30 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 cannot claim the absolute value given to the later Authorized 
 Version by its consummate qualities of spirit and style ; but 
 the second Wycliflte text, which is much more finished and 
 vigorous than the first, is, historically speaking, an achieve- 
 ment of the first importance. 
 
 Many other writings which are beyond all doubt Wyclif's, 
 are in Latin. His English tracts and sermons are of great 
 theological interest, as expressing his denial of transubstantia- 
 tion, his antipathy to Urban VI, and his general views on 
 church abuses and their cure. These writings show a strong 
 sincerity and an eager desire for the people's good ; but their 
 literary interest is chiefly historical, and they have little distinc- 
 tion of style. 
 
 Trevisa. Of much interest, as showing the growing importance of the 
 vernacular, are the English works translated from the Latin 
 by John of Trevisa (f-1413). The first of these is a version 
 of the well-known mediaeval text-book or encyclopaedia, the 
 De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus ; but 
 far more important is Trevisa's rendering of the Latin chronicle 
 history, known as the Polychronicon, of Ranulph Higden. 
 Higden was a Cheshire monk who is said to have died in 1364, 
 and perhaps finished his chronicle some twelve years earlier. 
 After the fashion of such surveys, it reviews the whole history 
 of the world from the Creation downwards. By far its most 
 interesting part is that which describes the social conditions 
 of contemporary England ; and when this was put into racy 
 homely English for the benefit of Englishmen, a work of real 
 note had been accomplished. Trevisa rendered his original 
 freely, inaccurately, and with considerable expansion, and 
 accompanied it with curt, and often curious, notes. His 
 chronicle is interesting linguistically, and through its attempts 
 to enlarge the scope of the English vocabulary ; but it lacks 
 the magical and strongly individual quality of style possessed 
 by the third representative writer of the period, the author, 
 or translator, of the so-called Voyage and Travail of Sir John 
 Mandeville. 
 
 John Mandeville, knight, is unfortunately as wholly fictitious 
 a personage as John Doe. According to the best opinion, he 
 is the creation of an imaginative Frenchman, who wrote the 
 description of his 'travels' at Liege some time before 1371. 
 This writer may have been a certain Jean d'Outremeuse, who 
 was certainly living and writing in that city in that year. 
 In another volume, undoubtedly his own, Outremeuse says that 
 Mandeville, after his travels, settled in Liege under the name 
 of Jehan de Bourgogne, or Jean a la Barbe, and made certain 
 disclosures to him on his death-bed. But Outremeuse's author- 
 ship of the Voyage and Travail is not proved beyond doubt ; 
 all that is certain is that the book was originally written in 
 French, that it was translated into Latin and many European 
 languages, and that it survives in English in three separate 
 versions. Its main fabric is pieced together from various 
 
PROSE, 1350-1400 31 
 
 authentic narratives of travel, including those of Albert of 
 Aix, William of Boldenseele, and Odoric of Pordenone ; but 
 with this true romance the author has interwoven much 
 wondrous romance of legend, and for this he has drawn on 
 all manner of authorities, from the Golden Legend to Pliny 
 and Herodotus. In his deft interweaving of these strands, and 
 the wonderful authenticity with which he invests his wildest 
 marvels, lies much of his book's compelling charm. During the 
 early part of his narrative, in which he describes Turkey, 
 Egypt, and the Holy Land, ' Mandeville ' is comparatively 
 chary of wonders, though even here occur the beautiful tale 
 of how Roses first came, and the more famous, if less exquisite, 
 one of the Watching of the Sparrow Hawk. But when he 
 passes into less known lands, into Java and Thurse and Cathay, 
 caution ceases to oppress him, and he multiplies his miracles 
 at will. He tells us of the well, marvellously curative, ' that 
 hath Odour and Savour of all Spices, and at every Hour of 
 the Day changeth his Odour and his Savour diversely '. He 
 describes ' the Diamonds of Ind, some of the greatness of 
 a Bean, and some as great as an Hazel Nut, that grow together, 
 Male and Female, be nourished with the Dew of Heaven, 
 and engender commonly and bring forth small Children, that 
 multiply and grow all the Year '. He had visited the Isle 
 of Ghana, * where be Rats as great as Hounds : and men take 
 them with great Mastiffs, for Cats may not take them '. He 
 knew before his time that the earth was round, and told 
 a wondrous tale of a man who ' sailed past Ind and the Isles 
 beyond Ind, where be more than 5000 Isles ', on and on, ' till 
 he came to an Isle where he heard folk speak his own Lan- 
 guage, calling on Oxen at the Plough, such Words as Men 
 speak to Beasts in his own Country : whereof he had great 
 Marvel, for he knew not how it might be '. The man had sailed 
 round the world and had come to his own borders again, yet 
 knew it not, and put back in fear and sadness over his vast 
 course. But Mandeville' s story and style reach their greatest 
 moments in the description of the Great Chan of Cathay, and 
 the beauty and wonder and cruelty of his court. Here his 
 fancy takes on a colour, and his prose a richness, of sheer 
 delight ; and here, as throughout the whole narrative, we 
 know our English writer to be no mere translator, but a great 
 creative artist. His prose is simple, yet its cadence never 
 wearies, and its effects are subtle and various. If we consider 
 its period, it is a greater marvel than any of Cathay. 
 

 I 
 
A -SHORT HISTORY 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 ARCHIBALD T. STRONG, M.A., Lrrr.D. 
 
 ASSOCIATE-PROFESSOR Ol ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MELHOUHNE 
 
 HUMPHREY MILFORD 
 
 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW COPENHAGEN 
 
 NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPETOWN 
 BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS SHANGHAI PEKING 
 
 1921 
 
TO 
 
 A. C. BRADLEY 
 IN HOMAGE AND AFFECTION 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 THIS Short History of English Literature was originally 
 intended to have been written in collaboration with 
 Professor R. S. Wallace, M.A., Professor of English 
 Language and Literature in the University of Melbourne. 
 The War, however, called Professor Wallace away from 
 Australia on active service, after he had written the first 
 chapter and a fragment of the second. It fell to his 
 partner to complete the book. In doing so he was com- 
 pelled, for reasons of space, to avoid biographical details, 
 except in so far as these had a direct bearing on an author's 
 writings. His conviction that, where occasion offers, a 
 history of English literature should discuss the thought 
 and faith of a great writer no less than his art, will explain 
 his treatment of such writers as Blake, Shelley, and 
 Wordsworth. Some apology or explanation should 
 perhaps be offered for the writing of a new History of 
 English Literature when there are already good older 
 histories in the field. A partial justification may be found 
 in the attempt here made to bring the treatment of the 
 subject abreast of recent research and criticism. 
 
 A. T. S. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST . 1 
 The earliest English poetry JBeourulf Christian poetry 
 Caedmon and Cynewulf Early English prose Bede, 
 Alfred, jElfric. 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE (1066-1350) . 10 
 Effect of the Norman Conquest on English literature Anglo- 
 Latin literature Geoffrey of Monmouth Anglo-French 
 literature English literature : Religious works : Chronicles : 
 Romances. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PROSE, 1350-1400 29 
 
 Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 LYRIC AND MISCELLANEOUS POETRY OF THE MIDDLE 
 
 ENGLISH PERIOD BEFORE CHAUCER ... 32 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 CHAUCER, LANGLAND, GOWER . ... 36 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE AFTERMATH OF CHAUCER IN ENGLAND . . 48 
 Lydgate, Occleve Minor Chaucerians Hawes 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 SCOTTISH POETRY 52 
 
 The Beginnings The Scottish Chaucerians Popular 
 Poetry Lyndsay to Montgomerie. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 BALLADS AND LYRICS 66 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE PECOCK TO MALORY . . 74 
 Lack of tradition in prose Pecock, Capgrave, Caxton, 
 Berners, Malory. 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BARCLAY AND SKELTON ... . .78 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 82 
 
 The Beginnings The Miracle Play The Morality Play 
 Court Influence School plays The Interlude Early 
 Comedies and Tragedies The influence of Plautus, Terence, 
 and Seneca. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE .... 95 
 The Beginnings : Fisher to Ascham Lyly, Sidney, 
 Hooker The Elizabethan Novel Literary Criticism 
 The Chroniclers The Translators The Pamphleteers 
 Satire Literature of the Sea Character-writing 
 Raleigh, Burton, Bacon, Jonson, Selden. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 DRAMA: THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE . . . . 119 
 Shakespeare's predecessors Lyly, Nash, Peele, Kyd, 
 Marlowe, Greene Shakespeare His relation to his con- 
 temporaries Jonson, Chapman, Marston, Dekker, Middle- 
 ton, Heywood, Webster, Tourneur, Massinger, Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, Ford, Shirley Minors. 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY . . .152 
 The Beginnings : Wyatt and Surrey to Sackville Spenser 
 The Elizabethan Sonnet Daniel, Drayton, Breton, 
 Wotton, Davies, Browne, Wither, the Fletchers, Jonson, 
 Donne, Drurnmond, Campion. 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 CAROLINE POETRY 171 
 
 Fashions in contemporary poetry Herrick, Carew, Ran- 
 dolph, Suckling, Lovelace Religious Poetry : Crashaw, 
 Herbert, Vaughan, and others Developments of the 
 Couplet Waller, Denham, Cowley, Marvell Minors. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 JOHN MILTON 180 
 
CONTENTS . ix 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CAROLINE PROSE 186 
 
 New Developments in Prose Religious writers Andrewes, 
 Donne, Taylor, Baxter, Borrow, South Sir Thomas Browne 
 
 Herbert of Oherbury, Clarendon, Hobbes, Harrington, 
 Fuller, Walton. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 JOHN DRYDEN AND THE POETRY AND DRAMA OF 
 
 THE RESTORATION 193 
 
 . New literary forces Dryden's plays, poems, and prose 
 His relation to his age Developments in Restoration drama 
 
 The Heroic Play Restoration Comedy : Etherege, 
 Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbnigh, Farquhar, Shadwell and 
 others Restoration Tragedy : Davenant and others, Lee, 
 Otway, Southerne, Rowe Restoration Poetry Butler, 
 Oldham, Rochester, Sedley. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 PROSE OF THE RESTORATION 210 
 
 General qualities of Restoration prose Cowley, Temple, 
 Bunyan, Halifax Religious writers Philosophical writers : 
 Locke and others Diarists : Evelyn, Pepys, and others 
 Historians. 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 THE RISE OF THE PRESS 217 
 
 Defoe, Addison, Steele, Swift, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, 
 Berkeley, Joseph Butler, Bentley, and others. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 POPE AND QUEEN ANNE POETRY 230 
 
 The Poetry of Pope His relation to his age Qualities 
 of Queen Anne poetry Prior, Gay, Young Minors. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL . . . .238 
 Rise and progress of the Novel Richardson, Fielding, 
 Smollett, Sterne Minors. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 245 
 
 Causes of the Drama's decay The new staging Dramatic 
 types and tendencies Classical and romantic plays 
 Domestic dramas : Lillo and others Sentimental drama 
 Comedy and burlesque Sheridan. 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 251 
 
 The Spirit of Augustan literature Johnson, Boswell, 
 Goldsmith, Burke, Hume, Gibbon, Junius, Chesterfield, 
 Walpole Minors. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE . . , .265 
 Form and spirit of eighteenth-century poetry Thomson, 
 Shenstone, and minors New forces Gray, Collins, 
 Cowper The revival of romance Ossian, Percy 
 Scottish Poetry : Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns Crabbe, 
 Blake. 
 
 CHAPTER, XXVI 
 
 POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH . . . .277 
 The full tide of romanticism Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
 Southey, Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor, Moore, Hood, 
 Campbell, Rogers, Hogg, Cunningham. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE OF THE EARLY NINETEENTH 
 
 CENTURY . 306 
 
 Rise of the Reviews Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Brougham 
 The great Essayists : Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Southey, 
 Coleridge Landor, Cobbett Historians and Philosophers. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 SCOTT AND THE NOVEL 313 
 
 The novel of sentiment and terror Mackenzie, Walpole, 
 Mrs. Radcliffe, Beckf ord Scott and the historical novel 
 Jane Austen, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, Disraeli, Bulwer, Lever, 
 Peacock Minors. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NINETEENTH- 
 
 CENTURY LITERATURE ... .319 
 
 The French Revolution and English Literature Waning 
 German and increasing French influence The appeal of 
 French poetry Science and literature Changed outlook 
 of the English poets Diversity of style and spirit in Victo- 
 rian literature Degradation of Victorian drama Criticism 
 and Novel-writing The appeal of the Russian novel. 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 POETS OF THE TRANSITION 323 
 
 Religious poetry Clare, Hartley Coleridge, Hawker, Darley, 
 Beddoes, de Vere, Taylor, Home, and others The ' Spas- 
 raodics '. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 VICTORIAN POETRY 327 
 
 Tennyson, the Brownings, Swinburne, William Morris, 
 Rossetti, James Tnomson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, 
 Clough, Christina Rossetti, Patmore, O'Shaughnessy, Francis 
 Thompson, Henley, Wilde, Davidson, Brooke. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS . . . .346 
 Chief characteristics Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude Other 
 historians Newman, Mill Scientific writers Lockhart 
 and other biographers Criticism: Matthew Arnold, Swin- 
 burne, Ruskin, Bagehot, Pater, Symonds, Henley, Stephen, 
 Lang Borrow, Kinglake, Burton, and others. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 357 
 
 Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, Charles and 
 Henry Kingsley, Wilkie Collins, George Meredith, Stevenson, 
 Butler, Gissing, and others Conclusion. 
 
 INDEX . 369 
 
A SHORT HISTORY OF ENGLISH 
 LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 FROM THE BEGINNINGS TO THE NORMAN 
 CONQUEST 
 
 The earliest English poetry Beowdf Christian poetry Csedmon 
 and Cynewulf Early English prose Bede, Alfred, ^Elfric. 
 
 IT is customary to classify Old English, or, to use the more Old 
 popular term, Anglo-Saxon, poetry under two heads, pagan English 
 and Christian, according as it finds its subjects in the legends Poetry, 
 of Teutonic heathendom or, after the introduction of Chris- 
 tianity, in biblical story and ecclesiastical ritual and tradition . 
 The classification is a just one, although it may obscure, if too 
 strictly interpreted, one of the most interesting things in Old 
 English poetry the curious mingling in the same poem of 
 pagan and Christian elements. The pagan poems, for reasons 
 which will soon appear, have often a colouring of Christian 
 sentiment, while the poems on biblical themes do not break 
 so completely with the heathen narratives as not to adopt 
 something of their method and spirit. 
 
 The tribes who invaded and occupied England in the 
 fifth and sixth centuries were heathen marauders from Den- 
 mark and the north coast of Germany. They belonged to 
 that group of nations whose civilization Tacitus describes in 
 his Germania. Of their literature at the time of the invasion 
 we know nothing directly, but we can infer from the poems 
 which remain that there were current among them songs 
 and lays telling of the great deeds of the warriors and kings 
 of the Teutonic world. These hero -songs were handed on orally 
 from generation to generation, and were recited by minstrels 
 or scops at tribal or festive gatherings. Not many of them have 
 survived ; doubtless a few only were written down, at a later 
 time when the art of writing was acquired from Irish and 
 Roman missionaries. The poem Widsith, which in its first- 
 form may belong to the fourth century for additions were 
 made to it from time to time to keep it up to date is not 
 itself a hero -song, but rather a list of the great kings whose 
 deeds were the themes of such songs. It tells of the wander- 
 ings of a scop among the Teutonic tribes. Dear's Lament is 
 also the story of a minstrel, in which reference is made, by 
 way of illustration, to well-known names and legends. Of 
 hero -songs proper there survive two fragments, Finnsburh 
 
 i 
 
2 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and Wildkere records of bitter feuds and fierce fighting and 
 the poem Beowulf. 
 
 Beowulf Beowulf is the only poem of any length it runs to three 
 thousand one hundred and eighty-two lines which has come 
 down to us, of the early heroic poetry of the Teutons. There 
 is no certainty about the date of its composition. It is extant 
 in a manuscript of the tenth century, but this manuscript 
 must be a copy of a much older original. The possibilities are 
 that the poem, which contains several references to the narra- 
 tive of the Old Testament, and speaks frequently of the God 
 of the Christian religion, was put together in the late seventh 
 century by a Christian poet who interested himself in the 
 songs and lays of his heathen forefathers, and, making a selec- 
 tion of them, worked them into a consecutive story. Whether 
 he rewrote and refashioned the old lays, or merely edited them 
 without making any very great changes, it is impossible to 
 say ; in the present state of our knowledge it may be nearer 
 the truth to speak of him as the shaper or editor rather than 
 as the actual author. There is nothing distinctively English 
 in the poem. The scenes are laid in Denmark and South 
 Sweden : the tribes who play a part in the action are Danes, 
 Greats, Swedes, and Frisians. It is clear, therefore, that, if 
 the poem was written in England and of that there can be 
 little doubt the legends were carried, in all likelihood in 
 the form of short lays, by the English from their continental 
 home, and remained current among them for many years 
 after the settlement. Though biblical allusions abound, and 
 the heathen deities have, for the most part, vanished before 
 the editing if we may call it editing of the Christian reviser, 
 the background is not Christian but heathen. 
 
 The main story deals with the adventures of Beowulf in 
 his contest with ogres and dragons. We are told how the hall 
 of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, is devastated for the space 
 of twelve years by a demon called Grendel. Beowulf, nephew 
 of Hygelac, King of the Geats, a tribe of South Sweden, 
 crosses the sea to help Hrothgar, and in fight in his hall, 
 mortally wounds Grendel. Grendel's mother, seeking ven- 
 geance for the death of her son, renews the attacks. Beowulf 
 tracks her to her lair, a cave at the bottom of a deep mere, 
 and slays her. Loaded with gifts, he returns to his native 
 land, where he ultimately succeeds to the throne. In his old 
 age a fire-breathing dragon lays waste the land. Beowulf 
 attacks and kills it, but is himself wounded to death in the 
 fray. The poem ends with an account of his burial amid the 
 mourning of his whole people. 
 
 This short summary does scant justice to the poem. In out- 
 line the story is trivial enough, a typical folk-tale ; but it is 
 interspersed wfth many subsidiary legends, historical and 
 mythical, and with allusions to legends, which open up for us 
 the life of Teutonic heathendom, and lift the story far above 
 a mere recital of the deeds of a giant-killer. Beowulf is the 
 
TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST 3 
 
 picture of a whole civilization, of the Germania which Tacitus 
 describes. The main interest which the poem has for us is 
 thus not a purely literary interest. Beowulf is an important 
 historical document, recreating for us a whole society, telling 
 us, in most authentic fashion, of life as it was lived in far-off 
 heathen days. The rites which are practised in the poem are 
 heathen rites. The hero is the typical Teutonic warrior, the 
 embodiment of valour and loyalty, the supreme virtues of 
 those days. Tacitus tells us that among the Teutonic tribes 
 ' it is a reproach on the battlefield for a chief to be surpassed 
 in valour, a reproach for his retinue not to equal the prowess 
 of its chief ; but to have left the field and have survived one's 
 chief this means life-long infamy and shame'. Beowulf 
 bears this out. ' Better is death ', says one of the hero's 
 companions, * to every one of noble birth than an inglorious 
 life.' His life is inglorious who shows cowardice or who fails 
 his lord at need. 
 
 The Christian allusions show up rather incongruously against 
 the pervading paganism. Fate is the driving power in the 
 poem. ' Fate goes ever as it must.' * Death ', we read, * is 
 not easy to escape from, let him try who will, but, impelled 
 by Fate, he shall win the place prepared for soul-possessors, 
 earth-dwelling sons of men, where his body, fast in its narrow 
 bed, shall sleep after the banquet.' Knowing that his hour is 
 fixed and that nothing can avert his doom, it behoves a man 
 not to whine but to act his part bravely. There is no joy in 
 the poem, no hope. Life is a warfare, and a man must face it 
 with what fortitude he may. 
 
 No little art is shown in Beowulf in the introduction of Other ear- 
 other stories besides the main one stories of the heroic past ly poems 
 by way of illustration and contrast. These, as we have said, 
 were doubtless the themes of separate lays which the shaper 
 of Beowulf knew and worked upon. One of them, that of 
 Finn, has in fact been preserved in an independent form in the 
 fragment on the Fight at Finnsburh. It is tolerably certain 
 that Beowulf is only one of many old sagas, of which no trace 
 remains. Much else has perished too. Tacitus tells us that 
 the hymns of the Teutonic tribes * celeb Ate a God Tuisto, 
 a scion of the soil, and his son Mannus, as the beginning and the 
 founders of their race '. These religious hymns of the Angles, 
 Saxons, and Jutes have disappeared : we depend for our 
 knowledge of the Teutonic deities on Scandinavian literature. 
 One or two incantations alone survive in English, short 
 snatches of song sung to increase the fertility of the soil and to 
 ward off evil. Three longer poems, which may very well be 
 of early date, although, like Beowulf, they have been touched 
 up with Christian sentiment, are elegiac in tone and speak 
 wistfully, as does Beowulf, of the transitoriness of life, the 
 inhospitality of Nature, and the power of fate. The Wanderer, 
 a poem of one hundred and fifteen lines, is the lament of one 
 who has lost his lord and travels companionless over the 
 
4 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 rime-cold sea. The whole world is darkened by his sorrow ; 
 ' all this tract of earth is full of hardship, and fate changes 
 everything under the heavens '. The Seafarer, a poem of one 
 hundred and eight lines, describes the lure of the * weltering 
 waves ' : a seafaring life is full of hardship, but, for all its 
 misery, it exercises a fatal fascination. The Ruin is the descrip- 
 tion of a wasted city. Two love poems, The Wife's Complaint 
 and The Husband's Message, the exact interpretation of which 
 is still a matter of doubt, close the list of these, presumably 
 heathen, lyrics. 
 
 With the coming of Augustine and the conversion of the 
 English to Christianity, new themes were opened up for the 
 scop and the poet. We are not to suppose that the old pagan 
 poetry ceased at once to find an audience : some of it, like 
 Beowulf, was put into writing, as we have seen, by Christian 
 scholars, who would, as far as possible, eliminate all references 
 to heathen deities and substitute the conceptions of the 
 Christian faith. We have abundant evidence of the continued 
 popularity of the old poetry, as, for example, in the letter 
 which Alcuin wrote in 797 to Coenwulf, King of Mercia, 1 and, 
 in a more indirect way, in the manner in which the new 
 Christian poetry caught its spirit and imitated its phrases. 
 Moreover, four centuries after the coming of Augustine, there 
 appear several poems, notably those on the battles of Brunan- 
 burh (937) and Maldon (991), quite in the heroic manner. 
 The Battle The poem on the battle of Maldon is the finest example of 
 of Maldon . Old English heroic poetry and one of the most stirring battle- 
 poems in our language. It describes the determined resistance 
 which Byrhtnoth, Ealdorman of Essex, made against a raiding 
 army of Danes under Olaf Tryggvason. Byrhtnoth falls, 
 but his following rally round his dead body, and fight to the 
 last. Their creed is the same as that of Wiglaf, Beowulf's 
 devoted thane : 
 
 * Leofsunu spake, as he raised his linden shield : " This vow I make 
 that I will not budge a foot's length, but will avenge my lord. Round 
 Sturmere never shall our sturdy fighters have need to say with scornful 
 words that I, when my lord had fallen, turned from the fray, and went 
 lordless home." ' 
 
 Two famous lines in the poem sum up the heroic temper : 
 Harder must be the heart, bolder the spirit, 
 Greater must be our courage, as our strength grows less. 
 
 Christian Inevitably, however, Christianity, with its refining, softening 
 
 Poetry. influence, encroached upon the traditions of pagan poetry. 
 
 Stories from the Bible and episodes from the lives of the 
 
 saints began to compete with stories from the heroic past. 
 
 1 'Let the work of God ', says the letter, ' be read at priestly banquets. 
 There it is fitting to listen to a reader, not to a harper ; to the discourses 
 of the Fathers, not to the songs of the heathen. What has Ingeld to do 
 with Christ ? ' Ingeld is often mentioned in the heathen poetry : there 
 is a legend about him in Beowulf. 
 
TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST 5 
 
 We can see the process at work in Beowulf, where the scop 
 who entertains Hrothgar's company of an evening, recites 
 on one occasion the tale of Sigmund the Volsung, on another 
 the story of Finn, while on a third he tells how * the Almighty 
 made the earth, appointed the effulgence of the sun and moon 
 as light for land -dwellers, and fashioned life for all kinds that 
 live and move '. This last recitation was after the manner of 
 the new poetry which was becoming popular when Beowulf 
 was put into writing, and which drew its themes from the Bible 
 story, as in Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, Christ and Satan ; from 
 saints' lives, as in Juliana, Elene, Andreas, Guthlac ; from 
 the apocrypha, as in Judith ; or from the services of the 
 church, as in Crist. The Dream of the Rood and The Phoenix are 
 more fanciful handlings of similar themes. These poems with 
 the exception of Judith, which is found in the same manuscript 
 as Beowulf, have come down to us in three great manuscript 
 collections, the so-called Junian MS., now at Oxford, the 
 Exeter Book in Exeter Cathedral, and the Vercelli MS. in the 
 Cathedral library of Vercelli, in North Italy. 
 
 It is impossible to assign exact dates to these poems : all 
 that we are sure of is that they belong to a time between the 
 seventh and tenth centuries, say, between A.D. 650 and 1000. 
 Two names only, those of Caedmon and Cynewulf, have been 
 associated with them Caedmon's on the strength of a well- 
 known passage in Bede's Ecclesiastical History (731), where 
 we are told how Caedmon, an inmate of the monastery of 
 Whitby during the abbacy of Hilda (658-680), was miracu- 
 lously endowed with the gift of song. * He sang first', says 
 Bede, ' of the earth's creation, and the beginning of man, and 
 all the story of Genesis, and afterwards about the departure 
 of the people of Israel from the land of Egypt, and about 
 many other narratives in the books of the canon of scripture.' 
 On the evidence of this account of Bede's, and because of the 
 similarity which a hymn, paraphrased in Latin by Bede and 
 attributed by him to Caedmon, bears to the opening of the 
 metrical paraphrases of Genesis, the poems of the Junian MS., 
 Genesis, Exodus, Daniel, Christ and Satan, came to be regarded 
 as Caedmon's work. This view has now been abandoned. 
 Although they belong to that class of poetical paraphrases 
 which Caedmon, on Bede's showing, certainly practised, they 
 are probably of a later date, and by different authors. Part 
 of Genesis, indeed, is known to be an adaptation of an Old 
 Saxon poem, and can hardly have been earlier than 850, two 
 centuries later than Caedmon. Of the life of Cynewulf we know 
 nothing, although many legends have been woven round his 
 name. He may have fived, as has been generally supposed, 
 about the year 800. He inserted his name in runic letters in 
 four poems, Crist, Juliana, Elene, and The Fates of the Apostles, 
 while several others, such as Andreas, The Dream of the Rood, 
 and The Phoenix, have been attributed to him, but on evidence 
 not always very convincing. 
 
6 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Although their subjects are of a religious character, there 
 is much in these poems which recalls the earlier heroic verse. 
 Occasion is found to describe incidents and situations such as 
 were common in the pagan poems. When an opportunity is 
 given for the introduction of scenes of battle, it is seldom 
 lost. Moreover, the relationship in which men and angels 
 stand to God is conceived after the manner of that of clansmen 
 to their chief, while the virtues of courage and loyalty, which 
 receive such emphasis in Beowulf, are eulogized again and again. 
 Genesis has a vivid account of the fall of the angels, in which 
 faithlessness to God, his over-lord, is regarded as Satan's 
 principal crime. Exodus resounds with the clash of shields 
 and the tramp of armies, showing such sympathy with the 
 pride and pomp of war that Ten Brink was led to believe that 
 its author was a heathen singer who in latter life turned 
 Bible-poet. ' In no old English poetry is the martial passion 
 so marked, so exclusive : and this is the more striking as the 
 action involves no battle at all, but merely a struggle of 
 the Egyptians with the waves.' Andreas, dealing with the 
 acts of St. Andrew, opens very much as Beowulf does ; the 
 twelve disciples, the apostles of peace and good tidings, 
 become typical Teutonic warriors. ' Lo ! we have heard of 
 twelve glorious men in olden days under the stars, the thanes 
 of God : nor did their glory fail them in the fray, when 
 standards clashed together. . . . They were mighty men over 
 the earth, brave leaders of the people, bold in battle, stout of 
 heart, when hand and buckler shielded the helm on the plain 
 of war, on the field of fate.' l Elene, which tells how St. Helena, 
 mother of the Emperor Constantine, found the true cross, and 
 Judith, are memorable for their descriptions of sea and battle. 
 
 The Cynewulfian poems are more lyrical, more intimately 
 personal, than those which have been attributed to Csedmon. 
 They are full of the sense of sin and the necessity for forgive- 
 ness, and are, therefore, more definitely Christian. This is 
 especially so with Crist, whose themes are the Nativity, the 
 Ascension, and the Last Judgment : part of it is an expansion, 
 lyrical in nature, of the choral services of the church. The 
 Dream of the Rood, in which the Cross speaks and describes 
 the Passion, is the finest flower of all this religious poetry. 
 
 Mention has to be made of the Riddles, ninety-five in number, 
 once attributed to Cynewulf, but' no longer regarded as his. 
 
 1 Hwset ! we gefrunan on fyrndagum 
 twelfe under tunglum tireadige hseled 
 >eodnes )>egnas. No hira >rym alaeg 
 camprsedenne, >onne cumbol hneotan. 
 
 ])set wseron msere men ofer eorftan, 
 frome folctogan and fyrdhwate, 
 rofe rincas, Jxmne rond ond hand 
 on herefelda helm ealgodon, 
 on meotudwange. 
 
TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST 7 
 
 The writing of riddles was a favourite poetic pastime : there 
 is extant more than one collection in Latin ; one is by Aid- 
 helm, Bishop of Sherborne (died 709). The Old English riddles 
 are noteworthy for their intimate portrayal of natural scenery, 
 particularly of the sea in storm and calm. 
 
 The poems mentioned above, with a few others of minor Anglo- 
 importance, make up the record of what survives of Old Saxon 
 English poetry only a small fragment, we may be sure, of Metre, 
 what once existed. All this poetry is written in an alliterative 
 metre without rhyme, the common form of verse in early 
 times among all the Teutonic nations. Each line is sharply 
 divided into two parts by a pause or caesura, and has four 
 stressed syllables, two in either half-line. Of these stressed 
 syllables at least two, often three, begin with the same con- 
 sonant, or with vowels, thus : 
 
 ByrhtnoS mafelode, bord hafenode, 
 
 Wand wacne sesc, wordum mselde, 
 
 Yrre and anraed, ageaf him andsware. 
 
 Byrhtnoth spake then, his buckle r he lifted, 
 Shook his slender spear, these words he shouted, 
 Angry and undismayed, answer he gave him. 
 
 The unstressed syllables vary in number, so that the lines are 
 of uneven length. The diction of this poetry differs markedly 
 from that of prose, and abounds in periphrastic expressions, as 
 when a ship is called ' an ocean-horse ' (brimhengest) or 
 ' a wave-goer ' (yj>lida). There seems to have been a large 
 store of stock phrases regarded by every poet as common 
 poetic coin on which he might ring the changes, when he had 
 not the skill to invent phrases of his own. The poem on 
 Bruuanburh (Tennyson's translation will give any one who 
 cannot read Old English a fair idea of the poem and of the 
 movement of Old English verse in general) is little more than 
 a skilful patchwork of traditional phraseology, a cento of 
 quotations, like a schoolboy's Latin verses. We have already 
 seen how the vocabulary of the heroic poetry was adapted to 
 religious themes, as in the opening of Andreas, often with little 
 change. Yet, in spite of the frequent employment of a conven- 
 tional poetic diction, the Old English poets can at times write 
 with real eloquence and feeling. They are at their best when 
 they describe the turmoil of battle and the terrors of the sea. 
 
 Old English prose cannot compare in variety or interest with QJ<J 
 Old English poetry ; there is nothing in prose to set beside English 
 ^Beowulf. The poetry in spirit and metre and rhythm is Prose, 
 original and indigenous, even when, as in the religious poems, 
 its themes are borrowed ; the prose is a secondary literature, 
 following Latin prose with uncertain steps, as it was destined 
 to do for many centuries to come. Its range is also limited : 
 it is used mainly for instructional purposes, and is too desper- 
 ately in earnest to have much time for the artistic graces. 
 England has to Hait many years for a prose in any way 
 
8 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 comparable with that evolved BO early, without outside help, 
 in Iceland. 
 
 From the time of the introduction of Christianity, Latin 
 became the formidable rival of the vernacular as a prose 
 medium, and remained so till the seventeenth century. The 
 English from the first took kindly to Latin culture, and very 
 soon after the arrival of Augustine, there sprang up throughout 
 the land schools for the advancement of Latin learning, 
 notably those at Canterbury and York. For one and a halt 
 centuries (circa 650-800) England was well in the forefront 
 of European scholarship. The greatest product of this Latin 
 learning is the Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica 
 Gentis Anglorum) by Bede (673-735), a priest of the monastery 
 of Jarrow. Bede's history, one of our first-rate authorities 
 for the early history of England, the record of one who himself 
 saw the transition from the old faith to the new, is one of those 
 books which never lose their charm, and is as fresh to-day as 
 when it was written. Other scholars who acquired more than 
 a local Deputation were Aldhelm, who died Bishop of Sher- 
 borne in 709, author, among other things, of a hundred riddles 
 in Latin verse, from which the English riddles drew some of 
 their inspiration ; and Alcuin (735-804), the writer of several 
 commentaries and of many interesting letters, who in 782 
 was summoned to the Continent by Charlemagne to direct 
 the education of France. These writers and they are only 
 three out of many also wrote vernacular prose and verse, 
 but only their Latin works have survived, being those alone 
 on which they themselves set any value. 
 
 All this learning, which the monasteries and the monastic 
 schools so sedulously cultivated, was swept away by the incur- 
 sions of the heathen Danes, and it was not until the time of 
 Alfred that an attempt was made to revive it. How disastrous 
 to the cause of learning these incursions were we may gather 
 from Alfred's preface to his translation of Pope Gregory's 
 Oura Pastoralis. Here Alfred tells us that, when he came to 
 the throne (871), there were very few persons on either side 
 of the Humber who could read Latin : he could not think of 
 a single one south of the Thames. He recalls with envy the 
 days when foreigners came to England in search of wisdom and 
 instruction the days of Bede and Alcuin and announces 
 his resolve, in view of the general ignorance of Latin, to 
 translate ' such books as are most needful for all men to know 
 into the language which we can all understand '. Alfred's 
 labours established English prose. 
 
 Among his translations are those of Gregory's Pastoral 
 Care, Orosius's History of the World, Bede's Ecclesiastical 
 History, and Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy , the standard 
 works of the day on theology, history, and philosophy. Alfred 
 does not follow his originals with very great closeness, but 
 omits, adds, and expands to suit his purposes. In his transla- 
 tion of Orosius he inserted one notable passage of his own, 
 
TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST 9 
 
 the account, which he took down from their own lips, of the 
 voyages of two Norwegians, Ohthere and Wulfstan, round the 
 North Cape and far into the Baltic Sea. It is a bright, clear 
 narrative, all too short, wonderfully simple and direct (not 
 unlike the narratives of Hakluyt's seamen, among which it 
 afterwards found a worthy place), which gives us a better 
 idea than all the translations of the capabilities of Old English 
 as a prose vehicle. In his translation Alfred is hampered by 
 the Latin, and even when he is writing independent of it, 
 should the occasion seem to him to call for a more formal 
 style, as in the preface to the Pastoral Care, the influence of 
 Latin syntax is evident in his long, intricate sentences. In 
 the passage on the Norwegian explorers Alfred writes as he 
 must have talked, forgetting his Latin syntax ; it is a pity he 
 ever wrote otherwise. There are passages in the Chronicle, too, 
 which are expressed in the same direct and simple way. The 
 English Chronicle, which is extant in several recensions and 
 takes the history backward to the invasion of Caesar, and, 
 in one recension, forward to the reign of Stephen, may owe 
 its inception to Alfred's influence. At any rate it is in dealing 
 with Alfred's reign that it first begins to discuss events with 
 any measure of fullness. It is a very unequal work, some 
 of the entries being the barest statements of fact ; but in 
 telling the story of the wars against the Danes it gives us many 
 passages of simple, vivid narrative. 
 
 Unfortunately, Old English prose is for the most part of a 
 strictly expository character. Its greatest exponent, after 
 Alfred, is ^Elfric (circa 955-1020), Abbot of Eynsham, near 
 Oxford, author of numerous homilies, lives of the saints, and 
 a grammar ; and translator of parts of the Bible. JElfric in 
 many of his works shows an excessive fondness for alliteration, 
 his prose resembling Old English verse broken down. Another 
 homilist is Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, a contemporary of 
 ^Elfric. 
 
 The development of English prose was checked by the 
 Norman Conquest, which was destined to influence profoundly 
 the course of English Literature in direct and indirect ways, 
 which will be discussed in the next chapter. 
 
10 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 EAELY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE (1066-1350) 
 
 Effect of the Norman Conquest on English literature Anglo-Latin 
 literature Geoffrey of Monmouth Anglo-French literature 
 English literature : Religious works : Chronicles : Romances. 
 
 A new be- AT the time of the Norman Conquest the literature of 
 ginning. England, both in poetry and prose, was incomparably richer 
 than that of any other European country. Yet for any 
 influence which it exerted on succeeding literature, it might 
 just as well have never existed. It is interesting in itself, it 
 is well worth reading, but in the evolution of our modern 
 literature it counts for nothing. With the Norman Conquest, 
 and in some measure owing to it although, had there been no 
 Conquest, the same thing would eventually have happened 
 English literature made a fresh start. With the coming of 
 the Normans it did not, as has frequently been said, go under- 
 ground for a time to reappear in the fourteenth century the 
 same in essentials. There is no bond of connexion between 
 Cynewulf and Chaucer. The eleventh century saw the exhaus- 
 tion of the old alliterative poetry, and it is of poetry, rather 
 than of prose, that we have at this time mainly to think. 
 Efforts, it is true, were made to preserve it and revive it, 
 and as late as the fourteenth century we find Langland 
 writing in a loose form of Old English verse ; but in this, 
 as in other respects, he was out of touch with prevailing 
 fashion. In the eleventh century English poetry set out to 
 learn a new tune, a new prosody, and new themes ; it went to 
 school in French poetry. 
 
 There need be no attempt to explain away this fact. English 
 literature has again and again refreshed itself from foreign 
 springs, and if in the sources of its inspiration it owes more 
 to the Latin races than to the Teutonic, a consideration not 
 without its comfort in these days, this is only another reminder 
 that we are a mixed race. And of all the debts which English 
 owes to foreign literature, none is so great as that which it 
 incurred in the Middle Ages to French. Unless this indebted- 
 ness is kept constantly in mind, there can be no understanding 
 of Middle English literature ; indeed, there can be none 
 of modern English literature either, since the origins of many 
 things, and these not the least important, in that literature 
 are to be found in certain departures of the twelfth, thirteenth, 
 and fourteenth centuries. For the literary historian Middle 
 English literature before Chaucer is excessively important, 
 not so much for any work of outstanding merit which it has 
 given us, as for its promise of what is to come. 
 
 The history of Middle English poetry might easily resolve 
 itself into the history of the endeavour to win for English 
 the French elegance and grace, to naturalize in England the 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 11 
 
 style and the themes of French poetry. Chaucer is the father 
 of English poetry in a stricter sense than that generally 
 attached to such attributions of literary paternity. His poetry 
 is the full and triumphant expression of all that English poetry 
 of the three preceding centuries was trying to be, and in achiev- 
 ing this he follows closely in the steps of those ' that make in 
 France '. 
 
 We have to wait for Chaucer till we see all that French 
 literature meant for English. For the English language and 
 English versification in the time between the Conquest and 
 Chaucer were in a state of transition, and, moreover, did not 
 receive that measure of scholarly cultivation which alone 
 could fit them to be the 'vehicles of a great literature. One of 
 the results of the Norman invasion was to set up French as 
 the language of the upper classes the classes most capable 
 in those days of producing literature and to relegate English 
 to an inferior position as the language of the humble and 
 unlettered. At the same time Latin continued, as before the 
 Conquest, to be written and spoken by scholars. The imme- 
 diate consequences of this state of things were disastrous for 
 English literature. It received a set-back from which it took 
 three centuries to recover. Had all those who wrote in French 
 and Latin as sedulously cultivated the mother-tongue, the 
 recovery might have been much more rapid, but, as it was, the 
 remaking of English versification on the pattern of French 
 for that is what the new order of things involved was left 
 in the hands of those who were often least able to accomplish 
 it. Moreover, the condition of the language itself rendered 
 a new literary standard difficult to attain at once. It was 
 rapidly shedding its inflexions, and was taking over many 
 new words from the French. There was, besides, no standard 
 English ; there was one English for the north, another for 
 the midlands, and another for the south, all of equal literary 
 importance. From all this it follows that early Middle 
 English literature (1066-1366) is largely experimental work ; 
 it is a literature in the making. What we witness is English 
 trying to make a foreign versification its own. Yet the halting 
 achievement of those years made Chaucer's work possible ; 
 for, though Chaucer owed little to it in direct inspiration, 
 yet it had done something towards fitting the language for the 
 purposes of literature. Without it, Chaucer might have written 
 in French. He is the first Englishman of genius to write in 
 English. He took over from his English predecessors the 
 language which they had struggled to make a worthy literary 
 medium, and having genius in him, he shaped it to finer 
 issues than they had dreamt of. 
 
 Before we consider the works in which this new English 
 literature was finding expression, we must glance at the 
 literature written in Latin and French. 
 
 The writings in Latin, in which language so much of the best 
 mediaeval thought found its expression, are of consequence for 
 
12 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Anglo- the student of English literature only in so far as they are the 
 Latin sources of some important books in the vernacular. Without 
 Literature fear of omitting anything of value for our purpose, we can 
 1066-1350 p a g s by the works of such men as Anselm, John of Salisbury, 
 Alexander Neckham, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Richard 
 of Bury, Duns Scotus, and others. Most of these were theo- 
 logians. The chroniclers, among whom are William of Malmes- 
 bury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth, William 
 of Newburgh, Jocelin of Brakelond, Giraldus Camfrrensis, 
 Matthew Paris, Ranulph Higden, are of more importance. 
 Two of them are better known to modern readers than the 
 others, Jocelin of Brakelond, because his chronicle of the 
 Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds had the good fortune to inspire 
 Carlyle's Past and Present, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, because 
 Geoffrey his Historia Eegum Britanniae (circa 1136) first gave literary 
 of Mon- vogue to the Arthurian legend, and to other stories since 
 mouth. made famous. Geoffrey, anxious perhaps to exalt their 
 recently conquered country in the eyes of the Normans, and 
 at the same time to make capital out of the contemporary 
 passion for romance, wrote a history of the British kings from 
 the time of the reputed landing in England of Brutus, descen- 
 dant of the Trojan Aeneas, to the date of the Saxon invasions. 
 For his purpose he drew on Celtic tradition, or classical story, 
 and, to a much greater extent, on his own imagination, piecing 
 together a very readable and circumstantial narrative, which, 
 needless to say, cannot be regarded as authentic history. 
 It succeeded, however, in passing as such, in spite of the 
 protests of more conscientious chroniclers, and was accepted 
 in all good faith even in the sixteenth century by men like 
 Grafton and Holinshed. In the latter part of his Historia 
 Geoffrey recounts the deeds of Arthur the Briton in his war 
 against the Saxon invaders, his subjugation of Scotland, Ireland, 
 and other countries, and his interrupted march on Rome. 
 Thus was the Arthurian legend launched on its victorious 
 career. Although many stories, such as those of Launcelot, 
 Tristram, and the Holy Grail, were only added to it in later 
 days, to Geoffrey belongs the credit of first seeing its literary 
 possibilities. It is in the Historia, too, that we first read of 
 Lear and his daughters, of Cymbeline, Sabrina, and Locrine. 
 Fabrication though it is, the book was thus a very potent one, 
 the source of many an English masterpiece. There we read 
 
 Of Spenser's fairy themes 
 And those that Milton loved in youthful years; 
 
 and of the themes of many another poet besides. Its virtue 
 was not, however, the discovery of later days ; it sprang into 
 fame at once. Soon after its appearance it was translated 
 into French verse by the Anglo-Norman poet, Wace, and Wace's 
 poem, in turn, was rendered into English by Layamon in his 
 Brut (circa 1205) the first noteworthy English book to appear 
 after the Conquest, 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 13 
 
 The Normans seem to have had a predilection for books Anglo- 
 of two kinds the historical and the religious. Several of the French 
 Latin chronicles were compiled at the instigation of Norman Literature 
 prelates and statesmen, and several rhyming chronicles exist 1066-1350 
 in Anglo-French, among them being that of Wace, which has 
 just been mentioned. In the same language there are also 
 many religious works, translations and paraphrases of the 
 Bible, saints' lives, and such-like. In the romantic literature 
 of the day the Normans had also a share, and it was in part 
 owing to their agency that the French on the Continent 
 became acquainted with the Celtic stories which figure so 
 prominently in mediaeval romance. 
 
 At a later date, in the fourteenth century, many ballads, 
 roundels, virelays, and complaints were written in England 
 in the French language for example, by Grower in imitation 
 of contemporary practice across the Channel. These poems 
 are important as indicating the influences which moulded 
 Chaucer's early work. 
 
 For a hundred years after the Conquest few books seem to English 
 have been written in English ; the most notable are in Latin. Literature 
 And when literature in the vernacular comes to life again 1066-1350 
 towards the close of the eleventh century, it accomplishes at 
 first, and for some considerable time, nothing of great intrinsic 
 value, although much that is of historical interest. That 
 interest is mainly linguistic and metrical. It is in the writings 
 of those years that we can trace the establishment of our 
 modern prosody. The linguistic development is of little 
 importance to our present purpose. 
 
 We may, for convenience' sake, divide the literature from 
 1066 to 1350 into four sections, comprising religious works, 
 chronicles, romances, and lyrics. 1 
 
 Homilies, lives of the saints, metrical paraphrases of the Religious 
 Bible, and such-like form a very large part of Middle English Works, 
 literature : in this respect the Norman Conquest effected 
 little change in popular taste. They can hardly be said to 
 be more in the main stream of literature than are the "pub- 
 lished sermons of to-day, although we have to remember 
 that Chaucer made them respectable in one or two edifying 
 verse-tales, and carried on, without improving, the tradition 
 in that * little thing in prose ' with which he pretended to be so 
 pleased. The best that can be said of all these works is that 
 they gave writers practice in adapting the new language to 
 poetic ends, and in handling the new rhyming measures. 
 In these respects, and in these alone, do they count among the 
 processes which made Chaucer's work possible. 
 
 One of the earliest of these religious writings is the Bestiary 
 (circa 1200), an allegorical interpretation of the characters 
 of certain animals. It is interesting because it shows a curious 
 mingling of two different prosodic systems on the one hand 
 the alliterative, unrhymed verse of Old English with its 
 
 1 The lyrics are held over for discussion in a subsequent chapter. 
 
14 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 irregularly placed stresses, and uncertain number of unstressed 
 syllables, and on the other, the more regular rhyming metres 
 of French. The description of the lion shows the former : 
 
 De leun stant on hille ; and he man hunten here, 
 OSer Surg his iiese smel, smake Sat he negge, 
 Bi wile weie so he wile to dele niSer wenden, 
 Alle hise fet steppes after him he filled. 
 
 The latter is evident in the internal and terminal rhymes of 
 the passage on the eagle : 
 
 Al is man so is tis ern, wulde ge nu listen, 
 Old in his sinnes dern, or he bicumeS cristen. 
 
 Each half line is here practically a six- (or seven-) syllabled 
 line with three stresses. It represents the metre of the French 
 Bestiary, and is seen again in such a passage as this, from the 
 description of the whale : 
 
 CeSegrande is a fis 
 De moste Sat in water is ; 
 Dat Su wuldes seien get, 
 Gef Su it soge wan it Set, 
 Dat it were an eilond 
 Dat sete one '<5e se sond. 
 
 The more regular iambic movement, imitated from French 
 (and, in part, probably from mediaeval Latin hymns), is here 
 apparent, although from the beginning this new English verse 
 kept some of the freedom of Old English verse, and did not 
 adopt the strict syllabic uniformity of French. 
 
 It has seemed worth while to quote these examples, as they 
 show better than pages of dissertation what English, after 
 the Norman Conquest, had to learn. It took, as we have said, 
 some time to learn it, and cannot be said to have learned it 
 thoroughly till Chaucer appeared. Layamon's Brut, of which 
 more will be said in the next section, was written about the 
 same time as the Bestiary, and shows the same vacillation 
 between two different prosodies. The Ormulum (circa 1200), 
 so called, as its author tells us, ' forrj>i )>att Orrm itt wrohhte ', 
 is a long dreary poem, consisting of paraphrases of the gospels 
 and homilies upon them. It is written in a phonetic spelling 
 of Orm's own devising, discards the respective ornaments of 
 Old English and of French verse, alliteration and rhyme, and 
 exhibits a monotonously regular iambic rhythm. Its lines 
 consist of fifteen syllables, with a marked pause after the 
 eighth, and represent an adaptation of the Latin septenarius. 
 The same metre, with rhyme added, is employed in the Moral 
 Ode, a kind of versified sermon. Genesis and Exodus (circa 1250), 
 a paraphrase of the opening books of the Bible, is written in 
 octosyllabic couplets, the commonest metre of mediaeval 
 poetry. From all this it will be seen that, by the middle of 
 the thirteenth century , the new measures were well established, 
 although much had yet to be done in extending and improving 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 15 
 
 them. Certain of the didactic and religious poems adopt the 
 form of dialogue so common in all European countries through- 
 put the Middle Ages. The Debate of the Body and Soul develops 
 in eloquent stanzas a recurrent mediaeval theme. The Owl 
 and the Nightingale (circa 1220) is a spirited ' flyting' between 
 the two birds, in which satire and railing are leavened with 
 a good deal of serious comment upon life. The cult of the 
 Virgin inspired a number of other poems, chief among which 
 is the Good Orison of Our Lady (circa 1225). The wisdom of 
 the people takes shape in The Proverbs of Hendyng, which 
 are set forth in seven-lined stanzas with the added refrain, 
 ' Quoth Hendyng '. 
 
 Passing over much other religious and didactic verse, we 
 may single out for notice three works belonging to the first 
 half of the fourteenth century. The Cursor Mundi 
 
 Cursur o werld man aght it call, 
 For almast it overrennes all 
 
 is written in octosyllables, and is^a history of the world from 
 the Creation to the Day of Judgment. It thus covers much 
 the same ground as the Miracle Plays, which were very popular 
 in that district of northern England in which it was written. 
 In an interesting preface the author explains that the book 
 was written as a counter-attraction to the love romances ; 
 he will write in praise not of earthly, but of heavenly, love, 
 not of 
 
 Tristrem and hya leif Ysote 
 
 How he for here becom a sote, 
 
 and such-like, but of the Virgin Mary. Handlynge Synne, by 
 Robert Mannynge of Brunne, a translation in octosyllables 
 from the French, and The Pricke of Conscience, also in octo- 
 syllables, and possibly by Richard Rolle of Hampole, follow 
 the usual manner of the mediaeval homily. 
 
 In books designed to illustrate the history of the English 
 language, these poems deservedly play an important part; 
 but, from a literary standpoint, they are of quite minor impor- 
 tance, except, as we have said, for reasons of metre. 
 
 Middle English m-ose is of even less consequence ; for a long 
 time to come the best prose was to be written in Latin. The 
 vernacular prose of the period is wholly devoted to religious 
 purposes, to prose homilies and saints' lives. The only work 
 which rises above mediocrity is the Ancren Eiwle (circa 1200), 
 written to instruct nuns in their duties. It offers a lively, 
 and at times unintentionally amusing, account of monastic 
 life, and is informed with a large-hearted charity, as engaging 
 as it is rare in mediaeval writings. The Ayenbite of Inwit, 
 or Eemorse of Conscience (circa 1340) is a tedious work of 
 edification, badly translated from the French. More note- 
 worthy are the prose writings of Richard Rolle of Hampole, 
 which include a commentary on the Psalms, and the finely 
 mystical Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat. 
 
16 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Chronicles All the historical, or quasi-historical, information contained 
 in Latin and French chronicles was very soon made accessible 
 to English readers in certain verse narratives. The first of 
 these is the Brut (circa 1205) of Layamon, a priest of Ernley, 
 on the banks of the Severn. He tells us how ' it came to him 
 in mind, to tell the noble deeds of England ', and how ' he 
 journeyed wide over the land and procured the noble books 
 which he took as pattern '. The chief of these books was that 
 ' which a French clerk made, who was named Wace ; he 
 well could write and he gave it to the noble Eleanor, high King 
 Henry's queen '. The Brut, which runs to more than thirty - 
 two thousand lines, is a free rendering of Wace's verse transla- 
 tion of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia. Layamon does not 
 follow his original slavishly, but makes several important 
 additions, especially to the account of the coming and passing 
 of Arthur, and to the story of the Round Table. The sources 
 of this additional matter have not yet been identified, but are 
 probably to be found in Welsh oral tradition. Interesting as 
 the poem is, as the first great monument of the English 
 language after the Conquest, and as being the first account 
 in English of Arthur, it has little poetic merit. It is written 
 for the most part in the old alliterative verse, deviating here 
 and there into the new rhyming metres. From a prosodic 
 point of view it has thus the same interest for us as has the 
 Bestiary. 
 
 About a century after the Brut appeared another verse 
 chronicle, that of Robert of Gloucester (circa 1300), which 
 also begins with the Trojan landing and ends with the year 
 1271. Robert's sources are the Latin chronicles of his day. 
 His enthusiastic praise of England ' England is a very good 
 land, I ween of all lands the best ' has won for the book more 
 respect than can be justified by its poetic quality. A verse 
 chronicle (circa 1340) has also been left by Robert Mannynge, 
 author of Handlynge Synne. 
 
 Romances Of the books in Middle English religious and historical, or 
 General quasi-historical which we have been reviewing, none are 
 Character- great in themselves, or give any promise of great things to 
 istics. come. Their subject-matter tells against them, and even when 
 that is right, as in Layamon's Brut, the workmanship is lacking. 
 The interest of these poems is, as we have said, largely metrical ; 
 they exhibit the gradual establishment of a new prosody which 
 only waited for a man of genius to be turned to good account. 
 That man appeared in Chaucer. The case is different with 
 the romances. For even if the best of the English romances 
 fall far short of the superlatively excellent, and if the worst 
 of them |ire very bad indeed, still the themes, however crudely 
 handled, have their attraction, for they have had the good 
 fortune to beget much great work of a later day. Were it 
 only on the question of ' origins ' not always an enthralling 
 question but here more enthralling than usual the early 
 English romances would demand respect. Here most surely 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 17 
 
 we have the beginnings of the modern novel : here the theme 
 of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, of the epic which the youthful 
 Milton planned, and Dryden had a mind to write : here, too, 
 we have the inspiration of many a poem, of many an immortal 
 passage in English literature, such as a very famous one of 
 Burke's in his Reflections on the French Revolution, or as the 
 great simile in Paradise Lost : 
 
 What resounds 
 
 In Fable or Romance of Uther's son 
 
 Begirt with British and Armoric Knights : 
 
 And all who since, baptized or infidel, 
 
 Jousted at Aspramont or Montalban, 
 
 Damasco or Marocco or Trebisond, 
 
 Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore 
 
 When Charlemain with all his peerage fell 
 
 By Fontarabbia. 
 
 We have already discovered, when discussing Beowulf, the 
 nature of the older poetry of the Teutonic peoples, a poetry 
 which we designate heroic or epic, growing out of national 
 happenings, and possessing or suggesting a solid background 
 of historic fact. By the eleventh century this poetry had done 
 its work, its day was past, and a new order of society, with 
 different ideals and aspirations, demanded a different form of 
 expression. The heroic age gave place to the age of chivalry, 
 and heroic poetry was displaced by romance. The literature 
 which now made an appeal is a literature in which love and 
 adventure and chivalry are the ruling motives. 
 
 It is significant of the change which marks the passage 
 from heroic poetry to romance that women play a conspicuous 
 part in much of the new literature. In heroic poetry the hero 
 fights for some solid advantage, for plunder, or in defence of 
 his country, or for territory : the knight of romance fights 
 under the banner of his lady-love and seeks adventures merely 
 * in hope to stonden in his lady grace '. The love motive plays 
 little part in heroic poetry : it is the leading motive in romance. 1 
 
 In this new romantic poetry France led the way. Writing Romances 
 under the general influence of the spirit of the age, the age French 
 of chivalry and the crusades, and under the special influence Influence, 
 of the love-poets of Provence (the troubadours), French poets 
 sought far and wide for stories which might be made to mirror 
 the life of their time and embody its ideals. Charlemagne and 
 his paladins, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, 
 Alexander the Great, the Trojan War, tales from Celtic folk- 
 lore, from Greek romance, the marvels of the East, stories from 
 English tradition made known through the agency of the 
 Normans these were some of the themes of the romances. 
 Everything is interpreted in the light of mediaeval ideas. If 
 it is a tale of Troy, we get knights and castles and tournaments 
 and love-lore. Chaucer's Knight's Tale is a story of Thebes 
 but the trappings of the story are entirely romantic, or, if 
 1 See W. P. Ker, Epic and Romance. 
 
18 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 classical in origin, are mediaevalized in the most fantastic 
 manner. * Mail-clad knights, " cote armour " by which their 
 rank is known to " heraudes ", lists and tourneys and chapels, 
 " haukes sitting on the perche above and houndes ligging on 
 the floor below ", these things blend into a picture strangely 
 different from that presented in the clear, sunlit pages of Homer. 
 But more striking still is the difference in spirit due to the 
 mediaeval cult of chivalry and love. Pity and love and 
 generosity in war govern the action in the story from beginning 
 to end in a manner which Homer could not haveTinderstood.' 1 
 Romances The romances grouped round the name of Charlemagne 
 Charle- the chansons de geste, as they are called in France are epic in 
 magne origin, and represent the heroic poetry of the French nation, 
 and However much historical facts may be confused in them, they 
 
 Arthur. have a basis in history, and retain to the end some of the 
 qualities of heroic poetry. In them the crusading zeal of the 
 day found its expression. As time went on they came more and 
 more under the influence of the more popular romances, and 
 some of the later examples are hardly to be distinguished from 
 pure romance. Of more widespread appeal were the Arthurian 
 stories in which writers were in no way restricted by a respect 
 for history, and were at liberty to invent what they pleased. 
 Arthur was, indeed, a historical person, a British warrior who 
 in the fifth century successfully fought against the Saxon 
 invaders of his country. He became a national hero, and, as in 
 the case of other national heroes, there gathered round his name 
 a mass of legend, much of it transferred from other heroes 
 and even deities, to swell his fame. By the twelfth century 
 he had become a half-mythical, half-historical figure, when 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth took up some of these floating legends, 
 and, inventing where legend failed, fashioned for him a career 
 that might please Norman readers. He pictured Arthur as 
 a gallant warrior, the monarch of a splendid court, the beau 
 ideal of chivalry. The process begun by Geoffrey was 
 carried further by French poets of the same century. In 
 their hands Arthur becomes the King of some vague undefined 
 land, surrounded by a band of knights whose business it is to 
 uphold the chivalrous code. Many legends, drawn from Celtic 
 folk-lore, were worked into the Arthurian story, and so 
 Launcelot, Tristram, and others became members of the 
 Round Table. More and more the legends become the vehicles 
 'of chivalrous ideas and ideals. To Chrestien de Troyes, 
 a French poet living in the twelfth century at the court of 
 Champagne, we owe more than to any one else the refined 
 and chivalrous tone of the Arthurian romances. ' By him they 
 were more than ever impregnated with the Proven9al ideas 
 that dominated the society of the time. The old stories that 
 he found ready at hand Chrestien used as vehicles of tender 
 sentiment and beautiful description. He pictured in them the 
 brilliant life at the court of Champagne. ... He lingers gladly 
 1 Dixon and Grierson, Tlie English Parnassus, pp. 710-11. 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 19 
 
 over banquets and tournaments, and describes with fond care 
 the costumes of ladies and the armour of knights ; but above 
 all he loves to analyse the emotions of his characters when in 
 perplexing positions, and to study their shifting states of 
 mind.' 1 Chrestien's romances are the sentimental novels of 
 his time, written for women, and much given to the analysis 
 of love. The Grail legend was also added to the Arthurian 
 legend in the twelfth century. It is probably of Celtic origin, 
 the Grail being originally a magic talisman. It was identified 
 by some one bent on turning the romance to purposes of 
 edification by Eobert de Boron or Walter Map with the 
 cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood as it 
 flowed from Christ's wounds on the Cross. He who would 
 receive a sight of the Grail must be without fear and without 
 reproach. The quest of the Grail became the supreme quest, 
 a quest spiritual not material, a symbol of man's ceaseless 
 striving after perfection. Thus were the ideals of Christian 
 asceticism imported into the legend. * What the Pilgrim's 
 Progress centuries after did for Protestantism ', it has been 
 well said, ' the Holy Grail did for mediaeval Catholicism. 
 It put religion into a story of aspiration, struggle, and attain- 
 ment.' 
 
 Before discussing the romances in detail, we may draw Middle 
 attention to an important matter of prosody, which concerns English 
 not only them but the remaining English poetry of their period. Prosody. 
 The steps by which rhyme and the new metre established them- 
 selves in English and ousted the Old English alliterative 
 verse, have been outlined earlier in this volume. It has been 
 shown that in the twelfth-century Bestiary the two forces are 
 struggling for mastery, and that by the end of that century 
 the new one had prevailed. Its triumph remained complete 
 for over a hundred years, but it becomes pertinent to our 
 present inquiry to discuss here, by way of anticipation, an 
 attempt which was made about the middle of the fourteenth 
 century, chiefly in the north-west of England and in Scotland, 
 to revive the Old-English principle of alliteration. The 
 metrical forms resulting from this effort were several : the 
 chief of them will be illustrated throughout the remainder 
 of this chapter. In some cases a long rhymeless line was 
 used, modelled on the Anglo-Saxon alliterative line with 
 four stresses and a strong central pause ; but in this case there 
 is a marked difference between the Old English rhythm and 
 the Middle English, which seems to have been strongly 
 affected by the new metrical influences. In other cases the 
 succession of rhymeless alliterative lines is broken at intervals 
 by the occurrence of rhyming tags or * wheels ' , of a kind to 
 be illustrated later ; or alliteration is combined with rhyme 
 and stanza-form, generally with the ' wheel ' added. All of 
 these varieties, together with the metrical, are employed in 
 
 1 W. H. Schofield, English Literature from the Conquest to Chaucer, 
 p. 176. 
 
20 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the romances presently to be noticed. It should be carefully 
 remarked that the practice of alliteration itself is a revival 
 rather than a survival 1 ; that, though in the present scheme 
 of treatment the alliterative and the metrical romances are 
 discussed together, the former are all later than the earliest 
 of the latter ; and that alliteration, in the sense just defined, 
 fought a losing fight, surviving longer in Scotland than in 
 England, but giving way even there before the beginning 
 of the sixteenth century to the more potent forces of rhyme 
 and the metre that bore it company. 
 
 Romances The oldest extant romance written in our language. The 
 dealing Oeste of King Horn (circa 1250), has an English theme and 
 with Eng- setting though it is based on an Anglo-French chanson de geste. 
 l* sn Its story has its analogues in many other romances : it is 
 
 Themes, that of a hero driven forth from his lawful country and under- 
 going adventures of love and war in a strange land till his 
 valour wins him a bride and the lordship of his kingdom. 
 The tale, which was doubtless Norse in origin, has its scene 
 in north-western England and in Ireland. Told in some 
 1,500 three-stress lines, rhymed in couplets, it contains spirited 
 passages notably that in which Horn, disguised as a palmer, 
 gains access to Rimenhild's wedding feast, and rescues her 
 from her unwelcome bridegroom. Another very famous 
 romance with an English theme is Havelock the Dane, which 
 is written in rhyming couplets, and probably dates from the 
 beginning of the fourteenth century. Though it is based upon 
 two Norman-French poems, these had originally been worked 
 up from an Anglo-Saxon source. Havelock has been identified 
 with the historical Anlaf Cuaran, the adversary of Athelstan 
 in Northumbria, but the incidents related in the poem are 
 mainly mythical. There are vigour and charm in the passages 
 which tell how Havelock was saved by the good fisherman, 
 Grim, from his evil guardian Godard, and how he did menial 
 work in England till he won for wife the Princess Goldborough, 
 and gained the lordship of two kingdoms. Throughout the 
 poem there are such snatches of poetry as that describing 
 the death of good King Birkabeyn : 
 
 He that wille none forbear 
 Rich ne povre, king no kayzere, 
 Death, took him when he best wilde 
 Liven. 
 
 Two English romances, Beves of Hampton (circa 1300) and 
 Guy of Warwick (circa 1330), had enormous vogue in their 
 own day and for centuries afterwards. The theme of Beves 
 is the old one of exile, strange adventure, and return. Beves 
 
 1 Cf . Professor Saintsbury : ' nobody has yet produced an English poem 
 of the slightest importance in alliterative measure dating even probably 
 between 1210 and 1340.' His History of English Prosody, vol. i, 
 pp. 89-111, contains an admirably clear and complete account of the 
 metres used in the English romances. 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 21 
 
 has incurred the wrath of his mother, who had previously 
 procured his father's murder at the hands of her paramour, 
 the Emperor of Almaine. Like Havelpck, he is saved by the 
 man who has been ordered to kill him, and, like Havelock 
 too, he journeys abroad and gains a princess for his bride. 
 But Beves has far wilder and more miraculous adventures 
 than the Danish hero, killing among other beings a boar, 
 a dragon, and two lions, besides innumerable Saracens. He 
 subdues the giant Ascopart, who subsequently turns traitor 
 to him ; and he marries King Ermin's daughter, the charming 
 Josiane : 
 
 So fair she was and bright of mod 
 As snow upon the rede blod. 
 
 The romance contains many quaint strokes : thus Beves 
 regards it as a reflection on his manhood that Josiane should 
 hold back one of the lions while he is killing the other. In 
 another passage, mistaking her motive, he expresses a wish 
 that she were as loyal as his good horse Arundel, which, with 
 his sword Morglay, helps him mightily in all his perils. The 
 chief incident of Guy of Warwick is his combat with the giant 
 Colbrand, whom he slays, thus breaking the power of the 
 Danes ; but before this event, which raised him to the position 
 of a national hero, Guy had undertaken many perilous adven- 
 tures in Europe, at the hest of his imperious mistress, Felice. 
 His romance is not nearly as interesting or spirited as that of 
 Beves, but its strong nationalism and the abundance of its 
 martial episodes gave it a great vogue in England. The Tale 
 of Gamelyn (circa 1350) is an admirable romance composed 
 in the variety of common metre associated with Robert of 
 Gloucester. It describes the adventures of a younger brother 
 driven to the woodland by the cruelty of an elder, and winning 
 success in the end through his own stout heart and strong 
 hand. The theory which attributes this poem to Chaucer is 
 discussed in a later chapter. Eehandled in Lodge's Rosalynd, 
 Gamelyn helps to make the plot of As You Like It. John the 
 Reeve represents a theme dear to the popular heart, and 
 familiar in many later tales and ballads, the adventure of an 
 English king with a man of the people, who entertains him 
 unawares. 
 
 But the English romances which are at once finest in point Arthurian 
 of poetry, and most imbued with the national spirit, are not Romances 
 the Anglo-Saxon, but those which cast back to the older 
 ' matter of Britain '. Their origin and general character have 
 already been discussed. Some of them are heroic and deal 
 chiefly with fighting, keeping love in the background : others 
 are romantic, and have love for their prevailing theme. The 
 contrast may be emphasized by a comparison of two romances, 
 both of which describe Arthur's death, and are entitled Morte 
 Arthure. The first is written in the long rhymeless alliterative 
 lin^e of four accents, and is chiefly concerned with the victorious 
 
22 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 battles fought by Arthur immediately before his death, 
 against the Emperor of Rome, the Duke of Lorraine, and other 
 foemen. The last fight against Modred, and the passing of 
 the King are also described, but in language which seems pale 
 beside Malory's splendid narrative of the same great happen- 
 ings. Other incidents of the poem, however, are admirably 
 told notably Arthur's reception of the Roman envoys at 
 Carlyon-on-Usk, Gawain's combat with Sir Priamus, and the 
 refusal of Sir Idras to leave Arthur in the mellay when he is 
 ordered to save his own father. There are some fine psycho- 
 logical strokes at the end notably those which express the 
 remorse of Modred for the killing of Gawain, and the sorrow 
 of Arthur over his dead knights. But the romance of love is 
 almost wholly lacking, and there is little subtlety in the 
 drawing of Guenever, who takes the veil at the end, not in 
 remorse or for love of Christ, but ' alle for falsede and frawde, 
 and fear of her loverde '- 1 There is no lack of love, however, 
 in the earlier Morte Arthure, a rhyming poem in eight-lined 
 stanzas. Here Launcelot plays a leading part, and appears 
 both as the beloved of Elaine and the lover of the queen, 
 whose honour and life he saves in battle. He and she, however, 
 are betrayed by Sir Agravaine, whom Launcelot kills, thus 
 incurring the fierce wrath of his victim's brother, Gawain. 
 The description of Arthur's last fight and passing is at once 
 fuller and finer than that given in the alliterative romance, 
 and contains many episodes familiar to readers of Malory 
 and Tennyson. 2 
 
 In view of the subsequent fame of Launcelot in England, 
 and of his popularity in contemporary French poetry, it is 
 
 1 Arthur's ambiguous last message to her is worth noting : ' aife 
 Way nor hafe wele wroghte, wele hir betydde.' 
 
 2 e.g. the following one : 
 
 The knight was bothe hende and free, 
 
 To save that sword he was full glad, 
 And thought, whether I better be 
 
 If never man it after had : 
 An I it caste into the see, 
 
 Of mold was never man so mad. 
 The sword he hid under a tree 
 
 And said, ' Sir, I did as ye me bad,' 
 
 ' What saw thou there ? ' then said the king, 
 
 ' Tell me now, if thou me can : ' 
 'Certes, sir,' he said, 'nothing 
 
 But waters deep and waves wan.' 
 'Ah, now thou haste broke my bidding, 
 
 Why hast thou do so, thou false man ? 
 Another bode thou must me bring.' 
 
 Then carefully the knight forth ran 
 
 And thought the sword yet he would hide, 
 And cast the scabbard in the flood. 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 23 
 
 remarkable that he figures but seldom as the leading figure 
 in an English romance. The Scottish Lancelot of the Laik, 
 of which he is the hero, is late and inferior work : in England 
 his fame is eclipsed by that of Gawain, who appears in numerous 
 romances, and always as a brave, honourable, and courteous 
 knight, free of the sinister characteristics which have been 
 assigned to him by later poets. He is the hero of what is 
 
 fenerally admitted to be the finest romance in the language, 
 ir Gawain and the Green Knight, a poem composed in batches 
 of alliterative four-accent lines, having anapaestic rhythm, 
 and separated by rhyming and alliterative tags of the ' bob 
 and wheel ' type. It describes the marvellous adventures 
 of Gawain with a huge knight, clad all in green, who enters 
 Arthur's hall at Camelot, and suffers himself to be beheaded 
 by our hero on the understanding that he shall be allowed 
 to return the blow in a year's time. He rides off with his 
 head in his hand, and in due course Gawain seeks him out, 
 achieving many adventures by the way. Lighting on the castle 
 of a hospitable knight, he becomes his guest, and is submitted 
 by the knight's wife to a trial of chastity. From this he 
 emerges almost wholly victorious, receiving from her only 
 a kiss and a fair girdle. When his ordeal arrives he finds that 
 his host and the green knight are one, and he is let off lightly, 
 and even given honour, for his honourable conduct. Apart 
 from its high spirit of chivalry and courage, the romance is 
 precious for its poetry and colour, its vivid descriptions of 
 feasting, fighting and hunting, and its keen sense of natural 
 beauty. 1 
 
 1 Cf. the following stanza, which will serve to illustrate the metre of 
 the poem, and the kind of metre which might be devised by the romancers 
 in general : 
 
 After the sesoun of somer with the soft windes, 
 When zephyrus sifles himself on sedes and erbes, 
 Wela-wynne is the wort that waxes ther-oute 
 When the donkande dew dropes of the leves, 
 To bide a blisful blush of the bright sunne, 
 But then hies harvest, and hardens him sone 
 Warnes him for the winter to wax full ripe ; 
 He drives with droght the dust for to rise, 
 Fro the face of the folde to flie full high, 
 Wrath wind of the welkin wresteles with the sunne, 
 The leaves lancen fro the linde, and lighten on the grounde, 
 And all grays the grass, that grene was ere : 
 Then all ripes and rotes that rose upon first, 
 And thus runs the year in yesterdays mony, 
 And Winter winds again, as the world askes 
 No sage, 
 
 Til Michelmes mone 
 
 Was cumen with Winter wage, 
 
 Then thenkkes Gawain full sone 
 
 Of his anious voyage. 
 
24 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Gawain figures again in the Awyntyrs (Adventures) of Arthur 
 (circa 1350), an admirable northern romance, employing both 
 rhyme and alliteration. His combat with Galleroun, Prince 
 of Galloway, is the chief matter of the poem ; but perhaps 
 its finest passage is the early one which describes the dream of 
 Guenever, and begins thus : 
 
 All but Sir Gawain, graythest of alle, 
 
 He leves with Dame Gaynour in those groves greene, 
 
 Under a laurel she lay, that lady so smalle, 
 
 Of box and of barborane, biggit full bene. 
 
 Chief among the remaining romances dealing with Gawain 
 are Golagros and Gawain, The Wedding of Gawain, The Jest of 
 Sir Gawain, and The Avowing of King Arthur, Sir Gawain, 
 Sir Kay, and Sir Baldwin of Britain. Gawain's son, Guinglain, 
 is the hero of an interesting romance in stanzas Libeaus 
 Desconus (Le Beau De'connu : The Fair Unknown}. Guinglain, 
 after many magical adventures, finally rescues with a kiss 
 a lady condemned by wizardry to take the form of a serpent. 
 In Twain and Gawain, a fine romance in couplets adapted 
 from the Chevalier au Lion of Chrestien de Troyes, Gawain 
 plays only a minor part. The poem deals chiefly with the 
 adventures of Twain, who, after manifold perils, weds the 
 fair lady Laudine, and becomes the defender of the fountain 
 perilous of Broceliande. 
 
 It is curious that the tale of Tristram and Iseult, which has 
 played so great a part in the later story of the world, should 
 be but poorly represented among the early English romances. 
 The sole considerable version in which it is preserved is the 
 northern though probably not Scottish poem, Sir Tristrem, 
 which was in all likelihood composed near the end of the thir- 
 teenth century. Its metre is a complicated eleven-line rhyming 
 stanza, with the ninth line foreshortened. In the opening lines 
 the author says that he had the tale from Thomas of Ercil- 
 doune, whose misty and probably legendary personality is 
 discussed elsewhere in this volume. Probably this ascription 
 had a twofold reason. There already existed in England an 
 Anglo-French romance on the subject of Tristram, written 
 by one Thomas ; and the later poem would certainly gain in 
 popularity if it were attributed to a well-known author. The 
 poem itself is inferior, and the relation of its narrative to the 
 world-famous story need not concern us here ; but it is a note- 
 worthy fact that the Tristram legend was extant in Britain 
 before the Conquest, and that in Britain, too, were composed 
 the two French versions which preserved it, and enabled it to 
 become one of the chief glories of European literature. 1 
 Not till the coming of Malory is it greatly handled in 
 English. 
 
 Malory, too, was the first English author to tell greatly the 
 
 1 Cf. Schofield, English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer, 
 pp. 201-14. 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 25 
 
 legend of the Holy Grail, though this, like the Tristram legend, 
 almost certainly had its origin in Britain, and had been welded 
 together there at a very early date. Before Malory's day 
 it had been developed in Britain in the Anglo-French of 
 Walter de Map and Robert de Boron, and on the Continent 
 it had been taken up by Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von 
 Eschenbach, and had inspired a vast literature. With the 
 details of this we are not here concerned ; but we are con- 
 cerned with two figures closely connected with the Grail 
 legend, Percival and Merlin, both of whom become the heroes 
 of English romances. Though Percival had been ' the first 
 achiever of the Grail ' in the early French and German versions 
 of the legend, no mention of it occurs in Sir Perceval of Galles, 
 a late fourteenth-century poem written in lengthy stanzas with 
 tail-rhyme. Here Percival slays a Red Knight who has 
 murdered his father, and after many perils and exploits he 
 wins the fair Luf amour of Maiden -land for his bride. Arthur 
 and Merlin, a romance of great merit, extending to over 10,000 
 lines, and written in couplets, probably belongs to the very 
 end of the thirteenth century, or the beginning of the four- 
 teenth. It contains much description of Arthur's court and 
 battles : the most interesting episodes relating to Merlin are 
 those telling of his wondrous birth, and his enchantment by 
 the fair Ninian. Like Libeaus Desconus and many other of 
 the Arthurian romances, Arthur and Merlin is particularly 
 rich in the Celtic element of mystery. In the fifteenth century 
 the tales of Merlin and the Grail were retold in two couplet 
 poems of great length and dullness by a skinner named Henry 
 Lonelich. 
 
 Somewhat apart, but still belonging to the ' matter of 
 Britain ', come a group of Breton lays translated into English 
 from French originals. The best of these have remarkable 
 charm and grace. Two of them, Lamwell and Le Freine, are 
 adapted from extant French poems of Marie de France, whose 
 rhyming octosyllables they retain. Lamwell is a tale of glamour 
 describing the chequered loves of a mortal and a fay. Toward 
 the middle of the fifteenth century it was exquisitely rehandled 
 in stanzas by Thomas Chestre under the title of Sir Launfal. 
 The theme of faerie recurs with a different development in 
 Sir Degare and Sir Gowghter, two admirable romances of the 
 early fourteenth century. Le Freine and Emare both tell, 
 though after widely different fashions, the tale of a woman 
 wronged and outcast, yet in the end restored to love and 
 happiness. In The Earl of Toulouse, a romance in lengthy 
 rhymed stanzas, a queen prevails over her traducers, and, 
 after a dreadful ordeal, wins her lover. Also of Breton origin 
 is Sir Orfeo or in its Scottish form Orfeo and Eeurodis one 
 of the most beautiful of all the romances. Orpheus here 
 becomes a king of the Celtic Wonderland, and harps his wife 
 away from the clutch of a fairy king, without losing her at 
 the end. The tale is told with the utmost delicacy and grace, 
 
26 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and contains some delightful descriptions of Nature 1 and 
 fairyland. 
 
 Charle- The English Charlemagne romances are in most cases adapted 
 
 magne from the French chansons de geste, and thus deal chiefly with 
 Romances fighting. They are few and inferior : most of them may be 
 assigned to the very end of the fourteenth century, and are 
 written in rhyming stanzas of various length. The main 
 incident of Sir Ferumbras is Oliver's combat with a heathen 
 giant whom he eventually overcomes and has baptized. 
 Roland and Vernagu and Roland and Otuel both celebrate the 
 prowess of Oliver's fellow-paladin against Saracen foemen. 
 Other aspects of the Charlemagne story are dealt with in 
 The Siege of Milan and The Soudone of Babylon. The allitera- 
 tive Rauf Coilyear belongs to the same class as John the Reeve, 
 and describes with much spirit the rough and ready entertain- 
 ment given by the ' collier ' to the disguised Charlemagne. 
 In one passage Ralph reproves the king for lack of courtesy, 
 and hits him ' under the eir with the richt hand '. The latter 
 part of the poem describes with great gusto Ralph's return 
 visit to the king. The humour and popular sympathies of 
 Rauf Coilyear show that it was intended for the bourgeoisie, 
 and it thus falls into quite a different class from the graver 
 and more aristocratic chansons de geste. 
 
 Romances The general characteristics of ' the Matter of Greece and 
 of An- Rome ' have been discussed earlier in this chapter. The 
 tiquity. legend of Troy had been given a new and elaborate develop- 
 ment through the Middle Ages in the writings of the mythical 
 Dictys Cretensis and Dares Phrygius, and the historical 
 Benoit de Sainte-More and Guido delle Colonne. Its interest 
 for Englishmen lay largely in the conviction which they had 
 derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth and others, that their 
 race had sprung from the loins of Brutus, the supposed descen- 
 dant of Aeneas. The * tale of Troy divine ' therefore became 
 in some sense a British national theme. It is doubtless to the 
 belief just cited that we owe the existence of the first English 
 version of the Troy story, the Geste Hystoriale of the Destruction 
 of Troy. This is an alliterative poem of 14,000 lines, translated, 
 possibly before the end of the fourteenth century, from the 
 Historia Destructionis Troiae of Guido delle Colonne.. Despite 
 its length and discursiveness, much of it may be read with 
 pleasure, and it contains some admirable descriptions of 
 warfare, adventure, and love. The matter of Troy received 
 a new and notable development in the hands of Chaucer, 
 Lydgate, and Caxton, in connexion with whom it will again be 
 
 1 Of. 
 
 Bifel so in the comesing of May, 
 When merry and hot is the day, 
 And away beth winter showers, 
 And every field is full of flowers, 
 And blossom breme on every bough 
 Over all waxeth merry enow. 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 27 
 
 discussed. The matter of Thebes is later to become the subject 
 of Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Lydgate's Story of Thebes. 
 
 The life of Alexander, with its mediaeval accretions of 
 legend, is the subject of a particularly fine romance, King 
 Alisaunder, which extends to nearly 10,000 lines in couplets, 
 and was probably completed before the end of the thirteenth 
 century. It is based on the huge French Eoman d'Alixandre, 
 transmitted through the Norman-French version of Eustace 
 of Kent. Naturally its chief themes are fighting and conquest, 
 but it deals largely in marvels, and has great vigour and rich- 
 ness of colour. Some have attributed it to the author of Arthur 
 and Merlin. The Alexander story or legend was rehandled in 
 certain alliterative poems, or fragments of poems, composed 
 during the middle of the fourteenth century, and was developed 
 at a length of 14,000 lines in the Scottish Buik of Alexander the 
 Great, which may conceivably have been the work of John 
 Barb our. 
 
 Many Eastern tales or lays were floating through Europe at 
 this period, and certain of them are preserved in English story 
 or romance. Of this type is Chaucer's Squire's Tale : 
 
 The story of Cambuscan bold, 
 Of Camball and of Algarsife, 
 And who had Canace to wife. 
 
 To Byzantine story belongs Floris and Blancheflur, one of the 
 earliest of all the English romances, which describes in couplets 
 the fortunes of a pair who had been lovers even as children, 
 but had been cruelly separated. They are united, after many 
 adventures, in Babylon, where the girl has become the slave 
 , of an autocratic, but in the end beneficent, admiral. The 
 following lines, in which the admiral unites the lovers, illustrate 
 the style and metre of the poem : 
 
 The Admiral tho, wel him betide, 
 
 That child he sette by his side, 
 
 And hath forgive his wrathe bo, 
 
 Floris and Blancheflur also, 
 
 And said with him hi scholde be 
 
 The beste of alle his meinie. 
 
 And Floris he made stand upright, 
 
 And there he dubbed him to knight. 
 
 Now bothe togadere thes childre for blisse 
 
 Falle to his fet, hem to kisse. 
 
 Many of the romances deal with themes lying outside the four Miscel- 
 classic divisions just cited. Eichard Cceur de Lion, an excellent laneous 
 English couplet-poem of the late thirteenth century, was doubt- Romances 
 less written in its original Anglo -French in order to satisfy the 
 patriotic instincts of Englishmen. Its account of Richard's 
 miraculous birth is interesting, as showing how soon after the 
 death of an historical character legend could be woven round 
 his life. The particularly charming French romance, Partheno- 
 9 peus de Blois, appears in English in a fragmentary translation 
 
28 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of considerable merit. In Ypomedon, Amis and Amiloun, 
 and Generides, a romance of late origin, fighting and adventure 
 are fairly equally blended with love : the second poem is 
 exquisite. William of Palerne, also a translation, is the tale 
 of a good were-wolf, who, like Mowgli's foster-brothers, brings 
 a mortal safe through many perils. The Squire of Low Degree, 
 a late metrical romance apparently of English origin, tells 
 delightfully the tale of a princess who is faithful throughout 
 great trials to her brave and chivalrous, but less than royal, 
 suitor. The Pistyl of Susan, a rhymed alliterative romance, 
 written in eight-line stanzas 1 with added * bob and wheel ', 
 retells with quaint charm and colour the story of Susanna 
 and the elders. 
 
 Tales in During the Middle Ages there were in circulation throughout 
 Verse. Europe a number of tales which cannot be properly classified 
 as romances, though some of them approach the romance in 
 form and theme. Many of them had a moral or religious 
 aim : others, especially those of the fabliau type, were frankly 
 and sometimes grossly entertaining. In a work of larger 
 scope the English tales of both these kinds would demand 
 fuller notice : here we can do little more than call attention 
 to their existence. Several of them are preserved in the 
 Canterbury Tales. The stories of the Pardoner, the Merchant, 
 and the Manciple are obviously Eastern in origin, 2 and so are 
 many non-Chaucerian stories notably the admirable metrical 
 tale of Dame Siriz, which combines a domestic situation with 
 the Oriental belief in the transmigration of souls. Tales of 
 beasts, as we have already seen, had been early told in the 
 thirteenth-century Bestiary, and are to be told again in the 
 verse of Holland and Henryson. The French Boman de 
 Eenart supplies the material of the early English metrical 
 poem, The Vox and the Wolf, and of Chaucer's Nun's Priest's 
 tale. Sir Amadace and Sir Cleges have been sometimes 
 classified as romances, possibly on account of their titles, but 
 
 1 The following passage may be quoted as illustrating the general type 
 of stanza used in many of the alliterative romances : 
 
 Now is Susan in sale, sengeliche arayed, 
 In a silken schert, with schoulders wel schene. 
 Tho rose up with rancour the renkes reneyed, 
 This comelich accused with worses wel kene; 
 Homliche on her heved her hendes they leyed, 
 And heo wepte for wo, no wonder, I wene. 
 We shall presenten this plaint, how thou ever be paied, 
 And sei sadliche the soth, right as we have seen, 
 On sake. 
 
 Thus with cauteles waynt, 
 
 Priestes presented this playnt, 
 
 Yet shall trouthe them ataynt 
 I dar undertake. 
 
 8 Cf. Schoneld, p. 321. 
 
EARLY MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE 29 
 
 might better be described as spirited tales, each with an 
 attached moral. Many of the tales existed in collections. 
 Keference is made elsewhere in these pages to the Oesta 
 Romanorum, but as the more current, and possibly the original, 
 form of this huge work is Latin, it cannot here be discussed in 
 detail. The Seven Sages of Borne, previously current in Latin 
 and French versions, is reproduced in a thirteenth -century 
 English poem of some 4,000 lines. It is a series of stories told 
 in competition by a wicked queen, who, Phaedra-like, wishes 
 to bring her step-son to doom, and by the seven wise men who 
 wish to save him. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 PROSE, 1350-1400 
 Wyclif, Trevisa, Mandeville. 
 
 1 WITH two notable exceptions the prose writings of English- Victory of 
 men during the latter half of the fourteenth century are theVerna- 
 important rather through their bearing on the development cular. 
 of our literature, than for any great force and beauty of their 
 own. During this period English was gradually asserting 
 itself, as the medium of official communication, against Latin, 
 the universal and learned language, and French, the national 
 speech of the Norman conqueror. During the last quarter 
 of the century it had, in large measure, supplanted its rivals 
 in parliament, at the royal court, and in the law courts. The 
 gradual adoption of the vernacular by the learned and popular 
 classes soon spread to the schools, where by 1385 French had 
 been wellnigh superseded as the medium of instruction. 
 
 The change was bound to affect literature speedily, and was Wyclif. 
 accelerated by the strong desire of certain religious reformers 
 that the people should be enabled to read the Scriptures in 
 their own tongue. For a long while partial translations of it 
 had existed in the monasteries for the use of the initiated ; 
 but the first complete Bible written in the English language 
 and intended for the commonalty is that attributed to 
 John Wyclif (1320 ?-1384). There is fair traditional evidence 
 that he had a chief hand in the two versions translated succes- 
 sively from the Vulgate, and known as the ' Wyclifite ' : if 
 he had, it would be quite in keeping with his strong and ever- 
 increasing desire to simplify religion and bring it into touch 
 with popular life. Yet this evidence does not amount to 
 certainty ; and in any case very much of the work must 
 have been carried out by his disciples. On the other hand, 
 it seems beyond doubt that if Wyclif did not actually share 
 in the translation, he inspired it, and thus did a mighty service 
 both to religion and literature. In view of the undeveloped 
 state of the language at this period, the Wyclif Bible obviously 
 1 The prose of Chaucer_is noticed in Chapter V. 
 
30 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 cannot claim the absolute value given to the later Authorized 
 Version by its consummate qualities of spirit and style ; but 
 the second Wyclifite text, which is much more finished and 
 vigorous than the first, is, historically speaking, an achieve- 
 ment of the first importance. 
 
 Many other writings which are beyond all doubt Wyclif's, 
 are in Latin. His English tracts and sermons are of great 
 theological interest, as expressing his denial of transubstantia- 
 tion, his antipathy to Urban VI, and his general views on 
 church abuses and their cure. These writings show a strong 
 sincerity and an eager desire for the people's good ; but their 
 literary interest is chiefly historical, and they have little distinc- 
 tion of style. 
 
 Trevisa. Of much interest, as showing the growing importance of the 
 vernacular, are the English works translated from the Latin 
 by John of Trevisa (t-1413). The first of these is a version 
 of the well-known mediaeval text-book or encyclopaedia, the 
 De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomaeus Anglicus ; but 
 far more important is Trevisa' s rendering of the Latin chronicle 
 history, known as the Polychronicon, of Ranulph Higden. 
 Higden was a Cheshire monk who is said to have died in 1364, 
 and perhaps finished his chronicle some twelve years earlier. 
 After the fashion of such surveys, it reviews the whole history 
 of the world from the Creation downwards. By far its most 
 interesting part is that which describes the social conditions 
 of contemporary England ; and when this was put into racy 
 homely English for the benefit of Englishmen, a work of real 
 note had been accomplished. Trevisa rendered his original 
 freely, inaccurately, and with considerable expansion, and 
 accompanied it with curt, and often curious, notes. His 
 chronicle is interesting linguistically, and through its attempts 
 to enlarge the scope of the English vocabulary ; but it lacks 
 the magical and strongly individual quality of style possessed 
 by the third representative writer of the period, the author, 
 or translator, of the so-called Voyage and Travail of Sir John 
 Mandeville. 
 
 Mande- John Mandeville, knight, is unfortunately as wholly fictitious 
 
 ville's a personage as John Doe. According to the best opinion, he 
 Voyages, is the creation of an imaginative Frenchman, who wrote the 
 description of his ' travels ' at Liege some time before 1371. 
 This writer may have been a certain Jean d'Outremeuse, who 
 was certainly living and writing in that city in that year. 
 In another volume, undoubtedly his own, Outremeuse says that 
 Mandeville, after his travels, settled in Liege under the name 
 of Jehan de Bourgogne, or Jean a la Barbe, and made certain 
 disclosures to him on his death-bed. But Outremeuse's author- 
 ship of the Voyage and Travail is not proved beyond doubt ; 
 all that is certain is that the book was originally written in 
 French, that it was translated into Latin and many European 
 languages, and that it survives in English in three separate 
 versions. Its main fabric is pieced together from various 
 
PROSE, 1350-1400 31 
 
 authentic narratives of travel, including those of Albert of 
 Aix, William of Boldenseele, and Odoric of Pordenone ; but 
 with this true romance the author has interwoven much 
 wondrous romance of legend, and for this he has drawn on 
 all manner of authorities, from the Golden Legend to Pliny 
 and Herodotus. In his deft interweaving of these strands, and 
 the wonderful authenticity with which he invests his wildest 
 marvels, lies much of his book's compelling charm. During the 
 early part of his narrative, in which he describes Turkey, 
 Egypt, and the Holy Land, ' Mandeville ' is comparatively 
 chary of wonders, though even here occur the beautiful tale 
 of how Roses first came, and the more famous, if less exquisite, 
 one of the Watching of the Sparrow Hawk. But when he 
 passes into less known lands, into Java and Thurse and Cathay, 
 caution ceases to oppress him, and he multiplies his miracles 
 at will. He tells us of the well, marvellously curative, ' that 
 hath Odour and Savour of all Spices, and at every Hour of 
 the Day changeth his Odour and his Savour diversely '. He 
 describes ' the Diamonds of Ind, some of the greatness of 
 a Bean, and some as great as an Hazel Nut, that grow together, 
 Male and Female, be nourished with the Dew of Heaven, 
 and engender commonly and bring forth small Children, that 
 multiply and grow all the Year '. He had visited the Isle 
 of Ghana, ' where be Rats as great as Hounds : and men take 
 them with great Mastiffs, for Cats may not take them '. He 
 knew before his time that the earth was round, and told 
 a wondrous tale of a man who ' sailed past Ind and the Isles 
 beyond Ind, where be more than 5000 Isles ', on and on, ' till 
 he came to an Isle where he heard folk speak his own Lan- 
 guage, calling on Oxen at the Plough, such Words as Men 
 speak to Beasts in his own Country : whereof he had great 
 Marvel, for he knew not how it might be '. The man had sailed 
 round the world and had come to his own borders again, yet 
 knew it not, and put back in fear and sadness over his vast 
 course. But Mandeville's story and style reach their greatest 
 moments in the description of the Great Chan of Cathay, and 
 the beauty and wonder and cruelty of his court. Here his 
 fancy takes on a colour, and his prose a richness, of sheer 
 delight ; and here, as throughout the whole narrative, we 
 know our English writer to be no mere translator, but a great 
 creative artist. His prose is simple, yet its cadence never 
 wearies, and its effects are subtle and various. If we consider 
 its period, it is a greater marvel than any of Cathay. 
 
32 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 LYRIC AND MISCELLANEOUS POETRY OF THE 
 MIDDLE ENGLISH PERIOD BEFORE CHAUCER 
 
 TheEarli- As we have already seen, one of the distinctive marks of 
 
 est Eng- Middle English poetry was the triumph of the new metres, 
 
 lish Lyric, and nowhere is that triumph more complete than in the lyrics 
 
 of the period. Yet their interest, unlike that of certain other 
 
 kinds of contemporary poetry, is very far from being merely 
 
 prosodic : it depends largely on their intrinsic beauty and 
 
 charm. It has been claimed that the earliest English song in 
 
 rhyme is the boat song not as it has been sometimes strangely 
 
 called, the ballad of King Canut : 
 
 Merie sungen the muneches binnen Ely 
 Tha Cnut king rew thereby : 
 Roweth, knihtes, ner the land 
 And here we these muneches sang. 
 
 Yet there are obstacles to this claim ; and it should not be 
 forgotten that the fragment occurs for the first time in 
 a chronicle written a century and a half after the incident 
 which it purports to record. More remarkable are the frag- 
 mentary hymns of the mariner turned hermit, St. Godric of 
 Finchale, which exhibit rhyme and the new metre before 1170, 
 the year of his death. Two rhymed fragments of verse, set 
 for singing, survive from the latter half of the thirteenth 
 century ; and to the same period belongs the famous Cuckoo 
 Song * Sumer is icumen in, Ihude sing cuccu ' ' the earliest 
 secular composition in parts which has hitherto been discovered 
 a Canon or Round for six voices '. This, apart from its 
 historic interest, is admirably vigorous, and shows a fresh and 
 most English delight in Nature. 
 
 Songs of To the very end of the thirteenth century belongs a collec- 
 Love and tion of the first importance now known as the Harleian MS. 
 Religion. 2253, consisting of poems said to have been written down at 
 Leominster Abbey, in the south-west of England. This, 
 and a few other collections of the late thirteenth and early 
 fourteenth centuries, supply us with our first notable body 
 of English song. The greater number of the poems, and the 
 earliest, are religious. Though Christian, they carry with them 
 something of the gloom which is part of the older pagan faith, 
 and is inseparable from Anglo-Saxon poetry. Life is a show, 
 at once sorrowful and transitory, and the world is * but 
 a brotil tree ' : 
 
 Now shrinketh rose and lylie flour, 
 
 That whilom bore that suete savour, 
 In somer, that suete tyde : 
 
 Ne is no quene so stark ne stoure, 
 
 Ne no lady so bryht in bower, 
 That deth ne shall by glyde. 
 
POETRY BEFORE CHAUCER 33 
 
 In the beautiful Love Rune of Thomas de Hales, this warning 
 is repeated the warning that sounds again in Villon's most 
 famous ballad and one of Shakespeare's most perfect songs, 
 that ' golden girls and lads all must, like chimney-sweepers, 
 come to dust ' : 
 
 Where is Paris and Heleyne, 
 
 That weren so bright and fair of blee ? 
 Amadas, Tristram and Dideyne, 
 
 Yseude and such as she ? 
 Ector with his sharp nieyne, 
 
 And Caesar rich of worldes fee ? 
 They are y-glidden out of the reyne 
 
 As the shaft is from the clee. 
 
 On the gloom of the present waits the gloom of the hereafter, 
 lit only by the hope of salvation through Christ and his Mother. 
 The lyrics in praise of Mary are among the most beautiful of 
 all, and have something of the lover-like fervour which we 
 meet later in Crashaw. This quality, like that which inspires 
 the poems of earthly love, was doubtless due to the influence 
 of the French trouveres, and it is significant that many poems 
 in the famous Harleian 2253 are in French : yet it has been 
 pointed out that the love poems of the period are by no means 
 slavish renderings of the amour courtois, but that they have 
 a freshness and sweetness which is English, and of the people. 
 The most famous and charming of them is that in praise of 
 Alison 
 
 Betuene March and Averil, 
 
 When spray beginneth to spring, 
 The litel foul hath her will 
 
 In her lud l to sing. 
 I live in love-longing, 
 For seemliest of alle thing, 
 She may 1110 bliss bring. 
 
 I am in her baundoun, 2 
 An hendy hap I have yhent 3 
 I wot from heaven it is me sent, 
 From all women my love is lent * 
 And lit on Alison. 
 
 In certain of the poems love and nature are blended, as 
 when a lover sings : 
 
 Blou, northerne wind, 
 
 Send thou me my sweeting, 
 
 Blou, northerne wind, blou, blou, blou ! 
 
 Another poem puts the romance and joy of a season into a single 
 lilting line : 
 
 Lenten is come with love to town. 
 
 1 Speech. a Power. 3 I have had a stroke of luck. 
 
 4 Turned. 
 
 C 
 
34 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A third utters an old fancy with fresh delight and grace : 
 
 I would I were a thrustle-cock, 
 A bunting l or a laverock, 2 
 
 Sweet bride ! 
 Between her kirtle and her smock 
 
 I would me hide. 3 
 
 Political Besides poems of love and religion, there were also many 
 Songs. political songs of hate or scorn. One of the earliest of these 
 is a poem written after the battle of Lewes (1264) and directed 
 against Richard of Almain, brother of the reigning king : 
 
 Sir Simon de Montfort hath swore by his chin, 
 Hadde he now here the Erl of Warin, 
 Sholde he never come more to his inn 
 With shelde, ne with spere, ne with other gin . 
 
 To helpe of Windesore ! 
 Richard ! thah thou be ever trichard * 
 Trichen shalt thou never more ! 
 
 Songs of this kind are frequent throughout the following 
 hundred years. The most notable writer of them is Laurence 
 Minot. Minot, whose period of activity covers the middle years of the 
 fourteenth century. Minot's poems are chiefly in celebration 
 of the English victories against the Scotch and the French. 
 He taunts the former thus, after Halidon Hill : 
 
 Bot, loved be God, the pride is slaked 
 Of them that war so stout on stede, 
 
 And some of them is leved ah 1 naked 
 Noght fer fro Berwik upon Twede. 
 
 His poem on the siege and taking of Calais begins thus : 
 
 Calays men, now may ye care, 
 
 And mourning mun ye have to mede ; 
 Mirth on mold get ye no mare ; 
 Sir Edward shall ken you your creed. 
 
 Minot's poems are written in many metres, employing both 
 rhyme and alliteration. They vary greatly in quality, but the 
 best of them have vigour and point ; and Minot's scorn for 
 his country's foemen never degenerates into scolding. 
 
 The general effect of Latin and French upon the ne\\ 
 English prosody has been discussed earlier in this volume, and 
 from this point of view, as from others, it is noteworthy that 
 several of the religious songs in the collections we have men- 
 tioned are written in a blend of English with one or other of 
 these languages. Rhyme has now become essential, and alli- 
 teration has ceased to be so. It is still freely used for ornament, 
 but the full revival of it, to which we have made earlier refer - 
 
 1 Blackbird 2 Lark. 
 
 3 The last four specimens are quoted in almost all the works dealing 
 with the lyric of the period, but there are many other poems of hardly 
 less charm. See Early English Lyrics (Chambers and Sidgwick) and 
 Mr. E. K. Chambers's masterly terminal essay. 4 Treacherous. 
 
POETRY BEFORE CHAUCER 35 
 
 ence, is not as yet. Stanzas of varying length and complexity 
 are used : one of the most important of these is the romance 
 sestet, subsequently burlesqued by Chaucer in Sir Thopas. 
 In some cases this is followed by a quatrain : in others the 
 quatrain follows the romance octave. The famous six-line 
 stanza of Burns is found, as so frequently in the Mystery 
 cycles. And if the metres are French, they are already handled 
 with somewhat of that licence which is later to become one 
 of the most precious qualities of English poetry. 
 
 . There fall also for consideration here a remarkable group of 
 poems which, with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are 
 preserved in a single manuscript, and were almost certainly all 
 composed during the latter half of the fourteenth century. 
 The Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience, with Gawain itself, have Cleanness, 
 been attributed to a single author,' and in the case of the first Patience, 
 three this attribution seems reasonable and almost certain. The Pearl. 
 The author's identity, however, remains undiscovered, despite 
 the various attempts which have been made to prove that he 
 is either ' Huchoun of the Awle Eoyale', or Kalph Strode, 
 Fellow of Merton College, Oxford. It is established that in 
 general his language is that of the extreme north-west midland. 1 
 All of the poems, including Gawain, use alliteration ; but 
 Cleanness and Patience are written in rhymeless quatrains of 
 four beats, 2 whereas Pearl uses twelve-lined rhyming stanzas 
 grouped in batches of five, and possessing each a recurrent 
 terminal refrain. Gawain and its metre have been discussed 
 elsewhere. Cleanness retells, with considerable force, certain 
 stories of Scripture embodying the praise of purity. Patience, 
 on the whole a better poem, paraphrases the Book of Jonah, 
 and points a moral inculcating endurance and trust in the 
 Divine Will. There is much spirit in the description of the 
 tempest beneath which ' the windes on the wonne water so 
 wrastel together ' ; and there is a quaint portrait of the 
 ' wylde walterande whal ' which swallows the prophet 
 ' withouten touche of any tothe'. But by far the finest of 
 the three poems is Pearl, in its first intention the lament of 
 a bereaved father for his daughter, whose name, as the symbol 
 of the pearl seems to indicate, may well have been Margaret. 
 While he is searching in vain for his ' precious perle withouten 
 spot ' amid ' bloomes black and blue and red that schines full 
 schir against the sun ', his grief overcomes him and he falls 
 into a swoon. He has a vision of his daughter, who reproves 
 him for his sorrow, since what he lost was * but a rose that 
 flowered and failed as kind (nature) it gave ' a rose which is 
 now become a pearl of price. He tells her that through her 
 death he is become a ' joyless jeweller ', but would be a joyful 
 one could he cross the water that separates her from him. 
 
 1 Charles Osgood, Introduction to his edition of The Pearl (Belles 
 Lettres Series, D. C. Heath & Co., Boston). 
 3 Cf. I. Gollancz, Preface to his edition of Patience (Clarendon Press). 
 
36 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 She comforts him with parables, aiid with the assurance of 
 her bliss. He has a vision of the heavenly city ' of great 
 renown ', glorious with all manner of jewels : and after a vain 
 attempt to join her, he awakes. 
 
 Attempts have been made to show that this poem is a mere 
 allegory embodying no personal grief ; but few who have read 
 it closely and with sympathy will adopt this view. Nor is 
 it very profitable to scan this pearl of poems too closely, as 
 some have scanned it, for flaws of structure and phrasing. 
 After pedantry has wrought its worst upon it it remains a thing 
 of high beauty and spiritual worth ; and the unknown who 
 made it and its fellows is certainly one of the great poets of 
 his age. Our next chapter leads us to a greater still. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 CHAUCER, LANGLAND, GOWER 
 
 The New IN Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 ?-1400), 'the morning star of 
 Prosody, song ', we reach the most consummate expression of mediaeval 
 thought and art in English poetry, together with our first 
 great earnest of the Renaissance. The language in which he 
 wrote the London variety of the east midland dialect 
 had been gradually simplified through more than two cen- 
 turies, and was slowly moving toward its modern form : 
 little by little, the elaborate Old English inflections had been 
 levelled under a few common forms, and were now well on 
 their way to disappearance. A relic of the old speech and 
 syntax survived in the syllabic value given, in most cases, to the 
 final -e ; and this matter becomes very important in relation 
 to Chaucer, since failure to understand its prosodic significance 
 led to the belief, entertained for many generations, that the 
 form of his verse was crude and broken. As we have seen, 
 the old alliterative metre which had been the staple of Anglo- 
 Saxon poetry had been temporarily revived at this period, 
 notably in the later romances. We shall deal later in this 
 chapter with its handling by Langland : Chaucer, however, 
 partly through training and environment, partly from a sure 
 poetic instinct, rejected this form in favour of measures which 
 disregarded alliteration and ensued rhyme and a comparatively 
 strict accentual regularity. He took over certain of the rhym- 
 ing metres which had become acclimatized in England 
 notably the octosyllabic rhyming couplet : his use of certain 
 others was to a large extent affected by contemporary French 
 practice. It has been noticed that, despite his great general 
 debt to Italian writers, he borrows the form of Italian verse 
 only in one brief passage 1 doubtless because the measures 
 which he had independently perfected gave him full satis- 
 faction. 
 
 1 Cf. W. P. Ker, English Mediaeval Literature, p. 227. 
 
CHAUCER 37 
 
 His earlier writings were strongly influenced by the poetry General 
 of mediaeval France : in his intermediate work, produced Character- 
 after his journeys to the south of Europe, Italian influence was istics. 
 strong, and the change is one not only of country, but of period 
 and spirit ; for the Italian writer to whom he owes most, 
 Giovanni Boccaccio, was a pioneer of the Eenaissance and the 
 new humanism. In Chaucer's latest and most famous work, 
 the Canterbury Tales, he writes with greater force and origin- 
 ality than heretofore. For these reasons, some have attempted 
 to divide his work sharply into three periods, French, Italian, 
 and English ; but such a division is misleading, for the French 
 spirit is strong in him from beginning to end, and in his last 
 work French and Italian influences blend. On the other hand 
 it is dangerous to confine the term ' English ' to his later work, 
 or to imply that strong originality is lacking in his earlier; 
 for even in The Book of the Duchess his handling is native and 
 individual, and his Troilus and Criseyde, for all its debt to 
 Boccaccio, is a great original work in its own right. Nor is 
 that explanation of him sufficient which says that * his mind 
 was French, like his name ', and that he was * a direct descen- 
 dant of the French trouveres ' l ; for the ' God's plenty ' which 
 Dryden found in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales is the 
 earliest great harvesting of the English spirit. 
 
 The earlier editions of Chaucer, and notably that of Thomas 
 Thynne (1532), attributed to him several works now unani- 
 mously regarded as non-Chaucerian, and a few others which 
 are rejected by most, though not by all, modern scholars. 
 Modern Chaucerian scholarship dates from the great edition 
 of the Canterbury Tales of Thomas Tyrwhitt (1775) and the 
 determination of the Chaucerian canon has been carried on by a 
 succession of scholars, English and American, of whom the 
 chief are Skeat and Furnivall. For the time being we may 
 confine ourselves to that canon, postponing discussion of the 
 Chaucer apocrypha. 
 
 Much doubt exists as to the dates and order 2 of Chaucer's 
 chief works. It is practically certain, however, that among 
 the very earliest comes his translation of the Eomaunt of the The Eo- 
 Rose. The first part of this very famous work was written by maunt of 
 the French poet, Guillaume de Lorris, probably between the the Row. 
 years 1225 and 1230. The second part, written somewhere 
 between 1268 and 1277, is by Jean de Meung. The two parts 
 differ widely in spirit ; for Guillaume wrote in a vein of idealism 
 and romance, whereas Jean has treated the manifold subjects 
 of his choice, and especially women and contemporary society, 
 realistically and with mordant satire. The Eomaunt, as 
 originally conceived by Guillaume, is an allegory of love : 
 in one sense it is an epitome of preceding French romantic 
 poetry ; and it became a potent influence upon succeeding 
 
 1 Emile Legouis, Chauc.er, p. 57. 
 
 2 For a careful discussion of this matter see The Poetry of Chaucer, 
 by R. K. Root. 
 
38 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Early 
 Minor 
 Poems. 
 
 The Boole 
 of the 
 Duchess. 
 
 poetry, French and English. It is certain that Chaucer 
 translated some part of it 1 ; but opinions have differed as to 
 whether the translation which he made is the one we now 
 possess. Some 2 regard the version as entirely his, others 3 
 deny that he had any part in it : the best opinion would seem to 
 be that its first and last parts are Chaucerian, but that the 
 intermediate part (Fragment B) is by another hand. The 
 whole version covers a third part only of the original work. 
 Like the original, it is written in the octosyllabic couplet, 
 which Chaucer handles even thus early with workmanlike 
 power. In choosing this famous allegory for his subject, he 
 puts himself in touch with the romantic tradition of France, 
 and at the same time gives an earnest of his own later use of 
 allegory. The satirical habit of Jean de Meung evoked the 
 satire latent in his own nature, and Meung is thus in some 
 sense responsible for the ironical attitude constantly evident 
 in Chaucer's later work. 
 
 Within the same early period also fall several of Chaucer's 
 minor poems, in which the French influence still predominates. 
 These include ballades, roundels, and virelays, many of which 
 are now lost. Chaucer's A. B.C. is translated from the French 
 of G-uillaume de Deguileville. The Complaint of Pity 4 is 
 written in the French manner, and may have had a French 
 original : its main importance lies in the probability that it 
 introduced into English for the first time the great seven-lined 
 stanza known as rime royal. Here the stanza is employed 
 lyrically after the prevalent French fashion : later, Chaucer 
 was to make the discovery that it could be used for narrative 
 purposes, and was to put that discovery to consummate use. 
 
 The Boole of the Duchess was probably written toward the 
 end of 1369, shortly after the death of Blanche, Duchess of 
 Lancaster, which it commemorates. Its allegorical setting 
 and its atmosphere, at once courtly and romantic, have obvious 
 French analogues. It is gracefully written, but lacks the gusto 
 and irony which make their appearance in The Parliament 
 of Fowls, and are henceforth seldom far to seek in Chaucer. 
 The Parliament is an allegorical poem in which a ' formel ' 
 or female eagle is wooed and won by a male eagle of royal 
 birth, after she has rejected two lesser suitors. There is almost 
 certainly a reference here to the betrothal of Richard II to 
 
 1 See his reference to such a translation in the Prologue to the Legend 
 of Good Women, pp. 328-31. 
 
 2 e. g. Professor Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer. 
 
 3 e. g. Professor Skeat, Essays on Chaucer (collected by the Chaucer 
 Society). 
 
 4 The following are the chief of Chaucer's remaining shorter poems : 
 TJie Complaint of Mars, A Complaint to his Lady, The Former Age, 
 A Ballad, of Good Counsel, the Envois to Scogan and to Bukton, Lad- 
 of Steadfastness, and the Complaint to Ms Empty Pur fie. For an account 
 of these, and of his translation of Boethius (De Consolatione) and his 
 Treatise on ilw. Astrolabe, see R. K. Root, The Poetry of Chaucer, 
 
CHAUCER 39 
 
 Anne of Bohemia in 1382. The poem contains much that is 
 courtly and charming, but for many its chief appeal lies in 
 the amusing views on love put forward by a company of birds 
 ranging from the materialistic goose to the sentimental 
 turtle-dove. Various literary ' sources ' have been found for 
 this poem, but its finest work is undoubtedly Chaucer's own. 
 Like the fragmentary and interesting romance, Anelida-and 
 Arcite, which perhaps follows it in time, it is written in rime 
 royal. 
 
 In 1373, and again in 1378, Chaucer visited Italy, and 
 his visits quickened, if they did not kindle, the love of Italian 
 literature which so profoundly affected his subsequent work 
 and outlook. The first-born of that love is Troilus and Troilus 
 Criseyde, in which he retells with a new and mightier mastery an d Cris- 
 the romantic story which had been gradually built up through- e ^ t 
 out the Middle Ages, reaching Chaucer through the Filostrato 
 of Giovanni Boccaccio. The three chief characters of the 
 Italian poem, Troilus the Trojan prince and lover, his false 
 love Cressida, and the friendly and unscrupulous go-between 
 Pandarus, become new creations beneath Chaucer's trans- 
 forming hand. The delicate and fickle nature of Criseyde is 
 subtly and surely limned, onward from the hour when Troilus 
 first sees her in the temple, to the last stage after she has 
 departed from Troy with her new love, Diomede. Modern 
 taste may find less interest in the rhapsodies of Troilus, yet 
 he too is greatly drawn. Pandarus, who in Boccaccio is 
 a youthful and dissolute gallant, has in Chaucer become an 
 elderly patron of sin, drawn with the finest comic insight. 
 Chaucer has now reached his full strength in the use of rime 
 royal, and Troilus, apart from its greatness as a narrative, 
 contains some of his finest poetry. He here comes very near 
 to the modern spirit, not only through his humour but through 
 his keen realistic sense of character, and especially of feminine 
 character. Despite its length and its digressions, the poem 
 is a masterpiece of sustained power. 
 
 In The House of Fame Chaucer reverts to the octosyllable, The 
 and to allegory. Suggestions for the story were found in House of 
 Dante, Virgil, and Ovid. The poet, after visiting the temple Fame. 
 of Venus, is transported by an eagle, figuring Philosophy, 
 to the House of Fame, where he has a vision of those wnom 
 the capricious goddess has favoured. In one sense the poem 
 may be considered a satire on the fickleness of fortune ; but 
 it is satire interwoven with a playfulness delightfully evident 
 in the drawing of the sardonic and disputatious eagle. The 
 Legend of Good Women (probably written during the years TJieLe- 
 1385-1386) is preceded by an allegorical Prologue, extant in gendof 
 two widely differing versions, in which Chaucer is shown Good 
 worshipping his favourite flower, the daisy, 1 on a fair morning ' 
 
 1 ProfessoF J. I* Lowes has shown (in the Publications of the Modern 
 Language Association, Vol. xix, No. 4), that Chaucer's description of 
 the daisy and its symbolism owes much to the writings of the French 
 
40 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of May. The God of Love, attended by nineteen beautiful 
 women, appears to him, and upbraids him with having 
 written poems in disparagement of love and lovers. The poet 
 tries to justify himself, but is ordered by Queen Alcestis to 
 reform and to write a 'glorious legend of good women', 
 lauding their virtues and castigating the men who had betrayed 
 them. He thereupon prepares to write the legends of the 
 women whom he sees before him. Here ends the Prologue, 
 which is one of the most charming things in Chaucer, by 
 virtue of its poetry, its delicate self -portraiture, and its radiant 
 picture of springtide. Of the legends themselves, Chaucer 
 only completed eight, leaving a ninth unfinished. Though 
 the best of them are exquisite, he had clearly wearied of his 
 task some time before he relinquished it. Doubtless he felt 
 that still greater work awaited him. The Legend is remark- 
 able for the employment of the great ten-syllabled rhyming 
 couplet later known as the heroic couplet or 'riding-rhyme'. 
 This had already been used in France, and was not utterly 
 unknown in England ; but it certainly did not become a staple 
 English measure until Chaucer touched it with his sovereign 
 hand. 1 
 
 In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer at last reached his full 
 strength. 2 Collections of stories connected by a common 
 theme or framework had been frequent in the East, and 
 already existed in Europe, where they had reached a notable 
 development in the Decameron of Boccaccio. The Decameron 
 may possibly have been known to Chaucer : he cannot have 
 known Gower's story-sequence, the Confessio Amantis, which 
 according to the best estimate was not published till 1390. 
 In any case, Chaucer's great collection is a thing apart. The 
 conception of a pilgrimage from London to Canterbury enabled 
 him to assemble quite plausibly a number of personages 
 drawn from all social ranks, embodying all manner of experi- 
 
 poet, Guillaume de Machaut, and of Machaut's disciples, Froissart and 
 Eustache Deachamps. The cult of the marguerite was common in 
 French poetry, yet Chaucer here, as elsewhere, handled his borrowings 
 less as imitator than as conqueror, and made of them a new thing of 
 beauty. The general scheme of the legend may have been suggested by 
 the Heroides of Ovid, and the De Claris MvKeribw of Boccaccio. The 
 matter of the different Tales came to him through a variety of sources, 
 classical and contemporary. 
 
 1 For a discussion of the early history of the heroic couplet, and of 
 the part played by Chaucer in perfecting it and the other metres of his 
 choice, seeG. Samtsbury's History of English Prosody, Book II, Chap. IV; 
 also his chapter on Chaucer in the Cambridge, History of English Litera- 
 ture, vol. ii, p. 176. 
 
 2 The collection in its present form was probably conceived and begun 
 in 1387 and was continued till Chaucer's death. The Knight's Tale, 
 The Second Nun's Tale, and probably several of the rest, had been 
 written considerably before this date, and were subsequently incorporated 
 in the main work. 
 
CHAUCER 41 
 
 euce, and rendered communicative through the freemasonry 
 of the road. The gamut of the characters runs from that 
 
 freat gentleman, the Knight, through the hale and prosperous 
 ranklin, the crafty Man of Law, and the poor Oxford Scholar, 
 down to the swindling Pardoner, the bawdy-minded Miller 
 and Reeve, and the drunken Cook. Among the most memor- 
 able pilgrims are two women the Prioress, sweet, sentimental, 
 and modern as a character of Meredith's, and the Wife of 
 Bath, coarse, forcible, subtle and various, a worthy mate for 
 Falstaff himself. The travellers, to the number of twenty -nine, 
 are marshalled at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, whence they 
 set forth on their journey, conducted by the self-sufficient 
 Host. They agree to beguile the way by telling stories in 
 rotation. These form the staple of the poem ; but they would 
 utterly lose their savour were they regarded apart from their 
 setting, and as isolated wholes. The full significance of each 
 tale can only be rightly understood if it is considered in 
 relation to its teller and its motley-minded audience. Professor 
 Saintsbury, indeed, considers it hardly fantastic to say that 
 the whole Prologue ought to be read, or vividly remembered, 
 before the reading of each tale. 
 
 The stories are infinitely various in character and origin. 
 The Knight's Tale, as befits its teller, is a romance of war and 
 love. It retells, with strong individual power, the story of 
 Palamon, Arcite, and Emilia, which Chaucer had found in the 
 Teseide of Boccaccio. To the same order belongs the tale of 
 the Man of Law, which narrates the tragic suffering of the guijt- 
 less Constance, familiar to Chaucer through the Anglo -Norman 
 chronicle of Nicholas Trivet. One of the most sad and beautiful 
 stories of the collection is that in which the Prioress retells, 
 Avith a changed setting, the well-known legend describing the 
 murder by Jews of the child martyr, Hugh of Lincoln. At the 
 opposite pole stand the tales of the Miller and the Reeve, 
 coarse and racy after the fashion of the French fabliau on 
 which they are patterned. Certain of the stories, such as the 
 * moral tale vertuous ' of Melibeus, and the Parson's tale, are 
 really homilies and tedious homilies in disguise, which the 
 audience seems to have accepted without wincing or suffering. 
 More to their taste, doubtless, was the rich comedy of the 
 Nun's Priest's tale, describing the humours of Chantecleer, 
 his hen Dame Partlet, and the marauding fox, Dan Russell. 
 In one of the tales, The Rhyme of Sir Thopas, Chaucer makes 
 friendly fun of the old romances such as Sir Eglamour, and 
 of a famous romance metre. The remaining tales are of various 
 kinds and origin, and the collection is a huge epitome of 
 mediaeval life, learning, and legend. 
 
 Apart from Chaucer's narrative power, his emotional range, Chaucer's 
 here and elsewhere, is wide and various. His habitual humour Mind and 
 and irony keep his outlook on life sane and free of sentimen- Art. 
 talism ; yet he has a sure hold on tragic issues, and the state- 
 ment that he lacks ' high seriousness ' must be regarded as 
 
 c3 
 
42 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 one of the vagaries of a great critic. When he wishes he can 
 tell with mastery ' a lamentable tale of things done long ago, 
 and ill done ' ; and his longer works apart, a fine philosophy 
 or faith is surely evident in his Ballad of Good Counsel, with its 
 opening line, 
 
 Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse, 
 and its refrain, 
 
 And trouthe shall delivere, hit is no drede. 
 
 He does not write in the missionary spirit of his contemporary 
 Langland, yet no one who reads his prose translation of 
 Boethius, or the confessional conclusion of his Parson's Tale, 
 can regard him as lacking in ethical fervour. The outstanding 
 quality of his nature is his strong humanism, his intense 
 interest in all human life and knowledge. The impulse which 
 made him write his treatise on the Astrolabe, and discourse 
 eruditely on alchemy through the mouth of the Canon's 
 Yeoman, dictated also that vast criticism of mediaeval life, 
 the Canterbury Tales. Despite the grievous misunderstanding 
 of him which prevailed throughout a long period of our 
 literature, hardly any poet in any country has had more 
 fervent homage from the poets of his own and succeeding 
 ages. A charming picture of him is that drawn by Swinburne : 
 Along these low pleached lanes, on such a day, 
 So soft a day as this, through shade and sun, 
 With glad grave eyes that scanned the glad wild way, 
 And heart still hovering o'er a song begun, 
 And smile that warmed the world with benison,- 
 Our father, lord long since of lordly rhyme, 
 Long since hath haply ridden, when the lime 
 Bloomed broad above him, flowering where he came. 
 Because thy passage once made warm this clime, 
 Our father Chaucer, here we praise thy name. 
 
 The As has been already stated, the early editions of Chaucer 
 
 Chaucer attributed to him many pieces now known to be non- 
 Apocry- Chaucerian. The Tale of Gamelyn has been discussed in 
 pha. a previous chapter. Its metre and general style are decisively 
 
 against Chaucer's having written it, but there is plausibility 
 in Professor Skeat's suggestion that he kept it by him with 
 the intention of working it up into one of the Canterbury 
 Tales. Some of the poems can be assigned with certainty to 
 other contemporary authors : thus the Testament of Cresseid 
 is by Henryson, the Complaint of the Black Knight and the 
 Flower of Courtesy by Lydgate, The Letter of Cupid by Occleve, 
 The Praise of Peace by Grower, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale 
 by Clanvowe, and La Belle Dame sans Merci by Sir Richard Kos. 
 The authorship of other pieces remains uncertain, but is proved 
 to be non-Chaucerian by specific considerations of style and 
 metre, and especially by a noticeable uncertainty, of which 
 Chaucer was never guilty, in the use of. the final -e. To this 
 class belong The Pardoner and the Tapster, The Second Mer- 
 

 UOER 43 
 
 chant's Tale, aij< toman's Tale. The first of these 
 
 is admirably rac \ u using ; the last has the most poetry. 
 
 Among the be, : e apocryphal poems, and, indeed, of 
 
 all the non-Chauc; ooems of the period, is The Flower and 
 the Leaf, a charming ;i ;, written allegory in rime royal, describing 
 the richly dight and chap let ed retinues of Diana and Flora, 
 who symbolize respectively the life of honour and the life 
 of loveliness and love. The Assembly of Ladies is in the same 
 metre, and describes the court and cult of the Lady Loyalty. 
 The piece as a whole is inferior to The Flower and the Leaf, 
 but contains some pleasing descriptions, including that of the 
 Lady herself : 
 
 Aboute her nekke a sort of fair rubyes 
 
 In whyte floures of right fyne enamayl ; . 
 
 Upon her heed, set in the freshest wyse, 
 
 A cercle with great balays of entayl ; 
 
 That in ernest to speke, withouten fayl, 
 
 For yonge and olde, and every maner age 
 
 It was a world to loke on her visage. 
 
 The Court of Love is evidently written by a skilled craftsman, 
 for its rime royal moves with the greatest freedom and grace. 
 It describes the homage paid to the Lady Rosiall, in obedience 
 to the ritual of the Court, by her ' servant ' Philogenet, 
 a * clerk ' of Cambridge, who sets forth on his adventure thus 
 promisingly : 
 
 When I was yong, at eighteen year of age, 
 
 Lusty and light, desirous of plesannce, 
 
 Approaching on full sad and ripe corage, 
 
 Love arted me to do myn observaunce 
 
 To his estate. 
 
 The statutes of the Court are described in detail, not without 
 wholesome touches of satire. The beautiful conclusion, in 
 which the birds descant upon the theme of love, begins thus : 
 
 On May day, when the lark began to sing, 
 To matens went the lusty nightingale 
 Within a temple shapen hawthorn-wise. 
 
 The Court of Love must certainly be assigned to a much later 
 period than that of Chaucer. 
 
 In sharp contrast to Chaucer's greatest work stands the only Langland 
 poem by a contemporary which even begins to rival it in power Piers tit* 
 The Vision of Piers the Plowman. This poem is composed Plowman. 
 in the revived alliterative metre which has already been 
 discussed in relation to the mediaeval romances. It exists 
 to-day in three texts, commonly distinguished as A, B, and C, 
 which represent successive and widely differing drafts of the 
 poem. Most have hitherto accepted the tradition that these 
 are all the work of a certain William Langland, or Langley, 
 a native of either Shropshire or Oxfordshire, who probably 
 wrote the A draft as early as 1362, and made the first revision 
 somewhere about 1377 and the second in 1393. An attempt 
 
44 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 has recently been made to show that Langland had little or no 
 part in the poem, and that its three drafts represent the 
 successive labours of four anonymous authors, and of a fifth 
 called John But. It is claimed that the A text is the work of three 
 of these men, and that B and C represent revisions and addi- 
 tions made respectively by the two remaining ones. In the 
 opinion of excellent judges, however, the case for the quintuple 
 authorship has not been satisfactorily made out ; and although 
 on the other hand the authorship of Langland has not been 
 conclusively established, there is fair evidence in support of 
 it, and it may be provisionally accepted until refuted by 
 conclusive argument. Questions of authorship apart, much 
 complication arises from the notable differences between the 
 three versions, which make it very difficult to present a brief 
 survey of the poem as a whole. The B text is nearly three 
 times as long as the A text ; it makes numerous insertions 
 among the visions of which that version consists, and adds 
 lengthy visions of its own. The C text is of nearly the same 
 length as the B text, and there are far fewer differences 
 between these two than there are between A and the corre- 
 sponding part of B. No attempt can be made here to describe 
 these differences in detail, or to supply more than the most 
 general outline of the allegory, as it may be pieced together 
 from the three texts. 
 
 The sleeper is shown a series of visions portraying the world 
 with its wickedness, folly, and greed, and showing also certain 
 forces which urge humanity toward a purer and truer life. 
 Prominent in the first vision of the A text is the picture of 
 Lady Meed, who embodies the desire of worldly gain. Meed 
 is betrothed to False (Falsehood) : Favel (Duplicity) prepares 
 to give away the bride, in the presence of a vast company. 
 The bridal party ride to London, attended by Simony and 
 Civil (Civil Law). The king, however, has Meed apprehended. 
 False flies, and Conscience, when asked if he will marry 
 the Lady, refuses with scorn, and is supported both by Reason 
 and by Love. Throughout runs the suggestion that Meed, 
 had she wished, might have done much good instead of much 
 harm, and might still do so. The second vision recaptures 
 the opening scene of the first, showing Conscience preaching 
 to a field of folk, symbolizing the world. . There follow the 
 confessions of the Seven Deadly Sins, of which the most 
 interesting is that of Gluttony, with its vivid picture of 
 a carouse in a contemporary ale-house. The company deter- 
 mine to seek Truth, and call on Piers the Plowman to be their 
 guide. He says he will lead them on their way when he has 
 ploughed his field : meanwhile, he rebukes the ' wasters ' 
 and shows by his toil and virtue the way of right -living. 
 The dream concludes the vision with a brief exhortation to 
 all men to seek Do-Well. In the third vision the search is 
 pursued, and to Do-Well are added Do-bet (Do-better) and 
 Do-best. There follows a very complicated allegory symbol- 
 
LANGLAND 45 
 
 izing the relation of these virtues to Anima (Life), Inwit 
 (Discretion), Wit, and Study. Various definitions of the three 
 are offered by various characters : according to the most 
 natural one, Do-well is Love, and Do-bet and Do-best are 
 Secular and Ecclesiastical Benevolence. But at the end 
 Clergy brings the seeker no certainty that his quest will be 
 crowned with discovery. 
 
 Much new narrative and complication are introduced by 
 the additional visions of the B and C texts. The search for the 
 three is pursued and Activa-Vita, or Honest Toil, takes part in 
 it, bearing upon his coat the stains of his commerce with life. 
 Piers also reappears, and now is seemingly identified with 
 Christ. Then follows a description of the Crucifixion, and 
 a splendid passage is devoted to the Harrowing of Hell, and 
 the triumphant release of the saved souls. But the poem 
 lapses into gloom, and ends in preparation for the last great 
 fight with Anti-Christ. 
 
 Despite the complexity of Piers the Plowman, there is little 
 of that incongruity between the different visions and versions 
 which is postulated by the separatist theory. They possess 
 a general unity of atmosphere and outlook which seems 
 inconsistent with the suggestion of multiple authorship. The 
 poem is at once an allegory, a satire, and a sermon. The author 
 is intensely preoccupied with the social problems of his day, 
 and with the vaster problem of good and evil. To him, 
 a reformation of life seems essential, and that reformation 
 must be primarily spiritual. His fervid insistence on this 
 new order is emphasized by his vivid pictures of the unleavened 
 world which he sees before him. In his portrayal of medieval 
 society, he is a satiric realist ; but he is also constantly a poet, 
 and can both see and create beauty. His message of reforma- 
 tion must not be confused with certain modern theories of 
 social regeneration : his cure for evil, as he sees it in the state, 
 lies not in socialism but in the performance by each class of 
 its fitting function. His longing for reform is suffused with 
 mysticism, and he is ever insistent on the mystic virtue of 
 humility. His intensity of faith and purpose, and his sombre 
 intuition of worldly life, make his work a necessary comple- 
 ment to Chaucer's benign and comprehensive reading of the 
 Middle Age. 
 
 To the author of Piers the Plowman has been also attributed 
 Richard the Eedeless, 1 a fragmentary poem dealing with the 
 misgovernment of Eichard II. Although it has much in 
 common with Piers, in form and spirit, a common authorship 
 has not been decisively established, and there are many argu- 
 ments against it. The resemblances are probably due to 
 imitation by an admirer of the longer poem. That it had 
 many admirers and imitators is proved by the existence of 
 a number of other poems closely resembling it in form or spirit. 
 Chief among these are The Parliament of the Three Ages, 
 
 1 To adopt the title given to it by its most important editor, Skeat. 
 
46 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Winner and Waster, The Plowman's Creed, and The Plowman's 
 Tale. 1 Considerable as was the influence of Piers the Plowman 
 on succeeding poetry, it was not comparable to that of Chaucer, 
 nor even to that of Glower. Both of these had the advantage 
 of Langland in adopting the metres which were destined to 
 prevail ; and Chaucer, at least, had the further advantage 
 of an infinitely more free, genial, and universal method of 
 narrative. 
 
 }ower. At a first glance John Grower ( 1 325 ?-1408) may seem to have 
 
 a good deal in common with the author of Piers the Plowman ; 
 for the first of his three long poems, Speculum Meditantis 
 (Mirour de VOmme), is a moral allegory dealing with the battle 
 of the Virtues and Vices for the soul of man : and the second, 
 Vox Clamantis (1382 ?) surveys and arraigns the social and 
 political conditions of its day. The Mirour, however, is written 
 in French, and based on French models, and it has little of 
 Langland's originality and intensity. It lacks, moreover, the 
 vivid descriptions which save Piers the Plowman alike from 
 the slough of didacticism and from the heavy-headed revel of 
 abstract allegory. The Vox Clamantis, again, is written in 
 Latin, and further differs from Piers the Plowman in that 
 it bases its indictment of society on a historical occurrence, 
 the Peasants' Eising of 1381. For ourselves, who are con- 
 cerned with English literature, the interest of these two poems 
 is only secondary ; but it is significant of the unfixed condition 
 of the vernacular that Grower should have chosen to write 
 them in foreign tongues : and it is characteristic, too, both of 
 him and of his time, that one of those tongues should have 
 been French. Chaucer, while accepting the French spirit, 
 was able to transcend it by dint of his own natural genius, 
 and through his acceptance of the newer Italian humanism ; 
 but Gower remained French to the end. It has been truly 
 said 2 of him that ' he invented nothing in style or matter ' , 
 and that ' the merit of his style is that it accomplishes in 
 English what had been attained long before, and practised 
 for many generations in France'. The French influence, 
 indeed, affected not only the general style and spirit of his 
 English poetry, but the details of its metrical form. 
 Confessio The poem of his which chiefly concerns us here, the Con- 
 Amantis. fessio Amantis, was composed, in English, between the years 
 1386 and 1390. It consists of about 33,000 lines, and is written 
 in the octosyllabic rhyming couplet which Gower handles 
 after the French model, and far more rigidly than Chaucer. 
 It has been shown in a previous chapter that the conception 
 of a story-sequence held together by a common framework 
 is of Eastern origin, and was early familiarized in Europe in 
 a series of legends and romances. With the chief of these 
 
 1 As has been shown elsewhere, this last poem has also been attributed 
 to Chaucer. 
 
 * W. P. Ker, Gower (Essays on Mediaeval Literature). 
 
GOWER 47 
 
 Gower was certainly familiar. He obviously owes much to 
 Chaucer and to The Romaunt of the Rose. From the Romaunt 
 he borrowed his conception of the Genius who in that poem 
 had been the priest of Nature, but who in the Confessio 
 becomes the priest of Venus and the poet's confessor and 
 mentor in relation to his transgressions against Love. These 
 the Genius discusses in relation to the Seven Deadly Sins, 
 and their progeny of minor offences. In every case he improves 
 the occasion and tells a tale, or tales, which emphasize the 
 nature of the sin. These tales, which number more than 
 a hundred, are the main matter of the Confessio. They are 
 adapted from various writers, classical and mediaeval. Many 
 of the best, including the admirably told tale of Ceyx and 
 Alcyone, come from Ovid. The tale of Jason and Medea, 
 another of Gower's masterpieces, is taken from the Roman 
 de Troie of Benolt de Sainte-More. Others are filched from the 
 dull page of Guido delle Colonne and retold with a difference. 
 These and his numerous other ' originals ' supply Gower 
 with a throng of characters whose love stories belong to the 
 history or romance of all times and countries. Chief among 
 his men and women, beside the four first mentioned, are 
 Perseus and Andromeda, Hercules and Deianira, Alboin and 
 Rosmunda, Actaeon, Ulysses, Rosiphelee, and Mundus and 
 Paulina. Gower, as he tells us in the prologue to the poem, 
 wished here to depart in some measure from his earlier didacti- 
 cism and to minister to his reader's delight. He was helped 
 to do this by his admirable gift of story -telling, and by the 
 poetry that was frequently in him. His best tales are vivid 
 and dramatic, and if he does not invent, he can on occasion 
 embellish charmingly. On the other hand he has neither the 
 power, the scope, nor the humour of Chaucer, and the monotony 
 of his couplet is too often unrelieved by any grace or passion 
 of style. He is often distressingly long-winded both in his 
 main narratives and in the digressions with which they are 
 laden. Despite the professions of his prologue, he cannot for 
 long escape the didactic habit of his age. 
 
 Yet in the better parts of the Confessio he shows himself 
 to be a true craftsman, writing with ease, grace, and correct- 
 ness. The worth of his work is in large measure relative : 
 it cannot be fully understood till it is contrasted with the 
 crude and tentative striving evident in the English poetry 
 of the past and of his own day, and indeed of the immediate 
 future. His historical value is great, and he helped English 
 poetry toward a correcter sense of form and a surer mastery 
 of narrative. His example was lost on many of his immediate 
 successors, as their work shows : yet from his own day onward 
 he was highly honoured, and for many generations was even 
 ranked with Chaucer. To our own age such a coupling seems 
 fantastic : yet a reading of the Fourth Book of the Confessio 
 will convince any sensitive mind that the value of Gower's 
 boat work is more than merely historical. His remaining works 
 
48 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 include his Cinkante Ballades, written in French, and dealing 
 
 gracefully, if conventionally, with themes of love ; and his 
 atin Cronica Tripertita, in leonine hexameters, which 
 describes with angry Lancastrian bias the last twelve years of 
 the reign of Richard II. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 THE AFTERMATH OF CHAUCER IN ENGLAND 
 
 Lydgate, Occleve Minor Chaucerians Hawes. 
 
 Prosodic A POET of Chaucer's greatness, writing in an age when 
 Changes, there was little other great poetry, was bound to have a host 
 of imitators ; and for peculiar reasons his influence was by 
 no means solely for good. For the most part, they took the 
 more conventional portion of his work for their model ; and 
 few of them followed the lead he had given them in Troilus 
 and Oriseyde or the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. As 
 has been shown, he had adopted a very exact scheme of 
 metrical scansion which corresponded closely to the pro- 
 nunciation and syntax of his day. During the following 
 years, the inflexional changes of the language, and especially 
 the change in the use and pronunciation of the final -e, 
 demanded a corresponding prosodic modification ; and it is 
 the failure of his successors to realize this fact, and their 
 attempt to use his prosody without understanding its secrets, 
 that makes much of their verse halting and even hopeless. 
 
 Mainly to Chaucer, but in some measure to Gower, must 
 be traced the continuance by following poets of the allegorical 
 tradition of the Eomaunt of the Rose, and of the habit of 
 epical story -telling which accompanied that tradition and in 
 some sense competed with it. Yet little blame can attach to 
 either of these two for the poetical excesses they clearly cannot 
 be called shortcomings of their most prolific follower, John 
 Lydgate. Lydgate (1370 $-1450 f ). Lydgate did not share Edgar Allan 
 Poe's antipathy to the long poem. His own three longest 
 poems number between them eighty-eight thousand lines, 
 and the whole of his extant works reach a total of between 
 one hundred and thirty and one hundred and forty thousand. 
 Longest of all is The Falls of Princes (numbering more than 
 thirty-six thousand lines), which is based on Boccaccio's 
 De Casibus Illustrium Virorum, and is the prototype of the 
 Tudor Mirror for Magistrates. Its substance is accurately 
 described by its title : it is probably the most tedious of all 
 Lydgate' s poems, and to say this is to say much. Very long 
 also are his Pilgrimage of Man and his Troy Book, which are 
 respectively free and wordy renderings of Deguileville's 
 metrical Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine and of Guido delle 
 
 Colonne's 
 
 Historia Destructions Troiae. In the 
 
LYDGATE 49 
 
 Pilgrimage the allegorical motive prevails ; in the Troy 
 Book, the epical. Though the Troy Book has certain passages 
 of interest, each poem, taken as a whole, might well have made 
 * Guatimozin doze on his red gridiron of brass '. Some, with 
 small justification, have thought that Bunyan was seriously 
 indebted to the Pilgrimage for The Pilgrim's Progress. The 
 Story of Thebes is a mistaken attempt, running to nearly 
 five thousand lines, to continue the sequence of the Canter- 
 bury Tales. The Temple of Glass is a long and dull love-poem 
 interspersed with allegory. Somewhat more readable is the 
 unfinished Reason and Sensuality, an adaptation of the early 
 French love romance, Les fichecs amoureux. Chief among 
 Lydgate'e remaining longer poems are The Life of our Lady, 
 Guy of Warwick, and his various Legends of Saints. For 
 narrative his favourite metres are the octosyllabic and heroic 
 couplets. His shorter poems, of which there are many, are 
 written mainly in rime royal and the ballade stanza. Through- 
 out these, and throughout his Life of Our Lady, occur occa- 
 sional passages of true beauty which, to some extent, relieve 
 the general tedium of his verse. 
 
 Lydgate was given equal place with Chaucer and Gower 
 by many of his contemporaries and immediate successors, 
 and in modern times he has had such ' powers that will work 
 for him ' as Gray, Coleridge, and Mrs. Browning ; but it is 
 doubtful whether any of the powers in question had read him 
 hard and long. Most who have done so have probably felt 
 their enthusiasm sicken and fall away. Lydgate himself 
 thought poorly of his gift of versification, for he writes : 
 
 And trouthe of metre I set also a-syde, 
 For of that art I had as tho no guide 
 Me to reduce when I went a-wronge. 
 I took none hede neither of short nor long. 
 
 He has been taken at his own valuation by most moderns who 
 ' speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake '. Others not so 
 handicapped have come to know him better than he knew 
 himself, and have been able to wring harmony and pleasure 
 out of his discords. 1 It has been claimed on his behalf that 
 his printers are in some sense responsible for the lapses in his 
 text, and that there is method in what looks like his prosodic 
 madness. This last claim, even if substantiated, would bring 
 little consolation to a reader with a sensitive ear, who might 
 well reply that a century and a half later there was also 
 method in the discordant lunacies of Abraham Fraunce. Most 
 discriminating readers will probably agree that Lydgate is 
 ' prosodically incompetent ' 2 even if they do not dismiss his 
 
 1 Of. Schipper, Englische M etrik ; Schick, Temple of Glass, Intro- 
 duction. 
 
 2 George Saintsbury, 'The English Chaucerians', Cartridge History 
 of English Literature, vol. ii, p. 205. 
 
50 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Minor 
 Chau- 
 cerians. 
 
 verse as a * barbarous jangle V Those who find it ' smooth ' 2 
 are to be congratulated on an ear that would presumably 
 withstand the discord of the crack of doom. 
 
 In his Testament, and again in his lively London Lickpenny? 
 Lydgate has given a good deal of information regarding his 
 own life and the manners of his time. 
 
 This confessional and descriptive habit is shared by the poet 
 with whom he is constantly coupled, Thomas Occleve (1368 ?- 
 1450?). In his early poem La Male "Regie, and in his later 
 Complaint and Dialogue (1421), Occleve discourses of his own 
 life and habits with something of Pepys's frank garrulity, 
 though with little of his gusto and genius. Despite their 
 manifold shortcomings, these works contain some pleasing 
 human touches ; thus, in the Eegle, he describes his cowardice, 
 and states that he was in the habit of taking boat at West- 
 minster out of vanity, because the watermen called him 
 ' Mister '. In the later poems he relates, with considerable 
 
 Eathos, how when he had emerged from a period of insanity, 
 e found his friends avoiding him and predicting, within his 
 hearing, a return of his malady. Further news of his life is 
 made known to us through a dialogue between himself and 
 a beggar in his De Eegimine Principum, a poem of about five 
 thousand five hundred lines, written for the instruction and 
 edification of Prince Hal. On the purely conventional pretext 
 that his Epistle to Cupid had given offence to women, he writes 
 in their honour a poetical tale, Jereslaus* Wife, the substance 
 of which he had found in the Gesta Bomanorum. From the 
 same source he culled a further story, Jonathas, and this, 
 together with his fine Ars Sciendi Mori, his verse letter to 
 Sir John Oldcastle, and several shorter poems, complete the 
 tale of his work. 
 
 Both Occleve's versification and his capacity for narrative 
 are surer than Lydgate's, but such virtue is only relative, and 
 we constantly find him caught in the metrical snares of the 
 period. Even apart from this shortcoming, he must be 
 reckoned rather a determined versifier than a true poet. 
 Historic considerations apart, his verse is chiefly interesting 
 for what it tells us about his life : in itself it is generally flaccid 
 and lacks the sinews of song. 
 
 Later in the history of English poetry the influence of 
 Chaucer was to take hold on many men far greater than Lyd- 
 gate and Occleve : during their own period it affected many 
 lesser than they. Thus Osbern Bokenham wrote in Chaucerian 
 decasyllabics the lives of several saints. Benet Burgh trans- 
 lated Cato's Moralia into verse, and completed the Secrets of 
 
 1 Oscar Triggs, The Assembly of Gods, Introduction, Chapter III, 
 p. xiv, E.E.T.S., 1896. 
 
 H. N. McCracken, Ph.D., Introduction to the Minor Poems of John 
 litigate, E.E.T.S., 1911. 
 
 3 A recent attempt has been made, on quite insufficient evidence, to 
 deprive Lydgate of this poem. 
 
OCCLEVE 51 
 
 Philosophers, a poem which has been sometimes attributed to 
 Lydeate. Benet's fondness for rime royal must be traced 
 to Chaucer, and illustrates the fashion of the age. This stanza 
 is used, or misused, by numerous contemporary writers, and 
 is put to various, and often strange, uses : it is employed for 
 scientific exposition by George Ripley and Thomas Norton, 
 for political reflection by George Ashby, and for religious 
 propaganda by John Audelay. Throughout the fifteenth 
 century the Chaucerian influence persists in all manner of 
 forms and quarters, without any more weighty result than 
 has here been indicated. 
 
