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 Literary Epochs 
 
 CHAPTERS ON NOTED PERIODS OF 
 INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE F. UNDERBILL. 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 ELLIOT STOCK, 62, PATERNOSTER ROW. 
 1887.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 'IN presenting this small volume to 
 the public the author wishes it to be 
 clearly understood that it is not his 
 intention to deal in a comprehensive 
 manner with such an inexhaustible 
 subject as the history of literature. 
 Neither personal biography nor 
 lengthy criticism is attempted in the 
 following pages. It is rather the 
 purpose of this work to prove that 
 the practical events of the world 
 
 2040037
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 are reflected in the mirror of contem- 
 porary writings, and from such argu- 
 ment to gain a logical explanation 
 for the fact that it has ever been the 
 tendency of intellectual power to 
 gather in clusters. 
 
 MIDDLE TEMPLE. 
 September, 1887.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION - - I 
 
 II. THE ANCIENT CLASSICS - - 8 
 
 III. MEDIEVAL ITALY - 34 
 
 IV. THE ELIZABETHAN ERA - "53 
 V. LOUIS XIV. - 103 
 
 VI. THE AGE OF ANNE - 131 
 
 VII. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 169 
 
 VIII. AMERICA - - 196 
 
 IX. CONCLUSION - - - 211
 
 I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 So much has already been written, 
 both in regard to the history of litera- 
 ture and also concerning the bio- 
 graphies of great authors, that it 
 would seem at first sight well-nigh 
 impossible to say anything on the 
 subject which has not been said 
 before. Bulky encyclopaedias and 
 huge dictionaries appear to have 
 sufficiently fulfilled the task of sup- 
 plying the student of literature with 
 the knowledge of every conceivable 
 fact that he may want to know. But, 
 except for purely practical purposes, 
 few men will devote their leisure
 
 2 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 hours to the trouble of research. 
 There are men who spend their lives 
 in acquiring a vast amount of know- 
 ledge, which they neither use them- 
 selves nor publish to the world for 
 the benefit of posterity. Such people 
 are merely reading machines, and 
 happily are rare. They are the 
 ciphers of the human race, who exist 
 without living. The essence of life is 
 activity. It is not the bookworm, 
 whose mind conceives luminous ideas 
 not before thought of, and who thus 
 founds a fresh school of philosophy, 
 but it is the man whose brain is being 
 ever stimulated to action, and who, 
 having reaped the knowledge of the 
 past, carries his learning with him 
 into the pursuits of real life, and, for 
 the good of his contemporaries and 
 those who come after him, adds his 
 mite of experience to that of the 
 sages from whose writings he himself 
 learnt to think. The value of history
 
 INTRODUCTION. 3 
 
 is that from the study of the past we 
 may learn how to act in the present. 
 It is from the knowledge of facts that 
 we form our conclusions, as it is from 
 thought that we learn how to apply 
 our knowledge. 
 
 Thus, when we come to examine 
 the history of literature, from the 
 earliest times of which we have any 
 trustworthy information down to the 
 present era, we find that certain 
 periods have been exceptionally pro- 
 lific in intellectual power. To use 
 De Quincey's phrase, there is a 
 marked gregariousness in human 
 genius. These periods are seldom 
 longer than two, or at the most three, 
 generations ; so that it would seem as 
 if the salutary conditions of the mind 
 were infectious, like many maladies of 
 the body. It may be described as 
 one of the effects of association, as 
 one of the many proofs of the influ- 
 ence that men have respectively on 
 
 I 2
 
 4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 each other's minds. But this influence 
 is only one of the minor reasons for 
 the tendency of intellectual power to 
 come forth to the world in isolated 
 groups of men inspired with genius. 
 It accounts for there being clusters of 
 great minds to some extent, but it 
 gives us no adequate explanation why 
 these clusters should appear at inter- 
 vals in the history of literature. In 
 order to explain this phenomenon, it 
 is necessary to examine carefully not 
 only the lives and writings of the men 
 who form the principal figures in these 
 clusters of intellect, but also to ex- 
 amine the history of the times in 
 which they lived, and so by compari- 
 son form an analysis of the causes 
 which tend to produce literary genius. 
 Such is the object of this book. 
 The nature of the inquiry has been 
 before this briefly dealt with in 
 modern times by De Quincey in his 
 essay on " Style," and in ancient times
 
 INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 by Velleius Paterculus in the Historia 
 Romana. In fact, the writings of the 
 latter seem to have suggested the 
 idea to De Quincey. But I am not 
 aware that the different epochs which 
 have been celebrated for literary 
 excellence have ever been separately 
 discussed with the view of finding out 
 the cause of such excellence. Genius 
 requires some excitement to stimulate 
 it into action, and to prevent its re- 
 maining latent. In short, whatever 
 intellectual pursuit a man devotes 
 himself to, he must have outside 
 sympathy in order to become emi- 
 nent. Thus it will be seen that in 
 each epoch there has been an exciting 
 influence and a sympathetic public 
 which caused men to strive for the 
 applause and appreciation of those of 
 their own day, and which gave birth 
 to the noble ambition of intellect, 
 that seeks for the praise of posterity. 
 The history of the world is but a
 
 6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 reproduction on a larger scale of the 
 history of a man's life. There is a 
 period of stirring excitement, when 
 every power, both physical and 
 mental, that has been implanted in 
 man becomes roused into incessant 
 activity, and great results are achieved. 
 
 Such is the day: then comes the 
 night, and, like man, succeeding 
 generations rest, contented with the 
 labours of those who have preceded 
 them, and allow the inherent vigour 
 of humanity to remain dormant. 
 Again they are awakened out of their 
 stupor ; and thus through countless 
 ages we find vigour and relaxation in 
 invariable succession. 
 
 And so it is with literature. In the 
 following pages let us endeavour to 
 discover the bugle-note which has so 
 often sounded to awaken the intellect 
 of man. The field for research is a 
 wide one so wide, indeed, that it 
 would be impossible within the limits
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 of one small volume to extend the 
 inquiry to every nation throughout 
 all time. It will be sufficient if, after 
 a cursory glance at ancient literature 
 as exemplified by Greece and Rome, 
 we confine ourselves to the Christian 
 era, and investigate the principal 
 periods of intellectual excellence in 
 Italy, France, Germany, England, and 
 America.
 
 II. 
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 MENTION has already been made of 
 De Quincey's reference to the Historia 
 Romana of Velleius Paterculus, though 
 De Quincey evidently assumed that 
 his readers were as profound classical 
 scholars as himself, and so omitted to 
 give the reference. By some unex- 
 plainable freak of fortune the Historia 
 Rojuana is but little read. It is not 
 in the category of public school read- 
 ing, nor yet in that of the universities. 
 Still it is the work of a philosophical 
 soldier, to be esteemed more for depth 
 of thought and vigour than for ele- 
 gance of style. As his remark on the
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 9 
 
 gregariousness of human genius may 
 be said to form the text of this volume, 
 no apology is necessary for quoting it 
 in full. The passage is to be found in 
 Liber I., Caput 16, and is as follows : 
 " Nequeo temperare mihi, quin rem 
 ssepe agitatam animo meo, neque ad 
 liquidum ratione perductam, signem 
 stilo. Quis enim abunde mirari po- 
 test, eminentissima cuj usque profes- 
 sionis ingenia, in eandem formam, et 
 in idem artati temporis congruens 
 spatium ; et quemadmodum clausa 
 capsa alioque septo diversi generis 
 animalia, nihilo minus separata alienis, 
 in unum quseque corpus congregantur, 
 ita cuj usque clari operis capacia in- 
 genia in similitudinem et temporum 
 et profectuum semetipsa ab aliis sepa- 
 raverunt ?" 
 
 Such was the observation of the 
 Roman soldier, namely, that the most 
 renowned genius in every intellectual 
 profession had appeared within the
 
 io THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 space of a generation. The observa- 
 tion was founded on the history of 
 Greece ; and no other nation through- 
 out all ages has afforded such a strik- 
 ing example of its truth. The fifth 
 century before Christ was probably 
 more prolific of literary genius than 
 any other century in the known his- 
 tory of the world. It was the golden 
 era of intellect. ^Eschylus, Sophocles, 
 and Euripides ; Cratinus, Aristophanes, 
 and Eupolis ; Anaxagoras, Socrates, 
 Xenophon, and Plato ; Herodotus and 
 Thucydides ; Phidias, Polygnotus, 
 Apollodorus, Zeuxis, and Parrhasius 
 these were the giants of genius, who 
 have never been surpassed in these 
 departments of learning, of which 
 they may almost be said to have been 
 the creators. 
 
 It has been said, with truth, that 
 the age of Pericles was the most re- 
 nowned for literary and artistic excel- 
 lence ; but I rather prefer, for the
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. u 
 
 present purpose, to call it the age 
 which succeeded the Persian Wars. 
 The battles of Plataea and Mycale 
 were fought in B.C. 479 ; and it was 
 owing to these victories that Greece 
 became a nation, and thus prevented 
 the wave of Eastern despotism from 
 overflowing Europe. If the result of 
 Marathon had been different, it is 
 probable that the whole of the world 
 would at this day have been sleeping 
 indolently under the combined in- 
 fluence of Asiatic despotism and 
 Asiatic languor. What, then, must 
 have been the spirit of the age which 
 was able to arrest the movement ? 
 What must have been the activity to 
 which the excitement of the times 
 stirred the minds of men ? It is im- 
 possible for us, who live in this un- 
 romantic era of nineteenth-century 
 civilization, to answer. We can only 
 surmise that at such epochs, more 
 especially when the world was young,.
 
 12 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 men became inspired by the influence 
 of the events which were going on 
 around them, so that posterity is 
 obliged to regard them as divini 
 spiritus. So Greece, when she had 
 effectually expelled the Persian in- 
 vaders, with all the strength of 
 youth and pride of victorious power, 
 seems to have spent all her energies 
 in giving to the world a generation of 
 men who have built for themselves " a 
 monument more lasting than brass." 
 
 I think, then, there can be little 
 doubt that the Persian Wars were the 
 primary cause of this mass of Grecian 
 intellect. Such events as wars, more 
 especially when one of the fighting 
 parties is a nation struggling for its 
 national liberty and existence, not only 
 oblige men to rouse themselves to 
 great physical exertion, but also tend 
 to produce incessant activity of mind, 
 so that even if a man is not himself 
 a creator of literature, yet he is able
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. i$ 
 
 to sympathize with the men who pre- 
 sent to him their creations. Without 
 sympathy, the loftiest genius will 
 wither and die. There is no more 
 convincing proof of the intellectual 
 refinement of the Greeks, as a people, 
 than the fact that even the masses 
 received with applause the works of 
 their great writers. 
 
 Lucian tells us that when Hero- 
 dotus recited his history at the great 
 Olympic games, the people shouted 
 forth their praise, and straightway 
 christened his books by the names of 
 the nine muses. This is only one out 
 of many instances. 
 
 In the case of poetry, and of dra- 
 matic poetry in particular, the writer 
 was yet still more dependent for suc- 
 cess on the public sympathy. The 
 poems were recited, and the audience 
 determined whether they should live, 
 or die an early death. And this, too, 
 in days when there were hardly any
 
 14 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 but the faintest class distinctions ; 
 when education was not confined to 
 the privileged few, but when acute 
 understanding and the refinement of 
 intellect were the natural inheritance 
 of the masses. Then it was not the 
 ignorant, but the learned masses ; 
 and they truly were the surest judges. 
 But the Persian Wars do not ac- 
 count for the innate intellectual 
 power of Greece ; they only account 
 for the fact of that power being called 
 into action. They were the bugle- 
 note arousing from the sleep of semi- 
 barbarity one of the most acute and 
 most imaginative races who ever 
 dwelt on the face of the earth. It is 
 not within the province of a literary 
 discussion to investigate the different 
 qualities which are the especial cha- 
 racteristics of various nations. We 
 know that they are the result of the 
 great law of inheritance. In the same 
 .manner as instinct is supposed to be
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 15 
 
 inherited knowledge, so are these 
 national qualities inherited habits, or, 
 more correctly, the outcome of in- 
 herited habits. The qualities of the 
 Athenians were excitement and im- 
 agination, and so they were by nature 
 probably more sympathetic than any 
 other race. They must either applaud 
 or hiss, and consequently they would 
 not tolerate mediocrity. The poet, 
 reciting his poems, knew that he must 
 touch their hearts and appeal to their 
 feel ings, otherwise he would be doomed 
 to failure ; and he knew also that to 
 win their applause he must show them 
 that he had as great a genius as his 
 compeers. 
 
 Thus by public recitation, more 
 particularly at the great Olympic 
 tribunal, that ambition was fostered, 
 without which no noteworthy result 
 in any department of human life can 
 ever be achieved. To the ambitious 
 man literature was then the high road
 
 1 6 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 to power; for Athenian life was not a 
 work-a-day life it was rather a life 
 of sensualism. The man who aspired 
 to greatness had to appeal to the eyes 
 and to the ears of the people by the 
 creations of his mind he must give 
 them pleasure. If he could do this 
 he gained the ascendency which was 
 his aim ; but if he relied only on his 
 wealth, or the practical utility of his 
 advice, he could not hope ever to 
 become popular. So the talent of 
 the nation was directed into the 
 channels of literature. The sense of 
 security engendered by the utter dis- 
 comfiture of the Persians had de- 
 stroyed the necessity for their being; 
 everlastingly engaged in all the bustle 
 of warlike preparation, so that they 
 expended the energy which patriotism 
 and hatred for a foreign country had 
 been the means of arousing on litera- 
 ture, philosophy, and the fine arts. 
 The Peloponnesian War, so far from
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 17 
 
 having an adverse influence on literary 
 genius, seems rather to have been 
 the means of preventing it declining 
 from that pitch of excellence to which 
 it had been stirred by the invasion of 
 Xerxes. In fact, it seems rather to have 
 been a series of domestic bickerings 
 between rival states than a war; it 
 prevented the populace from relapsing 
 into the languor of perfect peace, and 
 so rnay be said to have had a bene- 
 ficial effect on literature. 
 
 It will be thus seen that in con- 
 sidering the golden age of Athenian 
 genius the element of war holds a 
 prominent position, inasmuch as it 
 called forth into action the latent 
 powers of intellect which the Greeks 
 possessed. Undoubtedly the chief 
 feature of their literature was poetry, 
 in which they have never been sur- 
 passed. Leaving war entirely out of 
 the question, let us briefly examine 
 how it was that their minds were
 
 i8 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 so susceptible to the influence of 
 poetry. 
 
 The inherent principle of their re- 
 ligion was a love of beauty, while the 
 Pantheistic feelings which spring from 
 Polytheism led them to have a strong 
 sensibility to nature. The mytho- 
 logical legends which formed the 
 groundwork of their religious cult 
 caused them to have that fanciful 
 imagination which must of necessity 
 be the parent of poetry. With them 
 the phrases " love of beauty " and 
 " sympathy with nature " were not 
 mere theoretical expressions, for it 
 was on account of the presence of 
 those qualities that they were the 
 poetical people which they were. So 
 they were capable of grasping the 
 idealistic conceptions of the poets 
 sculptors, and painters whose name 
 now we venerate. It may not be in 
 accordance with nineteenth-century 
 philosophy to believe that a faun
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS, 19 
 
 dwells in a brook, or a naiad in a 
 fountain ; but the Athenian peasants 
 believed in fauns and naiads, and 
 when they heard their poets sing of 
 them, the song touched their hearts 
 with a chord of sympathy. So there 
 was an inflexible bond of union be- 
 tween the poets and the people. 
 Aristotle wrote, " The multitude is the 
 surest judge of the productions of 
 art ;" and thus it was that the Greeks 
 not only invented, but have never 
 been excelled in what are commonly 
 termed the fine arts. 
 
 So much for the age of Pericles. 
 Let us now take a stride of four 
 hundred years and examine the 
 Augustan era of Roman literature. 
 
 Like the age of Pericles, the age of 
 Augustus was mainly celebrated for 
 poetry ; in fact, with the exception of 
 Livy, whose style was too poetical for 
 historical writing, there is hardly a 
 prose writer of the time whose name 
 
 2 2
 
 20 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 has been handed down to posterity. 
 The death-blow had been given to 
 prose by the abolition of the legal 
 struggles in the forum, consequent 
 upon the accession of Augustus to 
 the purple of imperial power. Instead 
 of listening to the advocate at the 
 rostra, people now flocked to hear the 
 poet reciting his verses at the baths. 
 The change in the constitution had 
 worked a still greater change in the 
 domestic life of the Romans as a 
 nation. So the convulsion which had 
 taken place in public affairs had a 
 marked influence on the literature of 
 the times. 
 
 The age which preceded that of 
 Augustus, more commonly known as 
 the age of Cicero, was essentially an 
 age of rhetoric. Cicero was an orator, 
 not a writer. As an orator no doubt 
 he brought the Latin language to the 
 perfection for which it is celebrated. 
 Seneca wrote, " Quicquid Romana
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 21 
 
 facundia habuit, quod insolent! 
 Graeciae aut opponat aut praeferat 
 circa Ciceronem effloruit." If we 
 may draw a comparison between 
 Rome and modern times, we would 
 compare Cicero to Sir Edmund 
 Burke. They both influenced the 
 prose" of their country, and both were 
 too much engaged in the active life of 
 the political arena to enjoy that 
 peaceful calm which is the nurse of 
 literature. In the days of Cicero 
 Rome was full of the seething 
 passions caused by civil commotion. 
 The last days of the Republic were 
 at hand, and the contest for supreme 
 power was fiercely raging. At such 
 times national talent wastes itself on 
 the fruitless struggles of intestine 
 warfare, though, happily, only to be 
 revigorated by the reaction of the 
 succeeding peace. So, at least, it was 
 in the case of Rome. The fierce 
 rhetorical eloquence of Cicero, with
 
 22 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 which he had denunciated his oppo- 
 nents, led indirectly to the brilliant 
 period of Augustus. 
 
 The warlike nature of the Romans 
 was resting after the party conflicts in 
 which it had been engaged. Augustus 
 was firmly seated on the imperial 
 throne, and the Empire was founded 
 on a secure basis. The national 
 energy required a fresh field for ex- 
 pending itself; for the luxury and 
 vicious immorality which were so 
 conspicuous a few years later, and 
 subsequently caused the decline of 
 the Roman Empire, had not as yet 
 attained their full growth. Maecenas, 
 the apostle of literary patronage, was 
 all-powerful at court. An influx of 
 intellectual genius was therefore to be 
 expected, and the expectation was 
 not vain. 
 
 Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, Gallus, 
 Varius, Propertius, Ovid, and Livy. 
 Such was the procession of men who
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 23 
 
 were destined to hand down their 
 names to posterity, and make their 
 time remarkable for the genius which 
 it displayed. Space forbids that we 
 should examine the characteristics of 
 each individual who helped to form 
 this phalanx of minds. Virgil, Horace 
 and Ovid, as being the best known, 
 will suffice to serve our purpose. 
 From their writings we can gather 
 the nature of the literature which the 
 Empire had been the cause of pro- 
 moting. 
 
 It is the present fashion to con- 
 demn Virgil. It is said that he had 
 neither fertility of genius nor inven- 
 tive power ; and that he was a plagia- 
 rist, who borrowed from Theocritus. 
 This criticism appears to me to be as 
 unfair as it is foolish. The only argu- 
 ment for accusing him of want of 
 originality is that he transferred to 
 Italy the style of the Greek poems. 
 The truth or fallacy of this argument
 
 24 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 seems to be a matter of very little 
 importance ; but what is important is, 
 that he imbued the Latin language 
 with an excellent refinement of 
 diction which it had never before 
 possessed. Taken as a whole, pro- 
 bably the Bucolics were the best 
 poetry that he wrote ; but the j&neid, 
 the great task of his life, is the poem 
 by which posterity has chosen to 
 judge him. It is said that in his 
 modesty Virgil wished to have this 
 poem burnt. Fortunately his wish 
 was not gratified ; for although as an 
 epic poem the AZneid may be said to 
 have been a failure, yet it so teems 
 with the creations of poetical fancy 
 it contains so many passages the 
 beauty of which has never been sur- 
 passed that we thankfully forgive 
 the poet for having presented us with 
 a Greek instead of a Roman national 
 epic. But it must be borne in mind 
 that at the time at which Virgil wrote,
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 25 
 
 the old Italian traditions were already 
 becoming buried in oblivion, so that 
 there were hardly sufficient materials 
 to form a basis for a grand Italian 
 epic poem. Virgil did his best, and, 
 as we know, he himself was not satis- 
 fied with the result. It was not the 
 scheme of his work, but the thoughts 
 contained in it, which have won him 
 fame, and make us all long to pay a 
 pilgrimage to his tomb on Mount 
 Posilipo, 
 
 Of all the ancient classic poets 
 none has ever been, or is, so popular 
 as Horace. If all the extant copies 
 of his works could be burnt, there are 
 hundreds of men who could sit down 
 and write them again from memory. 
 We can imagine him now, living his 
 epicurean life on his little farm 
 amongst the Sabine hills, the embodi- 
 ment of intellectual refinement. Ami- 
 able, superior to the temptations of 
 wealthy patronage, enjoying luxury,
 
 26 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 yet, to use his own phrase, simplex 
 munditiis, he owned no master but his 
 sacred Muse. He lacked the lofty 
 grandeur of his contemporary, Virgil. 
 His songs were more like the soft 
 sounds of the lute than the majestic 
 swell of an operatic orchestra. They 
 lulled the minds of his listeners into 
 that calm serenity which they needed 
 after the turbulence of the preceding 
 ages. He was essentially the bard 
 who breathed the spirit of the times, 
 the spirit of leisurely peace. There is 
 one feature, moreover, which is espe- 
 cially prominent throughout all his 
 writings, and which tends to give us 
 some notion of what the domestic 
 character of the Romans was in the 
 early days of the Empire. I allude 
 to the Epicurean irony with which he 
 seems to have viewed everything. He 
 seems to have considered life to be 
 a huge farce, a stage given over to 
 the worship of folly. The essential
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 27 
 
 national characteristic of the Romans 
 was their love of war, and when cir- 
 cumstances forbad them indulging 
 this taste they sank into the slough or 
 vicious sensualism. Like a young 
 man racing along the road to ruin, 
 they were as yet only foolish ; they 
 had not become guilty of the sins 
 which aroused the satire of Juvenal. 
 It required the diabolical influence of 
 a Tiberius to bring this to pass. So 
 Horace sneered good-humouredly at 
 their folly, only reminding them of 
 the halcyon days of republican sim- 
 plicity. I have thought fit to make 
 this reference to the philosophy of 
 Horace, since it appears to be one of 
 the many proofs of the inseparable 
 connection that exists between the 
 history of literature and the history of 
 the contemporary times. 
 
