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ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
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 1 
 
• ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 ^H. 
 
 STOPFORD A. BROOKE, M.A. 
 
 WITH CHAPTERS ON 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE (1832-1892) AND 
 ON AMERICAN LITERATURE 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE R. CARPENTER 
 
 Neb) gorfe 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
 1906 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 English Literature before the Norman Conquest, 
 
 670-1066 I 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 From the Conquest to Chaucer's Death, 1066-1400 . 32 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 From Chaucer's Death to Elizabeth, 1400-1558 . . 72 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 The Reign of Elizabeth, i 558-1 603 .... 98 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 From Elizabeth's Death to the Restoration, 1603- 
 
 1660 150 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 From the Restoration to the Death of Pope and 
 
 Swift, i 660-1 745 170 
 
 vii 
 
VIU CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PAGB 
 
 Prose Literature from the Death of Pope and Swift 
 TO THE French Revolution, and from the French 
 Revolution to the Death of Scott, i 745-1 832 . 196 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 Poetry from i 730-1 832 213 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 Prose Literature from the Death of Scott to the 
 
 Death of George Eliot, i 832-1 881 .... 250 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 Poetry from the Death of Scott to the Deaths of 
 
 Tennyson and Browning, i 832-1 892 , . . . 276 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 Prose Literature in the United States . . .281 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 Poetry in the United States 309 
 
 Chronological Table ..••«•• 323 
 
 Index 343 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 WRITERS BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST, 67O-IO66 
 
 I. The History of English Literature is the story 
 of what great EngHsh men and women thought and felt, 
 and then wrote down in good prose and beautiful poetry 
 in the English language. The story is a long one. It 
 begins in England about the year 670; it had its un- 
 written beginnings still earlier on the Continent, in the 
 old Angle- Land ; it was still going on in the year which 
 closes this book, 1832 ; nor has our literature lost any of 
 its creative force in the years which have followed 1832. 
 Into this little book then is to be briefly put the story of 
 nearly 1200 years of the thoughts, feehngs, and imagina- 
 tion of a great people. Every English man and woman 
 has good reason to be proud of the work done by their 
 forefathers in prose and poetry. Every one who can 
 write a good book or a good song may say to himself, 
 " I belong to a noble company, which has been teaching 
 
2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and delighting the world for more than looo years." 
 And that is a fact in which those who write and those 
 who read English literature ought to feel a noble pride. 
 
 2. The English and the Welsh. — This literature is - 
 written in English, the tongue of our fathers. They 
 lived, while this island of ours was still called Britain, in 
 North and South Denmark, in Hanover and Friesland — 
 Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. Their common tongue and 
 name were English; but, either because they were 
 pressed from the inland, perhaps by Attila, or for pure 
 love of adventure, they took to the sea, and, landing at 
 various parts of Britain at various times, drove back, 
 after 150 years of hard fighting, the Britons, whom they 
 called Welsh, to the land now called Wales, to Strath- 
 clyde, and to Cornwall. It is well for those who study 
 English Hterature to remember that in these places 
 the Britons remained as a distinct race with a distinct 
 hterature of their own, because the stories and the poetry 
 of the Britons crept afterwards into English literature 
 and had a great influence upon it. Moreover, in the 
 later days of the Conquest, a great number of the Welsh 
 were amalgamated with the English. The whole tale of 
 King Arthur, of which EngUsh poetry and even English 
 prose is so full, was a British tale. Some then of the 
 imaginative work of the conquered afterwards took cap- 
 tive their fierce conquerors. 
 
 3. The English Tongue. — The earliest form of our 
 English tongue is very different from modern English in 
 form, pronunciation, and appearance ; but still the Ian- 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 3 
 
 guage written in the year 700 is the same as that in 
 which the prose of the Bible is written, just as much as 
 the tree planted a hundred years ago is the same tree 
 to-day. It is this sameness of language, as well as the 
 sameness of national spirit, which makes our literature 
 one literature for 1200 years. 
 
 4. Of English Literature written in this tongue we 
 have no extant prose until the time of King Alfred. 
 Men like Baeda and Ealdhelm wrote their prose in 
 Latin. But we have, in a few manuscripts, a great deal 
 of poetry written in EngHsh, chiefly before the days 
 of Alfred. There is (i) the MS. under the name of 
 Ccedmon's Paraphrase, a collection of religious poems 
 by various writers, now in the Bodleian. There is (2) 
 the MS. oi Beowulf and of the last three books of 
 
 -'Judith, There is (3) the Exeter Book, a miscellaneous 
 collection of poems, left by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, to 
 his cathedral church in the year 107 1. There is (4) the 
 Vercelli Book, discovered at Vercelli in the year 1822, in 
 which, along with homilies, there is a collection of six 
 poems. A few leaflets complete the Hst of the MSS. 
 containing poems earlier than Alfred. All together they 
 constitute a vernacular poetry which consists of more 
 than twenty thousand lines. 
 
 5. The metre of the poems is essentially the same, un- 
 like any modern metre, without rhyme, and without any 
 fixed number of syllables. Its essential elements were 
 accent and aUiteration. Every verse is divided into two 
 half-verses by a pause, and has four accented syllables, 
 
4 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 while the number of unaccented syllables is indifferent. 
 These half-verses are linked together by alliteration. The 
 two accented syllables of the first half, and one of the 
 accented syllables in the second half, begin with the same 
 consonant, or with vowels which were generally different 
 one from another. This is the formal rule. But to give 
 a greater freedom there is often only one alliterative 
 letter in the first half-verse. Here is an example of the 
 usual form ; — 
 
 And flfeaw-^rtas : on dsegt weor'Se'S 
 Winde geonds^wen. 
 
 And the ^ew-^ownfall : at the ^ay-break is 
 Winnowed by the wind. 
 
 This metre was continually varied, and was capable, 
 chiefly by the addition of unaccented syllables, of many 
 harmonious changes. The length of the Hues depended 
 on the nature of the things described, or on the rise and 
 fall of the singer's emotion ; the emphatic words in which 
 the chief thought lay were accented and alliterated, and 
 probably received an additional force by the beat of the 
 hand upon the harp. All the poetry was sung, and the 
 poet could alter, as he sang, the movement of the verse. 
 But, however the metre was varied, it was not varied 
 arbitrarily. It followed clear rules, and all its develop- 
 ments were built on the simple original type of four 
 accents and three alHterated syllables. This was the 
 vehicle, interspersed with some rare instances in which 
 rhymes were employed, in which all English poetry was 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 5 
 
 sung and written till the French system of rhymes, metres, 
 and accents was transferred to the English tongue ; and 
 it continued, alongside of the French system, to be used, 
 sometimes much and sometimes little, until the sixteenth 
 century. Nor, though its use was finished then, was its 
 influence lost. Its habits, especially alliteration, have 
 entered into all English poetry. 
 
 6. The Characters of this Poetry. — (i) It is marked 
 by parallelism. It frequently repeats the same statement 
 or thought in different ways. But this is not so common 
 as it is, for example, in Hebrew poetry. (2) It uses 
 the ordinary metaphorical phrases of Teutonic poetry, 
 such as the whale' s-road for the sea, but uses them with 
 greater moderation or with less inventiveness than the 
 Icelandic poets. Elaborate similes are not found in the 
 earlier poetry, but later poets, Cynewulf especially, invent 
 them, not frequently, but well. (3) A great variety of 
 compound words, chiefly adjectives, also characterise it, 
 by the use of which the poet strove to express with 
 brevity a number of qualities belonging to his subject. 
 When Tennyson used such adjectives as hollow -vaulted, 
 dainty-woeful, he was returning to the custom of his 
 ancient predecessors. (4) At times the poetry is con- 
 cise and direct, but this is chiefly found in those parts 
 of the poems which have some relation to heathen 
 times. For the most part, save when the subject is 
 war or sea-voyaging, the poetry is diffuse, and wearies 
 by a constant repetition. But we owe a great deal of 
 this repetition to the introduction of extempore matter 
 
6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 by the bards as they sung. There is not much of it in 
 poems which have been carefully edited, as many were 
 in the time of Alfred. Nor do I think that the original 
 lays which the bards expanded were more diffuse than 
 the early Icelandic lays. (5) It is the earliest extant 
 body of poetry in any modern language. It began to 
 be written in England towards the close of the seventh 
 century, and all its best work was done before the close 
 of the eighth. (6) Its width of range is very remarkable. 
 The epic is represented in it by Beowulf. Judith is an 
 heroic saga. The earlier Genesis is a paraphrase with 
 original episodes. The later Genesis is an epic fragment 
 with dramatic conversations, and in other poems there 
 are traces of what might have formed a basis for a 
 dramatic literature. The Exodus is an heroic narrative, 
 freely invented on the Biblical story. The Christ of 
 Cynewulf is a threefold poem, conceived like a trilogy, 
 in the honour of Christ, the Hero. Narrative poetry is 
 represented by Cynewulf s poems of the life of Saint 
 Gu"Slac, of the martyrdom of Saint Juliana, by the Elene 
 and the Andreas, There is one pure lyric, and there 
 are sacred hymns of joy among Cynewulfs poems which 
 have all the quality of lyrics. There are five elegiac 
 poems. There are a number of Riddles, some of 
 which are poems of pure natural description. There 
 are didactic, gnomic, and allegorical poems. Almost 
 every form of poetry is represented. (7) It is the 
 only early poetry which has poems wholly dedicated to 
 descriptions of nature. Of such descriptions there is no 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST / 
 
 trace in the Icelandic poetry. For anything resembling 
 them we must look forward to the nineteenth century. 
 (8) Many of the poems are extraordinarily modern in 
 feeHng. The hymns of Cynewulf might have been writ- 
 ten by Crashaw. The sentiment of the Wanderer and the 
 Ruin might belong to this century. The Seafarer has 
 the same note of feeling for the sea which prevails in 
 the sea-poetry of Swinburne and Tennyson. (9) There 
 is no trace of any Norse influence or religion on early 
 English poetry. Old Saxon poetry influenced the later 
 English verse, but may itself have been derived from 
 England. The poetry of natural description owes much 
 to the Celtic influence which was largely present in 
 Northumbria, but otherwise there is no Celtic note in 
 early English poetry. There is a classic note. Virgil 
 and other Latin poets were read by those whom Baeda 
 taught, and the ancient models had their wonted power. 
 The unexpected strain of culture, so remarkable in this 
 poetry, must, I think, be due to this influence. (10) 
 The greater part of this poetry was written in Nor- 
 thumbria, and before the coming of the Danes. This has 
 been questioned, but it seems not wisely. The only 
 examples of any importance outside of this statement 
 are the war-lyrics in the Chronicle and that portion 
 of the Caedmonic poems which it is now believed was 
 translated from an Old Saxon original, probably in the 
 time of ^.Ifred. 
 
 7. The First English Poems. — Our forefathers, while 
 as yet they were heathen and lived on the Continent, 
 
S ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 made poems, and of this poetry we may possess a few 
 remains. The earliest is The Song of the Traveller — 
 Widsith, the far-goer — but it has been filled up by 
 later insertions. It is not much more than a catalogue 
 of the folk and the places whither the minstrel said he 
 went with the Goths, but when he expands concerning 
 himself, he shows so pleasant a pride in his art that 
 he wins our sympathy. Dear's Complaint is another 
 of these poems. Its form is that of a true lyric. The 
 writer is a bard at the court of the Heodenings, from 
 whom his rival takes his place and goods. He writes 
 this complaint to comfort his heart. Weland, Beado- 
 hild, Theodric knew care and sorrow. " That they 
 overwent, this also may I." This is the refrain of all 
 the verses of our first, and, I may say, our only early 
 English lyric. The Fight at Finsburg is an epic frag- 
 ment. It tells, and with all the fire of war, of the 
 attack on Fin's palace in Friesland, and another part 
 of the same story is to be found in Beowulf, It is 
 plain there was a full Fin-saga, portions of which were 
 sung at feasts. This completes, with those parts of 
 Beowulf which we may refer to heathen traditionary 
 songs, the list of the English poetry which we may 
 possibly say belonged to the older England over seas. 
 There are two fragments of a romance of Waldhere 
 of the date or place of which we know nothing. In 
 the so-called Rune Song — which, as we have it, is not 
 old — there is one verse at least which alludes to the 
 times of the heroic sagas. But the poems where we 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 9 
 
 find most traces of early English paganism are the 
 so-called Cha?'ms, 
 
 8. Beowulf is our old English epic, and it recounts 
 the great deeds and death of Beowulf. It may have 
 arisen before the English conquest of Britain in the 
 shape of short songs about the hero, and we can trace, 
 perhaps, three different centres for the story. The 
 scenery is laid among the Danes in Seeland and among 
 the Geats in South Sweden, on the coast of the North 
 Sea and the Kattegat. There is not a word about our 
 England in the poem. Coming to England in the form 
 of short poems, it was wrought together into a complete 
 tale of two parts, the first of which we may again divide 
 into two ; and was afterwards edited, with a few Chris- 
 tian applications, and probably by a Northumbrian poet, 
 in the eighth century. In this form we possess it. 
 
 T he stor y is of Hrothgar^one of the kingly race of 
 Jutland, who builds his hall, Heorot, near the sea, on 
 the edge of the moorland. A monster called Grendel, 
 half-human, half-fiend, dwells in a sea-cave, near the 
 moor over which he wanders by night, and hating the 
 festive noise, carries off thirty of the thegns of Hrothgar 
 and devours them. He then haunts the hall at night, 
 and after twelve years of this distress, Beowulf, thegn of 
 Hygelac, sails from Sweden to bring help to Hrothgar, 
 and at night, when Grendel breaks into the hall, wrestles 
 with him, tears away his arm, and the fiend flies away 
 to die. The second division of the first part of the 
 poem begins with the vengeance taken by Grendel's 
 
lO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 mother. She slays ^schere, a trusty thegn of Hroth- 
 gar. Then Beowulf descends into her sea-cave and 
 slays her also ; feasts in triumph with Hrothgar, and 
 returns to his own land. The second part of the poem 
 opens fifty years later. Beowulf is now king ; his land 
 is happy under his rule. But his fate is at hand. A 
 fire-drake, who guards a treasure, is robbed and comes 
 from his den to harry and burn the country. The gray- 
 haired king goes forth to fight his last fight, slays the 
 dragon, but dies of its fiery breath, and the poem closes 
 with the tale of his burial, burned on a lofty pyre on 
 the top of Hronesnaes. 
 
 Its social interest Hes in what it tells us of the man- 
 ners and customs of our forefathers before they came 
 to England. Their mode of life in peace and war is 
 described ; their ships, their towns, the scenery in which 
 they lived, their feasts, amusements — we have the ac- 
 count of a whole day from morning to night — the close 
 union between the chieftain and his war-brothers ; their 
 women and the reverence given them ; the way in which 
 they faced death, in which they sang, in which they gave 
 gifts and rewards. The story is told with Homeric direct- 
 ness and simplicity, but not with Homeric rapidity. A 
 deep fatalism broods over it. " Wyrd (the fate-goddess) 
 goes ever as it must," Beowulf says, when he thinks he 
 may be torn to pieces by Grendel. " It shall be," he 
 cries when he goes to fight the dragon, " for us in the 
 fight as Wyrd shall foresee." But a daring spirit fills 
 the fatalism. " Let him who can," he says, " gain honour 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST II 
 
 ere he die." " Let us have fame or death." Out of the 
 fatalism naturally grew the dignity and much of the 
 pathos of the poem. It is most poetical in the vivid 
 character-drawing of men and women, and especially 
 in the character of the hero, both in his youth and in 
 his age ; in the fateful pathos of the old man's last 
 fight for his country against certain death, in the noble 
 scene of the burial, in the versing of the grave and 
 courteous interchange of human feeling between the 
 personages. Moreover, the descriptions of the sea and 
 the voyage, and of the savage places of the cliffs and 
 the moor, are instinct with the spirit which is still alive 
 among our poetry, and which makes dreadful and lonely 
 wildernesses seem dwelt in — as if the places needed a 
 king — by monstrous beings. In the creation of Gren- 
 del and his mother, the savage stalkers of the moor, 
 that half-natural, half-supernatural world began, which, 
 when men grew gentler and the country more cultivated, 
 became so beautiful as fairyland. Here is the descrip- 
 tion of the dwelling-place of Grendel : — 
 
 There the land is hid in gloom, 
 Where they ward; wolf-haunted slopes, windy headlands 
 
 o'er the sea. 
 Fearful is the marish-path, where the mountain torrent 
 'Neath the Nesses' mist, nither makes its way. 
 Under earth the flood is, not afar from here it lies; 
 But the measure of a mile, where the mere is set. 
 Over it, outreaching, hang the ice-nipt trees : 
 Held by roots the holt is fast, and o'er-helms the water. 
 
12 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 There an evil wonder, every night, a man may see — 
 In the flood a fire ! 
 
 Not unhaunted is the place ! 
 Thence the welter of the waves is upwhirled on higl\ 
 Wan towards the clouds, when the wind is stirring 
 Wicked weather up; till the lift is waxing dark, 
 And the welkin weeping ! 
 
 The whole poem, Pagan as it is, is EngUsh to its very root. 
 It is sacred to us, our Genesis, the book of our origins. 
 
 9. Christianity and English Poetry When we came 
 
 to Britain we were great warriors and great sea pirates 
 — "sea wolves," as a Roman poet calls us; and all our 
 poetry down to the present day is full of war, and still 
 more of the sea. No nation has ever written so much 
 sea-poetry. But we were more than mere warriors. We 
 were a home-loving people when we got settled either in 
 Sleswick or in England, and all our Hterature from the 
 first writings to the last is full of domestic love, the dear- 
 ness of home, and the ties of kinsfolk. We were a re- 
 ligious people, even as heathen, still more so when we 
 became Christian, and our poetry is as much of religion 
 as of war. But with Christianity a new spirit entered 
 into English poetry. The war spirit did not decay, but 
 into the song steals a softer element. The fatalism is 
 modified by the faith that the fate is the will of a good 
 God. The sorrow is not less, but it is relieved by an on- 
 look of Joy. The triumph over enemies is not less, but 
 even more exulting, for it is the triumph of God over His 
 foes that is sung by Caedmon and Cynewulf. Nor is the 
 
EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1 3 
 
 imaginative delight in legends and in the supernatural 
 less. But it is now found in the legends of the saints, in 
 the miracles and visions of angels that Baeda tells of the 
 Christian heroes, in fantastic allegories of spiritual things, 
 like the poems of the Phxnix and the Whale, The love 
 of nature lasted, but it dwells now rather on gentle than 
 on savage scenery. The human sorrow for the hardness 
 of life is more tender, and when the poems speak of the 
 love of home, it is with, an added grace. One little bit 
 still lives for us out of the older world. 
 
 Dear the welcomed one 
 To his Frisian wife, when his Floater's drawn on shore, 
 When his keel comes back, and her man returns to home ; 
 Hers, her own food-giver. And she prays him in, 
 Washes then his weedy coat, and new weeds puts on him ! 
 O lythe it is on land to him whom his love constrains. 
 
 If that was the soft note of home in a Pagan time, it 
 was softer still when Christianity had mellowed manners. 
 Yet, with all this, the ancient faith still influences the 
 Christian song. Christ is not only the Saviour, but the 
 Hero who goes forth against the dragon. His overthrow 
 of the fiends is described in much the same terms as that 
 of Beowulf's wrestling with Grendel. " Bitterly grim, 
 gripped them in his wrath." The death of Christ, at 
 which the universe trembles and weeps, was mixed up 
 afterwards with the story of the death of Balder. The 
 old poetry penetrated the new, but the spirit of the new 
 transformed that of the old. 
 
14 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 lo. Caedmon. — The poem oi Beowulf \i2& the grave 
 Teutonic power, but it is not, as a whole, native to our 
 soil. It is not the first true EnglMPpoem. That is the 
 work of CiEDMON, and it was done in Northumbria. The 
 story of it, as told by Baeda, proves that the making of 
 songs was common at the time. Caedmon was a servant 
 to the monastery of Hild, an abbess of royal blood, at 
 Whitby in Yorkshire. He was somewhat aged when the 
 gift of song came to him, and he knew nothing of the 
 art of verse, so that at the feasts when for the sake of 
 mirth all sang in turn he left the table. One evening, 
 having done so and gone to the stables, for he had the care 
 of the cattle that night, he fell asleep, and One came to 
 him in vision and said, " Caedmon, sing me some song." 
 And he answered, " I cannot sing ; for this cause I left 
 the feast and came hither." Then said the other, "How- 
 ever, you shall sing." "What shall I sing ?" he repHed. 
 "Sing the beginning of created things," answered the 
 other. Whereupon he began to sing verses to the praise 
 of God, and, awaking, remembered what he had sung, 
 and added more in verse worthy of God. In the morn- 
 ing he came to the town-reeve, and told him of the gift 
 he had received, and, being brought to Hild, was ordered 
 to tell his dream before learned men, that they might 
 give judgment whence his verses came. And when they 
 had heard, they all said that heavenly grace had been 
 conferred on him by our Lord. This story ought to be 
 loved by us, for it tells of the beginning in England of 
 the wonderful life of English Poetry. Nor should we 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1$ 
 
 fail to reverence the place where it began. Above the 
 small and land-locked harbour of Whitby rises and juts 
 out towards the sea the dark cliff where Hild's monastery 
 stood, looking out over the German Ocean. It is a wild, 
 wind-swept upland, above the furious sea ; and standing 
 there we feel that it is a fitting birthplace for the poetry 
 of the sea-ruling nation. Nor is the verse of the first 
 poet without the stormy note of the sea-scenery among 
 which it was written, nor without the love of the stars and 
 the high moorlands that Caedmon saw from Whitby Head. 
 Caedmon's poems were done before 680, in which year 
 he died. Baeda tells us that he sang the story of Genesis 
 and Exodus, many other tales in the Sacred Scriptures, 
 and the story of Christ and the Apostles and of Heaven 
 and Hell to come. "Others after him tried to make 
 religious poems, but none could compare with him for he 
 learnt the art of song not from men, but, divinely aided, 
 received that gift." It is plain then that he was the 
 founder of a school. It is equally plain, it seems, from 
 this passage, that at Baeda's death the later school of 
 religious poets, of whom Cynewulf was the chief, had not 
 begun to write. Caedmon's poems, then, were widely 
 known. Baeda quotes their first verses. They were 
 copied from monastery to monastery. Alfred got them 
 from the north, and no doubt gave them to the great 
 schools at Winchester. They were however lost. Only 
 their fame survived. 
 
 II. The Junian Caedmon. — Archbishop Ussher, hunt- 
 ing for books for Trinity College, Dubhn, found an Old 
 
l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 English MS. which Francis Dujon (Junius) printed in 
 Amsterdam about 1650, and pubUshed as the work of 
 Csedmon, because its contents agreed with Bseda's de- 
 scription of Csedmon's poems and of his first hymn. 
 Junius was a friend of Milton, and Milton was one of the 
 first to hear what the earliest Enghsh poet was supposed 
 to have written on the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of 
 Man. Since then critics have wrought their will upon 
 this MS. Some say that Caedmon did not write a line of 
 it ; others allow him some share in it. It pleases us to 
 think, and the judgment is possible, that the more 
 archaic portion of the first poem in the MS. — the Genesis 
 — which describes the Fall of the Angels and the Crea- 
 tion, the Flood, and perhaps the battle of Abraham with 
 the kings of the East is by Csedmon himself. In the 
 midst of the Genesis there is however a second descrip- 
 tion of the Fall of the Angels and an elaborate account of 
 the council in Hell, and of the temptation in the Garden. 
 This is held to be an after-insertion, made perhaps in the 
 time of iElfred. It differs in feeling, in subtlety, and in 
 manner of verse from the rest. A conjecture was made 
 that it was a translation of a part of an Old Saxon poem, 
 and this seems to be borne out by the discovery in 1894 
 of a fragment of Old Saxon poetry in which there are 
 lines similar to those of this separated portion of the 
 Genesis, The next poem in the MS. is the Exodus, It 
 is certainly not by Csedmon. It is not a paraphrase ; it 
 is a triumphal poem of war, boldly invented, on the pas- 
 sage of the Red Sea. The Daniel, the third poem of the 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 1/ 
 
 MS., is SO dull that it is no matter who wrote it or when 
 it was written. The second part of the MS. is in a differ- 
 ent handwriting from the first, and is a series of Psalm- 
 like poems on the Fall of the Angels, the Harrowing of 
 Hell, the Resurrection, Ascension, Pentecost, the Judg- 
 ment Day, and the Temptation. They are a kind of 
 Paradise Regaintd, 
 
 12. The interest of these poems is not found in any 
 paraphrase of the Scriptures, but in those parts of them 
 which are the invention of the poets, in the drawing of 
 the characters, in the passages instinct with the genius of 
 our race, and with the individuality of the writers. The 
 account of the creation in the older Genesis has the 
 grandeur of a nature-myth. The description of the flood 
 is full of the experience of one who had known the sea in 
 storm. The battle of Abraham is a fine clash of war, and 
 might be the description of the repulse by some Nor- 
 thumbrian king of the northern tribes. The ruin of the 
 angels and the peace of Heaven, set in contrast, have the 
 same kind of proud pathos as Milton's work on the same 
 subject. The later Genesis is even more Teutonic than 
 the first. Satan's fierce cry of wrath and freedom against 
 God from his bed of chains in Hell is out of the heart of 
 heathendom. The northern rage of war and the northern 
 tie of war-brotherhood speak in all he says, in all that his 
 thegns reply. The pleasure, of the northern imagination 
 in swiftness and joy is just as marked as its pleasure in 
 dark pride and in revenge. The burst of exulting ven- 
 geance when the thegn of Satan succeeds in the tempta' 
 
1 8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA?, 
 
 tion is magnificent. His master, he cries, will lie softly 
 and be blithe of heart in the dusky fire, now that his 
 revenge is gained. There is true dramatic power in the 
 dialogue between Eve and the fiend, and so much subtlety 
 of thought that it cannot belong to Caedmon's time. It is 
 characteristic of Teutonic manners that the motives of 
 the woman for eating the fruit are all good, and the pas- 
 sionate and tender conscientiousness of the love and 
 repentance of Adam and Eve is equally characteristic of 
 the gentler and more religious side of the Teutonic 
 nature. "Dark and true and tender is the North." 
 
 The Exodus is remarkable for its descriptions of war 
 and a marching host, and especially for the elaborate 
 painting of the breaking up of the sea, which was prob- 
 ably done by one who had himself battled with a whirling 
 gale on the German Ocean. On the whole, we have in 
 the two parts of the Genesis, 2ccA in the Exodus, m the 
 midst of spaces of dulness, original and imaginative 
 pieces of poetry well worthy of the beginnings of English 
 song. 
 
 13. English in the South. — While Caedmon was still 
 alive, Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his sub- 
 deacon Hadrian set up a celebrated school of learning at 
 Canterbury, which flourished for a short time and then 
 decayed. One of Theodore's scholars was Ealdhelm. 
 A young man when Caedmon died in 680, his name is 
 connected with English poetry. As Abbot of Malmes- 
 bury and Bishop of Sherborne he spread the learning of 
 Canterbury over the south of England, and sent his in- 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST IQ 
 
 fluence into Northumbria, where his Riddles were imi- 
 tated by Cynewulf. But our chief interest in him is that 
 he was himself an EngHsh poet. It is said that he had 
 not his equal in the making and singing of English verse. 
 One of his songs was popular in the twelfth century. 
 Alfred had some in his possession, and a pretty story 
 tells that when the traders came into the towns, Eald- 
 helm used, like a gleeman, to stand on the bridge or the 
 public way and sing songs to them in the English tongue, 
 that he might lure them by the sweetness of his speech 
 to hear the word of God. 
 
 \\. English Poetry in the North after Caedmon — 
 "Judith.'* — We have seen that English poetry began 
 with religion in the poems of Caedmon, and the greater 
 part of the written poetry which followed him is also 
 religious. One of the best of these pieces is \ht Judith, 
 Originally composed in twelve books, we only possess 
 the three last which tell of the banquet of Holofernes, 
 his slaughter, and the attack of the Jews on the Assyrian 
 camp. It is a poem made after Bseda's death, full of 
 the flame and joy of war. Nor is the drawing of the 
 person and character of Judith unworthy of a race which 
 has always honoured women. She stands forth clear, 
 a Jewish Velleda. To call the poem, however, as some 
 have done, the finest of the Old English poems, is to 
 say a great deal too much. We may date, about the 
 same time, in the eighth century, a fine fragment on the 
 Harrowing of Hell, some poems on Christian legends, 
 i perhaps the allegorical poems of the Whale and the 
 
20 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 Panther, and some lyrical translations of the Psalms in 
 the Kentish and West Saxon dialects. 
 
 15. There are five Elegies in the Exeter Book, which 
 from their excellence deserve to be isolated from the 
 pest of the minor poems. The first of these has been 
 called the Ruin, It is the mourning of a traveller over 
 a desolated city, and certain phrases in it seem to show- 
 that the city was Bath, utterly overthrown by Ceawlin 
 in 577. If so, the date of the poem may be between 
 676 when Osric founded a monastery among the ruins, 
 and 781 when Offa rebuilt the town. The second, the 
 Wanderer, expands the mourning " motive " of the Ruin 
 over the desolation of the whole world of man. It may 
 have been originally a heathen poem, edited afterwards 
 with a Christian Prologue and Epilogue. Of all the Old 
 Enghsh poems it is the most of an artistic whole, and a 
 noble piece of work it is. In its grave and fateful verse 
 an exile bewails his own lost happiness and the sorrow- 
 ful fates of men. The third, the Seafarer, apparently 
 a dialogue between an old and a young sailor about the 
 dangers and the fascination of the sea, breathes the 
 spirit which filled the heart of our forefathers while they 
 sang and sailed, and is extraordinarily modern in note. 
 The blank-verse manner of Tennyson is in it, and the 
 spirit of it is strangely re-echoed in the Sailor Boy, 
 The same may be said of the two other elegies — the 
 Wife's Complaint and the Husband's Message. They 
 are not of so fine a quality as the Wanderer or the 
 Seafarer, but they both have love-passion, otherwise 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 21 
 
 unrepresented in Old English poetry. To these must be 
 added the dramatic monologue, formerly regarded as 
 the First Riddle, As recently interpreted, it should 
 be known as Wulf and Eadwacer, 
 
 1 6. Cynewulf was the greatest of the northern singers, 
 and wrote, most people think, during the latter half of 
 the eighth^entury. His name is known to us, and he 
 is the only one of these poets of whose personality and 
 life we have some clear image, and whose work is so 
 wide in range and so varying in quality that it may be 
 divided into periods. He has signed his name in its 
 runic letters to four of his poems. The riddUng com- 
 mentary he hnked on to the runes gives some account 
 of his life, and the poems are throughout as personal 
 as Milton's. He was often a wandering singer, but 
 seems to have had, in his youth, a fixed place at the 
 court of some northern noble — a wild and gay young 
 man, a rider, a singer at the feasts, fond of sports and 
 war, indifferent to religion, sensitive to love and beauty, 
 and at home with all classes of men. It must have been 
 during this time that he wrote the greater number of 
 the Riddles, They prove that he had a poet's sympathy 
 with the hfe of man and nature. They are written by 
 one who knew the sea and its dangers, the iron coasts 
 and storms of Northumbria, who knew and had taken 
 part in war, who knew the forest-land, the scattered 
 villages and their daily life ; who loved the wild animals 
 and the birds, and who, strange to say at this early time, 
 wrote about nature with an observant and loving eye 
 
22 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and in a way we do not meet again in English poetry 
 for many centuries. The poem on the Hurricane is 
 an artistic whole, and may not be unjustly compared 
 with Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, There is scarcely 
 a trace of Christianity in these early poems. Trouble 
 then fell on Cynewulf, and with it repentance for his 
 " sinful Hfe," and he tells in the Dream of the Rood 
 of how comfort was brought to him at last. He then 
 turned to write religious poems, and to this part of his 
 life we may allot \ht Julianay and perhaps the first part 
 of the Gudlac, He then wrote, and with a far higher 
 art, the Crist, a long, almost an epical, poem of the 
 Incarnation, the Descent into Hell, the Ascension, and 
 the Last Judgment, a noble and continuous effort, full 
 of triumphant verse. He had now reached full peace 
 of mind, and as much mastery over his art as was pos- 
 .sible at that early time. He may then have composed, 
 from a poem now given to Lactantius, the allegorical 
 poem of the Phoenix^ in which there is a famous passage 
 describing the sinless land ; the second part of the 
 Gudlac, as fine as the first is poor ; and still later on 
 in life, and with a free recurrence to the war-poetry 
 of heathendom, the Ekne and the Andreas, the first, 
 the finding of the True Cross by the Empress Helena, 
 and remarkable for its battle-fervour ; the second equally 
 remarkable for its imaginative treatment of the voyage 
 of St. Andrew for the conversion of the Marmedonians. 
 Then, before he died, and to leave his last message 
 to his folk, he wrote, using perhaps part of an older 
 
r EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 23 
 
 poem, the Dream of the Holy Rood, and showed that 
 even in his old age his imagination and his versing were 
 as vivid as in his youth. 
 
 17. Poetry during and after Alfred's Reign — When 
 Alfred set up learning afresh in the south, it had perished 
 in Northumbria. But no great poetry arose in the south. 
 There was alliterative versing, but it had neither imagina- 
 tion, originaUty, nor music. The English alliterative ver- 
 sion of the Metra of Boethius may be Alfred's own ; if 
 so, he was plainly not a poet. The second part of the 
 Genesis may belong to this time, but it is asserted now 
 to be a translation. I do not believe that the last poems 
 in the Caedmonic MS. are of this time, but of the Nor- 
 thumbrian School. It was a time, however, of collections 
 of the poetry of the past. Nearly all the Old English 
 poetry, as we have it, is in the West-Saxon Dialect. 
 Alfred had a Handbook, into which, tradition says, he 
 copied some English songs. It is extremely likely that 
 the poems in the Exeter Book were brought together in 
 <Elfred's time. In that book itself there are gnomic and 
 didactic poems, as, for example, the Fates of Men and 
 the Gifts of Men, which are collections of short verses 
 belonging to various times, and some of them are very 
 old. At a later period than Alfred's reign, these gnomic 
 verses took the form of dialogues, pardy in prose and 
 partly in verse, and we have two incomplete specimens 
 of this in the Solomon and Saturnus, in which a Judaic 
 legend is curiously mingled with Teutonic forms of 
 thought. To the same period may be allotted the 
 
24 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Menologtmn, a poetical calendar, the best portions of 
 which seem borrowed from the past. The rest of the 
 verse up to the Conquest is chiefly made up of allitera- 
 tive sermons and the war songs. 
 
 1 8. The War-poetry was probably always as plentiful 
 as the religious, but was not likely to be written down 
 by the monks. When, however, Alfred developed the 
 Chronicle into a national history, the writers seized on 
 popular songs, and inserted them in the Chronicle, In 
 that way we have at least one fine war-poem handed 
 down to us — The Song of Brunanburh, 937. It de- 
 scribes the fight of King ^thelstan with Anlaf the Dane 
 and the Scots under Constantine. Another war-poem is 
 the Fight at Maldon, the story of the death of Byrhtnoth, 
 an East Saxon Ealdorman, in battle with a band of Vik- 
 ings. They are the fitting source, in their simplicity and 
 patriotism, of such war-songs as the Battle of the Baltic 
 and the Siege of Lucknow, Of the two the Fight at 
 Maldon is the finer, the most human and varied, but the 
 Song of Brunanburh is lyrical as the latter is not. They 
 are two different types of poetry. Both of them have 
 some Norse feeling, and we may link with them from this 
 point of view the Rhyme Song, which recalls the motive 
 and spirit of the earlier Ruin, but which, having rhymes 
 along with alliteration, resembles the Scandinavian form 
 called Runhenda, and has induced critics to attribute it 
 to the influence of the warrior and scald, Egil Skala- 
 grimsson, who twice visited King ^thelstan. Two frag- 
 mentary odes, among some other short poems, inserted 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 25 
 
 in the Chronicle, one on the deliverance of the five cities 
 from the Danes by King Eadmund, 942 ; and another 
 on the coronation of King Eadgar, are the last records 
 of a war-poetry which naturally decayed when the Eng- 
 lish were trodden down by the Normans. When Taille- 
 fer rode into battle at Hastings, singing songs of Roland 
 and Charlemagne, he sang more than the triumph of the 
 Norman over the Enghsh ; he sang the victory for a time 
 of French Romance over Old English poetry. 
 
 19. Old English Prose. — It is pleasant to think that 
 we may not unfairly make English prose begin with 
 B^DA. He was born about 673, and was like Caedmon, 
 a Northumbrian. After d'^^i^ he spent his life at Jar row, 
 "in the same monastery," he says, "and while attentive 
 to the rule of mine order, and the service of the Church, 
 my constant pleasure lay in learning, or teaching, or 
 writing." He enjoyed that pleasure for many years, for 
 his quiet life was long, and his toil unceasing. Forty- 
 five works prove his industry ; and their fame over the 
 whole of learned Europe proves their value. His learn- 
 ing was as various as it was great. All that the world 
 then knew of theology, science, music, rhetoric, medi- 
 cine, arithmetic, astronomy, and physics was brought 
 together by him ; his Ecclesiastical History is our best 
 authority for Early England ; accuracy and delightful- 
 ness are at one in it. It reveals his charming character ; 
 and indeed, his life was as gentle, and himself as loved, 
 as his work was great. His books were written in Latin, 
 and with these we have nothing to do, but he strove to 
 
26 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP, 
 
 make English prose a literary language, for his last work 
 was a Translation of the Gospel of St. John, as almost 
 his last words were in English verse. In the story of his 
 death told by his disciple Cuthbert is the first record 
 of Enghsh prose writing. When the last day came, the 
 dying man called his scholars to him that he might 
 dictate more of his translation. " There is still a chap- 
 ter wanting," said the scribe, " and it is hard for thee 
 to question thyself longer." ** It is easily done," said 
 Baeda, " take thy pen and write swiftly." Through the 
 day they wrote, and when evening fell, " There is yet one 
 sentence unwritten, dear master," said the youth. " Write 
 it quickly," said the master. *' It is finished now." 
 " Thou sayest true," was the reply, " all is finished now." 
 He sang the " Glory to God " and died. It is to that 
 scene that English prose looks back as its sacred source, 
 as it is in the greatness and variety of Baeda's Latin work 
 that English scholarship strikes its key-note. 
 
 When Baeda died, Northumbria was the centre of 
 European literature. Wilfrid of York had founded libra- 
 ries and monasteries, but the true beginner of all the 
 Northumbrian learning was Benedict Biscop, who col- 
 lected two brother libraries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, 
 and whose scholars were Ceolfrid and Baeda. Six hun- 
 dred scholars gathered round Baeda, and he handed on 
 all his learning to his pupil Ecgberht, who as Archbishop 
 of York established the famous library, and founded the 
 great school, or, as it may be called, the University of 
 York. To this place, for more than sixty years, all 
 
 1 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 27 
 
 Europe sent pupils to win the honey of learning. Al- 
 cuin, Ecgberht's pupil, finally took with him to the court 
 of Charles the Great, in 792, all the knowledge which 
 Baeda had won and the School of York had expanded. 
 Through Alcuin then, whom we may call Charles's Min- 
 ister of Education, England was the source of the new 
 education which slowly spread over the vast sphere of 
 the Prankish Empire. This was done just at the right 
 moment, for Alcuin had scarce left the EngUsh shores 
 for the last time when the Danes descended on Nor- 
 thumbria, and blotted out the whole of its hterature and 
 learning. . 
 
 20. -Alfred. —-Though the long battle with the in- ?^ 
 vaders was lost in the north, it was gained for a time by 
 Alfred the Great in Wessex ; and with Alfred's literary 
 work, learning changed its seat from the north to the 
 south.^ Alfred's writings and translations, being in Eng- 
 lish and not in Latin, make him, since Baeda's work is 
 lost, the true father of English prose. As Whitby is the 
 cradle of Enghsh poetry, so is Winchester of English 
 prose. At Winchester the king took the English tongue 
 and made it the tongue in which history, philosophy, 
 law, and religion spoke to the English people. No work 
 was ever done more eagerly or more practically. He 
 brought scholars from different parts of the world. He 
 set up schools in his monasteries " where every free-born 
 youth, who has the means, shall attend to his book till 
 he can read English writing perfectly." He presided 
 over a school in his own court. He made himself a 
 
28 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 master of a literary English style, and he did this that 
 he might teach his people. He translated the popular 
 manuals of the time into English, but he edited them 
 with large additions of his own, needful as he thought, 
 for English use. He gave his nation moral philosophy 
 in Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy ; a universal his- 
 tory, with geographical chapters of his own, "of the 
 highest hterary and philological value as specimens of his 
 natural prose," in his translation of Orosius ; an ecclesi- 
 astical history of England in Baeda's History, giving to 
 some details a West-Saxon form ; and a religious hand- 
 book, with a preface of his own, in the Pastoral Rule of 
 Pope Gregory. He induced Bishop Werferth to translate 
 into English the Dialogues of Gregory, a book which had 
 a far-reaching influence on mediaeval Hterature and the- 
 ology. We do not quite know whether he worked him- 
 self at the English or Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but at 
 least it was in his reign that this chronicle rose out of 
 meagre lists into a full narrative of events. To him, 
 then, we English look back as the fountain of English 
 prose literature. 
 
 21. The Later Old English Prose. — The impulse he 
 gave soon died away, but it was revived under King Ead- 
 gar the Peaceful, whose seventeen years of government 
 (958-75) were the most prosperous and glorious of the 
 West-Saxon Empire. Under him and his predecessors, 
 ^thelwold, Bishop of Winchester, founded and kept up 
 English schools, and, working together with Archbishop 
 Dunstan and Oswald of Worcester, recreated monastic 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 29 
 
 life, classic learning, and the education of the clergy. 
 Their labours were the origin of the famous Blickling 
 Homilies^ 971. About twenty years after, ^Elfric, called 
 " Grammaticus '* from his Englished Latin Grammar, 
 began to write. He turned into English the Pentateuch, 
 Joshua, and part of Job. The rest of his numerous 
 works are some of the best models we possess of the 
 literary English of the beginning of the eleventh century. 
 The two collections of Homilies we owe to him, and 
 his Lives of the Saints, are written in a classic prose, 
 and his Glossary and Colloquy, afterwards edited by 
 ^Ifric Bata, served for a kind of EngHsh- Latin text- 
 book. His prose in his later life was somewhat spoiled 
 by his over- mastering fancy for alliteration, but he is 
 always a clear and forcible writer of English. But this 
 revival had no sooner begun to take root than the North- 
 men came again in force upon the land and conquered it. 
 We have in Wulfstan's (Archbishop of York, 1002-23) 
 Address to the English, a terrible picture, written in im- 
 passioned prose, of the demoralisation caused by the in- 
 roads of the Danes. During the fresh interweaving of 
 Danes and English together under Danish kings from 
 1013 to 1042, no English literature arose, but Latin prose 
 intruded more and more on English writing. It was 
 towards the reign of Edward the Confessor that Enghsh 
 writing again began to live* But no sooner was it born 
 than the Norman invasion repressed, but did not quench 
 its hfe. 
 
 22. The English Chronicle. — ^One great monument, 
 
30 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 however, of Old English prose lasts beyond the Conquest. 
 It is the English Ch ronicle, and in it our Uterature is 
 continuous from ^Ifred to Stephen . At first it was 
 nothing but a record of the births and deaths of bishops 
 and kings, and was probably a West-Saxon Chronicle. 
 Among these short notices there is, however, one tragic 
 story, of Cynewulf and Cyneheard, under the date 755 
 — but the true date is 784 — so rude in style, and so cir- 
 cumstantial, that it is probably contemporary with the 
 events themselves. If so, it is the oldest piece of hi stori- 
 cal prose in any Teutonic tongu e. More than a hundred 
 years later Alfred took up the Chronicle, caused it to 
 be edited from various sources, added largely to it from 
 Baeda, and raised it to the dignity of a national his- 
 tory. The narrative of Alfred's wars with the Danes, 
 written, it is likely, by himself at the end of his reign, 
 enables us to estimate the great weight Alfred himself 
 had in literature. " Compared with this passage," says 
 Professor Earle, " every other piece of prose, not in these 
 Chronicles merely, but throughout the whole range of ex- 
 tant Saxon literature, must assume a secondary rank." 
 After Alfred's reign, and that of his s*on Eadward, 901-25, 
 the Chronicle becomes scanty, but songs and odes are in- 
 serted in it. In the reign of ^thelred and during the 
 Danish kings its fulness returns, and growing by additions 
 from various quarters, it continues to be our great contem- 
 porary authority in English history till ^54^ when it 
 abruptly closes with the death of Stephen. " It is the first 
 history of any Teutonic people in their own language ; it 
 
I EARLY WRITERS TO THE CONQUEST 3 1 
 
 is the earliest and most venerable monument of English 
 prose." In it Old Enghsh poetry sang its last extant 
 song, in its death Old English prose dies^ It is not till 
 the reign of John that Enghsh poetry, in any form but 
 that of short poems, appears again in the B^ut of Laya- 
 mon. It is not till the reign of Henry III. that original 
 English prose begins again in the Ancren Riwle (the 
 Rule of Anchoresses), in the Wooing of our Lord^ and in 
 the charming homily entitled the Sawles Warde. 
 
32 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER'S DEATH, IO66-I4OO 
 
 23. General Outline. — The invasion of Britain by the 
 English made the island, its speech, and its literature, 
 English. The invasion of England by the Danes left our 
 speech and literature still English. The Danes were of 
 our stock and tongue, and we absorbed them. The in- 
 vasion of England by the Normans seemed likely to crush 
 the English people, to root out their Uterature, and even 
 to threaten their speech. But that which happened to 
 the Danes happened to the Normans also, and for the 
 same reason. They were originally of Uke blood to the 
 English, and of like speech ; and though during their 
 settlement in Normandy they had become French in 
 manner and language, and their literature French, yet 
 the old blood prevailed in the end. The Norman felt^ 
 his kindred with the English tongue and spirit, became 
 an Englishman, and left the French tongue that he might 
 speak and write in English. We absorbed the Normans, 
 and we took into our Hterature and speech the French ^ 
 elements they had brought with them. It was a process 
 slower in literature than it was in the political history, 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 33 
 
 but it began from the political struggle. Up to the time 
 of Henry 11, the Norman troubled himself but little about 
 the English tongue. But when French foreigners came 
 pouring into the land in the train of Henry and his sons 
 the Norman allied himself with the Englishman against 
 these foreigners, and the English tongue began to rise into 
 importance. Its literature grew slowly, but as quickly 
 as most of the literatures of Europe. Moreover it never 
 quite ceased. We are carried on to the year 1154 by the 
 prose of the English Chronicle. There are traces in the 
 Norman Chroniclers of the use they made of lost Eng- 
 lish war-songs. There are Old English homilies which 
 we may date from 11 20. The so-called Moral Ode, an 
 English rhyming poem, was compiled about the year 1 170. 
 It made almost a school ; it gave rise to some impassioned 
 poems to the Virgin, and it is found in a volume of hom- 
 iUes of the same date. In the reign of Henry II., the 
 old Southern- English Gospels of King ^thelred's time 
 were modernised after 200 years or less of use. The 
 Sayings of Alfred, written in English for the English, 
 were composed about the year 1200. About the same 
 date the Old English Charters of Bury St. Edmunds were 
 translated into the dialect of the shire, and now, early in 
 the thirteenth century, at the central time of the strife 
 between English and foreign elements, after the death of 
 Richard I., the Brut_ of Layamon and the Orrmulum 
 come forth within ten years of each other to prove the 
 continuity, the survival, and the victory of the English 
 tongue. When the patriotic struggle closed in the reign 
 
34 ^ ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 of Edward I., English literature had again risen, through 
 the song, the religious poems, the alliterative romance 
 and homily, the lives of saints and the translations of 
 French romances, into importance, and was written by a 
 people made up of Norman and Englishman welded into 
 one by the fight against the French foreigner. But 
 though the foreigner was driven out, his literature influ- 
 enced, and continued to influence, the new English 
 poetry, for in this revival our literature was chiefly poet- 
 ical. Prose, with but few exceptions, was still written/ 
 in Latin. 
 
 24. Religious and Story-telling Poetry are the two 
 main streams into which this poetical literature divides 
 itself. The religious poetry is for the most part English 
 in spirit, and a poetry of the people, from the Orrmu- 
 lum, about 12 15, to Piers Plowman^ in which poem the 
 distinctly EngHsh poetry reached its truest expression in 
 1362. The story-telling poetry may be called English at 
 its beginning in the BruLc^ ^ Layamon, but becomes more 
 and more infliienced by the romantic poetry of France, 
 and in the end grows in Chaucer's hands into a poetry 
 of the court and of fine allegory, a literary in contrast 
 with a popular poetry. But Chaucer, at first thus influ- 
 enced by French and then by Italian subjects, becomes 
 at last entirely English in feeling and in subjects, and the 
 _fr( ^erbury Tales are the best example of English story- 
 telling we possess. The struggle then of England against | 
 the foreigner to become and remain England finds its 1 
 parallel in the struggle of English poetry against the 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 35 
 
 influence of foreign poetry to become and remain English. 
 Both struggles were long and varied, but in both Eng- 
 land was triumphant. She became a nation, and she won 
 a national literature. It is the course of this struggle 
 we have now to trace along the two lines already laid 
 down — the poetry of religion and the poetry of story- 
 telling; but to do so we must begin in both instances 
 with the Norman Conquest. 
 
 25. The Religious Poetry. — The religious revival of 
 the eleventh century was strongly felt in Normandy, and 
 both the knights and Churchmen who came to England 
 with William the Conqueror and during his son's reign, 
 were founders of abbeys, from which, as centres of learn- 
 ing and charity, the country was civilised. Where Lan- 
 franc and Anselm lived, religion or scholastic learning 
 was not likely to go to sleep. A frequent communica- 
 tion was kept up with French scholarship through the 
 University of Paris. Schools and libraries multiplied. 
 The Latin learning of England steadily developed. Its 
 scholars in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries wrote 
 not only on theology, but on many various subjects; 
 and some of their books influenced the whole of Euro- 
 pean thought. In Henry I.'s reign the religion of 
 England was further quickened by missionary monks 
 sent by Bernard of Clairvaux. London was stirred to 
 rebuild St. Paul's, and abbeys rose in all the well- 
 watered valleys of the north. Thus the English citi- 
 zens of London and the English peasants in the country 
 received a new religious life from the foreign noble and 
 
36 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the foreign monk, and both were drawn together through 
 a common worship. When this took place a desire arose 
 for religious handbooks in the English tongue. Orrmin's 
 Orrmulum may be' taken as a type of these. We may 
 date it, though not precisely, at 121 q, the date of the 
 Great Charter. It is English ; its sources are ^Ifric 
 and Baeda; its Danish writer loves his native dialect; 
 not five French words are to be found in it. It is a 
 metrical version of the Gospel of each day with the 
 addition of a sermon in verse. " This book is named 
 Orrmulum for that Orrm it wrought." It marks the 
 rise of Enghsh religious literature, and its religion is 
 simple and rustic. Orrm's ideal monk is " a very pure 
 man, and altogether without property, except that he 
 shall be found in simple meat and clothes." He will 
 have "a hard and stiff and rough and heavy life to 
 lead. All his heart and desire ought to be aye toward 
 heaven, and to serve his Master well." This was Eng- 
 hsh religion in the country at this date. It was con- 
 tinued in Enghsh prose writing by the Ancren Riwle — 
 the Rule of the Anchoresses — written about 1220. The 
 original MS. was probably in the Dorsetshire dialect. 
 The Genesis and then the Exodus, biblical poems of » 
 about 1250, were made by the pious writers to make 
 Christian men as glad as birds at the dawning for the 
 story of salvation. A Northumbrian Psalter of 1250 
 is only one example out of many devotional pieces, 
 homiUes, metrical creeds, hymns to the Virgin (mostly 
 imitated from the French), which, with the metrical 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 37 
 
 Lives of the Saints (a large volume, the lives translated 
 from Latin or French prose into English verse), carry 
 the religious poetry up to 1300. Among these the 
 most important are the lives of three saints, Marherete, 
 Juliane, and Katerine, and the homily on Hali Meiden- 
 had (Holy Maidenhood) all in aUiterative verse, written 
 in southern England, and beginning a new and vital 
 class of poetry, the poetry of impassioned love to 
 Christ and the Virgin. 
 
 26. Literature and the Friars. — There was little 
 religion in the towns, but this was soon changed. In 
 1 22 1 the Mendicant Friars came to England, and they 
 chose the towns for their work. The first Friars who 
 learnt English that they might preach to the people 
 were foreigners, and spoke French. Many English 
 Friars studied in Paris, and came back to England, 
 able to talk to Norman noble and English peasant. 
 Their influence, exercised both on Norman and Eng- 
 lish, was thus a mediatory and uniting one, and Normans 
 as well as English now began to write religious works in 
 English. The people, of course, had to be served with 
 stories, and in the early years of the fourteenth century 
 a number of Christian legends of the childhood of Jesus, 
 of the Virgin, the Apostles and Saints, and of miracles, 
 chiefly drawn from the French, were put into varying 
 poetic forms ; and, recited everywhere, added a large 
 number of materials to the imagination of England. A 
 legend-cycle was thus formed, and this cycle was chiefly 
 made by writers in the south of England. In 1303 
 
38 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Robert Mannyng of Brunne, in Lincolnshire, freely 
 translated, to please plain people, a French work, the 
 Manual of Sins (written thirty years earlier by William 
 of Waddington), under the title of Handlyng Synne. 
 William of Shoreham translated the whole of the Psalter 
 into English prose about 1327, and wrote poems which 
 might be called treatises in rhyme. The Cursor Mundi, 
 written about 1320, in Northumbria, and thought "the 
 best book of all '' by men of that time, was a metrical 
 recast of the history of the Old and New Testament, 
 interspersed, as was the Handlyng Synne, with legends 
 of saints. This book started a whole series of verse- 
 homilies tagged with tales, which created in northern 
 England a legend-cycle similar to that created in the 
 south. Some scattered Sermons, and in 1340 the 
 Ayenbite of Inwyt (the Sting of Conscience), translated 
 from the French, mark how English prose was rising 
 through religion. About the same year Richard RoUe, 
 the Hermit of Hampole, wrote in Latin and in Nor- 
 thumbrian English for the "unlearned," a poem called 
 the Pricke of Conscience, This poem is the last dis- 
 tinctly rehgious poem of any importance before the 
 Vision of Pjf^^ P(n'^pinin.n^ uulcss wc are led to except 
 those written by the author of The Grene Knight At 
 its date, 1340, the religious influence of the Friars was 
 swiftly decaying. In Piers Plowman their influence for 
 good is gone. In that poem, which brings religious 
 poetry, in the death of its author, up to 1400, the re- 
 ligious literature of England strikes the last note of 
 
11 FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 39 
 
 the old religious impulse and the boldest music of the 
 new. The Friar is slain, the Puritan survives. 
 
 27. History and the Story-telling Poetry. — The 
 Normans brought an historical taste with them to 
 England, and created a valuable historical literature. 
 It was written in Latin, and we have nothing to do 
 with it till English story-telling grew out of it about 
 the time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself 
 of such importance that a few things must be said 
 concerning it. 
 
 (i) The men who wrote it were called Chroniclers. 
 At first they were only annalists — that is, they jotted 
 down the events of year after year without any attempt 
 to bind them together into a connected whole. Of these, 
 the most important, and indeed they were something 
 more than mere annahsts, were Ordericus Vitalis, and 
 his predecessors, Florence of Worcester and Simeon of 
 Durham. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I., 
 another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scattered 
 monasteries, but at the C^ourt. Living at the centre of 
 political life, their histories were written in a philosophic 
 spirit, and wove into a whole the growth of law and 
 national life and the story of affairs abroad. They are 
 our great authorities for the history of these times. They 
 begin with William of Malmesbury, whose book ends in 
 1142, anddie out after Matthew Paris, 1235-73. His- 
 torical prose in England is only represented after the 
 death of Henry HI. by a few dry Latin annalists till it 
 rose again in modern English prose in 15 13, when Sir 
 
40 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Thomas More's Life of Edward V, and Usurpation of 
 Richard III, is said to have been written. 
 
 (2) A distinct English feeling soon sprang up among 
 these Norman historians. EngHsh patriotism was far 
 from having died among the English themselves. The 
 Sayings of /Elf red were written in EngHsh by the English. 
 These and some ballads, as well as the early English 
 war-songs, interested the Norman historians and were 
 collected by them. William of Malmesbury, who was 
 born of English and Norman parents, has sympathies 
 with both peoples, and his history marks how both were 
 becoming one nation. The same welding together of 
 the conquered and the conquerors is seen in Henry of 
 Huntingdon and others, till we come to Matthew Paris, 
 whose view of history is entirely that of an Englishman. 
 When he wrote, Norman noble and English yeoman, 
 Norman abbot and English priest, were, and are in his 
 pages, one in blood and one in interests. 
 
 28. English Story-telling grew out of this historical 
 Hterature. There was a Welsh priest at the court of 
 Henry I., called G eoffrey ^ of Monm ou th, who, inspired 
 by the Genius of romance, composed in Latin twelve 
 short books (1132-35), which he playfully called History. 
 He had tieen given, he said, an ancient Welsh book to 
 translate which told in verse the history of Britain from 
 the days when Brut, the great-grandson of ^neas, landed 
 on its shores, through the whole history of King Arthur 
 down to Cadwallo, a Welsh king who died in 689. The 
 real historians were angry at the fiction, and declared 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 4I 
 
 that throughout the whole of it " he had lied saucily and 
 shamelessly." It was indeed only a clever putting to- 
 gether and invention of a number of Welsh and other 
 legends, but it was the beginning of story-telling after the i 
 Conquest. Every one who read it was delighted with it ; 
 it made, as we should say, a sensation, and as much on 
 the Continent as in England. Geoffrey may be said to 
 have created the heroic figure of Arthur, which had been 
 only sketched in the compilation which passes under the 
 name of Nennius. In it the Welsh invaded English liter- "^^V" 
 ature, and their tales have never since ceased to live in 
 it. They charm us as much in Tennyson'^ Idylls of the 
 Xing as they charmed us in the days of Henry I. But the 
 stories Geoffrey of Monmouth told were in Latin prose. 
 They were put first into French verse by Geoffrey Gaimar 
 for the wife of his patron, Ralph FitzGilbert, a northern 
 baron. They got afterwards to France and, added to 
 from Breton legends, were made into a poem and decked 
 out with the ornaments of French romance. In that 
 form they came back to England as the work of Wace, a 
 Norman of Caen, the writer also of the Roinan de Ron, 
 who called his poem the Geste des Bretons (afterwards 
 the Brut), and completed it in 1155, shortly after the 
 accession of Henry II. Spread far and wide in France, 
 it led to an immense development there and elsewhere 
 of the Legend of Arthur and his Knights. 
 
 29. Layam on*s **Bru t." — In this French form the 
 story drifted through England, and at last faUing into the 
 hands of an English priest in Worcestershire, he resolved 
 
42 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 to tell it in alliterative English verse tQ his countrymen, 
 and so doing became the writer of our first important 
 English poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say 
 that its date is 120^ , ten years or so before the Orrmu- 
 lum was written, ten years before the Great Charter. It 
 is plain that its composition, though it told a Welsh story, 
 was looked on as a patriotic work by the writer. "There 
 was a priest in the land," he writes of himself, "whose 
 name was Layamon ; he was son of Leovenath : May 
 the Lord be gracious unto him ! He dwelt at Earnley, 
 a noble church on the bank of Severn, near Radstone, 
 where he read books. It came in mind to him and in 
 his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble needs 
 of England, what the men were named, and whence they 
 came, who first had English land." And it was truly of 
 great importance. The poem opened to the imagination 
 of the English people an immense, though a fabled, past 
 for the history of the island they dwelt in, and made a 
 common bond of interest between Norman and English- 
 man. It Hnked also the Welsh to the EngHsh and the 
 Norman. Written on the borders of Wales, it introduces 
 a number of Briton legends of which Wace knew nothing, 
 and of EngUsh stories also down to the days of ^thel- 
 stan. It enlarged Arthur before the eyes of men, and 
 even Teutonic^gas enter into the story. In the realm 
 of poetry all nations meet and are reconciled. Though 
 a great deal of it is rendered from the French, there are 
 not fifty French words in its 30,000 lines. The old Eng- 
 lish alliterative metre is kept up with a few rare rhymes. 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 43 
 
 In battle, in pathetic story, in romantic adventure, in in- 
 vention, in the sympathy of sea and storm with heroic 
 deeds, he is a greater and more original poet than those 
 who followed him, till we come to Chaucer. He touches 
 with one hand the ancien^Jingland befor^Uie Conquest, 
 he touches with another the romantiQj;)oetry after it. In- 
 deed, what Caedmon was to early English poetry, L ayamon ^ 
 is to English poetry after the Conquest. He is the first 
 of the new singers. 
 
 30. Story-telling becomes entirely French in Form. — 
 After an interval the desire for story-telling increased in 
 England, and France satisfied the desire. The French 
 tales were carried over our land by the travelling mer- 
 chant and friar, by the gleemen and singers who trans- 
 lated them, or sung translations of them, not only to the 
 castle and the farm, but to the village and the town. 
 Floriz aiid Blanche flur and the Romance of S ir Tristrem 
 were versified before 1300, and many other romantic 
 tales. The lay of Havelok the Dane was perhaps adapted 
 from the French towards the close of the thirteenth cen- 
 tury, and so was the song of King Horn, Their English 
 origin is also maintained, and at least both rest on Teutonic 
 tradition. The first took form in northern England, and 
 shares in the rough vigour of the north. The second is a 
 southern tale, and has been entirely transformed by the 
 romantic spirit. English in rhythm, it is thoroughly 
 French in feeUng. The romances of King Alexander and 
 of Richard Cceur de Lion, and of Arthour and Merlin^ 
 while romantic in form, preserve an English sentiment 
 
44 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and originality which make us remember that, when they 
 were written, Edward I. was making Norman and English 
 into one people. About 1300 the story- teUing verged 
 into historical poems, and Robert of Gloucester wrote 
 his Rhyming Chronicle^ from Brutus to Edward I. As the 
 dates grow nearer to 1300, the amount of French words 
 increases, and the French romantic manner of story- telling. 
 In the Romance of Alexander^ to take one example as a 
 type of all, the natural landscape, the conventional intro- 
 ductions to the parts, the gorgeous descriptions of pomps, 
 and armour, and cities, the magic wonders, the manners, 
 and feasts, and battles of chivalry, especially the love 
 affairs and feelings, are all steeped in the colours of 
 French romantic poetry. Now this romance was origi- 
 nally adapted by a Frenchman about the year 1200. It 
 took therefore nearly a century before the French 
 romantic manner of poetry could be naturahsed in 
 Enghsh; and it was naturalised, curious to say, at the 
 very time when England as a nation had lost its French 
 attachments and become entirely Enghsh. 
 
 31. Cycles of Romance. — At this time, then, the 
 French romance of a hundred years earlier was made 
 Enghsh in England. There were four great romantic 
 stories. The first was that of King Arthur^ and Geoffrey 
 of Monmouth began it in England about jj^. Before 
 1 150 it was taken up in Normandy, sent therefrom into 
 France, and independent invention soon began to play 
 upon it. Of these ^ventors the first was Crestien of 
 Troyes, but we owe to Robert de Boron, a knight of the 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 45 
 
 Vpsges country, the first poem on the Graal, the Holy 
 Dish with which Christ celebrated the Last Supper, and 
 which in the hands of Joseph of Arimathea received 
 his blood. The origin of the legend may be traced to 
 Celtic stories, and this may partly account for its 
 swift development in the west of England. Two more 
 romances on the subject, Le Grand St Graal and La 
 Quesie del St. Graal, in which Galahad appears, are 
 attributed to Walter Map, a friend of Henry II., and 
 they were certainly written in England in that king's 
 reign. It is due to the Anglo-Normans and the Normans 
 that this Graal-story, in which the Arthur legends were 
 bound up with the highest doctrine of the Church, took 
 its great development, not only in France but in Ger- 
 many. Alongside of the Arthurian Saga arose the 
 JTristan story, and, at first independent, it was afterwards 
 linked on to the tale of Arthur. These two together, 
 along with stories invented concerning all the Knights of 
 the Round Tabl,e, and chiefly Launcelot and Gawaine, 
 were worked over in a multitude of romandc tales, most 
 of which became popular in England, and were sung and 
 made into English verse from the thirteenth to the 
 sixteenth century. 
 
 The second romantic story was that of Charlemagne 
 and his twelve peers. Begun in France with the Song of 
 Roland, a huge tale of Charlemagne was forged about 
 iiio_ in the name of Archbishop Turpin. In this, 
 Charlemagne's wars were bound up with oriental legend, 
 with the Holy Sepulchre, with every kind of story. A 
 
46 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP, 
 
 great number of Carlovingian romances followed. This 
 cycle, however, owing perhaps to the aUenation of the 
 Anglo-Normans in.'England from the French, was not 
 much developed in England at the beginning of our 
 romance-writing. The most popular of the Carlovingian 
 poems was the poem of Otinel in the reign of Edward 
 II. ; but the most beautiful was Amis et Amiloun, the 
 English version of which so wholly leaves out its con- 
 nexion with Charlemagne that it has been supposed to be 
 an original Anglo-Norman-English poem. The Roland^ 
 the Charlemagne and Roland, a Siege of Milan, Sir 
 Ferumbras and the humorous Rauf Coilyear almost 
 exhaust the English poems of this cycle. 
 
 The third Romantic story is that of the Life of 
 Alexander, derived from a Latin version (fourth century) 
 of the Greek story made in Alexandria under the name 
 of Callisthenes. Its romantic wonders, fictions, and 
 magic, largely added to from the Arabian books about 
 Eskander, were doubled by the imagination and coloured 
 with all the romance of chivalry in the eleventh or twelfth 
 century ; and the story became so common in England 
 that " every wight that hath discrecioune," says Chaucer, 
 had heard of Alexander's fortune^^ No doubt it was sung 
 all over England, but we have only a few poems concern- 
 ing it in English, the last of which, a free translation of 
 a French original. The Buik of the most noble and vail- 
 zeand Conquerour, belongs to the fourth decade of the 
 fifteenth century. 
 