 The prosodic disintegration which accompanied it was pro- 
 longed into the sixteenth century, as may be seen from the 
 writings of Stephen Hawes (1474 f-1523 ?). Hawes was the Hawes. 
 last poet of the age following Chaucer to come strongly beneath 
 his influence. For him, as for Gower and Lydgate, he had the 
 strongest admiration, and throughout his works he con- 
 stantly pays homage to the three. His two longest poems, 
 The Example of Virtue (1504) and The Pastime of Pleasure 
 (1506), are both allegories, dealing, under courtly imagery, 
 with the life of man, and, as such, they reach back through 
 Chaucer and Gower to The Eomaunt of the Rose. It has been 
 shown, however, that in working out these courtly allegories, 
 Hawes 'emphasized the element of chivalrous romance', 1 
 and that this tendency, together with his strong interest in 
 scholastic learning and theology, gives a distinctive colour 
 to his poems. The Pastime, which is mainly in rime royal, 
 and numbers nearly six thousand lines, describes the quest of 
 the hero, Graund Amour, for La Bel Pucell, whom he eventually 
 wins after a long series of trials and perils. He is brought into 
 touch with the Quadrivium, part of the mediaeval scheme of 
 education, but is so little deflected by it from the Active Life 
 that he manages to destroy two giants, one of whom has three, 
 the other seven, heads. He wins the Lady, is married to her by 
 Law, and lives with her happily till Avarice and Old Age fall 
 upon him, and he is claimed first by Contrition, then by Death. 
 A humorous interlude is provided by the introduction of the 
 dwarf Godfrey Gobelive, who is a professional slanderer of 
 women, and tries to dissuade Graund Amour from his quest. 
 
 The Example of Virtue, also in rime royal, describes the 
 adventures of Youth, his wanderings in tne wilderness, his 
 temptations by Sensuality and Pride, and his wedding with 
 Cleanness, the daughter of Love. There is much other 
 allegorical machinery, and at the end there are references to 
 the political condition of England. Hawes's shorter poems 
 include The Conversion of Swearers, A Joyful Meditation to 
 all England of the Coronation of Henry the Eighth, and The 
 Comfort of Lovers. The chief defects of his verse are its prolixity, 
 metrical laxity and uncertainty, determined didacticism, 
 1 William Murison, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. ii, 
 p. 228. 
 
52 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 constant digressiveness, and preoccupation with abstract 
 allegory. The Pastime dimly anticipates Spenser, and is 
 a link between the Faerie Queene and the older English 
 allegories deriving from the Romaunt of the Rose. But though 
 Spenser's debts both to the Pastime and the Example are 
 specific, the Faerie Queene, in all essentials of genius and 
 beauty, is a thing generically different from anything that 
 Hawes ever wrote, or could have hoped to write. His hopeless 
 inferiority is due not only to the limitations of the period, but 
 also to those of his own temperament and equipment. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 SCOTTISH POETRY 
 
 The Beginnings The Scottish Chaucerians Popular Poetry 
 Lyndsay to Montgomerie. 
 
 A Late SCOTTISH literature before the middle of the fourteenth 
 
 Begin- century is a thing of mere fragments, and brings to light no 
 ning. single author of historical standing for Thomas of Ercildoune, 
 poet and seer, must, unfortunately, be regarded as a figure of 
 legend. Various causes have been assigned for this strange 
 barrenness. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, 
 Scotland was divided between various races Pict, Scot, 
 Anglian, Anglo-French, and Danish. The resulting multi- 
 plicity of tongues did not make for a national literature, even 
 if any of the races had been capable of supplying one. The 
 language commonly known as ' Early Scots ' was spoken 
 between the Tweed and the Forth, and in the towns along 
 the mid-east coast. It was in reality Northern English, and 
 was practically identical with the language spoken between 
 the Tweed and the Humber. 1 It is claimed that owing to 
 this identity certain works actually of Scotch origin may have 
 been attributed to the north of England. A more likely 
 reason for the dearth, at least during the latter part of the 
 period, lies in the terrible turmoil and peril arising out of the 
 Scottish wars with England. During these days of storm, 
 men's hands were devoted rather toward keeping their heads 
 than toward the penning of verse. Yet if this warfare for the 
 time being hindered poetry, in the end it helped and quickened 
 it, and made it the expression of a national faith and aspira- 
 tion ; for the two most lengthy and important of early Scotch 
 poems deal respectively with the two great heroes of Scottish 
 independence. 
 
 Barbour's The Bruce (1376) of John Barbour (1316 ?-1395) is less 
 Bruce. a history of King Robert than a historical romance woven 
 
 1 See Sir James Murray, Dialects of the Southern Counties of Scotland ; 
 and Peter Giles, ' The Earliest Scottish Literature ', Cambridge History 
 of English Literature, vol. ii, chap. v. 
 
SCOTTISH POETRY 53 
 
 around his exploits and perils. Its best scenes are vivid and 
 straightforward, and its outstanding characters the king 
 himself, Edward Bruce, and James of Douglas are drawn 
 with a noble simplicity. Barbour's narrative gift is Seen at 
 its highest in his descriptions of Bannockburn, and in such 
 other passages as tjiat relating the king's escape from the 
 sleuth-hound and ' meinie ' of John of Lome, and his subse- 
 quent flight across the moor. The struggle of the weary and 
 overwatched hero with the three traitors in the bothie is one 
 which Stevenson might have been proud to pen. Several other 
 passages in the poem are hardly less good. Barbour is at times 
 pedestrian ; but he is also capable of such flights as the 
 famous praise of liberty which is the expression, not only of 
 the man, but of his age and country : 
 
 A ! fredome is a noble thing ! 
 
 Fredome mayss men to have liking; 
 
 Fredome all solace to man giffis 
 
 He levy s at ess that freely levys ! 
 
 A noble hart may haiff nane ess 
 
 Ne ellys nocht that may him pless 
 
 Gyff fredome fail: he : for free liking 
 
 Is jharnyt our all othir thing. 
 
 Certain other poems of the period have also been attributed 
 to Barbour notably a collection of Lives of the Saints ; two 
 fragments of a Troy-book translated from the Latin of Guido 
 delle Colonne ; and a translation from the French, entitled 
 The Buik of Alexander. It is on his Bruce, however, that his 
 fame depends. 
 
 Nearly a century later the other hero of Scottish freedom Blind 
 received his due in the Wallace of Blind Harry. Harry, Harry's 
 according to the fifteenth-century scholar and historian, Wallace. 
 John Major, was a blind minstrel, who wandered the country 
 reciting for bread the deeds of its heroes. He claims to have 
 based his narrative on a Latin book in which John Blair, 
 Wallace's chaplain, had recorded his master's fights and 
 wanderings. There may have been such a book, but we have 
 no record of it ; and Harry's easy defiance of historical fact 
 and sequence shows that he set small store by authentic 
 records. His treatment of history is far more loose than 
 Barbour's, and he sometimes gives Wallace legendary powers. 
 Unlike Barbour, he expresses the bitterest hatred of England, 
 and his invective against her can only be paralleled by the 
 earlier invective of Minot against Scotland. His humour, of 
 which there is plenty, is generally grim and sarcastic. At 
 his best, he displays fine narrative and descriptive power, 
 though his lapses into the commonplace are more frequent 
 and distressing than Barbour's. 
 
 The Bruce is written in the octosyllabic, Wallace in the other 
 heroic, couplet. Blind Harry's contemporary, Richard Early 
 Holland, or de Holand, in writing his Buke of the Howlat, Writers, 
 employs the alliterative rhyming stanza so greatly favoured 
 
54 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 by the romancers of the period. Some have attempted, without 
 much reason or success, to interpret this poem as a political 
 allegory, dealing satirically with James II ; in point of fact, 
 it is simply what it purports to be, a fable based on the 
 ' humours ' of various birds, who assemble in conclave to 
 listen to the plaint of the owl against Nature. Certain tedious 
 digressions apart, the poem is both amusing and charming. 
 
 The identity and output of * Huchoun of the Awle Royale ', 
 together with the Scottish romances of the period, are discussed 
 elsewhere : if, as seems possible, Huchoun be identical with 
 Sir Hew of Eglintoun, Scotland during the fourteenth century 
 possessed a notable writer of romances. It possessed beyond 
 all doubt an industrious and imaginative, if not very poetic, 
 chronicler in Andrew Wyntoun, Prior of St. Serf's in Loch 
 Leven, and Canon Regular of St. Andrews. In his Original 
 Chronicle, written in rhymed octosyllables, he traces the history 
 of Scotland back to its imagined ' origines ' in the legendary 
 past. The early part of this work consists largely of marvels, 
 scriptural and other, but the later has a certain historical 
 value. History and legend blend in the tale of Macbeth, 
 which is related in the Sixth Book. Of the remaining 
 chroniclers of the period, the most notable were John of 
 Fordun and Walter Bower, who worked in succession on the 
 long Latin compilation known as the Scotichronicon. 
 Native Scottish literature, as we have hitherto described it, lacked 
 
 and tradition, and was a thing of beginnings : yet these beginnings 
 
 Southern had their origin in a spirit of robust nationalism, which found 
 Influ- its natural expression in martial poetry. Cognate with this 
 ences. was another native impulse which found utterance in poems of 
 satire, love, and coarse and racy merriment. These songs and 
 lampoons are written by poets of the people, and express the 
 people's joys and hates and sorrows. They continue through- 
 out the whole course of Scotch literature, and find their cul- 
 mination in such great national singers as Fergusson and Burns. 
 For a time, however, this native poetry was overshadowed 
 by a more courtly and literary tradition deriving from the 
 south, which produced some of Scotland's most exquisite 
 poetry, and during the fifteenth century gave her the poetic 
 mastery of England. We may deal with this at once, reserving 
 the popular verse for later notice. 
 
 Scottish It has been shown that Chaucer's English followers and 
 Prosody, disciples went astray largely through their failure to under- 
 stand the secrets of his prosody. One of the chief causes 
 of their discomfiture had been the disintegration caused in 
 English metre through the inflexional changes of the period, 
 and especially through the dubious quality of the final -e. 
 In the Scottish language of the period, which, as we have seen, 
 differed only slightly from Northern English, there was little of 
 this linguistic or prosodic ambiguity, for the inflexions had 
 early become levelled under common forms, and poets were 
 not confronted with the metrical difficulties which had disconi- 
 
SCOTTIiSH POETRY 
 
 55 
 
 fited Lydgate and Occleve. But the difference in quality 
 between the English and the Scottish poetry of the time can 
 certainly not be accounted -for by mere considerations of 
 prosody and dialectal form. The Scots poets had not only 
 a fitter and surer medium of poetry ; they had greater genius 
 as well. Lydgate, had he lived north of the Tweed, could never 
 have written anything so finished as the King's Quair, or so 
 powerful as The Testament of Cresseid : and, conversely, had 
 Dunbar or Henryson written in the English midlands, it is 
 incredible that they could have ever sunk into the slough 
 of The Temple of Glass. 
 
 Four great poets stand out in the Scottish literature of The Scot- 
 the period. Each of these professed direct allegiance to tish Chau- 
 Chaucer and magno intervallo, it may be imagined to Gower cerian?. 
 and Lydgate. James I speaks of the first two of these as 
 his ' maisteris dere ' : Henryson, in the homely and delightful 
 introduction to the Testament of Cresseid, proclaims himself 
 disciple of ' Chaucer glorious '. Dunbar styles Chaucer 
 ' reverend ', and the ' rose of rethoris all ', and writes : 
 
 O inorall Gower and Lydgate laureate, 
 Your sugarit lippis and toungis aureate 
 Bene to our eris cause of great delight ; 
 
 and Uavin Douglas, the least Chaucerian" of the four, cannot 
 abstain from praising Chaucer even in the prologues to his 
 ' Eneids ' ; elsewhere he hails him as 
 
 A per se sans peir 
 
 In his vulgair. 
 
 The influence of Chaucer affects both the spirit and the form 
 of all these men, and manifests itself in obvious and more 
 subtle ways throughout their work. 
 
 Most obviously Chaucerian are the uses made by the first James 1 
 three of rime royal, and by all four of allegory. The King's 
 Quair, or King's Book, the first great Chaucerian poem of Quair. 
 Scotland, is written throughout in the great seven-lined stanza 
 beloved by the Master, and in its allegorical setting it shows 
 a close acquaintance, not only with Chaucer's original work, 
 but also with his translation of The Eomaunt of the Hose. King 
 James I's authorship of the poem, though it has been disputed, 
 is now established beyond all doubt by the scholarship of 
 M. Jusserand. It is in great part an allegory set in the form 
 of a dream, in which the royal poet appears before Venus, 
 and, subsequently, before Minerva and Fortune, and beseeches 
 their help in his wpful plight of love. This passage is written 
 with fresnness, delicacy, and grace, and will stand comparison 
 with the finest allegorical passages of Chaucer himself. There 
 is fine quality, too, in the opening stanzas of the poem, which 
 describe how the poet tires of reading Boethius, falls into 
 slumber after musing on Fortune, and is aroused by the 
 ma tin -bell, which, as he thinks, bids him tell of his adventure. 
 But to most readers the chief charm of the Quair lies in the 
 
56 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 scene in which the King, leaning forth from the window of the 
 English castle which is his prison, sees 
 
 The fairest or the freschest yong floure 
 That ever I saw, methoght, before that houre, 
 For which sodayn abate, anone astert 
 The blude of all my body to my hert. 
 
 A charming passage follows in description and praise of the 
 lady; and its charm is heightened when we remember that 
 she was Lady Joan Beaufort, who eventually became James's 
 queen, and was present at his tragic death. The King's gallant 
 and romantic nature is delightfully evident in the concluding 
 passage, where, now that his boon is granted, he blesses all 
 things concerned with the vision of his beloved : 
 Thankit mot be, and fair and lufe befall, 
 The nychtingale that with so gud entent 
 Sang thare of lufe the riotis suete and small, 
 Quhair my fair hertes lady was present 
 
 And thankit be the fair castell wall, 
 Quhare as I quhilom lukit furth and lent. 
 Thankit mot be the sanctis marciall 
 That me first causit hath this accident. 
 Thankit mot be the grene bewis bent, 
 Throu quhom and under, first fortunyt me 
 My hertis hele, and my comfort to be 
 
 James's rime royal moves with great smoothness, and his poem 
 is full of graceful beauty ; but there are not only beauty and 
 Henryson grace but tragic intensity in The Testament of Cresseid, by 
 The Robert Henryson (1425 ?-1500 ?). This poem, which is in 
 Testament rime royal, is, in effect, a continuation of Chaucer's Troilus 
 of Ores- an d Criseyde ; but it presents a remarkable sequence and 
 seid. contrast of moods and motifs. It opens with a passage of 
 
 intimate and homely realism, showing the poet gazing at the 
 stars on a bitter, but beautiful, winter's night. Unable longer 
 to bear the cold, he passes to the fire, mends it, and takes 
 ' ane drink ' his ' spreitis to comfort '. He then opens Troilus, 
 and musing on Cressida's fate, resolves to write its sequel. 
 First he shows her cast off by Diomede and abusing Venus 
 and Cupid very angrily. This gives him the .opportunity of in- 
 troducing what may be called the pageantry of the poem to 
 wit,* a conclave of the gods, who debate as to what shall be her 
 punishment for her outrage against Love. This long passage 
 contains much pride, pomp, and classical circumstance, and 
 is admirable of its kind. The poem shifts suddenly to tragic 
 realism, when the dreadful doom of leprosy is inflicted on 
 Cressida by Saturn, and she is told that she 
 
 must go begging from hous to hous 
 With cop and clapper like ane lazarous. 
 
 She goes to the spittal-house, and there sings a dirge for her 
 dead happiness. Driven to beg by the road-side with her 
 
SCOTTISH POETRY 
 
 57 
 
 mates in leprosy, she is passed by Troilus riding Troyward with 
 his knights. The passage which follows is a wonderful and 
 authentic piece of psychology. He does not recognize her, but 
 her face recalls to him the old memory of his love : 
 
 Yit than hir luik into his mind it brocht 
 The sweet visage and amorous blenking 
 Of fair Crisseid. somet3 T me his awin darling. 
 
 For old sake's sake, he empties gold and jewels into her lap 
 and rides away, brooding on his grief. When the leper-folk 
 crowd round Cressida ' to see the equal distribution of the 
 almous ', she learns who her benefactor has been, falls to earth 
 in a ' bitter stound ' of grief and contrition, and dies. 
 
 This wonderful tragic poem, despite certain opinions to the 
 contrary, must certainly be considered Henryson's greatest 
 work ; but he would have ranked as a poet of note had he 
 written his Moral Fables alone. These are thirteen in number, 
 and are written in rime royal, which Henryson here adapts Fables. 
 with masterly skill to comic ends. He retells with great 
 freshness and gusto many of the tales attributed to Aesop, 
 including the Wolf and the Lamb, the Frog and the Mouse, 
 and the Mouse and the Lion. He had a keen eye for nature, 
 and his account of the joys and sufferings of the different birds 
 and beasts is not only charming, but true to their characters and 
 habits. One of the best things in the whole collection is the 
 tale of the Uplandis Mous and the Burgess Mous, in which 
 the two wee oeasts become warm and living personalities, 
 and are described with the most vivid humour. Each fable 
 concludes with a moralitas, but the didactic purpose is never 
 allowed to kill the charm of the tales, which in their homely 
 zest and realism represent a native element of Scottish 
 poetry. 
 
 Henryson's remaining long poem, Orpheus and Euridice, is 
 written in various metres chiefly in rime royal and concludes 
 with a lengthy moralitas. The tale is sufficiently well told, 
 but lacks the genius which went to the making of the Testament 
 and the Fables. That genius, however, is richly evident in 
 Henryson's third poem of note, Eobin and Makyn, in which RcMnand 
 the conventional French pastourelle is fashioned into a new M*ty** 
 and delightful thing by the poet's lively sense of character 
 and of Nature. The graceless lout, Robin, is wooed by the 
 fair shepherdess, Makyn, and at first the wooing is vain : 
 Robin goes his way ' als licht as lief of tree ', and leaves 
 Makyn disconsolate. But Love has his revenge on the scorner, 
 and in the ' full fair dale ' where he has mustered his sheep, 
 it fills him with desire of the scorned. He makes his court to 
 Makyn, but she is now hejirt-free, and can tell him that 
 
 The man that will not when he may 
 Sail haif nocht qnhen he wald. 
 
 The poem ends with a brief passage in which he urges his love, 
 and uinid the warmth and passion of the summer's night craves 
 
58 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 that he may have his will ; but she tells him that ' that world 
 is all away and quite brocht till ane end ' : and she leaves 
 him alone with his care and his sheep among the grey hills. 
 
 Henryson also wrote several shorter poems, the most notable 
 of which are The Bludy Sarlc, and the Garmond ofGuid Ladies. 
 Dunbar. it has been seen that both the native and derivative elements 
 are strong in Henryson's poetry, and the same is the case with 
 the third great ' Scottish Chaucerian ', William Dunbar 
 (1460 ?-1520). Dunbar is Henryson's inferior in emotional 
 intensity and tragic sense ; but his vigour and frequent 
 beauty of expression, his mastery of humour and satire, and 
 his keen feeling for natural loveliness, explain, if they do not 
 justify, Scott's statement that his poetry was ' unrivalled by 
 any which Scotland ever produced ' . None of his poems exceeds 
 six hundred lines ; but in them he displays a more various 
 mastery than can be credited to any of his three chief Scottish 
 contemporaries. The statements- that he is the ' Scottish 
 Chaucer ' and the ' Scottish Skelton ', are not more wise than 
 other comparisons of the kind, and their very juxtaposition 
 betrays their untrustworthiness : yet Chaucer's influence is 
 strong throughout the best part of Dunbar's work, and is 
 perhaps most obvious in such courtly allegories as The 
 Hisalle- Golden Targe, and The Thistle and the Rose. In the first of 
 gorical these Reason endeavours to guard the poet with her shield 
 poems. against the darts of love ; but vainly, for he is 
 
 wounded till the deth well nere, 
 And yoldyn as a woful prisonere 
 To Lady Bewty in a moment space. 
 
 The conventional themes of the May -morning, the dream, and 
 the song of the birds are managed with great charm, and with 
 a keenly individual sense of 
 
 Nature's nobil fresche anamalyng 
 In mirthful May of every monith quene. 
 
 The birds' song is heard again throughout The Thistle and the 
 Rose, a courtly allegory of the marriage of James IV with 
 Mary, ' the freschest quene of flouris '. Another allegory, 
 Beauty and the Prisoner, is at once didactic and spectacular, 
 and has been thought by some to portray one of the pageants 
 which Dunbar had witnessed in England. Still allegorical, 
 but far more forcible and realistic, is The Dance of the Seven 
 Deadly Sins, which is written with a rare swing, and displays 1 
 that delight in vivid words, whether homely or strange, which 
 is constant throughout Dunbar, and is indulged with astonish- 
 ing gusto in his longest poem, The Twa Mary it Wemen and the 
 Wedo. 
 
 1 For example in the description of the retinue, of ' Oovatyoe ' : 
 Catyvis, wrechis and okkerari?, 
 Hud-pykis, hurdaris and gadderaris, 
 All with that warlo went. 
 
SCOTTISH POETRY 59 
 
 This is a tour de force in more ways than one : prosodically 
 it is a daring experiment in the revived, and by now rapidly 
 declining, alliterative measure : in general spirit it is a remark- 
 able blend of beauty and coarse realism. The opening passage, 
 describing the garden and the graces of the women who 
 converse in it, is one of the most charming things in Dunbar : 
 their descriptions of their husbands outgo in frank brutality 
 the disclosures of the Wife of Bath herself, and are at once 
 diabolical and convincing. That formidable female doubtless 
 supplied Dunbar with suggestions for the poem ; but over 
 and above the southern influence there runs throughout the 
 satiric portraiture a perfervidum ingenium which seems native 
 to the northern poet and his race. There is hardly less gusto 
 in The Friars of Berwick, which has been traditionally ascribed 
 to Dunbar, and on internal evidence may well be his. Vigour, 
 coarseness, and an exultant mastery of abuse are evident 
 in The Flyting of Kennedy and Dunbar, in which the two poets 
 belabour and befoul each other, apparently by mere way of 
 exercise and in perfect good humour. The peculiar national 
 tendency toward satire, both public and private, which is to 
 recur so strongly in Burns, is evident in several of Dunbar's 
 poems, and most notably, perhaps, in the Tidings from the 
 Session. The session is not, as in Burns's case, the Kirk- 
 Session but the Scottish Session of Law. Notable among the 
 fairly numerous remaining poems of Dunbar are the whimsical 
 Ballad ofKynd KittocJc and the Lament for the Makaris, with its 
 poignant refrain, ' Timor mortis conturbat me,' and its interest- 
 ing references to the author and his fellow-poets. Some of 
 Dunbar's finest work is contained in his religious poems, 
 notably in the Eesurrection of Christ and the fragment on Life. 
 
 The fourth great Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas (1474 ?- Gavin 
 1 522), like the remaining three, uses the conventions of allegory Douglas. 
 in certain of his works ; but both in these and in the rest 
 he displays an individuality which, if less powerful than 
 theirs, is still very striking and distinguished. As Bishop of 
 Dunkeld, and son of the great Earl of Angus, Archibald ' Bell- 
 the-Cat ', he was quite at home both in the learned and the 
 courtly traditions of his age, with results which are evident 
 throughout his poetry. To some, indeed, 1 his achievement 
 and his peculiar interest in classicism have seemed to make 
 him a direct forerunner of the Renaissance, and a half -conscious 
 interpreter of its dawning spirit ; but according to the better 
 opinion, 2 his outlook, as manifested both in his original poetry 
 and his translation of Virgil, is mediaeval, and is not essentially 
 different from that of his chief Scottish contemporaries. His 
 Palace of Honour, indeed, has the familiar features of many 
 allegories deriving from The Pomaunt of the Rose, and can be 
 readily paralleled in the work of Hawes, Occleve, and Dunbar. 
 
 1 See Professor Courthope, History of English Poetry, i. 374. 
 
 2 Srp G. Gregory Smith, Cambridge History of English Literature, 
 vol. ii, chapter x. 
 
60 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 It portrays the garden, the may time slumber, the appearance 
 of Venus with her retinue, the poet's arraignment, his sentence, 
 and expiation of his offence. Towards the end he sees and 
 enters the Palace, is overcome by its glory, and awakes. 
 A rather amusing character is the nymph who is told off to 
 accompany and discipline the poet, and often treats him with 
 scant courtesy. 1 The poem is well conceived and finished ; 
 like Dunbar, Douglas exults in coloured and telling words, 2 
 and he displays, too, something of Dunbar's lively love of 
 Nature ; but scarcely in this allegory do these things rise 
 into high poetry, and Douglas's most distinctive work is 
 not to be sought here, nor yet in King Hart, another suffi- 
 ciently well-made allegory in octaves, showing the adventures, 
 perils, and joys of the human heart. 
 
 Douglas's Whatever be the deficiencies in point of pure scholarship 
 Version of or pure poetry of Douglas's version of ' Eneados of the most 
 y* e famose Poete Virgill ', it remains a most notable work, being, 
 
 4*ettf. indeed, ' the first translation of a great classical poet into 
 English, Northern or Southern'. Douglas, in his ' Prolong 
 of the First Buik ', while heaping scorn on the ' faultes ' of 
 Caxton's version, freely admits his own, and at the same time 
 claims the right to handle his original freely a right which, 
 as he defines it, would as freely be conceded him by every 
 scholar who has ever attempted translation. His shortcoming 
 lies not so much in his continuous departures from the letter 
 of his original, as in his general failure to reproduce that 
 spiritual depth and dignity which single Virgil out from the 
 company of poets. But if his version is not Virgilian, it has 
 a strength of its own, and it seems certain that that strength 
 is mediaeval and does not cast forward to the Kenaissance. 
 The translation itself is in the heroic couplet, but Douglas 
 employs a variety of metres in his * Prolougs ' to the several 
 books. Many of these have only the remotest connexion with 
 their subject ; all of them may claim to rank as original poems 
 in their own right, and the best contain Douglas's finest 
 and most distinctive work. Particularly spirited is the Pro- 
 
 1 Cf. Quhat devill (said scho) has thow nocht elHs ado, 
 
 Bot all thy wit and fantasie to set] 
 
 On sic doting ? 
 
 There are other amusing and probably intentionally amusing touches 
 in the poem, e. g. 
 
 The dasy and the marygold unlappit 
 
 Quhilks all the nicht lay with their levis happit, 
 
 Thame to reserve fra rewmes pungitive. 
 
 2 Cf. his description of the Palace : 
 
 Pinnakilis, fyellis, turnpekkis mony one, 
 Gilt birneist torris, quhilk like to Phebus schone, 
 Skarsment, reprise, corbell and battellingis, 
 Fuljery, bordouris of mony precious stone, 
 Subtile muldrie wrocht mony day agone, 
 
 On buttereis, jalme, pillaris, and plesand springis. 
 
SCOTTISH POETRY 
 
 61 
 
 logue to the Seventh Book, which, like a famous prologue of 
 Henryson's, shows the poet working at his task amid the 
 rigours of a Scottish midwinter. The whole passage is alive 
 with that keen sense of Nature's moods and shows l which 
 is constant throughout Scottish poetry. In the Twelfth 
 Prologue 2 there is a prettier but less powerful picture of 
 Summer, vocal with songbirds, and radiant with flowers. Some- 
 what less fine are the descriptions of sunset and sunrise in the 
 Eleventh Prologue. The Eighth, which employs the allitera- 
 tive romance stanza, is an astonishing piece of Scots, and seems 
 to have been written out of its author's sheer joy in words. 
 The First Prologue makes an interesting defence of Aeneas's 
 treatment of Dido, and the Sixth, with its portrayal of Virgil 
 as a Christian before Christ, and its defence of his picture of 
 Hell, would alone be sufficient to prove Douglas's mediaeval- 
 ness of outlook, which is further evident from his recurrent 
 praise of Chaucer. 
 
 Contemporary with the four just mentioned were a number Minor 
 of minor poets, some of whom are mentioned by Dunbar in Scottish 
 his Lament for the Makaris, and others by Gavin Douglas in Poets. 
 The Palace of Honour. The chief claim to renown of Walter 
 Kennedy (1460 ?-1508 !) rests on his Flyting with Dunbar: 
 he has also left a few short poems of small value. The single 
 
 goem -The Adventures of a Courtier left by Quintyne Shaw 
 ardly justifies the high place awarded him by Douglas. The 
 remaining poets in this class are little more than names. 
 
 We have already noticed that side by side with the courtly Scottish 
 and derivative strain in Scottish poetry, there existed a spon- Popular 
 taneous and native one, and that this had been given utter- Poetry, 
 ance even by the Chaucerians themselves. It reappears in 
 simpler and more characteristic form in a considerable number 
 of poems, many of which are preserved to us in those 
 very precious collections, the Asloan, the Bannatyne, and the 
 Maitland MSS. Most of these pieces are anonymous : nearly 
 all of their dates are uncertain : but in many cases they go 
 back far beyond the period we have just reviewed. Many of 
 them are romances or ballads, and as such are discussed 
 elsewhere in this volume. The rest deal, often very coarsely, 
 
 1 Cf. Dym skyis oft furth warpit feirful levyne, 
 
 Flaggis of fyir, and mony felloun flawe, 
 
 Sharp soppis of sleit, and of the snypand snaw. 
 
 The dowy die his war all donk and wait, 
 
 The law vaille flodderit all wyth spait, 
 
 The plane stretis and every hie way 
 
 Full of fluschis, doubbis, myre and clay. 
 
 2 Cf. The flour delice furth spred his hevinly hew, 
 
 Flour dammes, and columby blank and blew ; 
 Seyr downis smaill on dent de lion sprang, 
 The yong grene blomyt straberry levis amang ; 
 Gymp gerraflouris thar royn levys unschet, 
 Fresh prymros and the purpour violet. 
 
62 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 with a variety of themes dear to the popular mind, such as 
 love, satire, fun, and drink. The two most famous poems of 
 this class, Christ's Kirk on the Green and Peebles to the Play, 
 describe with great spirit the merriment and wild horseplay 
 of a Scottish village festival. Both are written in a ten-lined 
 rhyming alliterative stanza, and both have been assigned at 
 different times to James I, and to James V, of Scotland. It 
 has been claimed that their language indicates a later author- 
 ship than that of the first monarcn ; but this argument has 
 not been stated with sufficient force to deprive him of the 
 poems, and tradition is all in favour of his keeping them. 
 Two other poems, Bauf Coilyear and John the Reeve, which 
 have been discussed in an earlier chapter, represent a recurrent 
 theme of popular verse, the entertainment of a king by 
 a doughty man of the people, who is ignorant of his identity, 
 and subsequently visits the Court and finds his guest. 
 
 A kindred aspiration of the people is satisfied in the third 
 part of that very curious production, Golkelby's Sow, in the 
 raising of the stalwart peasant, Flammislie, to the earldom of 
 Flanders. The first part of the poem describes the ' feill 
 ferlifull deidis ' with which the Sow discomfits those who had 
 assembled to kill and cook her. Sir John EowWs Cursing 
 of the stealers of his fowls has been voted dull by some ; but 
 there is a certain humour, Rabelaisian through its amassment 
 of detail no less than through its coarseness, in the terrific 
 lists of torments intended for the miscreants. Sym and his 
 Brother makes fun of two St. Andrews palmers good- 
 humouredly, yet in a way which seems to indicate that 
 the more venomous satire against church abuses which was 
 to follow in the work of Lyndsay, had for long had a basis 
 in popular feeling. Lyndsay's moralizing tendency finds its 
 counterpart in The Three Priests of Peebles, a sequence of 
 tales which, despite their didacticism, are by no means dull. 
 Bacchanalian poetry is well represented by the Ballad of 
 Allan o' Maut, with its effective refrain, 'Why sould not 
 Allan honorit be ? ' The duel of sex, so often a theme of 
 fun in the popular domestic ballad, is comically handled in 
 The Wife of Auchtermuchty and The Dumb Wife. In both 
 of these the husband is discomfited, in the first case because 
 he has attempted to play housewife, in the second because he 
 has foolishly made his dumb wife speak with the aid of magic. 
 A very curious kind of poem is that which flings together at 
 haphazard marvels of fairy lore or popular superstition. Such 
 a poem is Lichtoun's Dream : another fragment tells of 
 
 the great king of Babylon, Berdok, 
 That dwelt in summer until ane bowkill 1 stok, 
 And into winter, when the frosts are fell, 
 He dwelt for cauld intil a cokkil shell. 
 
 A third poem tells many quaint wonders of the Gryre- Car ling, 
 
 1 Cabbage. 
 
SCOTTISH POETRY 63 
 
 or Scotch Mother-Witch. The theme of love is treated 
 humorously in Jock and Jinny, which foreshadows^ Allan 
 Gray ; and with a pathos worthy of llenryson himself, in 
 The Mourning Maiden. Though these popular songs and 
 tales do not often reward the seeker for pure poetry, it is they, 
 and not the more exquisite Chaucerian verse, which prepare 
 the way for such national singers as Kamsay, Fergusson, and 
 Burns. 
 
 In capacity for pure poetry, Sir David Lyndsay (1490 ?- Lyndsay. 
 1555 ?) is certainly inferior to all of the four great Scottish 
 poets discussed earlier in this chapter, yet he had much of 
 the vigour and satiric power which we have recognized in at 
 least three of them ; and his early work shows that, like them, 
 he had felt the spell of Chaucer. Yet, in the great body of 
 his writings, Chaucer's influence plays but little part, and his 
 most considerable production, the Satire of the Three Estates, 
 owes its formal characteristics not to him but to the example 
 of the early drama. Furthermore, the satire which was his 
 main strength is not Chaucer's satire. This had been devoted 
 almost entirely to enhancing interest of story or character : 
 Lyndsay's was primarily didactic and political, and had for 
 its chief object the welfare of Scotland. 
 
 This political obsession appears strongly even in his earliest The 
 work, The Dreme, though this is stronglv coloured by the influ- Dreme. 
 ence of Chaucer, transmitted through Dunbar and Gavin 
 Douglas. In this poem, the poet makes a progress of the 
 universe under the guidance of Dame Remembrance, who in 
 her grace and benevolence differs notably from the caustic 
 nymph of The Palace of Honour. She takes him through heaven, 
 hell, and all the spheres, gives him a survey of earth and 
 a succinct list of its chief countries, and transports him to 
 the Earthly Paradise, and hence, by a rather abrupt transi- 
 tion, to sixteenth-century Scotland. Arrived there, the poet 
 inveighs against the abuses of his country through several 
 j>ages of rime royal, sheeting the responsibility home to 
 Scotland's rulers, and ending with a solemn appeal to the youth- 
 ful James V to govern righteously. In the charming prologue 
 to this poem, Lyndsay describes his ingenious methods of 
 entertaining the monarch during his attendance on him in 
 his babyhood. 
 
 In the Complaint to the King's Grace he warns James 
 solemnly against corruption, and, especially, ecclesiastical 
 corruption ; and he concludes with a brightly expressed 
 but quite serious aspiration, that the king will advance his 
 mentor's welfare. The inveterate scorn which Lyndsay 
 always felt, or professed to feel, for ecclesiastical wrong-doers, 
 appears once more in the Testament and Complaint of our 
 Sovereign Lord's Papyngo, in which the king's parrot, being 
 on the point of death, delivers itself concerning the abuses of 
 the realm. The first part of this poem staggers under a heavy 
 load of didacticism, but the second contains some pleasing 
 
64 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 passages, notably the dialogue between the papyngo and those 
 unwelcome ecclesiastics, the magpie,' the raven and the hawk, 
 who pretend to shrive it, and finally rend and bear away its 
 half-cold body. A more pretentious and less readable produc- 
 tion is A Dialogue between Experience and a Courtier, which 
 extends to six thousand lines of octosyllabic couplet, and 
 describes the whole history, religious and secular, of the 
 universe, from the Creation to the Day of Doom. Lyndsay 
 put the couplet to far better use in the History of Squire 
 Meldrum, in which he describes his neighbour's adventures 
 in love and war with spirit, charm, and occasional strokes of 
 friendly fun. 
 
 The Satire The Satire of the Three Estates is a political morality play, 
 of the and as has been frequently noticed, it is in some sense a counter- 
 part to the English political moralities of John Bale. Nomi- 
 hstates. nally its chief character is Eex Humanitas, whose favour is 
 sought, after approved ' morality ' fashion, by such competing 
 vices and virtues as Sensuality and Deceit, Chastity and Good 
 Counsel. Much more interesting, however, and evidently 
 much more near to Lyndsay's heart, is John the Common- 
 weal, who symbolizes Scotland, and makes his complaint 
 against the two temporal estates and the single ecclesiastical 
 one. It is significant of Lyndsay's point of view that whereas 
 the temporal estates repent and amend their ways, ' Spiritu- 
 ality ' declines to do this, and justifies her general conduct in 
 a passage containing some of the poet's keenest and most 
 ironical wit. The interest of the play lies partly in such 
 strokes as this, partly in its interludes, which contain vivid 
 pictures of Scottish peasant life, and are lit both with humour 
 and with a saeva indignatio against the clerical oppressors 
 of the poor. The Satire numbers some five thousand lines, and, 
 as we are informed by the proclamation made on its perform- 
 ance at Cupar-Fife, it began at seven in the morning and 
 continued throughout the whole day. 
 
 Lyndsay's strong anti-clerical bias appears again in Kitty's 
 Confession, a lively diatribe against the auricular confession of 
 women by priests, and in The Tragedy of the Cardinal, written 
 shortly after the death of Beaton, whom it savagely attacks. 
 The Answer to the King's Flyting is Lyndsay's contribution 
 to a poetical jousting between himself and the ' Guidman of 
 Ballengeich', on whose gallantries it throws a curious light. 
 The king's poem has been lost. Chief among Lyndsay's 
 remaining minor poems are the Deploration of Queen Magdalene, 
 an elegy on the death of James's first queen, and The Petition 
 of Bagsche, an amusingly conceived sermon delivered by an 
 old sinner of a hound to several younger dogs. 
 
 Minor Lyndsay, in a well-known passage of the Complaint of the 
 
 Scottish Papyngo, mentions several contemporary poets, including 
 
 Poets. Sir James Inglis, Stewart of Lome, Kyd, and Bellenden. Many 
 
 of their poems appear in the Maitland and Bannatyne MSS., 
 
 but few are of any value. Somewhat more important is the 
 
SCOTTISH POETRY 65 
 
 verse of Sir Richard Maitland (1496-1586), who compiled the 
 valuable literary collection bearing his name. Some of his 
 poems are religious ; but he appears to greater advantage in 
 his Satires on the Age and on the Town Ladies, in the former 
 of which he becomes an effective laudator temporis acti. More 
 terse and incisive is his short poem On the Folly of an Old 
 Man's marrying a Young Woman. His lines Against the 
 Thieves of Liddesdale throw a grim light on the turbulence of 
 the Scottish border. His poetic quality, however, is very 
 thin. A far truer note is heard in the poetry of Alexander 
 Scott (1525-1584), who has a lyric gift greatly in advance of 
 his age. His best love poems Oppressed heart, endure, 
 To Love unloved, Lo, what it is to love are quickened by strong 
 personal feeling which is all the more moving for its infusion 
 of bitterness. In the Jousting Betwixt Adamson and Sym, 
 Scott has recourse both to the metre and the spirit of Christ's 
 Kirk on the Green, and the result is racy and amusing. No 
 amusement and very little interest can be found in two long 
 allegories, The Seven Sages and The Court of Venus, written 
 by John Holland about the year 1560. 
 
 Though the work of Alexander Montgomerie (1556 ?-1610 ?) Mont- 
 falls somewhat outside our period, he may conveniently be gomerie. 
 noticed here, as he has much in common with the older 
 ' makars '. His best-known poem is The Cherry and the Slae, 
 a lengthy allegory which hovers somewhat disconcertingly 
 between romantic love and moral edification. Its best part 
 is its commencement, in which the conventional pictures of 
 Nature, which Montgomerie took over from preceding allegories, 
 are freshly revived by a skilful hand. There is great charm 
 in the description of the river foaming over crags into its deep 
 ' lyn ', with the lowly and bitter sloe beside it, and, overhead, 
 the sweet red cherries of the poet's desire. The latter part of 
 the poem is overcrowded with abstractions, and tends to become 
 wearisome. The quatorzain in which it is written has a seduc- 
 tive wheel and chime, and owes much of its effect to the 
 cunning internal rhymes of the concluding quatrain. This 
 metre, which may possibly be of Montgomerie's invention, was 
 afterwards used consummately by Burns. Montgomerie wrote 
 a good deal of miscellaneous verse, including seventy sonnets, 
 a coarsely abusive Flyting, of the conventional type, directed 
 against Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, and one particularly 
 charming lyric with an effective refrain, ' The nicht is near 
 gone.' 
 
66 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 BALLADS AND LYRICS 
 
 Origins of IT will be seen from the last chapter that during the fif- 
 the Ballad teenth century, official poetry if this term may be applied 
 ecom- O poetry of definite authorship seldom reached a high 
 munal standard ; but for this there is a definite alleviation in the 
 )ory ' rare beauty of the anonymous lyric and ballad poetry of the 
 period. The early history of the English ballad is obscure and 
 vast ; the controversy concerning it shares the nature of 
 infinity. It is certain that the ballad in Western Europe 
 was originally composed in order to be sung with recitative 
 and chorus as an adjunct to dancing. It is therefore lyrical 
 in its origin, and is closely connected with the carole or French 
 round dance. * The proper form of the ballads is that of the 
 carole with narrative substance added.' l To this connexion 
 are due the refrain which still survives in many ballads, and 
 doubtless also the ' incremental repetitions ', or variations of 
 the same statement, in successive stanzas. Attempts have 
 been made, chiefly by certain American writers, to assume 
 that because the authors of ballads are unknown, they are 
 to be regarded not as professional singers but as obscure 
 members of the village community on whom the gift of song 
 suddenly descended during the dance, much as the gift of 
 prayer descends on Salvationists at a revival meeting. ' They 
 are not professional poets or minstrels,' says Professor Gum- 
 mere, ' but members of the folk.' Professor Kittredge goes 
 further, and claims that the ' process of improvisation is not 
 a solitary act ' but one ' in which the audience participate ' 
 after some mysterious fashion which gives them ' a kind of 
 share in the poetic act '. The Professor adds, after further 
 speculation : ' Thus we have arrived at a state of things 
 which is in effect scarcely to be distinguished from the sup- 
 posedly inconceivable phenomenon of a numerous throng 
 composing poetry with one voice.' 
 
 This conclusion, which is an extreme expression of the 
 ' communal theory ' of the ballad's origin, seems to the present 
 writer to be based on mere conjecture, unsupported by any 
 weight of evidence or probability. The actual facts concerning 
 the birth of ballads are so scanty that it is as difficult to 
 marshal them for the refutation of this theory as for its demon- 
 stration ; but the burden of proof certainly lies with those 
 who advance a conjecture so utterly out of keeping with all 
 the known facts of literary composition, and that burden 
 so far has never been satisfactorily shouldered. Most folk who 
 know and love poetry would surely rebel at the idea that 
 Olasgerion and The Wife of Usher's TFeM,with their exquisite, 
 
 1 W. P. Ker, English Mediaeval Literature. 
 
BALLADS AND LYRICS 67 
 
 if primitive, artistry, and their perfect unity of feeling, were 
 produced by any kind of improvisation, least of all by the 
 many-mouthed improvisation of the many-headed. Even 
 were the assumption granted, it could account only for a crude, 
 short, and primitive form of the ballads, and not for the ex- 
 tended and comparatively finished narrative form in which 
 most of them now survive. This would have to be explained, 
 and is explained, by the more extreme * communalists ' 
 through the assumption of a secondary communal process of 
 gradual revision and addition hardly less mysterious or better 
 authenticated than the first. In default of more convincing 
 explanations, we may assume that there was a definite, indi- 
 vidual, author for each of the ballads, that he composed these 
 before, and not at, the choral singing, and that in the case of 
 the best ballads thus produced, the original form was similar 
 in general characteristics to our own. Furthermore, as the 
 choral dance was by no means solely confined to villagers 
 to the ' people ' as contrasted with the gentry and aristocracy 
 there is no reason for assuming that the ballad poet was the 
 artless simpleton postulated by extreme communalist con- 
 jecture. Rather may we agree with Professor Child that ' the 
 oallad is not the product or the property of the common 
 orders of the people '. 
 
 It has been shown that in Denmark and elsewhere certain Ballad 
 surviving historical ballads go back to the eleventh century, and 
 In England a poem on the subject of Judas, generally Romance, 
 classed as a ballad, is found in a thirteenth -century manu- 
 script ; but ballads in the ordinary sense of the term ballads 
 with a story in them such as Sir Patrick Spens, or The Mill- 
 dams of Binnorie are not found in any quantity till late in 
 the Middle Ages, and hardly at all before the fifteenth century. 
 Some ballads are derived from romances ; but many are not, 
 and that view cannot be seriously entertained which regards 
 the ballad form as a degradation of, or even as a derivation 
 from, the romance form. Professor Ker has, indeed, indicated 
 an essential difference between the two kinds when he shows 
 that the ballads generally end tragically, whereas the romances 
 do not. The ballad in this respect is more akin to the older . 
 epic poetry, to which it is related ' not by derivation but by 
 sympathy '. The earlier and more imaginative English ballads 
 are at once epical or narrative, tragical, and lyrical. But it 
 is to their lyrical element and their connexion with the choral 
 dance that they owe their peculiar sweetness, simplicity, and 
 emotional intensity. 
 
 The ballad probably passed out of its choral stage toward Present 
 the beginning of the fifteenth century, and was recited in- Form of 
 stead of being sung. This may have led to the amplification the 
 of certain ballads already in existence, though such amplifi- Ballads, 
 cation was probably of definite authorship, and must be 
 carefully distinguished from the hypothetical communal 
 growth to which reference has just been made. In any case, 
 
68 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 a longer variety of the ballad became popular, one adapted 
 to the art of the reciter rather than of the singer, and now 
 lacking the choral refrain. To this class belong many, though 
 by no means all, of the historical ballads, and of those dealing 
 with Eobin Hood. Several of this last variety attain the 
 length, though not the nature, of the epic. As ' the longer 
 recital tended to become more prevalent, the shorter form 
 became more lyrical, so that it often becomes difficult to make 
 any definite distinction between a ballad and a song V So far 
 was oral transmission from improving the quality of the 
 ballad that in most cases it corrupted and weakened it, and 
 most students would agree with Professor Child that * the 
 ballad is at its best when it is early caught and fixed in print '. 
 A further source of alteration must be sought in the liberties 
 taken with certain of the old ballads by certain of their modern 
 editors ; but it would be heartless to apply the term ' corrup- 
 tion ' to the deft, if not always scrupulous, strokes, by which 
 Percy, and after him Scott, emended and amplified older 
 versions. Many ballads exist in two or more variant forms. 
 Practically all the available forms of all ballads extant in his 
 day are preserved in the great collection of Professor Child, 2 
 whose name, together with the two names just mentioned, 
 must be honoured wherever ballads are known and loved. 
 The chief varieties of the ballad can be distinguished here 
 
 1 T. F. Henderson, The Ballad in Literature. 
 
 2 The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, five vols., Boston and 
 New York, 1882-98, reissued with certain abridgements, by Helen Child 
 Sargent and George L. Kittredge, one vol., Boston, 1904. The earlier 
 classic collections, in their best editions, are The Percy Folio Manuscripts, 
 ed. J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall, three vols., London, 1867-8 ; and 
 Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, edited and revised by T. F. Hen- 
 derson, four vols., Edinburgh, 1902. See also The Oxford Book of English 
 Ballads, chosen and. edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Clarendon Press, 
 1910. For the ' communalist ' hypothesis in its extreme form, see 
 Kittredge's prefatory essay to the edition of Child just mentioned, 
 and various publications by F. B. Gummere, notably The Popular Ballad, 
 Boston and New York, 1907, and his article on Ballads in The Cambridge 
 History of English Literature, vol. ii. For a cogent refutation of the 
 theory see The Ballad in Literature, T. F. Henderson, Cambridge, 1912, 
 a short work of great value for the general study of the form. On the 
 
 1 subject generally see G. Gregory Smith, The Transition Period, London, 
 1900; F. Sidgwick's introduction (1903) to his Popular Ballads of the 
 Olden Time ; Andrew Lang's articles on the Ballad in Chambers's Cyclo- 
 paedia, 1902, and in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1910 ; W. P. Ker's 
 Epic and Romance, 1897; his English Mediaeval Literature (Home 
 University Library) ; and his very notable article On the History of the 
 Ballads, 1100-1500, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. iv. Various 
 Continental works bear directly or indirectly on the history of the form 
 in England. Among the most notable of these are S. H. Grundtvig's 
 Danmarks Gamle Folkeviser, five vols., Copenhagen, 1853-1890, and 
 Les Origines de la Poesie lyrique en France au may en age, by Alfred 
 Jeanroy, 1889. 
 
BALLADS AND LYRICS 71 
 
 in the briefest outline only. Most beautiful of all are 
 which deal with magic or romance. In Thomas the Bhymer, i - 
 the Queen of Elfland betrays her lover with a kiss to seven 
 years of service in her grim and wondrous country. In Tarn 
 Lin, the lover is similarly enthralled by the * Queen o' Fairies ', 
 but is rescued by a fair lady of earth who holds him fast in 
 her arms throughout fearsome transformations. In other 
 cases the victim is a woman and the wooer a warlock ; it is 
 thus in the magical stanzas which show the Daemon Lover 
 speeding o'er the sea with the doomed bride whom he has 
 tempted away from her husband and child : 
 
 ' O baud your tongue o' weeping,' he says, 
 
 ' Let a' your follies a- bee ; 
 I'll show where the white lilies grow 
 
 On the banks o' Italic.' 
 
 She hadna sailed a league, a league, 
 
 A league but barely three, 
 Till grim, grim grew his countenance 
 
 And gurly grew the sea. 
 
 ; What hills are yon, yon pleasant hills, 
 
 The sun shines sweetly on t ' 
 ' O yon are the hills o' Heaven,' he said, 
 
 ' Where you will never won.' 
 
 In some ballads a dead lover visits one still living, and the 
 sequel is generally tragic. The living visits the dead in The 
 Unquiet Grave, which tells its story in language of a primitive 
 intensity : 
 
 The twelve-month and a day being up, 
 
 The dead began to speak : 
 ' Oh, who sits weeping on my grave, 
 
 And will not let me sleep 't ' 
 
 ' 'Tis I, my love, sits on your grave, 
 
 And will not let you sleep ; 
 For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips, 
 
 And that is all I seek.' 
 
 ' You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips ; 
 
 But my breath smells earthy strong ; 
 If you have one kiss of my clay -cold lips 
 
 Your time will not be long.' 
 
 Where the tragedy or romance are human and not super- Ballads of 
 human, there is perhaps still greater beauty. In certain Love and 
 ballads, as in Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, a woman in this Death. 
 case the ' nut-brown bride ' murders her rival and is in turn 
 slain by him for whom the deed was done. In Little Musgrave 
 and Lady Bernard and Old Robin of Portingale, vengeance is 
 taken by a wronged husband on his wife and her lover. A 
 fairly frequent theme, developed elaborately in The Lass of 
 Locliroyan, is that of a mother who cruelly interposes between 
 
68 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 3*er son and his sweetheart and brings about the death of both. 
 Equally tragic themes of love are developed in three particu- 
 larly fine ballads, Glasgerion, Clerk Saunders, and Child Waters. 
 A further theme which recurs in numerous ballads, sometimes 
 with a happy, sometimes with a tragic sequel, is that of the 
 conflict in a girl's heart and life between true love and the love 
 chosen for her by her family. In one ballad of this class, 
 Lord Ingram and Childe Vyet, Lady Maisry answers her father 
 exquisitely : 
 
 Get up now, Lady Maisry, 
 
 Put on your wedding-gown ; 
 For Lord Ingram he will be here, 
 
 Your wedding must be done. 
 
 ' I'd rather be Childe Vyet's wife, 
 
 The white fish for to sell, 
 Before I were Lord Ingram' s wife 
 
 To wear the silk so well. 
 
 'I'd rather be Childe Vyet's wife, 
 
 With him to beg my bread, 
 Before I were Lord Ingram' s wife 
 
 To wear the gold so red.' 
 
 Somewhat apart, owing to its dialogue form, and its meditated 
 and highly finished art, stands The Nut-Brown Maid, which 
 has been classified by some as an ' art-ballad ', in contra- 
 distinction to the ' ballads of the people '. The great beauty 
 of its metre and alternating refrain, and its delicate sense of 
 emotion and romance, give this idyll of the wild-wood place 
 among the greatest poems of the century. Later it was re- 
 handled artificially and rather distressingly by Prior. Its 
 original grace and music make it a thing of indescribable 
 charm. 
 
 Such are a few only of the chief themes taken up by the 
 ballad of romance. In a slightly different class we find ' ro- 
 mance shading off into real history', 1 as in Sir Patrick Spens, 
 Hugh of Lincoln, The Queen's Marie. Of the historical 
 ballads the classic examples are The Ballad of Otterbourne 
 and The Hunting of the Cheviot in its later and less excellent 
 Border version, Chevy Chase. Some spirited ballads of this variety 
 Ballads, deal with border feuds or forays. Several describe the dashing 
 rescue of an imprisoned comrade, and here the historical 
 ballads connect with certain of the Robin Hood class. Thus 
 the two doughty outlaws and archers of the woodland, Adam 
 Bell and Clym of the Cleugh, break into ' Carleile town ' by 
 themselves, and snatch William Cloudesley away from the 
 Justice and Sheriff and whole assembled populace at the foot 
 of the gallows-tree. The beauty of this proceeding lay in its 
 perfect simplicity the two archers good had only to put 
 
 1 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, Preface to the Oxford Book of English 
 Ballads. 
 
BALLADS AND LYRICS 71 
 
 a * bearing arrow ' through the hearts of the two chief magis- 
 trates, and the whole martial populace melted away : 
 
 All the citizens fast 'gan fly, 
 
 They durst no longer abide, 
 There lightly they loosed Cloudesley 
 
 Where he with ropes lay tied. 
 
 Of course it must not be forgotten that * Carleile town ' was 
 a notoriously soft crib to crack in the vainglorious opinion, 
 at least, of the Scottish ballad-maker : being, indeed, the town 
 from which the Bold Buccleugh, with but twenty Scots and 
 ten ' or, historically speaking, about two hundred had in 
 Elizabeth's day rescued the redoubtable Kinmont Willie in 
 the teeth of his arch-enemies, the ' False Sakelde ' and the 
 * Keen Lord Scroope V Other admirable border ballads are 
 Jock o' the Side and Archie o' Cawfield. 
 
 Of the ballads dealing with the green-wood, the fine Robin Robin 
 and Gandelyn is among the oldest. There is very spirited Hood 
 work throughout A Little Geste of Robin Hood and his Meiny, Ballads, 
 which is the longest of all the long Robin Hood poems, and 
 constitutes by itself a whole collection of ballads. Perhaps 
 the finest thing among all the green-wood ballads is Robin 
 Hood and the Monk, with its magical opening : 
 
 In somer when the shawes be sheyne, 
 
 And leves be large and long, 
 Hit is full mery in feyre foreste, 
 
 To here the foulys song : 
 
 To se the dere draw to the dale 
 
 And leve the hilles hee, 
 And shadow them in leves grene, 
 
 Under the greenwood tree. 
 
 Many of the Robin Hood ballads exist in a debased broadside Ballads, 
 form ; but of the ballad generally in its decay no account can ld and 
 here be given. Not all of the later anonymous ballads are new - 
 debased : some of them, as Mary Ambree, are spirited, others, 
 as Barbara Allen, are delicately beautiful ; but their grace is not 
 the grace of the earlier ballads, of such exquisite wildings as 
 Ohild Waters and Edward. The charm of all these is the 
 charm of simplicity, and it is felt even in their quaint lapses 
 in the stanza of Young Bekie, for instance, in which Isbel, 
 the daughter of the King of France, prepares to free her 
 languishing lover from prison : 
 
 Oh when she saw him, young Bekie, 
 
 Her heart was wondrous sair, 
 For the mice but and the bold rottons 
 
 Had eaten his yellow hair ; 
 
 1 The ballad of Kinmont Willie owes much, if not the whole, of its 
 present form to the hand of Scott : but we have no right to doubt his 
 assurance that he drew on an original dealing explicitly with this exploit. 
 
72 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and in the more beautiful strangeness of Bonnie Annie, which 
 describes how the ship's captain is forced to cast his sweet- 
 heart overboard with his own hands, the crew holding that she 
 brings the ship ill-luck : 
 
 He has ta'en her in his arms twa, lo, lifted her cannie, 
 He has thrown her out owre-board, his ain dear Annie. 
 
 The corse it did float, the ship it did follow, 
 Until that they came to the high banks of Yarrow. 
 
 ' I'd bury my love on the high banks of Yarrow 
 
 But the wood it is dear and the planks they are narrow.' 
 
 He made his love a coffin o' the gowd sae yellow, 
 And buried his bonnie love down in a sea valley. 
 
 These extracts, together with the more highly wrought ones 
 previously quoted, will show how utterly different the early 
 anonymous ballads are from the sophisticated modern variety 
 of definite authorship. Their spell lies, above all things, in 
 their utter freedom from self-consciousness ; and it is just here 
 that The Daemon Lover and The Laily Worm differ from The 
 Ancient Mariner, where the art is as self-conscious as it is 
 consummate. Despite its wildness and wonder, there is little 
 of the old ballad touch in this : 
 
 The very deep did rot : Christ ! 
 
 That ever this should be ! 
 Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs 
 
 Upon the slimy sea. 
 
 Around, about, in reel and rout, 
 The death fires danced at night; 
 
 The water, like a witch's oils, 
 Burnt green and blue and white. 
 
 Even where modern ballads are written by a master expressly 
 on the older pattern, they will hardly deceive the initiated. 
 Swinburne's posthumous ballads were written avowedly as such 
 imitations ; but for all their plausibility they out-Herod 
 Herod : their licence is too licentious, too studiously irregular, 
 to convince. 
 
 We have seen that the ballad is closely connected in its 
 origin with the carole or round dance, and this connexion gives 
 it kinship with the anonymous lyric poetry of the period, much 
 Carols, of which is very beautiful. Most notable of all are the carols, 
 which owe their name, and something of their nature, to the 
 dance just mentioned. Carols had been brought to England 
 from France as early as the twelfth century, and were prob- 
 ably freely composed in English throughout the thirteenth ; 
 but the finest and fullest collection of them is to be found in 
 certain fifteenth-century manuscripts, most notably in the 
 Sloane and the Bodleian (Eng. Poet E. 1). They have some- 
 times been attributed to the minstrels, but it is more probable 
 that ' their authors were clerks, although, likely enough, clerks 
 
BALLADS AND LYRICS 73 
 
 of the errant persuasion V Their suggested origin in the folk 
 song and pagan festival cannot be discussed here. Most of 
 them show a lifting of the gloom which is so common in the 
 earlier mediaeval religious poetry, and is doubtless a survival 
 from Anglo-Saxon times. This new cheerfulness is due in 
 part to their French origin, in part to the natural joy of the 
 Christmas festival. It is often spiritual, as in 
 
 There is no rose of swich vertu 
 As is the rose that bare Jhesu : 
 Alleluia. 
 
 For in this rose conteined was 
 Hevene and erth in litel space : 
 Res miranda. 
 
 The aungels sungen, the schepherds to, 
 Gloria in excelsis Deo, 
 Gaudeamus. 
 
 It appears in a quieter form in ' I sing of a maiden that is 
 makeless ', the most exquisite of all the carols, and one of the 
 most exquisite of all English religious poems. It recurs, often 
 very charmingly, in the lullabies which spring naturally from 
 the theme of Mary's motherhood : 
 
 Mary mother, I am thy child 
 
 Thogh I be laid in stall, 
 Lordes and dukes shall worship me 
 
 And so shall kinges all. 
 
 Ye shall well see that lunges three 
 
 Shall come the twelfthe day, 
 For this behest give me thy brest, 
 
 And sing, By by, lullay. 
 
 The spiritual exaltation of the season passes, in some cases, 
 into material rejoicing in its good cheer, whence come carols 
 of wassailry and the boar's head : 
 
 The boar's head in hand bring I, 
 Caput apri defero. 
 
 There were also many secular poems in praise of drinking and Songs of 
 revelry : Revelry 
 
 I care right nought, I take no thought and Love. 
 
 For clothes to keep me warm ; 
 Have I good drink, I surely think 
 Nothing can do me harm. 
 
 For truly than I fear no man 
 
 Be he never so bold, 
 When I am armed and throughly warmed 
 
 With jolly good ale and old. 
 
 Henry VIII wrote several poems of good-fellowship and 
 
 1 E. K. Chambers, Some, Aspects of Mediaeval Lyric, 
 D 3 
 
74 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 love which survive in the song-book bearing his name. Many 
 English love-lyrics of the period derive from such French 
 forms as the pastourelle, the ballade, and the aube, or song of 
 the lover against dawn, familiar to all in Romeo and Jidiet. 
 There are also invectives against women, of the type which 
 became familiar in the later broadside ballads. Other poems 
 of moral counsel ' bring the eternal note of sadness in ' : 
 
 Earth upon earth would be a king ; 
 But how earth to earth shall, thinks he no thing : 
 When earth biddeth earth his rents home bring, 
 Then shall earth from earth have a hard parting. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE PECOCK TO MALORY 
 
 Lack of tradition in prose Pecock, Capgrave, Caxton, Berners, 
 Malory. 
 
 Lack of IN prose, as in poetry, the fifteenth century was a period of 
 Tradition no very momentous achievement. The fourteenth century had 
 in Prose, supplied it with no foundation on which a great prose literature 
 might be built. Only after a hard struggle had the language 
 of England made good its right to express the thought and 
 feelings of Englishmen ; and that right, even when won, was 
 by no means unchallenged. The vernacular, owing to its lack 
 of high tradition and its consequent uncertainty of form, was 
 rejected by many in favour of Latin as a means of learned 
 expression. In poetry Chaucer had set a tradition which, how- 
 ever interrupted and misunderstood, showed all men that 
 English metre was capable of great and various things. In 
 prose, despite the sudden glory of Mandeville, there had been 
 no such tradition ; and although in the following century 
 certain writers strove to create one, there could obviously, as 
 yet, be no such succession of finished work as was to follow in 
 such an age as Dryden's. 
 
 Certain writings, however, are important as showing signs 
 of effort and transition. Toward the middle of the century 
 Pecock. Reginald Pecock (1395-1460), Bishop of St. Asaph, and subse- 
 quently of Chichester, published his Represser of over-much 
 blaming of the Clergy, a work intended as a counterblast to the 
 Lollards, but ultimately condemned by those in authority as 
 heretical. His arguments do not concern us here : what does 
 concern us greatly is that, like Wyclif, he deliberately chose 
 English for the purpose of theological argument, and that his 
 handling of it is clear and cogent. The vernacular at this 
 period was necessarily lacking in technical terms fit to express 
 logical and theological conceptions. Pecock set himself, with 
 great ingenuity and will, to supply such terminology, giving 
 contemporary words a fresh meaning, reviving archaisms, and 
 
PECOCK TO MALORY 75 
 
 coining new words, both from Teutonic and Latin sources. His 
 prose, if it lacks finish, is at least forcible and various. 
 
 More simple in style, as less technical in subject, is the 
 Chronicle of England, the chief prose work in English of John 
 Capgrave (1393-1464), friar of Lynn in Norfolk. Capgrave's Capgrave. 
 English is terse and fairly workmanlike, but it lacks colour and 
 distinction, and the native vigour to be found in the chief work 
 of Sir John Fortescue (1394 ?-1476 ?), Chief Justice of England 
 under Henry VI. In The Difference between an Absolute and 
 a Limited Monarchy, Fortescue adapts the vernacular for legal 
 disquisition, as Pecock had adapted it for theological : yet his 
 book is by no means merely technical : it contains much 
 general comment on the social conditions of the time, and a very 
 lively passage contrasting the characteristics of the French and 
 English nations, much to the detriment of the former. 
 
 It is impossible here to deal in detail with the many minor 
 treatises of the period, and with such collections of letters as 
 that recording the interesting, but by no means always edify- 
 ing, doings and ambitions of the Paston family. 
 
 Two of the greatest writers of the period are translators. 
 Their work shows two things in chief first, that they recog- 
 nized the deficiencies of English when compared with languages 
 backed by an older tradition ; and second, that they were de- 
 termined to draw upon such languages in order to make these 
 deficiencies good. The position of one of these men, William 
 Caxton (1425-1491), gave him special opportunities for Caxton. 
 realizing his desire. In 1476 he set up his famous press at 
 Westminster, and thence continued to issue volumes till the 
 year of his death. It has been claimed, with some justice, that 
 he directed rather than followed the literary taste of his day ; 
 but his direction must have been in large measure conditioned 
 by the response he expected, and we may therefore take his 
 publications, and those of his successors, Richard Pynson and 
 Wynkyn de Worde, as fairly indicating the general reading of 
 the age. 
 
 Caxton, like all thinking men of his day, had the keenest 
 admiration for Chaucer, and he showed this by printing the 
 Canterbury Tales ; but the books issued from his press are, for 
 the most part, prose, and include devotional and didactic 
 treatises, romances, and histories, freely blended, in general, 
 with legend. About a third of his whole output consists of trans- 
 lations made either by himself or under his immediate direction. 
 The earliest of these the earliest book, indeed, printed in 
 the English language is the Eecuyell of the Histories of 
 Troy, in the preface of which he admits frankly, and with 
 pardonable envy, the superiority of the French tongue at this 
 period to the English. A more popular and considerable trans- 
 lation is the one made by him from the Latin and French 
 versions of the Golden Legend, that mediaeval storehouse of 
 wonder, piety, and saintly biography. His paraphrase, or very 
 five adaptation, of the Aeneid became, as we have seen, an 
 
76 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 object of scorn to Gavin Douglas. Caxton's other translations 
 include The Knight of the Town, Reynard the Fox, The Four 
 Sons ofAymon, and The History of Godfrey of Boulogne. Through 
 his choice of subjects he certainly did much to perpetuate the 
 taste for romances, though it is significant of the times that he 
 rejects the waning type written in alliterative verse for the 
 more fashionable variety derived from French prose. His 
 style, which appears most distinctively in the very instructive 
 prefaces to his different publications, alternates curiously 
 between the natural simplicity of the language at this period, 
 and the ornateness by which, quite consciously and explicitly, 
 he strove to give that language dignity. If his prose has seldom 
 the beauty so constant in Malory, its more direct passages are 
 admirably vigorous ; and its occasional defects of involution 
 and cumbrousness are those of one striving toward a richer and 
 nobler structure. 
 
 The same ornateness, due to the same striving, is evident in 
 certain works of another great translator, John Bourchier, Lord 
 Berners. Berners (1467-1533) ; but Berners' prose at its best has a tact 
 and music beyond Caxton's compass. His finest and longest 
 and most famous work is his translation of the Chronicles of 
 Froissart, which was issued from Pynson's press between 1523 
 and 1525. Berners, who had been bred in Froissart's school of 
 action and chivalry, set about his work with enthusiasm, and 
 did full justice to his incomparable model. His version is full 
 of vigour and charm, and reproduces Froissart's forthright 
 vividness, without undue ' aureation ' or embellishment. It 
 showed Englishmen what the French had already done in the 
 way of heightened historical narrative, and what they might do 
 themselves ; and in its general scope and method, if not in the 
 details of its style, it became a valued model for the Eliza- 
 bethan chroniclers. Among Berners' remaining translations 
 are two from the French, Arthur of Little Britain and Huon of 
 Bordeaux. In the first of these he is handicapped by the 
 crudity of his original. Huon, however, in its successive ver- 
 sions, had for long been one of the most popular romances in 
 French, and despite its digressions and weakness of construc- 
 tion, it may still be read with pleasure in Berners' spirited 
 English. His two remaining translations were made from 
 French versions of Spanish originals : the first is Guevara's 
 Golden Boole of Marcus Aurelius, subsequently Englished by 
 North under the title of The Diall of Princes ; the second is The 
 Castle of Love, a romance of chivalry. Both of these in their 
 original dress have the peculiar ornateness and artificiality 
 which, through North and Lyly, subsequently became ac- 
 climatised in England under the name of Euphuism. Berners 
 reproduces these qualities in his translation, and thus becomes 
 in a sense Lyly's forerunner as a craftsman in the ornate style. 
 Some have claimed that his general use of the ornate was not 
 due to his natural bent or inclination, but merely to the 
 accident which flung Guevara in his way ; yet his prefaces to 
 
PECOCK TO MALORY 77 
 
 Froissart arid Arthur, written before he had felt Guevara's 
 influence, are highly elaborated ; and he seems to have had 
 a natural tendency toward ' aureation ', which was inhibited 
 in his earlier translations only by the comparative lack of it 
 in his originals. In all its aspects his style is typical of the 
 effort and tendency of his period. 
 
 In literature the Middle Age was one of tradition and 
 borrowing. Originality was not, as now, considered essential 
 to greatness ; and translators might become important after 
 a fashion unknown to ourselves. Among them has sometimes Malory 
 been reckoned the author of that consummate prose romance, Morte 
 Morte d' Arthur, issued by Caxton from his press in 1485, d 1 Arthur. 
 but completed fifteen years earlier. ' Sir Thomas Malory, 
 Knight', to whom Caxton attributes the work, was, however, 
 far more than a mere translator, or even a mere compiler. 
 Even in his drawings on French sources, such as Merlin, he is 
 a selective artist, taking from them what suits him, and mould- 
 ing what he takes according to his own fine sense of fitness and 
 beauty. In many cases he reduces what he finds, in others he 
 adds matter of his own, and here again, as in his blending of 
 his divers sources, high artistry is evident. He shows the same 
 free and individual handling when drawing not on a French 
 but on an English source, as in his Fifth Book, where his 
 original is that fine rhyming romance, Morte cT Arthur. His 
 genius consists not in the invention of new plots or characters, 
 but in the imposition of superb form upon existing matter. It 
 is no more necessary to base his claim to originality on the 
 fact that no ' source ' has so far been discovered for his tale of 
 Beaumains and the damsel than it would be necessary to base 
 a similar claim in Shakespeare's case on a similar uncertainty 
 regarding Love's Labour's Lost, Nor is it reasonable to judge 
 the construction of the Morte cT Arthur by the strict and nar- 
 row canons which might be applicable to the modern ' well- 
 made play ' or short story. For all its surface inconsistencies, 
 it has a profound spiritual unity, and if Malory is not an im- 
 peccable artisan, he remains in all essentials a consummate 
 artist and genius. It was fitting that the Arthurian legend, 
 which had been begotten in England, should reach its highest 
 expression in this great English work. In its pages we meet 
 Arthur, as yet a true king and a warlike, of whom Tristram 
 could say ' Ye know not my lord Arthur, for all knights may 
 learn to be a knight of him ' : here too, are the four lovers, ' the 
 only ones that be within this land, that is Sir Launcelot du Lake 
 and Queen Guenever, and Sir Tristram de Liones and Queen 
 Isoud ' ; here are Isoud herself who ' died swooning upon the 
 corse of Sir Tristram, whereof was great pity ' : all the knights 
 of the Table Round sung by later poets : others, like the daunt- 
 less and tragic Sir Palomides, to whom no poet has yet given 
 his just due : x and others again like Sir Ozanna le Cure Hardy, 
 1 Though he enters, of course, into Tristram of Lyonesse and The 
 Defence of Guinevere. 
 
78 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Sir Griflet le Fils de Dieu, and Sir Selises of the Dolorous 
 Tower, whose very names are romance. As for the story, it 
 may be asked whether any tale in the world has surpassed its 
 greatest moments : the last parting, for instance, of Launcelot 
 and Guenever, or that other parting in which ' Arthur com- 
 manded to cast his sword Excalibur into the water and was 
 delivered to ladies in a barge '. 
 
 The spirit of the book, which is the spirit of all chivalry and 
 trust and faith, is best given in certain of its sayings : * Why, 
 said La Beale Isoud, are ye a knight and be no lover ? It is 
 shame to you : ^wherefore ye may not be called a good knight, 
 but if ye make quarrel for a lady . ' ' Sir Launcelot is come but of 
 the eighth degree from our Lord Jesu Christ, and Sir Galahad 
 is of the ninth degree from our Lord Jesu Christ, therefore 1 
 dare say they be the greatest gentlemen of the world.' 'This 
 day, said Sir Palomides, I did full uncourteously unto Sir 
 Launcelot, and full unknightly, and full knightly and cour- 
 teously he did to me again : for an he had been as ungentle to 
 me as I was to him, this day I had won no worship : and there- 
 fore, said Palomides, I shall be Sir Launcelot's knight while 
 my life lasteth.' ' Now reck I not though I die, for now I 
 hold me one of the blessed maidens of the world which hath 
 made the worthiest knight of the world.' 
 
 These passages illustrate not only the noble and passion- 
 ate spirit of the Morte d' Arthur, but its not less passionate 
 beauty of language. Simple, sensuous and exquisite, Malory's 
 best prose cannot be anatomized, nor ticketed with any label 
 of criticism. Its spell is best felt in the sentences just quoted, 
 and in these : * And then he began to tremble right hard 
 when the deadly flesh began to behold the spiritual things.' 
 ' In May when every lusty heart flourisheth and bourgeoneth.' 
 ' God give him joy that this spear made, for there came never 
 a better in my hand.' 'But she had taken such cold for the 
 default of help that deep draughts of death took her, that 
 needs she must die and depart out of this world, there was 
 none other bote.' ' But Sir Launcelot rode overthwart and 
 endlong in a wild forest, and held no path but as wild adven- 
 ture led him.' ' So the Bishop departed and did the cursing 
 in the most orgulist wise that might be done.' 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 BARCLAY AND SKELTON 
 
 IT has been shown in a previous chapter that the English 
 poets from Lydgate to Hawes owe much to Chaucer, and, 
 through him, to the Eomaunt of the Rose, and the French 
 tradition of allegory. French influence was also strong in the 
 early writings of Alexander Barclay (1475 $-1552), most 
 notably in his translation of Gringoire's Chasteau de Labeur. 
 
BARCLAY AND SKELTON 79 
 
 But it was from Germany that he took the conception of his Barclay 
 
 most important work, The Ship of Fools (1509), which is The Ship 
 a translation or free adaptation of Sebastian Brant's barren- of Fools, 
 schiff (1494). Brant had tried to make his readers morally 
 better by producing in them a sense of amused superiority to 
 the vices of their neighbours. Such a feeling being comfort- 
 able and human, his book had a vast popularity on the Con- 
 tinent, and was translated into Latin and thence into, the 
 chief European languages. In his brief prefatory note, Barclay 
 states that he has drawn on the ' Laten, Frenche and Doche ' 
 (German) versions for his own rendering. In the passage 
 dealing with ' unprofitable study ' he admits that 
 
 the enormity 
 
 Of our students and their obstinate error 
 Causeth me to write two sentences or three 
 More than I find written in iny author. 
 
 In point of fact, Barclay's translation is two and a half times 
 the length of his Latin original, and amounts to over fourteen 
 thousand lines. 1 He himself was apprehensive that he might 
 * halt in metre and err in eloquence ' ; and we shall do him 
 small injustice if we admit that he does both these things. He 
 has not the wit, or, failing wit, the nervous incisive speech, o'f 
 the true satirist ; and his pictures of fools and their folly are 
 imperfectly individualized, and tend always to the common- 
 place. It is only occasionally that his language attains even 
 such terseness as this : 
 
 Say, foolish father, hadst thou liever see 
 * Thy sonnes necke unwrested with a rope, 
 Than with a rod his skin should broken be ? 
 
 Or such quaintness as this : 
 
 Ye clerkes that on your shoulders bear the shield 
 Unto you granted by the university, 
 How dare ye adventure to fight in Christe's field 
 Against shine, without ye clear and guiltless be ? 
 Consider the Cock, and in him shall ye see 
 A great example, for with his winges thrice 
 He beateth himself to wake his own body 
 Before he crow, to cause others wake or rise. 
 
 The ballade octave used in this passage is reserved by Barclay 
 for the envoys he appends to his description of each class of 
 fools : the descriptions themselves are in rime royal. A wel- 
 come alleviation for the reader is provided by the quaint and 
 vivid woodcuts which Barclay took over from his German 
 original. 2 
 
 The Ship of Fools had considerable influence upon the 
 
 1 Cf. Arthur Koelbing, Cambridge History of English Literature, 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 2 These are reproduced in Jamicson's fine two-volume edition of the 
 poem (Paterson, Edinburgh : 1874). 
 
80 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 literature which immediately followed it, notably upon Oocke 
 LorelVs Bote, an amusing and strongly individual satire upon 
 Barclay's London tradesmen and their wives. Barclay's other chief 
 Eclogues, work, his Eclogues, gives him the distinction of being the first 
 writer of pastorals in English, and apart from such positive 
 value as the poems possess, this distinction is no mean one, 
 when we consider the subsequent history of the form in English. 
 The Eclogues, in which Menalcas, Coridon, and Amyntas 
 jostle witn such wholly un-Sicilian shepherds as Codrus and 
 Faustus, are free paraphrases of originals by Mantuan and 
 Aeneas Sylvius, with copious additions of Barclay's own. 
 Classical scholars who come to them seeking the exquisiteness 
 of Theocritus will be wofully disappointed ; but they contain 
 some interesting satire on the manners of the time : and the 
 combination of this with the pastoral convention foreshadows 
 the Shepherd's Calendar. 
 
 Skelton. If the Ship of Fools lacks vitality, there is no such lack in 
 the best work of John Skelton (1460 ?-1529), which falls into 
 a number of different kinds. His Garland of Laurel is in form 
 a fifteenth-century allegory of the familiar type ; it is written 
 largely in his own praise, and commemorates the presentation to 
 him of a laurel crown by the Countess of Surrey and her ladies. 
 A much more successful allegory is The Bowge of Court, a satire 
 in rime royal on the uncertainty and danger of court favour. 
 The personages of this poem Favell, Dissimulation, Sus- 
 picion, and others are not mere abstractions, but living per- 
 sonalities drawn with considerable vividness and force. In 
 these poems Skelton continues the Chaucerian tradition ; but 
 his other chief allegorical work, Magnificence, owes little if 
 anything to Chaucer, being a Morality Play, and a particu- 
 larly fine one. 1 Two further plays of his, now lost, but men- 
 tioned in the Garland of Laurel, are The Interlude of Virtue and 
 Achademios. 
 
 Skelton, who was a parson, if a very unconventional one, 
 has left several hymns and metrical meditations and prayers ; 
 but neither these nor his poems, erotic or ironical, on women 
 contain his most characteristic work, which must be sought in 
 his satires, personal, social, and political. The greater number 
 of these are written in the verse to which he has given his 
 name, the 'Skeltonic', which consists of iambic or anapaestic 
 lines, containing two stresses only, and rhymed together in 
 continuous succession twice, thrice, four times, or even more 
 frequently. Obviously this metre forbids the highest flights 
 of poetry, and can easily sink to the very lowest ; but as 
 handled by Skelton, it develops a certain doggerel speed and 
 devilry, which fit it for the homely invective or description of 
 his choice, and even for the elfin fancy by which he is some- 
 times seized. The most notorious of his poems in this metre.is 
 The Tunning of Eleanor Eumming, which describes the drunken 
 
 1 It receives separate notice in the chapter on the Early Drama. 
 
BARCLAY AND SKELTON 81 
 
 scenes following the beer -brewing of an old ale-wife. Many of 
 its descriptive passages are as coarse and potent as the ale it- 
 self ; perhaps Pope nad them in mind when he very unfairly 
 and unsuccessfully tried to dispose of Skelton by labelling him 
 ' beastly '. Colin Cloute is one of a series of satires directed 
 against the abuses and corruption of the Church. Its vigour 
 and vividness amply justify Skeltou's claim : 
 
 For though my rime be ragged, 
 
 Tattered and jagged, 
 
 Rudely rain-beaten, 
 
 Busty and moth-eaten, 
 
 If ye take well therewith 
 
 It hath in it some pith. 
 
 The keen sincerity of the indictment, and its deliverance 
 through a peasant's mouth, give Colin Cloute a certain affinity 
 with Piers the Plowman ; but Skelton goes about his work with 
 a glee and gusto which are not Langland's, and is most happy 
 when running amok among the objects of his hate. Chief of 
 these is Cardinal Wolsey, whom he attacks with increased 
 venom in his next satire, Speak, Parrot. Both the language 
 and allusions of this poem are very obscure ; but there is little 
 obscurity and much ' pith ' in its successor, ' Why come ye nat \yj t y come 
 to Court V ' which attacks Wolsey with great outspokenness y e na t to 
 and vigour. It thus explains its title : Court ? 
 
 Why come ye nat to court ? 
 To which court ? 
 To the king's court 
 Or to Hampton Court ? 
 
 i. e. to the court of the Cardinal, of which the corruptions are 
 forthwith detailed. The following is a fair specimen of the 
 indictment, and of * Skeltonics ' : 
 
 he will play checkmate 
 With royal majesty, 
 Count himself as good as hey^ 
 A prelate potential 
 To rule under Belial 
 As fierce and cruel 
 As the fiend of hell. 
 His servants menial 
 He doth rule, and brawl 
 Like Mahound in a play, 
 No man dare him withsay. 
 
 Little wonder that Skelton had to take sanctuary in West- 
 minster for the last ten years of his life to avoid the Cardinal's 
 vengeance. 
 
 Skelton wrote several lampoons against his personal foes and 
 detractors, and in celebration of the defeat of the Scotch by 
 England. He has left three elegies two serious ones on the 
 deaths of Edward the Fourth and the Duke of Northumberland 
 and a playful one of considerable humour and charm, entitled 
 
82 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Phillip Sparrow, on the dead pet of Mistress Joan Scroupe, of 
 the nunnery of Carrow. 
 
 Character- It is easy to scoff at Skeltpn and very difficult to like him 
 istics of wholeheartedly. To many his ' Skeltonics ' are irritating and 
 Skelton. suggest an experiment of the nursery. It is not merely that 
 they are slipshod, for slipshodness is often an effect of art, and 
 goes well with a certain kind of satire : it is that their jingle 
 is constantly obvious and monotonous. It is only Skelton's 
 superb vitality which saves them and him from utter downfall ; 
 and for that vitality he must be given every credit, since it 
 enabled him to break away from many outworn fifteenth- 
 century conventions of form and subject. In this credit his 
 4 Skeltonics ' must share, since they certainly make for metri- 
 cal freedom. But for all his originality, and for all the love of 
 learning which gives him contact with the new forces, Skelton 
 holds in nearly all essentials of the Middle Ages, as this brief 
 account of him may serve to show. 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 The Beginnings The Miracle Play The Morality Play Court 
 Influence School plays The Interlude Early Comedies and 
 Tragedies The influence of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca. 
 
 Early UP to the time of the Norman Conquest England was in the 
 
 Continen. unusual position of having a nourishing prose and poetry, but 
 tal Drama, no poetic or secular drama of any kind. For many centuries, 
 indeed, the drama had been neglected and flouted all the 
 world over, and had become the femme incomprise among the 
 literary kinds. In the fifth and sixth centuries the Roman 
 drama, already for long in its decadence, had finally become 
 extinct as a national form, beneath the pressure of the Northern 
 barbarian and the Christian ascetic. A feeble spark of it was 
 smuggled through the centuries by those despised ' firebringers ', 
 the mimiy who were forced by necessity to juggle and to tumble, 
 to walk ropes and to lead bears for a living, yet kept alive in 
 their aubes and pastourelles, dialogue, which is the first con- 
 dition of drama, and in their puppet-shows, plot, which is the 
 second. 
 
 On the continent of Europe their influence may be traced 
 through the tendon and the debat, on to such well-defined 
 dramatic forms as the fifteenth -century farce and morality. 
 Their connexion with the main stream of English drama is 
 less direct, though after the Conquest they played a great part 
 in the life of England, kept the element of farce alive, and pre- 
 pared the way for the dramatist by making the nation feel the 
 spiritual necessity for some kind of animated entertainment. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 83 
 
 The charming Jeu de Robin et de Marion, for which they are 
 responsible, passes, by a happy, if erroneous, popular identifi- 
 cation, into the early English Eobin Hood plays, which are 
 carried on in more than one Elizabethan drama. 
 
 The attempt to hail the Teutonic scop, or minstrel, as a fore- 
 runner of English drama, is a forlorn hope, though one which 
 has been occasionally attempted by the enfants perdus of 
 criticism. Much more reasonable is the citation in this con- 
 nexion of the village festival and the folk play. The May 
 Game, the mediaeval Sword Dance, and the Hock Tide Festi- 
 val, are all accompanied with drama, springing out of the very 
 heart of the people. In a favourite variety of this, the peasant's 
 elemental tragedy takes form in a scene representing the death 
 of Summer, followed, generally within the same drama, by 
 a scene of joyous comedy embodying the re-birth of Spring. 
 To this kind belongs the ' pretty little May-day drama ' per- 
 formed at Briancon in Dauphine, ' in which the leaf -clad man 
 falls into sleep upon the ground and is awakened by the kiss 
 of a maiden '- 1 Directly from the folk, too, come the Morris 
 Dance, with its clown and hobby-horse, and the Mummers' 
 Play, or St. George's Play, with its Knight and Dragon, and 
 strange cast of attendant characters, ' King Alfred and his 
 bride, King Cole, King William, Giant Blunderbore, Little 
 Jack, and a Morris Dance Fool'. 
 
 All of these forms had a contributory influence on English Church 
 drama, and some of them notably the farce affect its later Drama, 
 history directly and powerfully ; but the well-spring must be 
 sought elsewhere. It is an irony of history that the Church, 
 which banned and slew the old drama, should have tenderly 
 fostered the new, should have founded English tragedy, and, 
 despite herself, should have forwarded modern comedy and 
 even ribald farce. To this last kind she contributed the 
 Tripudium, or noisy revelry of the Feast of Fools, and the 
 celeoration of the Boy Bishop. These festivals consisted of 
 travesties made respectively by the lower dignitaries of the 
 Church and by the choir-boys, of the functions performed at 
 Mass by the higher Church dignitaries. They degenerated 
 into horseplay, often performed within the Church itself ; but 
 the farces to which they gave rise attach themselves to the 
 purely secular farces, and thus help to carry on the dramatic 
 tradition. 
 
 But the greatest gift of the early Church to English dramatic Christmas 
 literature was tragic, and concerned with the greatest Tragedy and Easter 
 of all. Already in the sixth century the development of dia- Plays, 
 logue in Church ritual had received a remarkable impetus 
 through the practice of trope -writing, or the contribution of 
 texts written for the neumae or melodies inserted in amplifi- 
 cation of the antiphones sung at Mass. This resulted in a free 
 development of alternating song, and to this sacred dialogue 
 
 1 E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, vol. i, p, 187. 
 
84 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 were shortly added sacred action and plot. In the Concordia 
 Regularis Monachorum (967 ?), a manual of Church ritual for 
 use in monasteries, occurs what has been called ' the oldest 
 extant example in European literature of the theatrical recital 
 of an alternating song in church V This performance is, in- 
 deed, more than a recital : it is a solemn Easter drama, cen- 
 tring round the sepulchre of Christ. On an erection symbolizing 
 this, one of the brethren takes his seat, in the likeness of an 
 angel. To him approach three other brethren clad in copes, 
 and swinging thuribles with incense, who counterfeit the women 
 with spices coming to anoint the body of Jesus. The angel, on 
 seeing them, begins ' in a dulcet voice of medium pitch ' to 
 sing ' Quern Quaeritis f ' ( ' Whom seek ye ? ' ). The three reply, 
 ' Jhesum Nazarenum' ('Jesus of Nazareth'). The angel re- 
 plies that He has arisen even as He foretold. The three turn 
 joyfully to the choir and sing 'Alleluia, surrexit Dominus' 
 (' Alleluia, the Lord hath risen '). Then the angel summons 
 them to the sepulchre with the anthem, ' Venite et videte locum ' 
 (* Come ye and see the place '). ' And saying this,' continues 
 the direction, ' let him rise and lift the veil, and show them the 
 place bare of the Cross, but only the clothes laid there in 
 which the Cross was to be wrapped.' 2 
 
 It is obvious that this piece of ritual already includes every 
 essential of drama. As time went on this Easter play received 
 further development : at Sarum, in the fourteenth century, it 
 included the race run to the tomb by Peter and John, but long 
 before this 3 a separate sacred drama, the Officium Pastorum, 
 had risen out of the antiphonal chants employed at the cele- 
 bration of Christmas. In this the angel reappears, and the 
 shepherds take the place of the adoring women. This play 
 centres round the crib of Christ, just as the Easter play had 
 centred round the sepulchre. Gradually additions were made 
 to the Christmas play, as they had been made to the Easter 
 play, and from this principle of extension grew the great 
 cycles of religious drama, which eventually covered the whole 
 of Gospel history from the Creation onwards, with an exten- 
 sion, in many cases, to the Day of Doom. Each of these plays, 
 of which there might be some fifty or more in one cycle, dealt 
 with a separate episode of the sacred narrative. Single plays 
 on sacred subjects were written in order to be acted by the 
 children in monastery schools, and this practice was carried 
 with notable effect into the period of Shakespeare. Plays of 
 this kind were written by Hilarius, a ribald pupil of Abelard, 
 in the first quarter of the twelfth century. 
 
 In England the sacred drama was mainly confined to the 
 incidents of the Gospel, with additions from the Apocrypha, 
 
 1 Professor W. Creizenach, Cambridge History of English Literature, 
 vol. v, Chap. III. 
 
 2 Chambers, vol. ii, Chap. XVIII. 
 
 3 Creizenach shows that a Christmas play was performed at Salisbury 
 in 1222. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 
 
 85 
 
 and mediaeval sacred tradition. Plays dealing with the lives Miracle 
 of saints are rare in England : on the Continent they were Plays, 
 common, and were known as ' miracle ' plays, in contra- 
 distinction to the ' mystery ' plays dealing with the Gospel 
 narrative. This distinction did not prevail in England, where 
 the term ' miracle play ' was early applied to sacred plays of 
 every type. The term * mystery play ', as far as English drama 
 is concerned, is ' a literary coinage of later times '.* 
 
 As the sacred play grew in vogue and volume, and demanded 
 fresh scenes and properties, it became impossible to accommo- 
 date either it or its increasing audience within the church, and 
 early in the thirteenth century we find mention of a per- 
 formance in an English churchyard. From the yard it was 
 only a step to the street, or to such open places as those in 
 which many sacred plays (e. g. the Adam Play, and the 
 Donaueschingen Passion Play) were produced on the Con- 
 tinent. A further step, and a most important one, was taken 
 when the vernacular was substituted for Latin, and the folk 
 of the street were thus enabled to follow the dialogue as well 
 as the action. The earlier stage of the drama's emancipation 
 was complete when the control of the productions passed from 
 religious into secular hands. 
 
 It is obvious that each of these steps represents progress not Comic 
 only in the popularization of the plays, but in the possibility of Elements 
 dramatic handling. Scenes of comedy could now be introduced, in the 
 for the first time, into the solemn and even tragic setting of the Sacred 
 early liturgical dramas. It was, indeed, true, as has been Pl a y s - 
 already shown, that a good deal of rollicking horseplay had 
 taken place, even within the church walls, at the Feast of 
 Fools and similar festivities ; but this had been discouraged 
 by such Papal prohibitions as that of Innocent III (1207) ; and 
 within the liturgical plays themselves there could be little 
 development in this direction till the drama had won free of 
 the Church and church control, and was performed in the 
 English tongue. As soon as these conditions were fulfilled, 
 a remarkable development appears, and frtee scope is given to 
 the popular taste for bustling fun. Such a tendency was 
 naturally in abeyance during the supreme moments of Gospel 
 narrative, when the Deity Himself was present ; but when the 
 scene shifted, and was left free to humankind, the tension was 
 relaxed, often with startling suddenness. Thus, in the York 
 Cycle the plays dealing with the Creation, the Temptation, and 
 the Fall have considerable dignity and dramatic power. Luci- 
 fer, in particular, has much of the poignancy which is to re- 
 appear in the Mephistophilis of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. But 
 when we pass to Cain and Abel, there is horseplay at once : 
 Cain is provided with a comic servant who calls him ' Mr. Cain ' 
 and trips over his own feet, like a modern pantomime clown. 
 Similarly. Noah and his wife have a comic altercation over the 
 
 1 F. E. Schelling, Elizalf flirt* Drama, vol. i, p. 11. 
 
86 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 projected voyage in the Ark : she complains that she cannot 
 possibly get her packing done in time, and boxes" his ears 
 soundly when he tries to hurry her. Some of these scenes were 
 even introduced into dramas containing the Sacred Presence : 
 thus in the Second Shepherd's Play of the Towneley Cycle, 
 there is introduced into a scene representing the birth of 
 Christ, a border sheep -stealer, a highly amusing character 
 bearing the significant name of Mak. It is characteristic of the 
 mediaeval mind that it was equally unshocked by the ana- 
 chronism and by the buffoonery, and that the latter did not in 
 the least weaken its sense of reverence for the Gospel mysteries. 
 Staging of ^ n tne continent of Europe mystery and miracle plays were, 
 Miracle for the most part, performed on a stationary stage situated in 
 Plays. some open place or square : in England the performances were, 
 to a large extent, conditioned by the ritual of the Corpus 
 Christi festival, to which, after its institution in 1264, they 
 became attached with a closeness unparalleled in any part of 
 the Continent. This festival's processional nature was largely 
 responsible for the procession of ' pageants ', or movable plat- 
 forms, on which the sacred dramas were now produced. Each 
 pageant, with the play performed on it, was controlled by one 
 of the trade crafts or guilds, which had been originally respon- 
 sible for the groupings or tableaux associated with the festival. 
 The pageants, which were drawn by horses and preceded by 
 outriders, moved from ' station ' to * station ' throughout the 
 streets, and on arriving at each of these produced their own 
 plays in rotation : so that if a man cared to remain at the same 
 station throughout the day, he could witness the whole course 
 of Gospel history. We are told that at Chester, at a somewhat 
 later date, the pageants were of two storeys, and that the 
 actors dressed in the lower and played in the upper of these. 
 Guilds tended to choose dramas for whose production they 
 were naturally qualified : thus the shipwrights dealt with the 
 building of the Ark, the carpenters with the construction of 
 the Cross, and the dyers with the play in which Christ appears 
 before the gorgeously arrayed Herod. The performers, though 
 they were paid for their appearances, were amateurs in the 
 sense that their means of living were not derived from 
 the drama, and that they only appeared at stated seasons of the 
 year. The plays were full of oddities and anachronisms : thus, 
 Isaac swears by the Blessed Trinity, Herod by Mahomed : 
 Lucifer is represented as a ' fine serpent made with a virgin 
 face and yellow hair upon her head '. Hell-mouth is repre- 
 sented as ' the head of a whale worked by two men, out of 
 which devil boys ran '. On another occasion we find it pro- 
 vided with * fire, a windlass, and a barrel for the earthquake '. 
 The three main cycles of English miracle plays which remain 
 to us entire, or nearly entire, are those of York, Wakefield (The 
 Towneley cycle), and Chester. Other plays which have come 
 down to usindicate the existence of cycles atCoventry, Newcastle 
 upon Tyne, and Norwich. In the early part of the sixteenth 
 
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 87 
 
 century, single miracle plays began to be written by distinct 
 authors. Thus, John Bale's God's Promises (circa 1538) was 
 a polemical mystery play written in the Protestant interest. 
 More interesting is the treatment given to sacred subjects by 
 George Buchanan (1506-1582) in his Latin plays, Jephthes and 
 Baptistes. For the first time in Northern Europe the sacred 
 
 glay was humanized and rendered artistic by recourse to the 
 enecan and Euripidean model. Other Latin plays on sacred 
 subjects were written by Ralph Radcliffe (1519-1559) and 
 Nicholas Grimald (1519-1562). The single miracle play of 
 specified authorship holds its own till nearly the end of the 
 sixteenth century with such dramas as A Looking Glass for 
 London and England (1589 ?) though this also possesses 
 marked morality elements by Lodge and Greene ; and George 
 Peele's David and Bethsabe (1589). By this time the miracle 
 cycles, which had reached their flowering time in the fourteenth 
 and the fifteenth centuries, had almost disappeared, 1 partly 
 through the strenuous opposition of Protestantism, partly 
 owing to the vast new sources of dramatic material opened 
 up by the New Learning. 
 
 Before dealing with these newer developments, we must Morality 
 glance back again to an earlier stage of the drama and a dis- Plays, 
 tinct dramatic form. As early as the fourth century A.D., in 
 Psychomachia, the allegorical epic of Prudentius, the different 
 vices and virtues had been personified as warriors battling for 
 the soul of man. In Antichristus, a Latin play of the twelfth 
 century, similar characters (e. g. Hypocrisis and Misericordia) 
 are again personified and given a dramatic setting. From 
 some such origins as these, and possibly from the strange 
 imagery of the ' Danse Macabre ' or Dance of Death, sprang 
 that variety of drama known as the Morality. Here the 
 dramatis personae, for the most part, are not sacred personages, 
 but abstractions of the kind just indicated. The most usual 
 theme o| the Moralities was the conflict between Vice and 
 Virtue for the human soul. In The Castle of Perseverance 
 (1460?) man figures as ' Humanum Genus', and, aided by 
 certain allegorical virtues, defends the Castle against the powers 
 of evil. In the lost Paternoster play he appears as Vicious, and 
 runs the gauntlet of the Seven Deadly Sins. In Mundus et 
 Infans, he is the child waxing to manhood and old age 
 amid the world's manifold temptations. In the impressive 
 Everyman (circa 1500), the finest morality extant, he is suc- 
 cessively deserted on his perilous journey with Death to God by 
 all his earthly attributes save Good Deeds, who, at last, with 
 the help of Knowledge, brings him to salvation. Mary Magda- 
 lene (circa 1485) is partly a Miracle or saint's play, partly a 
 Morality. It contains many scenes of Gospel narrative, but 
 these are diversified by the introduction of Wrath, Sensuality, 
 
 1 At Coventry, Corpus Christi plays were produced up till 1575 or 
 thereabouts. Creizenach shows that at Kendal they were kept up as 
 late as the reign of James I. 
 
88 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and other abstractions, besides the devils Belphegor and Beel- 
 zebub. Skelton's Magnificence is an allegory directed against 
 prodigal expenditure on unworthy friends. The later Morali- 
 ties passing into the Interlude type were often devoted to 
 educational ends, as in the very remarkable Interlude of the 
 Nature of the Four Elements, by John Rastell : others were 
 used for the purpose of religious or political polemics. This 
 kind was especially forbidden by Elizabeth at the beginning of 
 her reign. For this reason, and for the causes which had 
 proved fatal to the Miracle play, the Morality soon became 
 unfashionable. 
 
 Character- its artistic limitations are obvious. It was first and fore- 
 isticsofthe mos t didactic in tendency, and the abstractions on which it 
 Morality, depended were hardly the most promising stuff for the creation 
 of a human interest. On the other hand, it has been remarked 
 that the maker of Moralities was not fettered by tradition, as 
 had been the playwrights who preceded him. He could give 
 free rein to his inventive power, and as the Morality appealed 
 primarily to the mind, whereas the Miracle play had appealed 
 to the eye, he could command something of the dramatic 
 interest now attaching to the ' problem -play '. From the 
 Morality, moreover, sprang that curious character known as 
 the Vice who wrought mischief on all and sundry with his 
 dagger of lathe, and had the attributes both of devil and buf- 
 foon. Many consider this character to be the prototype of the 
 Shakespearean Fool. This part was played by a professional 
 actor, and becomes readily distinguishable in the Moralities 
 and the later Interludes. 
 
 The Inter- j^ has been already seen that whereas both Miracles and 
 lude. Moralities contained scenes of comedy, such treatment was 
 greatly limited by their respective religious and didactic pur- 
 poses. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, a freer type 
 of drama became fashionable, especially amongst the aristo- 
 cratic class. This kind, though it often handled the same theme 
 as the Morality, and might take some educational or political 
 idea as its starting-point, had nearly always amusement for its 
 main end. It is generally known as the interlude, though the 
 Elizabethans used the word for any kind of short play just as 
 they used the word sonnet for any short poem. The playwright 
 who above all others helped the Interlude to a free development 
 was John Heywood (1497-1577). He was attached to the 
 court of Henry VIII, and there produced a succession of brisk 
 and farcical comedies for the pleasure-loving king, who had 
 grown considerably bored with the earlier Morality. The 
 plays traditionally attributed to Heywood may be taken as 
 representing a direct break with the Morality, and a recur- 
 rence to the rollicking French ' farce ' or ' sottie '. Several of 
 them are extant : two of the best are The Play of the Weather, 
 and The Four P. P. 1 The former deals with the comically con- 
 1 This play, though traditionally attributed to Heywood, has been 
 recently assigned to Cornish. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 89 
 
 flicting requests made to Jupiter by folk of various callings for 
 the weather that suits them best : the second is a dramatic 
 satire, racy, free, and Chaucerian in spirit, in which four 
 characters, the palmer, the pedlar, the potycary, and the 
 pardoner, vie for pre-eminence in the delicate art of lying. 
 
 The dramatic career of Hey wood illustrates the great and Drama 
 growing influence exerted by the Court on the history of and the 
 English drama. It was largely owing to the love of the Tudor Court, 
 monarchs for amusement that dramatic art was enabled to 
 shake itself free of irksome restrictions and to develop accord- 
 ing to its own impelling spirit. The Court drama has been 
 traced as far back as the reign of Kichard II ; but it first 
 becomes important under the Tudors, who contributed to the 
 national dramatic progress in two important ways through the 
 elaborately staged mummings and disguisings in which they 
 themselves participated, and which eventually helped the public 
 drama towards a considerable improvement in staging ; and 
 through the plays which were acted for their edification by the 
 choir children of the Chapel Royal and St. George's Chapel, 
 Windsor. These plays were both written and staged by the 
 royal choir-masters, one or two of whom, notably Heywood, 
 Edwards, and Hunnis, were evidently men of genius. From an 
 early period the amusements of the Court had been under the 
 direction of a special department known as the Office of the 
 Revels : in the reign of Henry VIII a Master of the Revels was 
 appointed, who eventually became not only a producer of 
 Court plays, but a licenser of public plays. This official is 
 important inasmuch as it was he who acted as medium 
 between the Court and the public stage during the period when 
 both institutions were at their highest pitch of glory. 
 
 It may be noted here that the performances by boy actors 
 were by no means confined to the children of the Court. During 
 Henry VIIFs reign, the boys of Eton and St. Paul's performed s c h ol 
 both Latin and English plays in his presence. In Elizabeth's D ram a. 
 reign the practice was extended to the Merchant Taylors' School, 
 the King's School, Canterbury, and many otter schools in 
 London and the provinces. Here, as at the Court, the plays 
 acted by the boys were commonly written by their head-masters. 
 In many cases the performances were isolated and occasional ; 
 but certain head-masters for example, Nicholas Udall, suc- 
 cessively head of Eton and Westminster became habitual 
 and almost professional playwrights, while certain of the boy 
 companies those, for instance, of the Chapel Royal and 
 St. Paul's achieve full professional status and eventually 
 move from the singing school into theatres of their own. These 
 are to become rivals of Shakespeare and his adult fellow actors, 
 and are glanced at in a notable passage of Hamlet, where refer- 
 ence is made to the official prohibitions which eventually led 
 to their disappearance. 
 
 The Interlude, as we have seen, represents an artistic advance 
 on what had gone before, inasmuch as it shows the comic spirit 
 
90 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 striving, however unsuccessfully, to free itself from didactic 
 motives. Some l have endeavoured to trace it as a separate 
 form throughout the later Tudor period ; but just as in its 
 beginnings it is often indistinguishable from the freer kind of 
 Morality (as in the Merry Interlude entitled Respublica, 1553), 
 so in its later developments it merges into the new comedy and 
 tragi-comedy, with frequent reversions to the didactic or 
 polemical type. 
 
 Classical Further development of a most notable kind was given to 
 Influence English drama at this period by the Classical revival. Terence 
 Comedy had been the favourite Eoman comic playwright of the Middle 
 Ages, but a keen interest in Plautus was created by the re- 
 covery of his twelve lost plays in 1427. Henceforth he eclipsed 
 Terence in popularity, though both playwrights were still staged 
 in the original Latin, and both subsequently influenced the 
 vernacular drama in England and throughout a great part of 
 Europe. More in his Utopia (1516) alludes to the frequency 
 of Plautine representations. In 1520, ' a goodly comedy of 
 Plautus ' was played in the presence of Henry VIII and the 
 French hostages. In 1527 the Menaechmi was performed by 
 the boys of St. Paul's before Wolsey. Later, both Terence 
 and Plautus in the original were played before Queen 
 Elizabeth by the boys of Westminster School, and similar 
 performances were given at the Merchant Taylors' School and 
 other schools throughout the kingdom. 
 
 A further step towards popularizing and nationalizing the 
 classical models was taken in 1530, in the translation of 
 Terence's Andria, entitled T evens in English. In the final 
 phase, playwrights are writing after the pattern of Roman 
 comedy, but in the tongue and spirit of their own nation. The 
 beginnings of this tendency are to be seen in the vigorous 
 English farce of Thersites (1537), where the Latin original, 
 though ultimately classical, is actually that of the mediaeval 
 humanist, Ravisius Textor. The direct Plautine influence is 
 evident in three of the earliest and best-known English come- 
 Early dies, Ralph Roister Doister (1553), Gammer Gurton's Needle 
 English (1552-3), and Jacke Jugeler (published in 1562-3, but probably 
 Comedies, composed some years earlier). The first of these is by Nicholas 
 Udall, and the third has recently been ascribed to the same 
 author. 2 Ralph Roister Doister is modelled on the Miles 
 Gloriosus of Plautus, with hints from the Eunuchus of Terence. 
 Roister Doister, the swaggering soldier, and his parasite, 
 Matthew Merygreeke, represent two stock types of Roman 
 comedy. Ralph lays siege to the heart of Christian distance, 
 a virtuous and sprightly matron whose affianced lover is away 
 on his travels. Mistress Custance fools him to the top of his 
 bent, even as Mistress Ford was subsequently to fool Falstaff. 
 The play closes with the discomfiture of the braggart, and the 
 loving reconciliation of the temporarily estranged couple. 
 
 1 e. g. C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Tudor Drama, Chaps, III and IV. 
 
 2 Jacke Juyeler, Introduction by W. H. Williams. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 91 
 
 Roister Doister, apart from its intrinsic merit, is a landmark 
 in the evolution of English comedy, embodying as it does the 
 form and symmetry derived from the old models. Yet the 
 Koman and English elements which it so enterprisingly brings 
 together, remain easily distinguishable in the fabric of the plot. 
 In Gammer Gurton's Needle, by William Stevenson, the fusion 
 is complete. Suggested by classical originals, this coarse and 
 racy comedy of village life is English to the core. In it, the 
 Gammer loses her needle, and turns the whole village topsy- 
 turvy to find it, till it is at last discovered sticking in the 
 breeches of her servant Hodge, which she had been mending. 
 This simple plot is complicated by the intrigues of the roguisn 
 mischief-maker, Diccon the Bedlam, and by the humours of 
 Dame Chat, the ale-wife, and the blackguardly parson, 
 Dr. Rat. Few plays in the language have been written with 
 greater gusto and natural devilry than this one, which has 
 a strong claim to be considered the earliest regular English 
 comedy. 
 
 English drama at this period is a river steadily swelling Continen- 
 beneath the inrush of various tributary streams. A whole tal Influ 
 class of plays have their origin in the Dutch humanist drama, ence. 
 notably in the Acolastus of Gnaphaeus, a play of widespread 
 
 fluence dealing with the Prodigal Son. This theme is handled 
 in several plays which blend elements of the older Morality 
 with those of the revived humanist drama. Chief among these 
 are Nice Wanton (1553 ?) ; The Disobedient Child by Thomas 
 Ingelend (1560 ?) ; the admirable Misogonus (1560 ?) ; Jacob 
 and Esau (1558 ?); and The Glass of Government (1575) by 
 George Gascoigne. Spanish influence had already made itself 
 felt in Calisto and Meliboea (1530 f), a tragi-comedy adapted 
 from the dramatic novel, Gelestina, by Fernando de Rojas 
 (1499). This play, though it is defaced by a didactic ending, 
 is in its original intention a tragi-comedy of love, and is remark- 
 able as being the earliest extant specimen of the romantic 
 drama, which was afterwards to become the chief glory of the 
 Elizabethan stage. A more important influence, which had 
 already made itself felt in Misogonus, was that of Italian 
 comedy. Gascoigne's Supposes (1566) is a fairly literal trans- 
 lation of Ariosto's Suppositi, an admirable comedy of intrigue, 
 in which Roman models are adapted to contemporary Italian 
 life. Supposes is remarkable as being the first English comedy 
 written in prose. The Bugbears (published in 1561) is an adap- 
 tation of Grazzini's La Spiritata. Its title has reference to the 
 device of Formosus, who, for purposes of his own gain, per- 
 suades his miserly father, Amadeus, that his house is haunted 
 by ' bugbears ', or spirits. These plays show how largely the 
 Italian influence was responsible for the growing mastery of 
 complicated plot which the English dramatist was gradually 
 developing. They belong respectively to the Court and the 
 University. Less artistic plays of Italian origin held the 
 popular stage at this period, while Italian actors performed 
 
92 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The 
 
 Native 
 
 Element. 
 
 Origins of 
 
 English 
 
 Tragedy. 
 
 at the Tudor Court, and in 1578 accompanied Elizabeth on 
 her royal progress. 
 
 Thesef oreign influences, for all their strength and importance, 
 did not inhibit the native element in English drama, which is 
 seen strongly at work in the gay, as well as in the grave arid 
 moving, scenes of Richard Edwards's admirable tragi- comedy, 
 Damon and Pithias (1564). Edwards, like William Hunnis 
 (author of Narcissus [1572] ), was Master of the Chapel Royal, 
 and the numerous plays accredited to this pair, and other 
 holders of the position, once more illustrate the immensely 
 important part played by the Court in the evolution of English 
 drama. 1 More romantic in its theme than the foregoing dramas, 
 and more popular in its appeal, is Promos and Cassandra 
 (printed 1578), which possesses racy comic interludes, and has 
 been well described 2 as ' the most typical example of an 
 original romantic play before the period of Shakespeare's 
 immediate predecessors '. 
 
 We must now glance back to the origins of English tragedy. 
 In its early stages this fuses so constantly with comedy, and 
 even with low comedy, that it becomes difficult to distinguish 
 between the two kinds. The primary motive of the Miracle 
 play was, however, one of the most solemn tragedy, and the 
 tragic motive predominates throughout the history of the 
 sacred cycles. Despite their manifold crudities, these plays 
 were suffused with that passionate romanticism which can only 
 flourish where some kind of great faith prevails. The favourite 
 themes of the Morality and Interlude were neither romantic 
 nor tragic ; so that we may regard the Miracle play as having 
 kept alive the tragic feeling throughout the period when it 
 was being threatened by these kinds. But a further in- 
 fluence of a secular kind helped to mould the beginnings of 
 English tragedy. Hero-worship, a prevailing emotion in young 
 communities, had early established a hold upon English litera- 
 ture. It is the moving force in all Anglo-Saxon poetry, 
 inspiring alike the pagan and semi-mythical Beowulf, the 
 sacred poems of Cynewulf, and that fine historical lay, The 
 Battle of Maldon. In a later age it reappears in the long verse 
 romances which sing the doughty deeds of Guy of Warwick and 
 Huon of Bordeaux. It is the original and inspiring force of 
 the Arthurian legend and the vast literature to which this 
 gave rise. It is one of the main motives of the English ballad, 
 as in Ohevy Chase and A Little Lay of Robin Hood. 3 Its 
 beginnings in drama may be seen in the Robin Hood plays and 
 in the choice of St. George as the hero of the Mummers' Play. 
 The early steps by which this heroic drama developed are 
 obscure, and the obscurity is increased by the fact that none 
 of the very earliest, and very few of the intermediate, plays 
 
 1 For Edwards and the Court Drama generally see C. W. Wallace, 
 The Evolution of the English Drama up to SJiakespeare. 
 
 3 F. S. Boas, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. v, p. 120. 
 
 3 See Tucker Brooke, TJie Tudor Drama, Chap. VII. 
 
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 93 
 
 have survived. But two things are certain first, that they 
 were written for popular audiences, and second, that they were 
 loose and rambling in construction. They turned on the for- 
 tunes and doughty deeds of one man, and subordinated to 
 these all other interests of plot or character. Stephen Gosson, 
 the puritanical ex -playwright, writing in 1579, indicates that 
 they had their origin in such romantic tales or poems as The 
 Palace of Pleasure, and Amadis of France. They were com- 
 monly knightly and chivalrous in their setting, as may be seen 
 from two surviving specimens, Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes 
 and Common Conditions, both of which deal with the magical 
 adventures of certain doughty champions in strange lands. 
 There is little to say as to the details of this variety of drama, 
 even were there space to say it here ; but it should be noted 
 that it represents a native element holding the public stage, 
 and that it is important since from its combination with the 
 classical element evolves the greatest kind of English tragedy. 
 
 This classical influence in English tragedy is in large measure The Influ- 
 the influence of Seneca making its way into England through ence of 
 the playwrights of the Court, University, School, and Inns of Seneca. 
 Court. Seneca, playwright, philosopher, millionaire, and tutor 
 of Nero, represents the decadence of classical drama. Instead 
 of terror, pity, and beauty, which had been the main marks of 
 Greek tragedy, he gives his readers for his plays were not 
 written for the stage horror and epigram. His dramas 
 abound in gruesome acts or descriptions of violence. His 
 dialogue is artificial, antithetical, and weighted with sen- 
 tentious maxims. Yet, both in dialogue and structure, he dis- 
 plays a certain strength and a certain symmetry which were 
 to prove of value to the Renaissance drama which came under 
 his influence. To Seneca, moreover, must be attributed the 
 division of drama into five acts, and the chorus which makes 
 its appearance in early English tragedy. To him, too, we owe 
 that convenient figure of tragedy, the ghost, and probably 
 also the nurse and the conventional tyrant. 1 As early as the 
 beginning of the fourteenth century translations of Seneca had 
 been published in Italy, and dramas had been written in the 
 vernacular on the Senecan model. His influence on French 
 drama, though later, was equally great, and took shape in the 
 tragedies of Gamier and Jodelle. In England the classical 
 influence was already evident in the themes, and, to some 
 slight extent, in the handling of Richard Edwards' s Damon and 
 Pithias, John Pickeryng's Borestes (printed 1567), ' R.B.'s ' 
 Appius and Virginia (1563 ?), and Thomas Preston's Cambyses 
 (written before 1569). But most of these are overweighted by 
 elements of the older Morality ; for all their natural vigour 
 they are crude in development and handling, and their comic 
 and tragic elements are unskilfully blended. There is little 
 in them of the true classical model. This was becoming familiar 
 
 1 See A, D. Godley, * Senecan Tragedy ', in English Literature and the 
 CJnnnic8 (Clarendon Press). 
 
94 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to English readers and writers through English translations of 
 Seneca's tragedies. Six of these appeared between 1559 and 
 1566, and in 1581 the whole ten were collected and published 
 in a single volume. It was mainly through these versions, and 
 from the Italian adaptations of Seneca by Ludovico Dolce that 
 the Elizabethan playwright learnt and practised the methods 
 of his Roman forerunner. 
 
 Gorboduc. Such methods are strongly evident in the first regular English 
 tragedy, Gorboduc. This was written by the lawyer, Thomas 
 Norton, and the famous courtier and poet, Thomas Sackville, 
 and was performed before Queen Elizabeth at the Inner 
 Temple in 1562. It portrays the tragedy of a legendary 
 British king who divides his country between his sons, Ferrex 
 and Porrex, and consequently undergoes a fate similar to that 
 of Lear. Up till the end of the fourth act, the play remains 
 a lurid tragedy, in which the essential characteristics of Senecan 
 drama are interwoven with the native theme. The fifth act, 
 which is a homily addressed to Elizabeth on the evils of an 
 unsettled succession, reverts to the methods of the political 
 Morality. Gorboduc is a most important production, not only 
 for the reasons just mentioned, but because it was the first 
 play to discard the old rhyming measures, on which English 
 drama had hitherto depended, for blank verse, which had 
 recently been introduced into England by Surrey in his trans- 
 lation of the Aeneid. It is hardly possible to overrate the 
 importance to our literature of this attempt to find an English 
 equivalent for the Senecan senarius. 
 
 Early Other tragedies on the Senecan model followed, though not 
 
 Senecan at once nor in any great number. Jocasta (1566) by Gascoigne 
 Tragedies, and Kinwelmershe, takes its plot from the Phoenissae of 
 Euripides, transmitted through the Italian of Dolce. Tancred 
 and Gismunda (1568) by Robert Wilmot and others, develops 
 a tale of Boccaccio's in fairly regular Senecan form, and with 
 lavish Senecan transcriptions. The Misfortunes of Arthur, by 
 Thomas Hughes and six others, reverts for its theme to the 
 legends of ancient Britain, and to Geoffrey of Monmouth's 
 Historia Eegum Britanniae. Gorboduc and the three plays just 
 mentioned are academic in their authorship and appeal. The 
 Senecan elements of horror and rhetoric and revenge in the 
 more popular Selimus (printed 1594) and Locrine (1586), show 
 that, for good and for bad, the classical influence has spread to 
 the public stage, and has helped to prepare the way for the 
 mightiest period of English drama. 
 
 Before we pass to this, and the dramatists who ushered it 
 in, we may glance for a moment at a curious development of 
 the Senecan drama. This consisted of the plays written by 
 Sir Philip Sidney's sister, the Countess of Pembroke, and her 
 coterie, in translation or imitation of the French tragedies, 
 composed on the Senecan model, of Robert Gamier (1534- 
 1590). She herself translated Antonie. Thomas Kyd followed 
 with a version of Cornelie, and Samuel Daniel produced an 
 
EARLY ENGLISH DRAMA 95 
 
 original play, The Tragedy of Cleopatra, written after the model 
 set by Gamier. In this class, too, may be reckoned Fulke 
 Greville's Alaham and Mustapha, which are strictly classical 
 in structure, though not in subject. These plays had little or 
 no influence upon the course of English drama. 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 
 
 The Beginnings : Fisher to Ascham Lyly, Sidney, Hooker The 
 Elizabethan Novel Literary Criticism The Chroniclers The 
 Translators The Pamphleteers Satire Literature of the Sea 
 Character- writing Raleigh, Barton. Bacon, Jonson, Selden. 
 
 ENGLISH literature, like English life, during the sixteenth The New 
 century, is moulded by two main influences, the religious Learning, 
 reformation and the classical renascence, and in many phases 
 of the literature now under discussion, these forces are seen 
 operating in unison. At the beginning of the century, the 
 sojourn of Erasmus in England, and the influence of such great 
 English scholars as Grocyn, Colet, and Linacre had deepened 
 the love of the new learning and the new humanism, and had 
 helped to point imaginative minds to fresh worlds of thought 
 and beauty. Everywhere the old canons and formulae were 
 being tested, and either rejected entirely or reinterpreted and 
 amplified. Alike in theology, scholarship, and literature, a 
 richer and wider human conception of life appeared, and after 
 some hesitation and opposition, prevailed. The physician 
 Linacre helped to humanize science by uniting it with the 
 classical learning which he had acquired from the great Greek 
 scholar Leonides. Colet the divine pointed his students away 
 from the dialectical Scotist theology, and even from the broader 
 doctrine of Aquinas, to a more elemental and personal con- 
 ception of religion. Grocyn the scholar gave to Oxford the 
 new classical lore which he imbibed in Italy from Politian and 
 Chalcondylas. Within the Church, the new learning affected 
 Fisher the reactionary no less powerfully than the reformer 
 Latimer. 
 
 John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester (1459 ?-1553), like his Fisher, 
 friend and fellow martyr, Thomas More (1478-1535), had been 
 the close friend and protector of Erasmus, who fanned, if he 
 did not kindle, the eager spiritual flame which make both of 
 these Englishmen notable in literature and great in history. 
 With the content of Fisher's sermons we are not here con- 
 cerned ; but their style, with its conscious grace and finish, and 
 deliberate fusion of English and Latin elements, shows how 
 strongly the classical models were at this period affecting the 
 practice of the vernacular. 
 
96 
 
 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 More's More's greatest work, Utopia (1516), was originally written in 
 
 Utopia. Latin, and therefore can be only briefly discussed here. Like 
 Plato's Republic and Augustine's De Givitate Dei, it is thepicture 
 of an ideal commonwealth. The broad humanism of More's 
 character and training manifests itself in his insistence on 
 pacificism, communism, clemency to criminals, kindness to 
 animals, and the elimination of grinding drudgery from the 
 worker's life. The frequent economic and the occasional 
 ethical weaknesses of his treatise are hardly matter for present 
 notice ; but its fine sympathy and keen preoccupation with 
 everything that makes for the dignity and worth of life, are 
 typical of all that is best in the new order of thought. Apart 
 
 from the Utopia, More is important in literature through his 
 carefully written controversial writings, his Latin epigrams, 
 and one or two of his interesting but uneven English poems. 
 Latimer. The humanism of Hugh Latimer (1485-1555) was directed 
 rather toward deepening and purifying religious faith than 
 toward widening the boundaries of secular knowledge. The 
 honesty and directness which characterized his whole life and 
 brought him a martyr's fate and glory, are everywhere evident 
 in his sermons. These are written in vigorous and simple 
 English, constantly lit up with racy allusion and homely 
 
 anecdote. In the evolution of the English sermon his style 
 represents a happy interlude between the uncouthness of much 
 that had gone before, and the ornateness of much that was to 
 follow. In his last communications to Eidley and others, as 
 preserved in his Conferences, his simple speech becomes poig- 
 nantly tragic. 
 
 Tindale, Great importance attaches to three men, William Tindale 
 Coverdale, (1484-1530), Miles Coverdale( 1488-1568), and Thomas Cranmer 
 Cranmer. (1489-1556), owing to their connexion with the new English 
 Bible and the English Prayer Book. Tindale's life was a stormy 
 one : throughout the years he spent on the Continent he was 
 persecuted by his enemies, who eventually had him put to 
 death for his religious writings and beliefs. His English trans- 
 lation of the New Testament made from the Latin, Greek, and 
 German versions, found its way into England at first surrepti- 
 tiously but afterwards with the acquiescence of Henry VIII. 
 Tindale had already translated part of the Old Testament ; but 
 it was left to Coverdale to publish a complete English Bible. 
 The first edition of this appeared in 1535, and was based on the 
 Vulgate, two other Latin versions, the German versions of 
 Zwingli and Luther, and Tindale's translation of the New 
 Testament and the Pentateuch. The so-called Matthew Bible 
 (1537) incorporated all Tindale's extant work, making up the 
 remainder from Coverdale's version : though soon superseded, 
 it is important as supplying the basis for later translations, 
 including the great Authorized Version. Tindale was a far 
 better scholar than Coverdale, and the superb rhythm and 
 language of the Authorized Version are ultimately due to his 
 genius. The language of the New Bible was simple and 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 97 
 
 vigorous, avoiding pedantry yet ensuing dignity, as became 
 a work of popular and national appeal. Cranmer contributed 
 a preface to the second edition of Coverdale's Great Bible (1540), 
 which is therefore known as Cranmer' s Bible. Of his remain- 
 ing work, the larger part was controversial ; but his greatest 
 achievement was his rehandling of the Church liturgy, to which 
 he contributed the litany and many of the collects. The Book of 
 Common Prayer, as we have it to-day, owes much to other hands, 
 and shows how widely spread at this period was the capacity 
 for fine prose ; but where it achieves its highest majesty and 
 most superb rhythm, there we can certainly trace the genius 
 of Thomas Cranmer. 
 
 The influence of Erasmus is as strongly evident in the work Elyot. 
 of Sir Thomas Elyot (1490 ?-1546) as it had been in that of 
 Sir Thomas More. His interest in medicine, which he probably 
 derived from Linacre, finds expression in The Castle of Health : 
 more famous is his Book of the Governor, a treatise strongly in- 
 fluenced both by Plato and Xenophon, in which he discusses 
 the ideal state, and the ideal education for one who is to share 
 in its government. The book is chiefly valuable as an expres- 
 sion of the educational ideals of the early Renaissance in 
 England. The course prescribed for the youthful Governor is 
 liberal and humanistic : it includes logic, geography, history, 
 and wide reading in the classics. The Platonic ' gymnastic ' 
 is extended to include tennis, though it forbids football. 
 
 The Itinerary of John Leland (1506-1552) possesses strong Leland, 
 antiquarian but small literary interest. More important are Cheke, 
 three Cambridge scholars and friends, John Cheke (1514-1557), Wilson. 
 Thomas Wilson (S-1581), and Roger Ascham (1515-1568). 
 Cheke, as Milton tells us in a famous line, ' taught Cambridge 
 and King Edward Greek ', as Regius Professor, and did much 
 to encourage English learning, though writing himself chiefly 
 in Latin. Wilson wrote English, and in his Art of Rhetoric 
 encouraged others to write it, and to write it simply, without 
 Latinisms, or those new-fangled affectations which he described 
 as * ink-horn ' terms. 
 
 The most notable of the three is Ascham, whose chief works Ascham 
 are The Schoolmaster, Toxophilus, and some interesting Latin 
 letters. Toxophilus is a treatise addressed to the Gentlemen 
 and Yeomen of England on the art of shooting with the long 
 bow. Ascham, who took the same interest in this subject that 
 Kipling was subsequently to take in rifle-shooting, complains 
 that archery has gone out of fashion, with lamentable results 
 to the national life. * If shooting could speak, she would 
 accuse England of unkindness and slothfulness.' His treatise, 
 though technical, is written vividly and with spirit. * When 
 a man shooteth,' he says, ' the might of his shot lieth in the 
 foremost finger and on the ringman, for the middle finger, which 
 is the longest, like a lubber starteth back, and beareth no weight 
 of the string at all.' He has a delightful half -serious panegyric 
 of the Goose, the patron bird of archers. Some of his senti- 
 
98 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ments recall Plato and anticipate Ruskin : ' Nothing is brought 
 to the most comely use which is not handled after the most 
 comely fashion.' ' Nature itself taught men to join always 
 wellfavouredness with profitableness.' ' Virtue itself is nothing 
 else but comeliness.' This high sense of form appears in 
 The- Schoolmaster, both by way of example and precept. ' Ye 
 know not what a hurt ye do to learning that care not for words 
 but for matter, and so make a divorce between the tongue and 
 the heart.' The book is inspired with that passion for English 
 learning which is later to find expression in such poems as the 
 Musophilus of Daniel, and is one of the master -impulses of the 
 Elizabethan age. Ascham's choice of English for his medium 
 anticipates the final victory of the vernacular over Latin. Less 
 absolute, though not less lasting, in its results was his rejection 
 of the ornate style, and his insistence on a simplicity based on 
 a discriminating use of classical models. He is an early and 
 eager champion of classical prosody in English poetry, and 
 anticipates Harvey and Campion in his objection to ' barbarous 
 rhyming'. 
 
 Lyly's Before discussing collectively the various kinds of Eliza- 
 
 bethan prose we may conveniently notice three outstanding 
 figures John Lyly (1554 ?-1606 !), Philip Sidney (1554-1586), 
 and Richard Hooker (15541600). j^yly's plays will be dis- 
 cussed elsewhere : his most famous work in prose consists of 
 two volumes, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579) and Euphues 
 and his England (1580), which together form the first regular 
 English novel. In point of content, Euphues owes much to 
 Sir Thomas North's Diall of Princes, a translation, through 
 the French, of a famous treatise by the Spaniard, Guevara. 
 North had endeavoured to reproduce the heightened style of 
 his original, and had added to it the ornament of alliteration : 
 to him, and to the example of John Pettie, author of The Petite 
 Palace of Pleasure, are due many of the formal characteristics 
 usually associated with 'Euphuism'. The first part of the 
 story is laid in Naples, and turns on the rivalry between 
 Euphues and his friend Philautus for the heart of the maiden 
 Lucilla, who jilts Euphues and involves him in a quarrel with 
 Philautus, and in bitter reflections on the inconstancy of women. 
 In Euphues and his England, the two friends become recon- 
 ciled, and pass into England, where they are entertained at 
 Canterbury by the amiable Fidus. Philautus now falls in love 
 with the Lady Camilla, while Euphues looks on and gives 
 seasonable advice. Camilla proving cold, Philautus transfers 
 his affections to another with greater success. Euphues again 
 quarrels with his friend, and eventually, after praising the 
 women of England, leaves that country for the mountainous 
 retirement of Silexedra. 
 
 It will be seen that this novel, written by a courtier for the 
 Court, turns largely on an immemorial theme of romance, the 
 conflict between love and friendship. There is little action in 
 the tale, and what there is is not enthralling. But the book is 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 99 
 
 not only a novel : it is a novel with a purpose indeed, with 
 several purposes. It discusses many themes of fashionable 
 interest friendship, dress, women, youthful folly, religion and 
 education. Lyly's remarks on this last subject in Euphues and 
 Ms England are derived from Plutarch through Erasmus. But 
 great as is the historical importance of the book in point of 
 content, it has still greater importance through its style, which 
 seems contrived in conscious reaction against the simplicity 
 preached and practised by Ascham and his school. Simplicity 
 was to Lyly a cardinal vice : he made it his business to ' load 
 every rift with ore ' or failing this, with tinsel. He arranged 
 his sentences after a scheme of the most carefully planned 
 parallelism or antithesis, and heightened this effect by the free 
 use of rhetorical questions and of repetition, alliteration and 
 assonance. 1 He was lavisji in his employment of classical 
 allusion, and of pseudo -classical embroidery and invention ; 
 but more distinctive still is the fantastic and often startling use 
 of folk-lore, magic and popular ' science ' which runs, generally 
 in the form of simile, throughout Euphues, and is directed to- 
 wards giving its periods richness and variety. For this * unnat- 
 ural history ', Lyly's chief source was Pliny's Natural History. 
 
 Lyly's achievement is of high importance in the history of Influence 
 English prose. The effect of Euphues was immediate and pro- of 
 found, and its style, though satirized by Nash and others, Euphues. 
 affected in some degree nearly every contemporary writer of 
 prose, and many writers of verse. Shakespeare constantly 
 uses its language and figures, satirically and otherwise. 2 In 
 point of form it prepared the way for Donne and Browne, and 
 indeed for all who have since striven to write rich and individual 
 prose. In subject and spirit it foreshadows Kichardson and 
 Sterne; for, as M. Jusserand remarks, 3 'With Euphues com- 
 mences in England the literature of the drawing-room.' 
 
 Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), writing literature as an Sidney's 
 aristocratic amateur, attempted almost as many of its kinds Defence of 
 as the typical professional in letters, Drayton. Here we are Poesy. 
 concerned with his two chief works in prose. His Apology for 
 Poetry, composed about 1579, published in 1595, and subse- 
 quently reissued as the Defence of Poesy, is among the chief 
 critical documents of the time. It was written in reply to 
 Stephen Gosson, a former playwright who had repented of his 
 ways and in The School of Abuse (1579) had written an attack 
 on the drama, and on poetry in general. Gosson's basis of 
 attack was largely moral, and this fact accounts for a good deal 
 in the tone of Sidney's reply. He is concerned to prove that in 
 all countries and ages poetry has been respected, and that she 
 
 1 See R. W. Bond's edition of The WorksofJohn Lyly, vol.i, pp. 120-7. 
 
 2 See W. R. Rushton, Shakespeare's Euphuism ; and R. W. Bond, 
 Works of John Lyly, vol. i, pp. 165-75. 
 
 3 The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare. See also Walter 
 Raleigh, The English Novel, pp. 30-48 ; George Saintsbury, The English 
 Novel, pp. 33-5 ; and John Lyly, by Albert Feuillerat. 
 
100 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 has earned respect through her natural dignity and worth. 
 She is the friend both of virtue and learning : yet she is no 
 austere task-mistress : * Nature never set forth the earth in so 
 rich tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with pleasant 
 rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever 
 else may make the too much loved earth more lovely.' Poetry 
 is not only beautiful and helpful : she is divine : her sons ' are 
 so beloved of the Gods that everything they write proceeds of 
 a divine fury'. Sidney now passes to an examination of the 
 different poetic kinds, defending most of them, but commenting 
 severely on the young romantic drama of England. In a 
 famous passage he praises the ballad, a form too little appre- 
 ciated by the learned of his day. ' Certainly I must confess 
 my own barbarousness : I never heard the old song of Percy 
 and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with 
 a trumpet : and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder, with 
 no rougher voice than rude style.' Towards the end of his 
 treatise he discusses the respective merits of rhyme and of 
 classical scansion or * versing'. English, it appears, is 'fit for 
 both sorts'. In attaching importance to quantitative, as 
 distinguished from accentual, scansion, Sidney was undoubt- 
 edly influenced by the theories advanced by his friend Harvey, 
 and adopted for a period by the youthful Spenser. The whole 
 tone of Sidney's treatise, and especially his citation of classical 
 precedents and canons, reflects the temper of the Kenaissance, 
 and was probably largely due to Italian influence. 
 
 Sidney's other great work in prose, The Countess of Pembroke's 
 Arcadia, was begun in 1580 and published in 1590. Written 
 primarily for the pleasure of the great Countess, his sister, it 
 reflects the gallant fancy and high chivalry of its author's 
 nature, and for its pastoral tone and setting owes much to the 
 Arcadia (1504) of Sannazaro and the Diana Enamorada (1552) 
 of Montemayor. Its relations to Euphuism have been variously 
 estimated : here it can only be said that while its sentences 
 have sometimes a euphuistic ring, they owe their peculiar 
 grace and aroma to a different and less self-conscious habit of 
 phrasing. The Arcadia describes the adventures of the princes 
 Musidorus and Pyrocles, who, being shipwrecked, disguise 
 themselves as rustics, and fall in love with their fellow-so- 
 journers in the forest, Pamela and Philoclea, daughters of 
 Basilius, King of Arcadia, and his wife Gynecia. Pyrocles, who 
 has adopted the garb of a shepherdess, is loved in that capacity 
 by the king, and in his own person by Gynecia, who has pene- 
 trated his deception. There results a long and complicated 
 series of intrigues, which are at last resolved in happiness and 
 marriage. By far the most interesting character in the book 
 is the love-stricken Gynecia. But the charm of the volume 
 lies not so much in its plot or psychology as in its general atmo- 
 sphere of romance, and in the fair flowers of fancy which light 
 up its pages. ' Baccha and Leucippe, two ladies of noble birth, 
 the latter of a fine daintiness of beauty, one that could do much 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JAC'i3EA,\ L'KOoE 101 
 
 good and meant uo hurt.' ' Queen Helen, whose jacinth hair, 
 curled by nature but intercuiied by art, like a fine brook 
 through golden sands, had a rope of fair pearl, which now 
 hiding, now hidden by her hair, did, as it were, play at fast- 
 and-loose with each other, mutually giving and receiving rich- 
 ness.' ' Phalantus his horse, young, and feeling the youth of 
 his master, stood curvetting, which being well governed by 
 Phalantus, gave such a glittering grace as when the sun in 
 a clear day shines upon a waving water.' 
 
 The wide scope of Elizabethan prose is strikingly illustrated Hooker, 
 by the fact that the styles of Lyly and Sidney could flourish 
 side by side with that of Kichard Hooker. Hooker, whose 
 personality lives for us in the quaint and delightful Life by 
 Izaak Walton, wrote his greatest work, The Laws of Ecclesi- 
 astical Polity, in order to assert the authority and worth of the 
 Established Church of England against its Puritanical assai- 
 lants. These had clamoured for a far stricter discipline, for the 
 abolition of bishops, and for the uprooting of all popery. 
 Hooker, before meeting them on their own ground, devoted 
 the first book of the Ecclesiastical Polity to examining the 
 nature of law, and distinguishing between those elements of 
 it which were divine and universal, and those which were of 
 merely temporary obligation. Having done this, he protested 
 against a too rigorous employment of Holy Scripture in the 
 determination of divine law, and pleaded for a system of 
 church government which should follow its own revelation 
 without attacking the revelation vouchsafed to others. He 
 next shows that the Elizabethan Church fulfils this condition ; 
 he defends her and her prayer-book against the charge of popery, 
 and examines and exalts her conception of sacramental grace. 
 The first five books of The Ecclesiastical Polity are admittedly 
 Hooker's own ; the last three are more doubtfully so. The 
 whole work represents a conception of religion and church 
 government which in largeness and profundity was worthy of 
 the highest humanistic tradition. Kare even with the greatest 
 contemporary humanists are the serenity and dignity with 
 which Hooker meets his opponents in controversy ; and these 
 qualities of spirit are also main qualities of his style, which 
 even in its least inspired moments possesses symmetry and 
 balance, and at its best achieves a majesty and rhythm un- 
 common in English prose of any period. Hooker shuns the 
 extravagant as carefully as Lyly had ensued it : he allows little 
 ornament for ornament's sake ; but his thought fashions its 
 own beauty, and often kindles into strange fervours. No prose 
 writer of his day is more definitely in the genius of the 
 language. 
 
 The Elizabethan novel, as we have seen, had Lyly and The Eliza- 
 Sidney for its greatest practitioners. The form was not entirely bethan 
 new in English literature. Before the appearance of the novel, 
 printing press, verse which might be easily memorized and 
 transmitted, had been the favourite medium of imaginative 
 
102 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 fictioii : yet, both before and after Caxton's day, the prose 
 romance had existed and had sometimes even achieved great- 
 ness, as in Mandeville's voyages, Malory's great narrative, and 
 the translations of Berners. In the age of Elizabeth, the use of 
 prose in fiction had been quickened by the growing preference 
 for the vernacular, and by its employment in translation, 
 Biblical and secular, and in the drama. 1 It was largely through 
 these influences that the Elizabethan period saw the rise of the 
 novel as a modern form. Though the old romantic themes 
 had fallen into disfavour, romance itself had achieved a new 
 lease through the chivalrous and pastoral elements which came 
 into English fiction from foreign sources. The most notable 
 result of these influences is Sidney's Arcadia. 
 
 A more courtly element had passed into the novel from the 
 novels. treatises of North and Hoby, and had found highly -wrought 
 expression in Euphues. Euphues and the Arcadia had numerous 
 imitators, and many of these reproduce the colour of both 
 novels. Thus Lodge's Rosalynde, famous as the chief ' source ' 
 of As You Like It, suggests by its sub -title Euphues his Golden 
 Legacy a debt to Lyly, yet really owes far more to Sidney. 
 G-reene, in Mamillia (1580), tries his hand at Euphuism, but in 
 a series of novels Pandosto (1588), Perimedes (1588), and 
 Menaphon displays the influence of Sidney, both in style 
 and setting. The debt of Shakespeare to the first and third 
 of these novels is discussed elsewhere in this volume. In his 
 later novels Oreene adopts a different theme and fashion. In 
 his Mourning Garment (1590) and Never too Late (1590), he 
 portrays in the form of romance certain incidents of his own 
 erring and pathetic life, and this self -revelation appears more 
 realistically and poignantly in his last works, A Groatsworth of 
 Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, and The Repentance 
 of Robert Greene (both 1592). In more than one of these novels 
 appears a character which occurs also in his plays, the wife 
 wronged and deserted by her husband, yet bearing her injuries 
 with patience and forgiveness. In a further class of work Greene 
 deals with London criminals and courtesans as he had known 
 them, describing them literally and by way of warning in his 
 Notable Discovery of Cosenage (1591), and more strikingly and 
 dramatically in his Disputation between a He-Coney -catcher and 
 a She -Coney -catcher. 
 
 Nash and A good deal of the work of Thomas Nash (1567-1601) falls 
 Deloney. under a different heading ; but his picaresque novel, The Un- 
 fortunate Traveller, or The Life of Jack Wilton, gives him a 
 leading place among the pioneers of English fiction. The 
 European novel of vagabondage and roguery derives from 
 the Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes. In exploiting its vogue and 
 describing the roving life of a fictitious English page somewhat 
 resembling the roving student of Quevedo's Pablo de Segovia 
 Nash undoubtedly prepared the way for Defoe. Equally 
 
 1 See the Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii, chap. xvi. 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 103 
 
 realistic, thoughvnot strictly of the picaresque order, are the 
 novels of Thoma*s Deloney (1545 *?-1605 ?), which portray the 
 bourgeois life of Elizabethan England, though some of them 
 are nominally set in the historic past. His Thomas of Beading 
 deals with the clothiers ; his Jack of Newbury has for its hero 
 a Berkshire weaver, and in The Gentle Craft he introduces the 
 shoemaker, Simon Eyre, who reappears as the chief figure in 
 Dekker's play The Shoemaker's Holiday. In his realistic 
 method and his addiction to bourgeois types, Deloney again 
 anticipates Defoe, and may even be said to be the forerunner 
 of Dickens and Mr. Arnold Bennett. His style is delightfully 
 racy and humorous; yet neither he nor his fellow-craftsmen 
 could give the contemporary English novel the greatness 
 which had already been achieved by the drama. There was not 
 as yet the requisite tradition ; and as far as novel writing was 
 concerned, the age is rather one of brilliant beginnings than of 
 high and steady achievement. 
 
 A few aspects of Elizabethan literary criticism have already Literary 
 been mentioned in connexion with Ascham and Sidney. We Criticism, 
 may now discuss certain other writers in this kind, together 
 with the general principles for which they stand. Here, as in 
 other paths of literature, the prevailing influence was that of 
 classical humanism, which, as far as criticism was concerned, 
 had been largely interpreted to England by Italian and French 
 writers. Classical learning, now fully discovered for the first 
 time, furnished the modern world with great exemplars, both 
 in prose and verse, and not only with these, but with much 
 luminous critical theory. The masterpieces of antiquity, at 
 first read for their own sake by the scholar, were early and 
 eagerly adopted as models by the man of letters. He had tried 
 his own literature in this respect, and had found it wanting : 
 save in a few cases, it seemed to him to be loose and unsatis- 
 factory alike in subject, handling, and metre. Some kind of 
 reformation, backed by sound theory, appeared necessary were 
 English to live and progress. These convictions gave rise to 
 various critical speculations, some technical, some general. 
 Among the technical the most notorious was the effort, already 
 noticed in connexion with Ascham and Sidney, to establish 
 a system of versification based on classical prosody. Extre- 
 mists even advocated the substitution of quantitative for 
 accentual scansion. 
 
 Closely connected with this attempt were the attacks made The War 
 upon ' rude beggarly rhyming ', and the effort to abolish it as against 
 a practice unworthy of a high and serious literature. These Rhyme 
 critical heresies are explained, though hardly justified, by the 
 disorder into which English poetry had been allowed to relapse 
 since the day of Chaucer. An early and unconvincing practi- 
 tioner of the quantitative classical hexameter, was Thomas 
 Watson, Master of St. John's College, Cambridge ; a few years 
 later his theories were being expounded by Thomas Drant, 
 a fellow of the same college. The infection spread from 
 
104 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 St. John's to Trinity Hall, whence Gabriel Harvey transmitted 
 it, shortly before 1570, to his friend, Edmund Spenser. Spenser 
 speedily and magnificently shook himself free of it, but it 
 afflicted critics like Webbe and Puttenham, and versifiers like 
 Stanyhurst and Fraunce. The struggle for and against the 
 * new versing ' raged fiercely among the critics. Most of the 
 poets were occupied with better things : yet one of them found 
 time to hit hard at a principle so alien to the genius of English 
 poetry : 
 
 Sweet Poesy l 
 
 Will not be clad in her supremacy 
 With those strange garments (Rome's hexameters), 
 As she is English; but in right prefers 
 Our native robes (put on with skilful hands 
 English heroics) to those antic garlands. 
 
 In the years 1602-3 the issue was slightly shifted and fought 
 out to a finish. Thomas Campion, himself an exquisite artist in 
 rhyme, wrote a treatise entitled Observations on the Art of 
 English Poesy, in which he attacked ' that vulgar and easy kind 
 of Poesie which is now in use throughout most parts of Christen- 
 dom, which we abusively call Rime'. Campion, though he 
 repudiated the English hexameter, set up a claim for various 
 rhymeless measures including the English sapphic and the 
 English anacreontic, and concluded with a defence of quanti- 
 tative scansion. He anticipated opposition on the part of ' many 
 glorious ' (i.e. vain -glorious) ' enemies, and those very expert 
 and ready at their weapon that can if need be extempore (as 
 they say) rime a man to death ' . He can hardly have expected, 
 however, that the opposition would produce one of the truest 
 and finest pieces of criticism in the language The Defence of 
 Rhyme in which his conclusions were triumphantly refuted 
 by Samuel Daniel. Daniel shows that the analogy between 
 English and classical poetry will not hold : ' for as Greek and 
 Latin verse consists of the number and quantity of syllables, 
 so doth the English verse of measure and accent.' Rhymeless 
 lyric has many qualities of high poetry, but rhymed tyric 
 has all these, and more, and greater. ' Our Ryme (which 
 is an excellency added to this work of measure and a 
 harmony far happier than any proportion antiquity could ever 
 show us) doth add more grace and hath more of delight than 
 ever bare numbers can possibly yield.' Daniel concludes his 
 defence of English poetry for it is to this in effect that his 
 treatise amounts in words of passionate conviction : ' And 
 therefore here I stand forth to defend the sacred monuments 
 which contain the honour of the dead, the fame of the living, 
 the glory of peace and the best power of our speech, and where- 
 in so many honourable spirits have sacrificed to memory 
 their dearest passions, showing by what divine influence they 
 have been moved, and under what stars they lived.' 
 