 It only remains now to notice 
 Ovid, who was born twenty-two years 
 after Horace, and therefore more
 
 28 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 under the influence of the rapidly 
 growing luxury of the Empire. One 
 single line out of his writings serves 
 to illustrate this : 
 
 " Ille ego nequitise Naso poeta mese " 
 
 "/, the great Naso, the poet of my 
 own naughtiness." But here our con- 
 demnation of Ovid ends ; and if it 
 had not been for contemporary events 
 and contemporary life it is most prob- 
 able that this cause for condemnation 
 would never have existed. In review- 
 ing his writings and life there is one 
 point which cannot fail to strike us 
 forcibly. To use the words of 
 Niebuhr, Ovid was born with one of 
 the most happy temperaments that 
 heaven can bestow upon a man. Not 
 even his exile amongst the barbarians 
 at Tomi could damp the cheerfulness 
 of his disposition. It was this quality, 
 doubtless, which gave him that 
 facilitas which is manifest in every
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 29 
 
 line he wrote. His fault of sexual 
 immorality need not be mentioned, 
 except that he had only caught the 
 mental disease which was then wreck- 
 ing Roman society. 
 
 In taking Virgil, Horace, and Ovid 
 as examples of the poets of the 
 Augustan era, it must not be imagined 
 that I am instancing isolated pheno- 
 mena. Virgil was somewhat afraid 
 that the crisis in public events would 
 not turn out as well as might be 
 wished. Horace was at heart a 
 republican ; at all events he was an 
 admirer of Brutus, and so was in an 
 embarrassing position. Ovid was 
 under the pernicious influence of a 
 society which recognised no code of 
 morality that interfered with the gra- 
 tification of sensual passion. Of other 
 men whose light has shone even unto 
 our own day, Tibullus was grieved at 
 the folly and sin which he saw around 
 him, and Propertius was a disap-
 
 30 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 pointed cynic. Yet, in spite of these 
 hostile forces, militating against the 
 production of elevated genius, the age 
 of Augustus has been handed down to 
 posterity as one of the golden eras of 
 literature. 
 
 In speaking of Virgil and Horace, 
 it would be unjust in the extreme to 
 omit the name of Maecenas. Refer- 
 ence has already been made to him as 
 a patron, but he was also the personal 
 friend of the men to whom he ex- 
 tended his patronage. At his table 
 the literati were wont to meet. What 
 a scene for an artist to depict on 
 canvas ! Maecenas dispensing the 
 luxurious hospitality of a Roman 
 table ; Virgil, Protius, and Horace 
 reclining on their couches, and vicing 
 with one another in the friendly 
 rivalry of scholarship. The friendship 
 which existed between Virgil and 
 Horace, is too well known to need any 
 words on my part. We all remember
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 31 
 
 the lines in the third ode of the first 
 book of the Carmina : 
 
 " Navis quse tibi creditum 
 
 Debes Virgilium, finibus Atticis 
 Reddas incolumem precor 
 
 Et serves animae dimidium meae." 
 
 How great must have been the 
 effect of this society of congenial 
 spirits on the writings of those who 
 were privileged to take part in it ! 
 
 Tacitus in the Dial, de Cans. Corrup., 
 El. 13, gives us a remarkable proof 
 of the popularity of Virgil with the 
 lower orders. "Witness/' he writes, 
 " the letters of Augustus witness the 
 conduct of the people itself, which, 
 when some of his verses were recited 
 in the theatre, rose en masse, and 
 showed the same veneration for Virgil, 
 who happened to be present among 
 the audience, which they were wont 
 to show to Augustus." The Bucolics 
 were, in truth, the result of Virgil's 
 sympathies with the rural classes, who 
 had suffered more than any other
 
 32 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 
 
 class from the devastations of the late 
 war. He was a singular instance of 
 that rule that demands that any school 
 of poetry, in order to be successful, 
 must appeal to the hearts of the people. 
 It is not only evident that he did ap- 
 peal to their hearts, but it is also clear 
 that his poetry breathed the spirit of 
 the times in which he lived. 
 
 It will be thus seen that the 
 Augustan era, like the age of Pericles, 
 was the indirect result of war. After 
 that era the decline of literature was 
 contemporary with the decline of the 
 Roman Empire. The effeminate 
 luxury of the times certainly gave 
 birth to the satires of Juvenal, and 
 the tyranny of Tiberius made Tacitus 
 write his history. But the intellectual 
 power of the last 'days of Rome seems 
 to have been devoted to law. How 
 great that intellectual power was may 
 be judged when we consider that the 
 common law of nearly every state in
 
 THE ANCIENT CLASSICS. 33 
 
 modern Europe is founded on the old 
 Roman code. To investigate this 
 legal literature is hardly within the 
 scope of this work, though the temp- 
 tation to do so is great, more especi- 
 ally as it is the only sign of literary 
 genius which we possess for some 
 centuries. 
 
 After Justinian comes the darkness 
 of the Middle Ages, when, owing to 
 the hatred of the Church for profane 
 learning, mental power was in a state 
 of stagnation. The Medici seem to 
 have been among the first to encourage 
 its revival, so that I shall next pro- 
 ceed to review the history of Italian 
 literature of that period, and further 
 attempt to show how it was influenced 
 by the history of the times. But both 
 in the next chapter and in those that 
 follow I shall ask the indulgence of 
 my readers to keep in mind the motto 
 that it is the tendency of intellectual 
 power to gather in clusters. 
 
 3
 
 IIT. 
 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 
 
 ITALY was the first European nation 
 which dispelled the darkness of the 
 Middle Ages by recognising that the 
 true political philosophy of govern- 
 ment was the science of governing men 
 for their advantage, of developing their 
 individual faculties, both intellectual, 
 moral, and physical, for their greater 
 happiness. Thus it came to pass that 
 after the destruction of the Roman 
 Empire, the Italians were the first 
 nation to revive the study of litera- 
 ture and the fine arts. It was in Italy 
 that liberty first secured the full enjoy-
 
 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 35 
 
 ment of intellectual existence, inas- 
 much as the fusion between the con- 
 querors and the conquered had taken 
 place earlier than it did in France, 
 Spain, England, or Germany. So 
 while the other powers of Europe 
 knew of no policy but that of aggran- 
 dizement, while they were expending 
 their energies in ambitious warfare, 
 Italy was making vast progress in 
 commerce, the arts, and science. 
 Even now it is impossible to over- 
 estimate the debt of gratitude which 
 we owe to the learned Italians of the 
 fourteenth century. They rescued 
 from oblivion the belles lettres of 
 antiquity. Florence in 1360 founded 
 the first chair of Grecian literature in 
 the West. A passion for erudition 
 seems to have spread throughout the 
 whole of Italy, which received its 
 crowning impulse by the taking of 
 Constantinople in 1453, when so many 
 of the learned Greeks came south of 
 
 32
 
 36 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 
 
 the Alps in search of a new and con- 
 genial home. The work which had 
 been begun by Petrarch and Boccaccio 
 was carried on by Laurentius Valla 
 of whom Erasmus said that he rescued 
 literature from the grave, and restored 
 to Italy the splendour of her ancient 
 eloquence and by Pontano, Sanazzaro, 
 Baptista, and a host of others. Doubt- 
 less the bias of these men was too 
 exclusive towards erudition, so that 
 imagination was almost extinguished 
 by the classical pedantry, which 
 effectually smothered national origi- 
 nality ; but, nevertheless, when we 
 consider the times and the circum- 
 stances under which they lived, we 
 must be thankful for their ardour in 
 the welfare of literature, without 
 criticising too keenly their claims to 
 originality. 
 
 The motive power which aroused 
 into activity this cluster of Italian 
 intellect is to be found in the history
 
 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 37 
 
 of the Roman Catholic Church. 
 Gregory VII., more commonly known 
 as Hildebrand, had in 1074 issued his 
 decree enjoining the doctrine of the 
 infallibility of the Pope ; and from 
 that time, with but few exceptions, it 
 was the primary object of those who 
 filled the papal chair to achieve tem- 
 poral power. Consequently the spirit 
 of religion soon became dead ; the 
 lower orders were held in bondage by 
 the most corrupt superstition which 
 has ever disgraced the history of the 
 world. The wealthy classes were 
 engaged in gaining more wealth to 
 satisfy their tendency towards luxury 
 and vice ; the literati devoted their 
 pens to sneers and denunciations 
 at the religion which had degenerated 
 into a farce, and substituted in its 
 place the pagan philosophy with all 
 the corroding influence of Epicur- 
 ianism. Thus the revival of letters 
 had its birth in the contempt for reli-
 
 38 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 
 
 gion as taught by the Church at 
 Rome and Avignon. 
 
 Let us shortly attempt to prove 
 the truth of this dictum from the 
 writings of the most prominent men 
 who formed the Italian school of 
 literature. Dante heads the list of 
 the poets who did not scruple to 
 expose the corruptions of the Roman 
 Church. Thus in Paradise, c. xxix. 
 121, he launches his satire against the 
 indecent buffoonery which disgraced 
 the pulpit and imposed on the cre- 
 dulity of the people : 
 
 " The preacher now provides himself with store 
 Of jests and gibes ; and, so there be no lack 
 Of laughter, while he vents them, his big cowl 
 Distends, and he has won the meed he sought : 
 Could but the vulgar catch a glimpse the while 
 Of that dark bird which nestles in his hood, 
 They scarce would wait to hear the blessing 
 
 said, 
 
 Which now the dotards hold in such esteem, 
 That every counterfeit, who spreads abroad 
 The hands of holy promise, finds a throng 
 Of credulous fools beneath. Saint Antony 
 Fattens with this his swine, and others worse 
 Than swine, who diet at his lazy board, 
 Paying with unstamp'd metal for their fare."
 
 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 39 
 
 Again, in c. xxi., in describing the 
 carnal luxury of the Church, he 
 writes : 
 
 " Down the palfrey's sides 
 Spread their broad mantles, so as both the 
 
 beasts 
 Are cover'd with one skin. Oh ! patience, 
 
 thou 
 That look'st on this, and dost endure so long !" 
 
 He peoples his Hell and Purgatory 
 with clergy, from Popes down to 
 begging friars, and compares the 
 Court of Rome to the idolatrous 
 Babylon of the Apocalypse. 
 
 So wrote Dante in the beginning of 
 the fourteenth century. Petrarch, 
 following in his steps, is still more 
 severe. In his epistolae sine titulo, 
 ep. 4, 12, 15, 1 6, the most violent 
 satire is to be found.' " I am at pre- 
 sent," he writes, " in the western Baby- 
 lon, than which the sun never beheld 
 anything more hideous, and beside 
 the fierce Rhone, where the successors 
 of the poor fishermen now live as
 
 40 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 
 
 kings. Here the credulous crowd of 
 Christians are caught in the name of 
 Jesus, but by the arts of Belial ; and 
 being stripped of their scales, are 
 fried to fill the belly of gluttons. Go 
 to India, or wherever you choose, but 
 avoid Babylon, if you do not wish to 
 go down alive to hell. Whatever you 
 have heard or read of as to perfidy 
 and fraud, pride, incontinence, and 
 unbridled lust, impiety and wicked- 
 ness of every kind, you will find here 
 collected and heaped together. Re- 
 joice, and glory in this, O Babylon, 
 situated on the Rhone, that thou art 
 the enemy of the good, the friend of 
 the bad, the asylum of wild beasts, 
 the whore that hath committed forni- 
 cation with the kings of the earth ! 
 Thou art she whom the inspired 
 evangelist saw in the spirit ; yes, thee, 
 and none but thee, he saw, ' sitting 
 upon many waters.' See thy dress 
 ' a woman clothed in purple and
 
 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 41 
 
 scarlet.' Dost thou know thyself, 
 Babylon ? Certainly what follows 
 agrees to thee, and to none else : 
 ' Mother of fornications, and abomi- 
 nations of the earth.' But hear the 
 rest : ' I saw,' says the evangelist, ' a 
 woman drunk with the blood of the 
 saints, and the blood of the martyrs 
 of Jesus.' Point out another to whom 
 this is applicable but thee." 
 
 To such an extent did the depravity 
 of the Church at Avignon inspire 
 Petrarch. Comment is hardly neces- 
 sary, more especially when we con- 
 sider that it was Petrarch, of all 
 poets, who wrote this ; Petrarch, the 
 writer of love-sonnets the man who, 
 amongst the warm groves of Italy, 
 preferred of all things in life to enjoy 
 the do Ice far niente amidst the war- 
 bling of birds in a southern climate, 
 the imitator of the gentle Horace. 
 Juvenal mourned at the tyranny of 
 a Tiberius and the vices of the Roman
 
 42 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 
 
 Empire ; but these must have been as 
 a mote to the beam of adultery and 
 cruelty which inspired the denuncia- 
 tions of Petrarch. Even in his 
 sonnets he could not restrain his 
 indignation. One example will suf- 
 fice the celebrated sonnet begin- 
 ning 
 
 " Fiamma del ciel su le tue treccie piova, 
 Malvagia," etc.' 
 
 (" Le Rime del Petrarcha/' edit. Lod. 
 Castelvetro, torn, i., p. 325), two 
 verses of which have been ably trans- 
 lated as follows : 
 
 " Foul nest of treason ! Is there aught 
 Wherewith the spacious world is fraught 
 
 Of bad or vile tis hatched in thee, 
 Who revellest in thy costly meats, 
 Thy precious wines, and curious seats, 
 
 And all the pride of luxury. 
 
 " The while within thy secret halls, 
 Old men in seemly festivals 
 
 With buxom girls in dance are going ; 
 And in the midst old Beelzebub 
 Eyes through his glass the motley club, 
 The fire with sturdy bellows blowing." 
 
 Boccaccio, with his broad humour
 
 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 43 
 
 and keen wit, was no less busy in ex- 
 posing the knavery of these arrogant 
 prelates. Poggio Bracciolini, himself 
 a pontifical secretary, wrote the dia- 
 logues on avarice, luxury, and hypo- 
 crisy, showing the ignorance and vice 
 of the preachers of his time, and only 
 escaped death by writing an invec- 
 tive against the anti-pope Amedaeus. 
 Ariosto and Berni, down to the very 
 time of the Reformation, continued 
 to write lampoons and pasquinades 
 on the monks and friars ; and the 
 various anonymous MSS., written by 
 men who, for obvious reasons, were 
 afraid to publish their names, prove 
 the prevailing practice which existed 
 amongst the literati of the day, of 
 ridiculing the Church. As an illus- 
 tration of this, it may be of interest 
 to students of mediaeval Italian to 
 quote the following verses on the 
 death of Alexander VIII., found in 
 a MS. in the Advocates' Library, and
 
 44 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 
 
 entitled " Raccolta delle migliori 
 Satire venuta alia luce in occasione 
 di diversi Conclavi da quello di 
 Alesandro VIII." 
 
 " Sacro Nume del Ciel, non diro mai, 
 Che tu facesti far papa Alesandro, 
 Che al Tebro cagione piu danno assai, 
 Di quel che fece il fuoco alia Scamandro. 
 
 " Sempre voleva dir qualche saldonia, 
 Parlando ancor di cosa alta e divina ; 
 E avea quasi ridotta in Babilonia, 
 Questa di Dio Jerusalem Latina. 
 
 " Che piu ? Si vedde al suo ponteficato, 
 Liberta di concienza, e di costumi ; 
 E il solo non peccar, era peccato, 
 Per far contro le stelle, e scorno a Numi." 
 
 That English readers may not lose 
 the sarcasm of the last verse, it may 
 be well to add Dr. M'Crie's transla- 
 tion : 
 
 " Truly, when he was pontiff, man was free ; 
 Conscience and conduct both had liberty, 
 When one might scoff the stars, and stand secure 
 In every crime but one the being pure." 
 
 Although the immense riches 
 amassed by the Church were mainly 
 spent in pomp, luxury, licentiousness,
 
 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 45 
 
 and the vilest and most abominable 
 lusts, yet the patronage extended by 
 the wealthy towards literature was 
 undoubtedly magnificent. Cosmo de 
 Medici, Pope Nicholas V., Lorenzo de 
 Medici, and Leo X., although men 
 who did not scruple to perform any 
 act which might serve to promote 
 their ambitious ends, not only them- 
 selves studied the fine arts, but also 
 did all which lay in their power to- 
 wards developing literary genius. It 
 has been said that grammarians, poets, 
 and rhetoricians were in this century 
 too much accustomed to regard them- 
 selves as clients or dependents on the 
 rich and great to live by their 
 bounty, and to form their opinions 
 and express them at the word of 
 command. They were the fore- 
 runners of those who disgraced our 
 own national literature by their ful- 
 some dedications in the time of the 
 Stuarts. When we consider the his-
 
 46 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 
 
 tory of Italy at this period, the in- 
 trigues, both religious, commercial, 
 and political, carried on by men de- 
 sirous only of personal power, the 
 contest which was being waged be- 
 tween liberty on the one hand and 
 despotism on the other, it is easy to 
 understand how useful literary men 
 were to leaders of factions in a time 
 when the study of literature was 
 popular throughout the length and 
 breadth of the land. The influence 
 of the Church, though negative in re- 
 gard to the poets, was great in regard 
 to the painters. If it had not been 
 for that influence, Michel Angelo 
 would never have painted in fresco 
 the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, nor 
 Leonardo da Vinci have painted his 
 " Last Supper;" Raffaelle would never 
 have painted his " Madonna/' nor 
 Correggio his " Magdalene." For 
 these things we must be thankful 
 to the Church, as well as for the
 
 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 47 
 
 satire of Dante, Petrarch, and Boc- 
 caccio. 
 
 The brilliant epoch of Italian liter- 
 ature closed with Leo X. In his short 
 reign of nine years the fine arts at- 
 tained to a pitch of excellence which 
 in Italy has never been surpassed ; 
 his reign also was marked by calami- 
 ties which hastened the downfall of 
 this intellectual splendour. The wars 
 of the League of Cambray, the series 
 of calamities with which the French, 
 Spaniards, and Germans successively 
 overwhelmed Italy, led to the pillage 
 and ruin of all the great cities, and 
 finally caused the loss of Italian in- 
 dependence. So the national litera- 
 ture received its death-blow. But it 
 had lived long enough to give birth 
 to a general revival of learning 
 throughout the whole of civilized 
 Europe, and may almost be con- 
 sidered the parent of our own bril- 
 liant epoch of Elizabethan literature.
 
 48 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 
 
 It will thus be seen that this epoch 
 of Italian literature forms another 
 example of the tendency of intel- 
 lectual power to gather in clusters, 
 and we may also deduct the con- 
 clusion that the schisms and depravity 
 of the Church at Rome were mainly 
 the cause of exciting the latent genius 
 into activity. Of the Reformation, 
 and of its beneficial influence on 
 literature, more will have to be said 
 when we discuss the age of Shake- 
 speare, Spenser, and Ben Jonson, in 
 our own country. Briefly, it was the 
 cause of intellectual liberty, without 
 which intellect is ever apt to stagnate. 
 But in the case of Italy there were also 
 other influences at work, to discover 
 the nature of which we must have 
 recourse to the contemporary history 
 of Europe. 
 
 During the barbarous centuries 
 which followed the downfall of the 
 Roman Empire, Europe seems to
 
 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 49 
 
 have lost all knowledge of the pri- 
 mary elements of civilization. Nations 
 warred against nations ; whole coun- 
 tries were conquered by foreign races ; 
 the conquerors, rendered proud and 
 arrogant by their conquest, governed 
 solely for their own advantage, and 
 gave no thought to the prosperity of 
 the native inhabitants of the soil. 
 Thus we find England conquered suc- 
 cessively by the Saxons, the Danes, 
 and the Normans, and it was not till 
 the close of the thirteenth century that 
 the Norman and Anglo-Saxon races 
 could be said to have been united. 
 Italy, however, seems to have kept 
 singularly free from these inter- 
 national quarrels. At a very early 
 period the population of the towns 
 acquired importance ; they built walls 
 to defend themselves, and had some 
 idea of the science of municipal 
 government ; in short, they enjoyed 
 some share of republican inde- 
 
 4
 
 50 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 
 
 pendence. The principle of feudalism 
 was unknown to them ; they were 
 citizens striving for the welfare of a 
 city, not ignorant peasants slaving to 
 increase the power of an arbitrary 
 landlord. While England and France 
 were engaging in a series of useless 
 conflicts, the energies of Italy were 
 devoted to the progress of elegant 
 literature and the fine arts. 
 
 Macaulay says that at this time the 
 admiration of learning and genius 
 became almost an idolatry. The 
 spirit of literary research allied itself 
 to that of commercial enterprise. 
 What an alliance ! The spontaneous 
 abundance of its results sufficiently 
 proves how powerful it must have 
 been. The oppressions and bar- 
 barities of other states no doubt in- 
 cited the finest intellects to resort to 
 the security of Italy, and strengthen 
 with new blood the commonwealths 
 of the Adriatic. So indirectly the
 
 MEDIAEVAL ITALY. 51 
 
 miserable ignorance and degradation 
 which was so prevalent throughout 
 the rest of Europe during the Middle 
 Ages conduced to the splendour of 
 Italian intellect. Moreover, their 
 trading successes, for which they were 
 so conspicuous, gave a certain crafti- 
 ness to their minds, which in poetry 
 was changed into a vivid and gor- 
 geous elegance. There is no word in 
 the English language which expresses 
 the nature of Italian mediaeval litera- 
 ture more precisely than the word 
 elegant. There was not that strong 
 imagination of genius, which is 
 generally aroused by war, nor were 
 there the powerful outpourings of a 
 nation first awaking to a sense of its 
 own importance. It was rather the 
 polite scholarship of a state which 
 had gained ascendency over its neigh- 
 bours by the peaceful means of craft 
 and guile. Climate also lent its aid 
 to promote splendid luxury and in- 
 
 42
 
 52 MEDIEVAL ITALY. 
 
 tellectual refinement. Pity 'tis that 
 so much mental vigour became ulti- 
 mately enfeebled by the sensualism 
 which it had itself created.
 