 The fourth romantic story, first in date, but last in im- 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 4/ 
 
 portance in England, was that of the Siege of Troy, Two 
 Latin pieces, bearing the names of Dares Fhrygius and 
 of Dictys Cretensis, composed about the story of Troy 
 in the decline of Latin literature, were worked over by 
 Benoit de Sainte More, with fabulous and romantic in- 
 ventions of his own, in the Roman de Troie, about 1160. 
 Guido della Colonne, of Messina, took them up about 
 1270, and with additions woven into them from the 
 Theban and Argonautic stories, made a great Latin story 
 out of them which Lydgate used. Virgil supplied mate- 
 rials for a romance of ^neas; Statins for a Roman de 
 Thebes, During the crusades Byzantine and oriental 
 stories entered into French romance, and especially into 
 this Cycle of Troy. The Gest Historiale (XIV. Cent.) 
 of the Destruction of Troy, first introduced the story of 
 Troilus (invented by Benoit) to readers of English verse. 
 This cycle does not seem to have much entered into our 
 literature till Chaucer's time, but it attracted both Chau- 
 cer and Lydgate. 
 
 These were the four great Romantic cycles which were 
 used by English poets. But the desire for romances 
 was not satisfied with these. A few collected round Old 
 English traditions or history. There was a poem about 
 Wade, the father of Weland, to which Chaucer alludes. 
 It has long been lost, but a small fragment of it has lately 
 been discovered. I have already mentioned the stories 
 of Horn and Havelok. The romances of Guy of War- 
 wick and of Bevis of Hampton, though both translated 
 from the French, take us back to the time of -^thelstan 
 
48 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and Eadgar, but are as unhistorical as the tales of Troy 
 and Alexander. A number of other romances from vari- 
 ous sources belong to the time of the Edwards, and were 
 all derived from the French. Short tales also sprang up, 
 taken from the fabliaux, from the Roman de Renariy 
 from the French lais, some satirical, some of love, some 
 in the form of "debates." Compilations of tales were 
 made. The Sevyn Sages was worked from the oriental 
 stock of the Book of the Seven Wise Men ; and the Gesta 
 Romanorum, a book of stories which began to be used 
 in England in the reign of Edward I., suppHed the mate- 
 rial for tales in England as well as all over Europe. The 
 country was therefore swarming with tales, chiefly French, 
 and its poetic imagination with the fancies, the fables, 
 the love, and the ornaments of French romance, trans- 
 lated and imitated in English, and written in the metres 
 of France and in rhyme. 
 ^ 32. Alliterative English Poems, 1350. — In the midst 
 . of all this French imitation, something national begins 
 to gleam, and it comes from the west, from the lands on 
 the edge of Wales and Cumbria. This is the recovery 
 of the Old English metre, that fine, elastic, marching, 
 epic, alliterative metre which Layamon used, and which 
 takes us back to Cynewulf. The things written now in 
 this national metre are still romantic and French in sub- 
 ject, feehng, and manners ; but their Teutonic metre 
 slides a fresh, even a vigorous originality, into the con- 
 ventional phrasing of the romantic poetry. This reaction 
 from a French to an English type began in the middle 
 
XI FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 49 
 
 of the fourteenth century, and runs parallel with the gen- 
 eral victory of the English language over the French in 
 the time of Edward III. At least twelve important 
 poems are written in this aUiterative metre, the last of 
 which in this century was Langland's Vision, Among 
 these, but not altogether alliterative, are the poems of a ( 
 northern, perhaps a Lancashire poet. These are Sir 
 Gawayne and the Grene Knight; Pearl; and Clean- 
 ness and Patience (Clannesse and Pacience) . This poet, 
 who probably had finished his poems just as Chaucer and 
 Langland began to write, stands quite apart from his fel- 
 lows in excellence, and, indeed, along with Langland and 
 only below Chaucer. Though Sir Gaway?ie is romantic, 
 it escapes at many points from the French spirit. It is 
 more original, it is more imaginative, it is far more in- 
 tense in feeling, than the ordinary romances. It de- 
 scribes natural scenery at first hand, and the scenery is 
 that of the poet's own country. It is moral in aim, it is 
 composed into an organic whole. It is full of new inven- 
 tions. In the Pearl J our earliest In Memoriam, there is 
 an extraordinary personal passion of grief and of religious 
 exultation pervading a lovely symbolism, which is quite 
 unique. The same strong- personality, mixed with a 
 more distinctly moral purpose, fills the writer's two other 
 poems, and brings him as a religious poet into range 
 with Langland on the one hand, and with Cynewulf 
 on the other. No one can crudely mix him up with 
 France. He is as English, at the last, as Langland or 
 Chaucer. 
 
50 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 33. English Lyrics. — In the midst of all this stc 
 telling, like prophecies of what should afterwards be « 
 lovely in our poetry, rose, no one can tell how, so 
 lyric poems, country idylls, love songs, and, later «.. ;. 
 some war-songs. The English ballad, sung from tow;, 
 to town by wandering gleemen, had never altogetb \ 
 died. A number of rude ballads collected round t"^ 
 legendary Robin Hood, and the kind of poetic liter 
 ture which sang of the outlaw and the forest, and aft( 
 wards so fully of the wild border life, gradually to( k 
 form. About 1280 a beautiful little idyll called the 
 Owl and the Nightingale was written, probably in Dor- 
 setshire, in which the rival birds submit their quarrel for 
 precedence to the possible writer of the poem, Nicholas 
 of Guildford. About 1300 we meet with a few lyric 
 poems, full of cljarm. They sing of spring-time with its 
 blossoms, of the woods ringing with the thrush and night- 
 ingale, of the flowers and the seemly sun, of country 
 work, of the woes and joys of love, and many other 
 delightful things. They are tinged with the colour of 
 French romance, but they have an EngHsh background. 
 This lyrical movement began with hymns to the Virgin 
 and Christ, touched with the sentiments of Latin and 
 Norman-French amorous poetry. These changed into 
 frank love-poems in the hands of the wandering stu- 
 dents. Many arose on the Welsh marches, and were 
 tinged with Celtic feeling. Some are no doubt literary 
 renderings of English folk-songs, such as " Sumer is 
 ycumen in/* "Blow, northerne wind," and are full of 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER SI 
 
 ]ove of women and love of nature. After these, a new 
 type of religious lyrics blossomed, in which, as in all 
 future English poetry, the love of nature was mingled 
 with the love of God and the longing of the soul for 
 perfect beauty. Satirical lyrics also arose, and the pro- 
 verbial poetry of France gave an impulse to collections 
 like the Proverbs of Hendyng. Most of these were of 
 the time of Henry III. and Edward I. Political ballads 
 now began, in Edward I.'s reign, to be frequently written 
 in English, but the only dateable ballads of importance 
 are that on the battle of Lewes, 1264, and the ten war 
 lyrics of Laurence Minot, who, in 1352, sang the great 
 deeds and battles of Edward IIL 
 
 34. The King's English. — After the Conquest, French 
 or Latin was the language of the literary class. The Eng- 
 lish tongue, spoken only by the people, fell back from the 
 standard West-Saxon English of the Chronicle into that 
 broken state of anarchy in which each part of the country 
 has its own dialect, and each writer uses the dialect of 
 his own dwelling-place. All the poems then of which we 
 have spoken were written in dialects of English, not in a 
 fixed English common to all writers. During the prev- 
 alence of French, and the continued translation of 
 French poems, English had been invaded by French 
 words, and though it had become, in Edward IIL's 
 reign, the national tongue, it had been transformed as a 
 language. The old inflections had mostly disappeared. 
 French endings and prefixes were used, till even so early 
 as the end of Edward I.*s reign, in Robert of Brunne's 
 
52 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 work, a third of his nouns, adverbs, and verbs, are 
 French. His work was still however in a dialect — the 
 East-Midland dialect. This dialect grew into the lan- 
 guage of literature, the standard English. In Robert of 
 Brunne, it was most Hterary and most French, but we 
 must remember that the same dialect belonged to the 
 two centres of learning, Oxford and Cambridge, and that 
 London, on this side the Thames was contained in the 
 same Anglian boundaries. This conquering dialect, when 
 it became the standard Enghsh, did not prevent the 
 Vision concerning Piers Plowman and Wyclifs transla- 
 tion of the Bible from being written in a dialect, but it 
 became the English in which all future English literature 
 was to be written. It was fixed into clear form by 
 Chaucer. It was the language talked at the court and 
 in the court society to which that poet belonged. It was 
 the King^s English^ and the fact that it was the tongue 
 of the best and most cultivated society, as well as the 
 great excellence of the works written in it by Chaucer, 
 made it at once the tongue of Hterature. 
 
 35. Religious Literature in Langland and Wyclif. — 
 We have traced the work of " transition English," as it 
 has been called, along the Hnes of popular religion and 
 story-telHng. The first of these, in the realm of poetry, 
 reaches its goal in the work of William Langland ; in the 
 realm of prose it reaches its goal in Wyclif. In both 
 these writers, the work differs from any that went before 
 it, by its popular power, and by the depth of its re- 
 ligious feeling. It is plain that it represented a society 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 53 
 
 much more strongly moved by religion than that of 
 the beginning of the fourteenth century. In Wyclif, the 
 voice comes from the university and it went all over the 
 land in the body of preachers whom, like Wesley, he sent 
 forth. In Langland's Vision we have a voice from the 
 centre of the people themselves ; his poem is written 
 in old aUiterative English verse, and in the Old English 
 manner. The very ploughboy could understand it. It 
 became the book of those who desired social and Church 
 reform. It was as eagerly listened to by the free labourers 
 and fugitive serfs who collected round John Ball and Wat 
 Tyler. It embodied a puritan reaction against the Friars 
 who had fallen away from the religious revival they had 
 so nobly instituted. The strongest cry of this regenerated 
 religion was for truth as against hypocrisy, for purity in 
 State and Church and private life, for honest labour, and 
 against ill-gotten wealth and its tyrannical persecution. 
 There was also a great movement at this time against the 
 class system of the Middle Ages. This was jn^de a re- 
 ligious movement when the equality of all men before 
 God was maintained, and a social movement when it pro- 
 tested against the oppression of the poor and on behalf 
 of their misery. The French wars had increased this 
 misery. Heavy taxation and severe laws ground down the 
 peasantry. The " Black Death " deepened the wretched- 
 ness into panic. In 1349, 1362, and 1369 it swept over 
 England. Grass grew in the towns ; whole villages were 
 left uninhabited ; a wild terror fell upon the people, 
 which was added to by a fierce tempest in 1362 that to 
 
54 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 men's minds told of the wrath of God. In their panic 
 then, as well as in their pain, they fled to religion. 
 
 36. Piers Plowman. -r All these elements are to be 
 found fully represented in the Vision of William concern- 
 ing Piers Plowman, followed by that concerning Dowely 
 Dobet, and Dobest Its author, William Langland, 
 though we are not certain of his surname, was born, about 
 1332, at Cleobury Mortimer, in Shropshire. His Vision 
 begins with a description of his sleeping on the Malvern 
 Hills, and the first text of it was probably written in the 
 country in 1362. At the accession of Richard II., 1377, 
 he was in London. The great popularity of his poem 
 made him in that year, and again about the year 1398, 
 send forth two more texts of his poem. In these texts 
 he made so many additions to the first text that he nearly 
 doubled the length of the original poem. In 1399, he 
 wrote his last poem, Richard the RedelesSy and then died, 
 probably in 1400, and we may hope in the quiet of the 
 West country. 
 
 37. His Vision. — He paints his portrait as he was 
 when he lived in Cornhill, a tall, gaunt figure, whom men 
 called Long Will ; clothed in the black robes in which he 
 sang for a few pence at the funerals of the rich ; hating 
 to take his cap off his shaven head to bow to the lords 
 and ladies that rode by in silver and furs as he stalked 
 in observant moodiness along the Strand. It is this 
 figure which in indignant sorrow walks through the 
 whole poem. The dream of the " field full of folk," 
 with which it begins, brings together nearly as many 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 55 
 
 typical characters as the Tales of Chaucer do. In the 
 first part, the truth sought for is righteous dealing in 
 Church, and Law, and State. After the Prologue of the 
 " field full of folk " and in it the Tower of Truth and the 
 Dungeon where the Father of Falsehood lives, the Visio?i 
 treats of Holy Church who tells the dreamer of Truth. 
 Where is Falsehood? he asks. She bids him turn, and 
 he sees Falsehood and Lady Meed, and learns that 
 they are to be married. Theology interferes and all the 
 parties go to London before the King. Laay Meed, 
 arraigned on Falsehood's flight, is advised by the King 
 to marry Conscience, but Conscience indignantly pro- 
 claims her faults, and prophesies that one day Reason 
 will judge the world. On this the King sends for Reason, 
 who, deciding a question against Wrong and in spite of 
 Meed (or bribery), is begged by the King to remain 
 with him. This fills four divisions or "Passus." The 
 fifth Passus contains the confession of the Seven Deadly 
 Sins, and is full of vivid pictures of friars, robbers, nuns, 
 of village life, of London alehouses, of all the vices of the 
 time. It ends with the search for Truth being taken up 
 by all the penitents, and then for the first time Piers 
 Plowman appears and describes the way. He sets all 
 who come to him to hard work, and it is here that the 
 passages occur in which the labouring poor and their evils 
 are dwelt upon. The seventh Passus introduces the bull 
 of pardon sent by Truth (God the Father) to Piers. A 
 Priest declares it is not valid, and the discussion between 
 him and Piers is so hot that the Dreamer awakes and 
 
56 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 ends with a fine outburst on the wretchedness of a trust 
 in indulgences and the nobleness of a righteous life. 
 This is the first part of the poem. 
 
 In the second part the truth sought for is that of 
 righteous life, to Do Well, to Do Better, to Do Best, the 
 three. titles of a new vision and a new pilgrimage. In a 
 series of dreams and a highly-wrought allegory, Do Well, 
 Do Bet, and Do Best are finally identified with Jesus 
 Christ, who now appears as Love in the dress of Piers 
 Plowman. Do Well is full of curious and important 
 passages. Do Bet points out Christ as the Saviour of the 
 World, describes His death, resurrection, and victory over 
 Death and Sin. And the dreamer awakes in a transport 
 of joy, with the Easter chimes peahng in his ears. But 
 as Langland looked round on the world, the victory did 
 not seem real, and the stern dreamer passed out of 
 triumph into the dark sorrow in which he lived. He 
 dreams again in Do Best, and sees, as Christ leaves the 
 earth, the reign of Antichrist. Evils attack the Church 
 and mankind. Envy, Pride, and Sloth, helped by the 
 Friars, besiege Conscience. Conscience cries on Contri- 
 tion to help him, but Contrition is asleep, and Conscience, 
 all but despairing, grasps his pilgrim staff and sets out to 
 wander over the world, praying for luck and health, " till 
 he have Piers the Plowman," till he find the Saviour. 
 And then the dreamer wakes for the last time, weeping 
 bitterly. This is the poem which displays to us that side 
 of English society which Chaucer had not touched, and 
 which wrought so strongly in men's minds that its moral 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 57 
 
 influence was almost as widely spread as Wyclif s in the 
 revolt which had now begun against Latin Christianity. 
 Its fame was so great, that it produced imitators. About 
 1394, another alliterative poem was set forth by an 
 unknown author, with the title of Pierce the Ploughman's 
 Crede ; and the Plowman's Tale, wrongly attributed to 
 Chaucer, is another witness to the popularity of Langland. 
 2,^. Wyclif. — At the same time as the Vision was 
 being read all over England, John Wyclif, about 1378, 
 determined to give a full translation of the Bible to the 
 English people in their own tongue. He himself trans- 
 lated the New Testament. His assistant, Nicholas of 
 Hereford, finished the Old Testament as far as Baruch, 
 and Wyclif completed it. Some time after, John Purvey, 
 under Wyclif, revised the whole, corrected its errors, 
 did away with its Latinisms, and made it a book of 
 sterling English — a book which had naturally a great 
 power to fix and preserve words in our language. But 
 Wyclif did much more than this for our tongue. He 
 made it the popular language of religious thought 
 and feeling. In 1381 he was in full battle with the 
 Church on the doctrine of transubstantiation, and was 
 condemned to silence. He replied by appealing to the 
 whole of England in the speech of the people. He sent 
 forth tract after tract, sermon after sermon, couched not 
 in the dry, philosophic style of the schoolmen, but in 
 short, sharp, stinging sentences, full of the homely words 
 used in his own Bible, denying one by one almost all the 
 doctrines, and denouncing the practices, of the Church of 
 
58 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAK 
 
 Rome. He was our first Protestant. It was a new 
 literary vein to open, the vein of the pamphleteer. With 
 his work then, and with Langland's, we bring up to the 
 year 1400 the English prose and poetry pertaining to 
 religion, the course of which we have been tracing since 
 the Conquest. 
 
 39. Story-telling is the other Hne on which we have 
 placed our hterature, and it is now represented by John 
 GowER. He belongs to a school older than Chaucer, 
 inasmuch as he is scarcely touched by the Italian, but 
 chiefly by the French influence. However, he had read 
 Petrarca. Fifty Balades prove with what clumsy ease he 
 could write in the French tongue about the affairs of love. 
 As he grew older he grew graver, and partly as the 
 religious and social reformer, and partly as the story- 
 teller, he fills up the literary space between the spirit 
 of Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Sav- 
 iour, at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his 
 three great works, the Speculum Meditantis, the Vox 
 Clamantis, the Confessio Amantis, 1393. It marks the 
 unsettled state of our Hterary language, that each of 
 these was written in a different tongue, the first in 
 French, the second in Latin, the third in English. The 
 first of these has been lost, but has lately been dis- 
 covered at Cambridge. The second is a dream which 
 passes into a sermon, cataloguing all the vices of the 
 time, and is suggested by the peasant rising of 1381. 
 
 The third, his English work, is a dialogue between a 
 lover and his confessor a priest of Venus, and in its 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 59 
 
 course, and with an imitation of Jean de Meung's part of 
 the Roman de la Rose, all the passions and studies which 
 may hinder love are dwelt upon, partly in allegory, and 
 their operation illustrated by apposite stories, borrowed 
 from the Gesta Romanorum and from the Romances. 
 But the book is in reaUty a better and larger collection 
 of tales than was ever made before in English. The 
 telling of the tales is wearisome, and the smoothness of 
 the verse makes them more wearisome. But Gower was 
 a careful writer of English ; and in his satire of evils, 
 and in his grave reproof of the follies of Richard II., 
 he rises into his best strain. The king himself, even 
 though reproved, was a patron of the poet. It was as 
 Gower was rowing on the Thames that the royal barge 
 drew near, and he was called to the king's side. " Book 
 some new thing," said the king, " in the way you are used, 
 into which book I myself may often look ; " and the re- 
 quest was the origin of the Confession of a Lover, He 
 ended by writing The Tripartite Chronicle, It is with 
 pleasure that we turn from the learned man of talent 
 to Geoffrey Chaucer — to the genius who called Gower, 
 with perhaps some of the irony of an artist, " the moral 
 Gower." 
 
 40. Chaucer's French Period. — Geoffrey Chaucer 
 was the son of John Chaucer, a vintner, of Thames 
 Street, London, and was born in 1340 or a year or two 
 earUer. He Hved almost all his life in London, in the 
 centre of its work and society. When he was sixteen he 
 became page to the wife of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, 
 
60 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and continued at the court till he joined the army in 
 France in 1359. He was taken prisoner, but ransomed 
 before the treaty of Bretigny, in 1360. We then know 
 nothing of his life for seven years ; but from items in the 
 Exchequer Rolls, we find that he was again connected 
 with the court, from 1366 to 1372. He was made a 
 valet of the king's chamber, and in 1368 an "esquire 
 of less degree." It was during this time that he began 
 to write. We seem to have evidence that he composed 
 in his wild youthful days a number of love poems, none 
 of which have survived, but which gave him some fame 
 as a poet. It is said that the A^ B, C, a prayer to the 
 Virgin, is the first of his extant poems, but some are in- 
 clined to put it later. The translation of the Roman de 
 la Rose which we possess is, with the exception of the 
 first 1 705 lines, denied to be his, but it is certain that he 
 did make a translation of the French poem ; and there 
 are a few who think that Chaucer's translation was made 
 about 1380, and that it is completely lost. It is com- 
 monly said that he wrote the Compleynt unto Pite, a 
 tender and lovely little poem, before 1369. This was 
 followed by the Boke of the Duchesse, in 1369, a pathetic 
 allegory of the death of Blanche of Castile, whose hus- 
 band, John of Gaunt, was Chaucer's patron. These, 
 being written under the influence of French poetry, are 
 classed under the name of Chaucer's first period. There 
 are lines in them which seem to speak of a luckless love 
 affair, and in this broken love it has been supposed we 
 find some key to Chaucer's early life. However that 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6l 
 
 may be, he was married to Philippa Chaucer at some 
 period between 1366 and 1374. Of the children of 
 this marriage we only know certainly of one, Lewis, 
 for whom he made his treatise on the Astrolabe. 
 
 41. Chaucer *s Italian Period. — Chaucer's second poetic 
 period may be called the period of Italian influence, from 
 1372 to 1384. During these years he went for the king 
 on four, perhaps five, diplomatic missions. Two of these 
 were to Italy — the first to Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, 
 1372-3 ; the second to Lombardy, 1378-9. At that 
 time the great Italian literature which inspired then, 
 and still inspires, European literature, had reached an 
 astonishing excellence, and it opened to Chaucer a 
 new world of art. His many quotations from Dante 
 show that he had read the Divina Commedia^ and we 
 may well think that he then first learnt the full power 
 and range of poetry. He read the Sonnets of Petrarca, 
 and he learnt what is meant by " form " in poetry ; but 
 Petrarca never had the same power over him which 
 Dante possessed. He read the tales and poems of 
 Boccaccio, who made Itahan prose, and in them he first 
 saw how to tell a story exquisitely. Petrarca and Boc- 
 caccio he may even have met, for they died in 1374 and 
 1375, and Petrarca was in 1373 at Arqua, close to Padua, 
 and employed on the Latin version of the story of Gri- 
 silde, the version which Chaucer translated in the Clerk's 
 tale. But Dante he could not see, for he had died at 
 Ravenna in 1321. When he came back from these 
 journeys he was a new man. He threw aside the roman- 
 
62 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 tic poetry much in vogue, and perhaps laughed at it then 
 in his gay and kindly manner in the Rime of Sir Thopas, 
 one of the Canterbury Tales. His chief work of this 
 time bears witness to the influence of Italy. It was 
 Troilus and Criseyde, 1380-3, a translation, with many 
 changes and additions, of the Filostrato of Boccaccio. 
 The additions (and he nearly doubled the poem) are 
 stamped with his own peculiar tenderness, vividness, and 
 simplicity. His changes from the original are all tow- 
 ards the side of purity, good taste, and piety. We 
 meet the further influence of Boccaccio in the birth of 
 some of the Canterbury Tales, and of Petrarca in the 
 Tales themselves. To this time is now referred the Lyf 
 of Seint Cecyle, afterwards made the Second Nun's tale ; 
 and the passionate religious fervour and repentance of 
 this poem has seemed to point to a period of penitence 
 in his life for his early sensuousness. It did not last 
 long, and he now wrote the Story of Grisilde, the Clerk's 
 tale ; the Story of Constance, the Man of Law's tale ; 
 the Monk's tale; the Compleynt of Mars; the Com- 
 pleynt to his Lady; Anelida and Arcyte ; Troilus and 
 Criseyde; the Lines to Adam Scrivener; To Rose- 
 mounde ; The Parlement of Foules ; Boece, a prose ver- 
 sion of the De Consolatione ; the Hous of Fame, and 
 the Legende of Good Women, In these two last poems 
 we may trace, not only an ItaHan, but a classical period 
 in the work of Chaucer. This is the record of the work 
 of the years between 1373 and 1384 ; and almost all 
 these poems are either influenced by Dante or adapted 
 
TI FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 63 
 
 from Petrarca and Boccaccio. In the passion with which 
 Chaucer describes the ruined love of Troilus or AneUda, 
 some have traced the lingering sorrow of his early loye 
 affair. ^ But if this be true, it was now passing away, for 
 in the creation of Pandarus in the Troilus, and in the 
 delightful fun of that enchanting poem the Parlenient 
 of Foules, a new Chaucer appears, the humorous poet 
 of some of the Canterbury Tales, The noble art of the 
 Farkfnenty as well as that of the Troilus, lifts Chaucer 
 already on to that eminence apart where sit the great 
 poets of the world. Nothing like this had appeared 
 before in England. Nothing like it appeared again till 
 Spenser. In the active business Hfe he led during the 
 period his poetry was likely to win a closer grasp on 
 human Hfe, for he was not only employed on service 
 abroad, but also at home. In 1374 he was Comptroller 
 of the Wool Customs, in 1382 of the Petty Customs, 
 and in 1386 Knight of the Shire for Kent. 
 
 42. Chaucer's English Period. — It is in the next 
 period, from 1384 to 1390, that he left behind (except 
 in the borrowing of his subjects) Itahan influence as he 
 had left French, and became entirely himself, entirely 
 English. The comparative poverty in which he now 
 lived, and the loss of his offices in 1386, for in John of 
 Gaunt's absence court favour was withdrawn from him, 
 and the death of his wife in 1387, may have given him 
 more time for study and the retired Hfe of a poet. His 
 appointment as Clerk of the Works in 1389 brought him 
 again into contact with men. He superintended the 
 
( 
 
 64 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 repairs and building at the Palace of Westminster, the 
 Tower, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, till July, 1391, 
 when he was superseded, and lived on pensions allotted 
 to him by Richard II. and by Henry IV., after he had 
 sent Henry in 1399 his Compleint to his Purse, Before 
 1390, however, he had added to his great work its most 
 EngUsh tales ; those of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, 
 the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Friar, the Nun's 
 Priest, the Pardoner, and perhaps the Sompnour. The 
 Prologue was probably written in 1388. In these, in 
 their humour, in their vividness of portraiture, in their 
 ease of narration, and in the variety of their characters, 
 Chaucer shines supreme. A few smaller poems belong 
 to this time, such as the Former Age ; Fortune ; Truth ; 
 Gentilesse ; and the Lak of Steadfastnesse. 
 
 During the last ten years of his life, which may be 
 called the period of his decay, he wrote some small 
 poems, and along with the Compleynt of Venus, and a 
 prose treatise on the Astrolabe, three more Canterbury 
 tales, the Canon's-yeoman's, Manciple's, and Parson's. 
 The last was written the year of his death, 1400. Having 
 done this work he died in a house under the shadow 
 of the Abbey of Westminster. Within the walls of the 
 Abbey Church, the first of the poets who lies there, 
 that " sacred and happy spirit " sleeps. 
 
 43. Chaucer's Character. — Born of the tradesman class, 
 Chaucer was in every sense of the word one of our finest 
 gentlemen : tender, graceful in thought, glad of heart, 
 humorous, and satirical without unkindness ; sensitive to 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 65 
 
 every change of feeling in himself and others, and there- 
 fore full of sympathy ; brave in misfortune, even to mirth, 
 and doing well and with careful honesty all he undertook. 
 His first and great delight was in human nature, and he 
 makes us love the noble characters in his poems, and feel 
 with kindliness towards the baser and ruder sort. He 
 never sneers, for he had a wide charity, and we can 
 always smile in his pages at the follies and forgive the 
 sins of men. He had a quiet and true religion, much 
 like that we conceive Shakespeare to have had ; nor was 
 he without a high philosophic strain. Both were kept in 
 order by his imagination and his humour. He had a 
 true and chivalrous regard for women of his own class, 
 and his wife and he ought to have been very happy if 
 they had fulfilled the ideal he had of marriage. He lived 
 in aristocratic society, and yet he thought him the great- 
 est gentleman who was the most courteous and the most 
 virtuous. He lived frankly among men, and as we have 
 seen, saw many different types of men, and in his own 
 time filled many parts as a man of the world and of busi- 
 ness. Yet, with all this active and observant life, he was 
 commonly very quiet and kept much to himself. " Flee 
 from the press and dwell with steadfastness " is the first 
 line of his last ballad, and it embodies, with the rest of 
 that personal poem, the serious part of his Hfe. The 
 Host in the Tales japes at him for his lonely, abstracted 
 air. "Thou lookest as thou wouldest find a hare. And 
 ever on the ground I see thee stare." Being a good 
 scholar, he read morning and night alone, and he says 
 
66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 that after his (office) work he would go home and sit at 
 another book as dumb as a stone, till his look was dazed. 
 While at study and when he was making of songs and 
 ditties^ "nothing else that God had made " had any in- 
 terest for him. There was but one thing that roused him 
 then, and that too he liked to enjoy alone. It was the 
 beauty of the morning and the fields, the woods, and 
 streams, and flowers, and the singing of the little birds. 
 This made his heart full of revel and solace, and when 
 spring came after winter, he rose with the lark and cried 
 "Farewell, my book and my devotion." He was a keen 
 observer of the nature he cared for, especially of colour. 
 He loved the streams and the birds and soft grassy 
 places and green trees, and all sweet, ordered gardens, 
 and flowers. He could spend the whole day, he says, in 
 gazing alone on the daisy, and though what he says is 
 symbolic, yet we may trace through the phrase that 
 lonely delight in natural scenery which is so special a 
 mark of our later poets. He lived thus a double life, in 
 and out of the world, but never a gloomy one. For he 
 was fond of mirth and good-living, and when he grew 
 towards age, was portly of waist, no poppet to embrace. 
 But he kept to the end his elfish countenance, the shy, 
 delicate, half- mischievous face which looked on men 
 from its gray hair and forked beard, and was set ofl" by 
 his dark-coloured dress and hood. A knife and ink-horn 
 hung on his dress ; we see a rosary in his hand ; and 
 when he was alone he walked swiftly. 
 
 44. The Canterbury Tales. — Of his work it is not 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 6/ 
 
 easy to speak briefly, because of its great variety. Enough 
 has been said of it, with the exception of his most com- 
 plete creation, the Canterbury Tales, It will be seen 
 from the dates given above that they were not written at 
 one time. They are not, and cannot be looked on as a 
 whole. Many were written independently, and then fitted 
 into the framework of the Prologue. Many, which he 
 intended to write in order to complete his scheme, were 
 never written. But we may say that the full idea of his 
 work took shape about 1385, after he had finished The 
 Legende of Good Women^ and that the whole existing 
 body of the Tales was completed, with the exception of 
 the last three already mentioned, before the close of 
 1390. At intervals, from time to time, he added a tale; 
 in fact, the whole was done much in the same way as 
 Tennyson has written his Idylls of the King, The manner 
 in which he knitted them together was very simple, and 
 likely to please the English people. The holiday ex- 
 cursions of the time were the pilgrimages, and the most 
 famous and the pleasantest pilgrimage to go, especially 
 for Londoners, was the three or four days* journey to see 
 the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury. Persons of all 
 ranks in life met and travelled together, starting from a 
 London inn. Chaucer had probably made the pilgrimage 
 to Canterbury in the spring of 1385 or 1387, and was led 
 by this experience to the framework in which he set his 
 pictures of life. He grouped around the jovial host of 
 the Tabard Inn men and women of every class of society 
 in England, set them on horseback to ride to Canterbury 
 
/; 
 
 68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and home again, intending to make each of them tell 
 tales. No one could hit off a character better, and in 
 his Prologue, and in the prologues to the several Tales, 
 a great part of the new, vigorous EngHsh society which 
 had grown up since Edward I. is painted with astonishing 
 vividness. '' I see all the pilgrims in the Canterbury 
 Tales ^^ says Dryden, " their humours, their features, and 
 the very dress, as distinctly as if I had supped with them 
 'at the Tabard in South wark." The Tales themselves 
 take in the whole range of the poetry and the life of the 
 Middle Ages ; the legend of the saint, the romance of the 
 knight, the wonderful fables of the traveller, the coarse 
 tale of common life, the love story, the allegory, the 
 animal-fable, and the satirical lay. And they are pure 
 tales. f\^He is not in any sense a dramatic writer; he is 
 our greatest story-teller in verse. All the best tales are 
 told easily, sincerely, with great grace, and yet with so 
 much homeliness, that a child would understand them. 
 Sometimes his humour is broad, sometimes sly, some- 
 times gay, but it is also exquisite and affectionate. His 
 pathos does not go into the far depths of sorrow and pain, 
 but it is always natural. He can bring tears into our eyes, 
 and he can make us smile or be sad as he pleases. 
 
 His eye for colour was superb and distinctive. He 
 had a very fine ear for the music of verse, and the tale 
 and the verse go together like voice and music. Indeed, 
 so softly flowing and bright are they, that to read them 
 is like listening in a meadow full of sunshine to a clear 
 stream rippling over its bed of pebbles. The English in 
 
II FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 69 
 
 which they are written is almost the English of our 
 time; and it is literary English. Chaucer made our 
 tongue into a true means of poetry. He did more, he 
 welded together the French and English elements in 
 our language and made them into one English tool for 
 the use of literature, and all our prose writers and poets 
 derive their tongue from the language of the Canterbury 
 Tales, They give him honour for this, but still more for 
 that he was so fine an artist. Poetry is an art, and the 
 artist in poetry is one who writes for pure and noble 
 pleasure the thing he writes, and who desires to give to 
 others the same or a similar pleasure by his poems 
 which he had in writing them. ^The things he most 
 cares about are that the form in which he puts his 
 thoughts or feeUngs may be perfectly fitting to the sub- 
 jects : and that subject, matter, and form should be as 
 beautiful as possible — but for these he cares very 
 greatly ; and in this Chaucer stands apart from the other 
 poets of his time./^Gower wrote with a set object, and 
 nothing can be less beautiful than the form in which he 
 puts his tales. The author of Piers Plowman wrote with 
 the object of reform in social and ecclesiastical affairs, 
 and his form is uncouth and harsh. (^ Chaucer wrote be- 
 cause he was full of emotion and joy in his own thoughts, 
 and thought that others would weep and be glad with 
 him, and the only time he ever moralises is in the tales of 
 the Canon's Yeoman and the Manciple, written in his de- 
 cay. He has, then, the best right to the poet's name. He 
 is, within his own range, the clearest of English artists. ) 
 
JO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Finally, his position in the history of English poetry 
 and towards his own time resembles that of Dante, whom 
 he loved so well, in the history and poetry of Italy. 
 Dante embodied all the past elements of the Middle 
 Ages in his work, and he began the literature, the 
 thoughts, and the power of a new age. He was the 
 Evening Star of the Mediaeval day and the Morning 
 Star of the Renaissance. Chaucer also represented med- 
 isevalism though in a much more incomplete way than 
 Dante, but he had, so far as poetry in England is con- 
 cerned^more of the Renaissance spirit than Dante. I He 
 is more humanistic than even Spenseix England needed 
 to live more than a century to get up to the level of 
 Chaucer. \^astly, both Dante and he made their own 
 country's tongue the tongue of noble literature. \ 
 
 45. The Travels of Sir John Maundevile belong to 
 this place which treats of story-teUing. Whatever other 
 English prose arose in the fourteenth century was theo- 
 logical or scientific. John of Trevisa had, among other 
 English translations, turned into English prose, 1387, 
 the Poly chronic on of Ranulf Higden. Various other 
 prose treatises, beginning with those of Richard Rolle, 
 had appeared. Chaucer himself translated two of his 
 tales, that of the Parson, and that of Meliboeus, from 
 the French into an involved prose ; and wrote in the 
 same rude vehicle, his Boece, and his book on the 
 Astrolabe. We have already noticed the prose of Wyc- 
 lif. But Maundevile* s Travels is a story-book. Maun- 
 devile himself, the quaint and pleasant knight, is as 
 
n FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER 7 1 
 
 much an invention as Robinson Crusoe, and the travels 
 as much an imposture as Geoffrey's History of the Kings 
 of Britain, But they had a similar charm, and when 
 made up originally by Jean de Bourgogne, a physician 
 who died at Liege in 1372, were received with delight 
 and belief by the world, and nowhere with greater 
 pleasure than in England, where they were translated 
 into English prose by an anonymous writer of the late 
 fourteenth or more probably fifteenth century. The 
 prose is garrulous and facile, gHding with a pleasure 
 in itself from legend to travellers' tales, from^ dreams 
 to facts, from St. Albans to Jerusalem, from Cairo to 
 Cathay. The book became a model of prose, and may 
 even be called an early classic. 
 
72 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 '<..i(^' 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 FROM Chaucer's death 1400, to Elizabeth, 1558 
 
 46. The Fifteenth Century Poetry. — The last poems 
 of Chaucer and Langland bring our story up to 1400. 
 The hundred years that followed are the most barren 
 in our Hterature. The influence of Chaucer lasted, and 
 of the poems attributed to him, but now rejected by 
 scholars, some certainly belong to the first half of this 
 century. There are fifty poems, making up 1 7,000 lines, 
 which have been wrongly attributed to Chaucer, and 
 though some of them were contemporary with him, a 
 number are by imitators of his in the fifteenth century. 
 Some of these have a great charm. T/ie Cuckoo and 
 the Nightingale is a pleasant thing. The Complaint of 
 the Black Knight is by Lydgate. The Court of Love 
 and Chaucef^s Dream are good but late imitations of 
 the master. The Flower and the Leaf is by a woman 
 whose name we should like to know, for the poem is 
 lovely. ^^ Moder of God and Virgin undefouled^' is by 
 Hoccleve, and was long attributed to Chaucer. The 
 triple Roundel, Merciles Beaute, is given by Professor 
 Skeat to Chaucer, and at least is worthy of the poet; 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 73 
 
 and the Amorous Compkint and a Ballade of Com- 
 pleynt, may possibly be also his. There was then a 
 considerable school of imitators, who followed the style, 
 who had some of the imaginative spirit, but who failed 
 in the music and the art of Chaucer. 
 
 47. Thomas Hoccleve and John Lydgate. — Two of 
 these imitators stand out from the rest by the extent 
 of their work. Hoccleve, a London man, was a monot- 
 onous versifier of the reigns of the three Henries, but 
 he loved Chaucer well. In the MS. of his longest 
 poem, the Governail of Princes, written before 14 13, 
 he caused to be drawn, with fond idolatry, the portrait 
 of his "master dear and father reverent," who had 
 enlumined all the land with his books. He had a 
 style of his own. Sometimes, in his playful imitations 
 of Chaucer's Balades, and in his devotional poetry, 
 such as his Moder of God, he reached excellence j but 
 his didactic and controversial aims finally overwhelmed 
 his poetry. 
 
 48. John Lydgate was a more worthy follower of 
 Chaucer. A monk of Bury, and thirty years of age 
 when Chaucer died, he yet wrote nothing of much 
 importance till the reign of Henry V. He was a gay 
 and pleasant person, though a long-winded poet, and 
 he seems to have lived even in his old age, when he 
 recalls himself as a boy *' weeping for naught, anon 
 after glad," the fresh and natural life of one who en- 
 joyed everything ; but, like many gay persons, he had 
 a vein of melancholy, and some of his best work, at 
 
74 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 least in the poet Gray's opinion, belongs to the realms 
 of pathetic and moral poetry. But there was scarcely 
 any Hterary work he could not do. He rhymed history, 
 ballads, and legends, till the monastery was delighted. 
 He made pageants for Henry VI., masques and May- 
 games for aldermen, mummeries for the Lord Mayor, 
 and satirical ballads on the follies of the day. It is 
 impossible here to mention the tenth part of his mul- 
 tifarious works, many of which are as yet unpubHshed. 
 They are a strange mixture of the poet striving to be 
 religious, and of the monk carried away by his passions 
 and his gaiety. He may have been educated at Oxford, 
 and perhaps travelled in France and Italy; he knew 
 the literature of his time, and he even dabbled in the 
 sciences. He was as much a lover of nature as Chau- 
 cer, but cannot make us feel the beauty of nature in 
 the same way. It is his story-telling which links him 
 closest to his master. His three chief poems are, first, 
 The Troye Book, which is adapted from Guido's His- 
 toria Trojana ; secondly, the Storie of Thebes, which 
 is introduced as an additional Canterbury Tale, and is 
 worked up from French romances on this subject. 
 The third is the Falles of Princes, 1424-5, at which 
 he worked till he was sixty years of age. It is a free 
 translation of a French version of Boccaccio's De Cas- 
 ibus Virorum et Feminarum Illustrium, It tells the 
 tragic fates of great men and women from the time 
 of Adam to the capture of King John of France at 
 Poitiers. The plan is picturesque ; the sorrowful dead 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 75 
 
 appear before Boccaccio, pensive in his library, and 
 each tells of his downfall. This is Lydgate's most im- 
 portant, but by no means his best, poem ; and it had 
 its influence on the future, for in the Mirror for Mag- 
 istrates, at least eight Elizabethan poets united at differ- 
 ent times to supplement his Falles of Princes, 
 
 A few minor poets do no more now than keep poetry 
 alive. Another version of the Troy Story in Henry VI. 's 
 time; Hugh de Campeden's Sidrac, Thpmas Chestre's 
 Lay of Sir Launfal, and the translation of the Earl of 
 Toulouse, prove that romances were still taken from the 
 French. William Lichfield's Complaint between God and 
 Man, and William Nassington's Mirrour of Life, carry 
 on the religious, and the Tournament of Tottenham the 
 satirical, poetry. John Capgrave's translation of the Life 
 of St. Catherine is less known than his Chronicle af 
 England i\t^\zdXt^ to Edward IV. He, with John Hard- 
 ing, a soldier of Agincourt, whose rhyming Chronicle 
 belongs to Edward IV. 's reign, continue the historical 
 poetry. A number of obscure versifiers, Thomas Norton, 
 and George Ripley who wrote on alchemy, and Dame 
 Juliana Berners' book on Hunting, bring us to the reign 
 of Henry VIL, when Skelton first began to write. Mean- 
 while poetry, which had decayed in England, was 
 flourishing in Scotland. 
 
 49. Ballads, lays, fragments of romances, had been 
 sung in England "from the earliest times, and popular 
 tales and jokes took form in short lyric pieces, to be ac- 
 companied with music and dancing. In fact, the ballad 
 
J6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 went over the whole land among the people. The trader, 
 the apprentices, and poor of the cities, the peasantry, had 
 their own songs. They tended to collect themselves 
 round some legendary name like Robin Hood, or some 
 historical character made legendary, hke Randolf, Earl 
 of Chester. In the fourteenth century, Sloth, in Piers 
 Plowman, does not know his paternoster, but he does 
 know the rhymes of these heroes. Robin Hood was then 
 well known in 1370. A crowd of minstrels sang them 
 through city and village. The very friar sang them, " and 
 made his English swete upon his tonge." The Tale of 
 Gamelyn is a piece of minstrel poetry, of the forest type, 
 and drew to it, as we know, the attention of Chaucer. 
 Chaucer and Langland mention the French ballads which 
 were sung in London, and these were freely translated. 
 The popular song, " When Adam dalf and Eve span," 
 was a type of a class of socialistic ballads. The Battle of 
 Otterbourne and The Hunting of the Cheviot were no 
 doubt composed in the fourteenth century, but were not 
 published till now. Two collections of Robin Hood bal- 
 lads and The Nut Brown Maid, printed about the begin- 
 ning of the sixteenth century, show that a fresh interest 
 had then awakened in this outlaw literature to which we 
 owe so much. It was not, however, till much later that 
 any large collection of ballads was made ; and few, in the 
 form we possess them, can be dated farther back than 
 the reign of Elizabeth. 
 
 50. Prose Literature. — Four men continued English 
 prose into the fifteenth century. The religious war be- 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 7/ 
 
 tween the Lollards and the Church raged during the reigns 
 of Henry V. and Henry VI., and in the time of the 
 latter Reginald Pecock took it out of Latin into homely 
 English. He fought the Lollards with their own weapons, 
 with pubUc sermons in Enghsh, and with tracts in Eng- 
 hsh ; and af^er 1449, when Bishop of Chichester, published 
 his works. The Repressor of overmuch Blaming of the 
 Clergy and The Book of Faith. They pleased neither 
 party. The Lollards disliked them because they defended 
 the customs and doctrines of the Church. Churchmen 
 burnt them because they agreed with the " Bible-men," 
 that the Bible was the only rule of faith. Both abjured 
 them because they said that doctrines were to be proved 
 from the Bible by reason. Pecock is the first of all the 
 Church theologians who wrote in English, and his books 
 are good examples of our early prose. 
 
 Sir John Fortescue's book on the Difference between 
 Absolute and Limited Monarchy ^ in Edward IV. 's reign, 
 is less fine an example of the prose of English politics 
 than Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur is of the 
 prose of chivalry. This book, arranged and modelled 
 into a labyrinthine story from French and contemporary 
 English materials, is the work of a man of genius, and 
 was ended in the ninth year of Edward IV., fifteen years 
 before Caxton had finished printing it. Its prose, in its 
 joyous simplicity, may well have charmed Caxton, who 
 printed it with all the care of one who " loved the noble 
 acts of chivalry." Caxton's own work added to the 
 prose of England. Born of Kentish parents, he went to • 
 
y8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAV. 
 
 the Low Countries in 1440, and learned his trade. The 
 first book said to have been printed in this country was 
 T/ie Game and Playe of the Chesse, 1474. The first book 
 that bears the inscription, " Imprynted by me, WilHam 
 Caxton, at Westmynstre," is The Dictes and Saymgs of 
 Philosophers. But the first Enghsh book Caxton made, 
 and finished at Cologne in 147 1, was his translation of 
 the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy, and in this book, 
 and in his translation of Reynard the Fox from the Dutch, 
 in his translation of the Golden Legend, and his re- 
 editing of Trevisa's Chronicle, in which he " changed the 
 rude and old English," he kept, by the fixing power of 
 the press, the Midland English, which Chaucer had es- 
 tablished as the tongue of literature, from further degrada- 
 tion. Forty years later Tyndale's New Testament fixed 
 it more firmly, and the Elizabethan writers kept it in its 
 purity. 
 
 51. The Foundations of the Elizabethan Literature. — 
 The first of these may be found in Caxton's work. John 
 Shirley, a gentleman of good family, and Chaucei^s con- 
 temporary, who died, a very old man, in 1449, deserves 
 mention as a transcriber and preserver of the works of 
 Chaucer and Lydgate, but Caxton fulfilled the task Shir- 
 ley had begun. He printed Chaucer and Lydgate and 
 Gower with zealous care. He printed the Chronicle of 
 the Brut; he secured for us the Morte Darthur. He 
 had a tradesman's interest in publishing the romances, 
 for they were the reading of the day; but he could 
 scarcely have done better for the interests of the coming 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 79 
 
 literature. These books nourished the imagination of 
 England, and supplied poet after poet with fine subjects 
 for work, or fine frames for their subjects. He had not 
 a tradesman's, but a loving literary, interest in printing the 
 old English poets; and in sending them out from his 
 press Caxton kept up the continuity of English poetry. 
 The poets after him at once began on the models of 
 Chaucer and Gower and Lydgate ; and the books them- 
 selves being more widely read, not only made poets but 
 a public that loved poetry. The imprinting of old Eng- 
 lish poetry was one of the sources in this century of the 
 Elizabethan literature. 
 
 The second source was the growth of an interest in 
 classic literature. All through the last two-thirds of this 
 century, though so little creative work was done, the 
 interest in that literature grew among 'men of the upper 
 classes. The Wars of the Roses did not stop the reading 
 of books. The Paston Letters^ 142 2-1 509, the corre- 
 spondence of a country family from Henry VI. to Henry 
 VII., are pleasantly, even correctly written, and contain 
 passages which refer to translations of the classics and to 
 manuscripts sent to and fro for reading. A great number 
 of French translations of the Latin classics were read in 
 England. Henry V. and VL, Edward IV., and some of 
 the great nobles were lovers of books. Men like Duke 
 Humphrey of Gloucester made libraries and brought over 
 Italian scholars to England to translate Greek works. 
 There were even scholars in England, like John, Lord 
 Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, who had won fame in the 
 
80 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 schools of Italy, and whose translations of Cicero*s De 
 Amicitid and of Caesar's De Bello Gallico prove, with his 
 Latin letters, how worthy he was of the praise of Padua 
 and the gratitude of Oxford. He added many MSS. to 
 the library of Duke Humphrey. The two great universi- 
 ties were also now reformed ; new colleges were founded, 
 new libraries were established, Greek, Latin, and Italian 
 MSS. were collected in them. The New Learning had 
 begun to move in these great centres. A number of uni- 
 versity men went to study in Italy, to Padua, Bologna, 
 and Ferrara. Among these were Robert Flemmyng, 
 Dean of Lincoln; John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells; 
 William Grey, Bishop of Ely; John Phreas, Provost 
 of Balliol ; William Sellynge, Fellow of All Souls, all of 
 whom collected MSS. in Italy of the classics, with which 
 they enriched the libraries of England. It is in this grow- 
 ing influence of the great classic models of literature that 
 we find the gathering together of another of the sources 
 of that Elizabethan literature which seems to flower so 
 suddenly, but which had been long preparing. 
 
 52. The Italian Revival of Learning. — The impulse, 
 as we see, came from Italy, and was due to that great 
 humanistic movement which we call the Renaissance, 
 and which had properly begun in Italy with Dante and 
 his circle, with Petrarca and Boccaccio, with Giotto and 
 Nicolo Pisano. It carried with it, as it went on reviving 
 the thought, literature and law of Greece and Rome, the 
 overthrow of Feudalism and the romantic poetry of the 
 // Middle Ages. It made classic literature and art the basis 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 8 1 
 
 of a new literature and a new art, which was not at first 
 imitative, save of excellence of form. It began a new 
 worship of beauty, a new worship of knowledge, and a 
 new statesmanship. It initiated those new views of man 
 and of human life, of its aims, rights, and duties, of its 
 pleasures and pains, of religion, of knowledge, and of the 
 whole course of the history of the world, which produced, 
 as they fell on various types of humanity, the Refor- 
 mation, a semi-pagan freedom of thought and life, the 
 theories and ideas which took such furious form in the 
 French Revolution, the boundless eifort which attempted 
 all things, and the boundless curiosity which penetrated 
 into every realm of thought and feeling, and considered 
 nothing too sacred or too remote for investigation by 
 knowledge or for representation in art. At every one of 
 those points it has affected literature up to the present day. 
 No sooner had Petrarca and Boccaccio started it than 
 Italy began to send eager searchers over Europe and 
 chiefly to Constantinople. For more than seventy years 
 before that city was taken by the Turk, shoals of MSS. 
 had been carried from it into Italy together with a host 
 of objects of ancient art. Before 1440 the best Latin 
 classics and many of the Greek, were known, and were 
 soon studied, lectured on, imitated, and translated. By 
 1460 Italy, in all matters of thought, life, art, literature, 
 and knowledge, was like a hive of bees in a warm sum- 
 mer. We have seen with what slowness this vast impulse 
 was felt in England in the fifteenth century. But it had 
 begun, and in EHzabeth's time, pouring into England, it 
 
 G 
 
S2 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 went forth conquering and to conquer. As France 
 dominated the Hterature of England after the Conquest, 
 till Chaucer, touched by Italy, made it Enghsh, so Italy 
 dominated it till Shakespeare and his fellows, touched 
 also by Italy, made it again English. 
 
 53. There was now a Transition Period both in 
 Prose and Poetry. — The reigns of Richard III. and 
 Henry VII. brought forth no prose of any worth, but 
 the country awakened into its first Renaissance with the 
 accession of Henry VIIL, 1509. John Colet, Dean of St. 
 Paul's, with William Lilly, the grammarian,, set on foot a 
 school where the classics were taught in a new and prac- 
 tical way, and between the year 1500 and the Reforma- 
 tion twenty grammar-schools were estabhshed. Erasmus, 
 who had all the enthusiasm which sets others on fire, had 
 come to England in 1497, and found Grocyn and Linacre 
 at Oxford, teaching the Greek they had learnt from Chal- 
 condylas at Florence. He learnt Greek from them, and 
 found eager admiration of his own scholarship in Bishop 
 Fisher, Sir Thomas More, Colet, and Archbishop War- 
 ham. From these men a liberal and moderate theology 
 spread, which soon, however, perished in the heats of the 
 Reformation. But the New Learning they had started 
 grew rapidly, assisted by the munificence of Wolsey; and 
 Cambridge, under Cheke and Smith, excelled even Ox- 
 ford in Greek learning. The study of the great classics 
 set free the minds of men, stirred and gave hfe to letters, 
 woke up English prose from its sleep, and kindled the 
 young English intelligence in the universities. Its earliest 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 83 
 
 prose was its best. It was in 15 13 (not printed till 1557) 
 that Thomas More wrote the history in English, of 
 Edward V/s life and Richard III.'s usurpation. The 
 simplicity of his genius showed itself in the style, and 
 his wit in the picturesque method and the dramatic 
 dialogue that graced the book. This stately historical 
 manner was laid aside by More in the tracts of nervous 
 EngUsh with which he replied to Tyndale, but both his 
 stylesare remarkable for their purity. Of all the " strong 
 words " he uses, three out of four are Teutonic. More's 
 most famous work, the Utopia, 15 16, was written in 
 Latin, but was translated afterwards, in 1551, by Ralph 
 Robinson. It tells us more of the curiosity the New 
 Learning had awakened in Englishmen concerning all 
 the problems of life, society, government, and religion, 
 than any other book of the time. It is the representative 
 book of that short but well-defined period which we may 
 call English Renaissance before the Reformation. We see 
 in all this movement another of the sources of the Eliza- 
 bethan outburst. Much of the progress of prose was due 
 to the patronage of the young king. It was the king who 
 asked Lord Berners to translate Froissart, a translation 
 which in 1523 made a landmark in our tongue. It was 
 the king who supported Sir Thomas Elyot in his effort to 
 improve education, and encouraged him to write books 
 (1531-46) in the vulgar tongue, that he might please 
 his countrymen. It was the king who made Leland, 
 our first English writer on antiquarian subjects, the 
 "King's Antiquary," 1533. It was the king to whom 
 
84 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Roger Ascham dedicated his first work, and who sent 
 him abroad to pursue his studies. This book, the 
 Toxophilus, or the School of Shooting, 1545, was writ- 
 ten for the pleasure of the yeomen and gentlemen of 
 England in their own tongue. Ascham apologises for 
 this, and the apology marks the state of English prose. 
 *^ Everything has been done excellently well in Greek 
 and Latin, but in the English tongue so meanly that no 
 man can do worse." But " I have written this English 
 matter, in the English tongue for EngHsh men." Ascham's 
 quaint English has its charm, and he did not know that 
 the very rudeness of language of which he complained 
 was in reality laying the foundations of an English more 
 Teutonic and less Latin than the English of Chaucer. 
 
 54. Prose and the Reformation. — The bigotry, the 
 avarice, and the violent controversy of the Reformation 
 killed for a time the New Learning, but the Reformation 
 did a vast work for English literature, and prepared the 
 language for the Elizabethan writers, by its version of 
 the Bible. William Tyndale's Translation of the New 
 Testament, 1525, fixed our standard English once for all, 
 and brought it finally into every English home. Tyndale 
 held fast to pure English. In his two volumes of polit- 
 ical tracts " there are only twelve Teutonic words which 
 are now obsolete, a strong proof of the influence his 
 translation of the Bible has had in preserving the old 
 speech of England." Of the 6000 words of the Author- 
 ised Version, still in a great part his translation, only 250 
 are not now in common use. " Three out of four of his 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 85 
 
 nouns, adverbs, and verbs are Teutonic." And he spoke 
 sharply enough to those who said our tongue was so rude 
 that the Bible could not be translated into it. " It is not 
 so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue 
 agreeth more with the EngHsh than the Latin ; a thou- 
 sand parts better may it be translated into the English 
 than into the Latin." 
 
 Tyndale was helped in his English Bible by William 
 Roy, a runaway friar; and his friend Rogers, the first 
 martyr in Queen Mary's reign, added the translation of 
 the Apocrypha, and made up what was wanting in Tyn- 
 dale's translation from Chronicles to Malachi out of 
 Coverdale's translation. It was this Bible which, re- 
 vised by Coverdale and edited and re-edited as Crom- 
 weirs Bible, 1539, and again as Cranmer's Bible, 1540, 
 was set up in every parish church in England. It got 
 north into Scotland and made the Lowland English more 
 like the London English. It passed over to the Prot- 
 estant settlements in Ireland. After its revisal in 161 1 
 it went with the Puritan Fathers to New England and 
 fixed the standard of English in America. Many mill- 
 ions of people now speak the English of Tyndale's Bible, 
 and there is no book which has had, through the Au- 
 thorised Version, so gre'at an influence on the style of 
 English literature and the standard of English prose. In 
 Edward VI. 's reign also Cranmer edited the English 
 Prayer Book, 1549-52. Its English is a good deal 
 mixed with Latin words, and its style is sometimes weak 
 or heavy, but on the whole it is a fine example of stately 
 
S6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 prose. It also steadied our speech. Latimer, on the 
 contrary, whose Sermon on the Ploughers and others were 
 dehvered in 1549 and in 1552, wrote in a plain, shrewd 
 style, which by its humour and rude directness made him 
 the first preacher of his day. On the whole the Refor- 
 mation fixed and confirmed our English tongue, but at the 
 same time it brought in through theology a large number 
 of Latin words. The pairing of English and Latin words 
 {acknowledge and confess, etc.) in the Prayer Book is 
 a good example of both these results. 
 
 55. Poetry in the Sixteenth Century under the In- 
 fluence of Chaucer. — One source, we have said, of the 
 EHzabethan literature, before Elizabeth, was the recovery, 
 through Caxton's press, of Chaucer and his men. It is 
 probable that the influence of Itahan literature on EngHsh 
 poets was now kept from becoming overwhelming by the 
 strong EngHsh element in Chaucer. At least this was 
 one of the reasons for the clear poetic individuality of 
 England; and we can easily trace its balancing effect 
 in Spenser. It was of importance, then, that before 
 Surrey and Wyatt again brought Itahan elements into 
 English verse, there should be a revival of Chaucer, 
 both in England and Scotland. This transition period, 
 short as it was, is of interest. Stj^phen Hawes, in the 
 reign of Henry VII., represented; the transition by an 
 imitation of the old work. Amid many poems, some 
 more imitative of Lydgate than of Chaucer, his long alle- 
 gorical poem, entitled the Pastille of Pleasure, is the 
 best. In fact, it is the first, since the middle of the 
 
m FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH S7 
 
 fifteenth century, in which Imagination again began to 
 plume her wings and soar. Within the realm of art, it 
 corresponded to that effort to resuscitate the dead body 
 of the Old Chivalry which Henry VIII. and Francis I. 
 attempted. It goes back for its inspiration to the Ro- 
 mance of the Roscy and is an allegory of the right educa- 
 tion of a knight, showing how Grand Amour won at last 
 La Bel Pufell. But, hke all soulless resurrections, it 
 died quickly. 
 
 On the other hand, John Skeltq n represents the 
 transition by at first following the old poetry, and then, 
 pressed upon by the storm of human life in the present, 
 by taking an original path. His imitative poetry belongs 
 mostly to Henry VII. 's time, but when the religious and 
 political disturbances began in Henry VIII.'s time, 
 Skelton became excited by the cry of the people for 
 Church reformation. His poem. Why come ye not to 
 Court? was a fierce satire on the great Cardinal. That 
 of Coli7i Clout was the cry of the country Colin, and of 
 the Clout or mechanic of the town against the corruption 
 of the Church ; and it represents the whole popular feel- 
 ing of the time just before the movement of the Reforma- 
 tion took a new turn from the opposition of the Pope to 
 Henry's divorce. Both are written in short " rude rayling 
 rimes, pleasing only the popular ear," and Skelton chose 
 them for that purpose. He had a rough, impetuous 
 power, but Skelton could use any language he pleased. 
 He was an admirable scholar. Erasmus calls him the 
 " glory and light of English letters," and Caxton says 
 
88 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 that he improved our language. His poem, the Bowge of 
 Court (rewards of court) , is full of powerful satire against 
 the corruption of the times, and of vivid impersonations 
 of the virtues and vices. But he was not only the satirist. 
 The pretty and new love lyrics that we owe to him fore- 
 shadow the Elizabethan imagination and Hfe ; and the 
 Boke of Phyllyp Sparowe, which tells, in imitation of 
 Catullus, the grief of a nun called Jane Scrope for the 
 death of her sparrow, is a gay and inventive poem. 
 Skelton stands — a landmark in English literature — be- 
 tween the mere imitation of Chaucer and the rise of a new 
 Italian influence in England in the poems of Surrey and 
 Wyatt. In his own special work he was entirely original. 
 The Ship of Fooles, 1508, by Barclay, is of this time, 
 but it has no value. It is a paraphrase of a famous 
 German work by Sebastian Brandt, published at Basel. 
 It was popular because it attacked the folHes and ques- 
 tions of the time. Its sole interest to us is in its pictures 
 of familiar manners and popular customs. But Barclay 
 did other work, and he established the eclogue in Eng- 
 land. With him the transition time is over, and the 
 curtain is ready to rise on the Elizabethan age of poetry. 
 While we wait, we will make an interlude out of the work 
 of the poets of Scotland. 
 
 SCOTTISH POETRY 
 
 56. Scottish Poetry is poetry written in the English 
 tongue by men living in Scotland. These men, though 
 calling themselves Scotsmen, are of good English blood. 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 89 
 
 But the blood, as I think, was mixed with a larger infu- 
 sion of Celtic blood than elsewhere. 
 
 Old Northumbria extended from the Humber to the 
 Firth of Forth, leaving however on its western border a 
 strip of unconquered land, which took in Lancashire, 
 Cumberland, and Westmoreland in our England, and, 
 over the border, most of the western country between 
 the Clyde and Sqlway Firth. This unconquered country 
 was the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, and was dwelt in 
 by the Celtic race. The present English part of it was 
 conquered and the Celts absorbed. But in the part to 
 the north of the Solway Firth the Celts were not con- 
 quered and not absorbed. They remained, lived with 
 the EngHshmen who were settled over the old Nor- 
 thumbria, intermarried with them, and became under Scot 
 kings a people with the Celtic elements more dominant 
 in them than in the rest of our nation. English litera- 
 ture in the Lowlands of Scotland would then retain more 
 of these Celtic elements than elsewhere ; and there are 
 certain peculiarities infused through the whole of English 
 poetry in Scotland which are especially Celtic. 
 
 57. Celtic Elements of Scottish Poetry. — The first 
 of these is the love of wild nature for its own sake. 
 There is a passionate, close, and poetical observation and 
 description of natural scenery in Scotland from the 
 earliest times of its poetry, such as we do not possess in 
 English poetry till the time of Thomson. The second is 
 the love of colour. All early Scottish poetry differs from 
 English in the extraordinary way in which colour is in- 
 
90 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 sisted on, and at times in the lavish exaggeration of it. 
 The third is the wittier and coarser humour in the Scot- 
 tish poetry, which is distinctly Celtic in contrast with 
 that humour which has its root in sadness and which be- 
 longs to the Teutonic races. Few things are really more 
 different than the humour of Chaucer and the humour of 
 Dunbar, than the humour of Cowper and the humour of 
 Burns. These are the special Celtic elements in the 
 Lowland poetry 
 
 58. But there are also national elements in it which, 
 exaggerated and isolated as they were, are also Celtic. 
 The wild individuality of the GaeHc clans was not un- 
 represented in the Lowland kingdom, and became there 
 as assertive a nationality as Ireland has ever proclaimed. 
 The English were as national as the Scots, but they were 
 not oppressed. But for nearly forty years the Scots re- 
 sisted for their very life the efforts of England to conquer 
 them. And the war of freedom left its traces on theii 
 poetry from Barboui to Burns and Walter Scott in the 
 almost obtrusive way in which Scotland, and Scottish 
 liberty, and Scottish heroes are thrust forward in their 
 verse. Their passionate nationaUty appears in another 
 form in their descriptive poetry. The natural descrip- 
 tion of Chaucer, Shakespeare, or even Milton, is not 
 distinctively English. But in Scotland it is always the 
 scenery of their own land that the poets describe. Even 
 when they are imitating Chaucer they do not imitate his 
 conventional landscape. They put in a Scottish land- 
 scape ; and in the work of such men as Gawin Douglas 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 9I 
 
 the love of Scotland and the love of nature mingle their 
 influences together to make him sit down, as it were, to 
 paint, with his eye on everything he paints, a series of 
 Scottish landscapes. 
 
 59. The first of the Scottish poets, omitting Thomas 
 of Erceldoune, is John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aber- 
 deen. His long poem of The Bruce ^ 1375-7* represents 
 the whole of the eager struggle for Scottish freedom 
 against the English which closed at Bannockburn ; and 
 the national spirit, which I have mentioned, springs in it, 
 full grown, into life. But it is temperate, it does not 
 pass into the fury against England, which is so plain in 
 writers like Blind Harry, who, about 1461, composed a 
 long poem in the heroic couplet of Chaucer on the deeds 
 of William Wallace, In Henry V.'s reign, Andrew of 
 Wyntoun wrote his Oryginale Cronykil of Scotland, one 
 of the rhyming chronicles of the time. It is only in the 
 next poet that we find the full influence of Chaucer, 
 and it is thereafter continuous till the Elizabethan time. 
 James the First of Scotland was prisoner in England 
 for nineteen years, till 1422. There he read Chaucer, 
 and fell in love with Lady Jane Beaufort, niece of 
 Henry IV. The poem which he wrote — The King's 
 Quair (the quire" or book) — is done in imitation of 
 Chaucer, and in Chaucer's seven-lined stanza, which 
 from James's use of it is called " Rime Royal." In six 
 cantos, sweeter, tenderer, and purer than any verse till 
 we come to Spenser, he describes the beginning of his 
 love and its happy end. "I must write," he says, "so 
 
92 ENGLISH LITERA'TURZ CHAP 
 
 much because I have come so from Hell to Heaven. *' 
 Though imitative of Chaucer, his work has an original 
 element in it. The natural description is more varied, 
 the colour is more vivid, and there is a modern self- 
 reflective quality, a touch of mystic feeUng which does 
 not belong to Chaucer. 
 
 Robert Henryson, who died about 1500, a school- 
 master in Dunfermline, was also an imitator of Chaucer, 
 and his Testament of Cresseid continues Chaucer's 
 Troilus, But he did not do only imitative work. He 
 treated the fables of ^sop in a new fashion. In his 
 hands they are long stories, full of pleasant dialogue, 
 political allusions, and with elaborate morals attached to 
 them. They have a peculiar Scottish tang, and are full 
 of descriptions of Scottish scenery. He also reanimated 
 the short pastoral in his Robin and Makyne, It is a 
 natural, prettily-turned dialogue ; and a flashing Celtic 
 wit, such as charms us in Duncan Gray, runs through it. 
 The individuality which reformed two modes of poetic 
 work in these poems appears again in his sketch of the 
 graces of womanhood in the Garmeftt of Good Ladies ; 
 a poem of the same type as those thoughtful lyrics which 
 describe what is best in certain phases of professions, or 
 of hfe, such as Sir H. Wotton's Character of a Happy 
 Life, or Wordsworth's Happy Warrior, 
 
 But among many poets whom we need not mention, 
 the greatest is William Dunbar. He carries the in- 
 fluence of Chaucer on to the end of the fifteenth century 
 and into the sixteenth. His genius, though masculine, 
 
Ill FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 93 
 
 loved beauty, and his work was as varied in its range as 
 it was original. He followed the form and plan of Chau- 
 cer in his two poems of The Thistle and the Rose, 1503, 
 and the Golden Terge, 1508, the first on the marriage of 
 James IV. to Margaret Tudor, the second an allegory of 
 Love, Beauty, Reason, and the poet. In both, though 
 they begin with Chaucer's conventional May morning, 
 the natural description becomes Scottish, and in both the 
 national enthusiasm of the poet is strongly marked. But 
 he soon ceased to imitate. The vigorous fun of the 
 satires and of the satirical ballads that he wrote is only 
 matched by their coarseness, a coarseness and a fun that 
 descended to Burns. Perhaps Dunbar's genius is still 
 higher in a wild poem in which he personifies the seven 
 deadly sins, and describes their dance, with a mixture of 
 horror and humour which makes the little thing unique. 
 
