
 
 "Wei nyne and twenty in a companye, 
 Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle 
 In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle, 
 That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde." 
 
 The completeness of the picture of fourteenth century 
 English life in the Canterbury Tales makes them abso- 
 lutely necessary reading for the historian as well as for 
 the student of literature. We have, for instance, a better 
 idea of fourteenth century seamen after reading about
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 79 
 
 Chaucer's Shipman, who knew all the havens on the 
 western coast of the continent and every creek in Britain 
 and Spain. We see him with his brown face as he steals 
 wine from the casks in his cargo, and we again catch a 
 glimpse of him as he turns pirate, when a good opportunity 
 offers, and makes his captives walk the plank. We are 
 given an interesting picture of a Pardoner pretending that 
 pigs' bones are the bones of saints. The finest character 
 in the company is that of the Parish Priest, who attends 
 to his flock like a good Samaritan : 
 
 " Cristes lore, and his apostles twelve, 
 He taughte, but first he folwed it him-selve." 
 
 Certainly no one who has ever read the Prologue to the 
 Tales will question Chaucer's right to be considered a 
 great original poet, no matter how much he may have 
 owed to foreign teachers. 
 
 The Tales. Harry Baily, the keeper of the Tabard 
 Inn, accompanied the Pilgrims, and he proposed that each 
 member of the party should tell four tales, two going and 
 two returning. The one who told the best story was to 
 have a supper at the expense of the rest. ' The plan 
 thus outlined was not fully executed by Chaucer, for the 
 collection contains but twenty-four tales, all but two of 
 which are in verse. 
 
 The Knightes Tale, which is the first, is also the best. 
 It is a very interesting story of love and chivalry. Two 
 young Theban noblemen, Palamon and Arcite, sworn 
 friends, are prisoners of war at Athens. Looking through 
 the windows of their dungeon, they see walking in the 
 garden the beautiful sister of the Queen. Each one 
 swears that he will have the Princess. Arcite is finally 
 pardoned on condition that he will leave Athens and
 
 80 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 never return, on penalty of death. He soon finds that he 
 loves the Princess Emily so that he would prefer to be in 
 the Athenian prison where he could see her. Reduced 
 almost to a skeleton, he disguises himself, goes to Athens, 
 and becomes a servant in the house of King Theseus. 
 Finally Palamon escapes from prison, and by chance over- 
 hears Arcite moaning half aloud his lover's woes. The 
 two men promptly fight and are caught in the act by the 
 King, who orders them killed. The Princess intercedes 
 for them, and the King directs them to return in a year, 
 each one with a hundred of the bravest knights that he 
 can find. Each shall lead his forces in a mortal battle in 
 the lists, and the Princess shall be awarded to the one who 
 is the victor. 
 
 On the morning of the fight, Palamon goes before dawn 
 to the temple of Venus and prays that, since this is 
 a case of love, she will hear his prayer, and grant him 
 Emily. The goddess promises that his prayer shall be 
 answered. Arcite at the same time steals to the temple 
 of Mars and beseeches the god to grant him the victory, 
 since this is a case of war. The martial deity promises 
 the victory to Arcite. 
 
 The descriptions of the temples, and the remainder of 
 the story, should be read by the student in the original. 
 Although Boccaccio's Teseide furnished the general plot 
 for the Knightes Tale, Chaucer's story is, as Skeat says, 
 "to all intents, a truly original poem." 
 
 The other pilgrims tell stories in keeping with their pro- 
 fessions and characters. Perhaps the next best tale is the 
 merry story of Chanticleer and the Fox. This is related 
 by the Nun's Priest. The Clerk of Oxford tells the pa- 
 thetic tale of Patient Griselda, and the Nun relates a 
 touching story of a little martyr.
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 8 1 
 
 General Characteristics of Chaucer's Work and its Effect 
 upon the Language 
 
 Chief Qualities. I. His descriptions are unusually 
 clear-cut and vivid. For instance, he says of the Friar : 
 
 " His eyen twinkled in his heed aright, 
 As doon the sterres in the frosty night." 
 
 Our eyes and ears distinctly perceive the jolly Monk, as 
 he canters along : 
 
 " And, whan he rood, men might his brydel here 
 Ginglen in a whistling wind as clere, 
 And eek as loude as dooth the chapel-belle." 
 
 II. Chaucer's kindly, sympathetic humor is especially 
 characteristic. We can see him looking with twinkling 
 eyes at the Miller, "tolling thrice"; at the Pardoner, show- 
 ing a piece of the sail from St. Peter's ship, or the pigs' 
 bones in place of those of a saint ; at the Squire, keeping 
 the nightingale company ; at the Doctor, prescribing by 
 the rules of astrology. The Nun feels a touch of his 
 
 humor : 
 
 " Ful wel she song the service divyne, 
 
 Entuned in hir nose ful semely." 
 Of the lawyer, he says : 
 
 " No-wher so bisy a man as he ther nas, 
 And yet he semed bisier than he was." 
 
 Sometimes Chaucer's humor is so delicate as to be lost 
 on those who are not quick-witted. Lowell instances the 
 case of the Friar, who, " before setting himself softly down, 
 drives away the cat," and adds what is true only of those 
 who have acute understanding : " We know, without need 
 of more words, that he has chosen the snuggest corner."
 
 82 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 III. Although Chaucer's humor and excellence in lighter 
 vein are such marked characteristics, we must not forget 
 his serious qualities, for he has the Saxon seriousness as 
 well as the Norman airiness. As he looked over the strug- 
 gling world, he said with sympathetic heart: 
 
 " Infinite been the sorwes and the teres 
 Of olde folk, and folk of tendre yeres." 1 
 
 In like vein, we have : 
 
 " This world nis but a thurghfare ful of wo, 
 And we ben pilgrimes, passinge to and fro ; 
 Deeth is an ende of every worldly sore." 1 
 
 "Her nis non hoom, her nis but wildernesse. 
 Forthe, pylgrime, forthe! forthe, beste out of thi stall 
 Knowe thi contree, look up, thank God of al! " 2 
 
 His humor is often a graceful cloak for his serious philos- 
 ophy of existence. The humor in the Prologue does not 
 impair its worth to the student of fourteenth century life. 
 
 IV. The largeness of his view of human nature is re- 
 markable. Some poets paint one type of men accurately 
 and distort all the rest, either intentionally or unintention- 
 ally. Chaucer impartially portrays the highest and the 
 lowest, the honest man and the hypocrite. The pictures of 
 the roguish Friar and the self-denying Parish Priest, the Ox- 
 ford Scholar and the Miller, the Physician and the Ship- 
 man, are painted with equal fidelity to life. In the breadth 
 and kindliness of his view of life, Chaucer is a worthy 
 predecessor of Shakespeare. Dryden's verdict on Chau- 
 cer's poetry is: "Here is God's plenty." 
 
 V. His love of nature is noteworthy for that early age. 
 The quotations on pp. 73, 74, show this characteristic. Such 
 
 1 Knightes Tale. 2 Truth: Balade de ban Comeyl.
 
 GEOFFREY CHAUCER 83 
 
 lines as these manifest something more than a desire for 
 rhetorical effect in speaking of nature's phenomena : 
 
 " Now welcom somer, with thy sonne softe 
 That hast this wintres weders over-shake, 
 And driven awey the longe nightes blake x ! " 2 
 
 His affection for the daisy has for five hundred years 
 caused many other people to look with fonder eyes upon 
 that flower. 
 
 VI. He stands in the front rank of those who have 
 attempted to tell stories in melodious verse. Lowell 
 justly says : " One of the world's three or four great story 
 tellers, he was also one of the best versifiers that ever 
 made English trip and sing with a gayety that seems care- 
 less, but where every foot beats time to the tune of the 
 thought." 
 
 What Chaucer did for the English Language. Before 
 Chaucer's works, English was, as we have seen, a language 
 of dialects. He wrote in the Midland dialect, and aided in 
 making that the language of England. Lounsbury says of 
 Chaucer's influence : " No really national language could 
 exist until a literature had been created which would be ad- 
 mired and studied by all who could read, and taken as a 
 model by all who could write. It was only a man of genius 
 that could lift up one of these dialects into a preeminence 
 over the rest, or could ever give to the scattered forces 
 existing in any one of them the unity and vigor of life. 
 This was the work that Chaucer did." For this reason he 
 deserves to be called our first modern English poet. At 
 first sight, his works look far harder to read than they 
 really are, because the spelling has changed so much since 
 Chaucer's day. 
 
 1 black. 2 The Parlcmcnt of Faults.
 
 84 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 The period from the Norman Conquest to the death of 
 Chaucer contains one, and only one, of the world's great 
 authors, Geoffrey Chaucer. But the time is important be- 
 cause it gave to England a new language of greater flexi- 
 bility and power. The old inflections, formative prefixes, 
 and capacity of making self-explaining compounds were 
 for the most part lost. For more than two hundred years 
 after the Norman Conquest, Saxon was the language of the 
 hearth and the field, not of literature and amusement. No 
 language was ever more closely linked to earnest life and 
 feeling. No affectation of speech survived that period of 
 trial, but the Saxon preserved for us those words which 
 caused his heart to throb with warmest feeling, words like 
 "mother," "home," ''hearth," "birth," "death," and "love." 
 Such a genuine language of the heart enabled Shakespeare 
 to speak more effectively to the ear of all time. 
 
 To supply the places of lost words and to express those 
 new ideas which came with the broader experiences of 
 an emancipated, progressive nation, many new words 
 were adopted from the French and the Latin. When 
 the time for literature came, Chaucer found ready for his 
 pen the strongest, sincerest, and most flexible language 
 that ever expressed a poet's thought. 
 
 In tracing the development of English literature, we have 
 noted (i) Geoffrey of Monmouth's (Latin) History of the 
 Kings of Britain, and Layamon's Brut, with their stories 
 of Lear, Cymbeline, and King Arthur ; (2) the Ormulum, 
 a metrical paraphrase of those parts of the Gospels used 
 in church service; (3) the Ancren Riwle, remarkable for 
 its natural eloquent prose and its noble ethics, as well as 
 for showing the development of the language ; (4) the lyr-
 
 READING REFERENCES 85 
 
 ical poetry, beginning to be redolent of the odor of the 
 blossom and resonant with the song of the bird; (5) the 
 Handlyng Synne, in which we stand on the threshold of 
 modern English ; (6) Mandeville's Travels, with its enter- 
 taining stories; (7) Wycliffe's monumental translation of 
 the Bible ; (8) Langland's Piers Plowman, with its pic- 
 tures of homely life and its intense desire for higher ideals ; 
 (9) Gower's Confessio Amantis, a dull collection of tales 
 about love ; and (10) Chaucer's poetry, which stands in the 
 front rank for the number of vivid pictures of contempo- 
 rary life, for humor, love of nature, melody, and capacity 
 for story telling. 
 
 In brief, the 334 years following the Norman Conquest 
 are remarkable (a) for the development of English into 
 the greatest of the world's languages, (^) for the rising of 
 the Reformation spirit and for the translation of the Bible, 
 and (c) for the emergence of modern English in one of the 
 world's poetic masterpieces, the Canterbury Tales of Chau- 
 cer. His line, 
 
 " The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne," * 
 
 shows that English poetry could still look at life through 
 Saxon eyes. 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER II 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Gardiner, 2 pp. 89-288; Green, Ghaps. II., III., IV., V.; Under- 
 wood-Guest, pp. 130-311; Guerber, pp. 76-173; Robertson, pp. 79- 
 108; yutton's King and Baronage, pp. 8-112 (Oxford Manuals of 
 English History} ; Oman's England and the Hundred Years' War 
 
 1 The Parlement of Faults. 
 
 2 For full titles of histories see list at end of Chap. I. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 6
 
 86 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 (same series), pp. 7-96; Freeman's William the Conqueror (200 pp., 
 50 cents) ; Traill, I., 231-491, li., 1-276. 
 
 LITERARY'I 
 
 Lounsbury's History of the English Language, pp. 48-160, gives a 
 good account of the linguistic changes following the Norman Conquest. 
 
 Mandeville's Travels may be read in modernized form in Cassell's 
 National Library, No. 10, edited by Morley (paper, 10 cents). Read 
 the last page of the Prologue and pp. 168-177, r substitute the selec- 
 tions to be found in Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 22-26. 
 It will be instructive to compare as products of the story teller's art 
 these Travels with Gullivers Travels. 
 
 Selections from Wycliffe's Bible are given in No. 107 of Maynard, 
 Merrill & Co.'s English Classics (12 cents). Compare the words and 
 forms of expression in Wycliffe's translation with those of our Author- 
 ized Version. 
 
 Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early English, Part II., gives in 
 their original form, with notes and glossary, selections from Mandeville's 
 Travels. Wycliffe's Translation of the Gospel of Mark, Langland's Piers 
 the Plowman, Gower's Confessio Amantis. Good selections from Lang- 
 land and Gower, with modernized spelling, may be found in Ward's 
 English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 96-101 and 107-113. 
 
 Chaucer. His finest production is the Prologue (Eclectic English 
 Classics, American Book Co., Prologue and Knightes Tale, 25 cents ; 
 Ward's English Poets, I., 46-56), which should be read and re-read. 
 The student should be able to give a clear-cut description of each 
 one of the leading pilgrims and to answer definitely the following 
 questions : 
 
 How has the Prologue added to our knowledge of life in the four- 
 teenth century? Give examples of Chaucer's vivid pictures. What 
 specimens of his humor does the Prologue contain? Do any of 
 Chaucer's lines in the Prologue show that the Reformation spirit was 
 in the air, or did Wycliffe and Langland alone among contemporary 
 authors afford evidence of this spirit ? Compare the subject matter of 
 Chaucer's verse with Langland's. What qualities in Chaucer save him 
 from the charge of cynicism when he alludes to human faults? Does 
 
 1 Every school library should own Ward's English Poets, 4 vols., $4, and 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, 5 vols., $5.50.
 
 READING REFERENCES 8/ 
 
 the Prologue attempt to portray any of the nobler sides of human 
 nature ? Is the Prologue mainly or entirely concerned with the person- 
 ality of the pilgrims ? Has Chaucer any philosophy of life ? Are there 
 any references to the delights of nature? Note any passages that show 
 special powers of melody and mastery over verse. Does the poem 
 reveal anything of Chaucer's personality? 
 
 The student who has the time at this point should also read one or 
 two of Chaucer's delightful tales, e.g., The Knightes Tale and The 
 Nonne Preestes Tale. These two, together with the Prologue, may be 
 found in Morris's Clarendon Press edition (70 cents) and in Corson's 
 Selections from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (90 cents). Outside of 
 the drama, does English literature contain any other story teller in 
 verse who can be classed with Chaucer? 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Ramsay's The Foundations of England. 
 
 Ten Brink's Early English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 1 19-367 ; Vol. II., 
 pp. 3-206. 
 
 Morley's English Writers, Vols. III., IV., V. 
 
 Jusserand's Literary History of the English People, from the Origins 
 to the Renaissance, pp. 97-438. 
 
 Courthope's History of English Poetry, Vol. I. 
 
 Lounsbury's History of the English Language. 
 
 Champney's History of English. 
 
 Morris's Specimens of Early English, Part I., contains selections 
 from the Ormulum, Layamon's Brut, the Ancren Riwle, and The Owl 
 and the Nightingale. Part II. contains specimens of the lyrics, the 
 Handlyng Synne of Robert Manning of Brunne, Mandeville's Travels, 
 Langland's Piers the Plowman, Wycliffe's Translation of St. Mark, 
 Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with 
 Notes and Glossary. 
 
 Sweet's First Middle English Primer contains extracts from the 
 Ancren Riwle and the Ormulum. 
 
 Jusserand's Piers Plowman. 
 
 Skeat's text of Piers the Plowman, with Glossary and Notes. 
 
 Bosworth and Waring's edition of the Gospels contains the Gothic
 
 88 FROM 1066 TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400 
 
 and the Anglo-Saxon text, together with the translations by Wycliffe 
 and Tyndale (p. 98). 
 
 Skeat's Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 6 vols., is the best 
 edition. Skeat's Student' 's Edition of same, i vol., has the same text. 
 
 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales Annotated and Accented, with Illustra- 
 tions of English Life in Chaucer's Time, by John Saunders. 
 
 Pollard's Primer of Chaucer. 
 
 Lounsbury's Studies in Chaucer, 3 vols. 
 
 Ward's Life of Chaucer, in English Men of Letters Series. 
 
 Lowell's My Study Windows contains one of the best essays ever 
 written on Chaucer. 
 
 Minto's Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 1-58 (Chaucer, Lang- 
 land, Gower). 
 
 Morley's Early English Romances. 
 
 Ellis's Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances. 
 
 Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Fourteenth Century. 
 
 Cutts's Scenes and Characters of the Middle Ages. 
 
 Jessop's The Coming of the Friars. 
 
 Cutts's Parish Priests and their People in the Middle Ages in 
 England.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1400, TO THE ACCESSION OF 
 ELIZABETH, 1558 
 
 Reasons for Comparative Lack of Progress of Fifteenth 
 Century Literature. It might be expected that the fif- 
 teenth century would show the effect of Chaucer's quick- 
 ening influence and produce a literature of surpassing 
 interest. Let us inquire why the reverse is the case. 
 
 I. No genius like Chaucer was born ; or, if there was 
 such a potential genius, his talents were diverted into 
 channels other than those of literature. 
 
 II. There was not so much freedom of thought in the 
 fifteenth as in the fourteenth century. Wycliffe could 
 write his polemical tracts then, and translate and interpret 
 the Bible, but his followers could not in the next century. 
 In 1401 the first Englishman was burned at the stake 
 because of individual opinions on religious matters. From 
 this time the expenses of burning heretics are sometimes 
 found in the regular accounts of cities and boroughs. 
 Literature should be the full expression of a nation's 
 thought and feeling, and such literature did not flourish 
 again until Elizabethan days ushered in more freedom. 
 
 III. Chivalry, the moving spirit of the preceding age, 
 was changing. This fact necessitated the growth of some 
 new ideal. The increasing use of gunpowder gradually 
 put an end to the superiority of the knight. The great 
 castles began to decline, and people mingled more famil- 
 iarly with one another. There was no longer so vast a 
 
 89
 
 90 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 
 
 gulf between the rich and the poor. The poor man with 
 his firearm was a match for a horse and a rider. The rise 
 of the common people was soon to have a marked influ- 
 ence on literature. From their ranks was to come an 
 audience that would appreciate and support Shakespeare. 
 
 IV. The studies of the Schoolmen had helped to un- 
 dermine literature and make it repellent. " Schoolmen" 
 is merely a term for those who pursued the studies of the 
 schools or universities. Many of these studies finally be- 
 came little more than juggling with words or forming 
 smoke wreaths of abstractions. The scholars took noth- 
 ing for their subject and talked about it at great length. 
 Some of their subjects were : whether all children in a 
 state of innocence are masculine ; whether God ever knows 
 more things than he is aware of ; whether one angel can 
 occupy at the same time precisely the same space as 
 another angel ; whether God can make a yardstick without 
 two ends. Science brings new facts into being, but these 
 wordy gymnastics accomplished nothing. Taine says : 
 " Three centuries of labor at the bottom of this black moat 
 added not one idea to the human mind." 
 
 V. The Wars of the Roses, or the struggle of the 
 houses of Lancaster and York for the throne, broke out in 
 1455 and lasted for thirty years. During this time many 
 of the nobles were killed. The effects of this civil war in 
 depressing literature have been overestimated. The times 
 of Richard II. were unsettled, and yet Chaucer wrote then. 
 However, some who might have become writers may have 
 had their energies diverted in another direction by the 
 war. 
 
 Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The greatest prose work of 
 the fifteenth century was completed in 1470 by a man 
 who styles himself Sir Thomas Malory, Knight. We
 
 MALORY'S MORTE D'ARTHUR 91 
 
 know nothing of the author's life, but he has left as a 
 monument a great prose epic of the deeds of King Arthur 
 and his Knights of the Round Table. From the various 
 French legends concerning King Arthur, Malory selected 
 his materials and fashioned them into the completest 
 Arthuriad that we possess. While his work cannot be 
 called original, he displayed rare artistic power in arran- 
 ging, abridging, and selecting the various parts from 
 different French works. 
 
 Malory's prose is remarkably simple and direct. Even in 
 the impressive scene where Sir Bedivere throws the dying 
 King Arthur's sword into the sea, the language tells the 
 story simply and shows no straining after effect : 
 
 "And then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might, 
 and there came an arm and a hand above the water, and met it and 
 caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished. And then vanished 
 away the hand with the sword in the water. ... ' Now put me into 
 the barge,' said the King ; and so he did softly. And there received 
 him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and 
 in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen said, 
 ' Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me ? '" 
 
 After the dusky barge has borne Arthur away from mortal 
 sight, Malory writes : " Here in this world he changed his 
 life." A century before, Chaucer had with equal simplic- 
 ity voiced the Saxon faith : - 
 
 " His spiryt chaungede hous." 1 
 
 Sometimes this prose narrative, in its condensation and 
 expression of feeling, shows something of the poetic 
 spirit. When the damsel on the white palfrey sees that 
 her knightly lover has been killed, she cries : 
 
 1 Knightes Tale.
 
 92 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 
 
 " ' O Balin ! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts 
 in one body, and two souls thou hast lost.' And therewith she took 
 the sword from her love that lay dead, and as she took it, she fell to 
 the ground in a swoon." 
 
 Malory's work, rather than Layamon's Brut, has been 
 the storehouse to which later poets have turned. Many 
 nineteenth century poets are indebted to Malory. Tenny- 
 son's Idylls of the King, Matthew Arnold's Death of Tris- 
 tram, Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse, a,nd William 
 Morris's Defence of Guinevere were inspired by the Morte 
 cT Arthur. Few other English prose works have had more 
 influence on the poetry of the Victorian age. 
 
 Scottish Poetry. The best poetry of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury was written in the Northern dialect, that spoken 
 north of the river Humber. This language was just as 
 much English as the Midland tongue in which Chaucer 
 wrote. Not until the sixteenth century was this dialect 
 called Scotch. 
 
 This poetry is remarkable for showing in that early age 
 a genuine love of nature. Changes are not rung on 
 some typical landscape, copied from an Italian versifier. 
 The northern poet had his eye fixed on the scenery and 
 the sky of Scotland. About the middle of the century, 
 Robert Henryson, a teacher in Dunfermline, wrote: 
 
 " The northin wind had purifyit the air 
 And sched the misty cloudis fra the sky." * 
 
 This may lack the magic of Shelley's rhythm (p. 364), 
 but the feeling for nature is as genuine as in the latter 
 poet's lines : 
 
 " For after the rain, when with never a stain 
 The pavilion of heaven is bare." 2 
 
 1 Testament of Cresseid. 3 The Cloud.
 
 SCOTTISH POETRY 93 
 
 William Dunbar, the greatest poet of this group, who 
 lived in the last half of the fifteenth century, was a loving 
 student of the nature which greeted him in his northland. 
 No Italian poet, as he wandered beside a brook, would 
 have thought of a simile like this : 
 
 " The stone's clear as stars in frosty night." l 
 
 Dunbar takes us with him on a fresh spring morning, 
 
 where 
 
 " Enamelled was the field with all colours, 
 
 The pearly dropped shook in silver showers," 1 
 
 where we can hear the matin song of the birds hopping 
 among the buds, while 
 
 " Up rose the lark, the heaven's minstrel fine." 1 
 
 Both Dunbar and Gawain Douglas (i474?-i522), the 
 son of a Scotch nobleman, had keen eyes for all coloring 
 in sky, leaf, and flower. In one line Dunbar calls our at- 
 tention to these varied patches of color in a Scotch garden : 
 "purple, azure, gold, and gules [red]." In the verses of 
 Douglas we see the purple streaks of the morning, the 
 bluish-gray, blood-red, fawn-yellow, golden, and freckled 
 red and white flowers, and 
 
 " Some watery-hued, as the blue wavy sea." 2 
 
 Outside the. pages of Shakespeare, we shall for the next 
 two hundred years look in vain for such a genuine love of 
 scenery and natural phenomena as we can find in fifteenth 
 century Scottish poetry. These poets obtained many of 
 their images of nature at first hand, a quality rare in any 
 age. 
 
 1 The Golden Targe. * Prologue to JZneid, Book XII.
 
 94 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 
 
 "Songs for Man or Woman, of All Sizes." When 
 Shakespeare shows us Autolycus offering such songs at a 
 rustic festival, 1 the great poet emphasizes the fondness for 
 the ballad which had for a long time been developing a 
 taste for poetry. While it is difficult to assign exact dates 
 to the composition of many ballads, we know that they 
 flourished in the fifteenth century. They were then as 
 much prized as the novel is now, and, like it, they had a 
 story to tell. The verse was often halting, but it suc- 
 ceeded in conveying to the hearer tales of love, adventure, 
 and the supernatural. These ballads were sometimes 
 tinged with pathos, but there was an energy in the rude 
 lines which made the heart beat faster and often stirred 
 the listeners to find in a dance an outlet for their emotions. 
 Even now, with all the poetry of centuries from which to 
 choose, it is refreshing to turn to a Robin Hood ballad and 
 look upon the greensward, hear the rustle of the leaves in 
 Nottingham forest, and follow the adventures of the hero. 
 We read the opening lines : 
 
 " There are twelve months in all the year, 
 
 As I hear many say, 
 But the merriest month in all the year 
 Is the merry month of May. 
 
 " Now Robin Hood is to Nottingham gone, 
 
 With a link a down, and a day, 
 And there he met a silly old woman 
 Was weeping on the way." 
 
 Of our own accord we finish the ballad to see if Robin 
 Hood rescued her sons, who were condemned to death 
 for shooting the fallow deer. The ballad of the Nut- 
 Brown Maid has some touches which are almost 
 Shakespearean. 
 
 The Winter's Tale, IV., 4.
 
 BALLADS 95 
 
 Some of the carols of the fifteenth century give a fore- 
 taste of Elizabethan song. One carol on the birth of the 
 Christ-child, beginning : " I syng a of a mayden," contains 
 stanzas like these, which show artistic workmanship, 
 imaginative power, and, above all, rare lyrical beauty : 
 
 " He cam also stylle 
 
 to his moderes bowr, 
 As dew in Aprille 
 
 that fallyt on the flour. 
 
 " He cam also stylle 
 
 ther his moder lay, 
 As dew in Aprille 
 
 that fallyt on the spray." l 
 
 We saw that the English tongue during its period of 
 exclusion from the Norman court gained strength from 
 coming in such close contact with life. Although the 
 higher types of poetry were for the most part wanting 
 during the fifteenth century, yet the ballads multiplied 
 and sang their songs to the ear of life. Critics may say 
 that the rude stanzas seldom soar far from the ground, 
 but we are again reminded of the invincible strength of 
 Antaeus so long as he kept close to his mother earth. 
 English poetry is so great because it has not withdrawn 
 from life, because it was nurtured in such a cradle. 
 
 When Shakespeare wrote his plays, he found an audi- 
 ence to understand and to appreciate them. Not only 
 those who occupied the boxes, but also those who stood 
 in the pit, listened intelligently to his dramatic stories. 
 The ballad had played its part in teaching the humblest 
 home to love poetry. These rude fireside songs were no 
 mean factors in preparing the nation 'to welcome Shake- 
 speare. 
 
 1 Wright's Songs and Carols of the Fifteenth Century, p. 30.
 
 96 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 
 
 The Renaissance. The causes leading to the revival 
 of learning, usually called the Renaissance, constitute the 
 chief glories of the fifteenth century and the first part 
 of the sixteenth. We must remember that the Renais- 
 sance was a necessary factor in giving us Shakespeare in 
 the next century. Before the buds and the flowers start 
 forth in the spring, the warm sun has shone and the 
 showers have fallen for some time. . They apparently 
 produce no result for a long while, but finally the soft 
 green leaves will clothe the barren trees and the meadows 
 be dotted with fragrant flowers. The revival of learning 
 stands in the same relation to Elizabethan literature as 
 the sun and showers to vegetation. 
 
 There were several prominent causes helping to usher 
 in the Renaissance : 
 
 I. The art of printing multiplied books and made 
 their wisdom accessible to a larger number. About 1477 
 William Caxton printed the first book in England. In 
 the intellectual growth of a nation, it would be diffi- 
 cult to overestimate the importance of printing. When 
 the same forms of speech and idioms circulated among 
 all, an important step was taken in permanently fixing 
 the language. Among a large number of books, Caxton 
 printed the Canterbury Tales, and thus gave Chaucer's 
 genius and language wider influence. When we speak 
 of English books before this time, it should be remem- 
 bered that they were laboriously copied on parchment, 
 and that the copies were consequently few and costly. 
 
 II. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 
 1453 was a factor in hastening the influence of Grecian 
 literature on western Christendom. Constantinople, the 
 capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was the head- 
 quarters of Grecian learning. Because of the remoteness
 
 THE RENAISSANCE 97 
 
 of this capital, English literature had not been greatly 
 influenced by Greece. When Constantinople fell, many 
 of her scholars went to Italy, taking with them precious 
 Grecian manuscripts. As Englishmen often visited Italy, 
 they soon began to study Grecian masterpieces, and to fall 
 under the spell of Homer and the Athenian dramatists. 
 
 III. Science was gradually developing. Men were 
 asking the why and the wherefore of all things, even of 
 those beliefs grounded on faith. Copernicus was think- 
 ing out the true movements of the solar system, and 
 showing that the universe does not revolve around this 
 world as a center. Men began to demonstrate that the 
 world is round and can be circumnavigated. New colleges 
 were established at both Cambridge and Oxford. 
 
 IV. The discovery of the New World fired the imagi- 
 nations of men and made the most wonderful dreams seem 
 capable of realization. It is hard for us to-day, with 
 little undiscovered territory except near the Poles, to ap- 
 preciate the effect that the finding of a new world would 
 have upon the imaginations and the ambitions of men. 
 
 William Tyndale, I4go?-i536. The Reformation was 
 another mighty influence, working side by side with all the 
 other forces to effect a lasting change in English history 
 and literature. In the early part of the sixteenth century, 
 Martin Luther was electrifying Germany with his demands 
 for church reformation. In order to decide which religious 
 party was in the right, there arose a desire for more 
 knowledge of the Scriptures. The language had changed 
 much since Wycliffe's translation of the Bible, and, besides, 
 that was accessible only in manuscript. William Tyndale 
 was a clergyman who had been educated at both Oxford 
 and Cambridge. He was an excellent linguist and he con- 
 ceived the. idea of giving the English people the Bible in
 
 98 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 
 
 their own tongue. He found that he could not translate 
 and print it with safety in England, and so he went to the 
 continent, where with the help of friends he turned the 
 Bible into English and had it printed. He was forced to 
 move frequently from place to place, and he was finally 
 betrayed in his hiding place near Brussels. After eighteen 
 months' imprisonment without pen or books, he was stran- 
 gled and his body was burned at the stake. 
 
 Of his translation, Brooke says : " It was this Bible 
 which, revised by Coverdale, and edited and re-edited as
 
 WILLIAM TYNDALE 99 
 
 Cromwell's Bible, 1539, and again as Cranmer's Bible, 1540, 
 was set up in every parish church in England. It got 
 north into Scotland and made the Lowland English more 
 like the London English. It passed over into the Protes- 
 tant settlements in Ireland. After its revival in 1611 it 
 went with the Puritan Fathers to New England and fixed 
 the standard of English in America. Many millions of 
 people now speak the English of Tyndale's Bible, and 
 there is no other book which has had, through the Author- 
 ized Version, so great an influence on the style of English 
 literature and the standard of English prose." 
 
 The -following verses from Tyndale's version will show 
 its simplicity and directness and how much the translation 
 in present use owes to this : 
 
 "Jesus sayde unto her, Thy brother shall ryse agayne. 
 
 " Martha sayde unto hym, I knowe wele, he shall ryse agayne in the 
 resurreccion att the last daye. 
 
 " Jesus sayde unto her, I am the resurreccion and lyfe ; whosoever 
 beleveth on me, ye, though he were deed, yet shall he lyve." 
 
 Italian Influence : Wyatt and Surrey. During the 
 reign of Henry VIII. (1509-1547), the influence of Italian 
 poetry made itself distinctly felt. The roots of Eliza- 
 bethan poetry were watered by many fountains, one of 
 the chief of which flowed from Italian soil. To Sir 
 Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) and to the Earl of Surrey 
 (15171547) belongs the credit of introducing from Italian 
 sources new influences which helped to remodel English 
 poetry and give it a distinctly modern cast. 
 
 These poets were the first to introduce the sonnet, which 
 Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth employed with such 
 power in after times. Blank verse was first used in Eng- 
 land by the Earl of Surrey, who translated a portion of
 
 100 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 
 
 Virgil's jLneid into that measure. When Shakespeare 
 took up his pen, he found that vehicle of poetic expression 
 ready for his use. 
 
 Wyatt and Surrey adopted Italian subject matter as well 
 as form. They introduced the poetry of the amourists, 
 that is, verse which tells of the woes and joys of a lover. 
 We find Shakespeare in his Sonnets turning to this sub- 
 ject, which he made as broad and deep as life. In 1557, 
 the year before Elizabeth's accession, the poems of Wyatt 
 and Surrey appeared in Tottel's Miscellany, one of the 
 earliest printed collections of modern English poetry. 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 While the period between the death of Chaucer and the 
 accession of Elizabeth did not furnish to English literature 
 a single great name, the nation was preparing for Eliza- 
 bethan times. The influences of the Renaissance and the 
 Reformation were at work. The invention of printing 
 began to make it possible for the best literature to be 
 given to the cottage and the palace. The passing of the 
 knight and the rise of the common people helped to knit 
 the entire nation together and to extend the influences of 
 the revival of learning and the religious awakening. 
 
 The most important prose works are Sir Thomas 
 Malory's Morte d' Arthur, a masterly retelling of the 
 Arthurian legends, and Tyndale's translation of the Bible. 
 The best poetry was written in Scotland, and this poetry 
 anticipates in some measure that love of nature which is a 
 dominant characteristic of the last part of the eighteenth 
 century. The age is noted for its ballads, which aided in 
 developing among high and low a liking for poetry. At 
 the close of the period, we find Italian influences at work.
 
 READING REFERENCES IOI 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER III 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Gardiner, 1 pp. 289-427; Green, Chap. VI.; Underwood-Guest, pp. 
 312-426; Guerber, pp. 174-232; Oman's England and the Hundred 
 Years 1 War, pp. 96-159; Powers's England and the Reformation, 
 pp. 7-87; Traill, II., 276-574, III., 1-303. 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 Malory. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 72-74, and 
 the Camelot Series edition of Malory's History of King Arthur, pp. 
 311-313, contain the part relating to the death (or passing) of Arthur. 
 This should be compared with Tennyson's 7~he Passing of Arthur. 
 Are the finest thoughts in the poem original with Tennyson? 
 
 Early Scottish Poetry. Selections from fifteenth century Scottish 
 poetry, showing an early appreciation of the phenomena of nature, may 
 be found in Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 139, 151, 152, 164, and 
 165, and in Fitzgibbon's Early English Poetry {Canterbury Poets 
 Series, 40 cents), pp. 81-85, and 121. 
 
 What shows that the references to nature are not merely conven- 
 tional? The student should be on the alert to notice the next appear- 
 ance of poetry which shows a genuine love for nature. 
 
 Ballads. The student will find in Ward, I., p. 210, the ballad of 
 Sir Patrick Spens; p. 224, The Twa Corbies; and, p. 239, Robin 
 Hood Rescuing the Widow's Three Sons. The teacher should read to 
 the class parts of The Nut-Brown Maid (Fitzgibbon's Early English 
 Poetry, pp. 155-167). 
 
 What qualities in the ballad caused it to take such a hold on the 
 people? Did it have any educating power? 
 
 Tyndale. The student who has access to Bos worth and Waring's 
 Gospels, containing the Anglo-Saxon, WyclifFe, and Tyndale versions, 
 will find it profitable to compare these with the version now in use, and 
 to observe how much current English speech owes to these early trans- 
 lations of the Gospels. A specimen of Tyndale's prose is given in 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, I., 185-187. 
 
 Wyatt and Surrey. A characteristic love sonnet by Wyatt may be 
 
 1 For complete titles see list at end of Chap. I. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. "]
 
 102 FROM 1400 TO ELIZABETH'S ACCESSION, 1558 
 
 found on p. 251 of Vol. I. of Ward's English Poets, and two by Surrey 
 on p. 257. A specimen of the first English blank verse, employed by 
 Surrey in translating Virgil's dEneid, is given on pp. 233, 234, of Fitz- 
 gibbon's Early English Poetry. 
 
 Why are these poets called amourists? What contributions did 
 they make to the form of English verse? What foreign influence did 
 they help to usher in ? 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Morley's English Writers, Vols. VI. and VII. 
 
 Ten Brink's English Literature, Vol. II., Wycliffe to Renaissance, 
 pp. 209-234. 
 
 Jusserand's Literary History of the English People from the Origins 
 to the Renaissance, pp. 503-525. 
 
 Gosse's History of Modern English Literature, pp. 33-72. 
 
 Minto's Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 69-130. 
 
 Saintsbury's Short History of English Literature, pp. 157-218. 
 
 Fitzgibbon's Early English Poetry (Canterbury Poets Series) Intro- 
 duction and pp. 30-234. 
 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 114-262. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 50-234. 
 
 Malory's Le Morte d"* Arthur, edited by Sommer, with Essay on 
 Malory's Prose by Andrew Lang. 
 
 Dictionary of National Biography, articles, Malory, Caxton, Henry - 
 son, Gavuain Douglas, Dunbar, Tyndale, IVyatt, and Surrey. 
 
 Veitch's The Feeling for Nature in Scottish Poetry. 
 
 McLaughlin's Mediceval Life and Literature. 
 
 Child's English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 
 
 Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. 
 
 Gummere's Old English Ballads. 
 
 Hazlitt's Early Popular Poetry of England. 
 
 Songs and Carols of the Fifteenth Century, edited by Warton. 
 
 Carols and Poems, edited by Bullen. 
 
 The Paston Letters (1422-1509), 3 vols., edited by Gairdner. 
 
 Denton's England in the Fifteenth Century (excellent). 
 
 Green's Town Life in the Fifteenth Century.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 The High-water Mark of the World's Poetry. The 
 poetry of the Elizabethan age has never been equaled at 
 any other time in the history of the world. It has been 
 well said that one might become a person of broad culture 
 from the study of only two works: the one, the Bible ; the 
 other, the writings of the greatest of the Elizabethans. 
 Since Shakespeare's day, there have been many improve- 
 ments in science, but no writer of later times has equaled 
 him. The highest compliment that we can pay to the 
 literature of any other age is to say that it has Elizabethan 
 characteristics. 
 
 Unlike other countries, England felt the strong in- 
 fluences from the Renaissance and the Reformation at 
 one and the same time. When the attractions of the sun 
 and moon unite to draw the tides in one direction, they 
 reach their highest point. At no other time have two 
 forces like the Renaissance and the Reformation combined 
 to stimulate the human mind. The Elizabethan imagina- 
 tion took at the flood the tide raised by these mighty 
 forces, and that tide bore the English drama on to a 
 Shakespearean fortune. 
 
 We must proceed to note specifically the causes which 
 conspired to produce such a glorious literature in the 
 reign of Elizabeth. We shall seek them in the expansion 
 of both the New and the Old World, in the greater free- 
 
 103
 
 104 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 dom of thought, in the democratic and patriotic spirit, in 
 the desire born of fuller knowledge to live a life as varied 
 and as complete as possible, and in the awakening of 
 the imagination to grasp Ufa's newly suggested and un- 
 fathomed possibilities, and to express them in poetry of 
 sufficient fullness and depth to include all human aspira- 
 tion. 
 
 The Effect of the Exploration of the New World. A 
 New World had been previously discovered, but many of 
 its wonders had not been explored until Elizabethan times. 
 In the wonderful land beyond the sea, there seemed to be 
 everything necessary to usher in that Utopian age for 
 which men had so long sighed. There were precious 
 stones and gold in quantities that promised wealth and 
 enjoyment for all. There was the fabled Fountain of 
 Youth that would drive away the pains and decrepitude 
 of old age and enable all again to enjoy the promised en- 
 chantments of the new Utopia. At home things might 
 be prosaic, slow of movement, and obtained only by such 
 wearying toil as to preclude enjoyment of them when 
 secured. But this would not be the case in the fairy- 
 land of the New World. 
 
 There was the absolute proof sufficient to satisfy the 
 most skeptical that the New World was a wonderful land 
 of plenty. When Shakespeare was in his teens, Sir 
 Francis Drake, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the 
 world, returned from his voyage. Besides what he kept 
 for himself, he placed in the Tower for the use of the 
 Queen twenty tons of silver bullion, huge blocks of gold, 
 and many pearls, emeralds, and other precious stones. 
 The New World was a land of sufficient promise to spur 
 the ambition and quicken the imagination of the Eliza- 
 bethans. Even their third-rate poets could write :
 
 EXPLORATION OF THE NEW WORLD 1 05 
 
 "Xanthus shall run liquid gold for thee to wash thy hands ; 
 And if thou like to tend thy flock and not from them to fly, 
 Their fleeces shall be curle'd gold to please their master's eye." 1 
 
 The Expansion of the Old World. When we emphasize 
 the influence of the wonders of the New World upon 
 the imagination, we are in danger of forgetting that the 
 Old World was expanding more than the New. Never 
 before had traveling been so popular. Englishmen went 
 to Italy, felt the spell of her literature and art, and 
 came home to spread Italian influence. A contemporary 
 writer on education speaks of " the enchantments of Circe, 
 brought out of Italy " to mold the thought and manners 
 of English youth. Every time England felt a new stim- 
 ulus from the literature of another great nation, she was 
 receiving advantages from the expansion of the Old World. 
 
 The powerful example of Queen Elizabeth aroused in 
 the English people a desire to learn the best things from 
 every nation. Although Italian influence was in the as- 
 cendency during the sixteenth century, other literatures 
 were studied. A quotation from Roger Ascham's Schole- 
 master, a distinguished educational work (published in 
 1570), will show what languages were on the fashionable 
 list. He had been the Queen's tutor, and he says : 
 
 "Yea, I beleue, that beside her perfit readines, in Latin, Italian, 
 French, and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsore more Greeke 
 euery day, than some Prebendarie of this Chirch doth read Latin in a 
 whole weeke." 
 
 We thus see that learning was no longer confined to the 
 church, that even the laity might be more energetic stu- 
 dents than churchmen, that the royal example welcomed 
 learning from every land, and that Elizabethan England 
 
 1 Peele : The Arraignment of Paris, II., I.
 
 106 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 anticipated the age of Victoria in teaching Greek to 
 women. 
 
 Nothing contributed to this expansion of the Old World 
 more than the newly acquired freedom of thought, and we 
 must now consider the influence of this factor. 
 
 Freedom of Thought and its Results. In the reign of 
 Elizabeth's father, Catholics and Protestants alike had 
 been put to death for exercising freedom of thought. 
 Under her immediate predecessor on the throne many 
 fagot fires had been lighted in England to punish those 
 whose opinions were considered heretical. In the next 
 century the Puritan reformers would tolerate only that 
 kind of thought pleasing to themselves. Although there 
 was some persecution of Catholics and Dissenters in 
 Elizabeth's time, yet she allowed comparatively great 
 freedom of opinion and action, and English thought 
 reaped a wonderful harvest during her reign. 
 
 The Puritans were even then beginning to display their 
 narrowness, but the Queen would not permit them to stifle 
 thought. Had they been given the power to exercise the 
 same censorship which was allowed them in the next cen- 
 tury, the greatest of all dramas would have been throttled 
 in its cradle. During the time of Puritan ascendency in 
 the next century, the theaters were torn down. 
 
 Thought that is not free is like a bird in a cage. There 
 may be glorious meadows, leafy groves, and murmuring 
 streams with flower-fringed banks, but the caged bird can- 
 not gladden its eye with these, sing its song in the grove, 
 or bathe in the stream. Once open the door of the cage, 
 and the world seems a different one to the bird. Many 
 causes, among which the Reformation was the chief one, 
 had conspired to open the cage, and Elizabeth would not 
 permit the door to be closed.
 
 RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES IO/ 
 
 The Rise of the Middle Class and the Mingling of Differ- 
 ent Elements. Improvement in seamanship, in the art of 
 building vessels, and in the manner of life, which de- 
 manded more comforts, caused a vast increase in com- 
 merce and trade, and this naturally led to the rise of the 
 middle class. The nobility were no longer the sole leaders 
 in England's rapid progress. The men chosen by Eliza- 
 beth to manage affairs of state were not selected merely 
 on account of their titles. Many of her great ministers 
 and councilors were said to have sprung from the earth, 
 and no reign could boast of wiser ones. 
 
 When any one moves in an exclusive set or coterie, his 
 opinions are generally narrow. Such a one usually de- 
 spises others because he does not understand them. 
 Those who are careful not to mingle with others outside 
 of what is termed " our set " are not leaders in human 
 advancement. Different elements of society look at life 
 from different points of view. Difference of opinion has 
 always been a powerful spur to human progress. We 
 can understand others only from sympathetic association 
 with them. 
 
 In speaking of the various elements of Elizabethan soci- 
 ety, an English critic says : " But these materials, and to 
 a very large extent the members of the upper classes 
 already described, were intermingled and shaken together 
 in a manner quite unknown to-day. At present, society 
 moves in sharply separated groups, while even the indi- 
 viduals of these groups keep very much to themselves. 
 The same people meet each other at the same places and 
 times ; and they do not, as a rule, meet other people of 
 different classes. Then, life was led much more in com- 
 mon and much more in the open air." 
 
 When we study Shakespeare, we shall find that he paints
 
 108 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 almost every phase of human nature with unerring touch. 
 It is well that he was born in an age when the mingling 
 of different classes was common, so that it was easier for 
 him to become the poet of all humanity. The audience 
 that stood in the pit or sat in the boxes to witness the 
 performance of his plays, comprised not only lords and 
 wealthy merchants, but also weavers, sailors, and country 
 folk. 
 
 The mingling of the different classes took place with 
 less friction, because of the spirit of patriotism in the air. 
 When Englishmen, high and low alike, aided in destroy- 
 ing the Spanish Armada and in maintaining England's 
 freedom, all felt that they had a common share in her 
 greatness. 
 
 This mingling was further aided by the attempts of the 
 Elizabethans to try many different pursuits. Men thus 
 escaped the social restrictions of modern over-specialized 
 life. 
 
 The Many-sidedness of Life. The revival of learning 
 and the opportunity which the sea constantly afforded 
 for making discoveries and gaining wealth, infused into 
 almost all classes a desire for more knowledge, a long- 
 ing to find out those secrets which had before been 
 hidden. 
 
 We may instance Sir Walter Raleigh to show how 
 many sides to his nature an Elizabethan could develop. 
 He was a courtier, a warden of the tin mines, a vice- 
 admiral, a captain of the guard, a colonizer, a country 
 gentleman managing a vast Irish estate, a pirate, and a 
 writer. Sir Philip Sidney, who died at the age of thirty- 
 two, was an envoy to a foreign court, a writer of romances, 
 an officer in the army, a poet, and a courtier. Even such 
 an idealist as the poet Edmund Spenser was an active
 
 THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF LIFE 109 
 
 servant of the crown in Irish affairs. It became an ambi- 
 tion to have as many different experiences as possible, to 
 search for that variety which youth and a youthful age 
 always crave. This characteristic enabled the Eliza- 
 bethans to speak to all mankind out of the fullness of this 
 varied experience, and proved an important factor in en- 
 riching the literature of the age with such marvelous 
 variety. 
 
 The Fullness of Elizabethan Literature. For the first 
 time in the world, nearly every type of humanity then found 
 adequate recognition and expression. That age gave 
 lasting utterance to almost every feeling which any human 
 soul has ever known. Nothing was suppressed, neither 
 the imaginative longing of youth nor the disappointment 
 of old age. We see the white soul of a Cordelia and the 
 black one of an lago, a man in the grasp of ambition, like 
 Macbeth, and after it has passed, like Lear, the imagina- 
 tive Hamlet and the dull gravediggers, the servant and 
 the master, the beggar and the prince. We see how the 
 same man behaves on the crest of Fortune's wave and 
 when overwhelmed by adverse storms. For the first time 
 the shepherd's crook was given an equal rank beside the 
 scepter. 
 
 No one has ever complained because his inmost thoughts 
 could not find expression in Elizabethan literature. When 
 we have feelings which we regard as peculiarly our own, we 
 shall often be surprised, as we read the literature of the 
 Elizabethans, to find that they have preceded us in travers- 
 ing that land of feeling which we were on the point of 
 claiming as the first discoverers. 
 
 An Age of Imagination and Enthusiasm. The world 
 in every direction seemed to offer untold possibilities. A 
 nation which felt its youth in every vein was fired with
 
 IIO THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 new hopes, new ambitions, new ideals. The imagination 
 is the only power with which we can grasp the unseen 
 and the ideal. There was never a time in the history of 
 the world when the imagination was more exercised and 
 stimulated. It grew by what it fed on until it attained 
 first Spenserian and then Shakespearean greatness. The 
 stage on which the Elizabethan imagination acted was 
 built by the extension of two worlds, the physical and 
 the mental, the land beyond the western wave and the 
 empire of increasing knowledge, which promised to un- 
 lock the secrets of wind and tide, of plant and metal, of 
 disease and remedy, of sun and star and Milky Way, and 
 finally, perhaps, of life and love, of death and the immor- 
 tal spirit world. 
 
 No literature demands sympathetic interpretation from 
 the point of view of the spirit of the age more than the 
 Elizabethan. When we read Marlowe's Tamburlaine, we 
 may unsympathetically declare it a mass of exaggeration 
 and bombast. If we can make our own the imagination 
 and youthful feeling of that time, and remember that 
 a world expanding in every direction promised almost 
 everything, we shall catch something of young Marlowe's 
 enthusiasm and modify our former judgment. If we can- 
 not do this, there is much of Elizabethan literature that 
 we can never read aright. 
 
 We shall come later to an age of cold, juiceless reason, 
 but now the imagination sat on the throne beside the 
 reason. Imagination can tinge the leaden clouds of any 
 age with all the colors of the dawn. Taine says : " I can 
 well believe that things had no more beauty then than 
 now ; but I am sure that men found them more beauti- 
 ful." Let us remember that this added beauty was due 
 to the working of the imagination.
 
 AN AGE OF IMAGINATION AND ENTHUSIASM III 
 
 Even the poets who rank low in that age could write : 
 
 "To joy her love, I'll build a kingly bower, 
 Seated in hearing of a hundred streams," * 
 
 and speak without effort 
 
 " Of moss that sleeps with sound the waters make." 1 
 
 As indicative of the intensity of youthful feeling, an- 
 other poet, meaning every syllable he uttered, says : 
 
 "I live and love, what would you more? 
 As never lover lived before." 2 
 
 A great Elizabethan, trying to define beauty, begins thus : 
 
 " If all the pens that ever poets held 
 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts." 8 
 
 The faults of Elizabethan literature sprang from this 
 very exuberance of imagination and youthful feeling. In 
 connection with the praiseworthy qualities of spontaneity 
 and enthusiasm, manifested in connection with a vivid 
 imagination, we find in much of the literature exaggera- 
 tion, lack of pruning, and lack of artistic finish. Even 
 Shakespeare has some of these faults, but in his case 
 they are mostly concealed by the brilliancy of his genius. 
 
 A Nest of Singing Birds. To make a careful study of 
 Elizabethan literature would require more than a life- 
 time. We must guard against thinking that, after we 
 have studied Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Ben Jon- 
 son, and Bacon, we have finished the greater part of 
 Elizabethan literature. It has been aptly said that the 
 
 1 Peek: David and Bethsabe, I., I. 
 
 a Gascoigne : A Strange Passion of a Lover. 
 
 3 Marlowe: Tamlurlaine, V., I.
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 writers of the age were a nest of singing birds. Many of 
 them occasionally burst into songs of marvelous sweetness. 
 It is the purpose of this book to describe only the greatest 
 works. To show that there were other singers, we need 
 merely give a few stray snatches of song from some of 
 the minor poets. 
 
 " Love in my bosom, like a bee, 
 
 Doth suck his sweet ; 
 Now with his wings he plays with me, 
 Now with his feet." LODGE. 
 
 "Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, 
 When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee." GREENE. 
 
 "There is One 
 That wakes above, whose eye no sleep can bind." CHAPMAN. 
 
 "I shall have one hand in heaven 
 To write my happiness in leaves of stars." DEK.KER. 
 
 "For see! the dapple gray coursers of the morn 
 
 r ui sec: me udpjjie gi<iy tuuisers ui me mum 
 Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs 
 And chase it through the sky." MARSTON. 
 
 "Not that fair hair with which the wanton winds 
 Delight to play and love to make it curl, 
 Wherein the nightingales would build their nests, 
 And make sweet bowers in every golden tress 
 To sing their lover every night asleep." PEELE. 
 
 Even a nameless poet could say to his dead children : 
 
 "But you are playing in the angels' laps 
 And will not look at me." 
 
 Symonds truly says : " Shakespeare stands alone and 
 has no second; but without the multifarious excellence
 
 A DRAMATIC AGE 1 13 
 
 of Jonson, Webster, Heywood, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, 
 Massinger, and a score whom it would be tedious to 
 enumerate, the student would have to regard Shake- 
 speare as an inexplicable prodigy, instead of as the 
 central sun of a luminous sidereal system." 
 
 A Dramatic Age. As we sum up the characteristics 
 of the Elizabethan age, we can hardly fail to note that 
 it was a time of action in every direction. The explora- 
 tion of the new physical world and the unknown seas 
 called for action. To master the new world of knowl- 
 edge, which the Renaissance had disclosed, demanded 
 the exercise of youthful activities to their full, if the 
 power which such knowledge promised was to be ac- 
 quired and enjoyed before the curtain of life fell. The 
 Reformation gave new activities to thought, which, leav- 
 ing its cage, revelled in the new freedom. 
 
 The unwonted activities of the time of Elizabeth de- 
 manded a form of literature that would give them 
 adequate expression. Only the drama or the novel 
 could have afforded full expression to that age of action. 
 There were several reasons why the novel was not 
 chosen. In the first place, prose, the necessary vehicle 
 of expression for the novel, had not reached so high a 
 stage of development as poetry. The most finished prose 
 could hardly have successfully competed with Elizabethan 
 poetry in expressing the harmonies and the discords of 
 life. Certain dramatists used prose, but Shakespeare's 
 genius taught him to employ poetry and to resort to prose 
 only occasionally as an alloy. It is in their poetry that we 
 behold the Elizabethans 
 
 u Affecting thoughts co-equal with the clouds." 1 
 1 Marlowe : Tamburlaine, I., 2.
 
 114 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 In the second place, although Shakespeare's time pro- 
 duced some popular novels (see p. 276), yet they had not 
 reached the same stage of development as the drama. 
 The literature of both Greece and Rome furnished 
 dramatic models. The English nation had been under- 
 going an apprenticeship with both Miracle plays and 
 Moralities and had consequently become accustomed to 
 dramatic expression. Even the highly developed nine- 
 teenth century novel would not have satisfied the Eliza- 
 bethans. They would not have enjoyed the analytic 
 vein of Thackeray and George Eliot, nor would they 
 have cared much for either the minute dissection of 
 emotion or for the analysis of motive, so common in 
 modern novels. In largeness of view, boldness of touch, 
 and hearty humor, Scott is perhaps the only great 
 master of English prose fiction who would have appealed 
 strongly to the Elizabethans, but they would have missed 
 in him the height and depth and breadth, the sympathy, 
 the mystery, and the universality, which characterize 
 Shakespeare's dramas. 
 
 Thirdly, although the novel was in later times a power- 
 ful factor in dethroning the drama, even the nineteenth 
 century novel could not have brought all life to a focus 
 in so small a compass as the drama. Unlike it, the 
 novel could not have displayed such 
 
 "Infinite riches in a little room." 1 
 
 The Elizabethans demanded a form of literature that 
 would present to them life in all its variety and rapidity 
 of movement. Only the drama could satisfy such de- 
 mands. Even the apprentices, who could not read a 
 
 1 Marlowe : The Jew of Malta, I., I.
 
 FIRST PART OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN 115 
 
 line of the novels of Lodge or Greene or Nash, could for 
 a penny walk into the pit of the Globe Theater and 
 see all classes of humanity, from King Richard III. to 
 the gravediggers, act the play of life itself upon the 
 stage. 
 
 For these reasons, the responsibility of presenting 
 Elizabethan ideals embodied in action fell upon the 
 drama. Accordingly, we need not be surprised to find 
 that all the greatest poets of that master age, with the 
 single exception of Spenser, were dramatists. Much of 
 the literature of subsequent times is sicklied o'er with 
 the pale cast of thought without action, but everything 
 that obtained the greatest currency in that age was 
 obliged to bear the dramatic stamp. The highest types 
 of imagination and thought have always been embodied 
 in action. The literature of the age of Elizabeth fur- 
 nishes such types in the greatest state of perfection yet 
 attained. 
 
 LITERATURE OF THE FIRST PART OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN 
 
 Productions of the First Twenty Years. The first 
 twenty years of the Elizabethan age passed without the 
 appearance of any literary work of the highest rank. 
 Writers were, however, trying a wide range of subjects. 
 Books were written in prose on subjects as dissimilar as 
 martyrs and education, history and travels. Greek and 
 Latin classics were translated into English to serve as 
 stimulating models. 
 
 Poetic activity was even more marked. Almost every 
 important event gave rise to a ballad. The poets tried 
 lyrical verse of well-nigh endless variety. There ap- 
 peared in 1576 a collection of miscellaneous songs, known
 
 u6 
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 as Paradise of Dainty Devices. This very title shows 
 what the poets were attempting. They were pluming 
 their wings for longer flights in every clime of human 
 experience. In every direction the nation was attempting 
 and learning on a larger scale than at any preceding time. 
 Only one poet in the first half of the reign, Thomas 
 Sackville (1536-1608), towers sufficiently high above the 
 others to receive individual attention. He 
 helped to produce the first Elizabethan 
 tragedy in blank verse (see p. 142). 
 In 1563 he wrote the Induction and 
 Complaint of Buckingham, which 
 appeared in a narrative collection 
 of poetry by various writers, 
 under the general title of Mirror 
 for Magistrates. These poems 
 relate the haps and mishaps of 
 the illustrious dead, and the way 
 their spirits view this mortal 
 life. 
 
 These lines from the Induc- 
 tion describe a part of the journey to the land of spirits. 
 Sorrow says : 
 
 "I shall thee guide first to the grisly lake, 
 And thence unto the blissful place of rest, 
 Where thou s'halt see, and hear the plaint they make 
 That whilom here bare swing among the best. 
 
 Thence come we to the horrour and the hell, 
 The large great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign 
 Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell, 
 The wide waste places, and the hugy plain, 
 The wailings, shrieks, and sundry sorts of pain, 
 The sighs, the sobs, the deep and deadly groan : 
 Earth, air, and all, resounding plaint and moan." 
 
 THOMAS SACKVILLE
 
 SECOND PART OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN 17 
 
 These lines, notwithstanding their lack of ornament, have 
 a directness, poetic certainty, and firmness of grasp 
 that we miss in the productions of the preceding hundred 
 and fifty years. 
 
 LITERATURE OF THE SECOND PART OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN 
 
 I. THE PROSE 
 
 Lyly, Sidney, Hooker. The year 1579 ushered in the 
 second and more productive part of Elizabeth's reign. 
 The prose is far inferior to the poetry ; in fact, Bacon's 
 is the only Elizabethan prose which is much read to-day. 
 The imaginative spirit of the age was more favorable to 
 the production of poetry than of prose, and the drama 
 afforded a poetical outlet more popular with all classes 
 than prose. 
 
 John Lyly (i554?-i6o6) published in 1579 a peculiar 
 prose work entitled, Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit, which 
 has given a new critical term to our vocabulary. We ap- 
 ply the term " Euphuism " to any stilted, antithetical style, 
 which pays more attention to the manner of expressing a 
 thought than to its worth. Lyly's prose work shows an 
 excessive use of antithesis, of far-fetched similes, and 
 of obscure learning. This quotation is typical : 
 
 " Achilles spear could as well heal as hurt, the scorpion though he 
 sting, yet he stints the pain, though the herb Nerius poison the sheep, 
 yet is a remedy to man against poison. . . . There is great difference 
 between the standing puddle and the running stream, yet both water : 
 great odds between the adamant and the pomice, yet both stones, a 
 great distinction to be put between vitrum and the crystal, yet both 
 glass : great contrariety between Lais and Lucretia, yet both women. 11 
 
 We may also notice conscious art in this, a desire to 
 vary the diction and to avoid the repetition of the same 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 8
 
 Il8 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 word for the same idea. To find four different terms for 
 the same idea: "difference," "odds," "distinction," and 
 " contrariety," involves considerable painstaking. In the 
 course of time, attention, centered on both the form and 
 the thought, produced a good prose style. Lyly was one 
 of the pioneers on the formal side. 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586) wrote a romance, entitled 
 Arcadia, for his sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The 
 style is poetic throughout and the characters in the 
 romance move in a partial Utopia, which is called Ar- 
 cadia. Certain passages like the following, because of 
 their exuberant fancy, read as if they had been written 
 by a Celt (see p. 38): 
 
 " Her breath is more sweet than a gentle southwest wind, which 
 comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme 
 heat of summer; and yet is nothing compared to the honey-flowing 
 speech that breath doth carry." 
 
 To Sidney belongs the credit of having written the first 
 meritorious essay on criticism in the English language, 
 The Apologie for Poetrie. This defends the poetic art, 
 and shows how necessary such exercise of the imagination 
 is to take us away from the cold, hard facts of life. 
 
 Richard Hooker (1554?- 1600), an Episcopal clergyman, 
 wrote a theological work, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. 
 This is a defense of the doctrines of the Church of England, 
 and the theologians of that Church yet refer to him as 
 one of their authorities. Hooker's is one of the greatest 
 English prose works written before 1600. Its chief excel- 
 lences are (i) positive dignity of style, (2) freedom from 
 the excessive antithesis and conceits of Lyly, and (3) 
 from the over-profuse poetic ornamentation of much of 
 Sidney's work. (4) It often expresses profound thought
 
 SECOND PART OF ELIZABETH'S REIGN 119 
 
 
 in a richly musical succession of syllables. On the other 
 hand, the work has striking faults. The sentences are 
 often formed after a Latin model. They are long and 
 involved, and the verb is frequently placed last. For 
 these reasons, one soon wearies if he reads consecutively 
 much of Hooker.
 
 120 
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 FRANCIS BACON, 1561-1626 
 
 Life. A study of Bacon takes us beyond the limits 
 of the reign of Elizabeth, but not beyond the continued 
 influences of that reign. Francis Bacon, the son of Sir 
 Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under 
 Elizabeth, was born in London and grew up under the 
 influences of the court. We must remember the influences 
 which helped to fashion him in his boyhood days, in order 
 to understand some of his actions in later life. He early 
 acquired a taste for many luxuries, and these necessitated
 
 FRANCIS BACON 121 
 
 his getting much money. Those with whom he early as- 
 sociated and who unconsciously molded him were not very 
 scrupulous about the way in which they secured the favor 
 of the court or the means which they took to outstrip an 
 adversary. These unfortunate influences were intensified 
 when, at the age of sixteen, he was sent with the English 
 ambassador to Paris, where the youth remained for two 
 and a half years, studying statecraft and diplomacy. 
 
 When Bacon was nineteen, his father died. The son, 
 being without money, returned from Paris and became a 
 lawyer. His uncle, Lord Burleigh, was one of Elizabeth's 
 ministers. To him Bacon appealed for some lucrative 
 position at the court. In a letter to his uncle, Bacon 
 says : " I confess I have as vast contemplative ends as I 
 have moderate civil ends ; for I have taken all knowledge 
 to be my province." This shows that he wished leisure 
 for study and writing. Such an intention should be es- 
 pecially noted because it manifests the Elizabethan desire 
 to master the entire world of the New Learning. Instead 
 of helping his nephew, Lord Burleigh seems to have done 
 all in his power to thwart him. 
 
 Bacon entered Parliament in 1584 and distinguished 
 himself as a speaker. Ben Jonson, the dramatist, says 
 of him : " There happened in my time, one noble speaker 
 who was full of gravity in his speaking. No man ever 
 spoke more neatly, more presly, more weightily, or 
 suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. 
 His hearers could not cough or look aside from him 
 without loss. The fear of every man that heard him 
 was lest he should make an end." This speaking was 
 valuable training for Bacon in writing the pithy sentences 
 of his Essays. A man who uses the long, involved sen- 
 tences of Hooker can never become a speaker to whom
 
 122 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 people will listen. The habit of directness and simplicity, 
 which Bacon formed in his speaking, remained with him 
 through life. 
 
 After James I. came to the throne in 1603, Bacon's rise 
 was rapid. He ascended step by step, until he became 
 Lord High Chancellor of England. He was accused in 
 1621 of having received bribes as a judge. This was no 
 new thing in English jurisprudence. It had long been 
 customary for judges to accept presents. Bacon's love 
 for luxuries was so great that he had probably received, or 
 allowed his subordinates to receive, presents from rival 
 contestants. Some complained when the decision went 
 against them, but there is no complaint on record that his 
 decisions were unjust. Bacon himself said that he was 
 pleased to receive presents, but that they made no differ- 
 ence with his decisions. He was tried, found guilty, fined 
 .40,000, and sentenced to be imprisoned in the Tower 
 during the King's pleasure. After a few days the King 
 released him, remitted the fine, and gave him an annual 
 pension of 1200. 
 
 Bacon passed the remaining five years of his life in re- 
 tirement, studying and writing. His interest in observing 
 natural objects and experimenting with them was the 
 cause of his death. He was riding in a snowstorm when 
 it occurred to him to experiment with snow as a preserva- 
 tive agent. He stopped at a house, procured a fowl, and 
 stuffed it with snow. He caught cold while doing this, 
 was improperly cared for, and soon died. 
 
 The Essays. The first ten of his Essays, his most 
 popular work, appeared in the year 1597. At the time 
 of his death, he had increased them to fifty-eight. They 
 deal with a wide range of subjects, from Studies and No- 
 bility ', on the one hand, to Marriage and Single Life and
 
 FRANCIS BACON 123 
 
 Gardens, on the other. The great critic Hallam says : " It 
 would be somewhat derogatory to a man of the slightest 
 claim to polite letters, were he unacquainted with the Es- 
 says of Bacon. It is, indeed, little worth while to read 
 this or any other book for reputation's sake ; but very few 
 in our language so well repay the pains, or afford more 
 nourishment to the thoughts." 
 
 The following sentence from the essay Of Studies will 
 show some of the characteristics of his way of presenting 
 thought : 
 
 " Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing 
 an exact man ; and, therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a 
 great memory ; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit ; and 
 if he read little, he had need have much cunning to seem to know that 
 he doth not." 
 
 We may notice here (i) clearness, (2) conciseness, (3) 
 breadth of thought and observation. 
 
 A shrewd Scotchman says : " It may be said that to 
 men wishing to rise in the world by politic management of 
 their fellow-men, Bacon's Essays are the best handbook 
 hitherto published." In justification of this criticism, we 
 need only quote from the essay Of Negotiations : 
 
 " It is generally better to deal by speech than by letter. Letters are 
 good, when a man would draw an answer by letter back again, or when 
 it may serve for a man's justification afterwards to produce his own 
 letter, or where it may be danger to be interrupted or heard by pieces. 
 To deal in person is good, when a man's face breedeth regard, as com- 
 monly with inferiors, or in tender cases, where a man's eye upon the 
 countenance of him with whom he speaketh may give him a direction 
 how far to go, and generally, when a man will reserve to himself liberty 
 either to disavow or to expound." 
 
 Scientific and Miscellaneous Works. The Advancement 
 of Learning is another of Bacon's great works. The title
 
 124 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 aptly expresses the purpose of the book. He insists on 
 the necessity of close observation of nature and of making 
 experiments with various forms of matter. He decries 
 the habit of spinning things out of -one's inner conscious- 
 ness, without patiently studying the outside world to see 
 whether the facts justify the conclusions. In other words, 
 he insists on induction. Bacon was not the father of the 
 inductive principle, as is sometimes wrongly stated, for 
 prehistoric man was compelled to make inductions before 
 he could advance one step from barbarism. 
 
 Bacon had so little faith in the enduring qualities of the 
 English language, that he wrote the most of his philo- 
 sophical works in Latin. He planned a Latin work in 
 six parts, to cover the whole field of the philosophy 
 of natural science. The most famous of the parts com- 
 pleted is the Novum Organum, which deals with certain 
 methods for searching after definite truth, and shows how 
 to avoid some ever-present tendencies toward error. 
 
 Bacon wrote an excellent History of the Reign of Henry 
 VII. , which is standard to this day. He also wrote The 
 New Atlantis, which may be termed a Baconian Utopia, 
 or study of an ideal commonwealth. 
 
 General Characteristics. In Bacon's sentences we may 
 often find remarkable condensation of thought in few 
 words. One does not have to search for two grains of 
 wheat hid in two bushels of chaff. A modern essayist 
 has taken seven pages to express, or rather to obscure, 
 the ideas in these three lines from Bacon : 
 
 " Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, 
 repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but 
 content themselves with a mediocrity of success." 1 
 
 1 Of Youth and Age.
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 12$ 
 
 His work abounds in illustrations, analogies, and strik- 
 ing imagery ; but, unlike the great Elizabethan poets, he 
 appeals more to cold intellect than to the feelings. We are 
 pleased with his intellectual ingenuity in comparing a man 
 who is courteous to foreigners, not to an island cut off 
 from other lands, but to a continent joined to them ; or in. 
 likening the Schoolmen to spiders, spinning such stuff as 
 webs are made of " out of no great quantity of matter." 
 
 He resembles the Elizabethans in preferring magnificent 
 to commonplace images. It has been often noticed that if 
 he essays to write of buildings in general, he prefers to 
 describe palaces. His knowledge of the intellectual side 
 of human nature is specially remarkable, but, unlike 
 Shakespeare, Bacon never drops his plummet into the 
 emotional depths of the soul. 
 
 II. THE POETRY 
 
 EDMUND SPENSER, 1552-1599 
 
 Life and Minor Poems. Since Chaucer's day there had 
 been no poet of the first rank in England. In the last 
 year of the reign of Edward VI., was born Edmund Spen- 
 ser, who takes rank only slightly below Chaucer in the 
 list of English poets. Spenser was six years old when 
 Elizabeth became queen. 
 
 His parents were poor, but fortunately there were gener- 
 ous men in Elizabethan times as now, men who found 
 their chief pleasure, not in their own selfish gratification, 
 but in making others happy. Such a man assisted Spen- 
 ser in going to Cambridge. His benefactor was wise 
 enough not to make this assistance sufficient to support 
 Spenser without additional effort. His patron realized
 
 126 
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 that the student's will and capacity for depending on him- 
 self would have been weakened thereby. We know that 
 Spenser was a sizar at Cambridge ; that is, one of those 
 students who, to quote Macaulay, " had to perform some 
 menial services. They swept the court; they carried up 
 the dinner to the fellows' table, and changed the plate and 
 poured out the ale of the rulers of society." We further 
 know that Spenser was handicapped by ill health during a
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 1 2 7 
 
 part of his course, for we find entrances of allowances paid 
 "Spenser <zgrotanti" 
 
 After leaving Cambridge he went to the north of Eng- 
 land, probably in the capacity of tutor. While there, he 
 fell in love with a young woman whom he calls Rosalind. 
 This event colored his after life. Although she refused 
 him, she had penetration enough to see in what his great- 
 ness consisted, and her opinion spurred him to develop 
 his abilities as a poet. He was in his twenties when he fell 
 in love with Rosalind, and he remained single until he was 
 forty-two, when he married an Irish maiden named Eliza- 
 beth. In honor of that event, he composed the EpitJiala- 
 mion, the noblest marriage song in any literature. So strong 
 are early impressions that even in its lines he seems to be 
 thinking of Rosalind and fancying that she is his bride. 
 
 After returning from the north, he spent some time with 
 Sir Philip Sidney, who helped fashion Spenser's ideals of 
 a chivalrous gentleman. Sidney's influence is seen in 
 Spenser's greatest work, the Faerie Queene. Sir Walter 
 Raleigh was another friend who left his imprint on 
 Spenser. 
 
 In 1579 Spenser published the Shepherd's Calendar. 
 This is a pastoral poem, consisting of twelve different 
 parts, one part being assigned to each of the twelve 
 months. This poem occupies an inferior position beside 
 his greatest work ; but, considering the time, the Shep- 
 herd's Calendar is a remarkable production, and it shows 
 that its author had genius. 
 
 In 1580 he was appointed secretary to Lord Gray, Lord 
 Lieutenant of Ireland. In one capacity or another, in the 
 service of the crown, Spenser passed in Ireland almost the 
 entire remaining eighteen years of his life. In 1591 he 
 received in the south of Ireland a grant of three thousand
 
 128 
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 acres, a part of the estate of a rebellious Irish earl. Sir 
 Walter Raleigh was also given forty-two thousand acres 
 near Spenser. Ireland was then in a state of continuous 
 turmoil. In such a country Spenser lived and wrote his 
 Faerie Queene. Of course, this environment powerfully 
 affected the character of that poem. It has been said 
 that to read a contemporary's account of " Raleigh's ad- 
 ventures with the Irish chieftains, his challenges and 
 single combats, his escapes at fords and woods, is like 
 reading bits of the Faerie Queene in prose." 
 
 From an old print. 
 
 RUINS OF KILCOLMAN CASTLE (SPENSER'S HOME IN IRELAND) 
 
 In 1598 Spenser's castle was set on fire by the Irish. 
 He and his family barely escaped with their lives. He 
 crossed to England, and died the next year, according to 
 some accounts, in want. He was buried, at the expense of 
 Lord Essex, in Westminster Abbey, near Chaucer.
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 1 29 
 
 The Faerie Queene. In 1590 Spenser published the 
 first three books of the Faerie Queene. The original plan 
 was to have the poem contain twelve books, like Virgil's 
 ALneid, but only six were published. If more were 
 written, they have been lost. 
 
 The poem is an allegory with the avowed moral purpose 
 of fashioning " a gentleman or noble person in vertuous 
 and gentle discipline." Spenser says: " I labour to pour- 
 traict in Arthure, before he was King, the image of a brave 
 knight, perfected in the twelve private morall vertues, as 
 Aristotle hath devised." Twelve Knights personifying 
 twelve Virtues were to fight with their opposing Vices, and 
 the twelve books were to tell the story of the conflict. The 
 Knights set out from the court of Gloriana, the Faerie 
 Queene, in search of their enemies, and meet with divers 
 adventures and enchantments. 
 
 The hero of the tale is Arthur, who has figured so much 
 in English song and legend. Spenser makes him typical 
 of all the Virtues taken together. The first book, which 
 is really a complete 'poem by itself, and which is generally 
 admitted to be the finest, contains an account of the ad- 
 ventures of the Red Cross Knight, who represents Holi- 
 ness. Other books tell of the warfare of the Knights 
 who typify Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, 
 and Courtesy. 
 
 The poem begins thus : 
 
 " A gentle Knight was pricking l on the plaine, 
 Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, 
 Wherein old dints of deepe \\oundes did remaine, 
 The cruell markes of many 1 a bloody fielde ; 
 Yet armes till that time did he never wield. 
 
 1 riding.
 
 I3O THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 " And on his brest a bloodie Crosse he bore, 
 The deare remembrance of his dying Lord, 
 For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore. 
 
 " Upon a great adventure he was bond, 
 That greatest Gloriana to him gave, 
 That greatest glorious Queene of Faerie lond." 
 
 The entire poem really typifies the aspirations of the hu- 
 man soul for something nobler and better than can be gained 
 without effort. In Spenser's imaginative mind, these 
 aspirations became real persons who set out to win 
 laurels in a fairyland, lighted with the soft light of the 
 moon, and presided over by the good genius that loves to 
 uplift struggling and weary souls. 
 
 The allegory certainly becomes confused. A critic well 
 says : " We can hardly lose our way in it, for there is no 
 way to lose." We are not called on to understand the 
 intricacies of the allegory, but to read between the lines, 
 catch the noble moral lesson, and drink to our fill at the 
 fountain of beauty and melody. 
 
 Spenser a Subjective Poet. The subjective cast of 
 Spenser's mind next demands attention. We feel that 
 his is an ideal world, one that does not exist outside of 
 the imagination. In order to understand the difference 
 between subjective and objective, let us compare Chaucer 
 with Spenser. No one can really be said to study litera- 
 ture without constantly bringing in the principle of com- 
 parison. We must notice the likeness and the difference 
 between literary productions, or the faint impression which 
 they make upon our minds will soon pass away. 
 
 Chaucer is objective ; that is, he identifies himself with 
 things that have a real existence in the outside world. For 
 instance, when he says :
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 131 
 
 " The bisy larke, messager of daye, 
 Saluteth in hir song the morwe graye, 
 And fyry Phebus ryseth up so brighte 
 That al the orient laugheth of the lighte, 
 And with hise stremes dryeth in the greves 
 The silver dropes, hangynge on the leves," 1 
 
 our attention is here drawn to the song of an actual lark, 
 to the beauty of the morning light, to the sunbeams dan- 
 cing on the dewdrops, which sparkle on the green leaves. 
 There is nothing here which a sympathetic observer of 
 nature might not notice and regard without a thought of 
 self. In like manner we find ourselves looking at the 
 shiny bald head of Chaucer's Monk, at the lean horse 
 and threadbare clothes of the Student of Oxford, at the 
 brown complexion of the Shipman, at the enormous hat 
 and large figure of the Wife of Bath, at the red face of 
 the Summoner, at the hair of the Pardoner "yelow as 
 wex." These are not mere figments of the imagination. 
 We feel that they are either realities or that they could 
 have existed. 
 
 While the adventures in the Irish wars undoubtedly 
 gave the original suggestions for many of the contests 
 between good and evil in the Faerie Qtieene, Spenser inten- 
 tionally idealized these knightly struggles to uphold the 
 right and placed them in fairyland. This great poem is 
 the work of a mind that loved to elaborate purely subjec- 
 tive images. The pictures were not painted from gazing at 
 the outside world. We feel that they are mostly creations 
 of the imagination, and that few of them could exist in a 
 real world. The passages in the next section show this. 
 There is no bower in the bottom of the sea, " built of hollow 
 billowes heaped hye," and no lion ever follows a lost maiden 
 
 1 Knightes Tale.
 
 132 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 to protect her. We feel that the principal part of Shake- 
 speare's world could have existed in reality as well as in 
 imagination. Spenser was never able to reach this high- 
 est type of art. 
 
 The world, however, needs poets to create images of a 
 higher type of beauty than this life can offer. These 
 images react on our material lives and cast them in a 
 nobler mold. Spenser's belief that the subjective has 
 power to fashion the objective is expressed in two of the 
 finest lines that he ever wrote : - 
 
 " For of the soule the bodie forme doth take ; 
 For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make. 1 ' 1 
 
 Chief Characteristics of Spenser's Poetry. We can say 
 of Spenser's verse that it stands in the front rank for 
 (i) melody, (2) love of the beautiful, and (3) nobility of the 
 ideals presented. His poetry also (4) shows a preference 
 for the subjective world, (5) exerts a remarkable influence 
 over other poets, and (6) displays a peculiar liking for 
 obsolete forms of expression. 
 
 Spenser's melody is noteworthy. If we read aloud cor- 
 rectly such lines as these, we can scarcely fail to be im- 
 pressed with their harmonious flow : - 
 
 " A teme of Dolphins raunged in aray 
 Drew the smooth charett of sad Cymoent : 
 They were all taught by Triton to obay 
 To the long raynes at her commaundement : 
 As swifte as swallowes on the waves they went. 
 
