CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO PB 83 M55 iTl'llll IlllVmfllfl'hi^?,'!,'']* 5AN DIECO 3 1822 01400 3305 M55 V. ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS Jfrom Celt to UuDor ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS By Donald G. Mitchell I. from Celt to "CuSor II. Sxom. El(3abetb to Hnne III. ®ueen Bnne an^ tbe Qcoxqca IV. Ube later ©eorgea to Uictoda Each 1 vol., 12mo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50 AMERICAN LANDS AND LETTERS jfcom tbe flDa^f lower to fRip Van "CClinftlc / vo/., square 12mo, Illustrated, $2.60 ENGLISH LANDS LETTERS AND KINGS from Celt to 5Iu&or ^ ^1 \ BY Donald G: Mitchell NEW YORK Cbarles Scribner's Sons MDCCCXCVII Copyright, 1889, bv CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS. TROWS PRINTING AND eoOKBINOING COMPANy. h£W YORK o^^^^^Q^io^ xffU'^^^^^fv^'^^^ PREFACE. T I IHIS little book is made up from the opening -*" series of a considerable range of "talks," with wluch — during the past few years — I have undertaken to entertain, and (if it might be) in- struct a bevy of friends ; and the interest of a few outsiders who have come to the hearings has in- duced me to put the matter in type. I feel some- what awkwardly in obtruding upon the pubhc any such panoramic view of British writers, in these days of specialists — when students devote half a lifetime to the analysis of the works of a single author, and to the proper study of a single period. I have tried, however, to avoid bad mistakes and misleading ones, and shall reckon my commentary only so far forth good — as it may famihaiize the viii PREFACE. average reader with the salient characteristics of the writers brought under notice, and shall put these writers into such a swathing of historic and geographic enwrapments as shall keep them better in naind. When I consider the large number of books recently issued on similar topics, and the scholar- ly acuteness, and the great range belonging to so many of them, I am not a little discomforted at thought of my bold scurry over so wide reach of ground. Indeed, I have the figure before me now — as I hint an apology — of an old-time coun- try doctor who has ventured with his saddle-bags and spicy nostrums into competition with a half score of special practitioners — with their micro- scopy and their granules dosimetriques ; but I think, consolingly, that possibly the old-time mediciner — if not able to cure, can at the least induce 3 pleasurable slumber. Edgewood, 1888. CONTENTS. CHAPTER L than Preliminary, 1 Early Centuries, 5 Celtic Literature, 7 Beginning of English Learning, ... 9 CiEDMON, 13 Beda, 15 King Alfred, 17 Canute and Godiva, 23 WlLLLAM THE NORMAN, 25 Harold the Saxon, 29 CHAPTER n. Geoffrey op Monmouth, 87 King Arthur Legends, 39 Early Norman Kings, 46 Richard C KINGS. centuries of annual commemoration.* Tennyson tells, in his always witching way, how She rode forth clothed on with chastity : The deep air listened round her as she rode, the barking cur Made her cheek flame ; her palfry's foot-fall shot Light horror thro' her pulses : One low churl compact of thankless earth Peep'd — but his eyes, before they had their will Were shrivelled into darkness in his head, And she, that knew not, pass'd ; and all at once With twelve great shocks of sound, the shameless noon Was clash'd and hammered from a hundred towers, One after one : But even then she gained Her bower ; whence re-issuing, robed and crowned, To meet her lord, she took the tax away And built herself an everlasting name. Observe — that I call up these modern writers and their language, out of their turn as may seem to you, only that I may plant more distinctly in your * It is of record in Matthew of Westminster, a Bene- dictine monk of the fourteenth century— Ffc^r^s Historiarum —first printed in 1567. "• Nxida cquum ascendcns, crines ca- pitis et tricas (Ussolvens, corpus suum Mum, prater crura candulissima inde vdavit." The tradition is subject of crude mention in the PolyoUmn of Dkayton ; I also refer the reader to the chaiming Leofric and Gcdiva of Landoe. WILLIAM THE NORMAN. 25 thought the old incidents to which their words re- late. It is as if I were speaking to you of some long- gone line of ancestors, and on a sudden should call up some delicate blond child and say — This one is in the line of direct descent ; she bears the same old name, she murmurs the same old tunes ; and this shimmer of gold in her hair is what shone on the heads of the good Saxon foreparents. William the Norman. We now come to a date to be remembered, and in the neighborhood of which our first morning's talk will come to an end. It is the date of the Nor- man Conquest — 106G — that being the year of the Battle of Hastings, when the bravo Harold, last of the Saxon kings went down, shot through the eye ; and the lithe, clean-faced, smirking William of Nor- mandy " gat him " the throne of England. These new-comers were not far-away cousins of our Saxon and Danish forefathers ; only so recently as the reign of Alfred had they taken permanent foothold in that pleasant Norman country. But they have not brought the Norse speech of 26 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. the old home land with them : they have taken to a Frankish language — we will call it Norman French — which is thenceforth to blend with the Saxonism of Alfred, until two centuries or more later, our own mother Eughsh — the English of Chaucer and of Shakespeare — is evolved out of the union. Not only a new tongue, do these conquerors bring with them, but madrigals and ballads and rhyming his- tories ; they have great contempt for the stolid, lazy-going Latin records of the Saxon Chroniclers ; they love a song better. In the very face of the armies at Hastings, their great minstrel Taillefer had lifted up his voice to chant the glories of Ro- land, about which all the histories of the time wiU tell you. It was a new civihzation (not altogether Christian) out-topping the old. These Normans knew more of war — knew more of courts — knew more of affau's. They loved money and they loved conquest. To love one in those days, was to love the other. King William swept the monasteries clean of those igno- rant priests who had dozed there, from the time of Alfred, and put in Norman Monks with nicely chpped hair, who could construe Latin after latest WILLIAM THE NORMAN. 27 Norman rules. He new parcelled the lands, and gave estates to those who could hold and manage them. It was as if a new, sharp eager man of busi- ness had on a sudden come to the handling of some old sleepily conducted counting-room ; he cuts oS. the useless heads ; he squares the hooks ; he stops waste ; pity or tenderness have no hearing in his shop. I mentioned not far back an old Saxon Chronicle, which all down the years, from shortly after Beda's day, had been kept aHve — sometimes under the hands of one monastery, sometimes of another ; here is what its Saxon Scribe of the eleventh century says of this new-come and conquering Norman King : It is good Saxon histoiy, and in good Saxon style : — "King William was a very wise man, and very rich, more worshipful and strong than any of his foregangers. He was mild to good men who loved God ; and stark heyond all bounds to those who withsaid his will. He had Earls in his bonds who had done against his will ; Bishops he set off their bishoprics ; Abbots off their abbotries, and thanes in prisin. By his cunning he was so thoroughly acquainted with England, that there is not a hide of land of which he did not know, both who had it, and what was its worth. He planted a great preserue for deer, and he laid down laws therewith, that whoever should slay hart or hind should be 28 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KLYGS. blinded. He forbade the harts and also the boars to be killed. As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father He took from his subjects manjf marks of gold, and many hundred pounds of silver ; and that he took — some by right, and some by mickle might for very little need. He had fallen into avarice ; and greediness he loved withal. Among other things is not t;> be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land ; so that a man who had any confidence in himself might go ever his realm, with his bosom full of gold, unhurt. Nor durst any man slay another man had he done ever so great evil to the other. . . . Brytland (Wales) was in his power, and he therein wrought castles, and completely ruled over that race of men. . . • Certainly in his time men had great hardship, and very many injuries. . . . His rich men moaned, and the poor men murmured ; but he was so hard that he recked not the hatred of them all. For it was need they should follow the King's will, if they wished to live, or to have lands or goods. Alas, that any man should be so moody, and should so pul up himself, and think him- self above all other men 1 May Almighty God show mercy to his soul, and grant him forgiveness of his sins." There are other contemporary Anglo-Saxon annal- ists, and there are the rhyming chroniclers of Nor- man blood, who put a better color upon the quali- ties of King William ; but I think there is no one of them, who even in moments of rhetorical exaltation, thinks of putting "William's sense of justice, or his kindness of heart, before his greed or his self-love. HAROLD THE SAXON, 29 Harold the Saxon. The late Lord Lytton ( Bulwer ) gave to tlils per« iod and to the closing years of Harold one of the most elaborate of his Historic Studies. He availed himself shrewdly of all the most picturesque asj^ects (and they were very many) in the career of Harold, and found startling historic facts enough to supply to the full his passion for exaggerated melodrama. There are brilliant passages in his book,* and a great wealth of archsoologic material ; he shows us the remnants of old Roman villas — the crude home- liness of Saxon house surroundings — the assem- blage of old Palace Councils. Danish battle-axes, and long-bearded Saxon thanes, and fiery-headed Welshmen contrast with the poHshed and insidious Normans. Nor is there lacking a hea^'y and much over-weighted quota of love-making and misfortvme, and joy and death. Tennj^son has taken the same * Harold : the Last of the Saxon Kings ; first published in 1848 and dedicated to the Hon. C. T. D'Eyucourt, M.P., whose valuable library — says Bulweu — supplied much oi the material needed for the prosecution of the work. 30 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. subject, using the same skeleton of story for his play of Harold. It would seem that he has depended on the romance of Bulwer for his archaeology ; and indeed the book is dedicated to the younger Lord Lytton (better known in the literary world aa " Owen Meredith "). As a working play, it is counted, like all of Tennyson's — a failure ; but there are passages of exceeding beauty. Pie pictures the King Harold — the hero that he is — but with a veil of true Saxon gloom lowering over him : he tells the story of his brother Tostig's jeal- ous wrath, — always in arms against Harold : he tells of the hasty oath, which the king in young days had sworn to William in Normandy, never to claim England's throne : and this oath hangs like a cloud over the current of Harold's story. The grief, and noble devotion of poor Edith, the betrothed bride of the king, whom he is compelled by a devilish di- plomacy to discard — is woven like a golden thread into the woof of the tale : and Aldwyth, the queen, whom Harold did not and can never love, is set ofl against Edith — in Tennyson's own unmatchabie way in the last scenes of the tragedy. We are in the camp at Hastings : the battle waits j HAROLD THE SAXON. 31 a vision of Norman saints, on whose bones Harold had sworn that dreadful oath, comes to him in his trance : — They say — (these wraiths of saints) — hapless Harold ! king but for an hour ! Thou swarest falsely by our blessed bones, We give our voice against thee out of Heaven ! And warn him against the fatal arrow. And Harold — wakhig — says — Away I My battle-axe against your voices ! And then — remembering that old Edward the Confessor had told him on his deathbed that he should die by an arrow — his hope faints. The king's last word — " the arrow," I shall die : 1 die for England then, who lived for England. What nobler ? Man must die. I cannot fall into a falser world — I have done no man wrong. . . . Edith (his betrothed) comes in — Edith ! — Edith I Get thou into thy cloister, as the king Will'd it : . . . There, the great God of Truth Fill all thine hours with peace ! A lying Devil Hath haunted me — mine oath — my wife — I fain 32 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. Had made my marriage not a lie ; I could not: Thou art my bride ! and tliou, in after years, Praying perchance for this poor soul of mine In cold, white cells, beneath an icy moon. This memory to thee ! — and this to England, My legacy of war against the Pope, From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from Age to Age, Till the sea wash her level with her shores, Or till the Pope be Christ's. Aldwyth, the queen, glides in, and seeing Edith, says — Away from him ! Away I Edith says (we can imagine her sweet plaintive- ness) — I will. ... I have not spoken to tno king One word : and one I must. Farewell I And she offers to go. But Harold, beckoning with a gi*and gesture oi authority — Not yet I Stay I The king commands thee, woman ? And he turns to Aldwyth, from whose kinsmen he had expected aid — Have thy two brethren sent their forces in ? Akhcyth — Nay, I fear not. HAROLD THE SAXON. 33 And Harold blazes upon her — Then there's no force in thee ! Thou didst possess thyself of Edward's ear To part me from the woman that I loved. Thou hast been false to England and to me ' As — in some sort — I have been false to tliee. Leave me. No more. — Pardon on both sides. — Go I Aldicytli — Alas, my lord, I loved thee I O Harold ! husband ! Shall we meet again ? Harold — After the battle — after the battle. Go. Aldwyth — I go. {Adde.) That I could stab her standing there I {Exit Aldxm/ih. ) Edith — Alas, my lord, she loved thee. Harold — Never! never! Edith — I saw it in her eyes I Harold — I see it in thine I And not on thee — nor England — fall God's doom ! EditJi — On tJiee ? on me. And thou art England I Alfred Was England. Ethelred was nothing. England Is but her king, as thou art Harold I Harold — Edith, The sign in Heaven — the sudden blast at sea — My fatal oath — the dead saints — the dark dreams — The Pope's Anathema — the Holy Rood That bow'd to me at Waltham — Edith, if I, the last English King of England Edith— No, First of a lino that coming from the people, And chosen by the people 3 34 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. Harold — And fighting for And dying for the people Look, I will bear thy blessing into the battle And front the doom of God. And he did affront it bravely ; and the arrow did slay him, near to the spot where the Saxon standard flew to the breeze on that fateful day. The play from which I have quoted may have excess of elaboi-ation and an over-finesse in respect of details : but there are great bold reaches of descriptive power, a nobility of sentiment, and everywhere tender and winning touches, which will be very sure to give to the drama of Tennyson per- manence and historic dignity, and keep it always a literary waymai'k in the fields we have gone over. The scene of that decisive contest is less than a two hours' ride away from London (by the Southeastern Railway) at a village called Battle — seven miles from the coast Hne at Hastings — in the midst of a beautiful rolling country, with scattered copses of ancient wood and a great wealth of wild flowers — (for which the district is remarkable) sparkling over the fields. The Conqueror built a great abbey there — HAROLD THE SAXON: 35 Battle Abbey — "whose ruins are visited by hundreda every year. A large portion of tlie old religious house, kept in excellent repair, and very charming with its growth of ivy and its embowering shade, is held in private hands — being the occasional residence of the Duke of Cleveland. Amid the ruins the usher will guide one to a crypt of the ancient chapel — whose solid Norman arches date back to the time of the Conqueror, and which is said to mark the very spot on which Harold fell, wounded to the death, on that memorable day of Hastings. CHAPTEE n. IEECUK a moment to what was said in our opening talk — as a boy will wisely go back a little way for a better jump forward. I spoke — the reader will remember — of ringing, Celtic war-songs, which seemed to be all of literature that was drift- ing in the atmosphere, when we began : then there came a gleam of Christian light and of monkish learning thro' St. Augustine in Southern England ', and another gleam through lona, and Lindisfame, from Irish sources ; then came Csedmon's Bible singing, — which had echo far down in Milton's day ; next the good old Beda, teUing the story of these things ; then — a thousand years ago, — the Great Alfred, at once a book-maker and a King. Before him and after him came a drear}' welter of Danish wars ; the great Canute — tradition says — chu-ping a song in the middle of them ; and last, the slaughter GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH. 37 of Hastings, where the Saxon Harold -went down, and the conquering Norman came up. Geoffrey of Monmouth. "We start to-day with an England that has its office-holding and governing people speaking one language — its moody land-holders and cultivators speaking another — and its irascible Britons in Wales and Cumbria and Cornwall speaking yet an- other. Conquered people are never in much mood for song-singing or for histoiy-making. So there is little or nothing from Enghsh sources for a century or more. Even the old Saxon Chronicle kept by monks (at Peterboro in this time), does not grow into a stately record, and in the twelfth century on the year of the death of King Stephen, dies out altogether. But there is a Welsh monk — Geoffrey of Mon- mouth * — Uving just on the borders of Wales, and probably not therefore brought into close connec- tion with this new Norman element — who writes * Geoffrey of Monmouth (Bishop of St. Asaph), d. 1154. His Cronicon, me Hisloria Britonum first printed in 1508 : translated into Eng., 1718. Vid. Wright's Essays Arch. Sub., 1861. 38 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. (about one liundi*ed years after the Conquest) a half- earnest and mostly-fabulous British Chronicle. He professes to have received its main points from a Walter — somebody, who had rare old bookish se- crets of history, derived from Brittany, in his keep- ing. You will remember, perhaps, how another and very much later wiiter — sometimes known as Geoffrey Crayon — once wrote a History of New York, claiming that it was made up from the IMSS. of a certain Diedrich Knickerbocker : I think that per- haps the same sense of quiet humor belonged to both these Geoffreys. Certainly Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle bears about the same relation to British matters of fact which the Knickerbocker story of New York bears to the colonial annals of our great city. The fables which were told in this old Monmouth Chronicle are more present in men's minds to-day than the things which were real in it : there was, for instance, the fable about King Lear (who does not know King Lear ?) : then, there were the greater fables about good King Arthur and his avenging Caliburn (who does not know King Arthur?). These two stories are embalmed now in Literature, and will never perish. KING ARTHUR LEGENDS. 39 King Arthur Legends. Those Arthur legends had been floating about in ballad or song, but they never had much mention in anything pretending to be history * until Geoffrey of Monmouth's day. There is nothing of them in the Saxon Chronicle : nothing of them in Beda : "King Alfred never mentions King iVrthur. But was there ever a King Arthur ? Probably : but at what precise date is uncertain : jirobable, too, that ho had his court — as many legends run — one time at Caerleon, "upon Usk," and again at Camelot.f Caerleon is still to be found by the cu- rious traveller, in pleasant Monmouthshire, just upon the borders of Wales, with Tintem Abbey and the grand ruin of Chepstow not far off ; and a great amphitheatre among the hills (very likely of Eoman *Such exception as the name warrants, must be made in favor of Nennius, § 50, A. D. 452. f Other important Arthurian localities belong to the north and west of England ; and whoso is curious in such matters, will read with interest Mr. Stuart Glennie's ingeuious ar- gument to prove that Scotland was the great cradle of Ar, thurian Romance. Early English Text Society, Part iii.^ 1869. 40 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. origin) with green turf upon it, and green liill- sides hemming it in — is still called King Arthur's Round Table. Camelot is not so easy to trace : the name will not be found in the guide-books : but in Somersetshire, in a Kttle parish, called " Queen's Camel," are the re- mains of vast entrenchments, said to have belonged to the tourney ground of Camelot. A little branch of the Yeo Eiver (you will remember this name, if you have ever read Charles 'Kingsley's " Westward, Ho " — a book you should read) — a little branch, I say, of the Yeo runs tlu'ough the parish, and for in-igating purposes is held back by dykes, and then shot, shin- ing, over the green meadows : hence, Tennyson may say truly, as he does in his Idyls of the King — " Tliey vanished panic-stricken, like a shoal Of darting fish, that on a summer's morn Adown the crystal dykes at Camelot, Come slipping o'er their shadow, on the sand." There are some features of this ancient fable of King Arthur, which are of much older literary date than the times we are now speaking of. Thus " the dusky barge," that appears on a sudden — coming to carry off the dying King, — KING ARTHUR LEGENDS. 41 " whose decks are dense with stately forms, Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream — by these Three queens with crowns of gold, and from them rose A cry that shivered to the tingling stars " has a very old germ ; — Something not unlike this watery bier, to carry a dead hero into the Silences, belongs to the opening of that ancient poem of Beowulf — -which all students of early English know and prize — but which did not grow on English soil, and therefore does not belong to our present quest.* The brand Escalibur, too, which is thrown into the sea by King Arthur's friend, and which is caught by an arm clothed in white samite, rising from the mere, and three times bran- dished, has its prototype in the " old mighty sword " which is put into the hands of Beowulf before he can slay the gi-eat sea-dragon of the Scandinavian fable. Now, these Arthurian stories, put into book by * The fable is Scandinavian. The Anglo-Saxon version, dating probably from the seventh century, makes it a very important way-mark in the linguistic history of England. Eng. editions are numerous: among them — those of Kemble, 1833-7 : Thorpe, 1855 and 1875 : Arnold, 1876 : also (Am. ed.) Harrison, 1883: Translations accompany the three first named : a more recent one has appeared (1883) by Dr. Garnett? of Md. 43 LANDS, LETTERS, 6^ KINGS. Geoffrey — a Latin book, for all the monks wrote in Latin, though they may have sung songs in English, as good father Aldhelm did — were presently caught up by a romance-wi'iter, named "Wace, who was liv- ing at Caen, in Normandy, and whose knightly cousins (some say father and titled baron) had come over with William the Conqueror, — the name being long known in Nottinghamshire. This Wace put these Arthur stories into Norman verse — adding somewhat and giving a French air, which made his book sought after and read in royal courts ; and frag- ments of it were chanted by minstrels in castle halls. Then, this Arthur mine of Legends was exj)lored again by another priest and Welshman, who came to have some place at Oxford, where the beginnings of the great university were then a-brew. This writer, Walter Map* by name — or Mapes, as he is sometimes called — lived just about the meeting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the cru- sades were in full blast, and when dreams about the * Waltek Map, or Mapes, was born on the borders of Wales about 1143, and was living as Archdeacon at Oxford as late as 1196 : possibly this was the Walter who supplied material to Geoffrey of Monmouth ; there was however another Walter (Calienus) who was also Archdeacon at Oxford. KING ARTHUR LEGENDS. 43 Holy Sepulchre hovered round half the house roofs of England. People saw in visions the poor fam- ished pilgrims, fainting with long marches toward the far-away Jerusalem, and shot down by cruel Saracen arrows, within sight of the Holy of Holies. So Walter Map, the priest (they say he was one while chaplain to Henry H.), writing under light of that fierce enthusiasm, puts a religious element into the Arthur stories; and it is from him — in all prob- ability — comes that Legend of the Holy Graal — the cup which caught the sacred blood, and which saintly knights were to seek after, the pure Sir Galahad being the winning seeker. Nor did the Arthur legends stop here : but an- other priestly man, Layamon* — he, too, Hving on the borders of Wales, in the foraging ground of Arthur's knights, not far from the present town of Kidderminster (which we know carpet-mse) — set himself to turning the Legends, with many addi- tions, into short, clanging, alliterative Saxon verses, * Lajamon's work supposed to date (there being only in- ternal evidence of its epoch) in the first decade of the thir- teenth century. Vid. Marsh : English Language and Early Literature. Lecture IV. An edition, with translation, waa published by Sir Frederic Madden in 1857. 44 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. with occasional rhyme — the first EngKsh (or Teu tonic) wording of the story ; Map's version being in Latin and French. He copies very much from Wace {Le Brut d'Angleterre), but his book is longer by a half. It has its importance, too — this Layamon ver- sion — in the history of the language. Of the why and the how, and of its linguistic relations to the Anglo-Saxon, or the modern tongue, I shall leave discussion in the hands of those more instructed in the history of Early English. We know this Laya- mon in our present writing, only as a simple-minded, good, plodding, West-of-England priest, who asked God's blessing on his work, and who put that quaint alliterative jingle in it, which in years after was spent in larger measure over the poem of Piers Plowman, and which, stiU later, comes to even daintier usage when the great master — Spenser " fills with flowers fair Flora's painted lap." Even now we are not through with this story of the Arthurian legends : it does not end with the priest Layamon. After printing was invented, and an easier way of making books was in vogue than the old one of tediously copying them upon parch- KING ARTHUR LEGENDS. 45 ment — I say in this new day of printing a certain Sir Thomas Mallory, who lived at the same time with Caxton, the first English printer, did, at the instance, I think, of that printer — put all these le- gends we speak of into rather stiff, homely English prose — copying, Caxton tells us, from a French original : but no such full French original has been found ; and the presumption is that Mallory bor- rowed (as so many book-makers did and do) up and do^Ti, from a world of manuscripts. And he wrought so weU that his work had great vogue, and has come to frequent issue in modem times, under the hands of such editors as Southey, Wright, Strachey and Lanier. In the years following Mal- lory, succeeding writers poached frequently upon the old Arthur preserve — bit by bit* — till at last, in our day, Tennyson told his "Idyl of the King" — " aud all the people cried, Arthur is come again : he canuot die. And those that stood upon the hills behind Repeated — Come again, and thrice as fair." * Among other direct Arthurian growtl::s may be noted Moiuiis'8 Defence of Guinevere ; Arnold's Triairam and iseuU ; Quinet's Merlin, Wagner's Operatic Poems, and Smith's Edtdn of Deira. 46 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. Early Norman Kings. We come back now from this chase of Arthur, to the time of the Early Norman Kings : Orderic Vi- talis,* of Normandy, William of Malmsbnry, f Mat- thew Paris, J William of Newburgh,§ (whose record has just now been re-edited and printed in England,) and Roger of Hoveden, || were chroniclers of this pe- riod ; but I am afraid these names will hardly be kept in mind. Indeed, it is not worth much struggle to do so, unless one is going into the writing of History on his owTi account. Exception ought perhaps to be made in favor of Matthew Paris, who was a monk of * Orderic Vitalis, b. 1075 ; d. 1150. Of Abbey of St. Evroult, in Normandy. An edition of bis Ecclesiastical HiS' tory of England and Normandy was published in 1826, with notice of writer, by GuizOT. t William of Malmsbury : dates uncertain ; his record terminates with year 1143. X Matthew Paris, 1200-1259, a monk of St. Albans. His Historia Major extends from 1235 to 1259. § William of Newburgh, b. 113G ; d. 1208. New edi« tion of his record (Jlist. Iterum Anglicarum), edited by Rich- ard HOWLET, published in 1884 II Roger de Hoveden of twelfth century, (date uncer. tain.) His annals first published in 1595. EARLY NORMAN KINGS. 47 St. Albans, who won his name from studvinfc at Paris (as many Hve students of that day did), who put a brave and vehement Saxonism of thought into his Latin speech — who had art enough to illustrate his own Chi'onicle with his pencil, and honesty enough to steer by God's rule only and not by the King's. One should remember, too, that this was about the period of the best Provenyal balladry (in which Richard Coeur de Lion was proficient) ; — that strain of medieeval music and love regaling the Crusader knights on their marches toward Judea, and that strain of music and love waking delightful echoes against Norman castle-walls on their return. Again, one should keep note of the year when Magna Ctiarta was granted by King John (1215), and re- member, furthermore, that within ten years of the same date (1205) Layamon probably put the finish- ing touches to his Brut, and the Ai"thurian stories I was but now speaking of. Throughout these times — we will say the twelfth century and early in the thirteenth, — England was waxing every day stronger, though it grew strong in a rough and bloody way ; the great Norman castles were a-building up and do'vvn the land — 48 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. such as Conway and Rochester and Cardiff and Kenilworth : the older cathedrals, too, such as Dur- ham and Winchester and Canterbury and Ely were then piling column by column and vault by vault toward the grand proportions which amaze us to* day. It was the time of growing trade too : ships from Genoa and Venice lay off the Thames banks, and had brought thither cargoes of silks and glass, jewels, Milanese armor, and spicea Cloth-makers came over from Flanders and made settlements in England. Perhaps you have read Scott's story of the " Be- trothed." If so, you will remember his description of just such a Flemish settlement in its earlier chap- ters, with its Wilkin Flammock and its charming Rose. The scene is laid in the time of HeniT 11., that sturdy King, who had such woful trouble with his wild sons, Eichard and John, and still larger trouble with Thomas a Be eke t, (known now, as Harold is known, by Tennyson's tender music) who came to his death at last by the King's connivance, imder the arches of Canterbury Cathedi-al ; and so made that Bhrine sacred for pilgrims, whether they came from the "Tabard Inn," or other^vheres. EARLY NORMAN KINGS. 4g That story of the "Betrothed" puts in presence winningly, the threefold elements of English pop- ulation in that day — the Britons, the Saxons, and the Normans. The Britons are pictured by a scene of revel in the great rambling palace of a Welsh King, where the bard Cadwallon sings, and that other bard, Caradoc — both historic characters ; and it is upon a legend in the chronicle of the latter, Southey has based his poem of "Madoc." The Nor- mans are represented, in the same romance, by the men-at-arms, or knights of the Castle of La Garde Doloureuse, and the Saxons by the fierce old lady in the rehgious house of Baldringham, where Eveline the heroine, had such fearful experiences with hob- goblins over night. There may be lapses in the archaeology — as where Scott puts a hewn fireplace upon the wall of the dining-room of the Lady Er- mengarde — antiquarians being pretty weU agreed that chimneys of such class were unknown up to the fourteenth century ; but still the atmosphere of twelfth-century life in England is better given than in most of our histories.