 A man as remarkable as Dunbar is Gawin Douglas, 
 Bishop of Dunkeld, who died in 1522, at the Court of 
 Henry VIII., and was buried in the Savoy. He trans- 
 lated into verse Ovid's Art of Love, now lost, and after- 
 wards, with truth and spirit, the yEneids of Virgil, 15 13. 
 To each book of the ^neid he wrote a prologue of his 
 own. Three of them are descriptions of the country in 
 May, in Autumn, and in Winter. The scenery is alto- 
 gether Scottish, and the few Chaucerisms that appear 
 seem absurdly out of place in a picture of nature which 
 is painted with excessive care and directly from the truth. 
 The colour is superb, but the landscape is not composed 
 by any art into a whole. There is nothing like it in 
 
94 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 England till Thomson's Seasons, and Thomson was a 
 Scotsman. Only the Celtic love of nature can account 
 for the vast distance between work Hke this and contem- 
 porary work in England such as Skelton's. Of Douglas's 
 other original work, one poem, the Palace of Honour^ 
 1501, continues the influence of Chaucer. 
 
 There were a number of other Scottish poets who are 
 all remembered by Dunbar in his Lament for the Makars^ 
 and praised by Sir David Lyndsay, whom it is best to 
 mention in this place, because he still connects Scottish 
 poetry with Chaucer. He was born about 1490, and was 
 the last of the old Scottish school, and the most popular. 
 He is the most popular because he is not only the poet, 
 but also the reformer. His poem the Dreme, 1528, links 
 him back to Chaucer. It is in the manner of the old 
 poet. But its scenery is Scottish, and instead of the May 
 morning of Chaucer, it opens on a winter's day of wind 
 and sleet. The place is a cave over the sea, whence 
 Lyndsay sees the weltering of the ocean. Chaucer goes 
 to sleep over Ovid or Cicero, Lyndsay falls into a dream 
 as he thinks of the "false world's instability," wavering 
 like the sea waves. The difference marks not only the 
 difference of the two countries, but the different natures 
 of the men. Chaucer did not care much for the popular 
 storms, and loved the Court more than the Commonweal. 
 Lyndsay in the Dreme and in two other poems — the 
 Complaint to the King, and the Testament of the King's 
 Papyngo — is absorbed in the evils and sorrows of the 
 people, in the desire to reform the abuses of the Church, 
 
ni FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 95 
 
 of the Court, of party, of the nobiHty. In 1539 his 
 Satire of the Three Estates, a MoraHty interspersed with 
 interludes, was represented before James V. at LinHth- 
 gow. It was a daring attack on the ignorance, profli- 
 gacy, and exactions of the priesthood, on the vices and 
 flattery of the favourites — "a mocking of abuses used in 
 the country by diverse sorts of estates." A still bolder 
 poem, and one thought so even by himself, is the Mon- 
 archie, 1553, his last work. He is as much the reformer, 
 as he is the poet, of a transition time. Still his verse 
 hath charms, but it was neither sweet nor imaginative. 
 He had genuine satire, great moral breadth, much 
 preaching power in verse, coarse, broad humour in 
 plenty, and more dramatic power and invention than 
 the rest of his fellows. 
 
 60. The Elizabethan Dawn: Wyatt and Surrey. — 
 
 While poetry under Skelton and Lyndsay became an 
 instrument of reform, it revived as an art at the close of 
 Henry VIII. 's reign in Sir Thomas Wyatt and Lord 
 Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. They were both Italian 
 travellers, and in bringing back to England the inspi- 
 ration they had gained from Italian and classic models 
 they re-made English poetry. They are our first really 
 jn^kfJijgoets ; the first who have anything of the modern 
 manner. Though ItaHan in sentiment, their language is 
 more English than Chaucer's, that is, they use fewer 
 romance words. They handed down this purity of 
 English to the Elizabethan poets, to Sackville, Spenser, 
 
96 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and Shakespeare. They introduced a new kind of poetry, 
 the amourist poetry — a poetry extremely personal, and 
 personal as English poetry had scarcely ever been before. 
 The amourists, as they are called, were poets who com- 
 posed a series of poems on the subject of the joy^ and 
 sorrows of their loves — sonnets mingled with lyrical 
 pieces after the manner of Petrarca, and sometime* in 
 accord with the love philosophy he built on Plato. They 
 began with Wyatt and Surrey. They did not die out till 
 the end of James I.'s reign. The subjects of Wyatt and 
 Surrey were chiefly lyrical, and the fact that they imitated 
 the same model has made some likeness between them. 
 Like their personal characters, however, the poetry of 
 Wyatt is the more thoughtful and the more strongly felt, 
 but Surrey's has a sweeter movement and a livelier fancy. 
 Both did this great thing for EngHsh verse — they chose 
 an exquisite model, and in imitating it "corrected the 
 ruggedness of EngHsh poetry." A new standard was 
 made below which the future poets should not fall. They 
 also added new stanza measures to English verse, and 
 enlarged in this way the "lyrical range." Surrey was 
 the first, in his translation of the Second and Fourth 
 Books of VirgiVs ^neid, to use the ten-syllabled, un- 
 rhymed verse, which we now pall hkr^k y^ rae. In his 
 hands it is not worthy of praise. Sackvill^j Lord Buck- 
 hurst, introduced it into jdranaa ; Marlowe made it the 
 proper verse of the drauiaj* In plays it has a special 
 manner of its own ; in poetry proper it was, we may say, 
 not only cre ated butperfected3yJ >liltOQ . 
 
m FROM CHAUCER TO ELIZABETH 97 
 
 The new impulse thus given to poetry was all but 
 arrested by the bigotry that prevailed during the reigns 
 of Edward VI. and Mary, and all the work of the New 
 Learning seemed to be useless. But Thomas Wilson's 
 book in EngHsh on Rhetoric and Logic in 1553, and the 
 publication of Thomas Tusser's Pointes of Husbandrie and 
 of Tottel's Miscellany of Uncertain Authors, 1557, in the 
 last year of Mary's reign, proved that something was 
 stirring beneath the gloom. The Miscellany contained 
 40 poems by Surrey, 96 by Wyatt, 40 by Grimoald, and 
 134 by uncertain authors. The date should be remem- 
 bered, for it is the first printed book of modern English 
 poetry. It proves that men cared now more for the new 
 than the old poets, that the time of mere imitation of 
 Chaucer was over, and that of original creation begun. 
 It ushers in the Elizabethan literature. 
 
 H 
 
98 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 
 
 6i. Elizabethan Literature, as a literature, may be 
 said to begin with Surrey and Wyatt. But as their 
 poems were published shortly before Elizabeth came to 
 the throne, we date the beginning of the early period of 
 EHzabethan literature from the year of her accession, 
 1558. That period lasted till 1579, ^^^ was followed by 
 the great literary outburst of the days of Spenser and 
 Shakespeare. The appareht suddenness of this outburst 
 has been an object of wonder. I have already noticed 
 its earliest sources in the last hundred years. And now 
 we shall best seek its nearest causes in the work done 
 during the early years of Elizabeth. The flood-tide which 
 began in 1579 was preceded by a very various, plentiful, 
 but inferior literature, in which new forms of poetry and 
 prose-writing were tried, and new veins of thought opened. 
 These twenty years from the Mirror for Magistrates, 
 i559> to the ShephearcTs Calendar, 1579? sowed seeds 
 which when the time came broke into flower. We wonder 
 at the flower, but it grew naturally through seed and stem, 
 leaves and blossom. They made the flower, since the 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 99 
 
 circumstances were favourable. And never in England, 
 save in our own century, were they so favourable. 
 
 62. First Elizabethan Period, 1558-1570. — (i.) The 
 literary prose of the beginning of this time is represented 
 by the Schokmaster of Ascham, published in 15 70. This 
 book, which is on education, is the work of the scholar of 
 the New Learning of the reign of Henry VIII. who has 
 lived on into another period. It is not, properly speak- 
 ing, Elizabethan ; it is like a stranger in a new land and 
 among new manners. 
 
 (2.) Poetry is first represented by Sackville, Lord 
 Buckhurst. The Mirror for Magistrates ^ for which he 
 wrote, 1563, the Induction and one tale, is a series of 
 tragic poems on the model of Boccaccio^s Falls of Princes, 
 already imitated by Lydgate. Seven poets at least, with 
 Sackville, contributed tales^ to it, but his poem is poetry 
 of so fine a quality that it stands absolutely alone during 
 these twenty years. The Induction paints the poet's 
 descent into Avernus, and his meeting with Henry 
 Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, whose fate he tells with 
 a grave and inventive imagination, and with the first true 
 music which we hear since Chaucer. Being written in 
 the manner and stanza of the elder poets, this poem has 
 been called the transition between Lydgate and Spenser. 
 But it does not truly belong to the old time; it is as 
 modern as Spenser, and its allegorical representations 
 are in the same manner as those of Spenser. George 
 Gascoigne, whose satire, the Steele Glas, 1576, is our 
 first long satirical poem, deserves mention among a 
 
lOO ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 crowd of poets who came after Sackville. They wrote 
 legends, pieces on the wars and discoveries of the 
 EngUshmen of their day, epitaphs, epigrams, songs, son- 
 nets, elegies, fables, and sets of love poems ; and the best 
 things they did were collected in such miscellaneous 
 collections as \h^ Paradise of Dainty Devices /in 1576. 
 This book, with Tottel's, set on foot both now and in the 
 later years of EHzabeth a crowd of other miscellanies of 
 poetry which represent the vast number of experiments 
 made in Elizabeth's time, in the subjects, the metres, 
 and the various kinds of lyrical poetry. At present, all 
 we can say is that lyrical poetry, and that which we may 
 call " occasional poetry," were now in full motion. The 
 popular Ballads also took a wide range. The registers 
 of the Stationers^ Company prove that there was scarcely 
 any event of the day, nor almost any controversy in lit- 
 erature, poHtics, religion, which was not the subject of 
 verse, and of verse into which imagination strove to enter. 
 The ballad may be said to have done the work of the 
 modern weekly review. It stimulated and informed the 
 popular intellectual life of England. 
 
 (3.) Frequent translations were now made from the 
 classical writers. We know the names of more than 
 twelve men who did this work, and there must have been 
 many more. Already in Henry VIII.'s and Edward VI. 's 
 time, ancient authors had been made English ; and now 
 before 1579, Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Demosthenes, Plu- 
 tarch, and many Greek and Latin plays, were translated. 
 Among the rest, Phaer's Virgil, 1562, Arthur Golding^s 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LltERAtlJIllg ', >;,' >-jp| 
 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1567, and George Turbervile's 
 Historical Epistles of Ovid, 1567, are, and especially the 
 first, remarkable. The English people in this way were 
 brought into contact, more than before, with the classical 
 spirit, and again it had its awakening power. We cannot 
 say that either the fineness or compactness of classic 
 work appeared in these heterogeneous translations, 
 though one curious result of them was the craze which 
 followed, and which Gabriel Harvey strove, fortunately 
 in vain, to impose on Spenser, for reproducing classical 
 metres in English poetry. Nor were the old English 
 poets neglected. Though Chaucer and Lydgate, Lang- 
 land, and the rest, were no longer imitated in this time 
 when fresh creation had begun, they were studied, and 
 they added their impulse of life to original poets like 
 Spenser. 
 
 (4.) Theological Reform stirred men to another kind 
 of literary work. A great number of polemical ballads, 
 pamphlets, and plays issued every year from obscure 
 presses and filled the land. Poets like George Gas- 
 coigne and still more Barnaby Googe, represent in their 
 work the hatred the young men had of the old religious 
 system. It was a spirit which did not do much for 
 literature, but it quickened the habit of composition, 
 and made it easier. The Bible also became common 
 ; property, and its language glided into all theological 
 ( writing and gave it a hterary tone; while the publica- 
 tion of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments or Book o) 
 Martyrs, 1563, gave to the people all over England a 
 
ro^l V; {} ■: : en^Lish literature chap. 
 
 book which, by its simple style, the ease of its story- 
 telling, and its popular charm made the very peasants 
 who heard it read feel what is meant by literature. 
 
 (5.) The history of the country and its manners was 
 not neglected. A whole class of antiquarians wrote 
 steadily, if with some dulness, on this subject. Grafton, l 
 Stow, Holinshed, and others, at least suppHed materials 
 for the study and use of historical dramatists. 
 
 (6.) H\\Q love of stories grtw quickly. The old Eng- 
 lish tales and ballads were eagerly read and collected. 
 Italian tales by various authors were translated and 
 sown so broadcast over London by William Painter in 
 his collection, The Palace of Pleasure^ 1566, by George 
 Turbervile, in his Tragical Tales in verse, and by 
 others, that it is said they were to be bought at every 
 bookstall. The Romances of Spain and Italy poured 
 in, and Amadis de Gaul, and the companion romances 
 the Arcadia of Sannazaro and the Ethiopian Historyy 
 were sources of books Hke Sidney's Arcadia, and, with 
 the classics, supplied niaterials for the pageants. A 
 great number of subjects for prose and poetry were 
 thus made ready for literary men, and prose fiction 
 became possible in English literature. 
 
 (7.) All over Europe, and especially in Italy, now 
 closely linked to England, the Renaissance had pro- 
 duced a wild spirit of exhausting all the possibiHties 
 of human life. Every form, every game of life, was 
 tried, every fancy of goodness or wickedness followed 
 for the fancy's sake. Men said to themselves " Attempt, 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE IO3 
 
 Attempt.** The act accompanied the thought. Eng- 
 land at last shared in this passion, but in English life 
 it was directed. There was a great Hberty given to 
 men to live and do as they pleased, provided the 
 queen was worshipped and there was no conspiracy 
 against the State. That much direction did not apply 
 to purely literary production. Its attemptings were 
 unhmited. Anything, everything was tried, especially 
 in the drama. 
 
 (8.) The masques, pageants, interludes, and plays that 
 were written at this time p.re scarcely to be counted. 
 At every great ceremonial, whenever the queen made 
 a progress or visited one of the great lords or a uni- 
 versity, at the houses of the nobility, and at the Court 
 on all important days, some obscure versifier, or a 
 young scholar at the Inns of Court, at Oxford or at 
 Cambridge, produced a masque or a pageant, or wrote 
 or translated a play. The habit of play-writing became 
 common ; a kind of school, one might almost say a 
 manufacture of plays, arose, which partly accounts for 
 the rapid production, the excellence, and the multitude 
 of plays that we find after 1576. Represented all over 
 England, these masques, pageants, and dramas were 
 seen by the people, who were thus accustomed to take 
 an interest, though of an uneducated kind, in the larger 
 drama that was to follow. The literary men on the 
 other hand ransacked, in order to find subjects and 
 scenes for their pageants, ancient and mediaeval, magi- 
 cal, and modern literature, and many of them in doing 
 
I04 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 SO became not fine but multifarious scholars. The 
 imagination of England was quickened and educated 
 in this way, and as Biblical stories were well known 
 and largely used, the images of oriental life were kept 
 among the materials of dramatic imagination. 
 
 (9.) Another influence bore on Hterature. It was 
 that given by the stories of the voyagers, who, in the 
 new commercial activity of the country, penetrated into 
 remote lands, and saw the strange monsters and savages 
 which the poets now added to the fairies, dwarfs, and 
 giants of the Romances. Before 1579, books had been 
 published on the north-west passage. Frobisher had 
 made his voyages, and Drake had started, to return in 
 1580, to amaze all England with the story of his sail 
 round the world and of the riches of the Spanish Main. 
 We may trace everywhere in Elizabethan literature the 
 impression made by the wonders told by the sailors and 
 captains who explored and fought from the North Pole 
 to the Southern Seas. 
 
 (10.) Then there was the freest possible play of lit- 
 erary criticism. Every wine-shop in London, every 
 room at the university, was filled with the talk of young 
 men on any work which was published and on the manu- 
 scripts which were read. Out of this host emerged the 
 men of genius. Moreover, far apart from these, there 
 were in England now, among all the noise and stir, quiet 
 scholars, such as Contarini and Pole had been in Italy, 
 followers of Erasmus and Colet, precursors of Bacon, 
 who kept the lamp of scholarship burning, and who, 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE lOf 
 
 when literature became beautiful, nurtured and praised 
 it. Nor were the young nobles, who like Surrey had 
 been in Italy and had known what was good, less useful 
 now. There were many men who, when Shakespeare 
 and Spenser came, were able to say — "This is good/' 
 and who drew the new genius into light. 
 
 (ii.) Lastly, we have proof that there was a large 
 number of persons writing who did not publish their 
 works. It was considered at this time, that to write for 
 the public injured a marl, and unless he were driven by 
 poverty he kept his manuscript by him. But things 
 were changed when a great genius like Spenser took the 
 world by storm ; when Lyly's Euphues enchanted court 
 society; when a fine gentleman like Sir Philip Sidney 
 was known to be a writer. Literature was made the 
 fashion, and the disgrace being taken from it, the pro- 
 duction became enormous. Manuscripts written and 
 laid by were at once sent forth ; and when the rush 
 began it grew by its own force. Those who had previ- 
 ously been kept from writing by its unpopularity now 
 took it up eagerly, and those who had written before 
 wrote twice as much now. The great improvement also 
 in literary quality is also accounted for by this — that j 
 men strove to equal such work as Sidney's or Spenser's, ' 
 and that a wider and more exacting criticism arose. 
 Nor must one omit to say, that owing to this employ- 
 ment of life on so vast a number of subjects, and to the 
 voyages, and to the new hteratures searched into, and to 
 the heat of theological strife, a multitude of new words 
 
I06 V ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 streamed into the language, and enriched the vocabulary 
 of imagination. Shakespeare uses 15,000 words. 
 
 63. The Later Literature of Elizabeth's Reign, 1579- 
 1602, begins with the publication of Lyly's Euphues^ 
 1579, and Spenser's Shepheards Calendar^ also in 1579, 
 and with the writing of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and 
 his Apology for Foe trie, 15 80-1. It will be best to 
 leave the poem of Spenser aside till we come to write 
 of the poets. 
 
 The Euphues was the work of John Lyly, poet and 
 dramatist. It is in two parts, Euphues the Anatomie oj 
 . Wit, and Euphues and his England, In six years it ran 
 through five editions, so great was its popularity. Its 
 prose style is odd to an excess, " precious " and sweet- 
 ened, but it has care and charm, and its very faults were 
 of use in softening the solemnity and rudeness of previ- 
 ous prose. The story is long, and is more a loose frame- 
 work into which Lyly could fit his thoughts on love, 
 friendship, education, and religion, than a true story. It 
 made its mark because it fell in with all the fantastic and 
 changeable life of the time. Its far-fetched conceits, its 
 extravagance of gallantry, its endless metaphors from the 
 classics and especially from natural history, its curious 
 and gorgeous descriptions of dress, and its pale imitation 
 of chivalry, were all reflected in the life and talk and 
 dress of the court of Elizabeth. It became the fashion 
 to talk " Euphuism," and, like the Utopia of More, Lyly's 
 book has created an English word. 
 
 The Arcadia was the work of Sir Philip Sidney, and 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE lO/ 
 
 though written about 1580, did not appear till after his 
 death. It is more poetic and more careless in style than 
 the Euphues^ but it endeavours to get rid of the mere 
 quaintness for quaintness' sake, and of the far-fetched 
 fancies, of Euphuism. It is less the image of the time 
 than of the man. We know that bright and noble figure, / 
 the friend of Spenser, the lover of Stella, the last of the 
 old knights, the poet, the critic, and the Christian, who, 
 wounded to the death, gave up the cup of water to a 
 dying soldier. We find his whole spirit in the story of 
 the Arcadia, in the first two books and part of the third, 
 which alone were written by him. It is a pastoral ro- 
 mance, after the fashion of the Spanish romances, col- 
 oured by his love of his sister. Lady Pembroke, and by 
 the scenery of Wilton under the woods of which he wrote 
 it. The characters are real, but the story is confused 
 by endless digressions. The sentiment is too fine and 
 delicate for the world of action. The descriptions are 
 picturesque ; a quaint or poetic thought or an epigram 
 appear in every line. There is no real art in it, nor is it 
 true prose. But it is so full of poetical thought that it 
 became a mine into which poets dug for subjects. 
 
 64. Poetic Criticism began before the pubhcation of 
 the Faerie Queene, and its rise shows the interest now 
 awakened in poetry. The Discourse of English Foetrie, 
 1 5 ^6, written by WiUiam Webbe " to stirre up some other 
 of meet abilitie to bestow travell on the matter," was 
 followed three years after by the Art of English Foesie, 
 attributed to George Puttenham, an elaborate book, 
 
I08 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 "written," he says, "to help the courtiers and the gen- 
 tlewomen of the court to write good poetry, that the art 
 may become vulgar for all Englishmen's use," and the 
 phrase marks the interest now taken in poetry by the 
 highest society in England. Sidney himself joined in 
 this critical movement. His Apology for Poetrie, the 
 style of which is much more like prose than that of his 
 Arcadia, defended against Stephen Gosson's School of 
 Abuse in which poetry and plays were attacked from the 
 Puritan point of view, the nobler uses of poetry. But 
 he, with his contemporary, Gabriel Harvey, was so en- 
 thralled by the classical traditions that he also defended 
 the "unities" and attacked all mixture of tragedy and 
 comedy, that is, he supported all that Shakespeare was 
 destined to violate. The Defence of RhymCy written 
 much later by Samuel Daniel, and which finally destroyed 
 the attempt to bring classical metres into our poetry; 
 and also Campion's effort, in his Observations, in favour 
 of rhymeless verse, must be mentioned here. Their 
 matter belongs to this time. 
 
 65. Later Prose Literature. — (i.) Theological Litera- 
 ture remained for some years after 1580 only a literature 
 of pamphlets. Puritanism, in its attack on the stage, 
 and in the Martin Marprelate controversy upon episcopal 
 government in the Church, flooded England with small 
 books. Lord Bacon even joined in the latter contro- 
 versy, and Nash the dramatist made himself famous in 
 the war by the vigour and fierceness of his wit. Period- ' 
 ical writing was, as it were, started on its course. Over 
 
IIF THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE lOQ 
 
 this troubled and multitudinous sea rose at last the 
 stately work of Richard Hooker. It was in 1594 tha„ 
 the first four books of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 
 a defence of the Church against the Puritans, were given 
 to the world. Before his death he finished the other 
 four. The book has remained ever since a standard 
 work. It is as much moral and political as theological. 
 Its style is grave, clear, and often musical. He adorned 
 it with the figures of poetry, but he used them with 
 temperance, and the grand and rolling rhetoric with 
 which he often concludes an argument is kept for its 
 right place. On the whole, it is the first monument of 
 splendid literary prose that we possess. 
 
 (2.) We may place beside it, as^ other great prose of 
 Ehzabeth's later time, the development of The Essay in 
 Lord Bacon's Essayj, 1597, and Ben Jonson's Dis- 
 coveries, published after his death. The highest literary 
 merit of Bacon's Essays is their combination of charm 
 and of poetic prose with conciseness of expression and 
 fulness of thought. But the oratorical and ideal manner 
 in which, with his variety, he sometimes wrote, is best 
 seen in his New Atlantis, that imaginary land in the 
 unreachable seas. 
 
 (3.) The Literature of Travel wdi^ carried on by the 
 publication in 1589 of Hakluyt's Navigation, Voyages, 
 and Discoveries of the English Nation, The influence of 
 a compilation of this kind, containing the great deeds of 
 the English on the seas, has been felt ever since in the 
 literature of fiction and poetry. 
 
no ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 (4.) In the Tales, which poured out like a flood from 
 the "university wits," from such men as Peele, an& 
 Lodge, and Greene, we find the origin of Enghsh fiction, 
 and the subjects of many of our plays ; while the fan- 
 tastic desire to revive the practices of chivalry which was 
 expressed in the Arcadia, found food in the continuous 
 translation of romances, chiefly of the Charlemagne 
 cycle, but now more from Spain than from France ; and 
 in the reading of the Italian poets, Boiardo, Tasso, and 
 Ariosto, who supplied a crowd of our books with the 
 machinery of magic, and with conventional descriptions 
 of nature and of women's beauty. 
 
 (i(i, Edmund Spenser. — The later Ehzabethan poetry 
 begins with the Shepheards Calendar of Spenser. 
 Spenser was born in London in 1552, and educated at 
 the Merchant Taylors' Grammar School, which he left 
 for Cambridge in April, 1569. There seems to be evi- 
 dence that in this year the Sonnets of Petrarca and the 
 Visions of Bellay afterwards published in 15 91, were 
 written by him for a miscellany of verse and prose issued 
 by Van der Noodt, a refugee Flemish physician. At 
 sixteen or seventeen, then, he began literary work. At 
 college Gabriel Harvey, a scholar and critic, and the 
 Hobbinoll of Spenser's works, and Edward Kirke, the 
 E. K. of the Shepheards Calendar, were his friends. In 
 1576 he took his degree of M.A., and before he returned 
 to London spent some time in the wilds of Lancashire, 
 where he fell in love with the " Rosalind " of his poetry, 
 a "fair widowe's daughter of the glen.'* ,His love was 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE III 
 
 . not returned, a rival interfered, but he clung fast until 
 \his marriage to this early passion. His disappointment 
 drove him to the South, and there, JjTp, he was made 
 known through Leicester to Leicester's nephew, Philip 
 Sidney. With him, and perhaps at Pgnshurst, the Shep- 
 heards Calendar was finished for the press, and the 
 Faerie Queene conceived. The publication of the for- 
 mer work, 1579, made Spenser the first poet of the day, 
 and so fresh and musical, and so abundant in new life 
 were its twelve eclogues, that men felt that at last Eng- 
 land had given birth to a poet as original, and with as 
 much metrical art as Chaucer. Each month of the year 
 had its own eclogue ; some were concerned with his 
 shattered love, two of them were fables, three of them 
 satires on the lazy clergy ; one was devoted to fair Eliza's 
 praise : one, the Oak and the Briar, prophesies his 
 mastery over allegory. The others belong to rustic 
 shepherd Hfe. The English of Chaucer is imitated, but 
 the work is full of a new spirit, and as Spenser had begun 
 with translating Petrarca, so here, in two of the eclogues, 
 he imitates Clement Marot. The " Puritanism " of the 
 poem is the same as that of the Faerie Queene which he 
 now began to compose. Save in abhorrence of Rome, 
 Spenser does not share in the politics of Puritanism. 
 Nor does he separate himself from the world. He is as 
 much at home in society and with the arts as any literary 
 courtier of the day. He was Puritan in his attack on the 
 sloth and pomp of the clergy ; but his moral ideal, built 
 up, as it was, out of Christianity and Platonism, rose far 
 above the narrower ideal of Puritanism. 
 
112 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 In the next year, 1580, he went to Ireland with Lord 
 Grey of Wilton as secretary, and afterwards saw and 
 learnt that condition of things which he described in his 
 View of the Present State of Ireland, He was made 
 Clerk of Degrees in the Court of Chancery in 1581, and 
 Clerk of the Council of Munster in 1586, and it was then 
 that the manor and castle of Kilcolman were granted to 
 him. Here, at the foot of the Galtees, and bordered to 
 the north by the wild country, the scenery of which is 
 frequently painted in the Faerie Queene, and in whose 
 woods and savage places such adventures constantly took 
 place in the service of Elizabeth as are recorded in the 
 Faerie Queene ^ the first three books of that great poem 
 were finished. 
 
 67. The Faerie Queene. — The plan of the poem is 
 described in Spenser's prefatory letter to Raleigh. The 
 twelve books were to tell the warfare of twelve Knights, 
 in whom twelve virtues were represented. They are 
 sent forth from the court of Gloriana, Queen of Fairy- 
 land, and their warfare is against the vices and errors, im- 
 personated, which opposed those virtues. In Arthur, the 
 Prince, the Magnificence of the wRole of virtue is repre- 
 sented, and he was at last to unite himself in marriage to 
 the Faerie Queene, that divine glory of God to which all 
 human act and thought aspired.; Six books of this plan 
 were finished ; the legends of Holiness, Temperance, and 
 Chastity, of Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. The two 
 posthumous cantos on MutabiUty seem to Itave been part 
 of a seventh legend, on Constancy, and their splendid 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II 3 
 
 work makes us the more regret that the story of the 
 poem being finished is not true. Alongside of the spirit- 
 ual allegory is the historical one, in which Elizabeth is 
 Gloriana, and Mary of Scotland Dues5.a ; and Leicester, 
 and at limes Sidne^J^rince Arthur, and Lord Grey is 
 Arthegall, and Raleigh Timias, and Philip II. the Soldan, 
 or Grantorto. In the midst, other allegories slip in, re- 
 ferring to events of the day, and Ehzabeth becomes 
 Belphoebe and Britomart, and Mary is Radegund, and 
 Sidney is Calidore, and Alengon is Braggadochio. At 
 least, these are considered probable attributions. The 
 dreadful " justice " done in Ireland, by the " iron man," 
 and the wars in Belgium, and Norfolk's conspiracy, and 
 the Armada, and the trial of Mary are also shadowed 
 forth. 
 
 The allegory^ clear in the first two books. After- 
 wards it is troubled with digressions, sub-allegories, gene- 
 alogies, with anything that Spenser's fancy led him to 
 introduce. Stories are dropt and never taken up again, 
 and the whole tale is so tangled that it loses the interest 
 of narrative. But it retains the interest of exquisite alle- 
 
 (gory. It is the poem of the noble powers of the huraani 
 soul struggling towards union with God, and warring r 
 against all the forms of evil ; and these powers become \ 
 real personages, whose lives and battles Spenser tells in 
 verse so musical and so gliding, so delicately wrought, so 
 rich in imaginative ornament, and so inspired with the 
 finer life of beauty, that he has been called the poets' 
 Poet. But he is the poet of all men who love poetry. 
 
114 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA?. 
 
 Descriptions like those of the House of Pride and the 
 Mask of Cupid, and of the Months, are so vivid in form 
 and colour, that they have always made subjects for 
 artists ; while the allegorical personages are, to the very 
 last detail, wrought out by an imagination which de- 
 scribes not only the general character, but the special 
 characteristics of the Virtues or the Vices, of the Months 
 of the year, or of the Rivers of England. In its ideal 
 whole, the poem represents the new love of chivalry, 
 of classical learning; the delight in mystic theories of 
 love and religion, in allegorical schemes, in splendid 
 spectacles and pageants, in wild adventure ; the love of 
 England, the hatred of Spain, the strange worship of the 
 queen, even Spenser's own new love. It takes up and 
 uses the popular legends of fairies, dwarfs, and giants, all 
 the recovered romance and machinery of the Italian 
 epics, and mingles them up with the wild scenery of 
 Ireland, with the savages and wonders of the New World. 
 Almost the whole spirit of the Renaissance under Eliza- 
 beth, except its coarser and baser elements, is in its 
 pages. Of anything impure, or ugly, or violent, there 
 is no trace. And Spenser adds to all his own sacred 
 love of love, his own pre-eminent sense of the loveliness 
 of loveHness, walking through the whole of this woven 
 world of faerie — 
 
 " With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace.* 
 
 The first three books were finished in Ireland, and 
 Raleigh listened to them in 1589 at Kilcolman Castle, 
 
IV The ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 11$ 
 
 among the alder shades of the^ river Mulla that fed the 
 lake below the castle. Delighted with the poem, he 
 brought Spenser to England, and the queen, the court, 
 and the whole of England soon shared m Raleigh's 
 delight. It was the first great ideal poem that England 
 had produced ; it places, him side by side with Milton, 
 but on a throne built of wholly different material. It has 
 never ceased to make poets, and it will live, as he said 
 in his dedication to the queen, " with the eternitie of her 
 fame." 
 
 68. Spenser's Minor Poems. — The next year, 1591, 
 Spenser, being still in England, collected his smaller 
 poems, most of which seem to be early work, and 
 published them. Among them Mother HubbercTs Tale 
 is a remarkable satire, somewhat in the manner of 
 Chaucer, on society, on the evils of a beggar soldiery, of 
 the Church, of the court, and of misgovernment. The 
 Ruins of Timey and still more the Tears of the Muses, 
 support the statement that literature was looked on coldly 
 previous to 1580. Sidney had died in 1586, and three of 
 these poems bemoan his death. The others are of slight 
 importance, and the whole collection was entitled Com- 
 plaintSr His Daphnaida seems to have also appeared in 
 1 591. Returning to Ireland, he gave an account of his 
 visit and of the court of Elizabeth in Colin Cloufs come 
 Home again^ and at last, after more than a year's pursuit, 
 won, in 1594, his second love for his wife, and found with 
 her perfect happiness. A long series of lovely " Sonnets " 
 — the Amorettiy records the progress of his wooing ; and 
 
Il6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the Eptthalamion, his exultant marriage hymn, is the most 
 glorious love-song in the English tongue. These three 
 were published in 1595. At the close of 1595 he brought 
 to England in a second visit the last three books of the 
 Faerie Queene, The next year he spent in London, and 
 published these books, as well as the Prothalamion on 
 the marriage of Lord Worcester's daughters, the Hymns 
 on Love and Beauty and on Heavenly Love and Beauty, 
 The two first hymns were rapturously written in his 
 youth; the two others, now written, and with even 
 greater rapture, enshrine that love philosophy of Petrarca 
 which makes earthly love a ladder to the love of God. 
 The close of his life was sorrowful. In 1598, Tyrone's 
 rebellion drove him out of Ireland. Kilcolman was 
 sacked and burnt, one of his children perished in the 
 flames, and Spenser and his family fled for their lives to 
 England. Broken-hearted, poor, but not forgotten, the 
 poet died in a London tavern. All his fellows went with 
 his body to the grave, where, close by Chaucer, he Hes in 
 Westminster Abbey. London, "his most kindly nurse," 
 takes care also of his dust, and England keeps him in 
 her love. 
 
 69. Later Elizabethan Poetry : Translations. — There 
 are three translators that take literary rank among the 
 crowd that carried on the work of the earlier time. Two 
 mark the influence of Italy, one the more powerful influ- 
 •ence of the Greek spirit. Sir John Harington in 1591 
 translated Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Fairfax in 1600 
 translated TdiS^o'?, Jerusalem, and his book is " one of the 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II / 
 
 glories of Elizabeth's reign." But the noblest translation 
 is that of Homer's whole work by George Chapman, the 
 dramatist, the first part of which appeared in 1598. The 
 vivid Hfe and energy of the time, its creative power and 
 its force, are expressed in this poem, which is " more an 
 EHzabethan tale written about Achilles and Ulysses " 
 than a translation. The rushing gallop of the long four- 
 teen-syllable stanza in which it is written has the fire and 
 swiftness of Homer, but it has not his directness or dig- 
 nity. Its " inconquerable quaintness" and diffuseness 
 are wholly unlike the pure form and light and measure ot 
 Greek work. But it is a distinct poem of such power 
 that it will excite and delight all lovers of poetry, as it 
 excited and delighted Keats. John Florio's Translation 
 of the Essays of Montaigne, 1603, and North's Plutarch, 
 are also, though in prose, to be mentioned here, because 
 Shakespeare used the books, and because we must mark 
 Montaigne's influence on English hterature even before 
 his retranslation by Charles Cotton. 
 
 70. The Four Phavses of Poetry after 1579. — Spenser 
 reflected in his poems the romantic spirit of the English 
 Renaissance. The other poetry of Elizabeth's reign 
 reflected the whole of Enghsh Life. The best way to 
 arrange it — omitting as yet the Drama — is in an order 
 parallel to the growth of the national life, and the proof 
 that it is the best way is, that on the whole such an his- 
 torical order is a true chronological order. First, then^ 
 if we compare England after 1580, as writers have often 
 done, to an ardent youth, we shall find in the poetry of 
 
Il8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the first years that followed that date all the elements of 
 youth. Jt js a poetry of love, and romance, and imag- 
 ination, — of Romeo and Juliet. Secondly, and later on, 
 when EngHshmen grew older in feeling, their enthusiasm, 
 which had flitted here and there in action and literature 
 over all kinds of subjects, settled down into a steady 
 enthusiasm for England itself. The country entered on 
 its early manhood, and parallel with this there is the 
 great outbreak of historical plays, and a set Of poets whom 
 I will call the Patriotic Poets. Thirdly, and later still, 
 the fire and strength of the people, becoming inward, 
 resulted in a graver and more thoughtful national life, 
 and parallel with this are the tragedies of Shakespeare 
 and the poets who have been called philosophical. 
 These three classes of poets overlapped one another, 
 and grew up gradually, but on the whole their succes- 
 sion is the image of a real succession of national thought 
 and emotion. 
 
 A fourth and separate phase does not represent, as these 
 do, a new national life, a new religion, and new politics, 
 but the despairing struggle of the old faith against the 
 new. There were numbers of men, such as Wordsworth 
 has finely sketched in old NortDn^in the Doe of Ry Is tone, 
 who vainly and sorrowfully strove against all the new 
 national elements. Robert Southwell, of Norfolk, a 
 Jesuit priest, was the poet of Roman Catholic England. 
 Imprisoned for three years, racked ten times, and finally 
 executed, he wrote, while confessor to Lady Arundel, a 
 number of poems published at various intervals, and 
 
IV 
 
 THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE II9 
 
 finally collected under the title, Sf. Petet^s Complaint^ 
 Mary Magdalen's Tears ^ with other works of the Author, 
 R.S. The MceontcBy and a short prose work Marie Mag- 
 dalen's Funerall Tea^-s, became also very popular. It 
 marks not only the large Roman CathoHc element in the 
 country, but also the strange contrasts of the time that 
 eleven editions of books with these titles were published 
 between 1595 and 1609, at a time when, the Venus and 
 Adonis of^ jiakespeare led the way for a multitude of 
 poems — following on ^zx\o^^\^J Ier£jmd.Leander2xA 
 Lodgers Glaucus and Scylla — which sang devotedly of 
 love and amorous joy. ^ "^^ - 
 
 71. The Love Poetry. — I have called it by this name 
 because all its best work is almost limited to that subject 
 — the subject of youth. The Love sonnets, written in 
 a series, are a feature of the time. The best are Sidney's 
 Astrophel and Stella, Daniel's Delia, Constable's Diana, 
 Drayton's Idea, Spenser's Amoretti, and Shakesjjeare.'s- 
 Sofinets. More than twelve collections of these love 
 sonnets, each dedicated to one lady, and often a hun- 
 dred in number, were published between 1593 and 1596, 
 and these had been preceded by many others. 
 
 The Miscellanies, to which I have already alluded, 
 and the best of which were The Passionate Pilgrim, 
 England's Helicon, and Davison's Rhapsody y were 
 scarcely less numerous than the Song-books published 
 with music, full of delightful lyrics. The wonder is that 
 the lyrical level in such a multitude of short poems is 
 so high throughout. Some songs reach a first-rate ex- 
 
I20 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 cellence, but even the least good have the surprising 
 spirit of poetry in them. The best of them are " old 
 and plain, and dallying with the innocence of love," 
 childlike in their natural sweetness and freshness, but 
 full also of a southern ardour of passion. Shakespeare's 
 excel the others in their gay rejoicing, their firm reality, 
 their exquisite ease, and when in the plays, gain a 
 new beauty from their fitness to their dramatic place. 
 Others possess a quaint pastoralism like shepherd life 
 
 /in porcelain, such as Marlowe's well-known song, " Come 
 live with me, and be my love ; " others a splendour of 
 love and beauty as in Lodge's Song of Rosaline, and 
 Spenser's on his marriage. To specialise the various 
 kinds would be too long, for there never was in our 
 land a richer outburst of lyrical ravishment ^ and fancy. 
 England was like a grove in spring, full of birds in 
 revel and solace. Love poems of a longer kind were 
 also made, such as Marlowe's Hero and Leander, the 
 Venus and Adonis and, if we may date them here, the 
 Elegies of John Donne.' I mention only a few of these 
 poems, the mark of which is a luscious sensuousness. 
 There were also religious poems, the reflection of the 
 Puritan and Church elements in English society. They 
 were collected under such titles as the Handful of 
 Honeysuckles, the Poor Widow's Mite, Psalms and 
 Sonnets, and there are some good things among them 
 written by William Hunnis. 
 ^'> 72. The Patriotic Poets. — Among all this poetry of 
 ' Romance, Religion, and Love, rose a poetry which 
 
XV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 121 
 
 devoted itself to the glory of England. It was chiefly 
 historical, and as it may be said to have had its germ 
 in the Mirror for Magistrates, so it had its perfect 
 flower in the historical dramas of Shakespeare. Men 
 had now begun to have a great pride in England. She 
 had stepped into the foremost rank, had outwitted 
 France, subdued internal foes, beaten and humbled 
 Spain on every sea. Hence the history of the land 
 became precious, and the very rivers, hills, and plains 
 honourable, and to be sung and praised in verse. This 
 poetic impulse is best represented in the works of three 
 men — William Warner, Samuel Daniel, and Michael 
 Drayton. Born within a few years of each other, about 
 1560, they all lived beyond the century, and the national 
 v poetry they set on foot lasted when the romantic poetry 
 lost its wealth and splendour. 
 
 Win i am Warner's great book was Albion's England, 
 1586, a history of England in fourteen-syllable verse 
 from the Deluge to Queen Elizabeth. It is clever, 
 humorous, now grave, now gay, crowded with stories, 
 and runs to 10,000 lines. Its popularity was great, 
 and the English in which it was written deserved it. 
 Such stories in it as Argentile and Curan, and the 
 Patient Countess, prove Warner to have had a true, 
 pathetic vein of poetry. His English is not however so 
 good as that of " well-languaged Daniel," who, among 
 tragedies and pastoral comedies, the noble series of 
 sonnets to Deha and poems of pure fancy, wrote The 
 Complaint of Rosamond, far more poetical than his 
 
122 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP, 
 
 Steadier, even prosaic Civil Wars of York and Lan- 
 caster. Spenser saw in him a new " shepherd of poetry 
 who did far surpass the rest," and Coleridge says that 
 the style of his Hymen's Triumph may be declared 
 " imperishable English." Of the three the easiest poet 
 was Drayton. The Barons'* Wars^ England's Heroical 
 Epistles^ iS97f The Miseries of Queen Margaret, and 
 Four Legends, together with the briUiant Ballad of 
 Agincourt prove his patriotic fervour. Not content with 
 these, he set himself to glorify the whole of his land in 
 the Polyolbion, thirty books, and nearly 100,000 hnes. 
 It is a description in Alexandrines of the "tracts, 
 mountains, forests, and other parts of this renowned 
 isle of Britain, with intermixture of the most remark- 
 able stories, antiquities, wonders, pleasures, and com- 
 modities of the same, digested into a poem." It was 
 not a success, though it deserved success. Its great 
 length was against it, but the real reason was that this 
 kind of poetry had had its day. It appeared in 1613,- 
 in James I.'s reign. He, as well as Daniel, did other 
 work. Indeed Drayton is a striking instance of the way 
 in which these divisions, which I have made for the sake 
 of a general order, overlapped one another. He is as 
 much the love poet as the patriotic poet in his eclogues 
 of 1593 and in his later Idea; he is also a rehgious, a 
 satirical, a lyrical, and a fairy poet. He plays on every 
 kind of harp. 
 
 73. Philosophical Poets. — Before the date of the 
 Polyolbion a change had come. As the patriotic poets 
 
IV THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE 1 23 
 
 on the whole came after the romantic, so the patriotic, 
 on the whole, were followed by the philosophical poets. 
 The land was settled ; enterprise ceased to be the first 
 thing ; men sat down to think, and in poetry questions 
 of religious and political philosophy were treated with 
 " sen tenti ous reasoning, grave, subtle, and condensed." 
 Sh akespear e, in his passage from comedy to tragedy, in 
 1 601, illustrates this change. The two poets who best 
 represent it are Sir Jno. Davies and Fulke Greville, 
 Lord Brooke. In Davies himself we find an instance of 
 it. His earher poem of the Orchestra, 1596, in which 
 the whole world is explained as a dance, is as exultant 
 as Spenser. His later poem, 1599, is compact and vig- 
 orous reasoning, for the most part without fancy. Its 
 very title, Nosce te ipsum — Know Thyself — and its 
 divisions, i. "On humane learning," 2. "The immor- 
 tality of the soul" — mark the alteration. Two httle 
 poems, one of Bacon's, on the Life of Man, as a bubble, 
 and one of Sir Henry Wotton's, on the Character of a 
 Happy Life, are instances of the same change. It is still 
 more marked in Lord Brooke's long, obscure poems On 
 Human Learning, on Wars, on Monarchy, and on Relig- 
 io7i. They are political and historical treatises, not 
 poems, and all in them, said Lamb, " is made frozen 
 and rigid by intellect." Apart from poetry, "they are 
 worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit 
 on political science which was to produce the riper 
 speculations of Hobbes, Harrington, and Locke." 
 Brooke too, in a happier mood, was a lyrist; and his 
 
124 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 collection, Ccelica^ has some of the graces of love and 
 its imagination. 
 
 74. Satirical Poetry, which lives best when imaginative 
 creation begins to decay, arose also towards the end of 
 Elizabeth's reign. It had been touched in the begin- 
 ning before Spenser by Gascoigne's Steele Glas, but had 
 no further growth save in prose until 1593, when John 
 Donne is supposed to have written some of his Satires, 
 Thomas Lodge, Joseph Hall, John Marston, wrote satir- 
 ical poems in the last part of the sixteenth century. 
 These satires are all written in a rugged, broken style, 
 supposed to be the proper style for satire. Donne's are 
 the best, and are so because he was a true poet. Though 
 his work was mostly done in the reign of James I., and 
 though his poetical reputation, and his influence (which 
 was very great) did not reach their height till after the 
 publication in 1633 of all his poems, he really belongs, 
 by dint of his youthful sensuousness, of his imaginative 
 flame, and of his sad and powerful thought, to the Eliza- 
 bethans. So also does WilHam Drummond, of Haw- 
 thornden, whose work was done in the reign of James I., 
 and whose name is linked by poetry and friendship to 
 Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. Both are the 
 result of the Elizabethan influence extending to Scotland. 
 Drummond's sonnets and madrigals have some of the 
 grace of Sidney, and he rose at intervals into grave and 
 noble verse, as in his sonnet on John the Baptist. We 
 turn now to the drama, which in this age grew into 
 magnificence. 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 25 
 
 THE DRAMA 
 
 75. Early Dramatic Representation in England. — 
 The English Drama grew up through the Mystery and 
 the Miracle play, the Morality and the Interlude, the 
 rude farce of the strolling players and the pageant. 
 The Mystery was the representation (at first in or near 
 the Church, and by the clergy ; and then in the towns, 
 and by the laity) of the events of the Old and New 
 Testaments which bore on the Fall and the Redemption 
 of Man. ^The Miracle play, though distinct elsewhere 
 from the Mystery, was the common name of both in 
 England, and was the representation of some legendary 
 story of a saint or martyr. These stories gave more 
 freedom of speech, a more worldly note, and a greater 
 range of characters to the mystery plays. They also 
 supplied a larger opportunity for the comic element. The 
 Miracle plays of England fell before long into two classes, 
 represented at the feasts of Christmas Day and Easter 
 Day; and about 1262 the town-guilds took them into 
 their hands. At Christmas the Birth of Christ was rep- 
 resented, and the events which made it necessary, back 
 to the Fall of Man. At Easter the Passion was repre- 
 sented in every detail up to the Ascension, and the play 
 often began with the raising of Lazarus. Sometimes even 
 the Baptism was brought in, and finally, the Last Judg- 
 ment was added to the double series, which thus em- 
 braced the whole history of man from the creation to the 
 close. About the beginning of the fourteenth century 
 
126 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 these two series were brought together into one, and 
 acted on Corpus Christi Day on a great moveable stage 
 in the open spaces of the towns. The whole series con- 
 sisted of a number of short plays written frequently by 
 different authors, and each guild took the play which 
 suited it best. In a short time, there was scarcely a 
 town of any importance in England from Newcastle to 
 Exeter which had not its Corpus Christi play, and the 
 representations lasted from one day to eight days. Of 
 these sets of plays we possess the Towneley plays, 32 in 
 all, those of York, 48 in all, those of Chester, 24 in all, 
 and a casual collection, called of Coventry, of later and 
 unconnected plays. Of course, these sets only represent 
 a small portion of the Miracle plays of England. It is 
 not improbable that every little town had its own maker 
 of them. Any play that pleased was carried from the 
 town to the castle, from the castle, it may be, to the 
 court. The castle chaplain sometimes composed them : 
 the king kept players of them and scenery for them. 
 On the whole this irregular drama lasted, if we take in 
 its Anglo-Norman beginnings in French and Latin, for 
 nearly 500 years, from mo, when we first hear at St. 
 Albans of the Miracle play of St. Catherine, to the reign 
 of Henry III., when The Harrowing of Hell, our first 
 extant religious drama in English, was acted, and then 
 to 1580, when we last hear of the representation of a 
 Miracle play at Coventry. 
 
 76. Separate plays preceded and existed alongside 
 of these large series. Not only on the days of Christ- 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 12/ 
 
 mas, Easter, and Corpus Christi were plays acted, but 
 plays were made for separate feasts, saints' days, and 
 the turns of the year, and these had the character of 
 the counties where they were made. The villages took 
 them up, and soon began to ask for secular as well as 
 religious representations at their fairs and merry-mak- 
 ings. The strolling players answered the demand, and 
 secular subjects began to be treated with romantic or 
 comic aims, and with some closeness to natural life. 
 We have a play about Robin Hood of the sixteenth 
 century, acted on May Day; the Play of St George; 
 the Play of the Wake on St. John's Eve. Some of the 
 farcical parts of the Miracle plays, isolated from the 
 rest, were acted, and we have a dramatic fragment 
 taken from the very secular romance of Dame Siriz, 
 which dates from the time of Edward I. We may be 
 sure it was not the only one. 
 
 77. The Morality begins as we come to the reign 
 of Edward III. We hear of the Play of the Pater- 
 noster, and of one of its series, the Play of Laziness. 
 But the oldest extant are of the time of Henry VI. 
 The Castle of Constancy ; Humanity ; Spirit, Will, and 
 Understanding — these titles partly explain what the 
 Morality was. It was a play in which the characters 
 were the Vices and Virtues, with the addition after- 
 wards of allegorical personages, such as Riches, Good 
 Deeds, Confession, Death, and any human condition or 
 quality needed for the play. These characters were 
 brought together in a rough story, at the end of whicli 
 
128 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Virtue triumphed, or some moral principle was estab- 
 lished. The later dramatic fool grew up in the Moral- 
 ities out of a personage called "The Vice," and the 
 humorous element was introduced by the retaining of 
 "The Devil" from the Miracle play and by making 
 The Vice torment him. We draw nearer then in the 
 Morality to the regular drama. Its story had to be 
 invented, a proper plot had to be conceived, a clear 
 end fixed upon, to produce which the allegorical char- 
 acters acted on one another. We are on the very 
 verge of the natural drama; and so close was the 
 relation that the acting of Moralities did not die out 
 till about the end of EUzabeth's reign. A certain tran- 
 sition to the regular drama may be observed in them 
 when historical characters, celebrated for a virtue or 
 vice, were introduced instead of the virtue or the 
 vice, as when Aristides took the place of Justice. 
 Moreover, as the heat of the struggle of the Reforma- 
 tion increased, the Morality was used to support a side. 
 Real men and women were shown under the thin cloaks 
 of its allegorical characters. The stage was becoming a 
 living power when this began. 
 
 78. The Interludes must next be noticed. There had 
 been interludes in the Miracle plays, short, humorous 
 pieces, interpolated for the amusement of the people. 
 These were continued in the Moralities, and were made 
 closer still to popular life. It occurred to John Hey- 
 wooD to identify himself with this form of drama, and to 
 raise the Interludes into a place in literature. In his 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 29 
 
 hands, from 1520 to 1540, the Interlude became a kind 
 of farce, and he wrote several for the amusement of the 
 court of Henry VIII. He drew the characters from real 
 life ; in many cases he gave them the names of men and 
 women, but he retained " the Vice " as a personage. 
 
 79. The Regular Drama: its First Stage. — These 
 were the beginnings of the English Drama. To trace 
 the many and various windings of the way from the 
 Interludes of Heywood to the regular drama of Elizabeth 
 were too long and too involved a work for this book. 
 We need only say that the first pure English comedy 
 was Ralph Roister Doister, written by Nicholas Udall, 
 master of Eton, known to have been acted before 155 1, 
 but not published till 1566. It is our earliest picture of 
 London manners ; it is divided into regular acts and 
 scenes, and is made in rhyme. The first English tragedy 
 is GorboduCy or Ferrex and Porrex, written by Sackville 
 and Norton, and represented in 1561. The story was 
 taken from British legend ; the method followed that of 
 Seneca. A few tragedies on the same classical model fol- 
 lowed, but before long this classical type of plays died out. 
 
 For twenty years or so, from 1560 to 1580, the drama 
 was learning its way by experiments. Moralities were 
 still made, comedies, tragi-comedies, farces, tragedies ; 
 and sometimes tragedy, farce, comedy, and morality were 
 rolled into one play. The verse of the drama was as 
 unsettled as its form. The plays were written in dog- 
 gerel, in the fourteen-syllable line, in prose, and in a ten- 
 syllable verse, and these were sometimes mixed in the 
 
 K 
 
130 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 same play. They were acted chiefly at the Universities, 
 the Inns of Court, the Court, and after 1576 by players 
 in the theatres. Out of this confusion arose 1580-8 
 (i) two sets of dramatic writers, the "University Wits" 
 and the theatrical playwrights; (2) a distinct dramatic 
 verse, the blank verse destined to be used by Marlowe, 
 Peele, and Greene ; and (3) the licensed theatre. 
 
 80. The Theatre. — A patent was given in 1574 to 
 the Earl of Leicester's servants to act plays in any town 
 in England, and they built in 1576 the Blackfriars Thea- 
 tre. In the same year two others were set up in the 
 fields about Shoreditch — "The Theatre" and "The 
 Curtain." The Globe Theatre, built for Shakespeare 
 and his fellows in 1599, may stand as a type of the rest. 
 In the form of a hexagon outside, it was circular within, 
 and open to the weather, except above the stage. The 
 play began at three o'clock; the nobles and ladies sat 
 in boxes or in stools on the stage, the people stood in 
 the pit or yard. The stage itself, strewn with rushes, 
 was a naked room, with a blanket for a curtain. Wooden 
 imitations of animals, towers, woods, houses, were all the 
 scenery used, and a board, stating the place of action, 
 was hung out from the top when the scene changed. 
 Boys acted the female parts. It was only after the* 
 Restoration that movable scenery and actresses were 
 introduced. No "pencil's aid" supplied the landscape 
 of Shakespeare's plays. The forest of Arden, the castle 
 of Macbeth, were " seen only by the intellectual eye." 
 
 81. The Second Stage of the Drama ranges from 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA' 13 1 
 
 1580 to 1596. It includes the plays of Lyly, Peele, 
 Greene, Lodge, Marlowe, Kyd, Nash, and the earliest 
 works of Shakespeare. During this time we know that 
 more than 100 different plays were performed by four 
 out of the eleven companies ; so swift and plentiful was 
 their production. They were written in prose, and in 
 rhyme, and in blank verse mixed with prose and rhyme. 
 Prose and rhyme prevailed before 1587, when Marlow e 
 in his play of Tamburlaine made blank verse so new^ 
 and splendid a thing that it overcame all other dra- 
 matic vehicles. John Lyly, however, wrote so much of 
 his eight plays in prose, that he established, we may say, 
 the use of prose in the drama — an innovation which 
 Gascoigne- introduced, and which Shakespeare carried 
 to perfection. _Some beau tiful iittle soji^s,. scattered, 
 through Lyh^'s_plays are the forerunners of the songs 
 with which Shakespeare and his fellows illumined their 
 dramas, and the witty "quips and cranks," repartees 
 and similes of Lyly's fantastic prose dialogue were the 
 school of Shakespeare's first prose dialogue. Peele, 
 Greene, and Marlowe, the three important names of 
 the period, belong to the University men. So do Lodge 
 and Nash, and perhaps Kyd. They are the first in 
 whose hands the play of human passion and action is 
 expressed with any true dramatic effect. George 
 Peele's Arraignment of Paris, 1584, and his David 
 and Bethsabe are full of passages of new and delightful 
 poetry, and when the poetry is good, his blank verse 
 and his heroic couplet are smooth and tender. Robert 
 
132 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Greene, of whose prose in pamphlet and tale much 
 might be said, spent ten years in writing, and died in 
 1592. There is little poetry in his plays, but he could 
 write a charming song. Kyd's best play is the Spanish 
 Tragedy. None of these men had the power of work- 
 ^ing out a play by the development of their *^ cha racters " 
 to a natural conclusioiu They anticipate the poetry, 
 "But not the art, of Shakespeare. Christopher Marlowe 
 as dramatist surpassed, as poet rose far above, them, 
 and as metrist is almost as great as Shakespeare. The 
 difference between the unequal action and thought of 
 his Doctor Faustus, and the quiet and orderly progres- 
 sion to its end of the play of Edward II., is all the more 
 remarkable when we know that he died at thirty. As- 
 he may be said t aiiay-e-mad£,ihe verse of the drama, so 
 *he creatgd Lthe English_ _tra£ic,.iJiaiQa. His best plays 
 are wrought with a new skill to their end, his characters 
 are outHned with strength and developed with fire. 
 Each play illustrates one ruling passion, in its growth, 
 its power, and its extremes. Tamburlaine paints the 
 desire of universal empire ; the Jew of Malta, the mar- 
 ried passions of greed and hatred; Doctor Faustus, the 
 struggle and failure of man to possess all knowledge and 
 all pleasure without toil and without law ; Edward II., the 
 misery of weakness and the agony of a king's ruin. His 
 knowledge of human nature was neither extensive nor 
 penetrative, but the splendour of his imagination, and 
 the noble surging of his verse, make us forget his want 
 of depth and of variety. Every one has dwelt o)i his 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 33 
 
 intemperance in phrases and of images, but the spirit of 
 poetry moves in them ; we even enjoy the natural faults 
 of fiery youth in a fiery time. He had no humour, and 
 his farcical fun is like the boisterous play of a clumsy 
 animal. In nothing is the difference between Shake- 
 speare and him and his fellows more infinite than in this 
 point of humour. And indeed he had little pathos. 
 His sorrows are too loud. Nevertheless, by force of 
 poetry, not of dramatic art, Marlowe made a noble 
 porch to the temple which Shakespeare built. That tem- 
 ple, however, in spite of all the preceding work, seems to 
 spring out of nothing, so astonishing it is in art, in 
 beauty, in conception. He himself was his only worthy 
 predecessor, and the third sta^e of the drama includes 
 his work, that of Ben Jonson's, and of a few others. It 
 is the work, moreover, not of University men who did 
 not know the stage, but of men who were not only men 
 of genius, but also playwrights who understood what a 
 play should be, and how it was to be staged. 
 
 82. William Shakespeare in twenty-eight years made 
 the drama represent almost the whole of human life. He 
 was baptised April 26, 1564, and was the son of a com- 
 fortable burgess of Stratford-on-Avon. While he was 
 still young his father fell into poverty, and an interrupted 
 education left him an inferior scholar. " He had small 
 Latin and less Greek ; '* but he had avast store of English.^ 
 
 1 He uses 15,000 words, and he wrote pure English. Out of every 
 five verbs, adverbs, and nouns {e.g. in the last act of Othello) ^ four are 
 Teutonic ; and he is more Teutonic in comedy than in tragedy. 
 
134 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 However, by dint of genius and by living in a society 
 in which every kind of information was attainable, he 
 became an accomplished man. The story told 'of his 
 deer-stealing in Charlecote woods is without proof, but 
 it is likely that his youth was wild and passionate. At 
 nineteen he married Anne Hathaway, more than seven 
 years older than himself, and was probably unhappy with 
 her. For this reason, or from poverty, or from the driv- 
 ing of the genius that led him to the stage, he left Strat- 
 ford about 1586-7, and came to London at the age of 
 twenty-two years, and falling in with Marlowe, Greene, 
 and the rest, became an actor and playwright, and may 
 have lived their unrestrained and riotous life for some 
 years. It is convenient to divide his work into periods, 
 and to state the order in which it is now supposed his 
 plays were written. But we must not imagine that the 
 periods and the order are really settled. We know some- 
 thing, but not all we ought to know, of this matter. 
 
 S^, His First Period. — It is probable that before 
 leaving Stratford he had sketched a part at least of his 
 Venus and Adonis, It is full of the country sights and 
 sounds, of the ways of birds and animals, such as he saw 
 when wandering in Charlecote woods. Its rich and over- 
 laden poetry and its warm colouring made him, when it 
 was published, 1593, at once the favourite of men like 
 Lord Southampton, and lifted him into fame. But before 
 that date he had done work for the stage by touching up 
 old plays, and writing new ones. We seem to trace his 
 " prentice hand " in some dramas of the time, but the 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I35 
 
 first he is usually thought to have fully retouched is Tt- 
 ills AndronicuSy and some time after the First Part oj 
 Henry VI. Love's Labour's Lost, supposed to be written 
 1589 or 1590, the first of his original plays, in which he 
 quizzed and excelled the Euphuists in wit, was followed 
 by the involved and rapid farce of the Comedy of Errors, 
 Out of these froHcs of intellect and action he- passed 
 into pure poetry in the Midsummer Nighfs Dream, and 
 mingled into fantastic beauty the classic legend, the 
 mediaeval fairyland, and the clownish life of the EngHsh 
 mechanic. Itahan story laid its charm upon him about 
 the same time, and the Two Gentlemen of Verona pre- 
 ceded the southern glow of passion in Romeo and Juliet, 
 in which he first reached tragic power. They are said to 
 complete, with Love's Labour's Won, afterwards recast as 
 Alps Well that Ends Well, the love plays of his early 
 period. We should read along with them, as belonging 
 to the same period, the Rape of Lucrece, a poem finally 
 printed in 1594, one year later than the Venus and Ado- 
 nis, which was probably finished, if not wholly written, 
 at this passionate time. 
 
 The same poetic succession we have traced in the poets, 
 is now found in Shakespeare. The patriotic feeling of 
 England, also represented in Marlowe and Peele, had 
 seized on him, and he began his great series of historical 
 plays with Richard 11. and Richard III, To introduce 
 Richard III. or to complete the subject, he recast the 
 Second and Third Farts of Henry VI. , and ended what 
 we have called his first period by King John about i596e 
 
136 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 84. His Second Period, 1596-1601. — In the Merchant 
 of Venice Shakespeare reached entire mastery over his 
 art. A mingled woof of tragic and comic threads is 
 brought to its highest point of colour when Portia and 
 Shylock meet in court. Pure comedy followed in his 
 retouch of the old Taming of the Shrew, and all the wit 
 of the world mixed with noble history met in the first and 
 second Henry IV., 1597-8; while Falstaffwas continued 
 in the Merry Wives of Windsor, The historical plays 
 were then closed with Henry V., 1599; a splendid dra- 
 matic song to the glory of England. The Globe Theatre 
 of which he was one of the proprietors, was built in 1599. 
 In the comedies he wrote for it, Shakespeare turned to 
 write of love again, not to touch its deeper passion as 
 before, but to play with it in all its lighter phases. The 
 flashing dialogue of Much Ado About Nothing was fol- 
 lowed by the far-oif forest world of ^j- You Like It, 1599, 
 where " the time fleets carelessly," and Rosalind's char- 
 acter is the play. Amid all its gracious lightness steals in 
 a new element, and the melancholy of Jaques is the first 
 touch we have of the older Shakespeare who had " gained 
 his experience, and whose experience had made him 
 sad." As yet it was but a touch ; Twelfth Night shows 
 no trace of it, though the play that followed, AlVs Well 
 that Ends Well, 1601? again strikes a sadder note. We 
 find this sadness fully grown in the later Sonnets, which 
 are said to have been finished about 1602. We know 
 that some of the Sonnets existed in 1598, but they were 
 all printed together for the first time in 1609. They 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 1 37 
 
 form together the most deep, ardent, subtle, and varied 
 representation of love in our language, and their emotion 
 is mingled with so great a wealth of simple and complex 
 thought that they seem to be written out of the experi- 
 ence, not of one but of many men. 
 
 Shakespeare^s life changed now, and his mind changed 
 with it. He had grown wealthy during this period, 
 famous, and loved by society. He was the friend of the 
 Earls of Southampton and Essex, and of William Herbert, 
 Lord Pembroke. The queen patronised him ; all the 
 best literary society was his own. He had rescued his 
 father from poverty, bought the best house in Stratford 
 and much land, and was a man of wealth and comfort. 
 Suddenly all his Hfe seems to have grown dark. His 
 best friends fell into ruin, Essex perished on the scaffold, 
 Southampton went to the Tower, Pembroke was banished 
 from the court ; he may himself, some have thought, have 
 been slightly involved in the rising of Essex. Added to 
 this, we may conjecture, from the imaginative pageantry 
 of the sonnets, that he had unwisely loved, and been 
 betrayed in his love by a dear friend. Public and pri- 
 vate ill then weighed heavily upon him ; he seems to 
 even have had disgust for his profession as an actor; 
 and in darkness of spirit, though still clinging to the 
 business of the theatre, he passed from comedy to write 
 of the sterner side of the world, to tell the tragedy of 
 mankind. 
 
 85. His Third Period, 1 601-1608, begins with the 
 last days of Queen Elizabeth. It opens with Julius 
 
138 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Ccesar^ and we may have, scattered through the teUing 
 of the great Roman's fate, the expression of Shake- 
 speare's sorrow for the ruin of Essex. Hamlet followed, 
 1601-3? for the poet felt, like the Prince of Denmark, 
 that "the time was out of joint." Hamlet, the dreamer, 
 may well represent Shakespeare as he stood aside from 
 the crash that overwhelmed his friends, and thought on 
 the changing world. The tragi-comedy of Measure for 
 Measure, 1603 ? may have now been written, and is tragic 
 in thought throughout. Othello, 1604, Macbeth, Lear, 
 Troilus and C res si da, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, 
 1608? Timon (only in part his own), were all written in 
 these five years. The darker sins of men ; the unpitying 
 fate which slowly gathers round and falls on mistakes 
 and crimes, on ambition, luxury, and pride ; the aveng- 
 ing wrath of conscience ; the cruelty and punishment of 
 weakness ; the treachery, lust, jealousy, ingratitude, mad- 
 ness of men ; the follies of the great and the fickleness 
 of the mob, are all, with a thousand other varying 
 moods and passions, painted, and felt as his own while 
 he painted them, during this stern time. 
 
