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 ESSAYS AND STUDIES
 
 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN CHURTON COLLINS 
 
 " Mehr unordentliche Collectanea zu einem Buche, als ein Buck" 
 
 LESSING. 
 
 ILontJon 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 1895
 
 TO MY WIFE
 
 PREFACE 
 
 OF the Essays collected in the present volume four 
 originally appeared in the Quarterly Review between 
 October 1878 and July 1892, and one, the Essay on 
 Menander, in the Cornhill Magazine for May 1879. 
 It has not been thought necessary to recast their 
 form, but they are not mere reproductions. They 
 have all of them been revised and enlarged, two of 
 them so extensively that they may be said to have 
 been almost rewritten. 
 
 Whether I am justified in claiming for these 
 Essays an exemption from the ordinary fate of con- 
 tributions to periodical literature, by collecting them 
 into a volume, I must leave it to others to decide. 
 I can only say, for my own part, that I should 
 never have ventured to submit them a second time 
 to public notice, even in their present carefully 
 revised and greatly enlarged form, had I relied only 
 on any supposed intrinsic literary merit in them.
 
 viii ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 They have reappeared here because, without any 
 pretension to being authoritative, they at least show 
 reason why certain conventional literary verdicts, in 
 some cases of important concern, should be recon- 
 sidered ; because they endeavour to contribute some- 
 thing to a more judicial critical estimate and a fuller 
 historical study of writings which are of permanent 
 interest ; and because both occasionally and compre- 
 hensively they enter a protest against the mischievous 
 tendencies of the New School of Criticism, a school 
 as inimical to good taste and good sense as it is to 
 morals and decency. 
 
 Exception may perhaps be taken to the strictures 
 on Mr. Addington Symonds' book, and I should like 
 to add that when I heard of his lamented death I 
 determined, should the article ever be reprinted, to 
 suppress them. But on reconsideration I found I 
 had no choice. Nothing could have justified the 
 appearance of those strictures during Mr. Symonds' 
 lifetime if they are not equally justified when he 
 lives only in the power and influence of his writings. 
 There is no need for me to say with Bentley Non 
 nostrum est /cet/i/ot<? eirepfiaiveiv, for it was in no spirit 
 of personal hostility that I wrote what I thought it a 
 duty to write nearly ten years ago ; and it is with the 
 liveliest sense of the great loss which English Litera-
 
 PEEFACE is 
 
 ture has sustained by his death that I again perform 
 what I conceive to be a duty in reprinting what I 
 then wrote. 
 
 My thanks are due to Mr. John Murray and to 
 Messrs. Smith and Elder for allowing me to reprint 
 these Essays, and to Mr. Percy Wallace for his great 
 kindness in assisting me to see them through the 
 press. J. C. C.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1. JOHN DRYDEN 1 
 
 2. THE PREDECESSORS OP SHAKSPEARE . . . . 91 
 
 3. LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 193 
 
 4. THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM . . . 263 
 
 5. MENANDER . 316
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 1 
 
 NEARLY two centuries have passed since the coffin 
 of Dryden was reverently laid by those who loved 
 and honoured him in the grave of the Father of our 
 Poetry ; and in spite of all the caprices in taste, in 
 opinion, in fashion, to which the popular judgment in 
 every age is liable, in spite of revolutions in criticism 
 which have scarcely left a verdict of our forefathers 
 unchallenged, and revolutions in poetry which have 
 dethroned the dynasties of the last century, no one 
 has ever yet grudged his ashes the proud distinction 
 thus claimed for them. His services had indeed 
 been manifold and splendid. He had determined the 
 bent of a great literature at a great crisis. He 
 had banished for ever the unpruned luxuriance, the 
 licence, the essentially uncritical spirit, which had 
 marked expression in the literature of Elizabeth and 
 James, and he had vindicated the substitution of 
 a style which should proceed on critical principles, 
 
 1 Life and Works of John Dryden. By Sir Walter Scott, Bart. 8vo. 
 18 vols. 1821. 
 
 The Poetical Works of John Dryden. Edited, with a Memoir, Revised 
 'Text, and Notes, by W. D. Christie, M.A., of Trinity College, Cambridge. 
 London, 1870. 
 
 B
 
 2 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 which should aim at terseness, precision, and point, 
 should learn to restrain itself, should master the mys- 
 teries of selection and suppression. He had rescued 
 our poetry from the thraldom of a school which was 
 labouring, with all the resources of immense learning, 
 consummate skill, and abundant genius, to corrupt 
 taste and pollute style with the vices of Marini and 
 Gongora. He had brought home to us the master- 
 pieces of the Roman Classics, and he had taught us 
 how to understand and interpret them. He had 
 given us the true canons of classical translation. He 
 had shown us how our language could adapt itself 
 with precision to the various needs of didactic prose, of 
 lyric poetry, of argumentative exposition, of satirical 
 invective, of easy narrative, of sonorous declamation. 
 He had exhibited for the first time in all their ful- 
 ness the power, ductility, and compass of the heroic 
 couplet ; and he had demonstrated the possibility ot 
 reasoning closely and vigorously in verse, without 
 the elliptical obscurity of Fulke Greville on the one 
 hand or the painful condensation of Davies on the 
 other. Of English classical satire he had practically 
 been the creator. For Wyatt had taken Alamanni 
 and Ariosto for his models, Skelton and Roy had 
 seldom risen above doggerel ; Spenser had indeed 
 affected the heroic style, but, cumbersome, prolix, and 
 uncouth, he had no pretension to classicism. And 
 what was true of Spenser had been equally true of 
 Gascoigne. The Roman satirists had certainly found 
 disciples and imitators in Donne, Hall, Marston, and 
 Lodge, but if we except Hall, who is, in point of
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 3 
 
 style, incomparably superior to his brethren, the dis- 
 ciples bear little resemblance to their masters. If 
 they succeed in reflecting anything in their originals, 
 it is in reflecting only too faithfully what is most 
 insufferable in the style of Persius. Their diction is 
 cramped, jejune, affected, and obscure, their tone and 
 colour dull and coarse. Nor had satire made any 
 advance in passing successively through the hands of 
 Wither, Cleveland, Marvell, Butler, and Oldham. It 
 was reserved for Dryden to raise it to the level of 
 that superb satirical literature which Quintilian 
 claimed as the peculiar and exclusive product of 
 Roman genius. And these had not been his only 
 services. He had reconstructed and popularised the 
 poetry of romance. He had inaugurated a new era 
 in English prose, and a new era in English criticism. 
 The revolution which transformed the style most 
 characteristic of the classics of the sixteenth and early 
 seventeenth centuries into that most characteristic of 
 the classics of the eighteenth century may, it is true, 
 be traced historically to Hobbes, Cowley, Denham, 1 
 and Sprat. But this in no way detracts from the 
 honour due to Dryden. In his writings the new 
 style not only found its most perfect expression, but 
 became influential in literature. From the appear- 
 ance of his dissertations, prefaces, and dedications 
 dates a time when a return to the older models was 
 impossible. 
 
 His influence on our literature in almost all its 
 
 1 See particularly his admirable Preface to his version of the second 
 jEneid.
 
 4 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 branches has indeed been prodigious. "Perhaps," 
 observes Johnson, "no nation ever produced a writer 
 that enriched his language with such a variety of 
 models." He is one of those figures which are con- 
 stantly before us, and if his writings in their entirety 
 are not as familiar to us as they were to our fore- 
 fathers, their influence is to be traced in ever-recur- 
 ring allusion and quotation ; they have moulded or 
 leavened much of our prose, more of our verse, and 
 almost all our earlier criticism. His genius has, 
 moreover, been consecrated by the praises of men who 
 now share his own literary immortality. It would in 
 truth be difficult to name a single writer of distinc- 
 tion between the latter half of the seventeenth 
 century and the commencement of the present who 
 has not in some form recorded his obligations to him. 
 Wycherley addressed him in a copy of verses which 
 embody probably the only sincere compliment he 
 ever paid to a fellow-creature, and what Wycherley 
 has recorded in verse Congreve has recorded in prose. 
 Garth, in his admirable preface to Ovid's Meta- 
 morphoses, speaks of him as one of the greatest poets 
 who ever trod on earth, and has defined with a happy 
 precision his various and versatile powers. Addison 
 and Pope forgot their mutual jealousies to unite in 
 loyal homage to the genius of their common master l ; 
 and Gray, in those noble verses in which he ranks 
 him second only to Shakspeare and Milton, was true 
 
 1 There is no good authority for the story circulated by Tonson about 
 Addison and Steele joining in a conspiracy to detract from Dryden's reputa- 
 tion. Wherever Addison refers to Dryden it is always in the highest 
 terma.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 5 
 
 to the traditions of a long line of illustrious disciples. 
 Churchill, who might with care perhaps have rivalled 
 him as a satirist, dedicates to his memory a fine 
 apostrophe, which seems to kindle with the genius it 
 celebrates. Johnson has discussed his merits in a 
 masterpiece of criticism, and Goldsmith has laid a 
 graceful tribute at his shrine. Nor were Burke and 
 Gibbon silent. Charles Fox not only pronounced 
 him to be the greatest name in our literature, but 
 has lavished praises almost grotesque in their excess 
 of idolatrous enthusiasm. If Wordsworth with his 
 habitual bigotry, and Landor with his habitual in-"-* 
 
 & J ' Ivv 
 
 temperance, attempted to reverse the verdict of five w 
 generations, Byron and Scott, accepting the legacy 
 which the dying poet had more than a hundred years 
 before bequeathed to Congreve, "shaded the laurels 
 which had descended to them," and vindicated with 
 jealous fondness the fame of their great predecessor. 
 
 John Dryden, the eldest son of Erasmus Driden 
 and Mary, daughter of the Eev. Henry Pickering, 
 was born at Aldwinckle, a village near Oundle in 
 Northamptonshire, on the 9th of August 1631. 
 There is a local tradition that he first saw the light 
 in the parsonage house of Aldwinckle All Saints, 
 then the residence of his maternal grandfather. The 
 truth of this tradition has been questioned by the 
 biographers, who, on the authority of Malone, have 
 asserted that Mr. Pickering did not become rector till 
 1647, and that consequently there are no reasonable 
 grounds for supposing that Dryden was born there
 
 6 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 in 1631. But Mr. Christie, ascertaining that Picker- 
 ing became rector in 1597, not in 1647, has cor- 
 roborated the truth of the old tradition, and justified 
 the claims of the little room, which is still shown, to 
 the reverence of visitors. His family was gentle and 
 eminently respectable ; and, though two of his sisters 
 married small tradesmen, and one of his brothers 
 became a tobacconist in London, he could still remind 
 the Lady Elizabeth Howard that on his mother's side 
 he could number titled relatives who had enjoyed the 
 friendship of James I., and sat in judgment on his 
 successor. Poets have seldom been distinguished for 
 adhering to the political and religious traditions 
 which they have inherited, and Dryden is no excep- 
 tion to the rule. His father and his mother were not 
 only Puritans themselves, but belonged to families 
 which had made themselves conspicuous by their 
 opposition to the Crown, and by the consistency and 
 zeal with which they had upheld the principles of their 
 sect. His grandfather had been imprisoned for re- 
 fusing loan-money to Charles I. His uncle, Sir John 
 Driden, was accused of having turned the chancel of 
 his church at Canons-Ashby into a barn, and Mr. 
 Christie thinks it not improbable that his father was 
 a Committee-man of the Commonwealth times. Of 
 his early youth little is known. He had, he tells 
 us, read Polybius in English when he was ten years 
 old, " and even then had some dark notions of the 
 prudence with which he conducted his design" an 
 early instance of his characteristic preference for 
 solid and philosophic literature as distinguished from
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 7 
 
 romantic and imaginative. If the inscription on the 
 monument erected by his cousin, Mrs. Creed, in Tich- 
 marsh Church be trustworthy, he received the rudi- 
 ments of his education somewhere in that village. 
 From Tichmarsh he passed to Westminster School, 
 probably about 1642. We have now no means of 
 knowing why this school was selected ; but the choice 
 was a wise one, and young Dryden arrived at a 
 fortunate time. Three years before, the languid and 
 inefficient Osbolston had been ejected by Laud from 
 the headmastership ; and the school, now in the vigor- 
 ous hands of Richard Busby, was about to enter on a 
 career of unparalleled distinction. During his tenure 
 of office to employ the phraseology which he loved 
 to affect Westminster sent up to the Universities 
 more lads destined afterwards to become famous in 
 theology, in scholarship, in literature, and in public life, 
 than any other English school could boast of doing 
 in two centuries. In Busby Mulcaster lived again. 
 Like Mulcaster he was a man whom nature had en- 
 dowed with versatile powers which circumstances had 
 made it impossible for him to display actively, but 
 which expressed themselves in ready and delighted 
 sympathy whenever he recognised their presence in 
 others. At Oxford he had been distinguished, not 
 only by his classical and theological attainments, but 
 by his abilities as an orator, as a talker, and as an 
 amateur actor. The skill with which he had sus- 
 tained a leading character in Cartwright's comedy, 
 . The Royal Slave, on the occasion of Charles L's 
 visit to Oxford, was long remembered in the Uni-
 
 8 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 versity. For upwards of half a century he ruled 
 Westminster with a severity which has been plea- 
 santly ridiculed by Pope, and feelingly described by 
 more than one of his illustrious pupils. But he 
 could reflect with pride, at the end of his long and 
 laborious life, that he had nursed the young genius 
 of Dryden, Lee, Prior, Saunders, Howe, King, and 
 Duke ; that he had moulded the youth of Locke 
 and South ; had imbued with literary tastes which 
 never left them the practical abilities of Charles 
 Montagu and Stepney; had laid the foundations of 
 Atterbury's elegant scholarship, of Michael Mait- 
 taire's wide and varied erudition, and of that learning 
 which made Edmund Smith the marvel of his con- 
 temporaries ; had taught Freind " to speak as 
 Terence spoke," and Alsop to recall the refined wit 
 of Horace l ; that eight of his pupils had been raised 
 to the Bench, that no less than sixteen had become 
 Bishops. 2 
 
 His influence on Dryden was undoubtedly con- 
 siderable. He saw and encouraged in every way his 
 peculiar bent. Despairing, probably, of ever making 
 him an exact scholar, he taught him to approach 
 Virgil and Horace, not so much from the philological 
 
 1 Let Freind affect to speak as Terence spoke, 
 
 And Alsop never but like Horace joke. Pope. 
 
 2 Steele gives a remarkable testimony to Busby's genius as a teacher. " I 
 must confess, and have often reflected upon it, that I am of opinion Busby's 
 genius- for education had as great an effect upon the age he lived in as that of 
 any ancient philosopher, without excepting one, had upon his contemporaries. 
 I have known a great number of his scholars, and am confident I could 
 discover a stranger who had been such with a very little conversation. Those 
 of good parts who have passed through his instruction have such a peculiar 
 readiness of fancy and delicacy of taste as is seldom found in men educated 
 elsewhere, though of equal talents."
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 9 
 
 as from the literary side. He taught him to relish 
 the austere beauties of the Roman satirists, and with 
 admirable tact set him to turn Persius and others 
 into English verse, instead of submitting him to the 
 usual drudgery of Latin composition. Dryden never 
 forgot his obligations to Busby. Thirty years after- 
 wards, when the young Westminster boy had become 
 the first poet and the first critic of his age, he 
 addressed his master, then a very old man, in some 
 of the most beautiful verses he ever wrote. With 
 exquisite propriety he dedicated to him his transla- 
 tion of the Satire in which Persius records his rever 
 ence and gratitude to Cornutus : 
 
 Yet never could be worthily express'd 
 
 How deeply thou art seated in my breast. 
 
 When first my childish robe resign'd the charge, 
 
 And left me unconfin'd to live at large. 
 
 Just at that age when manhood set me free, 
 
 I then deposed myself and left the reins to thee. 
 
 On thy wise bosom I repos'd my head, 
 
 And by my better Socrates was bred. 
 
 My reason took the bent of thy command, 
 
 Was form'd and polish'd by thy skilful hand. 
 
 From Westminster young Dryden proceeded to 
 Trinity College, Cambridge. He was entered on the 
 18th of May 1650 ; he matriculated in the following 
 July, and on the 2nd of October, the same year, he 
 was elected a scholar on the Westminster Foundation. 
 He probably carried up to Trinity enough Latin to 
 enable him to read with facility the Roman classics, 
 and enough Greek to enable him to follow a Greek 
 text in a Latin version. It may be questioned 
 whether his attainments in Greek ever went beyond 
 this, and he has given us ample opportunities of
 
 10 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 judging. In his renderings from Homer and Theo- 
 critus he always follows the Latin translation. What 
 he knows of Aristophanes and the Tragedians he 
 appears to have derived chiefly from the French. 
 He had plainly not read Polybius and Plutarch in the 
 original ; Longinus, to whom in his later writings he 
 frequently refers, he approached through Boileau. 
 With Plato, with the orators, and with the less 
 known poets, his acquaintance is very scanty. 
 
 Of his life at Cambridge very little is known. Like 
 Milton before him, and like Gray, Wordsworth, and 
 Coleridge after him, he appears to have had no respect 
 for his teachers, and to have taken his education into 
 his own hands. From independence to rebellion is 
 an easy step, and an entry may still be read in the 
 Conclusion-book at Trinity, which charges him with 
 disobedience to the Vice-Master and with contumacy 
 in taking the punishment inflicted on him. It would 
 seem also from an allusion in a satire of Shadwell's 
 that he got into some scrape for insulting a young 
 nobleman, which nearly ended in expulsion ; but the 
 details are too obscure to warrant any definite con- 
 clusion. That he studied hard, however, in his own 
 way is likely enough. He had, at all events, the 
 credit of having read over and very well understood 
 all the Greek and Eoman poets. He taught himself 
 Italian, French, and perhaps Spanish, and impressed 
 his contemporaries as being " a man of good parts and 
 learning." 1 To Trinity he gratefully acknowledged 
 
 1 See an interesting letter lately discovered by Mr. Aldis Wright in the 
 Library of Trinity College.
 
 JOHN DRYDEX 11 
 
 the chief part of his education, though, like his pre- 
 decessors Marvell and Cowley, he probably owed 
 little or nothing to anybody but himself. 
 
 The University, still agitated by the civil com- 
 motions which had shaken England to its centre, was 
 not at that time distinguished either by scholarship 
 or by sympathy with polite literature. The age of 
 Milton, Marvell, Cowley, and May had just passed ; 
 the age of Bentley, Barnes, and Middleton had not 
 arrived. What activity there was, was principally in 
 a philosophical and scientific direction. Dryden's 
 tutor, Templer, had engaged himself in a controversy 
 with Hobbes. Cudworth was collecting materials for 
 his confutation of Atheism. Whichcote and Smith 
 were rationalising theology. Henry More was un- 
 ravelling the mysteries of Plotinus and the Cabbala. 
 John Nichols of Jesus was giving us our first history 
 of precious stones. Ray was laying the foundations 
 of English natural history. Isaac Barrow was deep in 
 chemistry and anatomy. Hill, the Master of Trinity, 
 was indifferent to everything but politics. Among 
 the few men who had any pretension to elegant 
 scholarship was Duport, then Margaret Professor of 
 Divinity, and shortly afterwards Professor of Greek. 
 He was an excellent Latinist, as his epigrams still 
 testify, and he was one of the few English scholars 
 who had acquired fluency and even some skill in 
 Greek verse composition. His versions of the Book 
 of Proverbs, of Ecclesiastes, of the Song of Solomon, 
 and of the Psalms, are unquestionably the best 
 Greek verses which had as yet appeared in England.
 
 12 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 To find anything as good, we must go forward nearly 
 a century and a half to Dr. Cooke's version of Gray's 
 Elegy. It does not seem that Dryden had any 
 acquaintance with him, though he was very likely in 
 residence when Duport was made Vice-Master of 
 Trinity in 1655. Dryden had, however, taken his 
 degree in the preceding year, and probably preferred 
 rambling at will through the well-stocked shelves of 
 the College library to attending Duport's lectures on 
 Theophrastus. 
 
 His studies were interrupted by the death of his 
 father, and by an attachment he had formed to his 
 cousin Honor Driden, a young lady of great personal 
 attractions and a fair fortune. She turned, it seems, 
 a deaf ear to the flowing periods of her passionate 
 lover, and left him " to bee burnt and martyred in 
 those flames of adoration " which a letter she addressed 
 to him had, he assures her, kindled in him. Whether 
 he returned again to Cambridge, after burying his 
 father, is doubtful. From 1655 to 1657 nothing is 
 known of his movements except what mere con- 
 jecture has suggested. In spite of the assertions of 
 Mr. Christie and the old gentleman who assures us 
 that the head of the young poet was too roving to 
 stay there, we are inclined to believe with Malone 
 that, for some time, at least, subsequent to his father's 
 death, he renewed his residence at Trinity. How- 
 ever that may be, it is pretty certain that he had 
 settled in London about the middle of 1657. 
 
 Cromwell was then, though harassed with accumu- 
 lating difficulties, in the zenith of his power, and
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 13 
 
 Dryden's cousin Sir Gilbert Pickering stood high in 
 the Protector's favour. He sought at once his 
 cousin's patronage, and appears to have been for 
 some time his private secretary ; but his bent was 
 towards literature. His prospects were certainly 
 not encouraging, and it would indeed have required 
 more penetration than falls to the lot even of far- 
 sighted judges to discern the future author of 
 Absalom and AchitopTiel and The Hind and the 
 Panther in the stout, florid youth, clad in gray 
 Norwich drugget, who now offered himself as a 
 candidate for poetic fame. He was in his twenty- 
 seventh year. At an age when Aristophanes, Catul- 
 lus, Lucan, Persius, Milton, Tasso, Shelley, and Keats 
 had achieved immortality, he had given no signs of 
 poetic ability ; he had proved, on the contrary, that 
 he was ignorant of the very rudiments of his art ; 
 that he had still to acquire what all other poets 
 instinctively possess. A few lines to his cousin 
 Honor, which in our day would have scarcely found 
 a place in the columns of a provincial newspaper, an 
 execrable elegy on Lord Hastings' death, and a com- 
 mendatory poem on his friend Hoddesdon's Epigrams, 
 immeasurably inferior to what Pope and Kirke White 
 produced at twelve, conclusively showed that he had 
 no ear for verse, no command of poetic diction, no 
 taste, no tact. We have now to watch the process 
 by which these crude and meagre powers gradually 
 assumed, by dint of study and practice, a maturity, a 
 richness, and a ductility which are the pride and 
 wonder of our literature. We are fortunately enabled
 
 14 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 to trace with accuracy not only the successive stages 
 but the successive steps by which the work of Dryden 
 underwent this wondrous transformation and the 
 history of letters presents few more interesting and 
 instructive studies. 
 
 When he entered London he must have found the 
 character of our prose and of our poetry singularly 
 undefined. Both were in a state of transition, and 
 passing rapidly into new forms ; but as yet the nature 
 of the transition was obscure, the forms undetermined. 
 There were, in fact, four centres of activity. In 
 Herrick and in the Cavalier School vibrated still the 
 lyric note of Ben Jonson and Fletcher, and in the 
 tragedies of Shirley the large utterance of the old 
 drama was faltering out its last unheeded accents. 
 Cowley and his disciples were upholding the principles 
 of the " metaphysical " school, and their influence was, 
 on the whole, predominant in most of the narrative, 
 religious, and lyrical poetry of the time. In Milton, 
 Wither, and Marvell, in Owen, Baxter, and Howe, it 
 seemed for a moment not unlikely that Puritanism 
 would subdue poetry and prose alike to its own austere 
 genius. But the course of intellectual activity is 
 determined by causes which lie outside itself. Partly 
 in obedience to a great European movement in a 
 scientific direction, and to an anti-Puritan reaction 
 already beginning to display itself, partly owing to 
 the critical and reflective spirit which never fails to 
 follow an age of intense creative energy, and partly 
 no doubt owing to our increasing familiarity with the 
 literature of France, an adherence to the ideals of
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 15 
 
 Puritanism became impossible, to Elizabethan models 
 intolerable, to metaphysical subtleties repulsive. 
 Paradise Lost had still to be written, but it was 
 entirely out of tune with the age, as contemporary 
 testimonies grotesquely illustrate. The Pilgrim's 
 Progress was yet to come forth for the delight of 
 millions, but it was not till the present century that 
 it was considered anything but a vulgar romance, 
 appealing only to vulgar readers. In the fourth 
 influence was the principle of life, for it was in 
 harmony with the genius of the age, and it was the 
 influence exercised by Waller, Denham, and Davenant. 
 The terseness, finish, and dainty grace of the first 
 banished for ever the " wood-notes wild " of the early 
 singers, and did much to purify language and thought 
 from the extravagance of the " metaphysical " school, 
 though that school was still popular. The mechanical 
 music, moreover, of Waller's heroics, and the equable 
 but pleasing commonplace of his sentiments, were 
 contributing greatly to bring the tenets of the 
 " correct " school into fashion. Denham laboured also 
 to substitute reflection for imagination, criticism for 
 passion, and fitted the heroic couplet for its new 
 duties. Davenant followed in his footsteps, added 
 body and solidity to the limper harmony of Waller, 
 aimed at brevity and point, wrote confessedly on 
 critical principles, recast the drama, and encouraged 
 his coadjutors to recast it. Cowley, at that time the 
 most eminent poet in England, clung with inexplic- 
 .able pertinacity to the vagaries of the school of 
 Donne, except in his better moments. But these
 
 16 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 better moments sufficed to give him a foremost place 
 among the fathers of the critical school. A rhetorician 
 rather than a poet, without passion, without imagina- 
 tion, but rich in fancy and rich in thought, his style 
 insensibly took its colour from the temper of his 
 genius. Such were the men who initiated the litera- 
 ture which it was the task of the youth now entering 
 on his career to define and establish, of Pope to carry 
 to ultimate perfection, and of Darwin and Hayley to 
 reduce to an absurdity. 
 
 In September 1658 Cromwell died, and at the 
 beginning of the following year Dry den published a 
 copy of verses to deplore the event. The Heroic 
 Stanzas on the Death of the Lord Protector initiate 
 his poetical career. They are not only greatly 
 superior in point of style to his former productions, 
 but they exhibit a native vigour, an alert and active 
 fancy, and a degree of imitative skill which promised 
 well with time and practice. They showed also that 
 he had attached himself to the new school ; and are 
 modelled closely on the style of Gondibert, repeating 
 Davenant's peculiarities of turn and cadence with 
 careful fidelity. The death of Cromwell changed the 
 face of affairs, and after nearly eighteen months of 
 anarchy Charles II. was on the throne of his ancestors. 
 Dryden lost no time in attempting to ingratiate him- 
 self with the Royalists, and the three poems succeeding 
 the Heroic Stanzas, namely, Astrcea Redux, the Pane- 
 gyric on the Coronation, and the Epistle To My Lord 
 Chancellor, were written to welcome Charles II. and 
 to flatter Clarendon. These wearisome productions,
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 17 
 
 to consider them for a moment apart from their 
 interest as illustrating the development of Dryden's 
 powers, are in one continued strain of stilted falsetto. 
 They have neither truth nor nature. Affecting to be 
 the expression of patriotism and loyalty, they are 
 mere exercises in ingenious rhetoric. Not a note, 
 not a touch indicates that they had any other inspira- 
 tion than a desire to display eloquence. But they 
 prove how assiduously Dryden had been labouring to 
 make himself what Nature had to all appearance not 
 made him a poet. They are modelled studiously on 
 the poetry then most in vogue. Their versification, 
 tone, and colour are those of Cowley, Davenant, 
 Waller, and Denham happily blended. From the 
 first he has caught a certain solidity of rhythm, and 
 a happy trick of epigrammatic expression ; from the 
 second, a tone of equable smoothness, and the art of 
 perverting imagery into compliment ; from the third, 
 a habit of commentative reflection and scientific 
 allusion. Though he had avoided the grotesque 
 extravagance of the Metaphysical Poets, he was not 
 entirely free from their influence, and was careful 
 to enrich and enliven his diction with their varied and 
 wide-ranging imagery. Hence the restless straining 
 after illustration, selected indiscriminately from natural 
 science, from astronomy, from mathematics, from 
 mythology, from history, which is so marked a feature 
 in these and in all his early works. 
 
 About this time he had formed the aquaintance of 
 Sir Eobert Howard, a fashionable playright of some 
 
 distinction ; and he honoured his friend with some 
 
 c
 
 18 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 complimentary verses, which probably form the link 
 between the Heroic Stanzas on Cromwell and the 
 three poems of which we have just spoken. Early in 
 1663 appeared the Epistle to Dr. Charlton, the first 
 of his works which, according to Hallam, possesses 
 any considerable merit. Considerable merit it un- 
 doubtedly does not possess, but in harmony of 
 versification and in ease and vigour of style it is 
 superior to its predecessors. 
 
