LIBRARY OF S.H AN ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY; NOTICES OF THE BRITISH POETS. BY THOMAS CAMPBELL/ AUTHOR OF 'THE PLEASURES OF HOPE,' &c. LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 1848. ADVERTISEMENT. THE following reprint of Mr. Campbell's Essay on English Poetry, and his Prefatory Notices of the principal English Poets, has been made to supply a want which many have felt of a pocket edition of the work without the Specimens. The Essay and Notices are complete in them- selves, and the real value of the work may be said to consist, not in the selection of extracts, which, from a desire not to give the same specimens as Ellis or Headley had given, is often defective and unjust, but in the beautiful discriminating character of the criticisms, and the wider feeling which the work evinces for poetry in its enlarged sense than is to be found in any other body of criticism in the English language. No work indeed of any importance on our literary history has been written since they were published without commendatory references to them. They have been appealed to by Lord Byron, applaudingly quoted by Sir Walter Scott, and frequently cited and referred to by Mr. Hallam. For the notes distinguished throughout by brackets the present Editor is responsible, to whom, with Mr. Campbell's express approval, the revision of the second edition was intrusted. Various inaccuracies of the former editions have been removed in this some silently, for it would have burdened the book with useless matter to have retained them in the text, and pointed them out in a note while others, entangled in a thought, have been allowed to stand, but not without notes to stop the perpetuity of the error. Mr. Campbell is not properly chargeable with many of the inaccuracies in dates and mere minutiae discovered since he wrote ; some may be laid to the excursive nature of his task, and others to the imperfect information of the period. The first edition of Mr. Campbell's work appeared in 1819, in 7 vols. 8vo., and the second in 1841, in one thick volume 8vo. PETKB CUNNINGHAM. Kensington, 25tf* October, 1848. CONTENTS. Page ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY PART 1 1 PART II 34 , , , , , , PART III 83 SCOTTISH POETRY .118 LIVES OF BRITISH POETS. Page Page Page Geoffrey Chaucer . 123 Alexander Hume . 165 Edward Fairfax . .188 John Gower . . . 135 Thomas Nash. . .,166 Samuel Rowlands . 190 John Lydgate . . 136 Edward Vere, Earl of John Donne . . .190 James I. of Scotland 137 Oxford .... 167 Thomas Picke . .192 Robert Henrysone . 138 Thomas Storer . . 168 George Herbert . . li)2 William Dunbar . . 138 Joseph Hall . . . 168 JohnMarston. . .193 Sir David Lyndsay . 139 William Warner . . 172 George Chapman. . 194 Sir Thomas Wyat . 141 Sir John Harrington 173 Thomas Randolph . 195 Henry Howard, Earl Henry Perrot. . . 173 Richard Corbet . .196 of Surrey . . . 144 Sir Thomas Overbury 173 Thomas Middleton . 196 LordVaux . . .149 Sir Walter Raleigh . 174 Richard Niccols . .197 Richard Edwards . 149 Joshua Sylvester . .176 Charles Fitzgeffrey . 197 William Hunnis . . 150 Samuel Daniel . . 177 Ben Jonson . . .198 Thomas Sackville, Ba- Giles and Phineas Thomas Carew . . 206 ron Buckhurst and Fletcher. . . .178 Sir Henry Wotton . 207 Earl of Dorset. . 150 Henry Constable. . 180 William Alexander, George Gascoigne . 152 Nicholas Breton . . 180 Earl of Sterline . 208 John Harrington. . 153 Dr. Thomas Lodge . 180 Nathaniel Field . . 208 Sir Philip Sydney . 154 Beaumont and Thomas Dekker . . 209 Robert Greene . .155 Fletcher. . . .181 John Webster . . 210 Christopher Marlowe 156 Sir John Davies . .184 John Ford . . . 210 Robert Southwell . 157 Thomas Goffe. . 185 William Rowley . .211 Thomas Watson . . 158 Sir Fulke Greville . 185 Philip Massinger. . 212 Edmund Spenser. . 158 Sir John Beaumont . 185 Sir John Suckling . 214 JohnLyly. . . .164 Michael Dray ton. . 186 William Cartwright . 215 UUi\ 1J5H 1 ft. Page Page Page George Sandys . .216 William Walsh . . 249 Mark Akenside . . 295 Francis Quarles . . 216 Thomas Parnell . . 250 Thomas Chatterton . 297 William Browne . . 217 Samuel Garth. . . 251 Christopher Smart . 304 Thomas Nabbes . . 218 Peter Anthony Mot- Thomas Gray ... 307 Thomas Heywood . 219 teux 252 Cuthbert Shaw . . 310 William Drummond. 220 Matthew Prior . . 252 Tobias Smollett . .311 Thomas May . . .222 Dr. George Sewell . 253 George Lord Lyttelton 314 Bichard Crashaw . 223 Sir John Vanbrugh . 253 Robert Fergusson . 315 William Habington . 224 Elijah Fenton. . . 254 Oliver Goldsmith . 316 William Chamber- Edward Ward . . 255 Paul Whitehead. . 327 layne .... 225 John Gay . . . .255 Walter Harte. . . 329 Richard Lovelace . 226 Matthew Green . . 256 John Armstrong. . 332 Katherine Philips . 227 George Lillo . . .257 John Langhorne. . 337 William Heminge . 227 Thomas Tickell . . 260 Thomas Penrose . . 341 James Shirley . . 228 Alexander Pope . . 260 Henry Brooke . . 343 Alexander Brome . 228 James Bramston . . 262 John Scott . . .345 Robert Herrick . . 229 William Meston . . 262 George Alexander Abraham Cowley . 230 Robert Blair . . .263 Stevens .... 346 Sir Richard Fanshawe 232 James Thomson . . 263 William Whitehead . 347 Sir William Davenant 232 Isaac Watts . . .267 Richard Glover . . 354 Sir John Dunham . 233 Ambrose Philips . . 267 Edward Thompson . 359 George Wither . . 234 Leonard Welsted . 268 Henry Headley . . 359 Jasper Mayne . . 237 Amhurst Selden . . 268 John Logan . . . 360 Richard Brathwaite . 238 Aaron Hill ... 268 Robert Nugent, Earl John Milton ... 238 William Hamilton . 268 Nugent .... 362 Andrew Marvell . . 241 William Collins . . 269 William Julius Mickle 363 Samuel Butler . . 243 Edward Moore . . 270 Timothy Dwight . . 368 Charles Cotton . . 243 John Dyer . . .271 Thomas Warton . . 368 Dr. Henry More . . 244 Allan Ramsay . .271 Thomas Blackloek . 373 George Etherege. 4 245 William Shenstone . 277 William Hayward Ro- Nathaniel Lee . . 246 Henry Carey ... 279 berts 375 Thomas Shadwell . 247 Charles Churchill . 280 Sir William Jones . 376 Henry Yaughan . . 247 Robert Lloyd. . . 284 Robert Burns . . . 385 John Pomfret . . 247 David Mallet . . .285 William Mason . . 395 Thomas Brown . . 248 Edward Young . . 286 Joseph Warton . . 404 Charles Sackville, Earl John Brown . . . 290 William Cowper . .411 of Dorset ... 248 Michael Bruce . . 290 Erasmus Darwin . . 428 George Stepney . . 248 James Grainger . . 291 James Beattie . . 431 John Philips ... 248 William^Falconer . 292 Christopher Anstey . 436 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. PART I. FHE influence of the Norman Conquest upon the language of England was like that of a great inundation, which at first buries ;he face of the landscape under its waters, but which, at last sub- siding, leaves behind'it the elements of new beauty and fertility. [ts first effect was to degrade the Anglo-Saxon tongue to the ;xclusive use of the inferior orders ; and by the transference of ;states, ecclesiastical benefices, and civil dignities, to Norman assessors, to give the French language, which had begun to >revail at court from the time of Edward the Confessor, a more ;omplete predominance among the higher classes of society. The lative gentry of England were either driven into exile, or lepressed into a state of dependence on their conqueror which labituated them to speak his language. On the other hand, we eceived from the Normans the first germs of romantic poetry ; ind our language was ultimately indebted to them for a wealth ind compass of expression which it probably would not have itherwise possessed. The Anglo-Saxon, however, was not lost, though it was super- eded by French, and disappeared as the language of superior ife and of public business. It is found written in prose at the ;nd of Stephen's reign, nearly a century after the Conquest ; and he ' Saxon Chronicle,' which thus exhibits it,* contains even a * [As the Saxon Chronicle relates the death of Stephen, it must have ieen written after that event. Ellis, Early Eng. Poets, vol. i. p. 60, and ol. iii. p. 404, ed. 1801. What is commonly called the ' Saxon Chronicle 1 is continued to the death if Stephen, in 1154, and in the same language, though with some loss of its iurity. Besides the neglect of several grammatical rules, French words low and then obtrude themselves, but not very frequently, in the latter pages if this Chronicle. Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. i. p. 59.J 2 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. fragment of verse, professed to have been composed by an indi- vidual who had seen William the Conqueror. To fix upon any precise time when the national speech can be said to have ceased to be Saxon, and begun to be English, is pronounced by Dr. Johnson to be impossible.* It is undoubtedly difficult, if it be possible, from the gradually progressive nature of language, as well as from the doubt, with regard to dates, which hangs over the small number of specimens of the early tongue which we possess. Mr. Ellis fixes upon a period of about forty years, pre- ceding the accession of Henry III., from 1180 to 1216, during which he conceives modern English to have been formed. f The opinions of Mr. Ellis, which are always delivered with candour, and almost always founded on intelligent views, are not to be lightly treated ; and I hope I shall not appear to be either cap- tious or inconsiderate in disputing them. But it seems to me that he rather arbitrarily defines the number of years which he supposes to have elapsed in the formation of our language, when he assigns forty years for that formation. He afterwards speaks of the vulgar English having suddenly superseded the pure and legitimate Saxon. if Now, if the supposed period could be fixed with any degree of accuracy to thirty or forty years, one might waive the question whether a transmutation occupying so much * Introduction to Johnson's Dictionary. [Nor can it be expected, from the nature of things gradually changing, that any time can be assigned when Saxon may be said to cease, and the English to commence. .... Total and sudden transformations of a language seldom happen. About the year 1150 the Saxon began to take a form in -which the beginning of the present English may be plainly discovered : this change seems not to have been the effect of the Norman Conquest, for very few French words are found to have been introduced in the first hundred years after it ; the language must therefore have been altered by causes like those which, notwithstanding the care of writers and societies instituted to obviate them, are even now daily making innovations in every living language. Johnson.] f [It is only justice to Mr. Ellis to give his date correctly, 1185. " We may fairly infer," Mr. Ellis writes, " that the Saxon language and literature began to be mixed with the Norman about 1185; and that in 1216 the change may be considered as complete."] J " The most striking peculiarity in the establishment of our vulgar English is, that it seems to have very suddenly superseded the pure and legitimate Saxon, from which its elements were principally derived, instead of becoming its successor, as generally has been supposed, by a slow and imperceptible process." Ellis, Specimens of Early English Poetry, vol. iii. p. 404. Conclusion. PART i.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 3 time could, with propriety or otherwise, be called a sudden one ; but when we find that there are no sufficient data for fixing its boundaries even to fifty years, the idea of a sudden transition in the language becomes inadmissible. The mixture of our literature and language with the Norman, or, in other words, the formation of English, commenced, accord- ing to Mr. Ellis, in 1180 [5]. At that period he calculates that Layamon, the first translator from French into the native tongue, finished his version of Wace's ' Brut.' This translation, however, he pronounces to be still unmixed, though barbarous Saxon.* It is certainly not very easy to conceive how the sudden and distinct formation of English can be said to have commenced with unmixed Saxon ; but Mr. Ellis possibly meant the period of Layamon's work to be the date after, and not at, which the change may be understood to have begun. Yet, while he pronounces Layamon's language unmixed Saxon, he considers it to be such a sort of Saxon as required but the substi- tution of a few French for Saxon words to become English.f Nothing more, in Mr. Ellis's opinion, was necessary to change the old into the new native tongue, and to produce an exact resemblance between the Saxon of the twelfth century and the English of the thirteenth ; early in which century, according to Mr. Ellis, the new language was fully formed, or, as he after- wards more cautiously expresses himself, was " in its far advanced state." The reader will please to recollect, that the two main circumstances in the change of Anglo-Saxon into English are the adoption of French words, and the suppression of the inflec- * [Mr. Ellis (p. 73) says, " very barbarous Saxon." " So little," says Sir Walter Scott in his Review of Mr. Ellis's Specimens, " were the Saxon and Norman languages calculated to amalgamate, that, though Layamon wrote in the reign of Henry II., his language is almost pure Saxon ; and hence it is probable, that, if the mixed language now called English at all existed, it was deemed as yet unfit for composition, and only used as a pie- bald jargon for carrying on the indispensable intercourse betwixt the Anglo- Saxons and Normans. In process of time, however, the dialect so much despised made its way into the service of the poets, and seems to have superseded the use of the Saxon, although the French, being the court lan- guage, continued to maintain its ground till a later period." Misc. Pr. Works, vol. xvii. p. 8.] t [It seems reasonable to infer that Layamon's work was composed at or very near the period when the^Saxons and Normans in this country began to unite into one nation, and to adopt a common language. Ellis, vol. i. p. 75. J B2 4 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. tions of the Saxon noun and verb. Now, if Layamon's style exhibits a language needing only a few French words to be con- vertible into English, the Anglo-Saxon must have made some progress before Layamon's time to an English form. Whether that progress was made gradually or suddenly, we have not suffi- cient specimens of the language, anterior to Layamon, to deter- mine. But that the change was not sudden, but gradual, I con- ceive, is much more probably to be presumed.* Layamon, however, whether we call him Saxon or English, certainly exhibits a dawn of English. And when did this dawn appear? Mr. Ellis computes that it was in 1180 [5], placing it thus late because Wace took a great many years to translate his ' Brut ' from Geoffrey of Monmouth ; and because Layamon, who translated that ' Brut,' was probably twenty-five years engaged in the task.f But this is attempting to be precise * If Layamon's work was finished in 11 80 [11 85], the verses in the 'Saxon Chronicle,' on the death of William the Conqueror, said to be written by one who had seen that monarch, cannot be considered as a specimen of the lan- guage immediately anterior to Layamou- But St. Godric is said to have died in 1170, and the verses ascribed to him might have been written at a time nearly preceding Layamon's work. Of St. Godric's verses a very few may be compared with a few of Layamon's. ST. GODRIC. Sainte Marie Christie's bur-! Maiden's clenhud, Modere's flur ! Dillie mine sinnen, rix in mine mod, Bring me to winne with selfe' God. In English. Saint Mary, Christ's bower Maiden's purity, Motherhood's flower Destroy my sin, reign in my mood (or mind) Bring me to dwell with the very God. LAYAMON. And of alle than folke The wuneden ther on folde, Wes thisses londes folk Leodene hendest itald ; And alswa the wimmen Wunliche on heowen. In English. And of all the folk that dwelt on earth was this land's folk the handsomest (people told) ; and also the women handsome of hue. Here are four lines of St. Godric, in all probability earlier than Laya- mon's ; and yet does the English reader find Layamon at all more intelli- gible, or does he seem to make anything like a sudden transition to English as the poetical successor of St. Godric ? f [Wace finished his translation in 1155, after, Mr. Ellis supposes, thirty years' labour : Layamon, he assumes, was the same period, finishing it in 1185; "perhaps," he says, " the earliest date that can be assigned to it." Specimens of Early English Poetry, vol. i. pp. 75-6. " Layamon's PART i.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 5 in dates where there is no ground for precision. It is quite as easy to suppose that the English translator finished his work in ten as in twenty years ; so that the change from Saxon to English would commence in 1265 [1165?], and thus the forty years' Exodus of our language, supposing it bounded to 1216, would extend to half a century. So difficult is it to fix any definite period for the commencing formation of English. It is easy to speak of a child being born at an express time ; but the birth- epochs of languages are not to be registered with the same pre- cision and facility.* Again, as to the end of Mr. Ellis's period : it is inferred by him that the formation of the language was either completed or far advanced in 1216, from the facility of rhyming displayed in Robert of Gloucester,! and in pieces belonging to the middle of the thirteenth century, or perhaps to an earlier date. I own that, to me, this theorizing by conjecture seems like stepping in quicksand. Robert of Gloucester wrote in 1280; | and surely his rhyming with facility then does not " Layamon's age," says Mr. Hallam, " is uncertain ; it must have been after 1 1 55, whea the original poem was completed, and can hardly be placed below 1200. His language is accounted rather Anglo-Saxon than English." Lit. Hist. vol. i. p. 59. Since the former editions of this Essay Layamon has been printed by the Society of Antiquaries of London, under the able superintendence of Sir F. Madden.] * [Nothing can be more difficult, except by an arbitrary line, than to de- termine the commencement of the English language. When we compare the earliest English of the thirteenth century with the Anglo-Saxon of the twelfth, it seems hard to pronounce why it should pass for a separate lan- guage, rather than a modification or simplification of the former. We must conform, however, to usage, and say that the Anglo-Saxon was converted into English 1st, by contracting or otherwise modifying the pronunciation and orthography of words; 2ndly, by omitting many inflections, especially of the nouns, and consequently making more use of articles and auxiliaries ; 3rdly, by the introduction of French derivatives ; 4thly, by using less in- version and ellipsis, especially in poetry. Of these, the second #lone I think can be considered as sufficient to describe a new form of language ; and this was brought about so gradually, that we are not relieved from much of our difficulty whether some compositions shall pass for the latest off- spring of the mother, or the earliest fruits of the daughter's fertility. It is a proof of this difficulty, that the best masters of our ancient language have lately introduced the word Semi-Saxon, which is to cover everything from 1150 to 1250. Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. i. p. 57.1 f- [Robert of Gloucester, who is placed by the critics in the thirteenth century, seems to have used a kind of intermediate diction, neither Saxon uor English ; in his work, therefore, we see the transition exhibited. Johnson.] t [As Robert of Gloucester alludes to the canonisation of St. Louis in 1297, it is obvious, however much he wrote before, he was writing after that event. See Sir F. Madden's Havelok, p. liii.] 6 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. prove the English language to have been fully formed in 1216. But we have pieces, it seems, which are supposed to have been written early in the thirteenth century. To give any support to Mr. Ellis's theory, such pieces must be proved to have been pro- duced very early in the thirteenth century. Their coming towards the middle of it, and showing facility of rhyming at that late date, will prove little or nothing. But of these poetical fragments supposed to commence either with or early in the thirteenth century, our antiquaries afford us dates which, though often confidently pronounced, are really only conjectural ; and in fixing those conjectural dates, they are by no means agreed. Warton speaks of this and that article being certainly not later than the reign of Richard I. ; but he takes no pains to authenticate what he affirms. He pronounces the love-song, ' Blow, northern wind, blow, blow^ blow !' to be as old as the year 1200.* Mr. Ellis puts it off only to about half a century later. Hickes places the ' Land of Cokayne ' just after the Conquest. Mr. "Warton would place it before the Conquest, if he were not deterred by the appearance of a few Norman words, and by the learned authority of Hickes. f Laya- mon would thus be superseded, as quite a modern. The truth is, respecting the ' Land of Cokayne,' that we are left in total astonishment at the circumstance of men, so well informed as Hickes and Warton, placing it either before or immediately after the Conquest, as its language is comparatively modern. It con- tains allusions to pinnacles in buildings, which were not intro- duced till the reign of Henry III.J Mr. Ellis is not so rash as to place that production, which Hickes and Warton removed to near the Conquest, earlier than the thirteenth century ; and I * [Warton says, " before or about," which is lax enough. Price's Warton, vol. i. p. 28, ed. 1824.] f It is not of the ' Land of Cokayne' that Warton says this, but of a religious or moral ode, consisting of one hundred and ninety-one stanzas. Price's Warton, vol. i. p. 7. Of the ' Land of Cokayne ' he has said that it is a satire, which clearly exemplifies the Saxon adulterated by the Norman, and was evidently written soon after the Conquest, at least soon after the reign of Henry II. p. 9. Mr. Price (p. 7) follows Mr. Campbell in the age he would attach to the verse quoted in the first section of Warton, which is, he says, very arbitrary and uncertain.] I [So says Gray to Mason ( Works by Mitford, vol. iii. p. 305) ; but this is endeavouring to settle a point by a questionable date one uncertainty by another.] PART i.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 7 believe it may be placed even late in that century. In short, where shall we fix upon the first poem that is decidedly English ? and how shall we ascertain its date to a certainty within any moderate number of years ? Instead of supposing the period of the formation of English to commence at 1180 [1185?], and to end at 1216, we might, without violence to any known fact, ex- tend it back to several years earlier, and bring it down to a great many years later. In the fair idea of English, we surely, in general, understand a considerable mixture of French words.* Now, whatever may have been done in the twelfth century, with regard to that change from Saxon to English which consists in the extinction of Saxon grammatical inflections, it is plain that the other characteristic of English, viz. its Gallicism, was only beginning in the thirteenth century. The English language could not be said to be saturated with French till the days of Chaucer, i. e. it did not, till his time, receive all the French words which it was capable of retaining. Mr. Ellis nevertheless tells us that the vulgar English, not gradually, but suddenly, superseded the legitimate Saxon. When this sudden succession precisely began, it seems to be as difficult to ascertain, as when it ended. The sudden transition, by Mr. Ellis's own theory, occupied about forty years ; and, to all appearance, that term might be lengthened, with respect to its commencement and continuance, to fourscore years at least. The Saxon language, we are told, had ceased to be poetically cultivated for some time previous to the Conquest. This might be the case with regard to lofty efforts of composition ; but In- gulphus, the secretary of William the Conqueror, speaks of the popular ballads of the English, in praise of their heroes, which were sung about the streets ; and William of Malmsbury, in the twelfth century, continues to make mention of them.f The pre- tensions of these ballads to the name of poetry we are unhappily, from the loss of them, unable to estimate. For a long time after the Conquest, the native minstrelsy, though it probably was never * [In comparing Robert of Gloucester with Layamon, a native of the same county, and a writer on the same subject, it will appear that a great quantity of French had flowed into the language since the loss of Normandy. Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. i. p. 61.] t William of Malmsbury drew much of his information from those Saxon ballads. 8 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PAKT i. altogether extinct, may be supposed to have sunk to the lowest ebb. No human pursuit is more sensible than poetry to national pride or mortification ; and a race of peasants, like the Saxons, struggling for bare subsistence, under all the dependence, and without the protection, of the feudal system, were in a state the most ungenial to feelings of poetical enthusiasm. For more than one century after the Conquest, as we are informed, an English- man was a term of contempt. So much has time altered the associations attached to a name, which we should now employ as the first appeal to the pride or intrepidity of those who bear it. By degrees, however, the Norman and native races began to coalesce, and their patriotism and political interests to be identi- fied. The crown and aristocracy having become during their struggles, to a certain degree, candidates for the favour of the people, and rivals in affording them protection, free burghs and chartered corporations were increased, and commerce and social intercourse began to quicken. Mr. Ellis alludes to an Anglo- Norman jargon having been spoken in commercial intercourse, from which he conceives our synonymes to have been derived. That individuals, imperfectly understanding each other, might accidentally speak a broken jargon, may be easily conceived ; but that such a lingua Franca was ever the distinct dialect, even of a mercantile class, Mr. Ellis proves neither by specimens nor historical evidence. The synonymes in our language may cer- tainly be accounted for by the gradual entrance of French words, without supposing an intermediate jargon. The national speech, it is true, received a vast influx of French words ; but it received them by degrees, and subdued them, as they came in, to its own idioms and grammar. Yet, difficult as it may be to pronounce precisely when Saxon can be said to have ceased and English to have begun, it must be supposed that the progress and improvement of the national speech was most considerable at those epochs which tended to restore the importance of the people. The hypothesis of a sudden transmutation of Saxon into English appears, on the whole, not to be distinctly made out. At the same time, some public events might be- highly favourable to the progress and cultivation of the language. Of those events, the establishment of municipal governments and of elective magistrates in the PART i.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 9 towns must have been very important, as they furnished mate- rials and incentives for daily discussion and popular eloquence. As property and security increased among the people, we may also suppose the native minstrelsy to have revived. The min- strels, or those who wrote for them, translated or imitated Norman romances ; and, in so doing, enriched the language with many new words, which they borrowed from the originals, either from want of corresponding terms in their own vocabulary, or from the words appearing to be more agreeable. Thus, in a general view, we may say that, amidst the early growth of her commerce, literature, and civilization, England acquired the new form of her language, which was destined to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings from which it sprang. In the formation of English from its Saxon and Norman ma- terials, the genius of the native tongue might be said to prevail, as it subdued to Saxon grammar and construction the numerous French words which found their way into the language.* But it was otherwise with respect to our poetry in which, after the Conquest, the Norman Muse must be regarded as the earliest preceptress of our own. Mr. Tyrwhitt has even said, and his opinion seems to be generally adopted, that we are indebted for the use of rhyme, and for all the forms of our versification, entirely to the Normans.t Whatever might be the case with * Vide Tyrwhitt's Preface to the ' Canterbury Tales,' where a distinct account is given of the grammatical changes exhibited in the rise and pro- gress of English. f It is likely that the Normans would have taught us the use of rhyme and their own metres, whether these had been known or not to the Anglo- Saxons before the Conquest. But respecting Mr. Tyrwhitt's position that we owe all our forms of verse and the use of rhyme entirely to the Nor- mans, I trust the reader will pardon me for introducing a mere doubt on a subject which cannot be interesting to many. With respect to rhyme, I might lay some stress on the authority of Mr. Turner, who, in his ' History of the Anglo-Saxons,' says that the Anglo-Saxon versification possessed occasional rhyme ; but as he admits that rhyme formed no part of its con- stituent character, for fear of assuming too much, let it be admitted that we have no extant specimens of rhyme in our language before the Conquest. One stanza of a ballad shall indeed be mentioned, as an exception to this, which may be admitted or rejected at the reader's pleasure. In the mean time let it be recollected, that, if we have not rhyme in the vernacular verse, we have examples of it in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon churchmen abun- dance of it in Bede's and Boniface's Latin verses. We meet also, in the same writers, with lines which resemble modern verse in their trochaic and 10 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. regard to our forms of versification, the chief employment of our earliest versifiers certainly was to transplant the fictions of the Norman school, and to naturalise them in our language. iambic structure, considering that structure not as classical but accentual metre. Take, for example, these verses : " Quando Christus Deus noster Natus est ex Virgine " which go precisely in the same cadence with such modern trochaics as " Would you hear how once repining Great Eliza captive lay." And we have many such lines as these : " Ut floreas cum domino In sempiterno solio Qua Martyres in cnneo," &c. which flow exactly like the lines in ' L' Allegro :' " The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty. * * * * * And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With masque, and antique pageantry." Those Latin lines are, in fact, a prototype of our own eight syllable iambic. It is singular that rhyme and such metres as the above, which are generally supposed to have come into the other modern languages from the Latin rhymes of the church, should not have found their way from thence into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular verse. But they certainly did not, we shall be told ; for there is no appearance of them in the specimens of Anglo-Saxon verse before the Conquest Of such specimens, however, it is not pretended that we have anything like a full or regular series. On the contrary, many Saxon ballads, which have been alluded to by Anglo-Norman writers as of considerable antiquity, have been lost with the very names of their com- posers. And from a few articles saved in such a wreck, can we pronounce confidently on the whole contents of the cargo ? The following solitary stanza, however, has been preserved, from a ballad attributed to Canute the Great : " Merry sungen the Muneches binnen Ely, The Cnut Ching reiither by, Koweth Cnites noer the land, And here we thes Muniches sang." " Merry sang the Monks in Ely, When Canute King was sailing by : Row, ye knights, near the land, And let us hear these Monks' song." There is something very like rhyme in the Anglo-Saxon stanza. I have no doubt that Canute heard the monks singing Latin rhymes ; and I have some suspicion that he finished his Saxon ballad in rhyme also. Thomas of Ely, who knew the whole song, translates his specimen of it in Latin lines, which, whether by accident or design, rhyme to each other. The genius of PARTI.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 11 The most liberal patronage was afforded to Norman min- strelsy in England by the first kings of the new dynasty. This encouragement, and the consequent cultivation of the northern dialect of French, gave it so much the superiority over the southern or troubadour dialect, that the French language, ac- cording to the acknowledgment of its best informed antiquaries, received from England and Normandy the first of its works which deserve to be cited. The Norman trouveurs, it is allowed, were more eminent narrative poets than the Provencal trouba- dours. No people had a better right to be the founders of chi- valrous poetry than the Normans. They were the most energetic generation of modern men. Their leader, by the conquest of England in the eleventh century, consolidated the feudal system upon a broader basis than it ever had before possessed. Before the end of the same century, chivalry rose to its full growth as an institution, by the circumstance of martial zeal being enlisted under the banners of superstition. The crusades, though they certainly did not give birth to jousts and tournaments, must have imparted to them a new spirit and interest, as the preparatory images of a consecrated warfare. And those spectacles con- stituted a source of description to the romancers, to which no exact counterpart is to be found in the heroic poetry of antiquity. But the growth of what may properly be called romantic poetry was not instantaneous after the Conquest ; and it was not till " English Richard ploughed the deep " that the crusaders seem to have found a place among the heroes of romance. Till the middle of the twelfth century, or possibly later, no work of pro- fessed fiction, or bearing any semblance to epic fable, can be traced in Norman verse nothing but songs, satires, chronicles, or didactic works, to all of which, however, the name of Ro- the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry, Mr. Turner observes, was obscure, peri- phrastical, and elliptical ; but, according to that writer's conjecture, a new and humble but perspicuous style of poetry was introduced at a later time in the shape of the narrative ballad. In this plainer style we may conceive the possibility of rhyme having found a place; because the verse would stand in need of that ornament to distinguish it from prose, more than in the elliptical and inverted manner. With regard to our anapaestic measure, or triple-time verse, Dr. Percy has shown that its rudiments can be traced to Scaldic poetry. It is often found very distinct in Langlande ; and that species of verse, at least, I conceive, is not necessarily to be referred to a Norman origin. 