* * I do not mean to say that Scott's portraitures maj te taken as archseologic data, or that one in search of the last JO LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. Hichard Co&ur de Lion. In the same connection and with same commen- dation, may be named those other romances, " The Talisman" and "Ivanhoe," both relating to epochs in the life of liing Eichard I. I suppose that of all EngHsh people, who have any figure in their minda of Eichard Coeur de Lion, his bearing and charac- ter, four-fifths will have derived the larger part of their impressions from these two books of Scott. It is a painting by a friendly hand : Scott loved kings ; and he loved the trace of Saxonism that was in Eichard's blood ; he loved his bravery, as every Eng- lishman always had and should. Is it quite needful that the friendly painter should put in all the bad birth-marks, or the bristling red beard ? M. Taine scores him savagely, and would have him a and minutest truths respecting our Welsh, or Saxon progeni- tors should not go to more recondite sources ; meantime you will get very much from the reading of Scott to aid you in forming an image of those times ; and, what is better still, you will very likely carry from the Romancer's glowing pages a sharpened appetite for the more careful but duller work of the historians proper. RICHARD CCEUR DE LION. 51 beast : and Thackeray, in his little story of Re« becca and Rowena, uses a good deal of blood in the coloring. No doubt he was cruel : but those were days of cruelty and of cruel kings. At least he was openly cruel : he carried his big battle-axe in plain sight, and if he met a foe thwacked him on the head with it, and there was an end. But he did not kill men on the sly like his brother King John, nor did he poison men by inches in low dungeons, as did so many of the polite and courteous Louis' of France. As people say now — in a good Saxon way — you knew where to find him. He was above-board, and showed those traits of boldness and frankness which almost make one forgive his cruelties. He was a rough burr ; and I daresay wiped his beard upon the sleeve of his doublet, besides killing a great many people he should not have killed, at Ascalon. At any rate, we shall not set to work here to gainsay or discredit those charming historic pictures of Scott "We shall keep on going to the pleasant tournament- ground at Ashby-de-la-Zouche every time the fanfare of those trumpets breaks the silence of a leisure 52 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. day ; and so will our cliildren ; and so, I think, will our children's children. We shall keep on listening to Wamba's jokes, and keep on loving Rebecca, and keep on — not thinking much of the airy Rowena, and keep on throwing our caps in the air whenever the big knight in black armor, who is Richard of England, rides in upon the course — whatever all the Frenchmen in the world may say about him. This Coeur de Lion appears too in the "TaUs- man " — one of Scott's tales of the crusaders : and here we see him set off against other monarchs of Europe ; as we find England, also, set off against the other kingdoms. The King came home, you will re- member, by the way of Austria, and was caught and caged there many months — for a time none of liis people knowing where he was : this is good romance and history too. A tradition, which probably has a little of both, says his prison was discovered by a brother minstrel, who wandered under castle- walls in search of him, and sang staves of old Pro- ven9al songs that were favorites of the King's. Fin- ally Richard responded from the depths of his dungeon. Howsoever this be, he was found, ran- TIMES OF KING JOHN: 53 somed, and came home — to the great grief of his brother John ; all which appears in the storj' of Ivanhoe, and in the chronicles of the time — based upon the reports of the King's chaplain, Anselm. Times of King John. King John — a base fellow every way — has a date made for him by the grant of Magna Charta, a.d. 1215, of which I have already spoken, and of its near coincidence with the writing of the Brut of Layamon. His name and memory also cling to mind in connection with two other events which have their literary associations. First, this scoundrelly King could only keep power by making away with his little nephew Arthur, and out of this tragedy Shakespeare has woven his play of John — not very much read per- haps, and rarely acted ; but in the old, school reader-books of my time there used to be ex- cerpted a passage — a whole scene, in fact — repre- senting the interview between Arthur and his gaoler Hubert, who is to put out the poor boy's eyes. I quote a fragment : — 54 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. Arthur — Must you with irons burn out both mine eyes ? Hubert — Young boy, I must. Arthur — And will you ? Hubert — And I will. Arthur — Have you the heart ? When your head did but ache, I knit my handkerchief about your brows. And again, when the ruffians come in with the irons, Hubert says — " Give me the irons, I say, and bind him here." Arthur — Alas, what need you be so boisterous rough ? I will not struggle ; I will stand stone still ; For Heaven's sake, Hubert, let me not be bound. I don't know how young people are made up now-a-days ; but in the old times this used to touch us and almost set us upon the "weep" and make us rank King John with Beelzebub and — the School-master. Second : In King John's day Normandy was lost to England — the loss growing largely, in fact, out of the cruelty just named, and its ensuing wars. Losing NoiTuandy had a vast influence upon the growing speech of England. Hitherto the cherished mother-land had been across the channel Sons of TIMES OF KING JOHN. 55 the •well-born had been sent over to learn French on French ground : young ladies of fashion or- dered, without doubt, their best cloaks and hats from Eouen : the English ways of talk might do for the churls and low-bom : but it was discredited by the more cultivated — above all by those who made pursuit of the gayeties and elegancies of life. The priest fraternity and the universities of course kept largely by Latin ; and the old British speech only lived in the moimtains and in the rattling war- songs of the Welsh bards. But when Norman nobles and knights found themselves cut off from their old home associations with Normandy, and brought into more intimate relations with the best of the Eng- lish population, there grew up a new pride in the land and language of their adoption. Hence there comes about a gradual weaning from France. Lon- don begins to count for more than Eouen. The Norman knights and barons very likely season their talk with what they may have called English slang; and the better taught of the islanders — the sons of country franklins affected more knowledge of the Norman tongue, and came to know the French romances, which minstrels sang at theii $6 LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS. doors. So it was that slowly, and with results only observable after long lapse of years, the nation and Innguage became compacted into one ; and the new English began to be taught in the schools. Mixed Language. Of the transition stage, as it was called, there are narrative poems of record, which were written with a couplet in Norman French, and then a coup- let in Enghsh. There were medleys, too, of these times, in which the friars mingled the three tongues of Latin, French, and EngHsL* Blood mingled aa languages mingled ; and by the middle of the four- teenth century a man was no longer foreign because he was of Norman descent, and no longer vulgar because he was of Saxon. To this transition time — in Henry m.'a day (who * I give fragment of one, of the reign of Edward II., cited by Mr. Marsh : p. 247, English Language and Early Liter- ature. " Quant honme deit parleir, videat qua verba loquatur ; Sen covent aver, ne stultior inveniatur, Quando quis loquitur, bote resoun reste therynne Derisum patitur, ant lutel so shal he wynne,'' etc. MIXED LANGUAGE. 57 had a long reign of fifty-six years — chiefly memor- able for its length), there appeared the rhyming Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester ; * — what we should call a doggerel story of England from fabu- lous times down, and worthy of mention as the first serious attempt at an English-written history — others noticed already being either merely bald chronicles, or in scholastic Latin, or in French met- ric form. I give you a little taste of his wooden verse — Lyncolne [has] fairest men, Grantebra?ge and Hontyndon most plente 5 deep fen, Ely of fairest place, of fairest site Rochester, Even agen Fraunce stonde ye countre 6 Chichester, Norwiche agen Denemark, Chestre agen Irelond, Duram agen Norwei, as ich understonde. Yet he tells us some things worth knowing — about every-day matters — about the fish and the fruits and the pastures, and the things he saw with his own eyes. And we learn from these old chron- * Robert of Gloucester lived in the latter part of the thir- teenth century, perhaps surviving into the fourteenth. In addition to his Chronicle of England, he is thought to have written Lives and Legends of tlie Engluh Saints. 58 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. iclers how mucli better a story a man can make, and how much more worth it is — in teUing of the things he has really seen, than of the things he has not seen. Most of these old writing people must needs begin at the beginning — drawHug over the ancient fables about the Creation and Siege of Troy, keep- ing by the conventional untruths, and so — very barren and good for nothing, until they get upon their own days, when they grow rich and meaty and juicy, in spite of themselves, and by reason of their voluble minuteness, and their mention of homely, every-day unimportant things. They cannot tell lies, without fear of detection, on their o^vn ground : and so they get that darUngest quality of all his- tory — the simple truth. But if a man wanders otherwheres and makes re- port, he may teU lies, and the lies may amuse and get him fame. Thus it happened with another well-known but somewhat apocryphal writer of this Transition English epoch ; I mean Sir John Man- deville, whose book of travels into distant countries had a very great run. SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE. 59 Sir John Mandeville. We know little of Mandeville except what he tells us ; — that he was born at St. Albans — twenty miles from London, a place famous for its great abbey and its Roman remains — in the year 1300 : — that he studied to be a mediciner — then set off (1322) on his travels into Egypt, Tartary, China, and Persia — countries visited by that more famous Venetian traveller, Marco Polo,* a half century ear- lier ; — also, at other dates by certaia wandering Italian Friars f of less fame. From some of these earlier travellers it is now made certain that Sir John pilfered very largely ; — so largely, in fact, and so rashly, that there is reason to doubt, not only his stories about having been in the service of a Sultan * n milione di Messer Marco Polo, Veneziatio. Florence, 1827. Marco Polo d. 1323. f Odouic, a priest of Pordenone in Friuii, who went on Church mission about 1318. His narrative is to be found in the Rammio Col., 2d Vol. 1574. Carpini (Joannes do Plaiw), was a Franciscan from near Perugia, who travelled East about 1245. Hakluyt has portions of his narrative : but full text is only in Eeciieil de Voyages, Vol. IV., by M. D'Avezac. 6o LANDS, LETTERS, &> AVJVGS. of Egypt or of the Khan of Kathay — as he avers -^ but also to doubt if he visited at all the far-away countries which he pretends to describe. Nay, so deflowered is he of his honors in these latter days, that recent critics * are inchned to ques- tion his right to the title of Sir John, and to deny wholly his authorship of that English version of the tales of travel, which have been so long and pleas- antly associated with his name. This seems rather hard measure to mete out to the garrulous old voyager ; nor does the evidence against his having Enghshed his own Romance stories, appear fully conclusive. What we may count for certain about the matter is this : — There does exist a very considerable budget of dehghtfully extrava- gant travellers' tales, bearing the Mandeville name, and written in an EngHsh which — with some mend- ing of bygone words — is charming now: and which may be called the first fair and square book of the new English prose ; — meaning by that — the first book of length and of popular currency which in- troduced a full measure — perhaps over-running * Messrs. Nicholson and Yule, who are sponsors for the elaborate article in the Br. Ency. SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE. b\ measure — of those words of Romance or Latin ori- gin, which afterward came to be incoi-porated in the English of the fifteenth century. The book has no EngHsh quaUties — beyond its language ; and might have been written by a Tartar, who could tell of Munchausen escapes and thank God in good cur- rent dialect of Britain. I give a specimen from the desciiption of his de- scent into the Valley Perilous — which he found be- side the Isle of IVIistorak, nigh to the river Phison : This Vale is all full of devils, and hath been always. And men say there that it is one of the entries of hell. In that Vale is plenty of gold and silver ; wherefore many misbeliev- ing men, and many Christians also, oftentimes go in, to have of the treasure. . . . And in midplace of that Vale is an head of the visage of a devil bodily — full horrible and dread- ful to see. But there is no man in the world so hardy, Chris- tian man, ne other, but that he would be drad [afraid] for to behold it. For he beholdeth every man so sharply with dreadful eyen that ben evermore moving and sparkling as fire, and changeth and steereth so often in divers manner, with 60 horrible countenance, that no man dare not nighen toward him. The author says fourteen of his party went in, and when they came out — only nine : " And we wisten never, whether that our fellows were lost or elles 62 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. turned again for dread. But we never saw them never after." He says there were plenty of jewels and precious stones thereabout, but "I touched none, because that the Devils be so subtle to make a thing to seem otherwise than it is, for to deceive mankind." He tells us also of the giants Gog and Magog, and of a wonderful bird — like the roc of Arabian Nights' fable — that would carry off an ele- phant in its talons, and he closes all his stupendous narratives with thanks to God Almighty for his mar- vellous escapes. I have spoken of its populaiity. Halliwell — who edits the London edition of 1839 — says that of no book, with the exception of Scriptures, are there so many MSS. of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries existing ; showing that for two centuiies its fables were either not exploded, or at least lost not their relish. Early Book-making. And now what do we mean by books and by popularity at the end of the thirteenth century? The reader must keep in mind that our notion of popularity measured by thousands of copies would EARLY BO OK- MAKING. 63 then have been regarded as strange as the most monstrous of Sii' John MandeAille's stories. There was no printing ; there was no paper, either — as we understand. The art, indeed, of making paper out of pulp did exist at this date with the Oriental nations — perhaps with the Moors in Spain, but not in England. Parchment made from skins was the main material, and books were engrossed laboredly with a pen or stylus. It was most hkely a very pop- ular book which came to an edition of fifty or sixty copies within five years of its fii'st appearance : and a good manuscrij)t was so expensive an aflfair that its purchase was often made a matter to be testi- fied to by subscribing witnesses, as we witness the transfer of a house. A little budget of these manu- scripts made a valuable hbrary. When St. Augus- tine planted his Church in Kent — he brought nine volumes with him as his literary treasure. Lanfranc, who was one of the Norman abbots brought over by the Conqueror to build uj) the priesthood in learning, made order in 1072 that at Lent the hbrarian should deliver to the worthiest of the brotherhood each a book ; and these were to have a year to read them. At the commencement of 64 LANDS, LETTERS, &» KINGS. the fourteenth century there were only four classics in the royal library of Paris ; and at the same date the library of Oxford University consisted of a few tracts kept in chests under St. Mary's Church. — Green, in his "Making of England,"* cites from Alcuin a bit of that old Churchman's Latin poem — " De Fontificibus " — which he says is worthy of spe- cial note, as the first catalogue which we have of any Enghsh Library. " Quidquid Gregorius summus docet, et Leo Papa ; Basilius quidquid, Fulgentius atque, coruscant, Cassiodorus item, Chrysostomus atque Johannes Quidquid et Athelmus docuit, quid Beda magister." Beda and Aldhelm are the only English writers represented ; and the catalogue — if we call it such — could be written on a half -page of note paper — Metaphors and Geography and Theology and dec- orative epithets included. Thus in these times a book was a book : some of them cost large sums ; the mere transcription into plain black-letter or Old Enghsh was toilsome and involved weeks and months of labor ; and when it * Page 407, chap. viii. EARLY BOOK-MAKING. 65 came to illuminated borders, or initials and title- pages with decorative paintings, the labor involved was enormous. There were collectors in those days as now — who took royal freaks for gorgeous mis- sals ; and monkish lives were spent in gratifying the whims of such collectors. In the year 1237 (Henry m.) there is entry in the Revenue RoU of the costs of silver clasps and studs for the King's great book of Romances. Upon the continent, in Italy, whero an art atmosphere prevailed that was more enkin- dling than under the fogs of this savage England, such work became thoroughly artistic ; and even now beautiful motifs for decoration on the walls of New York hovises are sought from old French or Latin manuscripts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And where was this work of making books done ? There were no book-shops or publishers' houses, but in place of them abbeys or monasteries -- each having its scriptorium or writing-room, where, under the vaulted Norman arches and by the dim light of their loop-holes of windows, the work of transcription went on month after month and year after year. Thus it is recorded that in that old mou- 66 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. astery of St. Albans (of which we just now spoke) eighty distinct works were transcribed during the reign of Henry VI. ; it is mentioned as swift work ; and as Henry reigned thirty-nine years, it counts up about two complete MSS. a year. And the atmo- sphere of St, Albans was a learned one ; this locality not being overmuch given to the roisterings that belonged to Bolton Priory — of which you will re- member the hint in a pleasant picture of Land- seer's. Heligious Houses. If you or I had journeyed thither in that day — coming from what land we might — I think we should have been earnest among the first things, to see those great monasteries that lay scattered over the surface of England and of Southern Scot- land ; — not perched on hills or other defensible positions like the Norman castles of the robber Barons — not buried in cities Hke London Tower, or the great halls which belonged to guilds of mer- chants — but i^lanted in the greenest and loveliest of valleys, where rivers full of fish rippled within hearing, and woods full of game clothed every RELIGIOUS HOUSES. 67 headland that looked upon the valley ; where the fields were the richest — where the water was purest — where the sun smote warmest ; there these relig- ious houses grew up, stone by stone, cloister by cloister, chapel by chapel, manor by manor, until there was almost a township, with outlying cottages — and some great dominating abbey church — rich in aU the choicest architecture of the later Nonnan days — hfting its sjoire from among the clustered buildings scarce less lovely than itself. Not only had learning and book-making been kept ahve in these great religious houses, but the art of Agriculture. Within their walled courts were gro^Ti all manner of fruits and vegetables known to their climate ; these monks knew and followed the best rulings of Cato, and Crescenzius (who just now has written on this subject in Northern Italy, and is heard of by way of Padua). They make sour wine out of grapes grown against suuuy walls : they have abundant flocks too — driven out each morn- ing from their sheltering courts, and retm*ned each night ; and they have great breadth of ground un- der carefullest tillage. Of such character was Tintern Abbey — in the 68 LANDS, LETTERS, (S- KINGS. valley of the Wye — now perhaps the most charm- ing of all English ruins. Such another was Netley Abbey, on Southampton water, and Bolton Priory, close by that famous stream, the Wharfe, which you will remember in Wordsworth's story of the " White Doe of Kylstone." Fountain's Abbey, in Yorkshire, was yet another, from whose niin we can study better perhaps than from any other in England, the extent and disposition of these old rehgious houses. Melrose was another ; and so was Dry- burgh, where Scott's body lies, and Abingdon, close upon Oxford — where was attached that Manor of Cumnor, which Scott assigns for a prison to the sad-fated Amy Robsart, in the tale of "Kenil worth." Glastonbury was another : this too (once encircled by the arms of the river Brue), was the " Isle of Av- alon " in Arthurian romance ; " Where falls not hail, or rain or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly." Here (at Glastonbury) is still in existence the abbot's barn of the fourteenth century, and here, too, a mag- nificent abbot's kitchen — thirty-three feet square and seventy-two feet high : Think what the cooking RELIGIOUS HOUSES. 69 and the meats must have been in a kitchen of that style ! Now, these shrewd people who lived in these great monasteries, and built them, and enjoyed the good things kept in store there — made friends of the vassals about them ; they were generous with their pot-herbs and fruits ; they were the medicine- men of the neighborhood ; they doled out flasks of wine to the sick ; they gave sanctuary and aid to the Kobin Hoods and Little Johns ; and Eobin Hood's men kept them in supply of venison ; they enlivened their courts with minstrelsy. Warton says that at the feast of the installation of Ealph, Abbot of St. Augustine's, Canterbur}', in 1309, seventy shil- lings was expended for minstrels in the gallery, and six thousand guests were present in and about the halls. Many abbeys maintained minstrels or harp- ers of their own ; and we may be sure that the monks had jolly as well as religious ditties. They made friends of all strong and influential people near them ; their revenues were enormous. They established themselves by all the arts of con- ciliation. Finding among their young vassals one keener and sharper witted than his fellows, they be 70 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. guiled him into the abbey — instructed him — per. haps made a clerk of him, for the transcription of the MSS. we have spoken of (it was thus Ceedmon was brought into notice) ; if very promising, he might come to place of dignity among the monks — possibly grow, as Thomas a Becket did, from such humble beginnings to an archbishopric and to the mastership of the religious heart of England. These houses were the fat corporations of that day, with their lobby-men and spokesmen in all state assemblages. Their representatives could wear hair shirts, or purple robes and golden mitres, as best suited the needs of the occasion. They could boast that their institutions were established — like our railways — for the good of the people, and in the interests of humanity ; but while rendering ser- vice, waxing into such lustiness of strength and such habits of corruption and rapacity, that at last, when fully bloated, they were broken open and their riches drifted away under the whirlwind of the wi-ath of King Heniy "Vm. Great schemes of greed are very apt to carry an avenging Henry VIII. some, where in their trail. But let us not forget that there was a time in the early centuries of Christian Eng- RELIGIOUS HOUSES. 71 land when these gi'eat reUgious houses — n hose mins appeal to us from their lovely solitudes — were the guardians of learning, the nurses of all new explorations into the ways of knowledge, the expounders of all heahng arts, and the promoters of all charities and all neighborly kindliness.* "What- ever young fellow of that day did not plant himself under shadow of one of these religious houses for growth, or did not study in the schools of Oxford or Cambridge, must needs have made his way into favor and fame and society with a lance * An abbot presided over monasteries — sometimes inde- pendent of the bishop — sometimes (in a degree) subject. Priors also had presidence over some religious houses — but theirs was usually a delegated authority. An aesthetic abbot or prior was always building — or always getting new colors for the missal work in the scriptorium : hunting abbots were thinking more of the refectory. At least six religious ser- vices were held a day, and always midnight mass. It was easy, but not wholly a life of idleness. A bell summoned to breakfast, and bells to mass. Of a sunny day — monks were teaching boys one side of the cloister — artistic monks work- ing at their missals the other ; perhaps under such prior aa he of Jorcaulx (Scott's Ivanhoe) some young monk would be training his hawks or dogs. An interesting abstract of the Rule of the Benedictines may be found under Monachism, Br. Ency., Vol. xvi. 72 LANDS, LETTERS, £-» KINGS. and good horse — just as young fellows do it now with an oar or a racket. Life of a Damoiselle. But what shall be said of a young person of the other sex of hke age and tastes — to whose ambi- tions war and knight-errantry and the university cloisters are not open ? Whither should the daugh- ters of the great houses go, or how fill up the cur- rent of their young lives in that old thirteenth-cen- tury England ? It is true, there are religious houses — nunneries — priories — for these, too, with noble and saintly prioresses, such as St. Hilda's, St. Agatha's, St. Mar- garet's ; all these bountiful in their charities, strict for most part in their discipline. To these clois- tered schools may go the cousins, sisters, nieces of these saintly lady superiors ; here they may learn of music, of embroidery, of letter -writing, and Christian carols — in Latin or English or French, as the case may be. If not an inmate of one of these quiet cloisters, our young thirteenth- century damsel will find large advantage in its LIFE OF A DAMOISELLE. 73 neighborhood ; in the interchange of kindly offices — in the loan of illuminated missals, of fruits, of flowers, of haunches of venison, and in the assur- ance that tenderest of nurses and consolers will be at hand in case of illness or disaster ; and always there — an unfailing sanctuary. At home, within the dingy towers of a castle or squat Saxon home- stead, with walls hung in tapestry, or made only half bright with the fire upon the hearthstone — with shts of windows filled with horn or translucent bits of skin — there must have been wearisome en- nui. Yet even here there were the deft handmaids, cheery and companionable; the games — dcixughts of a surety (in rich houses the checkers being of jasper or rock crystal) ; the harp, too, and the f;J- cous for a hunting bout in fair weather ; the little garden within the court — with its eglantine, its pinks, its lilies fair. Possibly there may be also transcripts of old chansons between ivory lids — images carven out of olive wood — relics brought to the castle by friendly knights from far-away Pales- tine. And travelling merchants find their way to Buch homes — briuging glass beads from Venice, and little dainty mirrors, just now the vogue in that 74 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. great City by the Sea ; and velvet and filigree head« dresses, and jewels and bits of tapestry from Flem- ish cities. Perhaps a minstrel — if the revenues of the family cannot retain one — will stroll up to the castle-gates of an evening, giving foretaste of his power by a merry snatch of song about Kobin Hood, or Sir Guy, or the Nut Brown Maid. Some company of priests with a lordly abbot at their head, journeying up from St. Albans, may stop for a day, and kindle up with cheer the great hall, which will be fresh strown with aromatic herbs for the occasion ; and so some solitary palmer, with scollop shell, may make the evening short with his story of travel across the desert ; or — best of all — some returning knight, long looked for — half doubted — shall talk bravely of the splendors he has seen in the luxurious court of Charles of Anjou, where the chariot of his Queen was covered with velvet sprinkled with Hlies of gold, and men-at-arms wore plumed helmets and jewelled collars ; he may sing, too, snatches of those tender madrigals of Provence, and she — if Sister Nathalie has taught her thereto — may join in a roundelay, and the min- strel and harpist come clashing in to the refrain. LIFE OF A DAMOISELLE. 75 Then there is the home embroidery — the hem- ming of the robes, the trimming of the mantles, the building up of the head pieces. Pray — in what age and vmder what civilization — has a young wo- « man ever failed of showing zeal in those branches of knowledge ? So, we will leave England — to-day — upon the stroke of thirteen hundred years. When we talk of life there again, we shall come very swiftly upon traces of one of her great philosophers, and of one of her great reformers, and of one of her greatest poeta CHAPTER EL IN our last chapter I spoke of that Geofifrey of Monmouth who about the middle of the twelfth century wi'ote a history — mostly apocryphal — in which was imbedded a germ of the King Ax- thur fables. We traced these fables, growing under the successive touches of Wace and Map and Laya- mon into full-fledged legends, repeated over and over ; and finally, with splendid affluence of color appearing on the Hterary horizon of our own day. I spoke of King Richard L and of his song loving, and of his blood loving, and of his royal frankness: then of John, that renegade brother of his — of how he granted 3Iagria Charta, killed poor Prince Arthur, and stirred such a current of war as caused the loss of Normandy to England. I spoke of the connec- tion of this loss with the consolidation of the lan- guage ; of how Robert of Gloucester made a rhym- ROGER BACON. 77 ing history that was in a new English ; of how the name of Sir John Mandeville was associated with great lies, in the same tongue ; how the rehgious houses made books, and fattened on the best of the land, and grew corrupt ; and last — of how we, if we had lived in those days, would have foimd disport for our idle hours and consolation for our serious ones. Roger Bacon. Starting now from about the same point in time where we left off, our opening scene will take us to the old University town of Oxford. It is a rare city for a young American to visit ; its beautiful High Street, its quaint Colleges, its Christ Church Hall, its Ubraries, its Magdalen walks and tower, its charm- ing gardens of St. John's and Trinity, its near Park of Blenheim, its fragrant memories — all, make it a place where one would wish to go and long to lin- ger. But in the far-away time we speak of it was a walled city, with narrow streets, and filthy lodging houses ; yet great parliaments had been held there ; the royal domaiu of Wootlstock was near by ^\-ith its Palace ; the nunnery was standing, where was edu- 78 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. cated the Fair Kosamund ; a little farther away waa the great religious house of Abingdon and the vil- lage of Cumnor ; but of all its present august and venerable aiTay of colleges only one or two then ex- isted — Merton, and perhaps BaUiol, or the Uni- versity.* But the schools here had won a very great repu- tation in the current of the thirteenth centuiy, largely through the scholarship and popularity of Grosseteste, one while Bishop of Lincoln, who held ministrations at Oxford by reason of his connection with a Franciscan brotherhood estabHshed here ; and among those crop-haired Franciscans was a monk — whom we have made this visit to Oxford to find — named Roger Bacon. He had been not only student but teacher there ; and a few miles south from the King's Arms Hotel in Broad Street, Ox- ford, is still standing a church tower, in the little parish of Sunningwell, from which — as tradition afiirms — Roger Bacon studied the heavens : for he * College Statutes of Merton date from 1274 ; those of University from 1280 ; and of BaUiol from 1282. Paper of George C. Broderick, Nineteenth Century, September, 1883. ROGER BACON. 79 believed in Astrology, and believed too in the trans- mutation of metals ; and lie got the name of magi- cian, and was cashiered and imprisoned twice or thrice for this and other strange behefs. But he believed most of all in the full utterance of his be- liefs, and in experimenting, and in inten-ogating nature, and distrusting conventionalisms, and in search for himself into all the mysteries, whether of natui'e or theology. He had sprung from worthy and well-to-do jDa- rents in the Western County of Somersetshire. He had spent very much money for those days on his education ; had obtained a Doctorate at Paris ; his acuteness and his capacity for study were every- where recognized ; he knew more of Greek than most of his teachers, and more of Hebrew than most of the Rabbis, and more of Chemistry and Physics generally than probably any other man in England. He took a Friar's vows, as we have said ; but these did not save him from interdiction by the Chief of his Order, by whom he was placed under ten years of sm-veillance at Paris — his teachings silenced, and he suffering almost to starvation. A Hberal Pope (for those days), Clement IV., by his intervention set ,8o LANDS, LETTERS, Gf KINGS. free the philosopher's pen again ; and there came ol this freedom the Opus Majus by which he is most worthily known. Subsequently he was permitted to return to his old sphere of study in Oxford, where he pursued afresh his scientific investigations, but coupled with them such outspoken denunciations of the vices and ignorance of his brother Friars, as to provoke new condemnation and an imprisonment that lasted for fourteen years — paying thus, in this accredited mediaeval way, for his freedom of speech. It is not improbable that we owe to him and to his optical studies — in some humble degree — the eye-glasses that make reading possible to old eyes : and his books, first of any books from English sources, described how sulphur and charcoal and saltpetre properly combined will make thunder and lightning {sic fades tonitrum et coruscatioiiem). We call the mixture gunpowder. In his Opus Majus (he wrote only in Latin, and vastly more than has appeared in printed form) scholars find some of the seeds of the riper knowledges which came into the Novum Organum of another and later Bacon — with whom we must not confound this sharp, ROGER BACON. 