 Dry den had now served his apprenticeship and 
 become a writer by profession. He had quitted his 
 cousin, quarrelled with his Puritan relations, who 
 were probably not pleased with his apostasy to the 
 Eoyalists, and attached himself to Herringman, a 
 bookseller in the New Exchange, and at that time 
 the chief publisher of poems and plays. Though 
 the property he had inherited from his father must 
 have preserved him from actual want, it was not 
 sufficient to support him in independence, and he was 
 afterwards taunted with being Herringman's journey- 
 man. However this may be, his admission at this 
 time into the Royal Society which numbered among 
 its members Boyle, Wallis, Wilkins, Barrow, Wren, 
 Waller, Denham, Cowley, and the Duke of Bucking- 
 ham and his intimacy with Sir Robert Howard, 
 place it beyond all doubt that his position was not 
 that which this taunt would imply. He was, perhaps, 
 indebted to Howard for some useful introductions, 
 and, if his enemies are to be believed, for more 
 substantial assistance also. A correspondent in the 
 Gentleman's Magazine for February 1745 gives us a
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 19 
 
 glimpse of the young poet in his lighter hours : " I 
 remember plain John Dryden before he paid his court 
 with success to the great, in one uniform clothing of 
 Norwich drugget. I have ate tarts with him and 
 Madame Reeve at the Mulberry Gardens, where our 
 author advanced to a sword and a Chadreux wig." 
 Mr. Christie is very severe with this tart-eating and 
 Madame Reeve, but there is surely no reason for con- 
 cluding either that Dryden was a libertine or that 
 the lady was notoriously for many years his mistress. 
 The only definite authority for such a statement is a 
 passage in the Rehearsal, and to cite the Rehearsal 
 as testimony against Dryden would be as absurd as 
 to appeal to the Thesmophoriazusce and the Frogs in 
 support of scandals against Euripides. Whatever 
 may have been the nature of his connection with her, 
 it was probably discontinued on his marriage with 
 the Lady Elizabeth Howard. 1 This lady, the sister 
 of his friend Sir Robert Howard, was the youngest 
 daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and the marriage, 
 as the register still testifies, took place at St. Swithin's 
 Church, London, on the 1st of December 1663. It has 
 been confidently asserted that Dryden married her 
 under derogatory circumstances, and that previous to 
 her marriage with him she had been the mistress of the 
 Earl of Chesterfield. But of this there is no proof. 
 The two brutal libels in which charges are brought 
 against her good name accuse her husband of being 
 
 1 Mr. Christie dates this tart-eating with Madame Reeve after Dryden's 
 marriage ; hinc illce lacrymce. Sir Walter Scott more liberally dates it before. 
 In either case the witness must have been a child.
 
 20 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 a drunken profligate, and are full of that reckless 
 malignity which carries with it its own refutation. 
 Scott long ago pointed out the utter worthlessness of 
 their testimony. Since Scott wrote, a letter addressed 
 by her to Chesterfield has, it is true, been brought 
 to light, and this letter, according to Mitford 
 and Mr. Christie, strongly corroborates the former 
 evidence. We cannot see it. She was the social 
 equal of the Earl, who was acquainted both with her 
 father and with her brothers. She promises to meet 
 him at a place of public resort. She asks him indeed 
 not to believe what the world says of her ; but it is 
 surely hard to wrest these words into criminal signifi- 
 cance. There is nothing in the letter incompatible 
 either with an innocent flirtation or with a legitimate 
 and honourable attachment. That Chesterfield was a 
 libertine scarcely affects the question. To suppose 
 that a daughter of one of the first noblemen in 
 England should, while still living under her father's 
 roof, submit to be the mistress of a young rake, is 
 preposterous. Mr. Christie supports his authorities 
 with an a priori argument that if her character had 
 been unsullied she would never have married Dryden. 
 He forgets that Dryden was himself of good family, 
 that he had her brother to plead for him, that he had 
 all the facilities afforded by a long visit at her father's 
 country house, that he was not in those days the 
 "poet-squab," but that he was "distinguished by the 
 emulous favour of the fair sex." One of his libellers 
 has even gone so far as to say that "blushing virgins 
 had died for him." That the marriage was not a
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 21 
 
 happy one is only too probable, though the unhappi- 
 ness arose, it is clear, from causes quite unconnected 
 with infidelity, on the part either of the husband or 
 of the wife. The truth is that the Lady Elizabeth 
 was, like many of the fashionable ladies of that time, 
 almost wholly illiterate, and had no sympathy with 
 her husband's pursuits. She appears also to have 
 been a woman of a morose and irritable temper. She 
 subsequently became insane. It is, however, due to 
 her to say that she was a tender and affectionate 
 mother, as one of her letters, preserved in Dryden's 
 correspondence, very touchingly shows. 
 
 About this time Dryden began his connection with 
 the stage, and this connection was, with some inter- 
 ruptions, continued till within a few years of his death, 
 his first play The Wild Gallant being acted in 
 1663, his last Love Triumphant in 1694. Since 
 the closing of the theatres by the Puritans in 1642, 
 the drama, which had been for upwards of a century the 
 glory and the pride of the English people, supported 
 by the throne, the aristocracy, and the great City 
 Guilds, had maintained a precarious and fugitive 
 existence. The successors of the Burbages and 
 Condells, who had once shaken the Globe and the 
 Blackfriars with the plaudits of ecstatic crowds, had 
 been constrained to act for the amusement of a few 
 desperate enthusiasts in a private room at Holland 
 House, or in miserable barns in the suburbs and back 
 streets, dreading the penance of imprisonment and 
 the imposition of enormous fines. Davenant had 
 indeed, by an ingenious compromise, succeeded in
 
 22 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 evading the prohibition of the Government. He had 
 in 1656 obtained leave to present at the back part of 
 Rutland House an entertainment so he called it 
 of declamation and music, after the manner of the 
 ancients ; and The Siege of Rhodes and Tlie History 
 of Sir Francis Drake still testify the existence of 
 this bastard drama. Four years afterwards the acces- 
 sion of Charles II. rescinded the Ordinance of 1642, 
 and, though the cautious policy of Clarendon only 
 suffered two theatres to be licensed, both managers 
 and playwrights lost no time in indemnifying them- 
 selves for their long privations. The King's Theatre 
 was under the direction of Thomas Killigrew, an 
 accomplished and licentious wit, whose sallies were 
 long remembered at Whitehall. The Duke's Theatre 
 was under the direction of Davenant, who, in 1660, 
 had been raised to the Laureateship. The position of 
 a professional writer who had to live by his pen was 
 once more pretty much what it had been when poor 
 Greene jeered at Shakspeare for tagging his verses ; 
 and when Shakspeare himself made his fortune out of 
 the Blackfriars Theatre. Dryden must have felt that 
 he had little to fear from the competition of his imme- 
 diate predecessors. Of the giant race who, to borrow 
 a sentence from Lamb, spoke nearly the same lan- 
 guage, and had a set of moral feelings and notions in 
 common, Shirley only remained. But Shirley had 
 collapsed, worn out and penniless, into a suburban 
 pedagogue; Ford had died in 1639; Massinger in 
 1640; and in such plays as Cokayne's Obstinate 
 Lady, Chamberlayne's Loves Victory, Killigrew's
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 23 
 
 Claricilla, and Davenant's tragedies and tragi- 
 comedies which may be cited as typical of the 
 period immediately preceding the Restoration the 
 drama had degenerated into mere fluent rhetoric. 
 
 Into a minute account of Dryden's labours for the 
 stage it is neither profitable nor requisite to enter. 
 Johnson has lamented the necessity of following the 
 progress of his theatrical fame, but sensibly remarks 
 at the same time that the composition and fate of 
 eight - and - twenty dramas include too much of a 
 poetical life to be omitted. They include unhappily 
 the best years of that life ; they prevented, as their 
 author pathetically complains, the composition of 
 works better suited to his genius. Had Fortune 
 allowed him to indulge that genius, Lucretius might 
 have found his equal and Juvenal and Lucan their 
 superiors. He had bound himself, however, to the 
 profession of a man of letters ; he had taken to 
 literature as a trade, and it was therefore necessary 
 for him to supply, not the commodities of which he 
 happened to have a monopoly, but the commodities 
 of which his customers had need. He followed models 
 for which he has been at no pains to conceal his 
 contempt, and he gratified as a playwright the 
 vitiated taste which as a critic he did his best to 
 correct and purify. Those who live to please must, 
 as he well knew, please to live. The subtlety and 
 refinement of Shakspearean comedy, the conscientious, 
 elaborate, and lofty art of Jonson, were beyond his 
 reach and beyond the taste of his patrons ; but the 
 bustle, the machinery, the surprises, the complicated
 
 24 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 intrigue of the Spanish stage, spiced with piquant wit, 
 with obscenity alternately latent and rampant, were 
 irresistibly attractive to a profligate Court and to a 
 debased and licentious mob. "With all this Dryden 
 hastened to provide them. 1 His first play, The Wild 
 Gallant y was a failure " as poor a thing," writes 
 honest Pepys, " as ever I saw in my life." Comedy, 
 as he soon found, was not his forte, and, though he 
 lived to produce five others by dint of wholesale 
 plagiarism from Moliere, Quinault, Corneille, and 
 Plautus, and by laboriously interpolating filth which 
 may challenge comparison with Philotus or Fletcher's 
 Custom of the Country, two of them were hissed off 
 the stage, one was indifferently received, and the 
 other two are inferior in comic effect, we do not say 
 to the worst of Congreve's but to the worst of 
 Wycherley's. He had, in truth, few of the qualities 
 essential to a comic dramatist " I know," he says 
 himself in the Defence of the Essay of Dramatic 
 Poesy, " I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy. 
 I want that gaiety of humour which is required to it. 
 My conversation is slow and dull, my humour saturnine 
 and reserved. So that those who decry my comedies 
 do me no injury except it be in point of profit ; re- 
 putation in them is the last thing to which I shall 
 pretend." He had 'indeed little humour ; he had no 
 grace ; he had no eye for these subtler improprieties 
 of character and conduct which are the soul of comedy; 
 
 1 " I confess," he says in the Defence of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy, "my 
 chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour of this 
 be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey 
 if
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 25 
 
 what wit he had was coarse and boisterous ; he had 
 no power of inventing ludicrous incidents, he could 
 not manage the light artillery of colloquial raillery. 
 The Wild Gallant was succeeded by The Rival 
 Ladies, and it is a relief to return to his efforts in 
 serious drama. This play was written about the 
 end of 1663, but, warned by his former failure, he 
 exchanged in the lighter parts plain prose for blank 
 verse, and he wrote the tragic portions in highly 
 elaborated rhyming couplets. In the Dedication to 
 the Earl of Orrery, he defended with arguments, which 
 he afterwards expanded in his Essay of Dramatic 
 Poesy, the practice of composing tragedies in rhyme. 
 The Rival Ladies was well received, and he hastened 
 to assist his friend, Sir Robert Howard, in The Indian 
 Queen, which was produced the following year at the 
 King's Theatre with all that splendour of costume 
 and scenery common to the theatre of the Restora- 
 tion. His powers were now rapidly maturing, and 
 The Indian Emperor, his next production, is a 
 masterpiece in ornate and musical rhetoric. 
 
 These plays were a great success ; and they were 
 something more. They revealed to Dryden where 
 his real strength lay. They furnished him with the 
 means of disguising his deficiencies as a dramatist, 
 and of displaying these powers in which he had no 
 rival among his contemporaries, and in which he has 
 had no equal since. English rhymed heroic tragedy 
 was practically Dryden's creation. Of their origin 
 and character he has himself given us an interesting 
 account in the essay prefixed to The Conquest of
 
 26 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Granada. He there tells us that the germ of them 
 was to be found in Davenant's recast of The Siege of 
 Rhodes, and he continues : 
 
 Having done him this justice as my guide, I will do myself 
 so much as to give an account of what I have performed after 
 him. I observed that what was wanting to the perfection of his 
 Siege of Rhodes was design and variety of characters. And in 
 the midst of this consideration by mere accident I opened the 
 next book that lay by me, which was an Ariosto in Italian, and 
 the very first two lines of that poem gave me light to all I could 
 desire 
 
 Le donne, i cavalier, 1'arme, gli amori, 
 
 Le cortesie, 1'audaci imprese io canto. 
 
 For the very next reflection that I made was this : that an heroic 
 play ought to be an imitation in little of an heroic poem, and 
 consequently that love and valour ought to be subject of it. 
 
 Dryden has omitted to notice, perhaps because he 
 thought it sufficiently obvious, that these plays also 
 owed much both to the French dramatists, particularly 
 to Corneille, and to the French heroic romances of 
 D'Urfe, Gomberville, Calprenede, and Madame de 
 Scuderi; borrowing from the first, not indeed the 
 style and colour, but the pitch and tone of the rhymed 
 dialogue, and from the second the stilted, precious, 
 and bombastic sentiment, as well as innumerable 
 hints in matters of detail. On these foundations 
 Dryden proceeded to raise his fantastic structure. 
 Carefully selecting such material as would be most 
 appropriate for rhetorical treatment, and most remote 
 from truth and life, he drew sometimes on the Heroic 
 Romances, as in The Maiden Queen, which is derived 
 from The Grand Cyrus, and in The Conquest of 
 Granada, which is mainly based on the Almahide
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 27 
 
 of Madame de Scuderi ; sometimes on the exotic 
 fictions of Spanish, Portuguese, or Eastern legends, 
 as in The Indian Emperor and Aurengzebe; or on 
 the misty annals of early Christian martyrology, as 
 in Tyrannic Love ; or on the dreamland of poets, as 
 in T/ie State of Innocence. All is false and unreal. 
 The world in which his characters move is a world of 
 which there is no counterpart in human experience, but 
 which is so incongruous and chaotic that it is simply 
 unintelligible and unimaginable even as fiction. His 
 men and women are men and women only by courtesy. 
 It would be more correct to speak of them as puppets 
 tricked out in fantastic tinsel, the showman, as he 
 jerks them, not taking the trouble to speak through 
 them in falsetto, but merely talking in his natural 
 voice. And in nearly every drama we have the same 
 leading puppets, the one in a male, the other in a 
 female form. The male impersonates either a rant- 
 ing, blustering tyrant, all fanfarado and bombast, like 
 Almanza and Boabdelin, Maximin and Montezuma, 
 or some sorely-tried and pseudo-chivalrous hero, like 
 Cortez and Aurengzebe ; the female some meretricious 
 Dulcinea, who is the object of the male hero's honour- 
 able or dishonourable desires. This Dulcinea has 
 usually some rival Dulcinea to vex and bring her 
 out, and the tyrant or preux chevalier some rival 
 opponent who serves the same purpose. This enables 
 the poet to pit these characters against each other in 
 declamation and dialogue, and it is these interbandied 
 declamations and dialogues which make up the greater 
 part, or at least the most effective part, of the
 
 28 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 dramas. Not that scenic effect is ignored, for battles, 
 processions, feasts, sensational arrests, harryings, 
 murders and attempted murders, invocations of the 
 dead, apparitions, and every variety of agitating 
 surprise, break up and diversify these dialogues and 
 declarations with most admired disorder. But, worth- 
 less and absurd as these plays are from a dramatic 
 point of view, as compositions they have often dis- 
 tinguished merit. The charm of their versification, 
 which is seen in its highest perfection in The Con- 
 quest of Granada, The Indian Emperor, Aurengzebe, 
 and The State of Innocence, is irresistible, being a 
 singular and exquisite combination of dignity and 
 grace, of vigour and sweetness. Dryden is always 
 impressive when he clothes moral reflection in verse, 
 and always brilliant when he presents commonplaces 
 in epigram ; and he was careful to enrich these plays 
 with both. Some of the best examples of his ethical 
 eloquence, and many of his best aphorisms, are to be 
 found in them. But perhaps their most remarkable 
 feature is the rhymed argumentative dialogue. 
 Dryden's power of maintaining an argument in verse, 
 of putting, with epigrammatic terseness in sonorous 
 and musical rhythm, the case for and against in the 
 theme proposed, was unrivalled ; and he revelled in 
 its exercise. We may select for illustration the 
 dialogue between Almanzor and Almahide in the 
 third act of the first part of The Conquest of 
 Granada, that between Cydaria and Cortez in the 
 second act of The Conquest of Mexico, that between 
 Indamora and Arimant in the second act of Aureng-
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 29 
 
 zebe, and that in which St. Catharine converts Apol- 
 lonius from Paganism to Christianity in the second 
 act of Tyrannic Love. But if these plays add nothing 
 to Dryden's reputation, it was in their composition 
 that he trained, developed, and matured the powers 
 which enabled him to produce, with a rapidity so 
 wonderful, the masterpieces on which his fame rests. 
 
 But to return. The year of the plague closed the 
 theatres, and the following year, not less calamitous 
 to the Londoner, scarcely made the metropolis a 
 desirable abode. Dryden spent the greater part 
 of this long period at Charlton in Wiltshire, the seat 
 of his father-in-law. He employed his retirement in 
 producing two of the longest and perhaps the most 
 carefully finished of all his writings, the Annus 
 Mirabilis, and the Essay of Dramatic Poesy. In 
 the Annus Mirabilis he returned to the heroic 
 quatrains of Davenant, because he had, he tells us in 
 the preface, "ever judged them more noble and of 
 greater dignity, both for the sound and number, than 
 any other verse in use amongst us." A minute and 
 somewhat tedious account of the four days' battle 
 with the Dutch fleet, an apostrophe to the Eoyal 
 Society, a description of the fire of London, written 
 with great animation and vigour, the King's services 
 at that crisis, and a prophecy of what the future city 
 would be form the material of the poem. Both in 
 its merits and in its defects it bears a close re- 
 semblance to the Pharsalia of Lucan. It is enriched 
 with some fine touches of natural description, and, if 
 the moonlight night at sea and the simile of the bees
 
 30 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 were borrowed from Virgil, the pictures of the dying 
 hare, of the baffled falcon, of the herded beasts lying 
 on the dewy grass, and of the moon "blunting its 
 crescent on the edge of day," show that Dry den had 
 the eye of an artist as he wandered about the park at 
 Charlton. The work is disfigured with many " meta- 
 physical" extravagances, but the King's prayer, as 
 well as the concluding stanzas, must rank among the 
 most majestic passages in English rhetorical poetry. 
 Preceded by a Dedication to the Metropolis, executed 
 with a laboured dignity of diction and sentiment in 
 which he seldom afterwards indulged, it appeared in 
 1667. If the poem commemorated the events of a 
 year memorable in history, the year in which it saw 
 the light was not less memorable in literature, for 
 it witnessed the publication of Paradise Lost in 
 England and of Tartuffe and Andromaque in France ; 
 and, while it mourned the death of Wither, of Cowley, 
 and of Jeremy Taylor, it welcomed into the world 
 Jonathan Swift and John Arbuthnot. 
 
 The Essay of Dramatic Poesy, which is cast in 
 the form of a dialogue under names representing 
 
 E^acvylA? UlVOeu 
 
 respectively Lord Buckhurst. Sir Charles Sedley, Sir 
 
 r e*ta \\l*a-A>c- . . J ' 
 
 Robert Howard, and the author himself, is not only 
 an admirable discourse, but it forms an era in the 
 history of literary criticism. The treatises of Wilson, 
 Gascoigne, Sidney, Webbe, Puttenham, Campion, and 
 Daniel ; the occasional excursions of Ascham in his 
 Schoolmaster, and of Ben Jonson in his Discoveries ; 
 the dissertation of Hobbes and the incidental remarks 
 of Cowley, Denham, and Davenant, may be said to
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 31 
 
 represent what had hitherto appeared in England on 
 this important province of literature. But none of 
 these works will bear any comparison with Dryden's. 
 From many of the conclusions, indeed, at which the 
 critics in Dryden's dialogue arrive, modern criticism 
 would undoubtedly dissent, and it may freely be con- 
 ceded that there is much in it which is superficial and 
 even erroneous. Such would be the remarks on the 
 relative merits of ancient and modern poets, and on 
 the superiority of the later drama to the Elizabethan. 
 But the remarks on the defects and limitations of 
 ancient tragedy, on the necessity for extending the 
 sphere of the drama, and of paying more attention to 
 precision, correctness, and measure than the poets of 
 the preceding age had done, are admirable ; the 
 Examen of The Silent Woman is an excellent piece 
 of analytical criticism, so also are the portraits of 
 Shakspeare and Ben Jonson. But the best thing 
 in the essay is the defence of rhyme in tragedy, which 
 is a masterpiece of ingenious reasoning. 
 
 At what time he left the country is not known, 
 but in 1668 Dry den was again busy with his literary 
 engagements in London. The Annus Mirabilis had 
 placed him at the head of the poets of the new 
 school ; the Essay of Dramatic Poesy had placed 
 him at the head of contemporary critics. But, as 
 he was not in a position to prefer fame to independ- 
 ence, he at once betook himself to the drama, and 
 such was his industry that within the year he pro- 
 duced three plays, in one of which, a wretched 
 recast of Shakspeare's Tempest, he had the assist-
 
 32 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 ance of Davenant. About this time he contracted 
 with the King's Theatre to supply them, in con- 
 sideration of an -annual salary, with three plays a 
 year, and, though he failed to satisfy the terms of 
 the agreement, the company, with a liberality not 
 very common with people of their profession, allowed 
 him his stipulated share of the profits. In 1666 the 
 office of Historiographer-Royal had been vacated by 
 the death of James Howell, who is still remembered 
 as the pleasing author of the Familiar Letters, and 
 in 1668 the death of Davenant threw the Laureateship 
 open. To both these offices Dryden succeeded. He 
 was now in comfortable circumstances, but he was 
 soon brought into collision with opponents who 
 embittered his life, and on whom he was destined to 
 confer an unenviable immortality. 
 
 Among the young noblemen who varied the amuse- 
 ments of prosecuting vagrant amours, in the guise of 
 quacks, on Tower Hill, and of haranguing mobs naked 
 from the balcony of public-houses in Bow Street, with 
 scribbling libels and hanging about the greenrooms, 
 were George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and 
 Thomas Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The Duke either 
 had, or pretended to have, a contempt for the rhymed 
 heroic tragedies which were now in almost exclusive 
 possession of the stage. These heroic plays Bucking- 
 ham had already resolved to ridicule in a farce in 
 which Davenant was to be the principal character. 
 As Davenant had died, he resolved to substitute 
 Dryden. His Grace's literary abilities were, however, 
 scarcely equal to the task, as the specimens which he
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 33 
 
 afterwards gave of them in his Reflections on Absalom 
 and Acliitophel abundantly testify. He therefore 
 sought the assistance of Samuel Butler, Thomas Sprat, 
 and Martin Clifford. Butler, a consummate master 
 of caustic humour, had recently parodied the heroic 
 plays in a dialogue between two cats, and was 
 smarting under the double sting of neglect and envy. 
 Sprat, though a prebendary of Westminster, was a 
 man whose convivial wit was equal to his convivial 
 excesses, and these excesses were proverbial among 
 his friends, and long remembered by the good people 
 about Chertsey. Clifford, a clever man and a 
 respectable scholar, found the Mastership of the 
 Charterhouse not incompatible with habits which 
 he had probably contracted during his lieutenancy 
 in the Earl of Orrery's regiment, and was notorious 
 for his licentious tastes and his powers of scurrilous 
 buffoonery. Between them they produced The 
 Rehearsal. In this amusing farce which furnished 
 Sheridan with the idea and with many of the points 
 of his Critic the central figure is Bayes, a vain and 
 silly playwright; and Bayes is Dryden. "With all 
 the licence of the Athenian stage, Dryden's personal 
 peculiarities, his florid complexion, his dress, his 
 snuff-taking, the tone of his voice, his gestures, his 
 " down look," his favourite oaths " Gad's my Life," 
 " I'fackins," " Gadsooks," were faithfully caught and 
 copied. Buckingham, who was unrivalled as a 
 mimic, undertook to train Lacy for the part of 
 Bayes. The mischievous joke succeeded. In a few 
 weeks Bayes, indistinguishable from Dryden, was
 
 34 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 making all London merry. Dryden's plots were 
 pulled to pieces, the scenes on which he had prided 
 himself were mercilessly mangled, and he had the 
 mortification of hearing that the very theatre which 
 a few nights before had been ringing with the sonorous 
 couplets of his Siege of Granada, was now ringing 
 with laughter at parodies of his favourite passages, as 
 happy as those with which Aristophanes maddened 
 Agathon and Euripides. Dryden made no immediate 
 reply. He calmly admitted that the satire had a 
 great many good strokes, and has more than once 
 alluded to the character of Bayes with easy in- 
 difference. 
 
 His equanimity, however, seems to have been 
 really disturbed by the success of Elkanah Settle's 
 Empress of Morocco, about a year and a half after- 
 wards. This miserable man, who is now known only 
 by the stinging lines in the second part of Absalom 
 and Achitophel, had found a patron in the Earl of 
 Kochester. The Earl had possibly been annoyed at 
 Dryden's intimacy with Sheffield ; he may have been 
 impelled merely by whim. But, whatever were his 
 motives, he resolved to do his utmost to oppose the 
 Laureate, with whom he had up to this moment been 
 on good terms. By his efforts The Empress of 
 Morocco was acted at Whitehall, the lords at Court 
 and the maids -of -honour supporting the principal 
 characters. It was splendidly printed, adorned with 
 cuts, and inscribed to the Earl of Norwich in a 
 dedication in which Dryden was studiously insulted. 
 London, following fashion, was loud in its praises, and
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 35 
 
 Dryden, knowing the nature of theatrical fame, was 
 seriously alarmed. Crowne and Shad well, both 
 leading playwrights, and both at that time his friends, 
 lent him their assistance in a pamphlet which exposed 
 Settle's pretensions in a strain of coarse and brutal 
 abuse. Dryden now felt that he was on his mettle, 
 and applied himself with more scrupulousness to his 
 dramatic productions. In The State of Innocence, 
 which has been justly censured as a travesty of 
 Paradise Lost, and in Aurengzeoe, his splendid 
 powers of versification and rhetoric are seen in per- 
 fection. In truth, these two plays, amid much 
 bombast, contain some of his finest writing, and 
 possess throughout an ease, a copiousness and uniform 
 magnificence of diction, only occasionally reached 
 before the result perhaps of a careful study of the 
 principal English poets, to which he had, as he in- 
 formed Sir George Mackenzie, about this time applied 
 himself. With Aurengzebe died the rhymed heroic 
 plays. For Dryden was now weary of his own 
 creation, and in the prologue to this play he announced 
 that he "had another taste of wit," that he had 
 determined to discard " his long - loved mistress, 
 Ehyme," and that he should henceforth follow nature 
 and Shakspeare. The reasons for this sudden con- 
 version may, perhaps, be assigned partly to his 
 disgust at the success of Settle's Empress of Morocco 
 and of other inferior imitations of his own work, and 
 partly to a sincere conviction of the truth of what he 
 had said about the restrictions placed on a tragic poet 
 who employs rhyme :
 
 36 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Passion's too fierce to be in fetters bound, 
 And Nature flies him like enchanted ground. 1 
 
 In any case, his conversion was sincere, and again 
 tragedy and tragi-comedy took the ply from his 
 example. As between 1664 and 1677 he had brought 
 the rhymed heroic plays into fashion, so from 1678 
 he brought, and brought permanently, blank verse 
 
 into fashion. 
 
 (jtfft 
 
 In his next play, All for Love, he kept his promise, 
 and enrolled himself among the disciples of Shak- 
 speare. But he was careful to show that it was as 
 no servile imitator. Indeed, his design was to improve 
 on his model, and to show how a drama might be 
 constructed which should reflect nature as faithfully 
 as the Shakspearean drama had done without violat- 
 ing the canons of Aristotle. It was an interesting 
 experiment, and he certainly gave it a fair trial. To 
 challenge comparison with Shakspeare he chose as 
 his subject the story of Antony and Cleopatra. And 
 we may fairly concede to him what he claims that 
 he has made the moral of his play clear; that the 
 fabric of the plot is regular ; that the action is "so 
 much one that it is without underplot or episode " ; 
 that "every scene conduces to the main design and 
 every act concludes with a turn of it " ; that in the 
 matter of the unities of time and place it is irreproach- 
 able, and that the style is evidently modelled, and 
 sometimes successfully, on the style of " the divine 
 Shakspeare." But to compare All for Love with 
 Antony and Cleopatra would be to compare works 
 
 1 Prologue to Aurengzebe.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 37 
 
 which, in all that pertains to the essence of poetry 
 and tragedy, differ not in degree merely but in kind. 
 And yet Dry den's tragedy, even from a dramatic 
 point of view, is, with three or four exceptions, 
 superior to anything produced by his contemporaries. 
 If his Cleopatra is wretched, his Antony is powerfully 
 sketched. The altercation between Antony and 
 Ventidius, though modelled too closely on that 
 between Brutus and Cassius in Julius Ccesar, is a 
 noble piece of dialectical rhetoric, while the scene 
 between Cleopatra and Octavia is perhaps finer than 
 anything which the stage had seen since Massinger. 
 