 " Upon great Neptune's neck they softly swim, 
 And to her watry chamber swiftly carry him. 
 Deepe in the bottome of the sea her bowre 
 Is built'of hollow billowes heaped hye."' 2 
 
 l An Hymne in Honour of Beautie. 2 Faerie Queene, Book III., Canto 4.
 
 EDMUND SPENSER 133 
 
 The following lines will show Spenser's love for beauty, 
 and at the same time indicate the nobility of some of his 
 ideal characters. He is describing Lady Una, the fair 
 representative of true religion, who has lost through en- 
 chantment her Guardian Knight, and who is wandering 
 disconsolate in the forest : 
 
 "... Her angel's face, 
 As the great eye of heaven, shyned bright. 
 And made a sunshine in the shady place ; 
 Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace. 
 
 "It fortuned out of the thickest wood 
 A ramping Lyon rushed suddeinly, 
 Hunting full greedy after salvage blood. 
 Soone as the royall virgin he did spy, 
 With gaping mouth at her ran greedily, 
 To have att once devoured her tender corse ; 
 But to the pray when as he drew more ny, 
 His bloody rage aswaged with remorse, 
 And with the sight amazd, forgat his furious forse. 
 
 " In stead thereof he kist her wearie feet, 
 And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong, 
 As he her wronged innocence did weet. 
 O, how can beautie maister the most strong, 
 And simple truth subdue avenging wrong ! " 1 
 
 The power of beauty has seldom been more vividly 
 described. As we read the succeeding stanzas and see the 
 lion following her, like a faithful dog, to shield her from 
 harm, we feel the power of both beauty and goodness and 
 realize that with Spenser these terms are interchangeable. 
 Each one of the preceding selections shows his preference 
 for the subjective and the ideal to the actual. 
 
 A critic rightly says that Spenser repels none but the 
 anti-poetical. His influence upon other poets has been 
 
 1 Faerie Queene, Book I., Canto 3. 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 9
 
 134 THE ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 far-reaching. Milton, Dryden, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, 
 and Shelley show traces of his influence. Spenser has 
 been called the poet's poet, because the more poetical one 
 is, the more one will enjoy him. 
 
 Spenser searched for old and obsolete words. He used 
 "eyne" for "eyes," " fone " for "foes," " shend " for 
 "shame." He did not hesitate to coin words when he 
 needed them, like "mercify" and " fortunize." He even 
 wrote "wawes" in place of "waves" because he wished 
 it to rhyme with "jaws." In spite of these peculiarities, 
 Spenser is not hard reading after the first appearance of 
 strangeness has worn away. 
 
 III. THE ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 The Rise of the Drama in England. Like so many 
 things of great moment, our drama took its rise in religion. 
 The rites of the Roman Catholic church have always been 
 marked with much dramatic splendor. Any one may to- 
 day form some idea of the rise of our drama by attending 
 the service of that church on Christmas or Easter Sunday. 
 In many Catholic churches there may still be seen at 
 Christmas time a representation of the manger at Beth- 
 lehem. Sometimes the figures of the infant. Savior, of 
 Joseph and Mary, of the wise men, of the sheep and 
 cattle, are very lifelike. 
 
 The events clustering about the Crucifixion and the 
 Resurrection furnished the most striking material for the 
 early religious drama. Our earliest dramatic writers drew 
 their inspiration from the New Testament. 
 
 Miracle and Mystery Plays. A Miracle play is the 
 dramatic representation of the life of a saint and of the 
 miracles connected with him. A Mystery play deals with .
 
 THE MIRACLE PLAYS 135 
 
 gospel events which are concerned with any phase of the 
 life of Christ, or with any biblical event that remotely 
 foreshadows Christ or indicates the necessity of a Re- 
 deemer. In England there were few, if any, pure Miracle 
 plays, but the term "Miracle" is applied indiscriminately 
 to both Miracles and Mysteries. 
 
 The first Miracle play in England was acted probably 
 not far from noo. In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and 
 sixteenth centuries these plays had become so popular 
 that they were produced in nearly every part of England. 
 Shakespeare felt their influence. He must have had fre- 
 quent opportunities in his boyhood to witness their pro- 
 duction. They were seldom performed in England after 
 1600, although visitors to Germany have every ten years 
 the opportunity of seeing a modern production of a 
 Mystery in the Passion Play at Oberammergau. 
 
 The Subjects. Four great cycles of Miracle plays have 
 been preserved : the York, Chester, and Coventry plays, 
 so called because they were performed in those places, 
 and the Towneley plays. These last take their name 
 from Towneley Hall in Lancashire, where the manuscript 
 was kept for some time. It is probable that almost every 
 town of importance had its own collection of plays. 
 
 The York cycle contains forty-eight plays. A cycle or 
 circle of plays means a list forming a complete circle from 
 Creation until Doomsday. The York collection begins with 
 Creation and the fall of Lucifer and the bad angels from 
 Heaven, a theme which was later to inspire the pen 
 of one of England's greatest poets. The tragedies of 
 Eden and the Flood, scenes from the lives of Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Moses, the manger at Bethlehem, the slaughter 
 of the Innocents, the Temptation, the resurrection of 
 Lazarus, the Last Supper, the Trial, the Crucifixion, and
 
 136 
 
 THE ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 the Easter triumph, are a few of the Miracle plays that 
 were acted in the city of York. 
 
 The Actors and Manner of Presentation. At first the 
 actors were priests who presented the plays either in the 
 church or in its immediate vicinity on sacred ground. 
 
 From an old print. 
 
 MIRACLE PLAY AT COVENTRY 
 
 After a while the plays became so popular that the laity 
 presented them. When they were at the height of their 
 popularity, that is, during the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries, the actors were selected with great care from 
 the members of the various trades guilds, and each guild 
 undertook the entire responsibility for the presentation of 
 some one play, and endeavored to surpass, all the other 
 guilds.
 
 THE MIRACLE PLAYS 137 
 
 Considerable humor was displayed in the allotment of 
 various plays. The tanners presented the fall of Lucifer 
 and the bad angels into the infernal regions; the ship 
 carpenters, the play of Noah and the building of the ark ; 
 the bakers, the Last Supper ; the butchers, the Crucifixion. 
 
 In their prime, the Miracle plays were acted on wooden 
 platforms mounted on wheels. There were two distinct 
 stories in these movable stages, a lower one in which the 
 actors dressed, and an upper one in which they played. 
 The entrance to the lower story was a terrible pair of 
 dragonlike jaws, painted red. From these issued smoke, 
 flame, and horrible outcries. This entrance was known 
 as Hell Mouth. From it leaped red-coated devils to 
 tempt the Savior, the saints, and men. Into it the devils 
 would disappear with some wicked soul. They would 
 torture it and make it roar with pain, as the smoke poured 
 faster from the red jaws. 
 
 In York on Corpus Christi Day, which usually fell in 
 the first week in June, the actors were ordered to be 
 in their places on these movable theaters at half past 
 three in the morning. Certain stations had been selected 
 throughout the city, where each pageant should stop and, 
 in the proper order, present its own play. In this way the 
 enormous crowds that visited York to see these perform- 
 ances were more evenly scattered throughout the city. 
 
 The actors did not always remain on the stage. Herod 
 in his magnificent robes used to ride on horseback among 
 the people, boast of his prowess, and overdo everything, 
 so that Shakespeare, who was evidently familiar with the 
 character, speaks of out-Heroding Herod. The Devil 
 also frequently jumped from the stage and availed him- 
 self of his license to play pranks among the audience. 
 
 Much of the acting was undoubtedly excellent. In 1476
 
 138 THE ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 the council at York ordained that four of the best players 
 in the city should examine with regard to fitness all who 
 wished to take part in the plays. So many were desirous 
 of acting, that it was much trouble to get rid of incom- 
 petents. The ordinance ran : " All such as they shall 
 find sufficient in person and cunning, to the honor of the 
 City and worship of the said Crafts, for to admit and 
 able ; and all other insufficient persons, either in cunning, 
 voice, or person, to discharge, ammove and avoid." A 
 critic says that this ordinance is "one of the steps on 
 which the greatness of the Elizabethan stage was built, 
 and through which its actors grew up." * 
 
 Introduction of the Comic Element in the Miracle Plays. - 
 While the old drama generally confined itself to religious 
 subjects, the comic element occasionally crept in, made its 
 power felt, and disclosed a new path for future playwrights. 
 In the Play of NoaJi's Flood, when the time for the flood 
 has come, Noah's wife refuses to enter the ark and a 
 domestic quarrel ensues. Finally her children pull and 
 shove her into the ark. When she is safe on board, Noah 
 bids her welcome. His enraged wife deals him resounding 
 blows until he calls to her to stop, since his back is nearly 
 broken. 
 
 The Play of the Shepherds has a genuine little comedy 
 inserted, the first comedy worthy of the name to appear in 
 England. While watching their flocks on Christmas Eve, 
 the shepherds are joined by Mak, a neighbor whose repu- 
 tation for honesty is not good. Before they go to sleep, 
 they make him lie down within their circle, but he rises 
 when he hears them begin to snore, steals a sheep, and 
 hastens home. His wife is alarmed, because in that day 
 the theft of a sheep was punishable by death. She finally 
 
 1 Smith's York Plays.
 
 THE MORALITY 139 
 
 concludes that the best plan will be to wrap the animal in 
 swaddling clothes and put it in the cradle. If the shep- 
 herds come to search the house, she will pretend that she 
 has a child ; and, if they approach the cradle, she will cau- 
 tion them against touching it for fear of waking the child 
 and causing him to fill the house with his cries. She 
 speedily hurries Mak away to resume his slumbers among 
 the shepherds. When they wake, they miss the sheep, sus- 
 pect Mak, and go to search his house. His wife allows 
 them to look around thoroughly, but she keeps them away 
 from the cradle. They leave, rather ashamed of their sus- 
 picion. As they are going out of the door, a thought 
 strikes one of them whereby they can make partial amends. 
 He decides to give the child sixpence, and so he returns, 
 lifts up the covering of the cradle, and discovers the sheep. 
 Mak and his wife both declare that an elf has changed their 
 child into a sheep. The shepherds threaten to have the 
 pair hanged. They seize Mak, throw him on a canvas, 
 and toss him into the air until they are exhausted. They 
 then lie down to rest and are roused with the song of an 
 angel from Bethlehem. 
 
 To produce this comedy required genuine inventive 
 imagination ; for there is nothing faintly resembling this 
 incident in the sacred narrative. These early exercises of 
 the imagination in our drama may resemble the tottering 
 footsteps of a child, but they were necessary antecedents 
 to the strength, beauty, and divinity of movement in Eliza- 
 bethan times. 
 
 The Morality. The next step in the development of 
 the drama is known as the Morality play. This personified 
 abstractions. Characters like Charity, Hope, Faith, Truth, 
 Covetousness, Falsehood, Abominable Living, the World, 
 the Flesh, and the Devil, in short, all the Virtues and the
 
 140 
 
 THE ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 Vices, came on the stage in the guise of persons, and 
 played the drama of life. 
 
 Critics do not agree about the precise way in which the 
 Morality is related to the Miracle play. It is certain that 
 the Miracle play had already introduced some 
 abstractions. In one very important respect, 
 the Morality marks an advance, by giving more 
 scope to the imagination. The Miracle plays 
 had their general treatment absolutely pre- 
 determined by the Scriptural version of 
 the action or by the legends of the lives 
 of saints, although diverting incidents 
 could be introduced, as we have seen. 
 In the Morality, the events could take any 
 turn which the author chose to give. 
 
 In spite of this advantage, the Morality is 
 in general a synonym for what is uninterest- 
 ing. The characters born of abstractions are 
 too often bloodless, like their parents. The Morality under 
 a changed name was current a few years ago in the aver- 
 age Sunday-school book. Incompetent writers of fiction 
 to-day often adopt the Morality principle in mak- 
 ing their characters unnaturally good or bad, 
 mere puppets who do not develop along the 
 line of their own emotional prompting, but who 
 are moved by machinery in the author's hands. 
 
 A new character, the Vice, was added as an ad- 
 junct to the Devil, to increase the interest of the 
 audience in the Morality play. The Vice repre- 
 sented the leading spirit of evil in any particular 
 play, sometimes Fraud, Covetousness, Pride, In- 
 iquity, or Hypocrisy. It was the business of the Vice to 
 
 1 Stage properties of the Vice and Fool. 
 
 FOOL'S HEAD 1
 
 THE INTERLUDE 
 
 LATH 
 DAGGER 
 
 annoy the Virtues and to be constantly playing pranks. 
 The Vice was the predecessor of the clown and the fool 
 upon the stage. The Vice also amused the audience by 
 tormenting the Devil, belaboring him with a sword of lath, 
 sticking thorns into him, and making him roar with 
 pain. Sometimes the Devil would be kicked down 
 Hell Mouth by the offended Virtues, but he would 
 soon reappear with saucily curled tail, and at the 
 end of the play he would delight the spectators by 
 plunging into Hell Mouth with the Vice on his 
 back. 
 
 The Interlude. Any short dramatic incident, such 
 as the refusal of Noah's wife to enter the ark, or 
 Mak's thievery in the Play of the Shepherds, inter- 
 polated in Miracle and Mystery plays, to give variety and 
 interest, might be called an Interlude. This type served 
 to bring the drama closer to real life, and became for 
 this reason one of the important foundation 
 stones of the Elizabethan drama. John Hey- 
 wood, who died about the year 1580, made the 
 Interlude a finished play by itself, and gave it 
 a place of its own in dramatic literature. Dur- 
 ing the reign of Queen Mary, he supplied the 
 royal court with dramatic amusements, but 
 on account of his religious views he fled to 
 the continent when Elizabeth came to the 
 throne. 
 
 The Interlude was short. It was some 
 times given between the courses of a ban- 
 quet or immediately after it. Such a play 
 could also be acted before guests at the 
 home in connection with other forms of entertainment. 
 
 FOOL'S HEADi 
 
 1 Stage properties of the Vice and Fool.
 
 142 THE ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 The Interlude shows the modern drama in its chrysalis 
 state. Artistic expansion, complexity, and proportion 
 are yet to come, but the development will now proceed 
 without any great break. 
 
 Further Steps toward Shakespeare. Two early com- 
 edies and a tragedy are worthy of note. 
 
 Ralph Royster Doyster was written by Nicholas Udall, 
 master of Eton College, and acted in 1551, thirteen years 
 before the birth of Shakespeare. This play, founded on 
 a comedy of Plautus, shows the classical influence which 
 was so powerful in England at this time. Ralph, the hero, 
 is a conceited simpleton. He falls in love with a widow 
 who has already promised her hand to a man infinitely 
 Ralph's superior. Ralph, however, cannot understand 
 why she should not want him, and so persists in his 
 wooing. She makes him the butt of her jokes, and he 
 finds himself in ridiculous positions. The comedy amuses 
 us in this way until her lover returns and marries her. 
 The characters of the play, which is written in rhyme, 
 are of the English middle class. 
 
 Gammer Gurtoris Needle is probably the work of 
 John Still, Bishop of Bath and Wells. This comedy 
 was acted at Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1 566, two 
 years after Shakespeare's birth. This play borrows hardly 
 anything from the classical stage. The most of the charac- 
 ters of Gammer Gurtoris Needle are from the lowest 
 English working classes, and its language, unlike that 
 of Ralph Royster Doyster, which has little to offend, 
 is very coarse. 
 
 The tragedy of Gorboduc, in part the work of Thomas 
 Sackville, the author of the Induction, was acted in 1561, 
 three years before the birth of Shakespeare. This is the 
 first regular English tragedy written in blank verse. Gor-
 
 THE DRAMATIC UNITIES 143 
 
 boduc is fashioned after the classical rules of Seneca and 
 the Greeks. There is little action on the stage. There 
 is any amount of bloodshed in the play, but the spectators 
 are informed of the carnage by a messenger, as they are 
 not permitted to witness a bloody contest on the stage. 
 
 The Dramatic Unities. If Gorbodnc had been taken 
 for a model, the English drama could never have attained 
 Shakespearean greatness. Our drama would then have 
 been crippled by following tlje classical rules, which pre- 
 scribed unity of place and time in the plot and the action. 
 The ancients held that the play should not represent actions 
 which would, in actual life, require much more than twenty- 
 four hours for their performance. If one of the characters 
 was a boy, he had to be represented as a boy throughout 
 the entire play. The next act could not introduce him 
 as one who had grown to manhood in the interval. The 
 classical rules further required that the action should be 
 performed in one place, or near it. Anything which hap- 
 pened at a great distance had to be merely related by a 
 messenger, and not acted on the stage. 
 
 Had these rules been followed, the English drama could 
 not have painted the growth and development of character, 
 for it is not built or developed in a day. The genius of. 
 Marlowe and Shakespeare taught them to disregard these 
 dramatic unities. In As Yon Like //, the action is now at 
 the court, and now in the far-off Forest of Arden. Shake- 
 speare knew that the imagination could traverse the dis- 
 tance. At the beginning of the play Oliver is an unnatural, 
 brutal brother; but events change him, so that in the 
 fourth act, when he is asked if he is the man who tried to 
 kill his brotner, Oliver replies : 
 
 " 'Twas I ; but His not I."
 
 144 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 1564-1593 
 
 Life. The year 1 564 saw the birth of the two greatest 
 geniuses in the English drama, Marlowe and Shakespeare. 
 There are other great names in the early Elizabethan 
 drama, but we must pass them by for the study of the 
 greatest. 
 
 Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker, was born at Canter- 
 bury, and educated at Cambridge. When he graduated, 
 the dramatic profession was the only one that gave full 
 scope to genius like his. He became both playwriter 
 and actor. All his extant work was written in about six 
 years. When he was only twenty-nine he was fatally 
 stabbed in a quarrel in a tavern. Shakespeare had at that 
 age not produced his greatest plays. Marlowe unwittingly 
 wrote his own epitaph in that of Dr. Faustus : 
 
 " Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, 
 And burne'd is Apollo's laurel bough. 1 ' 
 
 Works. Marlowe's great tragedies are four in number : 
 Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Edward 
 II. No careful student of English literature can afford to 
 be unacquainted with any of them. Shakespeare's work 
 appears less miraculous when we know that a predecessor 
 at the age of twenty-four had written plays like Tambur- 
 laine and Dr. Faustns. 
 
 Tamburlaine shows the supreme ambition for conquest, 
 for controlling the world with physical force. It is such a 
 play as might have been suggested to an Elizabethan by 
 watching Napoleon's career. Dr. Faustus, on the other 
 hand, shows the desire for knowledge that would give uni- 
 versal power, a desire born of the Renaissance. The Jeiv 
 of Malta is the incarnation of the passion for the world's
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 145 
 
 wealth, a passion that towers above common greed only by 
 the magnificence of its immensity. In that play we see 
 that Marlowe 
 
 "Without control can pick his riches up, 
 And in his house heap pearl like pebble stones, 
 
 Infinite riches in a little room." 
 
 Edward II. gives a pathetic picture of one of the weakest 
 of kings. This shows more evenness and regularity of 
 construction than any of Marlowe's other plays, but it is 
 the one least characteristic of him. Others manifest more 
 intensity of imagination, more of the spirit of the age. 
 
 Dr. Faustns shows Marlowe's peculiar genius at its best. 
 The legend on which the play is based came from Ger- 
 many, but Marlowe breathed his own imaginative spirit 
 into the tragedy. Faustus is wearied with the barren phi- 
 losophy of the past. He is impatient to secure at once 
 the benefits of the New Learning, which seems to him to 
 have all the powers of magic. If he can immediately 
 enjoy the fruits of such knowledge, he says : 
 
 " Had I as many souls as there be stars, 
 I'd give them all." 
 
 In order to acquire this knowledge and the resulting power 
 for twenty-four years, he sells his soul to Mephistophilis. 
 Faustus then proceeds to enjoy all that the new order of 
 things promised. He commands Homer to come from the 
 realm of shades to sing his entrancing songs. He summons 
 Helen to appear before him in the morning of her beauty. 
 The apostrophe to her shows the vividness and exuberance 
 of his imagination : 
 
 "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
 And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
 
 146 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. 
 
 Oh ! thou art fairer than the evening air 
 Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars." 
 
 Marlowe left a fragment of a lyrical poem, entitled Hero 
 and Leander, which is the finest production of its kind 
 in the language. Shakespeare accorded him the unusual 
 honor of quoting from this poem. 
 
 In What Sense is Marlowe a Founder of the English 
 Drama ? His success with blank verse showed Shake- 
 speare that this was the proper versification for the drama. 
 Before Marlowe, rhyme or prose had been chiefly em- 
 ployed in writing plays. Sackville had used blank verse in 
 Gorboduc, but his verse and Marlowe's are as unlike as the 
 movements of the ox and the flight of the swallow. The 
 sentences of Gorboduc generally end with the line, and the 
 accents usually fall in the same place. Marlowe's blank 
 verse shows great variety. The major pause frequently 
 does not come at the end of the line. The poet can move 
 over the field of dramatic action far more easily than he 
 could if he were tied down to the necessity of making his 
 verses rhyme. 
 
 Lines like these from the Jew of Malta show the free- 
 dom of his verse. The thought is often not allowed to 
 suffer any pause at the end of the line : 
 
 "Thus, like the sad-presaging raven, that tolls 
 The sick man's passport in her hollow beak. 
 And in the shadow of the silent night 
 Doth shake contagion from her sable wings." 
 
 Marlowe cast the dramatic unities to the wind. The action 
 in Dr. Faustus occupies twenty-four years, and the scene 
 changes from country to country. He knew that he was 
 speaking to a people whose imaginations could accompany
 
 CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 147 
 
 him and interpret what he uttered. The other dramatists 
 followed him in placing imaginative interpretation above 
 measurements by the foot rule of the intellect. Symonds 
 says of him : " It was he who irrevocably decided the 
 destinies of the romantic drama ; and the whole subse- 
 quent evolution of that species, including Shakespeare's 
 work, can be regarded as the expansion, rectification, and 
 artistic ennoblement of the type fixed by Marlowe's epoch- 
 making tragedies. In very little more than fifty years from 
 the publication of Tamburlaine, our drama had run its 
 course of unparalleled energy and splendor." 
 
 General Characteristics. As we sum up Marlowe's 
 general qualities, it is well to note that they exhibit in a 
 striking way the characteristics of the time. In the morn- 
 ing of that youthful age the superlative was possible. 
 Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Dr. Faustus show in 
 the superlative degree the love of conquest, of wealth, and 
 of knowledge. Everything that Marlowe wrote is stamped 
 with a love of beauty and of the impossible. 
 
 Tamburlaine speaks like one of the young Elizabethans 
 
 " That in conceit bear empires on our spears, 
 Affecting thoughts co-equal with the clouds." 
 
 Marlowe voices the new sense of worth of enfranchised 
 
 man : 
 
 "Thinkest thou heaven is such a glorious thing? 
 I tell thee, 'tis not half so fair as thou, 
 Or any man that breathes upon the earth. 
 'Twas made for man. therefore is man more excellent. 11 1 
 
 The one who runs may note Marlowe's faults. They 
 are the faults of youth and of the age. There are exagger- 
 ation and lack of restraint in almost all his work. In 
 
 1 Dr. Faustus, Scene 6.
 
 148 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 Tantbttrlaine, written when he was twenty-two, he is often 
 bombastic. He has hardly any sense of humor. He does 
 not draw fine distinctions between his characters. 
 
 On the other hand, using the words of Tamburlaine, we 
 may say of other writers : 
 
 " If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy," 
 
 were gathered into one vial, it could not surpass the odor 
 from patches of flowers scattered here and there in Mar- 
 lowe's garden. 
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, 1564-1616 
 
 Parents and Birthplace. William Shakespeare was the 
 son of John Shakespeare, a merchant, who in 1571 was 
 chosen for the chief office in Stratford-on-Avon, Warwick- 
 shire. A few years later he lost the most of his property, 
 and with it his position of commanding influence. The 
 poet's mother was- the daughter of Robert Arden, a well- 
 to-do farmer. We are told that she was her father's 
 favorite among seven children. 
 
 Stratford, where William Shakespeare was born in 1 564, 
 lies in the midst of England's fairest rural scenery. When 
 two Englishmen were asked to name the finest walk in 
 England, one chose the walk from Stratford to Coventry, 
 the other the walk from Coventry to Stratford. A short 
 distance northeast of Stratford are Warwick with its 
 castle, the home of the famous King-Maker, and Kenil- 
 worth Castle, whose historic associations were romantic 
 enough to stir the imagination of a boy like Shakespeare. 
 
 Home Training. When we study the greatest writer 
 of all time, it is desirable to learn some of the causes
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 
 
 149 
 
 contributing to his greatness. In 1579 the parents of 
 the poet sold a piece of land. The conveyance is thus 
 signed : " The marke + of John Shackspere. The marke 
 + of Marye Shacksper." Some think that such evidence 
 tends to indicate that the poet's parents could neither 
 read nor write. However this may be, it is probable that 
 both of them were better educated than the average well- 
 to-do inhabitants of our best cities at the present day, for 
 his parents learned the world at first hand, through the 
 
 SHAKESPEARE'S HOUSE (THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE) 
 
 'exercise of their own senses and reflective powers, and 
 not at second hand through books. Had the dramatist 
 not been an unusually close observer, he could never 
 have written his plays. Had his parents been in the 
 habit of referring him to books for everything, he could 
 never have become a close observer. 
 
 It is probable that his mother was the sympathetic 
 
 HA I,. ENG. LIT. IO
 
 150 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 teacher who trained him to miss nothing that came 
 within range of his senses. We can fancy her pointing 
 out to him 
 
 "... daffodils, 
 
 That come before the swallow dares, and take 
 The winds of March with beauty ; violets dim, 
 But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes. 1 ' 1 
 
 We can imagine that from her rude song, as she walked 
 with him over the Stratford fields, he obtained sugges- 
 tions which enabled him to hold captive the ear of the 
 world, when he sang of the pearl in the cowslip's ear, of 
 the bank where the wild thyme blows, of the greenwood 
 tree and the merry note of the bird, of the beauty of the 
 morning, in strains like this: 
 
 '' Hark, hark ! the lark at heaven's gate sings, 
 And Phrebus 'gins arise, 
 His steeds to water at those springs 
 On chaliced flowers that lies ; 
 And winking Mary-buds begin 
 To ope their golden eyes." 2 
 
 What he learned at School. In all probability Shake- 
 speare entered the Stratford Grammar School at about the 
 age of seven and continued there until he was nearly 
 fourteen. The typical course in grammar schools of 
 that period consisted principally of various Latin authors. 
 One school in 1583 had twenty-five Latin books on its, 
 list of studies, while the only required works in English 
 were the Catechism, Psalter, Book of Common Prayer, 
 and Neiv Testament. Children were put to studying 
 Lilly's Latin Grammar instead of learning their mother 
 tongue. Among the works which Shakespeare probably 
 
 1 The Winter's Tale, IV., 4. 2 Cymbeline, II., 3.
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 
 
 > 
 
 CLASS ROOM IN STRATFORD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 1 
 
 read in Latin, ysop's Fables and Ovid's Metamorphoses 
 may be mentioned. 
 
 In the fourth act of The Merry Wives of Windsor, 
 Shakespeare ridicules the 
 current study of the 
 schools. Mrs. Page 
 there complains 
 to the parson: 
 "Sir Hugh, 
 my husband 
 says my son 
 profits noth- 
 ing in the 
 world at his \ 
 book." In the 
 fifth act of 
 Love's Labor s 
 Lost, we are shown adults making a pedantic display of 
 just such wordy learning as Shakespeare was forced to 
 acquire at school. He has two of his characters thus 
 criticise such " learning " : 
 
 "Moth. (Aside to Costard?) They have been at a great feast of 
 languages, and stolen the scraps. 
 
 " Costard. O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words." 
 
 Study of Human Nature. In some way or other 
 Shakespeare managed to learn more about human nature 
 than any other mortal. He learned to watch human 
 beings of every rank with the same sympathetic eyes 
 with which he observed the daffodil and the wild bird. 
 The hopes and fears of others appealed to him almost 
 as strongly as his own. People like to talk with one 
 
 1 Tradition says that Shakespeare occupied the desk in the farthest corner.
 
 152 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 who sympathizes with them. No author can become 
 great unless he draws close to the universal heart of 
 humanity, as well without, as within, his own set or 
 coterie. To Shakespeare, the blacksmith was as human 
 as the lord. An eminent critic says: "He could talk 
 simply and naturally without a touch of patronage or 
 condescension to a hodman on his ladder, a costermonger 
 at his stall, the tailor on his board, the cobbler in his 
 combe, the hen-wife in her poultry-yard, the plowman 
 in his furrow, or the base mechanicals at the wayside 
 country inn." If this had not been the case, the Eliza- 
 bethan drama could not have sounded so many notes of 
 hope, love, fear, ambition, and despair; in other words, 
 the drama could not have been complete. Close observa- 
 tion is the child of sympathy. Lines like these show his 
 power in noting what to most would be trivial : - 
 
 " I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus, 
 The whilst his iron did on the anvil cool, 
 With open mouth swallowing a tailor's news ; 
 Who, with his shears and measure in his hand, 
 Standing in slippers, which his nimble haste 
 Had falsely thrust on contrary feet, 
 Told of a many thousand warlike French, 
 That were embattailed and rank'd in Kent." 1 
 
 Life in London. In 1582, at the age of eighteen, 
 William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, a woman 
 nearly eight years his senior. The next year his first 
 child, Susanna, was born, and two years later Hamnet 
 and Judith, twin children, were added to his family. 
 He and his parents were poor, and he probably real- 
 ized that Stratford was no place for him, if he was 
 
 1 King John, IV., 2.
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 153 
 
 to provide properly for his wife and children, and re- 
 gain the family estates which his father had lost a few 
 years before. Accordingly, at about the age of twenty- 
 one, he set out for London and attached himself to the 
 theater. A tradition says that he not only shot some of 
 the deer of Sir Thomas Lucy, but also lampooned him 
 in cutting verses when that nobleman prosecuted him, 
 and that, to escape being severely dealt with, Shakespeare 
 fled to London. There is, however, no dispute about the 
 fact that he went to London and that he became both an 
 actor and a writer of plays. He is thought to have acted, 
 for instance, the part of the Ghost in Hamlet, of Adam 
 in As You Like It, and of Old Knowell in Ben Jonson's 
 Every Man in His Humor. 
 
 By 1592 Shakespeare had become famous as a drama- 
 tist. We know this from the attack of envious contem- 
 poraries. He was honored by Queen Elizabeth, and he 
 won the friendship of great men, like the Earl of South- 
 ampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated two of his early 
 poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece. 
 
 He became a shareholder in at least two theaters, the 
 Blackfriars and the Globe. He grew wealthy and pur- 
 chased for his family in Stratford larger estates than had 
 been held before the days of misfortune. In 1597 he 
 bought in Stratford a fine large house, known as New 
 Place. A little later he bought one hundred and seven 
 acres near his birthplace. He occasionally visited Strat- 
 ford during these years, but the majority of his time was 
 passed in London, where he probably wrote almost all 
 his plays. 
 
 Last Days at Stratford. Not far from 1613 he re- 
 turned to Stratford, where he seems to have passed the 
 remainder of his days in quiet with his family. We can
 
 '54 
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 infer from his plays that he had for some time looked 
 forward to such a quiet consummation of his labors. 
 
 There was in Shakespeare's time more or less odium 
 attached to the theatrical profession, to the playwright 
 as well as to the actor. We cannot wonder that when 
 he felt assured of his independence, he wished to go 
 where he could live the life of a country gentleman.
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 155 
 
 One of his Sonnets shows how he smarted under the dis- 
 grace attaching to his profession : 
 
 " O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide, 
 The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds, 
 That did not better for my life provide 
 Than public means, which public manners breeds 
 And almost thence my nature is subdued 
 To what it works in, like the dyer's hand." 1 
 
 It is probable that he wrote no more for the stage dur- 
 ing these years of retirement. In 1616, at the age of fifty- 
 two, this master singer of the world, who, in De Quincey's 
 phrase, was " a little lower than the angels," died and 
 was laid at rest in the parish church at Stratford. 
 
 ' Shakespeare's Non-dramatic Work 
 
 Narrative Poems and Sonnets. Not all of Shake- 
 speare's work is dramatic. He would have stood among 
 the first poets of his age, if he had not written a single 
 drama. The best of his non-dramatic poems are Venus 
 and Adonis, Lucrece, and one hundred and fifty-four Son- 
 nets. In the Venus and Adonis, possibly written before 
 he left Stratford, we find frequent allusions to the natural 
 phenomena with which he was familiar .in his Warwick- 
 shire home : 
 
 " Once more the ruby-color' d portal open'd. 
 Which to his speech did honey passage yield ; 
 Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken'd 
 Wreck to the seaman, tempest to the field, 
 Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds, 
 Gusts and foul flaws to herdsmen and to herds." 
 
 i Sonnet CXI.
 
 156 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 The comparison here indicated between the ruby lips of 
 Adonis and a red morning is more in Lyly's vein and less 
 inevitable than almost any of the similes in Shakespeare's 
 maturer work. In these early non-dramatic poems he 
 shows conscious effort to think of something to write, but 
 before long his verse came to him as easily as song to the 
 skylark. 
 
 In his Sonnets, which are the productions of a more 
 mature period, many of the references to nature are 
 masterly. The following lines from Sonnets XXXIII. 
 and XVIII. are illustrations in point: 
 
 " Full many a glorious morning hav.e I seen 
 Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, 
 Kissing with golden face the meadows green, 
 Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy." 
 
 " Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, 
 And summer's lease hath all too short a date. 1 ' 
 
 But the chief subject of the Sonnets is love, concerning 
 which he speaks in such noble lines as these : 
 
 " Let me not to the marriage of true minds 
 Admit impediments. Love is not love 
 Which alters when it alteration finds." l 
 
 Almost every phase of the emotion of love is expressed 
 in these Sonnets. Saintsbury says : " From Sappho and 
 Solomon to Shelley and Mr. Swinburne, many bards have 
 spoken excellently of love : but what they said could be 
 cut out of Shakespeare's Sonnets better said than they 
 have said it, and yet enough remain to furnish forth the 
 greatest of poets." 
 
 1 Sonnet CXVI.
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 157 
 
 The Dramas 
 
 Classification of the Plays. Shakespeare's chief work 
 consisted in writing plays, which were acted in the 
 theaters. His dramas may be divided into three classes : 
 comedies, histories, and tragedies. We may indicate the 
 following as some of the best in each class. They will be 
 read by every cultivated person. 
 
 Comedies : A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, As You Like It, The Mer- 
 chant of Venice, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, 
 
 Histories : Richard III., Henry IV., Henry V., Julius Casar. 
 Tragedies : Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet. 
 
 Counting plays which have two or more parts as one 
 play, we find that the Globe edition of Shakespeare con- 
 tains thirty-four different plays. 
 
 We may make another classification from a different 
 point of view, according to the time at which the plays 
 were written. In order to trace the growth of Shake- 
 speare's mind, it is necessary to study him chronologi- 
 cally. By such study, says Furnivall, " Shakespeare's 
 mind is shown to have run from the amorousness and fun 
 of youth, through the strong patriotism of early manhood, 
 to the wrestling with the dark problems that beset the 
 man of middle age, to the time of gloom which weighed on 
 Shakespeare, as on so many men, in later life, when, though 
 outwardly successful, the world seemed all against him, 
 and his mind dwelt with sympathy on scenes of faithless- 
 ness of friends, treachery of relations and subjects, ingrati- 
 tude of children, scorn of his kind, till at last in his 
 Stratford home again, peace came to him, Miranda and 
 Perdita, in their lovely freshness and charms, greeted him, 
 and he was laid by his quiet Avon's side."
 
 158 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 Four Periods of his Life. We may mark off four peri- 
 ods in Shakespeare's life, corresponding, in the main, to the 
 divisions indicated by Furnivall. 
 
 (1) There was the sanguine period, showing the exuber- 
 ance of youthful love and imagination. Among the plays 
 which are typical of these years are The Comedy of 
 Errors, A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, Romeo and Juliet, 
 Richard II. , and Richard III. These were probably all 
 composed before 1595. 
 
 (2) The second period, from 1595 to 1601, shows prog- 
 ress in dramatic art. There is less exaggeration, more 
 real power, and a deeper insight into human nature. 
 There appears in his philosophy a vein of sadness, such 
 as we find in the sayings of Jaques in As You Like It, and 
 more appreciation of the growth of character, typified by 
 his treatment of Orlando and Adam in the same play. 
 Among the plays of this period are The Merchant of Ven- 
 ice, Henry IV., Henry V., and As You Like It. 
 
 (3) We may characterize the third period, from 1601 to 
 1608, as one in which he felt that the time was out of 
 joint, that life was a fitful fever. His father died in 
 1601, after great disappointments. His best friends suf- 
 fered what he calls, in Hamlet, "the slings and arrows 
 of outrageous fortune." In 1601 Elizabeth executed the 
 Earl of Essex for treason and on the same charge threw 
 the Earl of Southampton into the Tower. Even Shake- 
 speare himself may have been suspected, and he had 
 probably been deceived by some one whom he had 
 trusted. The great plays of this period are tragedies, 
 among which we may instance Julius Ccesar, Hamlet, 
 Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. 
 
 (4) The plays of his fourth period, 1608-1613, are 
 remarkable for calm strength and sweetness. The fierce-
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 159 
 
 ness of Othello and Macbeth is left behind. In 1608 
 Shakespeare's mother died. Her death and the vivid 
 recollection of her kindness and love may have been strong 
 factors in causing him to look on life with kindlier eyes. 
 The greatest plays of this period are Cymbeline, The Win- 
 ter's Tale, and The Tempest. 
 
 While the dates of the composition of these plays are 
 not exactly known, the foregoing classification is probably 
 approximately correct, and it should be followed in study- 
 ing the development and the changing phases of Shake- 
 speare's mind. 
 
 Sources of the Plots. In almost all cases we can find 
 the sources of the plots of Shakespeare's plays in some 
 old chronicle, novel, biography, or older play. We can 
 find in Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and 
 Ireland, published when Shakespeare was thirteen years 
 old, the stories of Macbeth and Lear. But if Shakespeare's 
 genius had not changed the old tales in vital points, we 
 should not have had at the close of King Lear the stron- 
 gest lines he ever penned. He read Plutarch's Lives for 
 aid in writing Julius C&sar and Antony and Cleopatra, 
 while an old Italian tale gave him the framework for part 
 of The Merchant of Venice. 
 
 Even Shakespeare could not make brick without straw. 
 Here we have a fresh application of the psychological 
 truth that the imagination is dependent for its materials 
 on the stores of knowledge gleaned from the world by the 
 exercise of our own senses, by learning from other people, 
 and by thinking over what we have thus learned. When 
 a comparison is made between these dramatic masterpieces 
 and the old chronicles and tales, the student will often find 
 that Shakespeare's plays are as different from their sources 
 as the rose from the soil which nourished it.
 
 !(5o THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 General Characteristics of his Dramas 
 
 The Comic and the Tragic Spirit. Shakespeare is 
 equally successful in depicting humor and pathos, comedy 
 and tragedy. The next greatest English writer is lacking 
 in the sense of humor. John Milton could write the trag- 
 edies of a Paradise Lost and a Samson Agonistes, but he 
 could not give us the humor of A Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, The Comedy of Errors, or As You Like It. We 
 have seen that the next greatest dramatic genius, Mar- 
 lowe, has little sense of humor. Mrs. Browning correctly 
 describes the plays of Shakespeare as filled 
 
 " With tears and laughters for all time." * 
 
 Mastery of his Mother Tongue. His wealth of expres- 
 sion is another striking characteristic. In a poem on 
 Shakespeare, Ben Jonson wrote: 
 
 "Thou had'st small Latin and less Greek." 
 
 Shakespeare is, however, the mightiest master of the Eng- 
 lish tongue. He uses 15,000 different words, while the 
 second greatest writer in our language employs 7000. A 
 great novelist like Thackeray has a vocabulary of about 
 5000 words, while many uneducated laborers do not use 
 over 600. The combinations which Shakespeare has made 
 with these 15,000 words are far more striking than their 
 mere number. 
 
 Variety of Style. Shakespeare's style is remarkable. 
 When we speak of the style of Milton, Addison, or 
 Macaulay, we have some definite peculiarities which we 
 can easily classify, but Shakespeare, in holding the mirror 
 
 1 A Vision of Poets.
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE l6l 
 
 up to nature, has different styles for his sailors, soldiers, 
 courtiers, merchants, kings, shepherds, for the ale wife 
 Mistress Quickly, and for Lady Macbeth, for Hamlet the 
 philosopher, and for Bottom the weaver. 
 
 To employ so many varied styles requires genius of the 
 highest kind. In the case of the most of us, our style 
 would soon betray our individuality. When Dr. Samuel 
 Johnson tried to write a drama, he made all his little fishes 
 talk like whales, as Goldsmith wittily says. 
 
 Breadth of Sympathy. The most pronounced character- 
 istic in his plays is the extent of his sympathy with human 
 kind. There are few intelligent people who do not build 
 a barrier between the larger part of humanity and them- 
 selves. When the glass vessel breaks or the reed fails to 
 sustain the weight, the most feel contempt for the frailty 
 and the weakness. To Shakespeare, frailty and weakness 
 were as absolute facts as strength. The ivy, the myrtle, 
 and the floating water lily met his gaze, as well as the oak. 
 A carpenter might have noticed only the oak, but Shake- 
 speare's sympathy enabled him to see more, to understand 
 more, and to interpret more. 
 
 Those err who look for Shakespeare's most striking 
 quality in the myriad directions of his intellectual action. 
 He studied people because he found himself entering into 
 their joy and sorrow, because he sympathized with them. 
 It was his sympathy that gave wings to his intellect and 
 rendered its flight easy. Many Elizabethans thought that 
 Ben Jonson had more cold intellect than Shakespeare, and 
 their judgment in this respect was probably right. Sym- 
 pathy puts sun and moon and stars in the sky of knowl- 
 edge. Sympathy may create no new objects, but it throws 
 a matchless light on what was previously dark. By look- 
 ing at a world thus illumined, Shakespeare was able to
 
 1 62 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 read those secrets of the soul which are never revealed to 
 an unsympathetic eye. In one of his great tragedies he 
 wrote : 
 
 " Thou canst not speak of that thou dost not feel." l 
 
 The centuries have been strewn with the failures of writers 
 who have not heeded this adage. 
 
 In his dramas, Shakespeare enters into the lives of such 
 different characters as Hamlet and Juliet, Lear and Fal- 
 staff, Dame Quickly and Perdita, Henry the Fourth and 
 the old servant Adam. Shakespeare identifies himself 
 with the philosophic Hamlet as he voices his dissatisfac- 
 tion with the world : 
 
 " O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, 
 Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! 
 Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd 
 His canon 'gainst self-slaughter ! O God ! O God ! 
 How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable 
 Seem to me all the uses of this world ! " 
 
 Shakespeare looks at the world with the hopeful eyes of a 
 lover, as he hears Juliet say : 
 
 "This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath, 
 May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet." 
 
 When Lear's daughters have driven him out into the 
 storm, the great dramatist takes us with the helpless old 
 King. We can hear him call to the elements : 
 
 "... here I stand, your slave. 
 A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man : 
 But yet I call you servile ministers, 
 That have with two pernicious daughters joinM 
 Your high engendered battles 'gainst a head 
 So old and white as this." 
 
 1 Romeo and Juliet, III., 3.
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 163 
 
 We descend very far in the social scale when we enter the 
 tavern at Eastcheap and listen to the conversation of the 
 hostess, Dame Quickly, with Falstaff : 
 
 " Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in my 
 Dolphin-chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednes- 
 day in Wheeson week, when the prince broke thy head for likening his 
 father to a singing-man of Windsor, thou didst swear to me then as I 
 was washing thy wound, to marry me and make me my lady thy wife. 
 Canst thou deny it? Did not goodwife Keech, the butcher's wife, 
 come in then and call me gossip Quickly? coming in to borrow a mess 
 of vinegar ; telling us she had a good dish of prawns ; whereby thou 
 didst desire to eat some ; whereby I told thee they were ill for a green 
 wound ? " 1 
 
 No psychologist has ever given a more lifelike illustration 
 of the working of an uncultivated mind. All things that 
 arrested her attention are dragged into the story, in the 
 order in which they happened, although they have no log- 
 ical relation to the progress of events. Shakespeare has 
 the same sympathetic insight into her character as into 
 that of Hamlet and of Juliet. From Dame Quickly we 
 may turn to Perdita, the princess of young womanhood. 
 We can almost see Shakespeare's brown eyes glisten as 
 he tells us that 
 
 "... nothing she does or seems 
 But smacks of something greater than herself." a 
 
 His portraiture of women of varied types is well-nigh 
 marvelous. Giles says : " The fidelity of Shakespeare to 
 the innermost feelings of woman is one of the wonders of 
 his genius to women themselves. Mrs. Siddons marveled 
 at it. Feminine secrecies, which she thought no mascu- 
 line imagination could divine, she found that Shakespeare 
 
 1 King Henry IV., Part /., Act. II. 2 The Winter's Tale, IV., 4.
 
 1 64 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 had discovered ; and this not alone in the maternal 
 anguish of Constance, or the queenly grief of Katharine, 
 but even in the stony dungeons of Lady Macbeth's 
 bosom." 
 
 No class is untouched by the great dramatist's sympa- 
 thy. The old servant in As You Like It is drawn with as 
 kindly a pen as King Henry IV. and Prince Hal. 
 
 Shakespeare made this rare discovery : 
 
 "There is some soul of goodness in things evil, 
 Would men observingly distil it out." x 
 
 When a character like Shylock is presented by a great 
 actor, like Sir Henry Irving, the audience feels flashes of 
 sympathy for the Jew. True disciples of Shakespeare 
 constantly feel those touches of nature which make the 
 whole world seem more closely kin. 
 
 Universality. Other writers may have equaled Shake- 
 speare on some one side, but he has as many sides as life 
 has changes, and he is great in them all. He penetrates 
 almost every sea, harbor, creek, and rivulet of human 
 emotion. He identifies himself with the joys and sor- 
 rows of the king and of the shepherd, of youth and 
 of age. 
 
 Of him Ben Jonson truly says : 
 
 " He was not of an age, but for all time." 
 
 Shakespeare does not exhibit some popular conceit, folly, 
 or phase of thought which was merely the fashion of the 
 hour and for which succeeding generations would care 
 nothing. He voices those truths which appeal to the 
 universal heart of humanity. The grief of Lear over the 
 
 1 Henry V., IV., I.
 
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 165 
 
 dead Cordelia, the ambition of Lady Macbeth, the loves of 
 Rosalind and Juliet, the questionings of Hamlet, interest 
 us as much to-day as they did the people three hundred 
 years ago. Fashions in literature may come and go, but 
 Shakespeare's work remains. 
 
 Comparative Rank of his Work. Shakespeare is the 
 greatest writer of the ages. Goethe says : "I do not 
 remember that any book, or person, or event in my life 
 ever produced so great an effect upon me as Shakespeare's 
 plays. They seem to be the work of some- heavenly 
 genius." A cautious critic like Hallam writes: "The 
 name of Shakespeare is the greatest in all literature. No 
 man. ever came near to him in the creative powers of the 
 mind ; no man ever had such strength at once and such 
 variety of imagination." 
 
 True as these criticisms are, we must avoid inferring 
 that Shakespeare has no faults. Some of his earlier work 
 is marred by the shortcomings of the age : exaggeration, 
 lack of pruning, and lack of repression. There are also 
 euphuistic conceits scattered through his work. 
 
 His Influence on Thought. If a person should master 
 Shakespeare and the Bible, he would find all that is 
 greatest in human thought. With the exception of the 
 Scriptures, Shakespeare's dramas have surpassed all other 
 works in molding modern English thought. 
 
 Even when we do not read him, we cannot escape the 
 influence of others who have been swayed by him. For 
 generations, certain modes of thought have crystallized 
 about his phrases. We may instance such expressions as 
 these : " Brevity is the soul of wit." " What's in a name ? " 
 " The wish was father to the thought." ''The time is out 
 of joint." "There's the rub." "There's a divinity that 
 shapes our ends." " Comparisons are odorous." It would, 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. II
 
 1 66 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 perhaps, not be too much to say that the play of Hamlet 
 has affected the thought of the majority of the English- 
 speaking race. 
 
 Shakespeare's influence on the thought of any individual 
 has only two circumscribihg factors, the extent of Shake- 
 spearean study and the capacity for interpreting the 
 facts of life. No intelligent person can study Shakespeare 
 without becoming a deeper and more varied thinker, with- 
 out securing a broader comprehension of human existence, 
 its struggles, failures, 'and successes. If we have before 
 viewed humanity through a glass darkly, he will gradually 
 lead us where we can see face to face the beauty and the 
 grandeur of the mystery of existence. He will also give us 
 an added something difficult of definition ; he will alche- 
 mize the" leaden facts of life. After intimate companion- 
 ship with him, there will be, in the words of Ariel, hardly 
 any common thing in life 
 
 " But doth suffer a sea-change 
 Into something rich and strange." 1 
 
 BEN JONSON, 15737-1637 
 
 Life. About nine years after the birth of Shakespeare, 
 his greatest successor in the English drama was born in 
 London. Jonson outlived Shakespeare twenty-one years, 
 and helped to usher in the decline of the drama. 
 
 The son of a clergyman and the stepson of a master 
 bricklayer, Ben Jonson received a good education at West- 
 minster School, and, unlike Shakespeare, learned much 
 Latin and Greek. In one respect Jonson's training here 
 was unfortunate for a poet. He was taught to write prose 
 
 1 The Tempest, I., 2.
 
 BEN JONSON 
 
 167 
 
 exercises first and then to turn them into poetry. In this 
 way he acquired the habit of trying to express unpoetical 
 ideas in verse. Art could change the prose into metrical, 
 rhyming lines, but art could not breathe into them the liv- 
 ing soul of poetry. In after times Jonson said that Shake- 
 speare lacked art, but Jonson recognized that the author 
 of Hamlet had the magic touch of nature. Jonson's pen 
 rarely felt her all-embracing touch. 
 
 If Jonson served an apprenticeship as a bricklayer, as
 
 1 68 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 his enemies afterward said, he did not continue long at 
 such work. He crossed the Channel and enlisted for a 
 brief time as a soldier in the Netherlands. He soon re- 
 turned to London and became a writer for the theater, and 
 thenceforth lived the life of a writer and a student. He 
 loved to study and translate the classics. In fact, what 
 a novice might think original in Jonson's plays was often 
 borrowed from the classics. Of his relations to the clas- 
 sical writers, Dryden says : " You track him everywhere 
 in their snow." Jonson was known as the most learned 
 poet of the age, because, if his plays demanded any special 
 knowledge, no subject was too hard, dry, or remote from 
 common life for him to attempt to master. He knew the 
 boundaries of Bohemia, and he took pleasure in saying to 
 a friend : " Shakespeare in a play brought in a number 
 of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, 
 where is no sea near, by some hundred miles." 
 
 Jonson's personal characteristics partly explain why 
 he placed himself in opposition to the spirit of the age. 
 He was extremely combative. It was almost a necessity 
 for him to quarrel with some person or with some opinion. 
 He killed two men in duels, and he would probably have 
 been hanged, if he had not pleaded benefit of clergy. For 
 the greater part of his life, he was often occupied with pen 
 and ink quarrels. 
 
 When James I. ascended the throne in 1603, Jonson soon 
 became a royal favorite, and was often employed to write 
 masques, a peculiar species of drama which called for 
 magnificent scenery and dress, and gave the nobility the 
 opportunity of acting the part of some distinguished or 
 supernatural character. Such work brought Jonson into 
 intimate association with the leading men of the day. 
 
 In 1616, the year in which Shakespeare died, Jonson
 
 BEN JONSON 169 
 
 was made poet laureate. When he died in 1637, he was 
 buried in an upright position in Westminster Abbey. A 
 plain stone with the unique inscription, "O Rare Ben 
 Jonson," marks his grave. 
 
 Plays. Ben Jonson's comedies are his best dramatic 
 work. From all his plays we may select three which will 
 best repay reading : Volpone, The Alchemist, and The 
 Silent Woman. Volpone is the story of an old childless 
 Venetian nobleman whose ruling passion is avarice. 
 Everything else in the play is made tributary to this 
 passion. The first three lines in the first act strike the 
 keynote of the entire play. Volpone says: 
 
 u Good morning to the day ; and next, my gold ! 
 Open the shrine, that I may see my saint. 
 Hail the world's soul and mine ! " 
 
 The Alchemist makes a strong presentation, not of the 
 "eternal gullible" in human nature, but of certain forms 
 of gullibility and of the special tricks which the alchemists 
 and impostors of that day adopted. One character wants 
 to buy the secret of the helpful influence of the stars; 
 another parts with his wealth to learn the alchemist's 
 secret of turning everything into gold and jewels. The 
 way in which these characters are deceived is very amus- 
 ing. A study of this play adds to our knowledge of a cer- 
 tain phase of the times. In point of artistic construction 
 of plot, The Alchemist is nowhere excelled in the English 
 drama, but the intrusion of Jonson's learning often makes 
 the play tedious reading. He must, for instance, by intro- 
 ducing the technical terms of the so-called science of 
 alchemy, show that he has studied it thoroughly. One 
 character speaks to the alchemist of 
 
 " Your lato, azoch, zernich, chibrit, heautarit,"
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 and another asks : 
 
 "Can you sublime and dulcify? calcine? 
 Know you the sapor pontic ? sapor stiptic, 
 Or what is homogene, or heterogene?" 
 
 Lines like the following show that Jonson's acute mind 
 had grasped something of the principle of evolution : 
 
 "... 'twere absurd 
 
 To think that nature in the earth bred gold 
 Perfect in the instant : something went before. 
 There must be remote matter." 
 
 The Silent Woman is in lighter vein than either of the 
 plays just mentioned. The leading character is called 
 Morose, and his special whim or " humor " is a horror of 
 noise. His home is on a street " so narrow at both ends 
 that it will receive no coaches nor carts, nor any of these 
 common noises." He has mattresses on the stairs, and 
 he dismisses the footman for wearing squeaking shoes. 
 For a long time Morose does not marry, fearing the 
 noise of a wife's tongue. Finally he commissions his 
 nephew to find him a silent woman for a wife, and the 
 author uses to good advantage the opportunity for comic 
 situations which this turn in the action affords. Dryden 
 preferred The Silent Woman to any of the other plays. 
 
 Besides the plays mentioned in this section, Jonson 
 wrote during his long life many other comedies and 
 masques, as well as some tragedies. 
 
 Marks of Decline. In Jonson's plays we may study 
 the decline of the drama, and in doing this we shall the 
 better appreciate the genius of Shakespeare. We may 
 change Jonson's line (see p. 164) so that it will state one 
 reason for his not maintaining Shakespearean excellence: 
 
 He was not for all time, but of an age.
 
 BEN JONSON I/I 
 
 His first play, Every Man in His Humor, paints, not the 
 universal emotions of men, but some especial humor. He 
 thus defines the sense in which he uses humor : 
 
 " When some peculiar quality 
 Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw 
 All his effects, his spirits and his powers, 
 In their confluctions, all to run one way, 
 This may be truly said to be a Humor." 
 
 Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson gives a distorted or incom- 
 plete picture of life. In Volpone everything is subsidiary 
 to the humor of avarice, which receives unnatural em- 
 phasis^ In The Alchemist there is little to relieve the 
 picture of credibility and hypocrisy, while The Silent 
 Woman has for its leading character a man whose princi- 
 pal " humor " or aim in life is to avoid noise. 
 
 No drama which fails to paint the nobler side of 
 womanhood can be called complete. In Jonson's plays 
 we do not find a single woman worthy to come near the 
 Shakespearean characters, Cordelia, Imogen, and Desde- 
 mona. His limitations are nowhere more marked than in 
 his inability to portray a noble woman. 
 
 Another reason why he fails to present life completely 
 is shown in these lines, in which he defines his mission : 
 
 a My strict hand 
 
 Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe 
 Squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls 
 As lick up every idle vanity." 
 
 Since the world needs building up rather than tearing 
 down, a remedy for an ailment rather than fault-finding, 
 the greatest of men cannot be mere satirists. Shake- 
 speare displays some fellow feeling for the object of his 
 satire, but Jonson's satire is cold and devoid of sympathy.
 
 1/2 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 Jonson deliberately took his stand in opposition to the 
 romantic spirit of the age. Marlowe and Shakespeare 
 had disregarded the classical unities (see p. 143) and had 
 developed the drama on romantic lines. Jonson resolved 
 to follow classical traditions and to adhere to unity of time 
 and place in the construction of his plots. The action in 
 the play of The Silent Woman, for instance, occupies only 
 twelve hours. 
 
 Miscellaneous Work. Jonson also wrote some lyrics, 
 exquisite as well for their delicacy of expression as for 
 the character of the thought. A few lin.es from one of 
 his songs will show both these qualities : 
 
 " Drink to me only with thine eyes, 
 And I will pledge with mine ; 
 Or leave a kiss but in the cup, 
 And I'll not look for wine. 
 The thirst that from the soul doth rise 
 Doth ask a drink divine." 1 
 
 No one should form an estimate of Ben Jonson without 
 reading the pithy prose known as his Discoveries Made 
 upon Men and Matter. His critical power, as well as his 
 large, ungainly frame, reminds one of Dr. Samuel Johnson. 
 In the Discoveries we meet with thoughts as vigorous and 
 as tersely expressed as we find in the conversations of the 
 Doctor (see pp. 296, 297). The following from the Dis- 
 coveries may be compared with the Doctor's way of 
 stating whatever occurred to him on various subjects, or 
 with the best pedagogic thought of to-day : 
 
 " A youth should not be made to hate study before he know the 
 causes to love it, or taste the bitterness before the sweet ; but called on 
 and allured, entreated and praised." 
 
 i To Celia.
 
 BEN JONSON 173 
 
 The Discoveries contains Jonson's famous criticism on 
 Shakespeare, in which occurs this statement, noteworthy 
 because it shows how a great contemporary regarded 
 him : " I loved the man and do honor his memory on this 
 side idolatry as much as any." 
 
 General Characteristics. Jonson's plays show the touch 
 of a conscientious artist with great intellectual ability. 
 His vast erudition is constantly apparent. He is the 
 satiric historian of his time, and he exhibits the follies and 
 the humors of the age under a powerful lens. He is also 
 the author of dainty lyrics and forcible prose criticism. 
 
 Among the shortcomings of his plays, we may specially 
 note lack of feeling and of universality. He fails to com- 
 prehend the nature of woman. He is not a sympathetic 
 observer of manifold life, but he presents only what is 
 perceived through the frosted glass of intellect. His art 
 is self-conscious. He defiantly opposed the romantic spirit 
 of the age and he weakened the drama by making" it bear 
 the burden of the classical unities. 
 
 THE PRESENTATION OF ELIZABETHAN PLAYS 
 
 Theaters and Actors. The first building in England for 
 the public presentation of plays was known as The Theater, 
 and it was built in London in 1576. . The Globe Theater, 
 with which Shakespeare's name is so closely identified, was 
 erected across the Thames at Southwark in 1593. The 
 public theaters, with the exception of the stage, were roof- 
 less. The pit corresponded to the first floor of our modern 
 theaters, but it had neither chairs nor covering. The 
 great bulk of the audience, all the common people, stood 
 and jostled one another in the pit. There was no floor, and 
 hence the frequenters of the pit were sometimes called the
 
 174 
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 " groundlings." Occasionally an overviolent storm would 
 drive them out of the theater to seek shelter. Around the 
 sides of the theaters were boxes for those who could afford 
 
 them. Admission to the 
 pit was often not more 
 than a penny, but the 
 price for the best or the 
 most fashionable seats 
 was sometimes as much 
 as two shillings. The 
 aristocratic young gal- 
 lants, who went to the 
 theater as much to be 
 seen as to see, paid an 
 extra price for stools on 
 the outer edges of the 
 stage. The play usually 
 began at three o'clock in 
 the afternoon. There was 
 scarcely any scenery. 
 The stage had the same 
 setting for the Forest of 
 
 CONTEMPORARY DRAWING OF THE INTERIOR 
 OF AN ELIZABETHAN THEATER 1 
 
 1 "A rude sketch of the interior of the Swan Theater, London, as it was 
 about the year 1596, was not long since brought to light in the University 
 Library, Utrecht. It is from the hand of a learned Dutchman, Johannes de 
 Witt, who visited England toward the close of the reign of Elizabeth. The stage, 
 strongly supported on timber bulks, is occupied by three actors, and has for 
 all its furniture a bench on which a female figure is seated. Neither curtains 
 nor traverses appear. At the back of the stage, which is open to the weather, 
 is the tiring-room, to which two doors give entrance, and above this rises a 
 covered balcony or row of boxes occupied by spectators, but available at need 
 for the actors. The trumpeter is seen at the door of a covered chamber near 
 the gallery-roof, and from its summit floats a flag, having upon it the figure of 
 a swan. The form of the building is oval. No other drawing of the interior 
 of an Elizabethan theater is known to exist." EDWARD DOWDEN.
 
 THE PRESENTATION OF ELIZABETHAN PLAYS 175 
 
 Arden as for the Danish castle of Elsinore. A board 
 marked "Rome," "Venice," "Athens," or whatever place 
 it might be, announced a change 
 of scene. Active imagina- 
 tion on the part of the spec- 
 tator was needed to supply 
 the place of elaborate scenery. 
 
 The plays as a rule were prob- 
 ably well acted, and such acting 
 would in a measure make amends 
 for lack of scenery. The actors also 
 endeavored to produce some scenic 
 effect by elaborate and costly costumes. 
 The occupants of the pit would occa- 
 sionally throw apples or worse mis- 
 siles at an unsatisfactory actor. 
 Sometimes the disgusted spec- 
 tators would rush on the stage THE FOOL OF THE OLD PLAY 
 to beat all the actors. If the 
 
 fault lay with the playwright, the angry audience might 
 cowhide him or toss him in a blanket. 
 
 Excellence in the presentation of plays may seem 
 strange when we know that, prior to the Restoration in 
 1660, the women's parts were taken by boys. . Ophelia, 
 Lady Macbeth, and Desdemona were acted by boys. We 
 know that Shakespeare complained of this and other limi- 
 tations of the stage. He makes Cleopatra resent the way 
 the stage of future times will deal with her, when she 
 
 says : 
 
 " The quick comedians 
 Extemporally will stage us, and present 
 Our Alexandrian revels, Antony 
 Shall be brought drunken forth, and I shall see 
 Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness."
 
 176 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 These limitations were not without compensation, for 
 they forced the dramatist to do his utmost to produce 
 plays which could hold the attention under the most dis- 
 advantageous circumstances. The spectators were also 
 compelled to cultivate their imaginative power by using it. 
 Modern stage settings often leave little for the imagination 
 to supply. No mental power can grow without exercise. 
 
 GENERAL SUMMARY 
 
 England was vivified by the combined influence of the 
 Renaissance and the Reformation. Knowledge was ex- 
 panding in every direction and promising to crown human 
 effort with universal mastery. The Reformation removed 
 artificial restraint from the workings of the human mind. 
 To seek for knowledge in every direction was no longer 
 considered impious. 
 
 The wonders of the New World, the increase of com- 
 merce, the rise of the middle classes, and the spirit of 
 patriotism aroused in England by her enemies and her 
 victories, made the nation feel like a youth capable of all 
 things. The poets caught and reflected the spirit in the 
 air. All forces seemed to work together to inspire the 
 Elizabethans to produce the greatest literature in the world. 
 In reaching this position, they owed much to the literature 
 of Italy, but the English pupils were soon in a position to 
 instruct their Italian teachers. 
 
 The prose of the age is far inferior to the poetry. The 
 prose of Lyly is overwrought with conceits, and much of 
 Sidney's is too poetical. Hooker shows advance, but a 
 comparison of his heavy religious prose with the prayer of 
 the King in Hamlet or with Portia's words about mercy 
 in' The Merchant of Venice will show the vast superiority
 
 GENERAL SUMMARY 177 
 
 of the poetry in dealing with the same ideas. Bacon's 
 Essays are the only prose that has stood the test of time 
 well enough to claim many readers to-day. 
 
 Although the poetry covers a wide range, Edmund 
 Spenser is the only great non-dramatic poet. In England 
 the drama underwent a slow growth for centuries, through 
 the Miracle plays, Moralities, and Interludes, to the plays 
 of Shakespeare. Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson 
 are the three greatest Elizabethan dramatists, but they are 
 only the central figures of a group of singers. 
 
 The English drama in the hands of Sackville imitated 
 Seneca and followed the rules of the classic stage. Mar- 
 lowe and Shakespeare threw off the restraints of the 
 classical unities, and the romantic drama, rejoicing in its 
 freedom, speedily told the story of all life. No human 
 being was too high or too low to receive sympathetic 
 attention. This drama was spun out of the very web and 
 woof of life. The master singer of the age set the soul 
 of life to music. Later poetry considers theories and 
 justifications of life. The Shakespearean drama is neither 
 theories nor justifications of life ; it is life itself. 
 
 The chief excellences of the age consist in the freshness, 
 spontaneity, and universality or sympathetic grasp of all 
 life. An imagination of wonderful activity gave varied 
 concrete interpretation to the manifold facts of life. Such 
 an interpretation was necessary for the drama to gain the 
 ascendency and represent life on an actual stage. Ben 
 Jonson shows a decline in dramatic power because he 
 lacks Shakespeare's universality. The faults of the age 
 sprang naturally from unbridled youthful imagination and 
 the belief that the new forces acting in life would make all 
 things possible. Exaggeration and lack of repression are 
 manifest not only in Marlowe and the minor writers, but
 
 178 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 sometimes even in Shakespeare. In the majority of the 
 minor poets there are exquisite jewels, little known because 
 of the crude accretions which surround them. 
 
 Gardiner, 1 pp. 428-480 ; Underwood-Guest, pp. 427-441 ; Green, 
 Chap. VII.; Guerber, pp. 233-252; Powers's England and the Refor- 
 mation, pp. 88-136; Traill, III., 304-579. 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 Sackville. The best parts of Sackville's Induction are given in 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 271-274, and also in Fitzgibbon's 
 Early English Poetry, pp. 317-326. For Sackville's dramatic work see 
 p. 1 80, under Gorboduc. 
 
 What is there remarkable about Sackville's verse? 
 
 Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon. A selection from Lyly's Euphues 
 is given in Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 379-384. A 
 complete edition is edited by Arber in his English Reprints, 478 pp. 
 Craik also gives in Vol. I. (pp. 409-422) selections from Sidney's 
 Arcadia and Apologie for Poetrie, and (pp. 473-478) from Hooker's 
 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, and in Vol. II., pp. 14-27, from Bacon's 
 Essays, 
 
 Craik's selections from Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon will enable 
 the student to compare the structure of sentence, general style, and 
 worth of the subject matter of these four authors. Whose prose style 
 shows most improvement over Mandeville and Malory? In what 
 respects ? 
 
 Edmund Spenser. The Faerie Queene, Book I., Canto I., should be 
 read. Maynard, Merrill, & Go's English Classic Series, No. 27 (12 
 cents), contains this canto. Kitchin's edition of Book I. (Clarendon 
 Press, 60 cents) is an excellent volume. Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., 
 pp. 284-340, contains representative selections from all of Spenser's 
 great poems. 
 
 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. 1.
 
 READING REFERENCES 
 
 The student should select passages that show (a) Spenser's melody, 
 () love of the beautiful, (c) nobility of ideals, and (d) subjective cast 
 of mind. Instance stanzas that justify calling him the poets' poet. 
 Does he, as the only great non-dramatic poet of the age, show any- 
 thing of its spirit? 
 
 The Drama 1 
 
 Miracle Plays. Pollard's English. Miracle Plays, Moralities, and 
 Interludes, 250 pp. (Clarendon Press, $1.90, the best single volume on 
 the subject), gives the two Miracle plays : the Chester Play of Noafts 
 Flood (pp. 8-20), and the Towneley Play of the Shepherds (pp. 31-43), 
 which best show the germs of English comedy. Manly's Specimens 
 of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama, Vol. I., pp. 94-119, also gives this 
 Towneley play. Selections from these two may be found in Morley's 
 English Writers, Vol. IV., pp. 71-73 and 95-99. The Play of the 
 Shepherds is given almost entire in Morley's English Plays, pp. 3-1 1 . 
 
 Show how these plays differ from a bald narrative of scriptural facts. 
 Does the Play of the Shepherds show constructive plot, apart from mere 
 incident? Give some reasons for calling Miracle plays like these the 
 foundation of our drama. What general purpose did they serve in 
 their time ? 
 
 Moralities. The best Morality is that known as Everyman (Pol- 
 lard, pp. 77-96). If Everyman is not accessible, Hycke-Scorner may 
 be substituted (Morley's English Plays, pp. 12-18; Manly's Specimens 
 of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama, Vol. I., pp. 386-420). 
 
 Does the Morality show a forward step in the evolution of the drama ? 
 What were the favorite characters represented? Is the ethical spirit 
 as prominent in the modern novel as in the early drama? 
 
 Interludes. The best Interlude is John Heywood's The Four Ps. 
 Morley's English Plays, pp. 18-20, and Symonds's Shakspere^s Prede- 
 cessors in the English Drama, pp. 188-201, give as much of this Inter- 
 lude as is necessary for the student to read. 
 
 What were some of the purposes for which Interludes were written? 
 How did they aid in the development of the drama? 
 
 1 All the plays mentioned for study in this section, with the exception of 
 those by Shakespeare and Jonson, may be found in Cassell's Library of 
 English Literature, Vol. III., English Plays, edited by Henry Morley and 
 published by Cassell & Co., London, at eleven and one half shillings.
 
 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 Ralph Royster Doyster and Gorboduc. Ralph Royster Doyster may 
 be found in Arber's Reprints (40 cents), in Morley's English Plays, 
 pp. 22-46, and in Manly's Specimens, Vol. II., pp. 5-92. 
 
 Gorboduc is given in Morley's English Plays, pp. 51-64, and, under 
 the title of Ferrex and Porrex, in Dodsley's Old Plays, Vol. I. 
 
 In what different poetic forms are these two plays written? In what 
 does Gorboduc resemble classical models? Why would Shakespeare's 
 plays have been impossible if the evolution of the drama had stopped 
 with Gorboduc? 
 
 Marlowe. Read Dr. Faustus, edited by Gollancz in The Temple 
 Dramatists. This play may also be found in Morley's English Plays, 
 pp. 116-128, or in Morley's Universal Library. 
 
 Does this drama observe the classical unities? In what way does it 
 show the spirit of the Elizabethan age? Was the poetic form of the 
 play the regular vehicle of dramatic expression? In what does the 
 greatness of the play consist ? What are its defects ? Why do young 
 people sometimes think Marlowe the greatest of all the Elizabethan 
 dramatists ? 
 
 Shakespeare. Students who at this point in their course have 
 sufficient time to read three of Shakespeare's plays should choose one 
 tragedy, either Hamlet or Macbeth, one historical play, Julius Caesar, 
 and one comedy, The Merchant of Venice. These plays, with good 
 explanatory notes, may be found in the Eclectic English Classics Series 
 or the Rolfe Series (American Book Co.). Among other good annotated 
 editions of separate plays are those of Clark and Wright, Verity, and 
 Arden. Furness's Variorum Shakespeare is the best for exhaustive study. 
 The student cannot do better than follow the advice of Dr. Johnson : 
 " Let him who is unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and 
 who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read 
 every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all 
 his commentators. . . . Let him read on through brightness and 
 obscurity, through integrity and corruption ; let him preserve his com- 
 prehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when 
 the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and 
 read the commentators." 
 
 For effective study, the student must bring to Shakespeare wide 
 sympathy with life, keen observing powers, and the capacity for reflect- 
 ing on what he sees and reads. To such a student, Shakespeare will 
 speak with myriad tongues. Let the student frequently apply to himself 
 these two lines from Coleridge :
 
 READING REFERENCES l8l 
 
 " O Lady ! we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life does nature live." 
 
 What in these plays specially shows Shakespeare's (#) variety of 
 style, (<) power over laughter and tears, (c) strength of imagination, 
 (d) breadth of sympathy, (e) depth of feeling, and (/") universality 
 or myriad-mindedness ? Is there anything in Marlowe worthy of 
 Shakespeare ? In what special points does Marlowe fail to rank with 
 Shakespeare? Take a certain play and show how Shakespeare treated 
 the classical unities. What did he gain by this treatment? 
 
 Ben Jonson. The Alchemist may be found in the Canterbury 
 Poets edition of his Dramatic Works and Lyrics, edited by Symonds 
 (40 cents) ; also, with Volpone and The Silent Woman, in Morley's 
 Universal Library, No. 20 (40 cents). 
 
 Why is the plot of The Alchemist called unusually fine ? How does 
 Shakespeare's humor differ from Jonson's ? Compare Marlowe, Shake- 
 speare, and Jonson in their power of portraying women. How did 
 Jonson regard the classical unities? In what ways does he show a 
 decline in the drama? Why is he called a great dramatist? 
 
 Jonson's Discoveries Made upon Men and Matter (Cassell's National 
 Library, No. 169, 10 cents) contains his striking thoughts on educa- 
 tion (pp. 98-101), the oft-quoted criticism of Shakespeare (pp. 47, 
 48, 169-172), and a number of fine lyrics (pp. 161-192), such as " Drink 
 to me only with thine eyes." 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Creigh ton's The Age of Elizabeth. 
 HalFs Society in the Elizabethan Age. 
 Warner's The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote. 
 Goadby's The England of Shakespeare. 
 Beesley's Life of Elizabeth. ' 
 
 Rye's England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth anct 
 James I. 
 Froude's History of England. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 12
 
 1 82 THE AGE OF ELIZABETH 
 
 GENERAL LITERATURE 
 
 Saintsbury's A History of Elizabethan Literature. 
 
 Morley's English Writers, Vols. IX., X., XI. 
 
 Taine's English Literature, Book II., Chaps. II., III., IV. 
 
 Whipple's The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. 
 
 Minto's Characteristics of English Poets, pp. 163-367. 
 
 Minto's English Prose Writers, pp. 197-251. 
 
 Gosse's A Short History of Modern English Literature, pp. 73-128. 
 
 Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 103-284. 
 
 Courthope's History of English Poetry, Vol. II. 
 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. 275-566. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 267-598. 
 
 Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics. 
 
 SPECIAL AUTHORS 
 
 Lyly, in Dictionary of National Biography. 
 Symonds's Life of Sidney. 
 Sidney's Apologie for Poetrie (Arber Reprints). 
 Walton's Life of Hooker. 
 Hooker, in Dictionary of National Biography. 
 Church's Life of Bacon. 
 Church's Life of Spenser. 
 
 Dowden's Transcripts and Studies (pp. 269-337) contains Spenser 
 the Poet and Teacher, and The Heroines of Spenser. 
 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes ; Sped' 
 mens of the Pre-Elizabethan Drama, with an introduction, Notes, and 
 Glossary. 
 
 Smith's York Plays (Clarendon Press). 
 
 Symonds's Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama. 
 
 Bates's The English Religious Drama. 
 
 Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shakspearean Drama, 3 vols. 
 
 Dodsley's Old Plays, Vols. I. and II. 
 
 Gayley's Representative English Comedies. 
 
 Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry, 3 vols.
 
 READING REFERENCES 183 
 
 Ward's A History of English Dramatic Literature, 3 vols. 
 Lowell's The Old English Dramatists. 
 
 Marlowe in Encyclopedia Britannica and Dictionary of National 
 Biography. 
 
 Symonds's Introduction to Marlowe in Mermaid Series of Dramatists. 
 Christopher Marlowe in Dowden's Transcripts and Studies, pp. 
 
 431-453- 
 
 Symonds's Ben Jonson. 
 
 Swinburne's A Study of Ben Jonson. 
 
 Symonds's Selections from Ben Jonson in Canterbury Poets Series. 
 
 SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Sidney Lee's A Life of William Shakespeare. 
 
 Halliwell-Phillips's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare. 
 
 Wilder's The Life of Shakespeare. 
 
 Fleay's A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of Shakespeare. 
 
 Williams's Homes and Haunts of Shakespeare. 
 
 Hudson's Life, Art, and Characters of Shakespeare. 
 
 Baynes's Shakespeare Studies and Other Essays. 
 
 How Shakespeare^s Senses were Trained, Chap. X., in Halleck's 
 Education of the Central Nervous System. 
 
 Harting's The Ornithology of Shakespeare (excellent for young 
 students). 
 
 Rolfe's Shakespeare the Boy. 
 
 Dowden's Shakspere Primer. 
 
 Dovvden's Shakspere : A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. 
 
 Coleridge's Notes and Lectures on the Plays of Shakespeare. 
 
 Brandes's William Shakespeare : A Critical Study, 2 vols. 
 
 Ten Brink's Five Lectures on Shakespeare. 
 
 Mrs. Jameson's Characteristics of Women. 
 
 Weiss's Wit, Humor, and Shakspeare. 
 
 Gervinus's Shakespeare Commentaries. 
 
 Dyer's Folk-Lore of Shakespeare. 
 
 Madden's The Diary of Master William Silence: A Study of Shake- 
 speare and of Elizabethan Sport. 
 
 Boswell-Stone's Shakespeare^s Holinshed. 
 
 Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar. 
 
 Bartlett's Shakespeare Concordance.
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 Why Termed "Puritan Age." We call the era fol- 
 lowing the death of Elizabeth the age of Puritan in- 
 fluence for two reasons: (i) The Puritan standard of 
 morals and of government became triumphant during 
 this period and affected the character of the literature. 
 (2) The greatest writer of the age, the second greatest 
 in English literature, is the Puritan, John Milton. 
 
 We must remember that different periods of English 
 literature overlap each other to a considerable extent. 
 To aid the memory, we make classifications which are 
 only roughly true. We have seen that the Elizabethans, 
 Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Bacon, lived for a con- 
 siderable time after the death of Elizabeth. Indeed, some 
 apply the term " Elizabethan " to all the literature written 
 between 1558 and 1660, because some of the influences of 
 the age of Elizabeth are shown in Milton and in the minor 
 poetry of the period here called the Puritan age. 
 
 An Age of Controversy. There are some characteris- 
 tics which sharply differentiate this age from the pre- 
 ceding one. It was an age of controversy in literature 
 and politics. The pen and the bullet were both used 
 to advance party interests. Milton's Paradise Lost is an 
 epic of conflict to the bitter end, an epic which embodies 
 something of the spirit of the times through which he 
 had passed in his manhood. 
 
 184
 
 CHANGE OF IDEAL 185 
 
 The Elizabethans did not allow questions of politics and 
 religion to plunge them in civil war. Theirs was a time of 
 intense patriotism, when Englishmen were united to resist 
 the power of Spain. In fifty-four years after the defeat of 
 the Armada, Englishmen were engaged in a war between 
 King and Parliament. 
 
 Why the Age was One of Conflict. Elizabeth with all 
 her faults had the qualities that enabled her to rule well 
 and to keep the affection of her subjects. James I. (1603- 
 1625), the son of Mary Queen of Scots, was the first of 
 the Stuart line to rule in England. He was contemptible 
 and ridiculous in appearance, a coward, and a vain and 
 conceited pedant. He believed that kings governed by 
 divine right, and received from the Deity a title of which 
 no one could lawfully deprive them, no matter how out- 
 rageously they ruled. 
 
 His son and successor, Charles I. (1625-1649), tena- 
 ciously adhered to this view, and tried to govern as he 
 pleased. The resulting struggle between Royalists and 
 Puritans finally led to civil war (1642-1648), in which the 
 Puritans under the leadership of the great Oliver Cromwell 
 were victorious. Charles I. was tried on the charge of 
 being a traitor to the nation, convicted, and beheaded. 
 Oliver Cromwell then ruled as Protector, and the Puri- 
 tans were in the ascendency until 1660, when the Stuart 
 line of kings was restored in the person of Charles II. 
 