8l eager, determined, inquiring Franciscan friar. He is worthy to be kept in mind as the Englishman who above all others living in that turbid thirteenth century, saw through the husks of things to their very core. He died at the close of the century — probably in the year 1294 ; and I have gone back to that far-away time — somewhat out of our forward track — and have given you a glimpse of this Franciscan inno- vator and wrestler with authorities, in order that I might mate him with two other radical thinkers whose period of activity belonged to the latter half of the succeeding century : I mean Langlande and Wyclif. And before we go on to speak of these two, we will set up a few waymarks, so that we may not lose our historic bearings in the drift of the in- tervening years. Bacon died, as we have said, in 129-4. William Wallace fought his great battle of Cambuskenneth in 1297. Those who have read that old favorite of school-boys, IHiss Porter's "Scottish Chiefs," will not need to have their memories refreshed about William Wallace. Indeed, that hero will bo apt to loom too giantr-like in their thought, and with a halo 82 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. about him which I suspect sober history would hardly justify. Wallace was executed at Smithfield (Miss Porter says he died of grief before the axe fell) in 1305 ; and that stout, flax-haired King Ed- ward L, who had humbled Scotland at Falkirk — who was personally a match for the doughtiest of his knights — who was pious (as the times went), and had set up beautiful memorial crosses to his good Queen Eleanor — who had revived King Ar- thur's Bound Table at Kenilworth, died only two years after he had cruelly planted the head of Wallace on London Bridge. Then came the weak Edward IL, and the victories of Bruce of Bannockbura, and that weary Piers Gaveston story, and the shocking death of the King in Berkeley Castle. The visitor to Berkeley (it is in Gloucestershire, and only two miles away from station on the IMidland Railway) can still see the room where the murder was done : and this Castle of Berkeley — strangely enough — has been kept in repair, and inhabited continuously from the twelfth century until now ; its moat, its keep, and its warders walks are all intact. After this Edward IL came the great Edward m. — known to us through Froissart and the Black ROGER BACON. 83 Prince* and Crecy and Poitiers, and by Windsor Castle — which he built — and by Chaucer and Wy- clif and Langlande and Gower, who gi-ew up while he was king ; known to us also in a worse way, for outliving all his good qualities, and becoming in his last days a peevish and tempestuous voluptuary. Some few foreign way-marks I also give, that the reader may have more distinctly in mind this great historic epoch, Dante died in exile at Ravenna, six years before Edward m. came to power, Boccaccio was then a boy of fourteen, and Petrarch nine years his elder. And on the year that Crecy was fought and won — through the prowess of the Black Prince, and when the Last of the Tribunes, as you see him in Bulwer Lytton's novel, was feeling his way to lord- ship in Rome, — there was living somewhere in Shropshii-e, a country-born, boy poet — not yet ripened into utterance, but looking out with keen eyes and soreness of heart upon the sulferuigs ot * The story of the Black Prince meets with revival in our day, by the recent publication of " Ze Prince Noir, Poeme du Herault cCArmes CTmndos,' edited, translated, etc., by Francisque Michel, F.A.S. Fotheringham : London, 1884. The original MS. is understood to be preserved in the Li- brary of Worcester College, Oxford. 84 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. poor comitr}' folk, and upon the wantonness of the monks, and the extravagance of the rich, and the hatefuhiess of the proud — all which was set forth at a later day in the Vision of Piers Plowman. WilUaTii Langlande. This was WiUiam Langlande * (or Langley, as oth- ers call him), reputed author of the poem I have named. It makes a little book — earliest, I think, of all books written in English — which you will be apt to find in a well-appointed private Ubrary of our day. I won't say that it is bought to read, so much as to stand upon the shelves (so many books are) as a good and sufficient type of old respectabihties. Yet, for all this, it is reasonably readable ; with crabbed aUiterative rhythm ; — some Latin inter- mixed, as if the writer had been a priest (as some * Precise dates are wanting with respect to Langlande. Facts respecting his personal history are derived from what leaks out in his poem, and from interpolated notes (in a for- eign hand) upon certain MS. copies. Of three different texts (published by the E. E. Text Soc.) Mr. Skeat dates one about 13G3 — a second in or about 1377, and the third still later. The first imprint has date of 1550. WILLIAM LANGLANDE. 85 allege) ; and such knowledge of life and of current shortcomings among all sorts of people as showed him to be a wide-awake and fearless observer. It is in the form of an Allegor}', Christian in its motive ; so that 5'ou might almost say that the author was an immature and cnide and yet sharper kind of John Bunyan who would turn Great-Heart into a Plow- man. The nomenclature also brings to mind the tinker of the Pilgrim's Progress ; there is a Sir Do- Well and his daughter Do-Better : then there is Sir In-idt with his sons See-tcell and Say-ivell and Ilcar- well, and the doughtiest of them all — Sir Work-well. We may, I think, as reasonably behove that Bunyan hovered over this book, as that Milton took hints from the picture of Pandemonium attributed to Csedmon. Langlande is a little mixed and raw oftentimes ; but he is full of shrewdness and of touches of a rough and unwashed humor. There is little tender- ness of poetic feeling in his verse ; and scarcely ever does it rise to anything approaching stateliuess ; but it keeps a good dog-trot jog, as of one who knew what he was doing, and meant to do it. "What he meant was — to whip the vices of the priests and to 86 LANDS, LETTERS, &' KINGS. scourge the covetousnesa of the rich and of the men in power. It is English all over ; English * in the homeHness of its language ; he makes even Norman words sound homely ; English in spirit too ; full of good, hearty, grumbling humor — a sort of pre- dated and poetic kind of Protestantism. Plums might be picked out of it for the decoration of a good radical or agrarian speech of to-day. Of his larger rehgious and political drift no ex- tracts will give one a proper idea ; only a reading from beginning to end will do this. One or two snatches of his verse I give, to show his manner : And thanne cam coveitise, Kan I hym naght discryve, So hungrily and holwe Sire Hervy hym loked. He was bitel-browed, And baber-lipped also With two blared eighen As a blynd hagge ; And as a letheren purs Lolled his chekes, * Not that he is specially free from foreign vocables: Marsh {Lee. VL, Eng. Langiuu/e) gives his percentage of Anglo-Saxon words in Passus XIV. at only 84. See also Skeat's Genl. Preface, p. xxxiii. WILLIAM LANGLANDE, 87 Well sidder [wider] than his chjn Thei chyveled [shrivelled] for elde ; And as a bonde-man of his bacon His herd was bi-draveled, With an hood on his heed- A lousy hat above And in a tawny tabard Of twelf wynter age. — 2847 Pasi. Y. And again, from the same Passus (he dividing thus his poem into stejis or paces) I cite this self- drawn picture of Envy : Betwene manye and manye I make debate ofte, That bothe lif and lyme Is lost thorugh my speche. And when I mete hym in market That I moost hate, I hailse hym hendely [politely] As I his frend were ; For he is doughtier than I, I dar do noon oother : Ac, hadde I maistrie and myght. God woot my wille ! And wlianne I come to the kirk And sholde kneel to the roode, And preye for the peple . . , Awey fro the auter thanne Turne I myne eighen And bi-holdo Eloyna 8« LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. Hatli a newe cote ; I wisslie tlianne it were myn, And al tlie web after. For who so liath moore than I That angreth me soore, And thus I lyve love -lees, Like a luther [mad] dogge ; That al mj body bolneth [swelleth] For bitter of my galle. — vers. 2667. It is a savage picture ; and as savagely true as was ever drawn of Envy. Those wlio cultivated the ele- gancies of letters, and delighted in the pretty rhym- ing-balance of Romance verse, would hardly have reHshed him ; but the average thinker and worker would and did. It is specially noteworthy that the existing MSS. of this poem, of which there are very many, are "without expensive ornamentation by il- luminated initial letters, or otherwise, indicating that its circulation was among those who did not buy a book for its luxuries of "make-up," but for its pith. A new poj)ularity came to the book after printing was begun, and made it known to those who sympathized with its protesting spirit ; — most of all when the monasteries went down and readers saw how this old grumbler had prophesied truly — WILLIAM LANGLANDE. 89 in saying " the Abbot of Abingdon and all his peo- ple should get a knock from a king " — as they did ; and a hard one it was. Langlande was bom in the West, and had wan- dered over the beautiful Malvern hills of Worcester- shire in his day but he went afterward to Hve in London, which he knew from top to bottom ; had a wife there, " Kytte," and a daughter, " Calote ; " * shaved his head like a priest ; was tall — so tail he came to be called "Long Will" He showed little respect for fine dresses, though he saw them all ; he was in London when Chaucer was there and when the greater poet was writing, and had higher-placed friends than himself; but he never met him, — from anything that appears ; never met Wyclif either, with whom he must have had very much thinking * In saying this I follow literal statement of the poem {Pass, xviii., 12,948), as do Tyewhit, Pkice, and Rev. Mr. Skeat, whose opinions overweigh the objections of Mr. Wbight, (Introdwiion, p. ix., note 3, to Wkight's Piers Plowman.) The Christian name William seems determined by a find of Sir Frederic Madden on the fly-leaf of a MS. in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. Piers Pl&wmuri's Creed, often printed with the Vision, it now by best critics counted the work of another hand. 90 LANDS, LETTERS, &» KINGS. in common, and who also must have been in Lon- don many a time when tall Will Langlande sidled along Fenchurch Street, or CornhilL Yet he is worthy to be named with him as representing a popular seam in that great drift of independent and critical thought, which was to ripen into the Refor- mation. John Wyclif. In the year when gtmpowder was first burned in battle, and when Rienzi was trying to poise himself with a good balance on the rocking shoulders of the Roman people, John Wyclif, the great English re- former and the first translator of the Bible, was just turned of twenty and poring over his books, not im- probably ia that Baliol College, Oxford — of which in the ripeness of his age he was to become Master. We know Httle of his early personal history, save that he came from a beautiful Yorkshire valley in the North of England, where the Tees, forming the border line of the County of Durham, sweeps past the little parish of Wyclif, and where a manor- house of the same name — traditionally the birth- JOHN WYCLIF. 91 place of the Reformer — stands upon a lift of the river bank Its grounds stretch away to those " Rokeby " woods, whose murmurs and shadows re- lieve the dullest of the poems of Scott. But there is no record of him thereabout : if in- deed he were born upon that lift of the Tees bank, the proprietors thereof — who through many gene- rations were stanch Romanists — would have shown no honor to the arch-heretic ; and it is noteworthy that within a chapel attached to the Wyclif manor- house, mass was said and the Pope reverenced, down to a very recent time. John WycHf, in the great crowd of his writings, whether English or Latin, told no story of himself or of his young days. We have only clear sight of him when he has reached full manhood — when he has come to the master- ship of Baliol Hall, and to eloquent advocacy of the rights and dignities of England, as against the Papal demand for tribute. On this service he goes up to London, and is heard there — maybe in Parliament ; certainly is heard with such approval that he is, only ft few years thereafter — sent with a commission, to treat witli ambassadors from the Pope, at the old city of Bruges. 92 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. This was a rich city — called the Venice of the North — and princes and nobles from all Europe were to be met there ; its great town-house even then lifted high into the air that Belfrey of Bi-uges which has become in our day the nestling-place of song. But Wyclif was not overawed by any splen- dors of scene or association. He insisted doggedly upon the rights of EngUshmen as against Papal pre- tensions. John of Gaiint, a son of the king, stood hy WycHf ; not only befriending him there, but afterward when Papish bulls were thundered against him, and when he was summoned up to London — as befell in due time — to answer for his misdeeds ; and when the populace, who had caught a liking for the stalwart independence of the man, crowded through the streets (tall WiU Langlande very prob- ably among them), to stand between the Reformer and the judges of the Chvu-cL He did not believe in Ecclesiastic hierarchies ; and it is quite certain that he was as little liked by the abbots and the bishops and the fat vicars, as by the Pope. I have said he was befriended by John of Gaunt : and this is a name which it is worth while for stu- dents of English history to remember ; not only be- JOHN WYCLIF. 93 cause he was a brother of the famous Black Prince (and a better man than he, though ho did not fight so many battles), but because he was also a good friend of the poet Chaucer — as we shall find. It will perhaps help one to keep him in mind, if I re- fer to that glimpse we get of him in the early scenes of Shakespeare's tragedy of Richard H, where he makes a play upon his name : O, liow that name befits my composition I Old Gaunt, indeed I and gaunt in being old. Within me grief hath kept a tedious fast And who abstains from meat, that is not gaunt ? A good effigy of this John, in his robes, is on the glass of a window in All-Souls' College, Oxford. But such great friends, and Wyclif numbered the widow of the Black Prince among them, could not shield him entirely from Romish wrath, when he began to call the Pope a " cut-purse ; " and his argu- ments were as scathing as his epithets, and had more reason in them. He was compelled to forego his teachings at Oxford, and came to new trials, * at * Church chroniclers who were contemporaries of Wyclif, girded at him as a blasphemer. Capgrave : Cron. of Eng. (RoUa Series), speaks of him as " the orgon of the devel, the 94 LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS. which — as traditions run — he wore an air of gi'eat dignity ; and old portraits show us a thin, tall fig- ure — a little bent with over-study ; his features sharp-cut, with lips full of firmness, a flowing white beard and piercing eyes — glowing with the faith that was in him. This was he who blocked out the path along which England stumbled through Lollai-dry quagmires, and where Huss, the Bohe- mian, walked in after days with a clumsy, for- ward tread, and which Luther in his later time put all a-light with his torch of flame. The King — and it was one of the last good deeds enmy of the Cherch, the confusion of men, the ydol of heresie," etc. Netter collected his (alleged) false doctrines under title of Bundles of Tares (Fasciculi Zizaniorum,), Ed. by Shirley, 1858. Dr. Robt. Vaughan is author of a very pleasant monograph on Wyclip, with much topographic lore. Dr. Lechler is a more scholarly contributor to Wycllb" literature ; and the Early Eng. Text Soc. has published (1880) Mathews' Ed. of '■' hitJierto unprinted Eng. works of Wyglif, with notice of his life." Rudolph Buddenseig, (of Dresden) has Ed. his polemical works in Latin (old) besides contributing an interesting notice for the anniversary just passed. Nor can I forbear naming in this connection the very eloquent quin-centenary address of Dr. Richard S. 8TORR8, of Brooklyn, N. Y. JOHN WYCLIF. 95 of Edward m. — gave to the old man who was railed at by Popes and bishops, a church living at Lutter- worth, a jDleasant village in Leicestershii'e, upon a branch of that Avon, which flows by Stratford Church ; and here the white-haired old man — some five hundred years ago (1384) finished his life ; and here the sexton of the church will show one to-day the gown in which he preached, and the pulpit in which he stood. Even now I have not spoken of those facts about this early Reformer, which are best kept in memory, and which make his name memorable in connection with the literature of England. In the quiet of Lutterworth he translated the Latin Bible (prob- ably not knowing well either Greek or Hebrew, as very few did in that day) ; not doing all this work himself, but specially looking after the Gospels, and perhaj)s all of the New Testament. The reader will, 1 think, be interested in a Httle fragment of this work of his (from Matthew viii.). " Sothely [verily] Jhesus seeynge mauy cumpanyes about hym, bad Tiii dlsciplis go ouer the watir. And oo [one] scribe or a man of lawe, commynge to, saide to hym — Maistre, I shall sue [follow] thee whidir euer thou slialt go. And 96 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. Jhesus said to hym, Foxis han dichis or 'horrowis [holes] and briddes of the eir han nestis ; but mannes sone hath nat wher he reste his heued. Sotheli an other of his disciplis saide to hym — Lord, suffre me go first and birye my f adir. Forsothe Jhesus saide to hym, Sue thou me, and late dede men birye her dead men." It is surely not very hard reading ; — still less so in the form as revised by Purvey,* an old assistant of his in the Parish of Lutterworth ; and it made the groundwork of an English sacred dialect, which with its Thees and Thous and Speaketh and Eeareth and Prayeth has given its flavor to all succeeding translations, and to all utterances of pi-aise and thanksgiving in every English pulpit. Not only this, but Wyclif by his translation opened an easy English pathway into the arcana of sacred mysteries, which in all previous time — save for exceptional parts, such as the paraphrase of Csedmon, or the Ormulum, or the Psalter of Aldhelm and other fragmentary Anglo-Saxon versions of Scripture — had been veiled from the common people in the dimness of an unknown tongue. But * Those who love books which are royal in their dignities of print and paper, will be interested in Forshall & Madden's elegant 4to. edition of the Wyclifite versions of the Bible. CHA UCER. 97 from the date of Wyclif' s translation — forward, for- ever — whatever man, rich or poor, could read an EngHsh ordinance of the King, or a bye-law of a British pai'ish, could also — though he might be driven to stealthy reading — spell his way back, through the old aisles of Sacred History, where Moses and the prophets held their place, and into the valleys of Palestine, where Bethlehem lay, and where Chiist was hung upon the tree. Chaucer. Now we come to a Poet of these times ; not a poet by courtesy, not a small poet, but a real and a great one. His name is Chaucer. You may not read him ; you may find his speech too old- fashioned to please you ; you may not easily get through its meaning ; but if you do, and come to study him with any warmth, the more you study him the more you will hke him. And this — not because there are curious and wonderful tales in his verse to interest you ; not because yom- passion will be kindled by any extraordinary show of dramatic power ; but because his humor, and gentleness. 98 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. and gi*ace of touch, and exquisite harmonies of lan« guage will win upon you page by page, and story by story. He was bom — probably in London — some time during the second quarter of the foui-teenth cen- tury ; * and there is reason to beheve that an early home of his was in or near Thames Street, which runs parallel with the river, — a region now built up and overshadowed with close lines of tall and grimy warehouses. But the boy Chaucer, li\'ing there five hundred and more years ago, might have caught between the timber houses glimpses of cultivated fields lying on the Southwark shores ; and if he had wandered along Wallbrook to Cheapside, and thence westerly by Newgate to Smithfield Common — where * The biographers used to say 1328 : this is now thought inadmissible by most commentators. Furnival makes the birth-year 1340 — in which he is followed by the two Wards, and by Professor Minto {Br. Ency.). Evidence, however, is not as yet conclusive ; and there is an even chance that further investigations may set back the birth-year to a date which will better justify and make more seemly those croak- ings of age which crept into some of the latter verse of the poet. For some facts looking in that direction, and for cer- tain interesting genealogic Chaucer puzzles, see paper in Liondon Atheneum for January 29, 1881, by Walter Rye. CHAUCER. 99 he may have watched tournaments that Froissart watched, and Philippa, queen of Edward IIL, had watched — he would have found open country ; and on quiet days woiild have heard the birds singing there, and have seen green meadows lying on either side the river Fleet — which river is now lost in sewers, and is planted over with houses. On Ludgate Hill, in that far-off time, rose the tall and graceful spire of old St. Paul's, and underneath its roof was a vista of Gothic arches seven hundred feet in length. The great monastery of the Tem- plars — and of the Knights of St. John — where we go now to see that remnant of it, called the Temple Church, — had, only shortly before, passed into the keeping of the Lawyers ; the Strand was like a coimtry road, with great country-houses and gar- dens looking upon the water ; Charing Cross was a hamlet midway between the Temple and a parish called Westminster, M'here a huge Abbey Church stood by the river bank Some biographers have labored to show that Chaucer was of high family — with titles in it. But I think we care very little about this ; one story, now fully accredited, makes his father a vintner, TOO LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. or wine-dealer, with a coat-of-ai'ms, showing upon one half a red bar upon white, and upon the other white on red ; as if — hints old Thomas Fuller — 'twas dashed with red wine and white. This es- cutcheon with its parti-colored bars may be seen in the upper left comer of the portrait of Chaucer, which hangs now in the picture-gallery at Oxford. And — for that matter — it was not a bad thing to be a vintner in that day ; for we have record of one of them who, in the year after the battle of Poitiers, entertained at his house in the Vintry, Edward King of England, John King of France, David King of Scotland, and the King of Cypinis. And he not only dined them, but won their money at play ; and afterward, in a very unking-like fashion — paid back the money he had won. Chaucer was a student in his young days ; but never — as old stories ran — at either Cambridge or Oxford ; indeed, there is no need that we place him at one or the other. There were schools in London in those times — at St. Paul's and at Westminster — in either of which he could have come by all the scholarly epithets or allusions that appear in his ear- lier poems ; and for the culture that declares itself in CHAUCER. loi his riper days, we know that he was more or less a student all his life — loving books, and proud of his fondness for them, and showing all up and down his poems traces of his careful reading and of an obser- vation as close and as quick. It is the poet's very self, who, borne away in the eagle's clutch amongst the stars, gets this comment from approving Jove * : Thou hear-ist neither that nor this, For when thy labor all done is, And hast made all thy reckininges In stead of rest and of new thingcs, Thou goest home to thine house anon And all so dombe as any stoue, Thou sittest at another boke Till fully dazed is thy loko. But though we speak of Chaucer as bookish and scholarly, it must not be supposed that he aimed at, or possessed the nice critical discernment, with re- spect to the literary work of others, which we now associate with highest scholarly attainments ; it may well happen that his bookish allusions are not al- ways " by the letter," or that he may misquote, or IIou&c of Fame, Book IL 102 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. strain a point in interpretation. He lived before the days of exegetical niceties. He is attracted by large effects ; lie searches for what may kindle his enthusiasms, and put him upon his own trail of song. Books were nothing to him if they did not bring illumination ; where he could snatch that, he burrowed — but always rather toward the light than toward the depths. He makes honey out of coarse flowers ; not so sure always — nor much car- ing to be sure — of the name and habitudes of the plants he rifles. He stole not for the theft's sake, but for the honey's sake ; and he read not for cumulation of special knowledges, but to fertilize and quicken his own spontaneities. Nor was this poet ever so shapen to close study, but the woods or the birds or the flowei'S of a sum- mery day would take the bend from his back, and straighten him for a march into the fields : There is game none, That from my bookes maketh me to gone, Save certainly whan that the month of Male Is comen, and that I heare the foules sing, And that the flowris ginnen for to spring — Farewell my booke, and my devocion 1 CHA UCER. 103 And swift upon this in that musical " Legende of Good Women," comes his rhythmical crowning of the Daisy — never again, in virtue of his verse, to be discrowned — above all the flowris in the mede Thanne love I moste these flowris white and rede ; Soche that men callin Daisies in our toun To 'hem I have so grete affectionn As I said erst, whan comin is the Maie, That in my hedde there dawith me no dale That I n' am up, and walking in the mede To sene this floure ayenst the sunne sprede, As she that is of all flowris the floure, Fulfilled of all vertue and honoure And evir alike faire and freshe, of hewe, And evir I love it and ever alike newe. These lines of his have given an everlasting per- fume to that odorless flower. How it befell that this son of a vintner came first to have close association with members of the royal household — household of the great Edward HI. — we cannot tell ; but it is certain that he did come at an early day to have position in the establishment of the King's son. Prince Lionel, Duke of Clarence ; he was sometime valet, too, of Edward HL, and in I04 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. other years a familiar protege of Jolm of Gaunt — < putting his poet's gloss upon courtly griefs and love-makings. It is certain, moreover, that in the immediate ser- vice of either Prince or King, he went to the wars — as every young man of high spirit in England yearned to do, when war was so great a part of the business of Hfe, and when the Black Prince was gal- loping in armor and in victory over the fields of Guienne. But it was a bad excursion the poet hit upon ; he went when disaster attended the Enghsh forces ; he was taken prisoner, and though ransomed shortly thereafter — as the record shows — it is un- certain when he returned ; uncertain if he did not linger for years among the vineyards of France ; maybe writing there his translation of the famous Roman de la Rose * — certainly loving this and other * There is question of the authenticity of the translation usually attributed to Chaucer — of which there is only one fifteenth century MS. extant. Some version, however, Chaucer did make, if his own averment is to be credited. Prof. MiNTO {Br. Ency.) accepts the well-known version; so does "Ward {Men of Letters); Messrs. Bradshaw (of Cambridge) and Prof. Ten Brink doubt — a doubt in which Mr Humphrey Ward {Eng. Poets) seems to share. CHA UCER. los such, and growing by study of these Southern melo- dies into gi-aces of his own, to overlap and adorn his Saxon sturdiness of speech. There are recent continental critics * indeed, who claim him as French, and as finding not only his felicities of verse, but his impulse and his motives among the lilies of Fi-ance. He does love these lilies of a surety ; but I think he loves the Enghsh daisies better, and that it is with a thoroughly Eng- lish spirit that he "powders" the meadows with their red and white, and sets among them the green blades of those island grasses, which flash upon his " morwenyngs of Male." To these times may pos- sibly belong — if indeed Chaucer wrote it — "The Court of Love." Into the discussion of its au- thenticity we do not enter ; we run to cover un- der an ignorance which is more blissful than the wisdom that wearies itself with comparison of dates, with laws of prosody, with journeyman-like estimate of the tinklings of this or that spurt of rhyming habit. If Chaucer did not write it, we lift our hat to the unknown melodist — who can put the birds in choir — and pass on. * Sandras : Etude sur Chaucer. io6 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. When our poet does reappear in London, it ia not to tell any story of the war — of its hazards, or of its triumphs. Indeed, it is remarkable that this lissome poet, whose words like bangles shook out all tunes to his step, and who lived in the very heart of the days of Poitiers — when the doughty young Black Prince kindled a martial furor that was like the old crusade craze to follow Cceur de Lion to battle — remarkable, I say, that Chaucer, living on the high tide of war — living, too, in a court where he must have met Froissart, that pet of the Queen, who gloried in giving tongue to his enthusiasm about the deeds of knighthood — wonderful, I say, that Chaucer should not have brought into any of his tales or rhymes the din and the alarums and the seething passions of war. There are indeed glimpses of fluttering pennons and of spear thrusts ; maybe, also, purple gouts of blood welling out from his page ; but these all have the unreal look of the tour- ney, to which they mostly attach ; he never scores martial scenes with a dagger. For all that Crecy or its smoking artillery had to do with his song, he might have sung a century earlier, or he might have Bung a century later. Indeed, he does not seem to CHAUCER. 107 us a man of action, notwithstanding liis court con- nection and his somewhile official place ; — not even a man of loudly declared public policy, but always the absorbed, introspective, painstaking, quiet ob- server, to whom Nature in the gi'oss, with its hu- manities now kindled by wanton appetites, and now lifted by reverence and love (with the everlasting broidery of flowers and trees and sunshine), was al- ways alluring him from things accidental and of the time — though it were time of royal Philip's ruin, or of a conquest of Aquitaine. Yet withal, this Chaucer is in some sense a man of the world and courtier. The " Boke of the Duchesse " teUs us this. And he can weave chapleta for those who have gone through the smoke of bat- tles — though his own inclination may not lead him thither. To a date not very remote from that which belongs to the " Duchesse " must in all probability be assigned that other well-known minor poem of Chaucer's, called the "Parlament of Foules."