3 1822 01243 2951
 
 PR 
 
 3 1822 01243 2951
 
 AN 
 
 OUTLINE SKETCH 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY A. BEERS. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 CHAUTAUQUA PRESS, 
 
 C. L. S. C. Department, 
 
 8os BROADWAY.
 
 The required books of the C. L. S. C. are recom- 
 mended by a Council of six. It must, however, be 
 understood that recommendation does not involve 
 an approval by the Council^ or by any member of it, 
 of every principle or doctr.ne contained in the book 
 recommended. 
 
 .franklin 13rts: 
 
 BAND, AYEKY, AND COMPANY, 
 BOSTON. 
 
 Copyright 1886, by PHILLIPS & HUNT, 805 Broadway, New York.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 IN so brief a history of so rich a literature, 
 the problem is how to get room enough to 
 give, not an adequate impression that is im- 
 possible but any impression at all of the sub- 
 ject. To do this I have crowded out every 
 thing but belles-lettres. Books in philosophy, 
 history, science, etc., however important in 
 the history of English thought, receive the 
 merest incidental mention, or even no men- 
 tion at all. Again, I have omitted the litera- 
 ture of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is writ- 
 ten in a language nearly as hard for a mod- 
 ern Englishman to read as German is, or 
 Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more 
 a part of English literature than Vergil and 
 Horace are of Italian. I have also left out
 
 4 PREFACE. 
 
 the vernacular literature of the Scotch before 
 the time of Burns. Up to the date of the 
 union Scotland was a separate kingdom, and 
 its literature had a development independent 
 of the English, though parallel witn it. 
 
 In dividing the history into periods, I have 
 followed, with some modifications, the divis- 
 ions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his 
 excellent little Primer of English Literature. 
 A short reading course is appended to each 
 
 chapter. 
 
 HENRY A. BEERS.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 1066-1400. 7 
 
 II. FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER, 1400-1599 38 
 
 III. THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE, 1564-1616 72 
 
 IV. THE AGE OF MILTON, 1608-1674 121 
 
 V. FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF 
 
 POPE, 1660-1744 159 
 
 VI. FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE FRENCH 
 
 REVOLUTION, 1744-1789 186 
 
 VII. FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE 
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT, 1789-1832 218 
 
 VIII. FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT 
 
 TIME, 1832-1886 262
 
 OUTLINE SKETCH 
 
 OF 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER, 
 1066-1400. 
 
 THE Norman conquest of England, in the nth 
 century, made a break in the natural growth of the 
 English language and literature. The old English 
 or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic 
 speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set 
 of inflections. For three hundred years following 
 the battle of Hastings this native tongue was_ driven 
 from the king's court and the courts of law, from 
 parliament, school, and university. During all 
 this time there were two languages spoken in En- 
 gland. Norman French was the birth-tongue of 
 the upper classes and English of the lower. When 
 the latter finally got the better in the struggle, and 
 became, about the middle of the i4th century, the 
 national speech of all England, it was no longer 
 the English of King Alfred. It was a new lan- 
 guage, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly
 
 8 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of 
 its old words, and had filled their places with 
 French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had 
 introduced legal terms ; the ladies and courtiers, 
 words of dress and courtesy. The knight had 
 imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase. 
 The master-builders of the Norman castles and 
 cathedrals contributed technical expressions prop- 
 er to the architect and the mason. The art of 
 cooking was French. The naming of the living 
 animals, ox, swine, sheep, deer, was left to the Saxon 
 churl who had the- herding of them, while the 
 dressed meats, beef, pork, mutton, venison, received 
 their baptism from the table-talk of his Norman 
 master. The four orders of begging friars, and 
 especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars, intro- 
 duced into England in 1224, became interme- 
 diaries between the high and the low. They went 
 about preaching to the poor, and in their sermons 
 they intermingled French with English. In their 
 hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; 
 their medicine, botany, and astronomy displaced the 
 old nomenclature of leechdom, wort-cunning, and 
 star-craft. And, finally, the translators of French 
 poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign 
 word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, 
 particularly when the former supplied them with 
 a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the 
 commonest words in every-day use, so that voice 
 drove out steven, poor drove out earm, and color, 
 use, and place made good their footing beside hue,
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 9 
 
 wont, and stead. A great part of the English words 
 that were left were so changed in spelling and 
 pronunciation as to be practically new. Chaucer 
 stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and 
 Alfred Tennyson, but his English differs vastly 
 more from the former's than from the latter's To 
 Chaucer Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead lan- 
 guage as it is to us. 
 
 The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been 
 the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's 
 capital, Winchester. When the French had dis- 
 placed this as the language of culture, there was 
 no longer a " king's English " or any literary stand- 
 ard. The sources of modern standard English 
 are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in 
 Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neigh- 
 boring shires. Here the old Anglian had been 
 corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw 
 off its inflections when it became a spoken and 
 no longer a written language, after the Conquest. 
 The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to 
 ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local 
 dialect ; while the East Midland, spreading to Lon- 
 don, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary 
 English in which Chaucer wrote. 
 
 The Normans brought in also new intellectual 
 influences and new forms of literature. They 
 were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected 
 England with the continent. Lanfranc and An- 
 selm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canter- 
 bury, were learned and splendid prelates of a
 
 io ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They 
 introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the 
 University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of 
 the Norman abbeys. They bound the English 
 Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with 
 Normans. English bishops were deprived of their 
 sees for illiteracy, and French abbots were set 
 over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the 
 middle of the i4th century the learned literature 
 of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite 
 literature in French. English did not at any time 
 altogether cease to be a written language, but the 
 extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 
 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. 
 After 1200 English came more and more into 
 written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, 
 and imitations of French works. The native 
 genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the 
 copy set by its master. 
 
 The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been 
 rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly 
 written in lines containing four rhythmical accents 
 and with three of the accented syllables allitera- 
 ting. 
 
 ^este hine thd rum-heort ; reced hlifade 
 6"eap and ^old-fah, g&st inne swaf. 
 
 Rested him then the great-hearted ; the hall towered 
 Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within. 
 
 This rude energetic verse the Saxon scdp had 
 sung to his harp or glee-beam, dwelling on the em-
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. n 
 
 phatic syllables, passing swiftly over the others 
 which were of undetermined number and position 
 in the line. It was now displaced by the smooth 
 metrical verse with rhymed endings, which the 
 French introduced and which our modern poets 
 use, a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. 
 The old English alliterative verse continued, in- 
 deed, in occasional use to the i6th century. But 
 it was linked to a forgotten literature and an ob- 
 solete dialect, and was doomed to give way. 
 Chaucer lent his great authority to the more 
 modern verse system, and his own literary models 
 and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. 
 Literature in England began to be once more 
 English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer 
 and his contemporaries, but it was the literature 
 of a nation cut off from its own past by three cent- 
 uries of foreign rule. 
 
 The most noteworthy English document of the 
 nth and i2th centuries was the continuation of 
 the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these an- 
 nals, differing somewhat among themselves, had 
 been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, 
 Abingdon, Worcester, and elsewhere. The yearly 
 entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing 
 events, though occasionally they become full and 
 animated. The fen country of Cambridge and 
 Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries. Here 
 were the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croy- 
 land and Ely minster. One of the earliest English 
 songs' tells how the savage heart of the Danish
 
 12 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 king Cnut was softened by the singing of the monks 
 in Ely. 
 
 Merie sungen mur.eches binnen Ely 
 
 Tha Cnut chyning reu ther by ; 
 
 Roweth, cnihtes, noer the land, 
 
 And here we thes muneches sang. 
 
 It was among the dikes and marshes of this fen 
 country that the bold outlaw Hereward, " the last 
 of the English," held out for some years against 
 the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich 
 abbey of Burch or Peterborough, the ancient 
 Medeshamstede (meadow- homestead) that the 
 chronicle was continued for nearly a century after 
 the Conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154, the 
 date of King Stephen's death. Peterborough had 
 received a new Norman abbot, Turold, " a very 
 stern man," and the entry in the chronicle for 
 1170 tells how Hereward and his gang, with his 
 Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey 
 of its treasures, which were first removed to Ely, 
 and then carried off by the Danish fleet and sunk, 
 lost, or squandered. The English in the later 
 portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes 
 gradually more modern, and falls away more and 
 more from the strict grammatical standards of the 
 classical Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable his- 
 torical monument, and some passages of it are 
 written with great vividness, notably the sketch of 
 William the Conqueror put down in the year of 
 his death (1086) by one who had "looked upon 
 him and at another time dwelt in his court."
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CiiAucER. 13 
 
 " He who was before a rich king, and lord of 
 many a land, he had not then of all his land but 
 a piece of seven feet. . . . Likewise he was a very 
 stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do 
 nothing against his will. . . . Among other things 
 is not to be forgotten the good peace that he 
 made in this land, so that a man might fare over 
 his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. 
 He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws 
 therewith that whoso should slay hart or hind, he 
 should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall 
 deer as if he were their father." 
 
 With the discontinuance of the Peterborough 
 annals, English history written in English prose 
 ceased for three hundred years. The thread of 
 the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, 
 compiled by writers partly of English and partly 
 of Norman descent. The earliest of these, such 
 as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry 
 of Huntingdon, and William of Malmesbury, 
 were contemporary with the later entries of 
 the Saxon chronicle. The last of them, Mat- 
 thew of Westminster, finished his work in 1273. 
 About 1300 Robert, a monk of Gloucester, com- 
 posed a chronicle in English verse, following 
 in the main the authority of the Latin chron- 
 icles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming 
 chroniclers in the i4th century. In the hands of 
 these the true history of the Saxon times was 
 overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable 
 and legend. All real knowledge of the period
 
 14 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 dwindled away until in Capgrave's Chronicle of 
 England, written in prose in 1463-64, hardly any 
 thing of it is left. In history as in literature the 
 English had forgotten their past, and had turned 
 to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that Shaks- 
 pere, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes 
 sometimes from authentic English history, some- 
 times from the legendary history of ancient Brit- 
 ain, Denmark, and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet, 
 and Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. 
 And Spenser, who gives in his second book of 
 the Faerie Queene, a resume of the reigns of fab- 
 ulous British kings the supposed ancestors of 
 Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron has nothing to 
 say of the real kings of early England. So com- 
 pletely had the true record faded away that it 
 made no appeal to the imaginations of our most 
 patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had been de- 
 throned by the British Arthur, and the conquered 
 Welsh had imposed their fictitious genealogies 
 upon the dynasty of the conquerors. In the 
 Roman de Ron, a verse chronicle of the dukes of 
 Normandy, written by the Norman Wace, it is 
 related that at the battle of Hastings the French 
 jongleur, Taillefer, spurred out before the van of 
 William's army, tossing his lance in the air and 
 chanting of " Charlemagne and of Roland, of 
 Oliver and the peers who died at Roncesvals." 
 This incident is prophetic of the victory which 
 Norman song, no less than Norman arms, was to 
 win over England. The lines which Taillefer
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 15 
 
 sang were from the Chanson de Roland, the old- 
 est and best of the French hero sagas. The 
 heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts of 
 France in the xoth century, had become in the 
 course of one hundred and fifty years, completely 
 identified with the French. They had accepted 
 Christianity, intermarried with the native women, 
 and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race 
 thus formed was the most brilliant in Europe. 
 The warlike, adventurous spirit of the vikings 
 mingled in its blood with the French nimbleness 
 of wit and fondness for display. The Normans 
 were a nation of knights-errant, with a passion for 
 prowess and for courtesy. Their architecture was 
 at once strong and graceful. Their women were 
 skilled in embroidery, a splendid sample of which 
 is preserved in the famous Bayeux tapestry, in 
 which the conqueror's wife, Matilda, and the 
 ladies of her court wrought the history of the 
 Conquest. 
 
 This national taste for decoration expressed 
 itself not only in the ceremonious pomp of feast 
 and chase and tourney, but likewise in literature. 
 The most characteristic contribution of the Nor- 
 mans to English poetry were the metrical romances 
 or chivalry tales. These were sung or recited by 
 the minstrels, who were among the retainers of 
 every great feudal baron, or by \\iQJ0ngleurs, who 
 wandered from court to castle. There is a whole 
 literature of these romans (f aventure in the Anglo- 
 Norman dialect of French. Many of them are
 
 i6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 very long often thirty, forty, or fifty thousand 
 lines written sometimes in a strophic form, some- 
 times in long Alexandrines, but commonly in the 
 short, eight-syllabled rhyming couplet. Numbers 
 of them were turned into English verse in the 
 i3th, i4th, and i5th centuries. The translations 
 were usually inferior to the originals. The French 
 trouvere (finder or poet) told his story in a straight- 
 forward, prosaic fashion, omitting no details in 
 the action and unrolling endless descriptions of 
 dresses, trappings, gardens, etc. He invented plots 
 and situations full of fine possibilities by which later 
 poets have profited, but his own handling of them 
 was feeble and prolix. Yet there was a simplicity 
 about the old French language and a certain ele- 
 gance and delicacy in the diction of the trauveres 
 which the rude, unformed English failed to catch. 
 The heroes of these romances were of various 
 climes: Guy of Warwick, and Richard the Lion 
 Heart of England, Havelok the Dane, Sir Troi- 
 lus of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But, 
 strangely enough, the favorite hero of English 
 romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, 
 whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most 
 formidable enemy of the Sassenach invaders and 
 their victor in twelve great battles. The lan- 
 guage and literature of the ancient Cymry or 
 Welsh had made no impression on their Anglo- 
 Saxon conquerors. There are a few Welsh borrow- 
 ings in the English speech, such z&bard &&&druid ; 
 but iu the old Anglo-Saxon literature there are
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 17 
 
 no more traces of British song and story than if 
 the two races had been sundered by the ocean 
 instead of being borderers for over six hundred 
 years. But the Welsh had their own national 
 traditions, and after the Norman Conquest these 
 were set free from the isolation of their Celtic 
 tongue and, in an indirect form, entered into the 
 general literature of Europe. The French came 
 into contact with the old British literature in two 
 places: in the Welsh marches in England and in 
 the province of Brittany in France, where the popu- 
 lation is of Cymric race and spoke, and still to some 
 extent speaks, a Cymric dialect akin to the Welsh. 
 About 1140 Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedic- 
 tine monk, seemingly of Welsh descent, who lived 
 at the court of Henry the First and became aft- 
 erward bishop of St. Asaph, produced in Latin 
 a so-called Historia Britonum in which it was 
 told how Brutus, the great grandson of ^Eneas, 
 came to Britain, and founded there his kingdom 
 called after him, and his city of New Troy 
 (Troynovant) on the site of the later London. 
 An air of historic gravity was given to this tissue 
 of Welsh legends by an exact chronology and the 
 genealogy of the British kings, and the author 
 referred, as his authority, to an imaginary Welsh 
 book given him, as he said, by a certain Walter, 
 archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that line 
 of fabulous British princes which has become so 
 familiar to modern readers in the plays of Shaks- 
 pere and the poems of Tennyson : Lear and his
 
 i8 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 three daughters ; Cymbeline, Gorboduc, the subject 
 of the earliest regular English tragedy, composed 
 by Sackville and acted in 1562 ; Locrine and his 
 Queen Gwendolen, and his daughter Sabrina, who 
 gave her name to the river Severn, was made im- 
 mortal by an exquisite song in Milton's Cotnus, 
 and became the heroine of the tragedy of Locrine, 
 once attributed to Shakspere ; and above all, Ar- 
 thur, the son of Uther Pendragon, and the founder 
 of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace, the author 
 of the Roman de Rou, turned Geoffrey's work in- 
 to a French poem entitled Brut d' Angleterre, 
 " brut " being a Welsh word meaning chronicle. 
 About the year 1200 Wace's poem was Englished 
 by Layamon, a priest of Arley Regis, on the 
 border stream of Severn. Layamon's Brut is in 
 thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly 
 rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with 
 hardly any French words. The style is rude but 
 vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative. Wace 
 had amplified Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but 
 Layamon made much larger additions, derived, 
 no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh 
 border. In particular the story of Arthur grew 
 in his hands into something like fullness. He 
 tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; 
 of the unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever; 
 and the treachery of his nephew, Modred. His 
 narration of the last great battle between Arthur 
 and Modred ; of the wounding of the king " fifteen 
 fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 19 
 
 three gloves thrust "; and of the little boat with 
 " two women therein, vvonderly dight," which 
 came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen 
 Argante, " sheenest of all elves," whence he shall 
 come again, according to Metlin's prophecy, to rule 
 the Britons ; all this left little, in essentials, for 
 Tennyson to add in his Death of Arthur. This 
 new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon 
 by the Norman romancers. The story of Arthur 
 drew to itself other stories which were afloat. 
 Walter Map, a gentleman of the Court of Henry 
 II., in two French prose romances, connected with 
 it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy cup, 
 from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, 
 and which Joseph of Arimathea had afterward 
 brought to England. Then it miraculously dis- 
 appeared and became thenceforth the occasion 
 of knightly quest, the mystic symbol of the ob- 
 ject of the soul's desire, an adventure only to be 
 achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son 
 of the great Launcelot, who in the romances had 
 taken the place of Modred in Geoffrey's history, as 
 the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like man- 
 ner the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was 
 joined by other romancers to the Arthur-Saga. 
 This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. 
 Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Ar- 
 thurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity 
 and vitality which have prolonged it to our own 
 day and rendered it capable of a deeper and 
 more spiritual treatment and a more artistic hand-
 
 20 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ling by such modern English poets as Tennyson 
 in his Idyls of the King, by Matthew Arnold, 
 Swinburne, and many others. There were in- 
 numerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, 
 in Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, 
 in English, in German, and in other tongues. 
 But the final form which the Saga took in 
 mediaeval England was the prose Morte Dartur 
 of Sir Thomas Malory, composed at the close of 
 the i5th century. This was a digest of the earlier 
 romances and is Tennyson's main authority. 
 
 Beside the literature of the knight was the 
 literature of the cloister. There is a considerable 
 body of religious writing in early English, con- 
 sisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of 
 devotion, like the Ancren Riwle (Rule of An- 
 choresses), 1225; the Ayenbite of Inwyt (Remorse 
 of Conscience), 1340, both in prose ; the Handlyng 
 Sinne, 1303; the Cursor Mundi, 1320; and the 
 Pricke of Conscience, 1340, in verse; metrical ren- 
 derings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the 
 Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Gospels 
 for the Day, such as the Ormulum, or Book of 
 Orm, 1205 ; legends and miracles of saints; poems 
 in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the 
 world, on the five joys of the Virgin, the five 
 wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the 
 seven deadly sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming 
 judgment, and dialogues between the soul and the 
 body. These were the work not only of the 
 monks, but also of the begging friars, and in
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 21 
 
 smaller part of the secular or parish clergy. 
 They are full of the ascetic piety and supersti- 
 tion of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the 
 marvelous, the allegorical interpretation of Script- 
 ure texts, the grotesque material horrors of hell 
 with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human 
 body and the loathsome details of its corruption 
 after death. Now and then a single poem rises 
 above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the 
 general level of this monkish literature, either 
 from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, 
 or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse. 
 A poem so distinguished is, for example, A Luve 
 Ron (A Love Counsel) by the Minorite friar, 
 Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the 
 French poet Villon's Balade of Dead Ladies ', with, 
 its refrain. 
 
 " Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?" 
 
 " Where are the snows of yester year? 
 Where is Paris and Heleyne 
 
 That weren so bright and fair of blee * 
 Amadas, Tristan, and Ideyne 
 
 Yseude and alle the.f 
 Hector with his sharpe main, 
 
 And Caesar rich in worldes fee ? 
 They beth ygliden out of the reign $ 
 
 As the shaft is of the clee." 
 
 A few early English poems on secular subjects 
 are also worthy of mention, among others, The 
 Owl and the Nightingale, generally assigned to 
 the reign of Henry III. (1216-1272), an Estrif, 
 
 * Hue. f Those. \ Realm, Bowstring.
 
 22 ENGL&H LITERATURE. 
 
 or dispute, in which the owl represents the ascetic 
 and the nightingale the aesthetic view of life. 
 The debate is conducted with much animation and 
 a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. The Land of 
 Cokaygne is an amusing little poem of some two 
 hundred lines, belonging to the class of fabliaux, 
 short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse. 
 It describes a lubber-land, or fool's paradise, where 
 the geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bring- 
 ing garlic in the bills for their dressing, and where 
 there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and 
 an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls, 
 like the hall of little King Pepin, are " of pie- 
 crust and pastry crust," with flouren cakes for 
 the shingles and fat puddings for the pins. 
 
 There are a few songs dating from about 1300, 
 and mostly found in a single collection (Had. 
 MS., 2253), which are almost the only English 
 verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to 
 a modern ear. They are written in French 
 strophic forms in the southern dialect, and some- 
 times have an intermixture of French and Latin 
 lines. They are musical, fresh, simple, and many 
 of them very pretty. They celebrate the gladness 
 of spring with its cuckoos and throstle-cocks, its 
 daisies and woodruff. 
 
 "When the nightingale sings the woodes waxen green 
 Leaf and grass and blossom spring in Averil, I ween, 
 And love is to my herte gone with a spear so keen, 
 Night and day my blood it drinks my herte doth me tene.* 
 
 * Pain,
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 23 
 
 Others are love plaints to " Alysoun " or some 
 other lady whose " name is in a note of the 
 nightingale ; " whose eyes are as gray as glass^ 
 and her skin as " red as rose on ris." * Some em- 
 ploy a burden or refrain. 
 
 " Blow, northern wind, 
 
 Blow thou me, my sweeting. 
 
 Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, blow ! " 
 
 Others are touched with a light melancholy at the 
 coming of winter. 
 
 " Winter wakeneth all my care 
 
 Now these leaves waxeth bare. 
 
 Oft I sigh and mourne sare 
 
 When it cometh in my thought 
 
 Of this worldes joy, how it goeth all to nought" 
 
 Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or 
 the Virgin, composed in the warm language of 
 earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united 
 with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had pro- 
 duced Mariolatry and the imagery of the Song of 
 Solomon, in which Christ wooes the soul, had made 
 this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the 
 end of the ijth century a collection of lives of 
 saints, a sort of English Golden Legend, was pre- 
 pared at the great abbey of Gloucester for use on 
 saints' days. The legends were chosen partly from 
 the hagiology of the Church Catholic, as the lives 
 of Margaret, Christopher, and Michael; partly 
 from the calendar of the English Church, as the 
 
 * Branch.
 
 24 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 lives of St. Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo- 
 Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin who is mentioned by 
 Shakspere and Kenelm, whose life is quoted 
 by Chaucer in the Nonne Preste's Tale. The verse 
 was clumsy and the style monotonous, but an im- 
 aginative touch here and there has furnished a 
 hint to later poets. Thus the legend of St. 
 Brandan's search for the earthly paradise has 
 been treated by Matthew Arnold and William 
 Morris. 
 
 About the middle of the i4th century there was 
 a revival of the Old English alliterative verse in 
 romances like William and the Werewolf, and Sir 
 Gawayne, and in religious pieces such as Clannesse 
 (purity), Patience and The Perle, the last named 
 a mystical poem of much beauty, in which a be- 
 reaved father sees a vision of his daughter among 
 the glorified. Some of these employed rhyme as 
 well as alliteration. They are in the West Mid- 
 land dialect, although Chaucer implies that al- 
 literation was most common in the north. " I 
 am asotherne man," says the parson in the Canter- 
 bury Tales. " I cannot geste rom, ram, ruf, by my 
 letter." But the most important of the allitera- 
 tive poems was the Vision of William concerning 
 Piers the Plowman. In the second half of the 
 i4th century French had ceased to be the mother- 
 tongue of any considerable part of the population 
 of England. By a statute of Edward III., in 1362, 
 it was displaced from the law courts. By 1386 
 English had taken its place in the schools. The
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 25 
 
 Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and 
 Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the 
 provincial French spoken by his prioress, " after 
 the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe." The native 
 English genius was also beginning to assert itself, 
 roused in part, perhaps, by the English victories 
 in the wars of Edward III. against the French. 
 It was the bows of the English yeomanry that 
 won the fight at Crecy, fully as much as the prow- 
 ess of the Norman baronage. But at home the 
 times were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated 
 visitations of the pestilence, or Black Death, 
 pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The 
 Church was corrupt ; the mendicant orders had 
 grown enormously wealthy, and the country was 
 eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, pardoners, 
 and apparitors. The social discontent was fer- 
 menting among the lower classes, which finally is- 
 sued in the communistic uprising of the peas- 
 antry, under Wat Tyler and Jack Straw. This 
 state of things is reflected in the Vision of Piers 
 Plowman, written as early as 1362, by William 
 Langland, a tonsured clerk of the west country. 
 It is in form an allegory, and bears some resem- 
 blance to the later and more famous allegory of 
 the Pilgrim's Progress. The poet falls asleep on 
 the Malvern Hills, in Worcestershire, and has a 
 vision of a " fair field full of folk," representing 
 the world with its various conditions of men. 
 There were pilgrims and palmers; hermits with 
 hooked staves, who went to Walsingham and
 
 26 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 their wenches after them great lubbers and long 
 that were loth to work: friars glossing the Gospel 
 for their own profit ; pardoners cheating the peo- 
 ple with relics and indulgences; parish priests 
 who forsook their parishes that had been poor 
 since the pestilence time and went to London to 
 sing there for simony; bishops, archbishops, and 
 deacons, who got themselves fat clerkships in the 
 Exchequer, or King's Bench ; in short, all manner 
 of lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics. A lady, who rep- 
 resents holy Church, then appears to the dreamer, 
 explains to him the meaning of his vision, and 
 reads him a sermon the text of which is, " When 
 all treasure is tried, truth is the best." A number 
 of other allegorical figures are next introduced, 
 Conscience, Reason, Meed, Simony, Falsehood, 
 etc., and after a series of speeches and adventures, 
 a second vision begins in which the seven deadly 
 sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic 
 impersonations, and finally all the characters set 
 out on a pilgrimage in search of St. Truth, finding 
 no guide to direct them save Piers the Plowman, 
 who stands for the simple, pious laboring man, the 
 sound heart of the English common folk. The 
 poem was originally in eight divisions or " passus," 
 to which was added a continuation in three parts? 
 Vita Do Wei, Do Bet, and Do Best. About 1377 
 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author. 
 
 Piers Plmvman was the first extended literary 
 work after the Conquest which was purely English 
 in character. It owed nothing to France but the
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 27 
 
 allegorical cast which the Roman de la Rose had 
 made fashionable in both countries. But even 
 here such personified abstractions as Langland's 
 Fair-speech arid Work-when-time-is, remind us less 
 of the Fraunchise, Bel-amour, and Fals-semblaunt 
 of the French courtly allegories than of Bun- 
 yan's Mr. Worldly Wiseman, and even of such 
 Puritan names as Praise-God Barebones, and 
 Zeal-of-the-land Busy. The poem is full of En- 
 glish moral seriousness, of shrewd humor, the 
 hatred of a lie, the homely English love for reality. 
 It has little unity of plan, but is rather a series of 
 episodes, discourses, parables, and scenes. It is 
 all astir with the actual life of the time. We see 
 the gossips gathered in the ale-house of Betun the 
 brewster, and the pastry cooks in the London 
 streets crying " Hote pies, hote ! Good gees and 
 grys. Go we dine, go we ! " Had Langland not 
 linked his literary fortunes with an uncouth and 
 obsolescent verse, and had he possessed a finer 
 artistic sense and a higher poetic imagination, his 
 book might have been, like Chaucer's, among the 
 lasting glories of our tongue. As it is, it is for- 
 gotten by all but professional students of literature 
 and history. Its popularity in its own day is 
 shown by the number of MSS. which are extant, 
 and by imitations, such as Piers the Plowman s 
 Crede (1394), and the Plowman's Ta/e, for a long 
 time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales. 
 Piers became a kind of typical figure, like the 
 French peasant, Jacques Bonhomme, and was ap-
 
 28 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 pealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of 
 the i6th century. 
 
 The attack upon the growing corruptions of the 
 Church was made more systematically, and from 
 the stand-point of a theologian rather than of a 
 popular moralist and satirist, by John Wiclif, the 
 rector of Lutterworth and professor of Divinity in 
 Baliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin and 
 English tracts he made war against indulgences, 
 pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope, 
 and the doctrine of transubstantiation. But his 
 greatest service to England was his translation 
 of the Bible, the first complete version in the 
 mother-tongue. This he made about 1380, with 
 the help of Nicholas Hereford, and a revision of it 
 was made by another disciple, Purvey, some ten 
 years later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew 
 or Greek in England at that time, and the Wic- 
 lifite versions were made not from the original 
 tongues, but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anx- 
 iety to makeTiis rendering close, and mindful, per- 
 haps, of the warning in the Apocalypse, " If any 
 man shall take away from the words of the book 
 of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out 
 of the book of life," Wiclif followed the Latin 
 order of construction so literally as to make rather 
 awkward English, translating, for example, Quid 
 sibi vult hoc somnium ? by What to itself wole this 
 sweven ? Purvey's revision was somewhat freer 
 and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV. 
 and V. it was forbidden to read or to have any
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 29 
 
 of Wiclif 's writings. Such of them as could be 
 seized were publicly burned. In spite of this, copies 
 of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers. 
 Forshall and Madden, in their great edition (1850), 
 enumerate one hundred and fifty MSS. which had 
 been consulted by them. Later translators, like 
 Tyndale and the makers of the Authorized Version, 
 or " King James' Bible " (1611), followed Wiclif 's 
 language in many instances; so that he was, in 
 truth, the first author of our biblical dialect and 
 the founder of that great monument of noble En- 
 glish which has been the main conservative in- 
 fluence in the mother-tongue, holding it fast to 
 many strong, pithy words and idioms that would 
 else have been lost. In 1415, some thirty years 
 after Wiclif's death, by decree of the Council of 
 Constance, his bones were dug up from the soil of 
 Lutterworth chancel and burned, and the ashes cast 
 into the Swift. " The brook," says Thomas Fuller, 
 in his Church History, "did convey his ashes into 
 Avon ; Avon into Severn ; Severn into the narrow 
 seas ; they into the main ocean. And thus the 
 ashes of Wiclif are the emblem of his doctrine, 
 which now is dispersed all the world over." 
 
 Although the writings thus far mentioned are 
 of very high interest to the student of the English 
 language, and the historian of English manners 
 and culture, they cannot be said to have much 
 importance as mere literature. But in Geoffrey 
 Chaucer (died 1400) we meet with a poet of the 
 first rank, whose works are increasingly read and
 
 3 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 will always continue to be a source of delight and 
 refreshment to the general reader as well as a" well 
 of English undefiled " to the professional man of 
 letters. With the exception of Dante, Chaucer 
 was the greatest of the poets of mediaeval Europe, 
 and he remains one of the greatest of English 
 poets, and certainly the foremost of English story- 
 tellers in verse. He was the son of a London 
 vintner, and was in his youth in the service of 
 Lionel, Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Ed- 
 ward III. He made a campaign in France in 
 1359-60, when he was taken prisoner. Afterward 
 he was attached to the court and received nu- 
 merous favors and appointments. He was sent 
 on several diplomatic missions by the king, three 
 of them to Italy, where, in all probability, he made 
 the acquaintance of the new Italian literature, the 
 writings of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. He 
 was appointed at different times Comptroller of 
 the Wool Customs, Comptroller of Petty Customs, 
 and Clerk of the Works. He sat for Kent in Par- 
 liament, and he received pensions from three suc- 
 cessive kings. He was a man of business as well 
 as books, and he loved men and nature no less 
 than study. He knew his world ; he " saw life 
 steadily and saw it whole." Living at the center 
 of English social and political life, and resorting 
 to the court of Edward III., then the most brill- 
 iant in Europe, Chaucer was an eye-witness of 
 those feudal pomps which fill the high-colored 
 pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler,
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 31 
 
 Froissart. His description of a tournament in the 
 Knight's Tale is unexcelled for spirit and detail. 
 He was familiar with dances, feasts, and state 
 ceremonies, and all the life of the baronial castle, 
 in bower and hall, the " trompes with the loude 
 minstralcie," the heralds, the ladies, and the 
 squires, 
 
 " What hawkes sitten on the perch above, 
 What houndes liggen on the floor adown." 
 
 But his sympathy reached no less the life of the 
 lowly, the poor widow in her narrow cottage, and 
 that "trewe swynkere and a good," the plowman 
 whom Langland had made the hero of his vision. 
 He is, more than all English poets, the poet of the 
 lusty spring, of " Aprille with her showres sweet " 
 and the "foules song," of " May with all her floures 
 and her greene," of the new leaves in the wood, 
 and the meadows new powdered with the daisy, 
 the mystic Marguerite of his Legend of Good 
 Women. A fresh vernal air blows through all his 
 pages. 
 
 In Chaucer's earlier works, such as the trans- 
 lation of the Romaunt of the Rose (if that be 
 his), the Boke of the Duchesse, the Parlament of 
 Foules, the Hous of Fame, as well as in the Le- 
 gend of Good Women, which was later, the inspira- 
 tion of the French court poetry of the i3th and 
 i4th centuries is manifest. He retains in them 
 the mediaeval machinery of allegories and 
 dreams, the elaborate descriptions of palaces,
 
 32 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 temples, portraitures, etc., which had been made 
 fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume 
 de Lorris's Roman de la Rose, and Jean Machault's 
 La Fontaine Amoureuse. In some of these the 
 influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible. 
 There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in 
 the Parlament of Foules and the Hous of Fame, 
 and Troilus and Cresseide is a free handling rather 
 than a translation of Boccaccio's Filostrato. In all 
 of these there are passages of great beauty and 
 force. Had Chaucer written nothing else, he 
 would still have been remembered as the most ac- 
 complished English poet of his time, but he would 
 not have risen to the rank which he now occupies, 
 as one of the greatest English poets of all time. 
 This position he owes to his masterpiece, the 
 Canterbury Tales. Here he abandoned the imita- 
 tion of foreign models and the artificial literary 
 fashions of his age, and wrote of real life from his 
 own ripe knowledge of men and things. 
 
 The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories 
 written at different times, but put together, prob- 
 ably, toward the close of his life. The frame-work 
 into which they are fitted is one of the happiest 
 ever devised. A number of pilgrims who are 
 going on horseback to the shrine of St. Thomas 
 a Becket, at Canterbury, meet at the Tabard Inn, in 
 Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host 
 of the Tabard, Harry Bailey, proposes that on their 
 way to Canterbury, each of the company shall tell 
 two tales, and two more on their way back, and
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 33 
 
 that the one who tells the best shall have a supper 
 at the cost of the rest when they return to the 
 inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and 
 " reporter." In the setting of the stories there is 
 thus a constant feeling of movement and the air 
 of all outdoors. The little " head-links " and 
 " end-links " which bind them together, give in- 
 cidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of 
 the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the pro- 
 logue of the Wife of ath, to full and almost 
 dramatic character-sketches. The stories, too, are 
 dramatically suited to the narrators. The general 
 prologue is a series of such character-sketches, 
 the most perfect in English poetry. The por- 
 traits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft 
 brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of the 
 miniatures in the old missals, and with the same 
 quaint precision in traits of expression and in cos- 
 tume. The pilgrims are not all such as one would 
 meet nowadays at an English inn. The pres- 
 ence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and 
 especially of so many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, 
 a friar, a monk, a pardoner, and a sompnour or ap- 
 paritor, reminds us that the England of that day 
 must have been less like Protestant England, as 
 we know it, than like the Italy of some thirty 
 years ago. But however the outward face of 
 society may have changed, the Canterbury pil- 
 grims remain, in Chaucer's description, living and 
 universal types of human nature. The Canterbury 
 Tales are twenty-four in number. There were thif ty- 
 3
 
 34 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 two pilgrims, so that if finished as designed the 
 whole collection would have numbered one hun- 
 dred and twenty-eight stories. 
 
 Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the 
 English Middle Age. Like many another great 
 poet, he put the final touch to the various literary 
 forms that he found in cultivation. Thus his 
 Knight's Tale, based upon Boccaccio's Teseide, is 
 the best of English mediaeval romances. And yet 
 the Rime of Sir Thopas, who goes seeking an 
 elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by the 
 giant Sir Olifaunt, burlesques these same ro- 
 mances with their impossible adventures and their 
 tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the 
 prioress and the second nun are saints' legends. 
 The Monk's Tale is a set of dry, moral apologues 
 in the manner of his contemporary, the " moral 
 Gower." The stories told by the reeve, mil- 
 ler, friar, sompnour, shipman, and merchant, be- 
 long to the class of fabliaux, a few of which ex- 
 isted in English, such as Dame Siriz, the Lay of 
 the Ash, and the Land of Cokaygne, already men- 
 tioned. The Nonne Preste's Tale, likewise, which 
 Dryden modernized with admirable humor, was of 
 the class of fabliaux, and was suggested by a lit- 
 tle poem in forty lines, Don Coc et Werpil, by 
 Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the i3th 
 century. It belonged, like the early English poem 
 of The Fox and the Wolf, to the popular animal- 
 *aga of Reynard the Fox. The Franklin s Tale, 
 .vhcfse scene is Brittany, and the Wife of Baths'
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 35 
 
 Tale, which is laid in the time of the British Ar- 
 thur, belong to the class of French fat's, serious met- 
 rical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton 
 origin, the best representatives of which are the 
 elegant and graceful fat's of Marie de France. 
 
 Chaucer was our first great master of laughter 
 and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the 
 tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delight- 
 fully humorous and life-like. He is the kindliest 
 of satirists. The knavery, greed, and hypocrisy 
 of the begging friars and the sellers of indul- 
 gences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by 
 Langland and Wiclif, though his mood is not like 
 theirs, one of stern, moral indignation, but rather 
 the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. 
 His charity is broad enough to cover even the 
 corrupt sompnour of whom he says, 
 
 " And yet in sooth he was a good felawe." 
 
 Whether he shared Wiclif 's opinions is unknown, 
 but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and 
 father of Henry IV., who was Chaucer's life-long 
 patron, was likewise Wiclif 's great upholder 
 against the persecution of the bishops. It is, per- 
 haps, not without significance that the poor parson 
 in the Canterbury Tales, the only one of his eccle- 
 siastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with re- 
 spect, is suspected by the host of the Tabard to be 
 a " loller," that is, a Lollard, or disciple of Wiclif, 
 and that because he objects to the jovial inn- 
 keeper's swearing " by Goddes bones."
 
 36 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a mod- 
 ern reader as Shakspere's, and few of his words 
 have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly 
 read, is correct and melodious. The early En- 
 glish was, in some respects, more " sweet upon 
 the tongue " than the modern language. The 
 vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and: the 
 speech was full of soft gutturals and vocalic sylla- 
 bles, like the endings en, es, and e, which made 
 feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from 
 coming harshly together. 
 
 Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite 
 free from the literary weakness of his time. He 
 relapses sometimes into the babbling style of the 
 old chroniclers and legend writers ; cites " auc- 
 tours " and gives long catalogues of names and 
 objects with a naive display of learning; and in- 
 troduces vulgar details in his most exquisite pas- 
 sages. There is something childish about almost 
 all the thought and art of the Middle Ages at 
 least outside of Italy, where classical models and 
 traditions never quite lost their hold. But Chau- 
 cer's artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful 
 ease in story-telling, and is so engaging that, like 
 a child's sweet unconsciousness, one would not 
 wish it otherwise. 
 
 The Canterbury Tales had shown of what high 
 uses the English language was capable, but the 
 curiously trilingual condition of literature still 
 continued. French was spoken in the proceed- 
 ings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER. 37 
 
 VI. (1422-1471). Chaucer's contemporary, John 
 Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantis in Latin, his 
 Speculum Meditantis (a lost poem), and a number 
 of ballades in Parisian French, and his Confessio 
 Amantis (1393) in English. The last named is 3 
 dreary, pedantic work, in some 15,000 smooth, 
 monotonous, eight - syllabled couplets, in which 
 Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the 
 love of Bel Pucell. 
 
 1. Early English, Literature. By Bernhard ten 
 Brink. Translated from the German by H. M. Ken- 
 nedy. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1883. 
 
 2. Morris and Skeat's Specimens of Early En- 
 glish. (Clarendon Press Series.) Oxford. 
 
 3. Langland's Vision of William concerning Piers 
 the Plowman. Wright's Edition; or Skeat's, in 
 Early English Text Society publications. 
 
 4. Chaucer: Canterbury Tales. Tyrwhitt's Edi- 
 tion; or Wright's, in Percy Society publications. 
 
 5. Complete Writings. Morris's Edition. 6 vols. 
 (In Aldine Series.)
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 
 1400-1599, 
 
 THE i5th century was a barren period in En- 
 fish literary history. It was 4 nearly two hundred 
 years after Chaucer's death before any poet came, 
 whose name can be written in the same line with 
 his. He was followed at once by a number of imi- 
 tators who caught the trick of his language and 
 verse, but lacked the genius to make any fine use 
 of them. The manner of a true poet may be 
 learned, but his style, in the high sense of the word, 
 remains his own secret. Some of the poems which 
 have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in 
 editions of his works, as the Court of Love, the 
 Flower and the Leaf, the Cuckow and the Nightin- 
 gale, are now regarded by many scholars as the 
 work of later writers. If not Chaucer's, they are 
 of Chaucer's school, and the first two, at least, are 
 very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor 
 pieces, such as the Boke of the Duchesse and the 
 Parlament of Foules. 
 
 Among his professed disciples was Thomas Oc- 
 cleve, a dull rhymer, who, in his Governail of 
 Princes, a didactic poem translated from the Latin
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 39 
 
 about 1413, drew, or caused to be drawn, on the 
 margin of his MS. a colored portrait of his " mais- 
 ter dere and fader reverent," 
 
 "This londes verray tresour and richesse, 
 Dethe by thy dethe hath harm irreparable 
 Unto us done ; hir vengeable duresse 
 Dispoiled hath this londe of the swetnesse 
 Of Rhetoryk." 
 
 Another versifier of this same generation was 
 John Lydgate, a Benedictine monk, of the Abbey 
 of Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, a very prolix 
 writer, who composed, among other things, the 
 Story of Thebes, as an addition to the Canterbury 
 Tales. His ballad of London Lyckpenny, recount- 
 ing the adventures of a countryman who goes to 
 the law courts at Westminster in search of justice, 
 
 " But for lack of mony I could not speede," 
 
 is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of 
 London street life. 
 
 Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in 
 Scotland, whither it was carried by James I., 
 who had been captured by the English when 
 a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as 
 a prisoner of State. There he wrote during the 
 reign of Henry V. (1413-1422) a poem in six 
 cantos, entitled the King's Quhair (King's Book), 
 in Chaucer's seven lined stanza which had been 
 employed by Lydgate in his Falls of Princes 
 (from Boccaccio), and which was afterward called
 
 40 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the "rime royal," from its use by King James. 
 The King's Quhair tells how the poet, on a May 
 morning, looks from the window of his prison 
 chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, haw- 
 thorn hedges, and fair arbors set with 
 
 " The sharpe, greene, sweete juniper." 
 
 He was listening to " the little sweete nightingale," 
 when suddenly casting down his eyes he saw a 
 lady walking in the garden, and at once his " heart 
 became her thrall." The incident is precisely 
 like Palamon's first sight of Emily in Chaucer's 
 Knighfs Tale, and almost in the very words of 
 Palamon, the poet addresses his lady : 
 
 " Ah, sweet, are ye a worldly creature 
 
 Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature ? 
 
 Or are ye very Nature, the goddess, 
 
 That have depainted with your heavenly hand 
 
 This garden full of flowres as they stand ? " 
 
 Then, after a vision in the taste of the age, in 
 which the royal prisoner is transported in turn to 
 the courts of Venus, Mincn>a, and Fortune, and 
 receives their instruction in the duties belong- 
 ing to Love's service, he wakes from sleep and a 
 white turtle-dove brings to his window a spray of 
 red gillyflowers, whose leaves are inscribed, in gold- 
 en letters, with a message of encouragement. 
 
 James I. may be" reckoned among the English 
 poets. He mentions Chaucer, Gower, and Lyd- 
 gate as his masters. His education was English, 
 and so was the dialect of his poem, although the
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 41 
 
 unique MS. of it is in the Scotch spelling. The 
 King's Quhair is somewhat overladen with orna- 
 ment and with the fashionable allegorical devices, 
 but it is, upon the whole, a rich and tender love 
 song, the best specimen of court poetry between 
 the time of Chaucer and the time of Spenser. 
 The lady who walked in the garden on that May 
 morning was Jane Beaufort, niece to Henry IV. 
 She was married to her poet after his release from 
 captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424. 
 Twelve years later James was murdered by Sir 
 Robert Graham and his Highlanders, and his wife, 
 who strove to defend him, was wounded by the 
 assassins. The story of the murder has been told 
 of late by D. G. Rossetti, in his ballad, The King's 
 Tragedy. 
 
 The whole life of this princely singer was, like 
 his poem, in the very spirit of romance. 
 
 The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was 
 to fix a standard of literary style, and to confirm 
 the authority of the East-Midland English in 
 which he had written. Though the poets of the 
 i5th century were not overburdened with genius, 
 they had, at least, a definite model to follow. As 
 in the i4th century, metrical romances continued 
 to be translated from the French, homilies and 
 saints' legends and rhyming chronicles were still 
 manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and 
 Lydgate and James I. had helped to polish and 
 refine the tongue and to prolong the Chaucerian 
 tradition. The literary English never again slipped
 
 42 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 back into the chaos of dialects which had pre- 
 vailed before Chaucer. 
 
 In the history of every literature the develop- 
 ment of prose is later than that of verse. The 
 latter being, by its very form, artificial, is cultivated 
 as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early 
 stage of society, when prose is simply the talk of 
 men, and not thought worthy of being written and 
 kept. English prose labored under the added 
 disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was 
 the cosmopolitan tongue and the medium of com- 
 munication between scholars of all countries. 
 Latin was the language of the Church, and in the 
 Middle Ages churchman and scholar were con- 
 vertible terms. The word clerk meant either priest 
 or scholar. Two of the Canterbury Tales are in 
 prose, as is also the Testament of Love, formerly 
 ascribed to Chaucer, and the style of all these is so 
 feeble, wandering, and unformed that it is hard to 
 believe that they were written by the same man 
 who wrote the Knight's Tale and the story of 
 Griselda. The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John 
 Maundeville the forerunner of that great library 
 of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern 
 literature was written, according to its author, 
 first in Latin, then in French, and, lastly, in the 
 year 1356, translated into English for the behoof 
 of " lordes and knyghtes and othere noble and 
 worthi men, that conne not Latyn but litylle." 
 The author professed to have spent over thirty 
 years in Eastern travel, to have penetrated as far
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 43 
 
 as Farther India and the " iles that ben abouten 
 Indi," to have been in the service of the Sultan of 
 Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins, and, at 
 another time, in the employ of the Great Khan of 
 Tartary. But there is no copy of the Latin ver- 
 sion of his travels extant ; the French seems to be 
 much later than 1356, and the English MS. to be- 
 long to the early years of the fifteenth century, and 
 to have been made by another hand. Recent inves- 
 tigations make it probable that Maundeville bor- 
 rowed his descriptions of the remoter East from 
 many sources, and particularly from the narrative 
 of Odoric, a Minorite friar of Lombardy, who wrote 
 about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the 
 existence of any such person as Maundeville. 
 Whoever wrote the book that passes under his 
 name, however, would seem to have visited the 
 Holy Land, and the part of the " voiage " that de- 
 scribes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close to 
 the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not 
 taken from the tales of other travelers, is a divert- 
 ing tissue of fables about gryfouns that fly away with 
 yokes of oxen, tribes of one-legged Ethiopians who 
 shelter themselves from the sun by using their 
 monstrous feet as umbrellas, etc. 
 
 During the i5th century English prose was grad- 
 ually being brought into a shape fitting it for more 
 serious uses. In the controversy between the 
 Church and the Lollards Latin was still mainly em- 
 ployed, but Wiclif had written some of his tracts in 
 English, and, in 1449, Reginald Peacock, Bishop of
 
 44 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 St. Asaph, contributed, in English, to the same con- 
 troversy, .7^ Represser of Overmuch Blaming of the 
 Clergy. Sir John Fortescue, who was chief-justice 
 of the king's bench from 14421460, wrote during 
 the reign of Edward IV. a book on the Difference 
 between Absolute and Limited Monarchy, which may 
 be regarded as the first treatise on political philos- 
 ophy and constitutional law in the language. But 
 these works hardly belong to pure literature, and 
 are remarkable only as early, though not very good, 
 examples of English prose in a barren time. The 
 i5th century was an era of decay and change. The 
 Middle Age was dying, Church and State were 
 slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual 
 influences that were working secretly under ground. 
 In England the civil wars of the Red and White 
 Roses were breaking up the old feudal society by 
 decimating and impoverishing the baronage, thus 
 preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of 
 the Tudors. Toward the close of that century, and 
 early in the next, happened the four great events, 
 or series of events, which freed and widened men's 
 minds, and, in a succession of shocks, overthrew 
 the mediaeval system of life and thought. These 
 were the invention of printing, the Renascence, 
 or revival of classical learning, the discovery of 
 America, and the Protestant Reformation. 
 