 Dryden was now at the height of his theatrical 
 fame. His last three plays had been deservedly 
 popular, and, satisfied with their success, he began 
 with his habitual carelessness to relax in his efforts, 
 as Limberham and Troilus and Cressida sufficiently 
 testify. Settle was crushed, but Rochester was busy. 
 About this time appeared, circulated in manuscript, the 
 Essay on Satire. The nominal author was the Earl 
 of Mulgrave, Dryden's friend and patron. The poem 
 contained some coarse and bitter attacks on Sir Car 
 Scrope, on Rochester, on Sedley, and on the two 
 favourite mistresses of the King. It was believed at 
 the time that the real author was Dryden ; it was 
 supposed afterwards that the real author was Mul- 
 grave, but that the work had been revised by Dryden. 
 Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Christie can see no trace of 
 Dryden's hand, and are anxious to save him from the 
 discredit of being convicted of playing a double part. 
 We wish we could agree with them. It seems to
 
 38 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 us that Dryden's touch is as unmistakably apparent 
 in this essay as the hand of Shakspeare is apparent 
 amid the interpolated rubbish of Pericles. Dryden's 
 mannerisms of expression, cadence, rhythm, are so 
 marked that it is never possible for a critical ear 
 to mistake them. They have often been cleverly 
 imitated ; they have never been exactly reproduced. 
 It has been alleged that Pope revised the text as 
 it now stands ; but Pope, according to the same 
 authority, revised the text of Mulgrave's Essay on 
 Poetry, and the hand is not the hand of Pope. 
 It is not perhaps too much to say that Pope, with 
 his style formed and his principles of versification 
 fixed, would have been as incompetent as Mulgrave 
 to catch with such subtle fidelity the characteristics 
 of the elder poet. We very much fear, therefore, 
 that the drubbing which Dryden got in Eose Alley, 
 on the night of the 18th of November 1679, was not 
 undeserved ; and, if Rochester took up the quarrel 
 in behalf of the Duchess of Portsmouth, we can 
 only regret that he had not the courage to administer 
 the cudgelling himself. One of his letters, however, 
 makes it probable that he was influenced by the less 
 generous motive of revenging the libel on himself. 
 The Rose Alley ambuscade, which might have cost 
 the victim his life, and was certainly a disgrace to 
 all who were concerned in it, appears to have been 
 generally regarded as derogatory only to Dryden, 
 and long continued to furnish matter for facetious 
 ribaldry to party scribblers and coffee-house wits. 
 Dryden had now arrived at that period in his
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 39 
 
 career when he was to produce the works which have 
 made his name immortal. From the fall of Claren- 
 don in August 1667 to the death of Shaftesbury in 
 January 1683, England was in a high state of ferment 
 and agitation. The mad joy of 1660 had undergone 
 its natural reaction, and that reaction was intensified 
 by a long series of national calamities and political 
 blunders. There were feuds in the Cabinet and 
 among the people ; the established religion was in 
 imminent peril ; the Royal House had become a 
 centre of perfidy and disaffection. Clarendon had 
 been made the scapegoat of the disasters which had 
 marked the commencement of the reign of the 
 miserable squabbles attendant on the Act of Indem- 
 nity, of the first Dutch War, of the sale of Dunkirk. 
 But Clarendon was now in exile, and with him was 
 removed one of the very few honourable ministers in 
 the service of the Stuarts. The Triple Alliance was 
 defeated by the scandalous Treaty of Dover, by which 
 an English King bound himself to re-establish the 
 Roman Catholic religion in England, and to join his 
 arms with those of France in support of the house of 
 Bourbon, that he might turn the arms of the foreigner 
 against his own subjects should they attempt to 
 oppose his designs. Between the end of 1667 and the 
 beginning of 1674 the direction of affairs was in 
 the hands of the Cabal, the most unprincipled and 
 profligate Ministry in the annals of English politics. 
 Then followed the administration of Danby. Danby 
 fell partly because no Minister at such a time could 
 hold his own for long, mainly owing to the machina-
 
 40 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 tions of Louis XIV., who was to the England of 
 Charles II. what his predecessor Louis XL had been 
 to the England of Edward IV. From a jarring and 
 turbulent chaos of Cavaliers, Roman Catholics, Presby- 
 terians, Independents, Country Parties, of colliding 
 interests, of maddened Commons, of a corrupted and 
 corrupting Ministry, of a disaffected Church, of plots 
 and counterplots of a Royal House ostensibly in opposi- 
 tion but secretly in union, two great parties had been 
 gradually defining themselves. In May 1662 the 
 King had married Catharine of Braganza, but he had 
 no issue by her, and as she had now been his wife 
 for seventeen years they were not likely to have issue, 
 and the question of the succession became urgent. 
 In the event of the King having no legitimate 
 children the crown would revert to the Duke of York. 
 But the Duke of York was a Papist, and of all the 
 many prejudices of the English people generally, the 
 prejudice against Papacy was strongest. All now 
 began to centre on this question, and two great 
 factions were formed. The one insisted on the 
 exclusion of the Duke of York from the right of 
 succession on the ground of his religion. These were 
 the Petitioners and Exclusionists, afterwards nick- 
 named Whigs, and their leader was the Earl of 
 Shaftesbury. The other party, strongest among 
 Churchmen and the aristocracy, were anxious, partly 
 in accordance with the theory of the divine right of 
 kings and the duty of passive obedience, and partly 
 with an eye to their own interests, to please the King 
 by supporting the claim of his brother. These were
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 41 
 
 the Abhorrers, afterwards nicknamed Tories. The 
 object of the Exclusionists was to inflame the populace 
 against the Papists. For this purpose the infamous 
 fictions of Gates and his accomplices were accepted 
 and promulgated, and the complications which 
 succeeded the fall of Danby took their rise. These 
 were succeeded by a second attempt to exasperate the 
 public mind against the anti- Exclusionists, which 
 found expression in the Meal-tub Plot. Meanwhile 
 Shaftesbury had conceived the idea of securing the 
 succession for Monmouth, the King's son by Lucy 
 Walters. Monmouth was a popular favourite, and 
 was early induced by Shaftesbury to pose as the 
 representative of Protestantism. A wild story was 
 circulated that Charles had made Lucy Walters his 
 wife. Every month added to the popular excitement, 
 and Shaftesbury, at the head of the stormy democracy 
 of the city, was now sanguine of success. All centred 
 on the Exclusion Bill, which on the llth of Novem- 
 ber 1680 triumphantly passed the Commons, but was 
 thrown out by the Lords. The country was now on 
 the verge of civil war. Parliament was dissolved in 
 January 1681, and such was the frenzy in London 
 that the next Parliament was summoned to meet at 
 Oxford. It met amid storm and tumult in the 
 following March, but was suddenly dissolved without 
 transacting business. 
 
 All this time a savage literary warfare was raging, 
 in which the Whigs had been most conspicuous. 
 The King, the Duke of York, and the Ministry were 
 assailed with a rancour and ferocity never before
 
 42 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 displayed by the popular press of this country. The 
 prose libels of Hunt and Ferguson vied with the 
 sermons of Hickeringhill and the rhymes of Settle and 
 Shadwell in damning the Duke and his cause, and in 
 upholding Shaftesbury and Protestantism. The stage, 
 patronised by the King, had ever since the Restora- 
 tion been true to him. It had upheld monarchy : it 
 had insisted on the divine right of kings, and had 
 zealously set itself to abolish all traces of republican- 
 ism. It refused, however, to support the Duke of 
 York, and in The Spanish Friar Dryden employed 
 his dramatic ability to cover the Papists with ridicule 
 and odium. In the person of the protagonist 
 Dominic were represented all those characteristics 
 which a year before young Oldham had satirised as 
 typical of the Popish priest ; meanness, gluttony, and 
 avarice, set off and darkened by vices still more 
 criminal and loathsome, are careful concessions to 
 popular sentiment, though, as Scott well observes, a 
 sense of artistic propriety led the satirist to endow 
 his hero with the wit and talents necessary to save 
 him from being utterly contemptible. The Spanish 
 Friar is beyond question the most skilfully constructed 
 of all Dry den's plays. 1 
 
 Dryden's support of the Protestant cause by no 
 means implied apostasy from the Court and the Tories, 
 or any sympathy with the faction of Shaftesbury and 
 Monmouth. He was soon indeed to give abundant 
 proof of this. The fear of civil war, now to all 
 
 1 He was not, however, satisfied with it himself. See his remarks in the 
 Parallel between Poetry and Painting.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 43 
 
 appearance imminent, brought on a Tory reaction, 
 and the King soon found himself strong enough to 
 strike a decisive blow against the arch enemy of the 
 public peace. In July Shaftesbury was arrested on a 
 charge of " subornation of high treason for conspiring 
 for the death of the King, and the subversion of the 
 Government/' and thrown into the Tower to await 
 his trial at the Old Bailey in the following November. 
 At this momentous crisis, just a week before the trial 
 on which so much depended, appeared Absalom and 
 Achitophel. Well might Scott observe that " the 
 time of its appearance was chosen with as much art 
 as the poem displays genius." Its popularity was 
 instantaneous and enormous. There were two edi- 
 tions within two months, and seven others followed 
 at no long interval. Nothing approaching to such a 
 hit had been made since the appearance of the first 
 part of Hudibras. In one respect this poem stands 
 alone in literature. A party pamphlet dedicated to 
 the hour, it is yet immortal. No poem in our lan- 
 guage is so interpenetrated with contemporary allu- 
 sion, with contemporary portraiture, with contem- 
 porary point, yet no poem in our language has been 
 more enjoyed by succeeding generations of readers. 
 Scores of intelligent men who know by heart the 
 characters of Zimri and Achitophel are content to 
 remain in ignorance of the political careers of Bucking- 
 ham and Shaftesbury. The speech in which Achitophel 
 incites his faltering disciple has been admired and re- 
 cited by hundreds who have been blind to its historical 
 fidelity and to its subtle personalities. The plan of
 
 44 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 the poem is not perhaps original. The idea of casting 
 a satire in the epic mould was derived perhaps from 
 the fourth Satire of Juvenal though Dry den is 
 serious where Juvenal is mock-heroic. Horace and 
 Lucan undoubtedly supplied him with models for the 
 elaborate portraits, and Lucan's description of the 
 social and political condition of Kome at the time of 
 the great civic conflict is unmistakably Dryden's 
 archetype for his picture of the state of parties in 
 London. Nor was the ingenious device of disguising 
 living persons and current incidents and analogies 
 new to his readers. A Koman Catholic poet, for 
 example, had in 1679 paraphrased the scriptural story 
 of Naboth's vineyard, applying it to the condemna- 
 tion of Lord Stafford for his supposed complicity in 
 the Popish Plot, while a small prose tract published at 
 Dublin in 1680, entitled Absalom's Conspiracy; or 
 The Tragedy of Treason, anticipates in adumbration 
 the very scheme of his work. 
 
 Absalom and Achitophel produced, naturally 
 enough, innumerable replies from the Whig party, all 
 of which have deservedly sunk into oblivion. We 
 are certainly not inclined to enter into the compara- 
 tive merits of Toivser the Second, Azaria and 
 Hushai, and Absalom Senior, or to determine the 
 relative proportion of dulness between Henry Care, 
 Samuel Pordage, and Elkanah Settle. 
 
 Meanwhile the Bill against Shaftesbury had been 
 presented to the Grand Jury. It was ignored, and 
 Shaftesbury was immediately liberated from the 
 Tower. The joy of the Whigs knew no bounds.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 45 
 
 Bonfires blazed from one end of London to the other ; 
 the city rang with boisterous jubilee ; a medal was 
 struck to commemorate the event. The Tories, 
 baffled and mortified, were at their wit's end to know 
 what to do. At this moment the King happening to 
 meet Dryden is said to have suggested to him a 
 satire on the Whig triumph, and to have urged him 
 to direct once more against Shaftesbury those weapons 
 of invective and ridicule which he had already wielded 
 with such signal success. A less fertile genius would 
 have found it difficult to repeat himself in another 
 form, or to add any particulars to a portrait which 
 he had just delineated so carefully ; but Dryden 
 
 j * ' Qbirtt j 
 
 was equal to the task. In The Medal he hurled 
 at Shaftesbury and his party a philippic which, for 
 rancorous abuse, for lofty and uncompromising scorn, 
 for coarse, scathing, ruthless denunciation, couched in 
 diction which now swells to the declamatory grandeur 
 of Juvenal and now sinks to the sordid vulgarity of 
 Swift, has no parallel in our literature. The former 
 attack, indeed, was mercy to this new outburst. 
 To find anything approaching to it in severity and 
 skill we must go back to Claudian's savage onslaught 
 on the Achitophel of the fourth century, or for- 
 ward to Akenside's diatribe against Pulteney. No 
 sooner had The Medal appeared than the poets 
 of the Whig party set themselves with reckless 
 temerity to answer it. Shadwell and Settle led 
 . the van. Shadwell, who shortly before had been on 
 friendly terms with Dryden, and was now about to 
 make himself a laughing-stock for ever, was a man of
 
 46 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 some distinction. He belonged to a good family 
 in Norfolk, had been educated at Cambridge, and 
 after studying at the Middle Temple had given up 
 law and commenced wit and playwright. His con- 
 versation, though noted even in those days for its 
 coarseness, was so brilliant that Kochester, no mean 
 judge of such an accomplishment, used to say that, if 
 he had burnt all he wrote, and printed all he spoke, 
 he would have had more wit and humour than any 
 other poet. His habits were dissolute and sensual, 
 and the time he could spare from entertaining 
 tavern companions he divided between muddling 
 himself with opium and writing for the stage. He is 
 known to us chiefly from Dryden's ludicrous carica- 
 ture, but under that burly and unwieldy exterior 
 that " tun of man " there lurked a rich vein of 
 comic humour, keen power of observation, and much 
 real dramatic power both in vivid portraiture and in 
 the presentation of incident. His Virtuoso is truly 
 amusing, and his Epsom Wells and Squire of Alsatia 
 give us very graphic pictures of the social life of 
 those times. Settle's character was beneath contempt, 
 and his works are of a piece with his character ; the 
 first was a compound of flighty imbecility and gro- 
 tesque presumption, the second are a compound of 
 sordid scurrility and soaring nonsense. Of the rest 
 of the replies to The Medal, and they were innumer- 
 able, Dryden took no notice ; but in a piece called Tlie 
 Medal of John Bdyes Shadwell had exceeded the 
 limits of literary and political controversy, and had 
 descended to some gross libels on Dryden's private
 
 JOHN DKYDEN 47 
 
 character. This it could scarcely be expected lie 
 would forgive, and he proceeded to revenge himself. 
 About 1678 there died one Eichard Flecknoe, an 
 industrious scribbler and poetaster, who had been the 
 butt of Marvell's satire, and who, though he had 
 written one exquisite copy of verses and a clever 
 volume of prose sketches, seems to have been regarded 
 as a typical dullard. 1 His character was estimated, 
 perhaps, from his failures as a dramatist, for of the 
 five plays which he had written he could only get 
 one to be acted, and that one was damned. This 
 man is depicted by Dryden as the King of the Eealms 
 of Nonsense, conscious of his approaching demise, and 
 anxious for the election of his successor. In a strain 
 of ludicrous panegyric he discusses the grounds of 
 his son Shadwell's right to the vacant throne. He 
 reflects with pride on the exact similarity, in genius, 
 in taste, in temper, which exists between himself and 
 his hopeful boy. His own title to supremacy in 
 dulness and stupidity had never been questioned by 
 any one, but he freely admitted the superior claims of 
 the new monarch. Numbscull and blockhead from 
 his birth, no gleam of wit, no ray of intelligence had 
 ever, as was sometimes the case with his brethren, 
 been discernible in the dunce of dunces. His life, 
 moreover, had been one long war with sense, and 
 what his life had been in the past it would con- 
 tinue to be in the future. Shadwell's coronation is 
 
 1 What can be said for Flecknoe has been said by Southey (Omniana, 
 vol. i. p. 105) and by the author of an article in the Retrospective Review, 
 vol. v. p. 266.
 
 48 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 then described with more humour than is common 
 with Dryden a humour which, broadening and 
 deepening through old Flecknoe's inimitably ludi- 
 crous peroration, attains in the concluding scene 
 a climax which Swift himself might have envied. 
 This admirable satire to which Pope was indebted 
 for the plot of the Dunciad is certainly to be 
 numbered among Dryden's masterpieces. The 
 raillery, though neither nice nor graceful, is light, 
 and with one or two exceptions free from that 
 offensive coarseness which mars so many of his 
 satirical compositions. Though he lived to learn 
 from young Lockier that it was not the first mock- 
 heroic poem written in heroics, he could assert, with- 
 out fear of contradiction, that the plot of it was 
 original, and a happier plot never suggested itself 
 to a satirist. 
 
 The first part of Absalom and Achitophel had been 
 so popular that the publisher was anxious to add a 
 second. Dryden was, however, weary or indifferent, 
 and the work was entrusted to Nahum Tate. Sir 
 Thomas Browne has remarked that Thersites will live 
 as long as Agamemnon, and Bentley observed of him- 
 self that, as he despaired of achieving immortality by 
 dint of original effort, he thought his best course 
 would be to climb on the shoulders of his betters. 
 Tate illustrates in a very lively manner the cynical 
 truism of the one and the happy expedient of the 
 other. Nature had endowed that respectable and 
 gentlemanly man with powers scarcely equal to Pom- 
 fret's and immeasurably inferior to Blackmore's.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 49 
 
 Accident introduced him to Dryden, party -spirit 
 finally conducted him to the Laureateship, and the 
 Laureateship enabled him to inflict on successive 
 generations of his countrymen that detestable version 
 of the Psalms which was so long appended to our 
 Book of Common Prayer. His other writings are 
 buried in the limbo which contains those of his 
 friends Brady and Duke, and those of his successor 
 Eusden. The second part of Absalom and Achitophel 
 was carefully revised and corrected by Dryden. Indeed 
 his hand is everywhere traceable, and his additions, 
 we suspect, amounted to more than the memorable 
 two hundred and two lines which were confessedly 
 inserted by him. In these lines he took the oppor- 
 tunity of revenging himself on the meaner actors 
 in the great drama of 1682. After disposing of 
 Ferguson, Forbes, Johnson, Pordage, and others, 
 with that cursory indifference so stinging in its 
 contemptuous brevity of which Juvenal and Dante 
 were such consummate masters he proceeds to 
 engage once more with Settle and Shadwell. The 
 verses on the former unite in an equal degree 
 poignant wit with boisterous humour, and are 
 in every way worthy of his great powers. But 
 in dealing with Shadwell he descends too much 
 to the level of Shadwell himself. The portrait 
 of Og has been much admired, but it is marred, 
 powerful though it be, by its excessive and loath- 
 some coarseness ; it is as gross in the execution 
 as it is in the design. Bluff, vulgar, and truculent, 
 
 it savours too much of that kind of vituperation for 
 
 E
 
 50 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 which Virgil rebukes Dante for lending an attentive 
 ear 
 
 Che voler ci6 udire e basso. 
 
 In the Religio Laid, which appeared in the same 
 year, he struck a new chord, and produced what Scott 
 justly describes as one of the most admirable poems 
 in our language. From politics to religion was at 
 that time an easy transition, and it would in truth be 
 difficult to determine which raged with more contro- 
 versial violence. The Eomanists, the Episcopalians, 
 and the Dissenters were all powerfully represented, 
 and were all powerfully opposed. The Romanists 
 charged the Dissenters with bigotry and intolerance, 
 and the Dissenters retorted by charging the Romanists 
 with plotting against the Government and with cor- 
 rupting civil order. Both were, unhappily, right. 
 The Established Church, standing between them, 
 despised the one party and feared the other. Dryden, 
 anxious doubtless to please his patrons, was probably 
 interested chiefly in the political bearing of the 
 question, and the Religio Laid was written, he tells 
 us, with a view of moderating party zeal. The posi- 
 tion of Dryden in this poem is precisely that of 
 Chillingworth. Both agree that the foundations of 
 faith rest solely on Scripture and universal tradition, 
 and, while both deny the existence of an infallible 
 Church, both insist that the Established Protestant 
 Church is the best of guides and teachers. Both 
 recognise the right of individual reason, regret and 
 reject the Athanasian Creed, and refuse to set limits 
 to the justice and mercy of Omnipotence. Both insist
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 51 
 
 on the distinction between truths necessary and truths 
 not necessary to salvation, contending that the first 
 are to an open and candid mind few, plain, and clear. 
 In conflicting interpretations of the second both dis- 
 cern the causes of the feuds and schisms which have 
 disturbed the peace of Protestant Christendom, and 
 what Dryden sums up in the lines 
 
 Private reason 'tis more just to curb 
 Than by disputes the public peace disturb, 
 For points obscure are of small use to learn, 
 But common quiet is mankind's concern 
 
 Chillingworth expressed when, in assigning his reason 
 for subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles, he wrote, 
 " There is no error which may necessitate or warrant 
 any man to disturb the peace or renounce the Com- 
 munion of the Church." 1 If in point of style the 
 Religio Laid has none of that lightness of touch, and 
 none of that felicitous grace, which throw such a 
 charm over the Epistles of Horace, on which it was, 
 he says, modelled, it may, short though it be, challenge 
 comparison with any didactic writing in verse since 
 Lucretius vindicated the tenets of Epicurus. The 
 opening verses of this poem are among the most 
 majestic passages in our poetry. 
 
 It is strange and melancholy to find the author 
 of poems so brilliant, so powerful, and so popular, 
 condemned by the meanness of his royal and aristo- 
 cratic patrons to toil like a hack in a Grub Street 
 garret. Yet so it was. His salary as Poet Laureate 
 was in arrears ; his income from the theatres was 
 
 1 Preface to the author of Charity Maintained, Works (folio), p. 24.
 
 52 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 considerably diminished. The expenses of a hand- 
 some house in Gerrard Street, then one of the most 
 fashionable quarters of London, and those incident 
 to the education of three sons, two of whom were 
 destined for the Universities, must have increased his 
 pecuniary embarrassments. His health was impaired, 
 and a visit into the country was, his physicians in- 
 formed him, not only desirable but necessary. His 
 means, however, were at such a low ebb that without 
 relief it was impossible for him to leave London. He 
 was even in danger of being arrested for debt. " Be 
 pleased to look upon me," he wrote about this time to 
 Rochester, then First Commissioner of the Treasury, 
 " with an eye of compassion. Some small employ- 
 ment would make my position easy " ; and he adds 
 bitterly, " 'Tis enough for one age to have neglected 
 Mr. Cowley and starved Mr. Waller." It was prob- 
 ably as the result of this application that he was 
 appointed (17th of December 1683) to an office once 
 held by Chaucer, the Collectorship of Customs in the 
 Port of London. He had now to discover, like John- 
 son, that the booksellers, though hard taskmasters, 
 are the only patrons on whom genius can rely, and he 
 submitted to the drudgery of hack-work with some 
 querulousness and much energy. As early as 1673 
 he had entertained the design of composing a great 
 national epic, with either King Arthur or the Black 
 Prince for its hero. This was now abandoned, and he 
 betook himself to the humbler but more remunerative 
 occupation of writing prefaces, of executing miscel- 
 laneous translations, of providing young dramatists
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 53 
 
 with prologues, and of co-operating with Lee in 
 producing pieces for the theatres. In 1680 he had 
 taken part in some versions from Ovid's Epistles. 
 The work had been successful, and the publisher, 
 Tonson, with whom he had allied himself since 1679, 
 proposed to bring out a volume of Miscellanies. To 
 this Dryden contributed some versions of parts of 
 Virgil, Horace, and Theocritus, which the most in- 
 dulgent critic must pronounce to be not only unworthy 
 of him, but, to speak plainly, disgraceful to him. For 
 the majesty and elaborate diction of the first he has 
 substituted a shambling slipshod vulgarity; the curious 
 felicity of the second has vanished in vapid, slovenly 
 diffuseness ; and the pen of Pordage or Settle could 
 not have disguised more effectually the features of the 
 third. The truth was, he sorely needed rest ; he was 
 weary, in miserable health, and had saddled himself 
 with a translation of Maimbourgh's History of the 
 League. In 1685 appeared another volume of Miscel- 
 lanies, which contained, among other things, some 
 versions from Lucretius. Dryden was now himself 
 again. He had been for a visit into the country, and 
 had recovered from what he describes as a kind of 
 hectic fever. He had been pleased with the success 
 of his Maimbourgh, and a gossiping letter which he 
 wrote about this time to Tonson, thanking him for 
 two melons, gives us an interesting glimpse of him in 
 domestic life. This second volume of Miscellanies 
 was probably published on his return to London. 
 The versions from Lucretius, and the paraphrase of 
 the twenty-ninth Ode of the third book of Horace,
 
 54 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 are the gems of the collection, and in them his genius 
 once more kindles with all its old fire. The superb 
 invocation which the great Koman poet addresses to 
 the tutelary goddess of his race is rendered with a 
 power and majesty which need fear no comparison 
 with the imperial splendour of the original, and the 
 version from the third book, though not so happy, is 
 vigorous and skilful. He might have left the con- 
 clusion of the fourth book where he found it, for, 
 though he humorously assures us in his preface that 
 he was not yet so secure from the passion of love as 
 to dispense with his author's antidote against it, he 
 knew well enough that, whatever might have been the 
 intention of Lucretius, his own was simply to pander 
 to licentiousness. The brilliance and care with which 
 these pieces were executed were due, no doubt, not 
 only to his real sympathy with a poet who in some 
 respects resembled himself, but to the necessity for 
 asserting his superiority over Creech, who had just 
 before clothed Lucretius in an English dress. Fox, 
 it is well known, preferred Dryden's rendering of 
 Horace's Ode to the original. There is, in reality, 
 little or no comparison between them. Assuredly no 
 two poets could be less like each other than Horace 
 and Dryden, and in none of his works is Horace more 
 Horatian, in none of his works is Dryden more 
 Drydenian. 
 
 In February 1685 Charles II. died, and Dryden 
 dedicated to the memory of a patron who had 
 given him little but fair words and a few broad 
 pieces, a Pindaric ode, entitled TJirenodia Augustalis.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 55 
 
 This, says Johnson, with a courteous euphemism, is 
 not amongst his happiest productions. It is, in truth, 
 among his very worst. Nothing which Dryden wrote 
 with deliberation in his mature years could be wholly 
 worthless, but it would be difficult to name another 
 of his poems which contains fewer beauties, more 
 prolixity, less merit. It is perhaps the best example 
 to be found in our poetry of what the Greeks called 
 parenthyrsus. In celebrating the demise of one 
 sovereign he took care to commemorate the accession 
 of the new. He did not forget that the Hesperus of 
 the setting becomes the Lucifer of the dawn ; and in 
 regretting a Numa he dried his tears in an anachron- 
 istic vision of an Ancus. Albion and Albinovanus, 
 which had been written to celebrate Charles's triumph 
 over the popular party, was now furbished up to 
 celebrate the accession of James, and to welcome the 
 advent of justice and generosity. The character of 
 the new monarch was, however, a mixture of mean- 
 ness and ingratitude, and his treatment of Dryden 
 was just what might have been expected. He renewed 
 the patent of the offices enjoyed by the poet, who had 
 served him so well, but he struck off a hundred a year 
 from his salary, and would probably have reduced it 
 still further. This, however, Dryden took care to 
 prevent. On the 19th of January 1686 John Evelyn 
 entered in his Diary: ( ' Dryden, the famous playwright, 
 and his two sons, and Mrs. Nelly (miss to the late 
 King), are said to go to mass. Such proselytes are no 
 great loss to the Church." With regard to Mrs. Nelly 
 Evelyn had been misinformed the Church was not
 
 56 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 to lose her ; she was to adorn it till her death. With 
 regard to Dryden, his information was correct. The 
 Poet Laureate had indeed publicly embraced the 
 religion which his royal master was bent on establish- 
 ing, and his salary was at once raised to its full 
 amount. 
 
 The sincerity of his conversion under these circum- 
 stances to a creed which had hitherto been the butt 
 of his keenest sarcasms has been very naturally called 
 into question. Johnson, with a liberality of feeling 
 rare with him on such points, and Scott, with 
 elaborate argumentative skill, have contended that 
 it was sincere. Macaulay and Mr. Christie arrive 
 at the opposite conclusion. Hallam is of opinion 
 that no candid mind could doubt the absolute 
 sincerity of the author of such an apology as The 
 Hind and the Panther. It seems to us that the 
 truth probably lies where truth usually does lie 
 midway between the two extremes. Dryden was 
 in all probability induced to take the step by 
 motives of personal interest. He was probably able 
 to satisfy himself of his honesty when he had taken 
 it. Of all the characteristics of his genius its plasticity 
 is perhaps the most remarkable ; of all the resources 
 of his fertile mind none were more abundant than 
 those on which casuists and logicians chiefly draw in 
 convincing themselves and in convincing others. 
 What religious opinions he had, so far as we can 
 gather from his writings previous to the Religio 
 Laid, probably differed little from those of a busy 
 man of letters who never seriously reflected on such
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 57 
 
 matters, but amused himself, as occasion offered, 
 with easy acquiescence in conventional dogmas, with 
 the casual speculations of languid scepticism, or with 
 laughing at both. Most creeds he had treated with 
 contempt, and neither the Protestant nor the Catholic 
 Church had escaped the shafts of his sarcastic wit. 
 But he had now arrived at that period in life when to 
 men of his temper the blessing of a fixed belief is 
 inexpressibly soothing. He was beginning to experi- 
 ence the pain and weariness of a career, the boundaries 
 of which he could now plainly descry ; he was getting 
 old ; his health was failing ; his spirits were depressed ; 
 his literary ambition was realised ; he could scarcely 
 hope to stand higher than he was. The Religio 
 Laid is the first indication of his having reflected 
 seriously on religious subjects, and whoever will con- 
 sider this poem attentively will see that Dryden's 
 conversion to the faith of Rome was just what might 
 have been expected from the position of one who 
 reasoned as he had reasoned there. He had, as we 
 have seen, rejected Roman Catholicism and accepted 
 Protestantism ; but while rejecting the one he had 
 acknowledged that it supplied what every believer in 
 Revelation must desiderate, and while accepting the 
 other he had accepted it at the sacrifice of all hope 
 of a logical faith. As long as he was content to 
 acquiesce loosely in the dogmas and teaching of the 
 Establishment, and to be satisfied with the belief that 
 
 The unletter'd Christian who believes in gross 
 Plods on to heaven, and ne'er is at a loss, 
 
 he could remain comfortably a Protestant. But he
 
 58 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 ceased to be comfortable when he began seriously to 
 reflect, and if anything is clear in the Religio Laid it 
 is that Dryden already felt that there was no middle 
 course between Deism and the creed of Rome, between 
 believing nothing and believing all. 
 
