UN!v;t?-';Ti OP CALIF M>A SAN UILGO . Of the two the Fight at Maldon is the finer, the most human and varied, but the Song of Brunanburh is lyrical as the latter is not. They are two different types of poetry. Both of them have some Norse feeling, and we may link with them from this point of view the Rh\me Song, which recalls the motive and spirit of the earlier Ruin, but which, having rhymes along with alliteration, resembles the Scandinavian form called Ritnheiiiht, and has induced critics to attribute it to the influence of the warrior and scald, Egil Skala- grimsson, who twice visited King /Kthelstan. Two frag- mentary odes, among some other short poems, inserted I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 25 in the Chronicle, one on the deliverance of the five cities from the Danes by King Eadmund, 942 ; and another on the coronation of King Eadgar, are the last records of a war-poetry which naturally decayed when the Eng- lish were trodden down by the Normans. \Yhen Taille- fer rode into battle at Hastings, singing songs of Roland and Charlemagne, he sang more than the triumph of the Norman over the English ; he sang the victory for a time of French Romance over Old English poetry. 19. Old English Prose. It is pleasant to think that we may not unfairly make English prose begin with B.-EDA. He was born about 673, and was like Caedmon, a Northumbrian. After 683, he spent his life at Jarrow, "in the same monastery," he says, "and while attentive to the rule of mine order, and the service of the Church, my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or writing." He enjoyed that pleasure for many years, for his quiet life was long, and his toil unceasing. Forty- five works prove his industry ; and their fame over the whole of learned Europe proves their value. His learn- ing was as various as it was great. All that the world O o then knew of theology, science, music, rhetoric, medi- cine, arithmetic, astronomy, and physics was brought together by him ; his Ecclesiastical History is our best authority for Early England ; accuracy and delightful- ness are at one in it. It reveals his charming character; and indeed, his life was as gentle, and himself as loved, as his work was great. His books were written in Latin, and with these we have nothing to do, but he strove to 26 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. make English prose a literary language, for his last work was a Translation of the Gospel of St. John, as almost his last words were in English verse. In the story of his death told by his disciple Cuthbert is the first record of English prose writing. When the last day came, the dying man called his scholars to him that he might dictate more of his translation. " There is still a chap- ter wanting," said the scribe, " and it is hard for thee to question thyself longer." " It is easily done," said Baeda, " take thy pen and write swiftly." Through the day they wrote, and when evening fell, " There is yet one sentence unwritten, dear master," said the youth. " Write it quickly," said the master. "It is finished now." "Thou sayest true," was the reply, "all is finished now." He sang the " Glory to God " and died. It is to that scene that English prose looks back as its sacred source, as it is in the greatness and variety of Bseda's Latin work that English scholarship strikes its key-note. When Breda died, Northumbria was the centre of European literature. Wilfrid of York had founded libra- ries and monasteries, but the true beginner of all the Northumbrian learning was Benedict Biscop, who col- lected two brother libraries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, and whose scholars were Ceolfrid and Baeda. Six hun- dred scholars gathered round Baeda, and he handed on all his learning to his pupil Ecgberht, who as Archbishop of York established the famous library, and founded the great school, or, as it may be called, the University of Y'ork. To this place, for more than sixty years, all I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 2/ Europe sent pupils to win the honey of learning. Al- cuin, Ecgberht's pupil, finally took with him to the court of Charles the Great, in 792, all the knowledge which Breda had won and the School of York had expanded. Through Alcuin then, whom we may call Charles's Min- ister of Education, England was the source of the new education which slowly spread over the vast sphere of the Prankish Empire. This was done just at the right moment, for Alcuin had scarce left the English shores for the last time when the Danes descended on Nor- thumbria, and blotted out the whole of its literature and learning. 20. Alfred. Though the long battle with the in- vaders was lost in the north, it was gained for a time by /Elfred the Great in Wessex ; and with Alfred's literary work, learning changed its seat from the north to the south. /Elfred's writings and translations, being in Eng- lish and not in Latin, make him, since Breda's work is lost, the true father of English prose. As Whitby is the cradle of English poetry, so is Winchester of English prose. At Winchester the king took the English tongue and made it the tongue in which history, philosophy, law, and religion spoke to the English people. No work was ever done more eagerly or more practically. He brought scholars from different parts of the world. He set up schools in his monasteries "where every free-born youth, who has the means, shall attend to his book till he can read English writing perfectly." He presided over a school in his own court. He made himself a 28 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. master of a literary English style, and he did this that he might teach his people. He translated the popular manuals of the time into English, but he edited them with large additions of his own, needful as he thought, for English use. He gave his nation moral philosophy in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy ; a universal his- tory, with geographical chapters of his own, " of the highest literary and philological value as specimens of his natural prose," in his translation of Orosius ; an ecclesi- astical history of England in Breda's History, giving to some details a West-Saxon form ; and a religious hand- book, with a preface of his own, in the Pastoral Rule of Pope Gregory. He induced Bishop Werferth to translate into English the Dialogues of Gregory, a book which had a far-reaching influence on mediaeval literature and the- ology. We do not quite know whether he worked him- self at the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but at least it was in his reign that this chronicle rose out of meagre lists into a full narrative of events. To him, then, we English look back as the fountain of English prose literature. 21. The Later Old English Prose. The impulse he gave soon died away, but it was revived under King Ead- gar the Peaceful, whose seventeen years of government (958-75) were the most prosperous and glorious of the West-Saxon Empire. Under him and his predecessors, /Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, founded and kept up English schools, and. working together with Archbishop Dunstan and Oswald of Worcester, recreated monastic I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 29 life, classic learning, and the education of the clergy. Their labours were the origin of the famous Blickling Homilies, 971. About twenty years after, /Elfric, called " Grammaticus " from his Englished Latin Grammar, began to write. He turned into English the Pentateuch, Joshua, and part of Job. The rest of his numerous works are some of the best models we possess of the literary English of the beginning of the eleventh century. The two collections of Homilies we owe to him, and his Lives of the Saints, are written in a classic prose, and his Glossary and Colloquy, afterwards edited by ^Elfric Bata, served for a kind of English- Latin text- book. His prose in his later life was somewhat spoiled by his over-mastering fancy for alliteration, but he is always a clear and forcible writer of English. But this revival had no sooner begun to take root than the North- men came again in force upon the land and conquered it. We have in Wulfstan's (Archbishop of York, 1002-23) Address to tlie English, a terrible picture, written in im- passioned prose, of the demoralisation caused by the in- roads of the Danes. During the fresh interweaving of Danes and English together under Danish kings from 1013 to 1042, no English literature arose, but Latin prose intruded more and more on English writing. It was towards the reign of Edward the Confessor that English writing again began to live. But no sooner was it born than the Norman invasion repressed, but did not quench its life. 22. The English Chronicle. One great monument, 3O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. however, of Old English prose lasts beyond the Conquest. It is the English Chronicle, and in it our literature is continuous from /Klfred to Stephen. At first it was nothing but a record of the births and deaths of bishops and kings, and was probably a West-Saxon Chronicle. Among these short notices there is, however, one tragic story, of Cynewulf and Cyneheard, under the date 755 but the true date is 784 so rude in style, and so cir- cumstantial, that it is probably contemporary with the events themselves. If so, it is the oldest piece of histori- cal prose in any Teutonic tongue. More than a hundred years later Alfred took up the Chronicle, caused it to be edited from various sources, added largely to it from Boeda, and raised it to the dignity of a national his- tory. The narrative of yElfred's wars with the Danes, written, it is likely, by himself at the end of his reign, enables us to estimate the great weight yElfred himself had in literature. " Compared with this passage," says Professor Earle, " every other piece of prose, not in these Chronicles merely, but throughout the whole range of ex- tant Saxon literature, must assume a secondary rank." After /Elfred's reign, and that of his son Eadward, 901-25, the Chronicle becomes scanty, but songs and odes are in- serted in it. In the reign of /Ethelred and during the Danish kings its fulness returns, and growing by additions from various quarters, it continues to be our great contem- porary authority in English history till 1154, when it abruptly closes with the death of Stephen. " It is the first history of any Teutonic people in their own language ; it I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 3! is the earliest and most venerable monument of English prose." In it Old English poetry sang its last extant song, in its death Old English prose dies. It is not till the reign of John that English poetry, in any form but that of short poems, appears again in the Brut of Laya- mon. It is not till the reign of Henry III. that original English prose begins again in the Ancren Riwle (the Rule of Anchoresses), in the Wooing of our Lord, and in the charming homily entitled the Sawles Warde. ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. CHAPTER II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, 1066-1400 23. General Outline. The invasion of Britain by the English made the island, its speech, and its literature, English. The invasion of England by the Danes left our speech and literature still English. The Danes were of our stock and tongue, and we absorbed them. The in- vasion of England by the Normans seemed likely to crush the English people, to root out their literature, and even to threaten their speech. But that which happened to the Danes happened to the Normans also, and for the same reason. They were originally of like blood to the English, and of like speech ; and though during their settlement in Normandy they had become French in manner and language, and their literature French, yet the old blood prevailed in the end. The Norman felt his kindred with the English tongue and spirit, became an Englishman, and left the French tongue that he might speak and write in English. We absorbed the Normans, and we took into our literature and speech the French elements they had brought with them. It was a process slower in literature than it was in the political history, II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 33 but it began from the political struggle. Up to the time of Henry II. the Norman troubled himself but little about the English tongue. But when French foreigners came pouring into the land in the train of Henry and his sons the Norman allied himself with the Englishman against these foreigners, and the English tongue began to rise into importance. Its literature grew slowly, but as quickly as most of the literatures of Europe. Moreover it never quite ceased. We are carried on to the year 1 154 by the prose of the English Chronicle. There are traces in the Norman Chroniclers of the use they made of lost Eng- lish war-songs. There are Old English homilies which we may date from 1120. The so-called Moral Ode, an English rhyming poem, was compiled about the year 1 170. It made almost a school ; it gave rise to some impassioned poems to the Virgin, and it is found in a volume of hom- ilies of the same date. In the reign of Henry II., the old Southern-English Gospels of King .^Ethelred's time were modernised after 200 years or less of use. The Sayings of /Elfred, written in English for the English, were composed about the year 1 200. About the same date the Old English Charters of Bury St. Edmunds were translated into the dialect of the shire, and now, early in the thirteenth century, at the central time of the strife between English and foreign elements, after the death of Richard I., the Brut of Layamon and the Orrmitlum come forth within ten years of each other to prove the continuity, the survival, and the victory of the English tongue. When the patriotic struggle closed in the reign 34 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. of Edward I., English literature had again risen, through the song, the religious poems, the alliterative romance and homily, the lives of saints and the translations of French romances, into importance, and was written by a people made up of Norman and Englishman welded into one by the fight against the French foreigner. But though the foreigner was driven out, his literature influ- enced, and continued to influence, the new English poetry, for in this revival our literature was chiefly poet- ical. Prose, with but few exceptions, was still written in Latin. 24. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the two main streams into which this poetical literature divides itself. The religious poetry is for the most part English in spirit, and a poetry of the people, from the Orrmu- litm, about 1215, to Piers Plowman, in which poem the distinctly English poetry reached its truest expression in 1362. The story-telling poetry may be called English at its beginning in the Bnit of Layamon, but becomes more and more influenced by the romantic poetry of France, and in the end grows in Chaucer's hands into a poetry of the court and of fine allegory, a literary in contrast with a popular poetry. But Chaucer, at first thus influ- enced by French and then by Italian subjects, becomes at last entirely English in feeling and in subjects, and the Canterbury Talcs are the best example of English story- telling we possess. The struggle then of England against the foreigner to become and remain England finds its parallel in the struggle of English poetry against the II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 35 influence of foreign poetry to become and remain English. Both struggles were long and varied, but in both Eng- land was triumphant. She became a nation, and she won a national literature. It is the course of this struggle we have now to trace along the two lines already laid down the poetry of religion and the poetry of story- telling; but to do so we must begin in both instances with the Norman Conquest. 25. The Religious Poetry. The religious revival of the eleventh century was strongly felt in Normandy, and both the knights and Churchmen who came to England with William the Conqueror and during his son's reign, were founders of abbeys, from which, as centres of learn- ing and charity, the country was civilised. Where Lan- franc and Anselm lived, religion or scholastic learning was not likely to go to sleep. A frequent communica- tion was kept up with French scholarship through the University of Paris. Schools and libraries multiplied. The Latin learning of England steadily developed. Its scholars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries wrote not only on theology, but on many various subjects ; and some of their books influenced the whole of Euro- pean thought. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of England was further quickened by missionary monks sent by Bernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to rebuild St. Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well- watered valleys of the north. Thus the English citi- zens of London and the English peasants in the country received a new religious life from the foreign noble and 36 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the foreign monk, and both were drawn together through a common worship. When this took place a desire arose for religious handbooks in the English tongue. Orrmin's Orrmulum may be taken as a type of these. We may date it, though not precisely, at 1215, the date of the Great Charter. It is English ; its sources are ^Ifric - and Breda ; its Danish writer loves his native dialect ; not five French words are to be found in it. It is a metrical version of the Gospel of each day with the addition of a sermon in verse. " This book is named Orrmulum for that Orrm it wrought." It marks the rise of English religious literature, and its religion is simple and rustic. Orrm's ideal monk is " a very pure man, and altogether without property, except that he shall be found in simple meat and clothes." He will have " a hard and stiff and rough and heavy life to lead. All his heart and desire ought to be aye toward heaven, and to serve his Master well." This was Eng- lish religion in the country at this date. It was con- tinued in English prose writing by the Ancren Riwle the Rule of the Anchoresses written about 1220. The original MS. was probably in the Dorsetshire dialect. The Genesis and then the Exodus, biblical poems of about 1250, were made by the pious writers to make Christian men as glad as birds at the dawning for the story of salvation. A Northumbrian Psalter of 1250 is only one example out of many devotional pieces, homilies, metrical creeds, hymns to the Virgin (mostly imitated from the French), which, with the metrical n FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 37 Lives of the Saints (a large volume, the lives translated from Latin or French prose into English verse), carry the religious poetry up to 1300. Among these the most important are the lives of three saints, Marherete, Juliane, and Katcrine, and the homily on Hali Mciden- had (Holy Maidenhood) all in alliterative verse, written in southern England, and beginning a new and vital class of poetry, the poetry of impassioned love to Christ and the Virgin. 26. Literature and the Friars. There was little religion in the towns, but this was soon changed. In 1 22 1 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and they chose the towns for their work. The first Friars who learnt English that they might preach to the people were foreigners, and spoke French. Many English Friars studied in Paris, and came back to England, able to talk to Norman noble and English peasant. Their influence, exercised both on Norman and Eng- lish, was thus a mediatory and uniting one, and Normans as well as English now began to write religious works in English. The people, of course, had to be served with stories, and in the early years of the fourteenth century a number of Christian legends of the childhood of Jesus, of the Virgin, the Apostles and Saints, and of miracles, chiefly drawn from the French, were put into varying poetic forms ; and, recited everywhere, added a large number of materials to the imagination of England. A legend -cycle was thus formed, and this cycle was chiefly made by writers in the south of England. In 1303 38 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAV. Robert Mannyng of Brunne, in Lincolnshire, freely translated, to please plain people, a French work, the Manual of Sins (written thirty years earlier by William of Waddington), under the title of Handlyng Synne. William of Shoreham translated the whole of the Psalter into English prose about 1327, and wrote poems which might be called treatises in rhyme. The Cursor Mtuidi, written about 1320, in Northumbria, and thought " the best book of all " by men of that time, was a metrical recast of the history of the Old and New Testament, interspersed, as was the Handlyng Synne, with legends of saints. This book started a whole series of verse- homilies tagged with tales, which created in northern England a legend-cycle similar to that created in the south. Some scattered Sermons, and in 1340 the Ayenbite of Inwyt (the Sting of Conscience), translated from the French, mark how English prose was rising through religion. About the same year Richard Rolle, the Hermit of Hampole, wrote in Latin and in Nor- thumbrian English for the " unlearned," a poem called the Pricke of Conscience. This poem is the last dis- tinctly religious poem of any importance before the Vision of Piers Plowman, unless we are led to except those written by the author of The Grene Knight. At its date, 1340, the religious influence of the Friars was swiftly decaying. In Piers Plowman their influence for good is gone. In that poem, which brings religious poetry, in the death of its author, up to 1400, the re- ligious literature of England strikes the last note of II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 39 the old religious impulse and the boldest music of the new. The Friar is slain, the Puritan survives. 27. History and the Story-telling Poetry. The Normans brought an historical taste with them to England, and created a valuable historical literature. It was written in Latin, and we have nothing to do with it till English story-telling grew out of it about the time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself of such importance that a few things must be said concerning it. (i) The men who wrote it were called CHRONICLERS. At first they were only annalists that is, they jotted down the events of year after year without any attempt to bind them together into a connected whole. Of these, the most important, and indeed they were something more than mere annalists, were Ordericus Vitalis, and his predecessors, Florence of Worcester and Simeon of Durham. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I., another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scattered monasteries, but at the Court. Living at the centre of political life, their histories were written in a philosophic spjrit, and wove into a whole the growth of law and national life and the story of affairs abroad. They are our great authorities for the history of these times. They begin with William of Malmesbury, whose book ends in 1142, and die out after Matthew Paris, 1235-73. His- torical prose in England is only represented after the death of Henry III. by a few dry Latin annalists till it rose again in modern English prose in 1513, when Sir 4O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Thomas More's Life of Edward V. and Usurpation of Richard III. is said to have been written. (2) A distinct English feeling soon sprang up among these Norman historians. English patriotism was far from having died among the English themselves. The Sayings of /Elf red were written in English by the English. These and some ballads, as well as the early English war-songs, interested the Norman historians and were collected by them. William of Malmesbury, who was born of English and Norman parents, has sympathies with both peoples, and his history marks how both were becoming one nation. The same welding together of the conquered and the conquerors is seen in Henry of Huntingdon and others, till we come to Matthew Paris, whose view of history is entirely that of an Englishman. When he wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, Norman abbot and English priest, were, and are in his pages, one in blood and one in interests. 28. English Story-telling grew out of this historical literature. There was a Welsh priest at the court of Henry L, called GEOFFREY OF MOXMOUTH, who, inspired by the Genius of romance, composed in Latin twelve short books (i 132-35), which he playfully called History. He had been given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to translate which told in verse the history of Britain from the days when Brut, the great-grandson of .Eneas, landed on its shores, through the whole history of King Arthur down to Cadwallo, a Welsh king who died in 689. The real historians were angry at the fiction, and declared II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 4! that throughout the whole of it " he had lied saucily and shamelessly." It was indeed only a clever putting to- gether and invention of a number of Welsh and other legends, but it was the beginning of story-telling after the Conquest. Every one who read it was delighted with it ; it made, as we should say, a sensation, and as much on the Continent as in England. Geoffrey may be said to have created the heroic figure of Arthur, which had been only sketched in the compilation which passes under the name of Nennius. In it the Welsh invaded English liter- ature, and their tales have never since ceased to live in it. They charm us as much in Tennyson's Idylls of the King as they charmed us in the days of Henry I. But the stories Geoffrey of Monmouth told were in Latin prose. They were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar for the wife of his patron, Ralph FitzGilbert, a northern baron. They got afterwards to France and, added to from Breton legends, were made into a poem And decked out with the ornaments of French romance. In that form they came back to England as the work of Wace, a Norman of Caen, the writer also of the Roman cie Ron, who called his poem the Geste dcs Bretons (afterwards the Brut}, and completed it in 1155, shortly after the accession of Henry II. Spread far and wide in France, it led to an immense development there and elsewhere of the Legend of Arthur and his Knights. 29. Layamon's "Brut." In this French form the story drifted through England, and at last falling into the hands of an English priest in Worcestershire, he resolved 42 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. to tell it in alliterative English verse to his countrymen, and so doing became the writer of our first important English poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say that its date is 1205, ten years or so before the Orrmu- lum was written, ten years before the Great Charter. It is plain that its composition, though it told a Welsh story, was looked on as a patriotic work by the writer. " There was a priest in the land," he writes of himself, " whose name was Layamon ; he was son of Leovenath : May the Lord be gracious unto him ! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on the bank of Severn, near Radstone, where he read books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble needs of England, what the men were named, and whence they came, who first had English land." And it was truly of great importance. The poem opened to the imagination of the English people an immense, though a fabled, past for the history of the island they dwelt in, and made a common bond of interest between Norman and English- man. It linked also the Welsh to the English and the Norman. Written on the borders of Wales, it introduces a number of Briton legends of which Wace knew nothing, and of English stories also clown to the days of ^thel- stan. It enlarged Arthur before the eyes of men, and even Teutonic sagas enter into the story. In the realm of poetry all nations meet and are reconciled. Though a great deal of it is rendered from the French, there are not fifty French words in its 30,000 lines. The old Eng- lish alliterative metre is kept up with a few rare rhymes. II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 43 In battle, in pathetic story, in romantic adventure, in in- vention, in the sympathy of sea and storm with heroic deeds, he is a greater and more original poet than those who followed him, till we come to Chaucer. He touches with one hand the ancient England before the Conquest, he touches with another the romantic poetry after it. In- deed, what Ccedmon was to early English poetry, Layamon is to English poetry after the Conquest. He is the first of the new singers. 30. Story-telling becomes entirely French in Form. After an interval the desire for story-telling increased in England, and France satisfied the desire. The French tales were carried over our land by the travelling mer- chant and friar, by the gleemen and singers who trans- lated them, or sung translations of them, not only to the castle and the farm, but to the village and the town. Floriz and Blancheflur and the Romance of Sir Tristrem were versified before 1300, and many other romantic tales. The lay of Havelok the Dane was perhaps adapted from the French towards the close of the thirteenth cen- tury, and so was the song of King Horn. Their English origin is also maintained, and at least both rest on Teutonic tradition. The first took form in northern England, and shares in the rough vigour of the north. The second is a southern tale, and has been entirely transformed by the romantic spirit. English in rhythm, it is thoroughly French in feeling. The romances of King Alexander oxA. of Richard Cd'i/r if< : Lion, and of Arthour >inJ JAv////, while romantic in form, preserve an English sentiment 44 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and originality which make us remember that, when they were written, Edward I. was making Norman and English into one people. About 1300 the story- telling verged into historical poems, and Robert of Gloucester wrote his Rhyming Chronicle, horn Brutus to Edward I. As the dates grow nearer to 1300, the amount of French words increases, and the French romantic manner of story-telling. In the Romance of Alexander, to take one example as a type of all, the natural landscape, the conventional intro- ductions to the parts, the gorgeous descriptions of pomps, and armour, and cities, the magic wonders, the manners, and feasts, and battles of chivalry, especially the love affairs and feelings, are all steeped in the colours of French romantic poetry. Now this romance was origi- nally adapted by a Frenchman about the year 1200. It took therefore nearly a century before the French romantic manner of ' poetry could be naturalised in English ; and it was naturalised, curious to say, at the very time when England as a nation had lost its French attachments and become entirely English. 31. Cycles of Romance. At this time, then, the French romance of a hundred years earlier was made English in England. There were four great romantic stories. The first was that of King Arthur, and Geoffrey of Monmouth began it in England about 1132. Before 1150 it was taken up in Normandy, sent therefrom into France, and independent invention soon began to play upon it. Of these inventors the first was C'restien of Troyes, but we owe to Robert de Boron, a knight of the n FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 45 Vosges country, the first poem on the Graal, the Holy Dish with which Christ celebrated the Last Supper, and which in the hands of Joseph of Arimathea received his blood. The origin of the legend may be traced to Celtic stories, and this may partly account, for its swift development in the west of England. Two more romances on the subject, Le Grand St. Graal and La Qucste del St. Graal, in which Galahad appears, are attributed to Walter Map, a friend of Henry II., and they were certainly written in England in that king's reign. It is due to the Anglo-Normans and the Normans that this Graal-story, in which the Arthur legends were bound up with the highest doctrine of the Church, took its great development, not only in France but in Ger- many. Alongside of the Arthurian Saga arose the Tristan story, and, at first independent, it was afterwards linked on to the tale of Arthur. These two together, along with stories invented concerning all the Knights of the Round Table, and chiefly Launcelot and Gawaine, were worked over in a multitude of romantic tales, most of which became popular in England, and were sung and made into English verse from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The second romantic story was that of Charlemagne and his twelre peers. Begun in France with the Song of Roland, a huge tale of Charlemagne was forged about nio in the name of Archbishop Turpin. In this, Charlemagne's wars were bound up with oriental legend, with the Holy Sepulchre, with every kind of story. A 46 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. great number of Carlovingian romances followed. This cycle, however, owing perhaps to the alienation of the Anglo-Normans in England from the French, was not much developed in England at the beginning of our romance-writing. The most popular of the Carlovingian poems was the poem of Otinel in the reign of Edward II. ; but the most beautiful was Amis et Amiloun, the English version of which so wholly leaves out its con- nexion with Charlemagne that it has been supposed to be an original Anglo-Norman-English poem. The Roland, the Charlemagne and Roland, a Siege of Milan, Sir Ferumbras and the humorous Rauf Coilyear almost exhaust the English poems of this cycle. The third Romantic story is that of the Life of Alexander, derived from a Latin version (fourth century) of the Greek story made in Alexandria under the name of Callisthenes. Its romantic wonders, fictions, and magic, largely added to from the Arabian books about Eskander, were doubled by the imagination and coloured with all the romance of chivalry in the eleventh or twelfth century ; and the story became so common in England that " every wight that hath discrecioune," says Chaucer, had heard of Alexander's fortune. No doubt it was sung all over England, but we have only a few poems concern- ing it in English, the last of which, a free translation of a French original, The Buik of the most noble and vail- zeand Conquerour, belongs to the fourth decade of the fifteenth century. The fourth romantic story, first in date, but last in im- II FROM TI1K CONQUEST TO CIIAUCKR 47 portance in England, was that of the Siege of Troy. Two Latin pieces, bearing the names of Dares Phrygius and of Dictys Cretcnsis, composed about the story of Troy in the decline of Latin literature, were worked over by Benoit de Sainte More, with fabulous and romantic in- ventions of his own, in the Roman de Troic, about 1160. Guido della Colonne, of Messina, took them up about 1270, and with additions woven into them from the Theban and Argonautic stories, made a great Latin story out of them which Lydgate used. Virgil supplied mate- rials for a romance of sEiieas ; Statius for a Roman de Thebes. During the crusades Byzantine and oriental stories entered into French romance, and especially into this Cycle of Troy. The Gat Historiale (XIV. Cent.) of the Destruction of Troy, first introduced the story of Troilus (invented by Benoit) to readers of English verse. This cycle does not seem to have much entered into our literature till Chaucer's time, but it attracted both Chau- cer and Lydgate. These were the four great Romantic cycles which were used by English poets. But the desire for romances was not satisfied with these. A few collected round Old English traditions or history. There was a poem about Wade, the father of Weland, to which Chaucer alludes. It has long been lost, but a small fragment of it has lately been discovered. I have already mentioned the stories of Horn and Havelok. The romances of Guy of War- wick and of Bevis of Hampton, though both translated from the French, take us back to the time of .