 1 Chapman, Hymnus in Cyntliiam, 11. 86-91 ; see Gregory Smith, 
 Elizabethan Critical Essays, Introduction, p. 59. 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 105 
 
 Closely akin to the question of prosody were the more 
 general questions of diction and style. English was only 
 gradually estab lishing itself , in the hands of writers like Ascham, 
 as the medium in which Englishmen might safely write of 
 serious things. The triumph of the vernacular was helped and 
 quickened by the great patriotic impulse of the age ; but with 
 its establishment arose many questions as to its true and 
 proper form. On the one hand it was felt that English had 
 achieved no settled standard, and that it needed every device 
 which could be legitimately used to give it strength and beauty. 
 To some writers this improvement seemed best effected by 
 recourse to classical models : thus Sidney blames Spenser's 
 archaism inasmuch as it was not ' affected ' by Theocritus or 
 Virgil. By others, English archaisms were allowed and even 
 encouraged : thus Gascoigne in his Making of Verse declares 
 that in some places ' a strange word doth draw attentive 
 reading ' ; and ' E.K.', in the Epistle Dedicatory to Spenser's 
 Shepherd's Calendar, remarks * that often-times an ancient 
 word maketh the style seem grave and, as it were, reverend '. 
 To many writers, on the other hand, the purity of English 
 prose seemed gravely endangered by the introduction of 
 archaisms, classical borrowings, neologisms and * ink-horn 
 terms '. This line of criticism casts back to Ascham and 
 Wilson, and is reflected later in Nash's dislike of what he calls 
 ' o*verracked absonism ' and ' balductums ' ' the ooze which 
 overflowing barbarism, withdrawn to her Scottish northern 
 channel, had left behind her '- 1 Similarly Sidney, in what 
 seems certainly an attack on Euphuism, refers 2 to ' that honey- 
 flowing matron, eloquence ' as being ' apparelled, or rather 
 disguised, in a courtesan -like painted affectation ' ; and Daniel 
 speaks 3 of our affectation, * wherein we always bewray ourselves 
 to be both unkind and unnatural to our own native language in 
 disguising or forging strange or unusual words '. Untroubled 
 by this critical antinomy, Elizabethan poets and prose writers 
 continued on their way, practising both kinds of writing, the 
 simple and the ornate, with a decided preference for the latter. 
 The different views regarding diction reappear with a differ- 
 ence in reference to the larger questions of form, structure, and 
 handling. Here the strict classical principle took the form of 
 insistence on literary propriety, or as George Puttenham 4 calls 
 it, decorum, seemliness, comeliness, or decency. This tendency 
 manifests itself constantly and variously throughout the criti- 
 cism of the age : many writers try to apply the maxims of 
 Horace to contemporary poetry : more noteworthy still are 
 the recurrent strictures made by the advocates of decorum upon 
 contemporary drama. Sidney struck the dominant note when 
 he taxed Gorboduc and other plays of the period with failing to 
 observe the unities, with containing ' gross absurdities ', and 
 with mingling the serious with the flippant, so that they 
 1 A Reply to Harvey. 2 Defence of Poesy. Defence of Phi/me. 
 4 The Art of English Poesie, Chap. XXTIT. 
 
 E 3 
 
 Critical 
 Theories. 
 
106 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 became neither right tragedies nor the right comedies ; and the 
 outcry was maintained till the day of Jonson, who in two of his 
 plays l defined strictly the laws of tragedy and comedy, and in 
 another 2 uttered his scorn for the authors who within the 
 compass of one play 
 
 make a child, now swaddled, to proceed 
 Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed 
 Past threescore years ; and with three rusty swords 
 And help of some few foot and half foot words 
 / Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, 
 
 And in the tyring house bring wounds to scars. 
 
 Didacti- Such criticism as this was first and foremost literary ; but 
 ism and there were also moral purists at work, and as wehave seenin the 
 Delight, case of Sidney, their challenge in some sense determined the 
 tone of the reply. Thus Lodge, in his reply to Gosson, asserts 
 with much violence the moral and civic usefulness of poets ; 
 and Nash holds that a main end of poetry was to teach ' moral 
 precepts of manners, illustrated with divers examples of other 
 kingdoms and countries '. 3 Neither critic had yet learnt, nor 
 perhaps could any writer learn till the day of Shelley's great 
 Defence, that poetry's end is to touch the imagination pro- 
 foundly, and that if she once does this, all other things, including 
 morality, shall be added unto her. The champions of poetry 
 propitiated her persecutors by flinging to them some of her own 
 children to mangle. The repudiation of the mediaeval romance 
 commonly made by the Elizabethan writing man and some- 
 times, as in Nash's case, made with considerable savagery was 
 really a sacrifice made to the artistic and ethical precisians. 
 Yet the Elizabethan men of letters by no means confined their 
 defence of poetry to an assertion of her respectability and of her 
 aptitude to ' grind moral corn in the Philistine mills '. No man 
 ever praised her beauty more fitly or fervently than Sidney : 
 less ecstatic but not less sound is the statement of Puttenham 
 that poesie is ' the common solace of mankind in all his travails 
 and cares of this transitory life : and in this last sort, being 
 used for recreation only, may allowably bear matter not always 
 of the gravest, or of any great commodity and profit, but rather 
 in some sort vain, dissolute or wanton, so it be not very scan- 
 dalous and of evil example'. 
 
 3 edantry If these writers asserted the freedom of poetry against thepuri- 
 
 Jid tans, others were found to assert it against the pedants. At a time 
 
 vomance. when England's creative writers were forging her greatest 
 
 romantic literature, it was unthinkable that her critics should 
 
 allowpoetry to be confined by classical formulae, however worthy 
 
 and august. It was impossible at the period that all men should 
 
 unite in recognizing the Tightness of all the ' nine and sixty 
 
 1 Every Man out of his Humour, and Poetaster. 
 
 2 Every Man in his Humour (Prologue). 
 
 3 Anatomy of Absurdity. 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 107 
 
 ways ' of verse ; yet Sidney, as has been shown, expressed his 
 delight in the ballad, which to many had become a thing of 
 scorn ; and Daniel, defending the despised Middle Age, de- 
 clared that ' it is but the clouds gathered about our own judge- 
 ment that makes us think all other ages wrapt up in mists'. 
 Daniel's Defence of Rhyme, with its insistence on freedom of 
 literary judgement and development, has justly been described 1 
 as an 'important document on the side of romanticism'. 
 Elizabethan writing men, indeed, were constantly romantics 
 without knowing it, and not least so in the passion with which 
 they sought out the soul of all learning and beauty. This intel- 
 lectual eros suffuses Chapman's Defence of Homer, and passes 
 into poetry in Daniel's Ulysses and the Siren. It reappears 
 again in the eager aspiration of men like Carew to vindicate 
 ' the excellency of the English tongue ' ; and in the wider vindi- 
 cation of English thought and poetry, it finds noble expression 
 in Daniel's Musophilus. 
 
 From the enormous mass of Elizabethan prose we can select The Tudor 
 only a few further kinds. Among the great Tudor chroniclers Chroni- 
 one of the earliest and most notable was Edward Hall (d. 1547). 
 His account of English history between the reigns of Henry IV 
 and Henry VIII is painstaking in its earlier part, and often 
 vivid and brilliant in its latter, where Hall was writing of what 
 he had seen and known. More famous, through the use made 
 of them by Shakespeare, are the Chronicles of England, Scotland, 
 and Ireland, edited, and in great part written, by Raphael 
 Holinshed. The early part of Holinshed's narrative deals 
 mainly with the legendary kings of Britain, and is one of the 
 sources on which Shakespeare drew for King Lear ; but the debt 
 becomes greater and more obvious when the narrative passes 
 from legend to historv, for on this portion of it Shakespeare 
 has drawn freely for the greater number of his English history 
 plays. He has sometimes indeed deigned to use the very lan- 
 guage of Holinshed, whose style, though it does not possess the 
 colour of North's, is often spirited and moving, as in the des- 
 cription of the combat between Mowbray and Bolingbroke. A 
 notable contribution to Holinshed's collection was tne Descrip- 
 tion of England by William Harrison, a treatise at once quaint, 
 informative, and aglow with the national pride which lends 
 peculiar gusto to all the chronicles of the period. 
 
 Richard Grafton (d. 1572) and John Stow were contemporary 
 and rival chroniclers : junior to both was John Speed. The 
 greatest of these was undoubtedly Stow, a tailor who gave the 
 best part of his life to the study of his country's greatness. He 
 left two sets of English Chronicles (1565 and 1580) besides his 
 famous Survey of London (1598), perhaps onr main document 
 for the topography of the city at this period. A greater scholar 
 than any of these was William Camden (1551-1623), head- 
 master of Westminster School, who wrote in Latin an admirably 
 
 1 Gregory Smith. 
 
108 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 clear and full history of England and Ireland beneath Eliza- 
 beth's rule, wherein he celebrated his country's glory with 
 finely tempered enthusiasm. An equally fine work is Britannia, 
 a learned and attractive account of his journey through England 
 in 1582. 
 
 The Tudor ^\r e have already seen that there were two main tendencies 
 Trans- j n English prose during the Elizabethan period, and that the 
 one making for ornateness prevailed. Its victory is curiously 
 evident in the great translations, prose and verse, of the period. 
 Modern translation, even at its greatest, is seldom strongly 
 individual ; its virtue consists rather in fidelity than in origin- 
 ality. This could not be the case in the Tudor period, where all 
 men, including writing men, were individualists, and variety 
 was the law of life. Certain it is that the Elizabethan trans- 
 lator thought but little of scholarship, in the word's strict 
 sense, and sought, above all things, to be free and racy. Strict 
 scholarship was, indeed, impossible when, as happened with 
 North and Nicolls, the translator made his rendering of a 
 classic from a French intermediate version. The Elizabethan 
 translator, having thrown off the shackles of accuracy, danced 
 freely and gaily. He used all manner of words that came to his 
 hand, giving the vernacular free head, now filching a lively 
 phrase! rom the gutter, now embraving his sentence with a splen - 
 dour all his own. As a result the Tudor translation, whatever 
 its faults, had the quality of an original : it was thoroughly 
 individual and vital ; and it was vitalizing as well, as may be 
 seen from its influence upon the Tudor novel and play. To the 
 drama it supplied a particularly famous exemplar ; for Sir 
 North. Thomas North's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Eomans (1579), 
 translated from Amyot's French version of Plutarch's Greek, 
 supplied the theme, and even, in many cases, the language, of 
 Shakespeare's three Eoman plays. North was to his sources, 
 if we may use the words of a play he helped to inspire, * as is 
 the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature'. 
 The richness and colour of his prose is evident in the great 
 passage describing the coming of Cleopatra to Antony on the 
 Cydnus, which Shakespeare paraphrased and hardly bettered. 
 Another notable translation was John Florio's version of 
 Montaigne, which has been widely read by Englishmen ever 
 since it was published. Florio used slang and fancy figures of 
 speech even beyond the wont of his colleagues. No translation 
 of the day is more readable. More scholarly than either of 
 these two was Philemon Holland (1552-1637), who by his 
 translations of Livy, Pliny, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Xenophon, 
 amply deserved the title conferred upon him by Fuller of 
 'Translator General!' . Other considerable prose versions of 
 the classics are Adlington's Apuleius and Sir Henry Savile's 
 Tacitus. Other men were at work upon Aristotle, Xenophon, 
 Sallust, and Cicero. Many, too, were translating from modern 
 tongues. Painter in his Palace 'of Pleasure (1566-67) drew 
 not only upon the classics, but upon Boccaccio and Bandello. 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 109 
 
 North's Diall of Princes, translated from Guevara's Spanish, 
 has been noticed elsewhere. There were also many .verse trans- 
 lations : one or two of these were notable, and one, as we shall 
 see, was great. The heresy of classical prosody finds a practical 
 outlet in JR-ichard Stanyhurst's translation from Virgil in 
 alleged English hexameters. The ten-syllabled couplet was 
 chosen by Joshua Sylvester (1563-1618) for his uninspired 
 translation (1590) of the Divine Semaine, a huge poem by the 
 French Huguenot, du Bartas. The rhyming octave was used 
 to far finer effect by Edward Fairfax in his rendering (1600) of 
 Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberate,. But the staple metre of the 
 Elizabethan verse translator was the ' fourteener ' the four- 
 teen-syllabled rhyming couplet employed by Phaer, Golding, 
 and Chapman, in their respective versions of Virgil's Aeneid, 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Homer's Iliad. The work of Phaer 
 and Golding is worthy and workmanlike. Shakespeare had read 
 the latter's version, and had drawn on it for a famous passage 
 in The Tempest. But Chapman's translation is a thing apart, chap- 
 The pedants have tried to damn it, and are trying still ; but man's 
 the poets know better, and have hailed it as a great poem in its Homer. 
 own right. Chapman, for all his Greek, missed the letter of 
 Homer time and again ; but he was one with Homer in spirit, 
 and his lines at their best have the right Homeric glory and 
 speed. Chapman's original poems (which include the Shadow 
 of Night, Andromeda Liberata, and Tears of Peace) are obscure, 
 but contain many beauties. He continued Marlowe's Hero and 
 Leander. His plays and his De Guiana Carmen are noticed 
 elsewhere. 
 
 The pamphlets of the period form a literature by themselves. The Mar- 
 Though the rise of the printing press had made this form prelate 
 popular, yet its use for political and theological purposes was Pamph- 
 restricted by the severe penal laws in force against such lets, 
 publications. The theological disputes of the time, however, 
 produced one set of tracts which may fairly claim to rank as 
 literature. These are the Martin Marprelate pamphlets, pub- 
 lished in the Puritan interest and directed against the oppres- 
 sive administration of Archbishop Whitgift, the Puritans' most 
 determined enemy. Seven of the tracts are extant : they were 
 issued from a secret and itinerant press, and attacked the bishops 
 with great scorn and vigour. Some doubt attaches to their 
 authorship, but it seemscertain that one Job Throckmorton had 
 a considerable hand in them. The anti-Martinists replied in 
 a fresh series of pamphlets, few of which possess literary value, 
 despite the fact that Lyly, and probably Nash, helped to write 
 them. They include the quaintly named Pap with a Hatchet, 
 and An Almond for a Parrot, the first of which is certainly by 
 Lyly. The controversy was ended by the drastic legislation 
 passed against the Puritans and their literature in 1593. Thelitera- 
 
 Passing from theology to crime facilis descensus we reach ture of 
 a series of pamphlets which describe the habits of contem- Crime and 
 porary rogues, vagabonds, and thieves. Awdeley, who was Fashion. 
 
110 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 far from being the first in the field of English criminology, had 
 published in 1 561 his Fraternity of Vagabonds. He was followed 
 by Thomas Harman, whose Caveat for Common Cursitors is an 
 examination, at once scientific and entertaining, of the rascally 
 types he had studied at first hand as a Justice of the Peace. 
 Greene's ' coney-catching ' pamphlets, which also represent his 
 personal experience, have been noticed elsewhere, together 
 with the rest of his prose. Dekker's Bellman of London and 
 Lanthorn and Candle-light (both 1608) are interesting specimens 
 of this kind. A whole series of Elizabethan pamphlets dealt 
 with London life in its various aspects. Greene had brilliantly 
 exploited this theme in his Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592). 
 Nash developed it with equally brilliant satire in Pierce Penni- 
 less his Supplication to the Devil, and more tragically in Christ's 
 Tears over Jerusalem. Pierce Penniless throws a good deal of 
 light on the life of the Elizabethan literary man, and incident- 
 ally affords some queer information regarding contemporary 
 diabolism. Perhaps the raciest portrait of contemporary 
 London life, however, is that supplied in Dekker's Gull's Horn- 
 book ( 1 609 ), which tells an aspirant how to become a full-fledged 
 ' gull ' or rakish man about town. 
 
 The pamphlet, like the drama, was at this period constantly 
 made the weapon of personal controversy. Thus Nash uses 
 it for the discomfiture of his enemies, the Harveys, in his 
 brilliantly vituperative little treatise, Have with you to Saffron 
 Waldron. 
 
 Tudor Whatever was its precise object, the pamphlet was nearly 
 
 Satirists, always satirical in tendency ; and for this reason, as for others, 
 it was well suited to express the pulsing vitality of its period. 
 Many writers in this kind were unconsciously helping to prepare 
 the way for greater than themselves : thus it has been noticed 
 that the Marprelate pamphlets in some sense anticipate The 
 Tale of a Tub. It might similarly be claimed that the verse 
 satire of the period, as practised by Joseph Hall and Marston, 
 anticipates the satire of Pope. This form was used freely by 
 these two writers for personal controversy. Hall's Virgi- 
 demiarum (1597) consists of 'toothless' satires, aimed at 
 things or institutions, and ' biting ' satires, which hit hard at 
 individuals. John Marston in 1598 published Certain Satires, 
 and in 1599 The Scourge of Villainy : these poems are rougher 
 in execution and fiercer in spirit than those of Hall, whom they 
 attack acrimoniously. The satires of these two, and of certain 
 minor men, supply curious pictures of the manners and vices 
 of the time ; but outside the drama, the Elizabethan age 
 produced no satirist of the first order. 
 
 Literature Some of the finest prose of the period deals with England's 
 of the Sea. maritime enterprise and discovery. The literature of the sea 
 casts back to Alfred, and the interest in far lands and waters 
 had been maintained throughout the Middle Ages by accounts 
 of travel, mythical as in Mandeville, or real as in the narrative 
 of Marco Polo. But it was not till the middle of the sixteenth 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 111 
 
 century that the interest in travel became widespread and 
 produced a literature of considerable volume. The Elizabethan 
 sailor and the Elizabethan man of letters were so closely akin 
 in spirit that a remarkable result might have been predicted 
 from the union of their activities. In 1576, the great voyager 
 Sir Humphrey Gilbert, published a notable volume, his Dis- 
 course to prove a passage by the West to Cathaia and the East 
 Indies. This was an elaborate attempt to prove by ' authority' , 
 ' reason ' and the course of the currents, that the passage was 
 navigable, had been navigated, and, if rediscovered, would be 
 of supreme value to England. The concluding sentence of the 
 treatise expresses the whole spirit of the man and his age : 'He 
 is not worthy to live at all that for fear, or danger of death, 
 shunneth his country's service or his own honour.' Hawkins 
 has left a spirited account of his ' troublesome voyage to the 
 parts of Guinea and the West Indies ' in 1567 and 1568. 
 Frobisher's valiant attempts upon the North-West passage 
 were brilliantly chronicled by his friend, Captain George Best. 
 In 1595, eight years after his own last Northern voyage, that 
 great seaman, John Davis, published his World's Hydro- 
 graphical Description. The lengthy sub -title of this treatise 
 expands the maxim enunciated seventy years before by Kobert 
 Thome the maxim which, as Professor Kaleigh remarks, 
 is ' fit to be inscribed as a headline in the charter of 
 Britannia ' that ' there is no land unhabitable, nor sea 
 innavigable.' 
 
 But the greatest monument to the glory of Elizabethan' sea- Hakluyt. 
 manship is that of Kichard Hakluyt (1552-1616). Hakluyt 
 devoted his whole life to the study of English exploration, and 
 after publishing certain smaller volumes, he gave the world the 
 great collection known as The Principal Voyages, Traffics and 
 Discoveries of the English Nation (1589-98). With this 
 achievement in view he studied books innumerable, old and 
 new, digested a multitude of ' old records, privileges and 
 letters ', and made ' long and chargeable journeys ' in search 
 of communicative mariners. The result has been fitly called 
 the ' great prose epic of the English nation '. Hakluyt, begin- 
 ning with Arthur, passes on to Ohthere's ' Voyage beyond 
 Norway ', discusses the charter of the Cinque Ports, and at last 
 comes to the subject which lay nearest to his heart, the prowess 
 of the Elizabethan voyagers. He takes all the accounts of these 
 which he can obtain, and edits them wisely, giving them unity 
 without destroying their originality. He chronicles Drake's 
 expedition to Cadiz, the voyages of Davis and Frobisher, the 
 heroic and disastrous attempts made upon the North-East 
 passage by Willoughby and. Chancellor, and the adventures by 
 land and sea of the astonishing Anthony Jenkinson. There 
 are many descriptions of minor voyages. Sea fighting, too, 
 finds recognition, as in the account of the Armada, and of 
 Cavendish' s destruction of the great Spanish galleon, the ' Santa 
 Anna.' Throughout Hakluyt'a whole narrative runs the pride 
 
112 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the man. and his age in the unparalleled glory of England's 
 achievement by sea. 
 
 Hakluyt's work was carried on by Samuel Purchas (1577- 
 1626) in the collection of voyages known as Hakluytus Pos- 
 thumus or Purchas his Pilgrims (1625). This, though not the 
 equal of Hakluyt's collection in quality, easily outgoes it in 
 length, and supplies a vast amount of information concerning 
 early enterprises in the East, later expeditions to the North- 
 West, the voyages of circumnavigation of Drake and Cavendish, 
 and, indeed, all memorable aspects of contemporary ' discovery ' . 
 There were many other volumes describing English travel by 
 land and sea. One of the most curious was the Crudities of 
 that eccentric and indomitable traveller, Thomas Coryat, the 
 friend and butt of many Elizabethan writers, who travelled 
 over Europe, for the most part on foot, and eventually made 
 his way overland to India. 
 
 The pride of the age in its seamen and seamanship and in the 
 beginnings of English colonization is reflected throughout the 
 poetry of the period. It is implicit in many an allusion of 
 Shakespeare's, and becomes explicit in suchpoems as Chapman's 
 De Guiana Carmen (1596) : 
 
 Guiana, whose rich feet are mines of gold, 
 Whose forehead knocks against the roof of stars, 
 Stands on her tiptoes at fair England looking, 
 Kissing her hand, bowing her mighty breast, 
 And every sign of all submission making 
 To be her sister, and the daughter both 
 Of our most sacred maid. 
 
 In The Virginian Voyage Drayton becomes constructively the 
 poet of England's Outer Empire, and in the nineteenth song of 
 Polyolbion he pays eloquent and patently sincere homage to 
 the great discoverers. Here is his praise of Martin Frobisher : 
 
 Then Forbosher, whose fame flew all the ocean o'er, 
 
 Who to the North West sought huge China's wealthy shore, 
 
 When nearer to the North that wandring seaman set, 
 
 Where he in our hott'st months of June and July met 
 
 With snow, frost, hail and sleet, and found stern Winter strong 
 
 With mighty isles of ice, and mountains huge and long, 
 
 Where as it comes and goes, the great eternal light 
 
 Makes half the year still day and half continual night, 
 
 Then for those bounds unknown he bravely set again 
 
 As he a sea-god were, familiar with the main. 
 
 We may conveniently discuss the prose of Sir Walter Raleigh 
 under this heading, since one of the most spirited narratives 
 in Hakluyt is his description of the great sea fight of ' The 
 Revenge'. This was originally published in 1596 under the 
 title Report of the Truth of the Fight about the Isles of the Azores 
 this last Summer. This gave Tennyson the matter for his poem 
 ' The Revenge ' ; but even Tennyson has hardly been able to 
 better some of Raleigh's strokes. There are many fine descrip- 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 113 
 
 tive passages in his treatise on Guiana published in 1596, the 
 year after nis first expedition to that country. Raleigh's keen 
 eye for nature, and his love of gorgeous colours and precious 
 stones, are evident in many passages of this narrative. He 
 left several other treatises ; but his most comprehensive work 
 is his History of the World, written during his captivity in the 
 Tower, and published in 1614. In this he treats of the * first 
 three monarchies of the world, whereof the founders and 
 erectors thought that they could never have ended'. His 
 narrative runs from the Creation down to the final subjugation 
 of Macedonia by Rome. The work is greatly planned and is 
 executed with erudition : to modern readers its main interest 
 lies in the dignity and beauty of utterance which characterize 
 its preface and many of its digressive passages. Thus he 
 writes : ' eloquent, just and mighty Death ! Whom none 
 could advise, thou hast persuaded ; what none hath dared, 
 thou hast done ! and whom all the world hath flattered, thou 
 only hast cast out of the world and despised : thou hast drawn 
 together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty 
 and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two 
 narrow words Hie Jacet. ' 1 There are few more moving passages 
 in English prose than the farewell letter written by Raleigh 
 to his wife, after the death sentence had been passed upon him. 
 
 Some of the wittiest work of the period appears in the pages ' Charac- 
 of its ' character '-writers. When character -writing first be- ter'" 
 came fashionable, the essay had not yet found itself in England, Writing, 
 though it was speedily to do so through the influence of Mon- 
 taigne and in the practice of Bacon : meanwhile, the ' character ' 
 fulfilled some of its more human functions. Character sketches 
 occur incidentally throughout earlier English literature ; but 
 the ' character ' as a specific literary form owes its existence 
 firstly to the Roman imitators of Theophrastus, and secondly, 
 and chiefly, to Theophrastus himself, studied at first hand in 
 the Latin version of Casaubon. Theophrastus, 2 the disciple 
 and successor of Aristotle, had described a number of types 
 whom he conceived as diverging from the mean in which his 
 master had found the true rule of conduct. His first English 
 imitator was Joseph Hall (1574-1656), bishop and satirist, who Hall and 
 published in 1608 his Characters of Virtues and Vices. Unfor- Breton, 
 tunately Hall's so-called characters are for the most part not 
 characters at all, but pegs on which to hang abstract and some- 
 what threadbare characteristics. As may be seen from a glance 
 at his moralizations on The Ambitious and The Unthrift, he 
 lacked those deft yet simple strokes through which Theo- 
 
 Shrastus' characters cease to be mere abstractions, and become 
 ving men and women. Hall, moreover, had a tendency to 
 preach, and to preach heavily : this spoilt his chance of writing 
 1 History of the World, Book V, Chap. VI. 
 
 a For an account of the stages by which Theophrastus established 
 himself in England, see 'Theophrastus and His Imitators' by G. S. 
 Gordon in English Literature arid the Classics, Oxford. 
 
114 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ' characters ' successfully, for a ' character's first characteristic 
 is lightness'. Hardly more successful was Nicholas Breton 
 (1545-1626), who in The Good and the Bad (1616) contrasted 
 the qualities of A Noble Man, An Unnoble Man, A Worthy 
 Knight, An Unworthy Knight, and other abstract beings. 
 Breton sometimes achieves a striking sentence, but never a 
 living portrait. 
 
 Overbury. Much more brilliant were the Witty Characters and Conceited 
 News appended to the second edition of Sir Thomas Overbury's 
 poem The Wife, and published in 1614, after his death. These 
 were written by Overbury and his friends. Their language is 
 individual, and, in general, spirited. There is much wit in 
 them, and also a good deal of strained and fantastic phrasing. 
 They vary greatly in handling and spirit : some are eulogistic, 
 but the most readable are the satirical. The colour of the age 
 and the feeling of life are frequently reproduced sometimes 
 with gusto, as in the portrait of the ' Mere Scholar ' : ' the 
 antiquity of his University is his creed, and the excellency of 
 his college (though but for a match at football) an article of his 
 faith : he speaks Latin better than his mother tongue : and is 
 a stranger in no part of the world but his own country.' 
 
 Earle. Still finer work is evident in the Microcosmographie (1628) of 
 
 John Earle (1601-1665). Earle had not only wit and style : 
 he had a most keen and delicate sense of character. He can be 
 as satirical as Overbury at his fiercest. Thus of the ' Mere Dull 
 Physician ' he writes : ' the best cure he hath done is upon 
 his purse, which from a lean sickliness he hath made lusty and 
 in flesh.' Of a gallant he remarks : * His first care is his dress, 
 the next his body, and in the uniting of these two lies his soul 
 and its faculties.' Many of Earle's ' characters ', however, are 
 written in a neutral vein, and he is just as admirable in this as 
 in the more easily managed satirical kind a fact which proves 
 his superiority to Overbury. But delightful as is his wit, his 
 most precious attributes are his rare tenderness of feeling, and 
 his gift of delicate and poetic phrase. Both these qualities are 
 seen at their highest in his perfect portrait of ' A Child ' ; but 
 they reappear in his description of ' A Good Old Man ' : 'All 
 men look on him as a common father, and on old age for his sake 
 as a reverent thing.' The same beauty is present in his word 
 on the * Contemplative Man ' : ' He looks not upon a thing 
 as a yawning stranger at novelties : but his search is more 
 mysterious and inward, and he spells Heaven out of Earth : 
 He knits his observations together and makes a ladder of them 
 all to climb to God.' In Earle, character -writing reaches its 
 highest development. He had many imitators, including 
 Cleveland, Butler, and Law. The greatest of these is Butler : 
 yet if Butler can hold his own with Earle in wit, he lacks the 
 delicacy, insight and poetic gift which make Earle's collection 
 a thing apart. The difference in quality between the two men 
 may be gathered from a comparison of their respective portraits 
 of * An Antiquary '. 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 115 
 
 Character-writing, as has been frequently pointed out, has 
 much in common with the variety of drama known as ' The 
 Comedy of Humours '. Had either the essay or the novel been 
 firmly established in England, the ' character ' must have at 
 once become absorbed in these kinds. As things were, the 
 absorption was only gradual. The transition to the essay-form 
 had already begun w r hen Earle deserted men and women to 
 discourse of the places in which they might be found * A 
 Tavern ' or ' Paul's Walk '. Here he already anticipates much 
 that is to follow in The Spectator. 
 
 Another phase of the transition is evident in Nicholas 
 Breton's Characters upon Essays, in which he deals entirely 
 with abstractions, though he retains the brief and epigrammatic 
 ' character ' form. In the period of Addison and Steele, the 
 'character' is no longer specialized, but occurs incidentally 
 among the themes of the periodical essayist. Its transfigura- 
 tion is Sir Roger de Coverley. 
 
 The collaboration in any literary project of * certain learned The 
 men to the number of four and fifty ' hardly gives promise of Author- 
 a masterpiece : yet it is to such collaboration that we owe the ized Ver- 
 greatest prose classic in the English language, the Authorized si ? n * the 
 Version of the Bible (1611). The labours of these scholars were Blble 
 the outcome of the Hampton Court Conference held in 1604 
 for the adjustment of ecclesiastical differences under the presi- 
 dency of James I. James took the keenest interest in the 
 translation, and ordered provision to be made for the trans- 
 lators, who were almost entirely Oxford and Cambridge men. 1 
 The Preface informs us that tne work extended over nearly 
 three years ; it probably also included two years of preliminary 
 research. The work of the original translators was overseen 
 and corrected by a board of twelve revisers. The principle 
 adopted is thus defined in the rules set down for the translator's 
 guidance : * The ordinary Bible read in Church, commonly 
 called the Bishops' Bible, is to be followed, and as little altered 
 as the truth of the original will permit.' In adopting the 
 Bishops' Bible as their basis, the translators were, in fact, 
 drawing on all the best that had gone before, including the 
 versions of Tindale and Coverdale. Among their chief glories 
 is the fact that they left the finest part of this unaltered. Such 
 changes as occur were made with supreme literary tact and feel- 
 ing. The result is a work uniquely great. Its qualities have 
 been well described by Froude as those of 'mingled 
 tenderness and majesty, Saxon simplicity, and preternatural 
 grandeur'. Its style has given inspiration to great English 
 writers from Milton and Bunyan to Wordsworth, Ruskin, and 
 Swinburne. 
 
 We have already seen that during the sixteenth century the 
 English tongue was having a hard fight to establish itself as the 
 
 1 For a list of them and an account of their method of working, see 
 Record* of the English Bible, A. W. Pollard, p. 49 seq. 
 
116 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 medium of English thought. How hardly Latin died may be 
 Burton's seen from the fact that Kobert Burton (1577-1640) regretted 
 Anatomy the necessity which caused his great work, The Anatomy of 
 of Melan- Melancholy ( 1 621 ), to appear in English. The fact that it did so 
 choly. doubtless caused the book to lose something in continental 
 vogue at a time when Latin was still the universal language : 
 yet had it been written in that tongue England would have lost 
 a classic, and one which, unlike some classics, has been widely 
 popular from the time of its appearance onwards. ' Scarce any 
 book of philology in our land', writes Fuller, 'hath in so short 
 a time passed so many editions.' The contemporary vogue 
 of the Anatomy is a high tribute to the taste of the age, for there 
 are few countries and periods in which a work so learned could 
 be so widely read, whatever its literary quality. The theme of 
 the book is Melancholy, studied in relation to the human body 
 and soul. A great deal of it is medical, and describes the physical 
 means by which melancholy may be caused and avoided. Few 
 medical treatises have been so quaint and readable as Burton's. 
 Thus he lays down in his dietary scheme that beef is a ' strong 
 and hearty meat ', whereas goat is a ' filthy beast and rammish, 
 and its flesh will breed rank and filthy humours '. The claim of 
 the hare to be a ' merry meat ' is unjustified ; in reality it is 
 ' a black meat, melancholy, and hard of digestion : it breeds 
 incubus, often eaten, and causeth fearful dreams '. Burton 
 refers with gusto to a type of invalid unhappily not extinct in 
 our own day ' the melancholy Jew mentioned by Montanus 
 who was so waspish and suspicious that no one could continue 
 inoffensively in. his company '. Melancholy, he held, was often 
 the work of devils and their lord, ' the ringleader to all naughti- 
 ness ' : he instances a nun who was possessed with a devil 
 for eating a piece of lettuce without asking a blessing. Yet 
 the Anatomy is by no means a mere collection of quaint 
 ideas and phrases : it has a serious interest, and its author 
 frequently achieves real eloquence and distinction. Especially 
 i* this so in the latter part of the book, where Burton deals 
 with * love -melancholy ' and religious melancholy, Much 
 of his best writing occurs in his continual ethical digressions, 
 particularly in those in the division entitled ' Eemedies against 
 Discontents '. His prose has not the magical depth and beauty 
 of Browne's : yet it has vigour and a strange charm. Johnson 
 admits that it is overloaded with quotations, but adds there is 
 ' great spirit and power in what Burton says when he writes 
 from his own mind'. He told Boswell that The Anatomy of 
 Melancholy was the * only book that ever took him out of bed 
 two hours sooner than he wished to rise'. Many men before 
 and after Johnson have had pleasure in the volume. Sterne 
 borrowed from it in Tristram Shandy, Lamb and Coleridge 
 loved it, Keats used a quotation from it as the text of Lamia, 
 and expressed his admiration for Burton in his letters. There 
 are few moods in which the Anatomy cannot be read with 
 pleasure. 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 117 
 
 Francis Bacon (1561-1626) occupies a place apart among Bacon, 
 the writers of the period, and is as important in tne evolution 
 of English prose as in that of English philosophy. The work of 
 his which is now most widely read is one which he himself de- 
 preciated ; for he tells his brother Antony that his ' Essays ' 
 were but ' fragments of his conceits ', and he apparently regrets 
 that they were written in English, one of ' these modern 
 languages ' which * will at one time or another play the bank- 
 rout with books '. The first edition of the Essays was pub- 
 lished in 1597 : between it and the third, and much fuller, 
 edition which appeared in 1625, came the sequence of his 
 philosophic works, the chief of which are The Advancement of 
 Learning (1605), Novum Organum (1620), and De Augmentis 
 Scientiarum (1623), which is the Advancement translated into 
 Latin, with additions. This last work was written during his 
 retirement at Gorhambury after his disgrace ; and to the same 
 period belong his History of Henry VII (1622) and the New 
 Atlantis (1624), his picture of the ideal commonwealth which 
 might, in his view, be realized through long and diligent in- 
 vestigation of natural law. The necessity for such investi- 
 gation was the basis of his whole philosophy. * The mind is 
 the man,' he said, ' and knowledge mind : a man is but what he 
 knoweth.' Nature, as embodied in her various * forms ' could 
 be discovered and exhausted, were the right method once 
 found : the task was difficult, since ' the subtlety of Nature is 
 greater many times over than the subtlety of argument ' . There 
 had, moreover, been many false guides, and not the least false 
 had been Plato and Aristotle. Yet the matter was of supreme 
 moment, for a complete discovery of Nature would not only 
 perfect men in knowledge, but would help them towards 
 creation. The right method was everything : it depended on 
 the collection of a complete set of instances which might servo 
 as the basis of a cautious and gradual induction. Nature must 
 be followed, not anticipated : yet men were constantly kept 
 from the sight of her by their own ' idols ' the prejudices of 
 their race, individual idiosyncrasy, profession, or dogma. Bacon 
 apparently believed himself to have been the originator of the 
 inductive method which he so eloquently advocated. Though 
 this belief is incorrect, it is his statement of that method, com- 
 bined with his conception of science as a single whole, which 
 constitute his philosophic greatness. His chief philosophical 
 work is undoubtedly Novum Organum ; but his vast and eager 
 intellectual purpose is evident throughout The Advancement of 
 Learning : * Thus have I made, as it were, a small globe of the 
 Intellectual World as truly and faithfully as I could discover : 
 with a note and description of those parts which seem to me 
 not constantly occupate or not well converted by the labour 
 of man.' 
 
 Bacon's early collection of essays was intended for himself Bacon's 
 or for private circulation among his friends : a further edition, Essays, 
 with additions, was issued in 1612 ; and the final edition of 
 
118 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Jonson's 
 Dis- 
 coveries. 
 
 Selden. 
 
 1625 was expanded into fifty-eight essays. This progression 
 is accompanied by a growing elaboration and improvement of 
 style consequent on his consciousness that he was now writing 
 for the public, and even for posterity. The themes of the essays 
 are various : they range from Goodness to Gardens, and from 
 Envy to Masques and Triumphs. It must be confessed that 
 Bacon's wisdom, as expressed in his more abstract essays, is 
 often acute and worldly rather than profound. His conceptions, 
 both of Friendship and of Greatness, make rather discon- 
 certingly for utility, and his rules of life seem often mere maxims 
 of state-craft maxims quite appropriate in his essays on 
 Counsel and Cunning, but much less so when they are applied 
 to the highest things. Yet when generalizing upon him thus, 
 we may remember that he has written : * the desire of power 
 in excess caused the angels to fall : the desire of knowledge 
 in excess caused man to fall : but in charity there is no excess ; 
 neither can angel or man come in danger by it.' ' For a crowd 
 is not company and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk 
 but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love.' His later essays 
 on concrete things, on Gardens and Building, have peculiar 
 charm : ' God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed 
 it is the purest of human pleasures.' ' He that builds a fair house 
 upon an ill seat committeth himself to prison.' The style of 
 Bacon's essays is more curt and self-conscious than that of his 
 philosophical works. Epigram is frequent, yet is always ordered 
 judiciously and with measure. The expression is artificial, yet 
 seldom ornate : there is none of the Euphuistic lavishness. 
 Many of the images are homely, and are expressed with a cun- 
 ning simplicity. Thus malignant men ' in other men's calami- 
 ties are, as it were, in season, and are ever on the loading part : 
 not so good as the dogs that licked Lazarus' sores, but like flies 
 that are still buzzing upon anything that is raw. Such dis- 
 positions are the very errors of human nature ; and yet they 
 are the fittest timber to make great politiques of : like to knee- 
 timber, that is good for ships that are ordained to be tossed, but 
 not for building houses that shall stand firm.' The finish and 
 balance of Bacon's style helped to give tradition to English 
 prose, and prepared the way for Dryden. 
 
 A broader and more virile sweep is to be found in the 
 prose of Ben Jonson. The most notable example of this is the 
 posthumously published Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men 
 and Matter (1641). This, in substance, is Jonson's common- 
 place book, his collection of extracts from the writers of 
 antiquity, altered and amplified till it assumes the form of an 
 original work. Short though the collection is, it is quite 
 sufficient to prove Jonson one of the great prose masters. It 
 contains a famous appreciation not depreciation, as has been 
 sometimes asserted of Shakespeare, together with much manly 
 moralizing upon life. 
 
 John Selden (1584-1654) was a great lawyer and a great 
 scholar, whose erudition is perpetuated in his elaborate trea- 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE 119 
 
 tises, Titles of Honour (1614) and History of Tithes (1618). 
 Much more widely read is his famous Table Talk, posthumously 
 published in 1689 by his whilom secretary, Kichard Milward. 
 These ' discourses ' as their sub-title indicates, relate ' especially 
 to Religion and State ' ; but they cover a variety of other 
 subjects, and illustrate not only their author's learning and 
 intellectual incisiveness, but his easy versatility and trenchant 
 wit. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 
 
 Shakespeare's predecessors Lyly, Nash, Peele, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene 
 Shakespeare His relation to his contemporaries Jonson, 
 Chapman, Marston, Dekker. Middleton, Heywood, Webster, Tourneur, 
 Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ford, Shirley Minors 
 
 IN the preceding chapter upon early English drama we dealt 
 with certain dramatic kinds, but encountered few independent 
 personalities of the first order. In our present period, however, 
 both the acting and the writing of plays are becoming regular 
 and professional, instead of fitful and amateur; and with 
 this change notable names at once appear. 
 
 Among the first of these is that of the last regular dramatist Lyly. 
 of the Court John Lyly. He and the remaining playwrights 
 now to be considered are commonly termed ' the University 
 Wits ' a name which accurately represents their general 
 attitude toward life and literature, but must not be taken as 
 implying that it is possible to discover a common factor for 
 their dramatic work. Lyly's career is interesting, as illus- 
 trating the growing connexion between the school stage and the 
 public stage, and also as showing how the centre of dramatic 
 interest was beginning to shift away from the Coiirt. Shortly 
 after leaving Oxford ne had achieved fame and Court favour 
 with his prose romance, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579). 
 After this he becomes certainly the playwright, and possibly 
 the Vicemaster, of the children of St. Paul's, and for perform- 
 ance by these writes the eight dramas which bear his name. 
 These were produced in the first instance for the benefit of 
 the Court, but according to the practice of the time, the boy 
 company converted the period of rehearsal into a regular 
 professional season in a playhouse at Blackfriars. This had 
 been provided for Lyly by his patron, the Earl of Oxford ; he 
 had to retire from it for a period on the ' inhibition ', or 
 prohibition, of the children's companies in 1591. 
 
 Lyly's plays vary considerably in theme and manner. The 
 earliest and most charming of them, Campaspe (1580), is a free 
 exercise in romantic dramatization, and portrays the love 
 passage between the captive maiden and the painter, Apelles, 
 who is eventually enabled to win her through the magnanimity 
 
120 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of Alexander the Great, himself a claimant for her heart. 
 Mother Bombie (1590) is a brisk and realistic comedy of con- 
 temporary life, in which the Roman model is adapted to the 
 humours of an English country town. 
 
 Others of Lyly's plays, e.g. Sappho and Phao (1581), 
 Endimion (1585), and Midas (1589), are allegories, whose 
 classical themes embody reference to contemporary affairs 
 of high public moment. The first two deal with the suits 
 respectively paid to Elizabeth by d'Alencon and Leicester, 
 and the third expresses the national hatred and scorn felt for 
 Philip the Second of Spain. In the remaining three, Gallathea 
 (1584), Love's Metamorphosis, and The Woman in the Moon 
 (1592 ?), pastoral, romantic, and classical elements blend, and 
 the allegorical element is in abeyance. 
 
 His Place The genius of Lyly opened new possibilities to English 
 in English drama, and supplied it with fresh qualities of form and finish. 
 Drama. As has been seen, the themes of his choice were varied, and so 
 were the literary and dramatic kinds to which he turned for 
 their development. His importance lies in the skill with 
 which he smoothed and fashioned the material at his disposal 
 into a rounded artistic whole, and in the delicate sensibility 
 which enabled him to draw from each source, were it pastoral 
 or mythological, early Roman or modern Italian, precisely 
 that portion which would blend and harmonize with the rest. 
 Nowhere is his skill more evident than in his handling of 
 allegory, in his suffusion of it with poetry and fancy. In point 
 of plot, he shows a greater fastidiousness than most of his 
 predecessors, and carefully avoids the cruder elements of 
 Senecan drama. He is equally an artist in dialogue, and 
 especially in the form, comparatively new in English, of prose 
 dialogue. His plays bear nearly all the main marks of his earlier 
 Euphuism wit, grace, antithesis, and a delicate artificiality 
 which the youthful Shakespeare did not disdain to copy. 
 Nash and To the same group of playwrights belong Thomas Nash 
 Peele. (1567-1601) and George Peele (1558-1597?). Nash colla- 
 borated with Marlowe in the Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage 1 
 (1591), and also wrote a comedy, now lost, entitled The Isle of 
 Dogs. In the one surviving play which represents his undivided 
 authorship, Summer's Last Will and Testament (1592), elements 
 of the older Morality are blended with rude comedy. Nash's 
 real strength, however, lies not in drama but in the novel and 
 the pamphlet. 
 
 More important, in relation to the drama, is George Peele 
 (1558-1597 *?), whose Arraignment of Paris (1582 ?), composed 
 while he was still a graduate in residence at Oxford, is 
 a courtly allegory, written in verse of no mean charm and 
 beauty. The subsequent career of Peele illustrates the 
 growing importance of the public stage. Lyly, in spite of the 
 grievous disappointment occasioned by his failure to attain 
 1 This play is discussed later in this chapter, under the heading r>f 
 Marlowe's dramas. 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 121 
 
 the Mastership of the Revels, remained till the end a hanger-on 
 of the Court, and did not seek to utilize the new means of profit 
 opened to him by the rise of the public theatres. Peele, however, 
 early turned to. the popular stage, and for this wrote all his 
 remaining dramas. These include the indifferent Chronicle 
 play, Edward I (1590-91) ; The Battle of Alcazar (1591 T), a 
 drama whose hero is the remarkable contemporary adven- 
 turer, Thomas Stukeley ; and The Old Wives' Tale (1590 1) 
 which, like its greater successor, The Knight of the Burning 
 Pestle, satirizes effectively the crude machinery of the 
 dramatized romances. Peele's scriptural play, David and 
 Bethsabe, has been already noticed. 
 
 A much more important dramatic influence is Thomas Kyd Kyd, 
 (1558-1594), who may be called the connecting link between 
 the older Senecan drama and Shakespeare. The influence of 
 Seneca is strongly evident in The Spanish Tragedy (circa 1587) 
 and Soliman and Perseda (1592?). The Spanish ' Tragedy 
 was written for the public stage, and enjoyed a vast and 
 lasting popularity. It turns on the wooing of the fair Belim- 
 peria by the captured Balthazar, her rejection of him for 
 Horatio, the son of the Knight-Marshal Hieronimo, Horatio's 
 murder by Belimperia's villainous brother, Lorenzo, and the 
 revenge taken for that deed by the crazed Hieronimo. The 
 violent horrors of this play, and especially the revenge motive, 
 are thoroughly Senecan in spirit, and inaugurate in English 
 the ' Tragedy of Blood ' of which Titus Andronicus is the type 
 and Hamlet the apotheosis. The ghost and the chorus also 
 appear, and so does the short antithetical Senecan dialogue 
 of alternating lines. But to Kyd himself are due the love- 
 passages between Horatio and Belimperia, which carry a note 
 of moving passion hitherto hardly heard in English drama. 
 The careful elaboration of the plot was also a valuable rein- 
 forcement to the hitherto crude technique of the public stage ; 
 but above all things The Spanish Tragedy is important for 
 the new force, constantly, indeed, passing into crudity and 
 violence, which it introduced into the faltering beginnings of 
 English tragedy. The play stormed and held the popular 
 imagination, and the raving Hieronimo was beyond doubt 
 the favourite figure on the Elizabethan stage. In 1601 and 
 1602 Jonson made some powerfully -written additions to the 
 play to fit it for revival by Henslowe. The First Part of Hiero- 
 nimo is a crude play written by some imitator of Kyd in order 
 to exploit the popularity of his masterpiece. 
 
 To Kyd must almost certainly be attributed the original 
 play on the subject of Hamlet, commonly known as the ' Ur- 
 Hamlet ', which was subsequently revised and elaborated 
 by Shakespeare in two apparently separate and distinct 
 versions. According to one theory, traces of this lost play 
 have been preserved in a German drama on the subject of 
 Hamlet, Der bestrafte Brudermord, which was first printed in 
 1781, but probably first performed in 1629. Even the Hamlet 
 
122 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of Shakespeare, in its definitive form, has many features in 
 common with The Spanish Tragedy : it is probable that the 
 Ur -Hamlet had many more. 
 
 Marlowe ^ still greater force than Kyd was Christopher Marlowe 
 Tambur- (1564-1593). Educated at the King's School, Canterbury, he 
 may well have taken part in the school plays which we know 
 to have been performed there under the mastership of Anthony 
 Kushe. Immediately after leaving Cambridge (1587) he pro- 
 duced the first of his two plays entitled Tamburlaine the Great ; 
 the second probably followed in the succeeding year. In its 
 choice of hero, its development of character, and its free, loose 
 handling of plot, Tamburlaine belongs to the class of heroic 
 play of which Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes is one of the few 
 surviving examples. 
 
 As this type already held the popular stage, Marlowe's 
 contribution to English drama differs from that of Kyd, who 
 introduced to it what had been already developed elsewhere. 
 Nor can Marlowe share in the claim of Kyd to have helped the 
 popular playwright substantially toward better methods of 
 plot-construction. Yet, these facts apart, it is true that he 
 rendered the same service to the heroic play which Kyd had 
 rendered to the Senecan. The crude heroic type of hero 
 which had hitherto held the public stage finds its transfigura- 
 tion in Tamburlaine, that mighty figure eager with the joy 
 of beauty, and bent on the conquest of the world. The right 
 Renaissance zest for all loveliness and might flames forth 
 in the apostrophes of Tamburlaine to his queen, Zenocrate, 
 in his promises to his lieutenants, Theridamas, Techelles, and 
 Usumcasane, and in his exultation over Bajazet and the other 
 monarchs he has conquered. There is little enough of tragedy, 
 as we moderns understand the word, in these ' tragical 
 discourses '. No ethical issue is interwoven with the hero's 
 progress, no Nemesis attends his vaunting pride, no chain of 
 causality holds together the events of the play. Crudities and 
 cruelties alike deface the story, and impair our sympathy for 
 the conqueror. But his passion and pride and triumphant 
 will are presented with an intensity of feeling and of poetry 
 which had nowhere yet been seen upon the English stage. 
 The whole spirit of the play, and of Marlowe, is expressed in 
 these lines of Tamburlaine' s : 
 
 Nature that framed us of four elements 
 Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
 Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds : 
 Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
 The wondrous architecture of the world, 
 And measure every wandering planet's course, 
 Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
 And always moving as the restless spheres, 
 Will us to wear ourselves and never rest, 
 Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, 
 That perfect bliss and sole felicity, 
 The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 123 
 
 Even the concluding anticlimax finds its counterpart in certain 
 aspects of Marlowe's genius. 
 
 Hardly less important than the play's dramatic and poetic 
 quality was the medium in which it was written blank verse, 
 which Marlowe transferred for the first time from the academic 
 to the public stage. This at once superseded the crude 
 rhyming metres of the earlier popular playwrights the ' jig- 
 ging veins of rhyming mother wits ' to which the prologue 
 refers and became the staple measure of English drama. 
 The gain in freedom and flexibility was incalculable, and was 
 enhanced by the new beauty and majesty which Marlowe 
 imparted to his ' mighty line '. 
 
 In his second play, Dr. Faustus (1588), the Will to Power Dr. Fans- 
 is still mighty, but it operates in the sphere of intellect rather lus. 
 than of action. Faustus, as a result of his compact with 
 Mephistophilis, becomes a mightier Tamburlaine, aspiring to 
 control the past and the future, and having devils for his 
 tributary kings. The material horrors of the German Faustbuch, 
 the original source of the Faust story, have beffc spiritualized 
 and thus rendered infinitely more poignant arfd majestic. 
 The concluding scene, in which Faustus awaits his doom, has 
 greater intensity and terror than anything yet attempted in 
 English drama. The play represents the tragedy of power, 
 not, as Tamburlaine had done, its mere exaltation. It is 
 probable that the crude buffooneries which deface Dr. Faustus 
 came from another hand than Marlowe's. 
 
 Ambition and its downfall are again the subject of Marlowe's The Jew 
 next play, The Jew of Malta (1589 ?). Barabas, the Jew who of Malta. 
 finds his Absolute in gold, and is despoiled by Christians of 
 his treasure and his daughter, is a prototype of Shylock, and 
 during the first three acts is heightened almost to his propor- 
 tions ; but in its two final acts the play degenerates into 
 melodrama, and the reader's interest in Barabas has ceased 
 long before he is boiled alive in the cauldron which he has set 
 for the destruction of his foes. In Tamburlaine and Faustus, 
 and to some extent in The Jew of Malta, Marlowe is handling 
 the tragedy of power. In his next play, Edward II (1592), Edwardll. 
 he displays the tragedy of weakness, and shows England's most 
 feckless monarch at handgrips with destiny. Marlowe here 
 shows a greater interest in plot than had been evident in his 
 previous dramas. It has been well said * that Edward II 
 ' displays an evident desire to escape from the one-man 
 type of drama ', and that ' this escape is effected rather 
 curiously and somewhat to the detriment of the piece not 
 by the juxtaposition of several figures of equivalent dramatic 
 weight, but by giving predominating importance to each of 
 two or three during various portions of the play ' . The descrip- 
 tion of Edward's murder in the fifth act of this play is one of 
 the most powerful passages in Elizabethan or in any drama. 
 
 Marlowe's Massacre at Paris (1592-93) is a feeble and dis- 
 1 Tucker Brooke, The Tudur Drama, p. 251. 
 
124 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 appointing drama of contemporary French history. Of greater 
 interest is Dido, Queen of Carthage, accredited to him and to 
 Nash, which contains several fine passages, and, in Dido, 
 Marlowe's most successful picture of a woman. Marlowe's 
 share in Henry VI will be discussed later, in relation to 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 The popularity of Tamburlaine, which was second only to 
 that of The Spanish Tragedy, kept before the Elizabethan 
 playwrights the fact that the Senecan model was not the only 
 one for English tragedy. The native way of handling drama 
 had been triumphantly vindicated, and the result is evident 
 in the criticism and practice of Marlowe's chief contemporaries. 
 Some of these, notably Nash and Greene, paid 'him the tribute 
 of jealousy, expressed in a form of envenomed sarcasm. Yet 
 Greene. Greene, who had sneered at his blank verse, and compared it 
 to the ' fa-burden of Bo-bell ', was forced by its popularity and 
 evident merits, to make use of it in his earliest extant play, 
 Alphonsus, King of Arragon (1588 ? ). This is modelled through- 
 out on Tamburlaine, which it outdoes in extravagance. 
 Alphonsus is a mythical conqueror, who, after overcoming 
 . monarch after monarch, eventually defeats ' the Great 
 Turk ', and wins his daughter to wife. The play possesses little 
 strength or interest, and abounds in absurdities and anachron- 
 isms. Even more absurd (1588 ?) isjOrlando Furioso, in which 
 Greene, following Ariosto, represents Orlando as in love with 
 the fair Angelica, and driven mad through the machinations 
 of his rejected rival, Sacrapant, a figure apparently recreated 
 by Greene in deliberate burlesque of Tamburlaine. Hardly 
 more successful or interesting is A Looking Glass for London 
 and England (1589?), by Greene and Lodge, which contains 
 curiously blended elements of the Mystery, the Morality, and 
 the farcical Interlude, and describes the pride and downfall 
 of Kasni, King of Nineveh, to the accompaniment of a moral 
 chorus intoned by the prophets, Jonah and Oseas. If Greene's 
 dramatic career had ended at this period, he would have been 
 a mere name in the history of English drama ; but far finer 
 Friar work is evident in his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1589 ?). 
 Bacon and If his earlier plays were modelled on Tamburlaine, Friar Bacon 
 Friar undoubtedly owes much to Dr. Faustus. But Greene had by 
 Bungay. now realized that his strength did not lie in tragedy, and he 
 allows his hero to remain a genial and patriotic wizard who 
 engages our sympathies throughout the play especially in 
 his duel of magic with his rival Vandermast and saves himself 
 at the end from damnation after the fashion indicated in 
 Greene's prose original, The Famous History of Friar Bacon. 
 Interwoven with the tale of Bacon is a pastoral story developed 
 by Greene with great charm and poetic feeling,, centring round 
 the love-match between Lacy, the disguised Earl of Lincoln, 
 and the delightful country maiden, Margaret of Fressingfield. 
 There is also a historical, or pseudo -historical, element in the 
 play ; and though Greene's blending of these several themes 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 125 
 
 is far from consummate, it is still successful, and successful 
 at a period when the art of intricate plot-weaving was practi- 
 cally unknown in England. For this reason, and because he 
 is undoubtedly the founder of English pastoral comedy, he 
 must take high rank among Shakespeare's predecessors in 
 drama. 
 
 More skilful still in construction is The Scottish History of 
 James IV (1590?), which turns on James's love intrigue with 
 the Lady Ida, and his unsuccessful attempt to murder his 
 queen. The mastery over feminine character which led Nash 
 to call Greene ' the Homer of Women ', reappears here in the 
 delicately drawn figures of Ida and Queen Dorothea. A fairy 
 setting to the play is provided by the introduction of * Oboram ' 
 in the prelude and interscenic passages, though it must be 
 confessed that in point of charm between Oboram and Oberon 
 there is a great gulf fixed. George a Greene, the Pinner of Wake- 
 field (1590 ?) is a play of popular and national appeal, moving 
 in the setting of an English countryside. It takes for its hero 
 the keeper of a village pound who overcomes the rebellious 
 Earl of Kendal, and when offered honour and reward by the 
 king, craves only that he may be united to hjs true love 
 Bettris. 
 
 Apart from the qualities already mentioned, the main 
 marks of Greene's genius are his chaste and exquisite lyric- 
 gift, and the vein of racy humour which runs through even his 
 inferior plays. 
 
 Greene died in 1592 and Marlowe in the following year. 
 By this time William Shakespeare (1564-1616) had already 
 begun to write both poems and plays, and his early production 
 in the latter kind attaches him to more than one of the names 
 just mentioned. He probably left Stratford at the end of 
 1585, and soon after this he attached himself to the company 
 of players under the protection of Lord Leicester, which had 
 visited Stratford in 1573 and 1577. This subsequently became 
 the Lord Chamberlain's company, and, after the accession 
 of James I, passed under the patronage of the king, and was 
 known as the King's Players. Shakespeare was attached to 
 it during the whole of his career in the capacities of actor, 
 playwright, dramatic adapter and reviser, and actor-manager. 
 It is possible that in his early days of struggle he held horses 
 at the door of the first regular playhouse in England, The 
 Theatre, built by James Burbage at Shoreditch in 1576, and 
 subsequently transplanted across the Thames to Southwark 
 in 1598-9, and rechristened by the more famous name of 
 The Globe. Shakespeare's first connexion with the stage was 
 undoubtedly as an actor. What parts he took at this period 
 must remain uncertain : the tradition which associates him 
 with the Ghost in Hamlet, and Adam in As Ton Like It, 
 belongs to a later period of his life. The combination of the 
 playwright's and actor's profession was common throughout 
 this period. 
 
 George 
 a Greene. 
 
 Shake- 
 speare 
 Early 
 Career. 
 
126 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 His Early His first efforts as a dramatist almost certainly consisted of 
 Comedies, collaboration, or of revision of other men's work. As will be 
 seen, some of his work in both these kinds survives ; but the 
 earliest specimens have been lost, and the play, Love's Labour's 
 Lost (1590 ?), which is now generally considered to represent 
 his first extant work, is entirely his own. This drama, together 
 with The Comedy of Errors (1591) and The Two Gentlemen 
 of Verona (1592 ?), shows Shakespeare working tentatively in 
 various dramatic kinds. It is significant of his later and 
 habitual dramatic method that Love's Labour's Lost, his earliest 
 play, should be the one which owes least to previous literary 
 sources the only one, in fact, in which the story is substan- 
 tially of his own making. It turns on the attempt of the King 
 of Navarre and his three lords to forswear love for learning, 
 and on the revenge which Nature takes upon them for this 
 resolve, through the fair persons of the Princess of France and 
 her three ladies. The influence of Lyly is strongly evident in 
 the play's style and development, in its antithetical dialogue, 
 its courtly atmosphere, its conceits, its setting of ' love in 
 idleness ', and its references to contemporary events and 
 personages. Although Shakespeare ridicules the affectations 
 of the courtier, Armado, and the pedant Holof ernes, his own 
 mind is here wantoning in its new-found powers, and spending 
 itself in the fine phrasing dear to youth, and in the still finer 
 poetry put into the mouth of Berowne. Lyly's influence is still 
 further evident in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the plot of 
 which came to Shakespeare, through earlier English versions 
 or adaptations, from the Spanish romance, Diana, of Jorge 
 de Montemayor. There is clear progress here, both in handling 
 and characterization. Valentine and Proteus, Sylvia and 
 Julia, are living and well-balanced figures, and despite the 
 play's unsatisfying ending, the contrasted themes of love and 
 loyalty in friendship are developed with a certain youthful 
 mastery. There are some fine flights of poetry, and a foretaste 
 of the splendid fooling that is to come in the later plays is 
 supplied by Launce and Speed not to forget Launce's dog. 
 Crab, who, if not witty himself, is the cause of wit in others. 
 In The Comedy of Errors Shakespeare is seeking to develop 
 another vein that of Plautine comedy which the youth- 
 ful Ben Jonson was to handle in his early play, The Case is 
 Altered. In Shakespeare's case the speed and bustle of the 
 plot destroy any attempt at subtle and elaborate characteriza- 
 tion. But youthful as his hand is, he handles his farcical and 
 complicated theme with great success, and imparts a vitality 
 and swing to his scenes which most English imitators of Plautus 
 and Terence had missed. It is significant that both Shake- 
 speare and Jonson, after trying their prentice hands on this 
 kind, turn away from it to one in which character is given 
 freer play. In these three plays we see Shakespeare exercising 
 himself in two different dramatic kinds romantic comedy 
 and the classical comedy of incident and farce. In Romeo 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 127 
 
 and Juliet (first authorized version printed in 1599 : original Romeo and 
 draft perhaps 1592) he was to attempt a higher flight. The JuKe** 
 ancient tale retold by Bandello lay ready to his hand in the 
 English verse of Broke, and the English prose of William 
 Painter, on both of whom he drew for the play. For the 
 first time in drama Shakespeare is handling passion seriously, 
 and showing human life face to face with tragic issues. His 
 mind seems to go forth to the star-crossed lovers with all 
 the sympathy and glow of youth, while many passages of 
 the play are fraught with youth's aspiring music. Romantic 
 love, seldom the dominating theme of his later tragedies, is 
 here all sufficing. Romeo and Juliet is, indeed, rather a romance 
 with a tragic ending than a tragedy in the sense in which Hamlet 
 and Lear are tragedies : despite its intensity of beauty and 
 passion and suffering, it does not suggest the universal issues 
 which seem everywhere present in the great plays of Shake- 
 speare's tragic period. 
 
 To the same period may be perhaps assigned Titus Titiis An- 
 Andronicus, a crude pseudo -historical Roman drama of lust dronicits. 
 and murder and horror. Shakespeare's company performed 
 this play in 1594, but the present draft, which apparently 
 represents a making-over of two older plays, may have been 
 published a year or two earlier. Shakespeare's part in this 
 play has been diversely estimated, some writers, e.g. Mr. J. M. 
 Robertson, declining to believe that any of it is his. Yet 
 while it is certain that he is not responsible for the whole of 
 it, it contains strokes which could hardly have come from any 
 other hand. The version on which he worked has been 
 diversely attributed to Greene, Kyd, Peele, and Marlowe. 
 The chief interest of the play, from our present point of view, 
 is that it illustrates the work of revision which Shakespeare 
 might be required to perform. 
 
 Before dealing with Shakespeare's historical plays we may Shake- 
 here conveniently consider his two long poems, Venus and speare's 
 Adonis (1593) and The Rape ofLucrece (1594), written respec- p oema. 
 tively in six-lined and seven-lined rhyming stanzas. In the 
 first, Shakespeare retells with youthful sympathy the tale of 
 passion which he had found in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and 
 suffuses his stanza with much of Spenser's sensuousness. The 
 poem as a whole is overweighted with conceits, and lacks the 
 full fire and force of Marlowe's Hero and Leander ; but it 
 contains some exquisite descriptions of Nature set forth in 
 perfect poetry. Most notable in this regard are the descriptions 
 of the boar, Adonis's charger, and the hunted hare. In Venus 
 and Adonis, a woman is the seducer ; this part is played by 
 man in the companion poem, Lucrece, which lacks the freshness 
 of the first poem, but is wrought with equal metrical mastery 
 and a graver sense of tragic issues. 
 
 We may deal with Shakespeare's historical plays separately, His His- 
 though the earliest among them certainly preceded some of the torical 
 plays already noticed. The history play was the outcome Plays. 
 
128 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of the great pride taken by the Tudor Englishman in the present 
 and past glories of his nation. That pride was greatly quickened 
 by the defeat of the Armada in 1588, and from then onward 
 till the end of Elizabeth's reign there was a mighty output of 
 chronicle plays, dealing with nearly every English monarch 
 who had hitherto reigned, as well as with other historical 
 persons of eminence, and with figures (e.g. Gorboduc, Lear, 
 and Locrine) of Britain's legendary past. The chronicle play 
 represents in drama the same impulse which had led to the 
 writing of prose historical chronicles by Graf ton, Hall, and 
 Holinslied, and of historical poems such as Drayton's Barons' 
 Wars and England's Heroical Epistles, and Daniel's Civil Wars. 
 As has been seen, this kind of play had already been handled 
 by Peele and Marlowe, and by several anonymous writers. 
 
 Henry VI. The first historical play in which Shakespeare had a hand 
 is that which appears in the First Folio as Henry VI, Parts I, 
 II, and III. The two latter parts had already appeared under 
 different titles in three successive quarto forms, which, with 
 variations, represent a version intermediate between a lost 
 draft (presumably unshakespearean and possibly by Greene 
 and Peele) and the lavishly revised text which is preserved 
 in the Folio. It is now generally thought that Shakespeare 
 and Marlowe revised this lost draft, and are thus responsible 
 for the version of the quartos, and that Marlowe may also have 
 collaborated with Shakespeare in the final revision. Only 
 a small part of Henry VI, Part I, is Shakespearean. Titus 
 Andronicus had shown Shakespeare working as reviser : 
 Henry VI displays him as collaborator and collaborator with 
 
 Richard Marlowe. In Richard III, which is entirely Shakespeare's 
 
 ///. own work, Marlowe's influence is strongly evident. Richard III, 
 
 the defiant superman lusting and fighting for power, is of the 
 same mould as Tamburlaine, the superman in the world of 
 action, and Faustus, the superman in the world of thought. 
 The intensity and aspiration of his language are Marlowesque, 
 and there is much of Marlowe's clang and beat in the music 
 of Shakespeare's blank verse. Senecan influence is obvious 
 in the splendidly handled figure of Margaret, who broods 
 over the play like an avenging genius. Richard III may 
 perhaps be attributed to 1593, and its successor, Richard II, 
 to 1594. 
 
 Richard j n this sequence there is again a curious parallel with 
 Marlowe's practice. Marlowe, as we have seen, had shown 
 the exaltation of might in Tamburlaine, and its tragedy in 
 Faustus and The Jew of Malta ; and in Edward II he had, 
 apparently in conscious contrast, portrayed the tragedy of 
 weakness. There is the same antithesis, conscious or uncon- 
 scious, between Richard III and Richard II. The wistful and 
 pathetic figure of the latter king is treated with a full sense 
 both of its poetry and its tragedy. In psychological subtlety 
 his character represents an advance on anything which 
 Shakespeare had yet attempted in historical drama. Here, 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 129 
 
 as in Richard III, history, as presented in the prose narrative 
 of Raphael Holinshed, presented Shakespeare with tragic 
 material, and he handled it tragically : yet he keeps far closer 
 to Holinshed than he does in the great tragedies of his later 
 years, King Lear and Macbeth, where he draws on the same 
 source, but where the historical motive is definitely secondary 
 to the tragic. 
 
 In King John (1594 ?) Shakespeare, instead of going to the King 
 Chronicles, has worked over the old play, The Troublesome John. 
 Reign of King John (1588). He takes all his characters from 
 this, and follows it closely in point of structure, yet invests 
 the old uninspired figures with new life, and develops with 
 maturing power the contrasted tragedies of Constance and 
 Arthur. The poignantly dramatic scene between Arthur and 
 Hubert is a forecast of his later and greater tragic manner. 
 His growing mastery of humour is evident in his portrayal of 
 the Bastard Falconbridge. 
 
 We may anticipate by dealing at once with Shakespeare's 
 later history plays, postponing notice of the intervening 
 comedies. In Henry IV, 1 and 4? (1597-98 ), and Henry V( 1599), Henry IV. 
 Shakespeare creates a trilogy far greater than Henry VI, 
 1, 2, 3, though it has been noticed that in both sets of plays his 
 manner tends more to the epic than it does in Richard III, 
 Richard II, and King John, where the facts of history are so 
 marshalled as to bring out their tragic significance. Thus, 
 though Henry IV, Part I, takes up history where Richard II 
 left it off, it represents a very great difference in atmosphere and 
 feeling ; there is a wider sweep of plot, greater variety of 
 character, greater complexity of dramatic motive. In both 
 plays, however, Shakespeare relies for interest on strong 
 dramatic contrasts. The cold and resolute Bolingbroke, who 
 in Richard II had been used as a foil to the weak and irresolute 
 king, is now used as Henry IV for quite a different contrast 
 as serving to show off the fiery temper of Hotspur on the one 
 hand, and the ribald, roystering spirit of Prince Hal on the 
 other. The feminine interest, save in the scenes between 
 Hotspur and his wife, is in abeyance. But the main interest 
 of. the play, now as when it was first performed, centres in 
 'Falstaff, the greatest comic figure of all time, and his inimitable 
 followers. 
 
 Falstaff, that radiant and indomitable ruffian, has been 
 described as possessing something of the elemental and 
 universal quality which we feel in Hamlet. Originally intended 
 as comic relief, he becomes to us the play's central figure, 
 overshadowing its original hero, Prince Hal, so that we feel 
 his final rejection by the prince as pathetic and even tragic. 
 Doubtless from a purely human point of view Shakespeare 
 shared our feelings, otherwise he could hardly have put into 
 the mouth of Mrs. Quickly in Henry V the imperishable words 
 describing Falstaff 's death ; but the historical idea inform- 
 ing the play, the Tudor ideal of strong and efficient kingship, 
 
130 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Henry V. 
 
 The Merry 
 Wives of 
 Windsor. 
 
 The Mer- 
 chant of 
 Venice. 
 
 The Mid- 
 summer 
 Night's 
 Dream. 
 
 demanded Falstaff' s rejection as a preparation for the 
 apotheosis of Hal which we find in Henry V. Here Shake- 
 speare's 'sources ' are the same as for Henry IV Holinshed and 
 the old play, The Famous Victories of Henry V. Henry is here 
 shown as the champion of his country, and the incarnation 
 of its valour and manly virtue. 1 The valiant poetry of the 
 play, and the free and inevitable movement of its blank verse, 
 display all the greatness of Shakespeare's maturing art. 
 Pistol, Bardolph, and Nym, who here make their last appear- 
 ance, are as racy as ever, and a new set of humours is introduced 
 in Gower, Jamy, Macmorris, and Fluellen, with their con- 
 trasted national characteristics, and in the scenes between 
 the king and the private soldiers, Williams and Bates. 
 
 Before leaving the Falstaff plays, we may notice The Merry 
 Wives of Windsor (1598 or 1599). Only here and in the 
 Induction to The Taming of the Shrew do we find Shake- 
 speare dealing dramatically with the realistic aspects of 
 English life which were so freely handled by his fellow play- 
 wrights, Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and Heywood. The 
 plot was suggested by certain tales appearing in the Italian 
 of Straparola and Ser Giovanni Fiorentino ; but the handling, 
 the atmosphere, and the humours incarnate in Dr. Caius and 
 Sir Hugh Evans, are entirely native and entirely Shakespeare's 
 own. There may be truth in Eowe's statement that Shake- 
 speare wrote the play because Queen Elizabeth had ordered 
 him to show her Falstaff in love : in any case Falstaff is here 
 a diminished and degenerate figure, lit up only at times by 
 flashes of his former greatness. 
 
 We must now go back a little in order to trace the sequence 
 of Shakespeare's great comedies. The Merchant of Venice 
 (1594-1595) shows him for the first time interweaving a double 
 plot successfully. The story of the Jew, the pound of flesh, 
 and the lady of Belmont had occurred in the Pecorone of 
 Giovanni Fiorentino (fourteenth century) and in the Gesta 
 Romanorum, which had also related in an independent con- 
 nexion the tale of the caskets. The story had already been 
 handled in a lost English play, and there are traces of Marlowe's 
 Barabas in the drawing of Shylock. But the Jew of The 
 Merchant of Venice becomes a towering figure, probably, since 
 he precedes Falstaff in time, the greatest whom Shakespeare 
 had yet drawn. To our modern sense, though probably not 
 to the Elizabethan, he dwarfs all the other characters in the 
 play, and walks, upon the very verge of tragedy. The charac- 
 terization of Portia and Nerissa, the trial scene, and the beauti- 
 ful last act, show Shakespeare already writing romantic 
 comedy with full mastery. 
 
 The same skill in combining diverse elements is evident in 
 The Midsummer Night's Dream (1595). Shakespeare may have 
 
 1 The present writer rejects unhesitatingly the view (developed by 
 Gerald Gould, English Review, July 1919) that Henry's character was 
 drawn by Shakespeare with satirical intent. 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 131 
 
 borrowed the Athenian elements from Chaucer and thus from 
 Boccaccio, and may also have drawn upon Plutarch and Ovid ; 
 but his genius has so transformed his materials that the play 
 becomes in effect a free creation of fancy and imagination. 
 Oberon had already been presented crudely by Greene in 
 James IV ; and fairies were used subsequently by many 
 dramatists notably by Ben Jonson in his masques. But 
 Shakespeare's fairy world is a thing apart, and perfect. "Its 
 humour and beauty is skilfully interwoven with the cruder 
 humours of the ' rude mechanicals ' and with the fates of the 
 mystified lovers. For sheer sensuous and lyric beauty this 
 play can hardly be matched in Shakespeare's dramatic work. 
 
 The Taming of the Shrew (1596-7) follows an old play of The Tarn- 
 unknown authorship, The Taming of a Shrew (1588), in the ing of the 
 development of its main plot, and of the Induction. The Shrew. 
 underplot, introducing Bianca and her competing suitors, was 
 taken from Gascoigne's Supposes. It is probable that these 
 scenes are not Shakespeare s work, and it is possible that he 
 did no more than retouch the scenes between Petruchio and 
 Katharina. 
 
 All's Well that Ends Well (1598-1602), in the form in which The Great 
 we possess it, is probably a rehandling by Shakespeare of his Comedies, 
 own early draft of the play. Apart from metrical considera- 
 tions, the pathetic and subtle delineation of Helena, the wooer 
 of her unworthy lover, Bertram, seems to take the play beyond 
 the period of Shakespeare's immaturity, and a similar indica- 
 tion is supplied by the perfect portrait of that great lady, the 
 Countess of Rousillon. All's Well that Ends Well has a deeper 
 psychological interest than any comedy Shakespeare had yet 
 written. It is in a sense a problem comedy, a searching study 
 in the psychology of sex, which he was to treat in a more 
 poignant form in the later tragedies. 
 
 Shakespeare's next three comedies, Much Ado about Nothing, 
 As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, probably all fall within 
 the years 1599-1601, and represent the culmination of his, 
 and indeed of the world's, romantic comedy. The tale of 
 Hero and Claudio, which forms the original plot of Much 
 Ado, had been told by Bandello, Belleforest, and Ariosto, 
 and had been already dramatized in English. Shakespeare 
 probably drew on the first two sources ; but the high comedy 
 of Beatrice and Benedick, and the roaring low comedy of 
 Dogberry and Verges, are entirely his own. Here, as so often 
 in Shakespeare, the additions have outgone the original theme 
 in interest. If they do not outgo it in the case of As Ton 
 Like It, the honours are at least divided ; for to the tale of 
 true love which he found to his hand in Lodge's prose pastoral, 
 Rosalynde, Euphues' Golden Legacy (1590), he added Jaques, 
 Touchstone, and Audrey. Similarly, the mediaeval story 
 which is the primary theme of Twelfth Night had already been 
 developed in three Italian plays, and probably came beneath 
 Shakespeare's notice in a translation, French or English, of 
 
132 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Bandello's prose version of the tale ; but to Shakespeare 
 himself we owe Malvolio, Sir Toby, Aguecheek, Feste, and 
 Maria, as well as the genius which interweaves their broader 
 comedy with the romantic comedy of the overplot. 
 From These three plays are romantic in every sense of which the 
 
 Comedy word is capable. Almost every scene is suffused with Shake- 
 to speare's sweetest and serenest poetry. Joy and beauty prevail, 
 
 Tragedy. an( j are only enhanced by the broodings of Jaques, the love- 
 sickness of Orlando, and the gloom and discomfiture of Mal- 
 volio. Love is treated with a smiling and kindly sympathy, 
 and its handling is kept free of se"ntimentalism by Shakespeare's 
 steadfast sanity of outlook, and by the keen, laughing criticism 
 which his characters undergo at one another's hands. 1 Thus 
 comedy, as with Meredith, becomes the ally of true romance, 
 and the foe of false, freeing this human world alike from 
 pessimism and pretence. The radiance of romance and joy 
 which suffuses these plays could hardly have been present 
 unless they had reflected a phase of Shakespeare's own feeling. 
 Shortly after the opening of the seventeenth century, however, 
 a different mood is noticeable, and some critics have even 
 seen in the utterances of the melancholy Jaques evidence of 
 a growing disillusionment in Shakespeare's own outlook upon 
 life. Certain it is that in the plays of the following seven 
 years especially in Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Timon, Macbeth 
 there is a prevailing gloom which seems to be not only dramatic 
 but personal and, in the opinion of good critics, represents 
 a tragedy of Shakespeare's soul. In all the plays just men- 
 tioned, there are vehement attacks on sex, and on all that 
 makes for the continuance of life ; and these occur, even 
 where, as in Hamlet and Lear, they are not strictly necessitated 
 by the dramatic situation. Some refuse to see anything 
 personal in these plays ; they consider that Shakespeare 
 wrote tragedies at this period because tragedies were the 
 fashion, and that this poignancy of utterance was entirely 
 due to his transcendent dramatic imagination. Two facts 
 seem, however, to tell against this view the same feeling is 
 to be found in many of his sonnets, which, in the opinion of 
 all but very few, express his personal emotion: moreover, 
 when he tried to write a comedy at this period he literally 
 could not do so, but only succeeded in producing such ' very 
 tragical mirth ' as Troilus and Cressida and Measure for 
 Measure. 
 
 Julius On the threshold of this period comes Julius Caesar (1600). 
 
 Caesar. The profoundly tragic spirit evident in this play is due to the 
 
 fact that, when Shakespeare's own attitude toward life and 
 
 art was changing and deepening, he chanced to go for his 
 
 material to Plutarch, an artist inspired by the keenest sense of 
 
 tragic issues. The main human and political interest of the 
 
 1 Cf. the obvious instance of Beatrice and Benedick : also the testing 
 
 of both Orlando and Jaques by the disguised Rosalind ; and of Olivia 
 
 by the disguised Viola. 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 133 
 
 play centres, of course, in the contrast between Caesar, the 
 incarnation of the Koman Imperium, and Brutus, the noble 
 idealist thrust on to murder by his impelling Republicanism. 
 Secondary to these are Mark Antony, the hedonist stung into 
 greatness by the murder of his benefactor ; Octavius, cold 
 and remorseless ; Cassius, whose republicanism, though eager 
 and real, is alloyed with earthiness ; and Cicero, etched lightly, 
 yet with vivid genius. Shakespeare, wishing to carry the 
 action through to Philippi, and being thus forced to make 
 Caesar disappear half-way through the play, is bound for 
 dramatic reasons to prevent his becoming the supreme figure 
 of the early acts ; but if he in some sense diminishes the 
 figure of the living man, he expands and heightens his spirit 
 after death till it dominates the play, and brings the murderers 
 to destruction. 
 
 Among the plays of the next few years the four great tragedies The Great 
 occupy a place apart. Their informing spirit has already been Tragedies, 
 indicated. Holinshed, handled otherwise than in the historical 
 plays, supplied the material for two of them King Lear 
 (1605-6) and Macbeth (1606 !). In Hamlet (1602) Shake- 
 speare drew on an old play, probably by Kyd, for the story 
 told in the thirteenth -century Historia Danica of Saxo 
 Grammaticus, and subsequently incorporated in the Histoires 
 Tragiques (1570) of Pierre de Belleforest. The plot of Othello, 
 like that of Measure for Measure, comes from Hecatommithi 
 (1565), a collection of Italian tales by Giraldi Cinthio. The 
 differing technique of the f<5ur plays illustrates strikingly the 
 variety and consummate power of Shakespeare's genius. 
 In Othello and Macbeth the action is single and direct, and 
 satisfies the spirit, if not the letter, of classical unity : in 
 Macbeth it moves with remarkable rapidity. In Hamlet, 
 on the other hand, the whole structure of the play is based on 
 the necessity of delaying the action by every conceivable 
 device of technique. Here, though the themes are several, 
 the plot is really one. In King Lear, on the other hand, there 
 are three separate stories, interwoven with the greatest 
 intricacy, and developed with a disregard of the neo-classical 
 unities which is essentially romantic. Hamlet is the tragedy 
 of a sensitive and generous soul, which at the outset of the 
 tragedy has received a shock to its inmost moral nature, and 
 falters beneath that blow from the terrible task assigned to it 
 by fate. The play, however, is far more than the study of 
 a Danish prince stunned by his mother's fickleness and set 
 to avenge his father's murder : it is the tragedy of every 
 imaginative nature which has ever been confronted with 
 a duty too vast for its will and power. Hamlet's sense of the 
 universal issues involved in his personal action, or inaction, 
 gives profound meaning to the sufferings and problems of 
 ordinary humanity, and explains the wide appeal of the play 
 in all times and countries. Less transcendental in its sugges- 
 tion, but equally poignant and universal in its appeal, is the 
 
134 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 tragedy of Othello and Desdemona, betrayed by him who 
 represents the most intense study in evil ever drawn by 
 Shakespeare or by man. Swinburne considered Lear to be the 
 outcome of Shakespeare's ' tragic fatalism ', and held that 
 in it ' requital, redemption, amends, equity, explanation, pity 
 and mercy ' are words without a meaning. This statement 
 does not hold true of any of Shakespeare's tragedies ; but it 
 is far more nearly true of Othello than it is of Lear. In Othello 
 Desdemona dies before she can understand the true cause of her 
 husband's cruelty, and before he can sue for her forgiveness. 
 There is no such alleviation or consummation as occurs in the 
 scene in which Lear struggles forth from his insanity to be 
 greeted by the tender love of the daughter he had wronged so 
 cruelly. This scene, and that in which Lear and Cordelia 
 comfort one another in captivity, surely make their deaths 
 less terrible than those of Othello and Desdemona. The terror 
 of Lear lies not so much in its conclusion as in its atmosphere 
 in the suggestion of sinister forces far mightier than man, which 
 brood over the action of the play, sustaining the evil souls of 
 Goneril and tlegan and Edmund, and overcoming all things 
 save the devotion of Cordelia and Kent and the crazy Fool. 
 In Macbeth alone of the four great tragedies, Nemesis, working 
 after the full Greek fashion, visits characters whose transgres- 
 sion is in some degree commensurate with their fate. Yet both 
 Macbeth and Lady Macbeth have in them qualities in his 
 case imagination, in hers, highly-strung will, and in both, 
 a mighty capacity for suffering which redeem them from 
 ordinary villainy, and win a certain sympathy with their fate. 
 Troilus, In two plays of this period Troilus and Cressida (1602 ?) 
 Timpn, and Timon of Athens (1607) tragedy if Troilus be tragedy 
 Pericles, and not attempted comedy has lost its majesty and taken 
 a tinge of satirical bitterness. In Timon, as in Pericles, Prince 
 of Tyre (1608), Shakespeare is found in collaboration with 
 another playwright ; in the case of Timon the collaborator 
 may have been George Wilkins. The material for this play 
 came to the writers from Plutarch through Painter's Palace 
 of Pleasure : for Pericles they probably drew on the version 
 supplied by Gower and Laurence Twine of the mediaeval legend 
 centring round Apollonius of Tyre. Both plays are exceedingly 
 unequal in execution. Timon represents the tragedy of 
 a benefactor turned misanthrope through the ingratitude of 
 friends who desert him when he has lost the means of helping 
 and regaling them. He is the idealist driven by intolerable 
 circumstances into pessimism, and his noble and passionate 
 cynicism is powerfully contrasted with the vulgar cynicism of 
 the professional misanthropist, Apemantus. Pericles is badly 
 constructed, and a very great part of it, including Acts I and II, 
 is obviously not from Shakespeare's hand ; but several 
 scenes, notably that containing the shipwreck and the birth 
 of Marina, seem his beyond all doubt. Troilus is remarkable 
 for the acridly drawn figure of Cressida, who loses all the 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 135 
 
 glamour she had possessed, in Chaucer, and becomes a scheming 
 
 and graceless wanton. Still more remarkable are the degraded 
 
 and vulgarized presentations of Ajax and Achilles. Yet the 
 
 play has fine passages, and is informed with sardonic power. 
 
 Measure for Measure (1604?) is equally sinister, but in Measure 
 
 different kind. The play moves in a setting of lust where for 
 
 * corruption boils and bubbles till it o'errun the stew ' lust Measure. 
 
 finding its reaction in the hypocrisy of Angelo and the inflexible 
 
 chastity of Isabella, who will not yield to Angelo's overtures 
 
 even to save her brother's life. 
 
 The two remaining plays of this period which may be attri- Antony 
 buted to Shakespeare's entire and certain authorship are and Cleo- 
 Antony and Cleopatra (1608 ?) and Coriolanus (1608-9), for patra, 
 both of which his source is Plutarch. In Coriolanus, as Corio- 
 previously in Tamburlaine,vre> find a superman of mighty will l anus - 
 and ambition as the central figure of the action ; but the thirty 
 years which separate the two dramas represent a vast 
 advance for the Elizabethan playwright in every essential of 
 dramatic technique. The political theme is here consummately 
 interwoven with the domestic. The contrast and clash between 
 Coriolanus and the populace are varied and balanced by the 
 sympathy between tne conqueror and his mother, which in its 
 turn produces a fresh clash of wills, and the fresh dramatic con- 
 trast between Coriolanus and Aufidius. Never was Shakespeare's 
 hand more sure than in his delineation of the Koman mother, 
 Volumnia, and the ' humorous ' patrician, Menenius Agrippa. 
 In this play Menenius plays a somewhat similar part, as com- 
 mentator and chorus, to that played by Enobarbus, the down- 
 right soldier, in Antony and Cleopatra. In this latter play 
 Shakespeare has handled Plutarch freely and nobly, taking 
 much from him, in some cases to his very language, compress- 
 ing and excising much, but also adding much, and that of 
 his finest work. He has given the wanton Cleopatra all the 
 glamour he denied to the wanton Cressida, and has suffused 
 the profligacy and intrigue of Antony with splendid poetry 
 and imagination. Never has mere passion divorced from its 
 higher spiritual elements been made more romantic than here. 
 Despite the play's defects we may rejoice with Coleridge in its 
 ' happy valiancy of style ', and even share his doubt whether 
 it is not ' in all exhibitions of a giant power in its strength and 
 vigour and maturity, a formidable rival of Macbeth, Lear, 
 Hamlet, and Othello '. 
 
 The last phase of Shakespeare's dramatic production shows The Last 
 a marked change of handling and spirit. A new style of play, Phase, 
 romantic rather than tragic, and terminating in peace and 
 reconciliation, had been made popular by Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, and other of Shakespeare's contemporaries. It was 
 doubtless their example which led him to write such tragi- 
 comedies or dramatic romances as Cymbeline (1609) and 
 A Winter's Tale (1610): yet the spirit of beauty and calm 
 which pervades these dramas and The Tempest (1611) has been 
 
136 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 regarded, with justification, as representing a certain per- 
 sonal reaction against the gloom of the tragic period. It 
 is not the circumstance of the happy endings which lends 
 colour to this view ; for these, as has been pointed out, are 
 probably due to the fashion of the day : it is the fact that 
 the whole atmosphere and colour of these dramas differs from 
 anything which was written, or could have been written, 
 during the years which produced Lear and Measure for 
 Measure. 
 
 Ct/mbeline. In Cymbeline Shakespeare drew on Holinshed for the tale of 
 the British king and the Koman embassy, on Boccaccio for 
 the theme of Imogen and Posthumus, and on his own genius 
 for the story of the princes' kidnapping, and for the beautiful 
 scenes portraying their upbringing by Bellarius. But to many 
 the play remains chiefly memorable for her who is perhaps 
 Shakespeare's most noble and exquisite heroine, Imogen. 
 The difference between the plays of this period and the great 
 tragedies is well illustrated by the difference between Shake- 
 speare's handling of lago and lachimo : the latter villain, 
 for all his blackness of heart, is drawn with far less intensity 
 than his predecessor, and he is pardoned at the end, instead 
 of being reserved for unspeakable torments. 
 
 The Win- The plot of The Winter's Tale was taken by Shakespeare 
 ter's Tale, from Greene's novel, Pandosto (Dorastus and Fawnia). It is 
 perhaps the most loosely constructed of all his plays, and treats 
 the unities with the true romantic contempt. The theme of 
 Leontes' insane jealousy of his much-enduring queen, Her- 
 mione, leads onward to the delightful and most English idyll 
 between their lost daughter, Perdita, * the queen of curds and 
 cream ', and the disguised Prince Florizel. Hermione's youth- 
 ful son, Mamilius, is drawn with mastery and charm, and not 
 less masterly is the portrait of the light-hearted and rascally 
 pedlar, Autolycus. 
 
 Th e The Tempest (1611) is probably to be accepted as the last 
 
 Tempest, play which came entirely from Shakespeare's hand. The 
 main story, that which concerns the beneficent wizard, 
 Prospero, his daughter Miranda, and her lover Ferdinand, was 
 the theme of an old romance, especially popular in Spain, but 
 possibly reaching Shakespeare through the medium which 
 inspired an extant German play, the Comedia von der schonen 
 Sidea. The description of the island, and the suggestion of its 
 being full of voices and inhabited by devils, are due to the 
 narrative of the sufferings of certain English seamen recently 
 shipwrecked on the Bermudas. Caliban is a creation of 
 Shakespeare's own fancy, intended to represent the primaeval 
 savage, and serving through his enforced subservience to exalt 
 the might of Prospero. The wooing of Miranda, the child of 
 Nature, by Ferdinand, the innocent son of her father's 
 villainous foe, forms the main romantic theme. The isle 
 contains as many villains as were subsequently to be found on 
 Treasure Island, from the highborn Antonio and Sebastian to 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 137 
 
 Stephano and Trinculo, Shakespeare's last essays in low-born 
 rascality. And over love and villainy alike watches Prospero, 
 like the providence of the isle, dispensing their deserts to all 
 at the end, and then bidding them good-bye as he takes a long 
 farewell of his magic arts. 
 
 Several other plays have been traditionally attributed, 
 either in part or in whole, to Shakespeare ; but his authorship 
 has been substantiated in biit few cases besides those already 
 mentioned. It is possible that he may have collaborated with 
 Fletcher in The Two Noble Kinsmen, a play dealing with the 
 fortunes of Palamon and Arcite, already handled by Chaucer : 
 it is practically certain that this collaboration occurred in the 
 case of Henry VIII, though opinions differ as to Shakespeare's 
 precise part in the play. 1 Katharine, in the quiet and queenly 
 dignity with which she meets her undeserved sufferings, is 
 certainly the outstanding figure in this drama. Neither Henry 
 nor Wolsey is drawn with the same sureness of hand. The fine 
 dying speech of Wolsey, though popularly attributed to 
 Shakespeare, is probably Fletcher's. Sir Thomas More, 
 a biographical drama, contains a fragment of Shakespearean 
 work. In its original form, it represents the work of Munday, 
 Dekker, and two unidentified dramatists, and is preserved in 
 manuscript. On being offered to the King's Men, it was 
 apparently handed over to the Company's poet for strengthen- 
 ing, and Shakespeare accordingly wrote a portion of onB 
 scene. His work here, consisting of less than 200 lines, is 
 not merely of interest for its dramatic vigour, but is of unique 
 value as being all that has come down to us in his hand. 
 The play did not meet with the approval of the Master of the 
 Revels, and seems never ta have been staged. Its date is 
 apparently about 1598-9, though attempts have been made to 
 place it five or six years earlier. Two plays on the subject of 
 contemporary murders, Arden of Feversham (1591 ?) and 
 The Yorkshire Tragedy (printed 1608) have also been attributed 
 to Shakespeare. Both of these are powerful, the former 
 especially so ; but in the opinion of the best modern critics 
 neither bears the distinguishing marks of Shakespeare's 
 genius. 
 
 In the foregoing summary an attempt has been made to 
 disengage the chief qualities of Shakespeare's genius. His 
 might and beauty are as generally and as confidently accepted 
 as the might and beauty of the sun and sea. ' All joy, all 
 glory, all sorrow, all strength, all mirth, are his.' There has 
 been less agreement regarding the greatness of his chief 
 contemporaries. All admit that he transcends them in power : 
 some have even gone the length of denying even to the greatest 
 any real spiritual kinship with him. To this extreme view 
 
 1 In the view of the present writer, the early part of Act I, the latter 
 part of Act IT, a small portion of Act III, the opening portions of Acts 
 IV and V, are certainly Shakespeare's. 
 
 Plays 
 partly 
 Shake- 
 speare's or 
 attributed 
 to him. 
 
 Shake- 
 speare and 
 his con- 
 tempor- 
 aries. 
 
138 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti inclines in his sonnet ' On Certain 
 Elizabethan Revivals ' : 
 
 O ruff-embastioned vast Elizabeth, 
 
 Bush to these bushel-bellied casks of wine, 
 Home-growth, 'tis true, but rank as turpentine. 
 
 What would we with such skittle-plays at death ? 
 
 Say, must we watch these brawlers' brandished lathe, 
 Or to their reeking wit our ears incline, 
 Because all Castaly flowed crystalline 
 
 In gentle Shakespeare's modulated breath ? 
 
 According to a more natural view Shakespeare, apart though 
 he stands in the world's reverence, has much in common with 
 his chief contemporaries, and could not have become Shake- 
 speare save through their example and fellowship. It may 
 confidently be claimed that the greatest of them at their 
 greatest moments reach his level. The Duchess of Malfi merits 
 aplace beside his great tragedies, and Edward II and PerTcin 
 WarbecJc are not unworthy of the company of Richard II and 
 Henry IV. Shakespeare's transcendency lies not so much in 
 his having reached heights unsealed by others as in his having 
 kept constantly upon the heights from which others, after 
 reaching them, fell away. Even had he never written, the 
 Elizabethan period would have been one of the greatest in 
 the history of the world's drama. The praise of the Eliza- 
 bethans has been sung rhapsodically yet with fine critical 
 insight by Swinburne in a series of sonnets embodying a view 
 quite different from that of Rossetti. Here he exalts Marlowe, 
 'son first-born of the morning, sovereign star'; Jonson, 
 ' broad-based, broad-fronted, bounteous, multiform ' ; those 
 * warm twin lights ' which 
 
 as day decreased 
 
 Waxed wider, till when all the sun had ceased 
 As suns they shone from evening's kindled crest ; 
 
 ' grave and greathearted Massinger ' ; Ford, ' whose hand with 
 high funereal art carved night and chiselled shadow '; Webster, 
 usurping ' the very throne of night, her very crown '; Dekker, 
 ' sweetest heart of all his time save one '; Middleton, Heywood, 
 Chapman, Marston, and the ' sons born of many a loyal Muse 
 to Ben ' as well as those anonymous 
 
 dim watch-fires of some darkling hour 
 Whose fame forlorn time saves not nor proclaims 
 Forever. 
 
 One great poet is best confuted by another ; and if certain of 
 Swinburne's tributes seem exaggerated, they are far more 
 critical and balanced than the pronouncements of certain 
 modern criticasters who decry the Elizabethans because their 
 plays fail to embody the psychological or sociological fads of 
 the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. 
 
 Throughout the rest of this chapter the main phases of 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 139 
 
 English drama will be traced onward from the work of Shake* Minor 
 speare's immediate contemporaries, down to the closing of the Play- 
 theatres by the Puritans in 1642. Only the greater men can wrights. 
 be noticed in any detail ; but we may at least indicate the 
 existence of a number of playwrights, none of them of the first 
 order, who wrote for the various dramatic companies. Notable 
 in this class are certain writers for the Lord High Admiral's 
 men, who under the direction of Philip Henslowe became the 
 chief rivals to Shakespeare's company. For Henslowe, Antony 
 Munday wrote John a Kent and John a Cumber (1594?), 
 a play of wizardry and romance. He collaborated with Henry 
 Chettle, another of Henslowe's men, in two plays on the subject 
 of Robin Hood, The Downfall, and The Death, ofEobert, Earl of 
 Huntingdon. The chief play which Chettle wrote single-handed 
 was The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), a by no means con- 
 temptible essay in the ' Tragedy of Blood '. To William 
 Haughton is accredited a bustling comedy, Englishmen for 
 my Money (1598), and, more doubtfully, Grim, the Collier of 
 Croydon (1600), in which a devil, Belphegor, appears upon 
 earth and is made the dupe of human cunning and unscrupu- 
 lousness. The sole surviving play of Henry Porter is The Two 
 Angry Women of AMngton (1596-98), a bright and admirable 
 comedy of English country life. Michael Drayton is recorded 
 in Henslowe's Diary as having taken part in twenty-three 
 plays, none of which can be certainly said to have survived. 
 
 Reserving the junior playwrights of this class for subsequent Ben 
 mention, we may pass to the greater contemporaries of Jonson. 
 Shakespeare. There could be no more illuminating contrast 
 than that between him and Ben Jonson (1573-1637). Whether 
 in tragedy or in comedy Shakespeare's presentation of existence 
 was essentially romantic, and remote from the atmosphere of 
 contemporary life. Even when he uses features of that life, he 
 universalizes them, and invests them with a glamour not their 
 own. It is a different abstraction from life, and one far more 
 closely conditioned by actual fact, that we meet in Jonson's 
 most characteristic comedies. In his great tragedies, moreover, 
 Jonson is first and foremost a classic, both in the strictness of 
 his structure, and in the keen fidelity with which he paints 
 the colour of a bygone age. The lordly licence allowed, and 
 even ensued, by the great Romantic in both these regards, 
 has no appeal for him. Similarly, even when Shakespeare's 
 mind passes into gloom and bitterness, the resulting satire 
 works sub specie aeternitatis, and is directed at the universal 
 qualities of men. Jonson, however, is seldom a universal 
 satirist : he is generally either a public satirist, lashing or 
 mocking the fraud or the affected ' humours ' of his day, or 
 a private satirist, assailing his personal enemies with eager 
 scorn and obloquy. 
 
 Jonson's earlier dramas include his essay in Plautine His Early 
 comedy, The Case is Altered (1598), and his promising comedy Comedfea 
 of London life, A Tale of a Tub (1601 !) ; but his first really 
 
140 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 great play is the comedy Every Man in fiis Humour (1598). 
 It is significant of his growing tendency toward realism that 
 this was originally published with an Italian setting, but that 
 in the later Folio edition of 1616 it is transferred to the environ- 
 ment of Elizabethan London. The intrigue on which its 
 plot turns is well managed, but by far the greatest interest 
 of the play centres in its characters of contemporary life 
 Bobadil, the cowardly ' skeldring ' soldier, Matthew and 
 Stephen, the admirably contrasted 'gulls', Cob the water- 
 carrier and his wife, and that delectable rascal, Brainworm. 
 
 In the considerably less racy Every Man out of Ms Humour 
 (1599), Jonson portrays other contemporary types, e.g. 
 Fastidious Brisk, the flashily dressed man about town, Carlo 
 Buff one, the scurrilous jester and parasite, Fungoso and 
 Puntarvolo. Many of the characters in this play, and in his 
 next two comedies, Cynthia's Revels (1600) and Poetaster 
 (1601), are intended as travesties of contemporary literary 
 men. In Poetaster, in the course of a plot laid in Augustan 
 Rome, Jonson satirizes his dramatic rivals, Marston and 
 Dekker, with great power and zest. This play was his most 
 notable contribution to the ' War of the Theatres ', a kind of 
 dramatic duel between the playwrights of the Chapel children 
 performing at Blackfriars for whom Jonson was at this 
 time writing and those representing the adult professional 
 actors of the Globe and the Fortune Theatres. The most 
 notable contribution on the men's side was Dekker's Satiro- 
 mastix (1602). Shortly after this Jonson became reconciled 
 to his adversaries, renounced personal satire, and wrote the 
 His first of his classical tragedies, 8ejanus, which was acted by 
 
 Tragedies. Shakespeare's company in 1603. 'This, like the later Catiline 
 (1611), is distinguished by a faithful portrayal of the Roman 
 background, great sureness of characterization and diction, 
 and considerable skill in the development of plot. But in 
 both plays there are many dull passages ; poetry of the first 
 order is lacking, and there is little of Shakespeare's inspired 
 vision. Jonson's real strength lay in comedy, and to this he 
 returned in 1604, when he produced a capital drama of 
 London life, Eastward Ho, in collaboration with his whilom 
 enemy, Marston, and with Chapman. 
 
 His During the next few years Jonson produced three plays, 
 
 Greater which may be regarded with Every Man in his Humour as 
 Comedies, his masterpieces. Volpone (1605) is a tense study in evil, 
 portraying a miserly sensualist and misanthrope, who takes 
 joy in leading his hangers-on into crime and disaster, till his 
 machinations result in his own undoing. The Silent Woman 
 (1609) is notable for its skilful and bustling plot, but still more 
 so for the vis comica which has gone to the making of its main 
 character, the misanthrope Morose, who hates noise, and jumps 
 at the notion of marriage with a dumb woman, till after the 
 conspirators of the piece have gained their ends the woman 
 turns out to be a very noisy boy in disguise. 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 141 
 
 The Alchemist (1010) may justly claim to rank as Jonson's 
 greatest play. Its main figure, Sir Epicure Mammon, is at 
 once a generalized type of sensual greed and a human figure 
 of extraordinary vitality, the one character of Jonson's who is 
 worthy to rank with the greatest creations of Moliere. The 
 rascal, Subtle, who poses as the Alchemist, draws around him- 
 self and his two accomplices a diverting set of dupes and gulls, 
 from Sir Epicure himself down to the credulous tobacconist, 
 Abel Drugger, and the petulant spendthrift, Kastril. The plot, 
 which has been described by Coleridge as one of the three most 
 perfect in existence, culminates in the duping of the chief 
 dupers. Bartholomew Fair, like The Alchemist, is full of the 
 colour and incident of Elizabethan London ; but it is inferior 
 to its predecessor both in plot and characterization. It is 
 a medley of strange types, and possesses little terseness, or 
 cohesion of plot. Many of its scenes notably those introduc- 
 ing Cokes, the foolish apple-snatching squire, Humphrey 
 Waspe, his henchman and guardian, and the canting Puritan, 
 Zeal o' the Land Busy have a splendid vitality ; but the 
 canvas is too huge to fit the frame of drama. 
 
 Jonson's remaining comedies include The Devil is an Ass His last 
 (1616), a play which, like Grim the Collier of Croydon, shows Plays, 
 a devil duped by the superior cunning and wickedness of 
 mortals The Staple of News (1625), The New Inn (1629), 
 and The Magnetic Lady (1632). These plays, despite their 
 many brilliant strokes, show a distinct decline in power ; 
 but this is abundantly redeemed by the unfinished Sad Shep- 
 herd, Jonson's most beautiful play, which shows Robin Hood, 
 Maid Marian, and their crew at home in Sherwood amid shep- 
 herds and fairies. Jonson had a weakness for the fairies, who 
 reappear in more than one of his Court masques. Of this form 
 he has left us some forty specimens ranking among the best 
 of their kind in point of wit, grace, and skilful construction. 
 
 George Chapman (1559-1634) is better known to modern Chapman, 
 readers through his translation of Homer than through any 
 of his plays : yet his dramatic output was considerable, and 
 his limited capacity both for construction and characterization 
 is redeemed, at least for the modern reader, by the splendid 
 rhetoric, often deepened with metaphysical suggestion, and 
 occasionally passing into great poetry, which recurs through- 
 out his plays. These fall into three main divisions, of which 
 the most important deals with certain recent episodes of 
 French history. The best plays of this series are Bussy 
 d'Ambois (1599 ?) and The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois (1604), 
 which portray the deeds of this celebrated French adventurer. 
 Chapman's remaining plays on French subjects are The 
 Conspiracy, and The Tragedy, of Charles, Duke of Byron (both 
 acted in 1608) and The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of 
 France. They portray several living historical characters, 
 and show how the Elizabethan stage might sometimes perform 
 the function of a modern newspaper by keeping men in touch 
 
142 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 with foreign affairs. Chapman's uneven, but frequently 
 admirable comic power, is evident in three other plays, 
 All Fools (1599), a complicated, skilfully managed, and most 
 amusing comedy of intrigue; The Gentleman Usher (1601 ?), 
 a charming romantic comedy ; and Monsieur d'Olive (1605), 
 chiefly remarkable for the racily drawn ' gull ' who is its 
 main character. His remaining dramas are inferior, and need 
 not detain us here. His share in Eastward Ho has already been 
 indicated. Jonson, who did not praise readily, praised Chap- 
 man's masques, only one of which has survived. 
 
 John Marston (1576-1634), as we have seen, was one of the 
 collaborators in Eastward Ho ; he was also probably the reviser 
 of Ristriomastix (1599 ?), an allegorical play embodying in the 
 character of Chrisoganus a not unkindly portrait of Jonson. 
 The earliest plays of Marston' s original and unaided authorship, 
 Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge (both 1599), are 
 lurid essays in the ' tragedy of blood ', with a vein of undeniable 
 power threading their bombast and violence. In The Mal- 
 content (1601), the bitter quality of his early verse-satires 
 reappears in the utterances of the honest misanthrope who 
 is the play's hero. The Dutch Courtezan (printed 1605) 
 is a well-made comedy, notable for the rollicking Cockledemoy, 
 one of the most amusing characters in Elizabethan drama. 
 Sophonisba (1603) and Parasitaster (1604) are both inferior 
 work. Only certain portions of The Insatiate Countess can be 
 assigned to Marston : these display his lurid power, though 
 the play is disappointing as a whole. Marston is a baffled 
 and a baffling genius, constantly promising some great 
 triumph in the sinister, yet never wholly performing it. Eupert 
 Brooke says of him, ' he loved dirt for truth's sake : also for 
 its own. Filth, horror, and wit were his legacy : it was 
 a splendid one.' 
 
 Thomas Dekker (1570-1641 ?) was a prolific writer in various 
 kinds, and one of the most unfortunate among Elizabethan 
 writing men. The grinding poverty of his life, 1 and his acquain- 
 tance with debtors' prisons, seem to have deepened his 
 sympathy with the lowly and oppressed, while in nowise 
 impairing his exquisite lyric gift. His genial nature and his 
 sympathy with popular types are evident in The Shoemaker's 
 Holiday (1599), which is perhaps the earliest drama represent- 
 ing his unaided work. This interweaves a charming love story 
 with the humours and intrigues of contemporary English 
 bourgeois life. Simon Eyre, the master shoemaker, is a delight- 
 fully drawn figure, and the play, despite its elements of pathos, 
 exhales the serene atmosphere of work and contentment which 
 we breathe in Wagner's Meister singer. There is more poetry 
 and looser construction in Old Fortunatus (printed in 1600), 
 a play in two parts, which shows the aspiration and strange 
 adventures, and eventual disaster, of a somewhat Faust-like 
 
 1 An attempt has been recently made to minimize this : cf. Mary 
 Hunt, Thomas Dekker, p. 48. 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 143 
 
 character who chooses riches when offered his choice of For- 
 tune's gifts. The part taken by Dekker with Satiromastix 
 in the ' War of the Theatres ' has been already indicated. 
 In the same connexion may be mentioned Westward Ho 
 (1604!) and Northward Ho (16061), shameless comedies of 
 contemporary life, written in collaboration with Webster, in 
 the second of which Chapman is satirized. In The Honest 
 Whore Dekker once more displays his gift of pathos, collaborat- 
 ing with Middleton in the first part (printed 1604) and working 
 unaided in the vastly superior second part. In the plays of 
 Dekker, as in the novels of Dostoievsky, passionate idealism 
 constantly transfigures the most sordid scenes and subjects ; 
 and such idealism is abundantly evident in The Honest Whore, 
 which in its culminating phase shows the reclaiming of the 
 courtesan Bellafront, after her strangely moving experiences 
 in the Bridewell and Bedlam. Her father, Orlando Frisco - 
 baldo, who seeks her out and leads her back to virtue, is 
 greatly drawn. The remaining plays which Dekker wrote 
 unaided are little worth. He collaborated with Webster again 
 in Sir Thomas Wyatt (1602), with Middleton in The Soaring 
 Girl (1611), with Chettle and Haughton in Patient Grissell 
 (1598), and with Ford in The Witch of Edmonton (1621) and 
 The Sun's Darling (1623). Patient Grissell retells the old tale 
 of Griselda, and contains Dekker's most famous lyric, ' Art 
 thou poor yet hast thou golden slumbers t ' which is put into 
 the mouth of his delightful creation, the faithful servant, 
 Babulo. The Witch of Edmonton is a highly pathetic dramatiza- 
 tion of the fate of a woman tried and executed for witchcraft 
 in 1621. The Roaring Girl is a study of a famous contemporary 
 character named Moll Cutpurse, who appears in this play as 
 a large-hearted roysterer donning men's clothes, and talking 
 thieves' cant, yet shunning evil communications, and playing 
 the good providence of the piece. 
 
 The plays of Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) fall into two Middle- 
 main classes the realistic and romantic. To the first of these ton. 
 belong the series of rollicking comedies dealing with contem- 
 porary London manners, of which the earliest is Blurt, Master 
 Constable (1602), and two most spirited are A Trick to Catch 
 the Old One (1606) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1612). 
 The latter is as lively a piece of work as is to be found in any 
 of Shakespeare's dramatic contemporaries ; but for more than 
 one reason its plot cannot be described here. Middleton's 
 comic characters belong to the same world as Jonson's, but 
 their portrayal is more photographic, less universal, and less 
 great. Finer work of Middleton's was done in collaboration 
 with William Eowley (1585 ?-1642?); the partnership seems 
 to have been equally beneficial to both playwrights. Their 
 greatest drama is undoubtedly The Changeling (1623), in 
 which the heroine, Beatrice Joanna, is claimed as his prey, 
 in a scene of enthralling power, by the desperado De Flores, 
 whom she has hired to dispatch her destined husband and thus 
 
144 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 as she had hoped to secure for her the inan of her heart. 
 Of De Flores' character Leigh Hunt wrote that ' for effect 
 at once tragical, probable, and poetical, it surpasses anything 
 I know of in the drama of domestic life '. Hardly less powerful 
 are certain scenes of The Mayor of Queenborough (1596), a play 
 with a setting in early British legend. A Fair Quarrel (1617) 
 is a moving domestic drama in which a mother strives to pre- 
 vent a son from fighting a duel in defence of her honour by 
 falsely informing him that the charge against her is true. 
 On a somewhat lower footing stands the tragi-comedy The 
 Spanish Gipsy (1623). The most powerful tragedy of Middle- 
 ton's unaided hand is Women beware Women (1612), which 
 portrays the fate of a historical 6haracter, the notorious 
 Bianca Capello. His remarkable political drama, A Game 
 at Chess (1624), has been described by Swinburne as 'the only 
 work of English poetry which may properly be called Aristp- 
 phanic'. There is fine work in The Witch, which stands in 
 a curious relation to Shakespeare's Macbeth. The best play of 
 Rowley, working singly, is the powerful All's Lost by Lust. 
 
 Thomas Hey wood (1572-1648?) has been called by Lamb 
 the prose Shakespeare : present-day criticism would be 
 inclined to lay more emphasis on the adjective than on the 
 substantive. According to his own account, Hey wood had 
 a hand in no less than two hundred and twenty plays, of which 
 over thirty survive. His early dramatic work includes the 
 chronicle play in two parts, King Edward IV (1593-94); If 
 you know not me you know nobody (1604-5), an unconvincing 
 drama, also in two parts, on the early sufferings of Queen 
 Elizabeth ; and possibly Nobody and Somebody (1590), which 
 takes for its hero the legendary British king Elidure. His 
 next play, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1607), is his master- 
 piece, and the greatest surviving example of English domestic 
 tragi-comedy. It deals with the seduction of a woman by the 
 friend of her husband, who discovers the wrong and forbears 
 to punish his wife. Her remorse brings her to her death, but 
 before the end she begs and receives her husband's forgiveness. 
 Heywood handles this difficult subject with tact and power, 
 and imparts to the play, especially in the famous hawking 
 scene, a delightful sense of English country life. In The 
 English Traveller (printed 1633) a hardly less delicate subject 
 is handled with almost equal success. Lacking Webster's 
 intense imaginative power, and Dekker's gift of poetry, Hey- 
 wood displays in these two plays, and to some extent in the 
 rest, the rare power of being able to deal with fine emotional 
 issues without ever falling into the slough of sentimentalism. 
 The Wise Women of Hogsdon, with its well-constructed plot 
 and interesting characters of contemporary English life, and 
 The Fair Maid of the West, an English comedy with a romantic 
 background of adventure, are the best of his remaining plays. 
 
 The early dramatic work of John Webster (1580 ?-1625 ?) 
 was written in collaboration with other men : his share in 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 145 
 
 Weal-ward Ho and Northward Ho has been already noticed. 
 The classical tragedy, Appius and Virginia, has been com- 
 monly attributed to him, though recent criticism * assigns it to 
 Heywood. A Cure for a Cuckold (1617), The Devil's Law 
 Case (1623), and a few other plays of less note are clearly from 
 his hand. But his fame rests mainly upon his two great 
 tragedies, The While Devil (1611 1) and The Duchess of Malji 
 (1617 ?). The chief figure of The While Devil is the notorious 
 Vittoria Coromboua (historically Accoramboni), whose deeds 
 and death had occurred during Webster's lifetime. Having 
 urged her lover, Brachiano, to murder her husband, Camillo, 
 and his own duchess Isabella, Vittoria marries him, and both 
 eventually fall victims to the vengeance of Francisco de' 
 Medici, Isabella's brother. Great power distinguishes the 
 scene in which Vittoria stands her trial, and, like Helen before 
 the elders of Troy, dazzles her judges by her beauty and bril- 
 liance. Flamineo, Vittoria's brother, is a tense study in evil. 
 There is great power and terror in the scene where Cornelia, 
 her mother, is shown maddened with grief for her murdered 
 son, Marcello. An even greater play is The Duchess of Malfi, 
 in which Webster depended on a theme supplied to him in 
 Painter's Palace of Pleasure. The persecution of the Duchess 
 by her brothers for having married the man of her heart, her 
 murder at their order by the imaginative villain, Bosola, and 
 his remorse and atonement, are described with intense tragic 
 feeling, and the subtlest psychological sense. Webster's 
 sinister imagination displays itself not only in the main 
 features of plot and character, but in the unearthly images and 
 haunting close-packed lines of poetry with which the two great 
 tragedies abound. A strange beauty, matchable only in Donne, 
 suffuses his most grim and sinister scenes ; and those who 
 read him closely and sympathetically will eventually agree 
 with Swinburne and Symonds, that ' there is no poet morally 
 nobler than Webster '. 
 
 Webster's plays, as has been seen, turn on revenge : the Tourneur. 
 same motive predominates in The Atheist's Tragedy (1603 I ) 
 and The Revenger's Tragedy (printed 1607), the two lurid 
 dramas ascribed to the hand of Cyril Tourneur. Of these the 
 first has the higher moral purpose, but the second, describ- 
 ing the vengeance taken by Vendice for the death of his 
 sister, is incomparably greater in dramatic power. Both are 
 full of horrors and evil passions, and represent an extreme 
 variety of the ' Tragedy of Blood '. 
 
 Philip Massinger (1584-1640) revised Dekker's Virgin Massinger. 
 Martyr (1620) and collaborated with Fletcher in several 
 tragedies notably in Thierry and Theodoret (1617) and The 
 Double Marriage (1620) and with Field in The Fatal Dowry 
 (1619 ?). The influence of Fletcher is evident in two of the 
 three dramatic kinds which Massinger chiefly practised 
 romantic tragedy and romantic tragi-comedy. He has left 
 1 Cf. Rupert Brooke, John Webster, p. 101 seq. 
 
146 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 four important, if not great, tragedies The Unnatural Combat 
 (1621), of which the subject is akin to that of Shelley's Cenci, 
 and may have come from the same source ; The Duke of Milan 
 ( 1623), a transposition of the story of Herod and Marianne to an 
 Italian setting ; The Eoman Actor (1626), dealing with the fate 
 incurred by the actor Paris, owing to the infatuation felt for 
 him by Domitian's mistress ; and Believe as You List (1630), 
 which under a classical disguise refers to a famous event of 
 recent Spanish history. 
 
 His best tragi-comedies are The Maid of Honour (1622 ?), 
 The Great Duke of Florence (1627), and The Bashful Lover 
 (1635). The first and second of these are noteworthy as con- 
 taining respectively his two most charming heroines, Camiola 
 and Lidia. The chief qualities displayed by Massinger in his 
 more serious plays are great ethical earnestness, a gift of 
 admirable and easy-flowing, if seldom very intense, blank 
 verse, and a mastery of rhetoric which at its best is moving and 
 splendid, but constantly loses itself in wholly unnecessary 
 verbosity. This latter defect apart, he had a keen sense of the 
 theatre and fine constructive power. The influence of Jonson 
 and Middleton is evident in his two admirable comedies 
 The City Madam (1619) and A New Way to Pay Old Debts 
 (1625). A New Way contains the most famous, and perhaps the 
 greatest, of all his characters, Sir Giles Overreach, the merciless 
 usurer, whose machinations form the subject of a powerful and 
 capitally sustained plot. The voracious Mr. Justice Greedy 
 recurs amusingly throughout the play, and a charming theme is 
 supplied by the relations between the good-hearted spendthrift, 
 Wellborn, and his friend and benefactress, Lady Allworth. 
 Beaumont John Fletcher (1579-1625) and Francis Beaumont (1584- 
 and 1616) represent the rare union of two men who were cornple- 
 
 Fletcher. mentary to one another no less in genius than in friendship. 
 We are told that they lived together and had all things in 
 common ; and we may well imagine that they carried this 
 friendship into the realm of the mind, and that here too mutual 
 trust and community prevailed from the day when, according 
 to received accounts, they first collaborated in Philaster 
 (1608 ?) till 1616, the year which saw the death of Beaumont 
 and of Shakespeare. Little weight is now attached to Pope's 
 statement that Beaumont's share in this partnership was 
 chiefly confined to criticism and moderation of Fletcher's more 
 original and exuberant genius : indeed, the best modern 
 criticism holds that in many essentials Beaumont was the 
 higher and more powerful genius of the pair. Few modern 
 authorities, moreover, share the disability of Coleridge ' to 
 distinguish the presence of Fletcher during the life of Beaumont, 
 or the absence of Beaumont during the life of Fletcher '. 
 Bonduca (1616) and Valentinian (1617), which represent 
 Fletcher's later work in tragedy at its highest, show essential 
 differences, both of technique and feeling, from the best work 
 in tragedy and tragi-comedy of the collaboration, Philaster, 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 147 
 
 The Maid's Tragedy (1609), aiid A King and No King (1611). 
 A comparison between these or similar groups enables us to 
 disengage Beaumont's qualities and a similar experiment-urn 
 crucis may be made by comparing the two plays in Four Plays 
 in One (1608) which are undoubtedly Beaumont's, with the two 
 plays which are undoubtedly Fletcher's. The comparison in- 
 dicates that Beaumont had a graver and more tragic gift, and 
 a finer and more Shakespearean sense of character than 
 Fletcher ; and it also tends to prove that where the two were 
 writing together, it was Beaumont rather than Fletcher who 
 took the lead. Similarly, Beaumont's humour has a stronger 
 and more Jonsoniaii fibre than Fletcher's ; and Fletcher's 
 blank verse, rich in feminine endings, and constantly end- 
 stopped, is at once lighter and less flexible than Beaumont's 
 more impressive line, which avoids redundant syllables and 
 runs freely, yet not loosely, into periods. In invention, 
 however, and in dialogue, Fletcher's was the lighter and more 
 flexible mind. 'The genius of Beaumont ', says Swinburne, 
 ' was deeper, sweeter, nobler than his elder's : the genius of 
 Fletcher more supple, more prodigal, and more voluble than his 
 friend's.' 
 
 Two early comedies, The Woman Hater (1606) and The 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle (1610 ?), are now attributed 
 mainly, if not wholly, to Beaumont. Both illustrate his 
 tendency to burlesque, which in the latter play is directed 
 agaitfst the romantic extravagances of such plays as Heywood's 
 tour Prentices. The mock-heroic adventures of the prentice, 
 Ralph, who plays the chief part before a stage audience in- 
 cluding his master and mistress, are inimitably funny. Such 
 comedies of Fletcher as may be assigned to the period before 
 the collaboration deal mainly with contemporary London life, 
 and are markedly Middletonian in quality. 
 
 To the joint authorship of Beaumont and Fletcher seven 
 plays have been confidently assigned by recent authorities, 
 and a few others with less confidence. Though the collabora- 
 tion produced more than one comedy, its finest results were 
 reached in tragedy and tragi-comedy. In the first kind the 
 masterpiece was The Maid's Tragedy, in which the contrasted 
 themes of love, friendship, and loyalty to a sovereign, are 
 handled in such a way as to precipitate the true tragic conflict, 
 culminating in tragic disaster. PMlaster, though it possesses 
 tragic elements, reaches a less tragic ending. Its chief themes 
 are the suspicion entertained by Philaster for his high-born 
 sweetheart, Arethusa, the infatuation felt for him by the 
 maiden Euphrasia, and the ruse by which she disguises her- 
 self as a page and enters his service, and is eventually preferred 
 to the service of her rival. A King and No King, the main 
 theme of which is not as repulsive as it has often been declared 
 to be, is remarkable for the braggart soldier, Bessus, a worthy 
 comrade of Bobadil and Parolles. These three plays contain 
 much splendid poetry, and are developed with constructive 
 
148 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 skill, psychological insight, and a keen sense of tragic issues : 
 yet for all their power they fall short, both in freedom and 
 intensity, of the highest tragic work of Shakespeare and 
 Webster. 
 
 Fletcher The vexed and intricate question of Fletcher's collaboration 
 and Mas- with Massinger has already been touched on : the precise share 
 singer. of each in such dramas as The False One and The Beggar's Bush 
 cannot be discussed here. Massinger's hand has been traced in 
 many plays commonly attributed to Fletcher alone especially 
 in such later tragedies as Thierry and Theodoret, The Prophe- 
 tess, and The Double Marriage. Two of the finest tragedies 
 attributed to Fletcher's unaided authorship are Bonduca and 
 Valentinian. The first takes its theme from ancient British 
 history, and combines the stories of Boadicea and Caractacus 
 in a finely handled plot. Most moving are the passages 
 describing the character and death of the heroic youth Hengo. 
 Valentinian contains some of Fletcher's most typical work : it 
 develops in free and graceful poetry the conspiracy of the 
 wronged husband, Maximus, against the libidinous tyrant 
 Valentinian. Among the best of Fletcher's tragi-comedies are 
 The Loyal Subject (1619 ?) which reverts to the theme of The 
 Maid's Tragedy and Valentinian and The Knight of Malta 
 (1620 "?), a drama of chivalry, containing in the high-souled 
 Oriana one of his most finely drawn women. 
 
 Fletcher's Fletcher has left many comedies of manners with an English 
 Comedies, or foreign setting. Among the best of these are The Little 
 French Lawyer (1619), The Wild Goose Chase (1621), and his 
 two comedies of London life, Monsieur Thomas (1611?) and 
 Wit Without Money (1614). Monsieur Thomas, which has not 
 had its dues from modern criticism, is one of the most amusing 
 plays of the period : it deals with a lively young man who 
 pretends to be a prig in order to please his sweetheart, and 
 appears in this guise to his disgusted father, whose pet 
 ambition had been that his son should become an accomplished 
 rake. A place apart in Fletcher's plays must be given to the 
 charming pastoral romance, The Faithful Shepherdess (1608), 
 which is lit with some of his most exquisite poetry. His 
 splendid lyric gifts, his workmanlike and efficient faculty of 
 blank verse, and the masterly ease and freedom with which he 
 handles both plot and character, are among Fletcher's highest 
 dramatic qualities. It must be admitted, however, that if his 
 characterization is masterly in its kind, that kind is some way 
 below the highest, and that he constantly forces human nature 
 out of its true mean into violent and unnatural contrasts. The 
 virtue of his maidens is constantly felt to be strained and 
 artificial. They protest too much, and their chastity is 
 strangely interwoven with prurience. Conversely, many of his 
 villains and their villainies are unauthentic and altogether ' too 
 steep '. The interest they inspire seems too often due rather to 
 adroit manipulation than to the^profound intuition of genius. 
 Fletcher's great gifts of wit and numour may be praised with 
 
DRAMA : THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 149 
 
 less reserve. The one gift which he has never been denied 
 is cleverness. We may call him a playwright of the decadence, 
 provided it be understood that decadence is a totally different 
 thing from weakness. 
 
 To the decadence, too, if. the word be accepted with this Ford, 
 reservation, belongs John Ford (1586-1640). He is said to have 
 had part in sixteen plays, four of which were destroyed in 
 manuscript by Warburton's cook. In two other lost plays, and 
 in the extant Sun's Darling, he collaborated with Dekker. 
 His part in The Witch of Edmonton has been already noticed. 
 The loss of A Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother, by Ford 
 and Webster, dealing, like Arden of Feversham and The 
 Yorkshire Tragedy, with a murder-case of contemporary 
 life, is greatly to be regretted. The power and terror which 
 would have resulted from such a combination on such a theme 
 may easily be imagined. Ford's two romantic comedies, The 
 Fancies (1635?) and The Lady's Trial (1638), are now little 
 read ; the latter has been generally underrated, and is an 
 admirable piece of work. Merit of a different and more re- 
 flective order attaches to his youthful tragi-comedy, The 
 Lover's Melancholy (1628). But his fame depends ultimately on 
 his three tragedies, Love's Sacrifice, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore 
 (both printed 1633), and The Broken Heart (1629 ?), and on his 
 interesting and thoroughly well-made history play, Perkin 
 WarbecTc (1633). The first of these displays, not very con- 
 vincingly, passion foiled of its actual consummation, yet 
 virtually triumphant, even in death, over honour and fidelity. 
 The second develops sympathetically, and with great power, 
 a theme of passion declared by Shelley to be ' a very poetical 
 subject ', yet generally avoided in modern literature, or else 
 handled as by Shelley in The Genci, after such a fashion as to 
 cause horror and repulsion. In The BroTcen Heart, passion is 
 again dominant over all else in life and death : if its mani- 
 festation is more normal than in the preceding play, the 
 episodes to which it leads are developed with the melodramatic 
 sensationalism always dear to Ford. In ' Tis Pity, this manifests 
 itself in the scene where Giovanni rushes into his father's 
 presence with the heart of his murdered sister on a dagger. 
 In The BroTcen Heart it takes very effective form in the scene 
 where Calantha, dancing on the eve of her nuptials, is told 
 successively of the deaths of her father, Penthea, and her 
 betrothed, yet dances on to the end while she plots her own 
 doom. 
 
 Ford's sensationalism, his love of forbidden themes, and 
 his ethical antinomianism are commonly cited to his dis- 
 advantage ; but they seem inseparable from the less dubious 
 qualities of his genius the intensity of imagination, the 
 poignant sense of tragic fate, the exquisite and subtle intuition 
 of character, which to all who have felt the meaning of life or 
 literature give him a place very little below the highest. 
 
 James Shirley (1590-1666) wrote for the Irish as well as for Shirley. 
 
150 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the English stage, from 1625 till the closing of the theatres in 
 1642. During this period he produced forty plays, nearly all 
 of which are extant. His three finest tragedies, The Traitor, 
 (1631), Love's Cruelty (1631), and The Cardinal (1641), are 
 romantic in theme and setting, and the first and the last fall 
 little below the best tragedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, or 
 even of Webster. Shirley was a most capable craftsman, with 
 a gift of easy and often beautiful blank verse. The Traitor is 
 a masterpiece of construction, and some of Shirley's finest 
 characterization has gone to the drawing of the ambitious 
 villain, Lorenzo, his brother, the libidinous Duke, and 
 Lorenzo's fiery and chivalrous dupe, Sciarrha. The Cardinal, 
 which is reminiscent of The Duchess of Malfi, is on a slightly 
 lower plane. In romantic comedy or tragi-comedy Shirley's 
 chief successes are perhaps The Brothers (1626) and The 
 Imposture (1640). More generally read, and more readable, are 
 his comedies of manners. In The Witty Fair One (1628) the 
 complicated yet never tedious intrigue centring round the 
 loves of Aimwell and Violetta, and the ' humours ' of the * gull ' 
 Sir Nicholas Treddle and his tutor, once more display Shirley 
 as a thoroughly capable craftsman. Hyde Park (1632) is 
 equally well made, and its interest is enhanced for modern 
 readers by the vivid scenes portraying 1 horse-racing and foot- 
 racing within the Park's precincts. The Lady of Pleasure 
 (1635) is a brisk and interesting comedy, showing how Sir 
 Thomas Bornwell cures his wife of extravagance by outdoing 
 her in that vice. This play supplies some curious and particular 
 information as to the costumes, male and female, of the period. 
 Shirley's late masque, The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses 
 ( 1640), contains the exquisite lyric, ' The glories of our blood and 
 state '. If his plays lack the intensity necessary to the highest 
 drama, they have a peculiar charm for the discerning, owing 
 to their ease, finish, and deliberate and self-conscious literary 
 quality. 
 
 Minor The minor dramatists of the period can only be briefly 
 
 Play- mentioned here. Robert Armin, actor and playwright, lives 
 wrights. by one drama, The Two Maids of Mortlake (printed 1609), and 
 the lawyer, Edward Sharpham, by two, The Fleire (1606) and 
 Cupid's Whirligig (1607). Ludowick Barry's single play, Earn 
 Alley (1609), deals racily and coarsely with some very queer 
 characters living between Fleet Street and the Temple. 
 Joshua Cooke's lively comedy, Greene's Tu Quoque, or The City 
 Gallant, owed its name and much of its contemporary popu- 
 larity to the acting of the celebrated comedian, Thomas Greene. 
 Robert Tailor's The Hog hath lost his Pearl (1613) is an in- 
 different comedy which was acted by prentices and suppressed 
 as satirizing the Lord Mayor of London. A more important 
 name is that of John Day, who collaborated in several dramas, 
 and wrote alone the charming little poetic dialogue, The 
 1 After the Restoration real race-horses were brought upon the stage 
 in this play. 
 
DRAMA: THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE 151- 
 
 Parliament of Bees' (1641). His best plays are The Isle of Gulls 
 (1605), a fresh and charming romantic comedy, reminiscent of 
 Shakespeare and Lyly ; and the hardly less successful Humour 
 out of Breath (1608) and Law Tricks (1608). The 'sons of 
 Ben', Jonson's proteges and disciples, include several play- 
 wrights of note. Nathaniel Field and Richard Brome were 
 actually his apprentices in playwriting. Field has left two 
 clever but very complicated comedies, A Woman is a Weather- 
 cock and Amends for Ladies (both about 1611). Fifteen of 
 Brome' s plays are extant ; the best of these are comedies of 
 contemporary ' humours ' or manners, such as The City Wit 
 (1629), The Northern Lass (1632), and The Sparagus Garden 
 (1635). The Jovial Crew (1641) is a charming romantic drama 
 turning on the pleasures and pathos of a vagabond life. 
 Another * son ', though not a pupil, of Jonson's, was the 
 brilliant and short-lived Thomas Randolph (1605-1635), who 
 wrote several witty, though artificial comedies, including The 
 Conceited Pedlar (1630), The Jealous Lovers (1632), and The 
 Muses' Looking-Glass (1634). 
 
 Sir John Suckling (1609-1642) has left two serious dramas, 
 Aglaura (1637) and the greatly superior Brennoralt (1639) ; 
 and a sprightly comedy, The Goblins (1638). His dramatic 
 capacity is not great, but his lyric gift redeems many of his 
 pages ' from dullness, presenting, for instance, the much- 
 enduring reader of Aglaura with such a trouvaille as ' Why so 
 pale and wan, fond lover * ' Suckling's friend, Shakerley 
 Marmion (1603-1639) has left us, besides the poem Cupid and 
 Psyche, three rather mediocre comedies, Jonsonian in colouring, 
 of which the best known is The Antiquary (1636). Jonson's 
 influence is also evident in The Ordinary (1634), the single 
 comedy of William Cartwright. A much more lively play is 
 The City Match (1639) by Cartwright's friend, Jasper Mayne. 
 Other comedies of varying merit are The Old Couple (1619?) 
 by Thomas May ; Covent Garden (1632) and Tottenham Court 
 (1633) by Thomas Nabbes ' a weaker Brome ' ; and The City 
 Nightcap (1624) and A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, by Robert 
 Davenport. The best of the three comedies left by Sir Aston 
 Cockayne is The Obstinate Lady (1638 ?). Albertus Wallenstein 
 (1639), by Henry Grlapthorne, is chiefly remarkable as illustrat- 
 ing the fashion in which the Elizabethan playwright occasion- 
 ally dramatized recent happenings in foreign history and 
 presented them to his audience, who apparently in many cases 
 became thus acquainted with their details for the first time. 
 The best of Glapthorne's comedies, such as they are, is 
 undoubtedly Wit in a Constable (1639). The dramatic work of 
 Ludowick Carlell and the Duke of Newcastle does not merit 
 mention here. That of William Davenant will be held over to 
 a future ohnpter. 
 
152 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 / 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 
 
 The Beginnings : Wyatt and Surrey to Sackville Spenser The 
 Elizabethan Sonnet Daniel, Drayton, Breton, Wotton, Davies, 
 Browne, Wither, the Fletchers, Jonson, Donne, Drummond, Campion. 
 
 OWING to causes which have been already outlined in this 
 volume, there had been prosodic uncertainty in English poetry 
 from the day of Lydgate to that of Skelton, Hawes, and 
 Barclay, and where prosody is uncertain, poetry can never be 
 great. From this condition English verse was rescued by an 
 influence which had already stood it in good stead, the 
 Italian. Though help was given by many other metres, the 
 form which played the greatest part in the new development 
 was one hitherto unpractised in England, the sonnet. The 
 spread of the Italian influence was due to one man in especial. 
 Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), who in his early manhood 
 visited Italy and Spain on diplomatic missions, had met in 
 the former country the famous Baldassare Castiglione, and 
 had been strongly influenced by his courtly manual, II Corte- 
 glano. It was in Italy, too, that Wyatt had studied the poetry 
 of Petrarch. As a result he brought the sonnet into England, 
 and practised a form of it differing only from the Petrarcan 
 model in having a rhyming couplet at the close. The sonnet 
 form, through its strictness and conciseness, was to become an 
 admirable corrective to the prosodic lawlessness of the day. 
 Wyatt has left thirty-one sonnets in all, the greater number 
 of which are either translated or adapted from foreign models. 
 He practised many other metres, including rime royal, the 
 rondeau, ' Skeltonics ', the octosyllabic couplet, and ' poulter's 
 measure ' a combination of the Alexandrine and the ' four- 
 teener ' and it is, perhaps, rather in these than in his sonnets 
 that he shows the natural force that was in him. His poems, 
 and especially those written in his longer metres, display the 
 faulty sense of rhythm characteristic of the age ; for instance, 
 he begins a sonnet thus : 
 
 Because I have thee still kept from lies and blame, 
 And to my power always have I thee honoured, 
 Unkind tongue ! right ill hast thou me rendered. 
 
 Yet Wyatt at his best shows himself to be much more than 
 a stumbling pioneer of new metres. Some of his love poems 
 have true passion ; and his fine lyric gift appears in his famous 
 ' Forget Not Yet ', and in the less known, but hardly inferior, 
 ' What Should I Say ? ' His three satires addressed to John 
 Poynz and Sir Francis Bryan have a vigorous and manly ring. 
 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), had less 
 natural vigour than his friend and mentor, Wyatt, but a far 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 153 
 
 r sense of poetic form. His superiority in this respect 
 may be gathered from a comparison of the two men's versions 
 of Petrarch's sonnet, ' Amor, che nel pensier mio vive e regna *. 
 Surrey saw, what Wyatt had not seen, that the alteration in 
 the language since Chaucer's day necessitated a corresponding 
 variation of poetic rhythm, and he managed that variation 
 with skill and understanding. For this reason he may well 
 be called the first of modern English poets. He departed, 
 moreover, from the practice of Wyatt by deserting the 
 Petrarchan sonnet structure, and devising a form, consisting 
 of three independent quatrains and a concluding couplet, 
 which was extensively practised by Elizabethan sonneteers, 
 and was transfigured in the practice of Shakespeare. Surrey 
 used most of Wyatt's metres, and, like Wyatt, drew largely 
 on foreign sources both for his themes and language ; but 
 despite all debts, the man's own courtly and chivalrous nature 
 finds free play in his verse, and especially in those of his love 
 poems which are addressed to his ' Fair Geraldine '. A good 
 deal has been written, considerably beside the point, in the 
 attempt to disprove his attachment to this lady, who was 
 Elizabeth Fitzgerald, daughter of the ninth Earl of Kildare. 
 It is certain that even if he was not her lover in the full sense 
 of the word, he was her knight, chosen and favoured after the 
 romantic fashion prescribed by the mediaeval Courts of Love. 
 To her is addressed the well-known sonnet : 
 
 From Tuscane came my Lady's worthy race, 
 Fair Florence was sometime her ancient seat, 
 The Western Isle, whose pleasant shore doth face 
 Wild Camber's cliffs, first gave her lively heat. 
 
 But Surrey's most personal and moving poem is his Elegy 
 on the Duke of Richmond, written while he was in captivity at 
 Windsor, awaiting his execution and musing on the happy past. 
 It has been well said that in these verses ' we seem to be 
 listening to a lament over the chivalry that is passing out of 
 the order of the modern world '. 
 
 If Wyatt gave the sonnet to English poetry, it is indebted 
 to Surrey for a yet more precious gift blank verse, which 
 ho used for his translation of the Second and Fourth Books of 
 Virgil's Aeneid. His choice of this metre was apparently 
 dictated in part by the dislike of rhyme so common during the 
 Renaissance, in part by his desire to devise a line which, with 
 due allowance for the genius of the English language, should 
 correspond with the Virgilian hexameter. It is probable 
 that his immediate model was Molza's rhymeless translation 
 of Virgil, published in Venice in 154 1. 1 It is unlikely that 
 blank verse had been consciously used before Surrey's time 
 by any English poet. It is difficult to exaggerate the impor- 
 tance of an innovation which prepared the way for Marlowe, 
 Shakespeare, and Milton. 
 
 1 See W. J. Courthopu, History of Enyliah Podry, vol. ii, p. 96. 
 
154 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Miscel- The poems both of Wyatt and Surrey originally saw the 
 
 laniesand light in Totter s Miscellany (1557), a verse collection compiled 
 from the work of several contemporary poets. Such collec- 
 tions were frequent at the day ; the most important of them, 
 after Tottel, were The Miscellany, The Paradise of Dainty 
 Devices, England's Helicon, England's Parnassus, and The 
 Poetical Rhapsody. After Wyatt and Surrey, the two most 
 important contributors to Tottel were Lord Vaux, a straight- 
 forward and vigorous writer, who dealt chiefly in chivalrous 
 and religious themes ; and Nicholas Grimald, a scholarly but 
 uninspired versifier. The Paradise of Dainty Devices was 
 compiled by the Court playwright, Richard Edwards, and 
 published after his death. It includes contributions by 
 Edwards's fellow -playwright, William Hunnis, by Sidney's 
 friend, Fulke Greville, and by a certain ' W. R.', who may be 
 Walter Raleigh. 
 
 In this connexion may be mentioned a number of minor 
 poets, some of whom were represented in the different Miscel- 
 lanies. Many of these were strongly influenced by Surrey. 
 Thomas Churchyard (1520-1604), after soldiering in France 
 and Scotland, took up the career of a writing man, and pub- 
 lished several volumes of verse among others the quaintly 
 named Churchyard's Chips. He also translated from Ovid, 
 and contributed a tragedy of Jane Shore to the Mirror for 
 Magistrates. Barnabe Googe (1540-1594), in his Eclogues, 
 Epitaphs, and Songs (1563), used the pastoral form without 
 distinction, yet in such a fashion as to prepare the way for 
 Spenser. George Turberville (1540 ?-1610) translated from 
 Ovid and Mantuan, and in his Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs, and 
 Sonnets (1567) showed himself to have been strongly influenced 
 by Wyatt and Surrey. Somewhat apart from these stands 
 Thomas Tusser (1515-1580), a scholar who took to farming, 
 and in 1573 published his Five Hundred Points of Good Hus- 
 bandry, a quaint and frequently lively treatise on English 
 country life, written in jumpy anapaests. 
 
 Gascoigne. A truer poet than any of these was George Gascoigne 
 (1525 ?-1577), a university man of good family, who had had 
 experience of warfare and diplomacy, and wrote in several 
 different kinds. His dramatic and critical work is noticed 
 elsewhere. His poems were originally published, together 
 with other work, in 1573, under circumstances of some mystery. 
 In 1575 he reissued them with certain alterations and additions 
 and omissions, as The Poesies of George Gascoigne. The most 
 valuable part of this collection was the lyric poetry, and 
 especially that section of it which is entitled The Flowers. 
 This includes such charming poems as ' Gascoigne' s Good- 
 morrow ' and ' The Lovers' Lullaby ', in which he combines 
 great sweetness of utterance with complete technical mastery. 
 Gascoigne uses many metres, and in all of them shows skilful 
 craftsmanship. His Dulce Bellum Inexpertis is written in rime 
 royal : it tells of his martial experiences with an easy rough- 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 155 
 
 and-ready realism. His Don Bartholomew of Bath describes 
 his early love adventures : he subsequently repented of 
 these, and, like Greene, wrote several prose tracts with a moral 
 purpose. His changed attitude towards life is evident in his 
 verse satire, The Steel Glass, which arraigns many features 
 of English life, and has a good deal in common with Piers the 
 Plowman, to which it makes several references. Gascoigne 
 was a true, though not a great, poet, and in view of the 
 numerous literary kinds in which he worked, he may perhaps 
 be ranked with Drayton as a typical Elizabethan man of 
 letters. 
 
 A greater than Gascoigne, however, is Thomas Sackville Sackville 
 (1536-1608), afterwards Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset, &ndThe 
 who contributed an Induction and The Complaint of the Duke Mirror for 
 of Buckingham to The Mirror for Magistrates, a huge collection Magis- 
 of tragic tales in verse, written by various hands and published trates. 
 in several editions or instalments between 1555 and 1610. 
 This work consists entirely of stories from English history, 
 legendary or real, extending from the mythical Albanact to 
 Elizabeth herself. Its original projectors were two Oxford 
 men, William Baldwin and George Ferrers : its subsequent 
 editors were John' Higgins and Thomas Blennerhasset. Among ' 
 the contributors, besides the men just mentioned, were John 
 Skelton, Thomas Churchyard, and Thomas Phaer. The 
 contributors' chief sources were, for the legendary part, 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, and for the historical, the chronicles 
 of Hall and Fabyan. The work was intended as a continuation 
 of Lydgate's Falls of Princes, itself an adaptation from 
 Boccaccio. Its object was partly to teach history or what was 
 conceived to be history in the form of poetry, partly, as 
 Baldwin indicates, to induce rulers to take warning from the 
 terrible examples cited. It is not possible here to discuss 
 further the collection's complicated history and elaborate 
 contents, but apart from the work of its greatest contributor, 
 it has a certain importance owing to the stimulus it gave to 
 the historical play and the historical poem during the Eliza- 
 bethan period. 
 
 The only poetry of first-rate quality which it contains is 
 that of Sackville. His metre was rime royal, the great measure 
 which had been used to such purpose by Chaucer, and James I 
 of Scotland, and Henryson. This he adapts with perfect 
 mastery to the new laws which the English language had 
 evolved since the day of these poets. But his mastery of 
 metre goes far beyond such merely adaptive skill : his stanza 
 has a rhythm and a majesty which none save the great 
 poets achieve. He wields it with the superb power which 
 Spenser was to impart to his own great measure. Spenserian, 
 too, is Sackville's use of allegory throughout The Induction, 
 his dissociation of it from merely didactic ends, and his 
 magical fusion of it with perfect poetry. His conception of 
 Hell aud its terrors has a classical largeness and a Dantcsque 
 
156 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 intensity. His mighty vision and rhythm are already evident 
 in the opening description of Winter, and are sustained 
 throughout the scenes where he is shown walking with Sorrow 
 for guide, till the close, at which the broken Buckingham 
 prepares to pour out his soul in despair. No poem was ever 
 more surely conceived in the grand style than the Induction. 
 
 Spenser. There is every promise that if Sackville's achievement had 
 been more considerable, his would have been one of the greatest 
 names in English poetry. With fuller leisure for production, 
 Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) has left work sufficient in volume 
 and quality to give him place as the greatest poet since Chaucer. 
 In appraising his work we must not forget that the age, as far 
 as English poetry was concerned, was one of beginnings, or 
 at least of recommencements, and that no high and unbroken 
 literary tradition existed to help the poet to perfection. 
 In 1569 Spenser matriculated at Cambridge and in poetry, 
 his first verse consisting of translations of Petrarch and du 
 Bellay. At Cambridge he came under two main influences, the 
 Puritanical and the Platonic, between which, as the theological 
 history of the time shows, a stronger analogy existed than 
 might at first appear. Both took strong hold on his sensitive 
 and impressionable nature, and both are strongly reflected in 
 his subsequent poetry. Renaissance humanism had made him 
 familiar with the Platonic theory of ideas, and with the con- 
 
 His Early ception of God as the Master Craftsman. The result is splendidly 
 
 Writings evident in his two youthful Hymns in Honour of Love and 
 
 and Life, of Beauty : 
 
 What time this world's great Workmaster did cast 
 To make all things, such as we now behold : 
 It seems that he before his eyes had placed 
 A goodly pattern, to whose perfect mould 
 He fashioned them as comely as He could, 
 That now so fair and seemly they appear, 
 As nought may be amended anywhere. 
 
 That wondrous pattern, whereso'er it be, 
 Whether in earth laid up in secret store, 
 Or else in heaven, that no man may it see 
 With sinful eyes, for fear it to deflore, 
 Is perfect Beauty, which all men adore. 
 