 ^d. His Fourth Period, 1608-1613. — As Shakespeare 
 wrote of these things he passed out of them, and his last 
 days are full of the gentle and loving calm of one who 
 has known sin and sorrow and fate, but has risen above 
 them into peaceful victory. Like his great contemporary 
 Bacon, he left the world and his own evil time behind 
 him, and with the same quiet dignity sought the inno- 
 cence and stillness of country life. The country breathes 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA 139 
 
 through all the dramas of this time. The flowers Perdita 
 gathers in Winter's Talc^ the frolic of the sheep-shear- 
 ing, he may have seen in the Stratford meadows; the 
 song of Fidele in Cymbeline is written by one who already 
 feared no more the frown of the great, nor slander, nor 
 censure rash, and was looking forward to the time when 
 men should say of him — 
 
 Quiet consummation have ; 
 And renowned be thy grave ! 
 
 Shakespeare probably left London in 1609, and lived in 
 the house he had bought at Stratford-on-Avon. He was 
 reconciled, it is said, to his wife, and the plays now writ- 
 ten dwell on domestic peace and forgiveness. The story 
 of Marina, which he left unfinished, and which it is 
 supposed two later writers expanded into the play of 
 Pericles, is the first of his closing series of dramas. 
 Cymbeline, 1609? The Teinpest, 16 10? Winter's Tale, 
 bring his history up to 161 1, and in the next year he 
 may have closed his poetic life by writing, with Fletcher, 
 Henry VIII., 1 6 1 2 ? The Two Noble Kinsmen, of Fletcher, 
 part of which is attributed to Shakespeare, and in which 
 the poet sought the inspiration of Chaucer, would belong 
 to this period. For some three years he kept silence, 
 and then, on the 23d of April, 161 6, it is supposed on 
 his fifty-second birthday, he died. 
 
 87. His Work. — We can only guess with regard to 
 Shakespeare's life and character. It has been tried to 
 find out what he was from his sonnets, and from his plays, 
 
r40 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA^ 
 
 but every attempt seems to be a failure. We cannot lay 
 our hand on anything and say for certain that it was 
 spoken by Shakespeare out of his own personality. He 
 created men and women whose dramatic action on each 
 other, and towards a chosen end, was intended to please 
 the public, not to reveal himself. Frequently failing in 
 fineness of workmanship, having, but far less than the 
 other dramatists, the faults of the art of his time, he was 
 yet in all other points — in creative power, in impassioned 
 conception and execution, in truth to universal human 
 nature, in intellectual power, in intensity of feeling, in 
 the great matter and manner of his poetry, in the weld- 
 ing together of thought, passion, and action, in range, in 
 plenteousness, in the continuance of his romantic feeling 
 — the greatest poet our modern world has known. Like 
 the rest of the greater poets, he reflected the noble things 
 of his time, but refused to reflect the base. Fully in- 
 fluenced, as we see in Hamlet he was, by the graver and 
 more philosophic cast of thought of the latter time of 
 Elizabeth ; passing on into the reign of James I., when 
 pedantry took the place of gaiety, and sensual the place 
 of imaginative love in the drama, and artificial art the 
 place of that art which itself is nature ; he preserves to 
 the last the natural passion, the simple tenderness, the 
 sweetness, grace, and fire of the youthful Elizabethan 
 poetry. The Winter's Tale is as lovely a love-story as 
 Romeo and Juliet^ the Tempest is more instinct with im- 
 agination and as great in fancy as the Midsummer Nighfs 
 Dreamy and yet there are fully twenty years between 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I4I 
 
 them. The only change is in the increase of power and 
 in a closer, graver, and more ideal grasp of human nature. 
 In the unchangeableness of this joyful and creative art- 
 power Shakespeare is almost alone. It is true that in 
 these last plays his art is more self conscious, less natu- 
 ral, and the greater glory is therefore lost, but the power 
 is not less nor the beauty. 
 
 S8, The Decline of the Drama begins while Shake- 
 speare is alive. At first we can scarcely call it decHne, 
 it was so superb in its own qualities. For it began 
 with "rare Ben Jonson." With him are connected 
 by associated work, by quarrels, and by date, Dekker, 
 Marston, and Chapman. They belong with Shakespeare 
 to the days of Elizabeth and the days of James I. Ben 
 Jonson's first play, in its very title. Every Man in his 
 Humour^ 1596, enables us to say in what the first step 
 of this dechne consisted. The drama in Shakespeare's 
 hands had been the painting of the whole of human 
 nature, the painting of characters as they were built up 
 by their natural bent, and by the play of circumstance 
 upon them. The drama, in Ben Jonson's hands, was 
 the painting of particular phases of human nature, espe- 
 cially of his own age ; and his characters are men and 
 women as they may become when they are completely 
 mastered by a special bias of the mind or Humour, 
 "The Manners, now called Humours, feed the stage," 
 says Jonson himself Every Man in his Humour was 
 followed by Every Man out of his Humour, and by 
 Cynthia's Revels y written to satirise the courtiers* The 
 
142 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 fierce satire of these plays brought the town down upon 
 him, and he repUed to their " noise " in the Poetaster, 
 in which Dekker and Marston were satirised. Dekker 
 answered with the Satiro-Mastix, a bitter parody on 
 the Poetaster, in which he did not spare Jonson's bodily 
 defects. Silent then for two years, he reappeared with 
 the tragedy of Sejanus, and then quickly produced 
 three splendid comedies in James I.*s reign, Volpone the 
 Fox, the Silent Woman, and the Alchemist, 1 605-9-10. 
 The first is the finest thing he ever did, as great in 
 power as it is in the interest and skill of its plot ; the 
 second is chiefly valuable as a picture of English life 
 in high society ; the third is full of Jonson*s obscure 
 learning, but its character of Sir Epicure Mammon is 
 done with Jonson's keenest power. In 161 1 his Catiline 
 appeared, and then Bartholomew Fair. Eight years 
 after he was made Poet Laureate. Soon he became 
 poor and palsy-stricken, but his genius did not decay. 
 His tender and imaginative pastoral drama, the Sad 
 Shepherd, proves that, like Shakespeare, Jonson grew 
 gentler as he grew near to death, and death took him 
 in 1637. He was a great man. The power and copi- 
 ousness of the young Elizabethan age belonged to him ; 
 and he stands far below, for he had nu passion, but 
 still worthily by, Shakespeare, " a robust, surly, and ob- 
 serving dramatist." Thos. Dekker, whose lovely lyrics 
 are well known, and whose copious prose occupies five 
 volumes, " had poetry enough," Lamb said, " for any- 
 thing." His light comedies of manners are excellent 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I43 
 
 pictures of the time. But his romantic poetry is better 
 felt in such dramas as Patient Gfissil, Old Fortunatus, 
 and The Witch of Edmonton, in which, though others 
 worked them along with Dekker, the women are all his 
 own by tenderness, grace, subtlety, and pathos. John 
 Marston, whose chief plays were written between 1602 
 and 1605, needs little notice here. He is best known 
 by certain noble and beautiful passages, and his finest 
 plays were Antonio and Mellida and the Malcontent, 
 Of the three Geo. Chapman was the most various genius, 
 and the most powerful. He illuminated the age of 
 Elizabeth by the first part of his translation of Homer ; 
 he lived on into the reign of Charles I. His poems 
 (of which the best are his continuation of Marlowe's 
 Hero and Leander, and The Tears of Peace) are ex- 
 treme examples of the gnarled, sensuous, formless, and 
 obscure jpoetry of which Dryden cured our literature. 
 His plays are of a finer quaUty, especially the five 
 tragedies taken from French history. They are weighty 
 with thought, but the thought devours their action, and 
 they are difficult and sensational. Inequality pervades 
 them. His mingling of intellectual violence with intel- 
 lectual imagination, of obscurity with a noble exultation 
 and clearness of poetry, is a strange compound of the 
 earlier and later Elizabethans. He, like Marlowe, but 
 with less of beauty, "hurled instructive fire about the 
 world." With these three I may mention Cyril Tourneur 
 and John Day, the one as ferocious in the Atheists Trag- 
 edy as the other was graceful in his Parliament of Bees. 
 
144 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Both were poets, and both were more truly Elizabethan 
 than Beaumont, Fletcher, or Webster. 
 
 89. Masques. — Rugged as Jonson was, he could turn 
 to light and graceful work, and it is with his name that 
 we connect the Masques. He wrote them delightfully. 
 Masques were dramatic representations made for a fes- 
 tive occasion, with a reference to the persons present 
 and the occasion. Their personages were allegorical. 
 They admitted of dialogue, music, singing, and dancing, 
 combined by the use of some ingenious fable into a 
 whole. They were made and performed for the court 
 and the houses of the nobles, and the scenery was as 
 gorgeous and varied as the scenery of the playhouse 
 proper was poor and unchanging. Arriving for the first 
 time at any repute in Henry VIII. *s time, they reached 
 splendour under James and Charles I. Great men took 
 part in them. When Ben Jonson wrote them, Inigo 
 Jones made the scenery and Lawes the music ; and 
 Lord Bacon, Whitelock, and Selden sat in committee 
 for the last great masque presented to Charles. Milton 
 himself made them worthier by writing ComuSy and their 
 scenic decoration was soon introduced into the regular 
 theatres. 
 
 90. Beaumont and Fletcher worked together, and be- 
 long not only in date, but in spirit, to the reign of James. 
 In two plays, Henry VIIL and The Two Noble Kinsmen, 
 Fletcher has been linked to Shakespeare. With Beau- 
 mont as fellow-worker and counsellor, he wrote about 
 a third of the more than fifty plays which go under 
 
nr THE ENGLISH DRAMA 145 
 
 their names. Beaumont died, aged thirty, in 1616, 
 Fletcher, aged fifty, in 1625. The creative power of 
 the Elizabethan time has no more striking example 
 than in their vast production. The inventiveness of 
 the plays is astonishing, and their plots are almost 
 always easily connected and well supported. Far the 
 greater part of the work was done by Fletcher, but it 
 has been tried to trace Beaumont's hand chiefly in such 
 fine tragedies as The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster, 
 In comedy Fletcher is gay, and quick, and interesting. 
 In tragedy and comedy alike, his level of goodness is 
 equal, but then we have none of those magnificent out- 
 bursts of imaginative passion to which, up to this time, 
 we have been accustomed. The Faithful Shepherdess 
 of Fletcher is a lovely pastoral, and the lyrics which 
 diversify his plays have even some of the charm of 
 Shakespeare. 
 
 He and his fellows represent a distinct change, and 
 not lor the better, in the drama — a kind of fourth 
 stage. Its poetry is on the whole less masculine. Its 
 blank verse is rendered smoother and sweeter by the 
 incessant addition of an eleventh syllable, but it is also 
 enfeebled. This weak ending, by the additional free- 
 dom and elasticity it gave to the verse, was suited to 
 the rapid dialogue of comedy, but the dignity of trag- 
 edy was lowered by it. The change is also seen in 
 other matters. In the previous plays moral justice is 
 done. The good are divided from the bad. Fletcher 
 seems quite indifferent to this. In the previous plays, 
 
146 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAK 
 
 men and women, save in Shakespeare, are coarse and 
 foul enough at times, but they are so by nature or 
 under furious passion. In Fletcher, there is a natural 
 indecency, an every-day foulness of thought, which be- 
 longs to the good and the bad alike. The women are, 
 when good, beyond nature, and, when bad, below it. 
 The situations invented tend to be studiously out of the 
 way, beyond the natural aspects of humanity. The aim 
 of art has changed for the worse. It strives for the 
 strange and the sensational. Even John Webster lost 
 some of the power his genius gave him by the ghastly 
 situations he chose to dwell upon. Yet he all but re- 
 deemed the worst of them by the intensity of his imag- 
 ination, and by the soul-piercing power with which, in 
 a few words, he sounds the depths of the human heart 
 when it is wrought b^ ^remorse, by sorrow, by fear, or 
 by wrath to its greatest point of passion. Moreover, 
 in his worst characters there is some redeeming touch, 
 and this poetic pity saves his sensationalism from weari- 
 ness, and brings him nearer to Shakespeare than others 
 of his time. His two greatest plays, things which will 
 be glorious forever in poetry, are The Duchess of 
 Malfi, acted in 16 16, and the White Devil, Vittoria 
 Corrombona, printed in 161 2. One other play of the 
 time is held to approach them in poetic quality, The 
 Changeling, by Thomas Middleton, but it does so only 
 in parts. 
 
 91. Decay of the Drama. — In the next dramatists, in 
 the followers, if I may thus class them, of Massinger 
 
rv THE ENGLISH DRAMA 147 
 
 and Ford, the change for the worse in the drama is 
 more marked than in the work of those of whom we 
 have been speaking. The poetic and creative qualities 
 are both less, the sensationalism is greater, the foulness 
 of language increases, the situations are more out of 
 nature, the verse is clumsier and more careless, the 
 composition and connexion of the plots are tumbled 
 and confused. But these statements are only moder- 
 ately true of Massinger and Ford. They stand at the 
 head of the rapid decay of the drama, but they still 
 retain a predominant part of that which made the 
 Elizabethans great. Massinger's first dated play was 
 the Virgin Martyr, 1620. He lived poor, and died 
 "a stranger," in 1639. In these twenty years he wrote 
 thirty-seven plays, of which the New Way to Pay Old 
 Debts is the best known by its character of Sir Giles 
 Overreach. His versification and language are flexible 
 and strong, "and seem to rise out of the passions he 
 describes." He speaks the tongue of real life. He is 
 greater than he seems to be. Like Fletcher, there is 
 a steady equality in his work. Coarse, even foul as he 
 is in speech, he is the most moral of the secondary 
 dramatists. Nowhere is his work so forcible as when 
 he represents the brave man struggling through trial to 
 victory, the pure woman suffering for the sake of truth 
 and love ; or when he describes the terrors that con- 
 science brings on injustice and cruelty. John Ford, 
 his contemporary, published his first play, the Lovet^s 
 Melancholy^ in 1629, and five years after, Perkin War^ 
 
148 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 beck, one of the best historical dramas after Shake- 
 speare. Between these dates appeared others, of which 
 the best are the Broken Heart and ^Tis Pity She's a 
 Whore. He carried to an extreme the tendency of the 
 drama to unnatural and horrible subjects, but he did so 
 with great power. He has no comic humour, but few 
 men have described better the worn and tortured hu- 
 man heart. A crowd of dramatists carried on the pro- 
 duction of plays till the Commonwealth. Some names 
 alone we can mention here — Thomas Heywood, Henry 
 Glapthorne, Richard Broome, William Rowley, Thomas 
 Randolph, Nabbes, and Davenport. Of these "all of 
 whom," says Lamb, " spoke nearly the same language, 
 and had a set of moral feeHngs and notions in com- 
 mon," James Shirley is the best and last. He lived 
 till 1666. In him the fire and passion of the old time 
 pass away, but some of the delicate poetry remains, and 
 in him the EHzabethan drama dies. Sir John Suckling 
 and Davenant, who wrote plays before the Common- 
 wealth, can scarcely be called even decadent Eliza- 
 bethans. In 1642 the theatres were closed during the 
 calamitous times of the Civil War. Strolling players 
 managed to exist with difficulty, and against the law, 
 till 1656, when Sir William Davenant had his opera 
 of the Siege of Rhodes acted in London. It was the 
 beginning of a new drama, in every point but impurity 
 different from the old, and four years after, at the Res- 
 toration, it broke loose from the prison of Puritanism to 
 indulge in a shameless license. 
 
IV THE ENGLISH DRAMA I49 
 
 In this rapid sketch of the drama in England we 
 have been carried on beyond the death of Elizabeth 
 to the date of the Restoration. It was necessary, be- 
 cause it keeps the whole story together. We now re- 
 turn to the time that followed the accession of James Ii 
 
 0' v-"t 
 
150 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 FROM ELIZABETH'S DEATH TO THE RESTORATION, 
 1603-1660 
 
 92. The Literature of this Period may fairly be 
 called Elizabethan, but not so altogether. The prose 
 retained the manner of the Elizabethan time and the 
 faults of its style, but gradually grew into greater ex- 
 cellence, spread itself over larger fields of thought, and 
 took up a greater variety of subjects. The poetry, on 
 the whole, declined. It exaggerated the vices of the 
 Elizabethan art, and lessened its virtues. But this is 
 not the whole account of the matter. We must add 
 that a new prose, of greater force of thought and of a 
 simpler style than the Elizabethan, arose in the writings 
 of a theologian like Chillingworth, an historian hke 
 Clarendon, and a philosopher like Hobbes : and that 
 a new type of poetry, distinct from the poetry of fan- 
 tastic wit into which Elizabethan poetry had descended, 
 was written by some of the lyrical writers. It was Eliza- 
 bethan in its lyric note, but it was not obscure. It had 
 grace, simplicity, and smoothness. In its greater art and 
 clearness it tells us that the critical school is at hand. 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION I5I 
 
 93. Prose Literature. James I. — The greatest prose 
 triumph of this time was the Authorised Version of the 
 Bible. There is no need to dwell on it, nor on all it has 
 done for the literature of England. It lives in almost 
 every book of worth and imagination, and its style, es- 
 pecially when the subject soars, is inspired by the spirits 
 of fitness and beauty and melody. Philosophy passed 
 from Elizabeth into the reign of James I. with Francis 
 Bacon. The splendour of the form and of the EngHsh 
 prose of the Advancement of Learning, two books of 
 which were published in 1605, raises it into the realm 
 of pure literature. It was expanded into nine Latin 
 books in 1623, and with the Novum (7r^^;z^;/, finished 
 in 1620, and the Historia Naturalis et Experime7italis, 
 1622, formed the Instauratio Magna, The impulse 
 these books gave to research, and to the true method 
 of research, awoke scientific inquiry in England ; and 
 before the Royal Society was constituted in the reign of 
 Charles II., our science, though far behind that of the 
 Continent, had done some good work. William Harvey 
 lectured on the circulation of the blood in 16 15, and 
 during the Civil War and the Commonwealth men like 
 Robert Boyle, the chemist, John Wallis, the mathe- 
 matician, and others, met in William Petty's rooms at 
 Brazenose, and prepared the way for Newton. 
 
 94. History, except in the publication of the earlier 
 Chronicles of Archbishop Parker, does not appear in 
 the later part of Elizabeth's reign, but under James I. 
 Camden, Spelman, Selden, and Speed continued the anti- 
 
X52 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 quarian researches of Stow and Grafton. Bacon wrote 
 a dignified History of Henry F//., and Daniel the poet, 
 in his History of England to the Time of Edward ///., 
 1 6 13-18, was one of the first to throw history into such a 
 literary form as to make it popular. Knolles's History 
 of the Turks, 1603, and Sir Walter Raleigh's vast 
 sketch of the History of the World, show how for the 
 first time history spread itself beyond EngHsh interests. 
 Raleigh's book, written in the peaceful evening of a 
 stormy life, and in the quiet of his prison, is not only 
 literary from the impulsive passages which adorn it, but 
 from its still spirit of melancholy thought. In 16 14, 
 John Selden's Titles of Honour added to the accurate 
 work he had done in Latin on the English Records, 
 and his History of Tithes was written with the same 
 careful regard for truth in 1618. 
 
 9 5 . Miscellaneous Literature. — The pleasure of Travel, 
 still lingering among us from Elizabeth's reign, found a 
 quaint voice in Thomas Coryat's Crudities, which, in 
 16 1 1, describes his journey through France and Italy; 
 and m George Sandys' book, 1615, which tells his 
 journ^ in the East ; while Henry Wotton's Letters from 
 Italymt pleasant reading. The care with which Samuel 
 Purc^as embodied (1613) in Purchas his Pilgrimage 
 (" his own in matter, though borrowed ") and in Hak- 
 luyfs PosthumuSy or Purchas his Pilgrimes (1625), the 
 great deeds, sea voyages, and land travels of adventurers, 
 brings us back to the time when England went out to 
 win the world. The painting of short "Characters" 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 53 
 
 was begun by Sir Thomas Overbury's book in 16 14, and 
 carried on in the following reign by John Earle and 
 Joseph Hall, who became bishops. This kind of litera- 
 ture marks the interest in individual Hfe which now began 
 to arise, and which soon took form in Biography. 
 
 96. In the Caroline Period and the Commonwealth, 
 Prose grew into a nearer approach to the finished in- 
 strument it became after the Restoration. History was 
 illuminated, and its style digilified, by the work of Claren- 
 don — the History of the Rebellion (begun in 1641) and 
 his own Life, Thomas May wrote the History of the 
 Parliament of 1640, a book with a purpose. Thomas 
 Fuller's Church History of Britain^ 1656, may in style 
 and temper be put alongside of his Worthies of England 
 in 1662. 
 
 In Theology and Philosophy the masters of prose at 
 this time were Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Hobbes. It 
 is a comfort amidst the noisy war of party to breathe the 
 calm spiritual air of The Great Exemplar and the Holy, 
 Living and Dying which Taylor published at the close 
 of the reign of Charles I. They had been preceded in 
 1647 by the Liberty of Prophesying, in which, agreeing 
 with his contemporaries, John Hales and William Chil- 
 lingworth, he pleaded the cause of religious toleration, 
 and of rightness of life as more important than correct 
 theology. Taylor was the most eloquent of men, and 
 the most facile of orators. Laden with thought, his 
 books are read for their sweet and deep devotion (a 
 quality which also belonged to his fellow-writer, Lancelot 
 
154 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Andrewes), even more than for their impassioned and 
 convoluted outbreaks of beautiful words. On the Puritan 
 side, the fine sermons of Richard Sibbes converted Rich- 
 ard Baxter, whose manifold literary work only ended in 
 the reign of James II. One little thing of his, written 
 at the close of the Civil War, became a household book 
 in England. There used to be few cottages which did 
 not possess a copy of the Sai nts' Everla sting Rest. The 
 best work of Hobbes belonged to Charles I. and the 
 Commonwealth, but will better be noticed hereafter. 
 The other great prose writer is one of a number of 
 men whose productions may be classed under the title 
 of Miscellaneous Literature. He is Sir Thomas Browne, 
 who, born in 1605, died in 1682. In 1642 his Religio 
 Medici was printed, and the book ran over Europe. 
 The Enquiry into Vulgar Errors followed in 1646, and 
 the Hydriotaphia, or Urn- Burial, in 1658. These books, 
 with other happy things of his, have by their quaintness, 
 their fancy, and their special charm always pleased the 
 world, and often kindled weary prose into fresh produc- 
 tion. We may class with them Robert Burton's Anatomy 
 of Melancholy, a book of inventive wit and scattered learn- 
 ing, and Thomas Fuller's Holy and Profane State and 
 Worthies of England, in which gaiety and piety, good 
 sense and whimsical fancy meet. This kind of writing 
 was greatly increased by the setting up of libraries, 
 where men dipped into every kind of literature. It 
 was in James I.'s reign that Sir Thomas Bodley estab- 
 lished the Bodleian at Oxford, and Sir Robert Cotton 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 155 
 
 a library now in the British Museum. A number of 
 writers took part in the Puritan and Church contro- 
 versies, among whom for graphic force WiUiam Prynne 
 stands out clearly. But the great controversialist was 
 Milton. His prose is still, under the Commonwealth, 
 Elizabethan in style. It has the fire and violence, the 
 eloquence and diffuseness of the earlier literature, but in 
 spite of the praise its style has received, it can in reality 
 be scarcely called a style. It has all the faults a prose 
 style can have except obscurity and the commonplace. 
 Its magnificent storms of eloquence ought to be in 
 poetry, and it never charms, though it amazes, except 
 when Milton becomes purposely simple in personal 
 narrative. It has no humour,^ but it has almost unex- 
 ampled individuality and ferocity. Among this tem- 
 pestuous pamphleteering one pamphlet is almost singular 
 in its masterly and uplifted thought, and the style only 
 rarely loses its dignity. This is the Areopagitica, In 
 pleasant contrast to these controversies arises the gentle 
 literature of Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler , 1653, a 
 book which resembles in its quaint and garrulous style 
 the rustic scenery and prattling rivers that it celebrates, 
 and marks the quiet interest in country life which had 
 now arisen in England. Prose, then, in the time of 
 James and Charles I., and of the Commonwealth, had 
 largely developed its powers. 
 
 97. The Poetry of the Reign of James I. — It is said 
 that during this reign and the following one, poetry 
 declined. On the whole that is true, but it is true with 
 
156 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 many modifications. We must remember that Shake- 
 speare and many of the Elizabethan poets, Uke Drayton 
 and Daniel, did their finest work in the reign of James I. 
 Yet there was decHne. The various elements which we 
 have noticed in the poetry of Elizabeth's reign, without 
 the exception even of the sHght Catholic element, though 
 opposed to each other, were filled with one spirit — the 
 love of England and the queen. Nor were they ever 
 sharply divided ; they are found interwoven, and modi- 
 fying one another in the same poet, as for instance Puri- 
 tanism and Chivalry in Spenser, Catholicism and Love in 
 Constable : and all are mixed together in Shakespeare 
 and the dramatists. This unity of spirit in poetry 
 became less and less after the queen's death. The ele- 
 ments remained, but they were separated. The cause of 
 this was that the strife in pohtics between the Divine 
 Right of Kings and Liberty, and in religion between the 
 Church and the Puritans, grew so defined and intense 
 that England ceased to be at one, and the poets repre- 
 sented the parties, not the whole, of England. Then, 
 too, that general passion and life which inflamed every- 
 thing EUzabethan lessened, and as it lessened, the faults 
 of the Elizabethan work became more prominent ; they 
 were even supposed to be excellences. Hence the fan- 
 tastic, far-fetched, involved style, which was derived from 
 the Euphues and the Arcadia, grew into favour and was 
 developed in verse, till it ended by greatly injuring good 
 sense and clearness in English poetry. In the reaction 
 from this the critical and classical school began. Again, 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 57 
 
 when passion lessens, original work lessens, and imitation 
 begins. The reign of James is marked by a class of 
 poets who imitated Spenser. Giles Fletcher in his 
 Chris fs Victory and Triumph, 1610, owned Spenser as 
 his master. So did his brother Phineas Fletcher, whose 
 Purple Island, an allegory of the human body, 1633, ^^^ 
 both grace and sweetness. We may not say that Will- 
 iam Browne imitated, but only that he was influenced 
 by Spenser. His Brifa?inia's Pastorals in two parts, 
 1 6 13-16, followed by the seven eclogues of the Shepherd's 
 Pipe, are an example in true poetry of the ever-recurring 
 element in English poetry, pleasure in country life and 
 scenery, which from this time forth grew through Milton, 
 Wither, Marvell, and then, after an apparent death, through 
 Thomson, Gray, and Collins, into its wonderful flower in 
 our own century. These, if we include the poetry of the 
 Dramatists, especially the Underwoods of Ben Jonson, 
 and the poems already mentioned of Drummond and 
 Stirling, are the poets of the reign of James I. They 
 link back to Elizabeth's time and its temper, and it may 
 be said of them that they have no special turn, save that 
 which arises from tfieir own individuality. That cannot 
 be said of the poets of Charles I.'s reign, even though 
 they may be classed as writing under the influencQ of 
 Ben Jonson and of Donne. 
 
 98. The Caroline Poets, as they are called, are love 
 poets or religious poets. Often, as in the case of Herri ck 
 and Crashaw, they combined both kinds into a single 
 volume. Sometimes they were only religious like Her 
 
158 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 bert, sometimes only love poets like Lovelace and Suck- 
 ling. But whatever they were, they were as individual as 
 BotticelH, with whose position and whose contemporaries 
 in painting they may, with much justice, be compared. 
 The greatest of these was Robert Herrick. The gay 
 and glancing charm of The Hesperides, 1648, in which 
 Horace and Tibullus seem to mingle ; their peculiar art 
 which never misses its aim, nor fails in exquisite execution ; 
 the almost equal power of The Noble Numbers, published 
 along with the Hesperides, in which the spiritual side of 
 Herrick's nature expressed itself, make him, within his 
 self-chosen and limited range, the most remarkable of 
 those who at this time sat below the mountain top on 
 which Milton was alone. Close beside him, but more 
 unequal, was Thomas Carew, whose lyrical poems, well 
 known as they are, do not prevent our pleasure in his 
 graver work like the Elegy on Donne, Greater in im- 
 agination, but more unequal still, was Richard Crashaw. 
 One of his poems. The Flaming Heart, expresses in its 
 name his religious nature and his art. He does not 
 burn with a steady fire, he flames to heaven ; and when 
 he does, he is divine in music and in passion. At other 
 times he is one of the worst of the fantasticals, of those 
 lovers of the quaint for quaintness* sake, among whom the 
 exclusively religious poets of the time are sadly to be 
 classed. There is George Herbert, whose Temple, 
 1 63 1, is, by the purity and devotion of its poems, dear 
 to all. It is his quiet religion, his quaint, contemplative, 
 vicarage- garden note of thought and scholarship w^hich 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 59 
 
 pleases most, and will always please, the calm piety of 
 England. He also is individual, and so is Henry 
 Vaughan, whose Sacred Poems ^ 165 1, unequal as a whole, 
 love nature dearly, and leap sometimes into a higher air 
 of poetry than Herbert could attain ; " transcend our 
 wonted themes, and into glory peep." Nor must we 
 forget William Habington, who mingled his devotion to 
 Roman Catholicism with the praises of his wife under the 
 name of Castara, 1634; nor George Wither, who sent 
 forth, just before the Civil War began, when he left the 
 king for the Parliament, his Hallelujah, 1641, a noble 
 series of religious poems ; nor Francis Quarles, whose 
 Divine Emblems^ 1635, is still read in the cottages of 
 England. These poets, with Henry More, the Platonist, 
 and Joseph Beaumont, the friend of Crashaw and the 
 rival of More, are far below (Wither's work being ex- 
 cepted) both Herbert and Vaughan, and bring to an end 
 the religious poetry of this curious transition time. I 
 have omitted some poems of Cowley and of Edmund 
 Waller, which appeared during the Commonwealth, be- 
 cause both these poets belong to a new class of poetry, 
 the classical poetry of the Restoration. Between this 
 new kind of poetry, which rose to full power in Dryden, 
 and the dying poetry x)f the transition, stands alone the 
 majestic work of a great genius who touches the great 
 Elizabethan time with one hand and our own time with 
 the other. But* before we speak of Milton, a word must 
 be said of the lyrics. 
 
 99. The Songs and other Lyrical Poetry. — All through 
 
l60 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the period between James I. and the Restoration, Sorig- 
 writing went on, and was more natural and less " meta- 
 physical " than the other forms of poetry. The elements 
 of decay attacked it slowly ; those of brightness and pas- 
 sion, nature and gaiety, continued to live in it. Moreover, 
 the time was remarkable for no small number of lyrical 
 poems, other than songs, of a strange loveliness, in which 
 the Elizabethan excellences were enhanced by a special, 
 particular grace, due partly to the more isolated life some 
 of the poets led, and partly to the growth among them of 
 a more artistic method. 
 
 With regard to the Songs, a distinct set of them, on the 
 most various subjects, are to be found in the Dramatists, 
 from Ben Jonson to Shirley. Another set has been 
 collected out of the many Song-books which appeared 
 with music and words. Many arose in the court of 
 Charles I. and among the Royalists in the country, — 
 Cavalier songs — on love, on constancy, on dress, on 
 fleeting fancies of every kind. Others were on battle and 
 death for the king ; and a few, sterner and more ideal, 
 on the Puritan side. The same power of song- writing 
 went on for a brief time after the Restoration, but finally 
 perished in the political ballad which was sung about the 
 streets by the political parties of the Revolution. Then 
 the song-lyric of love was almost silent till the days of 
 Burns. 
 
 With regard to the Lyrical poems, it is impossible to 
 mention all that are worthy, but an age which produced 
 the masques, the poems, and the Sad Shepherd of Ben 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION l6l 
 
 Jonson ; which heard the lyrical measures of Fletcher's 
 Faithful Shepherdess ; which read with joy Herrick's 
 Corinna and his country lyrics ; which wished, while it 
 had its delight in Wither*s Philarete, that it was not so 
 long ; which felt a finer thrill than usual of the imagina- 
 tion in Marvell's Emigrants in the Bermudas and The 
 Thoughts in a Garden ; which was caught, as it were into 
 another world, by the Allegro, the Fenseroso, the songs 
 in Comus and the Arcades, and by the Lycidas of Milton 
 a^ can scarcely be called an age of decay. There was 
 Xdechne, on the whole. We feel what had passed away 
 when we come to the days of the Restoration. But the 
 Elizabethan lyrical day died in a lovely sunset. And as 
 if to make this clear, we meet with Milton who bore the 
 passion, the force, and the beauty of the past along with 
 his own grandeur into the age of Dryden. 
 
 loo. John Milton was the last of the EHzabethans, and, 
 except Shakespeare, far the greatest of them all. Born in 
 1608, in Bread Street (close by the Mermaid Tavern), he 
 may have seen Shakespeare, for he remained till he was 
 sixteen in London. His literacy life may be said to begin 
 with his entrance into Cambridge, in 1625, the year of the 
 accession of Charles I. Nicknamed the " Lady of Christ's " 
 from his beauty, delicate taste, and moral life, he soon 
 attained a reputation by his Latin poems and discourses, 
 and by his Enghsh poems which revealed as clear and 
 original a genius as that of Chaucer and Spenser. Of 
 Milton even more than of the two others, it may be said 
 that he was " whole in himself, and owed to none." The 
 
 M 
 
1 62 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 Ode to the Nativity^ 1629, the third poem he composed^ 
 while it went back to the EUzabethan age in beauty, in 
 instinctive fire, went forward into a new world of art, the 
 world where the architecture of the lyric is finished with 
 majesty and music. The next year heard the noble 
 sounding strains of At a Solemn Music ; and the sonnet, 
 On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three^ reveals in dignified 
 beauty that intense personality which lives, like a force, 
 through every line he wrote. He left the university in 
 1632, and went to live at Horton, near Windsor, where 
 he spent five years, steadily reading the Greek and Latin 
 writers, and amusing himself with mathematics and music. 
 Poetry was not neglected. The Allegro and Penseroso 
 were written in 1633 and probably the Arcades ; Comus 
 was acted in 1634, and Lycidas composed in 1637. 
 They prove that though Milton was Puritan in heart his 
 Puritanism was of that earlier type which disdained 
 neither the arts nor letters. But they represent a grow- 
 ing revolt from the Court and the Church. The Pen- 
 seroso prefers the contemplative Kfe to the mirthful, and 
 Comus, though a masque, rose into a celestial poem to 
 the glory of temperance, and under its allegory attacked 
 the Court. Three years later, Lycidas interrupts its ex- 
 quisite stream of poetry with a fierce and resolute onset 
 on the greedy shepherds of the Church. Milton had 
 taken his Presbyterian bent. 
 
 In 1638 he went to Italy, the second home of so many 
 of the English poets, visited Florence where he saw 
 Galileo, and then passed on to Rome. At Naples he 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 1 63 
 
 heard the sad news of civil war, which determined him 
 to return ; " inasmuch as I thought it base to be travel- 
 ling at my ease for amusement, while my fellow-country- 
 men at home were fighting for liberty." At the meeting 
 of the Long Parliament we find him in a house in Alders- 
 gate, where he lived till 1645. ^^ ^^^ projected while 
 abroad a great epic poem on the subject of Arthur, but 
 in London his mind changed, and among a number of 
 subjects, tended at last to Paradise Lost, which he meant 
 to throw into the form of a Greek Tragedy with lyrics 
 and choruses. 
 
 1 01. Milton's Prose. The Commonwealth. — Suddenly 
 his whole hfe changed, and for twenty years — 1640-60 
 — he was carried out of art into politics, out of poetry 
 into prose. Most of the Sonnets, however, belong to 
 this time. Stately, rugged, or graceful, as he pleased to 
 make them, some with the solemn grandeur of Hebrew 
 psalms, others having the classic ease of Horace, some 
 of his own grave tenderness, they are true, unlike those 
 of Shakespeare and Spenser, to the correct form of this 
 difficult kind of poetry. But they were all he could now 
 do of his true work. Before the Civil War began in 
 1642, he had written five vigorous pamphlets against 
 Episcopacy^ Six more pamphlets appeared in the next 
 two years. One of these was the Areopagitica ; or, 
 Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, 1644, a 
 bold and eloquent attack on the censorship of the press 
 by the Presbyterians. Another, remarkable, Hke the 
 Areopagitica, for its finer prose, was a tract On Educa- 
 
164 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 Hon, The four pamphlets in which he advocated con- 
 ditional divorce made him still more the horror of the 
 Presbyterians. In 1646 he pubhshed his poems, and in 
 that year the sonnet On the Forcers of Conscience shows 
 that he had wholly ceased to be Presbyterian. Plis 
 political pamphlets begin when his Tenure of Kings and 
 Magistrates defended in 1649 ^^ execution of the king. 
 The Eikonoclastes answered the Eikon Basilike (a portrait- 
 ure of the sufferings of the king) ; and his famous Latin 
 Defence for the People of Ejigland, 1651, replied to Sal- 
 masius's Defence of Charles /., and inflicted so pitiless a 
 lashing on the great Leyden scholar that Milton's fame 
 went over the whole of Europe. In the next year he 
 wholly lost his sight. But he continued his work (being 
 Latin secretary since 1649) when Cromwell was made 
 Protector, and wrote another Defence for the English 
 People y 1654, and a further Defence of Himself dig^xa^X. 
 scurrilous charges. This closed the controversy in 1655. 
 In the last year of the Protector's life he began the 
 Paradise Lost, but the death of Cromwell threw him 
 back into politics, and three more pamphlets on the 
 questions of a Free Church and a Free Commonwealth 
 were useless to prevent the Restoration. It was a won- 
 der he was not put to death in 1660, and he was in hid- 
 ing and also in custody for a time. At last he settled in 
 a house near Bunhill Fields. It was here that Paradise 
 ZostwsiS finished, l)efore the end of 1665, and then pub- 
 lished in 1667. 
 
 102. Paradise Lost. -f- We may regret that Milton was 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION 165 
 
 shut away from his art during twenty years of contro- 
 versy. But it may be that the poems he wrote when the 
 great cause he fought for had closed in seeming defeat 
 but real victory, gained from its solemn issues and from 
 the moral grandeur with which he wrought for its ends 
 their majestic movement, their grand style, and their 
 grave beauty. During the struggle he had never for- 
 gotten his art. *^ I may one day hope," he said, speak- 
 ing of his youthful studies, " to have ye again, in a still 
 time, when there shall be no chiding. Not in these 
 Noises," and the saying strikes the note of calm sublim- 
 ity which is kept in Paradise Lost 
 
 As we read the great epic, we feel that the lightness of 
 heart of the Allegro, that even the quiet classic philosophy 
 of the Comus, are gone. The beauty of the poem is like 
 that of a stately temple, which, vast in conception, is 
 involved in detail. The style is the greatest in the whole 
 range of English poetry. Milton's intellectual force sup- 
 ports and condenses his imaginative force, and his art is 
 almost too conscious of itself Subhmity is its essential 
 difference. The subject is one phase of the great and 
 universal subject of high poetic thought and passion, that 
 struggle of Light with Darkness, of Evil with Good, 
 which, arising in a hundred myths, keeps its undying 
 attraction to the present day. But its great difficulty in 
 his case was that he was obliged to interest us, for a 
 great part of the poem, in two persons, who, being inno- 
 cent, were without any such play of human passion and 
 trouble as we find in CEdipus, ^neas, Hamlet, or Alceste. 
 
1 66 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 In the noble art with which this is done Milton is su- 
 preme. The interest of the story collects at first round 
 the character of Satan, but he grows meaner as the poem 
 develops, and his second degradation after he has de- 
 stroyed innocence is one of the finest and most consistent 
 motives in the poem. This at once disposes of the view 
 that Milton meant Satan to be the hero of the epic. His 
 hero is Man. The deep tenderness of Milton, his love 
 of beauty, the passionate fitness of his words to his work, 
 his religious depth, fill the scenes in which he paints 
 Paradise, our parents and their fall, and at last all thought 
 and emotion centre round Adam and Eve, until the 
 closing lines leave us with their lonely image on our 
 minds. In every part of the poem, in every character in 
 it, as indeed in all his poems, Milton's intense individu- 
 ality appears. It is a pleasure to find it. The egotism 
 of such a man, said Coleridge, is a revelation of spirit. 
 
 103. Milton's Later Poems. — Paradise Lost yNZ.^ fol- 
 lowed by Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, pub- 
 lished together in 1 67 1. Paradise Regained o^tn^ With. 
 the journey of Christ ^into the wilderness after his bap- 
 tism, and its four books describe the temptation of Christ 
 by Satan, and the answers and victory of the Redeemer. 
 The speeches in it overwhelm the action, and their 
 learned argument is only relieved by a few descriptions ; 
 but these, as in that of Athens, are done with Milton's 
 highest power. Its solemn beauty of quietude, and a 
 more severe style than that of Paradise Lost, make us 
 feel in it that Milton has grown older. 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION l6j 
 
 In Samson Agonistes the style is still severer, even to 
 the verge of a harshness which the sublimity alone tends 
 to modify. It is a choral drama, after the Greek model. 
 Samson in his blindness is described, is called on to make 
 sport for the Philistines, and overthrows them in the end. 
 Samson represents the fallen Puritan cause, and Samson's 
 victorious death Milton's hopes for the final triumph of 
 that cause. The poem has all the grandeur of the last 
 words of a great man in whom there was now " calm of 
 mind, all passion spent." It is also the last word of the 
 music of the Elizabethan drama long after its notes 
 seemed hushed, and its deep sound is strange in the 
 . midst of the shallow noise of the Restoration. Soon 
 afterwards, November, 1674, blind and old and fallen on 
 evil days, Milton died ; but neither blindness, old age, 
 nor evil days could lessen the inward light, nor impair 
 the imaginative power with which he sang, it seemed 
 with the angels, the "undisturbed song of pure concent," 
 until he joined himself, at last, with those "just spirits 
 who wear victorious palms." 
 
 104. His Work. — To the greatness of the artist Milton 
 joined the majesty of a clear and lofty character. His 
 poetic style was as stately as his character, and proceeded 
 from it. Living at a time when criticism began to purify 
 the verse of England, and being himself well acquainted 
 with the great classical models, his work is seldom weak- 
 ened by the false conceits and the intemperance of the 
 Elizabethan writers, and yet is as imaginative as theirs, 
 and as various. He has not their naturalness, nor all 
 
l68 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 their intensity, but he has a larger grace, a lovelier col- 
 our, a closer eye for nature, a more finished art, and a 
 sublime dignity they did not possess. All the kinds of 
 poetry which he touched he touched with the ease of 
 great strength, and with so much energy, that they be- 
 came new in his hands. He put a fresh life into the 
 masque, the sonnet, the elegy, the descriptive lyric, the 
 song, the choral drama ; and he created the epic in 
 England. The hghter love poem he never wrote, and 
 we are grateful that he kept his coarse satirical power 
 apart from his poetry. In some points he was untrue 
 to his descent from the Elizabethans, for he had no dra- 
 matic faculty, and he had no humour. He summed up 
 in himself the learned and artistic influences of the Eng- 
 lish Renaissance, and handed them on to us. His taste 
 was as severe, his verse as polished, his method and lan- 
 guage as strict as those of the school of Dryden and 
 Pope that grew up when he was old. A hterary past 
 and present thus met in him, nor did he fail, like all the 
 greatest men, to make a cast into the future. He estab- 
 Hshed the poetry of pure natural description. Lastly, he 
 did not represent in any way the England that followed 
 the Stuarts, but he did represent Puritan England, and 
 the whole spirit of Puritanism from its cradle to its grave. 
 105. The Pilgrim's Progress. — We might say that 
 Puritanism said its last great words with Milton, were it 
 not that its spirit continued in English life, were it not 
 also that four years after his death, in 1678, John Bun- 
 van, who had previously written religious poems, and in 
 
V ELIZABETH TO THE RESTORATION i6q 
 
 1665 the Ho/y Ciiy^ published the Pilgrim'' s Progress. 
 It is the journey of Christian the Pilgrim from the City 
 of Destruction to the Celestial City. The second part 
 was pubhshed in 1684. In 1682 he had written the 
 allegory of the Holy War, and in 1680 The Life and 
 Death of Mr, Badman^ a curious little story. I class 
 the Pilgri7n's Progress here, because in its imaginative 
 fervour and imagery, and in its quality of naturalness, it 
 belongs to the spirit of the Elizabethan times. Written 
 by a man of the people, it is a people's book ; and its 
 simple form grew out of passionate feeling, and not out 
 of self-conscious art. The passionate feeling was relig- 
 ious, and in painting the pilgrim's progress towards 
 Heaven, and his battle with the world and temptation 
 and sorrow, the book touched those deep and universal 
 interests which belong to poor and rich. Its language, 
 the language of the Bible, and its allegorical form, initi- 
 ated a plentiful prose literature of a similar kind. But 
 none have equalled it. Its form is almost epic : its dra- 
 matic dialogue, its clear types of character, its vivid 
 descriptions, as of Vanity Fair, and of places, such as the 
 Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Delectable 
 Mountains, which represent states of the human soul, 
 have given an equal but a different pleasure to children 
 and men, to the villager and the scholar. 
 
I/O ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE DEATH OF POPE AND 
 
 SWIFT, 1 660-1 745 
 
 106. Poetry, Change of Style. — We have seen the 
 natural style as distinguished from the artificial in the 
 Elizabethan poets. Style became not only natural but 
 artistic when it was made by a great genius like Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, or Spenser, for a first-rate poet creates 
 rules of art : his work is filled with laws which other men 
 see, collect, and obey. '^Art, which is the just and lovely 
 arrangement of nature to fulfil a nobly chosen aim, is 
 then born.,/^ But when the art of poetry is making, the 
 second-rate poets, inspired only by their feelings, will 
 write in a natural style unrestrained by rules, that is, 
 they will put their feelings into verse without caring 
 much for the form in which they do it. As long as they 
 live in the midst of a youthful national life, and feel an 
 ardent sympathy with it, their style will be fresB and im- 
 passioned, and give pleasure because of the strong feel\ 
 ing that inspires it.. But it will also be extravagant and^ 
 unrestrained in its use of images and words because of 
 its want of art. This is the general history of the style 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE I /I 
 
 of the second-class poets of the middle period of Eliza- 
 beth's reign, and even Shakespeare affords examples of 
 this want of art. (2) Afterwards the national life grew 
 chill, and the feelings of the poets also chill. Then the 
 want of art in the style made itself felt. The far-fetched 
 images, the hazarded meanings, the over-fanciful way of 
 putting thoughts, the sensational expression of feeling, 
 in which the Elizabethan poets indulged, not only ap- 
 peared in all their ugliness when they were inspired by 
 no ardent feeling, but were indulged in far more than be- 
 fore. Men tried to produce by extravagant use of words 
 the same results that a passionate sense of life had pro- 
 duced, and the-more they failed the more extravagant and 
 fantastic they became, till at last their poetry ceased to 
 have clear meaning. This is the general history of the 
 style of the poets from the later days of Elizabeth till the 
 Civil War. (3) The natural style, ttsregulated by art, 
 had thus become unnatural. When it had reached that 
 point, men began to feel how necessary it was that the 
 work of poetry should be subjected to the rules of art, 
 and two influences partly caused and partly supported this 
 desire. One was the influence of Milton. Milton, first 
 by his superb genius, which, as 1 said, creates of itself 
 rules of art, and secondly by his knowledge and imitation 
 of the great classical models, was able to give the first 
 example in England of a pure, grand, and finished style ; 
 and in blank verse, in the lyric and the sonnet, wrote for 
 the first time with absolute correctness. Another influence 
 was that of the movement all over Europe towards inquiry 
 
1/2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 into the right way of doing things, and into the truth of 
 things, a movement we shall soon see at work in science, 
 politics, and religion. In poetry it produced a school 
 of criticism which first took form in France, and the 
 influence of Boileau, La Fontaine, and others who were 
 striving after greater finish and neatness of expression, 
 told on England now. It is an influence which has been 
 exaggerated. It is absurd to place the " creaking lyre " 
 of Boileau side by side with Dryden's " long resounding 
 march and energy divine." Our critical school of poets 
 have few French qualities in them even when they imi- 
 tate the French. (4) Further, our own poets had 
 already, before the Restoration, begun the critical work, 
 and the French influence served only to give it a greater 
 impulse. We shall see the growth of a colder and more 
 correct phrasing and versification in Waller, Denham, and 
 Cowley. Vigour was given to this new method in art by 
 Dryden, and perfection of artifice added to it by Pope. 
 The artificial style succeeded to and extinguished the 
 natural^ or to put it otherwise, a merely intellectual 
 poetry finally overcame a poetry in which emotion always 
 accompanied thought. 
 
 107. Change of Poetic Subject. — The subject of the 
 Elizabethan poets was Man as influenced by the Pas- 
 sions, and it was treated from the side of natural feeling. 
 This was fully and splendidly done by Shakespeare. But 
 after a time this subject followed, as we have seen in 
 speaking of the drama, the same career as the style. It 
 was treated in an extravagant and sensational manner, 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1/3 
 
 and the representation of the passions tended to become 
 unnatural or fantastic. Milton redeemed the subject 
 from this vicious excess. He wrote in a grave and natu- 
 ral manner of the passions of the human heart ; he made 
 strong in English poetry the religious passions of love of 
 God, of sorrow for sin, and he raised in song the moral 
 passions into a solemn splendour. But with him the 
 subject of man as influenced by the great passions died 
 for a time. Dryden, Pope, and their followers turned 
 to another subject. They left, except in Dryden's 
 Dramas and Fables, the passions aside, and wrote of the 
 things in which the intellect and the casuistical con- 
 science, the social and political instincts in man, were 
 interested. In this way the satiric, didactic, philosophi- 
 cal, and party poetry of a new school arose. 
 
 1 08. The Poems in which the New School began belong 
 in date to the age before the Restoration, but in spirit 
 and form they were the sources of the poetry which is 
 called classical or critical, or artificial. Edmund Waller, 
 Sir John Denham, and Abraham Cowley are the pre- 
 cursors of Dryden. Waller remodelled the heroic coup- 
 let of Chaucer, and gave it the precise character which 
 made it for nearly a century and a half the prevailing 
 form of verse. He wrote his earliest poems about 1623, 
 in precisely the same symmetrical manner as Dryden 
 and Pope. His new manner was not followed for many 
 years, till Denham published in 1642 his Cooper's HilL 
 " The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully 
 known,*' said Dryden, " till Mr. Waller taught it, but this 
 
174 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 sweetness of his lyric poetry was afterwards followed in 
 the epic of Sir John Denham in his Cooper's Hill'' The 
 chill stream of this poem, which is neither " lyric " nor 
 " epic," has the metrical cadence, but none of the grip 
 and force of Dryden's verse. Cowley's earlier poems 
 belong to the Elizabethan phantasies, but the later were, 
 with the exception of some noble poems of personal feel- 
 ing, cold and exact enough for the praise of the new 
 school. He invented that curious misnomer — the Pin- 
 daric Ode — which, among all its numerous offspring, 
 had but one splendid child in Dry den's Alexander' s 
 Feast When Gray took up the ode again, Cowley was 
 not his master. Sir W. Davenant's Gondibert, 165 1, also 
 an heroic poem, is another example of this transition. 
 Worthless as poetry, it represents the new interest in 
 political philosophy and in science that was arising, and 
 preludes the intellectual poetry. Its preface discourses 
 of rhyme and the rules of art, and embodies the critical 
 influence which came over with the exiled court from 
 France. The critical school had therefore begun even 
 before Dryden's poems were written. The change was 
 less sudden than it seemed. 
 
 Satiric poetry, soon to become a greater thing, was 
 made during this transition time into a powerful weapon 
 by two men, each on a different side. Andrew Marvell's 
 Satires, after the Restoration, exhibit the Puritan's wrath 
 with the vices of the court and king, and his shame for 
 the disgrace of England among the nations. The Hudi- 
 bras of Samuel Butler, in 1663, represents the fierce 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1/5 
 
 reaction which had set in against Puritanism. It is 
 justly famed for wit, learning, good sense, and ingenious 
 drollery, and, in accordance with the new criticism, it is 
 absolutely without obscurity. It is often as terse as 
 Pope's best work. But it is too long, its wit wearies us 
 at last, and it undoes the force of its attack on the Puri- 
 tans by its exaggeration. Satire should have at least the 
 semblance of truth ; yet Butler calls the Puritans cow- 
 ards. We turn now to the greatest of these poets in 
 whom poetry is founded on intellect rather than on feel- 
 ing, and whose verse is mostly devoted to argument and 
 satire. 
 
 109. John Dry den was the first of the new, as Milton 
 was the last of the elder, school of poetry. It was late in 
 life that he gained fame. Born in 163 1, he was a Crom- 
 wellite till the Restoration, when he began the changes 
 which mark his life. His poem on the death of the Pro- 
 tector was soon followed by the Astrcea Redux, which 
 celebrated the return of Justice to the realm in the per- 
 son of Charles II. The Annus Mirabilis appeared in 
 1667, and in this his metrical ease was first clearly marked. 
 But his power of exact reasoning expressing itself with 
 powerful and ardent ease in a rapid succession of con- 
 densed thoughts in verse, was not shown (save in drama) 
 till he was fifty years old, in the first part of Absalom and 
 Achitophely the foremost of English satires. He had been 
 a playwriter for fourteen years, till its appearance in 1681, 
 and the rhymed plays which he had written enabled him 
 to perfect the versification which is now so remarkable 
 
176 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 in his work. The satire itself, written in mockery gf the 
 Popish Plot and the Exclusion Bill, attacked Shaftesbury 
 as Achitophel, was kind to Monmouth as Absalom, and 
 in its sketch of Buckingham as Zimri the poet avenged 
 himself for the Rehearsal, It was the first fine example 
 of that party poetry which became still more bitter and 
 personal in the hands of Pope. It was followed by the 
 Medal, a new attack on Shaftesbury, and the Mac Fleck- 
 noe, 1682, in which Shad well, a rival poet, who had sup- 
 ported Shaftesbury's party, was made the witless successor 
 of Richard Flecknoe, a poet of all kinds of poetry, and 
 master of none. Then in the same year, after the arrest 
 of Monmouth, the second part of Absalom and Achito- 
 phel appeared, all of which, except two hundred lines, 
 was written by Nahum Tate. These were four terrible 
 masterpieces of ruthless wit and portraiture. Then he 
 turned to express his transient theology in verse, and the 
 Religio Laid, 1682, defends and states the argument for 
 the Church of England. It was perhaps poverty that led 
 him to change his rehgion, and the Hind and Panther, 
 1 68 7, 'is a model of melodious reasoning in behalf of the 
 milk-white hind of the Church of Rome. The Dissenters 
 are mercilessly treated under the image of the baser 
 beasts ; while at first the Panther, the Church of Eng- 
 land, is gently touched, but in the end lashed with sever- 
 ity. However, Hind and Panther tell, at the close, two 
 charming stories to one another. It produced in reply 
 one of the happiest burlesques in English poetry. The 
 Country Mouse and the City Mouse, the work of Charles 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 7/ 
 
 Montague (Lord Halifax), and Mat Prior. Deprived of 
 his offices at the Revolution, Dryden turned again to the 
 drama and to prose, but the failure of the last of his good 
 plays in 1694, drove him again from the stage, and he 
 gave himself up to his Translation of Virgil which he 
 published in 1697. As a narrative poet his Fables ^ 
 Anciefit and Modern, finished late in life, in 1699, give 
 him a high rank in this class of poetry. They sin from 
 coarseness, but in style, in magnificent march of verse, 
 in intellectual but not imaginative fire, in ease but not 
 in grace, they are excellent. As a lyric poet his fame 
 rests on the animated Song for St Cecilia's Day, 1687, 
 and on Alexander's Feast, 1697. From Milton's death, 
 1674, till his own in 1700, Dryden reigned undisputed, 
 and round his throne in Will's Coffeehouse, where he sat 
 as " Glorious John," we may place the names of the lesser 
 poets, the Earls of Dorset, Roscommon, and Mulgrave, 
 Sir Charles Sedley, and the Earl of Rochester. The 
 lighter poetry of the court lived on in the two last. John 
 Oldham won a short fame by his Satire on the Jesuits, 
 1679; ^^d Bishop Ken, 1668, established, in his Morn- 
 ing and Evening Hymns, a new type of religious poetry. 
 
 no. Prose Literature of the Restoration and Revolu- 
 tion. Criticism. — As Dryden was now first in poetry, so 
 he was in prose. No one can understand the poetry of 
 this time, in its relation to the past, to the future, and 
 to France, who does not read the Critical Essays pre- 
 fixed to his dramas, On the Historical Poem, on dramatic 
 rhyme, on Heroic Plays, on the classical writers, and his 
 
178 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Essay on Dramatic Poetry, He is in these essays, not 
 only the leader of modern literary criticism, but the 
 leader of that modern prose in which the style is easy, 
 unaffected, moulded to the subject, and in which the 
 proper words are put in the proper places. Dryden was 
 a great originator. . 
 
 III. Science. — During the Civil War the religious 
 and political struggle absorbed the country, but yet, 
 apart from the strife, a few men who cared for scien- 
 tific matters met at one another's houses. Out of this 
 little knot, after the Restoration, arose the Royal Society, 
 embodied in 1662. Astronomy, experimental chemistry, 
 medicine, mineralogy, zoology, botany, vegetable physi- 
 ology, were all founded as studies, and their hterature 
 begun, in the age of the Restoration. One man's work 
 was so great in science as to merit his name being men- 
 tioned among the literary men of England. In 167 1 
 Isaac Newton laid his Theory of Light before the Royal 
 Society ; in the year before the Revolution his Fnncipia 
 established, by its proof of the theory of gravitation, the 
 true system of the universe. 
 
 It was in poHtical and religious knowledge, however, 
 that the intellectual inquiry of the nation was most 
 shown. When the thinking spirit succeeds the active 
 and adventurous in a people, one of the first things they 
 will think upon is the true method and grounds of gov- 
 ernment, both divine and human. Two sides will be 
 taken : the side of authority and the side of reason in 
 Religion ; the side of authority and the side of indi- 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 79 
 
 112. The Theological Literature of those who declared 
 that reason was supreme as a test of truth, arose with 
 some men who met at Lord Falkland's just before the 
 Civil War, and especially with John Hales and William 
 ChiUingworth. The same kind of work, though modified 
 towards more sedateness of expression, and less rational- 
 istic, was now done by Archbishop Tillotson, and Bishop 
 Burnet. In 1678, Cudworth's Intellectual System of the 
 Universe is perhaps the best book on the controversy 
 which then took form against those who were called 
 Atheists. A number of divines in the English Church 
 took sides for Authority or Reason, or opposed the 
 growing Deism during the latter half of the seventeenth 
 century. It was an age of preachers, and Isaac Barrow, 
 Newton's predecessor in the chair of mathematics at 
 Cambridge, could preach, with grave and copious elo- 
 quence, for three hours at a time. Theological prose 
 was strengthened by the publication of the sermons of 
 Edward Stillingfleet and William Sherlock, and their 
 adversary, Robert South, was as witty in rhetoric as 
 he was fierce in controversy. 
 
 113. Political Literature. — The resistance to authority 
 in the opposition to the theory of the Divine Right of 
 Kings did not much enter into literature till after the 
 severe blow that theory received in the Civil War. Dur- 
 ing the Commonwealth and after the Restoration the 
 struggle took the form of a discussion on the abstract 
 question of the Science of Government, and was mingled 
 with an inquiry into the origin of society and the ground 
 
f80 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 of social life. Thomas Hobbes, during the Common- 
 wealth, was the first who dealt with the question from 
 the side of abstract reason, and he is also, before Dryden, 
 the first of all our prose writers whose style may be said 
 to be uniform and correct, and adapted carefully to the 
 subjects on which he wrote. His treatise, the Leviathan, 
 165 1, declared (i) that the origin of all power was in 
 the people, and (2) that the end of all power was the 
 commonweal. It destroyed the theory of a Divine 
 Right of Kings and Priests, but it created another kind 
 of Divine Right when it said that the power lodged in 
 rulers by the people could not be taken away by the 
 people. Sir R. Filmer supported the side of Divine 
 Right in his Patriarcha, pubhshed 1680. Henry Nevile, 
 in his Dialogue concerning Government^ and James Har- 
 rington in his romance, The Commonwealth of Oceana, 
 published at the beginning of the Commonwealth, con- 
 )ended that all secure government was to be based on 
 property, but Nevile supported a monarchy, and Har- 
 rington — with whom I may class Algernon Sidney, whose 
 political treatise on government is as statesmanlike as it 
 is finely written — a democracy, on this basis. I may 
 here mention that it was during this period, in 1667, that 
 the first effort was made after a Science of Political 
 Economy by Sir William Petty in his Treatise on Taxes. 
 T\iQ political pamphlet W2i?> also begun at this time by Sir 
 Roger L' Estrange, and George Savile, Lord Hahfax. 
 
 114. John Locke, after the Revolution, in 1690, fol- 
 lowed the two doctriiies of Hobbes in his treatises on 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 151 
 
 Civil Government^ but with these important additions — 
 (i) that the people have a right to take away the power 
 given by them to the ruler, (2) that the ruler is respon- 
 sible to the people for the trust reposed in him, and (3) 
 that legislative assemblies are Supreme as the voice of 
 the people. This was the political philosophy of the 
 Revolution. Locke carried the same spirit of free in- 
 quiry into the realm of religion, and in his Letters on 
 Toleration laid down the philosophical grounds for lib- 
 erty of religious thought. He finished by entering the 
 realm of metaphysical inquiry. In 1690 appeared his 
 Essay concerning the Human Understanding, in which 
 he investigated its limits, and traced all ideas, and there- 
 fore all knowledge, to experience. In his clear state- 
 ment of the way in which the Understanding works, in 
 the way in which he guarded it and Language against 
 their errors in the inquiry after truth, he did almost as 
 much for the true method of thinking as Bacon had done 
 for the science of nature. 
 
 115. The intellectual stir of the time produced, apart 
 from the great movement of thought, a good deal of 
 Miscellaneous Literature. The painting of short " char- 
 acters " was carried on after the Restoration by Samuel 
 Butler and W. Charleton. These " characters " had no 
 personality, but as party spirit deepened, names thinly 
 disguised were given to characters drawn of living men, 
 and Dryden and Pope in poetry, and all the prose wits 
 of the time of Queen Anne and George I., made per- 
 sonal and often violent sketches of their opponents a 
 
1 82 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 special element in literature. On the other hand, Izaak 
 Walton's Lives, in 1670, are examples of kind, agreeable^ 
 and careful Biography. Cowley's small volume, written 
 shortly before his death in 1667, gave Hchness to the 
 Essay, and its prose almost anticipated the prose of Dry- 
 den. John Evelyn's multitudinous writings are them- 
 selves a miscellany. He wrote on painting, sculpture, 
 architecture, timber (the Sy/vu), on gardening, com- 
 merce, and he illustrates the searching spirit of the age. 
 In William III.'s time Sir William Temple's pleasant 
 jEssays bring us in style and tone nearer to the great 
 class of essayists of whom Addison was chief. Lady 
 Rachel Russell's Letters begin the Letter-writing liter- 
 ature of England. Pepys (1660-9), and Evelyn, whose 
 Diary grows full after 1 640, gave rise to that class of gos- 
 siping Memoirs which has be n of so much use in giving 
 colour to history. History itself at this time is litde 
 better than memoirs, and such a name may be fairly 
 given to Bishop Burnet's History of his Own Time and 
 to his History of the Reformation, Finally Classical 
 Criticism, in the discussion on the genuineness of the 
 Letters of Phalaris, was created by Richard Bentley in 
 1697-9. Literature was therefore plentiful. It was 
 also correct, but it was not inventive. 
 
 116. The Literature of Queen Anne and the First 
 Georges. — Witl? the closing years of William III. and 
 the accession of Queen Anne (1702) a Hterature arose 
 which was partly new and partly a continuance of that 
 of the Restoration. The conflict between those who 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 83 
 
 took the oath to the new dynasty and the Nonjurors who 
 refused, the hot blood that it produced, the war between 
 Dissent and Church, and between the two parties which 
 now took the names of Whig and Tory, produced a mass 
 of political pamphlets, of which Daniel Defoe's and 
 Swift's were the best; of songs and ballads, like Lillibul- 
 lerOy which were sung in every street ; of squibs, reviews, 
 of satirical poems and letters. Every one joined in it, 
 and it rose to importance in the work of the greater men 
 who mingled literary studies with their political excite- 
 ment. In politics, all the abstract discussions we have 
 mentioned ceased to be abstract, and became personal 
 and practical, and the spirit of inquiry applied itself more 
 closely to -he questions of every-day life. The whole of 
 this stirring Hterary life was concentrated in London, 
 where the agitation of society was hottest; and it is 
 round this vivid ity hfe that the literature of Queen 
 Anne and the two following reigns is best grouped. 
 
 117. It was, with a few exceptions, a Party Literature. 
 The Whig and Tory leaders enlisted on their sides the 
 best poets and prose writers, who fiercely satirised and 
 unduly praised them under names thinly disguised. Our 
 " Augustan Age " was an age of unbridled slander. Per- 
 sonalities were sent to and fro like shots in battle. Those 
 who could do this work well were well rewarded, but the 
 rank and file of writers were left to starve. Literature 
 was thus honoured not for itself, but for the sake of party. 
 The result was that the abler men lowered it by making 
 it a political tool, and the smaller men, the fry of Grub 
 
184 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Street, degraded it by using it in the same way, only in a 
 baser manner. Their flattery was as abject as their abuse 
 was shameless, and both were stupid. They received and 
 deserved the merciless lashing which Pope was soon to 
 ' give them in the Dunciad, Being a party literature, it 
 naturally came to study and to look sharply into human 
 character and into human Hfe as seen in the great city. 
 It debated subjects of Hterary and scientific inquiry and 
 of philosophy with great ability, but without depth. It 
 discussed all the varieties of social life, and painted town 
 society more vividly than has been done before or since ; 
 and it was so wholly taken up with this, that country life 
 and its interests, except in the writings of Addison, were 
 scarcely touched by it at all. Criticism being so active, 
 the form in which thought was expressed was now espe- 
 cially dwelt on, and the result was that the style of English 
 prose became even more simple than in Dryden's hands ; 
 and English verse, leaving Dryden's power behind it, 
 reached a neatness of expression as exquisite as it was 
 artificial. At the same time, and for the same reasons, 
 Nature, Passion, and Imagination decayed in poetry. 
 