 Macaulay argues that if his conversion had been 
 
 sincere he would not have continued to pander to 
 
 the profligacy of the age, but would have regarded 
 
 his former transgressions with horror. Such a view 
 
 appears to us to be based on a radical misconception 
 
 of Dryden's character. Unless we are much mistaken, 
 
 he was so far as the moral elements of his character 
 
 were concerned as purely emotional as Shelley or 
 
 Edgar Poe ; but the peculiarity is hidden by the 
 
 masculine energy of his rhetoric and his robust good 
 
 sense. It is difficult to associate the idea of weakness 
 
 of this kind with one who is the personification in so 
 
 marked a degree of intellectual vigour. But the 
 
 moment we look at the man on the moral side we are 
 
 confronted with extraordinary inconsistencies and 
 
 contradictions. Like his own Zimri, he had indeed 
 
 been everything by starts and nothing long. He 
 
 began with Republican principles ; he was soon an 
 
 uncompromising Tory. In 1658 he was panegyrising 
 
 Cromwell and his partisans ; in 1660 he was hailing 
 
 Charles II. as the saviour of an erring nation. In 
 
 1673 he was doing every thing in his power to inflame 
 
 the prosecution of the Dutch War ; ten years later he 
 
 was cursing Shaftesbury for his share in it. He 
 
 exhausted compliment in his allusions to Charles II., 
 
 and was simultaneously assisting Mulgrave in libelling
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 59 
 
 him. In 1687 he had attached himself to James II.; 
 in 1690 he was speaking respectfully of the Revolu- 
 tion. In 1686 he was pathetically lamenting the 
 profanation of poetry and its debasement to obscene 
 and impious uses ; in 1693 he was adding to the 
 filth and prurience of Juvenal. The truth is, he was a 
 poet, with all the sensitive susceptibilities of his race ; 
 he was a man of letters, whose proper sphere was the 
 library; but with the temperament of the one and 
 with the accomplishments of the other he combined 
 also the coarser instincts of the mere worldling. Not 
 naturally a man of high spirit or lofty aims, the age 
 in which he lived did little to supply them. He 
 soon ascertained the marketable value of his endow- 
 ments, and he offered them with little scruple to the 
 highest bidder. Thus, while motives of self-interest 
 determined the direction of his energy, the native 
 genius brought into play soon created genuine en- 
 thusiasm, and he at last became what he at first 
 affected to be. He addressed himself to religious 
 controversy as he had addressed himself to politics. 
 When he took the step which has laid him open to so 
 much suspicion, he took it under that pressure on the 
 part of circumstances which had never failed to dic- 
 tate his actions ; but, having taken it, he soon per- 
 suaded himself that he was sincere. It is due also to 
 him to say that during the rest of his life, and on his 
 deathbed, where few men are hypocrites, he professed 
 that he felt a satisfaction such as he had never before 
 known, that he converted his children to the same 
 creed, and that he never recanted, though recantation
 
 60 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 might have been to his advantage. We may therefore 
 accept his magnificent apology for the Church of 
 Kome as the honest expression of sincere conviction, 
 and not, as his enemies would have us accept it, as 
 the hollow rhetoric and conscious sophistry of an 
 interested apostate. 1 
 
 His pen was not suffered to remain idle, and he 
 was at once employed to defend both in prose and 
 verse the religion which he had adopted. From an 
 entry of Tonson's at Stationers' Hall, Dryden had, 
 it seems, intended to translate Varilla's History of 
 Revolutions in Matters of Religion, but for some 
 reason, which it is now useless to guess, the work was 
 abandoned, and he proceeded to engage in a con- 
 troversy which added little to his reputation. Soon 
 after his accession James ordered some papers to be 
 published which had, it was alleged, been discovered 
 in the strong-box of Charles II. They consisted of 
 two documents in the handwriting of the deceased 
 King, asserting that the only true Church was the 
 Church of Eome. To these James added the copy of 
 a paper written by his first wife, Anne Hyde, stating 
 the motives which had induced her to become a con- 
 vert to the Catholic religion. No sooner had these 
 
 1 In an interesting letter to Mrs. Steward, dated 7th November 1699, he 
 says or implies that recantation would probably restore Court favour, but he 
 could " never go an inch beyond my conscience and my honour. ... I can 
 neither take the oaths nor forsake my religion, because I know not what 
 Church to go to if I leave the Catholic ; they are all so divided among them- 
 selves in matters of faith necessary to salvation, and yet all assuming the 
 name of Protestant. May God be pleased to open your eyes, as He has 
 opened mine ! Truth is but one ; and they who have once heard of it can 
 plead no excuse if they do not embrace it. But these are things too serious 
 for a trifling letter."
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 61 
 
 manuscripts appeared than their authenticity was 
 called into question by the Protestant divines. Still- 
 ingfleet, then Dean of St. Paul's, and one of the most 
 accomplished theologians in England, produced a 
 pamphlet in which he boldly contended that the 
 papers were forgeries. Dryden was selected to reply. 
 He was, however, no match for an adversary who at 
 twenty-four had written the Irenicum, and whose 
 whole life had been a long training in theological 
 polemics. Dryden confined himself to the defence of 
 the paper attributed to Anne Hyde, and his vindi- 
 cation betrays a coarse licence of vituperation, a 
 shallowness and ignorance, which Stillingfleet, in a 
 second pamphlet, contented himself with exposing in 
 a few stinging sentences. The Laureate had the 
 good sense to abandon a contest in which he could 
 scarcely hope to retrieve himself, and to resort to a 
 weapon in which he was not likely to find his match. 
 He went down into Northamptonshire, and there, 
 in the old mansion of the Treshams at Rushton so 
 runs the tradition produced a poem which, in point 
 of plot, is grotesque in the extreme, but which, in 
 point of execution, must rank among the masterpieces 
 of our literature. 
 
 No act had more enraged and perplexed the friends 
 of the constitution in Church and State than the 
 King's recent assumption of the dispensing power, to 
 which he was now about to give practical expression 
 in the Declaration of Indulgence. The Hind and 
 the Panther was written with the threefold object of 
 answering the objections of those who disputed the
 
 62 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 King's right to suspend the Test Act; of proving 
 that the religion of Christians, if pure and sound, is 
 and can only be the religion of the Church of Eome ; 
 and of denouncing and exposing the errors of Pro- 
 testantism, and especially those of the Sectaries. The 
 Hind milk -white and immortal represents the 
 Church of Kome ; the Panther the fairest creature 
 of the spotted kind represents the Church of Eng- 
 land. Surrounded with Socinian foxes, Independent 
 bears, Anabaptist boars, and other animals typifying 
 the innumerable sects into which the Protestant 
 community was subdivided, these fair creatures con- 
 fer on their common danger, discuss the points on 
 which they differ, comment on current topics, smile, 
 wag their tails, and interchange hospitalities. On 
 this monstrous groundwork Dryden has raised the 
 most splendid superstructure of his genius. " In 
 none of his works," says Macaulay with happy dis- 
 crimination, " can be found passages more pathetic 
 and magnificent, greater ductility and energy of 
 language, or a more pleasing and various music." 
 There was one circumstance connected with the 
 composition of this work which must have been 
 inexpressibly mortifying to the author, and which 
 still deforms, with an ugly inconsistency, the conduct 
 of its argument. The original policy of James had 
 been to attempt an alliance between the Catholic 
 and the Protestant Churches for the purpose of uniting 
 them against the Dissenters. Dryden had therefore, 
 in the course of his poem, treated the Protestant 
 Church with respect and forbearance and the Dis-
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 63 
 
 senters with contempt. But the King, finding that 
 such an alliance was impossible, suddenly veered 
 round and adopted a conciliatory tone with the Dis- 
 senters, without acquainting his apologist, who was 
 away from London, with the circumstance. The 
 poem was on the point of going to press, and Dryden 
 saw with chagrin the mistake which he had made. 
 He proceeded at once to do all in his power to rectify 
 it. He softened down his praises of the Protestant 
 Church and his sneers at the Dissenters. He intro- 
 duced two episodes, the fable of the Swallows and 
 the fable of the Doves, in which the clergy of the 
 Church of England are bitterly assailed. Both in the 
 conclusion of the poem and in the preface he exhorts the 
 Dissenters to make common cause with the Catholics 
 against their common enemy the Established Church. 
 Thus altered to meet the new emergency, Tlie Hind 
 and the Panther made its appearance in April 1687. 
 It was at once violently assailed, and the poet had to 
 bear the brunt of the odium which the sullen tyranny 
 of his royal master was now beginning to excite 
 on all sides. Whigs and Tories united to attack 
 the apologist of their common enemy. The plot, the 
 argument, the style of the work, were caricatured. 
 The inconsistencies of its author's political career were 
 scoffingly enumerated. One opponent raked up the 
 Elegy on Cromwell, with comments from the Astrcsa 
 Redux and the Threnodia Augustalis; another re- 
 , printed the Religio Laid. Two or three of the more 
 unscrupulous among them charged him with gross 
 profligacy in private life, and descended to per-
 
 64 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 sonalities about his domestic troubles, his red face, 
 and his short stature. Most of these productions have 
 sunk below the soundings of antiquarianism : one, 
 however, may still be read with interest, even by 
 those familiar with the refined parodies of Canning 
 and the brothers Smith. This was The Hind and the 
 Panther Transversed to the Story of the Country 
 Mouse and the City Mouse, written by two young 
 adventurers, one of whom was destined to become 
 the most distinguished financier in our history, the 
 other one of the most graceful and accomplished of 
 our minor poets Charles Montagu and Matthew 
 Prior. The old poet had, it seems, treated both Prior 
 and Montagu with great kindness ; and he is said to 
 have felt their ingratitude very keenly. He must 
 have recognised the wit of their exquisite satire, and 
 was perhaps not insensible to its justice. A trans- 
 lation of the Life of St. Xavier, and a poem on the 
 birth of the young Prince, 10th June 1688, hurriedly 
 but vigorously executed, and incomparably the best 
 of his official poems, concluded his services for James 
 II. Six months afterwards William III. was on the 
 throne. 
 
 Dry den's position was now deplorable. He was 
 not only in declining years and in miserable health, 
 but he was deprived of all those Government offices 
 which he had laboured so hard to secure, and on 
 which he relied for permanent income. He was de- 
 prived of the Laureateship and Historiographership, 
 and he had the mortification of seeing them conferred 
 on his old enemy Shadwell. His place in the Customs
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 65 
 
 was taken from him. He had pledged himself too 
 deeply to the religious and political principles which 
 were the abhorrence of the new dynasty and its sup- 
 porters to dream of preferment. He had nothing but 
 his pen to depend on. An ordinary man would have 
 sunk under the weight of such an accumulation of 
 misfortunes. Dryden grappled with them with all 
 the spirit of youth renewed. Never was the divine 
 energy of genius, the proud loyalty to the conscience 
 of genius, more jealously preserved in spite of sordid 
 temptation to hurried and slovenly work, or more 
 nobly illustrated, than in the ten years still allotted to 
 him. He might engage to provide Tonson with ten 
 thousand verses for a wretched pittance of three 
 hundred guineas ; but he took care to make those 
 verses worthy of immortality. He might engage to 
 translate the whole of Virgil for a sum little more 
 than his friend Southerne cleared by two plays ; but 
 he strove to make it worthy of the name it bore, 
 " and refused to be hurried." 
 
 In 1689 he betook himself once more to the stage, 
 and in less than a year produced a tragedy, Don 
 
 Sebastian, which is justly regarded as his masterpiece, 
 and a comedy, Amphitryon 1 , which holds a respectable 
 place even in an age which witnessed the comedies 
 of Wycherley and Congreve. Don Sebastian was, he 
 tells us, laboured with great diligence, and of that 
 diligence it bears evident traces. The subordinate 
 characters are more carefully discriminated than was 
 usual with him. Dorax and Sebastian are noble 
 sketches, and Almeyda is not unworthy of her lover.
 
 66 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 In depicting the hero friendless, desolate, and ruined, 
 the old poet was not improbably thinking of himself, 
 and when Sebastian cries 
 
 Let Fortune empty all her quiver on me, 
 I have a soul that like an ample shield 
 Can take in all, and verge enough for more. 
 Fate was not mine, nor am I Fate's 
 
 there speaks in trumpet-tones the indomitable energy 
 which made Dryden's last dark years the most glorious 
 epoch in his artistic life. If we except Otway's two 
 tragedies, Don Sebastian is beyond comparison the 
 finest tragedy the English stage had seen since 
 Fletcher had passed away. The celebrated scene in 
 the fourth act between Dorax and Sebastian is one of 
 the gems of the English drama. " Had it been the 
 only one Dryden ever wrote," says Scott, " it would 
 have been sufficient to insure his immortality." 
 
 He could scarcely expect to get a hearing from the 
 new monarch, but both these plays were anxiously 
 dedicated to men who would be likely to have weight 
 with him, Philip, Earl of Leicester, and Sir William 
 Leveson-Gower. King Arthur and Cleomenes need 
 not detain us, and with Love Triumphant the veteran 
 dramatist took leave of the stage for ever. In the 
 conspicuous failure of his last play he probably read 
 the advent of a new age, and, with that graceful 
 magnanimity which is such a pleasing trait in his 
 character, he resigned the sceptre which he had 
 swayed so long to his friends Southerne and Congreve. 
 He was now busy with his translations of Juvenal and 
 Persius. Of the former he versified the first, third,
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 67 
 
 sixth, tenth, and sixteenth Satires, entrusting the rest 
 to his sons Charles and Erasmus, to his former coad- 
 jutor Tate, and to Creech. The whole of Persius was 
 translated by himself. To this work, brought out in 
 folio in 1693, he prefixed a Discourse on Satire, 
 dedicated in an exquisitely courtly strain to the Earl 
 of Dorset. It is somewhat ungracefully garnished 
 with what Scott calls " the sort of learning in fashion 
 among the French " ; but it is still valuable for its 
 occasional remarks on points of criticism ; for its 
 eloquent protest against the abuse of satire ; for 
 its admirable delineation of the Latin satirists ; 
 for its interesting autobiographical particulars ; and, 
 above all, for the ease, variety, and vigour of the style. 
 The versions themselves have all the air of original 
 compositions. In accordance with those principles of 
 translation laid down by Chapman, Cowley, and 
 Denham, and already illustrated by himself in his 
 versions from Lucretius and Ovid, he has aimed not 
 so much at reproducing the literal meaning as at 
 transfusing the spirit of his authors. 1 He is not there- 
 fore to be tried by any canons of exact scholarship. 
 He has indeed spoken contemptuously of the servile 
 fidelity of Barton Holiday. He approaches Juvenal 
 pretty much as Horace approached Archilochus and 
 Alcaeus. He confesses himself a disciple, but he 
 spoke not so much what his master dictated as 
 what his master suggested or inspired. He writes, 
 he says, as Juvenal might have written had Juvenal 
 
 1 See his admirable remarks on poetical translation in his Preface to the 
 Translation of Ovid's Epistles, and in the Preface to the Second Miscellany.
 
 68 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 written in English ; and he has not scrupled to 
 boast that he has taught Persius to speak with a 
 purity and precision to which he was in his own 
 language a stranger. In this bold experiment he has, 
 on the whole, succeeded. He has produced transla- 
 tions which may be read with delight by those who 
 cannot read the original, and, if in the versions from 
 Juvenal he who can read the original will miss the 
 trenchant terseness, the happy turns, the splendid 
 elaborate rhetoric of the Roman, he must impartially 
 confess that in the sixth Satire the Englishman has 
 almost made the palm ambiguous. He must admit 
 that the noble verses at the conclusion of the tenth, 
 which are one of the proudest gems in the coronet of 
 Roman literature, have by the genius of Dryden been 
 set as a precious gem in the coronet of our own. 
 With regard to his Persius, scholars will, no doubt, 
 continue to prefer the fascinating perplexities, the 
 tortuous euphuisms, and the harsh enigmatical phrase 
 of Casaubon's favourite to the flowing diction of his 
 English interpreter. It must, however, be allowed 
 that if Dryden has diluted he has not enervated, and 
 that in two memorable passages the conclusion of 
 the second Satire and the lines to Cornutus in the fifth 
 he has equalled his original where that original 
 is at its best. To a third and fourth volume of 
 Miscellanies, which appeared in 1693 and 1694, he 
 also contributed ; but, with the exception of the fine 
 Epistle to Kneller, which, like his Eleonora, written 
 a year before, exhibits his style in its highest per- 
 fection, none of these contributions added anything
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 69 
 
 to his reputation. About this time he made the 
 acquaintance of Congreve, who had been introduced 
 to him by Southerne, and who had just written his 
 first comedy, The Old Bachelor. This play, revised 
 and adapted by Dryden's experienced hand, had been 
 received with marked approbation ; but a second play, 
 The Double Dealer, a far superior work, had been a 
 comparative failure. Upon this Dryden addressed 
 to his young friend that eloquent epistle in which he 
 hails with rapture a disciple who had already out- 
 stepped his teacher, and, contrasting his own desolate 
 old age with the glorious promise of his friend's 
 youth, prophesies that fortune will be far more pro- 
 pitious to the scholar than she had ever been to the 
 master. 
 
 And oh, defend 
 
 Against your judgment your departed friend ; 
 Let not th' insulting foe my fame pursue, 
 But shade those laurels which descend to you. 
 
 Towards the end of 1693 he commenced his trans- 
 lation of Virgil. It occupied him three years, and 
 though the labour was great, it was lightened during 
 its continuance by the hospitality of the Earl of 
 Exeter, Sir William Bowyer, and his cousin John 
 Driden, and at its termination by the contributions 
 of an old friend, Dr. Knightly Chetwood, and of a 
 recent acquaintance, Addison. Chetwood, who was a 
 respectable poet and an accomplished scholar, furnished 
 him with the Life of Virgil and with the Preface to 
 .the Pastorals; and Addison, then a young man at 
 Oxford, supplied him with the arguments of the 
 several books and with an essay on the Georgics.
 
 70 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 The work, originally suggested, it is said, by Motteaux, 
 was impatiently expected by the public, who had from 
 its commencement shown a great interest in its pro- 
 gress. It appeared in July 1697, and from that day 
 to this it has maintained a high place among English 
 classics. Marred by coarseness, marred by miserable 
 inequalities, marred by errors of ignorance and errors 
 of inadvertency, it is still a noble achievement. It is 
 a work instinct with genius ; but it is instinct not 
 with the placid and majestic genius of the most 
 patient of artists, but with the impetuous energy of 
 the prince of English rhetorical poets. The tender 
 grace, the pathetic cadences, the subtle verbal mecha- 
 nism of the most exquisite poet of antiquity will be 
 sought in vain in its vehement and facile diction, 
 in the rushing and somewhat turbid torrent of its 
 narrative. It is indeed one of those works which will 
 never cease to offend the taste and never fail to 
 captivate the attention. The critic will continue to 
 censure, but the world will continue to be delighted ; 
 and Dryden, probably, cared little about the applause 
 of the former if he could secure popularity. His 
 really lamentable failures are in tender and pathetic 
 passages in the episode, for example, of Orpheus and 
 Eurydice, in the whole of the fourth dEneid, in the 
 lament of the mother of Euryalus, in the reflections 
 of ^neas on the death of Lausus in all these his 
 versions are little better than travesties in which we 
 have a deplorable mixture of sounding declamation 
 and frigid commonplace. Nor is he more successful 
 in his renderings of Virgil's many pictures of Nature.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 71 
 
 As Wordsworth has remarked, whenever Virgil can be 
 fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden 
 always spoils the passage. Where he succeeds, and 
 eminently succeeds, is in rhetorical passages, in 
 passages which call for pomp, energy, and rapidity. 
 Thus the storm in the first Georgic, in the first dEneid, 
 the whole or nearly the whole of the second <sEneid, 
 the description of Etna, the beginning of the sixth 
 book, the battle-pieces and speeches in the later books, 
 and many of the similes, are, on the whole, admirably 
 rendered. He was, as usual, careful to adorn the 
 work with dedications. The Pastorals were inscribed 
 to Lord Clifford, the Georgics to the Earl of Chester- 
 field, the JEneid to the Marquis of Normanby. The 
 latter dedication is a long discourse on epic poesy, and 
 is one of the most pleasing of his critical essays. To 
 his Virgil he added a postscript which it is impossible 
 to read unmoved. " What Virgil wrote in the vigour 
 of his age in plenty and at ease" so runs the 
 opening paragraph " I have undertaken to translate 
 in my declining years, struggling with wants, op- 
 pressed by sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be 
 misconstrued in all I write, and my judges, if they 
 are not very equitable, already prejudiced against me 
 by the lying character which has been given them of 
 my morals." We may, however, temper our pity with 
 the reflection that if the veteran poet had so much to 
 complain of he had much still left to soothe and 
 encourage him. Indeed, we are by no means sure 
 that the undertone of discontent and querulousness 
 which runs through most of his later writings is not
 
 72 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 to be referred rather to the nervous irritability of his 
 temperament than to any insensibility either on the 
 part of the public or on the part of his personal 
 friends. He complains bitterly of his poverty, and 
 poor he undoubtedly was ; yet he never could have 
 wanted the necessaries of life. He had, on the con- 
 trary, we suspect, a full share of its luxuries. He had 
 constant engagements with Tonson ; and Tonson, 
 though mean, was honest and punctual in his pay- 
 ments. He had been paid for each one of the 
 Miscellanies ; he had been paid for Juvenal ; he had 
 received 500 for his Eleonora. The Earl of Dorset 
 had presented him with a large sum, he had a small 
 property of his own, and the Lady Elizabeth was not 
 dowerless. He had cleared at least 1300 by his 
 Virgil. He complains of ill-health, but what allevia- 
 tions two of the most eminent surgeons of the day 
 could afford him he enjoyed in the unfee'd attention 
 of Hobbes and Guibbons. He complains of the malice 
 of his enemies, and yet he might have solaced himself 
 by remembering his friends, for he could number 
 among them some of the most illustrious, the most 
 hospitable, and the most charming of his contempor- 
 aries. In that brilliant society which had sat round 
 the Duke of Ormond he had held a conspicuous place, 1 
 and he had numbered among his intimate associates 
 the elegant and sprightly Sedley, the brilliant Dorset, 
 and the refined and accomplished Sheffield. The 
 country seats of many of the nobility were open to 
 him, and of their hospitality he frequently availed 
 
 1 See Carte's Life of the Duke of Ormond, vol. ii. p. 554.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 73 
 
 himself. At the house of his cousin John Driden he 
 was always welcome ; and he could gossip with his 
 old love Honor, who, it is said, repented of her early 
 cruelty. At Cotterstock he could be happy in the 
 society of his beautiful relative Mrs. Stewart, who 
 seems to have taken an affectionate interest in his 
 studies, and to have consulted with anxious solicitude 
 his tastes and his comforts. At the pleasant farm of 
 his friend Jones of Ramsden he could indulge in his 
 favourite amusement of angling; and, when the ill- 
 health under which he latterly laboured compelled 
 him to abandon the fishing-rod, he could still com- 
 placently discuss D'Urfey's bad angling, and his own 
 superior powers while the Fates were kind. His 
 manners, we are told, were not genteel, and he has 
 himself observed that his conversation was slow and 
 dull ; but the genial kindliness of his disposition seems 
 to have made him welcome in every circle, and a man 
 more amiable, more humane, and more good-natured 
 than Dryden probably never existed. " He was," says 
 Congreve, " of very easy, I may say of very pleasing 
 access," and we have many pleasant glimpses of him 
 both in his own home in Gerrard Street and in the 
 homes of his friends. 
 
 But there was another scene with which Dryden 
 will always be associated, and where we love to 
 picture him. His short stout figure, his florid care- 
 worn face, his sleepy eyes, his " down look," his snuffy 
 waistcoat, and his long gray hair, were for many years 
 familiar to the frequenters of Will's Coffee House, in 
 Russell Street, Covent Garden. There his supremacy
 
 74 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 had never been shaken. There, whatever had been 
 the vicissitudes of his fortune and whatever may 
 have been his annoyances at home, he could forget 
 them amid loyal and devoted disciples. Round 
 his arm-chair, placed near the fire in winter, and out 
 on the balcony in summer, hung delighted listeners, 
 gay young Templars, eager to hear the reminiscences 
 of one who could recall roistering suppers with 
 Etherege and Sedley, and Attic evenings with Waller 
 and Cowley and Davenant ; who could remember 
 the wit -combats between Charles and Killigrew, 
 and the sallies of Nell Gwynn when she was still 
 mixing strong waters for the gentlemen ; students 
 from Oxford and Cambridge, who had quitted their 
 books to catch a glimpse of the rival of Juvenal ; 
 clever lads about town, ambitious for a pinch from his 
 snuff-box, which was, we are told, equal to a degree in 
 the Academy of Wit ; pleasant humorists, " honest 
 Mr. Swan " the punster, Tom d'Urfey, Browne, and old 
 Sir Roger 1'Estrange ; young Moyle, " with the learn- 
 ing and judgment above his age," whose splendid pro- 
 mise was never fulfilled ; men distinguished for their 
 skill in art and science, whom his fame had attracted 
 thither, Ratcliffe, Kneller, and poor Closterman. 
 There were those who had like himself achieved 
 high literary distinction, but who were, nevertheless, 
 proud to acknowledge him their teacher, Wycherley, 
 Southerne, Congreve, and Vanbrugh ; Thomas Creech, 
 whose edition of Lucretius had placed him in the 
 front rank of English scholars ; William Walsh, " the 
 best critic in the nation"; George Stepney, "whose
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 75 
 
 juvenile poems had made gray authors blush " ; young 
 Colley Gibber, flushed with the success of his first 
 comedy ; and Samuel Garth, whose admirable mock- 
 heroic poem is even now not forgotten. There, too, 
 were occasionally to be seen those younger men who 
 were to carry on the work he was so soon to lay down, 
 and who were to connect two great ages of English 
 literature. Pope, indeed, was a child of twelve when 
 his young eyes rested for the first and last time on his 
 master ; but Prior, now turned of thirty, was already 
 a distinguished wit ; Addison, though he had not yet 
 given evidence of the powers which were to place him 
 in the foremost rank of the classics of the eighteenth 
 century, had laid the foundation of future renown ; 
 and Swift, though still aspiring to fame as a poet, was 
 about to discover where his real strength lay. The 
 Battle of the Books and The Tale of a Tub were com- 
 pleted in manuscript while Dryden still presided at 
 Will's. 
 
 Dryden's labours were not to end with the trans- 
 lation of Virgil. He had still nearly three years of 
 toil before him. They were years harassed by a 
 painful disease, by malevolent opponents, and by 
 pecuniary difficulties, but they were years rich in the 
 production of the mellowest and most pleasing of his 
 writings. Neither age nor sickness could damp his 
 spirits or dim his genius. His energy seemed the 
 energy of youth renewed. In the autumn of 1697 
 appeared that immortal ode which Scott, Byron, and 
 Macaulay have pronounced to be the noblest in our 
 language, which Voltaire preferred to the whole of
 
 76 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Pindar, and which even the least indulgent critic 
 must admit to be an unapproached masterpiece in 
 lyrical rhetoric. Then he meditated a translation of 
 the Iliad. He wrote a life of Lucian. He revised 
 his Virgil, and he was engaged on less important 
 works beside. He contracted with Tonson to supply 
 him with ten thousand verses, and he added upwards 
 of two thousand more. These verses form a volume 
 which has, till within comparatively recent times, 
 been the delight of all classes of readers, and which 
 cast the same spell on our ancestors ninety years ago 
 as the poetic narratives of Scott, Byron, and Moore 
 cast on a later generation. It was published under 
 the title of Fables, Ancient and Modern, Translated 
 into Verse from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and 
 Chaucer, with Original Poems, and it appeared in 
 March 1700, a few weeks before Dryden's death. 
 There is much in this volume which can never lose 
 its charm, but modern criticism will discriminate. 
 The versions from Chaucer, consisting of The 
 Knight's Tale, The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Wife 
 of Bath's Tale, the character of the good parson, 
 and The Flower and the Leaf, which were once 
 held to constitute the most attractive portion of the 
 work, will probably find least favour with readers 
 in our day. Dry den deals with Chaucer precisely as 
 he had dealt with Virgil. But, if his genius had little 
 affinity with the genius of the poet of the Georgics 
 and the dEneid, it had unfortunately still less affinity 
 with that of the poet of the Canterbury Tales. In 
 translating, or rather in re-writing, a work like the
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 77 
 
 JEneid, he had many opportunities for the display of 
 his own peculiar talents, and he had been able with 
 some propriety to substitute a masterpiece of rhetoric 
 for a masterpiece of poetry. But this was impossible 
 in the case of Chaucer, and Dryden's failure is 
 deplorable. He preserves literally nothing of what 
 constitutes the charm and power of his original. All 
 Chaucer's naivete, simplicity, freshness, grace, pathos, 
 humour, truth to nature and truth to life, all that 
 attracts us in his temper, tone, and style, have not 
 merely disappeared, but, what is much worse, have 
 been represented by Drydenian equivalents. "Where 
 Chaucer is easy and natural with the easiness and 
 naturalness of good breeding, Dryden is coarsely 
 colloquial. Where Chaucer is humorous, Dryden is 
 simply vulgar. It may be doubted whether there is 
 a single touch of nature which Dryden has not missed 
 or spoilt, or a single pathetic passage which he 
 has not made ridiculous. To take two illustrations. 
 Chaucer's magical description of the early morning in 
 May is well known : 
 
 The busy larke, messager of daye, 
 Saluteth in her song the morne graye, 
 And fiery Phebus riseth up so bright 
 That all the orient laugheth of the light, 
 And with his streames dryeth in the greves 
 The silver droppes hanging on the leaves. 
 
 This becomes in Dryden's hands 
 
 The morning lark, the messenger of day, 
 
 Saluteth in her song the morning gray, 
 
 And soon the sun arose with beams so bright 
 
 That all the horizon laughed to see the joyous sight ; 
 
 He with his tepid rays the rose renews 
 
 And licks the dropping leaves and dries the dews.
 
 78 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Nor do Chaucer's pathos and charm of style fare 
 better. Take the touching and exquisite passage in 
 which the dying Arcite takes leave of Emily : 
 
 Alas the woe, alas the peynes strong 
 
 That I for you have suffered and so long ! 
 
 Alas the death ! alas mine Emeleye ! 
 
 Alas departing of our companeye ! 
 
 Alas mine hertes queen ! Alas my wyfe ! 
 
 Mine hertes lady, ender of my life ! 
 
 What is this world ? What asken men to have 
 
 Now with his love, now in his colde grave 
 
 Alone withouten any companeye ? 
 
 This, when translated into Drydenese, becomes 
 
 This I may say, I only grieve to die 
 
 Because I lose my charming Emily ; 
 
 To die when Heaven had put you in my power ! 
 
 Fate could not choose a more malicious hour. 
 
 What greater curse could envious fortune give, 
 
 Than just to die when I began to live ! 
 
 Vain men ! how vanishing a bliss we crave, 
 
 Now warm in love, now withering in the grave ! 
 
 Never, never more to see the sun ! 
 
 Still dark, in a damp vault, and still alone ! 
 