 His Puritanism was probably not the extreme form advocated 
 by Cartwright, but the milder persuasion of Grindal, the head 
 of his college, whom he afterwards portrays with affection 
 as Algrind in The Shepherd's Calendar. An even more pOAverful 
 personal influence was that of Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of 
 Pembroke, the * Hobbinol ' of The Shepherd's Calendar. 
 Harvey's behaviour was often that of a truculent pedant, 
 but he was a man of genuine intellectual power, and a true 
 friend of Spenser, who always showed the strongest regard for 
 him. As has been elsewhere shown, he was an enemy to 
 rhyme, and a champion of rhymeless classical metre. Mainly 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 157 
 
 owing to his influence Spenser attempted for a while, with 
 small success, to write English poetry in Latin feet. 
 
 Within three years after leaving Cambridge Spenser had 
 entered the service of the Earl of Leicester, and had become 
 an inmate of his household. This experience resulted in his 
 friendship with Leicester's nephew, Sir Philip Sidney, and 
 had a profound effect on his life and poetry. He was now 
 the favourite of England's greatest courtier, and the friend 
 of its truest and most accomplished gentleman. The glamour 
 of a great ambition greatly pursued invested the personality 
 of Leicester. All the chivalry of the past age, all the accom- 
 plishment and courtesy of the present, all the golden promise 
 of the future, seemed incarnate in Sidney. By both men was 
 the sensitive young poet attracted, but especially by the 
 latter, in whom he saw nobility of soul united with charm 
 and genius. Henceforth Sidney, both before and after his 
 heroic death, was a constant theme of Spenser's, praise. His 
 earliest considerable work, The Shepherd's Calendar, was 
 dedicated to this * president of nobleness and chivalry '. Later, 
 the poet's admiration and love of his * Astrophel ' recur in 
 The Ruins of Time and The Tears of the Muses, and help to 
 sweeten the bitterness of Mother Hubbard's Tale. But Sidney's 
 character played a still greater part in Spenser's work, for 
 it profoundly influenced his conception of The Faerie Queene. 
 Spenser's correspondence with Gabriel Harvey shows that 
 some part of this poem was finished as early as 1580. 
 
 The previous year had seen the completion of The Shepherd's The Shep- 
 Calendar. This consisted of twelve eclogues, one for each herd's 
 month of the year, composed in various metres, including the Calendar. 
 heroic couplet and six-lined and eight-lined stanzas. It was 
 accompanied by a prose commentary, from the hand of one 
 ' E. K.' who may almost certainly be identified with Edward 
 Kirk, a Cambridge friend and fellow-student of Spenser's. 
 In developing his Calendar, Spenser owes much to the pastoral 
 poets of antiquity, and of modern France, Italy, and England. 
 Theocritus and Virgil had already used the pastoral as a theme 
 of love : Spenser pursues this theme in more than one of his 
 Eclogues, and incidentally tells the tale of his own hopeless 
 passion for Rosalynd, ' the widow's daughter of the glen '. 
 The practice of other poets, notably Petrarch, Mantuan, and 
 Barclay, supplied other themes, some of which hardly promised 
 the highest poetry. 1 Such poetry, it must be admitted, is 
 
 1 Professor Courthope has shown (History of English Poetry, vol. ii, 
 p. 244) that in Spenser's reflections on the faults of the Roman Catholic 
 and Anglican clergy, he had been anticipated by Mantuan on the one 
 hand, and by Googe on the other ; while Barclay, by his praises of 
 Archbishop Morton in the character of a shepherd, furnished him with 
 the idea of complimenting his old patron, Grindal, and with the idea of 
 giving the rustic names Morell and Ruffin to the contemporary Bishops 
 Elmore and Young. From Marot he borrowed the motive of the dirge 
 in the eleventh Eclogue, and the elegy or complaint of the twelfth. 
 
158 . HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 seldom to be found in the Eclogues : yet they contain numerous 
 passages of most pleasing fancy, and the technical mastery 
 which had already been displayed in the two Hymns is seldom 
 absent. Spenser combines the more usual themes of the 
 pastoral with eulogies of his friends and patrons, and refer- 
 ences to contemporary abuses in Church and State. These 
 topics, despite their diversity, are brought into happy union 
 beneath the pastoral convention. In The Shepherd's Calendar 
 we meet for the first time that extravagant eulogy of Elizabeth 
 which was to recur henceforth throughout all Spenser's poetry. 
 
 With the subseqiient details of his life in Ireland and England 
 we are not here concerned. In 1590, ten years after The 
 Shepherd's Calendar, appeared the first three books of The 
 Faerie Queene. The following three were not published till 
 1596. This represents all of the poem that Spenser actually 
 wrote, with the exception of the splendid fragment on Mutability 
 published ten years after his death. In 1591 he issued his 
 early translations from du Bellay and Petrarch together with 
 The Euins of Rome, Mother Hubbard's Tale, The Ruins of 
 Time, Muiopotmos, and The Tears of the Muses. In 1595 he 
 published his sonnet sequence, Amoretti, the Epithalamium, 
 and Colin Clout's Come Home Again. In 1596 appeared his 
 Four Hymns l ; the Prothalamium, a poem commemorating the 
 marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester ; and 
 Daphnaida, an elegy on the wife of his friend, Arthur Gorges. 
 The Ruins of Time and The Tears of the Muses lament the decay 
 of learning and the triumph of barbarism, and reflect Spenser's 
 disappointment at his failure to secure the recognition which 
 was his due. The first poem contains a famous passage on the 
 death of Leicester. Mother Hubbard's Tale of the Ape and the 
 Fox is an admirably managed satire in couplets on court 
 abuses. It is relieved by a charming portrait of the perfect 
 courtier, who is undoubtedly Sidney. The beautiful Amoretti 
 sonnets are addressed to his wife. Their technical qualities 
 will be noticed elsewhere. The Epithalamium, written to 
 celebrate his own marriage, is a poem of high and passionate 
 beauty. Colin Clout's Come Home Again is full of interest and 
 charm : it describes his visit to the court under the guidance 
 of Raleigh, 'the Shepherd of the Ocean', and records his 
 impressions of the great ladies and courtiers and poets of the 
 day. 
 
 If Spenser's work had closed with his minor poems his 
 rank as a poet might have been the far from despicable one 
 of Drayton or Daniel : his longest and greatest poem lifted 
 him above them, and made nim the second poet of his 
 age. In a letter addressed to Raleigh in 1590, he declared 
 his aim in writing The Faerie Queene. The poem, he says, 
 is ' a continued allegory or dark conceit. King Arthur has been 
 chosen as the hero owing to the glory of his fame and his 
 
 1 Including the earlier two on Earthly Love and Beauty ' reformed ' 
 by two on Heavenly Love and Beauty. 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 150 
 
 remoteness from the envy and suspicion of the present time.' 
 To justify his handling of his hero and the general structure 
 of his poem, Spenser cites the precedents of Homer, Virgil, 
 Ariosto, and Tasso. He states, moreover, that his book's 
 object is ' to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous 
 and gentle discipline'. This profession reconciles his own 
 chivalrous instinct with the current demand that art should 
 have an ethical purpose. But he rejects with vigour the 
 contention that the presence of such a purpose need, or should, 
 make the poem didactic in form. Twelve books had been 
 intended, each with its patron knight representing a specific 
 virtue : ' the first of the Knight of the Eed Cross, in whom 
 I express Holiness : the second, of Sir Gruyon, in whom 
 1 set forth Temperance : the third, of Britomartis, a Lady 
 knight, in whom I picture Chastity.' We have seen that only 
 six books and a fragment were completed. The twelfth book 
 was to have set forth the events occasioning the action of the 
 poem. Spenser further tells us. * In that Fairy Queen I mean 
 Glory in my general intention : but in my particular I conceive 
 the most excellent and gracious person of our sovereign, the 
 Queen.' 
 
 A good deal has been written, hardly helpfully, as to the 
 precise qualities on which the poem's greatness depends, and 
 as to whether its central conception is really that professed by 
 Spenser. There seems little difficulty in taking him strictly 
 at his word when he declares in effect that he wishes to write 
 of chivalry in order to help other men to its achievement. 
 Such an, aim, pursued not ' by way of precepts ' but through 
 allegory, and ' ensample ', is no unfitting motive for a great 
 poem. There is high spiritual purpose and achievement 
 throughout The Faerie Queene, and we shall do it far less than 
 justice if, with Hume and Lowell, we deny this, and limit its 
 beauty to its poetic exquisiteness. It is first and foremost 
 a poem written to the glory of a dying ideal, and of a man 
 of Spenser's day who, in the strength of that ideal, had become 
 the perfect knight. Of this glory Spenser tells in a form 
 modelled in great measure on prevfous tradition and the 
 practice of Ariosto, a form deficient, indeed, in technical unity, 
 but nowise deficient in the higher unity of feeling, colour, 
 and spirit. This sense of unity is heightened by the royal 
 sweep and ease with which Spenser handles the great nine- 
 line stanza of his own invention, and by the exquisite imagina- 
 tion which runs throughout the poem, and constantly suffuses 
 its scenes and images with perfect beauty. The archaism of 
 language for which Jonson blamed Spenser, and which had 
 certainly been used to excess in The Shepherd's Calendar, is 
 here employed with finer art, and helps to produce a sense 
 of happy remoteness from common things. Spenser's 
 pictures of Acrasia's Bower of Bliss, the garden of Adonis, 
 and Busirane's Masque of Cupid, are perfect in their sensuous 
 beauty ; a different power is evident in the Procession of the 
 
160 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Vices in the first Book, and the Procession of the Months in 
 the final fragment. Sometimes Spenser's imagery is dark and 
 tremendous, as Sackville's had been before him. Thus Duessa 
 invokes Night : 
 
 O thou most ancient grandmother of all, 
 
 More old than Jove whom thou at first didst breed, 
 
 Or that great house of gods celestial 
 
 Which wast begot in Demogorgon's hall, 
 
 And saw'st the secrets of the world unmade. 
 
 More usual, perhaps, is the serener beauty of this : 
 
 The lily, lady of the flowering field, 
 The flower de luce, her lovely paramour, 
 Bid thee to them thy fruitless labours yield 
 And soon leave off this toilsome weary stoure. 
 Lo, lo, how brave she decks her bounteous bower 
 With silken curtains and gold coverlets, 
 Therein to shroud her sumptuous belamoure, 
 Yet neither spins nor cards nor cares nor frets, 
 But to her mother Nature all her care she lets 
 
 This passage illustrates at once the exquisiteness of Spenser's 
 imagery, and the free and perfect music of his stanza. Both 
 perfections are again evident here : 
 
 As a tall ship tossed in troublous seas, 
 
 Whom raging winds, threatening to make the prey 
 
 Of the rough rocks, do diversely disease, 
 
 Meets two contrary billows by the way 
 
 That her on either side do sore assay, 
 
 And boast to swallow her in greedy grave, 
 
 She, scorning both their sprites, does make wide way, 
 
 And with her breast breaking the foamy wave 
 
 Does ride on both their backs, and fair herself does save. 
 
 Spenser, ' the poets' poet ', has had more homage from his 
 successors than any English poet save Chaucer and Shake- 
 speare. In his own day, men delighted to honour him and to 
 take him for their model. Among modern poets Keats has 
 probably felt his influence most strongly. A fine symbol of 
 his genius is that of Wordsworth : 
 
 Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven 
 With the Moon's beauty and the Moon's soft pace. 
 
 The Eliza- The sonnet form gained no immediate popularity in England 
 bethan after its acclimatization by Wyatt and Surrey. Spenser 
 Sonnet. appears to have been the first Elizabethan to use it, as he 
 published twenty-six sonnets adapted from French models 
 as early as 1569. In 1582 Thomas Watson published Hecatom- 
 pathia or Passionate Century of Love, a collection of so-called 
 sonnets adapted from the Italian, and written chiefly in an 
 eighteen-lined stanza. Watson, in the prose commentary 
 which he appended to each of these poems, admits his borrow- 
 ings, and indicates their sources. His confession or what is 
 virtually such that his ' sonnets ' were mere essays in versifi- 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 161 
 
 cation, may have been to some extent responsible for the 
 extreme view that sonnets by other writers, in which borrow- 
 ing occurs, are essays of this kind and nothing more. The 
 question affects the whole group of Elizabethan sonneteers 
 now to be discussed, including Shakespeare. Modern scholar- 
 ship has shown that nearly all of these men took much of their 
 language and imagery from foreign sources, and especially 
 from Petrarch, and Ronsard, and their followers, notably du 
 Bellay, Desportes, Pontus de Tyard, and Claude de Pontoux. 
 Adaptations from the work of these poets have been traced in 
 the work of practically every Elizabethan sonneteer. It 
 is impossible here to discuss this debt in detail ; but it must 
 be remarked, firstly, that judicious adaptation of this kind 
 was regarded at the period as a legitimate and even praise- 
 worthy literary device, savouring in no sense of plagiarism ; 
 and, secondly, that such borrowing is no certain indication 
 that the Elizabethan sonnet was a mere literary exercise, 
 devoid of true passion and emotion. On the one hand it must* 
 be remembered that in very many sonnets there is no sugges- 
 tion of borrowing ; on the other, it may be freely admitted 
 that much work of the minor men, and some work of the major, 
 was written purely for literary practice. Yet they know little 
 of either life or literature who would claim that the best 
 sonnets of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney, or even of 
 Drayton and Daniel, were written mainly in this spirit. It is 
 not, indeed, necessary, or possible, to interpret by reference 
 to the actual facts of the sonneteer's life each allusion which 
 he makes to his passion and suffering ; much must be ascribed 
 to imagination projecting itself into the emotions of others, 
 much to the poet's desire to set forth his own emotions in 
 a veiled and symbolic form. What seems certain is that in all 
 the greatest cases the emotion is there, transcending and 
 transfiguring the borrowed figures, and making the sonnet 
 an authentic record of the poet's soul. 
 
 Such is undoubtedly the case with Sir Philip Sidney, whose Sidney's 
 sonnet-sequence, Astrophel and Stella, 1 with its interspersed Sonnets, 
 lyrics, comprises the better part of his poetry. No sensitive 
 intelligence can doubt that these poems, at their best, are 
 inspired by genuine passion. We need not greatly concern 
 ourselves as to how literally they refer to the lady to whom 
 they were addressed, Penelope Devereux, daughter of the 
 Earl of Essex. They are written in a form conforming mainly 
 to the Petrarchan, but differing from this through the employ- 
 ment of the final couplet, which was to come into general use 
 among Elizabethan sonneteers. The worst fault of Sidney's 
 poetry is his use of uncouth and grotesque conceits ; but his 
 best sonnets for example, the beautiful one on the Moon 
 show a mastery all the more remarkable in view of his early 
 place among English sonneteers. The finest of *the songs in 
 this collection is perhaps ' Doubt you to whom the Muse these 
 1 Written between 1580 and 1584. first published in 1591. 
 
162 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Spenser's 
 Sonnets. 
 
 Shake. 
 
 speare's 
 
 Sonnets. 
 
 notes intendeth ' . There is much pleasing, but little really 
 exquisite, work among Sidney's miscellaneous lyrics, and those 
 of his Arcadia. 
 
 Much that has been said of Sidney as a sonneteer applies 
 to Spenser, in whose Amoretti there is the same free adaptation 
 from foreign sources, and, at the poet's best, the same strong 
 feeling, passing into the beauty of the sonnets ' Kudely thou 
 wrongest my dear heart's desire ' and * Most glorious lord of 
 life that on this day '. Spenser has left several fine sonnets 
 outside this collection, among the best being one addressed to 
 Gabriel Harvey. He employs a form midway between the 
 strict Petrarchan and the free Shakespearean, connecting the 
 first twelve lines of the sonnet with a chain of alternating 
 rhymes, and concluding with the inevitable couplet. 
 
 Though several collections of Elizabethan sonnets preceded 
 that of Shakespeare, we may leave these for the moment and 
 pass directly to him from Spenser. His sonnets were first 
 published in 1609 ; it is uncertain when they were written. 
 Some writers, without good evidence, have assigned them to 
 so early a date as 1594. Meres in 1598 refers to Shakespeare's 
 ' sugared sonnets ' ; but it is quite possible that even at this 
 date the collection was not complete. Probably the greater 
 number were composed during the last three or four years 
 of the sixteenth century. Similar uncertainty prevails regard- 
 ing the chief persons who figure in them. These are a beautiful 
 young man of gentle, if not noble, birth, whom the poet loved 
 with deep affection ; a second poet, rival of the first for the 
 youth's patronage and friendship ; and a dark woman, evil 
 and not very beautiful, who had laid a spell upon the poet 
 and corrupted his friend. The youth has been variously 
 identified as Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton ; 
 William Herbert, Sidney's nephew and subsequently Earl of 
 Pembroke ; and a certain William Hughes. The probabilities 
 point to Pembroke. The rival poet has been said by different 
 writers to be Chapman, Daniel, Marston, Jonson, Drayton, and 
 Barnabe Barnes. Regarding the dark lady's identity, nothing 
 has been advanced save the wildest conjecture. 
 
 Even these sonnets of Shakespeare's have not escaped the 
 imputation of being mere 'literary exercises' ; but in this 
 case the charge breaks down, almost ludicrously. We need not, 
 indeed, regard them as autobiographical in all their details ; 
 we may admit all that is claimed regarding their debt to 
 foreign and classical models ; and it may be further admitted 
 that certain of them have been built up on forced and con- 
 ventional ' conceits '. But when all due discount has been 
 made, it seems beyond doubt that the story they tell is based 
 on a real experience of Shakespeare's soul. That experience 
 is expressed in poetry which at its best has not been surpassed 
 in the world's literature for beauty and passion. Love, joy, 
 aspiration, disillusionment, jealousy, bitter self-reproach, 
 hatred, and despair, have all passed into Shakespeare's song, 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 163 
 
 and have given it unparalleled fullness and intensity. And these 
 emotions have found a music most apt to express their every 
 change and nicety. The strict Petrarchan sonnet form, with 
 its closely interlocked octave and regular three-rhymed 
 sestet, had, as we have seen, been gradually suppled and 
 loosened by Sidney and Spenser. With Shakespeare the 
 sonnet has won utterly free, for it now consists of three 
 independent quatrains with the ringing or solemn couplet at 
 the close. There are other ways of writing great sonnets 
 than Shakespeare's way. Some of them may be fitter to express 
 certain things which he did not attempt ; but none is fitter 
 for the themes of his choice ; and it is difficult to think of 
 him as giving forth his best in any form save one whose service 
 is perfect freedom. The sonnet to which he has given his 
 sovereign name is still, and always will be, among the great 
 measures of English song. 
 
 Two other collections of sonnets, the Delia (1592) of Samuel Sonnets 
 Daniel, and the Idea's Mirror (1594) of Michael Drayton, reach of Dray- 
 a level lower indeed than Shakespeare's, but definitely above ton and 
 the average of their day. Daniel's sonnets, which do not Daniel, 
 represent his best work, ate more polished than Drayton's, but 
 Dray ton' s at their best have the greater natural force and 
 fervour. Daniel is indebted to du Bellay and Desportes, 
 Drayton to Claude de Pontoux ; but in both cases, though 
 less so in Daniel's, there is originality of handling and authen- 
 ticity of feeling. In two of Daniel's finest sonnets, ' When men 
 shall find thy flower, thy glory, pass', and the famous * Care- 
 charmer sleep ', old conceits are handled with beauty and new 
 meaning. The finest sonnet of Drayton's is the famous 
 ' Since there 's no help ', which has sometimes, without just 
 cause, been attributed to Shakespeare. Beautiful, after 
 a different fashion, is ' The glorious sun went blushing to his 
 bed ', with its delightful conclusion : 
 
 No cloud was seen, but crystalline the air, 
 Laughing for joy upon my lovely fair. 
 
 The remaining work of these two poets will be considered later 
 in this chapter. 
 
 The Diana (1592) of Henry Constable contains some Lesser 
 admirably wrought sonnets, including the beautiful one Sonnet- 
 addressed to Sir Philip Sidney's soul. Constable has also left eers. 
 a few songs, the most charming of which is * Diaphenia like the 
 daffadown dilly ', Thomas Lodge's Phillis (1593) contains 
 some pleasing sonnets ; but finer quality is evident in the songs 
 interspersed throughout this -collection and his remaining 
 works. Few even of the Elizabethans have left anything more 
 charming than his madrigal ' Love in my bosom like a bee '. 
 Less perfect, but delightful in its way, is his lyric, ' My 
 Phyllis hath the morning sun '. The Parthenophil and Par- 
 thenope of Barnabe Barnes contains madrigals and other 
 lyrios, as well as a hundred and five sonnets. One of these, 
 
164 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 ' Ah, sweet content, where is thy mild abode ! ' falls little, 
 if at all, short of greatness. The chief remaining collections 
 are Licia (1593), by Giles Fletcher, father of Phineas and the 
 younger Giles ; Ooelia (1594), by William Percy ; the anony- 
 mous Zepheria (1594) ; Fidessa (1596), by Bartholomew Griffin ; 
 Ghloris (1596), by William Smith ; and Caelica, a collection 
 of sonnets and other lyrics by Fulke Greville, published in 
 1633, five years after their author's death. As a poet Greville 
 is probably best known by the rare and quaint charm of his 
 lyric, * I with whose colours Myra dressed her head '. William 
 Alexander, Earl of Stirling, published in 1604 his collection 
 of sonnets and songs known as Aurora, but he is inferior as 
 a poet to his friend, William Drummond of Hawthornden, 
 whose natural lyric gift finds expression in several admirably 
 wrought sonnets of love and religion. 
 
 The ' flowering-time ' of the Elizabethan sonnet, as has been 
 pointed out by Sir Sidney Lee, was the period between 1591 
 and 1597. During these years there were published no fewer 
 than twelve hundred love sonnets, to say nothing of other 
 kinds. The fashion of sonnet writing waned as rapidly as 
 that of ballade writing waned in the last decade of the nine- 
 teenth century. The amusing Gulling Sonnets (1595), in which 
 Sir John Davies satirizes the fashion for sonneteering, show that 
 the form had done its work for the time being, and had to 
 make way for new varieties of verse. 
 
 We may here deal with a number of other poets, most of 
 whom have left work in several different kinds. The sonnets, 
 Daniel. drama, and prose Defence of Rhyme of Samuel Daniel (1562- 
 1619) have been mentioned elsewhere. The most elaborate 
 of his remaining works is his History of the Civil Wars (1595- 
 1609), a poem in eight books, of nine hundred stanzas each, 
 on the Wars of the Eoses. Its verse, though seldom rising 
 to great heights, has the finish and distinction of all its author's 
 more characteristic work. More highly wrought poetry is to 
 be found in The Complaint of Eosamond (1592) and Muso- 
 philus (1599), a poem instinct with the love of learning and 
 of England. In his capacity as Master of the Bevels to 
 James I, Daniel wrote several masques, including the charming 
 Hymen's Triumph. His verse Epistles were addressed to 
 various ladies and noblemen. In 1605 he published Certain 
 Small Poems, the finest and best known of which is Ulysses 
 and the Siren. 
 
 In his own day Daniel enjoyed a great reputation, which 
 was largely justified by his high reflective vein, his enthusiasm 
 for learning, and the silver beauty of his style ; but he lacked 
 Drayton. the natural force of Michael Drayton (1563-1631), with whom 
 he is so often coupled. Drayton, especially in his sonnets and 
 his Barons' Wars, shows marked traces of Daniel's influence. 
 His Idea's Mirror and his plays have been already noticed. 
 His most ambitious poem, Polyolbion (1613-22), is written 
 in Alexandrine verse, and extends to thirty long books or 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 165 
 
 ' Bongs '. It seems to have been suggested by Albion's England 
 (1586), a long poem in which Thomas Warner had pursued the 
 course of English history from the Flood to the execution of 
 Mary Queen of Scots. Polyolbion is an itinerary of England, 
 with interludes of history, fancy and fairy-lore, and reflects 
 credit both on Dray ton's determination and his patriotism. It 
 is not to be expected that a work of this nature should achieve 
 beauty and interest in all its parts ; it is a high tribute to 
 Dray ton's genius that these qualities should be present as often 
 as they are, and that his huge canvas should be constantly lit 
 up with poetry. Drayton's historical poems include several 
 ' legends ' concerning famous characters ; also Mortimer iados 
 (1596), subsequently worked over and expanded into The 
 Barons' Wars (1603); and England's Heroical Epistles (1597), 
 which the poet conceives as having been written by certain 
 romantic characters of history. These poems, though uneven, 
 sometimes attain great beauty, as in A Passion of King Henry 
 and Fair Rosamond, where the influence of Daniel is again 
 strongly evident. Dray ton also published The Mooncalf (1627), 
 a satire, and The Owl (1604), an obscure satirical allegory or 
 fable. His sacred poem, The Harmony of the Church (1591), is 
 of negligible value. The patriotic impulse which impelled him 
 to write Polyolbion flames out again in the stirring Ballad of 
 Agincourt, and burns with a steadier glow in The Ode to the 
 Virginian Voyage. His fairy poem, Nymphidia, is an inimitable 
 blend of humour and fancy. 
 
 As early as 1593, in The Shepherd's Garland he had written 
 pastoral poetry ; but his happiest efforts in this kind were, 
 strangely and pleasingly enough, reserved for his old age, 
 which produced the perfect Shepherd's Sirena (1627) and the 
 Muses' Elysium (1630). The Nymphals which make up this 
 last collection are as full of poetry and freshness and charm as 
 anything ever created by youth. Here the old man makes 
 us known to * Lirope the bright ' : 
 
 Some said a god did her beget, 
 But much deceived were they : 
 Her father was a Rivulet, 
 Her mother was a Fay. 
 
 Later, a woodman tells us : 
 
 The Dryads, Hamadryads, the Satyrs and the Fawns 
 Oft play at hide and seek before me on the lawns, 
 The frisking fairy oft when horned Cynthia shines 
 Before me as I walk dance wanton matachynes. 
 
 No little bubbling brook from any spring that falls 
 But on the pebbles plays me pretty madrigals. 
 There were few kinds of literature extant in his day which 
 Drayton l did not handle, and handle effectively. His mingled 
 1 Professor Elton's short volume on Michael Drayton is indispensable 
 to the student and may be read with pleasure by the general reader. 
 
166 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Breton, 
 Wotton, 
 and 
 others. 
 
 Sir John 
 Da vies. 
 
 Browne. 
 
 ruggedness and sweetness make him a curiously lovable 
 figure. 
 
 Nicholas Breton (1542-1626) has left several long poems, 
 but his most charming work is to be found in the pastorals 
 of The Passionate Shepherd. Richard Barnfield (1574-1626) 
 published three volumes of scholarly and sometimes pleasing 
 verse, but is known to the general by a single lyric, ' As it 
 fell upon a day' ('Philomel'). The writings of Sir Henry 
 Wotton (1568-1639) were published after his death, under the 
 title Reliquiae Wottoniae. He is chiefly memorable here for 
 a few lyrics, including the perfect ' Ye meaner beauties of the 
 night '. Two writers of religious poetry were John Davies of 
 Hereford (1565-1618) and the Jesuit priest, Robert Southwell 
 (1560-1595). Davies' verse has small value; Southwell has 
 left a long poem, Saint Peter's Complaint (1595), but his best 
 work is contained in his shorter pieces, the most familiar of 
 which is the finely symbolistic Burning Babe. A long poem 
 in which philosophy and religion blend is Nosce Teipsum 
 (1599) by Sir John Davies (1569-1626). This is a fervid 
 affirmation of the worth and immortality of the soul, embody- 
 ing the Platonism of the age, and often rising to great .heights 
 of beauty. The two quatrains beginning * I know my soul 
 hath power to know all things ' are in all anthologies. The 
 key-note of the poem is struck in these lines : 
 
 Heaven waxeth old and all the spheres above 
 Shall one day faint, and their swift motion stay, 
 And Time itself in time shall cease to move ; 
 Only the soul survives and lives for aye. 
 
 Davies' work, though not great in volume, is curiously varied 
 in kind. Orchestra (1596) celebrates the majesty of Dancing, 
 ' the child of Music and of Love ', and shows incidentally that 
 earth, sun, moon, and stars, are all partners in a cosmic 
 dance. This fancy, and the others which go to make the poem, 
 are expressed in delightful language. There is much charm 
 even in the series of acrostics the Hymns to Astraea (1599) 
 which Davies addressed to Elizabeth. 
 
 William Browne (1591-1643) was a self-confessed disciple 
 of Spenser, whose praises he never ceased to sing. The 
 sensuous charm of his best work is thoroughly Spenserian, 
 and so is his delight in describing natural beauty. In 1613 
 Browne published the first book of Britannia's Pastorals, 
 his best and best-known work. In the intervals of a not very 
 interesting love story, he praises the beauty of England, 
 lingering with special delight over his native county, Devon. 
 The greater part of the poem is written in a freely overrun 
 form of the heroic couplet ; it contains some charming lyrics, 
 as does The Inner Temple Masque (1615). Hardly less charm- 
 ing are the pastorals of The Shepherd's Pipe (1614). Browne's 
 work is uneven, and very much of it is lacking in strength, 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 167 
 
 but the beat of it has great sweetness and grace. The exultant 
 spirit of the age is evident in his apostrophe to England : 
 
 Hail, thou my native soil ! thou blessed plot 
 
 Whose equal all the world affordeth not ! 
 
 Show me who can so many crystal rills, 
 
 Such sweet-clothed valleys or aspiring hills, 
 
 Such wood-ground, pastures, quarries, wealthy mines, 
 
 Such rocks in whom the diamond fairly shines, 
 
 And if the earth can show the like again, 
 
 Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men. 
 
 Next to Browne may be mentioned his friend. George Wither. 
 Wither (1588-1667), much beloved of Lamb and of good critics 
 before him and after. After a youthful volume of satires, 
 which caused him to be imprisoned in the Marshalsea, he 
 published successively the volumes which contain his best 
 work The Shepherd's Hunting (1615), Fidelia (1617), and 
 Philarete (1622). Wither' s pastorals have all the joy of 
 Browne's, with something more of intimacy. Lacking 
 Wordsworth's high transcendentalism, he used poetry after 
 Wordsworth's fashion to show the beauty of simple things 
 an English Christmastide, a child in its cradle, the humble 
 grace of * the grateful and obsequious marigold ' . The religious 
 poetry of his later years has been unfairly disparaged. Though 
 not of his best, it contains much that is beautiful and charac- 
 teristic of his quiet, happy genius. 
 
 High place among the Spenserians must be accorded to the Giles and 
 brothers, Giles and Phineas Fletcher (1588-1623 and 1582- Phineas 
 1650), sons of Giles the sonneteer, and cousins of the more Fletcher, 
 famous John. The chief work of Giles the younger is his long 
 poem, Christ's Victory and Triumph (1610), written in an eight- 
 lined stanza of his own devising. Giles, like Phineas, was 
 a strongly religious man, and his religion has passed into his 
 verse and helped to give it its distinctive fervour and beauty. 
 Particularly impressive is the passage in the first book, in 
 which Mercy pleads to God for Man, and overcomes the stern 
 prompting of Justice. Spenser's influence may be seen in 
 Fletcher's fine use of allegory, in the high purpose of his work, 
 in the sweep and flow and majesty of his stanza, and in the 
 frequent exquisiteness of his descriptive passages. Here, for 
 instance, is the stanza describing the joy of earth at the 
 Saviour's resurrection : 
 
 Th' engladded Spring, forgetful now to weep, 
 
 Began t' eblazon from her leavy bed, 
 
 The waking swallow broke her half year's sleep, 
 
 And every bush lay deeply puipui-ed 
 
 With violets; the wood's late -wintry head 
 
 Wide flaming primroses set all on fire, 
 
 And his bald trees put on their green attire, 
 
 Among whose infant leaves the joyous birds conspire. 
 
 Phineas Fletcher has left much more work than Giles, and. 
 
168 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 a good deal of this is of the lighter kind. To this class belong 
 Britain's Ida (1628), a dainty poem once attributed to Spenser ; 
 Sicelides (1614), a masque of fishers and fishing; and the 
 Piscatory Eclogues (1633). Elisa (1633) is a fine elegy upon 
 a dead friend, written at the request of the friend's wife. 
 The Apollyonists (1627), a religious allegory, describes the fall 
 of Lucifer, and hits at the Church of Borne. But Fletcher's 
 longest and most remarkable work is The Purple Island, 
 a poem in twelve cantos taking for its subject the body of 
 man. The first five cantos are physiological, sometimes rather 
 distressingly so. Fletcher chronicles each part of the body, 
 narrates its functions, and invests it with poetic attributes, 
 just as Dray ton had invested the streams and mountains of 
 England in Polyolbion. The result is a curiosity, though it is 
 doubtful whether Fletcher meant it to be considered so. 
 Here is a stanza describing the functions of the ear : 
 
 The portal hard and dry all hung around 
 
 With silken, thin, carnation tapestry, 
 
 Whose open gate drags in each voice and sound, 
 
 That through the shaken air passes by. 
 
 The entrance winding, lest some violence 
 
 Might fright the Judge with sudden influence, 
 
 Or some unwelcome guest might vex the busy sense. 
 
 It is curious to find amid metrical descriptions of the bile, 
 spleen, phlegm, and gall, stanzas in praise of Elizabeth, and 
 some really fine passages of natural description. When 
 Fletcher passes from humanity's outward case to the soul 
 within, poetry results more naturally, and there are some 
 impressive Spenserian personifications, as, for instance, that 
 of Despair in the Twelfth Canto. The Apollyonists and The 
 Purple Island, as well as Christ's Victory and Triumph, were 
 familiar to Milton, and their influence is evident in Paradise 
 Lost. 
 
 Campion. Thomas Campion (1567-1619) is memorable for his treatise 
 on English prosody, for a few masques, and for the lyrics con- 
 tained in his four Books of Airs ( 1601, 1612, 1617). The treatise, 
 as has been shown elsewhere, attempted to demonstrate the 
 superiority of rhymeless over rhymed English lyric. Campion's 
 own practice disproved the contention, for his best lyrics 
 are rhymed for instance, the beautiful 'Follow your saint', 
 * There is a garden in her face ', and ' Now winter nights 
 enlarge ' ; yet a handful of his rhymeless lyrics as ' Rose- 
 cheeked Laura, come ' and ' Hark all you ladies ' are so 
 exquisite as to more than justify his use of this form. Many of 
 his metrical ambiguities are accounted for when it is remem- 
 bered that his songs were written to music of his own composi- 
 tion. He had the true lyric gift, and Henley is less than just 
 to him when he dismisses him as a ' curious metrist '. 
 
 Donne. In John Donne (1573-1631) we encounter a mightier than 
 
 Campion, a great poet who had a profound influence on succeed- 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 169 
 
 ing poetry. Comparatively little of Donne's verse was pub- 
 lished during his lifetime : a full edition of it appeared in 1635. 
 The most important of his earlier poems were his Songs and 
 Sonnets, his Elegies, and his Satires. The Satires were written 
 in a style of deliberate harshness a harshness adopted, we 
 can hardly doubt, in direct imitation of the style of Persius. 
 Like the satires of Marston and Hall, they hit hard at certain 
 characters and customs of the time. Perhaps the most vivid 
 of them is the fourth, with its picture of the tedious, travelled 
 ' Macaron ' or fop. The third is serious and reflective ; through - 
 out the series there are constant gleams of wit and vision. They 
 are written in a loose and freely overrun form of the couplet, 
 which clearly aims at a conversational effect, and is in striking 
 contrast to the stricter form used by Donne in the Anniver- 
 saries and elsewhere. For a great while the Satires were 
 regarded as Donne's most important and characteristic work. 
 Their influence is strongly evident in Dryden, and they were 
 copied by Pope. 
 
 Our own age attaches more importance to the songs and 
 elegies. In these Donne l breaks with the Petrarchan tradition 
 in so far as it involves the use of formal and courtly compli- 
 ment ; yet much of Renaissance Platonism survives in his 
 constant sense of the ideal world behind the visible, and in his 
 contempt for the flesh as that which thwarts the soul. Occa- 
 sionally in these earlier poems as in the famous ' Sweetest love, 
 I do not go ' addressed to his wife the ideal is foremost, and 
 the beauty and power of the soul, and of love, are exquisitely 
 vindicated ; but in very many of them contempt has become 
 the motive force, and the poet interprets life and love cynically 
 and sensually. Yet Donne's cynicism is no cold principle of 
 negation ; it has intensity and passion ; and the fierce defiant 
 sensuality of the elegies is lightened by his constant wit and 
 strange possessing imagery. Occasionally, too, love, even in 
 these poems, wins free of cynicism, and renders the pure 
 homage of The Picture. The Progress of the Soul, a curious 
 study in metempsychosis, is thoroughly characteristic of 
 Donne's genius. His Verse Epistles are largely autobio- 
 graphical, and contain The Calm and The Storm, of which the 
 first was justly approved by Jonson. His later devotional 
 poems, like his earlier love poems, are strained and artificial 
 in form, but sincere in their craving for utter self -revelation. 
 Perhaps the most profound and beautiful of all his poems is 
 the second of the two Anniversaries, nominally a funeral 
 elegy upon Mistress Elizabeth Drury, but actually a passionate 
 affirmation of the soul's worth, and of its triumph over death. 
 The music of Donne's verse is often as unearthly as the 
 quality of his thought. Frequently it baffles the ear ; yet 
 much in him that may at first seem dissonance is in reality 
 the subtlest melody. At its best his lyric has an intensity and 
 
 1 Cf. H. ,T. C. Grierson, Cambridge. History of English Literature, 
 vol. iv, p. 195 
 
 03 
 
170 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 a strangeness which are without parallel in our literature. 
 But it was rather by his imagery than by his rhythm that he 
 made his profound effect upon English poetry. His verse is 
 packed with symbols, now fantastic, now startling through 
 their very homeliness, but nearly always fraught with haunting 
 suggestion. Two quotations from the second Anniversary will 
 serve to show the range of his imagination : 
 
 Think then, my soul, that death is but a groom 
 Which brings a taper to the outward room, 
 Whence thou spiest first a little glimmering light, 
 And after brings it nearer to thy sight ; 
 For such approaches doth heaven make in death. 
 
 and : 
 
 her pure and eloquent blood 
 Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought 
 That one might almost say, her body thought. 
 
 The moods expressed in Donne's poetry were infinitely 
 various, ranging from desire and jealousy to adoration, and that 
 brooding on death which is part of the Kenaissance soul. 
 He is the first of the poets styled by Johnson ' metaphysical '. 
 Many men of the next generation hold of him, though too often 
 with a difference ; for in their poetry the form constantly 
 persists after the soul has departed, so that symbolism 
 becomes mere ' conceit '. Donne is a poet of the ' decadence ' ; 
 but with him, as with so many others, decadence is a variation, 
 and not a failure, of strength and beauty. In many moods 
 we may prefer his broken yet intense music to the organ roll 
 of Milton. 
 
 Drum- A true poet, though a lesser one than either Donne or 
 
 mond. Jonson, is William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). 
 Drummond's chaste gift of expression and finely imaginative 
 habit of mind are perhaps seen at their best in the madrigals, 
 sonnets, songs, and elegies which were published in the second 
 edition of his Tears on the Death of Moeliades (1616). Many 
 of the poems in this collection attain a very high level of beauty, 
 and display their author's poignant sense of tragedy in life. 
 Under the title of Forth Feasting (1617) Drummond published 
 some admirably turned but uninspired verses on the occasion 
 of the king's visit to Scotland. His Flowers of Sion (1623) 
 consists of religious verse which is often of quite remarkable 
 beauty. Drummond, with a little more strength, would have 
 been a very great poet indeed. His sonnets and those of his 
 friend, the Earl of Stirling, are noticed elsewhere. Lord Stirling 
 is also memorable for his interesting Monarchical Tragedies of 
 Croesus, Darius, Alexander, and Julius Oaesar. 
 
 Jonson. An influence even more important than Donne's is that 
 of Ben Jonson, whose lyric poetry is chiefly contained in 
 his collections The Forest, Underwoods, a,nd*iCharis, and in 
 numerous passages of his plays and masques. He, no less than 
 Donne, represents a reaction against the Petrarchan tradition, 
 
ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN POETRY 171 
 
 with its formal and outworn imagery ; but in his case the 
 cure was provided, not through the substitution of a new and 
 more vital symbolism, but by recourse to the clear and 
 balanced beauty of the best classical lyric. Jonson strove to 
 bring into English poetry the restraint, simplicity, and strength 
 of Greek and Latin song. Several of his own songs are para- 
 phrases of classical originals ; and even where there is no direct 
 debt of this kind, the influence of the old lyrists is powerful. 
 It appears in the beautiful Hymn to Diana and Song to Celia 
 (' Drink to me only with thine eyes '), in the famous elegy, 
 ' Though beauty be the mask of praise ', and in the Ode on 
 Sir Lucius Gary and Sir H. Morison. Jonson's massive 
 virility is evident even in his more delicate and highly wrought 
 verse. Perhaps his least satisfactory poems are his satirical 
 epigrams, written in imitation of Martial, yet showing little of 
 Martial's wit and neatness. In respect of lyric poetry as of 
 much else, Jonson's influence is strongly evident in the 
 practice of the young men who gathered round him at the 
 Devil Tavern and were proud to be styled his ' sons '. Notice 
 of these must be reserved for a fresh chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 CAROLINE POETRY 
 
 Fashions in contemporary poetry Herrick, Carew, Randolph, Suck- 
 ling, Lovelace Religious Poetry : Crashaw, Herbert, Vaughan, and 
 others Developments of the Couplet Waller, Denham, Cowley, 
 Marvell Minors. 
 
 As has been indicated in the previous chapter, the dominating 
 influences in Elizabethan lyric poetry, the Petrarchan and the 
 Spenserian, were towards the end of the period giving way to 
 the new forms and forces exemplified after widely different 
 fashions in the poetry of Jonson and Donne. The greatest 
 poet of the school of Jonson in some ways the greatest 
 lyrist of the English Renaissance was Robert Herrick (1591- Herrick. 
 1674), whose fame rests upon his two volumes of poems, 
 respectively religious and secular, Noble Numbers (1647) and 
 Hesperides (1648). Herrick was a sworn disciple and admirer 
 of Jonson, and had partaken of those ' lyrick feasts ' held at 
 ' Hie Sun, the Dog, the Triple Tun ' where each verse of his 
 Master's ' outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine '. To Jonson 
 he prays : 
 
 When I a verse shall make, 
 
 Know I have prayed thee 
 
 For old religion's sake, 
 
 Saint Ben, to aid me. 
 
 Ilis prayer is not merely an outburst of personal affection, but 
 n profession of artistic faith. Tho cln.Ksir.il grace ami perfection 
 
172 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 of Jonson at his best are richly evident throughout Herrick's 
 poetry ; but in Herrick's most characteristic pieces there are a 
 lightness and an exquisite play of fancy which are all his own. 
 Some of his most famous lyrics are addressed to women whom 
 he loved, or pretended to have loved Julia, Dianeme, Silvia, 
 and Anthea. To the first of these are addressed The Night 
 Piece, and many poems hardly less famous and perfect ; the 
 last is immortal in ' Bid me to live '. In many of Herrick's 
 poems as in 'To Violets', 'The Primrose', * Corinna's 
 Going a-Maying ' the love of women is lyrically blended with 
 the love of flowers ; yet to Herrick nature was no divine 
 mother, as she was to become to Wordsworth and Meredith, 
 but a mistress whose casual favours he enjoyed with pagan 
 delight. Here he is one with Theodore de Banville, whom he 
 also resembles in his love of fairies, in the particular note of his 
 gallantry, the silver perfection of his verse, and in his maxim 
 of life ' to live merrily and trust to good verses ' which has 
 its exact counterpart in an envoi of the French poet : 
 
 So. Prince, I scorn the harsh world's cruel best 
 And own me thrall of rhyme and mirth and jest, 
 
 Of song, of flowers; of Fancy's idlest toy : 
 Ay, Prince, of Poesy ! Lo, 'tis now confesst ! 
 
 This is the only way of peace and joy ! 
 
 But if Banville's verse at its best is as finished as Herrick's, 
 Herrick's sweep is freer, and his music larger and more various. 
 Only one or two of his lyrics To Anthea, for instance, and 
 ' Sweet Spirit, comfort me ' display emotional intensity ; 
 the rest are great through sheer force of poetry. And thus, 
 strangely enough, his spiritual limitation becomes an artistic 
 triumph. 
 
 Carew. Thomas Carew (1598 ?-1639 ?), like Herrick, was proud of his 
 
 discipleship to Jonson, of whom he wrote 
 
 The wiser world doth greater Thee confess 
 Than all men else, than Thyself only less. 
 
 His best poems have the measured beauty of his master's ; they 
 are more marmoreal than Herrick's, and lack his winning and 
 easy habit of self -revelation. Often, as in A Looking -Glass, 
 Carew uses ' conceits ' after a fashion deriving partly from the 
 older Petrarchan tradition, partly from the ' metaphysical ' 
 innovations of Donne. Often there is direct reminiscence of 
 Donne, as in ' To his Mistress in Absence ', which carries echoes 
 of ' The Ecstasy '. A handful of his lyrics notably ' He that 
 loves a rosy cheek ', and ' Ask me no more where Jove be- 
 stows' rank amongst the greatest in the language ; but his 
 most personal and passionate and audacious poem is ' The 
 Kapture'. He collaborated with Inigo Jones in the pro- 
 duction of a fine masque, Coelum Britannicum, which was 
 performed at Whitehall on Shrove Tuesday night of 1634. 
 Randolph, The short-lived and brilliant Thomas Randolph (1605- 
 Suckling, 1635) was also a ' son of Ben ', and his most famous lyric, ' I have 
 Lovelace. 
 
CAROLINE POETRY 173 
 
 a mistress for perfections rare ', lias an unmistakably Jonsonian 
 rhythm. There is a delightfully English quality in his ' Ode to 
 Master Anthony Stafford, to hasten him into the Country '. 
 Other poets who owe much to Jonson are William Habington 
 (1605-1654) and William Cartwright (1611-1643). The lyrics 
 of Habington's Castara are addressed to his wife, and are often 
 of admirable quality. Cartwright has left some charming 
 songs ; his best thing is perhaps To Chloe. Two greater names 
 are those of Sir John Suckling (1609 ?-1642) and Richard 
 Lovelace (1618-1658). In technique as in sentiment Suckling's 
 lyrics are more easy and devil-may-care than those of Carew 
 and Jonson. He owned his admiration for Donne, and in more 
 than one place has copied him without achieving his pro- 
 fundity. One might say of him, as Scott said of Byron, that 
 he ' managed his pen with the careless and negligent ease of 
 a man of quality '. The gay and cynical spirit of the Cavalier 
 is evident in his best-known lyrics, * The Constant Lover ' and 
 ' Why so pale and wan f ' Some of his best songs appeared in 
 his plays, which receive separate notice in this volume. 
 Suckling has not only an attitude, but a light and lilting music 
 of his own. His best things for instance, his famous ' Ballad 
 of a Wedding ' show a delightful combination of raciness and 
 charm. 
 
 Lovelace has left a considerable volume of poetry, much of 
 which displays the worst faults of the age, and is * conceited ' 
 and tedious to a degree. At other times he can write charm- 
 ingly, as in ' The Grasshopper ' : 
 
 O thou that swing'st upon the waving hair 
 
 Of some well-filled oaen beard, 
 
 Drunk every night with a delicious tear 
 
 Dropt thee from heaven, where thou wert reared. 
 
 Two of his lyrics, 'To Althea from Prison', and 'To Lucasta, 
 on going beyond the Seas ', are more than charming : they are 
 consummate. 
 
 Some of the finest poetry of the period comes from a group of Religious 
 religious writers, the chief of whom are George Herbert (1593- Poetry. 
 1633), Richard Crashaw (1613 T-1649), and Henry Vaughan 
 (1622-1695). Most of Herbert's religious verse is included in 
 his collection The Temple (1633), a work which suggested to 
 Crashaw the title of his own collection, Steps to the Temple 
 (1646). The Poems published by Vaughan in 1646 were 
 chiefly secular ; his best religious poetry is contained in his 
 two volumes, Silex Scintillans (1651) and Olor Iscanus (1652). 
 All of these poets belong to the class described by Johnson as 
 'metaphysical', and employ imagery which is constantly 
 fantastic and exaggerated, sometimes absurd, but often of 
 strange beauty and power. 
 
 Crashaw's best work notably the great Nativity Ode, The Crashaw. 
 Flaming Heart, and the Hymn to the Name and Honour of the 
 Admirable Saint Theresa shows him to be beyond doubt the 
 
174 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 greatest poet of the three. These poems are consummate ; 
 their recurrent * conceits ' are transfigured by their passion and 
 deep sensuous glow. Crashaw wooed heaven with a lover-like 
 intensity, and found strange and often exquisite imagery in 
 which to express his ecstasy. Had he been less ' metaphysical ' 
 we should never have been given the Shepherds' praise of the 
 Infant Jesus : 
 
 We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest, 
 Young dawn of our eternal Day, 
 We saw Thine eyes break from their East 
 And chase the trembling shades away. 
 We saw Thee, and we blest the sight, 
 We saw Thee by Thine own sweet light. 
 
 Crashaw's worst work embodies the most strained and ludicrous 
 excesses of metaphysical poetry, but his best soars to its highest 
 conceivable pitch. Sometimes in him beauty and pathos touch 
 each other ; thus in The Weeper he can write the following 
 dreadful stanza, of the Magdalene's tears : 
 
 Every morn from hence 
 
 A brisk cherub something sips 
 Whose sacred influence 
 
 Adds sweetness to his sweetest lips, 
 Then to his music, and his song * 
 
 Tastes of his breakfast all day long. V\ ** 
 
 In the same poem, another stanza begins disquietingly and, 
 daring all, passes into perfect beauty : 
 
 Not in the Evening's eyes, 
 
 When they red with weeping are 
 For the Sun that dies, 
 
 Sits Sorrow with a face so fair; 
 Nowhere but here did ever meet 
 Sweetness so sad, sadness so sweet. 
 
 There are few more impassioned lines in the language than 
 those which conclude The Flaming Heart. Crashaw has left 
 several translations in verse. His best secular poem is the 
 charming Wishes to his Supposed Mistress. 
 
 Herbert. Herbert's imagery is hardly less fantastic than Crashaw's, 
 though his emotion has a quieter glow. His great book, The 
 Temple, was preceded by a long induction, The Church 
 Porch, containing moral and religious maxims. These are 
 sometimes quaint, as when the bibber of wine is told to 
 
 pour the shame 
 Which it would pour on thee, upon the floor. 
 
 Others are touched with poetry ; thus the soldier is bidden to 
 
 Chase brave employments with a naked sword 
 Throughout the world. 
 
 The Temple itself is full of 'conceits', some of which are 
 merely fantastic, as the verse which illustrates the omni- 
 potence of Providence : 
 
CAROLINE POETRY 175 
 
 To show Thou art not bound, as if Thy lot 
 Were worse than ours, sometimes Thou shiftest hands. 
 Most things move the underjaw, the crocodile not, 
 Most things sleep lying, the elephant leans or stands. 
 
 Yet Herbert's outrages against taste are hardly ever so extreme 
 and startling as Crashaw's, and his best devotional lyrics have 
 a quaint and perfect charm which, like Crashaw's intenser 
 beauty, is inseparable from the ' metaphysical ' habit of 
 thought and expression. Some of his most delightful poems 
 The Quip, for instance, and the Pulley are spun merely of 
 ' conceits '. The Collar surprises by its opening violence : 
 I struck the board, and cried ' No more ; 
 I will abroad,' 
 
 and closes quietly, and with strange beauty : 
 
 But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild 
 
 At every word, 
 Methought I heard one calling ' Child ', 
 
 And I replied, 'My Lord'. 
 
 Herbert's most famous, and probably his finest, lyric is Virtue 
 ( ' Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright ' ) ; but a few of his other 
 poems are of hardly less beauty. 
 
 Vaughan in his youth had written love-lyrics to Amoret, and Vaughan. 
 a drinking song in praise of ' royal, witty sack, the poet's soul '. 
 He had also, in a poem to his friend * K. W.', owned his admira- 
 tion of Jonson and Randolph ; but his sacred poetry which 
 is by far his better part shows him to have been strongly 
 influenced by Herbert. He is a greater poet than his master, 
 however ; his best religious verse has a mystical fervour which 
 is strangely moving, while his ' conceits ' are less frequent and 
 extreme than those of Crashaw. Perhaps his finest poem is 
 ' They are all gone into the world of light ' ; hardly less 
 beautiful is The Retreat, which is said to have suggested to 
 Wordsworth his Ode on some Intimations of Immortality. The 
 quality of his genius appears in such lines as these : 
 Where through thick pangs, high agonies, 
 Faith into life breaks, and Death dies, 
 and 
 
 I saw Eternity the other night 
 Like a great ring of pure and endless light, 
 All calm as it was bright, 
 and 
 
 Follow the cry no more : there is 
 
 An ancient way, 
 All strewed with flowers and happiness 
 
 And fresh as May ; 
 There turn, and turn no more : let wits 
 
 Smile at fair eyes 
 Or lips : but who there weeping sits 
 
 Hath got the prize. 
 
 Of lesser but definite importance among the religious writers Traherne 
 of the period were Thomas Traherne (1637-1674) and Francis and 
 
 Quarles. 
 
176 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Quarles (1592-1644). Traherne's verse is uncertain in quality ; 
 it has much of Vaughan's mysticism without his intensity, and 
 at its best has a peculiarly winning charm. His poems were 
 discovered in manuscript by the late Mr. Bertram D obeli, and 
 were first published in 1903. He has also left some fine 
 imaginative prose. Quarles was a voluminous writer, but is 
 chiefly known to-day through his Emblems (1635), short 
 religious poems whose symbolism is eked out, after the fashion 
 of ' emblems ', with illustrations. Quarles has his full share of 
 the quaintness of the age, which with him is often homely and 
 humorous, but is sometimes suffused with beauty. Two 
 long religious poems, The Song of the Soul by Henry More, 
 and Psycheby Joseph Beaumont, deserve mention here, though 
 to-day they are ' seldom pored on '. 
 
 Develop- If English lyric during this period was undergoing an 
 ments of important development, an even more important one was 
 the Coup- affecting the heroic couplet. The English rhyming couplet, 
 * efc - like English blank verse, had originated in a curbed and 
 
 measured form, had gradually won fuller freedom, and, in the 
 hands of its later and inferior practitioners, had passed into 
 licence and disorder. In its earlier stages there had been little 
 variation of beat and measure, little overrunning of couplet 
 into couplet. Such a tendency, however, became pronounced 
 during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Many Eliza- 
 bethans hesitate between the stricter and the freer ways ; 
 William Browne for the most part handles his couplets with 
 freedom, and so does Donne in his early satires. In William 
 Charnberlayne's long couplet-poem, Pharonnida (1659), metri- 
 cal liberty has certainly degenerated into metrical licentious- 
 ness. Chamberlayne, with the view of giving his couplets ease 
 and speed, overruns them freely, and frequently, for the same 
 reason, ends his lines with unemphatic words. This practice 
 had already been adopted in blank verse, often, as in Shake- 
 speare's case, with the happiest results ; but the couplet is less 
 apt for such handling. In both forms licence was pushed 
 beyond due limits, and resulted in metrical anarchy. As we 
 are here concerned with the so-called ' reform of English 
 numbers ', it is important to notice the exact reasons why such 
 1 reform ' occurred, and was regarded as necessary. These may 
 be gathered from a glance at the following ' unreformed ' 
 couplets, from Pharonnida : 
 
 That since-famed gulf (where the brave Austrian made 
 
 The Turkish crescents an eternal shade 
 
 Beneath dishonour seek) Lepanto, lay 
 
 So near that from their lofty station they 
 
 A ship, upon whose streamers there were fixt 
 
 The Christian badge, saw in fierce battle mixt 
 
 With a prevailing Turkish squadron, that 
 
 With shouts assault what now lay only at 
 
 That feeble guard, which, under the pretence 
 
 Of injuring others, seeks its own defence. 
 
 It may be remarked that this is only a brief specimen of 
 
CAROLINE POETRY 177 
 
 Chamber lay ne' s periods, which not infrequently run for thirty 
 lines without a full pause. 
 
 Such writing afflicted the delicate taste of Edmund Waller Waller. 
 (1605-1687). * Metric ught,' said he, according to Aubrey, 4 I 
 never saw a good copy of English verses ; they want smooth- 
 ness : then I began to essay.' Other men were thinking as he 
 did. Sir John Beaumont in his Lines to his Late Majesty, 
 concerning the True Form of English Poetry, deplored the 
 shapelessness of English verse and demanded a new pattern. 
 Models of correctness were not wanting to Waller. Donne, if 
 his metre had run to looseness in the satires, had in his later 
 Epistles written more strict and formal couplets. Fairfax, 
 whose influence upon himself Waller acknowledges, had, in his 
 translation of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, concluded each 
 of his eight-lined stanzas with a stopped couplet ; and George 
 Sandys, while ensuing freedom and variety in his translation 
 of Ovid's Metamorphoses, had carefully avoided the looseness 
 into which Chamberlayne was to fall. Waller wrote many 
 poems in the couplet : the most notable are, perhaps, the 
 long and tantalizing Battle of the Summer Islands ; and the 
 Instructions to a Painter, written to commemorate the sea- 
 fighting of 1665. These and his other poems in the same form 
 have little hold upon the present age, but they gave him 
 a prodigious reputation with his own generation, and with 
 at least two succeeding ones. Dryden declared that ' the 
 excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known till 
 Mr. Waller taught it ', and that he first made easy writing a fine 
 art. Pope praised him for his ' smoothness '. It is perhaps less 
 difficult to understand what the men of the early eighteenth 
 century saw in Waller than to share their enthusiasm for him. 
 They gave him credit for moulding that form of the couplet 
 which became their own standard measure, and for wielding 
 it, in their opinion for the first time, with ease and smoothness. 
 Dismayed by the excesses of the looser form, they welcomed 
 a variety which ensured elegance and order without forfeiting 
 ease, observed the caesura and the normal accentual beat, 
 eschewed weak and loose rhymes, and was far advanced 
 toward the practice, eventually adopted by themselves, of 
 stopping each couplet and confining the sense to its limits. 
 These metrical devices apart, Waller's language is easy, 
 light, and elegant, and was thus highly to the taste of the 
 Augustan Age. A generation which has read Tristram of 
 Lyonesse realizes that the heroic couplet may be freely overrun 
 without becoming loose or weak, and believes, conversely, 
 that the end-stopped form is ill-suited to express the highest 
 flights of passion or imagination. 
 
 Men of all generations can unite in appreciating the beauty 
 of Waller's finest lyrics ' On a Girdle ', ' Go, Lovely Rose', or 
 * Old Age ', with its unforgettable couplet : 
 
 The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd; 
 
 Lets in new light through chinks that Time has made. 
 
178 HISTORY_ OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Sir John Denham (1615-1660-j shared with Waller and 
 Cowley the reputation of ^having been a ' reformer ' of English 
 'numbers'. His play, The Sophy (1641) first brought him 
 reputation, though there is little in it to attract the reader 
 of to-day. It was followed in 1642 by Cooper's Hill, his most 
 famous work, which describes the landscape seen from his 
 house at Cooper's Hill, including the 'distant view of London 
 and the nearer one of Windsor. Many of Denham's descrip- 
 tions of Nature are interwoven with reflection ; yet there is 
 a far cry between him and Cowper or Wordsworth. The 
 poem's finest and most famous passage is that addressed to the 
 Thames, beginning, '0 could I flow like thee'. Cooper's 
 Hill favours the end-stopped variety of the couplet, though 
 Denham deserts this not infrequently for the overrun form, 
 which he had used in his youthful translation of Virgil's 
 second Aeneid. He has also left a verse paraphrase of Cicero's 
 De Senectute, and poems on Prudence and Justice, together with 
 shorter pieces. He lacks Waller's ease and elegance, and to 
 modern readers his verse possesses little attraction. 
 
 The reputation of Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), though it 
 is inferior to his contemporary fame, stands higher to-day 
 than Denham's. His collected works, which he published 
 in 1656, consisted of his youthful lyrics, entitled Miscellanies ; 
 a further collection of lyrics, The Mistress ; his Pindarique 
 Odes ; and his unfinished sacred poem, Davideis. Cowley's 
 lyrics illustrate curiously the spirit of the age ; many of them 
 are ' metaphysical ' to a degree, and have Donne's fantastic 
 strangeness without his fire ; others, notably his Anacreontics, 
 are as classically smooth as anything of Jonson's. Cowley tells 
 us in the Miscellanies that he considered bombast to be 
 a * crying sin o' the English muse ' ; yet he could never per- 
 suade himself to forgo -it. But if innumerable examples of it 
 might be cited from his poems, he could on occasion use 
 ' conceits ' after happier fashion, as in the concluding stanza of 
 Friendship in Absence : 
 
 And when no art affords me help or ease, 
 
 I seek with verse my griefs t' appease, 
 
 Just as a bird that flies about 
 
 And beats itself 'against the cage, 
 
 Finding at last no passage out 
 It sits and sings, and so o'ercomes its rage. 
 
 Cowley's elegiac verses on William Harvey and on Crashaw are 
 affecting and sincere, though the latter poem contains one of 
 his most extreme and infelicitous ' conceits '. At other times, 
 as in the admirably playful Chronicle, and in Inconstancy, he 
 flaunts the fashionable cynicism of the time, and proclaims 
 
 The world's a scene of changes, and to be 
 Constant, in Nature were inconstancy. 
 
 The pleasant personal note which is so frequent in Cowley's 
 prose appears in such a stanza as this, from The Wish : 
 
CAROLINE POETRY 179 
 
 Ah yet, e'er I descend to the grave, 
 May I a small House and large Garden have, 
 And a few friends and many Books, both true, 
 Both wise, and both delightful too ! 
 
 Cow ley's Odes were written in professed imitation of Pindar's, 
 though, as was subsequently shown by Congreve, they ignored 
 the fundamental laws of his prosody. Among the more 
 successful is that * To Mr. Hobbes ' the ' great Columbus of 
 the Golden Lands of New Philosophies '. The Odes are 
 little, perhaps too little, read nowadays ; though ' conceited ' 
 to a degree, they contain fine things, and are interesting 
 historically, owing to their curious effect on the subse- 
 quent development of the English Ode. Davideis, as its 
 sub -title indicates, was A Sacred Poem of the Troubles of David. 
 Written in the couplet, it is marred by incorrigible ' conceits ' 
 and constant digressions. Much of the Second Book is simply 
 a chronicle of the kings of Israel and Judah ; but the First 
 Book contains a fine description of Hell, home of ' tyrannous 
 and unquestioned night ', and the Fourth Book is memorable 
 for David's glowing description of Jonathan. In Davideis 
 and elsewhere Cow ley played his part in the evolution of the 
 couplet, to which he strove to impart fullness and force rather 
 than the easy smoothness of Waller. His prose is discussed 
 elsewhere. His early comedy, The Guardian, was revised 
 after the Kestoration, and acted under the title Cutter of 
 Coleman Street. 
 
 The work of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) falls into two Marvell. 
 classes : the first of these includes his early poetry in praise 
 of love and nature, and his non-satirical patriotic poetry ; the 
 second comprises the fierce and outspoken satire which, after 
 the Restoration, he directed at the abuses of his beloved 
 country. Marvell had, perhaps, as keen an eye for Nature and 
 as passionate a delight in her as any English poet before 
 Cowper, or even Wordsworth. While tutor to Lord Fairfax's 
 daughter at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, he had drunk his fill 
 of natural beauty, and much of this had passed into his song. 
 There did he 
 
 through the hazels thick espy 
 The hatching throstle's shining eye, 1 
 
 and note the ' sapphire -winged mist ' of the kingfisher skimming 
 the streams, or lose himself in the beauty of the garden, 
 
 Annihilating all that 's made 
 
 To a green thought in a green shade. 2 
 
 Some of his poems for instance, Eyes and Tears are as 
 ' conceited ' as anything of Donne's ; but the conceits are 
 given the happiest turn in the famous To His Coy Mistress, 
 which contains the great couplet, 
 
 And yonder all before us lie 
 
 Deserts of vast eternity. 
 
 1 Upon Appleton House. * The Garden. 
 
180 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Marvell's most great and stately poem is his Horatian Ode upon 
 Cromwell's Return from Ireland, with its splendid stanzas 
 describing the last hours of Charles. His poems show a con- 
 siderable emotional range : some of them as The Dialogue 
 between Thy r sis and Dorinda are light and joyous ; others 
 as A Dialogue between the Soul and Body are lit with moral 
 and religious fervour. The most notable of his satires is the 
 Last Instructions to a Painter, which owes its title to one of 
 Waller's best-known poems. 
 
 ser The age was remarkable for a number of small poets, many 
 
 ts. of whom left long poems. The dramatist Shakerley Marmion 
 is represented by Gupid and Psyche (1637), John Chalkhill by 
 Thealma and Clearchus (1683). Sir Francis Kynaston by Leoline 
 and Sydanis (1642), and the amazingly extravagant Edward 
 Benlowes by Theophila, or Love's Sacrifice. These poems, 
 though metrically and otherwise they have a certain bearing 
 on the evolution of literature, are hardly literature themselves. 
 Two writers, however, stand somewhat ahead of the rest : the 
 first is William Chamberlayne, whose Pharonnida (1659), 
 already mentioned for its metre, is a lengthy and disjointed 
 poetical romance containing passages of genuine beauty ; and 
 Sir William Davenant (1606-1668), whose Gondibert is an 
 unfinished heroic poem possessing a determined moral purpose 
 and written in rhyming quatrains. Davenant is far from being 
 a great poet. Among writers of shorter poems may be men- 
 tioned Thomas Stanley, Henry King, and John Hall, each of 
 whom has left some fine lyrics. The greatest poet of the age 
 will be discussed in a separate chapter. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 JOHN MILTON 
 
 THE spirit of John Milton's life (1608-1674) is perhaps best 
 expressed in his second sonnet, 1 and in the words of his letter 
 to his friend Diodati : ' You make many inquiries as to what 
 I am about. What am I thinking of ! Why, with God's help, 
 of immortality ! Forgive the word, I only whisper it in your 
 ear ! Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight.' From his early 
 youth onwards, Milton's was a dedicated life. He had achieved 
 erudition and scholarship during his seven years at Cambridge, 
 where learning had been broadened and humanized by the 
 Renaissance, and Calvinistic theology and Aristotelian logic 
 had alike become leavened with Platonism. Here Milton, in 
 spite of certain troubles by the way, ' performed the collegiate 
 and academical exercises to the admiration of all '. Here he 
 
 1 Beginning : 
 
 How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth. 
 Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year. 
 
JOHN MILTON 
 
 181 
 
 learnt to write Latin prose freely and correctly, and Latin 
 verse not merely correctly, but in such a way as to liberate 
 inspiration. His university studies were those of his time, and 
 he studied hard ; his habit of life was pure, and for this, and 
 perhaps also because of his beauty and natural refinement, his 
 fellows styled him ' the lady of Christ's '. 
 
 Even as an undergraduate he had written great poetry in Early 
 the English tongue. To this period belong his exquisite lines Poetry. 
 On the Death of a Fair Infant, and his stately Ode on the 
 Nativity, which to all who knew must have proclaimed the 
 appearance of a new force in poetry. He left Cambridge at 
 the age of twenty-three, and, like Wordsworth, eschewed the 
 occupation of money-getting. Through his father's under- 
 standing kindness he was enabled to live for the next seven 
 years in delightful rustic retirement at the village of Horton in 
 Buckinghamshire. These years, he tells us, were ' studious and 
 contemplative ' ; they were ' altogether spent in the search of 
 religious and civil knowledge '. The quiet beauty of his 
 surroundings passed into his soul and his song : clear re- 
 miniscences of it are to be found in the perfect flower-pieces 
 which recur throughout his poems. The earliest fruits of this 
 sojourn were his two great essays in the pastoral ode, L' Allegro U Allegro 
 and II Penseroso. Both of these are constructed on the same ^J 1 " 
 model, and both are written in the eight-syllabled rhyming Penseroso ' 
 couplet, which Milton handles with admirable ease and variety. 
 Jj Allegro begins with an invocation to Mirth, and traces a day 
 of the poet's life spent in her company from the dawn, vocal 
 with the lark's song, on through the various scenes and music 
 of the day, till the quiet evening, given to the reading of old 
 romance and of light drama, and to musing on 
 Such sights as youthful poets dream 
 On summer eves by haunted stream. 
 
 At the close are heard 
 
 soft Lydian airs 
 Married to immortal verse, 
 Such as the meeting soul may pierce 
 In notes with many a winding bout 
 Of linked sweetness long drawn out. 
 
 In II Pertseroso there is similar progress, this time beneath the 
 guidance of Melancholy, that 
 
 pensive Nun, devout and pure, 
 Sober, steadfast, and demure. 
 
 The music is the song of Philomel, the study tragedy, and the 
 poem closes on the solemn note of the organ. 
 
 In 1634 Milton was asked by his friend, the composer Henry Comus. 
 Lawes, to write the words for a musical entertainment to be 
 given at Ludlow Castle before the Earl of Bridgewator. 
 President of Wales and the Marches. The result was Comus, a 
 masque in form, yet greater than any masque hitherto written. 
 Us theme of innocence triumphant over an enchanter's 
 
182 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 spells is Spenserian, and Spenserian, top, is the sensuous 
 beauty of its speeches and songs. It contains a perfect lyric in 
 ' Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph that liv'st unseen '. 
 
 Lycidas. Lycidas, Milton's elegy on his fellow student, Edward King, 
 was published in 1638, together with elegies on King from 
 other hands. There is no reason to think that Milton had 
 known King much more intimately than Shelley knew Keats ; 
 but in Lycidas, as in Adonais, grief is universalized, and achieves 
 a grandeur which transcends any merely personal poignancy. 
 Both elegies, vastly as they differ in spirit and general handling, 
 are constructed closely on the model of the Greek pastoral 
 elegy ; and in both, this convention, so far from inhibiting 
 inspiration, directs and moulds it into exquisiteness. Techni- 
 cally, in skill of rhyming and rhythm, Lycidas was never 
 surpassed by Milton ; nor in the wider aspect of beauty did 
 he often surpass the passage beginning ' Bring the rathe 
 primrose that forsaken dies ', nor the great lines, 
 
 Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, 
 Sleep' st by the fable of Bellerus old. 
 Where the great Vision of the guarded Mount 
 Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold. 
 
 From The details of Milton's Italian tour (1638-9), and of his 
 
 Poetry to subsequent essays in matrimony and politics, lie outside the 
 Prose. scope of the present volume. After visiting Florence, Rome, 
 Naples, and Geneva, and making the acquaintance of Grotius 
 and Galileo, he returned to England. ' I considered it dis- 
 honourable ', he wrote, ' to be enjoying myself in foreign 
 lands while my countrymen were striking a blow for freedom.' 
 This sentence embodies one master-impulse of Milton's life 
 that which led him for the next twenty years to forgo poetry 
 save for a handful of sonnets and to put his whole might into 
 prose written on behalf of liberty. That the earlier impulse was 
 not dead may be seen from his reference in 1641 ' to the inward 
 prompting which grows daily upon me that by labour and 
 intent study, which I take to be my portion in this life, joined 
 with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave 
 something so written to after times as they would not willingly 
 let it die'. Yet this instinct was for the time-being directed to 
 political rather than poetic ends. 
 
 His Prose His next work, his Tractate on Education, written in 1642 at 
 Works. the request of Samuel Hartlib, reflects much of the experience 
 he himself had gained from schoolmastering. A more dis- 
 tressing experience the unhappiness of his first marriage 
 resulted in a more fervid piece of prose The Doctrine and 
 Discipline of Divorce (1643), in which, as in the later Tetra- 
 cliordon and Colasterion, he pleads for the granting of liberty 
 when the marriage bond has become intolerable. His publica- 
 tion of the Doctrine and Discipline, in defiance of the recent 
 licensing ordinance, led immediately to the writing of his most 
 famous prose work, Areopagitica, for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
 
JOHN MILTON 183 
 
 Printing. Milton does not claim an immunity for all books, how- 
 ever outrageous, after publication ; his protest is directed against 
 such a censorship before publication as would entirely prevent 
 the appearance of unorthodox works. He pleads his cause with 
 a mighty energy, and the best periods of the Areopagitica have 
 a fervour and a music unsurpassed in the prose of our race. 
 
 To this earlier period of Milton's prose writings belong also 
 the series of pamphlets in which he attacked 'prelatical 
 episcopacy '. The earliest and best known of these is The 
 Reformation, and the causes that hitherto have hindered it. 
 
 From the political, though not from the literary, point of 
 view, the most important class of his prose work was that 
 beginning with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), 
 published fourteen days after the execution of Charles I, which 
 it vindicated. His Eiconoclastes, written in refutation of the 
 royalist Eicon Basilike, followed close upon his appointment 
 as Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth. From now onwards 
 till the Restoration his writings were mainly political and 
 controversial. His Defence of the English People (Pro Populo 
 Anglicano Defensio), written in reply to the Defensio Eegia of 
 the great classical scholar, Salmasius, consists largely of 
 personal abuse. Despite its contemporary fame, its chief 
 claim to sublimity lies in the fact that the toil he spent upon it- 
 cost Milton his sight. Equally abusive, less famous, but more 
 interesting through its biographical passages, is the Second 
 Defence, in which Milton fiercely assails Morus, the reputed 
 author of a further attack upon the regicides. The Pro Se 
 Defensio followed in 1655, and, by a piece of unconscious irony, 
 Milton published in 1660, on the very eve of the Restoration, 
 his Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth. 
 
 Some writers, appalled by the personal virulence recurring 
 throughout Milton's writings, have held that these represent 
 a kind of spiritual interregnum in his life, and that the instinct 
 which produced Lycidas and Gomus slumbered for some twenty 
 years, only to awake with Paradise Lost. Nothing could be 
 more unsound than this view. Milton, as we have seen, had 
 from the beginning regarded his life as a dedicated one. When 
 the call came, he gave up to liberty what had been originally 
 meant for poetry, and accepted all the conditions of the change. 
 Personal virulence was universal, if not necessary, in tne 
 quarrels of the day. That Milton used it merely meant that he 
 was writing controversial prose, as he was afterwards to write 
 imaginative verse, with his whole might and spirit. If, in the 
 circumstances of the time, he had not been the man to write the 
 Defensio Secunda, he could not have been the man to write 
 Paradise Lost. The highest nights of his prose have, moreover, 
 marked affinity, both in form and spirit, with his highest 
 poetry, and have often the long roll and swell of his greatest 
 blank verse. If his style frequently becomes unwieldy, and 
 all too seldom reaches the highest moments of Areopagitica, at 
 Hs best it is supremely great. 
 
184 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 His Son- Practically the only poetry which Milton wrote during the 
 
 nets. twenty years preceding the Restoration was a sprinkling of 
 
 sonnets. He had tried his hand in this form during his youth, 
 and the most notable result had been the lines on his ' three 
 and twentieth year'. His later sonnets, though scanty in 
 number, have a range of theme which is unparalleled in the 
 previous English practice of the form, and includes vitupera- 
 tion, homage, friendship, playful invitation, solemn indigna- 
 tion, and still more solemn resignation. In quality they range 
 from ' I did but prompt the age ', with its commonplace 
 violence, to the transcendent grandeur of ' When I consider 
 how my light is spent '. Milton's sonnet reverts from the 
 Shakespearean form, with its final couplet and free scheme of 
 rhyme, to the stricter Petrarchan model, which had not 
 previously obtained a secure place in English, and had been 
 used with a difference even by its sponsor Wyatt. Not until 
 the day of Wordsworth do we meet again the combined fervour 
 and grandeur which distinguish the best sonnets of Milton. 
 
 Paradise, The Restoration, which brought Milton poverty and neglect. 
 
 Lost. brought him also rest from political strife, and the means of 
 achieving his greatest glory, Paradise Lost. In his Latin verses 
 to his Italian friend and host, Manso, he had indicated his 
 desire to write a heroic poem, with Arthur for its hero. In 
 1641, as is shown by the list of some hundred possible subjects 
 contained in his commonplace-book, the theme of Arthur has 
 been dropped, and later still the epic form is substituted for the 
 dramatic. This latter change was probably due, partly to 
 Milton's sense of the epic's superior fitness for his sublime 
 purpose, partly also to the strong disfavour with which he came 
 to regard romantic drama. The main theme of Paradise Lost 
 had already been treated, both dramatically and epically, on 
 the Continent and in England. In taking the Fall for his 
 subject, Milton was doubtless attracted by the grandeur of the 
 first great Tragedy of all. He has imparted a good deal of that 
 grandeur to his drawing of Adam and Eve ; yet intimate 
 humanity is as necessary a condition of tragedy as grandeur ; 
 and in this quality the first inhabitants of Eden, from the very 
 conditions of their being, were necessarily in some sense lacking. 
 It seems as if Milton, fully conscious of this drawback, had 
 endeavoured to make up by sheer force of poetry for what he 
 forfeited in psychology ; for there are no more lovely though 
 there may be more sublime passages in Paradise Lost than 
 those in which we overhear for the first time the speech of our 
 first parents. And if the humans, Adam and Eve, in some 
 sense lack humanity, the same cannot be said of the super- 
 human, Satan. Milton seems to have lavished all the force of 
 his imagination, and even of his sympathy, upon the arch- 
 rebel, whose indomitable will beneath adversity was in so many 
 respects akin to his own. Beauty and grandeur, defiance, 
 compassion, eternal misery and eternal endurance, all combine 
 to make Satan a supreme figure of romance. To heighten the 
 
JOHN MILTON 
 
 185 
 
 terrific effect of his fall and journey, Milton has, moreover, 
 retained the old Ptolemaic cosmology, though in the Eighth 
 Book he expresses, through the mouth of Raphael, his know- 
 ledge of the newer and truer Copernican theory. Through this 
 choice Milton has achieved some of the most tremendous 
 descriptions in Paradise Lost the scene, for instance, of the 
 fallen angels in hell, and of Satan's journey upward through 
 Chaos to the primum mobile, and thence downward through the 
 spheres to Earth and Eden. For the metre of the poem Milton 
 has chosen blank verse in preference to what he calls ' the 
 troublesome and modern bondage of riming '. His line is 
 austere and exquisite ; it seldom admits hypermetrical 
 syllables, whether medial or terminal, but passes freely into the 
 long music of the paragraph. All of his vast reading in Hebrew, 
 Latin, Greek, and modern literature, is used to give volume and 
 variety to his verse and the great story which it tells. 
 
 Milton's two last poems, Paradise Eegained and Samson Paradise 
 Agonistes, were publisned together in 1671 ; the dates of their Regained. 
 composition remain uncertain. Paradise Regained expands the 
 story of the Temptation to an extent of more than two 
 thousand lines. It has not the splendour and dramatic in- 
 tensity of the highest passages of Paradise Lost ; yet Coleridge 
 described it as ' in its kind the most perfect poem extant ', 
 and many of its passages rank among the greatest in Milton. 
 Mark Pattison's statement that it ' betrays the senility of age ', 
 and that in it ' Milton has not only curbed his imagination, 
 but has almost suppressed it ', must rank among the strangest 
 statements ever made by a fine critic. It is difficult to say 
 where in literature imagination is to be found, if not in the 
 great speech of Satan at the end of the First Book, or in 
 the scene of the Fourth which describes his final defeat. For 
 the most part the blank verse has Milton's old majesty and 
 strength, though there are curious lapses into looseness and 
 harshness. 1 
 
 In Samson Agonistes, Milton realized his long -cherished Samson 
 ambition to write a classical drama. The play is Hebrew in Agonistes. 
 subject, Greek rather than Senecan in structure, and intensely 
 personal in spirit and emotion. Like Samson, Milton himself 
 was blind, and at the mercy of his enemies, yet scornful and 
 uutameable. Like him he had suffered deeply from 'the 
 ungrateful multitude ', and, according to his own view of the 
 case, from woman ; and, like him too, he was conscious of 
 
 1 Cf. Perhaps thou lingerest in deep thoughts detained 
 Of the enterprise so hazardous and high ; 
 No wonder, for though in thee be united 
 What of perfection can in man be found, 
 Or human nature can receive, consider 
 Thy life hath yet been private, most part spent 
 At home, scarce viewed the Galilean towns 
 And once a year Jerusalem, few days 
 Short sojourn. 
 
186 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 a valiant and upright life foiled and broken by permission of 
 God. The tragedy, therefore, owes its poignancy not only to 
 Milton's art, but to the innermost experience of his soul. 
 Regarded thus, as the product of agony no less than of genius, 
 it is seen to be ' the intensest utterance of the most intense of 
 English poets'. But even apart from its personal relation, 
 this tragedy of a Jew is probably the greatest Greek play ever 
 written in EnffliSnT' The different episodes or acts in which 
 Samson is visited in turn by his father, Dalila, and the Philis- 
 tine giant Harapha, are so ordered as to elicit every emotion 
 of his soul, and to lead inevitably to the final catastrophe. 
 The tragedy is given depth, fullness, and added beauty by the 
 chorus, especially in those intermediate and final passages in 
 which Milton has availed himself of rhyme. It was thoroughly 
 fitting that the last work of this great rebel should have been 
 Samson Agonistes ; and it is fitting, too, that here at the very 
 end there should have been no failure of the sublimity whereby 
 Milton ranks second only to Shakespeare among the poets of 
 our tongue. 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 CAROLINE PROSE 
 
 New Developments in Prose Religious writers Andre wes, Donne, 
 Taylor, Baxter, Borrow, South Sir Thomas Browne Herbert of 
 Cherbury, Clarendon, Hobbes, Harrington, Fuller, Walton. , 
 
 Develop- IT has already been shown that at a time when English 
 mentof prose was wavering between two extremes, and tending on 
 Prose. the whole towards extravagance, Hooker's Ecclesiastical 
 Polity represents a form making for clearness, balance, and 
 harmony. The same qualities distinguish one main kind of 
 ecclesiastical prose throughout the next century, though the 
 ornate style is also found striving for mastery. Throughout 
 the reign of Elizabeth the sermon had been growing both in 
 vogue and merit, and during the Jacobean and Caroline 
 periods it had won a place among the highest forms of English 
 prose. The interest now felt in it was the product of various 
 causes the eager zest of patriotic and Protestant Englishmen 
 f or anti- Romish polemics, the puritan preference for the sermon 
 over other literary forms, and the fashionable taste created for it 
 by the preoccupation of James I with theology. This fashion- 
 able revival was a source both of weakness and of strength. 
 It helped to bring the sermon into prominence and to attract 
 to it some of the best intellects in England ; but it also 
 promoted extravagance of expression, and an undue use of 
 the fashionable ' conceits ' of the day. The good and the bad 
 tendencies are both evident in the sermons and devotional 
 Andrewes. writings of Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626), Dean of West- 
 minster, and subsequently Bishop of Winches ter under Janicy 1. 
 
CAROLINE PROSE 187 
 
 These display considerable moral fervour, and Audrewes 
 received less than justice from a certain contemporary who 
 declared that ' he plays with his text rather than preaches 
 with it ' . Yet the fine natural quality of his thought is marred 
 by an excessive display of erudition, by long-drawn and 
 finical distinctions, and by over- elaboration of phrase. Kindred 
 qualities are present in the sermons of John Donne, which Donne, 
 survive to the number of nearly two hundred, and, with his 
 letters and his tract on Suicide, make up his extant prose. In 
 the best of this, however, as in his poetry, extravagance is 
 constantly transfigured by fervour of feeling and imagination, 
 and there is hardly one of his sermons which does not kindle 
 into greatness. No one can doubt either the genius or the 
 earnestness of the man who could write thus of Christ : ' Love 
 him not only in spiritual transfigurations, when he visits thy 
 soul with glorious consolations, but even in his inward eclipses, 
 when he withholds his comforts and withdraws his cheerful- 
 ness, even when he makes as though he loved not thee, love 
 him, love him all the way, to his end and to thy end too, to 
 the laying down of thy life for him.' 
 
 The same richness of imagery, with somewhat less of imagina- 
 tive fullness and intensity, is evident in the Centuries of Medita- 
 tions of Thomas Traherne. His prose is sensitive in feeling 
 and utterance, and, like Donne's, is constantly quickened by 
 a poet's insight. A quieter and equally delightful play of 
 fancy is evident in A Priest to the Temple ( The Country Parson, 
 1632) of George Herbert, a delicate and thoroughly English 
 portrait of such an one as Herbert had in mind when he wrote 
 elsewhere : 
 
 Only a sweet and virtuous soul 
 
 Like seasoned timber, never gives, 
 But when the whole world turns to coal 
 Then chiefly lives. 
 
 The high imaginative fashion of English devotional writing Jeremy 
 culminated in Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), probably the most Taylor, 
 eloquent writer who ever mounted an English pulpit. Taylor 
 is less profound than Donne, and never equalled the unearthly 
 intensity of his highest flights ; but he has much of Donne's 
 richness and colour, and is able to alternate passages of the 
 most gorgeous rhetoric with others of a clear simplicity which 
 Donne seldom attempted. His period has a shifting and various 
 music, and can at times achieve high splendour and majesty. 
 His most famous works are Holy Living (1650) and Holy 
 Dying (1651), but there is hardly less fine writing in his 
 Marriage Ring and his devotional Golden Grove (1655). His 
 Ductor Dubitantium, like Joseph Hall's Decisions of Diverse 
 Practical Cases of Conscience (1649), is a treatise on casuistry, 
 and the greatest work of its kind ever written in English. 
 
 The sermons of Donne and Taylor are among the triumphs * 
 of the ornate style ; but throughout the century a simpler 
 utterance had been practised by various other divines. Pro- 
 
188 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Baxter, 
 Barrow, 
 South. 
 
 cedent for this, as we have seen, had been furnished, though 
 after widely different fashions, by Latimer and Hooker. 
 A simple straightforwardness characterizes the best work of 
 Richard Baxter (1615-1691), the finest among whose volumi- 
 nous writings is The Saints' Everlasting Best (1650). Hardly 
 less voluminous, and equally straightforward in style, are the 
 writings of Henry Hammond, who has been called ' The father 
 of English biblical criticism '. The sermons and theological 
 treatises of Izaac Barrow (1630-1677) are given interest and 
 fullness by his learning and wide experience of the world, 
 and are written in free, clear, and closely-knit English. Three 
 theological writers of note, Richard Chillingworth, Gilbert 
 Sheldon, and John Hales, belonged to the set of scholars and 
 thinkers whom Lucius Gary, Lord Falkland, gathered around 
 him at his house at Great Tew. John Gauden, Bishop of 
 Exeter -after the Restoration, is chiefly remarkable through 
 his supposed claim to be the author of Eicon Basilike, ' a por- 
 traiture of his Sacred Majesty in his sufferings ' . This strangely 
 moving treatise, which drew forth in reply the Eiconoclastes 
 of Milton, has been said to be the work of Charles I himself, 
 but the better opinion attributes it to Gauden. A more notable 
 figure was Robert South (1634-1716), one of the most virile 
 and vivacious among English preachers, who rejects the ornate 
 style for one ensuing balance, simplicity, and directness. 
 South possesses humour and a grim satirical gift, which he used 
 freely for the confusion of his theological opponents. In him 
 the plain style more than holds its own ; but it has lost 
 savour, like so much of later seventeenth- century prose, in the 
 sermons of John Tillotson, which are now felt to be dull and 
 undistinguished, though they enjoyed a vast popularity in 
 their day. 
 
 Among the supreme triumphs of the seventeenth century 
 must be reckoned the prose of Sir Thomas Browne (1605- 
 1682). His chief works are Eeligio Medici (published in 1642, 
 Rdiqio but probably written some six years earlier), Pseudodoxia Epi- 
 Medici. demica (otherwise known as Vulgar Errors 1646), Hydriotaphia 
 or Urn Burial and The Garden of Cyrus (both 1658), and the 
 posthumously published Christian Morals. Although in 
 Religio Medici Browne has not reached his full strength, its 
 best prose has his characteristic splendour and richness. 
 In it he declares the faith that is in him, and shows this to be 
 orthodox, yet independent and discriminating. He loves 
 science, yet will not allow it to cramp or condition belief. 
 ' To believe only possibilities ', he says, ' is not faith but mere 
 philosophy.' If we accept his own assurance and we have 
 n/> right to reject it his personal faith was not only positive 
 but intense. ' I have so fixed my contemplations on Heaven ', 
 he says, * that I have almost forgot the idea of Hell.' He 
 believes, moreover, in much that is not now considered essen- 
 tial to orthodoxy : in guardian angels, who know * by their 
 forms ' things which men know only by their accidents and 
 
 Sir 
 
 Thomas 
 
 Browne 
 
CAROLINE PROSE 189 
 
 properties ; and in spirits sent forth by the devil to frequent 
 cemeteries, charnel-houses, and other ' dormitories of the dead '. 
 Elsewhere, however, he gives his scepticism free play; he 
 opposes the literal interpretation of the Scriptures, and 
 declares: 'to me the world is but a dream or mock-show, and 
 we all therein but pantalones or antics, to my severer con- 
 templations.' From this dream, however, there was a sure 
 release : ' there is but one comfort left, that though it be in the 
 power of the weakest arm to take away life, it is not in the 
 strongest to deprive us of death.' On this antinomy of faith 
 and doubt hangs the whole of Browne's thought. But he 
 perhaps becomes most fascinating when he tells us, with the 
 frankness of Montaigne and a fervour and splendour all his 
 own, of himself and his relations to his kind. The passages 
 in which he praises charity and friendship are among the 
 finest in his prose, and are the truest revelation of his brooding, 
 humorous, and lovable soul. 
 
 The Pseudodoxia Epidemica is at once the most humorous Pseudo- 
 and the most sceptical of Browne's works, though his scepti- doxia Epi- 
 cism is applied not so much to the destruction of belief as to demica. 
 the establishment of its true boundaries. The text of his work 
 is this sentence from its preface : * therefore in this Encyclo- 
 paedic and round of knowledge, like the great and exemplary 
 wheels of heaven, we must observe two circles : that while 
 we are daily carried about and whirled on by the swing and 
 rapt of one, we may maintain a natural and proper course in 
 the slow and sober wheel of the other.' After chronicling some 
 of the general sources of error as ' credulity and supinity ', 
 'adherence unto antiquity and authority', and so forth 
 Browne proceeds, with evident gusto, to an enumeration of its 
 peculiar instances. His own knowledge and practice of science 
 fitted him to criticize the scientific errors which he chronicles. 
 For most modern readers the book's chief charm lies in its 
 stores of strange information, and in Browne's comments, 
 which are sometimes satirical, sometimes naive, and often 
 wholly delightful. He holds that the eye of a basilisk may well 
 be able to kill at a distance, but dismisses the belief that the 
 creature ' proceedeth from a cock's egg hatched under a toad 
 or serpent ' as ' a conceit as monstrous as the brood itself '. 
 He once hung up a dead kingfisher in an air-tight glass to see 
 whether it would act as a reliable weathercock. He refutes 
 the contention that elephants have no joints in their legs, 
 and therefore sleep leaning against trees ; and he opposes with 
 characteristic irony the belief that bay-leaves will protect 
 their wearer against lightning : ' although Tiberius for this 
 intent did wear a laurel about his temples, yet did Augustus 
 take a more probable course, who fled under arches and hollow 
 vaults for protection.' Though the Vulgar Errors has seldom 
 the gorgeous beauty of Browne's highest prose, it in nowise 
 lacks that rich quaintness which is so endearing a feature of 
 his style. 
 
190 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 U j rn ?M~ Perhaps his greatest prose is to be found in the volume 
 
 at and The which comprises HydriotapMa and The Garden of Cyrus. 
 
 Garden of Hydriotaphia, or Urn Burial, is primarily a discourse 'upon 
 
 Cyrus. the sepulchral urns lately found in Norfolk '. After examining 
 
 the practice of urn-burial historically, and with a wealth of 
 
 antiquarian detail, Browne discusses sepulture generally, and 
 
 then passes to the wider questions of death and immortality, 
 
 concluding his reflections with a passage of sustained and fervid 
 
 splendour. His prose has now reached its full strength and 
 
 scope, and achieves such beauty as this : 
 
 ' But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals 
 with the memory cf men without distinction to merit of perpetuity.' 
 
 and this : 
 
 ' But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying . . . adversity 
 stretcheth our days, misery makes Alcmena's nights, and time hath no 
 wings unto it ' ; 
 
 and this : 
 
 ' 'Tis all one to lie in St. Innocent's churchyard as in the sands of Egypt ; 
 ready to be anything in the ecstasy of being ever, and as content 'with 
 six foot as the mole of Adrianus.' 
 
 The Garden of Cyrus is a dissertation on the ' quincuncial, 
 lozenge, or net-work plantations of the ancients, artificially 
 (i.e. artistically), naturally, mystically considered'. It re- 
 solves itself into a general examination of the quincunx or 
 figure five, arranged in the form it takes on the surface of 
 a die. Browne pursues the quincunx through the whole world 
 of art and Nature, and illustrates the quest with his quaintest 
 and most characteristic figures of fancy, till he concludes in the 
 great and famous passage beginning, ' But the quincunx of 
 Heaven runs low '. 
 
 Browne's remaining work consists of his letters and his 
 treatise on Christian Morals. The relative inferiority of this 
 last work is doubtless in some sense due to his not having 
 revised it personally. Yet even so, some of its passages are 
 worthy to stand beside his best. His prose owes much of its 
 incomparable cadence and glow to his love of Latin words, 
 which he adopts freely when he finds them to his purpose, and 
 invents with hardly less freedom when adoption fails him. 
 Yet many who have Latinized have marred their prose instead 
 of moulding it into exquisiteness ; and his triumph is ulti- 
 mately due to his superb tact of phrasing, his mastery of both 
 the larger and the subtler prose harmonies, and the mystical 
 fervour which wings his highest flights. His ornateness is not 
 affectation ; it is the expression of his own rich and various 
 personality. In no man's prose has there been more ' funda- 
 mental brain -work ' ; and if we could adopt Shelley's view of 
 poetry, Browne would be one of the great poets of his century. 
 Herbert Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583-1648), brother of George 
 of Cher- Herbert, wrote a History of Henry VIII, which has considerable 
 
CAROLINE PROSE 191 
 
 merit, and also left various philosophic treatises in Latin, 
 the chief of which are De Veritate and Religio Laid. But his 
 most widely read, and most readable, book is his Autobiography, 
 which remained in manuscript till Horace Walpole published 
 it in 1764. Herbert was proud of his learning, and of his 
 prowess as a duellist and a lady-killer ; there is an amiable 
 fatuousness in his account of his first meeting with Elizabeth, 
 and in his subsequent remark : ' I could tell how much my 
 person was commended by the lords and ladies that came to 
 see the solemnity then used, but I shall natter myself too much 
 if I believe it.' 
 
 Historians during this period were fairly numerous, but only Claren- 
 one has left work of high literary merit. Edward Hyde, don< 
 Earl of Clarendon (1608-1674), wrote the early part of his 
 History of the Great Rebellion during his exile in Scilly between 
 the years 1646 and 1648, and the later parts at Montpellier 
 after he had been finally exiled from England in 1667. To 
 this period also belongs his Life, a justification of his political 
 career, portions of which he eventually inserted in the body of 
 the History. Clarendon's style is in the main simple, clear, 
 and dignified, yet it shows occasional unwieldiness and seldom 
 achieves the highest eloquence. His vivid narrative power is 
 evident in the pages in which he describes Montrose's death, the 
 escape and flight of Charles II, and bull-fighting as he saw it 
 at Madrid. But his genius is at its highest in his portraits 
 of the great characters of his age Strafford, Laud, Hampden, 
 Pym, Montrose, Argyle, Charles I himself, and many a one 
 more. He never did anything finer than his portrait of 
 Falkland, surrounded by the chosen spirits who dwelt with 
 him at Great Tew ' as in a college situated in a purer air: 
 so that his house was a university in less volume '. There 
 is deep feeling in his reference to Falkland as * a person of such 
 prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable 
 sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing and 
 obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that 
 primitive simplicity and integrity of life that if there were 
 no other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war than 
 that single loss, it must be most infamous and execrable to 
 posterity '. 
 
 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) holds in the philosophy of the Hobbes. 
 period the same place of eminence that Clarendon holds in 
 its history. A good scholar, he translated Thucydides in his 
 youth, and Homer in his old age, and followed the example of 
 his master, Bacon, by writing much of his philosophic work in 
 Latin. Our chief interest, however, is not with this, but with 
 his English works, the greatest of which is the famous Leviathan 
 (1651). The sub -title of the book indicates that ita chief aim 
 was to describe ' the matter, form, and power of a Common- 
 wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil ' ; but it opens with a discus- 
 sion of man and natural law, and Hobbes here develops the 
 explanation which he had offered of the whole 
 
192 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Harring- 
 ton. 
 
 Fuller. 
 
 Walton. 
 
 universe, in opposition to Descartes, who had exempted mind 
 from the operation of the mechanism controlling matter. To 
 Hobbes, a state of Nature was a state of equality, and hence of 
 distrust and warfare, since ' from equality of ability arises 
 equality of hope in the attaining of our ends : and therefore 
 if any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they 
 cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.' Man, this creature 
 of unruly passions and selfish desires, could" only cease to be 
 dangerous to his kind through firm and steady government ; 
 and such government, thought Hobbes, could not be found 
 outside a monarchy. He develops his theory of the state with 
 great imaginative power and cogency. His prose is clear and 
 dignified, and its natural force is often augmented by weighty 
 epigram. He was not only a great thinker, but a great man of 
 letters. Apart from Leviathan, his chief English works are 
 his treatise on Human Nature (1650) and his Questions concern- 
 ing Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656). 
 
 James Harrington (1611-1677) was as keen a speculator in 
 sociology as Hobbes, and his Oceana was described by Hume 
 as ' the only valuable model of a commonwealth ' extant. 
 When he says that ' where there is inequality of power there 
 can be no true commonwealth ', he seems to be more of 
 a democrat than Hobbes'; but he was not, and indeed, at his 
 age, could not have been, a democrat in the modern sense ; 
 and the ' equality ' which he advocates ultimately depends on 
 a balance between different classes. Oceana has of late been 
 undeservedly disparaged : it is thoughtful, for the most part 
 readable, and often quaintly delightful. 
 
 Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), in his love of quips and ' con- 
 ceits ', has something in common with both Herbert and 
 Donne, yet he wore his coat of many colours with a difference 
 and more flippantly, often flaunting it as motley. A keen 
 antiquary and student of history, he is cherished by posterity 
 not for his erudition, but for the charm of his prose, which 
 abounds in quaint sallies and epigrams, with here and there 
 a deeply imaginative phrase. His rare quality won for his 
 writings the admiration and affection of Coleridge and Charles 
 Lamb. His best known and most characteristic works are 
 his Holy and Profane States (1642), and his posthumously 
 published Worthies of England. Less popular, yet notable, 
 are his sermons, his very long Church History (1655), and his 
 Good Thoughts in Bad Times, written in 1645, at the darkest 
 moment of the Civil War. 
 
 The name of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is hardly less dear 
 to Englishmen than that of Charles Lamb : in both men there 
 is the same rare charm of spirit, reflecting itself in easy and 
 intensely personal prose. Walton's most famous work is 
 The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653, and reissued in 
 1676 with a supplement by his disciple, Charles Cotton. 
 None save anglers will appreciate to the full the cunning means 
 he outlines for taking the ' chavender or chub ', the ' minnow 
 
CAROLINE PROSE 193 
 
 or penk', and the 'bull-head or miller's thumb': yet all 
 may enjoy the delightful passages which light up the book, 
 even in its most technical pages. Many of Walton's state- 
 ments might have furnished texts for Browne's Pseudodoxia 
 Epidemica : he favours the opinion that pike are bred of 
 pickerel-weed, as well as by ordinary generation, and that 
 ' the tench is the physician of fishes, of the pike especially, 
 and that the pike being either sick or hurt is cured by the 
 touch of the tench '. But it is not for his credulity that men 
 cherish him, nor yet for his craft and learning, but for the quaint 
 and lovable personality evident in every sentence of the 
 Angler, as throughout the Lives of Wotton, Donne, Hooker, 
 Herbert, and Sanderson, which make up the tale of his prose. 
 With Walton we are already on the threshold of the Age of 
 Dryden. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 JOHN DRYDEN AND THE POETRY AND DRAMA 
 OF THE RESTORATION 
 
 New literary forces Dryden's plays, poems, and prose His relation 
 to his age Developments in Restoration drama The Heroic Play 
 Restoration Comedy : Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, 
 Farquhar, Shadwell and others Restoration Tragedy : Davenant 
 and others, Lee, Otway, Southerne, Rowe Restoration Poetry 
 Butler, Oldham, Rochester, Sedley. 
 
 IN literature, as in life, the Elizabethan period had been The Age of 
 one of mighty experiment and expansion, and had exhibited Dryden 
 a play of forces probably unparalleled in any age or country. 
 In the province of thought this expansion, as has been shown, 
 was not the sequel of a steady and unbroken literary tradition, 
 but was a sudden outburst consequent on the discovery of new 
 treasures of art and thought. In creative literature, whether 
 in poetry, drama, or prose, the impulse was towards freedom 
 rather than order, and imagination was often pushed to the 
 farthest boundaries. The interest in critical problems was 
 acute, but, in the almost complete absence of good English 
 models, it was necessarily tentative and wayward. Had the 
 Elizabethan genius been more curbed and self-conscious, the 
 world would have gone without Shakespeare and his fellows, 
 who could never have written as they did save through that 
 way of literary service which is perfect freedom. But there 
 dwelt within the very flame of the great Elizabethan period 
 ' a kind of wick or snuff ' that must needs abate it. The 
 resulting disintegration was none the less emphatic because 
 many of its manifestations were magnificent. In all the literary 
 kinds there were sure signs of decay. The licence which in 
 Shakespeare's hands had made blank verse a vital and splendid 
 thing, too often passed into lawlessness and chaos in those of 
 
194 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 his successors. A similar loosening of the couplet was being 
 exultantly effected by men like Marmion and Chamberlayne. 
 In lyric poetry, one group at least of writers had gone far 
 toward smothering poetry in ' conceits ', and had ' dodged 
 conception to the very bourne of heaven '. From that effort 
 came the glories of Donne, but also the lunacies of Benlowes. 
 There was the same uncertainty in prose ; for all the 
 splendours of Donne and Browne and Taylor, there had been 
 evolved no sure form or medium of expression of the kind 
 available to all men of genius in Augustan Rome or Augustan 
 England, or in the France of our own day. Rich and various 
 as were the beauties of our literature at this period, they 
 are still beauties of the decadence : this much may be admitted 
 by those who would be most loath to exchange them for the 
 surer and more measured work that was to come. These 
 conditions explain, and in large measure justify, the theory 
 and practice of the succeeding age. New forces and new 
 theories were struggling to birth. In all kinds of literature 
 the impulse was toward reaction and fresh creation ; and in 
 almost all of these kinds the most typical and potent force, 
 whether for creation or reaction, was John Dryden. 
 Dryden Dryden has left work of considerable volume in poetry, 
 Early drama, and prose ; and in most of the kinds which he chose 
 Poetry. to handle he outdistanced all competitors. Reserving his 
 prose, we may discuss his poems and plays together, with 
 reference to the general literary tendencies of the day. His 
 early lines On the Death of Lord Hastings are written in a form 
 of heroic couplet strongly reminiscent of Donne's Anniver- 
 saries : they contain one at least of the most forced and 
 extraordinary ' conceits ' to be found in contemporary 
 literature. His Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell 
 (1659) were written in the decasyllabic quatrain to which he 
 Was to revert in the Annus Mirabilis (1666). They possess 
 dignity and finish, but lack the strength and flow of the later 
 and greater poem. The Annus has two main themes the 
 sea-victories over the Dutch in the ' year of wonders ', and 
 the Great Fire of London. In this poem Dryden's verse has 
 learnt the sureness of which it was seldom afterwards to fail : 
 the descriptions of the fighting are spirited, and many of the 
 lines have a royal and splendid ring. In spite of Johnson's 
 objection to them, we may instance these two, which hymn the 
 future of British commerce : 
 
 Then we upon our globe's last verge shall go, 
 And view the ocean leaning on the sky ; 
 
 and these others, of the Fire : 
 
 The fire meantime walks in a broader gross : 
 To either hand his wings he opens wide, 
 He wades the streets and straight he reaches cross 
 And plays his longing flames on th' other side. 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 195 
 
 At first they warm, then scorch, and then they take ; 
 Now with long necks from side to side they feed : 
 At length, grown strong, their mother-fire forsake, 
 And a new colony of flames succeed. 
 
 To every nobler portion of the town 
 The curling billows roll their restless tide : 
 In parties now they straggle up and down, 
 As armies, unopposed, for prey divide. 
 
 To the same period belong certain poems of courtly compliment, 
 the most important of which is Astraea Redux, ' on the happy 
 restoration and return ' of Charles II. 
 
 Between the years 1666 and 1681 Dryden wrote very little Restora. 
 pure poetry and a great deal of drama. For the better under- tion 
 standing of his plays, a word must here be said concerning the Drama, 
 general tendencies of contemporary English drama. In view 
 of the almost complete cessation of theatrical production during 
 the years 1642-1660, it was inevitable that the new plays 
 should differ notably, both in style and spirit, from the old. 
 A link between the two epochs is to be found in the work 
 of men likeDavenant and Killigrew, who wrote for the English 
 stage both before and after trie interregnum. The master- 
 pieces of the older writers were, moreover, constantly revived, 
 the favourites of the Restoration playgoer being Shakespeare, 
 Fletcher, and Jonson. The new drama, too, whether comic 
 or tragic, was influenced at every turn by the practice of the 
 older men : thus the Jonsonian comedy of humours was 
 revived by Shadwell and Wilson ; Fletcher's influence appears 
 in productions so diverse as Davenant's Siege of Rhodes, and 
 Dryden's Wild Gallant ; and Shakespeare was constantly 
 copied and adapted, with results ranging from the monstrous 
 dislocations and distortions effected by Crowne and Tate, to 
 that triumphant rehandling of him which appears in Dryden's 
 All for Love. The native tradition, therefore, remained varied 
 but unbroken, and must be regarded as by far the most 
 important factor in the new drama. Yet that drama was also 
 markedly affected by certain foreign influences which had been 
 either unfelt, or only partly felt, by the older playwrights. 
 Important among these was Spanish drama : the comedies 
 of Calderon stood Tuke and Wycherley in as good stead as the 
 novels of Cervantes had previously stood Fletcher. Still 
 stronger, both in comedy and tragedy, was the influence of 
 France. As was but natural, the outstanding model in comedy 
 was Moliere, whose early dramatic triumphs had been achieved 
 in the years immediately preceding the Restoration. His 
 influence is evident in the work of nearly every English comic 
 dramatist of the period, from Dryden to Crowne : a notable 
 example of it is Wycherley 's Plain Dealer, which is a vigorous 
 rehandling of Le Misanthrope. In tragedy the main influence 
 was Corneille, whose Cid had been performed in England, in 
 translation, before the closing of the theatres, and whose 
 
196 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Pompee was played in Dublin in 1663, in the rendering of 
 Katherine Phillips. Corneille's dramas, as will be seen, had 
 a marked effect on the dramatic practice of Dryden and his 
 contemporaries. A further French influence, which especially 
 affected the history of the English heroic play, was the lengthy 
 prose romance, as practised by La Calprenede and Madeleine 
 de Scudery, which had a vast popularity in France toward 
 the middle of the seventeenth century. 
 
 Dryden's Dryden's dramatic work covers nearly every contemporary 
 Early kind.' The first play of his to be acted was The Wild Gallant 
 Plays. (1663), a moderately successful prose comedy reproducing 
 the free speech and morals of the time. His greatest strength, 
 as he knew and admitted, did not lie in comedy : yet his chief 
 remaining plays in this kind Marriage a la Mode (1672), 
 Limberham (1678), and Amphitryon (1690) are brilliantly 
 written and had considerable success with the public. Their 
 coarseness, though it drew down upon Dryden the censure of 
 Jeremy Collier, is inseparable from the manners of the time. 
 Dryden's comedies, as has been seen, were produced at 
 various stages of his career. His second acted play was The 
 Eival Ladies (1664), a tragi-comedy partly verse, partly prose. 
 Before the closing of the theatres, tragi-comedy had reached its 
 greatest triumphs in the hands of Fletcher and Shakespeare. 
 Dryden helped to sustain the tradition with several plays, 
 chief among which are Secret Love (1667), and The Spanish 
 Friar (1681), which contains an admirably racy underplot. 
 But brilliant as these productions were, Dryden's most 
 characteristic work was done in other kinds than comedy. 
 His Heroic The Indian Emperor (1665) is the first * heroic play ' due to 
 Plays. his unaided authorship ; and it is the beginning of a splendid 
 series. Throughout the plays of this class and period, Dryden 
 employed the rhyming couplet, which he had already used 
 tentatively in The Rival Ladies. As a dramatic medium, the 
 couplet doubtless owed much of its contemporary English vogue 
 to the brilliant example of the French Alexandrine, though there 
 was already abundant precedent for rhymed dramatic verse 
 in Elizabethan drama. Dryden, however, did for the reformed 
 couplet nmch the same service that Marlowe had done for 
 blank verse : though not the first to admit it in drama, he was 
 the first to use it freely on the public stage. Neither in France 
 nor in England had it at this period been broken up for purposes 
 of dramatic dialogue or narrative after the fashion now familiar 
 in the practice of Hugo and Rostand and Swinburne. The 
 resulting regularity of beat may have helped the * heroic play' 
 to its peculiar stateliness, but it also made against variety and 
 flexibility and naturalness. Naturalness was, however, in the 
 very order of things somewhat at a discount in the ' heroic 
 play ', which in style and subject not only ensued the super- 
 normal, but rejected, as far as it might, every manifestation 
 of the normal. The heroic characters of Elizabethan drama 
 had constantly transcended the action and utterance of 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 197 
 
 common life ; but they had not lost touch with them : rather 
 by keeping touch had they transfigured them. But the ' heroic 
 play ' not only strove to transcend them : it shunned them as 
 unworthy, and aimed at the creation of supermen and a super - 
 speech. ' Prithee undo this button ', the familiar words 
 which intensify the grandeur of Lear's last moments, would 
 have been regarded as unfit for the most prosaic passage of 
 The Conquest of Granada. And as a reading of this play and 
 Aurengzebe will show, the unreality of the ' heroic ' convention 
 affected not merely language but character. The ' heroic ' 
 type and the * heroic ' way of writing were doubtless imme- 
 diately suggested to the Restoration playwright by such 
 famous French prose romances as Le Grand Cyrus and Alma- 
 hide ; but here again there is a danger of exaggerating the 
 foreign influence, and it must not be forgotten that the 
 English stage had already been trodden by the heroic figures 
 of Tamburlaine and Zenocrate. 
 
 The chief heroic plays which succeeded The Indian Emperor 
 were Tyrannic Love (1669), The Conquest of Granada (pro- 
 duced in two parts, 1669 and 1670), and Aurengzebe (1676). 
 In all of these there is the same strained exaltation of character, 
 the same swift yet mechanical dialogue, and the same brazen 
 clangour and beat of verse. In the best Greek and Shake- 
 spearean tragedy the spectator is held spellbound by his sense 
 that the doom of the chief characters might well have been 
 his own. In Dryden's heroic plays this illusion would be 
 impossible unless the beholder could transport himself into 
 ;i wonder-world where all life was as tremendous as it was 
 mechanical. In language, too, there is the same alternation 
 between the grand and the artificial ; and in not a few cases 
 artificiality has become absurdity, as when Almanzor says, in 
 all seriousness, of his beloved : 
 
 "Tis false : she is not ill, nor can she be ; 
 She must be chaste because she's loved by me. 
 
 Yet iii scene after scene the language has the valiancy of 
 
 Aureiigzebe's reference to Arimant :' 
 
 Did he, my slave, presume to look so high ? 
 That crawling insect, who from mud began, 
 Warmed by my beams, and kindled into man. 
 
 To Aurengzebe, too, is given a still more great and famous 
 passage that beginning ' When I consider life, 'tis all 
 a cheat '. 
 
 Mention may here be made of the remarkable comedy or The Re- 
 skit, The Eehearsal (1670), written to parody heroic plays in JiearsaL 
 general, and particularly those of Dryden, whom it satirized 
 under the name of Bayes. Several writers, including Bucking- 
 ham, and, it is said, Butler, had a hand in this piece, which is 
 written with skill and spirit, and contains some shrewd hits 
 at the ' heroic ' style. 
 
 At this period Dryden not only wrote plays in rhyme, but 
 
198 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 defended the practice in his Essays of Dramatic Poesy, and 
 of Heroic Plays. In the Prelude to Au.rengzebe, however, he 
 tells us that he 
 
 has now another taste of wit, 
 And to confess a truth, though out of time, 
 Grows weary of his long-loved mistress, Rhyme. 
 
 He further confesses that 
 
 a secret shame 
 Invades his breast at Shakespeare's sacred name. 
 
 Dryden's This reaction finds expression in the tragedies which follow, 
 Tragedies, where he uses blank verse, and also adopts Shakespeare's 
 themes, as in All for Love (1677) and his rehandling of Troilus 
 and Gressida (printed 1679). His Troilus is hardly more 
 successful than the travesty of The Tempest which he had 
 published in 1670 ; but in All for Love, though its theme is 
 that of Antony and Cleopatra. Dryden has not merely copied 
 or adapted Shakespeare, but has produced an original play, 
 less vast and exquisite indeed than the earlier drama, but more 
 realistic and closely knit. The finest of his remaining tragedies 
 are Don Sebastian (acted 1690) and Gleomenes (acted 1692). 
 He also wrote a rhymed opera on the subject of Paradise Lost 
 and another on King Arthur ; and in two plays he co-operated 
 with Nathaniel Lee. 
 
 His Having surveyed the course of Dryden's drama, we may 
 
 Satires. return to his poetry, and discuss the great satires of which 
 Absalom and AcMtophel (Part I, 1681) is the earliest arid most 
 powerful. Using the poetic convention of the time, by which 
 the return of Charles II to his country was likened to that 
 of the youthful David, Dryden pillories, under scriptural names, 
 the chief advocates of the Exclusion Bill and enemies of the 
 Catholic succession. Absalom and Achitophel owes its greatness 
 and it is the greatest verse satire in our language to its 
 author's Olympian aloofness, to the fact that he neither 
 preaches nor scolds, nor indulges spite nor hate, to the curious 
 suggestion of fairness that accompanies some of his deadliest 
 lines, to the impression, in fine, that he is writing satire in 
 ' calm of mind, all passion spent '. His couplet has now 
 achieved superb strength and freedom, and runs its course 
 exultantly. There is relentless power in the portraits of 
 Achitophel (Shaftesbury), Zimri (Buckingham), Shimei (Sir 
 Sliugsby Bethel), and Corah (Titus Gates). Slightly less great 
 than Absalom is The Medal, a Satire against Sedition, directed 
 against the arch-intriguer, Shaftesbury. The Whig playwright, 
 Thomas Shadwell, wrote one of the numerous replies to The 
 Medal, and drew down upon himself the deadly and racy satire 
 of Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, in which he is represented as succeed- 
 ing the tedious playwright Flecknoe in his rule over ' the 
 realms of Nonsense'. The 'aged prince' speaks thus of his 
 successor and son : 
 
 "Pis resolved ; for Nature pleads that he 
 Should only rule who most resembles inc. 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 199 
 
 Shadwell alone my perfect image bears, 
 Mature in dulness from his tender years : 
 Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he 
 Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. 
 The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, 
 But Shadwell never deviates into sense. 
 Some beams of wit on other souls may fall, 
 Strike through, and make a lucid interval ; 
 But Shadwell's genuine night admits no ray, 
 His rising fogs prevail upon the day. 
 
 There is more personal gusto and venom here than in the 
 first part of Absalom ; and the same quality is evident in the 
 portraits of Doeg (Settle) and Og (Shadwell), which Dryden 
 contributed to Absalom and Achitophel, Part Second, a satire 
 mainly from the hand of Nahum Tate. 
 
 The strong intellectual basis of all Dryden's best poetry HisKe- 
 is nowhere more evident than in the two poems, Eeligio Hgious 
 Laid (1682), and The Hind and the Panther (1687), in which Poems, 
 he declares the successive stages of his religious faith. Eeligio 
 was written before his conversion to Koman Catholicism, The 
 Hind and the Panther after it : yet already in the earlier poem 
 there are indications of the coming change. Its opening 
 passage, stating the grounds for religious belief, is one of the 
 finest things in Dryden. The Hind and the Panther is in form 
 a fable, illustrating the differences between the English and 
 Koman Catholic churches ; but the original allegorical theme 
 is not strictly maintained and, in the third part, two fresh 
 fables are introduced with admirable effect. The first book 
 contains the famous and splendid confessional passage 
 beginning * My thoughtless youth '. The whole poem is full 
 of brilliant epigram, and of portraiture vivid as that of the 
 Presbyterian wolf : 
 
 with belly gaunt and famished face; 
 Never was so deformed a beast of grace. 
 His ragged tail betwixt his legs he wears, 
 Close-clapp'd for shame ; but his rough crest he rears 
 And pricks up his predestinating ears. 
 
 Again, we are told that the leaders of dissent 
 
 like wild horses, several ways have whirl'd 
 The tortur'd text about the Christian world. 
 
 To the vast volume of his general work, Dryden added transla- 
 tion : his highest achievement here was his version of Virgil. 
 A remarkable effort of his genius came toward the end of his 
 life in the paraphrases of Chaucer and Boccaccio, which he 
 entitled Fables Ancient and Modern. These were written in 
 the couplet form, with all his old vigour and ease. 
 
 Dryden's lyric gift finds expression in his Odes, and in His Odes 
 the songs which are scattered throughout his plays. The and Songs, 
 stately Song for St. Cecilia's Day (1687) and Alexander's Feast 
 (1697) arc universally kiiowii : less famous, but among his 
 
200 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 very finest things, is his Pindaric Ode to the Pious Memory 
 of Mrs. Anne Killigrew. He has not the passionate fervour 
 of Crashaw, nor the strangeness and depth of Donne ; and he 
 can be guilty both of frigidity and extravagance. Though his 
 lyric at its best is majestic and exquisite, his fame depends 
 ultimately on his use of the couplet, which he has handled with 
 a strength and largeness unparalleled in our literature. 
 His Prose. It has already been remarked that if English prose through- 
 out the early seventeenth century possessed much splendour 
 and strength, it had so far evolved no sure and universal 
 medium of expression. To attribute to Dryden alone the 
 creation of such a medium would be to ignore the just claims 
 of men like Temple and Halifax ; but he certainly did more 
 than any single man towards purging English prose of its 
 ' conceits ' and exaggerations, and evolving a form of it which 
 should be at once strong, easy, clear, and dignified. Apart 
 from translations, Dryden's prose consists almost entirely of 
 essays. Many of these he published as prefaces to his plays, 
 after a fashion which he learnt from Corneille. His most 
 famous prose work, however, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy 
 (1668), was published as a separate work in reply to certain 
 views put forward by his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. 
 In form it is a dialogue, and in effect a masterpiece. Its 
 estimates of Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare would be 
 alone sufficient to prove Dryden one of the greatest among 
 English critics. Particularly illuminating is his defence of 
 the rhyming dramatic couplet, and his examination of contem- 
 porary dramatic practice. Among Dryden's chief remaining 
 essays are those on Heroic Plays, on Heroic Poetry, and Poetic 
 License, and on. the Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy; but 
 more masterly than any of these is the Preface to the Fables, 
 which has all the strength and ease of the Essay on Dramatic 
 Poesy, with a new intimacy and charm, in some sense due, 
 as Dryden himself tells us, to his reading of Montaigne. In 
 the Preface this splendid veteran has left some of his greatest 
 literary criticism, and a fascinating account of his life's effort 
 and achievement. Such a passage as the following displays 
 the instinct of a consummate man of letters : ' Thoughts, such 
 as they are, come crowding in so fast upon me that my only 
 difficulty is to choose or to reject, to run them into verse, or to 
 give them the other harmony of prose : I have so long studied 
 and practised both, that they are grown into a habit, and 
 become familiar to me.' 
 
 Minor Mention has already been made of the general influences, 
 
 Comic native and foreign, which helped to determine Restoration 
 Play- drama. It now remains to consider that drama in its main 
 wrights. kinds, the chief of which is undoubtedly comedy. Despite the 
 prohibition of play-acting during the Commonwealth, comedy 
 had still been performed from time to time, chiefly in the form 
 of the ' droll ', a kind of seventeenth-century revue, or adapta- 
 tion of scenes in well-known contemporary plays. Immediately 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 201 
 
 after the Restoration there was an eager recurrence to the 
 Jonsonian tradition, which is evident in The Cheats (1662), 
 and The Projectors (1664) of John Wilson, and in the two sur- 
 viving comedies of the Duke of Newcastle. One of Jonson's 
 favourite .dramatic themes had been ridicule of the Puritans : 
 in such comedies as The Hump (1660) by John Tatham, and 
 The Old Troop (1663 ?) by John Lacy, this reappears under 
 a new lease, and with an added vehemence due to the political 
 hatred of the time. This theme is again exploited in Cowley's 
 Cutter of Coleman Street. This play, despite its strained plot, 
 remains readable chiefly owing to the tricks of the ' sharking * 
 Cutter, who to gain the hand of the non-conforming Tabitha 
 Barebottle, affects a Puritanical lingo, fully worthy of 
 Bartholomew Fair. Obviously, however, neither love of 
 Jonson nor hatred of the Puritans could provide a sufficient 
 source or motive for a flourishing comedy. 
 
 Before we look elsewhere for such a motive, and discuss Restora- 
 the greater comic playwrights of the Restoration, a word must tion 
 be said concerning the charge of licentiousness commonly Comedy, 
 levelled against them. This, as will be seen, originates with 
 Jeremy Collier, but in the hands of later writers it becomes 
 largely an attempt to appraise seventeenth-century dramatic 
 art by a purely moral standard and that standard an early 
 Victorian one. Macaulay's essay on The Comic Dramatists 
 of the Restoration did. more than any thing towards perpetuating 
 this injustice, 1 which has been repudiated explicitly or 
 implicitly by the men of his period best qualified to judge 
 Lamb, Hazlitt, Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt. * I do not know 
 how it is with others,' says Lamb, ' but I feel the better 
 always for the perusal of one of Congreye's nay, why should 
 I not add, even of Wycherley's comedies. I am the gayer at 
 least for it ; and I could never connect those sports of a witty 
 fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to 
 imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves, almost 
 as much as fairyland. The Fainalls and the Mirabells, the 
 Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere 
 do not offend my moral sense : in fact they do not appeal to 
 it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They 
 break through no laws and conscientious restraints. They 
 know of none.' The values of life are not always or precisely 
 the values of art ; and unless Lamb's words are marked and 
 understood, the true significance of Etherege, Wycherley, 
 Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar must remain ungrasped. 
 
 Sir George Etherege (1635 ?-1691 ?), familiar through Etherege. 
 Steele's affectionate obituary essay on him to many who have 
 not read his plays, has left three comedies, Love in a Tub 
 (1664), She Would if She Could (1668), and The Man of Mode, 
 or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676). All of these have intrigue for 
 their theme, and deal with contemporary manners : the first, 
 
 1 See TJie Comedy of Manners, by John Palmer, which contains 
 a brilliant defence of the Restoration playwrights. 
 
 H 3 
 
202 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 which is part prose, part verse, is immature and unshapely, 
 but provides a great deal of rollicking fun in the adventures of 
 Sir Frederick Frollick. She Would if She Could shows better 
 construction and an easy command of dialogue : its morals, 
 though different from our own, are certainly not below the 
 contemporary standard. But Etherege's best and wittiest 
 play was his last, which contains, in Dorimant and Sir Fopling 
 Flutter, two of the most successful comic characters of the 
 period. Sir Fopling, whose name precisely indicates his 
 nature, is forerunner to a long and brilliant series of stage 
 beaux and men about town. ' Easy ' Etherege had a light 
 heart and a fairly light hand. He was the first of the splendid 
 Restoration amateurs who deigned to write a few plays of 
 genius in the intervals of fashionable life. He is concerned 
 with manners, not with morals ; his plays carry none of the 
 social criticism implicit in the comedy of Moliere. He is 
 important historically as having helped to set the mould of 
 Restoration comedy. 
 
 Wycher- Etherege prepared the way for a more important figure, 
 ley. William Wycherley (1640-1715), whose fame depends on his 
 
 four comedies, Love in a Wood (produced in 1671), The Gentle- 
 man Dancing -Master (1671), The Country Wife (1673). and 
 The Plain Dealer (1674). Though Wycherley's life was long- 
 he was born nine years after Dryden, and lived to be the frieml 
 of Pope it will be seen that his dramatic activity was limited 
 to five or six years. Like Etherege and Congreve he was an 
 amateur in letters. In early manhood he lived the life of a 
 courtier and man of fashion, and became the favourite of the 
 Duchess of Cleveland and the husband of the Countess of 
 Drogheda. His experience of fashionable life helped him 
 greatly with his plays, which are all comedies of manners. 
 Love in a Wood is immature, but presents the amusing 
 Mr. Dapperwit, ' a brisk conceited half-witted fellow of the 
 town ', a type already frequent, despite superficial differences, 
 in Elizabethan comedy. Alderman Gripe in this play is of 
 the family of Overreach and Volppne, and the strong, angry 
 drawing that has gone to his creation is typical of Wycherley 
 in certain moods. The Gentleman Dancing -Master was sug- 
 gested by Calderon's El Maestro de Danzar, but the handling 
 is Wycherley's own. The play is a slight comedy of intrigue, 
 but is superior in construction to its predecessor. 
 
 Wycherley's strongest work, however, is to be found in his 
 last two comedies. The plot of A Country Wife may not be 
 related here, and the play had to suffer bowdlerization even 
 in Garrick's not over-fastidious generation. It is entirely 
 innocent of the moral purpose subsequently assigned to it by 
 Steele. 1 Its debt to two comedies of Moliere TSEcole de$ 
 Femmes and L'Ecole des Maris is wholly superficial : the 
 soul and substance of it are Wycherley's own. Those of our 
 own generation who can find the level of Lamb and Hazlitl . 
 1 Tfttler, April 16. 1709, 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 20?, 
 
 and see it with their eyes, will confess it to be one of the 
 most racy and engrossing comedies in the language. Still 
 more powerful work appears in The Plain Dealer, from whose 
 leading character Wycherley derived his sobriquet of ' Manly '. 
 Much of this play is very amusing, and Voltaire has described 
 the ' petulant, litigious Widow Blackacre ' as ' the most- 
 comical character ever brought upon the stage '. More 
 characteristic, however, is the strong, dark work which luis 
 gone to the drawing of Manly, the ' honourable misanthrope ' 
 work which shows Wycherley in the mood of a Juvenal, 
 lashing through his creation a vice in which he seems absorb- 
 ingly interested. It was this feature of the play which led 
 Dryden to describe it as one of ' the most bold, most general, 
 and most useful satires which has ever been presented in the 
 English theatre '. The central theme is undoubtedly borrowed 
 from Moliere, yet in all essentials Wycherley's play is a new 
 thing ; and we have Voltaire's testimony that if its strokes 
 are less delicate than those of Le Misanthrope, they are also 
 stronger and bolder. 
 
 William Congreve (1670-1729) received his loftiest, and Congreve. 
 on the whole his truest, tribute from the prefatory verses 
 contributed by Dryden to his ' dear friend's ' play, The Double 
 Dealer : 
 
 In him all beauties of this age we see, 
 
 Etherege his courtship, Southerne's purity, 
 
 The satire, wit, and strength of manly Wycherley, 
 
 All this in blooming youth you have achieved. 
 
 Nor are your foiled contemporaries grieved, 
 
 So much the sweetness of your manners move. 
 
 We cannot envy you because we love. 
 
 The reference to Congreve' s ' sweetness of manners ' is no idle 
 compliment : it is confirmed by all who knew him ; and nearly 
 all of these seem to have shared Dryden's love for him. Like 
 his two predecessors, he left only a handful of plays The Old 
 Bachelor and The Double Dealer (1693). Love for Love (1695), 
 The Mourning Bride (1697), and The Way of the World (1700). 
 The Mourning Bride is a tragedy which would have remained 
 unnoticed by posterity but for the extravagant eulogy of 
 Johnson, who declared that its description of the temple might 
 be styled ' the most poetical paragraph in English poetry '. 
 
 Congreve's attitude toward his plays is typical of his time 
 and set, and is attested by Voltaire, who visited him shortly 
 before his death : ' He spoke of his works as trifles that were 
 beneath him, and hinted to me in our first conversation that 
 I should visit him on no other footing than that of a gentleman 
 who lived a life of plainness and simplicity.' Though Congreve 
 carries on the great tradition set by Etherege and Wycherley. 
 it is notable that a considerable interval intervenes between 
 his best work and theirs. During that interval there had been 
 a marked sophistication of English life and manners. The 
 result is reflected in Congreve's comedies, which are at once 
 
204 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 more artificial and more exquisite than anything that had gone 
 before. His characters envisage life as curiously as Wycherfey's 
 but with less joy. His men of pleasure savour vice-with the 
 sharp passionless gusto of the connoisseur. Addison justly 
 says of Heartwell, the character who gives his name to The 
 Old Bachelor, that he ' neither languishes nor burns, but frets 
 for love'. Similarly Congreve's heroines notably Angelica 
 in Love for Love, and Millamant in The Way of the World 
 wellnigh smother their true capacity for feeling with a show of 
 worldliness and wit. Millamant, the superb and unforgettable, 
 is the very Cleopatra of comedy : she holds all hearts from the 
 moment when Mirabell describes her first entry : * Here she 
 comes, i' faith, full sail, with her fan spread and her streamers 
 out, and a shoal of fools for tenders.' Millamant and Mirabell 
 wage the duel of sex less vehemently, perhaps, than Beatrice 
 and Benedick, but with weapons of finer edge. Though 
 Wycherley and Vanbrugh at their best achieve greater comic 
 force than Congreve, neither can compass the perfection of his 
 dialogue. Meredith has done him justice, perhaps more than 
 justice, in a passage of his Essay on Comedy, where the estimate 
 of his style is admirably sane and true : ' Where Congreve excels 
 all his English rivals is in his literary force, and a succinctness 
 of style peculiar to him. He hits the mean of a fine style and a 
 natural in dialogue. He is at once precise and voluble. If you 
 have ever thought upon style, you will acknowledge it to be a 
 singular accomplishment. In this he is a classic, and worthy 
 of treading a measure with Moliere.' 
 
 When we turn from Congreve to Sir John Vanbrugh (1666- 
 1726) we find a notable falling off in style. Vanbrugh's life 
 was a busier one than Congreve's ; and perhaps this fact, no 
 less than natural idiosyncrasy, may account for his more 
 rough-and-ready way of writing. In 1697 was acted his first 
 play, The Relapse, which contains his best known, though not 
 his greatest, character. Colley Cibber had already drawn an 
 amusing fop, Sir Novelty Fashion, in his comedy, Love's Last 
 Shift. Vanbrugh took this character and remoulded him into 
 Lord Foppington, a comic creation of the first order. The 
 description of his day's round given by Foppington in the 
 second act of this play is a racy caricature of the life led by 
 a contemporary beau ; and the remaining scenes in which 
 he appears are developed with corresponding power and 
 brilliancy. Two other most amusing characters are Sir Tun- 
 belly Clumsy and his daughter Hoyden ; but the scenes in 
 which they figure are unskilfully connected with those introduc- 
 ing the more seriously and dully drawn Loveless and 
 Amanda. Vanbrugh's next play, The Provoked Wife (1697), 
 contains his greatest creation, Sir John Brute, a sinister rake, 
 exulting in the will to evil. ' I would not give a fig for a song ', 
 says Sir John, ' that is not full of sin and impudence.' The 
 opening scene in which he heaps contempt upon his patient 
 wife is written with great power. The Provoked Wife is more 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 205 
 
 skilfully constructed than The Relapse, and the improvement 
 is maintained in The Confederacy, the best of Vanbrugh's 
 adaptations or translations from the French. Some of his 
 linest work appears in his unfinished comedy, A Journey to 
 London. If he cannot rival Congreve in style, he is fully his 
 equal in natural comic power. 
 
 Despite the broadness of Vanbrugh's plays, they had shown Farquhar, 
 occasional evidence of a sentimentalisin almost unknown to 
 his predecessors : this reappears at times in the comedies of 
 George Farquhar (1678-1707), and has been held by some 
 to mark the decline of Restoration comedy. Farquhar has 
 left seven plays, which bear upon them the imprint of his good- 
 humoured, happy-go-lucky personality. His first effort, 
 Love and a Bottle (1698) has small merit, but enjoyed consider- 
 able contemporary success. A Constant Couple, or A Trip to 
 the Jubilee (1699), and Sir Harry Wildair (1701) are notable 
 for the appearance of the gallant who gives his name to the 
 second play. Sir Harry, as played by Robert Wilks, became 
 a very popular stage figure. Less skilfully drawn than Flutter 
 or Foppington, he is credited with certain finer instincts which 
 they lack ; and this literary innovation corresponds with a 
 growing change in national manners and outlook. Farquhar' s 
 best work is contained in his last two plays, The Recruiting Officer 
 ( 1 706) and The Beaux' Stratagem (1707). In The Recruiting Officer 
 he has evidently reproduced something of the military experi- 
 ence he had gained at Shrewsbury ; and he deserves credit for 
 breaking with tradition and giving his comedy freshness and 
 variety by removing it from the London scene. The play 
 owes most of its liveliness to the portraits of Captain Plume, 
 Sergeant Kite, and the adventurous damsel Silvia. But 
 Farquhar's masterpiece is undoubtedly The Beaux' Stratagem. 
 Its dialogue is sparkling, its plot ingenious and engrossing ; 
 and it contains such admirable figures as the audacious 
 pretending footman, Archer ; Boniface, the archetype of 
 all stage landlords ; his daughter, Cherry ; Gibbet, the 
 highwayman ; Squire Sullen and his ,' humorous ' servant, 
 Scrub. Here again it has been remarked that Farquhar's 
 characters Aimwell and Archer, notably, and even Sullen 
 himself have more morality in their composition than can be 
 found in their prototypes of the earlier comedy ; and here, 
 too, the trend of the time is clearly seen. Farquhar died at the 
 height of his powers, when his dramatic genius had been going 
 on from strength to strength : it is difficult to say what he 
 might not have achieved had he lived. 
 
 The above account has dealt in succession with the chief Shadwell 
 comic playwrights of the period : brief mention must now be and 
 made of certain minors who flourished throughout its different others, 
 stages. Thomas Shadwell (1642-1692), poet laureate, Dryden's 
 ' Og', and the hero of his MacFlecknoe, has left seventeen 
 plays : most of these are coarse, and all are clumsy. He owes 
 much to Moliere, and was among those who tried to revive 
 
206 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the Jonsouiau comedy of 'humours'. In The Libertine he 
 dramatized the Don Juan story, and in Timon he mishandled 
 Shakespeare, greatly to his own satisfaction. In his three 
 best plays, Epsom Wells (1676), Bury Fair (1686), and The 
 Squire of Alsatia (1689), he has- left some lively pictures of 
 contemporary life and manners. Scott drew largely on the 
 last play for his Fortunes of Nigel. Thomas D'Urfey, literary 
 hack and man of fashion, wrote a number of plays, ranging 
 from farce to tragedy, which need not detain us here. Sir 
 Charles Sedley has left several inferior tragedies, and two 
 moderately good comedies, The Mulberry Garden (1668) and 
 Bellamira, or The Mistress (1687). The first of these is adapted 
 from Moliere, the second from Terence. Best among the fairly 
 numerous comedies of Aphra Behn are The Rover, or the Banished 
 Cavaliers (published in two parts, 1677 and 1681) and The 
 City Heiress (1682). Towards the end of the period the chief 
 names in comedy are those of Colley Gibber (1671-1757) and 
 Susannah Centlivre (1680-1722). Cibber, if he be not assured 
 of immortality through his excellent Apology for his Life, 
 will live for ever through the ' bad eminence ' to which Pope 
 raised him as successor to Theobald in The Dunciad. His 
 comedies, though popular at the time, have little worth as 
 literature. The most notable of them are Love's Last Shift 
 and The Careless Husband. Mrs. Centlivre's best play is A Bold 
 Stroke for a Wife. 
 
 Collier's Mention may here be made of that curious treatise, A Short 
 Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage 
 View. (1698), written by the Tory divine, Jeremy Collier (1650-1725), 
 in a spirit exactly reflected by its name. The chief playwrights 
 arraigned in it were Vanbrugh and Congreve, though Dryden 
 was by no means forgotten. Its method of criticism is phari- 
 saical and inferior, yet it attracted great attention in its day 
 and occasioned much controversy. Though it cannot be 
 regarded as having materially hastened the decline of the 
 comedy of manners, which succumbed to more general and 
 powerful forces, it is ultimately responsible for much censorious 
 modern criticism of the Restoration playwrights. 
 
 Kestora- The tragedy of the period, though perhaps more individual 
 tion Trag- than the comedy, is certainly less great. Something has 
 cdy Dav- already been said of the ' heroic ' play, which had made its 
 enant and appearance even before the Restoration in The Siege of Rhodes, 
 others. by Sir William Davenant (1606-1668). Davenant had com- 
 menced play-writing long before the closing of the theatres, 
 with Albovine and other dramas. After the Restoration he 
 several times adapted or mangled Shakespeare, and served the 
 result upon the stage with musical accompaniments ; and he 
 also wrote a good tragi-comedy, Love and Honour. Other 
 early writers of the heroic play are the Earl of Orrery and Sir 
 William Killigrew. John Crowne (1640 ?-1703) wrote exten- 
 sively in different kinds of drama. His best play, Sir Courtly 
 Niee (1685), is a comedy, but he has left several tragedies, 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 207 
 
 including The Destruction of Jerusalem (1677), Thyestes (1681), 
 and Caligula (1698). Elkanah Settle (1648-1724), Dryden's 
 ' Doeg ', wrote a number of heroic plays, the least despicable 
 of which, The Empress of Morocco, was cried up for a while 
 against Dryden's triumphs in this kind. A better playwright 
 than either of the foregoing was Nathaniel Lee (1653 ?-1692), 
 who wrote rhyming heroic plays, blank verse tragedies, and 
 one tragi-comedy. Best in the first kind are Nero (1675) and 
 Hoplionisba (1676) ; in the second, The Rival Queens (1677), 
 Mithridates (1678), and Theodosius (1680). Lee's style is wild 
 and ranting : he has been over -praised by certain modern 
 critics ; but he did not lack poetry, and sometimes shows 
 dramatic power. 
 
 The greatest tragic playwright of the period is undoubtedly Otway 
 Thomas Otway (1651-1685). Otway was an Oxford man, had 
 failed as an actor, and was for some time in the Army. His 
 first play was an unsuccessful tragedy, Alcibiades (1675), in 
 which appeared the celebrated actress Mrs. Barry, for whom 
 he entertained an unrewarded and life-long passion. He 
 subsequently adapted two plays from the French, and in 
 1678 wrote his first comedy, Friendship in Fashion. He had 
 little comic talent : his Soldier's Fortune (1681) is mediocre, 
 and its sequel, The Atheist (1684), far below mediocrity. In 
 tragedy his work is very uneven : few would praise his Caius 
 Marius (1680) ; and his rhymed Don Carlos (1676), though it 
 contains spirited passages, inevitably suffers by comparison 
 with the masterpieces on the same theme by Schiller and 
 Alfieri. His fame depends ultimately on two plays, The 
 Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (-1682). In The Orphan, 
 Polydore impersonates his twin-brother Castalia, and thus wins 
 the last favour from Castalio's loving bride, Monimia. This 
 cruel situation and its tragic sequel are developed with psycho- 
 logical insight and tragic force. But Otway's greatest and 
 most famous play is Venice Preserved. Here, the tragic conflict 
 is waged in the soul of Jaflier, who is distracted between the 
 claims of his beloved fellow -conspirators and the plea of his 
 passionately worshipped wife, Belvidera, whose father's life 
 is threatened by their schemes. The scenes between Jaflier, 
 Belvidera, and Pierre, Belvidera's rival for Jaflier's soul, are 
 developed with moving power. It is difficult to share Taine's 
 enthusiasm for the comic scenes in this play : on the other 
 hand, the criticism l is surely mistaken which denies poetry 
 to him who gave to the distracted Belvidera the lines begin- 
 ning, ' Come, come, come', or inspired Pierre to say, in the 
 course of two consecutive speeches : 
 
 Burn! 
 
 First burn, and level Venice to thy ruin. 
 
 What, starve like beggars' brats in frosty weather 
 
 Under a hedge, and whine ourselves to death ! 
 
 1 Of. Professor Saintsbury, Short History of English Literature, p. 501. 
 
208 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and 
 
 Revenge ! the attribute of gods : they stamped it 
 With their great image on our natures ! 
 
 It is true, on the other hand, that Otway's prose style is far 
 less highly wrought than that of the greater Elizabethans, 
 and that he is often a sloven, and a far from splendid one. 
 Southerne Thomas Southerne (1660-1746), during his long life, wrote 
 and Rowe. many plays. His comedies have little merit. The best of 
 his tragedies are The Fatal Marriage (1694) and Oronooko, 
 or The Royal Slave (1696), adapted from Aphra Behn's novel 
 of the same name. Southerne was coupled with Nicholas 
 Rowe by Pope as being ' sure for the passions '. The best 
 scenes of his best plays are effective, though far from great. 
 Like Southerne, Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718) wrote many plays, 
 and, like him, he owes what dramatic fame he possesses to 
 two tragedies, The Fair Penitent (1703) and Jane Shore (1714). 
 The first is partly adapted from Massinger's Fatal Dowry, 
 and is written in glossy pseudo-Fletcherian blank verse, which 
 is as easy to read as it is difficult to remember or to like. Its 
 situations are developed with a certain skill, but are utterly 
 lacking in tragic depth. In this play, as in others, Rowe freely 
 tags his scenes with homilies of this kind : 
 
 By such examples are we taught to prove 
 The sorrows that attend unlawful love. 
 Death, or some worse misfortunes, soon divide 
 The injured bridegroom from his guilty bride. 
 If you would have the nuptial union last 
 Let virtue be the bond that ties it fast. 
 
 Jane Shore is a much better play. Rowe tells us that it was 
 4 written in imitation of Shakespeare's style ', and though the 
 Shakespearean quality is not obvious, the blank verse has 
 gained in freedom and strength, and some of the passages 
 between Jane, her suitor Hastings, and her husband, Shore, 
 alias Dumont, are pathetic and spirited. Both plays enjoyed 
 great popularity throughout the eighteenth century. 
 
 The spirit and tendency of Dryden's age may be best illus- 
 trated by the fact that of its three greatest poems, two were 
 satires. The Hudibras (1663-78) of Samuel Butler (1612- 
 1680) is far more loose in form than Absalom and Achitophel, 
 Hudibras, fo u t its looseness, like that of Don Juan, is deliberate, and 
 a distinctive literary virtue. It is of great length, and is 
 written in the rhyming octosyllabic couplet, which Butler 
 handles with rollicking ease and vigour. Mock-heroic in form, 
 it describes the manifold adventures of the knight Hudibras 
 and his squire Rollo, in whom, as in their rapscallion opponents, 
 Butler satirizes the puritanical foes of royalty. His sneers at 
 their hypocrisy and folly are unceasing, and are enhanced by 
 the imposing classical precedents devised for the deeds of 
 Crowdero the fiddler, Talgol the butcher, and many another 
 undistinguished worthy. The brilliant humour of the poem is 
 
RESTORATION POETRY AND DRAMA 209 
 
 greatly helped, again as in Don Juan, by its author's skill and 
 zest in the use of fantastic rhymes. Hudibras had a vast 
 popularity, largely due to the eager popular reaction against 
 Puritanism. The best known of Butler's shorter poems is 
 The Elephant in the Moon, directed against a member of the 
 Koyal Society who had mistaken for an elephant a fly in the 
 lens of a telescope through which he was viewing the moon. 
 
 Of far less importance as a satirist is John Oldham (1653- Oldham 
 1683), whose fiercely vituperative Satires upon the Jesuits and 
 are an instructive contrast to the calm and lofty scorn of others. 
 Dryden. The satirical work of Marvell and Denham has beett 
 already noticed. There is much minor satire during the period, 
 and it is interesting to notice that writer after writer published 
 poems entitled Instructions to a Painter, after Waller's poem 
 of this title. 
 
 Outside satire, a peculiar variety of verse was being developed 
 in the critical poem. This kind, which was to reacn its height 
 in Pope's Essay on Criticism, has for its chief contemporary 
 examples An Essay upon Poetry by John Sheffield, Earl of 
 Mulgrave, and An Essay on Translated Verse by Wentworth 
 Dillon, Earl of Koscommon. Though neither production Jias 
 much value for ourselves, both had great contemporary vogue. 
 Mulgrave' s verse was praised by Johnson for its * correctness ', 
 Roscommon's by Pope for its respectability. 
 
 Considerably more important is the work of certain lyric Rocheste 
 poets of the period. John Wihnot, Earl of Rochester (1648- and Scd- 
 1680), wrote a satirical masterpiece, A Satire against Mankind ; ley. 
 but he is best known by his songs, the most exquisite of which 
 are perhaps ' Absent from thee I languish still and * I cannot 
 change as others do '. The beautiful poem once considered his 
 masterpiece * Why dost thou shade thy lovely face ? ' is 
 now known to be by another hand. A great deal of Rochester's 
 verse is licentious, even beyond the standard of the time. 
 The finest lyric of Sir Charles Sedley (1639-1701) is that 
 beginning, 
 
 Love still has something of the sea 
 From whence his mother rose, 
 
 but hardly less perfect in their lighter kind are the two Phyllis 
 poems ' Phyllis is my only joy ' and ' Hears not my Phyllis 
 how the birds '. Excellent also is his lyric to Celia, the last 
 lines of which are the complement of Dowson's ' I have been 
 faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion ' : 
 
 Why then should I seek further store 
 And still make love anew ? 
 When change itself can give no more 
 'Tis easy to be true. 
 