 118. Alexander Pope absorbed and reflected all these 
 elements. Born in 1688, he wrote tolerable verse at 
 twelve years old ; the Pastorals appeared in 1 709, and 
 two years afterwards he took full rank as the critical poet 
 in the Essay on Criticism (1711).-^ The next year saw 
 the first cast of his Rape of the Lock, the most brilliant 
 occasional poem in our language. /This closed what we 
 may call his first period. In 171 2 his sacred pastoral, 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 85 
 
 The Messiah^ appeared, and in 17 13, when he pubHshed 
 Windsor Forest, he became known to Swift and to Henry 
 St. John, Lord BoHngbroke. When these, with Gay, 
 Parnell, Prior, Arbuthnot, and others, formed the Scrib- 
 lerus Club, Pope joined them, and soon rose into great 
 fame by his Translation of the Iliad (1715-20), and by 
 the Translation of the Odyssey (1723-5), in which he 
 was assisted by Fenton and Broome. Being now at ease, 
 for he received fully 9000/. for this work, he published 
 from his retreat at Twickenham, and in bitter scorn of 
 the poetasters and of all the petty scribblers who annoyed 
 him, the Dunciad, 1728. Its original hero was Lewis 
 Theobald, but when the fourth book was pubHshed, under 
 Warburton's influence, in. 1742, Colley Gibber was en- 
 throned^ as the King of Dunces instead of Theobald. 
 The fiercest and finest of Pope's satires, it closes his '^ 
 second period which breathes the savageness of Swift. 
 The third phase of Pope's literary hfe was closely linked 
 to his friend Bolingbroke. It was in conversation with 
 him that he originated the Essay on Man (1732-4) and 
 the Imitations of Horace, The Moral Essays, or Epis- 
 tles to men and women, were written to praise those 
 whom he loved, and to satirise the bad poets and the 
 social follies of the day, and all who disHked him or his 
 party. Among these, who has not read the Epistle to 
 Dr, Arbuthnot? In the last few years of his life. Bishop 
 Warburton, the writer of the Legation of Moses and 
 editor of Shakespeare, helped him to fit the Moral 
 Essays into the plan of which the Essay on Man formed 
 
1 86 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 part. Warburton was Pope's last great friend; but 
 almost his only old friend. By 1740 nearly all the 
 members of his literary circle were dead, and a new 
 race of poets and writers had grown up. In 1744 he 
 died. His Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady and the 
 Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard show how he once tried 
 to handle the passions of sorrow and love. The mas- 
 terly form into which he threw the philosophical prin- 
 ciples he condensed into didactic poetry make them 
 more impressive than they have a right to be. The 
 Essay on Man, though its philosophy is poor and not 
 his own, is crowded with lines that have passed into 
 daily use. The Essay on Criticism is equally full of 
 critical precepts put with exquisite skill. The Satires 
 and Epistles are didactic, but their excellence is in the 
 terse and finished types of character, in the almost cre- 
 ative drawing of which Pope remains unrivalled, even by 
 Dryden. His translation of Homer resembles Homer 
 as much as London resembled Troy, or Marlborough 
 Achilles, or Queen Anne Hecuba. It is done with great 
 literary art, but for that very reason it does not make us 
 feel the simplicity and directness of his original. It has 
 neither the manner nor the spirit of the Greek, just as 
 Pope's descriptions of nature have neither the manner 
 nor the spirit of nature. The heroic cotcplet, in which he 
 wrote nearly all his work, he used with a correctness that 
 has never been surpassed, but its smooth perfection, at 
 length, wearies the ear. It wants the breaks that passion 
 and imagination naturally make. Finally, he had the 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 8/ 
 
 spirit of an artist, hating those who degraded his art, and 
 at a time when men followed it for money, and place, 
 and the applause of the club and of the town, he loved 
 it faithfully to the end, for its own sake. 
 
 119. The Minor Poets who surrounded Pope in the 
 first two-thirds of his life did not approach his genius. 
 Richard Blackmore endeavoured to restore the epic in 
 his Prince Arthur, 1695, and Samuel Garth's mock heroic 
 poem of the Dispensary appeared along with John Pom- 
 fret's poems in 1699. I^ i7oi> Defoe's Truebojii Eng- 
 lishman defended William III. against those who said he 
 was a foreigner, and Prior's finest ode, the Carmen Secu- 
 lare, took up the same cause. John Philips is known by 
 his Miltonic burlesque of The Splendid Shilling, and his 
 Cyder was a Georgic of the apple. Matthew Green's 
 Spleen and Ambrose Philip's Pastorals were contempo- 
 rary with Pope's first poetry ; and John Gay's Shepherd's 
 Week, six pastorals, 1714, were as lightly wrought as his 
 famous Fables. He had a true vein of happy song, and 
 Black-eyed Susan remains with the Beggars'* Opera to 
 please us still. The political poems of Swift were coarse, 
 but always hit home. Addison celebrated the Battle of 
 Blenheim in the Campaign, and his cultivated grace is 
 found in some devotional pieces. On his death Thomas 
 Tickell made a noble elegy. Prior's charming ease is 
 best shown in the light narrative poetry which we may say 
 began with him in the reign of William III. In Pope's 
 later life a new and quickening impulse came upon poetry, 
 and changed it root and branch. It arose in Ramsay's 
 
l88 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAR 
 
 Gentle Shepherd, 1725, and in Thomson's Seasons, 1730, 
 and it rang the knell of the manner and the spirit of the 
 critical school. 
 
 120. The Prose Literature of Pope's time collects 
 itself round four great names, Swift, Defoe, Addison, and 
 Bishop Berkeley, and they all exhibit those elements of 
 the age of which I have spoken. Jonathan Swift was 
 the keenest of poHtical partisans, for his fierce and 
 earnest personality made everything he did impassioned. 
 But he was far more than a partisan. He was the most 
 original prose writer of his time — the man of genius among 
 many men of talent. It was not till he was thirty years 
 old, 1697, that he wrote the Battle of the Books, concern- 
 ing the so-called Letters of Phala^is, and the Tale of a 
 Tub, a satire on the Dissenters, the Papists, and even the 
 Church of England. These books, published in 1704, 
 made his reputation. He soon became the finest and 
 most copious writer of pamphlets England had ever 
 known. At first he supported the Whigs, but left them 
 for the new Tory party in 1710, and his tracts brought 
 him court favour, while his literary fame was increased 
 by many witty letters, poems, and arguments. On the 
 fall of the Tory party at the accession of George I., 17 14, 
 he retired to the Deanery of St. Patrick in Ireland, an 
 embittered man, and the Drapier's Letters, 1724, writ- 
 ten against Wood's halfpence, gained him popularity in 
 .a country that he hated. In 1726 his inventive genius, 
 his savage satire, and his cruel indignation with life were 
 all shown in Gulliver's Travels, The voyage to Lilliput 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 89 
 
 and Brobdingriag satirised the politics and manners of 
 England and Europe ; that to Laputa mocked the philoso- 
 phers ; and the last, to the country of the Houyhnhnms, 
 lacerated and defiled the whole body of humanity. No 
 EngUsh is more robust than Swift's, no life in private 
 and public more sad and proud, no death more pitiable. 
 He died in 1745 hopelessly insane. Daniel Defoe'^^ 
 vein as a pamphleteer seems to have been inexhaustible, 
 and the style of his tracts was as roughly persuasive as 
 it was popular. Above all he was the journahst. His 
 Review, published twice a week for a year, was wholly 
 written by himself; but he "founded, conducted, and 
 wrote for a host of other newspapers," and filled them 
 with every subject of the day. His tales grew out of 
 matters treated of in his journals, and his best art lay 
 in the way he built up these stories out of mere sug- 
 gestions. ''The little art he is truly master of," said one 
 of his contemporaries, " is of forging a story and impos- 
 ing it on the world for truth." His circumstantial inven- 
 tion, combined with a style which exactly fits it by its 
 simplicity, is the root of the charm of the great story 
 by which he chiefly hves in literature. Robinson Crusoe, 
 1 719, equalled Gulliver's Travels in truthful representa- 
 tion, and excelled them in invention. The story lives 
 and charms from day to day. But none of his stories 
 are real novels ; that is, they have no plot to the working 
 out of which the characters and the events contribute. 
 They form the transition, however, from the slight tale 
 and the romance of the Elizabethan time to the finished 
 
igO ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 121. Metaphysical Literature, which drifted into the- 
 ology, was enriched by the^work of Bishop Berkeley. 
 The Platonic dialogue of Hylas and Philonotis, 17 13, 
 charms us even more than his subtle and elastic Siris, 
 1 744. These books, with Alciphron, the Minute Philoso- 
 pher y 1732, questioned the real existence of matter, — 
 "no idea can exist," he said, '^out of the mind," — and 
 founded on the denial of it an answer to the English 
 Deists, round whom in the first half of the eighteenth 
 century centred the struggle between the claims of nat- 
 ural and revealed religion. The influence of Shaftes- 
 bury's Characteristics y 1711? was far more literary than 
 metaphysical. He condemned metaphysics, but his phi- 
 losophy, such as it was, inspired Pope, and his cultivated 
 thinking on several subjects made many writers in the 
 next generation care for beauty and grace. He, like 
 Bolingbroke, and Wollaston, Tindal, Toland, and Collins, 
 on the Deists' side, were opposed by Samuel Clark, by 
 Bentley, by Bishop Butler, and by Bishop Warburton. 
 Bishop Butler's acute and solid reasoning treated in 
 his Sermons the subject of Morals, inquiring what was 
 the particular nature of man, and hence determining the 
 course of Hfe correspondent to this nature. His Analogy 
 of Religion y Natural and Revealed y to the Constitution and 
 Course of Nature ^ 1736, endeavours to make peace be- 
 tween authority and reason, and has become a standard 
 book. I may mention here a social satire. The Fable of 
 the BeeSy by Mandeville, half-poem, half-prose dialogue, 
 and finished in 1729. It tried to prove that the vices 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE IQI 
 
 of society are the foundation of civilisation, and is one 
 of the first of a new set of books which marked the rise 
 in England of the bold speculations on the nature and 
 ground of society to which the French Revolution gave 
 afterwards so great an impulse. 
 
 12 2. The Periodical Essay is connected with the 
 names of Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele. 
 The gay, light, graceful, literary Essay, differing from 
 such Essays as Bacon's as good conversation about a 
 subject differs from a clear analysis of all its points, was 
 begun in France by Montaigne in 1580. Charles Cot- 
 ton, a wit of Charles II. 's time, retranslated Montaigne's 
 Ess ays y and they soon found imitators in Cowley and 
 Sir W. Temple. But the periodical Essay was created 
 by Steele and Addison. It was at first published three 
 times a week, then daily, and it was anonymous, and 
 both these characters necessarily changed its form from 
 that of an essay by Montaigne. Steele began it in the 
 Tatler, 1 709, and it treated of everything that was going 
 on in the town. He paints as a social humourist the 
 whole age of Queen Anne — the poHtical and literary 
 disputes, the fine gentlemen and ladies, the characters 
 of men, the humours of society, the new book, the new 
 play ; we live in the very streets and drawing-rooms of 
 old London. Addison soon joined him, first in the Tat- 
 ler^ afterwards in the Spectator, 171 1. His work is more 
 critical, literary, and didactic than his companion's. The 
 characters he introduces, such as Sir Roger de Coverley, 
 are finished studies after nature. The humour is very 
 
192 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 fine and tender ; and, like Chaucer's, it is never bitter. 
 The style adds to the charm : in its varied cadence and 
 subtle ease it has npt been surpassed within its own 
 peculiar sphere in England ; and it seems to grow out 
 of the subjects treated of. Addison's work was a great 
 one, lightly done. The Spectator^ the Guardian, and the 
 Freeholder, in his hands, gave a better tone to manners, 
 and hence to morals, and a gentler one to political and 
 literary criticism. The essays published every Friday 
 were chiefly on literary subjects, the Saturday essays 
 chiefly on religious subjects. The former popularised 
 literature, so that culture spread among the middle 
 classes and crept down to the country ; the latter popu- 
 larised religion. " I have brought," he says, " philosophy 
 out of closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell 
 in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and in coffee-houses." 
 
 THE DRAMA, FROM THE RESTORATION TO I780 
 
 123. The Drama after the Restoration took the tone 
 of the court both in poHtics and religion, but its .partisan- 
 ship decayed under William III., and died in the reign 
 of Queen Anne. The court of Charles II., which the 
 plays now written represented much more than they did 
 the national life, gave the drama the "genteel" ease 
 and the immorahty of its society, and encouraged it 
 to find new impulses from the tragedy and comedy of 
 Spain and of France. The French romances of the 
 school of Calprenede and Scud^ry furnished plots to 
 the play writers. The great French dramatists, Corneille, 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 93 
 
 Racine, and Moliere, were translated and borrowed from 
 again and again. The " three unities " of Corneille, and 
 rhyme instead of blank verse as the vehicle of tragedy, 
 were adopted, but " the spirit of neither the serious nor 
 the comic drama of France could then be transplanted 
 into England." 
 
 Two acting companies were formed on Charles II. 's 
 return, under Thomas Killigrew and Davenant ; actresses 
 came on the stage for the first time, the ballet was intro- 
 duced, and scenery began to be largely used. Dryden, 
 whose masterly force was sure to strike the key-note that 
 others followed, began his comedies in 1663, but turned 
 to tragedy in the Indian Queen, 1664. This play, with 
 the Indian Emperour, established for fourteen years the 
 rhymed couplet as the dramatic verse. His defence of 
 rhyme in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy asserted the 
 originaHty of the English school, and denied that it fol- 
 lowed the French. The Maiden Queen, 1667, brought 
 him new fame, and then Tyrannic Love and the Con- 
 quest of Granada, 1672, induced the burlesque of the 
 Rehearsal, written by the Duke of Buckingham, in which 
 the bombastic extravagance of these heroic plays was 
 ridiculed. Dryden now changed, in 1678, his dramatic 
 manner, and following Shakespeare, "disencumbered 
 himself from rhyme " in his fine tragedy of All for Love, 
 and showed what power he had of low comedy in the 
 Spanish Friar. After the Revolution, his tragedy of 
 Don Sebastian ranks high, but not higher than his brill- 
 iantly written comedy of Amphitryon, 1690. Dryden is' 
 
194 ENGLISH LITERATQRE CHAP. 
 
 the representative dramatist of the Restoration. Among 
 the tragedians who followed his method and possessed 
 their own, those most worthy of notice are Nat Lee, 
 whose Rival Queens, 1667, deserves its praise; Thomas 
 Otway, whose two pathetic tragedies, the Orphan and 
 Venice Preserved, still keep the stage ; Thomas Southerne 
 whose Fatal Marriage, 1694, was revived by Garrick; 
 and Congreve who once turned from comedy to write 
 The Mourning Bride, 
 
 It was in comedy, however, that the dramatists ex- 
 celled. Sir George Etherege originated with great skill 
 the new comedy of England with She Would if She 
 Could, 1668. Sedley, Mrs. Behn, Lacy, and Shadwell 
 carry on to the Revolution that light Comedy of Man- 
 ners which William Wycherley's gross vigour and natural 
 plots lifted into an odious excellence in such plays as the 
 Country Wife and the Plain Dealer, Three great come- 
 dians followed Wycherley — William Congreve, whose 
 well-bred ease is almost as remarkable as his briUiant 
 wit ; Sir John Vanbrugh, and George Farquhar, both of 
 whom have quick invention, gaiety, dash, and sincerity. 
 The indecency of all these writers belongs to the time, 
 but it is partly forgotten in their swift and sustained 
 vivacity. This immorality produced Jeremy Collier's 
 famous attack on the stage, 1698; and the growth of 
 a higher tone in society, uniting with this attack, began 
 to purify the drama, though Mrs. Centlivre's comedies, 
 during the reign of Queen Anne, show no love of purity. 
 Steele, at this time, whose Lying Lover makes him the 
 
VI RESTORATION TO DEATH OF POPE 1 95 
 
 father of Sentimental comedy, wrote all his plays with 
 a moral purpose. Nicholas Rowe, whose melancholy 
 tragedies " are occupied with themes of heroic love," is 
 dull, but never gross ; while Addison's ponderous tragedy 
 of Cato, 1 713, praised by Voltaire as the first tragedie 
 raisonnable, marks, in its total rejection of the drama of 
 nature for the classical style, " a definite epoch in the 
 history of English tragedy, an epoch of decay, on which 
 no recovery has followed." Comedy, however, had still 
 a future. The Beggars^ Opera of Gay, 1728, revived an 
 old form of drama in a new way. Colley Gibber carried 
 on into George II. 's time the light and the sentimental 
 comedy ; Fielding made the stage the vehicle of criticism 
 on the follies, literature, and politics of his time ; and Foote 
 and Garrick did the same kind of work in their farces. 
 
 The influence of the Restoration drama continues, past 
 this period, in the manner of Goldsmith and Sheridan 
 who wrote between 1768 and 1778; but the lambent 
 humour of Goldsmith's Good-natured Man and She 
 Stoops to Conquer^ and the wit, almost as brilliant and 
 more epigrammatic than Congreve's, of Sheridan's Rivals 
 and the School for Scandal, are not deformed by the 
 indecency of the Restoration. Both were Irishmen, but 
 Goldsmith has more of the Celtic grace and Sheridan 
 of the Celtic wit. The sentimental comedy was carried 
 on into the next age by Macklin, Murphy, Cumberland, 
 the Colmans, and many others, but we may say that with 
 Sheridan the history of the elder English Drama closes. 
 That which belongs to our century is a different thing. 
 
\g6 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF POPE AND OF 
 SWIFT TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND FROM THE 
 FRENCH REVOLUTION TO THE DEATH OF SCOTT 
 1745-1789-1832 
 
 124. Prose Literature. — The rapid increase of manu- 
 factures, science, and prosperity which began with the 
 middle of the eighteenth century is paralleled by the 
 growth of Literature. The general causes of this growth 
 were — 
 
 I St, That a good prose style had been perfected ^ and 
 the method of writing being made easy, production in- 
 creased. Men were born, as it were, into a good school 
 of the art of composition. 
 
 2ndly, The long peace after the accession of the House 
 of Hanover'had left England at rest, and given it wealth. 
 The reclaiming of waste tracts, the increased population 
 and trade, made better communication necessary; and 
 the country was soon covered with a network of high- 
 ways. The leisure gave time to men to think and 
 write; the quicker interchange between the capital and 
 the country spread over England the literature of the 
 capital, and stirred men everywhere to express their 
 
VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 19/ 
 
 thoughts. The coaching services and the post carried 
 the new book and the hterary criticism to the villages, 
 and awoke the men of talent there, who might otherwise 
 have been silent. 
 
 3rdly, The Press sent far and wide the news of the 
 day, and grew in importance till it contained the opinions 
 and writings of men like Johnson. Such seed produced 
 literary work in the country. Newspapers now began 
 to play a larger part in literature. They rose under the 
 Commonwealth, but became important when the censor- 
 ship which reduced them to a mere broadsheet of news 
 was removed after the Revolution of 1688. The politi- 
 cal sleep of the age of the two first Georges hindered 
 their progress ; but in the reign of George III., after a 
 struggle with which the name of John Wilkes and the 
 author of the Letters of Junius are connected, and 
 which lasted from 1764 to 17 71, the press claimed and 
 obtained the right to criticise the conduct and measures 
 of ministers and the king; and the further right to 
 publish and comment on the debates in the two Houses. 
 
 4thly, Communication with the Continent had in- 
 creased during the peaceable times of Walpole, and 
 the wars that followed made it still more common. 
 With its increase two new and great outbursts of litera- 
 ture told upon England. France sent the works of 
 Montesquieu, of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alem- 
 bert, and the rest of the liberal thinkers who were 
 called the Encyclopaedists, to influence and quicken 
 English literature on all the great subjects that belong 
 
198 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 to the social and political life of man. Afterwards, 
 the fresh German movement, led by Lessing and others, 
 and carried on by Goethe and Schiller, added its impulse 
 to the poetical school that arose in England along with 
 the French Revolution. These were the general causes 
 of the rapid growth of literature from the time of the 
 death of Swift and of Pope. 
 
 125. Prose Literature between 1745 and the French 
 Revolution may be said to be bound up with the literary 
 lives of one man and his friends. Samuel Johnson, 
 born in 1709, and whose first important prose work, 
 the Life of Savage, appeared in 1744, was the last 
 representative of the literary king, who, Hke Dryden 
 and Pope, held a court in London. Poor and un- 
 known, he worked his way to fame, and his first poem, 
 the London, 1738, satirised the town where he loved to 
 live. His longer and better poem. The Vanity oj 
 Human Wishes, was pubhshed in 1749, and his moral 
 power was never better shown than in its weighty verse. 
 His one play, //r;^^, was acted in the same year. He 
 carried on the periodical essays in the Rambler, 1750-2, 
 but in it, as afterwards in the Idler, grace and lightness, 
 the essence of this kind of essay, were lost. Driven 
 by poverty, Johnson undertook a greater work: the 
 Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, and his 
 celebrated letter to Lord Chesterfield, concerning its 
 publication, gave the death-blow to patronage, and 
 makes Johnson the first of the modern literary men 
 who, independent of patrons, live by their pen and find 
 
vn PROSE LITERATURE FROM I745 TO 1789 199 
 
 in the public their only paymaster. He represents thus 
 a new class. In 1759 he set on foot the Didactic Novel 
 in Rasselas, For a time he was one of the poHtical 
 pamphleteers, from 1770 to 1776. As he drew near to 
 his death his Lives of the Poets appeared as prefaces 
 to his edition of the poets in 1781, and lifted biography 
 into a higher place in Hterature. But he did even more 
 for literature as a converser, as the chief talker of a 
 literary club, than by writing, and we know exactly what 
 a power he was by the vivid Biography, the best in our 
 language, which James Boswell, with fussy devotedness, 
 made of his master in 1791. Side by side with Johnson 
 stands Oliver Goldsmith, whose graceful and pure 
 Enghsh is a pleasant contrast to the loaded Latinism of 
 Johnson's style. The Vicar of Wakefield, the History 
 of Animated Nature, are at one in charm, and the 
 latter is full of that love of natural scenery, the senti- 
 ment of which is absent from Johnson's Journey to 
 the Western Isles, Both these men were masters of 
 Miscellaneous Literature, and in that class, I mention 
 here, as belonging to the latter half of the eighteenth 
 century, Edmund Burke's Vindication of Natural So- 
 ciety, 2L parody of Bohngbroke ; and his Inquiry into 
 the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 
 a book which in 1757 introduced him to Johnson. Nor 
 ought we to forget Sir Joshua Reynolds, another of 
 Johnson's friends, who first made English art literary 
 in his Discourses on Painting; nor Horace Walpole, 
 whose Anecdotes of Painting, 1762-71, still please; 
 
200 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHA>. 
 
 and whose familiar Letters, malicious, light as froth, but 
 amusing, retail with liveHness all the gossip of the time. 
 Among all these books on the intellectual subjects of life 
 arose to delight the lovers of quiet and the country the 
 Natural History of Selborne, by Gilbert White. His 
 seeing eye and gentle heart are imaged in his fresh 
 and happy style. 
 
 126. The Novel. — "There is more knowledge of the 
 heart," said Johnson, " in one letter of Richardson's than 
 in all Tom Jones, ^^ and the saying introduces Samuel 
 Richardson and Henry Fielding, the makers of the 
 modern novel. Wholly distinct from merely narrative 
 stories like Defoe's, the true novel is a story wrought 
 round the passion of love to a tragic or joyous conclusion. 
 But the name is applied now to any story of human life 
 which is woven by the action of characters or of events 
 on characters to a chosen conclusion. Its form, far more 
 flexible than that of the drama, admits of almost infinite 
 development. The whole of human Hfe, at any time, at 
 any place in the world, is its subject, and its vast sphere 
 accounts for its vast production. Pamela, 1741, appeared 
 while Pope was yet alive, and was the first of Richardson's 
 novels. Like Clarissa Harlowe, 1 748, it was written in 
 the form of letters. The third of these books was Sir 
 Charles Grandison, They are novels of Sentiment, and 
 their purposeful morality and rehgion mark the change 
 which had taken place in the morals and faith of litera- 
 ture since the preceding age. 
 
 Clarissa Harlowe is a masterpiece in its kind. Rich- 
 
VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1 745 TO 1 789 20I 
 
 ardson himself is mastered day by day by the passionate 
 creation of his characters : and their variety and the 
 variety of their feelings are drawn with a slow, diffusive, 
 elaborate intensity which penetrates into the subtlest 
 windings of the human heart. But all the characters are 
 grouped round and enlighten Clarissa, the pure and 
 ideal star of womanhood. The pathos of the book, its 
 sincerity, its minute reality, have always, but slowly, im- 
 passioned its readers, and it stirred as absorbing an 
 interest in France as it did in England. "Take care," 
 said Diderot, " not to open these enchanting books, if 
 you have any duties to fulfil." Henry Fielding followed 
 Pamela with Joseph Andrews , 1742, and Clarissa with 
 Tom Jones y 1749. At the same time, in 1748, appeared 
 Tobias Smollett's first novel, Roderick Random, Both 
 wrote many other stories, but in the natural growth and 
 development of the story, and in the infitting of the 
 characters and events towards the conclusion, Tom 
 Jones is said to be the English model of the novel. The 
 constructive power of Fielding is absent from Smollett, 
 but in inventive tale-telling and in cynical characterisa- 
 tion, he is not easily equalled. Fielding, a master of 
 observing and of recording what he observed, draws 
 English life both in town and country with a coarse and 
 realistic pencil : Smollett is led beyond the truth of 
 nature into caricature. Ten years had thus sufficed to 
 create a wholly new literature. 
 
 Laurence Sterne published the first part of Tristram 
 Shandy in the same year as RasselaSj 1759. Tristram 
 
202 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Shandy and the Sentimental Journey are scarcely novels. 
 They have no plot, they can scarcely be said to have any 
 story. The story of Tristram Shandy wanders like a 
 man in a labyrinth, and the humour is as labyrinthine 
 as the story. It is carefully invented, and whimsically 
 subtle ; and the sentiment is sometimes true, but mostly 
 affected. But a certain unity is given to the book by the 
 admirable consistency of the characters. A little later, in 
 1766, Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield was the first and, 
 perhaps, the most charming, of all those novels which we 
 may call idyllic, which describe in a pure and gentle style 
 the simple loves and lives of country people. Lastly, but 
 still in the same circle of Johnson's friends. Miss Burney's 
 Evelina, 1778, and her Cecilia, in which we detect John- 
 son's Roman hand, were the first novels of society. 
 
 127. History shared in the progress made after 1745 
 in prose writing, and was raised into the rank of literature 
 by three of Johnson's contemporaries. All of them were 
 influenced by the French school, by Montesquieu and 
 Voltaire. David Hume's History of Engla7id, finished 
 in 1 76 1, is, in the writer's endeavour to make it a philo- 
 sophic whole, in its clearness of narrative and purity of 
 style, our first literary history. But he is neither exact, 
 nor does he care to be exact. He does not love his sub- 
 ject, and he wants sympathy with mankind and with his 
 country. His manner is the manner of Voltaire, passion- 
 less, keen, and elegant. Dr. Robertson, Hume's friend, 
 was a careful and serious but also a cold writer. His 
 histories of Scotland, of Charles V., and of America 
 
VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1745 TO 1789 203 
 
 show how historical interest again began to reach beyond 
 England. Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of 
 the Roman Empire, completed in 1788, gave a new im- 
 pulse and a new model to historical Hterature, had no 
 more sympathy with humanity than Hume, and his irony 
 lowers throughout the human value of his history. But 
 he had creative power, originality, and the enjoyment and 
 imagination of his subject. It was at Rome in 1 764, while 
 musing amid the ruins of the Capitol, that the idea of 
 writing his book arose in his mind, and his conception 
 of the work was that of an artist. Rome, eastern and 
 western, was painted in the centre of the world, dying 
 slowly like a lion in his cave. Around it and towards it he 
 drew all the nations and hordes and faiths that wrought 
 its ruin \ told their stories from the beginning, and the re- 
 sults on themselves and on the world of their victories over 
 Rome. This imaginative conception, together with the 
 collecting and use of every detail of the arts, literature, 
 customs, and manners of the times he described, the read- 
 ing and use of all the contemporary literature, the careful 
 geographical detail, the marshalling of all this information 
 into his narration and towards his conclusion, the power 
 with which he moved over this vast arena, and the use of 
 a full if too grandiose a style to give importance to his 
 subject, makes him the one historian of the eighteenth 
 century whom modern research recognises as its master. 
 128. Philosophical and Political Literature. — Hutch- 
 eson. Hartley, and Reid were inferior as philosophers 
 to David Hume, who inquired, while he followed Locke, 
 
204 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 into the nature of the human understanding, and based 
 philosophy upon psychology. He constructed a science 
 of man ; and finally limited all our knowledge to the 
 world of phenomena revealed to us by experience. In 
 morals he made utility the only measure of virtue. The 
 first of his books, the Treatise of Human Nature, 1739, 
 was written in France, and was followed by the Inquiry 
 concerning the Principles of Morals in 1751. ^\\^ Dia- 
 logues on Natural Religion were not published till after 
 his death. These were his chief philosophical works. 
 But in 1 741-2, he had pubHshed two volumes oi Essays 
 Moral and Politicaly from which we might infer a politi- 
 cal philosophy; and in 1752 the Political Discourses ap- 
 peared, and they have been fairly said to be the cradle 
 of political economy. But that subject was afterwards 
 taken up by Adam Smith, a friend of Hume's, whose 
 book on the Moral Sentiments, i759> classes him also 
 with the philosophers of Scotland. In his Wealth of 
 Nations, 1776, by its theory that labour is the source of 
 wealth, and that to give the labourer absolute freedom to 
 pursue his own interest in his own way is the best means 
 of increasing the wealth of the country ; by its proof that 
 all laws made to restrain, or to shape, or to promote com- 
 merce, were stumbling-blocks in the way of the wealth 
 of a state, he created the Science of Political Economy, 
 and brought the theory of Free Trade into practice. All 
 the questions of labour and capital were now placed on a 
 scientific basis, and since that time the literature of the 
 whole of the subject has engaged great thinkers. As the 
 
VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1 745 TO 1789 205 
 
 immense increase of the industry, wealth, and commerce 
 of the country from 1720 to 1770 had thus stirred inquiry 
 into the laws which regulate wealth, so now the Metho- 
 dist movement, beginning in 1738, awoke an interest in 
 the poor, and gave the first impulse to popular education. 
 Social Reform became a literary subject, and fills a large 
 space until 1832, when political reform brought forward 
 new subjects, and the old subjects under new forms. 
 This new philanthropy was stirred into further growth 
 by the theories of the French Revolution, and these 
 theories, taking violent effect in France, roused into 
 opposition the genius of Edmund Burke. Unlike Hume, 
 whose politics were elaborated in the study, Burke wrote 
 his political tracts and speeches face to face with events 
 and upon them. Philosophical reasoning and poetic 
 passion were wedded together in them on the side of 
 Conservatism, and every art of eloquence was used with 
 the mastery that imagination gives. In 1766 he defended 
 Lord Rockingham's administration ; he was then wrongly 
 suspected of the authorship of the Letters of Junius, 
 political invectives (1769-72), whose trenchant style has 
 preserved them to this day. Burke's Thoughts on the 
 Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770, maintained an 
 aristocratic government ; and the next year appeared his 
 famous Speech on American Taxation, while that on 
 American Conciliation, 1 774, was answered by his friend 
 Johnson in Taxation no Tyranny, The most powerful 
 of his works were the Reflections on the French Revo- 
 lution, 1 790, the Letter to a Noble Lord, and the Letters 
 
20b ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 on a Regicide Peace^ 1796-7. The first of these, an- 
 swered by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, and by 
 James Mackintosh's VindicicE Gallicce, spread over all 
 England a terror of the principles of the Revolution ; the 
 third doubled the eagerness of England to carry on the 
 war with France. As a writer he needed more temper- 
 ance, but, if he had possessed it, we should probably have 
 not had his magnificence. As an orator he ended by 
 wearying his hearers, but the very men who slept under 
 him in the House read over and over again the same 
 speech when published with renewed delight. Gold- 
 smith's praise of him — that he '^ wound himself into 
 his subject like a serpent" — gives the reason why he 
 sometimes failed as an orator, why he generally suc- 
 ceeded as a writer. 
 
 129. Prose from 1789-1832. Miscellaneous. — The 
 death of Johnson marks a true period in our later pros^ 
 literature. London had ceased then to be the only literary 
 centre. Books were produced in all parts of the country, 
 and Edinburgh had its own famous school of literature. 
 The doctrines of the French Revolution were eagerly 
 supported and eagerly opposed, and stirred like leaven 
 through a great part of the literary work of England. 
 Later on, through Coleridge, Scott, Carlyle, and others, 
 the influence of Lessing, Goethe, of all the new literature 
 of Germany, began to tell upon us, in theology, in phi- 
 losophy, and even in the novel. The great English 
 Journals, the Morning Chronicle, the Times, the Morni?ig 
 Post, the Morning Herald, were all set on foot between 
 
VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 20/ 
 
 1775 and 1793, between the war with America and the 
 war with France ; and when men like Coleridge and 
 Canning began to write in them the literature of journal- 
 ism was started. A literature especially directed towards 
 education arose in the Cyclopcedias, which began in 1778, 
 and rapidly developed into vast dictionaries of know- 
 ledge. Along with them were the many series issued 
 from Edinburgh and London of Popular Miscellanies, A 
 crowd of literary men found employment in writing about 
 books rather than in writing them, and the literature of 
 Criticism became a power. The Edinburgh Review was 
 established in 1802, and the Quarterly , its poHtical op- 
 ponent, in 1809, and these were soon followed by Eraser's 
 and Blackwood's Magazine, Jeffrey, Professor Wilson, 
 Sydney Smith, and a host of others wrote in these reviews 
 on contemporary events and books. Interest in con- 
 temporary stimulated interest in past literature, and Cole- 
 ridge, Charles Lamb, Thomas Campbell, Hazlitt, Southey, 
 and Savage Landor carried on that study of the Eliza- 
 bethan and earher poets to which Warton had given so 
 much impulse in the eighteenth century. Literary quar- 
 rels concerning the nature of poetry produced books like 
 Coleridge's Biographia Literaria ; and Wordsworth's 
 Essays on his own art are in admirable prose. De 
 QuiNCEY, one of the Edinburgh School, is, owing to the 
 over-lapping and involved melody of his style, one of our 
 best, as he is one of our most various miscellaneous 
 writers : and with him for masculine EngHsh, for various 
 learning and forcible fancy, and, not least, for his vigor- 
 
208 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 ous lyrical work and poems, we may rank Walter 
 Savage Landor, who deepened an interest in English 
 and classic literature and made a hterature of his own. 
 Charles Lamb's inimitable fineness of perception was 
 shown in his criticisms on the old dramatists, but his 
 most original work was the Essays of Elia, in which he 
 renewed the lost grace of the Essay, and with a humour 
 not less gentle, more surprising, more self-pleased than 
 Addison's. 
 
 130. Theological Literature had received a new im- 
 pulse in 1738-91 from the evangehsing work of John 
 Wesley and Whitfield ; and their spiritual followers, 
 Thomas Scott, Newton, and Cecil, made by their writ- 
 ings the Evangelical School. William Paley, in his 
 Evidences^ defended Christianity from the common-sense 
 point of view ; while the sermons of Robert Hall and of 
 Dr. Chalmers are, in different ways, fine examples of 
 devotional and philosophical eloquence. 
 
 131. The eloquent intelligence of Edinburgh con- 
 tinued the Literature of Philosophy in the work of 
 Dugald Stewart, Reid's successor, and in that of Dr. 
 Browne, who for the most part opposed Hume's funda- 
 mental idea that Psychology is a part of the science of 
 life. Coleridge brought his own and German philosophy 
 into the treatment of theological questions in the Aids to 
 Reflection, and into various subjects of life in the Friend, 
 The utihtarian view of morals was put forth by Jeremy 
 Bentham with great power, but his chief work was in the 
 province of law. He founded the philosophy of juris- 
 
VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1789 TO 1832 2O9 
 
 prudence, he invented a scientific legal vocabulary, and we 
 owe to him almost every reform that has improved our law. 
 He wrote also on political economy, but that subject was 
 more fully developed by Malthus, Ricardo, and James Mill. 
 
 132. Biography and travel are Hnked at many points 
 CO history, and the literature of the former was enriched 
 by Hayley*s Cowper, Southey's Life of Nelson, McCrie's 
 Life of Knox, Moore's Life of Byron, and Lockhart's 
 Life of Scott As to travel, it has rarely produced books 
 which may be called literature, but the works of biog- 
 raphers and travellers have brought together the mate- 
 rials of literature. Bruce left for Africa in 1762, and in 
 the next seventy years Africa, Egypt, Italy, Greece, 
 the Holy Land, and the Arctic Regions were made the 
 common property of literary men. 
 
 133. The Historical School produced Mitford's His- 
 tory of Greece and Lingard's History of England ; but 
 it was Henry Hallam who for the first time wrote history 
 in this country without prejudice. His Europe during 
 the Middle Ages, 181 8, is distinguished by its exhaustive 
 and judicial summing-up of facts, and his Constitutional 
 History of England opened a new vein of history in the 
 best way. Since his time, history has become more 
 and more worthy of the name of fine hterature, and the 
 critical schools of our own day, while making truth the 
 first thing, and the philosophy of history the second, do 
 not disdain but exact the graces of literature. But of all 
 the forms of prose literature, the novel was the most 
 largely used and developed. 
 
210 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 134. The Novel. — The stir of thought made by the 
 French Revolution had many side influences on novel- 
 writing. The political stories of Thomas Holcroft and 
 William Godwin disclosed a new realm to the novelist. 
 The Canterbury Tales of Sophia and Harriet Lee, and 
 the wild and picturesque tales of Mrs. Radcliffe intro- 
 duced the romantic nove l. Mrs. Inchbald's Simple 
 Story, 1 79 1, started the jinvpl of passion, whilst Mrs. 
 Opie made domestic life the sphere of her graceful and 
 pathetic stories, 1806. Miss Edge worth in her Irish 
 stories gave the first impulse to the ig ovel of national 
 c haracte r, and in her other tales to the novel with a 
 moral purpose, 1800-47. Miss Austen, "with an ex- 
 quisite touch which renders commonplace things and 
 characters interesting from truth of description and sen- 
 timent," produced the best novels we have of everyday 
 socie ty, 1811-17. With the peace of 18 15 arose new 
 forms of fiction ; and travel, now popular, gave birth to 
 the tale of foreign society and manners ; of these, 
 Thomas Hope's Anastasius (181 9) was the first. The 
 classical nove l arose in Lockhart's Valerius, and Miss 
 Ferrier's humorous tales of Scottish Hfe were pleasant 
 to Walter Scott. 
 
 It was Walter Scott, however, who raised the whole 
 of the literature of the novel into one of the great in- 
 fluences that bear on human life. Men are still alive 
 who remember the wonder and dehght with which 
 Waverley (1814) was welcomed. The swiftness of work 
 combined with vast diligence which belongs to very great 
 
VII PROSE LITERATURE FROM 17S9 TO 1S32 211 
 
 genius belonged to him. Guy Mannering was written 
 in six weeks, and the Bride of Lammermoor, as great in 
 fateful pathos as Romeo and Juliet, but more solemn, 
 was done in a fortnight. There is then a certain abandon 
 in his work which removes it from the dignity of the 
 ancient writers, but we are repaid for this loss by the in- 
 tensity, and the animated movement, the clear dayhght, 
 and the inspired delight in and with which he invented 
 and wrote his stories. It is not composition ; it is Scott 
 actually present in each of his personages, doing their 
 deeds and speaking their thoughts.. His national tales 
 — and his own country was his best inspiration — are 
 written with such love for the characters and the scenes, 
 that we feel his living joy and love underneath each of 
 the stories as a completing charm, as a spirit that en- 
 " chants the whole. And in these tales and in his poems 
 his own deep kindliness, his sympathy with human 
 nature, united, after years of enmity, the Highlands to 
 the Lowlands. In the vivid portraiture and dramatic 
 reality of such tales as Old Mortality and Quentin Dur- • 
 ward he created the histo^^'^^^ novf^l, "All is great," 
 said Goethe, speaking of one of these historical tales, " in 
 the Waverley Novels ; material, effect, characters, execu- 
 tion." In truth, so natural is Scott's invention, that it 
 seems creation — even the landscape is woven through 
 the events and in harmony with them. His comprehen- 
 sive power, which drew with the same certainty so many 
 characters in so many various classes, was the direct re- 
 sult of his profound sympc^thy^with the simpler feelings 
 
 ^^ os: THE \ 
 
212 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 of the human heart, and of his pleasure in writing so 
 as to make human hfe more beautiful and more good in 
 the eyes of men. He was always romantic, and his per- 
 sonal romance did not fail him when he came to be old. 
 Like Shakespeare he kept that to the very close. The 
 later years of his life were dark, but the almost unrivalled 
 nobleness of his battle against ill fortune proves that he 
 was as great-hearted as he was great. " God bless thee, 
 Walter, my man," said his uncle, " thou hast risen to be 
 great, but thou wast always good." His last long tale of 
 power was the Fair Maid of Perth, 1828, and his last 
 effort, in 1831, was made the year before he died. That 
 year, 1832, which saw the deaths of Goethe and Scott, 
 is the close of an epoch in literature. 
 
VIU POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 213 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 POETRY FROM 173O TO 1 83 2 
 
 135. The Elements and Forms of the New Poetry, — 
 
 The poetry we are now to study may be divided into two 
 periods. The first dates fi-om about the middle of 
 Pope's Hfe, and closes with the publication of Cowper's 
 Task^ 1785 ; the second_begins with the Task and closes 
 in 1832. ^hc first is not wrongly called a time of transi- 
 tion. The influence of the poetry of the past lasted ; 
 new elements were added to poetry, and new forms of it 
 took shape. There was a change also in the style and 
 in the subject of poetry. Under these heads I shall 
 bring together the various poetical works of this period, 
 (i) The influence of the didactic and satirical , poetry 
 of the critical school lingered among the new elements 
 which first modified and then changed poetry altogether. 
 It is found in Johnson's two satires on the manners of 
 his time, the London, 1738, and the Vanity of Human 
 Wishes, 1 749 ; in Robert Blairls dull poem of The 
 Grave, 1743 ; in Edward Young's Night Thoughts, 1743, 
 a poem on the immortality of the soul, and in his satires 
 on The Universal Passion of fame ; in the tame work of 
 
214 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Richard Savage, Johnson's poor friend ; and in the short- 
 lived but vigorous satires of Charles Churchill, who died 
 in 1764, twenty-one years after Savage. The Pleasures 
 of the Imagination, i744, by Mark Akenside, belongs 
 also in spirit to the time of Queen Anne, and was sug- 
 gested by Addison's essays in the Spectator on Imagi- 
 nation. 
 
 (2) The study of the Greek and Latin classics re- 
 vived, and with it a more artistic poetry. Men like 
 Thomas Gray and William Collins attempted to '^ revive 
 the just designs of Greece," not only in fitness of lan- 
 guage, but in perfection of form. They are commonly 
 placed together, but the genius of each was essentially 
 different. What they had in gommon belonged to the 
 age in which they lived, and one of thesre elements 
 was a certain artificial phrasing from which they found it 
 difficult to escape. Both sought beauty more than their 
 fellows, but Collins found it more than Gray. He had 
 the greater grace and the sweeter simplicity^ and his Ode 
 to Simplicity tells us the direction in which poetry was 
 going. His best work, like The Ode to Eveningy is near 
 to Keats, and recalls that poet's imaginative way. His in- 
 ferior work is often rude and his style sometimes obscure, 
 but when he is touched by joy in "ecstatic trial," or 
 when he sits with Melancholy in love of peace and gentle 
 musing, he is indeed -inspired by truth and loveliness. 
 He died too young to do much in a perfect way. Gray 
 was different. All is clear light in his work. There is 
 no gradual dusky veil such as Collins threw with so much 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 21 S 
 
 charm over his expression. Out of his love of Greek 
 work he drew his fine lucidity. Out of the spirit of his 
 own time and from his own cultivated experience he 
 drew the moral criticism of human life which gives his 
 poetry its weight, even its heaviness. It is true the 
 moral criticism, even in the Elegy^ shares in the com- 
 monplace, but it was not so commonplace in his time, 
 and it is so full of a gentle charity that it transcends his 
 time. He moved with easy power over many forms of 
 poetry, but there is naturalness and no rudeness in the 
 power. It was adorned by high ornament and finish. 
 The Odes are far beyond their age, especially The 
 Progress of Poesy, and each kind has its own appropri- 
 ate manner. The Elegy will always remain one of the 
 beloved poems of Englishmen. It is not only a piece of 
 exquisite work ; it is steeped in England. It is contem- 
 plative and might have been cold. On the contrary, 
 even when it is conventional, it has a certain passion in 
 its contemplation which is one of the marks of the work 
 of Gray. Had he had more imagination he would have 
 been greater, but the spirit of his age repressed nature in 
 him. But he stands clear and bright, along with his 
 brother, on the ridge between the old and the new. 
 Having ascended through the old poetry, he saw the new 
 landscape of song below him, felt its fresher air, and sent 
 his own power into the men who arose after him. 
 
 (3) The study of the Elizabethan and the earlier 
 poets Hke Chaucer, and of the whole course of poetry in 
 England, was taken up with great interest. Shakespeare 
 
2l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and Chaucer had engaged both Dryden and Pope ; but 
 the whole subject was now enlarged. Gray, Hke Pope, 
 projected a history of English poetry, and his Ode on 
 the Progress of Poesy illustrates this new interest. 
 Thomas Warton wrote his History of English Poetry, 
 1774-81, and brought the lovers of poetry into closer 
 contact with Chaucer. Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas 
 Hanmer's, and Warburton's editions of Shakespeare were 
 succeeded by Johnson's in 1765 ; and Garrick began the 
 restoration of the genuine text of Shakespeare's plays 
 for the stage. Spenser formed the spirit and work of 
 some poets, and Thomas Warton wrote an essay on the 
 Faerie Queene, William Shenstone's Schoolmistress y 1 742, 
 was one of these Spenserian poems, and so was Thom- 
 son's delightful Castle of Indolence, 1748. James Beattie, 
 in the Minstrel, 1771, also followed the stanza and man- 
 ner of Spenser. 
 
 (4) A new element — interest in the romantic past — 
 was aided by the publication of Dr. Percy's Reliques of 
 Ancient English Poetry, 1765. The narrative ballad and 
 the narrative romance, afterwards taken up and perfected 
 by Sir Walter Scott, had already begun to strike their 
 roots afresh in English poetry. The Braes of Yarrow 
 and Mallet's William and Margaret were written before 
 1725. Men now began to seek among the ruder times 
 of history for wild, natural stories of human life ; and 
 the pleasure in these increased and accompanied the 
 growing love of lonely, even of savage scenery. Even 
 before the Reliques were published, Gray's power of 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 217 
 
 seeing into the right thing is seen in this matter. He 
 entered the new paths, and in a new atmosphere, when 
 he wrote of the Norse legends, or studied what he could 
 learn of the poetry of Wales. The Ossian, 1762, of 
 James Macpherson, which imposed itself on the public 
 as a translation of Gaelic epic poems, is an example of 
 this new element. Still more remarkable in this way 
 were the poems of Thomas Chatterton, 
 
 ** That sleepless soul who perished in his pride." 
 
 He pretended to have discovered, in a muniment room 
 at Bristol, the Death of Sir Charles Bawdtn, and other 
 poems, by an imaginary monk named Thomas Rowley, 
 1768. Written with quaint spelling, and with a great 
 deal of lyrical invention, they raised around them a great 
 controversy. His early death, at seventeen, has, by the 
 pity of it, lifted his lyric poetry, romantic as it is, into 
 more repute than it deserves. 
 
 136. Change of Style. — We have seen how the natural 
 style of the Elizabethan poets had passed into^a style 
 which erred against the simplicity of natural expression. 
 In reaction from this the critical poets set aside natural 
 feeling, and wrote according to intellectual rules of art. 
 Their style lost life and fire ; and losing these, lost art 
 and gained artifice. Unwarmed by natural feeling, it be- 
 came as unnatural a style, though in a different way, 
 as that of the later Elizabethan poets. But out of the 
 failure of nature without art, and of art without nature, 
 
2l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and cut of the happy union of both in scattered and 
 particular examples, the way was now rBady for a style 
 in which the art should itself be nature, and it found 
 its first absolute expression in a few of Cowper's lyrics. 
 His style, in such poems as the Lines to Mary Unwin, 
 and in The Castaway^ arises out of the simplest pathos, 
 and yet is almost as pure in expression as a Greek elegy. 
 The work was then done ; but the element of fervent 
 passion did not enter into poetry till the poems of Robert 
 Burns appeared in 1786. 
 
 137. Change of Subjec":. Nature. — The Poets have 
 always worked on two great subjects — man and nature. 
 Up to the age of Pope the subject of man was chiefly 
 treate^, and we have seen how many phases it went 
 through. There remained the subject of nature and of 
 man's relation to it ; that is, of the visible landscape, sea,^ 
 and sky, and all that men feel in contact with them. 
 Natural scenery had been hitherto chiefly used as a back- 
 ground to the picture of human Hfe. It now began to 
 occupy a much larger space in poetry, and after a time 
 grew to occupy a distinct place of its own apart from 
 man. Much of this was owing to the opening out of the 
 wild country by new roads and to the increased safety of 
 travel. It is the growth of this new subject which will 
 engage us now. 
 
 138. The Poetry of Natural Description. — We have 
 already found in the poets, but chiefly among the lyrical 
 poets, a pleasure in rural scenery and the emotions it 
 awakened. But nature is only, as in the work of Shake- 
 
vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 219 
 
 speare, Marvell, Milton, Vaughan, or Herrick, incident- 
 ally introduced. The first poem devoted to natural 
 description appeared while Pope was yet alive, in the 
 very midst of the town poetry. It was the Seasons, . 
 1726-30; and it is curious, remembering what I have 
 said about the peculiar turn of the Scots for natural de- 
 scription, that it was the work of James Thomson, a Scots- 
 man. It described the landscape and country life of 
 Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. He wrote with 
 his eye upon their scenery, and even when he wrote of 
 it in his room, it was with "a recollected love." The 
 descriptions were too much like catalogues, the very 
 fault of the previous Scottish poets, and his style was 
 heavy and cold, but he was the first poet who deliber- 
 ately led the English people into that separated world of 
 natural description which has enchanted us in the work 
 of modern poetry. The impulse he gave was soon fol- 
 lowed. Men left the town to visit the country and 
 record their feelings. John Dyer's Grongar Hill, 1726, 
 a description of a journey in South Wales, and his Fleece, 
 1757, are full of country sights and scenes: and even 
 Akenside mingled his spurious philosophy with pictures 
 of the solitudes of nature. 
 
 Foreign trav.el now enlarged the love of nature. The 
 wilder country of England was eagerly visited. Gray's 
 letters, some of the best in the English language, de- 
 scribe the landscape of Yorkshire and Westmoreland with 
 a minuteness quite new in English literature. In his 
 poetry he used the description of nature as "its most 
 
220 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 graceful ornament," but never made it the subject. It 
 was interwoven with reflections on human life, and used 
 to point its moral. Collins observes the same method 
 in his Ode on the Passions and the Ode to Evening, 
 There is as yet but httle love of nature entirely for its 
 own sake. A further step was made by Oliver Gold- 
 smith in his Traveller, 1764, a sketch of national man- 
 ners and governments, and in his Deserted Village, 1770* 
 He describes natural scenery with less emotion than 
 ColHns, but does not moralise it like Gray. The scenes 
 he paints are pure pictures, and he has no personal 
 interest in them. The next step was made a few years 
 later by some fourth-rate men like the two Wartons. 
 Their poems do not speak of nature and human life, but 
 of nature and themselves. They see the reflection of 
 their own passions in the woods and streams, ^d this 
 self-conscious pleasure with lonely nature grew slowly 
 into a main subject of poetry. These were the steps 
 towards that love of nature for its own sake which we 
 shall find in the poets who followed Cowper. One poem 
 of the time almost anticipates it. It jp the Minstrel, 
 1 771, of James Beattie. This poem represents a young 
 poet educated almost altogether by solitary communion 
 with nature, and by love of her beauty ; and both in the 
 spirit and treatment of the first part of the story resem- 
 bles very closely Wordsworth's description of his own 
 education by nature in the beginning of the Prelude, 
 
 139. Further Change of Subject. Man. — During 
 this time the interest in mankind, that is, in man inde- 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 221 
 
 pendent of nation, class, and caste, which we have seen 
 in prose, began to influence poetry. One form of it 
 appeared in the pleasure the poets began to take in 
 men of other nations than England ; another form of it 
 — and this was increased by the Methodist revival — was 
 a deep feeling for the lives of the poor. Thomson 
 speaks with sympathy of the Siberian exile and the 
 Mecca pilgrim, and the Traveller of Goldsmith enters 
 into foreign questions. His Deserted Village, Shenstone's 
 Schoolmistress, Gray's Elegy celebrate the annals of the 
 poor. Michael Bruce in his Lochleven praises the " secret 
 primrose path of rural life," and Dr. John Langhorne in 
 his Country Justice pleads the cause of the poor and 
 paints their sorrows. Connected with this new element 
 is the simple^llad of simple love, such as Shenstone's 
 Jeiiimy jf^ison, Mickle's Mariner's Wife, Goldsmith's 
 Edwin and Angelina, poems which started afresh a de- 
 lightful type of poetry, afterwards worked out more com- 
 pletely in the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth. In a class 
 apart stands the Song to David^ a long poem written by 
 Christopher Smai%a friend of Johnson's. Its power of 
 metre and imaginative presentation of thoughts and 
 things, and its mingling of sweet and grand reHgious 
 poetry ought to make it better known. 
 
 140. Scottish Poetry illustrates and anticipates the 
 poetry of the poor and the ballad. We have not men- 
 tioned it since Sir David Lyndsay, for with the exception 
 of stray songs its voice was almost silent for a century 
 and a half. It revived in Allan Ramsay, a friend of 
 
222 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Pope and Gay. His light pieces of rustic humour were 
 followed by the Tea Table Miscellany and the Ever- Green, 
 collections of existing Scottish songs mixed up with some 
 of his own. Ramsay's pastoral drama of the Gentle Shep- 
 herd^ 1725, is a pure, tender, and genuine picture of 
 Scottish life and love among the poor and in the country. 
 Robert Ferguson deserves to be named because he 
 kindled the muse of Burns, but his occasional pieces, 
 1773, are chiefly concerned with the rude and humorous 
 life of Edinburgh. One man, Michael Bruce, illustrates 
 the English transition of which I have spoken. The 
 Ballad, Scotland's dear companion, took a more modern 
 but pathetic form in some Yarrow poems, in Auld Robin 
 Gray and the Lament for Flodden, The peculiarities I 
 have dwelt on already continue in this Scottish revival. 
 There is the same nationaUty, the same rough wit, the 
 same love of nature, but the love of colour has lessened. 
 141. The Second Period of the New Poetry. — The 
 new elements and the changes on which I have dwelt 
 are expressed by three poets — Cowper, Crabbe, and 
 Burns. But before these we must mention the poems 
 of William Blake, the artist, and for three reasons, (i) 
 They represent the new elements. The Poetical Sketches, 
 written in 1777, illustrate the new study of the Eliza- 
 bethan poets. Blake imitated Spenser, and in his short 
 fragment of Edward III, we hear again the note of 
 Marlowe's violent imagination. A short poem To the 
 Muses is a cry for the restoration to English poetry of 
 the old poetic passion it had lost. In some ballad poems 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 223 
 
 we trace the influence represented by Ossian and quick- 
 ened by the publication of Percy's Reliques. (2) We 
 find also in his work certain elements which belong to 
 the second period of which I shall soon speak. The 
 love of animals is one. A great love of children and 
 the poetry of home is another. He also anticipated in 
 1789 and 1794, when his Songs of Innocence and Experi- 
 ence were written, the simple natural poetry of ordinary 
 life which Wordsworth perfected in the Lyrical Ballads, 
 1798. Moreover, the democratic element, the hatred of 
 priestcraft, and the cry against social wrongs which came 
 much later into English poetry spring up in his poetry. 
 Then, he was a full Mystic, and through his mysticism 
 appears that search after the true aims of life and after a 
 freer theology which characterise our poetry after 1832. 
 (3) He cast back as well as forward, and reproduced in 
 his songs the spirit, movement, and music of the Eliza- 
 bethan songs. The little poems in the Songs of Inno- 
 r^«g, on^ fancy and first motherhood, and on subjects 
 life the Lamb, are without rival in our language for sim- 
 plicity, tenderness, and joy. The Songs of Experience 
 give the reverse side of the Songs of Innocence, and they 
 see the evil of the world as a child with a man's heart 
 would see it — with exaggerated horror. This small but 
 predictive work of Blake, coming where it did, between 
 1777 and 1794, going back to Elizabethan lyrics and for- 
 ward to those of Wordsworth, is very remarkable. 
 
 142. William Cowper*s first poems were some of the 
 Olney Hymns, 1779, ^^^ in these the religious poetry of 
 
224 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 Charles Wesley was continued. The profound personal 
 religion, gloomy even to insanity as it often became, 
 which fills the whole of Cowper's poetry, introduced a 
 theological element into English poetry which continually 
 increased till it died out with Browning and Tennyson. 
 His didactic and satirical poems in 1782 link him back- 
 wards to the last age. His translation of Homer, 1791, 
 and of shorter pieces from the Latin and Greek, connects 
 him with the classical influence, his interest in Milton 
 with the revived study of the English poets. The play- 
 ful and gentle vein of humour which he showed in John 
 Gilpin and other poems, opened a new kind of verse to 
 poets. With this kind of humour is connected a simple 
 pathos of which Cowper is a great master. The Lines to 
 Mary Unwin and to his Mother's Picture prove, with 
 the work of Blake, that pure natural feeling wholly free 
 from artifice had returned to Enghsh song. A new ele- 
 ment was also introduced by him and Blake — the love 
 of animals and the poetry of their relation to man, a vein 
 plentifully worked by after poets. His greatest work was 
 the Tasky ly^S- It is mainly a description of himself 
 and a life in the country, his home, his friends, his 
 thoughts as he walked, the quiet landscape of Olney, the 
 life of the poor people about him, mixed up with disqui- 
 sitions on poHtical and social subjects, and at the end, a 
 prophecy of the victory of the Kingdom of God. The 
 change in it in relation to the subject of nature is very 
 great. Cowpsr loves nature entirely for her own sake. 
 The change in relation to the subject of man is equally 
 
vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22$ 
 
 great. The idea of mankind as a whole which we have 
 seen growing up is fully formed in Cowper's mind. And 
 though splendour and passion were added by the poets 
 who succeeded him to the new poetry, yet they worked 
 on the thoughts he had begun to express, and he is so 
 far their forerunner. 
 
 143. George Crabbe took up the side of the poetry of 
 man which had to do with the lives of the poor in the 
 Village y 1783, and in the Parish Register, 1807. In the 
 short tales related in these books we are brought face to 
 face with the sacrifices, temptations, love, and crimes of 
 humble life, and the effect of these poems in widening 
 human sympathies was great among his readers. His 
 work wanted the humour of Cowper, and though often 
 pathetic and always forcible, was perhaps too unrelenting 
 for pure pathos. He did much better work afterwards 
 in his Tales of the Hall, His work on nature is as mi- 
 nute and accurate, but as limited in range of excellence, 
 as his work on man. Robert Bloomfield, himself a 
 poor shoemaker, added to this poetry of the poor. The 
 Farmer's Boy, finished in 1798, and the Rural Tales, 
 are poems as cheerful as Crabbe's were stern, and his 
 descriptions of rural life are not less faithful. The poetry 
 of the poor, thus started, long continued in our verse. 
 Wordsworth added to it new features, and Thomas Hood 
 in short pieces like the Song of the Shirt gave it a direct 
 bearing on social evils. 
 
 144. One element, the passionate treatment of love, 
 had been on the whole absent from our poetry since the 
 
 Q 
 
226 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Restoration. It was restored by Robert Burns. In his 
 love songs we hear again, ^even more simply, more directly, 
 the same natural music which in the age of Elizabeth en- 
 chanted the world. It was as a love-poet that he began 
 to write, and the first edition of his poems appeared in 
 1786. But he was not only the poet of love, but also of 
 the new excitement about mankind. Himself poor, he 
 sang the poor. He did the same work in Scotland in 
 1786 which Crabbe began in England in 1783 and Cow- 
 per in 1785, and it is worth remarking how the dates run 
 together. As in Cowper, so also in Burns, the further 
 widening of human sympathies is shown in his tenderness 
 for animals. He carried on also the Celtic elements of 
 Scottish poetry, but the rattling fun of the Jolly Beggars 
 and of Ta7n 0' Shanter is united to a life-like painting of 
 human character which is peculiarly English. A large 
 gentleness of feeling often made his wit into that true 
 humour which is more English than Celtic, and the pas- 
 sionate pathos of such poems as Mary in Heaven is con- 
 nected with this vein of Enghsh humour. The special 
 nationality of Scottish poetry is as strong in Burns as in 
 any of his predecessors, but it is also mingled with a 
 larger view of man than the merely national one. Nor 
 did he fail to carry on the Scottish love of nature, though 
 he shows the English influence in using natural descrip- 
 tion not for the love of nature alone, but as a background 
 for human love. It was the strength of his passions and 
 the weakness of his moral will which made his poetry 
 and spoilt his4i£e. 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 22/ 
 
 145. The French Revolution and the Poets. — Certain 
 ideas relating to mankind considered as a whole had 
 been growing up in Europe for some centuries, and we 
 have seen their influence on the work of Cowper, Crabbe, 
 and Burns. These ideas spoke of a return to nature, and 
 of the best life being found in the country rather than 
 in the town, so that the simple Hfe of the poor and the 
 scenery of the country were idealised into subjects for 
 poetry. They spoke also of natural rights that belonged 
 to every man, and which united all men to one another. 
 All inen were equal, and free, and brothers. There was 
 therefore only one class, the class of man; only one 
 nation, the nation of man, of which all were citizens. 
 The divisions therefore which wealth and rank and 
 caste and national boundaries had made were theo- 
 retically put aside as wrong. Such ideas had been 
 growing into the political, moral, and religious Hfe of 
 men ever since the Renaissance, and they brought with 
 them their own emotions. France, which does much of 
 the formative work of Europe, had for some time past 
 expressed them constantly in her literature. She now 
 expressed them in the action which overthrew the Bastille 
 in 1789 and proclaimed the new Constitution in the fol- 
 lowing year. They passed then from an abstract to a 
 concrete form, and became active powers in the world, 
 and it is round the excitement they kindled in England 
 that the work of the poets from 1790 to 1832 can best 
 be grouped. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey ac- 
 cepted them at first with joy, but receded from them 
 
228 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 when they ended in the violence of the Reign of Terror, 
 and in the imperiaUsm of Napoleon. Scott turned from 
 them with pain to write of the romantic past which they 
 destroyed. Byron did not express them themselves, but 
 he expressed the whole of the revolutionary spirit in its 
 action against old social opinions. Shelley took them up 
 after the reaction against them had begun to die away, 
 and in half his poetry re- expressed them. Two men, 
 Rogers and Keats, were wholly untouched by them. 
 One special thing they did for poetry. They brought 
 back, by the powerful feehngs they kindled in men, 
 passion into its style, into all its work about man, and 
 through that, into its work about nature. 
 
 But, in giving the French Revolution its due weight, 
 we must always remember that these ideas existed al- 
 ready in England and were expressed by the poets. The 
 French outburst precipitated them, and started our new 
 poetry with a rush and a surprise. But the enthusiasm 
 soon suffered a chill, and a great part of our new poetry 
 was impelled, not by the Revolution, but by the indig- 
 nant revolt against what followed on it. Moreover, I 
 have already shown that fully half of the new lines of 
 thought and feeling on which the poetry of England 
 ran in the nineteenth century had been laid down in 
 the century which preceded it, and they were com- 
 pleted now. 
 
 146. Robert Southey began his political life with the 
 revolutionary poem of Wat Tyler, 1 794 ; and between, 
 1 80 1 and 18 14 wrote Thalaba, Madoc, The Curse oj 
 
vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 229 
 
 Kehamay and Roderick the Last of the Goths, Thalaba 
 and Kehama are stories of Arabian and of Indian mythol- 
 ogy. They are real poems, and have the interest of 
 good narrative and the charm of musical metre, but 
 the finer spirit of poetry is not in them. Roderick is 
 the most human and the most poetical. His Vision of 
 Judgment, written on the death of George III., and ridi- 
 culed by Byron in another Vision, proves him to have 
 become a Tory of Tories. Samuel T. Coleridge could 
 not turn round so completely, but the stormy enthusiasm 
 of his early poems was lessened when in 1796 he wrote 
 the Ode on the Departing Year and France, an Ode, 
 1798. His early poems are transitional, partly based 
 on Gray, violent and obscure in style. But when he 
 came to live with Wordsworth, he gained simplicity, 
 and for a short time his poetic spirit was at the height 
 of joy and production. But his early disappointment 
 about France was bitter, and then, too, he injured his 
 own life. The noble ode to Dejection is instinct not 
 only with his own wasted life, but with the sorrow of 
 one who has had golden ideals and found them turn 
 in his hands to clay. His best work is but little, but 
 unique of its kind. For exquisite metrical movement 
 and for imaginative phantasy, there is nothing in our 
 language to be compared with Christabel and Kubla 
 Khan, The Ancient Mariner, published as one of the 
 Lyrical Ballads in 1798, belongs to the dim country 
 between earth and heaven, where the fairy music is 
 heard, sometimes dreadful, sometimes lovely, but always 
 
230 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 lonely. All that he did excellently might be bound up 
 in twenty pages, but it should be bound in pure gold. 
 