 But the moment we turn to passages which admit of 
 rhetorical treatment, and which enable Dryden to 
 follow, and to follow with propriety, the bent of his 
 own genius, there he is pre-eminently successful. 
 Such would be the description of the quarrel between 
 Arcite and Palamon, the portraits of Lycurgus 
 and Demetrius, Arcite's prayer, the tournament, and 
 the last speech of Theseus in The Knight's Tale, 
 the procession of the fairy chivalry and the dialogue 
 between the heroine and the fairy in The Flower 
 and the Leaf, the witch-bride's speech in The Wife 
 of Baths Tale. 
 
 Of the versions from Boccaccio and Boccaccio
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 79 
 
 supplied him with little more than the framework of 
 the stories Wordsworth has observed that they are 
 the best, or at least the most poetical, of Dryden's 
 poems. 1 This is unquestionably true. Though they 
 continually strike false notes and shock and jar on 
 us, sometimes by their coarseness, sometimes by their 
 diffuse and too declamatory eloquence, sometimes by 
 their palpable untruthfulness to nature, their total im- 
 pression is undoubtedly that of powerful poetry. They 
 appeal more directly and effectively to the passions 
 and the imagination than anything else which 
 Dryden has left us, not excepting the best of his 
 lyrics. There are indeed passages in these versions 
 which approach poetry of a high order. The noble 
 lines in Theodore and Honoria are well known : 
 
 While listening to the murmuring leaves he stood, 
 More than a mile immers'd within the wood, 
 At once the wind was laid ; the whispering sound 
 Was dumb ; a rising earthquake rock'd the ground. 
 With deeper brown the grove was overspread, 
 A sudden horror seiz'd his giddy head, 
 And his ears tinkled and his colour fled. 
 Nature was in alarm ; some danger nigh 
 Seem'd threatened though unseen to mortal eye. 
 Unus'd to fear he summon'd all his soul 
 And stood collected in himself and whole. 
 
 And in another vein how exquisite is the passage 
 describing the sleeping Iphigenia, concluding with the 
 triplet 
 
 The fanning wind upon her bosom blows, 
 
 To meet the fanning wind the bosom rose, 
 
 The fanning wind and purling streams continue her repose. 
 
 Among the pieces comprised in the Fables is a singularly 
 
 1 Letter to Sir Walter Scott. Lockhart's Life of Scott, chap. xiv.
 
 80 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 graceful epistle to the Countess of Ormond, exhorting 
 her to see her own reflection in Chaucer's Emily, and 
 her husband's in the chivalrous and fortunate Palamon. 
 Dryden prefixed to the work, which is dedicated to 
 the Duke of Ormond, one of the most delightful of 
 his critical prefaces, full of pleasant and instructive 
 gossip about Ovid, Homer, Virgil, and Chaucer, about 
 style and language, about the principles of translation, 
 about himself and his opponents, Blackmore, Mil- 
 bourne, and Collier. On these prefaces he greatly 
 prided himself. They were a form of composition 
 not then familiar in England, and among Dryden's 
 many services to our literature must certainly be 
 added the invention of this most delightful variety of 
 the essay. It had no doubt been originally suggested 
 to him by the French critics and poets, but it had 
 gradually assumed in his hands quite a new character. 
 It had entirely lost the tone and colour of the treatise 
 and disquisition, and had become pure causerie. He 
 tells us himself that he had taken Montaigne for his 
 model, that he had learned from him to "ramble," and 
 so to treat his theme as to be never wholly out of it 
 nor in it, and these prefaces certainly bear a very close 
 resemblance in their style and method to the writings 
 of that most fascinating of philosophical gossips. 
 The most charming and valuable of these prefaces are 
 perhaps those prefixed to the Fables and to Troilus 
 and Cressida, and those which introduce the second 
 and third Miscellany, the translation of the jflneid, 
 and the translation of Du Fresnoy's De Arte 
 GrapJiica.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 81 
 
 There is one passage in the preface to the Fables 
 that illustrates very touchingly the effect which 
 years and perhaps sorrows had had in mellowing and 
 purifying the character of the old poet. In 1698 
 appeared Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Profane- 
 ness and Immorality of the English Stage. The 
 severest portion of this invective had been directed 
 against Dryden, whose plays had been ransacked to 
 furnish illustrations of what Collier designed to hold 
 up to the execration of his countrymen. To a man 
 in Dryden's position and of Dryden's resources 
 Collier was not a formidable adversary ; for he stood 
 alone, he had greatly overstated his case, he had 
 not always been honest in his citations ; having little 
 judgment and no humour, he had been guilty of 
 many absurdities which a much less accomplished 
 controversialist than the controversialist whom he 
 had provoked could have turned to excellent account 
 both in defence and attack. Nor was this all. Con- 
 temptuous and truculent in his tone often out- 
 rageously so he had descended to gross personal 
 abuse. It was naturally expected that the great 
 man would reply, and that Collier would fare as 
 Milbourne and Blackmore had recently fared at his 
 hands. Nothing that we know of Dryden is so 
 honourable to him as his conduct on this occasion. 
 He replied, but his reply was not what the world 
 expected, and, considering the provocation received, 
 what meekness itself might have expected. 
 
 I shall say the less of Mr. Collier, because in many things 
 he has taxed me justly; and I have pleaded guilty to all 
 
 G
 
 82 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 thoughts and expressions of mine which can be truly argued of 
 obscenity, profaneness, or immorality, and retract them. If he 
 be my enemy, let him triumph ; if he be my friend, as I have 
 given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be glad 
 of my repentance. 
 
 With these words, a fitting prelude to the solemn 
 scene which was now close at hand, the old man took 
 his leave of controversy for ever. 
 
 " By the mercy of God," he wrote in this same 
 preface it is dated February 1700 "I am come 
 within twenty years of fourscore and eight, a cripple 
 in my limbs, but I think myself as vigorous as ever 
 in the faculties of my soul." On the 13th of the 
 following May he was lying in the Abbey among his 
 illustrious predecessors, of whom he had never during 
 the course of his long life written or perhaps spoken 
 one disloyal word. He died, it appears, somewhat 
 suddenly. Enfeebled by a complication of diseases, 
 he was attacked by erysipelas and gangrene, to which, 
 at three o'clock on the morning of the 1st of May 
 1700, he succumbed, in spite of the anxious care of 
 one of the most eminent surgeons of that day, his 
 old friend Dr. Hobbes. A not very painful operation 
 might have saved his life ; he chose rather to resign 
 it. " He received the notice of his approaching 
 dissolution," writes one of those who stood round 
 his deathbed, " with sweet submission and entire 
 resignation to the Divine will, and he took so tender 
 and obliging a farewell of his friends as none but 
 himself could have expressed." His body was em- 
 balmed and lay in state for several days in the 
 College of Physicians, and on the 13th of May was
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 83 
 
 honoured with a public funeral more imposing and 
 magnificent than any which had been conceded to an 
 English poet before. He was laid in the grave of 
 Chaucer, near the bones of Spenser and Jonson and 
 Cowley, not far from his old friend Davenant, and 
 his old schoolmaster Busby, in 
 
 the temple where the dead 
 Are honoured by the nations. 
 
 Nothing seems to have distressed Dryden more 
 than the persistency with which his enemies maligned 
 and misrepresented his private character, and it is 
 certainly due to his memory to protest against the 
 injustice of much which has been circulated to his 
 discredit. He has been described in terms which 
 would require some qualification if applied to Gates 
 or Chininch. Burnet, smarting from the severe casti- 
 gation which he had received in The Hind and the 
 Panther, represents him as a monster of immodesty 
 and impurity. Macaulay paints him in the blackest 
 colours ; an abject spirit, a depraved and polluted 
 imagination, shamelessness, and turpitude of all kinds 
 are imputed to him, not as a writer merely, but as a 
 man. He has been accused of backbiting, of double 
 dealing, and of practising all those mean arts by 
 which the vanity and envy of little men seek to 
 obtain their ends. Nay, charges of a still more 
 odious kind have been advanced and repeated against 
 him. Most of these charges have been grossly 
 exaggerated ; for some of them there is absolutely 
 no foundation at all. Those who knew him well, for 
 instance, have distinctly asserted that his private
 
 84 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 life was perfectly pure, and yet Mr. Christie con- 
 tinues to accuse him, on the paltry evidence of an 
 obscure libeller, of the grossest libertinism. The 
 simple truth is that Dryden was in private life a very 
 respectable, a very amiable, and a very generous man. 
 " Posterity," says a writer in the Gentleman's Maga- 
 zine for February 1745, who was acquainted with 
 Dryden, "is absolutely mistaken as to that great 
 man ; though forced to be a satirist, he was the 
 mildest creature breathing, and the readiest to help 
 the young and deserving." He was, indeed, always 
 going out of his way to do a kindness to his fellow- 
 labourers in literature. He welcomed Wycherley with 
 open arms, though he knew that Wycherley 's success 
 must be, to some extent, based on his own depression. 
 Dennis, Shere, Moyle, Motteaux, and Walsh were 
 constantly assisted by him. By his patronage Addi- 
 son, then a diffident lad at Oxford, and Congreve, a 
 timid aspirant for popular favour, came into pro- 
 minence. When Southerne was smarting under the 
 failure of his comedy, Dryden was near to cheer and 
 condole with him. He helped Prior, and he was but 
 ill rewarded. He did what he could for young 
 Oldham; and when the poor fellow buried in his 
 premature grave, abilities which might have added to 
 the riches of our literature, he dedicated a touching 
 elegy to his memory. Lee and Garth were among 
 his disciples ; and, if he was at first blind or unjust 
 to Otway's fine genius, he afterwards made ample 
 amends. He gave Nell Gwynn a helping hand at 
 the time when she sorely needed it. His letters to
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 85 
 
 Mrs. Thomas still testify not only his willingness to 
 oblige, but the courtesy and kindliness with which 
 he proffered his services. He was, we are told, 
 beloved by his tenants in Northamptonshire for his 
 liberality as a landlord. The few private letters 
 which have been preserved to us clearly indicate that, 
 if he was not happy with his wife, he was a forbearing 
 and kindly husband, and his devotion to his children 
 is touching in the extreme. He was always thinking 
 of them ; he is always alluding to them. He sent 
 two of them to the Universities when he could but 
 ill afford it ; and he seems to have helped them in 
 their studies. " If," he writes, referring to his son 
 Charles, who had been ill, " it please God that I must 
 die of over-study, I cannot spend my life better than 
 in preserving his." From those base passions, which 
 are so often the curse of men of letters envy and 
 jealousy he was absolutely free. We may not be 
 prepared either to defend or to extenuate the grave 
 offences against morality and decency which sully his 
 writings ; we may not be prepared to defend the 
 wild inconsistency of his conduct and his opinions ; 
 and yet it is but just to try a poet by the standard 
 of the age which nurtured him. Dryden has been 
 the noble scapegoat of an ignoble and dissolute 
 generation. He fell on evil days and profligate 
 patrons, with the hard alternative of popularity or 
 starvation. 
 
 The importance of Dryden from a historical point 
 of view can scarcely be overestimated. Probably no 
 writer ever left so deep an impression* on the litera-
 
 86 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 ture of his country. For nearly a hundred years the 
 greater part both of our poetry and of our criticism 
 was profoundly affected by his influence. He stood 
 indeed in pretty much the same relation to belles 
 lettres as Bacon had stood to philosophy. He was 
 the exponent, if not the initiator, of new ideas, the 
 prophet of a new dispensation. At once summing 
 up and concentrating what had found scattered and 
 somewhat uncertain expression in the earlier repre- 
 sentatives of the critical school, he gave it precision, 
 power, vogue, and authority. Neither Waller nor 
 Denham, neither Davenant nor Cowley, singly or 
 collectively, would have been able permanently to 
 affect the course and character of our literature. But 
 Dryden appeared, and an epoch was made. Temper, 
 tone, colour, style all became changed. A trans- 
 formed society had found its literary interpreter and 
 teacher an age not merely unpropitious but inimical 
 to poetry had found its poet. Dryden taught our 
 literature to adapt itself to an altered world. He 
 struck the keynote of the new strains ; he marshalled 
 the order of the new procession. Of the poets and 
 men of letters most characteristic of the eighteenth 
 century he was the acknowledged master. He 
 directed them to the classics of ancient Kome and 
 modern France for their models in composition and 
 for their canons of criticism, and both by example 
 and by precept he made those models and canons pre- 
 dominantly influential. It would be no exaggeration 
 to say that if we except The Rape of the Lock and 
 Windsor Forest, Pope not only followed implicitly
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 87 
 
 in the footsteps of Dryden, but was indebted to him 
 for the archetypes, or at least the suggestions, of 
 every kind of poetry attempted by him. He once 
 observed that he could select from Dryden's works 
 better specimens of every mode of poetry than any 
 other English writer could supply ; and the remark is 
 significant. Indeed, Dryden was to Pope what Homer 
 and Apollonius, Theocritus and Nicander, were to 
 Virgil. On criticism his influence was almost equally 
 extensive. Till the appearance of the subtler and 
 more philosophical disquisitions of Hurd, Kames, and 
 Harris, he contributed more than any single writer 
 to give the ply and the tone to the criticism of the 
 eighteenth century, to prescribe its limits, to deter- 
 mine its scope, not so much directly by virtue of his 
 own authority as a legislator, as indirectly by intro- 
 ducing, interpreting, and popularising the critics of 
 antiquity and of modern France. Johnson has observed, 
 and observed with reference to Dryden, that a writer 
 who obtains his full purpose loses himself in his own 
 lustre. It is certainly doing Dryden no more than 
 justice to say that Addison and the periodical writers in 
 their capacity as critics, that Pope in his prefaces and 
 dissertations, that Goldsmith in his critical papers, 
 and that Johnson himself in his great work are 
 satellites in the system of which he was the original 
 and central luminary. Of modern English prose, of 
 the prose, that is to say, which exchanged the old 
 synthetic and rhetorical scheme of structure and 
 colour for that happier temper of ease and dignity, of 
 grace and variety, familiar to us in the style of such
 
 88 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 writers as Addison, Bolingbroke, and Chesterfield, he 
 was the first to furnish a perfect model. 
 
 The judgment of our forefathers which assigned <to 
 Dryden the third or fourth place among English poets 
 will not be corroborated by modern criticism. It 
 would, indeed, be easy to frame, and to frame with 
 unexceptionable correctness, a definition of poetry 
 which should exclude, or nearly exclude, him from 
 the right to be numbered among poets at all. Of 
 imagination in the sensuous acceptation of the term 
 he had little, in the higher acceptation of the term 
 nothing. And if his genius is, to borrow an expression 
 from Plato, without the power of the wing, it is almost 
 equally deficient in most of those other qualities which, 
 constitute the essential distinction between poetry 
 and rhetoric. It was neither finely touched nor finely 
 tempered. It had little sense of the beautiful, of the 
 pathetic, of the sublime, though it could juggle with 
 their counterfeits. To say with Wordsworth that 
 there is not a single image from Nature to be found 
 in the whole body of his poetry would be to say what 
 is not true ; but it is true that such images are rare. 
 The predominating power in Dryden was a robust, 
 vigorous, and logical intellect, intensely active and 
 extraordinarily versatile. In addition to this he 
 possessed, or, to speak more properly, acquired, a 
 singularly fine ear for the rhythm of verse, and a 
 plastic mastery over our language, such as few even 
 of the Classics of our poetry have attained. What 
 these powers could effect they effected to the full. 
 They placed him in the front rank of rhetorical poets.
 
 JOHN DRYDEN 89 
 
 They enabled him to rival Lucretius in didactic poetry, 
 Lucan in epic, and Juvenal in satire. If they could 
 not supply what Nature had denied him, they supplied 
 its semblance. There is in Dryden's poetry, and 
 especially in his lyrical poetry, a vehemence and 
 energy, a rapidity of movement and a fertility and 
 vividness of imagery, which it is sometimes difficult 
 to distinguish from the expression of that emotional 
 and spiritual exaltation which constitutes genuine 
 enthusiasm. But genuine enthusiasm is not there. 
 Alexander's Feast is a consummate example both of 
 metrical skill and of what a combination of all the 
 qualities which enter into the composition of rhetori- 
 cal masterpieces can effect. But it is nothing more. 
 The moment we compare it, say, with Pindar's first 
 Pythian Ode, its relation to true poetry becomes at 
 once apparent. It is the same when he attempts the 
 pathetic and when he attempts the sublime. For 
 the first he substitutes as in the Elegy on Oldham, 
 the Ode on Mrs. Anne Killigrew, Eleonora, and the 
 lines on Ossory in Absalom and Achitophel elaborate 
 eloquence ; for the second, if he does not collapse in 
 bombast, magnificence and pomp. 
 
 But when all deductions are made, how much 
 must the most scrupulous criticism still leave to 
 Dryden. As long as our literature endures, his 
 genial energy, his happy unstinted talent, his incom- 
 parable power of style, can never fail to fascinate. 
 It may be said with simple truth that what is best 
 in his work is in our language the best of its kind. 
 His only rival in satire is Pope ; but the satires of
 
 90 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Pope stand in the same relation to Absalom and 
 Achitophel, The Medal, and MacFlecknoe, as the 
 jEneid stands to the Iliad. Some of the most 
 eminent of our poets have essayed to make rhymed 
 verse the vehicle for argumentative discussion ; but 
 what have we which can for a moment be placed 
 beside the Reliyio Laid and The Hind and the 
 Panther? His Epistles again, the Epistles, for 
 example, to Eoscommon, to Congreve, to his cousin, 
 to Kneller, to the Duchess of Ormond, are the per- 
 fection of this species of composition. His Prologues 
 and Epilogues are models of what such pieces should 
 be. If his lyrics have not the finer qualities of poetry, 
 and jar on us now with the note of falsetto and now 
 with the note of vulgarity, the first Ode on Saint 
 Cecilia 's Day, Alexander's Feast, the Ode on Mrs. 
 Anne Killigrew, and the Horatian Paraphrase are 
 superb achievements. No one, indeed, can con- 
 template without wonder the manifold energy of that 
 vigorous and plastic genius, which added to our 
 literature so much which is excellent and so much 
 which is admirable, and which elicited from one of 
 the most fastidious of poets and critics the rapturous 
 exhortation to read Dryden " and be blind to all 
 his faults ! " 

 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 1 
 
 THIS volume has more than one important claim to 
 serious consideration. It is the first instalment of 
 what promises to be the most voluminous history of 
 our national drama which has yet been attempted. 
 As a composition and as a contribution to literary 
 criticism it appears to us, and we have little doubt 
 that it will appear to posterity, to illustrate and to 
 illustrate comprehensively a most curious phase in 
 the development of modern prose literature. Its 
 author has been long known to the world as an 
 accomplished and industrious man of letters, and in 
 undertaking the present work he would seem to have 
 undertaken a work for which he was peculiarly well 
 qualified. It has been, he tells us, for many years in 
 his thoughts. It was commenced nearly a quarter of 
 a century ago ; and though its composition has been 
 suspended, it has, if we may judge from Mr. Symonds' 
 principal publications, been suspended for studies 
 which must* assuredly have formed an excellent train- 
 ing for the task which he now resumes. Nor is this 
 
 1 Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama. By John Addington 
 Symonds. London, 1884.
 
 92 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 all. We have no wish to speak disparagingly of the 
 historians of English literature, but it must, we fear, 
 be admitted that they have as a class been deficient 
 in that wide and liberal culture that scholarly 
 familiarity with the classics of other ages and of other 
 tongues which constitutes the chief difference be- 
 tween literary historians of the first and literary 
 historians of the second order. It is this which has 
 given us many Shaws but few Hallams much that 
 will satisfy those who seek to be informed, little that 
 will satisfy those who seek to be enlightened ; and it 
 is this which places the histories of English literature 
 now current among us so immeasurably below the 
 work of M. Taine. But assuredly no deficiency on 
 the score of literary attainments and literary culture 
 can be imputed to Mr. Symonds. His essays on the 
 Greek poets are a sufficient proof of his acquirements 
 as a scholar. His Study of Dante is a historical 
 and critical disquisition of great merit, and his five 
 stout volumes on the Eenaissance in Italy display 
 an acquaintance with the literature and history of 
 that period such as probably no other Englishman 
 since Roscoe has possessed. With the poetry and 
 criticism of Germany and France he appears to be 
 equally conversant. He has sought fame as a poet, 
 as a translator, as a critic of the fine arts ; and in each 
 of these characters he has distinguished himself. The 
 appearance, therefore, of such a work as the present, 
 by so eminent and so accomplished a writer, cannot 
 but be regarded as an event of importance. On 
 writers like Mr. Symonds depends the ordinary
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 93 
 
 standard of literary achievement. What they do has 
 the force of example ; what they neglect to do is drawn 
 into precedent. The quality of the work produced 
 by them determinates the quality of the work pro- 
 duced by many others. A bad book is its own anti- 
 dote ; a superlatively good book appeals to few ; but 
 a book which is not too defective to be called excel- 
 lent, and not too excellent to become popular, exercises 
 an influence on literary activity the importance of 
 which it is scarcely possible to overestimate. And 
 of such a character is the volume before us. 
 
 "We have explained our reasons for attaching par- 
 ticular importance to it, and we shall we hope be for- 
 given for commenting freely on what appear to us to 
 be its chief blemishes. It is our duty to say, then, that 
 there is much in this volume which will, we fear, be 
 of ill precedent in the future. What we expected, 
 and what we felt we had a right to expect, in so am- 
 bitious a work, were some indications of the meditatio 
 et labor in posterum valescentes, something that 
 smacked, as the ancient critics would put it, of the 
 file and the lamp. What we found was, we regret to 
 say, every indication of precipitous haste, a style 
 which where it differs from the style of extemporary 
 journalism differs for the worse florid, yet common- 
 place ; full of impurities ; inordinately, nay, incredibly 
 diffuse and pleonastic ; a narrative clogged with end- 
 less repetitions, without symmetry, without proportion. 
 'To go no further than the opening chapter, Mr. 
 Symonds there observes that Elizabethan art cul- 
 minated in Shakspeare. Such a remark was assuredly
 
 94 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 neither very new nor very profound, but it is repeated 
 no less than eight times in almost as many pages. 
 First it appears simply as, " In Shakspeare the art of 
 sixteenth-century England was completed and accom- 
 plished." Then it reappears as, " In Shakspeare we 
 have the culmination of dramatic art in England." 
 Next it assumes the form of, " Shakspeare represents 
 the dramatic art in its fulness." Again it presents 
 itself as, " Shakspeare forms a focus for all the rays 
 of dramatic light which had emerged before his 
 time." On the next page, " Shakspeare is the key- 
 stone of the arch." A few lines afterwards, " Shak- 
 speare's greatness consists in bringing the type 
 established by his predecessors to artistic fulness." 
 A few lines before, " It (the drama) reaches that 
 accomplishment in Shakspeare's art which enthrals 
 attention." Then again it starts up as, " Shakspeare 
 realised the previous efforts of the English genius 
 to form a drama, and perfected the type." A not 
 less glaring illustration of the same defect will 
 be found in the chapter on Marlowe : " The leading 
 motive which pervades Marlowe's poetry may be 
 defined as V amour de I 'impossible." This is the 
 text, and through twenty-three octavo pages is the 
 remark repeated and illustrated, illustrated and re- 
 peated, till the iteration becomes almost maddening. 
 Some portions of the work bear the appearance of 
 having been contributions to periodical literature, 
 which Mr. Symonds has, without revising, and with- 
 out adapting to the purposes of his history, forced to 
 do service as sections of a continuous narrative. This
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 95 
 
 is always a dangerous experiment, and it has certainly 
 not succeeded in Mr. Symonds' case. A moment's 
 reflection would, for example, have shown him the 
 impropriety of prefacing his account of Marlowe with 
 a sketch of the history of the drama, when a history 
 of the drama had been the subject of the preceding 
 five hundred and eighty-four pages. 
 
 To the same inconsiderate haste are no doubt to be 
 attributed the many inaccuracies of statement which 
 deform the work. It would be impossible to conceive 
 a description more erroneous and distorted than the 
 description which Mr. Symonds gives, in the second 
 chapter, of the world of Elizabeth. What he says of 
 its intellectual characteristics will apply only to the 
 dramatists, and will even then require to be greatly 
 modified. What he says of its social characteristics 
 is true only of one or two phases of its many-sided 
 life. We can hardly suppose that Mr. Symonds is 
 imperfectly versed either in the dramas of ^Eschylus 
 or in the dramas of Greene. Yet when he tells us that 
 jEschylus has scarcely any moral precepts capable of 
 isolation from the dramatic context, and that Greene's 
 blank verse betrays the manner of the couplet, he 
 certainly surprises us. What is of course true is that 
 <yywjuat are far less frequent in JEschylus than in 
 Euripides, and that in Greene's earlier style the blank 
 verse is, as Mr. Symonds describes, constructed on the 
 model of the couplet ; but, for all that, the plays of 
 ^Eschylus abound in yvwpat, and Greene's earlier blank 
 verse is not his later and characteristic blank verse, 
 which is by no means constructed on the model of the
 
 96 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 couplet. Equally loose and equally untrue is the 
 assertion that Lyly discovered euphuism. We are 
 surprised that a scholar like Mr. Symonds should not 
 have known that it would be as erroneous to ascribe 
 to the author of Euphues the discovery of euphuism 
 as it would be to ascribe to the author of Samson 
 Agonistes the discovery of the machinery of the 
 classical drama, or to the author of the second 
 book of the Novum Organum the discovery of wit. 
 Euphuism is in many of its characteristic features 
 as old as Seneca and Plutarch. Even when fully 
 developed that is to say, in the form which it 
 assumed in Lyly's romance it had been long before 
 the world, and had Mr. Symonds taken the trouble to 
 glance at the books most in vogue when Euphues was 
 in course of composition, he would have seen that 
 Lyly, so far from setting, was simply following a 
 fashion. Has Mr. Symonds never inspected North's 
 version of Guevara's Relox de Principes, George 
 Pettie's Petite Palace of Pettie, and Castiglione's 
 II Cortegianof 
 
 Nor is Mr. Symonds always sound in his generalisa- 
 tions on the spirit of the Elizabethan drama. Nothing 
 can be less felicitous than his remark that that drama 
 is draped with " a tragic pall of deep Teutonic medi- 
 tative melancholy," and nothing can be more unsatis- 
 factory than the evidence adduced by him in support 
 of the remark. It consists of some thirty quotations 
 selected from the speeches of characters who, figuring 
 in tragic scenes, are simply, in obedience to dramatic 
 propriety, expressing themselves in dramatic language.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 97 
 
 On Mr. Symonds' principle it would be the easiest 
 thing in the world to prove that the distinguishing 
 feature of the Homeric poems is their cynical pes- 
 simism, that the distinguishing feature of Chaucer's 
 poetry is its pensive sentimentalism, and that what 
 chiefly characterises the poetry of Sophocles and 
 Milton is its audacious impiety. What it was incum- 
 bent on Mr. Symonds to show was, not that such 
 passages as he refers to occur, but that they occur 
 with obtrusive frequency. True it is that there is an 
 undue preponderance of meditative melancholy in the 
 dramas of Webster, Marston, Tourneur, and Ford, but 
 this school was only one out of many, it is confessedly 
 not a representative school, and its productions form 
 but a small portion of the literature on which Mr. 
 Symonds is generalising. For every play which would 
 give some colour to his remark, there are fifty to 
 which it would not be applicable. The truth is that 
 there is no drama in the world in which the mixture 
 of the serious and humorous is so happily tempered, 
 and which reflects so faithfully the normal conditions 
 of normal humanity. 
 
 But these are trifles. We have now to animadvert 
 on blemishes in Mr. Symonds' work of a much more 
 serious character. Within the last few years there has 
 sprung up a school of writers, the appearance of which 
 at a certain period in the history of every literature 
 seems to be inevitable. The characteristics of this 
 school have been the same in all ages. They have 
 indeed been delineated and ridiculed by successive 
 generations of critics, by Quintilian and Petronius 
 
 H
 
 98 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 among the Romans, by Aristotle and Longinus among 
 the Greeks ; Boileau and Voltaire covered them with 
 contempt in France, Cascales and Ignacio de Luzan 
 held them up to the scorn of Spain, and they were the 
 detestation of Alfieri in Italy. These characteristics 
 resolve themselves into morbid peculiarities of style, 
 and into morbid peculiarities of opinion and senti- 
 ment. In the writings of purer schools style may be 
 compared to a mirror. In the writings of this school 
 it resembles a kaleidoscope. Its property is not to 
 reflect, but to refract and distort ; not to convey 
 thought in the simplicity of its original conception, 
 but to decompose it into fantastic shapes. With them 
 the art of expression is simply the art of making 
 common ideas assume uncommon forms, or, in other 
 words, the art of simulating originality and eloquence. 
 No senses lend themselves so readily to deception as 
 hearing and sight. The strongest eye, if dazzled, 
 cannot discern ; the nicest ear, if stunned, cannot 
 distinguish. And what glare and tumult are to the 
 eye and ear, that in the hands of these writers is 
 language to the mind. Their diction is all blaze and 
 glitter. It has sometimes the effect of spangles 
 dangled in the sun, and sometimes the effect of flame 
 
 O ' 
 
 radiating from burnished metal. Its glancing flash 
 baffles ; its unrelieved glare blinds. 
 