-Ethelstan 48 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and Eadgar, but are as unhistorical as the tales of Troy and Alexander. A number of other romances from vari- ous sources belong to the time of the Edwards, and were all derived from the French. Short tales also sprang up, taken from the fabliaux, from the Roman de Renart, from the French lais, some satirical, some of love, some in the form of "debates." Compilations of tales were made. The Sevyn Sages was worked from the oriental stock of the Book of the Seven Wise Men; and the Gesfa Romanorum, a book of stories which began to be used in England in the reign of Edward I., supplied the mate- rial for tales in England as well as all over Europe. The country was therefore swarming with tales, chiefly French, and its poetic imagination with the fancies, the fables, the love, and the ornaments of French romance, trans- lated and imitated in English, and written in the metres of France and in rhyme. 32. Alliterative English Poems, 1350. In the midst of all this French imitation, something national begins to gleam, and it comes from the west, from the lands on the edge of Wales and Cumbria. This is the recovery of the Old English metre, that fine, elastic, marching, epic, alliterative metre which Layamon used, and which takes us back to Cynewulf. The things written now in this national metre are still romantic and French in sub- ject, feeling, and manners ; but their Teutonic metre slides a fresh, even a vigorous originality, into the con- ventional phrasing of the romantic poetry. This reaction from a French to an English type began in the middle li FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 49 of the fourteenth century, and runs parallel with the gen- eral victory of the English language over the French in the time of Edward III. 'At least twelve important poems are written in this alliterative metre, the last of which in this century was Langland's Vision. Among these, but not altogether alliterative, are the poems of a northern, perhaps a Lancashire poet. These are Sir Gawavne and the Grene Knight ; Pearl ; and Clean- ness and Patience (Clannesse and Pacience). This poet, who probably had finished his poems just as Chaucer and Langland began to write, stands quite apart from his fel- lows in excellence, and, indeed, along with Langland and only below Chaucer. Though Sir Gaivayne is romantic, it escapes at many points from the French spirit. It is more original, it is more imaginative, it is far more in- tense in feeling, than the ordinary romances. It de- scribes natural scenery at first hand, and the scenery is that of the poet's own country. It is moral in aim, it is composed into an organic whole. It is full of new inven- tions. In the Pearl, our earliest /;/ Memoriam, there is an extraordinary personal passion of grief and of religious exultation pervading a lovely symbolism, which is quite unique. The same strong personality, mixed with a more distinctly moral purpose, fills the writer's two other poems, and brings him as a religious poet into range with Langland on the one hand, and with Cynewulf on the other. Xo one can crudely mix him up with France. He is as English, at the last, as Langland or Chaucer. E 5O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 33. English Lyrics. In the midst of all this story- telling, like prophecies of what should afterwards be so lovely in our poetry, rose, no one can tell how, some lyric poems, country idylls, love songs, and, later on, some war-songs. The English ballad, sung from town to town by wandering gleemen, had never altogether died. A number of rude ballads collected round the legendary Robin Hood, and the kind of poetic litera- ture which sang of the outlaw and the forest, and after- wards so fully of the wild border life, gradually took form. About 1280 a beautiful little idyll called the Owl and the Nightingale was written, probably in Dor- setshire, in which the rival birds submit their quarrel for precedence to the possible writer of the poem, Nicholas of Guildford. About 1300 we meet with a few lyric poems, full of charm. They sing of spring-time with its blossoms, of the woods ringing with the thrush and night- ingale, of the flowers and the seemly sun, of country work, of the woes and joys of love, and many other delightful things. They are tinged with the colour of French romance, but they have an English background. This lyrical movement began with hymns to the Virgin and Christ, touched with the sentiments of Latin and Norman-French amorous poetry. These changed into frank love-poems in the hands of the wandering stu- dents. Many arose on the Welsh marches, and were tinged with Celtic feeling. Some are no doubt literary renderings of English folk-songs, such as " Surner is ycumen in," "Blow, northerne wind," and are full of n FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 51 love of women and love of nature. After these, a new type of religious lyrics blossomed, in which, as in all future English poetry, the love of nature was mingled with the love of God and the longing of the soul for perfect beauty. Satirical lyrics also arose, and the pro- verbial poetry of France gave an impulse to collections like the Proverbs of Hendyng. Most of these were of the time of Henry III. and Edward I. Political ballads now began, in Edward I.'s reign, to be frequently written in English, but the only dateable ballads of importance are that on the battle of Lewes, 1264, and the ten war lyrics of Laurence Minot, who, in 1352, sang the great deeds and battles of Edward III. 34. The King's English. After the Conquest, French or Latin was the language of the literary class. The Eng- lish tongue, spoken only by the people, fell back from the standard West-Saxon English of the Chronicle into that broken state of anarchy in which each part of the country has its own dialect, and each writer uses the dialect of his own dwelling-place. All the poems then of which we have spoken were written in dialects of English, not in a fixed English common to all writers. During the prev- alence of French, and the continued translation of French poems, English had been invaded by French words, and though it had become, in Edward III.'s reign, the national tongue, it had been transformed as a language. The old inflections had mostly disappeared. French endings and prefixes were used, till even so early as the end of Edward I.'s reign, in Robert of Brunne's 52 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. work, a third of his nouns, adverbs, and verbs, are French. His work was still however in a dialect the East-Midland dialect. This dialect grew into the lan- guage of literature, the standard -English. In Robert of Brunne, it was most literary and most French, but we must remember that the same dialect belonged to the two centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, and that London, on this side the Thames was contained in the same Anglian boundaries. This conquering dialect, when it became the standard English, did not prevent the Vision concerning Piers Plowman and Wyclif's transla- tion of the Bible from being written in a dialect, but it became the English in which all future English literature was to be written. It was fixed into clear form by Chaucer. It was the language talked at the court and in the court society to which that poet belonged. It was the King's English, and the fact that it was the tongue of the best and most cultivated society, as well as the great excellence of the works written in it by Chaucer, made it at once the tongue of literature. 35. Religious Literature in Langland and Wyclif. We have traced the work of " transition English," as it has been called, along the lines of popular religion and story-telling. The first of these, in the realm of poetry, reaches its goal in the work of William Langland ; in the realm of prose it reaches its goal in Wyclif. In both these writers, the work differs from any that went before it, by its popular power, and by the depth of its re- ligious feeling. It is plain that it represented a society II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 53 much more strongly moved by religion than that of the beginning of the fourteenth century. In Wyclif, the voice comes from the university and it went all over the land in the body of preachers whom, like Wesley, he sent forth. In Langland's Vision we have a voice from the centre of the people themselves ; his poem is \vritten in old alliterative English verse, and in the Old English manner. The very ploughboy could understand it. It became the book of those who desired social and Church reform. It was as eagerly listened to by the free labourers and fugitive serfs who collected round John Ball and Wat Tyler. It embodied a puritan reaction against the Friars who had fallen away from the religious revival they had so nobly instituted. The strongest cry of this regenerated religion was for truth as against hypocrisy, for purity in State and Church and private life, for honest labour, and against ill-gotten wealth and its tyrannical persecution. There was also a great movement at this time against the class system of the Middle Ages. This was made a re- ligious movement when the equality of all men before God was maintained, and a social movement when it pro- tested against the oppression of the poor and on behalf of their misery. The French wars had increased this misery. Heavy taxation and severe laws ground down the peasantry. The "Black Death" deepened the wretched- ness into panic. In 1349, 1362, and 1369 it swept over England. Grass grew in the towns : whole villages were left uninhabited ; a wild terror fell upon the people, which was added to by a fierce tempest in 1362 that to 54 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their panic then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion. 36. Piers Plowman. All these elements are to be found fully represented in the Vision of William concern- ing Piers Plowman, followed by that concerning Dowel, Dobet, and Dobcst. Its author, WILLIAM LAXGLAND, though we are not certain of his surname, was born, about 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. His Vision begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in the country in 1362. At the accession of Richard II., 1377, he was in London. The great popularity of his poem made him in that year, and again about the year 1398, send forth two more texts of his poem. In these texts he made so many additions to the first text that he nearly doubled the length of the original poem. In 1399, he wrote his last poem, Richard the Redeless, and then died, probably in 1400, and we may hope in the quiet of the West country. 37. His Vision. He paints his portrait as he was when he lived in Cornhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men called Long Will ; clothed in the black robes in which he sang for a few pence at the funerals of the rich ; hating to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the lords and ladies that rode by in -silver and furs as he stalked in observant moodiness along the Strand. It is this figure which in indignant sorrow walks through the o o o whole poem. The dream of the " field full of folk," with which it begins, brings together nearly as many II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 55 typical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do. In the first part, the truth sought for is righteous dealing in Church, and Law, and State. After the Prologue of the " field full of folk " and in it the Tower of Truth and the Dungeon where the Father of Falsehood lives, the Vision treats of Holy Church who tells the dreamer of Truth. Where is Falsehood ? he asks. She bids him turn, and he sees Falsehood and Lady Meed, and learns that they are to be married. Theology interferes and all the parties go to London before the King. Lady Meed, arraigned on Falsehood's flight, is advised by the King to marry Conscience, but Conscience indignantly pro- claims her faults, and prophesies that one day Reason will judge the world. On this the King sends for Reason, who, deciding a question against Wrong and in spite of Meed (or bribery), is begged by the King to remain with him. This fills four divisions or " Passus." The fifth Passus contains the confession of the Seven Deadly Sins, and is full of vivid pictures of friars, robbers, nuns, of village life, of London alehouses, of all the vices of the time. It ends with the search for Truth being taken up by all the penitents, and then for the first time Piers Plowman appears and describes the way. He sets all who come to him to hard work, and it is here that the passages occur in which the labouring poor and their evils are dwelt upon. The seventh Passus introduces the bull of pardon sent by Truth (God the Father) to Piers. A Priest declares it is not valid, and the discussion between him and Piers is so hot that the Dreamer awakes and 56 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. ends with a fine outburst on the wretchedness of a trust in indulgences and the nobleness of a righteous life. This is the first part of the poem. In the second part the truth sought for is that of righteous life, to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the three titles of a new vision and a new pilgrimage. In a series of dreams and a highly-wrought allegory, Do Well, Do Bet, and Do Best are finally identified with Jesus Christ, who now appears as Love in the dress of Piers Plowman. Do W T cll is full of curious and important passages. Do Bet points out Christ as the Saviour of the World, describes His death, resurrection, and victory over Death and Sin. And the dreamer awakes in a transport of joy, with the Easter chimes pealing in his ears. But as Langland looked round on the world, the victory did not seem real, and the stem dreamer passed out of triumph into the dark sorrow in which he lived. He dreams again in Do Best, and sees, as Christ leaves the earth, the reign of Antichrist. Evils attack the Church and mankind. Envy, Pride, and Sloth, helped by the Eriars, besiege Conscience. Conscience cries on Contri- tion to help him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, all but despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to wander over the world, praying for luck and health, '' till he have Piers the Plowman," till he find the Saviour. And then the dreamer wakes for the last time, weeping bitterly. This is the poem which displays to us that side of English society which Chaucer had not touched, and which wrought so stronglv in men's minds that its moral II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 57 influence was almost as widely spread as Wyclif's in the revolt which had now begun against Latin Christianity. Its fame was so great, that it produced imitators. About 1394, another alliterative poem was set forth by an unknown author, with the title of Pierce tlic Ploughman's Crcde ; and the Plowman 's Tale, wrongly attributed to Chaucer, is another witness to the popularity of Langland. 38. Wyclif. At the same time as the Vision was being read all over England, JOHN WYCLIF, about 1378, determined to give a full translation of the Bible to the English people in their own tongue. He himself trans- lated the New Testament. His assistant, Nicholas of Hereford, finished the Old Testament as far as Earuch, and Wyclif completed it. Some time after, John Purvey, under Wyclif, revised the whole, corrected its errors, did away with its Latinisms, and made it a book of sterling English a book which had naturally a great power to fix and preserve words in our language. But Wyclif did much more than this for our tongue. He made it the popular language of religious thought and feeling. In 1381 he was in full battle with the Church on the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was condemned to silence. Fie replied by appealing to the whole of England in the speech of the people. He sent forth tract after tract, sermon after sermon, couched not in the dry, philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in short, sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all the doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the Church of 58 ENGLISH LITER A TURK CHAP. Rome. He was our first Protestant. It was a new literary vein to open, the vein of the pamphleteer. With his work then, and with Langland's, we bring up to the year 1400 the English prose and poetry pertaining to religion, the course of which we have been tracing since the Conquest. 39. Story-telling is the other line on which we have placed our literature, and it is now represented by JOHN GOVVER. He belongs to a school older than Chaucer, inasmuch as he is scarcely touched by the Italian, but chiefly by the French influence. However, he had read Petrarca. Fifty Balades prove with what clumsy ease he could write in the French tongue about the affairs of love. As he grew older he grew graver, and partly as the religious and social reformer, and partly as the story- teller, he fills up the literary space between the spirit of Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Sav- iour, at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his three great works, the Speculum Meditantis, the Vox Clamantis, the Confessio Aman/is, 1393. It marks the unsettled state of our literary language, that each of these was written in a different tongue, the first in French, the second in Latin, the third in English. The first of these has been lost, but has lately been dis- covered at Cambridge. The second is a dream which passes into a sermon, cataloguing all the vices of the time, and is suggested by the peasant rising of 1381. The third, his English work, is a dialogue between a lover and his confessor a priest of Venus, and in its II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 59 course, and with an imitation of Jean de Meung's part of the Roman de la Rose, all the passions and studies which may hinder love are dwelt upon, partly in allegory, and their operation illustrated by apposite stories, borrowed from the Gesta Romanorum and from the Romances. But the book is in reality a better and larger collection of tales than was ever made before in English. The telling of the tales is wearisome, and the smoothness of the verse makes them more wearisome. But Gower was a careful writer of English ; and in his satire of evils, and in his grave reproof of the follies of Richard II., he rises into his best strain. The king himself, even though reproved, was a patron of the poet. It was as Gower was rowing on the Thames that the royal barge drew near, and he was called to the king's side. " Book some new thing," said the king, " in the way you are used, into which book I myself may often look;" and the re- quest was the origin of the Confession of a Lorcr, He ended by writing The Tripartite Chronicle. It is with pleasure that we turn from the learned man of talent to Geoffrey Chaucer to the genius who called Gower, with perhaps some of the irony of an artist, " the moral Gower." 40. Chaucer's French Period. GEOFFREY CHAUCER was the son of John Chaucer, a vintner, of Thames Street, London, and was born in 1340 or a year or two earlier. Me lived almost all his life in London, in the centre of its work and society. When he was sixteen he became page to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, 6O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and continued at the court till he joined the army in France in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but ransomed before the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360. We then know nothing of his life for seven years ; but from items in the Exchequer Rolls, we find that he 'was again connected with the court, from 1366 to 1372. He was made a valet of the king's chamber, and in 1368 an " esquire of less degree." It was during this time that he began to write. We seem to have evidence that he composed in his wild youthful days a number of love poems, none of which have survived, but which gave him some fame as a poet. It is said that the A, B, C, a prayer to the Virgin, is the first of his extant poems, but some are in- clined to put it later. The translation of the Roman de la Rose which we possess is, with the exception of the first 1 705 lines, denied to be his, but it is certain that he did make a translation of the French poem ; and there are a few who think that Chaucer's translation was made about 1380, and that it is completely lost. It is com- monly said that he wrote the Comple\nt unto Fife, a tender and lovely little poem, before 1369. This was followed by the Bokc of flu- Duchcsse, in 1369, a pathetic allegory of the death of Blanche of Castile, whose hus- band, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's patron. These, being written under the influence of French poetry, are classed under the name of Chaucer's first period. There are lines in them which seem to speak of a luckless love affair, and in this broken love it has been supposed we find some key to Chaucer's early life. However that II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6 1 may be, he was married to Philippa Chaucer at some period between 1366 and 1374. Of the children of this marriage we only know certainly of one, Lewis, for whom he made his treatise on the Astrolabe. 41. Chaucer's Italian Period. Chaucer's second poetic period may be called the period of Italian influence, from 1372 to 1384. During these years he went for the king on four, perhaps five, diplomatic missions. Two of these were to Italy the first to Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, 1372-3 ; the second to Lombardy, 1378-9. At that time the great Italian literature which inspired then, and still inspires, European literature, had reached an astonishing excellence, and it opened to Chaucer a new world of art. His many quotations from Dante show that he had read the Divina Commedia, and we may well think that he then first learnt the full power and range of poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, and he learnt what is meant by " form" in poetry; but Petrarca never had the same power over him which Dante possessed. He read the tales and poems of Boccaccio, who made Italian prose, and in them he first saw how to tell a story exquisitely. Petrarca and Boc- caccio he may even have met, for they died in 1374 and 1375, and Petrarca was in 1373 at Arqua, close to Padua, an 1 employed on the Latin version of the story of Gri- silde, the version which Chaucer translated in the Clerk's tale. But Dante he could not see, for he had died at Ravenna in 132 1. When he came back from these journeys he was a new man. He threw aside the roman- 62 ENGLISH LITERATUKK CHAP. tic poetry much in vogue, and perhaps laughed at it then in his gay and kindly manner in the Rime of Sir Thopas, one of the Canterbury Tales. His chief work of this time bears witness to the influence of Italy. It was Troihts and Criseyde, 1380-3, a translation, with many changes and additions, of the 'Filostrato of Boccaccio. The additions (and he nearly doubled the poem) are stamped with his own peculiar tenderness, vividness, and simplicity. His changes from the original are all tow- ards the side of purity, good taste, and piety. We meet the further influence of Boccaccio in the birth of some of the Canterbury Tales, and of Petrarca in the Tales themselves. To this time is now referred the Lyf of Seint Cecyle, afterwards made the Second Nun's tale ; and the passionate religious fervour and repentance of this poem has seemed to point to a period of penitence in his life for his early sensuousness. It did not last long, and he now wrote the Story of Grisilde, the Clerk's tale ; the Story of Constance, the Man of Law's tale ; the Monk's tale; the Complevnt of Mars; the Com- pleynt to his Ladv ; Anelida and Arcyte ; Troilus and Criseyde; the Lines to Adam Scrivener; To Rose- mounde ; The Parlement of Foides ; Boece, a prose ver- sion of the De Consolatione ; the Hous of Fame, and the Lcgcntie of Good U'omen. In these two last poems we may trace, not only an Italian, but a classical period in the work of Chaucer. This is the record of the work of the years between 1373 and 1384 ; and almost all these poems are either influenced by Dante or adapted II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 63 from Petrarca and Boccaccio. In the passion with which Chaucer describes the ruined love of Troilus or Anelida, some have traced the lingering sorrow of his early love affair. Hut if this be true, it was now passing away, for in the creation of Pandarus in the Troilus, and in the delightful fun of that enchanting poem the Par/cm cut of Foules, a new Chaucer appears, the humorous poet of some of the Canterbury Tales. The noble art of the Park men t, as well as that of the Troilus, lifts Chaucer already on to that eminence apart where sit the great poets of the world. Nothing like this had appeared before in England. Nothing like it appeared again till Spenser. In the active business life he led during the period his poetry was likely to win a closer grasp on human life, for he was not only employed on service abroad, but also at home. In 1374 he was Comptroller of the Wool Customs, in 1382 of the Petty Customs, and in 1386 Knight of the Shire for Kent. 42. Chaucer's English Period. It is in the next period, from 1384 to 1390, that he left behind (except in the borrowing of his subjects) Italian influence as he had left French, and became entirely himself, entirely English. The comparative poverty in which he now lived, and the loss of his offices in 1386, for in John of Gaunt's absence court favour was withdrawn from him, and the death of his wife in 1387, may have given him more time for study and the retired life of a poet. His appointment as Clerk of the Works in 1389 brought him again into contact with men. lie superintended the 64 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. repairs and building at the Palace of Westminster, the Tower, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, till July, 1391, when he was superseded, and lived on pensions allotted to him by Richard II. and by Henry IV., after he had sent Henry in 1399 his Co nipleint to his Purse. Before 1390, however, he had added to his great work its most English tales ; those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun's Priest, the Pardoner, and perhaps the Sompnour. The Prologue was probably written in 1388. In these, in their humour, in their vividness of portraiture, in their ease of narration, and in the variety of their characters, Chaucer shines supreme. A few smaller poems belong to this time, such as the Former Age ; Fortune ; Truth; Gentilesse ; and the Lak of Steadfastncsse. During the last ten years of his life, which may be called the period of his decay, he wrote some small poems, and along with the Compleynt of Venus, and a prose treatise on the Astrolabe, three more Canterbury tales, the Canon's-yeoman's, Manciple's, and Parson's. The last was written the year of his death, 1400. Having done this work he died in a house under the shadow of the Abbey of Westminster. Within the walls of the Abbey Church, the first of the poets who lies there, that "sacred and happy spirit" sleeps. 43. Chaucer's Character. Born of the tradesman class, Chaucer was in every sense of the word one of our finest gentlemen : tender, graceful in thought, glad of heart, humorous, and satirical without tmkindness ; sensitive to II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 65 every change of feeling in himself and others, and there- fore full of sympathy; brave in misfortune, even to mirth, and doing well and with careful honesty all he undertook. His first and great delight was in human nature, and he makes us love the noble characters in his poems, and feel with kindliness towards the baser and ruder sort. He never sneers, for he had a wide charity, and we can always smile in his pages at the follies and forgive the sins of men. He had a quiet and true religion, much like that we conceive Shakespeare to have had ; nor was he without a high philosophic strain. Both were kept in order 'by his imagination and his humour. He had a true and chivalrous regard for women of his own class, and his wife and he ought to have been very happy if they had fulfilled the ideal he had of marriage. He lived in aristocratic society, and yet he thought him the great- est gentleman who was the most courteous and the most virtuous. He lived frankly among men, and as we have seen, saw many different types of men, and in his own time filled many parts as a man of the world and of busi- ness. Yet, with all this active and observant life, he was commonly very quiet and kept much to himself. " Flee from the press and dwell with steadfastness " is the first line of his last ballad, and it embodies, with the rest of that personal poem, the serious part of his life. The Host in the Tales japes at him for his lonely, abstracted air. "Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare, And ever on the ground I see thee stare." Being a good scholar, he read morning and night alone, and he says F 66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. that after his (office) work he would go home and sit at another book as dumb as a stone, till his look was dazed. While at study and when he was making of songs and ditties, " nothing else that God had made " had any in- terest for him. There was but one thing that roused him then, and that too he liked to enjoy alone. It was the beauty of the morning and the fields, the woods, and streams, and flowers, and the singing of the little birds. This made his heart full of revel and solace, and when spring came after winter, he rose with the lark and cried " Farewell, my book and my devotion." He was a keen observer of the nature he cared for, especially of colour. He loved the streams and the birds and soft grassy places and green trees, and all sweet, ordered gardens, and flowers. He could spend the whole day, he says, in gazing alone on the daisy, and though what he says is symbolic, yet \ve may trace through the phrase that lonely delight in natural scenery which is so special a mark of our later poets. He lived thus a double life, in and out of the world, but never a gloomy one. For he was fond of mirth and good-living, and when he grew towards age, was portly of waist, no poppet to embrace. But he kept to the end his elfish countenance, the shy, delicate, half-mischievous face which looked on men from its gray hair and forked beard, and was set off by his dark-coloured dress and hood. A knife and ink-horn hung on his dress ; we see a rosary in his hand ; and when lie was alone he walked swiftly. 44. The Canterbury Tales. Of his work it is not II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6/ easy to speak briefly, because of its great variety. Enough has been said of it, with the exception of his most com- plete creation, the Canterbury Tales. It will be seen from the dates given above that they were not written at one time. They are not, and cannot be looked on as a whole. Many were written independently, and then fitted into the framework of the Prologue. Many, which he intended to write in order to complete his scheme, were never written. But we may say that the full idea of his work took shape about 1385, after he had finished The Legende of Good Women, and that the whole existing body of the Tales was completed, with the exception of the last three already mentioned, before the close of 1390. At intervals, from time to time, he added a tale; in fact, the whole was done much in the same way as Tennyson has written his Idylls of the King. The manner in which he knitted them together was very simple, and likely to please the English people. The holiday ex- cursions of the time were the pilgrimages, and the most famous and the pleasantest pilgrimage to go, especially for Londoners, was the three or four days' journey to see the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Persons of all ranks in life met and travelled together, starting from a London inn. Chaucer had probably made the pilgrimage to Canterbury in the spring of 1385 or 1387, and was led by this experience to the framework in which he set his pictures of life. He grouped around the jovial host of the Tabard Inn men and women of every class of society in England, set them on horseback to ride to Canterbury 68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. and home again, intending to make each of them tell tales. No one could hit off a character better, and in his Prologue, and in the prologues to the several Tales, a great part of the new, vigorous English society which had grown up since Edward I. is painted with astonishing vividness. " I see all the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales," says Dryden, " their humours, their features, and the very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them at the Tabard in Southwark." The Tales themselves take in the whole range of the poetry and the life of the Middle Ages ; the legend of the saint, the romance of the knight, the wonderful fables of the traveller, the coarse tale of common life, the love story, the allegory, the animal-fable, and the satirical lay. And they are pure tales. He is not in any sense a dramatic writer ; he is our greatest story-teller in verse. All the best tales are told easily, sincerely, with great grace, and yet with so much homeliness, that a child would understand them. Sometimes his humour is broad, sometimes sly, some- times gay, but it is also exquisite and affectionate. His pathos does not go into the far depths of sorrow and pain, but it is always natural. He can bring tears into our eyes, and he can make us smile or be sad as he pleases. His eye for colour was superb and distinctive. He had a very fine ear for the music of verse, and the tale and the verse go together like voice and music. Indeed, so softly flowing and bright are they, that to read them is like listening in a meadow full of sunshine to a clear stream rippling over its bed of pebbles. The English in II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 69 which they are written is almost the English of our time ; and it is literary English. Chaucer made our tongue into a true means of poetry. _He did more, he welded together the French and English elements in our language and made them into one English tool for the use of literature, and all our prose writers and poets derive their tongue from the language of the Canterbury Talcs. They give him honour for this, but still more for that he was so fine an artist. Poetry is an art, and the artist in poetry is one who writes for pure and noble pleasure the thing he writes, and who desires to give to others the same or a similar pleasure by his poems which he had in writing them. The things he most cares about are that the form in which he puts his thoughts or feelings may be perfectly fitting to the sub- jects : and that subject, matter, and form should be as beautiful as possible but for these he cares very greatly ; and in this Chaucer stands apart from the other poets of his time. Gower wrote with a set object, and nothing can be less beautiful than the form in which he puts his tales. The author of Piers Plowman wrote with the object of reform in social and ecclesiastical affairs, and his form is uncouth and harsh. Chaucer wrote be- cause he was full of emotion and joy in his own thoughts, and thought that others would weep and be glad with him, and the only time he ever moralises is in the tales of the Canon's Yeoman and the Manciple, written in his de- cay. He has, then, the best right to the poet's name. He is, within his own range, the clearest of English artists. 