 147. Of all the poets misnamed Lake Poets, William 
 Wordsworth was the greatest. Born in 1770, educated 
 on the banks of Esthwaite, he loved the scenery of the 
 Lakes as a boy, lived among it in his manhood, and 
 died in 1850 at Rydal Mount, close to Rydal Lake. 
 He took his degree in 1791 at Cambridge. The year 
 before, he had made a short tour on the Continent, 
 and stepped on the French shore at the very time 
 when the whole land was "mad with joy." The end 
 of 1 791 saw him again in France and hving at Orleans. 
 He threw himself eagerly into the Revolution, joined 
 the "patriot side," and came to Paris just after the 
 September massacre of 1792. Narrowly escaping the 
 fate of his friends the Brissotins, he got home to Eng- 
 land before the execution of Louis XVL in 1793, and 
 published his Descriptive Sketches and the Evening 
 Walk, His sympathy with the French continued, and 
 he took their side against his own country. He was 
 poor, but his friend Raisley Calvert left him 900/. and 
 enabled him to live the simple hfe he had then chosen 
 — the life of a retired poet. At first we find him at 
 Racedown, where in 1797 he made friendship with 
 Coleridge, and then at Alfoxden, in Somerset, where 
 he and Coleridge planned and published in 1798 the 
 first volume of the Lyrical Ballads, After a winter in 
 Germany with Coleridge, where the Prelude was be- 
 gun, he took a small cottage at Grasmere, and the 
 
vm POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 23 1 
 
 first book of The Recluse tells of his settlement in that 
 quiet valley. It tells also of the passion and intensity 
 of the young man who saw infinite visions of work 
 before him, and who lived poor, in daily and unbroken 
 joy. It was in this irradiated world that he wrote the 
 best of his poems. There in 1805-6 he finished the 
 Prelude, Another set of the Lyrical Ballads appeared 
 in 1800, and in 1807 other poems. The Excursion 
 belongs to 18 14. From that time till his death he 
 produced from his home at Rydal Mount a long suc- 
 cession of poems. 
 
 148. Wordsworth and Nature. — The Prelude is the 
 history of Wordsworth's poetical growth from a child 
 till 1806. It reveals him as the poet of Nature and 
 of Man. His view of nature was entirely different from 
 that which up to his time the poets had held. Words- 
 worth conceived, as poet, that nature was alive. It had, 
 he imagined, one living soul which, entering into flower, 
 stream, or mountain, gave them each a soul of their 
 own. Between this Spirit in nature and the mind of 
 man there was a prearranged harmony which enabled 
 nature to communicate its own thoughts to man, and 
 man to reflect upon them, until an absolute union be- 
 tween them was established. This was, in fact, the 
 theory of the Florentine Neo-Platonists of the Renais- 
 sance. They did not care for nature, but when Words- 
 worth either reconceived or adopted this idea, it made 
 him the first who loved nature with a personal love, 
 for she, being living, and personal, and not only his 
 
232 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 reflection, was made capable of being loved as a man 
 loves a woman. He could brood on her character, her 
 ways, her words, her life, as he did on those of his 
 wife or sister. Hence arose his minute and loving ob- 
 servation of her and his passionate description of all 
 her life. This was his poetic philosophy with regard 
 to nature, and bound up as it was with the idea of 
 God as the Thought which pervaded and made the 
 world, it rose into a poetic religion of nature and man. 
 149. Wordsworth and Man. — The poet of nature in 
 this special way, Wordsworth is even more the poet of 
 man. It is by his close and loving penetration into 
 the reahties and simplicities of human life that he him- 
 self makes his claim on our reverence as a poet. He 
 relates in the Prelude how he had been led through his 
 love of nature to honour man. The shepherds of the 
 Lake hills, the dalesmen, had been seen by him as 
 part of the wild scenery in which he lived, and he 
 mixed up their life with the grandeur of nature and 
 came to honour them as part of her being. The love 
 of nature led him to the love of man. It was exactly 
 the reverse order to that of the previous poets. At 
 Cambridge, and afterwards, in the crowd of London 
 and in his first tour on the Continent, he received new 
 impressions of the vast world of man, but nature still 
 remained the first. It was only during his Hfe in France 
 and in the excitement of the new theories and their ac- 
 tivity that he was swept away from nature and found 
 himself thinking of man as distinct from her and first 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 233 
 
 in importance. But the hopes he had formed from the 
 Revolution broke down. All his dreams about a new 
 life for mankind were made vile when PYance gave up 
 liberty for Napoleon; and he was left without love of 
 nature or care for man. It was then that his sister 
 Dorothy, herself worthy of mention in a history of litera- 
 ture, led him back to his early love of nature and restored 
 his mind. Living quietly at Grasmere, he sought in the 
 simple lives of the dalesmen round him for the founda- 
 tions of what he felt to be a truer view of mankind than 
 the theories of the French Revolution afforded. And 
 in thinking and writing of the common duties and faith, 
 kindnesses and truth of lowly men, he found in man once 
 more 
 
 an object of delight, 
 Of pure imagination and of love. 
 
 With that he recovered his interest in the larger move- 
 ments of mankind. His love of Hberty and hatred of 
 oppression revived. He saw in Napoleon the enemy of 
 the human race. A series of sonnets followed the events 
 on the Continent. One recorded his horror at the attack 
 on the Swiss, another mourned the fate of Venice, an- 
 other the fate of Toussaint the negro chief; others cele- 
 brated the struggle of Hofer and the Tyrolese, others 
 the struggle of Spain, Two thanksgiving odes rejoiced in 
 the overthrow of the oppressor at Waterloo. He became 
 conservative in his old age, but his interest in social 
 and national movements did not decay. He wrote, and 
 
234 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 badly, on Education, the Poor Laws, and other sub- 
 jects. When almost seventy he took the side of the 
 Carbonari and sympathised with the Italian struggle. 
 He was truly a poet of mankind. But his chief work 
 was done in his own country and among his own folk ; ' 
 and he is the foremost singer of those who threw around 
 the lives of homely men and women the glory and sweet- 
 ; ness of song. He made his verse " deal boldly with sub- 
 stantial things " ; his theme was '^ no other than the very 
 heart of man " ; and his work has become what he de- 
 sired it to be, a force to soothe and heal the weary soul 
 of the world, a power like one of nature's, to strengthen 
 or awaken the imagination in mankind. He lies asleep 
 now among the people he loved, in the green churchyard 
 of Grasmere, by th^ side of the stream of Rothay, in a 
 place as quiet as hi. life. Few spots on earth are more 
 sacred than his grave, 
 
 150. Sir Walter Scott was Wordsworth's dear friend, 
 and his career as a poet began with the Lay of the Last 
 Minstrel, 1805. But before that he had collected, 
 inspired by his revolt from the Revolution to the re- 
 gretted past, the song^ and ballads of the Border. 
 Marmion was published in 1808, and the Lady of the 
 Lake in 18 10. These were his best poems ; the others, 
 with the exception of some lyrics which touch the sad- 
 ness and exultation of life with equal power, do not 
 count in our estimate of him. He brought the narrative 
 poem into a new and dehghtful excellence. In Mar- 
 mion and the Lady of the Lake his wonderful inventiveness 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 23$ 
 
 n Story and character is at its height, and it is matched 
 by the vividness of his natural description. No poet, 
 and in this he carries on the old Scottish quality, is a 
 finer colourist. Nearly all his natural description is of 
 the wild scenery of the Highlands and the Lowland 
 moorland. He touched it with a pencil so light, grace- 
 ful, and true, that the very names are made forever 
 romantic ; while his faithful love for the places he de- 
 scribes fills his poetry with the finer spirit of his own 
 tender humanity. 
 
 151. Scotland produced another poet in Thomas 
 Campbell.' His earliest poem, the Pleasures of Hope, 
 1799, belonged in its formal rhythm and rhetoric, and 
 in its artificial feeling for nature, to the time of Thomson 
 and Gray rather than to the newer time. He will chiefly 
 live by his lyrics. Hohenlinden, the Battle of the Baltic, 
 the Mariners of England, are splendid specimens of the 
 war poetry of England ; and the Song to the Evening Star 
 and Lord Ullin's Daughter, full of tender feeling, mark 
 the influence of the more natural style that Wordsworth 
 had brought to excellence. 
 
 152. Rogers and Moore. — The Pleasures of Memory, 
 1792, and the Italy, 1822, of Samuel Rogers, are the 
 work of a slow and cultivated mind, and contain some 
 laboured but fine descriptions. The curious thing is that, 
 living apart in a courtly region of culture, there is not a 
 trace in all his work that Europe and England and 
 society had passed during his life through a convulsion 
 of change. To that convulsion the best poems of Thomas 
 
236 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Moore may be referred. They are the songs he wrote 
 to the Irish airs collected in 1796. The best of them 
 have for their hidden subject the struggle of Ireland 
 against England. Many of them have lyrical beauty and 
 soft melody. At times they reach true pathos, but their 
 lightly Hfted gaiety is also delightful. He sang them 
 himself in society, and it is not too much to say that they 
 helped by the interest they stirred to further Catholic 
 Emancipation. 
 
 153. .We turn to very different types of men when we 
 come to Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Of the three, Lord 
 Byron had most of the quality we call force. Born in 
 1788, his Hours of Idleness ^ a collection of short poems, 
 in 1807, was mercilessly lashed in the Edinburgh Review, 
 The attack only served to awaken his genius, and he 
 replied with astonishing vigour in the satire of English 
 Bards and Scotch Reviewers in 1809. Eastern travel 
 gave birth to the first two cantos of Childe Harold, 181 2, 
 to the Giaour and the Bride of Abydos in 181 3, to the 
 Corsair zxiA Lara in 1814. The Siege of Corinth, Par- 
 isina, the Prisoner of Chillon, Manfred, and Childe 
 Harold were finished before 1819. In 18 18 he began 
 a new style in Beppo, which he developed fully in the 
 successive issues of Don Juan, 1819-24. During this 
 time he published a number of dramas, partly historical, 
 as his Marino Faliero, partly imaginative, as the Cain, 
 His life had been wild and useless, but he died in trying 
 to redeem it for the sake of the freedom of Greece. At 
 Missolonghi he was seized with fever, and passed away 
 in April, 1824. 
 
VIII ^^ POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 23/ 
 
 154. The Position of Byron as a Poet is a curious one. 
 He is partly of the past and partly of the present. Some- 
 thing of the school of Pope clings to him ; yet no one so 
 completely broke away from old measures and old man- 
 ners to make his poetry individual, not imitative. At 
 first, he has no interest whatever in the human questions 
 which were so strongly felt by Wordsworth and Shelley. 
 His early work is chiefly narrative poetry, written that 
 he might talk of himself and not of mankind. Nor has 
 he any philosophy except that which centres round the 
 problem of his own being. Cain, the most thoughtful 
 of his productions, is in reality nothing more than the 
 representation of the way in which the doctrines of 
 original sin and final reprobation affected his own soul. 
 We feel naturally great interest in this strong personality, 
 put before us with such obstinate power, but it wearies 
 us at last. Finally it wearied himself. As he grew in 
 power, he escaped from his morbid self, and ran into 
 the opposite extreme in Don Juan, It is chiefly in it 
 that he shows the influence of the revolutionary spirit. 
 It is written in bold revolt against all the conventionality 
 of social morality and religion and politics. It claimed 
 for himself and for others absolute freedom of individual 
 act and thought in opposition to that force of society 
 which tends to make all men after one pattern. This 
 was the best result of his work, though the way in which 
 it was done can scarcely be approved. As the poet of 
 nature he belongs also to the old and the new school. 
 Byron's sympathy with nature is a sympathy with himself 
 
238 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 reflected in her moods. But he also escapes from this 
 position of the later eighteenth century poets, and looks 
 on nature as she is, apart from himself; and this escape 
 is made, as in the case of his poetry of man, in his later 
 poems. Lastly, it is his colossal power and the ease that 
 comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, as well as 
 his amazing productiveness, which mark him specially. 
 But it is always more power of the intellect than of the 
 imagination. 
 
 155. In Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the contrary, the 
 imagination is first and the intellect second. He pro- 
 duced while yet a boy some worthless tales, but soon 
 showed in Queen Mab, 1813, the influence of the revolu- 
 tionary era, combined in him with a violent attack on the 
 existing forms of religion. One half of Shelley's poetry, 
 and of his heart, was devoted to help the world towards 
 the golden year he prophesied in Queen Mab, and to 
 denounce and overthrow all that stood in its way. The 
 other half was personal, an outpouring of himself in his 
 seeking after the perfect ideal he could not find, and, 
 sadder still, could not even conceive. Queen Mab is an 
 example of the first, Alastor of the second. The hopes 
 for man with which Queen Mab was written grew cold, 
 and he turned from writing about mankind to describe 
 in Alastor the life and wandering and death of a lonely 
 poet. But the Alastor who isolated the poet from man- 
 kind was, in Shelley's own thought, a spirit of evil, and 
 his next poem, the Revolt of Islam, 181 7, unites him 
 again to the interests of humanity. He wrote it with the 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1 730 TO 1 832 239 
 
 hope that men were beginning to recover from the apathy 
 and despair into which the failure of the revolutionary 
 ideas had thrown them, and to show them what they 
 should strive and hope for, and destroy. The poem 
 itself has finer passages in it than Alas tor ^ but as a whole 
 it is inferior to it. It is far too formless. The same year 
 Shelley went to Italy, and never returned to England. 
 He then produced Rosalind and Helen dcvA Julian and 
 Maddalo; but the new health and joy he now gained 
 brought back his enthusiasm for mankind, and he broke 
 out into the splendid lyric drama of Prometheus Unbound, 
 Asia, at the beginning of the drama separated from Pro- 
 metheus, is the all-pervading Love which in loving makes 
 the universe of nature. When Prometheus is united to 
 Asia, the spirit of Love in man is wedded to the spirit of 
 Love in nature, and all the world of man and nature is 
 redeemed. The marriage of these two, and the distinct 
 existence of each for that purpose, is the same idea as 
 Wordsworth's differently expressed ; and Shelley and he 
 are the only two poets who have touched it philosophi- 
 cally, Wordsworth with most contemplation, Shelley with 
 most imagination. Pronietheus Unbound is the finest 
 example we have of the working out in poetry of the idea 
 of a regenerated universe, and the fourth act is the 
 choral song of its emancipation. Then, She)!ey, having 
 expressed this idea with exultant imagination, turned to 
 try his matured power upon other subjects.. Two of 
 these were neither personal nor for the sake of man. 
 The first, the drama of the Cenci, is as restrained in 
 
240 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 expression as the previous poem is exuberant : yet there 
 is no poem of Shelley's in which passion and thought 
 and imagery are so wrought together. The second was 
 the Adonaisy a lament for the death of John Keats. It 
 is a poem written by one who seems a spirit about a 
 spirit, and belongs in expression, thought, and feeling to 
 that world above the senses in which Shelley habitually 
 lived. Of all this class of poems, to which many of his 
 lyrics belong, Epipsychidion is the most impalpable, but, 
 to those who care for Shelley's ethereal world, the finest 
 poem he wrote. Of the same class is the Witch of Atlas ^ 
 the poem in which he has personified divine Imagination 
 in her work in poetry, and imaged all her attendants, and 
 her doings among men. 
 
 As a lyric poet, Shelley, on his own ground, is easily 
 great. Some of the lyrics are purely personal ; some, as 
 in the very finest, the Ode to the West Windy mingle 
 together personal feeling and prophetic hope for man- 
 kind. Some are lyrics of pure nature ; some are dedi- 
 cated to the rebuke of tyranny and the cause of liberty ; 
 others belong to the indefinite passion he called love, 
 and others are written on visions of those " shapes that 
 haunt Thought's wildernesses." They form together the 
 most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musi- 
 cal, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess. 
 
 As the poet of nature, he had the same idea as Words- 
 worth, that nature was alive : but while Wordsworth 
 made the active principle which filled and made nature 
 to be Thought, Shelley made it Love. The natural 
 
mi POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 24I 
 
 world was dear then to his soul as well as to his eye, 
 but he loved best its indefinite aspects. He wants the 
 closeness of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats 
 had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than 
 they of describing the cloud-scenery of the sky, the 
 doings of the great sea, and vast realms of landscape. 
 He is in this, as well as in his eye for subtle colour, the 
 Turner of poetry. What he might have been we cannot 
 tell, for at the age of thirty he left us, drowned in the sea 
 he loved, washed up and burned on the sandy spits near 
 Pisa. His ashes lie beneath the walls of Rome, and Cor 
 cordium, " Heart of hearts," written on his tomb, well 
 says what all who love poetry feel when they think of 
 him. 
 
 156. John Keats lies near him, cut off like him before 
 his genius ripened ; not so ideal, but for that very reason 
 more naturally at home with nature than Shelley. In 
 one thing he was entirely different from Shelley — he had 
 no care whatever for the great human. questions which 
 stirred Shelley ; the present was entirely without interest 
 to him. He marks the close of that poetic movement 
 which the ideas of the Revolution had crystallised in 
 England, as Shelley marks the attempt to revive it. 
 Keats, seeing nothing to move him in an age which had 
 now sunk into apathy on these points, went back to 
 Spenser, and especially to Shakespeare^s minor poems, 
 to find his inspiration ; to Greek and mediaeval life to 
 find his subjects, and established, in doing so, that which 
 has been called the literary poetry of England. Leigh 
 
2^2 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Hunt, his friend and Shelley's, did part of this work. 
 The first subject on which Keats worked, after some 
 minor poems in 1^17, was Endymion, 181 8, his last, 
 Hyperion y 1820. These^ along with Lamia, which is, on 
 the whole, the finest of his longer poems, were poems of 
 Greek life. Endymion has all the faults and all the 
 promise of a great poet's early work, and no one knew 
 its faults better than Keats, whose preface is a model of 
 just self-judgment. Hyperion, a fragment of a tale of the 
 overthrow of the Titans, is itself like a Titanic torso. Its 
 rhythm was derived from Milton, but its poetry is wholly 
 his own. But the mind of Keats was as yet too luxuriant 
 to support the greatness of his subject's argument, and 
 the poem dies away. It is beautiful, even in death. 
 Both poems are filled with that which was deepest in the 
 mind of Keats, the love ©f loveliness for its own sake, 
 the sense of its rightful and pre-eminent power ; and in 
 the singleness of worship which he gave to Beauty, Keats 
 is especially the ideal poet. Then he took us back into 
 mediaeval romance, and in this also he started a new 
 type of poetry. There are two poems which mark this 
 revival — Isabella, and the Eve of St. Agnes. Mediaeval 
 in subject, they are modern in manner ; but they are, 
 above all, of the poet himself. Their magic is all his 
 own. In smaller poems, such as the Ode on a Grecian 
 Urn, the poem To Autumn, to the Nightingale, and 
 some sonnets, he is the fairest of all Apollo's children. 
 He knew the inner soul of words. He felt the world 
 where ideas and their forms are one, where nature and 
 
Vill POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 243 
 
 humanity, before they divide, flow from a single source. 
 In all his poems, his painting of nature is as close as 
 Wordsworth's, but more ideal ; less full of the imagina- 
 tion that links human thought to nature, but more full of 
 the imagination which broods upon enjoyment of beauty. 
 He was not much interested in human questions, but as 
 his mind grew, humanity made a more and more impera- 
 tive call upon him. Had he lived, his poetry would have 
 dealt more closely with the heart of man. His letters, 
 some of the most original in the English language, show 
 this clearly. The second draft of Hyperion, unpublished 
 in his lifetime, and inferior as poetry to the first, accuses 
 himself of apartness from mankind, and expresses his 
 resolve to write of Man, the greatest subject of all. 
 Whether he could have done this well remains unknown. 
 His career was short ; he had scarcely begun to write 
 when death took him away from the loveliness he loved 
 so keenly. Consumption drove him to Rome, and there 
 he died, save for one friend, alone. He lies not far 
 from Shelley, on the " slope of green access," near the 
 pyramid of Caius Cestius. He sleeps apart ; he is him- 
 self a world apart. 
 
 157. Modern English Poetry. — Keats marks the ex- 
 haustion of the impulse which began with Burns and 
 Cowper. There was no longer now in England any 
 large wave of public thought or feeling such as could 
 awaken the national emotion and life out of which poetry 
 is naturally born. We have then, arising after the deaths 
 of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, a number of pretty little 
 
244 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 poems, having no inward fire, no idea, no marked char- 
 acter. They might be written by any versifier at any 
 time, and express pleasant, indifferent thought in pleas- 
 ant verse. Such were Mrs. Hemans' poems, and those 
 of L. E. L., and such were Tennyson's earliest poems, in 
 1830. There were, however, a few men who, close to 
 1820 and 1822, had drunk at the fountain of Shelley, and 
 who, for a very brief time, continued, amid the apathy, 
 to write with some imagination and fervour. T. L. Bed- 
 does, whose only valuable work was done between 1822 
 and 1825, was one of these. George Darley, whose Sylvia 
 earned the praise of Coleridge, was another. They rep- 
 resent in their imitation of Shelley, in their untutored 
 imagination, the last struggles of the poetic phase which 
 closed with the death of Byron. When Browning imitated 
 or rather loved Shelley in his first poem, Pauline, it was 
 to bid Shelley farewell ; when Tennyson imitated Byron 
 and was haunted by Keats in his first poems, it was also 
 to bid them both farewell. Then Tennyson and Browning 
 passed on to strike unexpected waters out of the rocks 
 and to pour two rivers of fresh poetry over the world. 
 For with the Reform agitation, and the twofold religious 
 movement at Oxford, which was of the same date, a 
 novel national excitement came on England, and with 
 it the new tribe of poets arose among whom we have 
 lived. The elements of their poetry were also new, 
 though we can trace their beginnings in the previous 
 poetry. This poetry took up, so far as Art could touch 
 them, the theological, social, and even the political ques- 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 245 
 
 tions which disturbed England. It came, before long, C 
 moved by the critical and scientific inquiries into the 
 origins of religion and man and the physical world, to 
 represent the scepticism of England and the struggle 
 for faith against doubt. It gave itself t metaphysics, 
 but chiefly under the expression and analysis of the 
 characters of men and women. It played with a vast 
 variety of subjects, and treated them all with a personal 
 passion which filled them with emotion. It worked 
 out, from the point of view of deep feeling, the relation 
 of man to God, and of man to sorrow and immor- 
 tality. It studied and brought to great excellence the 
 Idyll, the Song, and the short poem on classic subjects 
 with a reference to modern life. It increased, to an 
 amazing extent, the lyrical poetry of England. The 
 short lyric was never written in such numbers and of 
 such excellence since the days of Elizabeth. It recapt- 
 ured and clothed in a new dress the Arthurian tale, and 
 linked us, back through many poets, to the days of 
 legend and delight. It re-established for us in this new 
 time, as the most natural and most emotional subject of 
 English poetry, England, her history, her people, and 
 her landscape, so that the new poets have described not 
 only the whole land but the natural scenery and histori- 
 cal story, the human and animal life of the separate 
 counties. Our native land, as in the days of Elizabeth, 
 has been idealised. 
 
 Nor did this new impulse stay in England only. It 
 went abroad for its subjects, and especially to Italy. It 
 
246 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Strove to express the main characteristics of periods of 
 history and of art, of the origins of reUgions and of Chris- 
 tianity, of classic and Renaissance thought at critical 
 times, and of lyric passion in modern life. Indeed, it 
 aimed at a universal representation of human life and 
 at a subtle characterisation of individual temperaments. 
 Thus, it was a poetry of England, and also of the larger 
 world beyond England. 
 
 Apart from the main stream of poetry, there were 
 separate streams which represented distinct passages in 
 the general movement. The Sonnets of Charles Tenny- 
 son Turner, which began in 1830, stand by their grace 
 and tenderness at the head of a large production of 
 poetry which describes with him the shy, sequestered, 
 observant life of the EngHsh scholar and lover of nature, 
 of country piety and country people. One man among 
 them stands alone, WilHam Barnes, of Dorsetshire. The 
 time will come when the dialect in which he wrote will 
 cease to prevent the lovers of poetry from appreciating 
 at its full worth a poetry which, written in the mother- 
 tongue of the poor and of his own heart, is as close to 
 the lives and souls of simple folk as it is to the woods 
 and streams, the skies and farms of rustic England. 
 Among them also is Coventry Patmore, who, though 
 alive, belongs to the past. What Barnes did for the 
 peasant and the farmer, Patmore did for the cultivated 
 life which in quiet English counties gathers round the 
 church, the parsonage, and the hall, the lives and piety 
 of the EngUsh homes that are still the haunts of ancient 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1832 247 
 
 peace. His work, with its retired and careful if over- 
 delicate note, is a true picture of a small part of English 
 life. But it has the faults of its excellences. 
 
 The High Church and Broad Church movements, as 
 they were called, produced two sets of poetical writers who 
 also stand somewhat apart from the main line of English 
 poetry. The first is best represented by John Keble, 
 whose Christian Year, in 1827, with its poetry, so good 
 within its own range, so weak beyond it, was the source 
 of many books of poems of a similar but inferior char- 
 acter. On the other hand the impulse towards a wider 
 theology was combined in some poets with a laxer moral- 
 ity than England is accustomed to maintain, and Bailey^s 
 Festus, 1839, was the first of a number of sensational 
 poems which painted the struggles of the spirit towards 
 immortal life, and of the senses towards mortal love with 
 equal effervescence. A noble translation o f Omar_ 
 Khp.yyn.rn hy F.Hwa rd Fitzgera ld, fin d the fine ballad-SOngS 
 and Andromeda of Charles Kingsley, may also be said to 
 flow apart from the main stream in which poetry flowed. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning (whose wife 
 will justly share his fame) began to write between 1830 
 and 1833, and continued their work side by side for fifty 
 years, when they died, almost together. Both of them 
 were wholly original, and both of them, differing at every 
 point of their art, kept with extraordinary vitality their 
 main powers, and were capable of fresh invention, even 
 to the very last. They passed through a long period of 
 change and development, during which all the existing 
 
248 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 foundations of faith and knowledge and art were dug out, 
 investigated, tested, and an attempt made to reconstruct 
 them, an attempt which still pursues its work. They 
 lived and wrote in sympathy with the emotions which 
 this long struggle created in the minds of men, and ex- 
 pressed as much of these emotions as naturally fell within 
 their capability and within the sphere of poetry. And 
 this they did with great eagerness and intensity. Their 
 love of beauty and of their art was unbroken, and they 
 had as much power, as they had desire, to shape the 
 thought and the loveliness they saw — great poets who 
 have illuminated, impelled, adorned, and exalted the 
 world in which we live. 
 
 At first the great inquiry into the roots of things dis- 
 turbed the next generation of poets, those who stepped 
 to the front between 1850 and i860 ; and as Arthur Hugh 
 Clough expressed the trouble of the want of clear light 
 on'^he fates of men and their only refuge in duty, so 
 Matthew Arnold, more deeply troubled, embodied in his 
 poetry, even in his early book of 1852, the restlessness, 
 the dimness, the hopelessness pf a world which had lost 
 the vision of the ancient stars and could cling to nothing 
 but a stoic conduct. But he did this with keen sorrow, 
 and with a vivid interest in the world around him. Then 
 about i860 the poets grew weary of the whole struggle. 
 Theology, the just aim and ends of life, science, political 
 and social questions, ceased on the whole to awaken the 
 slightest interest in them. Exactly that which took place 
 in the case of Keats now took place. The poets sought 
 
VIII POETRY FROM 1730 TO 1 832 249 
 
 only for what was beautiful, romantic, of ancient heroism, 
 far from a tossed and wearied world, far from all its 
 tiresome questions. Dante G. Rossetti, whose sister, 
 Christina, touched the romantic and religious lyric with 
 original beauty, was the leader of this school. He, and 
 others still alive, found their chief subjects in ancient 
 Rome and Greece, in stories and lyrics of passion, in 
 mediaeval romance, in Norse legends, in the old England 
 of Chaucer, and in Italy. But this literary poetry has 
 now almost ceased to be produced, and has been suc- 
 ceeded as in 1825 by a vast criticism of poetry, and by a 
 multitudinous production, much inspired from France, of 
 poetry, chiefly lyrical, which has few elements of endur- 
 ance and Httle relation to Hfe. What will emerge from 
 this we cannot tell, but we only need some new human 
 inspiration, having a close relation to the present, and 
 bearing with it a universal emotion, to create in England 
 another school of poetry as great as that which arose in 
 the beginning of this century, and worthy of the tradi- 
 tions which have made England the creator and lover of 
 poetry for more than 1200 years. 
 
250 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 PROSE LITERATURE FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE 
 DEATH OF GEORGE ELIOT (l 83 2-1 88 1) 
 
 158. The Growth of the Reading Public. — It has been 
 pointed out (page 196) that, with the middle of the 
 eighteenth century, there began in England a period of 
 rapid increase in manufactures, science, and prosperity, 
 which was paralleled by a remarkable growth in litera- 
 ture. This increase in material welfare has continued 
 throughout the nineteenth century. Science has made 
 greater progress within a hundred years than within the 
 five preceding centuries, and the discoveries of science 
 have affected in a most wonderful way the lives of men. 
 The greater part of the population of Great Britain, even 
 people of the smallest means, may live in accordance 
 with nature's laws, supplied with proper food, water, 
 clothing, and shelter, and free from dangerous epi- 
 demics. Laws have given greater liberty to the indi- 
 vidual, have mitigated the lot of the poor and unfortunate, 
 and have helped to reform the vicious. Improvements 
 in machinery, the growth of commerce, and the colonisa- 
 tion of new lands, have aided in the greater diffusion of 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 2$ I 
 
 wealth among the people ; and, though various industrial 
 and economic causes still tend to crowd the poor into 
 unhealthy districts of large cities, and deprive them of 
 the full rewards of their labour, it is, in the main, true 
 that, in point of material welfare, the average English- 
 man has at his command far more means towards health 
 and happiness than he would have had a century ago. 
 Education, too, is more widely spread: we all know 
 more of the essential facts of history and principles of 
 science, have a truer idea of what life means, and are 
 thus better prepared to enjoy and appreciate literature. 
 
 This increase in material prosperity has been accom- 
 panied by a remarkable growth in population. In 1800 
 the population of Great Britain and Ireland was about 
 15,000,000. In 1899 it is about 40,000,000. If, 
 moreover, we would estimate the present extent of the 
 English-speaking race, we must add to these 40,000,000 
 the even greater population of the United States, as well 
 as the English-speaking population of the colonies and 
 possessions of Great Britain in various parts of the world. 
 The total would probably exceed 125,000,000. 
 
 With this growth of English-speaking people in many 
 separate lands, it has come about that each of the large 
 bodies of the race has developed, to some extent, its 
 own special literature; and within a century it will 
 probably be necessary to discuss, not only the literature 
 of England itself, but that of Canada and Australia, just 
 as, in subsequent chapters, we find it necessary to treat 
 briefly of literature in the United States of America, or, 
 
252 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 as it is loosely called, American literature. For the 
 present we can afford to neglect, in a sketch of English 
 literature, the literature of the British colonies; but it is 
 important that we should remember that the boundaries 
 of the reading public are no longer those of the times of 
 Addison, when there was little writing outside of Lon- 
 don, and authors there felt that they were addressing 
 largely their own immediate circle of friends and fellow- 
 citizens. For, though no one book, except the Bible, 
 can be known to even a majority of the great total 
 referred to, any book in English may, according to the 
 degree to which it is fitted to instruct and entertain the 
 people, reach the hands of multitudes of men, women, 
 and children, not only in England, but wherever the 
 English tongue is spoken. The English language, too, 
 has become so important that it is understood by many 
 cultivated people of other nationalities, so that an Eng- 
 lish book of merit may also be read in all civilised 
 countries. The city-audience of the beginning of the 
 eighteenth century has thus, at the end of the nineteenth 
 century, become almost a world-audience. 
 
 Many changes, similar to those mentioned in pages 
 196-98, have also come about in the tastes and needs of 
 the wide public to whom the literature of this century 
 is addressed : — 
 
 (i) As has been explained above (page 196), a good 
 prose style has been inherited from the eighteenth cen- 
 tury and has been perfected in this century. Educated 
 men are born, as it were, into a good school of compo- 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 253 
 
 sition, and, profiting by the experience of their prede- 
 cessors, do not now have to discover for themselves how 
 to make their meaning clear and their style effective. 
 
 (2) The increase in health, wealth, and comfort on 
 the part of the people at large has given us leisure to 
 read and means to purchase books, while the extraordi- 
 nary development of railways and of postal and tele- 
 graph systems has, in many respects, made each of the 
 English-speaking nations almost a unit in feeling, and 
 has greatly increased the bonds of sympathy and under- 
 standing between them. The whole race may know 
 almost immediately what is known and felt by any large 
 body of individuals in it. The common interests of the 
 race are thus emphasised, and the thought of any indi- 
 vidual stimulated and broadened by his acquaintance 
 with the experience of his brothers. 
 
 (3) The same and similar causes have given a great 
 impetus to the press. Not only are many more books 
 printed than formerly; not only have newspapers in- 
 creased rapidly in numbers and circulation; but there 
 has arisen a host of periodicals, published weekly or at 
 longer intervals, devoted less to news than to literature, 
 which together reach a large part of the reading public. 
 It may even be doubted whether the reading of people, 
 at the end of the century, does not consist less of books 
 than of periodicals of various sorts, including news- 
 papers. This enormous growth of periodical literature 
 has been rendered possible by the inventions that make 
 printing less costly and more rapid, and by the fact that 
 
254 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 periodicals receive for the advertising of merchandise 
 large sums which may be drawn upon for the payment 
 of authors and artists. Books and periodicals have 
 become cheaper, and, through the better organisation of 
 the publishing trade, more easily obtainable. It is now 
 possible to procure, for a comparatively small sum, a 
 library which even fifty years ago would have been 
 beyond the means of any but the rich. 
 
 (4) It has been remarked (page 197) that in the 
 eighteenth century communication with the continent 
 of Europe increased, so that English literature stimu- 
 lated that of other European nations, and was in turn 
 stimulated by them. This process still continues. The 
 civilised world has in some respects become a single 
 body, for purposes of culture; and ideas or works of 
 art that appeal strongly to one nation have their influ- 
 ence upon all. With regard to English literature more 
 particularly, it is noteworthy that a similar process has 
 tended to remove the barriers between different classes 
 of the reading public. The reduction in the price of 
 printed matter; the increase in the amount; the growth 
 of rapid communication; the consequent increase in 
 knowledge, on the part of each individual or commu- 
 nity, of what is thought and done by other individuals 
 or communities; the industrial and legal changes that 
 have tended to obliterate the differences in experience 
 and opportunity between rich and poor; the decay of 
 social distinctions; the increase in education among all 
 classes, — all these have assisted in bringing about a 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 25 J 
 
 remarkable unity of sentiment. An author may feel 
 not only that he addresses a large audience, but that he 
 is, to a great degree, in sympathy with large and appar- 
 ently diverse portions of that audience. Nor is he 
 addressing men alone, for, from the eighteenth century 
 on, with new opportunities for education, women have 
 constituted an increasingly large part of the English 
 reading public, which is now composed of both sexes 
 and of all classes, in many lands. 
 
 The expansion of the reading public, which is char- 
 acteristic of this century and which has been described 
 above, and the accompanying increase in the production 
 of printed matter, make it exceedingly difficult to sum- 
 marise the history of English literature in this century. 
 We must limit ourselves by speaking, with only the rarest 
 exceptions, of men no longer living, and of English 
 authors who have exerted a strong influence on the more 
 thoughtful parts of this public. We must necessarily 
 omit many such authors, but we must be careful not to 
 include authors whose works, though they were widely 
 circulated and became favourites with large numbers of 
 people, have failed to exert a permanent influence, and, 
 with slight changes of the popular taste, have passed into 
 oblivion. 
 
 159. The Victorian Age. — The period of prosperity 
 which dawned upon England at about the time of Queen 
 Victoria's accession to the throne, and which has lasted 
 throughout the century, has been attended by an intel- 
 lectual and emotional awakening of the nation, of which 
 
256 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the growth of the reading public is merely a sign. In 
 the fine arts, in the industrial arts, in pure and applied 
 science, — in all branches of human activity, — the 
 period has been one of continuous development. The 
 literature of the period has been remarkable for its 
 variety and excellence, not only in poetry, but in the 
 several branches of prose. It has been lacking only in 
 the drama, which has been so inconspicuous that we 
 need not again refer to it. This lack seems to be mainly 
 due to the fact that, following the line of Scott's suc- 
 cesses, authors have cultivated the novel, which has 
 throughout the century been the most profitable branch 
 of literature, and to the fact that until recently it has 
 been possible for the managers of theatres to please their 
 audiences by the translation or adaptation of clever 
 French plays. 
 
 160. The Romantic School in Prose. — The romantic 
 school in poetry has been clearly described in the pre- 
 ceding chapter (pages 213-18). From the middle of the 
 eighteenth century on, men had been turning away from 
 the more formal classic models, and had been increas- 
 ingly influenced by earlier English poetry, by the 
 quaintness and romance of mediaeval life, by a desire 
 to make use of the more impressive elements of verse, 
 and, especially, by a growing sympathy for that in life 
 which had the greatest emotional value. Under such 
 influences the poetry of the nineteenth century became, 
 in many respects, radically different from that of the 
 eighteenth. The same influences were working to trans- 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 257 
 
 form prose literature, both in matter and in style. As 
 to matter, it will be noticed that in this century writers 
 have been deeply interested in the emotional life of the 
 past and the present, tending in novels to the narration 
 of stirring incidents or the portrayal of striking types, 
 and, in other forms of prose, to whatever moved the 
 hearts of the people through beauty, sympathy, sense of 
 contrast, or the embodiment of vigorous ideals. They 
 have been anxious to draw on all material that would 
 incite us to tears or laughter, or that would fill us with 
 enthusiasm, or that seemed to involve impressive or 
 impelling truths. This impulse has been, to a great 
 extent, shared by the other great European literatures. 
 It has persisted throughout the century, and is still, in 
 a somewhat modified form, a dominant force. 
 
 161. The Scientific Movement. — Less easily recog- 
 nised, less often flowering into great literature, there 
 runs throughout the period a strong impulse towards 
 research and observation, towards the accurate and dis- 
 passionate statement of the full truth in all branches of 
 human knowledge. In science, men who appreciated 
 the grandeur and dignity of their calling have made 
 efforts to make clear to the common people the results 
 of organised investigation; in history and economics, 
 to make clear the real purport of past and present events 
 and the principles of human action involved; and in 
 philosophy, theology, and kindred subjects of enquiry, 
 to learn the truth at all costs and to reproduce it faith- 
 fully. In the novel a similar impulse, common to most 
 
 8 
 
258 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 modern literatures, has led some writers to a more de- 
 tailed observation of the facts of life, and to the presen- 
 tation of them in a less fanciful fashion. This method 
 is called " realism." It was at first feared that the whole 
 scientific movement would tend to weaken the power of 
 the imagination in literature; but there seems* to be 
 room in our hearts for both interests, — that in life as 
 portrayed by the skilled observer and that in life as 
 portrayed by the man of imagination, — and it is grow- 
 ing clearer that the two can often be combined. 
 
 162. Prose Style in the Nineteenth Century. — By 
 the middle of the eighteenth century a good prose style 
 had already been formed. It was clear and orderly, — 
 the courteous language of accomplished gentlemen, — 
 and was free from the intricacy and eccentricity of earlier 
 periods. In Goldsmith it was simple and flowing; in 
 Johnson, dignified, if not pompous; in Burke and Gib- 
 bon, so'norous. In the nineteenth century the essential 
 qualities of clearness and dignity have been perpetuated; 
 but we have also learned to expect, in prose literature, 
 a certain melody or singing quality, as if the writer were 
 appealing to the ear even more than to the eye; and, 
 even when this is absent, at least an earnest eloquence, 
 as is appropriate when the appeal is to the emotions as 
 well as to the intellect. 
 
 163. The Novel. — From Defoe to Scott the hold of 
 the novel on the public grew stronger. Each great 
 novelist, moreover, added something to the development 
 of his art. Defoe taught his skill in arousing curiosity; 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 259 
 
 Richardson, the use of detail and of sentiment; Field- 
 ing, the creation of characters that have all the sem- 
 blance of reality; Smollett, the force of rough humour 
 and the sketching of whimsical characters; Miss Austen, 
 the building up of characters through minute observa- 
 tion. Scott first gave the modern public the taste for 
 the rapidly moving tale of romantic adventure. 
 
 Dickens succeeded Scott as a popular favourite, but 
 before taking him up we must speak of several novelists 
 of less importance in the early part of the century. 
 Frederick Marryat followed Smollett in his rough tales 
 of sea life, the best of which are Peter Simple (1834) 
 and Mr, Midshipman Easy (1836). Full of eccentric 
 characters, practical jokes, and amusing incidents, they 
 portrayed so admirably the bluff and hearty side of 
 active life as long to keep their freshness and charm. 
 Charles Lever, an Irishman, in Charles O' Malley 
 (1841) and many other tales of the same sort, did for 
 the army what Marryat did for the navy. His novels 
 are weak in plot, but full of dashing adventure and 
 bubbling over with merriment. Benjamin Disraeli, 
 Earl of Beaconsfield, the great Tory statesman, was 
 the author of many novels dealing with fashionable 
 life, of which the best are perhaps Coningsby (1844) 
 and Sybil (1845), which have in common the motive 
 of explaining the principles and ideals on which he 
 based the reconstruction of his party. Loose in plot, 
 but brilliant in style, they won the public partly 
 through their cleverness, partly because they dealt 
 
260 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 with the rich and the great, and partly because they are 
 mainly biographies, as it were, of ardent, impression- 
 able, and ambitious minds. They are likewise remark- 
 able because in them, for the first time in English 
 literature, were revealed the brilliance and wisdom of 
 the Jewish race. Edward I^ton Bulwer, Lord Lytton, 
 more commonly known as Bulwer- Lytton, wrote a long 
 series of novels with the definite purpose of entertaining 
 the public. They were of many sorts, as became his 
 versatile genius, and were received with favour partly 
 because, like Disraeli's, they drew many of their charac- 
 ters from high life, of which the growing multitude of 
 readers heard with delight, but chiefly because they often 
 dealt with mystery and crime, and because, again like 
 Disraeli's tales, they followed Byron's narrative poems 
 in presenting, in an heroic light, men of great ambition, 
 whether for good or for ill. Romanticism worshipped 
 the individual whose spirit was high and whose will was 
 strong. The novel of Bulwer-Lytton's that retains its 
 interest most permanently is The Last Days of Pompeii 
 (1834), which is fortunate in having as its theme one 
 of the most tragic events in all history. Geor ge Bqr- 
 Row's intimate acquaintance with the Gypsies and his 
 experiences as a colporteur in Spain gave him material 
 for The Bible in Spain (1843), Lavengro (185 1), and 
 other volumes of romantic adventure. To Charlotte 
 X Bronte belongs the distinction of having produced per- 
 haps the most typical English novel of the Romantic 
 ^Q!ciOQ\ Jane Eyre (1847), the heroine of which conceals 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 261 
 
 an indomitable will under the exterior of a quiet and 
 plain governess, on whom is centred the fiery passion 
 of a grim hero of higher station. 
 
 The real successor of Scott, however, was Charles 
 Dickens, who, from Pickwick Papers (1837) to Our 
 Mutual Friefid (1865), poured forth a series of re- 
 markable novels, which were read wherever the English 
 tongue was known, and which made their author beloved 
 from the palace of the prince to the camp of the Cali- 
 fornian miner. If Scott was the Wizard of the North, 
 Dickens was the Wizard of the South. He had Scott's 
 genius for story-telling; he knew the way to the hearts 
 of the people; and, at a time when the uniformity of 
 modern life was beginning to do away with many of the 
 external differences between persons and places, he fol- 
 lowed Smollett in creating a host of odd characters, 
 taken largely from the ranks of the poor and the humble. 
 These fantastic figures he produced in such numbers and 
 with such vitality that they form a little world of their 
 own; and we often say of odd people that they look as 
 if they had stepped from the pages of Dickens. His 
 tales all appeal strongly to the emotions, sometimes by 
 humour, sometimes by horror or pathos. They all have 
 a strong dramatic element, — are now farcical, now 
 melodramatic, and, at their best, delightful comedies. 
 His queer characters have the semblance of life, but we 
 feel them to be creatures of the fancy, who could not 
 exist in an actual world. In spite of this, he was a man 
 who knew well what English life was, especially among 
 
262 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the poorer classes, and earnestly tried to make it better 
 by picturing its evils; and his tender heart and the won- 
 derful power of his fancy made him one of the great 
 English story-tellers. 
 
 Equally great as a master of tears and gentle laughter 
 was William Makepeace Thackeray, who, though less 
 widely popular than Dickens, was, and is, on the whole, 
 a greater favourite with readers of more social expe- 
 rience. Of gentler birth, breeding, and education, 
 Thackeray began his career by dabbling both in art and 
 in letters; and it was only in 1848, when Vanity Fair 
 appeared, that the public realised that a new and great 
 interpreter of life had arisen. Vanity Fair was followed 
 by Pendennis (1850), Esmond (1852), The Newcomes 
 (1855), and The Virginians (1859), ^s well as by two 
 volumes of lectures, English Humourists (1853) and 
 The Four Georges (i860). A just idea of Thackeray's 
 merits can be obtained by contrasting his work with 
 that of Dickens. (i) In the field of the creative 
 imagination they are both great, but Thackeray's char- 
 acters belong largely - to the so-called upper classes. 
 (2) Thackeray's characters, like those of Fielding, 
 impress one less as odd than as real, less as what 
 we could fancy ourselves as being than as what we 
 are. (3) Thackeray does not so much tell a rapid 
 and exciting tale as follow a curious form of confidential 
 address, as if he were actually speaking directly to the 
 reader. His style and his matter are full of the personal 
 qualities of a man who, by sympathy and experience, 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 263 
 
 knew the life of the social world, and presented his 
 views, without exaggeration, in the careless but modu- 
 lated voice of a gentleman in conversation. The absence 
 of melodrama in his writings, and his habit of gently 
 railing at cant and hypocrisy in all its forms, have some- 
 times brought on him the reproach of cynicism; but it 
 is now more apparent that his zeal was always for truth 
 and honour. He felt stirring in his own heart the im- 
 pulses that led now to virtue, now to vice, and was too 
 candid to represent life as other than it was; too full of 
 sympathy with all his brother-men to represent them 
 otherwise than as compounded of the clay of which we 
 all are fashioned. His Henry Esmond is generally 
 agreed to be, of all historical novels in English, that 
 which most faithfully reproduces the life of a vanished 
 epoch, and may profitably be contrasted, in its methods, 
 with Dickens' Tale of Two Cities, 
 
 Marian Evans, who wrote under the name of George 
 Eliot, was a country girl of great power of mind and 
 much learning, who reached middle life before she 
 realised that she had a natural talent for the creation of 
 character and the telling of tales. In her first stories 
 and novels, — Scenes of Clerical Life (1858), Adam Bede 
 (1859), ^^^ ^i^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ (i860), Silas Marner 
 (1861), — she revealed her talent, and displayed also, 
 in dealing with simple and earnest characters and with 
 country life, much power of humour, of pathos, and 
 even of tragedy, and especially a deep feeling for moral 
 problems. In her later works, — Romola (1863), ^^lix^ 
 
264 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Holt {i2>66), Middlemarch (1872), and Daniel Deronda 
 (1876), — she threw an increasingly greater stress on 
 ethical problems, so that her novels became really studies 
 in the portrayal of the conscience and moral develop- 
 ment or retrogression of men and women. Those who 
 like best novels dealing with the lighter sides of life, or 
 those in which the ethical purpose is less explicit, have . 
 thought her later work inferior to her earlier; but the 
 English public has always gladly read literature in which 
 such purposes were prominent, and George Eliot's hold 
 on the people at large has not been greatly weakened on 
 this account. Less famous than Scott, Dickens, and 
 Thackeray, she retains an honoured place in English 
 literature by right of her power as a story-teller and a 
 creator of character, and of her success in dealing with 
 the moral and religious elements in life. 
 
 Our cenlJiry has been rich in minor novelists, each 
 with a special claim to recognition. Mrs. Gaskell is 
 best known by her Cranford (1853), a story of village 
 life which reveals both sympathy and close observation, 
 and which has become a classic. Anihony Trollope 
 wrote more than any of his contemporaries, and though 
 his quiet but pleasing novels of life in the country and 
 in the cathedral towns, of which Barchester Towers 
 (1857) is a good example, never reached the first rank, 
 they were almost uniform in excellence, and won, to no 
 small degree, the favour of the public. Charles Reade 
 wrote with more vivacity. His was a manly spirit, hating 
 fraud and useless convention; and his novels, of which 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 265 
 
 Put Yourself in his Place (1870) is typical, strike at the 
 false and commend the true in modern civilisation. 
 He was also the author of a good historical novel, 
 The Cloister and the Hearth ( 1 860). Charles Kingsley 
 was a clergyman and a reformer, and his novels, like 
 himself, were overflowing with physical energy and 
 moral earnestness. He is best known by a charming tale 
 for children, The Water Babies (1863), and by two his- 
 torical novels, IIypatia{i^^^) and Westward Ho / (1855). 
 Greater than any of these writers is George Meredith, 
 whose Richard Feverel (1859), Beauchamfs Career 
 (1875), ^^<i Diana of the Crossways (1885) have been 
 recognised by acute readers as showing a rare power of 
 analysing the more subtle sides of human nature, and a 
 rare power of portraying characters of great charm and 
 nobility. Unfortunately, a somewhat whimsical style 
 and method of narration has kept him from being as 
 widely read as Dickens and Thackeray, to whose class 
 he belongs by the type and scope of his genius. 
 
 The last third of the century has seen, in Europe, the 
 rise of the realistic school of fiction, which endeavours 
 to give an accurate picture of life as it actually appears 
 to the observer, but which, on the continent, has shown 
 a tendency to take for its subject-matter, in many in- 
 stances, vice and crime and the ignoble side of man's 
 character. English fiction, throughout the century, has, 
 on the whole, preferred to follow a less scientific and 
 more purely fanciful or idealistic method, though from 
 Jane Austen down a strong undercurrent of realism 
 
266 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 has, from time to time, made itself manifest; the ten- 
 dency to treat dispassionately of crime and vice has 
 been wholly absent. While standing somewhat aloof, in 
 this respect, from the realistic movement, English fic- 
 tion has, in the last two decades of the century, revived 
 the novel of romantic adventure, returning to the field 
 opened by Scott; and the public, perhaps a little weary 
 of novels of society, reform, and ethics, has welcomed 
 the change. Of the new writers of tales of adventure by 
 sea and land the chief was Robert Louis Stevenson, 
 who, while himself fighting bravely against disease, 
 delighted young and old by his New Arabian Nights 
 (1882), Treasure Island (1883), a tale of pirates, and 
 by Kidnapped (1886) and The Master of Ballantrae 
 (1889), in which the elements of adventure and of char- 
 acter are cunningly combined. 
 
 The nineteenth century has done its work in present- 
 ing us with almost all the possible ways of treating human 
 life in fiction. The twentieth century must follow the 
 general methods of the nineteenth, combining and ex- 
 tending them, as our century has done with the methods 
 of Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett. A very great 
 number of novels is published each year, but it is plain 
 that, though many writers are skilled in this form of 
 composition, few or none give promise of becoming 
 masters. It is plain, too, that the hold of the short story 
 is growing stronger. What the nineteenth century has 
 taught us is sympathy. We have learned to feel, through 
 the art of the narrator, what men and women are doing 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 267 
 
 and suffering throughout the world; and we give our 
 sympathy both to the more complex group of characters 
 and more intricate series of events portrayed in the novel 
 and to those indicated in the less detailed, more rapid 
 and suggestive short story, the very movement and brevity 
 of which seem so highly typical of modern life and 
 emotion. 
 
 164. History. — We now turn to other branches of 
 prose-writing, in which, not through fictions, but by the 
 clear and impressive statement of what they believed to 
 be facts and principles, men have won honour and influ- 
 ence over their fellows. 
 
 The essays and history of Thomas Babington Macaulay 
 have been almost as widely read as the novels of Scott 
 and Dickens. He had been a precocious boy, with a 
 prodigious memory, great industry, and a genius for the 
 accumulation and organisation of facts; and he was but 
 a young man when, in 1825, he astonished the public 
 by a remarkable essay on Milton, in which he sketched 
 rapidly, but brilliantly, the life, works, and times of 
 the Puritan poet. From his first essay to his last, 
 Macaulay' s skill, vivacity, and information never 
 flagged, and he became the people's great painter of 
 historical scenes and historical characters, excelling 
 in his power of visualising the events and the per- 
 sonages of the past. This power was even more 
 clearly shown in the uncompleted History of England 
 from the Accession of James IL (1848-60). Mac- 
 aulay wrote at a time when the reading public was 
 
268 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 rapidly increasing, when knowledge of history was like- 
 wise growing, and when, partly led on by Scott, men 
 were eager to understand and realise for themselves the 
 character and meaning of past events. That Macaulay 
 was able to satisfy this longing was due not only to 
 his power of imagination, but to his clear, rapid, 
 and entertaining style, which had a strong influence 
 on journalism and letters. Macaulay 's mind was down- 
 right and positive. His information was often insuf- 
 ficient, his judgment hasty, his attitude prejudiced; but 
 his clear and brilliant intellect and his clear and brill- 
 iant style made him, of all the writers of the century, 
 the greatest populariser of history. 
 
 Thomas Carlyle was a man of a wholly different sort. 
 He had known poverty, physical pain, and mental suffer- 
 ing. He was irritable, morose, inclined to believe that 
 most men were fools, and that what truth and nobility 
 there was in the world was disguised and concealed by 
 the wrappings of hypocrisy, cant, and affectation. His 
 first important work. Sartor Res or tus (1834), a "philoso- 
 phy of clothes, '* expresses in a grotesque form this pes- 
 simistic feeling and his resolve to find and hold fast to 
 the truth in a world of shams.' It was this resolve 
 that led him to the field of history. In The French 
 Revolution (1837), Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), 
 Cromweir s Letters and Speeches (1845), and History 
 of Frederick II (1858-65), he expounded with great 
 energy and vividness the idea that the truly great 
 men, the heroes, are those who battle against the 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 269 
 
 folly and vice of the multitudes, and that it is they 
 who should be admired and followed as prophets 
 and teachers. Carlyle's style is broken and grotesque, 
 but at times full of grandeur. His great power over 
 men lay in his genius for worshipping the noble and 
 energetic and steadfast in warrior-characters; in a skill 
 not wholly unlike Macaulay's in visualising their acts 
 and their surroundings; and in a power transcending 
 Macaulay's for analysing and appreciating the motives 
 that sway men. Carlyle also exerted a strong influence 
 on the thought and literature of the century by introduc- 
 ing into England a knowledge of German philosophy 
 and letters, which were at that time of a particularly 
 stimulating character. 
 
 Comparable with Macaulay and Carlyle in the power 
 of imaginative visualisation of the past v/as James An- 
 thony Froude, whose History of England from the Fall 
 of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada (1856-69) charmed 
 all by its brilliant and rapid style, its grasp alike of 
 character and of political history, and its note of patri- 
 otic devotion. With all this, Froude was peculiarly 
 prone to errors of fact and of judgment. 
 
 Throughout the century there have been many histori- 
 ans of note, but, with the possible exception of John 
 Richard Green, whose Short History of the English 
 People (1874) combined a picturesque and sympathetic 
 style with painstaking accuracy and sound scholarship, 
 they wrote for the learned public, and have been little 
 known or appreciated by the general public. Among 
 
270 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 these are the two historians of Greece, George Grote 
 and Bishop Thirlwall; Dean Milman, the historian of 
 Latin Christianity; and Charles Merivale, the historian 
 of the Roman Empire. To these names, which show how 
 English interest clung to the history of classical and 
 early Christian times, should be added those of Henry 
 Thomas Buckle, author of a stimulating but incom- 
 plete History of Civilisation in Europe (1857-61), and 
 Edward Augustus Freeman, whose elaborate History 
 of the Norman Conquest (1867-76) was perhaps the 
 most painstakingly accurate English historical work of 
 the century. 
 
 165. Criticism. — We now turn to a group of writers 
 who were scarcely less important than Macaulay and 
 Carlyle, in that they helped to improve the taste of the 
 public and to stimulate, to a considerable degree, inter- 
 est in art and letters. Chief among these was John 
 RusKiN, whose enthusiasm for nature and art and con- 
 stant appeal to the emotions rather than to the intellect 
 mark his kinship with the poets and novelists of the 
 romantic school. In his two longer works, Modern 
 Painters (1843-60) and Stones of Venice (1851-53), as 
 well as in many minor writings, he called forcibly to 
 the attention of his countrymen — at a time when the 
 tendency was to conventionalise art and to make social 
 economics a matter of abstract calculation — the minute 
 beauties of nature, especially in clouds and mountains, 
 the charm and inner meaning of mediaeval and Renais- 
 sance art, and the forgotten truths that even humble call- 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 2/1 
 
 ings have a dignity of their own when rightly followed, 
 and that happiness is not to be measured by rank nor 
 value and worth by gold alone. Full of prejudices, an 
 implacable foe to modern industrial progress, often 
 lacking in accurate knowledge of the matters he treated, 
 and prone to make laws of art by generalisation from 
 his personal fancies, he was, in spite of all this, a power- 
 ful influence in breaking down foolish conventions and 
 in opening the eyes of many to the beauty of the art of 
 the past and to the glory and shame of contemporary 
 civilisation. His style is among the most beautiful 
 in English literature, — rich and sonorous, with a lyric 
 swing and cadence. 
 
 Matthew Arnold performed a service for literature 
 somewhat similar to that which Ruskin performed for 
 art, though he appealed less to the emotions of his 
 readers and more to their critical faculties. He wrote 
 much on questions of Church and State, and much in 
 analysis of existing social conditions, frequently in a 
 tone half-bantering, half-serious. His more permanent 
 work is contained in his two series of Essays in Criti- 
 cism (1865, 1888), in which he tried to make clear that 
 scholars and thoughtful people generally throughout all 
 Europe were attacking the problems of literature, phi- 
 losophy, science, and kindred subjects in much the same 
 orderly way, and in accordance with much the same 
 fundamental beliefs and principles. He illustrated this 
 conception by a critical estimate of several famous 
 authors, in essays which have themselves become famous, 
 
272 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and did a great deal to convince the public that judg- 
 ments as to the kind or value of literary productions are 
 not matters of whim or fancy, but may be profitably dis- 
 cussed on the basis of aesthetic and ethical principles. 
 Arnold's style was calm and resolute, and owed much 
 of its effectiveness to his curious habit of repeating at 
 intervals a phrase or catchword, such as " sweetness and 
 light," which recalled forcibly his main tenet. Arnold 
 was dogmatic in his opinions, but he always explained 
 his reasons for holding them; and one who disagreed 
 with his results could determine how and why the dis- 
 agreement came about. He thus acted as a clarifier of 
 thought in every field which he touched. 
 
 Ruskin and Arnold, with Carlyle, were the great 
 influences on criticism in this period, but two minor 
 critics of literature deserve mention, Walter Bagehot 
 and Walter Pater. Bagehot was a banker, and ren- 
 dered criticism and literature itself an important service 
 by neglecting the implicit convention of men of letters 
 that criticism belonged to them alone, and, without pre- 
 tence at an elaborate style or method, by showing what 
 judgment an acute man of affairs had to pass on books 
 and authors. It thus became clear — and it is each year 
 growing clearer — that literature is written for all, and 
 may be fairly judged by all who read with open eyes and 
 an open heart. Pater rendered criticism an equally 
 great service by the extraordinary subtlety and skill of 
 his analysis of all aesthetic pleasures. Practically with- 
 out a profession, he lived a life of leisure and seclusion, 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1S32 TO 18S1 273 
 
 devoting himself entirely to the quest of the beautiful 
 and the delicate analysis of all its effects. He be- 
 lieved that each art, and each work of any of the 
 arts, has its own peculiar note, as it were, of beauty, 
 and can be best enjoyed when that note is discov- 
 ered and appreciated. This stimulating conception 
 was developed in Studies in the Reiiaissance (1873) 
 and Appreciations (1889). He was also the author of 
 Marius the Epicurean (1885), an historical novel, in 
 which the philosophic, religious, and literary thought 
 of the second century was analysed in accordance with 
 the same principle. 
 
 166. Theology, Philosophy, and Science. — England 
 has been lacking in great theologians and philosophers 
 during this period. In religious literature the strongest 
 influence was that of John Henry Newman; in philoso- 
 phy, that of John Stuart Mill. The circumstances of 
 Cardinal Newman's career, no less than his high abili- 
 ties, made him the most distinguished representative in 
 English-speaking countries of an historic church; and 
 his voice, in the minds of many, came to stand for all 
 the processes of thought and feeling involved in Chris- 
 tianity as an ancient organised body of belief and tra- 
 dition. His style, too, was resonant and powerful, yet 
 subtle, and based on Roman models; and its exquisite 
 purity and dignity gain by contrast with the emotional 
 whimsicalities of Carlyle, and even of Ruskin. His 
 many volumes" of sermons, his Idea of a University 
 (1854), his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), and other 
 
 T 
 
274 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 works of greater or less importance, had a strong 
 iafluence on thoughtful men, who found in them 
 an almost perfect expression of noble and spiritual 
 thoughts. 
 
 Mill was eminent in metaphysics; but it is character- 
 istic of him and his race that he devoted his attention, 
 with scarcely less persistence and success, to questions 
 of ethics, economics, and public welfare, as in his essays 
 on Liberty (1859) and on The Subjection of Women 
 (1869), the latter a plea for the emancipation of women. 
 A similar devotion to public welfare was prominent 
 in the English scientific work of the last part of the 
 century. 
 
 England's greatest contribution to science during the 
 century was the fertile thought conceived at practically 
 the same period by Alfred Russel Wallace and 
 Charles Darwin, and first formulated by Darwin in his 
 On the Origin of Species (1859), and later works, that 
 the whole development of life on the planet was due to 
 the modification of heredity by the law of natural selec- 
 tion. This gave impulse to a great movement of research, 
 carried on by groups of scholars throughout the civilised 
 world, which has resulted in an almost complete change 
 in the conception of man's relation to the universe, and 
 which has stimulated, if not transformed, history and 
 psychology and all cognate branches of thought. Most 
 of these scholars have written for the learned public 
 alone, but we must mention several who have served 
 truth and their country well by popularising, to some 
 
IX PROSE LITERATURE FROM 1832 TO 1881 2/5 
 
 degree, the results of research, — John Tyndall, a great 
 physicist; Thomas Huxley, who did much to make 
 clear the meaning of evolution and its bearing on ethics 
 and religion; and Herbert Spencer, the formulator of 
 a system of philosophy based on the principle of 
 evolution. 
 
2/6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 POETRY FROM THE DEATH OF SCOTT TO THE DEATHS OF 
 TENNYSON AND BROWNING (1832-1892) 
 
 167. Alfred Tennyson. — In treating the poetry of the 
 period it is necessary only to expand the sketch given 
 in pages 243-49. Alfred Tennyson was, in many re- 
 spects, the most remarkable author of the century in 
 England. From early manhood to extreme old age he 
 put his verse before the public, which at first, following 
 the critics, read him grudgingly and then with increas- 
 ing approbation, until, from In Memoriam (1850) to 
 the Death of (Enone (1892), he reached the hearts of 
 the English-speaking race as no man had before him. 
 That he was appreciated so widely was partly due to the 
 influences (pages 250-55) that had created a vast reading 
 public, and had put all parts of it, realising their com- 
 mon humanity, into sympathy with one another; but it 
 is also due to the genius of the singer. His themes were 
 such as had long filled the hearts of all, but had hitherto 
 received no adequate expression. He sang of patriot- 
 ism, of passionate regret for the beloved dead, of hope 
 and faith in God and man and heaven, of constancy in 
 
X POETRY FROM 1832 TO 1892 277 
 
 love, of noble ideals of purity and honour, of all the 
 struggles that lead us higher. He was master of every 
 form of lyric and narrative verse, combining the melody 
 of Coleridge, the colour of Keats, the story-telling power 
 of Scott, the ethical impulse of Wordsworth. Living 
 aloof from the crowd, he was independent of political 
 or religious creeds, or social coteries, and was thus in 
 his seclusion a poet of pure contemplation, free to 
 reflect in his poems the currents of thought and feeling 
 in his day, without giving them a partisan form. He 
 pleased all classes of the public : the acutely literary by 
 the exquisite finish of his form, no less than by qualities 
 that appealed to the people at large — the melody of his 
 song and the sweep of his blank verse. He became 
 poet-laureate in 1850 by royal command, but he was 
 none the less so by national acclamation. 
 
 168. Robert Browning was almost the exact contem- 
 porary of Tennyson, aiid throughout a long life devoted 
 himself to poetry with equal earnestness. A man of 
 genius, with great stores of information, a mind of ex- 
 traordinary acuteness, and a creative imagination of the 
 first rank, he had not the qualities that allowed him to 
 appeal strongly to the great public, which was bewildered 
 by his Sordello (1840). It was not until the appearance 
 of Men and Women (1855) that he acquired a staunch 
 following of ardent admirers, and not until the publica- 
 tion of The Ring and the Book (1868) that he was gen- 
 erally recognized as a great poet. He never became a 
 national favourite, as did Tennyson, but he appealed 
 
2/8 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 with great force to all who loved analysis of character. 
 What stood in the way of Browning's popularity was, in 
 part, his intricate manner of expression, but mainly the 
 fact that, in the field of dramatic monologue, which he 
 made his own, his purpose was to reveal the individu- 
 ality by reproducing minute processes of thought. His 
 hold on his admirers, now rapidly growing in numbers, 
 is due partly to the rare melody of his verse in certain 
 poems or isolated passages, but mainly to the mighty 
 band of dramatis per s once, of all times and nations, but 
 chiefly, perhaps, of mediaeval Italy, which he created, 
 — a band equalled only by that of Shakespeare, — and 
 whose inner thoughts he analysed with marvellous reality. 
 He thus satisfied to the full, in the more acute class of 
 readers, the passion which has been one of the great 
 strains of modern thought, — the passion for reproduc- 
 tions in art of the life of typical men and women of the 
 past. 
 
 169. Other Poets. — Our century, so rich in great 
 poets, was also rich in poets less great. Elizabeth 
 Barrett Browning, the wife of Robert Browning, was 
 another of the remarkable group of women who have 
 been an essential element in the literature of this period, 
 adding to it qualities which, in kind or in degree, are 
 peculiarly feminine. Mrs. Browning had the woman's 
 heart of spontaneous and undisciplined feeling, — over- 
 flowing with pity and indignation, as in her humani- 
 tarian protests for the oppressed; or with pure affection, 
 as in her beautiful Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850). 
 