 IV. 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 THE Elizabethan era of literature is 
 so closely connected with the Re- 
 formation that it will be necessary to 
 describe shortly the general aspect of 
 the times, before discussing the in- 
 fluence which the sudden birth of 
 religious and intellectual liberty had 
 on the literature of England. In the 
 Christian era there have been two 
 great convulsions which have swept 
 over Europe like a violent volcanic 
 eruption. The first was the Re- 
 formation, the parent of religious 
 liberty ; the second was the French 
 Revolution, the parent of political
 
 54 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 liberty. Both were celebrated for 
 barbarity, cruelty, and bloodshed. 
 The terrors of the Inquisition find 
 their counterpart in the sansculottism 
 of a Paris mob. During both times 
 were assassinations and massacres 
 rife. Patriotism gave way to love of 
 principle ; and, such was the pre- 
 vailing bigotry, that men thought it 
 no dishonour to fight by the side of 
 foreigners against their own nation. 
 It is hardly possible for us to con- 
 jecture what must be the state of 
 feeling amongst men at such times, 
 inasmuch as happily we have no 
 experience of these revolutionary out- 
 bursts, but only reap the harvest of 
 liberty which was sown amidst so 
 much calamity. There are certainly 
 two things which it seems impossible 
 for us to imagine, namely, the uncon- 
 trollable force of human passions, 
 and the absorbing interest taken by 
 every individual, from the highest to
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 55 
 
 the lowest, in the question of the day. 
 National welfare, personal benefit, 
 commercial success, all the ordinary 
 institutions and habits of life, are 
 swept aside by the all-powerful wave 
 of revolution. Happily, in the huge 
 devastation which takes place, much 
 that is evil is destroyed, as well as 
 much that is innocent ; and, although 
 nations may have been bathed in 
 blood, they rise again, and, as if 
 reformed by the terrible ordeal they 
 have undergone, rebuild their consti- 
 tutions on a basis at once more 
 secure and more conducive to pros- 
 perity. Intellect receives an extra 
 stimulus from the preceding revolu- 
 tionary excitement, and a cluster of 
 genius springs up which seems to 
 have imbibed its very life and soul 
 from the seething sea of the past 
 times. Like as the awe-inspiring 
 thunderstorm with its deluging rain 
 passes over the arid earth and causes
 
 56 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 the brooks and rivers to surge and boil, 
 till they overflow their natural limits 
 and flood the neighbouring fields with 
 their devastating waters, so comes the 
 outburst of human passions, hitherto 
 held in check by a tyrannous des- 
 potism, destroying all the landmarks 
 of ancient government, and breaking 
 through the rampart of human reason, 
 so that whole nations are bathed in 
 bloody massacres and sanguinary 
 wars ; and like as the waters of the 
 flood recede back into their natural 
 channels, leaving the earth refreshed, 
 and rejoicing as a mother in the birth 
 of a new and vigorous fertility, so do 
 the revolutionary passions of humanity 
 calm down, leaving the national charac- 
 ter, over which they have spent their 
 fury, secure in the strength of freedom. 
 The shock of the Reformation was 
 felt far less in England than on the 
 Continent. The true view of the case 
 seems to be that the mass of the Eng-
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 57 
 
 lish people, although essentially re- 
 ligious, cared but little for the outside 
 forms of religion. Henry VIII. per- 
 secuted both Protestants and Romans. 
 Edward VI. established the Reformed 
 Church. Mary re-established the 
 Church of Rome. Elizabeth again 
 re-established the Reformed Church. 
 Thus, as Lord Macaulay has pointed 
 out, the majority of the people were 
 indifferent as to the cult under which 
 they worshipped God, while their 
 sense of right caused them to uphold 
 the Government. With the excep- 
 tion of a few fanatical persons, the 
 English, as a nation, regarded the 
 Reformation as a war waged between 
 foreign countries, in which they played 
 the inactive part of allies. The French 
 conquests of Henry V. and the Wars 
 of the Roses had so absorbed the 
 national mind that it took little in- 
 terest in the controversies and schisms 
 which were havocking the Church of
 
 58 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 Rome. Civil war had devastated the 
 land, and made the people consider 
 seriously whether it was worth while 
 to fight against one another. And, 
 most important of all, a new school 
 of politicians had sprung up, of which 
 Burleigh and Sir Nicholas Bacon may 
 be taken as types, in which intellectual 
 power had usurped the place formerly 
 held by military ardour. 
 
 Again, there was not the same need 
 for the Reformation in England as 
 there was on the Continent. Although 
 the English had not the semblance of 
 freedom, they had the reality. Nom- 
 inally the Government was an abso- 
 lute monarchy ; practically it was 
 democratic, for the monarch had no 
 military force, no power of any sort, 
 except the will of the people, to en- 
 force his decrees. Thus he was un- 
 able to oppress them with impunity. 
 And, as the Reformation was the 
 result of oppression, it was hardly
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 59 
 
 needed by a people who, at all events, 
 were free in their work-a-day life. 
 The dissensions of York and Lan- 
 caster had destroyed the last rem- 
 nants of feudalism, and made England 
 a nation instead of a collection of 
 shires. 
 
 Powerful abroad, more firmly united 
 at home after their late quarrels, pos- 
 sessed of liberty, recognising in poli- 
 tics the greater importance of mind 
 than rash energy such were the 
 English when Elizabeth came to the 
 throne. It would indeed be strange 
 if her reign of forty-five years did not 
 prove productive of genius. 
 
 It produced two men, of whom we 
 may safely say, that, if there had been 
 no others, this brace of intellects alone 
 would have made the age worthy 
 of the title it has received, namely, 
 the golden era of English literature. 
 Lord Bacon and Shakespeare have 
 been handed down to posterity as the
 
 60 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 princes of philosophy and poetry. Of 
 the former it was said that his genius 
 embraced every department of human 
 knowledge ; of the latter, the public 
 opinion has never been more happily 
 expressed than by the reply of Mr. 
 Irving to the question as to which 
 were the best hundred books to read : 
 " Give me two the Bible and Shake- 
 speare." Then, look at the constella- 
 tion of literary genius of which these 
 two men were the principal stars ! 
 Spenser, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter 
 Raleigh, Greene, Hooker, besides a 
 host of minor names. For the pur- 
 pose of this work, however, it will be 
 sufficient if we confine our attentions 
 to these seven giants of intellect. 
 
 In discussing Bacon, it must be re- 
 membered that the discussion applies 
 only to his philosophy, and not to the 
 personal character of the man. For- 
 tunately, we may spare ourselves the 
 pain of analyzing the latter, dismiss-
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 61 
 
 ing it with the sole comment that it 
 seems inexplicable that a philosopher 
 such as Bacon could have been cap- 
 able of the mean ingratitude with 
 which he treated Essex, or of the 
 acceptance of bribes with which he 
 disgraced his tenure of office. As a 
 philosopher, with the single exception 
 of Plato, he stands without a rival in 
 the history of the world. The differ- 
 ence between the Platonic and the 
 Baconian philosophies shows clearly 
 the influence of the times on the 
 mind of Bacon. While the Platonic 
 philosophy consists entirely of meta- 
 physical speculation, with a semblance 
 of authority as its basis, the Baconian 
 philosophy is essentially that of pro- 
 gress and utility. It was not only 
 the difference between theory and 
 practice ; it was also the difference 
 between the assertions of blind faith 
 and the reasons of indisputable logic. 
 The works of Bacon are so well
 
 62 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 known, and have been so frequently 
 compared with those of Plato, that it 
 is needless to prove by quotations the 
 difference between the two schools of 
 philosophy. During the Middle Ages 
 religion and learning had been so in- 
 separably connected that speculation 
 had been directed towards those un- 
 certainties, which, however much the 
 contemplation of them may elevate 
 the soul, have but little practical uti- 
 lity. The Reformation and the con- 
 temporary birth of politics made men 
 consider that the happiness of earthly 
 existence was worthy of thought, and 
 that, since the soul was allied to the 
 body, it should not be the only object 
 of man to attempt to separate the 
 soul and body, by fixing the mind on 
 subjects too lofty for human compre- 
 hension. Plato wrote that the end of 
 all government was to make men vir- 
 tuous ; Bacon wrote that the end of 
 all government was to make men
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 63 
 
 happy, " ut cives feliciter degant," and 
 considered virtue the means by which 
 such end should be attained. Here 
 we see the mind of the statesman : 
 with him men were men, not gods, as 
 Plato would have them be ; therefore 
 human felicity must be studied. "Usui 
 et commodis hominum consulimus." 
 
 Lord Macaulay, in his essay on 
 Lord Bacon, has given us several 
 examples from the works of the two 
 philosophers, showing that while Plato 
 only considered the perfection of the 
 soul, Bacon's great object was the 
 study of general utility. With the 
 former, mathematics meant the ab- 
 stract study of the properties of num- 
 bers ; with the latter, it meant the 
 handmaid of science, the promoting 
 force of invention. Plato and Socrates 
 discouraged invention, and were angry 
 with their disciples when they specu- 
 lated on the advantages which might 
 accrue to the human race from thought.
 
 64 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 Bacon, on the other hand, considered 
 thought as being the means to an end ; 
 that end was the perfection of earthly 
 happiness. The philosophy of the one 
 was divine and useless; the philosophy 
 of the other was human, and might, 
 with truth, be regarded as the mother 
 of invention. 
 
 The system of Bacon subverted en- 
 tirely that of the Schoolmen, which 
 relied altogether on authority. He is 
 a grand example of that vitality of 
 thought which had been called into 
 existence by all the stirring events of 
 the period. Literature was no longer 
 in the hands of the Church no longer 
 the slave of a wretched convention- 
 ality. Reality had usurped the place 
 of spiritual idealism. In art, admi- 
 ration for external beauty had de- 
 stroyed the love of the beauty of 
 sentiment; the perfection of form had 
 superseded purity of expression ; the 
 school of Fra Angelico was defunct.
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 65 
 
 Such was the effect of the Renais- 
 sance and the Reformation ; and, if 
 these two causes are not sufficiently 
 powerful to account for the impulse 
 given to the mental faculties of men, 
 we have a third cause in the discovery 
 of the New World. 
 
 As in Philosophy, so it was in the 
 case of the Drama. The drama before 
 the time of Shakespeare had consisted 
 of the representation of sacred sub- 
 jects, withdialogues inculcating lessons 
 of morality ; wretched exhibitions in 
 which the action of human passions 
 played no part. These plays, as may 
 be expected, were generally written 
 by Churchmen, and were wholly under 
 the control of the Church. When, 
 however, men no longer dreaded the 
 power of the Church, these dramas, 
 commonly known as mystery plays, 
 failed to satisfy them, and they craved 
 for the vigour of reality. They wanted 
 something human, with the bad side 
 
 5
 
 66 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 as well as the good side of man's 
 nature portrayed. In short, they de- 
 manded to have revealed to them on 
 the stage the forms of life which they 
 saw around them. So, in accordance 
 with the golden rule that a sympa- 
 thetic public creates literary genius, 
 we find a cluster of dramatic authors 
 ready to supply the nation with the 
 plays that it desired. 
 
 When one regards the cartloads of 
 books which have been written about 
 Shakespeare and his plays, one is shy 
 at adding any fresh criticism to the 
 vast store already in existence. His 
 knowledge of human character and his 
 sympathy with human feeling seem to 
 be the keynote to his genius, a genius 
 so brilliant as to be hardly human. 
 So marvellous is it that one man 
 should have written the plays which 
 have been handed down to us under 
 the name of Shakespeare, that it has 
 been constantly alleged that Shake-
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 67 
 
 speare never wrote them. This con- 
 troversy appears to be somewhat 
 useless, except so far as it affords en- 
 joyment to quibbling antiquarians : 
 three centuries have destroyed the 
 personality of Shakespeare, though 
 probably thirty centuries will fail to 
 destroy his works. He was not only 
 a dramatic poet : he was also a philo- 
 sopher, possessing a knowledge of the 
 primary elements of justice. In many 
 respects his philosophy resembles that 
 of Bacon ; it is the philosophy of a 
 man acquainted with the springs of 
 human action, and as such it appeals 
 to his readers or his audience. In 
 comparing Shakespeare with the men 
 of the Italian epoch there is one curi- 
 ous conclusion to be drawn, which tends 
 to show that the power and influence 
 of the Roman Church in this country 
 was certainly not great enough to per- 
 mit of the prelates indulging with im- 
 punity in the vices and immorality 
 
 52
 
 6 8 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 which disgraced their brethren on the 
 Continent. The fierce satire of Petrarch 
 and the broad humour of Boccaccio 
 were directed against the priests. On 
 the other hand, Shakespeare never 
 holds the Church up to ridicule, but 
 always treats it with the utmost 
 reverence. The truth is that the 
 English people had never been priest- 
 ridden, like the lower orders of other 
 countries in Europe had been. When 
 the Reformation came, therefore, there 
 was, in proportion to what took place 
 on the Continent, but little change of 
 feeling. But although the power of 
 the priests was comparatively small, 
 the character of the nation was essen- 
 tially religious, so that the sarcasm 
 and burlesques which were popular in 
 Italy would not have been tolerated 
 in England. Shakespeare was obliged 
 to study public opinion. He was not 
 a dreamy poet luxuriating in the pas- 
 toral simplicity of Warwickshire, away
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 69 
 
 from the haunts of men, nor was he 
 an arrogant cynic affecting to despise 
 the feelings of his fellow-creatures. 
 He came to town as a young man, 
 probably about eighteen, and had to 
 depend on his popularity for his liveli- 
 hood. Afterwards he acquired a large 
 share both in the Globe and Black- 
 friars Theatres, and with the instinct 
 of a manager suited his plays to his 
 audience. We may therefore con- 
 clude that in his writings we have the 
 opinions and feelings of the age repro- 
 duced, though perhaps somewhat 
 magnified by the magic of his genius. 
 The materials for founding a bio- 
 graphy of Shakespeare are so slender 
 that it is impossible to write a history 
 of his life. But to talk, to write, or to 
 read of the traditions which have 
 been handed down concerning him 
 must always give pleasure to lovers of 
 literature. We gain some idea of the 
 social life of our ancestors, and we
 
 70 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 enjoy that " delicate flavour of anti- 
 quity," so refreshing in the unromantic 
 work-a-day life of modern civilization. 
 We can imagine, with some amuse- 
 ment, the great poet night-poaching 
 after deer in the park of Sir Thomas 
 Lucy, and having a pugilistic tussle 
 with the keepers. We can see him in 
 our mind's eye drinking a bowl of 
 punch with the irritable Ben Jonson 
 and the profligate Greene, and we long 
 to have been present at the party. 
 We like to picture him at Kenilworth 
 with Elizabeth, though there is no 
 reason why he should have been there, 
 except that he was a native of War- 
 wickshire. We envy the Earl of 
 Southampton extending his gracious 
 hospitality to this gifted son of a 
 wool-dealer, and we leisurely wonder 
 whether or not the house at Stratford 
 was given to him by his patron. The 
 very paucity of accurate information 
 is a source of pleasure, inasmuch as
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA, "Ji 
 
 we are thereby enabled to indulge the 
 imagination in conjecturing what his 
 inner life must have been. Finally, we 
 all love to pay a pilgrimage to Strat- 
 ford, and yield honour to him who was 
 and is a glory to his country. Wher- 
 ever English is spoken his memory is 
 dear, and Englishmen, struck with 
 awe and admiration at the dazzling 
 radiance of his genius, are proud to 
 belong to the country which gave him 
 birth. 
 
 This necessarily brief survey of 
 Shakespeare cannot be brought to a 
 better conclusion than by quoting a 
 few lines from the epitaph on him 
 written by Milton : 
 
 " Dear son of memory, great heir of fame, 
 
 What need'st thou such weak witness of thy 
 
 name ? 
 
 Thou in our wonder and astonishment 
 Hath built thyself a livelong monument. 
 * * * * 
 
 And so sepulchr'd in such pomp dost lie, 
 That kings in such a tomb would wish to die."
 
 72 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 After Shakespeare there is no doubt 
 that Spenser ranks next as a poet. 
 The criticisms on his writings are 
 probably more conflicting than they 
 are in the case of any other man who 
 ever tempted fortune with his pen. 
 Milton confessedly copied him : at 
 least so we are told by Dryden, who 
 writes, " Milton has acknowledged to 
 me that Spenser was his original." 
 Addison, on the other hand, speaks 
 disparagingly of him : 
 
 " The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
 While the dull moral lyes too plain below." 
 
 The truth seems to be that con- 
 tinued allegory is always tedious, and 
 not even the genius of Spenser could 
 prevent its being so. Again, he wrote 
 in language which was considered 
 obsolete even in his own day. Yet his 
 attempt to enlist the public sym- 
 pathies on the side of goodness and 
 faith, purity and justice, was no doubt
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 73 
 
 successful. In our own day, however, 
 his popularity chiefly depends on the 
 fact that " Spenser's lond of Faerie " 
 is the England of Elizabeth. His 
 poem is essentially heroic, and as such 
 could only have been written in an 
 heroic age. His allegory, expressed 
 in peculiarly happy similitudes, reflects 
 all the beauty and energy of the 
 national life, of the times which pro- 
 duced men like Drake, Raleigh, and 
 Sidney : it also expressed in his latter 
 days the deterioration which took 
 place in the national character at the 
 end of the sixteenth and beginning of 
 the seventeenth century. He felt, in- 
 deed, that " a sorrow's crown of sorrow 
 is remembering happier things ;" he 
 saw that pride comes before a fall, 
 and that both the political and the 
 literary power of England were on the 
 decline. 
 
 It is the common habit to compare 
 the Faerie Queene with the
 
 74 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 Never was comparison more unhappy. 
 The grand principle of epic poetry is 
 that there should be uniformity of 
 design. Virgil recognised the truth 
 of this Spenser utterly failed to do 
 so. No doubt the death of Sidney 
 and other similar incidents caused the 
 Elizabethan constantly to change the 
 plan of his work, and so both the poet 
 and his readers become lost in a 
 labyrinthine maze of blind rambles. 
 There is much more likeness between 
 Spenser and Ariosto than there is be- 
 tween Spenser and Virgil. Yet this 
 incoherency of plan, pernicious as it 
 is to the beauty of an epic poem taken 
 as a whole, proves to us how powerful 
 is the influence of the outside world 
 on the writings of a poet. The gor- 
 geous heroism of his earlier writings 
 became in his latter days a mournful 
 craving after the times that were 
 past. 
 
 And truly we can mourn with him.
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 75 
 
 When we consider the deplorable 
 misery of the Stuart period, and the 
 loss of the old Elizabethan traditions, 
 we marvel with grief that one genera- 
 tion could have so changed our 
 country. 
 
 The prosperity of England both at 
 home and abroad, the birth of intel- 
 lectual and religious liberty, the union 
 which existed between all classes of 
 the nation, and which was rendered 
 more insoluble by the defeat of the 
 Spanish Armada, had caused that 
 dazzling glory with which the reign 
 of Elizabeth is environed. Unfortu- 
 nately it was the brilliance of a shoot- 
 ing star, and not the perennial lustre 
 of a planet. 
 
 In spite of his tediousness and 
 obsolete language, Spenser, strange to 
 say, is generally more pleasing to 
 boys than he is to grown-up people. 
 The youthful mind will follow the 
 knights in their adventures without
 
 76 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 taking too much notice of the allegory 
 which forces itself continually on the 
 mind of the reader of riper years. As 
 Sir Walter Scott, in talking of his boy- 
 hood, says, "But Spenser I could have 
 read for ever. Too young to trouble 
 myself about the allegory, I considered 
 all the knights and ladies and dragons 
 and giants in their outward and 
 exoteric sense ;" and again, " From 
 Cowley downwards, every youth of 
 imagination has been enchanted with 
 the splendid legends of the Faery 
 Queen." This proves to a greater 
 extent than is seen at first sight what 
 a genius for poetry Spenser had. 
 Youth is more susceptible to poetry 
 than mature age. Lord Macaulay 
 stated that the influence of civiliza- 
 tion was adverse to poetry. The 
 history of literature proves the truth 
 of this dictum. Those grand, rolling 
 hexameters of the rude age of Homer, 
 though, perhaps, they have been sur-
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 77 
 
 passed in elegance, have never been 
 equalled in that divine afflatus which 
 goes straight to the heart and imagina- 
 tion of the reader. The heart of a boy 
 is more easily touched than the heart of 
 a man, in the same way as the people 
 who lived when the world was young 
 were more impressionable than the 
 unimaginative people of the present 
 day. 
 
 But it was not only in his legends 
 of fairyland that Spenser showed his 
 genius, but in his descriptions also. 
 Southey's remark on them is pecu- 
 liarly happy : "The delicious land- 
 scapes which he luxuriates in describ- 
 ing brought everything before my 
 eyes. I could fancy such scenes as 
 his lakes and forests, gardens and 
 fountains presented." Coleridge says, 
 " Spenser's descriptions are not in the 
 true sense of the word picturesque, 
 but are composed of a wondrous 
 series of images, as in our dreams."
 
 78 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 We should not look too close, there- 
 fore, for fear the images fade away, 
 leaving behind them nought but 
 moral virtues. Virtue and morality 
 are no doubt excellent things ; but it 
 is more pleasing to the fancy to 
 read of enchanted forests, chivalrous 
 knights, and damsels in distress. 
 
 Ben Jonson is known to us for two 
 things namely, his broad humour, 
 and his observing study of the unities 
 of time and place. The best descrip- 
 tion of him is that of Dr. Johnson, 
 in his celebrated prologue : 
 
 " Then Jonson came, instructed from the school, 
 To please by method, and inv ent by rule. 
 His studious patience and lab orious art 
 With regular approach assay' d the heart." 
 
 Jonson was not a poet ; he was 
 only a dramatist. He had but little 
 sympathy, and no imagination. This 
 may seem an arrogant criticism on a 
 man who was poet laureate, and who, 
 presumably on account of his talents,
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 79 
 
 but more probably on account of his 
 flattery, caused the pension of the 
 laureate to be raised to one hundred 
 pounds sterling and " a terse of 
 Canary wine." Truth often is arro- 
 gant, and, as many of us have experi- 
 enced, very unpleasantly so. Ben 
 Jonson doubtless was a splendid 
 manager of the State entertainments. 
 His bibulous propensities were splen- 
 did too that is to say, in regard to 
 their quantity ; and we may take it as 
 one of the certainties which cannot be 
 disputed, that he fully appreciated the 
 " terse of Canary." He shone above 
 his fellows, both as a stage manager 
 and a tippler ; but, as a poet, he was 
 harsh. No light pencilling, no soft 
 colouring, but everything stiff, stern, 
 and unsympathetic. The character of 
 his verse was like the personal char- 
 acter of the man it was unamiable. 
 Mr. Hazlitt impliedly resembles him 
 to an olive, and says he can't relish
 
 8o THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 him ; but an olive is sweet in com- 
 parison to the caustic bitterness of 
 " Rare Ben Jonson." 
 
 It certainly- would astonish the 
 members of modern clubland if they 
 could have been present at the old 
 gatherings at the Apollo and the 
 Mermaid. These formed a striking 
 exception to the rule, that when the 
 wine is in the wit is out, for here the 
 wit seemed to take an extra stimulus 
 from the wine. 
 
 " What things have we seen 
 Done at the Mermaid ! heard words that have 
 
 been 
 
 So nimble, and so full of subtile frame, 
 As if that everyone, from whom they came, 
 Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
 And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
 Of his dull life." 
 
 Here, as Thomas Fuller tells us, 
 did Shakespeare and Jonson hold 
 their wit or wet combats "which two 
 I behold like a Spanish great galleon 
 and an English man-of-war. Master 
 Jonson, like the former, was built far
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 81 
 
 higher in learning; solid, but slow in 
 his performances. Shakespeare, with 
 the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, 
 but lighter in sailing, could turn with 
 all tides, tack about and take advant- 
 age of all winds by the quickness of 
 his wit and invention." 
 