 William Caxton, the first English printer, learned 
 the art in Cologne. In 1476 he set up his press 
 and sign, a red pole, in the Almonry at Westminster. 
 Just before the introduction of printing the demand
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 45 
 
 for MS. copies had grown very active, stimulated, 
 perhaps, by the coming into general use of linen 
 paper instead of the more costly parchment. The 
 scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where 
 the transcribing and illuminating of MSS. went on, 
 professional copyists resorting to Westminster 
 Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books 
 belonging to the monastic library. Caxton's choice 
 of a spot was, therefore, significant. His new art 
 for multiplying' copies began to supersede the old 
 method of transcription at the very head-quarters 
 of the MS. makers. The first book that bears his 
 Westminster imprint was the Dictes and Sayings of 
 the Philosophers, translated from the French by 
 Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law 
 of Edward IV. The list of books printed by 
 Caxton is interesting, as showing the taste of the 
 time, as he naturally selected what was most in de- 
 mand. The list shows that manuals of devotion 
 and chivalry were still in chief request, books 
 like the Order of Chivalry, Faits of Arms, and 
 the Golden Legend, which last Caxton translated 
 himself, as well as Reynard the Fox, and a 
 French version of the sEneid. He also printed, 
 with continuations of his own, revisions of several 
 early chronicles, and editions of Chaucer, Gower, 
 and Lydgate. A translation of Cicero on Friend- 
 ship, made directly from the Latin, by Thomas 
 Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton, 
 but no edition of a classical author in the original. 
 The new learning of the Renascence had not, as
 
 46 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 yet, taken much hold in England. Upon the 
 whole, the productions of Caxton's press were 
 mostly of a kind that may be described as medi- 
 aeval, and the most important of them, if we except 
 his edition of Chaucer, was that " noble and joy- 
 ous book," as Caxton called it, Le Morte Dar- 
 thur, written by Sir Thomas Malory in 1469, and 
 printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compila- 
 tion from French Arthur romances, and was by far 
 the best English prose that had yet been written. 
 It may be doubted, indeed, whether, for purposes 
 of simple story telling, the picturesque charm of 
 Malory's style has been improved upon. The 
 episode which lends its name to the whole romance, 
 the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and 
 Tennyson has followed Malory's narrative closely, 
 even to such details of the scene as the little 
 chapel by the sea, the moonlight, and the answer 
 which Sir Bedwere made the wounded king, when 
 bidden to throw Excalibur into the water, "'What 
 saw thou there ? ' said the king. ' Sir," he said, ' I saw 
 nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.' " 
 
 " I heard the ripple washing in the reeds 
 And the wild water lapping on the crag." 
 
 And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted 
 lament of Sir Ector over Launcelot, in Malory's 
 rinal chapter : " 'Ah, Launcelot,' he said, ' thou 
 were head of all Christian knights; and now I dare 
 say,' said Sir Ector, ' thou, Sir Launcelot, there thou 
 liest, that thou were never matched of earthly
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 47 
 
 knight's hand; and thou were the courtiesl knight 
 that ever bare shield ; and thou were the truest 
 friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and 
 thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever 
 loved woman ; and thou were the kindest man that 
 ever strake with sword ; and thou were the good- 
 liest person ever came among press of knights ; 
 and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest 
 that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were 
 the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put 
 spear in the rest." " 
 
 Equally good, as an example of English prose 
 narrative, was the translation made by John Bour- 
 chier, Lord Berners, of that most brilliant of the 
 French chroniclers, Chaucer's contemporary, Sir 
 John Froissart. Lord Berners was the English 
 governor of Calais, and his version of Froissart 's 
 Chronicles was made in 1523-25, at the request of 
 Henry VIII. In these two books English chivalry 
 spoke its last genuine word. In Sir Philip Sidney 
 the character of the knight was merged into that 
 of the modern gentleman. And although tourna- 
 ments were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and 
 Spenser cast his Faery Queene into the form of a 
 chivalry romance, these were but a ceremonial 
 survival and literary tradition from an order of 
 things that had passed away. How antagonistic 
 the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal 
 of the Middle Age may be read in Toxophilus* a 
 treatise on archery published in 1545, by Roger 
 Ascham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the
 
 48 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and of Lady Jane 
 Grey. " In our forefathers' time, when Papistry 
 as a standing pool covered and overflowed all En- 
 gland, few books were read in our tongue saving 
 certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime 
 and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in 
 'monasteries by idle monks or wanton canons : as 
 one, for example, Morte Arthure, the whole pleas- 
 ure of which book standeth in two special points, 
 in open manslaughter and bold bawdry. This is 
 good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men 
 to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God's 
 Bible was banished the Court, and Morte Arthure 
 received into the prince's chamber." 
 
 The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first 
 introduced into England by the translation of the 
 Romaunt of the Rose, reached its extremity in Ste- 
 phen Hawes's Passetyme of Pleasure, printed by 
 Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, in 1517. 
 This was a dreary and pedantic poem, in which it 
 is told how Graunde Amoure, after a long series 
 of adventures and instructions among such shad- 
 owy personages as Verite, Observaunce, Falshed, 
 and Good Operacion, finally won the love of La 
 Belle Pucel. Hawes was the last English poet of 
 note whose culture was exclusively mediaeval. His 
 contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the old 
 fashions with the new classical learning. In his 
 Bmvge of Courte (Court Entertainment or Dole), 
 and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like 
 Hawes, Chaucer's seven-lined stanza. But his later
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 49 
 
 poems were mostly written in a verse of his own 
 invention, called after him Skeltonical. This was 
 a sort of glorified doggerel-, in short, swift, ragged 
 lines, with occasional intermixture of French and 
 Latin. 
 
 " Her beautye to augment. 
 
 Dame Nature hath her lent 
 
 A warte upon her cheke, 
 
 Who so lyst to seke 
 
 In her vysage a skar, 
 
 That semyth from afar 
 
 Lyke to the radyant star, 
 
 All with favour fret, 
 
 So properly it is set. 
 
 She is the vyolet, 
 
 The daysy delectable, 
 
 The columbine commendable, 
 
 The jelofer amyable ; 
 
 For this most goodly floure, 
 
 This blossom of fressh colour, 
 
 So Jupiter me succoiir, 
 
 She florysheth new and new 
 
 In beaute and vertew ; 
 
 Hac claritate gemina, 
 
 gloriosa femina, etc." 
 
 Skclton was a rude railing rhymer, a singular 
 mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon ; 
 coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always 
 vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, 
 but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather 
 out of keeping with his clerical character. His 
 Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study of very 
 low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's Jolly
 
 50 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Beggars. His Phyllyp Sparowe is a sportive, 
 pretty, fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird 
 belonging to Mistress Joanna Scroupe, of Carowe, 
 and has been compared to the Latin poet Catul- 
 lus's elegy on Lesbia's sparrow. In Speke, Parrot, 
 and Why Come ye not to Courtet he assailed the 
 powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious 
 satire, and was, in consequence, obliged to take 
 sanctuary at Westminster, where he died in 1529. 
 Skelton was a classical scholar, and at one time 
 tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist, Eras- 
 mus, spoke of him as the " one light and ornament 
 of British letters." Caxton asserts that he had 
 read Virgil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, 
 " I suppose he hath dronken of Elycon's well." 
 
 In refreshing contrast with the artificial court 
 poetry of the i5th and first three quarters of 
 the i6th century, was the folk-poetry, the popular 
 ballad literature which was handed down by oral 
 tradition. The English and Scotch ballads were 
 narrative songs, written in a variety of meters, but 
 chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza. 
 
 " In somer, when the shawes* be sheyne, \ 
 
 And leves be large and longe, 
 Hit is full merry in feyre forest 
 
 To here the foulys song. 
 
 " To se the dere draw to the dale, 
 
 And leve the hilles hee, \ 
 And shadow them in the leves grene, 
 
 Under the grene-wode tree." 
 
 * Woods. f Bright. \ High.
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 51 
 
 It is not possible to assign a definite date to these 
 ballads. They live^d on the lips of the people, 
 and were seldom reduced to writing till many 
 years after they were first composed and sung. 
 Meanwhile they underwent repeated changes, so 
 that we have numerous versions of the same story. 
 They belonged to no particular author, but, like 
 all folk-lore, were handled freely by the unknown 
 poets, minstrels, and ballad reciters, who modern- 
 ized their language, added to them, or corrupted 
 them, and passed them along. Coming out of an 
 uncertain past, based on some dark legend of 
 heart-break or bloodshed, they bear no poet's name, 
 but are ferae naturae, and have the flavor of wild 
 game. In the forms in which they are preserved 
 few of them are older than the lyth century, or 
 the latter part of the i6th century, though many, in 
 their original shape, are, doubtless, much older. A 
 very few of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the 
 i5th century, and to the same period is assigned 
 the charming ballad of the Nut Brown Maid and 
 the famous border ballad of Chevy Chase, which 
 describes a battle between the retainers of the 
 two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was 
 this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, " I 
 never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas 
 but I found myself more moved than by a 
 trumpet ; and yet it is sung but by some blind 
 crouder,* with no rougher voice than rude style.'' 
 But the style of the ballads was not always rude. 
 * Fiddler.
 
 52 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 In their compressed energy of expression, in the 
 impassioned abrupt, yet indirect way in which 
 they tell their tale of grief and horror, there re- 
 side often a tragic power and art superior to any 
 English poetry that had been written since Chau- 
 cer, superior even to Chaucer in the quality of 
 intensity. The true home of the ballad literature 
 was " the north country," and especially the 
 Scotch border, where the constant forays of moss- 
 troopers and the raids and private warfare of the 
 lords of the marches supplied many traditions of 
 heroism, like those celebrated in the old poem of 
 the Battle of Otterbourne, and in the Hunting of 
 the Cheviot, or Chevy Chase, already mentioned. 
 Some of these are Scotch and others English ; 
 the dialect of Lowland Scotland did not, in effect, 
 differ much from that of Northumberland and 
 Yorkshire, both descended alike from the old 
 Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other bal- 
 lads were shortened, popular versions of the 
 chivalry romances which were passing out of 
 fashion among educated readers in the i6th century, 
 and now fell into the hands of the ballad makers. 
 Others preserved the memory of local country- 
 side tales, family feuds, and tragic incidents, partly 
 historical and partly legendary, associated often 
 with particular spots. Such are, for example, 
 The Dowie Dens of Yarrow, Pair Helen of Kirk- 
 connell, The Forsaken Bride, and The Twa Cor- 
 bies. Others, again, have a coloring of popular 
 superstition, like the beautiful ballad concerning
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSZR. 53 
 
 Thomas of Ersyldoune, who goes in at Eldon Hill 
 with an Elf queen and spends seven years in fairy 
 land. 
 
 But the most popular of all the ballads were those 
 which cluster about the name of that good outlaw, 
 Robin Hood, who, with his merry men, hunted the 
 forest of merry Sherwood, where he killed the 
 king's deer and waylaid rich travelers, but was 
 kind to poor knights and honest workmen. Robin 
 Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the 
 common people, as Arthur was of the nobles. The 
 names of his Confessor, Friar Tuck ; his mistress, 
 Maid Marian ; his companions, Little John, 
 Scathelock, and Much, the Miller's son, were as 
 familiar as household words. Langland, in the 
 I4th century, mentions " rimes of Robin Hood," 
 and efforts have been made to identify him with 
 some actual personage, as with one of the dis- 
 possessed barons who had been adherents of 
 Simon de Montfort in his war against Henry III. 
 But there seems to be nothing historical about 
 Robin Hood. He was a creation of the popular 
 fancy. The game laws under the Norman kings were 
 very oppressive, and there were, doubtless, dim 
 memories still cherished among the Saxon masses 
 of Hereward and Edric the Wild, who had defied 
 the power of the Conqueror, as well as of later 
 freebooters, who had taken to the woods and lived 
 by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly na- 
 tional character. He had the English love of fair- 
 play, the English readiness to shake hands and
 
 54 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 make up, and keep no malice when worsted in" 
 a square fight. He beat and plundered the 
 rich bishops and abbots, who had more than 
 their share' of wealth, but he was generous and 
 hospitable to the distressed, and lived a free 
 and careless life in the good green wood. He 
 was a mighty archer, with those national weap- 
 ons,, the long-bow and the cloth-yard-shaft. He 
 tricked and baffled legal authority in the per- 
 son of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby 
 appealing to that secret sympathy with lawless- 
 ness and adventure which marked the free-born, 
 vigorous yeomanry of England. And finally 
 the scenery of the forest gives a poetic back- 
 ground and a never-failing charm to the exploits 
 of "the old Robin Hood of England" and his 
 merry men. 
 
 The ballads came, in time, to have certain 
 tricks of style, such as are apt to character- 
 ize a body of anonymous folk-poetry. Such is 
 their use of conventional epithets ; " the red, 
 red gold," " the good, green wood," " the gray 
 goose wing." Such are certain recurring terms 
 of phrase like, 
 
 " But out and spak their stepmother." 
 
 Such is, finally, a kind of sing-song repetition, 
 which doubtless helped the ballad singer to mem- 
 orize his stock, as, for example, 
 
 " She had'na pu'd a double rose, 
 A rose but only twae."
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 55 
 
 Or again, 
 
 ' ' And mony ane sings o* grass, o* grass, 
 
 And mony ane sings o' corn ; 
 An mony ane sings o' Robin Hood, 
 
 Kens little whare he was born. 
 
 It was na in the ha', the ha', 
 
 Nor in the painted bower ; 
 But it was in the gude green wood, 
 
 Amang the lily flower." 
 
 Copies of some of these old ballads were hawked 
 about in the i6th century, printed in black letter, 
 " broad sides," or single sheets. Wynkyn de 
 Worde printed, in 1489, A Lytell Geste of Robin 
 Hood, which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads 
 on the subject. In the ryth century a few of the 
 English popular ballads were collected in mis- 
 cellanies, called Garlands. Early in the i8th cent- 
 ury the Scotch poet, Allan Ramsay, published a 
 number of Scotch ballads in the Evergreen and 
 Tea-Table Miscellany. But no large and impor- 
 tant collection was put forth until Percy's Rel- 
 iques, 1765, a book which had a powerful influence 
 upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott. In Scotland 
 some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were 
 written in the i8th century, such as Jane Elli- 
 ott's Lament for Flodden, and the fine ballad of 
 Sir Patrick Spcnce. Walter Scott's Proud Maisie 
 is in the Wood, is a perfect reproduction of the 
 pregnant, indirect method of the old ballad 
 makers. 
 
 In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks,
 
 56 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and many Greek scholars, with their MSS., fled 
 into Italy, where they began teaching their lan- 
 guage and literature, and especially the philos- 
 ophy of Plato. There had been little or no 
 knowledge of Greek in western Europe during 
 the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect 
 knowledge of the Latin classics. Ovid and 
 Statius were widely read, and so was the late 
 Latin poet, Boethius, whose De Consolatione Phil- 
 osophies had been translated into English by King 
 Alfred and by Chaucer. Little was known of 
 Vergil at first hand, and he was popularly sup- 
 posed to have been a mighty wizard, who made 
 sundry works of enchantment at Rome, such as 
 a magic mirror and statue. Caxton's so-called 
 translation of the ^Eneid was in reality nothing but 
 a version of a French romance based on Vergil's 
 epic. Of the Roman historians, orators, and moral- 
 ists, such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar, Cicero, and Sen- 
 eca, there was an almost entire ignorance, as 
 also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal, and 
 Catullus. The gradual rediscovery of the re- 
 mains of ancient art and literature which took 
 place in the i5th century, and largely in Italy, 
 worked an immense revolution in the mind of 
 Europe. MSS. were brought out of their hiding 
 places, edited by scholars and spread abroad by 
 means of the printing-press. Statues were dug 
 up and placed in museums, and men became ac- 
 quainted with a civilization far more mature tban 
 that of the Middle Age, and with models of perfect
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 57 
 
 workmanship in letters and the fine arts. In the 
 latter years of the i5th century a number of En- 
 glishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it 
 back with them to England. William Grocyn 
 and Thomas Linacre, who had studied at Florence 
 under the refugee, Demetrius Chalcondylas, be- 
 gan teaching Greek, at Oxford, the former as early 
 as 1491. A little later John Colet, Dean of St. 
 Paul's and the founder of St. Paul's School, and 
 his friend, William Lily, the grammarian and first 
 master of St. Paul's (1500), also studied Greek 
 abroad, Colet in Italy, and Lily at Rhodes and in 
 the city of Rome. Thomas More, afterward the 
 famous chancellor of Henry VIII., was among the 
 pupils of Grocyn and Linacre at Oxford. Thither 
 also, in 1497, came in search of the new knowl- 
 edge, the Dutchman, Erasmus, who became the 
 foremost scholar of his time. From Oxford the 
 study spread to the sister university, where the 
 first English Grecian of his day, Sir Jno. Cheke, 
 who " taught Cambridge and King Edward 
 Greek," became the incumbent of the new pro- 
 fessorship founded about 1540. Among his pupils 
 was Roger Ascham, already mentioned, in whose 
 time St. John's College, Cambridge, was the chief 
 seat of the new learning, of which Thomas Nashe 
 testifies that it "was as an universitie within it- 
 self; having more candles light in it, every winter 
 morning before four of the clock, than the four of 
 clock bell gave strokes." Greek was not intro- 
 duced at the universities without violent opposi-
 
 58 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tion from the conservative element, who were 
 nicknamed Trojans. The opposition came in part 
 from the priests, who feared that the new study 
 would sow seeds of heresy. Yet many of the most 
 devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal 
 culture, among them Thomas More, whose Cathol- 
 icism was undoubted and who went to the block 
 for his religion. Cardinal Wolsey, whom More suc- 
 ceeded as chancellor, was also a munificent patron 
 of learning and founded Christ Church College, at 
 Oxford. Popular education at once felt the impulse 
 of the new studies, and over twenty endowed gram- 
 mar schools were established in England in the first 
 twenty years of the i6th century. Greek became a 
 passion even with English ladies. Ascham in his 
 Schoolmaster, a treatise on education, published in 
 1570, says, that Queen Elisabeth "readeth here now 
 at Windsor more Greek every day, than some preb- 
 endarie of this Church doth read Latin in a whole 
 week." And in the same book he tells how call- 
 ing once upon Lady Jane Grey, at Brodegate, in 
 Leicestershire, he " found her in her chamber 
 reading Phadon Platonis in Greek, and that with 
 as much delite as some gentlemen would read a 
 merry tale in Bocase," and when he asked her why 
 she had not gone hunting with the rest, she an- 
 swered, " I wisse, all their sport in the park is but 
 a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato." 
 Ascham 's Schoolmaster, as well as his earlier book, 
 Toxophilns, a Platonic dialogue on archery, bristles 
 with quotations from the Greek and Latin clas-
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 59 
 
 sics, and with that perpetual reference to the au- 
 thority of antiquity on every topic that he touches, 
 which remained the fashion in all serious prose 
 down to the. time of Dryden. 
 
 One speedy result of the new learning was fresh 
 translations of the Scriptures into English, out of 
 the original tongues. In 1525 William Tyndal 
 printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the 
 New Testament from the Greek. Ten years later 
 Miles Coverdale made, at Zurich, a translation of 
 the whole Bible from the German and the Latin. 
 These were the basis of numerous later transla- 
 tions, and the strong beautiful English of Tyn- 
 dal's Testament is preserved for the most part in 
 our Authorized Version (1611). At first it was 
 not safe to make or distribute these early trans- 
 lations in England. Numbers of copies were 
 brought into the country, however, and did much 
 to promote the cause of the Reformation. After 
 Henry VIII. had broken with the Pope the new 
 English Bible circulated freely among the people. 
 Tyndal and Sir Thomas More carried on a vigor- 
 ous controversy in English upon some of the 
 questions at issue between the Church and the 
 Protestants. Other important contributions to 
 the literature of the Reformation were the homely 
 sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul's 
 Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer, who was burned 
 at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary. The 
 English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 
 1549-52. More was, perhaps, the best representa-
 
 6o ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tive of a group of scholars who wished to en- 
 lighten and reform the Church from inside, but 
 who refused to follow Henry VIII. in his breach 
 with Rome. Dean Colet and John Fisher, Bishop 
 of Rochester, belonged to the same company, 
 and Fisher was beheaded in the same year (1535) 
 with More, and for the same offense, namely, re- 
 fusing to take the oath to maintain the act con- 
 firming the king's divorce from Catherine of Arra- 
 gon and his marriage with Anne Boleyn. More's 
 philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia, the de- 
 scription of an ideal commonwealth, modeled on 
 Plato's Republic, and printed in 1516. The name 
 signifies " no place " (OUTOTTOC), and has furnished 
 an adjective to the language. The Utopia was in 
 Latin, but More's History of Edward V. and 
 Richard III., written in 1513, though not printed 
 till 1557, was in English. It is the first example 
 in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a 
 chronicle; that is, it is a reasoned and artistic 
 presentation of an historic period, and not a mere 
 chronological narrative of events. 
 
 The first three quarters of the i6th century 
 produced no great original work of literature in 
 England. It was a season of preparation, of 
 education. The storms of the Reformation in- 
 terrupted and delayed the literary renascence 
 through the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., 
 and Queen Mary. When Elizabeth came to the 
 throne, in 1558, a more settled order of things be- 
 gan, and a period of great national prosperity and
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 61 
 
 glory. Meanwhile the English mind had been 
 slowly assimilating the new classical culture, 
 which was extended to all classes of readers by 
 the numerous translations of Greek and Latin 
 authors. A fresh poetic impulse came from Italy. 
 In 1557 appeared Tottel 's Miscellany, containing 
 songs and sonnets by a " new company of courtly 
 makers." Most of the pieces in the volume had 
 been written years before, by gentlemen of Henry 
 VIII. 's court, and circulated in MS. The two 
 chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wiat, at one 
 time English embassador to Spain, and that brill- 
 iant noble, Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, 
 who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the 
 king's arms with his own. Both of them were dead 
 long before their work was printed. The pieces 
 in Tottel's Miscellany show very clearly the in- 
 fluence of Italian poetry. We have seen that 
 Chaucer took subjects and something more from 
 Boccaccio and Petrarch. But the sonnet, which 
 Petrarch had brought to great perfection, was 
 first introduced into England by Wia.t. There 
 was a great revival of sonneteering in Italy in the 
 i6th century, and a number of Wiat's poems were 
 adaptations of the sonnets and canzoni of Pe- 
 trarch and later poets. Others were imitations of 
 Horace's satires and epistles. Surrey introduced 
 the Italian blank verse into English in his trans- 
 lation of two books of the JEneid. The love 
 poetry of Tottel's Miscellany is polished and artifi- 
 cial, like the models which it followed. Dante's
 
 62 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Beatrice was a child, and so was Petrarch's Laura. 
 Following their example, Surrey addressed his 
 love complaints, by way of compliment, to a little 
 girl of the noble Irish family of Gtraldine. The 
 Amourists, or love sonneters, dwelt on the meta- 
 physics of the passion with a tedious minuteness, 
 and the conventional nature of their sighs and 
 complaints may often be guessed by an expe- 
 rienced reader from the titles of their poems: 
 " Description of the restless state of a lover, with 
 suit to his lady to rue on his dying heart ; " " Hell 
 tormenteth not the damned ghosts so sore as un- 
 kindness the lover;" "The lover prayeth not to 
 be disdained, refused, mistrusted, nor forsaken," 
 etc. The most genuine utterance of Surrey was 
 his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor 
 a cage where so many a song-bird has grown 
 vocal. And Wiat's little piece of eight lines, " Of 
 his Return from Spain," is worth reams of his 
 amatory affectations. Nevertheless the writers in 
 Tottef s Miscellany were real reformers of English 
 poetry. They introduced new models of style 
 and new metrical forms, and they broke away 
 from the mediaeval 'traditions which had hitherto 
 obtained. The language had undergone some 
 changes since Chaucer's time, which made his 
 scansion obsolete, The accent of many words 
 of French origin, like nattire, courage, virtue, 
 matere, had shifted to the first syllable, and the e 
 of the final syllables es, en, ed, arid e, had largely 
 disappeared. But the language of poetry tends
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 63 
 
 to keep up archaisms of this kind, and in Stephen 
 Hawes, who wrote a century after Chaucer, we 
 still find such lines as these : 
 
 " But he my strokes might right well endure, 
 He was so great and huge of puissance." * 
 
 Hawes's practice is variable in this respect, and so 
 is his contemporary, Skelton's. But in Wiat and 
 Surrey, who wrote only a few years later, the 
 reader first feels sure that he is reading verse 
 pronounced quite in the modern fashion. 
 
 But Chaucer's example still continued potent. 
 Spenser revived many of his obsolete words, both 
 in his pastorals and in his Faery Queene, thereby 
 imparting an antique remoteness to his diction, 
 but incurring Ben Jonson's censure, that he " writ 
 no language." A poem that stands midway be- 
 tween Spenser and late mediaeval work of Chau- 
 cer's school such as Hawes 's Passetyme of Pleas- 
 ure was the Induction contributed by Thomas 
 Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, in 1563 to a collection 
 of narrative poems called the Mirrour for Magis- 
 trates. The whole series was the work of many 
 hands, modeled upon Lydgate's Falls of Princes 
 (taken from Boccaccio), and was designed as a 
 warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune. 
 The Induction is the only noteworthy part of it. 
 It was an allegory, written in Chaucer's seven- 
 lined stanza and described with a somber im- 
 aginative power, the figure of Sorrow, her abode 
 
 * Trisyllable like creature, neighebour, etCj in Chaucer.
 
 64 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 in the " griesly lake " of Avernus and her attend- 
 ants, Remorse, Dread, Old Age, etc. Sackville 
 was the author of the first regular English tragedy, 
 Gorboduc; and it was at his request that Ascham 
 wrote the Schoolmaster. 
 
 Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund 
 Spenser (1552-99). While a student at Pem- 
 broke Hall, Cambridge, he had translated some 
 of the Visions of Petrarch^ and the Visions of 
 Bellay, a French poet, but it was only in 1579 that 
 the publication of his Shepheartfs Calendar an- 
 nounced the coming of a great original poet, the 
 first since Chaucer. The Shepheartfs Calendar was 
 a pastoral in twelve eclogues one for each 
 month in the year. There had been a great re- 
 vival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France, but, 
 with one or two insignificant exceptions, Spenser's 
 were the first bucolics in English. Two of his 
 eclogues were paraphrases from Clement Marot, a 
 French Protestant poet, whose psalms were greatly 
 in fashion at the court of Francis I. The pastoral 
 machinery had been used by Vergil and by his 
 modern imitators, not merely to portray the loves 
 of Strephon and Chloe, or the idyllic charms of 
 rustic life ; but also as a vehicle of compliment, 
 elegy, satire, and personal allusion of many kinds. 
 Spenser, accordingly, alluded to his friends, Sid- 
 ney and Harvey, as the shepherds, Astrophel and 
 Hobbinol,paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia, 
 and introduced, in the form of anagrams, names 
 of the High-Church Bishop of London, Aylmer,
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 65 
 
 and the Low-Church Archbishop Grindal. The 
 conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate 
 exotic in English poetry, and represents a very 
 unreal Arcadia. Before the end of the iyth 
 century the squeak of the oaten pipe had become 
 a burden, and the only piece of the kind which it 
 is easy to read without some impatience is Mil- 
 ton's wonderful Lycidas. The Shepheard's Cal- 
 endar, however, though it belonged to an artificial 
 order of literature, had the unmistakable stamp of 
 genius in its style. There was a broad, easy mas- 
 tery of the resources of language, a grace, fluency, 
 and music which were new to English poetry. It 
 was written while Spenser was in service with the 
 Earl of Leicester, and enjoying the friendship of 
 his nephew, the all-accomplished Sidney, and was, 
 perhaps, composed at the latter's country seat of 
 Penshurst. In the following year Spenser went to 
 Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord Grey 
 of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord 
 Deputy of that kingdom. After filling several 
 clerkships in the Irish government, Spenser re- 
 ceived a grant of the castle and estate of Kil- 
 colman, a part of the forfeited lands of the rebel 
 Earl of Desmond. Here, among landscapes richly 
 wooded, like the scenery of his own fairy land, 
 " under the cooly shades of the green alders by 
 the Mulla's shore," Sir Walter Raleigh found him, 
 in 1589, busy upon his Faery Queene. In his poem, 
 Colin Clout's Come Home Again, Spenser tells, in 
 pastoral language, how " the shepherd of the
 
 66 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ocean " persuaded him to go to London, where he 
 presented him to the Queen, under whose patron- 
 age the first three books of his great poem were 
 printed, in 1590. A volume of minor poems, en- 
 titled Complaints, followed in 1591, and the three 
 remaining books of the Faery Queene in 1596. In 
 1595-96 he published also his Daphnaida, Protha- 
 lamion, and the four hymns On Love and Beauty^ 
 and On Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty. In 
 1598, in Tyrone's rebellion, Kilcolman Castle was 
 sacked and burned, and Spenser, with his family, 
 fled to London, where he died in January, 1599. 
 
 The Faery Queene reflects, perhaps, more fully 
 than any other English work, the many-sided 
 literary influences of the renascence. It was the 
 blossom of a richly composite culture. Its im- 
 mediate models were Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, 
 the first forty cantos of which were published in 
 1515, and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, printed 
 in 1581. Both of these were, in subject, romances 
 of chivalry, the first based upon the old Charle- 
 magne epos Orlando being identical with the 
 hero of the French Chanson de Roland the 
 second upon the history of the first Crusade, and 
 the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen. 
 But in both of them there was a splendor of dic- 
 tion and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to 
 the rude mediaeval romances. Ariosto and Tasso 
 wrote with the great epics of Homer and Vergil 
 constantly in mind, and all about them was the 
 brilliant light of Italian art, in its early freshness
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 67 
 
 and power. The Faery Queene, too, was a tale of 
 knight-errantry. Its hero was King Arthur, and 
 its pages swarm with the familiar adventures and 
 figures of Gothic romance ; distressed ladies and 
 their champions, combats with dragons and 
 giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed 
 wells, forest hermitages, etc. But side by side 
 with tliese appear the fictions of Greek mythology 
 and the personified abstractions of fashionable 
 allegory. Knights, squires, wizards, hamadryads, 
 satyrs, and river gods, Idleness, Gluttony, and Su- 
 perstition jostle each other in Spenser's fairy land. 
 Descents to the infernal shades, in the manner of 
 Homer and Vergil, alternate with descriptions of 
 the Palace of Pride in the manner of the Romaunt 
 of the Rose. But Spenser's imagination was a 
 powerful spirit, and held all these diverse ele- 
 ments in solution. He removed them to an ideal 
 sphere " apart from place, withholding time," where 
 they seem all alike equally real, the dateless con- 
 ceptions of the poet's dream. 
 
 The poem was to have been " a continued 
 allegory or dark conceit," in twelve books, the 
 hero of each book representing one of the twelve 
 moral virtues. Only six books and the fragment 
 of a seventh were written. By way of compli- 
 menting his patrons and securing contemporary 
 interest, Spenser undertook to make his allegory 
 a double one, personal and historical, as well as 
 moral or abstract. Thus Gloriana, the Queen of 
 Faery, stands not only for Glory but for Elizabeth,
 
 68 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 to whom the poem was dedicated. Prince Arthur 
 is Leicester, as well as Magnificence. Duessa is 
 Falsehood, but also Mary Queen of Scots. Gran- 
 torto is Philip II. of Spain. Sir Artegal is Jus- 
 tice, but likewise he is Arthur Grey de Wilton. 
 Other characters shadow forth Sir Walter Raleigh, 
 Sir Philip Sidney, Henry IV. of France, etc. ; and 
 such public events as the revolt of the Spanish 
 Netherlands, the Irish rebellion, the execution of 
 Mary Stuart, and the rising of the northern Cath- 
 olic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable. 
 In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle 
 of the time, the warfare of young England against 
 Popery and Spain. 
 
 The allegory is not always easy to follow. It 
 is kept up most carefully in the first two books, 
 but it sat rather lightly on Spenser's conscience, 
 and is not of the essence of the poem. It is an 
 ornament put on from the outside and detachable 
 at pleasure. The " Spenserian stanza," in which 
 the Faery Queene was written, was adapted from 
 the ottava rima of Ariosto. Spenser changed 
 somewhat the order of the rimes in the first 
 eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syl- 
 lables, thus affording more space to the copious 
 luxuriance of his style and the long-drawn sweet- 
 ness of his verse. It was his instinct to dilate and 
 elaborate every image to the utmost, and his sim- 
 iles, especially each of which usually fills a whole 
 stanza have the pictorial amplitude of Homer's. 
 Spenser was, in fact, a great painter. His poetry
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 69 
 
 is almost purely sensuous. The personages in 
 the Faery Queene are not characters, but richly 
 colored figures, moving to the accompaniment of 
 delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene re- 
 moteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said 
 that he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed 
 wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of 
 beauty. Not until Keats did another English 
 poet appear so filled with the passion for all out- 
 ward shapes of beauty, so exquisitely alive to all 
 impressions of the senses. Spenser was, in some 
 respects, more an Italian than an English poet. 
 It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing 
 the stanzas of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. 
 It is not easy to imagine the Thames bargees 
 chanting passages from the Faery Queene. Those 
 English poets who have taken strongest hold 
 upon their public have done so by their profound 
 interpretation of our common life. But Spenser 
 escaped altogether from reality into a region of 
 pure imagination. His aerial creations resemble 
 the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have 
 no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment 
 from the moisture of the air. 
 
 " Their birth was of the womb of morning dew, 
 And their conception of the glorious prime." 
 
 Among the minor poems of Spenser the most 
 delightful were his Prothalamion and Epithala- 
 mion. The first was a " spousal verse," made for 
 the double wedding of the Ladies Catherine and
 
 70 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Elizabeth Somerset, whom the poet figures as 
 two white swans that come swimming down the 
 Thames, whose surface the nymphs strew with 
 lilies, till it appears "like a bride's chamber- 
 floor." 
 
 " Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song," 
 
 is the burden of each stanza. The Epithalamion 
 was Spenser's own marriage song, written to 
 crown his series of Amoretti, or love sonnets, and 
 is the most splendid hyrnn of triumphant love in 
 the language. Hardly less beautiful than these 
 was Muiopotrnos j or, the Fate of the Butterfly, an 
 addition to the classical myth of Arachne, the 
 spider. The four hymns in praise of Love and 
 Beauty, Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty, are 
 also stately and noble poems, but by reason of 
 their abstractness and the Platonic mysticism 
 which they express, are less generally pleasing 
 than the others mentioned. Allegory and mys- 
 ticism had no natural affiliation with Spenser's 
 genius. He was a seer of visions, of images full, 
 brilliant, and distinct, and not like Bunyan, 
 Dante, or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily 
 shapes of ideas, typical and emblematic, the 
 shadows which haunt the conscience and the 
 mind. 
 
 1. A First Sketch of English Literature. By 
 Henry Morley. 
 
 2. English Writers. By the same. Vol. iii. From 
 Chaucer to Dunbar.
 
 FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER. 71 
 
 3. Skeat's Specimens of English Literature, 
 1394-1579. Clarendon Press Series. 
 
 4. Morte Darthur. Globe Edition. 
 
 5. Child's English and Scottish Ballads. 8 vols. 
 
 6. Hale's edition of Spenser. Globe. 
 
 7. "A Royal Poet." Irving's Sketch-Book.
 
 72 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 
 1564-1616. 
 
 THE great age of English poetry opened with 
 the publication of Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar, 
 in 1579, and closed with the printing of Milton's 
 Samson Agonistes, in 1671. Within this period of 
 little less than a century English thought passed 
 through many changes, and there were several 
 successive phases of style in our imaginative liter- 
 ature. Milton, who acknowledged Spenser as his 
 master, and who was a boy of eight years at Shaks- 
 pere's death, lived long enough to witness the 'es- 
 tablishment of an entirely new school of poets, in 
 the persons of Dryden and his contemporaries. 
 But, roughly speaking, the dates above given mark 
 the limits of one literary epoch, which may not 
 improperly be called the Elisabethan. In strict- 
 ness the Elisabethan age ended with the queen's 
 death, in 1603. But the poets of the succeeding 
 reigns inherited much of the glow and splendor 
 which marked the diction of their forerunners; 
 and " the spacious times of great Elisabeth " have 
 been, by courtesy, prolonged to the year of the 
 Restoration (1660). There is a certain likeness
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 73 
 
 in the intellectual products of the whole period, a 
 largeness of utterance, and a high imaginative cast 
 of thought which stamp them all alike with the 
 queen's seal. 
 
 Nor is it by any undue stretch of the royal 
 prerogative that the name of the monarch has 
 attached itself to the literature of her reign and 
 of the reigns succeeding hers. Thje expression 
 " Victorian poetry " has a rather absurd sound 
 when one considers how little Victoria counts for 
 in the literature of her time. But in Elisabethan 
 poetry the maiden queen is really the central 
 figure. She is Cynthia, she is Thetis, great queen 
 of shepherds and of the sea; she is Spenser's 
 Gloriana, and even Shakspere, the most imper- 
 sonal of po.ets, paid tribute to her in Hetiry VIII., 
 and, in a more delicate and indirect way, in the 
 little allegory introduced into Midsummer Nighfs 
 Dream. 
 
 " That very time I marked but thou could'st not 
 Flying between the cold moon and the earth, 
 Cupid all armed. A certain aim he took 
 At a fair vestal throned by the west, 
 And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow 
 As he would pierce a hundred thousand hearts. 
 But I might see young Cupid's fiery dart 
 Quenched in the chaste beams of the watery moon, 
 And the imperial votaress passed on 
 In maiden meditation, fancy free " 
 
 an allusion to Leicester's unsuccessful suit for 
 Elisabeth's hand. 
 
 The praises of the queen, which sound through
 
 74 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 all the poetry of her time, seem somewhat overdone 
 to a modern reader. But they were not merely 
 the insipid language of courtly compliment. En- 
 gland had never before had a female sovereign, 
 except in the instance of the gloomy and bigoted 
 Mary. When she was succeeded by her more 
 brilliant sister, the gallantry of a gallant and fan- 
 tastic age was poured at the latter's feet, the senti- 
 ment of chivalry mingling itself with loyalty to 
 the crown. The poets idealized Elisabeth. She 
 was to Spenser, to Sidney, and to Raleigh, not 
 merely a woman and a virgin queen, but the 
 champion of Protestantism, the lady of young En- 
 gland, the heroine of the conflict against popery 
 and Spain. Moreover Elisabeth was a great 
 woman. In spite of the vanity, caprice, and in- 
 gratitude which disfigured her character, and the 
 vacillating, tortuous policy which often distin- 
 guished her government, she was at bottom a 
 sovereign of large views, strong will, and daunt- 
 less courage. Like her father, she " loved a man" 
 and she had the magnificent tastes of the Tudors. 
 She was a patron of the arts, passionately fond 
 of shows and spectacles, and sensible to poetic 
 flattery. In her royal progresses through the 
 kingdom, the universities and the nobles and the 
 cities vied with one another in receiving her with 
 plays, revels, masques, and triumphs, in the myth- 
 ological taste of the day. " When the queen pa- 
 raded through a country town," says Warton, 
 the historian of English poetry, " almost every
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 75 
 
 pageant was a. pantheon. When she paid a visit 
 at the house of any of her nobility, at entering 
 the hall she was saluted by the Penates. In the 
 afternoon, when she condescended to walk in the 
 garden, the lake was covered with tritons and 
 nereids ; the pages of the family were converted 
 into wood-nymphs, who peeped from every bower; 
 and the footmen gamboled over the lawns in the 
 figure of satyrs. When her majesty hunted in 
 the park she was met by Diana who, pronouncing 
 our royal prude to be the brightest paragon of un- 
 spotted chastity, invited her to groves free from 
 the intrusions of Acteon." The most elaborate 
 of these entertainments of which we have any 
 notice, were, perhaps, the games celebrated in her 
 honor by the Earl of Leicester, when she visited 
 him at Kenilworth, in 1575. An account of these 
 was published by a contemporary poet, George 
 Gascoigne, The Princely Pleasures at the Court of 
 Kenilworth, and Walter Scott has made them 
 familiar to modern readers in his novel of Kenil- 
 worth. Sidney was present on this occasion, and, 
 perhaps, Shakspere, then a boy of eleven, and liv- 
 ing at Stratford, not far off, may have been taken 
 to see the spectacle, may have seen Neptune, rid- 
 ing on the back of a huge dolphin in the castle 
 lake, speak the copy of verses in which he offered 
 his trident to the empress of the sea, and may have 
 
 " heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back, 
 Utter such dulcet and harmonious breath, 
 That the rude sea grew civil at the sound."
 
 76 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 But in considering the literature of Elisabeth's 
 reign it will be convenient to speak first of the 
 prose. While following up Spenser's career to its 
 close (1599), we have, for the sake of unity of 
 treatment, anticipated somewhat the literary his- 
 tory of the twenty years preceding. In 1579 ap- 
 peared a book which had a remarkable influence 
 on English prose. This was John Lyly's Enphues, 
 the Anatomy of Wit. It was in form a romance, 
 the history of a young Athenian who went to 
 Naples to see the world and get an education ; 
 but it is in substance nothing but a series of dia- 
 logues on love, friendship, religion, etc., written in 
 language which, from the title of the book, has 
 received the name of Euphuism. This new En- 
 glish became very fashionable among the ladies, 
 and " that beauty in court which could not parley 
 Euphuism," says a writer of 1632, "was as little 
 regarded as she which now there speaks not 
 French." 
 
 Walter Scott introduced a Euphuist into his 
 novel the Monastery^ but the peculiar jargon which 
 Sir Piercie Shafton is made to talk is not at 
 all like the real Euphuism. That consisted of 
 antithesis, alliteration, and the profuse illustration 
 of every thought by metaphors borrowed from a 
 kind of fabulous natural history. " Descend into 
 thine own conscience and consider with thyself 
 the great difference between staring and stark- 
 blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust; be merry, 
 but with modesty; be sober, but not too sullen;
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 77 
 
 be valiant, but not too venturous." " I see now 
 that, as the fish Scolopidus in the flood Araxes 
 at the waxing of the moon is as white as the 
 driven snow, and at the waning as black as the 
 burnt coal; so Euphues, which at the first increas- 
 ing of our familiarity was very zealous, is now at 
 the last cast become most faithless." Besides the 
 fish Scolopidus, the favorite animals of Lyly's 
 menagerie are such as the chameleon, which, 
 " though he have most guts draweth least 
 breath ; " the bird Piralis, " which sitting upon 
 white cloth is white, upon green, green ; " and 
 the serpent Porphirius y which, " though he be full 
 of poison, yet having no teeth, hurteth none but 
 himself." 
 
 Lyly's style was pithy and sententious, and his 
 Sentences have the air of proverbs or epigrams. 
 The vice of Euphuism was its monotony. On 
 every page of the book there was something pun- 
 gent, something quotable ; but many pages of such 
 writing became tiresome. Yet it did much to 
 form the hitherto loose structure of English prose, 
 by lending it point and polish. His carefully bal- 
 anced periods were valuable lessons in rhetoric, 
 and his book became a manual of polite conver- 
 sation and introduced that fashion of witty rep- 
 artee, which is evident enough in Shakspere's 
 comic dialogue. In 1580 appeared the second 
 part, Euphues and his England, and six editions of 
 the whole work were printed before 1598. Lyly 
 had many imitators. In Stephen Gosson's Scfiool
 
 78 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of Abuse, a tract directed against the stage and 
 published about four months later than the first 
 part of Euphues, the language is distinctly Eu- 
 phuistic. The dramatist, Robert Green, published, 
 in 1587, \\\s Menaphon .j Camillas Alarum to Slum- 
 bering Euphues, and his Eup hues' s Censure to Phi- 
 lautus. His brother dramatist, Thomas Lodge, 
 published, in 1590, Rosalynde : Euphues' s Golden 
 Legacy, from which Shakspere took the plot of As 
 You Like It. Shakspere and Ben Jonson both 
 quote from Euphues in their plays, and Shakspere 
 was really writing Euphuism, when he wrote such 
 a sentence as " 'Tis true, 'tis pity ; pity 'tis tis 
 true." 
 
 That knightly gentleman, Philip Sidney, was 
 a true type of the lofty aspiration and mani- 
 fold activity of Elizabethan England. He was 
 scholar, poet, courtier, diplomatist, statesman, 
 soldier, all in one. Educated at Oxford and then 
 introduced at court by his uncle, the Earl of Leices- 
 ter, he had been sent to France when a lad of 
 eighteen, with the embassy which went to treat of 
 the queen's proposed marriage to the Duke of 
 Alencon, and was in Paris at the time of the Mas- 
 sacre of St. Bartholomew, in 1572. Afterward he 
 had traveled through Germany, Italy, and the 
 Netherlands, had gone as embassador to the Em- 
 peror's Court, and every-where won golden opin- 
 ions. In 1580, while visiting his sister Mary, 
 Countess of Pembroke, at Wilton, he wrote, for her 
 pleasure, the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, which
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 79 
 
 remained in MS. till 1590. This was a pastoral 
 romance, after the manner of the Italian Arcadia 
 of Sanazzaro, and the Diana Enamorada of Monte- 
 mayor, a Portuguese author. It was in prose, but 
 intermixed with songs and sonnets, and Sidney 
 finished only two books and a portion of a third. 
 It describes the adventures of two cousins, Musi- 
 dorus and Pyrocles, who are wrecked on the coast 
 of Sparta. The plot is very involved and is full 
 of the stock episodes of romance : disguises, sur- 
 prises, love intrigues, battles, jousts and single 
 combats. Although the insurrection of the Helots 
 against the Spartans forms a part of the story, 
 the Arcadia is not the real Arcadia of the Hel- 
 lenic Peloponnesus, but the fanciful country of 
 pastoral romance, an unreal clime, like the Faery 
 Land of Spenser. 
 
 Sidney was our first writer of poetic prose. The 
 poet Drayton says that he 
 
 " did first reduce 
 
 Our tongue from Lyly's writing, then in use, 
 Talking of stones, stars, plants, of fishes, flies, 
 Playing with words and idle similes." 
 
 Sidney was certainly no Euphuist, but his style 
 was as " Italianated " as Lyly's, though in a dif- 
 ferent way. His English was too pretty for prose. 
 His " Sidneian showers of sweet discourse " sowed 
 every page of the Arcadia with those flowers of 
 conceit, those sugared fancies which his contem- 
 poraries loved, but which the taste of a severer
 
 8o ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the 
 Elisabethan writers appears rn Sidney, chiefly in 
 the form of an excessive personification. If he 
 describes a field full of roses, he makes " the roses 
 add such a ruddy show unto it, as though the 
 field were bashful at his own beauty." If he de- 
 scribes ladies bathing in a stream, he makes the 
 water break into twenty bubbles, as " not content 
 to have the picture of their face in large upon 
 him, but he would in each of those bubbles set 
 forth the miniature of them." And even a pas- 
 sage which should be tragic, such as the death of 
 his heroine, Parthenia, he embroiders with con- 
 ceits like these : " For her exceeding fair eyes 
 having with continued weeping got a little redness 
 about them, her round sweetly swelling lips a lit- 
 tle trembling, as though they kissed their neigh- 
 bor Death ; in her cheeks the whiteness striving 
 by little and little to get upon the rosiness of 
 them ; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, dis- 
 playing the wound which with most dainty blood 
 labored to drown his own beauties; so as here 
 was a river of purest red, there an island of per- 
 fectest white," etc. 
 
 The Arcadia, like Euphues, was a lady's book. 
 It was the favorite court romance of its day, but 
 it surfeits a modern reader with its sweetness, and 
 confuses him with its tangle of adventures. The 
 lady for whom it was written was the mother of 
 that William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to whom 
 Shakspere's sonnets are thought to have been
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 81 
 
 dedicated. And she was the subject of Ben 
 Jonson's famous epitaph. 
 
 41 Underneath this sable herse 
 Lies the subject of all verse, 
 Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother ; 
 Death, ere thou hast slain another 
 Learn'd and fair and good as she, 
 Time shall throw a dart at thee." 
 
 Sidney's Defense of Poesy, composed in 1581, 
 but not printed till 1595, was written in manlier 
 English than ihe Arcadia, and is one of the very 
 few books of criticism belonging to a creative and 
 uncritical time. He was also the author of a 
 series of love sonnets, Astropkel and Stella, in 
 which he paid Platonic court to the Lady Penel- 
 ope Rich (with whom he was not at all in love), 
 according to the conventional usage of the amour- 
 ists. 
 