12 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. mance, derived from the Roman descent of the French tongue, was applied in the early and wide acceptation of the word. To these succeeded the genuine metrical romance, which, though often rhapsodical and desultory, had still invention, ingenuity, and design, sufficient to distinguish it from the dry and dreary chronicle. The reign of French metrical romance may be chiefly assigned to the latter part of the twelfth, and the whole of the thirteenth century ; that of English metrical romance to the latter part of the thirteenth, and the whole of the fourteenth* century. Those ages of chivalrous song were, in the mean time, fraught with events which, while they undermined the feudal system, gradually prepared the way for the decline of chivalry itself. Literature and science were commencing, and even in the improvement of the mechanical skill employed to heighten chivalrous or superstitious magnificence, the seeds of arts, in- dustry, and plebeian independence were unconsciously sown. One invention, that of gunpowder, is eminently marked out as the cause of the extinction of chivalry ; but even if that inven- tion had not taken place, it may well be conjectured that the contrivance of other means of missile destruction in war, and the improvement of tactics, would have narrowed that scope for the prominence of individual prowess which was necessary for the chivalrous character, and that the progress of civilisation must have ultimately levelled its romantic consequence. But to an- ticipate the remote effects of such causes, if scarcely within the ken of philosophy, was still less within the reach of poetry. Chivalry was still in all its glory, and to the eye of the poet appeared as likely as ever to be immortal. The progress of civilisation even ministered to its external importance. The early arts made chivalrous life, with all its pomp and ceremonies, more august and imposing, and more picturesque as a subject for description. Literature, for a time, contributed to the same effect, by her jejune and fabulous efforts at history, in which the athletic worthies of classical story and of modern romance were gravely connected by an ideal genealogy. f Thus the dawn of * The practice of translating French rhyming romances into English verse, however, continued down to the reign of Henry VII. f Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, of which the modern opinion seems to be, that it was not a forgery, but derived from an Armorican original, and PAST i.] FORMATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 13 human improvement smiled on the fabric which it was ultimately to destroy, as the morning sun gilds and beautifies those masses of frost-work which are to melt before its naonday heat. The elements of romantic fiction have been traced up to various sources ; but neither the Scaldic, nor Saracenic, nor Armorican theory of its origin can sufficiently account for all its materials. Many of them are classical, and others derived from the Scriptures. The migrations of Science are difficult enough to be traced ; but Fiction travels on still lighter wings, and scatters the seeds of her wild flowers imperceptibly over the world, till they surprise us by springing up with similarity in regions the most remotely divided.* There was a vague and unselecting love of the marvellous in romance, which sought for adventures, like its knights errant, in every quarter where they could be found ; so that it is easier to admit of all the sources which are imputed to that species of fiction, than to limit our belief to any one of them.t the pseudo-Turpin's ' Life of Charlemagne? were the grand historical maga- zines of the romancers. Ellis's Met. Rom., vol. i. p. 75. Popular songs about Arthur and Charlemagne (or, as some will have it, Charles Martel) were probably the main sources of Turpin's forgery and of Geoffrey's Armorican book. Even the proverbial mendacity of the pseudo-Turpin must have been indebted for the leading hints to songs that were extant respecting Charlemagne. The stream of fiction, having thus spread itself in those grand prose reservoirs, afterwards flowed out from thence again in the shape of verse, with a force renewed by accumulation. Once more, as if destined to alternations, romance, after the fourteenth century, returned to the shape of prose, and in many instances made and carried pretensions to the sober credibility of history. * [It is common fairness to Mr. Campbell to say that the late Mr. Price has cited this passage as one distinguishable alike for its truth and its beauty, that establishes the fact that popular fiction is in its nature tradi- tive. Introd. to Warton's Hist., p. 92.] f [Various theories have been proposed for the purpose of explaining the origin of romantic fiction. Percy contended for a Scandinavian, Warton for an Arabian, and Leyden for an Armorican birth, to which Ellis inclined ; while some have supposed it to be of Proven9al, and others of Norman in- vention. If every argument has not been exhausted, every hypothesis has. But all their systems, as Sir Walter Scott says, seem to be inaccurate, in so far as they have been adopted exclusively of each other, and of the general proposition that fables of a nature similar to the Romances of chivalry, modified according to manners and the state of society, must necessarily be invented in every part of the world, for the same reason that grass grows upon the surface of the soil in every climate and in every country. Misc. P. W. vol. vi. p. 174. "In reality," says Southey, "mythological and romantic tales are current among all savages of whom we have any full 14 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. Norman verse dwelt for a considerable time in the tedious his- toric style, before it reached the shape of amusing fable ; and we find the earliest efforts of the Native Muse confined to trans- lating Norman verse, while it still retained its uninviting form of the chronicle. The first of the Norman poets, from whom any versifier in the language is known to have translated, was Wace, a native of Jersey, born in the reign of Henry II.* In the year 1155 Wace finished his ' Brut d'Angleterre,' which is a French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's ' History of Great Britain,' deduced from Brutus to Cadwallader, in 689. Laya- mon, a priest of Ernleye-upon-Severn, translated Wace's ' Me- trical Chronicle ' into the verse of the popular tongue ; and, notwithstanding Mr. Ellis's date of 1180 [1185 ?], may be sup- posed, with equal probability, to have produced his work within ten or fifteen years after the middle of the twelfth century. Layamon's translation may be considered as the earliest speci- men of metre in the native language posterior to the Conquest ; except some lines in the ' Saxon Chronicle ' on the death of William I., and a few religious rhymes, which, according to Matthew Paris, the Blessed Virgin was pleased to dictate to St. Godric, the hermit, near Durham ; unless we add to these the specimen of Saxon poetry published in the ' Archaeologia ' by Mr. Conybeare, who supposes that composition to be posterior to the Conquest, and to be the last expiring voice of the Saxon Muse.f Of the dialect of Layamon, Mr. Mitford, in his ' Har- mony of Languages,' observes that it has " all the appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of account ; for man has his intellectual as well as his bodily appetites, and these things are the food of his imagination and faith. They are found wherever there is language and discourse of reason, in other words, wher- ever there is man. And in similar stages of civilisation, or states of society, the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance, notwithstanding the difference of time and scene." Pref. to Morte d'Arthur.~] * [Ellis (p. 44) says Henry I., whom he professes to have seen. Warton (p. 67) says he was educated at Caen, was canon of Bayeux, and chaplain to Henry II.] f Two specimens of the ancient state of the language viz. the stanzas on Old Age, beginning " He may him sore adreden," and the quotation from the Ormulum, which Dr. Johnson placed, on the authority of Hickes, nearly after the Conquest are considered by Mr. Tyrwhitt to be of a later date than Layamon's translation. Their language is certainly more modern. PARTI.] TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES. 15 those who spoke it. It is truly neither Saxon nor English."* Mr. Ellis's opinion of its being simple Saxon has been already noticed. So little agreed are the most ingenious speculative men on the characteristics of style which they shall entitle Saxon or English. We may, however, on the whole, consider the style of Layamon to be as nearly the intermediate state of the old and new languages as can be found in any ancient spe- cimen: something like the new insect stirring its wings before it has shaken off the aurelia state. But of this work, or of any specimen supposed to be written in the early part of the thir- teenth century, displaying a sudden transition from Saxon to English, I am disposed to repeat my doubts. Without being over credulous about the antiquity of the ' Lives of the Saints,' and the other fragments of the thirteenth century, which Mr. Ellis places in chronological succession next to Layamon, we may allow that before the date of Robert of Gloucester, not only the legendary and devout style, but the amatory and satirical, had begun to be rudely cultivated in the language. It was customary in that age to make the minstrels sing devotional strains to the harp on Sundays, for the edifi- cation of the people, instead of the verses on gayer subjects which were sung at public entertainments ; a circumstance which, while it indicates the usual care of the Catholic church to make use of every hold over the popular mind, discovers also the fondness of the people for their poetry, and the attrac- tions which it had already begun to assume. Of the satirical style I have already alluded to one example in the ' Land of Cokayne,' an allegorical satire on the luxury of the church, couched under the description of an imaginary paradise, in which the nuns are represented as houris, and the black and grey monks as their paramours. This piece has humour, though not of the most delicate kind, and the language is easy and fluent, but it * [Mitford, p. 170. In the Specimen of Layamon, published by Mr. Ellis; not a Gallicism is to be found, nor even a Norman term : and so far from exhibiting auy " appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of those who spoke it," nearly every important form of Anglo-Saxon grammar is rigidly adhered to ; and so little was the language altered at this advanced period of Norman influence, that a few slight varia- tions might convert it into genuine Anglo-Saxon. Price, Warton, vol. i. p. 109.] 16 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. possesses nothing of style, sentiment, or imagery, approaching to poetry. Another specimen of the pleasantry of the times is more valuable, because it exhibits the state of party feeling on real events, as well as the state of language at a precise time.* It is a ballad, entitled ' Richard of Alemaigne,' composed by one of the adherents of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, after the defeat of the royal party at the battle of Lewes in 1264. In the year after that battle the royal cause was restored, and the earl of Warren and Sir Hugh Bigod returned from exile, and assisted in the king's victory. In this satirical ballad those two personages are threatened with death if they should ever fall into the hands of their enemies. Such a song and such threats must have been composed by Leicester's party in the moment of their triumph, and not after their defeat and dis- persion ; so that the date of the piece is ascertained by its con- ten ts.f This political satire leads me to mention another, which the industrious Ritson published, | and which, without violenx anachronism, may be spoken of among the specimens of the thirteenth century, as it must have been composed within a few years after its close, and relates to events within its verge. It is a ballad on the execution of the Scottish patriots, Sir William Wallace and Sir Simon Eraser. The diction is as bar- barous as we should expect from a song of triumph on such a subject. It relates the death and treatment of Wallace very minutely. The circumstance of his being covered with a mock crown of laurel in Westminster Hall, which Stowe repeats, is there mentioned ; and that of his legs being fastened with iron fetters " under his horses wombe " is told with savage exul- tation. The piece was probably endited in the very year of the political murders which it celebrates ; certainly before 1314, as it mentions the skulking of Robert Bruce, which, after the battle of Bannockburn, must have become a jest out of season. * " Though some make slight of libels," says Selden, " yet you may see by them how the wind sits ; as, take a straw, and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels." Table Talk. t [See it in Percy's ' Reliques,' and in Wright's ' Political Songs of Eng- land,' p. 69.] J Ritson's ' Ancient Songs.' [Wright assigns it to 1306. Political Songs, p. 212.] PART I.] THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 17 A few love-songs of that early period have been preserved, which are not wholly destitute of beauty and feeling. Their ex- pression, indeed, is often quaint, and loaded with alliteration ; yet it is impossible to look without a pleasing interest upon strains of tenderness which carry us back to so remote an age, and which disclose to us the softest emotions of the human mind in times abounding with such opposite traits of historical recollection. Such a stanza as the following* would not disgrace the lyric poetry of a refined age. For her love I cark and care, For her love I droop and dare ; For her love my bliss is bare, And all I wax wan. For her love in sleep I slake,f For her love all night I wake ; For her love mourning I make More than any man. In another pastoral strain the lover says, When the nightingale singes the woods waxen green ; Leaf, and grass, and blosme, springs in Averyl, I ween : And love is to my heart gone with one spear so keen, Night and day my blood it drinks my heart doth me teen. Robert, a monk of Gloucester, whose surname is unknown, is supposed to have finished his ' Rhyming Chronicle ' about the year 12804 He translated the Legends of Geoffrey of Mon- mouth, and continued the History of England down to the time of Edward I., in the beginning of whose reign he died. The topographical, as well as narrative, minuteness of his ' Chronicle' has made it a valuable authority to antiquaries ; and as such it was consulted by Selden, when he wrote his Notes to Drayton's * Polyolbion.' After observing some traits of humour and sen- timent, moderate as they may be, in compositions as old as the middle of the thirteenth century, we might naturally expect to find in Robert of Gloucester not indeed a decidedly poetical * It is here stripped of its antiquated spelling, f I am deprived of sleep. J [Ellis, vol. i. p. 97. It was evidently written after the year 1278, as the poet mentions King Arthur's sumptuous tomb, erected in that year before the high altar of Glastonbury church ; and he declares himself a living witness of the remarkably dismal weather which distinguished the day upon which the battle of Evesham was fought, in 120 5. From these and other circumstances this piece appears to have been composed about the year 1280. Warton, vol. i. p. 52.] C \ \ 13 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PARTI. manner, but some approach to the animation of poetry. But the ' Chronicle ' of this English Ennius, as he has been called,* whatever progress in the state of the language it may display, comes in reality nothing nearer the character of a work of imagi- nation than Layamon's version of Wace, which preceded it by a hundred years. One would not imagine, from Robert of Gloucester's style, that he belonged to a period when a single effusion of sentiment, or a trait of humour and vivacity, had appeared in the language. On the contrary, he seems to take us back to the nonage of poetry, when verse is employed not to harmonise and beautify expression, but merely to assist the memory. Were we to judge of Robert of Gloucester not as a chronicler but as a candidate for the honours of fancy, we might be tempted to wonder at the frigidity with which he dwells, as the first possessor of such poetical ground, on the history of Lear, of Arthur, and Merlin ; and with which he describes a scene so susceptible of poetical effect as the irruption of the first crusaders into Asia, preceded by the sword of fire which hung in the firmament, and guided them eastward in their path. But, in justice to the ancient versifier, we should remember, that he had still only a rude language to employ the speech of boors and burghers, which, though it might possess a few songs and satires, could afford him no models of heroic narration. In such an age, the first occupant passes uninspired over subjects which might kindle the highest enthusiasm in the poet of a riper period ; as the savage treads unconsciously, in his deserts, over mines of incalculable value, without sagacity to discover, or implements to explore them. In reality, his object was but to be historical. The higher orders of society still made use of French ; and scholars wrote in that language or in Latin. His ' Chronicle' was therefore recited to a class of his contemporaries to whom it must have been highly acceptable, as a history of their native country believed to be authentic, and composed in their native tongue. To the fabulous legends of antiquity he added a record of more recent events, with some of which he was contemporary. As a relater of events, he is tolerably succinct and perspicuous ; and wherever the fact is of any importance, he shows a watchful attention to keep the reader's memory distinct with regard to * [By Tom Hearne, his very accurate editor.] PART i.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 19 chronology, by making the date of the year rhyme to something prominent in the narration of the fact. Our first known versifier of the fourteenth century is Robert, commonly called De Brunne. He was born (according to his editor, Hearne) at Malton,in Yorkshire; lived for some time in the house of Sixhill, a Gilbertine monastery in Yorkshire ; and afterwards became a member of Brunne or Browne, a priory of black canons in the same county. His real surname was Man- nyng ; but the writers of history in those times (as Hearne ob- serves) were generally the religious, and when they became celebrated they were designated by the names of the religious houses to which they belonged. Thus, William of Malmsbury, Matthew of Westminster, and John of Glastonbury, received those appellations from their respective monasteries.* De Brunne was, as far as we know, only a translator. His principal per- formance is a Rhyming Chronicle of the History of England, in two parts, compiled from the works of Wace and Peter de Lang- toft, f The declared object of his work is " not for the lerid (learned) but for the lewed (the low). " For tho a that in this land worm, 1 " That the latyn no e Frankys d conn." 8 He seems to reckon, however, if not on the attention of the "lerid," at least on that of a class above the "lewed," as he begins his address to " Lordynges that be now here." He de- clares also that his verse was constructed simply, being intended neither for seggers (reciters) nor harpours (harpers). Yet it is clear, from another passage, that he intended his ' Chronicle ' to be sung, at least by parts, at public festivals. In the present day it would require considerable vocal powers to make so dry a recital of facts as that of De Brunne's work entertaining to an audience ; but it appears that he could offer one of the most * [Sir F. Madden supposes, and on very fair grounds, that Mannyng was born at Brunne. Havelok, p. xiv.] t Peter de Langtoft was an Augustine canon of Bridlington, in Yorkshire, of Norman origin, but born in England. He wrote an entire ' History of England ' in French rhymes, down to the end of the reign of Edward I. Robert de Brunne, in his ' Chronicle,' followers Wace in the earlier part of his History, but translates the latter part of it from Langtoft. " Those. b Live. c Nor. d French. e Know. c2 20 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PAKT i. ancient apologies of authorship, namely, " the request of friends" for he says, " Men besoght me many a time To torn it hot in light rhyme." His < Chronicle,' it seems, was likely to be an acceptable work to social parties, assembled " For to haf solace and gamen a In fellawship when they sit samen." b In rude states of society verse is attached to many subjects from which it is afterwards divorced by the progress of litera- ture ; and primitive poetry is found to be the organ not only of history, but of science,* theology, and of law itself. The an- cient laws of the Athenians were sung at their public banquets. Even in modern times, and within the last century, the laws of Sweden were published in verse. De Brunne's versification, throughout the body of the work, is sometimes the entire Alexandrine, rhyming in couplets ; but for the most part it is only the half Alexandrine, with alternate rhymes. He thus affords a ballad metre, which seems to justify the conjecture of Hearne, that our most ancient ballads were only fragments of metrical histories, f By this time (for the date of De Brunne's ' Chronicle ' brings us down to the year 1339)| our popular ballads must have long added the redoubted names of Eandal [earl] of Chester, and Robin Hood, to their list of native subjects. Both of these worthies had died before the middle of the preceding century, and, in the course of the next hundred years, their names became so popular in English song, a Game. b Together. * Virgil, when he carries us back to very ancient manners, in the picture of Dido's feast, appropriately makes astronomy the first subject with which the bard lopas entertains his audience. Cithara crinitus lopas Personat aurata, docuit quse maximus Atlas ; Hie canit errantem lunam, solisque labores. jiEneid I. t [" The conjectures of Hearne," says Warton (vol. i. p- 91). " ^ere generally wrong." An opinion re-echoed in part by Ellis. Spec. vol. i. p. 117.J % Robert de Brunne, it appears, from internal evidence, finished his 'Chronicle' in May of that year. Ritson's Minot, XIII. [He began it in 1303, as he tells us himself in very ordinary verse.] PART i.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 21 that Langlande, in the fourteenth century, makes it part of the confession of a sluggard, that he was unable to repeat his pater- noster, though he knew plenty of rhymes about Randal of Chester and Robin Hood.* None of the extant ballads about Robin Hood are however of any great antiquity. The style of Robert de Brunne is less marked by Sax- onisms than that of Robert of Gloucester ; and though he can scarcely be said to come nearer the character of a true poet than his predecessor, he is certainly a smoother versifier, and evinces more facility in rhyming. It is amusing to find his editor, Hearne, so anxious to defend the moral memory of a writer, respecting whom not a circumstance is known beyond the date of his works and the names of the monasteries where he wore his cowl. From his willingness to favour the people with historic rhymes for their " fellawship and gamen," Hearne infers that he must have been of a jocular temper. It seems, however, that the priory of Sixhill, where he lived for some time, was a house which consisted of women as well as men, a discovery which alarms the good antiquary for the fame of his author's personal purity. " Can we therefore think," continues Hearne, " that, since he was of a jocular temper, he could be wholly free from vice, or that he should not sometimes express himself loosely to the sisters of that place ? This objec- tion" (he gravely continues) " would have had some weight, had the priory of Sixhill been any way noted for luxury or lewdness ; but whereas every member of it, both men and women, were very chaste, we ought by no means to suppose that Robert of Brunne behaved himself otherwise than became a good Chris- tian during his whole abode there." This conclusive reasoning, it may be hoped, will entirely set at rest any idle suspicions that may have crept into the reader's mind respecting the chastity of Robert de Brunne. It may be added, that his writings betray not the least symptom of his having been either an Abelard among priests, or an Ovid among poets. Considerably before the date of Robert de Brunne's ' Chronicle,' as we learn from De Brunne himself, the English minstrels, or those who wrote for them, had imitated from the French many * [Pierce Plowman's Visions, as quoted by Warton (vol. i. p. 92). Lang- lande tells it of a friar, perhaps with truthful severity.] 22 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. compositions more poetical than those historical canticles, namely, genuine romances. In most of those metrical stories, irregular and shapeless as they were, if we compare them with the sym- metrical structure of epic fable, there was still some portion of interest, and a catastrophe brought about, after various obstacles and difficulties, by an agreeable surprise. The names of the writers of our early English romances have not, except in one or two instances, been even conjectured, nor have the dates of the majority of them been ascertained with anything like pre- cision. But in a general view, the era of English metrical romance may be said to have commenced towards the end of the thirteenth century. Warton, indeed, would place the commence- ment of our romance poetry considerably earlier; but Ritson challenges a proof of any English romance being known or mentioned, before the close of Edward I.'s reign, about which time, that is, the end of the thirteenth century, he conjec- tures that the romance of 'Hornchild ' may have been composed. It would be pleasing, if it were possible, to extend the claims of English genius in this department to any considerable number of original pieces. But English romance poetry, having grown out of that of France, seems never to have improved upon its original, or, rather, it may be allowed to have fallen beneath it. As to the originality of old English poems of this kind, we meet, in some of them, with heroes whose Saxon names might lead us to suppose them indigenous fictions, which had not come into the language through a French medium. Several old Saxon ballads are alluded to, as extant long after the Conquest, by the Anglo-Norman historians, who drew from them many facts and inferences ; and there is no saying how many of these ballads might be recast into a romantic shape by the composers for the native minstrelsy. But, on the other hand, the Anglo-Normans appear to have been more inquisitive into Saxon legends than the Saxons themselves ; and their Muse was by no means so illiberal as to object to a hero because he was not of their own generation. In point of fact, whatever may be alleged about the minstrels of the North Country, it is difficult, if it be pos- sible, to find an English romance which contains no internal allusion to a French prototype. Ritson very grudgingly allows that three old stories may be called original English romances, PART i.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 23 until a Norman original shall be found for them ;* while Mr. Tyrwhitt conceives that we have not one English romance, an- terior to Chaucer, which is not borrowed from a French one. * Those are, ' The Squire of Low Degree,' ' Sir Tryamour,' and ' Sir Eglamour.' Respecting two of those, Mr. Ellis shows that Ritsou might have spared himself the trouble of making any concession, as the antiquity of ' The Squire of Low Degree' [Ritson, vol. iii. p. 145] remains to be proved, it being mentioned by no writer before the sixteenth century, and not being known to be extant in any ancient MS. ' Sir Eglamour' contains allusions to its Norman pedigree. The difficulty of finding an original South British romance of this period, unborrowed from a French original, seems to remain undisputed : but Mr. Walter Scott, in his edition of 'Sir Tristrem,' has presented the public with an ancient Scottish romance, which, according to Mr. Scott's theory, would demonstrate the .English language to have been cultivated earlier in Scotland than in England. 3 I have elsewhere (post, Scottish Poetry) expressed myself in terms of more unqualified assent to the supposition of Thomas of Erceldoune having been an original romancer, than I should [ a " The strange appropriation of the Auchinleck poem as a Scottish pro- duction, when no single trace of the Scottish dialect is to be found through- out the whole romance which may not with equal truth be claimed as current in the north of England, while every marked peculiarity of the former is entirely wanting, can hardly require serious investigation. From this opinion the ingenious editor himself must long ago have been reclaimed. The singular doctrines relative to the rise and progress of the English lan- guage in North and South Britain may also be dismissed, as not immediately relevant. But when it is seriously affirmed that the English language was once spoken with greater purity in the Lowlands of Scotland than in this country, we ' Sothrons ' receive the communication with the same smile of. incredulity that we bestow upon the poetic dogma of the honest Fries- lander : Buwter, breat, en greene tzies, Is guth Ingliscb en guth Fries. Butter, bread, and green cheese, Is good English and good Friese." Price, Warton's Hist., vol. i. p. 196., ed. 1824. "As to the Essayist's assertion (Mr. Price's) that the language of ' Sir Tristrem' has in it nothing distinctively Scottish this is a point on which the reader will, perhaps, consider the authority of Sir Walter Scott as sufficient to countervail that of the most accom lished English antiquary." Lockhart, Advt. to ' Sir Tristrem,' 1833. No one has yet satisfactorily accounted for the Elizabethan-like Inyiis of Barbour and Blind Harry, or the Saxon Layamon-like Inglis of Gawaiu Douglas. Did Barbour, who wrote in 1375, write in advance of his age, and Douglas, who began and ended his '^Eneid' in 1513-14, behind his age ? Or did each represent the spoken language of the times they wrote in ? Scott's view of the priority in cultivation of Inglis in Scotland over England is sanctioned by Ellis in the Introduction (p. 127) to his 'Metrical Romances.'] 24 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. In the reign of Edward II., Adam Davie, who was marshal of Stratford-le-Bow, near London, wrote ' Visions ' in verse, which be inclined to use upon mature consideration. Robert de Brunne certainly alludes to ' Sir Tristrem,' as " the most famous of all gests" in his time." He mentions Erceldoune, its author, and another poet of the name of Kendale. Of Kendale, whether he was Scotch or English, nothing seems to be known with certainty. With respect to Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas the Rhymer, the Anchinleck MS. published by my illustrious friend professes to be the work not of Erceldoune himself, but of some minstrel or reciter who had heard the story from Thomas. Its language is confessed to be that of the fourteenth century, and the MS. is not pretended to be less than eighty years older than the supposed date of Thomas of Erceldoune's romance. Accordingly, whatever Thomas the Rhymer's production might be, this Auchinleck MS. is not a transcript of it, but the transcript of the composition of some one who heard the story from Thomas of Erceldoune. It is a specimen of Scottish poetry not in the thirteenth but the fourteenth century. How much of the matter or manner of Thomas the Rhymer was retained by his deputy reciter of the story, eighty years after the assumed date of Thomas's work, is a subject of mere conjecture. Still, however, the fame of Erceldoune and Tristrem remain attested by Robert de Brunne; and Mr. Scott's doctrine is, that Thomas the Rhymer, having picked up the chief materials of his romantic history of ' Sir Tristrem' from British traditions surviving on the border, was not a translator from the French, but an original authority to the continental romancers. It is nevertheless acknowledged that the story of ' Sir Tristrem' had been told in French, and was familiar to the romancers of that language, long before Thomas the Rhymer could have set about picking up British traditions on the border, and in all probability before he was born. The possibility, therefore, of his having heard the story in Norman minstrelsy, is put beyond the reach of denial. b On the other hand, Mr. Scott argues that the Scottish bard must have been an authority to the continental romancers, from two circumstances. In the first place, there are two metrical fragments of French romance preserved in the library of Mr. Douce, which, according to Mr. Scott, tell the story of 'Sir Tristrem' in a manner corresponding with the same tale as it is told by Thomas of Erceldoune, and in which a reference is made to the authority of a TJiomas. But the whole force of this argument evidently depends on the supposition of Mr. Douce's fragments being the work of one and the same author whereas they are not, to all appearance, B [Over gestes it has the steem Over all that is or was, If men it sayd as made Thomas.] b [' Sir Tristrem,' like almost all our romances, had a foreign origin its language alone is ours. Three copies in French, in Anglo-Norman, and in Greek composed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and edited by Francisque Michel, appeared in two vols. 8vo. at London in 1835. But Scott never stood out for Thomas's invention. " The tale," he says, " lays claim to a much higher antiquity." (P. 27, ed. 1833.) To a British antiquity, however. See also Scott's ' Essay on Romance,' in Misc. Prose Works (vol. vi. p. 201), where he contends that it was derived from Welsh traditions, though told by a Saxon poet.] PAKT i.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 25 appear to be original ; and ' The Battle of Jerusalem,' in which he turned into rhyme the contents of a French prose romance.