 It has been already said that 
 Jonson's character was unamiable. 
 Drummond, whose guest he used to 
 be, has told us what sort of a man he 
 found him, from a social point of 
 view : " A great lover and praiser of 
 himself; a contemner and scorner of 
 others ; given rather to lose a friend 
 than a jest ; jealous of every word 
 and action of those about him, especi- 
 ally after drink, which is one of the 
 elements in which he lived ; a dis- 
 sembler of ill parts, which reign in 
 him ; a bragger of some good that he 
 wanted ; thinketh nothing well done 
 but what either he himself or some of 
 his friends hath said or done. He is 
 
 6
 
 82 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 passionately kind and angry, careless 
 either to gain or keep ; vindictive, 
 but if he be well answered at himself, 
 interprets best sayings and deeds 
 often to the worst. He was for any 
 religion, as being versed in both ; 
 oppressed with fancy, which hath ever 
 mastered his reason a general dis- 
 ease in many poets ; his inventions 
 are smooth and easy, but above all 
 he excelleth in a translation." 
 
 It would not be unfair to say that 
 the majority of his works were trans- 
 lations ; at all events, they were 
 plagiarisms from Latin and Greek 
 authors. Jonson had talent, but he 
 lacked the genius of imagination. 
 Genius mpst be creative, not merely 
 adaptive. This alcoholic liabitut of 
 the Mermaid could adapt from the 
 Latin and Greek in the same way as 
 a modern quill-driver can adapt from 
 the French and German ; but, excel- 
 lent as the adaptations may be, they
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 83 
 
 can hardly be termed the creations of 
 genius. 
 
 Unfortunately for posterity, Greene 
 died at the comparatively early age of 
 thirty -two, from eating too many 
 pickled herrings and drinking too 
 much Rhenish wine ; otherwise, to 
 judge from the prose and poetry 
 which he did leave behind him, he 
 would have shone forth as one of the 
 greatest geniuses of this era. Unfor- 
 tunately, also, while his advice was 
 good, his habits were those of the 
 most licentious profligacy. He was 
 an ardent disciple of what was then 
 termed the Euphean sect, which 
 caused him to be somewhat too pro- 
 fuse in similes. As an example of 
 this, and also of his highly- polished 
 style, Doron's description of Saniela 
 in MenapJwn may be instanced : 
 
 " Like to Diana in her Summer weede, 
 Girt with a crimson roabe of brightest die, 
 Goes faire Saniela. 
 
 62
 
 84 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 Whiter than be the flockes that straggling feede, 
 When washt by Arethusa, faint they lie, 
 Is faire Samela. 
 
 " As faire Aurora in her morning gray, 
 Deckt with the ruddie glister of her loue, 
 
 Is faire Samela. 
 
 Like louelie Thetis on a calmed day, 
 When as her brightnesse Neptune's fancie 
 moue, 
 
 Shines faire Samela. 
 
 " Her tresses gold, her eyes like glassie streams, 
 Her teeth are pearle, the breast are yuorie, 
 
 Of faire Samela. 
 Her cheekes like rose and lilly yeeld foorth 
 
 gleames, 
 
 Her browes bright arches framde of ebonie : 
 Thus faire Samela 
 
 " Passeth faire Venus in her brauest hiew, 
 And Juno in the shew of majestic, 
 
 For she's Samela. 
 
 Pallas in wit, all three if you will view, 
 For beautie, wit, and matchlesse dignitie, 
 
 Yeeld to Samela." 
 
 The above seems to be a very fair 
 type of Greene's poetry. Crowded 
 with similes taken for the most part 
 from the ancient classics, and appo- 
 sitely applied, his poetry is at once 
 polished and elegant. Nor, strange 
 to say, does he betray any of those
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 85 
 
 signs of slovenliness which we should 
 expect to find in the writings of the 
 first English poet who is said to have 
 written for bread. Occasionally, more 
 especially in his prose, he becomes 
 indecent ; but we must remember the 
 manners of the times, before false 
 modesty and hypocritical Grundyism 
 had been born. His lessons of mor- 
 ality are both impressive and virtuous, 
 so that, in his own day, he became 
 noted alike for his good advice and 
 bad example. He deserted a beau- 
 tiful wife, lived in profligacy, and 
 died of greediness. For his readers 
 he wrote the most Christian senti- 
 ments of virtuous morality, and ex- 
 posed the knavery of those who, 
 under the names of Cony-Catchers, 
 Cooseners, and Crosse Biters, lived on 
 the foolish credulity of their neigh- 
 bours. It has been said, with some 
 degree of truth, that his great fault is 
 a want of simplicity ; he is continu-
 
 86 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 ally showing us his classical scholar- 
 ship. But this was the fault of the 
 age, not the fault of Greene in par- 
 ticular. Shakespeare is, perhaps, the 
 only writer who is without it ; but 
 then he had not the knowledge. In 
 short, the great difference between 
 Shakespeare and his contemporaries 
 is that he, from force of circumstances, 
 depended entirely on his own un- 
 rivalled genius, while they tried to 
 gain inspiration from the vast store of 
 classical learning which diligent re- 
 search had suddenly given to the 
 world. 
 
 After discussing Greene, it is a 
 somewhat startling change to discuss 
 Hooker. Such is one of the unavoid- 
 able evils of treating literature on a 
 plan based on chronology ; but, as no 
 other plan would suffice to explain 
 the text of this volume, indulgence 
 must be asked for the disadvantages, 
 which, it is respectfully submitted, are
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 87 
 
 far outnumbered by the advantages. 
 From a social point of view no two 
 characters could be more dissimilar 
 than those of Hooker and Greene. 
 The latter deserted a beautiful wife ; 
 the former lived with an ugly Xan- 
 tippe, whom a vulgar landlady had 
 seduced him into marrying. We pity, 
 though at the same time we feel some 
 contempt for, the country parson, who 
 was unable to entertain his old pupils 
 because, forsooth, his wife who has 
 been compared to the "dripping 
 house" of Solomon commanded 
 him to rock the cradle ; and " the 
 rest of their welcome was so like this, 
 that they staid but till next morning, 
 which was time enough to discover 
 and pity their tutor's condition." 
 Long before Hooker wrote his Eccle- 
 siastical Polity, however, in spite of 
 his connubial unhappiness, he must 
 have risen tp some eminence. For 
 six years he was Master of the
 
 88 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 Temple, which appointment he ob- 
 tained when he was but thirty-three 
 or thirty-four ; but, finding the Temple 
 too distracting for the arduous nature 
 of the work in which he was engaged, 
 he asked the Archbishop to remove 
 him. Accordingly, in 1591, he be- 
 came Rector of Boscombe in Wilt- 
 shire, where he finished four books of 
 his great work. In 1595, Elizabeth 
 gave him the rectory of Bishopsbourne 
 in Kent, where he lived till his death, 
 and completed the Ecclesiastical 
 Polity, which has won for him the 
 name of the Judicious Hooker. 
 
 Hooker was essentially the out- 
 come of the Reformation. Before 
 then there was no need for a cham- 
 pion of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. 
 But in the same way as philosophy 
 and politics had found an advocate in 
 Bacon, so did the constitution of 
 Church and State find one in Hooker. 
 And he was peculiarly apt to fulfil
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 89 
 
 the office. Not only had he an im- 
 mense store of learning, which he 
 knew how to give to the world in 
 good English prose, but he was also 
 exceedingly meek in expressing his 
 opinions. Considering the unsettled 
 state of the Church at this time, it 
 would have been foolish, if not danger- 
 ous to its very existence, for a man 
 writing in its defence to say anything 
 rancorous or arrogant. Hooker's logic 
 was singularly free from either arro- 
 gance or rancour : it is the logic of a 
 man who unites philosophy and spiri- 
 tual comfort ; and, as Dr. Dibdin 
 wrote, never was logic more success- 
 fully employed to combat error and 
 establish truth. How correct this 
 opinion of the learned Doctor's is 
 may be judged from the fact that 
 now, after nearly three centuries have 
 elapsed, when men's minds are har- 
 assed with questions of disestablish- 
 ment and disendowment, Hooker still
 
 90 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 remains the strong bulwark which is 
 the surest literary defence against the 
 separation of Church and State. It 
 has been stated though I am unable 
 to say by whom that should the 
 English constitution in Church and 
 State be unhappily ruined by some 
 convulsion of extraordinary times, 
 this book alone probably contains 
 materials sufficient for repairing and 
 rebuilding the shattered fabric. The 
 book is, of course, the Ecclesiastical 
 Polity. Probably no book on the 
 Christian religion has ever received 
 such praise. 
 
 When, as the result of a great 
 movement like the Reformation, re- 
 ligious liberty and freedom of thought 
 have been established, there is a 
 strong tendency on the part of man to 
 misuse his advantages and indulge 
 in bold atheism, denying the need of 
 any religion at all. At such a time, 
 therefore, it is most desirable to have
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 91 
 
 the calm, unpassionate, but convince 
 ing arguments of a Churchman with 
 a mind too lofty to be capable of 
 descending to bigotry. Such a mind 
 had Hooker, and such were the 
 opinions expressed in his writings. 
 It would be out of place entirely to 
 discuss here, in any form, the political 
 question of Church and State. It 
 is sufficient to point out that it 
 was mainly owing to the arguments 
 contained in Hooker's Ecclesiastical 
 Polity that the Church and State 
 became bound in a bond of union 
 which has lasted for nigh three cen- 
 turies. 
 
 Probably the most distinguished 
 man of the reign of Elizabeth was 
 Sir Walter Raleigh. Statesman, 
 soldier, navigator, courtier, poet, and 
 historian happily it is only our 
 task to study him in his last two 
 characters. For when we consider 
 that Gibbon, having determined to
 
 92 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 write a history, and having fixed on 
 Sir Walter Raleigh and his times as 
 his subject, gave up the task after a 
 year of preliminary investigation on 
 account of the magnitude of the mat- 
 ter, and in its place substituted the 
 decline of the Roman Empire, it 
 would, indeed, be the utmost folly 
 of presumption to pretend in these 
 pages to give any detailed account 
 of this man, who seems to have 
 eclipsed all others. His discoveries 
 as a navigator, and his victories as an 
 admiral, seem to have endued his 
 mind with an amount of vigour rarely 
 surpassed, so that when suffering from 
 the confinement of prison life, incom- 
 parably more irksome to a man of his 
 activity, he had, as it were, to let off 
 the steam of his intellect through the 
 safety-valve of historical literature. 
 His end, and the manner in which 
 he was sacrificed to the Spaniards by 
 the cowardly Stuart, are matters which
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 93 
 
 aroused the just indignation of his 
 contemporaries, and the pity of all 
 Englishmen throughout every suc- 
 ceeding age. What a career to be 
 finished by the ignominy of the scaf- 
 fold ! 
 
 Raleigh's great work, the History 
 of the World, was written while the 
 author was suffering from one of the 
 most unjust sentences which ever dis- 
 graced English law, a sentence which 
 is a blot never to be erased on the 
 memories of Cecil and Coke. Yet 
 one searches in vain throughout his 
 work for any sign of resentment. One 
 only finds evidence of the most acute 
 political discernment, of vast know- 
 ledge, of a refined elegance of diction, 
 and, most important of all, a philoso- 
 phical application of the events of 
 history and of his own discoveries to 
 the principles of humanity and springs 
 of human action. 'Ike Maxims of 
 State and The Cabinet Council prove
 
 94 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 his penetrating skill as a statesman, 
 while The Sceptic and His Advice to 
 His Son show the sterling common- 
 sense of the man of the world. These 
 and his great History of the World 
 constitute his chief prose writings, 
 though many others are attributed to 
 him whether with truth or not it is 
 impossible to say. 
 
 His poetry, which is not so com- 
 monly read as it deserves to be, is a 
 striking testimony both of the social 
 habits of the time, and of the charac- 
 ter of the man himself. It is conspi- 
 cuous for amatory sweetness coupled 
 with pastoral simplicity. Raleigh was 
 the most polished courtier who ever 
 adorned the precincts of English 
 royalty ; fond perhaps, as Macaulay 
 says, of whispering his love sonnets too 
 near to the willing ears of Elizabeth's 
 maids of honour, but too innately 
 refined to relapse into vulgar de- 
 bauchery. In fact, the Court of the
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 95 
 
 maiden Queen was one of the least 
 dissolute of any monarch in the his- 
 tory of England. Raleigh's sonnets 
 are an admirable reflection of the 
 manners of the society in which he 
 lived ; and, as from his prose writings 
 we discern the influence of an age of 
 discovery and unexampled vigour, so 
 from his verses do we glean some idea 
 of the reverential homage paid by her 
 Court to the proud virgin daughter of 
 Henry VIII. 
 
 Raleigh, thou ' great Shepherd of 
 the Ocean,' destined to die with a 
 broken heart in Palace Yard, not only 
 in thy mother country but in the free 
 land of America, where under thy 
 auspices the name, language, and in- 
 stitutions of merry England became 
 known and venerated, is thy memory 
 dear and thy fame beloved ! 
 
 Here our review of the literature of 
 the Elizabethan era must close, so far 
 as particular authors and their works
 
 96 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 are concerned. Pleasant would it 
 have been to discuss Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, Massinger and Marlowe ; 
 pleasanter still would it have been to 
 have lingered in the company of those 
 we have already portrayed in this 
 light sketch. Truly a work of love 
 would it have been to have filled up 
 the rich details of what it has only 
 been possible to give a rough outline 
 of, and to have revelled in the harmony 
 of 
 
 " Those melodious bursts that fill 
 The spacious times of great Elizabeth 
 With sounds that echo still." 
 
 But we must return to the purport 
 and explanation of our text, and 
 devote the remaining pages of this 
 chapter to inquiring more deeply into 
 the nature of the causes of this won- 
 drous intellectual development. - 
 
 From the time of the Norman Con- 
 quest to the reign of Henry VIII., the 
 condition of England may be likened
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 97 
 
 to the condition of a child. As its 
 advising guardian it had the Church. 
 It had a childlike incompetence to 
 restrain passion, which in the case of 
 a nation is more euphoniously termed 
 military ardour. In short, it thought 
 as a child and it behaved as a child. 
 But in the reign of Henry VIII. it 
 arrived at manhood, and intimated to 
 its guardian that for the future it 
 could think and act for itself. That 
 intimation was in reality the Refor- 
 mation, the birth of the age of Reason 
 and consequent death of the age of 
 Faith. Accordingly the nation, like 
 a young man suddenly awakened to a 
 sense of his responsibilities, exerted 
 itself to prove worthy of the liberty it 
 had gained. As intellectual develop- 
 ment depends entirely on exoteric 
 influences and is not the creature of 
 accidental chance, it follows that when 
 a nation finds that it is obliged to rely 
 on its own strength it makes every 
 
 7
 
 98 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 endeavour to render itself strong. 
 Now, as the individual is the arche- 
 type of the nation, at such a period 
 there must be men of exceptional 
 intellectual power. It would have 
 been an impossibility a thing con- 
 trary to the unchangeable laws of 
 nature for the reign of Elizabeth to 
 have been less prolific of talent than 
 it was. 
 
 The activity engendered by the 
 birth of liberty caused men like 
 Raleigh to sail over the seas in 
 search of new lands, and men con- 
 ceived a love for travels. The effect 
 was communication of intelligence 
 the interchange of knowledge by 
 which both parties gain without 
 losing one tittle of what they already 
 possess. 
 
 With the exception of the hostile 
 invasions of France, the English 
 during the Middle Ages had been a 
 stay-at-home people. They had not,
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 99 
 
 like the Italians, sailed to foreign 
 countries to find fresh markets for 
 trade. The greater part of England 
 was an uncultivated wilderness, inha- 
 bited by people whose civilization 
 was on a par with that of South Sea 
 Islanders. They had no idea of the 
 various improvements and inventions 
 which were taking place. Theirswamps 
 were undrained ; they lived in rude 
 huts like the dens of wild beasts. 
 There was no chance for the national 
 intellect to develop. On the con- 
 trary, everything was done which 
 might tend to cause mental stagna- 
 tion. 
 
 Such was the condition of England 
 that was dissipated by the birth of 
 liberty and the communication of 
 intelligence. 
 
 But travel was not the only channel 
 of communication. Printing had 
 been invented, and books had be- 
 come multiplied. The writings of 
 
 72
 
 ioo THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 the ancients, hitherto hidden in the 
 palaces of the great, could now be 
 studied by the multitude. A rapid 
 spread of knowledge took place ; and 
 alike from the history and the wisdom 
 of past times men gained experience, 
 and learnt how to apply it to the 
 present. On every side there were 
 signs of the rapid strides of mental 
 progress. Cities sprang up where 
 there had been fastnesses ; mud cot- 
 tages and castellated fortresses were 
 succeeded by the gabled houses of 
 the Elizabethan school of architec- 
 ture ; the sword was turned into the 
 ploughshare, and in the place of 
 swamps and forests appeared the 
 cultivated tenements of an agricul- 
 tural district. 
 
 Such was the advancement of 
 learning ; such the convincing proof 
 that knowledge is power. 
 
 But even in the reign of Elizabeth 
 the people who could read and write
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 101 
 
 were in a small minority, so that the 
 drama became the great field for 
 aspirants to literary fame. By far 
 the larger number of those indivi- 
 duals, whom posterity has chosen as 
 the representatives of the genius of 
 the age, were dramatists. The stage 
 was the medium through which the 
 author caught the sympathy of the 
 public. Moreover, the stage had 
 been already formed by the sacred 
 representations of Biblical subjects. 
 It had been invented by priestcraft as 
 a means of teaching idolatrous super- 
 stition to the ignorant. The only 
 thing needed was an alteration in the 
 style of play to be produced. Shake- 
 speare, and the brilliant circle of 
 satellites with which he was sur- 
 rounded, saw the necessity, and satis- 
 fied it 
 
 It has been already shown how 
 Bacon and Hooker reflected, in their 
 writings and philosophy, the feelings
 
 102 THE ELIZABETHAN ERA. 
 
 of the times. In fact, it cannot be 
 too clearly pointed out that the rela- 
 tions between individuals and social 
 life are physiologically inseparable, 
 and, as has been demonstrated by 
 Mr. Draper in his work on the " Intel- 
 lectual Development of Europe," that 
 man is the archetype or exemplar of 
 society. This being so, the social life 
 of the reign of Elizabeth, as exem- 
 plified by the individuals whom we 
 have been discussing in this chapter, 
 must have been a life of the most 
 magnificent intellectual refinement.
 
 v. 
 
 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 AFTER the death of Elizabeth the 
 next great cluster of intellectual 
 power which appeared in Europe was 
 the one which had its home at the 
 Court of the Grand Monarch. Never 
 did king deserve this title more than 
 Louis. The history of his reign is 
 well known ; it is the history of a 
 man enslaved to the passion of am- 
 bition. But he did not confine that 
 ambition to warfare ; he longed to be 
 celebrated for his splendour in every 
 department of life ; and thus he be- 
 came one of the most princely patrons 
 of literature that the world has ever
 
 104 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 seen. He founded academies for 
 sciences, for astronomy, and for litera- 
 ture ; Racine was his friend, and 
 Moliere his valet de chambre. His 
 very mistresses were chosen rather 
 for their wit than their beauty ; wit- 
 ness Mademoiselle de Manchini, the 
 niece of the great Cardinal Mazarin ; 
 witness Mademoiselle de la Valiere, 
 the woman whom the king loved 
 most ; witness the great Madame de 
 Maintenon, as conspicuous in the 
 cabinet as in the closet. But with 
 few exceptions the French literature 
 of this epoch bears too plainly the 
 impress of Court influence ; the poets 
 of the Elizabethan age met and drank 
 together at the Apollo, the Mermaid, 
 and other coffee-houses and ale- 
 houses ; the literati of the reign of 
 Louis had their reunions amidst the 
 brilliancy of Marli and Versailles, and 
 amongst the salon coteries of Paris. 
 So that, while Shakespeare and his
 
 LOUIS XIV. 105 
 
 followers appeal to the heart, the 
 French school appealed to the subtlety 
 of the mind. Their literature is more 
 polished, more elegant ; but it lacks 
 the sympathetic touch without which 
 poetry is but rhyming prose. 
 
 It has been universally allowed that 
 no prince ever influenced literature to 
 such an extent as Louis. The literary 
 men lived entirely at Paris ; almost 
 all the intellect of France was gathered 
 within the capital. Moreover, besides 
 the love of letters which the King un- 
 doubtedly possessed, there was a 
 political motive for his patronage. 
 The beginning of his reign had been 
 disturbed by the squabbles, almost 
 amounting to civil war, between the 
 factions of Cardinal Mazarin and the 
 Prince of Conde ; and, when the Car- 
 dinal was on his death-bed, his part- 
 ing advice to the King was that he 
 should rule himself, and not through 
 his ministers. In accordance with
 
 io6 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 this advice Louis's first object was to 
 humble the grandees, and, as a means 
 of doing this, he created an aristocracy 
 of intellect as a counterinfluence to the 
 aristocracy of birth. Such a stimulus 
 of itself would be sufficient to bring 
 forth genius, but there were other 
 minor motives at work, of which one 
 especially is worthy of notice. 
 
 Since Loyola had founded the Order 
 of the Jesuits that body had increased 
 in strength till its power was felt all 
 throughout Europe ; but nowhere was 
 its influence so strong as in France. 
 To arrest this current of religious 
 slavery, one Jansen wrote a book im- 
 pliedly condemning the Jesuitical 
 doctrines. After some delay and a 
 great deal of controversy, the Pope 
 forbad its publication. This pro- 
 hibition was of course entirely due 
 to the instigation of the Jesuits. But 
 the harm or good was already 
 done ; the book, which consisted of
 
 LOUIS XIV. 107 
 
 arguments on main points of doctrine, 
 had been widely read, and the result 
 was the foundation of Jansenism, 
 which had its home at Port Royal. 
 Des Cartes, too, had died in 1650, 
 leaving behind him the doctrines of 
 Cartesianism, which Malebranche ex- 
 pounded more fully. Thus there 
 were three parties in Paris the Jan- 
 senists, or Port Royalists ; the Carte- 
 sians, or Pantheists ; and the dis- 
 ciples of the Jesuits, who taught 
 implicit obedience to the authorities 
 of the Roman Church. It will be 
 well to discuss Des Cartes more fully 
 in treating of philosophy. At present 
 it is sufficient to have briefly pointed 
 out that religious controversy had no 
 little influence on literature. 
 