 Sedley had been represented as ' Lisideius ' in Dryden's Essay 
 of Dramatic Poesy ; and that dialogue had also presented, 
 under the title ' Eugenius ', Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset 
 (1638-1706), who enjoyed great contemporary fame, both as 
 
210 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 satirist and lyrist. For ourselves he lives chiefly by his spirited 
 ballad, or song, ' To all you ladies now on land ', said on more 
 than doubtful authority 1 to have been written at sea during 
 the First Dutch War (1665), the night before an engagement. 
 Others who have left one fine lyric or more to posterity are 
 Thomas Flatman, Aphra Behn, and the playwrights Etherege 
 and Otway. 
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 f 
 
 PROSE OF THE RESTORATION 
 
 General qualities of Restoration prose Cowley, Temple, Bunyan, 
 Halifax Religious writers Philosophical writers : Locke and 
 others Diarists : Evelyn, Pepys, and others Historians. 
 
 THE trend of prose after the Restoration, as we have seen, 
 was increasingly toward clearness, simplicity, and ease ; and 
 here, as elsewhere, Dryden illustrates and heads the new 
 movement. The reasons for the change are many and com- 
 plicated. The example of France certainly counts for much ; 
 and the models she supplied were various. Montaigne, familiar 
 for a full half -century in Florio's translation, strongly affected 
 the prose of Cowley and Dryden and Temple, and, through 
 Cotton's more recent version (1685), in some degree influenced 
 the style of Halifax. The result was a gain in intimacy, 
 simplicity, and ease. But more recent French writers, such 
 as Pascal and La Bruyere, were eagerly read by Dryden and 
 his contemporaries, and the beauty of their style naturally 
 had a strong influence upon men already bent on giving their 
 language classic form. Furthermore, the writings of such 
 critics as Boileau, Le Bossu, Rapin, and Dacier, had greatly 
 quickened the interest of English writers in all matters making 
 for ' correct ' expression. It is possible, however, here, as in 
 drama, to exaggerate the foreign influence and neglect the 
 native. The plain style had existed in English from and before 
 the day of Latimer, had been carried on by Hooker, and 
 revived by Clarendon and Hobbes. It had often been prac- 
 tised in conscious reaction against ornate extravagance, and 
 though it had never yet attained the suppleness and ease 
 which might qualify it to become a universal medium, the 
 tendency which it embodies must not be under-rated. A further 
 native factor must be sought in the attempt of the newly- 
 founded Royal Society to evolve and fix a style of writing 
 which should be apt for scientific demonstration. This effort 
 is described in a notable passage of Bishop Sprat's history 
 of the Society a (1667). Though all of these influences may 
 
 1 For more about this matter, see ' The Court Poets ', by Charles 
 Whibley, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. viii, p. 218. 
 
 2 ' They have therefore been most vigorous in putting in execution the 
 only remedy that can be found for this extravagance, and that has been 
 
PROSE OF THE RESTORATION 211 
 
 be traced iii the making of the new prose, it is difficult to 
 disengage any one of them from the general result, or to say 
 that it predominated. A good deal of the literary striving 
 towards order probably had its counterpart in the social forces 
 which were working up toward the Revolution and the 
 refoundiiig of English life on a sounder and stronger basis ; 
 but whatever be its origins, the new tendency is unmistakable, 
 and is seen in the style of many men. The prose writings of 
 Tillotson have been discussed elsewhere. Dryden professed 
 to have used him as a model, but the debt cannot have been 
 a great one. 
 
 More important is the prose of Abraham Cowley, which Cowley. 
 chiefly consists of essays, and bridges the gulf between the 
 old way of writing and the new. The transition may be clearly 
 seen from a comparison of his Discourse concerning Oliver 
 Cromwell (1661) with his later essays Of Solitude and Of Great- 
 ness. In the Discourse Cowley's periods are often unwieldy : 
 in the essays they have admirable ease and balance. Through- 
 out his later writings there is something of the intimacy and 
 quietism which go to make the charm of Lamb. 
 
 The prose of Sir William Temple (1628-1699) received the Temple, 
 highest praise from Swift and Johnson, and was undoubtedly 
 regarded as a model by the eighteenth century. To our own 
 age it seems to achieve greatness only at moments, and for 
 the rest, to be polished and agreeable. His works consist of 
 essays (Miscellanea, 1680-1701), memoirs, and of the letters 
 published after his death by Swift, who had at one time lived 
 with him at Moor Park as his secretary. The letters are 
 interesting, not only for their personal charm, but for the light 
 they throw on contemporary politics and diplomacy. The 
 essays deal with a multitude of subjects, including political 
 science, literary criticism, gout, and gardening. The best 
 known, though not the most charming, are those Upon Ancient 
 and Modern Learning (1690) and Upon Poetry. 
 
 All the writers just mentioned ensued simplicity ; but their Bunyan. 
 simplicity was the result of much craft and striving. John 
 Bunyan was simple after another fashion. ' I could ', he says, 
 ' have stepped into a style much higher than this in which 
 I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things 
 more than here I have seemed to do : but I dare not. God 
 did not play in tempting of me ; neither did I play when 
 I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught 
 hold upon me ; wherefore I may not play in relating of them , 
 
 a constant resolution to reject all amplification, digressions, and swellings 
 of style : to return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when 
 men delivered so many things almost in an equal number of words. 
 They have exacted from all their members a close naked natural way 
 of speaking, positive expressions, clear senses, a native easiness, bringing 
 all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can, and preferring 
 the language of artizans, countrymen, and merchants before that of poets 
 or scholars.' 
 
212 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Tlie Holy 
 War. 
 
 but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. 
 He that liketh it, let him receive it : and he that doth not, let 
 him produce a better.' In his boyhood, as the apprentice 
 of his father, the brazier, he had little leisure or taste for general 
 study. Later, all chance of this was cut short by the Civil 
 War, in which he took up arms. Yet one Book was always 
 with him, and moulded his style as surely as his character. 
 ' He had jived in the Bible ', says J. K. Green, ' till its words 
 became his own.' He had published two theological treatises 
 before the Restoration, but the inspiration of his soul was not 
 fully liberated till the imprisonment of his body in Bedford 
 Jail (1660). While in prison he wrote several works, and 
 among them Grace Abounding (published in 1666), one of 
 the four great books on which his fame depends, and one of 
 the greatest self -confessional pieces ever written. It describes 
 his sins and manifold temptations by the devil in the days 
 when he was * more loathsome in his own eyes than was 
 a toad ' ; and tells of his conversion, his terrible relapses into 
 darkness and despair, and his final salvation and illumination 
 by God. The book is written throughout in intense and moving 
 language, and its spirit is expressed in these words of the 
 preface to his children : ' If you have sinned against light : 
 if you are tempted to blaspheme : if you are drowned in 
 despair : if you think God fights against you ; or if heaven is 
 hid from your eyes remember it was thus with your father, 
 but out of them all the Lord delivered me.' 
 
 The three chief remaining works of Bunyan are The Pilgrim's 
 Progress (first published in 1678), the Life and Death of Mr. Bad- 
 man (1680), and The Holy War (1682). The Holy War is an 
 allegory describing the siege laid by the devil to the human 
 soul, which is represented by the city of Mansoul, open to 
 attack through five gates Eargate, Eyegate, Mouthgate, 
 Nosegate, and Feelgate. The chief virtues and vices appear 
 under symbolic names, such as Captain Boanerges, Captain 
 Resistance, Captain Foresight, Mr. Incredulity, Mr. Stand-to - 
 lies, Mr. Falsepeace. The town is taken by Diabolus, but is 
 relieved by the armies of God (Shaddai), and stern justice 
 is meted out to the Vices. A fresh war breaks out between 
 Emmanuel and Diabolus, and the issue is left undecided. 
 The Holy War contains some of Bunyan' s most spirited prose, 
 and abounds in vivid and telling incident. Yet it is hard to 
 agree with Macaulay that but for The Pilgrim's Progress it 
 would have been the greatest allegory in the language. It 
 lacks the simplicity and unity of design which distinguish the 
 greater work ; and the story and its symbolism are alike con- 
 fused by the swarming multitude of allegorical figures. 
 
 Had these flaws been present in The Pilgrim's Progress, it 
 could never have been as eagerly read as it has been by 
 Englishmen ever since the day of its publication. Only one 
 Book has had a greater hold on them ; and the spell in each 
 case has been due to the union of spiritual sublimity with 
 
PROSE OF THE RESTORATION 213 
 
 superb descriptive power. The great allegory is too familiar 
 to be described here : Christian and Christiana, Greatheart 
 and Valiant and Feeble, the Hill Difficulty and the Valley of . 
 Humiliation, are part of our knowledge for ever. The inner 
 meaning of the allegory, the progress of the human soul 
 through dangers and temptations to salvation, is simple 
 and of universal appeal. Suggestions for the story may have 
 been found in previous works notably in Deguileville's 
 Pilgrimage of the Soul, less probably in The Faerie Queene. 
 Yet in all essentials of form and spirit The Pilgrim's Progress 
 is original : as Bunyan himself tells us, ' manner and matter 
 was all mine own the whole and every whit is mine.' He 
 further testifies that it was written for himself, not for his 
 neighbour ' I did it mine own self to gratify '. To this fact 
 is mainly due the strength and simplicity which are its supreme 
 greatness. 
 
 Despite its high allegorical meaning, The Pilgrim's Progress Mr. Bad 
 has many attributes of the novel. The Life and Death of man. 
 Mr. Badman has still more, though in form it is an allegorical 
 dialogue. It shows a man beginning in the state of sin described 
 by Bunyan in Grace Abounding, but experiencing no genuine 
 conversion, and going on from depth to depth of evil. Badman 
 is atheist, drunkard, thief, swindler, and hypocrite : yet he 
 is not a faggot of abstractions, but a very human scoundrel, 
 drawn in the setting of Bunyan's time, with a vivid and Defoe- 
 like realism. This realism is not confined to descriptive 
 strokes but extends to the whole conception of the work. 
 Thus Bunyan will neither save Badman by an eleventh-hour 
 repentance, nor bring him to an end of Faust-like horror : he 
 first leads him through a period of slow married misery, and 
 then leaves him on his death-bed, tranquil, unregenerate, and 
 predestined to damnation. In any history of the English 
 novel Mr. Badman must hold high place. It contains some 
 of Bunyan's most masterly prose. 
 
 George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (1633-1695), moves in Halifax, 
 a different world of thought and feeling from Bunyan, and 
 writes with far more conscious art. He must certainly be 
 ranked high among the makers of the new prose. His style 
 is lucid, flexible, and rounded. It freely admits the epigram 
 of which he was a master, is admirable for exposition, and can 
 .it need kindle into fine eloquence. His most famous thing- 
 is The Character of a Trimmer, a pamphlet in which he states 
 his political faith, and refutes 'that most singular apophthegm, 
 a trimmer is worse than a rebel '. In general, the style of this 
 work is epigrammatic and hard-held ; but Halifax gives his 
 eloquence free rein in the great passa.ge on Truth, which 
 suggests the influence both of Montaigne and of the Areo- 
 pacfitica. There are also two splendid passages in praise of 
 England and her king. Other political tracts of Halifax are 
 The Anatomy of an Equivalent, A Letter to a Dissenter, and 
 >: Cautions for the ( 1 hoice of Members in Parliament. In 
 
214 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 these Halifax's magnificent sagacity is lightened by his grace 
 of style and brilliant use of irony. His Advice to a Daughter, 
 addressed to his own daughter, the future mother of the great 
 Lord Chesterfield, contains much that is affectionate and 
 charming, but also many satirical strokes which suggest the 
 earlier character writers and anticipate Swift. Thus of the 
 vain woman of fashion he writes that, on hearing other women 
 praised, ' up she riseth and goeth home, half burst with anger 
 and straitlacing ' ; and again, ' she is faithful to the fashion, 
 to which not only her opinion but her senses are resigned : so 
 obsequious she is to it that she would be ready to be resigned 
 even to virtue with all its faults, if she had her dancing 
 master's word that it was practised at court.' 
 
 More, Among the leading religious and philosophical writers of 
 
 Cudworth the period may be named the Cambridge Platonists, Henry 
 and More (1614-1687) and Ealph Cudworth (1617-1688). More's 
 
 others. poetry has received separate mention : in prose he has left 
 several theological and metaphysical treatises. The chief 
 work of Cudworth is The True Intellectual System of the 
 Universe, which ranks among the very finest of English philo- 
 sophical works, and is written in an admirably clear and 
 forcible style. John Wilkins (1614-1672), Bishop of Chester, 
 wrote on science and religion ; in Ecclesiastes* or The Gift of 
 Preaching, he enjoins a plain pulpit style. Much of his own 
 writing was whimsical, and he has an acceptable gift of humour. 
 His chief remaining works are The Discovery of a New World, 
 and his Essay towards a Philosophical Language. 
 
 The Sacra Telluris Theorm of Thomas Burnet (1635-1715) 
 is a curious combination of theology, popular science, and 
 romance, and is not without qualities of style. Joseph Glanvill 
 (1636-1680), a Fellow of the Eoyal Society, wrote several 
 scientific works, chief among which are Plus Ultra and Scepsis 
 Scientifica ; but his most famous work is Sadducismus 
 Triumphatus (1681), which Lecky has called the ablest defence 
 of the belief in witchcraft ever published. Glanvill's style, 
 which is modelled on Sir Thomas Browne's, shows that the 
 "prevailing tendency towards plainness in prose had not proved 
 fatal to the more ornate and imaginative fashion of writing. 
 Locke. A quite different outlook and style are evident in the writings 
 
 of John Locke (1632-1704), the leading philosopher of his age. 
 Locke's writings possess little appeal or illumination for those 
 who have been swayed by the older transcendentalism of 
 Plato, or the newer transcendentalism of Kant. Hegel, Fichte, 
 and their followers : yet, were this a short history of philo- 
 sophy, a detailed survey would be given of his famous Essay 
 concerning Human Understanding (1690), his Two Treatises 
 of Government (1690), and his numerous remaining works on 
 philosophy, sociology, and economics. Literature, however, 
 is not directly concerned with his arguments against innate 
 ideas, his general theory of knowledge, or his conception of the 
 social contract. It is sufficient to say that his style is clear. 
 
PROSE OF THE RESTORATION 215 
 
 precise, and as forcible as a style may be which utterly lacks 
 inspiration. 
 
 Highly notable among the prose writers of the period was Diarists, 
 the class of diarists and writers of memoirs and essays. Only 
 brief mention can be made here of Sir John Keresby, who left 
 memoirs of English life and continental travel ; Sir Eichard 
 Bulstrode, whose letters throw a certain light on foreign 
 politics, and whose memoirs vindicate tho characters of 
 Charles I and Charles II ; Lady Warwick, whose Diary 
 displays her fine Puritanism ; Lady Fanshawe, whose brave 
 and romantic personality is disclosed in her delightful Memoirs ; 
 and Roger North, who has left quaint and readable lives of 
 himself and his three distinguished brothers. Two names 
 stand out from the rest those of John Evelyn (1620-1706) 
 and Samuel Pepys (1633-1703). These men were friends, 
 and Fellows of the Royal Society ; but in temperament and 
 literary style they are poles apart. 
 
 Apart from his famous Diary. Evelyn has left many original Evelyn, 
 works and translations. He was always a lover of gardens, 
 and his treatise Sylva had a great effect upon English arbori- 
 culture. His Life of Mrs. Godolphin (Margaret Blagge) is by 
 far his most attractive work, and describes the friendship 
 which he for many years enjoyed with one of the most beautiful, 
 virtuous, and charming women of his age. More generally 
 read, however, is his famous Diary, which is a fairly complete 
 record of his long life, and describes his Oxford education, his 
 extensive travels in Europe, his experiences of the Common- 
 wealth, and of public life after the Restoration, and the 
 long and happy retirement at Sayes Court which formed the 
 last chapter of his life. The Diary clearly displays the fineness 
 of Evelyn's character and taste, and his great love of art and 
 general culture. Few men of his period had more attractive 
 private virtues ; but it must be admitted that the charm of 
 his personality is imperfectly reflected in his prose style, which 
 lacks distinction and colour, and loses greatly by contrast 
 with the racy and individual periods of Samuel Pepys. 
 
 Pepys' s Diary is unique in the English, and perhaps in any, Pepys. 
 language. It was originally written in a complicated system 
 of shorthand, which was not deciphered till the year 1822, 
 when John Smith completed his translation of it. It covers 
 the period between January 1, 1660, when Pepys was a poor 
 clerk in private employ, and May 31, 1669, when he gave up 
 keeping the diary owing to his fear of blindness. During .these 
 years, besides acquiring a considerable fortune, he became 
 Clerk of the Privy Seal and Clerk of the Acts. Eventually he 
 was made Secretary of the Admiralty, in which position he 
 did work of permanent national value. It would hardly be 
 an exaggeration to call him the father of the modern English 
 Navy. The Diary contains much interesting comment on 
 naval matters, which he was eventually to amplify in his 
 Memoir* of the Navy (1690). Interesting, too, are his descrip- 
 
216 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 tions of the Plague, the Great Fire, the sea-wars with Holland, 
 and his portraits of such contemporaries as Rupert of the 
 Ehine, Blake, and his patrons the Duke of York, the Earl 
 of Sandwich, and Sir William Coventry ; but by far the 
 most readable part of the Diary is that in which he tells of 
 his own household affairs, his merry jaunts to the play-house, 
 his peccadilloes, short-lived reformations, and much enjoyecl 
 relapses ; his quarrels with his fellow officials, his eagerness 
 for wealth, his simple delight in rich clothes, the not less 
 simple egoism of his domestic relations ; his delight in music, 
 his unsteady sense of literary and dramatic values, and his steady 
 and unwavering sense of his own value and his own pleasure. 
 The extreme frankness of Pepys finds expression in some 
 strokes which it has not been found possible to print, even in 
 Mr. Wheatley's very full and faithful edition ; but it manifests 
 itself more harmlessly in such touches as these, which help 
 to give the Diary its salt : ' My wife having dressed herself 
 in a silly dress of a blue petticoat uppermost, and a white 
 satin waistcoat and white hood, though I think she did it 
 because her gown is gone to the tailor's, did, together with 
 my being hungry, which always makes me peevish, makes 
 me angry.' . . . ' But Lord ! how did I please myself to make 
 Betty Turner sing, to see what a beast she is as to singing, not 
 knowing how to sing one note in tune ; but only for the experi- 
 ment I would not for 40s. hear her sing a tune : worse than my 
 wife a thousand times, so that it do a little reconcile me to 
 her.' . . . ' Called upon Doll, our pretty 'Change woman, for 
 a pair of gloves trimmed with yellow ribbon to match the 
 petticoat my wife bought yesterday, which cost me 20s. ; 
 but she is so pretty that, God forgive me, I could not think it 
 too much, which is a strange slavery that I stand in to beauty, 
 that I value nothing near it.' 
 
 Histor- The age was by no means a strong one in history. The chief 
 
 ians. name here is that of Gilbert Burnet (1643-1715), best known 
 
 by his posthumously published History of My Own Time 
 (published 1724-1734), but notable also for his History of the 
 Enlgish Reformation (1679), and for several other works. 
 Burnet has been called a ' Whig Clarendon ' : his historical 
 method has recently received praise ; but his literary gift is 
 not great, though Swift certainly went too far when he said 
 of the History, ' I never read so ill a style'. Burnet's pupil, 
 Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (1655-1716), wrote several 
 political treatises, though he is best known as having preserved 
 the saying of a ' very wise man ' that ' if a man were permitted 
 to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the 
 laws of a nation '. George Mackenzie, Earl of Cromarty 
 (1630-1714). lives through his account of the Gowrie con- 
 spiracy, and his Vindication of the Reformation of the Church 
 of Scotland. The period was apparently favourable to anti- 
 quarian research. In 1656 the learned Dugdale published his 
 Antiquities of Warwickshire, and in 1691-2 appeared a still 
 
PROSE OF THE RESTORATION 217 
 
 more valuable work, the Athenae Oxonienses of Anthony Wood, 
 a description of the chief writers produced by Oxford Uni- 
 versity. The famous Miscellanies (1696) of John Aubrey 
 (1626-1697) contain much agreeable gossip. 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 THE RISE OF THE PRESS 
 
 Defoe, Addiaon, Steele, Swift, Bolingbroke ; Shaftesbury, Berkeley, 
 Joseph Butler, Bentley, and others. 
 
 IT has been shown that throughout the Age of Dryden The Be- 
 English prose was constantly gaining in flexibility and freedom, ginnings 
 This process had been greatly assisted by the birth and sudden of English 
 growth of the English press. The first English newspapers Journal- 
 date from 1622, when news sheets known as Corantos began ism ' 
 to be issued at intervals of a few days. They dealt exclusively 
 with foreign news thus the organ of their leading promoter, 
 Nathaniel Butter, is styled Weekly News from Italy and 
 Germany. Ben Jonson, in his comedy. The Staple of News, 
 satirizes racily the unscrupulousness of their editors and the 
 childish curiosity of their readers. The publication of the 
 Corantos was greatly hindered by the Star Chamber, which at- 
 one time succeeded in suppressing them altogether for a period 
 of six years. In 1641 the Star Chamber was abolished and 
 the press for a time became free. The Coranto disappeared, 
 and its place was taken by a new kind of periodical, the 
 Diurnall, which supplied domestic news and in many cases 
 endeavoured to influence the political opinion of its readers. 
 During the Civil War the new press was freely used for con- 
 troversy on both sides, and a series of polemical newspapers, 
 known as Mercuries, sprang into being. The Presbyterian 
 tailor, John Dillmgham, created the leading article. For 
 the royalists, Sir John Berkenhead edited the Mereurius 
 Aulicus from Oxford : on the parliamentary side the chief 
 journalists were Cromwell's red-headed leader-writer, Henry 
 Walker, and that scoundrelly scribbler befriended by Milton, 
 Marchamont Nedham. Parliament was greatly inconvenienced 
 by the scurrility and party venom shown in many of these 
 publications, and in 1647 it prohibited the publication of any 
 book* or sheet of news ' except the same be licensed by both or 
 
 either House of Parliament '. 
 
 The most famous of the journalists empowered to write Muddi- 
 
 under this ordinance was Henry Muddiman, editor, before the man, 
 
 Restoration, of The Parliamentary Intelligencer., and, after it, L'Estrangt 
 
 of The London Gazette. Muddiman organized the distribution and 
 
 of reliable news with a thoroughness hitherto unknown in others. 
 England. For a few years he was the only authorized journalist 
 in the country. In 1663, however, the Government mono- 
 
218 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 polized the right to publish news, and gave the sole control 
 of it to Roger L'E strange ( 161 6-1704), a keen royalist partisan, 
 who became editor of The Public Intelligencer. Muddiman 
 eventually regained the ascendancy in journalism, but 
 L' Estrange was a busy writer throughout his long life, and 
 published several translations and innumerable pamphlets. 
 In 1681 he started an important political newspaper, The 
 Observator. In 1682 the Licensing Act lapsed, and the party 
 press became exceedingly active, though the Government still 
 controlled its own Gazette through an official Gazetteer. 
 Descriptive journalism at this period is represented by the 
 Amusements Serious and Comical of Thomas Brown (1663- 
 1704), which supply a curious and vivid picture of contem- 
 porary London life. The more reflective reader found his 
 account in the Athenian Gazette, afterwards the Athenian 
 Mercury, of John Dunton (1659-1733), who is also notable for 
 that strange volume, his Life and Errors. But for some years 
 before the appearance of the first daily, The Daily Gourant, 
 in 1702, journalism had been chiefly active along party lines. 
 Roper's Post Boy was edited in the Tory interest ; another 
 Tory editor was Mist according to Pope, as ' dear to Dulness ' 
 as was Ridpath, editor of the Whig Flying Post. In the Second 
 Book of the Dunciad Pope in literal fact pillories Ridpath and 
 Roper, together with John Tutchin, editor of The Observator, 
 and one greater still : 
 
 Earless on high stood unabash'd Defoe, 
 And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below, 
 And Ridpath, Roper, cudgelled might ye view, 
 The very worsted still looked black and blue. 
 
 Defoe Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), who is famous to our age for his 
 His Jour- novels, was notorious to his own for his pamphlets and 
 nalism. journalism. Into the intricate and, for the most part, discredit- 
 able details of his life it is impossible here to pry, though they 
 have the closest bearing upon his controversial writings. 
 He was a mercenary and unscrupulous pamphleteer, who ran 
 indifferently with the Tory hare or the Whig hounds. His 
 vigorous but prosaic verse satire, The True-born Englishman 
 (1701), satirizes the attempt of Tutchin to decry King William 
 for his foreign origin. The purpose of his most fainou.s 
 pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), 
 remains something of a mystery to this day. In so far as 
 it possessed a practical aim at all, and was not a mere literary 
 exercise, it was probably intended to discredit the High 
 Church Party by outgoing them in venom against dissent. 
 But neither dissenters nor churchmen received it favourably, 
 and it brought upon Defoe the punishment indicated in Pope's 
 lines though the word ' earless ' is a libel. This experience 
 drew forth from its victim his forcible Hymn to the Pillory 
 (1703). His sentence had also included imprisonment in 
 Newgate during the queen's pleasure. Shortly after his 
 
THE RISE OF THE PRESS ' 219 
 
 release he began to edit the first and most powerful of his 
 journals, The Review (1704), an organ written in the interests 
 of liar ley, and containing much information regarding 
 foreign affairs. Later he edited a trade journal, M creator, 
 and helped to edit the Tory Mist's Journal, secretly wresting 
 its point of view to the Whig interest. 
 
 Much other journalism and pamphleteering may be placed His 
 to his credit or discredit ; but far greater importance attaches Novels, 
 to the remarkable works of fiction which begin in 1719 with 
 Robinson Crusoe, and comprise Duncan Campbell, The Memoirs 
 of a Cavalier, and Captain Singleton (all 1720), Moll Flanders, 
 The Religious Courtship, The History of the Plague, and Colonel 
 Jacque (all 1722), Roxana (1724), and A New Voyage Round the 
 World (1725). In these novels Defoe put to brilliant use the 
 experience which he had gained in the rough-and-tumble of 
 journalism. All of them were written strictly with an eye 
 to what the public wanted, and Defoe had found this to be 
 first and foremost what was lifelike and lively. Sometimes, 
 as in his greatest work, Robinson Crusoe, he gave it a narrative 
 of actual life, thinly disguised and greatly elaborated. Else- 
 where, as in Duncan Campbell, there was elaboration without 
 disguise. Roxana and Moll Flanders are pure invention : yet 
 each of them has the detail and colour of reality. Defoe's keen 
 utilitarian imagination showed him exactly what veins of 
 popular curiosity might be worked with profit. The scorn 
 of fashionable critics could not stale his infinite variety : 
 sometimes it was a shipwreck he gave the public, sometimes 
 a piracy, or a tale of ghosts, or vagabondage, or prostitution. 
 If he was an artist in pot-boiling, he was also a great master 
 of the infinitely little. Much of his genius consists in the 
 rightness and precision which he imparts to his description 
 of detail, and in the resulting sense of security felt by his 
 reader. A good deal of his narrative consists of adventure or 
 intrigue or roguery in all of which effects he was helped by 
 his life-long experience. But, intriguer and adventurer as he 
 was, he had still a certain spiritual insight, and, as in Robinson 
 Crusoe, could deal at least plausibly with ethical issues. His 
 fiction is nearly always alive and readable ; and he did the 
 English novel good service at a stage when it was still uncouth 
 and unformed. 
 
 Defoe, especially in The Review, had done much toward Addison 
 bringing journalism into touch with literature : the process and 
 was completed by Richard Steele (1672-1729) and Joseph Steelc. 
 Addison (1672-1719). The outlook and work of bothmen were 
 strongly affected by the social forces of their time, of which 
 they became the conscious, and sometimes very self-conscious, 
 interpreters. The Restoration had resulted in a licentious and 
 cynical reaction against the rigid Puritanism which for twenty 
 years had gripped and held the English nation. The Puritans, 
 while doing much to purify and ennoble life, had also done 
 much to cramp and deaden it, and their attitude toward art 
 
220 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 is evidenced by their prohibition of stage performances during 
 a period of eighteen years. The most obvious symbol of the 
 revulsion against them is the court of Charles II with its 
 profligacy and wit and cynicism. In literature, the same 
 reaction inspires the anti-puritanical satire of Butler and the 
 unabashed and shameless dialogue of Kestoration comedy. 
 Puritanism, however, had bitten too deeply into the national 
 life to be disposed of by a parcel of cpurtiers and libertines. 
 It had always had its stronghold among the middle class, 
 and this, during and after the Commonwealth, had been 
 steadily growing in weight and dignity. The ever -widening 
 opportunities of commerce had given it material prosperity, 
 and with this had come fresh needs and tastes, which it often 
 strove to satisfy in ways quite other than material. The 
 religion of which it had become the chief guardian was now 
 gradually broadened and humanized by a new culture : hence 
 an order which had discarded the harshness of the old Puritan- 
 ism, yet retained its strong moral fervour, and set itself against 
 the fashionable immorality of the time. The new tendency 
 was both intensified and broadened by the appearance of the 
 coffee-houses, which gave thinking members of the middle 
 class a hitherto unknown opportunity of meeting and exchang- 
 ing their views on literature and life. Hence a quiet and steady 
 reaction in favour of order and decency a reaction furthered 
 and justified by its freedom from fanaticism. It was this spirit 
 which provided Steele and Addison with the opportunity 
 employed by them to such notable purpose in The Tatler 
 and The Spectator. 
 
 Steele's Before their collaboration in journalism, each had written 
 Early considerably in other kinds. While still a captain in the 
 Writings. Fusiliers, Steele had published The Christian Hero (1701), 
 a book of devotion which combines his characteristic moral 
 fervour with a no less characteristic frankness regarding his 
 own very definite and human failings. During the next five 
 years he wrote three plays The Funeral (1701), The Lying 
 Lover (1703), and The Tender Husband (1705), which illustrate 
 strikingly the change that had come over English drama since 
 the licentious heyday of Restoration comedy. The reaction 
 had found its most formidable expression in Jeremy Collier's 
 Short View of the Immorality and Profanity of the English 
 Stage, and is clearly evident in The Funeral. Though Steele, 
 as he tells us, wrote this comedy in order to ' enliven his 
 character ', after having been ' slighted instead of encouraged 
 for his declaration as to religion ', he was prevented, both 
 by his own instincts and by the increasing decorum of his age, 
 from taking the free fling of Etherege or Congreve, and he 
 feels at least compelled to make ' virtue and vice appear just 
 as they ought to do '. The play describes in a series of amusing, 
 if somewhat forced, situations the stratagem by which an 
 elderly nobleman, Lord Brumpton, feigns death in order to 
 test the affection of his young wife. The Lying Lover is an 
 
THE RISE OF THE PRESS 
 
 221 
 
 adaptation of Corneille's Le Menteur ; for all its brilliant 
 strokes it is handicapped by its author's subservience to 
 Collier's injunctions. It tends to justify Hazlitt's remark that 
 Steele's comedies were ' moral homilies ', and Steele himself 
 tells us that on its appearance it was * damned for its piety '. 
 The Tender Husband is less didactic ; it contains some exceed- 
 ingly unnatural situations, but also some admirably drawn 
 characters, including Sir Harry Gubbin, his yokelish son 
 Humphry, who anticipates and partly occasions Tony 
 Lumpkin, and the romantic Biddy Tipkin, an earlier Lydia 
 Languish. Interwoven with Steele's comic effects in all these 
 plays is a sentimentalism which is in part temperamental, in 
 part due to his imperfect mastery of dramatic motive and 
 material. 
 
 Steele's friendship with Addison dates from their school days Addison's 
 at Charterhouse : later, they were at Oxford together, though Early 
 at different colleges. Addison went there two years before Writings. 
 Steele, and remained as a Fellow of Magdalen, while his friend 
 was pushing his fortunes in the world. This long period of 
 learning and leisure gave mellowness to his character, while 
 his practice of Latin composition helped him to his mastery 
 of English style. His early efforts include poems in both Latin 
 and English. After leaving Oxford he travelled for four years 
 on the Continent, owing to the not wholly disinterested 
 beneficence of the Whig Ministers of State. While abroad he 
 wrote the first four acts of Gato, and after his return he 
 published his Remarks on Italy. But his first work of real 
 importance was The Campaign (1704), a poem in heroic couplets 
 written at the request of Halifax and Godolphin, in celebration 
 of Maryborough and Blenheim. As a whole it is conventional, 
 and has been described by Warton as ' a gazette in rhyme ' ; 
 but it has a certain dignity, and there is power in the descrip- 
 tion of Marlborpugh's generalship in the battle and in the 
 comparison of him to the angel who 
 
 pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, 
 Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm. 
 
 The chief remaining work of Addison's earlier manhood was 
 an unsuccessful opera named Rosamond (1706). 
 
 Neither writer reached his full strength till the period of The 
 The Tatler, which first appeared on April 12, 1709, and was Taller. 
 published tri-weekly till January 2, 1711. Steele was now, 
 as generally, in financial straits, and saw a chance of using 
 profitably the knowledge and experience he had gained as 
 Government Gazetteer. This was the material cause of the 
 paper's existence. The final cause was the instruction and 
 edification of thoughtful men and women. Edification, as has 
 been shown, had always been congenial to Steele. His 
 official appointments had given him an inner knowledge of 
 public affairs, domestic and foreign : to this he added the wide 
 acquaintance with human nature which, like Addison, he had 
 
222 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 gained in the coffee-houses. Addison began to write for the 
 paper after the first few weeks of its existence, and supple- 
 mented Steele's experience with the fruits of his scholarship 
 and travel. The objects of the magazine, and their close 
 connexion with the coffee-houses, are indicated by Steele in 
 his introductory advertisement : * All accounts of gallantry, 
 pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of 
 White's Chocolate House ; poetry under that of Wills' 
 Coffee-House ; foreign and domestic news, you will have from 
 St. James' Coffee-House : and what else I shall on any other 
 subject offer. shall be dated from my own apartment.' For 
 added picturesqueness, Steele published the paper under 
 the fictitious name and personality of Isaac Bickerstaff, 
 a pseudonym invented by Swift, and used by him in the 
 perpetration of his famous hoax on Partridge, the almanac - 
 maker. At first The Tatler kept fairly closely to its professed 
 objects, and its accounts of the drama, politics, and fashion 
 are full of the detail and colour of the age. Throughout them 
 Steele keeps to his intention of rallying ' all those singularities 
 of human life, through the different professions and characters 
 in it which obstruct anything that was truly good and great '. 
 The rallying was often done with humour, sometimes more 
 gravely, and occasionally, as in his onslaughts on duelling and 
 
 faming, with a fervour which makes it no longer rallying at all. 
 n The Tatler, Steele also developed the character -sketch, as 
 in his admirable picture of Jenny Distaff and her husband, 
 Tranquillus. His description of his own father's death is 
 written with moving pathos. Yet Steele's contributions to 
 The Tatler were often hastily written, and they lack the grace 
 and polish which from the beginning distinguished the articles 
 of Addison. ' The elegance, purity, and correctness which 
 appeared in his (Addison's) style, were not so much to my 
 purpose,' he writes. Many of Addison's contributions consist 
 of that delicately satirical portraiture which he continued in 
 The Spectator, often failing to better the brilliancy of his earlier 
 efforts. It was probably also largely owing to Addison that 
 The Tatler gradually discarded the provision of news, and 
 depended more and more on the free, yet carefully finished, 
 occasional essay. The share of each writer is accurately 
 indicated by Professor Courthope : ' Though it was doubtless 
 Addison's fine workmanship and admirable method which 
 carried to perfection the style of writing initiated in The 
 Tatler, yet there is scarcely a department of essay writing 
 developed in The Spectator which does not owe its origin to 
 Steele.' 
 
 The reasons for The Toiler's discontinuance are complex 
 and somewhat obscure. In certain of its later numbers 
 Steele had attacked Harley, yet on the succession of the 
 Tories to office had received his help and protection. In these 
 circumstances he seems to have thought it inadvisable to 
 continue a publication with such a political past ; but there 
 
THE RISE OF THE PRESS 223 
 
 was a more essential reason for his decision. Both his experi- 
 ence and Addison's had shown them that their main strength 
 and opportunity lay rather in the essay than in the news- 
 letter ; and they now projected a publication which should 
 disregard almost entirely the reporting of fact, and should 
 confine itself to the criticism, grave and gay, of life and 
 conduct. The result was the Spectator, which made its first The 
 appearance on March 1, 1711, and continued to appear Spec 
 daily till December 6, 1712, supplying one essay only as the 
 content of each issue. All but a very few of the papers were 
 written by Steele and Addison : the rest came from Hughes, 
 Tickell, and Addison's cousin, Eustace Budgell. The Spectator 
 took for its theme the doings of men, their thoughts, books, 
 fashions, loves, and humours. Much of it was written in the 
 satirical moralizing vein which both writers had Already 
 perfected and made popular. The great success of Bickerstaff 
 led to the conception of the ' Spectator ' as a personage whose 
 comment and criticism might give unity to the miscellany ; 
 and fresh figures were added, representing contemporary 
 interests and opinions. Chief among these was the old, 
 chivalrous, and lovable Sir Koger de Coverley, a splendid 
 survival of the cavalier and feudal ideal. Sir Andrew Freeport 
 is a merchant, hard-headed, prosperous, and, to many, some- 
 what uninteresting. The Army is represented by Captain 
 Sentry, the world of letters and criticism by the Templar : 
 there is also a clergyman. A figure characteristic of the time 
 is Will Honeycomb, a younger son growing old, yet unwearied 
 in fashionable trifling. This set forms a club in itself, and 
 includes representatives of the chief existing coffee-houses. 
 Through these personalities, Steele and Addison were enabled 
 to interpret and criticize their age, while supplying the human 
 interest of the novel and the character -sketch. Their master- 
 piece is undoubtedly the noble and touching figure of Sir 
 Roger. To him both authors contributed their finest strokes : 
 if his death-scene is Addison's, the most memorable portrayal 
 of his love-affair is Steele's. In the Coverley papers, as in 
 the remaining Spectators, the qualities of the two writers 
 remain distinct and complementary. The fervour which often 
 transfigures Steele's morality is set off by Addison's measured 
 and ironical reflection. 
 
 The contrast may be made by setting Steele's papers on 
 education, 1 jealousy, 2 and scandal 3 beside Addison's on 
 religious enthusiasm and excess, 4 manners, 5 and bores. 6 
 Steele's serious Spectators are saved from tediousness by their 
 ethical intensity. Addison's, though sincere, are lit with no 
 such fervour, and when his irony fails, they frequently become 
 tedious. 7 Many of the essays treat of women, and endeavour 
 to raise their status from the depth to which it had been 
 reduced by the cynical libertinism of the Restoration. This 
 
 1 Spectator, No. 230. 2 Ibid. 194. 3 Ibid. 348. 4 Ibid. 201. 
 Ibid. 11 H. 8 Ibid. 371. 7 Cf. ibid. 441, 501. 
 
224 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 aim is especially marked in Steele, who declares his ambition 
 ' to make the word wife the most agreeable and delightful 
 name in Nature V endorses the claim of sensible women to be 
 addressed sensibly by men, 2 enlarges on the joys of happy, 3 
 and the miseries of utilitarian, 4 marriages, and admonishes 
 women for their good in his remarks on the * henpeckt ', and 
 the duel of sex. 5 Addison's best contributions on this theme 
 are generally in lighter vein, as in his papers on suffragettes, 6 
 and hooped skirts : 7 when he tries to improve the occasion he 
 is frequently ineffective. His wide reading and fine sense of 
 literature are displayed in many papers : thus he formulates 
 theories of tragedy, 8 genius, and art, 9 declares his love of old 
 ballads, 10 appraises Pope's Essay on Criticism? 1 writes with 
 discrimination on Homer and Virgil, and interprets Milton 
 in a series of essays all the more remarkable in view of the 
 imperfect contemporary sense of his genius. Those modern 
 readers who find no great attraction in the more serious 
 Spectators, will surely find their account in the lighter ones 
 in Steele's racy rallying of those who are ' extremely learned 
 and knotty * in expounding the obvious : 12 in his whimsical 
 ' letter from the Emperor of China to the Pope ' 13 ; in his 
 rollicking description of the ' infirmary for those who should 
 be out of humour ' 14 ; or they may take joy in Addison's 
 inimitable description of the Spectator's dialogue with the 
 stage-lion in Hydaspes 15 ; in his account of that formidable 
 dramatic critic, ' the trunkmaker of the upper gallery ' 16 ; 
 or of the Widows' Club, 17 or of the French * Academy for 
 Politics '. 18 If Steele be allowed as he surely must be allowed 
 greater originality and natural force, Addison was incontest- 
 ably the finer artist. Lacking the intensity and great sweep 
 of Dry den, he handled English prose with unparalleled ease 
 and finish, and showed its writers a new perfection. Hardly less 
 precious was the infinite variety which he and Steele imparted 
 to the essay, and the wide possibilities which they opened up 
 for their followers. The Spectator often deals in material not 
 usually handled by the essayist, and contains many elements 
 of the novel and the short story. 
 
 After its cessation Steele published another daily, The 
 Guardian, and for a few numbers enjoyed Addison's co-opera- 
 tion. But over and above its purely literary features, the 
 paper dealt in politics, which soon proved its undoing. 
 Steele's subsequent connexion with The Englishman, and other 
 papers, is almost entirely political, and need not here concern 
 us. In 1722 he wrote and produced his last play, The Conscious 
 Lovers, a well-made but artificial and over-serious comedy. 
 Addison, too, in his last years wrote a comedy entitled The 
 
 1 Spectator, No. 490. 2 Ibid. 534. 
 5 Ibid. 176. Ibid. 81. 
 
 9 Ibid. 160. 10 Ibid. 70, 74, 85. 
 
 13 Ibid. 545. 14 Ibid. 429. 
 
 17 Ibid. 561. Ibid. 305. 
 
 3 Ibid. 479. 
 
 7 Ibid. 127. 
 
 11 Ibid. 253. 
 
 13 Ibid. 13. 
 
 Ibid. 522. 
 8 Ibid. 237. 
 12 Ibid. 138. 
 ' Ibid. 235. 
 
THE RISE OF THE PRESS 225 
 
 Drummer, which contains some brilliant dialogue but is other- 
 wise inferior. More famous in its day, but not more satisfying 
 to posterity, is Cato, a dignified and frozen tragedy in blank 
 verse. Had Addison and Steele not handled the essay, their 
 names would not be familiar, as they are, to all Englishmen. 
 
 Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is the greatest and most terrible Swift- 
 prose satirist in our language, though his sponsor in letters Early 
 was the urbane Sir William Temple. During his stay at Moor Writings 
 Park as Temple's secretary he wrote two of his most famous 
 works, A Tale of a Tub (1696) and The Battle of the Books 
 (1697). Primarily, the Tale is a satire on Roman Catholicism, 
 Presbyterianism, and, in a lesser degree, on Anglicanism ; but 
 in its numerous digressions, Swift's satire plays acridly and 
 freely over life and letters. The Battle of the Books was written 
 in support of Temple and against Bentley, who had respec- 
 tively championed the Ancients and the Moderns in a famous 
 controversy of the day. Swift handled Bentley, and his ally 
 Wotton, with savage scorn, and pointed his moral by comparing 
 the Moderns to a spider spinning dirt, poison, and pedantry 
 out of its own entrails, and the Ancients to a bee going to the 
 flowers and blossoms of Nature, thence filling its hive ' with 
 honey and wax, and thus furnishing mankind with the two 
 noblest of things, which are sweetness and light '. The Tale 
 of a Tub, though not directed against religion, had been far 
 from orthodox ; but orthodoxy's claims were fully honoured 
 in the satirical and brilliantly -named Argument to Prove that 
 the abolishing of Christianity may, as things now stand, be 
 attended with some inconveniences, and perhaps not produce 
 those many good effects proposed thereby (1708). 
 
 In 1701 Swift had written the first of his political pamphlets, 
 the Discourse on the Dissensions in Athens and Borne, which 
 remonstrated against the impeachment of Somers and his 
 Whig colleagues, and at once brought its author their goodwill 
 and favour. Swift was still a Whig when, in 1708, he wrote 
 The Sentiments of a Church of England Man ; but in 1710 
 he quarrelled with the Party concerning certain Church 
 matters, and passed over to the Tories. Their leaders, Harley 
 and St. John, now showed him favour and friendship, and, 
 in return, he rendered them invaluable aid through the articles 
 which he contributed to their organ, The Examiner. In 1711 
 he published one of his ablest political pamphlets, The Conduct 
 of the Allies, directed against the continuance of the war with 
 France and the corruption of the Whig Junto. To the same 
 class and period belong a series of other pamphlets, including 
 The Importance of the * Guardian ' Considered and The Public 
 Spirit of the Whigs both directed expressly at Steele and his 
 paper and Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs. 
 Of less importance is his strongly partisan History of the Last 
 Four Years of Queen Anne. To a different phase and period 
 belong the celebrated Drapier's Letters (1724), in which he took 
 up the cudgels for Ireland or rather for the English in 
 
226 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Ireland in consequence of a monopoly enabling a certain 
 William Wood to coin copper halfpence, and thus exploit the 
 country for the benefit of himself and the king's mistress. These 
 pamphlets do not represent the highest flights of Swift's 
 genius, but they are powerful and straightforward, and 
 produced a remarkable effect at their time. A terrible and 
 passionate piece of satire is the -Modest Proposal for Preventing 
 the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to 
 their Parents or Country (1729). Here Swift outlines with 
 minute realism a plan for using the starving children for food, 
 and thus turning them to use while putting them out of 
 their misery. 
 
 Gulliver's Like the two works just mentioned, Swift's greatest book, 
 Travels. Gulliver's Travels, was written in Ireland : he published it 
 in England in 1726. Its first two parts, the Voyages to 
 Lilliput and Brobdingnag, are known and loved by every 
 school-child for their ingenious marvels, yet remain for the 
 initiated masterpieces of satire. Beneath their whimsical 
 surface glows Swift's fiery scorn for the politicians, theologians, 
 and militarists of England, and, ultimately, for mankind in 
 general. The midgets symbolize the pettiness, the giants the 
 grossness, of human kind. Yet Swift does not stickle for 
 allegorical consistency if he sees a chance of making a point 
 against his race. Thus the King of Brobdingnag is no longer 
 cynosure but critic when he comments on Gulliver's account 
 of human progress and civilization : ' the bulk of your natives 
 appear to me to be the most pernicious race of odious little 
 vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl on the face of the 
 earth.' The savagery of the attack, and the fierce exultant 
 coarseness with which it is delivered, wax throughout the 
 Voyage to Laputa, till they reach their ghastly culmination 
 in the contrast drawn between those wise and gentle horses, 
 the Houyhnhnms, and their subjects, the unspeakable human- 
 like Yahoos. The Laputans, who conduct imbecile and often 
 disgusting experiments in an Academy on a floating island, 
 represent the scientific pedants who had always met with 
 Swift's contempt. The Yahoos are the most appalling 
 embodiment of his scorn for man, and there is something 
 almost Satanic in the joy with which he records their filthiness 
 of body and soul. There is no more powerful and sinister 
 touch in all Swift than the one in which Gulliver, on his return, 
 is shown loathing the touch and odour of his own wife and 
 children, so near are they to the detested race. 
 
 His Later Two remarkable productions, A Complete Collection of Genteel 
 Writings, and Ingenious Conversation (1738) and the Directions to 
 Servants, were written shortly before the black period of 
 insanity in which his life ended. The Collection is amusing 
 and racy, the Directions are grim, biting, and full of Swift's 
 ferocious misanthropy. 
 
 His Verse. Throughout his life he wrote verse, very little of which rises 
 to the level of poetry. An early Pindaric Ode elicited Dryden's 
 
THE RISE OF THE PRESS 227 
 
 remark, ' Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet.' The Windsor 
 Prophecy, Fable of Midas, and Legion Club are fierce and 
 polemical. The Journal of a Modern Lady and Lady's Dressing 
 Room embody his growing preoccupation with filth and decay 
 in their relations to human life. Swift has left a good deal of 
 easy occasional verse. His most celebrated poem is Cadenus 
 and Vanessa (1713) which tells the tale of the ill-fated infatua- 
 tion conceived for him by Heater Vanhomrigh. The prose Jour- 
 nal to Stella (1710-13) stands apart among Swift's writings. 
 It was written from London, during the height of his connexion 
 with the Tory leaders, to Esther Johnson, the woman whom he 
 loved, yet, according to the best account, never married. It 
 is a remarkable picture both of his life and hers, and of 
 English politics and politicians. But for many its main 
 interest lies in its revelation of the tenderness which could 
 find place in Swift's haughty and savage soul. 
 
 Swift, as has been stated above, is beyond all reasonable His place 
 doubt the greatest prose satirist in our language ; and his among 
 satire, as the foregoing survey has shown, is an utterly different Satirists, 
 thing from that of either Steele or Addison. Both of these, 
 in their several ways, had a kindly feeling for the men and 
 women who were the objects of their ridicule or blame ; and 
 their kindliness is never far to seek in their writings. Such 
 a feeling, as we know from Swift's life, was strong in his nature ; 
 but it is seldom explicit in his writings, which are constantly 
 kindled and made terrible by the will to destroy. Yet his 
 scorn is an utterly different thing from the cold and acrid 
 cynicism under which some writers have disguised their lack 
 of heart : it is winged with passion, and is the outcome of 
 a great idealism warped and foiled. Swift is a fierce angel, 
 but he is not a lost or fallen one. 
 
 Swift, Steele, Addison, and perhaps Defoe, occupy a place 
 apart in the prose of the period. Prominent among the rest 
 was John Arbuthnot, High Tory, Court Physician to Queen Arbuth- 
 Anne, and close friend of Pope, who addressed to him one of not. 
 his most spirited verse epistles. Like Pope and Swift, he was 
 a member of the Scriblerus Club, and as a result of this con- 
 nexion he wrote the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a collec- 
 tion of satires ridiculing 'all the false tastes in learning'. 
 He has left much miscellaneous writing ; but his most famous 
 work is certainly that racy political satire, the History of John 
 Bull. He has much of Swift's wit and irony, yet he wielded 
 these with a difference. He justified Thackeray's description 
 of him as * one of the wisest, wittiest, most accomplished, 
 gentlest of mankind '. 
 
 More of Swift's bitterness appears in the writings of another Boling- 
 of his friends, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678- broke. 
 1751), the great Tory statesman. At different periods during 
 his stormy career he founded political journals, and con 
 tributed freely to them. He wrote extensively on history and 
 politics : left some instructive correspondence, inspired 
 
228 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Pope's Essay on Man through his philosophical speculations, 
 and, in A Letter to Sir William Wyndham, has given the world 
 a disingenuous but readable apologia. His Idea of a Patriot 
 King a king who besides reigning, governs wisely and in his 
 people's interest was widely read in its day, and has had some 
 effect on later political thought, including Disraeli's. The 
 eager, fiery quality of Bolingbroke's nature passes into his 
 best prose, and gives it eloquence and a certain splendour 
 a splendour which seldom reaches sublimity. His writing is 
 lucid and spirited, yet rarely profound. For all his qualities 
 he leaves one with a strange sense of disappointment. 
 tShaftes- In philosophy and theology, the age produced some notable 
 bury. writers. Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713), third Earl of 
 Shaftesbury and grandson of ' Achitophel ' , published his 
 miscellaneous writings in 1711, under the title Characteristics 
 of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Throughout these he 
 showed strong leanings toward Deism, and also strove to 
 prove that the self -regarding principle of human conduct was 
 reconcilable with the spirit of self-sacrifice. Shaftesbury 's 
 thought, though keen, is not of the first order : his style has 
 the right eighteenth-century lucidity, but is mannered and 
 over-polished. 
 
 Berkeley. Greater than Shaftesbury, both in thought and style, is 
 George Berkeley (1685-1753), one of the very first among 
 English philosophers. From the metaphysical standpoint his 
 chief works are his Essay towards a New Theory of Vision 
 (1709) and the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), in which 
 he starts from Locke's standpoint, but subsequently transcends 
 it, proving that matter has no existence apart from idea, and 
 maintaining the existence of ' an omnipresent eternal Mind 
 which knows and comprehends all things and exhibits them 
 to our view in such a manner and according to such rules as 
 He Himself hath ordained, and are by us termed laws of 
 Nature'. In Alciphron, or the Minute Philosopher (1732), 
 he confutes the Deists, and others of the unorthodox, with 
 remarkable grace, brilliancy, and force. His Hylas, also 
 a dialogue, is more positive, and sets forth some of his main 
 philosophic principles. Siris (1744) contains his celebrated 
 testimony to the healing virtues of tar -water ; but besides 
 prescribing for this for the body, it prescribes idealism for the 
 soul, and shows an increasing mysticism of outlook. Berkeley's 
 style is not only clear and forcible, but possesses a delicacy 
 and beauty all too rare in English philosophical writing. 
 His use of irony in Alciphron is superb. The earnestness and 
 charm of his writings give him the same sway over his readers 
 that he exerted in the flesh over his friends. 
 
 Among the chief religious writers of the period are Joseph 
 Butler, Bishop of Durham (1692-1752), and William Law 
 (1686-1761). Butler's best-known work is The Analogy of 
 Eeligion, Natural and Eevealed, to the Constitution and Course 
 of Nature (1736) ; but there is also much stimulating thought 
 
 Joseph 
 Bntler. 
 
THE RISE OF THE PRESS 229 
 
 in his Fifteen Sermons (1726). Lacking Berkeley's gift of 
 style, Butler comes little short of him in intellectual profundity. 
 Law is best known by his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy 
 Life (1729), a book of great power and charm, which has pro- 
 foundly affected many generations of Englishmen and has set 
 its mark on thinkers so diverse as Charles Wesley and Samuel 
 Johnson. Some of Law's most remarkable work was written 
 during the latter part of his life, after he had come beneath 
 the influence of the German mystic, Jacob Boehme. 
 
 Of lesser note are Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), philosopher Lesser 
 and theologian ; that highly unorthodox divine, Conyers Prose 
 Middleton (1683-1750); and Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Writers! 
 Rochester (1662-1732), scholar, critic, and friend and fellow- 
 clubman of Swift and Pope. Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733), 
 though far from religious himself, was the cause of much 
 religious activity in others. His cynical Fable of the Bees 
 ( 1723), which in its final form is part verse, part prose, brought 
 replies from Hutcheson, Berkeley, Law, and others. 
 
 The main critical theories of the day have already been Critics, 
 discussed in relation to their greater exponents. With these, 
 as with lesser men, there was commonly an exaggerated 
 reverence for classical example, frequently combined with 
 a tendency to disparage preceding English poetry for its 
 ' incorrectness ' and failure to comply with the classical model. 
 The reductio ad absurdum of all this may be found in the 
 Short View of Tragedy (1692) of Thomas Rymer, in which 
 Shakespeare is tried at the bar of ' correctness ' and found guilty 
 on several counts. Only slightly more discriminating is John 
 Dennis, who, in his Essay on Shakespeare (1712), asserts that 
 if Shakespeare ' had had the advantage of art and learning, 
 he would have surpassed the very best and strongest of the 
 Ancients '. Dennis has erudition and a certain force, and 
 occasionally shows critical acumen. In some of Pope's most 
 scornful lines, he is coupled with Charles Gildon. author of 
 a book on The English Dramatic Poets (1691), to whom he 
 is certainly superior. The greatest triumphs of Richard 
 Bentley (1662-1742) were won in the field of classical scholar- Bentley. 
 ship, and he was one of the greatest men who ever entered that 
 field. His interest for ourselves lies chiefly in his controversial 
 writings, which include his Dissertation (1699) on the so-called 
 Epistles ofPhalaris, and his Remarks on the Discourse of Free- 
 thinking of Anthony Collins. Bentley writes strong trenchant 
 English, and his great learning gives his treatises dignity and 
 weight. It was unfortunate for his contemporary reputation 
 that he incurred the wrath of the two most terrible satirists 
 of his day Swift, who attacked him in the Battle of the Books, 
 and Pope, who made him the * hero ' of the Fourth Book of 
 the Dunciad. The most unfortunate thing he ever did was 
 to edit Paradise Lost as if it were a classical text, and to 
 ' improve ' it with his own emendations. We may pass from 
 him to his chief castigator. 
 
230 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 POPE AND QUEEN ANNE POETRY 
 
 The Poetry of Pope His relation to his age Qualities of Queen 
 Anne poetry Prior, Gay, Young Minors. 
 
 Pope's ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1 744) from boyhood had set his heart 
 
 Ea^y on literary glory, and had tried to fit himself for its achieve- 
 Wntmgs. men t by diligent reading and writing. Though his own testi- 
 mony regarding the details of his life is in general untrust- 
 worthy, there is little exaggeration in his famous profession : 
 
 As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, 
 I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came. 
 
 The trend of his youthful genius was moulded by the greater 
 genius of Dryden, for whom he expressed the deepest admira- 
 tion and reverence. He had read widely in English, French, 
 and classical literature, achieving his knowledge of Homer and 
 Ovid partly at first hand, partly through the translations of 
 Ogilby and Sandys. His first essays in poetry found favour 
 with the judicious : 
 
 Granville the polite, 
 And knowing Walsh would tell me I could write. 
 
 In 1709 he published in Tonson's Miscellany the Pastorals of 
 which he afterwards writes : 
 
 Like gentle Fanny's was my flowery theme. 
 A painted mistress, or a purling stream. 
 
 These poems were doubtless suggested by Nature, as Pope had 
 seen her in the pleasant home of his boyhood at Binfield ; but 
 if we may judge from his references to her, he was not pro- 
 foundly stirred by her beauty, as Milton and Wordsworth in 
 their youthful verse show themselves to have been stirred by 
 a similar sojourn. These poems afe prentice work, and are 
 chiefly noticeable for their metrical smoothness and perfection, 
 and for certain passages of pleasant fancy. More notable is 
 The Essay his Essay on Criticism, written when he was twenty-one, and 
 on Criti- published in 1711. This work contains little original thought, 
 cism. being largely an exhortation to follow the classics, in the sense 
 prescribed by Boileau, Le Bossu, and their English followers ; 
 but it is of value as showing what the age of reason meant by 
 poetry and by poetry's concomitants, ' nature ', ' wit ', * under- 
 standing ', and ' the rules '. Pope's heroic couplet is here 
 polished, incisive, and antithetical, though it has not achieved 
 the happy colloquialism of his later work. Windsor Forest 
 (1713) has some fine descriptive passages, and represents a great 
 advance on the earlier Pastorals. 
 
 The Rape In 1712 Pope published the first draft of The Rape of the Lock, 
 of the a poem celebrating in light and spirited mock-heroic verse the 
 Lock 
 
POPE AND QUEEN ANNE POETRY 231 
 
 exploit of a certain Lord Petre, who had cut a lock from the 
 hair of the beautiful Arabella Fermor during an entertainment 
 at Hampton. There is nothing more delicately playful in the 
 language than Pope's description of ' Belinda's ' toilet. He 
 here had a subject which suited him exactly, inasmuch as it 
 evoked fancy without challenging imagination. We may 
 agree with Dr. Johnson ' that the Rape of the Lock is the most 
 airy, the most ingenious and the most delightful of all Pope's 
 compositions'. In 1714 the poem was published in a revised 
 form, with the ingenious additional ' machinery ' of the sylphs. 
 
 In 1717 Pope published two poems, the Elegy to the Memory 
 of an Unfortunate Lady and Eloisa to Abelard, which represent 
 an element of passion and romance very rare in his work. The 
 Elegy deals with a subject similar to that of Swinburne's 
 beautiful Choriambics the suicide of a young and beautiful 
 woman. Such romantic intensity as inspires this poem and 
 Eloisa has seldom been achieved in the end-stopped couplet. 
 
 Pope had now achieved the literary glory which he so eagerlv HJ S 
 desired. Addison and Swift, the greatest of living English Homer. 
 writers, had recognized his genius, and had admitted him as 
 wellnigh their equal : he had either gained, or was on the way 
 to gain, the friendship of Oxford, Bolingbroke, Atterbury, 
 Arbuthnot, Peterborough, and other leading men of the day. 
 This popularity was turned to practical account through the 
 publication of his translation of the Iliad (1715-20), to which 
 everybody of importance in England subscribed. This book 
 brought him an increase both of money and fame. It was 
 a daring thing for one knowing but little Greek to think of 
 translating Homer at all ; and it was hardly less daring for 
 such a one to choose the end -stopped rhyming couplet as the 
 equivalent of the Homeric hexameter. This metre could never 
 be adopted for an epic in an age which, like our own, had been 
 familiarized with the freely over -run couplets of Tristram of 
 Lyonesse, or with the longer and more swinging couplets of 
 Sigurd the Volsung. Pope's version is neither Homer nor is it 
 magnificent. It lacks the simplicity so justly postulated by 
 Matthew Arnold as an essential of good Homeric translation, 
 and it lacks, too, the speed and fire which constantly inspire 
 Chapman's version. Yet it has been greatly praised by great 
 men, and possesses both vigour and distinction. Less excellent, 
 and less successful, is his translation of the Odyssey, in which he 
 was helped by Fenton and Broome. 
 
 Pope's early works, as we have seen, had brought him repu- The 
 tation : his Homer gave him supremacy. But his success had Dunciad. 
 made him many enemies, especially among the Grub Street 
 critics of the day ; and against these, and his rivals, he directed 
 his next work/TAe Dunciad (1728). This great and terrible 
 satire originally consisted of three books, and took for its ' hero ' 
 Theobald, who had published an edition of Shakespeare that 
 challenged Pope's, and in the opinion of posterity, has surpassed 
 it. Later, a fourth book was added, with Bentley for its butt. 
 
232 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The Age 
 of Pope. 
 
 In a subsequent edition of the poem, Theobald was displaced in 
 favour of Colley Gibber, the famous actor and playwright, who 
 had slighted Pope and had never been forgiven. Besides these 
 worthies, there were a host of minor victims the critics Dennis 
 and G-ildon, orator Henley, Hervey the fop, and the rascally 
 publisher, Curll. Pope's satire is more virulent and personal, 
 less large and Olympian, than that of Dryden, his master and 
 model. Much of the Dunciad is of a more than Swiftian foul- 
 ness : yet the poem's wit and satire and fierce joy make it 
 readable to most men at some moments and in some moods. 
 Pope's Essay on Man, much praised in England in its own day, 
 and still regarded in foreign countries as his greatest work, is 
 brilliant and well finished rather than comprehensive or pro- 
 found. The Moral Essays (1731-35) are an offshoot of it and 
 deal with riches, taste, and the characters of men and women. 
 But the best of Pope's later work consists of his Epistles and 
 Satires in imitation of Horace, in which he returns to the 
 satiric and colloquial vein, which perhaps represents his great- 
 est strength. The Prologue to the Satires (or the Epistle to 
 Arbuthnot) has well been called his Apologia, and contains his 
 celebrated lines on Addison. The Epistle to Augustus directs 
 some deadly irony at George II and embodies a good deal of 
 instructive literary comment and criticism. These later Satires 
 contain Pope's most satisfying, though not his most ambitious, 
 work. His couplet here has all its old strength, together with 
 a certain new ease and flexibility. His language has developed 
 the flow and liveliness of the best conversation. It is sensible, 
 witty, and, at its best, urbane : to offer more was hardly within 
 the power of the man or his century. 
 
 Pope represents many essential qualities of his age. 
 Thoroughly in accordance with eighteenth-century standards 
 is the imitation of the Ancients which he preached in his Essay 
 on Criticism, and practised in his later epistles. In the spirit of 
 his age, too, are his insistence on ' the Kules ' of poetry, his 
 belief that those Kules might be deduced from a close study of 
 classical writers, his conviction that these writers had ex- 
 hausted ' Nature ', and that the Moderns could only realize her 
 through their medium, his constant inculcation of order and 
 restraint, and his belief that these qualities could only find 
 their highest expression in the end-stopped couplet. Yet this 
 common matter is adapted to new ends with astonishing tact 
 and skill. That each of these poems should rank as a master- 
 piece indicates at once the strength and the limitations of its 
 author. It shows with what determination and success he 
 could put his theories into practice ; but it also shows that his 
 triumphs, and the triumphs of his age, could be compassed 
 through sheer ingenuity. Not thus was written the great 
 poetry of the age of Wordsworth. When this is inspired by 
 classical influence, as in Hyperion, Laodamia, and Prometheus 
 Unbound, there has been a free rehandling of an original theme, 
 and the miracle has been wrought, not through imitation, but 
 
POPE AND QUEEN ANNE POETRY 233 
 
 through imagination working in obedience to its own law. It 
 is significant, moreover, that, despite Pope's Homer, he, like 
 Dryden and Johnson, was far more strongly influenced by 
 Roman literature than by Greek. The reverse is the case when 
 we pass to Keats and Shelley, each of whom was profoundly 
 swayed by Greek thought and poetry. The resultant poetry 
 manifests not only a new profundity and freedom, but an 
 utterly changed outlook. 
 
 This change reappears strikingly in the different views of 
 Nature conceived during the two periods. Perhaps never in 
 the course of English literature was her name more often cited 
 by writers in prose or verse ; but the Nature which appears in 
 Pope's Essay on Man, and even in Young's Night Thoughts, 
 was not so much a thing different from the Nature of Lines 
 written above Tintern Abbey or Lewti, as one in direct conflict 
 with it. Nature with the generation of Popevhad meant largely 
 the common sense of man fortified by such logical arguments of 
 analogy and design as could be derived from the order of the 
 universe : there is barely a hint of the Power with which 
 Wordsworth was to hold solitary and mystical communing. 
 Imagination, which with Coleridge was to mean inspiration, 
 in Addison meant little more than rhetorical ingenuity, and 
 natural beauty, which to Coleridge and Scott could only be 
 sublime in its wildest aspects, was most delightful to the 
 average Augustan when trimmed and pruned to the compass 
 of a garden. Pope is in many ways the symbol of this spirit. 
 Not only does he exemplify many of his generation's opinions 
 regarding literature and life, but he possesses in an astonishing 
 degree the polish and brilliancy which it prized so highly, and 
 for which it has been so highly prized by posterity. But in 
 certain other essential qualities of the Age of Reason, Pope is 
 conspicuously deficient. He lacks its calm, and has small 
 measure of its broad sanity. He lacks the magnanimity of its 
 greatest characters ; and his high-pitched energy is a thing more 
 febrile and less elemental than the massive strength of Dryden 
 before, and of Johnson after, him. Yet any theory of criticism 
 which denies him the title of a great poet is sadly lacking in 
 breadth and insight. 
 
 The polish and urbanity of the age is richly evident in the Prior, 
 style of Matthew Prior (1664-1721), who is a master of lighter 
 English verse in more than one of its kinds. Little value now 
 attaches to his more serious and pretentious poems, Solomon 
 on the Vanity of the World, and the Carmen Saeculare in honour 
 of William III. Under the title Henry and Emma he attempted 
 to re-write in couplets the beautiful fourteenth-century Nut- 
 brown Maid : with such measure, or lack, of success as may be 
 gathered from the lines : 
 
 Now night advanced. The house in sleep were laid, 
 
 The nurse experienced and the prying maid ; 
 
 And last that sprite which does incessant haunt 
 
 The lover's steps, the ancient maiden aunt. 
 13 
 
234 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 His semi-Hudibrastic Alma, or the Progress of the Mind, a poem 
 in three cantos, contains some lively strokes of wit, but often 
 wearies, generally through over-ingenuity. Prior had con- 
 siderable learning, and, even in Alma, was by no means a super- 
 ficial thinker ; but his real strength lies in his lighter and 
 shorter pieces. He writes vers d' occasion with great wit and 
 charm, and here anticipates Praed and Dobson. A masterpiece 
 in this kind is his poem to A Child of Quality, ' five years old, 
 the author forty ' : 
 
 Nor quality nor reputation 
 
 Forbid me yet my flame to tell ; 
 Dear iive-years-old befriends my passion, 
 
 And I may write till she can spell. 
 
 Not less admirable are The Secretary, a brief and lively de- 
 scription of a pleasure- jaunt at The Hague, and the Ballad of 
 Down Hall, which narrates with glee and gusto his journey into 
 Essex in search of a house. Very delightful, too, is The Female 
 Phaeton, with its concluding stanza : 
 
 Fondness prevailed, mamma gave way, 
 
 Kitty at heart's desire 
 Obtained the chariot for a day, 
 
 And set the world on fire. 
 
 Prior has left two or three coarse and racy fabliaux : he con- 
 cludes one poem approximating to this kind The English 
 Padlock with a moral at once sane and charming. His finest 
 piece of humorous character-drawing is the inimitable Jinny 
 the Just : 
 
 Her will with her duty so equally stood 
 
 That, seldom opposed, she was commonly good, 
 
 And did pretty well, doing just what she would. 
 
 Some parts of the Bible by heart she recited, 
 
 And much in historical chapters delighted, 
 
 But in points about faith she was something shortsighted. 
 
 So notions and modes she referred to the schools, 
 And in matters of conscience adhered to two rules, 
 To advise with no bigots and jest with no fools. 
 
 In the Lines written in Mezaray's History of France, Prior's 
 humour, without ceasing to be humour, takes a serious and 
 beautiful turn. His best love poems Chloe and Euphelia, 
 Farewell, Aminta, and the Better Answer to Chloe, are in lighter 
 vein. He has perhaps written the wittiest verse epigrams in the 
 language : among the best of his quotable things in this kind is 
 The Remedy (' I sent for Ratcliffe'). Attention has recently 
 been drawn to the prosodic importance of much of his verse. 1 
 Though he used at need the almost universal measure of his 
 day, the heroic couplet, it did not satisfy him, and he spoke out 
 
 1 See George Saintsbury, History of English Prosody, vol. ii, pp. 423-5. 
 
POPE AND QUEEN ANNE POETRY 235 
 
 about its shortcomings in the Preface to Solomon. He sought 
 refuge from it in many other measures blank verse, the ' Pin- 
 daric ' and Spenserian stanzas, rhyming octosyllables, and, 
 above all things, in the free anapaestic measures of his own 
 devising. Of his four prose Dialogues of the Dead, the most 
 amusing is that in which the discursive and remorseless Mon- 
 taigne talks Locke's logical method out to a ribald reductio ad 
 absurdum. 
 
 John Gay (1685-1732) was most famous to his own age Gay. 
 through The Beggar's Opera (1728) : with posterity he is more 
 popular through the Fables (1727). The Opera, like The What 
 D'Ye Call It, Polly, and his remaining dramatic pieces, has 
 lost much of its savour for modern palates. Yet the lyrics 
 scattered throughout all of these are at least sprightly, and 
 The What D'Ye Gall It contains one number, 'Twas when the 
 seas were roaring, worthy to rank with Gay's most popular 
 ballad, Black-eyed Susan. The Fnbles are ingenious and 
 shrewd, and are written in flowing and occasionally slipshod 
 octosyllables. Despite their popularity his best work is not 
 to be found here, nor in his youthful blank verse poem, Wine, 
 nor yet in Rural Sports (1713), the rhyming eclogues which he 
 wrote in respectful imitation of Pope's Pastorals. His poem 
 on * that agreeable machine ' The Fan, attempts to be mock- 
 heroic, but is merely pseudo -heroic and frigid. Far more 
 amusing is The Shepherd's Week (1714), a series of burlesque 
 eclogues written at Pope's instigation as a reductio ad absurdum 
 of the sickly ' pastoral ' method of Ambrose or ' namby- 
 pamby ' Philips. In his satirical preface, Gay has his fling at 
 his victim's 'fine finical newf angle fooleries', and claims to 
 have introduced his readers to ' plain, downright, hearty, 
 cleanly folk'. 'Cleanliness' is hardly the most obvious 
 quality of Sparabella, Bumkinet, Grubbinol, Bowzybee, and 
 the rest of his creations, whose humours are often as quaintly 
 diverting as their names. Thus Bumkinet sings of his deceased 
 mistress, Blouzelind : 
 
 But now, alas ! these ears shall hear no more 
 The whining swine surround the dairy door, 
 No more her care shall fill the hollow tray, 
 To fat the guzzling hogs with floods of whey. 
 Lament, ye swine, in grunting spend your griefs 
 For you, like me, have lost your sole relief." 
 
 Of Gay s remaining long poems the most successful, despite its 
 unevenness of execution, is Trivia, or the Art of Walking the 
 Streets of London (1715). It throws a vivid light on the London 
 of its day, and contains at least one admirable mock-heroic 
 passage, besides many finely-etched portraits of contemporary 
 types. The wanderer encounters blustering hackney coachmen, 
 football-playing prentices, drunken chairmen, such midnight 
 roysterers as the ' Nicker ', the ' Scowrer', and the ' Mohock' ; 
 and, 'where Catherine Street descends into the Strand,' he 
 
236 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 lights on a street-walker, perhaps the most masterly -drawn 
 figure of the poem. Both Gray's Epistles and his Eclogues con- 
 tain admirably witty and ingenious strokes. Best among the 
 Epistles is perhaps Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece, written in 
 smooth octaves, and presenting brief and lively portraits of 
 famous contemporaries. Among the most brilliant of the 
 Eclogues is the Tea- Table, a poem compact of scandal, spite, and 
 wit. 
 
 Young. The first poem of Edward Young (1681-1765) was The Last 
 
 Day (1713), which, like its successor, The Force of Religion 
 (1714), was written in the heroic couplet, and in its combination 
 of gloom and rhetoric, anticipates the later and more famous 
 Night Thoughts. In 1719 appeared his first play, the heroic, or 
 pseudo -heroic, Busiris, and in 1721 his more famous tragedy, 
 The Revenge. His lengthy satire, The Universal Passion (1725- 
 1728), contains many shrewd strokes and vivid portraits, and 
 has a great deal of Pope's power, with less of his ferocity. But 
 his most important poem, and the only one now widely read, 
 is The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immor- 
 tality (1742-44), written when its author was over sixty. 
 This expanded title accurately indicates not only the tenor of 
 the poem, but the spirit of querulousness and gloom in which 
 it is conceived. In point of form its most obvious quality is 
 perhaps its rhetoric rhetoric often swollen with conceits and 
 sometimes lapsing into utter bathos. Headers, according to 
 their different temperaments, may feel amused or irritated at 
 such stuff as this : 
 
 Though grey our heads, our thoughts and aims are green, 
 Like damaged clocks whose hand and bell dissent, 
 Folly sings six, while Nature points at twelve ; 
 
 or 
 
 the sun, 
 Rude drunkard, rising rosy from the main ! 
 
 or 
 
 One eye on Death and one full fixed on heaven, 
 Becomes a mortal and immortal man ; 
 
 or 
 
 O Britain, infamous for suicide ! 
 
 An island in thy manners ! far disjoined 
 
 From the whole world of rationals beside t 
 
 Yet often the rhetoric has the right eighteenth -century point 
 and power, as when he writes : 
 
 'Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool, 
 
 and 
 
 Were death denied, even fools would wish to die, 
 
 and 
 
 Oh give eternity ! or thought destroy ! 
 
I'OL'E AND QUEEN ANNE POETRY 237 
 
 Sometimes it takes on a more marked and individual colour, 
 as in 
 
 Why this so sumptuous insult .o'er our head? '! 
 Why this illustrious canopy displayed ? 
 Why so magnificently lodged Despair t 
 
 and sometimes it is no longer rhetoric, but becomes pure poetrv 
 as in 
 
 this gloom of Night 
 With all her wealth, with all her radiant worlds, 
 
 and 
 
 I gaze, and as I gaze, my mounting soul 
 Catches strange fire, eternity, at thee, 
 
 and 
 
 Prisoner of earth and pent beneath the moon. 
 
 Young's sense of form is crude and uncertain, and where he 
 uses rhyme, as in his Odes {Ocean, 1728 ; Imperium Pelagi, 
 1729, &c.), he is constantly intolerable. Even in the less risky 
 medium of blank verse he can write lines like 
 
 What smooth emollients in theology 
 Recumbent virtue's downy doctors preach. 
 
 But he has probably had less than his due from modern criti- 
 cism, and in the Night Thoughts he often achieves power, and 
 sometimes beauty. Less praise can be given to his last poem, 
 Resignation (1762). 
 
 The remaining poets of the period can only receive brief Lesser 
 notice. Lady Winchilsea (1660-1720), who is Pope's ' Ardelia ', Poets, 
 and appears ' meditating song ' in Gay's Welcome from Greece, 
 wrote Pindaric Odes, including one on The Spleen (1701) ; also 
 The Prodigy (1706) and Miscellany Poems (1714). Wordsworth 
 commended her Nocturnal Reverie on account of its feeling 
 for Nature. There is merit both in her light and her serious 
 verse ; and she has the distinction of having supplied a famous 
 phrase to Pope and a beautiful idea to Shelley. Samuel Garth 
 (1660-1718), like Arbuthnot, was a physician, and his chief 
 work, The Dispensary (1699), is a burlesque poem in couplets 
 on a contemporary quarrel between physicians and apothe- 
 caries. Sir Richard Blackmore (1650-1729) wrote long, some- 
 times inordinately long, poems Prince Arthur (1695), King 
 Arthur (1697), Job (1700), Eliza (1705), and Creation (1712). 
 The last was praised by Addison and condoned by Johnson. 
 Modern criticism regards most of Blackmore's work as past 
 possibility or hope of condonation. Blackmore, if he could 
 hardly write poetry, had the gift of evoking sarcasm, and hav- 
 ing the misfortune to live a long life in a satirical age he suffered 
 in his earlier years at the hands of Dryden, and in his later at 
 those of Pope and Gay. * Granville the polite ' (Lord Lans- 
 downe) and ' knowing Walsh ', both of whom wrote far from 
 contemptible verse, are familiar through Pope's grateful ac- 
 knowledgement of encouragement received from them. The 
 
238 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Pastorals of Ambrose Philips (1675-1749) have already beeii 
 discussed in relation to Pope and Gay. Thomas Tickell (1688- 
 1740), the protege of Addison and butt of Pope, left much 
 miscellaneous and mediocre work, but will always be remem- 
 bered by his noble and fervent elegy on Addison. Thomas 
 Parnell (1679-1718) lives chiefly through three pieces The 
 Hermit, most popular throughout the eighteenth century but 
 now less thought of ; and the more distinguished Nightpiece on 
 Death and Hymn to Contentment. John Philips (1676-1709) 
 wrote an amusing Miltonic parody or burlesque called The 
 Splendid Shilling. His poem on Cider is satirically referred to 
 in Gay's poem on Wine, which it probably suggested. The 
 smaller fry of this period are numerous, but they are not for 
 our net. 
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 
 
 Rise and progress of the Novel Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, 
 Sterne Minors. 
 
 Growing WE have already traced the English novel through various 
 Vogue of stages, and have shown how it evolved toward realism through 
 the Novel, the 'character' writers and the 'Spectator', and emerged 
 full-fledged in the fiction of Defoe. Since the Revolution, the 
 drama, for reasons to be specified, had steadily decayed, and 
 with that decay the novel had gained considerably in vogue. 
 With such writers as Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, it 
 became largely a chronicle of scandal, rendered more piquant 
 by thinly-veiled portraiture of contemporary characters ; 1 
 but Addison and Swift had endeavoured, each after his own 
 way, to make literature the guardian of society, and the 
 Addisonian essay, which has often marked affinities with the 
 novel, had been given a direct, if not very profound, moral 
 aim. This ethical purpose appears under a much more sincere 
 and intense form in the religion of the English middle class, 
 who were now gaining greatly in social power and influence. 
 The older Puritanism, of which they had been the stronghold 
 during the Elizabethan period, had regained at the Revolution 
 much that it had lost at the Restoration, and subsequently 
 received a fresh lease in the teaching of Wesley and Young. 
 Both morals and religion were lit with a new fervour, and the 
 old Puritanical ^austerity was quickened and humanized by 
 a fervent emotionalism. This earnestness of feeling is combined 
 
 1 Cf. Professor Sir Walter Raleigh, The English Novel, pp. 138-9, who 
 shows that Mrs. Haywood's later and better novels, The History of 
 Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and The History of Jemmy and Jenny 
 Jessamy (1753), are strongly affected by the new influences of Richardson, 
 Fielding, and Smollett. 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 239 
 
 with a new realism of presentation in the novels of Samuel 
 Richardson (1689-1761). 
 
 As a boy he had been precocious both in sentiment and Richard- 
 conduct, and was originally intended for the Church. His son 
 first novel, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, did not appear till Pamela. 
 1740, when he was over fifty. His friends, the publishers 
 Messrs. Rivington and Osborne, had desired him to write 
 * a book of familiar letters on the useful concerns in common 
 life', and this he did with an aim at once moral and anti- 
 romantic. He wished to turn young people away from * the 
 pomp and parade of romance writing ' into courses which 
 ' might promote the cause of religion and virtue '. In this 
 mood he bethought him of a story he had heard many years 
 before of virtue tempted and persecuted, yet resisting and, in 
 the end, winning the decent triumph of marriage. From these 
 beginnings sprang Pamela, the tale of a girl left dependent on 
 the libertine son of her dead mistress. She continues to stay 
 beneath his roof while he makes repeated but unsuccessful 
 attempts upon her virtue, treating her with every circumstance 
 of insolence and perfidy. Yet in the end the reader is expected 
 to be greatly edified by finding that the heart of ' Mr. B.' has 
 been softened by her resistance, and that he offers her marriage, 
 which she accepts with trembling gratitude. It is not too 
 much to say with Sir Walter Raleigh, that in Pamela * the 
 prudential doctrine appears in its earliest and most disgusting 
 form '. Yet the novel had an astonishing vogue throughout 
 the country, for reasons by no means difficult to appreciate. 
 The extraordinary subtlety and care which went to the 
 description of Pamela and her sufferings, have still their hold 
 on Richardson's readers ; and for all the novel's length and 
 ethical fustiness, it is impossible not to feel interested in its 
 heroine and villain, in good Mrs. Jervis and odious Mrs. Jewkes, 
 and in the well-meaning ' college novice ', Mr. Williams. Far 
 less interesting are the two volumes subsequently added by 
 Richardson, which show Pamela married and still triumphant 
 over temptation. 
 
 A far greater novel is Clarissa, or the History of a Young Clarissa 
 Lady (1747-48). Richardson's moral earnestness, instead of Harlowe. 
 being cheapened into prudentialism, is here heightened into 
 tragedy. The book's prime purpose is still ethical, and it aims 
 at showing ' the distresses that may attend the misconduct 
 both of parents and children in relation to marriage ' . Lovelace 
 entices Clarissa from her home, and pursues her with his love 
 through the book's first six lengthy volumes. In the end he 
 has his will and overcomes her, though not her virtue. She 
 languishes and dies, and he falls in a duel by the hand oFher 
 kinsman, Colonel Morden. Such is the plot of this great novel, 
 which was not only read by all England in its day, but had 
 subsequently a profound effect upon European thought and 
 feeling. Throughout its eight volumes the action is scanty, 
 and apart from the central catastrophe, trivial. The same 
 
240 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 minuteness is shown in describing Lovelace's tactics and 
 Clarissa's emotions of despair, religious faith and hope, and 
 stifled love for her tormentor. Yet, despite its length, Clarissa 
 remains as readable to -day as when it moved Macaulay to tears. 
 Its appeal is due first and foremost to Richardson's masterly 
 touch on the feminine heart and soul, and to his poignant 
 sense of the tragedy implicit in such a seduction as Clarissa's. 
 Lovelace, too, with his refinement, his great gifts, and his 
 artistic reservations in villainy, remains, when criticism has 
 done its worst upon him, a vastly interesting figure. The 
 novel's obvious defects are more than redeemed by the 
 presence of a great idea, on the whole greatly carried out. 
 Sir Still longer than Clarissa, but far less great, is Sir Charles 
 
 Charles Grandison (1753-54). Here the drawbacks of Richardson's 
 Grandison. method, which is ultimately the sentimental, become very 
 apparent. Sir Charles is the perfect man, and he knows it, 
 and several women know it too, and worship him adoringly. 
 In Meredith's hands he would have been matter for comedy, 
 and might have been profitably put to the test which wrought 
 such havoc on Sir Willoughby Patterne. Or he might have 
 figured in tragedy, in which case his perfections, like Clarissa's, 
 would have become interesting. Attended as they are by his 
 own self-complacency and the admiration of all and sundry, 
 they are little less than odious ; and when he confers himself 
 magnanimously on the grateful Harriet Byron, we wish to be 
 shown him suing to Clara Middleton, or even to Laetitia Dale. 
 Yet, repulsive as the hero is, he is drawn with much psycho- 
 logical power, as are also Clementina, Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, 
 and the minors of the tale. 
 
 Fielding There is much of the woman in Richardson's character and 
 Dramas, method, but Henry Fielding (1707-1754), who planned his 
 first novel as a burlesque of Pamela, was one of the most 
 masculine intelligences in the history of our literature. He 
 began his literary career with two plays written in imitation 
 of Congreve Love in Several Masques (1728) and The Temple 
 Beau (1730). Miss Oldfield's acting helped the first to success, 
 but neither possesses much merit. The Author's Farce and 
 The Pleasures of the Town (1730) are no longer imitative, but 
 develop that satirical vein in which Fielding was to excel, and 
 draw a racy picture of London literary life. Other plays 
 followed, including Fielding's best work in drama, The Tragedy 
 of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great 
 (1731). This has been justly described as 'one of the best 
 burlesques overwritten '. In 1736 Fielding produced Pasquin 
 and The Historical Register at the Little Theatre (Haymarket), 
 of which he had become the lessee. In 1739 he edited The 
 Champion, a paper largely modelled on The Spectator, but 
 substituting for Sir Roger, Will Honeycomb and their club, 
 the much less successful Vinegar family. 
 
 Joseph A far more important piece of work came from his hand in 
 
 Andrews. 1742. Pamela had seemed namby-pamby work to Fielding's 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 241 
 
 robust mind ; and he resolved to write a novel which should 
 be its reductio ad absurdum. He therefore invented a brother 
 for Pamela, the footman Joseph, whose virtue was attacked 
 by his mistress, Lady Booby, even as Pamela's had been 
 attacked by ' Mr. B.'. Thus were conceived the amusing 
 opening scenes of Joseph Andrews (1742) which introduce the 
 rascally and inimitable confidante, Mrs. Slipslop. But beneath 
 Fielding's hand the novel soon grew beyond its original scope, 
 and ceasing to be a burlesque, became a rollicking romance in 
 its own right. As soon as that muscular Christian, scholar, 
 and fantastic, Parson Adams, appears upon the scene, he takes 
 precedence of Joseph and his sweetheart Fanny, and for all 
 readers becomes the lovable and admirable, if ludicrous, hero 
 of the book. A more odious fantastic is the hog -fancying 
 Parson Trulliber. 
 
 Fielding's three volumes of Miscellanies (1743) contain, Jonath 
 besides much other work, the admirable Lucianic dialogue, Wild, 
 A Journey from this World to the Next, and The History of the 
 Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Or eat. Mr. Austin 
 Dobson has justly styled this book ' a model of sustained and 
 sleepless irony ' . The irony is directed toward showing that 
 worldly greatness, as commonly understood, and as embodied 
 in the career of the famous thief-taker, is a thing infinitely 
 superior to virtue. * Jonathan Wild ', says Fielding, * had 
 every qualification necessary to form a great man. He was 
 entirely free from those low vices of modesty and good nature, 
 which, as he said, implied a total negation of human greatness, 
 and were the only qualities which absolutely rendered a man 
 incapable of making a considerable figure in the world.' Such 
 a passage as this, both in form and spirit, suggests the writings 
 of M. Anatole France, who also resembles Fielding in his 
 admiration for the moral goodness that is founded in humility ; 
 but Fielding's irony is a far fiercer thing than that of the great 
 Frenchman, which ' disarms anger ' and helps to sweeten 
 life. 
 
 In 1749 Fielding published his masterpiece, The History of Tom 
 Tom Jones, a Foundling. Here there was no longer, as in Jones. 
 Joseph Andrews, a divided purpose of construction : Fielding 
 puts confidently forth into that ' new province of writing ' 
 which he claimed to have discovered. He avoids ' the highest 
 life' as affording ' very little Humour or Entertainment ', and 
 aspires to fill ' his pages with Humour till mankind learn the 
 Goodnature to laugh at the follies of others and the Humility 
 to grieve at their own '. The love story between Tom and the 
 charming Sophia Western is told realistically, and without any 
 of that false sentiment which Fielding attributed to Richardson. 
 We find here treated in Comedy the theme presented tragically 
 in Richard Feverel that of a woman whose lover is unfaithful 
 to her, yet still loves her. Lady Bellenden, Tom's fair and 
 unscrupulous seducer, is drawn with masterly and merciless 
 power. Less masterly, perhaps, is the portrait of the villain, 
 
242 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Blifil ; but Squire Western, the racy and brutal, and the 
 grotesque schoolmaster, Partridge, are vital and unforgettable. 
 
 Amelia. Amelia (1751), Fielding's last novel, has not the width and 
 sweep of Tom Jones, but in the portrayal of its chief character 
 it shows deeper pathos and insight. Amelia, the wife who 
 realizes clearly her husband's wrongdoing against her, and 
 feels it intensely, but forgives and even forgets it, is drawn 
 with the greatest feeling and beauty. In hands less sure, 
 such a character might have become insipid, and even imbecile ; 
 but Fielding has given her not only sentiment but soul and 
 brain. Hardly less mastery is shown in the drawing of the 
 dissolute Miss Matthews. 
 
 Fielding, despite the prejudiced verdict of Johnson, certainly 
 must take precedence of Richardson as a writer of prose fiction. 
 He first gave classic form to the English novel, and made it 
 a thing of symmetry and power, using free, clear, and vigorous 
 language to describe the common life of men. Both in feeling 
 and style he ensues the essential things, and in his highest 
 work he has mastered the twin arts of construction and 
 omission. His genius first put the English novel on a level 
 with English poetry and drama. 
 
 Smollett. Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771), like Fielding, began as 
 a dramatist, writing in 1739 his unsuccessful blank verse 
 tragedy, The Regicide. During the succeeding years he 
 published several pieces of satirical verse, but his first novel, 
 The Adventures of Roderick Random, did not appear till 1748. 
 He states in the preface that in writing it he has followed the 
 scheme of Le Sage's Gil Bias, with certain modifications. The 
 Spanish picaresque novel had been familiar to England, in 
 translations, from the sixteenth century onwards, and the 
 form had been handled independently and successfully by 
 Defoe and others. Smollett took it and moulded it to his own 
 desire, importing into it much satire of his enemies, and some 
 autobiography. Many of the nautical scenes which give 
 Roderick Random its racy and distinctive flavour, represent 
 his own experience, for he had been a naval surgeon in 
 Vernon's ill-starred expedition to Cartagena. The novel was 
 an immediate success, and was succeeded by Peregrine Pickle 
 (1751), Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1752), Sir Launcelot Greaves 
 (1760), and Humphry Clinker (1771). Roughly speaking, 
 these conform to a common type, and have little plot or 
 construction. Peregrine Pickle is from first to last a series of 
 elaborate practical jokes perpetrated by its scapegrace ' hero ' 
 and his assistants, on all and sundry. The most attractive 
 and memorable character in the book is Peregrine's uncle, the 
 old sea-dog, Commodore Hawser Trunnion. The description 
 of his household, ' The Garrison ', and his housemates, Captain 
 Jack Hatchway and Tom Pipes, is inimitably rollicking and 
 vivacious. Far less successful novels are Count Fathom and 
 Sir Launcelot Greaves, which respectively describe a scoundrel 
 clearly suggested by Fielding's Jonathan Wild and a 
 
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL 243 
 
 modern Don Quixote. Smollett's greatest novel is his last, 
 Humphry Clinker, a story, mainly farcical, of adventure in 
 England and Scotland, which contains such brilliant figures of 
 comedy as the irascible yet tender-hearted Squire, Matthew 
 Bramble, his sour sister Tabitha, and the gossiping servant 
 maid, Winifred Jenkins, whose ill-spelt letters are masterpieces 
 of ingenious fooling. But the greatest character of the book, 
 the greatest indeed that Smollett ever drew, is Lismahago, the 
 proud and needy Scottish soldier of fortune, a worthy proto- 
 type of Kittmeister Dugald Dalgetty. 
 
 Judged even by the most liberal modern standard, Smollett's 
 novels are coarse, brutal, and frequently cruel. Most of them 
 are rife with that fierce rancour which was deep-seated in his 
 nature. Even in his most mellow work, Humphry Clinker, 
 there is little of the broad charity and sympathy which are 
 never far to seek in Fielding, even in his most satirical moments. 
 On the other hand, Smollett's three best novels have a splendid 
 vitality, and his best descriptive passages for example that 
 very gruesome one of the ship's hospital in Roderick Random 
 are admirably vivid. In Roderick Random he dealt authentic- 
 ally with the sailor, practically for the first time in English 
 fiction. Smollett is also important through his influence on 
 succeeding novelists notably on Charles Dickens. His chief 
 remaining works are his erudite and popular History of England 
 (1757-65), his entertaining account of his Travels through 
 France and Italy (1766), and his rancorous and Kabelaisian 
 political lampoon, The Adventures of an Atom (1769). His 
 poetry can find no mention here. 
 
 Many, indeed most, of Smollett's best-remembered types Sterne 
 were eccentrics ; but there was little that was eccentric in his Tristram 
 presentation of them. The method of Laurence Sterne (1713- Shandy. 
 1768), however, is as whimsical as any of his characters ; 
 indeed, his peculiar position in English literature depends 
 largely on his personal attitude, or attitudes, towards life. 
 His great novel. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 
 Gent., did not appear till he was forty-seven. It is safe to say 
 that the reading public has never been so gulled by a book's 
 title, and that never has the gulling been so greatly to its 
 advantage. So far is the work from being a ' Life ' of Tristram 
 Shandy, that, as has been frequently pointed out, he is not 
 born till the third volume, and makes no appearance at all 
 in the seventh and eighth. The ' opinions ', moreover, on 
 which the book hangs, are those, not of Tristram, but of the 
 crotchety philosopher, his father, a figure * humorous ' as any 
 in Jonson, yet handled with a quite un-Jonsonian lightness 
 and inconsequence. Yet not even Walter Shandy holds the 
 honours of the novel : these must be parted between Uncle 
 Toby, perhaps the most finely-drawn English eccentric outside 
 Shakespeare, and his faithful servant and fellow-campaigner, 
 Corporal Trim. These characters, together with the widow 
 Wadman. Mrs. Shandy, and Dr. Slop, help to make up a work 
 
244 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 which is at once Rabelaisian, sentimental, pathetic, whimsical, 
 and prurient. Its whole method depends on whimsicality and 
 surprise, and on scorn of method as commonly understood 
 and practised in fiction. Much of Sterne's sensibility is 
 mawkish and forced, but a good deal of it is real and moving, 
 and passes quite naturally into that humour which Thackeray 
 denied him, but which is delightfully present on almost every 
 I>age he wrote. 
 
 The Senti- The Sentimental Journey is a slighter thing than Tristram 
 mental Shandy, but to many it is equally precious. Every one re- 
 Journey. members the simple-minded valet, La Fleur, and the adventures 
 of Yorick with the snuff-taking monk, and with the beautiful 
 grisette of the periwig shop. Here, too, in the meditations on 
 the captive starling, and the dead ass, appears that sensibility 
 to the fate and suffering of animals which was to reappear 
 with more simplicity and sincerity in Cowper. Certain critics 
 of our own day have made far too much of Sterne's prurience, 
 and far too little of his more positive and delectable qualities. 
 Lesser Each of the four great writers discussed in this chapter 1 
 
 Novelists, gave the novel new significance and opportunity, and helped 
 to make possible its manifold modern developments. Before 
 their day its activities had been groping and tentative, and 
 its position inferior : after they had written, it took its place 
 in English as a classic kind beside lyric and drama. All the 
 four, but especially Richardson and Smollett, wore freely 
 imitated by the minor novelists of their day. More important 
 than such imitations are The History o/Pompey the Little ( 1751 ) 
 and Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea 
 (1760), both of which develop from the picaresque novel, but 
 are given a strongly satirical turn. The first describes the 
 adventures of a lap-dog, which, like the guinea, frequently 
 changes hands, and is made the medium for much shrewd 
 hitting at contemporary characters. Of a certain importance 
 in their different kinds are David Simple (1744), a moderately 
 successful novel of character by Fielding's sister Sarah ; 
 Almoran and Hamet (1761), by Dr. Hawkesworth, written 
 after the model of Easselas, but more tediously ; and Peter 
 Wilkins (1751), by Robert Partook, a novel of miraculous 
 adventure, chiefly memorable for its charming heroine, the 
 winged Youwarkee. There is interest, if not method, in the 
 madness of .Thomas Amory's John Buncle (1756), a strange 
 novel much admired by Hazlitt. 
 
 1 The novels of Goldsmith and Johnson are discussed under the 
 heading of their general work ; and one or two late minors of the period 
 are reserved for a subsequent chapter. 
 
245 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 
 
 Causes of the Drama's decay The new staging Dramatic types and 
 tendencies Classical and romantic plays Domestic dramas : Lillo 
 and others Sentimental drama Comedy and burlesque 
 
 Sheridan. 
 
 THE most splendid period of the English theatre the only Decline of 
 one, indeed, during which great poetic drama regularly held English 
 the stage falls between the year 1587, which saw the pro- J 
 duction of Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and 1642, when the theatres 
 were closed. After this there was practically no dramatic 
 production till 1660, when a new activity began, consummate 
 in at least one of its kinds, if less splendid and various than 
 the old. The Comedy of Manners persisted in the hands of 
 Vanbrugh and Farquhar till the first decade of the eighteenth 
 century, thus reaching up to the comedies of Steele, which 
 already show signs of the growing taste for sentiment. Till 
 this period English drama had been for a century and a quarter 
 in close touch with English literature, and had, indeed, ranked 
 as one of its highest kinds. .But it had already lost quality 
 shortly after the eighteenth century began ; and that entire 
 century only produced two playwrights whose work is of high 
 literary worth. We may anticipate by saying that this divorce 
 between the stage and literature has remained all but absolute 
 until our own day. The nineteenth century was by no means 
 barren of literary drama ; indeed, in poetic drama it was 
 particularly rich : yet comparatively few of its poetic plays 
 ever came upon the stage, and those which did seldom held 
 their place. This strange and unsatisfactory state of affairs 
 needs closer examination. 
 
 Various causes have been assigned for the decline of Causes 
 eighteenth-century drama. It is said that the literary play * tne 
 was crushed out by the growth of less literary rivals panto- Decline, 
 mime, dumb-show, Italian opera, and ballad opera. The 
 growth of the novel is said to have lessened the taste for 
 playgoing, especially among the thoughtful and respectable 
 classes, to whom the licence of the stage nad become repugnant. 
 Finally, it is claimed that the increasing vogue of the player 
 and the higher specialization of his art threw the play into 
 the background, and caused it to deteriorate. 
 
 Some of these considerations it would seem difficult to 
 establish : others are effects rather than causes. There were 
 other forms of popular entertainment than drama during the 
 Elizabethan period : yet it is not seriously claimed that 
 Shakespeare's plays would have been better had there been 
 no bear-gardens on the Bankside. Again, the respectable 
 bourgeois might easily have gone to many mid-eighteenth- 
 
246 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 century plays in England without danger of being shocked : 
 many plays had, indeed, been written with express regard to 
 his moral foibles, and he would doubtless have patronized 
 these had he found them interesting. Nor again, is it easy to 
 admit the contention that the play deteriorates as the actor's 
 art advances : l it would be much more easy, and much more 
 relevant to the dramatic conditions of the period, to show 
 that where plays are already bad the player is sometimes 
 thrown back on his own resources, with a possibility of gain 
 for his art. The main causes of the drama's decline must be 
 sought elsewhere. 
 
 Change in The Elizabethan stage had been a platform stage running 
 Stage out promontory -wise among the audience. Before the end of 
 Structure, the sixteenth century, comparatively little use was made of 
 scenery or properties ; and although shortly before the closing 
 of the theatres provision had been made for changes of scene, 
 even then the ' painted cloths ' were mainly confined to the 
 background, and can have made little impression upon the 
 numerous spectators who perforce regarded the platform from 
 the sides. Hence the place of action on the stage of Shake- 
 speare and Jonson was indicated rather by symbol than by 
 illusion : the spectators were expected to * work, work, their 
 thoughts ' 2 in order to conjure up a given scene, instead of 
 having its semblance more or less realistically set before their 
 eyes. This deficiency in scenery, if it caused the audience 
 a certain imaginative effort, also gave the author great freedom 
 and opportunity. He could vary the scene as often and as 
 abruptly as he liked : he was independent of the scene-painter ; 
 indeed, to the great gain of our literature, he was forced to 
 become his own scene-painter, and to use vivid descriptive 
 poetry for the enlightenment of his audience. Owing to the 
 very vagueness of his stage, he could choose and handle his 
 themes according to the natural bent of his genius, and could 
 write with large technique and free inspiration. The variety 
 and might of Elizabethan drama are at least in some sense 
 due to the structure of the Elizabethan stage. 
 
 The history of the theatre between the Restoration and 
 our own day is that of the transformation of the platform - 
 stage into a picture-stage, and the consequent substitution of 
 illusion for symbol. This change, which had a profound effect 
 on the form of English drama, was gradual, yet can be clearly 
 
 1 It is difficult, too, to allow the claim that Garrick's art was more 
 highly specialized than Betterton's, or that he engrossed more of the 
 public attention. As against this, see Pepys's admiring references to Bet- 
 terton's acting, and the detailed account given by Colley Gibber, in his 
 autobiography, of Betterton and his twelve chief contemporaries. Gibber 
 concludes : * May we not venture to say that they had not their equals 
 at any one time upon any theatre in Europe ? . . . No stage at any one 
 period could show thirteen actors standing all in equal lights of excellence 
 in their profession.' 
 
 8 Henry V, Act III, Prologue, line 25. 
 
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 
 
 247 
 
 traced through its various stages. Almost immediately after 
 the Restoration the proscenium, which had already existed 
 before the Commonwealth, was freely employed, and helped 
 to sever the audience from the front of the stage. The back 
 stage grew in size, and the curtain, which in the Elizabethan 
 theatre had shut off only a small corridor or alcove, was now 
 thrust further forward. The front stage was correspondingly de- 
 creased, and was eventually seen from the side by certain box- 
 holders only, instead of, as in the Elizabethan play-house, by a 
 great number of the spectators standing in the ' yard '. While 
 these developments were occurring, the stage scenery was be- 
 coming more various and elaborate, and was employed on the 
 front part of the stage and at its sides, no less than at its back. 
 In 1762 spectators were excluded from the stage, and the 
 auditorium was enlarged to receive the resulting overflow. 
 In many theatres a few boxes remained behind the proscenium 
 till the nineteenth century, but this did not effect the general 
 change of structure. For the great majority of the spectators, 
 the stage was no longer a reciting -platform jutting into their 
 midst, and supported in certain cases by a meagre back scene : 
 it had assumed the form of a picture, of which the proscenium 
 was the frame a picture from which they were excluded, and 
 at which they gazed from without. The growing elaboration 
 of scenery made it possible, and indeed necessary, to accom- 
 pany the action of the play by an elaborate illusion of reality, 
 instead of by its mere suggestion. In his conceptions of place 
 and setting the playwright was limited to developments 
 suitable to the scene-painter, who first became his rival, and 
 then his master and tyrant, overwhelming his descriptive 
 poetry with his own more showy and tawdry devices. 
 
 Although various kinds of romantic play still continued to Effect of 
 hold the theatre, it was obvious that the new staging made the New 
 rather for realism than for romance, for prose rather than for Staging. 
 poetry, for quiet and life-like dialogue rather than for splendid 
 declamation. For a considerable while many survivals of 
 Elizabethan acting and setting continued to hold a stage to 
 which they were no longer appropriate ; and it is only in our 
 own age that the actors have learnt, for the sake of increased 
 realism, to abolish the aside, to restrict very rigorously the 
 use of the soliloquy, and to act throughout as if unconscious 
 of the spectators' presence. The modern picture stage is now 
 regarded both by player, playwright, and spectator, as a room 
 out of which one side has been knocked, and into which the 
 audience are only allowed to peep by stealth. Obviously such 
 a condition of things has favoured the realistic prose play, and 
 has handicapped the romantic and poetic. In some countries 
 it has been possible to overcome this handicap by the institution 
 of theatres subsidized by the State, in which drama can be 
 performed without regard to the box-office receipts, and the 
 audience can be educated till it gets over the initial incon- 
 gruity between the romantic play and the realistic stage. In 
 
248 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 continental countries possessing such theatres, the romantic 
 drama still flourishes, and the tradition thus kept alive has 
 affected and improved the repertory of privately -managed 
 houses. But in England, where there is no national theatre, 
 the private act or -manager is content to follow the line of 
 least resistance, with the result that, for nearly two and a half 
 centuries, little romantic drama of the first order has been 
 written for the English stage, and none so written has held its 
 place. This change in the structure of the stage, combined 
 with the influence of the modern commercial actor-manager, 
 must be held a main cause of the decay of English drama. 
 Classic A second cause must be sought in the general attitude of 
 
 an d the eighteenth century toward literature and life. The great- 
 
 Romantic nesg o | Elizabethan drama had been largely due to the freedom 
 1 lays. an( j v ar i e ty in which the national spirit had found expression. 
 The growing tendency toward order and restriction, though 
 it was favourable to some kinds of literature, was certainly 
 not so to romantic drama, whether tragedy or comedy. The 
 quickened moral sense of the period, which gave a certain 
 impetus both to the essay and to satire, appears less acceptably 
 in the ' moralized dramas ' of Gibber, and in the sentimentalized 
 comedies of Steele, and provokes, by a natural and significant 
 reaction, such licentious drama as that of Mrs. Centlivre 
 (1680-1722). The prevailing classicism of the age takes 
 dramatic shape in many adaptations from Corneille and 
 Kacine, and in a series of original plays ranging from Addison's 
 Cato'to Johnson's Irene. Toward the middle of the century, 
 classical drama was given a fresh impetus through adaptations 
 of Voltaire's plays, and the production of many plays written 
 on the Voltairean model by Arthur Murphy and others. Yet 
 the romantic element was kept alive in constant revivals of 
 Shakespeare, and in such tragedies as The Revenge and Busiris 
 of Edward Young (1681-1765), which show signs of Elizabethan 
 influence. Romantic after a somewhat different fashion was 
 the Douglas (1756) of John Home (1722-1808), a play very 
 famous in its time, yet now little read, and chiefly familiar 
 through the serio-comic suggestion of the quotation * My name 
 is Norval'. Some years later Hannah More attempted, in 
 Percy, to fit the spirit of romantic tragedy to the fashionable 
 taste for moral casuistry. 
 
 Lillo and Different in spirit and technique, and embodying a conscious 
 others. reaction against both the classical and the romantic play, are 
 the domestic tragedies of George Lillo (1693-1739). The 
 London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell (1731), is 
 written in prose, and is based upon an Elizabethan ballad 
 narrating the fall of a prentice who had taken to evil courses. 
 The Fatal Curiosity (1736), written in uninspired blank verse, 
 follows the model of Arden of Feversham and The Yorkshire 
 Tragedy, and tells the story of a Cornish murder case. Lillo 
 also adapted Shakespeare, and attempted romantic tragedy ; 
 but his chief importance is due to the plays just named, which, 
 
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 249 
 
 though far from intrinsically great, had a notable effect on the 
 development of eighteenth-century drama, mainly through 
 their preoccupation with the sentimental and familiar. Senti- 
 mental drama had by this time firmly occupied the English 
 stage, and had issued both in tragedy and in comedy. Later in 
 the century it finds expression in the False Delicacy (1768) of 
 Hugh Kelly, and, after a different fashion, in The Brothers 
 (1769) and The West Indian (1771) of Kichard Cumberland,- 
 who is the original of Sheridan's Sir Fretful Plagiary. In his 
 mingling of the sentimental interest with the interest of 
 adventure, and in his use of exaggerated effects, Cumberland 
 anticipates the modern melodrama. 
 
 Though comedy reaches no very high level throughout the Comedy 
 earlier part of the eighteenth century, on the whole it suffered and Bur- 
 less than tragedy from the effects just indicated. It was lesque. 
 occasionally, indeed, stimulated by both the classical and the 
 romantic tendencies of contemporary drama to a certain 
 vigour of reaction, finding outlet in such free burlesques as 
 Fielding's Tom Thumb the Great (1731) and Henry Carey's 
 Chrononhotonthologos (1734). These plays proclaim their 
 satiric intent by their respective sub-titles, The Tragedy of 
 Tragedies and The Most Tragical Tragedy ever Tragediz'd by 
 any Company of Tragedians. The sentimental pitfall is avoided 
 in such spirited comedies as The Fair Quaker of Deal, by 
 Charles Shadwell a nephew of Dryden's ' Og ' and The 
 Suspicious Husband (1747), by Joseph Hoadly, son of a famous 
 ecclesiastic. Similar freedom and robustness characterize many 
 plays by George Colman the elder (1732-1794), a prolific writer 
 whose best work is to be found in The Jealous Wife (1761) and 
 The Clandestine Marriage (1766), a comedy written in colla- 
 boration with David Garrick. Pantomime had early estab- 
 lished itself upon the eighteenth-century stage : farce also 
 was in continual favour, being regularly produced by Garrick 
 during his managership of Drury Lane (1747-76), and receiving 
 a racy topical turn from Samuel Foote * (1720-1777). The 
 satirical and topical element was also strong in the ballad 
 opera, which reached its triumph in Gay's Beggar's Opera 
 (1728), and received a fresh lease of popularity in Isaac 
 Bickerstaff's Padlock (1768). 
 
 It is significant of the national instinct in dramatic matters, 
 that the two leading English playwrights of the eighteenth 
 century achieved their triumphs through the more robust 
 and elemental effects of comedy, rather than by recourse to 
 the come'die larmoyante. Goldsmith's plays, and their relation 
 to the spirit of their time, will be discussed separately. The 
 first play of Sheridan (1751-1816), The Bivals (1775), depends Sheridan 
 in large measure for its success on its ingenious plot, which its The 
 author took over from tradition, and refashioned with fresh Rivals. 
 and brilliant skill. But the rollicking interest of situation is 
 heightened by the sure and spirited drawing of the main 
 
 1 Author of The Minor, The Mayor of Garralt, The Maid of Bath. 
 
250 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 characters, Sir Anthony Absolute, Mrs. Malaprop, Sir Lucius 
 O'Trigger, and Bob Acres, all of whom rank among the great 
 comic figures of our literature. The dialogue of this superb 
 farce is quick and sparkling, and its structure and colouring 
 are in nearly all ways admirable. A concession to the pre- 
 vailing taste of the day is evident in the sentimental underplot 
 between Falkland and Julia. The Rivals, though not written 
 in the highest style of English comedy, nor of Sheridan, is 
 a masterpiece in a delightful kind. 
 
 Sheridan's next play, St. Patrick's Day (1775), is a farce, 
 hastily written and startlingly inferior to its predecessor. 
 The Duenna contains flashes of wit, 1 but owes what interest 
 it commands rather to its ingenious, if not wholly original, 
 situations than to any particular brilliancy of dialogue or 
 character drawing. In 1777 Sheridan produced A Trip to 
 Scarborough, a skilful rehandling of Vanbrugh's Relapse ; and 
 in the same year appeared his greatest play, The School for 
 Scandal, which has justly been described as the ' last great 
 English comedy ' . Though here, as generally, he drew upon 
 conventional types, he has shaped these into such living and 
 unforgettable figures as Charles Surface, fine-souled beneath 
 his libertinism, Joseph Surface, the scoundrelly ' man of 
 sentiment', and Lady Teazle, the flighty, wavering, and. in 
 the end, repentant woman of fashion. In the main plot of 
 the play Sheridan reaches his highest flight of comedy : more 
 obvious humours are embodied in the 'grotesques', Sir Ben- 
 jamin Backbite, Crab tree, Mrs. Candour, and the rest of the 
 ' School ', who by no means equal the ' grotesques ' of The 
 Rivals. The dialogue has not only wit, but the peculiar ease 
 and fling distinctive of all Sheridan's best work. The School 
 for Scandal has not quite the elemental quality of Moliere's 
 highest comedy, but it is a masterly portrayal of the manners 
 of its time, and of the psychology of fashionable society in all 
 times. 
 
 The Critic. In The Critic (1779), Sheridan has his merry fling at the 
 dramatic affectations of his day. The first act introduces 
 certain hangers-on of the stage, drawn with malicious and 
 brilliant satire the vicious criticaster Sneer, the stage-struck 
 Dangle, Sir Fretful Plagiary, and Puff, that inimitably -drawn 
 dramatic factotum. Puff is at once author and producer of 
 the fantastic historic drama, The Spanish Armada, which 
 supplies the roaring fun of the last two acts, and is the most 
 brilliant dramatic caricature in the language. The loves of 
 Whisk erandos and Tilburina are a joy for ever, and The Critic, 
 though not the greatest, is surely the most laughable of 
 Sheridan's plays. 
 
 The remaining dramatists of the period may be briefly 
 1 As when Donna Louisa remarks to her lover, who has given up the 
 Jewish religion for an estate, but has not yet become Christian, that ho 
 ' stands like a dead wall between Church and Synagogue, or like the 
 blank leaves between the Old and New Testament '. 
 
 Lesser 
 Drama- 
 tists. 
 
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DRAMA 251 
 
 dismissed. Mrs. Hannah Cowley wrote a series of comedies 
 including The Eunaway (1776) and The Belle's Stratagem 
 (1780) obsequiously adapted to the successive demands of 
 popular taste. General Burgoyne, in The Heiress (1786), has 
 left a comedy of higher, though not of the finest, quality. The 
 drama of social purpose is represented by The Eoad to Ruin 
 (1792) and The Deserted Daughter of Thomas Holcroft, and, 
 to a certain extent, by the domestic comedies of Mrs. Inchbald. 
 But by the end of the eighteenth century the stage drama, 
 mainly for the causes above specified, had almost ceased to 
 rank as one of the higher kinds of literature ; and this estrange- 
 ment remains all but absolute till the death of the nineteenth 
 century and the birth of the Repertory Theatre and the 
 modern literary play. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 
 
 The Spirit of Augustan literature Johnson, Boswell, Goldsmith, 
 Burke, Hume, Gibbon, Junius, Chesterfield, Walpole Minors. 
 
 THE period of Addison, Pope, and Swift, even more than The Spirit 
 most literary periods, had been affected by concomitant of 
 political and social conditions. The order and restraint which Augustan 
 had been imposed after the Revolution on a country wellnigh Litera- 
 distraught by civil war and Stuart misrule, had had its ture - 
 parallel in the literary reaction against the licence of the * meta- 
 physical ' school and against the imaginative excesses which 
 Dryden had not hesitated to attribute even to Shakespeare. 
 The particular form of the heroic couplet which reached its 
 perfection in Pope was an admirable antidote to the metrical 
 laxity which had been growing in blank verse from the day of 
 Fletcher to that of Nicholas Rowe. The towering imagination 
 of the Elizabethans had been ' trashed for overtopping ', and 
 their widely differing attempts, for the most part unconscious, 
 to realize the Absolute and Unconditioned, had been replaced 
 by a school of ' philosophical ' poetry devoted to speculations 
 mainly ethical, which was content, for the most part, to take 
 God for granted, and was little concerned with any attempt, 
 whether wistful or passionate, to bridge the gulf between Him 
 and man. The * metaphysical quiverings ' which have been 
 described by a great French critic as the chief glory of Roman- 
 ticism, had died away with Donne, and were not to quicken 
 into a fresh blaze till the day of Wordsworth's immediate 
 forerunners. 
 
 The age was, indeed, not one of imagination and idealism in 
 the transcendental, yet possibly too exclusive sense, which our 
 own age has attached to these terms, but one of sense and 
 sanity, of breadth rather than of profundity, of virile and 
 
252 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 sometimes pseudo-virile robustness, of distaste for the misty 
 and the mystical, and of a tendency to regard Nature merely 
 as a savage and unkempt condition which was slowly and 
 beneficently being reformed into order by the civilizing hand 
 of man. And in this process Man was a seeker, not for the 
 infinity dear to the Romantic soul, but for finality ; nature, 
 society, and literature being conceived as kinds whose species 
 he would one day exhaust and perfect, were his judgment but 
 kept sufficiently true and his industry sufficiently unflagging 
 and methodical. 
 
 Johnson. Unless these antecedent conditions are understood, it will 
 be difficult to comprehend the genius of Samuel Johnson (1709- 
 1784), in which the massive strength of the eighteenth century 
 reaches its culmination. The last great interpreter of the Age 
 of Sense, he became one of the earliest victims of the Age of 
 Imagination. The reaction against him had begun well before 
 the end of the eighteenth century it is already evident in a 
 youthful satire of Chatterton's ; and it prejudiced his reputa- 
 tion as thinker and critic throughout a great part of the nine- 
 teenth century, despite the joy taken by almost all in the man 
 Johnson as presented by trie genius of Boswell. During the 
 last twenty years Johnson has come back into his own, and 
 perhaps even into a little more than his own, largely through the 
 splendid advocacy of such writers as Sir Walter Raleigh and 
 Mr. John Bailey. In our own eclectic generation, it would be 
 almost as dangerous to disparage him as to disparage Blake. 
 Our present interest in him begins after he had given up school- 
 mastering at Market Bosworth, and had thrown himself on 
 literature and London, bringing with him his friend and pupil, 
 Grarrick, and his cold tragedy, Irene. For several years poverty, 
 journalism, and translation were his portion. His invention 
 was quickened and his style strengthened by the largely 
 imaginary Parliamentary Debates which he contributed to the 
 Early Gentleman's Magazine. In 1738 he published London, a poem 
 Verse and written in imitation of Juvenal, which attracted the notice and 
 Prose. approval of Pope, and consequently of the town. In 1744 
 appeared his life of his friend, Richard Savage, that unhappy 
 Bohemian and ' very incommodious inmate ' of his friends' 
 homes, ' the reigning error ' of whose life was * that he mistook 
 the love for the practice of virtue, and was indeed not so much 
 a good man as the friend of goodness'. In 1747 Johnson 
 published his Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language : 
 his completion of this great work occupied the greater part of 
 the next eight years. Yet he found time to publish, in 1749, 
 The Vanity of Human Wishes, another Juvenalian imitation, 
 which is his finest thing in verse, and conveys with great power 
 his grim and stoical reading of life. During two other years of 
 this period, from 1750 to 1752, he turned his growing fame to 
 The account by publishing The Rambler, a bi-weekly ' newspaper 
 
 Rambler. essa y ' which owes its form but as Johnson expressly warns 
 us, not its general aim or spirit to The Spectator. The 
 
THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 253 
 
 Ramblers are generally serious : sometimes they are por- 
 tentously so. Johnson here frequently employs the lengthy 
 antithetical period, massive with Latinisms, which is generally 
 regarded as the main mark of his style. At its best this lends 
 great dignity and power to the moralizations on life, and the 
 precepts of literary criticism, which are the best part of The 
 Rambler. Few magazines written for the general public have 
 expressed so much wisdom in such memorable language. It 
 has been said that Johnson, when writing of life, deals largely 
 in commonplaces : yet his commonplaces are generally pre- 
 ferable to the paradoxes of men more brilliant and less great. 
 Thus he writes, ' To neglect at any time preparation for death 
 is to sleep on our post at a siege, but to omit it in old age is 
 to sleep at an attack.' ' Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul 
 which every new idea contributes in its passage to scour away.' 
 * He (a certain sinner) considers himself as suspended over the 
 abyss of eternal perdition only by the thread of life, which must 
 soon part by its own weakness, and which the wing of every 
 minute may divide.' Some of Johnson's Ramblers (e. g. No. 73) 
 have a bitter and Swift-like quality. His attempts at Addisonian 
 allegory (e. g. No. 91) are generally unsatisfactory, and so, for 
 the most part, are his essays in the light character sketch 
 which had been brought to such perfection in The Spectator. 
 Yet occasionally he succeeds even there, and his letter from 
 a virtuoso (No. 82) comes little short of Addison at his best. 
 When The Rambler waxes dull and, special pleading apart, it 
 does this fairly often the fault is generally of style rather 
 than sentiment, and consists in the piling up of top-heavy 
 periods. Yet considering the drawbacks under which it was 
 written drawbacks of which Johnson was acutely conscious * 
 its general excellence is remarkable. 
 
 In 1755 appeared the great Dictionary, and in 1758 Johnson The 
 produced a new paper, The Idler, which was written on the Diction- 
 lines of The Rambler, and appeared weekly till 1760. In 1759, ry Ros- 
 in the evenings of a single week, he wrote Rasselas, to pay the selas, and 
 expenses of his mother's funeral. Nominally a novel, it is Shake- 
 really an expression of his own grave views on life, and has s P eare ' 
 indeed been entitled a prose Vanity of Human Wishes. In 1756 
 had appeared his Proposals for an Edition of Shakespeare ; the 
 edition itself, after many delays, was published in 1765. His 
 notes to the various plays are written with a strong common - 
 sense which sometimes rises to genius, and often, though not 
 always, goes to the heart of Shakespeare's most difficult 
 meanings. His Preface to this edition is one of the greatest 
 
 1 Of. Rambler 208. ' He that condemns himself to compose on a stated 
 day will often bring to his task an attention dissatisfied, a memory over- 
 whelmed, an imagination embarrassed, a mind distracted with anxieties, 
 a body languishing with disease : he will sometimes labour on a barren 
 topic till it is too late to change it ; and sometimes, in the ardour of 
 invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing 
 hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.' 
 
254 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 things in his own writings, and in Shakespearean criticism. 
 Readers of our own day would unhesitatingly reject several 
 of its conclusions the view that ' in Shakespeare's tragic 
 scenes there is always something wanting ', or that ' his 
 tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct ' : yet, on 
 the whole, Shakespeare's genius has seldom been interpreted 
 with more sanity and light. Johnson steadily refuses to adopt 
 the common contemporary practice of putting Shakespeare on 
 trial before the ' Unities ' : he rebukes captious critics by 
 showing that * there is always an appeal from criticism to 
 nature ' ; and his sanity and sense kindle into enthusiasm 
 when he remarks that Shakespeare ' has perhaps excelled all 
 but Homer in securing the first purpose of a writer, by exciting 
 restless and unquenchable curiosity, and compelling him that 
 reads his work to read it through ' . 
 
 In 1775 Johnson published his Journey to the Western Islands 
 of Scotland, a most readable record of his travels in Scotland 
 with Boswell in 1773. To the last years of his life belong also 
 several political pamphlets, including The False Alarm, and 
 Taxation No Tyranny. But by far the greatest work of his 
 Lives of later years was The Lives of the Poets (1781). When Johnson 
 the Poets, wrote these, he had no longer to face the menace of ' toil, envy, 
 want, the patron and the gaol', which had put its mark on 
 his earlier life and work. He had now won fame and prosperity, 
 and could write freely and with ease, even as he talked. Here, 
 as in his Preface to Shakespeare, there is much to which 
 posterity demurs : the quite unworthy estimates, for instance, 
 of Gray and Collins ; the statements that in Lycidas ' there is 
 no nature, for there is no truth ', and that its form is that of 
 * a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting ' ; and 
 many such obiter dicta as * the fabric of a sonnet, however 
 adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours '. 
 Yet if Johnson does Lycidas scant justice, he has made amends 
 by the high and true praise he gives to Paradise Lost : ' a poem 
 which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first 
 place, and with respect to performance the second, among the 
 productions of human kind.' The Lives of Dryden, Addison, 
 and Pope, when every discount has been made, are masterly 
 pieces of biography and criticism ; and apart from more 
 positive merits, their remarks on metre and the general 
 problems of literature are invaluable to all students of eigh- 
 teenth-century criticism. Of wider and more human appeal 
 are the aphorisms scattered throughout the Lives, aphorisms 
 which represent the mature wisdom of Johnson's own life 
 expressed pithily and with masterly ease and gusto. ' Personal 
 resentment,' he tells us, ' though no laudable motive to satire, 
 can add great force to general principles.' ' It is pleasant to 
 remark how soon Pope learnt the cant of an author, and began 
 to treat critics with contempt, though he had yet suffered 
 nothing from them.' * Combinations of wickedness would 
 overwhelm the world by the advantage which licentious 
 
THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 255 
 
 principles afford, did not those who have long practised perfidy 
 grow faithless to' each other.' 
 
 Much of Johnson's writing, and especially of his literary Johnson 
 criticism, is the expression not only of the man but of his age. and his 
 Its tendency, no less than his own, is reflected in his love of Age. 
 the couplet, his dislike of pastorals, pindarics, and ' meta- 
 physical ' conceits, his suspicion of blank verse, his preference 
 of human to cosmic nature as the stuff of poetry, and his 
 demand that descriptions of natural scenery shall not descend 
 from the general to the particular. His views on these and 
 similar topics have an interest which is far more than merely 
 historical. Yet the value of Johnson as a critic, whether of 
 literature or life, depends on his greatness as a man on his 
 broad sanity and penetrating strength of intellect, his scorn 
 of all the shams of life and thought, nis fortitude and upright- 
 ness of soul on the qualities, in fine, which represent to all 
 the Englishmen who have read him with delight and love, the 
 most sterling, if not the most picturesque and imaginative, 
 expression of their national spirit. 
 
 To very many English readers who are but little read in Boswoll. 
 Johnson's writings, his mind and personality are alive 
 through the craft of James Boswell (1740-1795). Modern 
 criticism has done Boswell full justice, and has refuted Macau- 
 lay's wretched paradox that he was a fool who wrote a book 
 of genius. It is now seen that if many things in his life were 
 unwise, there were both wisdom and greatness in his love of 
 Johnson, and in the book which he wrote in the strength of 
 that love. Boswell' s interest in the cause of Corsican liberty 
 had found expression in the Account of Corsica which he 
 published in 1768 ; but his fame depends not on this nor on 
 his efforts in law and politics, but on his Journey to the Hebrides 
 (1773) and Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Few books have 
 enjoyed such popularity from the date of their publication 
 onwards : the Life is one of the greatest biographies in all 
 literature. Boswell's passionate devotion to Johnson gives his 
 portraiture its peculiar intensity and vividness : yet Boswell 
 was far too great an artist to use rhapsody, just as Johnson 
 was far too great and human a man to need it. Boswell has 
 drawn Johnson 'warts and all', realizing that idealism in 
 biography may transcend reality, but must never ignore it. 
 His narrative is at once a record of facts and the careful 
 portrait of a soul. His genius lies not only in the love and 
 conviction which he brings to his work, but in his superb 
 sense of unity and balance and detail. After the Bible and 
 Shakespeare, no book is dearer to Englishmen than Boswell's 
 Johnson. 
 
 1 Let not his frailties be remembered ; he was a very great Gold- 
 man,' wrote Johnson after the death of Oliver Goldsmith smith. 
 (1728-1774). There were frailties in Goldsmith's writings as 
 well as in his character ; but his greatness is past doubt, for 
 he excelled in verse and drama, the essay and the novel. 
 
256 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Early 
 Writings. 
 
 The 
 Citizen 
 of the 
 World. 
 
 The. Vicar 
 of Wake- 
 field. 
 
 After a fleeting experience of several universities, certain 
 vagabond travels on the Continent, and certain vain attempts 
 to qualify for various professions, he became a hack writer 
 in London, contributing to The Monthly Review and other 
 magazines, and translating from the French. His first work 
 of note was his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning 
 in Europe (1759), which compensates by its freshness and 
 originality for its deficiencies in knowledge, perspective, and 
 taste. Here he states his objections to blank verse, to the 
 * absurdities of Shakespeare ' and to * disgusting solemnity ' ; 
 here, too, he defends the portrayal of low life in literature, 
 and offers his reflections, the outcome of bitter experience, on 
 the paucity of patrons and the hard lot of English writers. 
 Better work came in the essays of the next few years, which 
 he contributed to his own short-lived periodical The Bee, to 
 Smollett's British Magazine, and to John Newbery's Public 
 Ledger. Among the best of these contributions are the City 
 Night Piece, with its pathetic reference to the outcast women 
 of London ; and the admirable Reverie in the Boar's Head 
 Tavern at East Cheap, wherein the spirit of Mrs. Quickly 
 appears to the essayist, and tells him ' in this room I have 
 lived, child, woman, and ghost, these three hundred years'. 
 In the Ledger originally appeared the Chinese Letters, re- 
 published in 1762, as The Citizen of the World. These follow 
 the device, perfected by Montesquieu and others, of using the 
 supposed comments of a visiting Oriental as a means of 
 satirizing English society and politics. In point of grace and 
 verisimilitude these papers are at a disadvantage with the 
 famous Lettres Persanes, and their satire and philosophy 
 occasionally miss fire. Yet the collection is lit with delightful 
 humour, and Goldsmith's mastery of the character sketch is 
 already evident in his portraits of the swaggering pauper, 
 Beau Tibbs, of the ' Man in Black ' who is largely Goldsmith 
 himself and of the gormandizing parson, Marrowfat. Most 
 of the letters are essays in effect, and many of them are essays 
 in form. Throughout their pages Goldsmith displays his own 
 views and preferences, including his admiration of the English 
 monarchy and of Voltaire, and his dislike of critics, warfare, 
 colonization, and Laurence Sterne, whom he accuses of ' bawdry 
 and pertness ' . 
 
 Goldsmith's long practice of the character sketch helped 
 greatly toward the success of his last important prose work, 
 The Vicar of Wakefield, which was written during 1761-2, but 
 not published till 1766. Its plot is conventional, and so is the 
 character of its main villain, Squire Thornhill ; but the family 
 of Thornhill's intended victim, Olivia Primrose, are drawn with 
 inimitable humour and delicacy, and the Vicar himself, with 
 his learning, lovable, and simple piety, and deep-rooted aversion 
 to ' deuterogamous ' parsons, is one of the great characters of 
 English fiction. Masterly, too, is the sketch of Moses, at once 
 the enfant terrible and Simple Simon of the family, and the 
 
THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 257 
 
 easy prey of that Protean scoundrel, Ephraim Jenkinson. 
 Certain of Goldsmith's own youthful experiences are preserved 
 in the tale of George, the Vicar's eldest son. Few novels in 
 the language are more thoroughly English in spirit than the 
 Vicar of WaTcefield. 
 
 Throughout his career Goldsmith wrote much miscellaneous 
 prose, including a biography of Beau Nash, Histories of Rome 
 and England, a History of Animated Nature, and many essays. 
 A very great deal of this mass is mere hackwork, lit with 
 gleams of genius. 
 
 His verse, which belongs chiefly to his middle and later His 
 years, is small in volume but various in kind, and, on the Poems, 
 whole, of remarkably high quality. His longer and more 
 serious poems, The Traveller and The Deserted Village, contain 
 some fine descriptive passages, and at their best have peculiar 
 sweetness and charm. The Traveller is the more reflective of 
 the two ; The Deserted Village contains the perfect portraits 
 of the village parson 
 
 to all the country dear, 
 And passing rich with forty pounds a year, 
 
 and of the village schoolmaster who argues before the gazing 
 rustics with * words of learned length and thundering sound ', 
 while 
 
 still the wonder grew 
 That one small head could carry all he knew. 
 
 Goldsmith's ballad, Edwin and Angelina, has no very strong 
 appeal to our own age. Of his shorter serious poems, the most 
 famous is the lyric from The Vioar of Wakefield, * When lovely 
 woman stoops to folly '. His best things in lighter vein are the 
 witty and skilful Elegies on Mrs. Mary Blaize and the Mad 
 Dog ; and two spirited pieces of occasional verse, The Haunch 
 of Venison and Retaliation. This last poem was evoked by 
 a famous sally of Garrick's, and chaffs most wittily many of 
 Goldsmith's fellow -diners at * The Club ', including Burke and 
 Sir Joshua Reynolds. 
 
 Of Goldsmith's two completed plays, The Good-matured Man His Pis 
 (1768) is a very successful comedy which has for its central 
 figure the childishly charitable and amiable Honeywood, and 
 for its most memorable minor characters the lugubrious 
 Croaker, and the vainglorious impostor, Lofty, to whose 
 vagaries 1 the play owes much of its appeal. But Goldsmith's 
 dramatic masterpiece is, of course, She Stoops to Conquer. Its 
 central episode, the mistaking of Squire Hardcastle'sliouse for 
 
 1 Of. the stroke by which Croaker is made to say to Olivia : ' Well, 
 well, it 's a good child, so say no more : but come with me and we shall 
 see something that will give us a great deal of pleasure, I promise you ; 
 old Ruggins, the curry-comb-maker, lying in state : I am told he makes 
 a very handsome corpse, and becomes his coffin prodigiously. He was 
 an intimate friend of mine, and these are friendly things we ought to do 
 for each other.' 
 
258 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 an inn, is said to have been suggested by a youthful experience 
 of Goldsmith's own. The plot is simple, but serves to supply 
 a variety of adventures, and to elicit a variety of 'humours'. 
 Mr. Hardcastle is almost as living and finished a figure as 
 Parson Primrose, and hardly less finely drawn are the sprightly 
 Miss Hardcastle and her lover, Marlow. In Tony Lumpkin, 
 Goldsmith has left a character not unworthy to rank with 
 Shakespeare's greatest comic figures. Tony's racy elemental 
 humour is consummately blended with the high comedy of 
 the piece, and the whole is suffused with Goldsmith's sweet 
 and wholesome humanity. On this play, as on all Goldsmith's 
 best work, is set the impress, not only of genius, but of a great 
 and lovable nature. 
 
 Burke. l n Edmund Burke (1729-1797) we meet one of the most 
 
 powerful thinkers of his age, and one of the great masters of 
 English prose. His mind was as complex as it was profound, 
 and this complexity has led, or misled, many into taxing him 
 with inconsistency. In political theory he is rooted in the past, 
 and takes his stand on the settlement of 1688 ; yet he has 
 swayed the most forward political thought of modern England ; 
 and it is significant of his wide sweep that both conservative 
 and liberal appeal to his authority with equal confidence. His 
 Whiggism was regarded as unorthodox by most Whigs of his 
 own day, whatever their shade of conviction ; yet he claimed 
 to the end to have been constant himself to that principle of 
 party loyalty which he always preached fervently to others. 
 He repeatedly expressed his dislike of philosophy, yet his 
 whole life and thought were informed by a profound philosophic 
 ideal. The best energies of his earlier manhood had helped 
 to keep alive the light of liberty which he saw menaced with 
 extinction in America, India, and Ireland ; yet in his later 
 years he strove with passionate earnestness to stifle with 
 reaction that wilder blaze of her kindling which was the French 
 Revolution. If, however, the later phases of his thought seem 
 inconsistent with the earlier, the inconsistencies are secondary 
 and superficial ; in all essentials his mind was constant to the 
 great convictions which had swayed it from the first. The 
 change had been in the morals and manners of the age. 
 Early His early work, the Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of 
 
 Writings, the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), stands almost alone 
 among his writings in having no political significance. Certain 
 of its speculations concerning art are trite, and certain others 
 are exaggerated and untrue, yet there is insight in his account 
 of tragedy, and of the relation of the sublime to the terrible ; 
 and if his style here lacks the sweep which it was later to 
 compass, it has a formal beauty of its own. In the same 
 year appeared A Vindication of Natural Society, in which 
 Burke borrows Bolingbroke's style, but ironically refutes 
 certain of his main ideas. It has been contended that this 
 experiment greatly affected the form of Burke's later prose ; 
 yet the swing and intensity which he was subsequently to 
 
THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 259 
 
 develop owe little to Bolingbroke's polished periods. Of 
 greater importance than the Inquiry and the Vindication are 
 the Observations on the Present State of the Nation (1769) and 
 Thoughts on the Present Discontents (1770). The Thoughts is 
 the first of Burke's really great political writings. In it he 
 comments on the circumstances of the Middlesex election, and 
 formulates, already with force and mastery, certain guiding 
 principles of British political development, and of his own 
 thought and life. 
 
 During the next few years Burke turned his best energies His 
 toward resisting the disastrous attempts of the British Govern- American 
 ment to tax the American Colonies. His wide reading in Speeches, 
 history, constitutional law, and political economy had been 
 fortified by the practical experience of politics which he had 
 gained as Member for Wendover, and through his successive 
 secretaryships to Hamilton and Rockingham. The fruits of this 
 training became evident in the two great speeches On American 
 Taxation (1774) and On Conciliation with America (1775), 
 which, with two addresses given at Bristol and his Letter to 
 the Sheriffs of Bristol, form his main contribution toward the 
 cause of American freedom. The speech on Taxation is the 
 more fiery and spontaneous of the two, and contains some 
 splendid nights of eloquence. After reviewing British policy 
 in America, Burke appeals passionately, yet with clear and 
 serried reasoning, for a liberal treatment of the colonists. His 
 pleading is glowing and intense, and is lit up with vivid 
 character sketches of Grenville, Chatham, and Townsend. The 
 speech on Conciliation is at once more comprehensive and more 
 closely knit than its predecessor, and for its consummate 
 blending of thought and eloquence may justly claim to be the 
 greatest of all Burke's orations. After reviewing the arguments 
 for and against taxation exhaustively and with penetrating 
 insight, Burke gives a masterly survey of the American 
 character, and shows that coercion of such a nation is fore- 
 doomed to failure. Both of the American speeches abound 
 in those sentiments, at once brilliant and profound, which leap 
 out of the mass of Burke's thought, and are the pith and 
 marrow of his genius. * Interested timidity disgraces as much 
 in the Cabinet as personal timidity does in the field. But 
 timidity with regard to the well-being of our country is 
 heroic virtue.' ' Oppose the ancient policy and practice of 
 the Empire as a rampart against the speculations of innovators 
 on both sides of the question, and you will stand on great, 
 manly and sure ground.' * An Englishman is the unfittest 
 person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery.' 
 * Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom ; 
 and a great empire and little minds go ill together.' 
 
 In the American speeches Burke's eloquence had been His Indian 
 winged by the greatness of his cause and of its underlying Speeches, 
 principle. Between 1780 and 1790 he puts his genius once 
 more at the service of an oppressed race, with the result 
 
260 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 apparent in his Indian orations. Chief among these are his 
 speeches on Fox's East India Bill (1783) and The Nabob of 
 Arcot's Debts (1785), and the series of indictments delivered 
 at the opening and close of the trial of Warren Hastings. 
 With the justice or injustice of his charges against Hastings 
 we are not here concerned ; but his Indian speeches, with their 
 insistence on humanity and righteousness in the treatment of 
 subject races, have profoundly affected our whole conception 
 of Indian administration, and together with his American 
 speeches, represent the highest principles of British colonial 
 policy. The Indian speeches, if they are not the greatest, are 
 the most fervent of all Burke's parliamentary deliverances, 
 and their eager scorn is lightened and relieved by such mag- 
 nificent descriptive passages as that portraying the invasion 
 of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali. 1 
 
 The third and last great issue which engrossed Burke's 
 energies was the attitude of his country and the world toward 
 the French Revolution. His conception of the State as a divine 
 organism destined for orderly, natural, and gradual growth, had 
 led him, when speaking of America, to praise the * wise and 
 salutary neglect ' through which ' a generous nature has been 
 suffered to take her own way to perfection'. The same 
 principle which had led him to uphold with all his might the 
 liberty of the colonists, now led him to resist with equal 
 vehemence the licence of the Terror. This, in his opinion, 
 threatened to destroy not only all existing political institutions, 
 but the moral and religious order of the world. His fulmina- 
 tions against the Revolutionaries and their English sympathizers 
 are conveyed, not in speeches, but in letters and pamphlets, 
 both of which forms he had already employed to good purpose 
 in his early manhood. His chief writings on this subject are 
 his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Thoughts on 
 French Affairs (1791), An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs 
 (1791), and the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1797). Of these 
 works the Reflections are the most weighty and interesting, 
 the Letters the most violent and extreme. In the Reflections 
 Burke's political philosophy is still expressed with trenchancy 
 and force ; 2 and there are passages of great eloquence, 
 including the very famous one in praise of Marie Antoinette. 
 Of the Letters, the most important is the third, with its com- 
 prehensive survey of contemporary European politics. In the 
 last year of his life Burke wrote his Letter to a Noble Lord, 
 
 1 Speech on the Nabob of ArcoCs Debts. 
 
 2 Cf . ' A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper 
 and confined views.' ' He who gave our nature to be perfected by our 
 virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection. He willed 
 therefore the State.' ' Our Church establishment is the first of our 
 prejudices : not a prejudice destitute of reason, but involving in it 
 profound and extensive wisdom.' ' A perfect democracy is the most 
 shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the 
 most fearless.' 
 
;THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 26i 
 
 addressed t6\the Duke of Bedford, who with the Earl of 
 
 ^Lauderdale had.striven to deprive him of the pension granted 
 
 . Him oy Parliament. This document is an interesting apologia 
 
 jgr i%8juithof s liffe and opinions, and is also, perhaps, the most 
 
 concentrated expression of that devastating irony which was 
 
 his favourite weapon of offence. 
 
 The greatness of Burke's style depends ultimately on The genius 
 profundity of thought kindled and sustained by intensity of of Burke 
 emotion. His expression, though it is far from being the 
 purest in the language, is probably the most passionate. But 
 his greatest speeches and writings depend on something more 
 than either ratiocination or rhapsody. They are great also in 
 structure, by dint of the architectonic faculty of which Burke 
 was a supreme master. No Englishman has ever excelled him 
 in the power of working toward a great climax through a series 
 of vivid strokes or pictures. His art in this regard is so subtle 
 and natural as almost to seem the result of accident ; but 
 close analysis of his great triumphs for instance, the Speech 
 on Conciliation with America discloses the conscious and 
 ordered purpose which has gone to make the miracle. It has 
 been said of him that ' he winds into his subject like a serpent '. 
 His imagery is lavish and various, but. in his best work, it is 
 always subordinated to the cumulative effect of the whole. 
 His wide reading of poetry, and keen delight in it, are evident 
 in his constant use of literary quotation, reminiscence, and 
 allusion. The length and pitch of his periods are varied freely, 
 and with seeming inevitableness, to the changes of his thought 
 and theme. His greatest work is always rhetorical, and that 
 view of his genius seems correct which finds its highest 
 manifestation, not in his letters and pamphlets, but in his 
 speeches, and especially in his American speeches. His faculty 
 of humour is uncertain, and the invective which wings some of 
 his highest flights at times becomes raucous and disconcerting. 
 Yet his best work has a richness and glow which seem only 
 possible where thought and feeling are interpenetrated by 
 a profound mystical conception. And in all his oratory and 
 writing there is that comprehensiveness which made Johnson 
 say of his conversation, * his stream of mind is perpetual : take 
 up whatever topic you please, he is ready to meet you '. 
 
 Passing from oratory to history and philosophy, we find Hume, 
 a master of both kinds in David Hume (1711-1776). His 
 philosophic work, 1 the greater part of which was written before 
 he was forty, is strongly sceptical. He followed Locke in 
 endeavouring to introduce ' the experimental method of 
 reasoning into moral subjects', and as a result of this attempt 
 strove to reduce all reason to 'experience'. Experience gave 
 no evidence of a soul or ego ; it reduced causality to mere 
 sequence, and it substituted sympathy or fellow-feeling for 
 1 Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Essays Moral and Political (1741- 
 1748), An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), An 
 Enquiry into the Principles of Morals (1751). 
 
262 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 reason as the basis of morality. The scepticism, and the 
 weakness, of Hume's position were due to his omission of the 
 intellectual element presupposed in experience. But he 
 restated the fundamental problems of philosophy in prose of 
 admirable dignity and clearness, and greatly influenced suc- 
 ceeding philosophic speculation. English philosophic empiri- 
 cism derives from him, and he occasioned, by reaction, much of 
 the profoundest German idealistic speculation. Outside philo- 
 sophy, his greatest work is his History of England (1754-61). 
 He began this with the reign of James I, and worked back- 
 wards from that date to the origins, and forward to the 
 Revolution. He had always had the deepest antipathy for 
 the Whig Party, and for the English, whom he believed to 
 have leagued together to destroy everything Scottish. This 
 prejudice defaces his History, especially the earlier part of it, 
 which he rewrote with the view of removing from it any 
 'villainous seditious Whig strokes', and 'plaguy prejudices 
 of Whiggism ' which it might contain. Despite this drawback, 
 Hume's history is important, through its comprehensiveness, 
 its grasp of social problems, and its powerful, polished, and 
 frequently satirical style. He was certainly one of the most 
 powerful intellects of the eighteenth century. 
 
 A more fair-minded, though less great, historian was Hume's 
 friend, William Robertson (1721-1793), who published his 
 History of Scotland in 1758-9, and his masterpiece, the History 
 oftlw Reign of Charles V, in 1769. Horace Walpole declared 
 the first of these works to be the ' best modern history ', and, 
 perhaps with greater reason, congratulated the author on the 
 purity of his English. From a strictly historical point of view, 
 both of these books are now antiquated ; but Robertson's 
 shrewdness and depth of judgment, no less than his undoubted 
 gift of style, make him a notable figure in literary history. 
 
 A greater historian than either of these, the greatest, indeed, 
 in the language, was Edward Gibbon (1737-1794). His monu- 
 mental work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was 
 projected in 1764, but the first volume was not published till 
 1776, and it was only in 1788 that the three last volumes were 
 sent to press. The History covers the centuries between the 
 
 geriod of the Antonines (the 2nd century B. c.), and the fall of 
 onstantinople to the Turks in A.D. 1453. Gibbon's out- 
 standing merits as a historian are his prodigious industry 
 in the preparation of his material ; his power of fashioning 
 that material into lucid and harmonious narrative, informed 
 by a great central idea ; and his style, weighty, antithetical, 
 and of gorgeous colour, especially admirable for description, 
 but passing easily into reflection, and into a weighty and 
 terribly effective form of satire. This last quality the 
 ' solemn sneer ' noted in him by Byron is prominent in the 
 attack on Christianity embodied in the famous conclusion to 
 his first volume. Gibbon's style, at once strongly personal 
 and strongly coloured by his age, is one of the greatest, though 
 
THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 
 
 263 
 
 not one of the purest, in the English tongue. Of his supremacy 
 as a historian, we may allow his fellow-historian, Mr. Freeman, 
 to speak : ' That Gibbon should ever be displaced seems 
 impossible. That wonderful man monopolized, so to speak, 
 the historical genius and the historical learning of a whole 
 generation, and left little, indeed, of either for his contempo- 
 raries. He remains the one historian of the eighteenth century 
 whom modern research has neither set aside nor threatened to 
 set aside. We may correct and improve from the stores which 
 have been opened since Gibbon's time. We may write again 
 large parts of his story from other and oftentimes more whole- 
 some points of view ; but the work of Gibbon as a whole, as 
 the encyclopaedic history of 1,300 years, as the grandest of 
 historical designs, carried out alike with wonderful power and 
 accuracy, must ever keep its place. Whatever else is read, 
 Gibbon must be read too.' 
 