 Sidney died in 1586, from a wound received in 
 a cavalry charge at Zutphen, where he was an 
 officer in the English contingent, sent to help the 
 Dutch against Spain. The story has often been 
 told of his giving his cup of water to a wounded 
 soldier with the words, " Thy necessity is yet 
 greater than mine." Sidney was England's dar- 
 ling, and there was hardly a poet in the land from 
 whom his death did not obtain " the meed of some 
 melodious tear." Spenser's Ruins of Time were 
 among the number of these funeral songs ; but 
 the best of them all was by one Matthew Royden, 
 
 concerning whom little is known. 
 6
 
 82 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Another typical Englishman of Elisabeth's reign 
 was Walter Raleigh, who was even more versatile 
 than Sidney, and more representative of the rest- 
 less spirit of romantic adventure, mixed with cool, 
 practical enterprise that marked the times. He 
 fought against the Queen's enemies by land and 
 sea in many quarters of the globe; in the Nether- 
 lands and in Ireland against Spain, with the 
 Huguenot Army against the League in France. 
 Raleigh was from Devonshire, the great nursery 
 of English seamen. He was half-brother to the 
 famous navigator, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and 
 cousin to another great captain, Sir Richard 
 Grenville. He sailed with Gilbert on one of his 
 voyages against the Spanish treasure fleet, and in 
 1591 he published a report of the fight, near the 
 Azores, between Grenville's ship, the Revenge, 
 and fifteen great ships of Spain, an action, said 
 Francis Bacon, " memorable even beyond credit, 
 and to the height of some heroical fable." 
 Raleigh was active in raising a fleet against the 
 Spanish Armada of 1588. He was present in. 
 
 1596 at the brilliant action in which the Earl of 
 Essex " singed the Spanish king's beard," in the 
 harbor of Cadiz. The year before he had sailed 
 to Guiana, in search of the fabled El Dorado, de- 
 stroying on the way the Spanish town of San Jose, 
 in the West Indies ; and on his return he pub- 
 lished his Discovery of the Empire of Guiana. In 
 
 1597 he captured the town of Fayal, in the 
 Azores. He took a prominent part in colonizing
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 83 
 
 Virginia, and he introduced tobacco and the potato 
 plant into Europe. 
 
 America was still a land of wonder and ro- 
 mance, full of rumors, nightmares, and .enchant- 
 ments. In 1580, when Francis Drake, "the 
 Devonshire Skipper," had dropped anchor in Ply- 
 mouth harbor, after his voyage around the world, 
 the enthusiasm of England had been mightily 
 stirred. These narratives of Raleigh, and the 
 similar accounts of the exploits of the bold sail- 
 ors, Davis, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and 
 Drake; but especially the great cyclopedia of 
 nautical travel, published by Richard Hakluyt, in 
 1589, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Dis- 
 coveries made by the English Nation, worked power- 
 fully on the imaginations of the poets. We see 
 the influence of this literature of travel in the 
 Tempest, written undoubtedly after Shakspere had 
 been reading the narrative of Sir .George Somers's 
 shipwreck on the Bermudas or "Isles of Devils." 
 
 Raleigh was not in favor with Elizabeth's suc- 
 cessor, James I. He was sentenced, to death on 
 a trumped-up charge of high treason. The sen- 
 tence hung over him until 1618, when it was re- 
 vived against him and he was beheaded. Mean- 
 while,, during his twelve years' imprisonment in 
 the Tower, he had written his magnum opus, the 
 History of the World. This is not a history, in the 
 modern sense, but a series of learned dissertations 
 on law, government, theology, magic, war, etc. 
 A chapter with such a caption as the following
 
 84 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 would hardly be found in a universal history now- 
 adays : " Of their opinion which make Paradise 
 as high as the moon ; and of others which make 
 it higher than the middle region of the^iir." The 
 preface and conclusion are noble examples of 
 Elisabethan prose, and the book ends with an oft- 
 quoted apostrophe to Death. " O eloquent, just: 
 and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, 
 thou has persuaded ; what none hath dared, thou 
 hast done ; and whom all the world hath flattered, 
 thou only hast cast out of the world and despised ; 
 thou hast drawn together all the far-fetched great- 
 ness, all the pride, cruelty, and ambition of man, 
 and covered it all over with these two narrow 
 words, hicjacet" 
 
 Although so busy a man, Raleigh found time to 
 be a poet. Spenser calls him " the summer's 
 night ingale,"and George Puttenham, in his Art of 
 English Poesy (1589), finds his "vein most lofty, 
 insolent, and passionate." Puttenham used in- 
 solent in its old sense, uncommon ; but this descrip- 
 tion is hardly less true, if we accept the word in 
 its modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable 
 verses, The Lie, are a challenge tq the world, in- 
 spired by indignant pride and the weariness of 
 life the saeva indignatio of Swift. The same 
 grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion 
 marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage. It is re- 
 markable how many of the verses among his few 
 poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by 
 tradition to have been "made by Sir Walter
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 85 
 
 Raleigh the night before he was beheaded." Of 
 one such poem the assertion is probably true, 
 namely, the lines " found in his Bible in the gate- 
 house at Westminster." 
 
 ' Even such is Time, that takes in trust, 
 Our youth, our joys, our all we have, 
 
 And pays as but with earth and dust ; 
 Who in the dark and silent grave, 
 
 When we have wandered all our ways, 
 
 Shuts up the story of our days ; 
 
 But from this earth, this grave, this dust, 
 
 My God shall raise me up, I trust ! " 
 
 The strictly literary prose of the Elisabethan 
 period bore a small proportion to the verse. 
 Many entire departments of prose literature were 
 as yet undeveloped. Fiction was represented 
 outside of the Arcadia and Euphues already men- 
 tioned chiefly by tales translated or imitated 
 from Italian novelle. George Turberville's Trag- 
 ical Tales (1566) was a collection of such stories, 
 and William Paynter's Palace of Pleasure (1576- 
 15 7 7) 'a similar collection from Boccaccio's De- 
 cameron and the novels of Bandello. These trans- 
 lations are mainly of interest, as having furnished 
 plots to the English dramatists. Lodge's Rosalind 
 and Robert Greene's Pandosto, the sources respect- 
 ively of Shakspere's As You Like It and Win- 
 ter's Tate, are short pastoral romances, not with- 
 out prettiness in their artificial way. The satirical 
 pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against 
 " Martin Marprelate," an smonymous writer, oi
 
 86 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 company of writers, who attacked the bishops, are 
 not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fan- 
 tastic whimsicalities, and so bound up with per- 
 sonal quarrels, that oblivion has covered them. The 
 most noteworthy of them were Nash's Piers Penni- 
 less's Supplication to the Devil, Lyly's Pap with a 
 Hatchet, and Greene's Groats Worth of Wit. Of 
 books which were not so much literature as the ma- 
 terial of literature, mention may be made of the 
 Chronicle of England, compiled by Ralph Holinshed 
 in 1577. This was Shakspere's English history, and 
 its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakspere 
 in his representation of Richard III. and other 
 characters in his historical plays. In his Roman 
 tragedies Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas 
 North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 
 1579 from the French version of Jacques Amyot. 
 
 Of books belonging to other departments than 
 pure literature, the most important was Richard 
 Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, the first four books 
 of which appeared in 1594. This was a work on 
 the philosophy of law and a defense, as against 
 the Presbyterians, of the government of the En- 
 glish Church by bishops. No work of equal 
 dignity and scope had yet been published in En- 
 glish prose. It was written in sonorous, stately, 
 and somewhat involved periods, in a Latin rather 
 than an English idiom, and it influenced strongly 
 the diction of later writers, such as Milton and Sir 
 Thomas Browne. Had the Ecclesiastical Polity 
 been written one hundred, or perhaps even fifty,
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 87 
 
 years earlier, it would doubtless have been written 
 in Latin. 
 
 The life of Francis Bacon, " the father of in- 
 ductive philosophy," as he has been called bet- 
 ter, the founder of inductive logic belongs to En- 
 glish history, and the bulk of his writings, in Latin 
 and English, to the history of English philos- 
 ophy. But his volume of Essays was a contribution 
 to general literature. In their completed form 
 they belong to the year 1625, but the first edition 
 was printed in 1597 and contained only ten short 
 essays, each of them rather a string of pregnant 
 maxims the text for an essay than that de- 
 veloped treatment of a subject which we now un- 
 derstand by the word essay. They were, said 
 their author, " as grains of salt that will rather 
 give you an appetite than offend you with satiety." 
 They were the first essays so-called in the lan- 
 guage. " The word," said Bacon, " is late, but the 
 thing is ancient." The word he took from the 
 French essais of Montaigne, the first two books 
 of which had been published in 1592. Bacon 
 testified that his essays were the most popular 
 of his writings because they " came home to 
 men's business and bosoms." Their alternate title 
 explains their character : Counsels Civil and 
 Moral, that is, pieces of advice touching the 
 conduct of life, " of a nature whereof men shall 
 find much in experience, little in books." The 
 essays contain the quintessence of Bacon's prac- 
 tical wisdom, his wide knowledge of the world of
 
 88 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 men. The truth and depth of his sayings, and 
 the extent of ground which they cover, as well as 
 the weighty compactness of his style, have given 
 many of them the currency of proverbs. " Re- 
 venge is a kind of wild justice." " He that hath 
 wife and children hath given hostages to fortune." 
 " There is no excellent beauty that hath not some 
 strangeness in the proportion." Bacon's reason 
 was illuminated by a powerful imagination, and his 
 noble English rises now and then, as in his essay 
 On Death, into eloquence the eloquence of pure 
 thought, touched gravely and afar off by emotion. 
 In general, the atmosphere of his intellect is that 
 lumen siccum which he loved to commend, " not 
 drenched or bloodied by the affections." Dr. 
 Johnson said that the wine of Bacon's writings 
 was a dry wine. 
 
 A popular class of books in the iyth century 
 were " characters " or " witty descriptions of the 
 properties of sundry persons," such as the Good 
 Schoolmaster, the Clown, the Country Magistrate ; 
 much as in some modern Heads of the People^ 
 where Douglas Jerrold or Leigh Hunt sketches 
 the Medical Student, the Monthly Nurse, etc. 
 A still more modern instance of the kind is 
 George Eliot's Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 
 which derives its title from the Greek philosopher, 
 Theophrastus, whose character-sketches were the 
 original models of this kind of literature. The 
 most popular character-book in Europe in the 
 1 7th century was La Bruyere's Caracftres. But
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 89 
 
 this was not published till 1588. In England the 
 fashion had been set in 1614, by the Characters of 
 Sir Thomas Overbury, who died by poison the 
 year before his book was printed. One of Over- 
 bury's sketches the Fair and Happy Milk- 
 maid is justly celebrated for its old-world 
 sweetness and quaintness. " Her breath is her 
 own, which scents all the year long of June, like a 
 new-made hay-cock. She makes her hand hard 
 with labor, and her heart soft with pity; and 
 when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her 
 merry wheel, she sings defiance to the giddy wheel 
 of fortune. She bestows her year's wages at next 
 fair, and, in choosing her garments, counts no 
 bravery in the world like decency. The garden 
 and bee-hive are all her physic and surgery, and 
 she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone 
 and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no man- 
 ner of ill, because she means none; yet to say 
 truth, she is never alone, but is still accompanied 
 with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but 
 short ones. Thus lives she, and all her care is 
 she may die in the spring-time, to have store of 
 flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet." 
 
 England was still merry England in the times 
 of good Queen Bess, and rang with old songs, 
 such as kept this milkmaid company; songs, said 
 Bishop Joseph Hall, which were " sung to the 
 wheel and sung unto the pail." Shakspere loved 
 their simple minstrelsy; he put some of them into 
 tne mouth of Ophelia, and scattered snatches of
 
 90 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 them through his plays, and wrote others like them 
 himself : 
 
 " Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song, 
 
 That old and antique song we heard la^t night, 
 
 Methinks it did relieve my passion much, 
 
 More than light airs and recollected terms 
 
 Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times. 
 
 Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain. 
 
 The knitters and the spinners in the sun 
 
 And the free maids that weave their threads with bones 
 
 Do use to chant it ; it is silly sooth 
 
 And dallies with the innocence of love 
 
 Like the old age." 
 
 Many of these songs, so natural, fresh, and spon- 
 taneous, together with sonnets and other more 
 elaborate forms of lyrical verse, were printed in 
 miscellanies, such as the Passionate Pilgrim, En- 
 gland's Helicon, and Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. 
 Some were anonymous, or were by poets of whom 
 little more is known than their names. Others 
 were by well-known writers, and others, again, were 
 strewn through the plays of Lyly, Shakspere, Jon- 
 son, Beaumont, Fletcher, and other dramatists. 
 Series of love sonnets, like Spenser's Amoretti and 
 Sidney's Astrophd and Stella, were written by 
 Shakspere, Daniel, Drayton, Drummond, Con- 
 stable, Watson, and others, all dedicated to some 
 mistress real or imaginary. Pastorals, too, were 
 written in great number, such as William Browne's 
 Britannia's Pastorals and Shephera's Pipe (1613 
 1616) and Marlowe's charmingly rococo little idyl,
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 91 
 
 The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, which Shaks- 
 pere quoted in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and 
 to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a reply. 
 There were love stories in verse, like Arthur 
 Brooke's Romeo and Juliet (the source of Shaks- 
 pere's tragedy), Marlowe's fragment, Hero and 
 Leander, and Shakspere's Venus and Adonis, and 
 Rape of Lucrece, the first of these on an Italian 
 and the other three on classical subjects, though 
 handled in any thing but a classical manner. 
 Wordsworth said finely of Shakspere, that he 
 " could not have written an epic : he would have 
 died of a plethora of thought." Shakspere's two 
 narrative poems, indeed, are by no means models 
 of their kind. The current of the story is choked 
 at every turn, though it be with golden sand. It 
 is significant of his dramatic habit of mind that 
 dialogue and^oliloquy usurp the place of narration, 
 and that, in the Rape of Lucrece especially, the 
 poet lingers over the analysis of motives and feel- 
 ings, instead of hastening on with the action, as 
 Chaucer, or any born story-teller, would have 
 done. 
 
 In Marlowe's poem there is the same spend- 
 thrift fancy, although not the same subtlety. In the 
 first two divisions of the poem the story does, in 
 some sort, get forward ; but in the continuation, by 
 George Chapman (who wrote the last four " ses- 
 tiads "), the path is utterly lost, " with woodbine 
 and the gadding vine o'ergrown." 
 
 One is reminded that modern poetry, if it has
 
 92 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 lost in richness, has gained in directness, when one 
 compares any passage in Marlowe and Chapman's 
 Hero and Leander with Byron's ringing lines : 
 
 " The wind is high on Helle's wave, 
 As on that night of stormy water, 
 When Love, who sent, forgot to save 
 The young, the beautiful, the brave, 
 The lonely hope of Sestos' daughter." 
 
 Marlowe's continuator, Chapman, wrote a number 
 of plays, but he is best remembered by his royal 
 translation of Homer, issued in parts from 1598- 
 1615. This was not so much a literal translation 
 of the Greek, as a great Elisabethan poem, inspired 
 by Homer. It has Homer's fire, but not his sim- 
 plicity; the energy -of Chapman's fancy kindling 
 him to run beyond his text into all manner of 
 figures and conceits. It was written, as has been 
 said, as Homer would have written if he had been 
 an Englishman of Chapman's time. Certainly 
 all later versions Pope's and Cowper's and Lord 
 Derby's and Bryant's seem pale against the 
 glowing exuberance of Chapman's English. His 
 verse was not the heroic line of ten syllables, 
 chosen by most of the standard translators, but the 
 long fourteen-syllabled measure, which degenerates 
 easily into sing-song in the hands of a feeble 
 metrist. In Chapman it is often harsh, but sel- 
 dom tame, and in many passages it reproduces 
 wonderfully the ocean-like roll of Homer's hex- 
 ameters.
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 93 
 
 " From his bright helm and shield did bum a most unwearied 
 
 fire, 
 Like rich Autumnus' golden lamp, whose brightness men 
 
 admire, 
 
 Past all the other host of stars when, with his cheerful face, 
 Fresh washed in lofty ocean waves, he doth the sky enchase." 
 
 Keats's fine ode, On First Looking into Chapman s 
 Homer, is well-known. Fairfax's version of Tas- 
 so's Jerusalem Delivered (1600) is one of the best 
 metrical translations in the language. 
 
 The national pride in the achievements of En- 
 glishmen, by land and sea, found expression, not 
 only in prose chronicles and in books, like Stow's 
 Survey of London, and Harrison's Description of 
 England (prefixed to Holinshed's Chronicle}, but 
 in long historical and descriptive poems, like Will- 
 iam Warner's Albion's England, 1586; Samuel 
 Daniel's History of the Civil Wars, 1595-1602; 
 Michael Drayton's Baron's Wars, 1596, En- 
 gland's Heroical Epistles, 1598, and Polyolbion, 
 1613. The very plan of these works was fatal to 
 their success. It is not easy to digest history and 
 geography into poetry. Drayton was the most 
 considerable poet of the three, but his Polyolbion 
 was nothing more than " a gazeteer in rime," a 
 topographical survey of England and Wales, with 
 tedious personifications of rivers, mountains, and 
 valleys, in thirty books and nearly one hundred 
 thousand lines. It was Drayton who said of Mar- 
 lowe, that he " had in him those brave translunary 
 things that the first poets had ; " and there are brave
 
 94 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 things in Drayton, but they are -only occasional 
 passages, oases among dreary wastes of sand. His 
 Agincourt is a spirited war-song, and his Nymph- 
 idia ; or, Court of Faery, is not unworthy of com- 
 parison with Drake's Culprit Fay, and is interest- 
 ing as bringing in Oberon and Robin Goodfellow, 
 and the popular fairy lore of Shakspere's Midsum- 
 mer Night's Dream. 
 
 The " well-languaged Daniel," of whom Ben 
 Jonson said that he was " a good, honest man, but 
 no poet," wrote, however, one fine meditative 
 piece, his Epistle to the Countess of Cumberland, a 
 sermon apparently on the text of the Roman poet 
 Lucretius's famous passage in praise of philosophy, 
 
 " Suave mari magno, turbantibus aequora vends," etc. 
 
 But the Elisabethan genius found its fullest and 
 truest expression in the drama. It is a common 
 phenomenon in the history of literature that some 
 old literary form or mold will run along for cent- 
 uries without having any thing poured into it 
 worth keeping, until the moment comes when 
 the genius of the time seizes it and makes it the 
 vehicle of immortal thought and passion. Such 
 was in England the fortune of the stage play. At 
 a time when Chaucer was writing character- 
 sketches that were really dramatic, the formal 
 drama consisted of rude miracle plays that had no 
 literary quality whatever. These were taken from 
 the Bible and acted at first by the priests as illus- 
 trations of Scripture history and additions to the
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 95 
 
 church service on feasts and saints' days. After- 
 ward the town guilds, or incorporated trades, took 
 hold of them and produced them annually on 
 scaffolds in the open air. In some English cities, 
 as Coventry and Chester, they continued to be 
 performed almost to the close of the i6th century. 
 And in the celebrated Passion Play, at Oberam- 
 mergau, in Bavaria, we have an instance of a 
 miracle play that has survived to our own day. 
 These were followed by the moral plays, in which 
 allegorical characters, such as Clergy, Lusty Ju- 
 ventus, Riches, Folly, and Good Demeanaunce, 
 were the persons of the drama. The comic char- 
 acter in the miracle plays had been the Devil, and 
 he was retained in some of the moralities side by 
 side with the abstract vice, who became the clown 
 or fool of Shaksperian comedy. The " formal 
 Vice, Iniquity," as Shakspere calls him, had it for 
 his business to belabor the roaring Devil with his 
 wooden sword 
 
 ..." with his dagger of lath 
 
 In his rage and his wrath 
 
 Cries ' Aha ! ' to the Devil, 
 
 ' Pare your nails, Goodman Evil ! ' " 
 
 He survives also in the harlequin of the panto- 
 mimes, and in Mr. Punch, of the puppet shows, 
 who kills the Devil and carries him off on his 
 back, when the latter is sent to fetch him to hell 
 for his crimes. 
 
 Masques and interludes the latter a species of
 
 96 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 short farce were popular at the Court of Henry 
 VIII. Elisabeth was often entertained at the 
 universities or at the inns of court with Latin 
 plays, or with translations from Seneca, Euripides, 
 and Ariosto. Original comedies and tragedies be- 
 gan to be written, modeled upon Terence, and 
 Seneca, and chronicle histories founded on the 
 annals of English kings. There was a Master of 
 the Revels at court, whose duty it was to select 
 plays to be performed before the queen, and these 
 were acted by the children of the Royal Chapel, 
 or by the choir boys of St. Paul's Cathedral. 
 These early plays are of interest to students of 
 the history of the drama, and throw much light 
 upon the construction of later plays, like Shaks- 
 pere's; but they are rude and inartistic, and with- 
 out any literary quality. 
 
 There were also private companies of actors 
 maintained by wealthy noblemen, like the Earl of 
 Leicester, and bands of strolling players, who acted 
 in inn-yards and bear-gardens. It was not until 
 stationary theaters were built and stock companies 
 of actors regularly licensed and established, that 
 any plays were produced which deserve the name of 
 literature. In 1576 the first play-house was built 
 in London. This was the Black Friars, which was 
 located within the liberties of the dissolved mon- 
 astery of the Black Friars, in order to be outside 
 of the jurisdiction of the Mayor and Corporation, 
 who were Puritan, and determined in their oppo- 
 sition to the stage. For the same reason the
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 97 
 
 Tfieater and the Curtain were built in the same 
 year, outside the city walls in Shoreditch. Later 
 the Rose, the Globe, and the Swan, were erected 
 on the Bankside, across the Thames, and play- 
 goers resorting to them were accustomed to " take 
 boat." 
 
 These early theaters were of the rudest con- 
 struction. The six-penny spectators, or " ground- 
 lings," stood in the yard, or pit, which had neither 
 floor nor roof. The shilling spectators sat on the 
 stage, where they were accommodated with stools 
 and tobacco pipes, and whence they chaffed the 
 actors or the " opposed rascality " in the yard. 
 There was no scenery, and the female parts were 
 taken by boys. Plays were acted in the after- 
 noon. A placard, with the letters " Venice," or 
 " Rome," or whatever, indicated the place of the 
 action. With such rude appliances must Shaks- 
 pere bring before his audience the midnight bat- 
 tlements of Elsinore and the moonlit garden of 
 the Capulets. The dramatists had to throw them- 
 selves upon the imagination of their public, and it 
 says much for the imaginative temper of the pub- 
 lic of that day, that it responded to the appeal. 
 It suffered the poet to transport it over wide in- 
 tervals of space and time, and " with aid of some 
 few foot and half-foot words, fight over York 
 and Lancaster's long jars." Pedantry undertook, 
 even at the very beginnings of the Elisabethan 
 drama, to shackle it with the so-called rules of 
 Aristotle, or classical unities of time and place,
 
 98 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 to make it keep violent action off the stage and 
 comedy distinct from tragedy. But the play- 
 wrights appealed from the critics to the truer 
 sympathies of the audience, and they decided for 
 freedom and action, rather than restraint and 
 recitation. Hence our national drama is of 
 Shakspere, and not of Racine. By 1603 there 
 were twelve play-houses in London in full blast, 
 although the city then numbered only one hundred 
 and fifty thousand inhabitants. 
 
 Fresh plays were produced every year. The 
 theater was more to the Englishman of that 
 time than it has ever been before or since. It 
 was his club, his novel, his newspaper all in one. 
 No great drama has ever flourished apart from 
 a living stage, and it was fortunate that the 
 Elisabethan dramatists were, almost all of them, 
 actors and familiar with stage effect. Even the 
 few exceptions, like Beaumont and Fletcher, who 
 were young men of good birth and fortune, and 
 not dependent on their pens, were probably in- 
 timate with the actors, lived in a theatrical atmos- 
 phere, and knew practically how plays should be 
 put on. 
 
 It had now become possible to earn a livelihood 
 as an actor and playwright. Richard Burbage 
 and Edward Alleyn, the leading actors of their 
 generation, made large fortunes. Shakspere him- 
 self made enough from his share in the profits of 
 the Globe to retire with a competence, some seven 
 years before his death, and purchase a handsome
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 
 
 99 
 
 property in his native Stratford. Accordingly, 
 shortly after 1580, a number of men of real talent 
 began to write for the stage "as a career. These 
 were young graduates of the universities, Mar- 
 lowe, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and 
 others, who came up to town and led a Bohemian 
 life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were 
 wild and dissipated, and ended in wretchedness. 
 Peele died of a disease brought on by his evil 
 courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a 
 surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring; and 
 Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl. 
 
 The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays from 
 1584 to 1601. They were written for court en- 
 tertainments, in prose and mostly on mythological 
 subjects. They have little dramatic power, but 
 the dialogue is brisk and vivacious, and there are 
 several pretty songs in them. All the characters 
 talk Euphuism. The best of these was Alexander 
 and Campaspe, the plot of which is briefly as 
 follows. Alexander has fallen in love with his 
 beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the 
 artist Apelles to paint her portrait. During the 
 sittings, Apelles becomes enamored of his sub- 
 ject and declares his passion, which is returned. 
 Alexander discovers their secret, .but magnani- 
 mously forgives the treason and joins the lovers' 
 hands. The situation is a good one, and capable 
 of strong treatment in the hands of a real drama- 
 tist. But Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of 
 the action and, in place of passionate scenes, gives
 
 TOO ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 us clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a 
 light interchange of question and answer, full of 
 conceits, repartees, and double meanings. For ex- 
 ample: 
 
 " Apel. Whom do you love best in the. world ? 
 
 " Camp. He that made me last in the world. 
 
 " Apel. That was a God. 
 
 " Camp. I had thought it had been a man," etc. 
 
 Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his in- 
 troduction of an easy and sparkling prose as the 
 language of high comedy, and Shakspere's in- 
 debtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such 
 passages as the wit combats between Benedict and 
 Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, greatly su- 
 perior as they are to any thing of the kind in 
 Lyly. 
 
 The most important of the dramatists, who were 
 Shakspere's forerunners, or early contemporaries, 
 was Christopher or as he was familiarly called 
 Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shaks- 
 pere (1564), he died in 1593, at which date his 
 great successor is thought to have written no orig- 
 inal plays, except the Comedy of Errors and Love's 
 Labour's Lost. Marlowe first popularized blank 
 verse as the language of tragedy in his Tam- 
 burlaine, written before 1587, and in subsequent 
 plays he brought it to a degree of strength and 
 flexibility which left little for Shakspere to do but 
 to take it as he found it. Tamburlaine was a 
 crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bom- 
 bast, but with passages here and there of splendid
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 101 
 
 declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, " Mar- 
 lowe's mighty line." Jonson, however, ridiculed, 
 in his Discoveries, the " scenical strutting and 
 furious vociferation " of Marlowe's hero; and 
 Shakspere put a quotation from Tamburlaine in- 
 to the mouth of his ranting Pistol. Marlowe's Ed- 
 ward II. was the most regularly constructed and 
 evenly written of his plays. It was the best his- 
 torical drama on the stage before Shakspere, and 
 not undeserving of the comparison which it has 
 provoked with the latter's Richard II. But the 
 most interesting of Marlowe's plays, to a modern 
 reader, is the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. 
 The subject is the same as in Goethe's Faust, and 
 Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it 
 as greatly planned. The opening of Marlowe's 
 Faustus is very similiar to Goethe's. His hero, 
 wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a 
 mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of 
 life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a few 
 years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of 
 the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use 
 which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power, 
 wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerde- 
 main; but of this Marlowe was probably uncon- 
 scious. The love story of Margaret, which is the 
 central point of Goethe's drama, is entirely wanting 
 in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of 
 Goethe's Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of 
 the supernatural is materialistic and downright, as 
 befitted an age which believed in witchcraft. The
 
 io2 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 greatest part of the English Faustus is the last 
 scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense 
 with which the magician awaits the stroke of the 
 clock that signals his doom are powerfully drawn. 
 
 " lente, lente cUrrile, noctis equi! 
 
 The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike. . . 
 
 O soul, be changed into little water-drops, 
 
 And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found !" 
 
 Marlowe's genius v was passionate and irregular. 
 He had no humor, and the comic portions of 
 Faustus are scenes of low buffoonery. 
 
 George Peele's masterpiece, David and Bethsabe, 
 was also, in many respects, a fine play, though its 
 beauties were poetic rather than dramatic, consist- 
 ing not in the characterization which is feeble 
 but in the eastern luxuriance of the imagery. There 
 is one noble chorus 
 
 " O proud revolt of a presumptuous man," etc. 
 
 which reminds one of passages in Milton's Samson 
 Agonistes, and occasionally Peele rises to such 
 high Aeschylean audacities as this : 
 
 " At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt, 
 And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings, 
 Sit ever burning on his hateful bones." 
 
 Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His 
 plays are slovenly and careless in construction, and 
 he puts classical allusions into the mouths of milk- 
 maids and serving boys, with the grotesque ped- 
 antry and want of keeping common among the
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 103 
 
 playwrights of the early stage. He has, notwith- 
 standing, in his comedy parts, more natural light- 
 ness and grace than either Marlowe or Peele. In 
 his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and his Pinner 
 of Wakefield, there is a fresh breath, as of the 
 green English country, in such passages as the de- 
 scription of Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, 
 and the picture of the dairy in the keeper's lodge 
 at merry Fressingfield. 
 
 In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there 
 was a defect of art proper to the first comers in a 
 new literary departure. As compared not only 
 with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the 
 inestimable advantage of his example, their work 
 was full of imperfection, hesitation, experiment. 
 Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the equal 
 at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a 
 whole, are certainly not equal to theirs. They 
 wrote in a more developed state of the art. But 
 the work of this early school settled the shape 
 which the English drama was to take. It fixed the 
 practice and traditions of the national theater. It 
 decided that the drama was to deal with the whole 
 of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, 
 prose and verse, in the same play, without limita- 
 tions of time, place, and action. It decided that 
 the English play was to be an action, and not a 
 dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene 
 feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays 
 within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle, mur- 
 der, and sudden death. It established blank verse,
 
 io4 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 with occasional riming couplets at the close of a 
 scene or of a long speech, as the language of the 
 tragedy and high comedy parts, and prose as the 
 language of the low comedy and " business " parts. 
 And it introduced songs, a feature of which Shaks- 
 pere made exquisite use. Shakspere, indeed, like 
 all great poets, invented no new form of literature, 
 but touched old forms to finer purposes, refining 
 every thing, discarding nothing. Even the old 
 chorus and dumb show he employed, though 
 sparingly, as also the old jig, or comic song, which 
 the clown used to give between tne acts. 
 
 Of the life of William Shakspere, the greatest 
 dramatic poet of the world, so little is known that 
 it has been possible for ingenious persons to con- 
 struct a theory and support it with some show of 
 reason that the plays which pass under his name 
 were really written by Bacon or some one else. 
 There is no danger of this paradox ever making 
 serious headway, for the historical evidence that 
 Shakspere wrote Shakspere's plays, though not 
 overwhelming, is sufficient. But it is startling to 
 think that the greatest creative genius of his day, 
 or perhaps of all time, was suffered to slip out of 
 life so quietly that his title to his own works could 
 even be questioned only two hundred and fifty 
 years after the event. That the single authorship 
 of the Homeric poems should be doubted is not so 
 strange, for Homer is almost prehistoric. But 
 Shakspere was a modern Englishman, and at the 
 time of his death the first English colony in Amer-
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 105 
 
 ica was already nine years old. The important 
 known facts of his life can be told almost in a sen- 
 tence. He was born at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, 
 married when he was eighteen, went to London 
 probably in 1587, and became an actor, play writer, 
 and stockholder in the company which owned the 
 Blackfriars and the Globe Theaters. He seem- 
 ingly prospered in his calling and retired about 
 1609 to Stratford, where he lived in the house that 
 he had bought some years before, and where he 
 died in 1616. His Venus and Adonis was printed 
 in 1593, the Rape of Lucrece in 1594, and his Son- 
 nets in 1609. So far as is known, only eighteen 
 of the thirty-seven plays generally attributed to 
 Shakspere were printed during his life-time. These 
 were printed singly, in quarto shape, and were little 
 more than stage books, or librettos. The first col- 
 lected edition of his works was the so-called " First 
 Folio " of 1623, published by his fellow-actors, 
 Heming and Condell. No contemporary of Shaks- 
 pere thought it worth while to write a life of the 
 stage-player. There are a number of references to 
 him in the literature of the time; some generous, 
 as in Ben Jonson's well-known verses; others 
 singularly unappreciative, like Webster's mention 
 of "the right happy and copious industry of Mas- 
 ter Shakspere." But all these together do not be- 
 gin to amount to the sum of what was said about 
 Spenser, or Sidney, or Raleigh, or Ben Jonson. 
 There is, indeed, nothing to show that his con- 
 temporaries understood what a man they had
 
 106 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 among them in the person of " Our English Ter- 
 ence, Mr. Will Shakespeare ! " The age, for the 
 rest, was not a self-conscious one, nor greatly 
 given to review writing and literary biography. 
 Nor is there enough of self-revelation in Shaks- 
 pere's plays to aid the reader in forming a notion 
 of the man. He lost his identity completely in the 
 characters of his plays, as it is the duty of a dra- 
 matic writer to do. His sonnets have been ex- 
 amined carefully in search of internal evidence as 
 to his character and life, but the speculations 
 founded upon them have been more ingenious 
 than convincing. 
 
 Shakspere probably began by touching up old 
 plays. Henry VI. and the bloody tragedy of Titus 
 Andronicus, if Shakspere's at all, are doubtless 
 only his revision of pieces already on the stage. 
 The Taming of the Shrew seems to be an old play 
 worked over by Shakspere and some other drama- 
 tist, and traces of another hand are thought to be 
 visible in parts of Henry VIII., Pericles, and Timon 
 of Athens. Such partnerships were common among 
 the Elisabethan dramatists, the most illustrious ex- 
 ample being the long association of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher. The plays in the First Folio were divided 
 into histories, comedies, and tragedies, and it will 
 be convenient to notice them briefly in that order. 
 
 It was a stirring time when the young adventurer 
 came to London to try his fortune. Elisabeth had 
 finally thrown down the gage of battle to Catholic 
 Europe, by the execution of Mary Stuart, in 1587.
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 107 
 
 The following year saw the destruction of the co- 
 lossal Armada, which Spain had sent to revenge 
 Mary's death, and hard upon these events followed 
 the gallant exploits of Grenville, Essex, and 
 Raleigh. 
 
 That Shakspere shared the exultant patriotism of 
 the times, and the sense of their aloofness from the 
 continent of Europe, which was now born in the 
 breasts of Englishmen, is evident from many a 
 passage in his plays. 
 
 " This happy breed of men, this little world, 
 
 This precious stone set in a silver sea, 
 
 This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, 
 
 This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land, 
 
 England, bound in with the triumphant sea !" 
 
 His English histories are ten in number. Of 
 these King John and Henry VIII. are isolated 
 plays. The others form a consecutive series, in 
 the following order: Richard ///., the two parts 
 of Htnry IV., Henry V. y the three parts of Henry 
 VI., and Richard III. This series may be divided 
 into two, each forming a tetralogy, or group of 
 four plays. In the first the subject is the rise of 
 the house of Lancaster. But the power of the Red 
 Rose was founded in usurpation. In the second 
 group, accordingly, comes the Nemesis, in the civil 
 wars of the Roses, reaching their catastrophe in the 
 downfall of both Lancaster and York, and the 
 tyranny of Gloucester. The happy conclusion is 
 finally reached in the last play of the series, when 
 this new usurper is overthrown in turn, and Henry
 
 io8 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 VII., the first Tudor sovereign, ascends the throne, 
 and restores the Lancastrian inheritance, purified, 
 by bloody atonement, from the stain of Richard 
 II. 's murder. These eight plays are, as it were, the 
 eight acts of one great drama; and if such a thing 
 were possible, they should be represented on suc- 
 cessive nights, like the parts of a Greek trilogy. In 
 order of composition, the second group came first. 
 Henry VI. is strikingly inferior to the others. 
 Richard III. is a good acting play, and its popu- 
 larity has been sustained by a series of great tra- 
 gedians, who have taken the part of the king. But, 
 in a literary sense, it is unequal to Richard //., or 
 the two parts of Henry IV. The latter is unques- 
 tionably Shakspere's greatest historical tragedy, and 
 it contains his master-creation in the region of low 
 comedy, the immortal Falstaff. 
 
 The constructive art with which Shakspere 
 shaped history into drama is well seen in compar- 
 ing his King John with the two plays on that sub- 
 ject, which were already on the stage. These, like 
 all the other old " Chronicle histories," such as 
 Thomas Lord Cromwell and the Famous Victories 
 of Henry V., follow a merely chronological, or bio- 
 graphical, order, giving events loosely, as they oc- 
 curred, without any unity of effect, or any reference 
 to their bearing on the catastrophe. Shakspere's 
 order was logical. He compressed and selected, dis- 
 regarding the fact of history oftentimes, in favor of 
 the higher truth of fiction; bringing together a 
 crime and its punishment, as cause and effect, even
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 109 
 
 though they had no such relation in the chronicle, 
 and were separated, perhaps, by many years. 
 
 Shakspere's first two comedies were experiments. 
 Love's Labour's Lost was a play of manners, with 
 hardly any plot. It brought together a number of 
 humors, that is, oddities and affectations of vari- 
 ous sorts, and played them off on one another, as 
 Ben Jonson afterward did in his comedies of hu- 
 mor. Shakspere never returned to this type of 
 play, unless, perhaps, in the Taming of the Shrew. 
 There the story turned on a single " humor," Kath- 
 erine's bad temper, just as the story in Jonson's 
 Silent Woman turned on Morose's hatred of noise. 
 The Taming of the Shrew is, therefore, one of the 
 least Shaksperian of Shakspere's plays; a bourgeois, 
 domestic comedy, with a very narrow interest. It 
 belongs to the school of French comedy, like 
 Moliere's Malade Imagtnaire, not to the romantic 
 comedy of Shakspere and Fletcher. 
 
 The Comedy of Errors was an experiment of an 
 exactly opposite kind. It was a play, purely of" inci- 
 dent ; a farce, in which the main improbability 
 being granted, namely, that the twin Antipholi and 
 twin Dromios are so alike that they cannot be dis- 
 tinguished, all the amusing complications follow 
 naturally enough. There is little character-draw- 
 ing in the play. Any two pairs of twins, in the 
 same predicament, would be equally droll. The 
 fun lies in the situation. This was a comedy of 
 the Latin school, and resembled the Menaechmi of 
 Plautus. Shakspere never returned to this type of
 
 no ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 play, though there is an element of " errors " in 
 Midsummer Night's Dream. In the Two Gentle- 
 men of Verona he finally hit upon that species of 
 romantic comedy which he may be said to have 
 invented or created out of the scattered materials 
 at hand in the works of his predecessors. In this 
 play, as in the Merchant of Venice, Midsummer 
 Nighfs Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, As You 
 Like It, Twelfth Night, Winters Tale, All's Well 
 that Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and the 
 Tempest, the plan of construction is as follows. 
 There is one main intrigue carried out by the high 
 comedy characters, and a secondary intrigue, or 
 underplot, by the low comedy characters. The 
 former is by no means purely comic, but admits 
 the presentation of the noblest motives, the 
 strongest passions, and the most delicate graces of 
 romantic poetry. In some of the plays it has a 
 prevailing lightness and gayety, as in As You Like It 
 and Twelfth Night. In others, like Measure for 
 Measure, it is barely saved from becoming tragedy 
 by the happy close. Shylock certainly remains a 
 tragic figure, even to the end, and a play like Win- 
 ter's Tale, in which the painful situation is pro- 
 longed for years, is only technically a comedy. 
 Such dramas, indeed, were called, on many of the 
 title-pages of the time, " tragi-comedies." The 
 low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was 
 broadly cosmic. It was cunningly interwoven with 
 the texture of the play, sometimes loosely, and by 
 yay of variety or relief, as in the episode of Touch-
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. in 
 
 stone and Audrey, in As You Like It; sometimes 
 closely, as in the case of Dogberry and Verges, in 
 Much Ado about Nothing, where the blunder- 
 ing of the watch is made to bring about the de- 
 nouement of the main action. The Merry Wives 
 of Windsor is an exception to this plan of con- 
 struction. It is Shakspere's only play of contem- 
 porary, middle-class English life, and is written 
 almost throughout in prose. It is his only pure 
 comedy, except the Taming of the Shrew. 
 
 Shakspere did not abandon comedy when writing 
 tragedy, though he turned it to a new account. The 
 two species graded into one another. Thus Cym- 
 beline is, in its fortunate ending, really as much of 
 a comedy as Winter 's Tale to which its plot bears 
 a resemblance and is only technically a tragedy, 
 because it contains a violent death. In some of 
 the tragedies, as Macbeth and Julius Ccesar, the 
 comedy element is reduced to a minimum. But in 
 others, as Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet, it heightens 
 the tragic feeling by the irony of contrast Akin 
 to this is the use to which Shakspere put the old 
 Vice, or Clown, of the moralities. The Fool in 
 Lear, Touchstone in As You Like It, and Thersites 
 in Troilus and Cressida, are a sort of parody of the 
 function of the Greek chorus, commenting the ac- 
 tion of the drama with scraps of bitter, or half- 
 crazy, philosophy, and wonderful gleams of insight 
 into the depths of man's nature. 
 
 The earliest of Shakspere's tragedies, unless 
 Titus Andronicus be his, was, doubtless, Romeo and
 
 ii2 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Juliet, which is full of the passion and poetry of 
 youth and of first love. It contains a large pro- 
 portion of riming lines, which is usually a sign in 
 Shakspere of early work. He dropped rime more 
 and more in his later plays, and his blank verse 
 grew freer and more varied in its pauses and the 
 number of its feet. Romeo and Juliet is also unique, 
 among his tragedies, in this respect, that the catas- 
 trophe is brought about by a fatality, as in the 
 Greek drama. It was Shakspere's habit to work 
 out his tragic conclusions from within, through 
 character, rather than through external chances. 
 This is true of all the great tragedies of his middle 
 life, Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth, in every one 
 of which the catastrophe is involved in the charac- 
 ter and actions of the hero. This is so, in a special 
 sense, in Hamlet, the subtlest of all Shakspere's 
 plays, and if not his masterpiece, at any rate the 
 one which has most attracted and puzzled the 
 greatest minds. It is observable that in Shakspere's 
 comedies there is no one central figure, but that, in 
 passing into tragedy, he intensified and concen- 
 trated the attention upon a single character. This 
 difference is seen, even in the naming of the plays; 
 the tragedies always take their titles from their 
 heroes, the comedies never. 
 
 Somewhat later, probably, than the tragedies al- 
 ready mentioned, were the three Roman plays, 
 Julius Cizsar, Coriolanus, and Anthony and Cleo- 
 patra. It is characteristic of Shakspere that he 
 invented the plot of none of his plays, but took
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 113 
 
 material that he found at hand. In these Roman 
 tragedies, he followed Plutarch closely, and yet, 
 even in so doing, gave, if possible, a greater evi- 
 dence of real creative power than when he bor- 
 rowed a mere outline of a story from some Italian 
 novelist. It is most instructive to compare Julius 
 Casar with Ben Jonson's Catiline and Sejanus. 
 Jonson was careful not to go beyond his text. In 
 Catiline he translates almost literally the whole of 
 Cicero's first oration against Catiline. Sejanus is 
 a mosaic of passages, from Tacitus and Suetonius. 
 There is none of this dead learning in Shakspere's 
 play. Having grasped the conception of the char- 
 acters of Brutus, Cassius, and Mark Anthony, as 
 Plutarch gave them, he pushed them out into their 
 consequences in every word and act, so independ- 
 ently of his original, and yet so harmoniously with 
 it, that the reader knows that he is reading history, 
 and needs no further warrant for it than Shakspere's 
 own. Timon of Athens is the least agreeable and 
 most monotonous of Shakspere's undoubted trag- 
 edies, and Troilus and Cressida, said Coleridge, is 
 the hardest to characterize. The figures of the old 
 Homeric world fare but hardly under the glaring 
 light of modern standards of morality which Shaks- 
 pere turns upon them. Ajax becomes a stupid 
 bully, Ulysses a crafty politician, and swift-footed 
 Achilles a vain and sulky chief of faction. In los 
 ing their ideal remoteness, the heroes of the Iliad 
 lose their poetic quality, and the lover of Homer 
 
 experiences an unpleasant disenchantment. 
 8
 
 H4 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 It was customary in the i8th century to speak 
 of Shakspere as a rude though prodigious genius. 
 Even Milton could describe him as " warbling his 
 native wood-notes wild." But a truer criticism, 
 beginning in England with Coleridge, has shown 
 that he was also a profound artist. It is true that 
 he wrote for his audiences, and that his art is not 
 every-where and at all points perfect. But a great 
 artist will contrive, as Shakspere did, to reconcile 
 practical exigencies, like those of the public stage, 
 with the finer requirements of his art. Strained in- 
 terpretations have been put upon this or that item 
 in Shakspere's plays; and yet it is generally true 
 that some deeper reason can be assigned for his 
 method in a given case than that " the audience liked 
 puns," or, "the audience liked ghosts." Compare, 
 for example, his delicate management of the su- 
 pernatural with Marlowe's procedure in Faustus. 
 Shakspere's age believed in witches, elves, and ap- 
 paritions; and yet there is always something shad- 
 owy or allegorical in his use of such machinery. 
 The ghost in Hamlet is merely an embodied suspi- 
 cion. Banquo's wraith, which is invisible to all but 
 Macbeth, is the haunting of an evil conscience. 
 The witches in the same play are but the prompt- 
 ings of ambition, thrown into a human shape, so as 
 to become actors in the drama. In the same way, 
 the fairies in Midsummer Nighfs Dream are the 
 personified caprices of the lovers, and they are 
 unseen by the human characters, whose likes and 
 dislikes they control, save in the instance where
 
 THE AGE OF SIIAKSPERE. 115 
 
 Bottom is " translated " (that is, becomes mad) 
 and has sight of the invisible world. So in the 
 Tempest, Ariel is the spirit of the air and Caliban 
 of the earth, ministering, with more or less of un- 
 willingness, to man's necessities. 
 
 Shakspere is the most universal of writers. He 
 touches more men at more points than' Homer, or 
 Dante, or Goethe. The deepest wisdom, the sweet- 
 est poetry, the widest range of character, are com- 
 bined in his plays. He made the English language 
 an organ of expression unexcelled in the history of 
 literature. Yet he is not an English poet simply, 
 but a world-poet. Germany has made him her 
 own, and the Latin races, though at first hindered 
 in a true appreciation of him by the canons of clas- 
 sical taste, have at length learned to know him. 
 An ever-growing mass of Shaksperian literature, in 
 the way of comment and interpretation, critical, text- 
 ual, historical, or illustrative, testifies to the dura- 
 bility and growth of his fame. Above all, his plays 
 still keep, and probably always will keep, the stage. 
 It is common to speak of Shakspere and the other 
 Elisabethan dramatists as if they stood, in some 
 sense, on a level. But in truth there is an almost 
 measureless distance between him and all his con- 
 temporaries. The rest shared with* him in the 
 mighty influences of the age. Their plays are 
 touched here and there with the power and splen- 
 dor of which they were all joint heirs. But, as a 
 whole, they are obsolete. They live in books, but 
 not in the hearts and on the tongues of men. The
 
 n6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 most remarkable of the dramatists contemporary 
 with Shakspere was Ben Jonson, whose robust fig- 
 ure is in striking contrast with the other's gracious 
 impersonality. Jonson was nine years younger 
 than Shakspere. He was educated at Westminster 
 School, served as a soldier in the low countries, 
 became an actor in Henslowe's company, and was 
 twice imprisoned once for killing a fellow-actor in 
 a duel, and once for his part in the comedy of 
 Eastward Hoe, which gave offense to King James. 
 He lived down to the times of Charles I. (1635), and 
 became the acknowledged arbiter of English letters 
 and the center of convivial wit combats at the Mer- 
 maid, the Devil, and other famous London taverns. 
 