X POETRY FROM 1832 TO 1892 2/9 
 
 Mention, too, must be made of Macaulay's Lays of 
 Ancient Rome (1842). His verses were mechanical, but 
 they had a swing and force that made them favourites 
 with many, particularly the young. Matthew Arnold 
 and Arthur Hugh Clough (who were both affected 
 deeply by the thought of their time, and remain, 
 to a great extent, poets for scholars, rather than for 
 the people); Charles Kingsley's fine ballads and 
 Andromeda (1858), his experiment in hexameter; and 
 Edward Fitzgerald's remarkable translation of Omar 
 Khayydfn (1858), have already been mentioned (pages 
 247-48). Two strains in our modern poetry remain to 
 be spoken of. The first is that of the writers of vers de 
 societe and of other forms of light and charming verse, 
 
 — Winthrop Mackworth Praed, Charles Stuart Cal- 
 VERLEY, Frederick Locker- Lampson, Austin Dobson, 
 
 — whose graceful art and whose influence in widening 
 the scope of English poetry by introducing the ballade 
 and other foreign forms of verse it would be churlish 
 not to recognise and appreciate. The second is that of 
 the poets sometimes called pre-Raphaelites, — Dante 
 Gabriel Rosseiti, Christina Rossetti, William Morris, 
 and Algernon Charles Swinburne (page 249). Rossetti 
 was a painter of much skill and beauty, and Morris had, 
 in several of the arts, and particularly in the handicrafts, 
 a strong influence in bringing about a better condition 
 of the public taste in household decoration. As artists 
 and as poets the whole group turned for inspiration to the 
 art and poetry of the Middle Ages, before Raphael set 
 
280 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the seal of academic convention on the young Renais- 
 sance, when each man in his own art created, with com- 
 plete naiVet^, what seemed beautiful in his own eyes. 
 An Italian by blood and temperament, Rossetti's trend 
 was towards the Italian poetry of the thirteenth century, 
 and especially its worship of beauty and its expression 
 in the sonnet of the ecstasy of contemplative love. 
 Morris loved to retell tales of mediaeval and ancient 
 romance, in The Earthly Paradise (1868-70), Sigurd the 
 Volsung (1876), and his translations of the ^Eneid (1876) 
 and the Odyssey (1887). Swinburne turned to many 
 sources, — to the Middle Ages, to the Elizabethans, to 
 the Greeks, — for his inspiration, and, in his Atalanta in 
 Calydon (1864) and Poems and Ballads (1866), thrilled 
 men by a richness of rhythm and a harmony of sound 
 which were new to English verse, and which have given 
 him a strong influence over younger writers. But all 
 these poets lived apart from the people, dazed by their 
 own worship of vanished ideals, and out of sympathy 
 with modern life. Their school ceases with their own 
 voices, and the elements they contributed to English 
 verse are absorbed, like so many others, in the great 
 current of English poetry. 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 28 1 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 PROSE LITERATURE IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 1 70. The Growth of a New Nation. — Settlements in 
 the territory that now constitutes the United States were 
 begun very early in the seventeenth century ; but it was 
 not until well within the present century that the inhabi- 
 tants of this land have come to consider themselves wholly 
 as brothers. Nothing could have exceeded in diversity 
 the elements that entered into the process of amalgama- 
 tion. Along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts there were Eng- 
 Hsh, Dutch, German, Swedish, French, Spanish, Scotch, 
 and Irish colonists ; and after the struggle for indepen- 
 dence was over, and especially after the opportunities 
 existing in the new world became generally known, there 
 have flocked to us, through every open gate, emigrants 
 of all races and from all countries, but particularly from 
 lands where severe governmental rule or harsh economic 
 conditions have driven out the oppressed, the poor, or 
 the ambitious. Diverse as were these elements, how- 
 ever, the process of unification has gone steadily on. By 
 far the majority of the early settlers were English, and, the 
 original colonies belonging to the English crown or soon 
 
282 ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 falling to it, the English speech became the official and 
 current language. But, though using a single speech and 
 subject to a single rule, it was long before the colonies 
 reached uniformity of sentiment. Drawn together gradu- 
 ally by common interests and mutual intercourse, it was 
 only late in the eighteenth century that they timidly 
 banded together to secure those interests. Carried further 
 than they intended, they achieved independence, and 
 became technically a nation. But even then a genuinely 
 national spirit was, to a large degree, impossible. The 
 states were full of jealousies and antipathies, falling, like 
 the German states of the same period, into little geo- 
 graphical groups. It was not until at least several decades 
 of the nineteenth century had passed that the people of 
 the United States grew to realise fully that they were 
 brothers, and to develop, consciously and unconsciously, 
 the policy and the temperament that were to distinguish 
 them in many ways from their kindred across the sea. 
 Indeed, we may say that it was not until the nation had 
 spread from one ocean to the other, and until the most 
 radical differences between parts of the country had been 
 settled by the great Civil War and the mutual under- 
 standing which slowly followed it, that the men of our 
 land have felt that they were bound together by ties 
 which cannot be broken. 
 
 171. The Growth of a New Literature. — There were 
 several causes which prevented the upgrowing of literature 
 in the United States until the nation had, to some extent, 
 reached consciousness as a nation. First, the time and 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 283 
 
 Strength of the colonists were filled with pressing and 
 often perilous duties. At the outset these were so en- 
 grossing that they took away alike the desire to produce 
 literature and the desire to receive it. The life of con- \ 
 templative leisure, which tends to foster literature, is still . 
 rare among us, for even when the more arduous duties of 
 the pioneer were over, the impulse towards a life of 
 activity was strong, as it must always be in a young state, 
 and our best minds turned from the task of clearing a 
 continent to the organising and upbuilding of a great 
 commercial and industrial nation. Second, there were 
 peculiar circumstances in the Hfe of each section of the 
 country that acted as a deterring force. In the southern 
 colonies it was the fact that men lived mainly on planta- 
 tions, somewhat isolated from their fellows, and that the 
 influence of slavery tended to produce an aristocratic and 
 unprogressive society. The middle colonies lacked the 
 spur of high ideals, and cared more for commerce than 
 for learning and the arts. In New England, on the other 
 hand, where Hfe was more strenuous, the influence of 
 religion was blighting. Puritans of the Puritans, straitest 
 of the sect, they regarded the works of the imagination 
 as sinful, and their abnormal self-analysis and religious 
 narrowness destroyed the element of beauty even in the 
 literature of piety. Third, the ties that bound each 
 colony to the mother country were stronger even than 
 the ties that bound them to one another, and the Utera- 
 
 ture of England satisfied all their needs. 
 
 Thus it came about that little writing of merit was done * 
 
284 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 in America until this century. We have, of course, the 
 writings of such of the early explorers and settlers as were 
 most impressed by the wonders of a virgin world, by their 
 novel adventures, or by a dim vision of what civilisation 
 on this continent might become. But quaint as these 
 are, they can scarcely be counted as the beginnings of 
 'American literature. The succeeding generations of 
 writers born on the new soil, the descendants of the 
 pioneers, felt dimly that new thoughts were stirring within 
 them ; but in all matters of expression they turned natur- 
 ally to English models, — to Pope or Addison, — imitat- 
 ing them consciously like unskilled novices. This period 
 of apprenticeship lasted until after the beginning of the 
 nineteenth century, broken only by a few men, to be 
 mentioned later, who were too intent on ideas of great 
 purport to follow any model slavishly. From the time 
 of Irving on, however, we meet new conditions. The 
 reading public was rapidly increasing, and cared more 
 
 I I and more for the work of American authors. Beginning 
 with Cooper, Hawthorne, and Emerson, American writers, 
 too, began to look within their own hearts, rather than 
 abroad, both for the matter of which they wrote, and for 
 the manner in which they wrote. The national move- 
 ment thus begun has grown in strength throughout the 
 country. As generation succeeded generation, we have 
 thought less and less of Enghsh models and tended more 
 and more to the natural expression of our own thoughts. 
 172. National Elements in American Literature. — Our 
 
 "* j* literature is thus both dependent and independent, both 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 285 
 
 a branch and a tree. The colonists came in the age of 
 Shakespeare and Milton, bringing with them the glorious 
 speech of the period and the staunch EngHsh temper of 
 mind and body. The language still remains common to 
 both nations, with only the slightest divergencies, due 
 sometimes to the survival here of words or idioms that 
 have now passed out of the British vocabulary, some- 
 times to changes that have occurred in Great Britain 
 within the last two centuries, and sometimes to similar 
 changes in the United States, — changes which the di- 
 verse elements in our population and the rapidly shifting 
 experiences of our people have made peculiarly fitting. 
 The racial traits of the English, especially those most 
 firmly rooted in the Anglo-Saxon stock, have been pre- 
 served in America ; but they have suffered a sea-change, 
 remaining the same and yet becoming different. Just as 
 it is impossible not to distinguish, as a rule, Americans 
 from Englishmen by their voices, dress, demeanor, habits, 
 and general theory of life, so it is impossible as a rule not 
 to find in American and in EngUsh literature of this cen- 
 tury somewhat different characteristics. To formulate 
 these national elements in American literature is a diffi- 
 cult task, but we cannot easily err in pointing out three. 
 
 First, American Hterature is in the main addressed to 
 the people at large, rather than to any set or class, and 
 is characterised by plainness and simplicity. It retains 
 much of the savour of the eighteenth century, partly 
 because the social centres in the United States were 
 until recently compact, neighbourly Uttle places, quite like 
 
286 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the London of Queen Anne's day, and partly because the 
 conditions of poUtical and social Hfe long tended to keep 
 the citizen's mind peculiarly alert, as in the little eigh- 
 teenth-century London, to matters of common interest 
 and welfare. The characteristic American style is thus 
 precisely what we should expect in a democracy : in 
 prose, the plain diction of Emerson, Thoreau, and Lin- 
 coln; in poetry, the homely, domestic verse of Long- 
 fellow and Whittier. Second, American literature is full 
 of hope and resoluteness. At the close of the nine- 
 teenth century the pioneers are still at their task in the 
 extreme West as their ancestors were in the extreme 
 East at the beginning of the seventeenth. The clearing of 
 a continent has taught us self-reliance. Thrown early on 
 our own resources, both as a nation and as individuals, 
 we have held fast to the belief that industry brings happi- 
 ness, and from first to last, from Franklin to Parkman, it is 
 hard to find in our literature the notes of dread and doubt 
 and despair. Third, American literature has a strong 
 tinge of humour. This is, in fact, a continuation of the old 
 mood of Steele and Swift and Defoe, and the England 
 that laughed with them and was swayed by them, — a 
 mood rather serious than merry, striving to recover a 
 manly balance of thought and action by contemplating 
 typical absurdities of foolishness and prejudice. But it is 
 above all the mood of a democracy, in which the citizens 
 form together a huge family, undivided save by the sim- 
 plest artificial distinctions, and in which, aware of the 
 frailty of all, we are quick to catch the ludicrous aspect 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 28/ 
 
 of life, its incongruities and surprises, the odd simulari- 
 ties between things seemingly diverse, the infinite and 
 whimsical variations of human nature. 
 
 173. Prose before Irving. — It was in New England, 
 where learning was cherished and the life of the spirit 
 burned most brightly, that American Hterature first found 
 voice in the works of Cotton Mather, who was by blood 
 and training a fi.t representative of the New England hier- 
 archy, for he came of a family of famous clergymen and 
 was himself the most learned and rigorous upholder of 
 the early principles of a church state. He is remem- 
 bered because of his connection with the Salem witch- 
 craft and by two remarkable works, his Wonders of the 
 Invisible JVor/d (i6g;^) and his Magnalia Chris ti Ameri- 
 cafia (1702), the history of Christ's church in America. 
 The former is full of vicious superstition, the latter 
 crammed with useless learning, but both are thoroughly 
 typical. To Cotton Mather the New World was the 
 abode of devils, and it was only by fasting and prayer, 
 by single-minded devotion to the letter of the stern Puri- 
 tan creed, by obedience to the laws of God and the rule 
 of his ministers on earth, that the demon-haunted wilder- 
 ness could be turned into the saintly paradise for which 
 he yearned. The Magnalia Christi Americana is a stout 
 folio, written in the quaint style of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury divines, at a moment when the almost absolute 
 power of the church was weakening. It is memorable 
 because it stands as the prose epic of the militant church 
 of the first American century, and because it breathes a 
 
288 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 spirit of noble patriotism, not for a country which had as 
 yet no separate existence, but for that high dream of an 
 American theocracy which influenced so potently our 
 subsequent fortunes. 
 
 Within half a century from the time at which Mather 
 wrote, gross superstition had vanished from New Eng- 
 land, and the church, separated from the "state, had with- 
 drawn to its natural functions. But the flame of religious 
 feeling burned more fiercely than ever. Jonathan Ed- 
 wards beUeved that men were thronging to hell, where . 
 they were to be tortured with fire by the divine ven- 
 geance, and his powerful sermons, such as Sinners in the 
 Hands of an Angry God, give an impressive expression 
 to this terrible conviction. Edwards himself was a man 
 of pure and exalted character, a Puritan mystic, who de- 
 sired a heaven of holiness, and who in his youth spent 
 much time, as he wrote, " in viewing the clouds and sky, 
 to behold the sweet glory of God in these things ; in the 
 meantime singing forth, with a low voice, his contempla- 
 tions of the Creator and Redeemer." He was, never- 
 theless, the most acute metaphysician of his day, and 
 influenced profoundly both American and British philo- 
 sophical thought by his Modern Prevailing Notions of 
 the Freedom of the Will (1754), written while he was 
 living as a missionary among the Stockbridge Indians. 
 In a clear, firm style — as different as possible from that 
 of Cotton Mather — he endeavoured logically to establish 
 the extreme doctrine of foreordination, — that man's 
 will is never free, but that, even while seemingly most 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 289 
 
 unfettered in his choice, he is perforce walking in the 
 path predestined from all eternity. 
 
 From the sombre fanaticism of Mather and Edwards, 
 we turn with delight to the cheery good sense of Benja- 
 min Franklin. He was a New Englander also, the son 
 of a soap-maker, the descendant of a long line of North 
 England blacksmiths ; but, by thrift and honest wisdom, 
 he came to be one of the great founders of the Republic, 
 a distinguished man of science, and a benefactor of the 
 people in innumerable ways. He was the incarnation of 
 the robust intelligence and inventive and constructive 
 genius that accomplished our independence, achieved 
 our commercial and industrial prosperity, and has lain at 
 the root of our progress in Hterature and science. Be- 
 wildered at finding so strikingly practical a figure in the 
 land of Mather and Edwards, critics have sometimes 
 declared that Franklin was a typical Englishman of the 
 eighteenth century, and that it is, as it were, only by 
 accident that he was born and bred on this side of the 
 water. But they who speak thus misread the character 
 of New England. Since the landing of the Puritans and 
 the Pilgrims the writing of books had been the privilege 
 of the learned, and the learned wrote of little else than 
 theology. We have only to look below the surface, how- 
 ever, to see that the common people were throughout 
 this long period of silence slowly developing the Yankee 
 traits of mind and temper to which Franklin first gave 
 expression in Hterature. 
 
 Franklin was early familiar with PilgrMs Progress and 
 
290 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the Spectator, and he began his literary career by imita- 
 tions of the latter. He had caught, however, the essen- 
 tial spirit of his models rather than their form, and it 
 was the plain speech of Bunyan and the ease of Addison 
 which showed themselves most clearly in his important 
 works. These consisted chiefly of short articles of many 
 kinds, by which he sought with success to influence pub- 
 He opinion on a variety of subjects. Much that he wrote 
 is still interesting, but his fame as a man of letters is due 
 mainly to his Poor Richard's Almanac (1732-48) and 
 his Autobiography, Each year the humble little Almanac 
 contained a fresh set of Poor Richard's pithy proverbs, 
 in prose or verse, and each year they were pored over, 
 not merely by individuals, but by whole households 
 throughout the land. The Autobiography, many times 
 issued in a garbled form, and printed in full only in 
 1868, has likewise been a permanent favourite with the 
 people, who read with perennial delight the simple but 
 wise tale of the steps by which a humble Yankee boy rose 
 to be second only to Washington in the esteem of his 
 contemporaries. 
 
 With Franklin in this early period of our literature 
 must be mentioned the group of noble men who gave 
 their lives to the founding of the state, men who wrote 
 well because they had high thoughts and were labouring 
 for great ideals. Such were George Washington, the 
 dignity of whose state papers are the reflection of his 
 own character; Thomas Jefferson, who gave to the 
 Declaration of Independence (1775) the sonorous elo- 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 29I 
 
 quence with which it solemnly calls on God and the 
 nations of the world to witness America's proclamation 
 of the inalienable rights of her citizens; Alexander 
 Hamilton, one of the ablest political thinkers of the 
 time and principal author of the remarkable series of 
 papers on the theory of government that form the Feder- 
 alist (1787-88) ; and Thomas Paine, who was unfor- 
 tunately best known by his violent deistical writings, but 
 who was the most effective pamphleteer of the Revolution, 
 and by his Common Sense (1776) and The Crisis (1776- 
 83) gave important support to the American cause. 
 
 174. Irving and Cooper. — Writing that dealt with 
 aught but spiritual truths or plain facts was frowned upon 
 in New England, and American imaginative literature 
 had its birth in the more hberal Middle States. Charles 
 Brockden Brown of Philadelphia is said to have been 
 the first man of letters in America who supported him- 
 self by his pen. His six novels belong to the English 
 school contemporary with him and preceding Scott. 
 He delighted in the horrors of death, crime, and pesti- 
 lence. But it should be noticed that Brown was the first 
 to discover the richness of the field open to American 
 writers of fiction, and to substitute, as iii Edgar Huntley 
 (1801), " the incidents of Indian hostihty and the perils 
 of the western wilderness " for the puerile terrors of Mrs. 
 Radcliffe and the Castle of Otranto, 
 
 It was in the fertile field of native romance that Amer- 
 ican literature won its earliest successes, a few years 
 later, in the tales of Washington Irving and the novels 
 
292 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 of James Fenimore Cooper. Irving was by nature akin 
 to Addison, Steele, and Goldsmith. He loved their 
 kindly, contemplative, whimsical mood, and his work is 
 a continuation of theirs without being in any sense an 
 imitation of it. Irving first became known through his 
 burlesque chronicle of the Dutch New Amsterdam, 
 Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809), a mock- 
 heroic parody of a now forgotten volume of local history. 
 His Sketch Book (1820), Braceb ridge ZT^// (1822), which 
 were the first American books read in England, showed, 
 at the beginning of his career, the two kinds of material 
 of which he was master. In the sketches dealing with an 
 English Christmas he continued, so to speak, the Sir 
 Roger de Coverley papers, writing from the point of 
 view, not of the native Englishman, but of his trans- 
 Atlantic cousin ; in the story of Rip Van Winkle he took 
 up the legends that clustered around the river of his 
 boyhood. In the Tales of a Traveller (1824), and in 
 other volumes, he continued to treat these two diverse 
 subjects, and to them, led by his long residence on the 
 continent of Europe and especially in Spain, he added 
 the Spanish legend. Irving thus revealed to Americans 
 the charm of the Old and — what was of even greater 
 service — the charm of the New World. His richest vein 
 was that of the romantic tale tinged with humour, and it 
 is clear that his temperament, which united a love of 
 humour with a love of romance, allowed him to combine 
 the best qualities of the eighteenth century essayist with 
 those of the story-tellers of his own time. 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 293 
 
 Irving discovered for us the picturesque treasures of 
 native scenery and of Dutch colonial life ; Cooper, the 
 romance of the virgin wilderness and of the American 
 revolution. He was not by instinct a man of letters. 
 He had not the breadth and urbanity of nature which 
 Irving possessed, and he had not Irving's grace of style. 
 But he had the gift of story-telHng ; and he was so for- 
 tunate as to have seen, in part, a side of American life 
 that was of permanent interest to the world, — the titanic 
 strife on the westward-moving borders between the pio- 
 neer and the Indian. He grew towards middle age with- 
 out a thought of authorship, when chance led him to 
 novel- writing. The Spy (182 1), dealing with the Ameri- 
 can Revolution, was followed by a rapid succession of 
 remarkable tales of adventure by land and sea. Of these 
 the most famous are The Pilot (1823), of which John 
 Paul Jones is the hero, and The Last of the Mohicans 
 (1826), the best of the Leatherstocking tales. In gen- 
 eral, it may be said that Scott was Cooper's model ; but 
 Scott merely pointed out the way. Each turned with 
 genuine delight to the romance of his own soil. Scott 
 wrote of knights and pretenders, of frays and tournaments 
 and dungeons ; Cooper, of trappers and braves, of wild 
 expeditions, of the scalping-knife and the stake. And 
 America and Europe read — and reads — the Waverley 
 novels and the Leatherstocking tales with equal joy. 
 Cooper's novels of the sea are scarcely less prized, for 
 they are the fruit of actual knowledge of nautical affairs ; 
 but his greatest contribution to fiction lay in the few great 
 
294 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 figures of pioneer life, — Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and 
 Uncas, which he created, and which must stand in Hter- 
 ature as permanent types. 
 
 175. Poe and Hawthorne. — Edgar Allan Poe and 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne had much in common. They 
 were as unlike the energetic and resolute Scott and 
 Cooper as were Keats and Shelley, and, like the latter, 
 they were supersensitive, ethereal, enamoured of the alle- 
 gorical and the ideal. 
 
 Poe's physique conditioned his art. His intellect was 
 extraordinarily clear and brilliant, delighting in intricate 
 problems ; but his nervous system was so morbidly excit- 
 able that he was a prey to despair and gloom, and his 
 mind was preoccupied by thoughts of death, the grave, 
 and all that is ghastly and horrible. From this curious 
 conjunction of qualities came the power of his Tales of 
 the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) and his other sto- 
 ries. Sometimes, as in The Gold Bug, Poe applied his 
 marvellous skill as an analyst to a mere cryptogram; 
 sometimes, as in the famous Murders in the Rue Morgue, 
 to tracing out, with the same inexorable logic, the perpe- 
 trator of a crime ; sometimes, as in Ha^is Pfaal, to the 
 construction of a hoax ; but more often, as in Ligeia, The 
 Masque of the Red Death, and The Fall of the House of 
 Usher, to producing by degrees on the reader the effect 
 of utter terror, but terror so refined by the beauty of the 
 style as to have become a pleasure. In this strange 
 power he has never been surpassed. 
 
 Hawthorne was a New Englander and came of a typi- 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 29$ 
 
 cal family of Salem sea captains — seafarers from father 
 to son, — the descendants of a judge in the Salem witch 
 trials. In Hawthorne all the inherited activities were 
 turned inwards. Living for years in extreme seclusion in 
 the quiet little seaport of Salem, writing by day and walk- 
 ing on the beach by night, he brooded over the shapes 
 his fancy fashioned, and particularly over the figures from 
 the Puritan past that had trodden less than two centuries 
 before where his feet then trod. His Twice-Told Tales 
 (1837, 1842) and Scarlet Letter (1850) were historical 
 romances as much as those of Cooper, but in a different 
 sense. Hawthorne's interest lies not in a plot of adven- 
 ture but in the analysis of moral impulses, of tempera- 
 ment and character, of the essential qualities, indeed, of 
 Puritan life. No one portrayed better than he its pictu- 
 resque elements, — the little town hemmed in by the 
 forest, the quaint garb and speech, the medley of relig- 
 ion and superstition. But it was the hfe of the spirit 
 with which he was preoccupied, and, as in the Marble 
 Faun (i860), the tendency is always toward the allegori- 
 cal, as if he would say, " Thus lives the soul of man, and 
 these are the crises through which it passes, whether to- 
 day, or centuries ago, whether in the Old World or the 
 New." Hawthorne's mind was not morbid, and his style 
 has lurking within it an element of the humorous and the 
 grotesque, which tempers the sombreness of the tragic 
 and heightens the effect of his quiet mirth, 
 
 176. The Novel after Hawthorne. — Mention must 
 also be made of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle 
 
296 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 Tom^s Cabin (1852), a novel which has probably had a 
 larger circulation than any other book of the century, and 
 of which Lincoln said, only half in jest, that it had brought 
 about the Civil War. Mrs. Stowe wrote many other books, 
 some of which give quaint pictures of rural Hfe in New 
 England, but none of them equalled her romance of slav- 
 ery, which was translated into many tongues and read 
 everywhere by the poor and oppressed, as well as by all 
 who sympathised with them. It owed its extraordinary 
 power, not to graces of style or peculiar skill in narrative, 
 — though the author possessed such skill to a consider- 
 able degree, — but to the fact that the subject involved 
 was then burning in the hearts of men, and to the fact 
 that, as no one had foreseen, the strongest possible argu- 
 ments against slavery were not those derived from the 
 Constitution or from any theory as to the abstract rights 
 of man, but the elemental feelings aroused by this artless 
 tale of a country clergyman's wife, who, busied with her 
 housework and her babies, had yet time to brood over 
 the wrongs done by law to the helpless and the innocent. 
 Poe died in 1849, Cooper in 185 1, Irving in 1859, Haw- 
 thorne in 1864. When the Civil War was over and there 
 was again a surplus of energy to devote to fiction, the 
 last of the earlier generation of story-tellers in America 
 had passed away. Slowly there grew up a new genera- 
 tion, but it had other subjects and other ways. The 
 effect of the war had been to break down in many ways 
 the barriers to complete understanding and sympathy 
 between different parts of the country, and to allow us to 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 297 
 
 form stronger ties of association with other nations. The 
 bitter experience of the tragedy of national and individual 
 life gained through the great conflict had swept away 
 many national and local absurdities, and brought us into 
 the full current of modern thought and feeling. The 
 results of this clarifying process were two : we gained 
 interest in ourselves, and we were in a position to appre-/ 
 ciate the contemporary movements of European thoughj^ 
 Up to 1870 no one had written well of modern American 
 life. Cooper had confined himself largely to colcTnial 
 and revolutionary times, Hawthorne and Poe lived in a 
 world of dreams. But from the Luck of Roaming Camp 
 (1870) in which Francis Bret Harte depicted, some- 
 what after the manner of Dickens, the rough but sterling 
 characters of the extreme West, to the end of the cen- 
 tury, the trend of fiction was towards the portrayal of 
 characters distinctive of special parts of the country, 
 scarcely any section of which is not now well represented 
 in current literature. Though romance has happily not 
 died out from American life or American fiction, there 
 has also been a strong trend towards realism in fiction, the 
 leaders in this movement, William Dean Howells and 
 Henry James, following, with important variations, the 
 general method of the strong European school, from 
 which England has to a great degree held herself aloof 
 (page 265). It is also interesting to notice the promi- 
 nent part played in the literature of this period by the 
 short story, which, from Poe and Hawthorne on, has been 
 a favourite with American authors, and which has proved 
 
298 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 an excellent vehicle for the studies of local character, 
 towards which, as has just been said, prose fiction so 
 strongly tended. 
 
 177. Statesmen. — A democratic government is by 
 nature prohfic in poHtical orators, who arouse the people 
 to the appreciation of whatever is essential in matters 
 under public discussion, and who, addressing large and 
 representative audiences, and taking for their themes 
 national issues, are themselves incited to their fullest 
 powers by the magnitude of the interests involved, and 
 the fact that they stand face to face with those to whom 
 they appeal, and do not address the impersonal reader 
 through the medium of the printed page. In the United 
 States, the period between the War of 18 12 and the Civil 
 War was especially rich in such orators, particularly in 
 the Senate, where for forty years debate centred on the 
 most vital questions, affecting the unity and welfare of 
 the young repubhc. Of these statesmen the greatest was 
 Daniel Webster, whose penetrating intellect, magnificent 
 voice, grand presence, sincere devotion to the cause of 
 national unity, and extraordinary power of marshalling 
 facts and principles so as to produce conviction, have 
 caused him to be ranked among the great orators of the 
 world, and made him one of the strongest forces in that 
 slow process by which the inhabitants of many federated 
 states came to feel themselves one nation. 
 
 The work of Abraham Lincoln began as that of Web- 
 ster closed, and it has become plain that the work of both 
 was part of the same great task of awakening a nation. 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 299 
 
 Great minds, like those of Hamilton and Webster, had 
 long held forth the idea of complete national unity. With 
 Hamilton the idea was a political abstraction. Webster 
 was the voice that taught the concept to the people. Lin- 
 coln, born of the very heart of the people, self-taught, and 
 growing spontaneously towards the right, was the token 
 that the mass of the people had unconsciously made that 
 concept their own, and became the great instrument by 
 which that concept became realised. A less powerful 
 orator than Webster, who spoke after the fashion of 
 Demosthenes and Cicero, he uttered his plain thoughts 
 only in the homely speech of the people. Not much of 
 what he said and wrote belongs to literature, but those 
 few words, as in the Address at Gettysburg (1863) and 
 the Second Inaugural Address (1865), sank into the 
 hearts of men, for he spoke in the name of the nation 
 and as its good genius. 
 
 1 78. Historians. — The first American historian who 
 was also a man of letters was undoubtedly Cotton Mather, 
 whose conception of the Magnalia Christi Americana 
 was that it should record all that was essential in the 
 history of the church, which was to him what our country 
 is to us. But it was destined that more than a century 
 and a half should pass before a writer of equal power 
 should attempt to deal with any important part of our 
 history. We may except Irving's biographies of Colum- 
 bus and Washington, works of soUd merit, whose real 
 value has been obscured by their author's reputation as 
 a writer of stories. But Irving was not a historian of the 
 
300 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 first rank, and William Hickling Prescott and John 
 LoTHROP Motley, who were, chose foreign themes. 
 Prescott was fascinated by the romance of Spanish dis- 
 covery. His Conquest of Mexico (1843) and Conquest 
 of Peru (1847) were the result of elaborate and pains- 
 taking research, a task made more onerous by the fact 
 that he was nearly blind. The entrancing theme and his 
 firm but somewhat cold style made his works widely read, 
 and it is to be regretted that the science of archaeology 
 was then so Httle advanced as to allow him to form an 
 altogether false conception of the primitive people of 
 whom he wrote. Motley, equally attracted by Spanish 
 history, chose for a theme the struggle with the Nether- 
 lands and the establishment there of a democratic gov- 
 ernment, — a subject which he investigated with equal 
 thoroughness, and treated, in his Rise of the Dutch Re- 
 public (1856) and History of the United Netherlands 
 (1861-68), in a noble and impassioned style, and with 
 sympathy for the cause of political and religious freedom. 
 Francis Parkman, superior to both as a historian and a 
 man of letters, chose the struggle between France and 
 England for supremacy in the New World, — an epic 
 theme, which, though partly disabled by ill health, he 
 treated in full in a series of works, beginning with the 
 Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851) and closing with A Half 
 Century of Conflict (1892). Parkman's mastery of his 
 subject was complete, and his style, — clear, pure, supple, 
 and brilliant, — though less sonorous than that of Gibbon, 
 has not been surpassed by that of any historian. The 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 3OI 
 
 history of the United States has been attempted, in 
 whole or in part, by many excellent writers, among whom 
 should be mentioned George Bancroft, and has been 
 made the subject of much detailed research, but no one 
 has yet treated it in such a fashion that his work has 
 become literature. 
 
 179. The New England Group of Essayists. — As we 
 have said, it was in New England that the hfe of the in- 
 tellect and of the spirit was the most intense in the seven- 
 teenth and the eighteenth centuries. The same statement 
 holds true of the nineteenth century, up to, at least, the 
 time of the Civil War. The Puritan inheritance was a 
 remarkable one. On generation after a^neration it had 
 impressed the immense importance of /the soul and its 
 relation to a personal God, thereby awakening to an ex- 
 traordinary degree the consciousness of the individual. 
 It had, moreover, kept the eyes of man open to the mys- 
 terious side of existence, teaching him to watch for mani- 
 festations of God and the devil. On the other hand, the 
 narrowness and bigotry of the sect had sealed all the 
 aesthetic senses of man, forcing him to fix his attention 
 alone upon his own sins and the just anger of an avenging 
 God, and rendering greater his torments on earth by 
 teaching, explicitly or implicitly, that his doom or his 
 pardon had been predestined from all eternity. As time 
 passed by, this grim conception of life became modified. 
 The New England colleges had gone steadily on with 
 their work of education. More important still, the com- 
 mon sense of the people awoke, touching life with humour 
 
302 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 and sagacity. Beginning in the early years of the nine- 
 teenth century, there arose what might be called a human- 
 istic or humanitarian movement, both within and without 
 the church, which insisted less on man's innate moral de- 
 pravity and more on his power, in many ways, to lay him- 
 self open to spiritual influences, and by high resolve and 
 earnest effort to make himself and the world better. 
 Cutting itself adrift from the church sometimes, the move- 
 ment showed itself in strange and transient sects and in 
 wild schemes for the better organization of society, and 
 produced swarms of fanatic reformers. It was also closely 
 associated with political and literary movements. It was 
 the mother of abolitionism, and it led directly to the tran- 
 cendental theories that were the basis of Emerson's phil- 
 osophy. Slowly the reticent New England mind, so cold 
 and grim, so closed to aught but God, opened also to 
 man, and the result was, for half a century, an outpouring 
 of the heart in prose and song that constitutes the major 
 part of American literature. Of the writers we have 
 mentioned, Webster, Hawthorne, Prescott, Motley, and 
 Parkman were New Englanders, and of those whom we 
 have still to mention, Emerson, Thoreau, Holmes, Lowell, 
 Bryant, Longfellow, and Whittier. Most of them, too, 
 came of Massachusetts stock, and are associated with the 
 north-eastern part of that state, where the Puritan civi- 
 lisation put out its deepest roots, and where the humani- 
 tarian movement found its chief seat. 
 
 The humanitarian movement may then be in general 
 defined as an awakening to a sense of human relations. 
 
XX PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 3O3 
 
 In this literary and philosophical movement the chief 
 figure for many years was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who 
 combined the two strains of New England thought repre- 
 sented by Cotton Mather and by Franklin. For two 
 centuries one group of minds had been mystics, and 
 another the incarnation of common sense ; one stood for 
 the priesthood, the other for the people. Emerson's 
 fathers had long been clergymen, and he began his career 
 by preaching. His mind instinctively turned to the un- 
 seen. His philosophy, best expressed perhaps in Nature 
 (1836), was that of the German idealists, — that all vis- 
 ible is but a form of the spirit, a manifestation of God ; 
 that man himself is another division of that same spirit, 
 having knowledge of God, its source, through innate ideas. 
 But though his thought ran at times to the extreme of 
 mysticism, it had that singular characteristic which we 
 find in Franklin and in Lincoln, and which makes us feel 
 them American. He loved simple things and ways and 
 people. He saw into the hearts of men with eyes not 
 distorted by erudition or dogma, and read there the es- 
 sential elements of human action. More like Montaigne 
 than any other European author, he loved to be the voice 
 of wisdom and to utter in the homeliest manner the most 
 vital truths. He lectured much and wrote much, in- 
 fluencing men strongly in both ways. His Essays (1841, 
 1844), Representative Men (1850), and Conduct of Life 
 (i860), were great forces in awakening the people, for, 
 whatever subject he treated, he preached freedom of 
 thought, nobility of mind, and high resolution. 
 
304 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP 
 
 Henry David Thoreau, Emerson's friend and fellow- 
 townsman, published only two books during his lifetime, 
 A Week on the Concord and Merriinac Rivers (1848), 
 and Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), though since 
 his death several other volumes have been compiled from 
 his papers. Thoreau was a man of education, but he 
 preferred to support himself by the work of his own 
 hands. He was an expert pencil-maker, an excellent 
 surveyor, and by the intermittent exercise of these em- 
 ployments, as well as by farm labour, he earned enough for 
 his simple needs. Much of his time was spent in the open 
 air, either in the woods and fields about his native place, 
 or in occasional longer journeys through New England. 
 His ruling passions were his deep and constant delight 
 in nature and his love of simplicity and independence. 
 Both passions were most completely and naturally grati- 
 fied when he passed more than two years in a little hut 
 which he built by Walden pond near Concord, tilling a 
 small plot of ground, and depending for sustenance and 
 for enjoyment almost entirely on his own resources. His 
 books are the reflection of a singularly quiet and beautiful 
 character, self-poised and self- controlled like that of a 
 stoic, but full of a sympathy with nature that became at 
 times almost mystic. No one has known nature in New 
 England better than he, or approached him in the 
 description of it, or given better expression to the type 
 of New England feeling that finds content and high 
 thoughts in a quiet and simple country Hfe. 
 
 Few contrasts can be greater than that between Emer- 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 30$ 
 
 son and Thoreau, with their gentle and thoughtful country 
 ways, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, long professor of 
 anatomy at the Harvard Medical School in Boston. 
 Holmes said jestingly of his city that it was the hub of the 
 solar universe, but it is plain that in his heart he felt this 
 to be true, for neither his subjects nor his sympathies 
 often allow him to stray far beyond the city borders. 
 His genius had in it no touch of the mystic ; he was not 
 greatly impressed by nature; he did not love solitude; 
 his social and professional connections held him aloof 
 from the common folk ; he was essentially an aristocrat. 
 But his intellect, if little touched by the imagination, was 
 keen, and his wit brilliant ; and he was a shrewd observer 
 of human nature. Of his verse we shall speak later ; it 
 was by his prose that he caught the ear of the people. 
 In the first volume of the Atlantic Monthly^ destined to 
 contain for a period so much of the best in American 
 literature, appeared his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table 
 (1858), and this was followed by The Professor at the 
 Breakfast Table (i860), and The Poet at the Breakfast 
 Table (1872). They are essay-novels, and begin quite 
 after the fashion of Tristram Shandy, The novel ele- 
 ment, though slight, is worth taking account of, in that it 
 is so complete a foil to the work of Hawthorne. Holmes 
 takes the types of a Boston boarding-house as his charac- 
 ters. He throws no veil of glamour over them, as Haw- 
 thorne would have done, but judges them as a physician 
 might, with an accurate knowledge of their physical and 
 mental peculiarities. The shrewd estimates of people, 
 
306 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 the pretty little romances he imagines about them — as 
 a man might imagine such things for his own amusement 
 — pleased everyone ; and everyone was also pleased by 
 the essay elements, the wise and witty opinions of men 
 and things, the humour, the pathos, the fashion all his 
 own, in which, as it were, he turned inside out the gar- 
 ment of life, allowing men to smile at the oddities re- 
 vealed, but showing them also, by this whimsical method, 
 something more of its true shape than they would other- 
 wise have known. 
 
 Most of the writers whom we have mentioned in this 
 chapter were graduated from Harvard College, which in 
 the first half of the century performed a unique service 
 in firing the ambition of young men in letters at the same 
 time that she trained their judgment and moulded their 
 taste. George Ticknor, the historian of Spanish litera- 
 ture, held the famous professorship of belles-lettres from 
 1820 to 1835, and was succeeded by Longfellow, and he 
 in his turn, in 1855, by James Russell Lowell, who, Hke 
 his predecessor, was already a poet, and who was also to 
 become the first critic in the land. Lowell had many 
 accomplishments. He had a wide knowledge of the 
 romance languages and literatures, and of EngHsh prose 
 and poetry. He was for years editor of the Atlantic 
 Monthly and of the North American Review^ and he 
 served as ambassador both to Spain and to England. 
 But his most conspicuous service to his country and to 
 literature were his critical essays, which deal almost 
 invariably with great literature and are the fruit of long 
 
XI PROSE IN THE UNITED STATES 307 
 
 reading and study. Lowell had a genius for criticism. 
 His style was rich and buoyant, abounding in happy 
 fancies and striking turns of expression. Less dogmatic 
 than Arnold, and less occupied with the foundation of a 
 critical method, he wrote with more enthusiasm as well 
 as with greater knowledge. With all his interest in 
 foreign literature, a sound knowledge of which he did 
 much to make possible in America, he was a lover of his 
 own country and our own letters. He was of the stock 
 that made New England, and he never lost his deep 
 affection for her peculiar characteristics, her idiosyncra- 
 sies of language and temper, and the great principles 
 which she has done so much to establish in American 
 life. 
 
 The chapter would be incomplete were we to omit 
 mention of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, — better known 
 under his pseudonym, Mark Twain, whose works have 
 perhaps been more widely read than those of any other 
 English author of this century. He may be classed as a 
 novelist. Huckleberry Finn (1884) and its sequels, as 
 well as other stories, are, apart from their ludicrous side, 
 of great value as fiction, for they portray with great 
 vividness and accuracy phases of American life before 
 the Civil War, particularly in the Mississippi valley. 
 But his wide fame is chiefly due to his Innocents 
 Abroad (1869), Roughing It -(1872), and A Tramp 
 Abroad (1880), which not only provoked hearty laugh- 
 ter but served also to mould the thought of the 
 nation. Beneath all his extravagance and whimsicality 
 
308 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 of statement, beneath apparent irreverence and (some- 
 times) even coarseness, there lurks a serious and a high 
 motive. Mark Twain, like Franklin and Lincoln, came 
 of the people, and he represents, in much the same way 
 that Lincoln did, the mass of the people, — their native 
 ideals, their real temper, their impatience of mere learn- 
 ing and mere convention and mere fancy. And so his 
 own laughter was echoed by theirs whenever he touched 
 on vital questions of character and conduct, showing, for 
 example, as he did in Innocents Abroad^ the foolishness 
 of that form of European travel that cultivates affectation, 
 mock appreciation, and the worship of the mere acci- 
 dents of antiquity, which civilisation has long justly 
 discarded. A deadly foe of sham and cant in all their 
 forms, strong in his sanity and in his reliance upon the 
 beliefs and principles of the people, he has been as 
 brave a soldier for the cause of humanity as was Heine. 
 
POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 309 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 
 
 180. Prose rather than poetry has been the natural 
 form of expression in American literature, — a form 
 wholly consonant with our national mood, that of clear- 
 headed, well-ordered aspiration. The part of literature 
 which we call poetry is great in importance, but very 
 limited in its field. Only ideas of certain sorts can be 
 expressed by it. Its production is dependent, to a large 
 degree, on a state of society in which an author is free to 
 live a life of resolute leisure like that of Tennyson or 
 Shelley, free from all that would divert his fancy or his 
 imagination from communion with his dreamlike ideals. 
 Such opportunities the American social system rarely fur- 
 nishes. Our thoughts have been of necessity immediately 
 concerned with the present, — with what has been done, 
 with what must now be done. Prose is, therefore, our 
 characteristic language, — the language of debate, and 
 discussion, and explanation, the language of the orator, 
 the statesman, the historian, the critic, the novelist. 
 
 It must not be forgotten, however, that there are three 
 elements in American life that have had a great influence 
 
. 3IO ENGLISH LITERATURE t^HAP. 
 
 in moulding the national character, and which have, to 
 some degree, given to our poetry traits peculiarly Ameri- 
 \^ can. These are, first, the influence of American scenery, 
 60 wild, so dominating, so long free from the touch of 
 man; second, the religious influence of the forms of 
 dissenting Christianity most wide-spread among us, all 
 of which have tended to awaken an intense interest in 
 the inner Ufe, the Hfe of the soul, with its subtle hopes 
 and fears, with its tenderness of conscience, its sympathy 
 with human frailty, its reliance on the unseen ; third, the 
 pervading influence of a well-assimilated democracy, in 
 which there was long little difference in comfort, edu- 
 cation, and refinement between the rich and the poor, 
 the great and the humble, and where each individual 
 and each household knew the joys of homely living. 
 These elements the attentive student will find running 
 throughout American verse. UnUke the prose of our 
 century, it has not been in volume and value com- 
 parable with that produced by some other great nations, 
 and particularly by England, but it has yet had its 
 modest glories. 
 
 i8i. Early American Verse. — There is little early 
 American verse worth mentioning. Between the landing 
 of the Pilgrims and Bryant's Thanatopsis (1817) there 
 had passed two centuries in which no melodious voice 
 was heard. Rehgion had stifled poetry ; the trend of life 
 had been away from it. If we had been a primitive race 
 we might have had our epics and ballads ; but we were 
 too old for these, and too young, too distracted by toil, 
 
XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 3 II 
 
 to sing in a new fashion of a new life. What verse there 
 was followed European models, — feeble imitations, in 
 the seventeenth century, of Donne and Quarles and Du 
 Bartas ; and, in the eighteenth, of Butler and Pope. The 
 first sign of quickening spirit was the swarm of political 
 and satirical ballads in Revolutionary times, of which 
 survives only the rollicking tune and bantering words of 
 Yankee Doodle, After the establishment of the Repub- 
 lic, we have, in addition, a few poems endeared to us by 
 tradition as the first lispings of patriotic verse, Hail Co- 
 lumbia (1798) and the Star Spangled Ba^mer (18 14). 
 Then came more ambitious, but still artless attempts to 
 sing of New World stuff, such as those made by Philip 
 Freneau, who, before Cooper, saw the romance of the 
 Indian, of whom his fathers had thought only as a danger- 
 ous beast ; or by Joseph Rodman Drake, who wrote the 
 American Flag, the best piece of patriotic verse in the 
 early century, and the Culprit Fay (1835), in which 
 the birds and beasts and flowers of our own land begin 
 to appear in our poetry ; or by his friend, Fitz-Greene 
 Halleck, who wrote so tenderly of his death. Nor 
 must we omit mention of John Howard Payne, whose 
 Home, Sweet Home (1823) touched deeply the hearts 
 of a land where men migrate so freely. 
 
 \Z\a, Bryant. — American poetry, however, begins 
 with William Cullen Bryant. Born in 1794, in the Berk- 
 shire highlands, he shared as a boy in the austere life of 
 early New England, where, though few knew want, every 
 farmer's boy was hardened to fatigue and cold, and 
 
312 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 taught Stern lessons of frugality by tasks that bred reso- 
 luteness and self-control. The terrors of inexorable fore- 
 ordination and punishment were ceasing somewhat to 
 haunt men's minds, but there was little innocent mirth and 
 spontaneous joy. Life was work, and work against odds. 
 Bryant spent the years of his manhood in New York, 
 where he became a distinguished journalist, but his best 
 verse, Thanatopsis, To a Water-Fowl, The Death of the 
 Flowers^ was either written in his boyhood or is wholly 
 removed in spirit from his later urban life. It breathes a 
 high spirit of austerity and stoic resignation, and is the 
 song of men who, escaped from the haunting terrors of 
 superstition, look anew on nature, and see in it only what 
 is cold and dark and silent — the stern, unsetting stars, 
 the silent beauty of the wilderness, the desolate sea, but 
 are still " sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust." 
 182. Longfellow and Whittier. — The best-known 
 name in American poetry is that of Henry Wadsworth 
 Longfellow, whose first experiments in verse were pub- 
 lished as early as 1826. His ambition from boyhood 
 was to enter the then entirely unprofitable field of litera- 
 ture, but his interests were fortunately in part those of 
 the student and teacher. His work as instructor in mod- 
 ern languages at Bowdoin College attracted attention, and 
 after several years of study and travel abroad he suc- 
 ceeded George Ticknor in the now famous professorship 
 of belles-lettres at Harvard College. Longfellow's work 
 as a teacher was of great service to the cause of letters in 
 America, for no one in his time did more to diffuse the 
 
XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 313 
 
 knowledge and appreciation of what was best in European 
 literature. As a poet, a part of his influence lay along 
 the same lines. He translated much foreign verse, 
 always with grace and fidelity, setting the seal on his 
 labours by his memorable rendering of the Diviiie Comedy 
 (1867). But his influence was greater than that of a 
 translator. The Golden Legend {iS<^i) and almost num- 
 berless minor pieces, bred of his own fancy or based on 
 foreign originals, reproduced the inner spirit of mediaeval 
 times, — at least on its gentler side, — the glamour and 
 romance alike of southern cUmes and of the north. 
 A close student of European literature and sensitive 
 to literary movements, he conceived in his apprentice 
 days the idea of creating new forms in American 
 literature, by applying to native material the methods 
 already common elsewhere. The idea was a natural 
 one and the execution was admirable. His two early 
 attempts at native ballads. The Skeleton in Armor and 
 The Wreck of the Hesperus, were entirely successful, 
 and his later attempts at the pastoral and the epic — 
 Evangeline (1847), after the manner of Goethe's Her- 
 mann and Dorothea, and Hiawatha (1855), in the 
 metre of the Finnish Kalevala, — were not only im- 
 mensely popular, serving their purpose in awakening the 
 country to the romance of its own soil, but must remain 
 permanent monuments of our literature. Though Long- 
 fellow was a master pioneer in this way, he was most 
 loved by the people for the gentle moralising of his verse. 
 A kindly man, devoted to his work and to his family and 
 
314 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 friends, he cared little for the great contemporary move- 
 ments in thought and politics. He loved the outward 
 aspects of nature, without passion or mysticism, and drew 
 from them, with the quaintness of the early German 
 romanticists, little lessons, as in The Rainy Day, He 
 was not a great thinker, and his work, like his life, held 
 aloof from great or intricate problems ; but he sang 
 sweetly and gently, his heart was pure, his sympathy 
 strong, and he lived a simple life. He was the first to 
 reveal to us the magic of foreign poetry and to show us 
 that American subjects had as much romance as those 
 of Europe. He appealed to the young and old, to men 
 and women, and he was the greatest household poet of 
 the century. 
 
 An almost exact contemporary of Longfellow was John 
 Greenleaf Whittier, born in 1807, in Haverhill, Massa- 
 chusetts, of a family that had been permanently settled 
 in that vicinity since the early days of the seventeenth 
 century. His early life was that of the ordinary farmer's 
 lad, full of labour and hardship, and free from affectation. 
 His formal education was slight, but he knew men and 
 good books, and his skill as a rhymster and his interest 
 in public affairs led him into journalism and politics. By 
 1832 he had won a name for himself in both fields, and 
 seemed likely to represent his district in Congress, but 
 his delicate health forced him to give up his ambitions in 
 either direction, and he retired to his native county, where 
 he spent, with slight exceptions, the remainder of his 
 long Ufe. Whittier was first known by his political verse. 
 
XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 315 
 
 A Quaker, with the spirit of a reformer, he early joined 
 the anti-slavery party, and became one of the leading 
 abolitionists, and certainly the great poet of the move- 
 ment. His verses were efficacious in moulding the 
 opinions of all ranks of society in the North and West, 
 from the President and his Cabinet to the lowest soldier 
 or tax-payer; but they were instruments in a transient 
 struggle, the product of discord and sectional feeUng, and 
 cannot perhaps be expected to remain permanently in 
 the national memory. 
 
 Whittier's rehgious verse is much more national in 
 character. His Quaker tolerance, his hfe of moral ear- 
 nestness, his gentle, unspotted character, and his simple 
 way of taking the world, made him a fitting spokesman 
 in verse of the more Hberal religious feeling of the day. 
 It is, however, by his verses on country Hfe, as in Snow- 
 Bound {1^66) and The Teuton the Beach (1867), rather 
 than by his political or religious poetry, that Whittier will 
 be remembered. A bachelor and an invaUd, not bound 
 by the ties that commonly blind men to wider thoughts 
 than society and ambition, following pursuits that gave 
 ample leisure for meditation, he lived, with Quaker and 
 Puritan frugality, a life full of reminiscence of boyhood 
 days and of the country ways that had never ceased to be 
 his. And this reminiscence and this sympathy became 
 the voice of a whole multitude. East and West, that still 
 toiled in the fields, or turned gladly back in spirit from 
 city counting-houses to the orchards and brooks of their 
 early years. Without Longfellow's learning and cultiva- 
 
3l6 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. 
 
 tion, he rivalled him too on his own field, reviving inci- 
 dents of early New England life after a less bookish 
 fashion, and one truer alike to the facts and to the temper 
 of the time, in ballads that are among the best in modern 
 Enghsh literature. 
 
 183. Emerson, Holmes, and Lowell. — Longfellow was 
 closely connected with the group of New England prose- 
 writers described in the preceding chapter; Whittier, 
 owing to his country hfe and retiring habits, stood some- 
 what outside of it. Hawthorne and Thoreau were not 
 poets; but Emerson, Holmes, and Lowell, the three 
 remaining figures in what might be called the Boston or 
 Cambridge school, were poets as well as prose-writers, 
 though their fame in the former field is not so great as 
 in the latter. 
 
 In prose, Emerson's glory was that by his noble phi- 
 losophy he thrilled the young and earnest with the desire 
 to live lives self-controlled, self-reliant, hopeful, simple; 
 and his voice was the first in America to rouse such 
 enthusiasm in the hearts of the aspiring, and to teach 
 such noble lessons. In verse Emerson's influence was 
 not different. Indeed, poetry and prose seemed to him 
 closely akin. His imagination once kindled and finding 
 vent in words, it was merely a matter of throwing them 
 into groups of one kind or another, or of so altering them 
 at times that they fell into a simple rhythm or made 
 simple rhymes or assonances. His ear was not keen in 
 either respect, and it is said that at times he scarcely 
 knew whether what he had written was prose or verse. 
 
XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 317 
 
 Yet such was the naked power of his imagination that, as 
 in the case of the Hebrew poets, we find a simple art the 
 fitting medium for thoughts of singular simpHcity and 
 remarkable power. The thought of the essays is in large 
 measure that of the poems, which are mainly gnomic or 
 didactic, the sage's aphorisms, pregnant with deep sug- 
 gestion, as in his mystical and beautiful Brahma, Some- 
 times, however, he undertook historical subjects, as in 
 the famous Concord Hymn, or was moved to give utter- 
 ance to the emotion caused by his own personal experi- 
 ence, as in the most touching of his poems, // is Time to 
 Be Old and the Threnody, But his best-known work 
 has perhaps been his nature poems, — The Humble-Bee, 
 Mofiadnocky and The Snow-storm, — where his art is 
 more like that of Whittier, and stamps them both as men 
 who had seen nature face to face, with the eyes of simple 
 humanity, and not through library windows. 
 
 Holmes was the city member of the little group, and 
 his verse has the urban qualities that remind us of Pope 
 and Queen Anne's London. He was only about twenty 
 when his spirited hues on the proposed destruction of the 
 old frigate Constitution (1830) were on everyone's lips. 
 His first volume of poems (1836) showed the quali- 
 ties that remained his throughout Hfe. He had the gift 
 of broad and farcical humour, the more dehcate art of wit, 
 and a vein of genuine pathos and serious thought, — the 
 last at its best in the Last Leaf and the Chambered Nau- 
 tilus, But it was wit, — the pun, the sparkling jest, the 
 neatly turned and saUent thought, — that made him the 
 
3l8 ENGLISH LITERATURE chap. 
 
 favourite poet at public or private gatherings in his native 
 state ; and though Httle of his verse on trivial topics and 
 occasions now no longer memorable can ultimately sur- 
 vive, it is astonishing how much of it retains its interest. 
 He was less an imitator of Pope than a belated member 
 of Pope's own school, with equal wit and skill in epigram, 
 and a power over Pope's favourite metre that has not 
 been equalled except by Pope. 
 
 Like Holmes, Lowell was a wit, and it was by clever 
 satire and humorous criticism that he first won favour in 
 his Biglow Papers (1848 and 1867) and his Fable for 
 Critics (1848). He differs from Holmes, however, in 
 that his talent is that of the brilliant improvisatore rather 
 than that of the somewhat mechanical artist, and that he 
 dealt with larger subjects. Holmes had an eighteenth 
 century heart, tolerant and kindly, but at bottom coldly 
 observant of human nature and incapable of devotion to 
 a cause. Lowell was made in a later and larger mould. 
 His heart was s^t on the welfare of his country, and so, 
 scholar and Yankee that he was, he gave his political satire 
 the flavour of rustic speech iand jest, as only one could 
 do who was learned in antiquarian lore and bred in the 
 stronghold of the New England spirit. His best serious 
 verse was The Vision of Sir Launfal (1848), a mediaeval 
 tale, in the manner, of Longfellow, with a prelude and 
 interlude which are accurately descriptive of nature in 
 New England, and the noble Commemoration (9y<? (1865). 
 
 184. Poe. — We now leave the New England school 
 of poets, passing to Poe, who was the only writer outside 
 
XII POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 319 
 
 of New England who was contemporary with them, and 
 to later poets. Poe published thin volumes in 1827, 1829, 
 and 1 83 1, containing, at least in germ, many of his best 
 poems ; and his last volume of collected verse appeared 
 in 1845. It must therefore be kept in mind that he wrote 
 before any of the preceding writers, except Bryant, had 
 done work that would justify their present reputation. 
 Poe had closer affinities with Coleridge, Shelley, and 
 Keats than had any other American poet, and is our soli- 
 tary figure on that side of the romantic school. He ab- 
 horred didacticism in verse, and loved the form of poetry 
 which by rhythm and melody appeals exclusively to the 
 imagination. What he wrote was short, exquisite in form, 
 and ethereal in matter, the artistic expression of moods 
 that are aUied to madness, — moods in which death con- 
 quers all, and ghosts and demons and evil harbingers are 
 on every hand. This unreal world he sung in a melody 
 more piercingly sweet, more haunting, more mystically 
 sad and terrible than that of any other American poet, 
 and the peculiarities of his genius and of his art have 
 caused him rightly to be hailed, in his limited field of 
 pure fancy, as the greatest that has arisen among us. 
 
 185. Whitman and Later Poets. — Emerson had de- 
 clared that men must look into their own hearts and on 
 nature for inspiration and solace, and that Americans 
 must find the stimulus for their own Hterature in their 
 own national and personal experiences. As if in response 
 to his call and his example, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and 
 Whittier were doing, in the sixth decade of the century, 
 
320 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAt. 
 
 their most characteristic work ; and in the same decade 
 appeared a thin volume entitled Leaves of Grass (1855), 
 by Walt Whitman. This, with succeeding productions 
 of the same character, have been much read, and, espe- 
 cially in Europe, have been thought typical of the ideas 
 of a great democracy. Whitman's manner was that of 
 the rhapsodist, who, deeply moved and despising con- 
 vention, uttered his thought in language depending largely 
 for its effect on its irregular rhythm, usually without the 
 aid of rhyme. Like Whittier, and with him almost alone 
 among our poets, Whitman knew the life of the people. 
 But it was the old New England farming folk with which 
 Whittier was familiar. Whitman knew the humbler city 
 folk, — firemen and drivers and mechanics, more typical 
 even than farmers of the men whose political judgment or 
 caprice determines the destinies of our municipahties or 
 the nation. These men, as symbols of democracy, he 
 idolised, seeing in them the nobility of active and healthy 
 life. He felt himself their brother, the type of the race. 
 He sang of them, of his joy in comradeship with them, of 
 their wondrous diversity of toil, of a commonwealth based 
 on honest living and plain thinking, of the joy of mere 
 physical existence, of the great panorama of nature spread 
 before us, of national ideals, of our heroes. His song 
 was full of uncouth words and rough thoughts, and not 
 free from affectation, and the people of whom he wrote 
 have not understood him; but others have, and the 
 grandeur of his conception and the majestic sweep of 
 his verse entitle him to a place among our poets. 
 
XU POETRY IN THE UNITED STATES 321 
 
 Poe died young, in 1849, but the other poets mentioned 
 in this chapter lived singularly long and happy lives. 
 Even the venerable Bryant lived until 1878 ; Longfellow 
 and Emerson, until 1882 ; Lowell, until 1891 ; Whittier 
 and Whitman, until 1892 ; and Holmes, until 1894. The 
 men who began American poetry have, then, survived 
 almost until the end of the century. Of these men, the 
 New England poets formed a group by themselves, whose 
 tendencies and habits of thought give our verse its chief 
 characteristics, namely, simplicity and a love for the di- 
 dactic. In the first respect they differ greatly from the 
 contemporary English school, who, from Keats to Ten- 
 nyson, have depended to a large degree on the exquisite 
 finish which they gave to their verse. In the second 
 respect, the American school followed the lead of Words- 
 worth. 
 
 Whitman may, on the whole, be regarded as a member 
 of the New England school in spirit, and as merely push- 
 ing to an extreme the methods of Emerson and Thoreau, 
 though it must be confessed that it is easier to put him 
 in a class by himself. At all events, he has had no 
 prominent disciples, and his influence, wherever felt, has 
 served merely to add to the simplicity of our verse and 
 its disregard of the more intricate conventions of form. 
 Poe's influence, on the contrary, has led towards greater 
 care for form and interest in the craftsman's side of 
 poetry. The influence of the school of the Pre-Raphael- 
 ites, which would have worked in the same direction, has 
 scarcely been felt in America, Since the Civil War only 
 
322 ENGLISH LITERATURE CHAP. XII 
 
 two tendencies have been distinguishable in our poetryo 
 The first is parallel to the tendency noted in the novel 
 and short story (see page 297), namely, towards verse 
 dealing with the humours and peculiarities of life in 
 certain localities, usually in dialect, the best example of 
 which is perhaps to be found in the poems of Bret 
 Harte. The other is that towards craftsmanship, best 
 shown in the verse of Sidney Lanier, poet and musician, 
 the intricate melody and charm of whose lyrics and 
 odes make him the only other poet of the century whom 
 it would be appropriate to mention here. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 A.D. 
 
 449 . . 
 
 597. . 
 627 . . 
 635, et Siq, 
 664. . 
 670-80 
 669-71 
 68o?-709 
 690 (cir.) 
 674-82 
 
 673. . 
 731 • • 
 
 735- • 
 
 766-82 
 
 782-92 
 793. . 
 
 800 . 
 830. 
 
 
 English History begins in Britain. The Jutes land 
 in Thanet. 
 
 Christianity brought into England by Augustine; 
 
 And into Northumbria by Paulinus. 
 
 The Celtic Missionaries evangelise Northumbria. 
 
 The Synod of Whitby. 
 
 The poems of Caedmon. 
 
 School of Canterbury; Archbishop Theodore. 
 
 The literary work of Ealdhelm. (Born 656.) 
 
 The laws of Ine. 
 
 Wearmouth, Jarrow, and their libraries, founded by 
 Benedict Biscop. 
 
 Bseda, Benedict's scholar, born. 
 
 Baeda's Ecclesiastical History. (Death of Baeda, 735.) 
 
 Ecgberht, Archbp. of York, establishes the School 
 of York and the Library. (Died 766.) 
 
 i^thelbert and Alcuin make York the centre of 
 European learning. 
 
 Alcuin carries the learning of York to Europe. 
 
 The first Viking raid on Northumbria. 
 
 Cynewijlf "(born about 720) wrote his poems prob- 
 ably in the latter half of this century. 
 
 Charles the Great crowned emperor. 
 
 About this date the " Heliand," an Old Saxon 
 poem, was written. 
 
 323 
 
324 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A.D. 
 
 867-76 . . The final destruction of the seats of learning in 
 
 Northumbria by " the Army." 
 8yi .... The accession of Alfred. 
 886 (cir.) . Alfred begins his literary work. The English 
 
 Chronicle is first carefully edited in this reign. 
 901 . . . . Death of Alfred. 
 913 . . . . Rolf settles in Normandy. 
 
 937 .... Song of Battle of Brunanburh, in the Chronicle. 
 961-88 . . Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 964, et seq. . King Eadgar, with ^Ethelwold and Oswald, Bishops 
 
 of Winchester and Worcester, revives EngHsh 
 
 monachism in Wessex and East Anglia. 
 971 . . . . Blickling Homilies. 
 991. . . . Song of the Battle of Maldon. 
 991-96 . . iElfric's Homilies; after 1005, his Treatise on the 
 
 Old and New Testament. (Died 1020-25.) 
 1031 . . . Swegen of Denmark becomes King of England. 
 1042-65 . . Reign of Edward the Confessor. England's first 
 
 contact with French Romance. 
 Latin translation of a late Greek Romance, Apol- 
 
 lonius of Tyre, and of two small books belonging 
 
 to the Alexander Saga. 
 1066 . . , The Lay of Roland is brought to England. 
 1066 . . . William I, 
 
 1070 , . , Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 
 The " Charlemagne," Norman poem, before the end 
 of the nth century. 
 
 107 1 . . . The Exeter Book given by Leofric, Bishop of Exe- 
 
 ter, to his Cathedral. 
 1085 . . . The Domesday Book. 
 io8y , , . Willia?n II. crowned by Lanfranc. 
 1093 , . . Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 1095 . . . The beginning of the Crusades. The stories of the 
 
 East soon come to the West. 
 1 100 . , . Henry I. 
 1 109 . . , University of Paris rises into importance with Wil' 
 
 liam of Champeaux and Peter Abelard. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 325 
 
 A.D. 
 
 mo . . . Miracle play of St. Catherine. 
 
 1 1 18 . . . End of Florence of Worcester's Chronicle. 
 
 1 1 20 . . . End of William of Malmesbury's Historia regum 
 
 Anglorum. 
 1126-43 • • William of Malmesbury's Historise novellae. 
 1 1 29 . . . End of Simeon of Durham's Chronicle. 
 1135-54 . . Henry of Huntingdon's History of England. 
 //J5 . . . Stephen, 
 1132-35 . • Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum. Final 
 
 form, 1 147. 
 1 154 , . . English Chronicle ends. 
 
 Gesta Stephani. Hexham Chroniclers. 
 
 At the end of reign of Henry I. and during 
 
 Stephen's reign the Cistercians brought about a 
 
 religious revival. The Abbeys founded in the 
 
 North. 
 
 1154 • • • Henry IT. 
 
 1 155 . . . Wace's Geste des Bretons (Brut d'Engleterre). 
 1 160 . . . Benoit de Sainte More's Roman de Troie. 
 1156-59?. . John of Salisbury's Polycraticus. 
 
 1160-70 . . Walter Map's De Nugis curialium; GoHas. 
 
 (cir.) The Lais of Marie de France; written in Eng- 
 
 land. 
 1160-70 . . Robert de Boron's Le petit Saint Graal. 
 1 1 70 . . . Wace finishes his Roman de Rou. 
 1170-90 . . Le Grand Saint Graal; Queste de Saint Graal; 
 
 Lancelot du Lac, by Walter Map? 
 1180-90? . . Chrestien de Troye's Conte de Graal (Percevale). 
 Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough, continued 
 
 by Roger of Howden. 
 Ranulf de Glanvill's work on English law. 
 Richard Fitz Nigel's Dialogus de Scaccario. 
 Getald de.Barri (Giraldus Cambrensis) — Itinera- 
 rium; Journey in Wales; Conquest of Ireland — 
 written in this and the two following reigns. 
 ij8g . . . Richayd L 
 1 198 . . . William of Newborough's Chronicle. 
 
326 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 In the middle of the 1 2th century the troubadour poetry of 
 Southern France rose into its fine fiower in the work of Bernart 
 de Ventadorn. He had been preceded by Guilhem de Poitiers, 
 the first troubadour of whom we know. Bertrand de Born, 
 Geoffrey Rudel, Pierre Vidal are famous troubadours of this cen- 
 tury. The lyrics of Northern France, those of the trouveres, grew 
 out of this Provencal poetry. No lyrical poetry in England in this 
 century. The chansons de geste of the last century in France 
 were largely added to in this. Great literary activity prevailed in 
 Wales from the middle of this century down to the death of 
 Llewellyn in 1282. The epic of the Cid was shaped about 1160-70 
 out of ballads that had sung the border battles of Moors and 
 Spaniards. In Germany the Minnelieder arose in the middle of 
 the century, and Wolfram von Eschenbach introduced his new 
 conception of Parzival into the Arthurian legend. Also in the 
 middle of this century the Niebelungen Lied was cast into its form. 
 Italian poetry began with Ciullo d'Alcamo in Sicily, and Folca- 
 chiero of Siena, in the years 1172-78. In this century also the 
 mediaeval tales from India were cast into the History of the Seven 
 Sages, and into the Disciplina Clericalis. These materials were 
 moulded into various shapes by the French poets, and afterwards 
 in England. 
 