 All these events left their mark on our literature, but 
 there was another still more potent factor affecting both 
 the poetry and the prose. 
 
 Change of Ideal. Men took a view of life different 
 from the one held when the New World and the New 
 Learning promised everything that heart could wish. 
 When Raleigh and Drake were sailing on their voyages
 
 1 86 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 of discovery, and English vessels were returning with tons 
 of silver from the mines across the sea, almost everything 
 seemed possible. The revival of learning also promised 
 to enable man to unravel the secrets of Nature and com- 
 mand her to serve him as he pleased. 
 
 These expectations had not been fulfilled. There were 
 still poverty, disease, and a longing for something that 
 earth had not given. The English, naturally a religious 
 race, reflected much on this. Those who concluded that 
 life could never yield the pleasure which man anticipates, 
 who determined by purity of living to win a perfect land 
 beyond the shores of mortality, who made the New World 
 of earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jeru- 
 salem, were called Puritans. 
 
 Their guide to this land was the Bible. Our Authorized 
 Version, the one which is in most common use to-day, was 
 made in the reign of James I. From this time it became 
 much easier to get a copy of the Scriptures, and their 
 influence was now more potent than ever to shape the 
 ideals of the Puritans. In fat, it is impossible to esti- 
 mate the influence which this Authorized Version has had 
 on the language and the literature of the English race. 
 
 An Imitative Age. John Milton had the creative capac- 
 ity of the Elizabethans, but the majority of the literature 
 of this age is imitative. Strange to say, Shakespeare had 
 fewer imitators than John Donne, Ben Jonson, or Edmund 
 Spenser. The foreign models were chiefly Italian, but 
 their influence was not paramount 
 
 John Donne (1573-1631) is of interest to the student 
 of literature chiefly because of the influence which he 
 exerted on the poetry of the age. His verse teems with 
 forced comparisons and analogies between things remark- 
 able for their dissimilarity. An obscure likeness and a
 
 PROSE 187 
 
 worthless conceit were as important to him as was the 
 problem of existence to Hamlet. He acquired the name 
 of "metaphysical" poet because he loved to look at the 
 common things of life through a glass darkened with 
 metaphysical smoke. He wrote some good poetry, but 
 that found fewer imitators. 
 
 The lyrics of Ben Jonson were imitated by the minor 
 poets, some of whom claimed the distinction of belonging 
 to the "tribe of Ben." Edmund Spenser exerted an influ- 
 ence for good over the best poetry. Milton called him 
 " our sage and serious Spenser, whom I dare be known to 
 think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas." 
 
 I. THE PROSE OF THE PURITAN AGE 
 
 Variety of Subject. Prose showed development in sev- 
 eral directions during this Puritan age : 
 
 I. The use of prose in argument and controversy was 
 largely extended. Questions of government and of reli- 
 gion were the living issues of the time. Innumerable pam- 
 phlets and many larger books were written to present 
 different views. We may instance as types of this class 
 almost all the prose writings of John Milton (1608-1674). 
 
 II. English prose dealt with a greater variety of 
 philosophical subjects. Shakespeare had voiced the 
 deepest philosophy in poetry, but up to this time such 
 subjects had found scant expression in prose. 
 
 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical 
 writer of the age. In his greatest work, Leviathan ; or, 
 The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, he 
 considers questions of metaphysical philosophy and of 
 government, in a way that places him on the- roll of 
 famous English philosophers.
 
 1 88 
 
 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 III. History had an increasing fascination for prose 
 writers. Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) 
 and Lord Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion, 
 begun in 1646, are specially worthy of mention. 
 
 IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing 
 delicate shades of humor. In Chaucer and in Shake- 
 speare, poetry had already excelled in 
 
 this respect. Thomas Fuller (1608- 
 1661), an Episcopal clergyman, dis- 
 plays an almost inexhaustible fund 
 of humor in his History of the 
 Worthies of England. We find 
 scattered through his works pas- 
 sages like these: 
 
 " A father that whipped his son for 
 swearing, and swore at him while he 
 whipped him, did more harm by his 
 example than good by his correction." 
 
 Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says : 
 
 " His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the 
 better attend the effectual informing thereof." 
 
 Of the lark, he writes : 
 
 "A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and whole- 
 some when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the 
 ear with music." 
 
 Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, 
 and it was not common until the first quarter of the next 
 century. 
 
 V. Izaak Walton's Complete Angler (1653) is so filled 
 with sweetness and calm . delight in nature and life, that 
 one does not wonder that the book has passed through 
 
 THOMAS FULLER
 
 PROSE 
 
 189 
 
 about two hundred editions. It manifests a genuine love 
 of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flow- 
 ers. In his pages we catch the odor 
 from the hedges gay with wild flowers 
 and hear the rain falling softly on the 
 green leaves : 
 
 " But turn out of the way a little, good 
 scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle 
 hedge ; there we 1 !! sit and sing, whilst this 
 shower falls so gently on the teeming 
 earth, and gives a yet sweeter smell to the 
 lovely flowers that adorn those lovely 
 meadows." 
 
 IZAAK WALTON 
 
 VI. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, 
 Jeremy Taylor (1613-1 667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds 
 the chief place. His imagination was so wide and his 
 pen so facile that he has been called 
 a seventeenth century prose Shake- 
 speare. Taylor's Holy Living and 
 Holy Dying used to be read in al- 
 most every cottage. This passage 
 shows his powers of imagery as 
 well as the Teutonic inclination 
 to consider the final goal of youth 
 and beauty: 
 
 " Reckon but from the sprightfulness 
 of youth, and the fair cheeks and full 
 eyes of childhood, from the vigorous- 
 ness and strong texture of the joints of 
 
 five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsome- 
 ness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the dis- 
 tance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose 
 newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as 
 
 JEREMY TAYLOR
 
 IQO THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece . . . and 
 at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into 
 the portion of weeds and outworn faces." 
 
 II. THE POETRY OF THE PURITAN AGE 
 
 The Drama. A number of dramatists who, by some 
 Elizabethan characteristics, partly compensate for much 
 inferior work, wrote plays during the reigns of the first 
 two Stuarts (1603-1649). In so far as strict chronology is 
 concerned, we must remember that Shakespeare . pro- 
 duced some of his greatest plays in the reign of James 
 I., and that Ben Jonson did not die until 1637. We 
 shall here consider the most notable of those minor 
 dramatists of the Puritan age, who, showing the decline 
 of the drama, may yet claim some kinship with their 
 greatest predecessors. The one among this group of 
 dramatists who stands nearest to Shakespeare is John 
 Webster. His greatest play, The Duchess of Malfi, was 
 acted in 1616. This and The White Devil, which ranks 
 second, in their own limited sphere show the working of a 
 master hand. Webster's genius comes to a focus only in 
 depicting the horrible. He found a congenial task in 
 weaving the web of crime and retribution that entangled 
 the Italian Duke Ferdinand, who hired assassins to mur- 
 der his sister, the Duchess of Malfi, and her children. 
 Just before one of the most terrible scenes in the English 
 drama, a troop of madmen, loosed from the common 
 asylum, bursts in upon the Duchess, and the foremost 
 sings : 
 
 " O, let me howl some heavy note, 
 Some deadly dogge'd howl, 
 Sounding as from the threatening throat 
 Of beast and fatal fowl."
 
 THE DRAMA 19! 
 
 As the assassins tie the cord around her neck, the Duchess 
 
 says : 
 
 " Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength 
 Must pull down heaven upon me. 
 Yet stay ; heaven-gates are not so highly arch'd 
 As princes' palaces ; they that enter there 
 Must go upon their knees [Kneels~] . Come, violent death, 
 Serve for mandragora to make me sleep ! 
 Go tell my brothers when I am laid out, 
 They then may feed in quiet. 
 
 [They strangle her." 
 
 When we feel Webster's power in representing the 
 summit of human anguish, we are even then aware of 
 a decline in the drama. We miss Shakespeare's univer- 
 sality, for he has taught us that the world is one of 
 laughter as well as of tears, and that the buds of May 
 are as real as the brown leaves of October. 
 
 John Ford (i586?-i639) had Webster's fondness for 
 ghastly subjects. Ford achieved the distinction of writ- 
 ing Perkin Warbeck, which is worthy of being placed in 
 a class second only to Shakespeare's historical plays. 
 
 Francis Beaumont (1584-161 6) and John Fletcher (1579- 
 1625) were collaborators in dramatic work. In their verse 
 we may often find rare flowers of poetry growing out of 
 mire. Lines like these in Philaster, one of Beaumont 
 and Fletcher's best plays, might have been uttered by 
 Hamlet : 
 
 " Philaster. O, but thou dost not know what 'tis to die. 
 Bellario. Yes, I do know, my lord. 
 
 'Tis less than to be born ; a lasting sleep, 
 
 A quiet resting from all jealousy ; 
 
 A thing we all pursue ; I know besides 
 
 It is but giving over of a game 
 
 That must be lost."
 
 192 
 
 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 On the whole, the drama during this age steadily pur 
 sued a downward course. We miss the earlier creative 
 power and grasp of all life. The plays 
 frequently do not follow the lines of 
 orderly growth in their development. 
 They often seem to be constructed 
 from the outside, and sensational 
 scenes are too frequently intro- 
 duced abruptly to stimulate tem- 
 porary interest. The greatest 
 blemish on the 
 drama of the 
 first two Stu- 
 arts is the 
 
 FRANCIS BEAUMONT 
 
 JOHN FLETCHER 
 
 prevailing 
 
 lack of refinement in thought 
 and language and the frequent 
 neglect of the proper moral se- 
 quence to acts, - - a sequence 
 which should be as inevitable as 
 any effect, when the efficient 
 cause is operative. Shakespeare 
 shows the moral result indissolu- 
 
 bly linked to the deed itself. In Macbeth, to name one 
 of many instances, he makes us feel that 
 
 "We still have judgment here; that we but teach 
 Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return 
 To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice 
 Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice 
 To our own lips." 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher, on the other hand, repeatedly 
 neglect the fundamental laws of moral results.
 
 THE CAROLINE POETS 193 
 
 In 1642 the Puritans closed the theaters, and the course 
 of the drama for this age was run. Although the indecent 
 plays of the Restoration flourished for a while, a considera- 
 tion of the drama hereafter forms but a minor part of the 
 history of the best English literature. 
 
 The Caroline Poets. Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, and 
 Herrick, all adherents of Charles I. (Latin, Carolus, hence 
 the adjective Caroline}, are the best of the Caroline school 
 of poets. They are often called Cavalier poets, because 
 they sympathized with the Cavaliers or Royalists. 
 
 The lyric, Disdain Rettirned, of Thomas Carew (1598 ?- 
 1639?) shows both the customary type of subject and the 
 serious application sometimes given : 
 
 " He that loves a rosy cheek, 
 Or a coral lip admires, 
 Or from starlike eyes doth seek 
 Fuel to maintain his fires, 
 As old time makes these decay, 
 So his flames must waste away." 
 
 Sir John Suckling (1609?- 1642) is a perfect specimen 
 of the Cavalier type. His poem Constancy begins : 
 
 " Out upon it, I have loved 
 Three whole days together; 
 And am like to love three more, 
 If it prove fair weather." 
 
 From Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) we have this ex- 
 quisite stanza, written in prison : 
 
 " Stone walls do not a prison make, 
 Nor iron bars a cage ; 
 Minds innocent and quiet take 
 That for an hermitage ;
 
 194 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 If I have freedom in my love, 
 And in my soul am free, 
 Angels alone, that soar above, 
 Enjoy such liberty." 1 
 
 By far the greatest of this school is Robert Herrick 
 (1591-1674), a clergyman of the Church of England. He 
 left nearly thirteen hundred poems. He occupies the 
 very front rank of the second class of 
 lyrical poets. The two collections of 
 his poems are entitled Hesperidcs and 
 Noble Numbers, the latter a volume of 
 religious poems. His work is uneven, 
 and much of it is unworthy to be read. 
 There is, however, sufficient to merit 
 attention. His Corinna's Going a- 
 Maying- gives the full freshness of 
 the meadow. His lyric To the Vir- 
 
 R08ERT HERRICK gtHS IS Often qUOted \ 
 
 " Gather ye rose-buds while ye may : 
 Old Time is still a-flying ; 
 And this same flower that smiles to-day, 
 To-morrow will be dying." 
 
 A stanza like this from his religious poem The Litany 
 shows his power over melody : 
 
 "When the passing-bell doth toll 
 And the furies in a shoal 
 Come to fright a parting soul, 
 Sweet Spirit, comfort me." 
 
 Characteristics of the School. The designation "Caro- 
 line school " is applied to a group of imitative poets who 
 
 1 To Althea from Prison.
 
 THE CAROLINE POETS 195 
 
 flourished chiefly during the reign of Charles I. (1625- 
 1649). The lyrical poems of Ben Jonson and the poetry 
 of John Donne were their chief models. The greatest of 
 the school, Robert Herrick, thus addresses Ben Jonson : 
 
 " Candles I'll give to thee, 
 And a new altar ; 
 And thou, Saint Ben, shall be 
 Writ in my psalter." x 
 
 To characterize the Caroline school by one phrase, we 
 might call them lyrical poets in lighter vein. They 
 usually wrote on such subjects as the color in a maiden's 
 cheek and lips, blossoms, meadows, May days, bridal 
 cakes, the paleness of a lover, and 
 
 "... wassail bowls to drink, 
 Spiced to the brink," * 
 
 but sometimes religious subjects were chosen, when these 
 lighter things failed to satisfy. 
 
 Among the special defects of this school may be 
 mentioned overwrought conceits, strained metaphors and 
 similes, and occasional attempts at obscure philosophical 
 hairsplitting. These conceits and the misuse of figures 
 are seen at their very worst in these two lines from 
 Richard Crashaw (:6i3?-i649?), in which he calls the 
 weeping eyes of Mary Magdalene 
 
 "Two walking baths, two weeping motions, 
 Portable and compendious oceans." 
 
 But we find occasional stanzas of such rare sweetness 
 that they are worthy to linger in our memory. 
 
 1 Prayer to Ben Jonson. 
 
 2 Herrick : A Thanksgiving to God.
 
 196 
 
 THE PURITAN AGE. 1603-1660 
 
 JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674 
 
 His Youth. The second greatest English poet was 
 born in London, eight years before the death of Shake- 
 speare. John Milton's father followed the business of a 
 scrivener and so drew wills and deeds and also invested 
 money for clients. He prospered at this calling, and 
 his family did not suffer for want of money. He was a 
 man of much culture and a musical composer of con- 
 siderable note. 
 
 In 1608 the poet was born and named after his father. 
 The child seems to have given early promise of future
 
 JOHN MILTON 
 
 197 
 
 greatness. His parents had rare judgment ; they believed 
 in the boy, and, seeing that he acted as if guided by a 
 high ideal, they generally allowed him to do whatever he 
 chose. They had the painter to the court execute a por- 
 trait of the child at the age of ten. The painting still 
 exists, and shows him to have been "a sweet, serious, 
 round-headed boy." They employed 
 the best of teachers for him at home, 
 and at the age of sixteen he was 
 ready for Cambridge University, 
 where he took both the B.A. and 
 M.A. degrees. 
 
 His Early Manhood and Life 
 at Horton. In 1632 Milton left 
 Cambridge and went to live with 
 his father in a country home at 
 Horton, about twenty miles west 
 of London. Milton had been 
 intended for the church, but he 
 
 felt that he could not subscribe to its intolerance, and 
 that he had another mission to perform. His father ac- 
 cordingly provided sufficient funds for maintaining him at 
 Horton in a life of studious leisure for over five years. 
 The poet's greatest biographer, David Masson, says: 
 " Until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then, 
 he did not earn a penny for himself." Such a course 
 would ruin ninety-nine out of every hundred talented 
 young men, but it was the making of Milton. He spent 
 those years in careful study and in writing his immortal 
 early poems. 
 
 In 1638, when he was in his thirtieth year, he deter- 
 mined to broaden his views by travel. He went to Italy, 
 which the Englishman of his day still regarded as the 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 13 
 
 JOHN MILTON, AET. 1O
 
 198 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 home of art, culture, and song. After about fifteen 
 months abroad, he heard that his countrymen were on the 
 verge of civil war, and he returned home to play his part 
 in the mighty tragedy of the times. 
 
 Milton's "Left Hand." In 1642 the Civil War broke 
 out between the Royalists and the Puritans. He took 
 sides in the struggle for liberty, not with his sword, but 
 with his pen. During this time he wrote little but prose. 
 In doing this, Milton himself says : " I have the use, as I 
 may account it, but of my left hand." 
 
 With that " left hand " he wrote much prose. There is 
 one common quality running through all his prose works, 
 although they treat of the most varied subjects. Every 
 one of these works strikes a blow for fuller liberty in some 
 direction ; for more liberty in church, in state, and in 
 home relations, for the freedom of expressing opinions, 
 and for a system of education which should break away 
 from the leading strings of the inferior methods of the 
 past. His greatest prose work is the Areopagitica : a 
 Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. 
 
 Much of his prose is poetic and adorned with grand fig- 
 ures of rhetoric. He frequently follows the Latin order, 
 and inverts his sentences, which are often unreasonably 
 long. Sometimes his "left hand" astonishes us by slinging 
 mud at his opponents, and we eagerly await the loosing of 
 the right hand which was to give us the Paradise Lost. 
 
 His Blindness. The English government from 1649 
 to 1660 is known as the Commonwealth. The two most 
 striking figures of the time were Oliver Cromwell, who 
 in 1653 was styled the Lord Protector, and John Milton, 
 who was the Secretary for Foreign Tongues. All his 
 letters to the various foreign powers were written in Latin. 
 
 One of the greatest of European scholars, a professor at
 
 JOHN MILTON 199 
 
 Leyden, named Salmasius, had written a book attacking 
 the Commonwealth and upholding the late King. The 
 Council requested Milton to write a fitting answer. His 
 eyes were already failing him, and he had been warned to 
 rest them. He refused to do this, saying that he would will- 
 ingly sacrifice his eyesight on the altar of liberty. He ac- 
 cordingly wrote in reply his Pro Populo Anglicano Defen- 
 siOy a Latin work, which was published in 1651. This 
 effort cost him his eyesight. In 1652, at the age of forty- 
 three, he was totally blind. In his Paradise Lost, he thus 
 alludes to his affliction : 
 
 " Thus with the year 
 Seasons return ; but not to me returns 
 Day, o'r the sweet approach of even or morn, 
 Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose, 
 Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine ; 
 But clouds instead and ever-during dark 
 Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men 
 Cut off." 
 
 Life after the Restoration. In 1660, Charles II. was 
 made king. The leaders of the Commonwealth had to 
 flee for their lives. Some went to America for safety and 
 some were caught and executed. The body of Cromwell 
 was taken from its grave in Westminster Abbey, sus- 
 pended from the gallows, and left to dangle there. Milton 
 was concealed by a friend until the worst of the storm had 
 blown over. Some influential friends interceded for him, 
 and his blindness probably won him sympathy. 
 
 During his old age he was largely dependent on the 
 kindness of friends to read to him, and to act as his aman- 
 uenses whenever he wished to write anything. Unfortu- 
 nately he had formed his ideas of woman in the light of 
 the old dispensation. He had not educated his three
 
 200 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 daughters sufficiently for them to take a sympathetic in- 
 terest in his work, and they resented his calling on them 
 to help him. 
 
 During this period of his life, when he was totally blind, 
 he wrote Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson 
 Agonist es. He died in 1674, and was buried beside his 
 father in the chancel of St. Giles, Cripplegate, London. 
 
 Minor Poems. In 1629, while Milton was a student at 
 Cambridge, and only twenty-one years old, he wrote a fine 
 lyrical poem, entitled On the Morning of Clirist 's Nativity. 
 These 244 lines of verse show that he did not need to be 
 taught the melody of song any more than a young night- 
 ingale. 
 
 Four remarkable poems were written during his years of 
 studious leisure at Horton, L Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, 
 and Lycidas. L* Allegro describes the charms of a merry 
 social life, and // Penseroso voices the quiet but deep en- 
 joyment of the scholar in retirement. These two poems 
 have been universal favorites. 
 
 Comus is a species of dramatic composition known as a 
 Masque, and it is the greatest of its class. Some critics, 
 like Taine and Saintsbury, consider this the finest of 
 Milton's productions. The 1023 lines in Comus can soon 
 be read, and there are few poems of equal length that 
 will better repay careful reading. 
 
 Comns is an immortal apotheosis of virtue, While in 
 Geneva in 1639, Milton was asked for his autograph and 
 an expression of sentiment. He chose the closing lines of 
 
 Comus : 
 
 "... if Virtue feeble were, 
 
 Heaven itself would stoop to her." 
 
 Lycidas, one of the world's great elegies, was written on 
 the death of Milton's classmate, Edward King. Mark
 
 JOHN MILTON 2OI 
 
 Pattison, one of Milton's biographers, says : " In Lycidas 
 we have reached the high-water mark of English poesy 
 and of Milton's own production." The 193 lines in this 
 poem are not to be read lightly, but to be studied. The 
 more one studies them, the more will their greatness 
 become evident. That person is to be pitied who has no 
 sympathetic appreciation for a passage like this : 
 
 " Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use 
 Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, 
 On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks, 
 Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes, 
 That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers, 
 And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. 
 Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, 
 The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, 
 The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, 
 The glowing violet, 
 
 The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine, 
 With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, 
 And every flower that sad embroidery wears ; 
 Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, 
 And daffadillies fill their cups with tears, 
 To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." 
 
 Paradise Lost ; Its Inception and Dramatic Plan. Cam- 
 bridge University has a list, written by Milton before he 
 was thirty-five, of about one hundred possible subjects for 
 the great poem which he felt it was his life's mission to 
 give to the world. He once thought of selecting Arthur 
 and his Knights of the Round Table, but his final choice 
 was Paradise Lost, which stands first on this special list. 
 There are in addition four separate drafts of the way in 
 which he thought this subject should be treated. This 
 proves that the great work of a man like Milton was 
 planned while he was young.
 
 2O2 
 
 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 All four drafts show that his early intention was to 
 make the poem a drama, a gigantic Miracle play. The 
 closing of the theaters and the prejudice felt against them 
 during the days of Puritan ascendency may have influenced 
 Milton to forsake the dramatic for the epic form, but he 
 seems never to have shared the common prejudice against 
 the drama and the stage. His sonnet on Shakespeare 
 shows in what estimation he held that dramatist. 
 
 Subject Matter and Form. About 1658, when Milton 
 was a widower, living alone with his three daughters, he 
 began, in total blindness, to dictate his Paradise Lost, 
 
 Painting by Munkacsy. 
 
 MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS 
 
 sometimes relying on them but more often on any kind 
 friend who might assist him. The manuscript accordingly 
 shows a variety of handwriting. The work was published
 
 JOHN MILTON 2O3 
 
 in 1667, after some trouble with a narrow-minded censor 
 who had doubts about granting a license. 
 
 The subject matter can best be given in Milton's own 
 lines at the beginning of the poem : 
 
 " Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit 
 Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste 
 Brought death into the World, and all our woe, 
 With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 
 Restore us, and regain the blissful seat, 
 Sing, Heavenly Muse." 
 
 The poem treats of Satan's revolt in heaven, of his 
 conflict with the Almighty, and banishment with all the 
 rebellious angels. Their new home in the land of fire and 
 endless pain is described with such a gigantic grasp of the 
 imagination, that the conception has colored all succeeding 
 theology. 
 
 The action proceeds with a council of the fallen angels 
 to devise means for alleviating their condition and annoy- 
 ing the Almighty. They decide to strike him through his 
 child, and they plot the fall of man. In short, Paradise 
 Lost is an intensely dramatic story of the loss of Eden. 
 The greatest actors that ever sprang from a poet's brain 
 appear before us on the stage, which is at one time the 
 sulphurous pit of hell, at another the bright plains of 
 heaven, and at another the Elysium of our first parents. 
 
 In form the poem is an epic in twelve books, contain- 
 ing a total of 10,565 lines. It is written in blank verse of 
 wonderful melody and variety. 
 
 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. After finish- 
 ing Paradise Lost, Milton wrote two more poems, which 
 he published in 1671. Paradise Regained is in great part 
 a paraphrase of the first eleven verses of the fourth chap- 
 ter of St. Matthew. The poem is in four books of blank
 
 204 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 verse and contains 2070 lines. Although it is written with 
 great art and finish, Paradise Regained shows a falling off 
 in Milton's genius. There is less ornament and less to 
 arouse human interest. 
 
 Samson Agonistes (Samson the Struggler) is a tragedy 
 containing 1758 lines, based on the sixteenth chapter of 
 Judges. This poem, modeled after the Greek drama, is 
 hampered by a strict observance of the dramatic unities. 
 It is vastly inferior to the Paradise Lost. Samson Ago- 
 nistes contains scarcely any of the glorious imagery of 
 Milton's earlier poems. It has been called " the most 
 unadorned poem that can be found." 
 
 Characteristics of Milton s Poetry 
 
 Variety in his Early Work. A line in Lycidas says : - 
 " He touched the tender stops of various quills," 
 
 and this may be said of Milton. His early poems show 
 great variety. We have not only the soul-stirring dirge 
 notes in Lycidas, but we also find the lines of the most of 
 his minor poems fresh with the sights, sounds, and odors of 
 the country. We have our own perception of the beauties 
 of nature quickened, as we catch sight in L Allegro of 
 
 "... beds of violets blue 
 And fresh-blown roses washed in dew," 
 
 as we inhale the matchless odors from 
 
 " The frolic wind that breathes the spring," 
 and as we find ourselves listening 
 
 " While the plowman near at hand 
 Whistles o'er the furrow'd land, 
 And the milkmaid singeth blithe, 
 And the mower whets his scythe."
 
 JOHN MILTON 2O5 
 
 Although Milton is noted for his seriousness and sub- 
 limity, we must not be blind to the fact that his minor 
 poems show great delicacy of touch. The epilogue of the 
 Spirit at the end of Comus is an instance of exquisite airy 
 fancy passing into noble imagination at the close. In 
 1638 Sir Henry Wotton wrote this intelligent criticism of 
 Comus to its author : "I should much commend the trag- 
 ical part, if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain 
 Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes, whereunto I must 
 plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in our 
 language : Ipsa mollifies" 
 
 Limitations. In giving attention to Milton's variety, 
 we should not forget that his limitations are apparent 
 when we judge him by Elizabethan standards. As varied 
 as his excellences are, his range is far narrower than 
 Shakespeare's. Milton has little sense of humor. All 
 sorts and conditions of men, with the ruddy glow of life, 
 do not throng his pages. We feel that he is farther 
 from human life than either Shakespeare or Burns. We 
 find that Milton, unlike those poets, became acquainted 
 with flowers through the medium of a book before he 
 noticed them in the fields. In speaking of flowers and 
 birds, he sometimes makes those mistakes to which the 
 bookish man is more prone than the child who first hears 
 the story of Nature from her own lips. Unlike Shakespeare 
 and Burns, Milton had the misfortune to spend his child- 
 hood in a large city. Again, while increasing age seemed 
 to impose no limitations on Shakespeare's genius, since 
 his touch is as delicate in The Tempest as in his first plays, 
 Milton's style, on the other hand, grew frigid and devoid 
 of imagery toward the end of his life. 
 
 Sublimity. The most striking characteristic of Milton's 
 poetry is sublimity, and this consists, first, in the subject
 
 206 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 matter. In the opening lines of Paradise Lost he speaks 
 of his " adventrous song " 
 
 " That with no middle flight intends to soar 
 Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues 
 Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme." 
 
 Milton succeeded in his intention. The English language 
 has not another epic poem, or a poem of any other kind, 
 which approaches Paradise Lost in sustained sublimity. 
 
 In the second place, we must note the sublimity of treat- 
 ment. Milton's own mind was cast in a sublime mold. 
 His very figures of rhetoric frequently throb with sub- 
 limity. Thus, the Milky Way is spoken of as the royal 
 highway to heaven : 
 
 "A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold, 
 And pavement stars." 
 
 When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror 
 of the scene to manifest something of the sublime. 
 What other poet could, in fewer words, have conveyed 
 a stronger impression of the effect of the frown of those 
 terrible powers? 
 
 " So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell 
 Grew darker at their frown." 
 
 The pictures painted by Milton show strength and mag- 
 nificence of touch, as well when the canvas discloses a lurid 
 sea of flame that gives 
 
 " No light ; but rather darkness visible," 
 
 as when Eden with its atmosphere of a spring dawn pre- 
 sents her 
 
 " Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose."
 
 JOHN MILTON 2O/ 
 
 In the first part of Paradise Lost, Satan is not the 
 crawling fiend that he becomes later: 
 
 " His form had yet not lost 
 All her original brightness, nor appeared 
 Less than Archangel ruined." 
 
 Harmony. A pronounced characteristic of Milton's 
 verse is harmony. Any one can detect the exquisite 
 harmony of such lines as these by reading them aloud : 
 
 " It was the winter wild, 
 While the heaven-born child 
 All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies. 
 
 u The winds, with wonder whist, 
 Smoothly the waters kissed, 
 
 " The oracles are dumb ; 
 No voice or hideous hum 
 Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving." 1 
 
 His blank verse has never been surpassed in harmonious 
 rhythm. Lines like these show the melody of which this 
 
 verse is capable : 
 
 " Heaven opened wide 
 Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound 
 On golden hinges moving." 2 
 
 How the Paradise Lost has affected Thought. Few 
 
 persons realize how profoundly this poem has influenced 
 men's ideas of the hereafter. The conception of hell for 
 a long time current was influenced by those pictures which 
 Milton painted with darkness for his canvas and the light- 
 ning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven 
 have also felt his touch. Theology has often looked through 
 Milton's imagination at the fall of the rebel angels and of 
 
 1 Hymn on the Nativity. a Paradise Lost, Book VII., lines 207-9.
 
 208 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 man. Huxley says that the cosmogony which stubbornly 
 resists the conclusions of science, is due rather to the 
 account in Paradise Lost than to Genesis. 
 
 Many of Milton's expressions have become crystallized 
 in modern thought. Among such we may mention : 
 
 "The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven, 
 What matter where, if I be still the same?" 1 
 
 "To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell: 
 Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven." 2 
 
 "... Who overcomes 
 By force hath overcome but half his foe." 8 
 
 "... Abashed the Devil stood 
 And felt how awful goodness is, and saw 
 Virtue in her shape how lovely." * 
 
 The Embodiment of High Ideals. No other poet has 
 embodied in his verse higher ideals than Milton. He 
 thought that he owed the world something which he was 
 determined to repay. When twenty-three, he wrote that he 
 intended to use his talents 
 
 " As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye." 6 
 
 Milton's poetry is not universally popular. He delib- 
 erately selected his audience. These lines from Comus 
 show to whom he would speak : 
 
 " Yet some there be that by due steps aspire 
 To lay their just hands on that golden key 
 That opes the palace of eternity. 
 To such my errand is." 
 
 1 Paradise Lost, Book I., line 254. 8 Ibid., 1. 649. 
 
 2 Ibid., 1. 262. * Ibid., Book IV., 1. 846. 
 6 Sonnet : On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-three.
 
 SUMMARY 209 
 
 He kept his promise of writing something which the 
 world would not willingly let die. That something still 
 speaks for liberty and for nobility of soul. No man with 
 his thoughts on the ground can appreciate Milton. His 
 ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To 
 him we may say with Wordsworth : 
 
 " Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart ; 
 Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea, 
 Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." l 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and polit- 
 ical ideals. The color of the Elizabethan dawn had faded 
 into leaden skies. Men realized that neither lands beyond 
 the sea nor the New Learning could fill the aspirations of 
 the soul. The Puritans turned their attention to the life 
 beyond. They felt that their ideals of this life should 
 be such as their great Taskmaster would approve. Life 
 became a ceaseless battle of the right against the wrong. 
 Hence much of the literature in both poetry and prose is 
 polemical. Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic of war 
 between good and evil. 
 
 The prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are 
 argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and 
 theological prose works, but only the fine presentation of 
 nature and life in The Complete Angler interests the general 
 reader of to-day, although the grandeur of Milton's Areopa- 
 gitica, the humor of Thomas Fuller, and the imagery and 
 variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers. 
 
 The drama shows a steady decline from the summit of 
 Elizabethan greatness. Webster and Ford manifest great 
 
 1 Milton : A Sonnet.
 
 2IO THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 power in dealing with horrible subjects, and the plays of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher are sprinkled with beautiful pas- 
 sages, but the dramatists of this age lack universality. 
 Their plays are often coarse, and fail to show orderly 
 development and the natural unfolding of moral law. 
 
 John Milton is the only great poet of this period. In 
 sublimity of subject matter and cast of mind, in nobility 
 of ideals, in expressing the conflict between good and 
 evil, he is the fittest representative of the Puritan spirit 
 in literature. Even in his minor poems, we see the young 
 Puritan pointing to 
 
 "... the crown that Virtue gives 
 After this mortal change, to her true servants." 1 
 
 In order to appreciate the difference in ideals between 
 this and the preceding age, it is instructive to compare 
 the aim of the heroes of Marlowe's Faustus and Tambur- 
 laine with that which animates Milton's Comus. While 
 Milton manifests much of the greatness of the Elizabethan 
 age, he lacks its universality and close association with life. 
 
 With the exception of Milton, the poets display little 
 creative originality. They are mainly imitators of John 
 Donne, Ben Jonson, and Edmund Spenser. The minor 
 poets of this period exhibit few traces of Shakespearean 
 influence. 
 
 Gardiner, 2 pp. 481-577; Green, Chap. VIII.; Underwood-Guest, 
 pp. 442-476 ; Guerber, pp. 252-275 ; Wakeling's King and Parliament 
 (Oxford Manuals), pp. 1-68; Frederic Harrison's Oliver Cromwell 
 (228 pp., 50 cents) ; Traill, IV., 1-345. 
 
 1 Comus, 1. 9. * For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I.
 
 READING REFERENCES 211 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 Prose. The student will obtain a fair idea of the prose of this age 
 by reading Milton's Areopagitica (Morley's National Library, No. 123, 
 10 cents ; Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. II., pp. 471-475) ; the 
 selections from Thomas Hobbes, in Craik, II., 214-221 ; from Thomas 
 Fuller, in Craik, II., 377-387; from Jeremy Taylor, in Craik, II., 529- 
 542 ; and from Izaak Walton, in Craik, II., 343-349. The student who 
 has the time will wish to read The Complete Angler entire (Cassell's 
 National Library, No. 4, 10 cents). 
 
 Compare (a) the sentences, (b) general style, and (c) worth of the 
 subject matter of these authors ; then, to note the development of Eng- 
 lish prose, in treatment of subject as well as in form, compare these 
 works with those of (i) Wycliffe and Mandeville in the fourteenth 
 century, (2) of Malory in the fifteenth, and (3) of Tyndale, Lyly, 
 Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon (e.g. essay Of Study, 1597), in the sixteenth. 
 
 The Caroline Poets. Specimens of the best work 'of Carew, Suck- 
 ling, Lovelace, and Herrick may be found in Ward's English Poets, 
 Vol. II., pp. 115-187, also in Cavalier Poets (Maynard, Merrill, & Co.'s 
 English Classics, 12 cents). The influence of John Donne, Ward, I., 
 558-566, and of Ben Jonson, Ward, II., 8-23, should be noted. 
 
 John Milton. L ''Allegro, II Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas (American 
 Book Co.'s Eclectic English Classics, 20 cents), and Paradise Lost, 
 Books I. and II. (same series) should be read. 
 
 Which is the greatest of his minor poems? Why? Is the keynote 
 of Comus in accord with Puritan ideals? Are there qualities in Lycidas 
 which justify calling it " the high-water mark " of English lyrical poetry? 
 Which poem has most powerfully affected theological thought? Which 
 do you think is oftenest read to-day? Why? What is the most strik- 
 ing characteristic of his poetry? Contrast Milton's greatness, limita- 
 tions, and ideals of life, with Shakespeare's. 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Gardiner's The First Two Stuarts and the Puritan Revolution. 
 Masson's The Life of John Milton, Narrated in Connection with the 
 Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time (6 vols.).
 
 212 THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660 
 
 Chapter VI. of Vol. I. gives a valuable survey of British literature when 
 Milton was a young man. 
 
 Masterman's The Age of Milton gives in 254 pages a survey of all 
 the literature of the age. 
 
 General work's on literature by Taine, Gosse, Saintsbury, and Phil- 
 lips. Saintsbury's A History of Elizabethan Literature comes down 
 to 1660. 
 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. II., pp. 24-379. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. II. 
 
 Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 261-295. 
 
 Pattison's Life of Milton. 
 
 Garnett's Life of Milton. 
 
 Stopford Brooke's Milton. 
 
 Masson's Poetical Works of John Milton, 3 vols., contains excellent 
 introductions and notes, and is the standard edition. 
 
 Addison's criticisms on Milton, beginning in number 267 of The. 
 Spectator, are suggestive. 
 
 Macaulay's Essay on Milton. 
 
 The Idealism of Milton, pp. 454-473, in Dowden's Transcripts and 
 Studies. 
 . Scherer's Milton and Paradise Lost, in Essays on English Literature. 
 
 Arnold's Essays in Criticism, Second Series. 
 
 For accounts of life and works of minor authors, consult Dictionary 
 of National Biography.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 Change in Morals. With the Restoration, a tremendous 
 reaction against the Puritanic view of life set in. Reaction 
 always results when excessive restraint in any direction 
 is removed. The. court of Charles II. was the vilest 
 ever known in England. Any one who insisted on purity 
 of life was mocked and called a hypocrite. The Puritan 
 virtues were laughed to scorn by the 
 ribald courtiers who attended Charles 
 II. In 1663 Samuel Butler published 
 a famous satire, entitled Hudibras. 
 Its object was to ridicule every- 
 thing that savored of Puritanism. 
 This satire became extremely pop- 
 ular in court circles, and it was 
 the favorite reading of Charles 
 II. 
 
 The change in morals is re- 
 flected in no branch of literature 
 more than in the drama of this 
 
 age. The popular plays show almost no respect for the 
 great ethical laws of life. The dramatists seemed unable 
 to grasp the truth presented with such emphasis in Shake- 
 speare's plays, that human society rests on moral founda- 
 tions, on the virtues of the home, on fidelity, kindness, 
 sympathy. The indecent drama of the Restoration, in 
 endeavoring to paint life out of harmony with these con- 
 
 SAMUEL BUTLER 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 14 
 
 213
 
 214 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 ditions, has fortunately paid the penalty by remaining for 
 the most part unread to-day. 
 
 Change in the Subject Matter of Literature. The 
 Elizabethan age impartially held the mirror up to every 
 type of human emotion. The writers of the Restoration, 
 as a class, avoided any subject which demanded a por- 
 trayal of deep and noble feeling. In this age, we catch 
 no glimpse of a Lear bending over a dead Cordelia, or of 
 the heroic characters of a Paradise Lost. 
 
 The popular subjects were those which appealed to cold 
 intellect, and these were, for the most part, satirical, didac- 
 tic, and argumentative. John Dryden, the ruling poet of 
 the Restoration, affords a typical instance of one who 
 usually chose such subjects. John Locke (1632-1704), a 
 great prose writer of this age, shows in the very title of 
 his most famous work, The Conduct of t)ie Understanding, 
 what he preferred to discuss. That book opens with the 
 statement : " The last resort a man has recourse to in the 
 conduct of himself is his understanding." This declara- 
 tion embodies a pronounced tendency of the age. It could 
 not realize that the world of feeling is no less real than 
 that of the understanding. 
 
 Neglect of Nature. A striking way in which the 
 change of subject matter manifested itself was hi the 
 neglect of references to nature. Shakespeare says : 
 
 " I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, 
 Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows." 1 
 
 In his pages we catch the gleam of the glowworm's 
 eyes, we see the summer's velvet buds, we inhale the 
 odor of the musk rose and the eglantine. " Everything 
 that pretty is " in the world of nature greets our senses 
 
 1 A Midsummer Night's Dream, II., I.
 
 CHANGE IN FOREIGN INFLUENCE 215 
 
 in his plays. With all his bookishness, Milton takes us out 
 
 of doors 
 
 "... early, ere the odorous breath of morn 
 
 Awakes the slumbering leaves," * 
 
 to visit inspiring scenery. 
 
 The poets of the Restoration, on the other hand, 
 pay but little attention to the charms of nature. Words- 
 worth says of Dryden : " There is not a single image from 
 nature in the whole of his works." Poetry which affects 
 a contempt for nature is lacking in an important element 
 of greatness. 
 
 The Study of Science. One of the best characteristics 
 of the period was its love of scientific investigation. An 
 age devoted to intellectual activity must seek various out- 
 lets. Some of the most important of these were found in 
 scientific fields. The Royal Society was founded in 1662 
 to investigate natural phenomena and to penetrate into the 
 hidden mysteries of philosophy and life. 
 
 When we remember that Locke was paid for his essay, 
 TJie Conduct of tJie Understanding, a volume of only 
 about a hundred pages, three times as much as Milton 
 received for the Paradise Lost, we may realize that the 
 taste of the age preferred the productions of cold intellect 
 to the noble creations of thought and imagination, in con- 
 junction with feeling. 
 
 Change in Foreign Influence. Of all foreign influences 
 from the beginning of the Renaissance to the Restora- 
 tion, the literature of Italy had been the most important. 
 French influence now gained the ascendency. 
 
 There were several reasons for this change, (i) France 
 under the great Louis XIV. was increasing her polit- 
 ical importance. (2) She now had among her writers 
 
 1 Arcades.
 
 2l6 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 men who were by force of genius fitted to exert wide 
 influence. Among such, we may instance Moliere (1622- 
 1673), who stands next to Shakespeare in dramatic power. 
 (3) Charles II. and many Cavaliers had passed the time 
 of their exile in France. They became familiar with 
 French literature, and when they returned to England in 
 1660, their taste had been influenced by French models. 
 
 More Attention paid to Form of Expression. A great 
 genius like Shakespeare, by the worth of what he says, 
 more than atones for any deficiencies of form. In the 
 Puritan age the metaphysical poets had nothing original 
 to utter, but even what they copied often lacks correctness 
 of form. Their shallow thoughts are frequently stated 
 obscurely ; their figurative language is often extravagant 
 or absurd. The readers of the Restoration demanded that 
 if a writer had nothing original to offer, his second-hand 
 thoughts should at least be presented in artistic form, and 
 that obscurity should no longer be employed as a cloak 
 to cover shallowness. 
 
 It is well for the student to be reminded frequently that 
 influences are often operative for a long while before their 
 results are widely felt. In the early part of the century, 
 Edmund Waller (1606-1687), a P oet very popular after 
 the Restoration, but little read to-day, had put in practice 
 the French idea that too much attention cannot be paid 
 to the formal excellence of poetry. Before 1630 he had used 
 the same French rhyming couplets which Dryden, and 
 especially Pope (see p. 234), brought to a high degree of 
 formal perfection in English verse. The following couplet, 
 the best that Waller ever wrote, will show its form : 
 
 " The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, 
 Lets in new light through chinks that time hath made." 1 
 
 1 Old Age and Death, from Divine Poems,
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 2I 7 
 
 Waller, however, found few pupils until the Restoration 
 opened wide the door to French influence, which in this 
 age and the next was potent in causing writers to pay 
 more attention to polished forms of expression. French 
 critics did not object to a commonplace thought, if the 
 style was clear, incisive, and attractive. 
 
 JOHN DRYDEN, 1631-1700 
 
 Life. John Dry den was born in 1631 in the small vil- 
 lage of Aldwinkle, in the northern part of Northampton- 
 shire. Few interesting facts concerning his life have come 
 down to us. His father was a baronet; his mother, the 
 daughter of a rector. Young Dryden graduated from 
 Cambridge in 1654. 
 
 From a print. 
 
 BIRTHPLACE OF DRYDEN 
 
 During his entire life, Dryden was a professional liter- 
 ary man, and with his pen he made the principal part of his 
 living. This necessity often forced him against his own
 
 218 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 better judgment to cater to the perverted taste of the Res- 
 toration. The theaters were opened soon after the return 
 of Charles II., and Dry den found that plays had more 
 market value than any other kind of literature. He agreed 
 to furnish three plays a year for the King's actors, but was 
 unable to produce that number. For fifteen years in the 
 prime of his life, Dryden did little but write plays, the 
 majority of which are seldom read to-day. 
 
 At the age of fifty, he showed the world where his 
 genius lay, by writing the greatest political satire in the 
 language. During the last twenty years of his life, he 
 produced but few plays. His greatest satires, didactic 
 poems, and lyrics belong to this period. In his last years 
 he wrote a spirited translation of Virgil, and retold in his 
 own inimitable way various stories from Chaucer and Boc- 
 caccio. Dryden died in 1 700 and was buried in Westmin- 
 ster Abbey beside Chaucer. 
 
 It is difficult to speak positively of Dryden's character. 
 He wrote a poem in honor of the memory of Cromwell, 
 and a little later another welcoming Charles II. He ar- 
 gued in stirring verse in favor of the Episcopal religion, 
 when that was the faith of the court. James II. was a 
 Roman Catholic, and, after his accession, Dryden wrote 
 another poem to prove the Catholic Church the only true 
 one. He had been appointed poet laureate in 1670, but 
 the Revolution of 1688, which drove James from the throne, 
 caused Dryden to lose the laureateship. He would neither 
 take the oath of fealty to the new government nor change 
 his religion. In spite of adversity and the loss of an in- 
 come almost sufficient to support him, he remained a Cath- 
 olic for the rest of his life and reared his sons in that faith. 
 
 He seems to have been of a forgiving disposition, and 
 ready to acknowledge his own faults. He admitted that
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 
 
 219 
 
 his plays were disfigured with coarseness. He was very 
 kind to young writers and willing to help them with their 
 work. In his chair at Will's Coffee House, discoursing to 
 the wits of the Restoration about matters of literary art, 
 he was one of the most prominent figures of the age. 
 
 His Prose. Although to the majority of people Dryden 
 is known only as a poet, his influence on prose has been 
 so far-reaching as to entitle him to be called one of the 
 founders of modern prose style. 
 
 The shortening of sentences has been a striking feature 
 in the development of modern English prose. Edmund
 
 220 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 Spenser averages about fifty words to each of his prose 
 sentences ; Richard Hooker, about forty-one. One of the 
 most striking sentences in Milton's Areopagitica contains 
 ninety-five words, although he crowds over three hundred 
 words into some of his long sentences. The sentences in 
 some of Dryden's pages average only twenty-five words 
 in length. We turn to Macaulay, one of the most finished 
 masters of modern prose, and find that his sentences 
 average twenty-two words. Dryden also helped to free 
 English prose from the inversions, involutions, and paren- 
 thetical intricacies of earlier times. 
 
 Dryden's prose deals chiefly with literary criticism. 
 The most of his prose is to be found in the prefaces to 
 his plays and poems. His most important separate prose 
 composition is his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, a work which 
 should be read by all who wish to know some of the 
 foundation principles of criticism. 
 
 Satiric Poetry. No English writer has surpassed 
 Dryden in satiric verse. His greatest satire is Absalom 
 and Achitophel, in which, under the guise of Old Testa- 
 ment characters, he satirizes the leading spirits of the Prot- 
 estant opposition to the succession of James, the brother 
 of Charles II., to the English throne. Dryden thus satirizes 
 Achitophel, the Earl of Shaftesbury : 
 
 " Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
 And thin partitions do their bounds divide, 
 Else, why should he, with wealth and honor blest, 
 Refuse his age the needful hours of rest? 
 Punish a body which he could not please, 
 Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease? 
 And all to leave what with his toil he won 
 To that unfeathered two-legged thing, a son. 
 
 In friendship false, implacable in hate, 
 Resolved to ruin or to rule the state."
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 221 
 
 Zimri, the Duke of Buckingham, is immortalized thus : 
 
 " Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, 
 Was everything by starts, and nothing long." 
 
 Mac Flecknoe is another satire of almost as great merit, 
 directed against a certain Whig poet by the name of Shad- 
 well. He would have been seldom mentioned in later times, 
 had it not been for two of Dryden's lines : 
 
 " The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, 
 But Shadwell never deviates into sense." 
 
 All for Love, one of Dryden's greatest plays, shows the 
 delicate keenness of his satire in characterizing the cold- 
 blooded Augustus Caesar, or Octavius, as he is there called. 
 Antony has sent a challenge to Octavius, who replies that 
 he has more ways than one to die. Antony rejoins : 
 
 " He has more ways than one ; 
 
 But he would choose them all before that one. 
 Ventidius. He first would choose an ague or a fever. 
 Antony. No ; it must be an ague, not a fever; 
 
 He has not warmth enough to die by that." 
 
 Dryden could make his satire as direct and blasting as a 
 thunderbolt. He thus describes his publisher: 
 
 " With leering looks, bull-faced, and freckled fair, 
 With two left legs, and Judas-colored hair, 
 And frowsy pores that taint the ambient air." 
 
 Argumentative or Didactic Verse. Dryden is a master 
 in arguing in poetry. He was not a whit hampered by the 
 restrictions of verse. They were rather an advantage to 
 him, for in poetry he could make more telling arguments 
 in briefer compass than in prose. The best two examples 
 of his power of arguing in verse are Religio Laid, written
 
 222 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 in 1682, to uphold the Episcopal religion, and The Hind 
 and the Panther, composed in 1687, to vindicate the Catho- 
 lic Church. Verse of this order is called didactic, because 
 it endeavors to teach or to explain something. The age 
 of the Restoration delighted in such exercises of the intel- 
 lect vastly more than in flights of fancy or imagination. 
 
 Lyrical Verse. While the most of Dryden's best poetry 
 is either satiric or didactic, he wrote three fine lyrical 
 poems: Alexander's Feast, A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 
 and An Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew. All are distinguished 
 by remarkable beauty and energy of expression. Alexan- 
 der's Feast is the most widely read of Dryden's poems. 
 The opening lines of the Ode to Mrs. Killigrew seem 
 almost Miltonic in their conception, and they show his 
 power in the field of lyrical poetry. Mistress Killigrew 
 was a young lady of rare accomplishments in both poetry 
 and painting. She died at the age of twenty-five, and 
 Dryden thus begins her memorial ode : 
 
 " Thou youngest virgin daughter of the skies, 
 Made in the last promotion of the blest ; 
 Whose palms, new plucked from Paradise, 
 In spreading branches more sublimely rise, 
 Rich with immortal green above the rest : 
 
 Thou wilt have time enough for hymns divine, 
 Since Heaven's eternal year is thine." 
 
 Some of his plays have songs and speeches instinct with 
 lyrical force. The following famous lines on the worth of 
 existence are taken from his tragedy of Aurengzebe : 
 
 " When I consider'd life, 'tis all a cheat, 
 Yet, fool'd with hope, men favor the deceit, 
 Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay : 
 To-morrow's falser than the former day,
 
 JOHN BUN VAN 223 
 
 Lies worse ; and while it says, we shall be blest, 
 With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. 
 Strange cozenage ! none would live past years again ; 
 Yet all hope pleasure in what remain. 
 And, from the dregs of life, think to receive 
 What the first sprightly running could not give. 
 I'm tir'd with waiting for this chemic gold, 
 Which fools us young and beggars us when old." 
 
 General Characteristics. In point of time, Dry den is the 
 first great poet of the school of literary artists. His verse 
 does not tolerate the un primed irregularities and exaggera- 
 tions of many former English poets. His command over 
 language is remarkable. He uses words almost as he chooses, 
 but he does not invest them with the warm glow of feeling. 
 He is, however, something more than a great word artist. 
 Many of his ideas bear the stamp of marked originality. 
 
 In the field of satiric and didactic poetry, he is a master. 
 The intellectual, not the emotional, side of man's nature 
 appeals strongly to him. He heeds not the song of the 
 bird, the color of the rose, or the clouds of evening. 
 
 Although more celebrated for his poetry than for his 
 prose, he is the earliest of the great modern prose stylists 
 and he displays high critical ability. 
 
 JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688 
 
 Life. The Bedfordshire village of Elstow saw in 1628 
 the birth of one who in his own peculiar field of literature 
 was to lead the world. The father, Thomas Bunyan, was 
 a brazier, a mender of pots and pans, and he reared his 
 son John to the same trade. In his autobiography, John 
 Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that rank 
 that is meanest and most despised of all the families in 
 the land."
 
 224 
 
 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 
 The boy went to school for only a short time and soon 
 forgot what little he had learned. The father, by marry- 
 ing a second time within a year after his wife's death, 
 wounded the feelings of his sixteen year old son sufficiently 
 to cause him to enlist as a soldier in the civil war. At 
 about the age of twenty, he married, when neither he nor 
 his wife had so much as a dish or a spoon. 
 
 Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked, 
 and he would probably have been so regarded from the 
 point of view of a strict Puritan. His worst offenses seem
 
 JOHN BUNYAN 22$ 
 
 to have been dancing on the village green, playing hockey 
 on Sundays, ringing bells to rouse the neighborhood, and 
 swearing. When he repented, his vivid imagination made 
 him think that he had committed the unpardonable sin. 
 In the terror which he felt at the prospect of the loss 
 of his soul, he passed through much of the experience 
 which enabled him to write the Pilgrim's Progress. 
 
 Bunyan became a preacher of God's word. Under trees, 
 in barns, on the village green, wherever people resorted, 
 he told them the story of salvation. Within six months 
 after the Restoration, he was arrested for preaching with- 
 out Episcopal sanction. The officers took him away from 
 his little blind daughter. The roisterers of the Restoration 
 thought a brazier was too coarse to have feelings, but he 
 dropped tears on the paper when he wrote of " the many 
 hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family were 
 like to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially 
 my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all 
 besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardship my poor blind 
 one might undergo, would break my heart to 
 pieces." In spite of his dependent family and 
 the natural right of the freedom of speech, 
 Bunyan was thrust into Bedford jail and kept 
 a prisoner for nearly 
 twelve years. 
 Had it not 
 been for his 
 imprisonment 
 in this "squalid 
 
 J r U' 1- 1- BEDFORD BRIDGE, SHOWING 
 
 den, of which he GATES AND JA1L 
 
 speaks in the Pilgrim's 
 
 Progress, we should probably be without that famous 
 
 work. Part of it, at least, was written in the jail.
 
 226 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 In 1672, as a step toward restoring the Catholic reli- 
 gion, Charles II. suspended all penal statutes against the 
 dissenting clergy, and Bunyan was released from jail. 
 
 After his release, he settled down to his life's work of 
 spreading the Gospel by both pen and tongue. He some- 
 times visited London to preach, and it was not uncommon 
 for twelve hundred persons to come to hear him at seven 
 o'clock in the morning of a week day in winter. 
 
 The immediate cause of his death was a cold caught by 
 riding in the rain, on his way to try to reconcile a father 
 and son. In 1688 Bunyan died as he uttered these words : 
 " Take me, for I come to Thee." 
 
 His life and works are a necessary supplement to an 
 account of the Restoration period, for they show how one- 
 sided an opinion of English life and literature might be 
 formed from a study of the dissolute court alone. All the 
 moral greatness of the Commonwealth period was not 
 obliterated in a day. Men like John Bunyan still lived to 
 exert a powerful influence over English life and thought. 
 
 His Work. Bunyan achieved the distinction of writing 
 the greatest of all allegories, the Pilgrim's Progress. This 
 is the story of Christian's journey through this life, the 
 story of meeting Mr. Worldly Wiseman, of the straight 
 gate and the narrow path, of the Delectable Mountains of 
 Youth, of the valley of Humiliation, of the encounter with 
 Apollyon, of the wares of Vanity Fair, " kept all the year 
 long," of my lord Time-server, of Mr. Anything, of im- 
 prisonment in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair, of the 
 flowery land of Beulah, lying beyond the valley of the 
 Shadow of Death, through which a deep, cold river runs, 
 and of the city of All Delight on the other side. This story 
 still has absorbing interest for human beings, for the child 
 and the old man, the learned and the ignorant.
 
 JOHN BUNYAN 
 
 227 
 
 Bunyan wrote many other works, but none of them 
 equals the Pilgrim's Progress. His Holy War is a power- 
 ful allegory, and it has been called a prose Paradise Lost. 
 Bunyan produced a strong piece of realistic fiction, the 
 Life and Death of Mr. B adman. This shows the de- 
 scent of a soul along the broad road. The story is the 
 counterpart of his great masterpiece, and ranks second to 
 it in point of merit. 
 
 From an old print. 
 
 BUNYAN'S BIRTHPLACE 
 
 General Characteristics. Since the Pilgrim's Progress 
 has been more widely read in England than any other book 
 except the Bible, it is well to investigate the secret of Bun- 
 yan's power. 
 
 In the first place, his style is simple. Secondly, rare 
 earnestness is coupled with this simplicity. He had some- 
 thing to say, and in his inmost soul he felt that this some- 
 thing was of supreme importance for all time. Only a
 
 228 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 great man can tell such truths without a flourish of lan- 
 guage, or without straining after effect. At the most 
 critical part of the journey of the Pilgrims, when they ap- 
 proach the river of death, note that Bunyan avoids the 
 tendency to indulge in fine writing, that he is content to 
 rely on the power of the subject matter, simply presented, 
 to make us feel the terrible ordeal : 
 
 "Now I further saw that between them and the gate was a river; 
 but there was no bridge to go over, and the river was very deep. . . . 
 The pilgrims then, especially Christian, began to despond in their mind, 
 and looked this way and that, but no way could be found by them by 
 which they might escape the river. . . . They then addressed them- 
 selve.s to the water, and entering, Christian began to sink. . . . And 
 with that, a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian, so that he 
 could not see before him. . . . 
 
 " Now, upon the bank of the river, on the other side, they saw the 
 two shining men again, who there waited for them. . . . Now you 
 must note, that the city stood upon a mighty hill ; but the pilgrims 
 went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead 
 them up by the arms ; they had likewise left their mortal garments 
 behind them in the river; for though they went in with them, they 
 came out without them." 
 
 Of all the words in the above selection, eighty per cent, 
 are monosyllables. Few authors could have resisted the 
 tendency to try to be impressive at such a climax. One 
 has more respect for this world, on learning that it has set 
 the seal of its approval on such earnest simplicity and neg- 
 lected works that strive wi'th every art to attract attention. 
 
 Thirdly, Bunyan has a rare combination of imagination 
 and dramatic power. His abstractions become living per- 
 sons. They have warmer blood coursing in their veins than 
 many of the men and women in modern fiction. Giant 
 Despair is a living giant. We can hear the clanking of the 
 chains and the groans of the captives in his dungeon. We
 
 SUMMARY 229 
 
 are not surprised to learn that Bunyan imagined that he 
 saw and conversed with these characters. The Pilgrim s 
 Progress is a prose drama. Note the vivid dramatic pres- 
 entation of the tendency to evil, which we all have at some 
 time felt threatening to wreck our nobler selves : 
 
 " Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, 
 and said, ( I am void of fear in this matter ; prepare thyself to die ; for 
 I swear by my infernal den that thou shalt go no further ; here will I 
 spill thy soul.' " 
 
 It would be difficult to find English prose more simple, 
 earnest, strong, imaginative, and dramatic than this. 
 Bunyan's style felt the shaping influence of the Bible 
 more than of all other works combined. He knew the 
 Scriptures almost by heart 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 The Restoration introduced a change in both the sub- 
 ject matter and the form of literature. With the Eliza- 
 bethans and their successors, intellectual action was but 
 the prelude to a richness of emotional life. They regarded 
 man as a being who could love and feel joy and grief. 
 The Restoration, on the other hand, looked at man chiefly 
 from the coldly intellectual side. The masterpieces are for 
 the most part couched in a satiric and a didactic vein. The 
 finest work of Dryden, the great representative of the age, 
 is his satiric and didactic verse. To the voice of nature 
 speaking through the buds of spring, the russet leaves of 
 autumn, or the song of bird, the poetry of the Restora- 
 tion turns a deaf ear. 
 
 France exerted the predominating foreign literary influ- 
 ence. Increasing attention was paid to the manner of 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 15
 
 230 THE AGE OF THE RESTORATION, 1660-1700 
 
 expressing thought. Literature began its long period of 
 worship at the shrine of formal excellence. 
 
 In prose there was a decided advance. Dryden's prose 
 might have been written by a modern hand. Few modern 
 writers have surpassed Bunyan in simplicity, energy, and 
 imaginative power. 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER VI 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Gardiner, 1 pp. 578-671 ; Green, pp. 616-700; Underwood-Guest, pp. 
 477-507; Guerber, pp. 275-290; Wakeling's King and Parliament, 
 pp. 69-115; Traill, IV., 346-511. 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 Prose. An idea of the best prose of the age may be gained from 
 the following works : 
 
 Bunyan's Pilgrini's Progress (Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. 
 III., pp. 84-96), Dryden's critical Essays (Craik, III., 148-166, or No. 
 161 in Cassell's National Library, 10 cents), Locke's Conduct of the 
 Understanding (Craik, III., 180-183). 
 
 In what does the secret of Bunyan's popularity consist in his style, 
 or in his subject matter, or in both ? What is specially noteworthy 
 about his style? In what respect was his style appreciably affected by 
 his familiarity with any other work? Select and comment on some 
 of Dryden's best critical dicta. Why is Locke's work considered a 
 classic? How does it indicate the spirit of the age? In what respects 
 does the prose of this age show advance ? 
 
 Poetry. Read the selections from Butler's Hudibras, in Ward's 
 English Poets, Vol. II., pp. 400-408; from Dryden's Alexanders Feast 
 (Ward. II., 478) ; from Absalom and Achitophel (Ward, II.. 454). 
 As a specimen of Dryden's argumentative or didactic verse, read the 
 opening lines of Religio Laid (Cassell's National Library, No. 98), or 
 the selections in Ward, II., 463-468. 
 
 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I.
 
 READING REFERENCES 231 
 
 What characteristic of the age is reflected in Hudibras ? What are 
 the qualities of this new school of poetry, of which Dryden is the 
 most famous exponent? What are his special excellences and defects? 
 Compare him with Shakespeare and Milton. 
 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Sydney's Social Life in England from the Restoration to the Revolu- 
 tion. 
 
 Macaulay's History of England. 
 
 Taine's History of English Literature, Book III., Chaps. I., II., III. 
 
 Gosse's History of Eighteenth Century Literature begins with 1660. 
 
 Garnett's The Age of Dryden. 
 
 Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 375- 
 434- 
 
 Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 312-341. 
 
 Saintsbury's Life of Dryden. 
 
 Macaulay's Essay on Dryden. 
 
 Lowell's Essay on Dryden, in Among My Books. 
 
 Dryden's Essays on the Drama, edited by Strunk. 
 
 Fowler's Life of Locke. 
 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. II., pp. 396-496. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. III., pp. 1-229. 
 
 Froude's Life of Butiyan. 
 
 Venable's Life of Bunyan. 
 
 Macaulay's Essay on Southey^s Edition of the Pilgrim >s Progress.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE FIRST FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 
 
 1700-1740 
 
 Ideals of the Age. The greater part of the eighteenth 
 century in England was marked by the existence of a low 
 moral standard. It was an age of double dealing and 
 corruption. The political situation was partly responsible 
 for this. In 1688 James II. was driven from England 
 because of his tyrannical and lawless methods. His 
 son-in-law and daughter, William and Mary, succeeded 
 him. For more than fifty years after James had been 
 dethroned, he, and after him his son and grandson, 
 made repeated efforts to return. Many of the leading 
 men of the nation tried to keep the favor of the exiled 
 princes as well as of the actual rulers. It was at times 
 impossible to tell in which direction the balance would 
 turn, hence double dealing was resorted to by many whose 
 example had wide influence because of their prominent 
 position. 
 
 The age was dull, unimaginative, and brutal. Drunk- 
 enness was extremely common. Not only the lower 
 classes, but also ministers of state and women of fashion 
 drank to excess. Bribery was the rule. The greatest 
 prime minister of the age had for a motto : " Every man 
 has his price." 
 
 Although hanging was the penalty for stealing a few 
 shillings and for numerous other offenses, this punishment 
 
 332
 
 LITERARY FORM PREFERRED TO MATTER 233 
 
 seemed to have little restraining power. Men and women 
 of fashion would go out in parties to see droves of poor 
 wretches hanged. For minor offenses, the culprits were 
 tied fast in the pillory and often maimed for life with 
 stones, bricks, and other missiles. All ranks of society 
 felt the degrading influence of such brutality. In this 
 soil nobility of soul and sympathy with one's kind did not 
 thrive. The eighteenth century furnished Swift sufficient 
 suggestions for his pictures of the Yahoos. Those who 
 object to such pictures are merely resenting the fact that 
 the ideals of the age left their mark on the literature. 
 There was not a single writer with Bunyan's moral power, 
 no Milton calling through a silver trumpet : 
 
 " Mortals, that would follow me, 
 Love Virtue ; she alone is free." * 
 
 Literary Form preferred to Matter. The desire for 
 polish and veneer, which had become marked during the 
 age of the Restoration, now attained the greatest intensity. 
 There was no poetic masterpiece of true creative imagi- 
 nation. The age was in one sense a critical one ; that is, 
 it was very particular about the way in which a thing was 
 said. The matter was considered of far less importance. 
 
 The age lacked enthusiasm and moral earnestness ; it 
 lacked imaginative comprehension of higher realities. In 
 poetry there was nothing to correspond to the Shake- 
 spearean conception as embodied in the following lines : 
 
 " The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 
 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven ; 
 And as imagination bodies forth 
 The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 
 Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
 A local habitation and a name " '-' 
 
 1 Comus, line 1018. 2 A Midsummer Nighfs Dream, V., I.
 
 234 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 Pope struck the keynote of the age when he said : 
 
 " True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, 
 What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd." l 
 
 A new thought was not so much desired as an excellent 
 dress for an old one. 
 
 The Rhyming Couplet. Almost all of the best poetry 
 of the age was written in lines of five iambic feet. The 
 two adjacent lines rhyme, and they are called a couplet. 
 There is generally a pause at the end of each line, and 
 each couplet, when detached from the context, will usually 
 make complete sense. Such lines catch the ear and they 
 are easily retained in the memory. The following couplet 
 from Pope is an example : 
 
 " A little learning is a dang'rous thing ; 
 Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring." 2 
 
 A strict adherence to the rules of the couplet cramps 
 both the reason and the imagination. Such leading strings 
 narrow freedom of movement. The greatest passages in 
 Shakespeare and Milton do not rhyme, and there is fre- 
 quently no pause in the sense at the end of a line. These 
 lines from Macbeth show how the ending of a line is not 
 allowed to interfere with the sense : 
 
 "... Besides, this Duncan 
 Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been 
 So clear in his great office, that his virtues 
 Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against 
 The deep damnation of his taking-off." 
 
 It is, however, easier for a small mind to catch the running 
 sense in Pope than in Shakespeare. 
 
 1 Essay on Criticism, line 297. 2 Ibid, line 215.
 
 THE CLASSIC SCHOOL 235 
 
 The influence of French writers was still in the ascend- 
 ency. Boileau (1636-1711), a French critic and poet, 
 whom Voltaire called the Legislator of Parnassus, advised 
 poets to compose the second line of the couplet first. 
 No better rule could have been given for dwarfing poetic 
 power and for making poetry artificial. 
 
 The Classic School. The literary lawgivers of the first 
 part of the eighteenth century held that a rigid adherence 
 to certain narrow rules was the prime condition of produ- 
 cing a masterpiece. Indeed, the belief was common that a 
 knowledge of rules was more important than genius. 
 
 The men of this school are called classicists because 
 they held that a study of the best works of the ancients 
 would disclose the necessary guiding rules. No style 
 which did not closely follow these rules was considered 
 good. Horace was the one classical author most copied 
 by this school. His Epistles and Satires were considered 
 models. The writers of this age were not the first class- 
 icists. In the days of Elizabeth, a determined effort was 
 made to have the English drama develop on classic lines 
 (p. 143). The classicists then tried to laugh down any 
 play that did not observe the rules of Seneca and regard the 
 classical unities of time and place. The Elizabethans 
 turned away from the laughers to listen to Shakespeare. 
 The first part of the eighteenth century had no such 
 genius, and all writers in order to be popular followed the 
 classical rules. 
 
 The motto of this school, of which Pope was the chief, 
 was polished regularity. The classicists cared little for the 
 fields, the flowers, and the birds. The writers closed their 
 ears to the great symphony of nature. They despised en- 
 thusiasm and the fire of passion. They disliked anything 
 that was romantic, irregular, or improbable. We find them
 
 236 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 condemning the Arabian Nights on the score of improb- 
 ability. Voltaire, a French classicist, says : " I do not like 
 the monstrous irregularities of Shakespeare." An eigh- 
 teenth century classicist endeavored to improve Hamlet's 
 soliloquy by putting it in rhyming couplets. These lines 
 show his attempt at improvement : 
 
 " My anxious soul is tore with doubtful strife, 
 And hangs suspended betwixt death and life ; 
 Life ! death ! dread objects of mankind's debate I 
 Whether superior to the shocks of fate, 
 To bear its fiercest ills with steadfast mind, 
 To Nature's order piously resigned," etc. 1 
 
 Pope was appealed to by an Episcopal bishop to polish 
 some of Milton's poetry. 
 
 Such views could not remain in the ascendency very 
 long, if imagination and fancy were to make their existence 
 felt. In 1730 James Thomson (1700-1748) published a 
 romantic poem entitled The Seasons. This deals with the 
 fields, flowers, woods, and streams. It takes us where 
 
 " The hawthorn whitens ; and the juicy groves 
 Put forth their buds." 2 
 
 This poem shows the revolt against the narrowness of the 
 classical school. In the next chapter we can trace the 
 progress of the revolt. 
 
 The Prevalence of Satire. The satirist is a critic who 
 searches for defects in order to ridicule them. Criticism 
 that concerns itself exclusively with faults is a mark of 
 deterioration in an age or in an individual. The highest 
 criticism is constructive, not destructive ; that is, it shows 
 the way to better achievements, instead of contenting itself 
 with merely holding existing things up to scorn. 
 
 1 William Hamilton of Bangour : Poems and Songs, p. 65. 
 
 2 Spring, from The Seasons.
 
 AN AGE OF PROSE 237 
 
 The greatest writers of this age, in both poetry and 
 prose, were satirists. Dean Swift, Joseph Addison, and 
 Alexander Pope excelled in satirizing the existing order of 
 things. Much of their work is of the very highest order 
 of excellence as satire, but the point to be remembered is 
 that satire can never be the highest type of literature. 
 
 The intense party strife between Whigs and Tories in- 
 creased the tendency toward satire, for the leaders of each 
 party were eager to get the services of the greatest writers 
 to satirize the opposition. Men of the rank of Swift and 
 Defoe employed their pens in political satire. 
 
 An Age of Prose. In each preceding age, if we except 
 the work of Bunyan, the masterpieces were poetry, but 
 the prose of the first half of the eighteenth century far 
 surpasses the poetry. Daniel Defoe (pp. 277-279), the 
 author of Robinson Crusoe, Dean Swift, the author of 
 Gulliver's Travels, Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, 
 the great essayists, are the principal prose writers of the 
 period. The question has been often discussed whether 
 Alexander Pope, the greatest writer in verse, is a true poet. 
 
 Matthew Arnold says : " The glory of English literature 
 is in poetry, and in poetry the strength of the eighteenth 
 century does not lie. Nevertheless the eighteenth cen- 
 tury accomplished for us an immense literary progress, 
 and its very shortcomings in poetry were an instrument 
 to that progress, and served it. The example of Ger- 
 many may show us what a nation loses from having 
 no prose style. . . . French prose is marked in the 
 highest degree by the qualities of regularity, uniformity, 
 precision, balance. . . . The French made their poetry 
 also conform to the law which was molding their 
 prose. . . . This may have been bad for French poetry, 
 but it was good for French prose." It is unques-
 
 238 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 tionably true that French writers exerted a powerful 
 influence in changing the cumbersome style of Mil- 
 ton's prose to the polished, neatly turned sentences of 
 Addison. The same influence which gave vigor, point, 
 and definiteness to the prose, necessary for the business 
 of the world, helped to dwarf the poetry. If both could 
 not advance together, we may be thankful that the eigh- 
 teenth century gave us a varied prose of such high 
 excellence. 
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT, 1667-1745 
 
 Life. Swift, one of the greatest prose writers of the 
 eighteenth century, was born of English parents in Dublin 
 in 1667. It is absolutely necessary to know something of 
 his life in order to pass proper judgment on his writings. 
 A cursory examination of his life will show that heredity 
 and environment were responsible for many of his pe- 
 culiarities. Swift's father died a few months before 
 the birth of his son, and the boy saw but little of his 
 mother. 
 
 Swift's school and college life were passed at Kilkenny 
 School and Trinity College, Dublin. For his education 
 he seems to have been dependent on the charity of an 
 uncle, who made the boy feel the bitterness of receiving 
 something at another's hand. In after times he said that 
 his uncle treated him like a dog. Swift's early experience 
 seems to have made him misanthropic and hardened to 
 consequences, for he neglected certain studies and came 
 near failing to take his A. B. degree. 
 
 After his graduation in 1688, he spent almost ten 
 years as the private secretary of Sir William Temple, 
 at Moor Park in Surrey, about forty miles southwest 
 of London. Temple had been asked to furnish some
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT 
 
 239 
 
 employment for the young graduate because Lady 
 Temple was related to Swift's mother. Here, Swift was 
 probably treated as a dependent, and he had to eat 
 at the second table. Finally, this life became so intoler- 
 able that he took holy orders and went to a little parish 
 in Ireland, a country that he hated. After a stay of 
 eighteen months there, he returned to Moor Park, where 
 he remained until Temple's death in 1699. 
 Swift then went to another little country 
 parish in Ireland. From 
 
 MOOR PARK 
 
 From a print. 
 
 there he went to 
 London on a mission 
 
 in behalf of the Episcopal church in Ireland. He quar- 
 reled with the Whigs, became a Tory, and assisted that 
 party by writing many political pamphlets. The Tory 
 ministry soon felt that it could scarcely do without him. 
 He dined with ministers of state, and was one of the most 
 important men in London. He advanced the interests of 
 his friends much better than his own, for he got little from 
 the government except the hope of becoming a bishop. 
 In 1713 he was made dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral,
 
 240 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 Dublin. In 1714 Queen Anne died, the Tories went out 
 of power, and Swift returned to Ireland a disappointed 
 man. He passed the rest of his life there, with the excep- 
 tion of a few visits to England. 
 
 Swift championed the Irish cause when English poli- 
 ticians endeavored to oppress Ireland with unjust laws. 
 A man who knew him well, says : " I never saw the poor 
 so carefully and conscientiously attended to as those of his 
 cathedral." He gave up a large part of his income 
 every year for the poor. In Dublin he was looked upon 
 as a hero. When a certain person tried to be revenged 
 on Swift for a satire, a deputation of Swift's neighbors 
 proposed to thrash the man. Swift sent them home, but 
 they boycotted the man and lowered his income ,1200 
 a year. 
 
 During the last years of his life, Swift was hopelessly 
 insane. He died in 1745, leaving his property for an 
 asylum for lunatics and incurables. 
 
 There are unsolved mysteries in Swift's life. He 
 suffered from an unknown brain disease for the principal 
 part of his existence. This affection, the galling treat- 
 ment received in his early years, and the disappointments 
 of his prime, largely account for his misanthropy, for his 
 coldness, and for the almost brutal treatment of the 
 women who loved him treatment against which Thack- 
 eray inveighs powerfully. 
 
 Swift's attachment to the beautiful Hester Johnson, 
 known in literature as Stella, led him to write to her that 
 famous series of letters known as the Journal to Stella, 
 in which he gives much of his personal history during the 
 three sunniest years of his life, from 1710 to 1713, when 
 he was a lion in London. Thackeray says : " I know of 
 nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touch-
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT 
 
 241 
 
 ing, than some of these brief notes, written in what Swift 
 calls his 'little language' in his Journal to Stella." 
 
 A Tale of a Tub. Swift's greatest satiric allegory is 
 known as A Tale of a Tub: The purpose of the work 
 is to satirize Romanists and Calvinists, and to uphold the 
 Episcopalians. For those not interested in theological 
 arguments, there is much entertaining philosophy, as the 
 following quotation will show : 
 
 " If we take an examination of what is generally understood by hap- 
 piness, as it has respect either to the understanding or the senses, we 
 shall find all its properties and adjuncts will herd under this short defi-
 
 242 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 nition, that it is a perpetual possession of being well deceived. And 
 first, with relation to the mind or understanding, it is manifest what 
 mighty advantages fiction has over truth ; and the reason is just at our 
 elbow, because imagination can build nobler scenes and produce more 
 wonderful revolutions than fortune or nature will be at expense to. 
 furnish." 
 
 Swift's satiric definition of happiness as the art " of being 
 well deceived " is a characteristic instance of a combina- 
 tion of his humor and pessimistic philosophy. 
 
 Gulliver's Travels. The world is always ready to lis- 
 ten to any one who has a good story to tell. Neither 
 children nor philosophers have yet wearied of reading the 
 adventures of Captain Lemuel Gulliver in Lilliput and 
 Brobdingnag. Gulliver's Travels is Swift's most famous 
 work. 
 
 In Lilliput we are introduced to a race of men about 
 six inches high. Everything is on a corresponding scale. 
 Gulliver eats a whole herd of cattle for breakfast and 
 drinks several hogsheads of liquor. He captures an entire 
 fleet of war ships. A rival race of pygmies endeavors to 
 secure his services so as to obtain the balance of power. 
 The quarrels between those little people seem ridiculous, 
 and so petty as to be almost beneath contempt. 
 
 The voyage to Brobdingnag shows all this to be 
 changed. Men are there sixty feet tall, and the affairs 
 of an ordinary human being appear petty and insignifi- 
 cant. The cats are as large as three oxen, and the dogs 
 attain the size of four elephants. Gulliver eats on a table 
 thirty feet high, and he trembles lest he may fall and 
 break his neck. The baby seizes Gulliver and tries to 
 swallow his head. Afterward the hero fights a desperate 
 battle with two rats. A monkey catches him and carries 
 him to the almost infinite height of the house top. Cer-
 
 JONATHAN SWIFT 243 
 
 tainly the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag merit 
 Leslie Stephen's criticism of being " almost the most de- 
 lightful children's book ever written." 
 
 The voyage to Laputa satirizes the philosophers. We 
 are taken through the academy at Lagado and are shown 
 a typical philosopher : 
 
 "He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams 
 out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials, hermetically sealed, 
 and let out to warm the air in raw, inclement summers. He told me 
 he did not doubt that in eight years more he should be able to supply 
 the governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate." 
 
 In this voyage the Struldbrugs are described. They 
 are a race of men who, after the loss of every faculty and 
 of every tie that binds them to earth, are doomed to con- 
 tinue living. Dante never painted a stronger or a ghastlier 
 picture. The voyage to the country of the Houyhnhnms 
 describes the Yahoos, who are the embodiment of all the 
 detestable qualities of human beings. The last two voy- 
 ages are not pleasant reading, and one might wish that 
 the author of two such inimitable tales as the adventures 
 in Lilliput and Brobdingnag had stopped with these. 
 
 Children read Gulliver's Travels for the story, but 
 there is more than a story in the work. In its pages 
 the historian finds allusions and side lights that reveal 
 the age more distinctly. Among the Lilliputians, there is 
 one party, known as the Bigendians, which insists that all 
 eggs shall be broken open at the big end, while another 
 party, called the Littleendians, contends that eggs shall be 
 opened only at the little end. These differences typify the 
 quarrels of the age concerning religion and politics. The 
 Travels also contains much human philosophy. The lover 
 of satire is constantly delighted with the keenness of the 
 thrusts.
 