 " What things have we seen 
 
 Done at the Mermaid ; heard words that have been 
 So nimble and so full of subtle flame, 
 As if that every one from whom they came 
 Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest, 
 And had resolved to live a fool the rest 
 Of his dull life."* 
 
 The inscription on his tomb, in Westminster Abbey, 
 is simply 
 
 " O rare Ben Jonson! " 
 
 Jonson's comedies were modeled upon the vetus 
 com&dia of Aristophanes, which was satirical in pur- 
 pose, and they belonged to an entirely different 
 school from Shakspere's. They were classical and 
 not romantic, and were pure comedies, admitting 
 
 * Francis Beaumont. Letter to Ben Jonson.
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 117 
 
 
 
 no admixture of tragic motives. There is hardly 
 one lovely or beautiful character in the entire range 
 of his dramatic creations. They were comedies 
 not of character, in the high sense of the word, but 
 of manners or humors. His design was to lash the 
 follies and vices of the day, and his dramatis per- 
 sona consisted for the most part of gulls, impostors, 
 fops, cowards, swaggering braggarts, and " Pauls 
 men." In his first play, Every Man in his Humor 
 (acted in 1598), in Every Man Out of his Humor, 
 Bartholomew Fair, and indeed, in all of his com- 
 edies, his subject was the " spongy humors of the 
 time," that is, the fashionable affectations, the whims, 
 oddities, and eccentric developments of London 
 life. His procedure was to bring together a num- 
 ber of these fantastic humorists, to play them off 
 upon each other, involve them in all manner of 
 comical misadventures, and render them utterly ri- 
 diculous and contemptible. There was thus a per- 
 ishable element in his art, for manners change; and 
 however effective this exposure of contemporary 
 affectations may have been, before an audience of 
 Jonson's day, it is as hard for a modern reader to 
 detect his points as it will be for a reader two hun- 
 dred years hence to understand the satire upon the 
 aesthetic craze in such pieces of the present day, as 
 Patience or the Colonel. Nevertheless, a patient 
 reader, with the help of copious foot-notes, can grad- 
 ually put together for himself an image of that world 
 of obsolete humors in which Jonson's comedy 
 dwells, and can admire the dramatist's solid good
 
 n8 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 sense, his great learning, his skill in construction, 
 and the astonishing fertility of his invention. His 
 characters are not revealed from within, like Shaks- 
 pere's, but built up painfully from outside by a suc- 
 cession of minute, laborious particulars. The dif- 
 ference will be plainly manifest if such a character 
 as Slender, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, be com- 
 pared with any one of the inexhaustible variety of 
 idiots in Jonson's plays ; with Master Stephen, for 
 example, in Every Man in his Humor j or, if Fal- 
 staff be put side by side with Captain Bobadil, in 
 the same comedy, perhaps Jonson's masterpiece in 
 the way of comic caricature. Cynthia's Revels was 
 a satire on the courtiers and the Poetaster on Jon- 
 son's literary enemies. The Alchemist was an ex- 
 posure of quackery, and is one of his best comedies, 
 but somewhat overweighted with learning. Volpone 
 is the most powerful of all his dramas, but is a harsh 
 and disagreeable piece; and the state of society 
 which it depicts is too revolting for comedy. The 
 Silent Woman is, perhaps, the easiest of all Jonson's 
 
 plays for a modern reader to follow and appreciate. 
 There is a distinct plot to it, the situation is ex- 
 tremely ludicrous, and the emphasis is laid upon a 
 single humor or eccentricity, as in some of Moliere's 
 lighter comedies, like Le Malade Imaginaire, or Le 
 Medecin malgre lui. 
 
 In spite of his heaviness in drama, Jonson had a 
 light enough touch in lyric poetry. His songs have 
 not the careless sweetness of Shakspere's, but they 
 
 have a grace of their own. Such pieces as his
 
 THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE. 119 
 
 Love's Triumph, Hymn to Diana, The Noble Mind, 
 and the adaptation from Philostratus, 
 
 "Drink to me only with thine eyes," 
 
 and many others entitle their author to rank among 
 the first English lyrists. Some of these occur in. 
 his two- collections of miscellaneous verse, the For- 
 est and Underwoods; others in the numerous 
 masques which he composed. These were a spe- 
 cies of entertainment, very popular at the court of 
 James I., combining dialogue with music, intricate 
 dances, and costly scenery. Jonson left an unfin- 
 ished pastoral drama, the Sad Shepherd, which, 
 though not equal to Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, 
 contains passages of great beauty, one, especially, 
 descriptive of the shepherdess 
 
 " Earine, 
 
 Who had her very being and her name 
 With the first buds and breathings of the spring, 
 Born with the primrose and the violet 
 And earliest roses blown." 
 
 1. Ward's History of English Dramatic Lit- 
 erature. 
 
 2. Palgrave's Golden Treasury of Songs and 
 Lyrics. 
 
 3. The Courtly Poets from Raleigh to Mont- 
 rose. Edited by J. Hannah. 
 
 4. Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. (First and Sec- 
 ond Books.) 
 
 5. Bacon's Essays. Edited by W. Aldis Wright
 
 i2o ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 6. The Cambridge Shakspere. [Clark & Wright.] 
 
 7. Charles Lamb's Specimens of English Dra- 
 matic Poets. 
 
 8. Ben Jonson's Volpone and Silent Woman. 
 (Cunningham's or Gifford's Edition.)
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 121 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 
 
 1608-1674. 
 
 L * THE Elisabethan age proper closed with the 
 death of the queen, and the accession of James I., 
 in 1603, but the literature of the fifty years follow- 
 ing was quite as rich as that of the half-century 
 that had passed since she came to the throne, in 
 1557. The same qualities of thought and style 
 which had marked the writers of her reign, pro- 
 longed themselves in their successors, through the 
 reigns of the first two Stuart kings and the Com- 
 monwealth. Yet there was a change in spirit. 
 Literature is only one of the many forms in which 
 the national mind expresses itself. In periods 
 of political revolution, literature, leaving the se- 
 rene air of fine art, partakes the violent agitation 
 of the times. There were seeds of civil and relig- 
 ious discord in Elisabethan England. As between 
 the two parties in the Church there was a compro- 
 mise and a truce rather than a final settlement. 
 The Anglican doctrine was partly Calvinistic and 
 partly Arminian. The form of government was 
 Episcopal, but there was a large body of Presby- 
 terians in the Church who desired a change. In
 
 122 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the ritual and ceremofiies many " rags of poperty " 
 had been retained, which the extreme reformers 
 wished to tear away. But Elisabeth was a worldly- 
 minded woman, impatient of theological disputes. 
 Though circumstances had made her the champion 
 of Protestantism in Europe, she kept many Catholic 
 notions, disapproved, for example, of the marriage 
 of priests, and hated sermons. She was jealous of 
 her prerogative in the State, and in the Church she 
 enforced uniformity. The authors of the Martin 
 Marprelate pamphlets against the bishops, were 
 punished by death or imprisonment. While the 
 queen lived things were kept well together and En- 
 gland was at one in face of the common foe. Ad- 
 miral Howard, who commanded the English naval 
 forces against the Armada, was a Catholic. 
 
 But during the reigns of James I. (1603-1625) 
 and Charles I. (1625-1649) Puritanism grew strong- 
 er through repression. "England," says the his- 
 torian Green, "became the people of a book, and 
 that book the Bible." The power of the king was 
 used to impose the power of the bishops upon the 
 English and Scotch Churches until religious dis- 
 content became also political discontent, and 
 finally overthrew the throne. The writers of this 
 period divided more and more into two hostile 
 camps. On the side of Church and king was 
 the bulk of the learning and genius of the time. 
 But on the side of free religion and the Parliament 
 were the stern conviction, the fiery zeal, the ex- 
 alted imagination of English Puritanism. The-
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 123 
 
 spokesman of this movement was Milton, whose 
 great figure dominates the literary history of his 
 generation, as Shakspere's does of the generation 
 preceding. 
 
 The drama went on in the course marked out 
 for it by Shakspere's example, until the theaters 
 were closed by Parliament, in 1642. Of the Stuart 
 dramatists, the most important were Beaumont and 
 Fletcher, all of whose plays were produced during 
 the reign of James I. These were fifty-three in 
 number, but only thirteen of them were joint pro- 
 ductions. Francis Beaumont was twenty years 
 younger than Shakspere, and died a few years be- 
 fore him. He was the son of a judge of the Com- 
 mon Pleas. His collaborator, John Fletcher, a 
 son of the bishop of London, was five years older 
 than Beaumont, and survived him nine years. He 
 was much the more prolific of the two and wrote 
 alone some forty plays. Although the life of one 
 of these partners was conterminous with Shaks- 
 pere's, their works exhibit a later phase of the 
 dramatic art. The Stuart dramatists followed the 
 lead of Shakspere rather than of Ben Jonson. 
 Their plays, like the former's, belong to the ro- 
 mantic drama. They present a poetic and ideal- 
 ized version of life, deal with the highest passions 
 and the wildest buffoonery, and introduce a great 
 variety of those daring situations and incidents 
 which we agree to call romantic. But while Shaks- 
 pere seldom or never overstepped the modesty of 
 nature, his successors ran into every license. They
 
 124 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 sought to stimulate the jaded appetite of their 
 audience by exhibiting monstrosities of. character, 
 unnatural lusts, subtleties of crime, virtues and 
 vices both in excess. 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's plays are much easier 
 and more agreeable reading than Ben Jonson's. 
 Though often loose in their plots and without that 
 consistency in the development of their characters 
 which distinguished Jonson's more conscientious 
 workmanship, they are full of graceful dialogue 
 and beautiful poetry. Dryden said that after the 
 Restoration two of their plays were acted for one 
 of Shakspere's or Jonson's throughout the year, 
 and he added, that they " understood and imitated 
 the conversation of gentlemen much better, whose 
 wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repar- 
 tees no poet can ever paint as they have done." 
 Wild debauchery was certainly not the mark of a 
 gentleman in Shakspere, nor was it altogether so 
 in Beaumont and Fletcher. Their gentlemen are 
 gallant and passionate lovers, gay cavaliers, gen- 
 erous, courageous, courteous according to the 
 fashion of their times and sensitive on the point 
 of honor. They are far superior to the cold- 
 blooded rakes of Dryden and the Restoration 
 comedy. Still the manners and language in Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher's plays are extremely licentious, 
 and it is not hard to sympathize with the objec- 
 tions to the theater expressed by the Puritan 
 writer, William Prynne, who, after denouncing the 
 long hair of the cavaliers in his tract, The Unlove-
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 125 
 
 liness of Lovelocks, attacked the stage, in 1633, with 
 Histrio-mastix : the Player s Scourge ; an offense 
 for which he was fined, imprisoned, pilloried, and 
 had his ears cropped. Coleridge said that Shaks- 
 pere was coarse, but never gross. He had the 
 healthy coarseness of nature herself. But Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher's pages are corrupt. Even 
 their chaste women are immodest in language and 
 thought. They use not merely that frankness of 
 speech which was a fashion of the times, but 9 
 profusion of obscene imagery which could not pro- 
 ceed from a pure mind. Chastity with them is 
 father a bodily accident than a virtue of the heart, 
 says Coleridge. 
 
 Among the best of their light comedies are The 
 Chances, The Scornful Lady, The Spanish Curate, 
 and Rule a Wife and Have a Wife. But far 
 superior to these are their tragedies and tragi- 
 comedies, The Maias Tragedy, Philaster, A King 
 and No King all written jointly and Valen- 
 tinian and Thierry and Theodoret, written by 
 Fletcher alone, but perhaps, in part, sketched out 
 by Beaumont. The tragic masterpiece of Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher is The Maid's Tragedy, a pow- 
 erful but repulsive play, which sheds a singular 
 light not only upon its authors' dramatic methods, 
 but also upon the attitude toward royalty favored 
 by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, which 
 grew up under the Stuarts. The heroine, Evadne, 
 has been in secret a mistress of the king, who mar 
 ries her to Amintor, a gentleman of his court, be-
 
 126 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 cause, as she explains to her bridegroom, on the 
 
 wedding night, 
 
 " I must have one 
 
 To father children, and to bear the name 
 Of husband to me, that my sin may be 
 More honorable." 
 
 This scene is, perhaps, the most affecting and 
 impressive in the whole range of Beaumont and 
 Fletcher's drama. Yet when Evadne names the 
 king as her paramour, Amintor exclaims: 
 
 " O thou hast named a word that wipes away 
 All thoughts revengeful. In that sacred name 
 ' The king ' there lies a terror. What frail man 
 Dares lift his hand against it? Let the gods 
 Speak to him when they please ; till when, let us 
 Suffer and wait." 
 
 And the play ends with the words 
 
 " On lustful kings, 
 
 Unlooked-for sudden deaths from heaven are sent, 
 But cursed is he that is their instrument." 
 
 Aspatia, in this tragedy, is a good instance of 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's pathetic characters. She 
 is troth-plight wife to Amintor, and after he, by 
 the king's command, has forsaken her for Evadne, 
 she disguises herself as a man, provokes her un- 
 faithful lover to a duel, and dies under his sword, 
 blessing the hand that killed her. This is a com- 
 mon type in Beaumont and Fletcher, and was 
 drawn originally from Shakspere's Ophelia. All 
 their good women have the instinctive fidelity of 
 a dog, and a superhuman patience and devotion.
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 127 
 
 a " gentle forlornness " under wrongs, which is 
 painted with an almost feminine tenderness. In 
 Philaster, or Love Lies Bleeding, Euphrasia, con- 
 ceiving a hopeless passion for Philaster who is in 
 love with Arethusa puts on the dress of a page 
 and enters his service. He employs her to carry 
 messages to his lady-love, just as Viola, in Twelfth 
 Night, is sent by the Duke to Olivia. Philaster is 
 persuaded by slanderers that his page and his lady 
 have been unfaithful to him, and in his jealous 
 fury he wounds Euphrasia with his sword. After- 
 ward, convinced of the boy's fidelity, he asks for- 
 giveness, whereto Euphrasia replies, 
 
 " Alas, my lord, my life is not a thing 
 Worthy your noble thoughts. "Pis not a life, 
 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." 
 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's love-lorn maids wear the 
 willow very sweetly, but in all their piteous pas- 
 sages there is nothing equal to the natural pathos 
 the pathos which arises from the deep springs of 
 character of that one brief question and answer 
 in King Lear. 
 
 " Lear. So young and so untender ? 
 
 " Cordelia. So young, my lord, and true." 
 
 The disguise of a woman in man's apparel is a 
 common incident in the romantic drama ; and the 
 fact, that on the Elisabethan stage the female 
 parts were taken by boys, made the deception 
 easier. Viola's situation in Twelfth Night is pre- 
 cisely similiar to Euphrasia's, but there is a differ-
 
 ia8 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ence in the handling of the device which is char- 
 acteristic of a distinction between Shakspere's art 
 and that of his contemporaries. The audience in 
 Twelfth Night is taken into confidence and made 
 aware of Viola's real nature from the start, while 
 Euphrasia's incognito is preserved till the fifth act, 
 and then disclosed by an accident. This kind of 
 mystification and surprise was a trick below 
 Shakspere. In this instance, moreover, it involved 
 a departure from dramatic probability. Euphrasia 
 could, at any moment, by revealing her identity, 
 have averted the greatest sufferings and dangers 
 from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the 
 only motive for her keeping silence is represented 
 to have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her 
 position. Such strained and fantastic motives are 
 too often made the pivot of the action in Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher's tragi-comedies. Their char- 
 acters have not the depth and truth of Shakspere's, 
 nor are they drawn so sharply. One reads their 
 plays with pleasure and remembers here and there 
 a passage of fine poetry, or a noble or lovely trait. 
 But their characters, as wholes, leave a fading im- 
 pression. Who, even after a single reading or 
 representation, ever forgets Falstaff, or Shylock, or 
 King Lear? 
 
 The moral inferiority of Beaumont and Fletcher 
 is well seen in such a play as A King and No King, 
 Here Arbaces falls in love with his sister, and, after 
 a furious conflict in his own mind, finally suc- 
 cumbs to his guilty passion. He is rescued from
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 129 
 
 the consequences of his weakness by the dis- 
 covery that Panthea is not, in fact, his sister. But 
 this is to cut the knot and not to untie it. It 
 leaves the denouement to chance, and not to those 
 moral forces through which Shakspere always 
 wrought his conclusions. Arbaces has failed, and 
 the piece of luck which keeps his failure innocent 
 is rejected by every right-feeling spectator. In 
 one of John Ford's tragedies, the situation which 
 in A King and No King is only apparent, becomes 
 real, and incest is boldly made the subject of the 
 play. Ford pushed the morbid and unnatural in 
 character and passion into even wilder extremes 
 than Beaumont and Fletcher. His best play, the 
 Broken Heart, is a prolonged and unrelieved tort- 
 ure of the feelings. 
 
 Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess is the best En- 
 glish pastoral drama. Its choral songs are richly 
 and sweetly modulated, and the influence of the 
 whole poem upon Milton is very apparent in his 
 Comus. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, writ- 
 ten by Beaumont and Fletcher jointly, was the 
 first burlesque comedy in the language, and is ex- 
 cellent fooling. Beaumont and Fletcher's blank 
 verse is musical, but less masculine than Mar- 
 lowe's or Shakspere's, by reason of their excessive 
 use of extra syllables and feminine endings. 
 
 In John Webster the fondness for the abnormal 
 and sensational themes, which beset the Stuart 
 stage, showed itself in the exaggeration of the ter- 
 rible into the horrible. Fear, in Shakspere as in 
 9
 
 130 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the great murder scene in Macbeth is a pure pas- 
 sion; but in Webster it is mingled with some- 
 thing physically repulsive. Thus his Duchess of 
 Malfi is presented in the dark with a dead man's 
 hand, and is told that it is the hand of her mur- 
 dered husband. She is shown a dance of mad- 
 men and, " behind a traverse, the artificial figures of 
 her children, appearing as if dead." Treated in 
 this elaborate fashion, that "terror," which Aris- 
 totle said it was one of the objects of tragedy to 
 move, loses half its dignity. Webster's images 
 have the smell of the charnel house about them. 
 
 " She would not after the report keep fresh 
 As long as flowers on graves." 
 " We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves, 
 That, ruined, yield no echo, 
 
 O this gloomy world ! 
 In what a shadow or deep pit of darkness 
 Doth womanish and fearful mankind live ! " 
 
 Webster had an intense and somber genius. In 
 diction he was the most Shaksperian of the 
 Elisabethan dramatists, and there are sudden 
 gleams of beauty among his dark horrors, which 
 light up a whole scene with some abrupt touch of 
 feeling. 
 
 " Cover her face : mine eyes dazzle : she died young,*' 
 
 says the brother of the Duchess, when he has pro- 
 cured her murder and stands before the corpse. 
 Vittoria Corombona is described in the old edi- 
 tions as " a night-piece," and it should, indeed, be
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 131 
 
 acted by the shuddering light of torches, and with 
 the cry of the screech-owl to punctuate the speeches. 
 The scene of Webster's two best tragedies was 
 laid, like many of Ford's, Cyril Tourneur's, and 
 Beaumont and Fletcher's, in Italy the wicked 
 and splendid Italy of the Renaissance, which had 
 such a fascination for the Elisabethan imagina- 
 tion. It was to them the land of the Borgias and 
 the Cenci; of families of proud noble's, luxurious, 
 cultivated, but full of revenges and ferocious cun- 
 ning; subtle poisoners, who killed with a perfumed 
 glove or fan; parricides, atheists, committers of 
 unnamable crimes, and inventors of strange and 
 delicate varieties of sin. 
 
 But a very few have here been mentioned of the 
 great host of dramatists who kept the theaters busy 
 through the reigns of Elisabeth, James I., and 
 Charles I. The last of the race was James Shirley, 
 who died in 1666, and whose thirty-eight plays 
 were written during the reign of Charles I. and 
 the Commonwealth. 
 
 In the miscellaneous prose and poetry of this 
 period there is lacking the free, exulting, creative 
 impulse of the elder generation, but there is a so- 
 berer feeling and a certain scholarly choiceness 
 which commend themselves to readers of bookish 
 tastes. Even that quaintness of thought, which is 
 a mark of the Commonwealth writers, is not with- 
 out its attraction for a nice literary palate. Prose 
 became now of greater relative importance than 
 ever before. Almost every distinguished writer of
 
 132 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the time lent his pen to one or the other party in 
 the great theological and political controversy of 
 the time. There were famous theologians, like 
 Hales, Chillingworth, and Baxter; historians and 
 antiquaries, like Selden, Knolles, and Cotton; phi- 
 losophers, such as Hobbes, Lord Herbert of 
 Cherbury, and More, the Platonist; and writers in 
 natural science which now entered upon its mod- 
 ern, experimental phase, under the stimulus of 
 Bacon's writings among whom may be mentioned 
 Wallis, the mathematician; Boyle, the chemist, and 
 Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the 
 blood. These are outside of our subject, but in 
 the strictly literary prose of the time, the same 
 spirit of roused inquiry is manifest, and the same 
 disposition to a thorough and exhaustive treatment 
 of a subject which is proper to the scientific atti- 
 tude of mind. The line between true and false 
 science, however, had not yet been drawn. The 
 age was pedantic, and appealed too much to the 
 authority of antiquity. Hence we have such monu- 
 ments of perverse and curious erudition as Robert 
 Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621; and Sir 
 Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica,m Inqui- 
 ries into Vulgar and Common Errors, 1646. The 
 former of these was the work of an Oxford scholar, 
 an astrologer, who cast his own horoscope, and a 
 victim himself of the atrabilious humor, from which 
 he sought relief in listening to the ribaldry of barge- 
 men, and in compiling this Anatomy, in which the 
 causes, symptoms, prognostics, and cures of melan-
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 133 
 
 choly are considered in numerous partitions, sec- 
 tions, members, and subsections. The work is a 
 mosaic of quotations. All literature is ransacked 
 for anecdotes and instances, and the book has thus 
 become a mine of out-of-the-way learning, in which 
 later writers have dug. Lawrence Sterne helped 
 himself freely to Burton's treasures, and Dr. John- 
 son said that the Anatomy was the only book that 
 ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he 
 wished to rise. 
 
 The vulgar and common errors which Sir Thomas 
 Browne set himself to refute, were such as these : 
 That dolphins are crooked, that Jews stink, that a 
 man hath one rib less than a woman, that Xerxes's 
 army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of 
 cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vin- 
 egar, together with many similar fallacies touching 
 Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or 
 tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon's 
 brazen head, etc. Another book in which great 
 learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling 
 ends, was the same author's Garden of Cyrus; or, the 
 Quincuncial Lozenge or Network Plantations of the 
 Ancients, in which a mystical meaning is sought in 
 the occurrence throughout nature and art of the 
 figure of the quincunx or lozenge. Browne was a 
 physician of Norwich, where his library, museum, 
 aviary, and botanic garden were thought worthy of 
 a special visit by the Royal Society. He was an 
 antiquary and a naturalist, and deeply read in the 
 schoolmen and the Christian fathers. He was
 
 134 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 a mystic, and a writer of a rich and peculiar imag- 
 ination, whose thoughts have impressed them- 
 selves upon many kindred minds, like Cole- 
 ridge, De Quincey, and Emerson. Two of his 
 books belong to literature, Religio Medici, published 
 in 1642, and Hydriotaphia; or, Urn Burial, 1658, 
 a discourse upon rites of burial and incremation, 
 suggested by some Roman funeral urns, dug up in 
 Norfolk. Browne's style, though too highly Latin- 
 ized, is a good example of Commonwealth prose, 
 that stately, cumbrous, brocaded prose, which had 
 something of the flow and measure of verse, rather 
 than the quicker, colloquial movement of modern 
 writing. Browne stood aloof from the disputes of 
 his time, and in his very subjects there is a calm 
 and meditative remoteness from the daily interests 
 of men. His Religio Medici is full of a wise toler- 
 ance and a singular elevation of feeling. " At the 
 sight of a cross, or crucifix, I can dispense with my 
 hat, but scarce with the thought or memory of my 
 Saviour." " They only had the advantage of a 
 bold and noble faith, who lived before his coming." 
 " They go the fairest way to heaven, that would 
 serve God without a hell." " All things are arti- 
 ficial, for Nature is the art of God." The last 
 chapter of the Urn Burial is an almost rithmical 
 descant on mortality and oblivion. The style 
 kindles slowly into a somber eloquence. It is the 
 most impressive and extraordinary passage in the 
 prose literature of the time. Browne, like Ham- 
 let, loved to " consider too curiously." His subtlety
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 135 
 
 led him to " pose his apprehension with those in- 
 volved enigmas and riddles of the Trinity with in- 
 carnation and resurrection; " and to start odd in- 
 quiries; "what song the Syrens sang, or what name 
 Achilles assumed when he hid himself among 
 women;" or whether, after Lazarus was raised 
 from the dead, " his heir might lawfully detain his 
 inheritance." The quaintness of his phrase ap- 
 pears at every turn. " Charles the Fifth can never 
 hope to live within two Methuselahs of Hector." 
 " Generations pass, while some trees stand, and old 
 families survive not three oaks." " Mummy is be- 
 come merchandise; Mizraim cures wounds, and 
 Pharaoh is sold for balsams." 
 
 One of the pleasantest of old English humorists 
 is Thomas Fuller, who was a chaplain in the royal 
 army during the civil war, and wrote, among other 
 things, a Church History of Britain; a book of re- 
 ligious meditations, Good Thoughts in Bad Times, 
 and a " character " book, The Holy and Profane 
 State. His most important work, the Worthies of 
 England, was published in 1662, the year after his 
 death. This was a description of every English 
 county; its natural commodities, manufactures, 
 wonders, proverbs, etc., with brief biographies of 
 its memorable persons. Fuller had a well-stored 
 memory, sound piety, and excellent common sense. 
 Wit was his leading intellectual trait, and the 
 quaintness which he shared with his contemporaries 
 appears in his writings in a fondness for puns, droll 
 turns of expressions, and bits of eccentric sugges
 
 136 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tion. His prose, unlike Browne's, Milton's, and 
 Jeremy Taylor's, is brief, simple, and pithy. His 
 dry vein of humor was imitated by the American 
 Cotton Mather, in his Magnalia, and by many of 
 the English and New England divines of the iyth 
 century. 
 
 Jeremy Taylor was also a chaplain in the king's 
 army, was several times imprisoned for his opinions, 
 and was afterward made, by Charles II., Bishop of 
 Down and Connor. He is a devotional rather than 
 a theological writer, and his Holy Living and Holy 
 Dying are religious classics. Taylor, like Sydney, 
 was a "warbler of poetic prose." He has been 
 called the prose Spenser, and his English has the 
 opulence, the gentle elaboration, the " linked sweet- 
 ness long drawn out " of the poet of the Faery 
 Queene. In fullness and resonance, Taylor's dic- 
 tion resembles that of the great orators, though it 
 lacks their nervous energy. His pathos is exqui- 
 sitely tender, and his numerous similes have Spen- 
 ser's pictorial amplitude. Some of them have be- 
 come commonplaces for admiration, notably his 
 description of the flight of the skylark, and the 
 sentence in which he compares the gradual awaken- 
 ing of the human faculties to the sunrise, which 
 "first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away 
 the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, 
 and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by 
 gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the 
 eastern hills." Perhaps the most impressive single 
 passage of Taylor's is the concluding chapter in
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 137 
 
 Holy Dying. From the midst of the sickening para- 
 phernalia of death which he there accumulates, 
 rises that delicate image of the fading rose, one of 
 the most perfect things in its wording, in all our 
 prose literature: "But so have I seen a rose 
 newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at 
 first it was as fair as the morning, and full with the 
 dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder 
 breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and 
 dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, 
 it began to put on darkness and to decline to soft- 
 ness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed 
 the head and broke its stock; and at night, having 
 lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into 
 the portion of weeds and outworn faces." 
 
 With the progress of knowledge and discussion 
 many kinds of prose literature, which were not ab- 
 solutely new, now began to receive wider exten- 
 sion. Of this sort are the Letters from Italy, and 
 other miscellanies included in the Reliquice Wot- 
 toniance, or remains of Sir Henry Wotton, English 
 embassador at Venice in the reign of James I., and 
 subsequently Provost of Eton College. Also the 
 Table Talk full of incisive remarks left by John 
 Selden, whom Milton pronounced the first scholar 
 of his age, and who was a distinguished authority 
 in legal antiquities and international law, furnished 
 notes to Drayton's Polyolbion, and wrote upon 
 Eastern religions, and upon the Arundel marbles. 
 Literary biography was represented by the charm- 
 ing little Lives of good old Izaak Walton, the first
 
 138 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 edition of whose Compleat Angler was printed in 
 1653. The lives were five in number, of Hooker, 
 Wotton, Donne, Herbert, and Sanderson. Several 
 of these were personal friends of the author, and 
 Sir Henry Wotton was a brother of the angle. 
 The Compleat Angler, though not the first piece of 
 sporting literature in English, is unquestionably 
 the most popular, and still remains a favorite with 
 "all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in 
 providence, and be quiet, and go a-angling." As 
 in Ascham's Toxophilus, the instruction is con- 
 veyed in dialogue form, but the technical part of 
 the book is relieved by many delightful digres- 
 sions. Piscator and his pupil Venator pursue 
 their talk under a honeysuckle hedge or a syca- 
 more tree during a passing shower. They repair, 
 after the day's fishing, to some honest ale-house, 
 with lavender in the window, and a score of bal- 
 lads stuck about the wall, where they sing catches 
 " old-fashioned poetry but choicely good " 
 composed by the author or his friends, drink 
 barley wine, and eat their trout or chub. They 
 encounter milkmaids, who sing to them and give 
 them a draft of the red cow's milk, and they never 
 cease their praises of the angler's life, of rural con- 
 tentment among the cowslip meadows, and the 
 quiet streams of Thames, or Lea, or Shawford 
 Brook. 
 
 The decay of a great literary school is usually 
 signalized by the exaggeration of its characteristic 
 traits. The manner of the Elisabethan poets was
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 139 
 
 pushed into mannerism by their successors. That 
 manner, at its best, was hardly a simple one, but 
 in the Stuart and Commonwealth writers it be- 
 came mere extravagance. Thus Phineas Fletcher 
 a cousin of the dramatist composed a long 
 Spenserian allegory, the Purple Island, descriptive 
 of the human body. George Herbert and others 
 made anagrams and verses shaped like an altar, a 
 cross, or a pair of Easter wings. This group of 
 poets was named, by Dr. Johnson, in his life of 
 Cowley, the metaphysical school. Other critics 
 have preferred to call them the fantastic or con- 
 ceited school, the later Euphuists, or the English 
 Marinists and Gongorists, after the poets Marino 
 and Gongora, who brought this fashion to its ex- 
 treme in Italy and in Spain. The English con- 
 ceptistas were mainly clergymen of the established 
 Church, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Quarles, and 
 Herrick. But Crashaw was a Roman Catholic, 
 and Cowley the latest of them a layman. 
 
 The one who set the fashion was Dr. John Donne, 
 Dean of St. Paul's, whom Dryden pronounced a 
 great wit, but not a great poet, and whom Ben 
 Jonson esteemed the best poet in the world for 
 some things, but likely to be forgotten for want of 
 being understood. Besides satires and epistles in 
 verse, he composed amatory poems in his youth, 
 and divine poems in his age, both kinds distin- 
 guished by such subtle obscurity, and far-fetched 
 ingenuities, that they read like a series of puzzles. 
 When this poet has occasion to write a valediction
 
 140 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 to his mistress upon going into France, he com- 
 pares their temporary separation to that of a pair 
 of compasses: 
 
 " Such wilt thou be to me, who must, 
 Like the other foot obliquely run ; 
 
 Thy firmness makes my circle just, 
 And makes me end where I begun." 
 
 If he would persuade her to marriage he calls her 
 attention to a flea 
 
 " Me it sucked first and now sucks thee, 
 And in this flea oar two bloods mingled be." 
 
 He says that the flea is their marriage-temple, and 
 bids her forbear to kill it lest she thereby commit 
 murder, suicide, and sacrilege all in one. Donne's 
 figures are scholastic and smell of the lamp. He 
 ransacked cosmography, astrology, alchemy, op- 
 tics, the canon law, and the divinity of the school- 
 men for ink-horn terms and similes. He was 
 in verse what Browne was in prose. He loved 
 to play with distinctions, hyperboles, paradoxes, 
 the very casuistry and dialectics of love or de- 
 votion. 
 
 " Thou canst not every day give me thy heart : 
 If thou canst give it then thou never gav'st it : 
 Love's riddles are that though thy heart depart, 
 It stays at home and thou with losing sav'st it." 
 
 Donne's verse is usually as uncouth as his 
 thought. But there is a real passion slumbering 
 under these ashy heaps of conceit, and occasion-
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 141 
 
 ally a pure flame darts up, as in the justly admired 
 
 lines: 
 
 " Her pure and eloquent blood 
 Spoke in her cheek and so divinely wrought 
 That one might almost say her body thought." 
 
 This description of Donne is true, with modifi- 
 cations, of all the metaphysical poets. They had 
 the same forced and unnatural style. The or- 
 dinary laws of the association of ideas were re- 
 versed with them. It was not the nearest, but the 
 remotest, association that was called up. " Their 
 attempts," said Johnson, "were always analytic: 
 they broke every image into fragments." The finest 
 spirit among them was " holy George Herbert," 
 whose Temple was published in 1631. The titles 
 in this volume were such as the following: Christ- 
 mas, Easter, Good Friday, Holy Baptism, The 
 Cross, The Church Porch, Church Music, The 
 Holy Scriptures, Redemption, Faith, Doomsday. 
 Never since, except, perhaps, in Keble's Christian 
 Year, have the ecclesiastic ideals of the Anglican 
 Church the " beauty of holiness " found such 
 sweet expression in poetry. The verses entitled 
 Virtue 
 
 " Sweet day so cool, so calm, so bright," etc. 
 are known to most readers, as well as the line, 
 
 "Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, makes that and the 
 action fine." 
 
 The quaintly named pieces, the Elixir, the Collar, 
 the Pulley, are full of deep thought and spiritual
 
 142 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 feeling. But Herbert's poetry is constantly dis- 
 figured by bad taste. Take this passage fron? 
 Whitsunday, 
 
 " Listen, sweet dove, unto my song, 
 And spread thy golden wings on me, 
 
 Hatching my tender heart so long, 
 
 Till it get wing and fly away with thee," 
 
 which is almost as ludicrous as the epitaph, writteiv 
 by his contemporary, Carew, on the daughter of Sir 
 Thomas Wentworth, whose soul 
 
 ..." grew so fast within 
 It broke the outward shell of sin, 
 And so was hatched a cherubin." 
 
 Another of these Church poets was Henry 
 Vaughan, " the Silurist," or Welshman, whose fine 
 piece, the Retreat, has been often compared 
 with Wordsworth's Ode on the Intimations of Im- 
 mortality. Francis Quarles' Divine Emblems long 
 remained a favorite book with religious readers, 
 both in Old and New England. Emblem books, 
 in which engravings of a figurative design were 
 accompanied with explanatory letterpress in verse, 
 were a popular class of literature in the lyth cent- 
 ury. The most famous of them all were Jacob 
 Catt's Dutch emblems. 
 
 One of the most delightful of English lyric poets 
 is Robert Herrick, whose Hesperides, 1648 has 
 lately received such sympathetic illustration from 
 the pencil of an American artist, Mr. E. A. Abbey. 
 Herrick was a clergyman of the English Church,
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 143 
 
 and was expelled by the Puritans from his living, 
 the vicarage of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. The 
 most quoted of his religious poems is, Haw to Keep 
 a True Lent. But it may be doubted whether his 
 tastes were prevailingly clerical; his poetry cer- 
 tainly was not. He was a disciple of Ben Jonson 
 and his boon companion at 
 
 ..." those lyric feasts 
 Made at the Sun, 
 The Dog, the Triple Tun ; 
 Where we such clusters had 
 As made us nobly wild, not mad. 
 And yet each verse of thine 
 Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine." 
 
 Herrick's Noble Numbers seldom rises above 
 the expression of a cheerful gratitude and con- 
 tentment. He had not the subtlety and elevation 
 of Herbert, but he surpassed him in the grace, 
 melody, sensuous beauty, and fresh lyrical impulse 
 of his verse. The conceits of the metaphysical 
 school appear in Herrick only in the form of an 
 occasional pretty quaintness. He is the poet of 
 English parish festivals, and of English flowers, 
 the primrose, the whitethorn, the daffodil. He 
 sang the praises of the country life, love songs to 
 " Julia," and hymns of thanksgiving for simple 
 blessings. He has been called the English Catul- 
 lus, but he strikes rather the Horatian note of 
 Carpe diem, and regret at the shortness of life and 
 youth in many of his best-known poems, such as
 
 144 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, and To Corinna, 
 To Go a Maying. 
 
 Abraham Cowley is now less remembered for 
 his poetry than for his pleasant volume of Es- 
 says, published after the Restoration; but he was 
 thought in his own time a better poet than Mil- 
 ton. His collection of love songs the Mistress 
 is a mass of cold conceits, in the metaphysical 
 manner; but his elegies on Crashaw and Harvey 
 have much dignity and natural feeling. He intro- 
 duced the Pindaric ode into English, and wrote an 
 epic poem on a biblical subject the Davidcis now 
 quite unreadable. Cowley was a royalist and fol- 
 lowed the exiled court to France. Side by side with 
 the Church poets were the cavaliers Carew. Waller, 
 Lovelace, Suckling, L'Estrange, and others gal- 
 lant courtiers and officers in the royal army, who 
 mingled love and loyalty in their strains. Colonel 
 Richard Lovelace, who lost every thing in the king's 
 service and was several times imprisoned, wrote 
 two famous songs To Lucasta on going to the 
 Wars in which occur the lines, 
 
 " I could not love thee, dear, so much. 
 Loved I not honor more." 
 
 and To Althaafrom Prison, in which he sings " the 
 sweetness, mercy, majesty, and glories of his king," 
 and declares that "stone walls do not a prison 
 make, nor iron bars a cage." Another of the cav- 
 aliers was sir John Suckling, who formed a plot to 
 rescue the Earl of Strafford, raised a troop of horse
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 145 
 
 for Charles I., was impeached by the Parliament 
 and fled to France. He was a man of wit and 
 pleasure, who penned a number of gay trifles, but 
 has been saved from oblivion chiefly by his exqui- 
 site Ballad upon a Wedding. Thomas Carew and 
 Edmund Waller were poets of the same stamp- 
 graceful and easy, but shallow in feeling. Waller, 
 who followed the court to Paris, was the author of 
 two songs, which are still favorites, Go, Lovely Rose, 
 and On a Girdle, and he first introduced the smooth 
 correct manner of writing in couplets, which Dryden 
 and Pope carried to perfection. Gallantry rather 
 than love was the inspiration of these courtly sing- 
 ers. In such verses as Carew's Encouragements to 
 a Lover, and George Wither's The Manly Heart 
 
 " If she be not so to me, 
 What care I how fair she be ?" 
 
 we see the revolt against the high, passionate, Sid- 
 neian love of the Elisabethan sonneteers, and the 
 note of persiflage that was to mark the lyrical verse 
 of the Restoration. But the poetry of the cavaliers 
 reached its high-water mark in one fiery-hearted 
 song by the noble and unfortunate James Graham, 
 Marquis of Montrose, who invaded Scotland in the 
 interest of Charles II., and was taken prisoner and 
 put to death at Edinburgh in 1650. 
 
 " My dear and only love, I pray 
 
 That little world of thee 
 Be governed by no other sway 
 
 Than purest monarchy." 
 10
 
 i4<5 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 In language borrowed from the politics of the time, 
 he cautions his mistress against synods or committees 
 in her heart; swears to make her glorious by his 
 pen and famous by his sword; and with that fine 
 recklessness which distinguished the dashing troop- 
 ers of Prince Rupert, he adds, in words that have 
 been often quoted, 
 
 " He either fears his fate too much, 
 
 Or his deserts are small, 
 That dares not put it to the touch 
 To gain or lose it all." 
 
 John Milton, the greatest English poet except 
 Shakspere, was born in London in 1608. His father 
 was a scrivener, an educated man, and a musical 
 composer of some merit. At his home Milton was 
 surrounded with all the influences of a refined and 
 well ordered Puritan household of the better class. 
 He inherited his father's musical tastes, and during 
 the latter part of his life, he spent a part of every 
 afternoon in playing the organ. No poet has writ- 
 ten more beautifully of music than Milton. One 
 of his sonnets was addressed to Henry Lawes, the 
 composer, who wrote the airs to the songs in Comus. 
 Milton's education was most careful and thorough. 
 He spent seven years at Cambridge where, from his 
 personal beauty and fastidious habits, he was called 
 " The lady of Christ's." At Horton, in Bucking- 
 hamshire, where his father had a country seat, he 
 passed five years more, perfecting himself in his 
 studies, and then traveled for fifteen months, main-
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 147 
 
 ly in Italy, visiting Naples and Rome, but residing 
 at Florence. Here he saw Galileo, a prisoner of 
 the Inquisition " for thinking otherwise in astrono- 
 my than his Dominican and Franciscan licensers 
 thought." Milton is the most scholarly and the 
 most truly classical of English poets. His Latin 
 verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Ad- 
 dison's; and his Italian poems were the admiration 
 of the Tuscan scholars. But his learning appears 
 in his poetry only in the form of a fine and chast- 
 ened result, and not in laborious allusion and pe- 
 dantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson, for in- 
 stance. " My father," he wrote, " destined me, 
 while yet a little child, for the study of humane let- 
 ters." He was also destined for the ministry, but, 
 " coming to some maturity of years and perceiving 
 what tyranny had invaded the Church, ... I thought 
 it better to prefer a blameless silence, before the 
 sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with 
 servitude and forswearing." Other hands than 
 a bishop's were laid upon his head. " He who 
 would not be frustrate of his hope to write well 
 hereafter," he says, "ought himself to be a true 
 poem." And he adds that his "natural haughti- 
 ness " saved him from all impurity of living. Mil- 
 ton had a sublime self-respect. The dignity and 
 earnestness of the Puritan gentleman blended in 
 his training with the culture of the Renaissance. 
 Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated 
 his gift to the service of Heaven, and he became, 
 like Heine, a valiant soldier in the war for libera-
 
 148 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 tion. He was the poet of a cause, and his song 
 
 was keyed to 
 
 " The Dorian mood 
 
 Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised 
 To heighth of noblest temper, heroes old 
 Arming to battle." 
 
 On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his uni- 
 versal sympathies and receptive imagination, one 
 perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in intense 
 personal conviction. He introduced a new note 
 into English poetry, the passion for truth and the 
 feeling of religious sublimity. Milton's was an 
 heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than 
 dramatic ; its singer must be in the fight and 
 of it. 
 
 Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge, the 
 most important was his splendid ode On the Morn- 
 ing of Christ's Nativity. A.t Horton he wrote, 
 among other things, the companion pieces, L! Alle- 
 gro and // Penseroso, of a kind quite new in En- 
 glish, giving to the landscape an expression in har- 
 mony with two contrasted moods. Comus y which 
 belongs to the same period, was the perfection of 
 the Elisabethan court masque, and was presented 
 at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of the 
 installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord 
 President of Wales. Under the guise of a skillful 
 addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe, with 
 her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song 
 in praise of chastity and temperance. Lycidas, in 
 like manner, was the perfection of the Elisabethan
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 149 
 
 pastoral elegy. It was contributed to a volume of 
 memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a 
 Cambridge friend of Milton's, who was drowned in 
 the Irish Channel in 1637. In one stern strain, 
 which is put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author 
 " foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at 
 their height." 
 
 " But that two-handed engine at the door 
 Stands ready to smite once and smite no more." 
 
 This was Milton's last utterance in English verse 
 before the outbreak of the civil war, and it 
 sounds the alarm of the impending struggle. In 
 technical quality Lycidas is the most wonderful of 
 all Milton's poems. The cunningly intricate har- 
 mony of the verse, the pressed and packed lan- 
 guage with its fullness of meaning and allusion 
 make it worthy of the minutest study. In these 
 early poems, Milton, merely as a poet, is at his 
 best. Something of the Elisabethan style still 
 clings to them ; but their grave sweetness, their 
 choice wording, their originality in epithet, name, 
 and phrase, were novelties of Milton's own. His 
 English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Syl- 
 vester, the translator of Du Bartas's La Semaine. 
 but nothing of Spenser's prolixity, or Fletcher's 
 effeminacy, or Sylvester's quaintness is found in 
 Milton's pure, energetic diction. He inherited 
 their beauties, but his taste had been tempered to 
 a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew 
 poetry. He was the last of the Elisabethans, and
 
 150 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 his style was at once the crown of the old and a 
 departure into the new. In masque, elegy, and 
 sonnet, he set the seal to the Elisabethan poetry, 
 said the last word, and closed one great literary 
 era. 
 
 In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his 
 Parliament brought Milton back from Italy. "I 
 thought it base to be traveling at my ease for amuse- 
 ment, while my fellow-countrymen at home were 
 fighting for liberty." For the next twenty years he 
 threw himself into the contest, and poured forth a 
 succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the 
 various public questions at issue. As a political 
 thinker, Milton had what Bacon calls " the humor 
 of a scholar." In a country of endowed grammar 
 schools and universities hardly emerged from a 
 mediaeval discipline and curriculum, he wanted to 
 set up Greek gymnasia and philosophical schools, 
 after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy. 
 He would have imposed an Athenian democracy 
 upon a people trained in the traditions of mon- 
 archy and episcopacy. At the very moment when 
 England had grown tired of the Protectorate and 
 was preparing to welcome back the Stuarts, he 
 was writing An Easy and Ready Way to Establish 
 a Free Commonwealth. Milton acknowledged that 
 in prose he had the use of his left hand only. 
 There are passages of fervid eloquence, where 
 the style swells into a kind of lofty chant, with 
 a rithmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the 
 English Book of Common Prayer. But in gen-
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 151 
 
 eral his sentences are long and involved, full of 
 inventions and latinized constructions. Con- 
 troversy at that day was conducted on scholastic 
 lines. Each disputant, instead of appealing at 
 once to the arguments of expediency and common 
 sense, began with a formidable display of learning, 
 ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the fathers 
 of the Church for opinions in support of his own 
 position. These authorities he deployed at tedious 
 length and followed them up with heavy scurrilities 
 and "excusations," by way of attack and defense. 
 The dispute between Milton and Salmasius over the 
 execution of Charles I. was like a duel between two 
 knights in full armor striking at each other with pon- 
 derous maces. The very titles of these pamphlets 
 are enough to frighten off a modern reader: A Con- 
 futation of the Animadversions upon a Defense of a, 
 Humble Remonstrance against a Treatise, entitled 
 Of Reformation. The most interesting of Milton's 
 prose tracts is his Areopagitica: A Speech for the 
 Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 1644. The argu- 
 ments in this are of permanent force; but if the 
 reader will compare it, or Jeremy Taylor's Liberty 
 of Prophesying, with Locke's Letters on Toleration, 
 he will see how much clearer and more convinc- 
 ing is the modern method of discussion, intro- 
 duced by writers like Hobbes and Locke and 
 Dryden. Under the Protectorate Milton was ap- 
 pointed Latin Secretary to the Council of State. 
 In the diplomatic correspondence which was his 
 official duty, and in the composition of his tract,
 
 152 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Defensio pro Populo Anglicano, he overtasked his 
 eyes, and in 1654 became totally blind. The only 
 poetry of Milton's belonging to the years 1640-1660 
 are a few sonnets of the pure Italian form, mainly 
 called forth by public occasions. By the Elisa- 
 bethans the sonnet had been used mainly in love 
 poetry. In Milton's hands, said Wordsworth, "the 
 thing became a trumpet." Some of his were ad- 
 dressed to political leaders, like Fairfax, Cromwell, 
 and Sir Henry Vane; and of these the best is, per- 
 haps, the sonnet written on the massacre of the 
 Vaudois Protestants "a collect in verse," it has 
 been called which has the fire of a Hebrew 
 prophet invoking the divine wrath upon the op- 
 pressors of Israel. Two were on his own blind- 
 ness, and in these there is not one selfish repining, 
 but only a regret that the value of his service is 
 impaired 
 
 "Will God exact day labor, light denied ?" 
 
 After the restoration of the Stuarts, in 1660, 
 Milton was for a while in peril, by reason of the 
 part that he had taken against the king. But 
 
 " On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues, 
 In darkness and with dangers compassed round 
 And solitude," 
 
 he bated no jot of heart or hope. Henceforth he 
 becomes the most heroic and affecting figure in 
 English literary history. Years before he had 
 planned an epic poem on the subject of King
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 153 
 
 Arthur, and again a sacred tragedy on man's fall 
 and redemption. These experiments finally took 
 shape in Paradise Lost, which was given to the 
 world in 1667. This is the epic of English Puri- 
 tanism and of Protestant Christianity. It was 
 Milton's purpose to 
 
 " assert eternal Providence 
 . And justify the ways of God to men," 
 
 or, in other words, to embody his theological sys- 
 tem in verse. This gives a doctrinal rigidity and 
 even dryness to parts of the Paradise Lost, which 
 injure its effect as a poem. His " God the father 
 turns a school divine:" his Christ, as has been 
 wittily said, is " God's good boy: " the discourses 
 of Raphael to Adam are scholastic lectures: Adam 
 himself is too sophisticated for the state of inno- 
 cence, and Eve is somewhat insipid. The real 
 protagonist of the poem is Satan, upon whose 
 mighty figure Milton unconsciously bestowed some- 
 thing of his own nature, and whose words of de- 
 fiance might almost have come from some Re- 
 publican leader when the Good Old Cause went 
 down. 
 
 " What though the field be lost ? 
 All is not lost, the unconquerable will 
 And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
 And courage never to submit or yield." 
 
 But when all has been said that can be said in 
 disparagement or qualification, Paradise Lost re- 
 mains the foremost of English poems and the sub-
 
 154 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 limest of all epics. Even in those parts where 
 theology encroaches most upon poetry, the diction, 
 though often heavy, is never languid. Milton's 
 blank verse in itself is enough to bear up the most 
 prosaic theme, and so is his epic English, a style 
 more massive and splendid than Shakspere's, and 
 comparable, like Tertullian's Latin, to a river of 
 molten gold. Of the countless single beauties 'that 
 sow his page 
 
 " Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks 
 In Valombrosa," 
 
 there is no room to speak, nor of the astonishing 
 fullness of substance and multitude of thoughts 
 which have caused the Paradise Lost to be called 
 the book of universal knowledge. " The heat of 
 Milton's mind," said Dr. Johnson, " might be said to 
 sublimate his learning and throw off into his work 
 the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser 
 parts." The truth of this remark is clearly seen 
 upon a comparison of Milton's description of the 
 creation, for example, with corresponding passages 
 in Sylvester's Divine Weeks and Works (translated 
 from the Huguenot poet, Du Bartas), which was, 
 in some sense, his original. But the most heroic 
 thing in Milton's heroic poem is Milton. There 
 are no strains in Paradise Lost so absorbing as 
 those in which the poet breaks the strict epic 
 bounds and speaks directly of himself, as in the ma- 
 jestic lament over his own blindness, and in the invo- 
 cation to Urania, which open the third and seventh
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 155 
 
 books. Every-where, too, one reads between the 
 lines. We think of the dissolute cavaliers, as Mil- 
 ton himself undoubtedly was thinking of them, 
 when we read of " the sons of Belial flown with 
 insolence and wine," or when the Puritan turns 
 among the sweet landscapes of Eden, to denounce 
 
 " court amours 
 
 Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, 
 Or serenade which the starved lover sings 
 To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain." 
 