 But the greatest reason of all for 
 this sudden influx of literary power 
 lies in the fact that never since the 
 time of Charlemagne had France 
 been so strong and prosperous. As
 
 io8 LOUIS 
 
 has been already pointed out, the 
 literary genius of individuals is but 
 a mirror in which is reflected the 
 prosperity of the nation to which 
 they belong. France under Louis 
 was prosperous ; Paris was brilliant ; 
 hence the brilliancy of the dramatic 
 and prose writings of the time. 
 
 Let us shortly discuss a few of the 
 individuals whose names are chiefly 
 prominent in this sparkling cluster. 
 
 First, we have to deal with the 
 celebrated society of four, La Fon- 
 taine, Boileau, Racine, and Moliere. 
 Although La Fontaine's works are 
 considerable, the Contes and the 
 Fables are nearly the only writings 
 which are read by posterity the 
 former has some poetic value, but is 
 spoilt by indecency ; the latter is 
 suited virginibus puerisque, is full of 
 talent, but lacks genius. La Fontaine 
 was a plagiarist ; he copied from old 
 French writers, and fiom the Italians;
 
 LOUIS XIV. 109 
 
 but his language is so polished, so 
 supple, such a perfect model of 
 French, his mode of narration, especi- 
 ally in the beast fable, so captivating, 
 that we willingly pardon him for pre- 
 senting us with a revised edition of 
 Pulci, Ariosto, and Boccaccio. The 
 English translation of the fables, with 
 the illustrations of Gustave Dore", is 
 so well known that any further criti- 
 cism here is needless ; but in justice 
 to La Fontaine it must be remem- 
 bered that the seventeenth century 
 was an age of literary piracy. There 
 was no law of copyright, and men 
 stole and copied from living authors 
 with impunity. All the more, then, 
 should indulgence be granted to the 
 plagiarisms from authors who were 
 long since dead. As an instance of 
 literary piracy the works of the Duke 
 de la Rochefoucault may be quoted. 
 After the triumph of the Mazarin 
 faction the Duke returned to his own
 
 no LOUIS XIV. 
 
 estates, and gave expression to his 
 feelings in certain memoirs. The 
 Elzevirs, by some stratagem unknown 
 to us, got hold of the manuscript, and 
 there appeared a book called the 
 Memoirs of M. L. R. F. The Duke 
 alleged that only a portion of the 
 work, which was somewhat libellous, 
 and, from a political point of view, 
 inflammatory, was written by him. 
 At all events, it was published 
 without his sanction. In modern 
 times such conduct would be followed 
 by an action for heavy damages in 
 the law courts. Tempera mutantur 
 times are changed in more ways 
 than one. 
 
 Everybody has read Lord Byron's 
 poem on " English Bards and Scotch 
 Reviewers." If they can imagine the 
 personalities to be a thousand times 
 more offensive, and the accusations to 
 be without a word of truth to support 
 them, they can form a fair idea of the
 
 LOUIS XIV. in 
 
 poetry of Boileau. Guilty of the 
 most grovelling sycophancy towards 
 Louis, to others he showed the unfeel- 
 ing arrogance of a bad heart. He 
 has been termed a writer of Horatian 
 satires ; in reality he was a libellous 
 reviewer in verse. 
 
 La Fontaine and Boileau are the 
 two best known poets of the era, and 
 though I give this opinion with 
 great deference they are the most 
 poetical. The surroundings of the 
 Court of Louis, splendid and gorgeous 
 as they were, were not conducive to 
 the promotion of the true spirit of 
 poetry. Excluding the dramatists, 
 Mr. Saintsbury says that not a single 
 poet of the seventeenth century in 
 France deserves more than fair second- 
 class rank. This opinion, I think, 
 will be endorsed by all students of 
 French literature. The truth is that 
 Malherbe, in attempting to refine the 
 French language, reduced poetry to
 
 H2 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 carefully-worded metrical prose, and 
 all his successors followed his ex- 
 ample. They wrote by rule of thumb, 
 ever looking at the " stop watch," and 
 so the divine afflatus was wanting. 
 The drama of the age is much 
 pleasanter to contemplate than the 
 poetry. 
 
 Racine and Moliere, the two re- 
 maining partners of the society of 
 four, which used to meet once a week 
 for dinner and conversation at a 
 tavern in the Rue Vieux Colombier, 
 were both far inferior in point of 
 genius to Corneille. There is a 
 strong resemblance between Racine 
 and our own Ben Jonson. The plays 
 of both are conspicuous for minute 
 adherence to the rules of dramatic 
 composition, though Racine was 
 especially noted for that quality 
 which Corneille expressed so happily 
 through the mouth of Aristie : 
 " Le commerce rampant de soupirs et de flammes. 1 '
 
 LOUIS XIV. 113 
 
 Nor does the likeness end here; 
 for, in their private character, both 
 were jealous of their reputation, sensi- 
 tive to criticism, and envious of others. 
 Racine, however, had had the good 
 fortune to have only Corneille as a 
 rival, while the name of Ben Jonson 
 has been eclipsed by Shakespeare. 
 Of imagination and invention Racine 
 had but little ; but he was peculiarly 
 clever at filling in the details where 
 others had drawn the outline. Boileau 
 described Racine as a very clever man, 
 to whom he himself had taught the 
 knack of easy versification with elabo- 
 rate rhyming ; and such description is 
 as true as it can be. The melody of 
 Racine is beautiful ; but his regularity 
 is too regular to be pleasing. He has 
 in excess the great fault of all French 
 art : he is everlastingly the same ; any 
 one play is a type of all the rest the 
 same characters, the same love-making, 
 the same general outline, the same
 
 H4 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 particular filling up. Of course, the 
 greater part of Racine's work was 
 written in a very few years ; his 
 literary life consisted of a short period 
 of consummate activity, followed by 
 almost complete inaction. But this is 
 no excuse ; it rather affords a fresh 
 charge of complaint against Racine 
 himself. For he was a man fairly 
 well off ; he was not bound to write 
 for bread ; why, then, should he not 
 have bestowed more time on each 
 individual play, instead of producing 
 them in such rapid succession ? But, 
 as Mr. Saintsbury points out in his 
 history of French literature, the great 
 fault of all French writers is, that they 
 give the type only without differentia- 
 tion ; one is inch'ned to alter the lists 
 of Racine's dramatis persona, and, 
 instead of the proper names, to substi- 
 tute "a lover," "a mother," "a tyrant," 
 and so forth. Now, given the plan as 
 Racine was given it by Boileau, and
 
 LOUIS XIV. 115 
 
 it would not be difficult for any verse- 
 monger, if he be only a comic writer 
 of political lampoons, to produce a 
 play ; in short, we may justly con- 
 clude that the talent of Racine con- 
 sisted solely in his polish of diction. 
 
 Moliere also has this great fault, 
 namely, the propensity to always 
 write in a settled groove. He takes 
 a certain character, as, for example, 
 a gambler in the play of Le Joueur, 
 and from the first line to the last, 
 throughout the whole action that 
 character is a gambler, and nothing 
 else but a gambler. This plan of 
 always depicting the universal is too 
 apt to destroy the interest of the 
 audience, and as such is one which a 
 dramatist cannot be too careful to 
 eschew. It is, at least, the worst 
 fault of the Molieresque comedy. 
 For what does it deserve to be most 
 praised ? 
 
 In regard to the answer to this 
 
 82
 
 Ii6 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 question, there have been many dif- 
 ferences of opinion ; but all are agreed 
 that there are two points, not only 
 peculiar to Moliere, but from a dra- 
 matic point of view to be highly 
 commended. Of the one we have 
 lately heard much since Mr. Irving 
 produced Faust on the boards of 
 the Lyceum, but it is not popularly 
 known that Moliere was the first 
 dramatist who made it his especial 
 endeavour to turn the stage into a 
 lay-pulpit. This seems the more 
 strange when we consider that Moliere 
 was a comedian. The second point, 
 doubly curious in comparison with 
 the first, is the inimitable manner in 
 which Moliere united screaming farce, 
 burlesque, and refined comedy in the 
 same play. To the modern playgoer, 
 such a union seems impossible, yet 
 the French poet did it, and that, too, 
 without ever verging on the grotesque. 
 Of course Moliere could never be
 
 LOUIS XIV. 117 
 
 called a poet : he was too faithful a 
 mirror of the society in which he lived. 
 He wrote in order that his plays might 
 be acted, not that they might be read. 
 
 How many of us have wished that 
 Shakespeare's plays did not contain 
 such fine passages of poetry ! We 
 read them with pleasure, and listen 
 with anguish to hear some ranting 
 idiot recite them. Yet it is hard to 
 murder mere wit ; and it is in bril- 
 liancy of wit that Moliere shines above 
 every other poet of France, perhaps of 
 the world. 
 
 The great father of the French 
 drama was, however, Corneille. His 
 writings would have been the best 
 plays which have ever been produced 
 if it had not been for two things, 
 the one a fault of his own, the other 
 an accident of fortune. Nobody but 
 himself was to blame because he wrote 
 too much. Moliere said, " My friend 
 Corneille has a familiar who comes
 
 n8 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 now and then and whispers in his 
 ear the finest verses in the world ; but 
 sometimes the familiar deserts him, 
 and then he writes no better than 
 anybody else." If Corneille had only 
 written what this familiar dictated to 
 him, and could have steered clear of 
 the pitfall, which accident in the shape 
 of Malherbe had put in his path, he 
 would have excelled Shakespeare, 
 and been a model for every dramatist 
 since his day. But the uniform 
 monotony of the French dramatic 
 school spoilt him. La Bruyere com- 
 pared him to the Greek tragedians : 
 and to a certain extent he has much 
 in common with ^Eschylus. He com- 
 mands admiration, but he fails to 
 awaken the sympathies of his audience 
 or of his readers. His characters are 
 like himself, scornful of fortune ; but 
 they are grand and heroic, with a 
 Promethean loftiness of spirit which 
 disdains all earthly troubles.
 
 LOUIS XIV. 119 
 
 Corneille's best play, Le Cid, 
 was produced in 1636, before the 
 epoch of Louis ; but Surena, which I 
 believe to be the last play he wrote, 
 was produced in 1674. As, indepen- 
 dently of his own merit, he may be 
 considered as the tutor of Racine, 
 Moliere, and the minor dramatists, a 
 few memoirs of his private life may 
 prove of interest. 
 
 Socially he was unpopular in the 
 extreme, being of a sour, caustic dis- 
 position, though much of this may 
 have been the result of shyness, as he 
 was extremely affectionate towards 
 his relations. Again, his discontent 
 with life may have been caused by 
 his poverty. " Je suis saoul de gloire 
 et affame d'argent " was his answer to 
 the compliments of Boileau : nor had 
 he any sympathy with the Court of 
 Louis " Je n'ai pas le me'rite de ce 
 pays-ci." In short, like many other 
 great writers, he was an unhappy
 
 120 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 man ; and it was probably owing to 
 this unhappiness that he disliked 
 portraying in his plays the power of 
 love. According to Lasne, an engraver 
 of Caen, his countenance was serious 
 almost to sternness. The man, like 
 his writings, commanded admiration ; 
 but was too insensible to the minor 
 springs of human action to command 
 the love of those who did not know 
 him well. 
 
 Of the prose writers, Balzac died in 
 1655, and, although Pascal lived till 
 1662, for the last years of his life he 
 abandoned himself to asceticism and 
 philosophical meditation, so neither of 
 these great masters of French prose 
 come directly under our notice. But 
 their style, graphic and sparkling with 
 epigram at every point, was the model 
 of the age which succeeded them. Of 
 this age, excepting the philosophers, 
 La Bruyere and Madame de Sevigne 
 are best known to posterity. The 
 Caracteres are the chief work of the
 
 LOUIS XIV. 121 
 
 former ; and inasmuch as they are 
 in reality descriptions of the leading 
 men of France at that period, they 
 will always prove of the greatest 
 interest ; but they are chiefly to be 
 admired for the easy method in which 
 they are written. They are utterly 
 free from the didactic maxim of the 
 ordinary essay, but pass from person- 
 alities to morals, without the reader 
 becoming conscious of the boundary- 
 mark. It would be well if his flu- 
 ency could be copied by all essay- 
 ists. The voluminous letters of 
 Madame de Sevigne, herself the friend 
 of the scornful Corneille, are an ad- 
 mirable reflection of the manners of 
 the times. The wife of a roue, who 
 spent his fortune on the celebrated 
 Ninon, she had seen something of the 
 shady side of life. Fortunately for 
 her she was left a handsome widow at 
 the age of twenty-eight, and from that 
 time she was one of the brilliant stars 
 of Parisian society. In spite of her
 
 122 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 great beauty and popularity, her char- 
 acter was ever sans reproche, and not 
 even the discovery of the letters of 
 Fouquet, written to him by the lead- 
 ing women of society, did her any 
 harm. She is a type of the French 
 woman of the world at that time : full 
 of affection towards her own daughter, 
 but callous to the sufferings of the 
 common people. Such was the cus- 
 tom of the French patricians : a 
 custom which did much towards 
 causing the sansculottic revenge of 
 the Revolution. We admire Madame 
 <ie Sevigne as a mother; but as a 
 woman she repels and disgusts us. 
 Her letters, like the memoirs of the 
 Duke de la Rochefoucault and the 
 Cardinal de Retz, are more an addi- 
 tion to history than they are to belles 
 lettres or polite literature. 
 
 It now only remains to criticise the 
 writings of the greatest metaphysical 
 philosopher that France ever pro-
 
 LOUIS XIV. 123 
 
 duced, namely, Des Cartes, which, with 
 the works of Malebranche, constituted 
 Cartesianism. Cartesianism, in its 
 turn, founded Spinozism ; and the 
 result of the two is modern Pantheism. 
 
 I do not know whether book-lovers 
 are, as a rule, metaphysicians, or are 
 fond of abstruse philosophical specu- 
 lation ; but I presume that the mean- 
 ing of the term modern Pantheism is 
 known to all the readers of this 
 volume. In any case, I feel that it 
 would be entirely incongruous in a 
 literary review to give an explanation 
 of the tenets of any school of philo- 
 sophy. Therefore, I shall content 
 myself with shortly attempting to 
 show how it was that such a philo- 
 sophy as Cartesianism came to be 
 propounded in France during the 
 seventeenth century. 
 
 There is, in the first place, a strong 
 affinity between Des Cartes and 
 Bacon. Both strove to escape from
 
 124 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 the incomprehensible transcendencies 
 of the old theologians, and to substi- 
 tute realism in their place. But the 
 surroundings of Des Cartes were 
 religious ; those of Bacon, on the 
 other hand, were political. Thus, 
 while both recognised the importance 
 of substituting reason in the place of 
 faith, Des Cartes confined himself to 
 preaching the doctrine that the truth 
 of Scripture must be proved by the 
 laws of nature, and hardly glances at 
 the theory of general utility. The 
 philosophy of Bacon was human ; 
 the philosophy of Des Cartes was 
 natural. Apart from his theological 
 opinions, he made several valuable 
 scientific discoveries. He first ex- 
 plained the reason for the use of 
 water in an exhausted space " the 
 weight of the water counterbalances 
 that of the air." In astronomy, 
 following in the footsteps of Galileo, 
 he demonstrated that every curvilinear
 
 LOUIS XIV. 125 
 
 deflection is due to a controlling force. 
 He also introduced the theory of an 
 ether and vortices. It must be re- 
 membered, too, that at this epoch 
 science, in all its numerous ramifi- 
 cations, was making rapid strides. 
 Piccolomini had laid the foundation 
 of anatomy ; Vieta had applied 
 algebra to geometry ; Tycho had 
 developed astronomy; Ambroise Pare 
 had invented modern surgery; Gilbert 
 had discovered magnetism. Such 
 was the scientific activity of the age 
 of reason. It required some motive 
 power to turn this activity into the 
 channels of theology and philosophy. 
 That motive power was the Jesuits. 
 
 The investigations of nature tended 
 to produce the intellectual ruin of 
 ecclesiasticism, unless the Church 
 chose to adapt itself to the new lights 
 of reason. This the Church, per- 
 suaded by the Jesuitical doctrine of 
 implicit obedience, refused to do.
 
 126 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 Mr. Draper has aptly described its 
 course of conduct : " On the ruins of 
 its ivy -grown cathedrals, ecclesias- 
 ticism, surprised and blinded by the 
 breaking day, sat solemnly blinking at 
 the light and life about it, absorbed in 
 the recollection of the night that had 
 passed, dreaming of new phantoms 
 and delusions in its wished-f^r return, 
 and vindictively striking its talons at 
 any derisive assailant who incautiously 
 approached too near." This hostile 
 position which the Church took up 
 was the worst policy it could possibly 
 have adopted. The professors of 
 natural science, in self-defence, were 
 obliged to combat against this arro- 
 gant ignorance, and so they boldly 
 asserted that nature was a faculty of 
 God, a creed which inevitably leads 
 to Pantheism. 
 
 In France the doctrines of Des 
 Cartes soon found disciples. Owing 
 to the oppression of the Jesuits, the
 
 LOUIS XIV. 127 
 
 Jansenists, the Arminians, and the 
 Coccejans had largely increased, and 
 Cartesianism received ready support 
 from the Port Royalists ; for, although 
 Des Cartes was antagonistic to the 
 Roman orthodoxy, he was a firm 
 believer in the principles of Chris- 
 tianity. Accordingly, in 1690, we 
 find Jean Silvain Regis publishing, in 
 Paris, a book in four parts, respectively 
 headed," Logic," " Metaphysics," " Phy- 
 sics," and "Ethics," purporting to be 
 an explanation of Cartesianism. The 
 book now would be considered crude, 
 but at that time it created an immense 
 amount of controversy, in which Louis 
 himself took an active part. The 
 writings of Malebranche had also 
 attracted notice ; in short, the first 
 blow was struck in France against 
 priestcraft a blow which led to the 
 bald atheism of Voltaire, and the 
 encyclopaedists, and ultimately ended 
 in the Revolution. If, however, at
 
 128 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 the first sign of schism mutual conces- 
 sions had been made, it is far from 
 improbable that the Roman Church 
 would have been spared the degrada- 
 tion of the next century. 
 
 In reviewing the age of Louis XIV. 
 there is hardly anything which strikes 
 us more forcibly than the influences 
 of war on the development of literary 
 genius. The great passion of Louis 
 was ambition, and the form that 
 ambition took was a never-ceasing 
 desire to increase his dominions. The 
 seventeenth century saw a vast change 
 come over the face of Europe. Spain, 
 from being the most important power, 
 had dwindled into comparative in- 
 significance ; the Dutch had been 
 unable to uphold their naval supre- 
 macy ; the strength of Germany was 
 not as yet consolidated ; it was not 
 till the close of the century that 
 England had sufficiently settled her 
 own affairs to be able to send a
 
 LOUIS XIV. 129 
 
 Marlborough to arrest the aggrandize- 
 ment of France. Therefore, in spite 
 of the desire to preserve the balance 
 of power in Europe, which first 
 assumed a definite form in the Triple 
 Alliance, the schemes of Louis did 
 not till the end of his reign meet with 
 any very serious opposition. His 
 history mainly consists of the history 
 of a series of campaigns, carried on 
 with more or less success, and ever 
 conducing to the prosperity of Paris. 
 The greater part of the money which 
 resulted from the wars was spent in 
 the capital. Hence, all the talent of 
 France was attracted to the Court ; 
 and that Court became at once the 
 most gorgeous, the most splendid, 
 and the most magnificent in all its 
 details that has ever graced the 
 annals of the princes of modern 
 Europe. It is impossible to excuse 
 the faults of Louis ; but the thanks of 
 posterity are due to him for his bril- 
 
 9
 
 130 LOUIS XIV. 
 
 liant patronage of the fine arts and of 
 literature. His reign undoubtedly 
 constituted the golden era of the 
 belles lettres of France, and under his 
 auspices science made rapid strides in 
 every direction. The condition of 
 his dominions and of his subjects was 
 prosperous ; and so the men and 
 women who sought and won fame 
 through their writings achieved the 
 success they deserved, and by the 
 creations of their brains have pre- 
 sented to nineteenth-century Europe 
 an admirable reflection of the times 
 in which they lived.
 
 VI. 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 THE end of the reign of Louis XIV. 
 and the end of the brilliant epoch of 
 French literature were simultaneous. 
 With the exception of Boileau, who 
 dared to tell Louis that he knew 
 nothing about poetry, the writers of 
 the Parisian school had been distin- 
 guished for their servility towards the 
 Grand Monarch ; so that, when in his 
 last years the King exchanged gor- 
 geous splendour for the forlorn hope 
 of religion, there was no room for the 
 gay genius which had especially dis- 
 tinguished the poetry of the age. 
 But in the meantime, with the excep- 
 
 92
 
 132 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 tion of a few Jacobite risings, England 
 had recovered from the internal dis- 
 sensions which had harassed her 
 during the period of the Stuarts. 
 The dynasty of the reigning family 
 had been settled by William, and 
 Maryborough re-established the in- 
 fluence of his country on the Con- 
 tinent by the victory of Blenheim. A 
 vast change in both political and 
 social life at home had taken place ; 
 and from the midst of the turmoil 
 caused by the civil wars between 
 Roundheads and Cavaliers, and by 
 the dissipated debauchery which 
 succeeded the Restoration, there 
 sprung up a mass of literature which, 
 although not devoid of genius, has 
 made itself more renowned for its 
 numerical strength. The quantity of 
 writers and the quantity of writings 
 are alike stupendous, so that it will 
 be well-nigh impossible to give any 
 personal account of the distinguished
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 133 
 
 men of the age. It must rather be 
 our province, therefore, to examine 
 into the causes which led to the de- 
 velopment of their intellectual power. 
 But, apart from the want of space, 
 anything pretending to the nature of 
 a biography would be useless, inas- 
 much as it could not be original. As 
 we approach nearer and nearer to our 
 own times, the personality of authors 
 becomes the more known. It is 
 interwoven with the history of the 
 times with which we have a more 
 extensive acquaintance. We know 
 the houses where they lived and wrote, 
 the streets in which they walked, even 
 the alehouses in which they drank. 
 We have innumerable biographies 
 written after the minutest research. 
 We are told the various scandals of 
 their lives as fully as if they were 
 recorded in the columns of a current 
 society journal. Everybody who pro- 
 fesses to take the slightest interest
 
 134 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 in the literature of England knows 
 that Pope, owing to pique, carried on 
 an ignoble literary warfare against 
 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and 
 that he indulged his taste for horti- 
 culture in a Twickenham villa ; that 
 Addison spent most of his evenings 
 at Button's, surrounded by admiring 
 satellites ; that Gay was so careless of 
 money that his patron ; the Duke of 
 Queensberry, doled it out to him ; 
 that Swift, the Tory Irish clergyman, 
 broke the heart of Stella ; that Par- 
 nell died from intemperance in drink- 
 ing. The most superficial book-lover 
 would smile if he were told these 
 things, or be angry at having been 
 trapped into reading mere gleanings 
 from Dr. Johnson's Lives of tJie 
 Poets. 
 