 244 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 General Characteristics. Swift is one of the greatest 
 of English prose humorists. He is also noted for wit 
 of that satiric kind which enjoys the discomfiture of the 
 victim. A typical instance is shown in the way in which 
 he, under the assumed name of Isaac Bickerstaff, dealt 
 with an astrologer and maker of prophetic almanacs, whose 
 name was Partridge. Bickerstaff claimed to be an infalli- 
 ble astrologer, and he predicted that Partridge would die 
 March 29, 1708, at 11 P.M. When that day had passed, 
 Bickerstaff issued a pamphlet giving a circumstantial ac- 
 count of Partridge's death. Partridge, finding that his 
 customers began to decrease, protested that he was alive. 
 Bickerstaff promptly replied that Partridge was dead by 
 his own infallible rules of astrology, and that the man now 
 claiming to be Partridge was a vile impostor. 
 
 Swift's wit frequently left its imprint on the thought 
 of the time. The results of this special prank with the 
 astrologer were : first, to cause the wits of the town to join 
 in the hue and cry that Partridge was dead ; second, to 
 increase the contempt for astrologers ; and, third, in the 
 words of Scott : " The most remarkable consequence of 
 Swift's frolic was the establishment of the Tatler" Richard 
 Steele, its founder, adopted the popular name of Isaac 
 Bickerstaff (p. 248). 
 
 Taine says of Swift : " He is the inventor of irony, 
 as Shakespeare of poetry." The most powerful instance 
 of Swift's irony is shown in his attempt to make the Irish 
 understand the brutality of rearing large families in igno- 
 rance, rags, hunger, and crime. His Modest Proposal for 
 relieving such distress is to have the children at the age 
 of one year served as a new dish on the tables of the 
 great. So apt is irony to be misunderstood and to fail 
 of its mark, that the Irish thought that Swift was brutal,
 
 JOSEPH ADDISON 
 
 245 
 
 instead of themselves. His ironical remarks on The Abol- 
 ishing of Christianity were also misunderstood. 
 
 We shall search Swift's work in vain for examples of 
 pathos or sublimity. We shall find his pages caustic with 
 wit, satire, and irony, and often disfigured with coarseness. 
 One of the great pessimists of all time, he is yet tremen- 
 dously in earnest in whatever he says, from his Drapier's 
 Letters, written to protect Ireland from the schemes of 
 English politicians, to his Gulliver's Travels, where he 
 describes the court of Lilliput. This earnestness and 
 circumstantial minuteness throw an air of reality around 
 his most grotesque creations. 
 
 Although sublimity and pathos are outside of his range, 
 his style is remarkably well adapted to the special sub- 
 ject matter that he chose. While reading his works, one 
 scarcely ever thinks of his style, unless the attention is 
 specially directed to it. Only a great artist can thus con- 
 ceal his art. A style so natural as this has especial merits 
 which will repay study. Three of its chief characteristics 
 are simplicity, flexibility, and energetic directness. 
 
 JOSEPH ADDISON, 1672-1719 
 
 Life. Joseph Addison was born in the paternal rectory 
 at Milston, a small village in 
 the eastern part of 
 Wiltshire. .He 
 was educated at 
 Oxford, and he 
 intended to be- 
 come a clergy- 
 man, but he had 
 attracted attention 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 1 6 
 
 .' From an old print. 
 
 ADDISON'S BIRTHPLACE
 
 246 
 
 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 by his graceful Latin poetry, and he was dissuaded by 
 influential court friends from entering the service of the 
 church. They persuaded him to fit himself for the diplo- 
 matic service, and they secured for him a yearly pension 
 of ^300. He then went to France, studied the language 
 of that country, and traveled extensively, so as to gain a 
 knowledge of foreign courts. The death of King William 
 in 1702 stopped the pension, and Addison was forced to 
 return to England and seek employment as a tutor. 
 
 The great battle of Blenheim was won by Marlborough 
 in 1 704. As Macaulay says, the ministry was mortified to
 
 JOSEPH ADDISON 247 
 
 see such a victory celebrated by so much bad poetry, and 
 he instances these lines from one of the poems : 
 
 " Think of two thousand gentlemen at least, 
 And each man mounted on his capering beast ; 
 Into the Danube they were pushed by shoals." 
 
 The Chancellor of the Exchequer went to Addison's 
 humble lodgings and asked him to write a poem in honor 
 of the battle. Addison took the town by storm with a 
 simile in which the great general was likened to the calm 
 angel of the whirlwind. When people reflected how 
 calmly Marlborough had directed the whirlwind of war, 
 they thought that no comparison could be more felici- 
 tous. From that time Addison's fortunes rose. Since his 
 day no other man relying on literary talents alone has 
 risen so high in state affairs. He was made assistant 
 Secretary of State, Secretary for Ireland, and finally chief 
 Secretary of State. 
 
 Though Addison was a prominent figure in the political 
 world, his literary life most concerns us. In his prime he 
 wrote for The Tatler and The Spectator, famous news- 
 papers of Queen Anne's day, many inimitable essays 
 on contemporary life and manners. Most newspaper 
 work is forgotten with the setting sun, but these essays 
 are eagerly read by the most cultivated people of to-day. 
 His own age thought his tragedy of Cato, a drama observ- 
 ing the classical unities, his most famous production. This 
 fact shows how unreliable contemporary opinion may be 
 concerning the merit of an author's works, for Cato is now 
 little read. Some of his Hymns are much finer. Lines 
 like these, written of the stars, linger in our memories : 
 
 " Forever singing as they shine, 
 The hand that made us is divine."
 
 248 
 
 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 Addison had a singularly pleasing personality. Though 
 he was a Whig, the Tories admired and applauded him. 
 He was a good illustration of the truth that if one smiles 
 in the mirror of 
 the world, it 
 will answer him 
 with a smile. 
 Swift said he 
 believed the 
 English would 
 have made Ad- 
 dison king, if 
 they had been 
 
 '- ~---^^fcB^n^Mtt%>lB/^UWU^h.* 
 
 '* 
 
 _ ** . - rr.'T-fw ' ' ' -' 
 
 to place 
 
 him on the 
 
 throne. Pope's 
 
 jealous nature 
 
 strove to quarrel with Addison, but the quarrel was chiefly 
 
 on one side. Men like Macaulay and Thackeray have 
 
 exerted their powers to do justice to the kindliness and 
 
 integrity of Addison. 
 
 Addison died at the age of forty-seven, and was buried 
 in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Collaborates with Steele. Under the pen name of 
 Isaac Bickerstaff, Richard Steele (1672-1729), a former 
 schoolmate and friend of Addison, started in 1709 The 
 Tatler, a periodical published three times a week. This 
 discussed matters of interest in society and politics, and 
 occasionally published an essay on morals and manners. 
 Steele was a good-natured, careless individual, who had 
 had experience as a soldier, playwright, moralist, keeper 
 of the official gazette, and pensioner. He says that he 
 
 From an old print. 
 
 ADDISON'S HOME AT BILTON, WARWICKSHIRE
 
 JOSEPH ADDISON 
 
 249 
 
 RICHARD STEELE 
 
 always " preferred the state of his mind to that of his 
 fortune," but his mental state was often fickle, and too 
 much dependent on bodily luxuries, though he was pa- 
 triotic enough to sacrifice his personal 
 fortune for what he considered his 
 country's interest. 
 
 We find Addison a frequent con- 
 tributor to The Tatler after its seven- 
 teenth number. Steele says : " I 
 fared like a distressed prince who 
 calls in a powerful neighbor to his 
 aid ; I was undone by my auxiliary ; 
 when I had once called him in, I 
 could not subsist without depend- 
 ence on him." 
 
 The Tatler was discontinued in 1711, and the more fa- 
 mous Spectator was begun two months later. Addison wrote 
 the first number, but the second issue, which came from 
 Steele's pen, contains sketches of those characters which 
 have become famous in the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. 
 While Steele should have full credit for the first bold 
 sketches, the finished portraits in the de Coverley gallery 
 are due to Addison. In many respects, each seemed to be 
 the complement of the other. Steele's writings have not 
 the polish or delicate humor of Addison's, but they have 
 more strength and pathos. From the neglect of Steele and 
 the enduring interest in Addison, the student should learn 
 the valuable lesson that artistic finish, as well as ex- 
 cellence of subject matter, has become almost a necessity 
 for a prose writer who would not be soon neglected. 
 
 Addison, however, needed as a starting point the sug- 
 gestive originality of Steele. Of Addison, Steele says : 
 " I claim to myself the merit of having extorted excellent
 
 2 $O FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 productions from a person of the greatest abilities, who 
 would not have let them appear by any other means." If 
 it is true that the majority of readers to-day neglect 
 Steele's work, it is also true that but for him they would 
 not have Addison's best essays with which to charm many 
 an idle hour. 
 
 Addison's Essays. The greatest of Addison's Essays 
 appeared in The Spectator, which was published every week 
 day for 555 issues. The subject matter of these Essays is 
 extremely varied. On one day there is a pleasant paper 
 on witches ; on another, a chat about the new woman ; 
 on another, a discourse on clubs. Addison is properly a 
 moral satirist, and his pen did much more than the pulpit 
 to civilize the age and make virtue the fashion. In The 
 Spectator, he says : " If I meet with anything in city, 
 court, or country, that shocks modesty or good manners, 
 I shall use my utmost endeavors to make an example of 
 it." He accomplished his purpose, not by heated denun- 
 ciations of vice, but by holding it up to kindly ridicule. 
 He remembered the fable of the different methods em- 
 ployed by the north wind and the sun to make a man lay 
 aside an ugly cloak. 
 
 Addison also stated that one of his objects was to bring 
 " philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools and col- 
 leges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea tables and 
 coffeehouses." His papers on Milton did much to dimin- 
 ish that great poet's, unpopularity in an age that loved 
 form rather than matter, art rather than natural strength. 
 
 The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers. The most famous 
 of Addison's productions are his papers which appeared 
 in The Spectator, describing a typical country gentleman, 
 Sir Roger de Coverley, and his friends and servants. Taine 
 says that Addison here invented the novel without sus-
 
 JOSEPH ADDISON 251 
 
 pecting it. This is an overstatement, but these papers 
 certainly have the interest of a novel from the moment 
 Sir Roger appears until his death, and the delineation 
 of character is far in advance of what the majority of 
 modern novels can show. We find ourselves rereading 
 the de Coverley papers more than once, a statement that 
 can be made of but few novels. 
 
 General Characteristics. Before we have read many of 
 Addison's essays, we shall discover that he is a humorist 
 of high rank. His humor is of the kind that makes one 
 smile, rather than laugh aloud. We are amused, for in- 
 stance, by this sentence from Spectator No. 112 : 
 
 " As Sir Roger is landlord to the whole congregation, he keeps them 
 in very good order, and will suffer nobody to sleep in it besides himself; 
 for. if by chance he has been surprised into a short nap at sermon, upon 
 recovering out of it, he stands up and looks about him, and, if he sees 
 anybody else nodding, either wakes them up himself, or sends his 
 servants to them." 
 
 The paper, Of Clttbs in General, is highly entertaining 
 because of its humor : 
 
 "When a set of men find themselves agree in any particular, though 
 never so trivial, they establish themselves into a kind of fraternity, and 
 meet once or twice a week upon the account of such a fantastic resem- 
 blance. I know a considerable market town, in which there was a club 
 of fat men. . . . The room where the club met was something of the 
 largest, and had two entrances, the one by a door of a moderate size, 
 and the other by a pair of folding doors. If a candidate for this cor- 
 pulent club could make his entrance through the first, he was looked 
 upon as unqualified ; but if he stuck in the passage, and could not force 
 his way through it, the folding doors were immediately thrown open for 
 his reception, and he was saluted as a brother. . . . 
 
 "In opposition to this society, there sprang up another, composed 
 of scarecrows and skeletons, who, being very meager and envious, did 
 all they could to thwart the designs of their bulky brethren." 1 
 
 1 The Spectator, No. 9.
 
 252 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 Some of the Rules for the Twopenny Club show Addi- 
 son's humor at its best : 
 
 " If any member absents himself, he shall forfeit a penny for the use 
 of the club, unless in case of sickness or imprisonment. 
 
 " If any member brings his wife into the club, he shall pay for what- 
 ever she drinks or smokes. 
 
 "If any member's wife comes to fetch him home from the club, she 
 shall speak to him without the door. 
 
 "None shall be admitted into the club that is of the same trade 
 with any member of it." 
 
 It is well to notice in the preceding quotations the pecul- 
 iarity of Addison's humor, for to this quality chiefly he 
 owes his legions of readers. His wit is never used against 
 morality. He is a satirist, but his satire is not personal, 
 like Pope's, or misanthropical, like Swift's. 
 
 Of his style, Dr. Samuel Johnson says : " Whosoever 
 wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and 
 elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights 
 to the study of Addison." This is stronger praise than the 
 present century would accord. His sentences are smooth 
 and elegant, but they need the additional qualities of 
 variety, incisiveness, energy, and, occasionally, of pre- 
 cision, to perfect them. 
 
 ALEXANDER POPE, 1688-1744 
 
 Life. Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688. 
 His father was a merchant and a devout believer in the 
 Roman Catholic religion. The future poet was not 
 allowed to go either to a public school or to a university. 
 He picked up almost all of his education in a haphazard 
 way, reading those authors that pleased his fancy.
 
 ALEXANDER POPE 
 
 253 
 
 In his childhood, his parents removed from London to 
 Binfield, a village in Berkshire, nine miles from Windsor. 
 When nearly thirty, he went to Twickenham, a rural place 
 on the Thames, near London. Here he indulged his fancy 
 for landscape gardening and lived in quiet for the chief 
 part of the rest of his life. 
 
 He was a very precocious child. At the age of twelve 
 he was writing an Ode on Solitude. He chose his voca- 
 tion early, for writing poetry was the business of his life. 
 
 On the basis of what he wrote, we may divide his life 
 into three periods. During his first thirty years, he pro-
 
 254 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 duced various kinds of verse, like the Essay on Criticism 
 and The Rape of tJie Lock. The middle period of his life 
 was marked by his translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. 
 In his third period, he wrote moral and didactic poems, like 
 the Essay on Man, and satires, like the Dnnciad. 
 
 By nature he was secretive and given to double dealing. 
 It was said that he could hardly drink tea without stratagem. 
 His vanity prompted him to take steps to have published a 
 volume of his letters to various friends. Fearing that he 
 would be criticised if he gave these letters to the public 
 himself, he arranged to have them stolen and published 
 apparently against his will. While accomplishing this, 
 he became involved in a network of falsehoods. Leslie 
 Stephen says of him : " He would instinctively snatch at 
 a lie even when a moment's reflection would have shown 
 that the plain truth would be more convenient, and there- 
 fore he had to accumulate lie upon lie, each intended 
 to patch up the other." 
 
 In spite of such failings, Pope had some admirable 
 traits. He showed the world what careful workmanship 
 and an indomitable will could accomplish. His devotion 
 to his aged mother also deserves special mention. 
 
 Some Poems of the First Period : Essay on Criticism and 
 The Rape of the Lock. In 1711 Pope gave to the world 
 a poem entitled Essay on Criticism. This is merely an 
 exquisite setting of a number of gems of criticism which 
 had for a long time been current. Pope's intention in 
 writing this poem may be seen from what he himself says : 
 " It seems not so much the perfection of sense to say 
 things that have never been said before, as to express 
 those best that have been said oftenest." 
 
 From this point of view, the poem is a remarkable one. 
 No other writer, save Shakespeare, has in an equal num-
 
 ALEXANDER POPE 
 
 255 
 
 From an old print. 
 
 POPE'S HOME AT BINFIELD 
 
 ber of lines said so many things which have passed into 
 current quotation. Rare perfection in the form of state- 
 ment accounts for this. The poem abounds in such lines 
 as these : 
 
 " For fools rush in where angels fear to tread." 
 "To err is human, to forgive divine." 
 
 "All seems infected that th' infected spy, 
 As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye." 
 
 " In words, as fashi'ons, the same rule will hold, 
 Alike fantastic, if too new, or old : 
 Be not the first by whom the new are tried, 
 Nor yet the last to lay the old aside." 
 
 The Rape of the Lock is Pope's masterpiece. It was a 
 favorite with Oliver Goldsmith, and Lowell rightly says: 
 " The whole poem more truly deserves the name of a crea-
 
 356 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 tion than anything Pope ever wrote." The poem is a 
 mock epic, and it has the supernatural machinery which 
 was supposed to be absolutely necessary for an epic. In 
 place of the gods and goddesses of the great epics, the 
 fairylike sylphs help to guide the action of this mock epic. 
 
 The poem describes a young lord's theft of a lock of 
 hair from the head of a court beauty. Such an incident 
 actually happened, and Pope composed The Rape of t/te 
 Lock to soothe her indignation and to effect a reconcilia- 
 tion. This poem, which should now be read entire by 
 the student, is a vivid satiric picture of fashionable life 
 in Queen Anne's reign. 
 
 Translation of Homer. Pope's chief work during the 
 middle period of his life was his translation of the Iliad 
 and the Odyssey of Homer. From a financial point of 
 view, these were the most successful of his labors. They 
 brought him in nearly ^"9000, and made him independ- 
 ent of bookseller or of nobleman. 
 
 The remarkable success of these translations is strange 
 when we remember that Pope's knowledge of Greek was 
 very imperfect, and that he was obliged to consult transla- 
 tions before attempting any passage. The Greek scholar 
 Bentley, a contemporary of Pope, delivered a just verdict 
 on the translation : " A pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you 
 must not call it Homer." The historian Gibbon said that 
 the poem had every merit except faithfulness to the 
 original. 
 
 Homer is simple and direct. He abounds in concrete 
 terms. Pope dislikes a simple term and loves a circum- 
 locution and an abstraction. We have the concrete " herd 
 of swine" translated into "a bristly care," "skins," into 
 "furry spoils." The concrete was considered common 
 and undignified. Homer says in simple language : " His
 
 ALEXANDER POPE 257 
 
 father wept with him," but Pope translates this: "The 
 father poured a social flood." 
 
 Pope used to translate thirty or forty verses of the Iliad 
 before rising, and then to spend a considerable time in 
 polishing them. But half of the translation of the 
 Odyssey is his own work. He employed assistants to 
 finish the other half. It is by no means easy to distin- 
 guish his work from theirs. To imitate the work of a 
 genius is not so easy. 
 
 Some Poems of his Third Period : Essay on Man, and 
 Satires. The Essay on Man is a philosophical poem with 
 the avowed object of vindicating the ways of God to man. 
 The entire poem is an amplification of the idea contained 
 in these lines : 
 
 " All nature is but art unknown to thee ; 
 All chance, direction which thou canst not see ; 
 All discord, harmony not understood ; 
 All partial evil, universal good. 
 And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite, 
 One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. 11 
 
 The chief merit of the poem consists in throwing into 
 polished form many of the views current at the time, so 
 that they may be easily understood. Before we read very 
 far we come across such old acquaintances as 
 
 "The proper study of mankind is man." 
 "An honest man's the noblest work of God." 
 
 " Vice is a monster of so frightful mien 
 As, to be hated, needs but to be seen ; 
 Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, 
 We first endure, then pity, then embrace." 
 
 The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot and the Dunciad are 
 Pope's greatest satires. In the Dunciad, an epic of the
 
 258 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 dunces, he holds up to ridicule every person and writer 
 who had offended him. These were in many cases scrib- 
 blers who had no business with a pen. In a few instances 
 they were the best scholars of that day. A great deal of 
 the poem is now very tiresome reading. Much of it is 
 brutal. Pope was a powerful agent, as Thackeray says, 
 in rousing much of that obloquy which has ever since 
 pursued a struggling author. 
 
 General Characteristics. For a long time there was 
 considerable dispute in regard to whether Pope's verse is 
 genuine poetry. He has not strong imagination, a keen 
 feeling for nature, or wide sympathy with man. Leslie 
 Stephen correctly says : " Pope never crosses the unde- 
 finable, but yet ineffaceable line, which separates true 
 poetry from rhetoric." No student can ever be a good 
 critic of poetry until he can both understand arid feel the 
 force of this remark. Many readers are to-day more 
 pleased with rhetoric than with true poetry. 
 
 He is the poet who best expresses the classical spirit of 
 the eighteenth century. His works show the preference 
 of his age for subjects and form of treatment. He excels 
 in satiric and didactic verse, expresses in as perfect a form 
 as possible his ideas, which are frequently not original, 
 and embodies them in classical couplets, sometimes styled 
 "rocking-horse meter," but he shows no power of fathom- 
 ing the emotional depths of the soul. 
 
 In the history of literature, he holds an important place 
 because, more than any other writer, he calls attention to 
 the importance of correctness of form, and of avoiding 
 slovenliness of expression. He is the prince of artificial 
 poets. Though he erred in exalting form above matter, 
 the lesson of careful workmanship which he taught his 
 age, was a needed one.
 
 SUMMARY 259 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 The first part of the eighteenth century was marked by 
 a low moral standard in both church and state. This 
 standard had its effect on literature. We find no such 
 sublime outbursts of song as characterize the Elizabethan 
 and Puritan ages. The writers chose satiric or didactic 
 subjects, and avoided pathos, deep feeling, and sublimity. 
 
 The age was molded by classical influence. Horace 
 in his Epistles and Satires was the patron saint of criti- 
 cism. The classical school loved polished regularity. 
 An old idea, dressed in exquisite form, was as welcome 
 as a new one. Anything strange, irregular, romantic, 
 full of feeling, highly imaginative, or improbable to the 
 intellect, was unpopular. Even in Gulliver's Travels, 
 Swift endeavored to be as realistic as if he were demon- 
 strating a geometrical proposition. Pope is the great 
 poetic exponent of this school. 
 
 The age is far more remarkable for its prose than for 
 its poetry. French influence helped to develop a concise, 
 flexible, energetic prose style. The deterioration in 
 poetry was partly compensated for by the rapid advances 
 in prose, which needed the influences working toward 
 artistic finish. Of all the prose writers since Swift's time, 
 few have equaled him and still fewer surpassed him in 
 simplicity, flexibility, directness, and lack of affectation. 
 In grace of style, delicate humor, and the power of awak- 
 ening and retaining interest, Addison's Essays have no 
 superiors. 
 
 The influence of this age was sufficient to raise perma- 
 nently the standard level of artistic literary expression. 
 The unpruned, shapeless, and extravagant forms of earlier 
 times will no longer be tolerated.
 
 260 FROM 1700 TO 1740 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER VII 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Gardiner, 1 pp. 671-729; Green, pp. 701-734; Underwood-Guest, 
 pp. 508-523 ; Guerber, pp. 291-303 ; Wakeling's King and Parliament, 
 pp. 115-128; and HassalPs Making of the British Empire, pp. 7-30 
 (Oxford Manuals); Traill, IV., 511-622, V, 1-171; John Morley's 
 Walpole (251 pp.. 50 cents). 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 Swift. Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. III., pp. 391-424, 
 contains representative selections from Swift's prose. The best of 
 these are The Philosophy of Clothes, from A Tale of a Tub (Craik, 
 III., 398) ; A Digression concerning Critics, from the same (Craik, 
 III., 400) ; The Emperor of Lillipnt (Craik, III., 417), and The King 
 of Brobdingnqg (Craik, III., 419), from Gullivers Travels. 
 
 Is Swift's a good prose style? Does he use ornament? Can you 
 find a passage where he strives after effect? In what respects do the 
 subjects which he chooses and his manner of treating them show the 
 spirit of the age? Why is Gulliver 's Travels so popular? What are 
 the most important lessons which a young writer may learn from 
 Swift? In what is he specially lacking? 
 
 Addison. From the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers the student 
 should not fail to read Spectator No. 112, A Country Sunday. He 
 may then read Spectator No. 2, by Steele, which sketches the de Cov- 
 erley characters, and compare the style and characteristics of the two 
 authors. The student who has the time at this point should read all 
 the de Coverley Papers {Eclectic English Classics, American Book Co.). 
 
 What are the excellences and defects of Addison's style ? Why 
 may his Essays be called a prelude to the novel of life and manners? 
 What qualities draw so many readers to the de Coverley Papers? 
 Select passages which will serve to bring into sharp contrast the style 
 and humor of Swift and of Addison. 
 
 Pope. Read The Rape of the Lock (printed with the Essay on Man 
 in Eclectic English Classics, American Book Co., 20 cents). Selections 
 from this are given in Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., pp. 73-82. 
 
 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I.
 
 READING REFERENCES 26 1 
 
 The Essay on Man, Book I. (Ward, III., 85-91) will serve as a 
 specimen of his didactic verse. The Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (Ward, 
 III., 103-105) will illustrate his satire, and the lines from the Iliad 
 in Ward, III., 82, will show the characteristics of his translation. 
 
 How does Pope show the spirit of the classical school ? What are 
 his special merits and defects? Does an examination of his poetry 
 convince you that Leslie Stephen's criticism (p. 258) is right ? Select 
 specimens of true poetry from as many of Pope's predecessors as possi- 
 ble. Place beside these selections some of Pope's best lines, and see 
 if you have a clearer idea of the difference between rhetoric and true 
 poetry. 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Ashton's Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne. 
 
 Sydney's England and the English in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Centtiry. 
 
 Stephen's History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Thackeray's Henry Esmond. 
 
 Taine's History of English Literature, Book III., Chaps. IV. and V. 
 
 Gosse's History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 342-408. 
 
 Clarke's Study of English Prose Writers, pp. 82-198. 
 
 Dennis's The Age of Pope. 
 
 Phillips's Popular Mamial of English Literature, Vol. I., pp. 
 
 437-564- 
 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., pp. 1-182. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. III., pp. 355-595. 
 
 Thackeray's English Humorists. 
 
 Stephen's Life of Swift. 
 
 Craik's Life of Swift. 
 
 Courthope's Life of Addison. 
 
 Macaulay's Essay on Addison. 
 
 Stephen's Life of Pope. 
 
 De Quincey's Essay on Pope, and On the Poetry of Pope. 
 
 Johnson's Lives of the Poets. 
 
 Gosse's From Shakespeare to Pope. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 1"J
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE SECOND FORTY YEARS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, 
 
 1740-1780 
 
 An Age of Changing Standards. The second forty 
 years of the eighteenth century are more remarkable for 
 the foundations which they laid for future changes than for 
 original literary productions. Moral, religious, political, and 
 literary standards began to change. There was more 
 diversity of opinion in regard to all these subjects. These 
 years were a flight of stairs leading up to the romantic age, 
 and to the entire nineteenth century. 
 
 In 1742 Robert Walpole's long term as prime minister 
 came to a close. His political code contained two rules 
 of action: (i) to secure by bribery, whenever necessary, 
 the adoption of his measures, and (2) never to attempt to 
 remedy abuses or to change any existing state of affairs, 
 unless the demand for such change was too strong to be 
 resisted. In 1757 William Pitt became, in effect, prime 
 minister (though not so in name). Walpole had tried to 
 bribe him in various ways and had utterly failed. In 
 politics, Pitt was in a certain sense the counterpart of 
 Wesley in religious life. Pitt appealed to the patriotism 
 and to the sense of honor of his countrymen, and many 
 heard his appeal. Under Walpole, Great Britain was a 
 third-rate insular power; under Pitt, she became one of 
 the foremost powers of the world. Between 1750 and 
 1760, Clive was making Great Britain mistress of the vast 
 empire of India, and in 1759 Wolfe shattered the power 
 
 262
 
 CHANGE IN RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE 263 
 
 of France in Canada. England was expanding to the 
 eastward and the westward and taking her literature with 
 her. As Wolfe advanced on Quebec, he was reading 
 Gray's Elegy. 
 
 Change in Religious Influence. The church had become 
 too lukewarm and respectable to endeavor to bring in the 
 masses, and they saw nothing in the church to attract them 
 to it. When religious influence was at the lowest ebb, two 
 eloquent preachers, John Wesley and George Whitefield, 
 started a movement which is still gathering force. Although 
 anything like enthusiasm or appeal to the emotions from 
 the pulpit had for some time been considered in bad taste, 
 Wesley did not ask his audience to listen to a sermon on 
 the favorite bloodless abstractions of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury pulpit, such as Charity, Faith, Duty, Holiness, abstrac- 
 tions which never moved a human being an inch heaven- 
 ward. His sermons were emotional. They dealt largely 
 with the emotion of love, God's love for man. He did not 
 ask his listeners to engage in intellectual disquisitions 
 about the aspects of infinity. He did not talk free-will 
 metaphysics or trouble his hearers with a satisfactory 
 philosophical account of the origin of evil. He spoke 
 about things which reached not only the understanding 
 but also the feelings of plain men. 
 
 About the same time, Whitefield was preaching to the 
 miners near Bristol. Tears streamed down the cheeks of 
 these rude men as he eloquently told them the story of 
 salvation, and made many resolve to lead better lives. 
 
 This religious awakening may have been accompanied 
 with too much appeal to the feelings and some unhealthy 
 emotional excitement, but some vigorous movement was 
 absolutely necessary to quicken the spiritual life of such 
 an age.
 
 264 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 CHANGE IN LITERARY STANDARDS : ROMANTICISM 
 
 What is Romanticism ? It is important to understand 
 the meaning of the romantic movement in order to com- 
 prehend the dominating spirit of the next age. The years 
 from 1740 to 1780 nowhere show romantic literature at 
 the height of its excellence, but they indicate how the 
 foundations of the movement were laid. 
 
 The best short definition of romanticism is that of Victor 
 Hugo, who called it " liberalism in literature." Although 
 this definition is incomplete, it has the merit of cover- 
 ing all kinds of romantic movements. In this period and 
 the far more glorious one that followed, romanticism made 
 its influence felt for the better in four different ways. An 
 understanding of each of these will make us more intelli- 
 gent critics. 
 
 In the first .place, the romantic spirit is opposed to the 
 prosaic. The romantic yearns for the light that never was 
 on sea or land and longs to attain the unfulfilled ambitions 
 of the soul, even when these in full measure are not possible. 
 Sometimes these ambitions are so unrelated to the possible 
 that .the romantic has in certain usage become synonymous 
 with the impractical or the absurd, but this is not its mean- 
 ing in literature^ The romantic may not always be " of 
 imagination all compact," but it has a tendency in that 
 direction. A reality of the imagination is as satisfying to 
 romanticists as a reality of the prosaic reason, hence they, 
 unlike the classicists, can enjoy The Tempest and A Mid- 
 summer Night's Dream. The events in these plays could 
 not have been objective realities in an actual world, but 
 they have the necessary element of subjective truth. The 
 imagination is the only power that can grasp the unseen. 
 Any movements which stimulate imaginative activity must
 
 WHAT IS ROMANTICISM? 265 
 
 give the individual more points of contact with that part 
 of the world that does not obtrude itself on the physical 
 senses, and especially with many facts of existence which 
 cold intellectual activity can never comprehend. Hence, 
 romanticism leads to greater breadth of view. 
 
 In the second place, the romantic is the opposite of the 
 hackneyed. Hence, too much repetition may take a 
 necessary quality away from what was once considered 
 romantic. The epithets "ivory" and "raven," when 
 applied to "brow" and to "tresses," respectively, were at 
 first romantic, but much repetition has deprived them 
 of this quality. If an age is to be considered romantic, it 
 must look at things from a point of view somewhat differ- 
 ent from that of the age immediately preceding. This 
 change may be either in the character of the thought or in 
 the manner of its presentation, or in both. An example 
 of the formal element of change which appeared, consists in 
 the substitution of blank verse and the Spenserian stanza 
 for the classical couplets of the French school. In the 
 next age, we shall find that the subject matter is no longer 
 chiefly of the satiric or the didactic type. 
 
 In the third place, the highest type of romanticism 
 must contain something of the subjective element (see 
 p. 130) peculiar to the individual. This often appears in 
 the ideals that we fashion and in our characteristic con- 
 ceptions of the spiritual significance of the world and 
 its deepest realities. Two writers of this period by invest- 
 ing nature with a spirit of melancholy (see p. 270) illus- 
 trate one of the many phases which this subjective element 
 can assume. 
 
 In the fourth place, we shall see that the romantic 
 movement tended toward deeper feeling. Sometimes the 
 movement was injured and subjected to caricature by
 
 266 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 exhibitions of unbridled and ridiculous passion. Of 
 course, the best romantic works are not mere seas of 
 rippling sensibility or stormy passion, but the great 
 romanticists never avoid expressions of profound feeling, 
 like the love of Juliet or the jealousy of Othello. The 
 classic school shunned as vulgar all exhibitions of en- 
 thusiasm and strong emotion. 
 
 The Influence of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. The 
 classicists had turned away from the great English authors 
 and had gone to French models for instruction in polish 
 and form. Spenser exerted a powerful influence on the 
 romanticists, for he is to the core a romantic poet. His 
 far-off forest world with its enchantment of bowers, 
 streams, glorious maidens, and heroic knights, is the 
 very fairyland of romance. Before 1750 there was only 
 one eighteenth century edition of Spenser's work pub- 
 lished in England. In 1758, three editions of the Faerie 
 Queene appeared. Spenser's readers and imitators were 
 becoming very numerous. 
 
 Much of the mid-eighteenth century influence of 
 Shakespeare came from the masterly performance of 
 his plays on the stage. In 1741 the great actor David 
 Garrick captivated London audiences by his presentation 
 of Shakespeare's dramas. Before Garrick retired in 1 776, 
 he had produced twenty-four of these plays, and so he 
 brought some of the influences of the romantic Eliza- 
 bethan age to bear on the taste of eighteenth century 
 England. The presentation of Shakespeare by a master 
 like Garrick affected the imaginations of the people far 
 more vividly than a mere reading of the plays. We have 
 seen that the classicists did not like the " monstrous 
 irregularities of Shakespeare," but, later in the century, 
 he found a larger and more delighted audience. No age
 
 OSSIAN 267 
 
 with its eye on Shakespeare can tolerate a literature 
 without romance and spirituality. 
 
 Milton's influence for romanticism was also strong. 
 At first thought, it may seem strange that a poet saturated 
 as he was with the study of Greek and Latin literature, 
 should have such influence, but his Paradise Lost is a 
 work of the creative imagination, and the subject matter 
 satisfies the romantic requirement in being strange and 
 instinct with strong feeling. His minor poetry, especially 
 his // Penseroso, was most important in the new move- 
 ment, although the blank verse of Paradise Lost was 
 often adopted as a welcome relief from "the rocking- 
 horse " verse of the rhyming couplet. 
 
 Ossian. Between 1760 and 1764 James Macpherson, 
 a Highland schoolmaster, published a series of poems, 
 which he claimed to have translated from an old manu- 
 script, the work of Ossian, a Gaelic poet of the third 
 century. These may have been forged in whole or in 
 part, but the question of their genuineness does not alter 
 the fact that they powerfully affected the romantic move- 
 ment. The so-called translation of the poems is in prose, 
 and it won for Macpherson a grave in the Poets' Corner 
 of Westminster Abbey. 
 
 The qualities in Ossian which appealed to the age 
 were its wildness, its vague suggestions to the imagina- 
 tion, its disregard of conventional forms, the profusion 
 of its rhetorical figures, and the deep feeling of melan- 
 choly. Gray was profoundly impressed with the strange 
 work. He praised highly the following quotation from 
 it: 
 
 " Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night ; 
 Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind ; 
 Their songs are of other worlds."
 
 268 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 Ossian also influenced Byron. Professor W. L. Phelps 
 found Byron's copy of Ossian with notes and comments 
 in Byron's own handwriting. In some respects Byron con- 
 sidered Ossian equal to Homer. But the Ossianic poems 
 have not stood the test of time. They are mentioned here 
 only because they were so pronounced a factor in ushering 
 in the romantic movement. 
 
 Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto. " The great 
 resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict 
 adherence to common life," said Horace 
 Walpole (1717-1797), one of the 
 leaders of the fashionable world. 
 He gave an impulse to romanticism 
 in both architecture and literature. 
 There had been as much classi- 
 cism in the one as in the other. 
 Even fine residences were built 
 after Grecian models. The term 
 
 HORACE WALPOLE " Gothic " was contemptuously ap- 
 
 plied to whatever was mediaeval or 
 
 out of date, whether in art, philosophy, or general litera- 
 ture. About 1750 he erected a Gothic residence, which 
 became the talk of fashionable England and soon found 
 many imitators. People began to study mediaeval architec- 
 ture and to turn their attention to other things that were 
 old as well as good. 
 
 In 1764 a book was published, entitled The Castle of 
 Otranto: A Gothic Romance. This professed to be a 
 translation from an old black-letter volume. The scene 
 of the story is laid in a Gothic castle, in whose mysteri- 
 ous labyrinths and trap doors the strangest adventures 
 occur. The weirdness and improbabilities of the romance 
 were welcomed by readers weary of the prosaic works
 
 THOMAS PERCY 269 
 
 that had been so unsparingly produced. No name was 
 placed on the title page of the first edition. Walpole 
 was afraid of being sneered at for breaking the classical 
 rules prescribing conventional regularity and probability. 
 The pronounced success of the story soon led him to 
 acknowledge the authorship, not, however, before some 
 had ascribed it to Thomas Gray, the poet. This work 
 gave a pronounced impetus to ultra-romantic tales. Its 
 influence was felt across the Atlantic, by an early Ameri- 
 can novelist, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). 
 
 Percy's Reliques and Translation of Mallet's Northern 
 Antiquities. In 1765 Thomas Percy (1729-1811) pub- 
 lished The Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an epoch- 
 making work in the history of the romantic movement. 
 The Reliques is a collection of old English ballads and 
 songs, many of which have a story to tell, and a very 
 romantic one, too. Scott drew inspiration from them, and 
 Wordsworth acknowledged his indebtedness to their influ- 
 ence. So important was this collection that it has been 
 called "the Bible of the Romantic Reformation." 
 
 In 1770 Percy's translation of Mallet's Northern An- 
 tiquities appeared. For the first time the English world 
 was given an easily accessible volume which disclosed the 
 Norse mythology in all its strength and weirdness. Clas- 
 sical mythology had become hackneyed, and poets like 
 Gray rejoiced that there was a new fountain to which they 
 could turn. Thor and his invincible hammer, the Frost 
 Giants, Bifrost or the Rainbow Bridge, Odin, th<J Valkyries, 
 Valhal, the sad story of Baldur, and the Twilight of the 
 Gods, have appealed strongly to a race which takes pride 
 in its own mythology, to a race which to-day loves to hear 
 Wagner's translation of these myths into the music of 
 Die Walkure, Siegfried, and Gb'tterdammerung.
 
 270 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 The Literature of Melancholy. The choice of sub- 
 jects in which the emotion of melancholy was given full 
 sway shows one direction taken by the romantic move- 
 ment. Here, the influence of Milton's // Penseroso can 
 often be traced. The exquisite Ode to Evening, by 
 William Collins (1721-1759) shows the love for nature's 
 solitudes where this emotion may be nursed. Lines 
 like these : 
 
 "... be mine the hut, 
 That, from the mountain's side, 
 Views wilds and swelling floods, 
 And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires ; 
 And hears their simple bell ; and marks o'er all 
 Thy dewy fingers draw 
 The gradual dusky veil," 
 
 caused Swinburne to say : " Corot on canvas might have 
 signed his Ode to Evening." 
 
 The high-water mark of the poetry 
 of melancholy of this period was 
 reached in Thomas Gray's (1716- 
 1771) Elegy -written in a Country 
 'Churchyard (1751). The poet with 
 great art selected those natural 
 phenomena which cast additional 
 gloom upon the scene. We may 
 notice in the very first stanza 
 that the images were chosen 
 THOMAS GRAY with this end in view : 
 
 "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, 
 The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea, 
 The plowman homeward plods his weary way, 
 And leaves the world to darkness and to me."
 
 THOMAS GRAY 
 
 271 
 
 Then we listen to the droning flight of the beetle, to the 
 
 drowsy tinklings from a distant fold, to the moping owl in 
 
 an ivy-mantled 
 
 tower. Each 
 
 natural object, 
 
 either directly 
 
 or by contrast, 
 
 reflects the mood 
 
 of man. Nature 
 
 is a background 
 
 for the display of 
 
 emotion. Later 
 
 poets cultivated 
 
 her for her own 
 
 beauties, but that 
 
 time had not yet 
 
 arrived. 
 
 Gosse says in 
 his L ife of Gray : 
 " The Elegy has 
 exercised an in- 
 fluence on all 
 the poetry of 
 Europe, from 
 Denmark to 
 
 Italy, from France to Russia. With the exception of cer- 
 tain works of Byron and Shakespeare, no English poem 
 has been so widely admired and imitated-abroad." 
 
 The Conflict between Romanticism and Classicism. The 
 influences of this period were not entirely in the direction 
 of romanticism. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of 
 the age, was unsparing in his condemnation of the move- 
 ment. The weight of his opinion kept many, romantic 
 
 STOKE POGES CHURCHYARD (GRAY'S BURIAL PLACE 
 AND SCENE OF HIS ELEGY)
 
 272 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 tendencies in check. Even authors like Gray were afraid 
 to adopt the new creed in its entirety. In one stanza of 
 his Hymn to Adversity we find four capitalized abstrac- 
 tions, after the manner of the classical school : Folly, 
 Noise, Laughter, Prosperity ; and the following two lay 
 figures, little better than abstractions : 
 
 " The summer Friend, the flattering Foe." 
 
 These abstractions have little warmth or human interest. 
 After Gray had studied the Norse mythology, we find him 
 using such strong expressions as " Iron-sleet of arrowy 
 shower." Collins's ode on The Passions contains seven- 
 teen personified abstractions, from " pale Melancholy " to 
 " brown Exercise." 
 
 In Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774) the conflict between 
 romanticism and classicism is marked. Goldsmith's natu- 
 ral taste in many directions preferred the romantic, but 
 the influence of the age in general, and of Dr. Johnson in 
 particular, modified this preference and made his work a 
 mixture of both the romantic and the classic. Goldsmith 
 wrote his two great poems, The Traveller and The Deserted 
 Village, in the classical couplet. To show how he could 
 combine words with art, Matthew Arnold quotes from The 
 Traveller the line : 
 
 " No cheerful murmurs fluctuate in the gale," 
 
 and says : " There is exactly the poetic diction of our 
 prose century : rhetorical, ornate, and, poetically, quite 
 false. Place beside it a line of genuine poetry, such as 
 
 the 
 
 'In cradle of the rude imperious surge' 
 
 of Shakespeare ; and all its falseness instantly becomes 
 apparent."
 
 ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM 
 
 2/3 
 
 On the other hand, one could not ask for pictures 
 lighted up with finer romantic touches than those of the 
 village preacher and the village master in The Deserted 
 Village. Every cultivated person ought to experience the 
 luxury of knowing those by heart. Swinburne happily 
 says : " In Goldsmith's verse there is a priceless and 
 adorable power of sweet human emotion." This is warm 
 enough to be felt in spite of the chilling effects of classical 
 influence. The hearty humor of his great comedy, She 
 Stoops to Conquer, would satisfy Victor Hugo's ideal of 
 " liberalism in literature " (p. 264).
 
 2/4 DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 The conflict between these two schools still continues. 
 Indeed, there are many people who still think that any 
 poetry which shows polished regularity must be excellent. 
 To prove this statement, we have only to turn to the 
 magazines and glance at the current poetry,' which often 
 consists of words rather artificially strung together without 
 the soul of feeling or of thought. 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 Story-telling an Old Art. It is true that the modern 
 novel was not developed until the middle of the eighteenth 
 century, but the modern novel is the flower of a plant 
 which had been growing for a long time. Authentic 
 history does not take us back to the time when human 
 beings were not solaced by stories. We are to-day 
 interested in tales from the old Aryan, Grecian, and Norse 
 mythologies. As we read the adventures of Ulysses with 
 the Cyclops and with Circe, we are charmed with the tales 
 which Homer tells. The Bible contains stories of marked 
 interest. The church often put the lives of saints in the 
 form of a story. It is primarily the business of the 
 novelist to tell a story, but a history of fiction shows that 
 there are different ways in which to tell stories, just as 
 a study of art from early times discloses differences in 
 the ways of drawing and painting human figures. 
 
 Mediaeval Romances. The original meaning of romance 
 was a story in verse in some one of the Romance languages. 
 The majority of the early romances read in England were 
 of French origin. There were four cycles of French 
 romance especially popular in England before Chaucer's 
 time. These were tales of the remarkable adventures 
 of King Arthur and his Knights, Charlemagne and his
 
 MEDIAEVAL ROMANCES 275 
 
 Peers, Alexander the Great, and the heroes at the siege 
 of Troy. 
 
 An account of the adventures of a knight, as he rode 
 about in his armor, often made interesting reading. 
 Writers soon began to imagine adventures for him, and 
 the literature of fiction received vast additions in this 
 way. Chaucer's Knightes Tale holds the place of honor 
 in his magnificent collection of stories. 
 
 We have an inventory of the library of a gentleman in 
 the reign of Edward IV. (1461-1483). About one half of 
 this library consisted of story-telling literature. Promi- 
 nent in this class were two of Chaucer's poetic tales, the 
 celebrated romance, Guy, Earl of Warwick, Sir Gawayne 
 and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur, a 
 collection of extravagant adventures attributed to Richard 
 the Lion-hearted, and a religious allegory. The point to 
 be noticed is that for several hundred years the favorite 
 type of romance consisted of tales crowded with marvel- 
 ous incidents, in which giants, fairies, enchanters, and 
 all-powerful knights figure. The adventures in Sir 
 Gawayne and the Green Knight may serve to illustrate 
 the characteristics of some of these stories. At the court 
 of King Arthur, Gawayne cuts off the Green Knight's 
 head. The decapitated giant picks up his head and rides 
 away, challenging his foe to meet him a year hence at a 
 certain Green Chapel. Gawayne presents himself at the 
 appointed time and barely resists many fatal enchant- 
 ments. Relying on the protection of a magic belt, he 
 fights the Green Knight. It is well to notice that the 
 wound which Gawayne receives is the result of deception 
 which he practices. The moral element thus introduced 
 gives dignity to the story. 
 
 The knight who meets with all kinds of adventures and
 
 2/6 DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 rescues everybody, is admirably burlesqued in the Don 
 Quixote of the Spanish author Cervantes, which appeared 
 at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This world- 
 famous romance shows by its ridicule that the taste for 
 the impossible adventures of chivalry was beginning to 
 pall. The following title to one of the chapters of Don 
 Quixote is sufficiently suggestive: "Chapter LVIII. 
 Which tells how Adventures came crowding on Don 
 Quixote in Such Numbers that they gave him No Breath- 
 ing Time." 
 
 The Romances of the Sixteenth Century. The Eliza- 
 bethan age shows an advance in the development of prose 
 fiction. Mention has already been made of Lyly's Euphues, 
 in which he strings his philosophy and curious knowledge 
 on a slight thread of romance, and of Sidney's Arcadia, 
 which furnished a model for pastoral romances. 
 
 Two of the novelists of the sixteenth century, Robert 
 Greene (1560?-: 592) and Thomas Lodge (1558 ?-i625), 
 helped to give to Shakespeare the plots of two of his 
 plays. Greene's novel Pandosto suggested the plot of 
 The Winter s Tale, and Lodge's Rosalind was the imme- 
 diate source of the plot of As You Like It. 
 
 Although Greene died in want at the age of thirty-two, 
 he was the most prolific of the Elizabethan novelists. His 
 most popular stories deal with the passion of love as well 
 as with adventure. He was also the pioneer of those 
 realistic novelists who go among the slums to study life at 
 first hand. Greene made a careful study of the sharpers 
 and rascals of London and published his observations in 
 a series of realistic pamphlets. 
 
 Thomas Nash (1567-1601) was the one who introduced 
 into England the picaresque novel in The Unfortunate 
 Traveller^ or the Life of Jacke Wilton (1594). The
 
 DANIEL DEFOE 
 
 picaresque novel (Spanish, picaro, a rogue) is a story of 
 adventure in which rascally tricks play a prominent part. 
 This type of fiction came from Spain and attained great 
 popularity in England. Jacke Wilton is page to a noble 
 house. Many of his sharp tricks were doubtless drawn 
 from real life. Nash is a worthy predecessor of Defoe 
 in narrating adventures which seem to be founded on 
 actual life. 
 
 Fiction in the First Part of the Eighteenth Century. - 
 Although there were in the seventeenth century the power- 
 ful religious allegories of Bunyan and the romances of 
 Mrs. Behn, yet this century does not show much progress 
 in the development of the novel. But the essay of life 
 and manners at the beginning of the eighteenth century 
 presents us at once with various pigments necessary for 
 the palette of the novelist. Students on turning to the 
 second number of TJie Spectator will find sketches of six 
 different types of character which are worthy to be framed 
 and hung in a permanent gallery of English fiction. The 
 portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley may even claim one of 
 the places of honor on the walls. 
 
 In 1719 Daniel Defoe (i66i?-i73i) gave to the world 
 Robinson Crusoe, one of the most remarkable tales of ad- 
 venture ever written. There has never appeared another 
 work which has been so great a favorite with as large a 
 number of boys. 
 
 In treatment of character and in style, Defoe takes a 
 forward step in the development of fiction. Robinson 
 Crusoe shows the way in which circumstance and environ- 
 ment react on character. We note with admiration the 
 logical way in which Crusoe sets to work to solve the prob- 
 lems of his environment and the patience which he displays 
 in overcoming difficulties. No magic belt is introduced to 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. l8
 
 2/8 DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODERN NOVEL 
 
 aid him. Obstacles merely develop additional will power 
 to surmount them. We do not, however, find in this story 
 the development and progress of the passion of love, which 
 is the chief element in modern novels. 
 
 In the second place, Defoe does not show a trace of 
 the grandiloquence of chivalry. The overwrought poetic 
 fancies of the Arcadia never appear in his writings. He 
 has no superior in telling a plain unvarnished tale about 
 a shipwrecked mariner, or about sharpers and cheats, such
 
 ROMANCE AND MODERN NOVEL 279 
 
 as figure in his picaresque stories entitled Moll Flanders and 
 Colonel Jack, or in describing with minute circumstantial 
 detail the events chronicled in his fanciful Journal of the 
 Plague Year. 
 
 He is a great realist. He never shunned any labor in 
 mastering every detail necessary to make his narratives 
 appear absolutely true. Leslie Stephen rightly calls his 
 stories " simple history minus the facts." Swift also has 
 something of this quality, as we may note in his Gulliver's 
 Travels (1726). 
 
 Distinction between the Romance and the Modern Novel. 
 The romances and tales of adventure which had been so 
 long in vogue differ widely from the modern novel. Many 
 of them pay but little attention to probability, but those 
 which do not offend in this respect generally rely on 
 a succession of stirring incidents to secure attention. Nov- 
 els showing the analytic skill of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, 
 or the development of character in George Eliot's Silas 
 Marner, would have been little read in competition with 
 the stirring tale of adventure, if they had appeared before 
 a taste for them had been developed by habits of trained 
 observation and thought. 
 
 We may broadly differentiate the romance from the mod- 
 ern novel by saying that the romance primarily deals with 
 incident and adventure for their own sake, while the novel 
 concerns itself with these only in so far as they are neces- 
 sary for a faithful picture of life or for showing the devel- 
 opment of character. Again, as a general rule, the leading 
 characters of the romances which we have been considering 
 are kings, princesses, knights, or members of the nobility. 
 The ordinary type of human being, the type that does the 
 most of the world's work, usually either occupies an insig- 
 nificant position or is held up to scorn in the romance.
 
 280 
 
 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 For the first time the eighteenth century novel undertook 
 to do for humanity what the Elizabethan drama had already 
 accomplished, to paint all human life, to neglect neither 
 the lord nor the servant. Pamela, a waiting maid, is the 
 heroine of the first eighteenth century novel, while the 
 aristocratic Sir Charles Grandison is the hero of another 
 tale. The romance, the ballad, and the drama had all 
 taught the novelist. In his endeavor to draw as near to 
 human life as the great dramatists of the sixteenth century, 
 the novelist has in a great measure supplanted the dram- 
 atist, because a good novel can entertain one at home, with- 
 out the necessity for living actors and elaborate scenery. 
 
 / 
 
 1 /> ' 
 
 ' ' *! -^i"'l 
 
 
 From an old print. 
 
 RICHARDSON'S HOME AT NORTH END, HAMMERSMITH 
 
 The First Great English Novelist. Samuel Richardson 
 (1689-1761) was born in Derbyshire. When he was only 
 thirteen years old some of the young women of the neigh- 
 borhood unconsciously began to train him for a novelist. 
 They employed him to conduct their love correspondence, 
 and they were well satisfied with his success. This early 
 training partly accounts for the fact that every one of
 
 SAMUEL RICHARDSON 
 
 28l 
 
 his novels is merely a collection of letters written by the 
 chief characters to each other and to their friends to narrate 
 the progress of events. 
 
 At the age of fifteen he went to London and learned the 
 printer's trade, which he followed for the rest of his life. 
 When he was about fifty years old, some publishers asked 
 him to prepare a letter writer which would be useful to 
 country people and others who could not think how to 
 express themselves with a pen. The idea of making these 
 letters tell a connected story occurred to him. The result 
 was the first modern novel, Pamela, published in four vol-
 
 282 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 umes in 1740. This was followed by Clarissa Harlowe, in 
 seven volumes, in 1 748, and this by Sir Charles Grandison, 
 in seven volumes, in 1753. 
 
 The affairs in the lives of the leading characters are so 
 minutely dissected, the plot is evolved so slowly and in a 
 way so unlike the astonishing bounds of the old romance, 
 that one is tempted to say, before starting the seventh vol- 
 ume of Clarissa Harlowe, that Richardson's novels pro- 
 gress more slowly than events in life. One 'secret of his 
 success depends on the fact that we feel that he is deeply 
 interested in all his characters. He is as much inter- 
 ested in the heroine of his masterpiece, Clarissa Harlowe, 
 as if she were his own daughter. He has the remarkable 
 power of so thoroughly identifying himself with his vari- 
 ous characters that, after we are thoroughly introduced to 
 them, we can name them when we hear selections read 
 from their letters. 
 
 The length and slow development of his novels repel 
 modern readers, but there was so little genuinely interesting 
 matter in the middle of the eighteenth century that many 
 were sorry his novels were no longer. The novelty of pro- 
 ductions of this type also added to their interest. His 
 many faults are largely those of his age. He wearies his 
 readers with his didactic aims. He is narrow and prosy. 
 He poses as a great moralist, but he teaches the morality 
 of direct utility. 
 
 Richardson may be called the inventor of the modern 
 novel in the same way that a man is said to be the inventor 
 of a new machine. The inventor does not discover the prin- 
 ciples of leverage. He is not the original finder of the 
 metals necessary for construction. He merely takes, com- 
 bines, and applies in a new way certain things which others 
 have discovered. Such a man is rightly called an inventor.
 
 HENRY FIELDING 
 
 283 
 
 He introduces the world to something new. Some one 
 else may immediately improve his invention. This was 
 the case with the novel, but this improvement could not 
 have been made unless some one had taken the first step, 
 and furnished something for improvement. 
 
 Henry Fielding, 1707-1754. The greatest novelist 
 of the eighteenth century, and one of the greatest that 
 England ever produced, was born in Sharpham Park, Som-
 
 284 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 ersetshire. After graduating at the University of Leyden, 
 he became a play writer, a lawyer, a judge of a police court, 
 and, most important of all, a novelist, or an historian of 
 society, as he preferred to style himself. 
 
 When Richardson's Pamela appeared, Fielding deter- 
 mined to write a story caricaturing its morality and senti- 
 ment, which seemed hypocritical to him. Before he had 
 gone very far he discovered where his abilities lay, and, 
 abandoning his narrow, satiric aims, he wrote Joseph 
 Andrews (1742), a novel far more interesting than Pamela. 
 In 1749 he published his masterpiece, Tom Jones, and in 
 1751 his third and last novel, Amelia. 
 
 Fielding's novels show several points of improvement 
 over Richardson's. In the first place, every one of Field- 
 ing's novels displays a remarkable sense of humor. 
 Richardson has no humor, and no man can enter the very 
 first rank of novelists without this quality. 
 
 In the second place, Fielding is a master of plot. From 
 all literature Coleridge selected for perfection of plot, 
 The Alchemist, CEdipus Tyrannus, and Tom Jones. 
 
 In the third place, Fielding writes with his eye sharply 
 fixed on the world. The most of his characters seem alive 
 and vigorous. Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison is an 
 impossible conglomeration of abstract virtues. Richardson 
 is more subjective and his own personality is much in 
 evidence in most of his characters. Except in the cases 
 of Tom Jones and Captain Booth, who are Fielding him- 
 self, Fielding appears to be listening with considerable 
 curiosity to the conversations of his characters, and won- 
 dering what they will do next. 
 
 Fielding shows the eighteenth century love of satire. He 
 hates that hypocrisy which tries to conceal itself under a 
 mask of morality. In the evolution of the plots of his
 
 STERNE AND SMOLLETT 285 
 
 novels, he invariably puts such characters in positions which 
 tear away their mask. He displays almost savage pleasure 
 in making them ridiculous. Perhaps the lack of spiritual- 
 ity of the age finds the most ample expression in his pages, 
 but the finest creations of both Chaucer and Fielding, the 
 Parish Priest of the Prologue (p. 79) and Parson Adams of 
 Joseph Andrews, are typical of those persisting moral forces 
 which have bequeathed a heritage of power to England. 
 
 Sterne and Smollett. With Richardson and Fielding 
 it is customary to associate two other mid-eighteenth cen- 
 tury novelists, Laurence Sterne (1713- 
 1768) and Tobias Smollett (1721- 
 1771). Between 1759 and 1767 
 Sterne wrote his first novel, The 
 Life and Opinions of Tristram 
 Shandy, Gentleman, which pre- 
 sents the delightfully comic and 
 eccentric members of the Shandy 
 family, among whom Uncle 
 Toby is the masterpiece. In 
 1768 Sterne gave to the world LAURENCE STERNE 
 
 that compound of fiction, essays, 
 
 and sketches of travel known as A Sentimental Journey 
 through France and Italy. The adjective " sentimental " 
 in the title should be specially noted, for it defines Sterne's 
 attitude toward everything in life. He is habitually sen- 
 timental in treating not only those things fitted to awaken 
 deep emotion, but also those trivial incidents which 
 ordinarily cause scarcely a ripple of feeling. Although 
 he is sometimes a master of pathos, he frequently gives 
 an exhibition of weak and forced sentimentalism. He 
 more uniformly excels in subtle humor, which is his next 
 most conspicuous characteristic.
 
 286 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), and 
 The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771) are Smollett's 
 best novels. They are composed mainly 
 of a succession of stirring or humorous 
 incidents. In relying for interest more 
 on adventure than on the drawing 
 of character, he reverts to the pic- 
 aresque (see p. 277) type of story. 
 The Relation of Richardson, 
 Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett to 
 Subsequent Fiction. Although 
 the modern reader frequently com- 
 
 TOBIAS SMOLLETT ? 
 
 plains that these older novelists 
 
 often seem heavy, slow in movement, unrefined, and too 
 ready to draw a moral or preach a sermon, yet these four 
 men hold an important place in the history of fiction. 
 With varying degrees of excellence, Richardson, Fielding, 
 and Sterne all have the rare power of portraying character 
 from within, of interpreting real life. Some novelists 
 resort to the far easier task of painting merely external 
 characteristics and mannerisms. Smollett belongs to the 
 latter class. He is so effective at focusing external pecul- 
 iarities and caricaturing exceptional individuals, that his 
 influence has been far-reaching. It may be traced in the 
 work of so great a novelist as Charles Dickens. On 
 the other hand, Thackeray learned much from Fielding, 
 and this great Victorian novelist has recorded in The 
 English Humorists his admiration for his earlier fellow- 
 craftsman. 
 
 Although subsequent English fiction has invaded many 
 new fields, although it has entered the domain of history 
 and of sociology, it is not too much to say that later novel- 
 ists have advanced on the general lines marked out by
 
 THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD 287 
 
 these four mid-eighteenth century pioneers. We may 
 even affirm with Gosse that "the type of novel invented 
 in 'England about 1740-50 continued for sixty or sev- 
 enty years to be the only model for Continental fiction; 
 and criticism has traced on every French novelist, in par- 
 ticular, the stamp of Richardson, if not of Sterne and 
 Fielding." 
 
 The Vicar of Wakefield. In 1766, there was published 
 a delightful romantic novel, of which Oliver Goldsmith, its 
 author, said : " There are an hundred faults in this thing, 
 and an hundred things might be said to prove them beau- 
 ties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with 
 numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single 
 absurdity." This is sound criticism. The Vicar of Wake- 
 field has faults, but it is amusing enough to be immortal 
 in spite of them. The plot shows that Goldsmith did not 
 have Fielding's constructive genius. In fact, the plot is so 
 poorly constructed that the novel would have been almost 
 a failure, had other qualities not insured success. But 
 the story is such a compound of sweet human emotion 
 and rare humor that we overlook some defects in the 
 framework. 
 
 The Vicar, who is the hero of the story, is a country 
 clergyman. We have delightfully entertaining pictures of 
 his virtues and failings. We are interested in his domestic 
 life, in his wife, his credulous son Moses, his good but 
 somewhat aspiring daughters, and his happy little ones. 
 It would be difficult to enumerate all the reasons which 
 have made the tale such a favorite, but the chief are its 
 inimitable humor, the grace and ease of the style, the ex- 
 cellent way in which some of the characters draw their 
 own portraits, and the air of naturalness and good nature 
 diffused throughout the work.
 
 288 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND POLITICAL PROSE 
 
 Philosophy. Although the majority of eighteenth cen- 
 tury writers disliked speculative thought and resolutely 
 turned away from it, yet the age produced some remark- 
 able philosophical works, which are still discussed, and 
 which have powerfully affected nineteenth century thought. 
 David Hume (1711-1776) is the greatest metaphysician 
 of the century. He took for his starting point the con- 
 clusions of a contemporary philosopher, George Berkeley 
 
 (1685-1753)- 
 
 Berkeley had said that ideas are the only real existing 
 entities, that matter is merely another term for the ideas 
 in the Mind of the Infinite, and that matter has no exist- 
 ence outside of mind. He maintained that if every quality 
 should be taken away from matter, no matter would remain ; 
 e.g., if color, sweetness, sourness, form, and all other quali- 
 ties, should be taken away from an apple, there would be 
 no apple. Now, a quality is a mental representation based 
 on a sensation, and this quality varies as the sensation 
 varies ; in other words, the object is not a stable immutable 
 something. It is only a something as I perceive it. 
 Berkeley's idealistic position was taken to crush atheistic 
 materialism. 
 
 Hume took Berkeley's position and attempted to rear 
 on it an impregnable citadel of skepticism. He accepted 
 Berkeley's conclusion that we know nothing of matter, 
 and then attempted to show that inferences based on ideas 
 might be equally illusory. Hume attacked the validity 
 of the reasoning process itself. He endeavored to show 
 that there is no such thing as cause and effect in either 
 the mental or the material world. 
 
 Hume's Treatise of Hitman Nature ( 1 739- 1 740) , in which
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL PROSE 289 
 
 these views are stated, is one of the world's epoch-making 
 works in philosophy. Its conclusion startled the great 
 German metaphysician Kant and roused him to action. 
 The questions thus raised by Hume have never been 
 answered to the satisfaction of all philosophers. 
 
 Hume's skepticism is the most thoroughgoing that the 
 world has ever seen, for he attacks the certainty of our 
 knowledge of both mind and matter. But he dryly re- 
 marks that his own doubts disappear when he leaves his 
 study. He avoids a runaway horse and inquires of a friend 
 the way to a certain house in Edinburgh, relying as much 
 on the evidence of his eyes and on the directions of his 
 friend, as if these philosophic doubts had never been raised. 
 
 Historical Prose. In carefully elaborated and highly 
 finished works of history, the eighteenth century surpasses 
 its predecessors. The History of England^ David Hume, 
 the philosopher, is the first work of the kind to add to the 
 history of politics and the affairs of state an account of the 
 people and their manners. His History is distinguished 
 for its polished ease and clearness. Unfortunately, his 
 work is written from a partisan point of view. Hume was 
 a Tory, and took the side of the Stuarts against the Puri- 
 tans. He sometimes misrepresents facts if they do not 
 uphold his views. His History is consequently read more 
 to-day as a literary classic than as an authority. 
 
 Edward Gibbon (1/37-1794) is the greatest historian of 
 the century. His monumental work, The -History of the 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in six volumes, be- 
 gins with the reign of Trajan, A.D. 98, and closes with the 
 fall of the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople in 
 1453. Gibbon constructed a " Roman road " through 
 nearly fourteen centuries of history, and he built it so well 
 that another on the same plan has not yet been found
 
 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 necessary. E. A. Freeman says: " He remains the one his- 
 torian of the eighteenth century whom modern research 
 has neither set aside nor threatened to set aside." In pre- 
 paring his History, Gibbon spent fifteen years. Every 
 chapter was the subject of long-continued study and care- 
 ful original research. From the chaotic materials which 
 he found, he constructed a history remarkable as well for 
 scholarly precision as for the vastness of the field covered. 
 His sentences follow one another in magnificent proces-
 
 POLITICAL PROSE 291 
 
 sion. One feels that they are the work of an artist. They 
 are thickly sprinkled with fine-sounding words derived 
 from the Latin. The 1611 version of the first four chap- 
 ters of the Gospel of John averages 96 per cent of Anglo- 
 Saxon words, and Shakespeare 89 per cent, while Gibbon's 
 average of 70 per cent is the lowest of any great writer. 
 He has all the coldness of the classical school, and he 
 shows but little sympathy with the great human struggles 
 described in his pages. He has been well styled " a skill- 
 ful anatomical demonstrator of the dead framework of 
 society." With all its excellences, his work has, therefore, 
 those faults which are typical of the eighteenth century. 
 
 Political Prose. Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a dis- 
 tinguished statesman and member of the House of Com- 
 mons in an important era of English history a time 
 when the question of the independence of the American 
 colonies was paramount, and when the spirit of revolt 
 against established forms was in the air. He is the 
 greatest political writer of the eighteenth century. 
 
 Burke's best productions are SpeecJi on American Taxa- 
 tion (1774) and Speech on Conciliation witJi America (I'jj^). 
 His Reflections on the Revolution in France is also note- 
 worthy. His prose marks a great advance in the follow- 
 ing directions: (i) He is one of the greatest masters of 
 metaphor and imagery in English prose. Only Carlyle 
 (p. 415) surpasses him in the use of metaphorical language. 
 (2) Burke's breadth of thought and wealth of expression 
 enable him to present an idea from many different points 
 of view, so that if his readers do not comprehend his expo- 
 sition from one side, they may from another. He endeavors 
 to attach what he says to something in the experience of 
 his hearers or readers ; and he remembers that the 
 experience of all is not the same. (3) As a corollary of
 
 292 
 
 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 the preceding, it follows that his imagery and figures lay 
 all kinds of knowledge under contribution. At one time 
 he draws an illustration from manufacturing ; at another, 
 from history ; at another, from the butcher shop. (4) His 
 work displays intense earnestness, love of truth, strength 
 of logical reasoning, vividness of imagination, and breadth 
 of view, all of which are necessary qualities in prose which 
 is to mold the opinions of men. 
 
 It is well to note that Burke's careful study of English 
 literature contributed largely to his success as a writer.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 293 
 
 His use of Bible phraseology and his familiarity with 
 poetry led a critic to say that any one " neglects the most 
 valuable repository of rhetoric in the English language, 
 who has not well studied the English Bible. . . . The 
 cadence of Burke's sentences always reminds us that 
 prose writing is only to be perfected by a thorough study 
 of the poetry of the language." 
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON, 1709-1784 
 
 Early Struggles. Michael Johnson, an intelligent book- 
 seller in Lichfield, Staffordshire, was in 1 709 blessed with 
 a son who was to occupy a unique position in literature, 
 a position gained not so much by his written as by his 
 spoken words and great personality. 
 
 Samuel was prepared for Oxford at various schools 
 and in the paternal bookstore, where he read widely and 
 voraciously, but without much system. He said that at 
 the age of eighteen, the year before he entered Oxford, 
 he knew almost as much as at fifty-three. Poverty kept 
 him from remaining at Oxford long enough to take a 
 degree. He left the university, and, for more than a quar- 
 ter of a century, he struggled doggedly against poverty. 
 When he was twenty-five, he married a widow of forty- 
 eight. With the money which she brought him, he opened 
 a private school, but failed. He never had more than 
 eight pupils, one of whom was David Garrick (p. 266). 
 
 In 1737 Johnson went to London and sought employ- 
 ment as a hack writer. Sometimes he had no money with 
 which to hire a lodging, and was compelled to walk the 
 streets all night to keep warm. Johnson reached London 
 in the very darkest days for struggling authors. They 
 often slept on ash heaps, and begged something for a 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 19
 
 294 
 
 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 meal. They were the objects of a general contempt, 
 to which Pope's Dunciad had largely contributed. 
 
 During this period Johnson did much hack work for 
 the Gentleman s Magazine. He was also the author of 
 two satirical poems, London (1738) and The Vanity of 
 Human Wishes (1749), "which won much praise. 
 
 Later Years. By the time he had been for ten years 
 in London, his abilities were sufficiently well known to 
 the leading booksellers for them to hire him to compile 
 a Dictionary of the English Language for i$?S- He 
 was seven years at this work, finishing it in 1755.
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 295 
 
 Between 1750 and 1760 he wrote the matter for two 
 periodicals, The Rambler (1750-1752) and The Idler (\"j^- 
 1760), which contain papers on manners and morals. He 
 intended to model these papers on the lines of The Tatler 
 and The Spectator, but his essays are for the most part 
 ponderously dull and uninteresting. 
 
 In 1762, for the first time, he was really an independent 
 man, for then George III. gave him a life pension of ^300 
 a year. Even as late as 1759, in order to pay his mother's 
 funeral expenses, Johnson had been obliged to dash off the 
 romance of Rasselas in a week, but from the time he re- 
 ceived his pension, he had leisure "to cross his legs and 
 have his talk out " in some of the most distinguished 
 gatherings of the eighteenth century. During the rest of 
 his life he produced little besides The Lives of the Poets, 
 which is his most, important contribution to literature. In 
 1784 he died, and was buried in Westminster Abbey, 
 among the poets whose lives he had written. 
 
 A Man of Character. Any one who will read Macau- 
 lay's Life of Johnson 1 may become acquainted with some 
 of Johnson's most striking peculiarities, but these do not 
 constitute his claims to greatness. He had qualities that 
 made him great in spite of his peculiarities. He knocked 
 down a publisher who insulted him, and he would never 
 take insolence from a superior, but there is no case on 
 record of his ever having been unkind to an inferior. 
 Goldsmith said : " Johnson has nothing of a bear but the 
 skin." When some one manifested surprise that Johnson 
 should have assisted a worthless character, Goldsmith 
 promptly replied : " He has now become miserable, and 
 that insures the protection of Johnson." 
 
 1 To be found in Encyclopedia Briiannica, Vol. XIII., or in Macaulay's 
 collected Essays.
 
 296 
 
 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 When Johnson came home late at night, he would some- 
 times see homeless street Arabs asleep on a doorstep. 
 
 In order that they might 
 find something for 
 breakfast when 
 they awoke, he 
 would frequent- 
 ly slip a coin 
 into their hands. 
 He spent the 
 greater part of 
 his pension on 
 the helpless, sev- 
 eral of whom he 
 received into his 
 own house. 
 
 There have 
 been many 
 broader and 
 more scholarly 
 Englishmen, 
 but there never 
 walked the streets of London a man who battled more 
 courageously for what he thought was right. The more 
 we know of him, the more certain are we to agree with 
 this closing sentence from Macaulay's Life of Johnson: 
 " And it is but just to say that our intimate acquaintance 
 with what he would himself have called the anfractuosities 
 of his intellect and of his temper serves only to strengthen 
 our conviction that he was both a great and a good man." 
 A Great Converser and Literary Lawgiver. By nature 
 Johnson was fitted to be a talker. He was happiest when 
 he had intelligent listeners. Accordingly, he and Sir 
 
 From an old print. 
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON'S BIRTHPLACE
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 
 
 297 
 
 Joshua Reynolds, the artist, founded the famous Literary 
 Club in 1764. During Johnson's lifetime this had for 
 members such men as Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, 
 Charles James Fox, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, and 
 David Garrick. Macaulay says : " The verdicts pro- 
 nounced by this conclave on new books were speedily 
 known all over London, and were sufficient to sell off a 
 whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the 
 service of the trunk maker and the pastry cook. ... To 
 predominate over such a society was not easy ; yet even 
 over such a society Johnson predominated." 
 
 He was consulted as an oracle on all kinds of subjects, 
 and his replies were generally the 
 pith of common sense. So famous 
 had Johnson become for his con- 
 versations, that George III. met 
 him on purpose to hear him talk. 
 A committee from forty of the 
 leading London booksellers 
 waited on Johnson to ask him 
 to write the Lives of the Poets. 
 There was then in England no 
 other man with so much influ- 
 ence in the world of literature. 
 
 Bos well's Life of Johnson. - 
 In 1763 James Boswell ( 1740- 
 T 795)> a Scotchman, met Johnson and devoted much 
 time to copying the words that fell from the great 
 Doctor's lips and to noting his individual traits. We must 
 go to Boswell's Life of Johnson, the greatest of all biog- 
 raphies, to read of Johnson as he lived and talked ; in 
 short, to learn those facts which render him far more 
 famous than his written works. 
 
 JAMES BOSWELL
 
 298 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 Leslie Stephen says : " I would still hope that to many * 
 readers Boswell has been what he has certainly been to 
 some, the first writer who gave them a love of English 
 literature, and the most charming of all companions long 
 after the bloom of novelty has departed. I subscribe most 
 cheerfully to Mr. Lewes's statement that he estimates his 
 acquaintances according to their estimate of Boswell." 
 
 A Champion of the Classical School. Johnson was a 
 powerful adherent of classicism, and he did much to defer 
 the coming of romanticism. His poetry is formal, and it 
 shows the classical fondness for satire and aversion to 
 sentiment. The first two lines of his greatest poem, The 
 Vanity of Human Wishes, 
 
 . " Let observation with extensive view 
 Survey mankind from China to Peru," 
 
 show the classical couplet, which he employs, and they 
 afford an example of poetry produced by a sonorous com- 
 bination of words. " Observation," " view," and " survey " 
 are nearly synonymous terms. Such conscious effort 
 centered on word building subtracts something from poetic 
 feeling. 
 
 His critical opinions of literature manifest his prefer- 
 ence for classical themes and formal modes of treatment. 
 He says of Shakespeare : " It is incident to him to be now 
 and then entangled with an unwieldy sentiment, which he 
 cannot well express . . . the equality of words to things 
 is very often neglected." 
 
 In The Lives of the Poets, Johnson writes thus of 
 Milton's great elegy : " One of the poems on which much 
 praise has been bestowed is Lycidas ; of which the diction 
 is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and numbers unpleasing. 
 ... Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and there-
 
 SAMUEL JOHNSON 299 
 
 fore disgusting." Johnson felt positive repugnance to 
 Milton's flocks and shepherds going forth 
 
 " Under the opening eyelids of the Morn," 
 
 amid the cowslips wan, the primroses dying forsaken, and 
 the daffodils with tear-filled cups. Johnson preferred the 
 streets of London to the finest spring landscape. 
 
 General Characteristics. While he is best known in 
 literary history as the great converser whose full-length 
 portrait is drawn by Boswell, Johnson left the marks 
 of his influence on much of the prose written within nearly 
 a hundred years after his death. On the whole, this in- 
 fluence has, for the following reasons, been bad. 
 
 First, he loved a ponderous style in which there was 
 an excess of the Latin element. He liked to have his 
 statements sound well. He once said in forcible Saxon : 
 " The Rehearsal has not wit enough to keep it sweet," 
 but a moment later he translated this into : " It has not 
 sufficient vitality to preserve it from putrefaction." In 
 his Dictionary he defined " network " as " anything re- 
 ticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices 
 between the intersections." Some wits of the day said 
 that he used long words to make his Dictionary a neces- 
 sity. If we read much of Johnson, we are in danger of 
 imitating him unconsciously. A critic in the latter part 
 of the nineteenth century, describing Johnson's style, 
 says : " He delivers himself with severe majestical dignity 
 and vigorous authoritative brevity." This critic was un- 
 consciously writing Johnsonese. 
 
 In the second place, Johnson loved formal balance so 
 much that he used too many antitheses. Many of his 
 balancing clauses are out of place or add nothing to the 
 sense. The following shows excess of antithesis :
 
 300 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 " If the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues 
 longer on the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's 
 the heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expec- 
 tation, and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent 
 astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight." 1 
 
 As a rule, Johnson's prose is too abstract and general, 
 and it awakens too few images. This is a characteristic 
 failing of his essays in The Rambler and The Idler. 
 Even in Rasselas, his great work of fiction, he speaks 
 of passing through the fields and seeing the animals 
 around him, but he does not mention definite trees, 
 flowers, or animals. Shakespeare's wounded stag or 
 " winking Mary-buds " would have given a touch of 
 life to the whole scene. 
 
 Johnson's latest and greatest work, The Lives of the 
 Poets, is comparatively free from most of these faults. 
 The sentences are energetic and full of meaning. Al- 
 though we may not agree with much of the criticism, 
 we shall find it stimulating and suggestive.. Before he 
 gave these critical essays to the world, he had been 
 doing little for years except talking in a straightforward 
 manner. His constant practice in speaking English 
 reacted on his later written work. Unfortunately this 
 work has been the least imitated. 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 The second part of the eighteenth century was a time 
 of changing standards in church, state, and literature. 
 The downfall of Walpole, the religious revivals of Wes- 
 ley, the victories of Clive in India and of Wolfe in Canada, 
 show the progress that England was making at home 
 and abroad. 
 
 1 Lives of the PocU.
 
 SUMMARY 301 
 
 There began to be a revolt against the narrow classical 
 standards in literature. A longing gradually manifested 
 itself for more freedom of imagination, such as we find 
 in Ossian, The Castle of Otranto, Percy's Reliques, and 
 translations of the Norse mythology. There was a de- 
 parture from the hackneyed forms and subjects of the 
 preceding age and an introduction of more of the sub- 
 jective and ideal element, such as can be found in 
 Gray's Elegy and Collins's Ode to Evening. The progress 
 toward romanticism was neither uniform nor constant. 
 Dr. Johnson threw his powerful influence against the 
 movement, and curbed somewhat the romantic tendencies 
 in Goldsmith, who, nevertheless, gave fine romantic touches 
 to The Deserted Village and to much of his other work. 
 This period was one of preparation for the glorious 
 romantic outburst at the end of the century. 
 
 In prose, the most important achievement of the age 
 was the creation of the modern novel. In addition to 
 Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, Fielding's 
 Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Smollett's Hnm- 
 plirey Clinker, and Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield, there 
 were noted prose works in philosophy and history by 
 Hume and Gibbon, in politics by Burke, and in criticism 
 by Johnson! 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER VIII 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Gardiner, 1 pp. 730-792 ; Green, pp. 735-786; Underwood-Guest, pp. 
 523-535 ; Guerber, pp. 303-308 ; HassalPs Making of the British Em- 
 pire, pp. 30-82; Traill, V., 172-365. 
 
 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I.
 
 3O2 FROM 1740 TO 1780 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 The Romantic Movement. In order to note the difference in feel- 
 ing, imagery, and ideals, between the romantic and the classic schools, 
 it will be advisable for the student to make a special comparison of 
 Dryden's and Pope's satiric and didactic verse with Spenser's Faerie 
 Queene and Milton's // Penseroso. What is the difference in the gen- 
 eral atmosphere of these poems? See if the influence of // Penseroso is 
 noticeable in Collins's Ode to Evening (Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., 
 p. 287), and in Gray's Elegy (Ward, III., 331). 
 
 What element foreign to Dryden and Pope appears in Thomson's 
 Seasons (Ward, III., 173)? 
 