 The process by which these effects are produced is 
 easily analysed. In the first place, the phraseology of 
 these writers is selected almost exclusively from the 
 phraseology of poetry. It consists mainly of meta- 
 phors. They reason in metaphors, they define in
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 99 
 
 metaphors, they reflect in metaphors ; and the meta- 
 phors in which they most delight are such as would, 
 even in the enthusiasm of the dithyramb, be used 
 sparingly. Not less characteristic is their habitual 
 employment of hyperbole. Whatever is said is con- 
 veyed in language which reaches the extreme limits of 
 expression. Whatever is described is described in 
 terms which exhaust the resources of rhetoric. Thus 
 they have no energy in reserve ; when eloquence is 
 appropriate, it has already palled ; when it is necessary 
 to be impressive, the force of impressiveness is spent. 
 They have emphasised till emphasis has ceased to 
 appeal. They have stimulated till stimulants have 
 lost their efficacy. Closely allied with this peculiarity, 
 or, to speak more accurately, one of the many phases 
 assumed by it, is the affectation of novel and striking 
 expressions. It was said of Augustus that he avoided 
 as a rock a word not sanctioned by popular usage. 
 It may be said of these writers that what popular 
 usage sanctions it is their chief aim to shun. Thus 
 their diction teems with outlandish words which are 
 sometimes coined and sometimes revived. Thus every 
 eccentricity of collocation and combination in the 
 repertory of vicious rhetoric is assiduously cultivated 
 by them. They out-Ossian Ossian in the tumid 
 extravagance of their epithets and turns. They out- 
 Pindar Pindar in the vehement audacity of their 
 figures. Now we are glutted with what Petronius 
 calls melliti verborum globuli honied turns, and now 
 we are dazzled with expressions which, to adopt 
 Smith's ingenious mistranslation of a phrase in
 
 100 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Longinus, do not shine like stars, but glare like 
 meteors. Everywhere it is the same an attempt to 
 produce finer bread than is made of wheat, till, like 
 the slave in Horace, nauseated with sweetmeats we 
 long for loaves. 
 
 In former times this style we are speaking of 
 course of prose- was as a rule confined to oratory and 
 history, where, though ridiculous and absurd, it was 
 not without a certain propriety. In our time it has 
 invaded criticism, where it is simply intolerable. The 
 founder and leader of the school of criticism which has 
 adopted it is Mr. Swinburne. Of Mr. Swinburne's 
 work as a poet this is not the place to speak. We 
 will only say that his superb powers as a lyrist have 
 no more appreciative, no more hearty admirers than 
 ourselves. But, unhappily, Mr. Swinburne is not 
 content to confine himself to the art in which he 
 excels. His critical writings are now almost as 
 voluminous as his poetry ; and as a prose-writer and 
 critic we believe him to have been guilty of greater 
 absurdities and to have done more mischief than any 
 writer of equal eminence who has ever lived. With 
 the examples of Goethe and Coleridge before us, it 
 would be impossible to accept without reservation the 
 remark of Plato that those who are most success- 
 ful in exhibiting the principles of poetry in practice 
 are the least competent to interpret and discuss them 
 in other words, that the best poets are the worst 
 critics. But assuredly no such reservation is possible 
 in the case of Mr. Swinburne. Of the intellectual 
 qualifications indispensable to a critic he has, with the
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 101 
 
 exception of a powerful and accurate memory, literally 
 none. His judgment is the sport sometimes of his 
 emotions and sometimes of his imagination ; and what 
 is in men of normal temper the process of reflection, 
 is in him the process of imagination operating on 
 emotion, and of emotion reacting on imagination. A 
 work of art has the same effect on Mr. Swinburne as 
 objects fraught with hateful or delightful associations 
 have on persons of sensitive memories. The mind 
 dwells not on the objects themselves, but on what 
 is accidentally recalled or accidentally suggested by 
 them, and nothing is but what is not. Criticism 
 is with him neither a process of analysis nor a pro- 
 cess of interpretation, but a "lyrical cry." Canons 
 and principles, criteria and standards, he has none. 
 His genius and temper as a critic are precisely those 
 of Aristotle's Young Man. What seem to be Mr. 
 Swinburne's convictions are merely his temporary 
 impressions. What he sees in one light in one mood, 
 he sees in another light in another mood. He is, in 
 truth, as inconsistent as he is intemperate, as dog- 
 matic as he is whimsical the very Zimri of criticism. 
 Indeed, the words in which Dry den paints Bucking- 
 ham admirably describe him : 
 
 Praising and railing are his usual themes, 
 And both, to show his judgment, in extremes ; 
 So over-violent or over-civil, 
 That every man with him is God or DeviL 
 
 He is at once the most ferocious of iconoclasts and 
 the most abject of idolaters. In a writer who has 
 been so fortunate as to become the object of his
 
 102 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 capricious homage, he can find nothing to censure ; 
 in a writer who has had the misfortune to become 
 the object of his equally capricious hostility, he can 
 find nothing to praise. The very qualities, for 
 example, which attract him in Fletcher, repel him 
 in Euripides. He overwhelms Byron with ribald 
 abuse for precisely the same qualities which in Victor 
 Hugo elicit from him fulsome eulogy. To exalt 
 Collins, he absurdly depreciates Gray. To degrade 
 Wordsworth, he ridiculously overrates Keats. But 
 it is when dealing with the poets who are the subjects 
 of Mr. Symonds' volume that his opinions become 
 most preposterous. The very name of Marlowe 
 appears to have the power of completely subjugating 
 his reason. He speaks of him in terms which a 
 writer who weighed words would* scarcely employ, 
 without qualification, when speaking of the greatest 
 names in all poetry. Indeed, he boldly says that, in 
 his opinion, there are not above two or three poets in 
 the whole compass of literature who can be set above 
 Marlowe ; " and if," he adds, " Marlowe's country 
 should ever bear men worthy to raise a statue or 
 a monument to his memory, he should stand before 
 them with the head and eyes of an Apollo." But 
 what follows is too absurd to transcribe. 
 
 But Mr. Swinburne's extravagance is not difficult 
 to account for. Few men who have ever lived have 
 been so prodigally endowed with the gifts which 
 ensure pre-eminence in lyrical poetry. With the 
 most exquisite sensibility to emotional impression, 
 with vehement enthusiasm, with the finest aesthetic
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 103 
 
 perception of the charm and power of the noble and 
 the beautiful wherever they find expression in art and 
 life, in absolute spontaneity of rapt musical utterance, 
 he has no rival among poets since Shelley ; in mere 
 command over words, over all the resources of 
 rhymed and rhythmic expression, no superior, perhaps 
 no equal, in modern literature. But these are not the 
 gifts, this is not the genius and temper, which qualify 
 men to become critics. When, for example, Mr. 
 Swinburne pronounces Marlowe to be " a poet of the 
 first order," and places Wordsworth below Keats, we 
 perceive at once that his critical lens is hopelessly 
 out of focus, that, judging of poetry purely from the 
 aesthetic point of view, or, to speak more correctly, 
 from the point of view of a lyrical poet, he does 
 not understand that what separates poetry of the 
 secondary order from poetry of the highest order 
 is a difference not merely in degree but in kind, 
 that what constitutes the superiority of Sophocles 
 and Shakspeare to Hugo and Webster is not simply 
 what comes under the cognisance of the criticism 
 of emotion. To the soundness or unsoundness of 
 the metaphysic and ethic of poetry Mr. Swinburne, 
 to judge from his estimates and precepts, appears to 
 be quite indifferent. " It does not," he naively 
 observes, " detract from the poetic supremacy of 
 JSschylus and of Dante, of Milton and of Shelley, 
 that they should have been pleased to put their art 
 to such use," that is, allied it " with moral or religious 
 passion, with the ethics or the politics of an age " ! l 
 
 1 Essay on Victor Hugo's L'Anne'e Terrible.
 
 104 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 As Mr. William Eossetti long ago admirably ob- 
 served, "Mr. Swinburne's mind appears to be very 
 like a tabula rasa on moral and religious subjects, 
 so occupied is it with instincts, feelings, perceptions, 
 and a sense of natural or artistic fitness and harmony." 1 
 He is thus largely responsible for the predominance 
 of the wretched cant now so much in vogue about 
 "art for art's sake," which would have us "under- 
 stand by poetry " we quote Mr. Pater's words " all 
 literary production which attains the power of giving 
 pleasure by its form as distinct from its matter," in 
 other words, for the prostitution on principle of the 
 noblest and divinest of the arts into a mere siren of 
 the senses. The brilliance of his own work as a 
 poet has naturally enabled him to exercise enormous 
 influence on contemporary literature. Even in the 
 judgment of those who can discern he is allowed 
 to stand high among English lyrists. But with 
 the many he is, like Spenser's Una, the object of 
 indiscriminating idolatry. The imitators of what 
 least deserves imitation in his poetry are to be 
 numbered by hundreds, his disciples in criticism are 
 to be numbered by myriads. Turn where we will, 
 to reviews, to critical prefaces, to critical disquisitions 
 and monographs, there, too often, is his note his 
 turbid intemperance of judgment, his purely sensuous 
 conception of the nature and scope of art ; there, too 
 often, his characteristic modes of expression, his hyper- 
 bole, his wild and whirling verbiage, his plethora of 
 extravagant and frequently nauseous metaphor. 
 
 1 Surinburne's Poems and Ballads : A Criticism, p. 17.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 105 
 
 In his critical estimates we are glad to see that 
 Mr. Symonds has not followed his master ; but of 
 many of the most offensive characteristics of Mr. 
 Swinburne's style he is, we regret to say, only too 
 faithful an imitator. In some cases he has even 
 gone beyond him. We doubt whether even Mr. 
 Swinburne would have spoken of crudities of com- 
 position as "the very parbreak of a youthful poet's 
 indigestion " ; or would so far have lost himself in 
 figurative imagery as to describe a drama as "an asp, 
 short, ash - coloured, poison - fanged, blunt - headed, 
 abrupt in movement, hissing and wriggling through 
 the sands of human misery " ; or would have repre- 
 sented a dramatist " stabbing the metal plate on 
 which he works, drowning it in aqua fortis till it 
 froths " ; or would have spoken of " the lust for the 
 impossible being injected like a molten fluid into all 
 Marlowe's eminent dramatic personalities." 
 
 There is scarcely a page in Mr. Symonds' work 
 which is not deformed with vices of this kind. The 
 " carnal " element in Marlowe's genius is " a sensuality 
 which lends a grip to Belial on the heartstrings of the 
 lust." Helen's kisses are " kisses hot as ' sops of flaming 
 fire.' " Marlowe's Hero and Leander is " that divinest 
 dithyramb in praise of sensual beauty in which the 
 poet moves in a hyperuranian region, from which he 
 contemplates with eyes of equal admiration the species 
 of terrestrial loveliness." Occasionally we have such 
 unmeaning expressions as " the adamantine declama- 
 tion of Ford," and the " torrid splendour of De 
 Quincey's rhetoric." It may be doubted whether
 
 106 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 metaphorical extravagance ever went further than in 
 the following sentence : " When he sees her corpse " 
 Mr. Symonds is describing the famous scene where, 
 in Webster's Duchess of Malfi, Ferdinand is standing 
 over the body of his murdered sister "his fancy, 
 set on flame already by the fury of his hatred, 
 becomes a hell, which burns the image of her calm 
 pale forehead on his reeling brain." 
 
 And now our ungrateful task is concluded. We 
 have so much sympathy with Mr. Symonds' studies, 
 we are so sensible of his distinguished services to 
 history and literature, and we have found so much 
 that is excellent in the present volume, that, had we 
 consulted inclination only, we should have refrained 
 from everything bearing the appearance of adverse 
 criticism. But the duty imposed on us as critics 
 is, we feel, imperative, and that duty would be ill 
 performed if we did not raise our voice against 
 innovations which we believe to be vicious and 
 mischievous. That the style which we have been 
 discussing is a fashion, and will, like other fashions, 
 pass away, we have no doubt. What is to be deeply 
 regretted is that it should have found expression 
 in a work which may possibly outlive many such 
 fashions. 
 
 Vitium tanto conspectius in se 
 Crimen habet quanto major qui peccat habetur. 
 
 We have often thought that a curiously interesting 
 book might be written on the posthumous fortune of 
 poets. In the case of prose writers, the verdict of the 
 age which immediately succeeds them is, as a rule,
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 107 
 
 final. Their reputation is subject to few fluctuations. 
 Once crowned, they are seldom deposed ; once deposed, 
 they are never reinstated. Time and accident may 
 affect their popularity, but the estimate which has 
 been formed by competent critics of their intrinsic 
 worth remains unmodified. How different has been 
 the fate of poets ! Take Chaucer. In 1500 his 
 popularity was at its height. During the latter part 
 of the sixteenth century it began to decline. From 
 that date till the end of William III.'s reign in spite 
 of the influence which he undoubtedly exercised over 
 Spenser, and in spite of the respectful allusions to him 
 in Sidney, Puttenham, Dray ton, and Milton his 
 fame had become rather a tradition than a reality. 
 In the following age the good-natured tolerance of 
 Dryden was succeeded by the contempt of Addison 
 and the supercilious patronage of Pope. Between 
 1700 and 1782 nothing seemed more probable than 
 that the writings of the first of England's narrative 
 poets would live chiefly in the memory of antiquarians. 
 In little more than half a century afterwards we find 
 him placed, with Shakspeare and Milton, on the 
 highest pinnacle of poetic renown. Not less remark- 
 able have been the vicissitudes through which the 
 fame of Dante has passed. During the fourteenth 
 century he was regarded with superstitious reverence. 
 Indeed, his reputation was so jealously guarded that 
 a pretext was found to bring a contemporary, who had 
 presumed to parody his verses, to the stake. In the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries his fame greatly 
 declined, and he sank to a position similar to that
 
 108 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 assigned to Ennius by the Augustan critics. During 
 the seventeenth century there were distinguished 
 critics, even among his own countrymen, who not only 
 placed him below Petrarch and Ariosto, but even dis- 
 puted his title to be called a classic. The sentence 
 passed on him by Voltaire and Bettinelli is well 
 known ; and, though he never, it is true, wanted 
 apologists, there can be no doubt that Voltaire and 
 Bettinelli represented the general opinion of the 
 eighteenth century. Then came the reaction. From 
 the time of Monti his influence on the literatures of 
 Italy and England has been prodigious. Every decade 
 has added to his fame, and that fame, gigantic though 
 it is, is even now increasing. Take again Ronsard. 
 Between 1580 and 1609 he was esteemed by many 
 the first poet in France. Between 1609 and 1630 his 
 fame rapidly declined, and between 1630 and 1858 he 
 was so completely ignored that, if we are not mistaken, 
 during the whole of this period no edition of his 
 poems was called for. Suddenly he regained his old 
 glory, and in 1872 a statue was erected to him as 
 " Le Premier Lyrique Franais." 
 
 Still more singular has been the fortune of the 
 fathers of our drama. It was their lot to obtain from 
 contemporaries what most poets obtain only from a 
 later age their just deserts. They were, as a rule, 
 neither over-praised nor under- valued. Nothing can 
 be more discriminating than the judgment passed on 
 the dramas of Marlowe, Greene, and Lyly by the 
 generation which witnessed their appearance. But, 
 strange to say, the justice which was so readily done
 
 THE PREDECESSOES OF SHAKSPEARE 109 
 
 them by contemporaries was destined to be persistently 
 withheld from them by after ages. It is not surpris- 
 ing that their fame should have been eclipsed by the 
 fame of their successors ; it is still less surprising that 
 the revolution which dethroned their successors should 
 have buried them in oblivion. But that their merits 
 should have been so tardily recognised when, at the 
 beginning of the present century, the tide turned in 
 favour of our earlier dramatists, is inexplicable. Yet 
 so it was. Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ford, Mass- 
 inger, Shirley, 1 had found enthusiastic editors when 
 the dramas of the masters of Shakspeare were still 
 uncollected. It was not till 1826 that Marlowe 
 received the honour of being edited. Greene and 
 Peele had to wait still longer. Six of Lyly's plays 
 had, it is true, been reprinted in 1632, but half the 
 present century had passed before a full and adequate 
 edition of his dramas appeared. It was natural that, 
 when the reaction came, it should come with a force 
 proportioned to the persistency with which it had been 
 delayed. It has come with a force which may well 
 astound all who are not acquainted with the charac- 
 teristics of reactions in criticism. The number of 
 essays and monographs, the object of which is to heap 
 indiscriminate eulogy on these poets, passes calculation. 
 One writer gravely compares Marlowe with ^schylus. 
 Another writer, and we regret to say that that writer 
 is Mr. Symonds, speaks of Greene as a " Titan." We 
 have seen Lyly placed on a level with Moliere, and 
 
 1 Though Gifford's edition of Shirley was not published before 1833, it had 
 been prepared before, for Gifford died in 1826.
 
 110 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 the author of The Arraignment of Paris exalted 
 above the author of the Aminta. Indeed, the length 
 to which this fulsome and ridiculous rhodomontade 
 is now being carried is simply sickening. We are 
 not, as we hope to show, in any way insensible to the 
 merits of these poets. We are quite willing to go as 
 far as Lamb and Hazlitt in eulogistic criticism, and in 
 our opinion Lamb and Hazlitt went quite far enough. 
 Every one who knows anything of the world knows 
 that the most mischievous form which detraction 
 can assume is exaggerated praise. Calumny may be 
 repelled or lived down, but the man who is over- 
 praised is continually forced to give the lie to his own 
 reputation. And what is true of men who live in the 
 world is true also of men who live only in the 
 memory of the world. The reputation of Richardson 
 has suffered more from the extravagant panegyrics of 
 Rousseau and Diderot than from the ridicule of Field- 
 ing and the sneers of Sterne. One of the noblest 
 passages in the drama of the Restoration is, in con- 
 sequence of Johnson's absurd encomium, now rarely 
 quoted except to be laughed at ; and we quite agree 
 with Blair that Parnell would stand much higher in 
 popular estimation had his merits not been so pre- 
 posterously overrated by Hume. In the interests, 
 therefore, of these poets themselves, as well as in the 
 interests of criticism, we protest against this fashion 
 of exaggerated panegyric. It cannot fail to operate 
 most perniciously on public taste, and it cannot fail 
 in the end to defeat its own object. 
 
 The history of the Early English Drama may be
 
 THE PKEDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 111 
 
 divided with some precision into three epochs. The 
 first extends from about the end of the eleventh 
 century to about the middle of the fifteenth. This is 
 the period of the Mysteries and Miracles, and its dis- 
 tinctive feature is the predominance of the sacred over 
 the secular element ; in other words, the absorption 
 of the Miracle, which was of literary origin, in the 
 Mystery, which was of liturgical origin. Between 
 the middle of Henry VL's reign and the beginning of 
 Elizabeth's, this rude drama assumed other forms. 
 In the Moralities, which now superseded the earlier 
 plays, it approached more nearly to the character of a 
 work of art. It became less simple and less uncouth. 
 Under the disguise of allegory it began to exhibit 
 increasing ingenuity in the structure of the fable. 
 Under the disguise of abstractions its dramatis 
 personce grew more and more true to nature and life. 
 Nor was this all. It brought itself into more immediate 
 contact with contemporary society and with contem- 
 porary history. If its spirit was didactic, it was not 
 didactic in the sense in which the Mysteries and 
 Miracles were didactic. It was no longer subservient 
 to settled dogma. It emancipated itself from Medi- 
 sevalism, it allied itself with an awakening world. 
 Nowhere, indeed, is the history of the revolution 
 which transformed the England of Medievalism 
 into the England of the Eenaissance written more 
 legibly than in these plays. In such Moralities, for 
 example, as The Castle of Perseverance and The 
 Interlude of Youth, the old faith still reigns domi- 
 nant and unimpaired. In Lusty Juventus and in
 
 112 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 New Custom the doctrines of the Reformation have 
 triumphed over the doctrines of Catholicism ; and in 
 The Conflict of Conscience the struggle between the 
 old faith and the new is depicted with an energy which 
 is almost tragic in its intensity. In The Nature of 
 the Four Elements and in Wit and Science we have, 
 on the other hand, remarkable illustrations of the 
 emancipation of the Morality from religion. In these 
 pieces the theological element entirely disappears. 
 Their object, so far at least as it is didactic, is simply 
 to awaken a love of science. They reflect the in- 
 fluence of the Renaissance on that side on which the 
 Renaissance was most hostile to the society from which 
 in the first instance the drama had emanated, and to 
 whom for so many generations the drama had been 
 loyal. But if the influence of the new science is 
 perceptible in these plays, the influence of the new 
 learning is not less perceptible in such a Morality as 
 The Triall of Pleasure. Here we find that indis- 
 criminate use of materials derived from the classics 
 and material derived from the Bible, that intermixture 
 of paganism and Christianity, which was one of the 
 essential characteristics of the literature of the Renais- 
 sance. 
 
 The next step in the history of the Morality is 
 the substitution of fictitious or historical personages 
 for abstract figures, and the subordination of the 
 allegorical to the dramatic element an innovation 
 so simple and so obvious that it is not a little 
 surprising that it should have been accomplished 
 so gradually and delayed so long. It was effected
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 113 
 
 at last by the Interludes of Heywood, and by the 
 Kyng John of Bale. Of these Interludes the 
 three written between 1520 and 1540 by John Hey- 
 wood, the Mery Play between Johan Johan the 
 Husbonde, Tyb his Wyfe, and Syr Jhon the Freest, 
 the Mery Play between the Pardoner and the Frere, 
 the Curate and Neybour Pratte, and The Four P's, 
 are incomparably the best. Of the last indeed it 
 would be no exaggeration to say that it is a master- 
 piece of farcical humour. Among the Interludes is 
 to be found a piece which affords perhaps the earliest 
 illustration of the influence of classical comedy on 
 our popular drama. The influence is slight, but 
 it is plain that the Interlude of Jack Jugler was 
 rudely modelled on the Amphitryon of Plautus. 
 These Interludes became in their turn the model 
 on which Still, some years later, framed his Gammer 
 Grurton's Needle, and thus the transition to regular 
 comedy was complete. Not less clearly is the transi- 
 tion from the Morality to the History marked by 
 Bale's Kyng John. In this play we find the 
 abstractions of the Morality resolving themselves 
 into historical characters. Thus Sedition becomes 
 Stephen Langton ; Private Wealth, Cardinal Pan- 
 dulph ; Usurped Power, Innocent III. It is only 
 a step from Kyng John to The Famous Victories 
 of Henry V. and The Troublesome Raigne of King 
 John, in which abstract characters and didactic 
 allegory entirely disappear, and a historical play, in 
 the proper sense of the term, presents itself. 
 
 So closes what may be called the second period in
 
 114 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 the history of our national drama. And it is perhaps 
 worth pausing to notice how curiously that history 
 repeated itself, not indeed chronologically, but in all 
 its essential features, in almost every country in 
 Europe. In Italy we have the Misterio and the 
 Miracolo, the Favola Morale and the Farsa, a 
 species of drama which answers in one of the forms 
 it assumed to our Interludes ; and side by side with 
 these we find the History Play. In France we 
 have the Mystere and the Miracle, and then we 
 have the Moralite, and we see the Morality and 
 the Mystery passing on the one hand into the Farce 
 and the Sotie, and on the other hand into the 
 History. In Germany the process is precisely the 
 same Mysterien, Moralitaten, Farcen, Sottien ; with 
 this difference only, that the four classes are not so 
 strictly distinguished as they are in France, but 
 continue till about the middle of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury to overlie and blend with each other. That 
 Mysteries and Miracles were among the earliest forms 
 which the drama assumed in Spain, and that these 
 were succeeded by Moralities, cannot reasonably be 
 doubted, though no specimens have, we believe, sur- 
 vived. Certainly the Entremises correspond exactly 
 to the Interludes. 
 
 But, though during this second period the transi- 
 tion from the Mystery to the Morality, from comedy 
 to history, was technically effected, the circumstance 
 is less important than it would at first sight appear 
 to be. It is indeed natural to suppose, as it commonly 
 is supposed, that the drama of Marlowe and Shak-
 
 THE PKEDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEAEE 115 
 
 speare was but a further development of the drama 
 represented by the Mysteries, Miracles, Moralities, 
 and Interludes. Such, however, was not the case. 
 We will not go so far as to say that there are no 
 traces in the Eomantic drama of the influence of 
 these earlier and ruder plays, for there are many, 
 particularly in Comedy, occasionally even in Tragedy. 1 
 But this we will venture to affirm, that had these 
 early plays never existed the Romantic drama would 
 have sprung up independently, would have presented 
 the same features, would have run the same course. 
 In other words, we believe that the Moralities and 
 Interludes stand in the same relation to the Romantic 
 drama as the Fabulce Atellance and the Etruscan 
 Mimes stood to the drama of ancient Rome. Roman 
 Tragedy owed nothing to the Atellan Fables. Roman 
 Comedy owed nothing to the Etruscan Mimes. Both 
 were exotics. The one sprang immediately from 
 Greek Tragedy, the other sprang immediately from 
 Greek Comedy. By no process of evolution could 
 the drama as it existed in Rome between B.C. 363 
 and B.C. 240 have developed into the drama which 
 was in vogue in Rome between B.C. 240 and B.C. 50. 
 By no process of evolution could the drama of Bale 
 and Heywood have developed into the drama of 
 
 1 The Good Angel and the Evil Angel in Marlowe's Faustus, and the part 
 played by the Devil in Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the abstrac- 
 tions of the Dumb Show in The Warning for Fair Women, in Mucedorus, in 
 Soliman and Perseda, and in Yarrington's Two Lamentable Tragedies in One, are 
 cases in point. The Shakspearean Clown, undoubtedly a lineal descendant of 
 the Satan of the Mysteries and of the Vice of the Moralities, the employment 
 of the dumb show, the interpolation of strictly realistic transcripts from 
 commonplace life, are more important illustrations.
 
 116 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Marlowe and Peele. To what source, then, is the 
 Komantic drama to be traced ? We answer unhesi- 
 tatingly, to the Italian drama of the Eenaissance. 
 
 The popularly-accepted theory that Elizabethan 
 Tragedy and Comedy flowed directly from the older 
 plays, that Tragedy is simply the Miracle and Morality 
 modified by the study of Seneca and the Italian 
 tragedians, and that Comedy is simply the Interlude 
 modified by the Comedy of ancient Kome and 
 Eenaissant Italy, is in our opinion a theory which 
 could be held by no one who had studied with 
 attention the drama of the Italian Eenaissance. As 
 this is a question of some importance, and as our 
 opinion may perhaps appear somewhat paradoxical, 
 we will state our reasons for dissenting from the 
 popular theory. 
 
 If what is technically known as the Eomantic 
 drama be compared with the older plays, we shall 
 find that it is distinguished from them by three 
 striking peculiarities. In the first place, it is divided 
 into five acts, or, if not so divided, is so constructed 
 as to admit of such a division in other words, it 
 possesses a regular plot regularly unravelling itself 
 on definite principles. In the second place, imagina- 
 tion and fancy enter largely into its composition ; 
 and, in the third place, it is, in its diction, studious 
 of the beauties of poetry and rhetoric. Now these 
 characteristics are, as we need scarcely say, the char- 
 acteristics of the classical drama. And yet if we 
 compare a page or two of any of our Eomantic 
 dramatists with a page or two of a Eoman dramatist,
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 117 
 
 we shall at once feel that the older poet could 
 have had no direct influence on the later. If, for 
 example, we place Gorboduc, a play closely modelled 
 on Seneca, side by side with Tamburlaine or 
 Edward II. , we shall have no difficulty in under- 
 standing how wide is the interval which separated 
 Eoman Tragedy from ours. Again, take Comedy as 
 formulated by Lyly and Greene and perfected by 
 Shakspeare. It is clearly no mere development of 
 the Interlude. It as clearly owes little or nothing 
 to Plautus and Terence. 
 
 We turn to Italy, and all is explained. We 
 there find a drama presenting all the chief features 
 of our Romantic drama that classicism which is 
 not the classicism of antiquity, that realism which 
 is not the realism of ordinary life. There, we con- 
 tend, are to be found the models on which Marlowe 
 and his contemporaries consciously or unconsciously 
 worked. It was there that the Romantic drama 
 was virtually promulgated. There, not in England, 
 was accomplished the revolution which transformed 
 the tragedy of Seneca into the tragedy of Marlowe, 
 and the comedy of Plautus and Terence into the 
 comedy of Lyly and Greene. 
 
 It is remarkable that from the very first there was 
 a marked tendency on the part of Italian playwrights 
 to romantic innovation. This is seen even in the 
 Latin plays. Among the earliest of them we find 
 comedy blended with tragedy, a constant attempt to 
 escape from the thraldom of the unities, and an 
 ostentatious realism substituted for the ideality of the
 
 118 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 classical stage. Their plots, moreover, are frequently 
 drawn from contemporary history, though in this, as 
 we need scarcely say, they found precedents in the 
 tragedy of the ancients. Thus Verardo's Historia 
 Bcetica, written about 149 1, 1 is founded on the ex- 
 pulsion of the Moors from Granada, and is in every- 
 thing but in diction and structure for it is written 
 in prose our Chronicle Play. The words of the 
 Prologue are so remarkable that we will quote them : 
 
 Eequirat autem nullus hie Comediae 
 Leges tit observentur aut Tragcediae, 
 Agenda nempe est Historia, non fabula. 
 
 In Albertino Mussato's Eccerinis and in Laudivio's 
 De Captivitate Duds Jacobi, we have striking illus- 
 trations of this romanticising tendency. The first 
 dramatises the career of Eccelino de Eomano, and the 
 second dramatises the fall of the famous condottiere 
 Jacopo Piccinino. Both, therefore, are studies from 
 real life, both embody in artistic form familiar 
 incidents. In both the language is the language of 
 Seneca, but the spirit and feeling are the spirit and 
 feeling of contemporaries. And what is apparent in 
 the Latin plays becomes, as we might naturally ex- 
 pect, far more apparent in the vernacular. It is not 
 too much to say that by the middle of the sixteenth 
 century the vernacular classical drama had undergone 
 so many modifications that it presents almost all the 
 characteristics of the Komance. To deal first with 
 style. We find plays written in tercets, in the ottava 
 rima, and in versi sdruccioli; we find rhyme and 
 
 1 It was acted in 1492.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 119 
 
 blank verse mingled; we find prose and verse mingled; 
 we find blank verse variously modified, monotonously 
 stately, loosely colloquial, broken and spasmodic, 
 fluent and diffuse ; we find prose substituted for 
 verse. In the comedies of Angelo Beolco and Andrea 
 Calmo we even find the dramatis personce speaking 
 in the dialects of the cities to which they belong. 
 We see, in fine, a constant attempt to cast off the 
 shackles of rigid classicism. 
 