 And we think of Milton among the triumphant 
 royalists when we read of the Seraph Abdiel 
 " faithful found among the faithless." 
 
 " Nor number nor example with him wrought 
 
 To swerve from truth or change his constant mind, 
 
 Though single. From amidst them forth he passed, 
 
 Long way through hostile scorn, which he sustained 
 
 Superior, nor of violence feared aught: 
 
 And with retorted scorn his back he turned 
 
 On those proud towers to swift destruction doomed." 
 
 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes were 
 published in 1671. The first of these treated in 
 four books Christ's temptation in the wilderness, a 
 subject that had already been handled in the 
 Spenserian allegorical manner by Giles Fletcher, a 
 brother of the Purple Islander, in his Christ's Vic- 
 tory and Triumph, 1610. The superiority of Para- 
 dise Lost to its sequel is not without significance. 
 The Puritans were Old Testament men. Their 
 God was the Hebrew Jehovah, whose single divin- 
 ity the Catholic mythology had overlaid with the
 
 156 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 figures of the Son, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. 
 They identified themselves in thought with his 
 chosen people, with the militant theocracy of the 
 Jews. Their sword was the sword of the Lord 
 and of Gideon. "To your tents, O Israel," was 
 the cry of the London mob when the bishops were 
 committed to the Tower. And when the fog lifted, 
 on the morning of the battle of Dunbar, Cromwell 
 exclaimed, " Let God arise and let his enemies be 
 scattered: like as the sun riseth, so shalt thou drive 
 them away." 
 
 Samson Agomstes, though Hebrew in theme and 
 in spirit, was in form a Greek tragedy. It had 
 chorus and semi-chorus, and preserved the so- 
 called dramatic unities; that is, the scene was un- 
 changed, and there were no intervals of time be- 
 tween the acts. In accordance with the rules of 
 the Greek theater, but two speakers appeared upon 
 the stage at once, and there was no violent action. 
 The death of Samson is related by a messenger. 
 Milton's reason for the choice of this subject is 
 obvious. He himself was Samson, shorn of his 
 strength, blind, and alone among enemies; given 
 
 over 
 
 " to the unjust tribunals, under change of times, 
 And condemnation of the ungrateful multitude." 
 
 As Milton grew older he discarded more and 
 more the graces of poetry, and relied purely upon 
 the structure and the thought. In Paradise Lost, 
 although there is little resemblance to Elisabethan 
 work such as one notices in Comus and the
 
 THE AGE OF MILTON. 157 
 
 Christmas hymn yet the style is rich, especially 
 in the earlier books. But in Paradise Regained 
 it is severe to bareness, and in Samson, even 
 to ruggedness. Like Michelangelo, with whose 
 genius he had much in common, Milton became 
 impatient of finish or of mere beauty. He blocked 
 out his work in masses, left rough places and sur- 
 faces not filled in, and inclined to express his 
 meaning by a symbol, rather than work it out in 
 detail. It was a part of his austerity, his increas- 
 ing preference for structural over decorative 
 methods, to give up rime for blank verse. His 
 latest poem, Samson Agonistes, is a metrical study 
 of the highest interest. 
 
 Milton was not quite alone among the poets of 
 his time in espousing the popular cause. Andrew 
 Marvell, who was his assistant in the Latin secre- 
 taryship and sat in Parliament for Hull, after the 
 Restoration, was a good Republican, and wrote a 
 fine Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from 
 Ireland. There is also a rare imaginative quality 
 in his Song of the Exiles in Bermuda, Thong /its in a 
 Garden, and The Girl Describes her Fawn. George 
 Wither, who was imprisoned for his satires, also 
 took the side of the Parliament, but there is little 
 that is distinctively Puritan in his poetry. 
 
 1. Milton's Poetical Works. Edited by David 
 Masson. Macmillan. s 
 
 2. Selections from Milton's Prose. Edited by 
 F. D. Myers. (Parchment Series.)
 
 158 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 3. England's Antiphon. By George Macdonald. 
 
 4. Robert Herrick's Hesperides. 
 
 5. Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici and 
 Hydriotaphia. Edited by Willis Bund. Sampson 
 Low & Co., 1873. 
 
 6. Thomas Fuller's Good Thoughts in Bad 
 Times. 
 
 7. Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler.
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 159 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE 
 DEATH OF POPE. 
 
 1660-1744, 
 
 THE Stuart Restoration was a period of descent 
 from poetry to prose, from passion and imagination 
 to wit and understanding. The serious, exalted 
 mood of the Civil War and the Commonwealth had 
 spent itself and issued in disillusion. There fol- 
 lowed a generation of wits, logical, skeptical, 
 and prosaic, without earnestness, as without prin- 
 ciple. The characteristic literature of such a 
 time is criticism, satire, and burlesque, and such, 
 indeed, continued to be the course of English 
 literary history for a century after the return of the 
 Stuarts. The age was not a stupid one, but one of 
 active inquiry. The Royal Society, for the cultiva- 
 tion of the natural sciences, was founded in 1662. 
 There were able divines in the pulpit and at the 
 universities Barrow, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, South, 
 and others: scholars, like Bentley; historians, like 
 Clarendon and Burnet; scientists, like Boyle and 
 Newton ; philosophers, like Hobbes and Locke. 
 But of poetry, in any high sense of the word, there 
 was little between the time of Milton and the time 
 of Goldsmith and Gray.
 
 160 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 The English writers of this period were strongly 
 influenced by the contemporary literature of France, 
 by the comedies of Moliere, the tragedies of Cor- 
 neille and Racine, and the satires, epistles, and ver- 
 sified essays of Boileau. Many of the Restoration 
 writers Waller, Cowley, Davenant, Wycherley, Vil- 
 liers, and others had been in France during the 
 exile, and brought back with them French tastes. 
 John Dryden (1631-1700), who is the great literary 
 figure of his generation, has been called the first 
 of the moderns. From the reign of Charles II., 
 indeed, we may date the beginnings of modern En- 
 glish life. What we call " society " was forming, the 
 town, the London world. " Coffee, which makes 
 the politician wise," had just been introduced, and 
 the ordinaries of Ben Jonson's time gave way to 
 coffee-houses, like Will's and Button's, which be- 
 came the head-quarters of literary and political gos- 
 sip. The two great English parties, as we know 
 them to-day, were organized: the words Whig and 
 Tory date from this reign. French etiquette and 
 fashions came in and French phrases of conveni- 
 ence such as coup de grace, bel esprit, etc. began 
 to appear in English prose. Literature became in- 
 tensely urban and partisan. It reflected city life, 
 the disputes of faction, and the personal quarrels 
 of authors. The politics of the Great Rebellion 
 had been of heroic proportions, and found fitting 
 expression in song. But in the Revolution of 1688 
 the issues were constitutional and to be settled by 
 the arguments of lawyers. Measures were in ques-
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 161 
 
 tion rather than principles, and there was little in- 
 spiration to the poet in Exclusion Bills and Acts of 
 Settlement. 
 
 Court and society, in the reign of Charles II. and 
 James II., were shockingly dissolute, and in litera- 
 ture, as in life, the reaction against Puritanism went 
 to great extremes. The social life of the time is 
 faithfully reflected in the diary of Samuel Pepys. 
 He was a simple-minded man, the son of a London 
 tailor, and became, himself, secretary to the admi- 
 ralty. His diary was kept in cipher, and published 
 only in 1825. Being written for his own eye, it is 
 singularly outspoken; and its naive, gossipy, con- 
 fidential tone makes it a most diverting book, as it 
 is, historically, a most valuable one. 
 
 Perhaps the most popular book of its time was 
 Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1663-64), a burlesque ro- 
 mance in ridicule of the Puritans. The king car- 
 ried a copy of it in his pocket, and Pepys testifies 
 that it was quoted and praised on all sides. Ridi- 
 cule of the Puritans was nothing new. Zeal-of-the- 
 land Busy, in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, is an 
 early instance of the kind. There was nothing 
 laughable about the earnestness of men like Crom- 
 well, Milton, Algernon Sidney, and Sir Henry Vane. 
 But even the French Revolution had its humors; 
 and as the English Puritan Revolution gathered 
 head and the extremer sectaries pressed to the 
 front Quakers, New Lights, Fifth Monarchy Men, 
 Ranters, etc. its grotesque sides came uppermost. 
 Butler's hero is a Presbyterian Justice of the Peace 
 11
 
 162 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 who sallies forth with his secretary, Ralpho an In- 
 dependent and Anabaptist like Don Quixote with 
 Sancho Panza, to suppress May games and bear- 
 baitings. (Macaulay, it will be remembered, said 
 that the Puritans disapproved of bear-baiting, not 
 because it gave pain to the bear, but because it 
 gave pleasure to the spectators.) The humor of 
 Hudibras is not of the finest. The knight and 
 squire are discomfited in broadly comic adventures, 
 hardly removed from the rough, physical drolleries 
 of a pantomime or a circus. The deep heart-laugh- 
 ter of Cervantes, the pathos on which his humor 
 rests, is, of course, not to be looked for in Butler. 
 But he had wit of a sharp, logical kind, and his 
 style surprises with all manner of verbal antics. 
 He is almost as great a phrase-master as Pope, 
 though in a coarser kind. His verse is a smart 
 doggerel, and his poem has furnished many stock 
 sayings, as, for example, 
 
 " 'Tis strange what difference there can be 
 'Twixt tweedle-dum and tweedle-dee." 
 
 Hudibras has had many imitators, not the least suc- 
 cessful of whom was the American John Trumbull, 
 in his revolutionary satire M'Fingal, some couplets 
 of which are generally quoted as Butler's, as, for 
 example, 
 
 ' No man e'er felt the halter draw 
 With good opinion of the law." 
 
 The rebound against Puritanism is seen no less 
 plainly in the drama of the Restoration, and the
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 163 
 
 stage now took vengeance for its enforced silence 
 under the Protectorate. Two theaters were opened 
 under the patronage, respectively, of the king and 
 of his brother, the Duke of York. The manager 
 of the latter, Sir William Davenant who had fought 
 on the king's side, been knighted for his services, 
 escaped to France, and was afterward captured and 
 imprisoned in England for two years had managed 
 to evade the law against stage plays as early as 
 1656, by presenting his Siege of Rhodes as an "op- 
 era," with instrumental music and dialogue in reci- 
 tative, after a fashion newly sprung up in Italy. 
 This he brought out again in 1661, with the dia- 
 logue recast into riming couplets in the French 
 fashion. Movable painted scenery was now in- 
 troduced from France, and actresses took the 
 female parts formerly played by boys. This last 
 innovation was said to be at the request of the 
 king, one of whose mistresses, the famous Nell 
 Gwynne, was the favorite actress at the King^s 
 Theater. 
 
 Upon the stage, thus reconstructed, the so-called 
 " classical " rules of the French theater were fol- 
 lowed, at least in theory. The Louis XIV. writers 
 were not purely creative, like Shakspere and his 
 contemporaries in England, but critical and self- 
 conscious. The Academy had been formed in 
 1636, for the preservation of the purity of the French 
 language, and discussion abounded on the prin- 
 ciples and methods of literary art. Corneille not 
 only wrote tragedies, but essays on tragedy, and
 
 164 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 one in particular on the Three Unities. Dryden 
 followed his example in his Essay of Dramatic 
 Poesie (1667), in which he treated of the unities, 
 and argued for the use of rime in tragedy in 
 preference to blank verse. His own practice 
 varied. Most of his tragedies were written in 
 rime, but in the best of them, All for Love, 1678, 
 founded on Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra, he 
 returned to blank verse. One of the principles of 
 the classical school was to keep comedy and trag- 
 edy distinct. The tragic dramatists of the Resto- 
 ration, Dryden, Howard, Settle, Crowne, Lee, and 
 others, composed what they called " heroic plays," 
 such as the Indian Emperor, the Conquest of Gra- 
 nada, the Duke of Lerma, the Empress of Morocco, 
 the Destruction of Jerusalem, Nero, and the Rival 
 Queens. The titles of these pieces indicate their 
 character. Their heroes were great historic per- 
 sonages. Subject and treatment were alike remote 
 frp.m nature and real life. The diction was stilted 
 and artificial, and pompous declamation took the 
 place of action and genuine passion. The trag- 
 edies of Racine seem chill to an Englishman 
 brought up on Shakspere, but to see how great an 
 artist Racine was, in his own somewhat narrow 
 way, one has but to compare his Phedre, or Iphi- 
 %enie, with Dryden 's ranting tragedy of Tyrannic 
 Love. These bombastic heroic plays were made 
 the subject of a capital burlesque, the Rehearsal, 
 by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, acted in 
 1671 at the King's Theater. The indebtedness of
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 165 
 
 the English stage to the French did not stop with 
 a general adoption of its dramatic methods, but 
 extended to direct imitation and translation. Dry- 
 den's comedy, An Evening's Love, was adapted 
 from Thomas Corneille's Le Feint Astrologue, and 
 \\\?, Sir M artin Mar-all, from Moliere's UEtourdi. 
 Shadwell borrowed his Miser from Moliere, and 
 Otway made versions of Racine's Berenice and 
 Moliere's Fourberies de Scapin. Wycherley's Coun- 
 try Wife and Plain Dealer, although not translations, 
 were based, in a sense, upon Moliere's Ecole des 
 Femmes and Le Misanthrope. The only one of the 
 tragic dramatists of the Restoration who prolonged 
 the traditions of the Elisabethan stage, was Otway, 
 whose Venice Preserved, written in blank verse, still 
 keeps the boards. There are fine passages in Dry- 
 den's heroic plays, passages weighty in thought and 
 nobly sonorous in language. There is one great 
 scene (between Antony and Ventidius) in his All 
 for Love. And one, at least, of his comedies, the 
 Spanish Friar, is skillfully constructed. But his 
 nature was not pliable enough for the drama, and 
 he acknowledged that, in writing for the stage, he 
 "forced his genius." 
 
 In sharp contrast with these heroic plays was the 
 comic drama of the Restoration, the plays of Wych- 
 erley, Killigrew, Etherege, Farquhar, Van Brugh, 
 Congreve, and others; plays like the Country Wife, 
 the Parson's Wedding, She Would if She Could, 
 the Beaux' Stratagem, the Relapse, and the Way of 
 the World. These were in prose, and represented
 
 166 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the gay world and the surface of fashionable life. 
 Amorous intrigue was their constantly recurring 
 theme. Some of them were written expressly in 
 ridicule of the Puritans. Such was the Committee 
 of Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard, the 
 hero of which is a distressed gentleman, and the 
 villain a London cit, and president of the commit- 
 tee appointed by Parliament to sit upon the se- 
 questration of the estates of royalists. Such were 
 also the Roundheads and the Banished Cavaliers of 
 Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a female spy in the serv- 
 ice of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the 
 coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The pro- 
 fession of piety had become so disagreeable that a 
 shameless cynicism was now considered the mark 
 of a gentleman. The ideal hero of Wycherley or 
 Etherege was the witty young profligate, who had 
 seen life, and learned to disbelieve in virtue. His 
 highest qualities were a contempt for cant, physical 
 courage, a sort of spendthrift generosity, and a good- 
 natured readiness to back up a friend in a quarrel, 
 or an amour. Virtue was bourgeois reserved for 
 London trades-people. A man must be either a 
 rake or a hypocrite. The gentlemen were rakes, 
 the city people were hypocrites. Their wives, how- 
 ever, were all in love with the gentlemen, and it 
 was the proper thing to seduce them, and to bor- 
 row their husbands' money. For the first and last 
 time, perhaps, in the history of the English drama, 
 the sympathy of the audience was deliberately 
 sought for the seducer and the rogue, and the laugh
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 167 
 
 turned against the dishonored husband and the 
 honest man. (Contrast this with Shakspere's 
 Merry Wives of Windsor?) The women were rep- 
 resented as worse than the men scheming, igno- 
 rant, and corrupt. The dialogue in the best of 
 these plays was easy, lively, and witty; the situa- 
 tions in some of them audacious almost beyond 
 belief. Under a thin varnish of good breeding, the 
 sentiments and manners were really brutal. The 
 loosest gallants of Beaumont and Fletcher's thea- 
 ter retain a fineness of feeling and that politesse de 
 coeur which marks the gentleman. They are po- 
 etic creatures, and own a capacity for romantic 
 passion. But the Manlys and Homers of the Res- 
 toration comedy have a prosaic, cold-blooded prof- 
 ligacy that disgusts. Charles Lamb, in his in- 
 genious essay on " The Artificial Comedy of the 
 Last Century," apologized for the Restoration 
 stage, on the ground that it represented a world of 
 whim and unreality in which the ordinary laws 
 of morality had no application. 
 
 But Macaulay answered truly, that at no time has 
 the stage been closer in its imitation of real life. 
 The theater of Wycherley and Etheregewas but the 
 counterpart of that social condition which we read 
 of in Pepys's Diary, and in the Memoirs of the 
 Chevalier de Grammont. This prose comedy of 
 manners was not, indeed, " artificial " at all, in the 
 sense in which the contemporary tragedy the 
 "heroic play" was artificial. It was, on the 
 contrary, far more natural, and, intellectually, of
 
 i68 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 much higher value. It 1698 Jeremy Collier, a non- 
 juring Jacobite clergyman, published his Short 
 View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the 
 English Stage, which did much toward reforming 
 the practice of the dramatists. The formal charac- 
 teristics, without the immorality, of the Restoration 
 comedy, re-appeared briefly in Goldsmith's She 
 Stoops to Conquer, 1772, and Sheridan's Rival, 
 School for Scandal, and Critic, 1775-9, our ^ ast 
 strictly " classical " comedies. None of this school 
 of English comedians approached their model, 
 Moliere. He excelled hisimitators not only in his 
 French urbanity the polished wit and delicate 
 grace of his style but in the dexterous unfolding 
 of his plot, and in the wisdom and truth of his criti- 
 cism of life, and his insight into character. It is a 
 symptom of the false taste of the age that Shaks- 
 pere's plays were rewritten for the Restoration 
 stage. Davenant made new versions of Macbeth 
 and Julius Ctzsar, substituting rime for blank 
 verse. In conjunction with Dryden, he altered the 
 Tempest, complicating the intrigue by the intro- 
 duction of a male counterpart to Miranda a youth 
 who had never seen a woman. Shadwell " im- 
 proved " Timon of Athens, and Nahum Tate fur- 
 nished a new fifth act to King Lear, which turned 
 the play into a comedy ! In the prologue to his 
 doctored version of Troilus and Cressida, Dry- 
 den made the ghost of Shakspere speak of him- 
 self as 
 
 "Untaught, unpracticed in a barbarous age."
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 169 
 
 Thomas Rymer, whom Pope pronounced a good 
 critic, was very severe upon Shakspere in his Re- 
 marks on the Tragedies of the Last Age j and in his 
 Short View of Tragedy, 1693, he said, " In the 
 neighing of a horse or in the growling of a mastiff, 
 there is more humanity than, many times, in the 
 tragical flights of Shakspere." " To Deptford by 
 water," writes Pepys, in his diary for August 20, 
 1666, "reading Othello, Moor of Venice; which I 
 ever heretofore esteemed a mighty good play; but, 
 having so lately read the Adventures of Five Hours, 
 it seems a mean thing." 
 
 In undramatic poetry the new school, both in 
 England and in France, took its point of departure 
 in a reform against the extravagances of the 
 Marinists, or conceited poets, specially represented 
 in England by Donne and Cowley. The new 
 poets, both in their theory and practice, insisted 
 upon correctness, clearness, polish, moderation, 
 and good sense. Boileau's Z' Art Poetique, 1673, 
 inspired by Horace's Ars Poetica, was a treatise in 
 verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it 
 gave the law in criticism for over a century, not 
 only in France, but in Germany and England. It 
 gave English poetry a didactic turn and' started 
 the fashion of writing critical essays in riming 
 couplets. The Earl of Mulgrave published two 
 " poems " of this kind, an Essay on Satire, and an 
 Essay on Poetry. The Earl of Roscommon who, 
 said Addison, " makes even rules a noble poetry " 
 made a metrical version of Horace's Ars Poetica.
 
 170 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and wrote an original Essay on Translated Verse. 
 Of the same kind were Addison's epistle to Sach- 
 everel, entitled An Account of the Greatest English 
 Poets, and Pope's Essay on Criticism, 1711, which 
 was nothing more than versified maxims of rhetoric, 
 put with Pope's usual point and brilliancy. The 
 classicism of the i8th century, it has been said, 
 was a classicism in red heels and a periwig. It 
 was Latin rather than Greek; it turned to the least 
 imaginative side of Latin literature and found its 
 models, not in Vergil, Catullus, and Lucretius, but 
 in the satires, epistles, and didactic pieces of Ju- 
 venal, Horace, and Persius. 
 
 The chosen medium of the new poetry was the 
 heroic couplet. This had, of course, been used be- 
 fore by English poets as far back as Chaucer. The 
 greater part of the Canterbury Tales was written in 
 heroic couplets. But now a new strength and 
 precision were given to the familiar measure by 
 imprisoning the sense within the limit of the 
 couplet, and by treating each line as also a unit in 
 itself. Edmund Waller had written verse of this 
 kind as early as the reign of Charles I. He, said 
 Dryden, " first showed us to conclude the sense 
 most commonly in distichs, which, in the verse of 
 those before him, runs on for so many lines to- 
 gether that the reader is out of breath to overtake 
 it." Sir John Denham, also, in his Cooper's Hill, 
 1643, had written such verse as this: 
 
 " O. could I flow like thee, and make thy stream 
 My great example as it is my theme !
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 171 
 
 Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull, 
 Strong without rage, without o'ernowing full." 
 
 Here we have the regular flow, and the nice bal- 
 ance between the first and second member of each 
 couplet, and the first and second part of each line, 
 which characterized the verse of Dryden and 
 Pope. 
 
 " Waller was smooth, but Dryden taught to join 
 The varying verse, the full resounding line, 
 The long resounding march and energy divine." 
 
 Thus wrote Pope, using for the nonce the triplet 
 and alexandrine by which Dryden frequently 
 varied the couplet. Pope himself added a greater 
 neatness and polish to Dryden's verse and brought 
 the system to such monotonous pefection that he 
 " made poetry a mere mechanic art." 
 
 The lyrical poetry of this generation was almost 
 entirely worthless. The dissolute wits of Charles 
 the Second's court, Sedley, Rochester, Sackville, 
 and the " mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease " 
 threw off a few amatory trifles; but the age was not 
 spontaneous or sincere enough for genuine song. 
 Cowley introduced the Pindaric ode, a highly arti- 
 ficial form of the lyric, in which the language was 
 tortured into a kind of spurious grandeur, and the 
 meter teased into a sound and fury, signifying noth- 
 ing. Cowley's Pindarics were filled with some- 
 thing which passed for fire, but has now utterly 
 gone out. Nevertheless, the fashion spread, and 
 " he who could do nothing else," said Dr. Johnson,
 
 172 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 " could write like Pindar." The best of these odes 
 was Dryden's famous Alexander 's Feast, written 
 for a celebration of St. Cecilia's day by a musical 
 club. To this same fashion, also, we owe Gray's 
 two fine odes, the Progress of Poesy and the Bard, 
 written a half-century later. 
 
 Dryden was not so much a great poet, as a solid 
 thinker, with a splendid mastery of expression, who 
 used his energetic verse as a vehicle for political 
 argument and satire. His first noteworthy poem, 
 Annus Mir-abilis, 1667, was a narrative of the pub- 
 lic events of the year 1666, namely: the Dutch 
 war and the great fire of London. The subject 
 of Absalom and Ahitophel the first part of which 
 appeared in 1681 was the alleged plot of the 
 Whig leader, the Earl of Shaftesbury, to defeat the 
 succession of the Duke of York, afterward James 
 II., by securing the throne to Monmouth, a natural 
 son of Charles II. The parallel afforded by the 
 story of Absalom's revolt against David was 
 wrought out by Dryden with admirable ingenuity 
 and keeping. He was at his best in satirical char- 
 acter-sketches, such as the brilliant portraits in 
 this poem of Shaftesbury, as the false counselor, 
 Ahitophel, and of the Duke of Buckingham as 
 Zimri. The latter was Dryden's reply to the Re- 
 hearsal. Absalom and Ahitophel was followed by 
 the Medal, a continuation of the same subject, and 
 Mac Flecknoe, a personal onslaught on the " true 
 blue Protestant poet," Thomas Shad well, a polit- 
 ical and literary foe of Dryden. Flecknoe, an ob-
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 173 
 
 scure Irish poetaster, being about to retire from 
 the throne of duncedom, resolved to settle the suc- 
 cession upon his son, Shadwell, whose claims to the 
 inheritance are vigorously asserted. 
 
 " The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, 
 But Shadwell never deviates into sense. . . . 
 The midwife laid her hand on his thick skull 
 With this prophetic blessing Bethou dull" 
 
 Dryden is our first great satirist. The formal 
 satire had been written in the reign of Elisabeth 
 by Donne, and by Joseph Hall, Bishop of Exe- 
 ter, and subsequently by Marston, the drama- 
 tist, by Wither, Marvell, and others; but all of 
 these failed through an over violence of lan- 
 guage, and a purpose too pronouncedly moral. 
 They had no lightness of touch, no irony and 
 mischief. They bore down too hard, imitated 
 Juvenal, and lashed English society in terms befit- 
 ting the corruption of Imperial Rome. They 
 denounced, instructed, preached, did every thing 
 but satirize. The satirist must raise a laugh. 
 Donne and Hall abused men in classes: priests 
 were worldly, lawyers greedy, courtiers obsequious, 
 etc. But the easy scorn of Dryden and the de- 
 lightful malice of Pope gave a pungent personal 
 interest to their sarcasm, infinitely more effective 
 than these commonplaces of satire. Dryden was 
 as happy in controversy as in satire, and is unex- 
 celled in the power to reason in verse. His Re- 
 ligio Laid, 1682, was a poem in defense of the En-
 
 174 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 glish Church. But when James II. came to the 
 throne Dryden turned Catholic and wrote the 
 Hind and Panther, 1687, to vindicate his new 
 belief. Dryden had the misfortune to be de- 
 pendent upon royal patronage and upon a corrupt 
 stage. He sold his pen to the court, and in his 
 comedies he was heavily and deliberately lewd, a 
 sin which he afterward acknowledged and re- 
 gretted. Milton's " soul was like a star and dwelt 
 apart," but Dryden wrote for the trampling multi- 
 tude. He had a coarseness of moral fiber, but was 
 not malignant in his satire, being of a large, care- 
 less, and forgetting nature. He had that masculine, 
 enduring cast of mind which gathers heat and 
 clearness from motion, and grows better with age. 
 His Fables modernizations from Chaucer and 
 translations from Boccaccio written the year be- 
 fore he died, are among his best works. 
 
 Dryden is also our first critic of any importance. 
 His critical essays were mostly written as prefaces 
 or dedications to his poems and plays. But his 
 Essay on Dramatic Poesie, which Dr. Johnson 
 called our " first regular and valuable treatise on 
 the art of writing," was in the shape of a Platonic 
 dialogue. When not misled by the French classi- 
 cism of his day, Dryden was an admirable critic, 
 full of penetration and sound sense. He was the 
 earliest writer, too, of modern literary prose. If 
 the imitation of French models was an injury to 
 poetry it was a benefit to prose. The best modern 
 prose is French, and it was the essayists of the
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 175 
 
 Gallicised Restoration age Cowley, Sir William 
 Temple, and, above all, Dryden who gave modern 
 English prose that simplicity, directness, and col- 
 loquial air, which marks it off from the more arti- 
 ficial diction of Milton, Taylor, and Browne. 
 
 A few books whose shaping influences lay in the 
 past belong by their date to this period. John 
 Bunyan, a poor tinker, whose reading was almost 
 wholly in the Bible and Fox's Book of Martyrs, 
 imprisoned for twelve years in Bedford jail for 
 preaching at conventicles, wrote and, in 1678, pub- 
 lished his Pilgrims Progress, the greatest of re- 
 ligious allegories. Bunyan's spiritual experiences 
 were so real to him that they took visible concrete 
 shape in his imagination as men, women, cities, 
 landscapes. It is the simplest, the most transpar- 
 ent of allegories. Unlike the Faery Queene, the 
 story of Pilgrims Progress has no reason for ex- 
 isting apart from its inner meaning, and yet its 
 reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity 
 Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting 
 Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death 
 with the same belief with which they read of 
 Crusoe's cave or Aladdin's palace. 
 
 It is a long step from the Bedford tinker to the 
 cultivated poet of Paradise Lost. They represent 
 the poles of the Puritan party. Yet it may admit 
 of a doubt, whether the Puritan epic is, in essentials, 
 as vital and original a work as the Puritan allegory. 
 They both came out quietly and made little noise 
 at first. But the Pilgrims Progress got at once
 
 J ;6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 into circulation, and not even a single copy of the 
 first edition remains. Milton, too who received 
 ;io for the copyright of Paradise Lost seemingly 
 found that "fit audience though few " for which he 
 prayed, as his poem reached its second impression 
 in five years (1672). Dryden visited him in his 
 retirement and asked leave to turn it into rime 
 and put it on the stage as an opera. " Ay," said 
 Milton, good humoredly, "you may tag my 
 verses." And accordingly they appeared, duly 
 tagged, in Dryden's operatic masque, the State of 
 Innocence, In this startling conjunction we have 
 the two ages in a nut-shell : the Commonwealth 
 was an epic, the Restoration an opera. 
 
 The literary period covered by the life of Pope, 
 1688-1744, is marked off by no distinct line from 
 the generation before it. Taste continued to be 
 governed by the precepts of Boileau and the 
 French classical school. Poetry remained chiefly 
 didactic and satirical, and satire in Pope's hands 
 was more personal even than in Dryden's, and ad- 
 dressed itself less to public issues. The literature 
 of the "Augustan age" of Queen Anne (1702- 
 1714) was still more a literature of the town and 
 of fashionable society than that of the Restoration 
 had been. It was also closely involved with party 
 struggles of Whig and Tory, and the ablest pens 
 on either side were taken into alliance by the polit- 
 ical leaders. Swift was in high favor with the Tory 
 ministers, Oxford and Bolingbroke, and his pam- 
 phlets, the Public Spirit of the Whigs and the Con-
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 177 
 
 duct of the Allies, were rewarded with the deanery 
 of St. Patrick's, Dublin. Addison became Secre- 
 tary of State under a Whig government. Prior 
 was in the diplomatic service. Daniel De Foe, the 
 author of Robinson Crusoe, 1719, was a prolific polit- 
 ical writer, conducted his Review in the interest of 
 the Whigs and was imprisoned and pilloried for 
 his ironical pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the 
 Dissenters. Steele, who was a violent writer on 
 the Whig side, held various public offices, such 
 as Commissioner of Stamps and Commissioner for 
 Forfeited Estates, and sat in Parliament. After the 
 Revolution of 1688 the manners and morals of 
 English society were somewhat on the mend. 
 The court of William and Mary, and of their suc- 
 cessor, Queen Anne, set no such example of open 
 profligacy as that of Charles II. But there was 
 much hard drinking, gambling, dueling, and in- 
 trigue in London, and vice was fashionable till 
 Addison partly preached and partly laughed it down 
 in the Spectator. The women were mostly frivo- 
 lous and uneducated, and not unfrequently fast. 
 They are spoken of with systematic disrespect 
 by nearly every writer of the time, except Steele. 
 "Every woman," wrote Pope, "is at heart a rake." 
 The reading public had now become large enough 
 to make letters a profession. Dr. Johnson said 
 that Pope was the first writer in whose case the 
 book-seller took the place of the patron. His 
 translation of Homer, published by subscription, 
 brought him between eight and nine thousand 
 12
 
 178 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 pounds and made him independent. But the 
 activity of the press produced a swarm of poorly- 
 paid hack-writers, penny-a-liners, who lived from 
 hand to mouth and did small literary jobs to order. 
 Many of these inhabited Grub Street, and their 
 lampoons against Pope and others of their more 
 successful rivals called out Pope's Dunriad, or epic 
 of the dunces, by way of retaliation. The politics 
 of the time were sordid and consisted mainly of 
 an ignoble scramble for office. The Whigs were 
 fighting to maintain the Act of Succession in favor 
 of the House of Hanover, and the Tories were 
 secretly intriguing with the exiled Stuarts. Many 
 of the leaders, such as the great Whig champion, 
 John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, were with- 
 out political principle or even personal honesty. 
 The Church, too, was in a condition of spiritual 
 deadness. Bishoprics and livings were sold and 
 given to political favorites. Clergymen, like Swift 
 and Lawrence Sterne, were worldly in their lives 
 and immoral in their writings, and were practically 
 unbelievers. The growing religious skepticism 
 appeared in the Deist controversy. Numbers of 
 men in high position were Deists ; the Earl of 
 Shaftesbury, for example, and Pope's brilliant 
 friend, Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, the 
 head of the Tory ministry, whose political writings 
 had much influence upon his young French ac- 
 quaintance, Voltaire. Pope was a Roman Cath- 
 olic, though there is little to show it in his writings, 
 and the underlying thought of his famous Essay
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 179 
 
 on Man was furnished him by Bolingbroke. The 
 letters of the cold-hearted Chesterfield to his son 
 were accepted as a manual of conduct, and La 
 Rochefoucauld's cynical maxims were quoted as 
 authority on life and human nature. Said Swift : 
 
 " As Rochefoucauld his maxims drew 
 From nature, I believe them true. 
 They argue no corrupted mind 
 In him; the fault is in mankind." 
 
 The succession which Dryden had willed to 
 Congreve was taken up by Alexander Pope. He 
 was a man quite unlike Dryden, sickly, deformed, 
 morbidly precocious, and spiteful; nevertheless he 
 joined on to and continued Dryden. He was more 
 careful in his literary workmanship than his great 
 forerunner, and in his Moral Essays and Satires 
 he brought the Horatian epistle in verse, the for- 
 mal satire and that species of didactic poem of 
 which Boileau had given the first example, to an 
 exquisite perfection of finish and verbal art. Dry- 
 den had translated Vergil, and so Pope translated 
 Homer. The throne of the dunces, which Dryden 
 had conferred upon Shadwell, Pope, in his Dunciad, 
 passed on to two of his own literary foes, Theobald 
 and Colley Gibber. There is a great waste of 
 strength in this elaborate squib, and most of the 
 petty writers, whose names it has preserved, as has 
 been said, like flies in amber, are now quite un- 
 known. But, although we have to read it with 
 notes, to get the point of its allusions, it is easy to
 
 180 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 see what execution it must have done at the time; 
 and it is impossible to withhold admiration from the 
 wit, the wickedness, the triumphant mischief of the 
 thing. The sketch of Addison who had offended 
 Pope by praising a rival translation of Homer as 
 " Atticus," is as brilliant as any thing of the kind in 
 Dryden. Pope's very malignity made his sting 
 sharper than Dryden's. He secreted venom, and 
 worked out his revenges deliberately, bringing all 
 the resources of his art to bear upon the question 
 of how to give the most pain most cleverly. 
 
 Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the Rape of the 
 Lock, a mock heroic poem, a " dwarf Iliad," re- 
 counting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, which 
 arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from 
 the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in 
 his Lutrin, had treated, with the same epic dignity, 
 a dispute over the placing of the re.ading desk in 
 a parish church. Pope was the Homer of the 
 drawing-room, the boudoir, the tea-urn, the om- 
 ber-party, the sedan-chair, the parrot cage, and the 
 lap-dogs. This poem, in its sparkle and airy grace, 
 is the topmost blossom of a highly artificial so- 
 ciety, the quintessence of whatever poetry was 
 possible in those 
 
 " Teacup times of hood and hoop, 
 And when the patch was worn," 
 
 with whose decorative features, at least, the recent 
 Queen Anne revival has made this generation fa- 
 miliar. It may be said of it, as Thackeray said of
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 181 
 
 Gay's pastorals : "It is to poetry what charming 
 little Dresden china figures are to sculpture, grace- 
 ful, minikin, fantastic, with a certain beauty al- 
 ways accompanying them." The Rape of the Lock, 
 perhaps, stops short of beauty, but it attains ele- 
 gance and prettiness in a supreme degree. In 
 imitation of the gods and goddesses in the Iliad, 
 who intermeddle for or against the human charac- 
 ters, Pope introduced the Sylphs of the Rosicru- 
 cian philosophy. We may measure the distance 
 between imagination and fancy, if we will compare 
 these little filagree creatures with Shakspere's 
 elves, whose occupation it was 
 
 " To tread the ooze of the salt deep, 
 
 Or run upon the sharp wind of the north, . . . 
 
 Or on the beached margent of the sea, 
 
 To dance their ringlets to the whispering wind." 
 
 Very different were the offices of Pope's fays: 
 
 "Our humble province is to tend the fair ; 
 Not a less pleasing, though less glorious, care ; 
 To save the powder from too rude a gale, 
 Nor let the imprisoned essences exhale. . . . 
 Nay oft in dreams invention we bestow 
 To change a flounce or add a furbelow." 
 
 Pope was not a great poet ; it has been doubted 
 whether he was a poet at all. He does not touch 
 the heart, or stimulate the imagination, as the true 
 poet always does. In the poetry of nature, and 
 the poetry of passion, he was altogether impotent.
 
 182 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 His Windsor Forest and his Pastorals are artificial 
 and false, not written with " the eye upon the ob- 
 ject." His epistle of Eloisa to Abelard is declam- 
 atory and academic, and leaves the reader cold. 
 The only one of his poems which is at all possessed 
 with feeling is his pathetic Elegy to the Memory of 
 an Unfortunate Lady. But he was a great literary 
 artist. Within the cramped and starched regularity 
 of the heroic couplet, which the fashion of the 
 time and his own habit of mind imposed upon him, 
 he secured the largest variety of modulation and 
 emphasis of which that verse was capable. He 
 used antithesis, periphrasis, and climax with great 
 skill. His example dominated English poetry for 
 nearly a century, and even now, when a poet like 
 Dr. Holmes, for example, would write satire or hu- 
 morous verse of a dignified kind, he turns instinct- 
 ively to the measure and manner of Pope. He 
 was not a consecutive thinker, like Dryden, and 
 cared less about the truth of his thought than about 
 the pointedness of its expression. His language 
 was closer-grained than Dryden's. His great art 
 was the art of putting things. He is more quoted 
 than any other English poet, but Shakspere. He 
 struck the average intelligence, the common sense 
 of English readers, and furnished it with neat, port- 
 able formulas, so that it no longer needed to 
 " vent its observation in mangled terms," but could 
 pour itself out compactly, artistically, in little, 
 ready-made molds. But his high-wrought brill- 
 iancy, this unceasing point, soon fatigue. His
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 183 
 
 poems read like a series of epigrams; and every 
 line has a hit or an effect. 
 
 From the reign of Queen Anne date the begin- 
 nings of the periodical essay. Newspapers had been 
 published since the time of the Civil War; at first 
 irregularly, and then regularly. But no literature 
 of permanent value appeared in periodical form 
 until Richard Steele started the Tatler, in 1709. 
 In this he was soon joined by his friend, Joseph 
 Addison ; and in its successor, the Spectator, the 
 first number of which was issued March i, 1711, 
 Addison's contributions outnumbered Steele's. 
 The Tatler was published on three, the Spectator on 
 six, days of the week. The Tatler gave political 
 news, but each number of the Spectator consisted 
 of a single essay. The object of these periodicals 
 was to reflect the passing humors of the time, and 
 to satirize the follies and minor immoralities of the 
 town. "I shall endeavor," wrote Addison, in the 
 tenth paper of the Spectator, " to enliven morality 
 with wit, and to temper wit with morality. ... It 
 was said of Socrates that he brought Philosophy 
 down from Heaven to inhabit among men; and I 
 shall be ambitious to have it said of me that I have 
 brought Philosophy out of closets and libraries, 
 schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assem- 
 blies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." Addison's 
 satire was never personal. He was a moderate 
 man, and did what he could to restrain Steele's in- 
 temperate party zeal. His character was dignified 
 and pure, and his strongest emotion seems to have
 
 184 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 been his religious feeling. One of his contempo- 
 raries called him "a parson in a tie wig," and he 
 wrote several excellent hymns. His mission was 
 that of censor of the public taste. Sometimes he 
 lectures and sometimes he preaches, and in his Sat- 
 urday papers, he brought his wide reading and 
 nice scholarship into service for the instruction of 
 his readers. Such was the series of essays, in 
 which he gave an elaborate review of Paradise 
 Lost. Such also was his famous paper, the Vision 
 of Mirza, an oriental allegory of human life. The 
 adoption of this slightly pedagogic tone was justi- 
 fied by the prevalent ignorance and frivolity of the 
 age. But the lighter portions of the Spectator are 
 those which have worn the best. Their style is 
 at once correct and easy, and it is as a humorist, 
 a sly observer of manners, and above all, a de- 
 lightful talker, that Addison is best known to 
 posterity. In the personal sketches of the mem- 
 bers of the Spectator Club, of Will Honeycomb, 
 Captain Sentry, Sir Andrew Freeport, and, above 
 all, Sir Roger de Coverley, the quaint and honest 
 country gentleman, may be found the nucleus of 
 the modern prose fiction of character. Addison's 
 humor is always a trifle grave. There is no whim- 
 sy, no frolic in it, as in Sterne or Lamb. " He 
 thinks justly," said Dr. Johnson, "but he thinks 
 faintly." The Spectator had a host of followers, 
 from the somewhat heavy Rambler and Idler of 
 Johnson, down to the Salmagundi papers of our 
 own Irving, who was, perhaps, Addison's latest and
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 185 
 
 best literary descendant. In his own age Addison 
 made some figure as a poet and dramatist. His 
 Campaign, celebrating the victory of Blenheim, 
 had one much-admired couplet, in which Marl- 
 borough was likened to the angel of tempest, who 
 
 " Pleased the Almighty's orders to perform, 
 Rides in the whirlwind and directs the storm." 
 
 His stately, classical tragedy, Cato y which was act- 
 ed at Drury Lane Theater in 1712, with immense 
 applause, was pronounced by Dr. Johnson " unques- 
 tionably the noblest production of Addison's gen- 
 ius." It is, notwithstanding, cold and tedious, as 
 a whole, though it has some fine declamatory pas- 
 sages in particular the soliloquy of Cato in the 
 fifth act 
 
 "It must be so: Plato, thou reasonest well," etc. 
 
 The greatest of the Queen Anne wits, and one of 
 the most savage and powerful satirists that ever 
 lived, was Jonathan Swift. As secretary in the 
 family of Sir William Temple, and domestic chap- 
 lain to the Earl of Berkeley, he had known in youth 
 the bitterness of poverty and dependence. After- 
 ward he wrote himself into influence with the Tory 
 ministry, and was promised a bishopric, but was 
 put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired 
 to Ireland to " die like a poisoned rat in a hole." 
 His life was made tragical by the forecast of the 
 madness which finally overtook him. " The stage 
 darkened," said Scott, " ere the curtain fell." In-
 
 i86 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 sanity deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, 
 and for three years before his death he spoke hard- 
 ly ever a word. He had directed that his tomb- 
 stone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indig- 
 natio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. " So great a man 
 he seems to me," wrote Thackeray, " that thinking 
 of him is like thinking of an empire falling." Swift's 
 first noteworthy publication was his Tale of a Tub, 
 1704, a satire on religious differences. But his 
 great work was Gulliver's Travels, 1726, the book 
 in which his hate and scorn of mankind, and the 
 long rage of mortified pride and thwarted ambition 
 found their fullest expression. Children read the 
 voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag, to the flying 
 island of Laputa and the country of the Hou- 
 yhnhnms, as they read Robinson Crusoe, as stories 
 of wonderful adventure. Swift had all of De Foe's 
 realism, his power of giving veri-similitude to his 
 narrative by the invention of a vast number of 
 small, exact, consistent details. But underneath 
 its fairy tales, Gulliver's Travels is a satire, far 
 more radical than any of Dryden's or Pope's, be- 
 cause directed, not against particular parties or per- 
 sons, but against human nature. In his account of 
 Lilliput and Brobdingnag, Swift tries to show 
 looking first through one end of the telescope and 
 then through the other that human greatness, 
 goodness, beauty disappear if the scale be altered 
 a little. If men were six inches high instead of six 
 feet such is the logic of his tale their wars, gov- 
 ernments, science, religion all their institutions.
 
 FROM RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE. 187 
 
 in fine, and all the courage, wisdom, and virtue by 
 which these have been built up, would appear laugh- 
 able. On the other hand, if they were sixty feet 
 high instead of six, they would become disgusting. 
 The complexion of the finest ladies would show 
 blotches, hairs, excrescences, and an overpowering 
 effluvium would breathe from the pores of the 
 skin. Finally, in his loathsome caricature of man- 
 kind, as Yahoos, he contrasts them to their shame 
 with the beasts, and sets instinct above reason. 
 
 The method of Swift's satire was grave irony. 
 Among his minor writings in this kind are his Ar- 
 gument against Abolishing Christianity, his Modest 
 Proposal for utilizing the surplus population of Ire- 
 land by eating the babies of the poor, and his Pre- 
 dictions of Isaac Bickerstaff. In the last he predict- 
 ed the death of one Partridge, an almanac maker, 
 at a certain day and hour. When the time set was 
 past, he published a minute account of Partridge's 
 last moments; and when the subject of this excel- 
 lent fooling printed an indignant denial of his own 
 death, Swift answered very temperately, proving 
 that he was dead and remonstrating with him on 
 the violence of his language. " To call a man a 
 fool and villain, an impudent fellow, only for differ- 
 ing from him in a point merely speculative, is, in 
 my humble opinion, a very improper style for a 
 person of his education." Swift wrote verses as 
 well as prose, but their motive was the reverse of po- 
 etical. His gross and cynical humor vulgarized 
 whatever it touched. He leaves us no illusions,
 
 i88 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and not only strips his subject, but flays it and 
 shows the raw muscles beneath the skin. He de- 
 lighted to dwell upon the lowest bodily functions 
 of human nature. " He saw bloodshot," said 
 Thackeray. 
 
 1. Macaulay's Essay, The Comic Dramatists of 
 the Restoration. 
 
 2. The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Globe 
 Edition. Macmillan & Co. 
 
 3. Thackeray's English Humorists of the Last 
 Century. 
 
 4. Sir Roger de Coverley. New York: Harper, 
 1878. 
 
 5. Swift's Tale of a Tub, Gulliver's Travels, 
 Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation, The 
 Great Question Debated, Verses on the Death of 
 Dean Swift. 
 
 6. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope. 
 Globe Edition. Macmillan & Co.
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 189 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 FROM THE DEATH OF POPE TO THE 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION. 
 
 1744-1789. 
 
 POPE'S example continued potent for fifty years 
 after his death. Especially was this so in satiric 
 and didactic poetry. Not only Dr. Johnson's adap- 
 tations from Juvenal, London, 1738, and the Van- 
 ity of Human Wishes, 1749, but Gifford's Baviad, 
 1791, and Maeviad, 1795, and Byron's English 
 Bards and Scotch Revinvers, 1 809, were in the verse 
 and manner of Pope. In Johnson's Lives of the 
 Poets, 1781, Dryden and Pope are treated as the 
 two greatest English poets. But long before this a 
 revolution in literary taste had begun, a movement 
 which is variously described as The Return to Nat- 
 ure, or The Rise of the New Romantic School. 
 