7O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Finally, his position in the history of English poetry and towards his own time resembles that of Dante, whom he loved so well, in the history and poetry of Italy. Dante embodied all the past elements of the Middle Ages in his work, and he began the literature, the thoughts, and the power of a new age. He was the Evening Star of the Mediaeval day and the Morning Star of the Renaissance. Chaucer also represented med- iaevalism though in a much more incomplete way than Dante, but he had, so far as poetry in England is con- cerned, more of the Renaissance spirit than Dante. He is more humanistic than even Spenser. England needed to live more than a century to get up to the level of Chaucer. Lastly, both Dante and he made their own country's tongue the tongue of noble literature. 45. The Travels of Sir John Maundevile belong to this place which treats of story-telling. Whatever other English prose arose in the fourteenth century was theo- logical or scientific. John of Trevisa had, among other English translations, turned into English prose, 1387, the Polychronicon of Ranulf Higden. Various other prose treatises, beginning with those of Richard Rolle, had appeared. Chaucer himself translated two of his tales, that of the Parson, and that of Melibceus, from the French into an involved prose ; and wrote in the same rude vehicle, his Boecc, and his book on the Astrolabe. We have already noticed the prose of Wyc- lif. But Maundevile 1 s Travels is a story-book. Maun- devile himself, the quaint and pleasant knight, is as II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER /I much an invention as Robinson Crusoe, and the travels as much an imposture as Geoffrey's History of the Kings of Britain. But they had a similar charm, and when made up originally by Jean de Bourgogne, a physician who died at Liege in 1372, were received with delight and belief by the world, and nowhere with greater pleasure than in England, where they were translated into English prose by an anonymous writer of the late fourteenth or more probably fifteenth century. The prose is garrulous and facile, gliding with a pleasure in itself from legend to travellers' tales, from dreams to facts, from St. Albans to Jerusalem, from Cairo to Cathay. The book became a model of prose, and may even be called an early classic. ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER III FROM CHAUCER'S DEATH 1400, TO ELIZABETH, 1558 46. The Fifteenth Century Poetry. The last poems of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to 1400. The hundred years that followed are the most barren in our literature. The influence of Chaucer lasted, and of the poems attributed to him, but now rejected by scholars, some certainly belong to the first half of this century. There are fifty poems, making up 17,000 lines, which have been wrongly attributed to Chaucer, and though some of them were contemporary with him, a number are by imitators of his in the fifteenth century. Some of these have a great charm. The Cuckoo and the Nightingale is a pleasant thing. The Complaint of the Black Knight is by Lydgate. The Court of Love and Chaucer's Dream are good but late imitations of the master. The Flower and the Leaf is by a woman whose name we should like to know, for the poem is lovely. " Moder of God and Virgin undefouled" is by Hoccleve, and was long attributed to Chaucer. The triple Roundel, Merciles Beaute, is given by Professor Skeat to Chaucer, and at least is worthy of the poet ; Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 73 and the Amorous Compleint and a Ballade of Com- pleynt, may possibly be also his. There was then a considerable school of imitators, who followed the style, who had some of the imaginative spirit, but who failed in the music and the art of Chaucer. 47. Thomas Hoccleve and John Ly gate. Two of these imitators stand out from the rest by the extent of their work. Hoccleve, a London man, was a monot- onous versifier of the reigns of the three Henries, but he loved Chaucer well. In the MS. of his longest poem, the Governail of Princes, written before 1413, he caused to be drawn, with fond idolatry, the portrait of his " master dear and father reverent," who had enlumined all the land with his books. He had a style of his own. Sometimes, in his playful imitations of Chaucer's Balades, and in his devotional poetry, such as his Moder of God, he reached excellence ; but his didactic and controversial aims finally overwhelmed his poetry. 48. John Lydgate was a more worthy follower of Chaucer. A monk of Bury, and thirty years of age when Chaucer died, he yet wrote nothing of much importance till the reign of Henry V. He was a gay and pleasant person, though a long-winded poet, and he seems to have lived even in his old age, when he recalls himself as a boy " weeping for naught, anon after glad," the fresh and natural life of one who en- joyed everything ; but, like many gay persons, he had a vein of melancholy, and some of his best work, at 74 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. least in the poet Gray's opinion, belongs to the realms of pathetic and moral poetry. But there was scarcely any literary work he could not do. He rhymed history, ballads, and legends, till the monastery was delighted. He made pageants for Henry VI., masques and May- games for aldermen, mummeries for the Lord Mayor, and satirical ballads on the follies of the day. It is impossible here to mention the tenth part of his mul- tifarious works, many of which are as yet unpublished. They are a strange mixture of the poet striving to be religious, and of the monk carried away by his passions and his gaiety. He may have been educated at Oxford, and perhaps travelled in France and Italy ; he knew the literature of his time, and he even dabbled in the sciences. He was as much a lover of nature as Chau- cer, but cannot make us feel the beauty of nature in the same way. It is his story-telling which links him closest to his master. His three chief poems are, first, The Troye Book, which is adapted from Guido's His- toria Trojana ; secondly, the Stone of Thebes, which is introduced as an additional Canterbury Tale, and is worked up from French romances on this subject. The third is the Falles of Princes, 1424-5, at which he worked till he was sixty years of age. It is a free translation of a French version of Boccaccio's De Cas- ibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium. It tells the tragic fates of great men and women from the time of Adam to the capture of King John of France at Poitiers. The plan is picturesque ; the sorrowful dead Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 75 appear before Boccaccio, pensive in his library, and each tells of his downfall. This is Lydgate's most im- portant, but by no means his best, poem ; and it had its influence on the future, for in the Mirror for Mag- istrates, at least eight Elizabethan poets united at differ- ent times to supplement his Falles of Princes. A few minor poets do no more now than keep poetry alive. Another version of the Troy Story in Henry VI. 's time ; Hugh de Campeden's Sidrac, Thomas Chestre's Lay of Sir Launfal, and the translation of the Earl of Toulouse, prove that romances were still taken from the French. William Lichfield's Complaint between God and Man, and William Nassington's Mirrour of Life, cany on the religious, and the Tournament of Tottenham the satirical, poetry. John Capgrave's translation of the Life of St. Catherine is less known than his Chronicle of England dedicated to Edward IV. He, with John Hard- ing, a soldier of Agincourt, whose rhyming Chronicle belongs to Edward IV. 's reign, continue the historical poetry. A number of obscure versifiers, Thomas Norton, and George Ripley who wrote on alchemy, and Dame Juliana Berners' book on Hunting, bring us to the reign of Henry VII., when Skelton first began to write. Mean- while poetry, which had decayed in England, was flourishing in Scotland. 49. Ballads, lays, fragments of romances, had been sung in England from the earliest times, and popular tales and jokes took form in short lyric pieces, to be ac- companied with music and dancing. In fact, the ballad 76 KNGLISll L1TKKATUKF. CHAr. went over the whole land among the people. The trader, the apprentices, and poor of the cities, the peasantry, had their own songs. They tended to collect themselves round some legendary name like Robin Hood, or some historical character made legendary, like Randolf, Earl of Chester. In the fourteenth century, Sloth, in Piers Plowman, does not know his paternoster, but he does know the rhymes of these heroes. Robin Hood was then well known in 1370. A crowd of minstrels sang them through city and village. The very friar sang them, " and made his English swete upon his tonge." The Tale of Gamely n is a piece of minstrel poetry, of the forest type, and drew to it, as we know, the attention of Chaucer. Chaucer and Langland mention the French ballads which were sung in London, and these were freely translated. The popular song, " When Adam dalf and Eve span," was a type of a class of socialistic ballads. The Battle of Otterbourne and The Hunting of the Cheviot were no doubt composed in the fourteenth century, but were not published till now. Two collections of Robin Hood bal- lads and The Nut Brown Maid, printed about the begin- ning of the sixteenth century, show that a fresh interest had then awakened in this outlaw literature to which we owe so much. It was not, however, till much later that any large collection of ballads was made ; and few, in the form we possess them, can be dated farther back than the reign of Elizabeth. 50. Prose Literature. Four men continued English prose into the fifteenth century. The religious war be- Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH // tween the Lollards and the Church raged during the reigns of Henry V. and Henry VI., and in the time of the latter REGINALD PECOCK took it out of Latin into homely English. He fought the Lollards with their own weapons, with public sermons in English, and with tracts in Eng- lish ; and after 1449, when Bishop of Chichester, published his works, The Represser of overmuch Blaming of the Clergy and The Book of Faith. They pleased neither party. The Lollards disliked them because they defended the customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen burnt them because they agreed with the " Bible-men," that the Bible was the only rule of faith. Both abjured them because they said that doctrines were to be proved from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the Church theologians who wrote in English, and his books are good examples of our early prose. SIR JOHN FORTESCUE'S book on the Difference between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, in Edward IV.'s reign, is less fine an example of the prose of English politics than SIR THOMAS MALORY'S Morte Darthur is of the prose of chivalry. This book, arranged and modelled into a labyrinthine story from French and contemporary English materials, is the work of a man of genius, and was ended in the ninth year of Edward IV., fifteen years before Caxton had finished printing it. Its prose, in its joyous simplicity, may well have charmed CAXTON, who printed it with all the care of one who " loved the noble acts of chivalry." Caxton's own work added to the prose of England. Born of Kentish parents, he went to 78 ENGLISH L1TKRATURK CHAI-. the Low Countries in 1440, and learned his trade. The first book said to have been printed in this country was The Game and Play e of the Chesse, 1474. The first book that bears the inscription, " Imprynted by me, William Caxton, at Westmynstre," is The Dictes and Sayings of Philosophers. But the first English book Caxton made, and finished at Cologne in 1471, was his translation of the Recuyell of the Historycs of Troy, and in this book, and in his translation of Reynard the ^jcfrom the Dutch, in his translation of the Golden Legend, and his re- editing of Trevisa's Chronicle, in which he " changed the rude and old English," he kept, by the fixing power of the press, the Midland English, which Chaucer had es- tablished as the tongue of literature, from further degrada- tion. Eorty years later Tyndale's New Testament fixed it more firmly, and the Elizabethan writers kept it in its purity. 5 1 . The Foundations of the Elizabethan Literature. The first of these may be found in Caxton's work. John Shirley, a gentleman of good family, and Chaucer's con- temporary, who died, a very old man, in 1449, deserves mention as a transcriber and preserver of the works of Chaucer and Lydgate, but Caxton fulfilled the task Shir- ley had begun. He printed Chaucer and Lydgate and Gower with zealous care. He printed the Chronicle of the Brut; he secured for us the Morte Darthur. He had a tradesman's interest in publishing the romances, for they were the reading of the day ; but he could scarcely have done better for the interests of the coming Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 79 literature. These books nourished the imagination of England, and supplied poet after poet with fine subjects for work, or fine frames for their subjects. He had not a tradesman's, but a loving literary, interest in printing the old English poets ; and in sending them out from his press Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry. The poets after him at once began on the models of Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate ; and the books them- selves being more widely read, not only made poets but a public that loved poetry. The imprinting of old Eng- lish poetry was one of the sources in this century of the Elizabethan literature. The second source was the growth of an interest in classic literature. All through the last two-thirds of this century, though so little creative work was done, the interest in that literature grew among men of the upper classes. The Wars of the Roses did not stop the reading of books. The Pas ton Letters, 1422-1509, the corre- spondence of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry VII., are pleasantly, even correctly written, and contain passages which refer to translations of the classics and to manuscripts sent to and fro for reading. A great number of French translations of the Latin classics were read in England. Henry V. and VI., Edward IV., and some of the great nobles were lovers of books. Men like Duke Humphrey of Gloucester made libraries and brought over Italian scholars to England to translate Greek works. There were even scholars in England, like John, Lord Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the 8dge, and Greene, we find the origin of English fiction, and the subjects of many of our plays ; while the fan- tastic desire to revive the practices of chivalry which was expressed in the Arcadia, found food in the continuous translation of romances, chiefly of the Charlemagne cycle, but now more from Spain than from France ; and in the reading of the Italian poets, Boiardo, Tasso, and Ariosto, who supplied a crowd of our books with the machinery of magic, and with conventional descriptions of nature and of women's beauty. 66. Edmund Spenser. The later Elizabethan poetry begins with the Shepheards Calendar of Spenser. Spenser was born in London in 1552, and educated at the Merchant Taylors' Grammar School, which he left for Cambridge in April, 1569. There seems to be evi- dence that in this year the Sonnets of Petrarca and the Visions of Bellay afterwards published in 1591, were written by him for a miscellany of verse and prose issued by Van der Noodt, a refugee Flemish physician. At sixteen or seventeen, then, he began literary work. At college Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and critic, and the Hobbinoll of Spenser's works, and Edward Kirke, the K. K. of the Shepheards Calendar, were his friends. In 1576 he took his degree of M.A., and before he returned to London spent some time in the wilds of Lancashire, where he fell in love with the " Rosalind " of his poetry, a " fair widowe's daughter of the den." Mis love was IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE III not returned, a rival interfered, but he clung fast until his marriage to this early passion. His disappointment drove him to the South, and there, 1579, he was made known through Leicester to Leicester's nephew, Philip Sidney. With him, and perhaps at Penshurst, the Shep- heards Calendar was finished for the press, and the Faerie Queene conceived. The publication of the for- mer work, 1579, made Spenser the first poet of the day, and so fresh and musical, and so abundant in new life were its twelve eclogues, that men felt that at last Eng- land had given birth to a poet as original, and with as much metrical art as Chaucer. Each month of the year had its own eclogue ; some were concerned with his shattered love, two of them were fables, three of them satires on the lazy clergy ; one was devoted to fair Eliza's praise : one, the Oak and the Briar, prophesies his mastery over allegory. The others belong to rustic shepherd life. The English of Chaucer is imitated, but the work is full of a new spirit, and as Spenser had begun with translating Petrarca, so here, in two of the eclogues, he imitates Clement Marot. The " Puritanism " of the poem is the same as that of the Faerie Queene which he now began to compose. Save in abhorrence of Rome, Spenser does not share in the politics of Puritanism. Nor does he separate himself from the world. He is as much at home in society and with the arts as any literary courtier of the day. He was Puritan in his attack on the sloth and pomp of the clergy ; but his moral ideal, built up, as it was, out of Christianity and Platonism, rose far above the narrower ideal of Puritanism. 112 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. In the next year, 1580, he went to Ireland with Lord Grey of Wilton as secretary, and afterwards saw and learnt that condition of things which he described in his View of the Present State of Ireland. He was made Clerk of Degrees in the Court of Chancery in 1581, and Clerk of the Council of Munster in 1586, and it was then that the manor and castle of Kilcolman were granted to him. Here, at the foot of the Galtees, and bordered to the north by the wild country, the scenery of which is frequently painted in the Faerie Qt/eenc, and in whose woods and savage places such adventures constantly took place in the service of Elizabeth as are recorded in the Faerie Queene, the first three books of that great poem were finished. 67. The Faerie Queene. The plan of the poem is described in Spenser's prefatory letter to Raleigh. The twelve books were to tell the warfare of twelve Knights, in whom twelve virtues were represented. They are sent forth from the court of Gloriana, Queen of Fairy- land, and their warfare is against the vices and errors, im- personated, which opposed those virtues. In Arthur, the Prince, the Magnificence of the whole of virtue is repre- sented, and he was at last to unite himself in marriage to the Faerie Queene, that divine glory of God to which all human act and thought aspired. Six books of this plan were finished ; the legends of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity, of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. The two posthumous cantos on Mutability seem to have been part of a seventh legend, on Constancy, and their splendid iv THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 11$ work makes us the more regret that the story of the poem being finished is not true. Alongside of the spirit- ual allegory is the historical one, in which Elizabeth is Gloriana, and Mary of Scotland Duessa ; and Leicester, and at times Sidney, Prince Arthur, and Lord Grey is Arthegall, and Raleigh Timias, and Philip II. the Soldan, or Grantorto. In the midst, other allegories slip in, re- ferring to events of the day, and Elizabeth becomes Belphcebe and Britomart, and Mary is Radegund, and Sidney is Calidore, and Alencon is Braggadochio. At least, these are considered probable attributions. The dreadful " justice " done in Ireland, by the " iron man," and the wars in Belgium, and Norfolk's conspiracy, and the Armada, and the trial of Mary are also shadowed forth. The allegory is clear in the first two books. After- wards it is troubled with digressions, sub-allegories, gene- alogies, with anything that Spenser's fancy led him to introduce. Stories are dropt and never taken up again, and the whole tale is so tangled that it loses the interest of narrative. But it retains the interest of exquisite alle- gory. It is the poem of the noble powers of the human soul struggling towards union with God, and warring against all the forms of evil ; and these powers become real personages, whose lives and battles Spenser tells in verse so musical and so gliding, so delicately wrought, so rich in imaginative ornament, and so inspired with the finer life of beauty, that he has been called the poets' Poet. But he is the poet of all men who love poetry. I [4 ENGLISH LITERATURK Descriptions like those of the House of Pride and the Mask of Cupid, and of the Months, are so vivid in form and colour, that they have always made subjects for artists ; while the allegorical personages are, to the very last detail, wrought out by an imagination which de- scribes not only the general character, but the special characteristics of the Virtues or the Vices, of the Months of the year, or of the Rivers of England. In its ideal whole, the poem represents the new love of chivalry, of classical learning; the delight in mystic theories of love and religion, in allegorical schemes, in splendid spectacles and pageants, in wild adventure ; the love of England, the hatred of Spain, the strange worship of the queen, even Spenser's own new love. It takes up and uses the popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, all the recovered romance and machinery of the Italian epics, and mingles them up with the wild scenery of Ireland, with the savages and wonders of the New World. Almost the whole spirit of the Renaissance under Eliza- beth, except its coarser and baser elements, is in its pages. Of anything impure, or ugly, or violent, there is no trace. And Spenser adds to all his own sacred love of love, his own pre-eminent sense of the loveliness of loveliness, walking through the whole of this woven world of faerie " With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace." The first three books were finished in Ireland, and Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman Castle, IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 11$ among the alder shades of the river Mulla that fed the lake below the castle. Delighted with the poem, he brought Spenser to England, and the queen, the court, and the whole of England soon shared in Raleigh's delight. It was the first great ideal poem that England had produced ; it places him side by side with Milton, but on a throne built of wholly different material. It has never ceased to make poets, and it will live, as he said in his dedication to the queen, " with the eternitie of her fame." 68. Spenser's Minor Poems. The next year, 1591, Spenser, being still in England, collected his smaller poems, most of which seem to be early work, and published them. Among them Mother Hubbenfs Tale is a remarkable satire, somewhat in the manner of Chaucer, on society, on the evils of a beggar soldiery, of the Church, of the court, and of misgovernment. The Ruins of Time, and still more the Tears of the Muses, support the statement that literature was looked on coldly previous to 1580. Sidney had died in 1586, and three of these poems bemoan his death. The others are of slight importance, and the whole collection was entitled Com- plaints. His Daphnaida seems to have also appeared in 1591. Returning to Ireland, he gave an account of his visit and of the court of Elizabeth in Colin Cloiifs come Home again, and at last, after more than a year's pursuit, won, in 1594, his second love for his wife, and found with her perfect happiness. A long series of lovely " Sonnets " the Amoretfi, records the progress of his wooing ; and I l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the Epithahunion, his exultant marriage hymn, is the most glorious love-song in the English tongue. These three were published in 1595. At the close of 1595 he brought to England in a second visit the last three books of the Faerie Quecne. The next year he spent in London, and published these books, as well as the Prothalamion on the marriage of Lord Worcester's daughters, the Hymns on Liwe and Beauty and on Heavenly Love and Beauty. The two first hymns were rapturously written in his youth the two others, now written, and with even greater rapture, enshrine that love philosophy of Petrarca which makes earthly love a ladder to the love of God. The close of his life was sorrowful. In 1598, Tyrone's rebellion drove him out of Ireland. Kilcolman was sacked and burnt, one of his children perished in the flames, and Spenser and his family fled for their lives to England. Broken-hearted, poor, but not forgotten, the poet died in a London tavern. All his fellows went with his body to the grave, where, close by Chaucer, he lies in Westminster Abbey. London, " his most kindly nurse," takes care also of his dust, and England keeps him in her love. 69. Later Elizabethan Poetry : Translations. There are three translators that take literary rank among the crowd that carried on the work of the earlier time. Two mark the influence of Italy, one the more powerful influ- ence of the Greek spirit. SIR JOHN* HARINGTOX in 1591 translated Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, FAIRFAX in 1600 translated 'Ya.sso's Jerusalem, and his book is " one of the IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE I I/ glories of Elizabeth's reign." But the noblest translation is that of Homer's whole work by GEORGE CHAPMAN, the dramatist, the first part of which appeared in 1598. The vivid life and energy of the time, its creative power and its force, are expressed in this poem, which is " more an Elizabethan tale written about Achilles and Ulysses " than a translation. The rushing gallop of the long four- teen-syllable stanza in which it is written has the fire and swiftness of Homer, but it has not his directness or dig- nity. Its " inconquerable quaintness" and diffuseness are wholly unlike the pure form and light and measure ot Greek work. But it is a distinct poem of such power that it will excite and delight all lovers of poetry, as it excited and delighted Keats. John Florio's Translation of the Essays of Montaigne, 1603, and North's Plutarch, are also, though in prose, to be mentioned here, because Shakespeare used the books, and because we must mark Montaigne's influence on English literature even before his retranslation by Charles Cotton. 70. The Four Phases of Poetry after 1579. Spenser reflected in his poems the romantic spirit of the English Renaissance. The other poetry of Elizabeth's reign reflected the whole of English Life. The best way to arrange it omitting as yet the Drama is in an order parallel to the growth of the national life, and the proof that it is the best way is, that on the whole such an his- torical order is a true chronological order. First, then, if we compare England after 1580, as writers have often done, to an ardent youth, we shall find in the poetry of Il8 KNGI.ISII LITERATURE CHAP. the first years that followed that date all the elements of youth. It is a poetry of love, and romance, and imag- ination, of Romeo and Juliet. Secondly, and later on, when Englishmen grew older in feeling, their enthusiasm, which had flitted here and there in action and literature over all kinds of subjects, settled down into a steady enthusiasm for England itself. The country entered on its early manhood, and parallel with this there is the great outbreak of historical plays, and a set of poets whom I will call the Patriotic Poets. Thirdly, and later still, the fire and strength of the people, becoming inward, resulted in a graver and more thoughtful national life, and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare and the poets who have been called philosophical. These three classes of poets overlapped one another, and grew up gradually, but on the whole their succes- sion is the image of a real succession of national thought and emotion. \ fourth and separate phase does not represent, as these do, a new national life, a new religion, and new politics, but the despairing struggle of the old faith against the new. There were numbers of men, such as Wordsworth has finely sketched in old Norton in the Doe of Ry Is tone, who vainly and sorrowfully strove against all the new national elements. ROBERT SOUTHWELL, of Norfolk, a Jesuit priest, was the poet of Roman Catholic England. Imprisoned for three years, racked ten times, and finally executed, lie wrote, while confessor to Lady Arundel, a number of poems published at various intervals, and IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE I 19 finally collected under the title, St. Peter's Complaint, Mary Magdalen's Tears, with other works of the Author, R.S. The McBonix, and a short prose work Marie Mag- dalen's Funerall Tears, became also very popular. It marks not only the large Roman Catholic element in the country, but also the strange contrasts of the time that eleven editions of books with these titles were published between 1595 and 1609, at a time when, the Venus and Adonis of Shakespeare led the way for a multitude of poems following on Marlowe's Hero and Leander and Lodge's Glaucus and Scylla which sang devotedly of love and amorous joy. 71. The Love Poetry. I have called it by this name because all its best work is almost limited to that subject the subject of youth. The Love sonnets, written in a series, are a feature of the time. The best are Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Daniel's Delia, Constable's Diana, Drayton's Idea, Spenser's Amoretti, and Shakespeare's Sonnets. More than twelve collections of these love sonnets, each dedicated to one lady, and often a hun- dred in number, were published between 1593 and 1596, and these had been preceded by many others. The Miscellanies, to which I have already alluded, and the best of which were The Passionate Pilgrim. England's Helicon, and Davison's RJiapsody, were scarcely less numerous than the Song-books published with music, full of delightful lyrics. The wonder is that the lyrical level in such a multitude of short poems is so high throughout. Some songs reach a first-rate ex- I2O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. cellenoe, but even the least good have the surprising spirit of poetry in them. The best of them are " old and plain, and dallying with the innocence of love," childlike in their natural sweetness and freshness, but full also of a southern ardour of passion. Shakespeare's excel the others in their gay rejoicing, their firm reality, their exquisite ease, and when in the plays, gain a new beauty from their fitness to their dramatic place. Others possess a quaint pastoralism like shepherd life in porcelain, such as Marlowe's well-known song, " Come live with me, and be my love ; " others a splendour of love and beauty as in Lodge's Song of Rosaline, and Spenser's on his marriage. To specialise the various kinds would be too long, for there never was in our land a richer outburst of lyrical ravishment and fancy. England was like a grove in spring, full of birds in revel and solace. Love poems of a longer kind were also made, such as Marlowe's Hero and Leander, the Venus and Adonis and, if we may date them here, the Elegies of John Donne. I mention only a few of these poems, the mark of which is a luscious sensuousness. There were also religious poems, the reflection of the Puritan and Church elements in English society. They were collected under such titles as the Handful of Hone\suckles, the Poor Widoiii 1 s Mite, Psalms and Sonnets, and there are some good things among them written by William 1 lunnis. -2. The Patriotic Poets. Among all this poetry of Romance, Religion, and Love, rose a poetry which IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 121 devoted itself to the glory of England. It was chiefly historical, and as it may be said to have had its germ in the Mirror for Magistrates, so it had its perfect flower in the historical dramas of Shakespeare. Men had now begun to have a great pride in England. She had stepped into the foremost rank, had outwitted France, subdued internal foes, beaten and humbled Spain on every sea. Hence the history of the land became precious, and the very rivers, hills, and plains honourable, and to be sung and praised in verse. This poetic impulse is best represented in the works of three men WILLIAM WARNER, SAMUEL DANIEL, and MICHAEL DRAYTON. ]3orn within a few years of each other, about 1560, they all lived beyond the century, and the national poetry they set on foot lasted when the romantic poetry lost its wealth and splendour. William Warner's great book was Albion's England, 1586, a history of England in fourteen-syllable verse from the Deluge to Queen Elizabeth. It is clever, humorous, now grave, now gay, crowded with stories, and runs to 10,000 lines. Its popularity was great, and the English in which it was written deserved it. Such stories in it as Argcntile and Citran, and the Patient Countess, prove Warner to have had a true, pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not however so good as that of " well-languaged Daniel," who, among tragedies and pastoral comedies, the noble series of sonnets to Delia and poems of pure fancy, wrote The Complaint <>/ Rosamond, far more poetical than his 122 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. steadier, even prosaic Civil Wars of York and Lan- caster. Spenser saw in him a new " shepherd of poetry who did far surpass the rest," and Coleridge says that the style of his Hymen's Triumph may be declared ' imperishable English." Of the three the easiest poet was Drayton. The Barons' Wars, England's Heroical Epistles, 1597, The Miseries of Queen Margaret, and Four Legends, together with the brilliant Ballad of Agincourt prove his patriotic fervour. Not content with these, he set himself to glorify the whole of his land in the Polyollnon, thirty books, and nearly 100,000 lines. It is a description in Alexandrines of the " tracts, mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned isle of Britain, with intermixture of the most remark- able stories, antiquities, wonders, pleasures, and com- modities of the same, digested into a poem." It was not a success, though it deserved success. Its great length was against it, but the real reason was that this kind of poetry had had its day. It appeared in 1613, in James I.'s reign. He, as well as Daniel, did other work. Indeed Drayton is a striking instance of the way in which these divisions, which I have made for the sake of a general order, overlapped one another. He is as much the love poet as the patriotic poet in his eclogues of 1593 and in his later Idea ; he is also a religious, a satirical, a lyrical, anil a fairy poet. He plays on every kind of harp. 73. Philosophical Poets. Before the date of the Polyollnon a change had come. As the patriotic poets iv THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 123 on the whole came after the romantic, so the patriotic, on the whole, were followed by the philosophical poets. The land was settled ; enterprise ceased to be the first thing ; men sat down to think, and in poetry questions of religious and political philosophy were treated with " sententious reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed." Shakespeare, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in 1 60 1, illustrates this change. The two poets who best represent it are SIR Jxo. DAVIKS and FULKE GREVILLE, Lord Brooke. In Davies himself we find an instance of it. His earlier poem of the Orchestra, 1596, in which the whole world is explained as a dance, is as exultant as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is compact and vig- orous reasoning, for the most part without fancy. Its very title, Nosce te ipsitm Know Thyself and its divisions, i. "On humane learning," 2. "The immor- tality of the soul " mark the alteration. Two little poems, one of Bacon's, on the Life of Man, as a bubble, and one of Sir Henry Wotton's, on the Character of a Happy Life, are instances of the same change. It is still more marked in Lord Brooke's long, obscure poems On Jluman Learning, on Wars, on Monarchy, and on Relig- ion. They are political and historical treatises, not poems, and all in them, said Lamb, " is made frozen and rigid by intellect." Apart from poetry, "they are worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit on political science which was to produce the riper speculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke." Brooke too, in a happier mood, was a lyrist ; and his 124 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAI'. collection, Calica, has some of the graces of love and its imagination. 