 Except to prove how personal 
 experience affected the style of par- 
 ticular men, it would be plainly the 
 height of folly to attempt to give any
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 135 
 
 biographical account of well-known 
 authors after the time of Louis ; 
 therefore it is intended to restrict 
 this inquiry to generalities, without 
 touching on the personality or, to be 
 more explicit, the private life of any 
 particular author. 
 
 By some freak of nomenclature, 
 utterly unexplainable by the light of 
 reason, the age of Anne has been 
 termed the Augustan age of English 
 literature. In the first place, there 
 was no royal personage to act the 
 part of Augustus ; the Dutch William, 
 so far from extending any critical 
 patronage to letters, could not even 
 speak the English language correctly ; 
 the conflict in the political world 
 during the reign of Anne was so 
 keen, that the patronage of wealthy 
 individuals, instead of resembling 
 that of Maecenas, was essentially 
 directed by party motives. The Tory 
 Bolingbroke befriended Pope ; the
 
 136 THE AGE OF ANNE, 
 
 Whig Halifax befriended Addison. 
 There was no literary society like that 
 which crowded to the baths of Rome 
 to listen to poets reciting their verses. 
 Thus the form of public sympathy 
 was entirely different. In the second 
 place, the Augustan age was an age 
 of indolent prosperity succeeding an 
 age of excessive turmoil ; the reign 
 of Anne, on the contrary, was a time 
 of party warfare in the arena of poli- 
 tics at home, and a time of actual 
 warfare abroad. The Roman age was 
 one of absolute imperialism ; the 
 English age was one during which 
 supreme power in this country was 
 first held by the House of Commons. 
 The moral tone of Roman society was 
 beginning to be contaminated by 
 luxury and idleness ; the moral tone 
 of English society was beginning to 
 be reformed. Both in regard to 
 public life and in regard to private 
 habits, probably no two ages in the
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 137 
 
 course of history afford a more radical 
 distinction. 
 
 Accordingly, the only excuse for 
 the name is that there might be some 
 faint resemblance between the two 
 schools of literature unless, indeed, 
 anybody would suggest that the term 
 Augustan is used in the superlative 
 sense to signify " best." But as the 
 most brilliant epoch of English poetry 
 was the age of Shakespeare, and the 
 most brilliant epoch of English prose 
 had as its centre the French Revolu- 
 tion at all events, Addison and 
 Defoe are the only two prose writers 
 of their time who can with any 
 shadow of success appeal on behalf 
 of the claimants for the term Augus- 
 tan this suggestion is so feeble as 
 hardly to admit of argument. We 
 are obliged to fall back, therefore, on 
 the theory of resemblance. 
 
 The only basis for this theory is 
 that the poets of the age of Anne had
 
 138 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 spent much time in studying the 
 Latin poets. Pope wrote many clever 
 imitations of the classics, besides 
 translations ; and few men have ever 
 lived who had a more extensive know- 
 ledge of Latin poetry than Addison. 
 But both the style and the theme of 
 the original writings were utterly dis- 
 similar. Where there is no similarity 
 there can be no comparison. It only 
 remains, therefore, to prove the dictum 
 that the writings of the two ages are 
 dissimilar, in order to show how false 
 is the application of the term Augus- 
 tan to the age of Anne. 
 
 Firstly, in regard to poetry, the 
 only creation of the English school 
 which seems to have anything in 
 common with the Roman school of 
 Augustus is the opera of Rosa- 
 mund, by Addison. Such passages 
 as the following recall vaguely to 
 our minds the poetry of Ovid or 
 Horace :
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 139 
 
 " Full in the centre of the grove, 
 In yon pavilion made for love ; 
 Where woodbines, roses, jessamines, 
 Amaranths and eglantines, 
 With intermingling sweets, have wove 
 The parti-coloured gay alcove." 
 
 And, again, in the third scene of the 
 second act : 
 
 " Oh, the soft, delicious view, 
 Ever charming, ever new ! 
 Greens of various shades arise, 
 Decked with flowers of various dyes ; 
 Paths by meeting paths are crost, 
 Alleys in winding alleys lost ; 
 Fountains playing through the trees 
 Give coolness to the passing breeze. 
 A thousand fairy scenes appear : 
 Here a grove, a grotto here ; 
 Here a rock, and here a stream. 
 
 Sweet delusion, 
 
 Gay confusion 
 All a vision, all a dream !" 
 
 In short, although the lyrical form 
 of Rosamund is more Greek than 
 Latin, and more English than either, 
 there is both in the subject and the 
 words a smooth elasticity very akin 
 to the eloquence of the Metamor- 
 phoses. But so far as Addison is
 
 140 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 concerned with Rosamund, the re- 
 semblance ends : and even Rosamund 
 was one of his earliest efforts. It 
 will be said that Addison first made 
 his name by his Latin verses, which 
 were considered to be the best ever 
 written by an Englishman. Perhaps 
 so : but can any man write good 
 poetry in a dead language? I think 
 not ; and in regard to the Addisonian 
 verses, we have the opinion of Boileau, 
 the first literary critic that Europe has 
 ever seen : " Je les ai trouves fort 
 beaux, et dignes de Vida et de San- 
 nazar, mais non pas d'Horace et de 
 Virgile." Outside poetry Addison's 
 knowledge of classical literature is 
 hardly equal to that of an ordinary 
 fifth-form public-school boy. Lord 
 Macaulay, in his essay on the " Life 
 and Writings of Addison," has proved 
 this beyond all doubt : so he can 
 hardly be said to have borrowed from 
 the Latin prose writers. Besides,
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 141 
 
 there were few writers to copy, as has 
 already been shown in an earlier part 
 of this work. It would, indeed, be a 
 libel on the name of one of the greatest 
 masters of English prose to accuse 
 Addison of the Latinity which spoilt 
 the writing of his biographer, Dr. 
 Johnson. Pope confessedly imitated 
 Horace and Virgil : he also imitated 
 Chaucer, Spenser, Cowley, and other 
 English poets. But Pope has won his 
 laurels for being the most successful 
 writer of heroic verse that England 
 has ever seen. In fact, he introduced 
 the heroic metre. The Rape of tJie 
 Lock and The Essay on Man are 
 probably his best, as they are the 
 most popular of his poems ; of these 
 two, the subjects are taken from the 
 social manners of the times and the 
 philosophy of St. John Bolingbroke. 
 The treatment of the subjects, I ven- 
 ture to assert, can hardly be termed 
 Augustan ; it is the treatment of Pope,
 
 142 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 and of Pope alone. In the Tales of 
 Prior and the Fables of Gay, I have 
 failed to find anything approaching 
 to Latinity. Both poets probably 
 received some partial inspiration 
 from Les Fables and Les Contes of 
 La Fontaine ; but otherwise they 
 were English. The v/it of Congreve 
 and the humour of Horace are as 
 unlike as Halifax and Maecenas. 
 Finally, the poets of Anne's time had 
 read the Augustan literature, but had 
 happily failed to catch its spirit. 
 
 If we turn to prose, the difference 
 is far more striking. The increase in 
 the power of the House of Commons 
 led to an increase in the freedom of 
 the press. Whigs and Tories alike 
 possessed their organs amongst the 
 papers. In the reign of Anne journal- 
 ism received its birth. The leaders 
 of both parties sought for able writers, 
 and rewarded them with official posts 
 according to their ability. The rivalry
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 143 
 
 of the politicians created the rivalry of 
 the authors. Imagine for one moment 
 this state of affairs in the Rome of 
 Augustus ! A writer presuming to 
 teach the people the way in which 
 they should be governed ! Away 
 with him to the lions and tigers, and 
 let the gladiators have a holiday! 
 
 It is trusted that this condemnation 
 of the term Augustan, as applied to 
 the literature of Anne, will not only 
 have shown the folly of such appli- 
 cation, but also have served as an 
 introduction to the review of this 
 epoch. In no reign during English 
 history has the influence of politics 
 on literature been so powerful as it 
 was during the reign of Anne. Let 
 us, before proceeding further, briefly 
 examine the effects of this political 
 warfare. 
 
 Allusion has been already made to 
 the growing power of the press and 
 the consequent necessity for party
 
 144 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 leaders to employ men in the public 
 service who were members of the 
 aristocracy of intellect. Charles Mon- 
 tagu, afterwards Lord Halifax, and 
 Lord Chancellor Somers were the 
 first to recognise the influence of 
 literature on the public mind. Owing 
 to Montagu, Addison gave up the 
 idea of entering the Church, and was 
 educated as a diplomatist. Montagu, 
 however, lost office on the accession of 
 Anne, who was hostile to the Whigs. 
 so that it was not till the battle of 
 Blenheim that Addison attracted 
 notice. A poet was required to cele- 
 brate the victory ; and, by the advice 
 of Halifax, Godolphin sent Henry 
 Boyle, the Chancellor of the Ex- 
 chequer, to ask Addison to fulfil the 
 task. He did so, and the result of 
 the " Campaign " is well known. It 
 at once attracted attention, and the 
 poet was rewarded with a commis- 
 sionership cf two hundred pounds a
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 145 
 
 year. After that his rise was rapid ; 
 in 1 705 he became Under-Secretary of 
 State, and subsequently Chief-Secre- 
 tary for Ireland and Secretary of 
 State. Further, all these posts he 
 held successively during a parliamen- 
 tary career of only nine years. 
 
 I take Addison as an example, not 
 only on account of the rapidity of 
 his promotion, but also on account 
 of the fact that, with the exception 
 of his writings, he had not the slight- 
 est claim to political preferment. As 
 an orator in the House of Commons 
 he was a failure, because he was ner- 
 vous. He had the reputation of shining 
 in private conversation, but otherwise, 
 as far as I am aware, he never proved 
 himself proficient in diplomacy. He 
 could not lay claim to wealth or to 
 aristocracy of birth. It was by his 
 pen alone that he acquired power. 
 Men like Somers, Halifax, Wharton, 
 and Cowper, were not likely to prefer 
 
 10
 
 146 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 Addisons over the heads of such men 
 as Bentinck, Russell, and Talbot, un- 
 less the aid of literature was indis- 
 pensable to the popularity of the 
 party. Owing to shorthand, the 
 speech of a politician is in the pre- 
 sent day read at the breakfast-tables 
 of thousands of houses the morning 
 after it is delivered, and nobody cares 
 much for the opinions of the Fleet 
 Street leader-writer. But in the reign 
 of Anne, party measures were pro- 
 mulgated and public opinion gauged 
 by means of pamphlets. Hence the 
 importance of literary assistance. 
 Lord Macaulay has even gone so 
 far as to state, that it may well be 
 doubted whether St. John did so 
 much for the Tories as Swift ; and 
 whether Cowper did so much for the 
 Whigs as Addison. Controversial 
 talent of the highest order had to be 
 got ; and the illustrious names which 
 adorn the literary period of Anne
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 147 
 
 show that the supply was equal to 
 the demand. 
 
 But, although controversy was one 
 of the primary causes for the develop- 
 ment of talent, it forms one of the 
 worst blots on the writing of the 
 times. The antagonism, once aroused, 
 could not be kept within the limits of 
 politics. The biographies of authors 
 absolutely teem with the most ignoble 
 of personal quarrels. The members 
 of the Kit-Cat Club were hardly on 
 speaking terms with the members of 
 the October Club. The most ill- 
 natured composition which ever dis- 
 graced the annals of English litera- 
 ture is the Dunciad of Pope. Having 
 made Theobald the hero, or rather 
 dunce-in-chief of the poem in the 
 first edition, he displaces him on ac- 
 count of a petty quarrel, and substi- 
 tutes Colley Cibber. His attack on 
 Dennis was derogatory in the ex- 
 treme ; and his quarrel with Addison 
 
 IO 2
 
 148 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 seems to have been hardly justified 
 by the circumstance. The nature of 
 Pope was, of course, resentful and 
 petulant, and some excuse must be 
 made for him on account of the 
 bodily infirmities from which he 
 suffered ; yet, if in the present day 
 an author so far lost his self-respect 
 as to descend to the mean retaliation 
 of which Pope was guilty, he would 
 undoubtedly be scouted by all his liter- 
 ary brethren. So strong, however, was 
 the spirit of controversy, that Pope 
 seems rather to have gained honour 
 for that for which dishonour was due. 
 It may, perhaps, be wondered why 
 the influence of the general reading 
 public was so small in comparison 
 with that of the politicians. The 
 truth is, that outside the circle of 
 politics there was no reading public. 
 The only literature read by the fox- 
 hunting country squire was that which 
 related to the welfare of his party.
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 149 
 
 The Church concerned itself chiefly 
 with the great question of ritualism. 
 The upper middle class had yet to 
 be formed. The leaders of London 
 society, both men and women, were 
 either wholly devoted to the warfare 
 of the House of Commons, or else 
 they only took an interest in the 
 fashion of a wig, or the invention of 
 a new powder for the complexion. 
 The garden-parties of royalty at 
 Hampton Court were the essence of 
 everything that is dull. The satel- 
 lites who surrounded Charles II. 
 were dissipated, but they were bril- 
 liant wits. Rochester was a roue 
 who gained the unenviable reputation 
 of never having been sober for the 
 space of five years ; but he wrote 
 verses and made impromptu repartees 
 which are repeated even now. The 
 courtiers of Anne were empty fops, 
 with not even sufficient talent to be 
 rakes. The most inglorious fact in
 
 ISO THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 the reign of Anne is herself. A man 
 of talent had no choice but to be- 
 come a soldier, a statesman, or a 
 writer. There was no other road 
 open to distinction. So the writers 
 were wholly dependent for sympathy 
 on politics or war. But as the time 
 had arrived for war to be directed 
 from the Cabinet, the influence of 
 politics over literature became para- 
 mount. 
 
 The above remarks on the society 
 of the reign of Anne may seem some- 
 what severe, but on examination they 
 appear to be true. The Rape of the 
 Lock is generally acknowledged to be 
 the best reflection of the times which 
 has been handed down to us. It 
 would be well, therefore, to bestow 
 some attention upon it. 
 
 The Rape of the Lock is nothing 
 more than a burlesque, or social 
 pleasantry, describing how an amor- 
 ous lord cut off with a pair of scissors
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 151 
 
 a curl from a lady's head, and how 
 the damsel revenged herself for the 
 outrage. It was this poem that made 
 Dr. Johnson declare that " the freaks, 
 and humours, and spleen, and vanity 
 of women, as they embroil families in 
 discord, and fill houses with disquiet, 
 do more to obstruct the happiness of 
 life in a year than the ambition of the 
 clergy in many centuries." Certainly 
 in the reign of Anne the vanity of 
 the ladies led them to use more arti- 
 ficial means of adornment than even 
 society women of the present day. 
 Witness the description of Belinda's 
 dressing-table : 
 
 " Unnumber'd treasures ope at once, and here 
 The various offerings of the world appear ; 
 From each she nicely culls with curious toil, 
 And decks the goddess with the glitt'ring spoil. 
 This casket India's glowing gems unlocks, 
 And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. 
 The Tortoise here and Elephant unite, 
 Transform'd to combs, the speckled and the 
 
 white. 
 
 Here files of pins extend their shining rows ; 
 Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-Doux ;
 
 152 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 Now awful Beauty puts on all its arms ; 
 The fair each moment rises in her charms, 
 Repairs her smiles, awakens ev'ry grace, 
 And calls forth all the wonders of her face ; 
 Sees by degrees a purer blush arise, 
 And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes.' 
 
 With the exception of the Bibles, 
 the description in modern days would 
 be more applicable to the dressing- 
 room of the female choristers at a 
 burlesque theatre. Both Swift and 
 Addison have, however, left us de- 
 scriptions of the prevalent female 
 toilet, from which we may gather 
 that there is no exaggeration in the 
 above lines. But the amorous lord 
 is not to be outdone in folly ; de- 
 termined to gain the curl by fraud or 
 force, he makes a silly prayer : 
 
 " For this, ere Phoebus rose, he had implor'd 
 Propitious heav'n, and ev'ry pow'r ador'd, 
 But chiefly Love ; to Love an altar built, 
 Of twelve vast French Romances, neatly gilt. 
 There lay three garters, half a pair of gloves, 
 And all the trophies of his former loves ; 
 With tender Billet-doux he lights the pyre, 
 And breathes three am'rous sighs to raise the 
 fire. "
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 153 
 
 What would either a Rochester or 
 a Beau Brummel think of those 
 ridiculous absurdities ? 
 
 By way of side -play Pope intro- 
 duces the theory of the Rosicrucians ; 
 so we have invisible Sylphs, w,hose 
 duty it is to attend upon Belinda and 
 her sex : 
 
 " To save the powder from too rude a gale, 
 Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale ; 
 To draw fresh colours from the vernal flow'rs ; 
 To steal from rainbows ere they drop in show'rs 
 A brighter wash ; to curl their waving hairs, 
 Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs ; 
 Nay, oft in dreams, invention we bestow 
 To change a Flounce, or add a Furbelow." 
 
 It may be added that the term 
 " flirtation " was invented in this reign 
 from the manner in which the ladies 
 were wont to flirt their fans. Later 
 on we get a description of the beau 
 of the period : 
 
 " Sir Plume, of amber snuff-box justly vain, 
 And the nice conduct of a clouded cane." 
 
 Both from the writings of Pope, of 
 Addison, and of Swift, we arrive at
 
 154 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 the conclusion that English Society 
 had borrowed the frivolity of the 
 French Court, without its gorgeous 
 immorality. Addison, in the Spectator, 
 constantly writes against the growing 
 prevalence of French fashions; and, 
 as was proved in the next generation, 
 the imitation of the painted beauties 
 of Marli and Versailles was but too 
 dangerous to our own social morality. 
 The simplicity of rural life, on the 
 other hand, has been well shown in 
 the admirable sketches of Sir Roger 
 de Coverley. They constitute, prob- 
 ably, the best prose that Addison ever 
 wrote ; but as they are so universally 
 read, any comment on them is need- 
 less. The only other point to be 
 referred to is the growing passion for 
 gambling. A great part of the third 
 canto of The Rape of tJie Lock is 
 devoted to the game of Ombre ; so 
 we may infer that, even at garden- 
 parties, the introduction of cards was
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 155 
 
 an ordinary event. Godolphin spent 
 nearly all his leisure-time, which he 
 could spare from the affairs of state, 
 at the card-table, or at Newmarket ; 
 and from Godolphin downwards the 
 same passion prevailed. 
 
 It will thus be seen that, except in 
 regard to sonnets dedicated to a 
 lady's lapdog, and to political lam- 
 poons and pamphlets, there was little 
 public sympathy for literature. The 
 stage, however, had revived after the 
 Restoration ; and, in spite of the 
 foolish attack of the non-juror Collier, 
 was in a state of prosperity during 
 the reign of Anne. Of the dramatists 
 of the age, the foremost is, without 
 doubt, Congreve. Although Congreve 
 lived till 1729, his literary career was 
 over by the reign of Anne. Not only, 
 however, were his plays acted, but the 
 man himself exercised a great influ- 
 ence on the stage by his criticisms on 
 the productions of others. He is the
 
 156 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 only English dramatist who ap- 
 proaches the excellence of Shake- 
 speare, and we must ever regret his 
 choice in retiring from dramatic 
 writing before his genius was fully 
 developed. Dr. Johnson writes : 
 "Among all the efforts of early 
 genius which literary history records, 
 I doubt whether any one can be pro- 
 duced that more surpasses the com- 
 mon limits of nature than the plays 
 of Congreve." But, alas for posterity ! 
 Congreve had always aspired to be a 
 leading member of the beau monde, 
 for which, both by birth and educa- 
 tion, he was eminently qualified, and 
 eventually his social ambition over- 
 came his love of literature. In spite 
 of the adverse criticism bestowed on 
 the passage by Lord Macaulay, the 
 speech of Almeria, in the third scene 
 of the second act of The Mourning 
 Bride, is the finest, as it is the most 
 Shakespearian, poetry that Congreve
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 157 
 
 wrote. As, however, the opinions are 
 so various and conflicting, it would be 
 best to give the quotation, and leave 
 the reader to judge for himself: 
 
 " No, all is hush'd and still as death. 'Tis 
 
 dreadful ! 
 
 How reverend is the face of this tall pile, 
 Whose ancient pillars rear their marble heads 
 To bear aloft its arch'd and ponderous roof, 
 By its own weight made steadfast and immovable, 
 Looking tranquillity ! It strikes an awe 
 And terror on my aching sight ; the tombs 
 And monumental caves of death look cold, 
 And shoot a dullness to my trembling heart. 
 Give me thy hand, and let me hear thy voice ; 
 Nay, quickly speak to me, and let me hear 
 Thy voice my own affrights me with its echoes." 
 
 But there were many other aspir- 
 ants to dramatic fame besides Con- 
 greve. Gay introduced the ballad 
 opera, now more commonly known as 
 the comic opera, by means of the 
 famous Beggars Opera a play so 
 vicious in its tendencies that the 
 author was thenceforth called the 
 Orpheus of highwaymen. It may be 
 of interest to know that the practice 
 of gentlemen of birth and position
 
 158 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 marrying questionable characters from 
 off the stage is not confined to the 
 present day. Directly the comic 
 opera was introduced, Lavinia Fenton, 
 who played the part of the heroine 
 in the Beggar's Opera and was a 
 woman of the easiest, or rather of no 
 virtue at all, married the Right Hon. 
 Lord Charles, Duke of Bolton. So 
 popular was the Beggars Opera at 
 the time it was produced, that even 
 ladies carried about the favourite 
 songs in their fans. 
 
 Presuming that a person did not 
 possess the slightest knowledge of 
 literature, but had some slight ac- 
 quaintance with the society of Anne, 
 he would easily guess that the drama 
 was confined to comedy ; and he 
 would be right. Garrick certainly 
 revived Shakespeare ; but all the 
 literary talent was directed towards 
 the production of mixed comedy. 
 Nor were the productions of a high
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 159 
 
 order, in regard either to intrinsic 
 merit or to morality. The ribaldry 
 of Wycherley had been expelled, 
 but much indecency still remained 
 behind. The very titles of the plays 
 speak for themselves. Consequently, 
 although the reign constitutes an 
 important era in the history of the 
 stage, few of the plays would now be 
 allowed to be acted, and, except by 
 students of literature, are seldom 
 read. It would be curious to learn 
 the percentage of educated people 
 who have read the What D'ye Call 
 It ? of Gay ; The Mourning Bride of 
 Congreve ; or The Careless Husband 
 of Colley Gibber. Yet these were 
 the plays which our ancestors loved 
 to hear at the beginning of the 
 eighteenth century. In some re- 
 spects, certainly, we have improved 
 since " two hundred years ago." 
 