 For nearly a hundred years poetry had dealt 
 with manners and the life of towns, the gay, pro- 
 saic life of Congreve or of Pope. The sole con- 
 cession to the life of nature was the old pastoral, 
 which, in the hands of cockneys, like Pope and Am- 
 brose Philips, who merely repeated stock descrip- 
 tions at second or third hand, became even more 
 artificial than a Beggar's Opera or a Rape of the
 
 190 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Lock. These, at least, were true to their environ- 
 ment, and were natural, just because they were arti- 
 ficial. But the Seasons of James Thomson, pub- 
 lished in installments from 1726-30, had opened a 
 new field. Their theme was the English landscape, 
 as varied by the changes of the year, and they were 
 written by a true lover and observer of nature. 
 Mark Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination, 1744, 
 published the year of Pope's death, was written 
 like the Seasons, in blank verse ; and although its 
 language had much of the formal, didactic cast of 
 the Queen Anne poets, it pointed unmistakably in 
 the new direction. Thomson had painted the soft 
 beauties of a highly cultivated land lawns, gar- 
 dens, forest-preserves, orchards, and sheep-walks. 
 But now a fresh note was struck in the literature, 
 not of England alone, but of Germany and France 
 romanticism, the chief element in which was a 
 love of the wild. Poets turned from the lameness 
 of modern existence to savage nature and the 
 heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In 
 France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the nat- 
 ural man, following his instincts in disregard of so- 
 cial conventions. In Germany Bodmer published, 
 in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, 
 the Nibelungen Lied. Works of a similar tendency 
 in England were the odes of William Collins and 
 Thomas Gray, published between 1747-57, espe- 
 cially Collins's Ode on the Superstitions of the High- 
 lands, and Gray's Bard, a pindaric, in which the last 
 survivor of the Welsh bards invokes vengeance on
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 191 
 
 Edward I., the destroyer of his guild. Gray and 
 Mason, his friend and editor, made translations 
 from the ancient Welsh and Norse poetry. Thomas 
 Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, 1765, 
 aroused a taste for old ballads. Richard Kurd's 
 Letters on Chivalry and Romance, Thomas Warton's 
 History of English Poetry, 1774-78, Tynvhitt's crit- 
 ical edition of Chaucer, and Horace Walpole's 
 Gothic romance, the Castle of Otranto, 1765, stimu- 
 lated this awakened interest in the picturesque as- 
 pects of feudal life, and contributed to the fondness 
 for supernatural and mediaeval subjects. Jarnes 
 Seattle's Minstrel, 1771, described the educating 
 influence of Scottish mountain scenery upon the 
 genius of a young poet. But the most remarkable 
 instances of this passion for wild nature and the 
 romantic past were the Poems of Ossian and 
 Thomas Chatterton's literary forgeries. 
 
 In 1762 James Macpherson published the first 
 installment of what professed to be a translation of 
 the poems of Ossian, a Gaelic bard, whom tradition 
 placed in the 3d century. Macpherson said that 
 he made his version including two complete 
 epics, Fingal and Temora, from Gaelic MSS., 
 which he had collected in the Scottish Highlands. 
 A fierce controversy at once sprang up over the 
 genuineness of these remains. Macpherson was 
 challenged to produce his originals, and when, 
 many years after, he published the Gaelic text, it 
 was asserted that this was nothing but a transla- 
 tion of his own English into modern Gaelic. Of
 
 192 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 the MSS. which he professed to have found not a 
 scrap remained: the Gaelic text was printed from 
 transcriptions in Macpherson's handwriting or in 
 that of his secretaries. 
 
 But whether these poems were the work of Os- 
 sian or of Macpherson, they made a deep impres- 
 sion upon the time. Napoleon admired them 
 greatly, and Goethe inserted passages from the 
 " Songs of Selma " in his Sorrows of Werther. 
 Macpherson composed or translated them in an 
 abrupt, rhapsodical prose, resembling the English 
 version of Job or of the prophecies of Isaiah. 
 They filled the minds of their readers with images 
 of vague sublimity and desolation; the mountain 
 torrent, the mist on the hills, the ghosts of heroes 
 half seen by the setting moon, the thistle in the 
 ruined courts of chieftains, the grass whistling on 
 the windy heath, the gray rock by the blue stream 
 of Lutha, and the cliffs of sea-surrounded Gormal. 
 
 " A tale of the times of old! " 
 
 " Why, thou wanderer unseen! Thou bender of 
 the thistle of Lora; why, thou breeze of the valley, 
 hast thou left mine ear? I hear no distant roar of 
 streams! No sound of the harp from the rock! 
 Come, thou huntress of Lutha, Malvina, call back 
 his soul to the bard. I look forward to Lochlin 
 of lakes, to the dark billowy bay of U-thorno, where 
 Fingal descends from Ocean, from the roar of 
 winds. Few are the heroes of Morven in a land 
 unknown." 
 
 Thomas Chatterton, who died by his own hand
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 193 
 
 in 1770, at the age of seventeen, is one of the most 
 wonderful examples of precocity in the history of 
 literature. His father had been sexton of the an- 
 cient Church of St. Mary Redcliff, in Bristol, and 
 the boy's sensitive imagination took the stamp of 
 his surroundings. He taught himself to read from 
 a black-letter Bible. He drew charcoal sketches 
 of churches, castles, knightly tombs, and heraldic 
 blazonry. When only eleven years old, he began 
 the fabrication of documents in prose and verse, 
 which he ascribed to a fictitious Thomas Rowley, 
 a secular priest at Bristol in the i5th century. 
 Chatterton pretended to have found these among 
 the contents of an old chest in the muniment room 
 of St. Mary Redcliff's. The Rowley poems in- 
 cluded two tragedies, Aella and Goddwyn, two 
 cantos of a long poem on the Battle of Hastings, 
 and a number of ballads and minor pieces. Chat- 
 terton had no precise knowledge of early English, 
 or even of Chaucer. His method of working was 
 as follows: He made himself a manuscript glossary 
 of the words marked as archaic in Bailey's and 
 Kersey's English dictiqnaries, composed his poems 
 first in modern language, and then turned them 
 into ancient spelling, and substituted here and 
 there the old words in his glossary for their 
 modern equivalents. Naturally he made many 
 mistakes, and though Horace Walpole, to whom 
 he sent some of his pieces, was unable to detect 
 the forgery, his friends, Gray and Mason, to whom 
 he submitted them, at once pronounced 'them 
 12
 
 194 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 spurious. Nevertheless there was a controversy 
 over Rowley, hardly less obstinate than that over 
 Ossian, a controversy made possible only by the 
 then almost universal ignorance of the forms, 
 scansion, and vocabulary of early English poetry. 
 Chatterton's poems are of little value in them- 
 selves, but they are the record of an industry and 
 imitative quickness, marvelous in a mere child, 
 and they show how, with the instinct of genius, he 
 threw himself into the main literary current of his 
 time. Discarding the couplet of Pope, the poets 
 now went back for models to the Elisabethan 
 writers. Thomas Warton published, in 1753, his 
 Observations on the Faerie Qiteene. Beattie's Min- 
 strel, Thomson's Castle of Indolence, William Shen- 
 stone's Schoolmistress, and John Dyer's Fleece, 
 were all written in the Spenserian stanza. Shen- 
 stone gave a partly humorous effect to his poem by 
 imitating Spenser's archaisms, and Thomson re- 
 produced in many passages the copious harmony 
 and luxuriant imagery of the Faerie Queene. 
 The Fleece was a poem on English wool-growing, 
 after the fashion of Vergil's Georgics. The subject 
 was unfortunate, for, as Dr. Johnson said, it is im- 
 possible to make poetry out of surges and drug- 
 gets. Dyer's Grongar Hill, which mingles reflec- 
 tion with natural description in the manner of 
 Gray's Elegy written in a Country Churchyard, was 
 composed in the octosyllabic verse of Milton's 
 L" Allegro and // Penseroso. Milton's minor 
 poems, which had hitherto been neglected, exer-
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 195 
 
 cised a great influence on Collins and Gray. Col- 
 lins's Ode to Simplicity was written in the stanza of 
 Milton's Nativity, and his exquisite unrimed Ode 
 to Evening was a study in versification, after Mil- 
 ton's translation of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha, in the 
 original meters. Shakspere began to to be studied 
 more reverently: numerous critical editions of 
 his plays were issued, and Garrick restored his 
 pure text to the stage. Collins was an enthu- 
 siastic student of Shakspere, and one of his sweet- 
 est poems, the Dirge in Cymbeline, was inspired 
 by the tragedy of Cymbeline. The verse of Gray, 
 Collins, and the Warton brothers, abounds in 
 verbal reminiscences of Shakspere; but their 
 genius was not allied to his, being exclusively 
 lyrical, and not at all dramatic. The Muse of this 
 romantic school was Fancy rather than Passion. 
 A thoughtful melancholy, a gentle, scholarly pen- 
 siveness, the spirit of Milton's // Penseroso, 
 pervades their poetry. Gray was a fastidious 
 scholar, who produced very little, but that little 
 of the finest quality. His famous Elegy, express- 
 ing a meditative mood in language of the choicest 
 perfection, is the representative poem of the 
 second half of the iSth century, as the Rape of 
 the Lock is of the first. The romanticists were 
 quietists, and their scenery is characteristic. 
 They loved solitude and evening, the twilight 
 vale, the mossy hermitage, ruins, glens, and caves. 
 Their style was elegant and academic, retaining a 
 little of the stilted poetic diction of their classical
 
 196 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 forerunners. Personification and periphrasis were 
 their favorite mannerisms : Collins's Odes were 
 largely addressed to abstractions, such as Fear, 
 Pity, Liberty, Mercy, and Simplicity. A poet in 
 their dialect was always a "bard;" a countryman 
 was " the untutored swain," and a woman was a 
 " nymph " or ''the fair," just as in Dryden and 
 Pope. Thomson is perpetually mindful of Vergil, 
 and afraid to speak simply. He uses too many 
 Latin epithets, like amusive and precipitant, and 
 calls a fish-line 
 
 The floating line snatched from the hoary steed." 
 
 They left much for Cowper and Wordsworth to 
 do in the way of infusing the new blood of a 
 strong, racy English into our exhausted poetic 
 diction. Their poetry is impersonal, bookish, 
 literary. It lacks emotional force, except now 
 and then in Gray's immortal Elegy, in his Ode on 
 a Distant Prospect of Eton College, in Collins's 
 lines, On the Death of Thomson, and his little ode 
 beginning, " How sleep the brave ?" 
 
 The new school did not lack critical expounders 
 of its principles and practice. Joseph Warton 
 published, in 1756, the first volume of his Essay on 
 the Genius and Writings of Pope, an elaborate re- 
 view of Pope's writings seriatim, doing him cer- 
 tainly full justice, but ranking him below Shaks- 
 pere, Spenser, and Milton. " Wit and satire," 
 wrote Warton, "are transitory and perishable, but 
 nature and passion are eternal. . . . He stuck to
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 197 
 
 describing modern manners ; but those manners, be- 
 cause they are familiar, artificial, and polished, are, 
 in their very nature, unfit for any lofty effort of 
 the Muse. Whatever poetical enthusiasm he 
 actually possessed he withheld and stifled. Sure- 
 ly it is no narrow and niggardly encomium to say, 
 he is the great Poet of Reason, the first of Ethical 
 authors in verse." Warton illustrated his critical 
 positions by quoting freely not only from Spenser 
 and Milton, but from recent poets, like Thomson, 
 Gray, Collins, and Dyer. He testified that the 
 Seasons had " been very instrumental in diffusing 
 a general taste for the beauties of nature and 
 landscape." It was symptomatic of the change in 
 literary taste that the natural or English school of 
 lansdcape gardening now began to displace the 
 French and Dutch fashion of clipped hedges, reg- 
 ular parterres, etc., and that Gothic architecture 
 came into repute. Horace Walpole was a vir- 
 tuoso in Gothic art, and in his castle, at Strawberry 
 Hill, he made a collection of ancient armor, 
 illuminated MSS., and bric-a-brac of all kinds. 
 Gray had been Walpole's traveling companion in 
 France and Italy, and the two had quarreled and 
 separated, but were afterward reconciled. From 
 Walpole's private printing-press, at Strawberry 
 Hill, Gray's two " sister odes," the Bard and 
 the Progress of Poesy, were first printed, in 1757. 
 Both Gray and Walpole were good correspond- 
 ents, and their printed letters are among the most 
 delightful literature of the kind.
 
 198 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 The central figure among the English men of 
 letters of that generation was Samuel Johnson 
 (1709-84), whose memory has been preserved less 
 by his own writings than by James Boswell's 
 famous Life of Johnson, published in 1791. Bos- 
 well was a Scotch laird and advocate, who first met 
 Johnson in London, when the larter was fifty-four 
 years old. Boswell was not a very wise or witty 
 person, but he reverenced the worth and intellect 
 which shone through his subject's uncouth ex- 
 terior. He followed him about, note-book in 
 hand, bore all his snubbings patiently, and made 
 the best biography ever written. It is related that 
 the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell 
 meant to write his life, he should prevent it by tak- 
 ing BoswelTs. And yet Johnson's own writings and 
 this biography of him have changed places in rel- 
 ative importance so completely, that Carlyle pre- 
 dicted that the former would soon be reduced to 
 notes on the latter; and Macaulay said that the 
 man who was known to his contemporaries as a 
 great writer was known to posterity as an agree- 
 able companion. 
 
 Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self- 
 developed characters, so common among the En- 
 glish. He was the son of a Lichfield book-seller, 
 and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short 
 by poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a 
 school-master, he had come up to London, in 1737, 
 where he supported himself for many years as a 
 book-seller's hack. Gradually his great learning
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENXH REVOLUTION. 199 
 
 and abilities, his ready social wit and powers as a 
 talker, caused his company to be sought at the 
 tables of those whom he called " the great." He 
 was a clubbable man, and he drew about him 
 at the tavern a group of the most distinguished 
 intellects of the time, Edmund Burke, the orator 
 and statesman, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Rey- 
 nolds, the portrait painter, and David Garrick, the 
 great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's 
 school, near Lichfield. Johnson was the typical 
 John Bull of the last century. His oddities, vir- 
 tues, and prejudices were thoroughly English. 
 He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, 
 and had a cockneyish attachment to London. 
 He was a high Tory, and an orthodox churchman; 
 he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he as- 
 serted a sturdy independence against any lord in 
 particular. He was deeply religious, but had an 
 abiding fear of death. He was burly in person, 
 and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always 
 covered with snuff. He was a great diner out, 
 an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and 
 untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often 
 took the form of hypochondria and threatened to 
 affect his brain, deprived him of control over 
 the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how 
 his features worked, how he snorted, grunted, 
 whistled, and rolled about in his chair when get- 
 ting ready to speak. He records his minutest 
 traits, such as his habit of pocketing the orange 
 peels at the club, and his superstitious way of touch-
 
 2oo ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ing all the posts between his house and the Mitre 
 Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one by 
 chance. Though bearish in his manners and 
 arrogant in dispute, especially when talking " for 
 victory," Johnson had a large and tender heart. 
 He loved his ugly, old wife twenty-one years his 
 senior and he had his house full of unfortunates 
 a blind woman, an invalid surgeon, a destitute 
 widow, a negro servant whom he supported for 
 many years, and bore with all their ill-humors 
 patiently. 
 
 Among Johnson's numerous writings the ones 
 best entitled to remembrance are, perhaps, his 
 Dictionary of the English Language, 1755; his 
 moral tale, Rasselas, 1759; the introduction to his 
 Edition of Shakspere, 1765; and his Lives of the 
 Poets, 1781. Johnson wrote a sonorous, cadenced 
 prose, full of big Latin words and balanced 
 clauses. Here is a sentence, for example, from 
 his Visit to the Hebrides : 4< We were now treading 
 that illustrious island which was once the lu- 
 minary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage 
 clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits 
 of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To 
 abstract the mind from all local emotion would be 
 impossible, if it were endeavored, and would be 
 foolish, if it were possible." The difference between 
 his colloquial style and his book style is well illus- 
 trated in the instance cited by Macaulay. Speak- 
 ing of Villier's Rehearsal, Johnson said, " It has not 
 wit enough to keep it sweet;" then paused and
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 201 
 
 added translating English into Johnsonese " it 
 has not vitality sufficient to preserve it from 
 putrefaction." There is more of this in Johnson's 
 Rambler and Idler papers than in his latest work, 
 the Lives of the Poets. In this he showed himself 
 a sound and judicious critic, though with decided 
 limitations. His understanding was solid, but he 
 was a thorough classicist, and his taste in poetry 
 was formed on Pope. He was unjust to Milton 
 and to his own contemporaries, Gray, Collins, 
 Shenstone, and Dyer. He had no sense of the 
 higher and subtler graces of romantic poetry, and 
 he had a comical indifference to the " beauties of 
 nature." When Boswell once ventured to remark 
 that poor Scotland had, at least, some " noble, 
 wild prospects," the doctor replied that the noblest 
 prospect a Scotchman ever saw was the road that 
 led to London. 
 
 The English novel of real life had its origin at 
 this time. Books like De Foe's Robinson Crusoe, 
 Captain Singleton, Journal of the Plague, etc., 
 were tales of incident and adventure rather than 
 novels. The novel deals primarily with character 
 and with the interaction of characters upon one 
 another, as developed by a regular plot. The first 
 English novelist, in the modern sense of the word, 
 was Samuel Richardson, a printer, who began au- 
 thorship in his fiftieth year with his Pamela, the 
 story of a young servant girl, who resisted the se- 
 ductions of her master, and finally, as the reward 
 of her virtue, became his wife. Clarissa Harlowe,
 
 202 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 1748, was the tragical history of a high spirited 
 young lady, who being driven from home by her 
 family, because she refused to marry the suitor 
 selected for her, fell into the toils of Lovelace, an 
 accomplished rake. After struggling heroically 
 against every form of artifice and violence, she 
 was at last drugged and ruined. She died of a 
 broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, 
 was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir 
 Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson's por- 
 trait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately 
 doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the 
 modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these 
 novels were written in the form of letters passing 
 between the characters, a method which fitted 
 Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew 
 little of life, but he identified himself intensely 
 with his principal character and produced a strong 
 effect by minute, accumulated touches. Clarissa 
 Harlowe is his masterpiece, though even in that 
 the situation is painfully prolonged, the heroine's 
 virtue is self-conscious and rhetorical, and there 
 is something almost ludicrously unnatural in the 
 copiousness with which she pours herself out in 
 gushing epistles to her female correspondent at 
 the very moment when she is beset with dangers, 
 persecuted, agonized, and driven nearly mad. In 
 Richardson's novels appears, for the first time, 
 that sentimentalism which now began to infect 
 European literature. Pamela was translated into 
 French and German, and fell in with that current
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 203 
 
 of popular feeling which found fullest expression 
 in Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, 1759, and Goethe's 
 Leiden des Jungen Werther, which set all the world 
 a-weeping in 1774. 
 
 Coleridge said y^at to pass from Richardson's 
 books to those of Henry Fielding was like going 
 into the, fresh air from a close room heated by 
 stoves. Richardson, it has been affirmed, knew 
 man, but Fielding knew men. The latter's first 
 novel, Joseph Andrews, 1742, was begun as a 
 travesty of Pamela. The hero, a brother of 
 Pamela, was a young footman in the employ of 
 Lady Booby, from whom his virtue suffered a like 
 assault to that made upon Pamela's by her master. 
 This reversal of the natural situation was in itself 
 full of laughable possibilities, had the book gone 
 on simply as a burlesque. But the exuberance of 
 Fielding's genius led him beyond his original de- 
 sign. This hero, leaving Lady Booby's service, 
 goes traveling with good Parson Adams, and is 
 soon engaged in a series of comical and rather 
 boisterous adventures. 
 
 Fielding had seen life, and his characters were 
 painted from the life with a bold, free hand. He 
 was a gentleman by birth, and had made ac- 
 quaintance with society and the town in 1727, 
 when he was a handsome, stalwart young fellow, 
 with high animal spirits and a great appetite for 
 pleasure. He soon ran himself into debt and began 
 writing for the stage; married, and spent his wife's 
 fortune, living for awhile in much splendor as a
 
 204 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 country gentleman, and afterward in a reduced 
 condition as a rural justice with a salary of ^500 
 of "the dirtiest money on earth." Fielding's mas- 
 terpiece was Tom Jones, 1749, and it remains one 
 of the best of English novels^ Its hero is very 
 much after Fielding's own heart, wild, spendthrift, 
 warm-hearted, forgiving, and greatly in need of 
 forgiveness. The same type of character, with the 
 lines deepened, re-appears in Captain Booth, in 
 Amelia, 1751, the heroine of which is a portrait of 
 Fielding's wife. With Tom Jones is contrasted 
 Blifil, the embodiment of meanness, hypocrisy, and 
 cowardice. Sophia Western, the heroine, is one of 
 Fielding's most admirable creations. For the reg- 
 ulated morality of Richardson, with its somewhat 
 old-grannified air, Fielding substituted instinct. 
 His virtuous characters are virtuous by impulse 
 only, and his ideal of character is manliness. In 
 Jonathan Wild the hero is a highwayman. This 
 novel is ironical, a sort of prose mock-heroic, and 
 is one of the strongest, though certainly the least 
 pleasing, of Fielding's writings. 
 
 Tobias Smollett was an inferior Fielding with a 
 difference. He was a Scotch ship-surgeon and 
 had spent some time in the West Indies. He in- 
 troduced into fiction the now familiar figure of the 
 British tar, in the persons of Tom Bowling and 
 Commodore Trunnion, as Fielding had introduced, 
 in Squire Western, the equally national type of the 
 hard-swearing, deep-drinking, fox-hunting Tory 
 squire. Both Fielding and Smollett were of the
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 205 
 
 hearty British "beef-and-beer " school; their 
 novels are downright, energetic, coarse, and 
 high-blooded; low life, physical life, runs riot 
 through their pages tavern brawls, the breaking of 
 pates, and the off-hand courtship of country 
 wenches. Smollett's books, such as Roderick 
 Random, 1748, Peregrine Pickle, 1751, and Ferdi- 
 na?id Ceunt Fathom, 1752, were more purely stories 
 of broadly comic adventure than Fielding's. The 
 latter's view of life was by no means idyllic; but 
 with Smollett this English realism ran into vul- 
 garity and a hard Scotch literalness, and character 
 was pushed to caricature. "The generous wine 
 of Fielding," says Taine, " in Smollett's hands be- 
 comes brandy of the dram-shop." A partial ex- 
 ception to this is to be found in his last and best 
 novel, Humphrey Clinker, 1770. The influence of 
 Cervantes and of the French novelist, Le Sage, 
 who finished his Adventures of Gil jBlas in 1735, 
 are very perceptible in Smollett. 
 
 A genius of much finer mold was Lawrence 
 Sterne, the author of Tristram Shandy, 1759-67, 
 and the Sentimental Journey, 1768. Tristram 
 Shandy is hardly a novel: the story merely serves 
 to hold together a number ot characters, such as 
 Uncle Toby and Corporal Trim, conceived with 
 rare subtlety and originality. Sterne's chosen 
 province was the whimsical, and his great model 
 was Rabelais. His books are full of digressions, 
 breaks, surprises, innuendoes, double meanings, 
 mystifications, and all manner of odd turns.
 
 206 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Coleridge and Carlyle unite in pronouncing him. 
 a great humorist. Thackeray says that he was only 
 a great jester. Humor is the laughter of the 
 heart, and Sterne's pathos is closely interwoven 
 with his humor. He was the foremost of English 
 sentimentalists, and he had that taint of insincerity 
 which distinguishes sentimentalism from genuine 
 sentiment, like Goldsmith' s, for example. Sterne, 
 in life, was selfish, heartless, and untrue. A cler- 
 gyman, his worldliness and vanity and the in- 
 decency of his writings were a scandal to the 
 Church, though his sermons were both witty and 
 affecting. He enjoyed the titilation of his own 
 emotions, and he had practiced so long at detect- 
 ing the latent pathos that lies in the expression of 
 dumb things and of poor, patient animals, that he 
 could summon the tear of sensibility at the 
 thought of a discarded postchaise, a dead donkey, 
 a starling in a cage, or of Uncle Toby putting a 
 house fly out of the window, and saying, "There 
 is room enough in the world for thee and me." 
 It is a high proof of his cleverness that he generally 
 succeeds in raising the desired feeling in his read- 
 ers even from such trivial occasions. He was a 
 minute philosopher, his philosophy was kindly, and 
 he taught the delicate art of making much out of 
 little. Less coarse than Fielding, he is far more 
 corrupt. Fielding goes bluntly to the point; 
 Sterne lingers among the temptations and sus- 
 pends the expectation to tease and excite it. For- 
 bidden fruit had a relish for him, and his pages
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 207 
 
 seduce. He is full of good sayings, both tender 
 and witty. It was Sterne, for example, who wrote, 
 "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb." 
 
 A very different writer was Oliver Goldsmith, 
 whose Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, was the earliest, 
 and is still one of the best, novels of domestic and 
 rural life. The book, like its author, was thor- 
 oughly Irish, full of bulls and inconsistencies. 
 Very improbable things happened in it with a 
 cheerful defiance of logic. But its characters 
 are true to nature, drawn with an idyllic sweet- 
 ness and purity, and with touches of a most loving 
 humor. Its hero, Dr. Primrose, was painted after 
 Goldsmith's father, a poor clergyman of the En- 
 glisl. Church in Ireland, and the original, likewise, 
 of the country parson in Goldsmith's Deserted 
 Village, 1770, who was "passing rich on forty 
 pounds a year." This poem, though written in 
 the fashionable couplet of Pope, and even con- 
 taining a few verses contributed by Dr. Johnson 
 so that it was not at all in line with the work of 
 the romanticists did, perhaps, as much as any 
 thing of Gray or of Collins to recall English poetry 
 to the simplicity and freshness of country life. 
 
 Except for the comedies of Sheridan and Gold, 
 smith, and, perhaps, a few other plays, the stage 
 had now utterly declined. The novel, which is 
 dramatic in essence, though not in form, began to 
 take its place, and to represent life, though less in- 
 tensely, yet more minutely, than the theater could 
 do. In the novelists of the i8th century, the life
 
 208 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of the people, as distinguished from "society" or 
 the upper classes, began to invade literature. 
 Richardson was distinctly a bourgeois writer, and 
 his contemporaries Fielding, Smollett. Sterne, and 
 Goldsmith ranged over a wide variety of ranks 
 and conditions. This is one thing which distin- 
 guishes the literature of the second half of the i8th 
 century from that of the first, as well as in some 
 degree from that of all previous centuries. Among 
 the authors of this generation whose writings be- 
 longed to other departments of thought than pure 
 literature may be mentioned, in passing, the great 
 historian, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall 
 of the Roman Empire was published from 1776-88, 
 and Edmund Burke, whose political speeches and 
 pamphlets possess a true literary quality. The ro- 
 mantic poets had addressed the imagination rather 
 than the heart. It was reserved for two men a 
 contrast to one another in almost every respect 
 to bring once more into British song a strong indi- 
 vidual feeling, and with it a new warmth and di- 
 rectness of speech. These were William Cowper 
 (1731-1800) and Robert Burns (1759-96). Cowper 
 spoke out of his own life experience, his agony, his 
 love, his worship and despair; and straightway the 
 varnish that had glittered over all our poetry since 
 the time of Dryden melted away. Cowper had 
 scribbled verses when he was a young law student 
 at the Middle Temple in London, and he had con- 
 tributed to the Olney Hymns, published in 1779 by 
 his friend and pastor, the Rev. John Newton; but
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 209 
 
 he only began to write poetry in earnest when he 
 was nearly fifty years old. In 1782, the date of his 
 first volume, he said, in a letter to a friend, that he 
 had read but one English poet during the past 
 twenty years. Perhaps, therefore, of all English 
 poets of equal culture, Cowper owed the least im- 
 pulse to books and the most to the need of utter- 
 ing his inmost thoughts and feelings. Cowper had 
 a most unhappy life. As a child, he was shy, sen- 
 sitive, and sickly, and suffered much from bullying 
 and fagging at a school whither he was sent after 
 his mother's death. This happened when he was 
 six years old; and in his affecting lines written On 
 Receipt of My Mother's Picture, he speaks of him- 
 self as a 
 
 " Wretch even then, life's journey just begun." 
 
 In 1763 he became insane and was sent to an asy- 
 lum, where he spent a year. Judicious treatment 
 restored him to sanity, but he came out a broken 
 man and remained for the rest of his life an inva- 
 lid, unfitted for any active occupation. His dis- 
 ease took the form of religious melancholy. He 
 had two recurrences of madness, and both times 
 made attempts upon his life. At Huntingdon, and 
 afterward at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, he found 
 a home with the Unwin family, whose kindness did 
 all which the most soothing and delicate care could 
 do to heal his wounded spirit. His two poems To 
 Mary Unwin, together with the lines on his moth- 
 er's picture, were almost the first examples of deep 
 14
 
 2io ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and tender sentiment in the lyrical poetry of the 
 last century. Cowper found relief from the black 
 thoughts that beset him only in an ordered round 
 of quiet household occupations. He corresponded 
 indefatigably, took long walks through the neigh- 
 borhood, read, sang, and conversed with Mrs. Un- 
 win and his friend, Lady Austin; and amused him- 
 self with carpentry, gardening, and raising pets, es- 
 pecially hares, of which gentle animals he grew very 
 fond. All these simple tastes, in which he found 
 for a time a refuge and a sheltered happiness, are 
 reflected in his best poem, The Task, 1785. Cow- 
 per is the poet of the family affections, of domestic 
 life, and rural retirement; the laureate of the fire- 
 side, the tea-table, the evening lamp, the garden, the 
 green-house, and the rabbit-coop. He draws with 
 elegance and precision a chair, a clock, a harpsi- 
 chord, a barometer, a piece of needle-work. But 
 Cowper was an out-door as well as an in-door man. 
 The Olney landscape was tame, a fat, agricultural 
 region, where the sluggish Ouse wound between 
 plowed fields and the horizon was bounded by 
 low hills. Nevertheless Cowper's natural descrip- 
 tions are at once more distinct and more imagina- 
 tive than Thomson's. The Task reflects, also, the 
 new philanthropic spirit, the enthusiasm of human- 
 ity, the feeling of the brotherhood of men to which 
 Rousseau had given expression in France and which 
 issued in the French Revolution. In England this 
 was the time of Wilberforce. the antislavery agi- 
 tator; of Whitefield, the eloquent revival preacher;
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 211 
 
 of John and Charles Wesley, and of the Evangel- 
 ical and Methodist movements which gave new life 
 to the English Church. John Newton, the curate 
 of Olney and the keeper of Cowper's conscience, 
 was one of the leaders of the Evangelicals ; and 
 Cowper's first volume of Table Talk and other po- 
 ems, 1782, written under Newton's inspiration, was 
 a series of sermons in verse, somewhat intolerant of 
 all worldly enjoyments, such as hunting, dancing, 
 and theaters. " God made the country and man 
 made the town," he wrote. He was a moralizing 
 poet, and his morality was sometimes that of the 
 invalid and the recluse. Byron called him a " cod- 
 dled poet." And, indeed, there is a suspicion of 
 gruel and dressing-gowns about him. He lived 
 much among women, and his sufferings had refined 
 him to a feminine delicacy. But there is no sick' 
 liness in his poetry, and he retained a charming 
 playful humor displayed in his excellent comic 
 ballad, John Gilpin ; and Mrs. Browning has sung 
 of him, 
 
 " How when one by one sweet sounds and wandering lights 
 
 departed 
 He bore no less a loving face, because so broken-hearted." 
 
 At the close of the year 1786 a young Scotch- 
 man, named Samuel Rose, called upon Cowper at 
 Olney, and left with him a small volume, which had 
 appeared at Edinburgh during the past summer, 
 entitled Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by 
 Robert Burns. Cowper read the book through
 
 2i2 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 twice, and, though somewhat bothered by the dia- 
 lect, pronounced it a "very extraordinary produc- 
 tion." This momentary flash, as of an electric 
 spark, marks the contact not only of the two chief 
 British poets of their generation, but of two litera- 
 tures. Scotch poets, like Thomson and Beattie, 
 had written in Southern English, and, as Carlyle 
 said, /// vacuo, that is, with nothing specially na- 
 tional in their work. Burns's sweet though rugged 
 Doric first secured the vernacular poetry of his 
 country a hearing beyond the border. He had, to 
 be sure, a whole literature of popular songs and 
 ballads behind him, and his immediate models were 
 Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson; but these re- 
 mained provincial, while Burns became universal. 
 He was born in Ayrshire, on the banks of " bon- 
 ny Doon," in a clay biggin not far from " Alloway's 
 auld haunted kirk," the scene of the witch dance 
 in Tarn O ' Shanter. His father was a hard-headed, 
 God-fearing tenant farmer, whose life and that of 
 his sons was a harsh struggle with poverty. The 
 crops failed; the landlord pressed for his rent; for 
 weeks at a time the family tasted no meat; yet this 
 life of toil was lightened by love and homely pleas- 
 ures. In the Cotter's Saturday Night, Burns has 
 drawn a beautiful picture of his parents' household, 
 the rest that came at the week's end, and the fam- 
 ily worship about the "wee bit ingle, blinkin' bon- 
 nily." Robert was handsome, wild, and witty. H 
 was universally susceptible, and his first songs, like 
 his last, were of "the lasses." His head had been
 
 FROM POPE TO' FRENCH REVOLUTION. 213 
 
 stuffed, in boyhood, with " tales and songs concern- 
 ing devils, ghosts, faiiies, brownies, witches, war- 
 locks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights," 
 etc., told him by one Jenny Wilson, an old woman 
 who lived in the family. His ear was full of an- 
 cient Scottish tunes, and as soon as he fell in love 
 he began to make poetry as naturally as a bird 
 sings. He composed his verses while following the 
 plow or working in the stack-yard; or, at even- 
 ing, balancing on two legs of his chair and watch- 
 ing the light of a peat fire play over the reeky walls 
 of the cottage. Burns's love songs are in many 
 keys, ranging from strains of the most pure and 
 exalted passion, like Ae Fond Kiss and To Mary in 
 Heaven, to such loose ditties as When Januar 
 Winds and Green Grow the Rashes O. 
 
 Burns liked a glass almost as well as a lass, and 
 at Mauchline, where he carried on a farm with his 
 brother Gilbert, after their father's death, he be- 
 gan to seek a questionable relief from the pressure 
 of daily toil and unkind fates, in the convivialities 
 of the tavern. There, among the wits of the 
 Mauchline Club, farmers' sons, shepherds from the 
 uplands, and the smugglers who swarmed over the 
 west coast, he would discuss politics and farming, 
 recite his verses, and join in the singing and rant- 
 ing, while 
 
 " Bousin o'er the nappy, 
 
 And gettin" fou and unco happy." 
 
 To these experiences we owe not only those ex- 
 cellent drinking songs, John Barleycorn and Willie
 
 214 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Brewed a Peck <?' Maut, but the headlong fun of 
 Tarn O'S/ianter, and the visions, grotesquely ter- 
 rible, of Death and Dr. Hornbook, and the dra- 
 matic humor of the Jolly Beggars. Covvper had cel- 
 ebrated " the cup which cheers but not inebriates." 
 Burns sang the praises of Scotch Drink. Cowper 
 was a stranger to Burns's high animal spirits, and 
 his robust enjoyment of life. He had affections, 
 but no passions. At Mauchline, Burns, whose ir- 
 regularities did not escape the censure of the kirk, 
 became involved, through his friendship with 
 Gavin Hamilton, in the controversy between the 
 Old Light and New Light clergy. His Holy Fair, 
 Holy Tulzie, Twa Herds, Holy Willie's Prayer, and 
 Address to the Unco Gude, are satires against big- 
 otry and hypocrisy. But in spite of the rollicking 
 profanity of his language, and the violence of his 
 rebound against the austere religion of Scotland, 
 Burns was at bottom deeply impressible by relig- 
 ious ideas, as may be seen from his Prayer under 
 the Pressure of Violent Anguish, and Prayer in 
 Prospect of Death. 
 
 His farm turned out a failure, and he was on 
 the eve of sailing for Jamaica, when the favor with 
 which his volume of poems was received, stayed 
 his departure, and turned his steps to Edinburgh. 
 There the peasant poet was lionized for a winter 
 season by the learned and polite society of the 
 Scotch capital, with results in the end not alto- 
 gether favorable to Burns's best interests. For 
 when society finally turned the cold shoulder on
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 215 
 
 him, he had to go back to farming again, carrying 
 with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. 
 He leased a farm in Ellisland, in 1788, and some 
 friends procured his appointment as exciseman 
 for his district. But poverty, disappointment, ir- 
 regular habits, and broken health clouded his last 
 years, and brought him to an untimely death at the 
 age of thirty-seven. He continued, however, to 
 pour forth songs of unequaled sweetness and 
 force. " The man sank," said Coleridge, " but the 
 poet was bright to the last." 
 
 Burns is the best of British song-writers. His 
 songs are singable; they are not merely lyrical 
 poems. They were meant to be sung, and they are 
 sung. They were mostly set to old Scottish airs, 
 and sometimes they were built up from ancient 
 fragments of anonymous, popular poetry, a chorus, 
 or stanza, or even a single line. Such are, for ex- 
 ample, Auld Lang Syne, My Heart's in the High- 
 lands, and Landlady, Count the Laurin. Burns had 
 a great, warm heart. His sins were sins of passion, 
 and sprang from the same generous soil that nour- 
 ished his impulsive virtues. His elementary quali- 
 ties as a poet were sincerity, a healthy openness to 
 all impressions of the beautiful, and a sympathy 
 which embraced men, animals, and the dumb ob- 
 jects of nature. His tenderness toward flowers 
 and the brute creation may be read in his lines 
 To a Mountain Daisy, To a Mouse, and The Auld 
 Farmer's New Year's Morning Salutation to his 
 Auld Mare Maggie. Next after love and good fel-
 
 2i6 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 lo \vship, patriotism is the most frequent motive of 
 his song. Of his national anthem, Scots u>ha hae 
 wf Wallace bled, Carlyle said: " So long as there 
 is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman, or man, 
 it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode." 
 Burns's politics were a singular mixture of senti- 
 mental toryism with practical democracy. A ro- 
 mantic glamour was thrown over the fortunes of 
 the exiled Stuarts, and to have been " out " in '45 
 with the Young Pretender was a popular thing in 
 parts of Scotland. To this purely poetic loyalty 
 may be attributed such Jacobite ballads of Burns 
 as Over the Water to Charlie. But his sober con- 
 victions were on the side of liberty and human 
 brotherhood, and are expressed in the Twa Dogs, 
 the first Epistle to Davie, and A Mans a Man for 
 a' that. His sympathy with the Revolution led 
 him to send four pieces of ordnance, taken from a 
 captured smuggler, as a present to the French 
 Convention, a piece of bravado which got him 
 into difficulties with his superiors in the excise. 
 The poetry which Burns wrote, not in dialect, but 
 in the classical English, is in the stilted manner of 
 his century, and his prose correspondence be' rays 
 his lack of culture by his constant lapse into rhe- 
 torical affectation and fine writing. 
 
 1. T. S. Perry's English Literature in the Eight- 
 eenth Century. 
 
 2. James Thomson. The Castle of Indolence. 
 
 3. The Poems of Thomas Gray.
 
 FROM POPE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION. 217 
 
 4. William Collins. Odes. 
 
 5. The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of 
 the Poets. Edited by Matthew Arnold. Macmil- 
 lan, 1878. 
 
 6. Boswell's Life of Johnson [abridged] . Henry 
 Holt & Co., 1878. 
 
 7. Samuel Richardson. Clarissa Harlowe. 
 
 8. Henry Fielding. Tom Jones. 
 
 9. Tobias Smollett. Humphrey Clinker. 
 
 10. Lawrence Sterne. Tristram Shandy. 
 
 11. Oliver Goldsmith. Vicar of Wakefield and 
 Deserted Village. 
 
 12. William Cowper. The Task and John Gil- 
 pin. 
 
 13. The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
 
 218 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT. 
 
 1789-1832. 
 
 THE burst of creative activity at the opening of 
 the i Qth century has but one parallel in English 
 literary history, namely, the somewhat similar flow- 
 ering out of the national genius in the time of Elis- 
 abeth and the first two Stuart kings. The later age 
 gave birth to no supreme poets, like Shakspere and 
 Milton. It produced no Hamlet and no Paradise 
 Lost; but it offers a greater number of important 
 writers, a higher average of excellence, and a wider 
 range and variety of literary work than any preced- 
 ing era. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott, Byron, Shel- 
 ley, and Keats are all great names; while Southey, 
 Landor, Moore, Lamb, and De Quincey would be 
 noteworthy figures at any period, and deserve a 
 fuller mention than can be here accorded them. 
 But in so crowded a generation, selection becomes 
 increasingly needful, and in the present chapter, 
 accordingly, the emphasis will be laid upon the first- 
 named group as not only the most important, but 
 the most representative of the various tendencies 
 of their time.
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 219 
 
 The conditions of literary work in this century 
 have been almost unduly stimulating. The rapid 
 advance in population, wealth, education, and the 
 means of comunication has vastly increased the 
 number of readers. Every one who has any thing 
 to say can say it in print, and is sure of some sort 
 of a hearing. A special feature of the time is the 
 multiplication of periodicals. The great London 
 dailies, like the Times and the Morning Post, which 
 were started during the last quarter of the iSth 
 century, were something quite new in journalism. 
 The first of the modern reviews, the Edinburgh, was 
 established in 1802, as the organ of the Whig party 
 in Scotland. This was followed by the London 
 Quarterly, in 1808, and by Blackwood's Magazine, in 
 1817, both in the Tory interest. The first editor 
 of the Edinburgh was Francis Jeffrey, who assem- 
 bled about him a distinguished corps of contrib- 
 utors, including the versatile Henry Brougham, 
 afterward a great parliamentary orator and lord- 
 chancellor of England, and the Rev. Sydney Smith, 
 whose witty sayings are still current. The first 
 editor of the Quarterly was William Gifford, a satir- 
 ist, who wrote the Baviad and Mceviad in ridicule 
 of literary affectations. He was succeeded in 1824 
 by James Gibson Lockhart, the son-in-law of Wal- 
 ter Scott, and the author of an excellent Life of 
 Scott. Blackwood's was edited by John Wilson, 
 Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University 
 of Edinburgh, who, under the pen-name of "Chris- 
 topher North," contributed to his magazine a series
 
 220 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of brilliant, imaginary dialogues between famous 
 characters of the day, entitled Nodes Ambrosiance, 
 because they were supposed to take place at Am- 
 brose's tavern in Edinburgh. These papers were 
 full of a profuse, headlong eloquence, of humor, lit- 
 erary criticism, and personalities interspersed with 
 songs expressive of a roystering and convivial Tory- 
 ism and an uproarious contempt for Whigs and 
 cockneys. These reviews and magazines, and oth- 
 ers which sprang up beside them, became the nu- 
 clei about which the wit and scholarship of both 
 parties gathered. Political controversy under the 
 Regency and the reign of George IV. was thus car- 
 ried on more regularly by permanent organs, and 
 no longer so largely by privateering, in the shape 
 of pamphlets, like Swift's Public Spirit of the Allies, 
 Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny, and Burke's Re- 
 flections on the Revolution in France. Nor did pol- 
 itics by any means usurp the columns of the re- 
 views. Literature, art, science, the whole circle ot 
 human effort and achievement passed under review. 
 JBlackwood's, Frasers, and the other monthlies, 
 published stories, poetry, criticism, and correspond- 
 ence every thing, in short, which enters into 
 the make-up of our magazines to-day, except illus- 
 trations. 
 
 Two main influences, of foreign origin, have left 
 their trace in the English writers of the first thirty 
 years of the ipth century, the one communicated 
 by contact with the new German literature of the 
 latter half of the i8th century, and in particular
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION 10 DEATH OF SCOTT. 221 
 
 with the writings of Goethe, Schiller, and Kant ; 
 the other springing from the events of the French 
 Revolution. The influence of German upon En- 
 glish literature in the iQth century was more intel- 
 lectual and less formal than that of the Italian 
 in the i6th and of the French in the i8th. In oth- 
 er words, the German writers furnished the English 
 with ideas and ways of feeling rather than with 
 models of style. Goethe and Schiller did not be- 
 come subjects for literary imitation as Moliere, 
 Racine, and Boileau had become in Pope's time. 
 It was reserved for a later generation and for 
 Thomas Carlyle to domesticate the diction of Ger- 
 man prose. But the nature and extent of this influ- 
 ence can, perhaps, best be noted when we come to 
 take up the authors of the time one by one. 
 
 The excitement caused by the French Revolu- 
 tion was something more obvious and immediate. 
 When the Bastile fell, in 1789, the enthusiasm among 
 the friends of liberty and human progress in En- 
 gland was hardly less intense than in France. It 
 was the dawn of a new day : the shackles were 
 stricken from the slave; all men were free and all 
 men were brothers, and radical young England sent 
 up a shout that echoed the roar of the Paris mob. 
 Wordsworth's lines on the Fall of the Bastile, Cole- 
 ridge's Fall of Robespierre and Ode to France, 
 and Southey's revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, 
 gave expression to the hopes and aspirations of the 
 English democracy. In after life Wordsworth, 
 looking back regretfully to those years of promise,
 
 222 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 wrote his poem on the French Revolution as it Ap 
 peared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement. 
 
 " Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, 
 But to be young was very heaven. Oh times 
 In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways 
 Of custom, law, and statute took at once 
 The attraction of a country in romance." 
 
 Those were the days in which Wordsworth, th^n 
 an under-graduate at Cambridge, spent a college 
 vacation in tramping through France, landing <?t 
 Calais on the eve of the very day (July 14, 1790) 
 on which Louis XVI. signalized the anniversary of 
 the fall of the Bastile by taking the oath of fidelity 
 to the new Constitution. In the following year 
 Wordsworth revisited France, where he spent thir- 
 teen months, forming an intimacy with the repub- 
 lican general, Beaupuis, at Orleans, and reaching 
 Paris not long after the September massacres of 
 1792. Those were the days, too, in which young 
 Southey and young Coleridge, having married sis- 
 ters at Bristol, were planning a " Pantisocracy," or 
 ideal community, on the banks of the Susquehan- 
 nah, and denouncing the British government for 
 going to war with the French Republic. This group 
 of poets, who had met one another first in the south 
 of England, came afterward to be called the Lake 
 Poets, from their residence in the mountainous lake 
 rountry of Westmoreland and Cumberland, with 
 which their names, and that of Wordsworth, espe- 
 cially, are forever associated. The so-called " Lak-
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 223 
 
 ers " did not, properly speaking, constitute a school 
 of poetry. They differed greatly from one another 
 in mind and art. But they were connected by so- 
 cial ties and by religious and political sympathies. 
 The excesses of the French Revolution, and the 
 usurpation of Napoleon disappointed them, as it 
 did many other English liberals, and drove them 
 into the ranks of the reactionaries. Advancing 
 years brought conservatism, and they became in 
 time loyal Tories and orthodox Churchmen. 
 
 William Wordsworth (1770-1850), the chief of the 
 three, and, perhaps, on the whole, the greatest En- 
 glish poet since Milton, published his Lyrical Bal- 
 lads in 1798. The volume contained a few pieces 
 by his friend Coleridge among them the Ancient 
 Manner and its appearance may fairly be said to 
 mark an epoch in the history of English poetry. 
 Wordsworth regarded himself as a reformer of po- 
 etry ; and in the preface to the second volume 
 of Lyrical Ballads, he defended the theory on 
 which they were composed. His innovations were 
 twofold, in subject-matter and in diction. "The 
 principal object which I proposed to myself in 
 these poems," he said, " was to choose incidents 
 and situations from common life. Low and rustic 
 life was generally chosen, because, in that condi- 
 tion, the essential passions of the heart find a bet- 
 ter soil in which they can attain their maturity . . . 
 and are incorporated with the beautiful and per- 
 manent forms of nature." Wordsworth discarded, 
 in theory, the poetic diction of his piedecessors,
 
 224 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and professed to use "a selection of the real lan- 
 guage of men in a state of vivid sensation." He 
 adopted, he said, the language of men in rustic 
 life, " because such men hourly communicate with 
 the best objects from which the best part of lan- 
 guage is originally derived." 
 
 In the matter of poetic diction Wordsworth did 
 not, in his practice, adhere to the doctrine of this 
 preface. Many of his most admired poems, such 
 as the Lines written near Tintern Abbey, the great 
 Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the Sonnets, 
 and many parts of his longest poems, The Excur- 
 sion and The Prelude, deal with philosophic thought 
 and highly intellectualized emotions. In all of 
 these and in many others the language is rich, 
 stately, involved, and as remote from the "real 
 language " of Westmoreland shepherds, as is the 
 epic blank verse of Milton. On the other hand, in 
 those of his poems which were consciously written 
 in illustration of his theory, the affectation of sim- 
 plicity, coupled with a defective sense of humor, 
 sometimes led him to the selection of vulgar and 
 trivial themes, and the use of language which is 
 bald, childish, or even ludicrous. His simplicity 
 is too often the simplicity of Mother Goose rather 
 than of Chaucer. Instances of this occur in such 
 poems as Peter Bell, the Idiot Boy, Goody Blake 
 and Harry Gill, Simon Lee, and the Wagoner. 
 But there are multitudes of Wordsworth's ballads 
 and lyrics which are simple without being silly, 
 and which, in their homeliness and clear pro-
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 225 
 
 fundity, in their production of the strongest effects 
 by the fewest strokes, are among the choicest modern 
 examples of pure, as distinguished from decorated, 
 art. Such are (out of many) Ruth, Lucy, A Portrait^ 
 To a Highland Girl, The Reverie of Poor Susan, 
 To the Cuckoo, The Reaper, We Are Seven, The Pet 
 Lamb, The Fountain, The Two April Mornings, The 
 Leech Gatherer, The Thorn, and Yarrcrju Unvisited. 
 Wordsworth was something of a Quaker in 
 poetry, and loved the sober drabs and grays of 
 life. Quietism was his literary religion, and the 
 sensational was to him not merely vulgar, but 
 almost wicked. " The human mind," he wrote, "is 
 capable of being excited without the application 
 of gross and violent stimulants." He disliked the 
 far-fetched themes and high-colored style of Scott 
 and Byron. He once told Landor that all of 
 Scott's poetry together was not worth sixpence. 
 From action and passion he turned away to sing 
 the inward life of the soul and the outward life of 
 Nature. He said: 
 
 ' To me the meanest flower that blows can gire 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." 
 