* * A notable edition is that of Prof. Lounsbury (Ginn & Heath, 1877) ; and it is much to be hoped that the same editor will bring his scholarly method of estimating dates, sources, and varying texts, to some more important Chau- cerian labors. lo8 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. There are stories of his love-lornness in his young days, and of marriage delayed and of marriage made good — coming mostly from those who paint large pictures Avith few pigments — and which are exceeding hazy and indeterminate of outline : his *' Troilus and Cresseide " make us know that he could go through the whole gamut of love, and fawning and teasing and conquest and forget- ting, in lively earnest as well as fancy — if need were. We have better data and surer ground to go upon when we come to score his official relations. "We know that when not very far advanced in age (about 1370) he went to the continent on the King's service ; accomplishing it so well — presumably — that he is sent again, very shortly after, with a com- mission — his journey calling him to Genoa and Florence ; Italy and the Mediterranean, then, prob- ably for the first time, with all their glamour of old story, coming to his view. Some biographers make out, from chance lines in his after-poems, that he went over to Padua and saw Petrarch there, and learned of him some stories, which he after- "^rard wrought into his garland of the Canter- CHA UCER. 109 bury Tales. Possibly;* but it was not an easy joiirney over the mountains to Padua in those days, even if Petrarch had been domiciled there, — which is very doubtful ; for the Itahan poet, old and feeble, passed most of the latter years of his life at Arqua among the Euganean hills ; and if Chaucer had met him, Petrarch would have been more apt to ask the man from far-away, murky England, about his country and King and the Prince Lionel (dead m those days), who only a few years before had married, at Milan, a daughter of the Visconti — than to bore him with a stoiy at second hand (from Boc- caccio) about the patient Griselda. * Another possible epoch of meeting with Petrarch may have been in the year 13G8, when at the junketings attend- ing the wedding of Prince Lionel (in Milan), Petrarch was present; also — perhaps — Chaucer in the suite of the Prince. Froissakt makes note of the Feste^ but without mention of either poet, or of his own presence. Cliap. ccxlcii., Liv. I. Walter Besant (Br. Ency., Art. Froissart), I observe, avers the presence of all three — though without giving au- thorities. MuUATORi {Annali) mentions Petrarch as seated among the princely guests — fanta era la di ltd riputazione — but there is, naturally enough, no naming of Chaucer or Froissart. no LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. However this may be, it is agreed by nearly al\ commentators, that by reason of his southward jour- neyings and his after-famiharity with Itahan htera- ture (if indeed this familiarity were not of earher date), that his own poetic outlook became greatly ■widened, and he fell away, in lai'ge degree, from his old imitative allegiance to the jingling measures of France, and that pretty " Maze of to and fro, Where light-heeled numbers laugh and go." Through all this time he is in receipt of favors from the Government — sometimes in the shape of direct pension — sometimes of an annual gift of wine — sometimes in moneys for payment of his costs of travel ; — sometime, too, he has a money- getting place in the Customs. John of Gaunt continues his stalwart friend. In- deed this Prince, late in life, and when he had come to the title of Duke of Lancaster, married, in third espousals, a certain Kate Swynford (ixee Roet), who, if much current tradition may be trusted, was a sister of Chaucer's wife ; it was, to be sure, looked upon by court people (for various reasons) as a CHAUCER. Ill match beneath the Duke ; and Froissart tells us with a chuTUpy air * of easy confidence (but there is no mention of the poet) that the peeresses of the court vowed they would have nothing to do with the new Duchess of Lancaster — by which it may be seen that fine ladies had then the same methods of punishing social audacities which they have now. The tradition has been given a new lease of life by the memorial window which under rule of Dean Stan- ley was set in Westminster Abbey ; f and, however the truth may be, Chaucer's life-long familiarity in the household of Lancaster is undoubted ; and it is every way likely that about the knee of the poet may have frisked and played the little Hal. (b. 13G7), who came afterward to be King Henry IV. It is to this monarch, newly come to the throne, that Chau- cer adckesses — in his latter days, and with excel- * '^^Nouslui lairrons toute seule fairs lea Twnneurs ; nous ne irons ni viendrom en nulle place ou eUe soil" etc. — Cbro- niques de SiKE Jean Fuoissart (/. A. Baclion), tomo iii., p. 23G. Paris, 1835. •)• '• In the spandrils are the arms of Chancer on the dex- ter side, and on the sinister, Chaucer impaling those of (Roet) his y!\iG." — Appendix III. to Fuknival, Temporai-y Preface, etc. 112 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. lent effect — that little piquant snatch of verse * about the lowness of his purse : I am so sorrie now that ye be light, For certes, but ye make me heavy cheere, Me were as lief be laid upon my here For which unto your mercie thus I crie Be heavie againe, or elles mote I die. Yet he seems never to lose his good humor or his sweet complacency ; there is no cai-ping ; there ia no swearing that is in earnest. His whole character we seem to see in that picture of him which hia friend Occleve painted ; a miniature, to be sure, and upon the cover of a MS. of Occleve's poems ; but it is the best portrait of him we have. Looking at it — though 'tis only half length — you would say he was what we call a dapper man ; weU-fed, for he loved always the good things of life — " not drink- less altogether, as I guess ; " nor yet is it a bluff Enghsh face ; no beefiness ; regular features — al- most feminine in fineness of contour — with light beard upon upper lip and chin ; smooth cheeks ; lips full (rosy red, they say, in the painting) ; eye * Some MSS. have this poem with title of SuppUcatmi U King Richard. CHAUCER. 113 that is keen,* and with a sparkle of humor in it ; hands decorously kept ; one holding a rosary, the other pointing — and pointing as men point who see what they point at, and make others see it too ; his hood, which seems a part of his woollen di-ess, is picturesquely drawn about his head, revealing only a streak of hair over his temple ; you see it is one who studies picturesqueness even in costume, and to the trimming of his beard into a forked shape ; — no lint on his robe — you may be sure of that ; — no carelessness anywhere : dainty, dehcate, studious of effects, but with mu'th and good nature shimmering over his face. Yet no vagueness or shakiness of purpose show their weak lines ; and in his jaw there is a certain staying power that kej^t him firm and active and made him pile book upon book in the new, sweet EugHsh tongue, which out of the dialects of Essex and of the East of Eng- land he had compounded, ordered, and perfected, and made the pride of every man box'u to the in- heritance of that Island speech. ■" This — in the engraving ; the autotype published by the Chaucer Society gives, unfortunately, a very blurred effect to the upper part of the face : but who can doubt the real quality of Chaucer's eye ? 114 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. And it is with such looks and such forces and such a constitutional cheeriness, that this blithe poet comes to the task of enchaining together his Canter- buiy Tales, with their shrewd trappings of Pro- logue — his best work, getting its last best touches after he is fairly turned of middle age, if indeed he were not akeady among the sixties. Is it not wonderful — the distinctness with which we see, after five hundred years have passed, those nine and twenty pilgrims setting out on the sweet April day, to travel down through the country highways and meadows of Kent ! The fields are all green, "y-powdered with dai- sies ; " the birds are sLuging ; the white blossoms are beginning to show upon the hedge-rows. And the Pilgrims, one and all, are so touched and colored by his shrewdness and aptness of epithet that we see them as plainly as if they had been cut out, figure by figure, from the very middle of that far-away centui-y. There goes the Knight — And that a worthy man, That from the time that he first began To ryden out, he loved chyvalrie Trouth and honodr, freedom and courtesie. CHAUCER. »i5 And after him his son, the Squire, the bright bach- elor, who Was as fresh as is the month of Maj ; Schort was his goune, with sleevcis long and wide, Well coude he sit on hors, and faire ride. He coude songes make and wel endite, Joust and eke dance, and wel portray and write. Then there comes the charming Prioress — Ycleped Madame Eglantine. Ful well she sang tho servico divine, Entuned in hir nose ful semiily : And Frensch she spak ful fair and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bo we, For Frensch of Paris was to hir unknowe. Full fetys was her cloke, as I was waar Of smal coral aboute hir arme she baar A paire of bedcs gauded all with grene. And thereon heng a broch of gold ful schene On which was first y-writ a crowned A, And after — Amor Vincit Omnia! Then comes the Monk, who has a shiny pate, wIjo is stout, well fed, pretentious ; his very trappings make a portrait — And when he rocd, men might his bridel heere Gingling in a whitstlyng wynd as cleere And ft'k a^s loudo as doth the chapel belle. ii6 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. Again, there was a Friar — a wanton and a merry one — rollicksome, and loving rich houses only, who lisped for his wantonnesse, To make his Englissch swete upon his tunge ; His ejeu twinkled in his hed aright As do the starres in the frosty night. ^nd among them all goes, with mincing step, the middle-aged, vulgar, well-preserved, coquettish, ehrewish Wife of Bath : Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed, Ful streyte y-tied, and schoos ful moiste and newe, Bold was her face, and faire and reed of hewe. And so — on, and yet on — for the twenty or more ; all touched with those little, life-like strokes which only genius can command, and which keep the breath in those old Pilgrims to Canterbury, as if they travelled there, between the blooming hedge rows, on eveiy sunshiny day of every succeeding spring. I know that praise of these and of the way Chau- cer marshals them at the Tabard, and starts them on theu' way, and makes them tell their stories, is like praise of June or of sunshine. All poets and all readers have spoken it ever since the morning they set out upon their journeyiugs ; and many an Amer* CHAUCER. 117 ican voyager of our day has found best illumination for that pleasant jaunt through County Kent toward the old towers of Canterbury in his recollections of Chaucer's Pilgrims. It is time that the poet's way- side marks are not close or strong ; no more does a meteor leave other track than the memory of its brightness. "We cannot fix of a surety upon the " ale-stake " where the Pardoner did " by ten on a cake," and there may be some doubt about the " litel " town whicli that y-cleped is, Bob-up-and-Down. But there is no doubt at all about the old Wat- ling Road and Deptford, and the sight of Greenwich Heights, which must have shown a lifted forest away to their left ; nor about Boughton Hill (by Boughton-under-Blean), with its far-off view of sea-water and of sails, and its nearer view of the great cathedral dominating Canterbury town. Up to the year 1874 the traveller might have found a Tabard * tavern in Southwark, which * Tlae name, indeed, by some strange metonymy not easily explicable, bad become "Talbot." There is a later "Tab- ard," dreadfully new, on the corner of " Talbot Inn Yard," 85 High Street, Borough. ii8 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. at about 1600 bad replaced the old inn that Chaui cer knew ; but it repeated the old quaintness, and with its lumbering balconies and littered court and droll signs, and its saggings and slants and smells, carried one back delightfully to fourteenth-century times. And in Canterbury, at the end of the two or three days' * pilgiim jo\u"ney, one can set foot in very earnest upon the pavement these people from the Tabard trod, under the cathedral arches — look- ing after the tomb of the great Black Prince, and the scene of the slaughter of Thomas a Becket. In that quaint old town, too, are gables under which some of these story-tellers of the Pilgrimage may have lodged ; and (mingHng old tales with new) there are latticed casements out of which Agnes "Wickfield may have looked, and sidewalks where Da\'id Cop- perfield may have accommodated his boy-step to the lounging pace of the always imminent IVIicaw- ber. Yet it is in the country outside and in scenes the poet loved best, that the aroma of the Canter- bury Tales will be caught most sui-ely ; and it is * Dean Stanley, witliout doubt in error, in measuring the pilgrimage by twenty-four hours. See Temp. Pref. to SiB Text Edit. Fuknival. CHAUCER. 119 among those picturesque undulations of land which lie a little westward of Harbledown — upon the Rochester road, which winds among patches of wood, and green stretches of grass and billowy hop- gardens, that the lover of Chaucer will have most distinctly in his ear the jingle of the "bridel" of the Monk, and in his eye the scarlet hosen and the wimple of the Wife of Bath. Yet these Canterburj' Tales convey something in them and about them beside deHcacies ; the host, who is master of ceremonies, throws mud at a griev- ous rate, and with a vigorous and a dirtv hand. Boccaccio's indecencies lose nothing of their quaHty in the smirched rhyme of the Reeve's tale ; * the Miller is not presentable in any decent company, and the Wife of Bath is vulgar and unseemly. There are others, to be sure, and enough, who have only gracious and grateful speech put into their mouths ; and it is these we cherish. The stories, indeed. ■which these pilgrims tell, are not much in them- selves ; stolen, too, the most of them ; stolen, just * Nov. VT. Oiorn. IX. It may be open to question if Chaucer took scent from this trail, or from some as mal- odorous Fr. FaUuiu — as Tyrwhitt and Wuksut suggest. The quest is not a savory one. I20 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KhWGS. as Homer stole the cun-ent stories about Ajax and Ulysses ; just as Boccaccio stole from the Gesta Eomanorum; just as Shakespeare stole from the Cymric fables about King Lear and CymbeHne. He stole ; but so did everyone who could get hold of a good manuscript. Imagine — if all books were in such form now, and MSS. as few and sparse as then, what a range for enterprising authors ! But Chau- cer stole nothing that he did not improve and make his own by the beauties he added. Take that old slight legend (everywhere current in the north of England) of the Httle Christian boy, who was murdered by Jews, because he sang songs in honor of the Virgin ; and who — after death — still sang, and so discovered his murderers. It is a bare rag of story, with only streaks of blood-red in it ; yet how tenderly touched, and how pathetically told, in Chaucer's tale of the Prioress ! It is a widow's son — " sevene yeres of age " -— and wheresoe'er he saw the image Of Christe's moder, had be in usage, As him was taught, to knele adown and say His Are Marie I as he goth by the way. Thus hath this widows hire litel son y-taught To worship aye, and he forgat it nauglite. CHAUCER. 121 And the "litel" fellow, with his quick ear, hears at school some day the Alma Redemptoris sung ; and he asks what the beautiful song may mean? He says he will learn it before Christmas, that he may say it to his "moder dere." His fellows help him word by word — line by line — tiU he gets it on his tongue : From word to word, acording with the note, Twies a day, it passed thro' his throte. At last he has it trippingly ; so — schoolward and homeward, as he cam to and fro Full merrily than would he sing and crie, O Alma Redemptai'is ever mo, The sweetnesse hath his herte perced so. Through the Jews' quarter he goes one day, sing- ing this sweet song that bubbles from him as he walks ; and they — set on by Satan, who " hath in Jewe's herte his waspes nest" — conspire and plot, and lay hold on him, and cut his throat, and cast him into a pit. But — a wonder — a miracle ! — stiU from the bleeding throat, even when life is gone, comes the tender song, " Alma Redemptoris ! " And the 122 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. wretched mother, wandering and wailing, is led by the sweet, plaintive echoes, whose tones she knows, to where her poor boy Hes dead ; and even as she comes, he, with throte y-carven, his Alma Becleinptoiis gan to sing So loude that al the place gan to ring. Then the Christian people take him up, and bear him away to the Abbey. His mother Hes swooning by the bier. They hang those wicked Jews — and prepare the little body for burial and sprinkle it with holy water ; but still from the poor bleeding throat comes "evermo' " the song : Alma Jiedempioi'is mater! And the good Abbot entreats him to say, why his soul lingers, with his thi-oat thus all agape ? '• My throte is cut unto my nekke bone," Saide this child, " and as by -way of kynde, I should have dyed, ye longe time agone, But Jesu Christ, as ye in bookcis finde, Wol that his glory laste, and be in minde, And for the worship of his moder dere, Yet may I sing, ' Almuf ' loud and clere." But he says that as he received his death-blow, the Virgin came, and CHAUCER. 123 *' Methoughte she leyde a greyn upon my tongue, Wherefore I singe and singe ; I mote certcyn Til from my tonge off-taken is the greyn ; And after that, thus saide she to me, • My litel child, then wol I fecch( n thee I ' " [Where at] This holy monk — this Abbot — him mene I, His tonge out-caughte, and tok away the greyn, And he gaf up the goost full softcly. And when the Abbot had this wonder sein His salte teres trilled adown as raine. And graf he fell, all platt upon the grounde, And stille he lay as he had been y-bounde. After this they take away the boy -martyr from off his bier — And in a tombe of marble etones clere Enclosen they his litel body swete ; Ther he is now : God leve us for to mete t How tenderly the words all match to the delicate meaning ! This delightful poet knows every finest resource of language : he subdues and trails after him all its harmonies. No grimalkin stretching out BUken paws touches so lightly what he wants only to touch ; no cat with sharpest claws clings so tena- ciously to what he would grip -w-ith his eamester words. He is a painter whose technique ia never at fault — whose art is an instinct. ^ 124 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. Yet — it must be said — there is no grand horizon at the back of his pictures : pleasant May-raominga and green meadows a plenty ; pathetic episodes, most beguiling tracery of incidents and of character, but never strong, passionate outbursts showing pro- found capacity for measurement of deepest emotion. "We cannot think of him as telling with any ade- quate force the story of King Lear, in his delirium of wi'ath : Macbeth's stride and hushed madness and bated breath could not come into the charm- ing, mellifluous rhythm of Chaucer's most tragic story without making a dissonance that would be screaming. But his descriptions of all country things are gar- den-sweet. He touches the daisies and the roses with tints that keep them always in freshest, virgin, dewy bloom ; and he fetches the forest to our eye with words that are brim-full of the odors of the woods and of the waving of green boughs. In our next talk we shall speak of some who sang beside him, and of some who followed ; but of these not one had so rare a language, and not one had BO true an eye. CHAPTER IV. IN our last chapter we went back to the latter edge of the thirteenth century and to the City of Oxford, that we might find in that time and place a Franciscan Friar — known as Roger Bacon, who had an independence of spirit which brought him into difficulties, and a searchingness of mind which made people count him a magician, I spoke of Langlande and Wyclif : and of how the reforming spirit of the first expressed itself in the alliterative rhythm of the Piers Plowman allegory ; and how the latter declared against Papal tyranny and the accepted dogmas of the Church : he too, set on foot those companies of "pore priests," who in long rus- set gowns reaching to their heels, and with staff in hand, traversed the highways and byways of Eng- land, preaching humility and charity ; he gave to us moreover that Scriptural quaintness of language, 126 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. •which from Wyclif's time, down to ours, has left its trail in every English pulpit, and colored every English prayer. Then we came to that gi-eat poet Chaucer, who wrote so much and so well, as — first and most of all contemporary or preceding writers — to make one proud of the new English tongue. He died in 1400, and was buried at Westminster — not a stone's throw away from the site of his last London home. His tomb, under its Gothic screen, may be found in the Poet's Corner of the Abbey, a little to the right, on entering from the Old Palace Yard ; and over it, in a window that looks toward the Houses of Parlia- ment, has been set — in these latter years, in unfad- ing array — the gay company of Chaucer's Canter- bury Pilgrims. In the same year in which the poet died, died also that handsome and unfortunate Richard the Second * (son of the Black Prince) who promised bravely ; who seemed almost an heroic figure when in his young days, he confronted Wat Tyler so coolly ; but he made promises he could not or would * His dethronement preceded his death, by a twelvemonth or more. JOHN GOIVER. 127 not keep — slipped into the entbralment of royalties against which Lollard and democratic malcontents baj'ed in vain : there were court cabals that over- set him ; Shakespeare has told his story, and in that tragedy — lighted with brilliant passages — John of Gaunt, brother to the Black Piince, appears, old, and gray and near his grave ; and his son — the crafty but resolute Henry Bolingbroke — comes on the stage as Henry IV. to take the "brittle glory" of the crown. Of Goioer and Froissart. But I must not leave Chaucer's immediate times, without speaking of other men who belonged there : the first is John Gower — a poet whom I name from a sense of duty rather than from any special liking for what he wrote. He was a man of learning for those days — having a good estate too, and liv-ing in an orderly Kentish home, to which he went back and forth in an eight-oared barge upon the Thames. He wrote a long Latin poem Vox Glamantis, in which like Langlande he declaimed against the vices and pretensions of the clergy ; and he also treated in the high-toned conservative way of a 128 LANDS, LETTERS, &* A'/NGS. well-to-do country gentleman, the social troubles of the time, which had broken out into Wat Tyler and Jack Straw rebellions ; — people should be wise and discreet and religious ; then, such troubles would not come. A better known poem of Gower — because written in English — was the Confessio Amantis: Old Classic, and Eomance tales come into it, and are fearfully stretched out ; and there are pedagogic Latin rubrics at the margin, and wearisome repetitions, with now and then faint scent of prettinesses stolen from "French, fabliaux : but unless your patience is heroic, you will grow tired of him ; and the monotonous, measured, metallic jingle of his best verse is pro- vokingly like the " Caw-caw " of the prim, black raven. He had art, he had learning, he had good- will ; but he could not weave words into the thrush- like melodies of Chaucer. Even the clear and beautiful type of the Bell & Daldy edition* does not make him entertaining. You will tire before * Edited by Dr. Eeinhold Pauli • Loadou, 1857. Henry Morley {Eng. Writers^ IV., p. 238) enumerates a score or more of existing MSS. of the poem. The first printed edi* tion was that of Caxton, 1483. FROISSART. 129 you are half through the Prologue, which is as long, and stiff as many a sermon. And if you skip to the stories, they will not win you to liveliness : Pau- line's grace, and mishaps are dull ; and the sharp, tragic twang about Gurmunde's skull, and the ven- geance of Eosemunde (from the old legend which Paul the Deacon tells) does not wake one's blood. In his later years he was religiously inclined ; was a patron and, for a time, resident of the Prioi-y which was attached to the church, now known as St. Saviour's, and standing opposite to the Lon- don Bridge Station in Southwark. In that church may now be found the tomb of Gower and his effigy in stone, with his head resting on " the like- ness of three books which he compiled." Perhaps I have no right to speak of Froissart, because he was a Fleming, and did not write in EngHsh ; but Lord Berners' spirited translation of his Chronicle (1523) has made it an English classic : * moreover, Froissart was very much in London ; he was a great pet of the Queen of Ed- * A more modern and accepted translation — by a wealthy Welsh gentleman, Thos. Johnes — was luxuriously printed on his private press at Hafod, Cardiganshire, in 1803. 9 I30 LANDS, LETTERS, (Sr» KINGS. ward III. ; he had free range of the palace ; he described great futes that were given at Windsor, and tournaments on what is now Cheapside ; a reporter of our day could not have described these things better : he went into Scotland too — the Queen Philippa giving him his outfit — and stayed with the brave Douglas " much time," and tells us of Stirling and of Melrose Abbey. Indeed, he was a great traveller. He was at Milan when Prince Clarence of England married one of the great Visconti (Chaucer possibly there also, and Petrarch of a certainty) ; he was at Eome, at Florence, at Bordeaux with the Black Prince, when his son Richard 11. was born ; was long in the household of Gaston de Foix : we are inclined to forget, as we read him, that he was a priest, and had his paro- chial charge somewhere along the low banks of the Scheldt : in fact, we suspect that he forgot it him- self. He not only wrote Chronicles, but poems ; and he tells us, that on his last visit to England, he pre- sented a copy of these latter — beautifully illumin- ated, engrossed by his own hand, bound in crimson velvet, and embellished with silver clasps, bosses, FROISSART. 131 and golden rosea — to King Richard 11. ; and the King asked him what it was all about ; and he said — "About Love ;" whereat, he says, the King seem- ed much pleased, and dipped into it, here and there — for "he could read French as well as speak it." Altogether, this rambling, and popular Froissart was, in many points, what we should call an exqui- site fellow ; knowing, and liking to know, only knights and nobles, and flattering them to the full ; receiving kindly invitations wherever he went ; overcome with the pressure of his engagements ; going about in the latest fashion of doublet ; some- whiles leading a fine greyhound in leash, and pre- senting five or six of the same to his friend the Comte de Foix (who had a great love for dogs) ; never going near enough to the front in battle to get any very hard raps ; ready with a song or a stoiy always ; puUing a long bow with infinite grace. Well — the pretty poems he thought so much of, nobody knows — nobody cares for : they have never, I think, been published in their entirety : * But, his Journal — his notes of what he saw and * There is a manuscript copy in the (so-called) BibliotMque du Boi at Paris. A certain number — among them, the Espi- 132 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. heard, clapped down ciglit bj night, in hostelries or in tent — perhaps on horseback — are cherished of all men, and must be reckoned the liveliest, if not the best of all chronicles of his time. He died in the first decade of that fifteenth century on which we open our British march to-day ; and, at the outset, I call attention to a little nest of dates, which from their lying so close together, can be easily kept in mind. Richard 11. son of the Black Prince, died — a disgraced prisoner — in 1400. John of Gaunt, his uncle, friend of Chaucer, died the previous year : while Chaucer, Froissart and John Gower all died in less than ten years thereafter ; thus, the century opens with a group of great deaths. Two Henrys and Two Poets. That Henry IV. who appears now upon the throne, and who was not a very noticeable man, save for his kingship, you will remember as the little son of John of Gaunt, who played about Chaucer's knee ; you will remember him further nette Amoureuse — appear in the Buchon edition of the Chroniques ; Paris, 1835. HENRY V. 133 as giving title to a pair of Shakespeare's plays, in which appears for the first time that semi-historic character — that enormous wallet of flesh, that egre- gious -villain, that man of a prodigious humor, all in one — Jack Falstaff. And this famous, fjjt Knight of Literature shall introduce us to Prince Hal who, according to traditions (much doubted nowadays), was a wild boy in his youth, and boon companion of such as Falstaff; but, afterward, became the brave and cruel, but steady and magnificent Henry V. Yet we shall never forget those early days of his, when at Gad's Hill, he plots with Falstaff and his fellows, to waylay travellers bound to London, with plump purses. Before the plot is carried out, the Prince agrees privately with Poins (one of the rogues) to put a trick upon Falstaff: Poins and the Prince will slip away in the dusk — let Falstaff and his companions do the robbing ; then, suddenly — disguised in buckram suits — pounce on them and seize the booty. This, the Pi-ince and Poins do : and at the first onset of these latter, the fat Knight runs off, as fast as his great hulk will let him, and goes spluttering and puffing to a near tavern, where — after consuming " an intolerable deal of sack " — ■ 134 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. be is confronted by the Prince, who demands his share of the spoils. But the big Knight blurts out — "A plague on all cowards ! " He has been beset, while the Prince had sneaked away ; the spoils are gone : " I am a rogue, if I was not at half a sword with a dozen of them two hours together ; I have scaped by a miracle ; I am eight times thrust thro' the doublet — four thro' the hose. My sword is hacked like a hand-saw. If I fought not with fifty of them, then am I a bunch of radish. If there were not two or three and fifty on poor old Jack, then am I no two-legged creature." "Pray God, [says the Prince, keeping down his laughter] you have not murdered some of them ! " Falstaff. Nay, that's past praying for ; for I peppered two of them — two rogues in buckram. Here I lay, and thus I bore my sword. Four rogues in buckram let drive at me. Prince. What, four ? ; thou said'st two. FaXstaff. Four, Hal ; I told thee four. And Poins comes to his aid, with — " Ay, he said four." Whereat the fat Knight takes courage ; the men in buckram growing, in whimsical stretch to seven, and nine ; he, paltering and swearing, and never losing his delicious insolent swagger, till at last the Prince declares the truth, and makes show of the booty. You think this coward Falsta£f may lose heart at this ; not a whit of it ; his eye, roll- LYDGATE. 135 ing in fat, does not blink even, while the Prince unravels the story ; but at the end the stout Knight hitches up his waistband, smacks his lips : — " D'ye tliink I did not know ye, my masters ? Should I turn upon the true Prince ? Why thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules ; but beware instinct : I was a coward on instinct." So runs the Shakespearean scene, of which I give this glimpse only as a remembrancer of Henry IV., and his possibly wayward son. If we keep by the strict letter of history, there is little of literary interest in that short reign of his — only fourteen years. Occleve, a poet of whom I spoke as having painted a portrait of Chaucer (which I tried to describe to you) is worth men- tioning — were it only for this. Lydgate,* of about the same date, was a more fertile poet ; wTote so easily indeed, that he was tempted to write too much. But he had the art of choosing taking sub- jects, and so, was vastly popular. Ho had excellent training, both English and Continental ; he was a priest, though sometimes a naughty one ; and he opened a school at his monastery of St. Edmunds. * John Lydgate : dates of birth and death unsettled. 136 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KLNGS. A few fragments of that monastery are still to be seen in the ancient town of Bury St. Edmunds : — a town you may remember in a profane way, as the scene of certain nocturnal adventures that befel, in our time, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller. Notable amongst the minor poems of this old Bury monk, is a jingling ballad called London Lickpenny, in which a poor suitor pushing his way into London courts, is hustled about, has his hood stolen, wanders hither and yon, with stout cries of " ripe strawberries " and " hot sheepes feete " shrill- ing in his ears ; is beset by taverners and thievish thread-sellers, and is glad to get himself away again into Kent, and there digest the broad, and ever good moral that a man's pennies get " licked " out of him fast in London. Remembering that this was at the very epoch when Nym and Bardolph fre- quented the Boar's Head, Eastcheap, and cracked jokes and oaths with Dame Quickly and Doll Tear- sheet, and we are more grateful for the old rhyming priest's realistic bit of London sights, than for all his classics,* or all his stories of the saints. * The Storie qf Thebe and the Troy booke were among his ambitious works. Skeat gives liis epoch " about 1420," and PRINCE JAMES. \yj But at the very time this Lydgate was writing, a tenderer and sweeter voice was warbling music out of a prison window at Windsor ; and the music has come down to us : * "Beauty enough to make a world to doat, And wlien she walked had a little thraw Under the sweet grene bowls bent, Her fair freshe face, as white as any snaw She turned has, and forth her way is went ; But then begun my aches and torment To see her part, and follow I na might ; Methought the day was turned into night." There is a royal touch in that, and it comes from a royal hand — that of Prince James of Scotland, who, taken prisoner by Henry IV., was held fast for sixteen years in the keep of Windsor Castle. Mr. cites London Lickpenny — copying from the Harleian MS. (367) in the British Museum. * James I. (of Scotland), b. 1394 and was murdered 1437. TJie King's Quair, from which quotation is made, was written in 1423. It is a poem of nearly 1400 lines, of which only one MS. exists — in the Bodleian Library. An edition by Chalmers (1824) embodies many errors : the only trustworthy reading is that edited by the Rev. Walter Skeat for the Scottish Text Soc. (1883-4). A cer- tain modernuinfj belongs of course to the citation I make — as well as to many others I have made and shall make. 13S LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. Irving has made him the subject of a very pleasant paper in the Sketch-book. Though a prince, he was a poet by nature, and from the window of his prison did see the fair lady whose graces were gar- nered in the verse I have cited ; and oddly enough, he did come to maiTy the subject of this very poem (who was related to the royal house of England, being grand-daughter of John of Gaunt) and there- after did come to be King of Scotland and — what was a commoner fate — to be assassinated. That queen of his, of whom the wooing had been so ro- mantic and left its record in the Itlng's Quair — made a tender and devoted wife — threw herself at last between him and the assassins — receiving griev- ous wounds thereby, but all vainly — and the poor poet-king was murdered in her presence at Perth, in the year 1437. These three poets I have named all plumed their wings to make that great flight by which Chaucer had swept into the Empyrean of Song : but not one of them was equal to it : nor, thenceforward all down through the century, did any man sing as Chaucer had sung. There were poetasters ; there were rhyming chroniclers ; and toward the end of JOHN SK ELTON. 