 Another important link between the Italian drama 
 and the Eomantic is the fact that it rejected rhyme 
 in favour of blank verse on precisely the same ground. 
 It was employed for the first time in tragedy by 
 Trissino in his Sofonisba, represented in 1515 ; in the 
 following year Rucellai followed Trissino's example 
 in his Rosmunda, and after that time it was habitually 
 used. Blank verse, it was said, being less artificial 
 than rhyme, is better adapted to express the passions 
 and to appeal to the passions. " Bima denota," says 
 Antonio Cavallerino, in the Discourse prefixed to his 
 Rosamunda, which was published at Modena in 1582, 
 " pensamento, e premeditatione, e che le cose, ch' ap- 
 paiono pensate, e premeditate, estinto il verisimile, 
 estinguono insieme la compassione, e lo spavento, che 
 nascono ne gli spettatori da quella credenza c' hanno, 
 che le cose accaschino allora in scena." In tone and 
 structure these dramas adhere, it must be admitted, 
 much more closely to Roman models. And yet even 
 in these respects important differences are discernible. 
 As tragedies they have more colour, they have more 
 warmth, they have more life than their prototypes.
 
 120 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 If their plots are similar in their evolutions, they are as 
 a rule richer in incident. If, in imitation of a vicious 
 original, the action too often stagnates in arid dia- 
 lectics, it is as often animated by nature and passion. 
 Of the obligations of the Romantic stage to the 
 Italian with regard to machinery there can be no 
 question. Every one knows with what effect the 
 Elizabethan playwrights employed the echo ; how 
 they delighted in the play within the play ; how 
 common it was for a Chorus to explain the action ; 
 how frequently the ghosts of great men appeared in 
 the capacity of Prologue ; how elaborate the character 
 and how imposing the use made of the dumb show ; 
 how important the part played by apparitions, how 
 wide the space filled with physical horrors. All this 
 was undoubtedly learned from Italy. The dumb 
 show had, it is true, been popular in England long 
 before any influence from Italy can be traced on our 
 drama, and the shades of the dead had figured, as 
 we need scarcely say, among the dramatis personce of 
 the ancient stage. But it was reserved for the Italians 
 to discover their full effect as dramatic auxiliaries, 
 and it was as elaborated by Italian ingenuity that 
 they make their appearance in our Romantic drama. 1 
 
 1 See particularly the Discorso della Poesia Rappresentativa, by Angelo 
 Ingegneri, printed at Ferrara in 1598. As lugegneri's remarks about the 
 proper way of representing ghosts are well worth attention, and as the work 
 is not very accessible, we will quote a short passage: "L'ombra doverebbe 
 esser tutta coperta, piu che vestita, di zendale over altra cosa simile, pur di 
 color nero, e non mostrar ne volto, ne mani, lie piedi e sembrare in sommo 
 una cosa informe. . . . E quanto al parlare, aver una voce alta e rimbom- 
 bante, ma ruvida ed aspra e in conchiusione orribile e non naturale, servando 
 quasi sempre un istesso tuono." For the ghost in action see Speroni's Canace, 
 Decio's Acripanda, Corraro's Progne, and Manfredi's Semiramide.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 121 
 
 But the influence of the Italian drama on ours is 
 seen most conspicuously in the fact that it furnished 
 examples of almost every species of dramatic composi- 
 tion which obtained among us during the latter half 
 of the sixteenth century. From the Latin plays of 
 Mussato and Laudivio sprang the Latin plays of 
 Legge, Gager, Alabaster, and others. From the Italian 
 imitators of Seneca sprang Sackville and Norton's 
 Gorboduc, Gascoigne's Jocasta, and Hughes' Mis- 
 fortunes of Arthur. Indeed Gascoigne's Jocasta is, 
 as Mr. Symonds has for the first time pointed out, a 
 free version of Dolce's Giocasta. From such plays 
 as Cammelli's Pamphila, Rucellai's Rosmunda, and 
 Groto's Hadriana, sprang Tancred and Gismunda 
 and the numerous plays of which Tancred and Gis- 
 munda is the type. From the tragedies of Cinthio 
 and Mondella sprang the two famous tragedies 
 of Kyd and the tragedy of Soliman and Perseda. 
 From the Calandra of Bernardo Divizio, from 
 Machiavelli, from Angelo Beolco, and from the 
 Cassaria and the Suppositi of Ariosto, Lyly learned 
 to clothe comedy in prose. On the Boscareccie 
 Favole was modelled Peele's Arraignment of Paris, 
 and on the Farse Greene's Orlando Furioso and 
 Peele's Old Wives' Tale. Luca Contile and the 
 author of Cecaria had invented, or rather revived, 
 tragi-comedy. Luca Contile also vindicated it ; "la 
 tragicomedia," he says in the Prologue to his Pescara 
 (Milan, 1550), "voi sapete, come nel principio 
 ha gli atti suoi tranquilli, nel mezo contiene varie 
 passioni, e diversi accidenti, nel fin bisogna che
 
 122 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 si riduca a una comune e salda quiete." Domestic 
 tragedy dates from the Soldato of Angelo Leonico 
 (1550), and what are known in our drama as Histories 
 plays, that is to say, founded on recent historical 
 incidents had precedents in Mondella's Isifile and 
 in Fuligni's Bragadino, the first of which appeared 
 in 1582, and the second in 1589. 
 
 Nor are these resemblances between the Italian 
 and the English drama likely to have been mere 
 coincidences. Of the intimate connection between 
 England and Italy during the early and latter parts 
 of Elizabeth's reign, and of the popularity of Italian 
 literature in England during these years, there can 
 be no question. Its study had been facilitated by 
 grammars and dictionaries, by guides to its beauties, 
 and by guides to its pronunciation. 1 As early as 
 1578 an Italian Company was acting in London. 2 
 No man's education was held to be complete till he 
 had visited the cities which were to an Englishman 
 of that age what Athens and Corinth were to the 
 contemporaries of Horace, and till he had, in the 
 phrase of the time, returned home " Italianated." 
 That Gascoigne, Greene, Munday, Lodge, and Nash 
 travelled in Italy is certain, and it is very likely that, 
 if more was known of the lives of Peele and Marlowe, 
 we should find that they too had performed the 
 customary pilgrimage. However that may be, they 
 
 1 See, for example, Principal Rules of the Italian Grammar, by Wykes, 
 printed in 1560 and reprinted in 1567 ; The Italian Grammar and Dictionary, 
 by W. Thomas, 1560 ; Lenbulo's Italian Grammar, put into English by 
 Henry Grantham, 1578. 
 
 2 Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii. p. 201.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 123 
 
 were undoubtedly well read in the literature of Italy. 
 It could hardly, indeed, have been otherwise. The 
 taste was universal. At the Universities and in London 
 an Italian quotation was the symbol of the cultured. 
 Not only do Italian proverbs and distichs abound 
 in the popular drama, but occasionally we find cita- 
 tions of several lines, as in Greene's Orlando Furioso 
 and Peele's Arraignment of Paris. The classics of 
 modern Italy were indeed as reverently studied as 
 the classics of antiquity. We learn, for example, from 
 Gabriel Harvey's letters that at Cambridge Italian 
 was more in fashion than even Greek and Latin. 
 Those who could not read the originals contented 
 themselves with translations, and the number of 
 translations which appeared between the accession of 
 Elizabeth and the accession of James I. was immense. 
 Ascham tells us that these Italian translations were 
 sold in every shop in London, complaining that 
 Petrarch was preferred to Moses, and that the 
 Decameron was more highly estimated than the 
 Bible. That the English playwrights were in the 
 habit of indulging in wholesale plagiarism from their 
 brethren in Italy is proved by Gosson, who tells us 
 that the Italian comedies " were ransacked to furnish 
 matter for the London theatres." It would not 
 perhaps be too much to say that in the case of nearly 
 two-thirds of the Elizabethan dramas, where they are 
 not Comedies or Histories, the plots may be traced to 
 Italian sources. But it was only natural that the 
 power which had revolutionised our literature should 
 revolutionise our drama. Since the publication of
 
 124 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, English genius had been 
 as completely under the spell of Italy as seventeen 
 centuries before Roman genius had been under the 
 spell of Greece, and as a century afterwards French 
 genius was under the spell of Rome. We have not 
 the smallest doubt that Marlowe and Greene regarded 
 Bale and Heywood as Actius and Terence regarded 
 the authors of the Atellan Farces, and as Racine and 
 Moliere regarded Rutebeuf and Bodel. 
 
 We must, however, guard carefully against attach- 
 ing undue importance to the influence of Italy. It 
 was an influence the significance of which is purely 
 historical. All it effected was to furnish the artists 
 of our stage with models, it operated on form, and it 
 operated on composition, but it extended no further. 
 Once formulated, our drama pursued an independent 
 course. It became, in the phrase of its greatest re- 
 presentative, " the very age and body of the time, 
 his form and pressure" in style and diction of 
 unparalleled richness and variety, in matter co- ex- 
 tensive with human experience and human imagina- 
 tion. To no eye indeed but to the eye of the critical 
 historian would there seem to be anything in common 
 between those living panoramas of nature and 
 manners, the romances of Elizabethan England, and 
 the stately declamations which won the plaudits of the 
 Academia de' Rozzi and the Academia degl' Intronati. 
 
 With the accession of Elizabeth commences what 
 may be called the third period in the history of our 
 stage. More than a quarter of a century had still to 
 elapse before Marlowe and his coadjutors revolutionised
 
 THE PREDECESSORS' OF SHAKSPEARE 125 
 
 dramatic art. Of the plays produced between 1558 
 and 1586 probably not more than one- third have 
 escaped the ravages of time. But there is no reason 
 to suppose that those which are lost differed in any 
 important respect from those that remain, and enough 
 remain to enable us to form a clear conception of the 
 state of dramatic literature during these years. Re- 
 garded comprehensively, that literature is represented 
 by three distinct schools. On the one side stand a 
 body of playwrights who adhered to the traditions of 
 the vernacular drama, and who reproduced in forms 
 more or less modified the Moralities and Interludes. On 
 the other side stand a large and influential body who 
 treated these rude medleys with disdain, and owned 
 allegiance only to classical masters. Between these 
 two schools stands a third, which united the character- 
 istics or, to speak more accurately, many of the 
 characteristics of both. And from the appearance 
 of Gorboduc to the appearance of Tamburlaine these 
 three schools co-existed, each pursuing an independent 
 course. We have thus the extraordinary anomaly of 
 a drama, crude, rudimentary, semi-barbarous, flourish- 
 ing contemporaneously with a drama as perfect in 
 form as the most finished pieces of the Roman and 
 Italian stage. It would at first sight appear almost 
 incredible that such plays as Horestes, Tom Tiler and 
 his Wife, and Like to Like should have succeeded 
 such plays as Ralph Roister Doister and Gorboduc, 
 and that an age which had witnessed Tancred and 
 Gismunda could tolerate sixteen years afterwards the 
 History of Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes. But
 
 126 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 this anomaly is easily explained. The difference 
 between these plays corresponds with the difference 
 between the audiences to which they were addressed. 
 Till the last decade of Elizabeth's reign there were two 
 distinct spheres of dramatic activity. At the Inns of 
 Court, at the Court itself, at the Universities, at the 
 public schools, nothing was tolerated which did not 
 bear the stamp of classicism. It was for such 
 audiences that Rightwise produced in Latin his 
 Dido, Alabaster his Roxana, and Legge his Richardus 
 Tertius ; that Sackville and Norton parodied Seneca, 
 Udall Plautus, and Spenser Ariosto and Machiavelli 1 ; 
 that Gascoigne adapted Dolce's Giocasta and Ariosto's 
 Gli Suppositi; that Hatton and his coadjutors wrote 
 Tancred and Gismunda, Thomas " Hughes The Mis- 
 fortunes of Arthur, and Lyly Alexander and Cam- 
 paspe and Endymion. Of a very different order 
 were the spectators who gathered in the inn-yards of 
 the Belle Savage and the Red Bull and in the play- 
 houses on the Bankside and in Shoreditch, and of a 
 very different order were the performances in which 
 they delighted. No class is so conservative as the 
 vulgar. The spell of tradition is potent with them 
 long after it has lost its efficacy with others. What 
 found most favour in their eyes was what had found 
 favour in the eyes of their forefathers. They clung 
 
 1 These comedies of Spenser's have unfortunately perished, but their 
 character and our loss are sufficiently indicated in one of Gabriel Harvey's 
 letters to him : " I am voyd of all judgement if your nine Comedies where- 
 unto, in imitation of Herodotus, you give the names of the Nine Muses, 
 come not nearer Ariosto's Comedies, eyther for the fineness of plausible elo- 
 qution or the rareness of poetical invention, than that Elvish Queene doth to 
 his Orlando Furioso."
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 127 
 
 fondly to all that was peculiar to the old stage, to the 
 old buffoonery, to the old didacticism, to the old half- 
 farcical, half-serious allegorising, to the old realism, 
 to the Vice, to the abstractions, to the gingling dog- 
 gerel, to the cumbersome quatrains. In one respect, 
 indeed, these plays differed from those of the former 
 generation. The material out of which preceding 
 playwrights constructed their plots lay within a com- 
 paratively narrow compass. The cry now was for 
 novelty. The history and fiction of all ages and 
 all countries were ransacked for matter to weave into 
 dramas. " I may boldly say it, because I have seen 
 it," says Gosson, " that The Palace of Pleasure, The 
 Golden Ass, The ^Ethiopian History, Amadis of 
 France, and The Round Table, comedies in Latin, 
 French, Italian, and Spanish, have been thoroughly 
 raked to furnish the playhouses in London." * Nothing 
 came amiss to these indefatigable caterers for popular 
 amusement. They drew indiscriminately on pagan 
 mythology and on mediaeval legend, on incidents in 
 history and on incidents in private life. Of these 
 dramas probably few found their way into print, and 
 scarcely any have survived. 2 But the loss, if we may 
 trust the opinion of competent judges, and if those 
 which remain are samples of those which have dis- 
 appeared, is assuredly no matter for regret. The 
 contempt with which they were regarded by polite 
 critics is shown and justified by what Whetstone, 
 Gosson, and Sidney have written concerning them. 
 
 1 Plays Confided in Five Actions. 
 
 2 See, for a list of fifty-two of these, Collier's History of English Dramatic 
 Poetry, vol. ii. pp. 410, 411.
 
 128 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 They appear, indeed, to have been little better than 
 wild and improbable medleys, as coarse and bungling 
 in construction as they were vulgar and cumbersome 
 in style. 
 
 But of these early schools the most interesting 
 from a historical point of view is the third. It was 
 the aim of the representatives of this school to create 
 a drama out of elements furnished by each of the 
 other schools. They followed popular models in 
 blending tragedy with comedy, in cultivating a spirit 
 of homely fidelity to nature and life, and in em- 
 bodying dramatic dialogue in rhymed verse. But 
 classical models guided them in the evolution of their 
 plots, in their anxiety to avoid gross violation of the 
 unities, and in their attempt at dignity and propriety 
 of diction. As samples of the plays of this school we 
 have Richard Edwards' Damon and Pythias, and 
 George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra. The 
 latter, which is preceded by a singularly interesting 
 preface, explaining the principle on which it was 
 written, has more than one title to attention. It 
 was the work on which the greatest of poets founded 
 his Measure for Measure, and it was the first formal 
 vindication of some of the leading principles of 
 Romanticism. Whetstone regarded with just dis- 
 dain the rude plays in vogue with the vulgar, but he 
 saw clearly that too strict an adherence to the canons 
 of Classicism was in every way undesirable. He 
 chose, therefore, a middle course. He avoided the 
 extremes of both, but he adopted something from each. 
 His play is written in a medley of styles, he employs
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 129 
 
 rhyming lines of twelve or fourteen syllables indis- 
 criminately mixed, quatrains, short ballad lines, the 
 heroic couplet, and in two cases stately blank verse ; 
 and thus his play marks with preciseness the transi- 
 tion from the old drama to the new. But the preface 
 is of more importance than the play, for he there 
 practically lays down some of the chief canons of the 
 romantic as distinguished from the popular and the 
 classical drama. Speaking of comedy, and presumably 
 of tragi-comedy, he claims that it should be a faithful 
 reflection of nature and life, that it should not, as 
 was the case with the popular drama, violate truth 
 and probability l ; that without turning the stage 
 into a pulpit it should yet have a moral purpose. 
 Nor again should all the characters be cast in the 
 same mould and be made to express themselves in 
 the same style ; " grave old men should instruct 
 young men, strumpets should be lascivious, clowns 
 disorderly, intermingling all these actions in such 
 sort as the grave may instruct and the pleasant 
 delight." And it was with the intention of adapting 
 the language to the character that he employed the 
 medley of styles in which his play is written. 
 
 Such was the condition of the English drama 
 when that illustrious company of playwrights who 
 immediately preceded Shakspeare entered on their 
 career. 
 
 We remember to have read in some mediaeval 
 
 l He thus ridicules these violations in the popular plays. "In three 
 hours he runs round the world, marries, gets children, makes children men, 
 men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters, and bring gods from heaven and 
 fetch devils from hell. " 
 
 K
 
 130 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 writer a story to this effect. A traveller on enchanted 
 ground found himself in the course of his wanderings 
 in a wild and spacious valley. Around him were all 
 the indications of fertility, rich even to rankness. 
 The trees rose dense and high ; heavy parasites hung 
 in festoons from their trunks and branches ; thick 
 mantling shrubs matted the glades at their feet. 
 Wherever his eye rested, it rested on what appeared 
 to be exuberant vegetation. But the spectacle proved 
 on a nearer view to be delusive. He soon perceived 
 that what he beheld was the semblance of fecundity, 
 not the reality. The trees and the parasites which 
 clung to them were without bloom and without 
 vitality ; the underwood which appeared to be 
 flourishing so vigorously beneath was arid and 
 dwarfed. Scarcely a flower he saw was worth the 
 culling. Scarcely any of the fruits that had ripened 
 were worth the gathering. Suddenly, as by magic, 
 the scene changed. Every tree, every shrub, burst 
 into luxuriant life. The leaves and the grass were of 
 the hue of emeralds ; the ground was ablaze with 
 flowers. All was perfume, all was colour. He stood 
 dazzled and intoxicated amid a wilderness of sweets 
 a teeming paradise of tropical splendour. Very 
 similar to the phenomenon witnessed by the traveller 
 of the fable is the phenomenon presented to the 
 student of English poetry at the period on which 
 we are now entering. From the beginning of the 
 sixteenth century there had been no lack of literary 
 activity. With what assiduity the drama had been 
 cultivated we have already seen ; with what assiduity
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 131 
 
 other branches of poetry had been cultivated will be 
 apparent to any one who will glance at a catalogue of 
 the writers who flourished during these years. And 
 yet, voluminous as this literature is, how little has 
 it contributed to the sum of our intellectual wealth ! 
 how frigid, how lifeless does it appear when placed 
 in contrast with the literature which immediately 
 succeeded it ! The revolution which gave us The 
 Faery Queen for The Mirror for Magistrates, the 
 lyrics of Greene and Lodge for the lyrics of Gascoigne 
 and Turberville, the sonnets of Daniel for the sonnets 
 of Watson, the eclogues of Spenser for the eclogues 
 of Googe, Tamburlaine for Gorboduc, and Friar 
 Bacon and Friar Bungay for Ralph Roister 
 Doister and Misogonus, seems like the work of 
 enchantment. It was in truth the work of an age 
 rich beyond precedent in all that appeals to the 
 emotions and to the imagination, acting on men 
 peculiarly susceptible of such influences and possessed 
 of rare powers of original genius. 
 
 The golden era of Elizabethan literature may be 
 said to date its commencement from the seven years 
 which lie between 1579 and 1587 in other words, 
 with the first characteristic poems of Spenser and the 
 first characteristic plays of Marlowe, with the publica- 
 tion of Euphues and with the composition of the 
 Arcadia. Never, perhaps, has there existed an age 
 so fertile in all that inspires and in all that nourishes 
 poetic energy as that which opens the third decade of 
 Elizabeth's reign. It was contemporary with a great 
 crisis in European history, and with a great crisis in
 
 132 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 European thought. The discomfiture of the partisans 
 of Mary of Scotland, the execution of Mary herself, 
 and the destruction of the Armada in the following 
 year, had paralysed that mighty coalition which had 
 long been the terror of Protestant Europe. The effect 
 of the events of 1588 on the world of Marlowe and 
 his contemporaries was indeed similar to the effects 
 of the Persian victories on the world of ^Eschylus and 
 Sophocles. In both cases what was at stake was the 
 very existence of national life. In both cases were 
 arrayed in mortal oppugnancy the Oromasdes and the 
 Arimenes of social and intellectual progress. In both 
 cases the moral effects of the triumph achieved were 
 in proportion to the magnitude of the issues involved. 
 Joy, pride, and hope possessed all hearts. Patriotism 
 burned like a passion in the breasts of all men, and, 
 like a passion, chivalrous loyalty to the lion-hearted 
 Queen. The pulse of the whole nation was quickened. 
 The minds of men became under this fierce stimulus 
 preternaturally active, and every faculty of the mind 
 preternaturally alert. And this was not all. The forces 
 at work in that mighty revolution which transformed 
 the Europe of Mediae valism into the Europe of the 
 Renaissance were everywhere fermenting. It was the 
 fortune of England to pass simultaneously through 
 two of the greatest crises in the life of states, and the 
 excitement of the most momentous of epochs in her 
 spiritual history was coincident with the excite- 
 ment of the most momentous of epochs in her 
 political history. The energy thus stimulated oper- 
 ated on materials richer and more various than
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 133 
 
 perhaps any other age could have afforded. Philo- 
 sophy, having cast off the shackles of scholasticism, 
 had entered on the splendid inheritance which had 
 descended to it from antiquity. Astronomy was 
 unravelling the secrets of the skies, and natural 
 science the secrets of the land and sea. The discovery 
 of America and the North-West Passage had unveiled 
 another world to the wonder of Europe, and in widen- 
 ing the horizon of experience had widened also the 
 horizon of imagination. 1 Heroes, second to none in 
 the annals of endurance and adventure, were exploring 
 every corner of the habitable globe, and coming home 
 to record experiences as marvellous as those which 
 Ulysses poured into the ears of Alcinous and Arete. 
 The discovery of movable types had given wings to 
 knowledge. The Muse of History had awakened with 
 Grafton and Stow, and Hall and Holinshed ; and the 
 Muse of Romantic Fiction long before with Malory, 
 and now with his successors. The translators of 
 the Bible had unlocked the lore of the East. Scholars 
 
 1 This is illustrated very strikingly by Spenser 
 
 Many great regions are discovered, 
 Which to late age were never mentioned ; 
 Who ever heard of the Indian Peru ? 
 Or who in venturous vessel measured 
 The Amazon, huge river, now found true ? 
 Or fruitfullest Virginia who did ever view ? 
 
 Yet all these were when no man did them know, 
 
 Yet have from wisest ages hidden been, 
 
 And later times things more unknown shall show. 
 
 Why then should witless man so much misween, 
 
 That nothing is but that which he hath seen ? 
 
 What if within the moon's fair shining sphere, 
 
 What if in every other star unseen, 
 
 Of other worlds he happily should hear ? 
 
 Fairy Queen, Bk. II. Prologue.
 
 134 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 were revelling among the treasures of that noble 
 language which, in the fine expression of Gibbon, 
 " gives a soul to the objects of sense and a body to 
 the abstractions of philosophy," and which has during 
 more than twenty centuries been to the world of mind 
 what the sun is to the physical world. The study of 
 Roman literature had been rendered more fruitful by 
 the precedence now given to the classics of the 
 Republic and Early Empire over the writers of the 
 later ages. " The youth everywhere," says Strype, 
 " addicted themselves to the reading of the best 
 authors for pure Roman style, laying aside their old 
 barbarous writers and schoolmen." All that had been 
 contributed to the general stock of intellectual wealth 
 by modern Italy was becoming more and more familiar 
 to Englishmen, and scarcely anything of note appeared 
 either in France or Spain which was not sooner or 
 later pressed into the service of English genius. 
 
 But there were other sources of inspiration, other 
 stores on which the writers of that age could draw. 
 The world in which they moved was in itself rich in 
 all the materials which poetry most cherishes. In 
 the first place there had, for many centuries, been 
 gradually accumulating an immense mass of local 
 traditions. Every county, nay, every hundred and 
 every city in England, had its heroes and its annals. 
 We have only to open works like Warner's Albion's 
 England, and Drayton's Polyolbion, to see that there 
 was scarcely a mountain, a river, a forest, which did 
 not teem with the mingled traditions of history and 
 fable. The mythology out of which Livy constructed
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 135 
 
 the early chronicles of Latium was in truth not more 
 dramatic and picturesque than that which lived on 
 the lips of Elizabethan England. Much of this lore 
 had been embodied in rude ballads some of it had 
 found its way into the metrical romances, and more 
 recently into The Mirror for Magistrates; but it 
 owed its popularity to oral transmission. With this 
 heroic mythology was blended a mythology which had 
 its origin in superstition. To the England of the 
 sixteenth century the unseen world was as real as the 
 world of the senses. Its voice was everywhere audible, 
 its ministers were everywhere present. What reason 
 has with us coldly resolved into symbolism was with 
 them simple fact. The substantial existence of the 
 Prince of Darkness and the Powers of Hell, of the 
 Bad Angel who is man's enemy, and of the Good 
 Angel who is his friend, was no more questioned by 
 an ordinary Englishman of that day than the exist- 
 ence of the human beings around him. In his belief 
 the communion between the world of the living and 
 the world beyond the tomb had never been inter- 
 rupted. What Endor witnessed was, in his opinion, 
 what half the churchyards in England had witnessed. 
 " If any person shall practise or exercise any invoca- 
 tion of any evil or wicked spirit " these are the words 
 of a grave Act of Parliament passed as late as the 9th 
 of June 1604 " or shall consult with, entertain, feed, 
 or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, 
 her, or their grave . . . such offender shall suffer the 
 pains of death as felons." The angels, which were of 
 old beheld passing and repassing between earth and
 
 136 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 heaven, passed, it was believed, and repassed still on 
 their gracious errands. 
 
 How oft do they their silver bowers leave, 
 
 To come to succour us that succour want ! 
 
 How oft do they with golden pinions cleave 
 
 The flitting skies, like flying pursuivant, 
 
 Against foul fiends to aid us militant ! 
 
 They for us fight, they watch and duly guard, 
 
 And their bright squadrons round about us plant. 
 
 So sang Spenser, and what he sang he believed. " It 
 may," says one of the most popular writers of those 
 times, " be proved from many places of the Scripture 
 that all Christian men have not only one angell, but 
 manie whom God employ eth to their service." Nor 
 was it from the Bible only that the supernatural creed 
 of that age was derived. The awful forms with which 
 the sublime and gloomy imagination of the Goths had 
 peopled the tempest and the mist ; the elves, fays, 
 and fairies, and all that "bright infantry" who, in 
 the graceful mythology of the Celts, hold high revel 
 
 on hill, in dale, forest or mead, 
 By paved fountain or by rushy brook, 
 Or in the beached margent of the sea ; 
 
 the Demons of the fire, " who wander in the region 
 near the moon "; the Demons of the air, " who hover 
 round the earth " ; Mandrakes and Incubi, Hellwaines 
 and Firedrakes these were to the people of that age 
 as real as the objects which met their view in daily 
 life, and to doubt their existence was, says Grose, 
 held to be little less than Atheism. 1 
 
 1 Whoever would understand how completely even the most enlightened 
 minds were under the dominion of these superstitions would do well to turn 
 to Henry More's Antidote against Atheism; see too Nash's Pierce Penilesse,
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 137 
 
 If again we turn to the social life of those times, 
 we find ourselves in a world equally picturesque and 
 equally romantic. In the country dwelt a race as 
 blithe and simple as that which peopled the Sicily of 
 Theocritus or the Delos of the Homeric Hymn. The 
 English peasantry had, even when groaning under 
 the yoke of a martial and despotic aristocracy, been 
 distinguished by their light-heartedness and love of 
 social merriment. They were now in the first intoxi- 
 cation of newly-found freedom. They were now, for 
 the first time in their history, settled and prosperous. 
 If the happiness of a class is to be estimated by its 
 wealth and political importance, it would be absurd 
 to point to the sixteenth century as the golden age 
 of rural England. But those whose criterion is not 
 that of the political economist will, we think, agree 
 with Goldsmith that this was in truth the Saturnian 
 era of English country life. No fictitious Arcadia 
 has half the charm of the world described to us by 
 Stubbes and Stow, by Tusser and Burton. It was 
 a world in which existence appears to have been a 
 perpetual feast. Every house had its virginal, its 
 spinnet, and its lute. Each season of the year had 
 its festivals. At Christmas every farmstead and 
 country mansion, garnished with holly and evergreens, 
 and bright with the blazing yule, rang with tumultu- 
 ous merriment. Songs and dances, possets and 
 loving-cups, ushered in, amid pealing bells, the New 
 Year ; and the New Year's revels were often pro- 
 edit. Payne Collier, p. 74 seqq. For other illustrations see Mr. T. A. Spalding's 
 interesting little book, Elizabethan Demonology, and Drake's Shakspeare and 
 his Times, vol. i. chap. ix.
 