 Of lesser importance than his history, but of perennial 
 fascination, is Gibbon's posthumously published Autobiography. 
 
 The true greatness of Adam Smith (1723-1790) lies in other 
 fields than the literary, but he merits mention here owing to 
 the admirably clear and forcible style of his two chief works, 
 A Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and An Enquiry into the 
 Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The 
 profound effect which this last volume has had upon our 
 national life is not matter for our present inquiry. If a writer's 
 greatness could be gauged solely by the effect he has exercised 
 on his contemporaries, William Godwin (1756-1836) would 
 certainly rank very high among the writers of the period. His 
 novels are mentioned elsewhere in this volume. In 1793 he 
 published his most important work, An Inquiry Concerning 
 Political Justice, which embodied many of the ideas implicit 
 in the French Kevolution, and added many of Godwin's own. 
 He believed that all the ills of humanity, including sickness, 
 social inequality, murder, and conjugal incompatibility, could 
 be cured by an appeal to reason. As is 'noted elsewhere, 
 Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, were all, in varying 
 extent and for varying periods, influenced by Godwin. His 
 style is lucid and flexible, but he has no humour and little 
 passion. He wrote extensively in many literary kinds, pub- 
 lishing plays, histories and biographies which need not concern 
 us here. 
 
 Many of the best letters of this period have been written 
 by authors eminent in other kinds, and have been discussed 
 in relation to their general work ; but certain writers who 
 survive solely or mainly by their correspondence may be 
 considered separately here. The early letters of Lady Mary 
 Wortley Montagu, dealing with her courtship and her runaway 
 match with Edward Wortley Montagu, throw a curious light 
 on the position of women at this period. More interesting are 
 those which describe her journey across Europe to Constanti- 
 nople, and her sojourn in that city, where her husband had 
 
 Adam 
 Smith and 
 William 
 Godwin. 
 
 Lady 
 Mary 
 Wortley 
 Montagu. 
 
264 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 been appointed ambassador. Some of the letters written 
 thence contain admirable descriptions of her life and sur- 
 roundings ; others display her insatiable love of reading. 
 Sometimes she writes to Pope, who subsequently became her 
 implacable enemy. The best letters of ner last years are 
 written to her daughter, Lady Bute, and display a pleasing 
 affection. 
 
 Chester- A different picture of the time may be found in the letters 
 field. of Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield. The 
 first series of these were written to his natural son, Philip 
 Stanhope, the second to his godson, who bore the same name. 
 Chesterfield has suffered with posterity for two reasons : 
 Johnson, whom he slighted on a famous occasion, has described 
 the letters in a phrase which is as famous as it is unjust ; and 
 Dickens, by caricaturing him as Sir John Chester in Barndby 
 Rudge, has certainly given an unfair impression of his personal 
 character. 1 The letters are, indeed, of the world, worldly, 
 but they contain much advice which is both prudent and 
 moral ; and if in certain essentials their teaching seems lax 
 and cynical, we must make great allowance for tne spirit of 
 the time. It is only fair to Chesterfield, moreover, to remember 
 that the letters were never intended for publication. In style 
 they possess the classic qualities of elegance, wit, and charm. 
 Horace If Chesterfield was an artist in letter -writing, Horace Walpole 
 Walpole. (1717-1797) was both artist and genius. From early manhood 
 onward he loved writing to his friends, and three thousand 
 and sixty-one of his letters have been preserved in Mrs. Toyn- 
 bee's edition. His correspondents include some of the most 
 brilliant personalities of the day. Chief among them were 
 Thomas Gray, Kichard West, Sir Horace Mann, Henry Conway, 
 G-eorge Selwyn, George Montagu, and the Countess of Upper 
 Ossory. In his early manhood he had taken an active part in 
 politics, and, to the end, his letters display his interest in 
 European affairs. Thus we find him commenting on Fontenoy, 
 Minden, Ticonderoga, the execution of the Jacobite rebels, and, 
 towards the end of his life, on the French Revolution and the 
 disappointment it had caused his hopes. At other times he 
 writes of books, or of his recurrent ill-health, or of the fresh 
 treasures which he had added to his beautiful pleasure-house 
 at Strawberry Hill ; or he dispatches from his town house in 
 Arlington Street the bon-mots and scandal of London society, 
 often with malicious additions and comments. Walpole's 
 epistolary style is intimate and playful, and there is a pleasant, 
 familiar homage in his letters to women. Beneath his foppish 
 attitude toward life there were undoubted qualities both of 
 heart and judgment. If to be supremely readable is a sign of 
 genius, we must accord him the quality. 
 
 1 For fairer estimates of him as man and writer, see the Preface to 
 the Earl of Carnarvon's edition of his letters to his godson, and 
 Mr. H. B. Wheatley's chapter on him in vol. x of the Cambridge History 
 of English Literature. 
 
THE AGE OF JOHNSON : PROSE 265 
 
 Walpole's letters were written to his private friends ; but Junius. 
 the Letters of Junius were intended for publication, and 
 appeared in the Public Advertiser during a period extending 
 from January 21, 1769, to January 21, 1772. Their authorship 
 is still uncertain, but has been attributed at different times to 
 over forty people, including Burke, Chatham, Chesterfield, 
 Grattan, and Horace Walpole. It seems likely, on the evidence, 
 that they were written by Sir Philip Francis, a civil servant 
 who became notorious as the opponent of Warren Hastings, 
 and subsequently sat in the House of Commons in the Whig 
 interest. They were intended to bring about the fall of the 
 Duke of Grafton's Ministry, and contain venomous attacks on 
 him, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Mansfield, and others. The 
 best modern criticism would not attribute to the Letters the 
 importance attached to them by Burke and Johnson. Junius 
 had evidently studied Bolingbroke carefully, and his style 
 also shows the influence of Tacitus; yet beside Burke he is 
 a journalist, and what seems his strength is too often mere 
 violence. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 THE POETS FEOM THOMSON TO BLAKE 
 
 Form and spirit of eighteenth-century poetry Thomson, I 
 and minors New forces Gray, Collins, Cowper The 
 
 Shenstone, 
 revival of 
 
 romance Ossian, Percy Scottish Poetry : "Ramsay, Ferguason, 
 Burns Crabbe, Blake. 
 
 society verse, for instance, employed 
 and inimitable fashions by Prior, Gay, and by Pope in The 
 Rape of the Lock, and to that fierce guardian of refined and 
 sensitive civilization, satire, which in the prose of Jonathan 
 Swift had achieved an almost lyric fervour and intensity. In 
 poetry, whether philosophic, satirical or playful, an elegant 
 simplicity and colloquial ease of diction had almost come to be 
 regarded as the supreme literary quality, so that, for all their 
 fundamental differences, there are Strange and startling points 
 of contact between the respective theories of poetry formulated 
 by Pope and by Wordsworth. 
 
 Convenient as is the distinction between classicism and 
 romanticism, much harm has been done by sweeping and 
 exclusive use of the terms, and we might point to many 
 passages of Parnell and of Pope himself as being ' romantic ' 
 in the full modern sense. And though the so-called ' movement ' 
 only attained full strength and consciousness with the birth 
 of the nineteenth century, it was already alive in the germ, 
 and in something more than the germ, by the middle of the 
 eighteenth century. The literary quality, indeed, generally 
 
 K3 
 
266 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 attached to the term ' eighteenth century ', would more fitly 
 apply to the first half only of that century, and to the latter 
 half of the seventeenth. 
 
 The acute sensitiveness, for instance, to natural beauty, 
 which is a main mark of English romanticism, is already 
 visible in the Hermit and The Night Piece on Death of Thomas 
 Parnell (1679-1718), and is still more marked in The Seasons 
 (1726-30) of James Thomson (1700-1748). This poem, like 
 Young's Night Thoughts, deserts the couplet for blank verse, 
 and thus metrically prepares the way for Cowper and Words- 
 worth. Its sincere love of nature is sometimes, though by no 
 means always, marred by the conventional diction of the age, 
 and the poem is of greater importance in the history of poetry 
 than as poetry itself. Yet there is much in it which gives 
 permanent delight, and if Thomson did not anticipate Words- 
 worth as an interpreter of Nature, he certainly did anticipate 
 his precept that the first step towards such interpretation was 
 close and loving observation. It has been said of him that he 
 is over-fond of those generalized descriptions which were 
 common in his age ; but in point of fact, one of his chief 
 faults is a tendency to catalogue Nature's charms, to portray 
 her photographically and without transfiguring vision. Such 
 a tendency is evident in his descriptions of the flowers of 
 Spring, and of haymaking in Autumn ; but there are real 
 power and spirit in many of his descriptions, as in that of the 
 thunderstorm in Summer, and of the interior of earth in 
 Autumn. More than once he apostrophizes Nature, and he 
 frequently appeals to the Power which created her. His 
 pantheism sometimes has a Wordsworthian air, but in reality 
 it is vague and conventional, and possesses no intensity of 
 revelation. The greatness of The Seasons for great the poem 
 undoubtedly is depends on Thomson's keen delight in the 
 external shows of Nature, and in his frequently admirable 
 handling of blank verse. These excellences are all the more 
 praiseworthy in that they had little warrant from the fashion 
 of the age. 
 
 The In The Castle of Indolence (1748) Thomson, as if by an 
 
 Castle of unconscious impulse towards Romanticism, again deserts the 
 Indolence. C011 pi e t, this time using the Spenserian stanza, and thus 
 foreshadowing Keats, Shelley, and Byron. His stanza has 
 almost always the ease and flow which are at once essential to 
 this form, and infrequent with its minor practitioners ; but 
 this metrical facility is often compassed only by the forcing 
 of words into strange senses and contexts, and Thomson's 
 archaisms, unlike Spenser's, seem unsuccessfully blended with 
 the fabric of the poem. The allegory is somewhat thin and 
 unconvincing ; the slothful and pleasure-loving poet could 
 hardly have hailed with sincerity the victory won by the 
 Knight of Arts and Industry over the enchanter Indolence, 
 but in many passages of the poem there are delightful fancy 
 and charm. Thomson is seen at his best in the description 
 
THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE 267 
 
 of the Castle, with its porter and his page, and in the gently 
 satirical portraits of his own friends and fellow-poets. Besides 
 these two works, which contain the best of his genius, Thomson 
 has also left an inferior long poem, Liberty (1734-6), a good 
 deal of minor verse, five mediocre tragedies, of which Sophon- 
 isba is the first and chief, and The Masque of Alfred, written 
 in collaboration with David Mallet. 1 His influence upon his 
 contemporaries and successors was considerable ; it is evident 
 not only in such minor work as the Epistle to Mr. Thomson, 
 and The Ghace, of William Somerville (1675-1742), but through- 
 out the poetry of Gray and Collins. 
 
 The Spenserian stanza was used to lighter and more homely Shen- 
 purpose in The Schoolmistress of William Shenstone( 17 14-1763). stone. 
 It is significant of Shenstone's bent that he was drawn to 
 Spenser owing to * a peculiar tenderness of sentiment remark- 
 able throughout his works '. Such tenderness, sometimes 
 artificial and attenuated, not infrequently real and charming, 
 is to be found in his own elegies, odes, and songs. The curio- 
 sities of subject and form so frequent in his work are due, 
 partly to the conventions of his age, partly to his incurable 
 lack of humour. 2 Yet his expression at its best often antici- 
 pates Gray, and there is a certain foreshadowing of Cowper in 
 his sensitiveness of feeling and expression. 
 
 Certain lesser poetry of the period may here be discussed Lesser 
 and dismissed. John Byrom (1692-1763), physician, Fellow Poets, 
 of Trinity, Cambridge, and inventor of an improved system 
 of shorthand, has a certain importance, both as diarist and 
 poet. Richard Savage (1697-1743) has obtained, in Johnson's 
 great Life of him, an immortality unwarranted by his own 
 poems, chief of which are The Bastard (1728) and The Wanderer 
 (1729). The Bastard has at least an autobiographical interest, 
 and puts forward its author's claims upon the lady he declared 
 to be his mother. John Dyer ( 1 700 ?-l 758) wrote two long and 
 unimportant poems, The Fleece and The Ruins of Rome, and 
 a shorter and quite important one, Grongar Hill, which is still 
 read for its descriptions of Nature, and had earlier won the 
 .approval of Johnson, a critic not usually indulgent to the 
 'paysagiste'. Robert Blair (1699-1746) published in 1743 
 
 1 The Masque of Alfred contains Evle, Britannia. Mallet, whose 
 original name was Malloch, has left several plays and much miscellaneous 
 prose and verse. 
 
 Thus in his 22nd Elegy the ghost of the maiden Silvia appears to 
 him, and expresses her fear that her body may be dug up and sold to 
 the anatomists for dissection. If science must anatomize, she implores 
 that it will content itself with the ' breathless corses ' of 'guilty convicts'. 
 Irt the 18th Elegy a ' discerning^ shepherd ' laments with perfect serious- 
 ness * the state of the woollen manufactory in England', and complains 
 that Phillis appears to him clad in ' the Gallic loom's extraneous twine ' ; 
 and in The Schoolmistress, in a passage on flowers charming enough to 
 be set beside Bridges' Garden in Seplrmfter, we suddenly light on a refer- 
 ence to the ' pun-provoking thyme', 
 
268 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The Grave, a poem on the subject of death, written with 
 a certain rhetorical power, and containing a well-known 
 declamation on suicide. The Spleen, by Matthew Green 
 (1696-1737), is a lively satire in octosyllables in which its 
 author develops his cynical and easy-going view of life. The 
 Art of Preserving Health, by John Armstrong (1709-1 779), was 
 considered respectable in its time, but yields little more of 
 poetry than is promised by its title. The title of The Pleasures 
 of the Imagination, the chief work of Mark Akenside (1721- 
 1770), contains more imagination than would be recognized 
 in the poem itself by any disciple of Coleridge ; but Akenside's 
 political satire, the Epistle to Curio, is lively and readable. 
 The one important poem of the unfortunate Christopher 
 Smart (1722-1771) is The Song to David, written in rime couee, 
 and owing much of its fineness to its Biblical diction and 
 imagery. Charles Churchill (1731-1764), friend of John 
 Wilkes, and collaborator with him in The North Briton, is best 
 remembered by his long poem, The Eosciad, which contains 
 descriptions, mainly satirical, of leading contemporary actors ; 
 and by a fiercer piece of satire, The Prophecy of Famine, 
 directed at Bute and his Scottish following. Richard Glover 
 (1712-1785) is to-day better remembered by his spirited 
 broadside ballad, Admiral Hosier's Ghost, than by his long 
 and wearisome blank verse epics, Leonidas and The Athenaid. 
 William Mason (1724-1797), the friend of Gray, wrote two 
 inferior tragedies, Elfrida (1753) and Caractacus (1759), and 
 a long and uninspired poem in blank verse entitled The English 
 Garden. His Isis, a broken-backed satire upon Oxford, 
 elicited a spirited poetic reply, The Triumph of Isis, from 
 Thomas Warton (1728-1790), poet-laureate and author of 
 a famous and admirable History of English Poetry. James 
 Beattie (1735-1803), though gifted with small inspiration, 
 attempted to use that great and difficult stanza, the Spen- 
 serian, in his least unimportant poem, The Minstrel. William 
 Falconer (1732-1769) put his wide experience of the sea to 
 useful account in his single poem of merit, The Shipwreck. 
 
 With William Collins (1721-1759) and Thomas Gray (1716- 
 1771) we are already on the brink of the ' Romantic revival ', 
 and from the evolutionary point of view there are, perhaps, no 
 more interesting names in our literature. Both were classicists 
 in the sense that they reverted to the strict form of their Greek 
 models, and endeavoured to revive the Pindaric Ode, which 
 had been already handled in English after different fashions by 
 Cowley and Dryden and Congreve ; but both, even in their 
 very choice, represent a reaction, in some sense Romantic, 
 against the Augustan tradition of refined colloquial speech, 
 expressing itself in the end-stopped rhyming couplet. The 
 output of both men was small. Gray is best known by his 
 famous Elegy written in a Country Churchyard (1750) and by 
 a handful of serious Odes, the greatest of which are The Bard 
 and The Progress of Poesy. He has also left some fine Latin 
 
THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE 269 
 
 poetry and some light verse, which varies in quality from the 
 admirably playful Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat and The 
 Candidate, to that unlucky attempt at satire, The Hymn to 
 Ignorance. Gray's letters, especially those written during his 
 early travels on the Continent, are full of charm and scholar- 
 ship, and illustrate his view of poetry, and also that growing 
 sense of the romantic in nature which manifests itself diversely 
 throughout this period. Gray was not only a fine classical 
 scholar, but was one of the most widely-read men of his day ; 
 and his scholarship, like that of Collins, strongly affected the 
 form and spirit of his poetry. 
 
 Gray, in The Bard and The Progress of Poesy, keeps a strict- 
 ness of construction and expression which, architecturally 
 speaking, set him higher than Collins ; but in the younger 
 poet's Odes on The Passions, and tin the Superstitions of the 
 Scottish Highlands, and in^tfatf beautiful unrhymed Ode to 
 Evening, there are^a-4erfwir and an occasional wildness of 
 emotion and expression which make him in a very special 
 sense a forerunner of the great Romantic dawn. His love of 
 Nature and constant recourse to her are main marks of the new 
 tendency ; and in him, as in Gray, the two great notes of 
 human emotion and natural beauty, which had been sounded 
 separately by Thomson, become fugally blended and inter- 
 woven. His interest in the supernatural and transcendental, 
 which evoked the sarcasm of Johnson, puts him in touch with 
 Coleridge and Shelley, and with the later Romantics generally. 
 We may agree with Hazlitt and Swinburne that on the whole 
 he was definitely a greater poetic force than Gray ; but his 
 inspiration is uncertain, and is constantly thwarted bv the 
 artificiality and conventionalism of his day. Gray, with less 
 natural fire, had a far finer critical sense, and a far surer 
 architectonic faculty. 
 
 After the pieces just mentioned, Collins's most notable Odes 
 are those on Pity, Fear, Simplicity, Mercy, and Liberty. There 
 is much beauty in his elegy on Thomson ; two of his shorter 
 poems, the Dirge in Cymbeline and How Sleep the Brave, are 
 exquisite. 
 
 In Gray's Elegy appear clearly the classical elements of 
 dignity, studied conciseness, the use of Latinized epithets, and 
 of personification. It is instructive to contrast his use of the 
 latter figure with that made by Wordsworth in Tew Trees. 
 The newer impulse appears not only in the association, indi- 
 cated in the opening passage, between Nature's moods and 
 those of man, but in that vivid interest in lowly lives, studied 
 not aloofly but in their inwardness, which was to develop in 
 Cowper and culminate in Wordsworth. 
 
 From the comparative standpoint, it will be convenient Cowper. 
 to pass immediately to William Cowper (1731-1800). His 
 early satires, including Table Talk and Retirement ( 1782), are 
 written in the couplet, and it is not through them that he has 
 held the favour of posterity. By far the most important of 
 
270 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 The Task, his longer poems, historically and poetically, is The Task 
 (1785), in which is implicit very much of Wordsworth, and, 
 indeed, of the feeling and expression informing modern English 
 poetry. Some distinctive marks of this poem, and of Gowper's 
 poetry in general, as well as of the new spirit which was welling 
 up in English life and literature, are quietism, 1 love of the 
 country, a quite sincere detestation of large towns, 2 delight in 
 the more quiet and everyday beauty of rustic landscape and 
 life and of animal nature, 3 ardent love of liberty, 4 and hatred of 
 oppression and cruelty, whether public or private, and whether 
 inflicted upon man or beast. 5 This love in Cowper springs from 
 the heart, and not from any cheap and cerebral cosmopoli- 
 tanism or pacificism. He loved his country as Milton and 
 Wordsworth loved her ; he expresses his admiration of 
 Chatham and Wolfe, and appeals to England in the name of 
 ' soldiership and sense ' to ensue efficiency, and not to give 
 herself up to ' effeminates who philander when they should 
 be fighting '. A further mark of Cowper's genius, as of the 
 age which moulded Rousseau and was in turn re-moulded by 
 him, was the frank and poignant self-revelation and self- 
 oommiseration which expresses itself throughout all his work 
 notably in his last poem, The Castaway, and in the famous 
 passage of The Task beginning 
 
 I was a stricken deer that left the herd. 
 
 The gloom, deepening into insanity, which darkened so much 
 of his life, passes constantly into his poetry, and gives him 
 certain affinities with Leopardi and Vigny. The tender and 
 intimate side of his genius reaches serious expression in the 
 beautiful stanzas to Mary Unwin and the lines On the Eeceipt 
 of My Mother's Picture out of Norfolk, and finds lighter utter- 
 ance in a succession of poems compact of humour and senti- 
 ment, 6 which display their author as one of the great masters 
 of the higher kind of occasional verse. In point of humour 
 pure and simple, Cowper's genius finds unique expression in 
 John Gilpin (1785). 
 
 The Re- If Cowper's poetry already shows many tokens of the new 
 vival of spirit we must look elsewhere for one of the most important 
 Romance o f these the reversion to the poetry and romance of Britain's 
 -Ossian past, and the attempt to bring back something of their wildness 
 an( l and variety into the age of reason and law. This impulse had 
 
 Percy. already appeared in the interest taken in old Scandinavian 
 literature by writers like Hickes 7 and Gray ; it is continued 
 1 Retirement, 1-146 and passim. z Task, i. 678-749. 
 
 3 Task, i. 350-66 ; v. 1-125. 4 Task, v. 293-346. 
 
 5 Task, ii. 1-53 ; v. 137-289, 363 seq. ; and The Negro's Complaint, 
 Pity for Poor Africans, The Morning Dream, On a Spaniel called Beau, 
 The Cockfighter's Garland. 
 
 6 e.g. Epitaph on a Hare, On the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton's Bull" 
 finch, &c., &c. 
 
 7 Compiler of the highly important Thesaurus Linguarum Veterum 
 Septentrionalium. 
 
THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE 271 
 
 in Macpherson's paraphrase, or forgery of Ossian (1763), in the 
 form of a reversion to the wild Celtic intuition of nature and 
 love and war ; and it recurs under a fresh manifestation 
 in that renewed interest in old English balladry, domestic, 
 martial, supernatural, and satirical, which attracted a host of 
 editors and adapters during the eighteenth century, and 
 culminated in Percy's Reliques (1765), passing onwards and 
 determining in various degrees and fashions the trend of 
 Coleridge, Scott and much modern poetry, and receiving 
 a fresh lease in the great collection of Francis James Child. 
 
 A kindred impulse towards the past is visible in the poetry Chatter- 
 of Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who pretended to have ton. 
 discovered at Bristol the black-letter poems of a fifteenth- 
 century monk named Rowley, a fictitious person whom he 
 used as the mouthpiece for his own poetry. This was written 
 in an imitation of Middle English which to-day could not 
 deceive the veriest beginner. 1 It varies greatly in value, but 
 the recurrence to older metres, and the invention of new ones, 
 as well as the exultant battle-pieces, the strong ioy in natural 
 beauty, and the high imagination breaking forth imperiously 
 into its own forms of expression, are all tokens of revolt 
 against the rule of Johnson, whom Chatterton had already 
 attacked vigorously in one of his earlier satires. Outside the 
 Kowley poems, little of Chatterton's verse possesses much 
 merit, but his production, if often immature, is astonishing 
 work for a boy who was to kill himself at eighteen. 
 
 In Robert Burns (1759-1796) we encounter a greater than 
 Chatterton, and a fresh expression of the new spirit ; but 
 before considering his poetry, we must discuss that of certain 
 poets who preceded and strongly influenced him. Toward the 
 beginning of the eighteenth century, the darkness which had gusson. 
 lain upon Scottish poetry for nearly a century and a half 
 began to be broken, though perhaps not after a very startling 
 fasnion. The earliest verse of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) was 
 written in the six-lined rhyming stave rime come which had 
 already been used effectively by Robert Sempill and Hamilton 
 of Grilbertfield. Throughout his life Ramsay practised both 
 satire and lyric ; but his most noteworthy work is his Gentle 
 Shepherd (1725), a pastoral drama in five acts describing with 
 smooth grace the fortunes of a quartette of pastoral lovers. 
 Here occurs by far the best lyric Ramsay ever wrote, ' My 
 Peggy is a young thing '. He did much to increase the love of 
 poetry among the Scottish people through his two collections 
 of ancient and modern Scottish verse, The Tea- Table Miscel- 
 lany (1724-32) and The Ever Green (1724). The Miscellany 
 contains much work by Ramsay's contemporaries, and some 
 of this is notable. Thus Robert Crawford contributed the 
 
 1 The influence of mediaeval models on Chatterton was only super- 
 ficial ; it has been pointed out that his real master in poetry was Edmund 
 Spenser (see W. P. Ker, Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. x, 
 p. 235). 
 
272 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 famous Bush aboon Traquair, and the less famous, but more ex- 
 quisite, Down the burn, Davie, love. The contribution of William 
 Hamilton of Bangour was The Braes of Yarrow. The ballad 
 Hardyknute, included in The Ever Green, was for some time 
 believed to be a very old poem, commemorating the battle of 
 Largs ; but it is now known to be the work of Lady Wardlaw. 
 Another contemporary poet, Alexander Ross, has left several 
 spirited songs, and a dull pastoral, Helenore, or the Fortunate 
 Shepherdess. Lady Anne Lindsay is chiefly famous as the 
 author of Auld Bobin Gray. Many Scottish popular songs, old 
 and new, are preserved in another collection made by David 
 Herd; a later collection (1819-21), that of James Hogg, is 
 confined to Jacobite songs, only a few of which reach the 
 level of poetry. Slightly later than the poets just mentioned 
 come Michael Bruce (1746-1767), John Logan (1748-1788), and 
 Robert Fergusson (1750-1774). The most considerable of these 
 is Fergusson, whose love of Nature appears in his odes To the 
 Bee and The GowdspinTc, and whose vividly humorous descrip- 
 tive power is evident in such realistic poems of Scottish life as 
 Leith Races, The Farmer's Ingle, and The Sitting of the Session. 
 Robert Burns, though he read English poetry keenly, was 
 not profoundly affected by his chief English contemporaries ; 
 indeed, the poets to whom he reverts most constantly are 
 those of an earlier generation. Pope, Thomson, and Shenstone 
 have all set their marks on his inferior and more derivative 
 verse. His reading of Scottish poetry was enthusiastic but 
 partial. He had a nodding acquaintance with such older 
 masters as Gavin Douglas and Lyndsay ; his preferences 
 among later men are indicated by his lines, 
 
 O for a spunk of Allan's glee 
 
 Or Fergusson's, the bauld and slee. 
 
 His own poetry owes much to both these writers ; and it is 
 also influenced by such miscellaneous verse as he had met in 
 various collections of Scottish poetry. The vigour and direct- 
 ness of his genius are part of the spirit of the North ; but his 
 affinities with the poets of the South, and with the new beauty 
 which was unfolding from their various striving, are strong 
 and definite, if largely unconscious. He is akin to Crabbe 
 through his sharp sense of country life and character, to 
 Cowper through his love of animals and his hatred of injustice 
 and oppression, and to Wordsworth through his love of Nature 
 and his delight in simple and independent souls. His sense of 
 natural beauty, though less profound and mystical than 
 Wordsworth's, is equally vivid and intense. But when all 
 analogies have been drawn, and all influences indicated, 
 Burns, whether in satire or in song, remains individual and 
 aloof even beyond the wont of great poets. 
 
 Several of his most representative poems were contained in 
 the three volumes which he published in 1786, 1787, and 1793. 
 Many of his best songs were contributed to two collections, the 
 
THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE 273 
 
 Scots Musical Museum of Janies Johnson (1787-96), and the 
 Scottish Airs of James Thomson. Though he had written fine 
 poetry including The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie 
 before his twenty-fifth year, his most fruitful period of 
 production fell within the two or three years following his 
 migration to Mossgiel (1784), and preceding his sojourn in 
 Edinburgh. After 1787 he wrote some of his best songs, but 
 nothing else of the first order save Tarn o' Shanter and Captain 
 Matthew Henderson. 
 
 Apart from his songs, his greatest work consists of descrip- 
 tive, epistolary, or satirical poems written in the Scotch 
 vernacular. Among his masterpieces in personal satire are 
 Holy Willie's Prayer and Death and Doctor Hornbook. Both of 
 these poems are written with astonishing vigour and gusto ; 
 the first is winged with that hatred of hypocrisy and religious 
 cant which was almost an elemental passion with Burns, and 
 reappears in The Twa Herds and Holy Fair, finding more 
 general but not less bitter expression in tne Address to the Unco 
 Guid. More playful and railing is the famous Address to the 
 Deil ; and raillery is blended with affection in a number of 
 poems addressed by Burns to his friends, including the Epistles 
 to John Lapraik, William Simpson, and John Rankine. In 
 many of these Burns rallies not only his friends, but himself ; 
 in certain other poems, as in The Bard's Lament, he falls to 
 self-reproach or self-exculpation. In pure narrative his 
 masterpieces are Hallowe'en and his two long poems, The Jolly 
 Beggars and Tarn o' Shanter. All three describe rustics at 
 carouse or festival, and are full of speed, force, and humour. 
 Many of his poems are lit with that joy in natural beauty which 
 was ever keen and deep in his spirit. Though he often moralizes 
 life, he seldom moralizes Nature. He never lays himself open 
 to Swinburne's objection against Wordsworth, that he 
 regarded her as a vegetable fit to shred into his pot and pare 
 down like the outer leaves of a lettuce for didactic and culinary 
 purposes '. Burns's poetry is the record of strong, and some- 
 times conflicting, emotions rather than the expression of 
 a philosophy or faith ; but in it some things are constant his 
 deep love of human worth, his hatred of pride and oppression, 
 and his vindication of the rights, and even of the failings, of 
 natural man against convention and hypocrisy. His natural 
 sympathy with the humble or suffering appears in his poem To 
 a Mouse, and is alloyed with the fashionable sensibility of his 
 age in the lines To a Mountain Daisy and in The Cotter's 
 Saturday Night. 
 
 Throughout his Scottish verse Burns uses three stanzas or His 
 staves in especial, all of which had been freely employed in Metres, 
 preceding Scottish poetry. The first and most famous of these 
 is the six -lined rime couee, which descends from a Provenal 
 original and had been a favourite metre with Eamsay, Fergus- 
 son, and others. The second is that known as the Christ's Kirk 
 stave an octave with an added bob -wheel, or refrain. The 
 
274 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 third is an octave with a subtly rhymed additional wheel of 
 four lines. 1 These measures seem especially adapted not only 
 to the spirit of Scottish poetry but to the force and intensity 
 of Burns's own genius. Yet when he wrote in Scots he could 
 handle other metres with mastery, as may be seen from his use 
 of the octosyllabic couplet in Tarn o* Shanter. When he writes 
 in English inspiration constantly fails him, and he often 
 lapses into imitation, even in cases where he has retained the 
 Scottish metre. 
 
 According to one view, the greatness of Burns depends less 
 on his songs than on his descriptive, narrative, and satirical 
 poetry ; yet he is certainly one of the greatest and most 
 prolific song -writers the world has seen ; nor is his greatness 
 at all impaired by the fact that many of his finest things 
 represent the working up, or working over, of older and cruder 
 song. His notes and themes are various ; he sings of love in 
 Ae fond Kiss and Of a' the Airts, of patriotism in Scots Who, 
 Hae, of friendship in Auld Lang Syne, of drink in Willie 
 Brewed, of a lost cause in It was a' for our richtfu' King, and 
 of human worth and independence in For cC that. Constantly 
 in these lyrics his utterance has the supreme qualities of 
 simplicity, intensity, and sweetness. This supremacy cannot 
 be analysed ; it can only be felt and demonstrated in such 
 lines as : 
 
 My love is like a red red rose 
 That 's newly sprung in June, 
 
 My love is like the melodie 
 
 That 's sweetly played in tune ; 
 or 
 
 Had we never lov'd sae kindly, 
 
 Had we never lov'd sae blindly, 
 
 Never met, or never parted, 
 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted 
 or 
 
 When day is gane, and night is corne, 
 And a' folk boune to sleep, 
 
 I think on him that 's far awa' 
 The lee-lang night and weep, 
 
 My dear, 
 The lee-lang night and weep. 
 
 Of widely different importance is the poetry of George 
 Crabbe (1754-1832). His distinctive work is contained in the 
 long poems descriptive of village life which range from The 
 Village (1783), through The Borough and the Tales, to Tales 
 of the Hall (1819). Crabbe's merciless portrayal of village 
 types, through a realism generally bitter and frequently 
 satirical, differentiates him sharply from Goldsmith (the 
 
 1 Three poems written respectively in these staves are the Address to 
 the Deil, Holy Fair, and the first Epistle to Davie. For a full account of 
 Burns's principal metres, see vol. i of the edition of his works by Henley 
 and Henderson. 
 
THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE 275 
 
 unreal idealism of whose Deserted Village he expressly satir- 
 izes), and less sharply from Cowper and Wordsworth. Among 
 his favourite characters are the worldly or the pedantic parson, 
 the despised male or female dependant, young or old (a 
 character who recurs again and again throughout his work), 
 the mistress-keeping squire (who occurs hardly less frequently), 
 the tyrannous or incompetent schoolmaster, the scheming or 
 blackmailing confidant, the village wanton and her lovers, the 
 embezzling clerk, followed up through his progress to perdition, 
 the pauper with a past of sin or misfortune, and even the 
 village murderer and infanticide. It will be seen that for the 
 most part these characters differ greatly from Wordsworth's 
 Michael, or Matthew, or the Leech-gatherer, or the men and 
 women portrayed in the graveyard passages of The Excursion. 
 Crabbe's intuition of human nature, if less profound and 
 spiritual than Wordsworth's, is more sharp and clear and 
 dramatic. Nor does he dwell exclusively on the dark side of 
 village life ; when he can find goodness and fortitude he takes 
 them gratefully to himself, ana brings them into bright relief 
 against his black background. But he reverts to Johnson, 
 and tacitly combats Cowper, by resolutely refusing to admit 
 that, because the city may happen to spell sin, the country 
 must necessarily spell perfect peace and innocence. His keen 
 sense of the worth of lowly lives as dramatic and ethical 
 material, puts him, though with the reservations just indicated, 
 in affinity with Wordsworth. 
 
 His view of Nature., and of her relation to the moods and 
 passions of mankind, is also Wordsworthian, though after an 
 inverted fashion, for he is for the most part preoccupied with 
 the sinister in her and its relation to the sinister in man. He 
 handles his favourite rhyming couplet after a fashion which is 
 occasionally weak and halting, more often forced and clumsy, 
 but very often admirably racy and direct and strong. 
 
 No better instance could be offered of the width and scope of Blake 
 the new poetry and the new spiritual outlook than the fact 
 that both Crabbe and Blake were, each in his own way, among 
 their heralds. Hardly is there a greater contrast possible in 
 poetry than that between the stern and acrid realist, and the 
 seer vindicating, through ecstasy, the right of the individual 
 soul to declare, in the most extreme terms of its own imagining, 
 its communing with the universal spirit. The faculty of 
 Reason, the sublimated common sense which to the eighteenth 
 century had been the universal touchstone, was to Blake a cold 
 and contemptible process, working through mere memory 
 under the sway of the restrictive spirit Urizen, and utterly 
 incomprehensive of those higher realities which could only be 
 reached through inspired vision. The supreme importance of 
 Blake in the progress of English poetry is his vindication of the 
 right of the individual imagination to recreate all earth and 
 heaven after the pattern of its own revelation. Just as Words- 
 worth's mystical intuition of Nature possesses certain affinities 
 
276 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE N 
 
 with the Kantian philosophy, so does Blake, in his mystical 
 revelation of the Universe and the human soul, start from 
 a position having certain unconscious affinities with the 
 subjective idealism of Fichte. In one sense he is the most 
 extreme of the Romanticists, for it is to the individual soul, 
 and to it alone, that he looks for the supreme revelation. He 
 expressly rejects the Wordsworthian conception of Nature 
 which had regarded her as the beneficent revealer to man of 
 the Universal Spirit. This conception, through making Nature 
 the bond between that Spirit and individual souls, had avoided 
 mere subjectivity ; but to Blake the soul was sovereign, and 
 Nature, the outer show of things symbolized by him as Tirzah, 
 obscured the Spirit no less often than she revealed it. 1 j ' Nature 
 has no supernatural', he says, 'and dissolves. Imagination is 
 eternity.' Against a famous passage of Wordsworth's Prelude 
 he wrote, ' Natural objects always did and now do weaken, 
 deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth must 
 know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in Nature.' 2 
 This criticism, be it noted, was written towards the end of 
 Blake's life, when his reaction against ' vegetable nature ' was 
 becoming more and more marked. In other periods and moods 
 he had declared ' every minute particular ' of Nature to be 
 ' holy ', and in Songs of Innocence had given supreme utterance 
 to the mystical correspondence existing between natural 
 objects, the human soul, and the divine principle. 
 
 Blake's theory of imagination, and his poetic practice, are to 
 a very large degree bound up with the mystical and immensely 
 complicated interpretation of the universe which he develops 
 in The Prophetic Books. It is quite true that a great part of 
 his poetry and certainly the best part of it possesses 
 a meaning and a beauty absolutely independent of these 
 elaborate rhapsodies ; on the other hand, it is idle to dismiss 
 them as ' a mere curiosity ' : they are inseparable from Blake's 
 mind and genius, and without reference to them some of his 
 most remarkable poems for instance, The Mental Traveller 
 and The Crystal Cabinet remain almost wholly unintelli- 
 gible. The Prophetic Books themselves, besides much that is 
 involved and terribly obscure, contain passages of high beauty. 
 The unearthly quality of Blake's most beautiful and charac- 
 teristic poetry (e.g. The Fly, The Tiger, The Clod and the 
 Pebble) has been repeatedly noticed ; always in reading him 
 
 1 Cf. To Tirzah in Songs of Experience. 
 
 2 Cf. his conception of the Covering Cherub, but note carefully that 
 with him the Cherub is by no means wholly malign or restrictive. ' The 
 Covering Cherub is the masque of created form in which the uncreated 
 
 spirit makes itself visible Blake praises or denounces this Covering 
 
 Cherub according to whether he considers it a means whereby things, 
 too far above us to be seen as they are, can be made visible in symbol 
 and representative form, or as a Satanic hindrance keeping our eager 
 wills away from the freedom and truth of the Divine world. ' Ellis and 
 Yeats, Works of William Blake, vol. i, p. 288. 
 
THE POETS FROM THOMSON TO BLAKE 277 
 
 one must remember that throughout his life he believed 
 himself to be visited by legions of spirits whom he actually 
 beheld with the bodily eye. His best - known works are 
 Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience ; 
 but some of his greatest and most beautiful work was not 
 published during his lifetime, and is contained in the two 
 manuscripts known as the Rossetti and the Pickering. His 
 Poetical Sketches show Blake to have been largely influenced 
 in early youth by the Elizabethans (as in My silks and fine 
 array and the Mad Song) and by the older English ballads (as 
 in Fair Elenor and Gwin, King of Norway). Many lyrics, 
 however, in this volume and in Songs of Innocence possess 
 a certain magic simplicity which has never been achieved in 
 English poetry before or since ; and in the later volume Blake 
 becomes for all time the poet of childhood. Yet it is to the 
 Songs of Experience, and to his later poems in general, that we 
 must look for his most distinctive, though not for his most 
 popular work. That work owes its greatness to the inspired 
 lyrical interpretation of inspired spiritual vision. 1 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 
 
 
 The full tide of romanticism Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Scott, 
 Byron, Shelley, Keats, Landor, Moore, Hood, Campbell, Rogers, Hogg, 
 Cunningham/ 
 
 THE poets discussed in the last chapter represent in different New 
 fashions a breaking away from the Augustan tradition of Forces in 
 thought and expression. From the age of Dry den to that of Poetry. 
 Johnson, literature had been closely connected with the politi- 
 cal life of the country, and with the intellectual and social 
 activity of the metropolis. We have already demonstrated 
 the effect of this connexion upon the poetry of the period, 
 and have discussed the resulting elements of strength and 
 weakness. When we pass to such poets as Cowper and Blake, 
 we find that the bond has been severed. The first seeks refuge 
 from the stir and argument of the great city in the calm 
 pleasures of the country ; the second finds his escape in the 
 vision vouchsafed to his eyes and soul of another world at once 
 more lovely and more terrible than the present. The love of 
 
 1 During the last two generations, a number of books have been 
 published on Blake. The definitive text is that of Mr. John Sampson 
 (Clarendon Press. 1905). The student's attention is also drawn to Swin- 
 burne's William Blake, to Arthur Symons' William Blake, to Gilchrist's 
 Life of Blake, and to the edition by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats of Blake's 
 collected works. The Essay prefixed to vol. ii is of special value in 
 relation to the Prophetic Books. 
 
278 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Nature, which for a while had burnt very low in English poetry, 
 revives in the Elegy of Gray and The Task of Cowper, and 
 flames into fiercer energy in the songs of Burns and certain of 
 the Odes of Collins. In the Megy, too, we find that growing 
 sense of the pathos and worth and beauty of humble human 
 lives, which is also a symbol of the new spirit, and reappears 
 with a difference in many pages of Cowper and Burns. Closely 
 akin to this are the strong love of birds and animals, and the 
 pity for their suffering, which are common to Cowper, Blake, 
 and Burns. The casting back to the romantic past for inspira- 
 tion, which is to become so strong in Coleridge and Scott, 
 has already been anticipated in the Kowley poems of Chatterton 
 and in Macpherson's Ossian. The spell of the supernatural, 
 which was soon to inspire the greatest poem of Coleridge, had 
 already touched Collins, and had swayed the whole life and 
 outlook of Blake. All of these things represent an instinct 
 often an unconscious one to escape from the conventional 
 aspects of thought and experience to fresh vistas of revelation. 
 Sometimes the search disclosed the wonder of simple things or 
 of beings hitherto neglected or despised ; sometimes it made 
 intimate and near the glamour of the past, or the uncanny 
 happenings of the present. But in all its various forms it re- 
 presented a revolt against the tyranny of finite reason, and 
 a desire that imagination should follow its own law, even were 
 it to lose itself in lowliness or else ' dodge conception to the very 
 bourne of heaven '. The vastly different interpretations of 
 life and literature offered by the poets we have mentioned, 
 show how strongly individual was the trend of the age, and how 
 emphatic was its departure from the Augustan standard of 
 * correctness '. The same impulse toward freedom and indi- 
 vidualism is evident in the prosody of the period, in the 
 instinctive shrinking of many poets from the end-stopped 
 couplet, and in their preference for a variety of less orthodox 
 metres ranging from the Pindaric ode and the Spenserian 
 stanza to blank verse and the ballad measure. On every hand 
 the ground had been broken for such fresh achievement as 
 was realized in the publication by Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 of Lyrical Ballads (1797-8). This volume represents a direct 
 and conscious break with the past, and has generally, and 
 with justice, been regarded as the earliest realization of the new 
 spirit in all its fullness. As Coleridge tells us, it was intended 
 as ' a series of poems of two sorts : the one of common subjects 
 such as will be found in every village, poetically treated : the 
 other of subjects mainly "supernatural", but made real 
 by the dramatic truth of such emotions, supposing them real.' 
 To Wordsworth naturally fell the first part of this attempt, to 
 Coleridge the second. How far each succeeded is a question 
 closely related to the poetry of both, which we may discuss 
 forthwith, beginning with that of Coleridge. 
 
 His chief contribution to the volume had been The Ancient 
 Mariner, which contains nearly all that is best and most 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 279 
 
 characteristic in his genius, and has probably influenced 
 modern English poetry more profoundly than has any other 
 single poem. Employing the old ballad measure the ' four- 
 teener ' resolved into its component eights and sixes which 
 is one of the greatest among English metres, Coleridge has 
 adopted every possible device of stress and line variation which 
 might give it flexibility and variety without impairing its 
 force and directness. Here, as in Kubla Khan and Christabel, 
 he has divined and employed consummately that licence which, 
 though it is one of English poetry's chief glories, had been 
 flouted and lashed for a century and a half as an inexpiable 
 vice. Nor does licence with Coleridge ever degenerate into 
 lawlessness : to The Ancient Mariner, as to all his best poetry, 
 will apply the claim which he has put forward in the Preface to 
 Christabel : ' Nevertheless this occasional variation in number 
 of syllables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of 
 convenience, but in correspondence with some transition in the 
 nature of the imagery or passion.' Coleridge had, in fact, 
 deserted that code whose symbolic expression was the end- 
 stopped couplet, for the higher law of our poetry whose service 
 is perfect freedom. In subject and general design, The Ancient 
 Mariner embodies more strongly perhaps than any English 
 poem outside Coleridge, that Imagination which he, like Words- 
 worth, recognized as the supreme poetic quality, and which 
 both strove with might and main to bring back into the lan- 
 uage after its long banishment. A friend's dream, a saint's 
 egend, a hint from Wordsworth based on a reading of Shel- 
 vocke's voyages, these were all his materials, and with them he 
 dealt after a fashion of which we can only say, 
 
 And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, 
 That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. 
 
 The story of the poem is known to all ; as for its spirit, it should 
 be noted that though the Ancient Mariner's salvation is even- 
 tually achieved through his blessing the water-snakes, and thus 
 putting himself in touch with Nature, the poet's main object 
 is not to draw a moral, 1 however beautiful and sublime, but to 
 awaken delight and wonder through describing with strange 
 realism the adventure of a human soul upon a wide, wide sea 
 of miracle and terror. It is at once impossible and unnecessary 
 to analyse here the consummate process by which this thing- 
 is done. 
 
 The first part of the unfinished Christabel was written during Christabel. 
 the same period as The Ancient Mariner, though it was not in- 
 cluded in the Lyrical Ballads ; it again shows Coleridge's imagi- 
 nation working at its highest pitch. In it he once more achieves 
 
 1 To Mrs. Barbauld, who had complained that The Ancient Mariner 
 had no moral, Coleridge replied that 'in my own judgement the poem 
 had too much, and that the only, or chief, fault, if I might say so, was 
 the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle 
 or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination ', 
 
 g 
 l 
 
280 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the supremely difficult task of rendering the marvellous real and 
 intimate through investing it with the vivid details of daily 
 life and the rich and shifting colours of Nature. The tale is 
 one of a serpent-woman whom the innocent maiden, Christabel, 
 befriends, and brings to slumber by her side in her father's 
 castle. G-eraldine lays a spell on Christabel, and prepares to 
 destroy her, but the hidden horror which mars her beauty, and 
 is disclosed to Christabel, is only suggested to the reader, and 
 this vagueness increases the mystery and glamour which brood 
 over the whole poem. In the First Part occurs the famous 
 symbol of 
 
 The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 
 
 That dances as often as dance it can, 
 
 Hanging so light, and hanging so high, 
 
 On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. 
 
 The Second Part, while preserving the sense of mystery, has 
 a more realistic setting than the First, and portrays the wild 
 countryside ' from Bratha Head to Wyndermere ', near which 
 it was written. The whole poem is richly romantic in the 
 specific, as in the general, sense of the word, and its reversion 
 to the age of chivalry is typical of the new spirit at work in 
 English poetry. In his various and powerful handling of the 
 mighty four-stressed metre 1 of his choice, Coleridge shows that 
 he has once more intuitively divined and mastered the genius 
 of English poetry ; and the prosodical note with which he pre- 
 faces the poem, though it errs in describing his principle of 
 variation as a new one, goes to the very heart of English metre, 
 and certainly does not deserve the disparaging treatment 
 recently accorded to it in certain quarters. 
 
 Still more characteristic of the profound and subconscious 
 depth from which all Coleridge's best poetry seems to have been 
 flung up, is Kubla Khan, produced after a reading of Purchas 
 his. Pilgrims, during a deep slumber * in which all the images 
 rose up before him as things with a parallel production of the 
 correspondent expressions, without any sensation or conscious- 
 ness of effort '. The poem consists of less than seventy lines, 
 yet in it are summed all Coleridge's greatest qualities rich 
 sensuousness of expression, vivid and unearthly imagery, form 
 adapted to emotion with consummate beauty and variety, 
 imagination projecting itelf into the unknown, and returning 
 to earth aglow and quivering with infinity. 
 
 Besides the three great poems just mentioned, Coleridge 
 wrote a considerable amount of verse, but only the merest 
 handful of this is of the first order, and by far the greater part 
 is uninspired save by a few stray gleams. Such gleams are 
 evident in his Religious Musings and The Destiny of Nations, 
 which preceded the Lyrical Ballads. In the fragmentary Three 
 Graves Coleridge attempts to adapt to ordinary life the theme 
 
 1 For a detailed account of this see Oliver Elton, A Survey of English 
 Literature, 1780-1830, vol. i, pp. 112-13. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 281 
 
 of a curse or spell laid upon the human soul, which in The 
 Ancient Mariner he had developed with romantic wildness. 
 In two beautiful poems, Frost at Midnight and Lewti, he 
 approaches Wordsworth in the detection of mystical affinities 
 between Nature and the human soul ; but in the powerful Ode 
 Dejection (1802) he has moved from this position, and believes 
 that the soul can find no revelation outside itself. Thus he 
 writes : 
 
 Lady, we receive but what we give, 
 And in our life alone does Nature live ; 
 
 and 
 
 1 may not hope from outward forms to win 
 
 The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. 
 
 It is instructive to contrast the superbly sure language of his 
 greatest Ode, France, with the rhetoric which almost baffles 
 inspiration in its immediate predecessor, the Ode to the 
 Departing Year. 
 
 In drama Coleridge's first work was his crude and hastily His Plays, 
 written contribution to The Fall of Robespierre, a play in which 
 he collaborated with Southey and Lovell. His tragedy Osorio 
 is still early work, but was subsequently revised and produced 
 under the title of Remorse in 1813 at Drury Lane, where it had 
 a successful run. It is melodramatic and faulty in construction, 
 but contains fine poetry, as does its successor, the dramatic 
 idyll, Zapolya. 
 
 The influence of Coleridge on English poetry has been steady His Influ- 
 since his death, and was never more strong than it is to-day, ence. 
 Poems like Mr. G. K. Chesterton's Ballad of the White Horse, 
 and Mr. Herbert Trench's Apollo and the Seaman, owe much of 
 their form and expression to The Ancient Mariner ; and the 
 successive books of Georgian Poetry (1911-19) show that the 
 younger men are striving with might and main to recapture 
 Coleridge's intimate strangeness, his magical word and vision. 
 The miracle of his influence becomes all the greater when it is 
 remembered that it is by three or four poems alone that he 
 lives for the majority of men. 
 
 The influence of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is less Words- 
 formally obvious than that of Coleridge in its bearings upon worth, 
 modern poetry, but even more profound in point of thought 
 and spirit. No true understanding of his poetry and teaching 
 is possible without close study of his two longest poems, and 
 especially of the one in which he gives the history, material and 
 spiritual, of his earlier years. This work, The Prelude, was origi- 
 nally intended to be preparatory to a huge autobiographical and 
 speculative poem in three books called TheRecluse. This Words- 
 worth likened to a vast Gothic cathedral, of which the earlier 
 poem was to be the antechapel. Of the main fabric we only 
 possess entire the second part, The Excursion. The third part 
 was never written ; the first book of the first part was not 
 published till 1888, and is now generally known as TheRecluse. 
 
282 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Besides these magnificent portions of the greater whole, there 
 also survive no small number of those shorter poems which 
 were intended as the 'little cells, oratories and sepulchral 
 recesses ' of the main building. In these outer chapels many 
 votaries of Wordsworth have been content to worship without 
 ever penetrating into the inner sanctuary. 
 
 It is impossible here to discuss his boyhood save in the 
 briefest outline. 1 The trend which his inspiration was subse- 
 quently to take had been moulded, so he tells us, by the twofold 
 influence exerted on his boyish mind by Nature and by the 
 strong and simple rustic types whom he had encountered while 
 at school at Hawkshead. His teacher, William Taylor, whose 
 personality suggested many traits of ' Matthew ' , had already, 
 during Wordsworth's schooldays, stimulated his growing pas- 
 sion for natural beauty ; and it was as a schoolboy, too, that 
 he had learnt that love and admiration f or the Cumbrian 'states- 
 men ', the aristocracy of the English peasantry, which were 
 afterwards to take form in some of his finest poetry. From the 
 beginning it was through symbols offered by Nature, rather 
 than through austere introspection, or the independent inner 
 illumination known to Blake, that he had divined the spiritual 
 dignity of his kind ; 2 the sight of a Cumbrian shepherd, seen 
 as a giant through the mist on the mountain side, or glorified 
 by the deep radiance of the setting sun, had ennobled man out- 
 wardly before his sight, and had brought the poet, mystically 
 but surely, to an unconscious love and reverence of human 
 nature. It was the same with regard to external nature. From 
 early boyhood he had known 
 
 the first virgin passion of a soul 
 Communing with the glorious universe. 
 
 His soul lacked not ' Aeolian visitations ' ; he had felt ' gleams 
 like the flashing of a shield ' ; while still a boy, as he rowed by 
 stealth on Esthwaite in a purloined boat, the mountain that 
 towered above the lake had made after him , ' as if with volunta ry 
 power instinct," had overtaken him, and carried the meaning of 
 Nature deep into his heart, so that for many days his brain 
 
 Worked with a dim and undetermined sense 
 Of unknown modes of being. 
 
 The associations he had thus detected in boyhood between 
 natural impressions and memories and the deeper moods of the 
 human consciousness, 3 were afterwards to flash upon his mind 
 with profound inner meaning. It was in boyhood, too, that he 
 
 1 For a detailed study of it see The Early Life of Wordsworth, by fimile 
 Legouis, an elaborate study and analysis of The Prelude. 
 
 2 Cf. Excursion, vi. 179 seq. Prelude, xiii. 262-3, 269-75. The last 
 passage contains his famous praise of the inarticulate poets of homely 
 life. 
 
 3 Cf . Prelude, xii. 287-335, where he associates the grief caused by his 
 father's death with his tempestuous experience on the mountain aide. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 283 
 
 formed that habit of observing Nature lovingly and closely 
 which makes his communing with her a thing different in 
 kind from that of almost all his English predecessors. He 
 hotly repudiates the idea that such observation meant taking 
 n mere mechanical inventory of her details ; on the other hand 
 the ' wise passiveness ' with which he taught that she should be 
 watched, is no mere state of listless lethargy, but the mystical 
 culmination of the intense activity with wnich he thought she 
 should be wooed. It is such a spiritual state as this which 
 produces the essential beauty of more than one of the Duddon 
 Sonnets, and of the majestic description of moonrise upon the 
 mountains in the fourteenth book of The Prelude, or that other 
 description of the Green Linnet perched among the hazel trees : 
 
 Yet seeming still to hover 
 There where the flutter of his wings 
 Upon his back and body flings 
 Shadows and sunny glimmerings 
 
 That cover him all over. 
 
 Through watching came revelation, working immediately 
 through symbol, and only afterwards reduced to the full con- 
 sciousness of poetic thought. Wordsworth's highest poetry 
 arrives by the short cut of inspiration at conclusions akin to 
 those of the profoundest speculative reasoning. 
 
 Yet this had not always been so. There had been a time in His early 
 his life, so he tells us that of the Evening Walk and the passion 
 Descriptive Sketches when he had looked on Nature with for 
 the presumptuous eye of mere artistic dilettantism ; he had Nature, 
 savoured fastidiously 
 
 The winds, 
 
 And roaring waters and the lights and shades 
 That marched and countermarched about the hills 
 In glorious apparition, 1 
 
 had been 
 
 even in pleasure pleased 
 Unworthily, disliking here, and there 
 Liking, by rules of mimic art transferred 
 To things above all art. 1 
 
 Even when he had avoided this dilettantism, he had still often 
 regarded Nature merely with the physical eye which takes in 
 the outer show of things, and is blind to 
 
 The affections and the spirit of the place. 2 
 
 At this period he would have been moved 3 to draw Peele Castle 
 but with the artist's hand, 
 
 And add the gleam, 
 
 The light that never was, on sea or land. 
 The consecration, and the poet's dream. 
 
 1 Prelude, xii. 1)5-8, 109-12. - Ibid., xii. 120. 
 
 3 Cf. Walter Raleigh, Wordstvurlh, p. 108. 
 
284 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 It was at this season that the sounding cataract haunted him 
 like a passion, and the tall rock, the mountain and the deep 
 and gloomy wood, were but 
 
 An appetite, a feeling and a love, 
 That had no need of a remoter charm, 
 By thought supplied, nor any interest 
 Unborrowed from the eye. 1 
 
 His later But he was not long to remain thus. During his early man- 
 view of hood he had undergone a profound spiritual crisis, the result 
 her. j n g rea t measure of his disillusionment with the French Eevo- 
 
 lution and with the sterile philosophy of William Godwin. From 
 the gloomy despondency of this period he was rescued by the 
 guidance of his sister Dorothy, by the companionship of Cole- 
 ridge, and by the deeper understanding of Nature to which he 
 was brought by their influence. As he grew in years, and came 
 to scan Nature more piercingly, as, after his brother John's 
 death, he came to read thebook of life with the gloss of suffering, 
 then 
 
 The intellectual power through words and things 
 Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way, 
 
 and brought him into depths where he had never yet moved. 
 The cataract became more to him than a passion ; it became 
 a Vision Beautiful, a symbol of scarce utterable things. 
 His vision, like that of Blake, was henceforth as it had been 
 in the beginning, ' twofold always ', and he looked with con- 
 tempt on ' the blind, mechanical talent that walks while the 
 soul sleeps, with the mere activity of a blind somnambulism'. 
 He regained once more the mood of his youth the mood in 
 which Jacob Boehme gazed on a green field before Gorlitz till 
 he saw the essences, use, and properties of the herbs and 
 grasses, and through them the mysteries of the whole creation 
 the mood in which, as Wordsworth tells us : 
 
 with an eye made quiet by the power 
 Of harmony and the deep power of joy, 
 We see into the life of things. 2 
 
 It is thus that he can say in words which are the final expression 
 of his thought and poetry : 
 
 I have felt 
 
 A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 
 1 Lines composed above Tintern Abbey, 79-82. 
 
 2 Ibid. 46-8, 92-101. In this passage Nature is the Revealer ; for 
 Nature the Healer, cf. Tintern Abbey, 134-46. For the conception of 
 the human mind in its creative relation to Nature, cf . Prelude, ii. 368-74, 
 iii. 133-5, xiv. 94-5. For Wordsworth's insistence on the moral inde- 
 pendence and spiritual obligation of the soul, cf. Excursion, iv. 70-122, 
 Prelude, x. 182-90, and the Ode to Duly. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 285 
 
 And the round ocean and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man : 
 A motion and a spirit, that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things. 1 
 
 The same thought is expressed once more in the Address to 
 Kilchurn Castle : 
 
 Oh ! there is life that breathes not ; Powers there are 
 That touch each other to the quick in modes 
 Which the gross world no strength hath to perceive, 
 No soul to dream of. 
 
 This sense of a great unity, which comprised both Nature and 
 himself, explained both her and him, and it also explained the 
 profound feeling some say of infinity which all who have 
 sought and loved Nature, have sometimes felt in her presence. 
 The power, says Wordsworth, 
 
 which Nature thus 
 
 To bodily sense exhibits, is the express 
 Resemblance of that glorious faculty 
 That higher minds bear with them as their own. 2 
 
 It was only the man who had thus heard the mighty stream of 
 tendency, and looked with the eyes of the Spirit into Nature's 
 soul, who could hope to recapture something of the glory which, 
 as we are told in the great Ode on Intimations of Immortality , 
 the new-born child brings with him from the unknown world, 
 and which, in most men, shimmers gradually into nothingness 
 under the beat of the world's garish light. 
 
 In the light of these considerations, it is not wonderful that Words- 
 in his essential interpretation of Nature Wordsworth should worth and 
 differ utterly from her chief modern interpreter, Meredith, Meredith, 
 whose views have been profoundly coloured by the teachings 
 of modern science. To Meredith, as to Peter Bell, a primrose 
 by the river's brim was still a yellow primrose the loveliest 
 nursling, doubtless, of the Valley Beautiful or the Woods of 
 Westermain ; a flower instinct with Nature's message, and 
 radiant with her glory ; yet having no part in anything which 
 rose above her or informed her with infinity : an emblem, not a 
 symbol ; a thing still physical, supplying to man rather a sub- 
 lime text than a transcendent revelation. To Wordsworth, such 
 a flower had part in something ' far more deeply interfused ' : 
 it was one with what Plato called the Soul of the World, and 
 with something higher than that Soul ; it was one with the soul 
 of man ; nay, it was Soul itself, and took delight in its existence. 
 ' It is my faith', says Wordsworth, * that every flower enjoys 
 the air it breathes'. This conception may be attacked by those 
 who would ' peep and botanize upon their mother's grave ', as 
 
 1 Ibid. 2 Prelude, xiv. 85-90. 
 
286 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 by less ruthless investigators ; but what these rationalists must 
 not do, as Professor Kaleigh has warned them, is deny that 
 Wordsworth believed what he said, or attribute to his pleasant 
 fancy what he has told us is his faith. 
 
 Words- And how does Wordsworth deal with the problem of evil in 
 
 worth's Nature f He does not, as a matter of fact, explicitly interpret 
 Optimism, this aspect of her, and he even, as certain of his critics have 
 noticed, shows a tendency to shrink from discussing it, In his 
 age the theory of the struggle for survival had not made its 
 way insensibly into the minds of men, as it has among our- 
 selves since the day of Darwin. This, however, is hardly 
 a sufficient explanation of his attitude, for it would apply also 
 to Alfred de Vigny, whose indictment of Nature 1 is, neverthe- 
 less, one of the most terrible ever penned. Whatever be the 
 explanation, it is surely true that, in the words of Professor 
 Bradley, ' Wordsworth yields here and there too much to 
 a tendency to contrast the happiness, innocence, and harmony 
 of Nature with the unrest, misery, and sin of man \ Yet when 
 he came to the world of men and women, Wordsworth was in 
 no sense blind to evil 2 and suffering, and if it be true, as Matthew 
 Arnold declared, that he averted his ken from half of human 
 fate, that half was certainly not the one which comprised the 
 miserable and the outcast. In such poems as Ruth, Michael, 
 The Vision of Margaret, Simon Lee, and innumerable others, 
 as well as throughout the first and intermediate books of The 
 Excursion, Wordsworth shows that he has gone into the depth 
 of things, has read the innermost meaning of human sorrow, 
 and has felt in himself and others the meaning of his own 
 tremendous lines : 
 
 Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, 
 And shares the nature of infinity. 
 
 P*t ' f Closely akin to his conception of Nature, and of man's 
 patriotic Delation to her, is his conception of patriotism. The lesson of 
 independence which she taught the Leech -gatherer 011 the 
 lonely moor was also the lesson which she taught to the nations 
 whose manly freedom was imperilled by their own sloth or the 
 menace of a foreign power. At the time when Wordsworth 
 began to realize that Napoleon had betrayed the principles of 
 the French Kevolution, and was threatening the freedom of 
 the world, England was menaced both by the internal and the 
 external danger, and in Wordsworth's view had become ' a fen 
 of stagnant waters ' ; but his deep love and knowledge of her 
 
 1 In La Maison du Berger. 
 
 2 Wordsworth's conception of evil has been shown by Professor 
 Bradley to be akin to that of Hegel, and to proceed on the assumption 
 that it is the necessary correlative of good, that alone through evil, the 
 negation, can good, the actuality, have positive being. It is his constant 
 teaching that the soul by her own effort can wring good out of evil. 
 Of. Excursion, iv. 140-96, 1058-77 ; Prelude, viii. 647-50, x. 465 seq. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 287 
 
 taught him that if she were true to her own greatness, she 
 could conquer both herself and the foreign foe : 
 
 In our halls is hung 
 
 Armoury of the invincible knights of old : 
 We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 
 That Shakespeare spake ; the faith and morals hold 
 Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung 
 Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold. 
 
 It was in this faith that Wordsworth wrote the Poems dedi- 
 cated to National Liberty and Independence, which perhaps 
 contain his country's greatest patriotic poetry, and are in- 
 spired by the very spirit in which she entered on the latest and 
 greatest of her wars, and carried it through to victory. 
 
 Special prominence has here been given to the transcenden- 
 tal aspects of Wordsworth's poetry, beca~use the present writer, 
 in contradistinction to most critics of the past generation, and 
 to a few even of the present, is convinced that some such study 
 is necessary to the full comprehension even of his simpler and 
 less metaphysical poetry. Very many aspects of his poetic 
 achievement must be left undiscussed here. Consideration of 
 its form must be determined, at least in some measure, by his 
 own expressed opinions regarding the nature of poetry. In the His poetic 
 famous preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, theory 
 Wordsworth says : * Between the language of prose and that and prac- 
 of metrical composition, there neither is, nor can be, any tice. 
 essential difference ' ; again, he declares : ' poetry is but 
 a selection of the real language of men *, and, speaking of men 
 in low and rustic life, he continues, * the language of these men 
 has been adopted. I have proposed to myself to imitate, and 
 as far as possible to adopt, the very language of men.' Cole- 
 ridge, in nis criticism of these passages, has cited three verses 
 of Wordsworth's poem The Sailor's Mother, as being among 
 the few examples of his work which fulfil exactly his own 
 conditions, and has shown that these are emphatically not 
 poetry. On the other hand, where Wordsworth does achieve 
 true poetry, even of the simplest kind, 1 though the words may 
 
 1 For example : 
 
 Love had he found in huts where poor men lie; 
 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, 
 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills. 
 
 Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, 161-4. 
 
 And he had trudged through Yorkshire dales, 
 Among the rocks and winding scars ; 
 Where deep and low the hamlets lie 
 Beneath their little patch of sky 
 And little lot of stars. 
 
 Peter Bett, 226-30. 
 
 The stars of midnight shall be dear 
 To her; and she shall lean her ear 
 
288 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 be those of ordinary prose speech, the arrangement and the 
 whole effect are emphatically not so. Still less is this the case in 
 his more elaborate sonnets, or in Laodamia, or in the great 
 Odes. 1 The language of these is clearly not the language of 
 ordinary men, whether in the ' state of excitement ' presup- 
 posed by Wordsworth, or otherwise. Imagination has come 
 in and supplied far more than the ' certain colouring ' which 
 he demanded of her. The water has been turned into wine by 
 miracle, not by ' selection '. The secret of Wordsworth's, as 
 of all poetry, lies in these other words of his : 
 
 A hundred times when roving high and low, 
 I have been harassed with the toil of verse, 
 Much pains and little progress : and at once 
 Some lovely image in the song rose up, 
 Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea. 2 
 
 Yet when all has been said the fact remains that Wordsworth's 
 poetry, even though it never realizes his prose definition ab- 
 solutely, is constantly always, indeed, when most character- 
 istic closely akin to it, for good or for bad. In reading very 
 many of his poems, both long and short, one is far more 
 conscious of the * toil ' than of the ' progress ' ; as to the quality 
 of many others, there is still doubt and dispute. His best lyrics 
 and sonnets are consummate ; and there is exquisite poetry 
 throughout his two longest and greatest poems. Yet these 
 must be read even as they were written, as wholes, and must 
 not be threshed and winnowed out of their true shape and 
 substance in the quest of formal beauty. It is easy to prove 
 that the seventh book of The Prelude, or the sixth book of 
 The Excursion, or Goody Blake and Harry Gill, or Vaudracour 
 and Julia are not, for the most part, poetry ; it is quite 
 another matter to contend that they should, or may, be 
 utterly neglected by those who would know the true meaning 
 
 In many a secret place 
 
 Where rivulets dance their wayward round, 
 
 And beauty born of murmuring sound 
 
 Shall pass into her face. 
 
 Lucy. 
 
 1 Or in such brief snatches of great poetry as : 
 
 Suffering is permanent, obscure and vast, 
 And shares the nature of infinity. 
 
 or Fancy dreaming o'er the map of things. 
 
 or The intellectual power through words and things 
 
 Went sounding on, a dim and perilous way. 
 
 or Each little drop of wisdom as it falls 
 
 Into the dimpling cistern of his heart. 
 
 or Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 
 Of the eternal silence. 
 
 2 Prelude, iv. 110-14. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 289 
 
 of Wordsworth's mind and art. We are not here concerned 
 with the mass of latter poetry which he wrote when inspiration 
 had left him, or revisited him only fitfully. Through the truest 
 and highest work of his genius he remains for most Englishmen 
 the greatest of their poets since Milton. 
 
 Wordsworth's friend and fellow-poet of the Lakes, Robert Southey. 
 Southey (1774-1843), is chiefly read to-day in certain of his 
 shorter pieces, though his long poems were conceived with lofty 
 purpose and plan. Of these Joan of Arc (1195), Madoc (181)5), 
 and Roderick the Goth (1814) were written in blank verse, the 
 ' noblest measure ' , according to their author, of which the 
 English language was capable, ^adoc is an epic describing 
 the adventures of a Cymric prince, who, like the Northmen of 
 The Earthly Paradise, has sought refuge in a far land from the 
 perils of his own country. In Madoc's case the land is Mexico, 
 and the poem is given up to the strife and adventure encoun- 
 tered by him there, and in his own country, to which he returns 
 for a period. Roderick, a more spirited and interesting poem, 
 deals with the last phase in the history of the Visigoths, and 
 with the warfare arising out of the enmity between the royal 
 families of Chindasuintho and Wamba. The chief actors in the 
 ensuing drama are Roderick himself, Pelayo, founder of the 
 Spanish monarchy, the renegades Orpas and Count Julian, 
 and Julian's daughter, Florinda. In 1801, Southey published 
 Thalaba the Destroyer, a long, wild, Arabian tale written in the 
 rhymeless stanzas of unequal line-length which had been sug- 
 gested to him by the Dramatic Sketches of Northern Mythology 
 of Dr. Sayers. The prosodic monotony and bathos into which 
 this poem often falls are to a large extent avoided in The Curse 
 of Kehama (1810), which allows rhyme while retaining the 
 irregular stanza. Here again the tale is Eastern, and there are 
 considerable power and imagination in the descriptions of the 
 torment endured by Ladurlad under the imprecation of the 
 ' Man-Almighty ' Rajah. The chief remaining poem of this 
 class is the Tale of Paraguay (1814). 
 
 The best of Southey's long poems contain remarkably fine 
 things, and are readable through their swift sequence of vivid 
 incident. They are written with dignity and ease ; but these 
 qualities kindle too seldom into genuine poetry: too often the 
 impression left is merely that of determined and conscientious 
 work. The same criticism may be made upon most of his 
 romantic ballads, from the mass of which stands out the admir- 
 able Queen Orraca. There is a certain power in some of his 
 poems of peasant life for instance in Jaspar, which has 
 affinities both with Crabbe's Tales and with Peter Bell. He 
 could, at times, succeed in the grimly grotesque, as in The 
 Surgeon's Funeral. Very many of his minor poems, however, 
 labour with that malady of flatness which appears so distress- 
 ingly in his English Eclogues, but from which his Battle of 
 Blenheim, Cataract of Lodore, and Inchcape Rock so happily 
 escape. His later poem, the Vision of Judgment, though it is 
 
290 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 not without intrinsic merit, is chiefly remembered as having 
 inspired the brilliant and annihilating reply of Byron which 
 bears the same name. 
 
 Scott. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) had written by far the greater 
 
 part of his poetry before his forty-third year, after which he 
 devoted his chief energy to his great series of historical novels. 
 Even in his childhood he had been a keen reader of poetry of 
 all kinds, and his interest in old romance had been stirred by 
 his grandmother's tales of Border depredation and adventure. 
 He read Border ballads eagerly, and for seven successive years 
 made pilgrimages into the wilds of Liddesdale in search of 
 adventure and old song. Kor ballad literature he came to feel 
 the same passion that had inspired Percy nearly a generation 
 earlier. For a time he turned from the Scotch to the German 
 ballad, and in 1 796 he published a translation of Burger's Lenore, 
 and of other poems. Of far more moment is his great collection, 
 His hand- The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (three volumes, 1802-3), 
 ling of the which he compiled through love of ballads, and the desire that 
 Ballad. others should share that love. Some of the finest specimens 
 in the language have been preserved through his industry and 
 enthusiasm. Where the ballads existed in two or more ver- 
 sions, Scott compounded these so as to obtain the most poetical 
 text : where they were defective, he filled in the gaps, and in 
 some cases, as in Kinmont Willie, he built up anew from scanty 
 fragments. There is no fair evidence for the contention that in 
 certain cases he palmed off entire ballads of modern fabrication 
 for ancient ones. One section of his collection, however, con- 
 sists of modern ballads admittedly written in imitation of the 
 old. Some of these, as Cadyow Castle, are his own ; but they 
 are not of his best, and cannot compare with the posthumously 
 published ballads of Swinburne either for beauty or for fidelity 
 to the old ballad music and spirit. 
 
 His Lays. If Scott's practice of the ballad was not in itself notable at 
 this period it had a notable consequence, for out of it sprang the 
 long poems or lays which are the most widely read of all his 
 writings in verse. Lady Dalkeith had suggested the topic of 
 the goblin page, Gilpin Horner, as fit matter for the Border 
 Minstrelsy ; but Scott, when he began to work on it, found 
 it too long for a ballad, and expanded it into the Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel (1805). The original theme is ill developed, but the 
 main story with which it is interwoven is admirably told in 
 a swift and ringing metre ; and many of the passages deserve 
 the praise accorded by Pitt to the description of the old harper. 
 The Lay was followed by a succession of long poems Marmion 
 (1808), The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rokeby (1813), The Lord of 
 the Isles (1815), and the less successful Bridal of Triermain and 
 Harold the Dauntless. Of these the Lady of the Lake is best told, 
 and contains the finest poetry ; but much of Marmion is 
 greatly written, and few things of Scott's are more stirring than 
 the canto on Flodden Field. In nearly all of these poems there 
 are fine descriptions of scenery and of fighting, and the charac- 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 291 
 
 terization, if it generally lacks subtlety, seldom lacks colour, 
 and is adequate at its best to the swift and simple movement of 
 the tale. Scott's staple metres in these lays are the ballad 
 measure, and the octosyllabic rhyming couplet, used either 
 simply or in alternation with shorter rhyming lines ; x and to 
 these he constantly imparts the most admirable vigour and 
 glow. His joy in natural beauty and in the romantic past give 
 him kinship with more than one contemporary Southern poet. 
 These poems provoked Byron to competition, and led him to 
 ' write his own romantic lays ; and it was partly from his sense 
 that Byron had outdistanced him 'Byron bet me' he writes 
 that Scott ceased to practise the long poem. 
 
 Many of his lays notably The Lady of the Lake contain His Songs, 
 lyrics of great beauty ; and it is in the short poem or song that 
 his poetry reaches its highest pitch. He excels in the lyric of 
 action or swift emotion, such as the great Coronach and the 
 Pibroch of Donald Dhu, and in such a fusion of lyric and ballad 
 as Bonny Dundee. Some of his lighter songs for instance, the 
 Burns-like David Gawd's come again are admirable; but the 
 greatest poem he ever wrote is the exquisite Proud Maisie. 
 
 The only serious doubt concerning the supreme value of Byron. 
 Wordsworth's poetry centres round the question, which part of 
 his work it is that counts for most. With George Gordon, Lord 
 Byron (1788-1824), however, the case is different, for his very 
 claim to be reckoned among England's greater poets has been 
 hotly disputed from his day to our own, and the dispute 
 seems likely to be kept up as long as English criticism lasts. 
 European opinion, from Goethe's day to that of Mr. Georg 
 Brandes has, for the most part, reckoned him second only in 
 English poetry to Shakespeare. Goethe immortalizes him as 
 Euphorion in the Second Part of Faust, and in the beautiful 
 song which he gives to that child of Faust and Helen, he offers 
 devout homage to his spirit. In England, however, the case has 
 been different ; even during the tremendous European vogue 
 which came to Byron before his death, there was steady protest 
 in his own country against the insincerity of thought and 
 slovenliness of form which have been considered his chief 
 literary vices. Thackeray maintained that he never wrote from 
 his heart, and Wordsworth declared that he never could love 
 Nature genuinely or fervently, inasmuch as he took ' Life's 
 rule from passion craved for passion's sake'. Since his own 
 day his reputation as a poet has been subjected to a still fiercer 
 assault, headed by Swinburne, who had been maddened by 
 Matthew Arnold's perverse exaltation of him at the expense 
 of Swinburne's own idol, Shelley. Opinion of our own day 
 speaks with a divided voice : up till a few years ago most 
 representative critics (for example, Professor Saintsbury) sided 
 rather with Swinburne than with Arnold ;' but lately there has 
 
 1 For a fuller description of Scott's metres, see Elton, Survey, vol.i, 
 pp. 310-14. 
 
292 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 been a marked reaction in Byron's favour. 1 It is not difficult 
 to see how the discrepancies between the English and Conti- 
 nental estimates arose, nor what were the qualities in Byron 
 which appealed to European critics. Except to an ear and 
 mind highly trained in English poetry, Byron's rhetorical habit 
 of over-emphasis, and his constant lapses from poetic form, 
 would be less obvious than his dramatic and international 
 posture of revolt. This is an aspect of English romanticism 
 lower and far more easy to grasp than the pure, clear inspira- 
 tion of Wordsworth, or the unearthly glory of Shelley. The 
 very vices, moreover, of Byron's style give him, when read 
 in translation, a certain advantage over his greater contem- 
 poraries ; for in him it is the dross which falls away, in them the 
 gold. In comparing the relative value of the European and 
 English estimates, it must never be forgotten, first, that with 
 regard to Byron's general position English opinion is still 
 divided; and, second, that even that opinion has always 
 admitted the transcendent excellence in its kind of a great 
 part of his work. Nevertheless it is somewhat difficult to admit 
 outright that * the foreign estimate of his greatness is truer and 
 sounder than the English estimate '. The position of Byron in 
 English poetry is somewhat analogous to that of Heine in 
 German : in both cases the poet is more popular with general 
 readers in foreign countries than with critics in his own ; and 
 in neither case is it yet quite possible to make any final or 
 sweeping estimate of his position. 
 
 Phases of His earliest volumes were Poems on Various Occasions and 
 his poetry. Hours of Idleness (both 1807), which, except for Lachin y Gair, 
 and one or two stray passages, contain little of poetry or promise. 
 The attacks made upon the second volume elicited the rough 
 but vigorous and racy English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in 
 which Byron satirizes his critics and rivals after the fashion 
 which was to culminate in the masterly Vision of Judgment. 
 In 1812 Murray accepted and published the first two cantos of 
 Childe Harold, which recorded the grand tour Byron had made 
 through Europe and the Near East in 1809-11. The imme- 
 diate fame gained for him by this poem was enhanced by his 
 series of Eastern tales, The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The 
 Corsair, Lara, The Siege of Corinth, and Parisina (1813-16). 
 In attempting this form he was largely influenced, as we have 
 seen, by the work of Scott, whose vogue as a poet he immediately 
 eclipsed. After his disgrace and flight from England in 1816, 
 he travelled in Europe, and gave the result of his wanderings 
 and thought to the world in the third (1816) and fourth (1818) 
 cantos of Childe Harold. To this period belong The Prisoner of 
 Chillon (1816) and Mazeppa (1819). His historical and other 
 plays, Manfred, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two 
 Foscari, Heaven and Earth, The Deformed Transformed, Cain, 
 1 The most learned and eloquent modern defence of him as poet and 
 man occurs in Professor Elton's Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, 
 vol. ii, chap. 17. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 293 
 
 and Werner, range between the years 1817 and 1824: of these 
 the least successful are the purely historical, and the best are 
 those which, like Manfred and Cain, embody the right * By- 
 ronic ' or semi-satanic spirit of revolt and defiance. But his 
 most characteristic work, and that which has best assured his 
 reputation with posterity, is contained in the free, light, and 
 strong satiric and descriptive way of writing which began with 
 Beppo (1818) and culminated in The Vision of Judgment (1822) 
 and Don Juan (1819-24). It was Scott's proud boast on 
 behalf of Byron ' that he managed his pen with the careless and 
 negligent ease of a man of quality '. This contempt for the His style, 
 workmanlike and professional in literature is at once Byron's 
 weakness and his strength. In the serious and heroic work 
 which he had not yet learnt to lighten and leaven with satire, 
 it constantly results in slovenliness, false emphasis, and hectic 
 exaggeration. It made him write thus : 
 
 I can repeople with the past and of 
 
 The present there is still for eye and thought. 
 
 And meditation chastened down, enough. 1 
 
 and thus : 
 
 Yes one the first the last the best 
 The Cincinnatus of the West> 
 
 Whom envy dared not hate, 
 Bequeath'd the name of Washington, 
 To make man blush there was but one ! 2 
 
 and thus : 
 
 Many things will have 
 
 No end ; and some which would pretend to have 
 Had no beginning, have had one as mean 
 As thou ; and mightier things have been extinct 
 To make way for much meaner than we can 
 Surmise. 3 
 
 The same quality gave an air of insincerity to much of his 
 poetry of self -revelation and of Nature, especially where com- 
 parisons were possible, as in the first case with Rousseau, and 
 in the second with Wordsworth. 4 But considerable injustice 
 has been done to him by the assumption that insincerity of 
 form necessarily means insincerity of feeling ; and whatever 
 discords of diction or sentiment we may find in Childe Harold, 
 we have absolutely no right to doubt that the closing stanzas 
 of its third Canto represent Byron's authentic envisagement 
 of his own soul. Still less have we the right to regard all his 
 successes outside racy narrative and satire as mere accidents, 
 
 1 Childe Harold, iv. 163-6. 2 Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte. 
 
 3 Cain, Act II, Sc. i. 
 
 4 For Rousseau's influence on him, see Childe Harold, iii. Ixxvi seq. 
 Wordsworth's influence is strongly evident in The Prisoner of Chilian 
 and Childe Harold, Canto iii. Regarding Canto iv, we find him writing 
 to Murray, ' I have parted company with Shelley and Wordsworth : 
 subject matter and treatment are alike new.' 
 
. 294 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 or to close our eyes to the speed and glory of Mazeppa, to the 
 vivid power of The Dream, to the many beautiful descriptive 
 passages of Ohilde Harold, or to his best songs, or again to such 
 lines as : 
 
 The chaos of events, where lie half-wrought 
 Shapes that must undergo mortality. 1 
 
 or: 
 
 Great is their love who love in sin and fear, 2 
 
 or: 
 
 But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear 
 Her never-trodden snow, and seen the hoar 
 Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc both far and near, 
 And in Chimari heard the thunder-hills of fear, 
 The Acroceraunian mountains of old name. 8 
 
 On the other hand it was certainly not till he had learnt to 
 lighten his musings with laughter and had deserted the Spen- 
 serian stanza, which he never understood or mastered, for the 
 ' sparkling octaves ' of Don Juan and The Vision of Judgment, 
 that he found matter and metre fit for his passionate and 
 mocking soul. We prefer the Pilgrim of Eternity when his 
 solemn weeds take on a touch of motley, and in his last and 
 best phase we can rejoice in the laughing or weeping loves of 
 Juan and Julia and Haidee, no less than in the slashing wit and 
 gusto which season his indictments of Southey and Wilkes and 
 George III. For here Byron is * rattling on exactly as he'd 
 talk with anybody in a ride or walk '. 4 It was precisely in such 
 communication as this that he excelled, nor could he ever have 
 achieved such excellence had he taken a more fastidious and 
 professional view of his art : so that in this context Scott's 
 praise appears no mere perverse piece of snobbery, but becomes 
 the recognition of a real and delightful literary quality. 
 
 The genius of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) may be 
 variously considered according to its elements of intention or of 
 inspiration. The passion for human freedom, material and 
 spiritual, and the intense preoccupation with religious matters 
 which led to his being sent down from Oxford, are the starting 
 point of much of his finest poetry ; and though that poetry in 
 its consummation soars far beyond purposive reason, and the 
 didacticism which Shelley professed so -heartily to despise, no 
 full understanding of it is possible without some study of his 
 general attitude toward life. The most noticeable aspect of 
 this throughout his early writings is the militant rationalism 
 which produced the Necessity of Atheism, the notes to Queen 
 Mab (1813), which he afterwards to some extent repudiated, 
 a well-known passage of The Revolt of Islam, the terrible indict- 
 ment of Christianity formulated by Theosophus in a 'Refutation 
 of Deism, and the violent attacks on the same religion which 
 appear in his letters to Peacock, Godwin, and Elizabeth 
 
 1 Propliecy of Dante. 2 Heaven and Earth. 
 
 3 Childe Harold, iv. 653-8. 4 Don Juan, xv. 19. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 295 
 
 Kitchener. A similar conviction appears in the identification 
 in Prometheus Unbound of the Titan with the benign spirit of 
 man, and of Jupiter with man's cruel and malign oppressor. 
 This tendency in Shelley was undoubtedly intensified by the 
 influence of his father-in-law, William Godwin, and innumer- 
 able examples of it might be cited from his prose and poetry. 
 Yet his hatred of Christianity was combined with a profound 
 reverence for the personality of Christ, as is evident from his 
 Essay on Christianity, numerous passages of his letters, many 
 of his poems, and the notes to these. Two things he hated 
 with the greatest intensity first, historical Christianity, or 
 Paulinism, the assertion of dogma, and, as he considered it, of 
 blind or wicked misinterpretation, the tradition of cruelty, 
 oppression and intolerance, which, in his opinion, had darkened 
 the light of Christ's teaching, and turned a religion of love 
 into one of hatred and mistrust ; and second, the Old Testa- 
 ment tradition, cruel, as he thought, and sinister, on to which 
 the Gospel of Jesus had been grafted. How far these objec- 
 tions could be justified we are, of course, not concerned to 
 determine here ; but we must note that it is on these points 
 mainly that his antipathy to Christianity turns, and tnat it 
 therefore differs utterly from the anti-Christianity of Nietzsche, 
 which struck at the very heart of Christ's teaching, in its 
 ethical as well as in its traditional and supernatural aspects, 
 and described the religion of love as the religion of slaves. 
 Shelley hated ' Christianity ', but he was absolutely at one 
 with the spirit of Christ's own teaching, and would certainly 
 have claimed to be a Christian in the sense that He was one. 
 
 Yet there is more in the matter than this. Shelley might 
 logically have professed himself a reverent admirer of Christ, 
 and yet have remained a mere rationalist, an eighteenth-century 
 'Aufklarer'. But he was much more than this. Plato, as we 
 know from one of his letters, was his favourite author. He 
 translated The Symposium ; and such poems as Adonais and 
 Epipsychidion are instinct with Platonic influence. He had 
 also read a certain amount of modern transcendental philo- 
 sophy, and these two influences, combined with his now 
 strongly idealistic impulse, counteracted in his mind the cheap 
 rationalism with which Godwin had imbued him, and led him 
 to the conviction that ' the doctrines of the French and Material 
 Philosophy are as false as they are pernicious '. He is, in fact, 
 the most uncompromising of transcendental idealists, and 
 those and there have been such who attempt to suppress 
 or minimize this tendency, the very soul of his belief, are false 
 guides to his thought and poetry. There was a principle within 
 him, he tells us, which constantly transcended the * Keason ' 
 appealed to by the Encyclopaedists, and forced him to believe 
 in the immortality of the soul, and the existence of a Supreme 
 Power which swayed the universe and suffused it with the 
 spirit of Love. ' Keason ', he says, * tells me that death is the 
 boundary of the life of man, yet I feel, I believe, the direct 
 
296 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 contrary. The senses are the only inlets of knowledge, and 
 there is an inward sense which persuades me of this.' 
 
 In his last sentence he is speaking with the voice with which 
 Aristotle spoke in the Posterior Analytics and there is a curi- 
 ous echo in one of his letters of the idea so prominent in the 
 Phaedo of Plato that the body is only the contemptible prison- 
 house of the immortal soul. ' Everything', he says, 'which 
 relates simply to this clay-formed dungeon is comparatively 
 despicable.' The ethical aspect of his idealism is seen in his 
 far-reaching conception of universal charity and tolerance. 
 Thus, he says in his Letter to Lord Ellenborough, ' The time is 
 rapidly approaching I hope that you, my Lord, may live to 
 behold its arrival when the Mahometan, the Jew, the Chris- 
 tian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in one com- 
 munity, equally sharing the benefits which arise from its 
 association, and united in the bonds of charity and brotherly 
 love.' A more spiritual and transcendental conviction appears 
 in his conception of a future state in which the Particular shall be 
 absorbed in the Universal, the individual soul in the transcen- 
 dent, beneficent, and universal Power. Occasionally through- 
 out his poems we find this conception appearing as a belief in 
 separate personal immortality : more often, however, it is 
 identified with the spirit which was the essence of his life and 
 soul and thought with his profound and ecstatic faith in 
 That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
 That Beauty in which all things work and move ; 
 That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse 
 Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love 
 Which through the web of being blindly wove 
 By man and beast and earth and air and sea, 
 Burns bright or dim as each are mirrors of 
 The fire for which all thirst. 
 
 These lines of his own are really the last word on his thought 
 and teaching. 
 
 The spirit His belief in the spirit informing all existence was bound up 
 and form witn tne fervid conviction that the ideal perfection of love and 
 of his beauty could be, and must be, eventually realized both in life 
 poetry. and art. The poignant and constant disappointment of this 
 belief embittered many of his most intimate relations with his 
 kind : yet the fervour with which he continued to hold it gives 
 their distinctive beauty to many of his longer poems, and under- 
 lies the yearning of Alastor (1816), and Prince Athanase and 
 Epipsycnidion (1821), the revolt and indignation of The Revolt 
 of Islam (1818) and Prometheus Unbound (1820), and the 
 passionate yet transfigured grief of Adonais ( 1821 ). The moral 
 and intellectual unworldliness of Shelley's character in the 
 ordinary relations of life passes in his poetry into that peculiar 
 unearthliness of beauty which colours nearly all its expression, 
 whether abstract or dramatic or personal. Among such ex- 
 pressions the youthful Alastor represents the mood of personal 
 aspiration and ecstasy which was to recur again, variously yet 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 297 
 
 unmistakably, in the fragmentary Prince Athanase, in The 
 Triumph of Life, in Epipsychidion and The Sensitive Plant. 
 In The Revolt of T slam, though the form is narrative,the strivings 
 and agonies of Laon, Cythna and their aged counsellor are still 
 Shelley's : the inspired mysticism of Adonais is no less the 
 monument of Shelley's faith than of Keats's memory ; and the 
 same personal fervour of aspiration underlies the dramatic 
 grandeur of Prometheus Unbound and the dialogues and 
 choruses of Hellas (1822), which poem, so Shelley tells us in his 
 preface, ' derives its interest solely from the intense sympathy 
 which the author feels with the cause he would celebrate.' In 
 sharp and strange contrast to these symbolic dramas are The 
 Cenci (1819) -in dramatic intensity and aloofness perhaps the 
 greatest English play since the age of Shakespeare and the 
 fragmentary but powerful Charles the First. Rosalind and 
 Helen (1818), often disparaged as a mere metrical treatise on 
 the marriage question, is somewhat more than this psychologi- 
 cally and poetically, and contains some fine passages of natural 
 description. In Peter Bell the Third (1819) Shelley tries his 
 hand at satire, taking for his butt Wordsworth, who had 
 already been pilloried in John Hamilton Reynolds's Peter Bell 
 the Second. This poem is as racy and biting as Swellfoot the 
 Tyrant (1820), directed at George IV, is heavy and awkward. 
 Julian and Maddalo (1818), the vivid and intimate poem which 
 records an adventure shared with Lord Byron in Venice, and 
 the Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820), with its delightful picture 
 of Shelley's life at Pisa, and of his literary friends in England, 
 represent his easy mastery of poetic colloquy. At the opposite 
 extreme is that elvish vision, The Witch of Atlas (1820), in whose 
 perfect octaves the full splendour of imagination is shot with 
 the lightest grace and glow of fancy. Other moods and mas- 
 teries are evident in his Odes and Hymns, and in the various and 
 exquisite music of the Lines written among the Euganean Hills 
 (1818), which show us the poet's eye and soul communing 
 through ecstasy with Nature and the spirit of the past. Though 
 Shelley's reforming instinct frequently clashes with his poetic 
 inspiration, it was often through that instinct that he found 
 his voice, and in the choruses of Prometheus Unbound and 
 Hellas he has achieved the ideal unity of thought and form. 
 
 The intensity and range of Shelley's delight in Nature, and 
 the infinite variety of music in which that delight found voice, 
 may be gathered from a glance at The Ode to the West Wind, 
 To a Skylark, and The Cloud. 1 He differs from Byron in that he 
 was a poet by technical no less than by emotional instinct : 
 witness the infinite metrical subtlety and variety of his best 
 
 1 Cf. also The Question, ii, iii. Shelley's intuition of Nature was as 
 keen and various as Wordsworth's, but he depended far less closely than 
 Wordsworth on Nature's symbols for his consciousness of the universal 
 spirit, arriving at this partly by the a priori way of Plato, whom he 
 knew and loved, but more constantly and directly through an inspired, 
 subjective vision which has certain affinities with Blake's. 
 
 L 3 
 
298 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 lyrics, and the all but perfect mastery with which he has 
 handled innumerable English metres, from the great Spen- 
 serian stanza and the rhyming couplet, octosyllabic or deca- 
 syllabic, to the exotic terza rima. It is no false instinct which 
 has coupled him with Spenser as * the poet's poet '. It would 
 hardly be too much to say that he recreated English lyric metre. 
 There is no considerable poem of his from Alastor to Adonais 
 which does not contain passages reaching the loftiest and rarest 
 heights of poetry ; on the other hand, he is no mere singer 
 .to the elect, for all who have touched the garment's hem 
 of beauty may take joy in Arethusa or Mutability, or ' Life of 
 Life ! thy lips enkindle', or ' Swiftly walk over the western 
 wave '. 
 
 Keats, I n J nn Keats (1795^1821) we have the remarkable case of 
 
 a man who up till the age of twenty had, unlike Pope and 
 Chatterton, shown no marked signs of poetic greatness, yet who 
 dying at twenty -five left behind him a large amount of poetry 
 ranking with the greatest in the language. Consideration of 
 his work is impossible without reference to the poets who 
 influenced him, for to such influence Keats was as keenly re- 
 sponsive as we know him, on Severn's testimony, to have been 
 to the s/hifting moods and movements of Nature. As early as 
 1813 we find him listening delightedly to the Epithalamium of 
 Spenser, read to him by his teacher, Charles Cowden Clarke, 
 His early an< ^ m * ne 8a ; m e year he writes the Imitation of Spenser which 
 poems. appears in his volume of 1817. That fusion in poetry of sen- 
 suous and spiritual beauty which has endeared Spenser to all 
 succeeding poets, found a ready response in Keats's soul, and 
 the Spenserian influence is noticeable in him till the end, 
 formally and explicitly in his early work, more deeply and 
 spiritually in his intermediate and later. It was to another 
 great Elizabethan, Chapman, that he owed chiefly his intro- 
 duction to Greek poetry and mythology ; and this debt he has 
 acknowledged in a sonnet which is his earliest piece of truly 
 great work. A more direct and personal influence was Leigh 
 Hunt, whom he had first met in 1816. The same year saw the 
 appearance of Hunt's Story ofEimini, with its preface contain- 
 ing the well-known attack on Pope's use of the heroic couplet, 
 and its statement, curiously adapted from Wordsworth, that 
 * the proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from 
 that of real life '. The genial, versatile, and vulgar genius of 
 Hampstead showed Keats great kindness, and for a period 
 strongly influenced his outlook and work. One notable result 
 of this influence was the attack made on Pope and his school 
 in Sleep and Poetry, which earned for Keats the savage anti- 
 pathy of Byron. Vastly inferior though Keats's first volume is 
 to his later work, it already embodies that rich sensuousness 
 of feeling and that love of old romance which are constant 
 throughout his poetry. More positive, and, on the whole, very 
 Endy- regrettable, evidence of Hunt's influence is visible in his second 
 mion. volume, JVndymion (1818). The inscription of this poetic 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 299 
 
 romance to Thomas Chatterton, and its motto, ' the stretched 
 metre of an antique song,' indicate the hold which the ro- 
 mantic past and its chief modern singer had won upon Keats's 
 imagination. From the opening passage onward may be felt 
 his young, keen delight in natural beauty, gaining always in 
 intensity and fullness, and forecasting the full perfection of the 
 Ode to Autumn. Constantly, too, we have glimpses of natural 
 magic, of ' the wizard twilight Coleridge knew ', in which 
 imagination, now utterly freed from its trammels and working 
 after its own law, fashions images of strange beauty. Through- 
 out the poem there are many passages of high and sustained 
 power, many unforgettable shorter passages, and many ' jewels 
 five words long '. l Yet there are pains as well as pleasures for 
 those who follow the blessed shepherd through his manifold 
 adventures with Glaucus, Alpheus, and the rest, through his 
 perplexing loves for Diana and the Indian maid, till the happy 
 hour when, purified by sympathy with others' love, he finds 
 that these two are not rivals, but one and the same dear being. 
 The perspective of the poem is misty and unsure, and its action 
 is involved and disconnected. The descriptive power fre- 
 quently languishes, and there are desert stretches redeemed 
 by few oases. The many crudities of detail are all the more 
 obvious because they sometimes follow upon passages of rare 
 beauty. For these shortcomings Hunt is partly responsible, 
 thougn it is certainly not fair to attribute to his influence all 
 the defects in Keats's early work. For all the faults of Endy- 
 mion, there is little justification for the savage attack made 
 upon it by Croker in the Quarterly, and there is none at all for 
 the contemptible onslaught of Lockhart in BlacTcwood, which 
 refers to Keats throughout as * Johnny Keats ' and bids him go 
 back to his apothecary's shop. 2 
 
 There is clear progress, and an acceptable restraint, dite to Lamia. 
 Keats's study of Dryden, in Lamm (1819). This story was 
 suggested by a passage from Philostratus. quoted in Burton's 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, and deals with the love of the young 
 Corinthian, Lycius, for the fair Lamia, eventually proved by 
 the sage Apollodorus to be a snake in woman's form. Some 
 have pretended to see in it an allegorical treatise on the relation 
 between passion and intellect ; but not even such an interpre- 
 tation can destroy the beauties of the poem, which, in Keats's 
 own opinion, was his most successful work. It ig a typical 
 example of his treatment of Greek mythology, and is instinct 
 
 1 For example, ' The geeen evening quiet in the sun ', ' apples wan 
 with sweetness', 'My hair up-tying with fingers cool as aspen leaves'. 
 
 2 To the former of these criticisms Keats'a early death was attributed, 
 satirically by Byron in Don Juan, seriously and with passionate resent- 
 ment by Shelley in Adonais and its preface. It is certain, however, that 
 the chief and original cause of his early decay was disease, though this 
 may possibly have been to some extent aggravated by the rebuffs which 
 he had experienced in love and literature. 
 
300 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 with the spirit which led Shelley to exclaim, ' He was a Greek ! ' 
 Though Keats's chief instructors in Greek and Latin had been 
 such Elizabethans as Chapman and Sandys, there are innumer- 
 able passages throughout his work which seem to represent 
 without mediation the very spirit of Greek poetry. Keats had 
 as little first-hand Greek as had Shakespeare; yet the following 
 passage of Lamia has the chaste simplicity 'of Sophocles at 
 his highest : 
 
 He would return that way, as well she knew, 
 
 To Corinth from the shore : for freshly blew 
 
 The eastern soft wind, and his galley now 
 
 Grated the quay-stones with her brazen prow 
 
 In port Cenchreas from Aegina isle 
 
 Fresh anchored ; whither he had been awhile 
 
 To sacrifice to Jove, whose temple there 
 
 Waits with high marble doors for blood and incense rare. 
 
 But if the foregoing passage is wholly Greek, a different in- 
 spiration flames out in the famous and magical lines : 
 Besides, there, nightly, with terrific glare, 
 Love, jealous grown of so complete a pair, 
 Hover'd and buzz'd his wings, with fearful roar, 
 Above the lintel of their chamber door, 
 And down the passage cast a glow upon the floor, 
 
 and in these, describing the banqueting-hall which Lamia 
 prepared for the lovers' marriage feast : 
 
 A haunting music, sole perhaps and lone 
 Supportress of the faery roof, made moan 
 Throughout, as fearful the whole charm might fade. 
 
 Of Keats's three longest poems, however, the fragmentary 
 Hyperion^ undoubtedly attains the most splendid moments, 
 however much we may feel inclined to prefer the general con- 
 struction of Lamia. Byron, no lover of Keats's early work, 
 justly remarked that this poem was Aeschylean in its majesty, 
 while Shelley described it as ' an astonishing piece of writing '. 
 The sorrows of Saturn and the dethroned Titans, their eager 
 desire to regain their supremacy over the usurping Olympians, 
 the glorious beauty of Hyperion, the Titanic forerunner of the 
 sun-god Apollo, might well inspire splendid poetry. Keats's 
 close study of Milton is here at once the curbing and strengthen- 
 ing force, and, as he himself confessed, a definite source of 
 technical weakness and artificiality. From the very pen of 
 Milton at his best might have come such lines as these : 
 
 From chaos and parental darkness came 
 Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil, 
 That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends 
 Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came, 
 And with it light, and light, engendering 
 Upon its own producer, forthwith touch'd 
 The whole enormous matter into life. 
 
 1 Written chiefly during 1818. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 301 
 
 Thoroughly Miltonic, too, is the description of Hyperion at 
 the end of Book II, and only a little less so are the glowing 
 lines in Book I, describing the Titan's palace : 
 
 His palace bright, 
 
 Bastion'd with pyramids of glowing gold, 
 And touched with shade of bronzed obelisks, 
 Glared a blood-red through all its thousand courte, 
 Arches, and domes, and fiery galleries ; 
 And all its curtains of Aurorian clouds 
 Flushed angerly. 
 
 Nor can any reader of the following passage fail to be reminded 
 of Satan' s flight from the 'primum mobile' to Earth in Book III 
 of Paradise Lost : 
 
 Ere half this region -whisper had come down 
 Hyperion arose, and on the stars 
 Lifted his curved lids, and kept them wide 
 Until it ceased : and still he kept them wide ; 
 And still they were the same bright, patient stars. 
 Then, with a slow incline of his broad breast, 
 Like to a diver in the pearly seas, 
 Forward he stoop'd over the airy shore, 
 And plunged all noiseless into the deep night. 
 
 But mingling with this deeper music is a magic strain which 
 even Milton could never have compassed a strain that is at 
 once the voice of Keats and of Romance. Here, for instance, 
 is the simile suggested by the recumbent Titans : 
 
 Like a dismal cirque 
 Of Druid stones upon a forlorn moor, 
 When the chill rain begins at shut of eve 
 In dull November, and their chancel vault, 
 The Heaven itself, is blinded throughout night. 
 
 Here again, we have the same magic : 
 
 As when, upon a tranced summer night 
 Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, 
 Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars, 
 Dream, and so dream all night without a stir 
 Save from one gradual solitary gust, 
 Which conies upon the silence, and dies off, 
 As if the ebbing air had but one wave. 
 
 The Fall of Hyperion is a not very successful attempt made 
 by Keats during the last few months of 1819 to rewrite 
 Hyperion in the form of an allegorical vision shown by Moneta, 
 the prophetess of Saturn, to the poet himself. 
 
 Keats's shorter narrative poems are all in their respective Isabella. 
 ways strongly influenced by his passion for mediaevalism. The 
 earliest of them, Isabella, or The Pot of Basil (1818), is taken 
 from Boccaccio, though it really represents the spirit of an 
 earlier day. The moving grace of the old story, the tenderness 
 and keen sense of tragedy with which Keats has rehandled it, 
 and the simple beauty of many of its incidental passages, give 
 
302 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the poem high place among his work. There are minor blem- 
 ishes. The rhetorical questionings of stanza XVI, the strained 
 description of the brothers in the last lines of stanza XVII, and 
 the intrusive apostrophes of stanzas LV and LXI show that 
 Keats has not yet reached his full strength ; but these short- 
 comings are more than redeemed by the exquisite passages in 
 which human feeling is associated with natural loveliness 
 (XXXII, XXXVIII, XXXIX, and LIU) ; and the poem's 
 whole beauty and tragedy are summed in the magnificent 
 central stanza : 
 
 I am a shadow now, alas ! alas ! 
 
 Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling 
 Alone : I chant alone the holy mass, 
 
 While little sounds of life are round me knelling, 
 And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass, 
 
 And many a chapel bell the hour is telling, 
 Paining me through : those sounds grow strange to me, 
 And thou art distant in Humanity. 
 
 The Eve of More perfect, if less intense, is The Eve of St. Agnes (1819). 
 8t. Agnes Here Keats has turned away from Milton and reverted not 
 and other only to the stanza, but to the spirit, of Spenser. The rich and 
 poems. various colouring of the poem, and the magic blending of the 
 sensuous with the spiritual, are perfectly in the older poet's 
 manner. The subject is mediaeval, however, and was probably 
 suggested to Keats by a passage in Burton's Anatomy of Melan- 
 choly (III. 2, 3). Whereas the tale of Lorenzo and Isabella had 
 been tragedy, that of Porphyro and Madeline is pure romance, 
 and romance held aloof from life by the strangeness of its atmo- 
 sphere, and the more than earthly beauty of its colouring. This, 
 it has been said, is the first of Keats's longer poems in which we 
 would wish no line or stanza altered or erased. In the fragmen- 
 tary Eve of St. Mark (1819), Keats's octosyllabic couplet moves 
 with freedom and variety, and he displays two different masteries 
 in the fine opening picture of a chilly English spring, and in the 
 rich pre-Eaphaelite detail of the passage describing Bertha 
 and her room. In a letter to his brother, he writes that the 
 poem is ' quite in the spirit of town quietude. I think it will 
 give you the sensation of walking about an old country town 
 in a coolish evening '. Nowhere is his touch more sure than 
 here. Yet there was a still higher perfection to come in La 
 Belle Dame sans Merci (1819), which in its short compass 
 embodies all that is most elvish and tragic in the mediaeval 
 imagination. The intensity and chaste beauty of this poem 
 give it place among Keats's greatest poetry. The ballad metre 
 is here restricted to quatrains, and the magic foreshortening of 
 
 1 Suggested, according to D. G. Rossetti, by the legend ' that if 
 a person on St. Mark's Eve placed himself near the church porch when 
 twilight was thickening, he would behold the apparitions of those persons 
 in the parish who were to be seized with any severe disease that year, 
 go into the church '. 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 303 
 
 the last line, without forbidding variety, gives each verse, as 
 Professor Elton has remarked, ' a spondaic, tolling close.' 
 
 The later Odes 1 naturally tell us more of Keats' s mind, and His Odes, 
 its emotions and ecstasies, than do the dramatic poems. The 
 perfect image embodied in the central stanza of the Ode to 
 Autumn might be taken as the symbol, not of Autumn alone, 
 but of all Nature and her beauty as seen and felt by Keats. 
 There is nothing here of the self-conscious transcenden- 
 talism of Lines written above Tintern Abbey : the poet is to find 
 his Absolute in loveliness, and to express his worship of Nature 
 through the sensuous ecstasy of his song. The same sensuous- 
 ness, and the same ecstasy of Nature-worship appear in the 
 Ode to a Nightingale; and that supreme faith in Beauty which 
 was a main part, though by no means the whole, of Keats's 
 religion, becomes explicit in the closing lines of the Ode on a 
 Grecian Urn. A more intimate beauty is that of the Ode to 
 Melancholy, throughout which runs the undercurrent of sad- 
 ness so steady in Keats's soul. It was this quality which, 
 outside poetry, gave increasing depth and seriousness to his 
 intuition of the world, and made him long for leisure in which 
 to devote himself to philosophy and general study. 
 
 It is at once fascinating and unprofitable to speculate as to 
 what Keats might have achieved had he lived to the age of 
 Shakespeare, and been * nerved up to the writing of a few fine 
 plays ', which, as he assures us, was his greatest ambition ; but 
 the tendency of modern criticism has been increasingly to 
 recognize, not only the loveliness of his accomplished work, but 
 the growing depth and fullness, and the Shakespearean uni- 
 versality, of his outlook. 2 
 
 Gebir, the first considerable poem of Walter Savage Landor Landor 
 (1775-1864), was published in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Gebir* 
 Ballads, and narrates in seven books of blank verse the loves and 
 death of a mythical Spanish king. Landor' s choice of metre, 
 and his conscious rejection of the couplet, are instructive as 
 showing the tendency of the age ' I have chosen blank verse ', 
 he writes, ' because there never was a poem in rhyme that grew 
 not tedious in a thousand lines/ Gebir is perhaps less read and 
 remembered as a whole than for the. frequent beauty of its 
 parts. Though its language is too often forced and awkward, 
 it can rise to perfect passages, and occasionally achieves an 
 almost Miltonic majesty. Miltonic, too, is Landor's zest for 
 a succession of beautiful proper names. Throughout Gebir, as 
 through all Landor's poetry, the Greek and Latin influence is 
 strong, and Landor actually turned the poem into Latin in the 
 year after its original appearance in English. The romantic 
 imagination, which in its highest form was expressly denied to 
 Landor by Coleridge (Table Talk, January 1, 1834), seems 
 
 1 All of the four Odes here mentioned were written in 1819. 
 
 2 Cf. A. C. Bradley, The Letters of Keats, in his Oxford Lectures on 
 Poetry, One of the best critical estimates of Keats is that prefixed by 
 Mr. E. de Selincourt to his edition of Keats (Methuen, 1905). 
 
304 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 evident in the often-quoted passage describing the sea-shells 
 in Book I, in the fine incantation scene between Myrthyr and 
 the witch-wife Dalica at the end of Book V, and in such 
 lines as 
 
 How whirlpools have absorbed them, storms o'erwhelmed, 
 And how amidst their struggles and their prayers 
 The big wave blackened o'er the mouth supine. (Book VI.) 
 
 or 
 
 What potent hanoL hath touched thy quickened corse, 
 
 What' song dissolved thy cerements: who unclosed 
 
 Those faded eyes, and filled them from the stars ? (Book V.) 
 
 or 
 
 One that had called her in the morn, observed 
 How virgin passion with unfuelled flame 
 Burns into paleness. 
 
 (Book VII.) 
 
 The Nearly fifty years later, in 1847, Landor published the Hel- 
 
 Hellenics. lenics, a still more famous volume, consisting of poems on 
 
 \ Greek subjects which he had written at irregular intervals 
 
 during the preceding years. Many of these, as the short and 
 
 exquisite Death of Artemidora, combine great tenderness of 
 
 feeling with all the marble clearness of Heredia' best 
 
 sonnets. 
 
 Landor is the greatest master in English of the short epigram, 
 playful, graceful or pathetic, written after the Greek model ; 
 and he divides with Prior the honours of the highest kind of 
 occasional verse. Of the former kind the most famous examples 
 are the beautiful Dirce, and the lines on himself beginning, ' I 
 strove with none.' In Clementina's artless mien and Household 
 Gods are good examples of verse written in lighter vein, yet 
 remaining true poetry. More intense and tragic is the beautiful 
 Rose Aylmer. Of Landor's four blank-verse dramas the best, 
 and the best known, is the noble Count Julian. 
 
 Thomas Moore (1779-1852) is included by Shelley in Adonais 
 as one of the chief poets of his day. Later criticism has been 
 less merciful towards him, and beside the work of such modern 
 Irish poets as Yeats, and ' A.E.', a great part of his verse seems 
 crude, conventional, and even vulgar. Yet he had a fine and 
 true gift of song writing, and it is probably by such lyrics as 
 ' Oft in the Stilly Night ', and others appearing in his Irish 
 Melodies (1807) or elsewhere, that his fame will live, rather than 
 by the worthy and laborious Lalla Rookh (1817), or his smooth 
 but undistinguished renderings of Anacreon (1800). A good 
 deal of fastidious modern criticism upon Moore proceeds from 
 the rather ludicrous assumption that a song must needs be 
 inferior because it has taken a strong hold on the people. 
 
 Equally popular through some of his verse for example, 
 The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt but at his best 
 a far finer artist, is Thomas Hood (1799-1845). His work falls 
 into two sharply divided classes of humorous and serious. 
 Unfortunately his reputation with the many is chiefly that of 
 
POETRY : THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 305 
 
 the racy jingler or punster who wrote Miss Kilmansegg and 
 Sally Brown, and the description of the Chinaman : 
 
 His head was turned, and so he chewed 
 His pigtail till he died. 
 
 His real strength, however, is to be found in his graver work, 
 which includes his best songs, with their individual and perfect 
 melody ; his best sonnets ; the two poems already mentioned, 
 which express the tragedy of the lowly and outcast ; his finely 
 Poe-like Haunted House ; and such longer poems as the Spen- 
 serian Two Swans and the semi-Spenserian Plea of the Mid- 
 summer Fairies. His fame has suffered through the hack-work 
 to which he was driven by poverty : yet he remains a master of 
 English poetry in more than one of its kinds. 
 
 Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) first won pelf and fame Campbell, 
 through The Pleasures of Hope, written when he was twenty- 
 two. This collection was composed in the couplet, which 
 Campbell in the lengthy and rather tedious Gertrude of Wyoming 
 (1809) deserted for the Spenserian stanza. His real strengtn 
 and fame lie, not in the long philosophic or narrative poem, 
 but in songs and ballads, patriotic like Te Mariners of England, 
 The Battle of the Baltic, and Hohenlinden, or romantic like 
 Lochiel's Warning and Lord Ullin's Daughter. 
 
 Samuel Rogers (1763-1855), banker and lavish entertainer of Rogers, 
 literary men, wrote The Pleasures of Memory (1792) and Italy Hogg, and 
 (1822), neither of which has more than an historical interest in others, 
 in our day. James Hogg (1770-1835), the * Ettrick Shepherd ' 
 of ' Christopher North's ' Nodes Ambrosianae, lives by a few 
 of the ballads for instance, Donald McGillavry, and ' Lock the 
 door, Lariston ' occurring in The Forest Minstrel (1810), and 
 elsewhere; and by The Queen's Wake (1813), a succession of 
 tales and songs sung to Mary, Queen of Scots, by competing 
 bards. This collection contains the finely conceived Kilmeny, 
 the tale of a mortal maiden stolen by fairies and restored seven 
 years later to the bewilderment of earth. Allan Cunningham 
 (1784-1842) belongs in spirit to the age of Burns, and carries 
 on, though with no great mastery, the tradition of the ' makars '. 
 On a lower level ranks William Thorn (1798-1848), author of 
 Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver. With these 
 we are on the eve of a fresh transition. 
 
306 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 MISCELLANEOUS PROSE OF THE EARLY 
 NINETEENTH CENTUEY 
 
 Rise of the Reviews Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Brougham The great 
 Essayists : Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Southey, Coleridge Landor, 
 Cobbett Historians and Philosophers. 
 
 The Rise 
 of the 
 Reviews 
 Jeffrey 
 and the 
 Edin- 
 burgh. 
 
 THE end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the 
 nineteenth was a period prolific in great essayists, whose 
 careers were largely determined by the rise of such famous 
 reviews and magazines as the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, 
 Blackwood, and the London Magazine. The growth of the new 
 spirit is as strongly evident in these writers as in the poets 
 of the period, and may be best illustrated by a survey of their 
 work. The Edinburgh Review was a quarterly founded in 1802 
 and. conducted mainly in the Whig interest by Jeffrey, Sydney 
 Smith, and Brougham. Smith edited its first number, but 
 after his departure from Edinburgh to London, his place was 
 taken by Jeffrey, then a briefless advocate at the Scottish Bar, 
 and subsequently a Scottish judge. The first number of the 
 Review made a great impression, both in England and Scotland, 
 and its reputation was sustained by the continued brilliancy 
 of its articles. ' The Edinburgh ', said Jeffrey, * has but 
 two legs to stand on. Literature is one of them, but its right 
 leg is politics.' It was in virtue of the left leg that Scott, the 
 high Tory, became an early contributor to the Review. The 
 moving spirits remained the- three men just mentioned. 
 From first to last Jeffrey contributed some two hundred articles 
 to the Edinburgh, and these display considerable fluency and 
 force of style, and a judgment which was acute and just 
 within its not very wide limits. He did small justice to Shelley 
 and Keats, though his review of Endymion is discrimination 
 itself compared with the Blackwood article. The opening 
 words of his criticism on Wordsworth's Excursion ' This will 
 never do ' have become a by -word, though that criticism 
 as a whole is by no means cruel or unfair. 
 
 Sydney The contributions of Sydney Smith are distinguished by 
 Smith. balance, sanity, and a dislike of mysticism ; but above all by 
 the incorrigible and irresistible sallies of wit and humour which 
 seem subsequently to have told against him when his name 
 was proposed for a bishopric. It was Smith who suggested 
 as a punning motto for the Edinburgh the Virgilian tag Tenui 
 musam meditamur avena. For this was eventually substituted 
 the even more appropriate Index damnatur cum nocens 
 absolvitur. Perhaps Smith's best-known work is his Letters 
 of Peter Plymley, written in favour of Catholic Emancipation. 
 Brougham. The most notable qualities of Henry Brougham (1778- 
 1868), subsequently Lord Chancellor of England, were his 
 
PROSE OF EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 307 
 
 energy and versatility. There was a tradition that all the 
 twelve articles in one number of the Edinburgh Review came 
 from his hand. But neither in thought nor style had his 
 writings the qualities of permanence. 
 
 In February 1809 appeared the first number of The 
 
 Quarterly Review, published by the great John Murray in the 
 ory interest, and in direct opposition to the Edinburgh. 'Its 
 editor till 1824 was the much-abused William Gifford, the 
 editor of Ben Jonson and Massinger, the relentless foe of all 
 Radicals and Lake poets, and the victim of Hazlitt's fiery 
 scorn. Scott, who had now thrown over the Edinburgh, 
 contributed no fewer than four articles to the first number, 
 and reviewed his own Tales of My Landlord in the number 
 of January 1817. Southey, who had been bitterly attacked by 
 Jeffrey, and had refused on principle to write for the Edin- 
 burgh, contributed some of his finest prose to the Quarterly, 
 and became, in Gilford's words, ' the sheet-anchor of the 
 Review '. The most notorious article ever published in the 
 Quarterly was the review of Endymion, now known to have been 
 written by J. W. Croker, which was said to have hastened 
 Keats's death. After 1825 the Quarterly was edited by Scott's 
 biographer and son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart. Eight 
 years before this date Lockhart had united with John Wilson 
 (Christopher North) in the founding of Blackwood's Magazine 
 (Maga), a Tory organ intended by the celebrated publishers 
 whose name it bore to defeat the Edinburgh in its northern 
 stronghold. Many of its articles were written with trenchant 
 invective. Perhaps the most notorious, and certainly from our 
 present point of view the most interesting, were the coarse 
 and brutal series directed against fhe * Cockney school of 
 poets ' as they had been dubbed by the magazine who 
 included Leigh Hunt, Keats, Charles Lamb, and Charles 
 Lloyd. These were written by Lockhart, but it is distressing 
 to know that Scott himself had a hand in the most vulgar and 
 unpardonable of them all that in which Keats is apos- 
 trophized as 'Johnny Keats', and advised to go back to his 
 apothecary's shop. To the credit, however, of Blackwood's 
 must be set the Nodes Ambrosianae, a series of racy and admir- 
 able conversations on politics, literature, art, and life, of which 
 the greater part were written by * Christopher North ' (John 
 Wilson), then Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh 
 University. De Quincey and Hogg, who were both regular 
 contributors to the Review, figure in the Nodes under the names 
 of ' the English Opium-Eater ' and ' the Ettrick Shepherd '. 
 
 From the point of view of literary history, the most im- 
 portant of all these periodicals was the shortest -lived The 
 London Magazine (1820-9), directed by that great editor, John 
 Scott, till he was killed (1821) in a duel at Chalk Farm by 
 Lockhart' s friend, Christie. In 1821 the London published the 
 first instalment of De Quincey 's Confessions of an English 
 Opium-Eater, and in the next year appeared Lamb's deathless 
 
 The 
 Quarterly^ 
 
 Black- 
 wood, 
 
 ' Chris- 
 topher 
 North.' 
 
308 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Dissertation on Roast Pig. Both of these writers found in the 
 London their first introduction to essay writing. On its list 
 of contributors were Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and Keats. 
 Lamb. If the London Magazine had done nothing more than give 
 
 Charles Lamb (1775-1834) his chance of self-expression, it 
 would still have established a notable reputation. The 
 Essays ofElia are by far his greatest work, and are like nothing 
 else in English literature, or in any literature. The subjects 
 are various : Christ's Hospital describes the boyhood of Lamb 
 and Coleridge ; Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, The South 
 
 Sea House, and BlaJcesmore in H shire, enshrine memories 
 
 of Lamb's childhood and early manhood. Other essays are 
 devoted to his favourite actors for, as he has told us, he was 
 ' the finest playgoer in the world ' or describe his books and 
 their borrowers ' the great race '. 
 
 In mood as in theme the Essays are delightfully various. 
 The Dissertation on Roast Pig is sheer fun, and Dream Children 
 sheer poetry. The subjects matter little, except in so far as 
 they display that rare blend of the whimsical and the lovable 
 which was Charles Lamb's nature. He ever longed for the 
 remote, that on which time had cast its glamour and its 
 consecration. This preference appears obviously in his love 
 of sixteenth-century drama and of seventeenth-century prose, 
 and more subtly in his own style; for he avoided the trick 
 and colour of modern prose, and, as he has told us, * wrote 
 for antiquity '. He loved the quaint literary charm of authors 
 like Browne and Burton, no less than the quaint personal 
 charm of human oddities like George Dyer. His life and 
 thought were based on preferences as those of many meaner 
 men are based on principles. His delight in Elizabethan poetry 
 appears in his own finely poetical tragedy, John Woodvil 
 (1802), no less than in the precious notes with which he 
 enriched his Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets (1808) ; 
 and it is evident again in the Tales from Shakespeare (1807), 
 which he wrote in partnership with his sister Mary. These 
 last two volumes helped greatly to revive interest in the great 
 romantic drama of England. Outside the Essays, Lamb's 
 most notable piece of prose is the fine and tragic Tale of 
 Rosamund Gray (1798). The best known and most moving 
 of his poems is The Old Familiar Faces. For all Englishmen 
 he remains the 
 
 gentlest name 
 
 That ever clothed itself with flower-sweet fame, 
 Or linked itself with loftiest names of old 
 By right and might of loving. 
 
 Leigh James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) deserves mention 
 
 Hunt. here chiefly for his Essays, which appeared in a succession of 
 
 magazines with which he was connected, and were subsequently 
 
 republished in book form under various titles. His usual style 
 
 is of the kind recently described by Sir William Watson 
 
PROSE OF EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 309 
 
 as the ' loquitive ' : its ease and flow commend it, but it has 
 little distinction, and is constantly slipshod. Leigh Hunt's 
 range of literary sympathy was wide, and in his critical 
 writings he displays the tolerance and good-nature which 
 endeared him personally to his contemporaries, and are 
 evident in his very readable Autobiography, and his chatty 
 volume on London, The Town. 
 
 A much greater figure is William Hazlitt (1778-1830). His Hazlitt. 
 first love had been painting, which he practised in London in 
 the studio of his brother John ; but two experiences turned 
 him toward literature his reading, in 1796, of Burke' a Letter 
 to a Noble Lord, and his meeting with Coleridge, whom he 
 heard preach at Wem, and subsequently welcomed and 
 worshipped in his father's house. From hence onwards 
 Hazlitt's life-interest lay in literature, and he becomes the 
 typical man of letters of the period, living by prose, which 
 he wrote incessantly. In 1805 he published his Essay on the 
 Principles of Human Action. This work is little read now, 
 but the metaphysical interest which informs it reappears in 
 many of Hazlitt's general essays, and helps to give them their 
 distinctive colour and glow. His apprenticeship in painting 
 quickened that sense of natural beauty which inspired some 
 of his finest descriptions. Towards the end of his life he 
 published a Life of Napoleon (1828), and has left other long 
 compositions. But the works by which he chiefly lives are 
 his essays critical, as his Characters of Shakespeare's Plays 
 (1817), and Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819); 
 or general, as Table Talk (1821-2), The Spirit of the Age 
 (1825), and the posthumously collected Winterslow and 
 Sketches and Essays (both 1839). Whether he is commenting 
 on books or on life Hazlitt shows the same qualities of insight, 
 vigour, and gusto. His criticism of Shakespeare and other 
 English writers is intensely personal, and is in this sense typical 
 of the literary spirit of the age ; but its virility and fervour 
 prevent its degenerating into mere impressionism. Like 
 Swinburne, Hazlitt relies chiefly on his own enthusiasm to 
 kindle the reader's appreciation of the author under review ; 
 but through sheer force of genius he avoids many of the pitfalls 
 in the path of subjective criticism. The force and beauty of 
 his style are perhaps at their highest in such imaginative essays 
 as The Feeling of Immortality in Youth and On the Fear of 
 Death. Many passages in Winterslow are winged with his keen 
 joy in Nature. The Fight shows his genius for describing 
 action, and, though challenged by certain pages of Borrow 
 and Meredith, remains the greatest description of a prize- 
 fight in the language. The essay on Gilford in The Spirit of 
 the Age is a tremendous piece of invective, just as that on 
 Scott in the same collection is masterly in its apportionment 
 of praise and blame. Space will not permit of any detailed 
 analysis of his style : it is siifficient to say that his fervour 
 .mil force and swing give him a place apart among English 
 
310 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 prose writers, and justify the remark of Stevenson, ' We are 
 all mighty fine fellows, but none of us can write like Hazlitt '. 
 
 Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was, from the beginning, 
 a fervently imaginative being, as may be seen from his Auto- 
 biography, with its account of the strange kingdoms, Gombroon 
 and Tigrosylvania, created and peopled by his childish fancy. 
 While still an Oxford freshman he had opened a correspondence 
 with Wordsworth, whom he subsequently joined at Grasmere 
 in 1809, enjoying here the friendship of Coleridge and 
 Christopher North. Despite these advantages he published 
 practically nothing till his thirty-sixth year, when his Confes- 
 sions of an English Opium-Eater appeared in the London 
 Magazine. After this he wrote extensively on a vast number 
 of subjects, touching on many of the essentials of life, such 
 as economics, history, metaphysics, and murder. His best 
 work falls into two main kinds, the confessional and the 
 imaginative. Both of these are blended in the masterpiece 
 first mentioned, and in the Autobiographical Sketches which 
 he began to publish in 1832. These two works describe his 
 childhood, youth, and early manhood, often with a matchless 
 vividness and a familiar warmth of self-revelation, and, 
 occasionally, with a charming humour. Among the most 
 famous passages of the Confessions are those which relate how 
 he first took to opium, and how he nearly starved in London, 
 but was relieved by an outcast girl called Anne, who spent her 
 last sixpence oh a glass of wine to revive him, and subsequently 
 vanished utterly from his ken. That part of the Confessions 
 which deals with his opium -dreams passes naturally into the 
 realm of imagination, and takes form in some of his most 
 splendid prose. An even higher flight is found where imagina- 
 tion is completely free, as it has become in Levana and our 
 Ladies of Sorrow, and Savannah -La -Mar. In both of these 
 there is an intensity of feeling and expression which almost 
 bursts the bounds of prose. De Quincey's greatest piece 
 of historical writing is undoubtedly The Revolt of the Tartars, 
 and his most successful story is The Spanish Military Nun. 
 Admirable in their kind are The English Mail Coach, and 
 his critical paper on the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth. 
 His great faults are a constant tendency to digression, and 
 what has been termed ' rigmarole ' ; and a less constant pro- 
 clivity to awkward buffoonery. At its best and that best 
 is frequent throughout his work, though it is not frequently 
 sustained his prose has an intense and various music which 
 gives him place among the great masters. 
 
 De Quincey, Hazlitt, and Charles Lamb, all in their different 
 ways, helped to liberate English prose and to equip it anew. 
 Different from all these in essentials, yet of hardly less influ- 
 ence upon the development of our literature, was Walter 
 Savage Landor (1775-1864), whose poetry we have considered 
 elsewhere. The first two volumes of his Imaginary Conversa- 
 tions were published in 1 824, and three fresh series had appeared 
 
PROSE OF EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY 311 
 
 by 1830. These were followed by three longer works, The 
 Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare (1834), 
 Pericles and Aspasia (1836), and The Pentameron (1837), of 
 which the first and last are in conversational form. The men 
 and women of the Conversations are of all climes and ages. They 
 discuss all things essential in life, and many things not essential. 
 Often, as in certain of the Roman Conversations, Landor revives 
 the colour of a bygone age with a vividness hardly bettered by 
 Flaubert or Anatole France. But apart from his power of his- 
 torical reconstruction and vast range of subject, his royal 
 mastery of English makes him a great figure in tne evolution of 
 English literature. His style combines classical strength and 
 dignity with romantic colour and charm, and possesses an air 
 of aristocratic distinction all too rare in the prose of the period. 
 
 In his most widely-read volume, Eural Rides, William 
 Cobbett (1762-1835) gives his views on English life in its #* 
 political, sociological, and agricultural aspects. We are here y " r/ ' x - 
 concerned less with these than with the forcible and homely 
 style in which his theories are expressed. His language is 
 always perfectly fitted to his subject, whether for invective, 
 argument, or description, and his homespun periods hold 
 a worthy place in the development of our prose literature. 
 
 Robert Southey (1774-1843) has already been mentioned in Southey. 
 connexion with the Quarterly Review. In a work of wider scope 
 it would be necessary to trace his political development from 
 the early Jacobinism which caused him to go with his hair un- 
 powdered at Oxford, to the later high-Toryism which made 
 him the victim of Byron's Vision of Judgment. Here we can 
 only discuss briefly his chief prose works, and the style in 
 which they were written. All through his life Southey had to 
 work hard for bread, in a day when a sufficiency even of this 
 was not easy to gain by the pen. His works number such long 
 histories as those of Brazil (1810-19), and the Peninsular 
 War (1822-32); biographies, of which the greatest are th 
 Lives of Nelson (1813) and of Wesley (1820); and an enormous 
 number of critical and general articles. His long work, The 
 Doctor, now read, and readable, by few, is a remarkable com- 
 bination of learning, whimsicality, and horseplay. Sir Thomas 
 More (1829) is a series of colloquies on life between himself 
 and More's ghost. Southey's style is clear, elegant, and 
 flexible, and rises to a high level in such works as The Life 
 of Nelson, where his theme is lofty and his imagination has 
 been touched ; but it is in general true of him that he ' has 
 little genius', and 'that his achromatic prose, with all its 
 effortless ease and Tightness, leaves us impatient and dis- 
 satisfied '.* 
 
 Just as the greatest poem of S. T. Coleridge is The Ancient Coleridge. 
 Mariner, so his greatest work in prose is Biographia Literaria. 
 Besides much metaphysical matter foreign to our present 
 
 1 Oliver Elton, Survey of English Literature, 1780-1830, vol. ii, p. 9. 
 
312 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 discussion, this work contains his famous distinction between 
 the Fancy and the Imagination, and his illuminating, if not 
 always convincing, estimate of Wordsworth's poetry. In 
 many parts of the Biographia Literaria, in the Aids to Reflec- 
 tion, and the magazine articles collected and reprinted from 
 The Friend, Coleridge has a tendency to discursiveness, to 
 mistiness, and tranchons le mot to dullness. But when the 
 spirit is in him he writes with inspiration and insight probably 
 unparalleled in English criticism ; and there are few of his 
 
 gages which do not contain strokes of lofty genius. His 
 hakespearean criticism, though marked in an unusual degree 
 by his besetting faults, has gone far toward moulding modern 
 appreciation of Shakespeare. He is the critic and philosopher 
 as well as the poet of Romanticism, and in two of the three 
 kinds he is supreme. 
 
 Historians. We may here mention briefly the chief historians and philo- 
 sophers of the early eighteenth century. The History of Greece 
 of William Mitford (1744-1827), in spite of its great contem- 
 porary vogue, is as little read now as is his interesting treatise 
 on prosody. William Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de Medici 
 (1796) and his Leo X (1805) are still read, as is John 
 Lingard's History of England (1819-30), written largely from 
 the Roman Catholic standpoint. Of greater literary force and 
 vividness is the History of the Peninsular War (1828-40) by 
 Sir William Napier (1785-1860), a work which completely 
 eclipsed Southey's work on the same subject, and has become 
 an English classic. Classic too, though rather through their 
 historical than their literary merits, are the works 1 of Henry 
 Hallam (1777-1859). Judicial in his method, he was a Whig 
 at heart, and started from Whig premises. In spite of the 
 coldness of his style and his lack of enthusiasm, his compre- 
 hensive treatment of his subject gives him rank among the 
 great English historians. Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868) 
 published his History of the Jews in 1829, and his History of 
 Christianity from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism 
 in 1840 ; but his greatest and most original work, and the one 
 in which he shook himself free from suspicion of German 
 influence, was his History of Latin Christianity (1854-5). 
 The chief work of Dr. Thomas Arnold (the great head-master 
 of Rugby, and the father of Matthew Arnold) was his History 
 of Rome (1838-43), no longer possessing authority, but notable 
 for its qualities of style. George Grote (1794-1871) wrote his 
 History of Greece in order to combat Mitford's anti-democratic 
 conception of Greek history. He had great industry, and is 
 still widely read, but his style is uninspired, and he has little 
 vision. The same criticism may be made upon the History 
 of Greece of Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's (1797- 
 1875), though Thirlwall was a better scholar than Grote, and 
 his history has a somewhat finer literary quality. 
 
 1 A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818); The 
 Constitutional History of England (1821) ; An Introduction to the Literature 
 of Europe ( 1837-9). 
 
313 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 SCOTT AND THE NOVEL 
 
 The novel of sentiment and terror Mackenzie, Walpole, Mrs. Radcliffe, 
 Beckford Scott and the historical novel Jane Austen, Mrs. Gas- 
 kell, Trollope, Disraeli, Bulwer, Lever, Peacock Minors. 
 
 As has been indicated in the foregoing chapter, the new 
 spirit is as definitely, though perhaps not as splendidly, 
 evident in the prose of the period as in its poetry ; and in the 
 one case, as in the other, the origins of the movement must be 
 sought far back in the eighteenth century. As far as the novel 
 is concerned, the spirit of the earlier age had found expression, 
 as we have seen, in the true realism followed, after varying 
 ways, by Richardson and Fielding, and in the burlesque 
 realism of Smollett. Sterne's proclivity for sentiment and the 
 exploitation of his own personality in some sense foreshadow 
 the newer tendencies ; but the most marked reaction against 
 the older realism must be sought, not in Sterne nor in such 
 disciples of Sterne as Mackenzie 1 and Henry Brooke, 2 but 
 in the novel of terror originated by Horace Walpole in The The Novel 
 Castle of Otfdnto (1764) and carried on by Mrs. Radcliffe in of Won - 
 The Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), and other novels, and by der. 
 Matthew Lewis in his miscellaneous writings, of which the chief 
 is the celebrated Monk. The distinguishing feature of these 
 novels are their addiction to horror and sensationalism, their 
 remoteness from the setting of ordinary life and, especially 
 in Lewis's case, their proclivity for the cruder and more 
 obvious kinds of supernaturalism. The impulse towards the 
 remote and fantastic appears under a different guise in Vathek 
 (1783), the Eastern, or pseudo-Eastern, romance of William 
 Beckford, the ward of Chatham, and the celebrated ' Caliph 
 of Fonthill '. In the novels of this class, for all their crudity 
 and anachronisms, there was a foreshadowing, if a dim and 
 broken one, of Scott. But through the period runs a quite 
 different strain which finds expression in the novels of 
 Fanny Burney (Evelina, 1778 ; Cecilia, 1782). Owing much to 
 Richardson in her portrayal of feminine character, she deals 
 with English domestic life in a sprightlier, homelier, and less 
 tragic fashion, and thus helps to fashion the form that Jane 
 Austen was to bring to perfection. We may pass at once 
 from the numerous minors of the period (for example, Hannah 
 More, C celebs in Search of a Wife ; William Godwin, Caleb 
 Williams, 1794 ; St. Leon, 1799, &c.) to him who triumphed 
 
 1 Author of three novels of sentiment, The Man of Feeling (1771), 
 The Man of the World (1773), and Julia de Roubignb (1777); and editor 
 in succession of The Mirror and The Lounger. 
 
 2 Author of The Fool of Quality (1766). 
 
314 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 over that reluctant form at which so many of his predecessors 
 had fumbled, the English historical novel. 
 
 As we have already seen, the activity of Sir Walter Scott 
 (1771-1832) had been diverted from poetry to prose by the 
 growing poetic predominance of Byron. In 1814 he finished 
 his first novel, Waverley, which had been commenced many 
 years before. Its success opened his eyes to a new source of 
 strength, and a new path to wealth and fame. Within the 
 next six years he had published eight other novels, Guy 
 Mannering (1815), The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Blade 
 Dwarf (aU 1816), Eob Boy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian 
 (1818), The Bride of Lammermoor, A Legend of Montr ose (both 
 1819), all dealing with the history of his own country during 
 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All of these, except 
 perhaps The Black Dwarf, show him writing at his best, and 
 amongst his greatest masterpieces must be counted Old Mor- 
 tality, with its swift sequence of adventure, and its splendid 
 pictures of Claver house and Balfour of Burleigh. The Heart 
 of Midlothian is hardly less magnificent, and is memorable 
 for its introduction of the lowly and heroic Jeanie Deans, 
 Scott's most greatly drawn heroine. 
 
 A fresh period of his activity begins in 1819 with Ivanhoe, 
 and continues through The Monastery and The Abbot (1820), 
 Kenilworth and The Pirate (1821), The Fortunes of Nigel 
 (1822), Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durward, St. Ronan's Well, 
 Redgauntlet (all 1823), to The Talisman and The Betrothed 
 (1825). In this intermediate series Scott has frequently 
 departed from Scotland and his favourite periods of history, 
 and has ' ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes '. He could 
 not have given us anything better than his best early work ; 
 but he has given us more work equally good, after a slightly 
 different kind. In Peveril of the Peak, Kenilworth, and The 
 Fortunes of Nigel, the main scene is set in England, though 
 the last novel gives Scott a chance of developing a theme 
 always dear to him, the play of Scottish character against 
 English. The Talisman is a tale of the Crusades, 8t. Ronan's 
 Well a study of nineteenth-century life in a Lowland watering- 
 place. Redgauntlet, like Waverley, Rob Roy, and Montrose, 
 contains magnificent descriptions of Scottish scenery ; and it 
 also includes that great essay in the terrible, Wandering 
 Willie's Tale. The Jonsonian element in Scott, his use of the 
 ' Comedy of Humours ', the quality in him which to some seems 
 the most precious of all, becomes less racy and less large in 
 the novels of this period ; we have wandered from the Kaim 
 of Kinprunes, we find few fellows to Dominie Sampson and 
 Dugald Dalgetty : but against this, we meet a host of 
 Scott's more gravely and soberly outlined characters ; Lord 
 Crawford, Le Balafre, Varney, and George Heriot ; James I 
 and Lewis XI ; Mary the Queen and Catherine Seyton. 
 The stage is fuller and more splendid, the scenery more various 
 and rich. Moreover, Scott's capacity for management and 
 
SCOTT AND THE NOVEL 
 
 315 
 
 construction has lost nothing of its old power : there is no 
 greater novel of foreign history in English than Quentin 
 Durward. 
 
 During his last phase Scott's genius was to a large extent 
 thwarted by debt and ill-health : hence a certain decline in 
 the quality of his last novels, Woodstock (1827), The Fair 
 Maid of Perth (1828), Anne of Geierstein (1828-9), Count 
 Robert of Paris, and Castle Dangerous. Yet there are splendid 
 description and characterization even in the weakest of these, 
 and The Fair Maid of Perth, with its portraits of Ramorny 
 and Hal o' the Wynd, and the clansmen of Chattan and 
 Quhele, contains some of his most brilliant work. All of his 
 old power reappears in the brief sketch of Scottish life, The Two 
 Drovers, which belongs also to this period. 
 
 The work of Scott marks one of tne great epochs in English 
 fiction. He did for the historical novel what Fielding had done 
 for the realistic that is to say, he first touched the form 
 with mastery, and made it possible for his countrymen to 
 handle it with success. His industry and rapidity of output 
 were prodigious and Shakespearean : his thirty-one complete 
 stories, including twenty-seven long novels, were all written 
 within a period of sixteen years. And if he is deficient in 
 Shakespeare's subtlety and sense of the ^finest issues, he 
 resembles him again in the largeness of his sweep, in the 
 serene impersonality of his outlook, and in the number of 
 unforgettable figures he has given to the literature of England 
 and the world. The spirit of his age is evident in his love of 
 remote periods and climes, of his country's scenery in its 
 Highland beauty and wildness, of the supernatural, 1 of the 
 humour and romance which he divined in lowly lives. But if 
 these qualities make Scott a right romantic, his romanticism 
 is for the most part kept true and steady by his broad and 
 virile sanity of soul. Whatever be his faults, he never shrieks 
 in the falsetto dear to Hugo, and his greatest pages are those 
 in which he is nearest to common life. He saw romance with 
 the same steadiness and clearness with which Fielding saw 
 real life ; and the manliness and generosity which make him 
 beloved as a man are evident everywhere throughout his 
 writings. 
 
 It will here be convenient to say a brief word concerning 
 the not very distinguished history of the historical novel from 
 Scott's day onwards. His immediate successors were G. P. R. 
 James and Harrison Ainsworth, but neither of these produced 
 work approaching the first order. Much more important is 
 The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), by Charles Reade (1814- 
 1884), a really great historical novel, dealing with the period 
 and family of Erasmus. Reade's chief other novels, It is 
 Never too Late to Mend, Peg Woffington, Christie Johnstone, &c., 
 belong to a different type of story and an inferior order of 
 
 1 Of. The Monastery, Anne of Geierstein, The Tapestry Chamber, and 
 for the spurious variety beloved by Mrs. Radcliffe, Woodstock. 
 
 His last 
 phase. 
 
 Charles 
 Reade 
 and 
 others. 
 
316 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 merit. Conversely the historical romances of Disraeli, e.g. 
 Alroy, for all their theatrical vividness and colour, certainly 
 do not represent his best work in fiction. The Last Days of 
 Pompeii (1834), The Last of the Barons (1843), and Harold 
 (1848) are the most notable attempts in this kind of Edward 
 George Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton (1803-1873). They 
 display remarkable power of historical reconstruction, but 
 Lytton's lack of spiritual depth causes him to fall short of 
 the highest in this, as in the other literary forms which he 
 attempted. 
 
 The Novel We may turn back a few years to examine the novel of con- 
 ofMan- temporary manners which, as has been noticed, had already 
 been furthered, if not actually founded, by Fanny Burney. 
 To this class belong the novels of Mrs. Inchbald, Robert Bage, 
 Mrs.Opie, and other minors, of whom the chief is Maria Edge- 
 worth (1767-1849). Her Castle Eackrent (1801), The Absentee, 
 and Ormond deal with Irish society after a fairly lively fashion, 
 though the moralizing impulse is never far distant. The 
 novel of manners came to its perfection in the novels of Jane 
 Austen, one of the most fastidious artists in the fiction of our 
 own, and of any, language. That she should have been 
 a fairly exact contemporary of Sir Walter Scott shows the 
 remarkable range of the period, for in spirit and choice of 
 subject the two novelists were not so much different as mutually 
 exclusive. Jane Austen deliberately banished from her 
 canvas every figure of humanity alien to her own time and set. 
 * I could no more write a romance than an epic poem,' she 
 replied to a librarian who had unwisely suggested such 
 a subject. ' Three or four families in a country village is the 
 very thing to work on.' Her chief novels are Sense and Sensi- 
 bility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1812), Mansfield Park (1814), 
 Emma (1816), Northanger Abbey (1818), and the posthumously 
 published Persuasion. These works contain a picture drawn 
 with the most sure and delicate shading, and coloured by 
 a satire nowise heartless, of the world in which Miss Austen 
 moved. Self -restricted though she was to a single social vista, 
 she has left us a number of characters of remarkable variety 
 and the surest individualization. We have the sensitive 
 Marianne Dashwood and her ' sensible ' sister Elinor : the 
 masterly-drawn Bennett family, of whom the shrewd and 
 not unkindly Elizabeth was, as we know, near to the heart and 
 nature of Jane herself : Elizabeth's wooer, Darcy, who shows 
 like a dim foreshadowing of Sir Willoughby Patterne, but 
 behaves and fares better in the event : the caste-proud 
 Bertrams, with their correct, and, to many of us, impossible, 
 son Edmund, and their dependant, Fanny Price, much-endur- 
 ing till her final triumph : that grotesque wooer and letter- 
 writer, Mr. Collins : Emma, at first a prig and a meddler, but 
 in the end not unloving nor unloved : Anne Elliott, dearest 
 of all Jane Austen's women to the heart of many Austenians ; 
 and many another unforgotten figure. 
 
SCOTT AND THE NOVEL 
 
 317 
 
 Jane Austen's instinct for human nature is unerring within 
 its own range, but, special pleading apart, it must be confessed 
 that that range is somewhat disconcertingly limited. We need 
 not accept wholly the valuation by which she refers to ' the 
 little bit of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as 
 produces little effect after much labour ' ; but it is one of her 
 own champions who says of her that ' she has little idealism, 
 little romance, tenderness, poetry, or religion '. The indict- 
 ment is a formidable one, though there would not be lacking 
 advocates to dispute every count in it. Certainly she has 
 not passion ; she does not stir our nature to its depth as Char- 
 lotte Bronte sometimes stirs it. Her clear cool sense of life 
 seems coldness to some, and leaves them cold in turn ; but 
 those who, like Hippolytus, are enthralled by the chaste 
 perfection of Artemis, will find their account in Jane Austen, 
 who holds posterity by her sure and testing touch on life, her 
 sensitive irony, demure and inevitable dialogue, and quick, 
 true sense of some of the most sterling things in human 
 nature. 
 