139 the century there appeared a poet of more pi-eten- sioiij but with few of the graces we find in the au- thor of the Canterbury Tales. John Skelton * was his name : he too a priest liv- ing in Norfolk. His rhymes, as he tells us himself, were "ragged and jagged:" but worse than this, they were often ribald and rabid — attacking witli fierceness Cardinal Wolsey — attacking his fellow- priests too — so that he was compelled to leave his living : but he somehow won a j^lace afterward in the royal household as tutor ; and even the great Eras- mus (who had come over from the Low Countries, and was one while teaching Greek at Cambridge) congratulates some prince of the royal family upon the great advantage they have in the services of such a "special light and ornament of British literature." He is capricious, homely, never weak, often coarse, always quaint. From out his curious trick-track of verse, I pluck this little musical canzonet : — "Merry Margaret As midsummer flower ; ♦Priest at Diss in Norfolk, b. (about) 1460 ; d. 1529. Best edition of works edited by Rev. A. Dyce. 1843. 140 LANDS, LETTERS, &r' KINGS. Gentle as falcon Or liawk of the tower : With solace and gladness Much mirth and no madness, All good and no badness, So joyously, So maidenly, So womanly Her demeaning In everything Far, far passing That I can indite Or suffice to write Of merry Margaret As midsummer flower Gentle as falcon Or hawk of the tower : Stedfast of thought Well-made well-wrought ; Far may be sought Ere you can find So courteous — so kind As merry Margaret This midsummer flower." There is a pretty poetic pei'fume in this — a merry musical jingle ; but it gives no echo even of the tendernesses which wrapped all round and round the story of the Sad Griselda. HENRY V. 141 Henry Y. and War Times. This fifteenth century — in no chink of which, as would seem, could any brave or sweet English poem find root-hold, was not a bald one in British annals. There were great men of war in it : Henry V. and Bedford * and Warwick and Talbot and Richard m. all wi'ote bloody legends with their swords across French plains, or across English meadows. Normandy, which had slipped out of British hands — as you remember — under King John, was won again by the masterly blows Henry V. struck at Agincourt and otherwheres. Shakespeare has given an historic picture of this campaign, which will bs apt to outlive any contemporary chronicle. Falstaff disappears from sight, and his old crouy the dissolute Prince Hal comes upon the scene as the conquering and steady-going King. Through all the drama — from the "proud hoofs" * Bedford (when Regent of France) is supposed to have transported to England the famous Louvre Library of Charles V. (of France). There were 910 vols., according to the cata- logue drawn up by Gilles Mallet — "the greater number written on fine vellum and m.aguificently bound." /42 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KLVGS. of the war-horses, prancing in the prologue, to the last chorus, the lurid blaze of battle is threaten- ing or shining. Never were the pomp and circum- stance of war so contained within the pages of a play. For ever so little space — in gaps of the read- ing — between the vulgar wit of Nym, and the Welsh jargon of Fluellen, you hear the crack of ar- tillery, and see shivered spears and tossing plumes. In the mid scenes, vast ranks of men sweep under yom* vision, and crash against opposing ranks, and break, and dissolve away in the hot swirl of battle. And by way of artistic contrast to all this, comes at last, in the closing pages, that piquant, homely, strange coquettish love-scene, which — historicaUy true in its main details — joined the fortunes of Eng- land and of France in the persons of King Henry and Katharine of Valois. You will not be sorry to have a glimpse of this Shakespearean and historic love-making : The decisive battle has been fought : the French King is prisoner : Heniy has the game in his own hands. It is a condition of peace that he and the fair Katharine — daughter of France — shall join hands in marriage ; and Henry in his blunt war wav sets about his wooing : — HENRY V. 143 "O fair Katharine, if you will love me soundly with your French heart, I will be glad to hear' you confess it brokenly with your English tongue. Do you like me, Kate ? " Kate. Pardonnez moi; I cannot tell vat is — like me. King. [Explosively and deliciously.] An angel is like you, Kate ; and you aie like an augel : faith, I'm glad thou can'st speak no better English : for if thou could" st thou would'st find me such a plain King, that thou would'st think I had sold my farm to buy my crown. If you would put me to verses, or to dance for your sake, Kate, why you un- did me. I speak plain soldier. If thou can'st love me for this — take me: if not — to say to thee that I shall die, is true : but — for thy love — by the Lord, no. Yet I love thee too. And whil'st thou livest, Kate, take a fellow of a plain uncoined constancy : a straight-back will stoop ; but a good heart, Kate, is the sun and the moon ; or rather the sun and not the moon, for it shines bright and never changes. If thou would'st have such a one, take me ! Kate. Is it possible dat I should love de enemy of France ? King. No, it's not possible, Kate : but in loving me you would love the friend of France, for I love France so well, that I will not part with a village of it : I will have it all mine : and, Kate, when France is mine, and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine. But, Kate, dost thou understand thus much English — Can'st thou love me ? Kate. I cannot tell. King. Can any of your neighbors tell, Kate ? Kate. I do not know dat. King. By mine honor, in true English, I love thee, Kate : by which honor, I dare not swear thou lovest mo : 144 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. of the present century ; and on its demolition in 1846 its timbers were converted into snuff-boxes and the like, as mementos of the fii'st printer. It was in 1477 that William Caxton issued the first book, printed with a date, in England.* This Caxton was a man worth knowing about on many counts : he was a typical Englishman, born in Kent ; was apprenticed to a well-to-do mercer in the Old Jewry, London, at a time when, he says, many poor were a-hungered for bread made of fern roots ; — he went over (while yet apprentice) to the low countries of Flanders, perhaps to represent his master's interests ; abode there ; throve there ; came to be Governor of the Company of English merchant adventurers, in the ancient town of Bruges : knew the great, rich Flemings f who were * Caxton had been concerned, in company with. Colard Mansion, in printing other books, on the Continent, at an earlier date than this. The first book " set up " in England, was probably Caxton's translation — entitled " The Recuyle of the Histories of Troye." Vid. Blade's WiUiam Caxton: London, 1882. f Noticeable among these Louis de Bruges, Seigneur de la Gruthuyse — afterward made (by Edward IV. of England) Earl of Winchester. CAXTON. 151 patrons of letters; — becamo friend and proteg6 of that Englisli Princess Margaret who maiTied Charles Duke of Burgundy ; did work in translating old books for that gi'eat lady ; studied the new printing art, which had crept into Bruges, and finally, after thirty odd years of life in the busy Flemish city sailed away for London, and set up a press which be had brought with him, under the shadow of "Westminster towers. Fifteen years and more he wrought on there, at his printer's craft — counting up a hundred issues of books ; making much of his own copy, both translation and original, and dying over seventy in 1492. A good tag to tie to this date is — the Discovery of America ; Columbus being over seas on that early voyage of his, while the first English printer lay dying. And what were the books, pray, which Master Caxton — who, for a wonder, was shrewd business man, as well as inclined to literary ways — thought it worth his while to set before tbe world ? Among them we find A Sequell of the Hiatorie of Troie — The Dictes and Sayings of Philoso2Jhers — a history of Jason, the Game and Plays of Chesse, Mallory'a King Arthur (to which I have previously alluded), 152 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. a Booh of Courtesie, translations from Ovid, Virgil and Cicero — also the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer (of whom he was gi-eat admirer) — coupling with these latter, poems by Lydgate and Gower ; many people in those days seeming to rank these men on a level with Chaucer — just as we yoke wi-iters to- gether now in newspaper mention, who will most certainly be unyoked in the days that are to come. The editions of the first English books ranged at about two hundred copies : the type was what we call black letter, of which four varieties were used on the Caxton press, and the punctuation — if any — was of the crudest. An occasional sample of his work appears from time to time on the market even now ; but not at prices which are inviting to the most of us. Thus in 18G2, there was sold in Eng- land, a little Latin tractate printed by Caxton — of only ten leaves quarto, with twenty-four lines to the page, for £200 ; and I observe upon the catalogue of a recent date of Mr. Quaritch (the London bibho- pole) a copy of Godefroi de Boidoyne, of the Caxton imprint, offered at the modest price of £1,000. Very shortly after the planting of this first press at Westminster, others were estabHshed at Oxford JULIANA BARNES. 153 and also at the great monastery of St. Albana Among the early books printed at this latter place — say within ten years after Caxton's first — was a booklet written by a certain Dame Juliana Barnes ; * it is the first work we have encountered ^vritten by a woman ; and what do you think may have been its subject ? Religion — poesy — love — embroid- ery ? Not one of these ; but some twenty odd pages of crude verse " upon the maner of huntyng for all maner of bestys" (men — not being included) ; and she writes with the gusto and particularity of a man proud of his falcons and his dogs. Warton says blandly : " The barbarism of the times strongly ap- pears in the indelicate expressions which she often uses ; and which are equally incompatible with her sex and profession." The allusion to her "profes- sion " has reference to her supposed position as prioress of a convent ; this, however, is matter of grave doubt. * More frequently called Juliana Bemers — supposed rela- tive of the Lords Beruers and Abbess of Sopwell. Rev. Mr. Skeat, however — a very competent witness — confirms the reading given. For discussion of the question see the Angler's Note Book, No. iv. (1884) and opinions of Messrs. Quaritch & Westwood. 154 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. Old Private Letters. But tliis is not the only utterance of a female voice which we hear from out those years of barren- ness and moil. In 1787 there appeared in England a book made up of what were called Paston Let- ters * — published and vouched for by an antiqua- rian of Norfolk, who had the originals in his posses- sion — and which were in fact familiar letters that had passed between the members and friends of a well-to-do Norfolk family in the very years of the War of the Roses, of Caxton, of King Richard, and of Wynkyn de Worde. Among the parties to these old letters, there is a John Paston senior and a Sir John Paston, and a John Paston the younger and a good Margery Pas- ton ; there is a Sir John Fastolf too — as luck would have it. Was this the prototj'pe \ of Shakespeare's * The authenticity of these letters, published by John Fenn, Esq., F.A.S., has been questioned by Herman Meri- vale and others ; James Gairdner, however (of the Record office), has argued in their favor, and would seem to have put the question at rest. f Fuller, in his Worthies of England, says "The comedian is not excusable by some alteration of his name, seeing the P ASTON LETTERS. 155 mau of humors? Probably not : nor can we say of a certainty that he was the runaway warrior who was of so bad repute for a time in the army of the Duke of Bedford : but we do know from these musty papers that he had a "Jacket of red velvet, bound round the bottom with red leather," and "Another jacket of russet velvet lyned with blanket clothe ; " also " Two jackets of deer's leather, with a collar of black velvet," and so on. We do not however care so much about this Fas- tolf inventory, as for what good Margaret Paston may have to say : and as we read her letters we seem to go back on her quaint language and her good wifely fondness to the veiy days when they were written — in the great country-house of Norfolk, near upon the city of Norwich, with the gentle east wind from the German Ocean, blowing over the Norfolk fens, and over the forests, and over the orchards, and over the bams, and into the hall-windows, and lifting the very sheets of paper on which the good dame Margery is writing. And what does she say ? vicinity of sounds intrench on the memory of a worthy Knight ; and few do heed tho inconsiderable difference in gpelliug their names." 156 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. "Ryte -worshipful husband, I recommend me unto you " — she begins ; and thereafter goes on to speak of a son who has been doing unwise things, and been punished therefor as would seem : — •' As for his demeaning, sjn you departed, in good faith, it hath been ryt good, I hope lie will be well demeaned to please you hereafterward ; and I beseche you hartily that you would vouchsafe to be hys good fader, for I hope he is chas- tyzed, and will be worthier. As for all oder tyngges at home, I hope that I, and oder shall do our part therein, as wel as we may ; but as for mony it cometh in slowly, and God hav you in his keeping, and sen you good speed in all yr matters." Again, in another note, she addresses her hus- band, — "Myn onne sweethert [a good many years after marriage too!] in my most humble wyse I recommend me to you; desiring hertly to her of your welfare, the which I beseche Almighty God preserve and kepe." And a son writes to this same worthy Marga- ret: — "Ryght worshipful and my moste kynde and tender moder, I recommend me to you, thanking you of the great coste, and of the grete chere that ye dyd me, and myn, at my last being with you. Item : As for the books that weer Sir James [would] it like you that I may have them ? I am not able to buy them ■, but somewhat wolde I give, and the P ASTON LETTERS. 157 remnant with a good devout hert, by my truthe, I will pray for his soule. " Also, moder, I herd while in London ther was a goodly young woman to marry whyche was daughter to one Se£E, a mercer, and she will have 200 pounds in money to her marriage, and 20 £ by year after the dysesse of a step- moder of hers, whiche is upon 50 yeeres of age : and fore I departed out 0' Lunnon, I spak with some of the mayd's friends, and hav gotten their good wille to hav her married to my broder Edmond. Master Pykenham too is another that must be consulted — so he says : Wherefore, Moder, we must beseeche you to helpe x;s forward with a lettyr to Mas- ter Pykenham, for to remember him for to handyl this matter, now, this Lent. " A younger son "writes ; — '* I beseeche you humbly of your blessing : also, modyr, I beseeche you that ther may be purveyed some means that I myth have sent me home by the same messenger that shall bring my Aunt Poynings answer — two paire hose — 1 payr blak and another russet, whyche be redy for me at the hosers with the crooked back next to the Blk Friars gate, within Ludgate. John Pampyng kuoweth him well eno'. And if the blk hose be paid for, he will send me the russet ones unpaid for. I beseeche you that this geer be not for- got, for I have not an whole hose to do on. I pray you visit the Rood of St. Pauls, and St. Savior at Barmonsey whyls ye abide in London, and let my sister Margery go with you to pray to them that she may have a good husband ere she come home again. Written at Norwich on holyrood day, by yr " Sou and lowly Servant "Jijo: Paston th£ Younqest.'* IS8 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. This sounds as home-like as if it were wiittea yesterday, and about one of us — even to the send- ing of two pair of hose if one was paid for. And yet this familiar, boy-like letter was written in the year 1465 : six years before Caxton had set up his press in Westminster — twenty-seven before Columbus had landed on San Salvador, and at a time when Louis XI. and barber Oliver (whose characters are set forth in Scott's story of Quentin Durward) were hanging men who angered them on the branches of the trees which grew around the dismal palace of Plessis-les-Tours, in France. A Burst of Balladi'y. I have brought my readers through a waste liter- ary country to-day ; but we cannot reach the oases of bloom without going across the desert spaces. In looking back upon this moil and turmoil — this fret and wear and barrenness of the fifteenth cen- tury, in which we have welcomed talk about Cax- ton's sorry translations, and the wheezing of his press ; and have given an ear to the hunting dis- course of Dame Juliana, for want of better things •, and have dwelt with a certain gleesomeness on the BALLADRY. 159 homely Paston Letters, let us not forget that there has been all the while, and running through all the years of stagnation, a bright thread of balladry, with glitter and with gayety of color. This ballad music — whose first burst we can no more pin to a date than we can the first singing of the birds — had lightened, in that early century, the walk of the wayfarer on all the paths of England ; it had spun its tales by bivouac fires in France ; it had caught — as in silken meshes — all the young foragers on the ways of Romance. To this epoch, of which we have talked, belongs most likely that brave bal- lad of Chevy Chase, which keeps alive the memory of Otterbourne, and of that woful hunting which "Once there did, in Chevy Chase befal." *'To drive the deare with hounde and home Erie Percy took his way ; The child may rue, that is unborn The hunting of that day." Hereabout, too, belongs in all probability the early English shaping of the jingHng history of the brave deeds of Sir Guy of Warwick ; and some of the tales of Robin Hood and his " pretty men all," which had been sung in wild and crude carols for i6o LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. a century or roore, now seem to have taken on a more regular ballad garniture, and certainly be- came fixtures in type. This is specially averred of " Robin Hood and the Monk," beginning : — "In summer when the shawes be sheyne And leves be large and long, Hit is full merry, in feyre forest, To here the foulu's song; To see the dere draw to the dale, And leve the hillcs hee. And shadow them in the leves green, Under the grenwode tree." But was Eobin Hood a myth? Was he a real yeoman — was he the Earl of Huntington? We cannot tell ; we know no one who can. We know only that this hero of the folk-songs made the com- mon people's ideal of a good fellow — brave, lusty — a capital bowman, a wondrous wrestler, a lover of good cheer, a hater of pompous churchmen, a spoiler of the rich, a helper of the poor, with such advices as these for Little John : — " Loke ye do no housbande harme That tylleth with his plough ; No more ye shall no good yeman That walketh by greuewode shawe, NUT-BROWN MAID. i6i Ne no knjght, ne no squj^r, That wolde be a good felawe." That very charming ballad of the Nut -Brown Maid must also have been well known to contem- poraries of Caxton : She is daughter of a Baron, and her love has been won by a wayfarer, who says he is "an outlaw," and a banished man, a squire of low degree. He tries her faith and constancy, as poor Griselda's was tried in Chaucer's story — in Boccaccio's tale, and as men have tried and teased women from the beginning of time. He sets before her aU the dangers and the taunts that will come to her ; she must forswear her friends ; she must go to the forest with him ; she must not be jealous of any other maiden lying perdue there ; she must dare all, and brave all, — " Or else — I to the greenwood go Alone, a banished man." At last, having tormented her sufficiently, he con- fesses — that he is not an outlaw — not a banished man, but one who will give her wealth, and rank, and name and fame. And I will close out our ijresent talk with a verselet or two from this rich old ballad. 11 i62 LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS. The wooer says — " I counsel you, remember howe It is no maydens law Nothing to doubt, but to ran out To wed witb an outlaw : For ye must there, in your hand here A bowe ready to draw, And as a thefe, thus must you live Ever in drede and awe Whereby to you grete harme might growe ; Yet had I lever than That I had to the grenewode go Alone, a banished man." She: "I think not nay, but as ye say It is no maiden's lore But love may make me, for your sake As I have say'd before, To come on fote, to hunt and shote To get us mete in store ; For so that I, your company May have, I ask no more, From which to part, it maketh my hart As cold as any stone ; For in my minde, of all mankinde I love but you alone." He: "A baron's child, to be beguiled It were a cursed dede I To be felawe with an outlawe Almighty God forbid I NUT-BROWN MAID. 163 Yt better were, the poor Squyere Alone to forest yede, Than ye ehold say, another day That by my cursed dede Ye were betrayed ; wherefore good maid The best rede that I can Is that I to the grenewode go Alone, a banished man." &h6 : *' Whatever befal, I never shall Of this thing you upraid ; But if ye go, and leve me so Then have ye me betrayed ; Remember you wele, how that ye del© For if ye, as ye said Be so unkynde to leave behinde Your love the Nut Brown Mayd Trust me truly, that I shall die Soon after ye be gone ; For in my minde, of all mankinde I love but you alone." He: "My own deare love, I see thee prove That ye be kynde and true : Of mayd and wife, in all my life The best that ever I knewe Be merry and glad ; be no more sad The case is chaunged newe For it were ruthe, that for your truthe Ye should have cause to rue ; Be nut dismayed, whatever I said 1 64 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. To you when I began ; I will not to the grenewode go I am no banished man." And she, with delight and fear — " These tidings be more glad to me Than to be made a quene ; If I were sure they shold endure But it is often seene When men wyl break promise, they speak The wordes on the splene : Ye shape some wyle, me to beguile And stele from me I wene ; Then were the case, worse than it was And I more woebegone, For in my minde, of all mankynde I love but you alone." TJien he — at last, — "Ye shall not nede, further to drede I will not disparage You (God defend ! ) sy th ye descend Of so grate a lineage ; Now understand — to Westmoreland Which is mine heritftge I wyl you bring, and with a ryng By way of marriage I wyl you take, and lady make As shortcly as I can : Thus have you won an Erly's sou And not a banished man." BALLADE V. 165 In our next chapter we shall enter upon a dif- ferent century, and encounter a different people. We shall find a statelier king, whose name is more familiar to you: In place of the fat knight and Prince Hal, we shall meet brilUant churchmen and hard-headed reformers ; and in place of Otter- bourne and its balladry, we shall see the smoke of Smithfield fires, and listen to the psalmody of Stemhold. CHAPTER V. WHEN we turned the leaf upon the Balladry of England, we were upon fifteenth cen- tury ground, which, you will remember, we found very barren of great ^vriters. Gower and Froissart, whom we touched upon, slipped off the stage just as the century began — their names making two of those joined in that group of deaths to which I called attention, and which marked the meeting of two centuries. Next we had glimpse of Lydgate and of King James (of Scotland), who, at their best, only gave faint token of the poetic spirit which illumi- nated the far better verses of Chaucer. We then passed over the period of the Henrys, and of the War of the Roses, with mention of Shakespeare's Falstaff — of his Prince Hal — his Agincourt — his courtship of Katharine of Valois — his inadequate presentment of the Maid of Orleans HENRY VIIT. 167 — his crabbed and crooked Richard m. — all rounded out with the battle of Bosworth field, and the coming to power of Heniy of Richmond. We found the book-trade taking on a new phaso with Caxton's press : we gave a tinkling bit of Skel- ton's " Merry Margaret ; " we put a woman- writer — Dame Juhana Barnes — for the first time on our list ; we lingered over the quaint time-stained Pas- ton Letters, which smelled so strongly of old Eng- lish home-life ; and we summed up our talk with a little bugle-note of that Balladry which made fitful snatches of music all through the weariness of those hundred years. Early Days of Heninj VIII. To-day we front the sixteenth century. Great names and great deeds crop out over it as thickly as leaves grow in summer. At the very outset, three powerful monarchs came almost abreast upon the scene — Henry Vm. of England, Francis I. of France, and Charles V. of Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries. Before the first quarter of the century had passed, the monk Luther had pasted his ticket upon the l68 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KLYGS. doors of the church at Wittemberg ; and that other soldier-monk, Loyola, was astir with the beginnings of Jesuitism. America had been planted ; the Cape of Good Hope was no longer the outpost of stormy wastes of water with no shores beyond. St. Peter's church was a-building across the Tiber, and that brilliant, courteous, vicious, learned Leo X. was lording it in Rome. The Moors and their Sai-acen faith had been driven out of the pleasant countries that are watered by the Guadalquivir. Titian was alive and working ; and so was Michael Angelo and Raphael, in the great art-centres of Italy : and Ven- ice was in this time so rich, so grand, so beautiful, so abounding in princely houses, in pictures, in books, in learning, and in all social splendors, that to pass two winters in the City of the Lagoon, was equal to the half of a polite education ; and I sup- pose that a Florentine or Venetian or Roman of that day, thought of a pilgrimage to the far-away, murky London, as Parisians think now of going to Chica- go, or Omaha, or San Francisco — excellent places, with deHghtful people in them ; but not the centres about which the literary and art world goes spin- ning, as a wheel goes spinning on its hub. HENRY VII I. 169 We have in the contemporary notes of a well- known Venetian chronicler, Marini Sanuto — wlio was secretary to the famous Council of Ten — evi- dence of the impression which was made on that far-off centre of business and of learning, by such an event as the accession of Henry \T^II. to the thi'one of England. This Sanuto was a man of great dignity ; and by virtue of his position in the Council, heard all the " relations " of the ambassa- dors of Venice ; and hence his Diary is a great mine of material for contemporary history. •' News liave come," lie says, " through Rome of the death of the King of England on April 20tli [1509]. 'Twas known in Lucca on the Gth May, by letters from the hankers Bon- visi. Tlie new King is nineteen years old, a worthy King, and hostile to France. He is the son-in law of the King of Spain. His father was called Henry, and fifty odd years of age ; he was a very great inker, but a man of vast ability, and had accumulated so much gold that lie is supposed to have [had] more than wellnigh all the other Kings of Christendom. The King, his son, is liberal and handsome — the friend of Venice, and the enemy of France. This intelligence is most satisfactory." Certainly the new king was most liberal in his spending, and as certainly was abundantly provided for. And money counted in those days — as it does lyo LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS. most whiles : no man in England could come to the dignity of Justice of the Peace — such office as our evergreen friend Justice Shallow holds in Shake- speare — except he had a rental of £20 per annum, equivalent to a thousand dollars of present money — measured by its purchasing power of wheat.* By the same standard the average Earl had a revenue of £20,000, and the richest of the peers is put down at a probable income of three times this amount. What a special favorite of the crown could do in the way of expenditure is still made clear to us by those famous walks, gardens, and gorgeous saloons of Hampton Court, where the great Cardinal Wolsey set his armorial bearings upon the wall — still to be seen over the entrance of the Clock Court. If you go there — and every American visitor in London should be sure to find a way thither — you will see, may be, in the lower range of windows, that look upon the garden court — the pots of geranium and the tabby cats belonging to gentlewomen of rank, but of decayed fortune — humble pensioners of Vic- • The equipment of a parsonage house in Kent in those iays, is set forth in full inventory (from MS. in the Rolls House) by Mr. Yxou^Q. — IIiitorij of England, chap, i , p. 47. HENRY VIII. 171 toria — who occupy the sunny rooms from which, in the times we are talking of, the pampered servants of the great Cardinal looked out. And when the great man drove to court, or into the cit}', his ret- inue of outriders and lackeys, and his golden trap- pings, made a spectacle for all the street mongers. Into that panorama, too, of the early days of Henry VIQ., enters with slow step, and with sad speech, poor Katharine of Aragon — the first in or- der of this stalwart king's wives. ]\Irs. Fanny Kem- ble Butler used to read that queen's speech with a pathos that brought all the sadnesses of that sad court to life again : Miss Cushmau, too, you may possibly have heard giving utterance to the same moving story ; but, I think, with a masculinity about her manner she could never wholly shake off, and which gave the impression that she could — if need were — give the stout king sucli a buffet on the ears as would put an end to all chaffer about divorce. Shakespeare, writing that play of Henry VHL, probably duiing the lifetime of Elizabeth (though its precise date and full authenticity are matters of doubt), could not speak with very much freedom of the great queen's father : She had too much of that 172 LANDS, LETTERS, 6- KINGS. father's spirit in Ler to permit that ; otherwise, I think the great dramatist would have given a blazing score to the cruelty and Blueheardism of Henry VIII. I know that there be those acute historic inquir- ers who would persuade us to believe that the king's much-marrying propensities were all in order, and legitimate, and agreeable to English constitutional sanction: but I know, too, that there is a strong British current of common-sense setting down all throufjh the centuries which finds harbor in the old-fashioned belief — that the king who, with six successive wives of his own choice, divorced two, and cut off the heads of other two, must have had • — vicious weaknesses. For my own part, I take a high moral delight — Froude to the contrary — in thinking of him as a clever, dishonest, good-natured, obstinate, selfish, ambitious, tempestuous, arrogant scoundrel. Yet, withal, he was a great favorite in his young days ; — so tall, so trim, so stout, so rich, so free with his money. No wonder the stately and disconsolate Queen (of Aragon) said : — ♦' Would I liad never trod this English earth, Or felt the flatteries that grow upon it ; Ye've angels faces, but Heaven knows your hearts I " CARDINAL WOLSEY. 173 And this wilful King befriended learning and let- ters in his own wilful way. Nay, he came to have ambitions of his own iu that direction, when he grew too heavy for practice with the long-bow, or for feats of riding — iu which matters he had gained eminence even amongst those trained to sports and exercises of the field. Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Thomas More. It was with the King's capricious furtherance that Cardinal Wolsey became so august a friend of learning. The annalists delicrht in telling us how the great Cardinal went down to St. Paul's School to attend upon an exhibition of the boys there, who set afoot a tragedy founded upon the story of Dido. And at the boys' school was then established as head-master that famous William Lilly * who had learned Greek in his voyaging into Eastern seas, and was among the first to teach it in England : he was the author too of that Lilly's Latin Grammar * Not to be confounded with William Lilly the astrologer of the succeeding century. William Lilly of St. Paul's was b. 14G8 ; d. (of the plague) in 1533. His Latin Grammar was first published in 1513. /74 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. which was in use for centuries, and of which latef editions are hanging about now in old New Eng- land garrets, from whose mouldy pages our grand- fathers learned to decline their j^enncB — pennarujn. Wolsey wrote a preface for one of the earlier issues of this Lilly's Grammar ; and the King gave it a capital advertisement by proclaiming it illegal to use any other. The Cardinal, moreover, in later years established a famous school at his native place of Ipsvdch (a rival in its day to that of Eton), and he issued an address to all the schoolmasters of England in favor of accomplishing the boys sub- mitted to their charge in the most elegant litera- tures. The great Hall of Christ's Church College, Ox- ford, still further serves to keep in mind the mem- ory and the munificence of Cardinal Wolsey : ifc must be remembered, however, in estimating hia munificence that he had only to confiscate the rev- enues of a small monastery to make himself full- pocketed for the endowment of a college. 