 What signs of a struggle between the romantic and the classic are 
 noticeable in Goldsmith's Deserted Village (Ward, III., 373-379)? 
 Pick out the three finest passages in the poem, and give the reasons for 
 the choice. 
 
 Read pp. 173-176 of Ossian (Canterbury Poets series, 40 cents), 
 and show why it appealed to the spirit of romanticism. 
 
 Read the opening of Walpole's Castle of Otranto (Cassell's National 
 Library, No. 9, 10 cents), and explain why the time welcomed a 
 romance of that order. 
 
 In Percy's Reliques, read the first ballad, that of Chevy Chase, and 
 explain how the age could turn from Pope to read such rude verse. 
 
 The Novel. Guy, Earl of Warwick is given in Morley's Early 
 Prose Romances (pp. 331-408). An easily accessible Elizabethan novel 
 is Greene's Pandosto, which may be found at the end of the Cassell 
 National Library edition of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale (No. 101, 
 10 cents). Selections from Lodge's Rosalind are given in Craik's 
 English Prose Selections, Vol. I., pp. 544-549. These should be com- 
 pared with the parallel parts of As You Like It. {Rosalind may be 
 found complete in No. 62 of Cassell's National Library.) Selections 
 from Nash's The Unfortunate Traveller are given in Craik, I., 573- 
 576, and selections from Sidney's Arcadia in the same volume, 
 pp. 409-419- 
 
 For the preliminary sketching of characters that might serve as types 
 in fiction, read The Spectators Club by Steele (Cassell's National 
 Library, No. 28, pp. 21-29, IO cents). Defoe's Robinson Crusoe will 
 be read entire by almost every one. 
 
 In Craik, IV., read the following selections from these four great 
 novelists of the middle of the eighteenth century : from Richard-
 
 READING REFERENCES 303 
 
 son, pp. 59-66; from Fielding, pp. 118-125 i fr m Sterne, pp. 213-219; 
 and from Smollett, pp. 261-264 and 269-272. 
 
 Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield should be read entire by the student 
 (Eclectic English Classics, American Book Co.). Selections may be 
 found in Craik, IV., 365-370. 
 
 Sketch the general lines of development in fiction, from the early 
 romance to Fielding. What type of fiction did Don Quixote ridicule ? 
 Compare Greene's Pandosto with Shakespeare's Winters Tale, and 
 Lodge's Rosalind with As You Like It. In what relation do Steele 
 and Addison stand to the novel? Why is the modern novel said to 
 begin with Richardson? Why is the novel a dangerous rival of the 
 drama ? 
 
 Philosophy. Two selections from Berkeley in Craik, IV., 34- 
 39, give some of that philosopher's subtle metaphysics. The same 
 volume, pp. 189-195, gives a selection from Hume's Treatise of Human 
 Nature. Can the subject matter in these be readily comprehended, 
 or is the style involved and metaphysical ? 
 
 Gibbon. Read Aurelian's campaign against Zenobia, which con- 
 stitutes the last third of Chap. XI. of the first volume of The Decline 
 and Fall of the Roman Empire. Other selections may be found in 
 Craik, IV., 460-472. 
 
 What is the special merit of Gibbon's work ? Compare his style, 
 either in description or in narration, with Bunyan's. 
 
 Burke. Let the student who has not the time to read all the 
 speech on Conciliation with America (Eclectic English Classics, 20 
 cents) read the selection in Craik, IV., 379-385, and also the selection 
 referring to the decline of chivalry, from Reflections on the Revolution 
 in France (Craik, IV., 402). 
 
 Point out in Burke's writings the four characteristics mentioned on 
 pp. 291, 292. Compare his style with Bacon's, Swift's, Addison's, and 
 Gibbon's. 
 
 Johnson. Representative selections are given in Craik, IV., 141- 
 185. Those from The Lives of the Poets (Craik, IV., 175-182) will 
 best repay study. Let the student who has the time read Dryden's 
 Life entire (Cassell's National Library, No. 36, 10 cents). As much 
 as possible of Boswell's Life of Johnson should be read (Craik, IV., 
 482-495). 
 
 Compare the style of Johnson with that of Gibbon and Burke. For 
 what reasons does Johnson hold a high position in literature ?
 
 304 FROM 1740 TO. 1780 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Lecky's History of England in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Thackeray's The Four Georges. 
 
 Taine's History of English Literature. Book III., Chap. VI. 
 
 Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. II., pp. 3-84. 
 
 Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature, pp. 409-486. 
 
 Baldwin's Introduction to the Study of English Literature, Vol. II., 
 pp. 134-258. 
 
 Clark's Study of English Prose Writers, pp. 199-322. 
 
 Gosse's History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Perry's English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 282-419. 
 
 Saintsbury's A Short History of English Literature, pp. 567-636. 
 
 Stephen's History of Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Jusserand's The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare. 
 
 Cross's The Development of the English Novel. 
 
 Raleigh's The English Novel; Lanier's The English Novel. 
 
 Dunlop's History of Fiction. 
 
 Beers's English Romanticism, XVIII. Century. 
 
 Phelps's Beginnings of the English Romantic Movement. 
 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., pp. 245-381. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. IV., pp. 25-421. 
 
 Stephen's Hours in a Library. Vol. I. contains an excellent essay 
 on Samuel Richardson, and Vol. II. one on Henry Fielding. 
 
 Traill's The New Fiction and Other Essays contains Samuel 
 Richardson (pp. 104-136), and The Novel of Manners (pp. 137-169). 
 
 Dobson's Life of Fielding. 
 
 Thackeray's English Humorists. 
 
 Huxley's Life of Hume. 
 
 M orison's Life of Gibbon. 
 
 Forster's, Dobson's, or Black's Life of Goldsmith. 
 
 Stephen's Life of Johnson] Grant's Life of Johnson. 
 
 Dr. Johnson 's Writings in Vol. II. of Stephen's Hours in a Library. 
 
 Bos well's Life of Johnson. 
 
 Macaulay's Essay on Croker^s Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson. 
 
 Fitzgerald's Life of Bosivell. 
 
 Gosse's Life of Gray. 
 
 Morley's Life of Edmund Burke,
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 The Victory of Romanticism. We have traced in the 
 preceding age the beginnings of the romantic move- 
 ment. Its ascendency over classical rules was com- 
 plete in the period between 1780 and the Victorian age. 
 The romantic victory brought to literature more individual- 
 ity, deeper feeling, a less artificial form of expression, and 
 an added sense for the appreciation of the beauties of 
 nature and their spiritual significance. 
 
 Swinburne says that the new poetic school, "usually 
 registered as Wordsworthian," was " actually founded at 
 midnight by William Blake [1757-1827] and fortified at 
 sunrise by William Wordsworth." These lines from 
 Blake's To the Evening Star (1783) may be given to sup- 
 port this statement : 
 
 " Thou fair-haired Angel of the Evening, 
 
 Smile on our loves ; and while thou drawest the 
 Blue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dew 
 On every flower that shuts its sweet eyes 
 In timely sleep. Let thy West Wind sleep on 
 The lake." 
 
 If any one wishes to become a critic sufficiently intelli- 
 gent to appreciate the differences in the work of English 
 poets, it will be an excellent step for him to compare the 
 poetry of this romantic school beginning with the above 
 lines, for instance with the verse of Pope. 
 
 305
 
 306 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 If we except the verse of Milton, we may say that the 
 poetry of this age is more genuine and unaffected than 
 any other produced in England since the time of Eliza- 
 beth. The eyes of honest Cowper looked face to face on 
 nature and on rural life. To express strong feeling was 
 unfashionable in the time of Pope, but in the romantic 
 age there was no more hesitancy than in Elizabethan days 
 in voicing the deepest and most varied emotions of the 
 soul. Wordsworth, the greatest representative of the ro- 
 mantic age, boldly said : "All good poetry is the sponta- 
 neous overflow of powerful feelings." We hear from the 
 lips of Burns immortal songs of intense love, which make 
 all seasons seem like spring. 
 
 Increased Range of Literary Activity. Because of its 
 lack of polish and of conventionality, the classicists had 
 looked upon England's past as a rude age, worthy of con- 
 tempt. Writers now began to regard that past as the 
 parent of the present and to enrich literature with pictures 
 of bygone times. At his magic bidding, Scott made the 
 knightly past don the garb of life for 
 the entertainment of the world. Charles 
 Lamb (p. 312) increased the influence 
 of the Elizabethan age by an excellent 
 volume of selections from the half-for- 
 gotten dramatists of that time. 
 
 The union of strong imagination 
 with intellect gave more variety to 
 literature than resulted in the first 
 part of the eighteenth century from 
 CHARLES LAMB tne union f intellect with weak or 
 
 repressed imagination. We conse- 
 quently find a greater variety in the song notes of the 
 poets, from George Crabbe (1754-1832), who sings of the
 
 INCREASED RANGE OF LITERARY ACTIVITY 307 
 
 miseries of the poor, to Shelley and Byron, who at one 
 moment voice intense desire for individual liberty and at 
 another paint the delicate traceries of cloud or the ocean 
 
 mirror 
 
 " . . . where the Almighty's form 
 Glasses itself in tempests." 1 
 
 Such was the power of imagination that a new world then 
 burst from the chrysalis of the old. Wordsworth heard 
 from the common flowers, the pansy at his feet, the prim- 
 rose by a river's brim, truths newer and more weighty 
 than fell from the lips of any lord or lady mentioned in 
 Pope's verses. Keats could utter with new meaning : 
 
 u The poetry of earth is never dead." 2 
 
 We may say of the poetry of this age what Coleridge's 
 Ancient Mariner said of the music that filled the sea and 
 air around him : 
 
 " And now 'twas like all instruments, 
 Now like a lonely flute ; 
 And now it is an angel's song, 
 That makes the heavens be mute." 
 
 After a thorough study of the romantic age, each one may ' 
 truthfully apply to himself this line from Keats : 
 
 "Much have I travel'd in the realms of gold." 8 
 
 As varied as was the imaginative activity of the poets, 
 it was for the most part confined to regarding Nature and 
 Man from a new point of view. Let us next try to note 
 more specifically in what this change consists. 
 
 1 Byron : Childe Harold, Canto IV. 2 To a Grasshopper, 
 
 8 On First Looking into Chapman 1 s Homer.
 
 308 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 Growth of Appreciation of Nature. In the appreciation 
 of Nature and in sympathetic interpretation of her various 
 moods, every preceding age, even the Elizabethan, is sur- 
 passed. For more than a century after Milton, the majority 
 of references to nature were made in general terms and were 
 borrowed from the stock illustrations of older poets, like 
 Virgil. We find the conventional lark, nightingale, and 
 turtledove. Nothing new or definite is said of them. In 
 many cases the poets had probably neither heard nor seen 
 them. Increasing comforts and safety in travel now took 
 more people where they could see for themselves the 
 beauties of nature. Gradually, observation became more 
 exact, after the most obvious aspects of natural objects had 
 been commonly noted. In the new poetry of nature we 
 find more definiteness. We can hear the whir of the par- 
 tridge, the chatter of magpies, the caw of the rook, the 
 whistling of the quail. Poets speak not only in general 
 terms of a tree, but they also note the differences in the 
 shade of the green of the leaves and the peculiarities of 
 the bark. Previous to this time, poets borrowed from 
 Theocritus and Virgil piping shepherds reclining in the 
 shade, whom no Englishman had ever seen. Wordsworth 
 pictures a genuine English shepherd in Michael. 
 
 The love for mountains and wild nature is of recent 
 growth. One writer in the seventeenth century considered 
 the Alps as so much rubbish swept together by the 
 broom of nature to clear the plains of Italy. A seven- 
 teenth century traveler thought the Welsh mountains 
 better than the Alps because the former would pasture 
 goats. Dr. Johnson asked : " Who can like the High- 
 lands ? " The influence of the romantic movement de- 
 veloped the love for wild scenery, which is so conspicuous 
 in Wordsworth and Byron. The poetry of wonder and
 
 INFLUENCE OF THE DEMOCRATIC SPIRIT 309 
 
 mystery naturally followed this sympathetic feeling for wild 
 and solitary nature. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is a roman- 
 tic masterpiece, filled with the mystery of the lonely sea. 
 
 The eighteenth century classicists loved the town and 
 despised the country, but the spread of romanticism 
 changed this feeling. Burns could say : 
 
 " The Muse, na Poet ever fand her 
 Till by himsel he leaned to wander 
 Adown some trottin burn's 1 meander." 2 
 
 As the eighteenth century closed, we may notice that 
 Nature was loved more and more for herself, and not 
 merely because she was useful to man or appeared to 
 flatter him by reflecting his emotions. To William Words- 
 worth, the greatest romantic poet, nature seemed to possess 
 a conscious soul, which expressed itself in the primrose, 
 the rippling lake, or the cuckoo's song, with as much 
 intelligence as human lips ever displayed in whispering 
 a secret to the ear of love. 
 
 Influence of the Democratic Spirit on the Poetry of 
 Man. In the age of Pope, the only type of man con- 
 sidered worthy of a place in literature was the aristocratic, 
 cultured class. The ordinary laborer was an object too 
 contemptible even for satire. The democratic movement 
 had for some time been gathering force. In 1789 this 
 movement culminated in the French Revolution against 
 the tyranny of the nobility. The youth of all Europe 
 responded to the cry of the French people for Liberty, 
 Fraternity, Equality, and looked forward rapturously to 
 the time when mankind should be united under the uni- 
 versal democracy of Man, without regard to nationality, 
 birth, or religion. 
 
 1 stream. 2 7!? William Simpson. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 2O
 
 310 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 Such feelings completely changed the way of looking 
 at the begrimed, hard-handed laborer. He was no longer 
 simply a burden bearer or a machine, but a friend and a 
 brother. In 1795 Burns could proclaim thoughts which 
 would have been laughed to scorn early in the cen- 
 tury : 
 
 " Is there, for honest poverty, 
 
 That hangs his head and a' that? 
 
 The coward slave, we pass him by, 
 
 We dare be poor for a' that ! 
 
 The rank is but the guinea's stamp ; 
 The man's the gowd 1 for a' that." 2 
 
 To the ardent young spirits of the time, this French 
 Revolution meant the downfall of the old dynasty of 
 tyranny, and the birth of a new dynasty of world-wide 
 liberty. The English poets struck on their lyres notes 
 of hope, of promise, of boundless possibilities, not heard 
 since the days of the Elizabethans. Like the Eliza- 
 bethans, the poets of the Revolution saw the rising of 
 a new sun and dreamed of what would be when it 
 reached its glorious meridian, and liberty was at every 
 hearth. The very buoyancy of youth was in the earth, 
 and her poets caught the new spirit. 
 
 " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very Heaven! "* 
 
 cried the usually sober-minded Wordsworth. Shelley's 
 poetry is colored with rosy dreams of an enfranchised 
 humanity. 
 
 All the influences exerted by statesmen, poets, and phi- 
 lanthropists gradually brought fuller freedom to Great 
 Britain. Before Victoria ascended the throne, the House 
 
 1 gold. *For a' That and a' That. The Prelude, Book XI.
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT 311 
 
 of Lords had been forced to withdraw its opposition to 
 the passage of the Reform Bill, which gave to the middle 
 classes more voice in the government ; negro slavery had 
 been abolished ; and even the unfortunate and the criminal 
 classes had found their champions. 
 
 Philosophical Thought. While the French revolution- 
 ists were proclaiming the equal rights of all men, and the 
 British Parliament was gradually realizing the force of 
 this view, the philosophers were not confining their 
 attention entirely to metaphysics, as had been the cus- 
 tom too often in the past, but they were laying the 
 foundations for the new science of political economy and 
 endeavoring to ascertain how the condition of the masses 
 could be improved. While investigating this subject, 
 Malthus (1766-1834) announced his famous proposition, 
 since -known as the Malthusian theorem, that population 
 tends to increase faster than the means of subsistence. 
 
 In moral philosophy, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) 
 laid down the principle that happiness is the prime ob- 
 ject of existence. He shocked the upper classes of 
 society generally by announcing the revolutionary prin- 
 ciple that the happiness of any one person, whether lord 
 or bishop, is no more important than the happiness of 
 any other individual, although he may be a factory 
 hand. Bentham insisted that the basis of legislation 
 should be the greatest happiness to the greatest number, 
 instead of to the privileged few. He measured the 
 morality of actions by their efficiency in securing this 
 happiness, and he said that pushpin is as good as poetry, 
 if it gives as much pleasure. Such novel statements set 
 men to thinking. He was followed by James Mill (1773- 
 1836), who maintained that the morality of actions is 
 measured by their utility.
 
 312 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 Coleridge abhorred the destructive doctrine of Hume 
 and the utilitarian dogmas of Bentham and Mill. To 
 Coleridge, only the modern teachings of German philoso- 
 phers, like Kant and Schelling, were congenial, and he 
 propounded an idealistic philosophy and urged upon his 
 common-sense generation that mind alone is the force 
 in the world and that God reveals himself to every mind 
 directly. To Coleridge is largely due the introduction of 
 German influence on English philosophic thought. 
 
 We find in Shelley striking poetic expression of the be- 
 lief in the immanence of the Divine Spirit in everything, 
 from the flower to the storm. Such lines as these on 
 the death of Keats express a philosophy almost pan- 
 theistic : 
 
 " He is made one with Nature : there is heard 
 His voice in all her music, from the moan 
 Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird. 
 
 Dust to the dust ! but the pure spirit shall flow 
 Back to the burning fountain whence it came, 
 A portion of the Eternal." 1 
 
 The Position of Prose. The eighteenth century until 
 near its close was, broadly speaking, an age of prose. In 
 excellence and variety, the prose surpassed the poetry, 
 but in this age (1780-1837) their position was reversed, 
 and poetry regained almost an Elizabethan ascendency. 
 Toward the close of this era, the Victorian giants of prose, 
 Carlyle and Macaulay, began their work, but the chief prose 
 writers belonging to this age are Scott, Lamb, Southey, 
 Coleridge, De Quincey, and Landor. 
 
 The works of Scott alone, among this group, are widely 
 read to-day, although the delicate humor and unique liter- 
 ary flavor of Charles Lamb's (1775-1834) Essays of Elia 
 
 1 Adonais.
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 313 
 
 still charm many devotees. Coleridge has, perhaps, a thou- 
 sand readers for his Ancient Mariner to one for his prose. 
 Southey (1774-1843), usually classed with Wordsworth and 
 Coleridge as one of the three so-called 
 Lake Poets, wrote much better prose 
 than poetry. His Life of Nelson ranks 
 better as prose than his Curse of Kehama 
 as poetry. It is probable that, had he 
 lived in an age of prose ascendency, 
 he would have written little poetry, for 
 he distinctly says that the desire of 
 making money "has already led me to 
 write sometimes in poetry what would 
 perhaps otherwise have been better ROBERT SOUTHEY 
 written in prose." This statement shows 
 in a striking way the spirit of those times. To-day one 
 who wishes to make money avoids writing poetry. 
 
 The prose of the age is often the vehicle of romantic 
 adventure, as in Scott, and of romantic humor, as in 
 Lamb's Dissertation on Roast Pig and De Quincey's Mur- 
 der considered as one of the Fine Arts. The prose of one 
 writer, Walter Savage Landor, is the embodiment of con- 
 scious style and classical polish. These qualities are 
 conspicuous in his Imaginary Conversations. Some of the 
 critical prose is well worth study, especially Wordsworth's 
 Prefaces and parts of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, 
 which expound the literary philosophy of the new school 
 of poetry. 
 
 WILLIAM COWPER, 1731-1800 
 
 Life. It is usual to associate the idea of overpowering 
 enthusiasm or of intrepid fearlessness with the leaders of 
 all new movements. But with the name of Cowper, one
 
 314 
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 of the earliest among the romantic poets, neither charac- 
 teristic can be coupled. He was one of the shyest and 
 most shrinking of men. He had none of the aggressive 
 traits that make a reformer, and the thought of inaugura- 
 ting a revolt from the standard subjects of verse would 
 have frightened him into silence. He was merely a child 
 of nature who passed his life among rural scenes and 
 wrote of what he knew best. 
 
 His life is a tale of almost continual sadness, caused by 
 his morbid timidity. He was born at Great Berkhamp-
 
 WILLIAM COWPER 315 
 
 stead, Hertfordshire, in 1731. At the age of six, he lost 
 his mother and was placed in a boarding school". Here his 
 sufferings began. The child was so especially terrified 
 by one rough boy that he could never raise his eyes to 
 the bully's face, but knew him unmistakably by his shoe 
 buckles. 
 
 There was some happiness for Cowper at his next 
 school, the Westminster School, and also during the twelve 
 succeeding years, when he studied law; but the short res- 
 pite was followed by the gloom of madness. Owing to 
 his ungovernable fear of a public examination, which was 
 necessary to secure the position offered by an uncle, 
 Cowper underwent days and nights of agony, when he 
 tried in many ways to end his miserable life. The fright- 
 ful ordeal unsettled his reason, and he spent . eighteen 
 months in an insane asylum. 
 
 Upon his recovery, he was taken into the house of a 
 Rev. Mr. Unwin, whose wife tended Cowper as an own 
 son during the rest of her life. He was never supremely 
 happy, and he was sometimes again thrown into madness 
 by the terrible thought of God's wrath, but his life was 
 passed in a quiet manner in the villages of Weston and 
 Olney, where he was loved by every one. The simple 
 pursuits of gardening, carpentering, visiting the sick, caring 
 for his numerous pets, rambling through the lanes, and 
 studying nature, occupied his sane moments when he was 
 not at prayer. 
 
 Works. Cowper's first works were the Olney Hymns. 
 His religious nature is manifest again in the volume 
 which consists of didactic poems upon such subjects as 
 The Progress of Error, Truth, Charity, Table Talk, and 
 Conversation. These are in the spirit of the formal clas- 
 sical poets, and contain sententious couplets such as,
 
 316 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 " An idler is a watch that wants both hands, 
 As useless when it goes as when it stands." 1 
 
 "Vociferated logic kills me quite ; 
 A noisy man is always in the right." 2 
 
 The bare didacticism of these poems is softened and 
 sweetened by the gentle, devout nature of the poet, and is 
 enlivened by a vein of pure humor. 
 
 He is one of England's most delightful letter writers 
 because of his humor, which ripples occasionally over the 
 stream of his constitutional melancholy. The Diverting 
 History of John Gilpin is extremely humorous. The poet 
 seems to have forgotten himself in this ballad and to have 
 given full expression to his sense of the ludicrous. 
 
 The work which has made his name famous is The 
 Task. He gave it this title half humorously because his 
 friend, Lady Austen, had bidden him write a poem in 
 blank verse upon some subject or other, the sofa, for 
 instance; and he called the first book of the poem The 
 Sofa. The 7^ask is chiefly remarkable because it turns 
 from the artificial and conventional subjects which had 
 been popular, and describes simple beauties of nature and 
 the joys of country life. Cowper says: 
 
 "God made the country, and man made the town." 
 
 To a public acquainted with the nature poetry of Burns, 
 Wordsworth, and Tennyson, Cowper's poem does not 
 seem a wonderful production. Appearing as it did, how- 
 ever, during the ascendency of Pope's influence, when 
 aristocratic city life was the only theme for verse, The 
 Task is a strikingly original work. It marks a change 
 from the artificial style of eighteenth century poetry and 
 
 1 Retirement. 2 Conversation.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 317 
 
 proclaims the dawn of the natural style of the new school. 
 He who could write of 
 
 " . . . rills that slip 
 
 Through the cleft rock, and chiming as they fall 
 Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length 
 In matted grass, that with a livelier green 
 Betrays the secret of their silent course," 
 
 was a worthy forerunner of Shelley and Keats. 
 
 General Characteristics. Cowper's religious fervor was 
 the strongest element in both his life and his writings. 
 Perhaps that which next appealed to his nature was 
 the pathetic. He had considerable mastery of pathos, as 
 may be seen in the drawing of "crazed Kate " in The 
 Task, in the lines To Mary, and in the touchingly beautiful 
 poem On the Receipt of My Mothers Picture out of Nor- 
 folk, beginning with that well-known line : 
 
 " Oh that those lips had language ! " 
 
 The two most attractive characteristics of his works are 
 refined, gentle humor and a simple and true manner of 
 picturing rural scenes .and incidents. He says that he 
 described no spot which he had not seen, and expressed 
 no emotion which he had not felt. In this way, he re- 
 stricted the range of his subjects and displayed a some- 
 what literal mind, but, what he had seen and felt, he 
 touched with a light fancy and with considerable imagi- 
 native power. 
 
 ROBERT BURNS, 1759-1796 
 
 Life. The greatest of Scottish poets was born in a 
 peasant's clay-built cottage, a mile and a half south of 
 Ayr. His father was a man whose morality, industry, and 
 zeal for education made him an admirable parent. For
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 a picture of the father and the home influences under 
 which the boy was reared, The Cotter s Saturday Night 
 should be read. The poet had little formal schooling, 
 but under paternal influence he learned how to teach 
 himself. 
 
 Until his twenty-eighth year, Robert Burns was an ordi- 
 nary laborer on one or another of the Ayrshire tenant 
 farms which his father or brothers leased. At the age of 
 
 BIRTHPLACE OF ROBERT BURNS 
 
 fifteen, the future poet was worked beyond his strength in 
 doing a man's full labor. He called his life on the Ayr- 
 shire farms "the unceasing toil of a galley slave." All 
 his life he fought a hand-to-hand fight with poverty. 
 
 In 1786, when he was twenty-seven years old, he re- 
 solved to abandon the struggle and seek a position in the 
 far-off island of Jamaica. In order to secure money for 
 his passage, he published some poems which he had
 
 ROBERT BURNS 319 
 
 thought out while following the plow or resting after the 
 day's toil. Six hundred copies were printed at three shil- 
 lings each. All were sold in a little over a month. At 
 the end of the nineteenth century a copy of this edition 
 was. sold in Edinburgh for ^572. His fame from that 
 little volume has grown as much as its monetary value. 
 
 Some Edinburgh critics praised the poems very highly 
 and suggested a second edition. He abandoned the idea 
 of going to Jamaica and went to Edinburgh to arrange for 
 a new edition. Here he was entertained by the foremost 
 men of the town, some of whom wished to see how a 
 plowman would behave in polite society, while others 
 desired to gaze on what they regarded as a freak of 
 nature. The new volume appeared in 1/87, and con- 
 tained but few poems which had not been published the 
 previous year. The following winter he again went to 
 Edinburgh, but he was almost totally neglected by the 
 leaders in literature and society. 
 
 In 1788 Burns married Jean Armour and took her to 
 a farm which he leased in Dumfriesshire. The first part 
 of this new period was the happiest in his life. She has 
 been immortalized in his songs : 
 
 " I see her in the dewy flowers, 
 I see her sweet and fair : 
 I hear her in the tunefu' birds, 
 I hear her charm the air : 
 There's not a bonie flower that springs 
 By fountain, shaw, or green ; 
 There's not a bonie bird that sings, 
 But minds me o' my Jean." 1 
 
 This farm proved unprofitable. He appealed to influen- 
 tial persons for some position that would enable him to 
 
 1 / Love My Jean.
 
 320 
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 178O-1837 
 
 support his family and write poetry. This was an age of 
 pensions, but not a farthing of pension did he ever get. 
 He was made an exciseman or gauger, at a salary of $o 
 a year, and he followed that occupation for the few remain- 
 ing years of his life. 
 
 Robert Burns wrote much and did much unworthy of 
 a great poet ; but when Scotland thinks of him, she quotes 
 the lines which he wrote for Tarn Samson s Elegy: 
 
 " Heav'n rest his saul, whare'er he be ! 
 Is tlf wish o' mony mae than me :
 
 ROBERT BURNS 321 
 
 He had twa faults, or maybe three, 
 
 Yet what remead ? 1 
 
 Ae social, honest man want we." 
 
 Burns's Poetic Creed. We can understand and enjoy 
 Burns much better if we know his object in writing poetry 
 and the point of view from which he regarded life. It 
 would be hard to fancy the intensity of the shock which 
 the school of Pope would have felt on reading this state- 
 ment of the poor plowman's poetic creed : 
 
 " Give me ae spark o 1 Nature's fire, 
 That's a' the learning I desire ; 
 Then tho' 1 drudge thro' dub an' mire 
 At pleugh or cart, 
 My Muse, though hamely in attire, 
 May touch the heart." 2 
 
 Burns's heart had been touched with the loves and sor- 
 rows of life, and it was his ambition to sing so naturally 
 of these as to touch the hearts of others. 
 
 With such an object in view, he did not disdain to use 
 in his best productions much of the Scottish dialect, the 
 vernacular of the plowman and the shepherd. The lit- 
 erary men of Edinburgh, who would rather have been 
 convicted of a breach of etiquette than of a Scotticism, 
 tried to induce him to write pure English, but the Scotch 
 words which he first heard from his mother's lips se.emed 
 to possess more "o' Nature's fire." He ended by touch- 
 ing the heart of Scotland and making her feel more proud 
 of this dialect, of him, and of herself. 
 
 Union of the Elizabethan with the Revolutionary Spirit. 
 In no respect does the poetry of Burns more completely 
 part company with the productions of the classical school 
 
 1 remedy. 2 Epistle to John Lapraik.
 
 322 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 than in the expression of feeling. The emotional fire of 
 Elizabethan times was restored to literature. No other 
 poet except Shakespeare has ever written more nobly im- 
 passioned love songs. Burns's song beginning : 
 
 "Ae fond kiss and then we sever" 
 
 seemed to both Byron and Scott to contain the essence of 
 a thousand love tales. This unaffected, passionate treat- 
 ment of love had long been absent from our literature, 
 but intensity of genuine feeling reappeared in Burns's 
 Highland Mary, I Love My Jean, Farewell to Nancy, To 
 Mary in Heaven, and O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, 
 which last Mendelssohn thought exquisite enough to set 
 to music. The poetry of Burns throbs with varying emo- 
 tions. It has been well said that the essence of the lyric 
 is "to describe the passion of the moment. Burns is a 
 master in this field. 
 
 The spirit of revolution against the bondage and cold 
 formalism of the past made the poor man feel that his 
 place in the world was as dignified, his happiness as im- 
 portant, as that of the rich. A feeling of sympathy for 
 the oppressed and the helpless also reached beyond man 
 to animals. Burns wrote touching lines about a mouse 
 whose nest was, one cold November day, destroyed by 
 his plow. When the wild eddying swirl of the snow beat 
 around his cot, his heart went out to the poor sheep, cattle, 
 and birds. 
 
 Burns can, therefore, claim kinship with the Eliza- 
 bethans because of his love songs, which in depth of 
 feeling and beauty of natural utterance show something 
 of Shakespeare's magic. In addition to this, the poetry 
 of Burns voices the democratic spirit of the Revolution. 
 
 Treatment of Nature. In his verses, the autumn winds
 
 ROBERT BURNS 323 
 
 blow over yellow corn ; the fogs melt in limpid air ; the 
 birches extend their fragrant arms dressed in woodbine ; 
 the lovers are coming through the rye ; the daisy spreads 
 her snowy bosom to the sun; the "westlin" winds, blow 
 fragrant with dewy flowers and musical with the melody 
 of birds; the brook flows past the lovers' Eden, where 
 summer first unfolds her robes and tarries longest, because 
 of the rarest bewitching enchantment of the poet's tale told 
 there. 
 
 In his poetry those conventional birds, the lark and the 
 nightingale, do not hold the chief place. His verses show 
 that the source of his knowledge of birds is not to be 
 sought in books. We catch glimpses of grouse cropping 
 heather buds, of whirring flocks of partridges, of the 
 sooty coot and the speckled teal, of the fisher herons, of 
 the green-crested lapwing, of clamoring craiks among 
 fields of flowering clover, of robins cheering the pensive 
 autumn, of lintwhites chanting among the buds, of the 
 mavis singing drowsy day to rest. 
 
 It is true that on the poetic stage of Burns, man always 
 stands in the foreground. Nature is employed in order 
 to give human emotion a proper background. He chose 
 those aspects of nature which harmonized with his present 
 mood, but the natural objects in his pages are none the 
 less enjoyable for fhat reason. Sometimes his songs 
 complain if nature seems gay when he is sad, but this 
 contrast is employed to throw a stronger light on his woes. 
 
 General Characteristics. It is said that the birthplace 
 of Burns is visited each year by more people than go to 
 see Shakespeare's House. What qualities has Burns 
 sufficient to account for this ? 
 
 The fact that the Scotch are an unusually patriotic 
 people and make many pilgrimages to the land of Burns
 
 324 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 is only a partial answer to this question. The complete 
 answer is to be found in a study of his characteristics. In 
 the first place, with his "spark o' Nature's fire," he has 
 touched the hearts of more of the rank and file of human- 
 ity than even Shakespeare himself. The songs of Burns 
 minister in the simplest and most direct way to every one 
 of the common feelings of the human heart. Shakespeare 
 surpasses all others in painting universal human nature, 
 but he is not always simple. Sometimes his audience con- 
 sists of only the cultured few. 
 
 Especially enjoyable is the humor of Burns, which 
 usually displays a kindly and intuitive sympathy with 
 human weaknesses. Tarn o> Shanter, his greatest poem, 
 keeps the reader smiling or laughing from beginning to 
 end. When the Scottish Muse, proudly placed on his 
 brow the holly wreath, she happily emphasized two of his 
 conspicuous qualities, his love and mirth, when she 
 
 said : 
 
 " I saw thee eye the general mirth 
 
 With boundless love." l 
 
 Burns is one of the great masters of lyrical verse. He 
 preferred that form. He wrote neither epic nor dramatic 
 poetry. He excels in "short swallow flights of song." 
 
 There are not many ways in which a poet can keep 
 larger audiences or come nearer to them than by writing 
 verses which naturally lend themselves to daily song. 
 There are few persons, from the peasant to the lord, who 
 have not sung some of Burns's songs, such as^ An/d Lang 
 Syne, Coming through the Rye, John Anderson my Jo, or 
 Scots Wha hae wi Wallace Bled. Since the day of his 
 death, the audiences of Robert Burns have for these 
 reasons continually grown larger. 
 
 1 Tht Vision.
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 325 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1771-1832 
 
 Life. Walter Scott, the son of a solicitor, was born in 
 Edinburgh in 1771. He was such an invalid in childhood 
 that he was illowed to follow his own bent without much 
 attempt at fmal education. He was taken to the coun- 
 try, where ne acquired a lasting fondness for animals and 
 wild scenery. With his first few shillings he bought the 
 collection of early ballads and songs known as Percy's 
 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. Of this he says : " I 
 do not beiiey,e I ever read a book half so frequently, or
 
 326 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 with half the enthusiasm." His grandmother used to 
 delight him with tales of adventure on the Scottish border. 
 
 Later, Scott went to the Edinburgh High School and to 
 the University. At the High School he showed wonder- 
 ful genius for telling stories to the boys. " I made a 
 brighter figure in the yards than in the class" he says of 
 himself at this time. This early practice in relating tales 
 and noting what held the attention of his classmates was 
 excellent training for the future Wizard of the North. 
 
 After an apprenticeship to his father, the son was 
 called to the bar and began the practice of law. He often 
 left his office to travel over the Scottish counties in search 
 of legendary ballads, songs, and traditions, a collection 
 of which he published under the title of Minstrelsy of 
 the Scottish Border- In 1799 he married a Miss Char- 
 lotte Carpenter, who had an income of $00 a year. 
 He was shortly after appointed sheriff of Selkirkshire 
 at an annual salary of ^300, and he found himself able 
 to neglect the law for literature. His early freedom from 
 poverty is in striking contrast to the condition of his 
 fellow-Scotsman, Robert Burns. 
 
 During the period between thirty and forty, he wrote his 
 best poems. Not until he was nearly forty-three did he dis- 
 cover where his greatest powers lay. He then published 
 Waverley, the first of a series of novels known by that 
 general name. During the remaining eighteen years of 
 his life, he wrote twenty-nine novels, besides many other 
 works, such as the Life of Napoleon, in nine volumes, and 
 an entertaining work on Scottish history, under the title 
 of Talcs of a Grandfather. 
 
 The crisis which showed Scott's sterling character 
 came in the winter of 1825-1826, when an Edinburgh 
 publishing firm in which he was interested failed and
 
 SIR WALTER SCOT!' 
 
 327 
 
 left on his shoulders a debt of ; 117,000. Had he been 
 a man of less honor, he might have taken advantage of 
 the bankrupt law, and then his future earnings would 
 have been free from past claims. He refused to take any 
 step which would remove his obligation to pay the debt. 
 At the age of fifty-four, he abandoned his happy dream 
 of founding the house of Scott of Abbotsford and sat 
 
 ABBOTSFORD, HOME OF SIR WALTER SCOTT 
 
 . * 
 
 down to pay off the debt with his pen. The example of 
 such a life is better than the finest sermon on honor. 
 He wrote with almost inconceivable rapidity. His novel 
 Woodstock, the product of three months' work, brought 
 ^8228. In four years he paid ,70,000 to his creditors. 
 One day the tears rolled down his cheeks because he 
 could no longer force his fingers to grasp the pen. The 
 King offered him a man of war in which to make a voyage
 
 328 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 to the Mediterranean. Hoping to regain his health, Scott 
 made the trip, but the rest came too late. He returned to 
 Abbotsford in a sinking condition, and died in 1832, at 
 the age of sixty-one. 
 
 Poetry. Scott's three greatest poems are The Lay of 
 the Last Minstrel (1805), Marmion (1808), and The Lady 
 of the Lake (1810). They belong to the distinct class 
 of story-telling poetry. Like many of the ballads in 
 Percy's collection, these poems are stories of old feuds 
 between the Highlander and the Lowlander, and between 
 the border lords of England and Scotland. These ro- 
 mantic tales of heroic battles, thrilling incidents some- 
 times supernatural, and love adventures, are told in fresh, 
 vigorous verse, which breathes the free air of wild nature 
 and moves with the prance of a war horse. Outside of 
 Homer, we can nowhere find a better description of a 
 battle than in the sixth canto of Marmion : A Tale of 
 Flodden Field: 
 
 " They close, in clouds of smoke and dust, 
 With sword sway and with lance's thrust ; 
 And such a yell was there, 
 Of sudden and portentous birth, 
 As if men fought upon the earth, 
 And fiends in upper air, 
 
 And in the smoke the pennons flew, 
 As in the storm the white sea mew." 
 
 The Lady of the Lake, an extremely interesting story 
 of romantic love and adventure, has been the most popu- 
 lar of Scott's poems. Loch Katrine and the Trossachs, 
 where the scene of the opening cantos is laid, have since 
 his day been thronged with tourists. 
 
 The most prominent characteristic of Scott's poetry is 
 its energetic movement. Many schoolboys know by heart
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT 329 
 
 those dramatic lines which express Marmion's defiance 
 of Douglas, and the ballad of Lochinvar, which is alive 
 with the movements of tireless youth. These poems 
 have an interesting story to tell, not of the thoughts, but 
 of the deeds, of the characters. Scott is strangely free 
 from nineteenth century introspection. 
 
 He delights in wild outdoor life and in observing na- 
 ture. In his verses we find that his eye has rested lov- 
 ingly on the gray birch, the mountain ash with its narrow 
 leaves and red berries, the dew on the heath flower, and the 
 speckled thrush singing a good morning to the water lily 
 and to the green leaves just stirring from their breezeless 
 sleep in the gray mist. He does not implant his emo- 
 tions in nature, like Burns, or put there a nature spirit, 
 like Wordsworth. 
 
 We feel that Scott lacks the penetration and the spiritu- 
 ality of Wordsworth. We can hardly imagine Scott say- 
 ing with Wordsworth : 
 
 " To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 1 
 
 Like Burns, Scott appeals to the simpler feelings, but 
 Burns's plummet fathoms far deeper recesses of the hu- 
 man heart. Nevertheless, Scott's poems are specially 
 well adapted to develop an appreciation for poetry that 
 probes deeper into life. He holds the attention of the 
 young at a time when a study of more philosophical poetry 
 might awaken a lasting distaste for all verse. 
 
 Historical Fiction. Scott began in verse his story tell- 
 ing, which he continued more effectively in prose. He 
 stopped writing poetry not only because he saw that Byron 
 was surpassing him in this field. Scott had also discov- 
 
 1 Ode on Intimations of Immortality.
 
 33O THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 ered that his own great power lay in writing prose tales 
 which no living competitor could equal. In 1814 he pub- 
 lished Waverley, a story of the attempt of the Jacobite 
 Pretender to recover the English throne in 1745. Seven- 
 teen of Scott's works of fiction are historical. 
 
 When the young wish a vivid picture of the time of 
 Richard Cceur de Lion, of the knight and the castle, of 
 the Saxon swineherd Gurth and of the Norman master 
 who ate the pork, they may read Ivan/toe. If one 
 desires some reading which will make the Crusaders live 
 again, one finds it in the pages of The Talisman. When 
 we wish an entertaining story of the brilliant days of 
 Elizabeth, we turn to Kenilivorth. If we are moved by 
 admiration for the Scotch Convenanters to seek a story 
 of their times, we have Scott's finest historical tale, Old 
 Mortality. Shortly after this story appeared, Lord Hol- 
 land was asked his opinion of it. " Opinion ! " he ex- 
 claimed ; "we did not one of us go to bed last night 
 nothing slept but my gout." The man who could thus 
 charm his readers was called the Wizard of the North. 
 
 Scott is the creator of the historical novel, which has 
 advanced on the general lines marked out by him. Car- 
 lyle tersely says : " These historical novels have taught 
 all men this truth, which looks like a truism, and yet was 
 as good as unknown to writers of history and others till so 
 taught : that the by-gone ages of the world were actually 
 filled by living men, not by protocols, state papers, con- 
 troversies, and abstractions of men." 
 
 The history in Scott's novels is not always absolutely 
 accurate. To meet the exigencies of his plot, he some- 
 times takes liberties with the events of history, and there 
 are occasional anachronisms in his work. Readers may 
 rest assured, however, that the most prominent strokes of
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT 331 
 
 his brush will convey a sufficiently accurate idea of certain 
 phases of history. Although the hair lines in his pictures 
 may be neglected, most persons can learn more truth from 
 studying his gallery of historic scenes than from poring 
 over volumes of documents and state papers. Scott does 
 not look at life from every point of view. The reader of 
 IvanJioe, for instance, should be cautioned against thinking 
 that Scott presents a complete picture of the Middle Ages. 
 He shows the bright, the noble side of chivalry, but not 
 all the brutality, ignorance, and misery of the times. 
 
 Novels which are not Historical. Twelve of Scott's novels 
 contain but few attempts to represent historic events. The 
 greatest of these novels are Guy Mannering, The Heart of 
 Midlothian, The Antiquary, and The Bride of Lammermoor. 
 
 Scott said that his most rapid work was his best. The 
 finest product of his pen, Guy Mannering, was written in 
 six weeks. It is an admirable picture of Scottish life and 
 manners. Many of its characters, like Dominie Sampson, 
 the pedagogue, Meg Merrilies, the gypsy, and Dick Hat- 
 teraick, the smuggler, have more life than half the people 
 we meet. 
 
 A century before, Pope said that most women had no 
 characters at all. His writings tend to show that this was 
 his real conviction, as it was that of many others during 
 the time when Shakespeare was little read. The Heart 
 of Midlothian presents in Jeanie Deans a woman whose 
 character and feminine qualities have won the admiration 
 of the world. Scott could not paint women in the higher 
 walks of life. He was so chivalrous that he was prone to 
 make such women too perfect, but his humble Scotch lass 
 Jeanie Deans is one of his greatest creations. 
 
 When we note the vast number of characters drawn by 
 his pen, we are astonished to find that he repeats so little.
 
 332 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 Many novelists write only one original novel. Their suc- 
 ceeding works are merely repetitions of the first. The 
 hero may have put on a new suit of clothes and the 
 heroine may wear a new style of bonnet, or each may be 
 given a new mannerism, or a peculiar form of expression, 
 but there is nothing really new in character or in incident. 
 For year after year, Scott wrote with wonderful rapidity, 
 without repeating his characters or his plots. 
 
 General Characteristics. All critics are impressed with 
 the healthiness of Scott's work, with its freedom from what 
 is morbid or debasing. His stories display marked energy 
 and movement. There is little subtle analysis of feelings 
 and motives. He aimed at broad and striking effects. 
 We do not find much development of character in his 
 pages. " His characters have the brilliance and the fixity 
 of portraits." 
 
 Scott does not particularly care to delineate the intense 
 passion of love. Only one of his novels, The Bride of 
 Lammermoor, is aflame with this overmastering emotion. 
 He delights in adventure. He places his characters in 
 unusual and dangerous situations, and he has succeeded in 
 making us feel his own interest in the outcome. He has 
 on a larger scale many of the qualities which we may note 
 in the American novelist Cooper, whose best stories are 
 tales of adventure in the forest or on the sea. Like him, 
 Scott shows lack of care in the construction of sentences. 
 Few of the most cultured people of to-day could, however, 
 write at Scott's breakneck speed and make as few slips. 
 Scott has far more humor and variety than Cooper. 
 
 Scott's romanticism is seen in his love for supernatural 
 agencies, which figure in many of his stories. His fond- 
 ness for adventure, for mystery, for the rush of battle, for 
 color and sharp contrast, and his love for the past are also
 
 JANE AUSTEN 333 
 
 romantic traits. He, however, sometimes falls into the 
 classical fault of over-description and of leaving too little 
 to the imagination. 
 
 In the variety of his creations, he is surpassed by no 
 other novelist. He did more than any other pioneer to 
 aid fiction in dethroning the drama. His influence can be 
 seen in the historical novels of almost every nation. 
 
 JANE AUSTEN, 1775-1817 
 
 Life and Works. While Sir Walter Scott was laying 
 the foundations of his large family estates and recounting 
 the story of battles, chivalry, royalty, and brigandage, a 
 quiet, sunny little woman, almost unmindful of the great 
 world, was enlivening her father's parsonage and writing 
 about the clergy, the old maids, the short-sighted mothers, 
 the marriageable daughters, and other people that figure in 
 village life. This cheery, sprightly young woman, whom 
 her acquaintances never once suspected of the guilt of 
 authorship, was Jane Austen, a daughter of the rector of 
 Steventon, Hampshire-. 
 
 The life of Jane Austen was simple, wholesome, unpre- 
 tending, and happy. She possessed both wit and beauty, 
 and was ready to enjoy any festivities which her small 
 world afforded. She was clever in turning out tales for 
 her nephews and nieces and quick to seize upon the lead- 
 ing points in character. She studied carefully the folk 
 about her, and she was one of the first of novelists to 
 chronicle the lives of homely, commonplace people. 
 
 Pride and Prejudice is generally considered her best 
 novel, though Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Mansfield 
 Park all have their ardent admirers. The scenes of 
 these stories are laid in small English towns, with which
 
 334 
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 the author was thoroughly familiar, and the characters are 
 taken from the middle class and the gentry. 
 
 There are no startling discoveries and mysterious secrets 
 in her works. Simple domestic episodes and ordinary 
 people, living somewhat monotonous and narrow lives, 
 satisfy her, and she exhibits wonderful skill in fashioning 
 these into slight but entertaining narratives. In Pride and 
 Prejudice, for example, she creates some refreshing situa- 
 tions by opposing Philip. Darcy's pride to Elizabeth Ben- 
 net's prejudice, and manages the long-delayed reconciliation
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 335 
 
 between these two lovers with a tact which shows true 
 genius and a knowledge of the human heart. 
 
 A strong feature of Jane Austen's novels is her subtle, 
 careful manner of drawing character. She perceives with 
 an intuitive refinement the delicate shadings of emotion, 
 and describes them with the utmost care and detail. Her 
 heroines are especially fine, each one having an interesting 
 individuality, thoroughly natural and womanly. The minor 
 characters in Miss Austen's works are usually quaint and 
 original. She sees the oddities and foibles of people with 
 the insight of the true humorist, and paints them with 
 most dexterous cunning. 
 
 Walter Scott sums up Jane Austen's chief characteristics 
 when he says in his big-hearted way : " That young lady 
 has a talent for describing the involvements of feelings and 
 characters of ordinary life, which is to me the most won- 
 derful I ever met with. The big bow-wow strain T can 
 do myself, like any one going; but the exquisite touch 
 which renders ordinary commonplace things and charac- 
 ters interesting from the truth of the description and the 
 sentiment is denied to me. What a pity such a gifted 
 creature died so early ! " 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850 
 
 Early Education. William Wordsworth was born in 
 Cockermouth, Cumberland, in 1770. He came from a 
 North of England family, sound and healthy in its moral 
 tone, and vigorous physically. Losing his parents early in 
 life, he was left to the care of uncles who discharged their 
 trust in a praiseworthy manner. 
 
 He went to school in his ninth year at Hawkshead, a 
 village on the banks of Esthwaite Water. These school
 
 336 
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 days were happy ones. He boarded m the village with a 
 kindly old dame, whom he has fondly described in his 
 Prelude, and, out of school hours, he was free from the 
 supervision of tutors. He writes : " I was left at liberty 
 then, and in the vacation, to read whatever books I liked." 
 He was free also to go about as he pleased, and he 
 roamed early and late over the mountains. 
 
 The healthy out of door life hardened the fibers of his 
 sturdy frame and kept him vigorous, and the constant 
 sight of nature in the wondrous beauty of the Lake 
 District awoke love and reverence in him. He enjoyed
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 337 
 
 the sports of hunting, skating, and rowing, but he says, in 
 the Prelude : 
 
 " Not seldom from the uproar I retired 
 Into a silent bay, or sportively 
 Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng, 
 To cut across the reflex of a star 
 That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed 
 Upon the glassy plain." 
 
 At such a moment, almost as a revelation to his throbbing 
 
 heart, the 
 
 "... common face of nature spake to him 
 
 Rememberable things." 
 
 He says that in one of these moments of solitude 
 
 "... the calm 
 
 And dead still water lay upon my mind 
 Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
 Never before so beautiful, sank down 
 Into my heart, and held me like a dream." 
 
 Little by little, the glories of Nature grew upon him, until 
 his soul seemed flooded with unutterable delight when in 
 her presence. This profound passion was fostered by 
 his life in these early years, and grew steadily with his 
 youth. At seventeen, he went to Cambridge and, for a 
 time, was dazzled by the intercourse with town-bred men, 
 but the infatuation was of short duration, and his four 
 years at college were the least congenial of his life. 
 
 Influence of the French Revolution. His travels on the 
 continent in his last vacation and after his graduation 
 brought him in contact with the French Revolution, and 
 he came under its spell, as did most of the young, enthu- 
 siastic men of the time. His hopes were stirred and his 
 imagination fired with dreams of an ideal republic, which 
 he fancied would arise from the Revolution. He says:
 
 338 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 " I gradually withdrew 
 Into a noisier world, and thus ere long 
 Became a patriot ; and my heart was all 
 Given to the people, -and my love was theirs." : 
 
 He was prepared to throw himself personally into the 
 struggle, when his relatives recalled him to England to 
 face the ugly specter of poverty. The rude shock came 
 too suddenly upon his ardent aspirations, and, following 
 closely upon it, came the failure of the revolutionists, the 
 period of anarchy and imperialism in France. He sank 
 into a dejection as deep as his hopes had been high, and, 
 as he slowly recovered from his disappointment, he 
 became more and more conservative in his politics, and 
 less in sympathy with any violent reactions. For this he 
 was censured by Byron, Shelley, and other strong adherents 
 of liberty, but such moderation was more natural to Words- 
 worth than the excitement of his early years. To the end 
 of his days, he never failed to utter for genuine liberty a 
 hopeful, though calm and tempered note. 
 
 Maturity and Declining Years. He returned from 
 France in 1792. In 1795 a bequest of .900 relieved 
 the financial strain which had caused him anxiety, and 
 secured for him and his sister Dorothy a modest main- 
 tenance. They went back to the Lake District, in which, 
 save for an occasional tour, they passed the rest of their 
 lives. The two places most associated with the poet are 
 Grasmere, where he wrote the best of his poetry between 
 the years 1798 and 1808, and Rydal Mount, where he 
 lived in his later years. Dorothy was his lifelong com- 
 panion. She won him back from his hopelessness over 
 the Revolution and urged upon him the duty of devoting 
 himself to poetry. Their favorite pastime .was walking. 
 
 1 The Prelude, Book IX.
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 339 
 
 De Quincey estimates that Wordsworth, during the course 
 of his life, must have walked as many as 175,000 miles. 
 
 1 
 
 I 
 
 HP V* 
 
 ^i -. -^:-^v' : 
 
 _ 
 
 BV 
 
 WORDSWORTH S HOME AT GRASMERE - DOVE COTTAGE 
 
 In 1802 Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson. With 
 her income, the payment of a debt with its long accruing 
 interest, and the salary from the office of Distributor of 
 Stamps for the counties of Cumberland and Westmore- 
 land, Wordsworth was insured against annoyance from 
 debt, and given the leisure to devote his whole time to 
 the production of poetry. 
 
 This peaceful, retired life, away from the passionate 
 contests of men in crowded towns, prevented Words- 
 worth from gaining an accurate knowledge of his fellow- 
 men. His absorbing concentration of mind upon poetry 
 made him self-centered, and caused him to disparage all
 
 340 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 views and ideals of life which differed from his own. 
 His temper remained " stiff," but his earnestness and 
 purity of life made him, as his mother had prophesied, 
 "remarkable for good." 
 
 His poetry was too far removed from the formal 
 classical style to be at once popular with the public. 
 The critics ridiculed him harshly. He lived, however, 
 to see his work appreciated and to be rewarded with the 
 laureateship by the nation. He died six years later, in 
 1850, and was buried in the Grasmere churchyard. 
 
 A Poet of Nature. Wordsworth is one of the world's 
 most loving, penetrative, and thoughtful poets of Nature. 
 He found much of his greatest joy in the presence of her 
 calm, her beauty, her external revelations of a divine hand. 
 For him, Nature possessed a soul, a conscious existence, an 
 ability to feel joy and love. In these Lines Written in 
 Early Spring, he expresses his faith in her power to be 
 
 happy : 
 
 " And 'tis my faith that every flower 
 Enjoys the air it breathes." 
 
 Again, he says in The Leech-Gatherer: 
 
 " All things that love the sun are out of doors ; 
 The sky rejoices in the morning's birth." 
 
 The Intimations of Immortality also incorporates this belief 
 in the conscious soul of nature : 
 
 " The moon doth with delight 
 Look round her when the heavens are bare." 
 
 This manner of investing nature with sentiency is 
 peculiarly characteristic of Wordsworth. He was not 
 content to experience only that childlike joy which sat- 
 isfied Cowper and Burns, or, like Keats and Tennyson, to
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 341 
 
 paint only the external features of nature. With rare 
 skill Wordsworth looked beyond the color of the flower, 
 the outline of the hills, the beauty of the clouds, to the 
 spirit which breathed through them, and he communed 
 with "Nature's self which is the breath of God." Nature, 
 therefore, did more than please his senses ; she appealed 
 to his heart ; she aroused his noblest feelings and filled 
 him with a worship that was a part of his religion. 
 
 In his close study of her secrets, he learned her outward 
 appearances, and he wrote some beautiful descriptions, 
 such as the following upon a dandelion seed: 
 
 "Suddenly halting now, a lifeless stand! 
 And starting off again with freak as sudden ; 
 In all its sportive wanderings, all the while 
 Making report of an invisible breeze, 
 That was its wings, its chariot, and its horse, 
 Its very playmate and its moving soul." 
 
 But Wordsworth is not preeminently the purely descrip- 
 tive poet, as Tennyson is. Wordsworth was too much 
 engrossed with the feeling inspired by the scene, and 
 with its imaginative interpretation, to attend strictly to 
 sketching the outlines. Note these lines from one of his 
 sonnets : 
 
 "The gentleness of Heaven is on the sea: 
 Listen! the mighty Being is awake 
 And doth with his eternal motion make 
 A sound like thunder everlastingly." 1 
 
 There is not here a vivid picture of the sea, such as 
 Tennyson would have given, but there is the impression, 
 the feeling, the thought inspired in an imaginative mind 
 by the sea. Wordsworth is unrivaled in his capacity to 
 
 1 Sonnet : " It is a beauteous evening, calm and free." 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 22
 
 342 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 present the inherent atmosphere and spirit of a scene. 
 In the lines 
 
 " With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, 
 
 In frosty moonlight glistening; 
 
 Or mountain rivers, where they creep 
 
 Along a channel smooth and deep, 
 
 To their own far-off murmurs listening," 1 
 
 he suggests the very soul of solitude. Nothing else 
 could have done this so ideally as the streams that hear 
 no sound but the echo of their own lonely murmurings. 
 It is in this contemplative and imaginative interpretation 
 of nature that Wordsworth is a master poet. 
 
 Narrative Poems: Poetry of Man. Wordsworth is a 
 poet of man as well as of nature. The love for nature 
 came to him first, but out of it grew his regard for the 
 people who lived near to nature. 
 
 He traces the growth of these feelings in The Prelude 
 (1850), an autobiographical poem, unrivaled in its class. 
 Wordsworth also tells in this poem how the French 
 Revolution roused him to the worth of each individual 
 soul and to a sense of the equality of all humanity at 
 the bar of character and conscience. As his lyrics show 
 the sympathy which he had for the outside world, so his 
 narrative poems illustrate the second dominant characteristic 
 of the age, the strong sense of the brotherhood of man. 
 
 Michael, one of the very greatest of his productions, 
 displays a tender and living sympathy with the humble 
 shepherd. The simple dignity of Michael's character, 
 his frugal and honorable life, his affection for his son, 
 for his sheep, and for his forefathers' old home, appealed 
 to the heart of the poet. He loved his subject and wrote 
 the poem with that indescribable simplicity which makes 
 
 1 Memory.
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 343 
 
 the tale, the verse, and the tone of thought and feeling 
 form together one perfect and indissoluble whole. The 
 Leech-Gatherer and the story of " Margaret " in the 
 Excursion also deal with lowly characters and exhibit 
 Wordsworth's power of pathos and simple earnestness. 
 He could not present complex personalities, but these 
 characters, which belonged to the landscapes of the 
 Lake District and partook of its calm and its simplicity, 
 he drew with a sure hand. 
 
 His longest narrative poem is the Excursion (1814), 
 which is in nine books. It contains fine passages of 
 verse and some of his sanest and maturest philosophy, 
 but the work is not the masterpiece which he hoped to 
 make. It is tedious, prosy, and without action of any 
 kind. The style is heavy, for the most part, and becomes 
 pure and easy only in some description of a mountain 
 peak or in the recital of a tale, like that of " Margaret." 
 
 General Characteristics. " Meditation and sympathy, 
 not action and passion, were the two main strings of his 
 serene and stormless lyre. On these no hand ever held 
 more gentle yet sovereign rule than Wordsworth's," says 
 Swinburne. Wordsworth possessed no dramatic power, no 
 ability to enter into another's personality. His genius was 
 introspective. Moreover, he seemed a stranger to tem- 
 pestuous passions and fierce burning love. His nature was 
 strong, restrained, and calm. The joys of nature, the ele- 
 mental emotions of humanity, and the necessity of obey- 
 ing the moral law, are his subjects. This last subject is 
 treated with wonderful elevation of language in his Ode to 
 Duty and Character of the Happy Warrior, 
 
 Wordsworth's compass is limited, but within that com- 
 pass he is surpassed by no poet since Milton. On the 
 other hand, no great poet ever wrote more that is worth-
 
 344 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 less. Matthew Arnold did much for Wordsworth's renown 
 by collecting his priceless poems and publishing them apart 
 from the mediocre work. Among the fine productions, 
 his sonnets occupy a high place. Only Shakespeare and 
 Milton in our language excel him in this form of verse. 
 
 The most pronounced characteristic of Wordsworth's 
 style is its austere simplicity. When he was most truly 
 great, he seemed to write as he breathed, not only naturally 
 but involuntarily. He was unconscious of the power which 
 he wielded. When he attempted to command it at will, he 
 failed, as in the dull, lifeless lines of the Excursion. On the 
 contrary, of such a work as Michael, The Solitary Reaper, 
 or The Fountain, we may say with Matthew Arnold : " It 
 might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for 
 his poem, but wrote his poem for him." 
 
 We may take this line from Wordsworth : - 
 
 "This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon," 1 
 and compare it with Tennyson's line in The Princess: 
 "A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight." 
 
 Tennyson's is harmonious and the imagery is exceptionally 
 true and beautiful, but the line seems to have been elabo- 
 rated and polished in the study, while Wordsworth's artless 
 figure has the breath of inspiration about it. An excellent 
 craftsman might have produced Tennyson's line, but only 
 a genius could have displayed Wordsworth's frequent 
 natural directness and ease. He ranks among the great- 
 est poets of English literature ; only the very mightiest 
 tower above him. If Shakespeare occupies the first place, 
 Milton the next, and Chaucer the third, Wordsworth is 
 entitled to follow closely after them. 
 
 1 Sonnet : "The World is too much with us."
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834 
 
 Life. The troubled career of Coleridge is in striking 
 contrast to the peaceful life of Wordsworth. Coleridge, 
 the thirteenth child of a clergyman, was born in the year 
 1772, in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire. Early in his 
 life, the future poet became a dreamer. Before he was 
 five years old, he had read the Arabian Nights. A few 
 years later, the boy's appetite for books was so voracious 
 that he is said to have devoured an average of two volumes 
 a day. So omnivorous was his reading and so broad the
 
 346 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 fields which his studies finally covered, that a recent biog- 
 rapher is led to say that Coleridge's education " outstrides 
 the intellectual equipment of every Englishman since 
 Bacon." In this opinion contemporaries concurred. 
 
 Coleridge went to Cambridge, but he did not remain to 
 graduate. From this time he seldom completed anything 
 that he undertook. It was characteristic of him, stimulated 
 by the spirit of the French Revolution, to dream of found- 
 ing with Southey a Pantisocracy on the banks of the Sus- 
 quehanna. In this ideal village across the sea, the dreamers 
 were to work only two hours a day and to have all goods in 
 common. The demand for poetry was at this time suffi- 
 ciently great for a bookseller to offer Coleridge, although he 
 was as yet comparatively unknown, thirty guineas for a 
 volume of poems and a guinea and a half for each hundred 
 lines after finishing that volume. With such wealth in 
 view, Coleridge married a Miss Fricker of Bristol, because 
 no single people could join the new ideal commonwealth. 
 Southey married her sister, but the young enthusiasts were 
 forced to abandon the project because they did not have 
 sufficient money to procure passage across the ocean. 
 
 But the tendency to dream never forsook Coleridge. 
 One of his favorite poems begins with this line : 
 
 " My eyes make pictures when they are shut." 1 
 
 He recognized his disinclination to remain long at work on 
 prearranged lines, when he said : " I think that my soul 
 must have preexisted in the body of a chamois chaser." 
 
 In 1797-1798 Coleridge lived with his young wife at 
 Nether-Stowey in Somerset. Wordsworth and his sister 
 Dorothy moved to a house in the neighborhood in order to 
 
 1 A Day-Dream.
 
 347 
 
 be near Coleridge. The two young men and Dorothy 
 Wordsworth seemed to be exactly fitted to stimulate one 
 
 another. Together they roamed 
 over the Quantock Hills, gazed 
 upon the sea, and planned The 
 Rime of the Ancient 
 Mariner, which is 
 one of the' few 
 things that Cole- 
 ridge ever finished. 
 In not much more 
 than a year he 
 wrote nearly all the 
 poetry which has 
 made him famous. 
 Had he died when 
 he was twenty-five, 
 like Keats, the world 
 would probably be won- 
 dering what heights of poetic fame Coleridge might have 
 reached. He became addicted to the use of opium and 
 passed a wretched existence of thirty-six years longer, 
 partly in the Lake District, but chiefly in London, without 
 adding to his poetic fame. During his later years in 
 London, he did hack work for papers, gave occasional 
 lectures, wrote critical and philosophical prose, and became 
 a talker almost as noted as Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Poetry. The Ancient Mariner (1798) is Coleridge's 
 poetical masterpiece. It is also one of the world's master- 
 pieces. The supernatural sphere into which it introduces 
 the reader is a remarkable creation, with its curse, its 
 polar spirit, the phantom ship, the seraph band, and the 
 magic breeze. The mechanism of the poem is almost 
 
 COLERIDGE'S COTTAGE AT NETHER-STOWEY
 
 348 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 flawless. The meter, the rhythm, and the music are 
 superb. Almost every stanza shows not only exquisite 
 harmony, but also the easy mastery of genius in dealing 
 with those weird scenes which romanticists love. This 
 poem should by all means be read entire by the student. 
 His next greatest poem is the unfinished Christabel, 
 which in parts surpasses The Ancient Mariner. The 
 lovely maiden Christabel falls under the enchantments of 
 a mysterious Lady Geraldine : 
 
 " And Geraldine in maiden wise, 
 Casting down her large bright eyes, 
 With blushing cheek and courtesy fine 
 She turn'd her from Sir Leoline ; 
 
 And looked askance at Christabel 
 Jesu, Maria, shield her well ! 
 A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, 
 And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head, 
 Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye." 
 
 Even so did Coleridge's poetical powers shrink up in what 
 should have been his prime. 
 
 The fragment ends with Christabel under the spell of 
 Geraldine's enchantments. We miss the interest of a fin- 
 ished story, which draws so many readers to The Ancient 
 Mariner, but Christabel is thickly sown with gems. Lines 
 like these are filled with the airiness of nature : 
 
 " There is not wind enough to twirl 
 The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 That dances as often as dance it can, 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, 
 On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky." 
 
 In all literature there has been no finer passage written on 
 the wounds caused by broken friendship than the lines in 
 Christabel relating to the estrangement of Roland and Sir
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 349 
 
 Leoline. After reading this poem and Kubla Khan, an 
 unfinished dream fragment of fifty-four lines, we feel that 
 the closing lines of Kubla Khan are peculiarly applicable 
 
 to Coleridge : 
 
 " For he on honey dew hath fed 
 And drunk the milk of Paradise." 
 
 Swinburne says of Christabel and Kubla Khan : " When 
 it has been said that such melodies were never heard, 
 such dreams never dreamed, such speech never spoken, 
 the chief things remain unsaid, unspeakable. There is a 
 charm upon these poems which can only be felt in silent 
 submission and wonder." 
 
 General Characteristics of his Poetry. Unlike Words- 
 worth, Coleridge is not the poet of the earth and the com- 
 mon things of life. He is the poet of air, of the regions 
 beyond the earth, and of dreams. The supernatural has 
 never been invested with more charm. 
 
 He has rare feeling for the beautiful, whether in the 
 world of morals, or of nature, or of the harmonies of sound. 
 The motherless Christabel in her time of danger dreams a 
 beautiful truth of this divinely governed world : 
 
 <l But this she knows, in joys and woes, 
 That saints will aid if men will call : 
 For the blue sky bends over all." 
 
 Coleridge throws his whole soul into the beautiful picture 
 of friendship, painted on the living canvas of Christabel. 
 
 His nature poetry is less remarkable for photographic 
 details than for its suggestiveness. Note this picture of a 
 
 dell: 
 
 "A green and silent spot, amid the hills, 
 
 A small and silent dell ! O'er stiller place, 
 No singing skylark ever poised himself." 1 
 
 1 Fears in Solitude.
 
 350 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 The details of this picture must be filled in by imagination. 
 He invests natural objects with bewitching color, and, in 
 the lines following this quotation, he proceeds to clothe the 
 dell in a soft green light like that from the setting sun 
 shining through vernal cornfields. He revels in the grace 
 and beauty of coloring of even the water snakes : 
 
 " Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, 
 They coiled and swam ; and every track 
 Was a flash of golden fire." l 
 
 His melody is best described in his lines from The Eolian 
 
 Harp : 
 
 " Such a soft floating witchery of sound. 
 
 As twilight Elfins make, when they at eve 
 Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy Land." 
 
 Prose. Coleridge's prose, which is almost all of the 
 philosophic type, left its influence on the work of the 
 younger generation. He was an idealist and a student of 
 the German metaphysicians, whose idealistic teachings he 
 introduced to combat the utilitarian and sense-bound phi- 
 losophy of Bentham, Malthus, and Mill. We pass by 
 Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825), the weightiest of his 
 metaphysical works, to consider those works which possess 
 a more vital interest for the student of literature. 
 
 Coleridge's great work on criticism is entitled Biogmphia 
 Literaria (2 vols., 1817). J. C. Shairp, late Professor of 
 Poetry at Oxford, used to say to his students: ."There is 
 more to be learned about poetry from a few pages of that 
 dissertation, confined though it is to a specific kind of po- 
 etry, than from all the reviews that have been written in 
 English on poets and their works from Addison to the 
 present hour. . . . These principles, few or none at that 
 
 1 The Ancient Mariner.
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 351 
 
 time acknowledged, but they have since won the assent of 
 all competent judges." Coleridge's general point of view 
 is that of the romantic Wordsworthian school, but he does 
 not hold Wordsworth's belief that the language of poetry 
 and of common speech should be identical, and he protests 
 against not a little of Wordsworth's poetical practice. The 
 work abounds in statements as suggestive and as stimu- 
 lating as these : 
 
 "Not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return 
 with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power and claims the 
 name of essential poetry. . . . Our genuine admiration of a great poet 
 is a continuous undercurrent of feeling; it is everywhere present, but 
 seldom anywhere as a separate excitement. . . . For poetry is the 
 blossom and the fragrancy of all human knowledge, human thoughts, 
 human passions, emotions, language." 
 
 His Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare was an epoch- 
 making work in the criticism of that dramatist. Professor 
 Shairp says : " Coleridge was the first who clearly saw 
 through and boldly denounced the nonsense that had been 
 talked about Shakespeare's irregularity and extravagance. 
 . . . Any one who shall master these notes on Shakespeare, 
 taken as a whole, will find in them more fine analysis of 
 the hidden things of the heart, more truthful insight into 
 the workings of passion, than are to be found in whole 
 treatises of psychology." 
 
 One of Coleridge's finest prose sentences, filled with the 
 romantic appreciation of the living forms of nature, may 
 be found in the marginal notes to The Ancient Mariner : 
 
 " In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying 
 Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward ; and 
 everywhere the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, 
 and their native country, and their own natural homes, which they enter 
 unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected, and yet there is a 
 silent joy at their arrival."
 
 352 
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 GEORGE NOEL GORDON, LORD BYRON, 1788-1824 
 
 Life. Byron was born in London in 1788. His father 
 was a reckless, dissipated spendthrift, who deserted his 
 wife and child. Mrs. Byron convulsively clasped her son 
 to her one moment and threw the scissors and tongs at 
 him the next, calling him "the lame brat," in reference to 
 his club foot. Such treatment drew neither respect nor 
 obedience from Byron, who inherited the proud, defiant 
 spirit of his race. His accession to the peerage in 1798
 
 LORD BYRON 353 
 
 did not tend to tame his haughty nature, and he grew up 
 passionately imperious and combative. 
 
 He was ambitious, and he made excellent progress in 
 his studies at Harrow, but when he entered Cambridge he 
 devoted much of his time to shooting, swimming, and other 
 sports, for which he was always famous. In 1809 he started 
 on a two years' trip through Spain, Greece, and the far East. 
 Upon his return, he published two cantos of Cliilde Haro Id's 
 Pilgrimage, which describe his journey. 
 
 This poem made him immediately popular. London 
 society neglected its old favorite, Scott, and eagerly 
 sought out the beautiful young peer who had burst sud- 
 denly upon it. Poem after poem was produced by this 
 lion of society, and each one was received with enthusiasm 
 and delight. Probably no other English poet knew such 
 instant widespread fame as Byron. 
 
 Suddenly and unexpectedly this adulation turned to 
 hatred. In 1815 Byron married Miss Milbanke, an heiress, 
 and she left him a year later. No reason for the separa- 
 tion was given, but the public fastened all the blame upon 
 Byron. The feeling against him grew so strong that he 
 was warned by his friends to prepare for open violence, 
 and finally, in 1816, he left England forever. 
 
 His remaining eight years were spent mostly in Italy. 
 Here, his great beauty, his exile, his poetry, and his 
 passionate love of liberty made him a prominent figure 
 throughout Europe. Notwithstanding this fame, life was 
 a disappointment to Byron. Baffled but defiant, he threw 
 himself for a time into a vortex of dissolute, licentious liv- 
 ing, and enjoyed the shock it gave to his countrymen. 
 
 The closing year of his life shone the brightest of all. 
 His main activities had hitherto been directed to the selfish 
 pursuit of his own pleasure, and he had failed to obtain
 
 354 
 
 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 happiness. The Greeks were battling with Turkey for 
 their independence, and in 1823 Byron went to Greece to 
 aid them. He poured his whole energies into this struggle 
 for freedom, and he displayed "a wonderful aptitude for 
 managing the complicated intrigues and plans and selfish- 
 
 NEWSTEAD ABBEY, BYRON'S HOME 
 
 nesses which lay in the way." His efforts cost him his 
 life. He contracted fever, and, after restlessly battling 
 with the disease, he said quietly, one April morning in 
 1824: "Now I shall go to sleep." The proud, imperious 
 spirit awoke no more to dash itself against the cage of life. 
 He was buried in the family vault at Hucknall, Notting- 
 hamshire, not far from Newstead Abbey.
 
 LORD BYRON 355 
 
 Early Works. The poems which Byron wrote during 
 his brilliant sojourn in London, amid the whirl of social 
 gayeties, are The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The 
 Corsair, Parisina, Lara, and The Siege of Corinth. These 
 narrative poems are romantic tales of oriental passion and 
 coloring which show the influence of Scott. They are 
 told with a dash and a fine-sounding rhetoric well fitted to 
 attract immediate attention ; but they lack the qualities of 
 sincere feeling, lofty thought, and subtle beauty, which 
 give lasting fame. 
 
 His next publication, The Prisoner of Chillon (1816), is 
 a much worthier poem. The pathetic story is feelingly 
 told in language which often displays remarkable energy 
 and mastery of expression and versification. His picture 
 of the oppressive vacancy which the Prisoner felt is a well- 
 executed piece of very difficult word painting : 
 
 " There were no stars no earth no time 
 No check no change no good no crime 
 But silence, and a stirless breath 
 Which neither was of life or death ; 
 A sea of stagnant idleness, 
 Blind, boundless, mute, and motionless!" 
 
 Dramas. Byron wrote a number of dramas, the best of 
 which are Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821). His spirit 
 of defiance and his insatiable thirst for power are the sub- 
 jects of these dramas. Manfred is a man of guilt who is 
 at war with humanity, and who seeks refuge on the moun- 
 tain tops and by the wild cataract. He is fearless and 
 untamed in all his misery, and even in the hour of death 
 does not quail before the spirits of darkness, but defies 
 
 them with the cry : 
 
 " Back to thy hell ! 
 
 Thou hast no power upon me, that I feel ! 
 Thou never shalt possess me, that I know :
 
 356 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 What I have done is done ; I bear within 
 
 A torture which could nothing gain from thine : 
 
 Back, ye baffled fiends ! 
 The hand of death is on me but not yours ! " 
 
 Cain, while suffering remorse for the slaying of Abel, is 
 borne by Lucifer through the boundless fields of the uni- 
 verse. Cain yet dares to question the wisdom of the 
 Almighty in bringing evil, sin, and remorse into the world. 
 A critic has remarked that " Milton wrote his great poem 
 to justify the ways of God to man ; Byron's object seems 
 to be to justify the ways of man to God." 
 
 The very soul of stormy revolt breathes through both 
 Manfred and Cain, but Cain has more interest as a pure 
 drama. It contains some sweet passages and presents 
 one lovely woman, Adah. But Byron could not interpret 
 a character wholly at variance with his own. He pos- 
 sessed but little constructive skill, and he never overcame 
 the difficulties of blank verse. A drama that does not 
 show wide sympathy with varied types of humanity, and 
 the constructive capacity to present the complexities of 
 life, is lacking in essential elements of greatness. 
 
 Childe Harold, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan. 
 His best works are the later poems which require only 
 a slight framework or plot, such as Childe Harold's Pil- 
 grimage, The Vision of Judgment, and Don Juan. 
 
 The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, published 
 in 1816 and, 1818, respectively, are far superior to the first 
 two. These later cantos continue the travels of Harold, 
 and contain some of Byron's most splendid descriptions 
 of nature, cities, and works of art. Rome, Venice, the 
 Rhine, the Alps, and the sea inspired the finest lines. He 
 wrote of Venice as she
 
 LORD BYRON 357 
 
 1 . . sate in state, throned on her hundred isles ! 
 She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean, 
 Rising with her tiara of proud towers 
 At airy distance." 
 
 " The Niobe of nations! there she stands, 
 Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe ; 
 An empty urn within her withered hands, 
 Whose holy dust was scattered long ago." 
 
 The following description of a wild stormy night in the 
 mountains is very characteristic of his nature poetry and 
 of his own individuality : 
 
 " And this is in the night : Most glorious night ! 
 Thou wert not sent for slumber ! let me be 
 A sharer in thy fierce and far delight 
 A portion of the tempest and of thee ! 
 How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, 
 And the big rain comes dancing to the earth ! 
 And now again 'tis black, and now, the glee 
 Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth 
 As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth." 
 
 When George III. died, Southey wrote a poem filled 
 with absurd flattery of that monarch. Byron had such 
 intense hatred for the hypocrisy of society that he wrote 
 his Vision of Judgment (1822), to parody Southey's poem 
 and to make the author the object of satire. Pungent wit, 
 vituperation, and irony were here handled by Byron in a 
 brilliant manner, which had not been equaled since the 
 days of Dryden and Pope. The parodies of most poems 
 are quickly forgotten, but we have here the strange case 
 of Byron's parody keeping alive Southey's original. 
 
 Don Juan (1819-1824), a long poem in sixteen cantos, is 
 Byron's greatest work. It is partly autobiographic. The 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 23
 
 358 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 sinister, gloomy Don Juan is an ideal picture of the author, 
 who was sore and bitter over his thwarted hopes of liberty 
 and happiness. Therefore, instead of strengthening hu- 
 manity with hope for the future, this poem tears hope 
 fjom the horizon, and suggests the possible anarchy and 
 destruction toward which the world's hypocrisy, cant, 
 tyranny, and universal stupidity are tending. 
 
 The poem is unfinished. Byron followed Don Juan 
 through all the phases of life known to himself. The 
 hero has exciting adventures and passionate loves, he is 
 favored at courts, he is driven to the lowest depths of 
 society, he experiences a godlike happiness and demonia- 
 cal despair. 
 
 Don Juan is a scathing satire upon society. All its 
 fondest idols, love, faith, and hope, are dragged in the 
 mire. There is something almost grand in the way that 
 this titanic scoffer draws pictures of love only to mock at 
 them, sings patriotic songs only to add : 
 
 " Thus sung, or would, or could, or should have sung 
 The modern Greek in tolerable verse," 
 
 and mentions Homer, Milton, and Shakespeare only to 
 show how accidental and worthless fame is. 
 
 Amid the splendid confusion of pathos, irony, passion, 
 mockery, keen wit, and brilliant epigram, which display 
 Byron's versatile and spontaneous genius at its height, 
 there are some beautiful and powerful passages. There 
 is an ideal picture of the love of Don Juan and Haidee : 
 
 " Each was the other's mirror, and but read 
 Joy sparkling in their dark eyes like a gem." 
 
 "... they could not be 
 Meant to grow old, but die in happy spring, 
 Before one charm or hope had taken wing."
 
 LORD BYRON 359 
 
 As she lightly slept, 
 
 "... her face so fair 
 
 Stirr'd with her dream, as rose-leaves with the air ; 
 Or as the stirring of a deep clear stream 
 Within an Alpine hollow, when the wind 
 Walks o'er it." 
 
 General Characteristics. The poetry of Wordsworth 
 and Coleridge shows the revolutionary reaction against 
 classicism in literature and tyranny in government, but 
 their verse raises no cry of revolt against the proprieties 
 and moral restrictions of the time. Byron was so satu- 
 rated with the revolutionary spirit that he rebelled against 
 these also, and for this reason England would not allow 
 him to be buried in Westminster Abbey. 
 