 Turning from the drama to prose, 
 we feel surprised at finding such an
 
 160 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 elevated moral tone as pervades the 
 works of men like Addison and 
 Defoe. The biographer of the latter 
 goes so far as to state that, after per- 
 using his works, he feels satisfied that 
 religion was uppermost in his mind 
 that he reaped its consolations, and 
 lived under an habitual sense of its 
 practical importance. We must, of 
 course, take off some discount for the 
 admiration of a biographer ; but the 
 greatest credit is due to him for not 
 having made guilt and sin seductive 
 when treating of such characters as 
 Moll Flanders, Captain Singleton, 
 Roxana, and Colonel Jack a fault 
 which novelists are only too apt to 
 commit when describing vice and 
 vicious people. The popularity of 
 Robinson Crusoe, which has lived for 
 close on two centuries, is almost suffi- 
 cient testimony of his genius for 
 writing fiction ; but he also possessed 
 the functions of a novelist in a degree
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 161 
 
 which is surprising, when we remember 
 that the novel was only in its infancy. 
 He was, especially, never improbable, 
 but always true to real life. It would, 
 indeed, be a boon to modern literature 
 if authors were to study his writings 
 before they put pen to paper. His 
 works were the result of an accurate 
 observation of life, and, accordingly, 
 have been more often taken for true 
 narratives than for fiction. But Defoe 
 did not escape the contagion of the 
 times. He wrote several political 
 pamphlets, and would have written 
 many more, if the politicians had not 
 neglected to reward him. His last 
 treatise was An Appeal to Honour 
 and Justice, being, in reality, an 
 appeal to the House of Hanover to 
 give some recompense to him, the 
 neglected writer. It is well known that 
 he was employed by Anne on a 
 special mission to Scotland respecting 
 the Union, which caused him to 
 
 II
 
 162 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 publish his History of the Union, a 
 work containing much sound and 
 useful knowledge. Finally, however 
 sorry we may feel for the poetry of 
 Defoe, one can but be glad that the 
 neglect of the politicians to enlist his 
 services made him publish to the 
 world books and especially one 
 book which have charmed every 
 class of society, from the drawing- 
 rooms of royalty to the kitchen, and 
 from the studies of old age to the 
 nurseries of childhood. 
 
 It is a pity that space forbids any 
 further discussion on the prose of this 
 period. Sir Richard Steele and the 
 avaricious Dean Swift are worthy of 
 a place in any review of literature, 
 though the personal character of the 
 latter is apt to deteriorate from the 
 praise due to his intellect. Before 
 concluding this rapid survey of the 
 reign of Anne, however, it is necessary 
 to point out how the religious feel-
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 163 
 
 ings of mankind were influencing 
 literature. 
 
 The Essay on Man, though nomi- 
 nally the work of Pope, was really the 
 reflection of the thoughts of St. John 
 and the philosophical school of the 
 time. At the very commencement of 
 the poem we have evidence of the 
 destruction of the age of faith : 
 
 " Say first, of God above, or man below, 
 What can we reason, but from what we know ?" 
 
 And the reason of man was em- 
 bracing Pantheism, with the idea of 
 an ever-present Kosmos. 
 
 " The gen'ral order, since the whole began, 
 Is kept in nature, and is kept in man. 
 * * * * 
 
 The great directing MIND of ALL ordains. 
 
 *** 
 
 All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
 Whose body Nature is, and God the soul." 
 
 Whether either Pope or Boling- 
 broke understood the doctrines com- 
 monly called Spinozism is extremely 
 
 II 2
 
 1 64 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 doubtful ; but they must have been 
 conversant with the opinions of Des 
 Cartes and Malebranche. The whole 
 Essay on Man is but a poetical 
 rendering of the doctrines of Pan- 
 theism : 
 
 " All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee ; 
 
 All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see ; 
 
 All Discord, Harmony not understood ; 
 
 All partial Evil, Universal Good ; 
 
 And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite, 
 
 One truth is clear WHATEVER is, is RIGHT." 
 
 The spirit of the age was distinctly 
 against the abstruse speculations in- 
 volved in the higher Christianity. It 
 was rather a second edition of the 
 Baconian philosophy : 
 
 " The proper study of mankind is Man. " 
 
 Pope denounces the folly of the 
 conceited dabblers in science in terms 
 which, if we did not know the super- 
 ficial nature of the learning of the 
 times, would seem antagonistic to the 
 progress of intellectual development :
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 165 
 
 " Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule 
 Then drop into thyself, and be a fool." 
 
 The above quotations serve to show 
 how civilization had begun to throw 
 off the slavish yoke of the clergy, and 
 to think for itself. It is not for a 
 moment contended that the writers 
 of the reign of Anne made any 
 advancement in religious philosophy ; 
 on the contrary, Giordano Bruno and 
 Vanini had more than a century 
 earlier, in asserting that nature was a 
 faculty of God, done more to ex- 
 pound the true principle of the reli- 
 gion of reason than either Des Cartes 
 or Bolingbroke. But it was reserved 
 for the latter to receive partial assent 
 to doctrines which had hitherto been 
 considered dangerous in the extreme. 
 In other words, the conclusion one 
 arrives at is that, with the freedom of 
 the press, freedom of thought in every 
 department of human intellect was 
 commencing to assert its rights.
 
 166 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 After this brief survey of English 
 literature during the time of Anne, 
 one arrives at the conclusion that 
 England, as a country, had not only 
 shaken off her dependence on France, 
 which, with shame be it owned, had 
 been the normal condition of the 
 Court of the Stuarts during the reign 
 of Louis XIV., but under the general- 
 ship of Marlborough, and the calcu- 
 lating policy of William of Orange, 
 had risen to be the foremost power in 
 Europe. Moreover, all civil disaffec- 
 tion and internal discord at home was 
 at an end. But the people, as a 
 nation, had not as yet gained that 
 appreciation of the elegant arts which 
 tends to produce fine literature. It 
 would have been impossible for such 
 an age to have given birth to a Words- 
 worth, a Shelley, or a Coleridge. As 
 yet there was no literary world, only 
 a political world, in which genius 
 might be developed.
 
 THE AGE OF ANNE. 167 
 
 But that was soon to come. Already 
 there were signs on the horizon that 
 literature would have to depend on 
 public opinion, and not on the vain 
 patronage of a few eminent men. 
 Tonson and Lintot established the 
 publishing trade ; their less successful 
 rival, Curll, by his unscrupulous 
 piracy, was in reality laying the 
 foundation of the law of copyright. 
 These two facts, unimportant as they 
 may seem at first sight, show a great 
 advancement in public taste. True, 
 the subscription list was still in vogue, 
 as were also the fulsome dedications 
 to dedicatees willing to pay the price. 
 But every day they were decreasing ; 
 and, as publishing came into fashion, 
 the independence of literature became 
 more established. Men now had to 
 rely on the judgment of humanity, 
 not on the caprice of an individual for 
 the success of their works. 
 
 Finally, I think we may safely draw
 
 1 68 THE AGE OF ANNE. 
 
 the deduction that the cluster of 
 genius which appeared in the reign we 
 have been discussing was, for the main 
 part, due to the revolution in the Eng- 
 lish monarchy and the corresponding 
 increase of power which accrued to 
 England. I have constantly laid 
 down the dictum that the individual 
 is the archetype of the nation and the 
 period to which he belongs ; and in 
 the same way is the prosperity of a 
 country portrayed in its literature. 
 The resemblance between the history 
 of the times and the nature of the 
 writings at the beginning of the eigh- 
 teenth century is so striking as to 
 need no further words on my part to 
 make it appear more clear.
 
 VII. 
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 THE French Revolution, though 
 happily its chaotic effects were con- 
 fined to France, was in reality the 
 result of a general feeling in favour of 
 liberty, which had been taking place 
 throughout the whole of Europe. Not 
 only did it work a marked influence 
 on the literature of the times, but also 
 to a large extent it was hurried on by 
 the writings of those men, more espe- 
 cially the philosophers and pseudo- 
 philosophers who had constituted 
 themselves the champions of liberty. 
 In discussing this reciprocal agency it 
 will be sufficient if we restrict our-
 
 170 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 selves to France, England, and Ger- 
 many. 
 
 Montesquieu was the first man to 
 light the fire of republicanism in the 
 hearts of the French people. But his 
 ideas of political freedom must not be 
 considered republican. He rather 
 conceived constitutional monarchy to 
 be the form of government by which 
 the liberty of the subject would be 
 best gained. But his followers, of 
 whom we may take Voltaire as the 
 most illustrious example, were not 
 disposed to adopt such a mild policy. 
 The French peasantry were priest- 
 ridden on the one hand, and oppressed 
 by a cruel aristocracy on the other, 
 with a harshness which was hardly 
 exceeded by the Popes of the Middle 
 Ages. To check these two waves of 
 oppression strong counter-forces were 
 necessary ; so Voltaire and his school 
 preached atheism and democracy. In 
 their opinion all existing institutions,
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 171 
 
 both of Church and State, were a huge 
 lie. So they contradicted the lie, un- 
 fortunately without stating the truth. 
 
 Such was the philosophical system 
 of Voltaire and his contemporaries ; a 
 system calculated to destroy all order, 
 and reduce France to a condition of 
 chaos. Meanwhile the noblesse con- 
 tinued to disregard the signs of the 
 times, though they became infected 
 with the contagion of immorality 
 which bald atheism must ever give 
 birth to. Reverend abbes waltzed 
 with femmes de plaisir in the salons of 
 Paris, and the theatre was nightly 
 crowded with men and women who 
 flocked to witness such pieces as 
 Beaumarchais' Mariage de Figaro. 
 The crusade was being waged not 
 only against the despotism of man, 
 but against the despotism of God. 
 Henceforth man was to acknowledge 
 no force or power superior to himself. 
 
 But the crisis was at hand. The
 
 1 72 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 
 
 Histoire Philosopk^q^le written by the 
 Abbe" Raynal had been burnt by the 
 common hangman, but the pernicious 
 doctrines contained in it had been 
 widely promulgated. This book, the 
 last one of any note which was pub- 
 licly burnt, is only of interest as show- 
 ing for what libellous uses the name 
 of philosophy has been appropriated. 
 It is an ill-assorted mixture of blas- 
 phemy and socialism ; but it was a 
 mixture which the French swallowed 
 with the greatest avidity. What was 
 the consequence ? 
 
 Mr. Carlyle says that about once in 
 a thousand years the daemonic ele- 
 ment of human nature asserts itself; 
 but as far as the annals of history 
 afford us information, there never was 
 such an outpour of daemonism as in 
 Paris during that year of grace, 1792. 
 Eleuthomania, sansculottism, the reck- 
 less destruction of religion and order ! 
 The rule of a mob drunk with the
 
 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 1 73 
 
 wine of fraternity and equality. Nou- 
 velles a la main, pamphlets written by 
 twelve hundred pamphleteers, pla- 
 cards posted on every square foot of 
 space ! Truly, whoever runs may 
 read ! Ay, and while reading there 
 comes the hideous cry, " To the guil- 
 lotine !" He seemed doubtful ; so the 
 knife, which never ceased to fall, put 
 an end to his doubt. Theroigne, the 
 harlot from Luxemburg, rides cross- 
 legged on a cannon to Versailles, and 
 is hailed as a second Joan of Arc. 
 Lastly, there was the fatal morning of 
 the 2 ist of January, 1793. 
 
 Yet in this utter subversion of 
 everything which tends to restrain the 
 passions of men, there was not, to the 
 best of my belief, a single instance of 
 petty robbery for the purpose of pri- 
 vate gain. The rich were despoiled 
 of all their wealth, but the spoil was 
 cast into a common fund. The prin- 
 ciple of " Fraternite et Egaliti" was
 
 1 74 THE FRENCH RE VOL UT10N. 
 
 not a mere empty name, but an actual 
 fact. 
 
 There can be little doubt that the 
 Encyclopaedists had been the main 
 cause of producing this daemonic out- 
 break ; but, if it had not been for 
 tyranny, the name of Voltaire would 
 never have been connected with 
 philosophy. A philosopher he was 
 not ; nor can he even be regarded as 
 a reformer. His aim was to destroy 
 the whole fabric of society, without 
 having any plan on which to recon- 
 struct the building which he had de- 
 stroyed. Montesquieu grieved for the 
 slavery of the French masses, and 
 proposed a scheme for ameliorating 
 the condition of the people. Voltaire 
 made them slaves to their own pas- 
 sions. The work which he had begun 
 was quickly disseminated throughout 
 the length and breadth of France by 
 the pamphleteers, without, as may be 
 easily imagined, losing any of its
 
 THE FRENCH RE VOL UT10N. 1 7 5 
 
 dangerous force in the publication ; till 
 at last the long-smouldering volcano 
 burst in Paris, and with its eruption 
 flooded all France in a stream of 
 blood. 
 
 The demand for liberty in England, 
 meanwhile, was proceeding in a calm 
 and sure method, having as its 
 primary principle a strict adherence 
 to constitutional forms. An extra 
 stimulus was, however, given to that 
 demand by the crisis in France, more 
 especially in regard to literature. The 
 evidence which has been handed 
 down to posterity may be divided 
 into two groups, namely, that relating 
 to the press and periodical literature, 
 and that relating to belles lettres, and 
 more especially to poetry. 
 
 At the end of the last and the be- 
 ginning of the present century the 
 time of Parliament was much occu- 
 pied in dealing with the license of the 
 newspapers. Journalism had usurped
 
 1 76 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 unto itself the right of free criticism 
 on all matters connected with politics, 
 but the right was not undisputed. 
 Already, as a means of educating the 
 working man, the practice of publish- 
 ing Sunday newspapers had become 
 common. Thus, in 1799, Lord Bel- 
 grave and Mr. Wilberforce introduced 
 a Bill for the suppression of these 
 Sunday journals ; but the Bill was 
 thrown out on the second reading. 
 Sir Erskine May assigns as a reason 
 for this defeat that the majority of 
 the Sunday newspapers upheld the 
 policy of the Ministry ; but, with all 
 due deference to such an author, the 
 reason seems to be somewhat super- 
 ficial, as the succeeding Ministry 
 could have carried the Bill if they had 
 judged it expedient to do so. During 
 the first decade of the present century 
 the power of the press not only in- 
 creased enormously, but journalism 
 was attracting to its ranks much of
 
 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 1 7 7 
 
 the youthful intellect of London. As 
 an example of this, we find that in 
 1808 the Benchers of Lincoln's Inn 
 found it necessary to pass a by-law 
 excluding all students who had written 
 for the press from being called to the 
 Bar. The best idea, however, of the 
 growing influence of what Mr. Hatton 
 is pleased to term the " fourth estate 
 of the realm," may be gleaned from 
 the opinion of no less a man than 
 Sheridan, which he expressed in the 
 House of Commons on the 6th of 
 February, 1810. 
 
 " Give me but the liberty of the 
 press, and I will give the minister a 
 venal House of Peers ; I will give him 
 a corrupt and servile House of Com- 
 mons; I will give him the full swing 
 of the patronage of office ; I will give 
 him the whole host of ministerial in- 
 fluence ; I will give him all the power 
 that place can confer upon him to 
 purchase submission and overawe 
 
 12
 
 1 78 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 
 
 resistance ; and yet, armed with the 
 liberty of the press, I will go forth to 
 meet him undismayed ; I will attack 
 the mighty fabric he has reared, with 
 that mightier engine ; I will shake 
 down from its height corruption, and 
 lay it beneath the ruins of the abuses 
 it was meant to shelter." 
 
 Such was the opinion of an eminent 
 politician. What was the opinion of 
 the public, as represented by a British 
 jury? In 1817, one Hone, a small 
 bookseller, was put on his trial for 
 libel. The publication in question 
 was blasphemous, as well as being an 
 adverse criticism on the policy of the 
 Ministry. But the whole question of 
 the liberty of the press was supposed 
 to be involved. The consequence 
 was that, in spite of the summing-up 
 of Lord Ellenborough, the jury found 
 Hone " not guilty." 
 
 But, in addition to the press, an- 
 other influence was springing up in
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 179 
 
 the shape of the monthly periodicals. 
 The EdinburgJi Review had been 
 started, and its circulation justified 
 the hopes of its promoters. The 
 men who first contributed to it are 
 known by the sobriquet of " philo- 
 sophical radicals." They followed in 
 the footsteps of Locke, Bentham, and 
 Adam Smith. They studied the 
 wealth of nations and the principle of 
 general utility ; in short, they founded 
 the science of political economy. 
 They did not rush to the extreme 
 of mad folly, like the French, but 
 diffused their views in a spirit of 
 calm wisdom, the beneficial results of 
 which we are seeing in the present 
 day. 
 
 Before quitting the subject of the 
 press, it would be interesting to revert 
 to the difference between the French 
 and the English demand for liberty. 
 In France it took the form of sans- 
 culottism and dsemonism ; the con- 
 
 12 2
 
 i8o THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 dition of England can be best 
 described by the words of Sir Erskine 
 May : " What theory of a free state 
 can transcend this gradual develop- 
 ment of freedom in which the power 
 of the people has increased with their 
 capacity for self-government ? It is 
 this remarkable condition which has 
 distinguished English freedom from 
 democracy. Public opinion is ex- 
 pressed, not by the clamorous chorus 
 of the multitude, but by the measured 
 voices of all classes, parties, and inte- 
 rests. It is declared by the press, the 
 exchange, the market, the club, and 
 society at large. It is subject to as 
 many checks and balances as the con- 
 stitution itself, and represents the 
 national intelligence rather than the 
 popular will." 
 
 It might be added that it was 
 owing to the education of public 
 opinion by the writers for the Edin- 
 burgh Review that Burke said that
 
 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. \ 8 1 
 
 the age of chivalry was past, and that 
 the present was an age of sophists, 
 economists, and calculators. 
 
 The age of English poetry which 
 succeeded the French Revolution is 
 noted for two especial characteristics. 
 The first was a more attentive study 
 of nature as exemplified in the poetry 
 of the so-called Lake school ; the 
 second was the rejection of written 
 social and religious codes, of which 
 the poems of Shelley and Byron 
 afford innumerable instances. Words- 
 worth, Southey, and Coleridge first 
 sympathized with the revolutionary 
 movement on the Continent ; in fact, 
 Southey narrowly escaped getting 
 into serious trouble for publishing his 
 Wat Tyler. But, as their minds 
 became more matured, they recanted 
 their former opinions, and professed 
 to be Conservatives. The philosophy 
 of the Lake school as may be sup- 
 posed from the choice of their home,
 
 1 82 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 situated amongst the loveliest scenery 
 of England chiefly consisted in the 
 worship of Nature, so their poetry is 
 redundant with pantheistic principles. 
 What the religion of a man like 
 Coleridge really was it is impossible 
 to say ; most probably he did not 
 know himself. His writings, for the 
 most part, are the wild ramblings of a 
 great genius, rendered doubly inco- 
 herent by the delirious influence of 
 opium. The blind devotion of his 
 admirers, more especially at Bridge- 
 water, is incomprehensible, unless we 
 assign as its reason the propensity of 
 the foolish majority of mankind and 
 womankind to fall down on their 
 knees before eccentricity or hypocrisy 
 the same propensity which causes 
 silly feminine society to idolize the 
 lawn - tennis - playing, drawing - room, 
 washing-his-hands-with- invisible-soap 
 curate of the present day. In his 
 Constitution of Church and State,
 
 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. \ 83 
 
 Coleridge supports the institution of 
 the Church because it affords a means 
 of diffusing culture in the same way 
 as many men of modern times sup- 
 port it, since it affords an excellent 
 channel for the dispensation of pro- 
 miscuous charity ; but whether his 
 religion was that of orthodox Chris- 
 tianity is extremely doubtful. 
 
 On the contrary, the Lake school, 
 taken as a whole, seem to have trans- 
 lated into poetry the mathematical 
 axioms of Spinozism. To judge from 
 the press writings of Coleridge and 
 De Quincey, it would seem that scien- 
 tific philosophy had been superseded 
 by metaphysical speculation, as was 
 the case in the contemporary litera- 
 ture of Germany, headed by the 
 obscure Kant. 
 
 While Wordsworth and his fol- 
 lowers were indulging their fancy in 
 propounding problems in verse 
 which neither Darwin, Huxley, nor
 
 184 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 any of the leaders of modern science 
 have been able to solve the more 
 worldly Byron and Shelley were, both 
 in their lives and their writings, as- 
 serting that human life should suffer 
 from no restrictions. Shelley deserted 
 his wife, the beautiful Harriet West- 
 brook, because the bonds of matri- 
 mony interfered with the free exercise 
 of his genius ; and practised the 
 doctrine which he preached namely, 
 that love should be the only uniting 
 link between man and woman by 
 living with Mary Godwin. Byron 
 was so far a cosmopolitan that he 
 was not even a patriot. 
 
 It is necessary to trespass on 
 German literature for examples 
 which portray the signs of the times. 
 The Gretchen of Goethe, the Moor 
 of Schiller, and the Don Juan of 
 Byron are characters which now 
 would meet with little sympathy. 
 They all three possess one principle
 
 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 185 
 
 in common : the principle of throwing 
 aside all restraint which interferes 
 with the gratification of their own 
 pleasure. So Gretchen yields to her 
 importunate lover, poisons her mother, 
 is the cause of her brother's death, 
 and becomes a child-murderess ; and 
 then here lies the danger of Goethe 
 is borne up into heaven by angels ; 
 as if, forsooth, her loss of virtue were 
 to be rewarded. The hero Moor of 
 Schiller is a lawless bandit, whose 
 ultimate doom should be the gallows. 
 Don Juan is a licentious profligate, 
 who begins by defiling his neighbour's 
 wife, and ends by breaking the laws 
 of hospitality by the same offence 
 with the guest of his host. The Lake 
 school had determined to throw off 
 the yoke of orthodoxy ; their con- 
 temporaries threw off the yoke of 
 morality, and the law relating to 
 meum and tuum. 
 
 Surely it does not require much
 
 1 86 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 
 
 penetration to trace the influence of 
 the French Revolution ! 
 
 But as if that crisis which culmi- 
 nated on January 2ist, 1793 were 
 not sufficient, Napoleon had striven 
 to reduce the whole of Europe to 
 subjection, and to found one vast 
 empire, of which he should be the 
 emperor. The Revolution had been 
 the result of the demand for personal 
 liberty ; Waterloo was the result of 
 the demand for national liberty. 
 
 And yet, in the midst of this pro- 
 digious birth of new institutions in 
 every branch of human life, both 
 social, political, and religious, there 
 seems to have been some reaction 
 towards chivalry and feudalism. In 
 England, the vices of the Regency, 
 exposed in all their hideous nudity to 
 the public gaze, and, unlike the gor- 
 geous sensualism of the Versailles of 
 Louis XIV., not having the smallest 
 element of refinement to redeem
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 187 
 
 them, did more to recall the English 
 people to the path of morality than 
 all the puritanical doctrines that were 
 ever promulgated. The truth of this 
 reaction in favour of mediaeval sim- 
 plicity is testified by the writings of 
 Sir Walter Scott, and the popularity 
 which they at once earned. The 
 Border Minstrelsy was an immediate 
 success. Scotland at that time was 
 almost the only country of Europe 
 which still retained its ancient cus- 
 toms the only country which could 
 supply a bard of chivalry with a 
 theme for his song. The rough 
 habits of the people, the legends, the 
 very scenery, all breathed the spirit 
 of poetry, which it only required the 
 inspiration of genius to change into 
 the most touching literature which 
 ever appealed to the heart and intel- 
 lect of man. 
 