* In by the same author. A single perusal "will enable .us to observe how remark- ably they differ in style. They have no appearance of being parts of the same story, one of them placing the court of King Mark at Tintagil, the other at London. Only one of the fragments refers to the authority of a Thomas, and the style of that one bears very strong marks of being French of the twelfth century, a date which would place it beyond the possibility of its referring to Thomas of Erceldoune. a The second of Mr. Scott's proofs of the originality of the Scottish romance is, that Gotfried von Strasburg, in a German romance written about the middle of the thirteenth century, refers to Thomas of Britania as his original. Thomas of Britania is, how- ever, a vague word ; and among the Anglo-Norman poets there might be one named Thomas, who might have told a story which was confessedly told in many shapes in the French language, and which was known in France before the Rhymer could have flourished ; and to this Anglo-Norman Thomas, Gotfried might refer. Eichhorn, the German editor, says that Gotfried translated his romance from the Norman French. Mr. Scott, in his edition of ' Sir Tristrein,' after conjecturing one date for the birth of Thomas the Rhymer, avowedly alters it for the sake of identifying the Rhymer with Gotfried's Thomas of Britania, and places his birth before the end of the twelfth century. This, he allows, would extend the Rhymer's life to upwards of ninety years, a pretty fair age for the Scottish Tiresias ; but if he survived 1296, as Harry the Minstrel informs us, he must have lived to beyond an hundred. 15 * [His other works were, ' The Legend of St. Alexius/ from the Latin ; ' Scripture Histories ;' and ' Fifteen Tokens before the Day of Judgment.' The last two were paraphrases of Scripture. Mr. Ellis ultimately retracted his opinion, adopted from Warton, that he was the author of a romance entitled 'The Life of Alexander,' printed in Weber's Collection. See Ellis's Met. Bom., vol. i. p. 130.] a [ This passage is quoted by the late learned Mr. Price in a Note to ' Sir Tristrem,' appended to Warton's History. " In addition," says Price, " it may be observed that the language of this fragment, so far from vesting Thomas with the character of an original writer, affirms directly the reverse. It is clear that in the writer's opinion the earliest and most authentic narrative of Tristrem's story was to be found in the work of Breri. From his relation later minstrels had chosen to deviate ; but Thomas, who had also composed a romance upon the subject, not only accorded with Breri in the order of his events, but entered into a justification of himself and his predecessor, by proving the inconsistency and absurdity of these newfangled variations. If, therefore, the romance of Thomas be in exist- ence, it must contain this vindication ; the poem in the Auchinleck MS. is entirely silent on the subject."] b [There is now but one opinion of Scott's ' Sir Tristrem' that it is not, as he would have it, the work of Thomas of Erceldoune, but the work of some after bard that had heard Thomas tell the story in other words, an imper- fect transcript of the Erceldoune copy. Thomas's own tale is something we may wish for, but we may despair of finding. That Kendale wrote Scott's ' Sir Tristrem' is the fair enough supposition of Mr. David Laiug. Dunbar, vol. i. p. 38.] 26 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. the course of Adam Davie's account of the siege of Jerusalem, Pilate challenges our Lord to single combat. From the spe- cimens afforded by Wartou, no very high idea can be formed of the genius of this poetical marshal. Warton anticipates the sur- prise of his reader, in finding the English language improve so slowly when we reach the verses of Davie. The historian of our poetry had, in a former section, treated of Robert de Brunne as a writer anterior to Davie ; but as the latter part of De Brunne's ' Chronicle' was not finished till 1339, in the reign of Edward III., it would be surprising indeed if the language should seem to improve when we go back to the reign of Edward II.* Davie's work may be placed in our poetical chronology posterior to the first part of De Brunne's ' Chronicle,' but anterior to the latter. Richard Rolle, another of our earliest versifiers, died in 1349.f He was a hermit, and led a secluded life near the nunnery of Hampole, in Yorkshire. Seventeen of his devotional pieces are enumerated in Ritson's ' Bibliographia Poetica.' The penitential psalms and theological tracts of a hermit were not likely to enrich or improve the style of our poetry ; and they are accordingly confessed, by those who have read them, to be very dull. His name challenges notice only from the paucity of contemporary writers. Laurence Minot, although he is conjectured to have been a monk, had a Muse of a livelier temper ; and, for want of a better poet, he may, by courtesy, be called the Tyrtaeus of his age. His few poems which have reached us are, in fact, short narrative ballads on the victories obtained in the reign of Edward III., beginning with that of Hallidown Hill, and ending with the siege of Guisnes Castle. As his poem on the last of these events was evidently written recently after the exploit, the era of his poetical career may be laid between the years 1332 and 1352. Minot's works lay in absolute oblivion till late in the last century, in a MS. of the Cotton Collection, which was supposed to be a tran- script of the works of Chaucer. The name of Richard Chawfir having been accidentally scrawled on a spare leaf of the MS. * [In this the usual accuracy and candour of Mr. Campbell appear to have forsaken him. Warton's observation is far from being a general one, and might have been interpreted to the exclusion of De Brunne. That such was Warton's intention is obvious, &c. Price, Warton, vol. ii. p. 52.] t [Ellis, vol. i. p. 146. Warton (vol. ii. p. 90) calls him Richard Ham- pole.] PART i.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 27 (probably the name of its ancient possessor), the framer of the Cotton catalogue very goodnaturedly converted it into Geoffrey Chaucer. By this circumstance Mr. Tyrwhitt, when seeking materials for his edition of the ' Canterbury Tales/ accidentally discovered an English versifier older than Chaucer himself. The style of Minot's ten military ballads is frequently alliterative, and has much of the northern dialect. He is an easy and lively versifier, though not, as Mr. G. Chalmers denominates him, either elegant or energetic.* In the course of the fourteenth century our language seems to have been inundated with metrical romances, until the public taste had been palled by the mediocrity and monotony of the greater part of them. At least, if Chaucer's Host in the ' Canter- bury Tales' be a fair representation of contemporary opinion, they were held in no great reverence, to judge by the comparison which the vintner applies to the "draftyrhymings" of 'SirTopaz.'f The practice of translating French metrical romances into English did not, however, terminate in the fourteenth century. Nor must we form an indiscriminate estimate of the ancient metrical romances, either from Chaucer's implied contempt for them, nor from mine host of the Tabard's ungainly comparison with respect to one of them. The ridiculous style of ' Sir Topaz ' is not an image of them all. Some of them, far from being chargeable with impertinent and prolix description, are concise in narration, and paint, with rapid but distinct sketches, the battles, the banquets, and the rites of worship of chivalrous life. Classical poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so many interesting and complicated events as may be found in the good old romance of ' Le Bone Florence.'! Chaucer himself, when he strikes into the new or allegorical school of romance, has many passages more tedious and less affecting than the better parts of those simple old fablers. For in spite of their puerility in the * [An edition of Minot's poems was one of Ritson's many contributions to the elucidation of early English language and literature.] t [The ' Rime of Sir Topaz,' -which Chaucer introduces as a parody, un- doubtedly, of the rhythmical romances of the age, is interrupted by mine host Harry Bailly with the strongest and most energetic expressions of total and absolute contempt. Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 209.] J Given in Ritson's ' Old Metrical Romances.' 28 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. excessive use of the marvellous, their simplicity is often touching, and they have many scenes that would form adequate subjects for the best historical pencils. The reign of Edward III. was illustrious not for military achievements alone ; it was a period when the English character displayed its first intellectual boldness. It is true that the history of the times presents a striking contrast between the light of in- telligence which began to open on men's minds, and the frightful evils which were still permitted to darken the face of society. In the scandalous avarice of the church, in the corruptions of the courts of judicature, and in the licentiousness of a nobility who countenanced disorders and robbery, we trace the unbanished remains of barbarism ; but, on the other hand, we may refer to this period for the genuine commencement of our literature, for the earliest diffusion of free inquiry, and for the first great move- ment of the national mind towards emancipation from spiritual tyranny. The abuses of religion were, from their nature, the most powerfully calculated to arrest the public attention ; and poetry was not deficient in contributing its influence to expose those abuses, both as subjects of ridicule and of serious indignation. Two poets of this period, with very different powers of genius, and probably addressing themselves to different classes of society, made the corruptions of the clergy the objects of their satire taking satire not in its mean and personal acceptation, but understanding it as the moral warfare of indignation and ridicule against turpitude and absurdity. Those writers were Langlande and Chaucer, both of whom have been claimed as primitive re- formers by some of the zealous historians of the Reformation. At the idea of a full separation from the Catholic church both Langlande and Chaucer would possibly have been struck with horror. The doctrine of predestination, which was a leading tenet of the first Protestants, is not, I believe, avowed in any of Chaucer's writings, and it is expressly reprobated by Langlande. It is, nevertheless, very likely that their works contributed to promote the Reformation. Langlande, especially, who was an earlier satirist and painter of manners than Chaucer, is undaunted in reprobating the corruptions of the papal government. He prays to Heaven to amend the Pope, whom he charges with pil- laging the church, interfering unjustly with the king, and causing BART i.] FOUETEENTH CENTUEY. 29 the blood of Christians to be wantonly shed ; and it is a curious circumstance that he predicts the existence of a king who, in his vengeance, would destroy the monasteries. The work entitled ' Visions of William concerning Piers Plow- man,' * and concerning the origin, progress, and perfection of the Christian life, which is the earliest known orignal poem, of any extent, in the English language, is ascribed to Robert Langlande [or Longlande], a secular priest, born at Mortimer's Cleobury, in Shropshire, and educated at Oriel College, Oxford. That it was written by Langlande, I believe, can be traced to no higher authority than that of Bale, or of the printer Crowley ; but his name may stand for that of its author until a better claimant shall be found. Those 'Visions,' from their allusions to events evidently recent, can scarcely be supposed to have been finished later than the year 1 362, almost thirty years before the appearance of the ' Canter- bury Tales.'f It is not easy, even after Dr. Whitaker's laborious analysis of this work, to give any concise account of its contents. The general object is to expose, in allegory, the existing abuses of society, and to inculcate the public and private duties both of the laity and clergy. An imaginary seer, afterwards described by the name of William, wandering among the bushes of the Mal- vern hills, is overtaken by sleep, and dreams that he beholds a magnificent tower, which turns out to be the tower or fortress of Truth, and a dungeon, which we soon after learn is the abode of Wrong. In a spacious plain in front of it the whole race of mankind are employed in their respective pursuits ; such as husbandmen, merchants, minstrels with their audiences, begging friars, and itinerant venders of pardons, leading a dissolute life under the cloak of religion. The last of these are severely satirized. A transition is then made to the civil grievances of society ; and the policy, not the duty, of submitting to bad princes, is illustrated by the parable of the Rats and Cats. In the second canto, True Religion descends, and demonstrates, with many * The -work is commonly entitled the ' Visions of Piers Plowman,' but incorrectly, for Piers is not the dreamer who sees the visions, but one of the characters who is beheld, and who represents the Christian life. [t See Mr. Price's Note in Warton, vol. ii. p. 101, and Appendix to the same volume.] 30 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART i. precepts, how the conduct of individuals and the general manage- ment of society may be amended. In the third and fourth cantos, Mede or Bribery is exhibited, seeking a marriage with Falsehood, and attempting to make her way to the courts of justice, where it appears that she has many friends, both among the civil judges and ecclesiastics. The poem after this becomes more and more desultory. The author awakens more than once ; but, forgetting that he has told us so, continues to converse as freely as ever with the moral phantasmagoria of his dream. A long train of allegorical personages, whom it would not be very amusing to enumerate, succeeds. In fact, notwithstanding Dr. Whitaker's discovery of a plan and unity in this work, I cannot help thinking, with Warton, that it possesses neither ; at least, if it has any design, it is the most vague and ill-constructed that ever entered into the brain of a waking dreamer. The appearance of the visionary personages is often sufficiently whimsical. The power of Grace, for instance, confers upon Piers Plowman, or " Chris- tian Life," four stout oxen, to cultivate the field of Truth ; these are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the last of whom is de- scribed as the gentlest of the team. She afterwards assigns him the like number of stots or bullocks, to harrow what the evan- gelists had ploughed ; and this new horned team consists of Saint or stot Ambrose, stot Austin, stot Gregory, and stot Jerome.* The verse of Langlande is alliterative, without rhyme, and of triple time. In modern pronunciation it divides the ear between an anapaestic and dactylic cadence ; though some of the verses are reducible to no perceptible metre. Mr. Mitford, in his ' Harmony of Languages,' thinks that the more we accommodate the reading of it to ancient pronunciation, the more generally we shall find it run in an anapaestic measure. His style, even making allowance for its antiquity, has a vulgar air, and seems to indicate a mind that would have been coarse, though strong, in any state of society. But, on the other hand, his work, with all its tiresome homilies, illustrations from school divinity, and uncouth phraseology, has some interesting features of originality. * [If some of the criticisms in this genial Essay prove rather startling to the zealous admirer of our early literature, he will attribute them to the same cause which, during an age of romantic poetry, makes the effusions of Mr. Campbell's Muse appear an echo of the chaste simplicity and measured energy of Attic song. Price, Warton, vol. i. p. 107.] PART i.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 31 He employs no borrowed materials ; he is the earliest of our writers in whom there is a tone of moral reflection ; and his sen- timents are those of bold and solid integrity. The zeal of truth was in him ; and his vehement manner sometimes rises to elo- quence, when he denounces hypocrisy and imposture. The mind is struck with his rude voice, proclaiming independent and popular sentiments from an age of slavery and superstition, and thun- dering a prediction in the ear of papacy, which was doomed to be literally fulfilled at the distance of nearly two hundred years. His allusions to contemporary life afford some amusing glimpses of its manners. There is room to suspect that Spenser was acquainted with his works ; and Milton, either from accident or design, has the appearance of having had one of Langlande's passages in his mind when he wrote the sublime description of the lazar-house, in ' Paradise Lost.' * Chaucer was probably known and distinguished as a poet ante- rior to the appearance of Langlande's ' Visions.' Indeed, if he had produced nothing else than his youthful poem, * The Court of Love,' it was sufficient to indicate one destined to harmonise and refine the national strains. But it is likely that before his thirty-fourth year, about which time Langlande's 'Visions' may be supposed to have been finished, Chaucer had given several compositions to the public. The simple old narrative romance had become too familiar in Chaucer's time to invite him to its beaten track. The poverty of his native tongue obliged him to look round for subsidiary materials to his fancy, both in the Latin language and in some modern foreign source that should not appear to be trite and exhausted. His age was, unfortunately, little conversant with the best Latin classics. Ovid, Claudian, and Statins were the chief favourites in poetry, and Boethius in prose.f The alle- gorical style of the last of those authors seems to have given an early bias to the taste of Chaucer. In modern poetry, his first and long-continued predilection was attracted by the new and * |~B. xi. 1. 475, &c. This coincidence is remarked by Mrs. Cooper in her ' Muses' Library.' Ellis, vol. i. p. 157.] t [The ' Consolation of Boethius ' was translated by Alfred the Great and by Queen Elizabeth. No unfair proof of its extraordinary popularity may be derived from ' The Quair ' of King James I. It seems to have been a truly regal book.] 32 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART I. allegorical style of romance which had sprung up in France in the thirteenth century, under William de Lorris. We find him, accordingly, during a great part of his poetical career, engaged among the dreams, emblems, flower-worshippings, and amatory parliaments of that visionary school. This, we may say, was a gymnasium of rather too light and playful exercise for so strong a genius ; and it must be owned that his allegorical poetry is often puerile and prolix. Yet, even in this walk of fiction, we never entirely lose sight of that peculiar grace and gaiety which distinguish the Muse of Chaucer ; and no one who remembers his productions of ' The House of Fame,' and ' The Flower and the Leaf,' will regret that he sported for a season in the field of allegory. Even his pieces of this description the most fantastic in design and tedious in execution are generally interspersed with fresh and joyous descriptions of external nature. In this new species of romance, we perceive the youthful Muse of the language in love with mystical meanings and forms of fancy, more remote, if possible, from reality than those of the chivalrous fable itself; and we could sometimes wish her back from her emblematic castles to the [ more solid ones of the elder fable ; but still she moves in pursuit of those shadows with an impulse of novelty, and an exuberance of spirit, that is not wholly without its attraction and delight. Chaucer was afterwards happily drawn to the more natural style of Boccaccio, and from him he derived the hint of a subject * in which, besides his own original portraits of contemporary life, he could introduce stories of every description, from the most heroic to the most familiar. Gower, though he had been earlier distinguished in French poetry, began later than Chaucer to cultivate his native tongue. His ' Confessio Amantis,' the only work by which he is known as an English poet, did not appear till the sixteenth year of Richard II. He must have been a highly accomplished man for his time, and imbued with a studious and mild spirit of reflection. His French sonnets are marked by elegance and sensibility, and his English poetry contains a digest of all that constituted the knowledge of his age. His contemporaries greatly esteemed him ; and the Scottish as well as English writers of the subse- * [The Canterbury Tales.] PART i.] FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 33 quent period speak of him with unqualified admiration. But though the placid and moral Gower might be a civilising spirit among his contemporaries, his character has none of the bold originality which stamps an influence on the literature of a country. He was not, like Chaucer, a patriarch in the family of genius, the scattered traits of whose resemblance may be seen in such descendants as Shakspeare and Spenser.* The design of his ' Confessio Amantis ' is peculiarly ill contrived. A lover, whose case has not a particle of interest, applies, according to the Catholic ritual, to a confessor, who, at the same time, whimsi- cally enough, bears the additional character of a pagan priest of Venus. The holy father, it is true, speaks like a good Christian, and communicates more scandal about the intrigues of Venus than pagan author ever told. A pretext is afforded by the cere- mony of confession for the priest not only to initiate his pupil in the duties of a lover, but in a wide range of ethical and phy- sical knowledge ; and at the mention of every virtue and vice a tale is introduced by way of illustration. Does the confessor wish to warn the lover against impertinent curiosity ? he intro- duces, a propos to that failing, the history of Action, of peeping memory. The confessor inquires if he is addicted to a vain- glorious disposition ; because, if he is, he can tell him a story about Nebuchadnezzar. Does he wish to hear of the virtue of conjugal patience ? it is aptly inculcated by the anecdote respect- ing Socrates, who, when he received the contents of Xantippe's pail upon his head, replied to the provocation with only a witti- cism. Thus, with shriving, narrations, and didactic speeches, the work is extended to thirty thousand lines, in the course of which the virtues and vices are all regularly allegorized. But in allegory Gower is cold and uninventive, and enumerates qualities when he should conjure up visible objects. On the whole, though copiously stored with facts and fables, he is unable either to make truth appear poetical, or to render fiction the graceful vehicle of truth. * [Milton was the poetical son of Spenser, and Mr. Waller of Fairfax. Spenser more than once insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was transfused into his body, and that he was begotten by him two hundred years after his decease. Dryden, Malone, vol. iv. p. 592.] 34 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. PART II. WARTON, with great beauty and justice, compares the appear- ance of Chaucer in our language to a premature day in an English spring ; after which the gloom of winter returns, and the buds and blossoms, which have been called forth by a tran- sient sunshine, are nipped by frosts and scattered by storms. The causes of the relapse of our poetry, after Chaucer, seem but too apparent in the annals of English history, which during five reigns of the fifteenth century continue to display but a tissue of conspiracies, proscriptions, and bloodshed. Inferior even to France in literary progress, England displays in the fifteenth century a still more mortifying contrast with Italy. Italy too had her religious schisms and public distractions ; but her arts and literature had always a sheltering place. They were even cherished by the rivalship of independent communities, and re- ceived encouragement from the opposite sources of commercial and ecclesiastical wealth. But we had no Nicholas V., nor house of Medicis. In England the evils of civil war agi- tated society as one mass. There was no refuge from them no enclosure to fence in the field of improvement no mound to stem the torrent of public troubles. Before the death of Henry VI., it is said that one half of the nobility and gentry in the kingdom had perished in the field or on the scaffold. Whilst in England the public spirit was thus brutalised, whilst the value and security of life were abridged, whilst the wealth of the rich was employed only in war, and the chance of patronage taken from the scholar, in Italy princes and magistrates vied with each other in calling men of genius around them, as the brightest ornaments of their states and courts. The art of printing came to Italy to record the treasures of its literary attainments ; but when it came to England, with a very few exceptions, it could not be said, for the purpose of diffusing native literature, to be a necessary art. A circumstance, additionally hostile to the PART ii.] FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 35 national genius may certainly be traced in the executions for religion which sprang up as a horrible novelty in our country in the fifteenth century. The clergy were determined to indem- nify themselves for the exposures which they had met with in the preceding age, and the unhallowed compromise which Henry IV. made with them, in return for supporting his accession, armed them, in an evil hour, with the torch of persecution. In one point of improvement, namely, in the boldness of religious inquiry, the North of Europe might already boast of being superior to the South, with all its learning, wealth, and elegant acquirements. The Scriptures had been opened by Wickliff, but they were again to become " a fountain sealed, and a spring shut up." Amidst the progress of letters in Italy, the fine arts threw enchantment around superstition ; and the warm imagina- tion of the South was congenial with the nature of Catholic institutions. But the English mind had already shown, even amidst its comparative barbarism, a stern independent spirit of religion ; and from this single proud and elevated point of its character it was now to be crushed and beaten down. Some- times a baffled struggle against oppression is more depressing to the human faculties than continued submission. Our natural hatred of tyranny, and, we may safely add, the general test of history and experience, would dispose us to believe religious persecution to be necessarily and essentially baneful to the elegant arts, no less than to the intellectual pur- suits of mankind. It is natural to think that, when punishments are let loose upon men's opinions, they will spread a contagious alarm from the understanding to the imagination. They will make the heart grow close and insensible to generous feelings, where it is unaccustomed to express them freely ; and the graces and gaiety of fancy will be dejected and appalled. In an age of persecution, even the living study of his own species must be comparatively darkened to the poet. He looks round on the characters and countenances of his fellow- creatures ; and instead of the naturally cheerful and eccentric variety of their humours, he reads only a sullen and oppressed uniformity. To the spirit of poetry we should conceive, such a period to be an impassable Avernus, where she would drop her wings and expire. Undoubtedly this inference will be found warranted by a general survey of the 36 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. history of Genius. It is, at the same time, impossible to deny, that wit and poetry have in some instances flourished coeval with ferocious bigotry, on the same spot, and under the same govern- ment. The literary glory of Spain was posterior to the establish- ment of the Inquisition. The fancy of Cervantes sported . in its neighbourhood, though he declared that he could have made his writings still more entertaining, if he had not dreaded the Holy Office. But the growth of Spanish genius, in spite of the co- existence of religious tyranny, was fostered by uncommon and glorious advantages in the circumstances of the nation. Spain (for we are comparing Spain in the sixteenth with England in the fifteenth century) was, at the period alluded to, great and proud in an empire on which it was boasted that the sun never set. Her language was widely diffused. The wealth of America for awhile animated all her arts. Robertson says that the Spaniards discovered at that time an extent of political know- ledge which the English themselves did not attain for more than a century afterwards. Religious persecutions began in England at a time when she was comparatively poor and barbarous, yet after she had been awakened to so much intelligence on the sub- ject of religion as to make one half of the people indignantly impatient of priestly tyranny. If we add to the political troubles of the age the circumstance of religious opinions being silenced and stifled by penal horrors, it will seem more wonderful that the spark of literature was kept alive, than that it did not spread more widely. Yet the fifteenth century had its redeeming traits of refinement, the more wonderful for appearing in the midst of such unfavourable circumstances. It had a Fortescue, although he wandered in exile, unprotected by the constitution which he explained and extolled in his writings. It had a noble patron and lover of letters in Tiptoft,* although he died by the hands of the executioner. It witnessed the founding of many colleges in both of the universities, although they were still the haunts of scholastic quibbling ; and it produced, in the venerable Pecock, one conscientious dignitary of the church, who wished to have converted the Protestants by appeals to reason, though for so doing he had his books, and, if he had not recanted in good time, would have had his body also, committed to the flames. To these * Earl of Worcester. PART ii.] FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 37 causes may be ascribed the backwardness of our poetry between the dates of Chaucer and Spenser. I speak of the chasm extending to, or nearly to, Spenser ; for, without undervaluing the elegant talents of Lord Surrey, I think we cannot consider the national genius as completely emancipated from oppressive circumstances till the time of Elizabeth. There was indeed a commencement of our poetry under Henry VIII. It was a fine, but a feeble one. English genius seems then to have come forth, but half assured that her day of emancipation was at hand. There is something melancholy even in Lord Surrey's strains of gallantry. The succession of Henry VIII. gave stability to the government, and some degree of magnificence to the state of society. But tyranny was not yet at an end ; and to judge not by the gross buffoons, but by the few minds entitled to be called poetical, which appear in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, we may say that the English Muse had still a diffident aspect and a faltering tone. There is a species of talent, however, which may continue to endite what is called poetry, without having its sensibilities deeply affected by the circumstances of society ; and of luminaries of this description our fifteenth century was not destitute. Ritson has enumerated about seventy of them.* Of these, Occleve and Lydgate were the nearest successors to Chaucer. Occleve speaks of himself as Chaucer's scholar. He has, at least, the merit of expressing the sincerest enthusiasm for his master. But it is difficult to controvert the character which has been generally assigned to him, that of a flat and feeble writer. Excepting the adoption of his story of Fortunatus by William Browne in his Pastorals, and the modern republication of a few of his pieces, I know not of any public compliment which has ever been paid to his poetical memory. Lydgate is altogether the most respectable versifier of the fifteenth century. A list of 250 of the productions ascribed to him (which is given in Ritson's ' Bibliographia Poetica') attests at least the fluency of his pen ; arid he seems to have ranged with the same facility through the gravest and the lightest subjects of composition. Ballads, hymns, ludicrous stories, legends, ro- mances, and allegories, were equally at his command. Verbose * In his ' Bibliographia Poetica.' 38 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. and diffuse as Dan John of Bury must be allowed to have been, he is not without occasional touches of pathos. The poet Gray was the first in modern times who did him the justice to observe them.* His ' Fall of Princes ' may also deserve notice, in tracing back the thread of our national poetry, as^it is more likely than any other English production to have suggested to Lord Sackville the idea of his ' Mirror for Magistrates.' ' The Mirror for Magis- trates ' again gave hints to Spenser in allegory, and may also have possibly suggested to Shakspeare the idea of his historical plays. I know not if Hardynge,f who belonged to the reign of Edward IV., be worth mentioning as one of the obscure lumi- naries of this benighted age. He left a ' Chronicle of the History of England,' which possesses an incidental interest from his having been himself a witness to some of the scenes which he records ; for he lived in the family of the Percys, and fought tinder the banners of Hotspur ; but from the style of his versified ' Chronicle,' his head would appear to have been much better fur- nished for sustaining the blows of the battle, than for contriving its poetical celebration. The Scottish poets of the fifteenth, and of a part of the six- teenth century, would also justly demand a place in any history of our poetry that meant to be copious and minute ; as the northern " makers," notwithstanding the difference of dialect, generally denominate their language " Inglis." Scotland pro- duced an entire poetical version of the ' JEneid ' before Lord * Lydgate translated largely from the French and Latin. His prin- cipal poems are ' The Fall of Princes,' ' The Siege of Thebes,' and ' The Destruction of Troy.' The first of these is from Laurent's French version of Boccaccio's book, ' De Casibus virorum et feminarum illustrium.' His ' Siege of Thebes,' which was intended as an additional ' Canterbury Tale,' and in the introduction to which he feigns himself in company with ' the host of the Tabard and the Pilgrims,' is compiled from Guido Colonna, Statins, and Seneca. His 'Destruction of Troy' is from the work of Guido Colonna, or from a French translation of it. His ' London Lickpenny' is curious for the minute picture of the metropolis which it exhibits in the fifteenth century. A specimen of Lydgate's humour may be seen in his tale of ' The Prioress and her Three Wooers,' which Mr. Jamieson has given in his 'Popular Ballads and Songs' [vol. i. p. 249-266]. I had transcribed it from a manuscript in the British Museum [Harl. MS. 78], thinking that it was not in print, but found that Mr. Jamieson had anticipated me. t [A kind of Robert of Gloucester redivivus. Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Pr. Works, vol. xvii. p. 13.] PART ii.] FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 39 Surrey had translated a single book of it ; indeed before there was an English version of any classic, excepting Boethius, if he can be called a classic. Virgil was only known in the English language through a romance on the Siege of Troy, published by Caxton, which, as Bishop Douglas observes, in the prologue to his Scottish '.ZEneid,' is no more like Virgil than the devil is like St. Austin.* Perhaps the resemblance may not even be so great. But the Scottish poets, after all that has been said of them, form nothing like a brilliant revival of poetry. They are on the whole superior, indeed, in spirit and originality to their English contemporaries, which is not^ayina 1 much ; but their style is, for the most part, cast, if possible, in a worse taste. The prevailing fault of English diction, in the fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of " aureate terms " the Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the South. Some exceptions to the remark, I am aware, may be found in Dunbar, who some- times exhibits simplicity and lyrical terseness ; but even his style has frequent deformities of quaintness, false ornament, and allite- ration. The rest of them, when they meant to be most eloquent, tore up words from the Latin, which never took root in the lan- guage, like children making a mock garden with flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither. From Lydgate down to Wyat and Surrey, there seem to be no southern writers deserving attention, unless for the purposes of the antiquary, excepting Hawes, Barklay, and Skelton ; and even their names might perhaps be omitted without treason to the cause of taste.f Stephen Hawes,! who was groom of the chamber to Henry VII., is said to have been accomplished in the literature of France and Italy, and to have travelled into those countries. His most * [Warton, vol. iii. p. 112. Douglas is said to have written his transla- tion in the short space of sixteen months, and to have finished it in 1513. This was before Surrey was born .'] f To the reign of Henry VI. belong Henry Lonelich, who plied the unpoetical trade of a skinner, and who translated the French romance of St. Graal ; Thomas Chestre, who made a free and enlarged Version of the ' Lai de Lanval ' of the French poetess Marie ; and Robert Thornton, who versified the 'Morte Arthur' in the alliterative measure of Langlande. J [A bad imitator of Lydgate, ten times more tedious than his original.- Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Pr. Works, vol. xvii. p. 13.] 40 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. important production is the ' Pastyme of Pleasure,'* an allego- rical romance, the hero of which is Grandamour or Gallantry, and the heroine La Belle Pucelle, or Perfect Beauty. In this work the personified characters have all the capriciousness and vague moral meaning of the old French allegorical romance ; but the puerility of the school remains, while the zest of its novelty is gone. There is also in his foolish personage of Godfrey Gobe- live something of the burlesque of the worst taste of Italian poetry. It is certainly very tiresome to follow Hawes's hero, Grandamour, through all his adventures, studying grammar, rhetoric, and arithmetic in the tower of Doctrine; afterwards slaughtering giants, who have each two or three emblematic heads ; sacrificing to heathen gods ; then marrying according to the Catholic rites ; and, finally, relating his own death and burial, to which he is so obliging as to add his epitaph. Yet, as the story seems to be of Hawes's invention, it ranks him above the mere chroniclers and translators of the age. Warton praises him for improving on the style of Lydgate. His language may be somewhat more modern, but in vigour or harmony I am at a loss to perceive in it any superiority. The indulgent his- torian of our poetry has, however, quoted one fine line from him, describing the fiery breath of a dragon which guarded the island of beauty : " The fire was great ; it made the island light." Every romantic poem in his own language is likely to have inte- rested Spenser ; and if there were many such glimpses of magni- ficence in Hawes, we might suppose the author of ' The Fairy Queen ' to have cherished his youthful genius by contemplating them ; but his beauties are too few and faint to have afforded any inspiring example to Spenser. Alexander Barklay was a priest of St. Mary Otterburne, in Devonshire, and died at a great age at Croydon in the year 1552. His principal work was a free translation of Sebastian Brandt's f ' Navis Stultifera,' enlarged with some satirical strictures of his * He also -wrote ' The Temple of Glass,' the substance of which is taken from Chaucer's ' House of Fame.' [' The Temple of Glass ' is now, as Mr. Hallam observes, by general consent restored to Lydgate. Lit. Hist., vol. i. p. 432 ; and Price's Warton, vol. Hi. p. 46-7.] f Sebastian Brandt was a civilian of Basil. PART ii.] FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 41 own upon the manners of his English contemporaries. His ' Ship of Fools' has been as often quoted as most obsolete English poems ; but if it were not obsolete it would not be quoted. He also wrote Eclogues, which are curious as the earliest pieces of that kind in our language. From their title we might be led to expect some interesting delineations of English rural customs at that period. But Barklay intended to be a moralist, and not a painter of nature ; and the chief though insipid moral which he inculcates is, that it is better to be a clown than a courtier.* The few scenes of country life which he exhibits for that purpose are singularly ill fitted to illustrate his doctrine, and present rustic existence under a miserable aspect, more resembling the caricature of Scotland in Churchill's ' Prophecy of Famine ' than anything which we can imagine to have ever been the general condition of English peasants. The speakers, in one of his eclogues, lie littered among straw, for want of a fire to keep themselves warm ; and one of them expresses a wish that the milk for dinner may be curdled, to save them the consumption of bread. As the writer's object was not to make us pity but esteem the rustic lot, this picture of English poverty can only be accounted for by supposing it to have been drawn from partial observation, or the result of a bad taste, that naturally delighted in squalid subjects of description. Barklay, indeed, though he has some stanzas which might be quoted for their strength of thought and felicity of expression, is, upon the whole, the least ambitious of all writers to adorn his conceptions of familiar life with either dignity or beauty. An amusing instance of this occurs in one of his moral apologues : Adam, he tells us in verse, was one day abroad at his work Eve was at the door of the house, with her children playing about her ; some of them she was ' kembing,' says the poet, prefixing another participle, not of * Barklay gives some sketches of manners ; but they are those of the town, not the country. Warton is partial to his black-letter eclogues, because they contain allusions to the customs of the age. They certainly inform us at what hour our ancestors usually dined, supped, and went to bed ; that they were fond of good eating ; and that it was advisable, in the poet's opinion, for any one who attempted to help himself to a favourite dish at their banquets to wear a gauntlet of mail. Quin the player, who probably never had heard of Barklay, delivered at a much later period a similar observation on city feasts, namely, that the candidate for a good dish of turtle ought never to be without a basket-hilled knife and fork. 42 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. the most delicate kind, to describe the usefulness of the comb. Her Maker having deigned to pay her a visit, she was ashamed to be found with so many ill-dressed children about her, and hastened to stow a number of them out of sight ; some of them she concealed under hay and straw, others she put up the chim- ney, and one or two into a " tub of draff." Having produced, however, the best looking and best dressed of them, she was de- lighted to hear their Divine Visitor bless them, and destine some of them to be kings and emperors, some dukes and barons, and others sheriffs, mayors, and aldermen. Unwilling that any of her family should forfeit blessings whilst they were going, she immediately drew out the remainder from their concealment ; but when they came forth they were so covered with dust and cobwebs, and had so many bits of chaff and straw sticking to their hair, that, instead of receiving benedictions and promotion, they were doomed to vocations of toil and poverty, suitable to their dirty appearance. John Skelton, who was the rival and contemporary of Barklay, was laureate to the University of Oxford, and tutor to the prince, afterwards Henry VIII. Erasmus must have been a bad judge of English poetry, or must have alluded only to the learning of Skelton, when in one of his letters he pronounces him " Britanni- carum literarum lumen et decus." There is certainly a vehemence and vivacity in Skelton which was worthy of being guided by a better taste ; and the objects of his satire bespeak some degree of public spirit.* But his eccentricity in attempts at humour is at * He was the determined enemy of the mendicant friars and of Cardinal Wolsey. The courtiers of Henry VIII., -whilst obliged to flatter a minister whom they detested, could not but be gratified with Skelton's boldness in singly daring to attack him. In his picture of Wolsey at the Council Board, he thus describes the imperious minister : " in chamber of Stars All matters there he mars : Clapping his rod on the board, No man dare speak a word ; For he hath all the saying, Without any renaying. He rolleth in his Records ; He sayeth, How say ye, my lords, Is not my reason good ? Good even, good Robin Hood. Some say Yes, and some Sit still, as they were dumb." These lines are a remarkable "anticipation 8 of the very words in the fifteenth article of the charges preferred against Wolsey by the Parliament of 1 529 Neve's ' Cursory Remarks 011 the English Poets.' PART IT.] FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 43 once vulgar and flippant ; and his style is almost a texture of slang phrases, patched with shreds of French and Latin. We are told, indeed, in a periodical work of the present day, that his manner is to be excused, because it was assumed for " the nonce," and was suited to the taste of his contemporaries. But it is surely a poor apology for the satirist of any age to say that he stooped to humour its vilest taste, and could not ridicule vice and folly without degrading himself to buffoonery.* Upon the whole, we might regard the poetical feeling and genius of Eng- land as almost extinct at the end of the fifteenth century, if the beautiful ballad of the ' Nut-brown Maid ' were not to be re- ferred to that period.! It is said to have been translated from the German ; but even considered as a translation it meets us as a surprising flower amidst the winter-solstice of our poetry. The literary character of England was not established till near the end of the sixteenth century. At the beginning of that cen- tury, immediately anterior to Lord Surrey, we find Barklay and Skelton popular candidates for the foremost honours of English poetry. They are but poor names. Yet, slowly as the improve- " That the said Lord Cardinal, sitting among the Lords and other of your Majesty's most honourable Council, used himself so, that, if any man would show his mind according to his duty, he would so take him up with his accustomable words, that they were better to hold their peace than to speak ; so that he would hear no more speak but one or two great personages, so that he would have all the words himself, and consumed much time without a fair tale." His ridicule drew down the wrath of Wolsey, who ordered him to be apprehended. But Skelton fled to the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey, where he was protected; and died in the same year in which Wolsey's prosecutors drew up the article of impeachment, so similar to the satire of the poet. * [I know Skelton only by the modern edition of his works, dated 1736. But from this stupid publication I can easily discover that he was no ordi- nary man. Why Warton and the writers of his school rail at him vehe- mently I know not ; he was perhaps the best scholar of his day, and displays on many occasions strong powers of description, and a vein of poetry that shines through all the rubbish which ignorance has spread over it. He flew at high game, and therefore occasionally called in the aid of vulgar ribaldry to mask the direct attack of his satire. Gifford, Jonson, vol. viii. p. 77. The power, the strangeness, the volubility of his language, the intrepidity of his satire, and the perfect originality of his manner, render Skelton one of the most extraordinary poets of anyage^or country. Southey, Specimens ; and Quar. Jiev., vol. xi. p. 485.] t Wartou places it about the year 1500. [It was in print in 1521, if not a little earlier.] 44 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. meat of our poetry seems to proceed in the early part of the six- teenth century, the circumstances which subsequently fostered the national genius to its maturity and magnitude begin to be distinctly visible even before the year 1500. The accession of Henry VII., by fixing the monarchy and the prospect of its re- gular succession, forms a great era of commencing civilization. The art of printing, which had been introduced in a former period of discord, promised to diffuse its light in a steadier and calmer atmosphere. The great discoveries of navigation, by quickening the intercourse of European nations, extended their influence to England. In the short portion of the fifteenth cen- tury during which printing was known in this country, the press exhibits our literature at a lower ebb than even that of France ; but before that century was concluded the tide of classical learn- ing had fairly set in. England had received Erasmus, and had produced Sir Thomas More. The English poetry of the last of these great men is indeed of trifling consequence, in comparison with the general impulse which his other writings must have given to the age in which he lived. But everything that excites the dormant intellect of a nation must be regarded as contri- buting to its future poetry. It is possible that in thus adverting to the diffusion of knowledge (especially classical knowledge) which preceded our golden age of originality, we may be chal- lenged by the question, how much the greatest of all our poets was indebted to learning. We are apt to compare such geniuses as Shakspeare to comets in the moral universe, which baffle all calculations as to the causes which accelerate or retard their ap- pearance, or from which we can predict their return. But those phenomena of poetical inspiration are, in fact, still dependent on the laws and light of the system which they visit. Poets may be indebted to the learning and philosophy of their age, without being themselves men of erudition or philosophers. When the fine spirit of truth has gone abroad, it passes insensibly from mind to mind, independent of its direct transmission from books ; and it comes home in a more welcome shape to the poet when caught from his social intercourse with his species than from solitary study. Shakspeare's genius was certainly indebted to the intelligence and moral principles which existed in his age, and to that intelligence and to those moral principles the revival PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 45 of classical literature undoubtedly contributed. So also did the revival of pulpit eloquence, and the restoration of the Scriptures to the people in their native tongue. The dethronement of scholastic philosophy, and of the supposed infallibility of Aris- totle's authority an authority at one time almost paramount to that of the Scriptures themselves was another good connected with the Reformation ; for though the logic of Aristotle long continued to be formally taught, scholastic theology was no longer sheltered beneath his name. Bible divinity superseded the glosses of the schoolmen, and the writings of Duns Scotus were consigned at Oxford to proclaimed contempt.* The reign of true philosophy was not indeed arrived, and the Reformation itself produced events tending to retard that progress of literature and intelligence which had sprung up under its first auspices. Still, with partial interruptions, the culture of classical literature proceeded in the sixteenth century ; and, amidst that culture, it is difficult to conceive that a system of Greek philosophy more poetical than Aristotle's was without its influence on the English spirit namely, that of Plato. That England possessed a dis- tinct school of Platonic philosophy in the sixteenth century cannot, I believe, be affirmed, j but we hear of the Platonic studies of Sir Philip Sydney ; and traits of Platonism are some- * Namely, in the year 1 535. The decline of Aristotle's authority, and that of scholastic divinity, though to a certain degree connected, are not, however, to be identified. What were called the doctrines of Aristotle by the schoolmen were a mass of metaphysics established in his name, first by Arabic commentators, and afterwards by Catholic doctors, among the latter of whom many expounded the philosophy of the Stagyrite without under- standing a word of the original language in which his doctrines were written. Some Platonic opinions had also mixed with the metaphysics of the schoolmen. Aristotle was nevertheless their main authority ; though it is probable that, if he had come to life, he would not have fathered much of the philosophy which rested on his name. Some of the reformers threw off scholastic divinity and Aristotle's authority at once; but others, while they abjured the schoolmen, adhered to the Peripatetic system. In fact, until the revival of letters, Aristotle could not be said, with regard to the modern world, to be either fully known by his own works, or fairly tried by his own merits. Though ultimately overthrown by Bacon, his writings and his name, in the age immediately preceding Bacon, had ceased to be a mere stalking-horse to the schoolmen, and he was found to contain heresies which the Catholic metaphysicians had little suspected. t Enfield mentions no English school of Platonism before the time of Gale and Cudworth. [Hallam is equally silent.] 46 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. times beautifully visible in the poetry of Surrey and of Spenser.* The Italian Muse communicated a tinge of that spirit to our poetry, which must have been further excited in the minds of poetical scholars by the influence of Grecian literature. Hurd indeed observes that the Platonic doctrines had a deep influence on the sentiments and character of Spenser's age. They cer- tainly form a very poetical creed of philosophy. The Aris- totelian system was a vast mechanical labyrinth, which the human faculties were chilled, fatigued, and darkened by ex- ploring. Plato, at least, expands the imagination, for he was a great poet ; and if he had put in practice the law respecting poets which he prescribed to his ideal republic, he must have begun by banishing himself. The Reformation, though ultimately beneficial to literature, like all abrupt changes in society, brought its evil with its good. Its establishment under Edward VI. made the English too fana- tical and polemical to attend to the finer objects of taste. Its commencement under Henry VIII. , however promising at first, was too soon rendered frightful, by bearing the stamp of a tyrant's character, who, instead of opening the temple of religious peace, established a Janus-faced persecution against both the old and Hew opinions. On the other hand, Henry's power, opulence, and * In one of Spenser's hymns on Love and Beauty, he breathes this Pla- tonic doctrine : " Every spirit, as it is most pure, And hath in it the more of heavenly light, So it the fairer body doth procure To habit in, and it more fairly dight With cheerful grace and amiable sight ; For of the soul the body form doth take, For soul is form, and doth the body make." So, also, Surrey to his fair Geraldine : " The golden gift that Nature did thee give, To fasten friends, and feed them at thy -will With form and favour, taught me to believe How thou art made to show her greatest skill." This last thought was probably suggested by the lines in Petrarch, -which express a doctrine of the Platonic school, respecting the idea or origin of beauty : " In qual parte del ciel', in quale idea Era 1'esempio onde Natura tolse Quel bel viso leggiadro, in che ella volse Mostrar quaggiii, quanto lassi potea." PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 47 ostentation gave some encouragement to the arts. He himself, monster as he was, affected to be a poet. His masques and pageants assembled the beauty and nobility of the land, and prompted a gallant spirit of courtesy. The cultivation of musical talents among his courtiers fostered our early lyrical poetry. Our intercourse with Italy was renewed from more enlightened mo- tives than superstition ; and under the influence of Lord Surrey Italian poetry became once more, as it had been in the days of Chaucer, a source of refinement and regeneration to our own. I am not indeed disposed to consider the influence of Lord Surrey's works upon our language in the very extensive and important light in which it is viewed by Dr. Nott. I am doubtful if that learned editor has converted many readers to his opinion, that Lord Surrey was the first who gave us metrical instead of rhyth- mical versification ; for, with just allowance for ancient pronun- ciation, the heroic measure of Chaucer will be found in general not only to be metrically correct, but to possess considerable harmony.* Surrey was not the inventor of our metrical versi- fication ; nor had his genius the potent voice and the magic spell which rouse all the dormant energies of a language. In certain walks of composition, though not in the highest, viz. in the ode, elegy, and epitaph, he set a chaste and delicate example ; but he * [Our father Chaucer hath used the same liberty in feet and measures that the Latinists do use : and whosoever do peruse and well consider his works, he shall find that, although his lines are not always of one selfsame number of syllables, yet, being read by one that hath understanding, the longest verse and that which hath most syllables will fall (to the ear) cor- respondent unto that which hath in it fewest syllables, shall be found yet to consist of words that have such natural sound as may seem equal in length to a verse which hath many more syllables of lighter accents. Gascoigne. " But if some Englishe woorde herein seem sweet, Let Chaucer's name exalted be therefore ; Yf any verse doe passe on plesant feet, The praise thereof redownd to Petrark's lore. Gascoigne, The Grief of Joy. It is a disputed question whether Chaucer's verses be rhythmical or metrical. I believe them to have been written rhythmically, upon the same principle on which Coleridge composed his ' Christabel ' that the number of beats or accentuated syllables in every line should be the same, although the number of syllables themselves might vary. Verse so composed will often be strictly metrical ; and because Chaucer's is frequently so, the argu- ment has been raised that it is always so if it be read properly, according to the intention of the author. Southey, Cowper, vol. ii. p. 117.] 48 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PABT n. was cut off too early in life, and cultivated poetry too slightly, to carry the pure stream of his style into the broad and bold chan- nels of inventive fiction. Much undoubtedly he did, in giving sweetness to our numbers, and in substituting for the rude tauto- logy of a former age a style of soft and brilliant ornament, of selected expression, and of verbal arrangement, which often winds into graceful novelties, though sometimes a little objec- tionable from its involution. Our language was also indebted to him for the introduction of blank verse. It may be noticed at the same time that blank verse, if it had continued to be written as Surrey wrote it, would have had a cadence too uniform and cautious to be a happy vehicle for the dramatic expression of the passions. Grimoald, the second poet who used it after Lord Surrey, gave it a little more variety of pauses ; but it was not till it had been tried as a measure by several composers that it acquired a bold and flexible modulation.* The genius of Sir Thomas Wyat was refined and elevated like that of his noble friend and contemporary ; but his poetry is more sententious and sombrous, and in his lyrical effusions he studied terseness rather than suavity. Besides these two in- teresting men, Sir Francis Bryan, the friend of Wyat, George Viscount Rochford, the brother of Anna Boleyne, and Thomas Lord Vaux, were poetical courtiers of Henry VIII. To the second of these Ritson assigns, though but by conjecture, one of the most beautiful and plaintive strains of our elder poetry, * Death, rock me on sleep.' In Totell's Collection, the earliest poetical miscellany in our language, two pieces have been ascribed to the same nobleman, the one entitled ' The Assault of Cupid,' the other beginning, ' 1 loath that I did love/ which have been frequently reprinted in modern times. A poem of uncommon merit in the same collection, which is entitled ' The restless State of a Lover,' and which commences with these lines, " The sun, when he hath spread his rays, And show'd his face ten thousand ways," has been ascribed by Dr. Nott to Lord Surrey, but not on de- cisive evidence. * [Surrey is not a great poet, but he was an influential one ; we owe to him the introduction of the Sonnet into our language, and the first taste for the Italian poets.] PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 49 In the reign of Edward VI. the effects of the Reformation became visible in our poetry, by blending religious with poetical enthusiasm, or rather by substituting the one for the other. The national Muse became puritanical, and was not improved by the change. Then flourished Sternhold and Hopkins, who, with the best intentions and the worst taste, degraded the spirit of Hebrew psalmody by flat and homely phraseology ; and, mistaking vul- garity for simplicity, turned into bathos what they found sublime. Such was the love of versifying holy writ at that period, that the Acts of the Apostles were rhymed and set to music by Chris- topher Tye.* Lord Sackville's name is the next of any importance in our poetry that occurs after Lord Surrey's. The opinion of Sir Egerton Brydges, with respect to the date of the first appearance of Lord Sackville's ' Induction to the Mirror for Magistrates ' would place that production, in strictness of chronology, at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign. As an edition of the ' Mirror,' however, appeared in 1559, supposing Lord Sackville not to have assisted in that edition, the first shape of the work must have been cast and composed in the reign of Mary. From the date of * To the reign of Edward VI. and Mary may be referred two or three contributors to the ' Paradise of Dainty Devices ' [1576], who, though their lives extended into the reign of Elizabeth, may exemplify the state of poetical language before her accession. Among these may be placed Edwards, author of the pleasing little piece, ' Amantium irse amoris integratio est,' and Hunnis, author o.f the following song : " When first mine eyes did view and mark Thy beauty fair for to behold, And when mine ears 'gan first to hark The pleasant words that thou me told, I would as then I had been free From ears to hear, and eyes to see. And when in mind I did consent To follow thus my fancy's will, And when my heart did first relent To taste such bait myself to spill, I would my heart had been as thine, Or else thy heart as soft as mine. O flatterer false ! thou traitor born, What mischief more might thou devise, Thau thy dear frieud to have in scorn, And him to wound in sundry wise ; Which still a friend pretends to be, And art not so by proof I see ? Fie, fie upon such treachery." E 50 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. Lord Sackville's birth,* it is also apparent that, although he flourished under Elizabeth, and lived even to direct the councils of James, his prime of life must have been spent, and his poetical character formed, in the most disastrous period of the sixteenth century, a period when we may suppose the cloud that was passing over the public mind to have cast a gloom on the com- plexion of its literary taste. During five years of his life, from twenty-five to thirty, the time when sensibility and reflection meet most strongly, Lord Sackville witnessed the horrors of Queen Mary's reign ; and I conceive that it is not fanciful to trace in his poetry the tone of an unhappy age. His plan for * The Mirror of Magistrates ' is a mass of darkness and de- spondency. He proposed to make the figure of Sorrow intro- duce us in Hell to every unfortunate great character of English history. The poet, like Dante, takes us to the gates of Hell ; but he does not, like the Italian poet, bring us back again. It is true that those doleful legends were long continued, during a brighter period ; but this was only done by an inferior order of poets, and was owing to their admiration of Sackville. Dismal as his allegories may be, his genius certainly displays in them considerable power. But better times were at hand. In the reign of Elizabeth the English mind put forth its energies in every direction, exalted by a purer religion, and enlarged by new views of truth. This was an age of loyalty, adventure, and generous emulation. The chivalrous character was softened by intellectual pursuits, while the genius of chivalry itself still lingered, as if unwilling to depart, and paid his last homage to a warlike and female reign. A degree of romantic fancy remained in the manners and superstitions of the people ; and allegory might be said to parade the streets in their public pageants and festivities. Quaint and pedantic as those allegorical exhibitions might often be, they were nevertheless more expressive of eru- dition, ingenuity, and moral meaning, than they had been in former times. The philosophy of the highest minds still partook of a visionary character. A poetical spirit infused itself into the practical heroism of the age ; and some of the worthies of that period seem less like ordinary men than like beings called forth out of fiction, and arrayed in the brightness of her dreams. * [1536, if not a little earlier.] PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 51 They had "high thoughts seated in a heart of courtesy."* The life of Sir Philip Sydney was poetry put into action. The result of activity and curiosity in the public mind was to complete the revival of classic literature, to increase the im- portation of foreign books, and to multiply translations, from which Poetry supplied herself with abundant subjects and ma- terials, and in the use of which she showed a frank and fearless energy, that criticism and satire had not yet acquired power to overawe. Romance came back to us from the southern lan- guages, clothed in new luxury by the warm imagination of the south. The growth of poetry under such circumstances might indeed be expected to be as irregular as it was profuse. The field was open to daring absurdity, as well as to genuine inspi- ration ; and accordingly there is no period in which the extremes of good and bad writing are so abundant. Stanihurst, for in- stance, carried the violence of nonsense to a pitch of which there is no preceding example. Even late in the reign of Elizabeth, Gabriel Harvey was aided and abetted by several men of genius in his conspiracy to subvert the versification of the language ; and Lyly gained over the court for a time to employ his corrupt jargon called Euphuism. Even Puttenham, a grave and candid critic, leaves an indication of crude and puerile taste, when, in a laborious treatise on poetry, he directs the composer how to make verses beautiful to the eye, by writing them " in the shapes of eggs, turbots, fuzees, and lozenges." Among the numerous poets belonging exclusively to Elizabeth's reign, f Spenser stands without a class and without a rival. To proceed from the poets already mentioned to Spenser is certainly to pass over a considerable number of years, which are important especially from their including the dates of those early attempts in the regular drama which preceded the appearance of Shak- speare.J I shall therefore turn back again to that period, after having done homage to the name of Spenser. He brought to the subject of ' The Fairy Queen ' a new and * An expression used by Sir P. Sydney. t Of Shakspeare's career a part only belongs to Elizabeth's reign, and of Jonson's a still smaller. I The tragedy of ' Gorboduc,' by Sackville and Norton, was represented in 1561-2. Spenser's Pastorals were published in 1579, and the three first books of ' The Fairy Queen ' in 1590. E2 52 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. enlarged structure of stanza, elaborate and intricate, but well contrived for sustaining the attention of the ear, and concluding with a majestic 'cadence. In the other poets of Spenser's age we chiefly admire their language when it seems casually to advance into modern polish and succinctness. But the antiquity of Spenser's style has a peculiar charm. The mistaken opinion that Ben Jonson censured the antiquity of the diction in ' The Fairy Queen '* has been corrected by Mr. Malone, who pro- * Ben Jonson applied his remark to Spenser's Pastorals. [Malone was very rash in his correction : " Spenser, in affecting the ancients," says Jonson, " writ no language ; yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius." Works, ix. 215. Jonson's remark is a general censure, not confined to ' The Shepherd's Calendar ' alone. " Some," he says, in another place (evidently alluding to Spenser), " some seek Chaucerisms with us which were better expunged and banished. 