 Byron frequently wrote in the white heat of passionate 
 revolt, and his verse shows the effects of lack of restraint. 
 Unfortunately he did not afterwards take the trouble to 
 improve his subject matter, or the mold in which it was 
 cast. Swinburne says : " His verse stumbles and jingles, 
 stammers and halts, where is most need for a swift and 
 even pace of musical sound." 
 
 The great power of Byron's poetry consists in its wealth 
 of expression, its vigor, its rush and volume of sound, its 
 variety, and its passion. Lines like the following show 
 the vigorous flow of the verse, the love for lonely scenery, 
 and a wealth of figurative expression : 
 
 " Mont Blanc is the monarch of mountains, 
 They crowned him long ago 
 On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds, 
 With a diadem of snow." x 
 
 Scattered through his works we find rare gems, such 
 
 as the following : 
 
 1 Manfred, Act I,
 
 360 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 "... when 
 
 Music arose with its voluptuous swell, 
 Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, 
 And all went merry as a marriage bell." 1 
 
 We may also frequently note the working of an acute 
 intellect, as, for instance, in the lines in which he calls his 
 own gloomy type of mind 
 
 "... the telescope of truth, 
 Which strips the distance of its phantasies, 
 And brings life near in utter nakedness, 
 Making the cold reality too real! " 2 
 
 The answers to two questions which are frequently 
 asked, will throw more light on Byron's characteristics : 
 
 I. Why has his poetic fame decreased so much in Eng- 
 land? In the eyes of his contemporaries he seemed 
 worthy of a place beside Goethe. The reason for such 
 an estimate is to be sought in the fact that Byron reflected 
 so powerfully the mood of that special time. That re- 
 actionary period in history has passed and with it much 
 of Byron's influence and fame. He was, unlike Shake- 
 speare, specially fitted to minister to a certain age. 
 Again, much of Byron's verse is rhetorical, and that 
 kind of poetry does not wear well. On the other hand, 
 we might reread Hamlet, Lycidas, and the Intimations 
 of Immortality every month for a lifetime, and discover 
 some hidden beauty and deep truth at every reading. 
 
 II. Why does the continent of Europe still class Byron 
 among the very greatest English poets, next even to 
 Shakespeare ? There is more liberty in England than 
 on the continent. To the Europeans, Byron's poetry still 
 voices the desire for freedom from tyranny and conven- 
 
 1 Childe Harold, Canto III. 2 The Dream.
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 361 
 
 tionality. Swinburne gives as another reason the fact that 
 Byron actually gains by translation into a foreign tongue. 
 His faulty meters and careless expressions are improved, 
 and his vigorous way of stating things and his rolling 
 rhetoric are easily comprehended. On the other hand, the 
 delicate shades of thought in Hamlet cannot be translated 
 into French without a distinct loss. 
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822 
 
 Life. Another fiery spirit of the Revolution was 
 Shelley, born in 1792, of rich parentage, at Field Place, 
 near Horsham, Sussex. He was one of the most ardent, 
 independent, and reckless English poets inspired by the 
 French Revolution. He was a man who could face 
 infamy and defy the conventionalities of the world, and, 
 at the same moment, extend a helpful hand of sympathy 
 to a friend or sit for sixty hours beside the sick bed of 
 his dying child. Tender, pitying, fearless, full of a desire 
 to reform the world, and of hatred for any form of tyranny, 
 Shelley failed to adjust himself to the customs and laws 
 of his actual surroundings. He was calumniated and de- 
 spised by the public at large, and almost idolized by his 
 intimate friends. 
 
 At Eton he denounced the tyranny of the larger boys. 
 At Oxford he decried the tyranny of the church over free- 
 dom of thought, and he was promptly expelled for his 
 article on The Necessity of AtJieism. Immediately after 
 this, he married a schoolgirl of inferior birth, to relieve 
 her from parental tyranny. These acts alienated his fam- 
 ily and forced him to forfeit his right to Field Place. 
 
 His repeatedly avowed ideas upon religion, government, 
 and marriage brought him into conflict with his country's
 
 362 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 laws. When he finally left England in 1818, never to 
 return, he was, like Byron, practically an exile. 
 
 The remaining four years of Shelley's life were passed 
 in Italy, and they were comparatively peaceful. With 
 length of days, he might have learned moderation and 
 have gained the ear of the English people, but he died 
 in his thirtieth year, when he was still in the fervor of 
 youthful extravagance. He was drowned in the Bay of
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 363 
 
 Spezia in 1822 and was buried in Rome, near the spot 
 where Keats lay (p. 369). 
 
 Works. Alastor, or the Spirit of Solitude (1816), is a 
 magnificent expression of Shelley's own restless, tameless 
 spirit, wandering among the grand solitudes of nature in 
 search of the ineffably lovely dream maiden, who was his 
 ideal of beauty. He travels through primeval forests, 
 stands upon dizzy abysses, plies through roaring whirl- 
 pools, all of which are symbolic of the soul's wayfaring, 
 until at last, 
 
 " When on the threshold of a green recess," 
 
 his dying glance rests upon the setting moon and the suf- 
 ferer finds eternal peace. The general tone of this poem 
 is painfully despairing, but this is relieved by the grandeur 
 of the natural scenes and by many imaginative flights. 
 
 The year 1819 saw the publication of a work unique 
 among Shelley's productions, The Cenci. This is a 
 drama based upon the baleful story of Beatrice Cenci. 
 The poem deals with human beings, human passions, real 
 acts, and the natural world, whereas Shelley usually pre- 
 ferred to treat of metaphysical theories, personified ab- 
 stractions, and worlds of fancy. This strong drama was 
 the most popular of his works during his lifetime. 
 
 He returned to the ideal sphere again in his greatest 
 poem, the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). 
 This poem is the apotheosis of the Revolution. Prome- 
 theus, the friend of mankind, lies tortured and chained 
 to the mountain side. As the hour of redemption ap- 
 proaches, his beloved Asia, the symbol of nature, arouses 
 the soul of Revolution, represented by Demogorgon. He 
 rises, hurls down the enemies of progress and freedom, 
 releases Prometheus, and spreads liberty and happiness
 
 364 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 through all the world. Then the Moon, the Earth, and 
 the Voices of the Air break forth into a magnificent chant 
 of praise. The most delicate fancies, the most gorgeous 
 imagery, and the most fiery, exultant emotions are com- 
 bined in this poem with something of the stateliness of its 
 Greek prototype. The swelling cadences of the blank 
 verse and the tripping rhythm of the lyrics are the prod- 
 uct of a nature rich in rare and wonderful melodies. 
 
 The Witch of Atlas (1820), Epipsychidion (1821), Ado- 
 nais (1821), and the exquisite lyrics, The Cloud, To a Sky- 
 lark, and Ode to the West Wind are the most beautiful 
 of the remaining works. The first two mentioned are the 
 most elusive of Shelley's poems. With scarcely an echo 
 in his soul of the shadows and discords of earth, the poet 
 paints, in these works, lands 
 
 "... 'twixt Heaven, Air, Earth, and Sea, 
 Cradled, and hung in clear tranquillity ; " 
 
 where all is 
 
 " Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise." * 
 
 Adonais is a lament for the early death of Keats, and it 
 stands second in the language among elegiac poems, Lyci- 
 das, of course, coming first. Shelley makes all nature 
 mourn for the poet who had written of her with such 
 
 adoration : 
 
 " Morning sought 
 
 Her eastern watch tower, and her hair unbound, 
 Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, 
 Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day ; 
 Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, 
 Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, 
 And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay." 
 
 1 Epipsychidion.
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 365 
 
 There is an intensely thrilling beauty about the poem. It 
 is a sad, impassioned, spontaneous burst of song in which 
 one poet crowns another with unfading laurel. Nothing 
 that Shelley ever wrote surpasses this poem in roundness, 
 completeness, and perfection of artistic finish. 
 
 A Great Lyric Poet. Shelley is one of the supreme 
 lyrical geniuses in the language. In his lyrics he sings 
 with airy ease in strains of overflowing ecstasy. They 
 seem to float and soar as naturally as the JEolian harp 
 gives forth sound. They have an entrancing lightness 
 and grace, and their melody is glorious. This stanza from 
 the poem To Night shows Shelley's fine lyrical quali- 
 ties : 
 
 u Swiftly walk over the western wave, 
 
 Spirit of Night! 
 Out of the misty eastern cave, 
 
 Where, all the long and lone daylight, 
 Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, 
 Which make thee terrible and dear, 
 Swift be thy flight!" 
 
 This same fragile, spiritlike beauty is shown again in 
 Prometheus Unbound. One of the most exquisite, impas- 
 sioned passages is the following, where Asia approaches 
 
 her lover in 
 
 " An ivory shell, inlaid with crimson fire, 
 Which comes and goes within its sculptured rim 
 Of delicate strange tracery," 
 
 and where Asia's wondrous beauty dazzles the eye of her 
 
 sister : 
 
 "Child of Light! thy limbs are burning 
 
 Through the vest that seems to hide them, 
 As the radiant lines of morning 
 
 Through the clouds, ere they divide them ; 
 And this atmosphere divinest 
 Shrouds thee wheresoe'er thou shinest."
 
 366 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 The Cloud, To a Skylark, and the Ode to the West Wind 
 are lyrics which partake of this same charming witchery. 
 The first stanza of The Cloud is a fine example : 
 
 " I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers, 
 
 From the seas and streams ; 
 I bear light shade for the leaves when laid 
 
 In their noonday dreams. 
 From my wings are shaken the dews that waken 
 
 The sweet buds every one, 
 When rocked to rest on their mother's breast, 
 
 As she dances about the sun. 
 I wield the flail of the lashing hail, 
 
 And whiten the green plains under; . 
 And then again I dissolve it in rain, 
 
 And laugh as I pass in thunder." 
 
 The reader feels like saying of Shelley what he says of 
 
 the skylark: 
 
 " Higher still and higher 
 
 From the earth thou springest, 
 Like a cloud of fire ; 
 
 The blue deep thou wingest, 
 And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest." 
 
 Treatment of Nature. In many of his lyrics Shelley 
 seems to have forgotten humanity and to have entered 
 with wonderful intuition into the heart of nature. He 
 makes the cloud, the bird, and the wind sing, not as the 
 ordinary man would, simply as a reflection of his own mood, 
 but as these embodiments of nature might themselves be 
 supposed to sing. In the Ode to the West Wind, one of the 
 most exquisite things Shelley wrote, he cries out : 
 
 " Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is : 
 
 What if my leaves are falling like its own? 
 
 The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 
 
 Will take from both a deep autumnal tone 
 
 Sweet though in sadness."
 
 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 367 
 
 We can fancy that the spirit forms of nature which appear 
 in cloud and night, in mist and western wind, are content 
 to have found in Shelley a lyre that responded in such 
 entrancing notes to their touch. 
 
 General Characteristics. Shelley is the purest, the most 
 hopeful, and the noblest voice of the Revolution. Words- 
 worth and Coleridge lost their faith and became Tories, 
 and Byron was a selfish, lawless creature, but Shelley had 
 the martyr spirit of sacrifice, and he trusted to the end 
 in the wild hopes of the revolutionary enthusiasts. His 
 Queen Mab, Revolt of Islam, Ode to Liberty, Ode to Naples, 
 and, above all, his Prometheus Unbound, are some of the 
 works inspired by a trust in the ideal Democracy which 
 was to be based on universal love and the brotherhood of 
 man. This faith gives a bounding elasticity and buoyancy 
 to Shelley's thought, but also tinges it with that disgust 
 for the old, that defiance of restraint, and that boyish dis- 
 regard for experience which mark a time of revolt. 
 
 The other subject which Shelley treats most frequently 
 in his verse is ideal beauty. He yearned all his life for 
 some form beautiful enough to satisfy the aspirations of 
 his soul. Alastor, Epipsychidion, The Witch of Atlas, and 
 Prometheus Unbound, all breathe this insatiate craving for 
 that " Spirit of Beauty," that " awful Loveliness." 
 
 Some of his efforts to describe in verse this democracy 
 and this ideal beauty are impalpable, obscure, and difficult 
 to follow. Symonds says that Shelley " flew at the grand, 
 the spacious, the sublime ; and did not always succeed in 
 realizing for his readers what he had imagined." It is 
 difficult to clothe such shadowy abstractions in clear, 
 simple form. Sometimes his thoughts seem to have 
 emerged but partly from the cloud lands which gave 
 them birth.
 
 368 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 Like Byron, Shelley is sometimes careless, and his 
 poetry often shows the "negligence of nature." Neither 
 poet was in the habit of subjecting his work to that care- 
 ful revision which leaves every word in its exact place. 
 
 We shall, however, search in vain for these faults in 
 some of Shelley's lyrics. His greatest title to fame rests 
 on his rare lyric gift. Of all the lyric poets of England, 
 he is the greatest master of an ethereal, evanescent, and 
 phantomlike beauty. Many of his lyrics are wonderfully 
 successful in portraying the elusive spirit of nature, whether 
 in the changing lights of the dawn, the transient glory of 
 the rainbow, or the breath of autumn, which turns the 
 
 leaves 
 
 " Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, 
 Pestilence-stricken multitudes." l 
 
 JOHN KEATS, 1795-1821 
 
 Life. John Keats was born at Moorfields, London, in 
 1795. He attended school at Enfield, and was apprenticed 
 at fifteen to a surgeon. One day, when Keats should have 
 been listening to a surgical lecture, " there came," he says, 
 " a sunbeam into the room and with it a whole troop of 
 creatures floating in the ray ; and I was off with them to 
 Oberon and fairy land." 
 
 While he made a moderately good surgeon, he found 
 that his heart was constantly with " Oberon and the fairy 
 land" of poesy, so at nineteen he gave up his profession 
 and began to study hard, preparatory to a literary career. 
 Greek mythology and art were his favorite studies, and the 
 ones from which his poetry drew most freely. His first 
 volume was published in 1817, and his last in 1820. He 
 
 1 Ode to the West Wind,
 
 JOHN KEATS 
 
 369 
 
 died of consumption in 1821, when he was twenty-five 
 years old. He breathed his last in Rome, whither he had 
 gone to recuperate, and he lies buried in the Protestant 
 cemetery there. 
 
 Works. Keats's third volume of poetry, entitled Lamia, 
 Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, and Other Poems 
 (1820), is the one upon which his fame rests. In his earlier 
 works, notably in Endymion (1817), the immaturity of his 
 mind and art is shown by a boyish sentimentality, a con- 
 fusion of details, and an overabundance of ornament.
 
 3/0 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 These blemishes are not present in his third volume, which 
 reveals a mastery of poetic form, and establishes his right 
 to stand in the front rank of British poets. 
 
 Lamia is one of the most faultless of these poems. 
 Keats's nature was in sympathy with this beautiful en- 
 chantress, Lamia, who, upon turning from a serpent into 
 a radiant woman, filled every sense with joy and rapture ; 
 and he condemned the philosopher Apollonius for discov- 
 ering her sorceries and causing her to vanish from sight. 
 
 Keats says : 
 
 "... Do not all charms fly 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy ? 
 There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : 
 We know her woof, her texture ; she is given 
 In the dull catalogue of common things. 
 Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings, 
 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
 Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine 
 Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
 The tender-person'd Lamia melt into a shade." 
 
 Keats revels in the intoxicating and bewildering charms 
 which he gives to his enchantress and to her magic palace. 
 His language describing them is full of seductive beauty. 
 
 Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, is a romantic tale of love, 
 taken from a story in Boccaccio. The narration of this tale 
 is not well handled, but it contains incidents which are 
 beautifully told. The young, impulsive love of Isabella 
 and Lorenzo makes a sweet idyl, and the pitiful grief of 
 Isabella, when she learns, through a vision, that her lover 
 has been murdered, is painted with a tender pathos no- 
 where else surpassed in Keats. 
 
 The Eve of St. Agnes is an exquisite and brilliant gem, 
 fashioned out of the slightest of themes. The subject is 
 merely the visions of love which St. Agnes gives to one
 
 JOHN KEATS 3/1 
 
 of her votaries, and the manner in which those visions are 
 realized. It can hardly be said that this poem tells a tale ; 
 it rather paints a picture, vivid and highly colored. It 
 should be read entire. 
 
 The beautiful fragment of Hyperion differs widely from 
 The Eve of St. Agnes. Hyperion is an epic, planned on 
 lines of severity and simplicity. 
 
 "Deep in the shady sadness of a vale 
 Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, 
 Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star, 
 Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone, 
 Still as the silence round about his lair." 
 
 These opening lines of Hyperion show with what a stately 
 march the verse is to bear along this story of Gods and 
 Titans. There are repose, dignity, and majesty in the poem. 
 The characters tower above human proportions, as though 
 cut from the polished marble by Michael Angelo. Byron 
 says of Keats : "His fragment of Hyperion seems actually 
 inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as yEschylus." 
 
 In addition to these works, there are many shorter poems 
 which exhibit the powers of Keats at their height. Among 
 these poems are the ballad La Belle Dame sans Merci and 
 those glorious odes, On a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, and To 
 a Nightingale. 
 
 General Characteristics. In the judgment of Keats, 
 philosophy, politics, and ethics were not suitable subjects 
 for verse. While, therefore, Wordsworth and Coleridge 
 were reflecting upon the moral law of the universe, while 
 Byron was voicing the political ideals of Europe in his 
 poetry of revolt, and Shelley was writing of an enfran- 
 chised humanity, the muse of Keats was luxuriating in 
 classic myths and mediaeval legends, and was inspired by 
 an insatiable love of beauty.
 
 372 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 " A thing of beauty is a joy forever," 
 
 he says in Endymion. In the Ode on a Grecian Urn, he 
 
 writes : 
 
 " ' Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' that is all 
 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 
 
 His poetry has rarely been equaled in descriptions of the 
 beauties perceptible to the senses, such as form, color, 
 perfume, or music. It was his mission to interpret, not 
 the highest spiritual life, but the highest type of sensuous 
 beauty. Such beauty has its moral side, and its power to 
 elevate and purify. Since all the higher operations of the 
 intellect rest upon sensory foundations, it is well that the 
 latter should be built of the most beautiful masonry that 
 nature can offer. 
 
 The sensitiveness of Keats to all sense impressions 
 made him an ardent admirer of nature. In his verse, the 
 color, the form, and the sounds of nature possess Circean 
 charms. He delights to paint the " self -folding " flower, 
 
 "The coming musk-rose full of dewy wine, 
 
 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves," 1 
 and 
 
 " Sweet birds antheming the morn." 2 
 
 Because most of the poetry of Keats is full of a youthful 
 beauty, it is a mistake to suppose that he has no deep and 
 serious vein. The following lines have the old Saxon 
 seriousness, although it is softened into gentler strains 
 than we have before heard : 
 
 " Darkling I listen ; and, for many a time 
 I have been half in love with easeful Death, 
 Call'd him soft names in many a muse'd rime, 
 To take into the air my quiet breath." 8 
 
 1 Ode to a Nightingale. * Fancy. 8 Ode to a Nightingale.
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 373 
 
 These lines have appealed to many a tired soul and made 
 it "half in love with easeful Death." 
 
 Keats is akin to the Elizabethans in his fondness for 
 imagery. His poetry abounds in figurative language. He 
 is also a master of melody. His verse is full of deep, rich 
 harmonies. It has, in places, more of the epic quality than 
 any contemporary work possesses. 
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859 
 
 Life. Thomas De Quincey was born in Manchester in 
 1785. He was a precocious child, and he became quite a 
 student at the age of eight. When he was only eleven, 
 his Latin verses were the envy of the older boys at the 
 Bath school, which he was then attending. At the age of 
 fifteen, he was so thoroughly versed in Greek that his 
 professor said of him to a friend : " That boy could 
 harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could 
 address an English one." De Quincey was sent in this 
 year to the Manchester grammar school, but his mind 
 was in advance of the instruction given there, and he 
 unceremoniously left the school on his seventeenth 
 birthday. 
 
 For a time he tramped through Wales, living on an 
 allowance of a guinea a week. Hungering for books, he 
 suddenly posted to London. He feared that his family 
 would force him to return to school, so he did not let them 
 know his whereabouts. He therefore received no money 
 from them, and was forced to wander hungry, sick, and 
 destitute, through the streets of the metropolis, with its 
 outcasts and waifs. He describes this part of his life in a 
 very entertaining manner in his Confessions of an English 
 Opium-Eater. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 24
 
 374 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 
 When his family found him, a year later, they prevailed 
 on him to go to Oxford ; and, for the next four years, he 
 lived the life of a recluse at college, scarcely raising his 
 head from his books to talk to any one. 
 
 In 1808 he took the cottage at Grasmere which 
 Wordsworth had quitted, and enjoyed the society of the 
 three Lake poets (p. 3 1 3). Here De Quincey married and 
 lived his happiest years. 
 
 The latter part of his life was clouded by his indulgence 
 in opium, which he had first taken while at college to re- 
 lieve acute neuralgia. At one time he took 8000 drops of
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 375 
 
 laudanum a day. Owing to a business failure, his money 
 was lost, and it became necessary for him to throw off the 
 influence of the narcotic sufficiently to earn a livelihood. 
 In 1821 he began to write. From that time until his 
 death, in 1859, his life was devoted mainly to literature. 
 
 Works. Nearly all of De Quincey's writings were con- 
 tributed to magazines. His first and greatest contribution 
 was The Confessions of an English Opium- Eater, published 
 in the London Magazine. These Confessions are most re- 
 markable for the brilliant and elaborate style in which 
 the author's early life and his opium dreams are related. 
 His splendid, yet melancholy, dreams are the most famous 
 in the language. 
 
 De Quincey's wide reading, especially of history, sup- 
 plied the material for many of them. In these dreams he 
 saw the court ladies of "the unhappy times of Charles I.," 
 witnessed Marius pass by with his Roman legions, " ran 
 into pagodas" in China, where he "was fixed, for cen- 
 turies, at the summit, or in secret rooms," and "was buried 
 for a thousand years, in stone coffins, in narrow chambers 
 at the heart of eternal pyramids " in Egypt. 
 
 His dreams were affected also by the throngs of people 
 whom he had watched in London. He was haunted by 
 " the tyranny of the human face." He says : 
 
 " Faces imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thou- 
 sands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries : my agitation was infi- 
 nite, my mind tossed, and surged with the ocean." 
 
 Sound also played a large part in the dreams. Music, 
 heart-breaking lamentations, and pitiful echoes recurred fre- 
 quently in the most magnificent of these nightly pageants. 
 One of the most distressing features of the dreams was 
 their vastness. The dreamer lived for centuries in one
 
 3/6 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 night, and space " swelled, and was amplified to an extent 
 of unutterable infinity." 
 
 To present with such force and reality these grotesque 
 and weird fancies, these vague horrors, and these deep 
 oppressions required a powerful imaginative grasp of the 
 intangible, and a masterly command of language. 
 
 In no other work does De Quincey reach the eminence 
 attained in the Confessions, although his scholarly acquire- 
 ments enabled him to treat philosophical, critical, and his- 
 torical subjects with wonderful grace and ease. His 
 biographer, Masson, says : " De Quincey 's sixteen volumes 
 of magazine articles are full of brain from beginning to 
 end." The wide range of his erudition is shown by the 
 fact that he could write such fine literary criticisms as On 
 Wordsworth's Poetry and On the Knocking at the Gate in 
 Macbeth, such clear, strong, and vivid descriptions of his- 
 torical events and characters as The Ccesars,Joan of Arc, 
 and The Revolt of the Tartars, and such acute essays on 
 unfamiliar topics as The Toilette of a Hebrew Lady, The 
 Casuistry of Roman Meals, and The Spanish Military 
 Nun. 
 
 He had a contemplative, analytic mind which enjoyed 
 knotty metaphysical problems and questions far removed 
 from daily life, such as the first principles of political 
 economy, and of German philosophy. While he was a 
 clear thinker in such fields, he added little that was new 
 to English thought. 
 
 The works which rank next to The Confessions of an 
 English Opium-Eater are all largely autobiographical, and 
 reveal charming glimpses of this dreamy, learned sage. 
 These works are Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the 
 Depths), The English Mail Coach, and Autobiographic 
 Sketches. None of them contains any striking or unusual
 
 THOMAS DE QUINCEY 377 
 
 experience of the author. Their power rests upon their 
 marvelous style. Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow in 
 Suspiria de Profundis and the Dream Fugue in the Mail 
 Coach are among the most musical, the most poetic, and 
 the most imaginative of the author's productions. 
 
 General Characteristics. One of the most prominent 
 characteristics of De Quincey's style is precision. There 
 are but few English essayists who can compare with him 
 in scrupulous precision of expression. He qualifies and 
 elaborates a simple statement until its exact meaning 
 becomes plainly manifest. His vocabulary is extraordi- 
 nary. In any of the multifarious subjects treated by him, 
 the right word seems always at hand. The extreme care 
 which he takes to get the best word may be seen in the fol- 
 lowing passage from Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow : 
 
 "These Sisters by what name shall we call them? If I say 
 simply ' The Sorrows,' there will be a chance of mistaking the term ; it 
 might be understood of individual sorrow, separate cases of sorrow, 
 whereas I want a term expressing the mighty abstractions that incar- 
 nate themselves in all individual sufferings of man's heart, and I wish 
 to have these abstractions presented as impersonations, that is, as 
 clothed with human attributes of life, and with functions pointing to 
 flesh. Let us call them, therefore, Our Ladies of Sorrow." 
 
 Such elaborate explanation of expressions is met with fre- 
 quently in De Quincey. 
 
 Another characteristic, which is very striking in all his 
 works, is stateliness. His long, periodic sentences move 
 with a quiet dignity, adapted to the treatment of lofty 
 themes. In contrasting the simplicity of Swift with the 
 elegance of De Quincey, Leslie Stephen humorously 
 remarks that if Swift's plain, direct subjects had been 
 attempted by De Quincey, " he would have resembled a 
 king in his coronation robes, compelled to lead a forlorn
 
 378 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 hope up the scaling ladders." When, however, De 
 Quincey describes a magnificent dream, a fine landscape, 
 or an incident in his own experience, the floating " corona- 
 tion robes " of his style have the proper regal sweep. 
 
 A further striking quality of De Quincey's style is har- 
 mony. His language is so full of rich harmonies that it 
 challenges comparison with poetry. He shared the enjoy- 
 ment of Keats in the rhythm and sound of a sentence, 
 apart from its meaning. He sometimes gains his effects 
 by the repetition -of words. He says : 
 
 "The sound was reverberated everlasting farewells ! and again and 
 yet again reverberated everlasting farewells I" 1 
 
 De Quincey's work possesses also a light, ironic humor, 
 which is happiest in parody. The essay upon Murder 
 Considered as One of the Fine Arts is the best example of 
 his humor. This selection is one of the most whimsical : 
 
 " For, if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes 
 to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking 
 and Sabbath breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. 
 Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are 
 to stop." 
 
 De Quincey's gravest fault is digression. He fre- 
 quently leaves his main theme and follows some line of 
 thought that has been suggested to his well-stored mind. 
 These digressions are often quite lengthy, and sometimes 
 one digression leads to another, until several subjects 
 receive treatment in one paper. He, however, always 
 returns to the subject in hand, and he always defines 
 very sharply the point of digression and of return. An- 
 other of his faults is an indulgence in involved sentences, 
 which weaken the vigor and simplicity of the style. 
 
 1 Confessions of an English Opium- Eater.
 
 SUMMARY 379 
 
 Despite these faults, De Quincey is a great master of lan- 
 guage. He deserves study for the three most striking char- 
 acteristics of his style, precision, stateliness, and harmony. 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 The tide of reaction, which had for some time been 
 gathering force, swept triumphantly over England in this 
 age of Romanticism. 
 
 Men rebelled against the aristocracy, the narrow con- 
 ventions of society, the authority of the church and of the 
 government, against the supremacy of cold classicism in 
 literature, against confining intellectual activity to tangible 
 commonplace things, and against the repression of imagi-. 
 nation and of the soul's aspirations. The two principal 
 forces behind these changes were the Romantic Move- 
 ment, which culminated in changed literary ideals, and 
 the spirit of the French Revolution, which emphasized the 
 close kinship of all ranks of humanity. 
 
 The age was preeminently poetic. The Elizabethan 
 period alone excels it in the glory of its poetry. The sub- 
 jects of verse in the age of Romanticism were external 
 nature and an ideal humanity. Cowper, Burns, Scott, 
 Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats con- 
 stitute a group of nature poets that cannot be paralleled in 
 English literature. The democratic spirit of the age is 
 shown in the poetry of man. Burns sings of the Scotch 
 peasant, Wordsworth pictures the life of shepherds and 
 dalesmen, Byron's lines ring with a cry of liberty for 
 all, and Shelley immortalizes the dreams of a universal 
 brotherhood of man. 
 
 While the prose does not take such high rank as the 
 poetry, there are some writers who will not soon be for- 
 gotten. Scott will be remembered as the great master of
 
 380 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 the historical novel, Jane Austen as the skillful interpreter 
 of commonplace character, De Quincey for the brilliancy 
 of his style and the vigor of his imagination in presenting 
 his opium dreams, and Lamb for his exquisite humor. In 
 philosophical prose, Mill, Bentham, and Malthus made im- 
 portant contributions to moral, social, and political phi- 
 losophy, while Coleridge opposed their utilitarian and 
 materialistic tendencies, and codified the principles of 
 criticism from a romantic point of view. 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER IX 
 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Gardiner, 1 pp. 792-914; Green, pp. 786-836; Underwood-Guest, 
 pp. 536-556; Guerber, pp. 309-320; Hassall's Making of the British 
 Empire, pp. 82-142; Traill, V., 366-627, VI., i-iio. 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 Cowper. Read the opening stanzas of Cowper's Conversation and 
 note the strong influence of Pope in the cleverly turned but artificial 
 couplets. Compare this poem with the one On the Receipt of my 
 Mother's Picture or with The Task, Book IV., lines 1-41 and 267-332, 
 and point out the marked differences in subject matter and style. Is 
 there a forward movement in literature indicated by the change in 
 Cowper's manner? John Gilpin should be read for its fresh, beguiling 
 humor. 
 
 Burns. Read The Cotter's Saturday Night, For a" 1 That and a 1 
 That, To a Mouse, Highland Mary, To Mary in Heaven, Farewell to 
 Nancy, f Love My Jean, A Red, Red Rose. The teacher should read 
 to the class parts of Tain o' Shanter. 
 
 In what ways do the first three poems mentioned above show Burns's 
 sympathy with democracy? Quote some of Burns's fine descriptions 
 of nature and describe the manner in which he treats nature. How 
 does he rank as a writer of love songs? What qualities in his poems 
 
 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I.
 
 READING REFERENCES 381 
 
 have touched so many hearts ? Compare his poetry with that of Dry- 
 den, Pope, and Shakespeare. 
 
 Scott. Read The Lady of the Lake, Canto III., stanzas iii.-xxv., or 
 Marmion, Canto VI., stanzas xiii.-xxvii., (American Book Co.'s 
 Eclectic English Classics, or Cassell's National Library, Nos. 14 and 
 136). Read in Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. V., "The Gypsy's 
 Curse," pp. 14-17, "The Death of Madge Wildfire," pp. 30-35, and 
 " The Grand Master of the Templars," pp. 37-42. The student should 
 put on his list for reading at his leisure : Guy Mannering, Old Mortality, 
 Ivanhoe, Kenilworth, and The Talisman. 
 
 In what kind of poetry does Scott excel? Quote some of his spirited 
 lines, and point out their chief excellences. How does his poetry differ 
 from that of Burns? In the history of fiction does Scott rank as an 
 imitator or a creator? As a writer of fiction in what do his strength 
 and his weakness consist? Has he those qualities that will cause him 
 to be popular a century hence? What can be said of his style? 
 
 Jane Austen. In Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. V., read 
 the two selections from Pride and Prejudice, pp. 59-66. 
 
 In delineation of character, how does Jane Austen differ from Scott? 
 
 Wordsworth. From the uneven work of Wordsworth such poems 
 as the following may be selected : Michael, from the narrative poems ; 
 The Solitary Reaper, Glen Almain, To a Highland Girl, Lines Com- 
 posed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, and Daffodils, from the lyrics ; 
 " It is a beauteous evening, calm and free," "Milton! thou should'st be 
 living at this hour," and "The world is too much with us, late and 
 soon," from the sonnets ; and the Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 
 from the odes. 
 
 In which of these poems does Wordsworth show his belief in the 
 consciousness of nature ? Are these poems of nature more remarkable 
 for their power of description or for their spiritual, imaginative beauty? 
 Are the characters in Michael as clearly marked as those in The Cotter's 
 Saturday Night ? Was Matthew Arnold justified in saying of Words- 
 worth : " It might seem that nature not only gave him the matter for 
 his poem, but wrote his poem for him"? Indicate some passages 
 where Wordsworth's reflective genius is best displayed. 
 
 Coleridge. Read The Ancient Mariner and Christabel (Ward, IV., 
 128-154 ; The Ancient Mariner may also be had in the Eclectic English 
 Classics Series). 
 
 In what way do these poems display the influence of romanticism? 
 Is Wordsworth's influence noticeable in any of Coleridge's poetry of
 
 382 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 nature? What feeling, almost unknown in early poetry, is common 
 in Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's Hart-Leap Well, 
 Burns's To a Mouse, On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Me, A Win- 
 ter Night, and Cowper's On a Goldfinch Starved to Death in his Cage ? 
 
 Coleridge's prose criticisms upon Wordsworth in Biographia Lite- 
 raria and on Shakespeare in the first and second volumes of Literary 
 Remains should be read by the student. The cream of these works 
 will be found in Henry A. Beers's carefully edited Selections from the 
 Prose Writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 146 pp., 50 cents. 
 
 Note how fully Coleridge unfolds the principles of romantic criticism 
 in these essays. 
 
 Byron. Read The Prisoner of Chilian {Selections from Byron, 
 Eclectic English Classics}, Childe Harold, Canto III., stanzas xxi.- 
 xxv. and cxiii., Canto IV., stanzas Ixxviii. and Ixxix., " Oh, Snatch'd 
 away in Beauty's Bloom," " There's not a joy the world can give like 
 that it takes away," and from Don Juan, Canto III., the song inserted 
 between stanzas Ixxxvi. and Ixxxvii. All these poems will be found in 
 the two volumes of Byron's works in the Canterbury Poets' 1 series. 
 
 From these stanzas of Childe Harold select, first, the passages which 
 best illustrate the spirit of revolt, and, second, the passages marked by 
 most poetic beauty. Is Byron a poet of despair? What natural phe- 
 nomena appeal most to Byron? 
 
 Shelley. Read Adonais, The Cloud, To a Skylark, Ode to the 
 West Wind, The Sensitive Plant. 
 
 Does either the Adonais of Shelley or the Lycidas of Milton express 
 a deep, personal sorrow ? Under what different aspects do these two 
 elegiac poems view the life after death? Did Shelley see the spiritual 
 side of nature like Wordsworth ? What is the most striking quality of 
 Shelley's poetic gift? 
 
 Keats. Read The Eve of St. Agnes, La Belle Dame sans Merci, 
 Ode on a Grecian Urn, To a Nightingale. 
 
 In what respects is Keats a great poet of nature? Does he teach 
 any ethical lesson? How is he more nearly akin to the Elizabethans 
 than any of his contemporaries ? 
 
 De Quincey. Read Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, which will 
 be found in Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. V., pp. 264-270. 
 The first few chapters of The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 
 (Morley's Universal Library, No. 35, 40 cents) are so entertaining 
 that they will well repay reading, if the student has the time. 
 
 Do his writings show the influence of a romantic and poetic age?
 
 READING REFERENCES 383 
 
 Compare his style with that of Addison, Gibbon, and Burke. In what 
 respects does De Quincey succeed, and in what does he fail, as a model 
 for a young writer ? 
 
 Lamb. From the Essays of Elia, read the Dissertation on Roast Pig. 
 Selections from the Essays may be found in Craik, V., pp. 116-126. 
 
 In what does Lamb's chief charm consist ? Point out resemblances 
 and differences between his Essays and Addison's. 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 Herford's The Age of Wordsworth, 315 pp. (the best short work). 
 
 Oliphant's Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth 
 and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. 
 
 Saintsbury's History of Nineteenth Century Literature, pp. 1-137. 
 
 Shairp's Poetic Interpretation of Nature and Aspects of Poetry. 
 
 Brooke's Theology in the English Poets. 
 
 Hancock's French Revolution and the English Poets. 
 
 The French Revolution and Literature and The Transcendental 
 Movement and Literature, in Dowden's Studies in Literature. 
 
 Scudder's Life of tJte Spirit in the Afodern English Poets. 
 
 Arnold's Essays in Criticism. 
 
 Noel's Essays on Poetry and Poets. 
 
 Swinburne's Essays and Studies and Miscellanies. 
 
 Masson's Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. 
 
 Bagehot's Literary Studies. 
 
 Lowell's Among My Books. 
 
 Phillips's Popular Manual of English Literature, Vol. II., pp. 87-402. 
 
 Ward's English Poets, Vol. III., pp. 422-608 ; Vol. IV., pp. 1-488. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. V., pp. 1-273. 
 
 Clark's Study of English Prose Writers, pp. 323-419. 
 
 Wright's Life of Cowper. 
 
 Goldwin Smith's Life of Cowper. 
 
 Cowper and Rousseau, in Stephen's Hours in a Library, Vol. II. 
 
 Shairp's Life of Burns. 
 
 Blackie's Life of Burns. 
 
 Carlyle's Essay on Burns. 
 
 Lockhart's Life of Scott. 
 
 Hutton's Life of Scott.
 
 384 THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM, 1780-1837 
 
 Yonge's Life of Scott. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott, in Stephen's Hours in a Library, Vol. I. 
 
 Jack's Essays on the Novel as Illustrated by Scott and Miss Austen. 
 
 Gold win Smith's Life of Jane Austen. 
 
 Knight's Life of William Wordsworth, 3 vols. 
 
 Myers's Life of Wordsworth. 
 
 Wordsworth : the Man and the Poet, in Shairp's Studies in Poetry 
 and Philosophy. 
 
 Wordsworth's Ethics, in Stephen's Hours in a Library, Vol. II. 
 
 Knight's Through the Wordsworth Country, illustrated. 
 
 Reynold's The Treatment of Nature in English Poetry between Pope 
 and Wordsworth. 
 
 George's Preface to The Prelude and Preface to Selections from 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Pater's Appreciations (Wordsworth and Coleridge). 
 
 Traill's Life of Coleridge. 
 
 Caine's Life of Coleridge. 
 
 Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Shairp's Studies in Poetry and Philosophy. 
 
 Brandl's Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the English Romantic Move- 
 ment. 
 
 Coleridge : Prose Extracts, edited by H . A. Beers. 
 
 Nichol's Life of Byron. 
 
 Noel's Life of Byron. 
 
 Macaulay's Essay on Byron. 
 
 Mathilde Blind's Introduction to the Poetical Works of Lord Byron 
 in Canterbury Poets. 
 
 Dowden's Life of Shelley. 
 
 Symonds's Life of Shelley. 
 
 Shairp's Life of Shelley. 
 
 Shelley 's Philosophical Views of Reform and Last Words on Shelley, 
 in Dowden's Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 Brooke's Preface to Poems of Shelley. 
 
 Godwin and Shelley, in Stephen's Hours in a Library, Vol. III. 
 
 Colvin's Life of Keats. 
 
 Rossetti's Life of Keats. 
 
 Masson's Life of De Quincey. 
 
 Page's Life and Writings of De Quincey. 
 
 Study of Thomas De Quincey, in Minto's Manual of English Prose 
 Literature, pp. 31-75. 
 
 De Quincey, in Stephen's Hours in a Library, Vol. I.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE, 1837-1901 
 
 A Literature of Variety. Before Queen Victoria as- 
 cended the throne in 1837, Coleridge, Scott, Shelley, Byron, 
 and Keats had passed away. The old order had given 
 place to a new one. At the end of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, the spirit of revolt against classical literary forms 
 and tyrannical methods of government was animating the 
 poets. The Victorian age has been inspired by no over- 
 mastering impulse, without which no age can reach the 
 greatest heights, although it may do much excellent and 
 necessary work in the evolution of literature. 
 
 While no one type of literature has received its con- 
 summate expression in this period, a greater variety of 
 efforts has attained eminence than in any previous time. 
 In poetry, prose fiction, essays, history, philosophy, and 
 scientific treatises, the Victorian age has done good work. 
 The most eminent writers of the period are Browning and 
 Tennyson in poetry ; Thackeray, Dickens, and George 
 Eliot, in prose fiction ; Carlyle, Macaulay, Ruskin, and 
 Matthew Arnold, in essay writing; Herbert Spencer, 
 Cardinal Newman, and Sir William Hamilton in various 
 types of philosophy ; and Darwin, Tyndall, and Huxley 
 in science. This many-sided, restless modern life has 
 found literary expression as varied as its .aims and moods. 
 
 Prose takes higher comparative rank in the Victorian 
 than in the preceding age. In special fields, the prose 
 of Bunyan, Swift, and Burke has not been surpassed, 
 
 385
 
 386 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 but the Victorian age stands first in the extent, variety, 
 and finished style of its prose. The novel is the most 
 widely popular, the most prolific, and the most charac- 
 teristic type of nineteenth century prose. The changed 
 character of the reading public furnishes one reason for 
 the unprecedented growth of fiction. The spread of 
 education among all classes of society, through public 
 schools, newspapers, and cheap magazines, gradually 
 enabled the masses to become the readers of books not 
 too abstruse or philosophical. The lives of the majority 
 of people are spent in hard toil and their culture is lim- 
 ited. If such are to find much amusement, it must come 
 from reading matter within their comprehension. The 
 novel has also the advantage of being able to present life 
 in all its variety. 
 
 If those epochs represented by only one great poet, 
 like Chaucer or Milton, are not considered, it is probable 
 that posterity will assign third place to the Victorian age 
 for its poetry and rank it below the poetry of the age 
 of Elizabeth and of Romanticism. The Victorian poets, 
 unlike the Elizabethan, could not sit at the feet of all 
 human life, listen to its wonderful tale, and repeat it 
 unmarred by special theories and philosophies, nor could 
 the later poets "recapture the first fine careless rapture" 
 of the earlier singers. In some respects the Victorian 
 poets surpass their more gifted brothers. The exaggera- 
 tion and lack of self-control in the Elizabethan age have 
 been largely avoided. Unlike the poets of the first part 
 of the eighteenth century, Tennyson combines rare artis- 
 tic power with feeling and close observation of life. The 
 Victorian poets are less buoyant and imaginative than the 
 Romantic school which immediately preceded them, but 
 in regard to government, social reformation, and human
 
 A SCIENTIFIC AGE 387 
 
 capability, they display the characteristics of a saner, 
 wiser, and more moderate age. 
 
 The Victorian period may also be differentiated from 
 others by the extent of the influence of science on liter- 
 ature. This influence has been so powerful that it de- 
 mands special consideration. 
 
 A Scientific Age. The growth of science has been one 
 of the foremost influences to shape the thought of the 
 age. Steam has been put to a thousand uses. Wonderful 
 machines have been invented to do what was impossible 
 for human hands. The year of Victoria's accession to 
 the throne saw the operation of the first telegraph line in 
 England. Electricity made a reality of Puck's boast to 
 girdle the earth in forty minutes. Friend conversed with 
 friend across a thousand miles of space. Things which 
 the Elizabethans would have called the wildest dreams 
 became prosaic realities. 
 
 Some of the most acute thinkers of the century devoted 
 their lives to scientific investigation. Men like Charles 
 Darwin (1809-1882), Thomas Huxley 
 (1825-1895), John Tyndall (1820- 
 1893), and Herbert Spencer (1820- 
 
 ) endeavored to build the stray 
 
 bricks of scientific knowledge into 
 a philosophical structure. 
 
 The Victorian age was the first 
 to set forth clearly the evolution 
 hypothesis, which teaches the 
 orderly development of life from 
 simple to complex forms. While 
 
 CHARLES DARWIN 
 
 the idea of evolution had sug- 
 gested itself to many naturalists, Darwin was the first to 
 gain a wide hearing for the theory. His Origin of Species
 
 388 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 by Natural Selection (1859) was an epoch-making book. 
 Spencer carried the doctrine of evolution into broader 
 fields. In his Synthetic Philosophy he applied it to the 
 structure, not only of plants and animals, but also of 
 society, morality, and religion. Of all the scientific thought 
 of the age, the doctrine of evolution has had the most 
 influence on both prose and poetry. A great scientist 
 like Tyndall becomes almost poetic in presenting his 
 conception of evolution. He says : 
 
 " Not alone the more ignoble forms of animalcular or animal life, not 
 alone the nobler forms of the horse and lion, not alone the exquisite 
 and wonderful mechanism of the human body, but the human mind 
 itself emotion, intellect, will, and all their phenomena were once 
 latent in a fiery cloud. . . . All our philosophy, all our poetry, all our 
 science, and all our art Plato, Shakespeare, Newton, and Raphael 
 are potential in the fires of the sun." 1 
 
 With this we may contrast Tennyson's poetic exposition 
 of the nebular hypothesis : 
 
 " This world was once a fluid haze of light 
 Till toward the center set the starry tides, 
 And eddied into suns, that wheeling cast 
 The planets ; then the monster, then the man." a 
 
 "Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep, 
 Where all that was to be in all that was, 
 WhirPd for a million aeons thro 1 the vast 
 Waste dawn of multitudinous-eddying light." 8 
 
 We shall now proceed to note more specifically some 
 of the ways in which science has affected literature. We 
 shall find that science has influenced the idea of growth, 
 the search for truth, the way of regarding the problems of 
 existence, religious faith, ethical and social aims, and the 
 tendency toward analytical modes of thought. 
 
 * The Imagination in Science. 2 The Princess, Canto II. 8 De Profundis.
 
 THE IDEA OF GROWTH 389 
 
 The Idea of Growth. Evolution has impressed on liter- 
 ature and on social philosophy what might be termed the 
 " growth idea." In these two lines Browning thus expresses 
 this new idea of the working of the Divine Power : 
 
 " He fixed thee 'mid this dance 
 Of plastic circumstance." 1 
 
 Evolution teaches the slow development of the lower into 
 the higher. Preceding literature, with the conspicuous 
 exception of Shakespeare's work, had, for the most part, 
 presented individuals whose character was already fixed. 
 We are introduced to them as monsters of wickedness, or 
 as embodiments of strong will and fine character, but we 
 are not shown the various steps which complete the moral 
 perversion or develop the strength of character. George 
 Eliot, Thackeray, and Robert Browning, instead of taking us 
 into a gallery of completed statues, show us the sculptors at 
 work upon the newly quarried marble. These sculptors, 
 whose names are Heredity, Environment, Will Power, 
 Moral Feeling, and Trial, in both failure and success, are 
 chiseling out their statues in the world studio. We can see 
 the figures in process of development, and note the stage 
 at which the flaw in the marble appears and mars the work. 
 The idea of growth explains why this age has taken a 
 different view of social problems. Science has caused the 
 abandonment of the idea that men can be permanently 
 uplifted as the result of a sudden revolution, like the one 
 in France. Enlightened men no longer think that such 
 measures as the killing of a Catiline, a Caesar, or the 
 French nobles, or the imprisonment of some members of 
 a corrupt city government, can cure the evils in a state. 
 There has been a wider realization of the fact that there 
 
 1 Rabbi Ben Ezra. 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 25
 
 390 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 must be, under the proper stimulating influences, an orderly 
 growth from the former condition into a new one. Vast 
 progress is shown by the nineteenth century in its reali- 
 zation of the fact that changes in the character of an 
 individual or in the reformation of a government are not 
 the result of a few minutes' exposure to some strain or of 
 a sudden upheaval. Science has shown the necessity of 
 time in the development of all things. Tennyson voices 
 this new belief : 
 
 "Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, 
 Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape ? " 1 
 
 Browning also emphasizes it : 
 
 "... progress is 
 
 The law of life, man is not Man as yet. 
 Nor shall I deem his object served, his end 
 Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth, 
 While only here and there a star dispels 
 The darkness, here and there a towering mind 
 O'erlooks its prostrate fellows." 2 
 
 The Search for Truth. Man increased his dominion 
 over nature in proportion as he learned scientific truth. 
 The beneficent results of understanding natural laws and 
 of acting in harmony with them have impelled many to 
 join in the search for truth in this direction. Some few 
 have caught fresh glimpses of the fact that the laws of the 
 spiritual world, as well as of the natural world, must be 
 understood, if man would not introduce discordant notes 
 into the larger harmony of both worlds. The age is 
 distinguished by a groping after truth in every direction. 
 Physics, geology, biology, psychology, religion, sociology, 
 ethics, government, and every other subject that seemed 
 
 1 Making of Man. 2 Paracelsus, Act V.
 
 SCIENCE AND IMAGINATION 391 
 
 to point toward truth, all have had patient investi- 
 gators. 
 
 We see everywhere a determination to learn the truth, 
 irrespective of where it may lead. There has been the 
 firm consciousness that even the heavens rest on pillars of 
 truth, that the truth can harm no righteous cause. Geolo- 
 gists investigated the records of creation as carefully as 
 historians searched the state papers of a bygone reign. 
 Philosophers sought the origin of conscience, the founda- 
 tion of belief, the underlying truths of every science. 
 Men believed that all these truths, when woven together, 
 would give new unity, dignity, and fullness to life. 
 
 Science and Imagination. Some have insisted with 
 Keats that science would clip the wings of imagination. 
 Since a great imaginative poet does not make his appear- 
 ance on an average of once in a century, it is too early yet 
 to tell what the final outcome will be. In the first flush of 
 scientific discoveries, it was thought that all the mystery 
 would soon be eliminated from existence, and that the 
 sphere of imaginative activity would necessarily be less- 
 ened. This view is less common to-day, for it is now 
 generally recognized that evolution has merely substituted 
 a greater mystery in place of a lesser one. 
 
 Has any preceding age offered to the imagination wider 
 views with more unfathomed mystery than astronomy and 
 the seons of geology present ? In Shakespeare's theater, 
 we see the seven ages of man passing across the stage ; 
 in the theater of the universe, we behold all the offspring 
 of creation playing their parts. It seems safe to predict 
 that lack of genius will remain the only factor capable of 
 limiting the workings of imagination. 
 
 It is well to note that as philosophical a nineteenth cen- 
 tury scientist as John Tyndall wrote one of his greatest
 
 392 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 essays, The Imagination in Science, to show that even 
 science could not dispense with imagination. He says : 
 
 " Philosophers may be right in affirming that we cannot transcend 
 experience ; but we can at all events carry it a long way from its origin. 
 We can also magnify, diminish, qualify, and combine experiences, so as 
 to render them fit for purposes entirely new. We are gifted with the 
 power of imagination, and by this power we can lighten the darkness 
 which surrounds the world of the senses. . . . Bounded and condi- 
 tioned by cobperant reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instru- 
 ment of the physical discoverer. Newton's passage from a falling apple 
 to a falling moon was, at the outset, a leap of the imagination." 
 
 Problems of Existence. The hypothesis of evolutionary 
 development has caused men to regard from a new point of 
 view the origin of life, its worth here, and its destiny here- 
 after. On one side, evolution means continuous progress 
 from a lower to a higher and a nobler form of life, and the 
 entire world thus seems to be on the royal highway to 
 Eden. Tennyson proclaims that the human beings of the 
 future shall be 
 
 "No longer half akin to brute, 
 
 For all we thought and loved and did, 
 And hoped, and suffered, is but seed 
 Of what in them is flower and fruit." l 
 
 But the message of evolution is not entirely optimistic. 
 When men pondered over Darwin's famous demonstration 
 of the survival of the fittest, they saw that there were two 
 sides to the evolutionary shield, that for every fit one who 
 survived to reach the heights, perhaps a thousand perished, 
 and that success might be as dear to each of the prostrate 
 thousand as to the fortunate one. Tennyson perceived 
 the ruthless destructiveness of the natural world. Of 
 " Nature, red in tooth and claw with ravine," he says : 
 
 1 In Mtmoriam, CXXXI.
 
 PROBLEMS OF EXISTENCE 393 
 
 " So careful of the type she seems, 
 So careless of the single life. 
 
 " ' So careful of the type ? ' but no. 
 
 From scarpe"d cliff and quarried stone 
 She cries, ' A thousand types are gone : 
 I care for nothing, all shall go.'" 1 
 
 One school of evolutionists denied any freedom to will 
 power. They taught that everything is potential in the 
 nebular mist (see p. 388), and that its development is 
 under the control of a law as inexorable as that which 
 determines the path of a rifle ball. Since Shakespeare 
 and Benedict Arnold were both potential in the nebula, 
 it had to evolve them exactly as they were evolved. They 
 were, under this view, as powerless to change themselves, 
 as undeserving of either praise or blame, as a bullet which 
 cannot determine whether it shall strike a target or kill 
 a child. This school taught that man, like every other 
 product which the nebula was under the necessity of 
 evolving, is merely a bubble floating on 
 the stream of an eternal Energy, a pow- 
 erless spectator of a current which bears 
 him helplessly onward toward a great sea, 
 in which the bubble will change its form 
 and lose its individual existence. Such 
 theories have led toward materialism, and 
 the thought of the age has been pro- 
 foundly impressed by them. Some 
 writers, like Matthew Arnold, never 
 escaped from the doubts thus raised. ALGERNON C.SWINBURNE 
 ^Lines like these from Swinburne pre- 
 sent a gloomy picture of "the sleep eternal," with which 
 materialism endeavors to solace the weary : 
 
 1 In Memoriam, LV., LVI.
 
 394 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 " We thank with brief thanksgiving 
 Whatever gods may be 
 That no life lives forever ; 
 That dead men rise up never ; 
 That even the weariest river 
 Winds somewhere safe to sea. 
 
 " Then star nor sun shall waken, 
 Nor any change of light ; 
 Nor sound of waters shaken, 
 Nor any sound or sight : 
 Nor wintry leaves nor vernal. 
 Nor days nor things diurnal ; 
 Only the sleep eternal 
 In an eternal night." l 
 
 Materialistic fatalism leads naturally to pessimistic theo- 
 ries of life. The question, " Is life worth living ? " has 
 been asked on all sides. On the supposition that this life 
 ends all, the verdict of Tennyson, who perhaps more than 
 any other poet reflects the moods of the age, .is that 
 
 "... earth is darkness at the core, 
 And dust and ashes all that is." 2 
 
 Outcome in Religious Thought. Science has certainly 
 tended to inspire the belief that the world's development 
 is the result of a growth more orderly than former ages had 
 imagined. On examining the works of many of the great- 
 est writers of the period, we Shall, however, find that they 
 do not accept the hypothesis of a blind Energy that cares 
 nothing for a sparrow's fall, an Energy that says : " Thy 
 brother shall not rise again, but like a raindrop he shall 
 forever lose his identity in the great Ocean of Eternity." 
 
 The vastness of scientific discovery merely stunned 
 certain minds, while it served to stimulate others to reach 
 
 1 The Garden of Proserpine. 2 In Memoriam, XXXIV.
 
 OUTCOME IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT 395 
 
 greater heights of spiritual truth. While some writers 
 never emerged from the shadow of doubt, we can still say 
 that the greatest literature of the age is resonant with the 
 voices of faith and hope. Carlyle and Ruskin are power- 
 ful religious teachers. Carlyle says : 
 
 "The man who cannot wonder (and worship), were he President 
 of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Micanique 
 Celeste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all laboratories 
 and observatories with their results in his single head, is but a pair of 
 spectacles behind which there is no eye. Let those who have eyes look 
 through him, then he may be useful." 1 
 
 The greatest poets of this age used the vast stores of 
 fact which the scientist had gathered, as lenses for 
 deciphering more clearly the message from a divine hand. 
 Sometimes this message proved too complex for complete 
 human grasp, and Tennyson exclaims : 
 
 " I falter where I firmly trod, 
 
 And falling with my weight of cares 
 Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
 That slope thro' darkness up to God." 2 
 
 However dark these stairs may be, his creed is 
 
 " That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
 That not one life shall be destroyed, 
 Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
 When God hath made the pile complete." 8 
 
 And Browning, combining most splendidly his scientific 
 knowledge with his emotional intensity, exclaims with joy- 
 ous hopefulness : 
 
 "... all's love, yet all's law. 
 
 I but open my eyes, and perfection, no more and no less, 
 In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God 
 In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. 
 
 1 Sartor Resartus. 2 In Memoriam, LV. 8 Ibid., LIV.
 
 396 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew 
 (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too) 
 The submission of man's nothing perfect to God's all complete, 
 As by each new obeisance in spirit I climb to his feet." 1 
 
 Evolution impressed on both Browning and Tennyson 
 the necessity of a hand that never wearies or guides 
 wrong in the labyrinthine mazes of eternity. Tennyson, 
 who had wrestled with all the doubts of the century con- 
 cerning the hereafter, wrote just before his final voyage 
 across the Unknown Sea : 
 
 "I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
 When I have crost the bar." 2 
 
 The Ethical and Social Spirit. A striving for better 
 government, for higher moral ideals, and for the general 
 uplifting of the masses is a marked feature of the age. 
 The spirit of individualism reached its culmination at the 
 time of the French Revolution. That spirit exalted indi- 
 vidual effort and looked on the individual as unrelated to 
 the mass or to the movements of the age. In the latter part 
 of the nineteenth century, we may note more organized 
 ethical effort in the direction of an altruism that concerns 
 itself more with upward social movements and less with 
 stray individuals. Men have realized more than ever 
 before that they are their brothers' keepers. The wrongs 
 in industrialism, the inequalities in birth and opportunity, 
 have received increased attention. In no preceding age 
 was the philanthropic spirit so eager to cure social evils. 
 
 Nearly all the great works of the Victorian age are 
 imbued with an ethical purpose. The novels of Dickens 
 paint the horrors of poverty-stricken neighborhoods and 
 champion the cause of helpless school children under 
 
 1 Saul, XVII. 2 Crossing the Bar.
 
 AN ANALYTICAL AGE 397 
 
 brutal masters. George Eliot shows the influences of 
 heredity and environment, and teaches a needed moral 
 lesson based on those scientific truths. The novel has 
 proved the most effective ethical text-book of the century. 
 The poetry does something more than paint beautiful 
 pictures. It is mindful of our duty to the unfortunate. 
 Tennyson asks : 
 
 " Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the time, 
 City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city slime? vl 
 
 Browning shows how character is tested and developed. 
 Both he and Tennyson have strengthened the moral 
 courage of many who were wavering. There is high 
 ethical aim in such lines as these : 
 
 " Follow Light, and do the Right for man can half control his doom 
 Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb." 2 
 
 If, perchance, an author turned aside from the serious 
 questions of existence to the enjoyment of mere beauty, 
 he seemed to feel that he was a truant from one of life's 
 lessons and shirking a responsibility. The seriousness and 
 significance of existence were felt with an oppressive 
 weight by some writers, notably by George Eliot ; and all 
 the strongest spirits uttered earnest ringing words upon 
 conduct, ideals of living, and the duty of man to man. 
 The age is remarkable for ethical teachers. Carlyle, Rus- 
 kin, Browning, and George Eliot stand among the greatest 
 of those who have been inspired with a desire to uplift and 
 beautify life. 
 
 An Analytical Age. Science turned the spectroscope on 
 the stars and determined their constituent elements. The 
 chemist analyzed the bubbling fountain and resolved it into 
 
 1 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After. 2 Ibid.
 
 398 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 hydrogen and oxygen. The botanist dissected the rose, 
 the daffodil, and the violet. Science has infused into Vic- 
 torian literature the analytical spirit, the desire to dissect 
 life in order to discover the underlying springs of action. 
 
 The Elizabethans had preferred to watch throbbing life 
 in its wonderful variety rather than to subject it to minute 
 dissection. In this characteristic, the two ages differ 
 widely. Dowden says : " Shakespeare had cared to see 
 what things are, all of pity and terror, all of beauty and 
 mirth, that human life contains, Lear in the storm, and 
 Falstaff in the tavern, and Perdita among her flowers. 
 He had said : ' These things are,' and had refused to put 
 the question : 'How can these things be ? ' ' The Vic- 
 torian age, on the other hand, has demanded theories of 
 life, an analysis of all the reasons why Hamlet did not kill 
 the King, or why Romeo loved Juliet. 
 
 The Elizabethans had loved to present strong lights and 
 gloomy shadows, the fury of a Tamburlaine and the jeal- 
 ousy of an Othello, Macbeth as subject, murderer, and 
 king. The uneventful lives of the rank and file of human- 
 ity had few charms for the Elizabethans. The nineteenth 
 century alone has more adequately described the multi- 
 tudinous host of the commonplace, which includes the vast 
 majority of people. The common types of life acquire 
 new interest for us as we analyze them. A scientist who 
 can present an intelligent analysis of a grasshopper may 
 be as interesting as a novelist. The keen, searching, 
 analytical genius of a modern artist is required to point 
 out interesting features in ordinary people and to present 
 them with the necessary subtlety, such as George Eliot 
 displays in her Scenes from Clerical Life. Thackeray 
 shows a special gift in analyzing the motives of those 
 whom he met in everyday life. Dickens lacks this analyt-
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 399 
 
 ical faculty, but it is possessed by far the greater number 
 of modern novelists. So pronounced has been the ten- 
 dency to dissect character, that the psychological novel is 
 as typical of the Victorian age as the drama of the Eliza- 
 bethan. 
 
 Victorian poetry is largely introspective and it presents 
 a record of thoughts rather than of actions. It is full of 
 complexities, analyses, and critical judgments. Browning 
 is the prince of analytical poets. Tennyson and Arnold 
 are at their best when meditating upon nature or reflect- 
 ing upon life. The poetry in general is marked not by a 
 comprehensive grasp of life as a whole, but by a power of 
 analyzing certain problems, feelings, motives, and types of 
 character to serve as stepping stones toward the temple 
 of truth and as a foundation for theories of existence. 
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, 1800-1859 
 
 Life. A prominent figure in the social and political 
 life of England during the first part of the century was 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay, a man of brilliant intel- 
 lectual powers, strict integrity of character, and enormous 
 capacity for work. He loved England and gloried in her 
 liberties and her commercial prosperity. He served her 
 for many years in the House of Commons, and he bent his 
 whole energy and splendid forensic talent in favor of the 
 Reform Bill of 1832, which secured greater political liberty 
 for England. 
 
 He was not a theorizer, but a practical man of affairs. 
 Notwithstanding the fact that his political opinions were 
 ready made for him by the Whig party, his career in the 
 House was never " inconsistent with rectitude of intention 
 and independence of spirit." He voted conscientiously
 
 4OO 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 for measures, although he personally sacrificed hundreds 
 of pounds by so doing. 
 
 He was a remarkable talker. A single speech of his has 
 been known to change an entire vote in Parliament. Un- 
 like Coleridge, he did not indulge in monologue, but 
 showed to finest advantage in debate. His power of 
 memory was wonderful. He often startled an opponent 
 by quoting from a given chapter and page of a book. He 
 repeated long passages from Paradise Lost ; and it is said 
 he could have restored it complete, had it all been lost.
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 4OI 
 
 His disposition was sweet and his life altogether fortu- 
 nate. His biographer says of him : " Descended from 
 Scotch Presbyterians ministers many of them on his 
 father's side, and from a Quaker family on his mother's, 
 he probably united as many guarantees of 'good birth,' 
 in the moral sense of the word, as could be found in these 
 islands at the beginning of the century." 
 
 He was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, in 1800. 
 He was prepared for college at good private schools, and 
 sent to Cambridge when he was eighteen. He studied law 
 and was admitted to the bar in 1825, but, in the following 
 year, he determined to adopt literature as a profession, 
 owing to the welcome given to his Essay on Milton. He 
 had written epics, histories, and metrical romances prior 
 to the age of ten, so that his choice of a profession was 
 neither hasty nor unexpected. 
 
 He continued from this time to write for the Edinburgh 
 Revieiv, but literature was not the only field of his activity. 
 He had a seat in Parliament, and he held several positions 
 under the Government. He was never unemployed. Many 
 of his Essays were written before breakfast, while the other 
 members of the household were asleep. 
 
 He was a voracious reader. If he walked in the country 
 or in London, he always carried a book to read. He spent 
 some years in the Government's service in India. On the 
 long voyage over, he read incessantly, and on the return 
 trip he studied the German language. 
 
 He was beyond the age of forty when he found the 
 leisure to begin his History of England. He worked 
 uninterruptedly and broke down early. He was but 
 fifty-nine years old at the time of his death in 1859. 
 
 With his large, fine physique, his sturdy common 
 sense, his interest in practical matters, and his satisfac-
 
 402 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 tion in the physical improvements of the people, Macau- 
 lay was a fine specimen of the English gentleman. 
 
 Essays and Poetry. Like De Quincey, Macaulay was 
 a frequent contributor to periodicals. He wrote graphic 
 essays on men of action and historical periods. The 
 essays most worthy of mention in this class are Sir 
 William Temple, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, and 
 William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Some of his essays on 
 English writers and literary subjects are still classic. 
 Among these are Milton, Dry den, Addison, S out hey s 
 Edition of Pilgrim's Progress, Crokers Edition of Bos- 
 weirs Life of Johnson, and the biographical essays on 
 Bunyan, Goldsmith, and Johnson, contributed to the 
 Encyclopedia Britannica. Although they may lack deep 
 spiritual insight into the fundamental principles of life 
 and literary criticism, these essays are still deservedly 
 read by most students of English history and literature. 
 
 Gosse says : " The most restive of juvenile minds, if 
 induced to enter one of Macaulay's essays, is almost 
 certain to reappear at the other end of it gratified, and, 
 to an appreciable extent, cultivated." These Essays have 
 developed a taste for general reading in numbers who 
 could not have been induced to begin with anything dry 
 or hard. Many who have read Boswell's Life of Johnson 
 during the past fifty years say that Macaulay first turned 
 their attention to that fascinating work. In the following 
 quotation from an essay on that great biography, we may 
 note his love for interesting concrete statements, presented 
 in a vigorous and clear style : 
 
 "Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fullness of his fame and in the 
 enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other 
 man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, 
 his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blink-
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 403 
 
 ing eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of 
 his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish sauce and .veal pie with plums, 
 his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he 
 walked ... all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have 
 been surrounded from childhood." 
 
 Macaulay wrote some stirring ballad poetry, known as 
 Lays of Ancient Rome, which gives a good picture of 
 the proud Roman Republic in its valorous days. These 
 ballads have something of Scott's healthy, manly ring. 
 They contain rhetorical and martial stanzas which boys 
 love, but Macaulay lacked that spirituality and passion 
 for beauty which are necessary in a great poet. 
 
 History of England. Macaulay had for some time 
 wondered why some one should not do for real history 
 what Scott had done fol: imaginary history. Macaulay 
 accordingly proposed to himself the task of writing a 
 history which should be more accurate than Hume's 
 and possess something of the interest of Scott's historical 
 romances. In 1848 appeared the first two volumes of 
 TV/,? History of England from the Accession of James II. 
 Macaulay had the satisfaction of seeing his work, in sales 
 and popular appreciation, surpass the novels. He in- 
 tended to trace the development of English liberty from 
 James II. to the death of George III., but his minute 
 method of treatment allowed him to unfold only sixteen 
 years of that important period, from 1685 to 1701. 
 
 Macaulay's pages are not a graveyard for the dry 
 bones of history. The human beings that figure in his 
 chapters have been restored to life by his touch. We see 
 Charles II. " before the dew was off in St. James's Park 
 striding among the trees, playing with his spaniels, and 
 flinging corn to his ducks." We gaze for a moment 
 with the English courtiers at William III.:
 
 404 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 " They observed that the King spoke in a somewhat imperious tone, 
 even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and whom he sincerely 
 loved and esteemed. They were amused and shocked to see him, 
 when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first green peas 
 of the year were put on the table, devour the whole dish without offer- 
 ing a spoonful to her Royal Highness, and they pronounced that this 
 great soldier and politician was no better than a low Dutch bear." * 
 
 Parts of the History are masterpieces of the narrator's 
 art. A trained novelist, unhampered by historical facts, 
 could scarcely have surpassed the last part of Macau- 
 lay's eighth chapter in relating the trial of the seven 
 Bishops. Our blood tingles to the tips of our fingers 
 as we read in the fifth chapter the story of Monmouth's 
 rebellion and the Bloody Assizes of Judge Jeffreys. 
 
 Macaulay shirked no labor in preparing himself to 
 write the History. He read thousands of pages of au- 
 thorities and he personally visited the great battlefields 
 in order to give accurate descriptions. Notwithstanding 
 such preparation, the value of his History is impaired, not 
 only because he sometimes displays partisanship, but also 
 because he fails to appreciate the significance of under- 
 lying social movements. He does not adopt the modern 
 idea that history is a record of social growth, moral as 
 well as physical. While a graphic picture of the exterior 
 aspects of society is presented, we are given no profound 
 insight into the interior movements of a great constitu- 
 tional epoch. We may say of both Gibbon and Macaulay 
 that they are too often mere surveyors, rather than geol- 
 ogists, of the historic field. 2 The popularity of the History 
 is not injured by this method. 
 
 Macaulay's grasp of fact never weakens, his love of 
 
 1 History of England, Vol. III., Chap. XI. 
 4 Morison's Life of Macaulay, p. 139.
 
 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY 405 
 
 manly courage never relaxes, his joy in bygone time never 
 fails, his zeal for the free institutions of England never 
 falters, and his style is never dull. While scholars may 
 study other works, the generality of mankind will prefer 
 to read Macaulay. 
 
 General Characteristics. The chief quality of Macau- 
 lay's style is its clearness. Contemporaries said that 
 the printers' readers never had to read his sentences a 
 second time to understand them. This clearness is at- 
 tained, first, by the structure of his sentences. He 
 avoids entangling clauses, obscure references in his pro- 
 nouns, and long sentences whenever they are in danger 
 of becoming involved and causing the reader to lose his 
 way. In the second place, if the idea is a difficult one 
 or not likely to be apprehended at its full worth, Macau- 
 lay repeats his meaning from a different point of view 
 and throws additional light on the subject by varied illus- 
 trations. In the third place, his works abound in concrete 
 ideas, which are more readily grasped than abstract ones. 
 He is not content to write : " The smallest actual good 
 is better than the most magnificent promise of impos- 
 sibilities," but he gives the concrete equivalent : " An 
 acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia." 
 
 It is possible for style to be both clear and lifeless, but 
 his style is as energetic as it is clear. In narration he 
 takes high rank. His erudition, displayed in the vast 
 stores of fact which his memory retained for effective 
 service in every direction, is worthy of special mention. 
 
 While his excellences may serve as a model, he has 
 faults which admirers would do well to avoid. His fond- 
 ness for contrast often leads him to make one picture too 
 bright and the other too dark. His love of antithesis has 
 the merit of arousing attention in his readers and of 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 26
 
 406 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 crystallizing some thoughts into enduring epigrammatic 
 form, but he is often led to sacrifice exact truth in order 
 to obtain fine contrasts, as in the following : 
 
 "The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the 
 bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators." 
 
 Macaulay lacked sympathy with theories and aspira- 
 tions which could not accomplish immediate practical 
 results. His works are confined to the treatment of the 
 material world. They are not illumined with the spiritual 
 glow that sheds luster on the pages of Coleridge, Carlyle, 
 and Ruskin. 
 
 CARLYLE'S BIRTHPLACE 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881 
 
 Life. In striking contrast to the placid temperament 
 and realistic common sense of Macaulay, are the passion- 
 ate eagerness and idealism of Carlyle. This son of Scotch
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 407 
 
 peasants was bred upon the stern doctrines of the Kirk of 
 Scotland ; he was surrounded by " an inflexible element 
 of authority " in his cheerless home ; he was acquainted 
 with the stings of poverty; he endured the sufferings of 
 acute dyspepsia; and he knew the bitterness of a doubt- 
 ing soul. 
 
 He was born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, in 1795. 
 His parents destined him for the church, so they sent him 
 to the University of Edinburgh. He soon discovered that 
 his views were not in accord with the church's teachings, 
 and, with much sadness, he assured his parents that he 
 could not realize their ambitions. His somber, passionate 
 nature suffered intensely during the following years of 
 religious doubt. He lost faith both in himself and in a 
 God, and shrank from the pains of life. Carlyle's long 
 and troubled vigils were finally crowned with joy. He 
 seemed suddenly to pierce the gloom and to find his God. 
 This inner conflict left its traces upon Carlyle's entire 
 life. A powerful record of his experience is found in 
 Sartor Resartus. 
 
 During this dark period, Carlyle was writing for 
 magazines and striving to succeed in the uncongenial 
 drudgery of teaching. In 1819 he began the study 
 of German. He translated Goethe's novel, Wilhelm 
 Meister, and wrote a Life of Schiller. Together with 
 Coleridge and De Quincey, Carlyle was instrumental in 
 acquainting the English public with German philosophy 
 and literature. 
 
 He married in 1826. His wife, Jane Welsh, was a 
 woman of brilliant intellectual attainments. She recog- 
 nized her husband's genius, and by her timely words of 
 praise strengthened him against the ridicule of the critics. 
 Despite her quick temper, which took fire at Carlyle's
 
 408 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 querulousness, she was the ideal wife for him. They 
 loved each other passionately. In 1828 they went to 
 her lonely farm at Craigenputtock, where, for six years, 
 Carlyle was immersed in study. They moved to London 
 in 1834, and lived very quietly at Chelsea, where Carlyle 
 continued his literary labors. 
 
 Carlyle did not attain Macaulay's sudden and wide- 
 spread popularity. Carlyle had to wait years for a public, 
 but he finally won it. In 1865 he was highly honored 
 by the Edinburgh University, which elected him Lord 
 Rector. He was inaugurated in 1866. His gruff but
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 409 
 
 kindly heart was deeply touched, and his speech of ac- 
 ceptance was full of emotion. 
 
 A few weeks later, his happiness was blighted by the 
 announcement of his wife's death during his stay in Scot- 
 land. He lived fifteen lonely years after this loss. His 
 sad life ended in 1881, and on a bleak February day he 
 was laid beside his father in Ecclefechan. 
 
 Sartor Resartus. Carlyle's most daring and original 
 work is Sartor Resartus (1833-1834), which means "the 
 tailor patched." It pretends, half humorously, to be a 
 confused assortment of some German philosopher's manu- 
 scripts; but it is, in reality, Carlyle's own mystical 
 interpretation of life. He calls the work a Philosophy 
 of Clothes, using the word " clothes " symbolically to 
 signify the outward expression of the spiritual. For 
 example, since man's spirit expresses itself in thoughts 
 and deeds, these are the clothes of the human spirit ; and 
 since God reveals himself in the physical universe, there- 
 fore it is the clothing of the divine spirit. Carlyle says : 
 
 " It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a 
 Vesture ; which indeed they are : the Time-vesture of the Eternal. 
 Whatsoever sensibly exists, whatsoever represents Spirit to Spirit, is 
 properly a Clothing, a suit of Raiment, put on for a season, and to be 
 laid off. Thus in this one pregnant subject of CLOTHES, rightly 
 understood, is included all that men have thought, dreamed, done, and 
 been : the whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing ; 
 and the essence of all Science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF 
 CLOTHES." 
 
 The message that Carlyle delivers to his generation in 
 Sartor Resartus is that man must tear away these vest- 
 ments, which are but semblances, and pierce to the inner 
 spirit, which is the reality. The century's material prog- 
 ress, which was such cause of pride to Macaulay, afforded
 
 4IO THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Carlyle no sense of gratification. He emphasizes the 
 need of a quickening spirit for his time. He denounces 
 the money-making basis of modern life, the selfishness 
 of industrialism, the material explanations which science 
 finds for the sacred emotions of duty, sacrifice, and wor- 
 ship. He holds up to scorn the philosophy which takes 
 pleasure in a nation's commercial welfare, when her 
 people's heart is still hard and unloving. He says of the 
 utilitarian philosophy, which he hated intensely: 
 
 " It spreads like a sort of Dog-madness ; till the whole World-kennel 
 will be rabid." 
 
 He uses all the power of his grotesque and caustic humor 
 to satirize the lack of spirituality in the age, and he does 
 not shrink from mere ugliness of expression when he is 
 aroused. He writes : 
 
 " But what, in these dull unimaginative days, are the terrors of Con- 
 science to the diseases of the Liver ! Not on Morality, but on Cookery, 
 let us build our stronghold : there brandishing our frying pan as censer, 
 let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live on the fat things he has 
 provided for his Elect ! " 
 
 The gospel of Carlyle's teaching is work. He teaches 
 that all men are ennobled by work, honestly performed, 
 no matter how humble it is. In his peculiarly emphatic 
 way, he says : 
 
 " Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! 
 Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Prod- 
 uct, produce it, in God's name! 'Tis the utmost thou hast in thee : 
 out with it, then." 
 
 This production of Carlyle, which hurls satiric denun- 
 ciations at the shams and trivialities of the world, and calls 
 meri to earnest activity, proved a powerful stimulant to
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 411 
 
 the younger generation of Englishmen. Many were thus 
 roused from their lethargy and complacency to action, to 
 reforms, and to a trust in eternal spiritual truth. 
 
 The French Revolution. Carlyle's manner of handling 
 incidents and characters is so extremely dramatic that his 
 histories have been said to resemble more closely the his- 
 torical plays of Shakespeare than the works of ordinary 
 historians. The French Revolution (1837) is perhaps the 
 most dramatic of all Carlyle's works. It is not a flowing, 
 connected narrative like Macaulay's History of England, 
 but a succession of striking pageants that are alive with 
 action and lifelike characters. Carlyle used the ro- 
 mancer's privilege of selection ; and, from out a mass of 
 material which would have bewildered men of less ability, 
 he chose for powerful presentation a limited number of 
 significant and picturesque incidents. 
 
 The death of Louis XV., the storming of the Bastille, 
 the insurrection of the women, the march of the mob to 
 Versailles in search of royalty, the horrors of the Reign 
 of Terror, and other equally ghastly scenes, are presented 
 with distinctness and dramatic force. The individuals 
 who were the life of the Revolution are all strongly drawn. 
 Lafayette, Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre, and many an- 
 other stand forth like the flesh and blood realities which 
 they once were. 
 
 Carlyle seems to get into the very midst of a mob and 
 catch its feelings, and to reach the hearts of his characters 
 and know their springs of action. He neither describes 
 men, assemblages, and crowds from the outside, like Ma- 
 caulay, nor submits them to careful dissection, like De 
 Quincey. Carlyle describes everything as though he had 
 been a participator, so that there is a warm personal ele- 
 ment in all his men and scenes. In the following passage,
 
 412 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 he bears the reader with the mob as it breaks into Ver- 
 sailles : 
 
 " The terrorstruck Bodyguards fly, bolting and Barricading ; it fol- 
 lows. Whitherward? Through hall on hall : wo, now! toward the Queen's 
 Suite of Rooms, in the furthest room of which the Queen is now asleep. 
 Five sentinels rush through that long Suite ; they are in the Anteroom 
 knocking loud : ' Save the Queen ! ' Trembling women fall at their feet 
 with tears ; are answered : ' Yes, we will die ; save ye the Queen! ' 
 
 "Tremble not, women, but haste: for, lo, another voice shouts far 
 through the outermost door, ' Save the Queen ! ' and the door is shut. 
 It is brave Miomandre's voice that shouts this second warning. He 
 has stormed across imminent death to do it ; fronts imminent 
 death, having done it. ... She [the Queen] flies for her life, across 
 the CEil-de-Boeuf; against the main door of which, too, Insurrection 
 batters. She is in the King's Apartment, in the King's arms, she clasps 
 her children amid a faithful few." 
 
 The dramatic excitement, the vividness, and the vigor of 
 treatment which this selection shows, combine to make 
 The French Revolution a stirring recital. 
 