74. Satirical Poetry, which lives best when imaginative creation begins to decay, arose also towards the end of Elizabeth's reign. It had been touched in the begin- ning before Spenser by Gascoigne's Stcele Glas, but had no further growth save in prose until 1593, when John Donne is supposed to have written some of his Satires. Thomas Lodge, Joseph Hall, John Marston, wrote satir- ical poems in the last part of the sixteenth century. These satires are all written in a rugged, broken style, supposed to be the proper style for satire. Donne's are the best, and are so because he was a true poet. Though his work was mostly done in the reign of James I., and though his poetical reputation, and his influence (which was very great) did not reach their height till after the publication in 1633 of all his poems, he really belongs, by dint of his youthful sensuousness, of his imaginative flame, and of his sad and powerful thought, to the Eliza- bethans. So also does William Drummond, of Haw- thornden, whose work was done in the reign of James I., and whose name is linked by poetry and friendship to Sir William Alexander, Karl of Stirling. Both are the result of the Elizabethan influence extending to Scotland. Drummond's sonnets and madrigals have some of the grace of Sidney, and he rose at intervals into grave and noble verse, as in his sonnet on John the Baptist. We turn now to the drama, which in this age grew into magnificence. IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 12$ THE DRAMA 75. Early Dramatic Representation in England. The English Drama grew up through the Mystery and the Miracle play, the Morality and the Interlude, the rude farce of the strolling players and the pageant. The Mystery was the representation (at first in or near the Church, and by the clergy ; and then in the towns, and by the laity) of the events of the Old and New Testaments which bore on the Fall and the Redemption of Man. The Miracle play, though distinct elsewhere from the Mystery, was the common name of both in England, and was the representation of some legendary story of a saint or martyr. These stories gave more freedom of speech, a more worldly note, and a greater range of characters to the mystery plays. They also supplied a larger opportunity for the comic element. The Miracle plays of England fell before long into two classes, represented at the feasts of Christmas Day and Easter Day; and about 1262 the tow.i-guilds took them into their hands. At Christmas the Birth of Christ was rep- resented, and the events which made it necessary, back to the Fall of Man. At Easter the Passion was repre- sented in every detail up to the Ascension, and the play often began with the raising of Lazarus. Sometimes even the Baptism was brought in, and finally, the Last Judg- ment was added to the double series, which thus em- braced the whole history of man from the creation to the close. About the beginning of the fourteenth century 126 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. these two series were brought together into one, and acted on Corpus Christi Day on a great moveable stage in the open spaces of the towns. The whole series con- sisted of a number of short plays written frequently by different authors, and each guild took the play which suited it best. In a short time, there was scarcely a town of any importance in England from Newcastle to Exeter which had not its Corpus Christi play, and the representations lasted from one day to eight days. Of these sets of plays we possess the Towneley plays, 32 in all, those of York, 48 in all, those of Chester, 24 in all, and a casual collection, called of Coventry, of later and unconnected plays. Of course, these sets only represent a small portion of the Miracle plays of England. It is not improbable that every little town had its own maker of them. Any play that pleased was carried from the town to the castle, from the castle, it may be, to the court. The castle chaplain sometimes composed them : the king kept players of them and scenery for them. On the whole this irregular drama lasted, if we take in its Anglo-Xorman beginnings in French and Latin, for nearly 500 years, from mo, when we first hear at St. Albans of the Miracle play of St. Catherine, to the reign of Henry III., when The Harrowing of Hell, our first extant religious drama in English, was acted, and then to 1580, when we last hear of the representation of a Miracle play at Coventry. 76. Separate plays preceded and existed alongside of these large series. Not only on the days of Christ- IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I2/ mas, Easter, and Corpus Christi were plays acted, but plays were made for separate feasts, saints' days, and the turns of the year, and these had the character of the counties where they were made. The villages took them up, and soon began to ask for secular as well as religious representations at their fairs and merry-mak- ings. The strolling players answered the demand, and secular subjects began to be treated with romantic or comic aims, and with some closeness to natural life. We have a play about Robin Hood of the sixteenth century, acted on May Day; the Play of St. George; the Play of the Wake on St. John's Eve. Some of the farcical parts of the Miracle plays, isolated from the rest, were acted, and we have a dramatic fragment taken from the very secular romance of Dame Siriz, which dates from the time of Edward I. We may be sure it was not the only one. 77. The Morality begins as we come to the reign of Edward III. We hear of the Play of the Pater- noster, and of one of its series, the Play of Laziness. But the oldest extant are of the time of Henry VI. The Castle of Constancy ; Humanity ; Spirit, Will, and Understanding these titles partly explain what the J\[orality was. It was a play in which the characters were the Vices and Virtues, with the addition after- wards of allegorical personages, such as Riches, Good Deeds, Confession, Death, and any human condition or quality needed for the play. These characters were brought together in a rough story, at the end of which 128 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAi>. Virtue triumphed, or some moral principle was estab- lished. The later dramatic fool grew up in the Moral- ities out of a personage called " The Vice," and the humorous element was introduced by the retaining of "The Devil" from the Miracle play and by making The Vice torment him. We draw nearer then in the Morality to the regular drama. Its story had to be invented, a proper plot had to be conceived, a clear end fixed upon, to produce which the allegorical char- acters acted on one another. We are on the very verge of the natural drama ; and so close was the relation that the acting of Moralities did not die out till about the end of Elizabeth's reign. A certain tran- sition to the regular drama may be observed in them when historical characters, celebrated for a virtue or vice, were introduced instead of the virtue or the vice, as when Aristides took the place of Justice. Moreover, as the heat of the struggle of the Reforma- tion increased, the Morality was used to support a side. Real men and women were shown under the thin cloaks of its allegorical characters. The stage was becoming a living power when this began. 78. The Interludes must next be noticed. There had been interludes in the Miracle plays, short, humorous pieces, interpolated for the amusement of the people. These were continued in the Moralities, and were made closer still to popular life. It occurred to JOHN HEY- woon to identify himself with this form of drama, and to raise the Interludes into a place in literature. In his IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 2Q hands, from 1520 to 1540, the Interlude became a kind of farce, and he wrote several for the amusement of the court of Henry VIII. He drew the characters from real life ; in many cases he gave them the names of men and women, but he retained " the Vice " as a personage. 79. The Regular Drama: its First Stage. These were the beginnings of the English Drama. To trace the many and various windings of the -way from the Interludes of Heywood to the regular drama of Elizabeth were too long and too involved a work for this book. We need only say that the first pure English comedy was Ralph Roister Doister, written by NICHOLAS UDALL, master of Eton, known to have been acted before 1551, but not published till 1566. It is our earliest picture of London manners ; it is divided into regular acts and scenes, and is made in rhyme. The first English tragedy is Gorbodiic, or Ferrex and Forrex, written by Sackville and Norton, and represented in 1561. The story was taken from British legend ; the method followed that of Seneca. A few tragedies on the same classical model fol- lowed, but before long this classical type of plays died out. For twenty years or so, from 1560 to 1580, the drama was learning its way by experiments. Moralities were still made, comedies, tragi-comedies, farces, tragedies ; and sometimes tragedy, farce, comedy, and morality were rolled into one play. The verse of the drama was as unsettled as its form. The plays were written in dog- gerel, in the fourteen-syllable line, in prose, and in a ten- syllable verse, and these were sometimes mixed in the K I3O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. same play. They were acted chiefly at the Universities, the Inns of Court, the Court, and after 1576 by players in the theatres. Out of this confusion arose 1580-8 (i) two sets of dramatic writers, the "University Wits" and the theatrical playwrights; (2) a distinct dramatic verse, the blank verse destined to be used by Marlowe, Peele, and Greene ; and (3) the licensed theatre. 80. The Theatre. A patent was given in 1574 to the Earl of Leicester's servants to act plays in any town in England, and they built in 1576 the Blackfriars Thea- tre. In the same year two others were set up in the fields about Shoreditch "The Theatre" and "The Curtain." The Globe Theatre, built for Shakespeare and his fellows in 1599, may stand as a type of the rest. In the form of a hexagon outside, it was circular within, and open to the weather, except above the stage. The play began at three o'clock ; the nobles and ladies sat in boxes or in stools on the stage, the people stood in the pit or yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, was a naked room, with a blanket for a curtain. Wooden imitations of animals, towers, woods, houses, were all the scenery used, and a board, stating the place of action, was hung out from the top when the scene changed. Boys acted the female parts. It was only after the Restoration that movable scenery and actresses were introduced. No " pencil's aid " supplied the landscape of Shakespeare's plays. The forest of Arden, the castle of Macbeth, were " seen only by the intellectual eye." 81. The Second Stage of the Drama ranges from IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA IJI 1580 to 1596. It includes the plays of Lyly, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Marlowe, Kyd, Nash, and the earliest works of Shakespeare. During this time we know that more than 100 different plays were performed by four out of the eleven companies ; so swift and plentiful was their production. They were written in prose, and in rhyme, and in blank verse mixed with prose and rhyme. Prose and rhyme prevailed before 1587, when Marlowe in his play of Tamburlaine made blank verse so new and splendid a thing that it overcame all other dra- matic vehicles. JOHN LYLY, however, wrote so much of his eight plays in prose, that he established, we may say, the use of prose in the drama an innovation which Gascoigne introduced, and which Shakespeare carried to perfection. Some beautiful little songs scattered through Lyly's plays are the forerunners of the songs with which Shakespeare and his fellows illumined their dramas, and the witty " quips and cranks," repartees and similes of Lyly's fantastic prose dialogue were the school of Shakespeare's first prose dialogue. PEELE, GREENE, and MARLOWE, the three important names of the period, belong to the University men. So do Lodge and Nash, and perhaps Kyd. They are the first in whose hands the play of human passion and action is expressed with any true dramatic effect. GEORGE PEELE'S Arraignment of Paris, 1584, and his David and Bcthsabe are full of passages of new and delightful poetry, and when the poetry is good, his blank verse and his heroic couplet are smooth and tender. ROBERT 132 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. GREENE, of whose prose in pamphlet and tale much might be said, spent ten years in writing, and died in 1592. There is little poetry in his plays, but he could write a charming song. KYD'S best play is the Spanish Tragedy. None of these men had the power of work- ing out a play by the development of their " characters " to a natural conclusion. They anticipate the poetry, but not the art, of Shakespeare. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE as dramatist surpassed, as poet rose far above, them, and as metrist is almost as great as Shakespeare. The difference between the unequal action and thought of his Doctor Faustus, and the quiet and orderly progres- sion to its end of the play of Edward II., is all the more remarkable when we know that he died at thirty. As he may be said to have made the verse of the drama, so he created the English tragic drama. His best plays are wrought with a new skill to their end, his characters are outlined with strength and developed with fire. Each play illustrates one ruling passion, in its growth, its power, and its extremes. Tamburlaine paints the desire of universal empire ; the Jew of Malta, the mar- ried passions of greed and hatred; Doctor Faustus, the struggle and failure of man to possess all knowledge and all pleasure without toil and without law ; Edward II., the misery of weakness and the agony of a king's ruin. His knowledge of human nature was neither extensive nor penetrative, but the splendour of his imagination, and the noble surging of his verse, make us forget his want of depth and of variety. Every one has dwelt on his IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 133 intemperance in phrases and of images, but the spirit of poetry moves in them ; we even enjoy the natural faults of fiery youth in a fiery time. He had no humour, and his farcical fun is like the boisterous play of a clumsy animal. In nothing is the difference between Shake- speare and him and his fellows more infinite than in this point of humour. And indeed he had little pathos. His sorrows are too loud. Nevertheless, by force of poetry, not of dramatic art, Marlowe made a noble porch to the temple which Shakespeare built. That tem- ple, however, in spite of all the preceding work, seems to spring out of nothing, so astonishing it is in art, in beauty, in conception. He himself was his only worthy predecessor, and the third stage of the drama includes his work, that of Ben Jonson's, and of a few others. It is the work, moreover, not of University men who did not know the stage, but of men who were not only men of genius, but also playwrights who understood what a play should be, and how it was to be staged. 82. William Shakespeare in twenty-eight years made the drama represent almost the whole of human life. He was baptised April 26, 1564, and was the son of a com- fortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. While he was still young his father fell into poverty, and an interrupted education left him an inferior scholar. " He had small Latin and less Greek ; " but he had avast store of English. 1 1 He uses 15,000 words, and lie wrote pure English. Out of every five verbs, adverbs, and nouns (t'.g. in the last aet of Othello), four are Teutonic ; and he is more Teutonic in comedy than in tragedy. 134 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. However, by dint of genius and by living in a society in which every kind of information was attainable, he became an accomplished man. The story told of his deer-stealing in Charlecote woods is without proof, but it is likely that his youth was wild and passionate. At nineteen he married Anne Hathaway, more than seven years older than himself, and was probably unhappy with her. For this reason, or from poverty, or from the driv- ing of the genius that led him to the stage, he left Strat- ford about 1586-7, and came to London at the age of twenty-two years, and falling in with Marlowe, Greene, and the rest, became an actor and playwright, and may have lived their unrestrained and riotous life for some years. It is convenient to divide his work into periods, and to state the order in which it is now supposed his plays were written. But we must not imagine that the periods and the order are really settled. We know some- thing, but not all we ought to know, of this matter. 83. His First Period. It is probable that before leaving Stratford he had sketched a part at least of his Venus and Adonis. It is full of the country sights and sounds, of the ways of birds and animals, such as he saw when wandering in Charlecote woods. Its rich and over- laden poetry and its warm colouring made him, when it was published, 1593, at once the favourite of men like Lord Southampton, and lifted him into fame. But before that date he had done work for the stage by touching up old plays, and writing new ones. We seem to trace his " prentice hand " in some dramas of the time, but the IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 135 first he is usually thought to have fully retouched is Ti- tus Andronicus, and some time after the First Part of Henry VI. Love 's Labour's Lost, supposed to be written 1589 or 1590, the first of his original plays, in which he quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was followed by the involved and rapid farce of the Comedy of Errors. Out of these frolics of intellect and action he passed into pure poetry in the Midsummer Night's Dream, and mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, the mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the English mechanic. Italian story laid its charm upon him about the same time, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona pre- ceded the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet, in which he first reached tragic power. They are said to complete, with Lore's Labour's Won, afterwards recast as All's Well that Ends Well, the love plays of his early period. We should read along with them, as belonging to the same period, the Rape of Lucrcce, a poem finally printed in 1594, one year later than the Venus and Ado- nis, which was probably finished, if not wholly written, at this passionate time. The same poetic succession we have traced in the poets, is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic feeling of England, also represented in Marlowe and Peele, had seized on him, and he began his great series of historical plays with Richard II. and Richard III. To introduce Richard III. or to complete the subject, he recast the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., and ended what we have called his first period by King John about 1596. 136 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 84. His Second Period, 1596-1601. In the Merchant of Venice Shakespeare reached entire mastery over his art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic threads is brought to its highest point of colour when Portia and Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy followed in his retouch of the old Taming of the Shrew, and all the wit of the world mixed with noble history met in the first and second Hcu ry II 7 ., 1597-8; while Falstaff was continued in the Merry Wives of Windsor, The historical plays were then closed with Henry V., 1599; a splendid dra- matic song to the glory of England. The Globe Theatre of which he was one of the proprietors, was built in 1599. In the comedies he wrote for it, Shakespeare turned to write of love again, not to touch its deeper passion as before, but to play with it in all its lighter phases. The flashing dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was fol- lowed by the far-off forest world of As You Like It, 1599, where "the time fleets carelessly," and Rosalind's char- acter is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the first touch we have of the older Shakespeare who had " gained his experience, and whose experience had made him sad." As yet it was but a touch ; Twelfth Night shows no trace of it, though the play that followed, All's Well that Ends Well, 1601? again strikes a sadder note. We find this sadness fully grown in the later Sonnets, which are said to have been finished about 1602. We know that some of the Sonnets existed in 1598, but they were all printed together for the first time in 1609. They IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA IJ/ form together the most deep, ardent, subtle, and varied representation of love in our language, and their emotion is mingled with so great a wealth of simple and complex thought that they seem to be written out of the experi- ence, not of one but of many men. Shakespeare's life changed now, and his mind changed with it. He had grown wealthy during this period, famous, and loved by society. He was the friend of the Earls of Southampton and Essex, and of William Herbert, Lord Pembroke. The queen patronised him ; all the best literary society was his own. He had rescued his father from poverty, bought the best house in Stratford and much land, and was a man of wealth and comfort. Suddenly all his life seems to have grown dark. His best friends fell into ruin, Essex perished on the scaffold, Southampton went to the Tower, Pembroke was banished from the court ; he may himself, some have thought, have been slightly involved in the rising of Essex. Added to this, we may conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry of the sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been betrayed in his love by a dear friend. Public and pri- vate ill then weighed heavily upon him ; he seems to even have had disgust for his profession as an actor ; and in darkness of spirit, though still clinging to the business of the theatre, he passed from comedy to write of the sterner side of the world, to tell the tragedy of mankind. 85. His Third Period, 1601-1608, begins with the last days of Queen Elizabeth. It opens with Julius 138 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Ctfsar, and we may have, scattered through the telling of the great Roman's fate, the expression of Shake- speare's sorrow for the ruin of Essex. Hamlet followed, 1601-3? for the poet felt, like the Prince of Denmark, that "the time was out of joint." Hamlet, the dreamer, may well represent Shakespeare as he stood aside from the crash that overwhelmed his friends, and thought on the changing world. The tragi-comedy of Measure for Measure, 1603 ? may have now been written, and is tragic in thought throughout. Othello, 1604, Macbeth, Lear, Troilus and Crcssida, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, 1608? Timon (only in part his own), were all written in these five years. The darker sins of men ; the unpitying fate which slowly gathers round and falls on mistakes and crimes, on ambition, luxury, and pride ; the aveng- ing wrath of conscience ; the cruelty and punishment of weakness ; the treachery, lust, jealousy, ingratitude, mad- ness of men ; the follies of the great and the fickleness of the mob, are all, with a thousand other varying moods and passions, painted, and felt as his own while he painted them, during this stern time. 86. His Fourth Period, 1608-1613. As Shakespeare wrote of these things he passed out of them, and his last days are full of the gentle and loving calm of one who has known sin and sorrow and fate, but has risen above them into peaceful victory. Like his great contemporary Bacon, he left the world and his own evil time behind him, and with the same quiet dignity sought the inno- cence and stillness of country life. The country breathes iv THE ENGLISH DRAMA 139 through all the dramas of this time. The flowers Perdita gathers in Winter's 7a/e, the frolic of the sheep-shear- ing, he may have seen in the Stratford meadows ; the song of Fidele in Cymbeline is written by one who already feared no more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor censure rash, and was looking forward to the time when men should say of him Quiet consummation have ; And renowned be thy grave ! Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived in the house he had bought at Stratford-on-Avon. He was reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays now writ- ten dwell on domestic peace and forgiveness. The story of Marina, which he left unfinished, and which it is supposed two later writers expanded into the play of Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas. Cymbeline, 1609? The Tempest, 1610? Winter's Talc, bring his history up to 1611, and in the next year he may have closed his poetic life by writing, with Fletcher, Henry VIII., 1612? The Two Noble Kinsmen of Fletcher, part of which is attributed to Shakespeare, and in which the poet sought the inspiration of Chaucer, would belong to this period. For some three years he kept silence, and then, on the 23d of April, 1616, it is supposed on his fifty-second birthday, he died. 87. His Work. \Ve can only guess with regard to Shakespeare's life and character. It has been tried to find out what he was from his sonnets, and from his plays ; I4O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. but every attempt seems to be a failure. We cannot lay our hand on anything and say for certain that it was spoken by Shakespeare out of his own personality. He created men and women whose dramatic action on each other, and towards a chosen end, was intended to please the public, not to reveal himself. Frequently failing in fineness of workmanship, having, but far less than the other dramatists, the faults of the art of his time, he was yet in all other points in creative power, in impassioned conception and execution, in truth to universal human nature, in intellectual power, in intensity of feeling, in the great matter and manner of his poetry, in the weld- ing together of thought, passion, and action, in range, in plenteousness, in the continuance of his romantic feeling the greatest poet our modern world has known. Like the rest of the greater poets, he reflected the noble things of his time, but refused to reflect the base. Fully in- fluenced, as we see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and more philosophic cast of thought of the latter time of Elizabeth ; passing on into the reign of James I., when pedantry took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place of imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves to the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, the sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Elizabethan poetry. The Winter 's Talc is as lovely a love-story as Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest is more instinct with im- agination and as great in fancy as the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and yet there are fully twenty years between IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 14! them. The only change is in the increase of power and in a closer, graver, and more ideal grasp of human nature. In the unchangeableness of this joyful and creative art- power Shakespeare is almost alone. It is true that in these last plays his art is more self-conscious, less natu- ral, and the greater glory is therefore lost, but the power is not less nor the beauty. 88. The Decline of the Drama begins while Shake- speare is alive. At first we can scarcely call it decline, it was so superb in its own qualities. For it began with " rare BEN JONSON." With him are connected by associated work, by quarrels, and by date, Dekker, Marston, and Chapman. They belong with Shakespeare to the days of Elizabeth and the days of James I. Ben Jonson's first play, in its very title, Every Man in his Humour, 1596, enables us to say in what the first step of this decline consisted. The drama in Shakespeare's hands had been the painting of the whole of human nature, the painting of characters as they were built up by their natural bent, and by the play of circumstance upon them. The drama, in Ben Jonson's hands, was the painting of particular phases of human nature, espe- cially of his own age ; and his characters are men and women as they may become when they are completely mastered by a special bias of the mind or Humour. "The Manners, now called Humours, feed the stage," says Jonson himself. Every Man in his Humour was followed by Every Man out of his Humour, and by Cynthia 's Revels, written to satirise the courtiers, The 142 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. fierce satire of these plays brought the town down upon him, and he replied to their " noise " in the Poetaster, in which Dekker and Marston were satirised. Dekker answered with the Satiro-Mastix, a bitter parody on the Poetaster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily defects. Silent then for two years, he reappeared with the tragedy of Sejanus, and then quickly produced three splendid comedies in James I.'s reign, Volpone the fox, the Silent Woman, and the Alchemist, 1605-9-10. The first is the finest thing he ever did, as great in power as it is in the interest and skill of its plot ; the second is chiefly valuable as a picture of English life in high society ; the third is full of Jonson's obscure learning, but its character of Sir Epicure Mammon is done with Jonson's keenest power. In 1611 his Catiline appeared, and then Bartholomew Fair. Eight years after he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became poor and palsy-stricken, but his genius did not decay. His tender and imaginative pastoral drama, the Sad Shepherd, proves that, like Shakespeare, Jonson grew gentler as he grew near to death, and death took him in 1637. He was a great man. The power and copi- ousness of the young Elizabethan age belonged to him ; and he stands far below, for he had no passion, but still worthily by, Shakespeare, " a robust, surly, and ob- serving dramatist." THOS. DEKKER, whose lovely lyrics are well known, and whose copious prose occupies five volumes, " had poetry enough," Lamb said, " for any- thing." His li< r ht comedies of manners are excellent IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 143 pictures of the time. But his romantic poetry is better felt in such dramas as Patient Grissil, Old Fortunatus, and The Witch of Edmonton, in which, though others worked them along with Dekker, the women are all his own by tenderness, grace, subtlety, and pathos. JOHN MARSTON, whose chief plays were written between 1602 and 1605, needs little notice here. He is best known by certain noble and beautiful passages, and his finest plays were Antonio and Mellida and the Malcontent. Of the three GEO. CHAPMAN was the most various genius, and the most powerful. He illuminated the age of Elizabeth by the first part of his translation of Homer ; he lived on into the reign of Charles I. His poems (of which the best are his continuation of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and The Tears of Peace} are ex- treme examples of the gnarled, sensuous, formless, and obscure poetry of which Dryden cured our literature. His plays are of a finer quality, especially the five tragedies taken from French history. They are weighty with thought, but the thought devours their action, and they are difficult and sensational. Inequality pervades them. His mingling of intellectual violence with intel- lectual imagination, of obscurity with a noble exultation and clearness of poetry, is a strange compound of the earlier and later Elizabethans. He, like Marlowe, but with less of beauty, " hurled instructive fire about the world." With these three I may mention Cyril Tourneur and John Day, the one as ferocious in the Atheisfs Trag- edy zs the other was graceful in his Parliament of Bees. 144 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Both were poets, and both were more truly Elizabethan than Beaumont, Fletcher, or Webster. 89. Masques. Rugged as Jonson was, he could turn to light and graceful work, and it is with his name that we connect the Masques. He wrote them delightfully. Masques were dramatic representations made for a fes- tive occasion, with a reference to the persons present and the occasion. Their personages were allegorical. They admitted of dialogue, music, singing, and dancing, combined by the use of some ingenious fable into a whole. They were made and performed for the court and the houses of the nobles, and the scenery was as gorgeous and varied as the scenery of the playhouse proper was poor and unchanging. Arriving for the first time at any repute in Henry VIII. 's time, they reached splendour under James and Charles I. Great men took part in them. When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo Jones made the scenery and Lawes the music ; and Lord Bacon, Whitelock, and Selden sat in committee for the last great masque presented to Charles. Milton himself made them worthier by writing Comus, and their scenic decoration was soon introduced into the regular theatres. 90. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, and be- long not only in date, but in spirit, to the reign of James. In two plays, Henry VIII. and The Two Noble Kinsmen, Fletcher has been linked to Shakespeare. With Beau- mont as fellow-worker and counsellor, he wrote about a third of the more than fifty plays which go under iv THE ENGLISH DRAMA 145 their names. Beaumont died, aged thirty, in 1616, Fletcher, aged fifty, in 1625. The creative power of the Elizabethan time has no more striking example than in their vast production. The inventiveness of the plays is astonishing, and their plots are almost always easily connected and well supported. Far the greater part of the work was done by Fletcher, but it has been tried to trace Beaumont's hand chiefly in such fine tragedies as The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster. In comedy Fletcher is gay, and quick, and interesting. In tragedy and comedy alike, his level of goodness is equal, but then we have none of those magnificent out- bursts of imaginative passion to which, up to this time, we have been accustomed. The Faithful Shepherdess of Fletcher is a lovely pastoral, and the lyrics which diversify his plays have even some of the charm of Shakespeare. He and his fellows represent a distinct change, and not for the better, in the drama a kind of fourth stage. Its poetry is on the whole less masculine. Its blank verse is rendered smoother and sweeter by the incessant addition of an eleventh syllable, but it is also enfeebled. This weak ending, by the additional free- dom and elasticity it gave to the verse, was suited to the rapid dialogue of comedy, but the dignity of trag- edy was lowered by it. The change is also seen in other matters. In the previous plays moral justice is done. The good are divided from the bad. Fletcher seems quite indifferent to this. In the previous plays, L 146 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. men and women, save in Shakespeare, are coarse and foul enough at times, but they are so by nature or under furious passion. In Fletcher, there is a natural indecency, an every-day foulness of thought, which be- longs to the good and the bad alike. The women are, when good, beyond nature, and, when bad, below it. The situations invented tend to be studiously out of the way, beyond the natural aspects of humanity. The aim of art has changed for the worse. It strives for the strange and the sensational. Even JOHN WEBSTER lost some of the power his genius gave him by the ghastly situations he chose to dwell upon. Yet he all but re- deemed the worst of them by the intensity of his imag- ination, and by the soul-piercing power with which, in a few words, he sounds the depths of the human heart when it is wrought b v -emorse, by sorrow, by fear, or by wrath to its greatest point of passion. Moreover, in his worst characters there is some redeeming touch, and this poetic pity saves his sensationalism from weari- ness, and brings him nearer to Shakespeare than others of his time. His two greatest plays, things which will be glorious forever in poetry, are The Duchess of Malfi, acted in 1616, and the White Deri!, Vittoria Corrombona, printed in 1612. One other play of the time is held to approach them in poetic quality, The Changeling, by Thomas Middleton, but it does so only in parts. 91. Decay of the Drama. In the next dramatists, in the followers, if 1 may thus class them, of MASSINGER IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 147 and FORD, the change for the worse in the drama is more marked than in the work of those of whom we have been speaking. The poetic and creative qualities are both less, the sensationalism is greater, the foulness of language increases, the situations are more out of nature, the verse is clumsier and more careless, the composition and connexion of the plots are tumbled and confused. But these statements are only moder- ately true of Massinger and Ford. They stand at the head of the rapid decay of the drama, but they still retain a predominant part of that which made the Elizabethans great. Massinger's first dated play was the Virgin Martyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died " a stranger," in 1639. In these twenty years he wrote thirty-seven plays, of which the New Way to Pay Old Debts is the best known by its character of Sir Giles Overreach. His versification and language are flexible and strong, " and seem to rise out of the passions he describes." He speaks the tongue of real life. He is greater than he seems to be. Like Fletcher, there is a steady equality in his work. Coarse, even foul as he is in speech, he is the most moral of the secondary dramatists. Nowhere is his work so forcible as when he represents the brave man struggling through trial to victory, the pure woman suffering for the sake of truth and love ; or when he describes the terrors that con- science brings on injustice and cruelty. JOHN FORD, his contemporary, published his first play, the Lover's Melancholy, in 1629, and five years after, 1'crkin \Var- 148 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. beck, one of the best historical dramas after Shake- speare. Between these dates appeared others, of which the best are the Broken Jleart and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. He carried to an extreme the tendency of the drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he did so with great power. He has no comic humour, but few men have described better the worn and tortured hu- man heart. A crowd of dramatists carried on the pro- duction of plays till the Commonwealth. Some names alone we can mention here Thomas Heywood, Henry Glapthorne, Richard Broome, William Rowley, Thomas Randolph, Nabbes, and Davenport. Of these " all of whom," says Lamb, " spoke nearly the same language, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in com- mon," James Shirley is the best and last. He lived till 1666. In him the fire and passion of the old time pass away, but some of the delicate poetry remains, and in him the Elizabethan drama dies. Sir John Suckling and Davenant, who wrote plays before the Common- wealth, can scarcely be called even decadent Eliza- bethans. In 1642 the theatres were closed during the calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling players managed to exist with difficulty, and against the law, till 1656, when Sir William Davenant had his opera of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. It was the beginning of a new drama, in every point but impurity different from the old, and four years after, at the Res- toration, it broke loose from the prison of Puritanism to indulge in a shameless license. IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 149 In this rapid sketch of the drama in England we have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be- cause it keeps the whole story together. We now re- turn to the time that followed the accession of James I. I$O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAPTER V FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION, 1603-1660 92. The Literature of this Period may fairly be called Elizabethan, but not so altogether. The prose retained the manner of the Elizabethan time and the faults of its style, but gradually grew into greater ex- cellence, spread itself over larger fields of thought, and took up a greater variety of subjects. The poetry, on the whole, declined. It exaggerated the vices of the Elizabethan art, and lessened its virtues. But this is not the whole account of the matter. We must add that a new prose, of greater force of thought and of a simpler style than the Elizabethan, arose in the writings of a theologian like Chillingworth, an historian like Clarendon, and a philosopher like Hobbes : and that a new type of poetry, distinct from the poetry of fan- tastic wit into which Elizabethan poetry had descended, was written by some of the lyrical writers. It was Eliza- bethan in its lyric note, but it was not obscure. It had grace, simplicity, and smoothness. In its greater art and clearness it tells us that the critical school is at hand. V ELIZABETH TO TIIK RESTORATION 151 93. Prose Literature. James I. The greatest prose triumph of this time was the Authorised Version of the Bible. There is no need to dwell on it, nor on all it has done for the literature of England. It lives in almost every book of worth and imagination, and its style, es- pecially when the subject soars, is inspired by the spirits of fitness and beauty and melody. Philosophy passed from Elizabeth into the reign of James I. with Francis Bacon. The splendour of the form and of the English prose of the Advancement of Learning, two books of which were published in 1605, raises it into the realm of pure literature. It was expanded into nine Latin books in 1623, and with the Novum Organon, finished in 1620, and the Historia Naturalis ct Experimentalis, 1622, formed the Instanratio Magna. The impulse these books gave to research, and to the true method of research, awoke scientific inquiry in England ; and before the Royal Society was constituted in the reign of Charles II., our science, though far behind that of the Continent, had done some good work. William Harvey lectured on the circulation of the blood in 1615, and during the Civil War and the Commonwealth men like Robert Boyle, the chemist, John Wallis, the mathe- matician, and others, met in William Petty's rooms at Brazenose, and prepared the way for Newton. 94. History, except in the publication of the earlier Chronicles of Archbishop Parker, does not appear in the later part of Elizabeth's reign, but under James I. Camden, Spelman, Selden, and Speed continued the anti- 152 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. quarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon wrote a dignified History of Henry VII., and Daniel the poet, in his History of England to the Time of Edward III., 1613-18, was one of the first to throw history into such a literary form as to make it popular. KNOLLES'S History of the Turks, 1603, and SIR WALTER RALEIGH'S vast sketch of the History of the World, show how for the first time history spread itself beyond English interests. Raleigh's book, written in the peaceful evening of a stormy life, and in the quiet of his prison, is not only literary from the impulsive passages which adorn it, but from its still spirit of melancholy thought. In 1614, John Selden's Titles of Honour added to the accurate work he had done in Latin on the English Records, and his History of Tithes was written with the same careful regard for truth in 1618. 9 5 . Miscellaneous Literature. The pleasure of Travel, still lingering among us from Elizabeth's reign, found a quaint voice in Thomas Coryat's Crudities, which, in 1611, describes his journey through France and Italy; and in George Sandys' book, 1615, which tells his journey in the East ; while Henry Wotton's Letters from Italy are pleasant reading. The care with which Samuel Purchas embodied (1613) in Pun has his Pilgrimage (" his own in matter, though borrowed ") and in Hak- luyfs Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), the great deeds, sea voyages, and land travels of adventurers, brings us back to the time when England went out to win the world. The painting of short " Characters " V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 153 was begun by Sir Thomas Overbury's book in 1614, and carried on in the following reign by John Earle and Joseph Hall, who became bishops. This kind of litera- ture marks the interest in individual life which now began to arise, and which soon took form in Biography. 96. In the Caroline Period and the Commonwealth, Prose grew into a nearer approach to the finished in- strument it became after the Restoration. History was illuminated, and its style dignified, by the work of Claren- don the History of the Rebellion (begun in 1641) and his own Life. Thomas May wrote the History of tlie Parliament of 1640, a book with a purpose. Thomas Fuller's Church History of Britain, 1656, may in style and temper be put alongside of his Worthies of England in 1662. In Theology and Philosophy the masters of prose at this time were Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Hobbes. It is a comfort amidst the noisy war of party to breathe the calm spiritual air of The Great Exemplar and the Holy Living and Dying which Taylor published at the close of the reign of Charles I. They had been preceded in 1647 by the Liberty of Prophesying, in which, agreeing with his contemporaries, John Hales and William Chil- lingworth, he pleaded the cause of religious toleration, and of Tightness of life as more important than correct theology. Taylor was the most eloquent of men, and the most facile of orators. Laden with thought, his books are read for their sweet and deep devotion (a quality which also belonged to his fellow-writer, Lancelot 154 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Andrevves), even more than for their impassioned and convoluted outbreaks of beautiful words. On the Puritan side, the fine sermons of Richard Sibbes converted Rich- ard Baxter, whose manifold literary work only ended in the reign of James II. One little thing of his, written at the close of the Civil War, became a household book in England. There used to be few cottages which did not possess a copy of the Saints' Everlasting Rest. The best work of Hobbes belonged to Charles I. and the Commonwealth, but will better be noticed hereafter. The other great prose writer is one of a number of men whose productions may be classed under the title of Miscellaneous Literature. He is Sir Thomas Browne, who, born in 1605, died in 1682. In 1642 his Re/igio Medici was printed, and the book ran over Europe. The Enquiry into Vulgar Errors followed in 1646, and the Hydriotaphia, or Urn- Burial, in 1658. These books, with other happy things of his, have by their quaintness, their fancy, and their special charm always pleased the world, and often kindled weary prose into fresh produc- tion. We may class with them Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, a book of inventive wit and scattered learn- ing, and Thomas Fuller's Holy and Profane State and Worthies of England, in which gaiety and piety, good sense and whimsical fancy meet. This kind of writing was greatly increased by the setting up of libraries, where men dipped into every kind of literature. It was in James I.'s reign that Sir Thomas Bodley estab- lished the Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 55 a library now in the British Museum. A number of writers took part in the Puritan and Church contro- versies, among whom for graphic force William Prynne stands out clearly. But the great controversialist was Milton. His prose is still, under the Commonwealth, Elizabethan in style. It has the fire and violence, the eloquence and diffuseness of the earlier literature, but in spite of the praise its style has received, it can in reality be scarcely called a style. It has all the faults a prose style can have except obscurity and the commonplace. Its magnificent storms of eloquence ought to be in poetry, and it never charms, though it amazes, except when Milton becomes purposely simple in personal narrative. It has no humour, but it has almost unex- ampled individuality and ferocity. Among this tem- pestuous pamphleteering one pamphlet is almost singular in its masterly and uplifted thought, and the style only rarely loses its dignity. This is the Areopagitica. In pleasant contrast to these controversies arises the gentle literature of Izaak Walton's Co in pleat Angler, 1653, a book which resembles in its quaint and garrulous style the rustic scenery and prattling rivers that it celebrates, and marks the quiet interest in country life which had now arisen in England. Prose, then, in the time of James and Charles L, and of the Commonwealth, had largely developed its powers. 97. The Poetry of the Reign of James I. It is said that during this reign and the following one, poetry declined. On the whole that is true, but it is true with 156 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. many modifications. We must remember that Shake- speare and many of the Elizabethan poets, like Drayton and Daniel, did their finest work in the reign of James I. Yet there was decline. The various elements which we have noticed in the poetry of Elizabeth's reign, without the exception even of the slight Catholic element, though opposed to each other, were filled with one spirit the love of England and the queen. Nor were they ever sharply divided ; they are found interwoven, and modi- fying one another in the same poet, as for instance Puri- tanism and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in Constable : and all are mixed together in Shakespeare and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry became less and less after the queen's death. The ele- ments remained, but they were separated. The cause of this was that the strife in politics between the Divine Right of Kings and Liberty, and in religion between the Church and the Puritans, grew so defined and intense that England ceased to be at one, and the poets repre- sented the parties, not the whole, of England. Then, too, that general passion and life which inflamed every- thing Elizabethan lessened, and as it lessened, the faults of the Elizabethan work became more prominent ; they were even supposed to be excellences. Hence the fan- tastic, far-fetched, involved style, which was derived from the Euphues and the Arcadia, grew into favour and was developed in verse, till it ended by greatly injuring good sense and clearness in English poetry. In the reaction from this the critical and classical school began. Again, ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION l$J when passion lessens, original work lessens, and imitation begins. The reign of James is marked by a class of poets who imitated Spenser. Giles Fletcher in his Chris fs Victory and Triumph, 1610, owned Spenser as his master. So did his brother Phineas Fletcher, whose Purple Island, an allegory of the human body, 1633, has both grace and sweetness. We may not say that Will- iam Browne imitated, but only that he was influenced by Spenser. His Britannia's Pastorals in two parts, 1613-16, followed by the seven eclogues of the Shepherd's Pipe, are an example in true poetry of the ever-recurring element in English poetry, pleasure in country life and scenery, which from this time forth grew through Milton, Wither, Marvell, and then, after an apparent death, through Thomson, Gray, and Collins, into its wonderful flower in our own century. These, if we include the poetry of the Dramatists, especially the Underwoods of Ben Jonson, and the poems already mentioned of Drummond and Stirling, are the poets of the reign of James I. They link back to Elizabeth's time and its temper, and it may be said of them that they have no special turn, save that which arises from their own individuality. That cannot be said of the poets of Charles I.'s reign, even though they may be classed as writing under the influence of Ben Jonson and of Donne. 98. The Caroline Poets, as they are called, are love poets or religious poets. Often, as in the case of Herrick and Crashaw, they combined both kinds into a single volume. Sometimes they were only religious like Her- 158 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. bert, sometimes only love poets like Lovelace and Suck- ling. But whatever they were, they were as individual as Botticelli, with whose position and whose contemporaries in painting they may, with much justice, be compared. The greatest of these was ROBERT HKRRICK. The gay and glancing charm of The Hesperidcs, 1648, in which Horace and Tibullus seem to mingle ; their peculiar art which never misses its aim, nor fails in exquisite execution ; the almost equal power of The Noble Numbers, published along with the Hesperides, in which the spiritual side of Herrick's nature expressed itself, make him, within his self-chosen and limited range, the most remarkable of those who at this time sat below the mountain top on which Milton was alone. Close beside him, but more unequal, was THOMAS CAREW, whose lyrical poems, well known as they are, do not prevent our pleasure in his graver work like the Elegy on Donne. Greater in im- agination, but more unequal still, was RICHARD CRASHAW. One of his poems, The Flaming Heart, expresses in its name his religious nature and his art. He does not burn with a steady fire, he flames to heaven ; and when he does, he is divine in music and in passion. At other times he is one of the worst of the fantasticals, of those lovers of the quaint for quaintness' sake, among whom the exclusively religious poets of the time are sadly to be classed. There is GEORGE HERBERT, whose Temple, 1631, is, by the purity and devotion of its poems, dear to all. It is his quiet religion, his quaint, contemplative, vicarage-garden note of thought and scholarship which v ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 159 pleases most, and will always please, the calm piety of England. He also is individual, and so is HENRY VAUGHAN, whose Sacred Poems, 1651, unequal as a whole, love nature dearly, and leap sometimes into a higher air of poetry than Herbert could attain ; " transcend our wonted themes, and into glory peep." Nor must we forget WILLIAM HABINGTON, who mingled his devotion to Roman Catholicism with the praises of his wife under the name of Castara, 1634; nor GI-:ORGE WITHER, who sent forth, just before the Civil War began, when he left the king for the Parliament, his Hallelujah, 1641, a noble series of religious poems ; nor FRANCIS QUARLES, whose Divine Emblems, 1635, ^ s s *-\\\ read in the cottages of England. These poets, with Henry More, the Platonist, and Joseph Beaumont, the friend of Crashaw and the rival of More, are far below (Wither's work being ex- cepted) both Herbert and Vaughan, and bring to an end the religious poetry of this curious transition time. I have omitted some poems of Cowley and of Edmund Waller, which appeared during the Commonwealth, be- cause both these poets belong to a new class of poetry, the classical poetry of the Restoration. Between this new kind of poetry, which rose to full power in Dryden, and the dying poetry of the transition, stands alone the majestic work of a great genius who touches the great Elizabethan time with one hand and our own time with the other. But befoie we speak of Milton, a word must be said of the lyrics. 99. The Songs and other Lyrical Poetry. All through l6o ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. the period between James I. and the Restoration, Song- writing went on, and was more natural and less " meta- physical " than the other forms of poetry. The elements of decay attacked it slowly ; those of brightness and pas- sion, nature and gaiety, continued to live in it. Moreover, the time was remarkable for no small number of lyrical poems, other than songs, of a strange loveliness, in which the Elizabethan excellences were enhanced by a special, particular grace, due partly to the more isolated life some of the poets led, and partly to the growth among them of a more artistic method. With regard to the Songs, a distinct set of them, on the most various subjects, are to be found in the Dramatists, from Ben Jonson to Shirley. Another set has been collected out of the many Song-books which appeared with music and words. Many arose in the court of Charles I. and among the Royalists in the country, Cavalier songs on love, on constancy, on dress, on fleeting fancies of every kind. Others were on battle and death for the king ; and a few, sterner and more ideal, on the Puritan side. The same power of song- writing went on for a brief time after the Restoration, but finally perished in the political ballad which was sung about the streets by the political parties of the Revolution. Then the song-lyric of love was almost silent till the days of Burns. With regard to the Lyrical poems, it is impossible to mention all that are worthy, but an age which produced the masques, the poems, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben V ELIZA15ETH TO THE RESTORATION l6l Jonson ; which heard the lyrical measures of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess ; which read with joy Herrick's Corinna and his country lyrics ; which wished, while it had its delight in Wither's Philarete, that it was not so long ; which felt a finer thrill than usual of the imagina- tion in Marvell's Emigrants in the Bermudas and The Thoughts in a Garden ; which was caught, as it were into another world, by the Allegro, the Penseroso, the songs in Comus and the Arcades, and by the Lycidas of Milton can scarcely be called an age of decay. There was decline, on the whole. We feel what had passed away when we come to the days of the Restoration. But the Elizabethan lyrical day died in a lovely sunset. And as if to make this clear, we meet with Milton who bore the passion, the force, and the beauty of the past along with his own grandeur into the age of Dryden. 100. John Milton was the last of the Elizabethans, and, except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all. Born in 1608, in Bread Street (close by the Mermaid Tavern), he may have seen Shakespeare, for he remained till he was sixteen in London. His literary life may be said to begin with his entrance into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the accession of Charles I. Nicknamed the " Lady of Christ's " from his beauty, delicate taste, and moral life, he soon attained a reputation by his Latin poems and discourses, and by his English poems which revealed as clear and original a genius as that of Chaucer and Spenser. Of Milton even more than of the two others, it may be said that he was " whole in himself, and owed to none." The M 162 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Ode to the Nativity, 1629, the third poem he composed, while it went back to the Elizabethan age in beauty, in instinctive fire, went forward into a new world of art, the world where the architecture of the lyric is finished with majesty and music. The next year heard the noble sounding strains of At a Solemn Music ; and the sonnet, On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three, reveals in dignified beauty that intense personality which lives, like a force, through every line he wrote. He left the university in 1632, and went to live at Horton, near Windsor, where he spent five years, steadily reading the Greek and Latin writers, and amusing himself with mathematics and music. Poetry was not neglected. The Allegro and Penseroso were written in 1633 and probably the Arcades ; Comus was acted in 1634, and Lycidas composed in 1637. They prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart his Puritanism was of that earlier type which disdained neither the arts nor letters. But they represent a grow- ing revolt from the Court and the Church. The Pen- seroso prefers the contemplative life to the mirthful, and Comus, though a masque, rose into a celestial poem to the glory of temperance, and under its allegory attacked the Court. Three years later, Lycidas interrupts its ex- quisite stream of poetry with a fierce and resolute onset on the greedy shepherds of the Church. Milton had taken his Presbyterian bent. In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so many of the English poets, visited Florence where he saw Galileo, and then passed on to Rome. At Naples he V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 163 heard the sad news of civil war, which determined him to return ; " inasmuch as I thought it base to be travel- ling at my ease for amusement, while my fellow-country- men at home were fighting for liberty." At the meeting of the Long Parliament we find him in a house in Alders- gate, where he lived till 1645. He had projected while abroad a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur, but in London his mind changed, and among a number of subjects, tended at last to Paradise Lost, which he meant to throw into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics and choruses. 101. Milton's Prose. The Commonwealth. Suddenly his whole life changed, and for twenty years 1640-60 he was carried out of art into politics, out of poetry into prose. Most of the Sonnets, however, belong to this time. Stately, rugged, or graceful, as he pleased to make them, some with the solemn grandeur of Hebrew psalms, others having the classic ease of Horace, some of his own grave tenderness, they are true, unlike those of Shakespeare and Spenser, to the correct form of this difficult kind of poetry. But they were all he could now do of his true work. Before the Civil War began in 1642, he had written five vigorous pamphlets against Episcopacy. Six more pamphlets appeared in the next two years. One of these was the Areopagitica ; or, Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. 1644, a bold and eloquent attack on the censorship of the press by the Presbyterians. Another, remarkable, like the Areopagitica, for its finer prose, was a tract On Eciiica- 164 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Hon. The four pamphlets in which he advocated con- ditional divorce made him still more the horror of the Presbyterians. In 1646 he published his poems, and in that year the sonnet On the Forcers of Conscience shows that he had wholly ceased to be Presbyterian. His political pamphlets begin when his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates defended in 1649 tne execution of the king. The Eikonoclastes answered the Eikon Basilike (a portrait- ure of the sufferings of the king) ; and his famous Latin Defence for the People of England, 1651, replied to Sal- masius's Defence of Charles /., and inflicted so pitiless a lashing on the great Leyden scholar that Milton's fame went over the whole of Europe. In the next year he wholly lost his sight. But he continued his work (being Latin secretary since 1649) when Cromwell was made Protector, and wrote another Defence for the English People, 1654, and a further Defence of Himself against scurrilous charges. This closed the controversy in 1655. In the last year of the Protector's life he began the Paradise Lost, but the death of Cromwell threw him back into politics, and three more pamphlets on the questions of a Free Church and a Free Commonwealth were useless to prevent the Restoration. It was a won- der he was not put to death in 1660, and he was in hid- ing and also in custody for a time. At last he settled in a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that Paradise y>ut none have equalled it. Its form is almost epic : its dra- matic dialogue, its clear types of character, its vivid descriptions, as of Vanity Fair, and of places, such as the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Delectable Mountains, which represent states of the human soul, have given an equal but a different pleasure to children and men, to the villager and the scholar. I/O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAFFER VI FROM THE RESTORATION TO THK DEATH OF POPE AND SWIFT, 1660-1745 106. Poetry. Change of Style. We have seen the natural style as distinguished from the artificial in the Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural but artistic when it was made by a great genius like Chaucer, Shakespeare, or Spenser, for a first-rate poet creates rules of art : his work is filled with laws which other men see, collect, and obey. Art, which is the just and lovely arrangement of nature to fulfil a nobly chosen aim, is then born. But when the art of poetry is making, the second-rate poets, inspired only by their feelings, will write in a natural style unrestrained by rules, that is, they will put their feelings into verse without caring much for the form in which they do it. As long as they live in the midst of a youthful national life, and feel an ardent sympathy with it, their style will be fresh and im- passioned, and give pleasure because of the strong feel- ing that inspires it. But it will also be extravagant and unrestrained in its use of images and words because of its want of art. This is the general history of the style vi RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I /I of the second-class poets of the middle period of Eliza- beth's reign, and even Shakespeare affords examples of this want of art. (2) Afterwards the national life grew chill, and the feelings of the poets also chill. Then the want of art in the style made itself felt. The far-fetched images, the hazarded meanings, the over-fanciful way of putting thoughts, the sensational expression of feeling, in which the Elizabethan poets indulged, not only ap- peared in all their ugliness when they were inspired by no ardent feeling, but were indulged in far more than be- fore. Men tried to produce by extravagant use of words the same results that a passionate sense of life had pro- duced, and the more they failed the more extravagant and fantastic they became, till at last their poetry ceased to have clear meaning. This is the general history of the style of the poets from the later days of Elizabeth till the Civil War. (3) The natural style, unregulated by art, had thus become unnatural. When it had reached that point, men began to feel how necessary it was that the work of poetry should be subjected to the rules of art, and two influences partly caused and partly supported this desire. One was the influence of Milton. Milton, first by his superb genius, which, as I said, creates of itself rules of art, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation of the great classical models, was able to give the first example in England of a pure, grand, and finished style ; and in blank verse, in the lyric and the sonnet, wrote for the first time with absolute correctness. Another influence was that of the movement all over Europe towards inquiry 1/2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. into the right way of doing things, and into the truth of tilings, a movement we shall soon see at work in science, politics, and religion. In poetry it produced a school of criticism which first took form in France, and the influence of Boileau, La Fontaine, and others who were striving after greater finish and neatness of expression, told on England now. It is an influence which has been exaggerated. It is absurd to place the "creaking lyre " of Boileau side by side with Dryden's "long resounding march and energy divine." Our critical school of poets have few French qualities in them even when they imi- tate the French. (4) Further, our own poets had already, before the Restoration, begun the critical work, and the French influence served only to give it a greater impulse. We shall see the growth of a colder and more correct phrasing and versification in Waller, Denham, and Cowley. Vigour was given to this new method in art by Dryden, and perfection of artifice added to it by Pope. The artificial style succeeded to and extinguished the natural, or to put it otherwise, a merely intellectual poetry finally overcame a poetry in which emotion always accompanied thought. 107. Change of Poetic Subject. The subject of the Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the Pas- sions, and it was treated from the side of natural feeling. This was fully and splendidly done by Shakespeare. But after a time this subject followed, as we have seen in speaking of the drama, the same career as the style. It was treated in an extravagant and sensational manner, VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1/3 and the representation of the passions tended to become unnatural or fantastic. Milton redeemed the subject from this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natu- ral manner of the passions of the human heart ; he made strong in English poetry the religious passions of love of God, of sorrow for sin, and he raised in song the moral passions into a solemn splendour. But with him the subject of man as influenced by the great passions died for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers turned to another subject. They left, except in Dryden's Dramas and Fables, the passions aside, and wrote of the things in which the intellect and the casuistical con- science, the social and political instincts in man, were interested. In this way the satiric, didactic, philosophi- cal, and party poetry of a new school arose. 