 And again : 
 
 " Long have I loved what I behold, 
 The night that calms, the day that cheers ; 
 The common growth of mother earth 
 Suffices me her tears, her mirth. 
 Her humblest mirth and tears." 
 
 Wordsworth's life was outwardly uneventful. 
 The companionship of the mountains and of his 
 15
 
 226 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 own thoughts ; the sympathy of his household ; 
 the lives of the dalesmen and cottagers about 
 him furnished him with all the stimulus that he 
 required. 
 
 " Love had he found in huts where poor men lie : 
 His only teachers had been woods and rills, 
 
 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 
 He read little, but reflected much, and made poetry 
 daily, composing, by preference, out of doors, and 
 dictating his verses to some member of his family. 
 His favorite amanuensis was his sister Dorothy, 
 a woman of fine gifts, to whom Wordsworth was 
 indebted for some of his happiest inspirations. 
 She was the subject of the poem beginning " Her 
 eyes are wild," and her charming Memorials of a 
 Tour in the Scottish Highlands records the origin 
 of many of her brother's best poems. Throughout 
 life Wordsworth was remarkably self-centered. 
 The ridicule of the reviewers, against which he 
 gradually made his way to public recognition, 
 never disturbed his serene belief in himself, or in 
 the divine message which he felt himself com- 
 missioned to deliver. He was a slow and serious 
 person, a preacher as well as a poet, with a cer- 
 tain rigidity, not to say narrowness, of character. 
 That plastic temperament which we associate 
 with poetic genius Wordsworth either did not 
 possess, or it hardened early. Whole sides of life 
 were beyond the range of his sympathies. He
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 227 
 
 touched life at fewer points than Byron and Scott, 
 but touched it more profoundly. It is to him that 
 we owe the phrase "plain living and high think- 
 ing," as also a most noble illustration of it in his 
 own practice. His was the wisest and deepest 
 spirit among the English poets of his generation, 
 though hardly the most poetic. He wrote too 
 much, and, attempting to make every petty inci- 
 dent or reflection the occasion of a poem, he 
 finally reached the point of composing verses 
 On Seeing a Harp in the shape of a Needle Case, 
 and on other themes more worthy of Mrs. Sigour- 
 ney. In parts of his long blank-verse poems, The 
 Excursion, 1814, and The Prelude which was 
 printed after his death in 1850, though finished as 
 early as 1806 the poetry wears very thin. and its 
 place is taken by prosaic, tedious didacticism. 
 These two poems were designed as portions of a 
 still more extended work, The. Recluse, which was 
 never completed. The Excursion consists mainly 
 of philosophical discussions on nature and human 
 life between a school-master, a solitary, and an 
 itinerant peddler. The Prelude describes the de- 
 velopment of Wordsworth's own genius. In parts 
 of The Excursion the diction is fairly Shaksperian. 
 
 " The good die first. 
 
 And they whose hearts are dry as summer dust 
 Burn to the socket." 
 
 A passage not only beautiful in itself, but dramat- 
 ically true, in the mouth of the bereaved mother
 
 228 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 who utters it, to that human instinct which gen- 
 eralizes a private sorrow into a* universal law. 
 Much of TJie Prelude can hardly be called poetry 
 at all, yet some of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry is 
 buried among its dreary wastes, and now and then, 
 in the midst of commonplaces, comes a flash of 
 Miltonic splendor like 
 
 " Golden cities ten months' journey deep 
 Among Tartarian wilds." 
 
 Wordsworth is, above all things, the poet of Nat- 
 ure. In this province he was not without fore- 
 runners. To say nothing of Burns and Cowper, 
 there was George Crabbe, who had published his 
 Village in 1 783 fifteen years before the Lyrical Bal- 
 lads and whose last poem, Tales of the Hall, came 
 out in 1819, five years after The Excursion. Byron 
 called Crabbe '' Nature's sternest painter, and her 
 best." He was a minutely accurate delineator of the 
 harsher aspects of rural life. He photographs a 
 Gypsy camp; a common, with its geese and don- 
 key; a salt marsh, a shabby village street, or tumble- 
 down manse. But neither Crabbe nor Cowper 
 has the imaginative lift of Wordsworth, 
 
 " The light that never was on sea or land 
 The consecration and the poet's dream." 
 
 In a note on a couplet in one of his earliest 
 poems, descriptive of an oak tree standing dark 
 against the sunset, Wordsworth says: " I recollect 
 distinctly the very spot where this struck me.
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 229 
 
 The moment was important in my poetical history, 
 for I date from it my consciousness of the infinite 
 variety of natural appearances which had been un- 
 noticed by the poets of any age or country, and I 
 made a resolution to supply, in some degree, the 
 deficiency." In later life he is said to have been 
 impatient of any thing spoken or written by an- 
 other about mountains, conceiving himself to have 
 a monopoly of " the power of hills." Rut Words- 
 worth did not stop with natural description. 
 Matthew Arnold has said that the office of modern 
 poetry is the "moral interpretation of Nature." 
 Such, at any rate, was Wordsworth's office. To 
 him Nature wm alive and divine. He felt, un- 
 der the veil of phenomena, 
 
 " A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
 Of elevated thought : a sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused." 
 
 He approached, if he did not actually reach, the 
 view of Pantheism, which identifies God with Nat- 
 ure; and the mysticism of the Idealists, who 
 identify Nature with the soul of man. This tend- 
 ency was not inspired in Wordsworth by German 
 philosophy. He was no metaphysician. In his 
 rambles with Coleridge about Nether Stowey and 
 Alfoxden, when both were young, they had, indeed, 
 discussed Spinoza. And in the autumn of 1798, 
 after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, the 
 two friends went together to Germany, where 
 Wordsworth spent half a year. But the literature
 
 230 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 and philosophy of Germany made little direct im- 
 pression upon Wordsworth. He disliked Goethe, 
 and he quoted with approval the saying of the 
 poet Klopstock, whom he met at Hamburg, that 
 he placed the romanticist Burger above both 
 Goethe and Schiller. 
 
 It was through Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772- 
 1834), who was pre-eminently the thinker among 
 the literary men of his generation, that the new 
 German thought found its way into England. Dur- 
 ing the fourteen months which he spent in Ger- 
 many chiefly at Ratzburg and Gottingen he had 
 familiarized himself with the transcendental phi- 
 losophy of Immanuel Kant and of his continuators, 
 Fichte and Schelling, as well as with the general 
 literature of Germany. On his return to England, 
 he published, in 1800, a free translation of Schil- 
 ler's Wallenstein, and through his writings, and more 
 especially through his conversations, he became the 
 conductor by which German philosophic ideas 
 reached the English literary class. 
 
 Coleridge described himself as being from boy- 
 hood a book-worm and a day-dreamer. He re- 
 mained through life an omnivorous, though unsys- 
 tematic, reader. He was helpless in practical 
 affairs, and his native indolence and procrastina- 
 tion were increased by his indulgence in the opium 
 habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went 
 to reside at Keswick, in the Lake Country, with 
 his brother-in-law, Southey, whose industry sup- 
 ported both families. During his last nineteen
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 231 
 
 years Coleridge found an asylum under the roof 
 of Mr. James Oilman, of Highgate, near London, 
 whither many of the best young men in England 
 were accustomed to resort to listen to Coleridge's 
 wonderful talk. Talk, indeed, was the medium 
 through which he mainly influenced his genera- 
 tion. It cost him an effort to put his thoughts on 
 paper. His Table Talk crowded with pregnant 
 paragraphs was taken down from his lips by his 
 nephew, Henry Coleridge. His criticisms of Shaks- 
 pere are nothing but notes, made here and there, 
 from a course of lectures delivered before the 
 Royal Institute, and never fully written out. Though 
 only hints and suggestions, they are, perhaps, the 
 most penetrative and helpful Shaksperian criticism 
 in English. He was always forming projects and 
 abandoning them. He projected a great work on 
 Christian philosophy, which was to have been his 
 magnum opus, but he never wrote it. He projected 
 an epic poem on the fall of Jerusalem. " I schemed 
 it at twenty-five," he said, " but, alas! venturum ex- 
 pcctat." What bade fair to be his best poem, Chris- 
 tabel, is a fragment. Another strangely beautiful 
 poem, Kubla Khan which came to him, he said, 
 in sleep is even more fragmentary. And the most 
 important of his prose remains, his Biographia 
 Literaria, 1817, a history of his own opinions, 
 breaks off abruptly. 
 
 It was in his suggestiveness that Coleridge's 
 great service to posterity resided. He was what 
 J. S. Mill called a " seminal mind," and his thought
 
 232 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 had that power of stimulating thought in others, 
 which is the mark and the privilege of original 
 genius. Many a man has owed to some sentence 
 of Coleridge's, if not the awakening in himself of 
 a new intellectual life, at least the starting of fruit- 
 ful trains of reflection which have modified his 
 whole view of certain great subjects. On every 
 thing that he left is set the stamp of high mental 
 authority. He was not, perhaps, primarily, he cer- 
 tainly was not exclusively, a poet. In theology, in 
 philosophy, in political thought, and literary criti- 
 cism, he set currents flowing which are flowing yet. 
 The terminology of criticism, for example, is in his 
 debt for many of those convenient distinctions 
 such as that between genius and talent, between 
 wit and humor, between fancy and imagination 
 which are familiar enough now, but which he first 
 introduced, or enforced. His definitions and 
 apothegms we meet every-where. Such are, for ex- 
 ample, the sayings: " Every man is born an Aris- 
 totelian or a Platonist." "Prose is words in their 
 best order; poetry, the best words in the best 
 order." And among the bits of subtle interpreta- 
 tion, that abound in his writings, may be mentioned 
 his estimate of Wordsworth, in the Biographia 
 Littraria, and his sketch of Hamlet's character 
 one with which he was personally in strong sympa- 
 thy in the Lectures on Shakspere. 
 
 The Broad-Church party, in the English Church, 
 among whose most eminent exponents have been 
 Frederic Robertson, Arnold of Rugby, F. D.
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 233 
 
 Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and the late Dean 
 Stanley, traces its intellectual origin to Cole- 
 ridge's Aids to Reflection ; to his writings and 
 conversations in general, and particularly to his 
 ideal of a national Clerisy, as set forth in his 
 essay on Church and State. In politics, as in re- 
 ligion, Coleridge's conservatism represents the re- 
 action against the destructive spirit of the eight- 
 eenth century and the French revolution. To 
 this root-and-branch democracy he opposed the 
 view, that every old belief, or institution, such as 
 the throne or the Church, had served some need, 
 and had a rational idea at the bottom of it, to 
 which it might be again recalled, and made once 
 more a benefit to society, instead of a curse and an 
 anachronism. 
 
 As a poet, Coleridge has a sure, though slender, 
 hold upon immortal fame. No English poet has 
 " sung so wildly well " as the singer of Christabel and 
 the Ancient Mariner. The former of these is, inform, 
 a romance in a variety of meters, and in substance, 
 a tale of supernatural possession, by which a lovely 
 and innocent maiden is brought under the control 
 of a witch. Though unfinished and obscure in in- 
 tention, it haunts the imagination with a mystic 
 power. Byron had seen Christabel in MS., and 
 urged Coleridge to publish it. He hated all the 
 " Lakers," but when, on parting from Lady Byron, 
 he wrote his song, 
 
 " Fare thee well, and if forever, 
 Still forever fare thee well,"
 
 234 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 he prefixed to it the noble lines from Coleridge's 
 poem, beginning 
 
 " Alas ! they had been friends in youth." 
 
 In that weird ballad, the Ancient Mariner, the 
 supernatural is handled with even greater subtlety 
 than in Christabel. The reader is led to feel that 
 amid the loneliness of the tropic sea, the line be- 
 tween the earthly and the unearthly vanishes, and 
 the poet leaves him to discover for himself whether 
 the spectral shapes that the mariner saw were 
 merely the visions of the calenture, or a glimpse of 
 the world of spirits. Coleridge is one of our most 
 perfect metrists. The poet Swinburne than whom 
 there can be no higher authority on this point 
 (though he is rather given to exaggeration) pro- 
 nounces Kubla Khan, "for absolute melody and 
 splendor, the first poem in the language." 
 
 Robert Southey, the third member of this group, 
 was a diligent worker and one of the most volumi- 
 nous of English writers. As a poet, he was lacking 
 in inspiration, and his big Oriental epics, Thalaba, 
 1 80 r, and the Curse of Kehama, 1810, are little 
 better than wax-work. Of his numerous works in 
 prose, the Life of Nelson is, perhaps, the best, and 
 is an excellent biography. 
 
 Several other authors were more or less closely 
 associated with the Lake Poets by residence or 
 social affiliation. John Wilson, the editor of Black- 
 wooa's, lived for some time, when a young man, at 
 Elleray, on the banks of Windermere. He was an
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT 235 
 
 athletic man of out-door habits, an enthusiastic 
 sportsman, and a lover of natural scenery. His 
 admiration of Wordsworth was thought to have led 
 him to imitation of the latter, in his Isle of Palms, 
 1812, and his other poetry. 
 
 One of Wilson's companions, in his mountain 
 walks, was Thomas De Quincey, who had been led 
 by his reverence for Wordsworth and Coleridge to 
 take up his residence, in 1808, at Grasmere, where 
 he occupied for many years the cottage from which 
 Wordsworth had removed to Allan Bank. De 
 Quincey was a shy, bookish little man, of erratic, 
 nocturnal habits, who impresses one, personally, 
 as, a child of genius, with a child's helplessness 
 and a child's sharp observation. He was, above 
 all things, a magazinist. All his writings, with one 
 exception, appeared first in the shape of contribu- 
 tions to periodicals ; and his essays, literary criti- 
 cisms, and miscellaneous papers are exceedingly 
 rich and varied. The most famous of them was 
 his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, pub- 
 lished as a serial in the London Magazine, in 1821. 
 He had begun to take opium, as a cure for the 
 toothache, when a student at Oxford, where he re- 
 sided from 1803 to 1808. By 1816 he had risen to 
 eight thousand drops of laudanum a day. For sev- 
 eral years after this he experienced the acutest 
 misery, and his will suffered an entire paralysis. 
 In 1821 he succeeded in reducing his dose to a 
 comparatively small allowance, and in shaking off 
 his torpor so as to become capable of literary work.
 
 236 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 The most impressive effect of the opium habit was 
 seen in his dreams, in the unnatural expansion of 
 space and time, and the infinite repetition of the 
 same objects. His sleep was filled with dim, vast 
 images ; measureless cavalcades deploying to the 
 sound of orchestral music ; an endless succession 
 of vaulted halls, with staircases climbing to heaven, 
 up which toiled eternally the same solitary figure. 
 "Then came sudden alarms, hurrying to and fro; 
 trepidations of innumerable fugitives ; darkness and 
 light; tempest and human faces." Many of DeQuin- 
 cey's papers were autobiographical, but there is al- 
 ways something baffling in these reminiscences. In 
 the interminable wanderings of his pen for which, 
 perhaps, opium was responsible he appears to lose 
 all trace of facts or of any continuous story. Ev- 
 ery actual experience of his life seems to have been 
 taken up into a realm of dream, and there distorted 
 till the reader sees not the real figures, but the enor- 
 mous, grotesque shadows of them, executing wild 
 dances on a screen. An instance of this process 
 is described by himself in his Vision of Sudden 
 Death. But his unworldliness and faculty of vision- 
 seeing were not inconsistent with the keenness of 
 judgment and the justness and delicacy of percep- 
 tion displayed in his Biographical Sketches of Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, and other contemporaries: in his 
 critical papers on Pope, Milton, Lessing, Homer and 
 the Homeridcz: his essay on Style ; and his Brief Ap- 
 praisal of the Greek Literature. His curious schol- 
 arship is seen in his articles on the Toilet of a He-
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 237 
 
 breu> Lady, and the Casuistry of Roman Meals ; his 
 ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in his essay 
 on Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Of 
 his narrative pieces the most remarkable is his Re- 
 volt of the Tartars, describing the flight of a Kal- 
 muck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from 
 Russia to the Chinese frontier : a great hegira or 
 anabasis, which extended for four thousand miles 
 over desert steppes infested with foes; occupied six 
 months' time, and left nearly half of the tribe dead 
 upon the way. The subject was suited to De Quin- 
 cey's imagination. It was like one of his own opi- 
 um visions, and he handled it with a dignity and 
 force which make the history not altogether unwor- 
 thy of comparison with Thucydides's great chapter 
 on the Sicilian Expedition. 
 
 An intimate frit-nd of Southey was Walter Sav- 
 age Landor, a man of kingly nature, of a leonine 
 presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable 
 temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of man- 
 ner and with said Emerson a " wonderful brain, 
 despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He inherit- 
 ed wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Flor- 
 ence, where he died, in 1864, in his ninetieth year. 
 Dickens, who knew him at Bath, in the latter part 
 of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as Law- 
 rence Boythom, in Bleak House, whose "combina- 
 tion of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness," 
 testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his Diary, was 
 true to the life. Landor is the most purely clas- 
 sical of English writers. Not merely his themes
 
 238 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 but his whole way of thinking was pagan and an- 
 tique. He composed, indifferently, in English or 
 Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedi- 
 ence to his instinct for compression and exclusive- 
 ness. Thus portions of his narrative poem, Gcbir, 
 1798, were written originally in Latin, and he added 
 a Latin version, Gelririus, to the English edition. 
 In like manner his Hellenics, 1847, were mainly 
 translations from his Latin Idyllia fferoica, written 
 years before. The Hellenic clearness and repose 
 which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his 
 art. His poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, 
 their aloofness from modern feeling, have something 
 chill and artificial. The verse of poets like Byron 
 and Wordsworth is alive ; the blood runs in it. But 
 Landor's polished, clean-cut intaglios have been 
 well described as "written in marble." He was 
 a master of fine and solid prose. His Pericles 
 and Aspasia consists of a series of letters passing 
 between the great Athenian demagogue, the hetaira, 
 Aspasia, her friend, Cleone of Miletus. Anaxagorus, 
 the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. 
 In this masterpiece the intellectual life of Athens, 
 at its period of highest refinement, is brought before 
 the reader with singular vividness, and he is made 
 to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, deli- 
 cate wit, and thoughtful sentiment, expressed in 
 English "of Attic choice." The Imaginary Con- 
 versations^ 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues be- 
 tween a great variety of historical characters ; be- 
 tween, for example, Dante and Beatrice, Washing-
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 239 
 
 ton and Franklin, Queen Elisabeth and Cecil, 
 Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and 
 the President of the Senate. Lander's writings 
 have never been popular ; they address an aristoc- 
 racy of scholars; and Byron whom Landor dis- 
 liked and considered vulgar sneered at the 
 latter as a writer who " cultivated much private 
 renown in the shape of Latin verses." He said of 
 himself that he "never contended with a contem- 
 porary, but walked alone on the far eastern up- 
 lands, meditating and remembering." 
 
 A schoolmate of Coleridge, at Christ's Hospital, 
 and his friend and correspondent through life, was 
 Charles Lamb, one of the most charming of En- 
 glish essayists. He was an old bachelor, who lived 
 alone with his sister Mary a lovable and intellect- 
 ual woman, but subject to recurring attacks of mad- 
 ness. Lamb was " a notched and cropped scriv- 
 ener, a votary of the desk," a clerk, that is, in the 
 employ of the East India Company. He was of 
 antiquarian tastes, an ardent play-goer, a lover of 
 whist and of the London streets; and these tastes 
 are reflected in his Essays of Elia, contributed to 
 the London Magazine and reprinted in book form 
 in 1823. From his mousing among the Elisabeth- 
 an dramatists and such old humorists as Burton 
 and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar quaint- 
 ness and pungency. His Specimens of English 
 Dramatic Poets, 1808, is admirable for its critical 
 insight. In 1802 he paid a visit to Coleridge at 
 Keswick, in the Lake Country ; but he felt or af-
 
 240 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 fected a whimsical horror of the mountains, and 
 said, " Fleet Street and the Strand are better places 
 to live in." Among the best of his essays are 
 Dream Children, Poor Relations, The Artificial Com- 
 edy of the Last Century, Old China, Roast Pig, A 
 Defense of Chimney-sweeps, A Complaint of the De- 
 cay of Beggars in the Metropolis, and The Old 
 enchers of the Inner Temple. 
 
 The romantic movement, preluded by Gray, 
 Collins, Chatterton, Macpherson, and others, cul- 
 minated in Walter Scott (1771-1832). His passion 
 for the medieval was first excited by reading Per- 
 cy's Reliques, when he was a boy ; and in one of 
 his school themes he maintained that Ariosto was 
 a greater "poet than Homer. He began early to 
 collect manuscript ballads, suits of armor, pieces of 
 old plate, border-horns, and similar relics. He 
 learned Italian in order to read the romancers 
 Ariosto, Tasso, Pulci, and Boiardo, preferring them 
 to Dante. He studied Gothic architecture, her- 
 aldry, and the art of fortification, and made draw- 
 ings of famous ruins and battle-fields. In particu- 
 lar he read eagerly every thing that he could lay 
 hands on relating to the history, legends, and an- 
 tiquities of the Scottish border the vale of Tweed, 
 Teviotdale, Ettrick Forest, and the Yarrow, of all 
 which land he became the laureate, as Burns had 
 been of Ayrshire and the "West Country." Scott, 
 like Wordsworth, was an out-door poet. He spent 
 much time in the saddle, and was fond of horses, 
 dogs, hunting, and salmon-fishing. He had a keen
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 241 
 
 eye for the beauties of natural scenery, though 
 " more especially," he admits, " when combined with 
 ancient ruins or remains of our forefathers' piety or 
 splendor." He had the historic imagination, and, 
 in creating the historical novel, he was the first to 
 throw a poetic glamour over European annals. In 
 1803 Wordsworth visited Scott at Lasswade, near 
 Edinburgh ; and Scott afterward returned the vis- 
 it at Grasmere. Wordsworth noted that his guest 
 was "full of anecdote and averse from disquisi- 
 tion." The Englishman was a moralist and much 
 given to "disquisition," while the Scotchman was, 
 above all things, a raconteur, and, perhaps, on the 
 whole, the foremost of British story-tellers. Scott's 
 Toryism, too, was of a different stripe from Words- 
 worth's, being rather the result of sentiment and 
 imagination than of philosophy and reflection. His 
 mind struck deep root in the past ; his local at- 
 tachments and family pride were intense. Abbots- 
 ford was his darling, and the expenses of this do- 
 main and of the baronial hospitality which he there 
 extended to all comers were among the causes of 
 his bankruptcy. The enormous toil which he ex- 
 acted of himself, to pay off the debt of ^117,000, 
 contracted by the failure of his publishers, cost 
 him his life. It is said that he was more grat- 
 ified when the Prince Regent created him a bar- 
 onet, in 1820, than by all the public recognition 
 that he acquired as the author of the Waverley 
 Novels. 
 
 Scott was attracted by the romantic side of Ger- 
 16
 
 242 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 man literature. His first published poem was a 
 translation made in 1796 from Burger's wild bal- 
 lad, Leonora. He followed this up with versions 
 of the same poet's Wilde Jager, of Goethe's vio- 
 lent drama of feudal life, Go'tz Von Berlichinge n, and 
 with other translations from the German, of a 
 similar class. On his horseback trips through the 
 border, where he studied the primitive manners of 
 the Liddesdale people, and took down old ballads 
 from the recitation of ancient dames and cottagers, 
 he amassed the materials for his Minstrelsy of the 
 Scottish Border, 1802. But the first of his original 
 poems was the Lay of the Last Minstrel, published 
 in 1805, and followed, in quick succession, by 
 Marmion, the Lady of the Lake, Rokeby, the Lord 
 of the Isles, and a volume of ballads and lyrical 
 pieces, all issued during the years 1806-1814. The 
 popularity won by this series of metrical romances 
 was immediate and wide-spread. Nothing so fresh, 
 or so brilliant, had appeared in English poetry for 
 nearly two centuries. The reader was hurried 
 along through scenes of rapid action, whose effect 
 was heightened by wild landscapes and pictur- 
 esque manners. The pleasure was a passive one. 
 There was no deep thinking to perplex, no subtler 
 beauties to pause upon; the feelings were stirred 
 pleasantly, but not deeply; the effect was on the 
 surface. The spell employed Avas novelty or, at 
 most, wonder and the chief emotion aroused was 
 breathless interest in the progress of the story. 
 Carlyle said that Scott's genius was in extciiso.
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 243 
 
 rather than /';; intenso, and that its great praise was 
 its healthiness. This is true of his verse, but not 
 altogether so of his prose, which exhibits deeper 
 qualities. Some of Scott's most perfect poems, 
 too, are his shorter ballads, like Jock <?' Hazeldean, 
 and Proud Maisie is in the Wood, which have a 
 greater intensity and compression than his met- 
 rical tales. 
 
 From 1814 to 1831 Scott wrote and published 
 the Waverley novels, some thirty in number; if we 
 consider the amount of work done, the speed with 
 which it was done, and the general average of ex- 
 cellence maintained, perhaps the most marvelous 
 literary feat on record. The series was issued 
 anonymously, and takes its name from the first 
 number, Waverley, OK 'Tis Sixty Years Since. This 
 was founded upon the rising of the clans, in 1745, 
 in support of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward 
 Stuart, and it revealed to the English public that 
 almost foreign country which lay just across their 
 threshold, the Scottish Highlands. The Waverley 
 novels remain, as a whole, unequaled as historical 
 fiction, although, here and there a single novel, 
 like George Eliot's Romola, or Thackeray's Henry 
 Esmond, or Kingsley's Hypatia, may have attained 
 a place beside the best of them. They were a 
 novelty when they appeared. English prose fiction 
 had somewhat declined since the time of Fielding 
 and Goldsmith. There were truthful, though 
 rather tame, delineations of provincial life, like 
 Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, 1811, and
 
 244 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Pride and Prejudice, 1813; or Maria Edgeworth's 
 Popular Tales, 1804. On the other hand, there 
 were Gothic romances, like the Monk of Matthew 
 Gregory Lewis, to whose Tales of Wonder some of 
 Scott's translations from the German had been 
 contributed; or like Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of 
 Udolpho. The great original of this school of fic- 
 tion was Horace Walpole's Castle of Olranto, 1765, 
 an absurd tale of secret trap-doors, subterranean 
 vaults, apparitions of monstrous mailed figures and 
 colossal helmets, pictures that descend from their 
 frames, and hollow voices that proclaim the ruin of 
 ancient families. 
 
 Scott used the machinery of romance, but he was 
 not merely a romancer, or a historical novelist 
 even, and it is not, as Carlyle implies, the buff-belts 
 and jerkins which principally interest us in his 
 heroes. Ivanhoe and Kenilworth and the Talis- 
 man are, indeed, romances pure and simple, and 
 very good romances at that. But, in novels such 
 as Rob Roy, the Antiquary, the Heart of Midlothian, 
 and the Bride of Lammermoor, Scott drew from 
 contemporary life, and from his intimate knowl- 
 edge of Scotch character. The story is there, with 
 its entanglement of plot and its exciting advent- 
 ures, but there are also, as truly as in Shakspere, 
 though not in the same degree, the observation of 
 life, the knowledge of men, the power of dramatic, 
 creation. No writer awakens in his readers a 
 warmer personal affection than Walter Scott, the 
 brave, honest, kindly gentleman, the noblest
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 245 
 
 figure among the literary men of his genera- 
 tion. 
 
 Another Scotch poet was Thomas Campbell, 
 whose Pleasures of Hope, 1799, was written in 
 Pope's couplet, and in the stilted diction of the 
 eighteenth century. Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809, 
 a long narrative poem in Spenserian stanza, is 
 untrue to the scenery and life of Pennsylvania, 
 where its scene is laid. But Campbell turned 
 his rhetorical manner and his clanking, martial 
 verse to fine advantage in such pieces as Hohen- 
 linden, Ye Mariners of England, and the Battle 
 of the Baltic. These have the true lyric fire, and 
 rank among the best English war-songs. 
 
 When Scott was asked why he had left off writ- 
 ing poetry, he answered, " Byron bet me." George 
 Gordon Byron (1788-1824) was a young man of 
 twenty-four, when, on his return from a two years' 
 sauntering through Portugal, Spain, Albania, 
 Greece, and the Levant, he published, in the first 
 two cantos of Childe Harold, 1812, a sort of poetic 
 itinerary of his experiences and impressions. The 
 poem took, rather to its author's surprise, who said 
 that he woke one morning and found himself 
 famous. Childe Harold opened a ne\x field to 
 poetry, the romance of travel, the picturesque 
 aspects of foreign scenery, manners, and costumes. 
 It is instructive of the difference between the two 
 ages, in poetic sensibility to such things, to com 
 pare Byron's glowing imagery with Addison's tame 
 Letter from Italy, written a century before. Childe
 
 246 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Harold was followed by a series of metrical tales, 
 the Giaour, the Bride of Abydos, the Corsair, Lara, 
 the Siege of Corinth, Parasina, and the Prisoner of 
 Chilian, all written in the years 1813-1816. These 
 poems at once took the place of Scott's in popular 
 interest, dazzling a public that had begun to weary , 
 of chivalry romances, with pictures of Eastern life, 
 with incidents as exciting as Scott's, descriptions 
 as highly colored, and a much greater intensity of 
 passion. So far as they depended for this interest 
 upon the novelty of their accessories, the effect was 
 a temporary one. Seraglios, divans, bulbuls, Gulis- 
 tans, Zuleikas, and other Oriental properties, del- 
 uged English poetry for a time, and then subsided; 
 even as the tide of moss-troopers, sorcerers, her- 
 mits, and feudal castles had already had its rise 
 and fall. 
 
 But there was a deeper reason for the impression 
 made by Byron's poetry upon his contemporaries. 
 He laid his finger right on the sore spot in modern 
 life. He had the disease with which the time was 
 sick, the world-weariness, the desperation which 
 proceeded from " passion incapable of being con- 
 verted into action." We find this tone in much of 
 the literature which followed the failure of the 
 French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. 
 From the irritations of that period, the disappoint- 
 ment of high hopes for the future of the race, the 
 growing religious disbelief, and the revolt of de- 
 mocracy and free thought against conservative re- 
 action, sprang what Southey called the "Satanic
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 247 
 
 school," which spoke its loudest word in Byron. 
 Titanic is the better word, for the rebellion was 
 not against God, but Jupiter, that is, against the 
 State, Church, and society of Byron's day; against 
 George III., the Tory cabinet of Lord Castlereigh, 
 the Duke of Wellington, the bench of Bishops, 
 London gossip, the British Constitution, and Brit- 
 ish cant. In these poems of Byron, and in his dra- 
 matic experiments, Manfred and Cain, there is a 
 single figure the figure of Byron under various 
 masks and one pervading mood, a restless and 
 sardonic gloom, a weariness of life, a love of soli- 
 tude, and a melancholy exaltation in the presence 
 of the wilderness and the sea. Byron's hero is al- 
 ways represented as a man originally noble, whom 
 some great wrong, by others, or some mysterious 
 crime of his own, has blasted and embittered, and 
 who carries about the world a seared heart and a 
 somber brow. Harold who may stand as a type 
 of all his heroes has run " through sin's labyrinth " 
 and feeling the "fullness of satiety," is drawn 
 abroad to roam, " the wandering exile of his own 
 dark mind." The loss of a capacity for pure, un- 
 jaded emotion is the constant burden of Byron's 
 lament. 
 
 " No more, no more, O never more on me 
 
 The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew." 
 
 and again, 
 
 " O could I feel as I have felt or be what I have been, 
 
 Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished 
 
 scene
 
 248 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish tbo' they 
 
 be, 
 So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow 
 
 to me." 
 
 This mood was sincere in Byron ; but by cultiva- 
 ting it, and posing too long in one attitude, he be- 
 came self-conscious and theatrical, and much of 
 his serious poetry has a false ring. His example 
 infected the minor poetry of the time, and it was 
 quite natural that Thackeray who represented a 
 generation that had a very different ideal of the he- 
 roic should be provoked into describing Byron as 
 "a big, sulky dandy." 
 
 Byron was well fitted by birth and temperament 
 to be the spokesman of this fierce discontent. He 
 inherited from his mother a haughty and violent 
 temper, and profligate tendencies from his father. 
 He was through life a spoiled child, whose main 
 characteristic was willfulness. He liked to shock 
 people by exaggerating his wickedness, or by per- 
 versely maintaining the wrong side of a dispute. 
 But he had traits of bravery and generosity. Wom- 
 en loved him, and he made strong friends. There 
 was a careless charm about him which fascinated 
 natures as unlike each other as Shelley and Scott. 
 By the death of the fifth Lord Byron without issue, 
 Byron came into a title and estates at the age of 
 ten. Though a liberal in politics he had aristo- 
 cratic feelings, and was vain of his rank as he was 
 of his beauty. He was educated at Harrow and at 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was idle and
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 249 
 
 dissipated, but did a great deal of miscellaneous 
 reading. He took some of his Cambridge set 
 Hobhouse, Matthews, and others to Newstead 
 Abbey, his ancestral seat, where they filled the an- 
 cient cloisters with eccentric orgies. Byron was 
 strikingly handsome. His face had a spiritual pale- 
 ness and a classic regularity, and his dark hair curled 
 closely to his head. A deformity in one of his feet 
 was a mortification to him, though it did not great- 
 ly impair his activity, and he prided himself upon 
 his powers as a swimmer. 
 
 In 1815, when at the height of his literary and so- 
 cial eclat in London, he married. In February of the 
 following year he was separated from Lady Byron, 
 and left England forever, pursued by the execra- 
 tions of outraged respectability. In this chorus of 
 abuse there was mingled a share of cant ; but Byron 
 got, on the whole, what he deserved. From Switz- 
 erland, where he spent a summer by Lake Leman, 
 with the Shelleys ; from Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and 
 Rome, scandalous reports of his intrigues and his 
 wild debaucheries were wafted back to England, 
 and with these came poem after poem, full of burn- 
 ing genius, pride, scorn, and anguish, and all hurl- 
 ing defiance at English public opinion. The third 
 and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, 1816-1818, were 
 a great advance upon the first two, and contain the 
 best of Byron's serious poetry. He has written his 
 name all over the continent of Europe, and on a 
 hundred memorable spots has made the scenery his 
 own. On the field of Waterloo, on " the castled
 
 250 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 crag of Drachenfels," "by the blue rushing of the 
 arrowy Rhone," in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, 
 in the Coliseum at Rome, and among the " Isles of 
 Greece," the tourist is compelled to see with By- 
 ron's eyes and under the associations of his pilgrim- 
 age. In his later poems, such as Beppo, 1818, and 
 Don Juati, 1819-1823, he passed into his second 
 manner, a mocking cynicism gaining ground upon 
 the somewhat stagy gloom of his early poetry Me- 
 phistophiles gradually elbowing out Satan. Don 
 Juan, though morally the worst, is intellectually 
 the most vital and representative of Byron's poems. 
 It takes up into itself most fully the life of the 
 time ; exhibits most thoroughly the characteristic 
 alternations of Byron's moods and the prodigal re- 
 sources of wit, passion, and understanding, which 
 rather than imagination were his prominent qual- 
 ities as a poet. The hero, a graceless, amorous, 
 stripling, goes wandering from Spain to the Greek 
 islands and Constantinople, thence to St. Peters- 
 burg, and finally to England. Every-where his se- 
 ductions are successful, and Byron uses him as a 
 means of exposing the weakness of the human heart 
 and the rottenness of society in all countries. In 
 1823, breaking away from his life of selfish indul- 
 gence in Italy, Byron threw himself into the cause 
 of Grecian liberty, which he had sung so gloriously 
 in the Isles of Greece. He died at Missolonghi, in 
 the following year, of a fever contracted by expos- 
 ure and overwork. 
 
 Byron was a great poet but not a great literary
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 251 
 
 artist. He wrote negligently and with the ease of 
 assured strength, his mind gathering heat as it 
 moved, and pouring itself forth in reckless profu- 
 sion. His work is diffuse and imperfect ; much of 
 it is melodrama or speech-making rather than true 
 poetry. But, on the other hand, much, very much 
 of it, is unexcelled as the direct, strong, sincere ut- 
 terance of personal feeling. Such is the quality of 
 his best lyrics, like When We Two Parted, the Elegy 
 on T/'ivrza, Stanzas to Augusta, She Walks in Beauty, 
 and of innumerable passages, lyrical and descrip- 
 tive, in his longer poems. He had not the wisdom 
 of Wordsworth, nor the rich and subtle imagination 
 of Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats when they were at 
 their best. But he had greater body and motive 
 force than any of them. He is the strongest per- 
 sonality among English poets since Milton, though 
 his strength was wasted by want of restraint and 
 self-culture. In Milton the passion was there, but 
 it was held in check by the will and the artistic 
 conscience, made subordinate to good ends, ripened 
 by long reflection, and finally uttered in forms of 
 perfect and harmonious beauty. Byron's love of 
 Nature was quite different in kind from Words- 
 worth's. Of all English poets he has sung most 
 lyrically of that national theme, the sea, as wit- 
 ness among many other passages, the famous 
 apostrophe to the ocean, which closes Childe 
 Harold, and the opening of the third canto in the 
 same poem, 
 
 " Once more upon the waters," etc.
 
 252 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 He bad a passion for night and storm, because 
 they made him forget himself. 
 
 " Most glorious night ! 
 
 Thou wert not sent for slumber ! Let me be 
 A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, 
 A portion of the tempest and of thee ! " 
 
 Byron's literary executor and biographer was the 
 Irish poet, Thomas Moore, a born song-writer, 
 whose Irish Melodies, set to old native airs, are, 
 like Burns's, genuine, spontaneous, singing, and run 
 naturally to music. Songs such as the Meeting of 
 the Waters, The Harp of Tara, Those Evening Bells, 
 the Light of Other Days, Araby's Daughter, and the 
 Last Rose of Summer were, and still are, popular 
 favorites. Moore's Oriental romance, Lalla Rookh, 
 1817, is overladen with ornament and with a sugary 
 sentiment that clogs the palate. He had the quick 
 Irish wit, sensibility rather than passion, and fancy 
 rather than imagination. 
 
 Byron's friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792- 
 1822), was also in fiery revolt against all conven- 
 tions and institutions, though his revolt proceeded 
 not, as in Byron's case, from the turbulence of pas- 
 sions which brooked no restraint, but rather from 
 an intellectual impatience of any kind of control. 
 He was not, like Byron, a sensual man, but temper- 
 ate and chaste. He was, indeed, in his life and in 
 his poetry, as nearly a disembodied spirit as a hu- 
 man creature can be. The German poet, Heine, 
 said that liberty was the religion of this century,
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 253 
 
 and of this religion Shelley was a worshiper. His 
 rebellion against authority began early. He re- 
 fused to fag at Eton, and was expelled from Ox- 
 ford for publishing a tract on the Necessity of 
 Atheism. At nineteen, he ran away with Harriet 
 Westbrook, and was married to her in Scotland. 
 Three years later he deserted her for Mary God- 
 win, with whom he eloped to Switzerland. Two 
 years after this his first wife drowned herself in the 
 Serpentine, and Shelley was then formally wedded 
 to Mary Godwin. All this is rather startling, in 
 the bare statement of it, yet it is not inconsistent 
 with the many testimonies that exist, to Shelley's 
 singular purity and beauty of character, testimonies 
 borne out by the evidence of his own writings. 
 Impulse with him took the place of conscience. 
 Moral law, accompanied by the sanction of power, 
 and imposed by outside authority, he rejected as a 
 form of tyranny. His nature lacked robustness 
 and ballast. Byron, who was at bottom intensely 
 practical, said that Shelley's philosophy was too 
 spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt, himself a Radical, 
 wrote of Shelley: " He has a fire in his eye, a fever 
 in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter 
 in his speech, which mark out the philosophic 
 fanatic. He is sanguine complexioned and shrill 
 voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection 
 of this last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, 
 that Carlyle wrote of Shelley the poet, that " the 
 sound of him was shrieky," and that he had " filled 
 the earth with an inarticulate wailing."
 
 254 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 His career as a poet began characteristically 
 enough, with the publication, while at Oxford, of a 
 volume of political rimes, entitled Margaret Nich- 
 olson's Remains, Margaret Nicholson being the 
 crazy woman who tried to stab George III. His 
 boyish poem, Queen Mab, was published in 1813; 
 Alastor in 1 8 1 6, and the Rn'olt of Islam his longest 
 in 1818, all before he was twenty-one. These 
 were filled with splendid, though unsubstantial, 
 imagery, but they were abstract in subject, and 
 had the faults of incoherence and formlessness 
 which make Shelley's longer poems wearisome and 
 confusing. They sought to embody his social 
 creed of Perfectionism, as well as a certain vague 
 Pantheistic system of belief in a spirit of love in 
 nature and man, whose presence is a constant 
 source of obscurity in Shelley's verse. In 1818 
 he went to Italy, where the last four years of his 
 life were passed, and where, under the influences 
 of Italian art and poetry, his writing became deeper 
 and stronger. He was fond of yachting, and spent 
 much of his time upon the Mediterranean. In the 
 summer of 1822, his boat was swamped in a squall 
 off the Gulf of Spezzia, and Shelley's drowned body 
 was washed ashore, and burned in the presence of 
 Byron and Leigh Hunt The ashes were entombed 
 in the Protestant cemetery at Rome, with the epi- 
 taph, Cor cordium. 
 
 Shelley's best and maturest work, nearly all of 
 which was done in Italy, includes his tragedy, The 
 Cenci, 1819, and his lyrical drama, Prometheus Un-
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT- 255 
 
 bound^ 1821. The first of these has a unity and a 
 definiteness of contour unusual with Shelley, and 
 is, with the exception of some of Robert Brown- 
 ing's, the best English tragedy since Otway. Pro- 
 metheus represented to Shelley's mind the human 
 spirit fighting against divine oppression, and in his 
 portrayal of this figure, he kept in mind^not only 
 the Prometheus of /Eschylus, but the Satan of 
 Paradise Lost. Indeed, in this poem, Shelley came 
 nearer to the sublime than any English poet since 
 Milton. Yet it is in lyrical, rather than in dra- 
 matic, quality that Prometheus Unbound is great. 
 If Shelley be not, as his latest editor, Mr. Forman, 
 claims him to be, the foremost of English lyrical 
 poets, he is at lease the most lyrical of them. He 
 had, in a supreme degree, the "lyric cry." His 
 vibrant nature trembled to every breath of emo- 
 tion, and his nerves craved ever newer shocks; to 
 pant, to quiver, to thrill, to grow faint in the spasm 
 of intense sensation. The feminine cast observ- 
 able in Shelley's portrait is borne out by this trem- 
 ulous sensibility in his verse. It is curious how 
 often he uses the metaphor of wings: of the winged 
 spirit, soaring, like his skylark, till lost in music, 
 rapture, light, and then falling back to earth. 
 Three successive moods longing, ecstasy, and 
 the revulsion of despair are expressed in many 
 of his lyrics; as in the Hymn to the Spirit of 
 Nature, in Prometheus, in the ode To a Skylark, 
 and in the Lines to an Indian Air Edgar 
 Poe's favorite. His passionate desire to lose him-
 
 256 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 self in Nature, to become one with that spirit of 
 love and beauty in the universe, which was to him 
 in place of God, is expressed in the Ode to the West 
 Wind, his most perfect poem: 
 
 " Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is ; 
 
 What if my leaves are falling like its own ! 
 The tumult of thy mighty harmonies 
 
 Will take from both a deep autumnal tone. 
 Sweet, though in sadness, be thou, Spirit fierce, 
 
 My spirit ! be thou me, impetuous one !" 
 
 In the lyrical pieces already mentioned, together 
 with Adonais, the lines Written in the Euganean 
 Hills, Epipsychidion, Stanzas Written in Dejection 
 near Naples, A Dream of the Unknown, and many 
 others, Shelley's lyrical genius reaches a rarer love- 
 liness and a more faultless art than Byron's ever 
 attained, though it lacks the directness and mo- 
 mentum of Byron. 
 
 In Shelley's longer poems, intoxicated with the 
 music of his own singing, he abandons himself 
 wholly to the guidance of his imagination, and the 
 verse seems to go on of itself, like the enchanted 
 boat in Alastor, with no one at the helm. Vision 
 succeeds vision in glorious but bewildering profu- 
 sion; ideal landscapes and cities of cloud "pin- 
 nacled dim in the intense inane." These poems 
 are like the water-falls in the Yosemite, which, 
 tumbling from a height of several thousand feet, 
 are shattered into foam by the air, and waved 
 about over the valley. Very beautiful is this de- 
 scending spray, and the rainbow dwells in its
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 257 
 
 bosom; but there is no longer any stream, nothing 
 but an irridescent mist. The word etherial best 
 expresses the quality of Shelley's genius. His 
 poetry is full of atmospheric effects; of the tricks 
 which light plays with the fluid elements ot water 
 and air; of stars, clouds, rain, dew, mist, frost, 
 wind, the foam of seas, the phases of the moon, 
 the green shadows of waves, the shapes of flames, 
 the " golden lightning of the setting sun." Nature, 
 in Shelley, wants homeliness and relief. While 
 poets like Wordsworth and Burns let in an ideal 
 light upon the rough fields of earth, Shelley 
 escapes into a " moonlight-colored " realm of shad- 
 ows and dreams, among whose abstractions the 
 heart turns cold. One bit of Wordsworth's mount- 
 ain turf is worth them all. 
 
 By the death of John Keats (1796-1821), whose 
 elegy Shelley sang in Adonais, English poetry suf- 
 fered an irreparable loss. His Endymion, 1818, 
 though disfigured by mawkishness and by some af- 
 fectations of manner, was rich in promise. Its 
 faults were those of youth, the faults of exuber- 
 ance and of a tremulous sensibility, which time 
 corrects. Hyperion, 1820, promised to be his mas- 
 terpiece, but he left it unfinished " a Titanic 
 torso " because, as he said, " there were too many 
 Miltonic inversions in it." The subject was the 
 displacement, by Phoebus Apollo, of the ancient 
 sun-god, Hyperion, the last of the Titans who re- 
 tained his dominion. It was a theme of great 
 capabilities, and the poem was begun by Keats, 
 17
 
 258 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 with a strength of conception which leads to the 
 belief that here was once more a really epic genius, 
 had fate suffered it to mature. The fragment, as 
 it stands " that inlet to severe magnificence " 
 proves how rapidly Keats's diction was clarifying. 
 He had learned to string up his looser chords. 
 There is nothing maudlin in Hyperion ; all there 
 is in whole tones and in the grand manner, "as 
 sublime as ^Eschylus," said Byron, with the grave, 
 antique simplicity, and something of modern sweet- 
 ness interfused. 
 
 Keats's father was a groom in a London livery- 
 stable. The poet was apprenticed at fifteen to a 
 surgeon. At school he had studied Latin, but not 
 Greek. He, who of all English poets had the most 
 purely Hellenic spirit, made acquaintance with 
 Greek literature and art only through the medium 
 of classical dictionaries, translations, and popular 
 mythologies; and later through the marbles and 
 casts in the British Museum. His friend, the art- 
 ist Haydon, lent him a copy of Chapman's Homer, 
 and the impression that it made upon him he re- 
 corded in his sonnet, On First Looking into Chap- 
 man s Homer. Other poems of the same inspira- 
 "Hn are his three sonnets, To Homer, On Seeing the 
 tflgin Marbles, On a Picture of Leander, Lamia, 
 and the beautiful Ode on a Grecian Urn. But 
 Keats's art was retrospective and eclectic, the blos- 
 som of a double root; and "golden-tongued Ro- 
 mance with serene lute " had her part in him, as 
 well as the classics. In his seventeenth year he
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 259 
 
 had read the Faery Queene, and from Spender he 
 went on to a study of Chaucer, Shakspere, and Mil- 
 ton. Then he took up Italian and read Ariosto. 
 The influence of these studies is seen in his poem, 
 Isabella, or the Pot of Basil, taken from a story of 
 Boccaccio ; in his wild ballad, La Belle Dame sans 
 Merci ; and in his love tale, the Eve of Saint 
 Agnes, with its wealth of medieval adornment. In 
 the Ode to Autumn, and Ode to a Nightingale, the 
 Hellenic choiceness is found touched with the 
 warmer hues of romance. 
 
 There is something deeply tragic in the short 
 story of Keats's life. The seeds of consumption 
 were in him ; he felt the stirrings of a potent 
 genius, but knew that he could not wait for it to 
 unfold, but must die 
 
 " Before high-piled books, in charactry 
 Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain." 
 
 His disease was aggravated, possibly, by the stupid 
 brutality with which the reviewers had treated En- 
 dymion ; and certainly by the hopeless love which 
 devoured him. "The very thing which I want to 
 live most for," he wrote, " will be a great occasion 
 of my death. If I had any chance of recovery, 
 this passion would kill me." In the autumn of 
 1820, his disease gaining apace, he went on a sail- 
 ing vessel to Italy, accompanied by a single friend, 
 a young artist named Severn. The change was of 
 no avail, and he died at Rome a few weeks after, 
 in his twenty-sixth year.
 