'Tis certain that he loved learning, and that he did much for its development in the season of his greatest power and influence ; certain, too, that his SIR THOMAS MORE. 175 ambitions were too large for the wary King, his master, and brought him to that dismal fall from his high estate, which is pathetically set forth in Shakespeare's Henry VIII. : *' Farewell to all my greatness I This is the state of man : to-day he puts forth The tender leaves of hope, to-morrow blossoms And bears his blushing honors thick upon him ; The third day comes a frost — a killing frost ; And— when he thinks, good easy man, full surely His greatness is a ripening — nips his root And then he falls as I do. I have ventured, Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory ; But far beyond my depth ; my high blown pride At length broke under me ; and now has left me, Weary, and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream that must forever hide me." Another favorite of Heni-y in the early days of his kingship, and one bearing a far more im- portant name in the literary annals of England than that of Wolsey, was Sir Thomas More. He was a Greek of the very Greeks, in both character and attainment. Bom in the heart of London — in Milk Street, now just outside of the din and roar of Cheapside, he was a scholar of Oxford, and was 176 LANDS, LETTERS, 6^ KINGS. the son of a knight, who, like Sir Thomas himself, had a reputation for shrewd sayings — of which the old chronicler, William Camden,* has reported this sample : — " Marriage," said the elder More, "with its chauces, is like dipping one's hand into a bag, with a great many snakes therein, and but one eel ; the which most serviceable and comfortable eel might possibly be seized upon ; but the chauces are largely in favor of catching a stinging snake : " But, says the chronicler — this good knight did him- self thrust his hand three several times into such a bag, and with such ensuing results as preserved him hale and sound to the age of ninety or there- about. The son inherited this tendency to whimsi- cal speech, joining with it rare merits as a scholar : and it used to be said of him as a boy, that he could thrust himself into the acting of a Latin comedy and extemporize his part, with such wit and apt- * William Camden, antiquary and chronicler ; b. 1551 ; d. 1623. Annales Eeruni Aiiglicarum et Hibermcarum reg- iiante Elizabetha, pub. 1615. In 1597 he published a Greek Grammar — for the Westminster boys ; he being at the time head-master of the school. S/Ji THOMAS MORE. 177 ness, as not to break upon the drift of the play. He studied, as I said, at Oxford ; and afterward Law at Lincoln's Lin ; was onewhile strongly in- clined to the Church, and under influence of a patron who was a Church dignitary became zealous Religionist, and took to wearing in penance a bris- tling hair-shirt — which (or one like it) he kept wear- ing till prison -days and the scaffold overtook him, as they overtook so many of the quondam friends of Henry VHL For he had been early presented to that monarch — even before Heniy had come to the throne — and had charmed him by his humor and his scholarly talk : so that when More came to live upon his little farm at Chelsea (very near to Cheyne Eow where Carlyle died but a few years since) the King found his way thither on more than one occasion ; and there are stories of his pacing up and down the garden walks in familiar talk with the master. There, too, came for longer stay, and for longer and friendlier communings, the great and schol- arly Erasmus (afterward teacher of Greek at Cam- bridge) — and out of one of these visitations to Chelsea grew the conception and the working out 12 178 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. of his famous Praise of FoDy, with its punning title — Encomium Morice.* The King promised preferment to More — which came in its time. I think he was in Flanders on the King's business, when upon a certain day, as he was coming out from the Antwerp Cathedral, he en- countered a stranger, with long beard and sunburnt face — a man of the "Ancient Mariner" stamp, who had made long voyages with that Amerigo Ves- pucci who stole the honor of naming America : and this long-bearded mariner told Sir Thomas More of the strange things he had seen in a coxintry farther off than America, called Utopia. Of course, it is some- thing doubtful if More ever really encountered such a mariner, or if he did not contrive him only as a good frontispiece for his pohtical fiction. This is the work by which More is best known (through its EngHsh translations) ; and it has given the word Utopian to our every-day speech. The present popular significance of this term will give you a proper liint of the character of the book : it is an * Erasmus: by Robert Blackley Drunimond (cbap. vii.). London, 1873. SIR THOMAS MORE. 179 elaborate and whimsical and yet statesmanlike fore- cast of a government too good and honest and wise to be sound and true and real. Sir Thomas smacked the humor of the thing, in giving the name Utopia, which is Greek for No- where. If, indeed, men were all honest, and wom- en all virtuous and children all rosy and helpful, we might all live in a Utopia of our own. All the Fourierites — the SociaHsts — the Knights of Labor might find the germs of their best arguments in this reservoir of the ideal maxims of statecraft. In this model country, gold was held in large dis- respect ; and to keep the scorn of it wholesome, it was put to the vilest uses : a gi'eat criminal was compelled to wear gold rings in his ears : chains were made of it for those in bondage ; and a partic- ularly obnoxious character put to the wearing of a gold head-band ; so too diamonds and pearls were given over to the decoration of infants ; and these, with other baby accoutrements, they flung aside in disgust, 80 soon as they came to sturdy childhood. When therefore upon a time. Ambassadors came to Utopia, from a strange country, with their tricksy show of gold and jewels — the old Voyager says : — i8o LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KLWGS. " You sh"* have sene [Utopian] children that had caste away their peerles and pretious stones, when they sawe the like sticking upon the Ambassadours cappes ; — digge and pushe theire mothers under the sides, sainge thus to them, — ' Loke mother how great a lubbor doth yet were peerles, as though he were a litel child stil ! ' ' Peace sone,' saith she ; ' I thinke he be some of the Ambassadours f ooles. ' " Also in this model state industrial education was in vogue ; children all, of wliatsovever parentage, were to be taugbt some craft — as "masonrie or smith's craft, or the carpenter's science." Unlawful games were decried — such as "dyce, cardes, tennis, coytes [quoits] — do not all these," says the author, " sende the haunters of them streyghte a stealynge, when theyr money is gone ? " The Russian Count Tolstoi's opinion that money is an invention of Satan and should be abolished, is set forth with more humor and at least equal logic, in this Latin tractate of More's. In the matters of Religion King Utopus decreed that " it should be lawful for everie man to favoure and folow what religion he would, and that he mighte do the best he could to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peace- ablie, gentelie, quietlie and sobelie, without hastie and con- tentious rebuking." S/J? THOMAS MORE. i8i Yet this same self-contained Sir Thomas More did in bis after controversies with Tyndale use such talk of him — about bis " whyuing and biting and licking and tumbling in the myre," and " rubbing himself in puddles of dirt," — as were hke any- thing but the courtesies of Utopia. Indeed it is to be feared that tbeologic discussion does not greatly provoke gentleness of speech, in any time ; it is a very grindstone to put men's wits to sharp- ened edges. But More was a most honest man withal; — fearless in advocacy of his own opinions; eloquent, self-sacrificing — a tender father and husband — master of a rich English speech (his Utopia was written in Latin, but translated many times into English, and most languages of Con- tinental Europe), learned in the classics — a man to be remembered as one of the greatest of Henry VUL's time ; a Romanist, at a date when honestest men doubted if it were worthiest to be a King's man or a Pope's man ; — not yielding to his royal master in points of religious scruple, and with a lofty ob- stinacy in what he counted well doing, going to the scafibld, with as serene a step as he had ever put to his walks in the pleasant gardens of Chelsea. 1 82 LANDS, LETTERS, ^ KINGS. CranmeVy Latimer^ Knox., and Others. A much nobler figure is this, to my mind, than that of Cranmer,* who appears in such picturesque lights in the drama of Henry VIII. — who gave ad- hesion to royal wishes for divorce upon divorce ; who always colored his religious allegiances with the colors of the King ; who was a scholar indeed — learned, eloquent ; who wrought well, as it proved, for the reformed faith ; but who wilted under the fierce heats of trial ; would have sought the good will of the blood-thirsty Mary ; but who gave even to his subserviencies a half-tone that brought distrust, and so — finally — the fate of that quasi-martyrdom which has redeemed his memory. He stands very grandly in his robes upon the memorial cross at Oxford : and he has an even more august presence in the final scene of Shakespeare's play, where amidst all churchly and courtly pomp, he christened the infant — who was to become the ♦Cranmer, b. 1489; d. 1556. Complete edition of his works published 1834 (Rev. H. Jenkyns). Cranmer's Bible so called, because accompanied by a prologue, written by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop, etc. CRANMER. 183 Royal Elizabeth, and says to the assembled digni- taries : " This royal infant Tlio' in her cradle, yet now promises Upon this land a thousand thousand blessings, Which time will bring to ripeness : She shall be A pattern to all princes living with her, And all that shall succeed her. Truth shall nurse her, Holy and heavenly thoughts still counsel her : She shall be loved and feared. A most unspotted lily shall she pass To the ground, and all the world shall mourn her." * Tennyson, in his drama of Queen Mary (a most unfortunate choice of heroine) gives a statuesque pose to this same Archbishop Cranmer ; but Shake- speare's figures are hard to duplicate. He was with Henry VHL as counsellor at his death ; was intimate adviser of the succeeding Edward VI. : and took upon himseK obligations from that King • There are many reasons for doubting if these lines were from Shakespeare's own hand. Emerson {Representative Men) — rarely given to Literary criticism, remarks upon "the bad rhythm of the compliment to Queen Elizabeth" as unworthy the great Dramatist : so too, he doubts, though with less reason — the Shakespearean origin of the Wolsey Soliloquy. See also Trans. New Shakespere 6oaiety for 1874. Part I. (Spedding ei al.) i84 LANDS, LETTERS, 6^ KINGS. (contrary to his promises to Henrj') which brought him to grief under Queen Mary. That brave thrust of his offending hand into the blaze that consumed him, cannot make us forget his weaknesses and his recantations ; nor will we any more forget that he it was, who gave (1543) to the old Latin Litur- gy of the Church that noble, English rhythmic flow which so largely belongs to it to-day. It is quite impossible to consider the literary as- pects of the period of English history covered by the reign of Henry VHI., and the short reigns of the two succeeding monarchs, Edward VI. and Mary, without giving large frontage to the Eeform- ers and religious controversialists. Every scholar was aUve to the great battle in the Church. The Greek and Classicism of the Universities came to have their largest practical significance in connec- tion with the settlement of religious questions or in furnishing weapons for the ecclesiastic controversies of the day. The voices of the poets — the Skeltons, the Sackvilles, the Wyatts, were chirping sparrows' voices beside that din with which Luther thundered in Germany, and Heni-y VHI. thundered back, more weakly, from his stand-point of Anglicanism. WILLIAM TYNDALE. 185 We have seen Wolsey in his garniture of gold, going from court to school ; and Sir Thomas More, stern, strong, and unyielding ; and Archbishop Cranmer, disposed to think rightly, but without the courage to back up his thought ; and associated with these, it were well to keep in mind the other figures of the great religious processional. There was William Tyndale, native of Gloucestershire, a slight, thin figure of a man ; honest to the core ; well-taught ; getting dignities he never sought ; wearied in his heart of hearts by the flattering coquetries of the King ; perfecting the work of Wyclif iu making the old home Bible readable by all the world. His translation was first printed in Wittenberg about 1530:* I give the Lord's Prayer as it appeared in the original edition : — "Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thj name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well iu erth, as hit ys in heven. Geve vs this daye cure dayly breade. And forgeve va oure trespases, even as we forgeve them which treespas vs. Leade vs not into temptacion but delyvre vs from yvell. Amen." • William Tyndale, b. about 1480 ; d. (burned at the stake) 1536. G. P. aiarsh (Encj. Language and Early Lit.) says ♦' Tyndale's translation of the New Testament has exerted a 1 86 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. But Tyndale was not safe in England ; nor yet in the Low Countries whither he went, and where the long reach of religious hate and jealousy put its hand upon him and brought him to a death whose fiery ignominies are put out of sight by the lus- trous quality of his deserviugs. I see too amongst those great, dim figures, that speak in Scriptural tones, the form of Hugh Lati- mer, as he stands to-day on the Memorial Cross in Oxford. I think of him too — in humbler dress than that which the sculptor has put on him — even the yeoman's clothes, which he wore upon his father's farm, in the Valley of the Soar, when he wi-ought there in the meadows, and drank in humility of thought, and manly independence under the skies of Leicestershii'e * — where (as he says), "My father had walk for an hundred sheep, and my mother more marked influence upon English pliilology than any other native work between the ages of Chaucer and of Shakespeare." * Latimer (Hugh) b. 1491 ; d. (at the stake) 1555. He was educated at Cambridge — came to be Bishop of Worces- ter — wrote much, wittily and strongly. A collection of his Sermons was published in 1570-71 ; and there have been many later issues. JOHN KNOX. 187 milked thirty kine." He kept his head upon his shoulders through Henry's time — his amazing wit and humor helping him to security ; — was in fair favor with Edward ; but under Mary, walked coolly with Eidley to the stake, where the fires were set, to burn them both in Oxford. Foxe * too is to be remembered for his Stories of the Martyrs of these, and other times, which have formed the nightmare reading for so many school-boys. I see, too, another figure that will not down in this coterie of Reformers, and that makes itself heard from beyond the Tweed. This is John Knox,f a near contemporary though something younger than most I have named, and not ripening to his * John Foxe, b. 1517; d. 1587. He was a native of Bos- ton, Lincolnshire ; was educated at Oxford ; his Uistory of the Acts and Monuments of the Church was first published in England in 1563. There was an earlier edition pub- lished at Strasbourg in 1554. f Born near Haddington, Scotland, in 1505 (d. 1572); bred a friar ; was prisoner in France in 1547 ; resided long time at Geneva ; returned to Scotland in 1559. Life by Laing (1847) and by Braudes (1863); Swinburne's BothweU, Act iv., gives dramatic rendering of a sermon by John Knox. See also Carlyle's Uerocs and Hero-toorship, Lecture IV. l88 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. house of Walsingbam, ambassador of England, in Paris. Why not be gentle ? What is to provoke ? It is quite a different thing — as many another Cambridge man knew (Spenser among them), to be gentle and bland and forbearing, when illness seizes, when poverty pinches, when friends back- slide, when Heaven's gates seem shut ; — then, amiability and gentleness and forbearance are in- deed crowning graces, and will unlock, I think, a good many of the doors upon the courts, where the weary shall be at rest. Sidney is at Paris when that virago Catharine de' Medici was lording it over her sons, and over France ; — there, too, as it chanced, through the slaughter of St. Bartholomew's day, from which bloody holocaust he presently recoils, and con- tinues his travel over the Continent, writing very charming, practical letters to his younger brother Robert : "You think my experience," lie says, "has grown from the good things I have learned : but I know the only experi- ence which I have gotten is, to find how much I might have learned and how much indeed I have missed — for want of directing my course to the right end and by the right means." And again he tells him, "not to go travel — as SIDNEY'S 7 RAVELS. 235 many people do — merely out of a tickling humor to do as other men have done, or to talk of having been." He goes leisurely iuto Italy — is for some time at the famous University of Padua ; he is in Venice too during the great revels which were had there in 1574, in honor of Henry HL (of France). The Pi- azza of San Marco was for days and nights together a blaze of light and of splendor : what a city to visit for this young Briton, who came accredited by Elizabeth and by Leicester ! The palaces of the Foscari and of the Contarini would be open to him ; the younger Aldus Manutius was making imprints of the classics that would delight his eye ; the temple fronts of Palladio were in their first fresh- ness : Did he love finer forms of art — the great houses were rich in its trophies : the elder Pulma and Tintoretto were still at work : even the veteran Titian was carrying his ninety-eight years with a stately stride along the Piivi of the canal : if Lo loved adventure, the Venetian ladies were very beautiful, and the masks of the Eidotto gave him the freedom of their smiles; the escapade of Bi- anca Capello was a story of only yesterday ; and for other romance — the air was full of it ; snatches 236 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. from Tasso's Rinaldo * were on the lips of the gon- doHers, and poetic legends lurked in every ripple of the sea that broke upon the palace steps. It is said that Sidney was painted in Venice hy Paul Vero- nese ; and if one is cunning in those matters he may be able to trace the likeness of the heir of Penshurst in some one of those who belong to the great groups of noble men and women which the Veronese has left upon the walls of the Ducal Pal- ace. In 1575 he came home, with all the polish that European courts and European culture could give him. We may be sure that he paid dainty compli- ments to the Queen — then in the full bloom of womanhood : we may be sure that she devoured them all with a relish that her queenliness could not wholly conceal. He won his sobriquet of "The Gentleman " in these times ; elegantly courteous ; saying the right thing just when he should say it : — perhaps too elegantly courteous — too insistent that even a " Good-raorniug " should be spoken at precisely the right time, and in the right key — * The first edition of Rinaldo was printed at Venice in 1563 : this great epic was completed at Padua in 1575. THE ARCADIA. 237 too observant of the starched laws of a deportment that chills by its own consciousness of unvarying propriety, as if — well, I had almost said — as if he had been bom in Boston. His favorite sister meantime has married one of the Pembrokes, and has a princely place down at Wilton, near Salisbury (now another haunt of pleasure-seekers). Sidney ■was often there ; and he wrote for this cherished sister his book, or poem — (call it how we will) of Arcadia ; writing it, as he says, oflf-hand — and without re-reading — sheet by sheet, for her pleasure : I am son*y he ever said this ; it provokes hot-heads to a carel«ssness that never wins results worth winning. Indeed I think Sidney put more care to his Arcadia than he confessed ; though it is true, he expressed the wish on his death-bed, that it should never be printed. Shall I tell you anything of it — that it is an Allegory — shaped in fact after a famous Italian poem of the same name — that few people now read it continuously ; that it requires great pluck to do so ; and yet that no one can dip into it — high or low — without finding rich euphuisms, poetic symphonies, noble characters, dexterous experi- 238 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. mentation in verse — iambics, sapphics, hexameters, all interlaced with a sonorous grandiloquence of prose — a curious medley, very fine, and very dull ? When published after his death it ran through edition after edition, and young wives were grave- ly cautioned not to spend too much time over that cherished volume. His little book of the Defence of jPoesie, which he also wrote down at Wilton, appeals more nearly to our sympathies, and may be counted still a good and noble argument for the Art of Poetry. And Sidney gave proof of his skill in that art, far beyond anything in the Arcadia — in some of those amatory poems under title of Astrophel and Stella, which were supposed to have grown out of his fruitless love for PenelojDe Devereux, to which I made early reference. I cite a single sonnet that you may see his manner : — " SteUa, think not, that I by verse seek fame, Who seek, who hope, who love, who live — but thee ; Thine eyes my pride, thy lips mine history. If thou praise not, all other praise is shame, Nor so ambitious am I as to frame A nest for my young praise in laurel tree ; In truth I vow I wish not there should be Graved in my epitaph, a Poet's name. PHILIP SIDNEY. 239 Nor, if I would, could I just title make That any laud thereof, to me should grow Without — my plumes from other wings I take — For nothing from my wit or will doth flow Since all my words thy beauty doth indite, And Love doth hold my hand, and make me write." But it is, after all, more Lis personality than Lis books that draws our attention toward Lim, amid that galaxy of brigLt spirits wLicL is gatLering around tLe court of ElizabetL. In all tLe revels, and tLe pageants of tLe day tLe eyes of tLousanda fasten upon Lis fine figure and Lis noble presence, TLougL Scott — singularly enougL — passes Lim by witLout mention, lie is down at KenilwortL, wLen tLe ambitious Leicester turns Lis castle-gardens into a Paradise to welcome Lis sovereign. WLen he goes as ambassador to RudoIpL of Germany, Le hangs golden blazonry upon the walls of his Louse : EnglisLmen, everywLere, are proud of tLis fine gentleman, Sidney, wLo can talk in so many lan- guages, wLo can turn a sonnet to a lady's eye- brow, wLo can fence witL tLo best swordsmen of any court, wLo can play upon six instruments of music, wLo can outdance even Lis Grace of Anjou. His deatL was in keeping AvitL Lis life ; it Lap- 240 LANDS, LETTERS, &> A'LVGS. pened in the war of the Low Countries, and was due to a brilliant piece of bravado ; he and his companions fighting (as at Balaclava in the Charge of the Light Brigade) where there was little hope of conquest. All round them — in front — in rear — in flank — the arquebuses and the cannon twanged and roared. They beat down the gun- ners ; they sabred the men-at-arms ; thrice and four times they cut red ways through the beleaguering enemy ; but at last, a cruel musket-ball came crash- ing through the thigh of this brave, polished gentle- man — Philip Sidney — and gave him his death- wound. Twenty-five days he lingered, saying brave and memorable things — sending courteous messages, as if the sheen of royalty were still upon him — doing tender acts for those nearest him, and dying, with a great and a most worthy calm. We may well believe that the Queen found some- what to wipe from her cheek when the tale came of the death of "my Philip," the pride of her court. Leicester, too, must have minded it sorely : and of a surety Spenser in his far home of Kilcolman ; writing there, maybe — by the Mulla shore — his PHILIP SIDNEY. ii^\ apostrophe to Sidney's soul, so full of his sweetnesa and of Lis wonderful word-craft : — "Ah me, can so Divine a thing be dead ? Ah no : it is not dead, nor can it die But lives for aye in Blissful Paradise : Where, like a new-born Babe, it soft doth lie In bed of Lilies, wrapped in tender wise And compassed all about with Roses sweet And dainty violets, from head to feet. There — thousand birds, all of celestial brood To him do sweetly carol, day and night And with strange notes — of him well understood Lull him asleep in an-gelic Delight Whilst in sweet dreams, to him presented be Immortal beauties, which no eye may see." Two black palls fling their shadows on the court of Elizabeth in 1587 : Sidney died in October of 158G ; and in the following February Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded. The next year the Spanish Armada is swept from the seas, and all England is given up to rejoicings. And as we look back upon this period and catch its alternating light and shade on the pages of the historians and in the lives of English poets and statesmen, the great Queen, in her ruff and laces, and with her coronet of jewels, Beema somehow, throughout all, the central figure, IG 242 LANDS, LETTERS, 6^ KINGS. We see Raleigh the Captain of her Guard — the valiant knight, the scholar, the ready poet — but readiest of all to bring his fine figure and his stately gallantries to her court : We see Sir Fran- cis Drake, with his full beard and bullet-head — all browned with his long voyages, fi-om which he has come laden with ingots of Spanish gold — swinging with his sailor-gait into her august presence : We catch sight of Lord Burleigh, feeble now with the weight of years, leading up that young nephew of his — Francis Bacon, that he may kiss the Queen's hand and do service for favors which shall make him in time Lord Chancellor of England. Perhaps the rash, headstrong Oxfoi'd may be in presence, whose poor wife was once the affianced of Sidney : And the elegant Lord Buckhurst, decorous with the white hair of age, who, in his younger days, when plain Thomas Sackville, had contributed the best j)^i'ts to the Mirror for Magistrates : Richard Hooker, too, may be there — come up from the " peace and privacy " of his country parsonage — in his sombre clerical dress, bent with study, but in the prime of his age and power, with the cahn face and the severe GREA T ELI Z ABE THANS. 243 philosophy with which he has confronted a ter- magant of a wife and the beginnings of Dissent. And, if not in this presence, yet somewhere in Lon- don might have been found, in that da}', a young man, not much past twenty — just up from Strat- ford-upon-Avon — to take his part in playing at the Globe Theatre ; yet not wholly like other players. Even now, while all these worthies are gathering about the august Queen in her brilliant halls at Greenwich or at Hampton Court, this young Strat- ford man may be seated upon the steps of Old St. Paul's — with his chin upon his hand — looking out on the multitudinous human tide, which even then swept down Ludgate Hill, and meditating the speeches of those shadowy courtiers of his — only creatures of his day-di'eams ; yet they are to carry his messages of wisdom into all lands and languages. But I must shut the books where I see these fig- ures come and go. CHAPTER Vn. AS we open our budget to-day, we are still under kingship of the great Queen Bess, in whose presence we saw the portentous Lord Bur- leigh, whose nod has passed into history ; we saw, too, in our swift way, the wise, the judicious, the simple-minded, the mismarried Richard Hooker. We called Spenser before us, and had a taste of those ever-sweet poems of his — ever sweet, though ever so long. Then his friend Philip Sidney flashed across our view, the over-fine gentleman, yet full of nobility and courage, who wrote a long book, Arcadia, so bright with yellow splendor as to tire one ; and still so full of high thinking as to war- rant his fame and to lend a halo to his brave and tragic death. You may remember, too, that I made short mention of a certain John Lyly, who was about the same age with Spenser, and who, with JOHN L YL Y. 245 his pretty euphuisms came to cut a larger figure in the days of Elizabeth than many stronger men did. John Lyly. I recur to him now and tell you more of him, because he did in his time set a sort of fashion in letters. He was an Oxford man,* born down in Kent, and at twenty-five, or thereabout, made his fame by a book, which grew out of suggestions (not only of name but largely of intent and purpose) in the Schoolmaster of Roger Ascham ; and thus it hap- pens over and over in the fields of literature, that a plodding man will drop from his store a nugget, over which some fellow of lively parts will stumble into renown. The book I refer to was called Enphues, or the Anatomy of Wit, which came into such extraordi- nary favor that he wrote shortly after another, called Euphues and his England. And the fashion that he set, was a fashion of afifectations — of pretti- nesses of speech — of piling words on words, dam- tier and daintier — antithesis upon antithesis, with flavors of wide reading thrown in, and spangled * John Ljly, b. 1554 ; d. 1G06. 246 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. with classic terms and far-fetched similes — so that ladies ambitious of literary fame larded their talk with these fine euphuisms of Mr. Lyly. Some- thing of a coxcomb I think we must reckon him ; we might almost say an Oscar Wilde of letters — posing as finely and as capable of drawing female shoals in liis wake. His strain for verbal felicities, always noticeable, comparing with good, simple, downright EugHsh, as a dancing-master's mincing step, compares with the assured, steady tread of a go-ahead pedestrian, who thinks nothing of atti- tudes. Scott, you will remember, sought to cari- cature the Euphuist, in a somewhat exaggerated way, in Sir Piercie Shafton, who figures in his story of the Monastery ; he himself, however, in the later annotations of his novel, confesses his failure, and admitted the justice of the criticism which declared Sir Piercie a bore. Shakesj^eare, also, at a time not far removed fi-om Lyly's conquest, perhaps intended a slap at the euphuistic craze,* in the pedant Schoolmaster's talk of "Love's Labor's Lost." * The style of Lyly has heen traced by Dr. Landmaan, an ingenious German critic, to the influence of Don Antonii. de Guevara, a Spanish author, who wrote El Libro Aureo ds JOHN LYLY. 247 Yet there was a certain good in this massing of epithets, and in this tesselated cumulation of nice bits of language, from which the more wary and skilful of writers could choose — as from a great vo- cabulary — what words were cleanest and clearest. Nor do I wish to give the impression that there were no evidences of thoughtfulness or of good pur- pose, under Lyly's tintinnabulation of words. Haz- litt thought excellently well of him ; and Charles Kingsley, in these later times, has pronounced ex- travagant eulogy of him. Indeed he had high moral likings, though his inspirations are many of them from Plato or Boethius ; it is questionable also if he did not pilfer from Plutarch ; certainly he sugar-coats with his language a great many heathen pills. In observation he is very acute. That Euphues who gives name to his book, is an Athenian youth of rare parts — "well-constituted " as the Greek im- pHes — who has lived long in Italy, and who talks in this strain of the ladies he saw on a visit to Enc:- land: — Marco Aurelio, 1529. It was translated iuto English by Lord B.emera in 1531 (published in 1534). 248 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. " The English Damoiselles have their bookes tied to theil girdles — not feathers — who are as cunning in the Script- ures as you are in Ariosto or Petrark. It is the most gorgeous court [of England] that ever I have seene or heard of ; but yet do they not use their apparel so nicely as you in Italy, who thinke scorne to kneele at service, for fear of wrinckles in your silk, who dare not lift up your head to heaven, for fear of rumpling the ruffs in your neck ; yet your handes, I confess, are holden up, rather I thinke, to show your ringes, than to manifest your righteousness." Elizabeth would have very probably relished this sort of talk, and have commended the writer in per- son ; nor can there be any doubt that, in such event, Lyly would have mumbled his thanks in kissing the royal hands : there are complaining letters of his on the score of insufficient court patronage, which are not high-toned, and which make us a lit- tle doubtful of a goodly manhood in him. Cer- tainly his deservings were great, by reason of the plays which he wrote for her Majesty's Company of Child-players, and which were acted at the Chapel Eoyal and in the palaces. In some of these there are turns of expression and of dramatic incident which Shakespeare did not hesitate to convert to his larger purposes ; indeed there is, up and down in them, abundance of dainty word-craft — of in- JOHN LYLY. 249 genuity — of more than Elizabethan delicacy too, and from time to time, some sweet little lyrical out- burst that holds place still in the anthologies. One of these, with which I daresay you may be over-famiUar, is worth quoting again. It is called Apelles' Song, and it is from the play of " Alex- ander and Campaspe : " *' Cupid and my Campaspe played At cards for kisses — Cupid paid. He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows, His mother's doves, and team of sparrows : Loses them too : then down he throws The coral of his lip — the Rose Growing on's cheek (but none knows how) ; With these the crystal of his brow, And then the dimple of his chin — All these did my Campaspe win. At last, he set her both his eyes — She won ; and Cupid blind did rise. O Love, has she done this to thee ? What shall, alas I become of me,? " He puts, too, into imitative jingle of words the song of the Nightingale — (as Bryant has done for the Bobolink) ; and of the strain of the skylark nothing prettier was ever said than Mr. Lyly says : " How, at Heaven's gate she claps her wings. The morn not waking — till dhe sings.'' 