1 08. The Poems in which the New School began belong in date to the age before the Restoration, but in spirit and form they were the sources of the poetry which is called classical or critical, or artificial. EDMUND WALLER, SIR JOHN DENHAM, and ABRAHAM COWLEY are the pre- cursors of Dryden. Waller remodelled the heroic coup- let of Chaucer, and gave it the precise character which made it for nearly a century and a half the prevailing form of verse. He wrote his earliest poems about 1623, in precisely the same symmetrical manner as Dryden and Pope. His new manner was not followed for many years, till Denham published in 1642 his Cooper's Hill. " The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known," said Dryden, "till Mr. Waller taught it, but this 174 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. sweetness of his lyric poetry was afterwards followed in the epic of Sir John Denham in his Cooper's Hill'' 1 The chill stream of this poem, which is neither " lyric" nor "epic," has the metrical cadence, but none of the grip and force of Dryden's verse. Cowley's earlier poems belong to the Elizabethan phantasies, but the later were, with the exception of some noble poems of personal feel- ing, cold and exact enough for the praise of the new school. He invented that curious misnomer the Pin- daric Ode which, among all its numerous offspring, had but one splendid child in Dryden's Alexander's Feast. When Gray took up the ode again, Cowley was not his master. Sir W. Davenant's Gondibert, 1651, also an heroic poem, is another example of this transition. Worthless as poetry, it represents the new interest in political philosophy and in science that was arising, and preludes the intellectual poetry. Its preface discourses of rhyme and the rules of art, and embodies the critical influence which came over with the exiled court from France. The critical school had therefore begun even before Dryden's poems were written. The change was less sudden than it seemed. Satiric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was made during this transition time into a powerful weapon by two men, each on a different side. Andrew Marvell's Satires, after the Restoration, exhibit the Puritan's wrath with the vices of the court and king, and his shame for the disgrace of England among the nations. The Hudi- bras of SAMUEL BITLKR, in 1663, represents the fierce VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1/5 reaction which had set in against Puritanism. It is justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and ingenious drollery, and, in accordance with the new criticism, it is absolutely without obscurity. It is often as terse as Pope's best work. But it is too long, its wit wearies us at last, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puri- tans by its exaggeration. Satire should have at least the semblance of truth ; yet Butler calls the Puritans cow- ards. We turn now to the greatest of these poets in whom poetry is founded on intellect rather than on feel- ing, and whose verse is mostly devoted to argument and satire. 109. John Dryden was the first of the new, as Milton was the last of the elder, school of poetry. It was late in life that he gained fame. Born in 1631, he was a Crom- wellite till the Restoration, when he began the changes which mark his life. His poem on the death of the Pro- tector was soon followed by the Astrtza Redux, which celebrated the return of Justice to the realm in the per- son of Charles II. The Annus Mirabilis appeared in 1667, and in this his metrical ease was first clearly marked. But his power of exact reasoning expressing itself with powerful and ardent ease in a rapid succession of con- densed thoughts in verse, was not shown (save in drama) till he was fifty years old, in the first part of Absalom and Achitophel, the foremost of English satires. He had been a play writer for fourteen years, till its appearance in 1681, and the rhymed plays which he had written enabled him to perfect the versification which is now so remarkable ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. in his work. The satire itself, written in mockery of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked Shaftesbury as Achitophel, was kind to Monmouth as Absalom, and in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri the poet avenged himself for the Rehearsal. It was the first fine example of that party poetry which became still more bitter and personal in the hands of Pope. It was followed by the Medal, a new attack on Shaftesbury, and the Mac Fleck- noe, 1682, in which Shadwell, a rival poet, who had sup- ported Shaftesbury's party, was made the witless successor of Richard Flecknoe, a poet of all kinds of poetry, and master of none. Then in the same year, after the arrest of Monmouth, the second part of Absalom and Achito- phel appeared, all of which, except two hundred lines, was written by Nahum Tate. These were four terrible masterpieces of ruthless wit and portraiture. Then he turned to express his transient theology in verse, and the Religio Laid, 1682, defends and states the argument for the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty that led him to change his religion, and the Hind and Panther, 1687, is a model of melodious reasoning in behalf of the milk-white hind of the Church of Rome. The Dissenters are mercilessly treated under the image of the baser beasts ; while at first the Panther, the Church of Eng- land, is gently touched, but in the end lashed with sever- ity. However, Hind and Panther tell, at the close, two charming stories to one another. It produced in reply one of the happiest burlesques in English poetry, The Country Mouse and the City Mouse, the work of Charles vi RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 7? Montague (Lord Halifax), and Mat Prior. Deprived of his offices at the Revolution, Dryden turned again to the drama and to prose, but the failure of the last of his good plays in 1694, drove him again from the stage, and he gave himself up to his Translation of Virgil which he published in 1697. As a narrative poet his Fables, Ancieirt and Modern, finished late in life, in 1699, give him a high rank in this class of poetry. They sin from coarseness, but in style, in magnificent march of verse, in intellectual but not imaginative fire, in ease but not in grace, they are excellent. As a lyric poet his fame rests on the animated Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687, and on Alexander's Feast, 1697. From Milton's death, 1674, till his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, and round his throne in Will's Coffeehouse, where he sat as " Glorious John," we may place the names of the lesser poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, and Mulgrave, Sir Charles Sedley, and the Earl of Rochester. The lighter poetry of the court lived on in the two last. John Oldham won a short fame by his Satire on the Jesuits, 1679; an( l Bishop Ken, 1668, established, in his Morn- ing and Evening Hymns, a new type of religious poetry. no. Prose Literature of the Restoration and Revolu- tion. Criticism. As Dryden was now first in poetry, so he was in prose. No one can understand the poetry of this time, in its relation to the past, to the future, and to France, who does not read the Critical Essays pre- fixed to his dramas, On the Historical Poem, on dramatic rhyme, on Heroic Plays, on the classical writers, and his N 178 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Essay on Dramatic Poetry. He is in these essays, not only the leader of modern literary criticism, but the leader of that modern prose in which the style is easy, unaffected, moulded to the subject, and in which the proper words are put in the proper places. Dryden was a great originator. iii. Science. During the Civil War the religious and political struggle absorbed the country, but yet, apart from the strife, a few men who cared for scien- tific matters met at one another's houses. Out of this little knot, after the Restoration, arose the Royal Society, embodied in 1662. Astronomy, experimental chemistry, medicine, mineralogy, zoology, botany, vegetable physi- ology, were all founded as studies, and their literature begun, in the age of the Restoration. One man's work was so great in science as to merit his name being men- tioned among the literary men of England. In 1671 Isaac Newton laid his Theory of Light before the Royal Society ; in the year before the Revolution his Principia established, by its proof of the theory of gravitation, the true system of the universe. It was in political and religious knowledge, however, that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active and adventurous in a people, one of the first things they will think upon is the true method and grounds of gov- ernment, both divine and human. Two sides will be taken : the side of authority and the side of reason in Religion ; the side of authority and the side of indi- vidual liberty in Politics. VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 79 112. The Theological Literature of those who declared that reason was supreme as a test of truth, arose with some men who met at Lord Falkland's just before the Civil War, and especially with John Hales and William Chillingworth.. The same kind of work, though modified towards more sedateness of expression, and less rational- istic, was now done by Archbishop Tillotson, and Bishop Burnet. In 1678, Cudworth's Intellectual System of the Universe is perhaps the best book on the controversy which then took form against those who were called Atheists. A number of divines in the English Church took sides for Authority or Reason, or opposed the growing Deism during the latter half of the seventeenth century. It was an age of preachers, and Isaac Barrow, Newton's predecessor in the chair of mathematics at Cambridge, could preach, with grave and copious elo- quence, for three hours at a time. Theological prose was strengthened by the publication of the sermons of Edward Stillingfleet and William Sherlock, and their adversary, Robert South, was as witty in rhetoric as he was fierce in controversy. 113. Political Literature. The resistance to authority in the opposition to the theory of the Divine Right of Kings did not much enter into literature till after the severe blow that theory received in the Civil War. Dur- ing the Commonwealth and after the Restoration the struggle took the form of a discussion on the abstract question of the Science of Government, and was mingled with an inquiry into the origin of society and the ground ISO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. of social life. THOMAS HOHBES, during the Common- wealth, was the first who dealt with the question from the side of abstract reason, and he is also, before Dryden, the first of all our prose writers whose style may be said to be uniform and correct, and adapted carefully to the subjects on which he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan, 1651, declared (i) that the origin of all power was in the people, and (2) that the end of all power was the commonweal. It destroyed the theory of a Divine Right of Kings and Priests, but it created another kind of Divine Right when it said that the power lodged in rulers by the people could not be taken away by the people. Sir R. Filmer supported the side of Divine Right in his Patriarcha, published 1680. Henry Nevile, in his Dialogue concerning Government, and James Har- rington in his romance, The Commonwealth of Oceana, published at the beginning of the Commonwealth, con- tended that all secure government was to be based on property, but Nevile supported a monarchy, and Har- rington with whom I may class Algernon Sidney, whose political treatise on government is as statesmanlike as it is finely written a democracy, on this basis. I may here mention that it was during this period, in 1667, that the first effort was made after a Science of Political Economy by Sir William Petty in his Treatise on Taxes. The political pamphlet was also begun at this time by Sir Roger L'Estrange, and George Savile, Lord Halifax. 114. John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1690, fol- lowed the two doctrines of Hobbes in his treatises on VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE l8l Civil Government, but with these important additions ( i ) that the people have a right to take away the power given by them to the ruler, (2) that the ruler is respon- sible to the people for the trust reposed in him, and (3) that legislative assemblies are Supreme as the voice of the people. This was the political philosophy of the Revolution. Locke carried the same spirit of free in- quiry into the realm of religion, and in his Letters on Toleration laid down the philosophical grounds for lib- erty of religious thought. He finished by entering the realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 appeared his Essay concerning the Human Understanding, in which he investigated its limits, and traced all ideas, and there- fore all knowledge, to experience. In his clear state- ment of the way in which the Understanding works, in the way in which he guarded it and Language against their errors in the inquiry after truth, he did almost as much for the true method of thinking as Bacon had done for the science of nature. 115. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart from the great movement of thought, a good deal of Miscellaneous Literature. The painting of short " char- acters " was carried on after the Restoration by Samuel Butler and W. Charleton. These " characters " had no personality, but as party spirit deepened, names thinly disguised were given to characters drawn of living men, and Dryden and Pope in poetry, and all the prose wits of the time of Queen Anne and George I., made per- sonal and often violent sketches of their opponents a l82 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. special element in literature. On the other hand, Izaak Walton's Lives, in 1670, are examples of kind, agreeable, and careful Biography. Cowley's small volume, written shortly before his death in 1667, gave richness to the Essay, and its prose almost anticipated the prose of Dry- den. John Evelyn's multitudinous writings are them- selves a miscellany. He wrote on painting, sculpture, architecture, timber (the Sylra}, on gardening, com- merce, and he illustrates the searching spirit of the age. In William III.'s time Sir William Temple's pleasant Essays bring us in style and tone nearer to the great class of essayists of whom Addison was chief. Lady Rachel Russell's Letters begin the Letter-writing liter- ature of England. IVpys (1660-9), an( l Evelyn, whose Diary grows full after 1640, gave rise to that class of gos- siping Memoirs which has been of so much use in giving colour to history. History itself at this time is little better than memoirs, and such a name may be fairly given to Bishop Burnet's History <>f his Own Time and to his History of the Reformation. Finally Classical Criticism, in the discussion on the genuineness of the Letters of Phalaris, was created by Richard Bentley in 1697-9. Literature was therefore plentiful. It was also correct, but it was not inventive. 1 1 6. The Literature of Queen Anne and the First Georges. With the closing years of William III. and the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a literature arose which was partly new and partly a continuance of that of the Restoration. The conflict between those who VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 183 took the oath to the new dynasty and the Nonjurors who refused, the hot blood that it produced, the war between Dissent and Church, and between the two parties which now took the names of Whig and Tory, produced a mass of political pamphlets, of which Daniel Defoe's and Swift's were the best ; of songs and ballads, like Lillibul- Icro, which were sung in every street ; of squibs, reviews, of satirical poems and letters. Every one joined in it, and it rose to importance in the work of the greater men who mingled literary studies with their political excite- ment. In politics, all the abstract discussions we have mentioned ceased to be abstract, and became personal and practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more closely to the questions of every-day life. The whole of this stirring literary life was concentrated in London, where the agitation of society was hottest ; and it is round this vivid city life that the literature of Queen Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped. 117. It was, with a few exceptions, a Party Literature. The Whig and Tory leaders enlisted on their sides the best poets and prose writers, who fiercely satirised and unduly praised them under names thinly disguised. Our " Augustan Age " was an age of unbridled slander. Per- sonalities were sent to and fro like shots in battle. Those who could do this work well were well rewarded, but the rank and file of writers were left to starve. Literature was thus honoured not for itself, but for the sake of party. The result was that the abler men lowered it by making it a political tool, and the smaller men, the fry of Grub 184 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Street, degraded it by using it in the same way, only in a baser manner. Their flattery was as abject as their abuse was shameless, and both were stupid. They received and deserved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to give them in the Dunciad. Being a party literature, it naturally came to study and to look sharply into human character and into human life as seen in the great city. It debated subjects of literary and scientific inquiry and of philosophy with great ability, but without depth. It discussed all the varieties of social life, and painted town society more vividly than has been done before or since ; and it was so wholly taken up with this, that country life and its interests, except in the writings of Addison, were scarcely touched by it at all. Criticism being so active, the form in which thought was expressed was now espe- cially dwelt on, and the result was that the style of English prose became even more simple than in Dryden's hands ; and English verse, leaving Dryden's power behind it, reached a neatness of expression as exquisite as it was artificial. At the same time, and for the same reasons, Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in poetry. 1 1 8. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all these elements. Born in 1688, he wrote tolerable verse at twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared in i 709, and two years afterwards he took full rank as the critical poet in the Essay on Criticism (1711). The next year saw the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the most brilliant occasional poem in our language. This closed what we may call his first period. In 1712 his sacred pastoral, VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 185 The Messiah, appeared, and in 1713, when he published Windsor Forest, lie became known to Swift and to Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. When these, with Gay, Parnell, Prior, Arbuthnot, and others, formed the Scrib- lerus Club, Pope joined them, and soon rose into great fame by his Translation of the Iliad (1715-20), and by the Translation of the Odyssey (1723-5), in which he was assisted by Fenton and Broome. Being now at ease, for he received fully gooo/. for this work, he published from his retreat at Twickenham, and in bitter scorn of the poetasters and of all the petty scribblers who annoyed him, the Dunciad, 1728. Its original hero was Lewis Theobald, but when the fourth book was published, under Warburton's influence, in 1742, Colley Gibber was en- throned as the King of Dunces instead of Theobald. The fiercest and finest of Pope's satires, it closes his second period which breathes the savageness of Swift. The third phase of Pope's literary life was closely linked to his friend Bolingbroke. It was in conversation with him that he originated the Essay on Man (1732-4) and the Imitations of Horace. The Moral Essays, or Epis- tles to men and women, were written to praise those whom he loved, and to satirise the bad poets and the social follies of the day, and all who disliked him or his party. Among these, who has not read the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot? In the last few years of his life, Bishop Warburton, the writer of the Legation of Moses and editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the Moral Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man formed 1 86 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAI'. part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend ; but almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the members of his literary circle were dead, and a new race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he died. His Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady and the Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard show how he once tried to handle the passions of sorrow and love. The mas- terly form into which he threw the philosophical prin- ciples he condensed into didactic poetry make them more impressive than they have a right to be. The Essav on Man, though its philosophy is poor and not his own, is crowded with lines that have passed into daily use. The Essay on Criticism is equally full of critical precepts put with exquisite skill. The Satires and Epistles are didactic, but their excellence is in the terse and finished types of character, in the almost cre- ative drawing of which Pope remains unrivalled, even by Dryden. His translation of Homer resembles Homer as much as London resembled Troy, or Marlborough Achilles, or Queen Anne Hecuba. It is done with great literary art, but for that very reason it does not make us feel the simplicity and directness of his original. It has neither the manner nor the spirit of the Greek, just as Pope's descriptions of nature have neither the manner nor the spirit of nature. The heroic couplet, in which he wrote nearly all his work, he used with a correctness that has never been surpassed, but its smooth perfection, at length, wearies the ear. It wants the breaks that passion and imagination naturally make. Finally, he had the VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE l8/ spirit of an artist, hating those who degraded his art, and at a time when men followed it for money, and place, and the applause of the club and of the town, he loved it faithfully to the end, for its own sake. 119. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in the first two-thirds of his life did not approach his genius. Richard Blackmore endeavoured to restore the epic in his Prince Arthur, 1695, and Samuel Garth's mock heroic poem of the Dispensary appeared along with John Pom- fret's poems in 1699. I' 1 I 7 OI > Defoe's Trneboni Eng- lishman defended William III. against those who said he was a foreigner, and Prior's finest ode, the Carmen Secu- lare, took up the same cause. John Philips is known by his Miltonic burlesque of The Splendid Shilling, and his Cyder was a Georgic of the apple. Matthew Green's Spleen and Ambrose Philip's Pastorals were contempo- rary with Pope's first poetry ; and John Gay's Shepherd's Week, six pastorals, 1714, were as lightly wrought as his famous Fables. He had a true vein of happy song, and Black-eyed Susan remains with the Beggars' Opera to please us still. The political poems of Swift were coarse, but always hit home. Addison celebrated the Battle of Blenheim in the Campaign, and his cultivated grace is found in some devotional pieces. On his death Thomas Tickell made a noble elegy. Prior's charming ease is best shown in the light narrative poetry which we may say began with him in the reign of William III. In Pope's later life a new and quickening impulse came upon poetry, and changed it root and branch. It arose in Ramsay's 1 88 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Gentle Shepherd, 1725, and in Thomson's Seasons, 1730, and it rang the knell of the manner and the spirit of the critical school. 1 20. The Prose Literature of Pope's time collects itself round four great names, Swift, Defoe, Addison, and Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit those elements of the age of which I have spoken. JONATHAN SWIKT was the keenest of political partisans, for his fierce and earnest personality made everything he did impassioned. But he was far more than a partisan. He was the most original prose writer of his time the man of genius among many men of talent. It was not till he was thirty years old, 1697, that he wrote the Battle of the Books, concern- ing the so-called Letters of Phalaris, and the Tale of a Tub, a satire on the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the Church of England. These books, published in 1704, made his reputation. He soon became the finest and most copious writer of pamphlets England had ever known. At first he supported the Whigs, but left them for the new Tory party in 1710, and his tracts brought him court favour, while his literary fame was increased by many witty letters, poems, and arguments. On the fall of the Tory party at the accession of George I., 1714, he retired to the Deanery of St. Patrick in Ireland, an embittered man, and the Drapier's Letters, 1724, writ- ten against Wood's halfpence, gained him popularity in a country that he hated. In 1726 his inventive genius, his savage satire, and his cruel indignation with life were all shown in Gulliver s Travels. The voyage to Lilliput VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 189 and Brobdingnag satirised the politics and manners of England and Europe ; that to Laputa mocked the philoso- phers ; and the last, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, lacerated and defiled the whole body of humanity. No English is more robust than Swift's, no life in private and public more sad and proud, no death more pitiable. He died in 1745 hopelessly insane. DANIEL DEFOE'S vein as a pamphleteer seems to have been inexhaustible, and the style of his tracts was as roughly persuasive as it was popular. Above all he was the journalist. His Review, published twice a week for a year, was wholly written by himself; but he "founded, conducted, and wrote for a host of other newspapers," and filled them with every subject of the day. His tales grew out of matters treated of in his journals, and his best art lay in the way he built up these stories out of mere sug- gestions. "The little art he is truly master of," said one of his contemporaries, " is of forging a story and impos- ing it on the world for truth." His circumstantial inven- tion, combined with a style which exactly fits it by its simplicity, is the root of the charm of the great story by which he chiefly lives in literature. Robinson Crusoe, 1719, equalled Gulliver's Travels in truthful representa- tion, and excelled them in invention. The story lives and charms from day to day. But none of his stories are real novels ; that is, they have no plot to the working out of which the characters and the events contribute. They form the transition, however, from the slight tale and the romance of the Elizabethan time to the finished novel of Richardson and Fielding. ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAl' 121. Metaphysical Literature, which drifted into the- ology, was enriched by the work of BISHOP BERKELEY. The Platonic dialogue of Hylas and Philonous, 1713, charms us even more than his subtle and elastic Sin's, i 744. These books, with Alciphron, the Minute Philoso- pher, 1732, questioned the real existence of matter, "no idea can exist," he said, "out of the mind," and founded on the denial of it an answer to the Knglish Deists, round whom in the first half of the eighteenth century centred the struggle between the claims of nat- ural and revealed religion. The influence of Shaftes- bury's Characteristics, 1711, was far more literary than metaphysical. He condemned metaphysics, but his phi- losophy, such as it was, inspired Pope, and his cultivated thinking on several subjects made many writers in the next generation care for beauty and grace. He, like Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and Collins, on the Deists' side, were opposed by Samuel Clark, by Bentley, by Bishop Butler, and by Bishop Warburton. BISHOP BUTLER'S acute and solid reasoning treated in his Sermons the subject of Morals, inquiring what was the particular nature of man, and hence determining the course of life correspondent to this nature. His Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature, 1736, endeavours to make peace be- tween authority and reason, and has become a standard book. I may mention here a social satire, The Fable of the liees, by Mandeville, half-poem, half-prose dialogue, and finished in 1729. It tried to prove that the vices VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE IQI of society are the foundation of civilisation, and is one of the first of a new set of books which marked the rise in England of the bold speculations on the nature and ground of society to which the French Revolution gave afterwards so great an impulse. 122. The Periodical Essay is connected with the names of JOSEPH ADDISON and SIR RICHARD STEELE. The gay, light, graceful, literary Essay, differing from such Essays as Bacon's as good conversation about a subject differs from a clear analysis of all its points, was begun in France by Montaigne in 1580. Charles Cot- ton, a wit of Charles II.'s time, retranslated Montaigne's Essays, and they soon found imitators in Cowley and Sir W. Temple. But the periodical Essay was created by Steele and Addison. It was at first published three times a week, then daily, and it was anonymous, and both these characters necessarily changed its form from that of an essay by Montaigne. Steele began it in the Tatler, 1 709, and it treated of everything that was going on in the town. He paints as a social humourist the whole age of Queen Anne the political and literary disputes, the fine gentlemen and ladies, the characters of men, the humours of society, the new book, the new play ; we live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of old London. Addison soon joined him, first in the Tat- /nl UlliiCs Daughter, full of tender feeling, mark the influence of the more natural style that Wordsworth had brought to excellence. 152. Rogers and Moore. The Pleasures of Memory, 1792, and the Italy, 1822, of Samuel Rogers, are the work of a slow and cultivated mind, and contain some laboured but fine descriptions. The curious thing is that, living apart in a courtly region of culture, there is not a trace in all his work that Kurope and England and society had passed during his life through a convulsion of change. To that convulsion the best poems of THOMAS 236 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. MOORE may be referred. They are the songs he wrote to the Irish airs collected in 1796. The best of them have for their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland against England. Many of them have lyrical beauty and soft melody. At times they reach true pathos, but their lightly lifted gaiety is also delightful. He sang them himself in society, and it is not too much to say that they helped by "the interest they stirred to further Catholic Emancipation. 153. We turn to very different types of men when we come to Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Of the three, LORD BYRON had most of the quality we call force. Born in 1788, his Hours of Idleness, a collection of short poems, in 1807, was mercilessly lashed in the Edinburgh Review. The attack only served to awaken his genius, and he replied with astonishing vigour in the satire of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809. Eastern travel gave birth to the first two cantos of ChiMe Harold, 1812, to the Giaour and the Bride of Abydos in 1813, to the Corsair and Lara in 1814. The Siege of Corinth, Par- isina, the Prisoner of Cliillon, Manfred, and Childe Harold were finished before 1819. In iSiS he began a new style in Beppo, which he developed fully in the successive issues of Don Juan, 1819-24. During this time he published a number of dramas, partly historical, as his Marino Faliero, partly imaginative, as the Cain. His life had been wild and useless, but he died in trying to redeem it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away in April, 1824. VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 237 154. The Position of Byron as a Poet is a curious one. He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Some- thing of the school of Pope clings to him ; yet no one so completely broke away from old measures and old man- ners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At first, he has no interest whatever in the human questions which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has he any philosophy except that which centres round the problem of his own being. Cain, the most thoughtful of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the representation of the way in which the doctrines of original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. We feel naturally great interest in this strong personality, put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies us at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in power, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into the opposite extreme in Don Juan. It is chiefly in it that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. It is written in bold revolt against all the conventionality of social morality and religion and politics. It claimed for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual act and thought in opposition to that force of society which tends to make all men after one pattern. This was the best result of his work, though the way in which it was done can scarcely be approved. As the poet of nature he belongs also to the old and the new school. Byron's sympathy with nature is a sympathy with himself 238 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. reflected in her moods. But he also escapes from this position of the later eighteenth century poets, and looks on nature as she is, apart from himself; and this escape is made, as in the case of his poetry of man, in his later poems. Lastly, it is his colossal power and the case that comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, as well as his amazing productiveness, which mark him specially. But it is always more power of the intellect than of the imagination. 155. In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary, the imagination is first and the intellect second. He pro- duced while yet a boy some worthless tales, but soon showed in Queen Mab, 1813, the influence of the revolu- tionary era, combined in him with a violent attack on the existing forms of religion. One half of Shelley's poetry, and of his heart, was devoted to help the world towards the golden year he prophesied in Queen Mab, and to denounce and overthrow all that stood in its way. The other half was personal, an outpouring of himself in his seeking after the perfect ideal he could not find, and, sadder still, could not even conceive. Queen Mab is an example of the first, Alas tor of the second. The hopes for man with which Queen Mab was written grew cold, and he turned from writing about mankind to describe in Alastor the life and wandering and death of a lonely poet. But the Alastor who isolated the poet from man- kind was, in Shelley's own thought, a spirit of evil, and his next poem, the Revolt of Islam, 1817, unites him airain to the interests of humanitv. He wrote it with the vin POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 239 hope that men were beginning to recover from the apathy and despair into which the failure of the revolutionary ideas had thrown them, and to show them what they should strive and hope for, and destroy. The poem itself has finer passages in it than Alas for, but as a whole it is inferior to it. It is far too formless. The same year Shelley went to Italy, and never returned to England. He then produced Rosalind and Helen and Julian and Maddalo; but the new health and joy he now gained brought back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke out into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound. Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated from Pro- metheus, is the all-pervading Love which in loving makes the universe of nature. When Prometheus is united to Asia, the spirit of Love in man is wedded to the spirit of Love in nature, and all the world of man and nature is redeemed. The marriage of these t\vo, and the distinct existence of each for that purpose, is the same idea as Wordsworth's differently expressed ; and Shelley and he are the only two poets who have touched it philosophi- cally, Wordsworth with most contemplation, Shelley with most imagination. Prometheus Unbound is the finest example we have of the working out in poetry of the idea of a regenerated universe, and the fourth act is the choral song of its emancipation. Then, Shelley, having expressed this idea with exultant imagination, turned to try his matured power upon other subjects. Two of these were neither personal nor for the sake of man. The first, the drama of the Ccnci, is as restrained in 24O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. expression as the previous poem is exuberant : yet there is no poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought and imagery are so wrought together. The second was the Adonais, a lament for the death of John Keats. It is a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a spirit, and belongs in expression, thought, and feeling to that world above the senses in which Shelley habitually lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of his lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable, but, to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the finest poem he wrote. Of the same class is the Witch of Atlas, the poem in which he has personified divine Imagination in her work in poetry, and imaged all her attendants, and her doings among men. As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some, as in the very finest, the Ode to the West Wind, mingle together personal feeling and prophetic hope for man- kind. Some are lyrics of pure nature ; some are dedi- cated to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ; others belong to the indefinite passion he called love, and others are written on visions of those " shapes that haunt Thought's wildernesses." They form together the most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musi- cal, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess. As the poet of nature, he had the same idea as Words- worth, that nature was alive : but while Wordsworth made the active principle which filled and made nature to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. The natural Vllt POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 24! world was dear then to his soul as well as to his eye, but he loved best its indefinite aspects. He wants the closeness' of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than they of describing the cloud-scenery of the sky, the doings of the great sea, and vast realms of landscape. He is in this, as well as in his eye for subtle colour, the Turner of poetry. What he might have been we cannot tell, for at the age of thirty he left us, drowned in the sea he loved, washed up and burned on the sandy spits near Pisa. His ashes lie beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor cordium, " Heart of hearts," written on his tomb, well says what all who love poetry feel when they think of him. 156. John Keats lies near him, cut off like him before his genius ripened ; not so ideal, but for that very reason more naturally at home with nature than Shelley. In one thing he was entirely different from Shelley he had no care whatever for the great human questions which stirred Shelley ; the present was entirely without interest to him. He marks the close of that poetic movement which the ideas of the Revolution had crystallised in England, as Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. Keats, seeing nothing to move him in an age which had now sunk into apathy on these points, went back to Spenser, and especially to Shakespeare's minor poems, to find his inspiration ; to Greek and mediaeval life to find his subjects, and established, in doing so, that which has been called the literary poetry of England. Leigh R 242 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. Hunt, his friend and Shelley's, did part of this work. The first subject on which Keats worked, after some minor poems in 1817, was Endymion, 1818, his last, Hyperion, 1820. These, along with Lamia, which is, on the whole, the finest of his longer poems, were poems of (.reek life. Endymion has all the faults and all the promise of a great poet's early work, and no one knew its faults better than Keats, whose preface is a model of just self-judgment. Hyperion, a fragment of a tale of the overthrow of the Titans, is itself like a Titanic torso. Its rhythm was derived from Milton, but its poetry is wholly his own. But the mind of Keats was as yet too luxuriant to support the greatness of his subject's argument, and the poem dies away. It is beautiful, even in death. Both poems are filled with that which was deepest in the mind of Keats, the love of loveliness for its own sake, the sense of its rightful and pre-eminent power; and in the singleness of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats is especially the ideal poet. Then he took us back into mediaeval romance, and in this also he started a new type of poetry. There are two poems which mark this revival Isabella, and the Ere of St. Agnes. Mediaeval in subject, they are modern in manner ; but they are, above all, of the poet himself. Their magic is all his own. In smaller poems, such as the Ode on a Grecian Urn, the poem To Autumn, to the Nightingale, and some sonnets, he is the fairest of all Apollo's children. He knew the inner soul of words. He felt the world where ideas and their forms are one, where nature and vni POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 243 humanity, before they divide, flow from a single source. In all his poems, his painting of nature is as close as Wordsworth's, but more ideal ; less full of the imagina- tion that links human thought to nature, but more full of the imagination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. He was not much interested in human questions, but as his mind grew, humanity made a more and more impera- tive call upon him. Had he lived, his poetry would have dealt more closely with the heart of man. His letters, some of the most original in the English language, show this clearly. The second draft of Hyperion, unpublished in his lifetime, and inferior as poetry to the first, accuses himself of apartness from mankind, and expresses hi,; resolve to write of Man, the greatest subject of all. Whether he could have done this well remains unknown. His career was short ; he had scarcely begun to write when death took him away from the loveliness he loved so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, and there he died, save for one friend, alone. He lies not far from Shelley, on the " slope of green access," near the pyramid of Cains Cestius. He sleeps apart ; he is him- self a world apart. 157. Modern English Poetry. Keats marks the ex- haustion of the impulse which began with Hums and Cowper. There was no longer now in England any large wave of public thought or feeling such as could awaken the national emotion and life out of which poetry is naturally born. We have then, arising after the deaths of Keats, Shelley, and JJyron, a number of pretty little 244 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. poems, having no inward fire, no idea, no marked char- acter. They might be written by any versifier at any time, and express pleasant, indifferent thought in pleas- ant verse. Such were Mrs. Hemans' poems, and those of L. E. L., and such were Tennyson's earliest poems, in 1830. There were, however, a few men who, close to 1820 and 1822, had drunk at the fountain of Shelley, and who, for a very brief time, continued, amid the apathy, to write with some imagination and fervour. T. L. Bed- does, whose only valuable work was done between 1822 and 1825, was one of these. George Darley, whose Sylvia earned the praise of Coleridge, was another. They rep- resent in their imitation of Shelley, in their untutored imagination, the last struggles of the poetic phase which closed with the death of Byron. When Browning imitated or rather loved Shelley in his first poem, Pauline, it was to bid Shelley farewell ; when Tennyson imitated Byron and was haunted by Keats in his first poems, it was also to bid them both farewell. Then Tennyson and Browning passed on to strike unexpected waters out of the rocks and to pour two rivers of fresh poetry over the world. For with the Reform agitation, and the twofold religious movement at Oxford, which was of the same date, a novel national excitement came on England, and with it the new tribe of poets arose among whom we have lived. The elements of their poetry were also new, though we can trace their beginnings in the previous poetry. This poetry took up, so far as Art could touch them, the theological, social, and even the political ques- VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 245 tions which disturbed England. It came, before long, moved by the critical and scientific inquiries into the origins of religion and man and the physical world, to represent the scepticism of England and the struggle for faith against doubt. It gave itself to metaphysics, but chiefly under the expression and analysis of the characters of men and women. It played with a vast variety of subjects, and treated them all with a personal passion which filled them with emotion. It worked out, from the point of view of deep feeling, the relation of man to God, and of man to sorrow and immor- tality. It studied and brought to great excellence the Idyll, the Song, and the short poem on classic subjects with a reference to modern life. It increased, to an amazing extent, the lyrical poetry of England. The short lyric was never written in such numbers and of such excellence since the days of Elizabeth. It recapt- ured and clothed in a new dress the Arthurian tale, and linked us, back through many poets, to the days of legend and delight. It re-established for us in this new time, as the most natural and most emotional subject of English poetry, England, her history, her people, and her landscape, so that the new poets have described not only the whole land but the natural scenery and histori- cal story, the human and animal life of the separate counties. Our native land, as in the days of Elizabeth, has been idealised. Nor did this new impulse stay in England only. It went abroad for its subjects, and especially to Italy. It 246 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. strove to express the main characteristics of periods of history and of art, of the origins of religions and of Chris- tianity, of classic and Renaissance thought at critical times, and of lyric passion in modern life. Indeed, it aimed at a universal representation of human life and at a subtle characterisation of individual temperaments. Thus, it was a poetry of England, and also of the larger world beyond England. Apart from the main stream of poetry, there were separate streams which represented distinct passages in the general movement. The Sonnets of Charles Tenny- son Turner, which began in 1830, stand by their grace and tenderness at the head of a large production of poetry which describes with him the shy, sequestered, observant life of the English scholar and lover of nature, of country piety and country people. One man among them stands alone, William Barnes, of Dorsetshire. The time will come when the dialect in which he wrote will cease to prevent the lovers of poetry from appreciating at its full worth a poetry which, written in the mother- tongue of the poor and of his own heart, is as close to the lives and souls of simple folk as it is to the woods and streams, the skies and farms of rustic England. Among them also is Coventry Patmore, who, though alive, belongs to the past. What .Barnes did for the peasant and the farmer, Patmore did for the cultivated life which in quiet English counties gathers round the church, the parsonage, and the hall, the lives and piety of the English homes that are still the haunts of ancient via I'OKTRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 247 peace. His work, with its retired and careful if over- delicate note, is a true picture of a small part of English life. But it has the faults of its excellences. The High Church and Broad Church movements, as they were called, produced two sets of poetical writers who also stand somewhat apart from the main line of English poetry. The first is best represented by John Keble, whose Christian Year, in 1827, with its poetry, so good within its own range, so weak beyond it, was the source of many books of poems of a similar but inferior char- acter. On the other hand the impulse towards a wider theology was combined in some poets with a laxer moral- ity than England is accustomed to maintain, and Bailey's Festus, 1839, was the first of a number of sensational poems which painted the struggles of the spirit towards immortal life, and of the senses towards mortal love with equal effervescence. A noble translation of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, and the fine ballad-songs and Andromeda of Charles Kingsley, may also be said to flow apart from the main stream in which poetry flowed. Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning (whose wife will justly share his fame) began to write between 1830 and 1833, an( l continued their work side by side for fifty years, when they died, almost together. Both of them were wholly original, and both of them, differing at every point of their art, kept with extraordinary vitality their main powers, and were capable of fresh invention, even to the very last. They passed through a long period of change and development, during which all the existing 248 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. foundations of faith and knowledge and art were dug out, investigated, tested, and an attempt made to reconstruct them, an attempt which still pursues its work. They lived and wrote in sympathy with the emotions which this long struggle created in the minds of men, and ex- pressed as much of these emotions as naturally fell within their capability and within the sphere of poetry. And this they did with great eagerness and intensity. Their love of beauty and of their art was unbroken, and they had as much power, as they had desire, to shape the thought and the loveliness they saw great poets who have illuminated, impelled, adorned, and exalted the world in which we live. At first the great inquiry into the roots of things dis- turbed the next generation of poets, those who stepped to the front between 1850 and 1860 ; and as Arthur Hugh dough expressed the trouble of the want of clear light on the fates of men and their only refuge in duty, so Matthew Arnold, more deeply troubled, embodied in his poetry, even in his early book of 1852, the restlessness, the dimness, the hopelessness of a world which had lost the vision of the ancient stars and could cling to nothing but a stoic conduct. But he did this with keen sorrow, and with a vivid interest in the world around him. Then about 1860 the poets grew weary of the whole struggle. Theology, the just aim and ends of life, science, political and social questions, ceased on the whole to awaken the slightest interest in them. Exactly that which took place in the case of Keats now took place. The poets sought VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 249 only for what was beautiful, romantic, of ancient heroism, far from a tossed and wearied world, far from all its tiresome questions. Dante G. Rossetti, whose sister, Christina, touched the romantic and religious lyric with original beauty, was the leader of this school. He, and others still alive, found their chief subjects in ancient Rome and Greece, in stories and lyrics of passion, in mediaeval romance, in Norse legends, in the old England of Chaucer, and in Italy. But this literary poetry has now almost ceased to be produced, and has been suc- ceeded as in 1825 by a vast criticism of poetry, and by a multitudinous production, much inspired from France, of poetry, chiefly lyrical, which has few elements of endur- ance and little relation to life. What will emerge from this we cannot tell, but we only need some new human inspiration, having a close relation to the present, and bearing with it a universal emotion, to create in England another school of poetry as great as that which arose in the beginning of this century, and worthy of the tradi- tions which have made England the creator and lover of poetry for more than 1200 years. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE A.D. 449 .... English History begins in Britain. The Jutes land in Thanet. 597 .... Christianity brought into England by Augustine; 627 .... And into Northumbria by Paulinus. 635, et seij. . The Celtic Missionaries evangelise Xorthumbria. 664 .... The Synod of Whitby. 670-80 . . The poems of Csedmon. 669-71 . . School of Canterbury; Archbishop Theodore. 6807-709. . The literary work of Ealdhelm. (Born 656.) 690 (cir.) . The laws of Inc. 674-82 . . Wearmouth, Jarrow, and their libraries, founded by Benedict Biscop. 673 .... Breda, Benedict's scholar, born. 731. . . . Breda's Ecclesiastical History. (Death of Breda, 735.) 735 .... Ecgberht, Archbp. of York, establishes the School of York and the Library. (Died 766.) 766-82 . . .-Ethelbert and Alcuin make York the centre of European learning. . Alcuin carries the learning of York to Europe. . The first Viking raid on Xorthumbria. Cynewulf (born about 720) wrote his poems prob- ably in the latter half of this century. Soo .... Charles the Great crowned emperor. 830. . . . About this date the " Heliand," an Old Saxon poem, was written. 251 252 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 867-76 . . The final destruction of the seats of learning in Northumbria by " the Army." Sji .... The accession of ALlfrcd. 886 (cir.) . /Elfred begins his literary work. The English Chronicle is first carefully edited in this reign. 901 .... Death of /Elfred. 913. . . . Rolf settles in Normandy. 937 .... Song of Battle of Brunanburh, in the Chronicle. 961-88 . . Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. 964, et seq. . King Eadgar, with /Ethelwold and Oswald, Bishops of Winchester and Worcester, revives English monaehism in Wessex and East Anglia. 971 .... Blickling Homilies. 991 .... Song of the Battle of Maldon. 991-96 . . /Elfric's Homilies; after 1005, his Treatise on the Old and New Testament. (Died 1020-25.) 1031 . . . Swegen of Denmark becomes King of England. 1042-65 . . Reign of Edward the Confessor. England's first contact with French Romance. Latin translation of a late Greek Romance, Apol- lonius of Tyre, and of two small books belonging to the Alexander Saga. 1066 . . . The Lay of Roland is brought to England. lobb . . . William I. 1070 . . . Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. The " Charlemagne," Norman poem, before the end of the nth century. 1071 . . . The .Exeter Book given by Leofric, Bishop of Exe- ter, to his Cathedral. 1085 . . . The Domesday Book. io8j . . . William //. crowned by Lanfranc. 1093 . . . Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. 1095 . . . The beginning of the Crusades. The stories of the East soon come to the West. Jioo . . . Henry I. 1109 . . . University of Paris rises into importance with Wil- liam of Champeaux and Peter Abelard. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 253 A.D. mo . 1118 . 1120 . 1126-43 1129 . 1135-54 1132-35 1154 . 1155 . 1160 . 1156-59? 1160-70 (cir.) 1160-70 1170 . 1170-90 1180-90? nSg 1198 Miracle play of St. Catherine. End of Florence of Worcester's Chronicle. End of William of Malmesbury's Historia regum Anglorum. William of Malmesbury's Mistorioe novella;. End of Simeon of Durham's Chronicle. Henry of Huntingdon's History of England. Stephen. Geoffrey of Monmouth's Ilistoria Britonum. Final form, 1147. English Chronicle ends. Gesta Stephani. Hexham Chroniclers. At the end of reign of Henry I. and during Stephen's reign the Cistercians brought about a religious revival. The Abbeys founded in the North. Henry II. Wace's Geste cles Bretons (Brut d'Engleterre). Benoit de Sainte More's Roman de Troie. John of Salisbury's Polycraticus. Walter Map's De Nugis curialium; Golias. The Lais of Marie de France; written in Eng- land. Robert de Boron's Le petit Saint Graal. Wace finishes his Roman de Rou. Le Grand Saint Graal; Queste de Saint Graal; Lancelot du Lac, by Walter Map? Chrestien de Trove's Conte de Graal (Percevale). Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough, continued by Roger of Howden. Ranulf de Glanvill's work on English law. Richard Fitz Nigel's Dialogus de Scaccario. Gerald de Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) Itinera- rium; Journey in Wales; Conquest of Ireland written in this and the two following reigns. Richard /. William of Xewborough's Chronicle. 254 ENGLISH LITERATURE In the middle of the 1 2th century the troubadour poetry of Southern France rose into its fine flower in the work of Bernart de Ventadorn. He had been preceded by Guilhem de Poitiers, the first troubadour of whom we know. Bertram! de Born, Geoffrey Rudel, Pierre Vidal are famous troubadours of this cen- tury. The lyrics of Northern France, those of the trouveres, grew out of this Provencal poetry. No lyrical poetry in England in this century. The chansons de geste of the last century in France were largely added to in this. Great literary activity prevailed in Wales from the middle of this century down to the death of Llewellyn in 1282. The epic of the Cid was shaped about 1160-70 out of ballads that had sung the border battles of Moors and Spaniards. In Germany the Minnelieder arose in the middle of the century, and Wolfram von Eschenbach introduced his new conception of Parzival into the Arthurian legend. Also in the middle of this century the Niebelungen Lied was cast into its form. Italian poetry began with Ciullo d'Alcamo in Sicily, and Folca- chiero of Siena, in the years 1172-78. In this century also the mediaeval tales from India were cast into the History of the Seven Sages, and into the Disciplina Clericalis. These materials were moulded into various shapes by the French poets, and afterwards in England. A.D. 7/99 . . . yohn. Chronicle of Richard of Devizes. Annals of Barn- well. Chronicle of Jocelyn of Brakelond, and others. 1150-1200 . Sayings of Alfred. 1200-30 . . Roman de la Rose (Part I.) by Guillaume de Lorris. 1205 . . . Loss of Normandy. 1205 (cir.) . Layamon's Brut. 1215 . . . The Orrmulum. The Great Charter. 1210-50 . . Reign of Frederick II. Italian poetry in Sicily. 1216 . . . Henry ///. Chronicle of Roger of Wendover at St. Albans. I2 3S~73 Matthew Paris' Greater Chronicle; History of England; Lives of earlier abbots. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 255 A.D. 1220-76 . . Guido Guinicclli. Father of new national litera- ture in Italy. 1 220 (cir.) . Owl and Nightingale (Dorsetshire). 1 220 (cir.) . Ancren Rivvle (Dorsetshire). 1 22 1 . . . Coining of Black Friars to England (Dominicans). 1224 . . . Coming of Grey Friars (Franciscans). 1225 ... St. Francis of Assisi's Song to the Sun. 1225-35?. . The Bestiary. 1230-40 (cir.) King Horn. I2 35~53 Robert Grossetete (Bp. of Lincoln). Chastel d'amour. 1250 (cir.) . Genesis and Exodus. 1258 . . . Provisions of Oxford, Proclamation of King's adhesion to them in English as well as French. 1262 . . . Miracle plays acted by the Town Guilds. 1264 . . . Battle of Lewes Ballad. 1264 . . . Corpus Christi Day appointed; fully observed, 1311. 1268 . . . Roger Bacon's Opus Majus. After Lewes and its war-ballad, the Love Lyric begins in such verse as the Throstle and the Nightingale and the Cuckoo Song. Also the religious lyric in such verse as the Sorrows of Christ and the Lullaby, and the Love Song of Thomas de Hales, a Franciscan. Also the satirical lyric, such as the Land of Cockayne. In this reign Adam Marsh (De Marisco) has a famous Franciscan school at Oxford. The Harrowing of Hell, first dramatic piece in English, belongs to this reign. Northumbria begins again to write in second half of century. I2J2 . . . Edward I. The Alexander Romance in English in this reign. The Tristan Story is also widely spread. Romances arise in Northumbria. Many war-ballads. 1280-87 Guido delle Colonne's (a poet of Sicily, born 1250) Historia Destructionis Trojce. Visited England and wrote Ilistorin de regibus et rebus Anglia?. 1290-93 . . Dante's Vita Nuova. 1300 (cir.) . Gesta Romanorum. 256 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1300 (cir.) . Havelok the Dane. 1303 Robert Manning of Brunne's Handlyng Synne. His Chronicle finished 1338. 1300-05 . . Roman de la Rose (Part II.), by Jean de Meung. 130? . . . Edward II. 1303-21 . . Dante's Divine Comedy. 1324 . . . Court of Love at Toulouse. 1320-30 . . Cursor Mundi (Northumbrian). William Shore- ham's Poems (Kentish). A Cycle of Homilies, Legend Cycle (both Northumbrian) are now worked at. Sir Tristrem; Sire Otuel; Guy of Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; all now in English. 1327 . . . Edward III. 1330 . . . Pilgrimage of Human Life, a French poem by Guillaume de Delguileville. Legenda Aurea, by Jacobus a Voragine, Bishop of Genoa. Guillaume deMachault. (B.I 282 (cir.); d.i37o(cir.).) 1340 (cir.) . Richard Rolle of Hampole's Pricke of Conscience. 1340 . . . Dan Michel of Northgate's Ayenbite of Inwyt. 1341 . . . Petrarca crowned laureate at Rome. 1345 . . . Death of Richard Aungerville, Bishop of Durham, writer of Philobiblion; leaves library to Oxford. 1333-52 . . Songs of Laurence Minot on King Edward's wars. 1350, et seq. . Collections of books, and University foundations in England now begin to serve literature. 1350-53 . . Decameron of Boccaccio. 1341, LaTeseide. 1348, Eilostrato. 1350 (cir.) . Romances are now written on the Welsh marches in alliterative Old English verse ; subject and mise-en-scene French, verse and diction national. Among first of these, Joseph of Arimathie ami two fragments of an Alexander Romance. 1355 . . . William of Palerne. 1350? Tale of Gamelyn. 1355 (cir.) . Anturs of Arthur at the Tarnawathelan. 1360-70 (cir.) Sir Gawayne and the Grene % Perhaps by the Knight, Pearl, Cleanness \ " philosophical and Patience. J Strode." CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 1362-63 . . Langland's Vision of 1'iers the Plowman. (A-Text.) 1366-70 . . Chaucer's first poems. Book of the Duchess, 1369. 1373 . . . Petrarca's Griselda. 1375 . . . Harbour's Bruce. /J77 . . . Richard II. 1377 . . . B-Text of Piers the Plowman. 1378? . . . Wyclifs Summa in Theologia. 1379 . . . New College, Oxford; Latin School at Winchester founded by William of Wykeham. 1380 . . . Wyclifs translation of the Bible. 1380-83 . . Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida. 1382-85 . . Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, Hous of Fame, Legend of Good Women. 1383 (cir.) . Wyclifs Trialogus. (Died 1384.) 1385-89 . . Chaucer's Prologue and many of the Canterbury Tales. '393' Govver's Confessio Amantis. 1395 . . . Chrysoloras comes to Florence to teach Greek. Guarino Guarini teaches Greek at Venice, Florence, Ferrara. (Born 1370; died 1460.) 1398?. . . C-Text of Piers the Plowman. From Boccaccio to the middle of the i6th century a great mass of Italian Novelle were produced; used in England for plays, stories, &c. /j>99 . . . Henry IV. 1400 . . . Death of Chaucer and Langland. 1411-12 . . Hoccleve's Gouvernail of Princes. 1413 . . . Henry V. 1415 . . . Eustache Deschamps dies. Alain Chartier and Christine de Pisan, his contemporaries. 1421 . . . Lydgate's Troy Book. 1424-25, Story of Thebes. 1422 . . . Henry VI. 1422 . . . James I. of Scotland : The King's Quair. 1422 . . . Paston Letters begin; end 1509. 1423 . . . John Aurispa brings from Greece to Italy more than 200 MSS. 1424-25 . . Lydgate's Falles of Princes. 258 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1427 . . . Filelfo, laden with MSS., returns from Greece to Florence. Pletho, Bessarion, Gaza have diffused the spirit of ancient learn- ing in Italy by 1440. Universities at Pavia, Turin, Ferrara, Flor- ence, &c. Fight hundred MSS. left by Niccolo Niccoli to Florence, in 1436; cradle of the Laurcntian Library. 1449 . . . Pecock's Represser of Overmuch blaming of the Clergy. 1453 . . . Fall of Constantinople. 1450 (cir.) . Invention of Printing. 1460-80 . . Poems of Robert Henryson. 1461 . . . Edward IV. 1470 . . . Malory's Morte Darthur. 1474-76 . . Caxton sets up printing press at Westminster. 1481 . . . Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore. 1483 . . . Edward V, Richard III. 1485 . . . Henry VII. 1495? . . . Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato begun. 1501 . . . Gawin Douglas' Palace of Honour. 1503 . . . Dunbar's Thistle and Rose. 1504 . . . Sannazaro's Arcadia. 1506 . . . Ilawes' Pastime of Pleasure. 1507 . . . Skelton's Bowge of Court; Boke of Phyllip Sparowe. 1507-08 . . Dunbar's Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. 7509 . . . Henry VIII. 1509 . . . Frasmus : Praise of Folly. 1513 . . . Gawin Douglas : Translation of the ^neid. 1513? . . . Sir Thos. More's Life of Edward V. and History of Richard III. written. 1515 . . , Trissino's Sofonisba; first use of blank verse in Italy. 1516 . . . Ariosto's Orlando Furioso begun; the rest in 1532. 1516 . . . Sir Thos. More's Utopia, written in Latin. 1518? . . . Skelton's Colin Clout. 1518? . . . Amadis de Gaul translated into English. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 259 A.D. 1524 . . . Ronsard born. (Died 1586.) 1527 . . . Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. 1528 . . . Lyndsay's Dreme. 1520-40 . . Heywood's Interludes. 1532, et set], . Rabelais' Gargantua, &c. 1535 . . . Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates. 1540 . . . Cranmer's Bible. 1541? . . . Ralph Roister Doister, first English comedy, printed 1566. 1545 . . . Ascham's Toxophilus. 1547 . . . Edward VI. 1549 . . . Latimer's Sermon on the Ploughers. 1549-52 . . English Prayer Book. 1551 . . . Ralph Robinson's translation of More's Utopia into English. *553 Mary. 1553 . . . Lyndsay's Monarchic. 1557 . . . Tottel's Miscellany ; poems by Wyatt and Surrey. 1558 . . . Elizabeth. 1559 . . . Sackville's Mirror for Magistrates. 1561-62 . . Gorboduc, the first English Tragedy. Printed as Ferrex and Porrex, 1571. 1562 . . . Phaer's Virgil. Many other translations of the classics before 1579. 1563 . . . Foxe's Book of Martyrs. 1563 . . . Sackville's Induction to Mirror for Magistrates. 1570 . . . Ascham's Schoolmaster. 1571 . . . R. Edward's Damon and Pithias printed. 1575 . . . Comedy of Gammer Gurton's Needle printed. Play of Apius and Virginia printed. 1576 . . . Paradise of Dainty Devices; 1578, Gorgeous Gal- lery of Gallant Inventions; 1584, Handfull of Pleasant Delights all Poetical Miscellanies. 1576 . . . Three theatres built in London ; Blackfriars, the Curtain, the Theatre. 1576 . . . Gascoigne's Steele Glas. (First verse satire.) 1577 . . . Holinshed's Chronicle. 26o ENGLISH LITERATURE 1579-80 . . Lyly's Euphues. 1580-1601 (cir.) his dramas. 1579 . . . Spenser's Shepheards Calendar. 1579 . . . North's Plutarch's Lives. 1580-81 . . Sidney's Arcadia and Apologie for Poetrie. 1580-88 . . Montaigne's Essaies. 1581 . . . Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. 1582? . . . Watson's Hecatompathia or Passionate Century. 1583-1625? . Pamphleteers: Greene, Lodge, G. Harvey, Nash, Dekker, Breton. 1584-92 . . Dramas of Greene. 1583, et seq., Tales in prose. 1584-98 . . Dramas of Peele. 1586 . . . Warner's Albion's England. 1587 . . . Marlowe's Tamburlaine acted. (Printed 1590.) 1588-90 . . Marlowe's Faustus, Jew of Malta, Edward II. 1588-90 . . Series of Martin Marprelate Tracts. 1588-90? . . Love's Labour's Lost. 1589 . . . Hakluyt's Voyages. 1590 . . . Spenser's Faerie Queene (Books i.-iii. 1596, iv.-vi.). 1591 . . . Harrington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando. 1593 . . . Donne's Satires (died 1626). 1593 . . . Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. 1594 . . . Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Bks. i.-iv. 1597, v.). 1593-96 . . Many collections of Sonnets. 1595 . . . Daniel's Hist, of Civil Wars of York and Lancaster. 1596, et stq. . Ben Jonson's Dramas. (Died 1637.) 1594-96 . . Merchant of Venice. 1597 . . . Bacon's Essays. (First set.) 1597-98 . . Hall's Satires. 1598 . . . Chapman's Homer (First part). Sylvester's trans- lation of Du Bartas. 1598-99 . . Marston's Satires. 1596-98 . . Drayton's Barons' Wars and England's Heroical Epistles. 1599 . . . The Globe Theatre built. 1600 . . . England's Helicon; England's Parnassus; Belve- dere; all poetical Miscellanies. 1600 Fairfax's translation of Tasso. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 26l A.D. 1600 . . . Lope de Vega began his dramas about 1590, and continued writing till his death in 1635. 1 600-8 1 . . Calderon, who had a large influence on the French Drama of the lyth and i8th centuries, on the English Restoration Drama, and on the Italian, German and English poetry of i8th and igth centuries. 1603 (cir.) ? . The Return from Parnassus. 1603 . . . Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays. f6oj . . . James I. 1603 . . . Knolles' History of the Turks. 1604 . . . Authorised Version of the Bible. 1605 . . . Bacon's Advancement of Learning (Books i. and ii.). 1606-16 . . Cervantes' Don Quixote. 1609 . . . Shakespeare's Sonnets published. 1610-25 (cir.) Dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. 1610 . . . Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory. 1611 . . . Speed's History of Great Britain. 1612 . . . Webster's first drama, The White Devil (printed). 1612-20 . . T. Shelton's Translation of Don Quixote. 1613-14 . . Drayton's Folyolbion. 1613-16 . . Browne's Britannia's Pastorals; 1614, The Shep- herd's Pipe. 1613 . . . Purchas his Pilgrimage. 1613 . . . Wither's Abuses Stript and Whipt. 1613 . . . Drummond of Hawthornden's first poem. (D. 1649.) 1614 . . . Raleigh's History of the World. 1615 . . . Sandys' Travels. 1615 . . . Wither's Shepherd's Hunting. 1616 . . . Chapman's Homer finished. Shakespeare dies. 1621 . . . Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 1622 . . . Massinger's Virgin Martyr. (Died 1639.) 1623 . . . Webster's Duchess of Malli (printed). 1623 . . . Waller's first poems. 1623 . . . The " First Folio " of Shakespeare. Chapman, Tourneur, Middleton, and other drama- tists wrote during this reign. 262 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1625 . . . Charles I. 1628 . . . Harvey's De Motu Sanguinis. 1629 . . . Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 1631 . . . George Herbert's Temple. 1635? . . . Sir Thos. Browne's Religio Medici (pub. 1642). 1632-37 . . Milton's Allegro, Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas. 1633 . . . Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. 1634 . . . Ford's historical play of Perkin Warbeck. 1636 . . . Corneille's first tragedy, the Cid. His last play, 1675. 1636 . . . French Academy founded. 