1 ' Works, ix. 22. If Spenser's language is the language of his age, who among his contem- poraries is equally obsolete in phraseology ? The letters of the time have none of his words borrowed of antiquity, nor has the printed prose, the poetry contradistinguished from the drama, or the drama, which is always the language of the day. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity. Has Drayton, or Daniel, or Peele, Marlowe, or Shakspeare the obscure words found constantly recurring in Spenser ? " Let others," says Daniel (the well-languaged Daniel as Coleridge calls him) " Let others sing of knights and paladines, In aged accents and untimely words, I sing of Delia in the language of those who are about her and of her day." Davenant is express on the point, and speaks of Spenser's new grafts of old withered words and exploded expressions. Surely the writers of Spenser's own age are better authorities than Malone, who read verbally not spiritually, and, emptying a commonplace-book of obsolete words, called upon us to see in separate examples what collectively did not then exist. It is easy to find many of Spenser's Chaucerisms in his contemporaries, but they do not crowd and characterize their writings ; they tincture, but they do not colour ; they are there, but not for ever there. Bolton. who wrote in 1622 of language and style, speaks to this point in his ' Hypercritica.' He is recommending authors for imitation and study " those authors among ns whose English hath in my conceit most propriety, and is nearest to the phrase of court, and to the speech used among the noble and among the better sort in London ; the two sovereign seats, and as it were Parliament tribunals, to try the question in." " In verse there are," he says, " to furnish an English historian with copy and tongue, Ed. Spenser's Hymns. I cannot advise the allowance of other of his poems, as for practick English, no more than I can do Jeff. Chaucer, Lydgate, Peirce Ploughman, or Laureat Skelton. It was laid as a fault to the charge of Sallust, that he used some old outworn words, stolen out of Cato his Books de Originibus. And for an historian in our tongue to AFFECT the like out of those our poets would be accounted a foul oversight. That therefore must not be." Gray has a letter to prove that the language of the age is never the Ian- PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 53 nounces it to be exactly that of his contemporaries. His authority is weighty ; still, however, without reviving the ex- ploded error respecting Jonson's censure, one might imagine the difference of Spenser's style from that of Shakspeare's, whom he so shortly preceded, to indicate that his gothic subject and story made him lean towards words of the elder time. At all events, much of his expression is now become antiquated ; though it is beautiful in its antiquity, and, like the moss and ivy on some majestic building, covers the fabric of his language with romantic and venerable associations. His command .of imagery is wide, easy, and luxuriant. He threw the soul of harmony into our verse, and made it more warmly, tenderly, and magnificently descriptive than it ever was before, or, with a few exceptions, than it has ever been since. It must certainly be owned that in description he exhibits nothing of the brief strokes and robust power which characterise the very greatest poets ; but we shall nowhere find more airy and expansive images of visionary things, a sweeter tone of sentiment, or a finer flush in the colours of language, than in this Rubens of English poetry. His fancy teems exuberantly in minuteness of circumstance, like a fertile soil sending bloom and verdure through the utmost extremities of the foliage which it nourishes. On a comprehensive view of the whole work, we certainly miss the charm of strength, symmetry, and rapid or interesting pro- gress ; for, though the plan which the poet designed is not com- pleted, it is easy to see that no additional cantos could have rendered it less perplexed.* But still there is a richness in his guage of poetry. Was Spenser behind or Shakspeare in advance ? Stage language must necessarily be the language of the time ; and Shakspeare gives us words pure and neat, yet plain and customary the style that Ben Jonson loved, the eldest of the present and the newest of the past while Spenser fell back on Chaucer as the "Well of English undefilde," as he was pleased to express it. (See Warton's Essay on Spenser, vol. i., and Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. ii. p. 328.) " The language of Spenser," says Hallam, " like that of Shakspeare, is an instrument manufactured for the sake of the work it was to perform."] * [Mr. Campbell has given a character of Spenser, not so enthusiastic as that to which I have alluded, but so discriminating, and in general sound, that I shall take the liberty of extracting it from his ' Specimens of the British Poets.' Hallam, Lit. Hist., vol. ii. p. 334.] 54 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. materials, even where their coherence is loose, and their dis- position confused. The clouds of his allegory may seem to spread into shapeless forms, but they are still the clouds of a glowing atmosphere. Though his story grows desultory, the sweetness and grace of his manner still abide by him. He is like a speaker whose tones continue to be pleasing, though he may speak too long ; or like a painter who makes us forget the defect of his design by the magic of his colouring. We always rise from perusing him with melody in the mind's ear, and with pictures of romantic beauty impressed on the imagination.* For these attractions ' The Fairy Queen ' will ever continue to be resorted to by the poetical student. It is not, however, very popularly read, and seldom perhaps from beginning to end, even by those who can fully appreciate its beauties. This cannot be ascribed merely to its presenting a few words which are now obsolete ; nor can it be owing, as has been sometimes alleged, to the tedium inseparable from protracted allegory. Allegorical fable may be made entertaining. With every disadvantage of dress and language, the humble John Bunyan has made this species of writing very amusing. The reader may possibly smile at the names of Spenser and Bunyan being brought forward for a moment in comparison ; but it is chiefly because the humbler allegorist is so poor in language that his power of interesting the curiosity is entitled to admiration. We are told by critics that the passions may be allegorised, but that Holiness, Justice, and other such thin abstractions of the mind, are too unsubstantial machinery for a poet ; yet we all know how well the author of ' The Pilgrim's Progress ' (and he was a poet though he wrote in prose) has managed such abstractions as Mercy and Fortitude. In his art- less hands those attributes cease to be abstractions, and become our most intimate friends. Had Spenser, with all the wealth and graces of his fancy, given his story a more implicit and ani- mated form, I cannot believe that there was anything in the nature of his machinery to set bounds to his power of enchant- * [Spenser's allegorical story resembles, methinks, a continuance of ex- traordinary dreams. Sir W. Uavenant. After my reading a canto of Spenser two or three days ago to an old lady between 70 and 80, she said that I had been showing her a collection of pictures. She said very right. Pope to Spence.] PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 55 ment. Yet, delicious as his poetry is, his story considered as a romance is obscure, intricate, and monotonous. He translated entire cantos from Tasso, but adopted the wild and irregular manner of Ariosto. The difference is that Spenser appears like a civilized being, slow and sometimes half forlorn, in exploring an uninhabited country, while Ariosto traverses the regions of romance like a hardy native of its pathless wilds. Hurd and others, who forbid us to judge of ' The Fairy Queen ' by the test of classical unity, and who compare it to a gothic church, or a gothic garden, tell us what is little to the purpose. They cannot persuade us that the story is not too intricate and too diffuse. The thread of the narrative is so entangled, that the poet saw the necessity for explaining the design of his poem in prose, in a letter to Sir Walter Raleigh ; and the perspicuity of a poetical design which requires such an explanation may, with no great severity, be pronounced a contradiction in terms. It is degrading to poetry, we shall perhaps be told, to attach importance to the mere story which it relates. Certainly the poet is not a great one whose only charm is the management of his fable ; but where there is a fable, it should be perspicuous. There is one peculiarity in ' The Fairy Queen ' which, though not a deeply pervading defect, I cannot help considering as an incidental blemish ; namely, that the allegory is doubled and crossed with complimentary allusions to living or recent person- ages, and that the agents are partly historical and partly alle- gorical. In some instances the characters have a threefold allusion. Gloriana is at once an emblem of true glory, an empress of fairy land, and her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. Envy is a personified passion, and also a witch, and, with no very charitable insinuation, a type of the unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots. The knight in dangerous distress is Henry IV. of France ; and the knight of magnificence, Prince Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon, an ancient British hero, is the bulwark of the Protestant cause in the Netherlands. Such distraction of allegory cannot well be said to make a fair experiment of its power. The poet may cover his moral meaning under a single and transparent veil of fiction ; but he has no right to muffle it up in foldings which hide the form and symmetry of truth. Upon the whole, if I may presume to measure the imper- 56 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART 11. fections of so great and venerable a genius, I think we may say that, if his popularity be less than universal and complete, it is not so much owing to his obsolete language, nor to degeneracy of modern taste, nor to his choice of allegory as a subject, as to the want of that consolidating and crowning strength which alone can establish works of fiction in the favour of all readers and of all ages. This want of strength, it is but justice to say, is either solely or chiefly apparent when we examine the entire structure of his poem, or so large a portion of it as to feel that it does not impel or sustain our curiosity in proportion to its length. To the beauty of insulated passages who can be blind ? The sublime description of " Him who with the Night durst ride" ' The House of Riches,' ' The Canto of Jealousy,' ' The Masque of Cupid,' and other parts, too many to enumerate, are so splendid, that after reading them we feel it for the moment invidious to ask if they are symmetrically united into a whole. Succeeding generations have acknowledged the pathos and rich- ness of his strains, and the new contour and enlarged dimensions of grace which he gave to English poetry. He is the poetical father of a Milton and a Thomson. Gray habitually read him when he wished to frame his thoughts for composition ; and there are few eminent poets in the language who have not been essentially indebted to him. " Hither, as to their fountain, other stars Repair, and in their urns drew golden light." The publication of ' The Fairy Queen,' and the commence- ment of Shakspeare's dramatic career, may be noticed as con- temporary events ; for by no supposition can Shakspeare's ap- pearance as a dramatist be traced higher than 1589,* and that of Spenser's great poem was in the year 1590. I turn back from that date to an earlier period, when the first lineaments of our regular drama began to show themselves. Before Elizabeth's reign we had no dramatic authors more important than Bale and Heywood the Epigrammatist. Bale, * [It is clear that hefore 1591, or even 1592, Shakspeare had no celebrity as a writer of plays ; he must, therefore, have been valuable to the theatre chiefly as an actor ; and if this was the case, namely, that he speedily trode the stage with some respectability, Mr. Rowe's tradition that he was at first admitted in a mean capacity must be taken with a bushel of doubt. Camp- bell, Life of Shakspeare, 8vo. 1838, p. xxii.] PAKT ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 57 before the titles of tragedy and comedy were well distinguished, had written comedies on such subjects as the Resurrection of Lazarus, and the Passion and Sepulture of our Lord. He was, in fact, the last of the race of mystery- writers. Both Bale and Heywood died about the middle of the sixteenth century, but flourished (if such a word can be applied to them) as early as the reign of Henry VIII. Until the time of Elizabeth, the public was contented with mysteries, moralities, or interludes, too humble to deserve the name of comedy. The first of these, the mysteries, originated, almost as early as the Conquest, in shows given by the church to the people. The moralities,* which were chiefly allegorical, probably arose about the middle of the fifteenth century ; and the interludes became prevalent during the reign of Henry VIII. t Lord Sackville's ' Gorboduc,' first represented in 1561-2, and Still's ''Gammer Gurton's Needle,' about 1566, were the earliest, though faint, draughts of our regular tragedy and comedy. | They did not, however, immediately supersede the taste for the allegorical moralities. Sackville even introduced dumb show in his tragedy to explain the piece, and he was not the last of the old dramatists who did so. One might conceive the explanation of allegory by real personages to be a natural complaisance to an audience ; but there is something peculiarly ingenious in making allegory explain reality, and the dumb interpret for those who could speak. In reviewing the rise of the drama, ' Gammer Gurton's Needle ' and Sackville's ' Gorboduc ' form convenient resting-places for the memory ; but it may be doubted if their superiority over the mysteries and moralities be half so great as * [Mr. J. Payne Collier observes that the Mysteries should be called Miracle- Plays, and the Moralities, Morals or Moral-Plays.] f Warton'also mentions Rastell, the brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More, who was a printer ; but who is believed by the historian of our poetry to have been also an author, and to have made the moralities in some degree the vehicle of science and philosophy. He published [about 1519] a new interlude on The Nature of the Four Elements, in which the tracts of America lately discovered and the manners of the natives are described. [See Collier's ' Annals,' vol. ii. p. 319.] I [An earlier English comedy than ' Gammer Gurton's Needle,' viz. ' Ralph Roister Doister,' by Nicholas Udall, has been discovered since Mr. Campbell wrote this Essay. The only copy known is in the library of Eton College, and the only accurate reprint was made for the Shakspeare Society by Mr. W. D. Cooper.] 53 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. their real distance from an affecting tragedy or an exhilarating comedy. The main incident in ' Gammer Gurton's Needle ' is the loss of a needle in a man's smallclothes.* ' Gorboduc' has no interesting plot or impassioned dialogue ; but it dignified the stage with moral reflection and stately measure. It first intro- duced blank verse instead of ballad rhymes in the drama. Gas- coigne gave a further popularity to blank verse by his paraphrase of ' Jocasta,' from Euripides, which appeared in 1566. The same author's ' Supposes,' translated from Ariosto, was our earliest prose comedy. Its dialogue is easy arid spirited. Edwards's ' Palamon and Arcite ' was acted in the same year, to the great admiration of Queen Elizabeth, who called the author into her presence, and complimented him on having justly drawn the character of a genuine lover. Ten tragedies of Seneca were translated into English verse at different times, and by different authors, before the year 1581. One of these translators was Alexander Neyvile, afterwards secretary to Archbishop Parker, whose ' CEdipus ' came out as early as 1563 ; and though he was but a youth of nineteen, his style has considerable beauty. The following lines, which open the first act, may serve as a specimen : " The night is gone, and dreadful day begins at length t' appear, And Phoebus, all bedimm'd with clouds, himself aloft doth rear ; And, gliding forth, with deadly hue and doleful blaze in skies, Doth bear great terror and dismay to the beholder's eyes. Now shall the houses void be seen, with plague devoured quite, And slaughter which the night hath made shall day bring forth to light. Doth any man in princely thrones rejoice ? O brittle joy ! How many ills, how fair a face, and yet how much annoy, In thee doth lurk, and hidden lies what heaps of endless strife ! They judge amiss that deem the prince to have the happy life." In 1568 was produced the tragedy of ' Tancred and Sigis- munda,' by Robert Wilmot and four other students of the Inner * [" It is a piece of low humour ; the whole jest turning upon the loss and the recovery of the needle with which Gammer Gurton was to repair the breeches of her man Hodge ; but in point of manners it is a great curiosity, as the curta supellex of our ancestors is scarcely anywhere so well described." . . . . " The unity of time, place, and action, is observed through the play, with an accuracy of which France might be jealous." . . . " It is remarkable that the earliest English tragedy'' (alluding to 'Gorbo- duc ') " and comedy are both works of considerable merit ; that each par- takes of the distinct character of its class ; that the tragedy is without intermixture of comedy the comedy without any intermixture of tragedy." Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 333.J PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 59 Temple. It is reprinted in Reed's plays ; but that reprint is taken not from the first edition, but from one greatly polished and amended in 1592.* Considered as a piece coming within the verge of Shakspeare's age, it ceases to be wonderful. Immedi- ately subsequent to these writers we meet with several obscure and uninteresting dramatic names, among which is that of "Whet- stone, the author of ' Promos and Cassandra' [1578], in which piece there is a partial anticipation of the plot of Shakspeare's ' Measure for Measure.' Another is that of Preston, whose tragedy of ' Cambyses 'f is alluded to by Shakspeare, when FalstafF calls for a cup of sack, that he may weep " in King Cambyses' vein."^: There is, indeed, matter for weeping in this tragedy ; for, in the course of it, an elderly gentleman is flayed alive. To make the skinning more pathetic, his own son is witness to it, and ex- claims, " What child is he of Nature's mould could bide the same to see, His father fleaed in this wise ? O how it grieveth me !" It may comfort the reader to know that this theatric decortica- tion was meant to be allegorical ; and we may believe that it was performed with no degree of stage illusion that could deeply affect the spectator. In the last twenty years of the sixteenth century we come to a period when the increasing demand for theatrical entertain- ments produced play-writers by profession. The earliest of these appears to have been George Peele, who was the city poet and conductor of the civic pageants. His ' Arraignment of Paris ' came out in 1584. Nash calls him an Atlas in poetry. Unless * [Newly revived, and polished according to the decorum of these days. That is, as Mr. Collier supposes, by the removal of the rhymes to a blank- verse fashion.] t In the title-page it is denominated " A lamentable Tragedy, mixed full of pleasant Mirth." $ [The Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the late age had nothing in them but the scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers. Ben Jonson. ( [Gifford, vol. ix. p. 180.) I suspect that Shakspeare confounded King Cambyses with King Darius. Falstaft''s solemn fustian bears not the slightest resemblance, either in metre or in matter, to the vein of King Cambyses. Kyng Daryus, whose doleful strain is here burlesqued, was a pithie and plesaunt enterlude, printed about the middle of the sixteenth century. Gifford. Note on Jonson's ' Poetaster,' Works, vol. ii. p. 455.] $ [The stage direction excites a smile : Flea him with a false skin.] 60 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. we make allowance for his antiquity, the expression will appear hyperbolical ; but, with that allowance, we may justly cherish the memory of Peele as the oldest genuine dramatic poet of our language. His ' David and Bethsabe ' is the earliest fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in our dramatic poetry. His fancy is rich and his feeling tender, and his conceptions of dramatic character have no inconsiderable mixture of solid veracity and ideal beauty. There is no such sweetness of versi- fication and imagery to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakspeare.* David's character the traits both of his guilt and sensibility his passion for Bethsabe his art in inflaming the military ambition of Urias and his grief for Absalom, are delineated with no vulgar skill. The luxuriant image of Beth- sabe is introduced by these lines: " Come, gentle Zephyr, trick'd with those perfumes That erst in Eden sweeten'd Adam's love, And stroke my bosom with thy gentle fan : This shade, sun-proof, is yet no proof for thee. Thy body, smoother than this waveless spring, And purer than the substance of the same, Can creep through that his lances cannot pierce. Thou and thy sister, soft and sacred Air, Goddess of life, and governess of health, Keeps every fountain fresh, and arbour sweet. 1 No brazen gate her passage can refuse, Nor bushy thicket bar thy subtle breath : Then deck thee with thy loose delightsome robes, And on thy wings bring delicate perfumes, To play the wanton with us through the leaves. " David. What tunes, what words, what looks, what wonders pierce My soul, incensed with a sudden fire ? What tree, what shade, -what spring, what paradise, Enjoys the beauty of so fair a dame ? Fair Eva, placed in perfect happiness, Lending her praise-notes to the liberal heavens, Strook with the accents of archangels' tunes, Wrought not more pleasure to her husband's thoughts, Than this fair woman's words and notes to mine. May that sweet plain, that bears her pleasant weight, * [Mr. Dyce, in his edition of Peele, has quoted this passage from Mr. Campbell " a critic," he styles him, " who is by no means subject to the pardonable weakness of discovering beauties in every writer of the olden time." p. xxxviii. It is quoted, too, by Mr. Hallam (Lit. Hist., vol. ii. p. 378), who concurs with Mr. Collier in thinking these compliments excessive.] PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 61 Be still enamell'd with discolour'd flowers ; That precious fount bear sand of purest gold ; And, for the pebble, let the silver streams Play upon rubies, sapphires, chrysolites ; The brims let be embraced with golden curls Of moss, that sleeps with sound the waters make ; For joy to feed the fount with their recourse Let all the grass that beautifies her bower / Bear manna every morn instead of dew ! " ***** Joab thus describes the glory of David : " Beauteous and bright is he among the tribes, As when the sun, attired in glistering robe, Comes dancing from his oriental gate, And, bridegroom-like, hurls through the gloomy air His radiant beams : such doth King David show, Crown'd with the honour of his enemies' town, Shining in riches like the firmament, The starry vault that overhangs the earth ; So looketh David, King of Israel." At the conclusion of the tragedy, when David gives way to his grief for Absalom, he is roused with great dignity and energy by the speech of Joab. When informed by Joab of the death of his son, David exclaims, " David. Thou man of blood ! thou sepulchre of death ! Whose marble breast entombs my bowels quick, Did I not charge thee, nay, entreat thy hand, Even for my sake, to spare my Absalom ? And hast thou now, in spite of David's health, And scorn to do my heart some happiness, Given him the sword, and spilt his purple soul ? " Joab. What ! irks it David that he victor breathes, That Juda, and the fields of Israel Should cleanse their faces from their children's blood ? What ! art thou weary of thy royal rule ? Is Israel's throne a serpent in thine eyes, And he that set thee there so far from thanks, That thou must curse his servant for his sake ? Hast thou not said, that, as the morning light, The cloudless morning, so should be thine house, And not as flowers, by the brightest rain, Which grow up quickly, and as quickly fade ? Hast thou not said, the wicked are as thorns, That cannot be preserved with the hand ; And that the man shall touch them must be arm'd With coats of iron, and garments made of steel, Or with the shaft of a defenced spear ? And art thou angry he is now cut off, That led the guiltless swarming to their deaths, And was more wicked than an host of men ? C2 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. Advance thee from thy melancholy den, And deck thy body with thy blissful robes, Or, by the Lord that sways the heaven, I swear, I '11 lead thine armies to another king, Shall cheer them for their princely chivalry, And not sit daunted, frowning in the dark, When his fair looks, with oil and wine refresh'd, Should dart into their bosoms gladsome beams, And fill their stomachs with triumphant feasts ; That, when elsewhere stern War shall sound his trump, And call another battle to the field, Fame still may bring thy valiant soldiers home, And for their service happily confess She wanted worthy trumps to sound their prowess : Take thou this course, and live ; Refuse, and die." Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe, were the other writers for our early stage, a part of whose career pre- ceded that of Shakspeare.* Lyly, whose dramatic language is * [An interesting subject of inquiry in Shakspeare's literary history is the state of our dramatic poetry when he began to alter and originate Eng- lish plays. Before his time mere mysteries and miracle-plays, in which Adam and Eve appeared naked, in which the devil displayed his horns and tail, and in which Noah's wife boxed the patriarch's ears before entering the ark, had fallen comparatively into disuse, after a popularity of four centuries ; and in the course of the sixteenth century the clergy were for- bidden by orders from Rome to perform in them. Meanwhile " moralities," which had made their appearance about the middle of the fifteenth century, were also hastening their retreat, as well as those pageants and masques in honour of royalty, which nevertheless aided the introduction of the drama. But we owe our first regular dramas to the universities, the inns of court, and public seminaries. The scholars of these establishments engaged in free translations of classical dramatists, though with so little taste, that Seneca was one of their favourites. They caught the coldness of that model, however, without the feeblest trace of his slender graces ; they looked at the ancients without understanding them ; and they brought to their plots neither unity, design, nor affecting interest. There is a general similarity among all the plays that preceded Shakspeare in their ill-conceived plots, in the bombast and dulness of tragedy, and in the vulgar buffoonery of comedy. Of our great poef s immediate predecessors, the most distinguished were Lyly, Peele, Greene, Kyd, Nash, Lodge, and Marlowe. Lyly was not entirely devoid of poetry, for we have some pleasing lyrical verses by him ; but in the drama he is cold, mythological, and conceited, and he even pol- luted for a time the juvenile age of our literature with his abominable Eu- phuism. Peele has left some melodious and fanciful passages in his ' David and Bethsabe.' Greene is not unjustly praised for his comedy ' Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.' Kyd's ' Spanish Tragedy ' was at first admired, but subsequently quoted only for its samples of the mock sublime. Nash wrote no poetry, except for the stage ; but he is a poor dramatic poet, though his prose satires are remarkably powerful. Lodge was not much happier on the stage than Nash ; his prose works are not very valuable ; but he wrote PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 63 prose, has traits of genius which we should not expect from his generally depraved taste, and he has several graceful intersper- sions of " sweet lyric song." But his manner, on the whole, is stilted. " Brave Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,"* of whose " mighty Muse " Ben Jonson himself speaks reverentially, had powers of no ordinary class, and even ventured a few steps into the pathless sublime. But his pathos is dreary, and the terrors of his Muse remind us more of Minerva's gorgon than her countenance. The first sober and cold school of tragedy, which began with Lord Sackville's ' Gorboduc,' was succeeded by one of headlong extravagance. Kyd's bombast was proverbial in his own day. With him the genius of Tragedy might be said to have run mad ; and, if we may judge of one work, the joint production of Greene and Lodge, to have hardly recovered her wits in the company of those authors. The piece to which I allude is entitled ' A Looking-glass for London' (1594). There the ' Tamburlane' of Kyd is fairly rivalled in rant and blasphemy by the hero, Rasni, King of Nineveh, who boasts " Great Jewry's God, that foil'd stout Benhadab, Could not rebate the strength that Rasni brought ; For be he God in heaven, yet viceroys know Rasni is God on earth, and none but he." In the course of the play the imperial swaggerer marries his own sister, who is quite as consequential a character as himself; but, finding her struck dead by lightning, he deigns to espouse her lady-in-waiting, and is finally converted, after his wedding, by Jonah, who soon afterwards arrives at Nineveh. It would be perhaps unfair, however, to assume this tragedy as a fair test of the dramatic talents of either Greene or Lodge. Ritson re- commended the dramas of Greene as well worthy of being col- one satire in verse of considerable merit, and various graceful little lyrics. Marlowe was the only great man among Shakspeare's precursors ; his con- ceptions were strong and original ; his intellect grasped his subject as a whole : no doubt he dislocated the thews of his language by overstrained efforts at the show of strength, but he delineated character with a degree of truth unknown to his predecessors : his ' Edward the Second ' is pathetic, and his ' Faustus ' has real grandeur. If Marlowe had lived, Shakspeare might have had something like a competitor. Campbell, Life of Shakspeare , p. xxiii.] * [Drayton.] 64 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. lected. The taste of that antiquary was not exquisite, but his knowledge may entitle his opinion to consideration.* Among these precursors of Shakspeare we may trace, in Peele and Marlowe, a pleasing dawn of the drama, though it M-as by no means a dawn corresponding to so bright a sunrise as the appearance of his mighty genius. He created our romantic drama, or, if the assertion is to be qualified, it requires but a small qualification.f There were, undoubtedly, prior occupants of the dramatic ground in our language ; but they appear only like unprosperous settlers on the patches and skirts of a wilder- ness, which he converted into a garden. He is, therefore, never compared with his native predecessors. Criticism goes back, for names worthy of being put in competition with his, to the first great masters of dramatic invention ; and even in the points of dissimilarity between them and him discovers some of the highest indications of his genius. Compared with the classical com- * [His Dramas and Poems were printed together in 1831 by Mr. Dyce. " In richness of fancy, Greene," says Mr. Dyce, " is inferior to Peele ; and, with the exception of his amusing comedy 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bun- gay,' there is, perhaps, but little to admire in his dramatic productions."] f [" Untaught, unpractised, in a barbarous age, I found not, but created first the stage ; And if 1 drain'd no Greek or Latin store, 'Twas that my own abundance gave me more." Dryden, of Shakspeare. The English stage might be considered equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose. The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty ; but that genius, in its turn, is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into exist- ence. Such was the case with Shakspeare. Had he received an education more extensive, and possessed a taste refined by the classical models, it is probable that he also, in admiration of the ancient drama, might have mis- taken the form for the essence, and subscribed to those rules which had produced such masterpieces of art. Fortunately for the full exertion of a genius, as comprehensive and versatile as intense and powerful, Shakspeare had no access to any models of which the commanding merit might have controlled and limited his own exertions. He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him ; but he moved in it with the grace and majestic step of a being of a superior order, and vindicated for ever the British theatre from a pedantic restriction to classical rule. Nothing went before Shakspeare which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character of a national drama ; and certainly no one will succeed him capable of establishing, by mere authority, a form more re- stricted than that which Shakspeare used. Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Pr. Works, vol. iii. p. 336.] PART n.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 65 posers of antiquity, he is to our conceptions nearer the character of a universal poet ; more acquainted with man in the real world, and more terrific and bewitching in the preternatural. He ex- panded the magic circle of the drama beyond the limits that belonged to it in antiquity ; made it embrace more time and locality ; filled it with larger business and action with vicis- situdes of gay and serious emotion, which classical taste had kept divided with characters which developed humanity in stronger lights and subtler movements and with a language more wildly, more playfully diversified by fancy and passion, than was ever spoken on any stage. Like Nature herself, he presents alterna- tions of the gay and the tragic ; and his mutability, like the suspense and precariousness of real existence, often deepens the force of our impressions. He converted imitation into illusion. To say that, magician as he was, he was not faultless, is only to recall the flat and stale truism that everything human is imper- fect. But how to estimate his imperfections !