250 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. Francis Bacon. "We go away from singing skylarks to find the next character that I shall cull out from these Eliza- bethan times to set before you : this is Lord Ba- con — or, to give him his true title, Lord Veru- 1am — there being, in fact, the same impropriety in saying Lord Bacon (if custom had not "brazed it so ") that there would be in saying Lord D'Israeli for Lord Beaconsfield. Here was a great mind — a wonderful intellect which everyone admired, and in which everyone of English birth, from Royalty down, took — and ever will take — a national pride ; but, withal, few of those amiabilities ever crop out in this great char- acter which make men loved. He can see a poor priest culprit come to the rack without qualms; and could look stolidly on, as Essex, his special benefactor in his youth, walked to the scaffold ; yet the misstatement of a truth, with respect to physics, or any matter about which truth or untruth was clearly demonstrable, affected him like a galvanic shock. His biographers, Montagu and Spedding, have padded his angularities into roundness ; while FRANCIS BACON. 251 Pope and Macaulay have lashed him in the grave- I think we must find the real man somewhere be- tween them ; if we credit him with a great straight- thinking, truth-seeking brain, and little or no capac- ity for affection, the riddle of his strange life wiU be more easily solved. Spedding,* who wrote a vo- luminous life of Bacon — having devoted a quarter of a centm-y to necessary studies — does certainly make disastrous ripping-up of the seams in Macau- lay's rhetoric ; but there remain certain ugly facts relating to the tiial of Essex, and the bribe-takings, which will probably always keep alive in the popu- lar mind an under-current of distrust in respect to the great Chancellor. He was born in London, in 1561, three years be- fore Shakespeare, and at a time when, from his fath- * James Spedding, b. 1803 ; d. 1881. His cMef work was tlie Bacon life ; and there is something pathetic in the thought of a man of Spedding s attainments, honesty of pur- pose, and unflagging industry, devoting thirty of the best years of his life to a vindication of Bacon's character. Ilis aggressive attitude in respect to Macaulay is particularly shown in his Evenings with a Reviewer (2 vols., 8vo), in which ho certainly makes chaif of a good deal of Macaulay's arraignment. 252 LANDS, LETTERS, Sr' KINGS. er's house in the Strand he could look sheer across the Thames to Southwark, where, before he was thirty, the Globe Theatre was built, in which Shake- speare acted. He was in Paris when his father died ; there is no grief-stricken letter upon the event, but a curious mention that he had dreamed two nights before how his father's house was covered with black mortar — so intent is he on mental processes. He had a mother who was pious, swift-thoughted, jealous, imperious, unreasonable, with streaks of tenderness. " Be not speedy of speech," she says in one of her letters — " nor talk suddenly, but when discretion requireth, and that soberly then. Remember you have no father ; and you have little enough — if not too little, regarded your kind, no-simple mother's wholesome advice." And Again : " Look well to your health ; sup not, nor sit not up late ; surely I think your drinking near to bedtime hindereth your and your brother's digestion very much : I never knew any but sickly that used it ; besides ill for head and eyes." And again, in postscript: "I trust you, with yr servants, use prayers twice in a day, having been where ref- ormation is. Omit it not for any." And he responds with ceremony, waiving much of her excellent advice, and sometimes suggesting some favor she can do him, — FRANCIS BACON. 253 "It may be I sliall have occasion to visit the Court this Vacation [he being then at Gray's Inn], which I have not done this months space. In which respect, because car- riage of stuff to and fro spoileth it, I would be glad of that light bed of striped stuff which your Ladyship hath, if you have not otherwise disposed it." Sharpish words, too, sometimes pass between them ; but he is always decorously and untouch- ingly polite. Indeed his protestations of undying friendship to all of high station, whom he addresses unctuously, are French in their amplitude, and French, too, in their vanities. He presses sharply always toward the great end of self-advancement — whether by flatteries, or cajolement, or direct entreaty. He believed in the survival of the fittest ; and that the fittest should struggle to make the survival good — no matter what weak ones, or timid ones, or confid- ing ones, or emotional ones should go to the wall, or the bottom, in the struggle. His flatteries, I think, never touched the Queen, though he tried them often and gave a lurid color to his flatteries. She admired his parts as a young man ; she had honored his father ; she accepted his seiwices with thanks — even the dreadful services which he 254 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. rendered in demonstrating the treason of the gal- lant and generous, but headstrong Earl of Essex. He never came into full possession of royal confi- dences, however, until James L came to the throne : by him he was knighted, by him made Lord Chan- cellor, by him elevated to the peerage ; and it was under him that he was brought to trial for receiving bribes — was convicted, despoiled of his judicial robes, went to prison — though it might be only for a day — and thereafter into that retirement, at once shameful and honorable, where he put the last touches to those broad teachings of "Philosophy," which the world will always cherish and revere : not the first nor the last instance in which great and fatal weaknesses have been united to great power and great accomplishment. But lest you may think too hardly of this emi- nent man, a qualifying word must be said of that stain upon him — of receiving bribes: it was no uncommon thing for high judicial personages to take gifts ; no uncommon thing for all high of- ficers of the Government — nay, for the Govern- ment itself, as typified in its supreme head. And, strange as it may seem, Bacon's sense of justice FRANCIS BACON. 255 does not appear to have been swayed by the gifts he took. Sped ding has demonstrated, I think, that no judgment he rendered was ever reversed by subsequent and farther hearing.* He was not in the ordinary sense a money-lover ; but he did love the importance and consideration which money gave, yet was always in straits ; and those un- wise receivings of his went to supply the short- comings in a very extravagant and disorderly home-life. His servants plundered him ; his tradespeople fleeced him ; nor do I think that the mistress of the Chancellor's household was either very wary or very winning. Almost the only time there is mention of her in his letters oc- curs previous to his marriage (which did not take place till he was well in middle age), and then only as " the daughter of an alderman who will bring a good dot " with her. His mothex--iu-law, too, appears to have been of the stage sort of * We are disinclined, however, to accept the same biogra- pher's over-mild treatment of the bribe-taking, as a " moral negligence" — coupling it with Dr. Johnson's moral delin- quency of lying a-bed in the moi-uiug ! See closing pages of E:enia(j8 xcith a Reciewer. 256 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. mother-in-law, whom he addresses (by letter) in this fashion : — "Madam," he says, "you shall with right good-will be made acquainted with anything that concerneth your daugh- ters, if you bear a mind of love and concord : Otherwise you must be content to be a stranger to us. For I may not be so unwise as to sufifer you to be an author or occasion of dissension between your daughters and their husbands; having seen so much misery of that kind in yourself." This looks a little as if the mother-in-law found the " grapes sour " in the Bacon gardens. I do not think there was much domesticity about him, even if home influences had encouraged it : he was with- out children, and not one to read poetry to his wife in a boudoir ; yet his essays concerning marriage and concerning children and concerning friend- ehip and concerning extravagance, are full of pi- quant truths. Indeed two distinct lines of life ran through the career of this extraordinary man. In one he loved parade, ceremony, glitter ; he stooped ungra- ciously to those who ranked him in factitious dis- tinctions ; was profuse and heartless in his adula- tion ; taking great gifts with servile acknowledg- ment ; shunning friends who were falling ; court- FRANCIS BACON. 257 ing enemies who were rising : and yet through all this, and looking out h-om the same keen inscru- table eyes was the soul of a philosopher cognizant of all humanities, searching sharply after the largest and broadest tiniths ; too indifferent to small ones ; weighing his own shortcomings with bitter re- morse ; alive to everything in science that should help the advancement of the world, and absorbed in high ranges of thinking which the animosities and cares and criminalities and accidents of every-day life did not seem to reach or to disturb. In such mood he wrote those essays, of some of which I have spoken — wonderfully compact of thought, and as wonderfully compact of language — which one should read and read again. No private librai-y of a hundred English books is complete without a copy of Bacon's Essays. The keen sagac- ity and perdurable sense of his observations always engage one. Thus of Travel, he says, — "Let him [the Traveller] sequester himself from the company of his countrymen, and diet in such places where there is good company of the nation where be travelleth. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some en- trance into the language, goeth to school and not to travel." 258 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. Of Friendship : — " This communicating of a man's self to his friend, works two contrary efforts; "for it redoubleth jovsand cutteth griefs in halves." Again, of the advantages of talk with a friend: — "Certain it is, that whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and under- standing do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another ; he tosseth his thoughts more easily ; he marshalleth them more orderly ; he seeth how they look when they are turned into words ; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself : and that more by an hours dis- course than by a days meditation." Thus I could go on for page after page of ci- tations wliicli you would approve, and wliich are so put in words that no mending or shortening or deepening of their force seems anyway possible. And yet this book of Essays — with all its sagacities, its ringing terseness, its stanch worldly wisdom — ■ is one we do not warm toward. Even when ho talks of friendship or marriage, death or love, a cold line of self-seeking pervades it. Of sacrifice for love's sake, for friendship's sake, or for chari- ty's sake, there is nothing ; and in that Essay on "Parents and Children" — what iciness of reflection — of sugfofestion ! A man might talk as Bacon talks DO O there, of the entries in a " Herd-book," As for the Noinim Organum and the Augmentis FRANCIS BACON. 259 Scientiarum — you would not read them if I were to suggest it : indeed, there is no need for reading them, except as a literary excursus, seeing that they have wrought their work in breaking up old, slow modes of massing knowledge, and in pouring light upon new ways ; — in serving, indeed, so far as their reach went, as a great logical lever, by which subsequent inquirers have prised up a thou- sand hidden knowledges and ways of knowledge to the comprehension and cognizance of the world. And the two lines of life in Francis Bacon were joined by a strange hyphen at last : He got out of his coach (which was not paid for), and in his silk stockings walked through the snow, to prosecute some scientific post-mortem experiment upon the body of a chicken he had secured by the roadside, near to London. He caught cold — as lesser men would have done ; and he died of it. This date of his death (1G2G) brings us beyond Elizabeth's time — beyond James' time, too, and far down to the early years of Charles I. He was born, as I said, thi'ee years before Shakespeai'e, three years after Elizabeth came to the throne ; and the Novum Orr/anum was published in the same year in which 26o LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KINGS. the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock — a conven- ient peg on which to hang the date of two great events. He was buried in the old town of St. Alban's, of whose antiquities I have already spoken, and near to which Gorhambury, the counti-y home of Bacon, was situated. The town and region are well worth a visit : and it is one of the few spots whither one can still go by a well-appointed English stage-coach with sleek horses — four-in-hand, which starts every morning in summer from the White Horse Cellar, in Piccadilly, and spins over the twenty miles of in- tervening beautiful road (much of it identical with the old Roman Watling Street) in less than two hours and a half. The drive is through Middlesex, and into "pleasant Hertf ordshu'e, " where the huge Norman tower of the old abbey buildings, rising from the left bank of the Ver, marks the town of St. Alban's. The tomb and monument of Bacon are in the Church of St. Michael's : there is still an Earl of Verulam presiding over a new Gorhambury House ; and thereabout, one may find remnants of the old home of the great Chancellor and some portion of the noble gardens in which he took so much de- THOMAS HOBBES. 261 light, and in wliicb he wandered up and down, in peaked hat and in ruff, and with staff — pondering affairs of State — possibly meditating the while upon that most curious and stately Essay of hia upon " Gardens," which opens thus : — " God Almighty first planted a garden. And, indeed, it ia tlie purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refresh- ment to the spirits of man, without which building and palaces are but gross handyworks : and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely ; as if garden- ing were the greater perfection." Surely, we who grow our own salads and "graff" our own pear-trees may take exaltation from this : and yet I do not believe that the great Chancellor ever put his hand, laboringly, to a rake-stave : but none the less, he snuffed complacently the odor of his musk-roses and his eglantine, and looked ad- miringly at his clipped walls of hedges. Thomas Ilohles. There used to come sometimes to these gardens of Gorhambury, in Bacon's day, a young man — twenty years his junior — of a strangely subtle 262 LANDS, LETTERS, &= AGINGS. miud, who caught so readily at the great Chancel- lor's meaning, and was otherwise so well instructed that he was emj)lo3^ed by him in some clerical duties. His name was Thomas Hobbes ; and it is a name that should be known and remembered, because it is identified with writings which had as much influ- ence upon the current of thought in the middle of the next century (the seventeenth) as those of Her- bert Spencer have now, and for somewhat similar reasons. He was a very free thinker, as well as a deep one ; keeping, from motives of policy, nomin- ally within Church lines, yet abhoiTed and disavowed by Church-teachers ; believing in the absolute right of kings, and in self-interest as the nucleus of all good and successful schemes for the conduct of life ; weighing relations to the futm-e and a Supreme Good (if existing) with a trader's prudence, and counting Friendship "a sense of social utility." His theory of government was — a crystallization of forces, coming about regularly by the prudent self- seeking of individuals. Of divine or siDiritual influ- ences he does not take any sympathetic cognizance ; hard, cold, calculating ; not inspiring, not hopeful ; feeding higher appetites on metaphysic husks. THOMAS HOBBES. 263 Of his Deism I give this exhibit : — "Forasmuct as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it fol- loweth that we can have no conception or image of the Deity, and consequently, all his attributes signify our inabil- ity and defect of power to conceive anything concerning his nature, and not any conception of the same, except only this — that there is a God. For the effects, we acknowledge naturally, do include a power of their producing, before they were produced ; and that power presupposeth some- thing existent that hath such power : and the thing so exist- ing with power to produce, if it were not eternal, must needs have been produced by somewhat before it ; and that, again, by something else before that, till we come to an eternal (that is to say, the first) Power of all Powers, and first Cause of all Causes ; and this is it which all men con- ceive by the name God, implying eternity, incomprehensibil- ity, and omnipotency. And thus all that will consider may know that God is, though not what he is." Cribbing his emotional nature (if he ever had any), he yet writes with wonderful directness, per- spicacity, and verve — making " Hobbism " talked of, as Spencerism is talked of. Indeed, one does not see clearly how any man, fliuging only his bare hook of logic and his sinker of reason into the in- finite depths around us, can fish up anything of a helpfully spiritual sort much better than Hobbism now. 264 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. He was specially befriended by the Caven- dishes, having once been tutor to a younger scion of that distinguished family ; and so he came to pass his latest years in their princely home of Chatsworth, humoi-ed by the Duke, and treated by the Duchess as a pet bear — to be regularly fed and not provoked ; climbing the Derbyshire hills of a morning, dining at mid-day, and at candle-light- ing retiring to his private room to smoke his twelve pipes of tobacco (his usual allowance) and to follow through the smoke his winding trails of thought.* He lived to the extreme age of ninety-two, thus coming well down into the times of Charles H., who used to say of him that " he was a bear against whom the Church played her young dogs to exer- cise them." He lived and died a bachelor, not rel- ishing society in general, and liking only such shrewd acute friends as could track him in his subtleties, who had the grace to applaud him, and the wise policy of concealing their antagonisms. He is not much cited now in books, nor has his * The extraordinary habits of Hobbes are made subject of pleasant illustrative comment in Sydney Smith's (so-called) Sketches of Moral Philosophy , Lecture XXVI. THOMAS HOBBES. 265 name association with any of ttose felicities of liter- ature wliich exude perennial perfumes. He was careless of graces ; be stirred multitudes into new trains of thought ; he fed none of them with any of the minor and gracious delights of learning. Per- haps he is best known in literary ways proper by a close and lucid translation of the History of Thucy- dides, which I believe is still reckoned by scholars a good rendering of the Greek.* He ventured, too, upon verse in praise of Derby- shire and of the valley of the Derwent, but it is not rich or beautiful. A man who keeps his emo- tional nature in a strait-jacket — for security or for other purpose — may make catalogues of trees, or of summer days ; but he cannot paint the lilies or a sunrise. A translation of Homer which he under- took and accomplished, when over eighty, was just as far from a success, and for kindred reasons. * Hobbes' Thucydides was first published in the year 1628. An earlier English version (15o0| was, in effect, only a trans- lation of a translation, being based upon the French of Claude de Seyssel, Bishop of Marseilles. Hobbes sneers at this, and certainly made a better one — very literal, some- times tame — sometimes vulgar, but remaining the best until the issue of Dean Smith's (1753). 266 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. many of the best succeeding English tragedies were attuned. He scored first upon British theatre- walls, with fingers made tremulous by tavern orgies, a great sampler of dramatic story, by which scores of succeeding play-writers set their copy ; but into these copies many and many a one of lesser power put a grace, a tenderness, and a dignity which never belonged to the half-crazed and short-lived Mar- lowe. You will remember him best perhaps as the author of the pleasant little madrigal of which I cited a verselet ; and if you value the delicatest of description, you will relish still more his unfinished version of the Greek story of " Hero and Leander " — a pregnant line of which — ** who ever loved that loved not at first sight" — has the abiding honor of having been quoted by Shakespeare in his play of "As You Like It." I leave Marlowe — citing first a beautiful bit of descriptive verse from his " Hero and Leander : " — •' At Sestos Hero dwelt : Hero the fair, Whom young Apollo courted for her hair, And offered as a dower his burning throne, Where she should sit for men to gaze upon. MARLOWE. 273 The outside of her garments were of lawn, — The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn. Upon her head she wore a myrtle wreath From^thence her veil reached to the ground beneath ; Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves. Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives ; Many would praise the sweet smell, as she past, When 'twas the odor that her breath forth cast ; And there/cr honey-bees have souglit in vain And beat from thence, have lighted there again. About her neck hung chains of pebble stone, Which, lighted by her neck, like diamonds shone. She wore no gloves ; for neither sun nor wind Would burn or parch her hands, but, to her mind ; Or warm, or cool them ; for they took delight To play upon those hands, they were so white. Some say, for her the fairest Cupid pin'd And, looking in her face, was strooken blind. But this is true ; so like was one the other. As he imagined Hero was his mother : And often-times into her bosom flew, About her naked neck his bare arms threw, And laid his childish head upon her breast And, with still panting rock't, there took his rest." I think all will agree that this is very delicately done. 274 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. A Tavern Coterie. But let us not forget where we are, and where we are finding such men and such poems : we are iu London and are close upon the end of the sixteenth century ; there are no morning newspapers ; these came long afterward ; but the story of such a death as that of Marlowe, stabbed in the eye — maybe by his own dagger — would spread from tongue to tongue ; (possibly one of his horrific dramas had been played that very day) : certainly the knowledge of it would come quick to all his boon friends — ac- tors, writers, wits — who were used to meet, maybe at the Falcon on Baukside, or possibly at the Mer- maid Tavern. This Mermaid Tavern was a famous place in those and in succeeding days. It stood on Cheap- side (between Friday and Bread Streets) gorgeous with three ranges of Elizabethan windows, that gave look-out upon an array of goldsmiths' shops which shone across the way. It was almost in the shadow of the Chui'ch of St. Mary le Bow, burned in the great fire, but having its representative tower and spire — a good work of Christopher THOMAS LODGE. 275 Wren — standing thereabout in our time, and still holding out its clock over the sidewalk. And the literary friends who would have gathered in such a place to talk over the sad happening to Kit Marlowe are those whom it behoves us to know, at least by name. There, surely would be Thomas Lodge,* who was concerned in the writing of plays ; wrote, too, much to his honor, a certain novel (if we may call it so) entitled Rosalynde, from which Shakespeare took the hint and much of the pleasant machinei-y for his delightful drama of " As You Like It." This Lodge was in his youth hail fellow with actors who gathered at taverns ; and — if not actor himself — was certainly a lover of their wild ways and their f eastings. He admu-ed Euphues overmuch, was disposed to literary af- fectations and alliteration — writing, amongst other things, A Nettle for Nice Noses. He was, too, a man of the world and wide traveller ; voyaged with Cavendish, and was said to be engaged in a British raid upon the Canaries. In later years he became a physician of soberly habits and much credit, dying of the plague in 1625. B. about 15D6; d. 1G25. 276 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. Nasbe* also would have been good mate-fellow with Marlowe ; a Cambridge man this — though possibly " weaned before his time ; " certainly most outspoken, hard to govern, quick-witted, fearless, flinging his fiery word-darts where he would. Gabriel Harvey, that priggish patron of Spenser, to whom I have alluded, found this to his cost. Indeed this satirist came to have the name of the English Aretino — as sharp as he, and as wild-liv- ing, and wild-loving as he. Nashe was a native of Lowestoft, on the eastern- most point of English shore, in Suffolk, not far from those potteries (of Gurton) whose old quaint products collectors still seek for and value. Dr. Grosart, in the Huth Library, has built a wordy monument to his memory ; we do not say it is un- desei-ved ; certainly he had a full brain, great readi- ness, graphic power, and deep love for his friends. Like Lodge, he travelled : like him took to his wits to pay tavern bills ; a sharp fellow every way. He lent a hand, and a strong one, to that tedious, noisy, brawling ecclesiastic controversy of his day — called the Mar-Prelate one ; a controversy full of * Thomas Nashe, b. about 1564 ; d. 1601. ROBERT GREENE. 277 a great swash of those prickly, sharp-tasted, biting words — too often belonging to church quarrels — and which men hardly approach for comment, even in our time, without getting themselves pricked by contact into wrathful splutter of ungracious lan- guage. One may get a true taste (and I think a surfeit) of his exuberance in epithet, and of his coarse but rasping raillery in his Pierce Penilesse. Here is one of his pleasant lunges at some " Latinless " critic : — " Let a scholar write and he says — ' Tush, I like not these common fellows ' ; let him write well, and he says — ' Tush, it's stolen out of some book.' " Then there was Robert Greene * — a Eeverend, but used to tavern gatherings, and whose story is a melancholy one, and worth a little more than mere mention. He was a man of excellent family, well nurtured, as times went ; native of the old city of Norwich, in Norfolk ; probably something older than either Marlowe or Shakespeare ; studied at St. * B. 1560(?) ; d. 1592. See Grosart's edition of his writings (in Ilutli Library) where Dr. G. gives the best color possible to his life and works. 2/8 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. John's, Cambridge — " amongst wags " — he says in his Repentance — " as lewd as myself ; " was a clergyman (after a sort) ; pretty certainly had a church at one time ; married a charming wife in the country, but going up to that maelstrom of Loudon fell into all evil ways : wrote little poems a saint might have written, and cracked jokes with his tongue that would make a saint shudder ; de- serted his wife and child; became a red-bearded bully, raging in the taverns, with unkempt Tiair : Yet even thus and there (as if all England in those Elizabethan times bloomed with lilies and lush roses, which lent their perfume to all verse the vilest might write) inditing poems having a tender pathos, which will live. Take these verselets for instance ; and as you read them, re- member that he had deserted his pure, fond, loving wife and his prattling boy, and was more deeply sunk in ways of debauchery than any of his fel* lows ; 'tis a mother's song to her child : — *' Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee. Streaming tears that never stint, Like pearl-drops from a flint, ROBERT GREENE. 279 Fell by course from his eyes, That one another's place supplies. Thus he grieved in every part, Tears of blood fell from his heart When he left his pretty boy, Father's sorrow — father's joy. The wanton smiled, father wept, Mother cried, baby leapt ; More he crowed more we cried, Nature could not sorrow hide ; He must go, he must kiss Child and mother — baby bless — For he left his pretty boy, Father's sorrow, father's joy. Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee." And the poet who wrote this — putting tender- ness into poems of the affections, and a glowing color into pastoral verse, and point and delicacy into his prose — wrote also A Groates worth of Wit, bought with a Million of Repentance, and he died of a surfeit on pickled herring and Khenish wine. In that ' Groat's worth of Wit ' (published after his death) there is a memorable line or two — being probably the first contemporary notice of Shakespeare that still has cm-reucy ; and it is in the form of a gibe : — 28o LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. "There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygres heart wrapt iu a players hide, supposes hee is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of you ; and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his owne conceyt the onely Shake-Scene in a countrey." How drolly it sounds — to hear this fine fellow, broken up with drink and all bedevilments, making his envious lunge at the great master who has per haps worried him by theft of some of his dramatio methods or schemes, and who gives to poor Greene one of his largest titles to fame in having been the subject of his lampoon ! It gives added Importance, too, to this gibe, to know that it was penned when the writer, impov- erished, diseased, deserted by patrons, saw death fronting him ; and it gives one's heart a wrench to read how this debauched poet — whose work has given some of the best color to the " Winter's Tale " of Shakespeare — writes with faltering hand, beg- ging his "gentle" wife's forgiveness, and that she would see that the charitable host, who has taken him in, for his last illness, shall suffer no loss — then, toying with the sheets, and " babbling o' green fields," he dies. Keen critics of somewhat later days said Shake- EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON. 281 speare had Greene's death in mind when he told the story of Falstaff' s. It is quite possible that all these men I have named will have encountered, off and on, at their tavern gatherings, the lithe, youngish fellow, large browed and with flashing eyes, who loves Khenish too in a way, but who loves the altitudes of poetic thought better ; who is just beginning to be known poet-wise by his " Venus and Adonis " — whose name is William Shakespeare — and who has great aptitude at fixing a play, whether his own or an- other man's ; and with Burbage for the leading parts, can make them take wonderfully well. Possibly, too, in these tavern gatherings would be the young, boyish Earl of Southampton, who is associated with some of the many enigmas respect- ing Shakespeare's Sonnets, and whom we Ameri- cans ought to know of, because he became inter- ested thereafter in schemes for colonizing Virginia, and has left his name of Southampton to one of the Virginia counties; and, still better, is associ- ated with that beautiful reach of the Chesapeake "waters which we now call " Hampton Eoads." In that company too — familiar with London 282 LANDS, LETTERS, KINGS. wordy bounce in them, wrote a very tender scriptu* ral drama about King David and the fair Bethsabe, with charming quotable things in it. Thus — " Bright Bethsabe gives earth to my desires, Verdure to earth, and to that verdure — flowers; To flowers — sweet odors, and to odors — wings That carries pleasure to the hearts of Kings I " And again : — '•Now comes my lover tripping like the roe, And brings my longings tangled in her hair To joy her love, I'll build a Kingly bower Seated in hearing of a hundred streams." Tom Campbell said — " there is no such sweet- ness to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakespeare." And for his lyrical gi-ace I can- not resist this little show, from his " Arraignment of Paris:" — uMnone [aingeth and pipeiTi]. *' Fair and fair, and twice so fair. As fair as any may be ; The fairest shepherd on our green, A love for any lady." And Paris. " Fair and fair and twice so fair, As fair as any may be : Thy love is fair for thee alone And for no other lady. " THOMAS DEKKER. 287 Then Mnone. " Mj love is fair, my love is gay, As fresh as bin the flowers in May, And of my love my roundelay, My merry, merry, merry roundelay, Concludes with Cupid's curse, They that do change old love for new, Pray Gods, they change for worse! " Thomas Dekher. Dekker was fellow of Peele and of the rest ;* lie quarrelled bitterly with Ben Jonson — they beating each other vilely with bad words, that can be read now (by whoso likes such reading) in the Poetas- ter of Jonson, or in the Satiromastix of Dekker. 'Twould be unfair, however, to judge him altogether by his play of the cudgels in this famous contro- versy. There is good meat in what Dekker wrote : he had humor ; he had pluck ; he had gift for us- ing words — to sting or to praise — or to beguile cue. There are traces not only of a Dickens flavor * Thomas Dekker, b. about 15G8 ; d. about 1640. Best edition of his miscellaneous works that of Grosart (Huth Library), which is charming in its print and its pictures — even to the poet ia his bed, busy at his Dreaine. 