 260 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Keats was, above all things, the artist, with that 
 love of the beautiful and that instinct for its repro- 
 duction which are the artist's divinest gifts. He 
 cared little about the politics and philosophy of his 
 day, and he did not make his poetry the vehicle 
 of ideas. It was sensuous poetry, the poetry of 
 youth and gladness. But if he had lived, and if, with 
 wider knowledge of men and deeper experience of 
 life, he had attained to Wordsworth's spiritual in- 
 sight and to Byron's power of passion and under- 
 standing, he would have become a greater poet than 
 either. For he had a style a "natural magic " 
 which only needed the chastening touch of a finer 
 culture to make it superior to any thing in mod- 
 ern English poetry and to force us back to Milton 
 or Shakspere for a comparison. His tombstone, 
 not far from Shelley's, bears the inscription of his 
 own choosing: " Here lies one whose name was 
 wnt in water." But it would be within the limits 
 of truth to say that it is written in large'characters 
 on most of our contemporary poetry. "Words- 
 worth," says Lowell, " has influenced most the ideas 
 of succeeding poets ; Keats their forms." And he 
 has influenced these out of all proportion to the 
 amount which he left, or to his intellectual range, 
 by virtue of the exquisite quality of his technique. 
 
 1. Wordsworth's Poems. Chosen and edited by 
 Matthew Arnold. London, 1879. 
 
 2. Poetry of Byron. Chosen and arranged by 
 Matthew Arnold. London, 1881.
 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO DEATH OF SCOTT. 261 
 
 
 
 3. Shelley. Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus 
 Unbound, The Cenci, Lyrical Pieces. 
 
 4. Landor. Pericles and Aspasia. 
 
 5. Coleridge. Table Talk, Notes on Shaks- 
 pere, The Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Love, Ode 
 to France, Ode to the Departing Year, Kubla Khan, 
 Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni, 
 Youth and Age, Frost at Midnight. 
 
 6. De Quincey. Confessions of an English 
 Opium Eater, Flight of a Tartar Tribe, Biograph- 
 ical Sketches. 
 
 7. Scott. Waverley, Heart of Midlothian, 
 Bride of Lammermoor, Rob Roy, Antiquary, Mar- 
 mion, Lady of the Lake. 
 
 8. Keats. Hyperion, Eve of St. Agnes, Lyrical 
 Pieces. 
 
 9. Mrs. Oliphant's Literary History of England, 
 
 Centuries.
 
 262 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO 
 THE PRESENT TIME. 
 
 1832-1886. 
 
 THE literature of the past fifty years is too close 
 to our eyes to enable the critic to pronounce a 
 final judgment, or the literary historian to get a 
 true perspective. Many of the principal writers 
 of the time are still living, and many others have 
 been dead but a few years. This concluding 
 chapter, therefore, will be devoted to the consid- 
 eration of the few who stand forth, incontestably, 
 as the leaders of literary thought, and who seem 
 likely, under all future changes of fashion and 
 taste, to remain representative of their generation. 
 As regards form, the most striking fact in the his- 
 tory of the period under review is the immense 
 preponderance in its imaginative literature of prose 
 fiction, of the novel of real life. The povel has 
 become to the solitary reader of to-day what the 
 stage play was to the audiences of Elisabeth's reign, 
 or the periodical essay, like the Tatlers and Spec- 
 tators, to the clubs and breakfast-tables of Queen 
 Anne's. And, if its criticism of life is less concen- 
 trated and brilliant than the drama gives, it is fai
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 263 
 
 more searching and minute. No period has ever 
 left in its literary records so complete a picture of 
 its whole society as the period which is just clos- 
 ing. At any other time than the present, the 
 names of authors like Charlotte Bronte, Charles 
 Kingsley, and Charles Reade names which are 
 here merely mentioned in passing besides many 
 others which want of space forbids us even to 
 mention would be of capital importance. As it is, 
 we must limit our review to the three acknowledged 
 masters of modern English fiction, Charles Dickens 
 (1812-1870), William Makepeace Thackeray (1811 
 -1863), and "George Eliot " (Mary Ann Evans, 
 1819-1880). 
 
 It is sometimes helpful to reduce a great writer 
 to his lowest term, in order to see what the pre- 
 vailing bent of his genius is. This lowest term 
 may often be found in his early work, before expe- 
 rience of the world has overlaid his original im- 
 pulse with foreign accretions. Dickens was much 
 more than a humorist, Thackeray than a satirist, and 
 George Eliot than a moralist ; but they had their 
 starting-points respectively in humor, in burlesque, 
 and in strong ethical and religious feeling. Dick- 
 ens began with a broadly comic series of papers, 
 contributed to the Old Magazine and the Evening 
 Chronicle, and reprinted in book form, in r836, as 
 Sketches by Boz. The success of these suggested 
 to a firm of publishers the preparation of a num- 
 ber of similar sketches of the misadventures of 
 cockney sportsmen, to accompany plates by the
 
 264 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 comic draughtsman, Mr. R. Seymour. This sug- 
 gestion resulted in the Pickwick Papers, published 
 in monthly installments, in 1836-1837. The series 
 grew, under Dickens's hand, into a continuous, 
 though rather loosely strung narrative of the do- 
 ings of a set of characters, conceived with such 
 exuberant and novel humor that it took the public 
 by storm, and raised its author at once to fame- 
 Pickwick is by no means Dickens's best, but it is his 
 most characteristic, and most popular, book. At 
 the time that he wrote these early sketches he was 
 a reporter for the Morning Chronicle. His natu- 
 rally acute powers of observation had been trained 
 in this pursuit to the utmost efficiency, and there 
 always continued to be about his descriptive writ- 
 ing a reportorial and newspaper air. He had the 
 eye for effect, the sharp fidelity to detail, the 
 instinct for rapidly seizing upon and exaggerating 
 the salient point, which are developed by the re- 
 quirements of modern journalism. Dickens knew 
 London as no one else has ever known it, and, in 
 particular, he knew its hideous and grotesque re- 
 cesses, with the strange developments of human 
 nature that abide there; slums like Tom-all-Alone's, 
 in Bleak House; the river-side haunts of Rogue Rid- 
 erhood, in Our Mutual Friend ; as well as the old 
 inns, like the " White Hart," and the " dusky pur- 
 lieus of the law." As a man, his favorite occupa- 
 tion was walking the streets, where, as a child, he 
 had picked up the most valuable part of his educa- 
 tion. His tramps about London often after night-
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 265 
 
 fall sometimes extended to fifteen miles in a day. 
 He knew, too, the shifts of poverty. His father 
 some traits of whom are preserved in Mr. Micaw- 
 ber was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea 
 prison, where his wife took lodging with him, while 
 Charles, then a boy of ten, was employed at six 
 shillings a week to cover blacking-pots in Warner's 
 blacking warehouse. The hardships and loneli- 
 ness of this part of his life are told under a thin 
 disguise in Dickens's masterpiece, David Copper- 
 field, the most autobiographical of his novels. 
 From these young experiences he gained that in- 
 sight into the lives of the lower classes, and that 
 sympathy with children and with the poor which 
 shine out in his pathetic sketches of Little Nell, 
 in The Old Curiosity Shop, of Paul Dombey, of 
 Poor Jo, in Bleak House, of " the Marchioness," and 
 a hundred other figures. 
 
 In Oliver Twist, contributed, during 1837-1838, 
 to Bentley's Miscellany, a monthly magazine of which 
 Dickens was editor, he produced his first regular 
 novel. In this story of the criminal classes the 
 author showed a tragic power which he had not 
 hitherto exhibited. Thenceforward his career was 
 a series of dazzling successes. It is impossible 
 here to particularize his numerous novels, sketches, 
 short tales, and " Christmas Stories " the latter a 
 fashion which he inaugurated, and which has pro- 
 duced a whole literature in itself. In Nicholas 
 Nickleby, 1839; Master Humphrey's Clock, 1840; 
 Martin Chuzzlewit, 1 844 ; Dombey and Son, 1 848 ;
 
 266 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 David Copperfield, 1850 ; and Bleak House, 1853, 
 there is no falling off in strength. The last named 
 was, in some respects, and especially in the skill- 
 ful construction of the plot, his best novel. In 
 some of his latest books, as Great Expectations, 1861, 
 and Our Mutual Friend, 1865, there are signs of a 
 decline. This showed itself in an unnatural exag- 
 geration of characters and motives, and a painful 
 straining after humorous effects ; faults, indeed, 
 from which Dickens was never wholly free. There 
 was a histrionic side to him, which came out in 
 his fondness for private theatricals, in which he ex- 
 hibited remarkable talent, and in the dramatic ac- 
 tion which he introduced into the delightful pub- 
 lic readings from his works that he gave before 
 vast audiences all over the United Kingdom, and 
 in his two visits to America. It is not surprising, 
 either, to learn that upon the stage his preference 
 was for melodrama and farce. His own serious 
 writing was always dangerously close to the melo- 
 dramatic, and his humor to the farcical. There is 
 much false art, bad taste, and even vulgarity in 
 Dickens. He was never quite a gentleman, and 
 never succeeded well in drawing gentlemen or 
 ladies. In the region of low comedy he is easily 
 the most original, the most inexhaustible, the most 
 wonderful of modern humorists. Creations such 
 as Mrs. Nickleby, Mr. Micawber, Sam Weller, 
 Sairy Gamp, take rank with Falstaff and Dogberry; 
 while many others, like Dick Swiveller, Stiggins, 
 Chadband, Mrs. Jellyby, and Julia Mills are almost
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 267 
 
 equally good. In the innumerable swarm of minor 
 characters with which he has enriched our comic 
 literature, there is no indistinctness. Indeed, the 
 objection that has been made to him is that his 
 characters are too distinct that he puts labels on 
 them ; that they are often mere personifications of 
 a single trick of speech or manner, which becomes 
 tedious and unnatural by repetition; thus, Grand- 
 father Smallweed is always settling down into his 
 cushion, and having to be shaken up ; Mr. Jellyby 
 is always sitting with his head against the wall ; 
 Peggotty is always bursting her buttons off, etc., etc. 
 As Dickens's humorous characters tend perpetually 
 to run into caricatures and grotesques, so his sen- 
 timent, from the same excess, slops over too fre- 
 quently into "gush, "and into a too deliberate and 
 protracted attack upon the pity. A favorite hu- 
 morous device in his style is a stately and rounda- 
 bout way of telling a trivial incident, as where, for 
 example, Mr. Roker " muttered certain unpleasant 
 invocations concerning his own eyes, limbs, and cir- 
 culating fluids;" or where the drunken man who is 
 singing comic songs in the Fleet received from Mr. 
 Smangle " a gentle intimation, through the medium 
 of the water-jug, that his audience were not mu- 
 sically disposed." This manner was original with 
 Dickens, though he may have taken a hint of it 
 from the mock heroic language of Jonathan 
 Wild; but as practiced by a thousand imitators, 
 ever since, it has gradually become a burden. 
 It would not be the whole truth to say that the
 
 268 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 difference between the humor of Thackeray and 
 Dickens is the same as between that of Shakspere 
 and Ben Jonson. Yet it is true that the " humors " 
 of Ben Jonson have an analogy with the extremer 
 instances of Dickens's character sketches in this 
 respect, namely : that they are both studies of the 
 eccentric, the abnormal, the whimsical, rather than 
 of the typical and universal studies of manners, 
 rather than of whole characters. And it is easily 
 conceivable that, at no distant day, the oddities of 
 Captain Cuttle, Deportment Turveydrop, Mark 
 Tapley, and Newman Noggs will seem as far-fetched 
 and impossible as those of Captain Otter, Fastidi- 
 ous Brisk, and Sir Amorous La-Foole. 
 
 When Dickens was looking about for some one 
 to take Seymour's place as illustrator of Pickwick, 
 Thackeray applied for the job, but without suc- 
 cess. He was then a young man of twenty-five, and 
 still hesitating between art and literature. He had 
 begun to draw caricatures with his pencil when a 
 school-boy at the Charter House, and to scribble 
 them with his pen when a student at Cambridge, 
 editing The Snob, a weekly under-graduate paper, 
 and parodying the prize poem Timbuctoo of his 
 contemporary at the university, Alfred Tennyson. 
 Then he went abroad to study art, passing a sea- 
 son at Weimar, where he met Goethe and filled the 
 albums of the young Saxon ladies with carica- 
 tures ; afterward living, in the Latin Quarter at 
 Paris, a Bohemian existence, studying art in a des- 
 ultory way, and seeing men and cities ; accumu-
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 269 
 
 iating portfolios full of sketches, but laying up 
 stores of material to be used afterward to greater 
 advantTge when he should settle upon his true 
 medium of expression. By 1837, having lost his 
 fortune of ^500 a year in speculation and gam- 
 bling, he began to contribute to Eraser's, and 
 thereafter to the New Monthly, Cruikshank's 
 Comic Almanac, Punch, and other periodicals, 
 clever burlesques, art criticisms by " Michael An- 
 gelo Titmarsh," Yellow Plush Papers, and all man- 
 ner of skits, satirical character sketches, and 
 humorous tales, like the Great Hoggarty Diamond 
 and the Luck of Barry Lyndon. Some of these 
 were collected in the Paris Sketch-Book, 1840, and 
 the Irish Sketch-Book, 1843 ; but Thackeray was 
 slow in winning recognition, and it was not until 
 the publication of his first great novel, Vanity 
 Fair, in monthly parts, during 1846-1848, that he 
 achieved any thing like the general reputation 
 which Dickens had reached at a bound. Vanity 
 fair described itself, on its title-page, as "a novel 
 without a hero." It was also a novel without a 
 plot in the sense in which Bleak House or Nicho- 
 las Nickleby had a plot and in that respect it set 
 the fashion for the latest school of realistic fiction, 
 being a transcript of life, without necessary be- 
 ginning or end. Indeed, one of the pleasantest 
 things 10 a reader of Thackeray is the way which 
 his characters have of re-appearing, as old ac- 
 quaintances, in his different books; just as, in 
 real life, people drop out of mind and then turn
 
 270 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 up again in other years and places. Vanity Fair 
 is Thackeray's masterpiece, but it is not the best 
 introduction to his writings. There are no illu- 
 sions in it, and, to a young reader fresh from Scott's 
 romances or Dickens's sympathetic extravagances, 
 it will seem hard and repellant. But men who, 
 like Thackeray, have seen life and tasted its bitter- 
 ness and felt its hollowness, know how to prize it. 
 Thackeray does not merely expose the cant, the 
 emptiness, the self-seeking, the false pretenses, 
 flunkeyism, and snobbery the " mean admiration 
 of mean things " in the great world of London 
 society : his keen, unsparing vision detects the 
 base alloy in the purest natures. There are no 
 " heroes " in his books, no perfect characters. 
 Even his good women, such as Helen and Laura 
 Pendennis, are capable of cruel injustice toward 
 less fortunate sisters, like little Fanny ; and Amelia 
 Sedley is led, by blind feminine instinct, to snub 
 and tyrannize over poor Dobbin. The shabby 
 miseries of life, the numbing and belittling influ- 
 ences of failure and poverty upon the most gener- 
 ous natures, are the tragic themes which Thack- 
 eray handles by preference. He has been called 
 a cynic, but the boyish playfulness of his humor 
 and his kindly spirit are incompatible with cyni- 
 cism. Charlotte Bronte said that Fielding was the 
 vulture and Thackeray the eagle. The comparison 
 would have been truer if made between Swift and 
 Thackeray. Swift was a cynic ; his pen was driven 
 by hate, but Thackeray's by love, and it was not
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 271 
 
 in bitterness but in sadness that the latter laid 
 bare the wickedness of the world. He was him- 
 self a thorough man of the world, and he had that 
 dislike for a display of feeling which characterizes 
 the modern Englishman. But behind his satiric 
 mask he concealed the manliest tenderness, and a 
 reverence for every thing in human nature that is 
 good and true. Thackeray's other great novels 
 are Pendennis, 1849 ; Henry Esmond, 1852 ; and 
 The Newcomes, 1855 the last of which contains 
 his most lovable character, the pathetic and im- 
 mortal figure of Colonel Newcome, a creation 
 worthy to stand, in its dignity and its sublime 
 weakness, by the side of Don Quixote. It was 
 alleged against Thackeray that he made all his 
 good characters, like Major Dobbin and Amelia 
 Sedley and Colonel Newcome, intellectually feeble, 
 and his brilliant characters, like Becky Sharp and 
 Lord Steyne and Blanche Amory, morally bad. 
 This is not entirely true, but the other complaint 
 that his women are inferior to his men is true 
 in a general way. Somewhat inferior to his other 
 novels were The Virginians, 1858, and The Advent- 
 ures of Philip, 1862. All of these were stories of 
 contemporary life, except Henry Esmond and its 
 sequel, The Virginians, which, though not precisely 
 historical fictions, introduced historical figures, 
 such as Washington and the Earl of Peterborough. 
 Their period of action was the i8th century, 
 and the dialogue was a cunning imitation of the 
 language of that time. Thackeray was strongly
 
 272 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 attracted by the i8th century. His literary teach- 
 ers were Addison, Swift, Steele, Gay, Johnson, 
 Richardson, Goldsmith, Fielding, Smollett, and 
 Sterne, and his special master and model was 
 Fielding, He projected a history of the century, 
 and his studies in this kind took shape in his two 
 charming series of lectures on The English Hu- 
 morists and The Four Georges. These he delivered 
 in England and in America, to which country he, 
 like Dickens, made two several visits. 
 
 Thackeray's genius was, perhaps, less astonish- 
 ing than Dickens's, less fertile, spontaneous, and 
 inventive ; but his art is sounder, and his delinea- 
 tion of character more truthful. After one has 
 formed a taste for his books, Dickens's sentiment 
 will seem overdone, and much of his humor will 
 have the air of buffoonery. Thackeray had the 
 advantage in another particular : he described the 
 life of the upper classes, and Dickens of the lower. 
 It may be true that the latter offers richer mate- 
 rial to the novelist, in the play of elementary pas- 
 sions and in strong, native developments of char- 
 acter. It is true, also, that Thackeray approached 
 " society" rather to satirize it than to set forth its 
 agreeableness. Yet, after all, it is " the great 
 world " which he describes, that world upon which 
 the broadening and refining processes of a high 
 civilization have done their utmost, and which, 
 consequently, must possess an intellectual interest 
 superior to any thing in the life of London thieves, 
 traveling showmen, and coachees. Thackeray is
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 273 
 
 the equal of Swift as a satirist, of Dickens as a 
 humorist, and of Scott as a novelist. The one 
 element lacking in him and which Scott had irv 
 a high degree is the poetic imagination. " I have 
 no brains above my eyes," he said ; " I describe 
 what I see." Hence there is wanting in his crea- 
 tions that final charm which Shakspere's have. For 
 what the eyes see is not all. 
 
 The great woman who wrote under the pen-name 
 of George Eliot was a humorist, too. She had a 
 rich, deep humor of her own, and a wit that crystal- 
 lized into sayings which are not epigrams, only be- 
 cause their wisdom strikes more than their smart- 
 ness. But humor was not, as with Thackeray and 
 Dickens, her point of view. A country girl, the 
 daughter of a land agent and surveyor at Nuneaton, 
 in Warwickshire, her early letters and journals ex- 
 hibit a Calvinistic gravity and moral severity. 
 Later, when her truth to her convictions led her 
 to renounce the Christian belief, she carried into 
 Positivism the same religious earnestness, and 
 wrote the one English hymn of the religion of hu- 
 manity: 
 
 " O, let me join the choir invisible," etc. 
 
 Her first published work was a translation of 
 Strauss's Leben Jesu, 1846. In 1851 she went to 
 London and became one of the editors of the 
 Radical organ, the Westminster Review. Here she 
 formed a connection a marriage in all but the 
 name with George Henry Lewes, who was. like 
 18
 
 274 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 herself, a freethinker, and who published, among 
 other things, a Biographical History of Philosophy. 
 Lewes had also written fiction, and it was at his 
 suggestion that his wife undertook story writing. 
 Her Scenes of Clerical Life were contributed to 
 Blackwood's Magazine for 1857, and published in 
 book form in the following year. Adam Bede fol- 
 lowed in 1859, the Mill on the Floss in 1860, Silas 
 Marner in 1861, Romola in 1863, Felix Holt in 
 1866, and Middlemarch in 1872. All of these, ex- 
 cept Romola, are tales of provincial, and largely of 
 domestic, life in the midland counties. Romola is 
 a historical novel, the scene of which is Florence, 
 in the i5th century, the Florence of Macchia- 
 velli and of Savonarola. George Eliot's method 
 was very different from that of Thackeray or 
 Dickens. She did not crowd her canvas with the 
 swarming life of cities. Her figures are compara- 
 tively few, and they are selected from the middle- 
 class families of rural parishes or small towns, amid 
 that atmosphere of " fine old leisure," whose dis- 
 appearance she lamented. Her drama is a still 
 life drama, intensely and profoundly inward. 
 Character is the stuff that she works in, and she 
 deals with it more subtly than Thackeray. With 
 him the tragedy is produced by the pressure of so- 
 ciety and its false standards upon the individual ; 
 with her, by the malign influence of individuals 
 upon one another. She watches " the stealthy con- 
 vergence of human fates," the intersection at vari- 
 ous angles of the planes of character, the power
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 275 
 
 that the lower nature has to thwart, stupefy, or 
 corrupt the higher, which has become entangled 
 with it in the mesh of destiny. At the bottom of 
 every one of her stories, there is a problem of the 
 conscience or the intellect. In this respect she 
 resembles Hawthorne, though she is not, like him, 
 a romancer, but a realist. 
 
 There is a melancholy philosophy in her books, 
 most of which are tales of failure or frustration. 
 The Mill on the Floss contains a large element of 
 autobiography, and its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, 
 is, perhaps, her idealized self. Her aspirations 
 after a fuller and nobler existence are condemne( 
 to struggle against the resistance of a narrow, pro- 
 vincial environment, and the pressure of untoward 
 fates. She is tempted to seek an escape even 
 through a desperate throwing off of moral obliga- 
 tions, and is driven back to her duty only to die by 
 a sudden stroke of destiny. " Life is a bad busi- 
 ness," wrote George Eliot, in a letter to a friend, 
 "and we must make the most of it." Adam Bedc 
 is, in construction, the most perfect of her novels, 
 and Silas Marner of her shorter stories. Her an- 
 alytic habit gained more and more upon her as she 
 wrote. Middlemarch, in some respects her greatest 
 book, lacks the unity of her earlier novels, and the 
 story tends to become subordinate to the work- 
 ing out of character stories and social problems. 
 The philosophic speculations, which she shared 
 with her husband, were seemingly unfavorable 
 to her artistic growth, a circumstance which be-
 
 276 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 comes apparent in her last novel, Daniel Deronda, 
 1877. Finally in the Impressions of Theophrastus 
 Suc/i, 1879, sne abandoned narrative altogether, 
 and recurred to that type of " character " books 
 which we have met, as a flourishing department of 
 literature in the i7th century, represented by such 
 works as Earle's Microcosmographie and Fuller's 
 Holy and Profane State. The moral of George 
 Eliot's writings is not obtruded. She never made 
 the artistic mistake of writing a novel of purpose, 
 or what the Germans call a tendenz-roman; as Dick- 
 ens did, for example, when he attacked imprison- 
 ment for debt, in Pickwick ; the poor laws, in Oliver 
 Twist; the Court of Chancery, in Bleak House; 
 and the Circumlocution office, in Little Dorrit. 
 
 Next to the novel, the essay has been the most 
 overflowing literary form used by the writers of this 
 generation a form, characteristic, it may be, of an 
 age which "lectures, not creates." It is not the 
 essay of Bacon, nor yet of Addison, nor of Lamb, 
 but attempts a complete treatment. Indeed, many 
 longish books, like Carlyle's Heroes and Hero Wor- 
 ship and Ruskin's Modern Painters, are, in spirit, 
 rather literary essays than formal treatises. The 
 most popular essayist and historian of his time was 
 Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), an ac ~ 
 tive and versatile man, who won splendid success 
 in many fields of labor. He was prominent in pub- 
 lic life as one of the leading orators and writers of 
 the Whig party. He sat many times in the House 
 of Commons, as member for Calne, for Leeds, and
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 277 
 
 for Edinburgh, and took a distinguished part in 
 the debates on the Reform bill of 1832. He held 
 office in several Whig governments, and during his 
 four years' service in British India, as member of 
 the Supreme Council of Calcutta, he did valuable 
 work in promoting education in that province, and 
 in codifying the Indian penal law. After his return 
 to England, and especially after the publication of 
 his History of England from The Accession of 
 James //., honors and appointments of all kinds 
 were showered upon him, In 1857 he was raised 
 to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley. 
 
 Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical 
 and biographical subjects, was, in some points, 
 unique. His reading was prodigious, and his 
 memory so tenacious, that it was said, with but 
 little exaggeration, that he never forgot any thing 
 that he had read. He could repeat the whole of 
 Paradise Lost by heart, and thought it probable 
 that he could rewrite Sir Charles Grandison from 
 memory. In his books, in his speeches in the 
 House of Commons, and in private conversation 
 for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on 
 often for hours at a stretch he was never at a loss 
 to fortify and illustrate his positions by citation 
 after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, 
 and passages quoted verbatim from his multifarious 
 reading. The first of Macaulay's writings to at- 
 tract general notice was his article on Milton, 
 printed in the August number of the Edinburgh 
 Review, for 1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey, in
 
 278 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 acknowledging the receipt of the MS., wrote to his 
 new contributor, " The more I think, the less I 
 can conceive where you picked up that style." 
 That celebrated style about which so much has 
 since been written was an index to the mental 
 character of its owner. Macaulay was of a confi- 
 dent, sanguine, impetuous nature. He had great 
 common sense, and he saw what he saw quickly 
 and clearly, but he did not see very far below the 
 surface. He wrote with the conviction of an ad- 
 vocate, and the easy omniscience of a man whose 
 learning is really nothing more than " general in- 
 formation," raised to a very high power, rather 
 than with the subtle penetration of an original or 
 truly philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De 
 Quincey's'. He always had at hand explanations of 
 events or of characters, which were admirably easy 
 and simple -too simple, indeed, for the compli- 
 cated phenomena which they professed to explain. 
 His style was clear, animated, showy, and even its 
 faults were of an exciting kind. It was his habit 
 to give piquancy to his writing by putting things 
 concretely. Thus, instead of saying, in general 
 terms as Hume or Gibbon might have done 
 that the Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 
 1200, he says: "The great grandsons of those who 
 had fought under William and the great grandsons 
 of those who had fought under Harold began to draw 
 near to each other." Macaulay was a great scene 
 painter, who neglected delicate truths of detail for 
 exaggerated distemper effects. He used the rhe-
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 279 
 
 torical machinery of climax and hyperbole for all 
 that it was worth, and he " made points " as in his 
 essay on Bacon by creating antithesis. In his 
 History of England, he inaugurated the picturesque 
 method of historical writing. The book was as 
 fascinating as any novel. Macaulay, like Scott, had 
 the historic imagination, though his method of 
 turning history into romance was very different 
 from Scott's. Among his essays, the best are those 
 which, like the ones on Lord Clive, Warren Hast- 
 ings, and Frederick the Great, deal with historical 
 subjects; or those which deal with literary subjects 
 under their public historic relations, such as the 
 essays on Addison, Bunyan, and The Comic Drama- 
 tists of the Restoration. " I have never written a 
 page of criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote 
 Macaulay, " which I would not burn if I had the 
 power." Nevertheless his own Lays of Ancient 
 Rome, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the em- 
 phatic and declamatory kind, though their quality 
 may be rather rhetorical than poetic. 
 
 Our critical time has not forborne to criticize it- 
 self, and perhaps the writer who impressed himself 
 most strongly upon his generation was the one who 
 railed most desperately against the " spirit of the 
 age." Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied 
 between 1822 and 1830 chiefly in imparting to the 
 British public a knowledge of German literature. 
 He published, among other things, a Life of Schil- 
 ler, a translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, and 
 two volumes of translations from the German ro-
 
 280 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 mancers Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque*, 
 and contributed to the Edinburgh and Foreign Re- 
 view, articles on Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, 
 German playwrights, the Nibelungen Lied, etc. His 
 own diction became more and more tinctured with 
 Germanisms. There was something Gothic in his 
 taste, which was attracted by the lawless, the gro- 
 tesque, and the whimsical in the writings of Jean 
 Paul Richter. His favorite among English humor- 
 ists wa.s Sterne, who has a share of these same 
 qualities. He spoke disparagingly of " the sensu- 
 ous literature of the Greeks," and preferred the 
 Norse to the Hellenic mythology. Even in his ad- 
 mirable critical essays on Burns, on Richter, on 
 Scott, Diderot, and Voltaire, which are free from 
 his later mannerism written in English, and not 
 in Carlylese his sense of spirit is always more live- 
 ly than his sense of form. He finally became so 
 impatient of art as to maintain half-seriously 
 the paradox that Shakspere would have done bet- 
 ter to write in prose. In three of these early es- 
 says on the Signs of the Times, 1829; on History, 
 1830; and on Characteristics, 1831 are to be found 
 the germs of all his later writings. The first of 
 these was an arraignment of the mechanical spirit 
 of the age. In every province of thought he dis- 
 covered too great a reliance upon systems, institu- 
 tions, machinery, instead of upon men. Thus, in 
 religion, we have Bible Societies, "machines for 
 converting the heathen." " In defect of Raphaels 
 and Angelos and Mozarts, we have royal acade-
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 281 
 
 mies of painting, sculpture, music." In like man- 
 ner, he complains, government is a machine. " Its 
 duties and faults are not those of a father, but of 
 an active parish-constable." Against the "police 
 theory," as distinguished from the " paternal " the- 
 ory of government, Carlyle protested with ever- 
 shriller iteration. In Chartism, 1839 ; Past and 
 Present, 1843 ; and Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850, he 
 denounced this laissez faire idea. The business 
 of government, he repeated, is to govern ; but this 
 view makes it its business to refrain from govern- 
 ing. He fought most fiercely against the conclu- 
 sions of political economy, "the dismal science," 
 which, he said, affirmed that men were guided ex- 
 clusively by their stomachs. He protested, too, 
 against the Utilitarians, followers of Ben-tham and 
 Mill, with their "greatest happiness principle," 
 which reduced virtue to a profit-and-loss account. 
 Carlyle took issue with modern liberalism ; he ridi- 
 culed the self-gratulation of the time, all the talk 
 about progress of the species, unexampled pros- 
 perity, etc. But he was reactionary without being 
 conservative. He had studied the French Revolu- 
 tion, and he saw the fateful, irresistible approach 
 of democracy. He had no faith in government 
 "by counting noses," and he hated talking parlia- 
 ments ; but neither did he put trust in an aristoc- 
 racy that spent its time in "preserving the game." 
 What he wanted was a great individual ruler, a real 
 king or hero ; and this doctrine he set forth after- 
 ward most fully in Hero Worship, 1841, and illus-
 
 282 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 trated in his lives of representative heroes, such as 
 his Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 1845, and his 
 great History of Frederick the Great, 1858-1865. 
 Cromwell and Frederick were well enough ; but as 
 Carlyle grew older, his admiration for mere force 
 grew, and his latest hero was none other than that 
 infamous Dr. Francia, the South American dicta- 
 tor, whose career of bloody and crafty crime hor- 
 rified the civilized world. 
 
 The essay on History was a protest against the 
 scientific view of history which attempts to explain 
 away and account for the wonderful. " Wonder," 
 he wrote in Sartor Rcsartus, " is the basis of all 
 worship." He defined history as "the essence of 
 innumerable biographies." "Mr. Carlyle," said 
 the Italian patriot, Mazzini, "comprehends only 
 the individual. The nationality of Italy is, in his 
 eyes, the glory of having produced Dante and 
 Christopher Columbus." This trait comes out in 
 his greatest book, The French Revolution, 1837, 
 which is a mighty tragedy, enacted by a few lead- 
 ing characters, Mirabeau, Danton, Napoleon. He 
 loved to emphasize the superiority of history 
 over fiction as dramatic material. The third of 
 the three essays mentioned was a Jeremiad on the 
 morbid self-consciousness of the age, which shows 
 itself in religion and philosophy, as skepticism 
 and introspective metaphysics; and in literature, 
 as sentimentalism, and "view-hunting." 
 
 But Carlyle's epoch-making book was Sartor Re- 
 Tailor Re tailored), published mFraser's
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 283 
 
 Magazine for 1833-1834, and first reprinted in book 
 form in America. This was a satire upon shams, 
 conventions, the disguises which overlie the most 
 spiritual realities of the soul. It purported to be 
 the life and "clothes-philosophy" of a certain 
 Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, Professor der Allerlet 
 Wissenschaft of things in general in the Uni- 
 versity of Weissnichtwo. "Society," said Carlyle, 
 "is founded upon cloth," following the suggestions 
 of Lear's speech to the naked bedlam beggar : 
 " Thou art the thing itself : unaccommodated man 
 is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal 
 as thou art;" and borrowing also, perhaps, an iron- 
 ical hint from a paragraph in Swift's Tale of a 
 Tub: "A sect was established who held the uni- 
 verse to be a large suit of clothes. ... If certain 
 ermines or furs be placed in a certain position, we 
 style them a judge ; and so an apt conjunction of 
 lawn and black satin we entitle a bishop." In 
 Sartor Resartus Carlyle let himself go. It was 
 willful, uncouth, amorphous, titanic. There was 
 something monstrous in the combination, the hot 
 heart of the Scot married to the transcendental 
 dream of Germany. It was not English, said the 
 reviewers ; it was not sense ; it was disfigured by 
 obscurity and " mysticism." Nevertheless even the 
 thin-witted and the dry-witted had to acknowl- 
 edge the powerful beauty of many chapters and 
 passages, rich with humor, eloquence, poetry, 
 deep-hearted tenderness, or passionate scorn. 
 Carlyle was a voracious reader, and the plunder
 
 284 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 of whole literatures is strewn over his pages. He 
 flung about the resources of the language with a 
 giant's strength, and made new words at every 
 turn. The concreteness and the swarming fertil- 
 ity of his mind are evidenced by his enormous vo- 
 cabulary, computed greatly to exceed Shakspere's, 
 or any other single writer's in the English tongue. 
 His style lacks the crowning grace of simplicity 
 and repose. It astonishes, but it also fatigues. 
 
 Carlyle's influence has consisted more in his 
 attitude than in any special truth which he has 
 preached. It has been the influence of a moralist, 
 of a practical, rather than a speculative, philoso- 
 pher. "The end of man," he wrote, " is an action, 
 not a thought." He has not been able to persuade 
 the time that it is going wrong, but his criticisms 
 have been wholesomely corrective of its self- 
 conceit. In a democratic age he has insisted 
 upon the undemocratic virtues of obedience, si- 
 lence, and reverence. Ehrfurcht reverence 
 the text of his address to the students of Edin- 
 burgh University, in 1866, is the last word of his 
 philosophy. 
 
 In 1830 Alfred Tennyson (1809 ), a young 
 
 graduate of Cambridge, published a thin duodecimo 
 of 154 pages, entitled Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The 
 pieces in this little volume, like the Sleeping Beauty, 
 Ode to Memory, and Recollections of the Arabian 
 Nights, were full of color, fragrance, melody; but 
 they had a dream-like character, and were without 
 definite theme, resembling an artist's studies, or
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 285 
 
 exercises in music a few touches of the brush, a 
 few sweet chords, but no aria. A number of them 
 Claribel, Lilian, Adeline, Isabel, Mariana, Mad- 
 eline were sketches of women; not character por- 
 traits, like Browning's Men and Women, but im- 
 pressions of temperament, of delicately differen- 
 tiated types of feminine beauty. In Mariana, 
 expanded from a hint of the forsaken maid, in 
 Shakspere's Measure for Measure, " Mariana at 
 the moated grange," the poet showed an art then 
 peculiar, but since grown familiar, of heightening 
 the central feeling by landscape accessories. The 
 level waste, the stagnant sluices, the neglected 
 garden, the wind in the single poplar, re-enforce, by 
 their monotonous sympathy, the loneliness, the 
 hopeless waiting and weariness of life in the one 
 human figure of the poem. In Mariana, the Ode 
 to Memory, and the Dying Swan, it was the fens of 
 Cambridge and of his native Lincolnshire that fur- 
 nished Tennyson's scenery. 
 
 " Stretched wide and wild, the waste enormous marsh, 
 
 Where from the frequent bridge, 
 
 Like emblems of infinity, 
 
 The trenched waters run from sky to sky." 
 
 A second collection, published in 1833, exhibited 
 a greater scope and variety, but was still in his 
 earlier manner. The studies of feminine types 
 were continued in Margaret, Fatima, Eleanore, 
 Mariana in the South, and A Dream of Fair 
 Women, suggested by Chaucer's Legend of Good
 
 286 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Women. In the Lady of Skalott, the poet first 
 touched the Arthurian legends. The subject is 
 the same as that of Elaine, in the Idylls of the 
 King, but the treatment is shadowy, and even alle- 
 gorical. In Oenone and the Lotus Eaters, he 
 handled Homeric subjects, but in a romantic fash- 
 ion, which contrasts markedly with the style of 
 his later pieces, Ulysses and Tithonus. These last 
 have the true classic severity, and are among the 
 noblest specimens of weighty and sonorous blank 
 verse in modern poetry. In general, Tennyson's 
 art is unclassical. It is rich, ornate, composite* 
 not statuesque, so much as picturesque. He is *. 
 great painter, and the critics complain that in 
 passages calling for movement and action a battle, 
 a tournament, or the like his figures stand still as 
 in a tableau; and they contrast such passages un- 
 favorably with scenes of the same kind in Scott, 
 and with Browning's spirited ballad, How we 
 brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix. In the 
 Palace of Art, these elaborate pictorial effects were 
 combined with allegory; in the Lotus Eaters, with 
 that expressive treatment of landscape, noted in 
 Mariana j the lotus land, " in which it seemed 
 always afternoon," reflecting and promoting the 
 enchanted indolence of the heroes. Two of the 
 pieces in this 1833 volume, the May Queen and the 
 Miller's Daughter, were Tennyson's first poems of 
 the affections, and as ballads of simple, rustic life, 
 they anticipated his more perfect idyls in blank 
 verse, such as Dora, the Brook, Edwin Morris, and
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 287 
 
 the Gardener 's Daughter. The songs in the Miller's 
 Daughter had a more spontaneous, lyrical move- 
 ment than any thing that he had yet pub- 
 lished, and foretokened the lovely songs which 
 interlude the divisions of the Princess, the fa- 
 mous Bugle Song, the no-less famous Cradle Song, 
 and the rest. In 1833 Tennyson's friend, Arthur 
 Hallam, died, and the effect of this great sorrow 
 upon the poet was to deepen and strengthen the 
 character of his genius. It turned his mind in 
 upon itself, and set it brooding over questions 
 which his poetry had so far left untouched; the 
 meaning of life and death, the uses of adversity, 
 the future of the race, the immortality of the soul, 
 and the dealings of God with mankind. 
 
 " Thou madest Death: and, lo, thy foot 
 Is on the skull which thou hast made." 
 
 His elegy on Hallam, In Memoriam, was not 
 published till 1850. He kept it by him all those 
 years, adding section after section, gathering up 
 into it whatever reflections crystallized about its 
 central theme. It is his most intellectual and most 
 individual work, a great song of sorrow and con- 
 solation. In 1842 he published a third collection 
 of poems, among which were Locksley Hall, dis- 
 playing a new strength of passion ; Ulysses, sug- 
 gested by a passage in Dante : pieces of a specu- 
 lative cast, like the Two Voices and the Vision of 
 Sin; the song Break, Break, Break, which preluded 
 In Memoriam ; and, lastly, some additional grop-
 
 288 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 ings toward the subject of the Arthurian romance, 
 such as Sir Galahad, Sir Launcelot and Queen 
 Guinevere and Morte d 'Arthur. The last was in 
 blank verse, and, as afterward incorporated in the 
 Passing of Arthur, forms one of the best passages 
 in the Idylls of the King. The Princess, a Medley, 
 published in 1849, represents the eclectic character 
 of Tennyson's art ; a medieval tale with an ad- 
 mixture of modern sentiment, and with the very 
 modern problem of woman's sphere for its theme. 
 The first four Idylls of the King, 1859, with those 
 since added, constitute, when taken together, an 
 epic poem on the old story of King Arthur. Ten- 
 nyson went to Malory's Morte d' Arthur for his 
 material, but the outline of the first idyl, Enid, was 
 taken from Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of 
 the Welsh Mabinogion. In the idyl of Guinevere 
 Tennyson's genius reached its high-water mark. 
 The interview between Arthur and his fallen queen 
 is marked by a moral sublimity and a tragic intens- 
 ity which move the soul as nobly as any scene in 
 modern literature. Here, at least, the art is pure 
 and not " decorated ; " the effect is produced by 
 the simplest means, and all is just, natural, and 
 grand. Maud a love novel in verse published 
 in 1855, and considerably enlarged in 1856, had 
 great sweetness and beauty, particularly in its 
 Ivrical portions, but it was uneven in execution, 
 imperfect in design, and marred by lapses into 
 mawkishness and excesses in language. Since 
 1860 Tennyson has added little of permanent
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 289 
 
 value to his work. His dramatic experiments, like 
 Queen Mary, are not, on the whole, successful, 
 though it would be unjust to deny dramatic power 
 to the poet who has written, upon one hand, Guin- 
 evere and the Passing of Arthur, and upon the 
 other the homely, dialectic monologue of the 
 Northern Farmer. 
 
 When we tire of Tennyson's smooth perfection, 
 of an art that is over exquisite, and a beauty 
 that is well-nigh too beautiful, and crave a rougher 
 touch, and a meaning that will not yield itself too 
 readily, we turn to the thorny pages of his great 
 
 contemporary, Robert Browning (1812 ). Dr. 
 
 Holmes says that Tennyson is white meat and 
 Browning is dark meat. A masculine taste, it is 
 inferred, is shown in a preference for the gamier 
 flavor. Browning makes us think ; his poems are 
 puzzles, and furnish business for " Browning So- 
 cieties." There are no Tennyson societies, be- 
 cause Tennyson is his own interpreter. Intellect 
 in a poet may display itself quite as properly in the 
 construction of his poem as in its content ; we 
 value a building for its architecture, and not en- 
 tirely for the amount of timber in it. Browning's 
 thought never wears so thin as Tennyson's some- 
 times does in his latest verse, where the trick of 
 his style goes on of itself with nothing behind it. 
 Tennyson, at his worst, is weak. Browning, when 
 not at his best, is hoarse. Hoarseness, in itself, 
 is no sign of strength. In Browning, however, 
 the failure is in art, not in thought. 
 19
 
 290 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 He chooses his subjects from abnormal charac- 
 ter types, such as are presented, for example, in 
 Caliban upon Setebos, the Grammarian's Funeral, 
 My Last Duchess, and Mr. Sludge, the Medium. 
 These are all psychological studies, in which the 
 poet gets into the inner consciousness of a mon- 
 ster, a pedant, a criminal, and a quack, and gives 
 their point of view. They are dramatic solilo- 
 quies; but the poet's self-identification with each 
 of his creations, in turn, remains incomplete. His 
 curious, analytic observation, his way of looking at 
 the soul from outside, gives a doubleness to the 
 monologues in his Dramatic Lyrics, 1845, Men and 
 Women, 1855, Dramatis Persona, 1864, and other 
 collections of the kind. The words are the words 
 of Caliban or Mr. Sludge ; but the voice is the 
 voice of Robert Browning. His first complete 
 poem, Paracelsus, 1835, aimed to give the true in- 
 wardness of the career of the famous i6th century 
 doctor, whose name became a synonym with char- 
 latan. His second, Sordello, 1840, traced the strug- 
 gles of an Italian poet who lived before Dante, and 
 could not reconcile his life with his art. Paracel- 
 sus was hard, but Sordello was incomprehensible. 
 Mr. Browning has denied that he is ever perverse- 
 ly crabbed or obscure. Every great artist must be 
 allowed to say things in his own way, and obscur- 
 ity has its artistic uses, as the Gothic builders 
 knew. But there are two kinds of obscurity in 
 literature. One is inseparable from the subtlety 
 and difficulty of the thought or the compression
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 291 
 
 and pregnant indirectness of the phrase. Instances 
 of this occur in the clear deeps of Dante, Shaks- 
 pere, and Goethe. The other comes from a vice 
 of style, a willfully enigmatic and unnatural way of 
 expressing thought. Both kinds of obscurity exist 
 in Browning. He is a deep and subtle thinker; 
 but he is also a very eccentric writer, abrupt, harsh, 
 disjointed. It has been well said that the reader 
 of Browning learns a new dialect. But one need 
 not grudge the labor that is rewarded with an in- 
 tellectual pleasure so peculiar and so stimulating. 
 The odd, grotesque impression made by his poetry 
 arises, in part, from his desire to use the artistic 
 values of ugliness, as well as of obscurity; to avoid 
 the shallow prettiness that comes from blinking the 
 disagreeable truth : not to leave the saltness out of 
 the sea. Whenever he emerges into clearness, as 
 he does in hundreds of places, he is a poet of great 
 qualities. There are a fire and a swing in his Cav- 
 alier Tunes, and in pieces like the Glwe and the 
 Lost Leader ; and humor in such ballads as the 
 Pied Piper of Hamelin and the Soliloquy of the 
 Spanish Cloister, which appeal to the most con- 
 servative reader. He seldom deals directly in 
 the pathetic, but now and then, as in Evelyn 
 Hope, the Last Ride. Together, or the Incident of 
 the French Camp, a tenderness comes over the 
 strong verse 
 
 " as sheathes 
 A film the mother eagle's eye, 
 
 When her bruised eaglet breathes."
 
 292 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 Perhaps the most astonishing example of Brown- 
 ing's mental vigor is the huge composition, entitled 
 The Ring and the Book, 1868, a narrative poem in 
 twenty-one thousand lines, in which the same story 
 is repeated eleven times in eleven different ways. 
 It is the story of a criminal trial which occurred at 
 Rome about 1700, the trial of one Count Guido 
 for the murder of his young wife. First the poet 
 tells the tale himself; then he tells what one-half 
 of the world says and what the other ; then he 
 gives the deposition of the dying girl, the testimo- 
 ny of witnesses, the speech made by the count in 
 his own defense, the arguments of counsel, etc., 
 and, finally, the judgment of the pope. So won- 
 derful are Browning's resources in casuistry, and 
 so cunningly does he ravel the intricate motives 
 at play in this tragedy and lay bare the secrets of 
 the heart, that the interest increases at each repe- 
 tition of the tale. He studied the Middle Age 
 carefully, not for its picturesque externals, its 
 feudalisms, chivalries, and the like ; but because 
 he found it a rich quarry of spiritual monstros- 
 ities, strange outcroppings of fanaticism, super- 
 stition, and moral and mental distortion of all 
 shapes. It furnished him especially with a great 
 variety of ecclesiastical types, such as are painted 
 in Fra Lippo Lippi, Bishop B long rani's Apology, 
 and The Bishop Orders his Tomb in St. Praxed's 
 Church. 
 
 Browning's dramatic instinct has always attracted 
 him to the stage. His tragedy, Straff or d (1837),
 
 DEATH OF SCOTT TO PRESENT TIME. 293 
 
 was written for Macready, and put on at Covent 
 Garden Theater, but without pronounced success. 
 He has written many fine dramatic poems, like 
 Pippa Passes, Colombes Birthday, and In a Bal- 
 cony; and at least two good acting plays, I.uria 
 and A Blot in the Scutcheon. The last named has 
 recently been given to the American public, with 
 Lawrence Barrett's careful and intelligent pres- 
 entation of the leading role. The motive of the 
 tragedy is somewhat strained and fantastic, but it 
 is, notwithstanding, very effective on the stage. 
 It gives one an unwonted thrill to listen to a 
 play, by a living English writer, which is really 
 literature. One gets a faint idea of what it 
 must have been to assist at the first night of 
 Hamlet. 
 
 1. Dickens. Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickle- 
 by, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Tale of Two 
 Cities. 
 
 2. Thackeray. Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Henry 
 Esmond, The Newcomes, The Four Georges. 
 
 3. George Eliot. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mill 
 on the Floss, Silas Marner, Romola, Adam Bede, 
 Middlemarch. 
 
 4. Macaulay. Essays, Lays of Ancient Rome. 
 
 5. Carlyle. Sartor Resartus, French Revolu- 
 tion, Essays on History, Signs of the Times, Char- 
 acteristics, Burns, Scott, Voltaire, and Goethe. 
 
 6. The Works of Alfred Tennyson (6 vols.). 
 London: Strahan & Co., 1872.
 
 294 ENGLISH LITERATURE. 
 
 7. Selections from the Poetical Works of Robert 
 Browning. (2 vols.) London : Smith, Elder, & 
 Co., 1880. 
 
 8. E. C. Stedman's Victorian Poets. 
 
 9. Henry Morley's English Literature in the 
 Reign of Victoria. (Tauchnitz Series.) 
 
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