* To praise him is easy in facili causa cuivis licet esse diserto but to make a special, full, and accurate estimate of his imperfections would require a delicate and comprehensive discrimination and an authority which are almost as seldom united in one man as the powers of Shakspeare himself. He is the poet of the world. The magnitude of his genius puts it beyond all private opinion to set defined limits to the admiration which is due to it. We know, upon the whole, that the sum of blemishes to be deducted from his merits is not great,f and we should scarcely be thankful * [He (Shakspeare) was the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul. All the images of nature were still present to him, and he drew them not laboriously but luckily ; when he describes anything, you more than see it, you feel it too. Those who accuse him to have wanted learning give him the greater com- mendation ; he was naturally learned ; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature ; he looked inwards, and found her there. I cannot say he is everywhere alike ; were he so, I should do him injury to compare him with the greatest of mankind. He is many times flat, insipid ; his comic wit degenerating into clenches, his serious swelling into bombast. But he is always great when great occasion is presented to him ; no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of poets Quantum lenta solent inter viburna cupressi. Dryden.] f [If Shakspeare's embroideries were burnt down, there would still be silver at the bottom of the melting-pot. Dryden, Malone, vol. ii. p. 295.] F 66 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART 11. to one who should be anxious to make it. No other poet tri- umphs so anomalously over eccentricities and peculiarities in composition which would appear blemishes in others ; so that his blemishes and beauties have an affinity which we are jealous of trusting any hand with the task of separating. We dread the interference of criticism with a fascination so often inexplicable by critical laws, and justly apprehend that any man in standing between us and Shakspeare may show for pretended spots upon his disk only the shadows of his own opacity. Still it is not a part even of that enthusiastic creed to be- lieve that he has no excessive mixture of the tragic and comic, no blemishes of language in the elliptical throng and impatient pressure of his images, no irregularities of plot and action, which another Shakspeare would avoid, if " nature had not broken the mould in which she made him," or if he- should come back into the world to blend experience with inspiration.* The bare name of the dramatic unities is apt to excite re- volting ideas of pedantry, arts of poetry, and French criticism. With none of these do I wish to annoy the reader. I conceive that it may be said of those unities as of fire and water, that they are good servants but bad masters. In perfect rigour they were never imposed by the Greeks, and they would be still heavier shackles if they were closely riveted on our own drama. It would be worse than useless to confine dramatic action literally and immoveably to one spot, or its imaginary time to the time in which it is represented. On the other hand, dramatic time and place cannot surely admit of indefinite expansion. It would be better, for the sake of illusion and probability,! to change the * [" There is not a doubt that he lighted up his glorious fancy at the lamp of classical mythology : Hyperion's curls ; the front of Jove himself ; An eye like Mars to threaten and command ; A station like the herald Mercury, New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill Who can read these lines without perceiving that Shakspeare had imbibed a deeper feeling of the beauty of Pagan mythology than a thousand pedants could have imbibed in their whole lives ?" Campbell, Life of Shakspeare, p. xvi.] f Dr. Johnson has said, with regard to local unity in the drama, that we can as easily imagine ourselves in one place as another. So we can, at the beginning of a play ; but having taken our imaginary station with the poet PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 67 scene from Windsor to London, than from London to Pekin ; it Avould look more like reality if a messenger, who went and re- turned in the course of the play, told us of having performed a journey of ten or twenty, rather than of a thousand miles ; and if the spectator had neither that, nor any other circumstance, to make him ask how so much could be performed in so short a time. In an abstract view of dramatic art, its principles must appear to lie nearer to unity than to the opposite extreme of disunion, in our conceptions of time and place. Giving up the law of unity in its literal rigour, there is still a latitude of its application which may preserve proportion and harmony in the drama.* The brilliant and able Schlegel has traced the principles of what he denominates the romantic, in opposition to the classical drama ; and conceives that Shakspeare's theatre, when tried by those principles, will be found not to have violated any of the unities, if they are largely and liberally understood. I have no doubt that Mr. Schlegel's criticism will be found to have proved this point in a considerable number of the works of our mighty poet. There are traits, however, in Shakspeare, which, I must own, appear to my humble judgment incapable of being illus- trated by any system or principles of art. I do not allude to his historical plays, which, expressly from being historical, may be called a privileged class. But in those of purer fiction, it strikes me that there are licences conceded indeed to imagination's "chartered libertine," but anomalous with regard to anything which can be recognised as principles in dramatic art. When Perdita, for instance, grows from the cradle to the marriage altar in the course of the play, I can perceive no unity in the design of the piece, and take refuge in the supposition of Shakspeare's genius triumphing and trampling over art. Yet Mr. Schlegel, as far as I have observed, makes no exception to this breach of in one country, I do not believe with Dr. Johnson that we change into a different one with perfect facility to the imagination. Lay the first act in Europe, and we surely do not naturally expect to find the second in America. * [For some admirable remarks on dramatic unities, see Scott's 'Essay on the Drama' (Misc. Pr. Works, vol. vi. p. 298-321). Dr. Johnson has numerous obligations to an excellent paper by Farquhar a fact not gene- rally enough known.] F 2 68 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. temporal unity ; nor, in proving Shakspeare a regular artist on a mighty scale, does he deign to notice this circumstance, even as the ultima Thule of his licence.* If a man contends that dramatic laws are all idle restrictions, I can understand him ; or if he says that Perdita's growth on the stage is a trespass on art, but that Shakspeare's fascination over and over again redeems it, I can both understand and agree with him. But when I am left to infer that all this is right on romantic principles, I con- fess that those principles become too romantic for my conception. If Perdita may be born and married on the stage, why may not Webster's Duchess of Malfi lie-in between the acts, and produce a fine family of tragic children ? Her Grace actually does so in Webster's drama, and he is a poet of some genius, though it is not quite so sufficient as Shakspeare's to give a " sweet ob- livious antidote " to such " perilous stuff." It is not, however, either in favour of Shakspeare's or of Webster's genius that we shall be called on to make allowance, if we justify in the drama the lapse of such a number of years as may change the apparent identity of an individual. If romantic unity is to be so largely interpreted, the old Spanish dramas, where youths grow grey- b.eards upon the stage, the mysteries and moralities, and produc- tions teeming with the wildest anachronism, might all come in with their grave or laughable claims to romantic legitimacy. " Nam sic Et Laberi mimos ut pulchra poemata mirer." Hor. On a general view, I conceive it may be said that Shakspeare nobly and legitimately enlarged the boundaries of time and place in the drama ; but in extreme cases, I would rather agree with Cumberland, to waive all mention of his name in speaking * [Mitis. How comes it that in some one play we see so many seas, countries, and kingdoms, passed over with such admirable dexterity ? Cordatus. O, that but shows how well the authors can travel in their vocation, and outrun the apprehension of their auditory. Beii Jonson, Every Man out of his Humour. This was said in 1599, and at The Globe, when Shakspeare, that very year, perhaps the performance before, had crossed the seas in his chorus from England to France, and from France to England, with admirable dexterity. Jonson wrote to recommend his own unities, and to instruct his audience ; not, as the Shakspeare commentators would have us believe, to abuse Shakspeare, in the very theatre in which he was a large sharer, and unquestionably the main-stay.] PART ii.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 69 of dramatic laws, than accept of those licences for art which are not art, and designate irregularity by the name of order. There were other poets who started nearly coeval with Ben Jonson in the attempt to give a classical form to our drama. Daniel, for instance, brought out his tragedy of ' Cleopatra' in 1594 ; but his elegant genius wanted the strength requisite for great dramatic efforts. Still more unequal to the task was the Earl of Sterline, who published his cold " monarchic tragedies" in 1604. The triumph of founding English classical comedy belonged exclusively to Jonson. In his tragedies it is remark- able that he freely dispenses with the unities, though in those tragedies he brings classical antiquity in the most learnedly authenticated traits before our eyes. The vindication of his great poetic memory forms an agreeable contrast in modern criticism with the bold bad things which used to be said of him in a former period ; as when Young compared him to a blind Samson, who pulled down the ruins of antiquity on his head and buried his genius beneath them.* Hurd, though he inveighed against the too abstract conception of his characters, pronouncing them rather personified humours than natural beings, did him, nevertheless, the justice to quote one short and lovely passage from one of his masques, and the beauty of that passage pro- bably turned the attention of many readers to his then neglected compositions.! It is, indeed, but one of the many beauties which justify all that has been said of Jonson's lyrical powers. * [" If the ancients," says Headley, " were to reclaim their own, Jonson would not have a rag to cover his nakedness :" a remark that called a taunt- ing reply from Gifford in one of his most bitter moods. Dryden has beau- tifully said of Jonson that you may track him everywhere in the snow of the ancients.] f Namely, the song of Night, in the masque of ' The Vision of Delight' : " Break, Phant'sie, from thy cave of cloud." [His lyrical poetry forms, perhaps, the most delightful part of his poetical character. In songs, and masques, and interludes, his fancy has a wildness and a sweetness that we should not expect from the severity of his dramatic taste. It cannot be said, indeed, that he is always free from metaphysical conceit, but his language is weighty with thought, and polished with elegance. Upon the whole, his merits, after every fair deduction, leave him in posses- sion of a high niche in our literature, and entitle him to be ranked (next to Shakspeare) as the most important benefactor of our early drama. Camp- bell, article ' Jonson' in Brewster's Encyclopedia.] 70 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. In that fanciful region of the drama (the masque) he stands as pre-eminent as in comedy ; or, if he can be said to be rivalled, it is only by Milton. And our surprise at the wildness and sweetness of his fancy in one walk of composition is increased by the stern and rigid (sometimes rugged) air of truth which he preserves in the other. In the regular drama he certainly holds up no romantic mirror to nature. His object was to exhibit human characters at once strongly comic and severely and in- structively true to nourish the understanding, while he feasted the sense of ridicule. He is more anxious for verisimilitude than even for comic effect. He understood the humours and peculiarities of his species scientifically, and brought them forward in their greatest contrasts and subtlest modifications. If Shakspeare carelessly scattered illusion, Jonson skilfully pre- pared it. This is speaking of Jonson in his happiest manner. There is a great deal of harsh and sour fruit in his miscellaneous poetry. It is acknowledged that in the drama he frequently overlabours his delineation of character, and wastes it tediously upon uninteresting humours and peculiarities. He is a moral painter, who delights over much to show his knowledge of moral anatomy. Beyond the pale of his three great dramas, ' The Fox,' ' The Epicene, or Silent Woman,' and ' The Alche- mist,' it would not be difficult to find many striking exceptions to that love of truth and probability which, in a general view, may be regarded as one of his best characteristics. Even within that pale, namely, in his masterly character of Volpone, one is struck with what, if it be not an absolute breach, is at least a very bold stretch, of probability. It is true that Volpone is altogether a being daringly conceived ; and those who think that art spoiled the originality of Jonson may well rectify their opinion by considering the force of imagination which it re- quired to concentrate the traits of such a character as " the Fox ;" not to speak of his Mosca, who is the phoenix of all parasites. Volpone himself is not like the common misers of comedy a mere money-loving dotard a hard shrivelled old mummy, with no other spice than his avarice to preserve him ; he is a happy villain a jolly misanthrope a little god in his own selfishness ; and Mosca is his priest and prophet. Vigorous and healthy, though past the prime of life, he hugs himself in PART n.] SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 71 his arch humour, his successful knavery and imposture, his sensuality and his wealth, with an unhallowed relish of selfish existence. His passion for wealth seems not to be so great as his delight in gulling the human " vultures and gorecrows" who flock round him at the imagined approach of his dissolution the speculators who put their gold, as they conceive, into his dying gripe, to be returned to them a thousand-fold in his will. Yet still, after this exquisite rogue has stood his trial in a sweat of agony at the scrutineum, and blessed his stars at having narrowly escaped being put to the torture, there is something (one would think) a little too strong for probability in that mischievous mirth and love of tormenting his own dupes, which bring him, by his own folly, a second time within the fangs of justice. ' The Fox ' and l The Alchemist ' seem to have divided Jonson's admirers as to which of them may be considered his masterpiece. In confessing my partiality to the prose comedy of ' The Silent Woman,' considered merely as a comedy, I am by no means forgetful of the rich eloquence which poetry imparts to the two others. But ' The Epicene,' in my humble apprehension, ex- hibits Jonson's humour in the most exhilarating perfection.* With due admiration for ' The Alchemist,' I cannot help thinking the jargon of the chemical jugglers, though it displays the learning of the author, to be tediously profuse. ' The Fox ' rises to something higher than comic effect. It is morally im- pressive. It detains us at particular points iu serious terror and suspense. But ' The Epicene ' is purely facetious. I know not, indeed, why we should laugh more at the sufferings of Morose than at those of the sensualist Sir Epicure Mammon, who deserves his miseries much better than the rueful and piti- able Morose. Yet so it is, that, though the feelings of pathos and ridicule seem so widely different, a certain tincture of the pitiable makes comic distress more irresistible. Poor Morose * [The plot of ' The Fox' is admirably conceived ; and that of ' The Alche- mist," though faulty in the conclusion, is nearly equal to it. In the two comedies of ' Every Man in his Humour,' and ' Every Man out of his Humour,' the plot deserves much less praise, and is deficient at once in in- terest and unity of action ; but in that of ' The Silent Woman,' nothing can exceed the art with which the circumstance upon which the conclusion turns is, until the very last scene, concealed from the knowledge of the reader, while he is tempted to suppose it constantly within his reach. Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 341.] 72 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. suffers what the fancy of Dante could not have surpassed in description, if he had sketched out a ludicrous Purgatory. A lover of quiet a man exquisitely impatient of rude sounds and loquacity who lived in a retired street who barricadoed his doors with mattresses to prevent disturbance to his ears and who married a wife because he could with difficulty prevail upon her to speak to him has hardly tied the fatal knot when his house is tempested by female eloquence, and the marriage of him who had pensioned the city-wakes to keep away from his neighbour- hood is celebrated by a concert of trumpets. He repairs to a court of justice to get his marriage if possible dissolved, but is driven back in despair by the intolerable noise of the court. For this marriage how exquisitely we are prepared by the scene of courtship ! When Morose questions his intended bride about her likings and habits of life, she plays her part so hypocritically, that he seems for a moment impatient of her reserve, and with the most ludicrous cross feelings wishes her to speak more loudly, that he may have a proof of her taciturnity from her own lips ; but, recollecting himself, he gives way to the rapturous satisfaction of having found a silent woman, and exclaims to Cutbeard, " Go thy ways and get me a clergyman presently, with a soft low voice, to marry us, and pray him he will not be impertinent, but brief as he can." The art of Jonson was not confined to the cold observation of the unities of place and time, but appears in the whole adaptation of his incidents and characters to the support of each other. Beneath his learning and art he moves with an activity which may be compared to the strength of a man who can leap and bound under the heaviest armour.* The works of Jonson bring us into the seventeenth century ; and early in that century, our language, besides the great names already mentioned, contains many other poets whose works may * [He (Jonson) was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them ; there is scarce a poet or his- torian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated in ' Sejanus' and ' Catiline.' But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch, and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him. With the spoils of these writers he so represented old Rome to us in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies we had seen less of it than in him. Dryden.] PART ii.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 73 be read with a pleasure independent of the interest which we take in their antiquity. Drayton and Daniel, though the most opposite in the cast of their genius, are pre-eminent in the second poetical class of their age for their common merit of clear and harmonious diction. Drayton is prone to Ovidian conceits, but he plays with them so gaily, that they almost seem to become him as if natural. His feeling is neither deep, nor is the happiness of his fancy of long continuance, but its short April gleams are very beautiful. His * Legend of the Duke of Buckingham' opens with a fine description. Unfortunately, his descriptions in long poems are, like many fine mornings, succeeded by a cloudy day : " The lark, that holds observance to the sun, Quaver'd her clear notes in the quiet air, And on the river's murmuring base did run, Whilst the pleased heavens her fairest livery wear ; The place such pleasure gently did prepare, The flowers my smell, the flood my taste to steep, And the much softness lulled me asleep. When, in a vision, as it seem'd to me, Triumphal music from the flood arose." * * * Of the grand beauties of poetry he has none ; but of the sparkling lightness of his best manner an example may be given in the following stanzas, from his sketch of ' The Poet's Elysium.' " A Paradise on earth is found, Though far from vulgar sight, Which with those pleasures doth abound, That it Elysium hight. ***** The winter here a summer is, No waste is made by time ; Nor doth the autumn ever miss The blossoms of the prime. ***** Those cliffs whose craggy sides are clad With trees of sundry suits, Which make continual summer glad, E'en bending with their fruits Some ripening, ready some to fall, Some blossom'd, some to bloom, Like gorgeous hangings on the wall Of some rich princely room. 74 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. There, in perpetual summer shade, Apollo's prophets sit, Among the flowers that never fade, But flourish like their wit ; To whom the nymphs, upon their lyres, Tune many a curious lay, And, with their most melodious quires, Make short the longest day. Daniel is "somewhat &-flat" as one of his contemporaries said of him,* but he had more sensibility than Drayton, and his moral reflection rises to higher dignity. The lyrical poetry of Elizabeth's age runs often into pastoral insipidity and fantastic carelessness, though there may be found in some of the pieces of Sir Philip Sydney, Lodge, Marlowe, and Breton, not only a sweet wild spirit but an exquisite finish of expression. Of these combined beauties Marlowe's song, l Come live with me, and be my love,' is an example. ' The Soul's Errand,'f by whomsoever it was written, is a burst of genuine poetry. I know not how that short production has ever affected other readers, but it carries to my imagination an appeal which I cannot easily account for from a few simple rhymes. It places the last and inexpressibly awful hour of existence before my view, and sounds like a sentence of vanity on the things of this world, pronounced by a dying man, whose eye glares on eternity, and whose voice is raised by strength from another world 4 Raleigh, also (ac- cording to Puttenham), had a " lofty and passionate" vein. It is difficult, however, to authenticate his poetical relics. Of the numerous sonnetteers of that time (keeping Shakspeare and Spenser apart), Drummond and Daniel are certainly the best. Hall was the master satirist of the age ; obscure and quaint at times, but full of nerve and picturesque illustration. No con- temporary satirist has given equal grace and dignity to moral censure. Very unequal to him in style, though often as original in thought, and as graphic in exhibiting manners, is Donne, * [Bolton, in his ' Hypercritica,' 1622.] t [Mr. Campbell means the poem properly and better known as ' The Lie.'] J Is not ' The Soul's Errand' the same poem with ' The Soul's Knell,' which is always ascribed to Richard Edwards ? If so, why has it been inserted in Raleigh's poems by Sir Egerton Brydges ? [They are distinct poems ; ' The Soul's Errand ' is what is called ' The Lie.' See post, Sir Walter Raleigh.] PART ii.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 75 some of whose satires have been modernized by Pope.* Corbet has left some humorous pieces of raillery on the Puritans. "Wither, all fierce and fanatic on the opposite side, has nothing more to recommend him in invective than the sincerity of that zeal for God's house which ate him up. Marston, better known in the drama than in satire, was characterised by his contempo- raries for his ruffian style. He has more will than skill in invective. " He puts in his blows with love," as the pugilists say of a hard but artless fighter ; a degrading image, but on that account not the less applicable to a coarse satirist. Donne was the " best goodnatured man, with the worst- na.tured Muse." A romantic and uxorious lover, he addresses the object of his real tenderness with ideas that outrage decorum. He begins his own epithalamium with a most indelicate invocation to his bride. His ruggedness and whim are almost proverbially known. f Yet there is a beauty of thought which at intervals rises from his chaotic imagination, like the form of Venus smiling on the waters. Giles and Phineas Fletcher possessed harmony and fancy. The simple Warner has left, in his ' Argentile and Curan,' perhaps the finest pastoral episode in our language. Browne was an elegant describer of rural scenes, though incompetent to fill them with life and manners. As a poetical narrator of fiction, Chalkhill J is rather tedious ; but he atones for the slow progress of his narrative by many touches of rich and romantic description. His numbers are as musical as those of any of his contemporaries who employ the same form of versification. It was common with the writers of the heroic couplet of that age to bring the sense to a full and frequent pause in the middle of the line. This break, by relieving the * [Would not Donne's satires, which abound with so much wit, appear more charming if he had taken care of his words and his numbers ? * * * I may safely say of this present age, that if we are not so great wits as Donne, yet certainly we are better poets. Dryden.] f [Nothing could have made Donne a poet, unless as great a change had been worked in the internal structure of his ears as was wrought in elon- gating those of Midas. Southey, Specimens, p. xxiv.] J Chalkhill was a gentleman and a scholar, the friend of Spenser. He died before he could finish the fable of his ' Thealma and Clearchus,' which was published, long after his death, by Isaak Walton. [And has been since reprinted ; one of Mr. Singer's numerous contributions to our litera- ture. For the whole of the known particulars of Chalkhill's life, see Sir Harris Nicolas's Life of Walton.'] 76 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PAKT n. uniformity of the couplet measure, sometimes produces a graceful effect and a varied harmony which we miss in the exact and unbroken tune of our later rhyme ; a beauty of which the reader will probably be sensible in perusing such lines of Chalkhill's as " And ever and anon he might well hear A sound of music steal in at his ear, As the wind gave it being. So sweet an air Would strike a siren mute ." This relief, however, is used rather too liberally by the elder rhymists, and is, perhaps, as often the result of their carelessness as of their good taste. Nor is it at all times obtained by them without the sacrifice of one of the most important uses of rhyme, namely, the distinctness of its effect in marking the measure. The chief source of the gratification which the ear finds in rhyme is our perceiving the emphasis of sound coincide with that of sense. In other words, the rhyme is best placed on the most emphatic word in the sentence. But it is nothing unusual with the ancient couplet-writers, by laying the rhyme on un- important words, to disappoint the ear of this pleasure, and to exhibit the restraint of rhyme without its emphasis. In classical translation Phaer and Golding were the earliest successors of Lord Surrey. Phaer published his 'Virgil' in 1562, and Golding his 'Ovid' three years later.* Both of * [The first seven books of Phaer's ' Virgil' were first printed in 1558, the eighth, ninth, and the fragment of the tenth in 1562. Twyne's continua- tion was first printed in 1 573. In 156 5 Golding published the first four books of Ovid's 'Metamorphoses,' and in 1567 a translation of the whole. We have had the good fortune to fall in with a notice of Arthur Golding in a Museum MS. of orders made on petitions to the Privy Council from 1605 to 1616. " No particulars," says Mr. Collier, "of the life of Golding have been recovered. He does not appear to have written anything after 1590, but the year of his death is uncertain." Bridge. Cat., p. 130. Hatfield, the xxvth of July, 1605. Arthure Golding His Ma"* is graciouslie pleased that the lord Arch- t o have the sole byshopp of Canterburie his Grace and his Ma" Attorney printing of some Geriall shall advisedlie consider of this sut, and for books translated such of the books as they shall think meete for the by himself. benefitt of the church and commonweale to be solie printed by this peticon r and wherby noe enormious monopolies may ensue, his Ma" Atturney is to drawe a book ready for his Ma ts signature, contayning a graunt hereof to the peticoner, leaving a blank for the number of yeires to be inserted at his Ma ts pleasure. Lans. MSS. No. 266,/oZio 61.] PART ii.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 77 these translators, considering the state of the language, have considerable merit. Like them, Chapman, who came later, employed in his version of the ' Iliad ' the fourteen-sy liable rhyme, which was then in favourite use. Of the three trans- laters, Phaer is the most faithful and simple, Golding the most musical, and Chapman the most spirited ; though Chapman is prone to the turgid, and often false to the sense of Homer. Phaer's * JEneid ' has been praised by a modern writer,* in the ' Lives of the Nephews of Milton,' with absurd exaggeration. I have no wish to disparage the fair value of the old translator ; but when the biographer of Milton's nephews declares " that nothing in language or conception can exceed the style in which Phaer treats of the last day of the existence of Troy," I know of no answer to this assertion but to give the reader the very passage which is pronounced so inimitable although, to save myself further impediment in the text, I must subjoin it in a note.f * [William Godwin.] f ENEAS'S NARRATIVE AFTER THE DEATH OF PRIAM. ENEID II. " Than first the cruel fear me caught, and sore my sprites appall'd, And on my father dear I thought, his face to mind I call'd, Whan slain with grisly wound our king, him like of age in sight, Lay gasping dead, and of my wife Creuse bethought the plight. Alone, forsake, my house despoil'd, my child what chaunce had take, I looked, and about me view'd what strength I might me make. All men had me forsake for paynes, and down their bodies drew, To ground they leapt, and some for woe themselves in fires they threw. And now alone was left but I whan Vesta's temple stair To keep and secretly to lurk all crouching close in chair, Dame Helen I might see to sit ; bright burnings gave me light, Wherever I went, the ways I pass'd, all thing was set in sight. She fearing her the Trojans wrath, for Troy destroy'd to wreke, Greek's torments and her husband's force, whose wedlock she did break, The plague of Troy and of her country, monster most ontame, There sat she with her hated head, by the altars hid for shame. Straight in my breast I-felt a fire, deep wrath my heart did strain, My country's fall to wreak, and bring that cursed wretch to pain. What ! shall she into her country soil of Sparta and high Mycene, All safe shall she return, and there on Troy triumph as queen ? Her husband, children, country, kynne, her house, her parents old, With Trojan wives, and Trojan lords, her slaves shall she behold ? Was Priam slain with sword for this ? Troy burnt with fire so wood? Is it herefore that Dardan strondes so often hath sweat with blood ? Not so ; for though it be no praise on woman kind to wreak, And honour none there lietb. in this, nor name for men to speak, 78 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. The harmony of Fairfax is justly celebrated.* Joshua Syl- vester's version of the ' Divine Weeks and Works ' of the French poet Dubartas was among the most popular of our early trans- lations ; and the obligations which Milton is alleged to have owed to it have revived Sylvester's name with some interest in modern criticism. Sylvester was a Puritan, and so was the pub- lisher of his work, Humphrey Lovvnes, who lived in the same street with Milton's father ; and from the congeniality of their opinions, it is not improbable that they might be acquainted. It is easily to be conceived that Milton often repaired to the shop of Lownes, and there first met with the pious didactic poem. Lauder was the earliest to trace Milton's particular thoughts and expressions to Sylvester; and, as might be ex- pected, maliciously exaggerated them. Later writers took up Yet quench I shall this poison here, and due deserts to dight, Men shall commend my zeal, and ease my mind I shall outright : This much for all my people's bones and country's flame to quite. These things within myself I tost, and fierce with force I ran, Whan to my face my mother great, so brim no time till than, Appearing shew'd herself in sight, all shining pure by night, Right goddess-like appearing, such as heavens beholds her bright. So great with majesty she stood, and me by right-hand take, She stay'd, and, red as rose, with mouth these words to me she spake : My son, what sore outrage so wild thy wrathful mind upstares ? Why frettest thou, or where alway from us thy care withdrawn appears ? Nor first unto thy father see'st, whom, feeble in all this woe, Thou hast forsake, nor if thy wife doth live thou know'st or no, Nor young Ascanius, thy child, whom throngs of Greeks about Doth swarming run, and, were not my relief, withouten doubt By this time flames had by devour'd, or swords of en'mies kill'd. It is not Helen's fate of Greece this town, my son, hath spill'd, Nor Paris is to blame for this, but Gods, with grace unkind, This wealth hath overthrown, a Troy from top to ground outwind. Behold ! for now away the cloud and dim fog will I take, That over mortal eyes doth hang, and blind thy sight doth make ; Thou to thy parents haste, take heed (dread not) my mind obey. In 'yonder place, where stones from stones, and buildings huge to sway Thou seest, and, mixt in dust and smoke, thick streams of richness rise, Himself the God Neptune that side doth turn in wonders wise, With fork three-tined the walls uproots, foundations all too shakes, And quite from under soil the town with ground-works all uprakes. On yonder side, with furies mixt, Dame Juno fiercely stands, The gates she keeps, and from their ships the Greeks, her friendly bands, In armour girt, she calls." * [Many besides myself have heard our famous Waller own that he de- rived the harmony of his numbers from the ' Godfrey of Bulloigne,' which was turned into English by Mr. Fairfax. Dryden, Matone, vol. iv. p. 592.] PABT ii.