 I hope I do not overrate the 
 poetry of Scott, but I know of no
 
 1 88 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 
 
 writer who carries the imagination of 
 the reader along with him to the same 
 extent. To my mind the influence of 
 his poetry acts like the influence of a 
 huge magnet. He draws one to him, 
 and then, along with him, back to the 
 days of knights and archers, of min- 
 strels tuning their harps to please fair 
 dames, and of horses gnawing at their 
 bits, caparisoned with all the rich 
 harness of chivalry ; and this without 
 the slightest semblance of improba- 
 bility, without creating that sensation 
 of fiction which we feel when reading 
 of the fairyland of a Spenser. With 
 Scott, we stand on the heather, or run 
 along the mountain-side, row across 
 the lake, charge with Chester, or die 
 with Marmion. In short, he was the 
 literary " magician of the North," by 
 whose wand men were compelled to 
 regard and imitate the manly virtues 
 of their ancestors. Scott, who under- 
 stood the nature of his genius as well,
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 189 
 
 if not better, than any of his numerous 
 critics, explained the contagious effect 
 of his poetry by saying, " I am sen- 
 sible that if there be anything good 
 about my poetry, or prose either, it is 
 a hurried frankness of composition, 
 which pleases soldiers, sailors, and 
 young people of bold and active dis- 
 positions." As Thomas Campbell, 
 the poet, expressed it, Scott possesses 
 a strong and pithy eloquence which 
 has no rival in English literature. 
 
 Reference has been already made 
 to Goethe and Schiller the two best- 
 known poets that Germany has ever 
 produced. They were essentially the 
 creation of the new spirit of freedom. 
 Germany, even at the beginning of 
 the present century, was subject to a 
 feudal tyranny. Barons lived in for- 
 tress castles, amidst the solitude of 
 wooded hills, where they divided their 
 time between hunting boars and 
 drinking beer. We hear of one poor
 
 igo THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 
 
 poet being immured in a dungeon of 
 one of these castles for ten years, be- 
 cause his writings were distasteful to 
 the feudal owner. Hitherto the liter- 
 ature had been mainly servile to the 
 aristocracy. It was for Goethe and 
 his disciples to throw aside the yoke. 
 For some reason, for which I do 
 not attempt to account, philosophy 
 in Germany has always taken the 
 form of religious metaphysics. There 
 can be little doubt that this tendency 
 has had a most disastrous effect on 
 science, inasmuch as it makes men 
 feel that "nothing can be known." 
 The opening lines of Faust afford a 
 strong instance of the truth of this 
 remark : 
 
 " Alas ! I have explored 
 Philosophy, and Law, and Medicine ; 
 And over deep divinity have pored, 
 Studying with ardent and laborious zeal ; 
 And here I am, at last, a very fool, 
 With useless learning curst, 
 No wiser than at first !" 
 
 From Spinoza to the present day
 
 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 1 9 1 
 
 we find a constant succession of meta- 
 physical writers promulgating all kinds 
 of speculative doctrines. Of late years, 
 owing to the writings of men like Mr. 
 Huxley, it has become an established 
 principle that metaphysical specula- 
 tion, if it be worth anything, must 
 have science as its basis. But the 
 Germans of this epoch, of whom Kant 
 is the most prominent, appear to have 
 utterly disregarded science. Conse- 
 quently their writings are of little 
 value, beyond being the compositions 
 of great brains. They seem to have 
 groped after the truth without avail- 
 ing themselves of the light of know- 
 ledge, so that they become involved 
 in perplexity which is reflected in 
 their literary style. Kant will write 
 sixty lines without a full stop, sen- 
 tences being involved in sentences, till 
 at the end the reader is in doubt as to 
 which is the main, which the sub- 
 jective clauses. Thus we get the most
 
 1 92 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 
 
 dangerous form of literature an ob- 
 scure subject treated in an obscure 
 manner. There may be men who 
 profess to understand the meaning of 
 Kant ; I confess I do not, and, more- 
 over, very much doubt whether Kant 
 himself had any clear opinions him- 
 self on what he was writing. 
 
 But probably the effect of the 
 Revolution is more conspicuous in 
 the case of the lyric poets than in 
 the case of the metaphysicians. The 
 lyrical poetry of the Gottingen school 
 soon spread all over Germany, breath- 
 ing as it did the spirit of freedom. 
 Men were no longer afraid of being 
 imprisoned without a trial. The auto- 
 cracy of German feudalism had re- 
 ceived its death-blow. 
 
 When, at any historical epoch, a 
 national school of literature is formed, 
 creating new ideas, and giving birth 
 to a revolution in the thoughts of 
 men, there are always a few indi-
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 193 
 
 viduals who stand forth from amongst 
 the crowd and earn for themselves the 
 title of Immortal ; so they gain per- 
 sonal fame for work inspired by their 
 surroundings, to which work the praise 
 or censure accorded by posterity is 
 given, when in reality it should be 
 given to the age which produced it. 
 Goethe has been peculiarly fortunate 
 in winning this approbation. He had 
 been present at Argonne, in the capa- 
 city of minister to Weimar ; and he 
 had also been present at Mentz. He 
 thus had been an eye-witness of the 
 practical warfare of the Revolution ; 
 and, in the Campagne in FrankreicJi 
 and the Belagerung von Mainz, has 
 left us a record of the thoughts in- 
 spired by the occasions. He carried 
 back with him, perhaps unconsciously, 
 the spirit of the Revolution, and in 
 his writings diffused it throughout 
 Germany. But, although praise is 
 due to Goethe for the written expres- 
 
 13
 
 1 94 THE FRENCH RE VOL UTION. 
 
 sion of the spirit of liberty, it must 
 be remembered that every soldier in 
 the Prussian army also carried back 
 in his heart to his native land the 
 germ of the opinions developed in 
 the poetry of the World-Poet. 
 
 It is trusted that by this time some 
 idea will have been gained of the effect 
 of the French Revolution on the liter- 
 ature of the contemporary period. 
 Briefly, that effect had been to be- 
 stow upon it the invaluable gift of 
 free liberty, and to rid it of the bur- 
 den of a slavish conventionality. It 
 has been said that the French Revo- 
 lution was predicted in the Reforma- 
 tion in the same way as in its turn 
 the Revolution is the foreshadow of 
 the socialism of modern democracy. 
 Prophecy is dangerous to the prophet ; 
 but, to use the language of the Latter- 
 Day Pamphlets, new spiritual pythons 
 ay, and plenty of them huge mega- 
 theriums loom enormous and hideous
 
 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. 195 
 
 out of the twilight of the future. 
 May they be vanquished and over- 
 come with less human agony than 
 accompanied the demand for liberty 
 at the beginning of the nineteenth 
 century ! 
 
 13-
 
 VIII. 
 
 AMERICA. 
 
 THERE can hardly be anything more 
 difficult to accomplish fairly and im- 
 partially than for an Englishman to 
 write a criticism on American litera- 
 ture. The language is the same, but 
 here similarity ends ; and this very 
 identity of language is apt to make 
 us compare the American writings 
 with our own writings. Comparisons 
 are not only odious, but, when the 
 primary elements are utterly dissimi- 
 lar, they are useless and foolish as 
 well. In discussing America, there- 
 fore, it is incumbent in the first place 
 to disregard the English standard.
 
 AMERICA. 197 
 
 But why ? The answer is simple. 
 Since the days of Chaucer, England 
 has possessed a literature. Our mo- 
 dern writings are not the creation of 
 one, or even a few, generations ; they 
 are rather the mature development 
 of a literature which was born in the 
 Middle Ages. On the other hand, it 
 was not till the present century that 
 our transatlantic cousins can be said 
 to have had any literary genius. 
 Hitherto they had been engaged in 
 clearing forests, fertilizing wilder- 
 nesses, and building towns ; in short, 
 making themselves a national power. 
 As a nation, their history dates from 
 the Declaration of Independence on 
 the memorable fourth of July ; but it 
 was not till some years had served to 
 strengthen that independence that 
 they were able to devote themselves 
 to the calm pursuits of literature. 
 Then, as in all their other institutions, 
 they seem, without any education, to
 
 198 AMERICA. 
 
 have at once blossomed forth in a 
 spasmodic growth of intellect which 
 brings them on an equality with their 
 rivals in Europe. 
 
 In a speedy development such as 
 this, we should of course be surprised 
 to find any literary production which 
 is the result of tranquillity. Thus, 
 with the one illustrious exception of 
 Longfellow, America has given us no 
 poets who can enter the lists against 
 even Byron or the Lake school. But, 
 on the other hand, in history and 
 scientific philosophy, she has given 
 birth to men whom the world acknow- 
 ledges never to have been beaten. 
 Prescott, Motley, and Draper are as 
 deserving of fame as Macaulay, Car- 
 lyle, and Mill. In fiction she has 
 given us " Mark Twain," Browne 
 (more commonly known as Artemus 
 Ward), and Fenimore Cooper. In 
 transcendental philosophy she has 
 given us Emerson, whose boast was
 
 AMERICA. 199 
 
 that he could not be skipped. Baxter 
 has made his name noted by his 
 theological writings, of which we have 
 a remarkable example in the Saint's 
 Rest. Griswold has made his name 
 more famous than enviable by his 
 biographies, of which more will have 
 to be said later on. In Poe we have 
 the alcoholic outcome of a morbid 
 mind, such as outrivals our own De 
 Ouincey ; while the same author has 
 presented us in The Raven with a 
 poetical production, which, on account 
 of its remarkable singularity, is unique 
 in the history of literature. Lowell 
 gives us an entirely novel form of 
 writing in the Biglow Papers a form 
 distinctly the outcome of the War of 
 Secession. 
 
 Such are the most prominent names 
 of a nation in whose country, during 
 the year 1882, no less than 3,472 
 works were published. 
 
 The war between the North and
 
 200 AMERICA. 
 
 South is so recent that, for fear of 
 inadvertently offending people to 
 whom the recollection may be pain- 
 ful, I would, under any circumstances, 
 forbear from criticising it ; but I also 
 believe that the English never really 
 understood the nature of that war. I 
 shall, therefore, confine myself to 
 merely pointing out the enormous 
 increase in literary prosperity which 
 has taken place since those disputes 
 were settled. 
 
 The literature of America is, in one 
 way, a remarkable portrait of the 
 characteristics of Americans. They 
 never hesitate to make an experi- 
 ment. Their metaphysicians pro- 
 pound theories which to our mind 
 appear somewhat startling. The 
 truth seems to be that, where we 
 reverence antiquity, they reverence 
 immensity. We can trace our customs 
 back to mediaeval feudalism ; they 
 can point to vast unexplored terri-
 
 AMERICA. 201 
 
 tories, inexhaustible in their magni- 
 tude. Their cry is " Forward ;" their 
 radical principle, on which they ever 
 act, is " Progress." 
 
 It is not surprising, therefore, that 
 such a great proportion of their intel- 
 lectual talent should have been de- 
 voted to science and invention. I 
 take the first instance of a noted 
 American book that occurs to my 
 mind namely, the Intellectual De- 
 velopment of Europe, by Dr. Draper. 
 From the title, one would imagine 
 that the greater portion of the work 
 would be devoted to literature ; but 
 the author, in asserting the superiority 
 of the age of reason over the age of 
 faith, chiefly relies for his proofs on 
 scientific discoveries and the conse- 
 quent improved state of civilization. 
 As with Dr. Draper, so it is with the 
 majority of Americans. They are so 
 incessantly engaged in the turmoil of 
 practical life, that they have little
 
 202 AMERICA. 
 
 opportunity, even if they had the 
 inclination, for the leisure of elegant 
 literature. 
 
 It must be remembered also that 
 for many years America has suffered 
 from the worst malady that can 
 afflict a national literature, namely, 
 imitation. Their best writers have 
 travelled in Europe, and become 
 imbued with European tastes, which 
 are only too plainly reflected in their 
 writings. Also, English works are 
 read in America as much as they are 
 in the mother country. I do not wish 
 to discuss the question of international 
 copyright ; but to a large extent this 
 fault of imitation is the result of 
 Government. Sir Henry Maine, in 
 his Essays on Popular Government, 
 has very aptly described the state of 
 affairs which the policy of the 
 American Legislature has caused. 
 " The power," he writes, " to grant 
 patents by Federal authority has
 
 AMERICA. 203 
 
 made the American people the first 
 in the world for the number and 
 ingenuity of the inventions by which 
 it has promoted the ' useful arts ;' 
 while, on the other hand, the neglect 
 to exercise this power for the advant- 
 age of foreign writers has condemned 
 the whole American community to a 
 literary servitude unparalleled in the 
 history of thought." 
 
 In regard to thought alone, how- 
 ever, the Americans have no masters. 
 It is rather their method of expres- 
 sion, their style, in short, which 
 requires to be more polished. Their 
 metaphysical writings and psycho- 
 logical inquiries are noted for their 
 acuteness, and, since they are not 
 fettered by any ancient religious pre- 
 judices, they approach nearer to the 
 plain unvarnished truth than the 
 English authors, who are bound to 
 pay some respect to the orthodox 
 conventionality of their reading public.
 
 204 AMERICA. 
 
 The English have a rooted objection to 
 calling things by their right names ; 
 so they profess to be religious 
 Christians, and confine their religion 
 to asking a bishop or a curate, as the 
 case may be, to dinner. This is, of 
 course, nothing else but hypocrisy : 
 the last surviving remnant of the 
 ancient influence of the Church. The 
 United States are happily without 
 this cant, so their philosophy is less 
 adulterated with the alloy of false 
 reasons and the illogical ideas of the 
 age of faith. 
 
 So much for empirical transcenden- 
 talism, in which department of litera- 
 ture the Americans are more distin- 
 guished than in any other. 
 
 Mention has already been made of 
 the unenviable fame of Griswold. As 
 a biographer he stands the foremost 
 in the American ranks ; but that 
 which has gained for him the con- 
 tempt of every fair critic is the un-
 
 AMERICA. 205 
 
 justifiable manner in which he perse- 
 cuted poor Poe. Lord Jeffrey is said 
 to have condemned Keats to such a 
 degree that he died in consequence. 
 The antagonism of Griswold went so 
 far that, even after the death of the 
 poet, he wrote that he was found 
 dead drunk in the streets of Balti- 
 more, taken to the hospital, and there 
 died. There has been some contro- 
 versy in regard even to the truth of 
 this account ; but, whether it be true 
 or false, there can be no excuse for 
 the conduct of Griswold in attempt- 
 ing to hold up to the execration of 
 posterity the name of a literary rival, 
 who, whatever may have been his 
 faults, was one of the greatest authors 
 of America. " De mortuis nil nisi 
 bonum " is a proverb that Mr. Gris- 
 wold would have done well to study 
 before he wrote the biography of his 
 rival Poe. 
 
 Of late years in the United States
 
 206 AMERICA. 
 
 there has been an exceptionally large 
 development in one department of 
 literature. I allude to the number of 
 periodical magazines. The literature 
 of all magazines is to a great extent 
 ephemeral. From this fact we see 
 how in their writings the character 
 of the Americans is reflected. The 
 national life seems to be guided by 
 the principle that " sufficient for the 
 day is the evil thereof." I do not say 
 this with any intention of disparaging 
 the national modus vivendi, but rather 
 to point out how literature is the 
 mirror of the country which produces 
 it. The Americans are compelled to 
 counterbalance their brief national 
 existence by quickness of develop- 
 ment, in order to compete on equal 
 terms with their rivals in Europe. 
 They cannot afford to live in calm 
 quiet, but they must be ever employed 
 in an incessant activity. They dare 
 not wait, for fear of being left behind ;
 
 AMERICA. 207 
 
 so they are ever producing the off- 
 spring of their intellect through the 
 medium of periodical literature. 
 
 It might have been expected that 
 I should have dealt with the so-called 
 Americanisms, which have been so 
 often criticised by English authors. 
 I have purposely refrained from doing 
 so ; for although the English and 
 American languages are the same in 
 one respect, they differ when we 
 regard them from the point of view 
 of phraseology. In order that the 
 criticism be just, we ought to criticise 
 American idioms in the same spirit 
 as w"e criticise French or German 
 idioms, instead of criticising them 
 from a purely English standard. Un- 
 fortunately it has become a fashion 
 amongst a certain section of ill- 
 educated, misguided people, chiefly 
 consisting of men, young in manners 
 even if they are not young in age, 
 to use these idioms, which have there-
 
 208 AMERICA. 
 
 fore been placed in the category of 
 "slang" expressions. This habit is not 
 only derogatory to the English lan- 
 guage, but it also shows a most per- 
 nicious literary taste. As such it 
 cannot be too strongly condemned. 
 As I have before stated, the two lan- 
 guages are so dissimilar that they 
 ought not to be compared. 
 
 In taking a bird's-eye view of the 
 literature of the United States, one 
 comes to the conclusion that it has 
 not as yet had sufficient time for 
 development. The War of Secession 
 and its consequences are almost 
 matters of contemporary history; it 
 would be futile to attempt to prove 
 that at present a literary epoch has 
 succeeded that war. Moreover, in 
 the history of a country which has 
 only been independent for hardly 
 more than a century, it would be 
 somewhat arrogant to choose any one 
 generation as being peculiarly prolific
 
 AMERICA. 209 
 
 in intellectual power. The history of 
 America may be divided into three 
 periods : the discovery, the coloniza- 
 tion, and the independence. During 
 neither of the first two periods was 
 there any literary work produced 
 worthy of the slightest notice ; but 
 directly the States won independence 
 a cluster of writers appeared. As 
 was natural in a country obliged to 
 form a constitution of its own, the 
 first writers, of whom we may take 
 Hamilton and Jay as examples, 
 studied the forms of government and 
 political economy. The result of 
 those studies we have in the 
 Federalist. They were modelled 
 on the teaching of Montesquieu, and 
 on the practical representative govern- 
 ment of England under George III. 
 After the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence, in 1776, we have an endless 
 succession of authors, so that, as has 
 been said above, it is impossible to 
 
 14
 
 210 AMERICA. 
 
 point out any one generation as being 
 worthy of more notice than another. 
 But this, far from militating against 
 the truth of our text, rather seems to 
 support it, since the Independence 
 of America gave birth to a national 
 literature, which in its turn is a re- 
 markable portrait of national activity.
 
 IX. 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 IN this short volume seven noted 
 periods of intellectual activity have 
 been reviewed, with the purpose of 
 showing that literature reflects the 
 spirit of the age in which it is pro- 
 duced, and, a fortiori, those times 
 which have been distinguished for 
 memorable events have likewise been 
 conspicuous for literary genius. The 
 review has been so brief that there is 
 no need to recapitulate the different 
 headings. Greece, Rome, Italy in 
 the Middle Ages, England during the 
 Elizabethan era, the reign of Anne, 
 
 14 2
 
 212 CONCLUSION. 
 
 and the years which succeeded the 
 French Revolution, France, Germany, 
 and America, have all been discussed 
 in their turns, in order to explain the 
 tendency of intellectual power to 
 gather in clusters. After such a 
 survey, many conclusions may be 
 arrived at ; but out of the many, one 
 is clear, namely, that it is only in 
 times of great energy and super- 
 abundant activity, both in war and 
 politics, that the national intellect 
 issues in literary creations. Then the 
 genius, which has hitherto been con- 
 fined without the chance of spreading 
 its light before the world, is awakened 
 from out of its dormant state, and, 
 throwing aside the torpor in which it 
 has stagnated, bursts forth in luxuri- 
 ant grandeur. The overflow of talent 
 always assumes a strongly-marked 
 national character, although at the 
 same time in its artistic results it is
 
 CONCLUSION. 213 
 
 both cosmopolitan and catholic. In- 
 dividual brilliancy, decorative imagery, 
 profound thoughtful ness, tending to 
 the creation of original ideas not 
 before conceived these are the essen- 
 tial qualities for forming a new school 
 of literature, a school which, if it is to 
 become worthy of the praise of pos- 
 terity, must be the felicitous outcome 
 of a marked personality, aided by and 
 reflecting in itself a glorious nation- 
 ality. Wordsworth has told us that 
 language is the "incarnation of 
 thought ;" but thought must be stim- 
 ulated by passing' events, in order that 
 it may gain that vigour without 
 which the literary interpretation of it 
 will never be worth the paper upon 
 which it is printed. 
 
 As it is in every channel of life into 
 which the various sections of humanity 
 are by chance and circumstance 
 driven, so it is with that portion of
 
 214 CONCLUSION. 
 
 men and women who devote their 
 energies to literature. In order to 
 succeed they must have sympathy. A 
 sympathetic public is the creator of 
 the literature which it reads. Thus 
 in times of revolution we get eleu- 
 thomaniacal atheistical writings, which 
 in the succeeding calm are either 
 consigned to oblivion or held up for 
 execration. Even at the present 
 day we have hardly expelled the 
 insane thrasonical meretriciousness 
 of pseudo-aestheticism, which but for 
 the foolish gullibility of weak-kneed 
 calves calling themselves men, and 
 women distracted on account of their 
 painful inability to attract, would 
 never have existed. In short, litera- 
 ture must ever be dependent on 
 public sympathy. 
 
 Thus we arrive at the "quod est 
 demonstrandum" of this book, that 
 the signs of the times are to be found 
 in the contemporary writings.
 
 CONCLUSION. 215 
 
 It may be wondered why I have 
 not extended this inquiry to embrace 
 the period in which we are now living. 
 Perhaps at some future date I may do 
 so. But when we take into consider- 
 ation the thousands of volumes, the 
 numbers of daily, weekly, and monthly 
 papers and magazines which are being 
 issued to the reading public of every 
 class in society, of every party in 
 politics, and of every creed in religion ; 
 when also we remember the warped 
 opinions which it is ever the frail 
 nature of men to form on passing 
 events, the task, interesting as it might 
 prove, appears to be almost beyond 
 the scope of an ordinary pen. In 
 historical reviews of every sort it 
 ought to be the aim of the writer to 
 be strictly impartial ; and there are 
 few men so just as not to be biassed 
 in their judgment of current events 
 and current literature. I can only
 
 216 CONCLUSION. 
 
 hope to win the verdict of impar- 
 tiality in regard to the expression of 
 my opinions concerning the intellec- 
 tual activity during times which are 
 past. 
 
 Elliot Stock, Patern 'stei Row, London.
 
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