 Carlyle's power of making some great personality the 
 center of every movement adds much to the interest of 
 his work. Mirabeau is one of the most imposing figures. 
 He is made known by a few bold, graphic touches. He 
 is described as a man 
 
 "Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, 
 carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, smallpox, incontinence, 
 bankruptcy, and burning fire of genius. 
 
 " But now if Mirabeau is the greatest, who of these Six Hundred 
 may be the meanest? Shall we say, that anxious, slight, ineffectual- 
 looking man, under thirty, in spectacles ; his eyes (were the glasses 
 off) troubled, careful ? " 
 
 This is the " greenish coloured " Robespierre. Carlyle 
 delights in bringing out such contrasts in character as 
 these men afford.
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 413 
 
 Whatever found lodgment in Carlyle's brain seems to 
 have taken some definite form and to have become a pic- 
 ture. It is his manner of painting distinct pictures that 
 constitutes his chief power in historical writing. It is by 
 means of his pictorial vividness that the reader gains such 
 an intense realization of the wild chaos, the frenzy, and 
 the blood-curdling madness of the French Revolutionists. 
 
 Carlyle's "Real Kings." Carlyle believed that "uni- 
 versal history, the history of what man has accomplished 
 in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men 
 who have worked here." In accordance with this belief, 
 he studied, not the slow growth of the people, but the 
 lives of the world's great geniuses. 
 
 In his course of lectures entitled Heroes and Hero 
 Worship (1841), he considers The Hero as Prophet, The 
 Hero as Poet, The Hero as Priest, and The Hero as King, 
 and shows how history has been molded by men like 
 Mohammed, Shakespeare, Luther, and Napoleon. It is 
 such men as these whom Carlyle calls "kings," beside 
 whom "emperors," "popes," and "potentates" are as 
 nothing. He believed that there was always living some 
 man worthy to be the "real king" over men, and such a 
 kingship was Carlyle's ideal of government. The diffi- 
 culty lay only in the discovery of the rightful king. 
 
 Oliver Cromwell was one of Carlyle's great heroes. 
 The edition of Cromwell's Letters and Speeches (1845) is 
 Carlyle's most valuable book from a scholar's point of 
 view, because this work was the first to present the char- 
 acter of the Protector in its full strength and greatness. 
 In opposition to the rankest prejudices of the public, 
 Carlyle proved once for all that Cromwell was a "real 
 king " whose memory all Englishmen should honor. 
 
 The Life of John Sterling (1851) is a fair, true, and
 
 414 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 touching biography. Carlyle knew Sterling well and de- 
 scribed his faults and virtues, alike, with tender sympathy. 
 After reading the book, George Eliot said she wished that 
 more men of genius would write biographies. 
 
 Carlyle's next attempt at biography grew into the mass- 
 ive History of Friedrich II, (1858-1865), which includes 
 a survey of European history in that dreary century which 
 preceded the French Revolution. " Friedrich is by no 
 means one of the perfect demigods." He is "to the last 
 a questionable hero." However, "in his way he is a 
 Reality," one feels "that he always means what he 
 speaks ; grounds his actions, too, on what he recognizes 
 for the truth ; and, in short, has nothing of the Hypocrite 
 or Phantasm." Despite his tyranny and his bloody career, 
 he, therefore, is another of Carlyle's "real kings." While 
 this work is a history of modern Europe, Friedrich is al- 
 ways the central figure. He gives to these six volumes 
 a human note, a glowing interest of personal adventure, 
 and a oneness that are remarkable in so vast a work. 
 
 General Characteristics. Carlyle has been called the 
 " Censor of the age." With biting satire and contemptu- 
 ous scorn, he lashes this "swine's trough" of a world, 
 with its " Pig science, Pig enthusiasm and Devotion." 
 He is the champion of spiritual truth in opposition to the 
 material tendencies which gave Macaulay so much satis- 
 faction. Carlyle urges men to cease yearning for "pig's 
 wash," by which he means material comfort, and to seek 
 after the everlasting light of truth and duty. " Do thy Duty, 
 the Duty that lies nearest thee," he says again and again. 
 
 A subject had to possess strong human interest in 
 order to appeal to Carlyle. Metaphysics, technical liter- 
 ary criticisms, and economic histories had no attraction 
 for him. Sartor Resartns is not a bare philosophical
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE 415 
 
 treatise. The fears, doubts, beliefs, and ideals of Carlyle's 
 own palpitating heart are the subject of the work. His 
 literary criticisms of Burns, Voltaire, Johnson, and Goethe 
 judge the men by their characters and purposes and 
 not by their purely literary skill. His histories are not 
 made up of abstract movements and scientific economic 
 causes, but of living, suffering men and women, whose 
 passions, characters, and sacrifices have led to the move- 
 ments which constitute history. Carlyle is not a cool, 
 logical reasoner, but a seer and a revealer who quickens 
 history and philosophy with the breath of imagination, and 
 who speaks with the authority of a prophet and a priest. 
 
 He has wonderful richness of figurative language. It 
 seems more natural for him to use metaphors than simple 
 terms. In describing Daniel Webster, Carlyle speaks of 
 " the tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face ; 
 the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like 
 dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the 
 mastiff-mouth, accurately closed." His vocabulary abounds 
 in unusual metaphorical epithets, rare or new compounds, 
 and words which he coined himself and engrafted upon 
 the language. 
 
 In style, as in philosophy, he presents a striking con- 
 trast to Macaulay. Carlyle's sentences are loose, dis- 
 jointed, and broken by frequent interjections. He is de- 
 clamatory and rugged and seldom attains smoothness or 
 harmony. His style, on the whole, is like the man, origi- 
 nal, earnest, fiery, and forceful. It has the directness of 
 a personal spoken appeal. While this style is frequently 
 discordant, and sometimes theatrical, it can become, in his 
 intensest moments, poetic, full of deepest invective or noble 
 figure, and ablaze with words that come "flamingly from 
 the heart of a living man."
 
 416 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, 1819-1900 
 
 Life. The great disciple of Thomas Carlyle was John 
 Ruskin, also a man of earnest and dogmatic nature, and 
 of lofty and inspiring ideals. Like his master, Ruskin re- 
 gretted the mechanical humdrum and the spiritual dullness 
 of society, and he labored to construct a social system 
 founded upon nobler objects than those of trade. 
 
 Ruskin was born in London in 1819. Both of his par- 
 ents were Scotch, and both possessed the honesty, piety,
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 417 
 
 and unbending will characteristic of the best element of 
 that race. John Ruskin was their only child and their one 
 idol. He had the best tutors, the choicest books and 
 paintings, and the most costly education which Oxford 
 could afford. He gratefully returned this care with unfail- 
 ing attention to his parents throughout their lives. 
 
 Ruskin's home training was rigidly Puritanical. He 
 says : "Nothing was ever promised me that was not given ; 
 nothing ever threatened me that was not inflicted ; and 
 nothing ever told me that was not true." Another mold- 
 ing power in his early education was his daily lesson in the 
 Bible. The Scriptures became so familiar to him that quota- 
 tions from them slipped unconsciously into his speech, and 
 his early writings are strongly tinged with the eloquence 
 of the Hebrew Prophets. 
 
 While still a small child, Ruskin traveled with his par- 
 ents through England, Scotland, Italy, and Switzerland. 
 His passion for nature was thus early fostered. He became 
 a close student of the sky, the mountains, the rivers, and 
 the fields. These trips mark an important epoch in his 
 career, for they led him to keep a diary in which we find 
 him dwelling fondly on the description of landscapes and 
 the criticism of art. He thus acquired practice in the 
 special field of literature in which he afterwards became 
 so famous. His first great volume of art criticism was 
 published when he was twenty-four. This was followed 
 by repeated successes in the same field, until he became 
 one of the most note'd of art critics. 
 
 After 1860 Ruskin expended much thought on plans to 
 better the conditions of humanity. This course was per- 
 haps the only one which he ever took in open defiance of 
 his parents. They could not sympathize with his founding 
 of libraries, museums, art schools, his building of sanitary
 
 41 8 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 tenement houses, and his manual labor. It is said that his 
 fortune of ; 180,000 amounted to only 18,000 after his 
 expenditures for the poor had been deducted. He taught 
 art at the Workingmen's College. With his own hands 
 he wielded a pick, and he influenced some other Oxford 
 enthusiasts to aid in building for farmers a road leading 
 into London. His greatest undertaking was the founding 
 of an ideal village. The project was known as St. George's 
 Guild. All competition was discarded, and a healthy, un- 
 selfish, out-of-door life was encouraged. Some men and 
 women appreciated the benefits of this community, but, 
 on the whole, the experiment proved little more than an 
 expensive luxury. 
 
 Ruskin's noble endeavors were so misunderstood by 
 his neighbors that he was thought to be insane. He 
 says in Fors Clavigera: " Because I have passed my life 
 in almsgiving, not in fortune hunting; because I have 
 labored always for the honor of others, not of my own, 
 and have chosen rather to make men look at Turner and 
 Luini, than to form or exhibit the skill of my own hand ; 
 because I have lowered my rents, and assured the com- 
 fortable lives of my poor tenants, instead of taking from 
 them all I could force for the roofs they needed ; because I 
 love a wood walk better than a London street ; and would 
 rather watch a sea gull fly than shoot it, and rather hear 
 a thrush sing than eat it ; finally, because I never dis- 
 obeyed my mother, because I have honored all women 
 with solemn worship, and have been kind even to the 
 unthankful and evil ; therefore, the hacks of English art 
 and literature wag their heads at me." Ruskin did not 
 permit the criticism of the " hacks " to interfere with his 
 reforms. The relieving of the poor remained his chief 
 work, until broken health and shattered nerves drove him
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 419 
 
 into retirement at his beautiful home of Brantwood on 
 Coniston Water, in the Lake District. He died in 1900. 
 
 RUSKIN'S HOME ON CONISTON WATER 
 
 Art Criticism. Ruskin is noted as a critic of art. 
 His Modern Painters (1843-1860) and his two works on 
 architecture, TJie Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), 
 and The Stones of Venice (1851-1853), are his chief pro- 
 ductions in the criticism of art. The greatest of these 
 is Modern Painters, which deals primarily with landscape 
 painting. In a masterly survey of ancient and modern 
 artists, he shows the great superiority of the landscapes 
 of the modern school over those of the old masters. He 
 compares the landscapes of different artists with real 
 mountains, clouds, water, and vegetation, and shows how 
 inaccurate and stereotyped are most of the supposed 
 copies of nature. The only painter who filled all of 
 Ruskin's requirements in reproducing nature was J. M. 
 W. Turner. In a lecture on painting Ruskin says :
 
 420 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 " By Shakespeare humanity was unsealed to you ; by Verulam, the 
 principles of nature ; and by Turner, her aspect. All these were sent 
 to unlock one of the gates of light, and to unlock it for the first time. 
 . . . none before Turner had lifted the veil from the face of nature ; 
 the majesty of the hills and forests had received no interpretation, and 
 the clouds passed unrecorded from the fall of the heaven which they 
 adorned, and of the earth to which they ministered." 
 
 Before the revolution in landscape painting was complete, 
 a noted critic, on looking at a canvas where the trees 
 were green, asked in surprise : " But where is your brown 
 tree ? " Leafy trees appeared green to Ruskin and he 
 insisted that they should be painted green, no matter 
 what color the conventional school declared was the 
 proper one. 
 
 In Modern Painters, Ruskin enters into a careful study 
 of the phenomena of nature. He describes, for example, 
 the form and arrangement of clouds at certain elevations. 
 He explains the structure, angles, and surfaces of various 
 kinds of rocks. He sets forth in a minutely scientific 
 manner the manifold aspects of water. He also describes 
 the arrangement of boughs, the laws of foliage, the effects 
 of distance, and the wonders of color. 
 
 In ridiculing those who do not found on exact observa- 
 tion their criticism of art, he shows the influence of the 
 scientific spirit of the age. In the first part of Modern 
 Painters, he says : 
 
 "Ask the connoisseur, who has scampered all over Europe, the 
 shape of the leaf of an elm, and the chances are ninety to one that he 
 cannot tell you ; and yet he will be voluble of criticism on every painted 
 landscape from Dresden to Madrid, and pretend to tell you whether 
 they are like nature or not. Ask an enthusiastic chatterer in the Sistine 
 Chapel how many ribs he has, and you get no answer ; but it is odds 
 that you do not get out of the door without his informing you that he 
 considers such and such a figure badly drawn ! "
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 421 
 
 But Modern Painters is something more than a criticism 
 of art. The work is a gospel of the beautiful in nature 
 as the expression of the Divine Mind. Later in life 
 Ruskin himself said : " Modern Painters taught the claim 
 of all lower nature on the hearts of men ; of the rock, 
 and wave, and herb, as a part of their necessary spirit 
 life." In Modern Painters he also expounds the object 
 of his sermons on art, when he says of this dull world : 
 " I do verily believe it will come, finally, to understand 
 that God paints the clouds and shapes the moss fibers, 
 that men may be happy in seeing Him at His work." 
 Ruskin's works on architecture are also less valuable for 
 technical criticism than for magnificent descriptions of 
 beautiful objects, and for an exposition of the intellectual 
 and moral significance of the beautiful in architecture. 
 
 Social Questions. By turning from the criticism of art 
 to consider the cause of humanity, Ruskin shows the influ- 
 ence of the ethical and social forces of the age. In middle 
 life he was overwhelmed with the amount of human mis- 
 ery and he determined to do his best to relieve it. He 
 wrote : 
 
 " I simply cannot paint, nor read, nor look at minerals, nor do any- 
 thing else that I like, and the very light of the morning sky, when there 
 is any, which is seldom, nowadays, near London, has become 
 hateful to me, because of the misery that I know of, and see signs of, 
 where I know it not, which no imagination can interpret too bitterly." * 
 
 After 1860 his main efforts with both pen and purse 
 were devoted to improving the condition of his fellow-men. 
 His books written with this end in view bear strangely 
 fanciful titles, such as Unto this Last and Munera Pulveris, 
 which explain political economy, Crown of Wild Olive, 
 
 1 Fors Clavigera, Letter I. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 2"J
 
 422 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 which treats of "Work, Traffic, and War," and Fors 
 Clavigcra, a series of letters to workingmen. Some of 
 his economical theories and plans for bettering the world 
 are as fanciful and as unrelated to what is possible as the 
 titles of these works are to their contents. 
 
 These works deserve attention, not because of the ex- 
 cellence of their working theories of social regeneration, 
 but because Ruskin here voices grand ethical truths of 
 sufficient power to play a part in placing humanity on a 
 higher spiritual plane. 
 
 General Characteristics. As the high priest of beauty, 
 Ruskin occupies a secure place in prose literature. 
 Many have testified that their power to perceive new 
 beauties in cloud and mist, meadow and stream, waterfall 
 and mountain, tree and flower, has been tripled through 
 the influence of his teaching. The spirit of the age is 
 shown in the fact that Ruskin achieves this result less 
 by a direct appeal to feeling, after the manner of the 
 poets, than by teaching us to observe more closely and 
 to discover the beautiful for ourselves through the exer- 
 cise of our perceptive and reasoning powers on the world 
 around us. He once said : " All my work is to help those 
 who have eyes and see not." The aesthetic movement of 
 the last part of the nineteenth century owes more to 
 Ruskin than to any other single man. 
 
 In the second place, Ruskin is a great ethical teacher, 
 in his works on art as well as in those on social ameliora- 
 tion. He is not the apostle of merely sensuous beauty, 
 but rather of that beauty which ennobles the spiritual life 
 and ministers to the highest needs of the soul. His very 
 conception of beauty is founded on a high ethical stand- 
 ard. Like Carlyle he opposed sordid materialism. Un- 
 like Carlyle, Ruskin's social philosophy led to his following
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 423 
 
 the example of the Good Samaritan in the actual walks of 
 life. His utterances may sometimes be dogmatic and self- 
 contradictory, and his economic theories, absurd; but his 
 noble ethical teachings overarch all, like a rainbow prom- 
 ising a new covenant of good will to earth. 
 
 Ruskin's best prose is written in a descriptive, ornate, 
 almost poetic style. He is remarkable for his power of 
 word painting. The following description of the Rhone 
 deserves to be ranked with a fine oil painting : 
 
 " There were pieces of wave that danced all day as if Perdita were 
 looking on to learn ; there were little streams that skipped like lambs 
 and leaped like chamois ; there were pools that shook the sunshine all 
 through them, and were rippled in layers of overlaid ripples, like crystal 
 sand ; there were currents that twisted the light into golden braids, 
 and inlaid the threads with turquoise enamel ; there were strips of 
 stream that had certainly above the lake been mill streams, and were 
 busily looking for mills to turn again." l 
 
 Word painting naturally lends itself to a descriptive style, 
 for the writer desires to aid the reader in the realization of 
 what is described. By employing language as varied as a 
 painter's pigments, Ruskin enables us to realize the color 
 of the Rhone with its 
 
 "... ever-answering glow of unearthly aquamarine, ultra-marine, 
 violet blue, gentian blue, peacock blue, river-of-paradise blue, glow of a 
 painted window melted in the sun, and the witch of the Alps flinging 
 the spun tresses of it forever from her snow." 2 
 
 In breadth of sympathetic observation, joined to rare 
 ability for describing the beauties of nature, of painting, 
 and of architecture with something of the power usually 
 possessed by poets alone, Ruskin is surpassed by no other 
 English prose writer. 
 
 l Prceterita, Vol. II., Chap. V. 2 Ibid.
 
 424 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD, 1822-1888 
 
 Life. Matthew Arnold was born in 1822, at Laleham, 
 Middlesex. His father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, was the emi- 
 nent head master of Rugby School, and the author of 
 History of Rome, Lectures on Modern History, and Sermons. 
 Under the guidance of such a father, Matthew Arnold en- 
 joyed unusual educational advantages. In 1837 ne entered 
 Rugby, and from there he went to Baliol College, Oxford. 
 He was so ambitious and studious that he won two prizes 
 at Oxford, graduated with honors, and, a year later, was
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 
 
 425 
 
 elected fellow of Oriel College. Arnold's name, like 
 Thomas Gray's, is associated with university life. 
 
 From 1847 to 1851, Arnold was private secretary to 
 Lord Lansdowne. In 1851 he married the daughter of 
 Justice Wightman. After relinquishing his secretaryship, 
 Arnold accepted a position which took him again into ed- 
 ucational fields. He was made lay inspector of schools, 
 a position which he held to within two years of his death. 
 This office called for much study in methods of education, 
 and he visited the continent three times to investigate the 
 systems in use there. In addition, he held the chair of 
 poetry at Ox- 
 ford for ten 
 years, between 
 
 1857 and l86 7- 
 One of the 
 most scholarly 
 courses of lec- 
 tures that he 
 delivered there 
 was On Trans- 
 lating Homer. 
 From this time 
 until his death, in 
 1888, he was a dis- 
 tinguished figure in 
 English educational and literary circles. 
 
 Poetical Works. Matthew Arnold's poetry belongs to 
 the middle of the century, that season of doubt, perplexity, 
 and unrest, when the strife between the church and 
 science was bitterest and each threatened to overthrow the 
 other. In his home, Arnold was taught a devout faith in 
 revealed religion, and at college he was thrown upon a 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD'S GRAVE IN LALEHAM 
 CHURCHYARD
 
 426 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 world of inquiring doubt. Both influences were strong. 
 His feelings yearned after the early faith, and his intellect 
 sternly demanded scientific proof and explanation. He 
 was, therefore, torn by a conflict between his emotions and 
 reason, and he was thus eminently fitted to be the poetic 
 exponent of what he calls 
 
 "... this strange disease of modern life, 
 With its sick hurry, its divided aims, 
 Its heads o'ertaxed, its palsied hearts." 1 
 
 Arnold felt that there were too much hurry and excite- 
 ment in the age. In the midst of opposing factions, 
 theories, and beliefs, he cries out for rest and peace. We 
 rush from shadow to shadow, 
 
 " And never once possess our soul 
 Before we die." 2 
 
 Again, in the Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Ober- 
 mann" he voices the unrest of the age : 
 
 "What shelter to grow ripe is ours? 
 What leisure to grow wise ? 
 Like children bathing on the shore, 
 Buried a wave beneath, 
 The second wave succeeds, before 
 We have had time to breathe." 
 
 But Arnold is not the seer to tell us how to enter the 
 vale of rest, how to answer the voice of doubt. He 
 passes through life a lonely figure, 
 
 "Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born." 8 
 
 The only creed that he offers humanity is one born of the 
 scientific temper, a creed of stoical endurance and un- 
 
 1 The Scholar-Gypsy. *A Southern Night. 
 
 8 The Grande Chartreuse.
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 427 
 
 swetving allegiance to the voice of duty. While these 
 might support his own lofty spirit, they are little better 
 than stones to a people crying for the bread of life. 
 Arnold himself was far from satisfied, but his cool reason 
 refused him the solace of an unquestioning faith. 
 
 Arnold has been called " the poet of the Universities," 
 because of the reflective, scholarly thought in his verse. 
 It breathes the atmosphere of books and the study. Such 
 poetry cannot appeal to the masses. It is for the 
 thinker. 
 
 The style of verse which lends itself best to Arnold's 
 genius is the elegiac lyric. The Scholar-Gypsy and its 
 companion piece Thyrsis, Memorial Verses, Stanzas from 
 the Grande Chartreuse, and Stanzas in Memory of the 
 AutJior of "Obermann" are some of his best elegies. 
 
 Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead are Arnold's 
 finest narrative poems. They are stately, dignified re- 
 citals of the deeds of heroes and gods. The series of 
 poems entitled Switzerland and Dover Beach are among 
 Arnold's most beautiful lyrics. A fine description of the 
 surf is contained in the last-named poem : 
 
 "Listen ! you hear the grating roar 
 Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, 
 At their return, up the high strand, 
 Begin, and cease, and then again begin, 
 With tremulous cadence slow, and bring 
 The eternal note of sadness in." 
 
 Neither the movement of the narrative nor the lightness 
 of the lyric is wholly congenial to Arnold's introspective 
 melancholy muse. 
 
 Prose Works. Although Arnold's first works were in 
 poetry, he won recognition as a prose writer before he 
 widely known as a poet. His works in prose com-
 
 428 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 prise such subjects as literary criticism, education, the- 
 ology, and social ethics. As a critic of literature, he 
 surpasses all his great contemporaries. Neither Macau- 
 lay nor Carlyle possessed the critical acumen, the taste, 
 and the cultivated judgment of literary works, in such 
 fullness as Matthew Arnold." 
 
 His greatest contributions to critical literature are 
 the various magazine articles which were collected in the 
 two volumes entitled Essays in Criticism (1865-1888). 
 Arnold displays great breadth of culture and fairness of 
 mind in these essays. He rises superior to the narrow 
 provincialism and racial prejudices which he depre- 
 cates in other criticisms of literature, and gives the same 
 sympathetic consideration to the German Heine and the 
 Frenchman Joubert as to Wordsworth. Arnold further 
 insists that Frenchmen should study English literature for 
 its serious ethical spirit, and that Englishmen would be 
 benefited by a study of the lightness, precision, and 
 polished form of French literature. 
 
 Arnold's object in all his criticisms is to discover the 
 best in both prose and poetry, and his method of attaining 
 this object is another illustration of his scholarship and 
 mental reach. He says in his Introduction to Ward's 
 English Poets : 
 
 " Indeed, there can be no more useful help for discovering what 
 poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do 
 us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions 
 of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry." 
 
 When Arnold seeks to determine an author's true place 
 in literature, his keen critical eye seems to see at a 
 glance all the world's great writers, and to compare them 
 with the man under discussion. In order to ascertain 
 Wordsworth's literary stature, for example, his height is
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD 429 
 
 measured by that of Homer, of Dante, of Shakespeare, 
 and of Milton. 
 
 Another essential quality of the critical mind which 
 Arnold possessed, is "sweet reasonableness." His judg- 
 ments of men are marked by a moderation of tone. His 
 strong predilections are sometimes shown, but they are 
 more often restrained by a clear, honest intellect. Arnold's, 
 calm, measured criticisms are not marred by such stout 
 partisanship as Macaulay shows for the Whigs, by the hero 
 worship which Carlyle expresses, or by the exaggerated 
 praise and blame which Ruskin sometimes bestows. On 
 the other hand, Arnold loses what these men gain, for while 
 his intellect is less biased than theirs, it is also less colored 
 and warmed by the glow of feeling. 
 
 The analytical quality of Arnold's mind shows the spirit 
 of the age. His subjects are minutely classified and de- 
 fined. Facts seem to divide naturally into brigades, regi- 
 ments, and battalions of marching order. His literary 
 criticisms note subtleties of style, delicate shadings in ex- 
 pression, and many technical excellences and errors that 
 Carlyle would have passed over unheeded. In addition to 
 the Essays in Criticism, the other works of Arnold which 
 possess his fine critical qualities in highest degree are On 
 Translating Homer (1861) and The Study of Celtic Litera- 
 ture (\^\ 
 
 General Characteristics. The impression which Arnold 
 has left upon literature is mainly that of a keen, brilliant 
 intellect. In his poetry there is more emotion than in his 
 prose, but even in his poetry there is no passion or fire. 
 The sadness, the loneliness,- the unrest of life, and the 
 irreconcilable conflict between faith and doubt are most 
 often the subjects of his verse. His range is narrow, but 
 within it he attains a pure, noble beauty. His introspec-
 
 430 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 tive, analytical poetry is distinguished by a "majesty of 
 grief," depth of thought, calm, classic repose, and a dig- 
 nified simplicity. 
 
 In prose, Arnold attains highest rank as a critic of lit- 
 erature. His culture, the breadth of his literary sympa- 
 thies, his scientific analyses, and his lucid literary style, 
 place his critical works second to none in the language. 
 He has a light, rather fanciful, humor, which gives snap 
 and spice to his style. He is also a master of irony, 
 which is galling to an opponent. He himself never loses 
 his suavity or good breeding. Arnold's prose style is as 
 far removed from Carlyle's as the calm simplicity of the 
 Greeks is from the powerful passion of the Viking. The 
 ornament and poetic richness of Ruskin's style are also 
 missing in Arnold's. His style has a classic purity and 
 refinement. He has a terseness, a crystalline clearness, 
 and a precision which have been excelled in the works of 
 few even of the greatest masters of English prose. 
 
 CHARLES DICKENS, 1812-1870. 
 
 Life. Out of the vast host of Victorian novelists, the 
 three greatest, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot, 
 will be selected for special study. The first of these to 
 achieve fame was Charles Dickens. This man, who was 
 to become a great portrayer of child life, had a sad, pain- 
 ful childhood. He was born in 1812 at Landport, a dis- 
 trict of the city of Portsmouth, Hampshire, where his 
 father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office. John Dick- 
 ens, the prototype of Mr. Micawber, was a kind, well- 
 intentioned man, who knew far better how to harangue 
 his large household of children than to supply it with 
 the necessities of life. He moved from place to place,
 
 CHARLES DICKENS 
 
 431 
 
 sinking deeper into poverty and landing finally in a 
 debtors' prison. 
 
 The dreams of a fine education and a brilliant career 
 which the future novelist had fondly cherished in his 
 precocious little brain, had to be abandoned. At the age 
 of eleven the delicate child was called upon to do his part 
 toward maintaining the family. He was engaged at six- 
 pence a week, to paste labels on blacking bottles. He
 
 432 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 was poorly clothed, ill fed, forced to live in the cheapest 
 place to be found, and to associate with the roughest kind 
 of companions. This experience was so bitter and galling 
 to the sensitive boy, that years after, when he was a 
 successful, happy man, he could not look back upon it 
 without tears in his eyes. Owing to a rupture between 
 his employer and the elder Mr. Dickens, Charles was 
 removed from this place and sent to school. At fifteen, 
 however, he had to seek work again. This time he was 
 employed in an attorney's office at Gray's Inn. 
 
 It was impossible, of course, for this ambitious boy to 
 realize that he was receiving an education in the dirty 
 streets, the warehouses, the tenements, and the prisons. 
 But, for his peculiar bent of mind, these furnished far 
 richer stores of learning than either school or college 
 could have given. He had marvelous powers of obser- 
 vation. He noted everything, from the saucy street waif 
 to the sorrowful prison child, from the poor little drudge 
 to the brutal schoolmaster, and transplanted them from 
 life to fiction, in such characters as Sam Weljer, Little 
 Dorrit, the Marchioness, Mr. Squeers, and a hundred 
 others. 
 
 While in the attorney's office, Dickens began to study 
 shorthand, in order to become a reporter. This was the 
 beginning of his success. His reports were accurate and 
 racy, even though they happened to be written in the 
 pouring rain, in a shaking stage coach, or by the light of a 
 lantern. They were also promptly handed in at the office, 
 despite the fact that the stages sometimes broke down and 
 left their passengers to plod on foot through the miry 
 roads leading into London. These reports and newspaper 
 articles soon attracted attention, and Dickens received an 
 offer for a series of humorous sketches, which grew into
 
 CHARLES DICKENS 
 
 433 
 
 the famous Pickwick Papers, and earned ,20,000 for the 
 astonished publishers. He was able to make his own 
 terms for his future novels. Fame came to him almost 
 at a bound. He was loved and toasted in England and 
 America before he reached the age of thirty. When, late 
 in life, he made lecture tours through his own country, 
 Scotland, or America, they were like triumphal marches. 
 In his prime Dickens was an energetic, high-spirited, 
 fun-loving man. He made a charming host, and was 
 
 -S* 
 
 DICKENS'S HOME, GAD'S HILL 
 
 never happier than when engineering theatrical enter- 
 tainments at his delightful home, Gad's Hill. He was 
 esteemed by all the literary men of London, and idolized 
 by his children and friends. His strong personality was 
 communicated to his audiences and his readers, so that 
 his death in 1870 was felt as a personal loss throughout 
 the English-speaking world.
 
 434 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Works. Pickivick Papers (1836-1837), Dickens's first 
 long story, is one of his best. Mr. Pickwick, with his 
 genial nature, simple philosophy, and droll adventures, 
 and Sam Weller, with his ready wit, his acute observa- 
 tions, and almost limitless resources, are amusing from 
 start to finish. The book is brimful of its author's high 
 spirits. It has no closely knit plot, only a succession 
 of comical incidents, but these possess such a human 
 touch and such kindly, good-natured fun, that they smooth 
 out the reader's wrinkles and tend to keep his heart 
 young. 
 
 Oliver JW.r/ (1837-1838) is a powerful story, differing 
 widely from Pickwick Papers. While the earlier work is 
 delightful chiefly for its humor, Oliver Tzvist is strong in 
 its pictures of passion and crime. Bill Sykes the mur- 
 derer, Fagan the Jew, who teaches the boys deftness of 
 hand in stealing, and poor Nancy, are drawn with such 
 realistic power that they seem to be still actually living 
 in some of the London alleys which Dickens frequently 
 visited. There are some improbable features about the 
 plot and some over-wrought sentimental scenes in the 
 story, but the novel keeps the reader keenly interested, 
 and it contains passages which make a powerful appeal to 
 human emotion. 
 
 With the prodigality of a fertile genius, Dickens pre- 
 sented his expectant and enthusiastic public with a new 
 novel on an average of once a year for fourteen years, and, 
 even after that, his productivity did not fall off materially. 
 The best and most representative of these works are 
 Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839), Barnaby Rndge (1841), 
 Martin Chuszlewit (1843-1844), Doinbcy and Sou (1846- 
 1848), David Coppcrfield (1849-1850), and A Tale of Tivo 
 Cities (1859).
 
 CHARLES DICKENS 435 
 
 Of these David Copperfield is the masterpiece. David's 
 early home, Miss Trotwood's rustic abode, and the old 
 fishing village of Yarmouth, are never-to-be-forgotten 
 scenes. The characters in the book are among the most 
 human in the novels of Dickens. Chief among this in- 
 teresting company are loyal, constant Mr. Peggotty, dear 
 Aunt Betsey Trotwood, the inimitable Mr. Micawber, and, 
 above all, little David, into whom his creator breathed the 
 breath of his own childish life. Dickens always seemed to 
 understand children. His child characters are natural and 
 true. Most of them are sad, for no one realized more than 
 Dickens the universal repression of childish impulses, and 
 the frightful suffering it entailed. He laid bare to many 
 readers for the first time the sorrows, fears, and struggles 
 of the child world. Fuller knowledge of this world devel- 
 oped broader sympathy with it, and his writings helped to 
 secure for children better treatment in the school and the 
 workshop. With boys and girls, he is the most popular of 
 the great Victorian novelists. Thackeray's children once 
 na'i'vely asked him why he did not write like Dickens. 
 Thackeray was sufficiently generous to recommend for 
 children the unsullied pages of Dickens. 
 
 General Characteristics. Charles Dickens and Walter 
 Scott are probably the best-loved authors in England. 
 Their works offer sound and healthy entertainment to a 
 people almost too heavily burdened with problems of exist- 
 ence. Dickens widens the sympathies of people by taking 
 the gay world with him into the slums of London, 'and ex- 
 hibiting the misery and despair of those vice-haunted dis- 
 tricts. He is a powerful portrayer of the poor and degraded 
 classes of society. In this way, he is also an ethical force. 
 While he points out, in a general way, the sufferings of pov- 
 erty and crime, he does not, like George Eliot, probe deeply
 
 436 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 into the social evils and complex problems of modern life. 
 His social creed is thus formulated by Dowden : " Banish 
 from earth some few monsters of selfishness, malignity, 
 and hypocrisy, set to rights a few obvious imperfections 
 in the machinery of society, inspire all men with a cheery 
 benevolence, and everything will go well with this excel- 
 lent world of ours." 
 
 All classes of society are ready to join with Dickens in 
 his hearty laughter. His infectious humor is the most 
 remarkable quality of his works, but it is not of a kind 
 to be quoted in short passages. The whole scene of Mr. 
 Pickwick's trial is pervaded by irresistible mirth, and 
 nearly all the caricatures are conceived in the light of 
 a joke. Little David Copperfield, even in his saddest 
 moments, sees things in a distorted childish way, very 
 quaint and funny. This quality of humor is due to the 
 peculiar, exuberant, and fantastic imagination of Dickens. 
 He deals with real facts of life, but, like Alice in Wonder- 
 land, he sees them upside down and inside out. 
 
 Dickens is a master of caricature. The heroes and 
 heroines of his books are usually colorless and lifeless, but 
 certain characters, possessing some exaggerated manner- 
 ism, live forever in the memory. No one forgets the 
 squalid gentility and Vapid eloquence of the good-hearted 
 Micawber, or the energetic figure of Miss Betsey Trot- 
 wood, with her cry of "Janet! Donkeys! " or Uriah Heep 
 with the long fingers and clammy hands, or Sarah Gamp 
 with her visionary confidant, or dozens of other charac- 
 ters with certain eccentricities of dress, speech, walk, or 
 mind. 
 
 Closely allied to the fund of humor in Dickens is the 
 feeling for the pathetic. -The Christmas Carol contains a 
 most exquisite blending of humor and pathos. David
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 437 
 
 Copperfield's childish griefs and little Paul Dombey's 
 death are related with a touching pathos. But Dickens's 
 efforts to be pathetic sometimes lead to a display of weak 
 sentimentalism. We feel that he is laboring to be im- 
 pressive in describing the death of little Nell in The Old 
 Curiosity Shop, and that he might have added to the pathos 
 of the scene, had he rested content with a few simple touches 
 of nature. The death of Dora in David Copperfield is almost 
 ludicrous, coming as it does in conjunction with that of her 
 lap-dog. 
 
 Dickens is not a master in the artistic construction of his 
 plots. The majority of his readers do not, however, notice 
 this failing because he keeps them in such a delightful state 
 of interest and suspense by the sprightliness with which 
 he tells a story. 
 
 Dickens was a very rapid writer, and his English is con- 
 sequently often careless in structure and in grammar. He 
 was not a man of books, and so he never acquired that 
 half-unconscious knowledge of fine phrasing which comes 
 to the careful student of literature. The style of Dickens 
 is clear and graphic, but it can lay slight claims to elegance 
 or literarv finish. 
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY, 1811-1863 
 
 Life. Though nearly a year older than Dickens, Thacke- 
 ray made his way to popularity much more slowly. These 
 two men, who became friends and generous rivals, were very 
 different in character and disposition. Instead of possess- 
 ing the self-confidence, energy, and industry which brought 
 Dickens fame in his twenties, Thackeray had to contend 
 with a somewhat shy and vacillating temperament, extreme 
 modesty, and with a constitutional aversion to work. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 28
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Born in Calcutta in 1811, he was sent to England to 
 be educated. He passed through Charter House and went 
 one year to Cambridge. He was remembered by his school 
 friends for his skill in caricature sketching. He hoped to 
 make painting a profession and went to Paris to study, but 
 he never attained correctness in drawing, and when he 
 offered to illustrate the works of Dickens, the offer was 
 declined. Thackeray certainly added to the charm of his 
 own writings by his droll and delightful illustrations. 
 
 When Thackeray came of age in 1832, he inherited a
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 
 
 439 
 
 small fortune, which he soon lost in an Indian bank and 
 in newspaper investments. He was then forced to over- 
 come his idle, procrastinating habits. He became a liter- 
 ary hack, and contributed humorous articles to such 
 magazines as Fraser 
 2j\& Punch. While 
 his pen was causing 
 mirth and laughter 
 in England, his 
 heart was torn by 
 suffering. His wife, 
 whom he had mar- 
 ried in 183 7, became 
 insane. He nursed 
 her patiently with 
 the vain hope that 
 she could recover, 
 but he finally aban- 
 doned hope and put 
 her in the care of a 
 conscientious atten- 
 dant. His home 
 was consequently 
 lonely, and the club 
 was his only re- 
 course. Here, his 
 broad shoulders 
 and kindly face 
 were always greeted with pleasure, for his affable man- 
 ners and his sparkling humor, which concealed an aching 
 heart, made him a charming companion. 
 
 It is pleasant to know that the later years of his life were 
 happier. They were cheered by the presence of his 
 
 From an unpublished original. 
 
 ONE OF THACKERAY'S DRAWINGS
 
 440 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 daughters, and were free from financial worries. He had 
 the satisfaction of knowing that, through the sales of his 
 books and the returns from his lectures, he had recovered 
 his lost fortune. 
 
 Novels. Vanity Fair{ 1847- 1848) is Thackeray's mas- 
 terpiece. For the lifelikeness of its characters, it is one of 
 the most remarkable creations in fiction. Thackeray called 
 this work "A Novel without a Hero." He might have 
 added " and without a heroine," for neither clever Becky 
 Sharp nor beautiful Amelia Sedley satisfies the require- 
 ments for a heroine. No perfect characters appear in the 
 book, but it is enlivened with an abundance of genuine hu- 
 man nature. Few people go through life without meeting 
 a George Osborne, a Mrs. Bute Crawley, or a Mrs. Sedley. 
 Even a penurious, ridiculous, old Sir Pitt Crawley is some- 
 times seen. The greatest stroke of genius in the book, 
 however, is the masterly portrayal of the artful, scheming 
 Becky Sharp, who alternately commands respect for her 
 shrewdness and repels by her moral depravity. 
 
 In Vanity Fair certain classes of society are satirized. 
 Their intrigues, frivolities, and caprices are mercilessly 
 dealt with. Thackeray probes almost every weakness, 
 vanity, and ambition which leads humanity to strive for a 
 place in society, to long for a bow from a lord, and to 
 stint in private in order to shine in public. He uncovers 
 the great social farce of life, which is acted with such 
 solemn gravity by the snobs, the hypocrites, and the other 
 superficial dramatis persona. Amid these satirized frivoli- 
 ties there appear occasional touches of true pathos and 
 deep human tragedy, which are strangely effective in their 
 unsympathetic surroundings. 
 
 Thackeray gives in Henry Esmond (1852) an enduring 
 picture of high life in the eighteenth century. This work
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 441 
 
 is one of the great historical novels in our language. The 
 time of Queen Anne is reconstructed with remarkable 
 skill. The social etiquette, the ideals of honor, the life 
 and spirit of that bygone day, reappear with a powerful 
 vividness. Thackeray even went so far as to disguise his 
 own natural, graceful style, and to imitate eighteenth cen- 
 tury prose. Henry Esmond is a dangerous rival of Vanity 
 Fair. The earlier work has a freshness of humor and a 
 spontaneity of manner which are not so apparent in 
 Henry Esmond. On the other hand, Esmond has a supe- 
 rior plot and possesses a true hero. 
 
 In The Neivcomes (1854-1855), Thackeray exhibits again 
 his incisive power of delineating character. This book 
 would continue to live if for nothing except the simple- 
 hearted, courtly Colonel Newcome. Few scenes in Eng- 
 lish fiction are more affecting than those connected with 
 his death. The accompanying lines will show what a 
 simple pathos Thackeray could command : 
 
 "At the usual evening hour the chapel bell began to toll, and 
 Thomas Newcome's hands outside the bed feebly beat time. and just 
 as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his face, and 
 he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, 'Adsiim] and fell back. 
 It was the word we used at school when names were called; and, lo! 
 he whose heart was as that of a little child had answered to his name, 
 and stood in the presence of his Maker!" 
 
 The History of Pendennis (1849) and TJie Virginians 
 (1857-1859) are both popular novels and take rank infe- 
 rior only to the author's three greatest works. The Vir- 
 ginians is a sequel to Esmond, and carries the Castlewood 
 family through adventures in the New World. 
 
 Essays. Thackeray will live in English literature as 
 an essayist as well as a novelist. TJie English Humorists of 
 the Eighteenth Century (1853) and TJie Four Georges
 
 442 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 are among the most delightful essays of the age. The 
 author of Henry Esmond knew Swift, Addison, Fielding, 
 and Smollett almost as one knows the mental peculiarities 
 of an intimate friend. In The English Humorists of the 
 Eighteenth Century, Thackeray writes of their conversa- 
 tions, foibles, and strong points of character, in a most 
 easy and entertaining way. There is a constant charm 
 about his manner, which, without effort or display of 
 learning, brings the authors vividly before the reader. 
 In addition to this presentation of character, the essays 
 contain appreciative literary criticism. The essence of the 
 humor in these eighteenth century writers is distilled in its 
 purest, most delicate flavor, by this nineteenth century 
 member of their brotherhood. 
 
 The Four Georges deals with England's crowned heads 
 in a satiric vein, which caused much comment among 
 Thackeray's contemporaries. The satire is, however, 
 mild and subdued, never venomous. For example, he 
 says in the essay on George III.: 
 
 " King George's household was a model of an English gentleman's 
 household. It was early ; it was kindly ; it was charitable ; it was 
 frugal ; it was orderly ; it must have been stupid to a degree which I 
 shudder now to contemplate. No wonder all the princes ran away from 
 the lap of that dreary domestic virtue. It always rose, rode, dined, at 
 stated intervals. Day after day was the same. At the same hour at 
 night the King kissed his daughters 1 jolly cheeks ; the Princesses kissed 
 their mother's hand ; and Madame Thielke brought the royal nightcap." 
 
 General Characteristics. Dickens and Thackeray have 
 left graphic pictures of a large portion of contemporary 
 London life. Dickens presents in striking caricatures the 
 vagabonds, the outcasts, and the merchants, and Thack- 
 eray portrays the suave, polite leisure class and its de- 
 pendents.
 
 WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY 443 
 
 Thackeray is an uncompromising realist and a satirist. 
 He insisted upon picturing life as he believed that it 
 existed in London society, and, to his satiric eye, that life 
 was composed chiefly of the small vanities, the little pas- 
 sions, and the petty quarrels of commonplace people, 
 whose main objects were money and title. He could con- 
 ceive noble men and women, as is proved by Esmond, 
 Lady Castlewood, and Colonel Newcome, but such char- 
 acters are as rare in Thackeray as he believed they were 
 in real life. The following passage upon mankind's 
 fickleness is a good specimen of his satiric vein in dealing 
 with human weaknesses : 
 
 " There are no better satires than letters. Take a bundle of your 
 dear friend's letters of ten years back your dear friend whom you hate 
 now. Look at a pile of your sister's ! How you clung to each other 
 until you quarreled about the twenty-pound legacy ! . . . Vows, love 
 promises, confidence, gratitude, how queerly they read after a while ! 
 . . . The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly 
 in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you 
 might write on it to somebody else." 
 
 The phases of life which he describes have had no 
 more subtle interpreter. He does not label his characters 
 with external marks, but enters into communion with 
 their souls. His analytic method of laying bare their 
 motives and actions is strictly modern. His great master 
 Fielding would have been baffled by such a complex per- 
 sonality as Becky Sharp. Amid the throng of Thackeray's 
 men and women, there are but few who are not genuine 
 flesh and blood. 
 
 The art of describing the pathetic is unfailing in Thack- 
 eray. He never jars upon the most sensitive feelings 
 nor wearies them by too long a treatment. With a few 
 simple but powerful expressions he succeeds in arousing
 
 444 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 intense emotions of pity or sorrow. He has been called 
 a cynic, but wrongly, for no man can be a cynic who 
 shows Thackeray's tenderness in the treatment of pathos. 
 Thackeray is master of a graceful, simple prose style. 
 In its ease and purity, it most resembles that of Swift, 
 Addison, or Goldsmith. Thackeray writes as a cultured, 
 ideal, old gentleman may be imagined to talk to the 
 young people, while he sits in his comfortable armchair 
 in a corner by the fireplace.. The charm of freshness, 
 quaintness, and colloquial familiarity is seldom absent from 
 the delightfully natural pages of Thackeray. 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT, 1819-1880 
 
 Life. Mary Ann Evans, known to her family as Mar- 
 ian and to her readers as George Eliot, was born in 1819, 
 at South Farm, in Arbury, Warwickshire, about 'twenty-two 
 miles north of Stratford-on-Avon. A few months later, 
 
 \Sto*15 
 
 , :t 
 
 GEORGE ELIOT'S BIRTHPLACE
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 445 
 
 the family moved to a spacious ivy-covered farmhouse at 
 Griff, some two miles east, where the future novelist lived 
 until she was twenty-two. 
 
 She was a thoughtful, precocious child. She lived largely 
 within herself, passed much time in reverie, and pondered 
 upon deep problems. She easily outstripped her school- 
 mates in all mental accomplishments, and, from the first, 
 gave evidence of a clear, strong intellect. 
 
 The death of her mother and the marriage of a sister 
 left the entire care of the house and dairy to Marian 
 before she was seventeen years old. Her labors were 
 quite heavy for the next six years. At the end of that 
 time, she and her father moved to Foleshill, near 
 Coventry, where she had ample leisure to pursue her 
 studies and music. At Foleshill, she came under the 
 influence of free-thinking friends and became an agnostic, 
 which she remained tnrough the rest of her life. This 
 home was again broken up in 1849 by the death of her 
 father. Through the advice of friends she sought com- 
 fort in travel on the continent. 
 
 Upon her return, she settled in London as assistant 
 editor of the Westminster Review, By this time she had 
 become familiar with five languages, had translated 
 abstruse metaphysical books from the German into Eng- 
 lish, and had so thoroughly equipped her naturally strong 
 intellect that she was sought after in London by such 
 men as Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes. A 
 deep attachment sprang up between Mr. Lewes and Miss 
 Evans, and they formed an alliance which lasted until 
 his death. 
 
 George Eliot's early literary labors were mainly critical 
 and scientific, being governed by the circle in which she 
 moved. When she came under the influence of Mr. Lewes,
 
 446 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 s~ 
 
 she was induced to attempt creative work. Her novels, 
 published under the pen name of George Eliot, quickly 
 became popular. Despite this success, it is doubtful 
 whether she would have possessed sufficient self-reliance 
 to continue her work without Mr. Lewes's constant en- 
 couragement and protecting love, which shielded her from 
 contact with publishers and from a knowledge of harsh 
 criticisms. 
 
 Their companionship was so congenial that her friends 
 were astonished when she formed another attachment
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 447 
 
 after his death in 1878, and married Mr. Cross. Her 
 husband said that her affectionate nature required some 
 deep love to which to cling. She had never been very 
 robust, and, during her later years, she was extremely 
 frail. She died in 1880. 
 
 Works. George Eliot was fast approaching forty 
 when she found the branch of literature in which she 
 was to achieve fame. Her first volume of stories, Scenes 
 of Clerical Life (1858), showed decisively that she was 
 master of fiction writing. Three novels followed rapidly, 
 Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and 
 Silas Marner (1861). Her mind was stored with mem- 
 ories of the Midland counties, where her young life was 
 spent, and these four books present with a powerful 
 realism this rich rural district and its quaint inhabitants, 
 all of whom seem flushed with the warmth of real life. 
 
 Adam Bede is the freshest, healthiest, and most delight- 
 ful of her books. Aside from its one painful interlude, 
 this story leaves upon the memory a charming picture of 
 peace and contentment, with its clearly drawn and inter- 
 esting characters, its ideal dairy, the fertile stretches of 
 meadow lands, the squire's birthday party, the harvest 
 supper, and the sweet Methodist woman preaching on 
 the green. 
 
 The Mill on the Floss also gives a fine picture of village 
 life. This novel is one of George Eliot's most earnest 
 productions. She exhibits one side of her own intense, 
 brooding girlhood, in the passionate heroine, Maggie 
 Tulliver. There is in this tragic story a wonderfully 
 subtle revelation of a young nature which is morbid, 
 ambitious, quick of intellect, and strong of will, and which 
 has no hand firm enough to serve as guide. 
 
 Silas Marner, artistically considered, is George Eliot's
 
 448 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 masterpiece. In addition to the ruddy glow of life in 
 the characters, there is an idyllic beauty about the pas- 
 toral setting, and a poetic, half-mystic charm about the 
 weaver's manner of connecting his gold with his bright- 
 haired Eppie. The slight plot is well planned and rounded, 
 and the narrative is remarkable for ease and simplicity. 
 
 Romola (1863) is a much bolder flight. It is an attempt 
 to present Florence of the fifteenth century, to contrast 
 Savonarola's ardent Christianity with the Medicis and the 
 Greek love for beauty, and to show the influence of the 
 time upon two widely different characters, Romola and 
 Tito Melema. This novel is the greatest intellectual 
 achievement of its author, but it has not the warmth of 
 life, the vitality, and vigor of her English stories. Though 
 no pains is spared to delineate Romola, Tito, and the 
 inspiring monk, Savonarola, yet they do not possess the 
 genuineness and reality that are felt in her Warwickshire 
 characters. 
 
 Middlemarch (1871-1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876) 
 mark the decline of George Eliot's powers. She still 
 possessed the ability to handle dialogue, to analyze subtle, 
 complex characters, and to attain a philosophical grasp of 
 the problems of existence. Her weakening powers are 
 shown in the length of tedious passages, in an undue 
 prominence of ethical purpose, in the more studied and, 
 on the whole, duller characters, and in the prolixity of style. 
 
 George Eliot's poetry does not bear comparison with her 
 prose. The Spanish Gypsy (1868) is her most ambitious 
 poem, and it contains some fine dramatic passages. Her 
 most beautiful poem is the hymn beginning: 
 
 " Oh, may I join the choir invisible 
 Of those immortal dead who live again 
 In minds made better by their presence !"
 
 GEORGE ELIOT 449 
 
 There is a strain of noble thought and lofty feeling in her 
 poems, and she rises easily to the necessary passion and 
 fervor of verse, but her expression is hampered by the 
 metrical form. 
 
 General Characteristics. George Eliot is more strictly 
 modern in spirit than either of the other two great con- 
 temporary novelists. This spirit is exhibited chiefly in her 
 ethical purpose, her scientific sympathies, and her minute 
 dissection of character. 
 
 Her writings manifest her desire to benefit human beings 
 by convincing them that nature's laws are inexorable, and 
 that an infraction of the moral law will be punished as 
 surely .as disobedience to physical laws. She strives to 
 arouse people to a knowledge of hereditary influences, and 
 to show how every deed brings its own results and works, 
 directly or indirectly, toward the salvation or ruin of the 
 doer. And she throws her whole strength into an attempt 
 to prove that joy is to be found only in strict attendance 
 upon duty and in self-renunciation. In order to carry 
 home these serious lessons of life, she deals with powerful 
 human tragedies, which impart a somberness of tone to all 
 her novels. In her early works, she treats these problems 
 with artistic beauty, but in her later ones she often forgets 
 the artist in the moralist, and uses a character to preach a 
 sermon. 
 
 The analytical tendency is pronounced in George Eliot. 
 Her works exhibit an exhaustive study of the feelings, the 
 thoughts, the dreams, and purposes of the characters. 
 They become known more through description than 
 through action. 
 
 A striking characteristic of her men and women is their 
 power to grow. They do not appear ready made and fin- 
 ished at the beginning of a story, but, like real human
 
 450 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 beings amid the struggles of life, her characters change 
 for the better or the worse. Tito Melema is an example 
 of her skill in evolving character. At the outset, he is 
 a beautiful Greek boy with a keen zest for pleasure. In 
 order to escape pain, he forsakes a faithful friend, and lets 
 his little sweetheart continue to believe that she is married 
 to him. He enters political life, and, through his love for 
 personal happiness, becomes involved in base intrigues. 
 The consequences of his deeds entangle him finally in such 
 a net of lies that he is forced to betray "every trust that 
 was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe." 
 
 George Eliot occasionally brightens the seriousness of 
 her works with humor. Her pages are not permeated 
 with joyousness, as Dickens's are, nor do they ripple with 
 quiet amusement, like Thackeray's, but she puts witty and 
 aphoristic sayings into the conversations of the characters. 
 The scene at the " Rainbow " inn is bristling with mother 
 wit. Mr. Macey observes : 
 
 "'There's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of 
 himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be 
 two 'pinions about a cracked bell if the bell could hear itself.' " * 
 
 Great precision and scholarlike correctness mark the 
 style of George Eliot. Her vocabulary, though large, is 
 too full of abstract and scientific terms to permit of great 
 flexibility and idiomatic purity of English. She is master 
 of powerful figures of speech, original, epigrammatic turns 
 of expression, and, sometimes, of a stirring eloquence. 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING, 1812-1889 
 
 Life. The two most eminent poets of the Victorian 
 age are Browning and Tennyson. Their long and peace- 
 
 1 Silas Marner, Chap. VI.
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 451 
 
 
 fill lives are in marked contrast to the short and troubled 
 careers of Byron, Shelley, and Keats. 
 
 Robert Browning's life was uneventful but happy. He 
 inherited a magnificent physique and constitution from his 
 father, who never knew a day's illness. With such health, 
 Robert Browning felt a keen relish for physical existence 
 and a robust joyousness in all kinds of activity. Late in 
 life he wrote, in the poem At the Mermaid : 
 
 " Have you found your life distasteful? 
 My life did, and does, smack sweet.
 
 452 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 I find earth not gray but rosy, 
 Heaven not grim but fair of hue. 
 Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy. 
 Do I stand and stare ? All's blue." 
 
 Again, in Saul, he burst forth with the lines : 
 
 " How good is man's life, the mere living ! how fit to employ 
 All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy." 
 
 These lines, vibrant with life and joy, could not have been 
 written by a man of failing vitality or physical weakness. 
 
 Robert Browning was born in 1812 at Camberwell, whose 
 slopes overlook the smoky chimneys of London. In this 
 beautiful suburb he spent his early years in the companion- 
 ship of a brother and a sister. A highly gifted father and 
 a musical mother assisted intelligently in the development 
 of their children. Browning's education was conducted 
 mainly under his father's eye. The boy attended neither 
 a large school nor a college. After he had passed from 
 the hands of tutors, he spent some time in travel, and was 
 wont to call Italy his university. Although his training 
 was received in an irregular way, his scholarship cannot 
 be doubted by the student of his poetry. 
 
 Upon reading the poems of Shelley and Keats, the boy's 
 soul drank in the fancy and melody of these masters of 
 song, and he yearned to become a great poet. His father 
 had little faith in these boyish dreams, but he wisely re- 
 frained from interfering with his son's ambitions. 
 
 From this time, Browning's life was devoted to literature. 
 His works met with little success, but he never lost faith 
 in his power, and he continued to grow and develop along 
 his own lines. Finally, in 1855, he published Men and 
 Women and won an enthusiastic, if not a wide, audience. 
 
 In 1846 he married the poet Elizabeth Barrett, whose
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 453 
 
 reputation was then greater than his own. During the fif- 
 teen years of happy married life that followed, Browning 
 and his wife lived in Italy, where the balmy air infused 
 fresh life into the fragile form of Mrs. Browning. She 
 has given expression to the deep love and joy of these 
 years in her most beautiful work, the Sonnets from the 
 Portuguese. Her death in 1861 was a shock from which 
 her husband never fully recovered. There is a deeper 
 note to the writings which followed this one great sorrow 
 of his life. 
 
 BROWNING'S 
 
 IN VENICE, PALAZZO REZZONICO 
 
 His genial nature and the constantly increasing fame 
 which he enjoyed during his later years caused him to be 
 the center of much of London's social life. These years 
 were spent with his sister or his famous son, Robert 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 29
 
 454 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Barrett Browning. In December, 1889, the poet lay upon 
 his death bed in Venice, in a beautiful room, which Robert 
 Barrett had frescoed. Turning to his son, the poet asked 
 if any word had come concerning his last book. A tele- 
 gram, expressing the enthusiastic reception given to Aso- 
 lando, was shown him. " How gratifying," he murmured. 
 In a few moments he was dead, and both Italy and Eng- 
 land were in mourning. 
 
 Dramatic Monologues. Browning was a poet of great 
 productivity. From the publication of Pauline in 1833 to 
 Asolando in 1889, there were only short pauses between the 
 appearances of his works. Unlike Tennyson, Browning 
 could not stop to revise and recast them, but he constantly 
 sought expression, in narratives, dramas, lyrics, and mono- 
 logues, for new thoughts and feelings. 
 
 The study of the human soul held an unfailing charm 
 for Browning. He analyzes with marked keenness and 
 subtlety the experiences of the soul, its sickening failures 
 and its eager strivings amid complex, puzzling conditions. 
 In nearly all of his poems, whether narrative, lyric, or dra- 
 matic, the chief interest centers about some " incidents in 
 the development of a soul." 
 
 The poetic form which he found best adapted to " the 
 development of a soul " was the dramatic monologue. 
 Requiring but one speaker, this form permits all the force 
 to be concentrated upon his emotions, character, and growth. 
 Browning is one of the greatest masters of the dramatic 
 monologue. Most of his best monologues are to be found 
 in the volumes known as Dramatic Lyrics (1842), Dramatic 
 Romances and Lyrics (1845), Men and Women (1855), Dra- 
 matis Personce (1864). 
 
 My Last Duchess, Andrea del Sarto, and The Bishop 
 Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church are three strong
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 455 
 
 representative monologues. The speaker in My Last 
 Duchess is the widowed Duke, who is describing the por- 
 trait of his lost wife. In his blind conceit, he is utterly 
 unconscious that he is exhibiting clearly his own coldly 
 selfish nature and his wife's sweet, sunny disposition. The 
 chief power of the poem lies in the astonishing ease with 
 which he is made to reveal his own character. 
 
 The interest in Andrea del Sarto is in the mental con- 
 flict of this "faultless painter." He wishes, on the one 
 hand, to please his wife with popular pictures, and yet he 
 yearns for higher ideals of his art. He says : 
 
 " Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, 
 Or what's a heaven for ? " 
 
 As he sits in the twilight, holding his wife's hand, and 
 talking in a half-musing way, it is readily seen that his love 
 for this beautiful but soulless woman has caused many of 
 his failures and sorrows in the past, and will continue to 
 arouse conflicts of soul in the future. 
 
 In the poem entitled The Bisliop Orders His Tomb at 
 St. Praxed's Church, Browning shows a keen insight into 
 a luxurious, sensuous, vain nature. Even in the hour of 
 death, the Bishop takes delight in reviewing his worldly 
 successes, and in the thought that his tomb will be richer 
 than his rival's, and will have a purer Latin inscription. 
 
 The beautiful song of David in the poem entitled Saul 
 shows a wonderful sympathy with the old Hebrew proph- 
 ecies. Clean expresses the views of an early Greek upon 
 the teachings of Christ and St. Paul. The Soliloquy of a 
 Spanish Cloister describes the development of a coarse, 
 jealous nature in monastic life. Abt ]"oglcr, one of 
 Browning's noblest poems, voices the exquisite raptures of 
 a musician's soul. And that remarkable, grotesque, vul-
 
 456 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 garly humorous poem, Caliban upon Setebos, transcends 
 human fields altogether, and displays the brutelike, 
 Satanic theology of a fiend. 
 
 In these monologues, Browning interprets characters of 
 varying faiths, nationalities, stations, and historic periods. 
 He shows a wide range of knowledge and sympathy. One 
 character, however, which he rarely presents, is the simple, 
 commonplace man or woman. Browning excels in the 
 portrayal of unusual, intricate, and difficult characters, 
 that have complicated problems to face, weaknesses to 
 overcome, or lofty ambitions to attain. 
 
 The Ring and the Book. Browning's most masterly 
 study of the human soul is The Ring and the Book (1868- 
 1869), which is a long poem made up of a series of mono- 
 logues. The tragic story is briefly told in the first and 
 last books. In each of the ten remaining books, some one 
 speaker or class expresses views of the incidents, and ten 
 different versions of the tragedy are thus given. This was 
 a bold and wholly unique plan, but it offered peculiar 
 opportunities to such a subtle analyst as Browning. 
 
 The subject of the story is an innocent girl, Pompilia, 
 who, under the protection of a noble priest, flees from her 
 brutal husband and seeks the home of her foster parents. 
 Her husband wrathfully pursues her and kills both her and 
 her parents. While this is but the barest outline, yet the 
 story in its complete form is very simple; and, as is usual 
 with Browning, the chief stress is laid upon the character 
 portrayal. 
 
 The four important characters Guido, the husband ; 
 Caponsacchi, the priest; Pompilia, the girl-wife; and the 
 Pope stand out in strong relief. The greatest devel- 
 opment of character is seen in Guido, who starts with a 
 defiant, insulting spirit of certain victory, but gradually
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 457 
 
 becomes more subdued and abject, when he finds that 
 he is to be killed, and he finally shrieks in agony for the 
 help of his victim, Pompilia. In Caponsacchi there is the 
 inward questioning of the right and the wrong. He is a 
 strongly drawn character, full of passion and noble desires. 
 Pompilia is one of Browning's sweetest and purest women. 
 She has an intuitive knowledge of the right. The Pope, 
 with his calm, wise judgment and his lofty philosophy, is 
 probably the greatest product of Browning's intellect. 
 
 The books containing the monologues of these charac- 
 ters take first place among Browning's writings and occupy 
 a high position in the century's work. They have a strik- 
 ing originality, intensity, vigor, and imaginative richness. 
 The remaining books are incomparably inferior, and are 
 marked at times by mere acuteness of reason and thor- 
 oughness of legal knowledge. 
 
 A Dramatic Poet. Although Browning's genius is 
 strongly dramatic, his best work is not found in the field 
 of the drama. Strafford (1837), A Blot on the 'Scutcheon 
 (1843), and Colombes Birthday (1843) have been staged 
 successfully, but they cannot be called great acting plays. 
 The action is slight, the characters are complex, the solilo- 
 quies are lengthy, and the climaxes are too often wholly 
 dependent upon emotional intensity and not upon great or 
 exciting deeds. The strongest interest of the dramas lies 
 in their psychological subtlety, and this is more enjoyable 
 in the study than in the theater. 
 
 Browning's dramatic power is well exhibited in poems 
 like In a Balcony or Pippa Passes, where powerful indi- 
 vidual scenes are presented without all the accompanying 
 details of a complete drama. The great force of such 
 scenes lies in his manner of treating moments of severe 
 trial. He selects such a moment, focuses his whole genius
 
 458 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 upon it, as upon life's pivotal center, and makes the deed 
 committed then stand forth as an explanation of all the 
 past emotions and as a prophecy of all future acts. 
 
 Pippa Passes is one of Browning's most artistic presen- 
 tations of such dramatic scenes. The little silk weaver, 
 Pippa, rises on the morning of her one holiday in the 
 year, with the intention of enjoying in fancy the pleasures 
 "of the Happiest Four in our Asolo,"not knowing, in her 
 innocence, of their misery and guilt. She wanders from 
 house to house, singing her pure, significant refrains, and, 
 in each case, her songs arrest the attention of the hearer 
 at a critical moment. She thus becomes unconsciously a 
 means of salvation. The first scene is the most intense. 
 She approaches the home of the lovers, Sebald and 
 Ottima, after the murder of Ottima's husband, when they 
 are triumphant in sin. As Sebald begins to reflect on the 
 murder, there comes this song of Pippa's, like the knock- 
 ing at the gate in Macbeth, to loose the floodgates of 
 remorse : 
 
 " The year's at the spring 
 And day's at the morn ; 
 Morning's at seven ; 
 The hillside's dew-pearled ; 
 The lark's on the wing ; 
 The snail's on the thorn : 
 God's in his heaven 
 All's right with the world ! " 
 
 His Optimistic Philosophy. It has been seen that the 
 Victorian age, as presented by Matthew Arnold, was a 
 period of doubt and negation. Browning would not be 
 overcome and swept off the firm shore of faith by this 
 enormous tidal wave of doubt. He recognized fully the 
 difficulties of religious faith in an age just awakening to
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 459 
 
 scientific inquiry, and yet he retained a strong, fearless 
 trust in God and immortality. 
 
 Browning's reason demanded this belief. In this 
 earthly life, he saw the evil overcome the good, and beheld 
 injustice, defeat, and despair follow the noblest efforts. If 
 there exists no compensation for these things, he says that 
 life is a cheat, the moral nature a lie, and God a fiend. 
 But when this present life is looked upon as a place of 
 training for a purer life, when defeat is a discipline for 
 ennobling the soul, when evil is an enemy to test the 
 strength of man's might, and death is the last battle, 
 which passes man on to his immortal heritage, then this 
 life on earth is a reasonable, holy thing, and all the 
 suffering and sin are divinely sent. 
 
 There is no hesitancy in this philosophy of Browning. 
 With it, he does not fear to face all the problems and mys- 
 teries of existence. Such a philosophy of faith makes life 
 wholly intelligible to him, and gives him a trust in God 
 which is gloriously, exultingly firm. No other poet strikes 
 such a resonant, hopeful note as he. His Rabbi Ben Ezra 
 is more a song of triumphant faith than anything written 
 since the Puritan days : 
 
 " Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure : 
 What entered into thee, 
 That was, is, and shall be : 
 Time's wheel runs back or stops : Potter and clay endure." 
 
 General Characteristics. Browning is a poet of striking 
 originality and impelling force. His writings are the spon- 
 taneous outpourings of a rich, full nature, whose main 
 fabric is intellect, but intellect illumined with the glittering 
 light of spiritual hopefulness and flushed with the glow of 
 deep human passion.
 
 460 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 The subject of his greatest poetry is the human soul. 
 While he possesses a large portion of dramatic suggestive- 
 ness, he nevertheless does not excel in setting off charac- 
 ter against character in movement and speech, but rather 
 in a minute, penetrating analysis, by which he insinuates 
 himself into the thoughts and sensations of his characters, 
 and views life through their eyes. 
 
 He is a pronounced realist. His verse deals not only 
 with the beautiful and the romantic, but also with the pro- 
 saic and the ugly, if they furnish true pictures for the 
 panorama of real life. The unconventionally and realism 
 of his poetic art will be made manifest by merely reading 
 through the titles of his numerous works. 
 
 Browning did not write to amuse and entertain, but 
 to stimulate thought and to "sting" the conscience to 
 activity. The meaning of his verse was, therefore, the 
 matter of paramount importance, far overshadowing the 
 form of expression. In the haste and carelessness with 
 which he wrote many of his difficult abstruse poems, he 
 laid himself open to the charge of obscurity. 
 
 His style has a strikingly individual stamp, which is 
 marked far more by strength than by beauty. The bare 
 and rugged style of his verse is often made profoundly 
 impressive by its strenuous earnestness, its burning in- 
 tensity, which seems to necessitate the broken lines and 
 halting, interrupted rhythm. The following utterance of 
 Caponsacchi, as he stands before his judges, will show the 
 intensity and ruggedness of Browning's blank verse : 
 
 " Sirs, how should I lie quiet in my grave 
 Unless you suffer me wring, drop by drop, 
 My brain dry, make a riddance of the drench 
 Of minutes with a memory in each ? " 
 
 His lines are often harsh and dissonant. Even in
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 461 
 
 the noble poem Rabbi Ben Ezra, this jolting line ap- 
 pears : 
 
 " Irks care the crop-full bird? Frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?" 
 And in Sordello, Browning writes : 
 
 " The Troubadour who sung 
 Hundreds of songs, forgot, its trick his tongue, 
 Its craft his brain." 
 
 No careful artist tolerates such ugly, rasping inversions. 
 
 In spite of these inharmonious tendencies in Browning, 
 his poetry at times can sing with a lovely lyric lightness, 
 such as is heard in these lines : 
 
 " Oh, to be in England 
 Now that April's there, 
 And whoever wakes in England 
 Sees, some morning, unaware, 
 That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf 
 Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, 
 While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough 
 In England now!" * 
 
 Or his verse can swell and fall with a billowlike rhythm 
 like that of Saul or of these lines in Abt Vogler: 
 
 " There shall never be one lost good ! What was, shall live as before ; 
 The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound ; 
 What was good shall be good, with, for evil, so much good more ; 
 On the earth the broken arcs ; in the heaven, a perfect round." 
 
 While, therefore, Browning's poetry is often harsh, 
 faulty, and obscure, at times his melodies can be rhyth- 
 mically simple and beautiful. He is one of the subtlest 
 analysts of the human mind, the most original and impas- 
 sioned poet of his age, and one of the most hopeful, inspir- 
 ing, and uplifting teachers of modern times. 
 
 1 Home Thoughts from Abroad,
 
 462 
 
 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON, 1809-1892 
 
 Life. Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lin- 
 colnshire, in 1809. He was the fourth child of the cul- 
 tured rector of Somersby, and grew up with seven brothers 
 and four sisters amid a romantic world of the past. The 
 children knew far more about knights, giants, and princesses 
 than about the busy world a few miles distant. 
 
 When Alfred was seven years old, he went to his grand- 
 mother's in order to attend the Louth Grammar School, 
 which, to his dying day, he remembered with hatred be-
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 
 
 463 
 
 cause of the stern, flogging master. At the age of eleven 
 the boy returned home, and, under his father's tutelage, 
 prepared for college. The future poet entered Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, in 1828, but did not remain long 
 enough to take a degree. 
 
 After his father's death in 1831, Alfred Tennyson con- 
 tinued to live for six years with his mother and sisters 
 in the quiet little village where he was born. They then 
 moved to a place in Epping Forest, where they spent 
 three years. Tennyson resided at various places in Eng- 
 land from that time until 1853, when he moved to Farring- 
 ford, on the Isle of Wight. 
 
 TENNYSON'S BIRTHPLACE 1 
 
 His life was consecrated to poetry, and his time was 
 passed either in the study of nature or among his books. 
 During these years existence was saddened for him by 
 the death of his noblest and dearest friend, Arthur Henry 
 
 1 " The silent woody places 
 
 By the home that gave me birth."
 
 464 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Hallam. Another cause of sorrow to Tennyson was the 
 enforced breaking of his engagement to Miss Emily 
 Sellwood on account of an insufficient income. It was 
 not until thirteen years after he had first become en- 
 gaged, that he felt able to offer Miss Sellwood a home. 
 They were married in 1850, the same year in which he 
 published In Memoriam and became poet laureate. By 
 this time Tennyson was almost universally accorded first 
 place among living poets. His popularity far exceeded 
 that which Browning enjoyed. Unlike Browning, how- 
 ever, Tennyson had an extremely retiring nature, and he 
 shunned the lionizing of London society and the gaze of 
 sightseers. 
 
 Tennyson's most famous days are associated with two 
 homes. Farringford on the northwestern part of the 
 Isle of Wight was his residence for the greater part of 
 each year from 1853 until his death. Here in his "ivied 
 home among the pine trees," he looked with loving eyes 
 on the "beautiful blue hyacinths, orchises, primroses, 
 daisies, marsh marigolds, and cuckoo flowers," and mag- 
 nificent trees. The song of the birds, the beauty of the 
 fields, and the ever-changing face of the sea ministered 
 to his different moods. In 1868 he built near Haslemere 
 in Surrey a new residence, which he called Aldworth. 
 In 1884 he was raised to the peerage with the title of 
 Baron of Aldworth and Farringford. He died in 1892, 
 at the age of eighty-three, and was buried in Westminster 
 Abbey beside Robert Browning. 
 
 Poetic Apprenticeship. Some poets, like Coleridge, attain 
 the summit of their development at the age of twenty- 
 five, but Tennyson does not belong to that class. Before 
 he was thirty, he had written many poems distinguished 
 for their lightness of touch and beauty of expression, but
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 465 
 
 they lack depth. His verse was at this time in keeping 
 with the spirit of the age, which felt no strong impulse in 
 any direction. 
 
 We find him in his early poems writing of "Airy, fairy 
 Lilian" and "sweet, pale Margaret," and asking: 
 
 ' Who would be 
 A mermaid fair 
 Singing alone?" 1 
 
 Some of these early lyrics have, however, such rare 
 fancy, melody, and beauty, that they continue to give 
 exquisite pleasure. The following lines from The Sea- 
 Fairies show these qualities : 
 
 " And the rainbow lives in the curve of the sand ; 
 Hither, come hither and see ; 
 And the rainbow hangs on the poising wave, 
 And sweet is the color of cove and cave 
 And sweet shall your welcome be." 
 
 The majority of those poems in his 1833 volume, that 
 are such favorites to-day, were unsparingly revised and 
 changed for the better before they were again issued in 
 the form in which we now have them. 
 
 The death of Hallam set Tennyson to musing on deeper 
 themes. This event and the adverse comments of the 
 critics on his earlier verse were among the influences 
 which caused him to publish nothing for the next nine 
 years. His son and biographer says that the poet during 
 this period " profited by friendly and unfriendly criticism, 
 and in silence, obscurity, and solitude, perfected his art. 
 . . . Hundreds of lines were, as he expressed it, 'blown 
 up the chimney with his pipe smoke, or were written down 
 and thrown into the fire, as not being then perfect enough.' 
 
 1 7'Ae Alermaid.
 
 466 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 The Brook in later years was actually rescued from the 
 waste-paper heap." 
 
 Volumes of 1842. In 1842, at the age of thirty-three, 
 he published two volumes, one of which contained many 
 of his former poems vastly improved, while the other was 
 filled with new material. In these volumes were such 
 favorites as the richly ornamented lyric The Palace of Art, 
 the gem called, from its first line, Break, break, break, 
 the tender English idyls Dora and The Gardiner's Daugh- 
 ter, the stately specimens of blank verse entitled Ulysses 
 and Morte d' Arthur, the passionate couplets of Locksley 
 Hall, and The Two Voices. 
 
 These poems show that Tennyson had gained rare 
 mastery over his art. They abound in passages which 
 give exquisite pleasure because of the beauty of the pic- 
 ture or the felicity of the expression. 
 
 It would be too much to say that these poems are as 
 remarkable for their depth of thought as for their beauty, 
 but they show increasing power to grasp reality, and grow- 
 ing capacity for thought. For instance, these two lines 
 from Locksley Hall 
 
 " Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might ; 
 Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight," 
 
 unfold a great moral truth. The more we reflect upon it, 
 the deeper and the more beautiful does the significance of 
 the thought appear. 
 
 A friend, wishing to secure a pension for Tennyson, 
 read Ulysses to Sir Robert Peel. When that prime minis- 
 ter heard such lines as these : 
 
 " I am a part of all that I have met ; 
 Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 467 
 
 Gleams that untravel'd world, whose margin fades 
 Forever and forever when I move. 
 How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 
 To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use ! 
 As tho 1 to breathe were life," 
 
 he gave Tennyson a yearly pension of 200. 
 
 The Princess and Maud. Tennyson had hitherto pro- 
 duced only short poems, but his next three efforts, The 
 Princess (1847), ? n Memoriam (1850), and Maud (1855) 
 are of considerable length. The Princess and Maud may 
 be grouped together because the short lyrics which they 
 contain are the best parts of both poems. 
 
 The Princess : A Medley, as Tennyson rightly termed it, 
 contains 3223 lines of blank verse. The poem tells in 
 a half-humorous way the story of a Princess who broke off 
 her engagement to a Prince, founded a college for women, 
 and determined to devote her life to making them equal to 
 men. The poem abounds in exquisite melody and glorious 
 imagery, but nothing original is contributed to the solution 
 of the woman question. The finest parts of the poem are 
 the songs beginning: "Sweet and low," "The splendor 
 falls on castle walls," "Tears, idle tears." " O, Swallow, 
 Swallow, flying, flying South," and "Ask me no more." 
 
 Maud, a lyrical monodrama, paints the emotions of a 
 lover who passes from morbid gloom to ecstasy. Then in 
 a moment of anger he murders Maud's brother. Despair, 
 insanity, and recovery follow, but he sees Maud's face no 
 more. While the poem as a whole is not a masterpiece, 
 yet it contains lyrics which justify Tennyson's classing it 
 among his finest works. Note the beauty of these lines: 
 
 " And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, 
 And the musk of the rose is blown.
 
 468 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 "For a breeze of morning moves, 
 And the planet of Love is on high, 
 Beginning to faint in the light that she loves, 
 On a bed of daffodil sky. 
 
 " From the meadow your walks have left so sweet, 
 That whenever a March wind sighs, 
 He sets the jewel-print of your feet 
 In violets blue as your eyes." 
 
 Tennyson was fond of reading from Maud. His son, 
 referring to the following stanza, says that his father's 
 eyes "would suddenly flash as he looked up and spoke 
 these words, the passion in his voice deepening in the last 
 words of the stanza " : 
 
 " She is coming, my own, my sweet ; 
 Were it ever so airy a tread, 
 My heart would hear her and beat, 
 Were it earth in an earthy bed ; 
 My dust would hear her and beat, 
 Had I lain for a century dead ; 
 Would start and tremble under her feet, 
 And blossom in purple and red." 
 
 In Memoriam. One of the most profound experiences 
 of Tennyson's life was the loss of Arthur Hallam. It 
 brought the poet face to face with the vital questions of 
 existence, and called forth the masterpiece of his genius, 
 In Memoriam (1850). He did not originally intend publish- 
 ing the short lyrics which he wrote from time to time to 
 express his grief, but, in 1850, he collected them and pub- 
 lished them as one long poem, made up of 725 four-line 
 stanzas. 
 
 This work is one of the three great elegiacs of a litera- 
 ture which stands first in elegiac poetry. Lycidas has 
 more of a massive, commanding power than In Memoriam,
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 469 
 
 and Adonais rises at times to poetic heights which Tenny- 
 son could not reach, but neither Lycidas nor Adonais equals 
 In Memoriam in expressions of a passionate living grief. 
 Every shadow cast over the human heart by bereavement 
 is traced, from the shadow of despair which mantles all 
 when death is first met, through the softening of grief, 
 when the mourner can say : 
 
 " Peace ; come away : the song of woe 
 Is after all an earthly song," 1 
 
 to the final victory when the heart, feeling that its sorrows 
 have purified it and widened its sympathy for other suf- 
 ferers, can sing : 
 
 " Regret is dead, but love is more 
 
 Than in the summers that are flown, 
 For I myself with these have grown 
 To something greater than before." 2 
 
 In dealing with this subject, Tennyson necessarily 
 touched upon immortality. Sometimes he felt a " spec- 
 tral doubt" that he should never more meet the dead. 
 His reason told him that he could know nothing, that he 
 
 was only 
 
 " An infant crying in the night : 
 
 An infant crying for the light : 
 And with no language but a cry," 8 
 
 and that he had no proof of immortality. But to Tenny- 
 son, cold intellect was not the final judge, as it was to 
 Arnold. Tennyson turned to his feelings to hear the last 
 word upon eternity, and they cried out : 
 
 "That life shall live forevermore." 4 
 His heart 
 
 " Stood up and answered ' I have felt,' " 6 
 
 2 cxxxn. 8 uv. * xxxiv. 6 cxxiv. 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 30
 
 4/0 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 and he trusted it and defied the cold skepticism of the 
 reason, and put his faith in 
 
 " One God, one law, one element, 
 
 And one far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves." 1 
 
 With this hopeful assurance closes this poem, than which 
 Tennyson wrote nothing nobler or more beautiful. 
 