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 79 the subject with a very different spirit. Mr. Todd, the learned editor of Spenser, noticed, in a number of ' The Gentleman's Magazine,'* the probability of Milton's early acquaintance with the translation of Dubartas's poem ; and Mr. Dunster has since, in his ' Essay on Milton's early Reading,' supported the opinion that the same work contains the prima stamina of ' Paradise Lost,' and laid the first foundation of that " monumentum cere perennius." Thoughts and expressions there certainly are in Milton which leave his acquaintance with Sylvester hardly questionable ; although some of the expressions quoted by Mr. Dunster, which are common to them both, may be traced back to other poets older than Sylvester. The entire amount of his obligations, as Mr. Dunster justly admits, cannot detract from our opinion of Milton. If Sylvester ever stood high in his favour, it must have been when he was very young, f The beau- ties which occur so strangely intermixed with bathos and flatness in Sylvester's poem might have caught the youthful discernment, and long dwelt in the memory, of the great poet. But he must have perused it with disgust at Sylvester's general manner. Many of his epithets and happy phrases were really worthy of Milton ; but by far the greater proportion of his thoughts and expressions have a quaintness and flatness more worthy of Quarles and Wither. The following lines may serve as no unfavourable specimens of his translation of Dubartas's poem. PROBABILITY OF THK CELESTIAL ORBS BEING INHABITED. " I not believe that the great architect With all these fires the heavenly arches deck'd Only for show, and with these glistering shields T' amaze poor shepherds watching in the fields ; I not believe that the least flower which pranks Our garden borders, or our common banks, * For November, 1 796. t [I remember, when I was a boy, I thought inimitable Spenser a mean poet in comparison of Sylvester's ' Dubartas,' and was rapt into ecstacy when 1 read these lines : " Now, when the Winter's keener breath began To crystalize the Baltic ocean, To glaze the lakes, to bridle up the floods, And periwig with wool the bald-pate woods." I am much deceived if this be not abominable fustian. Dryden.] 80 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART IT. And the least stone that in her warming lap Our mother earth doth covetously wrap, Hath some peculiar virtue of its own, And that the glorious stars of heaven have none." THE SERPENT'S ADDRESS TO EVE WHEN HE TEMPTED HER IN EDEN. " As a false lover, that thick snares hath laid T' entrap the honour of a fair young maid, If she (though little) list'uing ear affords To his sweet-courting, deep- affecting words, Feels some assuaging of his ardent flame, And soothes himself with hopes to win his game, While, wrapt with joy, he on his point persists, That parleying city never long resists Even so the serpent. * * * Perceiving Eve his flattering gloze digest, He prosecutes, and jocund doth not rest. No, Fair (quoth he), believe not that the care God hath from spoiling Death mankind to spare Makes him forbid you, on such strict condition, His purest, rarest, fairest fruit's fruition. ***'** Begin thy bliss, and do not fear the threat Of an uncertain Godhead, only great ' Through self-awed zeal put on the glist'ning pall Of immortality." MORNING. " Arise betimes, while th' opal-colour'd morn In golden pomp doth May-day's door adorn." The " opal-colour'd morn " is a beautiful expression that I do not remember any other poet to have ever used. The school of poets which is commonly called the metaphy- sical began in the reign of Elizabeth with Donne ; but the term of metaphysical poetry would apply with much more justice to the quatrains of Sir John Davies, and those of Sir Fulke Gre- ville, writers who, at a later period, found imitators in Sir Thomas Overbury and Sir William Davenant.* Davies's poem on the Immortality of the Soul, entitled ' Nosce teipsum,' will convey a much more favourable idea of metaphysical poetry than the wittiest effusions of Donne and his followers. Davies carried abstract reasoning into verse with an acuteness and feli- city which have seldom been equalled. He reasons, undoubtedly, * [Johnson has been unjustly blamed for the name applied to Donne and his followers, of metaphysical poets, but it was given to this school before Johnson wrote, by Dryden and by Pope. However, as Mr. Southey has said, " If it were easy to find a better name, so much deference is due to Johnson, that his should be still adhered to/'] PART ii.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 81 with too much labour, formality, and subtlety, to afford uniform poetical pleasure. The generality of his stanzas exhibit hard arguments interwoven with the pliant materials of fancy so closely, that we may compare them to a texture of cloth and metallic threads, which is cold and stiff, while it is splendidly curious. There is this difference, however, between Davies and the commonly styled metaphysical poets, that he argues like a hard thinker, and they, for the most part, like madmen. If \ve conquer the drier parts of Davies's poem, and bestow a little attention on thoughts which were meant, not to gratify the in- dolence, but to challenge the activity of the mind, we shall find in the entire essay fresh beauties at every perusal : for in the happier parts we come to logical truths so well illustrated by ingenious similes, that we know not whether to call the thoughts more poetically or philosophically just. The judgment and fancy are reconciled, and the imagery of the poem seems to start more vividly from the surrounding shades of abstraction. Such were some of the first and inferior luminaries of that brilliant era of our poetry, which, perhaps, in general terms, may be said to cover about the last quarter of the sixteenth, and the first quarter of the seventeenth century ; and which, though commonly called the age of Elizabeth, comprehends many writers belonging to the reign of her successor. The romantic spirit, the generally unshackled style, and the fresh and fertile genius of that period, are not to be called in question. On the other hand, there are defects in the poetical character of the age, which, though they may disappear or be of little account amidst the excellences of its greatest writers, are glaringly conspicuous in the works of their minor contemporaries. In prolonged nar- rative and description the writers of that age are peculiarly deficient in that charm which is analogous to "keeping" in pictures. Their warm and cold colours are generally without the gradations which should make them harmonize. They fall precipitately from good to bad thoughts, from strength to im- becility. Certainly they are profuse in the detail of natural circumstances, and in the utterance of natural feelings. For this we love them, and we should love them still more if they knew where to stop in description and sentiment. But they give out the dregs of their mind without reserve, till their fairest G 82 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART n. conceptions are overwhelmed by a rabble of mean associations. At no period is the mass of vulgar mediocrity in poetry marked by more formal gallantry, by grosser adulation, or by coarser satire. Our amatory strains in the time of Charles II. may be more dissolute, but those of Elizabeth's age often abound in studious and prolix licentiousness. Nor are examples of this solemn and sedate impurity to be found only in the minor poets : our reverence for Shakspeare himself need not make it necessary to disguise that he willingly adopted that style in his youth, when he wrote his ' Venus and Adonis.' The fashion of the present day [1819] is to solicit public esteem not only for the best and better, but for the humblest and meanest writers of the age of Elizabeth. It is a bad book which has not something good in it ; and even some of the worst writers of that period have their twinkling beauties. In one point of view the research among such obscure authors is undoubtedly useful. It tends to throw incidental lights on the great old poets, and on the manners, biography, and language of the country. So far all is well but as a matter of taste, it is apt to produce illusion and disappointment. Men like to make the most of the slightest beauty which they can discover in an obso- lete versifier ; and they quote perhaps the solitary good thought which is to be found in such a writer, omitting any mention of the dreary passages which surround it. Of course it becomes a lamentable reflection, that so valuable an old poet should have been forgotten. When the reader, however, repairs to him, he finds that there are only one or two grains of gold in all the sands of this imaginary Pactolus. But the display of neglected authors has not been even confined to glimmering beauties ; it has been extended to the reprinting of large and heavy masses of dulness. Most wretched works have been praised in this enthusiasm for the obsolete; even the dullest works of the meanest contributors to ' The Mirror for Magistrates.' It seems to be taken for granted, that the inspiration of the good old times descended to the very lowest dregs of its versifiers ; whereas the bad writers of Elizabeth's age are only more stiff and artificial than those of the preceding, and more prolix than those of the succeeding period. Yet there are men who, to all appearance, would wish to re- PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 83 vive such authors not for the mere use of the antiquary, to whom every volume may be useful, but as standards of manner, and objects of general admiration. Books, it is said, take up little room. In the library this may be the case ; but it is not so in the minds and time of those who peruse them. Happily, indeed, the task of pressing indifferent authors on the public attention is a fruitless one. They may be dug up from oblivion, but life cannot be put into their reputations. " Can these bones live?" Nature will have her course, and dull books will be forgotten, in spite of bibliographers. PART III. THE pedantic character of James I. has been frequently repre- sented as the cause of degeneracy in English taste and genius. It must be allowed that James was an indifferent author ; and that neither the manners of his court nor the measures of his reign were calculated to excite romantic virtues in his subjects. But the opinion of his character having influenced the poetical spirit of the age unfavourably is not borne out by facts. He was friendly to the stage and to its best writers : he patronized Ben Jonson, and is said to have written a complimentary letter to Shakspeare with his own hand.* We may smile at the idea of James's praise being bestowed as an honour upon Shakspeare ; the importance of the compliment, however, is not to be esti- mated by our present opinion of the monarch, but by the ex- cessive reverence with which royalty was at that time invested in men's opinions. James's reign was rich in poetical names, some of which have been already enumerated. We may be re- minded, indeed, that those poets had been educated under Elizabeth, and that their genius bore the high impress of her heroic times ; but the same observation will also oblige us to recollect that Elizabeth's age had its traits of depraved fashion * This anecdote is given by Oldys on the authority of the Duke of Buck- ingham, who [is said to have] had it from Sir William Davenant. [The cause assigned, an obscure allusion in ' Macbeth,' is a very lame and unlikely one.] G 2 84 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. (witness its Euphuism),* and that the first examples of rhe worst taste which ever infected our poetry were given in her days, and not in those of her successor. Donne (for instance), the pa- triarch of the metaphysical generation, was thirty years of age at the date of James's accession, a time at which his taste and style were sufficiently formed to acquit his learned sovereign of all blame in having corrupted them. Indeed, if we were to make the memories of our kings accountable for the poetical faults of their respective reigns, we might reproach Charles I., among whose faults bad taste is certainly not to be reckoned, with the chief disgrace of our metaphysical poetry ; since that school never attained its unnatural perfection so completely as in the luxuriant ingenuity of Cowley's fancy, and the knotted deformity of Cleveland's. For a short time after the suppression of the theatres, till the time of Milton, the metaphysical poets are forced upon our attention for want of better objects. But during James's reign there is no such scarcity of good writers as to oblige us to dwell on the school of elaborate conceit. Phineas Fletcher has been sometimes named as an instance of the vitiated taste which prevailed at this period. He, however, though musical and fanciful, is not to be admitted as a repre- sentative of the poetical character of those times, which included Jonson, Beaumont and John Fletcher, Ford, Massinger, and Shirley. Shakspeare was no more; but there were dramatic authors of great and diversified ability. The romantic school of the drama continued to be more popular than the classical, though in the latter Ben Jonson lived to see imitators of his own manner, whom he was not ashamed to adopt as his poetical heirs. Of these Cartwright and Randolph were the most emi- nent. The originality of Cartwright's plots is always acknow- ledged ; and Jonson used to say of him, " My son Cartwright writes all like a man" Massinger is distinguished for the harmony and dignity of his dramatic eloquence. Many of his plots, it is true, are liable to heavy exceptions. The fiends and angels of his ' Virgin Martyr' are unmanageable tragic machinery ; and the incestuous passion of his ' Ancient Admiral ' excites our horror. The poet * An affected jargon of style, which was fashionable for some time at the court of Elizabeth, and so called from the work of Lyly entitled ' Euphues. 1 PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 85 of love is driven to a frightful expedient, when he gives it the terrors of a maniac passion breaking down the most sacred pale of instinct and consanguinity. The ancient Admiral is in love with his own daughter. Such a being, if we fancy him to exist, strikes us as no object of moral warning, but as a man under the influence of insanity. In a general view, nevertheless, Massinger has more art and judgment in the serious drama than any of the other successors of Shakspeare. His incidents are less entangled than those of Fletcher, and the scene of his action is more clearly thrown open for the free evolution of character. Fletcher strikes the imagination with more vivacity, but more irregularly, and amidst embarrassing positions of his own choosing. Massinger puts forth his strength more collectively. Fletcher has more action and character in his drama, and leaves a greater variety of impressions upon the mind. His fancy is more volatile and surprising, but then he often blends disap- pointment with our surprise, and parts with the consistency of his characters even to the occasionally apparent loss of their identity. This is not the case with Massinger. It is true that Massinger excels more in description and declamation than in the forcible utterance of the heart, and in giving character the warm colouring of passion. Still, not to speak of his one dis- tinguished hero * in comedy, he has delineated several tragic characters with strong and interesting traits. They are chiefly proud spirits. Poor himself, and struggling under the rich man's contumely, we may conceive it to have been the solace of his neglected existence to picture worth and magnanimity break- ing through external disadvantages, and making their way to love and admiration. Hence his fine conceptions of Paris, the actor, exciting by the splendid endowments of his nature the jealousy of the tyrant of the world ; and Don John and Pisander, habited as slaves, wooing and winning their princely mistresses. He delighted to show heroic virtue stripped of all adventitious circumstances, and tried, like a gem, by its shining through darkness. His ' Duke of Milan' is particularly admirable for the blended interest which the poet excites by the opposite weak- nesses and magnanimity of the same character. Sforza, Duke of Milan, newly married and uxoriously attached to the haughty * Sir Giles Overreach. 86 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. Marcelia, a woman of exquisite attractions, makes her an object of secret but deadly enmity at his court, by the extravagant homage which he requires to be paid to her, and the precedence which he enjoins even his own mother and sisters to yield her. As chief of Milan he is attached to the fortunes of Francis I. The sudden tidings of the approach of Charles V., in the cam- paign which terminated with the battle of Pavia, soon afterwards spread dismay through his court and capital. Sforza, though valiant and self-collected in all that regards the warrior or poli- tician, is hurried away by his immoderate passion for Marcelia ; and being obliged to leave her behind, but unable to bear the thoughts of her surviving him, obtains the promise of a con- fidant to destroy her, should his own death appear inevitable. He returns to his capital in safety. Marcelia, having discovered the secret order, receives him with coldness. His jealousy is in- flamed ; and her perception of that jealousy alienates the haughty object of his affection, when she is on the point of reconcilement. The fever of Sforza's diseased heart is powerfully described, passing from the extreme of dotage to revenge, and returning again from thence to the bitterest repentance and prostration, when he has struck at the life which he most loved, and has made, when it is too late, the discovery of her innocence. Mas- singer always enforces this moral in love; he punishes distrust, and attaches our esteem to the unbounded confidence of the passion. But while Sforza thus exhibits a warning against morbidly-selfish sensibility, he is made to appear, without vio- lating probability, in all other respects a firm, frank, and pre- possessing character. When his misfortunes are rendered desperate by the battle of Pavia, and when he is brought into the presence of Charles V., the intrepidity with which he pleads his cause disarms the resentment of his conqueror ; and the elo- quence of the poet makes us expect that it should do so. Instead of palliating his zeal for the lost cause of Francis, he thus pleads : " I come not, Emperor, to invade thy mercy By fawning on thy fortune, nor bring with me Excuses or denials ; I profess, And with a good man's confidence, even this instant That I am in thy power, I was thine enemy, Thy deadly and vow'd enemy; one that wish'd Confusion to thy person and estates, And with my utmost power, and deepest counsels, PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 87 Had they been truly follow'd, further'd it. Nor will 1 now, although my neck were under The hangman's axe, with one poor syllable Confess but that I honour'd the French king More than thyself and all men." After describing his obligations to Francis, he says " He was indeed to me as my good angel, To guard me from all danger. I dare speak, Nay must and w ill, his praise now in as high And loud a key as when he was thy equal. The benefits he sow'd in me met not Unthankful ground. * * * * * * * * If then to be grateful For benefits received, or not to leave A friend in his necessities, be a crime Amongst you Spaniards, Sforza brings his head To pay the forfeit. Nor come I as a slave, Pinion'd and fetter' d, in a squalid weed, Falling before thy feet, kneeling and howling For a forestall'd remission that were poor, And would but shame thy victory, for conquest Over base foes is a captivity, And not a triumph. I ne'er fear'd to die More than I wish'd to live. When I had reach'd My ends in being a duke, I wore these robes, This crown upon my head, and to my side This sword was girt ; and, witness truth, that now 'Tis in another's power, when I shall part With life and them together, I'm the same My veins then did not swell with pride, nor now Shrink.they for fear." If the vehement passions were not Massinger's happiest element, he expresses fixed principle with an air of authority. To make us feel the elevation of genuine pride was the master- key which he knew how to touch in human sympathy ; and his skill in it must have been derived from deep experience in his own bosom.* The theatre of Beaumont and Fletcher contains all manner of good and evil. Fletcher's share in the works collectively pub- * [Although incalculably superior to his contemporaries, Shakspeare had successful imitators; and the art of Jonson was not unrivalled. Massinger appears to have studied the works of both, with the intention of uniting their excellences. He knew the strength of plot ; and although his plays are altogether irregular, yet he well understood the advantage of a strong and defined interest ; and in unravelling the intricacy of his intrigues he often displays the management of a master. Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 342.] 88 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. lished with their names is by far the largest ; and he is chargeable with the greatest number of faults, although at the same time his genius was more airy, prolific, and fanciful. There are such extremes of grossness and magnificence in their drama, so much sweetness and beauty interspersed with views of nature either falsely romantic or vulgar beyond reality; there is so much to animate and amuse us, and yet so much that we would willingly overlook, that I cannot help comparing the contrasted impressions which they make to those which we receive from visiting some great and ancient city, picturesquely but irregularly built, glittering with spires and surrounded with gardens, but exhibiting in many quarters the lanes and hovels of wretchedness. They have scenes of wealthy and high life which remind us of courts and palaces frequented by elegant females and high- spirited gallants, whilst their noble old martial characters, with Caractacus in the midst of them, may inspire us with the same sort of regard which we pay to the rough-hewn magnificence of an ancient fortress. Unhappily, the same simile, without being hunted down, will apply but too faithfully to the nuisances of their drama. Their language is often basely profligate. Shakspeare's and Jonson's indelicacies are but casual blots, whilst theirs are sometimes essential colours of their painting, and extend, in one or two instances, to entire and offensive scenes. This fault has deservedly injured their reputation ; and, saving a very slight allowance for the fashion and taste of their age, admits of no sort of apology.* Their drama, nevertheless, is a very wide one, and " has ample room and verge enough "f to permit the attention to wander from these and to fix on more inviting peculiarities as on the great variety of their fables and personages, their spirited dialogue, their wit, pathos, and humour. Thickly sown as their blemishes are, their merit will bear great deductions, and still remain great. "We never can forget such beautiful characters as their Cellide, their Aspatia, and Bellario, or such humorous ones as their La * [Ravenscroft, the filthiest writer for the stage in the reign of the second Charles, is not more obscene than Beaumont and Fletcher. Yet Earle, who was in the church and a bishop withal, praises their plays for their purity ; and Lovelace likens the nakedness of their language to Cupid dressed in Diana's linen.] t [Dryden.] PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 89 Writ and Cacafogo. Awake they will always keep us, whether to quarrel or to be pleased with them. Their invention is fruit- ful ; its beings are on the whole an active and sanguine genera- tion ; and their scenes are crowded to fulness with the warmth, agitation, and interest of life. In thus speaking of them together, it may be necessary to allude to the general and traditionary understanding that Beaumont was the graver and more judicious genius of the two. Yet the plays in which he may be supposed to have assisted Fletcher are by no means remarkable either for harmonious adjustment of parts or scrupulous adherence to probability. In their ' Laws of Candy,' the winding up of the plot is accomplished by a young girl commanding a whole bench of senators to descend from their judgment-seats, in virtue of an ancient law of the state which she discovers ; and they obey her with the most polite alacrity. ' Cupid's Eevenge ' is assigned to them con- jointly, and is one of the very weakest of their worst class of pieces. On the other hand Fletcher produced his ' Rule a Wife and have a Wife ' after Beaumont's death, so that he was able, when he chose, to write with skill as well as spirit. Of that skill, however, he is often so sparing as to leave his characters subject to the most whimsical metamorphoses. Some- times they repent, like Methodists, by instantaneous conversion. At other times they shift from good to bad, so as to leave us in doubt what they were meant for. In the tragedy of ' Valen- tinian ' we have a fine old soldier, Maximus, who sustains our affection through four acts, but in the fifth we are suddenly called upon to hate him, on being informed by his own confes- sion that he is very wicked, and that all his past virtue has been but a trick on our credulity. The imagination in this case is disposed to take part with the creature of the poet's brain against the poet himself, and to think that he maltreats and calumniates his own offspring unnaturally.* But for these faults Fletcher * The most amusingly absurd perhaps'of all Fletcher's bad plays is ' The Island Princess.' One might absolutely take it for a burlesque on the heroic drama, if its religious conelusion did not show the author to be in earnest. Quisara, Princess of the island of Tidore, where the Portuguese have a fort, offers her hand in marriage to any champion who shall deliver her brother, a captive of the governor of Ternata. Ruy Bias, her Portu- guese lover, is shy of the adventure ; but another lover, Armusia, hires a 90 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. makes good atonement, and has many affecting scenes. We must still indeed say scenes ; for, except in ' The Faithful Shep- herdess,' which, unlike his usual manner, is very lulling, where shall we find him uniform ? If ' The Double Marriage ' could be cleared of some revolting passages, the part of Juliana would not be unworthy of the powers of the finest tragic actress. Juliana is a high attempt to portray the saint and heroine blended in female character. When her husband Virolet's conspiracy against Ferrand of Naples is discovered, she endures and braves for his sake the most dreadful cruelties of the tyrant. Virolet flies from his country, obliged to leave her behind him, and, falling at sea into the hands of the pirate Duke of Sesse, saves himself and his associates from death, by consenting to marry the daughter of the pirate (Martia), who falls in love and boat, with a few followers, which he hides, on landing at Tidore, among the reeds of the invaded island. He then disguises himself as a merchant, hires a cellar, like the Popish conspirators, and in the most credible manner blows np a considerable portion of a large town, rescues the king, slaughters all opposers, and re-embarks in his yawl from among the reeds. On his return he finds the lovely Quisara loth to fulfil her promise, from her being still somewhat attached to Ruy Dias. The base Ruy Dias sends his nephew, Piniero, to the Island Princess, with a project of assassinating Armusia ; but Piniero, who is a merry fellow, thinks it better to prevent his uncle's crime and to make lofre for himself. Before his introduction to the Princess, how- ever, he meets with her aunt Quisana, to whom he talks abundance of ribaldry and double entendre, and so captivates the aged woman, that she exclaims to her attendant, " Pray thee let him talk still, for methinks he talks handsomely ! " With the young lady he is equally successful, offers to murder anybody she please?, and gains her affections so far that she kisses him. The poor virtuous Armusia, in the mean time, determines to see his false Princess, makes his way to her chamber, and, in spite of her reproaches and her late kiss to Piniero, at last makes a new impression on her heart. The dear Island Princess is in love a third time, in the third act. In the fourth act the King of Tidore, lately delivered by Armusia, plots against the Christians ; he is accompanied by a Moorish priest, who is no other than the governor of Ternata, disguised in a false wig and beard -, but his Tidorian Majesty recollects his old enemy so imperfectly as to be completely deceived. This conspiracy alarms the Portuguese; the cowardly Ruy Dias all at once grows brave and generous ; Quisara joins the Christ- ians, and, for the sake of Armusia and her new faith, offers to be burnt alive. Nothing remains but to open the eyes of her brother, the King of Tidore. This is accomplished by the merry Piniero laying hold of the masqued governor's beard, which comes away without the assistance of a barber. The monarch exclaims that he cannot speak for astonishment, and everything concludes agreeably. ' The Island Princess ' is not unlike some of the romantic dramas of Dryden's time ; but the later play-writers super- added a style of outrageous rant and turgid imagery. PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 91 elopes with him from her father's ship. As they carry off with them the son of Ferrand, who had been a prisoner of the Duke of Sesse, Virolet secures his peace being made at Naples ; but when he has again to meet Juliana he finds that he has purchased life too dearly. When the ferocious Martia, seeing his repent- ance, revenges herself by plotting his destruction, and when his divorced Juliana, forgetting her injuries, flies to warn and to save him, their interview has no common degree of interest. Juliana is perhaps rather a fine idol of the imagination than a probable type of nature ; but poetry, which " conforms the shows of things to the desires of the soul,"* has a right to the highest possible virtues of human character. And there have been women who have prized a husband's life above their own, and his honour above his life, and who have united the tenderness of their sex to heroic intrepidity. Such is Juliana, who thus ex- horts the wavering fortitude of Virolet on the eve of his con- spiracy : " Virolet. * * Unless our hands were cannon To batter down his walls, our weak breath mines To blow his forts up, or our curses lightning, Our power is like to yours, and we, like you, Weep our misfortunes." * * * * She replies * * * Walls of brass resist not A noble undertaking nor can vice Raise any bulwark to make good a place Where virtue seeks to enter." The joint dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher, entitled ( Philas- ter ' and ' The Maid's Tragedy,' exhibit other captivating female portraits. The difficulty of giving at once truth, strength, and delicacy to female repentance for the loss of honour, is finely accomplished in Evadne. The stage has perhaps few scenes more affecting than that in which she obtains forgiveness of Amintor on terms which interest us in his compassion without compromising his honour. In the same tragedy, f the plaintive image of the forsaken Aspatia has an indescribably sweet spirit and romantic expression. Her fancy takes part with her heart, and gives its sorrow a visionary gracefulness. When she finds * Expression of Lord Bacon's. } The Maid's Tragedy. 92 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. her maid Antiphila working a picture of Ariadne, she tells her to copy the likeness from herself, from " the lost Aspatia :" "Asp. But where's the lady ? Ant. There, Madam. Asp. Fie, you have miss'd it here, Antiphila ; These colours are not dull and pale enough To show a soul so full of misery As this sad lady's was. Do it by me Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, And you shall find all true. Put me on the wild island. I stand upon the sea-beach now, and think Mine arms thus, and my hair blown by the wind Wild as that desert, and let all about me Be teachers of my story. * * * * * * * Strive to make me look Like Sorrow's monument ; and the trees about me, Let them be dry and leafless ; let the rocks Groan with continual surges ; and behind me Make all a desolation. See, see, wenches, A miserable life of this poor picture." The resemblance of this poetical picture to Guido's Bacchus and Ariadne has been noticed by Mr. Seward in the preface to his edition of Beaumont and Fletcher. " In both representations the extended arms of the mourner, her hair blown by the wind, the barren roughness of the rocks around her, and the broken trunks of leafless trees, make her figure appear like Sorrow's monument." Their masculine characters in tragedy are generally much less interesting than their females. Some exceptions may be found to this remark ; particularly in the British chief Caracta- cus, and his interesting nephew the boy Hengo. With all the faults of the tragedy of ' Bonduca,' its British subject and its native heroes attach our hearts. We follow Caractacus to battle and captivity with a proud satisfaction in his virtue. The stubborn- ness of the old soldier is finely tempered by his wise, just, and candid respect for his enemies the Romans, and by his tender affection for his princely ward. He never gives way to sorrow till he looks on the dead body of his nephew, Hengo, when he thus exclaims : * * " Farewell the hopes of Britain ! Farewell thou royal graft for ever ! Time and Death, Ye have done your worst. Fortune, now see, now proudly Pluck off thy veil, and view thy triumph. PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTUEY. 93 ***** fair flower, How lovely yet thy ruins show how sweetly Ev'n Death embraces thee ! The peace of Heaven, The fellowship of all great souls, go with thee ! " The character must be well supported which yields a sensation of triumph in the act of surrendering to victorious enemies. Caractacus does not need to tell us that when a brave man has done his duty he cannot be humbled by fortune but he makes us feel it in his behaviour. The few brief and simple sentences which he utters in submitting to the Romans, together with their respectful behaviour to him, give a sublime composure to his appearance in the closing scene. Dryden praises the gentlemen of Beaumont and Fletcher in comedy as the true men of fashion of " the times." It was neces- sary that Dryden should call them the men of fashion of the times, for they are not in the highest sense of the word gentle- men. Shirley's comic characters have much more of the con- versation and polite manners which we should suppose to belong to superior life in all ages and countries. The genteel charac- ters of Fletcher form a narrower class, and exhibit a more par- ticular image of their times and country. But their comic personages, after all, are a spirited race. In one province of the facetious drama they set the earliest example ; witness their humorous mock-heroic comedy, ' The Knight of the Burning- Pestle.'