 It will be convenient to mention here a considerably Mrs. Gas- 
 later successor to Jane Austen Mrs. Gaskell (1810-1865), kell and 
 who, in Mary Barton (1848), takes for her subject the lower Trollope. 
 life of a great manufacturing town. In Cranford (1853) 
 she adopts not only Jane Austen's manner, but her subject, 
 and presents a subtle and delightful picture of English 
 country life. The same field was laboured, after a very 
 different fashion, by Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), whose 
 Barchester Towers (1857) is the most famous among a numer- 
 ous series of novels describing with an easy, if never quite 
 first-rate, mastery, English country society of the middle and 
 upper classes. 
 
 We may turn back again to a group of novelists who came Disraeli, 
 midway between Scott and Thackeray, and of whom the chief 
 are Disraeli, Bulwer Lytton, and Peacock. Disraeli's literary 
 activity, like the activities of Landor and Meredith, extended 
 over more than fifty years, from Vivian Grey (1826) to Endy- 
 mion (1880). Most typical of his baffling and exotic genius are 
 the first of these novels, and Coningsby (1844), in which he 
 describes, with brilliant wit and colour, the English political 
 and aristocratic life of his day. Much of Disraeli's own 
 political theory and ideal, much, too, of the current Tory 
 interpretation of history, appear in .these volumes. They 
 contain, too, such powerfully drawn contemporary portraits 
 as those of Croker (Mr. Eigby), and of the second Earl of 
 Yarmouth (Earl Monmouth), who was later to achieve 
 a sinister immortality as Thackeray's Lord Steyne. Disraeli, 
 like his own Mr. Sidonia, affects a Semitic magnificence of 
 style, and the gloss and glitter of this debar him for the most 
 part from the highest expression. Henrietta Temple, however, 
 is a charming love story, and hardly less remarkable in its 
 different kind is Venetia, with its brilliant portrayal of Byron. 
 
318 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Bulwer's historical novels have already been noticed. 
 He touches Disraeli both in style and in subject in his early 
 story of English society, Pelham (1828). His remarkable ver- 
 satility is evident in the .variety of themes which he has 
 chosen to handle in Eugene Aram (1832), Zanoni (1842), The 
 Caxtons (1850), My Novel (1853), The Coming Race (1871), 
 Kenelm Chillingly, and several others. His Haunted and the 
 Haunters (1859) was probably the best ghost story in the 
 English language, until Mr. Henry James wrote The Turn of 
 the Screw. Bulwer, in an even greater degree than Disraeli, 
 is liable to the charge of artistic pretence and insincerity, but 
 this defect is to a large extent redeemed by his qualities of 
 power and brilliancy. His exact place in literature is hardly 
 settled even yet, but it is quite definitely below the highest. 
 Charles Lever (1806-1872) is less important for his more 
 mature and deliberate work than for the rollicking novels of 
 his early manhood, the chief of which are Harry Lorrequer 
 (1839) and Charles O'Malley ( 1841 ). These gay and superficial 
 sketches of Irish life will always be read with pleasure, though 
 they have few qualities of greatness. 
 
 Quite different in spirit from the three just mentioned was 
 Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866). Scholar, poet, and satirist, 
 he became often an acrid critic of the Romantic movement, 
 of which he was nevertheless a part. His criticism of this and 
 other developments of his age appear constantly under an 
 ironic form throughout his works, from Headlong Hall (1816) 
 to Gryll Grange (I860). Peacock, in his most representative 
 novels (the pair just mentioned and Nightmare Abbey, Melin- 
 court, and Crotchet Castle), constantly adopts the plan of making 
 his characters assemble in a country house, and give their 
 opinions, often over wine and generally very wittily, upon the 
 subjects and people whom their author most wished to 
 satirize. This device, since practised with great effect by 
 Mr. W. H. Mallock in The New Republic, gave Peacock the 
 chance of introducing many contemporary portraits, generally 
 coloured by a strong dash of caricature : thus, to take only 
 a few instances, Byron appears as Mr. Cypress and Shelley 
 as Glowry Scythrop in Nightmare Abbey ; Coleridge, whose 
 love of German metaphysics aroused great contempt in 
 Peacock, is Mr. Flosky in the same novel. These novels of 
 Peacock's, like some' of Mr. Shaw's plays, subordinate action 
 to dialogue, and often become a mere series of conversations. 
 Somewhat different in form are Maid Marian (1822) and 
 The Misfortunes of Elphin (1829), each of which contains 
 an acceptable blend of irony and romance. The peculiarly 
 detached quality of Peacock's humour makes his place in 
 English fiction unique and assured. Minors who can merely 
 be mentioned here are J. J. Morier (Hajji Baba, 1824), Michael 
 Scott (Tom Cringle's Log and The Cruise of the Midge), 
 Captain F. Marryat (Peter Simple, 1834, and Mr. Midshipman 
 Easy, 1836), and Samuel Warren (Ten Thousand a Tear, 1839). 
 
319 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF NINETEENTH- 
 CENTURY LITERATURE 
 
 The French Revolution and English Literature Waning German and 
 increasing French influence The appeal of French poetry Science 
 and literature Changed outlook of the English poets Diversity 
 of style and spirit in Victorian literature Degradation of Victorian 
 drama Criticism and Novel-writing The appeal of the Russian 
 novel. 
 
 IN some ways the Victorian period of literature represents 
 a development of the Romantic spirit, in others a definite 
 reaction against it. By far the most important social and 
 political influence upon the age of Wordsworth had been the 
 new spirit of France incarnate in the Revolution. When she 
 seemed to have betrayed the principles for which she had 
 fought and suffered and sinned, when aggression and tyranny 
 appeared to have succeeded equality and fraternity, the hopes 
 entertained by many English writers for the regeneration of 
 herself and the world vanished in disillusion and despair. 
 Partly to this cause, partly to another immediately to be 
 specified, is due the note of pessimism and scepticism which is 
 already heard in Coleridge's Ode to Dejection and Shelley's 
 Lines written in Dejection near Naples, and sounds throughout 
 much of the English poetry which follows. But the disillu- 
 sionment with France does not remain merely political : it 
 profoundly affects the attitude of many English thinkers 
 toward the whole French mind. Thus Coleridge, who in his 
 youth had looked to France for salvation, can at a later period 
 describe certain criticisms of Shakespeare as being * not 
 the growth of our own country but of France the judgment 
 of monkeys by some wonderful phenomenon put into the 
 mouths of people shaped like men '. Even Hazlitt, who, 
 unlike Southey and Coleridge, remained faithful to the 
 principles of the Revolution, allows the current tendency to 
 affect his attitude toward the French spirit, of which he 
 writes thus : ' The French attach no importance to anything, 
 except for the moment ; they are only thinking how they shall 
 get rid of one sensation for another : all their ideas are in 
 transitu. . . . They never arrive at the classical or the roman- 
 tic. They blow the bubbles of vanity, fashion, and pleasure ; 
 but they do not expand their perceptions into refinement, or 
 strengthen them into solidity. . . . They are light, airy, fanciful 
 (to give them their due), but when they attempt to be serious 
 (beyond mere good sense) they are either dull or extravagant.' 
 
 With this reaction against the French mind comes a corre- 
 sponding enthusiasm for the German. This had already taken 
 shape in the long visit paid$ by Coleridge and Wordsworth 
 
320 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 to Germany in 1798, in Coleridge's preoccupation with German 
 metaphysics, and in the great vogue enjoyed by the German 
 novel of mystery. It receives a fresh lease in the writings of 
 Carlyle, who interprets Goethe, Schiller, Richter, and Novalis 
 to England, takes Frederick the Great for his hero, and with 
 his admiration for the German- spirit, combines a certain 
 injustice to many French writers, including Voltaire. The 
 German influence remains paramount in England till the day 
 of Matthew Arnold, who, as will be seen, helps to promote 
 it, but also holds up certain French writers to the admiration 
 of Englishmen. From this time onwards, the influence of 
 Germany wanes, and although the writers of her greatest 
 period were, and still are, read with delight, her more recent 
 literature has had comparatively little influence on English 
 thought and art. Simultaneously with this decline, the 
 French influence increases. With Swinburne, who is almost 
 unaffected by the German mind, it is paramount, and other- 
 wise than with Arnold, results in a thorough understanding 
 of the spirit of French poetry, and the keenest enthusiasm 
 for it. This enthusiasm has been caught and transmitted by 
 a number of lesser men, and during the last two generations, 
 French lyric and French drama have held a strong fascination 
 for young imaginative England. In the case of France, then, 
 the interest has been first and foremost literary, and has been 
 largely concerned with the problems of form which have been 
 faced with such splendid success by her poets. The other 
 great foreign influence upon English poetry during this period, 
 the Italian, has been chiefly political, and the interest has 
 centred in the long and gallant struggle for freedom in which 
 Italy was engaged during the early and middle periods of the 
 nineteenth century. The tradition of responsive English 
 enthusiasm begins as early as Shelley, and is continued in the 
 poetry of the Brownings and Swinburne. Indeed, the Risorgi- 
 mento gave something of the quickening to Victorian poetry 
 that the Revolution had given to the earlier Romantic. 
 
 But there were other forces at play in the making of Victorian 
 poetry, and some of these were neither literary nor political. 
 When poetry in the Age of Wordsworth had striven to answer 
 the central problems of life it had constantly spoken to man of 
 a universal spirit comprising himself and nature, yet trans- 
 cending space and time, a spirit in which the perplexities and 
 tragedies of existence might be explained and reconciled. 
 This transcendental and universalizing tendency was as strong 
 in the * atheist ' Shelley as it was in the more orthodox 
 Wordsworth ; and it has led a great living critic to emphasize 
 the spiritual affinity between the English poetry of this period 
 and the German philosophy of the same, or a slightly earlier, 
 age. But the subsequent progress of science, the establish- 
 ment of the theory of evolution, and the publication of such 
 volumes as Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-3) and The 
 Origin of Species (1859), sharply challenged the older philo- 
 
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE 321 
 
 Sophies and faiths ; and if these were not routed, they at any 
 rate bore upon them the marks of the onslaught, and in many 
 cases were forced to give ground. This change of attitude 
 is evident throughout the poetry of the period in divers forms, 
 the most obvious of which is a certain pessimism and a certain 
 doubt concerning the spirit of the older faith. This doubt 
 remains unresolved in the poetry of Arnold and Clough ; in 
 that of Tennyson, it is resolved in hope rather than in any 
 confident or certain belief. When, as with Browning, the faith 
 remains steady and unshaken, it has been brought down from 
 the mountain-tops and more uniformly related to the experi- 
 ence of men than had been the faith of Wordsworth, and the 
 faith, and unfaith, of Shelley. In the poetry of Francis 
 Thompson an escape has been found through the acceptance 
 of a revealed religion. With Swinburne and Meredith there 
 has been a direct break with such religion, yet the faith is 
 still intensely held and expressed ; and it is with both men 
 a faith, whether the poet so meant it or no, which is quite 
 in keeping with the teaching of modern science. 
 
 In point of form, the chief characteristic of Victorian and 
 Georgian poetry is its remarkable diversity. In sharp contrast 
 to the classic language of Arnold and Tennyson stand the 
 intensely and sometimes perversely individual styles of 
 Browning and Meredith. The elaborate and often exquisite 
 ' conceits ' of Francis Thompson are frequently reminiscent of 
 Donne, and the rich sensuousness of his language gives him 
 kinship with Crashaw. Sensuous after a different fashion is 
 Rossetti's poetry, * a box where sweets compacted lie '. 
 William Morris, on the other hand, who distrusts the Renais- 
 sance, and strives to recapture the spirit of the Middle Age, 
 ensues in his poetry the large and simple speech of his master 
 Chaucer. The main influences on the younger men would 
 appear to be Coleridge and Blake, though one of the chief 
 poets now living has expressly deprecated Blake's influence, 
 and has professed his allegiance to Dryden and Gray. At 
 certain periods of English literature notably in the first 
 half of the eighteenth century it has been possible to point 
 to a given form or style of writing, and to describe it as typical 
 of the age. This would be utterly impossible with the Victorian 
 period, which both in practice and in theory would seem to be 
 the most various age of English literature. 
 
 There has been hardly less variety in English criticism ; 
 and the tendency here has been accompanied by a growing 
 and wholesome catholicity. Almost every period of England's 
 literary past, almost every great foreign literature, has found 
 its admirers and champions. Ruskin and Morris, after 
 widely different fashions, have helped to bring the spirit of 
 the Middle Ages into touch with modern English thought 
 and art. Swinburne, Symonds, and many lesser writers, 
 through their enthusiasm for Elizabethan drama, have kept 
 alive the national interest in the finest flower of the English 
 
322 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Renaissance. The Romantics are always with us, and our 
 delight in them has never waned ; but while their greatness 
 has been taken for granted by the finest critics of the Victorian 
 period, many of their prejudices have been discarded, and 
 a notable instance of the growing tendency toward breadth 
 and tolerance may be seen in the gradual mellowing of men's 
 attitude toward the eighteenth century. The poets of that 
 century had met with scant justice from the age of Words- 
 worth. To-day, however, the balance has been redressed. 
 Never has Johnson received finer praise and understand- 
 ing than have been given to him by certain living critics. 
 The poetry of Pope, which had been savagely attacked by 
 Keats and others of his day, has been interpreted with fine 
 scholarship and sympathy by such scholars as the late 
 W. J. Courthope ; and a number of other writers, of whom 
 the chief was perhaps Sir Leslie Stephen, have helped in diverse 
 fashions to revivify the life and form and colour of the period. 
 Despite the frequent perversity of many of Matthew Arnold's 
 judgments, much of this wider understanding and sympathy 
 must be attributed to his teaching and example. He had 
 always attacked ' provincialism ' in criticism, as elsewhere, 
 and had encouraged the critic to take his standards from the 
 highest, and, in formulating his judgments, to ensue the 
 ' sweetness and light ' which to Arnold seemed a first condi- 
 tion of all civilized life and thought. He had blamed the 
 critics of his day for their deficiencies both of sympathy and 
 knowledge. It may perhaps be claimed, without undue com- 
 placency, that since he wrote, English criticism has in large 
 measure made good both these defects, and that it can now 
 hold its own even with the work of the French critics to whose 
 example Arnold so constantly referred it. If the Victorian 
 age has not produced much great criticism it has at any rate 
 produced a very great deal of true and fine criticism ; it is 
 doubtful, indeed, whether in any previous period the general 
 level has been higher. Nor has the critical standard been 
 lowered during the Georgian period ; and this is all the more 
 satisfactory, since that period has been by no means rich in 
 creative work of the first order. 
 
 In drama the condition of affairs is much less encouraging. 
 The divorce between literature and the stage, indicated in an 
 earlier chapter, has remained all but absolute. The few 
 exceptions will be noted in their place. The Repertory 
 Theatre movement, which has done something to redeem the 
 English stage from this disgrace, cannot be discussed here, 
 as most of its leaders are happily still alive. 
 
 The Victorian novel displays the same variety that we have 
 already noticed in Victorian poetry. During the early part 
 of this period Dickens, with his exuberant imagination, his 
 love of romantic colour and realistic detail, and his all em- 
 bracing sympathies, stands in sharp contrast to the curbed and 
 cynical, yet most powerful, genius of Thackeray. Of the two 
 
NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE 323 
 
 Dickens has had by far the greater influence upon succeeding 
 novelists ; indeed, the modern English novel of contemporary 
 middle- class life and manners derives from him, and shows 
 signs of his practice both in obvious and subtle ways. Since 
 his day the tendency of the realistic novel in England has been 
 increasingly toward bringing character and plot into touch 
 with the social problems of the period, and the large questions 
 of national life. George Meredith, the third great novelist of 
 the period who falls within the scope of this volume, exhibits 
 differences from both Thackeray and Dickens which strikingly 
 illustrate the diversity of the age. The chief characteristics of 
 his thought and art will be discussed in their place. His 
 intensely personal style is characteristic of a tendency which 
 will be discussed later in relation to the poetry of Robert 
 Browning. 
 
 From the beginning of the Victorian period onwards, the 
 French novel has been widely read in England, and its greatest 
 practitioners, Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Maupas- 
 sant, have had a definite, if not always obvious, influence upon 
 the practice of English novelists. During the last generation 
 the Russian novel has taken a remarkable hold upon the 
 imagination both of English readers and writers. The earliest 
 influence here had been Tolstoy, whose Anna Karenina 
 was praised by Matthew Arnold in a thoughtful and illuminat- 
 ing essay. Later, men were captivated by the artistry and 
 humanism of Turgenev. The most recent, and probably the 
 most potent, influence of all has been that of Dostoievsky, 
 whose intense imaginative power, and combination of idealistic 
 conviction with unflinching realism, have had a profound 
 effect upon the younger generation. The mark of Dostoievsky 
 is strongly evident in the work of certain younger English 
 novelists ; but the foreign influences on the English novel 
 of the last century have been superficial only ; its main 
 development has been native and individual, and for force and 
 variety it can hold its own with any other English form of 
 the period. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 POETS OF THE TRANSITION 
 
 Religious poetry Clare, Hartley Coleridge, Hawker, Barley, Beddoes, 
 de Vere, Taylor, Home, and others The ' Spasmodics '. 
 
 SOME of the general tendencies just noted are already Religious 
 evident in certain poets of the transition whom we may Poetry, 
 briefly mention before passing to the greater poets of the 
 Victorian period. The age was prolific in religious verse, and 
 in this relation we may record the names of James and Robert 
 Montgomery and Henry Kirke White (1785-1806), who need 
 not otherwise detain us here. On a higher level is Reginald 
 
324 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Heber, Bishop of Calcutta (1783-1826), who wrote many fine 
 hymns and a prize poem, Palestine, worthy to rank in excel- 
 lence with that other prize poem of Milman's, the Apollo 
 Belvedere. Another writer of fine hymns is John Keble 
 (1792-1866), author of The Christian Year and Lyra Innocen- 
 tium (1846). The religious verse of John Henry Newman is 
 small in quantity but of fine quality. Some of his greatest 
 work appears in his long poem, The Dream of Gerontius ; his 
 most beautiful hymn is Lead, Kindly Light. 
 
 Clare and To a different order belongs the farmer poet, John Clare 
 others. (1793-1864), author of Poems Descriptive of Rural Life (1820), 
 The Village Minstrel (1821), and The Shepherd's Calendar 
 (1827). Clare's life, like Christopher Smart's, ended in a form 
 of insanity which seemed rather to heighten than to diminish his 
 poetic power. His greatest lyric, ' I am ! yet what I am who 
 cares or knows f ' was written in the Northamptonshire 
 County Asylum. Barry Cornwall (Bryan Waller Procter) 
 deserves mention rather for his literary friendships than for 
 his literary achievement. Ebenezer Elliott (1781-1849), the 
 'Anti-Corn Law Rhymer '. lives through the vigorous Battle 
 Song in which he rallies the workers to the fight for freedom. 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome (1842) 
 have been decried by the fastidious from Matthew Arnold 
 onwards, and are read by every one. Forcible and flowing, they 
 are as emphatically a kind of poetry as they are emphatically 
 no high kind. Balladists of lesser standing are William 
 Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813-1865 Lays of the Scottish 
 Cavaliers, 1848) and Francis Hastings Doyle (1810-1888), 
 best known by his spirited Private of the Buffs and Red 
 Thread of Honour. Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802-1839) 
 wrote consummate vers de societe, mainly jocular, as in 
 A Letter from Teignmouth, but sometimes suffused with deeper 
 sentiment, as in his masterpiece, The Vicar. His Red Fisher- 
 man is a brilliant essay in the grimly humorous. 
 
 Barnes. William Barnes (1801-1886), Vicar of Game in Dorsetshire, 
 wrote in the dialect of that county lyrics of a peculiarly 
 English simplicity and sweetness, which appeal to most 
 readers of our own day as strongly as they did to the peasants 
 who originally heard them read aloud. In such poems as 
 True Love and Jessie Lee, he sets the Dorset Doric, as Burns 
 had set the Scotch, to express an elemental theme, and the 
 result is exquisite. Hardly less exquisite is My Orchard in 
 Linden Lea, with its perfectly handled refrain. Blackmwore 
 Maidens has a more playful charm. One of Barnes's most 
 beautiful poems is the rhymeless In the Spring. James 
 Clarence Mangan (1803-1849), in right of My Dark Rosaleen 
 and other of his lyrics, must be counted a forerunner, and no 
 mean one, of the modern Celtic school. The amiable and 
 Hartley unfortunate Hartley Coleridge (1796-1849) was the son of 
 Coleridge. &. T - Coleridge, and the friend and admirer of Wordsworth 
 and Tennyson. His touch on the lyric and the longer poem 
 
POETS OF THE TRANSITION 325 
 
 was uncertain ; but he has left several sonnets of the first 
 order. Best of all, perhaps, are the self-confessional, such as 
 * When I review the course that I have run '. 
 
 Kobert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875), * Hawker of Morwen- Hawker, 
 stow ', was a poet of considerable power who drew for many of 
 his themes upon the legends, adventures, and memories of 
 his Cornish parish. His short and powerful Death-Song of 
 Harold celebrates the tragedy of the Battle of Camlan. He was 
 always greatly attracted by religious legend, and has woven 
 it into poetry in The Legend of St. Thekla and The Bier of Mary, 
 Mother of God. More generally known is his Song of the Western 
 Men, with its admirably counterfeited air of antiquity. Perhaps 
 his most beautiful poem is King Arthur's Waes-Hael. 
 
 A true and exquisite vein of poetry runs through the best Darley. 
 work of George Darley (1795-1846). His fairy play, Sylvia 
 (1827), is full of broken light and music. He had not the 
 strength and restraint to write a long poem of sustained 
 excellence, but the fitful beauty of Sylvia is recaptured in the 
 unfinished Nepenthe (1839), which contains snatches of perfect 
 poetry. Some of Darley's lyrics notably ' Sweet in her green 
 cell the flower of beauty slumbers ' are perfect in their kind. 
 
 Even rarer quality is evident in the best work of Darley's Beddoes. 
 contemporary, Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-1849). Though 
 his conscious desire from the beginning was for the dramatic, 
 his true genius was for the lyric. He had little or no construc- 
 tive power. His first book, The Improvisator -e, in Three Fyttes, 
 with other Poems (1821), was published while he was an Oxford 
 freshman. The Bride's Tragedy (1822) followed while he was 
 still an undergraduate, and won him the praise of Darley. 
 But his most notable work was Death's Jest Book, or The Fool's 
 Tragedy, published by his friend Kelsall, in the year after 
 Beddoes had died by his own hand in Germany. The play is 
 mediaeval in subject and spirit, and its chaotic wildness 
 suggests the influence of Tieck and the German romanticists, 
 whom Beddoes greatly admired. Much of its blank verse is 
 of great beauty, and it contains some delightful lyrics, including 
 ' If thou wilt ease thy heart ' and the admirably macabre 
 
 Old Adam, the carrion crow, 
 The old crow of Cairo. 
 
 Beddoes left fragments of several other plays ; many of his 
 lyrics, such as Dream-Pedlary and the Song from Torrismond 
 (' How many times do I love thee, dear ? '). rank little below the 
 highest. 
 
 The poetic or romantic prose drama, which had been the de Vere, 
 chief glory of our literature, was attempted by many at this Taylor, 
 period. Sir Aubrey de Vere (1788-1846), a true poet and the and 
 father of a true poet, wrote several plays in blank verse, includ- others, 
 ing Julian the Avostate (1822). The Duke of Mercia (1823), and 
 Mary Tudor. Tne last of these, and the finest, was written in 
 the last year of his life. Sir Henry Taylor (1800-1880) \vus 
 
326 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the author of Isaac Comnenus (1827), The Virgin Widow (1849), 
 and the far more famous Philip van Artevelde (1834), a poetic 
 drama of high and serious purpose, which was welcomed by 
 the discerning of its day, and retains a place of high honour. 
 Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), a distinguished lawyer, 
 the close friend of Charles Lamb, and an early champion of 
 Wordsworth, is chiefly remembered by his classical drama 
 Ion (1836), in which the austere splendour of Philip van Arte- 
 velde shines with diminished lustre. The plays of Bulwer 
 Lytton possess a kind of merit which is rather theatrical 
 than literary. His admirers claim that there must needs be 
 something in dramas which, like The Lady of Lyons (1838), 
 Richelieu (1839), and Money (1840), have held the stage for 
 nearly a hundred years. Equally successful in their day, but 
 of far less permanent appeal, are the plays of James Sheridan 
 Knowles (1784-1862), Virginius (1820), The Hunchback (1832), 
 The Love Chase (1837), and several others. If Knowles's plays 
 were theatrically successful but deficient in true literary 
 quality, the converse is the case with Cosmo de Medici and 
 The Death of Marlowe (both 1837) by Richard Hengist Home. 
 These plays, though very unequal, contain much fine work ; 
 yet Home's most notable production was no drama, but 
 Orion, an Epic Poem in Three Books, an allegory designed, as 
 he has told us, ' to present a type of the struggles of man with 
 himself, i.e. the contest between the intellect and the senses'. 
 Its blank verse is touched with fire and passion, and the poem, 
 though deficient in action, is lit with a great spiritual idea. 
 Of equally high aim, of less consistent merit, and of vast 
 length, is the Festus (1839) of Philip James Bailey, designed, 
 so its author tells us, ' as a summary of the world's combined 
 moral and physical conditions, estimated on a theory of 
 spiritual things '. 
 
 The 'Spas- The nickname ' Spasmodics ' was 7 originally given to a cer- 
 modics'. tain group of poets by W. E. Aytoun, who parodied in Fir- 
 milian (1854) the qualities, good and bad, which he attributed 
 to them. Chief among them were Sydney Dobell (1824-1874) 
 and Alexander Smith (1830-1867). The word 'spasmodic' 
 suggests the extravagance and incoherence which is common 
 to their work ; yet that work was frequently illumined by 
 passion and inspiration. The first volume to bring Dobell 
 fame was the dramatic poem, The Roman (1850), written in 
 a fervour of enthusiasm for Italian freedom. More profound and 
 philosophic in its aim was the unfinished and most unequal Balder 
 (1854), designed, so its author tells us, to trace 'the progress 
 of a Human Being from Doubt to Faith, from Chaos to Order '. 
 Far more generally read than either of these are Dob ell's 
 best sonnets many of which were inspired by the Crimean 
 War and his strangely beautiful ballad, Keith of Ravelston. 
 The best poetry of his friend, Alexander Smith, is to be found 
 in Poems (1853), City Poems (1857), and Edwin ofDeira (1861), 
 though the charming prose essays entitled Dreamthorp (1863) 
 
POETS OF THE TRANSITION 327 
 
 are probably more generally read than any of these. He has 
 left some fine sonnets ; and his Glasgow is a splendid poem, 
 written in praise of a city which has received few tributes 
 in song. 
 
 Of less importance are Richard Harris Barham (1788-1845), 
 whose Ingoldsby Legends (1837) are cunningly rhymed master- 
 pieces in the grotesque ; and Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord 
 Houghton (1805-1885), the friend of Tennyson, the Mr. Vava- 
 sour of Disraeli's Tancred, and critic, poet, and one of the great 
 social figures of his day. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 VICTORIAN POETRY 
 
 Tennyson, the Brownings, Swinburne, William Morris, Rossetti, James 
 Thomson, FitzGerald, Matthew Arnold, dough, Christina Rossetti, 
 Patmore, O'Shaughnessy, Francis Thompson, Henley, Wilde, Davidson, 
 Brooke. 
 
 WHEN we pass from the poets of the transition, the first Tennyson 
 
 great name we encounter is that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson Early 
 
 (1809-1892), who represents at once a development of the Poems/ 
 earlier Romanticism and a notable reaction against it. Much 
 even of his earlier poetry displays a richness and sensuous 
 beauty of colour which puts him in close touch with Keats. 
 In 1829 he won the Chancellor's prize at Cambridge with his 
 poem Timbuctoo ; in 1830 appeared his Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. 
 Most of these, as Oriana and The Merman, display a certain 
 wistfulness of cadence and feeling, combined with a strong and 
 sometimes exaggerated sense of the value of detail in the 
 creation of beauty. Tennyson's touch on poetry is here falter- 
 ing and uncertain : it has become far surer in The Lady of 
 Shalott and Other Poems (1832), which contained, besides the 
 name-poem, such master's work as Oenone, The Palace of 
 Art, The Lotus-Eaters, and A Dream of Fair Women. The 
 Lady of Shalott, a symbolic rehandling of the tale of Lancelot 
 and EJaine, is his first, and one of his most beautiful, essays 
 in the Arthurian Legend, which he subsequently wished to 
 compress within the compass of a musical masque, and 
 eventually developed more fittingly in The Idylls of the King. 
 The Two Voices, and, to some extent, The Palace of Art, 
 display in a form tinged with youthful despondency, that 
 eager questioning of life which was later to take more virile 
 and various shape in the great fabric of In Memoriam. The 
 poems of 1832, although they were savagely and unwisely 
 attacked in certain quarters, immediately won for Tennyson 
 the consideration of some of the most representative minds of 
 his day, including natures so diverse as Carlyle, FitzGerald, 
 and John Stuart Mill. 
 
328 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 No further volume was published till the year 1842, which 
 saw the production of two volumes, English Idylls and Enoch 
 Arden and Other Poems. These represent a notable develop- 
 ment in Tennyson's genius, for in the words of his biographer 
 and son, ' there was now a marvellous abatement of my father's 
 real fault the tendency, arising from the fullness of a mind 
 which had not learnt to master its resources freely, to over- 
 crowd his compositions with imagery, to which may be added 
 over-indulgence in the luxury of the senses '. Morte d' Arthur, 
 subsequently to be developed into The Passing of Arthur, 
 shows Tennyson's mind strongly at work on Malory and the 
 older Arthurian romances. Ulysses, Tithonus, and Lucretius 
 display his growing mastery of blank verse, together with 
 that high and Vergilian dignity of expression and acute 
 sensitiveness to all beauty of form and feeling, which, in 
 combination, make him one of the chief English inheritors 
 of the classical spirit. LocJcsley Hall represents the old wistful- 
 ness and disillusion which were to recur in Maud and to be 
 partially resolved in In Memoriam. 
 
 The Princess, a lengthy ' blank verse lyric ' to use Tenny- 
 son's own term for it on the subject of Woman's Rights, 
 was originally published in 1847, but is now chiefly prized 
 for the exquisite incidental lyrics which were added to it in 
 1850. 
 
 In Memoriam, published in 1850, had been begun in 1833, 
 the year which had seen the death of Arthur Hallam, the gifted 
 and well-beloved friend whose memory it celebrates. Full of 
 vivid scenery and portraiture, and containing passages of 
 perfect lyric beauty, it ranks with Lycidas and Adonais as one 
 of the classic elegies in our language, and is also .a great 
 autobiographical and philosophic poem. It shows a human 
 soul at handgrips with the deepest and darkest problems of 
 life, and embodies the attitude towards religion not only of 
 a man but of a whole generation. A comparison between it 
 and The Prelude shows clearly how far Tennyson has moved 
 from Wordsworth's envisagement of Nature, and how strongly 
 his outlook has been coloured by the age in which he wrote 
 the age of Lyell and Darwin and Huxley. Huxley, indeed, 
 remarked of him that he was the first poet since Lucretius 
 who had taken the trouble to understand the scientific point 
 of view ; and his conception of Nature as ' red in tooth and 
 claw ', like the intuition of her embodied in Arnold's Sonnet 
 to a Preacher, agrees with Huxley x in regarding her as a ruthless 
 force who was not the ally but the foe of the human soul in 
 its striving for spiritual and physical salvation. We are a far 
 way here from the conception of her as Healer and Revealer 
 embodied in the Lines Written above Tintern Abbey. Yet 
 Tennyson, despite his moods of black despondency, does not, 
 like Vigny, despair utterly of Nature and of life, but pours 
 forth in poignant language the aspiration of his soul for some 
 1 Cf. Huxley's Romanes Lecture on Evolution and Ethics. 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 
 
 329 
 
 form of spiritual existence which shall transcend the present 
 order, and enable him to regain his friend. Some, especially 
 those of the younger generation, -have found the philosophy 
 and faith of In Memoriam commonplace and unsatisfying, 
 and certainly Wordsworth scaled spiritual heights on whose 
 foot-hills Tennyson had barely trod ; but no dissatisfaction 
 of this kind can be allowed to discount the superb beauty of 
 description and reminiscence which runs throughout the 
 poem. 
 
 In 1855 Tennyson published Maud, a lyric romance embody- Maud. 
 ing a psychology essentially modern. Both the characteriza- 
 tion and the lyric expression of this poem are uneven, and the 
 invective against society with which it opens is overwrought 
 and rhetorical, for Tennyson's gloom nowhere achieves the 
 cosmic sublimity of Vigny's or Leopardi's ; but there is much 
 fine work in Maud, and critics should never forget that the 
 very strain in it which some of them denounce as 'morbid', 
 produced one at least of the loveliest lyrics that Tennyson 
 ever wrote. 
 
 In The Idylls of the King Tennyson recurs to the theme The Idylls 
 which had attracted him strongly both before and after the of the 
 publication of Sir Lancelot and Guinevere and The Lady of Kir^. 
 Shalott. The series began with the beautiful Morte d* Arthur, 
 which was written before 1835, originally published in 1842 
 as one of the English Idylls, and republished as the conclusion 
 of The Idylls of the King under the name of The Passing of 
 Arthur. Fresh idylls appeared at intervals from 1859 (Enid, 
 Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere) to 1885 (Balin and Balan). 
 In its final form, the series comprises twelve tales of the Bound 
 Table, each written in blank verse. In the main Tennyson 
 keeps to the version of Malory with recourse to the Mabinogion 
 and such early romances as the metrical Morte Arthure ; 
 but he has freely remoulded the old legends to the shape and 
 fashion of his formidably decorous age, and it must frankly 
 be confessed that much of the glamour of Malory has vanished 
 in the process. Nowhere is this more lamentably the case than 
 in Guinevere, where the queen's guilty yet heroic love for her 
 knight dwindles at the end into a half-hearted reversion to her 
 sermonizing lord and king, and thus prevents Tennyson from 
 portraying the far more beautiful and spiritual renunciation- 
 scene between Lancelot and Guinevere ,* which, as described 
 by Malory, is one of the greatest passages in English prose. 
 In The Last Tournament, again, Tennyson adopts the less 
 poetic and tragic version of Tristram's death, and altogether 
 fails to do justice to the spirit of the old romance. Yet, 
 despite all objections and many more might be added the 
 Idylls are not ignobly conceived or wrought, and, at their 
 best, as in The Passing of Arthur, they contain work inferior 
 to nothing in Tennyson. 
 
 In 1850 Tennyson was made Laureate in succession to Words- His later 
 worth, and in 1852 he wrote his first official ode of importance, Poems. 
 
 M3 
 
330 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 that On. the Death of the Duke of Wellington. From now 
 onwards he continued to publish at intervals such patriotic 
 poems as The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Defence of 
 Lucknow, the best of which are spirited and stirring. Probably 
 his finest achievement in this kind is The Eevenge, a Ballad 
 of the Fleet, which follows and sometimes, though by no means 
 always, betters the splendid prose narrative of Kaleigh. 
 
 A quite different handling is evident in Tennyson's poems 
 of pastoral life, some of which, as The Northern Farmer, are 
 written in dialect, others, as The May Queen, in ordinary English. 
 A powerful tragic poem in this class is Hizpah, which received 
 the passionate praise of Swinburne. Certain of Tennyson's 
 other poems, as Locksley Hall Sixty Years After and Vastness, 
 embody a deepening and a variation of the faith of In Memo- 
 riam, and a still keener sense of the poignant antinomy between 
 faith and science. 
 
 His Plays. Of his plays the most important are Queen Mary (1875), 
 Harold (1876), Beeket (1879), The Falcon and The Gup (1884). 
 The first three of these represent an attempt to revive the old 
 English history play, and to make it hold the English stage, 
 which, except for a few brief revivals, had hardly known it 
 since the day of Elizabeth. Both Harold and Beeket contain 
 fine character drawing : Beeket is strongly dramatic. Had 
 Tennyson begun to write poetic drama in his prime he might 
 have done very great things indeed. 
 
 Browning With Tennyson the writing of plays came late, and was 
 Pauline induced by his practice of the dramatic poem. With Robert 
 and Para- Browning (1812-1889) the sequence is reversed; his dramas 
 come early, and it is only after passing from them to the dramatic 
 poem that he achieves his full strength. It is noteworthy, too, 
 that whereas much of Tennyson's best work for instance, In 
 Memoriam is personal and confessional, Pauline (1833), which 
 is Browning's earliest publication, and is described by him as a 
 ' fragment of a confession ', represents a way of writing to which 
 he seldom returned. Dramatic in form, it is really an essay in 
 self -revelation ; and self-revelation, at least of the direct variety, 
 subsequently became distasteful to him. Pauline shows the 
 influence of Shelley, whom it praises as the 'Sun-treader'. Para- 
 celsus (1835) is a far greater achievement. It is a study in the 
 character of the famous sixteenth-century Swiss philosopher 
 and charlatan, who, as recreated by Browning, finds after years 
 of intellectual striving that his life has been thwarted through 
 lack of the human charity and love vouchsafed to his friend, the 
 poet Aprile. This early poem foreshadows Browning's later 
 practice of developing a great conception through the workings 
 of a human soul. The central idea itself, and Paracelsus's con- 
 viction that the struggle of his earthly life will find fruition in a 
 future state, also anticipate much that was to come in Brown- 
 ing's later work. This splendid poetic dialogue is an astonishing 
 Sordello. production for a man of twenty-three. Sordello, though it 
 did not appear till 1840, was conceived and partially written 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 331 
 
 before the publication of Paracelsus. It deals with the life- 
 tragedy of the young Guelf poet whose name it bears, and shows 
 the ideal triumphing over ambition, though at the cost of life . 
 itself. It is one of the most difficult among English poems, 
 yet contains passages of great beauty. 
 
 In 1837 Browning's first play, Strafford, was produced by H' s Plays. 
 Macready at Co vent Garden, but only ran for five nights. 
 Browning was not disheartened, and during the next eight 
 years produced six fresh dramas, King Victor and King Charles 
 (1842), The Return of the Druses (1843), A Blot in the 'Scutcheon 
 (1843), Colombe's Birthday (1844), Luria and A Soul's Tragedy 
 (1846). None of these plays has had any striking success on 
 the stage, though the most popular of them, A Blot in the 
 'Scutcheon, has been occasionally revived. If their failure 
 proves that Browning had an imperfect mastery of the 
 theatrical, it also suggests that early Victorian audiences had 
 an imperfect sense of the dramatic. The plays, it must be 
 admitted, are too wordy, and in some cases they elaborate 
 character to the detriment of plot ; yet Henry and Mildred, 
 Djabal and Anael, the tragic lovers of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon 
 and The Return of the Druses, might well appear dramatic 
 even beneath the cheap scrutiny of the limelight. Less able 
 to bear this test, but secure by every higher one, is the 
 exquisitely idealized figure of Luria ; and the plays contain 
 other unforgettable characters, such as Colombe and Chiap- 
 pino, whose story, like his life, has its first half poetry and its 
 second prose. 
 
 Somewhat apart from the plays proper lies Pippa Passes His great 
 a set of dramatic scenes showing how the song of a passing girl, dramatic 
 who is enjoying a holiday from her task work, enters and alters Poems, 
 the lives of those who hear it. Pippa contains some perfect 
 poetry, and one, at least, of the most dramatic passages ever 
 
 ?enned by Browning. In this class, too, may be reckoned 
 n a Gondola (1842) and the later In a Balcony, dramatic 
 dialogues which contain some of Browning's greatest lyric 
 and tragic work. But if his genius was intensely dramatic, it was 
 also, in the strength of its ethical and metaphysical conviction, 
 intensely self-conscious ; hence his perfect form of expression 
 was not the dramatic dialogue, which curbs self -consciousness, 
 but the dramatic monologue or lyric, which gives it freer 
 play. Browning had already attempted this form in two 
 volumes, Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and Dramatic Romances and 
 Lyrics (1845), which, with his six plays, complete the full 
 series of Bells and Pomegranates, and contain such splendid 
 work as Porphyria's Lover, Waring, The Flight of the Duchess, 
 and the first draft of Saul. They were followed by Christmas 
 Eve and Easter Day (1850), which discusses the human and 
 superhuman truths underlying orthodox religion ; and by 
 Men and Women ( 1855), which, with Dramatis Personae (1864) 
 and The Ring and the Book (1868-69), represents the finest 
 flower of Browning's achievement. The first two volumes 
 
332 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 consist mainly of dramatic poems of short or medium length. 
 Some of these, for example, How they brought the good News, 
 . Count Gismond, and The Glove, are simply spirited stories 
 in verse. Others, as In a Laboratory, The Heretic's Tragedy, 
 The Worst of It, How it strikes a Contemporary, Bishop Blougram, 
 The Bishop at St. Praxed's, The Grammarian's Funeral, are 
 first and foremost studies in character, sinister or simple, 
 worldly or heavenly ; but more characteristic of Browning's 
 genius, and containing all its highest qualities, are Cleon, 
 An Epistle of Karshish, Andrea del Sarto, Abt Vogler, Evelyn 
 Hope, Eabbi Ben Ezra, The Last Ride Together, and Holy -Cross 
 Day, in which he uses the dramatic form for the expression of 
 a great central idea which he either accepts himself or regards 
 with interest and sympathy. Browning's ' men and women ' 
 are of all periods, countries, faiths, and characters ; but the 
 period to which he returns most eagerly is the Renaissance, 
 and the country he loves above all others is Italy, where he 
 had lived so long and happily, and to which he devoted the 
 lyric praise of An Englishman in Italy, An Italian in England, 
 and De Gustibus. 
 
 hilo- Browning's range of character was vast and various ; yet 
 f +>! there are two kinds of character to whom he recurs with special 
 Lth< frequency and gusto : full-blooded or inquisitive folk of 
 the Renaissance time or type, to whom he was drawn by his 
 own insatiable zest of life and beauty ; and beings representing 
 a thwarted life or faith or art, whom he envisaged as seeking 
 beyond this life the realization of their hands' striving or their 
 soul's yearning. The creation of these latter types enabled 
 him to express some of his own most fervidly held beliefs. 
 Chief among these was the conviction that human life, its 
 aspirations and its failures, could only be understood and 
 explained by the light of the Christian revelation, and by the 
 assumption that the life of this world is not the end, but the 
 beginning, of human self-realization. This belief is attested 
 by the pagan in Cleon and An Epistle of Karshish, by the Jew 
 in Saul, the apostle in A Death in the Desert, the lover in 
 Evelyn Hope and The Last Ride Together, the sage in Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra, and the artist and musician in Andrea del Sarto and 
 Abt Vogler. The conviction, however, that perfect self- 
 realization is only possible in the hereafter, was not based in 
 Browning's case, as it was in Carlyle's, on a gloomy intuition 
 of earthly existence ; on the contrary, he held that this life 
 ' means intensely and means good ', and he gloried in its 
 very imperfections, taking his joy of souls whose yearning 
 soared beyond their achievement, 1 and of works of art where 
 mechanical technique fell maimed and broken before the 
 mightiness of spiritual aspiration. 2 Conversely, he often 
 expresses distrust of lives or works distinguished by a finite 
 
 1 Cf. The Grammarian's Funeral. - Cf. Old Pictures in Florence. 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 333 
 
 perfection. 'What's come to perfection perishes', he tells us 
 in Old Pictures in Florence. Failure and suffering and sin 
 were the necessary conditions of good ; they would be further 
 atoned and explained by a fuller understanding of that spirit 
 of love which with Browning, as with Shelley, was the moving 
 force of the universe. 
 
 Browning's greatest work of all, and probably the greatest The Ring 
 work of later Victorian poetry, is The Ring and the Book. Its and the 
 subject, a seventeenth - century Italian murder-case, was Book. 
 furnished to him in the ' square old yellow book ' which he 
 picked up at a second-hand bookstall in Florence. Its central 
 figures are the murderer, Count Guido Franceschini, his victim, 
 the girl-wife Pompilia, and the priest, Caponsacchi, who 
 worshipped her with a pure and devoted love. Her girlhood 
 and marriage, her husband's unbearable cruelty, her flight, 
 Guide's pursuit, the selfless devotion of Caponsacchi, her 
 murder, and Guido's trial, make up the themes of the ten 
 monologues into which the poem falls. Its greatness depends 
 largely on the technical device by which the action and chief 
 characters are reviewed from different standpoints in the 
 successive books by the characters themselves, by the chatty 
 Roman cits, by the advocates on each side, and by the Pope 
 himself. Guido is as tense and perfect a study in evil as any in 
 our literature ; and that literature possesses few more exquisite 
 and moving heroines than Pompilia, the * perfect in whiteness '. 
 Never did Browning show greater psychological mastery than 
 in his drawing of the major and minor characters in this 
 poem. 
 
 Browning's remaining works x represent a huge output. There His later 
 is much beauty in Balaustion's Adventure, with its * transcript Poems, 
 from Euripides ', which is Browning's translation of the 
 Alcestis. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is a dramatic re- 
 valuation of Napoleon the Third's character. The Inn Album 
 is a, powerful study in the sinister, and resembles a novel by 
 Mr. Henry James dotfe into verse. La Saisiaz is final as an 
 exposition of Browning's faith in immortality, but is anything 
 but final or satisfying in point of poetic form. The rest can 
 receive no further mention here. 
 
 Browning, like Meredith, has an intensely personal style, His style, 
 and of each writer it may be said that ' you must love him ere 
 to you he will seem worthy of your love ' . The day is long past 
 of that criticism which ' blames ' him because his style is 
 ' grotesque ' ; it is realized that in the might of that ' grotes- 
 querie ' ne has written such masterpieces as A Heretic's Tragedy 
 
 1 Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau and Balaustion 's Adventure (1871), 
 Fifine at the Fair (1872), Red Cotton Night-cap Country (1873), Aris- 
 tophanes' Apology and The Inn Album (1875), Pacchiarotto (1876), The 
 Agamemnon of Aeschylus (1877), La Saisiaz and The Two Poets of 
 Croisic (1878), Dramatic Idylls, First and Second Series (1879 and 1880), 
 Jocoseria (1883), FerishtaWs Fancies (1884), Parleyings with Certain 
 People of Importance (1887), and Asolando (1889). 
 
334 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and Caliban upon Setebos. With him too the grotesque, at its 
 best, passes constantly into beauty, as in A Grammarian's 
 Funeral and Holy -Gross Day \ and frequently the mastery 
 which he achieves is not grotesque at all, but becomes the 
 classic and final beauty of Saul. His style, like that of any 
 other great artist, must be appraised by the law of its own 
 being and by none other, and approved if it reaches the highest 
 pitch which that law allows. Often, especially in his later 
 work, it fails of that pitch, whereof come wordiness and con- 
 tortion ; yet there are few modern poets who have put forth 
 a greater volume of great work than Robert Browning. 
 Swin- Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) represents the 
 
 burne working of new forces, both in thought and in expression. 
 
 Early Educated at Eton and, under Jowett, at Balliol, he early 
 Plays and developed that love of learning, and that mastery of classical 
 Poems. scholarship, which colour all his work, and make him one of 
 the most erudite among English poets. His earliest volume 
 consisted of two plays, The Queen Mother and Eosamond 
 (1860) ; but it was his Greek tragedy, Atalanta in Calydon 
 (1865), which first showed men that he was a great poet. 
 Instead of the dead and faithful rhymeless choruses of Arnold's 
 Merope, Swinburne employed rhymed lyric measures of sur- 
 passing beauty, and imparted the same beauty and a joyous 
 eager might to the blank verse in which he retold the ancient 
 tale of the Calydonian boar-hunt. This drama, and the perhaps 
 slightly less great Erechtheus (1876), stand apart among Swin- 
 burne's dramas as being Greek in subject, and, to some extent, 
 in structure and spirit. Poems and Ballads (1866) won him 
 further fame, and in many quarters, owing to their occasional 
 eroticism, a certain notoriety. This volume contains some of 
 his very greatest poems including the Hymn to Proserpine, 
 In Memory of Walter Savage Landor, and the glorious Triumph 
 of Time. Its distinguishing qualities are its passionate 
 adoration of sensuous beauty, and its subtlety and might of 
 lyric expression. The same might and passion are present in 
 Songs before Sunrise (1871), but are now devoted to the cause 
 of liberty, and, in especial, to the great cause of Italian liberty, 
 which Swinburne, like Meredith and the Brownings, had 
 deeply at heart. The youthful phase of world -weariness 
 which had appeared in poems like The Garden of Proserpine and 
 Ex VotOy had now passed away, to reappear but seldom in 
 Swinburne's poetry, and had given place to a fervent belief 
 in the spirit of man, and in his right to vindicate that spirit 
 against the kings and creeds which would mar the joy and glory 
 of his spiritual growth. Thus he sings in Hertha : 
 
 A creed is a rod 
 And a crown is of night, 
 But this thing is God 
 To be man with thy might, 
 
 To grow straight in the strength of thy spirit, and live out thy life as 
 the light. 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 
 
 335 
 
 In The Hymn of Man we find the thought, so insistent in 
 Shelley, that the soul of man has power to tame the universe 
 and penetrate its furthest recesses : 
 
 His thought takes flight for the centre wherethrough it hath part in 
 
 the whole, 
 
 The abysses forbid it not enter : the stars make room for the soul. 
 Space is the soul's to inherit ; the night is hers as the day ; 
 Lo, saith man, this is my spirit : how shall not the worlds make way V 
 
 Much of Songs before Sunrise is politics ; but it is politics lit 
 with the lyric glory of The Halt before Rome, Messidor, and 
 The Litany of Nations ; and Swinburne's passion for righteous- 
 ness takes a form of perfect and balanced beauty in Genesis 
 and The Pilgrims. 
 
 From this time onwards there are two main notes in Swin- 
 burne's song. One is his love of beauty for beauty's sake, the 
 desire to sing for the joyous or passionate sake of singing. This 
 finds utterance pre-eminently in Poems and Ballads, Second 
 and Third Series (1878 and 1889), Studies in Song (1880), and 
 A Century of Roundels (1883), and results in such masterpieces 
 as The Forsaken Garden, Relics, and the superb Ohoriambics. 
 On the other hand, his passionate ethical impulse and love of 
 freedom find expression in the Songs of Two Nations, and 
 reappear once more toward the end in The Altar of Righteous- 
 ness. This love of freedom never failed in Swinburne, and is 
 traceable in his latest work ; but side by side with it there 
 gradually grew in him a not less passionate nationalism, born 
 of the conviction that his country was one in which the spirit 
 of freedom had become incarnate. This belief was enshrined 
 in a series of patriotic poems such as The Armada, A Word for 
 the Navy, Trafalgar Day, and The Commonweal ; and in the Ode 
 to Athens, whose concluding stanzas contain some splendid 
 praise of England. Swinburne's exultation in Britain's 
 historic glory is interwoven with two of his other main enthu- 
 siasms -nis eager delight in the sea, the element of freedom and 
 might with which he conceived England to have special kin- 
 ship ; and his undying love of the literature of England, which 
 he knew so intimately, and has hymned so nobly in such poems 
 as In the Bay, and his sonnets on the Elizabethan dramatists. 
 Some of his greatest poetry is written in praise of poets : in 
 Ave atque Vale (his elegy on Baudelaire), tne Memorial Verses 
 to Theophile Gautier, and his apostrophes to Hugo and Walter 
 Savage Landor, he has expressed his hero-worship lyrically 
 and rhapsodically, yet with penetrating critical insight. 
 
 Swinburne's two Arthurian poems, Tristram of Lyonesse 
 (1882) and The Tale of Balen (1896), differ considerably from 
 one another in form and handling. Considered simply as 
 a story, the latter, partly by virtue of its swinging and echoing 
 stanza, is more successful and direct, but it cannot vie in 
 passion and beauty with Tristram. Here Swinburne employs 
 a highly overrun form of the heroic couplet, handling it with 
 
 Poems of 
 beauty, 
 freedom, 
 and pa- 
 triotism 
 
336 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 an ease and intensity which more than atone for the poem's 
 occasional diffuseness. This diffuseness is his besetting sin, 
 and it becomes especially exasperating in certain of his later 
 poems, where inspiration sleeps and the verse walks to 
 use his own phrase 'with the mere activity of a blind 
 somnambulism '. 
 
 His Plays. Swinburne's plays have had no success upon the stage ; the 
 greater number of them, in view of their looseness of dramatic 
 structure, have perhaps not greatly deserved to succeed. On 
 the other hand, the modern playgoer, with his degraded and 
 degrading preferences, has certainly not deserved or earned the 
 beauty which suffuses cunningly -rhymed Locrine, and much of 
 Chastelard, the first play of Swinburne's trilogy on Mary 
 Queen of Scots. The second play, Bothwell, is of great length 
 and diffuseness, but has fine historical colour and some great 
 dramatic moments. 1 Mary Stuart, the third play, shows 
 a decline in beauty of expression, though its reading of Mary 
 Stuart's character is at once dramatic and faithful to history. 
 Swinburne's remaining plays are Marino Faliero (1885) 
 rendered hopeless from a stage point of view by the Doge's 
 lengthy final soliloquies Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, 
 and The Duke of Gandia. The Sisters (1892) is a remarkable 
 attempt to introduce the spirit of Elizabethan tragedy into the 
 setting of a modern English country house. 
 
 William In one sense the poetry of William Morris (1834-1896) might 
 Morris. seem little akin to the practical activities of his life ; for the 
 best of it has no note of the social propagandism which allured 
 him from the beginning, and absorbed so much of his energy 
 towards the end. On the other hand, each of the many arts 
 which Morris practised and mastered only becomes fully 
 intelligible if considered in relation to the rest, and to his 
 belief that the highest art could only be forthcoming in societies 
 where the practical conditions of life were humane, simple, and 
 beautiful. His earliest volume of poems, The Defence of 
 Guenevere and Other Poems (1858)T, is strongly pre-Eaphaelite 
 in form, and shows the influence of Kossetti, who profoundly 
 affected his early outlook on art and life. Many of the poems 
 in this volume have a strange and delicate, yet very definite 
 beauty. Some of them e. g. The Chapel in Lyoness are 
 almost perfect in their mediaevalism. The Arthurian poems 
 notably the name-poem and King Arthur's Tomb show an 
 artistry as sensitive as Malory's, though far less rich and full. 
 More dramatic and realistic are The Haystack in the Floods 
 and Sir Peter Harpdon's End. This volume illustrates Morris's 
 fervid love of the Middle Ages and his constant desire to 
 recapture their spirit, and avoid the morbid and disconcerting 
 influence which he attributed to the Kenaissance. His next 
 poem, The Life and Death of Jason (1867), won him the general 
 1 For instance, the passage of Mary and Darnley through the vaults 
 of Holyrood past the tomb of the murdered Rizzio ; Darnley's soliloquy 
 before his death ; and several other passages. 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 337 
 
 popularity which had been denied to the earlier volume. 
 Originally intended as a tale in The Earthly Paradise, it became 
 too bulky for its setting, and had to be issued separately. 
 It retells the old story of the Fleece in simple flowing verse. 
 Though this seldom attempts or achieves intensity, the poem 
 contains two of Morris's most charming lyrics, the Songs of 
 Orpheus and of the Sirens. 
 
 The Earthly Paradise (1868-1870) is a collection of stories, The 
 half Northern, half Greek, told in alternation by the members Earthly 
 of a Viking crew, and by the Greek settlers of a far-off Atlantic Paradise. 
 island who had shown them hospitality. The sources x of both 
 Greek and Scandinavian mythology are freely drawn upon, 
 and the repertory is supplemented from many other quarters. 
 The result has been likened to tapestry, by reason both of its 
 breadth and of its low and simple scheme of artistic values. 
 Morris professed in the Prologue and Epilogue of this work, 
 as elsewhere, to have followed the way of his revered master, 
 Chaucer. In telling a tale he certainly achieves the right 
 Chaucerian flow and clearness, though there is little of the 
 gusto and throbbing vitality which distinguish the Prologue 
 to The Canterbury Tales and many of the Tales themselves. 
 The book is entirely written in three Chaucerian metres the 
 heroic couplet, octosyllabic couplet, and rime royal ; in the 
 latter are written the charming introductions which usher in 
 the separate months. 
 
 The longest,and perhaps most successful, tale of The Earthly 
 Paradise, The Lovers ofGudrun, was Norse in its origin, and had 
 been inspired by Morris's growing interest in Iceland and 
 Icelandic. It represents a transition from the romance to the 
 epic ; and this transition has become complete in his greatest 
 poem, Sigurd the Volsung (1877), written after his visits to Sigurd the 
 Iceland in 1871 and 1873. The great old story, familiarized, Volsung. 
 and, in Morris's opinion, vulgarized, by Wagner's handling of 
 it, is here treated with a simple largeness and force which 
 make it one of the greatest long poems in our language. It 
 has not yet come into its own, largely owing to the conservatism 
 and insensibility of certain modern critics who have thought 
 that because it aims at creating a reality remote from the 
 present, and even from the historical past, it possesses little 
 reality of any kind, and little force or beauty save the purely 
 decorative. There could be no more complete fallacy than 
 this. Wonderful as are the poem's decorative passages, for 
 instance the descriptions of Brynhild's tapestry, and of the 
 House of the Niblungs, such narrative passages as the slaying 
 of Sigurd and the great fight in Atli's hall are more wonderful 
 and enthralling still ; and when the narrative and decorative 
 blend, as in the transformation of Sigurd and Gunnar before 
 the Riding of the Wavering Flame, the swinging couplet 
 beats and throbs with tense poetic inspiration. The great 
 
 1 For the ' sources ' of The Earthly Paradise, cf. J. W. Mackail's Life 
 of William Morris, vol. i, pp. 209-14. 
 
338 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 defect of the poem, and the one through which it remains 
 unpopular, is not any lack of narrative or dramatic power, 
 but the disproportionate length of the opening book, which, 
 though fine in itself, is not necessary to the Sigurd story, and 
 conveys the impression that the poem is lacking in unity. 
 Morris's chief remaining achievements in poetry are Poems by 
 the Way, the quaint mediaeval morality Love is Enough 
 (1873), and the socialistic poetry which he contributed to 
 The Commonweal. Among the finest of his prose romances are 
 The House of the Wolftngs and The Sundering Flood. 
 
 Dante Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) holds a place apart in 
 
 Gabriel Victorian literature. His great contemporaries and successors, 
 Rossetti. Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Meredith, each held 
 strong ethical convictions, and each strove in his poetry to 
 express the faith that was in him, no less than the art. With 
 Rossetti, however, faith was art, and art faith ; and both 
 were as far removed as were Heredia's from the influence of 
 contemporary speculation. With Holman Hunt, Millais 
 and Woolner, Rossetti had founded the ' pre-Raphaelite ' 
 brotherhood, and the name, originally used in connexion with 
 painting, became subsequently applied to the fashion of poetry 
 followed by certain members of the school. Rossetti was, on 
 his own showing, first and foremost a painter, and the painter's 
 insight and touch are everywhere evident through his writings. 
 His poetical production, like that of Coleridge, falls into two 
 widely separated periods. The first of these extended from 
 his nineteenth to his twenty -fifth year (1847-1853), the 
 second from 1870 till his death. His first publication was his 
 volume of translations entitled The Early Italian Poets, 
 afterwards known as Dante and his Circle. These, although 
 not published till 1861, were, as his brother W. M. Rossetti 
 tells us, ' the work almost entirely of his eighteenth to his 
 twenty-second year '. His early original poetry, though 
 written before 1853, was not published till 1870, much of it 
 being disinterred for this purpose from his wife's grave. 
 
 His third published volume was Ballads and Sonnets (1881), 
 which title indicates accurately the main forms in which he 
 attained mastery. The Blessed Damozel, originally published 
 in the pre-Raphaelite monthly, The Germ, and reprinted, after 
 revision, in the hardly less famous Oxford and Cambridge 
 Magazine, had a profound influence on Rossetti's younger 
 contemporaries, including Morris and Swinburne. This poem, 
 as he has himself told us, was suggested to him by Poe's Raven. 
 ' I saw ', he continues, ' that Poe had done the utmost it was 
 possible to do with the grief of the lover on earth, and I deter- 
 mined to reverse the conditions and give utterance to the 
 yearnings of the loved one in heaven.' The passionate yet 
 unearthly beauty of the poem renders it unlike anything else 
 in our literature, and gives fresh meaning and value to the old 
 ballad metre. Sister Helen is as satanic in subject as The 
 Blessed Damozel is celestial, and here, as in Lilith and Troy 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 
 
 339 
 
 Town, Rossetti has made effective use of the recurring refrain. 
 The King's Tragedy, which enshrines the heroism of Kate 
 Barlass, and The White Ship are splendid specimens of the 
 historical ballad ; Stratton Water is less successful in this kind. 
 Particularly beautiful is Rose Mary, which contains such poetry 
 as this : 
 
 In the hair dark-waved the face Jay white, 
 
 As the moon lies in the lap of night, 
 
 And as night through which no moon may dart 
 
 Lies on a pool in the woods apart, 
 
 So lay the swoon on the weary heart. 
 
 As a sonneteer Kossetti is best known by The Rouse of Life, 
 one of the greatest among English sonnet-sequences. Here, as 
 in his other poetry, Rossetti displays a sensuousness which 
 to some has appeared to merge occasionally in sensuality ; but 
 this sensuousness is the soul of his genius, and it is somewhat 
 beside the point to rail at the quality which has produced such 
 exquisite work as Willow -wood and Life-in-Love. 
 
 James Thomson (1834-1882), army schoolmaster, and sub- James 
 nequently journalist, wrote some fine early verse, notably the Thomson, 
 classically beautiful Requiem (1858) ; but he did not reach his 
 full strength till after his association with Charles Bradlaugh, 
 to whose magazine, The National Reformer, he contributed 
 many of the poems by which he is most famous. To Our 
 Ladies of Death (1861), a poem suggested by the Suspiria de 
 Profundis of De Quincey, first attracted the attention of 
 Thomson's friend and editor, Mr. Bertram Dpbell. Its pro- 
 found melancholy found intenser expression in his greatest 
 work, The City of Dreadful Night (1880). The black pessimism 
 of the poem puts Thomson in touch with Vigny and Leopardi, 
 and its sinister imagery can hardly be paralleled outside Poe. 
 There is something strange and sinister in the very technique 
 of the poem in the recurring double rhymes, in the stern 
 relentless beat of such a refrain as 
 
 Yet I strode on austere ; 
 No hope could have no fear, 
 
 anil in the long-drawn anguish of this other refrain, 
 
 I wake from day-dreams to this real night. 
 
 Thomson's two other long poems, Vane's Story (1864) and 
 Weddah and Om-el-Bonain (1868), though sad, do not show 
 the intensity of despair which characterizes his masterpiece. 
 He could write charmingly in lighter vein, as in Sunday up the 
 River, which contains such glorious lyrics as 4 The wine of love 
 is music ', and ' Give a man a horse he can ride '. He has left 
 some notable prose, partly critical, and partly imaginative. 
 His best prose work is A Lady of Sorrow (1862-4). 
 
 Many, unfortunately, have translated poetry who were not Fitz- 
 poets themselves ; but very few have earned the reputation Gerald, 
 of a great original poet on the strength of a single translation. 
 Yet this is the case with Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883). The 
 
340 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 close friend of Tennyson, Thackeray, and Carlyle, he published 
 in 1851 his beautiful prose dialogue Euphranor, and he subse- 
 quently translated six plays of Calderon, and some others of 
 Aeschylus and Sophocles. But his fame depends not on these, 
 but on his immortal rendering of the Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam 
 (1859). This translation, like most great translations, is very 
 far from being faithful to the letter of its original. It deals 
 freely with the quatrains (rubaiyat) of the old tentmaker, 
 often, as FitzGerald himself confesses, * mashing many of 
 them together,' and perhaps forfeiting some of their simplicity. 
 But as Persian scholars admit, the utterance of Omar is there, 
 though in a heightened form, and with modern additions. 
 The result has all the spontaneity and force of a great original 
 poem. FitzGerald's quatrain, with the curious refrain-like 
 effect of its unrhymed third line, shifts easily to the poem's 
 changing emotions of joy, aspiration, resignation, wistfulness, 
 and defiance. There is a haunting union throughout of the 
 carpe diem with the sunt lacrimae rerum. The imagery is 
 strange and exquisite, and, as may be seen by comparing the 
 poem's successive drafts, it was in many cases evolved gradu- 
 ally by FitzGerald himself. On the strength of this one poem 
 he stands a very little way below the greatest poets of his age. 
 Mrs. Mrs. Browning (Elizabeth Moulton Barrett; 1806-1861) 
 
 Browning, wrote both verse and prose at an early age ; but even her 
 second volume, The Seraphim, published when she was thirty, 
 two, shows but little sign of genius. She married Kobert 
 Browning in 1846, and her intermediate and later poems show 
 occasional and not always favourable signs of his influence. 
 In 1851 she published Casa Guidi Windows, a poem urging 
 Italy to regain her freedom ; and this was followed by a series 
 of other poems, in most cases of inferior value, on the same 
 theme. In 1850 she had published her greatest work, Sonnets 
 from the Portuguese. In 1862 appeared her Last Poems. 
 
 There is much of Mrs. Browning's poetry which it is impos- 
 sible to read with pleasure. She is habitually diffuse; she 
 constantly surfeits the reader with a syrupy and cloying 
 emotionalism ; her technique is wanton ; she rhymes ' hoof ' 
 with ' off ', ' ruin ' with ' pursuing ', ' doubted ' with * without 
 it ', and ' strangles ' with ' angels ' : and her handling of the 
 free metres which she affected was frequently clumsy. But 
 throughout all her work there are strokes of high genius of 
 poetry touched with passion, and flaming out in images of 
 strange beauty, These are fairly frequent in her longest poem, 
 Aurora Leigh, in which, for all its faults, the love story between 
 Aurora and her cousin is by no means ill managed. But 
 Mrs. Browning does better work in the ballad or short romance, 
 which after different fashions tend to restrain her character- 
 istic ' lushness ' of utterance. The Sonnets from the Portuguese 
 are an almost unique expression of a woman's love. There is 
 a fine romanticism in The Romaunt of Margret, The Romaunt 
 of the Page, and other poems in the same kind, though the old 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 341 
 
 diffuseness appears in The Rhyme of the Duchess May. Among 
 her most beautiful poems must be counted A Child's Grave at 
 Florence, The Great God Pan, and Cowper's Grave, all of which 
 are instinct with true pathos, and with her passionate love 
 of humanity. 
 
 Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), after some prentice-work and Matthew 
 prize-winning at Rugby and Oxford, published in 1849 his first Arnold, 
 volume of poems, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems. In 
 1852 appeared Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems ; in 1853, 
 Poems, including Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy ; 
 in 1855, Balder Dead and Separation ; in 1858, Merope ; in 
 1866, Thy r sis, and in 1867, his last volume, New Poems. The 
 nature of his poetry makes it possible to treat it as a whole, 
 instead of tracing its various stages, as has been done in certain 
 other cases in this volume. The fascination which it possesses 
 for all poetically sensitive mmds lies in its combination of 
 modern feeling with the most delicate and classical quality of 
 expression. Many of Arnold's poems, and especially of his 
 earlier ones, are purely narrative and descriptive ; the best 
 have the white and tempered glow of Greek poetry. To this 
 class belong the beautiful Forsaken Merman, and the lightly 
 wrought and pathetic Tristram and Iseult. Sohrab and Rustum 
 is a heroic tale of the East, perfectly told in majestic blank 
 verse laden with Homeric similes. Balder Dead follows a Scan- 
 dinavian legend, but is developed by Arnold after the Greek 
 epic manner. Noteworthy in their kinds ate The Neckan and 
 The Church ofBrou. In Arnold's coldly correct Greek tragedy 
 Merope, the choruses display, rather distressingly, the pitfalls 
 ever in the path of English unrhymed lyric. In all of these 
 poems pathos is more evident than passion, and light than 
 fire ; some of Arnold's characteristic qualities and short- 
 comings become disengaged if we compare Tristram and 
 Iseult with Swinburne's Tristram of Lyonesse. But in his best 
 work of this class there is a sureness of formal handling, and 
 a pulse of beauty which compensate for an occasional weakness 
 or vagueness of emotional quality. 
 
 In another class of poem, notably in Obermann, Obermann 
 Once More, and Lines Written in Kensington Gardens, Arnold 
 faces the problem of existence, and declares the faith, or as in 
 some moods, the lack of faith, that is in him. Reading them, 
 we feel that his outlook on existence was as determinedly 
 ethical as Rossetti's was determinedly non-ethical. Like 
 Tennyson, he was profoundly interested in the spiritual 
 problems of his day, but his attitude towards life and the 
 hereafter is more wistful and dubious even than Tennyson's 
 own. It takes form sometimes in the brooding and self-pity 
 of Switzerland and Despondency, sometimes in the stoicism of 
 Resignation. Arnold is at once the incarnation of the modern 
 spirit and its most unsparing critic. His outlook on life is 
 pessimistic, but his pessimism is alleviated by his keen joy in 
 all beauty, and especially in Nature's beauty ; and by the 
 
342 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 belief, or aspiration toward belief, which he experiences in his 
 more Wordsworthian moods, that Nature imparts to those 
 who love her a revelation of the universal spirit. Most typical 
 of his genius are such poems as The Scholar Gipsy and its 
 companion Thyrsis, an elegy upon Arthur Hugh Clough, which 
 contain all the finest qualities of his poetry despondency, 
 wistful aspiration, a keen sense of Nature's beauty, and 
 a quiet joy therein, a humanism blent of the Greek spirit 
 and the modern, and a classical might and delicacy of ex- 
 pression. His lyric power is perhaps best seen in the brief and 
 wonderful Eequiescat, in the Song of Collides from Empedocles 
 on Etna, and in such poems as A Southern Night and Dover 
 Beach, with its splendidly managed free rhyming verse. 
 Clough. Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861) represents the same spirit 
 of intellectual questioning and revolt which finds expression 
 in many poems of his friend Arnold ; but in his case inspiration 
 is deficient, and this lack is hardly compensated by the humour 
 of his best-known poem, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), 
 described by himself as a ' long vacation pastoral'. Here he 
 employs a form of hexameter which is both harsh and loose, and 
 compares unfavourably with the craftsmanlike anapaestic 
 hexameters used by Charles Kingsley in Andromeda. In his 
 shorter poems Clough seldom achieves so consummate an 
 image as the famous one embodied in the lines : 
 
 For while the tired waves vainly breaking, 
 
 Seem here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back, through creeks and inlets making, 
 
 Comes silent, flooding in, the main. 
 
 George The chief works in poetry of George Meredith (1828-1909) 
 
 Meredith, are Poems (1851), Modern Love and Other Poems (1862), Poems 
 and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883), Ballads and Poems of 
 Tragic Life (1887), A Reading of Earth (1888), The Empty 
 Purse and Other Poems (1892), Odes in Contribution to the Song 
 of French History (1898), and A Beading of Life, with Other 
 Poems (1901). The twofold nature of his verse has been well 
 indicated by his most discriminating critic, Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, 
 in the two chapter -headings which describe him as ' The Poet ' 
 and * The Singer of Strange Songs '. In the first capacity he 
 is the lyrist of Love in the Valley, Modern Love, Phoebus with 
 Admetus, Lucifer in Starlight, The Lark Ascending, and many 
 other poems for ever memorable by their beauty ; in the 
 second he is the seer who wrote The Empty Purse, and the Odes 
 to the Comic Spirit and The Spirit of Earth in Autumn poems 
 which are strange, rugged and sometimes contorted rather 
 than beautiful, and are first and foremost directed toward 
 setting forth his faith. 1 In many poems for instance, The 
 Thrush in February and Melampus the two qualities blend, 
 but Mr. Trevelyan's distinction is just and necessary. 
 
 1 For an account of this, see the account of Wordsworth given in an 
 earlier chapter. 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 
 
 343 
 
 Meredith's greatest and most popular poem is Love in the 
 Valley, of which Stevenson said that it ' haunted him and 
 made him drunk like wine '. Throughout its stanzas the lover 
 sees the beauty of his beloved reflected in the beauty of the 
 changing year. The poem's fervour of feeling and intense 
 beauty of expression make it one of the greatest English love- 
 lyrics and lyrics of Nature. His earlier poem, Modern Love, 
 written in sixteen-lined sonnets, achieves on the whole less 
 beauty, but is a powerful psychological study in the theme 
 indicated by its name. In the sensuousness and warmth of 
 colouring which inform such poems as Love in the Valley, 
 Meredith is sometimes very near to Keats. His masterly 
 technical skill e. g. the device by which in Love in the Valley 
 and Phoebus with Admetus he ends alternate lines with a strong- 
 double stress gives his best poems in this class a rare and 
 individual beauty. 
 
 Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) is perhaps most widely known 
 by the charming fantasy of her youth. Goblin Market ; but this 
 was followed by finer and more typical work. Both in form and 
 spirit her poetry differs widely from that of her brother, Dante 
 Gabriel. He had been strongly influenced by the romantic and 
 sensuous aspects of the revival which culminated in the 
 Oxford Movement, but he had disregarded its inspiring faith. 
 Christina Rossetti, on the contrary, avoided the sensuousness 
 and clave to the faith, expressing this in poetry whose simplicity 
 often kindles into a white flame of passion. Lionel Johnson 
 said of her best religious poems that they seem ' the national 
 hymns of heaven '. She has left a great mass of religious 
 poetry, and much of it is of this high order. Uphill, Passing 
 Away, and The Last Prayer are inspired by her characteristic 
 simplicity and intensity. She has written some perfect sonnets 
 and songs ; in the first kind may be noted Remember me when 
 1 am gone away, and Monna Innominate ; in the second, the 
 universally known My heart is like a singing bird, and When 
 I am dead, my dearest. 
 
 The Angel in the House (1854-60) of Coventry Patmore is 
 a domestic idyll : though it has on the whole been underrated 
 and misjudged, far finer work appears in Patmore's Odes (1868) 
 and The Unknown Eros (1877). He won the homage of 
 Francis Thompson and the scorn of Swinburne, who parodied 
 The Angel in the House savagely in The Heptalogia. Arthur 
 O'Shaughnessy (1844-1881) displays rare charm and delicacy 
 in the Epic on Women (1870), Music and Moonlight (1874), and 
 several other volumes. Robert Buchanan (1841-1901) wrote, 
 sometimes with power, of many subjects of Scotland in 
 Idylls and Legends oflnverburn (1865), of London in the London 
 Poems (1866), and of Celtic mysticism in The Boole of Orm 
 (1870). Lord Lytton (Owen Meredith 1831-1891) 'wrote 
 much verse, from his pre-Raphaelite drama Clytemnestra 
 (1855) onward to the posthumously published Marah (1892). 
 His work is largely imitative, and seldom achieves beauty of 
 
 Christina 
 Rossetti. 
 
344 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 the first order. Sir Edwin Arnold (1832-1904) is chiefly read 
 in his Light of Asia (1879), a fluent and thinly inspired epic 
 of Buddhism, and in the less notable Light of the World (1891). 
 
 There is still greater fluency in the work of Lewis Morris 
 (1833-1907) The Epic of Hades (1876-7), Gycia (1886) and 
 other volumes but with him inspiration is not even thin ; 
 it is non-existent. William Cory (or Johnson ; 1823-1892) 
 was an Eton master whose two volumes, successively issued 
 in 1858 and 1877 under the title lonica, contain many poems 
 of classical delicacy and strength. Perhaps his best-known 
 thing is his beautiful adaptation of a Greek epigram by Calli- 
 machus ; hardly inferior in quality are Mimnermus in Church 
 and An Invocation. 
 
 The tradition of Praed was carried on in the vers de societe 
 of Frederick Locker-Lampson (1821-1895 ; London Lyrics, 
 1857). Charles Stuart Calverley (1831-1884) and James 
 Kenneth Stephen (1859-1892) excel in parody and occasional 
 verse ; the former's Cock and Bull Story is one of the best 
 parodies ever written. The most popular work of Thomas 
 Edward Brown (1830-1897) is probably his vivid Fo'c's'le 
 Yarns ( 1881 ), written in the Manx dialect ; but far finer poetry 
 is to be found in his serious English verse, notably in Aber 
 Stations, a poignantly beautiful lament for his dead son, and 
 the Epistula ad Dakyns, rendered intense and exquisite by the 
 poet's passionate faith in Nature. 
 
 The pupil of Brown, and the friend and over-frank critic of 
 Stevenson, W. E. Henley (1849-1903) lives in English poetry 
 chiefly through his Boole of Verses (1888) and Hawthorn and 
 Lavender (1899). He had a genius for the short lyric, and 
 many of his love poems, e. g. Come where my lady lies, and 
 Dearest, when I am dead, are perfect in their kind. His rugged 
 and defiant paganism found expression in the universally 
 known Out of the night that covers me. His Hospital Verses 
 record with vividness and humour the days of illness at 
 Edinburgh, when he was visited by Stevenson and Baxter. 
 In A late lark twitters from the quiet skies he has left a superb 
 specimen of the English unrhymed lyric. Every line of his 
 verse bears the impress of his vehement and original personality. 
 
 The spontaneous sweetness and grace of Henley's poetry are 
 English to the core ; a lower and more exotic perfection is to 
 be found in much of the verse of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) 
 most notably in certain of his sonnets, and in such longer poems 
 as Panthea and The Sphinx. An intenser note rings in his splen- 
 did apostrophe to England, Are Imperatrix (1881), and in his 
 poignant Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). Wilde is most widely 
 known by his artificially brilliant dramas, Lady Windermere's 
 Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1894), and The Im- 
 portance of Being Earnest (1899), but his real strength was not 
 reached either in drama or, apart from the two poems last men- 
 tioned, in verse, but in the highly wrought prose of Intentions 
 ( 1891 ), his greatest volume, where his passionate love of beauty 
 
VICTORIAN POETRY 345 
 
 glows beneath its flaunting veil of paradox and banter. The 
 tragic note of The Ballad of Reading Gaol rings through his 
 fine piece of confessional prose, De Profundis (1905). 
 
 Among the most notable women poets of this period are 
 Jean Ingelow (1820-1897), whose High Tide on the Coast of 
 Lincolnshire possesses a power reflected in a few of her other 
 poems ; and Augusta Webster (1837-1894), whose best work, 
 poetic and dramatic, occurs in her Dramatic Studies (1866), 
 Portraits (1870), and The Sentence (1887). 
 
 Francis Thompson (1859-1907) had probably more inspira- Francis 
 tion than any poet of his generation, and many would class Thomp- 
 him among the greatest English lyric poets. His earlier son. 
 volumes x contain some perfect poems in praise of children ; 
 and here he shows already that love of rich words and far- 
 sought images which runs through all his work. Thus he 
 writes in the second of the Sister Songs : 
 
 In all I work, my hand includeth thine ; 
 
 Thou rushest down in every stream 
 
 Whose passion frets my spirit's deepening gorge, 
 
 Unhoodst mine eyas-heart, and fliest my dream; 
 
 Thou swing'st the hammers of my forge ; 
 
 As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, 
 
 Moves all the labouring surges of the world. 
 
 A simpler and more Blake-like touch appears in Little Jesus. 
 There is a different and Wordsworthian simplicity in The 
 Daisy, and an Elizabethan ring in the beautiful Carrier Sona, 
 modelled on Dray ton's Shepherd's Sirena. But in Thompson s 
 best-known poem, The Hound of Heaven, and in all the work 
 that is most truly his own, he freights his verse with rich 
 beauty, and sets it to drive beneath strange gales of the spirit. 
 The deep sensuousness of his religious poetry, and his love of 
 strange ' conceits ', puts him in touch with Crashaw, to whose 
 poetry he had always been strongly drawn. The following is 
 a typical image from The Hound of Heaven : 
 
 I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds ; 
 
 Yet ever and anon a trumpet sounds 
 
 From the hid battlements of Eternity ; 
 
 Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then 
 
 Round the half -glimpsed turrets slowly wash again. 
 
 His Ode to the Setting Sun and A Corymbus for Autumn have 
 the same rich music. A lighter and not less exquisite strain is 
 sometimes audible in his poetry for instance, in the con- 
 cluding lines of July Fugitive. His work suffers from a dis- 
 ability common to all poetry written in the ornate style ; 
 when inspiration has passed out of it it becomes not merely 
 disappointing, as does simpler poetry under similar conditions, 
 but exasperating. 
 
 1 Poems (1893), Sister Sotiga (1895), Xetv Poems (1897). 
 
346 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 John The life of John Davidson 1 (1857-1909) was a long fight 
 
 Davidson. a g a i ns t hardship and neglect, a fight in which he exulted, 
 though it was to bring him to a tragic death. That suffering 
 and exultation begot some of his finest poetry, notably his 
 Ballad of the Making of a Poet and certain of his Fleet Street 
 Eclogues. His powerful and sinister imagination is at its 
 height in his Ballad of a Nun, and in certain of his shorter 
 lyrics and ballads, as well as in his insufficiently appreciated 
 poetic dramas. The conditions of his life made it necessary 
 for him to write fast and much ; and a good deal of his verse 
 has suffered accordingly. In his striking essay On Poetry he 
 exalts blank verse at the expense of rhyme. 
 
 Rupert Rupert Brooke, one of the most bitterly lamented victims 
 
 Brooke, of the Great War, left two volumes, Poems and 1914 and Other 
 Poems, which suggest that had he lived he might have risen 
 to almost any height of greatness. As it is, he has left some 
 work of final beauty, amongst which may rank the Sonnets 
 especially the six war sonnets of his later volume. Grant- 
 Chester is an idyll compact of whimsicality and beauty, and 
 equally whimsical and beautiful are The Great Lover and 
 Heaven. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS 
 
 Chief characteristics Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude Other historians 
 Newman, Mill Scientific writers Lockhart and other biographers 
 Criticism : Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Ruskin, Bagehot, Pater, 
 Symonds, Henley, Stephen, Lang Borrow, Kinglake, Burton, and 
 others. 
 
 APART from the novel, the most interesting and important 
 prose form of the period, from our present point of view, is 
 literary criticism ; and here, as has been already shown, there 
 was remarkable development, both in form and outlook. 
 But the Victorian age was subtle and various, and. its literature 
 includes many writers whose aim was not primarily literary. 
 Macaulay. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) is important both 
 as literary critic and historian. He had begun to send articles 
 to the Edinburgh Review shortly after leaving Cambridge ; his 
 first contribution had been his well-known essay on Milton. 
 After spending five years in India, he returned to England in 
 1838, and collected and published in 1843 the essays which had 
 already appeared under his name. The first two volumes of his 
 History of England appeared in 1848, the second two in 1855. 
 In addition to this work he has left several speeches and 
 
 1 Fleet Street Eclogues (1893-6), Ballads and Songs (1894), The Last 
 Ballad and Other Poems (1899), Selfs the Man (1901), God and 
 (1U07-8), &c., &c. 
 
VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS 347 
 
 several articles originally contributed to the Encyclopaedia 
 Britannica. His essays are historical, biographical, and also 
 critical and philosophical, in so far as he can be said to have 
 understood criticism and philosophy. His chief merit as an 
 essayist is his remarkable vigour and vividness, his power of 
 painting scenes and men and happenings in bold lines and 
 glittering colours, and of presenting a picture which if not life, 
 still less something better than life, was at least a taking 
 substitute for life. Macaulay had a mighty memory and a not 
 less mighty power of marshalling detail. This last mastery is 
 conspicuous in his essays on Warren Hastings and Frederick 
 the Great. He wrote with gusto of what he could understand, 
 and he understood much ; but he did not understand the 
 highest things in poetry, philosophy or life. His canons were 
 ultimately materialistic, and mysticism in all its forms was 
 beyond his ken. A further defect is the combination of pre- 
 judice and inaccuracy which vitiates both his historical and 
 his critical writings. His essay on Warren Hastings contains 
 grotesque mistakes, and his estimate of Boswell is a grotesque 
 misjudgment. His Whiggery is everywhere, and it is not the 
 transfigured Whiggery of Burke. His hard and glossy style 
 has been indicted by Matthew Arnold, and the indictment 
 has not been quashed by Macaulay's modern apologists. His 
 genius ultimately depends on his matchless vitality, on that 
 insatiable curiosity which is the first virtue of both critic and 
 historian, and on his power of making his readers curious and 
 interested in their turn. 
 
 Macaulay's affinities are primarily with Jeffrey and the 
 early Edinburgh, and ultimately with the eighteenth century. 
 Thomas Carry le (1795-1881) represents a different order and Carlyle. 
 the working of mightier forces. His early work was written 
 in Edinburgh, and consists chiefly of his Life of Schiller (1823) 
 and many of the essays subsequently collected under the title 
 of Miscellanies. The Life is an early evidence of that love of 
 German poetry and philosophy which reappears in his praise 
 of Novalis, Richter and Goethe, persists throughout his 
 writings till the end, and merges with his own creative inspira- 
 tion. All his work of this period is written in an admirably 
 clear and correct, but also a perfectly conventional style. 
 It was not till the years which he spent with his wife on the 
 famous farm of Craigenputtock that he evolved the utterance 
 which is truly his own. This appears for the first time in 
 Sartor Eesartus (1833-4), a philosophical and autobiographical 
 work like nothing else in the language, which represents in the 
 person of its ' hero ', Teufelsdrockh, Carlyle's own spiritual 
 striving and victory, his ethical and metaphysical, or mystical, 
 beliefs, and certain facts of his early life. In this book, and in 
 his second long work, The French 'Revolution (1837), his style 
 has developed those intensely personal characteristics of 
 rnggedness and force which it henceforth retains till the last. 
 The French Eevolution is of matchless descriptive power, and 
 
348 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 embodies, especially in the character of Mirabeau, Carlyle's 
 belief that history is summed in the lives of its great men. 
 Its form also illustrates his detestation of dry -as -dust compila- 
 tion, and his conviction that history, truly understood, is an 
 art depending on a careful selection of facts and a vivid human 
 interpretation of them. The French Revolution is as truly 
 a classic as The Decline and Fall, and its errors, though not 
 few, are superficial and easily rectifiable. 
 
 In 1841 appeared Heroes and Hero-Worship, in 1843 Past 
 and Present, and in 1845 The Letters and Speeches of Oliver 
 Cromwell. Carlyle's hero-worship is offered as whole-heartedly 
 to the mediaeval monk who is the chief character of Past and 
 Present, and to Cromwell, as it is to Johnson, Goethe, Mahomet, 
 and the other Heroes of the first volume. In Past and Present 
 he develops once more, with an eloquence now passionate, now 
 humorous, but always vehement and intensely personal, his 
 belief that the world is merely a symbol of the unseen, yet that 
 only in it and its daily tasks can man find his life's realization, 
 which depends, not on happiness, but on toil and endurance 
 and faith. His Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) contain some 
 masterly political satire. That great and beautiful biography, 
 the Life of Sterling, appeared in 1851. His huge History of 
 Frederick the Great (1858-65) embodies once more his hero- 
 worship and admiration of the strong man at handgrips with 
 danger and difficulty. His choice of a hero was in this instance 
 unfortunate, and his admiration of Frederick is uncritical to 
 a degree. Yet his tremendous capacity for research is evident 
 both in his main narrative and in the summary of early 
 German history which precedes it ; and the accounts of 
 Frederick's battles and the other stirring events of his career 
 are narrated with enthralling vividness and power. 
 
 His quali- Many of Carlyle's essential tenets have been indicated in 
 ties of the foregoing summary. To these may be added his passion 
 genius. for truth, and that hatred of shams and inefficiency which he 
 has embodied in his statement of the ' clothes philosophy ' ; 
 his fervent belief that life was not mechanical in its operation, 
 but was the garment of God, the expression of a divine idea 
 which ' means intensely and means good ' ; and his dislike of 
 social injustice, and conviction that it could be abolished, not 
 by the levelling of all wills, but by the elevation of the greatest 
 and the best. These convictions are the driving force of his 
 whole life. Yet Carlyle was not only a thinker and a preacher ; 
 he was a poet, lacking indeed a poet's knack of verse, but 
 possessing the full poetic utterance and vision. Swinburne, 
 moreover, who disliked him for many things, has described 
 him as ' the most potent humorist of the century '. With him, 
 as with Meredith, the humorous perception and the poetic are 
 never far apart, and the two together enable him to see deep 
 into the heart of things. 
 
 His- Certain historians may here be briefly mentioned. The chief 
 
 torians. work of Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862) is his History of 
 
VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS 349 
 
 Civilization, written clearly and forcibly, though never with 
 inspiration. William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838-1903) is 
 notable for his History of Rationalism, his History of England 
 in the Eighteenth Century (1878-90), and his still greater 
 History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne 
 
 (1869). Chief among the extensive writings of John Robert 
 Seeley (1834-1895) are Ecce Homo (1866) with its moving 
 presentation of Christ, and The Expansion of England (1883), 
 a book dealing in masterly fashion with certain chapters of 
 British colonization. Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-1892) 
 was a historian of great learning, some accuracy, and an un- 
 inspired style, whose chief work is The History of the Norman 
 Conquest ( 1867-79). 
 
 More to our present purpose, as possessing greater literary 
 gifts, are John Richard Green (1837-1883), whose Short History 
 of the English People (1874) is still very widely read, and 
 possesses great charm ; and James Anthony Froude (1818- Froude 
 1894), who was a great man of letters as well as a great his- 
 torian. His most widely read work is probably his Short 
 Studies on Great Subjects (four series, 1867-83), reprinted from 
 Fraser's Magazine. The themes of the essays are historical, 
 and they are written in an admirably clear and eloquent style, 
 with much of the vigour and gusto of their author's friend and 
 master, Carlyle. An earlier work of Froude's, his History of 
 England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish 
 Armada (1856-70), displays his keen Protestantism, and his 
 not less keen sense of his country's greatness. Oceana (1886) 
 describes his travels in Australia and other parts of the Em- 
 pire, and enables him to express his eager Imperialism. His 
 Thomas Carlyle (1882-4) is masterly written, but Froude is often 
 mistaken, and sometimes over-candid, regarding the facts of 
 Carlyle's life. His great fault, as a historian, is his reckless 
 inaccuracy. His great merit is his vivid power of recreating 
 the historical past in winged and vivid prose. 
 
 Theology does not concern us here, except in so far as it 
 touches literature ; and it does this all too seldom throughout 
 the nineteenth century. But in the work of John Henry Newman. 
 Newman (1801-1890) it certainly does so consummately. It is 
 not within our present province to discuss the main thesis of 
 his greatest work, the Apologia (1864). Although this was 
 written nearly twenty years after Newman had joined the 
 Church of Rome, it is still the supreme expression in literature 
 of the ' Oxford Movement '. Those who derive little comfort 
 or light from its general teaching may nevertheless exult in 
 the limpid, yet often passionate beauty of its prose, which 
 shifts and shapes itself freely to every movement of its author's 
 thought and feeling. Prose of similar strength and delicacy 
 is to be found throughout the rest of Newman's writings most 
 notably, perhaps, in his finely conceived Idea of a University. 
 
 Henry Longueville Mansel (1820-1871), Dean of St. Paul's, 
 applied to theology the teachings of his distinguished master, 
 
350 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 John 
 
 Stuart 
 
 Mill. 
 
 Spencer 
 
 and 
 
 others. 
 
 Scientific 
 Writers. 
 
 Sir William Hamilton. His chief work is The Limits of 
 Religious Thought (1859), which on its appearance aroused 
 much hostile comment, owing to its suggestion that the 
 morality of the Deity might be at conflict with the morality 
 of man. 
 
 Among the philosophers of the period the earliest great 
 name is that of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). His chief 
 philosophic works are his System of Logic (1843), Principles 
 of Political Economy ( 1 848 ), and Utilitarianism (1863). Neither 
 his psychology nor his metaphysics are in accordance with 
 the highest philosophic thought of the present day it is 
 indeed doubtful whether he had any metaphysics worth con- 
 sideration but his exposition of logical method is stimulating 
 and original. Mill's System is read wherever logic is taught, 
 largely, it must be admitted, because its conclusions, by their 
 inadequacy, suggest the need of some more comprehensive 
 and transcendental system. Both the Logic and the treatise 
 on Utilitarianism are written in a clear and adequate style, 
 free of affectation and of the perplexing technical terminology 
 common in philosophical treatises. The latter work is a brief 
 and lucid statement of the principles of the ethical, or semi- 
 ethical, system which had been transmitted to Mill through 
 his father, James Mill, from Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), 
 the founder of the modern English school of utilitarian 
 philosophy. 
 
 The writings of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) are both 
 scientific and philosophic in aim, and include his First Prin- 
 ciples (1862), Principles of Psychology (1870-2), Principles of 
 Sociology (1876-96), and Data of Ethics (1892-3). He made 
 the theory of evolution the starting-point for his Synthetic 
 Philosophy, and endeavoured to apply certain first principles, 
 evolved biologically, to the ethical and sociological interpreta- 
 tion of life. 
 
 The most widely read philosophic work of James Martineau 
 (1805-1900) is his Types of Ethical Theory (1885). His own 
 theory of ethics was strongly religious and anti-materialistic. 
 Two greater names are those of Thomas Hill Green (1836- 
 1882) and Edward Caird (1835-1908), both of whom did 
 much toward deepening the tone of English philosophic 
 thought by bringing it into touch with 'the higher transcen- 
 dental philosophy. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883) 
 stated the obligation of social service with a force and pro- 
 fundity which have had a marked, if indirect, effect on 
 English national life. 
 
 Science enters even less than philosophy into the scope of 
 the present volume, and it is here only possible to mention the 
 following writers as having influenced profoundly not only 
 the scientific thought, but the general outlook, of their age : 
 Charles Lyell (1797-1875), Principles of Geology (1830-3); 
 Hugh Miller (1802-1856), Old Red Sandstone (1840) ; Kobert 
 Chambers (1802-1871), Vestiges of the Natural History of 
 
VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS 351 
 
 Creation (1844) ; and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), The Origin 
 of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). The effect 
 upon English poetry of the theory of evolution developed by 
 these writers and by Alfred Kussel Wallace, has already been 
 indicated. Still more important than these, from our present 
 point of view, is Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895). A pug- 
 nacious and powerfully equipped champion of Darwinism, he 
 applied its teachings to mankind in Man's Place in Nature 
 (1863), with a vigour and ease of expression which give him 
 high place as a man of letters. Huxley, moreover, had 
 a strong ethical and metaphysical side to his nature, as may 
 be seen from his Lay Sermons (1870) and his Collected Essays. 
 His conception of cosmic nature as a force to be combated by 
 ethical man is akin to the interpretation of her which appears 
 in Tennyson's In Memoriam and in much other Victorian 
 poetry. 
 
 The greatest biography of the last century and a half is 
 the Life of Scott by John Gibson Lockhart, whose connexion 
 with Blackwood's and the Quarterly has been already noted. 
 Lockhart was the son-in-law of Scott, and had the advantage 
 of his intimate acquaintance ; yet such a privilege unfortu- 
 nately does not invariably result in good biography. But 
 Lockhart's Life is superb ; its style is vivid and free, yet 
 capable of the highest dignity and eloquence, as in the great 
 death-scene. Splendid tact and adroitness are shown in the 
 handling of detail. Scott's figure is treated with a reverence 
 which never degenerates into unreasoning hero-worship ; and 
 it lives with a vivid authenticity that cannot be paralleled 
 outside Boswell's Johnson. Lockhart has left some fine work 
 in other kinds, notably in his translation of Spanish Ballads 
 (1823) ; but the Life of Scott remains his masterpiece. 
 
 Of lesser yet sterling merit are The Life of Thomas Arnold 
 (1844) by Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-1881); the Lives 
 of Goldsmith (1848), Landor (1869), and Dickens (1872-4), by 
 John Forster (1812-1876); and the long and most erudite 
 Life of Milton (1858-80) by David Masson (1822-1907). 
 
 We have dealt elsewhere with the poetry of Matthew 
 Arnold (1822-1888) ; his prose consists mainly of the succes- 
 sive volumes in which he criticizes English literature, religion, 
 and life. His chief works in purely literary criticism were On 
 Translating Homer (1861), On the Study of Celtic Literature 
 (1867), Essays in Criticism, First and Second Series (1865 and 
 1881). He is one of England's greatest critics, and his writings 
 have had a profound effect upon her literary outlook ; yet 
 his judgments, both particular and general, were frequently 
 arbitrary and perverse. He considered Shelley's original 
 poetry to be on the whole ' less satisfactory than his transla- 
 tions ', and thought it likely that his essays and letters would 
 come to stand higher than his poems ; he exalted Byron 
 at the expense of Shelley and Coleridge ; he misunderstood 
 French poetry, and glorified unduly such writers of delicate 
 
 Lockhart 
 and other 
 bio- 
 graphers. 
 
 Criticism 
 Mat- 
 thew 
 Arnold. 
 
352 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 French prose as Joubert and the two de Guerins. He loved 
 Wordsworth's poetry, but strove to reject what he called his 
 ' philosophy ' that is to say, the mysticism which is his 
 inspiration. He was apt to use his conception of * the grand 
 style ' as a sort of Procrustes' bed to the stature of which 
 all authors and especially the Romantics must be lopped 
 or stretched. He was frequently blinded by surface exaggera- 
 tion or violence to the presence of the real strength which often 
 accompanies these qualities. But as against all this, he remains 
 a very great critic owing to his high, clear sense of beauty, 
 and his constant insistence on standards which he deemed the 
 highest. The successor of the Romantic movement, he did 
 much toward pointing out its excesses and the dangers to 
 which it was exposed if unchastened by classicism. His 
 insistence on the ' disinterestedness ' of true criticism and on 
 the value of the comparative method, his belief that poetry 
 should rather be felt and understood in the concrete than 
 discussed and denned in the abstract, are wholly sane and 
 valuable. 
 
 In Culture and Anarchy (1869) he draws his famous distinc- 
 tion between * Hebraism ' and ' Hellenism ', declares the 
 England of his day to be rather Philistine than Hellene, and 
 insists on the value to her of ' culture ' with its accompanying 
 ' sweetness and light '. His superiority to the fierce struggle 
 of life, and his aloofness from the extremer forms of enthusiasm, 
 make him antipathetic to many ; but all may admire his eager 
 response to beauty as he understood it, his high sense of the 
 critic's calling, his graceful, and frequently exquisite, style, 
 and the delightful irony which lights up such a masterpiece as 
 his Friendship's Garland (1870). In Arnold the older German 
 influence, which had worked so strongly on English thought 
 through Coleridge and Carlyle, begins to wane and to be 
 replaced by the newer French spirit. Arnold had a deep 
 admiration for Goethe, but he also loved France, and pointed 
 England constantly to her example both in literature and life. 
 He thus differs from Coleridge and Hazlitt, both of whom had 
 expressed their scorn for French thought and art. 
 
 Swin- In the critical writings of Algernon Charles Swinburne we 
 
 burne. find the transition complete. Swinburne was practically 
 unaffected by the German genius, but he has probably done 
 more than any modern Englishman to make his countrymen 
 feel and understand the genius of French literature. Arnold, 
 as we have seen, failed to understand French poetry ; but 
 Swinburne understood it to the full, made others understand 
 it, and even wrote it himself with mastery. His finest tributes 
 to the poets of France were written in verse ; but he has 
 also written much prose in their praise and especially in praise 
 of his idol, Victor Hugo. His deep love and understanding of 
 English literature are evident throughout his volumes of critical 
 essays, Essays and Studies (1875), Miscellanies (1885) and 
 Studies in Prose and Poetry (1892) ; and they appear to the 
 
VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS 353 
 
 best advantage in his masterly essays on Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, Webster, and other Elizabethan dramatists. Some 
 of his finest English occurs in his early volume on William 
 Blake (1868). At his best Swinburne has a magnificent gift 
 of prose : he possesses passion, gusto, humour, and deadly 
 qualities of satire and invective. Beneath his rhapsodies 
 there often lies the keenest critical discrimination. His chief 
 critical virtues are his almost unerring sense of fine poetry, 
 and his lyric power of praising it aright. His main fault is 
 his exaggeration of praise and blame, and his lavish use of 
 superlatives. His prose has the same defect as his poetry : 
 owing to the expanded structure of its favourite period, it 
 becomes ugly and cumbersome, once inspiration has passed 
 out of it ; and unfortunately, in his later work, this happened 
 all too often. 
 
 John Ruskin (1819-1900). the son of a well-to-do wine Ruskin. 
 merchant, gained the Newdigate at Oxford with his poem, 
 Salsette and Elephanta (1839), and immediately after taking 
 his degree published the first volume (1843) of his Modern 
 Painters. This was primarily intended to vindicate the great- 
 ness of Turner as a painter against contemporary depreciation ; 
 but it contains much of Ruskin' s general teaching on the 
 relations between art and nature, expressed in some of his 
 finest prose. He published a second volume of Modern 
 Painters three years after the first, and in the preface to this 
 dealt trenchantly with adverse critics of Turner and himself. 
 In 1856 followed two more volumes of the same work ; the 
 fifth, and last, volume appeared in 1860. Modern Painters 
 ranges widely over the field of art, and since art was inseparable 
 in Ruskin's view from life's other main activities, there are 
 many digressions into these. 
 
 To this period also belong the short treatise on The Seven 
 Lamps of Architecture (1849) and the much longer Stones of 
 Venice (1851-3). In The Seven Lamps Ruskin's growing pre- 
 occupation with the ethical basis of art is strongly evident. 
 This work, as he himself subsequently wrote in The Crown of 
 Wild Olive, had for its main objects the glorification of Venetian 
 Gothic architecture as having ' arisen out of a state of pure 
 national faith and of domestic virtue ', and the depreciation of 
 Venetian Renaissance architecture as ' having arisen out of 
 a state of concealed national infidelity and of domestic corrup- 
 tion '. The relation of his next work, Unto This Last (1862), 
 to The Stones of Venice has been thus indicated by Ruskin in 
 Fors Clavigera : ' The Stones of Venice taught the laws of 
 constructive art, and the dependence of all human work or 
 edifice for its beauty on the happy life of the workman. Unto 
 this Last taught the laws of that life itself, and its dependence 
 on the Sun of Justice.' Unto this Last and Munera Pulveris 
 (1872) are chiefly devoted to showing the worthlessness of 
 any theory of political economy which has not a true ethical 
 basis. To this period belong the short treatises, Sesame and 
 
 N 
 
354 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Lilies (1865), The Ethics of the Dust, and The Crown of Wild 
 Olive (1866), and to these were added, during his tenure of 
 the Slade Professorship at Oxford, Aratra Pentelici (1872), 
 and several other volumes. These deal with many forms of 
 art from Egyptian antiquities to Tuscan painting and engrav- 
 ing on wood and metal. There are further discussions on 
 economics, and in the ten lectures entitled The Eagle's Nest 
 (1872) Ruskin treats of the relations between science and 
 art. Meanwhile, in January 1871, he had begun the series of 
 monthly letters afterwards published as Fors Clavigera. This 
 huge, wild miscellany touches on almost every subject he had 
 previously handled : it also tells us much about his life, and 
 is the fullest and most explicit confession of his faith. It 
 contains much harsh criticism of contemporary England and 
 her ways, and elaborate schemes for her social reconstruction. 
 Fors Clavigera has many affinities with Past and Present : 
 with less intensity and gusto, it has greater variety of mood 
 and theme. If it is not Ruskin's greatest work, it is certainly 
 his most comprehensive. It has been called by Mr. Frederic 
 Harrison its author's Hamlet, and also his Apocalypse, 
 
 Ruskin' s economics have been as severely criticized as his 
 aesthetics. Much of his thinking is marred by perversity 
 and prejudice and by a tendency not only to preach but to 
 scold. These Dualities are curiously at variance with the 
 perfection of his best English. The first volume of Modern 
 Painters had at once stamped him as a master of periodic 
 prose. The main virtues of his early descriptive writing are its 
 variety and rhythm, and the long exquisite sweep of its periods. 
 Combined with this, there is a simplicity and chastity of 
 language, and a careful avoidance of those verbal perversities 
 which many modern writers sedulously cultivate. The style 
 of Fors Clavigera is as spontaneous as that of any of his 
 earlier works, but here, as throughout his later writings, his 
 periods are relatively short, and there is little fine writing for 
 fine writing's sake. 
 
 Bagehot. Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), a banker by profession, wrote 
 largely on economic and constitutional subjects ; his chief 
 books in these kinds were The English Constitution, Lombard 
 Street (1873), and the very remarkable Physics and Politics 
 (1869). Of more interest from our present point of view are 
 the essays in literary criticism which he from time to time 
 contributed to the National Review and other periodicals. 
 Particularly brilliant are his estimates of Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Dickens, and Wordsworth. Whatever be his subject, his style 
 is admirably clear and easy, and is diversified with witty 
 aphorisms. It has been said with truth that he cared more 
 for the humanities of literature than for its formal graces. 
 His mind was brilliant rather than profound, but his quick 
 flashlight has lit up many obscure places of thought. 
 
 Pater. Walter Pater (1839-1894) is notable for his exquisite sense 
 
 of beauty in literature and life. While a Fellow of Brasenose, 
 
VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS 355 
 
 Oxford, he published his Studies in the History of the Renais- 
 sance (1873), which volume, together with his lectures and 
 conversation, had a profound influence on such younger men 
 as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons. Its description of 
 Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is his most celebrated single 
 piece of prose ; but his greatest sustained work is Marius the 
 Epicurean (1885), which presents in highly -wrought English 
 a picture of life at Rome under the Antonines, and also, like 
 the studies of Florian Deleal and Emerald Uthwart in his 
 posthumously published Miscellaneous Studies, draws a pro- 
 foundly subtle portrait of its author's youthful soul. His chief 
 remaining works are his Imaginary Portraits (1887), Apprecia- 
 tions (1889), Greek Studies (1895), and the unfinished Gaston 
 de Latour (1896). Graston is a French Marius of the sixteenth 
 century, * a clerk in orders ', contemporary with Ronsard and 
 Montaigne, and enthusiastic for the new learning. Pater, 
 epicurean as he was in his fine savouring of life, showed all the 
 asceticism of a great artist in his toil at the creation of beauty, 
 His style is not, as has been sometimes claimed, ornate ; but 
 its simplicity is exotic. It is not a style-of-all-work, and fails 
 when set, as it sometimes was, to perform ' the daily round, 
 the common task ' . It is at its best in flights of pure description 
 and imagination ; for instance in the perfect translation in 
 Marius of Apuleius' tale of Cupid and Psyche. 
 
 Less great as a stylist, but equally sensitive to beauty in Symonds. 
 all its forms, was John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), 
 whose greatest work, The Renaissance in Italy, deals with its 
 subject almost entirely from an aesthetic standpoint. There 
 is much fine criticism and fine writing in this work, and in 
 In the Key of Blue, and his remaining volumes ; but on the 
 whole his self-criticism remains true : ' I have not the inevit- 
 able touch of the true poet, the unconquerable patience of the 
 conscious artist.' 
 
 The literary criticism of W. E. Henley (1849-1903) has of Henley, 
 late been disparaged as prejudiced and impressionistic ; biit 
 prejudice may be the exaggeration of strength no less than of 
 weakness, an4 the impressions of genius are no mean things. 
 There are, moreover, ' nine-and-sixty ways of constructing 
 tribal' reviews. In Henley's Views and Reviews (1890-1901), and 
 in his longer essays on Burns, Fielding, Smollett, and others, 
 there is genius in abundance. Many hold him in affection for 
 the grace and vigour of his style. He not only wrote well 
 himself, but was the cause of good writing in many younger 
 men. In a day when prose, whether journalistic or academic, 
 is apt to be dull and mediocre, we may be grateful for one who 
 writes, as Cyrano fought, with a flourish of the ' panache'. 
 
 One of the most honoured figures of the last generation was Leslie 
 Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), whose work a,s editor of the Stephen. 
 Dictionary of National Biography is of high national value. 
 Stephen's leading philosophic work is his English Utilitarians 
 (1900), but he is at his best in the realm where biography and 
 
356 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 literary criticism meet, as in his Hours in a Library (1874-9), 
 his Studies of a Biographer (1898), and the admirable mono- 
 graphs on Johnson, Pope, Swift, and George Eliot, which he 
 contributed to the English Men of Letters series. His sympathies 
 were largely with the eighteenth century, and he began that 
 work of rehabilitating Johnson, which has been so sympathe- 
 tically carried on by men like Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. John 
 Bailey. Stephen's style is clear and strong, and sometimes 
 admirably racy. 
 
 Lang, Andrew Lang (1844-1912) in his early manhood wrote much 
 
 charming poetry, which is preserved in a succession of volumes 
 including Ballades in Blue China, Rhymes a la Mode, and Grass 
 of Parnassus. There is the same charm, together with fine 
 critical insight, in his best prose essays. In later life he handled 
 most of the known varieties of literature, from history to 
 leader-writing. It has been said of him that he ' sometimes 
 writes like Genesis, and sometimes in the Daily News'. To 
 many of his admirers it seems a pity that he gave up to ghosts 
 what was meant for mankind : they would have preferred 
 less spiritualistic research and more poetry. His style toward 
 the end suffered greatly through over-use. 
 
 Borrow. A few of the great books of the period deal with travel. 
 George Borrow (1803-1881) is chiefly memorable through three 
 volumes, The Bible in Spain (1843), Lavengro (1851), and The 
 Romany Eye (1857). The last two record many episodes of 
 his early wanderings in England, and abound in strange scenes 
 and characters, described in curiously fascinating prose. No 
 reader of these books will ever forget the gipsies lovable 
 Petulengro, odious Mrs. Herne, Tawno Chikno the beautiful ; 
 nor the fair girl boxer, Isopel Berners ; nor the great fight in 
 Mumpers's Dingle between Lavengro and the Flaming Tinman ; 
 nor the wanderer's musings upon life, and the wind on the 
 heath ; nor the man who touched against the evil chance ; 
 nor him who had sinned against the Holy Ghost. The Bible in 
 Spain, that very unconventional record of his travels on behalf 
 of the British Bible Society, has the same strange charm and 
 even greater colour. The unusual and the uncanny, always 
 dear to Borrow, are here evident in his portrayal of Benedict Mol. 
 His account of his journey to Finisterre is masterly. Borrow 
 has inspired so special and eager a zest among his readers 
 that one would call him the subject of a cult, did not the cult 
 include all who care in the least for genius and good writing. 
 
 Kinglake. Alexander William Kinglake (1809-1891) is famous through 
 his brilliantly written volume of Eastern travel, Eothen 
 (1844), and his vivid but biased and unduly long Invasion of 
 the Crimea (1863-87). Kinglake's style has been severely, 
 probably too severely, dealt with by Matthew Arnold. If it is 
 flashy and 'brassy', it is also vivid and picturesque, and its 
 merits are especially evident in the battle-pieces which are the 
 best part of the Invasion. 
 Tbat headstrong and original genius, Sir Richard Burton 
 
VICTORIAN PROSE : MISCELLANEOUS 357 
 
 (1821-1890), has left a great book of adventure and travel in Burton 
 his Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Meccah ( 1856-6). His version and 
 of The Arabian Nights (1885-8), with its strange and racy others, 
 vocabulary, the swing and joy of its rhythm, and its erudite 
 and startling notes, must be reckoned among the great trans- 
 lations. An equally wild genius was Laurence Oliphant (1829- 
 1888), who has left several books of travel (for example, 
 Episodes in a Life of Adventure, 1887), and a brilliant novel of 
 social satire, Piccadilly (1870). Much of Oliphant's adventure 
 had lain in Japan : it was left to Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) 
 to settle there and to record the impressions of his life in 
 several volumes of sensitive and charming prose (Glimpses of 
 Unfamiliar Japan, 1894; Kokoro, 1896, &c., &c.). Richard 
 Jefferies (1848-1887) was a wanderer, but in the fields of 
 England : a keen observer of nature, and a man of great 
 imaginative feeling, he is chiefly read in his Wild Life in 
 a Southern County (1879), The Amateur Poacher (1879), and 
 kindred works. 
 
 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the ' Lewis 
 Looking-Glass (1871) give 'Lewis Carroll' (Charles Lutwidge Carroll.' 
 Dodgson, 1832-1898) a place assured and apart in our literature. 
 He limned his elfin world with conviction, and wrote nonsense 
 with inspiration. Few modern authors are better known and 
 better loved. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 
 
 Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes, George Eliot, Charles and Henry 
 Kingsley, Wilkie Collins, George Meredith, Stevenson, Butler, Gissing 
 and others Conclusion. 
 
 WE have already noticed the main characteristics of the Dickens. 
 Victorian novel, and in this relation have touched on the novels 
 of Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Very few critics would now 
 be found to deny that he was among England's, and indeed 
 the world's, great masters of fiction ; but opinions still vary 
 considerably as to the exact grounds of his greatness. Though 
 his first notable production, Pickwick Papers (1836), is not his 
 most pretentious work, it is probably his greatest, just as Don 
 Juan is the greatest, though not the most pretentious, work 
 of Byron. For one thing Dickens was here, in large measure, 
 relieved from the necessity of employing pathos, a quality on 
 which his touch was never sure. Secondly, the book, like 
 Gogol's Dead Souls, with which it has much in common, 1 
 proceeds after a loose and bustling fashion which takes little 
 account of plot, and is well suited to its author's free inspiration. 
 
 1 Compare, for instance, the character and relationships of Mr. Jingle 
 and Job Trotter with those of Tchitchikofi and Petrushka. 
 
358 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Mr. Pickwick and his comrades are immortal, and so is Sam 
 Weller, a being compact of ' humours ', yet never becoming 
 a mere abstraction, after the tendency of some of Dickens's 
 later grotesques. Pickwick Papers brought Dickens immediate 
 fame, and launched him upon the activity of the next twenty 
 years, which produced the larger part of his greatest work : 
 Oliver Twist (1838), Nicholas Nickleby (1839), The Old Curiosity 
 Shop (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), Dombey and Son (1848), 
 and David Copperfield (1850). 
 
 His elemental creative force may best be realized from the 
 fact that these six novels have peopled the minds of Englishmen 
 with a small army of unforgettable characters, among whom 
 are such villains as Monk, Squeers, Ralph Nickleby, Quilp, 
 Jonas Chuzzlewit, Uriah Heep, and such grotesques as the 
 Kenwigs family, the Cheeryble Brothers, Vincent Crummies, 
 Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, Mark Tapley, Tom Pinch, 
 Miss Trotwood, and Wilkins Micawber. The interest of Dickens 
 in grotesque characters may have been originally due to the 
 influence of Smollett, whom he had read eagerly as a boy. 
 It is significant of his bent and method that in all the novels 
 of this period, except Barnaby Rudge (1841), character pre- 
 dominates over plot, and that that novel, in which character 
 is in great measure subordinated, is the weakest work of the 
 series. A certain decline has been noticed in the later novels, 
 from Little Dorrit (1857) through Great Expectations (1861) and 
 Our Mutual Friend (1865) to the unfinished Edwin Drood 
 (1870) : yet in every one of these there is work of the first 
 order. To this period, too, belongs his brilliant historical 
 novel, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), where for the first time he 
 tells a story with a perfectly coherent plot. 
 
 His Place During the lifetime of Dickens his pathos found as many 
 among admirers as his humour, and this popular approbation was 
 Novelists, endorsed by many excellent judges. Macaulay, as we all know, 
 wept over the death of Little Nell, while Jeffrey declared 
 Dombey and Son to possess * all the lofty and terrible attributes 
 of tragedy'. Modern criticism would probably endorse 
 Forster's verdict that little Paul is more pathetic than little 
 Nell ; but on the whole it has small sympathy for either 
 child, and still less for little Dorrit. It seems to share Mere- 
 dith's suspicion of the pathetic character who is ' allowed to 
 rush at you, roll you over, and squeeze your body for the 
 briny drops'. Dickens's portrayal of villains, too, is often 
 unsure and unconvincing ; a well-known modern critic has 
 declared Kalph Nickleby 'altogether too steep '. On the other 
 hand, Dickens's comic genius stands higher to-day than it ever 
 did, and full justice has also been done by such devotees as 
 Swinburne to his genius for description, as embodied, for 
 instance, in his masterly pictures of London and its river. 
 Many of his serious figures, for instance Hortense in Bleak 
 House and Rigaud in Little Dorrit, seem overdrawn and arti- " 
 ficial, and inspire little belief in his own belief in them ; and 
 
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 
 
 359 
 
 the same may be said of many of his more serious situations. 
 One may reflect, for instance, how much more greatly and 
 terribly the murder of Mr. Tulkinghorn would have been 
 managed by Balzac, or even, after his more lurid fashion, by 
 Hugo. But ours is a fastidious generation, and, like the Pole 
 family in Sandra Belloni, it is perhaps too great a stickler for the 
 1 fine shades '. It is quite possible that a more robust and eager 
 age may recapture the enthusiasm of Jeffrey and Macaulay, 
 and feel the spell of something in Dickens to which our own 
 age has grown somewhat callous. And in no case is it fair to 
 say that because he is not a pastmaster in pathos his genius 
 lies only in the direction of comedy. Apart from his instinct 
 for colour and atmosphere, he has a powerful, though not 
 unerring, touch on the sinister. His characterization has been 
 described as rather Jonsonian than Shakespearean : yet Jonson 
 limned the ' humours ' of humankind as masterly in the dark 
 shadows of Volpone as in the laughing sunlight of Every Man 
 in his Humour ; and similarly the creator of Joey Bagstock 
 and Miss Tox has drawn also Mr. Littimer and the elder 
 Mr. Smallweed. Dickens's practice of portraying social evils in 
 his novels has been frequently criticized, and sometimes very 
 absurdly : the laboured descriptions of the Circumlocution 
 Office certainly overweight the story, such as it is, of Little 
 Dorrit ; but in describing the academies of Mr. Squeers and 
 Doctor Blimber, Dickens keeps strictly within the colour and 
 compass of his tale, while the Court of Chancery forms quite 
 a fitting background to the sinister outline of Bleak House. 
 Dickens's elemental force and his rich and various imagination 
 will always ensure him place among the great novelists of the 
 world. 
 
 The earliest notable work of Dickens's great and confessed 
 rival, William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863), consisted of His 
 contributions to Fraser's, Punch, and other magazines. In this Great 
 way were originally produced Barry Lyndon (1844), The Novels. 
 Yellowplush Papers (1837-46), The Great Hoggarty Diamond, 
 and The Book of Snobs (1846). The last three of these works 
 contain much that is most typical of Thackeray's genius, and 
 much that was later to take fuller shape in his great 
 novels. They show his keen, and at this period rather acrid, 
 sense of the humours and weaknesses of society, as envisaged 
 by the clubman, the snob, and the footman ; and they present 
 the tragedy of them that fall no less than the comedy of them 
 that climb. There are few stronger situations in Thackeray 
 than the quarrel between the Earl of Crabs and his son, 
 Algernon Deuceace, portrayed in the closing pages of The 
 Yellowplush Papers. It is only at moments, however, that 
 these early sketches achieve the quality of his later and more 
 characteristic work. Barry Lyndon, the autobiography of 
 a scoundrelly adventurer, is inimitable in its seeming-uncon- 
 scious satire, which varies markedly in method from that of 
 those still greater satirical novels, Fielding's Jonathan Wild, 
 
360 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 and Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. But Thackeray 
 was not to come into his own, either in achievement or 
 reputation, till the appearance in 1847 of Vanity Fair, which 
 at once brought him fame. The chief men and women of this 
 novel, headed by the superlative Becky Sharp, are among the 
 classic characters of our fiction ; and the manners of the 
 time are presented under a form of masterly satirical realism, 
 marred occasionally by undue moralization. Like all Thacke- 
 ray's novels except Esmond, Vanity Fair was written from day 
 to day for serial publication, and hence exhibits a certain 
 unwieldiness of construction. It was succeeded by Pendennis 
 (1848-50), with its note of autobiography and its superb 
 picture of the worldling of worldlings, Major Pendennis. 
 Thackeray's most perfect work, in point of style and con- 
 struction, is the historical novel Esmond (1852), in which he 
 relaxes the satirical tension, and gives us the noble figure of 
 Henry Esmond to place beside the seductive Beatrix. The 
 Newcomes (1853-5) contains in Colonel Newcome the most 
 lovable character Thackeray ever drew. The Virginians 
 (1857-9) is the sequel to Esmond, and after the fashion of 
 sequels, by no means its equal. These, with Catherine 
 (1839-40), Philip (1861-2), and the unfinished historical novel 
 Denis Duval, represent Thackeray's chief achievement in 
 fiction. 
 
 His Outside the novel Thackeray's chief work in prose consists 
 
 Lectures of lectures and essays. In 1851 he began to lecture in England, 
 and and in the same year, and again in 1855, he made the tour of 
 
 Essays. America. In his first course, The English Humourists of the 
 Eighteenth Century, descriptive and imaginative force are more 
 evident than critical insight. If his account of Addison and 
 Steele is illuminating, his estimate of Swift, despite its great 
 power, is grotesquely unjust. In The Four Georges, his second 
 course, Thackeray was both helped and handicapped by his 
 experience as a writer of fiction. His estimates of the four 
 kings are penned with his old satirical and descriptive power ; 
 but he lacks the true historic sense, and cares little for the 
 greater events and movements of the period. Among his most 
 notable essays are The Eoundabout Papers, originally con- 
 tributed to the Cornhill Magazine, which he founded, and 
 edited from 1860 to 1862. In these he discourses with ease 
 and force of his past memories and his present experiences, 
 and of life in general. The Roundabouts contain some of his 
 finest prose. 
 
 Qualities Most of Thackeray's earlier work, and some of his later, was 
 
 of his written in conscious reaction against the prevailing romanticism 
 
 Genius, of his day, and as far as popular appreciation goes, he is 
 
 subject to the disabilities incident to all who are frequently 
 
 possessed by the spirit of negation. If he avoids Dickens's 
 
 exaggeration and exuberance, it must be admitted that he also 
 
 lacks much that is most human and elemental in him, and 
 
 brings with him little of the colour and feeling and fire which 
 
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 361 
 
 make the great romanticist of common life an evangelist to 
 many. Yet Thackeray's portraiture, his style, and his grasp 
 of situation are, all at their best, superb. He was a master of 
 the sinister, in which his greatest achievement is the portrait 
 of Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair. His best grotesques Foker, 
 Costigan, and 'F. B.' are inimitable, and despite the carica- 
 ture that has gone to their making, they are far nearer to the 
 life than those of Dickens. His restraint is often a quality of 
 strength, just as Dickens's exuberance is often an exaggera- 
 tion of it. Thackeray was only a cynic by fits. His satire 
 alternates curiously with the sentiinentalism which inspired 
 the death-scene of Colonel Newcome. 
 
 The three sisters Bronte Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were The 
 all novelists, and two of them were novelists of genius. In Brontes. 
 1846 they published collectively a volume of Poems by Currer, 
 Ellis and Acton Bell, chiefly remarkable for the work of Emily, 
 who was the greatest, and perhaps the only, poet of the three. 
 Charlotte's first novel, The Professor, is comparatively crude : 
 it was rejected when first submitted for publication, and was 
 not given to the world till after her death. The first novel of 
 Anne, Agnes Grey, appeared in 1847, simultaneously with the 
 masterpiece of her sister Emily, Wuthering Heights. In 1848 
 appeared Anne's second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, 
 but neither it nor its predecessor would now be remembered 
 were it not for the greater work of the two other sisters. 
 
 Charlotte lives chiefly by three novels Jane Eyre (1847), - 
 Shirley (1849), and Villette (1853). Of these Jane Eyre is 
 generally, and with justice, considered to be the greatest, 
 owing to the power and subtlety displayed in the portrait of 
 the dependant loved, and eventually won, by Rochester, the 
 victim of a miserable first marriage. Shirley has a greater 
 variety of characters, including the delightful neroine, Shirley 
 Keildar (a portrait of Emily), the squire Yorke, and the two 
 brothers Moore. The novel has for its background the York- 
 shire moors, among which Charlotte had lived, and which she 
 here describes in a masterly fashion. Villette, which is in 
 large measure autobiographical, describes the wooing of the 
 school assistant, Lucy Snowe, by that strange and tyrannous 
 but true-hearted lover, M. Paul. Despite the limited outlook 
 and occasional crudity of thought which were the legacy of 
 her restricted early life, there is a warm colouring of humanity 
 and a passionate intensity of imagination about Charlotte 
 Bronte's best work, and these have won her the homage of 
 many who, like Swinburne, are but feebly stirred by the 
 colder and more perfect artistry of Jane Austen. The same 
 crudities, redeemed and transfigured by the same intensity of 
 imagination, appear in Wuthering Heights. For good and for 
 bad, despite the homeliness of their scenes and subjects, the 
 three Bronte's were right romantics at heart. 
 
 'George Eliot' (Mary Ann Evans, or Mrs. Cross, 1819- 'George 
 1880) possessed hardly less natural inspiration than Charlotte Eliot ' 
 
 N 3 
 
362 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Bronte, together with a wider knowledge of life, a keener 
 sense of humour, and stronger reasoning power. She was 
 a good scholar in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and had 
 also taught herself French, German, and Italian. Her early 
 work consisted mainly of translation and essay writing. She 
 published translations of Strauss's Leben Jesu in 1846, and of 
 Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity in 1854. In 1851, after 
 her father's death, she became assistant editor of the West- 
 minster Review, to which she contributed regularly for many 
 years. This experience, together with the influence of 
 G. H. Lewes, her husband in all but name, increased both 
 her love and her power of writing ; but she did not discover 
 her true strength till she began to write fiction. Her early 
 stories, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857-8), Adam Bede (1859), The 
 Mill on the Floss (1860), and Silas Marner (1861), gave her 
 rank as one of the foremost novelists of her age. They all 
 deal with country life and character as observed by herself in 
 the midland counties of England, and despite their somewhat 
 austere philosophic background, they show the play of a great 
 imagination upon existence in both its tragic and comic 
 aspects. The greatest of all these novels, in George Eliot's 
 own opinion, was Adam Bede ; and it is indeed doubtful 
 whether she ever surpassed in tragedy the tale of Hetty Sorrel, 
 or in comedy the character of Mrs. Poyser. Yet Silas Marner, 
 the tale of a miser's redemption through the love of a little 
 child, is a true work of art ; and the character of Maggie 
 Tulliver, in The Mill on the Floss, is an exquisite piece of 
 spiritual autobiography. Less spontaneous is the elaborate 
 historical romance, Romola (1863), chiefly memorable for its 
 vivid portrait of Savonarola, of Romola herself, and of her 
 tragically fated lover, Tito Melema. Less successful than any 
 of these novels are the carefully planned and often unduly 
 laboured Felix Holt the Radical (1866), and Daniel Deronda 
 (1876), which aims at presenting a sympathetic study of the 
 Jewish character. By far the greatest novel of George Eliot's 
 later years was Middlemarch (1871-2), with its broad canvas 
 and vigorously drawn central characters, Casaubon and 
 Dorothea, Lydgate and Rosamond. The Impressions of 
 Theophrastus Such (1879) are studies of men and manners 
 lacking neither humour nor insight, yet often marred by their 
 author's fondness for heavy abstract speculation. 
 
 Though George Eliot wrote a good deal of verse, she can 
 hardly be ranked among the poets. Neither in her shorter 
 poems, nor in such more pretentious efforts as The Spanish 
 Gypsy and The Legend of Jubal, is there the true fire. 
 
 The earliest novels of Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), least 
 (1848) and Alton Locke (1850), represent, after different 
 fashions, the ferment working in English life as a result of the 
 Kingsley. great mid-century revolutionary movement. Hypatia (1853) 
 is a brilliant historical novel centring round the famous woman 
 who taught Neoplatonism and suffered for her faith in the 
 
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 363 
 
 fifth century ; but Kingsley's greatest, and by far his most 
 popular, novel is Westward Ho, with its brilliant pictures of 
 Elizabethan adventure and the splendidly drawn characters of 
 John Oxenham and Salvation Yeo. His chief remaining 
 novels are Two Tears Ago (1857), The Water Babies (1863), 
 and Hereward the Wake (1866). Charles's brother, Henry, 
 deserves mention chiefly for Qeoffry Hamlyn (1859) and 
 Ravenshoe (1861), the former of which divides with Robbery 
 Under Arms (by Rolf Boldrewood) the honour of being the 
 best Australian novel'ever written. 
 
 Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was a prolific novelist, now best Wilkie 
 remembered by The Woman in White ( 1860) and The Moonstone Collins. 
 (1868). These novels possess little psychological depth, and 
 depend largely on the sensational, but are well constructed 
 and are capital examples of their particular class. Some of 
 his characters have become classics notably Sergeant Cuff, 
 the rose-fancying detective, and that redoubtable spy, Count 
 Fosco. 
 
 Many minors of merit must be omitted here, and living George 
 novelists lie outside our scope. We may conclude this Meredith, 
 chapter with a discussion of two leading novelists of the later 
 Victorian period. The first of these, George Meredith (1828- 
 1909), seems secure of a place among the masters of English 
 fiction, though certain critics have attempted to oust him 
 from this vantage. His poetry has been discussed in a 
 previous chapter : a knowledge of it, and of his Essay on 
 Comedy, is essential for a full understanding of many things 
 in his novels. It was as a poet that he began, and it is as 
 poet that to some he still seems greatest. His earliest prose 
 works of note were The Shaving of Shagpat (1856), an Eastern 
 fantasy suffused with an element of burlesque, and Farina 
 (1857). In 1859 appeared The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The 
 a work far more characteristic of his genius, and containing Ordeal of 
 some of its greatest qualities. This story shows the egoist Richard 
 as father, just as Meredith's second great masterpiece was Feverel. 
 to show him as lover. The tragedy of the novel lies in the 
 wrecking of Richard's life through the attempt made by his 
 father, Sir Austin Feverel, to impose upon him a system of 
 education utterly out of keeping with the conditions of life. 
 But the book is far more than a mere novel of purpose it is 
 at once a tragedy, a comedy, and a romance. It has many 
 faults, yet contains several characters for ever memorable. 
 The first meeting of Richard and his destined wife, Lucy, at 
 the river weir, is an idyll of great beauty, and the idyll 
 deepens inevitably into the terrible denouement which 
 leads to Richard's separation from his wife, and her eventual 
 death. Adrian Harley, the 'wise youth', is the first of 
 Meredith's numerous wits and cynics. ' The Pilgrim's Scrip ' 
 illustrates that tendency to aphorism, satirical, sage or 
 poetic, which increases throughout the novels till it comes 
 to a head in One of our Conquerors 'and The Amazing 
 
364 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Marriage. Meredith's aim, even in The Ordeal, had been 
 to show the spirit of comedy at work on life, and in the 
 prelude to the novel he had described it as watching over 
 sentimentalism with a birch rod, yet as not opposed to romance. 
 It is this conception of comedy as the guardian of civilization 
 which gives all his novels their distinctive tone and colour, 
 and renders it easy for them to pass from a comic to a tragic 
 reading of life. While comedy performs her task of guardian- 
 ship and the characters react upon her discipline, the general 
 tendency may be satire suffused with romance, as in Evan 
 Harrington (1861), the love story of a tailor's son; and Harry 
 Richmond (1871), a fantastic love romance containing many 
 charming passages and that magnificent failure in characteri- 
 zation, Roy Richmond. But while life lasts there will always 
 be outlaws to civilization and to her guardian spirit. The 
 punishment meted out to these may be either satirically 
 terrible, like that undergone by Sir Willoughby Patterne in 
 The Egoist (1879), or tragically terrible, like that which befalls 
 Sir Austin in Richard Feverel, or Sigismund Alvan (Ferdinand 
 Lassalle) in The Tragic Comedians (1880). 
 
 The The Egoist is the second of the three great novels which 
 
 Egoist. show Meredith's genius at its highest. Its leading figure, 
 Sir Willoughby, is the incarnation of an egoism towering, 
 superb, and, in great part, unconscious. ' When his pride is 
 at ease he is a prince ' ; but his whole satisfaction in life 
 depends on the homage of dependants, and when these become 
 rebels to his will, and try to live their own lives, his magnifi- 
 cence deserts him, and he becomes a petty tyrant, the easy 
 prey of the Imps of Comedy, who appear in the ' Prelude ' to 
 the novel. He courts three women successively, but each of 
 these catches in turn a glimpse of his inner soul. The first two 
 shrink back shuddering and seek refuge, literally, in flight ; 
 while Laetitia, on whose blind adoration he had always counted, 
 becomes critical and disillusioned, and only accepts him in 
 the end with a kind of cold compassion, which to the reader 
 constitutes his supreme humiliation. Clara Middleton, the 
 heroine of the book, is one of the delightful English girls 
 whom Meredith drew with mastery and variety. Her lover, 
 Vernon Whitford, scholar and mountaineer * Phoebus Apollo 
 turned fasting friar ' is a type of man dear to Meredith's 
 heart, reappearing in The Amazing Marriage, with due varia- 
 tions, as Gower Woodseer, and praised again in the poem 
 Hard Weather. Lacking in some measure the romantic and 
 tragic quality of Richard Feverel, The Egoist, by virtue, of its 
 realistic and satiric quality, illustrates more typically Mere- 
 dith's conception of comedy in life and literature. 
 
 Diana of Diana of the Crossways ( 1 885 ) is generally held to be the third 
 
 the Cross- o f Meredith's masterpieces. Its heroine is a beautiful woman 
 
 ways. O f a highly wrought and artistic intelligence, face to face with 
 
 a world alternately admiring and censorious. For many the 
 
 charm and verisimilitude of Diana's character is destroyed by 
 
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 365 
 
 her gross and mercenary treachery to the ' frosty Cupid ', her 
 lover, Dacier. A far less justifiable objection is that taken to 
 her eventual union with the unimaginative and practical Torn 
 Redworth, in whom Meredith clearly wishes us to see her 
 complement and fitting mate. 
 
 In point of style Meredith, like Carlyle, begins in com- 
 parative simplicity, but gradually evolves an intensely personal 
 utterance of his own. The progress may be seen by a com- 
 parison of the early Ordeal with that extreme specimen of his 
 later style, One of our Conquerors. Rugged, ruffling, fantastic, 
 his diction at this later period is generally quite apt to his 
 thought and wit, and to that blend of poetry and humour which 
 is a main mark of his genius. If there are occasional perversity 
 and affectation, these qualities are of style only : they do 
 not pass beyond the suburbs of his soul ; for there is hardly 
 a novelist in English whose handling of life is more sane and 
 whole and virile/* 
 
 In passing from Meredith it becomes tempting to say a word Stevenson 
 concerning the two great novelists, Thomas Hardy and Henry His 
 James ; but for different reasons both of these lie outside the longer 
 scope of this treatise, and we must go back to Robert Louis Novels. 
 Stevenson (1850-1894). From his boyhood, as he has told us, 
 he had practised the art of writing, using various great English 
 writers successively as his models. The result is a style as 
 artificial as Meredith's, but clear and simple where his is 
 fantastic and sometimes obscure. The hackneyed phrase 
 'studied simplicity' suits his style perfectly, and to Stevenson - 
 ians it seems rather a grace than a drawback that the marks 
 of the study are everywhere upon the finished work. In this 
 respect he differs utterly from his greater forerunner, Scott, 
 whose artistry is never self-conscious, often lax, and occasion- 
 ally non-existent. Stevenson's earliest novel, Treasure Island 
 (1882), is probably still his most widely read work. Every 
 island, as he himself has stated, is a romance in itself ; and 
 when to this are added pirates, and such glorious villains as 
 Silver and Pew, the result becomes * a trap to catch all child- 
 hood ' and all manhood too. His finest finished novel, 
 however, is Kidnapped (1886), with its vividly drawn figure of 
 the Jacobite adventurer, Alan Breck. The great fight in the 
 roundhouse of the 'Covenant', the murder of the 'Red Fox', 
 and the flight across the heather of Alan and David, are among 
 the unforgettable scenes of English fiction. But his greatest 
 work of all is to be found in his unfinished novel, Weir of 
 Hermiston (1896), where the central characters, Weir, the 
 hanging judge, his son Archie, the two Kirsties, and the four 
 Elliott brothers, are all drawn with superb strength and 
 delicacy. This fragment is master's work, and if Stevenson 
 
 1 Chief among Meredith's remaining novels are Sandra Belloni (1864), 
 Rhoda Fkming(lS65), Vittoria (1867), and Lord Ormontand his Aminta 
 (1894). 
 
366 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 had lived to finish it, and had written more novels of the 
 same greatness, his place would have been among the very 
 highest. 
 
 Novels less great, yet fine in their degree, are The Master of 
 Ballantrae (1889), Gatriona (1893), and the unfinished St. Ivee 
 (1897). Of lower value is The Black Arrow (1888). In col- 
 laboration with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson wrote 
 The Wrecker (1892) and The Ebb Tide (1894), both studies of 
 South Sea life. The Ebb Tide has again an island for its 
 setting, and contains four of Stevenson's most powerfully 
 drawn characters the sinister and religious Attwater, the 
 diabolical cockney, Huish, Herrick the sensitive, and the 
 strangely fascinating ship's captain, Davis. 
 
 His Tales, Stevenson was a master of the short story. His triumphs in 
 Essays, this kind are probably Thrawn Janet, in his own opinion one 
 and of the greatest things he ever wrote, The Pavilion on the Links, 
 
 Letters, and The Beach of Falesa. A masterpiece in the sinister is 
 The Strange Case of Dr. Jelcyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Before 
 ' commencing novelist ' Stevenson had written several volumes * 
 of miscellaneous prose which contain much fine descriptive 
 writing, much eloquent criticism and generalization, an un- 
 fortunate estimate of Fra^ois Villon, and a splendid essay on 
 human life, Pulvis et Umbra. His letters and especially his 
 Vailima Letters contain some perfect prose, and are instinct 
 with the charm which has made him well beloved both in life 
 and literature. As a poet, except in a few pieces such as 
 Requiem, he was not consummate, though his Child's Garden 
 of Verse is full of charm. 
 
 Butler, Samuel Butler (1835-1902) has left a great satirical novel 
 
 in The Way of All Flesh, which describes certain conditions of 
 English life with deadly bitterness and humour, and concludes 
 in a fashion after Butler's own heart, by making its hero gain 
 self-respect for the first time through breaking the law and 
 going to prison. Few characters in English fiction have been 
 drawn with darker and grimmer humour than the odious 
 parson, Theobald Pontifex. Less grim and more fantastic in 
 their satire are Erewhon (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901), 
 where the conditions of modern life are travestied in the 
 picture of the strange country ' over the range'. Butler's wit 
 appears in brief and deadly form in the aphorisms of his 
 Notebooks. 
 
 Gissing George G-issing (1857-1903) has described the struggle of 
 
 and his own short life with great charm and intimacy in the Private 
 
 others. Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). His greatest novel is un- 
 doubtedly the powerfully realistic New Grub Street (1891), 
 though there is also genius in Demos (1886) and Thyrza (1887). 
 Chief among the remaining novelists of the period are the 
 
 1 An Inland Voyage (1878), Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 
 (1879), Virginibus Puerisque (1881), and Familiar Studies of Men and 
 Books (1882). 
 
THE VICTORIAN NOVEL 367 
 
 following : George John Whyte-Melville (1821-1878), author 
 of several spirited sporting tales, and a fairly successful his- 
 torical novel, The Gladiators (1863) ; Richard Blackmore (1825- 
 1900), whose Lorna Doone (1869) is an admirable, and almost 
 a great, historical romance ; William Sharp (1856-1905), who, 
 under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod, wrote poems and tales 
 instinct with Celtic mysticism; Walter Besant (1836-1901), 
 who collaborated with James Rice (1843-1882) in several most 
 readable novels e.g. Beady -Money Mortiboy (1872) and The 
 Golden Butterfly (1876) and wrote single-handed others not 
 less readable (e. g. All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882) and 
 The Children ofGibeon (1886); George MacDonald (1824-1905), 
 a minor master of the novel of Scottish life and character 
 (David Elginbrod (1863), Robert Falconer (1868), &c.) ; John 
 Watson ('Ian Maclaren' 1850-1907), a member, though by 
 no means the chief member, of the ' kailyard ' novelists whose 
 stories follow the tradition set by Gait, and centre round 
 Scottish parochial life. 
 
 As the literature of the past passes on toward the present, Con- 
 it becomes increasingly difficult to appraise it, or do more elusion, 
 than single out its greater masters ; and when the present is 
 actually reached, the difficulty and danger of generalization 
 become acute. A few conclusions, however, seem possible. 
 In poetry, the Georgian period has been one rather of interest- 
 ing experiment than of masterly achievement. For some 
 years before the war, there had been clear signs of an exhaustion 
 of poetic power, a reaction, it would seem, from the mighty 
 activity of the Victorian Age. Yet, despite this slackening, 
 which has occurred in all ages and countries after periods of 
 great artistic energy and tension, the spirit of poetry is awake : 
 there is acute interest in its practice, much daring and bril- 
 liancy of formal handling, keen sensibility to new influences, 
 and a wise catholicity of outlook. The burden and agony of 
 the War may seem to have overwhelmed literature for the time 
 being, but out of the War's effort and sacrifice there may well 
 come soon a quickening that shall find expression in great 
 poetry the poetry which in our literature has so often 
 accompanied the birth, or rebirth, of a great ideal or faith. 
 In the practice of the novel, there has been much brilliancy 
 and some greatness : indeed, one of the greatest novelists who 
 have ever written in English is still with us to-day . Apart from 
 him there have been a few stray masterpieces, but hardly 
 any man stands out as unmistakably a master. In drama 
 there has been still less performance and promise. For reasons 
 already specified, there has for long been an estrangement 
 between our stage and our greatest imaginative literature ; 
 and drama not written for the stage must always fall short of 
 the supreme. Yet there has been brilliancy here top ; and in 
 criticism, as we have shown, there has been brilliancy and 
 something more. If English literature at the present day is 
 
368 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 not supremely great, neither is it decadent. There has been 
 slackening rather than failure : a level has been kept from 
 which greatness may at any time arise. To those who doubt 
 the future, any student of his country's literature might well 
 reply in Rossetti's lines : 
 
 Nay, come up hither. From this wave-washed mound 
 
 Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me ; 
 Then reach on with thy thought till it be drowned. 
 
 Miles and miles distant though the last line be, 
 And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond, 
 
 Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea. 
 
INDEX 
 
 A. B. C., Chaucer's, 38. 
 
 Abbot, The, 314. 
 
 Aber Stations, 344. 
 
 Absalom and Achitophel, 198, 208. 
 
 Absentee, The, 316. 
 
 Abt Vogler, 332. 
 
 Achademios, 80. 
 
 Acolastus, 91. 
 
 Adam Bede, 362. 
 
 Adam Play, 85. 
 
 Addison, Joseph, 115, 204, 219- 
 25, 227, 231, 232, 233, 237, 238, 
 248, 251, 360. 
 
 Address to Kilchurn Castle, 285. 
 
 Address to the Deil, 72, 273, 274 n. 
 
 Address to the Unco Quid, 273. 
 
 Adlington, William, 108. 
 
 Admiral Hosier's Ohost, 268. 
 
 Adonais, 182, 295-7, 299 ., 328. 
 
 Advancement of Learning, The, 117. 
 
 Adventures of an Atom, The, 243. 
 
 Adventures of a Courtier, The, 61. 
 
 Advice to a Daughter, 214. 
 
 A. K, 304. 
 
 .Elfric, 9. 
 
 Aeneid, 60, 75, 94, 109, 153, 178. 
 
 Agamemnon, 333 n. 
 
 Aglaura, 151. 
 
 ^grwes G^'cy, 361. 
 
 Aids to Reflection, 312. 
 
 Ainsworth, Harrison, 315. 
 
 Akenside, Mark, 268. 
 
 Alaham, 95. 
 
 Alastor, 296, 298. 
 
 Albert of Aix, 31. 
 
 Albertus Walknstein, 151. 
 
 Albion's England, 165. 
 
 Albovine, 206. 
 
 Alchemist, The, 141. 
 
 Alcibiades, 207. 
 
 Alciphron, 228. 
 
 Alcuin, 4, 8. 
 
 Aldhelm, 7, 8. 
 
 ^fezawder's ^easJ, 199. 
 
 Alexander, William, Earl of Stir- 
 ling, 164, 170. 
 
 Alfieri, 207. 
 
 Alfred, 8, 110. 
 
 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, 
 
 357. 
 
 All Fools, 142. 
 All for Love, 195, 198. 
 All Sortsand Conditions of M ew,367. 
 AW s Lost by Lust, 144. 
 All's Wett that Ends Well, 131. 
 Allan o' Maut, 62. 
 4Zma, 234. 
 Almahide, 197. 
 
 Almond for a Parrot, An, 109. 
 Almoran and Hamet, 244. 
 Alphonsus, King of Arragon, 124. 
 .4Zroy, 316. 
 
 4ftar o/ Righteousness, The, 335. 
 AUheafrom Prison, To, 173. 
 ^tton, Z^cfce, 362. 
 Amadis of France, 93. 
 4watewr Poacher, The, 357. 
 Amazing Marriage, The, 363-4. 
 Amelia, 242. 
 Amends for Ladies , 151. 
 ^wen'caw Taxation, Speech on, 259. 
 -4mts and Amiloun, 28. 
 4raoreMt, 158, 162. 
 Amory, Thomas, 244. 
 Amphitryon, 196. 
 ^wiwewente Serious and Comical, 
 
 218. 
 
 Amyot, Jacques, 108. 
 .4wacreonw;s (Cowley), 178. 
 Analogy of Religion, 228. 
 Anatomy of an Equivalent, The, 213. 
 Anatomy of Melancholy, The, 116, 
 
 299, 302. 
 Ancient and Modern Learning, 
 
 Upon, 211. 
 Ancient Mariner, The, 72, 278-81, 
 
 311. 
 
 Ancren Riwle, 15. 
 Andrea del Sarto, 332. 
 Andreas, 5, 6, 7. 
 Andrewes, Lancelot, 186. 
 Andria, 90. 
 
 Andromeda (Kingsley), 342. 
 Andromeda Liberata, 109. 
 4we&da awd ^rcife, 39. 
 Angel in the House, The. 343. 
 
370 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Anna Karenina, 323. 
 
 Anne of Geierstein, 315. 
 
 Anniversaries (Donne), 169, 194. 
 