 A.D. 
 
 iigg . . . John. 
 
 Chronicle of Richard of Devizes. Annals of Barn- 
 well. Chronicle of Jocelyn of Bfakelond, and 
 others. 
 1 150-1200 . Sayings of Alfred. 
 
 1200-30 . . Roman de la Rose (Part I.) by Guillaume de Lorris. 
 1205 . . . Loss of Normandy. 
 _^-ia©5 (cir.) . Layamon's Brut. 
 
 1 21 5 . . . TheOrmulum. The Great Charter. 
 
 1210-50 . . Reign of Frederick II. Italian poetry in Sicily. 
 
 1216 . . . Henry III, 
 
 Chronicle of Roger of Wendover at St. Albans. 
 1235-73 , , Matthew Paris' Greater Chronicle; History of 
 England; Lives of earlier abbots. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 3^7 
 
 A.D. 
 
 1220-76 . . Guido Guinicelli. Father of new national litera- 
 ture in Italy. 
 1220 (cir.) . Owl and Nightingale (Dorsetshire). 
 
 1220 (cir.) . Ancren Riwle (Dorsetshire). 
 
 1 221 . . . Coming of Black Friars to England (Dominicans). 
 
 1224 . . . Coming of Grey Friars (Franciscans). 
 
 1225 ... St. Francis of Assisi's Song to the Sun. 
 1225-35?. . The Bestiary. 
 
 1230-40 (cir.) King Horn. 
 
 ^235-53 . . Robert Grossetete (Bp. of Lincoln). Chastel 
 
 d'amour. 
 1250 (cir.) . Genesis and Exodus. 
 1258 . . . Provisions of Oxford, Proclamation of King's 
 
 adhesion to them — in English as well as French. 
 1262 . . . Miracle plays acted by the Town Guilds. 
 1264 . . . Battle of Lewes — Ballad. 
 
 1264 . . . Corpus Christi Day appointed; fully observed, 131 1. 
 1268 . . . Roger Bacon's Opus Majus. 
 
 After Lewes and its war-ballad, the Love Lyric begins in such 
 verse as the Throstle and the Nightingale and the Cuckoo Song. 
 Also the religious lyric in such verse as the Sorrows of Christ and 
 the Lullaby, and the Love Song of Thomas de Hales, a Franciscan. 
 Also the satirical lyric, such as the Land of Cockayne. In this 
 reign Adam Marsh (De Marisco) has a famous Franciscan school 
 at Oxford. Th^ Ha frowi iifr^f-Hlgti. first dramatic piece in English, 
 belongs to this reign. Northumbria begins again to write in second 
 half of century. 
 
 12^2 , . . Edward I. 
 
 The Alexander Romance in English in this reign. 
 
 The Tristan Story is also widely spread. 
 Romances arise in Northumbria. Many war-ballads. 
 1280-87 • • Guido delle Colonne's (a poet of Sicily, born 1250) 
 Historia Destructionis Trojae. Visited England 
 and wrote Historia de regibus et rebus Anglise. 
 1290-93 . . Dante's Vita Nue^a. 
 1300 (cir.) . Gesta Romanorum. 
 
328 
 
 A.D. 
 
 1300 (cir.) 
 1303 • • 
 
 1300-05 
 
 1307 . 
 1303-21 
 
 1324 . 
 1320-30 
 
 1327 
 1330 
 
 v.l3^(cir.) 
 
 I 341 . . 
 1345 • • 
 
 1333-52 . 
 1350, etseq. 
 
 1350-53 . 
 1350 (cir.) 
 
 1355 . . • 
 1355 (cir.) . 
 1360-70 (cir.) 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Havelok the Dane. 
 
 Robert Manning of Brunne's Handlyng Synne. 
 His Chronicle finished 1338. 
 
 Roman de la Rose (Part II.), by Jean de Meung. 
 
 Edward II. 
 
 Dante's Divine Comedy. 
 
 Court of Love at Toulouse. 
 
 Cursor Mundi (Northumbrian). William Shore- 
 ham's Poems (Kentish). A Cycle of Homilies, 
 Legend Cycle (both Northumbrian) are now 
 vrorked at. Sir Tristrem; Sire Otuel; Guy of 
 Warwick; Bevis of Hampton; all now in English. 
 
 Edward III. 
 
 Pilgrimage of Human Life, a French poem by 
 Guillaume de Delguileville. Legenda Aurea, 
 by Jacobus a Voragine, Bishop of Genoa. 
 
 Guillaume de Machault. (B. 1 282 (cir.) ; d. 1 37o(cir.).) 
 
 Richard RoUe of Hampole's Pricke of Conscience. 
 
 Dan Michel of Northgate's Ayenbite of Inwyt. 
 
 Petrarca crowned laureate at Rome. 
 
 Death of Richard Aungerville, Bishop of Durham, 
 writer of Philobiblion; leaves library to Oxford. 
 
 Songs of Laurence Minot on King Edward's wars. 
 
 Collections of books, and University foundations in 
 England now begin to serve literature. 
 
 Decameron of Boccaccio. 1341, La Teseide. 1348, 
 Filostrato. 
 
 Romances are now written on the Welsh marches 
 in alliterative Old English verse; subject and 
 mise-en-scene French, verse and diction national. 
 Among first of these, Joseph of Arimathie and 
 two fragments of an Alexander Romance. 
 
 William of Palerne. 1350? Tale of Gamelyn. 
 
 Anturs of Arthur at the Tarnawathelan. 
 
 Sir Gawayne and the Grene ■\ Perhaps by the 
 Knight, Pearl, Cleanness > "philosophical 
 and Patience.- J Strode." 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 329 
 
 A.D. 
 ^1362-63 
 1366-70 
 1373 
 1375 
 1377 
 
 mi 
 
 1378? 
 
 1379 
 
 i^ . 
 1380-83 
 1382-85 
 
 1383 (cir.) 
 1385-89 . 
 
 1393? 
 1395 
 
 1398? . . 
 
 Langland's Vision of Piers the Plowman. (A-Text.) 
 
 Chaucer's first poems. Book of the Duchess, 1369. 
 
 Petrarca's Griselda. 
 
 Barbour's Bruce. 
 
 Richard II. 
 
 B-Text of Piers the Plowman. 
 
 Wyclif's Summa in Theologia. 
 
 New College, Oxford; Latin School at Winchester 
 
 founded by William of Wykeham. 
 Wyclifs translation of the Bible. 
 Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida. 
 Chaucer's Parlement of Foules, Hous of Fame, 
 
 Legend of Good Women. 
 Wychf's Trialogus. (Died 1384.) 
 Chaucer's Prologue and many of the Canterbury 
 
 Tales. 
 Gower's Confessio Amantis. 
 Chrysoloras comes to Florence to teach Greek. 
 Guarino Guarini teaches Greek at Venice, Florence, 
 
 Ferrara. (Born 1370; died 1460.) 
 C-Text of Piers the Plowman. 
 
 From Boccaccio to the middle of the i6th century a great mass of 
 Italian Novelle were produced; used in England for plays, stories, &c. 
 
 ^399 ' 
 1400 . 
 1411-12 
 
 ^4^3 ' 
 1415 . 
 
 1421 . 
 
 1422 . 
 1422 . 
 
 1422 . 
 
 1423 . 
 
 1424-25 
 
 Henry IV. 
 
 Death of Chaucer and Langland. 
 
 Hoccleve's Gouvernail of Princes. 
 
 Henry V. 
 
 Eustache Deschamps dies. Alain Chartier and 
 
 Christine de Pisan, his contemporaries. 
 Lydgate's Troy Book. 1424-25, Story of Thebes. 
 Henry VI. 
 
 James L of Scotland : The King's Quair. 
 Paston Letters begin; end 1509. 
 John Aurispa brings from Greece to Italy more than 
 
 200 MSS. 
 Lydgate's Falles of Princes. 
 
330 
 
 A.D. 
 1427 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 , Filelfo, laden with MSS., returns from Greece to 
 Florence. 
 
 Pletho, Bessarion, Gaza have diffused the spirit of ancient learn- 
 ing in Italy by 1440. Universities at Pavia, Turin, Ferrara, Flor- 
 ence, &c. Eight hundred MSS. left by Niccolo Niccoli to Florence, 
 in 1436; cradle of the Laurentian Library. 
 
 1449 . 
 
 1453 . 
 
 1450 (cir. 
 1460-80 
 14.61 . 
 
 ?470 .' 
 1474-76 
 1481 . 
 J 483 . 
 1485 . 
 1495? • 
 1501 . 
 
 1503 . 
 
 1504 . 
 
 1507 . 
 
 1507-08 
 iSog . 
 1509 . 
 1513 . 
 1513? . 
 
 1515 . 
 
 1516 . 
 
 I5I8? . 
 
 Pecock's Repressor of Overmuch blaming of the 
 
 Clergy. 
 Fall of Constantinople. 
 Invention of Printing. 
 Poems of Robert Henryson. 
 Edward IV. 
 Malory's Morte Darthur. 
 Caxton sets up printing press at Westminster. 
 Luigi Pulci's Morgante Maggiore. 
 Edward V, Richard III, 
 Henry VIL 
 
 Boiardo's Orlando Inamorato begun. 
 Gawin Douglas' Palace of Honour. 
 Dunbar's Thistle and Rose. 
 Sannazaro's Arcadia. 
 Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure. 
 Skelton's Bowge of Court; Boke of Phyllip 
 
 Sparowe. 
 Dunbar's Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins. 
 Henry VIII 
 Erasmus: Praise of Folly. 
 Gawin Douglas : Translation of the ^neid. 
 Sir Thos. More's Life of Edward V. and History 
 
 of Richard III. written. 
 Trissino's Sofonisba; first use of blank verse in 
 
 Italy. 
 Ariosto's Orlando Furioso begun; the rest in 1532. 
 Sir Thos. More's Utopia, written in Latin. 
 Skelton's Colin Clout. 
 Amadis de Gaul translated into English. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 331 
 
 A.D. 
 1524 . 
 
 1527 . 
 
 1528 . 
 1520-40 
 
 1532, etseq. 
 
 1535 
 1540 
 1541? 
 
 1576 
 
 1576 
 
 1576 
 1577 
 
 Ronsard born. (Died 1586.) 
 
 Tyndale's translation of the New Testament. 
 
 Lyndsay's Dreme. 
 
 Heywood's Interludes. 
 
 Rabelais' Gargantua, «&c. 
 
 Lyndsay's Satire of the Three Estates. 
 
 Cranmer's Bible. 
 
 Ralph Roister Doister, first English comedy, printed 
 1566. 
 
 Ascham's Toxophilus. 
 
 Edward VI. 
 
 Latimer's Sermon on the Ploughers. 
 
 English Prayer Book. 
 
 Ralph Robinson's translation of More's Utopia into 
 English. 
 
 Mary. 
 
 Lyndsay's Monarchie. 
 
 Tottel's Miscellany ; poems by Wyatt and Surrey. 
 
 Elizabeth. 
 
 Sackv^le's Mirror for Magistrates. 
 
 Gorboduc, the first English Tragedy. Printed as 
 Ferrex and Porrex, 1571. 
 
 Phaer's Virgil. Many other translations of the 
 classics before 1579. 
 
 Foxe's Book of Martyrs. 
 
 Sackville's Induction to Mirror for Magistrates. 
 
 Ascham's Scholemaster. "^ '" 
 
 R. Edward's Damon and Pithias printed. 
 
 Comedy of Gammer Gurton's Needle printed. Play 
 of Apius and Virginia printed. 
 
 Paradise of Dainty Devices; 1578, Gorgeous Gal- 
 lery of Gallant Inventions J 1584, Handfull of 
 Pleasant Delights — all Poetical Miscellanies. 
 
 Three theatres built in London ; Blackfriars, the 
 Curtain, the Theatre. 
 
 Gascoigne's Steele Glas. (First verse satire.) 
 
 Holinshed's Chronicle. 
 
332 
 
 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 1579-80 . . Lyly's Euphues. 1580-1601 (cir.) his dramas. 
 
 1579 . . . Spenser's Shepheards Calendar. 
 
 1579 . . . North's Plutarch's Lives. 
 
 1580-81 . . Sidney's Arcadia and Apologie for Poetrie. 
 
 1580-88 . . Montaigne's Essaies. 
 
 1 581 . . . Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata. 
 
 1582? . . . Watson's Hecatompathia or Passionate Century. 
 
 1583-1625? . Pamphleteers: Greene, Lodge, G. Harvey, Nash, 
 
 Dekker, Breton. 
 
 1584-92 . . Dramas of Greene. 1583, et seq.y Tales in prose. 
 
 1584-98 . . Dramas of Peele. 
 
 1586 . . . Warner's Albion's England. 
 
 1587 . . . Marlowe's Tamburlaine acted. (Printed 1590.) 
 1588-90 . . Marlowe's Faustus, Jew of Malta, Edward 11. 
 1588-90 . . Series of Martin Marprelate Tracts. 
 1588-90? . . Love's Labour's Lost. 
 
 1589 . . . Hakluyt's Voyages. 
 
 1590 . . . Spenser's Faerie Queene (Books i.-iii. 1596, iv.-vi.). 
 
 1 59 1 . . . Harrington's translation of Ariosto's Orlando. 
 1593 . ... Donne's Satires (died 1626). 
 
 1593 . . . Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. 
 
 1594 . . , Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity (Bks. i.-iv. 1597, v.). 
 1593-96 . . Many collections of Sonnets. 
 
 1595 . . . Daniel's Hist, of Civil Wars of York and Lancaster. 
 1596, et seq. . Ben Jonson's Dramas. (Died 1637.) 
 
 1594-96 . . Merchant of Venice. 
 
 1597 . . . Bacon's Essays. (First set.) 
 1597-98 . . Hall's Satires. 
 
 1598 . . . Chapman's Homer (First part). Sylvester's trans- 
 
 lation of Du Bartas. 
 
 1598-99 . . Marston's Satires. 
 
 1596-98 . . Drayton's Barons' Wars and England's Heroical 
 Epistles. 
 
 1599 . . . The Globe Theatre built. 
 
 1600 . . . England's Helicon; England's Parnassus; Belve- 
 
 dere; all poetical Miscellanies. \ 
 
 1600 . . . Fairfax's translation of Tasso. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 333 
 
 A.D. 
 1600 . 
 
 1600-81 
 
 1603 (cir.)? 
 1603 . 
 1603 . 
 
 1603 . 
 
 1604 . 
 
 1605 . 
 1606-16 
 
 1609 . 
 1610-25 (c 
 
 1610 . 
 
 1611 . 
 
 1612 . 
 1612-20 
 1613-14 
 1613-16 
 
 1613 
 1613 
 1613 
 1614 
 1615 
 1615 
 
 N<i6i6 
 1621 
 1622 
 
 <i623 
 1623 
 1623 
 
 Lope de Vega began his dramas about 1590, and 
 
 continued writing till his death in 1635. 
 Calderon, who had a large influence on the French 
 Drama of the 17th and i8th centuries, on the 
 English Restoration Drama, and on the Italian, 
 German and English poetry of 18th and 19th 
 centuries. 
 The Return from Parnassus. 
 . Florio's translation of Montaigne's Essays. 
 . ya?nes I. 
 
 . KnoUes* History of the Turks. 
 . Authorised Version of the Bible. 
 . Bacon's Advancement of Learning (Books i. and ii.). 
 . Cervantes' Don Quixote. 
 . Shakespeare's Sonnets published, 
 ir.) Dramas of Beaumont and Fletcher. 
 Giles Fletcher's Christ's Victory. 
 Speed's History of Great Britain.* 
 Webster's first drama. The White Devil (printed). 
 T. Shelton's Translation of Don Quixote. 
 Drayton's Polyolbion. 
 
 Browne's Britannia's Pastorals; 1614, The Shep- 
 herd's Pipe. 
 Purchas his Pilgrimage. 
 Wither's Abuses Stript and Whipt. 
 Drummond of Hawthornden's first poem. (D. 1649.) 
 Raleigh's History of the World. 
 Sandys' Travels. 
 Wither's Shepherd's Hunting. 
 Chapman's Homer finished. Shakespeare dies. 
 Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. 
 Massinger's Virgin Martyr. (Died 1639.) 
 Webster's Duchess of Malfi (printed). 
 Waller's first poems. 
 The " First Folio "of Shakespeare. 
 Chapman, Tourneur, Middleton, and other drama- 
 tists wrote during this reign. 
 
334 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A.D. 
 
 ■^162^ . . . Charles /. 
 
 1628 . . . Harvey's De Motu Sanguinis. 
 
 j« 1629 . . . Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity. 
 
 1631 . . . George Herbert's Temple. 
 
 K 1635? ... Sir Thos. Browne's Religio Medici (pub. 1642). 
 
 y 1632-37 . . Milton's Allegro, Penseroso, Comus, Lycidas".*~ 
 
 1633 . . . Phineas Fletcher's Purple Island. 
 
 1634 . . . Ford's historical play of Perkin Warbeck. 
 
 1636 . . . Corneille's first tragedy, the Cid. Hislast play, 1675. 
 
 1636 . . . French Academy founded. 
 
 1640 . . . Thomas Carew's poems. 
 y; 1 641 . . . Milton's first pamphlet. 
 
 1641 . . . Evelyn's Diary begins (ends 1697; published 1 81 8). 
 -1642 . . . Theatres closed. 
 
 1642 . . . Fuller's Holy and Profane state. 
 1642 . . . Denham's Cooper's Hill. 
 
 1642 . . . Hobbes' De Cive. 
 
 "^1644 . . . Milton's Areopagitica. 
 
 1645 • • • Waller's poems. 
 
 1645 • • • Meetings held which lead to formation of the 
 
 Royal Society. 
 
 1646 . . . Crashaw's Steps to the Temple. 
 
 1647 . . . Jeremy Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying. 
 
 1647 . . . Cowley's Mistress. Davideis, i64i(?). 
 1647-48 . . Herrick's Noble Numbers; Hesperides. 
 
 1648 ... J. Beaumont's Psyche or Love's Mystery. 
 
 1648 . . . Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea. 
 
 1649 . . . Lovelace's Lucasta. 
 - / j64g . . . Com7nonwealth. 
 
 1650 . . . Baxter's Saints' Rest. 
 
 y 1650 . . . Milton's Defensio pro Populo Anglicano. 
 
 1650-52 . . Marvell's Garden poems written. 
 
 1650-56 . . Vaughan's Silex Scintillans. 
 
 1650-57 . . Pascal's Provincial Letters. 
 
 1 65 1 . . . Hobbes' Leviathan. 
 
 — l655~ . . . Izaak Walton's Compleat Angler. 
 
 1653 . . . Moliere's first play.- 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 335 
 
 Harrington's Oceana. 
 
 Dryden's Stanzas on the Death of Cromwell. 
 
 Corneille's Essay on the Three Unities. 
 
 Pepys' Diary begins (finished 1669; published 1825). 
 
 Boileau's first satire. 
 
 Charles II. 
 
 Re-opening of the theatres by Davenant and 
 Killigrew. 
 
 Royal Society incorporated. 
 
 Dryden's first play, the Wild Gallant. 
 
 Butler's Hudibras (Part I.). 
 
 Algernon Sidney's Discourses concerning Govern- 
 ment, published 1698. 
 
 The London Public Intelligencer. (Becomes the 
 London Gazette, 1666.) ^ 
 
 Plays of Racine. Esther^ 1689 (?)> Athalie, i69o(?). 
 
 La Fontaine's first book of Contes. 
 
 Dryden's Annus Mirabilis; Essay on Dramatic Poesy. 
 
 Cowley's Essays. 
 
 Milton's Paradise Lost. 
 
 Petty's Treatise on Taxes. 
 
 La Fontaine's first book of Fables. (Died 1695.) 
 
 Izaak Walton's Lives. 
 
 Pascal's Les Pensees. 
 
 Paradise Regained. Samson Agonistes. 
 
 Dramas of Wycherley. 
 
 Dryden's Essay on Heroic Plays. 
 
 Boileau's Art of Poetry. 
 
 Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. (Part I.) 
 
 Dryden's All for Love. (In blank verse.) 
 
 Cudworth's Intellectual System of the Universe. 
 
 Filmer's Patriarcha. 
 
 Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel. (First part.) 
 
 Dryden's Medal, MacFlecknoe, Religio Laici. 
 
 Pilgrim's Progress. (Part II.) 
 
 Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion written 
 during this reign. (Published 1707.) 
 
336 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A.D. 
 
 -— j68^ . , . James II. 
 
 -;>'i687 . . . Newton's Principia. 
 
 M687 . . . Defoe's first tract. 
 
 1687 ... La Bruyere's Les Caractlres. 
 
 -~. i688-8g . . The Revolution. William III, 
 
 ^-1690 ... Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding. 
 
 1692 ... Sir Wm. Temple's Miscellanea, Vol. ii. 
 
 1693-1700 . Congreve's dramas. 
 
 ^l^SA • • • Dryden's Last Play. 
 
 1697-1705 . Dramas of Vanbrugh. 
 
 1698 . . . Collier's Short View of the Immorality of the Stage 
 
 1698-1707 . Dramas of Farquhar. 
 
 y 1700 . . . Dry den's Fables. (Nov. 1699.) 
 
 1700 . . . Prior's Carmen Seculare. 
 
 ^^'1^02 # . . Anne, 
 
 1702 . . . Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. 
 
 1702-05 . . Steele's Plays. (1722. Comedy of the Conscious 
 
 Lovers, his last play.) 
 
 1704 . . . Swift's Tale of a Tub, Battle of the Books. (Writ- 
 ten by 1596-97-) 
 
 1704 . . . Addison's Campaign. Rosamond (opera), 1706. 
 
 1704-13 . . Defoe's Review. 
 
 1709 . . . Mat Prior's Poems. 
 
 1 709-1 1 . . TheTatler. 
 
 1709-44 . . 'Writings of Bishop Berkeley. 
 
 1709 . . . Pope's Pastorals. (Written 1704-05.) 
 
 -1711-12^14 . The Spectator. 
 
 V1712 . . . Pope's Rape of the Lock. (Final form 17 14.) 
 
 1 713 , . . Addison's Cato. 
 
 1 7 14 . . . Gay's Shepherd's Week. 
 J714 . . . George /. 
 
 1715-20 . . Pope's Homer's Iliad. 
 
 1 715, et seq. . Le Sage's Gil Bias. 
 
 -1 719 . . . Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. 1720-25, Other novels. 
 
 1724-34 . . Bp. Burnet's History of my own Times published. 
 
 1725 . . . Allan Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd. (First form 1 723.) 
 
 1726-30 , . Thomson's Seasons. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 337 
 
 Swift's Gulliver's Travels. 
 
 George II. 
 
 Gay's Fables. 1728, Beggar's Opera. 
 
 Pope's Dunciad. (First form. Others in 1729-42-43.) 
 
 Voltaire's Henriade. 
 
 Marivaux : Le jeu de I'amour et du hasard. (D. 1 763.) 
 
 Pope's Essay on Man. Moral Essays, 1732-35. 
 
 Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. 
 
 Johnson's Translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abys- 
 sinia. (His first work.) 
 
 Butler's Analogy of Religion. 
 
 Shenstone's Schoolmistress. (Final form, 1742.) 
 
 Johnson's London. 
 
 Hume's Treatise of Human Nature. 
 
 Richardson's Pamela. 1 748, Clarissa Harlowe. — * 
 
 Warburton's Divine Legation. 
 
 Hume's Essays. 
 
 Fielding's Joseph Andrews. 1749, Tom Jones. 
 
 Gray's Poems. (Collected edition 1768.) 
 
 Johnson's Life of Savage. 
 
 Akenside's Pleasures of the Imagination. 
 
 Collins' Odes. 
 
 Smollett's Roderick Random. 
 
 Thomson's Castle of Indolence. 
 
 Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois. 
 
 Diderot's Encyclopedic begun. 
 
 Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes; Irene, . 
 
 Johnson's Rambler. 
 
 Hume's Principles of Morals and Political Discourse 
 
 Richardson's Sir Chas. Grandison. 
 Edwards' Freedom of the Will. 
 Hume's History of England. 
 Johnson's Dictionary. 
 
 Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful; Vin- 
 dication of Natural Society. 
 Hume's Natural History of Religion. 
 Robertson's History of Scotland. 1769, Charles V, 
 
338 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A.D. 
 
 1758 . . . Lessing's Litteraturbriefe. 
 ^759 • • • Johnson's Rasselas. 
 
 1759 . . . Adam Smith's Moral Sentiments. 
 
 1759 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (Vols, i and 2.) 
 1759-90 . . Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses on Art. 
 
 J*] 60 . . . George III. 
 
 1760 . . , Rousseau's Nouvelle Helofse. 
 
 1760 . . . Sterne's Tristram Shandy. (2 vols.; finished 1 765.) 
 
 1760-65 . . Macpherson's Ossian. 
 
 1761-64 . . Poems of Churchill. 
 
 1762 . . . Falconer's Shipwreck. 
 
 1764-70 . . Chatterton's Poems. 
 
 1765 . . , Goldsmith's Traveller. 
 
 1765 , . . Bisliop Percy's Reliques of English Poetry. 
 
 1765 . . , H. Walpole's Castle of Otranto. 
 
 1766 . . . Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield. (W^ritten 1 762 ?) 
 1766 . . . Lessing's Laokoon. 
 
 1768-78 . . Plays of Goldsmith and Sheridan. 
 
 1769 . . . Burke's Present State of the Nation. 
 1769-72 . . Letters of Junius. 
 
 1770 . . . Burke's Thoughts on the Present Discontents. 
 1770 . . . Goldsmith's Deserted Village. 
 
 1771-74 . . Beattie's Minstrel. 
 
 1773 . , . Ferguson's Poems. 
 
 1774 . . , Burke's Speech on American Taxation. 
 
 1774 . . . Goethe's Werther. 
 
 1775 . . . Beaumarchais : Le Mariage de Figaro. 
 
 1775 . . . Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America. 
 
 1776 . . . Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. 
 ijyb . . . Declaration of Independejtce. 
 
 1776 . , . Paine's Common Sense. 
 
 1777-81 . . T. Warton's History of English Poetry. 
 
 1776-88 . . Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 
 
 1777 • . , Robertson's History of America. 
 
 1778 . . . Frances Burney's Evelina. 
 1779-81 . . Johnson's English Poets. 
 1781 . . . Schiller's Die Rauber. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 339 
 
 Crabbe's Village. 
 
 Blake's Poetical Sketches. 
 
 Cowper's Task. 
 
 Samuel Rogers' Poems. 
 
 Burns' first Poems. 
 
 Blake's Songs of Innocence. 1794, Songs of 
 
 Experience. 
 White's Natural History of Selborne. 
 Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. 
 Paine's Rights of Man. 1794-95, Age of Reason. 
 Boswell's Life of Johnson. 
 Arthur Young's Travels in France. 
 Godwin's Enquiry concerning Political Justice. 
 Wordsworth's Evening Walk; Descriptive Sketches. 
 Coleridge and Southey's Fall of Robespierre. 
 Poems; by Coleridge and Lamb. 
 Scott's translation of Burger's Lenore. 
 Burke's Letters on a Regicide Peace. 
 Poems by Coleridge, Lamb, and Lloyd. 
 Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. 
 Lyrical Ballads; by Coleridge and Wordsworth. 
 Malthus' Essay on the Principles of Population. 
 Landor's Gebir and other Poems. 
 Ebenezer Elliott's Vernal Walk. 
 Scott's translation of Gotz von Berlichingen. 
 Campbell's Pleasures of Hope. 
 Coleridge's translation of Schiller's Wallenstein. 
 Southey's Thalaba. (He continued writing till 1843.) 
 Scott's Border Minstrelsy. 
 The Edinburgh Review. 
 Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel. 
 Byron's Hours of Idleness. 
 Wordsworth's Poems in 2 vols. 
 T. Moore's Irish Melodies begun. 
 Lamb's Specimens of Dramatic Poetry. 
 Scott's Marmion. 1810, Lady of the Lake. 
 The Quarterly Review. 
 
340 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A.D. 
 
 1809 . . . Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. 
 
 1810 . . . AllanCunningham's first pubUshedpoemSv (D.I 842.) 
 1811-18 . . Novels of Jane Austen. 
 
 1 81 2-1 8 . . Byron's Childe Harold. 
 
 1 813 . . . Shelley's Queen Mab. 181 6, Alastor. 
 
 1814 . . . Scott's Waverley. (His novels continue till 1831.) 
 1 8 14 . . . Wordsworth's Excursion. 
 
 1814 . . . H. Gary's Translation of Dante. 
 
 181 6 . . . Coleridge's Christabel ; Kubla Khan. 
 1816? . . . Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini. 
 
 1817 . . . Byron's Manfred. i8i8,Beppo; 1819-23, Don Juan. 
 18 1 7 . . . Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. 
 
 181 7 . . . Keats' first poems. 
 
 1 81 7 . . . Bryant's Thanatopsis. 
 
 1817,^/ j<?^. . Hazlitt's Dramatic and Poetical Criticisms. (Died 
 1830.) 
 
 1818 , . . Hallam'sViewofthe State of Europe during the Mid- 
 
 dle Ages. 1827, Constitutional Hist, of England. 
 
 1 819 , . . Irving's The Sketch-Book. 
 
 1820 . . . George IV. 
 
 1820 . . . Keats' Hyperion and other Poems. 
 
 1820 . . . Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. 
 
 1 821 . . . Byron's Cain and other dramas. 
 
 1821 . . . DeQuincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater. 
 
 1 82 1 . . . Shelley's Adona^s and Epipsychidion. 
 
 1 82 1 . . . Cooper's The Spy. 
 1821-23 . . Lamb's Essays of Elia. 
 
 1822 ... T. L. Beddoes' Bride's Tragedy. 
 1822 . . . Rogers' Italy. 
 
 1822-33 . . Prof. Wilson's NoctesAmbrosiange. (In Blackwood.) 
 
 1824 . . . Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister. 
 
 1825 . . . Macaulay's Essay on Milton. 
 
 1826 . . . Poems by Two Brothers. (Chas. and Alfd. Tennyson.) 
 
 1827 . . . Disraeli's Vivian Gray. 
 1827 . . . Keble's Christian Year. 
 1827 . . . Bulwer Lytton's Pelham. 
 
 1827 , . . Poe's Tamerlane and other Poems. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 341 
 
 William IV. 
 
 Alfred Tennyson : Poems. 
 
 Moore's Life of Byron. 
 
 Mrs. Hemans' Songs of the Affections. 
 '■ seq. . Ebenezer Elliott's Corn Law Rhymes. 
 
 Robert Browning's Pauline; published 1833. 
 
 Death of Sir Walter Scott. Death of Goethe. 
 
 Carlyle's Sartor Resartus. 
 
 Dickens' Pickwick. 
 
 Emerson's Nature. 
 
 Holmes' Poems. 
 
 Vic/or ia. 
 
 Carlyle's French Revolution. 
 
 Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. 
 
 Whittier's Poems. 
 
 Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. 
 , ' Longfellow's Voices of the Night. 
 
 Newman's Tracts for the Times, No. xc. 
 
 Browning's Dramatic Lyrics. 
 . Ruskin's Modern Painters. (Vol. I.) 
 
 C. Bronte's Jane Eyre. 
 . Arnold's Strayed Reveller and other Poems. 
 , Macaulay's History of England. (Vol. i.) 
 
 Thackeray's Vanity Fair. 
 
 Lowell's Biglow Papers (first series). 
 . Thoreau's Week on the Concord and Merrimac 
 
 Rivers. 
 . Park man's California and Oregon Trail. 
 . Mrs. Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese. 
 . Tennyson's In Memoriam. 
 . Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. 
 . Whitman's Leaves of Grass. 
 
 Froude's History of England. (Vol. I.) 
 . Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic. 
 . George Eliot's Scenes of Qerical Life. 
 . Morris' Defence of Guinevere and other Poems. 
 . Tennyson's Idylls of the King. 
 
342 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 A.D. 
 
 1858 . . . Holmes' Autocrat of the Breakfast Table. 
 
 1858 . . . Fitzgerald's Translation of Omar Khayyam, 
 
 1859 . . . Darwin's Origin of Species. 
 1859 . . . Mill's On Liberty. 
 
 1862 , . . Spencer's First Principles. 
 
 1863 . . . Huxley's Man's Place in Nature. 
 
 1864 . . . Lowell's Fireside Travels. 
 
 1865 . . . Meredith's Rhoda Fleming. 
 
 1865 . . . Arnold's Essays in Criticism (first series). 
 
 1866 . . . Swinburne's Poems and Ballads. 
 1866 . , . Whittier's Snow-Bound. 
 
 1869 . . , Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. 
 
 1870 . . . Rossetti's Poems. 
 
 1870 . . . Bret Harte''s Luck of Roaring Camp. 
 
 1872 . . , Howells' Their Wedding Journey. 
 
 1873 . . . Pater's Studies in the Renaissance. 
 ^^75 • • • James' A Passionate Pilgrim. 
 1882 . • . Stevenson's New Arabian Nights. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Born. Died 
 
 1672 Addison, Joseph, 182, 183, 187, 191, 192, 195 1719 
 
 849 Alfred, King, 3, 15, 19, 23, 24, 27 901 
 
 Fl. 1006 ^Ifric (Grammaticus) , 29 
 
 Fl. 1005 ^Ifric (Bata), 29 
 
 908? ^thelwold, Bishop, 28 984 
 
 1721 Akenside, Mark, 214, 219 1770 
 
 735 Alcuin, 27 804 
 
 Alexander, Sir W. (see Stirling, Earl of) 
 
 Fl. 1420 Andrew of Wyntoun, 91 
 
 1555 Andrewes, Lancelot, 153, 154 1626 
 
 1667 Arbuthnot, Dr. John, 185 1735 
 
 1822 Arnold, Matthew, 248, 271, 279 1888 
 
 1515 Ascham, Roger, 84, 99 1568 
 
 1775 Austen, Jane, 210 1817 
 
 1561 Bacon, Sir Francis, 104, 108, 109, 123, 144, 152. . 1626 
 
 673 Baeda, 3, 7, 14, 15, 25, 26 735 
 
 1826 Bagehot, Walter, 272 1877 
 
 1816 Bailey, Philip, 247 
 
 1316? Barbour, John, 91 1395 
 
 1475? Barclay, Alexander, 88 1552 
 
 1820 Barnes, William, 246 1886 
 
 1630 Barrow, Isaac, 179 1677 
 
 1615 Baxter, Richard, 154 1691 
 
 1735 Beattie, James, 216, 220 1803 
 
 1584 Beaumont, Francis, 144-145 , 1616 
 
 1616 Beaumont, Joseph, 159 1699 
 
 1803 Beddoes, Thomas, 244 1849 
 
 1640 Behn, Aphra, 194 v 1689 
 
 343 
 
344 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died. 
 
 628?. Benedict, Biscop, 26 690 
 
 1748 Bentham, Jeremy, 208 1832 
 
 1662 Bentley, Richard, 182, 190 1742 
 
 1685 Berkeley, Bishop, 188, 190 1753 
 
 1388? Bemers, Juliana, 75 
 
 1467 Berners, Lord, 83 1532 
 
 1650? 7 Blackmore, Sir Richard, 187 1729 
 
 1699 Blair, Robert, 213 1746 
 
 1757 Blake, William, 222-224. • • • 1827 
 
 Fl. 1470-1492 Blind Harry, 91 
 
 1766 Bloomfield, Robert, 225 1823 
 
 1545 Bodley, Sir Thomas, 154 — : 1613 
 
 1678 Bolingbroke, Lord, 185, 190, 199 1751 
 
 1803 Borrow, George, 260 1881 
 
 1740 Boswell, James, 199 1795 
 
 1627 Boyle, Robert, 151 1691 
 
 1816 Bronte, Charlotte, 260 1855 
 
 1554 Brooke, Lord (Fulke Greville), 123 1628 
 
 Broome, Richard, 148 1652? 
 
 1689 Broome, William, 185 1745 
 
 1778 Brown, Thomas, 208 1820 
 
 1771 Brown, Charles Brockden, 291 1810 
 
 1605 Browne, Sir Thomas, 154 1682 
 
 1591 Browne, William, 157 1643 
 
 1809 • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 278 1861 
 
 1812 Browning, Robert, 224, 244, 247, 277 1889 
 
 1730 Bruce, James, 209 1794 
 
 1746 Bruce, Michael, 221, 222 1767 
 
 1794 Bryant, William Cullen, 311 1878 
 
 1628 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 176, 
 
 193 1687 
 
 1822 Buckle, Henry Thomas, 270 1862 
 
 1628 Bunyan, John, 168 1688 
 
 1729 Burke, Edmund, 199, 205 1797 
 
 1643 Burnet, Bishop, 179, 182 1715 
 
 1752 Bumey, Frances (Madame D'Arblay), 202 1840 
 
 1759 Bums, Robert, 90, 222, 226, 243 1796 
 
 1577 Burton, Robert, 154 1640 
 
 1692 Butler, Bishop, 190 1752 
 
 1612 Butler, Samuel, 174, 181 1680 
 
 1788 Byron, Lord, 236, 237, 243, 244 1824 
 
INDEX '■ 345 
 
 Born. Died. 
 
 Fl. 670 Caedmon, 3, 12-19 
 
 1831 Calverley, Charles Stuart, 279 1834 
 
 1551 Camden, William, 151 1623 
 
 1777 Campbell, Thomas, 207, 235 1844 
 
 Temp. Hen. VI . .Campeden, Hugh de, 75 
 
 Campion, Thomas, 108 1619 
 
 1770 Canning, George, 207 1827 
 
 1393 Capgrave, John, 75 1464 
 
 1598? Carew, Thomas, 158 1639? 
 
 1795 Carlyle, Thomas, 206, 268 1881 
 
 1422? Caxton, William, 77, 78, 86, 87 1491? 
 
 1748 Cecil, Richard, 208 1810 
 
 1667? Centlivre, Susannah, 194 1723 
 
 1780 Chalmers, Dr., 208 1847 
 
 ISS9'* Chapman, George, 117, 141-143 1634 
 
 1619 Charleton, Walter, 181 1707 
 
 1752 Chatterton, Thomas,- 217 1770 
 
 1340 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 34, 52, 61-70, 78, 86, 88, 90, 
 
 91, 94, 216 1400 
 
 1514 Cheke, Sir John, 82 1557 
 
 Fl. 1430 Chestre, Thomas, 75 
 
 1602 Chillingworth, William, 150, 153, 179 1644 
 
 1731 Churchill, Charles, 214 1764 
 
 1671 Cibber, CoUey, 185, 195 1757 
 
 1609 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 150, 153 1674 
 
 1675 Clarke, Samuel, 190 1729? 
 
 1835 Clemens, Samuel L. (Mark Twain), 307 
 
 1819 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 248 1861 
 
 1772 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 122, 166, 206-208, 227, 
 
 229, 230 1834 
 
 1467? Colet, John, 82, 104 1519 
 
 1650 Collier, Jeremy, 194 1726 
 
 1676 Collins, Anthony, 190 1729 
 
 1721 Collins, William, 157, 214, 220 1759 
 
 1732 Colman, George (elder), 195 1794 
 
 1762 Colman, George (younger), 195 1836 
 
 1670 Congreve, William, 194, 195 1729 
 
 1562 Constable, Henry, 119, 156 1613 
 
 1789 Cooper, James Fenimore, 293 1851 
 
 1577? Coryat, Thomas, 152 1617 
 
 1630 Cotton, Charles, 117, 191 1687 
 
346 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died, 
 
 1571 Cotton, Sir Robert, 154 1631 
 
 1488 Coverdale, Miles, 85 1568 
 
 1618 Cowley, Abraham, 159, 172, 173, 182, 191 1667 
 
 1731 Cowper, William, 90, 213, 222-225, 243 1800 
 
 1754 Crabbe, George, 222, 225 1832 
 
 Socti 
 
 1489 Cranmer, Thomas, 85. 1556 "^^ 
 
 1613? Crashaw, Richard, 7, 157, 158 1649 
 
 1617 Cudworth, Ralph, 179 1688 
 
 1732 Cumberland, Richard, 195 1811 
 
 Fl. 8th century. .Cynewulf, 5-7, 12, 15, 19, 21, 22, 48, 49 
 
 1562 Daniel, Samuel, 108, 119, 121, 152 1619 
 
 1795 Darley, George, 244 1846 
 
 1809 Darwin, Charles, 274 1882 
 
 1606 Davenant, Sir William, 148, 174, 193 1668 
 
 Fl. 1623 Davenport, Robert, 148 
 
 1569 Davies, Sir John, 123 1626 
 
 Fl. 1606 Day, John, 143 
 
 1661? Defoe, Daniel, 183, 187-189 1731 
 
 1570? Dekker, Thomas, 141, 142 1641? 
 
 1615 Denham, Sir John, 172, 173 1669 
 
 1785 De Quincey, Thomas, 207. 1859 
 
 1812 Dickens, Charles, 261 1870 
 
 1804 Disraeli, Benjamin, 259 1881 
 
 1840 Dobson, Austin, 279 
 
 1573 Donne, John, 124, 157 1631 
 
 1637 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of, 177 1706 
 
 1474?- Douglas, Gawin, 90, 93 1522 
 
 1795 Drake, Joseph Rodman, 311 1820 
 
 1563 Drayton, Michael, 119, 121, 122 1631 
 
 1585 Drummond, of Hawthomden, William, 124, 157. 1649 
 
 1631 Dryden, John, 68, 159, 168, 172-174, 178, 181, 
 
 184, 193, 198, 216, 238 1700 
 
 Du Jon, Francis (see Junius) 
 
 1465? Dunbar, William, 90, 92-94 1530? 
 
 924 Dunstan, Archbishop, 28 988 
 
 1700? Dyer, John, 219 1758 
 
 640? Ealdhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, 3, 18 709 
 
 1601? Earle, John, 153 1665 
 
 Ecgberht, Archbishop, 27 766 
 
INDEX 347 
 
 Born. Died 
 
 1767 Edgeworth, Maria, 210 1849 
 
 1703 Edwards, Jonathan, 288 1758 
 
 1490? Elyot, Sir Thomas, 83 1546 
 
 1803 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 303, 316 1882 
 
 1467 Erasmus, 82, 87 1536 
 
 1635? Etherege, Sir George, 194 1691 
 
 1819 Evans, Marian (George Eliot), 263 i88o 
 
 1620 Evelyn, John, 182 1706 
 
 Fairfax, Edward, 116 1635 
 
 1678 Farquhar, George, 194 1707 
 
 1683 Fenton, Elijah, 185 1730 
 
 1750 Fergusson, Robert, 222 1774 
 
 1782 Ferrier, Susan, 210 1854 
 
 1707 Fielding, Henry, 195, 201 1754 
 
 Filmer, Sir Robert, 180 1653 
 
 1459? Fisher, Bishop, 82 1535 
 
 1809 Fitzgerald, Edward, 247, 279 1883 
 
 Flecknoe, Richard, 176 1678? 
 
 Flemming, Robert, 80 1483 
 
 1588? Fletcher, Giles, 157 1623 
 
 1579 Fletcher, John, 139, 144, 145, 161 1625 
 
 1582 Fletcher, Phineas, 157 1650 
 
 Florence of Worcester, 39 1118 
 
 1553? Florio, John, 117 1625 
 
 1720 Foote, Samuel, 195 1777 
 
 Fl. 1639 Ford, John, 147 
 
 1394? Fortescue, Sir John, ^^ 1476? 
 
 1516 Foxe, John, loi 1587 
 
 1706 Franklin, Benjamin, 289 1790 
 
 1823 Freeman, Edward Augustus, 270 1892 
 
 1818 Froude, James Anthony, 269 1894 
 
 1608 Fuller, Thomas, 153, 154 1661 
 
 Fl. 1140? Gaimar, Geoffrey, 41 
 
 1717 Garrick, David, 195, 216 1779 
 
 1661 Garth, Sir Samuel, 187 1719 
 
 1525? Gascoigne, George, 99, 124 1577 
 
 1810 Gaskell, Mrs., 264 1865 
 
 1685 Gay, John, 185, 187, 195, 222 1732 
 
 iiio? Geoffrey of Monmouth, 40, 44, 71 1154 
 
343 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died 
 
 1737 .Gibbon, Edward, 203 1794 
 
 Fl. 1639 Glapthorne, Henry, 148 
 
 Gloucester, Humphrey, Duke of , 79 1446 
 
 1756 Godwin, William, 210 1836 
 
 1536? Golding, Arthur, 100 1605? 
 
 1728 Goldsmith, Oliver, 195, 199, 202, 206, 220, 221 . . . .1774 
 
 1540 Googe, Bamaby, loi 1594 
 
 1555 Gosson, Stephen, 108 1624 
 
 1325? Gower, John, 58, 59. 69, 79 1408 
 
 Grafton, Richard, 102, 152 1572? 
 
 1716 Gray, Thomas, 157, 174, 215-216, 219-221, 235. , . 1771 
 
 1837 Green, John Richard, 269 1883 
 
 1696 Green, Matthew, 187 1737 
 
 1560? Greene, Robert, no, 131, 132, 134 1592 
 
 Greville, Fulke (see Brooke, Lord) 
 
 Grey, William, Bishop of Ely, 80 .1478 
 
 1519 Grimoald, Nicholas, 97 1562 
 
 1446? Grocyn, William, 82 1519 
 
 1794 Grote, George, 270 , 1871 
 
 Gunthorpe, John, Dean of Wells, 80 1498 
 
 1605 Habington, William, 159 1654 
 
 1552? Hakluyt, Richard, 109 1616 
 
 1584 Hales, John, 153, 179 1656 
 
 1651 Halifax, Charles Montague, Lord, 177 1715 
 
 1574 Hall, Joseph, Bishop of Norwich, 124, 153 1656 
 
 1764 Hall, Robert, 208 1831 
 
 1777 Hallam, Henry, 209 1859 
 
 1790 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 311 1867 
 
 1757 Hamilton, Alexander, 291 1804 
 
 1677 Hanmer, Sir Thomas, 216 1746 
 
 1378 Harding, John, 75 1465? 
 
 1561 Harington, Sir John, 116 1612 
 
 1611 Harrington, James, 123, 180 1677 
 
 1839. . . .* .Harte, Francis Bret, 297, 322 
 
 1705 Hartley, David, 203 1757 
 
 1545? Harvey, Gabriel, loi, 108, no 1630 
 
 1578 Harvey, William, 151 1657 
 
 Hawes, Stephen, 86 1523? 
 
 1804 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 295 1864 
 
 1745 Hayley, William, 209 , 1820 
 
INDEX 349 
 
 Born. Died. 
 
 1778 Hazlitt, William, 207 1830 
 
 1793 Hemans, Felicia, 244 1835 
 
 1084? Henry of Huntingdon, 40 1155 
 
 1430? Henryson, Robert, 92 1506? 
 
 1593 Herbert, George, 157, 158 1633 
 
 1591 Herrick, Robert, 157-160, 219 1674 
 
 1497? Heywood, John, 128 1580? 
 
 Heywood, Thomas, 100 1650? 
 
 Higden, Ranulf, 70 1364 
 
 1588 Hobbes, Thomas, 123, 150, 153, 180 1679 
 
 1370? Hoccleve, Thomas, 73 1450? 
 
 1745 Holcroft, Thomas, 210 1809 
 
 Holinshed, Raphael, 192 1580? 
 
 1809 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 305, 317 1894 
 
 1799 Hood, Thomas, 225 1845 
 
 1554? Hooker, Richard, 109 1600 
 
 1770? Hope, Thomas, 210 1831 
 
 1837 Howells, William Dean, 297 
 
 1711 Hume, David, 202-205, 208 1776 
 
 Hunnis, William, 120 , . 1597 
 
 1784 Hunt, Leigh, 241, 242 1859 
 
 1694 Hutcheson, Francis, 203 1746 
 
 1825 Huxley, Thomas, 275 1895 
 
 1753 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 210 1821 
 
 1783 Irving, Washington, 292, 299 1859 
 
 1394 James I. of Scotland, 91 1437 
 
 1843 James, Henry, 297 
 
 1743 Jefferson, Thomas, 290 1826 
 
 1773 Jeffrey, Francis, 207 1850 
 
 Fl. 1387 John of Trevisa, 70, 78 
 
 1709 Johnson, Samuel, 197, 198, 205, 213, 216 1784 
 
 1573? Jonson, Ben, 109, 133, 141, 142, 144, 157, 160 1637 
 
 1589 Junius (Francis du Jon), 16 1677 
 
 i8th century "Junius" (writer of the "Letters," 1769-1772), 
 
 197. 205 
 
 1795 Keats, John, 117, 228, 240-244 1821 
 
 1792 Keble, John, 247 1866 
 
 1637 Ken, Thomas, Bishop^ 177 1711 
 
350 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died 
 
 1819 Kingsley, Charles, 247, 265, 279 1875 
 
 1550? KnoUes, Richard, 152 1610 
 
 1557? Kyd, Thomas, 131 1595? 
 
 Lacy, John, 194 1681 
 
 1775 Lamb, Charles, 123, 148, 207, 208 1834 
 
 1802 Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (" L. E. L.")> 244. . . 1838 
 
 1775 Landor, Walter Savage, 207, 208 1864 
 
 173s Langhom, Dr. John, 221 1779 
 
 1330? Langland, William, 49, 52-58, loi 1400 
 
 1842 Lanier, Sidney, 322 1881 
 
 1485? Latimer, Hugh, Bishop of Worcester, 86 1555 
 
 Fl. 1200 Layamon, 33, 34, 41-43, 48 
 
 1757 Lee, Harriet, 210 1851 
 
 1653? Lee, Nat, 194 1692 
 
 1750 Lee, Sophia, 210 1824 
 
 1506? Leland, John, 83 1552 
 
 Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, 3 1072 
 
 1616 L'Estrange, Sir Roger, 180 1704 
 
 1806 Lever, Charles, 259 1872 
 
 Lichfield, William, 75 1447 
 
 1468? Lilly» William, 82 1522 
 
 1809 Lincoln, Abraham, 298 1865 
 
 1771. Lingard, John, 209 1851 
 
 1632 Locke, John, 123, 180 1704 
 
 1821 Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 279 1895 
 
 1794 Lockhart, John Gibson, 209, 210. 1854 
 
 1558?. Lodge, Thomas, no, 120, 124 1625 
 
 1807 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 312 1882 
 
 1618 Lovelace, Richard, 158 1658 
 
 1819 .Lowell, James Russell, 306, 318 1891 
 
 1370? Lydgate, John, 47, 72, 73, 78, 99, loi 1451? 
 
 1554? ^y^Yi John, 106, 131 1606 
 
 1490 Lyndsay, Sir David, 94, 95, 221 1555 
 
 1803 Lytton, Edward G. E. L. Bulwer, 278 1873 
 
 1800 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 267, 279 1859 
 
 1765 Mackintosh, Sir James, 206 1832 
 
 1697 , .Macklin, Charles, 195 ' 1797 
 
 1736 Macpherson, James, 217 1796 
 
 1772 McCrie, Thomas, 209 1835 
 
INDEX 351 
 
 Born. Died 
 
 1705? Mallet, David, 216 1765 
 
 Fl. 1470. Malory, Sir Thomas, ^7 
 
 1766 Malthus, Thomas, 209 1834 
 
 1670? Mandeville, Bernard, 190 1733 
 
 FI. 1288-1388 Mannyng, of Brunne, Robert, 38, 51 
 
 Fl. 1200 Map, Walter, 45 
 
 1564 Marlowe, Christopher, 119, 120, 131, 133, 143, 
 
 222 1593 
 
 1792 Marryat, Frederick, 259 1848 
 
 1575? Marston, John, 124, 141, 142 1634 
 
 1621 Marvell, Andrew, 157, 161, 174, 175, 219 1678 
 
 1583 Massinger, Philip, 146 1640 
 
 1663 Mather, Cotton, 287, 299 1728 
 
 Matthew Paris, 39 1259 
 
 14th century Maundevile, Sir John, 70 
 
 1595 May, Thomas, 153 1650 
 
 1828 Meredith, George, 265 
 
 1808 Merivale, Charles, 270 1893 
 
 1735 Mickle, William, 221 1788 
 
 1570? Middleton, Thomas, 146 1627 
 
 1773 Mill, James, 209 1836 
 
 1806 Mill, John Stuart, 274 1873 
 
 1791 Milman, Henry Hart, 270 1868 
 
 1608 Milton, John, 16, 90, 96, 144, 155, 161-168, 171, 
 
 173, 219, 224 1674 
 
 1300? Minot, Laurence, 51 1352? 
 
 1744 Mitford, William, 209 1827 
 
 Montague, Charles (see Halifax, Lord) 
 
 1779 Moore, Thomas, 209, 236 1852 
 
 1614 More, Henry, 159 1687 
 
 1478 More, Sir Thomas, 40, 82, 83 1535 
 
 1834 Morris, William, 279-280 1896 
 
 1814 Motley, John Lothrop, 300 1877 
 
 1649 Mulgrave, John Sheffield, Earl of, 177 1721 
 
 1727 Murphy, Arthur, 195 1805 
 
 Fl. 1638 Nabbes, Thomas, 148 
 
 1567 Nash, Thomas, 108, 131 1601 
 
 Fl. 1375 Nassington, William of, 75 
 
 1620 Nevile, Henry, 180 1694 
 
 1801 Newman, John Henry, 273 1890 
 
35^ ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died, 
 
 1642 Newton, Sir Isaac, 178 1727 
 
 1725 Newton, John, 208 1807 
 
 Fl. 1250 Nicholas of Guildford, 50 
 
 Fl. 1390 Nicholas of Hereford, 57 
 
 1535? North, Sir Thomas, 117 1601? 
 
 1532 .Norton, Thomas, 75, 129 1584 
 
 1653 Oldham, John, 177 1683 
 
 1769 Opie, Amelia, 210 1853 
 
 1075 Ordericus Vitalis, 39 ^H3^ 
 
 Fl. 1200 Orrmin, 42 
 
 Oswald of Worcester, 28 972 
 
 1652 Otway, Thomas, 194 1685 
 
 1581 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 153 1613 
 
 1737 Paine, Thomas, 206, 291 1809 
 
 1540? Painter, William, 102 1594 
 
 1743 Paley, William, 208 1805 
 
 1504. . .* Parker, Archbishop, 151 1575 
 
 1823 Parkman, Francis, 300 1893 
 
 1679 Pamell, Thomas, 185 1718 
 
 1839 Pater, Walter, 272 1894 
 
 1823 Patmore, Coventry, 246 1896 
 
 1791 Payne, John Howard, 311 1852 
 
 1395? Pecock, Reginald, 77 1460? 
 
 1558? Peele, George, no, 131, 135 1597? 
 
 1633 Pepys, Samuel, 182 1703 
 
 1729 Percy, Thomas, Bishop, 216, 223 1811 
 
 1623 Petty, Sir William, 151, 180 1687 
 
 1510? Phaer, Thomas, 100 1560 
 
 1675 Phillips, Ambrose, 187 1749 
 
 1676 Phillips, John, 187 1709 
 
 Phreas, John, 80 1465 
 
 1809 Poe, Edgar Allan, 294, 318 1849 
 
 1667 Pomfret, John, 187 1702 
 
 1500 Pole, Reginald, 104 1558 
 
 1688 Pope, Alexander, 173, 175, 176, 181, 184-188, 
 
 190, 198, 200, 213, 216, 219, 222 1744 
 
 1802 Praed, Winthrop Mackworth, 279 1839 
 
 1796 Prescott, William Hickling, 300 1859 
 
 1664 Prior, Matthew, 177, 185, 187 1721 
 
INDEX 353 
 
 Born. Died. 
 
 1600 Prynne, William, 155 1669 
 
 1577 Purchas, Samuel, 152 1626 
 
 FI. 15th century. Purvey, John, 57 After 1427 
 
 1530?. Puttenham, George, 107 1600? 
 
 1592 Quarles, Francis, 159 1644 
 
 1764 Radcliffe, Ann, 210 1823 
 
 1552 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 114, 115, 152 1618 
 
 1686 Ramsay, Allan, 187, 221, 222 1758 
 
 1605 Randolph, Thomas, 148 1634 
 
 1814 Reade, Charles, 264 1884 
 
 1710 Reid, Thomas, 203 1796 
 
 1723 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 199 1792 
 
 1772 Ricardo, David, 209 1823 
 
 1689 Richardson, Samuel, 200 1761 
 
 Ripley, George, 75 1490 
 
 Fl. 1295 Robert of Gloucester, 44 
 
 1721 Robertson, William, 202 1793 
 
 Fl. 1551 Robinson, Ralph, 83 
 
 1647 -.Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 177 1680 
 
 1509? Rogers, John, 85 1555 
 
 1763 Rogers, Samuel, 228, 235 1855 
 
 RoUe, of Hampole, Richard, 38 1349 
 
 1634 Roscommon, Dillon Wentworth, Earl of, 177. . 1684 
 
 1828 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 249, 279 1882 
 
 1830 Rossetti, Christina, 249, 279 1894 
 
 1674 Rowe, Nicholas, 195 1718 
 
 Fl. 17th century.. Rowley, William, 148 
 
 Roy, William, 85 1531 
 
 1819 Ruskin, John, 270 1900 
 
 1836 Russell, Lady Rachel, 182 1723 
 
 1536 Sackville, Thomas, Lord Buckhurst, 95, 96, 99, 
 
 100, 129 1608 
 
 St. John, Henry (see Boling^roke, Lord) 
 
 1577 Sandys, George, 152 1644 
 
 1697 Savage, Richard, 214 1743 
 
 Savile, George (see Halifax, Lord) 
 
 1747 Scott, Thomas, 208 1821 
 
 1771 Scott, Sir Walter, 90, 206, 210-212, 216, 228, 234. 1832 
 
 1639 Sedley, Sir Charles, 177, 194 1701 
 
 2A 
 
354 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died 
 
 1584 Selden, John, 151, 152 1654 
 
 Sellynge, William, 80 
 
 1640 Shadwell, Thomas, 176, 194 1692 
 
 1671 Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of, 190 1713 
 
 1564.- Shakespeare, William, 82, 90, 96, 98, 117-121, 
 
 130-142, 161, 170-172, 193, 212, 216, 218 1616 
 
 1792 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22, 228, 236, 238-244. . . 1822 
 
 1714 Shenstone, William, 216, 221 1763 
 
 1751 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 195 1816 
 
 1641 Sherlock, William, 179 1707 
 
 1596 Shirley, James, 148, 160 1666 
 
 Fl. 1440 Shirley, John, 78 
 
 1577 Sibbes, Richard, 154 1635 
 
 1622 Sidney, Algernon, 180 1683 
 
 1554 Sidney, Sir Philip, 102, 106-108, in, 115, 119. . 1586 
 
 Fl. nth and ) _. x r^ u 
 
 \ . . Simeon of Durham, 39 , 
 
 I2th centuries ) 
 
 1460? Skelton, John, 79, 87, 88, 95 1528? 
 
 1722 Smart, Christopher, 221 1771 
 
 1723 Smith, Adam, 204 1790 
 
 1512 Smith, Sir Thomas, 82 1577 
 
 1771 Smith, Sydney, 207 1845 
 
 1721 Smollett, Tobias, 201 1771 
 
 1633. .0 South, Robert, 179 1716 
 
 1660 Southeme, Thomas, 194 1746 
 
 1774 Southey, Robert, 207, 209, 227-229 1843 
 
 1560? ..Southwell, Robert, 118 1595 
 
 1552 Speed, John, 151 1629 
 
 1562 Spelman, Sir Henry, 151 .1641 
 
 1820 Spencer, Herbert, 275 
 
 1552? Spenser, Edmund, 91, "95, 99, 107, 110-117, 119, 
 
 122, 157, 170, 216, 222 1599 
 
 1672 Steele, Sir Richard, 191, 192 , .1729 
 
 1713 Sterne, Laurence, 201, 202 1763 
 
 i§5o Stevenson, Robert Louis, 266 1894 
 
 1753 Stewart, Dugald, 208 1828 
 
 1635 Stillingfleet, Edward, 179 1699 
 
 1567? Stirling, Sir William Alexander, Earl of, 124, 
 
 157 1640 
 
 1525 Stow, John, 102, 152 1605 
 
 1811 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 295 1896 
 
INDEX 355 
 
 Born. Died. 
 
 1609 Suckling, Sir John, 148, 158 1642 
 
 1516? Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of, 86, 88, 95-97. .1547 
 
 1667 Swift, Jonathan, 183, 185, 188, 189, 198 1745 
 
 1837 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 279 
 
 1613 Taylor, Jeremy, 153 1667 
 
 1628 Temple, Sir William, 182, 191 1699 
 
 i8c9 Tennyson, Alfred, 5, 7, 20, 41, 67, 224, 244, 246, 
 
 247, 276 1892 
 
 1811 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 262 1863 
 
 1688 Theobald, Lewis, 185, 216 1744 
 
 1797 Thirwall, Connop, 270 1875 
 
 1225? Thomas of Erceldoune, 91 1300? 
 
 17CXD Thomson, James, 94, 157, 188, 219, 235 1748 
 
 1817 Thoreau, Henry David, 304 1862 
 
 1686 Tickell, Thomas, 187 1740 
 
 1891 Ticknor, George, 306 1871 
 
 1630 Tillotson, John, Archbishop, 179 1694 
 
 1656 Tindal, Matthew, 190 1733 
 
 1670 Toland, John, 190 1722 
 
 Fl. 1551 Tottel, Richard, 97, 100 
 
 FI. 1600-1613. . . .Toumeur, Cyril, 143 
 
 1815 Trollope, Anthony, 264 1882 
 
 1530? Turbervile, George, loi, 102 iS94? 
 
 1808 Turner, Charles Tennyson, 246 1879 
 
 Turpin, Archbishop, 45 
 
 1526? Tusser, Thomas, 97 1580 
 
 1484? Tyndale, William, 83, 84 1536 
 
 1820 Tyndall, John, 275 1893 
 
 1505 Udall, Nicholas, 129 1556 
 
 1580 Ussher, Archbishop, 15 1656 
 
 1666? Vanbrugh, Sir John, 194 1726 
 
 1621 Vaughan, Henry, 159, 219 1693 
 
 1120? Wace, 41 1184? 
 
 1822 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 274 
 
 1605 Waller, Edmund, 159, 172, 173 1687 
 
 1616 Wallis, John, 151 1703 
 
 1717 Walpole, Horace, 199 1797 
 
356 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died 
 
 1676 Walpole, Sir Robert, 197 1745 
 
 1593 Walton, Izaak, 155, 182 1683 
 
 1698 Warburton, William, Bishop, 185, 190, 216 1779 
 
 1460 Warham, Archbishop, 82 1532 
 
 1558^ Warner, William, 121 1609 
 
 1722 Warton, Joseph, 220 1800 
 
 1728 Warton, Thomas, 207, 216, 220 1790 
 
 1732 Washington, George, 290 1799 
 
 Fl. i6th century. Webbe, William, 107 
 
 1582? Webster, John, 144, 146 1652? 
 
 1782 Webster, Daniel, 298 1852 
 
 1708 Wesley, Charles, 224 1788 
 
 1703 Wesley, John, 208 1791 
 
 1714 Whitfield, George, 208 1770 
 
 1720 White, Gilbert, 200 1793 
 
 1819 Whitman, Walt, 320 , 1892 
 
 1807 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 314 1892 
 
 1727 Wilkes, John, 197 1797 
 
 1095? William of Malmesbury, 39 1142? 
 
 FI. 1327 William of Shoreham, 38 
 
 Fl. 13th century. William of Waddington, 38 
 
 1785 Wilson, Professor John (Christopher North), 
 
 207 1854 
 
 1520? Wilson, Thomas, 97 1581 
 
 1588 Wither George 157, 159, 161 1667 
 
 1659 Wollaston, William, 190 1724 
 
 Worcester, John Tiptoft, Earl of, 79 1470 
 
 1770 Wordsworth, William, 92, 118, 207, 221, 223, 225, 
 
 227, 230-234, 239, 243 1850 
 
 1568 Wotton, Sir Henry, 92, 123, 152 1639 
 
 Fl. 1002-1023. . . .Wulfstan, Archbishop, 29 
 
 1503 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 86, 88, 95, 96 1542 
 
 1640? Wycherley, William, 194 1715 
 
 1320? Wyclif, John, 52, 53. 57 1384 
 
 1681 Young, Edward, 213 1765 
 
INDEX TO FOREIGN AUTHORS 
 
 Born. Dibd. 
 1474 Ariosto, no, 116 » 1533 
 
 1313 Boccaccio, 61, 62, 74, 80, 99 1375 
 
 1434 Boiardo, no 1494 
 
 1636 Boileau, 172 1711 
 
 Calprendde, 192 , 1663 
 
 14^ Chalcondylas, 82 1511 
 
 Fl. nth century. .Chrestien of Troyes, 44 
 
 106 B.c Cicero, 94, 100 43 B.C. 
 
 Contarini, 104 1550 
 
 1606 Corneille, 192 1684 
 
 1717 D*Alembert, 197 1783 
 
 1265 Dante, 61, 62, 70 1321 
 
 Dares Phrygius, 47 
 
 385 B.c Demosthenes, 100 322 B.C. 
 
 Dictys Cretensis, 47 
 
 1713 Diderot, 197 1784 
 
 1749 Goethe, 198, 206, 211 1832 
 
 13th century Guido delle Colonne, 47 
 
 Homer, 117, 143, 186, 224 
 
 65 B.c Horace, 163 8 B.C. 
 
 1621 La Fontaine, 172 1695 
 
 1729 Lessing, 192, 205 1781 
 
 1496 Marot, III ; 1544 
 
 1280? Meung, Jean de, 59 
 
 357 
 
3S8 ENGLISH LITERATURE 
 
 Born. Died. 
 
 1622 Moli^re, 193 1673 
 
 1533 , Montaigne, 117, 191 1592 
 
 1689 Montesquieu, 197, 202 1755 
 
 43 B.C. Ovid, 94, 100 17 A.D. 
 
 1304 Petrarca, 58, 61, 80, 96, 116 1374 
 
 427 B.c Plato, 96 347 B.c; 
 
 FI. 50-100 Plutarch, 100 
 
 1639 Racine, 193 1699 
 
 Fl. i2th century . .Robert of Boron, 44 
 
 1712 Rousseau, 197 1778 
 
 1458 Sannazaro, 102 1530 
 
 1759 Schiller, i'98 1805 
 
 1601 Scudery, 192 1667 
 
 Fl. 930 Skallagrimsson, Egil, 24 
 
 45? Statins, 47 96? 
 
 1544 Tasso, no, 116 1595 
 
 70 B.c Virgil, 7, 47, 93, 96, 100, 177 19 B.C. 
 
 1694 Voltaire, 132, 135, 195, 197, 202 1778 
 

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