* The memory of Ford has been deservedly revived as one of the ornaments of our ancient drama, though he has no great body of poetry, and has interested in us no other passion except that of love ; but in that he displays a peculiar depth and delicacy * [Beaumont and Fletcher seemed to have followed Shakspeare's mode of composition, rather than Jonson's. They may, indeed, be rather said to have taken for their model the boundless licence of the Spanish stage, from which many of their pieces are expressly and avowedly derived. The acts of their plays are so detached from each other in substance and consistency, that the plot can scarce be said to hang together at all, or to have, in any sense of the word, a beginning, progress, and conclusion. It seems as if the play began because the curtain rose, and ended because it fell. Sir Walter Scott, Misc. Prose Works, vol. vi. p. 343. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots are wholly inartificial ; they only care to pitch a character into a position to make him or her talk ; you must swallow all their gross improbabilities, and, taking it all for granted, attend only to the dialogue. Coleridge, Table Talk, p. 200.] 94 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. of romantic feeling.* Webster has a gloomy force of imagina- tion, not unmixed with the beautiful and pathetic. But it is " beauty in the lap of horror :" he caricatures the shapes of ter- ror, and his Pegasus is like a nightmare. Middleton,t Marston, Thomas Heywood, Decker, and Chapman, also present subordi- nate claims to remembrance in that fertile period of the drama. Shirley was the last of our good old dramatists. When his works shall be given to the public they will undoubtedly en- rich our popular literature.! His language sparkles with the most exquisite images. Keeping some occasional pruriencies apart, the fault of his age rather than of himself, he speaks the most polished and refined dialect of the stage ; and even some of his over-heightened scenes of voluptuousness are meant, though with a very mistaken judgment, to inculcate morality. I consider his genius, indeed, as rather brilliant and elegant than strong or lofty. His tragedies are defective in fire, gran- deur, and passion ; and we must select his comedies to have any favourable idea of his humour. His finest poetry comes forth in situations rather more familiar than tragedy and more grave than comedy, which I should call sentimental comedy, if the name were not associated witli ideas of modern insipidity. That he was capable, however, of pure and excellent comedy will be felt by those who have yet in reserve the amusement of reading his ' Gamester,' ' Hyde Park,' and ' Lady of Pleasure.' * [Mr. Campbell observes that Ford interests us in no other passion than that of love; "in -which he displays a peculiar depth and delicacy of romantic feeling." Comparatively speaking, this may be admitted; but in justice to the poet, it should* be added that he was not insensible to the power of friendship, and in more than one of his dramas has delineated it with a master-hand. Had the critic forgotten the noble Dal yell? the. generous and devoted Malfato ? Mr. Campbell, however, terms him " one of the ornaments of our ancient drama." Gifford, Ford, p. xl.] f Middleton's hags, in the tragi-comedy of ' The Witch,' were conjectured by Mr. Steeveus to have given the hint to Shakspeare of his witches in ' Macbeth.' It has been repeatedly remarked, however, that the resemblance scarcely extends beyond a few forms of incantation. The hags of Middleton are merely mischievous old women, those of Shakspeare influence the elements of nature and the destinies of man. J [They have been since published in six volumes octavo the plays with notes by Gifford, the poems with notes by Mr. Dyce.] The scene in Shirley's ' Love's Cruelty,' for example, between Hippo- lito and the object of his admiration, act iv., scene i., and another in ' The Grateful Servant,' between Belinda and Lodwick. Several more might be mentioned. PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 95 In the first and last of these there is a subtle ingenuity in pro- ducing comic effect and surprise, which might be termed Attic, if it did not surpass anything that is left us in Athenian comedy. I shall leave to others the more special enumeration of his faults, only observing, that the airy touches of his expression, the delicacy of his sentiments, and the beauty of his similes, are often found where the poet survives the dramatist, and where he has not power to transfuse life and strong individuality through the numerous characters of his voluminous drama. His style, to use a line of his own, is " studded like a frosty night with stars ;" and a severe critic might say that the stars often shine when the atmosphere is rather too frosty. In other words, there is more beauty of fancy than strength of feeling in his works. From this remark, however, a defender of his fame might justly appeal to exceptions in many of his pieces. From a general impression of his works I should not paint his Muse with the haughty form and features of inspiration, but with a countenance, in its happy moments, arch, lovely, and interesting, both in smiles and in tears ; crowned with flowers, and not unindebted to ornament, but wearing the drapery and chaplet with a claim to them from natural beauty. The contempt which Dryden expresses for Shirley* might surprise us, if it were not recollected that he lived in a degenerate age of dramatic taste, and that his critical sentences were neither infallible nor immutable. He at one time undervalued Otway, though he lived to alter his opinion.f The civil wars put an end to this dynasty of our dramatic poets. Their immediate successors or contemporaries, belonging to the reign of Charles I., many of whom resumed their lyres after the interregnum, may, in a general view, be divided into the classical and metaphysical schools. The former class, con- taining Denham, Waller, arid Carew, upon the whole cultivated * [In Mac Flecknoe.] t [That Dryden at any time undervalued Otway we have no other proof than a coffee-house criticism, retailed, though the retailer was Otway himself, at secondhand. The play that Dryden is said to have spoken petulantly and disparagingly about was ' Don Carlos.' ' The Orphan ' and ' Venice Preserved ' were of a later date, and justified Dryden's firm conviction that Otway possessed the art of expressing the passions and emotions of the mind as thoroughly as any of the ancients or moderns. ' Don Carlos ' gives no promise of ' The Orphan,' or of ' Venice Preserved.'] 96 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. smooth and distinct melody of numbers, correctness of imagery, and polished elegance of expression. The latter, in which Herrick and Cowley stood at the head of Donne's metaphysical followers, were generally loose or rugged in their versification, and preposterous in their metaphors. But this distinction can only be drawn in very general terms ; for Cowley, the prince of the metaphysicians, has bursts of natural feeling and just thoughts in the midst of his absurdities. And Herrick, who is O * equally whimsical, has left some little gems of highly-finished composition. On the other hand, the correct Waller is some- times metaphysical ; and ridiculous hyperboles are to be found in the elegant style of Carew. The characters of Den ham, Waller, and Cowley have been often described. Had Cowley written nothing but his prose it would have stamped him a man of genius and an improver of our language. Of his poetry Rochester indecorously said, that, " not being of God, it could not stand."* Had the word nature been substituted, it would have equally conveyed the intended meaning, but still that meaning would not have been strictly just.")" There is much in Cowley that will stand. He teems, in many places, with the imagery, the feeling, the grace, and gaiety of a poet. Nothing but a severer judgment was wanting to col- lect the scattered lights of his fancy. His unnatural flights arose less from affectation than self-deception. He cherished false thoughts as men often associate with false friends, not from in- sensibility to the difference between truth and falsehood, but from being too indolent to examine the difference. Herrick, if we were to fix our eyes on a small portion of his works, might be pronounced a writer of delightful Anacreontic spirit. He has passages where the thoughts seem to dance into numbers from his very heart, and where he frolics like a being made up of melody and pleasure ; as when he sings " Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying ; And this same flower that blooms to-day, To-morrow will be dying." * [Told on the authority of Dryden. (Ma/one, vol. iv. p. 6 1 2.) Yet Burnet, Joseph Warton, and Johnson speak of Cowley as Rochester's favourite author.] f [Nature is but a name for au effect Whose cause is God. Cowper, The Task, b. vi.] PART ni.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 97 In the same spirit are his verses to Anthea, concluding " Thou art my life, my love, my heart, The very eyes of me ; And hast command of every part, To live and die for thee." But his beauties are so deeply involved in surrounding coarse- ness and extravagance, as to constitute not a tenth part of his poetry ; or rather it may be safely affirmed, that, of 1400 pages of verse which he has left, not a hundred are worth reading. In Milton there may be traced obligations to several minor English poets ; but his genius had too great a supremacy to belong to any school. Though he acknowledged a filial rever- ence for Spenser as a poet, he left no Gothic irregular tracery in the design of his own great work, but gave a classical har- mony of parts to its stupendous pile. It thus resembles a dome, the vastness of which is at first sight concealed by its symmetry, but which expands more and more to the eye while it is contem- plated. His early poetry seems to have neither disturbed nor corrected the bad taste of his age. ' Comus' came into the world unacknowledged by its author, and ' Lycidas' appeared at first only with his initials.* These, and other exquisite pieces, composed in the happiest years of his life, at his father's country-house at Horton, were collectively published, witli his name affixed to them, in 1645 ; but that precious volume, which included ' L' Allegro' and ' II Penseroso,' did not come to a second edition till it was republished by himself at the distance of eight-and- twenty years.f Almost a century elapsed before his minor works obtained their proper fame. Handel's music is said, by Dr. Warton, to have drawn the first attention to them ; but they must have been admired before Handel set them to music, for he was assuredly not the first to discover their beauty. But of Milton's poetry being above the comprehension of his age we should have a sufficient proof, if we had no other, in the grave remark of Lord Clarendon, that Cowley had in his time " taken a flight above all men in poetry " Even when ' Paradise Lost' appeared, though it was not neglected, it attracted no crowd of imitators, and made no visible change in the poetical practice of the age. He stood alone and aloof above his times, the bard * [Comus, 1637 Lycidas, 1638.] f [1673.] H 98 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PAHT m. of immortal subjects, and, as far as there is perpetuity in lan- guage, of immortal fame. The very choice of those subjects bespoke a contempt for any species of excellence that was attain- able by other men. There is something that overawes the mind in conceiving his long-deliberated selection of that theme his attempting it when his eyes were shut upon the face of nature his dependence, we might almost say, on supernatural inspiration, and in the calm air of strength with which he opens ' Paradise Lost,' beginning a mighty performance without the appearance of an effort.* Taking the subject all in all, his powers could nowhere else have enjoyed the same scope. It was only from the height of this great argument that he could look back upon eternity past, and forward upon eternity to come ; that he could survey the abyss of infernal darkness, open visions of Paradise, or ascend to heaven and breathe empyreal air. Still the subject had precipitous difficulties. It obliged him to relinquish the warm, multifarious interests of human life. For these indeed he could substitute holier things ; but a more insuperable objec- tion to the theme was, that it involved the representation of a war between the Almighty and his created beings. To the vicissitudes of such a warfare it was impossible to make us attach the same fluctuations of hope and fear, the same curiosity, sus- pense, and sympathy, which we feel amidst the battles of the ' Iliad,' and which make every brave young spirit long to be in the midst of them. Milton has certainly triumphed over one difficulty of his sub- ject the paucity and the loneliness of its human agents ; for no one in contemplating the garden of Eden would wish to exchange it for a more populous world. His earthly pair could only be represented, during their innocence, as beings of simple * [There is a solemnity of sentiment, as well as majesty of numbers, in the exordium of this noble poem, which in the works of the ancients has no example We cannot read this exordium without perceiving that the author possesses more fire than he shows. There is a suppressed force in it, the effect of judgment. His judgment controls his genius, and his genius reminds us (to use his own beautiful similitude) of " A proud steed rein'd, Champing his iron curb." He addresses himself to the performance of great things, but makes no great exertion in doing it, a sure symptom of uncommon vigour. Cowper, Commentary.] PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 99 enjoyment and negative virtue, with no other passions than the fear of Heaven and the love of each other. Yet, from these materials, what a picture has he drawn of their homage to the Deity, their mutual affection, and the horrors of their alienation ! By concentrating all exquisite ideas of external nature in the representation of their abode by conveying an inspired impres- sion of their spirits and forms, whilst they first shone under the fresh light of creative Heaven by these powers of description, he links our first parents, in harmonious subordination, to the angelic natures he supports them in the balance of poetical importance with their divine coadjutors and enemies, and makes them appear at once worthy of the friendship and envy of gods. In the angelic warfare of the poem, Milton has done whatever human genius could accomplish. But, although Satan speaks of having " put to proof his [Maker's] high supremacy, in dubious battle, on the plains of heaven," the expression, though finely characteristic of his blasphemous pride, does not prevent us from feeling that the battle cannot for a moment be dubious. Whilst the powers of description and language are taxed and exhausted to portray the combat, it is impossible not to feel, with regard to the blessed spirits, a profound and reposing security that they have neither great dangers to fear, nor reverses to suffer. At the same time it must be said that, although in the actual contact of the armies the inequality of the strife becomes strongly visible to the imagination, and makes it a contest more of noise than terror, yet, while positive action is suspended, there is a warlike grandeur in the poem which is nowhere to be paralleled. When Milton's genius dares to invest the Almighty himself with arms, " his bow and thunder," the astonished mind admits the image with a momentary credence.* It is otherwise when we are in- volved in the circumstantial details of the campaign. We have then leisure to anticipate its only possible issue, and can feel no alarm for any temporary check that may be given to those who fight under the banners of Omnipotence. The warlike part of ' Paradise Lost ' was inseparable from its subject. Whether it could have been differently managed, is a problem which our reverence for Milton will scarcely permit us to state. I feel that * [Book vi. 1. 712. The bow and sword of the Almighty are copied from Psalms vii. and xlv.] H 2 100 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. reverence too strongly to suggest even the possibility that Milton could have improved his poem by having thrown his angelic warfare into more remote perspective ; but it seems to me to be most sublime when it is least distinctly brought home to the imagination. What an awful effect has the dim and undefined conception of the conflict which we gather from the opening of the first book ! There the veil of mystery is left undrawn between us and a subject which the powers of description were inadequate to exhibit. The ministers of divine vengeance and pursuit had been recalled the thunders had ceased " To bellow through the vast and boundless deep" Book i. v. 177 (in that line what an image of sound and space is conveyed !) * and our terrific conception of the past is deepened by its indis- tinctness.f In optics there are some phenomena which are beautifully deceptive at a certain distance, but which lose their illusive charm on the slightest approach to them that changes the light and position in which they are viewed. Something like this takes place in the phenomena of fancy. The array of the fallen angels in hell the unfurling of the standard of Satan and the march of his troops "In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood Of flutes aiid soft recorders" Book i. 1. 550 all this human pomp and circumstance of war is magic and overwhelming illusion. The imagination is taken by surprise. But the noblest efforts of language are tried with very unequal effect to interest us in the immediate and close view of the battle itself in the sixth book ; and the martial demons, who charmed us in the shades of hell, lose some portion of their sublimity when their artillery is discharged in the daylight of heaven. * [In this line we seem to hear a thunder suited both to the scene and the occasion, incomparably more awful than any ever heard on earth. The thunder of Milton is not hurled from the hand like Homer's, but discharged like an arrow ; as if jealous for the honour of a true God, the poet disdained to arm him like the God of the heathen. Cowper.] t [Of all the articles of which the dreadful scenery of Milton's hell con- sists, Scripture furnished him only with a lake of fire and brimstone. Yet thus slenderly assisted, what a world of woe has he constructed, proved, in this single instance, the most creative that ever poet owned! Cowper. The slender materials for ' Comus ' and ' Paradise Regained ' are alike wonderful, and attest the truth of Cowper's remark.] PAKT in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 101 If we call diction the garb of thought, Milton, in his style, may be said to wear the costume of sovereignty. The idioms even of foreign languages contributed to adorn it. He was the most learned of poets; yet his learning interferes not with his substantial English purity.* His simplicity is unimpaired by glowing ornament, like the bush in the sacred flame, which burnt but " was not consumed." In delineating the blessed spirits, Milton has exhausted all the conceivable variety that could be given to pictures of unshaded sanctity ; but it is chiefly in those of the fallen angels that his excellence is conspicuous above everything ancient or modern. Tasso had, indeed, portrayed an infernal council, and had given the hint to our poet of ascribing the origin of pagan worship to those reprobate spirits. But how poor and squalid, in compa- rison of the Miltonic Pandaemonium, are the Scyllas, the Cy- clopses, and the Chimeras of the Infernal Council of the ' Jeru- salem' ! Tasso's conclave of fiends is a den of ugly incongruous monsters : " O come strane, o come orribil forme ! Quant e negli occhi lor terror, e morte ! Stampano alcuni il suol di ferine orme E'n fronte umana han chiome d' angui attorte E lor s'aggira dietro immensa loda Che quasi sferza si ripiega, e snoda. Qui mille immonde Arpie vedestri, e mille Centauri, e Sfingi, e pallide Gorgoni, Molte e molte latrar voraci Scille E fischiar Idre, e sibilar Pitoni, E votnitar Chimere atre faville E Polifemi orrendi, e Gerioni. * * * * * La Gerusalemme, canto iv. The powers of Milton's hell are godlike shapes and forms. Their appearance dwarfs every other poetical conception, when we turn our dilated eyes from contemplating them. It is not their external attributes alone which expand the imagination, but their souls, which are as colossal as their stature their " thoughts that wander through eternity " the pride that burns amidst * [Our most learned poets were classed by Joseph Warton, a very com- petent judge, in the following order: 1. Milton. 2. Jonson. 3. Gray, 4. Akenside. Milton and Gray were of Cambridge; Ben Jonson was a very short time there, not long enough however to catch much of the learning of the place ; but Akenside was of no college it is believed self-taught.] 102 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. the ruins of their divine natures and their genius, that feels with the ardour and debates with the eloquence of heaven. The subject of * Paradise Lost ' was the origin of evil an era in existence an event more than all others dividing past from future time an isthmus in the ocean of eternity. The theme was in its nature connected with everything important in the circumstances of human history ; and amidst these circumstances Milton saw that the fables of Paganism were too important and poetical to be omitted. As a Christian, he was entitled wholly to neglect them ; but as a poet, he chose to treat them, not as dreams of the human mind, but as the delusions of infernal exist- ences. Thus anticipating a beautiful propriety for all classical allusions, thus connecting and reconciling the co-existence of fable and of truth, and thus identifying the fallen angels with the deities of " gay religions, full of pomp and gold," he yoked the heathen mythology in triumph to his subject, and clothed him- self in the spoils of superstition. One eminent production of wit, namely, ' Hudibras,' may be said to have sprung out of the Restoration, or at least out of the contempt of fanaticism, which had its triumph in that event ; otherwise, the return of royalty contributed as little to improve the taste as the morality of the public. The drama degenerated, owing, as we are generally told, to the influence of French lite- rature, although some infection from the Spanish stage might also be taken into the account. Sir William Davenant, who presided over the first revival of the theatre, was a man of cold and didactic spirit ; he created an era in the machinery, costume, and ornaments of the stage, but he was only fitted to be its me- chanical benefactor. Dryden, who could do even bad things with a good grace, confirmed the taste for rhyming and ranting tragedy. Two beautiful plays of Otway formed an exception to this degeneracy ; but Otway was cut off in the spring-tide of his genius, and his early death was, according to every appearance, a heavy loss to our drama. It has been alleged, indeed, in the present day, that Otway's imagination showed no prognostics of great future achievements ; but when I remember ' Venice Pre- served ' and ' The Orphan,' as the works of a man of thirty, I can PART in.] SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 103 treat this opinion no otherwise than to dismiss it as an idle assertion.* T Bown. Who is Goldsmith like, or Falconer, or Rogers, or Campbell himself? nferior writers imitate men of genius' strike out a path for themselves; heir numbers are all their own, like their thoughts.] 110 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. need not be asserted. He has a gracefully peculiar manner, though it is not calculated to be an universal one; and where, indeed, shall we find the style of poetry that could be pronounced an exclusive model for every composer ? His pauses have little variety, and his phrases are too much weighed in the balance of antithesis. But let us look to the spirit that points his antithesis, and to the rapid precision of his thoughts, and we shall forgive him for being too antithetic and sententious. Pope's works have been twice given to the world by editors who cannot be taxed with the slightest editorial partiality towards his fame. The last of these is the Rev. Mr. Bowles,* in speak- ing of whom I beg leave most distinctly to disclaim the slightest intention of undervaluing his acknowledged merit as a poet, however freely and fully I may dissent from his critical estimate of the genius of Pope. Mr. Bowles, in forming this estimate, lays great stress upon the argument that Pope's images are drawn from art more than from nature. That Pope was neither so insensible to the beauties of nature, nor so indistinct in de- scribing them, as to forfeit the character of a genuine poet, is what I mean to urge, without exaggerating his picturesqueness. But before speaking of that quality in his writings, I would beg leave to observe, in the first place, that the faculty by which a poet luminously describes objects of art is essentially the same faculty which enables him to be a faithful describer of simple nature ; in the second place, that nature and art are to a greater degree relative terms in poetical description than is generally recollected; and, thirdly, that artificial objects and manners are of so much importance in fiction, as to make the exquisite de- scription of them no less characteristic of genius than the descrip- tion of simple physical appearances. The poet is " creation's heir." He deepens our social interest in existence. It is surely by the liveliness of the interest which he excites in existence, and not by the class of subjects which he chooses, that we most fairly appreciate the genius or the life of life which is in him. * [Mr. Campbell wrote this in 1819; and in 1824 the late Mr. Roscoe gave another edition of Pope, but not the edition that is -wanted. Mr. Bowles was one of Joseph Warton's Winchester wonders ; and the taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened and con- firmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton was residing there.] PAST in.] EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Ill It is no irreverence to the external charms of nature to say, that they are not more important to a poet's study than the manners and affections of his species. Nature is the poet's goddess ; but by nature no one rightly understands her mere inanimate face however charming it may be or the simple landscape painting of trees, clouds, precipices, and flowers. Why then try Pope, or any other poet, exclusively by his powers of describing inani- mate phenomena ? Nature, in the wide and proper sense of the word, means life in all its circumstances nature moral as well as external. As the subject of inspired fiction, nature includes artificial forms and manners. Richardson is no less a painter of nature than Homer. Homer himself is a minute describer of works of art ;* and Milton is full of imagery derived from it. Satan's spear is compared to the pine that makes " the mast of some great ammiral," and his shield is like the moon, but like the moon artificially seen through the glass of the Tuscan artist.f * [But are his descriptions of works of art more poetical than his descrip- tions of the great feelings of nature ? Bowles's Invariable Principles, p. 15.] f [ " His ponderous shield, Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round, Behind him cast ; the broad circumference Hung on his shoulders, like the moon, whose orb Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views At evening, from the top of Fesole, Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands, Rivers, or mountains, on her spotty globe. His spear, to equal which the tallest pines, Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast Of some great ammiral, were but a wand." Par. Lost, b. 1. It is evident that Satan's spear is not compared to the mast of some great ammiral, though his shield is to the moon as seen through the glass of Ga- lileo. Milton's original (Cowley), whose images from art are of constant occurrence, draws his description of Goliah's spear from Norwegian hills : " His spear the trunk was of a lofty tree Which Nature meant some tall ship's mast should be." The poetry of the whole passage in Milton is in the images and names from nature, not from art " It is Fesole' and Valdarno that are poetical," says Mr. Bowles, " not the telescope." There is a spell, let us add, in the very names of Fesole and Valdarno. Milton's object in likening the shield of Satan to the moon, as seen through the glass of the Tuscan artist, was to give the clearest possible im- pression of the thing alluded to. " It is by no means necessary," says Cowper, " that a simile should be more magnificent than the subject ; it is 112 ESSAY ON ENGLISH POETRY. [PART in. The " spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife, the royal banner, and all quality, pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war,"* are all artificial images. When Shakspeare groups into one view the most sublime objects of the universe, he fixes first on " the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples."! Those who have ever witnessed the spectacle of the launching of a ship of the line will perhaps forgive me for add- ing this to the examples of the sublime objects of artificial life. Of that spectacle I can never forget the impression, and of having witnessed it reflected from the faces of ten thousand spectators. They seem yet before me I sympathise with their deep and silent expectation, and with their final burst of enthu- siasm. It was not a vulgar joy, but an affecting national solem- nity. When the vast bulwark sprang from her cradle, the calm water on which she swung majestically round gave the imagina- tion a contrast of the stormy element on which she was soon to ride. All the days of battle and the nights of danger which she had to encounter, all the ends of the earth which she had to visit, and all that she had to do and to suffer for her country, rose in awful presentiment before the mind ; and when the heart enough that it gives us a clearer and more distinct perception of it than we could have had without it. Were it the indispensable duty of a simile to elevate as well as to illustrate, what must be done with many of Homer's ? When he compares the Grecian troops, pouring themselves forth from camp and fleet in the plain of Troy, to bees issuing from a hollow rock or the body of Patroclus in dispute between the two armies to an ox-hide larded and stretched by the currier we must condemn him utterly as guilty of degrading his subject when he should exalt it. But the exaltation of his subject was no part of Homer's concern on these occasions ; he intended nothing more than the clearest possible impression of it on the minds of his hearers." Cowper's Works, by Southey, vol. xv. p. 321. When Johnson, in his ' Life of Gray,' laid it down as a rule that an epithet or metaphor drawn from Nature ennobles Art, an epithet or meta- phor drawn from Art degrades Nature, he had forgotten Homer, and the custom of all our poets.] * [ Othello, act iii. scene iii.] t \Tlie Tempest, act iv. scene i. One of the finest passages in Shakspeare is where he describes Fortune as a wheelwright would : " Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune ! All you gods, In general synod, take away her power ; Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel, And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven, As low as to the fiends." Hamlet, act ii. scene ii.]" PART in.] EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 113 gave her a benediction, it was like one pronounced on a living being.* Pope, while he is a great moral writer, though not elaborately picturesque, is by no means deficient as a painter of interesting external objects. No one will say that he peruses Eloisa's Epistle without a solemn impression of the pomp of Catholic superstition. In familiar description nothing can be more dis- * [In the controversy which Mr. Campbell's ' Specimens ' gave rise to, Mr. Bowles contended for this " Whether poetry be more immediately indebted to what is sublime or beautiful in the works of Nature or the works of Art ?" and taking Nature to himself, he argued that Mr. Campbell's ship had greater obligations to nature than to art for its poetic excellences. " It was indebted to nature," he writes, " for the winds that filled the sails ; for the sunshine that touched them with light ; for the waves on which it so tri- umphantly rode ; for the associated ideas of the distant regions of the earth it was to visit, the tempests it was to encounter ; and for being, as it were, endued with existence a thing of life." " Mr. Bowles asserts," says Lord Byron, " that Campbell's ship of the line derives all its poetry, not from art, but from nature. ' Take away the waves, the winds, the sun, &c. &c., one will become a stripe of blue bunting, and the other a piece of coarse canvas on three tall poles.' Very true : take away the waves, the winds, and there will be no ship at all, not only for poetical, but for any other purpose : and take away the sun, and we must read Mr. Bowles's pamphlet by candle-light. But the poetry of the ship does not depend on the waves, &c. ; on the contrary, the ship of the line confers its own poetry upon the waters, and heightens theirs. What was it attracted the thousands to the launch ? They might have seen the poetical calm water at Wapping, or in the London Dock, or in the Padding- ton Canal, or in a horse-pond, or in a slop-basin, or in any other vase ! Mr. Bowles contends," Lord Byron goes on to say, " that the pyramids of Egypt are poetical because of the ' association with boundless deserts,' and that a ' pyramid of the same dimensions ' would not be sublime in Lincoln's Inn Fields : not so poetical, certainly ; but take away the ' pyra- mids,' and what is the ' desert' ? Take away Stonehenge from Salisbury Plain, and it is nothing more than Hounslow Heath, or any other unen- closed down. " There can be nothing more poetical in its aspect," he continues, " than the city of Venice. Does this depend upon the sea or the canal ? ' The dirt and seaweed whence proud Venice rose.' Is it the canal which runs between the palace and the prison, or the Bridge of Sic/hs, which connects them, that renders it poetical ? There would be nothing to make the canal of Venice more poetical than that of Paddington, were it not for its artificial adjuncts." But why should Nature and Art be made divisible by these controver- sialists ? in poetry they are not so : Otfre v