1640 . . . Thomas Carew's poems. 1641 . . . Milton's first pamphlet. 1641 . . . Evelyn's Diary begins (ends 1697; published l8l8). 1642 . . . Theatres closed. 1642 . . . Fuller's Holy and Profane state. 1642 . . . Denham's Cooper's Hill. 1642 . . . Hobbes" De Give. 1644 . . . Milton's Areopagitica. 1645 Waller's poems. 1645 . . . Meetings held which lead to formation of the Royal Society. 1646 . . . Crashaw's Steps to the Temple. 1647 . . . Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying. 1647 . . . Cowley's Mistress. Davideis, 1 641(7) . 1647-48 . . Herrick's Noble Numbers; Hesperides. 1648 . . . J. Beaumont's Psyche or Love's Mystery. 1648 . . . Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea. 1649 . . . Lovelace's Lucasta. ibjg . . Commonwealth. 1650 . . . Baxter's Saints' Rest. 1650 . . . Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. 1650-52 . . Marvell's Garden poems written. 1650-56 . . Vaughan's Silex Scintillans. 1650-57 . . Pascal's Provincial Letters. 1651 . . . Hobbes' Leviathan. 1653 . . . Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. 1653 . . . Moliere's first play. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 263 A.D. 1656 . . . Harrington's Oceana. 1659 . . . Dryclen's Stanzas on the Death of Cromwell. 1659 . . . Corneille's Essay on the Three Unities. 1659-60 . . Pepys' Diary begins (finished 1669; published 1825). 1660 . . . Boileau's first satire. 1660 . . . Charles II. 1660 . . . Re-opening of the theatres by Davenant and Killigrew. 1662 . . . Royal Society incorporated. 1663 . . . Dryclen's first play, the Wild Gallant. 1663 . . . Butler's Hudibras (Part I.). 1663 . . . Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning Govern- ment, published 1698. 1663 . . . The London Public Intelligencer. (Becomes the London Gazette, 1666.) 1663-67 . . Plays of Racine. Esther, 1689 (?), Athalie, 1690(7) . 1664 . . . La Fontaine's first book of Contes. 1667 . . . Dryden'sAnnus Mirabilis; Essay on Dramatic Poesy. 1667 . . . Cowley's Essays. 1667 . . . Milton's Paradise Lost. 1667 . . . Petty 's Treatise on Taxes. 1668 . . . La Fontaine's first book of Fables. (Died 1695.) 1670 . . . Izaak Walton's Lives. 1670 . . . Pascal's Les Pensees. 1671 . . . Paradise Regained. Samson Agonistes. 1671-77 . . Dramas of Wycherley. 1672 . . . Dryden's Essay on Heroic Plays. 1674 . . . Boileau's Art of Poetry. 1678 . . . Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. (Part I.) 1678 . . . Dryden's All for Love. (In blank verse.) 1678 . . . Cud worth's Intellectual System of the Universe. 1680 . . . Filmer's Patriarcha. 1681 . . . Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. (First part.) 1682 . . . Dryden's Medal, Macflecknoe, Religio Laici. 1684 . . . Pilgrim's Progress. (Part II.) Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion written during this reign. (Published 1707.) 264 ENGLISH LITERATURE 1687 . . 1687 1687 . . ib88-8<) . 1 690 . . 1692 . . 1693-1700 1694 . . 1697-1705 1698 . . 1698-1707 1700 . . 1 700 . . 770.2 . . i 702-05 . 1704 . . 1704 . . 1704-13 . 1709 . . 1709-11 . 1709-44 . i 709 . . 171 1-12-14 1712 . . 1714 . . 1714 . . 1715-20 . 1715, et seq. 1719 . . 1724-34 . 1725 . . 1726-30 . 1726-27 . James If. Newton's Principia. Defoe's first tract. La Bruyere's Les Caracteres. The Revolution, IVilliam III. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. Sir Wm. Temple's Miscellanea, Vol. ii. Congreve's dramas. Dryden's Last Play. Dramas of Vanbrugh. Collier's Short View of the Immorality of the Stage. Dramas of Farquhar. Dryden's Fables. (Nov. 1699.) Prior's Carmen Seculare. Anne. Steele's Plays. (1722. Comedy of the Conscious Lovers, his last play.) Swift's Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books. (Writ- ten by 1596-97.) Addison's Campaign. Rosamond (opera), 1706. Defoe's Review. Mat Prior's Poems. The Tatler. Writings of Bishop Berkeley. Pope's Pastorals. (Written 1704-05.) The Spectator. Pope's Rape of the Lock. Addison's Cato. Gay's Shepherd's Week. George I. Pope's Homer's Iliad. Le Sage's Gil Bias. Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. (Final form 1714.) 1720-25, Other novels. Bp. Burnet's History of my own Times published. Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd. ( First form 1 723.) Thomson's Seasons. Swift's Gulliver's Travels. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 265 A.D. if '2j . . . George If. 1727 . . . Gay's Fables. 1728, Beggar's Opera. 1728 . . . Pope's Dunciad. (Firstform. Others in 1729-42-43.) 1728 . . . Voltaire's I lenriade. 1730 . . . Marivaux : Lejeude 1'amouretduhasard. (0.1763.) 1732-34 . . Pope's Essay on Man. Moral Essays, 1732-35. 1735 . . . Johnson's Translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abys- sinia. (His first work.) 1736 . . . Butler's Analogy of Religion. 1737 . . . Shenstone's Schoolmistress. (Final form, 1742.) 1738 . . . Johnson's London. 1739 . . . Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. 1740 . . . Richardson's Pamela. 1748, Clarissa Harlowe. 1741 . . . Warburton's Divine Legation. 1740-41 . . Hume's Essays. 1742 . . . Fielding's Joseph Andrews. 1749, Tom Jones. 1 744 . . . Johnson's Life of Savage. 1744 . . . Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. 1746 . . . Collins' Odes. 1742-69 . . Gray's Poems. (Collected edition 1768.) 1748 . . . Smollett's Roderick Random. 1748 . . . Thomson's Castle of Indolence. 1748 . . . Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. 1749 . . . Diderot's Encyclopedic begun. 1749 . . . Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes; Irene. 1750-52 . . Johnson's Rambler. 1751-52 . . Hume's Principles of Morals and Political Discourses. 17=54 . . . Richardson's Sir Chas. Grandison. 1754-61 . . Hume's History of England. 1755 . . . Johnson's Dictionary. 1756 . . . Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful; Vin- dication of Natural Society. 1757 . . . Hume's Natural History of Religion. 1758 . . . Robertson's History of Scotland. 1769, Charles V. 1758 . . . Lessing's Litteraturbriefe. 1759 . . . Johnson's Rasselas. 1759 . . . Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments. 266 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1759 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (Vols. I and 2.) 1759-90 . . Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art. 7760 . . . George III. 1760 . . . Rousseau's Nouvelle Helo'ise. 1760 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy, (avols. j finished 1765.) 1761-64 . . Poems of Churchill. 1762 . . . Falconer's Shipwreck. 1760-65 . . Macpherson's Ossian. 1 765 . . . Goldsmith's Traveller. 1764-70 . . Chatterton's Poems. 1765 . . . Bishop Percy's Reliques of English Poetry. 1765 . . . H. Walpole's Castle of Otranto. 1766 . . . Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. (Written 1762?) 1766 . . . Lessing's Laokoon. 1768-78 . . Plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan. 1769 . . . Burke's Present State of the Nation. 1769-72 . . Letters of Junius. 1770 . . . Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents. 1770 . . . Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 1771-74 . . Beattie's Minstrel. 1773 . . . Ferguson's Poems. 1774 . . . Burke's Speech on American Taxation. 1774 . . . Goethe's Werther. 1775 . . . Beaumarchais : Le manage de Figaro. 1775 . . . Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. 1776 . . . Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. 1777-81 . . T. Warton's History of English Poetry. 1776-88 . . Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1777 . . . Robertson's History of America. 1778 . . . Frances Burney's Evelina. 1779-81 . . Johnson's English Poets. 1781 . . . Schiller's Die Rauber. 1783 . . . Crabbe's Village. 1783 . . . Blake's Poetical Sketches. 1 785 . . . Cowper's Task. 1786 . . . Samuel Rogers' Poems. 1786 . . . Burns' first Poems. CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 2O/ A.D. 1789 . . . Blake's Songs of Innocence. I794> Songs of Experience. 1789 . . . White's Natural History of Selborne. 1 790 . . . Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1791-92 . . Paine's Rights of Man. 1794-95, Age of Reason. 1791 . . . Boswell's Life of Johnson. 1792-94 . . Arthur Young's Travels in France. 1793 . . . Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice. 1 793 . . . Wordsworth's Evening Walk ; Descriptive Sketches. 1794 . . . Coleridge and Southey's Fall of Robespierre. 1796 . . . Poems; by Coleridge and Lamb. 1796 . . . Scott's translation of Burger's Lenore. 1796-97 . . Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. 1797 . . . Poems by Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd. 1797 . . . Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. 1798 . . . Lyrical Ballads; by Coleridge and Wordsworth. 1798 . . . Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population. 1798 . . . Landor's Gebir and other Poems. 1798 . . . Ebenezer Elliott's Vernal Walk. 1799 . . . Scott's translation of Gotz von Berlichingen. 1799 . . . Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. 1800 . . . Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein. 1801 . . . Southey's Thalaba. (lie continued writing till 1843.) 1802 . . . Scott's Border Minstrelsy. 1802 . . . The Edinburgh Review. 1805 . . . Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 1807 . . . Byron's Hours of Idleness. 1807 . . . Wordsworth's Poems in 2 vols. 1807 . . . T. Moore's Irish Melodies begun. 1807-08 . . Lamb's Specimens of Dramatic Poetry. 1808 . . . Scott's Marmion. 1810, Lady of the Lake. 1809 . . . The Quarterly Review. 1809 . . . Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 1810 . . . Allan Cunningham's first published poems. (D.I 842.) 1811-18 . . Novels of Jane Austen. 1822-33 . . Prof. Wilson's NoctesAmbrosianre. (In Blackwood.) 1812-18 . . Byron's Childe Harold. 268 ENGLISH LITERATURE A.D. 1813 . . . Shelley's Queen Mah. 1816, Alastor. 1814 . . . Scott's Waverley. (His novels continue till 1831.) 1814 . . . Wordsworth's Excursion. 1814 H. Gary's 'Translation of Dante. 1816 . . . Coleridge's Christabel ; Kubla Khan. 1816? . . . Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini. 1817 . . . Byron's Manfred. 1818, Beppo ; 1819-23, Don Juan. 1817 . . . Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. 1817 . . . Keats' first poems. 1817, et seq. . Hazlitt's Dramatic and Poetical Criticisms. (Died 1830.) 1818 . . . Ilallam's View of the State of Europe during the Mid- dle Ages. 1827, Constitutional Hist, of England. 1820 . . . George [V. 1820 . . . Keats' Hyperion and other Poems. 1820 . . . Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. 1821 . . . Byron's Cain and other dramas. 1821 . . . DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. 1821 . . . Shelley's Adonai's and Epipsychidion. 1821-23 . . Lamb's Essays of Elia. 1822 . . . T. L. Beddoes' Bride's Tragedy. 1822 . . . Rogers' Italy. 1824 . . . Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. 1826 . . . Poems by Two Brothers. (Chas. and Alfd. Tennyson.) 1827 . . . Keble's Christian Year. 1830 . . . William IV. 1830 . . . Alfred Tennyson : Poems. 1830 . . . Moore's Life of Byron. 1830 . . . Mrs. I lemans' Songs of the Affections. 1831, et seq. . Ebenezer Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes. 1831 . . . Robert Browning's Pauline; published 1833. 1832 . . . Death of Sir Walter Scott. Death of Goethe. INDEX BORN. DIED. 1672 Addison, Joseph, 182, 183, 187, 191, 192, 195 1719 849 Alfred, King, 3, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27 901 Fl. 1006 /Elfric (Grammaticus) , 29 Fl. 1005 .ffilfric (Bata), 29 908? ^Ethelwold, Bishop, 28 984 1721 Akenside, Mark, 214, 219 1770 735 Alcuin, 27 804 Alexander, Sir W. (see Stirling, Earl of) Fl. 1420 Andrew of Wyntoun, 91 1555 Andrewes, Lancelot, 153, 154 1626 1667 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 185 1735 1822 Arnold, Matthew, 248 1888 1515 Ascham, Roger, 84, 99 1568 1775 Austen, Jane, 210 1817 1561 Bacon, Sir Francis, 104, 108, 109, 123, 144, 152. .1626 673 Baeda, 3, 7, 14, 15, 25, 26 735 1816 Bailey, Philip, 247 1316? Barbour, John, 91 1395 1475? Barclay, Alexander, 88 1552 1820 Barnes, William, 246 1886 1630 Barrow, Isaac, 179 1677 1615 Baxter, Richard, 154 1691 1735 Beattie, James, 216, 220 1803 1584 Beaumont, Francis, 144-145 1616 1616 Beaumont, Joseph, 159 1699 1803 Beddoes, Thomas, 244 1849 1640 Behn, Aphra, 194 ; 1689 269 2/O ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED. 628?. Benedict, Biscop, 26 690 1748 Bentham, Jeremy, 208 1832 1662 Bentley, Richard, 182, 190 1742 1685 Berkeley, Bishop, 188, 190 1753 1388? Berners, Juliana, 75 1467 Berners, Lord, 83 1532 1650? Blackmore, Sir Richard, 187 1729 1699 Blair, Robert, 213 1746 1757 Blake, William, 222-224 1827 Fl. 1470-1492. . . .Blind Harry, 91 1766 Bloomfield, Robert, 225 1823 1545 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 154 1613 1678 Bolingbroke, Lord, 185, 190, 199 1751 1740 Boswell, James, 199 1795 1627 Boyle, Robert, 151 1691 Broome, Richard, 148 1652? 1554 Brooke, Lord (Fulke Greville), 123 1628 1689 Broome, William, 185 1745 1778 Brown, Thomas, 208 1820 1605 Browne, Sir Thomas, 154 1682 1591 Browne, William, 157 1643 1812 Browning, Robert, 224, 244, 247 1889 1730 Bruce, James, 209 1794 1746 Bruce, Michael, 221, 222 1767 1628 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 176, 193 1687 1628 Bunyan, John, 168 1688 1729 Burke, Edmund, 199, 205 1797 1643 Burnet, Bishop, 179, 182 1715 1752 Burney, Frances (Madame D'Arblay), 202. . . .1840 1759 Burns, Robert, 90, 222, 226, 243 1796 1577 Burton, Robert, 154 1640 1692 Butler, Bishop, 190 1752 1612 Butler, Samuel, 174, 181 1680 1788 Byron, Lord, 236, 237, 243, 244 1824 Fl. 670 Caedmon, 3, 12-19 1551 Camden, William, 151 1623 1777 Campbell, Thomas, 207, 235 1844 Temp. Hen. VI.. Campeden, Hugh de, 75 Campion, Thomas, 108 1619 INDEX 271 BORN. DIED. 1770 Canning, George, 207 1827 1393 Capgrave, John, 75 1464 1598? Carew, Thomas, 158 1639? 1795 Carlyle, Thomas, 206 1881 1422? Caxton, William, 77, 78, 86, 87 ! 1491? 1748 Cecil, Richard, 208 1810 1667? Centlivre, Susannah, 194 1723 1780 Chalmers, Dr., 208 1847 1559? Chapman, George, 117, 141-143 1634 1619 Charleton, Walter, 181 1707 17:52 Chatterton, Thomas, 217 1770 1340 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 34, 52, 61-70, 78, 86, 88, 90, 91, 94, 216 1400 1514 Cheke, Sir John, 82 1557 l-'l. 1430 Chestre, Thomas, 75 1602 Chillingworth, William, 150, 153, 179 1644 1731 Churchill, Charles, 214 1764 1671 Cibber, Colley, 185, 195 1757 1609 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 150, 153. . . .1674 1675 Clarke, Samuel, 190 1729? 1819 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 248 1861 1772 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 122, 166, 206-208,227, 229, 230 1834 1467? Colet, John, 82, 104 1519 1650 Collier, Jeremy, 194 1726 1676 Collins, Anthony, 190 1729 1721 Collins, William, 157, 214, 220 1759 1732 Colman, George (elder), 195 1794 1762 Colman, George (younger), 195 1836 1670 Congreve, William, 194, 195 1729 1562 Constable, Henry, 119, 156 1613 1577? Coryat, Thomas, 152 1617 1630 Cotton, Charles, 117, 191 1687 1571 Cotton, Sir Robert, 154 1631 1488 Coverdale, Miles, 85 1568 1618 Cowley, Abraham, 159, 172, 173, 182, 191 1667 1731 Cowper, William, 90, 213, 222-225, 243 1800 1754 Crabbe, George, 222, 225 1832 1489 Cranmer, Thomas, 85 T556 1613? Crashaw, Richard, 7, 157, 158 1649 1617 Cudworth, Ralph, 179 1688 272 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED. 1732 Cumberland, Richard, 195 1811 Fl. 8th century . .Cynewulf, 5-7, 12, 15, 19, 21, 22, 48, 49 1562 Daniel, Samuel, 108, 119, 121, 152 1619 1795 Darley, George, 244 1846 1606 Davenant, Sir William, 148, 174, 193 1668 Fl. 1623 Davenport, Robert, 148 1569 Davies, Sir John, 123 1626 Fl. 1606 Day, John, 143 1661? Defoe, Daniel, 183, 187-189 1731 1570? Dekker, Thomas, 141, 142 1641? 1615 Denham, Sir John, 172, 173 1669 1785 De Quincey, Thomas, 207 1859 1573 Donne, John, 124, 157 1631 1637 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 177 1706 1474? Douglas, Gawin, 90, 93 1522 1563 Drayton, Michael, 119, 121, 122 1631 1585 Drummond, of Hawthornden, William, 1 24, 157 . 1649 1631 Dryden, John, 68, 159, 168, 172-174, 178, 181, 184, 193, 198, 216, 238 1700 Du Jon Francis (see Junius) 1465? Dunbar, William, 90, 92-94 i53? 924 Dunstan, Archbishop, 28 988 1700? Dyer, John, 219 1758 640? Ealdhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, 3, 18 709 1601? Earle, John, 153 1665 Ecgberht, Archbishop, 27 766 1767 Edgeworth, Maria, 210 1849 1490? Elyot, Sir Thomas, 83 1546 1467 Erasmus, 82, 87 1536 1635? Etherege, Sir George, 194 1691 1620 Evelyn, John, 182 1706 Fairfax, Edward, 116 1635 1678 Farquhar, George, 194 1707 1683 Fenton, Elijah, 185 1730 1750 Fergusson, Robert, 222 1774 1782 Ferrier, Susan, 210 1854 1707 Fielding, Henry, 195, 201 1754 Filmer, Sir Robert, 180 1653 INDEX 273 BORN. DIED. 1459? Fisher, Bishop, 82 1535 1809 Fitzgerald, Edward, 247 1883 Flecknoe, Richard, 176 1678? Flemming, Robert, 80 1483 1588? Fletcher, Giles, 157 1623 1579 Fletcher, John, 139, 144, 145, 161 1625 1582 Fletcher, Phineas, 157 1650 Florence of Worcester, 39 1118 1553? Florio, John, 117 1625 1720 Foote, Samuel, 195 1777 Fl. 1639 Ford, John, 147 1394? Fortescue, Sir John, 77 1476? 1516 Foxe, John, 101 1587 1608 Fuller, Thomas, 153, 154 1661 Fl. 1140? Gaimar, Geoffrey, 41 1717 Garrick, David, 195, 216 1779 1661 Garth, Sir Samuel, 187 1719 1525? Gascoigne, George, 99, 124 1577 1685 Gay, John, 185, 187, 195, 222 1732 mo? Geoffrey of Monmouth, 40, 44, 71 1154 1737 Gibbon, Edward, 203 1794 Fl. 1639 Glapthorne, Henry, 148 Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of, 79 1446 1756 Godwin, William. 210 1836 1536? Golding, Arthur, 100 1605 ? 1728 Goldsmith, Oliver, 195, 199, 202, 206, 220, 221 1774 1540 Googe, Barnaby, 101 1594 1555 Gosson, Stephen, 108 1624 1325? Gower, John, 58, 59, 69, 79 1408 Grafton, Richard, 102, 152 1572? 1716 Gray, Thomas, 157, 174, 215-216, 219-221, 235 177 1 1696 Green, Matthew, 187 1737 1560? Greene, Robert, no, 131, 132, 134 1592 Greville, Fulke (see Brooke, Lord) Grey, William, Bishop cf Ely, 80 1478 1519 Grimoald, Nicholas, 97 1562 1446? Grocyn, William, 82 1519 Gunthorpe, John, Dean of Wells, 80 1498 T 274 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED. 1605 Habington, William, 159 1654 1552? Hakluyt, Richard, 109 1616 1584 Hales, John, 153, 179 1656 1651 Halifax, Charles Montague, Lord, 177 1715 1574 Hall, Joseph, Bishop of Norwich, 124, 153 1656 1764 Hall, Robert, 208 1831 1777 Hallam, Henry, 209 1859 1677 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 216 1746 1378 Harding, John, 75 1465? 1561 Harington, Sir John, 116 1612 1611 Harrington, James, 123, 180 1677 1705 Hartley, David, 203 1757 1545? Harvey, Gabriel, 101, 108, no 1630 1578 Harvey, William, 151 1657 Hawes, Stephen, 86 1523? 1745 Hayley, William, 209 1820 1778 Hazlitt, William, 207 1830 1793 Hemans, Felicia, 244 1835 1084? Henry of Huntingdon, 40 1155 1430? Henryson, Robert, 92 1506? 1593 Herbert, George, 157, 158 1633 1591 Herrick, Robert, 157-160, 219 1674 1497? Heywood, John, 128 1580? Heywood, Thomas, 100 1650? Higden, Ranulf , 70 1364 1588 Hobbes, Thomas, 123, 150, 153, 180 1679 1370? Hoccleve, Thomas, 73 1450? 1745 Holcroft, Thomas, 210 1809 Holinshed, Raphael, 102 1580? 1799 Hood, Thomas, 225 1845 1554? Hooker, Richard, 109 1600 1770? Hope, Thomas, 210 1831 1711 Hume, David, 202-205, 208 1776 Hunnis, William, 120 1597 1784 Hunt, Leigh, 241, 242 1859 1694 Hutcheson, Francis, 203 1746 1753 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 210 1821 1394 James I. of Scotland, 91 1437 1773 Jeffrey, Francis, 207 1850 Fl. 1387 John of Trevisa, 70, 78 INDEX 275 BORN. DIED. 1709 Johnson, Samuel, 197, 198, 205, 213, 216 1784 1573? Jonson, Ben, 109, 133, 141, 142, 144, 157, 160 . . . 1637 1589 Junius (Francis du Jon), 16 1677 iSth century "Junius" (writer of the "Letters," 1769- 1772) , 197, 205 1795 Keats, John, 117, 228, 240-244 1821 1792 Keble, John, 247 1866 1637 Ken, Thomas, Bishop, 177 1711 1819 Kingsley, Charles, 247 1875 1550? Knolles, Richard, 152 1610 1557? Kyd, Thomas, 131 *595? Lacy, John, 194 1681 1775 Lamb, Charles, 123, 148, 207, 208 1834 1802 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth ("L. E. L."), 244. .1838 1775 Landor, Walter Savage, 207, 208 1864 1735 Langhorn, Dr. John, 221 1779 1330? Langland, William, 49, 52-58, 101 1400 1485? Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 86 1555 Fl. 1200 Layamon, 33, 34, 41-43, 48 1757 Lee, Harriet, 210 1851 1653? Lee, Nat, 194 1692 1750 Lee, Sophia, 210 1824 1506? Leland, John, 83 1552 Leof ric, Bishop of Exeter, 3 1072 1616 L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 180 1704 Lichfield, William, 75 1447 1468? Lilly, William, 82 1522 1771 Lingard, John, 209 1851 1632 Locke, John, 123, 180 1704 1794 Lockhart, John Gibson, 209, 210 1854 1558? Lodge, Thomas, no, 120, 124 1625 1618 Lovelace, Richard, 158 1658 1370? Lydgate, John, 47, 72, 73, 78, 99, 101 1451? 1554? Lyly, John, 106, 131 1606 1490 Lyndsay, Sir David, 94, 95, 221 1555 1765 Mackintosh, Sir James, 206 1832 1697 Macklin, Charles, 195 1797 1772 McCrie, Thomas, 209 1835 1736 Macpherson, James, 217 1796 2j6 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED. 1705? Mallet, David, 216 1765 Fl. 1470 Malory, Sir Thomas, 77 1766 Malthus, Thomas, 209 1834 1670? Mandeville, Bernard, 190 1733 i4th century . . . .Maundevile, Sir John, 70 Fl. 1288-1388. . . .Mannyng, of Brunne, Robert, 38, 51 Fl. 1200 Map, Walter, 45 1564 Marlowe, Christopher, 119, 120, 131-133, 143, 222 1593 1575? Marston, John, 124, 141, 142 1634 1621 Marvell, Andrew, 157, 161, 174, 175, 219 1678 1583 Massinger, Philip, 146 1640 Matthew Paris, 39 1259 1595 May, Thomas, 153 1650 1735 Mickle, William, 221 1788 1570? Middleton, Thomas, 146 1627 1773 Mill, James, 209 1836 1608 Milton, John, 16, 90, 96, 144, 155, 161-168, 171, 173, 219, 224 1674 1300? Minot, Laurence, 51 1352? 1744 Mitford, William, 209 1827 Montague, Charles (see Halifax, Lord) 1779 Moore, Thomas, 209, 236 1852 1614 More, Henry, 159 1687 1478 More, Sir Thomas, 40, 82, 83 1535 1649 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of, 177 1721 1727 Murphy, Arthur, 195 1805 Fl. 1638 Nabbes, Thomas, 148 1567 Nash, Thomas, 108, 131 1601 Fl. 1375 Nassington, William of, 75 1620 Nevile, Henry, 180 1694 1642 Newton, Sir Isaac, 178 1727 1725 Newton, John, 208 1807 Fl. 1250 Nicholas of Guildford, 50 Fl. 1390 Nicholas of Hereford, 57 1535? North, Sir Thomas, 117 1601? 1532 Norton, Thomas, 75, 129 1584 1653 Oldham, John, 177 1683 1769 Opie, Amelia, 210 1853 INDEX 277 BORN. DIED. 1075 Ordericus Vitalis, 39 1143? Fl. 1200 Orrmin, 42 Oswald of Worcester, 28 972 1652 Otway, Thomas, 194 1685 1581 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 153 1613 1737 Paine, Thomas, 206 1809 1540? Painter, William, 102 1594 1743 Paley, William, 208 1805 1504 Parker, Archbishop, 151 1575 1679 Parnell, Thomas, 185 1718 1823 Patmore, Coventry, 246 1395? Pecock, Reginald, 77 1460? 1558? Peele, George, no, 131, 135 *597? 1633 Pepys, Samuel, 182 1703 1729 Percy, Thomas, Bishop, 216, 223 1811 1623 Petty, Sir William, 151, 180 1687 1510? Phaer, Thomas, 100 1560 1675? Phillips, Ambrose, 187 1749 1676 Phillips, John, 187 1709 Phreas, John, 80 1465 1667 Pomfret, John, 187 1702 1500 Pole, Reginald, 104 1558 1688 Pope, Alexander, 173, 175, 176, 181, 184-188, I9O, 198, 200, 213, 2l6, 219, 222 1744 1664 Prior, Matthew, 177, 185, 187 1721 1600 Prynne, William, 155 1669 1577 Purchas, Samuel, 152 1626 FI. i5th century. Purvey, John, 57 After 1427 1530? Puttenham, George, 107 1600? 1592 Quarles, Francis, 159 1644 1764 Radcliffe, Ann, 210 1823 1552 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 114, 115, 152 1618 1686 Ramsay, Allan, 187, 221, 222 1758 1605 Randolph, Thomas, 148 1634 1710 Reid, Thomas, 203 1796 1723 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 199 1792 1772 Ricardo, David, 209 1823 2/8 ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED. 1689 Richardson, Samuel, 200 1761 Ripley, George, 75 1490 Fl. 1295 Robert of Gloucester, 44 1721 Robertson, William, 202 1793 Fl. 1551 Robinson, Ralph, 83 1647 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 177 1680 1509? Rogers, John, 85 1555 1763 Rogers, Samuel, 228, 235 1855 Rolle, of Hampole, Richard, 38 1349 1634 Roscommon, Dillon Wentworth, Earl of, 177.. .1684 1828 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 249 1882 1830 Rossetti, Christina, 249 1894 1674 Rowe, Nicholas, 195 1718 Fl. I7th century. . Rowley, William, 148 Roy, William, 85 1531 1636 Russell, Lady Rachel, 182 1723 1536 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, 95, 96, 99, 100, 129 1608 St. John, Henry (sue Bolingbroke, Lord) 1577 Sandys, George, 152 1644 1697 Savage, Richard, 214 1743 Savile, George (see Halifax, Lord) 1747 Scott, Thomas, 208 1821 1771 Scott, Sir Walter, 90, 206, 210-212, 216, 228, 234 1832 1639 Sedley, Sir Charles, 177, 194 1701 1584 Selden, John, 151, 152 1654 Sellynge, William, 80 1640 Shadwell, Thomas, 176, 194 1692 1671 Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of, 190 1713 1564 Shakespeare, William, 82, 90, 96, 98, 117-121, 130-142, 161, 170-172, 193, 212, 216, 218 1616 1792 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 228, 236, 238-244. . .1822 1714 Shenstone, William, 216, 221 1763 1751 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 195 1816 1641 Sherlock, William, 179 1707 1596 Shirley, James, 148, 160 1666 Fl. 1440 Shirley, John, 78 1577 Sibbes, Richard, 154 1635 1622 Sidney, Algernon, 180 1683 INDEX 279 BORN. DIED. 1554 Sidney, Sir Philip, 102, 106-108, in, 115, 119 . . 1586 Fl. nth n. Simeon of Durham, 39... I2th centuries ' 1460? Skelton, John, 79, 87, 88, 95 1528? 1722 Smart, Christopher, 221 1771 1723 Smith, Adam, 204 1790 1512 Smith, Sir Thomas, 82 1577 1771 Smith, Sydney, 207 1845 1721 Smollett, Tobias, 201 1771 1633 South, Robert, 179 1716 1660 Southerne, Thomas, 194 1746 1774 Southey, Robert, 207, 209, 227-229 1843 1560? Southwell, Robert, 118 1595 1552 Speed, John, 151 1629 1562 Spelman, Sir Henry, 151 1641 1552? Spenser, Edmund, 91, 95, 99, 107, 110-117, 119, 122, 157, 170, 216, 222 J 599 1672 Steele, Sir Richard, 191, 192 1729 1713 Sterne, Laurence, 201, 202 1768 1753 Stewart, Dugald, 208 1828 1635 Stillingileet, Edward, 179 1699 1567? Stirling, Sir William Alexander, Earl of, 124, 157 1640 1525 Stow, John, 102, 152 1605 1609 Suckling, Sir John, 148, 158 1642 1516? Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 86, 88, 95-97. .1547 1667 Swift, Jonathan, 183, 185, 188, 189, 198 1745 1837 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 7 1613 Taylor, Jeremy, 153 1667 1628 Temple, Sir William, 182, 191 1699 1809 Tennyson, Alfred, 5, 7, 20, 41, 67, 224, 244, 246, 247 1892 1688 Theobald, Lewis, 185, 216 1744 1225? Thomas of Erceldoune, 91 1300? 1700 Thomson, James, 94. 157, iSS, 219, 235 1748 K)8o Tickell, Thomas, 187 1740 1630 Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 179 1694 1656 Tindal, Matthew, 190 1733 1670 Toland, John, 190 1722 Fl. 1551 Tottel, Richard, 97, 100 28O ENGLISH LITERATURE BORN. DIED. Fl. 1600-1613 Tourneur, Cyril, 143 1530? Turbervile, George, 101 , 102 1594? 1808 Turner, Charles Tennyson, 246 1879 Turpin, Archbishop, 45 1526? Tusser, Thomas, 97 1580 1484? Tyndale, William, 83, 84 1536 1505 Udall, Nicholas, 129 1556 1580 Ussher, Archbishop, 15 1656 1666? Vanbrugh, Sir John, 194 1726 1621 Vaughan, Henry, 159, 219 1693 1120? Wace, 41 1184? 1605 Waller, Edmuud, 159, 172, 173 1687 1616 Wallis, John, 151 1703 1717 Walpole, Horace, 199 1797 1676 Walpole, Sir Robert, 197 1745 1593 Walton, Izaak, 155, 182 1683 1698 Warburton, William, Bishop, 185, 190, 216 1779 1460 Warham, Archbishop, 82 1532 1558? Warner, William, 121 1609 1722 Warton, Joseph, 220 1800 1728 Warton, Thomas, 207, 216, 220 1790 Fl. i6th century. Webbe, William, 107 1582? Webster, John, 144, 146 1652? 1708 Wesley, Charles, 224 1788 1703 Wesley, John, 208 1791 1714 Whitfield, George, 208 1770 1720 White, Gilbert, 200 1793 1727 Wilkes, John, 197 1797 1095 ? William of Malmesbury, 39 1 142? Fl. 1327 William of Shoreham, 38 Fl. 13111 century. William of Waddington, 38 1785 Wilson, Professor John (Christopher North), 207 1854 1520? Wilson, Thomas, 97 1581 1588 Wither, George, 157, 159, 161 1667 1659 Wollaston, William, 190 1724 Worcester, John Tiptoft, Earl of , 79 1470 1770 Wordsworth, William, 92, 118, 207, 221, 223, 225. 227, 230-234, 239, 243 1850 INDEX 28l BORN. DIED. 1568 Wotton, Sir Henry, 92, 123, 152 1639 Fl. 1002-1023. . . .Wulfstan, Archbishop, 29 1503 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 86, 88, 95, 96 1542 1640? Wycherley, William, 194 1715 1320? Wyclif , John, 52, 53, 57 1384 1681 Young, Edward, 213 1765 INDEX TO FOREIGN AUTHORS BORN. DIED. 1474 Ariosto, no, 116 1533 1313 Boccaccio, 61, 62, 74, 80, 99 1375 1434 Boiardo, no 1494 1636 Boileau, 172 1711 Calprenede, 192 1663 1424 Chalcondylas, 82.. 1511 Fl. nth century. .Chrestien of Troyes, 44 106 B.C Cicero, 94, 100 43 B.C. Contarini, 104 1550 1606 Corneille, 192 1684 1717 D'Alembert, 197 1783 1265 Dante, 61, 62, 70 1321 Dares Phrygius, 47 385 B.C Demosthenes, 100 322 B.C. Dictys Cretensis, 47 1713 Diderot, 197 1784 1749 Goethe, 198, 206, 211 1832 i3th century Guido delle Colonne, 47 Homer, 117, 143, 186, 224 65 B.C Horace, 163 8 B.C. 1621 La Fontaine, 172 1695 1729 Lessing, 192, 206 1781 1496 Marot, in 1544 1280? Meung, Jean de, 59 282 INDEX 283 BORN. DIED. 1622 Moliere, 193 , 1673 1533 Montaigne, 117, 191 1592 1689 Montesquieu, 197, 202 1755 43 H.c Ovid, 94, 100 17 A.n. 1304 Petrarca, 58, 61, 80, 96, 116 1374 427 li.c Plato, 96 347 B.C. Fl. 50-100 Plutarch, 100 1639 Racine, 193 1699 Fl. 1 2th century. .Robert of Boron, 44 1712 Rousseau, 197 1778 1458 Sannazaro, 102 1530 1759 Schiller, 198 1805 1601 Scudery, 192 1667 Fl. 930 Skallagrimsson, Egil, 24 45? Statius, 47 96? 1544 Tasso, no, 116 1595 70 B.C Virgil, 7, 47, 93, 96, 100, 177 19 B.C. 1694 Voltaire, 132, 135, 195, 197, 202 1778 THE HISTORY EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. Being the History of English Poetry from its 'Beginnings to the succession of King /Elf red. BY THE REV. STOPFORD A. BROOKE. WITH MAPS. Large i2mo. Gilt top, $2.50. NOTICES. " I had been eagerly awaiting it, and find it on examination distinctly the best treatise on its subject." PROF. CHARLES F. RICHARDSON, Dartmouth College. " I know of no literary estimate of Anglo-Saxon poetry that in breadth of view and sympathetic appreciation can be compared with this." PROF. W. E. MKAD, H'esleyan University. " In this work we have the view of a real lover of literature, and we have its utterance in a diction graceful enough to make the reading an intellectual pleas- ure in itself." -The Christian Union. " No other book exists in English from which a reader unacquainted with Anglo-Saxon may gain so vivid a sense of the literary quality of our earliest poetry." The Dial. " A delightful exposition of the poetic spirit and achievement of the eighth century." Chicago Tribune. " In Mr. Stopford Brooke's monumental work he strives with rare skill and insight to present our earliest national poetry as a living literature, and not as a mere material for research." London Times. " It is a monument of scholarship and learning, while it furnishes an authen- tic history of English literature at a period when little before was known respect- ing it." Public Opinion. " It is a comprehensive critical account of Anglo-Saxon poetry from its be- ginnings to the accession of King Alfred. A thorough knowledge of the Anglo- Saxon language was needed by the man who undertook such a weighty enterprise, and this knowledge is possessed by Mr. Brooke in a degree probably unsurpassed by any living scholar." Evening Bulletin. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. I A HISTORY OF ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE. BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY. Price, $1.00, net. NOTICES. " The work has been most judiciously done and in a literary style and perfec- tion which, alas, the present era has furnished too few examples." Christian at Work. " Mr. Saintsbury has produced a most useful, first-hand survey comprehen- sive, compendious, and spirited of that unique period of literary history when ' all the muses still were in their prime.' One knows not where else to look for so well-proportioned and well-ordered conspectus of the astonishingly vaiied and rich products of the turning English mind during the century that begins with Tortel's Miscellany and the birth of Bacon, and closes with the restoration." The Dial. " Regarding Mr. Saintsbury's work we know not where else to find so com- pact, yet comprehensive, so judicious, weighty, and well written a review and critique of Elizabethan literature. But the analysis generally is eminently dis- tinguished by insight, delicacy, and sound judgment, and that applies quite as much to the estimates of prose writers as to those of the poets and dramatists. . . . A work which deserves to be styled admirable." N'eiu York Tribune. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 2 A HISTORY OF EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE. (166O-178O.) EDMUND GOSSE, M.A., Clark Lecturer in English Literature at Trinity College, Cambridge. Price, $1.00, net. NOTICES. " Mr. Gosse's book is one for the student because of its fulness, its trust- worthiness, and its thorough soundness of criticisms; and one for the general reader because of its pleasantness and interest. It is a book, indeed, not easy to put down or to part with." OSWALD CRAWFURD, in London Academy. " Mr. Gosse has in a sense pre-empted the eighteenth century. He is the most obvious person to write the history of its literature, and this attractive volume ought to be the final and standard work on his chosen theme." The Literary IVorld. " We have never had a more useful record of this period" Boston Evening Traveler. " A brilliant addition to critical exposition. Written in a finished and elegant style, which gives enchantment even to the parts of the narrative of a biographi- cal and statistical character, the work illumines obscure writings and literature and brings new interest to famous ones. One of its great excellences is the easy transition made from one style of writing to another. The plan is distinct and well-preserved, but the continuity between parts is so close that unity and cohe- rence mark the work in a material degree." Boston Journal. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 3 A HISTORY OF NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE. (1780-1895.) BY GEORGE SAINTSBURY, Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. i2mo. Cloth. $1.50. NOTICES. " We should far exceed the limits of our space if we attempted to illustrate a quarter of the good things to be found in this ' History." We will not venture even to touch what will be to many the most interesting portion of it, the chapter on the novel since 1850. The biographical details are judiciously selected, skil- fully worked in, and pleasantly told. While it is possible that another hundred years may shake some of Mr. Saintsbury's conclusions, for the present a student who follows him with deference will have the company of an unusually well- furnished and an eminently sane guide, and will be likely to reach a much more satisfactory state of knowledge than by attempting to find his own way through the wide fields of this great century's literature." The Critic. " No student or reader of that great body of literature which because of its modernness comes nearest to our hearts and brains, but would find Mr. Saintsbury's opinions interesting and suggestive. He forms these opinions at first hand." Public Opinion. THE MACMILLAN COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. 4 c\ '. < i. ^ / * >-*t"-^ ( \ X "- A 001 117 162 6