 The Idylls of the King. One of Tennyson's most am- 
 bitious poems is the Idylls of the King (1859-1885). It 
 has for its subject the greatest of all the British heroes of 
 romance, King Arthur, .and the Knights of the Round 
 Table. Tennyson took the characters and stories mainly 
 as they are found in Malory's Mart e d' Arthur. Into these 
 he put his nineteenth century ideals of beauty, love, and 
 morality, and ennobled the old tales of chivalry into rev- 
 elations of spiritual truth. 
 
 King Arthur is more than the mighty warrior of the 
 early stories ; he is the impersonation of that spiritual 
 power which can subdue the lower nature of man. The 
 city, Camelot, in which he reigns, is the city of high 
 ideals, which is indestructible, for Camelot was 
 
 "... built 
 
 To music, therefore never built at all, 
 And therefore built forever." 2 
 
 Arthur's kingdom is a delightful fairyland. The scenery 
 is magnificent, and it seems to suggest heroic deeds for its 
 counterpart. The characters are ideal. Lancelot is the 
 knight of knights, unequaled in deeds of prowess, except 
 by the King. Gareth is the embodiment of youth, Galahad 
 of purity, Elaine of innocence, Enid of patient love, but 
 these knights and ladies seem at times almost as far re-' 
 
 1 In Memoriam, CXXXII. 2 Idylls of (he JCing: Gareth and Lynette.
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 471 
 
 moved from actual life as the characters in Spenser's 
 Faerie Queene. While the dramatis persona of the Idylls 
 of the King could not exist in a real world, there is wonder- 
 ful harmony between them and their imaginary setting.' 
 When sin creeps into this beautiful realm, the order is 
 disrupted, and King Arthur is borne away on a "dusky 
 barge " by the mystic Queens, and he passes 
 
 " To the island-valley of Avilion," * 
 
 where he will be " King among the dead." The knight 
 who watches the receding barge hears 
 
 " As from beyond the limit of the world, 
 Like the last echo born of a great cry, 
 Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice 
 Around a king returning from his wars." 1 
 
 Arthur's spiritual rule has failed on earth, but this rule is 
 welcomed in another land. This is the solace held out 
 by the author. 
 
 The poem is of the nature of an epic. Amid a confus- 
 ing mass of details, there is a thread of unity. The blank 
 verse is noble and harmonious, highly polished in every 
 line, exquisite in individual phrases, and extremely happy 
 in the choice of single words. 
 
 Later Poetry. In much of his later poetry, Tennyson 
 paid more attention to the thought than to the form of its 
 expression. The second Locksley Hall has more depth of 
 thought than the first, but the form of the verse in the 
 later poem is less pleasing. He could show, however, 
 when he chose, that he still possessed his old artistic 
 power. The lyric Crossing the Bar, one of the last things 
 
 1 The Passing of Arthur.
 
 472 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 that he wrote, stands in the front rank of his poems for 
 artistic finish and for beauty. 
 
 As he grew older, he labored to produce poetry that 
 would come in closer touch with life. The Northern 
 Farmer and The Northern Cobbler are two poems in which 
 Tennyson escaped from himself and looked at life from 
 the point of view of his characters. He displays here 
 a rich vein of humor. The drunken cobbler determined 
 to reform, and, scorning to win a victory in the absence 
 of his enemy, placed a quart bottle of gin in the window 
 before himself. Anticipating the question why he chose 
 a quart, the cobbler says : 
 
 " Wouldn't a pint a 1 sarved as well as a quart? Naw doubt : 
 But I liked a bigger feller to fight wi' an 1 fowt it out." 
 
 This desire to draw closer to life and to portray it in 
 action led Tennyson to attempt dramatic composition, 
 and, at the age of sixty-six, he wrote his first play, Queen 
 Mary. This was followed by several others, but for nine 
 years he failed to achieve much success in this field, until 
 he produced Becket in 1885. This play presents a strong 
 character in Archbishop Becket, but Tennyson was too 
 self-absorbed, the circle of his sympathies was too narrow, 
 and he secluded himself too much from his fellow-men 
 to make a great dramatist. 
 
 Poetry of Nature. It is well to note the different 
 points of view from which Tennyson and Wordsworth 
 regarded nature. The elder poet communed with a spirit- 
 ual presence in nature, and worshiped the mystic soul of 
 sky, mountain glen, and humble flower. The beauty of 
 the external face of nature appealed strongly to Tenny- 
 son. He loved pictorial effects, and he sought in Nature 
 and her phenomena subjects for his poetic canvas. A
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 473 
 
 great artist could paint pictures corresponding to these 
 stanzas from The Palace of Art : 
 
 *< One show'd an iron coast and: angry waves. 
 You seem'd to hear them climb and fall 
 And roar rock-thwarted under bellowing caves, 
 Beneath the windy wall. 
 
 " And one, a full-fed river winding slow 
 By herds upon an endless plain, 
 The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, 
 With shadow streaks of rain." 
 
 He often turned to Nature because her sensuous charms 
 delighted his eye or ear. For this reason he calls our 
 
 attention to 
 
 " The little speedwell's darling blue, 
 Deep tulips dasrTd -with fiery dew, 
 Laburnums, dropping-wells of fire." 1 
 
 He observed flowers and trees with something of a sci- 
 entist's accuracy. He knew their colors, habitats, times 
 of blossoming, and multiform changes through which they 
 passed. This intellectual apprehension of natural objects 
 enabled him to point out pleasing and instructive analo- 
 gies between them and his human characters. Of a young 
 man who made a thoughtless slip, but who had in him the 
 elements of manhood, Tennyson says : 
 
 " He has a solid base of temperament ; 
 But as the water lily starts and slides 
 Upon the level in little puffs of wind, 
 Tho 1 anchor'd to the bottom, such is he." 2 
 
 His keen observation and acuteness of intellect enabled 
 him to detect a likeness between the rushing water in the 
 brook and the arms of a hero : 
 
 1 In Memoriam, LXXXIII. 2 The Princess, Canto IV.
 
 474 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 ". . . arms on which the standing muscle sloped, 
 As slopes a wild brook o'er a little stone, 
 Running too vehemently to break upon it." 1 
 
 In short, his poetry of nature is remarkable for careful 
 observation, pictorial effects, sensuous beauty, and for 
 tracing resemblances between her manifestations and 
 certain qualities in his human characters. 
 
 An Exponent of the Age. His poetry is deeply tinged 
 with the new scientific philosophy. The evolution hypoth- 
 esis affected him powerfully. In Memoriam calls man to 
 
 " Move upward, working out the beast." 
 
 In the original Locksley Hall he was inspired by the 
 prophecies of science for the future, and he 
 
 " Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be." 
 
 As he realized the birthright which past evolution had 
 bequeathed to man, he exclaimed : 
 
 " I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time." 2 
 
 The student will find that Locksley Hall Sixty Years 
 After (1886), written when Tennyson was seventy-seven 
 years old, gives expression to many of the disappointments 
 of the age : 
 
 " Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, 
 And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud." 
 
 In the earlier Locksley Hall Tennyson would not, as in the 
 later, have placed a question mark after these lines : 
 
 " All diseases quench'd by Science, no man halt, or deaf, or blind ; 
 Stronger ever born of weaker, lustier body, larger mind ? " 
 
 1 Idylls of the King: Geraint and Enid. 2 Locksley Hall.
 
 ALFRED TENNYSON 475 
 
 In his social ideals, and in the narrowness of his social 
 sympathies, he was least in accord with the spirit of the 
 nineteenth century. The struggles of the French toward 
 freedom seemed to him nothing but 
 
 " The red fool-fury of the Seine." l 
 
 It is, however, a mistake to say that he was not affected 
 by the social movements of his time. High place is given 
 to the hero who 
 
 " Strove for sixty widow'd years to help his homelier brother men, 
 Served the poor, and built the cottage, raised the school, and drain'd 
 the fen." 2 
 
 In its groping after truth, his poetry is instinct with the 
 ethical spirit of the age, with its sense of struggle for better 
 things. Tennyson rightly describes himself as singing 
 
 " To one clear harp in divers tones, 
 
 That men may rise on stepping stones 
 Of their dead selves to higher things." 8 
 
 Such sentiments as this not only show the ethical spirit in 
 the progress of the century, but they have also helped to 
 mold this spirit. Readers of Tennyson have felt a fresh 
 incentive to rise through failure "to higher things." 
 
 General Characteristics. Like the early eighteenth 
 century poets, Tennyson took especial pains with the form 
 of his verse. He ranks high for artistic ability displayed 
 in the selection of words, in the elaboration of figures, in 
 securing pictorial effects, and in the metrical structure of 
 his verse. As a metrical artist, he is outranked by few 
 English poets. His shifting accents, bewitching melodies, 
 and combinations of sound which echo the sense, are a 
 
 1 In Memoriam, CXXVII. 2 Locksley Hall. 8 In Memoriam, I.
 
 476 THE VICTORIAN AGE ' 
 
 source of constant delight to an appreciative ear. We may 
 instance such lines as, 
 
 " The moan of doves in immemorial elms, 
 And murmuring of innumerable bees." 1 
 
 When the thought demands abruptness and strength, we 
 find those qualities in his verse : 
 
 " Flash brand, fall battle ax upon helm, 
 Fall battle ax, and flash brand! Let the King reign." 2 
 
 Tennyson is something more than a mere verbal artist 
 or an elegant metrist. He can express noble sentiment. 
 After reading these lines from The Passing of Arthur, let 
 the student ask himself if they do not show a dignity of 
 thought and a sublimity of feeling which are lacking in 
 Pope's work : 
 
 " More things are wrought by prayer 
 Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice 
 Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
 For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
 If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
 Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
 For so the whole round earth is every way 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God." 
 
 Tennyson is further unlike the poets of the early eigh- 
 teenth century in his desire to solve the problems of life 
 and to find rest for troubled souls. In his fondness for 
 nature, he shows no kinship with the school of Pope. 
 Tennyson's nature poetry is distinguished for accuracy of 
 observation, for pictorial effects, for appeals to the love of 
 sensuous beauty, and often for subtle comparisons between 
 natural objects and man. 
 
 1 The Princess, Canto VII. 2 The Coming of Arthur.
 
 SUMMARY 477 
 
 It is useless to deny that Tennyson has marked limita- 
 tions. The spiritual interpretation of nature in Words- 
 worth, the rush and sweep of Byron and Shelley, the 
 spontaneous flashes of Nature's fire in Burns, the imperi- 
 ous force and subtle revelations of character in Browning, 
 are wanting in Tennyson. He has not the highest type 
 of creative imagination. He often delights to throw into 
 new forms the thoughts of the old classical writers. He 
 is frequently conventional. He has no new message for 
 his age, and he is more often its mouthpiece than its leader. 
 His sympathies are not sufficiently wide for him to feel 
 deep interest in the various social movements of the time. 
 
 But his excellences are of a high order. Future histo- 
 rians of English literature will turn to him for the most 
 complete poetic exposition of the thought of the Victorian 
 age, with its scientific spirit, its unrest, and feeling of 
 world pain. Aside from his historical significance, he will 
 continue to hold no mean place in English poetic litera- 
 ture for a rare combination of depth, simplicity, and 
 beauty, in his chosen field of lyric and idyllic poetry. 
 
 SUMMARY 
 
 The literature of the Victorian age shows in a marked 
 degree the influence of science. No preceding age can 
 point to a body of scientific writers like Darwin, Tyndall, 
 Huxley, and Herbert Spencer. Evolution introduced the 
 idea of orderly development in every phase of life. All 
 conceptions of human progress, of the growth of the indi- 
 vidual and of society, underwent a change. Men no longer 
 thought it possible for society to experience a sudden, radi- 
 cal change, such as was hoped for from the French Revo- 
 lution. Evolution set men to considering all the problems
 
 478 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 of existence, here and hereafter, from a new point of view. 
 The greater part of the literature is permeated with a new 
 ethical and social spirit, with a sense of the responsibilities 
 of life, and with a desire to aid human progress. The 
 tendency to analysis and dissection is strongly marked. 
 
 In describing the prose of the Victorian age, we have 
 considered seven great writers: Macaulay, the brilliant 
 essayist and historian of the material advancement of 
 England; Carlyle, the admirer of the heroic power of 
 great men, and the champion of the spiritual interpreta- 
 tion of life in both philosophy and history ; Ruskin, the 
 apostle of the beautiful and of more ideal relations in 
 social life ; Arnold, the great analytical critic ; Dickens, 
 the novelist of the lower classes, who is noted for his 
 humor, optimism, power of drawing caricatures, and of 
 charming the masses ; Thackeray, whose novels are not 
 surpassed in keen, satiric analysis of the upper classes of 
 society ; and George Eliot, whose realistic stories of mid- 
 dle-class life are marked by high ethical ideals, by a rec- 
 ognition of the laws of heredity and development in the 
 growth of character, and by agnosticism regarding ulti- 
 mate human destiny. 
 
 In poetry, the age is best represented by three men : 
 by Arnold, who voices the feeling of doubt and unrest ; 
 by Browning, who, by his optimistic philosophy, leads to 
 impregnable heights of faith, who analyzes emotions and 
 notes the development of souls as they struggle against 
 opposition from within and without until they reach 
 moments of supreme victory or defeat; by Tennyson, 
 whose careful art mirrors in beautiful verse much of the 
 thought of the age, the influence of science, the unrest, 
 the desire to know the problems of the future as well as to 
 steal occasional glances at beauty for its own sake.
 
 CONCLUSION 479 
 
 As we stand on the threshold of the twentieth century, 
 we can see that the Victorian age has struggled to find 
 some unitary principle which would reconcile the ap- 
 parent contradictions between government and the rights 
 of man, duty and inclination, good and evil, life and 
 death. The age has passed the problem unsolved to 
 the twentieth century, but it would be a mistake to say 
 that the preponderating tone in Victorian literature 
 evidences lack of faith in a beneficent solution. Al- 
 though Tennyson may say : 
 
 " My will is bondsman to the dark ; 
 I sit within a helmless bark," 1 
 
 yet he hears at the end a clear call in the language of 
 faith, a tongue that has since the earliest times been 
 very intelligible to the Anglo-Saxon ; and in the beauti- 
 ful lyric, Crossing the Bar, he shows that he awaits 
 a Pilot to direct his helmless bark. The faith of even the 
 coming centuries may be strengthened as they catch the 
 echoes of Browning's refrain : 
 
 " God's in his heaven 
 All's right with the world." 2 
 
 CONCLUSION 
 
 We have traced the major points in the development of 
 a great literature. As we stop at the threshold of the 
 twentieth century, we may pause and for a moment listen 
 to the notes of a younger singer. Let us ask ourselves 
 whether they indicate a peculiar enduring element in the 
 
 !/ Memoriam, IV. 2 Pippa Passes, Part I.
 
 480 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 songs of the Anglo-Saxon race. In answering this question, 
 it will benefit each one to formulate clearly what he con- 
 siders the elements of durability in poetry. 
 
 " Yet do the songsmiths 
 Quit not their forges ; 
 Still on life's anvil 
 Forge they the rhyme. 
 
 " Lo, with the ancient 
 Roots of man's nature 
 Twines the eternal 
 Passion of song. 
 
 " Ever Love fans it, 
 Ever Life feeds it, 
 Time cannot age it ; 
 Death cannot slay. 
 
 u God on his throne is 
 Eldest of poets : 
 Unto his measures 
 Moveth the whole." 
 
 REQUIRED READINGS FOR CHAPTER X 
 
 HISTORICAL 
 
 Gardiner, 1 pp. 914-972 ; Underwood-Guest, pp. 557-592 ; Coman 
 and Kendall's History of England, pp. 434-494 ; Bright's History of 
 England, Period IV. ; Guerber, pp. 320-338 ; Oman's England in the 
 Nineteenth Century; Traill, VI., 111-690. 
 
 LITERARY 
 
 Macaulay. Read either the Essay on Milton or the Essay on Addi- 
 son (Eclectic English Classics) or the selections in Craik, V., 419-433. 
 Read History of England, Chap. IX., or Craik, V., 436-441. 
 What are some of the qualities that cause Macaulay's writings to 
 
 1 For full titles, see list at end of Chap. I.
 
 READING REFERENCES 481 
 
 outstrip in popularity other works of a similar nature ? What qualities 
 in his style may be commended to young writers ? What are his special 
 defects? Contrast his narrative style in Chap. IX. of the History with 
 Carlyle's in The French Revolution, Vol. I., Book V., Chap. VI. 
 
 Carlyle. Read the Essay on Robert Burns (Eclectic English Clas- 
 sics') ; Sartor Resartus, Book III., Chap. VI. ; The French Revolution, 
 Vol. I., Book V., Chap. VI. Selections may be found in Craik, V., 381-389. 
 
 What marked difference in manner of treatment is shown in Macau- 
 lay's Milton or Addison and Carlyle's Burns'? What was Carlyle's 
 philosophy? What was his message to the age ? Point out differences 
 between the humor of Carlyle, of Shakespeare, and of Ben Jonson. 
 What are the striking peculiarities of Carlyle's style? 
 
 Ruskin. In Vol. I., Part II., of Modern Painters, read the first 
 part of Chap. I. of Sec. III., Chap. I. of Sec. IV., and Chap. I. of 
 Sec. V., and note Ruskin's surprising accuracy of knowledge in dealing 
 with aspects of the natural world. Stones of Venice, Vol. Ill ., Chap. IV., 
 states Ruskin's theory of art and its close relation to morality. Excel- 
 lent selections from the various works of Ruskin will be found in An 
 Introduction to the Writings of John Ruskin, by Vida D. Scudder (Sib- 
 ley and Ducker's Students' 1 Series of English Classics, 259 pp., 50 cents) . 
 
 How do Ruskin's descriptions rank with those of other English prose 
 writers? What are the marked qualities of his style? Compare his 
 style with that of Macaulay and Carlyle. What is Ruskin's message to 
 the age? Is his philosophy in accord with Macaulay's? 
 
 Arnold. Read Dover Beach, Memorial Verses, Stanzas in Memory 
 of the Author of " Obermann " (Crowell's Students' 1 Edition}. 
 
 Is Arnold the poet' of exuberant fancy or of reflection? How does 
 his poetry show one phase of nineteenth century thought ? 
 
 Read in Craik, V., 705-721, the selections from the Essays in 
 Criticism, Culture and Anarchy, and The Study of Celtic Literature, 
 or Arnold's Introduction to Ward's English Poets, Vol. I., pp. xvii.-xlvii. 
 
 Is Arnold's attitude in criticism that of the controversialist or the 
 calm seeker after truth? Contrast his style of criticism with Ruskin's. 
 What are the main advantages in a prose style like Arnold's ? 
 
 Dickens. Read in Craik, V., "Mr. Pickwick on the Ice," 577~5 8 3< 
 and " Christmas at the Cratchits'." 587-590. The first works of Dickens 
 to be read are Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, and David 
 Copperfield. 
 
 Is there a well-developed plot in David Copperfield f Are the char- 
 acters natural or overdrawn ? Would you like them for friends ? Is
 
 482 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 the early life of the hero more strongly presented than his later life ? 
 Select a passage of mingled pathos and humor. 
 
 Thackeray. Read Henry Esmond and The English Httmorists. 
 In Craik, V., 567-572, there are two fairly good specimens from these 
 works. 
 
 Contrast the manner of treatment in Thackeray's historical novel, 
 Henry Esmond, and in Scott's historical romance, Ivanhoe. Thackeray 
 says: "The best humor is that which contains most humanity that 
 which is flavored throughout with tenderness and kindness." Would 
 this serve as a definition of Thackeray's own style of humor? State 
 definitely how he differs from Dickens in portraying character. Of 
 all the prose authors thus far read, whose style merits most com- 
 mendation from most points of view? 
 
 George Eliot. Read Silas Marner (Eclectic English Classics), and 
 selections in Craik, V., 671-677. 
 
 In what does the chief strength of Silas Marner consist, in the 
 plot, the characters, or the descriptions? Does the ethical purpose of 
 this novel grow naturally out of the story? Is the inner life or only 
 the outward appearance of the characters revealed ? Wherein do they 
 show growth ? 
 
 Browning. Read Rabbi Ben Ezra, Abt Vogler, Home Thoughts 
 from Abroad, Prospice, which will be found in French's Selections from 
 Browning (A. Lovell and Co.). 
 
 Define Browning's creed as found in Rabbi Ben Ezra. Do these 
 poems exhibit any metrical skill ? Compare Prospice with Tennyson's 
 Crossing the Bar. What qualities in Browning entitle him to be ranked 
 as a great poet ? 
 
 Tennyson. Read The Poet, The Palace of Art, Ulysses, Maud, 
 XVIII. and XXII., In Memoriam, XLI., LIV.-LVII., and CXXXI., 
 Crossing the Bar, and, from The Idylls of the King, read "The Passing 
 of Arthur" (Palgrave's edition of Tennyson's Lyrical Poems'). 
 
 In The Palace of Art, study carefully the stanzas from XIV. to XXIII., 
 which are illustrative of Tennyson's characteristic style of description. 
 Compare Locksley Hall with Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, and note 
 the difference in thought and metrical form. Does the later poem 
 show a gain over the earlier? Compare Tennyson's nature poetry with 
 that of Keats and Wordsworth. To what is chiefly due the pleasure 
 in reading Tennyson's poetry : to the imagery, form, meter, thought ? 
 What idea of his faith do you gain from In Memoriam and The Passing 
 of Arthur? In what is Tennyson the poetic exponent of the age?
 
 . READING REFERENCES 483 
 
 WORKS FOR CONSULTATION AND FURTHER STUDY 
 (OPTIONAL) 
 
 McCarthy's History of Our Own Times. 
 
 Walker's The Age of Tennyson and The Greater Victorian Poets. 
 
 Frederic Harrison's Early Victorian Literature. 
 
 Saintsbury's A History of Nineteenth Century Literature. 
 
 Oliphant's The Victorian Age of English Literature. 
 
 Morley's Literature in the Age of Victoria. 
 
 Craik's English Prose Selections, Vol. V., pp. 373-771. 
 
 Gosse's Modern English Literature, pp. 334-385. 
 
 Scudder's Social Ideals in English Letters, pp. 114-318. 
 
 Stedman's Victorian Poets. 
 
 Victorian Literature in Dowden's Transcripts and Studies. 
 
 The Scientific Movement and Literature, Mr. Tennyson and Mr. 
 Browning, and George Eliot in Dowden's Studies in Literature. 
 
 Symonds's Elizabethan and Victorian Literature in Fortnightly Re- 
 view, Vol. 51, or Living Age, Vol. 180. 
 
 Myers's Modern Poets and the Meaning of Life in Nineteenth Cen~ 
 tury, Vol. 33. 
 
 Bagehot's Literary Studies. (Thackeray, Dickens, Macaulay, Ten- 
 nyson, and Browning.) 
 
 Bayne's Lessons from My Masters. (Carlyle, Tennyson, and Ruskin.) 
 
 Zapp's Three Great Teachers of Our Time. (Carlyle, Tennyson, 
 and Ruskin.) 
 
 Hutton's Essays, Theological and Literary. (Browning, Arnold, 
 and Tennyson.) 
 
 Hutton's Modern Guides of English Thought in Matters of Faith. 
 (Carlyle, Arnold, and George Eliot.) 
 
 Cooke's Poets and Problems. (Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson.) 
 
 Masson's British Novelists and Their Styles. (Thackeray and 
 Dickens.) 
 
 Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and 
 Browning. 
 
 Minto's Manual of English Prose Literature. (Macaulay and Carlyle.) 
 
 Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Macaulay. 
 
 Morrison's Life of Macaulay. 
 
 Froude's Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 Garnett's Life of Carlyle.
 
 484 THE VICTORIAN AGE 
 
 Nichol's Life of Carlyle. 
 
 Collingwood's The Life and Works of John Ruskin. 
 
 Mather's John Ruskin: His Life and Teachings. 
 
 Ruskin's Prater it a : Scenes of My Past Life, 
 
 Waldstein's The Work of John Ruskin: fts Influence upon Modern 
 Thought and Life. 
 
 Scudder's An Introduction to the Writings of John Ruskin. 
 
 Saintsbury's Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Introduction to Gates's Prose Selections from Matthew Arnold. 
 
 Arnold's Letters, edited by Russell. 
 
 Swinburne's Essays and Studies. (Matthew Arnold.) 
 
 Foster's The Life of Charles Dickens. 
 
 Ward's Life of Dickens. 
 
 Marzials's Life of Dickens. 
 
 Trollope's Life of Thackeray. 
 
 Merivale and Marzials's Life of Thackeray. 
 
 Cross's George Eliofs Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journal. 
 
 Oscar Browning's Life of George Eliot. 
 
 Cooke's George Eliot : A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings, and 
 Philosophy. 
 
 Blind's George Eliot. 
 
 Brown's The Ethics of George Eliofs Works. 
 
 Sharp's Life of Browning. 
 
 Orr's Life and Letters of Browning. 
 
 Orr's A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning. 
 
 Symon's Introduction to the Study of Browning. 
 
 Corson's An Introduction to the Study of Robert Browning's Poetry. 
 
 Berdoe's Browning^s Message to His Times. 
 
 Berdoe's The Browning Cyclopedia. 
 
 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, A Memoir, by his son. 
 
 Waugh's Alfred, Lord Tennyson : A Study of His Life and Work. 
 
 Ainger's Tennyson, in the Dictionary of National Biography . (The 
 best short life.) 
 
 Brooke's Tennyson : His Art and Relation to Modern Life. 
 
 Van Dyke's The Poetry of Tennyson. 
 
 Luce's Handbook to the Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
 
 APPENDIX 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY LIST OF MINOR AUTHORS AND THEIR 
 CHIEF WORKS 
 
 1400-1558 
 
 John Lydgate (1370 7-1451 ?) : Falls of Princes. Thomas 
 Occleve (13 70 7-1450?) : Mother of God; Go vernail of Princes. 
 James I. of Scotland (1394-1437) : The King's Quair. Sir John 
 Fortescue (1394?-! 4 76?) : Difference between an Absolute and 
 Limited Monarchy. The Pas ton Letters (1422-1509). Stephen 
 Hawes (d. 1523?) : Pastime of Pleasure. John Skelton (1460? 
 1529) : Bowge of Court ; Philip Sparrow. Alex. Barclay (1475 ?- 
 1552) : Ship of Fools. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) : Utopia; 
 History of Edward V. and Richard III. Hugh Latimer (1485 ?- 
 1555) : Sermon on the Ploughers. Sir David Lindsay (1490- 
 1555) : Satire of the Three Estates. 
 
 1558-1603 
 
 Prose Writers. Roger Ascham (1515-1568) : The Scholemas- 
 ter. Raphael Holinshed (d. 1580?) : Chronicles of England, 
 Scotland, and Ireland. John Stow (1525?-! 605) : Survey of 
 London. Sir Thomas North (1535 ?-i6oi ?) : Translation of 
 Plutarch's Lives. Richard Hakluyt (1552 ?-i6i6) : Voyages. 
 George Puttenham (d. 1590?) : Art of English Poesie. Stephen 
 Gosson (1555-1624) : The School of Abuse. 
 
 Poets and Dramatists. George Gascoigne (1525 ?-i577) \-The 
 SteeleGlas. John Lyly (i554?-i6o6) : Alexander and Campaspe 
 (prose. For his Enphues, see p. 117). Thomas Kyd (1557?- 
 1595?) : The Spanish Tragedy. Thomas Lodge (i558?-i625) : 
 Phillis (for his novel, see p. 276) . William Warner (1558 ?-i 609) : 
 
 HAL. ENG. LIT. 3! 485
 
 486 APPENDIX 
 
 Albion's England. George Peele (1558?-! 597?) : David and 
 Bethsabe. George Chapman (1559?-! 634) : Translation of 
 Homer. Robert Greene (15 60?- 1592) : The Honourable His- 
 tory of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Thomas Dekker (1570?- 
 1641?): Old Fortunatus. John Donne (1573-1631): Poems. 
 Cyril Tourneur (1575 ?-i6 26) : The Revenger's Tragedy. Thomas 
 Heywood (d. 1650?) : A Woman Killed with Kindness. John 
 Marston (i575?-i634) : Antonio and Mellida. 
 
 1603-1660 
 
 Prose Writers. Robert Burton (1577-1640) : The Anatomy 
 of Alelancholy. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) : Religio Medici ; 
 Urn Burial. Richard Baxter (1615-1691) : The Saints' Everlast- 
 ing Rest. John Evelyn (1620-1706) : Diary (begins 1641, ends 
 1697). 
 
 Poets and Dramatists. Thomas Middleton (i57o?-i627) : 
 The Changeling. Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650?) : The Purple 
 Island. Philip Massinger (1583-1640) : A New Way to Pay Old 
 Debts. William Drummond (1585-1649) : Sonnets; TheCypresse 
 Grove (prose). Giles Fletcher (i588?-i623) : Christ's Victory 
 and Triumph. George Wither (1588-1667) : Juvenilia. George 
 Herbert (1593-1633) : The Temple. James Shirley (1596-1666) : 
 The Traitor. Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) : Gondibert. 
 Edmund Waller (1606-1687): Poems; Song "Go, lovely 
 Rose." Richard Crashavv (i6i3?-i649?) : Steps to the Temple; 
 The Delights of the Muses. Sir John Denham (1615-1669) : 
 Cooper's Hill. Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) : Anacreontiques. 
 Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) : The Garden. 
 
 1660-1700 
 
 Prose Writers. Sir William Temple (1628-1699): Essays. 
 Isaac Barrow (1630-1677) : Sermons. John Tillotson (1630- 
 1694) : Sermons. Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) : Diary (1660 to 
 1669). Rol >ert South (1634-1716): Sermons. AphraBehn (1640- 
 1689) : Oroonoko. Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) : Short View of
 
 MINOR AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF WORKS 487 
 
 the Immorality and Profaneness of the Stage. Richard Bentley 
 (1662-1742) : Epistles of Phalaris. 
 
 Dramatists of the Restoration. George Etherege (1635?- 
 1691?) : The Man of Mode. William Wycherley (1640-1715) : 
 The Plain Dealer. Thomas Shadwell (1642 ? 1692) : Epsom 
 Wells. Thomas Otway (1652-1685) : Venice Preserved. John 
 Vanbrugh (1666 7-1726) : The Confederacy. William Congreve 
 (1670-1729) : Love for Love. Golley Gibber (1671-1757) : 
 The Careless Husband. George Farquhar (1678-1707) : The 
 Beaux' Stratagem. 
 
 1700-1740 
 
 Prose Writers. Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715) : History of My 
 Own Time. Francis Atterbury (1662-1732) : Sermons. John 
 Arbuthnot (1667-1735) ; The History of John Bull. Lord 
 Bolingbroke (1678-1751) : Letter to Sir William Windham. 
 Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753) : Alciphron or the Minute Philoso- 
 pher. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) : Letters. 
 Bishop Butler (1692-1752) : Analogy of Natural and Revealed 
 Religion. William Warburton (1698-1779) : The Divine Legation 
 of Moses. 
 
 Poets. Matthew Prior (1664-1721) : Shorter Poems. Isaac 
 Watts (1674-1748) : Psalms and Hymns. Thomas Parnell (1679 
 1718): The Night-Piece on Death; The Hermit. John Gay 
 (1685-1732) : Fables ; Beggar's Opera. Allan Ramsay (1686 
 1758) : The Gentle Shepherd. 
 
 1740-1780 
 
 Prose Writers. Gilbert White (1720-1793): Natural His- 
 tory of Selborne. William Robertson (1721-1793) : History of 
 the Reign of Charles V. Adam Smith (1723-1790) : Wealth of 
 Nations. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) : Discourses on 
 Painting. Thomas Warton (1728-1790) : History of English 
 Poetry. Sir Philip Francis (1740-1818): Letters of Junius. 
 Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) : The Rivals ; The School 
 for Scandal. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) : Evelina.
 
 488 APPENDIX 
 
 Poets. Edward Young (1681-1765) : Night Thoughts. Charles 
 Wesley (1708-1788): Hymns. Mark Akenside (1721-1770): 
 Pleasures of Imagination. James Beattie (1735-1803) : The 
 Minstrel. Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) : Braid Claith; Ode 
 to the Gowdspink. Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) : Rowley 
 Poems. 
 
 1780-1837 
 
 Philosophers. William Paley (1743-1805) : Natural Theol- 
 ogy. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) : Principles of Morals and 
 Legislation. William Godwin (1756-1836) : Inquiry concerning 
 Political Justice. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) : Essay 
 on the Principle of Population. David Ricardo (1772-1823): 
 Principles of Political Economy. James Mill (1773-1836) : 
 Analysis of the Human Mind. 
 
 Historians. John Lingard (1771-1851) : History of England. 
 Henry Hallam (1777-1859) : Constitutional History of England. 
 Sir William Napier (1785-1860) : History of the Peninsular War. 
 
 Essayists. William Cobbett (1762-1835) : Rural Rides in 
 England. Sydney Smith (1771-1845) : Letters of Peter Ply mley. 
 Francis Jeffrey (1773-1850) : Essays. William Hazlitt (1778- 
 1830) : Lectures on the English Poets. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) : 
 Essays. John Wilson (1785-1854): Noctes Ambrosiance. John 
 Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854) : Life of Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 Novelists and Dramatists. William Beckford (1759-1844): 
 Vathek. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1822) : The Mysteries of Udolpho. 
 Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) : Castle Rackrent. Jane Porter 
 (1776-1850) : Scottish Chiefs. James Sheridan Knowles (1784- 
 1862) : The Hunchback; The Love Chase. Thomas Love Pea- 
 cock (1785-1866) : Nightmare Abbey. Mary Russell Mitford 
 (1787-1855) : Our Village. 
 
 Poets. George Crabbe (1754-1832) : The Borough. William 
 Blake (1757-1827) : Poetical Sketches ; Songs of Innocence. 
 Joanna Baillie (1762-1851) : Poems. James Hogg (1770-1835) : 
 Queen's Wake. Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) : The Pleasures 
 of Hope. Thomas Moore (1779-1852): Irish Melodies; Lalla
 
 MINOR AUTHORS AND THEIR CHIEF WORKS 489 
 
 Rookh. Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849) : Corn-Law Rhymes. 
 Bryan W. Procter (1787-1874) : English Songs. John Keble 
 (1792-1866) : The Christian Year. Felicia Hemans (1793- 
 1835) : Songs of the Affections. Thomas Hood (17991845) : 
 The Song of the Shirt; The Bridge of Sighs. Winthrop Praed 
 (1802-1839): The Season ; The Letter of Advice. Thomas Bed- 
 does (1803-1849) : Lyrics from Death's Jest Book and from The 
 Bride's Tragedy. 
 
 1837- 
 
 Philosophers and Scientists. Sir William Hamilton (1788- 
 1856) : Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic. Michael Faraday 
 (1791-1867) : Experimental Researches. Sir Charles Lyell (179 7 
 1875) : Principles of Geology; Antiquity of Man. John Henry 
 Newman (18011890) : Apologia pro Vita Sua. John Stuart Mill 
 (1806-1873): System of Logic ; Utilitarianism. George Henry 
 Lewes (1817-1878) : A Biographical History of Philosophy; 
 Problems of Life and Mind. Sir Henry Maine (1822-1888): 
 Ancient Law ; Village Communities. George J. Romanes (1848- 
 1894) : Mental Evolution in Animals and Man. 
 
 Historians. Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868) : History of 
 Latin Christianity down to the Death of Pope Nicholas V. George 
 Grote (1794-1871) : History of Greece. James Anthony Froude 
 (1818-1894) : History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the 
 Defeat of the Spanish Armada. Henry Thomas Buckle (1821- 
 1862) : History of Civilization. Edward Augustus Freeman (1823- 
 1892) : The History of the Norman Conquest. William Stubbs 
 (1825- ): The Constitutional History of England in its Origin 
 and Development. Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829- ) : His- 
 tory of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of 
 Civil War, 1603-1642 ; History of the Great Civil War, 1642- 
 1649; History of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, 1649- 
 1660. John Richard Green (1837-1883) : A Short History of the 
 English People. William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838- ) : 
 History of England in the Eighteenth Century. 
 
 Critics and Essayists Walter Bagehot (1826-1877) : Physics
 
 49O APPENDIX 
 
 and Politics. Leslie Stephen (1832- ) : Hours in a Library. 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837- ) : Essays and Studies ; 
 Miscellanies. Walter Pater (1839-1894) : Studies in the History 
 of the Renaissance; Marius the Epicurean. John Addington 
 Symonds (1840-1893) : The History of the Renaissance in Italy. 
 
 Novelists. Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton (1803-1873) : Last 
 Days of Pompeii. Charles Lever (1806-1872) : Charles O' Mai- 
 ley. Elizabeth C. Gaskell (1810-1865) : Cranford. Charles 
 Reade (1814-1884): The Cloister and the Hearth. Anthony 
 Trollope (1815-1882) : Last Chronicle of Barset. Charlotte 
 Bront^ (1816-1855) : Jane Eyre. Charles Kingsley( 1819-1 8 75) : 
 Hypatia; Westward ho ! Wilkie Collins (1824-1889): The 
 Moonstone. Richard D. Blackmore (1825-1900) : Lorna Doone. 
 Dinah Maria Craik (1826-1887) : John Halifax, Gentleman. 
 George Meredith (1828- ) : Diana of the Crossways ; The 
 Egoist; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Thomas Hardy (1840- 
 ) : Far from the Madding Crowd. William Black (1841- 
 1898) : A Daughter of Heth. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1 894) : 
 David Balfour. Mrs. Humphry Ward (1851- ) : Robert 
 Ehmere. Hall Caine (1853- ): The Manxman. Rudyard 
 Kipling (1865- ) : Jungle Books. 
 
 Poets. Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1809-1861): Sonnets 
 from the Portuguese. Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883) : Rubaiyat 
 of Omar Khayyam (translation). Arthur Hugh Clough (1819- 
 1861) : Qua Cursum Ventus ; Easter Day, Naples. Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) : The King's Tragedy; The Blessed 
 Damozel; Sonnets. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) : The Goblin 
 Market; Time Flies. Jean Ingelow (1830-1897) : Divided; 
 The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire. Edwin Arnold 
 (1832- ): The Light of Asia. William Morris (1834-1896) : 
 The Earthly Paradise. Alfred Austin (1835- ) : Lyrics. 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837- ): Atalanta in Calydon; 
 The Garden of Proserpine. William Watson (1858- ): Words- 
 worth's Grave and Other Poems ; England my Mother. Rudyard 
 Kipling (1865- ) : The Seven Seas ; The Recessional.
 
 INDEX 
 
 Diacritic marks. VOWELS : a in late, & in fat, a in care, a in far, a in fall ; e In me, 
 6 in mSt, e. in veil, e in term, e in there ; i in fine, I in tTn, i in police ; 6 in note, S in u6t 
 d in fdr, 9 in wplf ; u in tune, u in nut, u in rude, u in full ; y in hymn. CONSONANTS : 
 ? in cent, iu ean ; g in gem, g in get ; in hag ; tft in witti. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Abbotsford 327 
 
 Ab'sa lorn and A-chit'o-phel , 220, 221, 230 
 Abt Vo-jler (apt fo'glgr) ... 455, 461 
 Aotors in early drama . 136-138, 154, 175 
 
 Adam Bede 447 
 
 Addison, Joseph . 237, 245-252, 259, 333 
 
 life of 245-248 
 
 required readings iu 260 
 
 works of 248-252 
 
 Ad-o-na'is 364, 382, 469 
 
 Advancement of Learning . , 123, 124 
 
 .Elf'ric 43 
 
 Alchemist, The ... 189, 171, 181, 284 
 
 Aldwinkle 217 
 
 Aldworth 464 
 
 Alfred 39, 40, 45 
 
 All for Love 221 
 
 Alliteration 16, 17 
 
 Ancient Mariner . . . 309. 347, 348, 351 
 
 An'cren Riwle (rool) 60, 84 
 
 Andrea (an-dra'ya) del Sar"to . . . 455 
 
 An-dre-as (-dr&-) 32, 35 
 
 Anglo Saxon Chronicle .... 40^2, 45 
 Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, percentage 
 of, in literature . . 54, 55, 64, 291 
 
 Anslo-Saxons 12, 13 
 
 fondness of, for the sea . 21, 22, 35, 36 
 language of the . . . 14-17, 49-fil 
 
 mind, soinher cast of 14 
 
 poetry of the 11-38, 42-45 
 
 prose of the 38-43, 45 
 
 religion of the 13, 14 
 
 Apologie for Poetrie 118,178 
 
 Arabian Nights 236, 345 
 
 Arbury 444 
 
 Ar'buth-not, John 487 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Arcadia (Sidney's) . . 118, 178, 278, 302 
 Ar-e-o-pa-yiti-ca .... 198, 211, 220 
 
 Ar-ma'dn, Spanish 108 
 
 Arnold, E Iwiii 490 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 92, 385, 399, 424-430, 478 
 
 life of 424, 426 
 
 quoted 237, 272, 44 
 
 required readings in 481 
 
 works of 425-430 
 
 Arnold, Thomas 424 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, quoted 24 
 
 Arthur, King 91, 92, 201 
 
 As'eham, Roger 105, 485 
 
 As You Like It . 143, 157, 153, 160, 276 
 
 Atterbury, Francis 487 
 
 Aurewj-zebe' 222 
 
 Austen, Jane .... 333-3-5, 3SO, 381 
 
 Austin, Alfred 490 
 
 Authorities. See end of each chapter. 
 
 Au-tol'y-cus 94 
 
 Ayr 317 
 
 Bacon, Francis .... 117, 120-125 
 
 life of 123-12} 
 
 required readings in 1"8 
 
 works of . 122-1.5 
 
 Bagehot (bSj'ot), Walter 489 
 
 Baillie, Joanna 488 
 
 Ballads 94, 95, 100, 101 
 
 Barclay, Alex 485 
 
 Barrow, Isaac 486 
 
 Baxter, Richard 486 
 
 Beat'tle, James 488 
 
 Beau'mout (bo'-), Francis . 191, 192, 210 
 
 Becket, Thomas ;\ 76, 472 
 
 Beckford, William 488 
 
 491
 
 492 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAOK 
 
 Beddoes, Thomas 489 
 
 Bede 27,39 
 
 Ecclesiastical History of, 27, 28, 39, 40, 41 
 
 BeJford Jail 225 
 
 Belin, Mrs. Aphra 277, 486 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy 311, 488 
 
 Bentley, Richard 487 
 
 Beowulf (ba'o-wulf) . 23-26, 36, 37, 44 
 Berke'ley, George . . . 288, 303, 487 
 SiUe, influence of . 66, 99, 186, 229, 293 
 Bibliography. See end of each chapter. 
 
 Bickerstaff, Isaac 244, 248 
 
 Bilton 248 
 
 Binfleld 253, 255 
 
 Bi-o-graph'i-a Lit-e-rd'ri-a .... 350 
 
 Black, William 490 
 
 Blackmore, Richard D 490 
 
 Blake, William 305, 488 
 
 Blank verse 99, 142, 146, 265 
 
 Boc-cac'cio (-kat'cho) 76, 80 
 
 Boileau (l)wa-lo') 235 
 
 Bol'ing-broke, Lord 487 
 
 Bogwell, James . 297, 298, 299, 303, 402 
 
 Bourn 63 
 
 Bron't<5, Charlotte 490 
 
 Brooke, Stopford, quoted, 81, 33, 35, 37, 98 
 Brown, Charles Brockden .... 269 
 
 Browne, Sir Thomas 486 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett . 160, 452, 
 
 453, 490. 
 
 Browning, Robert, 385, 397, 399, 450-461, 
 464, 477, 478. 
 
 faith of 458, 459, 479 
 
 his idea of growth, 389, 454, 456, 457, 458 
 
 life of 450-454 
 
 required readings in 482 
 
 works of 464-461 
 
 Bru'ndn-byrh 34 
 
 Brut (Layamon's) .... 53, 58, 92 
 
 Buckle, Henry Thomas 489 
 
 Bulwer, Edward . . . 490 
 
 Bunyan, John . . . . 223-229,230,385 
 
 life of 223-226 
 
 required readings in 230 
 
 works of 226-229 
 
 Burke, Edmund . 291-293, 297, 303, 385 
 
 Btir'uet, Gilbert 487 
 
 Burney, Fanny 487 
 
 Burns, Robert, 309, 310, 317-324, 329, 379 
 compared with Elizabethans, 321, 3-22 
 
 life of 317-320 
 
 poetic creed of 321 
 
 required readings in 380 
 
 works of 821-324 
 
 Burton, Robert 486 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Butler, Bishop 487 
 
 Butler, Samuel 213, 230 
 
 Byron, Lord, 134, 268, 307, 338, 352-361, 379 
 compared with Wordsworth and 
 
 Coleridge 3"9 
 
 life of 352-354 
 
 required readings in 382 
 
 works of 355-361 
 
 Caed'mon 26-28, 38 
 
 compared with Milton . . . . 29, 30 
 aed-mo'ni-an Cycle . . 26-31, 34, 44 
 
 Caine, Hall 490 
 
 Cam'bridge 126, 197, 201, 217 
 
 337, 346, 353, 401, 438. 
 Campbell (c&m'el), Thomas .... 488 
 
 Canterbury 75, 76, 144 
 
 Canterbury Tales 75-80 
 
 Ca-rew', Thomas 193, 211 
 
 Car-lyle', Thomas . . 291, 330, 385, 397, 
 406-415, 478. 
 
 as a religious teacher 395 
 
 figurative language of ... 291, 415 
 
 life of 406-409 
 
 required readings in 481 
 
 works of 409-416 
 
 CaVo-Hne poets 193-195, 211 
 
 Carols, fifteenth century 95 
 
 Castlf. of 0-trorito . . 268, 269, 301, 302 
 
 Cavalier poets 193-195, 211 
 
 Caxton, William 56, 96 
 
 Celtic imagery 37, 38, 45 
 
 Cer-v5n'te 276 
 
 Chapman, George . 112, 307 (note), 486 
 Character, growth of, 143, 389, 390, 449, 464 
 
 Chatterton, Thomas 488 
 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 70-83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 386 
 
 an objective poet 130, 131 
 
 authorities on 88 
 
 life of 70-78 
 
 quoted 85, 91, 131 
 
 required readings in 86, 87 
 
 works of 73-83 
 
 Chester Miracle plays .... 135, 179 
 
 Childe Harold 853, 356, 257 
 
 Chivalry, effect of, on literature . . 83 
 
 Christ 31 
 
 Chris'ta-bel 848,349 
 
 Qiblter, Colley 487 
 
 Clat'en-don, Lord 188 
 
 Clarista f/arloioe. 282 
 
 Classic School . . 235, 236, 259, 271, 298, 
 299, 306, 30). 
 
 Cleo'bur-y Mortimer 67 
 
 Clive, Robert 262
 
 INDEX 
 
 493 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Cloud, The . . 364,366 
 
 Clough (cluf), Arthur Hugh .... 490 
 
 Cobbett, William 488 
 
 Cockermouth 335 
 
 Cole'ridge, Samuel Taylor . . 180, 307, 
 309, 312, 313, 345-351, 406. 
 
 life of 345-347 
 
 on pints 284 
 
 required readings in .... 381, 382 
 
 works of 347-361 
 
 Collier, Jeremy 486 
 
 Collins, Wilkie 480 
 
 Collius, William .... 270, 272, 301 
 Complete Angler .... 189, 209, 211 
 Compounds, self-explaining .... 51 
 
 Co'mus 200, 208, 210, 211 
 
 Conduct of the Understanding . 214, 215 
 
 Con-fes'sio A-man'tis 70, 85 
 
 Confessions of an Opium-Eater . 375, 376 
 
 Congreve, William 487 
 
 Con'is-ton Water 419 
 
 Cooper, James Fenimore 332 
 
 Cotter's Saturday Night . . . 318, 380 
 Couplets, rhyming . . . 216, 234, 258 
 
 Cpv'en-try 136, 148 
 
 Coventry Miracle plays . . . 135, 136 
 
 Cowley, Abraham 486 
 
 Cowper, William . . . 313-317, 340, 379 
 
 life of 313-315 
 
 required readings in 380 
 
 works of 315-317 
 
 Crabbe, George 306, 488 
 
 Crai-gen-put'tock 408 
 
 Craik, Dinah Maria 490 
 
 Crash'aw, Richard 195, 486 
 
 Crossing the Bar 396, 479 
 
 yn'e-wulf 31 
 
 Cynewulf Cycle 31-33, 44 
 
 Darwin, Charles ... 385, 387, 392, 477 
 
 DSv'en-ant, Sir William 486 
 
 Dwid Copperfield . . 435, 436, 437, 481 
 Da-foe', Daniel .... 237, 277-279, 302 
 
 Dekker, Thomas 112, 486 
 
 Deuhani, Sir John 486 
 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 155, 312, 313, 373-379 
 
 life of 373-375 
 
 required readings in 382 
 
 works of 375-379 
 
 Deserted Village, The .... 273, 302 
 
 Dialects, English 56 
 
 Dickens, Charles . . . 286, 385, 396, 430- 
 437, 442, 478. 
 
 a master of caricature 436 
 
 a portrayer of child life . . . 432, 435 
 
 PAGE 
 Dickens, Charles, required readings in, 481 
 
 style of 437 
 
 works of 434-437 
 
 Didactic verse 221, 267, 268 
 
 DonJu'an 356-358 
 
 Donne (don), John, 186, 187, 195, 211, 486 
 Don Quitfote (Span. pron. don ke-ho'ta) 276 
 
 Doug'las, Ga'wain 93 
 
 Dowden, Edward, quoted . 174, 398, 436 
 
 Drake, Sir Francis 104 
 
 Drama, English . 113-115, 134-183, 190- 
 193, 213, 218, 273, 333, 355, 454-458, 472 
 
 actors in early 136-138 
 
 and the Unities 143, 146 
 
 authorities on 182, 183 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's . . 191, 192 
 
 Browning's 454-458 
 
 Byron's 3?5, 356 
 
 comic element in ... 138, 139, 160 
 
 Dryden's 218, 221 
 
 interludes 141, 142 
 
 Jonson's 169-173 
 
 Marlowe's 143, 144-148 
 
 Miracle plays 134-139 
 
 Moralities 139-141 
 
 required readings in .... 179-181 
 Shakespeare's. See Shakespeare. 
 
 Tennyson's 472 
 
 Webster's 190, 101 
 
 Dr. Faustus . . 144, 145, 146, 147, 180 
 
 Drummoiid, William 486 
 
 Dryden, John. . . 82, 134, 168, 170, 214, 
 215, 217-223, 229. 
 
 life of 217-219 
 
 required readings in 230 
 
 works of 219-223 
 
 Duchess of Mal'fi 190,191 
 
 Dun-bar 1 , William 93 
 
 Dun'ci-ad 267 
 
 Earle, John, quoted 26 
 
 Ec-cle-feb'an 407, 409 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria 488 
 
 Ed'in-burgh (-bur-ro) . . . 319, 325, 408 
 Eighteenth century, first forty years 
 
 of 232-261 
 
 second forty years of ... 262-304 
 
 El-en-e 32 
 
 Eliot, George . . 114, 279, 385, 389, 397, 
 398, 435, 444-450, 478. 
 
 her message to the age 449 
 
 life of 444-447 
 
 required readings in 482 
 
 worksof 447-450 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen 106, 106
 
 494 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Elizabethan literature .... 103-183 
 
 and the novel 276, 277 
 
 authorities on 181-183 
 
 compared with that of the Roman- 
 tic age . . . 306, 310. 321, 322, 379 
 compared with that of the Vic- 
 torian age 386, 398 
 
 general characteristics, 103-115, 176-178 
 required readings in .... 178-181 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer 489 
 
 El'stow 223 
 
 English Humorists of the Eighteenth 
 
 Century. .... 286,441,442,482 
 English language . . . 48-57, 63, 83, 84 
 English literature, comparative rank 
 
 of 11, 103, 109, 165 
 
 Ep-i-tha-la'mi-on (Spenser's) . . .127 
 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy 220 
 
 Essay on Criticism ....... 254 
 
 Essay on Man 257 
 
 Esvays in Criticism 428 
 
 Essays of E'li-a 312 
 
 Eth'er-gjie, George 487 
 
 Ethical purpose in literature, 396, 409, 
 410, 417, 418, 421, 435, 449, 458, 459, 
 460, 466, 470, 478. 
 
 Eu'phu-es (ez) 117, 178 
 
 Ev'e-lyn, John 486 
 
 Ece of St. Agnes .... 370,371 382 
 
 Every Man in his Humor 171 
 
 Evolution, influence of theory of, 388-397, 
 474, 477. 
 
 Excursion 343 
 
 Ex'e-ter Book .... 18, 20, 21, 22, 44 
 Exeter Cathedral 18 
 
 Fa'e-rie Queene . . . 128, 129, 131, 178 
 Fallow period of English literature . 54 
 
 FaVa-day. Michael 489 
 
 Far'qnhar, George 487 
 
 Farringford 463 
 
 Fergusson, Robert 4S8 
 
 Fielding, Henry, 283-285, 286, 287, 301, 303 
 
 Field Place 361 
 
 Fight at Finnsburg 34 
 
 Figures of rhetoric .... 36, 291, 415 
 
 Fitz-ggr'ald, Edward 490 
 
 Fletcher, Giles 486 
 
 Fletcher, John .... 191, 192, 210 
 
 Fletcher, Phineas 486 
 
 Ford, John 191, 203 
 
 Fort Clt-viffe-ra 418, 421, 422 
 
 Forces-cue, Sir John 485 
 
 Fortunes of Men 22, 44 
 
 Francis, Sir Philip 487 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Freedom of thought 89, 106 
 
 Freeman, Edward Augustus .... 489 
 
 quoted 290 
 
 French element in English . . .49, 52, 
 
 53, 54, 61, 84. 
 French influence . . . 215, 216, 235, 237 
 
 French prose 237, 238 
 
 French Revolution (Carlyle's) . . , 411 
 French Revolution, effect of, on liter- 
 ature, 309, 310, 337, 361, 367, 379, 396 
 
 Froude, James Anthony 489 
 
 Fuller, Thomas 188, 209, 211 
 
 Furness's Va-ri-o'rum Shakespeare . 180 
 Fur'ni-vall, F. J., quoted 157 
 
 Gad's Hill 433 
 
 Gammer Ourton's Needle 142 
 
 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson .... 489 
 GaVrick, David .... 266, 293, 297 
 Gas-coigne' (-coin'), George . . Ill, 485 
 
 Gas'Uell, Elizabeth C 490 
 
 Gd'wayne and the Green Knight . . 275 
 
 Gay, John 487 
 
 Gender of Anglo-Saxon 50 
 
 Genesis (Caed inon's) 28,23 
 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth 57 
 
 <5ib'l>on, Edward . 289-291, 297, 303, 404 
 
 Giles, Henry, quoted 163 
 
 Gleeman 19, 20 
 
 songs of 20-26 
 
 Godwin, William 488 
 
 Goethe's (ge'teh'z) estimate of Shake- 
 speare 165 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver . . 161, 272, 274, 287, 
 295, 297, 301, 302, 303. 
 
 Goi j bo-due 142, 146, 180 
 
 GSss -, Edmund, quoted . 271, 287, 402 
 
 GSs'son, Stephen 485 
 
 Gower, John 69, 70, 86 
 
 Gras'mere 338, 339, 340, 374 
 
 Gray, Thomas, 267, 269, 270-27:', 301, 302 
 
 Great Berk'hamp-stead 314 
 
 Green, John Richard 489 
 
 Greene, Robert ... 112, 276, 392, 486 
 
 Griff 445 
 
 Grote, George 489 
 
 Growth, theory of .... 143, 389, 449 
 Gulliver's Travels, 65, 242, 243, 259, 260, 279 
 Guy Mannering 831 
 
 Hak'luyt, Richard .488 
 
 HaTlam, Henry 488 
 
 quoted 123, 165 
 
 Hamilton, Sir William .... 385,489 
 Hamilton, William, of Eangour . . 236
 
 INDEX 
 
 495 
 
 PAGE 
 Hamlet, 14, 48, 109, 157, 158, 164, 166, 180 
 
 Handlyng Sunne 63, 85 
 
 Hardy, Thomas ISO 
 
 Hawes, Stephen . 485 
 
 Hazlitt, William 488 
 
 Heart of Midlothian, The 331 
 
 Hel'ne, Heinrich, quoted ..... 23 
 
 Hell Mouth 137 
 
 Hem'ans, Felicia 489 
 
 Henry Esmond, 441 
 
 Henrysou, Robert 92 
 
 Herbert, George 486 
 
 Heroen and Hero Worship .... 413 
 Herrick, Robert .... 194, 195, 211 
 
 Hes-pifr'i-des (-dez) 194 
 
 Hey'wood, John 141, 142 
 
 Heywood, Thomas 486 
 
 Hipswell 65 
 
 Historical novel . . . 286, 330, 333, 380 
 History, English. See list at end of 
 each chapter. 
 
 History of Fricdrich II. 414 
 
 Hobbes, The mas 187, 211 
 
 Hogg, James 488 
 
 Hol'ing-hed's Chronicles . 159, 183, 485 
 Homer, Chapman's .... 307 (note) 
 
 Pope's 256 
 
 Hood, Thomas 489 
 
 Hooker, Richard 118, 119 
 
 Hor'ace, influence of 235 
 
 Horton 197 
 
 Hous of Fame 72, 74 
 
 Hu'di-brns (bras) 213, 230 
 
 Hume, David 288, 289, 303 
 
 Humphrey Clinker 286 
 
 Hunt, Leigh (le) 488 
 
 Huxley, Thomas .... S85, 387, 477 
 
 on Paradise Lost 208 
 
 Hy-pe'ri-on 371 
 
 Idler, The 295, 300 
 
 Idylls of the King .... 59, 470, 471 
 
 II Pen-ye-ro'so 200, 211, 270 
 
 Imagination in literature . . . 110, 233, 
 264, 306, 807, 31)1, 392. 
 
 Induction (Sackville's) 116 
 
 Inflections, loss of 49, 60 
 
 In gs-low, Jean 490 
 
 In Me-mo n-nm . . 392, 393, 3'J4, 395, 
 468, 469, 473, 475, 482. 
 
 Interlude 141 
 
 authorities on the 18.', 183 
 
 readings in the 179 
 
 Italian influence 74, 99, 105 
 
 I'van-hoe . 330 
 
 PAGE 
 
 James I. of Scotland 485 
 
 JftKrow 39 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis 488 
 
 Jew of Malta 144, 146, 147 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel . . 161, 172, 252, 
 
 271* 293-300, 308. 
 
 his opinion of Shakespeare . 180, 298 
 his opinion of Milton's Lycidan . . 298 
 
 life of 293 295 
 
 required readings in ..... 303 
 works of ........ 294-300 
 
 Johnson, Hester 240 
 
 Jonson, Ben . 166-173, 186, 187, 195, 211 
 
 life of 166-169 
 
 required readings in 181 
 
 works of 169-173 
 
 Joseph Andrews 284, 285 
 
 Ju-li-an'a -32 
 
 Juuius 28 
 
 Keats, John .... 134, 307, 312, 340, 
 364, 368-373, 379, 391. 
 
 and the Elizabethans 373 
 
 compared with Wordsworth, Cole- 
 ridge, Byron, and Shelley . . . 371 
 
 life of 368, 369 
 
 required readings in 382 
 
 works of 369-373 
 
 Ke'ble, John . 489 
 
 Ken'il-worth 148 
 
 Kenil worth 330 
 
 King Lear, 55, 58, 109, 157, 158, 159, 162 
 
 Kingsley, Charles 490 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard 490 
 
 Knightes Tale 79, 80, 86 
 
 Knowles, James Sheridan .... 488 
 Kyd, Thomas 485 
 
 Lady of the Lake 328 
 
 Lake District 338, 347 
 
 Lake Poets 313 
 
 Laleham 424 
 
 L' Allegro (lal-la'gro) .... 200, 211 
 Lamb, Charlts .... 306, 312, 383 
 
 La'mi-a 370 
 
 Landor, Walter Savage ... . 313, 314 ' 
 Laiig'land, William .... 67-69, 86 
 
 Liit'i-mer, Hugh 485 
 
 Latin element in English . . 49, 53, 84 
 
 La'ya-nion 58 
 
 Lear. See King Lear. 
 
 Lecky, William Edward Hartpole. . 489 
 
 Legende of Good Women . . . . 73, 74 
 
 Le'ver, Charles 490 
 
 LeWes (-Is) , George Henry , 298, 445, 446, 489
 
 496 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Lichfleld . . , 293 
 
 Lindsay, Sir David 485 
 
 Liiigard, John 488 
 
 Literary Club 297 
 
 Liven of the Poets .... 297, 300, 303 
 
 Locke, John 214, 215, 230 
 
 Lockhart, John Gibson 488 
 
 Lockxley Hall . . 397, 466, 474, 475, 482 
 Lodge, Thomas . . . 112, 276, 302, 485 
 
 London 294 
 
 Lounsbury, T. E., quoted . . . . 66, 83 
 
 Love'lace, Richard 193, 211 
 
 Low'ell, James Russell, quoted, 81, 83, 255 
 Lyfi-das. . . . 200, 211, 298, 382, 469 
 
 Lydgate, John 485 
 
 Lyell, Sir Charles 489 
 
 Lyl'y, John . . . 117, 118, 178, 276, 485 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 399-406, 478 
 his conception of history . . 403, 404 
 
 life of 399-402 
 
 on Dr. Johnson 295, 296 
 
 required readings in 480 
 
 works of 402-406 
 
 Macbeth, 55, 109, 167, 158, 164, 180, 192, 234 
 
 MacFlecknoe 221 
 
 Macpherson, James 267 
 
 Maine, Sir Henry 489 
 
 Mak, in Play of the Shepherds . 138, 139 
 Mal'o-ry, Sir Thomas . . 90-92, 101, 470 
 MSl'thus, Thomas Robert . . . 311, 488 
 Man, poetry of. . 309,310,322,342,379 
 
 Manchester 373 
 
 Mandeville's Travels . . . . 64, 65, 86 
 
 Manfred 365, 356 
 
 Manning, Robert 63, 64 
 
 Marlowe, Christopher .... 144-148 
 and the Elizabethan age, 110, 144, 145 
 
 quoted Ill, 113, 114 
 
 required readings in 180 
 
 works of 144-148 
 
 Marmion 328, 329 
 
 Marston, John 112, 486 
 
 Marvell, Andrew 486 
 
 Masques 168, 200 
 
 ilas'sin-ger, Philip 486 
 
 Masson, David, quoted . . . 197, 376 
 
 Maud 47, 468 
 
 Melancholy, liternture of .... 270 
 Merchant of Venice . . 157, 158, 159, 180 
 
 Mer'e-dith, George 490 
 
 Michael 308, 342 
 
 Micldleton, Thomas 480 
 
 Midsummer Mights Dream ... 38, 160 
 Mill, James 311,488 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Mill, John Stuart 489 
 
 MM on the Flosg 447 
 
 Milman, Henry Hart 489 
 
 Milston 245 
 
 Milton, John . 72,134,184,186,187,196- 
 209, 210, 215, 220, 233, 266, 270, 298, 306 
 
 life of 196-200 
 
 required readings in 211 
 
 works of 198-209 
 
 Miracle plays (see alsoDrama),114,134-lS9 
 
 actors in 136-138 
 
 authorities on 182, 183 
 
 comic element in 138, 139 
 
 required readings in 179 
 
 subject matter of 135 
 
 Mirror for Magistrates 116 
 
 Mitford, Mary Russell 488 
 
 Modern Painters 419-421, 481 
 
 Moliere (mo-le-eV) 216 
 
 Mon'ta-gu, Lady Mary Wortley . . 487 
 
 Moore, Thomas 488 
 
 Moor Park 239 
 
 Moralities (sec also Drama), 114, 139, 140 
 
 authorities on 182, 183 
 
 required readings in 179 
 
 More, Sir Thomas 485 
 
 Morris, William 92, 490 
 
 Morte (11161 t)d' Arthur. . 90,91,92,470 
 
 My Last Duchess 455 
 
 Mystery plays 134-139 
 
 Na'pi-er, Sir William 488 
 
 Nash, Thomas 276, 302 
 
 Nature, poetry of, 25, 33, 62, 63, 82, 83, 92f 
 93, 201, 205, 214, 215, 223, 229, 235, 236 
 299, 308, 309, 316, 323, 324, 329, 340, 366, 
 372, 472-474. 
 
 Nebular hypothesis 388 
 
 Nether-Stow'ey 846, 347 
 
 Newcomts, The 441 
 
 Newman, John Henry .... 385, 489 
 
 Newstead Abbey 354 
 
 New World, effect of exploration of . 104, 
 Noah's Flood, Flay of . . . . 138, 179 
 
 Norman Conquest 38, 47 
 
 effect of, on language .... 47-66 
 
 Norse mythology 13, 14, 269 
 
 North, Sir Thomas 485 
 
 Nove!, development of the, 274-287, 301, 
 302, 303, 330, 331, 435, 440, 441, 449. 
 
 authorities on the 304 
 
 compared with development of the 
 
 Elizabethan drama . . . 113, 114 
 in mediaeval times .... 274, 275 
 in the sixteenth century .... 27*
 
 INDEX 
 
 497 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Novel, development of the, in the eigh- 
 teenth century 277-287 
 
 in the nineteenth century . . 330. 333. 
 336, 380, 386, 435, 436, 443, 449, 478. 
 
 No'vum Or'ga-num 124 
 
 Nut-Broim Maid 94, 101 
 
 O'b6r-am'ni6r-gau (-gou) PassionPlay, 135 
 
 Oc'cleve, Thomas 485 
 
 Ode to the West Wind .... 364, 366 
 
 Old Mortality 330 
 
 Ol'i-phant, T. L., quoted 64 
 
 Oliver Twist 434 
 
 Olney 315 
 
 Origin of Species 387 
 
 Orm's Or'mu-lum 59 
 
 0-ro'si-us (Alfred's) 40 
 
 Ossian (fish'an) . . . 267, 268, 301, 302 
 
 Ot'ter-y St. Mary 345 
 
 Otway, Thomas 487 
 
 Owl and Nightingale 62 
 
 Oxford 245, 361, 417, 424 
 
 Palace of Art 466, 473, 482 
 
 Paley, William 488 
 
 Pam'e-la 281, 284 
 
 Paradise Lost, 23, 30, 184, 200-208, 211, 215 
 Paradise of Dainty Devices . . . .116 
 
 Paradise Regained 203 
 
 Parallelism 36, 37 
 
 Parlement of Foules 74, 85 
 
 Par'nell, Thomas 487 
 
 Passing of Arthur . . 59,101,476,482 
 
 Paston Letters 485 
 
 Pa'ter, Walter 490 
 
 Pattison, Mark, quoted 201 
 
 Peacock, Thomas Love 488 
 
 Peele, George .... 105, 111, 112, 483 
 
 Pgp'ys, Samuel 486 
 
 Percy, Thomas . . . 269, 301, 302, 325 
 
 Perkin Warbeck 191 
 
 Phi-las'ter 191 
 
 Philosophical prose, 187, 288, 289, 303, Sll 
 
 Phoenix 33, 37, 45 
 
 Picaresque novel, the . 276, 277, 279, 286 
 Pickwick Papers .... 433, 434, 481 
 
 Pier* Plowman 67-69, 85 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress 225-229 
 
 Pip'pd Passes 457, 458, 479 
 
 Pitt, William 262 
 
 Pope, Alexander . . 234, 235, 236, 237, 
 248, 252-258, 294, 316, 321, 831. 
 
 life of 252-254 
 
 required readings in . . . . 260, 261 
 works of 254-258 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Porter, Jane 488 
 
 Portsmouth 430 
 
 Praed, Winthrop 489 
 
 Prefixes, loss of 51 
 
 Prelude (Wordsworth's) . . . 336, 342 
 Pride and Prejudice .... 333, 334 
 
 Princess, The 467, 473, 4V 7 
 
 Prior, Matthew 48/ 
 
 Proctor, Bryan W 489 
 
 Prologue (Chaucer's) .... 77-79, 86 
 
 Pro-me'theus Unbound . . 363, 365, 367 
 
 Prose, development of, 117, 118, 187, 211, 
 
 219, 220, 230, 237, 312, 313, 385, 386, 430 
 
 Puritan age 184-212 
 
 authorities on the .... 211, 212 
 compared with Elizabethan age, 184-186 
 general characteristics, 184-187, 209, 210 
 required readings in .... 210, 211 
 
 Puritan ideals 186, 226 
 
 Puf ten-ham, George 485 
 
 Quantock Hills 347 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra . . . 389, 459, 461, 482 
 
 Radcliffe, Ann 488 
 
 Ra'lelgh, Sir Walter. . . 108,128,188 
 Ralph Royster Doyster .... 142, 180 
 
 Rambler, The 295, 301 
 
 Ramsay, Allan 487 
 
 Rape of the Lock . . . . 255,256,260 
 
 Ras'se-las 295 
 
 Reade, Charles 490 
 
 Readings. See end of each chapter. 
 
 Reformation 97, 103, 106 
 
 Re-lig'i-o Ld'i-cl 221, 230 
 
 Religion, effect of, on literature, 89, 186, 
 
 395, 458, 459, 469, 470, 479, 480. 
 Rel'lques of Ancient English Poetry, 269, 
 
 301, 302, 32.% 328. 
 
 Renaissance, the 96, 103 
 
 Required readings. See end of each 
 
 chapter. 
 
 Restoration, age of 213-231 
 
 authorities on 231 
 
 drama of 213 
 
 general characteristics, 213-217, 229, 230 
 
 morals of 213 
 
 Reynolds, Sir Joshua .... 297, 487 
 
 Ri-car'do, David 488 
 
 Richardson, Samuel . . 280-283, 284, 
 
 286, 2S7, 302. 
 
 Ring and the Bonk 456 
 
 Robert of Brunne 63, 64 
 
 Robertson, William 487 
 
 Robin Hood ballads . . 94
 
 498 
 
 INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Robinson Crusoe .... 237, 277, 278 
 .Romances, early .... 274-276, 02 
 
 Re-manes', George J 489 
 
 Romanticism 264-274 
 
 Romanticism, age of .... 306-384 
 
 authorities on . . . . . . 383, 384 
 
 general characteristics, 305-313, 379, 380 
 
 required readings 380-383 
 
 Rom'u-la 448 
 
 Rus-set'ti, Christina 430 
 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel ...... 490 
 
 Rothley Temple 401 
 
 Ruskin, John, 395, 397, 406, 416-423, 478 
 
 art criticism of 419-421 
 
 compared with Carlyle . 416, 422, 423 
 
 life of 416-419 
 
 required readings in 481 
 
 works of 419-423 
 
 Sackville, Thomas . . 116, 142, 146, 178 
 
 St. Albana 64 
 
 Saintsbuiy, George, quoted . . 107, 156 
 
 Samson Ag-o-nitftes (-tez) 204 
 
 Sar'ior Re-sar'ttts 35, 407, 403, 4iO, 414 
 
 Satire 171, 213, 220, 236, 259 
 
 Saul 896 
 
 Saxon. See Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 Scholemanter, The 105 
 
 Schoolmen, the 90, 125 
 
 Science, influence of, 215, 387-399, 474, 477 
 
 Scop 19-23 
 
 songs of the 20-26, 43, 44 
 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 114, 312, 313, 325-333, 379 
 
 life of 325-328 
 
 quoted 244, 336 
 
 required readings in E81 
 
 works of 328-333 
 
 Scotq^i poetry . . 92, 93, 101, 102, 321 
 
 Seafarer 21, 35, 44 
 
 Seasons, The 236 
 
 Sentence, shortening of 220 
 
 Shadwell, Thomas 221, 487 
 
 8'iairp, J. C., quoted .... 3'-0, 351 
 
 Shakespeare, William, 11, 38,43,48,65, 61, 
 
 95, 103, 113, 114, 148-166, 167, 168, 170, 
 
 171, J73, 175, 177, 183, 190, 191, 192, 205, 
 
 226, 266, 298, 323, 324, 351, 393. 
 
 authoiities on 183 
 
 early education of .... 148-152 
 general characteristics of . . 160-166 
 
 life of 148-155 
 
 quoted . 11. 21, 48, 65, 1S2, 214, 233, 234 
 required readings in . . 157, 180, 181 
 
 Saxon vocabulary of 64, 55 
 
 works of . . 155-166 
 
 PAGE 
 Sharpham Park 283 
 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (blsh), 92, 134, 307, 
 
 312, 338, 361-368, 379, 477. 
 compared with Wordsworth, Cole- 
 ridge, and Byron .... 367, 368 
 
 life of 361-363 
 
 required readings in 3b2 
 
 works of 363-368 
 
 Shepherd's Calendar 127 
 
 Shepherds, Play oj tlus . . 1S8, 139, 179 
 SheVi-dau, Richard Brinsley . . . 487 
 
 Shirley, Jam< s 486 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip . . 108, 118, 119, 178, 
 27o, 302. 
 
 Silas Marner 279, 447, 448 
 
 Silent Woman, The . . . 169, 170, 181 
 Sir Roger de Co e'er ley Papers, 249, 260, 260 
 
 Skelton, John 486 
 
 Smith, Adam 487 
 
 Smith, Sydney . . 488 
 
 Smith's (L. T.) York Plays . . . . 138 
 Smollett, To-bi'as . . 25, 286, cOl, 303 
 Social ideals . . 309, 310, 322, 396, 421 
 
 Sohrab and Rustum 427 
 
 Som'erg-by 462 
 
 Sonnet, the 99, 155, 156 
 
 South, Robert 486 
 
 Southey, Robert . . .312, 313, 346, 357 
 
 South wark (sfifh'ai-K) 77 
 
 Spectator, The, 247, 249-251, 277, 295, 302 
 Spencer, Herbert .... 385, 387, 477 
 Spenser, Edmund . . . 115, 125-134, 186, 
 187, 210, 266. 
 
 life of 126-128 
 
 required readings in 178 
 
 works of 129-134 
 
 Steele, Richard . 37, 244, 2,8-250, 302 
 
 Stella 240 
 
 Stephen, Leslie 490 
 
 quoted . . . 254, 68, 279, 298, 377 
 Sterne, Laurence . . . 285, 286, 301, 303 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis 490 
 
 Steventon 333 
 
 Still, John 142 
 
 Stokt; Po'gf 8 : . 271 
 
 Stones uf Venice 419, 481 
 
 Stdw, John 485 
 
 Stratford-on-Avoii . . . 148, 150, 151 
 
 Stnbbs, William 489 
 
 Suckling, Sir John 193, 211 
 
 ' Sum r is i cnmen " 63 
 
 Summaries. See last section of text in 
 each chapter. 
 
 Surrey, Earl of 99, 102 
 
 Sweet, Henry, quoted 61
 
 INDEX 
 
 499 
 
 PAGE 
 Swift, Jonathan, 233, 237, 238-245, 279, 385 
 
 life of 238-241 
 
 required readings in 260 
 
 works of 241-245 
 
 Swinburne, Al'ger-noa Charles, i,2, 393, 490 
 
 quoted, 22, 270, 273, 305, 343, 349, 359, 394 
 
 Symonds, John Addiugton .... 490 
 
 quoted 112, 147, 367 
 
 Tab'ardlnn 77 
 
 Taine, H. A., quoted . . 110, 244, 250 
 
 Tale of a Tub 241,260 
 
 Tamrbur-laine . . 110, 113, 144, 148, 210 
 
 Tain o' Shanter 324, 3SC 
 
 Task, The 3!6, 380 
 
 Taller, The . . . 244, 247, 248, -249, 295 
 Taylor, Jeremy .... 183, 209, 211 
 Temple, Sir William . . 238, 239, 486 
 
 Ten Brink, quoted 23, 67 
 
 Tennyson, Alfred . 14, 34, i9, 74, 92, 
 340, S85, 386, 388, 390, 392, 393, 394, 
 395, 396, S97, 399, 462-477, 478, 479. 
 
 life of 462-464 
 
 required readings in 482 
 
 works of 461-477 
 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 114, 160, 
 240, 279, 385, 389, 398, 437-444, 478. 
 
 life of 437-140 
 
 required readings in 482 
 
 works Of 440-444 
 
 Theaters, early English, 115, 153, 173-176 
 contemporary drawing of .... 174 
 
 Thomson, James 236 
 
 Tillotson, John 486 
 
 To a Nightingale 371, 382 
 
 Tom. Jones 284 
 
 Tour-neur', Cyril 486 
 
 Towne'ley Miracle plays . . . 13.">, 179 
 
 Trintram Shindy 285 
 
 Trollope, Anthony 490 
 
 Tros'saehs 328 
 
 Turner, J. M. W 419, 420 
 
 Twickenham 253 
 
 Tyndale, William .... 97-99, 101 
 Tyiidall, John, 385, 387, 338, 391, 3.)2, 477 
 
 U'dall, Nicholas 142 
 
 Uli/xges 466, 467 
 
 Unities, dramatic .... 143, 146, 172 
 Utilitarianism 311 
 
 VSl-haT 13,33 
 
 Van-brush' (-broo'), John .... 487 
 
 Vanity Fair 279, 441 
 
 Vemts and A-dO'nia 155 
 
 PAGE 
 Vercelli (vgr-chel'le) Boole .... 18 
 
 Vicar of Wakejield 287 
 
 Vice and Fool of Eaily Drama, 140, 176 
 
 Victorian age 385-184 
 
 authorities on 483, 484 
 
 compared with Elizabethan age, 386, 
 
 387, 393. 
 
 general characteristics, 385-393, 477-479 
 required readings in . . . . 480-482 
 
 variety of work of 386 
 
 Vocabulary, percentage of Saxou in, 64, 
 65, C4, 291. 
 
 Vol-po'ne 169, 171, 181 
 
 Voltaire's criticism of Shakespeare . 236 
 
 Wagner's trilogy 269 
 
 Waller, Edmund .... 216, 217, 486 
 Walpole, Horace .... 268, 263, 302 
 
 Walpole, Robert 262 
 
 Walton, Izaak .... 188, 189, 203, 211 
 
 War'bur-ton, William 487 
 
 Ward, Mrs. Humphry 490 
 
 Warner, William 485 
 
 Wars of the Roses 90 
 
 Warton, Thomas 487 
 
 Watson, William 490 
 
 Watts, Isaac 487 
 
 Waverley Novels 326, 329-332 
 
 Webster, Dnniel 415 
 
 Webster, John 190, 191, 209 
 
 Wesley, Charles 488 
 
 Wesley, John 263 
 
 Westminster Abbey, Frontispiece, 73, 128, 
 169, 218, 248, '267, 296, 464. 
 
 Weston 316 
 
 Whitby 27,88 
 
 White, Gilbert 487 
 
 White'fleld (whit'-), George .... 263 
 
 Widsid (wid-sith) 20, 43 
 
 Wilson, John 488 
 
 Wither, George 486 
 
 Wolfe, General 262 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 134, 209, '215, 306, 
 
 307, 338, S09, 310, 329, 336-344, 477. 
 compared with Tennyson . . 341,344 
 
 life of . . 335-340 
 
 requ'red readings in . . 881 
 
 works of 310-344 
 
 Wy'att, Sir Thomas 99, 101 
 
 Wycli'er-lcy, William 487 
 
 Wyc'liffe, John 65-67, 89 
 
 Yarmouth 485 
 
 York Miracle plays ... 135, 137, 133 
 Young, Edward 488
 
 LIC SOUTHERN REGION 
 
 001 117 166 7
 
 m