 Annus Mirabilis, 194. 
 
 Anselm, 12. 
 
 Answer to the King's Flyting, 64. 
 
 Anthea, To, 172. 
 
 Antichristua, 87. 
 
 Antiquary, The, 314. 
 
 Antiquary, The (Marmion), 151. 
 
 Antiquities of Warwickshire, 216. 
 
 Antonie, 94. 
 
 Antonio and Mettida, 142. 
 
 Antonio's Revenge, 142. 
 
 Antony and Cleopatra, 135, 198. 
 
 Apollo and the Seaman, 281. 
 
 Apollo Belvedere, 324. 
 
 Apottyonists, The, 168. 
 
 Apologia (Newman), 349. 
 
 Apology for his Life (Gibber), 206. 
 
 Apology for Poetry, An, 99. 
 
 Appeal from the New to the Old 
 Whigs, An, 260. 
 
 Appius and Virginia (Hey wood), 
 145. 
 
 Appius and Virginia (R. B.), 93. 
 
 Appreciations, 355. 
 
 Arabian Nights, The, 357. 
 
 Aratra Pentelici, 354. 
 
 Arbuthnot, John, 227, 231, 237. 
 
 Arcadia (Sannazaro), 100. 
 
 Arcadia, The Countess of Pem- 
 broke's, 100, 102, 162. 
 
 Archie o' CawfieU, 71. 
 
 Arden of Feversham, 137, 149, 
 248. ' 
 
 Areopagitica, 182, 183, 213. 
 
 Arethusa, 298. 
 
 Argument to Prove that the abolish- 
 ing of Christianity, &c. (Swift), 
 225. 
 
 Ariosto, 91, 124, 131, 159. 
 
 Aristophanes' Apology, 333 n. 
 
 Aristotle, 108, 113, 117, 296. 
 
 Armada, The (Swinburne), 335. 
 
 Armin, Robert, 150. 
 
 Armstrong, John, 268. 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 231, 286, 291, 
 320, 321, 322, 323, 324, 328, 
 334, 341, 351, 356. 
 
 Arnold,- Sir Edwin, 344. 
 
 Arnold, Thomas, 312, 351. 
 
 Arraignement of Paris, The, 120. 
 
 Ars Sciendi Mori, 50. 
 
 Arthur and Merlin, 25, 27. 
 
 Arthur of Little Britain, 76. 
 Arthurian legend, 12, 16, 17, 18, 
 
 21-2, 77, 198, 327. 
 Art of English Poesie, The, 105 n. 
 Art of Preserving Health, The, 268. 
 Art of Rhetoric, The, 97. 
 Ascham, Roger, 97-8, 99, 103, 105. 
 Ashby, George, 51. 
 Asloan MS., 61. 
 Asolando, 333 n. 
 Assembly of Ladies, The, 43. 
 Astraea Redux, 195. 
 Astrolabe, Treatise on, 38 n., 42. 
 Astrophel and Stella, 161. 
 As You Like It, 21, 125, 131-2. 
 Atalanta in Calydon, 334. 
 Atheist, The, 207. 
 Atheist's Tragedy, The, 145. 
 Athenae Oxonienses, 217. 
 Athenaid, The, 268. 
 Athenian Gazette, 218. 
 Atterbury, Francis, 229, 231. 
 Aubrey, John, 217. 
 Audelay, John, 51. 
 Auld Robin Gray, 272. 
 Aurengzebe, 197, 198. 
 Aurora, 164. 
 Aurora Leigh, 340. 
 Austen, Jane, 313, 316, 361. 
 Author's Farce, The, 240. 
 Autobiography (De Quincey), 310. 
 Autobiography (Gibbon), 263. 
 Autobiography (Leigh Hunt), 309. 
 Autobiography (Lord Herbert), 191. 
 Ave atque Vale, 335. 
 Ave Imperatrix, 344. 
 Avowing of King Arthur, 24. 
 Awdeley, John, 109. 
 Awyntyrs of Arthur, 24. 
 Ayenbite of Inwit, 15. 
 Aytoun, William Edmonstoune, 
 
 324,326. 
 
 Bacon, Francis, 113, 117, 191. 
 Bacon, Roger, 12. 
 Bage, Robert, 316 
 Bagehot, Walter, 354. 
 Bailey, John, 356. 
 Bailey, Philip James, 326. 
 Balaustiorfs Adventure, 333. 
 Balder, 326. 
 Balder Dead, 341. 
 Baldwin, William, 155. 
 Bale ,John, 64, 87. 
 
INDEX 
 
 371 
 
 Balin mid Balan, 329. 
 Ballad of a Wedding, 173. 
 Battad of Agincourt, 165. 
 Ballad of Down Hatt, The, 234. 
 Ballad of Good Counsel, A, 38 n., 
 
 42. 
 
 Ballad of Kynd Kittock, 59. 
 Battad of Otterbourne, 70. 
 Ballad of Reading Gaol, 344. 
 Battad of the White Horse, 281. 
 Ballades in Blue China, 356. 
 Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, 
 
 342. 
 
 Ballads and Songs, 346 n. 
 Ballads and Sonnets, 338. 
 Balzac, 323, 359. 
 Bandello, 108, 127, 131, 132. 
 Banished Cavaliers, The. See 
 
 The Rover. 
 
 Bannatyne MS., 61, 64. 
 Banville, Theodore de, 172 
 Baptistes, 87. 
 Barbara Atten, 71. 
 Barbour, John, 27, 52. 
 Barchester Towers, 317. 
 Barclay, Alexander, 78, 157. 
 Bard, The, 268, 269. 
 Bard's Lament, The, 273. 
 Barham, Richard Harris, 327. 
 Barnaby Rudge, 264, 358. 
 Barnes, Barnabe, 162. 
 Barnes, William, 324. 
 Barnfield, Richard, 166. 
 Barons' Wars, The, 128, 164. 
 Barrow, Izaac, 188. 
 Barry, Ludowick, 150. 
 Barry Lyndon, 359. 
 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 30. 
 Bartholomew Fair, 141, 201 
 Bashful Lover, The, 146. 
 Bastard, The, 267. 
 Battle of Alcazar, The, 121. 
 Battle of Blenheim, 289. 
 Battle of Brunanburh, 4, 7. 
 Battle of Maldon, 4, 92. 
 Battle of the Baltic, The, 305. 
 Battle of the Books, The, 225. 
 Battle of the Summer Islands, 177. 
 Baxter, Richard, 188. 
 Beach of Falesa, The, 366. 
 Beattie, James, 268. 
 Beaumont, Francis, 136, 138, 146, 
 
 160, 353. 
 
 Beaumont, Joseph, 176. 
 Beaumont, Sir John, 177. 
 
 Beauty and the Prisoner, 58. 
 
 Beaux' Stratagem, The, 205. 
 
 Becket, 330. 
 
 Beckford, William, 313. 
 
 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 325. 
 
 Bede, 5, 8. 
 
 Bee, The, 256. 
 
 Beggar's Bush, The, 148. 
 
 Beggar's Opera, The, 235, 249. 
 
 Behn, Aphra, 206, 208, 210. 
 
 Believe as You List, 146. 
 
 Bettamira, 206. 
 
 Belleforest, Pierre de, 131, 133. 
 
 Betters Strategem, The, 251. 
 
 BeUenden, 64. 
 
 Bellman of London, 110. 
 
 Bells and Pomegranates, 331. 
 
 Benlowes, Edward, 180, 194. 
 
 Bennett, Arnold, 103. 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 350. 
 
 Bentley, Richard, 225, 229, 231. 
 
 Beowulf, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 17, 92. 
 
 Beppo, 293. 
 
 Berkeley, George, 228, 229. 
 
 Berkenhead, Sir John, 217. 
 
 Berners, John Bourchier, Lord, 
 
 76, 102. 
 
 Besant, Walter, 367. 
 Best, Captain George, 111. 
 Bestiary, 13-14, 16, 19, 28. 
 Betrothed, The, 314. 
 Beves of Hampton, 20. 
 Bible, The, 29, 96-7, 115. 
 Bible in Spain, The, 356. 
 Bickerstaff, Isaac, 222, 249. 
 Biographia Liter aria, 311. 
 Bishop at St. Praxed's, The, 332. 
 Bishop Blougram, 332. 
 Black Arrow, The, 366. 
 Black Dwarf, The, 314. 
 Black-eyed Susan, 235. 
 
 Blakesmore in H shire, 308. 
 
 Blackmore, Richard, 367. 
 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 237. 
 Blackwood's Magazine, 299, 306, 
 
 307, 351. ' 
 Blair, Robert, 267. 
 Blake, William, 252, 275-7, 278, 
 
 282, 284, 297 n., 321, 353. 
 Bleak House, 358, 359. 
 Blennerhasset, Thomas, 155. 
 Blessed Damozel, The, 338. 
 Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A, 331. 
 Bludy Sark, The, 68. 
 Blurt, Master Constable, 143. 
 
372 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Boas, F. S., 92 n. 
 
 Boccaccio, 37, 39, 40 n., 41, 48, 
 94, 108, 131, 136, 155, 199, 301. 
 
 Bodleian MS., 72. 
 
 Boehme, Jacob, 229, 284. 
 
 Boethius, 8, 38 n., 42, 55. 
 
 Boileau, 210, 230. 
 
 Bokenham, Osbern, 50. 
 
 Bold Stroke Jor a Wife, A, 206. 
 
 Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Vis- 
 count, 227, 231, 258, 265. 
 
 Bond, R. W., 99 n. 
 
 Bonduca, 146, 148. 
 
 Bonnie Annie, 72. 
 
 Bonny Dundee, 291. 
 
 Book of Common Prayer, 97. 
 
 Book of Orm, The, 343. 
 
 Book of Snobs, The, 359. 
 
 Book of the Duchess, The, 37, 38. 
 
 Book of the Governor, The, 97. 
 
 Book of Verses (Henley), 344. 
 
 Books of Airs (Campion), 168. 
 
 Boron, Robert de, 19, 25. 
 
 Borough, The, 274. 
 
 Borrow, George, 309, 356. 
 
 Bossu, Le, 210, 230. 
 
 Boswell, James, 252, 255, 347. 
 
 Bothie ofTober-na- Vuolich,The,342. 
 
 Bothwell, 336. 
 
 Bower, Walter, 54. 
 
 Bowge of Court, The, 80. 
 
 Bradlaugh, Charles, 339. 
 
 Bradley, Professor, 286 n., 303 n. 
 
 Braes of Yarrow, The, 272. 
 
 Brandes, Georg, 291. 
 
 Brant, Sebastian, 79. 
 
 Brennoralt, 151. 
 
 Breton, Nicholas, 114, 115, 166. 
 
 Bridal of Triermain, 290. 
 
 Bride of Abydos, The, 292. 
 
 Bride of Lammermoor, 314. 
 
 Bride's Tragedy, The, 325. 
 
 Bridge of Sighs, The, 304. 
 
 Bridges, Robert, 267 n. 
 
 Britain's Ida, 168. 
 
 Britannia (Camden), 108. 
 
 Britannia's Pastorals, 166. 
 
 British Magazine, TJie, 256. 
 
 Broke, Arthur, 127. 
 
 Broken Heart, The, 149. 
 
 Brome, Richard, 151. 
 
 Bronte, Anne, 361. 
 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 361. 
 
 Bronte, Emily, 361, 
 
 Brooke, Henry, 313. 
 
 Brooke, Rupert, 142, 145 n., 346. 
 Brooke, Tucker, 90 n., 92 n., 123 n. 
 Broome, William, 231. 
 Brothers, The, 150. 
 Brothers, The (Cumberland), 249. 
 Brougham, Henry, Lord, 306. 
 Brown, Thomas, 218. 
 Brown, Thomas Edward, 344. 
 Browne, Sir Thomas, 99, 116, 188, 
 
 193, 194, 214, 308. 
 Browne, William, 166, 176. 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 49, 
 
 320, 334, 340-1. 
 Browning, Robert, 320, 321, 330-4, 
 
 338, 340. 
 Bruce, 52, 53. 
 Bruce, Michael, 272. 
 Brudermond, Der Bestrafte, 121. 
 Brut, 12, 14, 16. 
 Bruyere, La, 210. 
 Buchanan, George, 87. 
 Buchanan, Robert, 343. 
 Buckingham, George Villers, Duke 
 
 of, 197, 198. 
 
 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 348. 
 Budgell, Eustace, 223. . 
 Bugbears, The, 91. 
 Buik of Alexander the, Great, The, 
 
 27, 53. 
 
 Bukeofthe Howlat, 53. 
 Bulstrode, Sir Richard, 215. 
 Bulwer. See Lytton, Lord. 
 Bunyan, John, 49, 115, 211-13. 
 Burger, 290. 
 Burgh, Benet, 50. 
 Burgoyne, General, 251. 
 Burke, Edmund, 17, 257, 258, 265, 
 
 309, 347. 
 
 Burnet, Gilbert, 216. 
 Burnet, Thomas, 214. 
 Burney, Fanny, 313, 316. 
 Burning Babe, The, 166. 
 Burns, Robert, 35, 54, 59, 63, 65, 
 
 271, 272, 278, 355. 
 Burton, Richard, 356. 
 Burton, Robert, 116, 299, 302, 308. 
 Bury Fair, 206. 
 Bury, Richard of, 12. 
 Bush aboon Traquair, The, 272. 
 Busiris, 236, 248. 
 Bussy d'Ambois, 141. 
 But, John, 44. 
 Butler, Joseph, 228. 
 Butler, Samuel (seventeenth cen- 
 tury), 114, 197, 208, 220. 
 
INDEX 
 
 373 
 
 Butler, Samuel (nineteenth cen- 
 tury), 360, 366. 
 
 Butter, Nathaniel, 217. 
 
 Byrom, John, 267. 
 
 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 173-, 
 262, 266, 291, 297, 298, 299 n., 
 300, 311, 317, 318, 351, 357. 
 
 Byron, Tragedy of Charks, Duke of, 
 141. 
 
 Cadenus and Vanessa, 227. 
 
 Cadyow Castk, 290. 
 
 Csedmon, 5. 
 
 Caelica, 164. 
 
 Cain, 292, 293. 
 
 Caird, Edward, 350. 
 
 Caius Marius, 207. 
 
 Calderon, 195, 202, 340. 
 
 Caleb Williams, 313. 
 
 Caliban upon Setebos, 334. 
 
 Caligula, 207. 
 
 Calisto and Meliboea, 91. 
 
 Calprenede, La, 196. 
 
 Calverley, Charles Stuart, 344. 
 
 Cambyses, 93. 
 
 Camden, William, 107. 
 
 Campaign, The, 221. 
 
 Campaspe, 119. 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, 305. 
 
 Campion, Thomas, 98, 104, 168. 
 
 Candidate, The, 269. 
 
 Canterbury Tales, The, 28, 37, 
 
 40-2, 48, 49, 76. 
 Canut^ Song of, 32. 
 Capgrave, John, 75. 
 Captain Singleton, 219. 
 Caractacus, 268. 
 Cardinal, The, 150. 
 Careless Husband, The, 206. 
 Carew, Thomas, 107, 172. 
 Carey, Henry, 249. 
 Carlell, Ludowick, 151. 
 Carl vie, Thomas, 12, 320, 327, 
 
 332, 347, 349, 352, 365. 
 Carmen Saeculare, 233. 
 Carnarvon, Earl of, 264 n. 
 Carroll, Lewis. See Dodgson, C. L. 
 Cartwright, William, 151, 173. 
 Casa Ouidi Windows, 340. 
 Casaubon, 113. 
 Case is Altered, The, 126, 139. 
 Castara, 173. 
 Castaway, The, 270. 
 Caatiglione, Baldassare, 152. 
 
 Castle Dangerous, 315. 
 
 Castk of Health, The, 97. 
 
 Castk of Indoknce, The, 266. 
 
 Castk of Love, The, 76. 
 
 Castk of Otranto, The, 313. 
 
 Castk of Perseverance, The, 87. 
 
 Castk Eackrent, 316. 
 
 Cataract of Lodore, The, 289. 
 
 Catherine, 360. 
 
 Catiline, 140. 
 
 Cato, 221, 225, 248. 
 
 Catriona, 366. 
 
 Caveat for Common Cursitors, 1 10. 
 
 Caxton, William, 26, 60, 75. 77. 
 
 Caxtons, The, 318. 
 
 Cecilia, 313. 
 
 Cekstina, 91. 
 
 Cenci, The, 146, 149, 297. 
 
 Centlivre, Susannah, 206, 248. 
 
 Centuries of Meditations, 187 
 
 Century of Roundels, A, 335. 
 
 Certain Satires, 110. 
 
 Certain Smatt Poems, 164. 
 
 Cervantes, 195. 
 
 Chabot, Tragedy of Philip, 141. 
 
 Chace, The, 267. 
 
 Chalcondylas, 95. 
 
 Chalkhill, John, 180. 
 
 Chamberlayne, William, 176, 177, 
 
 180, 194. 
 Chambers, E. K., 34 n. t 73 n., 
 
 83 n., 84 n. 
 
 Chambers, Robert, 350. 
 Champion, The, 240. 
 Changeling, The, 143. 
 Chapel in Lyoness, The, 336. 
 Chapman, George, 104 n. t 107, 109, 
 
 112, 138, 140, 141-2, 143, 162, 
 
 231, 298, 300. 
 
 Character of a Trimmer, The, 213. 
 Characteristics of Men, Manners, 
 
 Opinions, Times, 228. 
 Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 
 
 309. 
 
 Characters of Virtues and Vices, 113. 
 Characters upon Essays, 115. 
 Charge of the Light Brigade, The, 
 
 330 
 
 Charis, 170. 
 
 Charlemagne, 8, 17, 18, 26. 
 Charks O'Malky, 318. 
 Charks the First, 297. 
 Chaste Maid in Cheapside, A, 143. 
 Chasteait de Labeur, 78. 
 Chastelard, 336. 
 
374 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Chatterton, Thomas, 252, 271, 278, 
 
 298, 299. 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 10, 11, 13, 16, 
 
 17, 21, 26, 2-7, 35, 36-43, 45, 46, 
 
 47, 48, 49, 64, 55-6, 61, 63, 74, 75, 
 
 78, 13-1, 135, 137, 199, 321, 337. 
 Cheats, The, 201. 
 Cheke, Sir John, 97. 
 Cherry and the Sloe, The, 65. 
 Chester Cycle, 86. 
 Chesterfield, Philip Stanhope, 
 
 Earl of, 214, 264, 265. 
 Chesterton, G. K., 281. 
 Chestre, Thomas, 25. 
 Chettle, Henry, 139, 143. 
 Chevalier au Lion, 24. 
 Chevy Chase, 70, 92. 
 Child, Professor F. J., 67, 271. 
 Child of Quality, A, 234. 
 Child Waters, 70, 71. 
 Childe Harold, 292, 293, 294. 
 Children of Oibeon, The, 367. 
 Child's Garden of Verse, A, 366. 
 Child's Grave at Florence, A, 340. 
 Chillingworth, Richard, 188. 
 Chinese Letters, 256. 
 Chloe and Euphelia, 234. 
 Chloe, To, 173. 
 Chloris, 164. 
 
 Choriambics (Swinburne), 231, 335. 
 Christ and Satan, 5. 
 Christabel, 279. 
 Christian Hero, The, 220. 
 Christian Morals, 188, 190. 
 Christian Year, The, 324. 
 Christie Johnstone, 315. 
 Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 331. 
 Christ's Hospital, 308. 
 Christ's Kirk on the Green, 62, 65, 
 
 273. 
 
 Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, 110. 
 Christ's Victory and Triumph, 167, 
 
 168. 
 
 Chronicle (Cowley), 178. 
 Chronicle of England (Capgrave), 
 
 75. 
 Chronicles (Froissart and Berners), 
 
 76. 
 Chronicles of England, Scotland, 
 
 and Ireland, 107. 
 Chrononhotonthologos, 249. 
 Chrysal, or the Adventures of a 
 
 Guinea, 244. 
 Church History, 192 
 Church Porch, The, 174. 
 
 Churchill, Charles, 268. 
 
 Churchyard, Thomas, 154, 155. 
 
 Churchyard's Chips, 164. 
 
 Cibber, Colley, 204, 206, 231, 
 246 n., 248. 
 
 Cicero, 178. 
 
 Cider, 238. 
 
 Cid, Le, 195. 
 
 Cinkante Battades, 48. 
 
 Cinthio, Giraldi, 133. 
 
 Citation and Examination of Wil- 
 liam Shakespeare, The, 311. 
 
 Citizen of the World, The, 256. 
 
 City Gallant, The (Tu Quoque), 150. 
 
 City Heiress, The, 206. 
 
 City Madam, The, 146. 
 
 City Match, The, 151. 
 
 City Nightcap, The, 151. 
 
 City Night Piece, The, 256. 
 
 City of Dreadful Night, The, 339. 
 
 City Poems, 326. 
 
 City Wit, The, 151. 
 
 Civil Wars, The, 128 
 
 Clandestine Marriage, The, 249. 
 
 Clanvowe, Sir Thomas, 42. 
 
 Clare, John, 324. 
 
 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 
 191, 210. 
 
 Clarissa, 239. 
 
 Clarke, Samuel, 229. 
 
 Cleanness, 35. 
 
 Cleomenes, 198. 
 
 Ckon, 332. 
 
 Cleopatra, The Tragedy of, 95. 
 
 Cleric Saunders, 70. 
 
 Cleveland, John, 114. 
 
 Cloister and the Hearth, The, 315, 
 
 Cloud, The, 297. 
 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 321, 342. 
 
 Clytemnestra (Lytton), 343. 
 
 Cobbett, William, 311. 
 
 Cock and Bull Story, A, 344. 
 
 Cockayne, Sir Aston, 151. 
 
 Cocke Lorett's Bote, 80. 
 
 Cockfighter's Garland, The, 270 n. 
 
 Calebs in Search of a Wife, 313. 
 
 Coelia, 164. 
 
 Coelum Britannicum, 172. 
 
 Colasterion, 182. 
 
 Coleridge, Hartley, 324. 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 49, 116, 
 135, 141, 146, 185, 192, 201, 233, 
 263, 269, 271, 278-81, 284, 303, 
 309, 310, 311, 318, 319, 321, 351, 
 352. 
 
INDEX 
 
 375 
 
 Colet, John, 95. 
 
 Colin Cloute, 81. 
 
 Colin Clout's Come Home Again, 
 
 158. 
 
 Colkelby's Sow, 62. 
 Cottar, The, 175. 
 Collected Essays (Huxley), 351. 
 Collier, Jeremy, 196, 201, 206, 
 
 220-1. 
 
 Collins, Anthony, 229. 
 Collins, Wilkie, 363. 
 Collins, William, 254, 267, 268, 269, 
 
 278. 
 
 Colman, George (the elder), 249. 
 Colonel Jacque, 219. 
 Colonne, Guido delle, 26, 47, 48, 53. 
 Colombo's Birthday, 331. 
 Comedia von der schonen Sidea, 136. 
 Comedy of Errors, The, 126. 
 Comfort of Lovers, The, 51. 
 Coming Race, The, 318. 
 Common Conditions, 93. 
 Commonweal, The, 335. 
 Compleat Angler, The, 192. 
 Complete Collection of Oenteel In- 
 genious Conversation, 226. 
 Complaint, A (Occleve), 50. 
 Complaint of Mars, The, 38 n. 
 Complaint of Pity, The, 38. 
 Complaint of Rosamond, The, 164. 
 Complaint of the Black Knight, The, 
 
 42. 
 
 Complaint of the Papyngo, 63, 64. 
 Complaint to his Empty Purse, A, 
 
 38 n. 
 
 Complaint to his Lady, A, 38 n. 
 Complaint to the King's Grace, 63. 
 Comus, 181. 
 
 Conceited Pedlar, The, 161. 
 Conciliation with America, Speech 
 
 on, 259, 261. 
 Concordia Regularis Monachorum, 
 
 84. 
 
 Conduct of the Allies, The, 225. 
 Confederacy, The, 205. 
 Conferences (Latimer), 96. 
 Confessio Amantis, 40, 46. 
 Confessions of an English Opium - 
 
 Eater, The, 307, 310. 
 Congreve, William, 179, 201, 203, 
 
 205, 206, 220, 268. 
 Coningsby, 317. 
 
 Conquest of Qranada, The., 197. 
 Conscious Lovers, The, 224. 
 Consolation of Philosophy, 8, 38 n. 
 
 Conspiracy of Byron, 141. 
 Constable, Henry, 163. 
 Constant Couple, A, 205. 
 Constant Lover, The, 173. 
 Constitutional History of England, 
 
 A (Hallam), 312. 
 Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, 
 
 150. 
 
 Conversion of Swearers, The, 51. 
 Cooke, Joshua, 150. 
 Cooper's Hill, 178. 
 Corantos, 217. 
 Coriolanus, 135. 
 Corneille, 195, 200, 221, 248. 
 Cornelie, 94. 
 
 Cornhitt Magazine, The, 360. 
 Cornwall, Barry (see Procter), 324. 
 Corsair, The, 292. 
 Corsica, Account of, 255. 
 Cortegiano, 11, 152. 
 Cory, William (Johnson), 344. 
 Coryat, Thomas, 112. 
 Cosmo de Medici, 326. 
 Cotter's Saturday Night, The, 273. 
 Cotton, Charles, 192, 210. 
 Count Oismund, 332. 
 Count Julian, 304. 
 Count Robert of Paris, 315. 
 Country Parson, The, 187. 
 Country Wife, The, 202. 
 Court of Love, The, 43. 
 Court of Venus, The, 65. 
 Courthope, Professor W. J., ">9 n., 
 
 153 n., 157 n., 322. 
 Covent Garden, 151. 
 Coverdale, Miles, 96, 115. 
 Cowley, Abraham, 178, 201, 210, 
 
 211, 268. 
 
 Cowley, Mrs. Hannah, 251. 
 Cowper, William, 178, 179, 244, 
 
 266, 267, 269-70, 275, 275, 277, 
 
 278. 
 
 Cowper' s Grave, 340. 
 Crabbe, George, 272, 274. 
 Cranford, 317. 
 Cranmer, Thomas, 96, 97. 
 Crashaw, Richard, 33, 173, 178, 
 
 200, 321. 
 
 Crawford, Robert, 271. 
 Creation (Blackmore), 237. 
 Creizenach, Professor W., 84 n. 
 
 87 n. 
 
 Crist, 5, 6. 
 Critic, The, 250. 
 Croker, John Wilson, 299, 307. 
 
376 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Cromarty, George Mackenzie, Earl 
 
 of, 216. 
 Cromwell, Letters and Speeches of, 
 
 348. 
 
 Cronica Tripertita, 48. 
 Cross. See George Eliot. 
 Crotchet Castle, 319. 
 Crown of Wild Olive, The, 353, 354, 
 Crowne, John, 195, 206. 
 Crudities, 112. 
 
 Cruise of the Midge, The, 318. 
 Crystal Cabinet, The, 276. 
 Cuckoo and the Nightingale, The, 42. 
 Cuckoo Song, 32. 
 Cudworth, Ralph, 214. 
 Culture and Anarchy, 352. 
 Cumberland, Richard, 249. 
 Cunningham, Allan, 305. 
 Cup, The, 330. 
 Cupid and Psyche, 151, 180. 
 Cupid's Whirligig, 150. 
 Cura Pastoralis, 8, 9. 
 Cure for a Cuckold, A, 145. 
 Curse of Kehama, The, 289. 
 Cursor Mundi, 15. 
 Cutter of Cokman Street, 179, 201. 
 Cymbeline, 12, 135-6. 
 Cynewulf, 5, 6, 10, 92. 
 Cynthia's Revels, 140. 
 
 Dacier, 210. 
 
 Daemon Lover, The, 72. 
 
 Daily C our ant, 218. 
 
 Dame Siriz, 28. 
 
 Damon and Pythias, 92, 93. 
 
 Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins, 58. 
 
 Daniel, 5. 
 
 Daniel Deronda, 362. 
 
 Daniel, Samuel, 94, 98, 104-7, 1 28, 
 
 158, 162, 163, 164. 
 Dante and his Circle, 338. 
 Daphnaida, 158. 
 Dares Phrygius, 26. 
 Darley, George, 325. 
 Darwin, Charles, 328, 351. 
 Data of Ethics, 350. 
 Davenant, Sir William, 151, 180, 
 
 195, 206. 
 
 Davenport, Robert, 151. 
 David and Bethsabe, 87, 121. 
 David Copperfield, 358. 
 David Elginbrod, 367. 
 David Simple, 244. 
 Davideis, 178, 179. 
 Davidson, John, 346. 
 
 Da vies, John of Hereford, 166. 
 
 Davies, Sir John, 164, 166. 
 
 Davis, John, 111. 
 
 Day, John, 150. 
 
 De Augmentis Scientiarum, 117. 
 
 De Consolatione. See Consolation 
 
 of Philosophy. 
 
 De Guiana Carmen, 109, 112. 
 De Profundis, 345. 
 De Proprietatibus Rerum, 30. 
 De Quincey, Thomas, 307, 310, 339. 
 De Regimine Principum, 50. 
 De Senectute, 178. 
 De Veritate, 191. 
 Dead Souls, 357. 
 
 Death and Doctor Hornbook, 273. 
 Death and Dying Words of Poor 
 
 Mailie, The, 273. 
 Death in the Desert, A, 332. 
 Death of a Fair Infant, On the, 181. 
 Death of Lord Hastings, On the, 194. 
 Death of Marlowe, The, 326. 
 Death of Mrs. Throckmorton* s 
 
 Bullfinch, 270 n. 
 Death of the Duke of Wellington, 
 
 Ode on the, 330. 
 Death of the Earl of Huntingdon, 
 
 139. 
 Death's Jest Book, or The Fool's 
 
 Tragedy, 325. 
 Debate of the Body and Soul, The, 
 
 15. 
 
 Decameron, The, 40. 
 Decisions of Diverse Practical 
 
 Cases, 187. 
 Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 
 Empire, The, 262, 348. 
 Defence of Ouenevere and other 
 
 Poems, The, 336. 
 Defence of Homer, A, 107. 
 Defence of Luclcnow, The, 330. 
 Defence of Poesy, A (Sidney). 
 
 See Apology. 
 
 Defence of Poetry, A (Shelley), 106. 
 Defence of Rhyme, A, 104, 107. 
 Defence of the English People, 183. 
 Defensio Pro Se, 183. 
 Defensio Regia, 183. 
 Defoe, Daniel, 102, 218, 227, 238. 
 Deformed Transformed, The, 292. 
 Deguileville, Guillaume de, 38, 48, 
 
 213. 
 Dekker, Thomas, 103, 110, 130, 
 
 137, 138, 140, 142-3, 144, 145, 
 
 149 
 
INDEX 
 
 377 
 
 Dejection, An Ode, 281, 319. 
 
 Delia, 163. 
 
 Deloney, Thomas, 103. 
 
 Demos, 366. 
 
 Denham, Sir John, 178. 
 
 Denis Duval, 360. 
 
 Dennis, John, 229. 
 
 Deor's Lament, 1. 
 
 Deploration of Queen Magdalene, 
 
 64. 
 
 Descartes, 192. 
 Descent of Man, The, 351. 
 Deschamps, Eustache, 40 n. 
 Description of England, A, 107. 
 Descriptive Sketches, 283. 
 Deserted Daughter, The, 251. 
 Deserted Village, The, 257, 275. 
 Desportes, 161, 163. 
 Destiny of Nations, The, 280. 
 Destruction of Jerusalem, The, 207. 
 Devil is an Ass, The, 141. 
 DeviFs Law Case, The, 145. 
 Diall of Princes, The, 76, 98, 109. 
 Dialogue, A (Occleve), 50. 
 Dialogue between Experience and 
 
 a Courtier, 64. 
 Dialogue between the Soul and Body, 
 
 180. 
 Dialogue between Thyrsis and 
 
 Dorinda, 180. 
 Dialogues of the Dead, 235. 
 Diana, 163. 
 
 Diana Enamorada, 100, 126. 
 Diana of the Crossways, 364. 
 Diary (Evelyn), 215. 
 Diary (Lady Warwick), 215. 
 Diary (Pepys), 215. 
 Dickens, Charles, 103, 243, 264, 
 
 322, 354, 357-^9, 360-1. 
 Dictionary (Johnson), 252, 253. 
 Dictionary of National Biography, 
 
 355. 
 
 Dictys Cretensis, 26. 
 Dido, Queen of Carthage, 120, 
 
 124. 
 Difference between an Absolute and 
 
 a Limited Monarchy, The, 75. 
 Dillingham, John, 217. 
 Directions to Servants, 226. 
 Dirge in Cymbeline (Collins), 269. 
 Discourse concerning Oliver Crom- 
 well, 211. 
 
 Discourse of Free-thinking, 229. 
 Discourse to prove a passage to 
 
 Cathaia, 111. 
 
 Discoveries made upon Men and 
 
 Matter, 118. 
 
 Discovery of a New World, The, 214. 
 Disobedient Child, The, 91. 
 Dispensary, The, 237. 
 Disputation (Greene), 102. 
 Disraeli, Benjamin, 228, 316, 317, 
 
 318, 327. 
 Dissensions in Athens and Rome, 
 
 Discourse on the, 225. 
 Dissertation on Epistles ofPhalaris, 
 
 229. 
 
 Dissertation on Roast Pig, A, 308. 
 Diurnall, 217. 
 Dobell, Bertram, 176, 339. 
 Dobell, Sydney, 326. 
 Dobson, Austin, 234, 241. 
 Doctor, The, 311. 
 
 Doctor Faustus, 85, 123, 124, 128. 
 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce , 
 
 182. 
 
 Dodgson, Charles Lutwidge, 357. 
 Dolce, Ludovico, 94. 
 Dombey and Son, 358. 
 Don Bartholomew of Bath, 155. 
 Don Carlos, 207. 
 Don Juan, 208, 293, 294, 299 n., 
 
 357. 
 
 Don Sebastian, 198. 
 Donaueschingcn Passion Play, 85. 
 Donne, John, 99, 145, 168, 172, 
 
 173, 176, 177, 178, 187, 192, 
 
 193, 194, 200, 251, 321. 
 Dorastus and Fawnia. See Pan- 
 
 dosto. 
 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 
 
 209. 
 
 Dostoievsky, 143, 323. 
 Doubk Dealer, The, 203. 
 Doubk Marriage, The, 145, 148. 
 Douglas, 248. 
 
 Douglas, Gavin, 55, 59, 63, 76, 272. 
 D'Outremeuse, Jean, 30. 
 Down the burn, Davie, love, 272. 
 Downfall of the Earl of Huntingdon, 
 
 139. 
 
 Dowson, Ernest, 209. 
 Doyle, Francis Hastings, 324. 
 Dramatic Idylls, 333 n. 
 Dramatic Lyrics, 331. 
 Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 
 
 331. 
 Dramatic Sketches of Northern 
 
 Mythology, 289. 
 Dramatic Studies, 345. 
 
378 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Dramatis Personae, 331. 
 Drant, Thomas, 103. 
 Drapier's Letters, 225. 
 Drayton, Michael, 99, 112, 128, 
 
 139, 155, 158, 162, 163, 164, 168, 
 
 345. 
 
 Dream, The, 294. 
 Dream Children, 308. 
 Dream of Fair Women, A, 327. 
 Dream of Gerontius, The, 324. 
 Dream of the Rood, The, 5, 6. 
 Dreamthorp, 326. 
 Dreme, The, 63. 
 Drummer, The, 225. 
 Drummond, William, 164, 170. 
 Dryden, John, 17, 37, 74, 118, 169, 
 
 177, 193, 194-200, 202,203, 205, 
 
 206, 207, 208, 209,210,211,224, 
 
 226, 230, 232, 233, 237, 251, 
 
 268, 277, 299, 321. 
 Du Bartas, Sylvester, 109. 
 Du Bellay, 156, 158, 161, 163. 
 Duchess of Malfi, The, 138, 145, 150. 
 Ductor Dubitantium, 187. 
 Duenna, The, 250. 
 Dugdale, Sir William, 216. 
 Duke of Gandia, The, 336. 
 Duke of Mercia, The, 325. 
 Duke of Milan, The, 146. 
 Dulce Bellum Inexpertis, 154. 
 Dumb Wife, The, 62. 
 Dunbar, William, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 
 
 63. 
 
 Duncan Campbell, 219. 
 Dunciad, The, 206, 218, 229, 231. 
 Duns Scotus, 12. 
 Dunton, John, 218. 
 D'Urfey, Thomas, 206. 
 Dutch Courtezan, The, 142. 
 Dyer, John, 267, 308. 
 
 'E. K.', 105, 157. 
 
 Eagle's Nest, The, 354. 
 
 Earl of Toulouse, The, 25. 
 
 Earle, John, 114. 
 
 Early Italian Poets, The, 338. 
 
 Earthly Paradise, The, 289, 337. 
 
 East India Bill, Speech on the, 260. 
 
 Eastward Ho, 140, 142. 
 
 Ebb Tide, The, 366. 
 
 Ecce Homo, 349. 
 
 Ecclesiastes (Wilkins), 214. 
 
 Ecclesiastical History, 5, 8. 
 
 Ecclesiastical Polity, Laws of, 18(3. 
 
 Eclogues (Barclay), 80. 
 
 Eclogues (Gay), 236. 
 
 Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Songs, 154. 
 
 Ecstasy, The, 172. 
 
 Edgeworth, Maria, 316. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, The, 306-7, 346. 
 
 Edward (Ballad), 71. 
 
 Edward 1, 121. 
 
 Edward II, 123, 128, 138. 
 
 Edward IV, 144. 
 
 Edwards, Richard, 89, 92, 93, 154. 
 
 Edwin and Angelina, 257. 
 
 Edwin Drood, 358. 
 
 Edwin of Deira, 326. 
 
 Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat, 15. 
 
 Egoist, The, 240, 316, 364. 
 
 Eicon Basilike, 183, 188. 
 
 Eiconodastes, 183, 188. 
 
 Ekgies (Donne), 169. 
 
 Elegy on a Mad Dog, 257. 
 
 Elegy on Mrs. Mary Blaize, 257. 
 
 Elegy on the Duke of Richmond, 163. 
 
 Elegy to the Memory of an Unfor- 
 tunate Lady, 231. 
 
 Elegy written in a Country Church* 
 yard, An, 268, 269, 278. 
 
 Elene, 5, 6. 
 
 Elephant in the Moon, The, 209. 
 
 Elfrida, 268. 
 
 Eliot, George, 356, 361. 
 
 Elisa, 168. 
 
 Eliza, 237. 
 
 Elliott, Ebenezer, 324. 
 
 Eloisa to Abelard, 231. 
 
 Elton, Professor Oliver, 165 n., 
 280 n., 291 n., 292 n., 303, 311. 
 
 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 97. 
 
 Emare, 25. 
 
 Emblems, 176. 
 
 Emma, 316. 
 
 Empedocles on Etna and other 
 Poems, 341. 
 
 Empress of Morocco, The, 207. 
 
 Empty Purse and other Poems, The, 
 342. 
 
 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 347. 
 
 Endimion (Lyly), 120. 
 
 Endymion (Disraeli), 317. 
 
 Endymion (Keats), 298, 306, 307. 
 
 England's Helicon, 154. 
 
 England's Heroical Epistles, 128, 
 165. . 
 
 England's Parnassus, 154. 
 
 English and Scottish Popular Bal- 
 lads (Child), 68. 
 
INDEX 
 
 379 
 
 English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, 
 292 
 
 English Chronicle, The (Alfred), 9. 
 
 English Constitution, The, 354. 
 
 English Dramatic Posts, The, 229. 
 
 English Eclogues, 289. 
 
 English Garden, The, 268. 
 
 English Humourists of the Eigh- 
 teenth Century, 360. 
 
 English Idylls, 328, 329. 
 
 English Mail Coach, The, 310. 
 
 English Padlock, The, 234. 
 
 English Traveller, The, 144. 
 
 English Utilitarians, The, 355. 
 
 Englishman, The, 224. 
 
 Englishman in Italy, An, 332. 
 
 Englishmen for my Money, 139. 
 
 Enoch Arden and other Poems, 328. 
 
 Enquiry concerning Human Under- 
 standing, An, 261 n. 
 
 Enquiry into the Present State of 
 Polite Learning in Europe, An, 
 256. 
 
 Enquiry into the Principles of 
 Morals, An, 261 n. 
 
 Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations, 
 An, 263. 
 
 Envoi to Bukton, 38 n. 
 
 Envoi to Scogan, 38 n. 
 
 Eothen, 356. 
 
 Epic and Romance, 68 n. 
 
 Epic of Hades, The, 344. 
 
 Epic on Women, 343. 
 
 Epicoene. See The Silent Woman. 
 
 Epipsychidion, 295-7. 
 
 Episodes in a Life of Adventure* 
 357. 
 
 Epistle of Karshish, The, 332. 
 
 Epistle to Cupid, An, 50. 
 
 Epistle to Curio, An, 268. 
 
 Epistle to Davie, 274 n. 
 
 Epistle to Mr. Thomson, 267. 
 
 Epistles (Burns), 273. 
 
 Epistles (Daniel), 164. 
 
 Epistles (Donne), 169, 177. 
 
 Epistles (Gay), 236. 
 
 Epistles (Pope), 232. 
 
 Epistula ad Dakyns, 344. 
 
 Epitaph on a Hare, An, 270. 
 
 Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs, and 
 Sonnets, 154. 
 
 Epithalamium, 158, 298. 
 
 Epsom Wells, 206. 
 
 Erasmus, 95, 97, 98. 
 
 Erechtheus, 334. 
 
 Erewhon, 366. 
 Erewhon Revisited, 366. 
 Eschenbach, Wolfram von, 25. 
 Esmond, 360. 
 
 Essay concerning Human Under- 
 standing, 214. 
 Essay of Dramatic Poesy, An t 198, 
 
 200, 209. 
 Essay , of Heroic Plays, An, 198, 
 
 200. 
 
 Essay on Christianity, An, 295. 
 Essay on Comedy, An, 204, 363. 
 Essay on Criticism, An, 209, 224, 
 
 230. 
 
 Essay on Man, 228, 232, 233. 
 Essay on Shakespeare (Dennis), 
 
 229. 
 Essay on the Principles of Human 
 
 Action, An, 309. 
 Essay on Translated Verse, An, 
 
 209. 
 Essay towards a New Theory of 
 
 Vision, 228. 
 
 Essay towards a Philosophical Lan- 
 guage, 214. 
 Essay upon Poetry, An (Sheffield), 
 
 209. 
 
 Essays (Bacon), 117. 
 Essays (Macaulay), 346-7. 
 Essays and Studies, 352. 
 Essays in Criticism, 209, 351. 
 Essays Moral and Political, 261 n. 
 Essays of Elia, 308. 
 Essence of Christianity, The, 362. 
 Etherege, Sir George, 201, 203, 210, 
 
 220. 
 
 Ethics of the Dust, The, 354. 
 Eugene Aram, 318. 
 Eunuchus, 90. 
 Euphranor, 340. 
 Euphues, 98, 99, 102, 119. 
 Euphues his Golden Legacy. See 
 
 Rosalynde. 
 Eustace of Kent, 27. 
 Evan Harrington, 364. 
 Evans, Mary Ann. See George 
 
 Eliot. 
 
 Evelina, 313. 
 Evelyn Hope, 332. 
 Evelyn, John, 215. 
 Eve of St. Agnes, The, 302. 
 EveofSt.Mark,3Q2. 
 Evening Walk, The, 283. 
 Ever Green, The, 271, 272. 
 Everyman, 87. 
 
380 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Every Man in his Humour, 140, 
 
 359. 
 
 Every Man out of his Humour, 140. 
 Evolution and Ethics, Lectures on, 
 
 328 ^ 
 
 Examiner, The, 225. 
 Example of Virtue, The, 51, 52. 
 Excursion, The, 275, 281-8, 306. 
 Exodus, 5, 6. 
 
 Expansion of England, The, 349. 
 Ex Voto, 334. 
 Eyes and Tears, 179. 
 
 Fabk of Midas, The, 227. 
 
 Fable of the Bees, 229. 
 
 Fables (Gay), 235. 
 
 Fables Ancient and Modern, 199. 
 
 Fabyan, Robert, 155. 
 
 Faerie Queene, The, 52, 157, 158- 
 
 60, 213. 
 
 Fair Maid of Perth, The, 315. 
 Fair Maid of the West, The, 144. 
 Fair Penitent, The, 208. 
 Fair Quaker of Deal, The, 249. 
 Fair Quarrel, A, 144. 
 Fairfax, Edward, 109, 177. 
 Faithful Shepherdess, The, 148. 
 Falcon, The, 330. 
 Falconer, William, 268. 
 Fall of Hyperion, The, 301. 
 Fall of Robespierre, The, 281. 
 Falls of Princes, The, 48, 155. 
 False Alarm, The, 254. 
 False Delicacy, 249. 
 False One, The, 148. 
 Familiar Studies of Men and Books, 
 
 366 n. 
 Famous History of Friar Bacon, 
 
 124. 
 
 Famous Victories of Henry V, 130. 
 Fan, The, 235. 
 Fancies, The, 149. 
 Fanshawe, Lady, 215. 
 Farina, 363. 
 
 Farmer's Ingle, The, 272. 
 Farquhar, George, 201, 205, 245. 
 Fatal Curiosity, The, 248. 
 Fatal Dowry, The, 145, 208. 
 Fatal Marriage, The, 208. 
 Fates of the Apostles, The, 5. 
 Faust (Goethe), 291. 
 Faustbuch, 123. 
 Fear, Ode on, 269. 
 Fear of Death, On tlic, 309. 
 
 Feeling of Immortality in Youth, 
 
 On the, 309. 
 
 Felix Holt the Radical, 362. 
 Female Phaeton, The, 234. 
 Fenton, Elijah, 231. 
 Ferdinand, Count Fathom, 242. 
 Fergusson, Robert, 54, 63, 272, 273. 
 Ferishtah's Fancies, 333 n. 
 Ferrers, George, 155. 
 Festus, 326. 
 Feuerbach, 362. 
 Feuillerat, Albert, 99 n. 
 Fidelia, 167. 
 Fidessa, 164. 
 
 Field, Nathaniel, 145, 151. 
 Fielding, Henry, 238 n., 240, 249, 
 
 313, 315, 355, 359. 
 Fielding, Sarah, 244. 
 Fifine at the Fair, 333 n. 
 Fifteen Sermons, 229. 
 Fight, The, 309. 
 Fight about the Azores, 112. 
 Filostrato, 39. 
 Finnsburh, 1, 3. 
 Florentine, Giovanni, 130. 
 Firmilian, 326. 
 First Principks, 350. 
 Fisher, John, 95. 
 FitzGerald, Edward, 327, 339. 
 Five Hundred Points of Good 
 
 Husbandry, 154. 
 Flaming-Heart, The, 173. 
 Flatman, Thomas, 210. 
 Flaubert, 311, 323. 
 Fleece, The, 267. 
 Fleet Street Eclogues, 346. 
 Fleire, The, 150. 
 
 Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 216. 
 Fletcher, Giles (the elder), 164, 
 
 167. 
 
 Fletcher, Giles (the younger), 167. 
 Fletcher, John, 135, 137, 138, 146- 
 
 9, 167, 195, 200, 251, 353. 
 Fletcher, Phineas, 167. 
 Flight of the Duchess, The, 331. 
 Florio, John, 108, 210. 
 Floris and Blancheflur, 27. 
 Flower and the Leaf, The, 43. 
 Flower of Courtesy, Thz, 42. 
 Flowers of Sion, 170. 
 Fly, The, 276. 
 Flying Post, The, 218. 
 Flyting (Montgomerie), 63. 
 Flyting of Kennedy and Dunbar, 
 
 The, 59, 61. 
 
INDEX 
 
 381 
 
 Fo'c's'le Yarns, 344. 
 
 Fotty of an Old Man's Marrying, 
 
 65. 
 
 Fool of Quality, The, 313 n. 
 Foote, Samuel, 249. 
 Force of Religion, The, 236. 
 Ford, John, 138, 143, 149. 
 Fordun, John of, 54. 
 Forest, The, 170. 
 Forest Minstrel, The, 305. 
 Former Age, The, 38 n. 
 Fors Clavigera, 353, 354. 
 Forsaken Garden, The, 335. 
 Forster, John, 351, 358. 
 Fortescue, Sir John, 75. 
 Forth Feasting, 170. 
 Fortunes of Nigel, The, 206, 314. 
 Four Georges, The, 360. 
 Four P. P., The, 88. 
 Four Plays in One, 147. 
 Four Prentices, The, 147. 
 Four Sons of Aymon, The, 76. 
 France, An Ode, 281. 
 France, Anatole, 241, 311. 
 Francis, Sir Philip, 265. 
 Fraser's Magazine, 349, 359. 
 Fraternity of Vagabonds, The, 110. 
 Fraunce, Abraham, 49, 104. 
 Free Thoughts upon the Present 
 
 State of Affairs, 225. 
 Freeman, Edward Augustus, 263, 
 
 349. 
 
 French Revolution, The, 347. 
 Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, 
 
 124. 
 
 Friars of Berwick, The, 59. 
 Friend, The, 312. 
 Friendship in Absence, 178. 
 Friendship in Fashion, 207. 
 Friendship's Garland, 352. 
 Frobisher, Martin, 111, 112. 
 Froissart, 40 n., 76. 
 Frost at Midnight, 281. 
 Froude, James Anthony, 115, 349. 
 Fuller, Thomas, 108, 116, 192. 
 Funeral, The, 220. 
 Furnivall, Dr. F. J., 68 n. 
 
 Gallathea, 120. 
 
 Gait, John, 367. 
 
 Game at Chess, A, 144. 
 
 Gammer Gurton's Needle, 90, 91. 
 
 Garden, The, 179 n. 
 
 Garden of Cyrus, The, 188, 190. 
 
 Garden of Proserpine, The, 334. 
 
 Garland of Laurel, The, 80. 
 Garmond of Guid Ladies, 58. 
 Gamier, Robert, 93, 94, 95. 
 Garrick, David, 246 n., 249, 252. 
 Garth, Samuel, 237. 
 Gascoigne, George, 91, 94, 105, 
 
 131, 154-5. 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 317. 
 Gaston de Latour, 355. 
 Gauden, John, 188. 
 Gay, John, 235, 237, 249, 265. 
 Gebir, 303. 
 Gensrides, 28. 
 Genesis, 5, 6. 
 Genesis (Swinburne), 335. 
 Genesis and Exodus, 14. 
 Gentle Craft, The, 103. 
 Gentle Shepherd, The, 271. 
 Gentleman Dancing -Master, The, 
 
 202. 
 
 Gentleman Usher, The, 142. 
 Gentleman's Magazine, The, 252. 
 Geoffrey Hamlyn, 363. 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 12, 16, 18, 
 
 26, 94, 155. 
 George a Greene, 125. 
 Georgian Poetry, 281. 
 Germ, The, 338. 
 Germania, 1, 3. 
 Gertrude of Wyoming, 305. 
 Gerusalemme Liberata, 109, 177. 
 Gesta Romanorum, 29, 50, 1 30. 
 Geste Hystoriak, 26. 
 Geste of King Horn, 20. 
 Giaour, The, 292. 
 Gibbon, Edward, 262. 
 Gifford, William, 307, 309. 
 Gift of Preaching, The, 214. 
 Gil Bias, 242. 
 
 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 111. 
 Gilchrist, Alexander, 277 n. 
 Gildon, Charles, 229. 
 Giles, Peter, 52 n. 
 Giraldus Cambrensis, 12. 
 Gissing, George, 366. 
 Gladiators, The, 367. 
 Glanvill, Joseph, 214. 
 Glapthorne, Henry, 151. 
 Glasgerion, 66, 70. 
 Glasgow, 327. 
 
 Glass of Government, The, 91. 
 Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan 
 
 357. 
 
 Glover, Richard, 268. 
 Gnaphaeus, 91. 
 
382 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Go, Lovely Rose, 177. 
 
 Goblin Market, 343. 
 
 Goblins, The, 151. 
 
 God and Mammon, 346 n 
 
 God's Promises, 87. 
 
 Godley, A. D., 93 n. 
 
 Godric of Finchale, St., 32. 
 
 Godwin, William, 263, 284, 294, 
 
 295, 313. 
 
 Goethe, 291, 320, 347, 352. 
 Gogol, 357. 
 
 Golagros and Gawain, 24. 
 Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, 
 
 The, 76. 
 
 Golden Butterfly, The, 367. 
 Golden Grove, The, 187. 
 Golden Legend, The, 31, 75. 
 Golden Targe, The, 58. 
 Golding, Arthur, 109. 
 Goldsmith, Oliver, 255, 274. 
 Gondibert, 180. 
 Good and the Bad, The, 114. 
 Good-Natured Man, The, 257. 
 Good Orison of Our Lady, 15. 
 Good Thoughts in Bad Times, 
 
 192. 
 
 Googe, Barnabe, 154, 157 n. 
 Gorboduc, 94, 105. 
 Gordon, G. S., 113%. 
 Gosson; Stephen, 93, 99, 106. 
 Gould, Gerald, 130 n. 
 Gower, John, 13, 40, 42, 46 y 49, 51, 
 
 56, 134. 
 Grace Abounding, 212, 213. 
 
 Grafton, Richard, 12, 107, 128. 
 
 Grammarian's Funeral, The, 332, 
 334. 
 
 Grand Cyrus, Le, 197. 
 
 Grantchester, 346. 
 
 Grass of Parnassus, 356. 
 
 Grave, The, 268. 
 
 Gray, Allan, 63. 
 
 Gray, Thomas, 49, 254. 267, 268, 
 270, 278, 321. 
 
 Grazzini, 91. 
 
 Great Duke of Florence, The, 146. 
 
 Great Expectations, 358. 
 
 Great Hoggarty Diamond, The, 359. 
 
 Great Lover, The, 346. 
 
 Greatness, Of, 211. 
 
 Greek Studies, 355. 
 
 Green, John Richard, 212, 349. 
 
 Green Linnet, The, 283. 
 
 Green, Matthew, 268. 
 
 Green, Thomas Hill, 350. 
 
 Greene, Robert, 87, 102, 110, 
 
 124-5, 127, 128, 131, 136, 155. 
 Greene's Tu Quoque (The City 
 
 Gattant), 150. 
 Gregory, Pope, 8. 
 Greville, Fulke, 95, 154, 164, 
 Grierson, H. J. C., 18 n., 169 n. 
 Griffin, Bartholomew, 164. 
 Grim, the Cottier of Croydon, 139, 
 
 141. 
 
 Grimald, Nicholas, 87, 154. 
 Gringoire, 78. 
 Groatsworth of Wit, A, 102. 
 Grocyn, William, 95. 
 Grongar Hill, 267. 
 Grosseteste, Robert, 12. 
 Grote, George, 312. 
 Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy. 
 
 The, 200. 
 
 Grundtvig, S. H., 68 n. 
 Gryll Grange, 318. 
 Guardian, The, 179, 224. 
 Guevara, 76, 77, 98. 
 Guerin, Eugenie de, 352. 
 Gulling Sonnets, 164. 
 Gulliver's Travels, 226. 
 GulVs Horn-book, The, 110. 
 Gummere, F. B., 66, 68 n. 
 Gustibus, De, 332. 
 Guthlac, 5. 
 Guy Mannering, 314. 
 Guy of Warwick, 20, 21, 49, 92. 
 Gycia, 344. 
 
 Habington, William, 173, 
 
 Hajji Baba, 318. 
 
 Hakluyt, Richard, 9, 111. 
 
 Hakluytus Posthumus. See Pur- 
 chas his Pilgrims. 
 
 Hales, J. W., 68 n. 
 
 Hales, John, 188. 
 
 Hales, Thomas de, 33. 
 
 Halifax, George Saville, Marquis 
 of, 200, 210, 213, 221. 
 
 Hall, Edward, 107, 128. 
 
 Hall, John, 180. 
 
 Hall, Joseph, 110, 113, 155, 169, 
 187. 
 
 Hallam, Henry, 312. 
 
 Hallowe'en, 273. 
 
 Hamilton, William, of Bangour, 
 272. 
 
 Hamilton, William, of Gilbert- 
 field, 271. 
 
INDEX 
 
 383 
 
 Hamlet, 89, 121, 125, 127, 132-4. 
 
 Hammond, Henry, 188. 
 
 Handlynge Synne, 15, 16 
 
 Hard Weather, 364. 
 
 Hardy, Thomas, 365. 
 
 Hardyknute, 272. 
 
 Harleian MS., 32. 
 
 Harman, Thomas, 110. 
 
 Harmony of the Church, The, 166. 
 
 Harold (Lytton), 316. 
 
 Harold (Tennyson), 330. 
 
 Harold the Dauntless, 290. 
 
 Harrington, James, 192. 
 
 Harrison, Frederic, 354. 
 
 Harrison, William, 107. 
 
 Harry, Blind, 53. 
 
 Harry Gill, 288. 
 
 Harry Lorrequer, 318. 
 
 Harry Richmond, 364 
 
 Harvey, Gabriel, 98, 100, 104, 156. 
 
 Haughton, William, 139, 143. 
 
 Haunch of Venison, The, 257. 
 
 Hauntedandthe Haunters, The, 318. 
 
 Haunted House, The, 305. 
 
 HavewithyoutoSaffronW olden, 110. 
 
 Havelock the Dane, 20, 21. 
 
 Hawes, Stephen, 51, 59, 78. 
 
 Hawker, Robert Stephen, 324,. 
 
 Hawkesworth, Dr., 244. 
 
 Hawkins, Sir John, 111. 
 
 Hawthorn and Lavender, 344. 
 
 Haystack in the Floods, The, 336. 
 
 Haywood, Mrs., 238. 
 
 Hazlitt, William, 201, 202, 221, 
 244, 263, 269, 307, 308, 309, 310, 
 319, 352. 
 
 Headlong Hall, 318. 
 
 Hearn, Lafcadio, 357. 
 
 Heart of Midlothian, The, 314. 
 
 Heaven, 346. 
 
 Heaven and Earth, 292, 294 n. 
 
 Heber, Reginald, 324. 
 
 Hecatompathia, 160. 
 
 Hecatommithi, 133. 
 
 Hegel, 286 n. 
 
 Heine, 292. 
 
 Heiress, The, 251. 
 
 Helenore, or the Fortunate Shep- 
 herdess, 272. 
 
 Hellas, 297. 
 
 Hellenics, 304. 
 
 Henderson, T. F., 68 n. 
 
 Henley, William Ernest, 168, 344, 
 355. 
 
 Henrietta Temple, 317. 
 
 Henry IV, 129, 138. 
 
 Henry V, 129. 
 
 Henry VI, 124, 128-9. 
 
 Henry VIII, 137. 
 
 Henry VIII, 73, 88, 96. 
 
 Henry and Emma, 233. 
 
 Henry of Huntingdon, 12. 
 
 Henryson, Robert, 28, 42, 56, 56 
 61, 63. 
 
 Henslowe, Philip, 139. 
 
 Heptalogia, The, 343. 
 
 Herbert, George, 173, 174, 187, 
 190, 192, 193. 
 
 Herbert, Lord, of Cherbury, 190. 
 
 Herd, David, 272. 
 
 Heredia, 304, 338. 
 
 Heretic's Tragedy, The, 332, 333. 
 
 Hereward the Wake, 363. 
 
 Hermit, The, 238, 266. 
 
 Hero and Leander, 109, 127. 
 
 Heroes and Hero- Worship, 348. 
 
 Heroic Poetry, 200. 
 
 Heroic Stanzas on the Death of 
 Oliver Cromwell, 194. 
 
 Herrick, Robert, 171. 
 
 Hertha, 334. 
 
 Hesperides, 171. 
 
 Hew of Eglintoun, Sir, 64. 
 
 Heywood, John, 88, 89, 138, 145. 
 
 Heywood, Thomas, 130, 144, 147. 
 
 Hickes, George, 270. 
 
 Hieronimo (First Part), 121. 
 
 Higden, Ranulph, 12, 30. 
 
 Higgins, John, 156. 
 
 High Tide on the Coast of Lincoln- 
 shire, 345. 
 
 Hilarius, 84. 
 
 Hind and the Panther, The, 199. 
 
 Histoires tragiques, 133. 
 
 Historia Danica, 133. 
 
 HistoriaDestructionisTroiae,2G,48. 
 
 Historia Regum Britanniae, 12, 16, 
 94. 
 
 Historical Register, The, 240. 
 
 History of Animated Nature, 257. 
 
 History of Brazil, 311. 
 
 History of Christianity, 312. 
 
 History of Civilization, 348. 
 
 History of England (Froude), 349. 
 
 History of England (Hume), 262. 
 
 History of England (Lingard), 312. 
 
 History of England (Macaulay),346. 
 
 History of England (Smollett), 243. 
 
 History of England in the Eigh- 
 teenth Century, 349. 
 
384 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 History of English Poetry ( Warton), 
 
 268. 
 
 History of European Morals, 349. 
 History of Frederick the Great, 348. 
 History of Godfrey of Boulogne, 76. 
 History of Greece (Grote), 312. 
 History of Greece (Mitford), 312. 
 History of Greece (Thirlwall), 312. 
 History of Henry VII, 117. 
 History of Henry VIII, 190. 
 History of John Bull, The, 227. 
 History of Latin Christianity, 312. 
 History of My Own Time, 216. 
 History of Rationalism, 349. 
 History of Rome, 312. 
 History of Scotland, 262. 
 History of Squire Meldrum, The, 
 
 64. 
 History of the Civil Wars (Daniel), 
 
 164. 
 History of the English Reformation, 
 
 216. 
 
 History of the Great Rebellion, 191. 
 History of the Jews, 312. 
 History of the Last Four Years of 
 
 Queen Anne, 225. 
 History of the Norman Conquest^ 
 
 349. 
 History of the Peninsular War 
 
 (Napier), 312. 
 History of the Peninsular War 
 
 (Southey), 311, 312. 
 History of the Plague, The, 219. 
 History of the Reign of Charles V, 
 
 262. 
 
 History of the World (Orosius), 8. 
 History of the World (Raleigh), 113. 
 History of Tithes, A, 119. 
 Histriomastix, 142. 
 Hoadly, Joseph, 249. 
 Hobbes, Thomas, 179, 191, 210. 
 Hoby, Sir Thomas, 102. 
 Hoffmann, Tragedy of, 139. 
 Hog hath lost his Pearl, The, 150. 
 Hogg, James, 272, 305, 307. 
 Hohenlinden, 305. 
 Holcroft, Thomas, 251. 
 Holinshed, Raphael, 12, 107, 128, 
 
 129, 133, 136. 
 Holland, Philemon, 108. 
 Holland, Richard, 28, 53. 
 Holy and Profane States, 1 92. 
 Holy-Cross Day, 332, 334. 
 Holy Dying, 187. 
 Holy Fair, 273, 274 n. 
 
 Holy Living, 187. 
 
 Holy War, The, 212. 
 
 Holy Willie's Prayer, 273. 
 
 Home, John, 248. 
 
 Homer, 109, 141, 191, 224, 230. 
 
 Homer (Pope's translation), 231. 
 
 Honest Whore, The, 143. 
 
 Hood, Thomas, 304. 
 
 Hooker, Richard, 98, 101, 186, 
 
 188, 193, 210. 
 Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's 
 
 Return from Ireland, 180. 
 Horestes, 93. 
 
 Horne, Richard Hengist, 326. 
 Hospital Verses, 344. 
 Hound of Heaven, The, 345. 
 Hours in a Library, 356. 
 Hours of Idleness, 292. 
 House of Fame, The., 39. 
 House of Life, The, 339. 
 House of the Wolfings, The, 338. : 
 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey. 
 
 See Surrey. 
 
 How it strikes a Contemporary, 332. 
 How Sleep the Brave, 269. 
 How they brought the good News, 
 
 332. 
 ' Huchoun of the Awle Royale,' 
 
 35, 54. 
 
 Hudibras, 208. 
 Hugh of Lincoln, 70. 
 Hughes, Thomas, 94. 
 Hugo, Victor, 196, 315, 323, 335, 
 
 352. 
 
 Human Nature, On, 192. 
 Hume, David, 159, 192, 261. 
 Humour out of Breath, 151. 
 Humphry Clinker, 242, 243. 
 Hunchback, The, 326. 
 Hunnis, William, 89, 92, 154. 
 Hunt, Holman, 338. 
 Hunt, Leigh, 144, 201, 298, 299, 
 
 307, 308. 
 
 Hunting of the Cheviot, The, 70. 
 Huon of Bordeaux, 76, 92. 
 Husband's Message, The, 4. 
 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 328, 351. 
 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 
 
 191. 
 
 Hyde Park, 150. 
 Hydriotaphia, 188, 190. 
 Hylas, 228. 
 
 Hymen's Triumph, 164. 
 Hymn of Man, The, 335. 
 Hymn to Contentment, 238. 
 
INDEX 
 
 385 
 
 Hymn to Diana, 171. 
 Hymn to Ignorance, The, 269. 
 Hymn to Proserpine, 334. 
 Hymn to Saint Theresa, 173. 
 Hymn to the Pillory, 218. 
 Hymns (Spenser), 156, 158. 
 Hymns to Astraea, 166. 
 Hymnus in Cynthiam, 104 n. 
 Hypatia, 362. 
 Hyperion, 232 .300. 
 
 Iceland, 8. 
 
 Idea of a Patriotic King, An, 228. 
 
 Idea of a University, The, 349. 
 
 Idea's Mirror, 163, 164. 
 
 Idkr, The, 253. 
 
 Idylls and Legends of Inverburn,34:3. 
 
 Idyllsofthe King,The, 17,327,329. 
 
 // you know not me, you know 
 nobody, 144. 
 
 II Penseroso, 181. 
 
 Imaginary Conversations, 310, 311. 
 
 Imaginary Portraits, 355. 
 
 Importance of Being Earnest, The, 
 344. 
 
 Importance of the Guardian Con- 
 sidered, The, 225. 
 
 Imposture, The, 150. 
 
 Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 
 362. 
 
 Improvixatore, in Three Fyttes, 
 with other Poems, The, 325. 
 
 In a Balcony, 331. 
 
 In a Gondola, 331. 
 
 In a Laboratory, 332. 
 
 In Memoriam, 327, 328, 330, 351. 
 
 In Memory of Walter Savage 
 Landor, 334. 
 
 In the Bay, 335. 
 
 In the Key of Blue, 355. 
 
 Inchbald, Mrs., 251, 316. 
 
 Inchcape Rock, 289. 
 
 Inconstancy, 178. 
 
 Indian Emperor, The, 196, 197. 
 
 Induction to the Mirror of Magis- 
 trates, 155. 
 
 Ingelend, Thomas, 91. 
 
 Ingelow, Jean, 346. 
 
 Inglis, Sir James, 64. 
 
 Ingoldsby Legends, The, 327. 
 
 Inland Voyage, The, 366 n. 
 
 Inn Album, The, 333. 
 
 Inner Temple Masque, The, 166. 
 
 Inquiry Concerning Political Jus- 
 tice, An, 263. 
 
 Inquiry into the, Sublime and the 
 
 Beautiful, An, 258. 
 Insatiate Countess, The, 142. 
 Instructions to a Painter, 111, 209. 
 Intentions, 344. 
 Interlude of Virtue, 80. 
 Interlude of the Four Elements, 88. 
 Interludes, 88. 
 Introduction to the Literature of 
 
 Europe, An, 312. 
 Invasion of the Crimea, The, 356. 
 Ion, 326. 
 lonica, 344. 
 Irene, 248, 252. 
 Irish Melodies, 304. 
 Isaac Comnenus, 326. 
 Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, 301. 
 Isis, 268. 
 
 Isle of Dogs, The, 120. 
 Isle of Gulls, The, 151. 
 It is Never too Late to Mend, 315. 
 Italian in England, An, 332. 
 Italy, 305. 
 
 Itinerary (Leland), 97. 
 Ivanhoe, 314. 
 
 Jack of Newbury, 103. 
 
 Jacke Jugeler, 90. 
 
 Jacob and Esau, 91. 
 
 James I (of Scotland), 55, 62. 
 
 James IV, 125, 131. 
 
 Jamea V, 62, 63. 
 
 James, G. P. R., 315. 
 
 James, Henry, 318, 333, 365. 
 
 Jane Eyre, 361. 
 
 Jane Shore (Churchyard), 154 
 
 Jane Shore (Rowe), 208. 
 
 Jaspar, 289. 
 
 Jealous Lovers, The, 151. 
 
 Jealous Wife, The, 249. 
 
 Jeanroy, Alfred, 68 n. 
 
 Jefferies, Richard, 357. 
 
 Jeffrey, Francis,306-7,347,358,359. 
 
 Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, 238 w. 
 
 Jephthes, 87. 
 
 Jereslaus' Wife, 50. 
 
 Jest of Sir Gawain, The, 24. 
 
 Jeu de Robin et de Marion, 83. 
 
 Jew of Malta, The, 123, 128. 
 
 Jinny the Just, 234. 
 
 Joan of Arc, 289. 
 
 Job, 237. 
 
 Jocasta, 94. 
 
 I Jocelin of Brakelond, 12. 
 ' Jock and Jinny, 63. 
 
386 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Jock o' the Side, 71. 
 
 Jocoseria, 333 n. 
 
 Jodelle, 93. 
 
 John a Kent and John a Cumber, 1 39. 
 
 John Buncle, 244. 
 
 John Gilpin, 270. 
 
 John of Fordun, 54 n. 
 
 John of Salisbury, 12. 
 
 John of Trevisa, 30. 
 
 John the Reeve, 21, 26, 62. 
 
 John Woodvill, 308. 
 
 Johnson, James, 273. 
 
 Johnson, Lionel, 343. 
 
 Johnson, Samuel, 116, 170, 194, 
 
 203, 209, 211, 229, 233, 237, 242, 
 
 248, 252-5, 264, 265, 267, 269, 
 
 271, 275, 322, 356. 
 Johnstone, Charles, 244. 
 Jolly Beggars, The, 273. 
 Jonathan Wild, 241, 359. 
 Jonathan, 50. 
 Jones, Inigo, 172. 
 Jonson, Ben, 106, 118, 121, 126, 
 
 130, 131, 138, 139-41, 142, 143, 
 
 146, 151, 159, 162, 169, 170, 171, 
 
 172, 175, 195, 200-1, 217, 246, 
 
 307, 359. 
 
 Joseph Andrews, 241. 
 Joubert, 352.- 
 Journal of a Modern Lady, The, 
 
 227. 
 
 Journal to SteUa, 227. 
 Journey from this World to the 
 
 Next, 241. 
 
 Journey to London, A, 205. 
 Journey to the Hebrides, A, 255. 
 Journey to the Western Islands of 
 
 Scotland, A, 254. 
 Jousting Betwixt Adamson and 
 
 Sym, The, 65. 
 Jovial Grew, The, 151. 
 Joyful Meditation to all England, 
 
 LSL 
 
 Judith, 6, 6. 
 Julia de Roubigne, 313. 
 Julian and Maddalo, 297. 
 Julian the Apostate, 325. 
 Juliana, 5, 6. 
 Julius Caesar, 132. 
 Jusserand, J. J., 55, 99. 
 Justice, 178. 
 
 K., E., 105. 
 
 Keats, John, 116, 160, 233, 266, 
 298-303, 306, 307, 308, 322, 343. 
 
 Keble, John, 324. 
 
 Keith of Ravelston, 326. 
 
 Kelly, Hugh, 249. 
 
 Kenelm Chillingly, 318. 
 
 Kenilworth, 314. 
 
 Kennedy, Walter, 61. 
 
 Ker, W. P., 17 n., 36 n., 46 ., 
 
 66 n., 67, 68 n., 271 n. 
 Kidnapped, 365. - 
 Killigrew, Sir William, 195, 206. 
 Kilmeny, 305. 
 King, Henry, 180. 
 King Alisaunder, 27. 
 King and no King, A, 147. 
 King Arthur, 237. 
 King Arthur's Tomb, 336. 
 King Arthur's Waes-Hael, 325. 
 King Hart, 60. 
 King John, 129. 
 
 King Lear, 12, 107, 127, 129, 132-6. 
 King Victor and King Charles, 331. 
 King's Quair, The, 65. 
 King's Tragedy, The, 339. 
 Kinglake, Alexander, 356. 
 Kingsley, Charles, 342, 362. 
 Kingsley, Henry, 363. 
 Kinmont Willie, 71 n., 290. 
 Kinwelmershe, 94. 
 Kittredge, Prof. G. L., 66, 68 n. 
 Kitty's Confession, 64. 
 Knight of Malta, 148. 
 Knight of the Burning Pestle, The, 
 
 121, 147. 
 
 Knight of the Town, The, 76. 
 Knight's Tale, The, 27, 40 n., 41. 
 Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, 
 
 310. 
 
 Knowles, James Sheridan, 326. 
 Koelbing, Arthur, 79 n. 
 Kokoro, 357. 
 Kubla Khan, 279, 280. 
 Kyd, Thomas, 64, 94, 121, 122, 
 
 127, 133. 
 
 Kynaston, Sir Francis, 180. 
 Kynd Kittock, Ballad of, 59. 
 
 La Belle Dame sans Merci (Keats), 
 
 302. 
 
 La Belle Dame sans Merci (Rcs),42, 
 La Saisiaz, 333. 
 Lachin-y-Oair, 292. 
 Lack of Steadfastness, 38 n. 
 Lacy, John, 201. 
 Lady of Lyons, The, 326. 
 Lady of Pleasure, The, 150. 
 
INDEX 
 
 387 
 
 Lady of Shalott, The, 327, 329. 
 
 Lady of Sorrow, A, 339. 
 
 Lady of the Lake, The, 290, 291. 
 
 Lady Windermere's Fan, 344. 
 
 Lady's Dressing Room, The, 227. 
 
 Lady's Trial, The, 149. 
 
 Laily Worm, The, 72. 
 
 Lalla Rookh, 304. 
 
 V Allegro, 181. 
 
 Lamb, Charles, 116, 144, 167, 192, 
 
 201, 202, 211, 307, 308, 310, 326. 
 Lamb, Mary, 308. 
 Lament for the Makaris, A, 59, 61. 
 Lamia, 116, 299. 
 Lamwell, 25. 
 Lancelot of the Laik, 23. 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 303, 310, 
 
 317, 335. 
 
 Lang, Andrew, 68 n., 356. 
 Langland, William, 10, 36, 42, 
 
 43-6, 81. 
 
 Langley. See Langland. 
 Lansdowne, Lord, 230, 237. 
 Lanthorn and Candle-Light, 110. 
 Laodamia, 232, 288. 
 Lara, 292. 
 
 Lass of Lochroyan, The, 69. 
 Last Ballad and Other Poems, The, 
 
 346 n. 
 
 Last Day, The, 236. 
 Last Days of Pompeii, The, 316. 
 Last Instructions to a Painter, 180. 
 Last Ride Together, The, 332. 
 Last of the Barons, The, 316. 
 Late Murder of the Son upon the 
 
 Mother, A, 149. 
 
 Latimer, Hugh, 96, 96, 188, 210. 
 Latter-Day Pamphlets, 348. 
 Lavengro, 356. 
 Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, The t 
 
 Law Tricks, 151. 
 
 Law, William, 114, 228, 229 
 
 Layamon, 12, 14, 16. 
 
 Lay Sermons, 351. 
 
 Lay of tne Last Minstrel, The, 290. 
 
 Lays of Ancient Rome, 324. 
 
 Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 324. 
 
 Lazarillo de Tormes, 102. 
 
 Le Bossu, 210, 230. 
 
 Le Freine, 25, 62-3. 
 
 Le Sage, 242. 
 
 Leben Jesu, 362. 
 
 Lecky, W. E. H., 214, 349. 
 
 L'Ecole des Femmes, 202. 
 
 VEcole des Maris, 202. 
 
 Lectures on the English Comic 
 
 Writers, 309. 
 
 Lee, Nathaniel, 198, 207. 
 Lee, Sir Sidney, 164. 
 Legend of Good Women, The, 38 n., 
 
 39-40. 
 
 Legend of Jubal, The, 362. 
 Legend of Montrose, A, 314. 
 Legends of Saints (Lydgate), 49. 
 Legion Club, The, 227. 
 Legouis, Emile, 37 n., 282 n. 
 Leith Races, 272. 
 Leland, John, 97. 
 Lenore, 290. 
 Leo X, 312. 
 
 Leoline and Sydanis, 180. 
 Leonidas, 268. 
 Leopardi, 270, 329, 339. 
 L'Estrange, Roger, 218. 
 Letter from Teignmouth, A, 324. 
 Letter of Cupid, The, 42. 
 Letter to a Dissenter, 213. 
 Letter to a Noble Lord, 260, 309. 
 Letter to Lord Ellenborough, 296. 
 Letter to Maria Oisborne, 297. 
 Letter to Sir William Wyndham, A t 
 
 228. 
 
 Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol, 259. 
 Letters of Junius, 265. 
 Letters of Peter Plymley, 306. 
 Letters on a Regicide Peace, 260. 
 Lettres Persanes, 256. 
 Levana and our Ladies of Sorro; 
 
 310. 
 
 Lever, Charles, 318. 
 Leviathan, The, 191. 
 Lewes, George Henry, 362. 
 Lewis, Matthew, 313. 
 Lewti, 233, 281. 
 Libeaus Desconus, 24. 
 Libertine, The, 206. 
 Liberty, 267. 
 Liberty, Ode on, 269. 
 Lichtourfs Dream, 62. 
 Licia, 164. 
 Life, 59. 
 
 Life and Death of Jason, The, 336. 
 Life and Death of Mr. Badman, 
 
 The, 212, 213. 
 
 Life of Lorenzo de Medici, 312. 
 Life of Mrs. Oodolphin, 215. 
 Life of Napoleon (Hazlitt), 309. 
 Life of Nelson (Southey), 311. 
 Life of Our Lady, The, 49. 
 
 O 2 
 
388 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Life of Samuel Johnson, 255. 
 
 Life of Sterling (Carlyle), 348. 
 
 Life of Wesley (Southey), 311. 
 
 Light of Asia, The, 344. 
 
 Light of the World, The, 344. 
 
 Lilith, 338. 
 
 Lillo, George, 248. 
 
 Limberham, 196. 
 
 Limits of Religious Thought, The, 
 
 350. 
 
 Linacre, Thomas, 95, 97. 
 Lindsay, Lady Anne, 272. 
 Lines to his Late Majesty, 177. 
 Lines written above Tintern Abbey, 
 
 233. 
 Lines written among the Euganean 
 
 Hills, 297. 
 Lines written in Dejection near 
 
 Naples, 319. 
 
 Lines written in Kensington Oar- 
 dens, 341. 
 Lines written in Mezeray's History 
 
 of France, 234. 
 Lingard, John, 312. 
 Litany of Nations, The, 335. 
 Little Dorrit, 358, 359. 
 Little French Lawyer, The, 148. 
 Little Jesus, 345. 
 Little Musgrave and Lady Bernard, 
 
 69. 
 
 Lives (Walton), 193. 
 Lives of the Noble Grecians and 
 
 Romans, 108. 
 Lives of the Poets, 254. 
 Lives of the Saints (Barbour)^ 53. 
 Lloyd, Charles, 307. 
 LochieVs Warning, 305. 
 Locke, John, 214, 228, 235, 261. 
 Locker- Lampson, Frederick, 344. 
 Lockhart, John Gibson, 299, 307, 
 
 351. 
 
 Locksley Hall, 328. 
 Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 
 
 330.' 
 
 Locrine, 94, 336. 
 Lodge, Thomas, 21, 87, 102, 106, 
 
 124, 131, 163. 
 Logan, John, 272. 
 Lombard Street, 354. 
 London, 252. 
 London Gazette, The, 217. 
 London Lickpenny, 50. 
 London Lyrics, 344. 
 London Magazine, The, 306, 307, 
 
 310. 
 
 London Merchant, The, 208. 
 London Poems, 343. 
 Lonelich, Henry, 25. 
 LooJdng-Glass, A, 172. 
 Looking-Glass for London and 
 
 England, A, 87, 124. 
 Lord Ingram and Childe Vyet, 70. 
 Lord of the Isles, The, 290. 
 Lord Thomas and Fair Annet, 69. 
 Lord Vllin's Daughter, 305. 
 Lorna Doone, 367. 
 Lorris, Guillaume de, 37. 
 Lotus-Eaters, The, 327. 
 Lounger, The, 313 n. 
 Love and a Bottle, 205. 
 Love and Honour, 206. 
 Love Chase, The, 326. 
 Love for Love, 203, 204. 
 Love in a Tub, 201. 
 Love in a Wood, 202. 
 Love in Several Masques, 240. 
 Love in the Valley, 342. 
 Love is Enough, 338. 
 Love Rune, 33. 
 Lovelace, Richard, 173. 
 Lover's Melancholy, The, 149. 
 Lovers of Gudrun, The, 337. 
 Love's Cruelty, 150. 
 Love's Labour's Lost, 77, 126. 
 Love's Last Shift, 204, 206. 
 Love's Metamorphosis, 120. 
 Love's Sacrifice, 149. 
 Lowell, J. R., 159. 
 Loyal Subject, The, 148. 
 Lucasta, To, 173. 
 Lucrece, 127. 
 Lucretius, 328. 
 Lucy, 288 n. 
 Luria, 331. 
 Luther, Martin. 96. 
 Lycidas, 182, 183, 254, 328. 
 Lydgate, John, 26, 27, 42, 48, 50, 
 
 55, 56, 78, 155. 
 Lyell, Charles, 320, 328, 350. 
 Lying Lover, The, 220. 
 Lyly, John, 76,. 98, 101, 102, 109, 
 
 U9-20, 126, 151. 
 Lyndsay, Sir David, 63, 272. 
 Lyra Innocentium, 324. 
 Lyrical Ballads, 278, 280, 287, 
 
 303. 
 Lytton, Edward George Bulwer, 
 
 Lord, 316, 317, 318, 326. 
 Lytton, Edward Robert Bulwer, 
 
 Lord, ' Owen Meredith', 343. 
 
INDEX 
 
 389 
 
 Mabinogion, 329. 
 
 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 
 
 201, 212, 240, 255, 324, 346, 35& 
 Macbeth, 129, 132-5, 144. 
 MacDonald, George, 367. 
 MacFlecknoe, 198, 205. 
 Machaut, Guillaume de, 40 n. 
 Mackail, J. W., 337 n. 
 Mackenzie, Henry, 313. 
 Maclaren, Ian, 367. 
 Macleod, Fiona (William Sharp), 
 
 367. 
 
 Macpherson, James, 271, 278. 
 Madoc, 289. 
 
 Maestro de Banzar, El, 202. 
 Magnetic Lady, The, 141. 
 Magnificence, 80, 88. 
 Maid of Bath, 249 n. 
 Maid of Honour, The, 146. 
 Maid Marian, 318. 
 Maid's Tragedy, The, 147, 148. 
 Maitland MS., 61, 64. 
 Maitland, Sir Richard, 65. 
 Major, John, 53. 
 Making of Verse, 105. 
 Malcontent, The, 142. 
 Male Regie, La, 50. 
 Mallet, David, 267. 
 Mallock, W. H., 318. 
 Malory, Sir Thomas, 22, 24, 76, 77, 
 
 102, 328, 329, 336. 
 Mamillia, 102. 
 Man of Feeling, The, 313 w. 
 Man of Mode, The, 201. 
 Man of the World, The, 313 n. 
 Man's Place in Nature, 351. 
 Mandeville, Bernard, 229. 
 Mandeville, Sir John, 30, 74, 102, 
 . 110. 
 
 Manfred, 292, 293. 
 Mangan, James Clarence, 324. 
 Manley, Mrs., 238. 
 Mannynge, Robert, of Brunne, 15, 
 
 16.' 
 
 Mansel, Henry Longueville, 349. 
 Mansfield Park, 316. 
 Mantuan, 80, 154, 157. 
 Map, Walter, 19, 25. 
 Marah, 343. 
 
 Marino Faliero (Byron), 292. 
 Marino Faliero (Swinburne), 336. 
 Marius the Epicurean, 355. 
 Marlowe, Christopher, 85, 109, 120, 
 
 122-5, 127, 128, 138, 196, 245. 
 Marmion, 290. 
 
 Marmion, Shakerley, 151, 180, 194. 
 
 Marot, 157 n. 
 
 Marprelate Pamphlets, 109, 110. 
 
 Marriage d la Mods, 196. 
 
 Marriage Ring, The, 187. 
 
 Marryat, Captain, 318. 
 
 Marston, John, 110, 138, 140, 142, 
 
 162, 169. 
 Martial, 171. 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, 358. 
 Martineau, James, 350. 
 Marvell, Andrew, 179. 
 Mary Ambree, 71. 
 Mary Barton, 317. 
 Mary Magdalene, 87. 
 Mary Stuart, 336. 
 Mary Tudor, 325. 
 Mason, William, 268. 
 Masque of Alfred, The, 267. 
 Massacre at Paris, The, 123. 
 Massinger, Philip, 138, 145, 148, 
 
 208, 307. 
 
 Masson, David, 351. 
 Master of Ballantrae, The, 366. 
 Maud, 328, 329. 
 Maupassant, 323. 
 May, Thomas, 151. 
 May Queen, The, 330. 
 Mayne, Jasper, 151. 
 Mayor of Qarratt, Tne, 249 n. 
 Mayor of Queenborough, The, 144. 
 Mazeppa, 292, 294. 
 Measure for Measure, 132-6. 
 Medal, The, 198.* 
 Mediaeval Stage, The (Chambers), 
 
 83 w, 
 
 Melincourt, 318. 
 Melville, G. J. Whyte, 366. 
 Memoirs (Fanshawe), 215. 
 Memoirs of a Cavalier, The, 219. 
 Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerns, 
 
 227. 
 
 Memoirs of the Navy, 215. 
 Memorial Verses to Theophile 
 
 Qautier, 335. 
 Men and Women, 331. 
 Menaechmi, 90. 
 Menaphon, 102. 
 Mental Traveller, The, 276. 
 Menteur, Le, 221. 
 Mercator, 219. 
 
 Merchant of Venice, The, 130. 
 Mercuries, 217. 
 Mercuriu* Anlicus, 217 
 . Mercy, Ode on, 269. 
 
390 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Meredith, George, 41, 132, 172, 204, 
 
 240, 241, 285, 309, 317, 321, 323, 
 
 333, 334, 338, 342-3, 348, 358, 
 
 363. 
 
 Meredith, Owen, 343. 
 Meres, Francis, 162. 
 Merlin, 77. 
 Merman, The, 327. 
 Merope, 334, 341. 
 Merry Wives of Windsor, The, 130. 
 Messidor, 335. 
 Meung, Jean de, 37, 38. 
 Michael, 286. 
 Microcosmographie, 114. 
 Midas, 120. 
 Middkmarch, 362. 
 Middleton, Conyers, 229. 
 Middleton, Thomas, 130, 138, 143, 
 
 146, 147. 
 
 Midshipman Easy, 318. 
 Midsummer Night's Dream, A, 130. 
 Miles Gloriosus, 90. 
 Mill, James, 350. 
 Mill, John Stuart, 327, 350. 
 Mill on the Floss, The, 362. 
 Mill-dams of Binnorie, 67. 
 Miller, Hugh, 350. 
 Mjlman, Henry Hart, 312, 324. 
 Milnes, Richard Monckton, Lord 
 
 Houghton, 327. 
 Milton, John, 17, 115, 168, 170, 
 
 180-6, 217, 224, 230, 270, 300, 
 
 301, 354. 
 
 Minor, The, 249 n. 
 Minot, Laurence, 34, 53. 
 Minstrel, The, 268. 
 Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 
 
 The, 68 n., 290. 
 Minute Philosopher, The, 228. 
 Miracle Plays, 15, 85, 86. 
 Mirour de VOmme. See Speculum 
 
 Meditantis. 
 Mirror, The, 313 n. 
 Mirror for Magistrates, 48, 154, 155. 
 Misanthrope, Le, 195, 203. 
 Miscellanea, 211. 
 
 Miscellaneous Studies (Pater), 355. 
 Miscellanies (Aubrey), 217. 
 Miscellanies (Carlyle), 347. 
 Miscellanies (Cowley), 178. 
 Miscellanies (Fielding), 241. 
 Miscellanies (Swinburne), 352. 
 Miscellany, The, 154. 
 Miscellany Poems, 237. 
 Misfortunes of Arthur, 94. 
 
 Misfortunes of Elphin, The, 318. 
 
 Misogonus, 91. 
 
 Miss Betsy Thoughtless, 238 n. 
 
 Miss Kilmansegg, 305. 
 
 Mistress, The (Cowley), 178. 
 
 Mistress, The (Sedley), 206. 
 
 Mistress, To His Coy, 179. 
 
 Mist's Journal, 218, 219. 
 
 Mitford, William, 312. 
 
 Mithridates, 207. 
 
 Modern Love and Other Poems, 342, 
 343. 
 
 Modern Painters, 353, 354. 
 
 Modest Proposal, <&c., A, 226. 
 
 Moliere, 141, 195, 202, 203, 204, 
 205, 206, 250. 
 
 Moll Flanders, 219. 
 
 Molza, 153. 
 
 Monarchical Tragedies, 170. 
 
 Monastery, The, 314. 
 
 Money, 326. 
 
 Monk, The, 313. 
 
 Monna Innominata, 343. 
 
 Monsieur tf Olive, 142. 
 
 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 263. 
 
 Montaigne, 108, 113, 189, 200, 210, 
 213, 234. 
 
 Montemayor, Jorge de, 100, 126. 
 
 Montesquieu, 256. 
 
 Montgomerie, Alexander, 65. 
 
 Montgomery, James, 323. 
 
 Montgomery, Robert, 323. 
 
 Monthly Review, The, 256. 
 
 Mooncalf, The, 165. 
 
 Moonstone, The, 363. 
 
 Moore, Thomas, 304. 
 
 Moral Essays, 232. 
 
 Moral Fables, 57. 
 
 Moral Ode, 14. 
 
 Morality Plays, 87-8. 
 
 More, Hannah, 248, 313. 
 
 More, Henry, 176, 214. 
 
 More, Sir Thomas, 90, 95-6. 
 
 Morier, J. J., 318. 
 
 Morning Dream, The, 270. 
 
 Morris, Sir Lewis, 344. 
 
 Morris, William, 77 n., 321, 336. 
 
 Morte Arthure (alliterative rom- 
 ance), 21. 
 
 Morte Arthure (metrical romance), 
 21 77 329 
 
 Morte ^Arthur (Malory), 77. 
 
 Morte d 1 Arthur (Tennyson), 328, 
 329. 
 
 Mortimeriados, 165. 
 
INDEX 
 
 391 
 
 Morns, 183. 
 
 Mother Bombie, 120. 
 
 Mother Hubbard's Talc, 157, 158. 
 
 Mountain Daisy, To a, 273. 
 
 Mourning Bride, The, 203. 
 
 Mourning Garment, 102. 
 
 Mourning Maiden, The, 63. 
 
 Mouse, To a, 273. 
 
 Mr. Pope's Welcome from Greece, 
 
 236, 237. 
 
 Much Ado about Nothing, 131 
 Muddiman, Henry, 217. 
 Muiopotmos, 158. 
 Mulberry Garden, The, 206. 
 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of, 
 
 209. 
 
 Monday, Antony, 137, 138. 
 Mundus et Infant, 87. 
 Munera Pulveris, 363. 
 Murphy, Arthur, 248. 
 Murray, John, 292, 293 n., 307. 
 Muses' Loolring-Glass, The, 151. 
 Muses' Elysium, The, 165. 
 Music and Moonlight, 343. 
 Musophilus, 98, 107, 164. 
 Mustapha, 96. 
 Mutability, 298. 
 My Novel, 318. 
 
 Mysteries of Udotpho, The, 313. 
 Mystery Plays. See Miracle Plays. 
 
 Nabbes, Thomas, 151. 
 
 Nabob of Arcot's Debts, Speech on 
 
 The, 260. 
 
 Napier, Sir William, 312. 
 Narcissus, 92. 
 Narrenschiff, 79. 
 Nash, Thomas, 98, 99, 102, 106-6, 
 
 109, 110, 120, 124, 126. 
 National Reformer, The, 339. 
 National Review, The, 364. 
 Nativity Ode (Crashaw), 173. 
 Nativity Ode (Milton), 181. 
 Necessity of Atheism, The, 294. 
 Neckham, Alexander, 12. 
 Nedham, Marohamont, 217. 
 Negro's Complaint, The, 270 n. 
 Nepenthe, 325 % 
 Nero, 207. 
 Never Too Late, 102. 
 New Atlantis, The, 117. 
 New Grub Street, 366. 
 New Inn, The, 141. 
 New Republic, The, 318. 
 New Trick to Cheat the Devil, 151. 
 
 New Voyage Round the World, A, 
 
 219. 
 New Way to Pay Old Debts, A, 
 
 146. 
 
 Newbery, John, 256. 
 Newcastle, Duke of, 151, 201. 
 Newcomes, The, 360. 
 Newman, John Henry, 324, 349. 
 Nice Wanton, 91. 
 Nicholas Nickleby, 358. 
 Nicolls, Thomas, 108. 
 Nietzsche, 295. 
 Nightmare Abbey, 318. 
 Night Piece, The, 172. 
 Night Piece on Death, 238, 266. 
 Night Thoughts, 233, 236, 266. 
 1914 and Other Poems, 346. 
 Noble Numbers, 171. 
 Nobody and Somebody, 144. 
 Noctes Ambrosianae, 305, 307. 
 Nocturnal Revery, A, 237. 
 North Briton, The, 268. 
 North, Christopher (John Wilson), 
 
 305, 307, 310. 
 North, Roger, 215. 
 North, Sir Thomas, 76, 98, 102, 
 
 107, 108, 109. 
 Northanger Abbey, 316. 
 Northern Farmer, The, 330. 
 Northern Lass, The, 151. 
 Northward Ho, 143, 145. 
 Norton, Thomas, 51, 94. 
 Nosce Teipsum, 166. 
 Notable Discovery of Cosenage, 102. 
 Notebooks (Samuel Butler), 366. 
 Novalis, 320, 347. 
 Novum Organum, 117. 
 Nun's Priest's Tale, 41. 
 Nut-Brown Maid, The, 70, 233. 
 Nymphidia, 165. 
 
 Observations on the Art of English 
 
 Poesy, 104. 
 Observations on the Present State of 
 
 the Nation, 259. 
 Observator, The, 218. 
 Obstinate Lady, The, 151. 
 Occleve, Thomas, 42, 50, 56, 59. 
 Oceana (Froude), 349. 
 Oceana (Harrington), 192. 
 Ode on a Grecian Urn, 303. 
 Ode on Intimations of Immortality, 
 
 176, 285, 288. 
 Ode on the Death of a Favourite 
 
 Cat, 269. 
 
392 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Ode on the Nativity, 173, 181. 
 
 Ode to a Nightingale, 303. 
 
 Ode to Athens, 335. 
 
 Ode to Autumn, 303. 
 
 Ode to Duty, 284 n., 288. 
 
 Ode to Evening, 269. 
 
 Ode to Melancholy, 303. 
 
 Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, 293 n. 
 
 Ode to Mrs. Anne Killigrew, 200. 
 
 Ode to the Comic Spirit, 342. 
 
 Ode to the Departing Year, 281. 
 
 Ode to the Setting Sun, 345. 
 
 Ode to the Spirit of Earth in 
 
 Autumn, 342. 
 Ode to the Virginian Voyage, The, 
 
 165. 
 
 Ode to the West Wind, 297. 
 Odes (Collins), 269, 278. 
 Odes (Cowley), 179. 
 Odes (Dryden), 199. 
 Odes (Gray), 268, 278. 
 Odes (Patmore), 343. 
 Odes (Shelley), 297. 
 Odes (Young), 237. 
 Odes in Contribution to the Song of 
 
 French History, 342. 
 Odoric of Pordenone, 31. 
 Oenone, 327. 
 Officium Pastorum, 84. 
 Ogilby, John, 230. 
 Old Age, 177. 
 
 Old Bachelor, The, 203, 204. 
 Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, 
 
 308. 
 
 Old Couple, The, 151. 
 Old Curiosity Shop, The, 358. 
 Old Familiar Faces, The, 308. 
 Old Fortunatus, 142. 
 Old Mortality, 314. 
 Old Pictures in Florence, 332 n., 333. 
 Old Red Sandstone, 350. 
 Old Robin of Portingak, 69. 
 Old Troop, The, 201. 
 Old Wives' Tale, The, 121. 
 Oldcastle, Sir John, 50. 
 Oldham, John, 209. 
 Oliphant, Laurence, 357. 
 Oliver Twist, 358. 
 Olor Iscanus, 173. 
 On a Girdle, 177. 
 One of Our Conquerors, 363, 365. 
 Opie, Mrs., 316. 
 Orchestra, 166. 
 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The, 
 
 363-5. 
 
 Ordinary, The, 151. 
 
 Orfeo and Heurodis, 25. 
 
 Oriana, 327. 
 
 Origin of Species, The, 320, 351. 
 
 Original Chronicle, The, 54. 
 
 Orion, 326. 
 
 Orlando Furioso (Greene), 124. 
 
 Orm, 14. 
 
 Ormond, 316. 
 
 Ormulum, 14. 
 
 Oronooko, 208. 
 
 Orosius, 8. 
 
 Orphan, The, 207. 
 
 Orpheus and Euridice, 57. 
 
 Orrery, Earl of, 206. 
 
 Osbourne, Lloyd, 366. 
 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 343. 
 
 Osorio, 281. 
 
 Ossian, 271, 278. 
 
 Othello, 133-5. 
 
 Otway, Thomas, 207, 210. 
 
 Our Ladies of Death, To, 339. 
 
 Our Mutual Friend, 358. 
 
 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 114. 
 
 Ovid, 39, 40 n., 47, 109, 127, 131, 
 
 154, 177, 230. 
 Owl, The (Drayton), 165. 
 Owl and the Nightingale, The, 15. 
 Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 
 
 The, 338. 
 
 Oxford Book of Ballads, 68 n., 70 n. 
 Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 303 n. 
 
 Pablo de Segovia, 102. 
 
 Pacchiarotto, 333 n. 
 
 Padlock, The, 249. 
 
 Painter, William, 108, 127, 134, 
 
 145. 
 
 Palace of Art, The, 327. 
 Palace of Honour, The, 59, 61, 63. 
 Palace of Pleasure, The, 93 108, 
 
 134, 145. 
 Palestine, 324. 
 Palmer, John, 201 n. 
 Paltock, Robert, 244. 
 Pamela, 239, 240. 
 Pandosto, 102, 136. 
 Pap with a Hatchet, 109. 
 Papyngo, Testament of, 63, 64. 
 Paracelsus, 330. 
 
 Paradise of Dainty Devices, 154. 
 Paradise Lost, 17, 168, 183, 184-5, 
 
 198, 229, 254, 301. 
 Paradise Regained, 185. 
 
INDEX 
 
 393 
 
 Parasitaster, 142. 
 
 Pardoner and the Tapster, The, 42. 
 
 Paris, Matthew, 12. 
 
 Parisina, 292. 
 
 Parliament of Bees, The, 151. 
 
 Parliament of Fowls, The, 38. 
 
 Parliament of the Three Ages, The, 
 
 Parliamentary Intelligencer, The, 
 
 217. 
 Parleyings with certain People of 
 
 Importance, 333 n. 
 Parnell, Thomas, 238, 265, 266. 
 Parson's Tale, The, 42. 
 Parthenopeus de Blois, 27. 
 Parthenophil and Parthenope, 163. 
 Pascal, 210. 
 Pasquin, 240. 
 
 Passing of Arthur, The, 328, 329. 
 Passion of King Henry and Fair 
 
 Rosamund, A, 165. 
 Passion Play (Donaueschingen). 
 
 85. 
 
 Passions, The, 269. 
 Passionate Century of Love, A, 160. 
 Passionate Shepherd, The, 166. 
 Past and Present, 12, 348, 354. 
 Pastime of Pkasure, The, 51, 52. 
 Paston family, 75. 
 Pastoral Care. See Cura Pas- 
 
 toralis. 
 
 Pastorals (Phillips), 235, 238. 
 Pastorals (Pope), 230, 235. 
 Pater, Walter, 354. 
 Paternoster Play, The, 87. 
 Patience, 35. 
 Patient Grissell, 143. 
 Patmore, Coventry, 343. 
 Pattison, Mark, 185. 
 Pauline, 330. 
 
 Pavilion on the Links, The, 366. 
 Peacock, Thomas Love, 294, 317, 
 
 318. 
 
 Pearl, The, 35. 
 Pecock, Reginald, 74, 75. 
 Pecorone, II, 130. 
 Peebles to the Play, 62. 
 Peele, George, 87, 120, 127, 128. 
 Peg Woffington, 315. 
 Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine, 48. 
 Pelham, 318. 
 
 Pembroke, The Countess of, 94. 
 Pendennis, 360. 
 Penseroso, 11,181. 
 Pcntameron The .311. 
 
 Pepys, Samuel, 50, 215, 246 /*. 
 
 Percy, 248. 
 
 Percy, Bishop, 68, 271, 290. 
 
 Percy Folio MS., 68 n. 
 
 Percy, William, 164. 
 
 Peregrine Pickle, 242. 
 
 Pericles and As pasta, 311. 
 
 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 134. 
 
 Perimedes, 102. 
 
 Perkin Warbeck, 138, 149. 
 
 Persuasion, 316. 
 
 Peter Bell, 285, 287 n., 289. 
 
 Peter Bell the Second, 297. 
 
 Peter Bell the Third, 297. 
 
 Peter Simple, 318. 
 
 Peter Wilkins, 244. 
 
 Petite Palace of Pleasure, 98. 
 
 Petition of Bagsche, The, 64. 
 
 Petrarch, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160. 
 
 Pettie, John, 98. 
 
 Peveril of the Peak, 314. 
 
 Phaedo, 296. 
 
 Phaer, Thomas, 109, 155. 
 
 Phalaris, Dissertation on, 229. 
 
 Pharonnida, 176, 180. 
 
 Philarete, 167. 
 
 Philaster, 146, 147. 
 
 Philip, 360. 
 
 Philip van Artevelde, 326. 
 
 Philips, Ambrose, 235, 238. 
 
 Philips, John, 238. 
 
 Phillip Sparrow, 82. 
 
 Phillips, Katherine, 196. 
 
 Phillis, 163. 
 
 Phoenissae, 94. 
 
 Phoenix, The, 5. 
 
 Physics and Politics, 354. 
 
 Pibroch of Donald Dhu, 291. 
 
 Piccadilly, 357. 
 
 Pickeryng, John, 93. 
 
 Pickwick Papers, The, 357-8. 
 
 Picture, The, 169. 
 
 Pierce Penniless, 110. 
 
 Piers the Plowman, The Vision of, 
 
 43-5, 46, 81, 155. 
 Pilgrimage of Man, The, 48-9. 
 Pilgrimage of the Soul, 213. 
 Pilgrimage to El Medinah and 
 
 Meccah, 357. 
 Pilgrims, The, 335. 
 Pilgrim's Progress, The, 19, 49, 
 
 211-12. 
 Pindarique Odes (Cowley), 178, 
 
 179. 
 Pippa Passes, 331. 
 
394 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Pirate, The, 314. 
 Piscatory Edoques, 168. 
 Pistyl of Susan, The, 28. 
 Pity for Poor Africans, 270 n. 
 Plain Dealer, The, 195, 202, 203. 
 Plan for a Dictionary of the Eng- 
 lish Language, 252. 
 Plato, 96, 97, 98, 117, 295, 296, 
 
 297 n. 
 
 Plautus, 90, 126. 
 Play of the Weather, The, 88. 
 Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, The , 
 
 305. 
 
 Pleasures of Hope, The, 305. 
 Pleasures of Memory, The, 305. 
 Pleasures of the Imagination, The, 
 
 268. 
 
 Pleasures of the Town, The, 240. 
 Pliny, 98, 108. 
 Plowman's Creed, The, 46. 
 Plowman's Tale, The, 43, 46. 
 Plus Ultra, 214. 
 
 Plutarch, 99, 108, 131, 132, 135. 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 48, 338, 339. 
 Poems and Ballads, 334, 335. 
 Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of 
 
 Earth, 342. 
 Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton 
 
 Bell, 361. 
 
 Poems by the Way, 338. 
 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 327. 
 Poems dedicated to National Liberty 
 
 and Independence, 287. 
 Poems descriptive of Rural Life, 
 
 324. 
 
 Poems on Various Occasions, 292. 
 Poesies of George Gascoigne, The, 
 
 154. 
 
 Poetaster, The, 140. 
 Poetical Rhapsody, 154. 
 Poetical Sketches, 277. 
 Poetry, Upon, 211. 
 Politian, 95. 
 Pollard, A. W., 115w. 
 Polo, Marco, 110. 
 Polychronicon, 30. 
 Polyolbion, 112, 164, 168. 
 Pompee, 196. 
 Pompey the Littk, 244. 
 Pontoux, Claude de, 161, 163. 
 Pope, Alexander, 81, HO, 146, 169, 
 
 177, 202, 206, 208, 209, 218, 224, 
 
 227-9, 230-8, 237, 251, 252, 265, 
 
 272, 298, 322, 356. 
 Popular Ballads, The, 68 n. 
 
 Popular Ballads of the Olden Time, 
 
 Populo Anglicano Defensio, Pro, 
 
 183. 
 
 Porphyrias Lover, 331. 
 Porter, Henry, 139. 
 Post Boy, The, 218. 
 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, 234, 
 
 324, 344. 
 
 Praise of Peace, The, 42. 
 Preface to the Fables, 200. 
 Prelude, The, 276, 281-8, 328. 
 Preston, Thomas, 93. 
 Pricke of Conscience, The, 15. 
 Pride and Prejudice, 316. 
 Priest to the Temple, A, 187. 
 Prince Arthur, 237. 
 Prince Athanase, 296, 297. 
 Prince Hohenstiel-JSchwangau, 333 
 Princess, The, 328. 
 Principal Voyages, &c., of the Eng- 
 
 lish Nation, The, 111. 
 Principles of Geology, 320, 350. 
 Principles of Human Knowledge, 
 
 The, 228. 
 Principles of Political Economy, 
 
 350. 
 
 Principles of Psychology, 350. 
 Principles of Sociology, 350. 
 Prior, Matthew, 70, 233, 265. 
 Prisoner of Chillon, The, 292, 
 
 293 n. 
 Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, 
 
 The, 366. 
 Procter, Brian Waller (Barry 
 
 Cornwall), 324. 
 Prodigy, The, 237. 
 Professor, The, 361. 
 Progress of Poesy, The, 268, 
 
 269| 
 
 Progress of the Mind, The, 234. 
 Progress of the Soul, The, 169. 
 Projectors, The, 201. 
 Prolegomena to Ethics, 350. 
 Prometheus Unbound, 232, 295-7. 
 Promos and Cassandra, 92. 
 Prophecy of Dante, The, 294 n. 
 Prophecy of Famine, The, 268. 
 Prophetess, The, 148. 
 Prophetic Books, The, 276, 277 n. 
 Proposals for an Edition of Shake- 
 
 speare, 253. 
 Prothalamium, 158. 
 Proverbs of Hendyng, The, 15. 
 Provoked Wife, The, 204. 
 
INDEX 
 
 395 
 
 Prudence, 178. 
 
 Psalms, Commentary on the, 15. 
 
 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 188, 189, 
 
 193. 
 
 Psyche, 176. 
 Psychomachia, 87. 
 Public Advertiser, The, 265. 
 Public Intelligencer, The, 218. 
 Public Ledger, The, 256. 
 Public Spirit of the Whigs, The, 
 
 225. 
 
 Pulley, The, 175. 
 Pulvis et Umbra, 366. 
 Punch, 359. 
 
 Purchas his Pilgrims, 112, 280. 
 Purchas, Samuel, 112. 
 Purple Island, The, 168. 
 Puttenham, George, 104, 105-6. 
 Pynson, Richard, 75, 76. 
 
 Quarles, Francis, 176. 
 
 Quarterly Review, The, 299, 306, 
 
 307, 351. 
 Queen Mob, 294. 
 Queen Mary, 330. 
 Queen Mother, The, 334. 
 Queen Orraca, 289. 
 Queene's Marie, The, 70. 
 Queen's Wake, The, 305. 
 Quentin Durward, 314. 
 Question, The, 297 n. 
 Questions concerning Liberty, &c., 
 
 192. 
 
 Quevedo, 102. 
 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, 68 n., 
 
 70 n. 
 
 Quip, The, 175. 
 Quip for an Upstart Courtier, A, 
 
 110. 
 
 1 R. B.', 93. 
 
 Rabbi Ben Ezra, 332. 
 Radcliffe, Mrs., 313, 315 n. 
 Radcliffe, Ralph, 87. 
 Raleigh, Professor Sir W. A., 
 
 99?i., Ill, 238 n., 239, 252,283 n., 
 
 286, 356. 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 112, 154, 158, 
 
 330. 
 
 Ralph Roister Doister, 90. 
 Ram Alley, 150. 
 Rambler, The, 252-3. 
 Ramsay, Allan, 63, 271, 272, 273'. 
 Randolph, Thomas, 151, 172, 175. 
 Rape of Lucrece, The, 111 
 
 Rape of the Lock, The, 230. 
 
 Rapin, 210. 
 
 Rasselas, 244, 253. 
 
 Rastell, John, 88. 
 
 Rauf Coilyear, 26, 62. 
 
 Raven, The, 338. 
 
 Ravenshoe, 363. 
 
 Reade, Charles, 315. 
 
 Reading of Earth, A, 342. 
 
 Reading of Life, with Other Poems. 
 
 4,342. 
 Ready and Easy Way to establish 
 
 a Free Commonwealth, 183. 
 Ready-Money Mortiboy, 367. 
 Reason and Sensuality, 49. 
 Receipt of my Mother's Picture, 
 
 On the, 270. 
 Recluse, The, 281. 
 Recruiting Officer, The, 205. 
 Recuyell of the Histories of Troy, 75. 
 Red Cotton Nightcap Country, 333 n. 
 Redgauntlet, 314. 
 Reflections on the Revolution in 
 
 France, 17, 260. 
 Reformation, &c., The, 183. 
 Refutation of Deism, A, 294. 
 Regicide, The, 242. 
 Rehearsal, The, 197. 
 Relapse, The, 204, 205. 
 Relics, 335. 
 
 Religio Laici (Dryden), 199. 
 Religio Laici (Herbert), 191. 
 Religio Medici, 188. 
 Religious Courtship, The, 219. 
 Religious Musings, 280. 
 Reliques (Percy), 271. 
 Reliquiae Wottoniae, 166. 
 Remarks on the Discourse of Free- 
 thinking, 229. 
 Remarks on Italy, 221. 
 Remedy, The, 234. 
 Remorse, 281. 
 Remorse of Conscience, 15. 
 Renaissance in Italy, The, 355. 
 Repentance of Robert Greene, Tlie, 
 
 102. 
 
 Reply to Harvey, A, 105 n. 
 Report of the Fight (Revenge), 112. 
 Repressor of over-much blaming of 
 
 the Clergy, 74. 
 Requiem (Stevenson), 366. 
 Requiem (Thomson), 339. 
 Reresby, Sir John, 215. 
 Resignation, 237. 
 Respublica (Interlude), 90. 
 
396 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Resurrection of Christ, 59. 
 
 Retaliation, 257. 
 
 Retirement, 269, 270 n. 
 
 Retreat, The, 175. 
 
 Return of the Druses, The, 331. 
 
 Revenge, A Battad of the Fleet, 
 
 The, 112, 330. 
 
 Revenge, The (Young), 236, 248. 
 Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, The, 
 
 141. 
 
 Revenger's Tragedy, The, 145. 
 Reverie in the Boar's Head Tavern 
 
 at East Cheap, 256. 
 Review, The, 219. 
 Revolt of Islam, The, 294, 296, 
 
 297. 
 
 Revolt of the Tartars, The, 310. 
 Reynard the Fox, 76. 
 Reynolds, John Hamilton, 297. 
 Rhymes a la Mode, 356. 
 Rhymes of a Weaver, 305. 
 Rice, James, 367. 
 Richard II, 128, 129, 138. 
 Richard III, 128, 129. 
 Richard Cceur de Lion, 27. 
 Richard Feverel, 241. 
 Richard the Redeless, 45. 
 Richardson, Samuel, 99, 238 w., 
 
 239, 241, 313. 
 Richelieu, 326. 
 Richter, 320, 347. 
 Riddles, 6. 
 
 Ridpath, George, 218. 
 Ring and the Book, The, 331, 333. 
 Ripley, George, 51. 
 Rival Ladies, The, 196. 
 Rival Queens, The, 207. 
 Rivals, The, 249. 
 Rizpah, 330. 
 Road to Ruin, The, 251. 
 Roaring Girl, The, 143. 
 Rob Roy, 314. 
 Robbery under Arms, 363. 
 Robert Falconer, 367. 
 Robert of Gloucester, 16, 21. 
 Robertson, J. M., 127. 
 Robertson, William, 262. 
 Robin and Gandelyn, 71. 
 Robin and Makyn, 57. 
 Robin Hood and his Meiny, A Little 
 
 Geste of, 71, 92. 
 
 Robin Hood and the Monk, 71. 
 Robinson Crusoe, 219. 
 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 
 
 209. 
 
 Roderick Random, Adventures of, 
 
 242, 243. 
 
 Roderick the Goth, 289. 
 Rogers, Samuel, 305. 
 Rojas, Fernando de, 91. 
 Rokeby, 290. 
 Roland and Otuel, 26. 
 Roland and Vernagu, 26. 
 Rolland, John, 65. 
 Rolle, Richard, of Hampole, 15. 
 Roman Actor, The, 146. 
 Roman d'Alixandre, 27. 
 Roman de Renart, 28. 
 Roman de Troie, 47. 
 Roman, The, 326. 
 Romany Rye, The, 356. 
 Romaunt of the Rose, 37, 47, 48, 51, 
 
 52, 55, 59, 78. 
 
 Romeo and Juliet, 74, 126-7. 
 Romola, 362. 
 Ronsard, 161. 
 Root, R. K., 37 n., 38 n. 
 Roper, Abel, 218. 
 Ros, Sir R., 42. 
 Rosalind and Helen, 297. 
 Rosalynd, 21. 
 Rosalynde, 21, 102, 131. 
 Rosamond (Addison), 221. 
 Rosamond (Swinburne), 334. 
 Rosamund Gray, 308. 
 Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards, 
 
 336. 
 
 Rosciad, The, 268. 
 Roscoe, William, 312. 
 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, 
 
 Earl of, 209. 
 Rose Mary, 339. 
 Ross, Alexander, 272. 
 Rossetti, Christina, 343. 
 Rossetti, D. G., 138, 302 n., 321, 
 
 336, 338, 341, 368. 
 Rostand, 196. 
 
 Roundabout Papers, The, 360. 
 Rousseau, 270, 293 n. 
 Rover, The, 206. 
 Rowe, Nicholas, 130, 208, 251. 
 Rowley, William, 143, 144. 
 Roxana, 219. 
 Royal Slave, The, 208. 
 Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, The, 
 
 340. 
 
 Ruin, The, 4. 
 
 Ruins of Rome, The, 158, 267. 
 Ruins of Time, The, 157, 158. 
 Rule, Britannia, 267 n. 
 
INDEX 
 
 397 
 
 Ramp, The, 201. 
 
 Runaway, The, 251. 
 
 Rural Rides, 311. 
 
 Rural Sports, 235. 
 
 Rushton, W. R., 99 n. 
 
 Ruskin, John, 98, 115, 321, 353. 
 
 Ruth, 286. 
 
 Rymer, Thomas, 229. 
 
 Sackville, Charles, Earl of Dorset, 
 
 209. 
 Sackville, Thomas, Earl of Dorset, 
 
 94, 155, 160. 
 
 Sacra Telluris Theoria, 214. 
 Sad Shepherd, The, 141. 
 Sadducismus Triumphatus, 214. 
 Sailor's Mother, The, 287. 
 Sainte-More, Benoit de, 26, 47. 
 Saint Peter's Complaint, 166. 
 Saints' Everlasting Rest, The, 188. 
 Saintsbury, Professor, 20 n., 40 n., 
 
 41, 49 n., 99 n., 207 n., 234 n., 
 
 291. 
 
 Saisiaz, La, 333. 
 Sally Brown, 305. 
 Salamasius, 183. 
 Salsette and Ekphanta, 353. 
 Sampson, John, 277. 
 Samson Agonistes, 185. 
 Sandra Belloni, 359. 
 Sandys, George, 177, 230, 300. 
 Sappho and Phao> 120. 
 Sardanapalus, 292. 
 Sargent, Helen Child, 68 n. 
 Sartor Resartus, 347. 
 Satire against Mankind, A, 209. 
 Satire of the Three Estates, A, 63, 
 
 64. 
 
 Satire on the Age, A, 65. 
 Satire on the Town Ladies, A, 65. 
 Satires (Donne), 169. 
 Satires (Pope), 232. 
 Satires upon the Jesuits, 209. 
 Satiromastix, 140, 143. 
 Saul, 331, 332, 334. 
 Savage, Richard, 252, 267. 
 Savannah- La- Mar, 310. 
 Savile, Sir Henry, 108. 
 Saxo Gramma ticu s, 133. 
 Sayers, Dr., 289. 
 Scenes of Clerical Life, 362. 
 Scepsis Scientifica, 214. 
 Schelling, F. E., 85 n. 
 Schick, Professor, 49 n. 
 Schiller, 207, 320. 
 
 Schiller, Life of, 347. 
 Schipper, Professor, 49 74. 
 Schofield, W. H., 19 /*., 24 *., 
 
 28 n. 
 
 Scholar Gypsy, The, 341, 342. 
 School for Scandal, The, 250. 
 School of Abuse, The, 99. 
 Schoolmaster, The, 97, 98. 
 Schoolmistress, The, 267. 
 Scotichronicon, 54. 
 Scots Musical Museum, The, 273. 
 Scott, Alexander, 65. 
 Scott, John, 307. 
 Scott, Michael, 318. 
 Scott, Sir Walter, 58, 68, 173, 206, 
 
 233, 271, 278, 290, 293, 294, 
 
 306, 307, 309, 313-15, 351, 365. 
 Scottish Airs, 273. 
 Scourge of Villainy, The, 1 10. 
 Scudery, Madeleine de, 196. 
 Seafarer, The, 4. 
 Seasons, The, 266. 
 Second Defence, The, 183. 
 Second Merchant's Tab, T/ie, 42. 
 Second Nun's Tale, The, 40 n. 
 Secret Love, 196. 
 Secretary, The, 234. 
 Secrets of Philosophers, The, 50. 
 Sedley, Sir Charles, 206, 209. 
 Seeley, John Robert, 349. 
 Sejanus, 140. 
 Selden, John, 118. 
 Self s the Man, 346 u. 
 Selimus, 94. 
 
 Selincourt, E. de, 303 n. 
 Sempill, Robert, 271. 
 Seneca, 93-4, 121. 
 Sense and Sensibility, 316. 
 Sensitive Plant, The, 297. 
 Sentence, The, 345. 
 Sentimental Journey, The, 244. 
 Sentiments of a Church of England 
 
 Man, The, 225. 
 Seraphim, The, 340. 
 Serious Call to a Holy Life, A, 229. 
 Sesame and Lilies, 353. 
 Settle, Elkanah, 199, 207. 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture, The, 
 
 353. 
 
 Seven Sages of Rome, 29. 
 Seven Sages, The (Rolland), 63. 
 Shadow of Night, The, 109. 
 Shadwell, Charles, 249. 
 Shadwell, Thomas, 195, 198, 199, 
 
 205, 249 
 
398 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Shattesbury, Anthony Ashley 
 
 Cooper, third Earl of, 228. 
 Shakespeare, William, 77, 89, 99, 
 
 107, 108, 109, 112, 118, 121, 
 
 125-38, 148, 151, 162, 176, 193, 
 
 195, 200, 206, 229, 246, 248, 251, 
 
 253, 300, 315, 354. 
 Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod), 
 
 367. , 
 
 Sharpham, Edward, 150. 
 Shaving of Shagpat, The, 363. 
 Shaw, George Bernard, 318. 
 Shaw, Quintyne, 61. 
 She Stoops to Conquer, 257. 
 She Would if she Could, 201, 202. 
 Sheldon, Gilbert, 188. 
 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 106, 146, 
 
 149, 190, 233, 237, 263, 266, 269, 
 
 291, 292, 294-8, 299 n. t 300, 306, 
 
 318, 319, 320, 321, 330, 333, 351. 
 Shenstone, William, 267, 272. 
 Shepherd's Calendar, The (Clare), 
 
 324. 
 Shepherd's Calendar, The (Spenser), 
 
 80, 105, 156, 157-8, 159. 
 Shepherd's Garland, The, 165. 
 Shepherd's Hunting, The, 167. 
 Shepherd's Pipe, The, 166. 
 Shepherd's Play, Second, 86. 
 Shepherd's Sirena, The, 165, 345. 
 Shepherd's Week, The (Gay), 235. 
 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 249. 
 Ship of Fools, The, 79. 
 Shipwreck, The, 268. 
 Shirley, 361. 
 Shirley, James, 149. 
 Shoemaker's Holiday, The, 103, 
 
 142. 
 Short History of the English People, 
 
 A, 349. 
 Short Studies in Great Subjects, 
 
 349. 
 Short View of the English Stage, A, 
 
 206, 220. 
 
 Short View of Tragedy, A, 229. 
 Shortest Way with the Dissenters, 
 ' The, 218. 
 Sicelides, 168. 
 Sidgwick, Frank, 68 n. 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 94, 98, 99, 101, 
 
 102, 103, 105, 157, 158, 161. 
 Siege of Corinth, The, 292. 
 Siege of Milan, The, 26. 
 Siege of Rhodes, The, 195, 206. 
 Sigurd the Volsung, 231, 337. 
 
 Silas Marner, 362. 
 
 Silent Woman, The, 140. 
 
 Silex Scintillans, 173. 
 
 Simon Lee, 286. 
 
 Simplicity, Ode on, 269. 
 
 Sir Amadace, 28. 
 
 Sir Charles Grandison, 240. 
 
 Sir Cleges, 28. 
 
 Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, 93, 
 
 122. 
 
 Sir Courtly Nice, 206. 
 Sir Degare, 25. 
 Sir Eglamour, 41. 
 Sir Ferumbras, 26. 
 Sir Fopling Flutter, 201. 
 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight t 
 
 23, 35. 
 
 Sir Gowghter, 25. 
 Sir Harry Wildair, 205. 
 Sir John Rowll's Cursing, 32. 
 Sir Launcelot Greaves, 242. 
 Sir Launfal, 25. 
 Sir Orfeo, 25. 
 Sir Patrick Spens, 67, 70. 
 Sir Perceval of Gattes, 25. 
 Sir Peter Harpden's End, 336. 
 Sir Thomas More, 137. 
 Sir Thomas More (Southey), 311. 
 Sir Thomas Wyatt, 143. 
 Sir Thopas, 35, 41. 
 Sir Tristrem, 24. 
 Siris,228. 
 Sister Helen, 338. 
 Sister Songs, 345. 
 Sisters, The, 336. 
 Sitting of the Session, The, 272. 
 Skeat, W. W., 38 w., 45 n. 
 Skelton, John, 58, 80, 88, 152, 
 
 155. 
 
 Sketches and Essays (Hazlitt), 309. 
 Skylark, To a, 297. 
 Sleep and Poetry, 298. 
 Sloane MS., 72. 
 Smart, Christopher, 268, 324. 
 Smith, Adam, 263. 
 Smith, Alexander, 326. 
 Smith, Gregory, 59 n., 104 . 
 Smith, John, 215. 
 Smith, Sydney, 306. 
 Smith, William, 164. 
 Smollett, Tobias George, 238 n. 
 
 242, 256, 313, 356, 358. 
 Sohrab and Rustum, 341. 
 Soldier's Fortune, The, 207. 
 Soliman and Perseda, 121. 
 
INDEX 
 
 399 
 
 Solitude, Of, 211. 
 
 Solomon on the Vanity of the 
 
 World, 233, 235. 
 Some Cautions for the Choice of 
 
 Members, 213. 
 Somerville, William, 267. 
 Song at the Feast of Brougham 
 
 Castle, 287 n. 
 
 Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 199. 
 Song of the Shirt, The, 304. 
 Song of the Soul, The, 176. 
 Song of the Western Men, The, 325. 
 Sow0 to David, The, 268. 
 Songs and Sonnets (Donne), 169. 
 Songs before Sunrise, 334, 335. 
 Songs of Experience, 276 n., 277. 
 Songs of Innocence, 276, 277. 
 Songs of Two Nations, 335. 
 Sonnet to a Preacher, 328. 
 Sonnets from the Portuguese, 340. 
 Sophocles, 300. 
 Sophonisba (Lee), 207. 
 Sophonisba (Mareton), 142. 
 Sophonisba (Thomson), 267. 
 Sophy, The, 178. 
 Sordello, 330. 
 Soudone of Babylon, 26. 
 Soul's Tragedy, A, 331. 
 South, Robert, 188. 
 South Sea House, The, 308. 
 Southerne, Thomas, 203, 208. 
 Southey, Robert, 281, 289, 294, 
 
 307,311,319. 
 Southwell, Robert, 166. 
 Spaniel called Beau, On a, 270 n. 
 Spanish Ballads, 351. 
 Spanish Friar, The, 196. 
 Spanish Gipsey, The (Middleton), 
 
 144. 
 Spanish Gypsy, The (George Eliot), 
 
 362. 
 
 Spanish Military Nun, The, 310. 
 Spanish Tragedy, The, 121, 124. 
 Sparagus Garden, The, 151. 
 Speak, Parrot, 81. 
 Specimens of the English Dramatic 
 
 Poets, 308. 
 Spectator, The, 115, 220, 222-4, 
 
 238, 240, 252. 
 Speculum Meditantis, 46. 
 Speed, John, 107. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 350. 
 Spenser, Edmund, 52, 100, 104, 
 
 105, 127, 154, 155, 156-60, 166, 
 
 167, 266, 267, 271 n., 298, 302. 
 
 Spirit of the Age, The, 309. 
 
 Spiritata, La, 91. 
 
 Spleen, The, 237, 268. 
 
 Splendid Shilling, The, 238. 
 
 Sprat, Bishop, 210. 
 
 Squire of Alsatia, The, 206. 
 
 Squire of Low Degree, The, 28. 
 
 Squire's Tale, The, 27. 
 
 St. Ives, 366. 
 
 St. Leon, 313. 
 
 St. Patrick's Day, 250. 
 
 St. Ronan's Well, 314. 
 
 Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn, 351. 
 
 Stanley, Thomas, 180. 
 
 Stanyhurst, Richard, 104, 109. 
 
 Staple of News, The, 141, 217. 
 
 Steel Glass, The, 155. 
 
 Steele, Richard, 115, 201, 202', 
 219-25, 227, 245, 248, 360. 
 
 Stendhal, 323. 
 
 Stephen, James Kenneth, 344. 
 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 322, 355. 
 
 Steps to the Temple, 173. 
 
 Sterne, Lawrence, 99, 116, 243, 
 256, 313. 
 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 53, 310, 
 343, 344, 365. 
 
 Stevenson, William, 91. 
 
 Stewart of Lome, 64. 
 
 Stirling, William Alexander, Earl 
 of, 164, 170. 
 
 Stones of Venice, The, 353. 
 
 Story of Rimini, The, 298. 
 
 Story of Thebes, The, 27, 49. 
 
 Stow, John, 107. 
 
 Strafford, 331. 
 
 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and 
 Mr. Hyde, The, 366. 
 
 Stratton Water, 339. 
 
 Strauss, 362. 
 
 Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, 
 The, 341. 
 
 Strode, Ralph, 35. 
 
 Studies in Prose and Poetry, 352| 
 
 Studies in Song, 335. 
 
 Studies in the History of the Renais- 
 sance, 355. 
 
 Studies of a Biographer, 356. 
 
 Study of Celtic Literature, On, 351; 
 
 Suckling, Sir John, 161, 173. 
 
 Suicide, On, 187. 
 
 Summer's Last Will and Testa- 
 ment, 120. 
 
 Sunday up the River, 339. 
 
 Sundering Flood, The, 338. 
 
400 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Sun's Darling, The, 143, 149. 
 
 Superstitions of the Scottish High- 
 lands, Ode on the, 269. 
 
 Supposes, 91, 131. 
 
 Suppositi t 91. 
 
 Surgeon's Funeral, The, 289. 
 
 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 
 94, 152-4, 160. 
 
 Survey of London, A, 107. 
 
 Suspicious Husband, The, 249. 
 
 Suspiria de Profundis, 339. 
 
 Swellfoot the Tyrant, 297. 
 
 Swift, Jonathan, 211, 214, 216, 
 222, 225-7, 229, 231, 238, 251, 
 356, 360. 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 42, 
 77 n., 115, 134, 138, 144, 145, 
 147, 196, 231, 269, 273, 277, 290, 
 291, 309, 320, 321, 330, 334-6, 
 338, 343, 348, 352, 358, 361. 
 
 Sylva, 215. 
 
 Sylvia, 325. 
 
 Sylvester, Joshua, 109. 
 
 Sym and his Brother, 62. 
 
 Symonds, John Addington, 145, 
 321, 355. 
 
 Symons, Arthur, 277 n., 355. 
 
 Symposium (Shelley's trans.), 295. 
 
 Synthetic Philosophy, 350. 
 
 System of Logic, The, 350. 
 
 Table Talk (Coleridge), 303. 
 Table Talk (Cowper), 269. 
 Table Talk (Hazlitt), 309. 
 Table Talk (Selden), 119. 
 Tacitus, 1, 3, 108. 
 Tailor, Robert, 150. 
 Taine, H., 207. 
 
 Tale of a Tub, A ( Jonson), 139. 
 Tale of a Tub, A (Swift), 110, 
 
 225. 
 
 Tale of Bakn, The, 335. 
 Tale of Oamelyn, The, 21, 42. 
 Tale of Paraguay, A, 289. 
 Tale of Two Cities, A, 358. 
 Tales (Crabbe), 274, 289. 
 Tales from Shakespeare, 308. 
 Tales of my Landlord, 307. 
 Tdei of ike Ball, 214. 
 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, 326. 
 Talisman, The, 314. 
 Tarn Lin, 69. 
 Tarn o' Shanter, 273, 274. 
 Tambwlaine, 122-4, 128, 135. 
 
 Taming of the Shrew, The, 130, 
 
 131. 
 
 Tancred, 316, 327. 
 Tancred and Gismunda, 94. 
 Tapestry Chamber, The, 315 ??. 
 Task, The, 270, 278. 
 Tasso, 109, 159, 177. 
 Tate, Nahum, 195, 199. 
 Tatham, John, 201. 
 Tatler, The, 220, 221-2. 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 187, 194. 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, 325. 
 Taxation no Tyranny, 254. 
 Tea-Table Miscellany, The, 271. 
 Tea-Table, The, 236. 
 Tears of Peace, 109. 
 Tears of the Muses, The, 157, 
 
 158. 
 Tears on the Death of Moeliades, 
 
 170. 
 
 Tempest, The, 109, 135-7. 
 Tempest, The (Dryden), 198. 
 Temple Beau, The, 240. 
 Temple of Glass, The, 49. 
 Temple, Sir William, 200, 210, 211, 
 
 225. 
 
 Temple, The, 173, 174. 
 Ten Thousand a Year, 318. 
 Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The, 361. 
 Tender Husband, The, 220, 221. 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 7, 17, 112, 321, 
 
 327-30, 338, 341, 351. 
 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 
 
 The, 183. 
 Terence, 90, 206. 
 Terens in English, 90. 
 Teseide, 41. 
 Testament, 50. 
 Testament of Cresseid, The, 42, 55, 
 
 56. 
 Testament of the Papyngo, The, 63, 
 
 64. 
 
 Tetrachordon, 182. 
 Textor Ravisius, 90. 
 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
 
 227, 244, 291, 317, 322, 359. 
 Thalaba the Destroyer, 289. 
 Thealma and Ckarchus, 180. 
 Theobald, Lewis, 206, 231. 
 Theodosius, 207. 
 Theophila, 180. 
 Theophrastus, 113. 
 Theory of Moral Sentiments, A, 
 
 263. 
 Thersites, 90. 
 
INDEX 
 
 401 
 
 Thesaurus, 270 n. 
 
 Thierry and Theodoret, 145, 148. 
 
 Thieves of Liddesdale, Against the, 
 
 66. 
 
 Thirlwall, Connop, 312. 
 Thistle and the Rose, The, 58. 
 Thorn, William, 305. 
 Thomas of Ercildoune, 24, 52. 
 Thomas of Reading, 103. 
 Thomas the Rhymer, 69. 
 Thompson, Francis, 320, 343, 345. 
 Thomson, James, 266, 269, 272, 
 
 273. 
 
 Thomson ('B. V.'), James, 339. 
 Thoughts on French Affairs, 260. 
 Thoughts on the Present Discontents, 
 
 259. 
 
 Thrawn Janet, 366. 
 Three Graves, The, 280. 
 Three Priests of Peebles, The, 62. 
 Throckmorton, Job, 109. 
 Through the Looking -Glass, 357. 
 Thucydides, 191. 
 Thyestes, 207. 
 Thynne, Thomas, 37. 
 Thyrsis, 341, 342. 
 Thyrza, 366. 
 
 Tickell, Thomas, 223, 238. 
 Tidings from the, Session, 59. 
 Tieck, 325. 
 Tiger, The, 276. 
 Tillotson, John, 188, 211. 
 Timber. See Discoveries, &c. 
 Timbuctoo, 327. 
 Timon (Shadwell), 206. 
 Timon of Athens, 132, 134. 
 Tindale, William, 96, 115. 
 Tintern Abbey, 284, 303, 328. 
 'Tis Pity She 's a Whore, 149. 
 Tithonus, 328. 
 Titles of Honour, 119. 
 Titus Andronicus, 121, 127, 128. 
 Tolstoy, Leo, 323. 
 Tom Cringle's Log, 318. 
 Tom Jones, 241. 
 Tom Thumb the Great, 240, 249. 
 Tonson's Miscellany, 230. 
 Torrismond, 325. 
 TotteVs Miscellany, 154. 
 Tottenham Court, 151. 
 Tourneur, Cyril, 145. 
 Town, The, 309. 
 Towneley Cycle (Miracle Plays), 
 
 86. 
 Toxophilus, 97. 
 
 Tractate on Education, 182. 
 
 Trafalgar Day, 335. 
 
 Tragedy of the Cardinal, The, 64. 
 
 Tragic Comedians, The, 364. 
 
 Traherne, Thomas, 175, 187. 
 
 Traitor, The, 150. 
 
 Translating Homer, On, 351. 
 
 Traveller, The, 257. 
 
 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 
 
 30. 
 Travels through France and Italy, 
 
 243. 
 
 Travels with a Donkey, 366 n. 
 Treasure Island, 365.' 
 Treatise of Human Nature, A, 
 
 261 n. 
 
 Trench, Herbert, 281. 
 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, 342. 
 Trick to Catch the Old One, A, 143. 
 Trip to Scarborough, A, 250. 
 Trip to the Jubilee, A, 205. 
 Tristram and Iseult, 341. 
 Tristramof Lyonesse, 177,231, 335, 
 
 341. 
 Tristram Shandy, Life and Opinions 
 
 of, 116, 243. 
 
 Triumph of Isis, The, 268. 
 Triumph of Life, The, 297. 
 Triumph of Time, The, 334. 
 Trivet, Nicholas, 41. 
 Trivia, 235. 
 
 Troilus and Cressida, 132, 134-5. 
 Troilus and Cressida (Dryden), 
 
 198. 
 Troilus and Criseyde, 37, 39, 48, 
 
 56. 
 
 Trollope, Anthony, 317. 
 Troublesome Reign of King John, 
 
 The, 129. 
 
 Troy Book, The (Barbour), 53. 
 Troy Book, The (Lydgate), 48-9. 
 Troy Town, 338. 
 Troyes, Chrestien de, 18, 25. 
 True-Born Englishman, The, 218. 
 True System of the. Universe, The, 
 
 214. 
 Tudor Drama, The (Tucker 
 
 Brooke), 123 n. 
 Tuke, Sir Samuel, 195. 
 Tunning of Eleanor Rumming, The, 
 
 80. 
 
 Turberville, George, 154. 
 Turgenev, 323. 
 Turn of the Screw, The, 318. 
 Tusser, Thomas, 154. 
 
402 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Tutchin, John, 218. 
 
 Two, Herds, The, 273. 
 
 Two, Maryit Wemen and the Wedo, 
 
 The, 58. 
 
 Twelfth Night, 131. 
 Twine, Laurence, 134. 
 Two Angry Women of Abington, 
 
 The, 139. 
 
 Two Drovers, The, 315. 
 Two Foscari, The, 292. 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona, The, 126. 
 Two Maids of Mortlake, The, 150. 
 Two Nobk Kinsmen, The, 137. 
 Two Poets of Croisic, The, 333 n. 
 Two Swans, The, 305. 
 Two Treatises of Government, 214. 
 Two Voices, The, 327. 
 Two Years Ago, 363. 
 Tyard, Pontus de, 181. 
 Types of Ethical Theory, 350. 
 Tyrannic Love, 197. 
 Tyrwhitt, Thomas, 37. 
 
 Udall, Nicholas, 89, 90. 
 
 Ulysses, 328. 
 
 Ulysses and the Siren, 107, 164. 
 
 Underwoods, 170. 
 
 Unfortunate Traveller, The, 102. 
 
 Universal Passion, The, 236. 
 
 Unknown Eros, The, 343. 
 
 Unnatural Combat, The, 146. 
 
 Unquiet Grave, 69, 
 
 Unto this Last, 353. 
 
 Uphill, 343. 
 
 Uplandis Mous and the Burgess 
 
 Mous, 57. 
 Ur-Hamlet, 121. 
 Urn Burial, 188, 190. 
 Utilitarianism, 350. 
 Utopia, 90, 96. 
 
 Vailima Letters, 366. 
 Vakntinian, 146, 148. 
 Vanbrugh, Sir John, 201, 204, 206, 
 
 245, 250. 
 Vane's Story, 339. 
 Vanity Fair, 317, 360, 361. 
 Vanity of Human Wishes, The, 252. 
 Vastness, 330. 
 Vathek, 313. 
 
 Vaudracour and Julia, 288. 
 Vaughan, Henry, 173, 175. 
 Vaux, Lord, 154. 
 Venetia, 317. 
 Venice Preserved, 207. 
 
 Venus and Adonis, 127. 
 
 Vere, Sir Aubrey de, 325. 
 
 Veritate, De, 191. 
 
 Fer-se Epistles (Donne), 169. 
 
 Vestiges of the Natural History of 
 
 Creation, 350. 
 Vicar, The, 324. 
 
 Vicar of Wakefield, The, 256, 257. 
 View of the State of Europe during 
 
 the Middle Ages, A, 312. 
 Views and Reviews, 355. 
 Vigny, Alfred de, 270, 286, 328, 
 
 Village, The, 274. 
 
 Village Minstrel, The, 324. 
 
 Vilktte, 361. 
 
 Vindication of Natural Society, A, 
 
 258. 
 Vindication of the Church of Scot- 
 
 land,^, 216. 
 Virgidemiarum, 110. 
 Virgil, 39, 59, 60, 105, 109, 153, 
 
 157, 159, 178, 199, 224. 
 Virgin Martyr, The, 145. 
 Virgin Widow, The, 326. 
 Virginian Voyage, The, 112. 
 Virginians, The, 360. 
 Virginibus Puerisque, 366 n. 
 Virginius, 326. 
 Virtue, 175. 
 
 Virtue Rewarded. See Pamela. 
 Vision of Judgment, The (Byron), 
 
 292, 293, 294, 311. 
 Vision of Judgment, The (Southey), 
 
 289. 
 
 Vision of Margaret, The, 286. 
 Vivian Grey, 317. 
 Volpone, 140, 359. 
 Voltaire, 203, 248, 256, 320 
 Vox and the Wolf, The, 28. 
 Vox Clamantus, 46. 
 Voyage and Travail of Sir John 
 
 Mandeville, 30. 
 Vulgar Errors, 188, 189, 193. 
 
 ' W. B.', 154. 
 Wace, 12, 13, 16. 
 Waldhere, 2. 
 Walker, Henry, 217. 
 Wallace, 53. 
 
 Wallace. Alfred Russel, 351. 
 Wallace, C. W., 92 n. 
 Waller, Edmund, 177, 179, 180, 209. 
 Walpole, Horace, 191, 262, 264, 
 265, 313. 
 
INDEX 
 
 403 
 
 Walsh, William, 230, 237. 
 Walton, Izaak, 101, 192-3. 
 Wanderer, The, 3. 
 Wanderer, The (Savage), 267. 
 Wandering Willie's Tale, 314. 
 Wardlaw, Lady, 272. 
 Waring, 331. 
 Warner, Thomas, 166. 
 Warren, Samuel, 318. 
 Warton, Thomas, 221, 268. 
 Warwick, Lady, 215. 
 Water Babies, The, 363. 
 Watson, John (Ian Maclaren), 
 
 367. 
 
 Watson, Bishop Thomas, 103. 
 Watson, Thomas, 160. 
 Watson, Sir William, 308, 321. 
 Waverky, 314. 
 
 Way of all Flesh, The, 360, 366. 
 Way of the World, The, 203, 204. 
 Wealth of Nations, 263. 
 Webbe, William, 104. 
 Webster, Augusta, 345. 
 Webster, John, 138, 143, 144, 148, 
 
 149, 150, 353. 
 
 Wcddah and Om-el-Bonain, 339. 
 Wedding of Oawain, The, 24. 
 Weekly News from Italy and 
 
 Germany, 217. 
 Weeper, The, 174. 
 Weir of Hermiston, 365. 
 Werner, 293. 
 Wesley, Charles, 229. 
 West Indian, The, 249. 
 Westminster Review, The, 362. 
 Westward Ho (Dekker), 143, 145. 
 Westward Ho (Kingsley), 363. 
 What D' Ye Call It, The, 235. 
 Wheatley, H. B., 264 n. 
 Whibley, Charles, 210 n. 
 White, Henry Kirke, 323. 
 White Devil, The, 145. 
 White Ship, The, 339. 
 Why come ye nat to Court ? 81. 
 Widsith, 1. 
 Wife, The, 114. 
 
 Wife of Auchtermuchty, The, 62. 
 Wife of Usher's Well, The, 66. 
 Wife's Complaint, The, 4. 
 Wild Gallant, The, 195, 196. 
 Wild Goose Chase, The, 148. 
 Wild Life in a Southern County, 
 
 357. 
 
 Wilde, Oscar, 344, 355. 
 Wilkes, John, 268, 294. 
 
 i Wilkins, George, 134. , 
 
 | Wilkins, John, 214. 
 
 1 William of Boldenseele, 31. 
 
 William of Malmesbury, 12. 
 
 William of Newburgh, 12. 
 
 William of Pakrne, 28. 
 
 Williams, W. H., 90 n. 
 
 Wilmot, Robert, 94. 
 
 Wilson, John (Christopher North), 
 305, 307, 310. 
 
 Wilson, John (16th cent.), 195, 
 201. 
 
 Wilson, Thomas, 97, 105. 
 
 Wilton, Life of Jack, 102. 
 
 WinchilBea, Lady, 237. 
 
 Windsor Forest, 230. 
 
 Windsor Prophecy, The, 227. 
 
 Wine, 235, 238. 
 
 Winner and Waster, 46. 
 
 Winter's Tale, A, 135-6. 
 
 Winterslow, 309. 
 
 Wise Woman of Hogsdon, The, 
 144. 
 
 Wish, The, 178. 
 
 Wishes to his Supposed Mistress, 
 174. 
 
 Wit in a Constable, 151. 
 
 Wit without Money, 148 
 
 Witch, The, 144. 
 
 Witch of Atlas, The, 297. 
 
 Witch of Edmonton, The, 143, 149. 
 
 Wither, George, 167. 
 
 Witty Characters and Conceited 
 News, 114. 
 
 Witty Fair One, The, 150. 
 
 Woman Hater, The, 147. 
 
 Woman in the Moon, The, 120. 
 
 Woman in White, The, 363. 
 
 Woman is a Weathercock, A, 161. 
 
 Woman Killed with Kindness, A, 
 144. 
 
 Woman of no Importance, A, 344. 
 
 Women beware Women, 144. 
 
 Wood, Anthony, 217. 
 
 Woodstock, 315. 
 
 Word for the Navy, A, 335. 
 
 Worde, Wynkyn de, 75. 
 
 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 284. 
 
 Wordsworth, William, 115, 160, 
 167, 172, 175, 178, 179, 181, 184, 
 230, 232, 233, 237, 251, 263, 265, 
 266, 269, 270, 272, 273, 275, 276, 
 278, 281-9, 291, 292, 293, 297, 
 298, 303, 306, 310, 312, 319, 320, 
 321, 326, 328, 352, 354. 
 
404 HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 World's Hydrographical Descrip- 
 tion, The, 111. 
 
 Worst of It, The, 332. 
 
 Worthies of England, The, 192. 
 
 Wotton, Sir Henry, 166, 193. 
 
 Wrecker, The, 366. 
 
 Wulfstan, 9. 
 
 Wuthering Heights, 361. 
 
 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 152-4, 160. 
 
 Wycherley, William, 195, 201, 202, 
 203, 204. 
 
 Wyclif, John, 29, 74. 
 
 Wyntoun, Andrew, 54. 
 
 Yeast, 362. 
 
 Yeats, William Butler, 276 n. t 304. j 
 
 Ye Mariners of England, 305. 
 
 Yellowplush Papers, The, 359. 
 
 Yew Trees, 269. 
 
 York Cycle, 86. 
 
 Yorkshire Tragedy, The, 137, 149, 
 
 248. 
 
 Young Bekie, 71. 
 Young, Edward, 233, 236, 248, 
 
 266. 
 
 Young Woman, On Marrying a, 65. 
 Ypomedon, 28. 
 Ywain and Oawain, 24, 
 
 Zanoni, 318. 
 Zapolya, 281. 
 Zepheria, 164. 
 
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