2S8 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. in him, but of a Lamb flavor as well ; and there ia reason to believe that, like both these later humor- ists, he made his conquests without the support of a university training. Swinburne characterizes him as a "modest, shiftless, careless nature:" but he was keen to thrust a pin into one who had of- fended his sensibilities; in his plays he warmed into pretty lyrical outbreaks, but never seriously measured out a work of large proportions, or en- tered upon execution of such with a calm, persever- ing temper. He was many-sided, not only literary- wise, but also conscience-wise. It seems incredible that one who should write the coarse things which appear in his Bachelor's Banquet should also have elaborated, with a pious unction (that reminds of Jeremy Taylor) the saintly invocations of the Foure Birds of Noah's Ark : and as for his Dreame it shows in parts a luridness of color which re- mmds of our own Wigglesworth — as if this New England poet of fifty years later may have dipped his brush into the same paint-pot. I cite a warm fragment from his Dreame of the Last Judge- ment ; — THOMAS DEKKER. 289 * Their cr'.es, nor yelling did the Judge regard, For all the doores of Mercy up were bar'd : Justice and Wrath in wrinkles knit his forhead, And thus he spake : You cursed and abhorred, You brood of Satlian, sonnes of death and hell, In fires that still shall burne, you still shall dwell ; In hoopes of Iron : then were they bound up strong, (Shrikes [shrieks] being the Burden of their dolefull song) Scarce was Sentence breath d-out, but mine eies Even saw (me thought) a Caldron, whence did rise A pitchy Steeme of Sulphure and thick Smoake, Able whole coapes of Firmament to choake : About this, Divels stood round, still blowing the fire, Some, tossing Soules, some whipping them with wire, Across the face, as up to th' chins they stood In boyliug brimstone, lead and oyle, and bloud." It is, however, as a social photographer that I wish to call special attention to Dekker ; indeed, his little toviches upon dress, dinners, bear-baiMnga, watermen, walks at Poivles, Spanish boots, tavern orgies — though largely ironical and much exag- gerated doubtless, have the same elements of nat- ure in them which people catch now with their pocket detective cameras. His Sinnes of London, bis answer to Pierce Pennilesse, his GiiU's Home Bo e are full of these sketches. This which fol- 290 LANDS, LETTERS, •Sr- KINGS. lows, tells bow a 3'oung gallant should behave him- self in an ordinary : — " Being arrived in the room, salute not any but those of your acquaintance ; walke up and downe by the rest as scornfully and as carelessly as a Geutleman-Uslier : Select some friend (having first throwne off your cloake) to walke up and downe the roome with you, . . . and this will be a meanes to publish your clothes better than Powles, a Tennis-court, or a Playhouse ; discourse as lowd as you can, no matter to what purpose if you but make a noise, and laugh in fashion, and have a good sower face to promise quarrelling, you shall be much observed. ' ' If you be a souldier, talke how often you have beene in action : as the PortingaU voiage, Cales voiage, besides some eight or nine imploiments in Ireland. . . . And if you perceive that the untravell'* Company about you take this doune well, ply them with more such stuff e, as how you have interpreted betweene the French king and a great Lord of Barbary, when they have been drinking healthes together, and that will be an excellent occasion to publish your lan- guages, if you have them : if not, get some fragments of French, or smal parcels of Italian, to fling about the table : but beware how you speake any Latine there." And he goes on to speak of the three-penny ta- bles and the twelve-penny tables, and of the order in which meats should be eaten — all which as giv- ing glimpses of something like the every-day, actual life of the ambitious and the talked-of young fel- MICHAEL DRAYTON. 291 lows about London streets and taverns is better worth to us than Dekker's dramas. Michael Drayton, We encounter next a personage of a different stamp, and one who, very likely, would have shaken his head in sage disapproval of the flippant advices of Dekker ; I refer to Michael Drayton,* who wrote enormously in verse upon all imaginable subjects ; there are elegiacs, canzonets, and fables ; there are eclogues, and heroic epistles and legends and Nimphidia and sonnets. He tells of the Barons' "Wars, of the miseries of Queen Margaret, of how David killed Goliath, of Moses in the burning bush — in lines counting by thousands ; Paradise Lost stretched six times over would not equal his pile of print ; and all the verse that Goldsmith ever wrote, compared with Drayton's portentous mass would seem like an iridescent bit of cockle-shell upon a sea of ink. This protracting writer was a Warwickshire man — not a far-off countryman of * Drayton, b. 1563 ; d. 1631. An edition of his works (still incomplete; by Rev. R. Hooper id tlie most recent. 292 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. Shakespeare, and a year only his senior ; a respect, able personage, not joining in tavern bouts, caring for himself and living a long life. His great poem of Poly-olhion many know by name, and very few, I think, of this generation ever read through. It is about the mountains, rivers, wonders, pleasures, flowers, trees, stories, and antiquities of England ; and it is twenty thousand lines long, and every line a long Alexandrine. Yet there are pictures and prettinesses in it, which properly segregated and detached from the wordy trails which go before and after them, would make the fortune of a small poet. There are descriptions in it, valuable for their utter fidelity and a fulness of nomenclature which keeps alive pleasantly ancient names. Here, for instance, is a summing up of old English wild-flowers, where, in his quaint way, he celebrates the nuptials of fbe river Thames (who is groom) with the bridal Isis, that flows by Oxford towers. It begins at the one hundred and fiftieth line of the fifteenth song of the fiftieth part : — " The Primrose placing first, because that in the Spring It is the first appears, then only flourishing ; The azured Hare-bell next, with them they gently miz'd MICHAEL DRAYTON. 293 T' allay whose luscious smell, they Woodbine plac'd be- twixt ; Amongst those things of scent, there prick they in the Lily, And near to that again, her sister — Dafifodilly To sort these flowers of show, with th' other that were so sweet, The Cowslip then they couch, and the Oxlip, for her meet ; The Columbine amongst, they sparingly do set. The yellow King-cup wrought in many a curious fret ; And now and then among, of Eglantine a spray, By which again a course of Lady-smocks they lay ; The Crow-flower, and thereby the Clover-flower they stick, The Daisy over all those sundry sweets so thick." The garden-flowers follow in equal fulness of array ; and get an even better setting in one of his Nymphals, where they are garlanded about the head of Tita ; and in these pretty Nymphals, and still more in the airy, fairy Nymphidia — with their elfins and crickets and butterflies, one will get an earlier smack of our own " Culpxit Fay." Those who love the scents of ancient garden-grounds — as we do — will relish the traces of garden love in this old Warwickshire man. In his Heroic Epistles, too, one will find a mastership of ringing couplets : and there are spirit and dash in that clanging battle 294 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. ode of his which sets forth the honors and the daring of Agincourt. Its martial echoes — kept ahve by Campbell ("Battle of the Baltic") and re- vived again in Tennyson's " Balaclava," warrant me in citing two stanzas of the original : — " Warwick in blood did wade, Oxford the foe invade, And cruel slaughter made Still as they ran up ; Suffolk his axe did ply, Beaumont and Willoughby Bear them right doughtily, Ferrers and Fanhope. **They now to fight are gone ; Armour on armour shone, Drum now to drum did groan. To hear, was wonder ; That, with the cries they make, The very earth did shake. Trumpet to trumpet spake. Thunder to thunder." * * There is an exquisite sonnet usually attributed to him beginning — "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part; " but this is so very much better than all his other sonnets, that I cannot help sharing the doubts of those who question its Drayton origin. If Drayton's own, the sonnet certainly shows a delicacy of expression, and a romanticism of hue quite exceptional with him. BEN JONSON. 295 Ben Jonson. I now go back to that friend of Drayton's — Ben Jonson,* whom we saw at the closing of the last chapter going into the tavern of the Mermaid. He goes there, or to other like places, very often. He is a friend no doubt of the landlady ; he is a friend, too, of all the housemaids, and talks uni- versity chaff to them ; a friend, too, of all such male frequenters of the house as will listen to him, and will never dispute him ; otherwise he is a slang-whanger and a bear. He was born, as I have said, some years after Shakespeare, but had roared himself into the front ranks before the people of London were thoroughly satisfied that the actor-author of " Eichard HI." was a better man than Ben. Very much of gossip with respect to possible jealousies between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may be found in the clumsy, bundled-up life of the latter by William Gifford. f * Ben Jonson, b. 1573 ; d. 1G37. f Prefacing the edition of Jonson's works of 1816; also in the elegant reissue of the same — under editorship of Colonel Cunningham in 1875. Gifford seems to have spent 296 LANDS, LETTERS, (^ KINGS. Jonson was born probably in the west of Lon- don — and born poor ; but througb the favor of some friends went to Westminster School, near to which his step-father, who was a bricklayer, lived : afterward, through similar favor, he went to Cambridge * — not staying very long, because called home to help that step-father at his brick- laying. But he did stay long enough to get a tho- rough taste for learning, and a thorough ground- ing in it. So he fretted at the bricks, and ran off and enlisted — serving a while in the Low Coun- tries, where poor Philip Sidney met his death, and coming back, a swaggerer, apt with his sword and his speech, into which he had grafted conti- nentalisms ; apt at a quarrel, too, and comes to fight a duel, and to kill his man.f For this he his force (of a biographic sort) in picking up from various contemporary authors whatever contained a sneer at Jonson, and exploding it, after blowing it up to its fullest possible dimensions ; — reminding one of those noise-loving boys who blow up discarded and badly soiled paper-bags, only to burst them on their knees. * Ward {Eney. Br.) is inclined to doubt his going at all to Cambridge : I prefer, however, to follow the current belief — as not yet sufficiently " upset." fThe facts regarding this "felony" of Jonson' s hav« BEN JONSON. 297 went to prison, getting material this way — by hard rubs with the world — for the new work which was ripening in the mind of this actor-author. So, full of all experiences, fuU of Latin, full of logic, full of history, full of quarrel, full of wine (most whiles) this great, beefy man turned poet. I do not know if you will read — do not think the average reader of to-day will care to study — his dramas. The stories of them are involved, but nicely adjusted as the parts of an intricate ma- chine : you will grow tired, I dare say, of matching part to part ; tired of their involutions and evo- lutions ; tired of the puppets in them that keep the machinery going ; tired of the passion torn to tattei's ; tired of the unrest and lack of all repose. Yet there are abounding evidences of wit — of more learning than in Shakespeare, and a great deal drearier ; aptnesses of expression, too, which show a keen knowledge of word-meanings and of etymol- ogies ; real and deep acquirement manifest, but been siabject of much and varied averment : recent inves- tigation lias brought to light the "Indictment" on which he was arraigned, and some notes of the "Clerk of the Peace." See Athenoixim, March 6, 1886. 298 LANDS, LETTERS, &> KINGS. wom like stiff brocade, or jingling at his pace, like bells upon the heels of a savage. You wonder to find such occasional sense of music with such heavy step — such delicate poise of such gross corpo- rosity. He helped some hack-writer to put Bacon's es- says into Latin — not that Bacon did not know - his Latin ; but the great chancellor had not time for the graces of scholastics. Ben wrote an English Grammar, too, which — for its syn- tax, so far as one may judge fi'om that compend of it which alone remains — is as good as al- most any man could invent now. Such learning weighed him down when he put on the buskins, and made the stage tremble with his heaviness. But when he was at play with letters — when he had no plot to contrive and fabricate and foster, and no character to file and finish, and file again, and to fit in with precise order and methodic juxtaposition — when a mad holiday masque — wild as the "Pirates of Penzance" — tempted him to break out into song, his verse is rampant, joyous, exuberant — blithe and dewy as the breath of May-day mornings : See how a little BEN JONSON. 299 darr ael in the dance of his verse sways and pirou- ettes — "As if the wind, not she did walk; Nor pressed a flower, uor bowed a stalk I " Then, again, in an Epithalamion of his Under- woods, as they were called, there is a fragment of verse, which, in many of its delicious couplets, shows the grace and art of Spenser's wonderful " Epitha- lamion," which we read a little time ago : — He is picturing the bridesmaids strewing the bride's path with flowers : — •' With what full hands, and in how plenteous showers Have they bedewed the earth where she doth tread, As if her airy steps did spring the flowers, And all the ground were garden, where she led." Such verses do not come often into our news- paper corners, from first hands : such verses make one understand the significance of that inscription which came by merest accident to be written on his tomb in Westminster Abbey — "0 rare Ben Jon- son ! " I do not believe I shall fatigue you — and I know I shall keep you in the way of good things if I give 300 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KLVGS. another fragment from one of his festal operettas ', — the " Angel " is describing and eymbohzing Truth, in the Masque of Hymen : — " Upon her head she wears a crown of stars, Thro' which her orient liair waves to her waist, By which believing mortals hold her fast, And in those golden cords are carried even Till with her breath she blows them up to Heaven. She wears a robe enchased with eagles' eyes, To signify her sight in mysteries ; Upon each shoulder sits a milk-white dove. And at her feet do witty serpents move ; Her spacious arms do reach from East to west, And you may see her heart shine thro' her breast. Her right hand holds a sun with burning rays Her left, a curious bunch of golden keys With which Heaven's gates she locketh and displays. A crystal mirror hangeth at her breast, By whicli men's consciences are searched and drest ; On her coach-wheels, Hypocrisy lies racked ; And squint-eyed Slander with Vain glory backed. Her bright eyes burn to dust, in which shines Fata ; An Angel ushers her triumphant gait, Whilst with her fingers fans of stars she twists. And with them beats back Error, clad in mists, Eternal Unity behind her shines. That Fire and Water, Earth and Air combines ; Her voice is like a trumpet, loud and shrill, Which bids all sounds in earth and heaven be still.'* BEN JONSON. 301 In that line of work Shakespeare never did a better thing than this. Indeed, in those da3's many, perhaps most, people of learning and culture thought Ben Jonson the better man of the two ; — more instructed (as he doubtless was) ; with a nicer knowledge of the unities ; a nicer knowledge of mei-e conventionalities of all sorts : Shakespeare was a humble, plain Warwickshire man, with no fine tinsel to his wardrobe — had no university training; not so much schooling or science of any sort as Ben Jonson ; had come up to Lon- don — as would seem — to make his fortune, to get money — to blaze his way : and how he did it! I suppose a Duchess of Buckingham or any lady of court consequence would have been rather proud of the obeisance of Ben Jonson, after that play of " Every j\Ian in his Humour," and would have given him a commendatory wave of her fan, much sooner, and more unhesitatingly, than to the Stratford actor, who took the part of Old Knowell in it. Ben believed in conventional laws of speech or of dramatic utterance far more than Shakespeare ; he regretted (or perhaps affected to regret when 302 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KLYGS. his jealousies were sleeping), that Will Shakespeare did not shape his language and his methods with a severer art ;* he would — very likely — have lashed him, if he had been under him at school, for his irregularities of form and of speech — irregularities that grew out of Shakespeare's domination of the language, and his will and his power to make it, in all subtlest phases, the servant, and not the master of his thought. Do I seem, then, to be favoring the breakage of customs, and of the rules of particular gramma- rians ? Yes, unhesitatingly — if you have the mas- tery to do it as Shakespeare did it ; that is, if you have that finer sense of the forces and dehcacies of language which will enable you to wrest its periods out of the ruts of every-day traffic, and set them to sonorous roll over the open ground, which is broad as humanity and limitless as thought. Parrots * In Ma Discoveries {De Shakespeare) Jonson says, ' ' The players have often mentioned it as an honour to Shake- speare, that in his writing (whatsoever he penned) he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, would he had blotted a thousand. Which they thought a malevolent speech I loved the man, and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry as much as any." SOME PROSE WRITERS. 303 must be taught to prate, particle by particle ; bufc the Bob-o-Liucoln swings himself into his great flood of song as no master can teach him to sing. Even now we do not bid final adieu to Ben Jon- son ; but hope to encounter him again in the next reign (that of James I.) through the whole of which he carried his noisy literary mastership. Some Prose Writers. Tou must not believe, because I have kept mainly by poetic writers in these later days of Queen Elizabeth, that there were no men who wrote prose — none who wrote travels, histories, letters of advice ; none who wrote stupid, dull, goodish books ; alas, there were plenty of them ; there al- ways are. But there were some to be remembered too : there was William Camden — to whom I have briefly alluded already — and of whom, when you read good histories of this and preceding reigns, you will find frequent mention. He was a learned man, and a kind mau, excellent antiquarian, and taught Ben Jouson at Westminster School. There 304 LANDS, LETTERS, &* KINGS. was Stow,* who wrote a Survey of London, which he knew from top to bottom. He was born in the centre of it, and as a boy used to fetch milk from a farm at the Minories, to his home in Cornhill, where his father was a tailor. His fulness, his truthful- ness, his simplicities, and his quaintness have made his chief book — on London — a much-prized one. Again there was Hakluyt, f who was a church official over in Bi'istol, and who compiled Voyages of English seamen which are in every well-ap- pointed libraiy. Dr. Robertson says in his His- tory, " England is more indebted [to Hakluyt] for its American possessions than to any man of that age." Of so much worth is it to be a good geog- rapher! The "Hakluyt Society" of England will be his enduring monument. There was also living in those last days of the sixteenth century a strange, conceited, curious trav- elling man, Thomas Coryat | by name, who went * John Stow, b. 1525 ; d. 1605. His Survey published in 1598 : reprinted over and over. Edition of 1876 has illus- trations. t Richard Hakluyt, b. about 1553 ; d. 1616. t Thomas Coryat, b. 1577 ; d. 1617. Full title of his book is— CoryaVs Crudities hastily gobbled up in Five moneths COR VAT'S CRUDITIES. 305 on foot tlu'ougli Europe, and published (in 1611) what he called — with rare and unwitting perti- nence — Goryat's Crudities. He affixed to them complimentary mention of himself — whimseys by the poets, even by so great a man as Ben Jonson — a budget of queer, half-flattering, half-ironical rig- marole, which (having plenty of money) he had pro- cured to be written in his favor ; and so ushered hia book into the world as something worth large no- tice. He would have made a capital showman. He had some training at Oxford, and won hia way by an inflexible persistence into familiarity with men of rank, who made a butt of him. With a certain gift for language he learned Arabic in some one of his long journeyings, was said to have knowledge of Persian, and made an oration in that speech to the Great Mogul — with nothing but lan- guage in it. His Crudities are rarely read ; but some letters and fragments relating to later travela of his, appear in Purchas' Pilcjrims. He lays hold upon peculiarities and littlenesses of life in hia work TraveUs in France, Savoy, Italy, RJietia, commonly called the Grisons Country, Helvetia, alias Switzerland, and some part* of Germany and the Netherlands. 20 3o6 LANDS, LETTERS, &- KINGS. which more sensible men would overlook, and which give a certain quaint piquancy to what he told ; and we listen, as one might listen to barbers or dressmakers who had just come back from Paris, and would tell us things about cravats and hair-oil and street sights that we could learn no other- wheres. Coryat says : — "I observe a custom in all those Italian Cities, and tounes thro' the which I passed, that is not used in any other coun- trie that I saw — nor do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian and most other strangers that are cormorant in Italy doe always at their meales use a little forke, when they cut their meate. For while, with their knife which they hold in one hand they cut the meate out of the dish, they fasten the forke which they hold in their other hand upon the same dish, so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the companie of any others at meale, should unadvisidly touch the dish of meate with his fingers from which alle at the table doe cut, he will give occasion of offence unto the company, as having trans- gressed the laws of good manners. "This forme of feeding is, I understand, common in all places of Italy — their forkes being for the most part made of iron or Steele, and some of silver — but these are used only by gentlemen. " I myself have thought good to imitate the Italy fashion by this forked cutting of meate not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany, and oftentimes in England, since ] came home." LEONARD WRIGHT. 307 Thus we may connect the history of silver forks with Tom Coryat's Crudities, and with the first re- ported foot-journeys of an Enghshman over the length and breadth of Europe. The wits may have bantered him in Elizabeth's day ; but his jouraey- ings were opened and closed under James. Again, there were books which had a little of humor, and a little of sentiment, with a great deal of fable, and much advice in them ; as a sample of which I may name Mr. Leonard Wright's Displaie of Duties, deck't loith sage Sayings, pythie Sentences, and proper Similes: Pleasant to read, delightful to hear, and profitable to practice : * By which singu- larly inviting title we perceive that he had caught the euphuistic ways of Mr. John Lyly. In enumer- ating the infelicities of a man who marries a shrew, he says : — "Hee shall find compact in a little flesh a great number of bones too hard to digest. And therefore some doe thinke wedlocke to be that same purgatorie which some learned divines have so long contended about, or a sharps penance to bring sinful men to Heaven. A merry fellow hearing a preacher saye in his sermon that whosoever would be * First published in 1589. 3o8 LANDS, LETTERS, &^ KLWGS. saved must take up and beare his cross, ran straight to hia wife, and cast lier upon his back. . . . Finally, he that will live quietly in wedlock must be courteous in speech, cheerful in countenance, provident for his house, careful to trains up his children in virtue, and patient in bearing the infirmities of his wife. Let all the keys hang at her girdle, only the purse at his own. He must also be voide of jeal- ousy, which is a vanity to think, and more folly to suspect. For eyther it needeth not, or booteth not, and to be jealous without a cause is the next way to have a cause." ' ' This is the only way to make a woman dum : To sit and smyle and laugh her out, and not a word but mum ! " Quite anotlier style of man was Philip Stubbes,* a Puritan reformer — not to be confounded with John Stubbes who had his right hand cut off, by order of the Queen, for writing against the impro- priety and villainy of her prospective mamage with a foreign prince — but a kinsman of his, who wrote wrathily against masques and theatre-going ; whip- ping with his pen all those roystering poets who made dramas or madrigals, all the fine-dressed gallants, and all the fans and ruffs of the women as so many weapons of Satan. •Dates of birth and death uncertain. His Anatomie oj Abuses first published in 1583. PHILIP STUBBES. 309 "One arch or piller,'' says he, "wherewith the Devil's kingdome of great ruffes is under propped, is a certain kind of liquid matter which they call starch, wherein the Devil hath learned them to wash and die their ruffes, which, be ing drie, will stand stiff and inflexible about their neckes." And he tells a horrific story — as if it were tnie — about an unfortunate wicked lady, who being in- vited to a wedding could not get her ruff stiffened and plaited as she wanted ; so fell to swearing and tearing, and vowed " that the Devil might have her whenever she wore neckerchers again." And the Evil One took her at her word, appearing in the guise of a presentable young man who arranged her ruflfs «» — to her so great contentation and liking, that she became enamored with him. The young man kissed her, in the doing whereof he writhed lier neck in sunder, so she died miserably ; her body being straightwaies changed into blue and black colors, most ugglesome to behold, and her face most deformed and fearful to look upon. This being known in the city great preparation was made for her burial, and a rich coffin was provided, and her fearful body- was laid therein. Four men assay' d to lift up the corps, but could not move it. Whereat the standers-by — mar- velling causing the coffin to be opened to see the cause thereof, found the body to be taken away, and a blacke catte, vbTy leane and deformed, sitting in the coffin, set- 3IO LANDS, LETTERS, 9. Bacon, Roger, 77 et seq. Balladry, English, 1.^8. Barnes, Daniu Juliana, 153. Battle Abbey, 35. Beda, 15, 64 Beowulf, 41. "Betrothed," Scott's novel, 48. Berners, Lord, his translation of Proissart, 129. Bible, Wyclif's translation of, 90 ; Tyndale'B translation, 185; reading of, by the com- mon people forbidden in reign of Henry VIII., 191. Black Prince, 93, 104, 106. Boccaccio, 83. Bcethius' "Consolation of Phi- losophy," translated by King Alfred, 19. " Boko of the Duchesse," Chau- cer's poem, 107. Books at the end of the thir- teenth century, 02 ; decora- tion of, 05. " Brut " of Layamon, 43. Burleigh, Lord, 212, 242. C^DMON, 13 it seq. ; possible influence of his paraphrase on Milton, 15. Camden, William, 170, 803. Camelot, o9, 40. 324 INDEX. Canute's verse about the singing of the monks of Ely, 22. Canterbury School, 10. " Canterbury Tales," Chaucer's, 114. Caxton, 45, 149 ; books from his press, 151. Celtic literature, early, 7 et seq. Chapman, George, and his Ho- mer, 206. Chaucer, 89, 97 etscq.; his early life in London, 98 ; a scholar, 100 ; his connection with the royal household, 103 ; his translation of the Roman de la Hose, 104; his " Boke of the Duchesse," 107 ; his " Parliament of Foules," 107; his " Troilus and Cresseide," 108 ; his journeys on the Con- tinent, 108 ; his portrait, 113 ; his- " Canterbury Tales," 114 ; characters of the Canterbury pilgrims, \lietseq.; localities of the pilgrimage, 117; his literary thefts, 119; example of his art, 120 et seq. Chevy Chase, ballad of, 159. "Comus," Milton's, its relation to Peele's "An Old Wives Tale," 285. Confessio Amantis of Gower, 128. Coryat, Thomas, 304. Cranmer, 182, 185. "Crayon, Geoffrey," 38. Damoiselle, life of a, in the thirteenth century, 72. Danish invasions of England, 17. Dante, 83. Dekker, Thomas, 287. Drake, Sir Francis, 243. Drayton, Michael, 291 ; his "Poly-olbion," 292; hia " Nymphidia," 293. Edward I., n., and III., 83 et seq. Edward VI., 183, 197. Elizabeth, Queen, Roger As- cham's encomium of her stu- diousness, 201 ; comes to the throne, 204 ; her religion, 206 ; Fronde's unfavorable portrait of, 207 ; Soranzo's description of, 308 ; her greatness, 209 ; her literary attempts, 311 ; her love of pageants, 312; her progresses, 313 ; at Kenil- worth, 314 ; her death, 331. Elizabethan authors, 214. Emerson, his enjoyment of Ta- Uesin, 8. Erasmus, 177. " Euphues," by Lyly, 345. Fai.staff, Jack, 133. Poze, John, 187. Froissart, Lord Berners' trans- lation of, 129. Froude, Mr., hia history charac- teri2;ed, 207. Geoffrey of Monmouth, 37 et seq. Green's ' ' History of the English People," 5, 6; "Making of England," 10, 17; cited, 64. Greene, Robert, 277 ; his rela- tions with Shakespeare, 280. Godiva, Lady, tradition of, 23. Gower, John, 127. INDEX. 325 " Grave, the," an Anglo-Saxon poem, 21. Hakltttt, Richard, 304. Hampton Court, 171. Harold the Saxon, 29 et seq. " Harold," Tennyson's play, 29. Henry U., 48. Henry HI., 56, 65. Henry IV., 127, 132, 145. Henry v., 141. Henry VI. and VIL, 144. Henry VTIL , 167 ; character of, 172. Hobbes, Thomas, 261 ; his trans- lation of Thucydides, 265. Holinshed, Raphael, 211. Hooker, Richard, and the " Ec- clesiastical PoUty," 215, 242. " IVANHOK," 50. James I. of Scotland, 137. Joan of Arc, 146. John, King, 53. John of Gaunt, 92 ; a friend of Wyclif, 92 ; of Chaucer, 110, 145. Jonson, Ben, 283, S95. Katharine of Aragon, 171. "Kenilworth," 68; its picture of Queen Elizabeth's visit, 314. " King's Quair, the," 137. Knox, John, 187. Lanqlande, William, 84. Lanier, Sidney, Ids " Mabino- gion," 8 ; his " King Arthur," 45. Latimer, Hugh, 186. Layamon, 43. Leicester, Earl of, and Queen Elizabeth, 315. Libraries at the end of the thir- teenth century, 63. Lilly, William, the head-master of St. Paul's, 173. Lindisfame Abbey, 12. Lodge, Thomas, 275. London, 6; in Chaucer's time, 98. "London Lickpenny" of Lyd- gate, 136. Longfellow's translation of "The Grave," 21. Lord's Prayer, the, in Tyndale's version, 18.5. Lydgate, John, 13.5. Lyly, John, 245. Lytton, Lord, his "Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings," 29. "Mabinoqion," the, 8. Macbeth, the murder of, 23. "Madoo," Southey's poem, 49. Mallory, Sir Thomas, 45. Mandeville, Sir John, 59; doubts respecting his travels, and personality, 60. Map, Walter, 42. Marco Polo, 59. Marini Sanuto on the acces- sion of Henry VIIL, 169. Marlowe, Christopher, 269. "Marmion,"3, 12. Mary, Queen, 182, 184, 197. Man,' Queen of Scots, 241. Matthew Paris, 46. Mermaid Tavern, the, 274» Milton, 15. "Monastery, the," 246. More, Sir Thomas, 175, 185. > 326 INDEX. Nashe, Thomas, 276. I " Roman de la Rose," 104. Norham Castle and " Mar- Roman remains in England, mion." 3. 6. Novum Organum, the, of Ba- con, 258. Nut-Brown Maid, ballad of, 161. OCCLEVE, 135. Orderic Vitalis, 46. Oxford in the thirteenth cen- tury, 77. "Parliament of Fodles," Chaucer's poem, 107. Paston Letters, the, 154 Peele, George, 284; his "Old Wives Tale," 285. Petrarch, 83. " Piers Plowman, the Vision of," 84. Printing, the rise of, in Eng- land, 149. Progresses of Queen Elizabeth, 312. Purvey, his work on Bible of Wyclif, 96. Puttenham's " Arte of English Poesie," 310. Raleigh, 242. Religious houses, spoliation of, 205. Richard Coeur de Lion, 50. Richard H., 126, 130. Richard III., 148. Rienzi, 83, 90. Robert of Gloucester, 57. Robin Hood's bay, 13. Robin Hood, 69. Robin Hood ballads, 159. Roger de Hoveden, 46. " Rosalynde," Lodge's novel, 275. Sackville, Thomas, 210, 242. " Saxon Chronicle, the," 17, 27, 37. St. Albans, 66. St. Augustine in England, 10, 63. St. Colomba, monastery of, 11. "Schoolmaster, the," by As- cham, 200. " Scottish Chiefs, the," 81. Shakespeare, his " Henry IV.," 133; "Henry v., "141; "Hen- ry VL," 146 ; "Richard IIL,' 148, 243 ; with the wits at the Mermaid Tavern, 281. Sidney, Philip, 230 ; his " Ar- cadia," 237 ; his " Defence of Poesie," 238. Skelton, John, 139. Sonnet, the, first used in Eng- Ush by Wyatt, 193. Soranzo, Signor, his report of Queen Elizabeth, 208. Spedding, James, his " Life of Bacon," 251. Spenser, Edmund, 217 ; his "Shepherd's Calendar," 217; "Faery Queen," 221 et seq. ; " Epithalamium," 228. Sternhold and Hopkins' versions of the Psalms, 189. Stow, John, 304. Stubbes, Philip, 308. SuiTey, Earl of, 194 ; his poetry, and story of his Florentine tourney, 195. INDEX. 327 the Norman min- ' Vox Clamantis of Gower, 127. Taillefer strel, 26. Taine's treatment of Richard Cceur de Lion, 50. Taliesin, S. "Talisman, the," .51. Tennyson's "Harold," 30; "Idyls of the King," 40; "Queen Mary," 183. Thackeray's treatment of Rich- ard CcEur de Lion in " Rebec- ca and Rowena," 51. Thomas a Becket, 48. Tolstoi, Count, 180. Tudor, Sir Owen, and the Tudor succession, 144. Tussei-, Thomas, 211. Tyndale, WUliam, 185. '''Utopia," by Sir Thomas More, l'<8. Wage, 42. Wallace, William, 81. "Westward, Ho," Kingsley'B novel, 40. Whitby Monastery, 12. Whittingham, 189. William the Norman, 25 et seq. WiUiam of Malmsbury, 46. William of Newburgh, 46. Wolsey, Cardinal, 170, 173. Wyclif, 89, 90 et seq.; his trans- lation of the Bible, 95. Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 193. Wright, Leonard, 807. York, 6. York and Lancaster, the wars «f, 145. < & s r^ v^ ^^ ^ w/ / /VA 000 264 015 9