 138 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 tracted till it was time to wreathe the wassail-bowls 
 and marshal the pageants of Twelfth Night. Then 
 came the feasts of Candlemas and Easter, which 
 terminated the festivities of Easter and opened the 
 festivities of Spring. On May-day all England held 
 carnival. Long before it was light the youth of 
 both sexes were in the woods gathering flowers and 
 weaving nosegays. By sunrise there was not a porch 
 or door without its chaplet, and while the dew was 
 still sparkling on the grass the May-pole had been 
 dressed, "twentie or fortie yoke of oxen, everie oxe- 
 having a sweet posie of flowers tied to the tip of his 
 horns, drawing it solemnly home/' On its arrival at 
 the appointed place it was set up. The ground 
 round it was strewn with hawthorn sprays and green 
 boughs. Summer -hall booths and arbours were 
 erected on each side of it. Processions from the 
 neighbouring hamlets, headed by milkmaids leading 
 a cow festooned with flowers and with its horns gilt, 
 were a common feature in these picturesque festivities. 
 At harvest time the last load, as it was carried to the 
 barn, was crowned with flowers, while round a figure 
 made of corn young men and women, with a piper 
 and a drum preceding them, shouted joyously or 
 sang songs. 1 Nor was it the younger people only 
 who kept festival. " In the month of May," says 
 Stow we cannot resist quoting this exquisitely 
 beautiful passage "namely on May Day in the 
 morning, every man, except impediment, would walk 
 
 1 See the passages from Hentzner and Dr. Moresin cited by Drake, vol. i, 
 p. 187.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 139 
 
 into the sweet meddowes and green woods, there to 
 rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of 
 sweet flowers, and with the harmonic of birdes 
 pray sing God in their kinde." It would have 
 required very little sagacity to foretell that a world 
 such as this was destined to bear rich fruit in poetry. 
 And yet at no period in its history did our poetry 
 pass through so perilous a crisis. For some time it 
 seemed not unlikely that the Renaissance would cast 
 the same spell on English genius as it had cast on the 
 genius of Italy and France. Its effect there had been 
 to kindle an enthusiasm for the works of the ancients 
 so intense and absorbing that it amounted to fanati- 
 cism, a fanaticism against which all the forces which 
 commonly direct, and all the causes which commonly 
 inspire, intellectual and artistic activity were power- 
 less to contend. No art escaped the infection, but 
 poetry suffered most. A wretched affectation of 
 classical sentiment, of classical imagery, of classical 
 diction, pervaded it. To write tragedies in the style 
 of Seneca, and comedies in the style of Plautus and 
 Terence ; to construct, out of materials furnished by 
 Theocritus and Virgil, rococo Arcadias; to parody 
 Pindar, Anacreon, and Horace in odes and dithyrambs, 
 Ovid and Tibullus in elegies, and the ancient idylls 
 in tinsel imitations; to torture Italian and French in to 
 Greek and Latin phrases and idioms ; and to substitute 
 the metres of ancient classical poetry for the metres 
 proper to the poetry of Eomance became the employ- 
 ment of men who, had they succeeded in casting off 
 the fetters of this degrading servitude, might have
 
 140 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 attained no mean rank among poets. In Italy this 
 taste was all but universal. In France it found ex- 
 pression, to take a few typical illustrations, in the 
 tragedies of Jodelle and Gamier ; in the detestable 
 Pindariques and equally detestable epic of Eonsard ; 
 in his wretched metrical experiments, and in those of 
 Jan Antoine de Baif, Passerat, Pasquier, and Nicholas 
 Rapin ; in the Foresteries and Pastorale of Jean 
 Vauquelin de la Fresnaie * ; in Remy Belleau's in- 
 genious adaptation of the Metamorphoses and of the 
 Orphic Lithica. Thus poetry became more and more 
 divorced from nature and life, losing all sincerity, 
 losing all originality. An exception indeed must be 
 made in favour of the Romantic school, but even the 
 Romantic school passed under the yoke. That our 
 poetry narrowly escaped the same fate cannot, we 
 think, be doubted. When we remember the super- 
 stitious reverence with which the writings of antiquity 
 were regarded, the ardour with which the study of 
 those writings was pursued, the ridiculous extent to 
 which the affectation of learning was carried in the 
 pulpit, in Parliament, and even in the taverns and 
 playhouses, the classicism and pseudo-classicism pre- 
 dominant everywhere in academic and aristocratic 
 circles, 2 the enormous popularity of the literature of 
 
 1 The motto of this school may be expressed in the words of Ronsard : 
 
 Les Frangois qui mes vers liront, 
 S'ils ne sont et Grecs et Remains, 
 En lieu de ce livre ils n'auront 
 Qu'un pesant faix entre les mains. 
 
 La Franciade Epilogue (De Luy-Mesme). 
 
 * " When the queen paraded through a county town almost every pageant 
 was a Pantheon. When she paid a visit at the house of any of her nobility,
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 141 
 
 Italy, the influence exercised by that literature, the 
 contempt for Eomanticism at the Court and at the 
 Universities, the constant endeavours on the part of 
 both to dethrone it, and, above all, the culture and 
 learning which distinguished the Eomancists them- 
 selves, we cannot but feel how imminent was the 
 danger. About 1579 a desperate attempt was made 
 by Gabriel Harvey and Sir Philip Sidney to revolu- 
 tionise English poetry on strictly classical principles ; 
 and for this purpose a club was formed, a prominent 
 member of which was Spenser. Khyme and our 
 ordinary metres were to be superseded by iambic 
 trimeters, hexameters, elegiacs, sapphics, asclepiads, 
 and the like, detestable specimens of which may be 
 found in Spenser's collected poems and in Sidney's 
 Arcadia. Though Spenser had the good sense to 
 abandon this particular form of pedantic classicism, 
 he was in his Shepherd's Calendar only too faithful 
 to other forms of it. And what is true of the Shep- 
 herds Calendar is true of much of his other work, 
 and of much of the work of his brother poets. A 
 large portion, indeed, of the lyric and miscellaneous 
 poetry of the time is as deeply tainted w T ith this 
 affectation as the poetry of Italy and France. In the 
 drama classicism made a long and obstinate stand 
 
 she was saluted by the Penates and conducted to her privy chamber by 
 Mercury. Even the pastrycooks were expert mythologists. At dinner select 
 transformations of Ovid's MetamorpTioses were exhibited in confectionery, and 
 the splendid iceing of an immense historic plum -cake was embossed with a 
 delicious basso-relievo of the destruction of Troy. In the afternoon^ when 
 she condescended to walk in the garden, the lake was covered with Tritons 
 and Nereids ; the pages of the family were converted into wood nymphs, who 
 peeped from every bower, and the footmen gambolled over the lawns in the 
 figure of Satyrs." Warton's History of English Poetry, vol. iv. p. 323.
 
 142 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 against the Romancists, as the comedies of Lyly and 
 the tragedies of Lady Pembroke, Brandon, Samuel 
 Daniel, and Ben Jonson show. " My verse," says 
 Daniel, in words which exactly express the attitude 
 of himself and his school to the popular schools 
 " my verse respects nor Thames nor Theatres." The 
 most authoritative critics were, moreover, almost 
 universally on the side of classicism. Sidney and 
 Webbe, for example, defended it in its most extra- 
 vagant forms, and Ben Jonson was its apostle and 
 apologist to the last. Fortunately, however, the 
 instinctive energy of genius prevailed ; fortunately 
 the England of Elizabeth was not the Italy of Leo ; 
 fortunately our poetry had its roots in a soil so rich 
 that the parasites which might, under less propitious 
 conditions, have choked its growth and exhausted its 
 vitality, served only 
 
 to become 
 Contingencies of pomp. 
 
 And that the poetry of those times should have 
 found its chief embodiment in the drama is not sur- 
 prising. The age was, in itself, pre-eminently an age 
 of activity. It had no tendency to introspective 
 brooding ; it troubled itself, as a rule, very little about 
 the ideal and the infinite ; it was no worshipper of 
 Nature. It was indeed the expression in acme of 
 reaction against all that had been characteristic of 
 medisevalism. Its central figure was man in action ; 
 its distinguishing feature was its sympathy with 
 humanity. Thus human life, its failures, and its 
 triumphs, thus human kind, their passions and pecu-
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 143 
 
 liarities, became objects of paramount interest. Nor 
 was this all. London was already the centre of the 
 social and intellectual life of the kingdom, and was 
 attracting each year from the provinces and the 
 Universities all who hoped to turn wit and genius to 
 account. The refuge of literary adventurers in our 
 day is the periodical and daily press. In those days 
 there were no journals and no periodicals, for there 
 was no reading public. But among the changes 
 introduced by the dissolution of the old system was 
 the appearance and rapidly-increasing importance of a 
 class which corresponded to that on which our popular 
 press relies for support. Since the accession of the 
 Tudors a great change had passed over London. 
 Peace and a settled government had transformed the 
 rude and martial nobility of the Plantagenets into 
 courtiers and men of mode. Their hotels swarmed 
 with dependants who would, a generation back, have 
 found occupation in the camp ; but who were now, 
 like their masters, devoted to gaiety and pleasure. 
 Contemporary with this revolution in the upper 
 sections of society was the rise of a great commercial 
 aristocracy. Each decade found London more pros- 
 perous, more luxurious, more thickly peopled. By 
 the middle of Elizabeth's reign it presented all the 
 features peculiar to great capitals and great seaports. 
 A large industrial population, branching out into 
 all the infinite ramifications of mercantile communi- 
 ties, mingled its multitudes with the crowd of men 
 of rank and fashion who affected the neighbourhood 
 of the Court, and with the swarms of adventurers and
 
 144 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 sycophants who hung loose on the town or subsisted 
 on the charity of noble houses. The Inns of Court, 
 thronged with students often as accomplished as they 
 were idle and dissolute, had already assumed that 
 half- fashionable, half -literary character, which for 
 upwards of two centuries continued to distinguish 
 them. But no quarter of London stirred with fuller 
 life than that which was then known as the Bankside. 
 It was here that the lawless and shifting population, 
 which came in and passed out by the river, found its 
 temporary home. In the taverns and lodging-houses 
 which crowded those teeming alleys were huddled 
 together men of all nations, of all grades, of all call- 
 ings ; Huguenot refugees, awaiting the turn which 
 would restore them to their country ; Switzers and 
 Germans who, induced partly by curiosity and partly 
 by the restlessness which a life of adventure engenders, 
 flocked over every year from the Low Countries ; half- 
 Anglicised Italians and half-Italianated Englishmen ; 
 filibusters from the Spanish Main and broken 
 squatters from the Portuguese settlements ; soldiers 
 of fortune who had fought and plundered under half 
 the leaders in Europe ; desperadoes who had survived 
 the perils of unknown oceans and lands where no 
 white man had ever before penetrated ; seamen from 
 the crews of Hawkins and Drake and Cavendish and 
 Frobisher. And among this motley rabble were to be 
 found men in whose veins ran the blood of the noblest 
 families in England Strangwayses and Carews, Tre- 
 maynes and Throgmortons, Cobhams and Killigrews. 
 Such was the London of Elizabeth. It was natural
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 145 
 
 that the cry of these people should be for amusement. 
 Too intelligent to be satisfied with the stupid and 
 brutal pastimes then in vogue with the vulgar, and 
 too restless and illiterate to find pleasure in books, it 
 was equally natural that they should look to the 
 stage to supply their want. And the stage responded 
 to the call. 
 
 In 1574 Elizabeth granted to James Burbage and 
 four other players the right of exhibiting dramatic 
 performances within the precincts of the City. This 
 was strongly opposed both by the Puritans and by 
 the Common Council. A memorial was addressed to 
 the Queen. A counter-memorial on the part of the 
 players followed. At last a compromise was effected. 
 Burbage and his company, quitting the strict limits 
 of the City, established themselves in Blackfriars. 
 The construction of a regular theatre was begun. The 
 Puritans were furious, the burgesses of Blackfriars 
 petitioned ; but Burbage triumphed, and London had 
 its first playhouse. From this moment dates the 
 commencement of the modern stage. The temporary 
 platforms which had been erected, as occasion required, 
 in inn-yards in the yard, for example, of the Bull in 
 Bishopsgate Street, and the Belle Savage on Ludgate 
 Hill now gave place to permanent theatres. The 
 erection of Burbage's Blackfriars theatre in 1576 
 was followed in the same year by the erection of the 
 " Theatre " and the " Curtain " in Shoreditch. Each 
 decade added to the number, and in the latter years 
 of Elizabeth's reign London could boast of at least 
 eleven of these edifices. What had before scarcely
 
 146 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 risen to the dignity of a distinct vocation now became 
 a thriving and lucrative profession. The strolling 
 companies who, under the real or pretended protec- 
 tion of noble houses, roamed the country, now flocked, 
 certain of employment, to the metropolis. Indeed, 
 the demand for those who could produce, and for 
 those who could act, plays was such that the supply, 
 though abundant, almost to miraculousness, could 
 scarcely keep pace with it. 
 
 In an incredibly short space of time the semi- 
 scholastic, semi-barbarous drama of preceding play- 
 wrights was transformed into that wonderful drama in 
 which, as in a mirror, the world of those times saw 
 itself reflected ; which, in its infinite flexibility, adapted 
 itself to every taste, to every understanding ; which, 
 in its all-absorbing, all-assimilating activity, disdained 
 nothing as too mean, excluded nothing as too exalted ; 
 and which, in its maturest manifestations, is among 
 the marvels of human skill and human genius. In 
 little more than twelve years from its first appearance 
 that drama had not only superseded every other form 
 of popular entertainment, but had cast into the shade 
 every other school of contemporary poetry. It had 
 disputed the pre-eminence of the classical playwrights 
 by turning against them their own weapons. Decla- 
 mation as ornate and stately, dialogue as brilliant 
 with antithesis and as rich with the embellishments 
 of scholarship and culture, as had ever won the ap- 
 plause of Elizabeth and Leicester, were now heard in 
 every playhouse from Shoreditch to Southwark. It 
 had rivalled the poetry of Spenser in gorgeousness of
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 147 
 
 diction and in teeming fertility of imagination and 
 fancy. No narrative poetry since Chaucer's could 
 compare with it in vividness of description and por- 
 traiture. In pastoral poetry nothing equal to its 
 pictures of country life and country scenery had 
 appeared since the Sicilian Idylls. It had pressed 
 into its service the graces of the lyric and the sonnet. 
 It had enriched itself with all that Sidney and his 
 circle had borrowed from Petrarch and Sanazzaro, 
 and with all that Lyly and his disciples had derived 
 from Spain. And it had transformed what it had 
 borrowed. It had extended the dominion of art. It 
 had revealed new capacities in our language and new 
 music in our verse. To the fathers of this drama 
 belongs the glory of having moulded that noble metre 
 which, even in their hands, rivalled the iambic tri- 
 meter of Greece, but which was in the hands of its 
 next inheritor to become the most omnipotent instru- 
 ment of expression known to art. 
 
 We will now, as far as our space will permit, pass 
 in review the chief of those remarkable men who were 
 the fathers of our Eomantic drama, and who, what- 
 ever may be their inferiority in point of genius, are 
 certainly entitled to the honour of having been the 
 masters of Shakspeare Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, 
 George Peele, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, and 
 the unknown author of Arden of Faversham. In the 
 lives and characters of these men, where particulars 
 have survived, there is so much in common that it is 
 as easy to describe them collectively as separately. 
 They were all men peculiarly typical of the New Age.
 
 148 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 They were all sprung from the lower and middle 
 classes ; they were all born in the provinces ; they 
 had all gone up from the provinces to the Univer- 
 sities, and from the Universities, with the object of 
 seeking a livelihood as authors by profession, to 
 London. They were all thorough men of the world. 
 They had all had ample experience of either fortune. 
 They all hung loose on the town, three of them 
 being distinguished, even in those wild times, by the 
 ostentatious dissoluteness of their lives, and coming 
 prematurely to mournful and shameful ends. Not 
 less striking was the similarity between them in point 
 of genius and culture. They were all scholars. Peele 
 translated one of the Iphigenias ; Marlowe paraphrased 
 the poem of the pseudo-Musseus, and has left versions 
 of Ovid's Amores and the first book of the Pharsalia. 
 The sapphics and elegiacs of Greene cannot indeed 
 be commended for their purity or elegance, but they 
 are a sufficient indication of his mastery over the 
 Latin language ; and what is true of the sapphics and 
 elegiacs of Greene is true also of the hexameters of 
 Kyd and Marlowe. Lyly's classical attainments are 
 sufficiently attested, not only by his respectable Latin 
 prose, but by his novel and by his comedies. Of 
 their familiarity with the literatures of modern Europe 
 there is scarcely a page in their writings which does 
 not afford abundant proofs. In mere learning, indeed, 
 and in their fondness for displaying that learning, 
 they bear some resemblance to the poets of Alexandria 
 and Augustan Kome ; but, though they owed much to 
 culture, they owed more to nature. They were all of
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 149 
 
 them pre-eminently poets. They had all, in the 
 phrase of Juvenal, bitten the laurel. In all of them 
 Kyd and the author ofArden of Faversham excepted 
 the faculties which enable men to excel as painters of 
 life and manners and character were less conspicuous 
 than the faculties which impress lyric poetry with 
 grace and fancy, and narrative poetry with pictur- 
 esqueness and dignity. If again we except Kyd and 
 the author of Arden of Faversham, they have all left- 
 plays which stand higher as poems and idylls than as 
 dramas. 
 
 Of these poets the youngest in years but the first 
 in importance was Christopher Marlowe. Born in 
 February 1563-64, the son of a shoemaker at Canter- 
 bury, he received the rudiments of his education at 
 the King's School in that city. He subsequently 
 matriculated at Benet College, Cambridge, taking his 
 degree as Bachelor of Arts in 1583, and his degree as 
 Master of Arts four years later. Of his career at 
 Cambridge, and of his movements between 1583 and 
 1587, nothing is known. It is probable that by the 
 end of 1587 he had settled in London, having already 
 distinguished himself by the production of Tambur- 
 laine. The rest of his life is a deplorable record of 
 misfortune, debauchery, and folly, suddenly and fright- 
 fully terminated, before he had completed his thirtieth 
 year, by a violent death in a tavern-brawl at Deptford. 
 
 When Dryden observed of Shakspeare that he 
 " found not, but created first the stage," he said what 
 was certainly not true of Shakspeare, but what would, 
 with some modification, be true of Marlowe. To no
 
 150 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 single man does our drama owe more than to this ill- 
 starred genius. It was he who determined the form 
 which tragedy and history were permanently to 
 assume. It was he who first clothed both in that 
 noble and splendid garb which was ever afterwards to 
 distinguish them. It was he who gave the death-blow 
 to the old rhymed plays on the one hand, and to the 
 frigid and cumbersome unrhymed classical plays on 
 the other. In his Doctor Faustus and in his Jew 
 of Malta it would not be too much to say that he 
 formulated English romantic tragedy. He cast in 
 clay what Shakspeare recast in marble. Indeed, 
 Marlowe was to Shakspeare in tragedy precisely what 
 Boiardo and Berni were to Ariosto in narrative. It 
 is certain that without the Orlando Innamorato we 
 should never have had the Orlando Furioso. It is 
 more than probable that without the tragedies of 
 Marlowe we should never have had, in the form at 
 least in which they now stand, the tragedies of Shak- 
 speare. Of the History in the proper sense of the title, 
 Marlowe was the creator. In his Edward I. Peele 
 had, it is true, made some advance on the old 
 Chronicles. 1 But the difference between Peele's 
 Edward I. and Marlowe's Edward II. is the 
 difference between a work of art and mere botch- 
 work. Peele's play is little better than a series of 
 disconnected scenes loosely tagged together ; superior 
 indeed in style, but in no way superior in structure 
 
 1 Though the date of the publication of Peele's Edward I. is subsequent to 
 that of Marlowe's Edward II. , we have little doubt that in point of composi- 
 tion it preceded Marlowe's play.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 151 
 
 to The Famous Victories of Henry V. and to The 
 Troublesome Raigne of King John. In Ediuard II. 
 Marlowe laid down, and laid down for all time, the 
 true principles of dramatic composition as applied to 
 history. He showed how, by a judicious process of 
 selection and condensation, of modification and sup- 
 pression, the crowded annals of many years could in 
 effect be presented within the compass of a single 
 play. He studied perspective and symmetry. He 
 brought out in clear relief the central figure and the 
 central action, grouping round each in carefully- 
 graduated subordination the accessory characters and 
 the accessory incidents. Chronology and tradition, 
 when they interfered either with the harmony of his 
 work or with dramatic effect, he never scrupled to 
 ignore or alter, rightly discriminating between the laws 
 imposed on the historian and the laws imposed on the 
 dramatist. He was the first of English playwrights 
 to discern that in dramatic composition the relative 
 importance of events is determined, not by the space 
 which they fill in history, but by the manner in which 
 they impress the imagination and bear on the cata- 
 strophe. Nor are these Marlowe's only titles to the 
 most distinguished place among the fathers of English 
 tragedy. He was not only the first of our dramatists 
 who, possessing a bold and vivid imagination, pos- 
 sessed also the faculty of. adequately embodying its 
 conceptions, but the first who, powerfully moved by 
 strong emotion, succeeding in awakening strong 
 emotion in others. In the hands of his predecessors 
 tragedy had been powerless to touch the heart. As
 
 152 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 a rule, it had maintained the same dead-level of frigid 
 and nerveless declamation. In his hands it resumed 
 its ancient sway over the passions ; it unlocked the 
 sources of terror and pity. To compare Marlowe with 
 the Attic dramatists would be in the highest degree 
 absurd, and yet we must go back to the Attic 
 dramatists to find anything equal to the concluding 
 scenes of Dr. Faustus and Edward II. 
 
 The appearance of Tamburlaine has been compared 
 to the appearance of Hernani. Its professed object 
 was to revolutionise the drama. The war which Victor 
 Hugo declared against classicism Marlowe declared 
 against the 
 
 jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
 And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay. 
 
 The most remarkable of his innovations was the 
 substitution of blank verse for rhyme and prose. It 
 would not, of course, be true to say that Marlowe 
 was the first of our poets to employ blank verse in 
 dramatic composition. It had been employed by 
 Sackville and Norton in Gorboduc; by Gascoigne in 
 Jocasta; by Lyly in his Woman in the Moon; by 
 Hughes in his Misfortunes of Arthur ; and by the 
 authors of other plays which in all probability pre- 
 ceded Tamburlaine. But these plays had been con- 
 fined exclusively to private audiences, and had not 
 been designed for the popular stage. Nor must we 
 confound the blank verse of Marlowe with the blank 
 verse of these dramas. In them it differed only from 
 the heroic couplet in wanting rhyme. It had made 
 no advance on Grimoald's experiments more than
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 153 
 
 thirty years before. It had no variety, no incatena- 
 tion, no harmony; in the contemptuous phrase of 
 Nash, it was a drumming decasyllabon, and a drum- 
 ming decasyllabon there seemed every probability of 
 it continuing to remain. It is remarkable that, since 
 its first introduction into our language by Surrey, 
 though it had passed through the hands of poets 
 whose other compositions show that they pos- 
 sessed no common mastery over metrical expres- 
 sion, its structure had never altered. The genius of 
 Marlowe transformed it into the noblest and most 
 flexible of English metres. If we examine the 
 mechanism of his verse, we shall see that it differed 
 from that of his predecessors in the resolution of the 
 iambic into tribrachs and dactyls, in the frequent 
 substitution of trochees and pyrrhics for monosyllables, 
 in the large admixture of anapests, in the inter- 
 spersion of Alexandrines, in the shifting of the pauses, 
 in the use of hemistichs, in the interlinking of verse 
 with verse. It was therefore no mere modification, 
 no mere improvement on the earlier forms of blank 
 verse ; it was a new creation. 
 
 The effect of Marlowe's innovation was at once 
 apparent. First went the old rhymed stanzas. We 
 doubt whether it would be possible to find a single 
 play written in stanzas subsequent to 1587. Next 
 went the prose Histories. Then commenced the 
 gradual disappearance of rhymed couplets. Thus 
 plays which previous to 1587 were written in rhyme, 
 we find after 1587 interpolated with blank verse. 
 Such is the case with Tlie TJiree Ladies of London;
 
 154 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 such is the case with Selimus ; such is the case with 
 the recast of Tancred and Gismunda. Before 1587 
 Peele habitually employed rhyme; after 1587 he 
 discarded it entirely. Greene, who, if we interpret 
 rightly an ambiguous passage in the Epistle prefixed 
 to his Perimedes, regarded Marlowe's innovation with 
 strong disfavour, almost immediately adopted it. In 
 all his extant dramas blank verse is employed. By 
 1593 it was firmly established. 
 
 How profoundly the genius of Marlowe impressed 
 his contemporaries is evident not only from the 
 frequent allusions to his writings, but from the 
 imitations, close even to servility, of his characters 
 and his style, which abound in our dramatic literature 
 between 1587 and 1600. Sometimes we have whole 
 plays which are mere parodies of his ; such would be 
 Greene's A Iphonsus and Peele's Battle of Alcazar ; 
 such also would be the anonymous play, Lust's 
 Dominion. His Barabas and Tamburlaine took the 
 same hold on the popular imagination as the Conrads 
 and Laras and Harolds and Manfreds of a later age, 
 appearing and reappearing, variously modified in 
 numerous forms. Tamburlaine became the prototype of 
 the stage hero. Barabas became the prototype of the 
 stage villain. To enumerate the characters modelled 
 on these creations of Marlowe would be to transcribe 
 the leading dramatis personce of at least two-thirds 
 of the heroic dramas in vogue during the latter years 
 of the sixteenth century. Indeed, the influence and 
 we are speaking now not of the general, but of the 
 particular influence exercised by Marlowe over the
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 155 
 
 works of his brother poets would, if traced in detail, 
 be found to be far more extensive than is generally 
 supposed. To go no further than Shakspeare, 
 Richard II. is undoubtedly modelled on Edward 
 II. ; the character of Richard is the character 
 *of Edward slightly modified. In the second and 
 third parts of Henry VI., if Shakspeare did not 
 actually work in co-operation with Marlowe, he set 
 himself to imitate with servile fidelity Marlowe's 
 method and Marlowe's style. Aaron in Titus 
 Andronicus is Barabas in The Jew of Malta ; so in 
 some degree is Shylock ; so in a considerable degree 
 is Richard III. In the nurse who attends on Dido 
 we have a sort of first sketch of the nurse in Romeo 
 and Juliet. From The Jew of Malta Shakspeare 
 derived many hints for The Merchant of Venice. 
 From the concluding scene of Dr. Faustus he 
 borrowed, or appears to have borrowed, one of the 
 finest touches in Macbeth.^ 
 
 From a historical point of view it would, 
 therefore, be scarcely possible to over-estimate the 
 importance of Marlowe's services. Regarded as 
 an initiator, he ranks with ^Eschylus. But criticism 
 must distinguish between merit which is relative 
 and merit which is intrinsic. It may sound para- 
 doxical to say of the father of our Romantic drama, 
 of the master of Shakspeare, that his genius was 
 in essence the very reverse of dramatic, nay, that 
 
 1 In both tragedies a storm is raging without, while the deeds of horror are 
 proceeding in ghastly silence within. Cf. the last scene of Dr? Faustus, edit. 
 1616, and Macbeth, Act II. Sc. 3. It is of course possible that the scene may 
 have been interpolated by another and later hand, and borrowed from Macbeth.
 
 156 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 the temper of his genius was such as absolutely to 
 disqualify him from excelling as a dramatist. And yet 
 such is the case. In Marlowe we have the extra- 
 ordinary anomaly of a man in whom the instincts of 
 the artist and the temper of the poet met in oppug- 
 nancy. Induced partly perhaps by the exigencies of- 
 his position, partly no doubt influenced by the age in 
 which it was his chance to live, the materials on 
 which he worked he elected to cast in a dramatic 
 mould. Nature had endowed him with a singular 
 sense of fitness and harmony, with an appreciation 
 of form Greek -like in its delicacy and subtlety. 
 This is conspicuous in all he has left us, in his 
 too scanty lyric poetry, in his too scanty narrative 
 poetry. When, therefore, he applied himself to 
 dramatic composition, the same instinct directed him 
 unerringly to the true principles on which a drama 
 should be constructed. It caused him to turn with 
 disgust from the rude and chaotic style of the popular 
 stage ; it preserved him, on the other hand, from the 
 pedantry and affectation of the classical school. In 
 a word, what propriety of expression, what nice skill 
 in the technique of his art, could accomplish, that 
 Marlowe achieved, and the achievement has made his 
 name memorable for ever in the history of the English 
 drama. 
 
 But the moment we turn from Marlowe as an 
 artist to Marlowe as a critic and painter of life, we 
 feel how immeasurable is the distance which separates 
 him, we do not say from Shakspeare, but from many 
 of the least distinguished of his brother playwrights.
 
 THE PEEDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 157 
 
 His genius and temper have been admirably described 
 by Drayton : 
 
 Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, 
 Had in him those brave translunary things 
 That the first poets had ; his raptures were 
 All ayre and fire, which made his verses clear, 
 For that fine madness still he did retain, 
 Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. 
 
 It was in this translunary sphere that he found 
 his characters ; it was under the inspiration of this 
 fine madness that he delineated them. Of air and 
 fire, not of flesh and blood, are the beings who people 
 his world composed. Regarded as counterparts of 
 mankind, as studies of humanity, they are mere 
 absurdities. They are neither true to life nor 'con- 
 sistent with themselves. Where they live they live 
 by virtue of the intensity with which they embody 
 abstract conceptions. They are delineations, not of 
 human beings, but of superhuman passions. 
 
 The truth is that in the constitution of Marlowe's 
 genius and we are using the word in its widest 
 sense there were serious deficiencies. In the first 
 place, he had no humour ; in the second place, he had 
 little sympathy with humanity, and with men of 
 the common type, none a defect which seems to 
 us as detrimental to a dramatist as colour-blindness 
 would be to a painter. In the faculty, again, of 
 minute and accurate observation a faculty which is 
 with most dramatists an instinct he appears to have 
 been almost wholly lacking. Nothing is t so rare in 
 Marlowe as one of those touches which show that the 
 poet had, as Wordsworth expresses it, " his eye on his
 
 158 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 object." His dramas teem with blunders and im- 
 proprieties such as no writer who had observed man- 
 kind even with common attention could possibly 
 have committed, and in the vagueness and con- 
 ventionality of the epithets which are in almost all 
 cases applied by him to natural objects we have 
 conclusive evidence of the same defective vision. 
 
 The words in which Sallust describes Catiline will 
 apply with singular propriety to Marlowe : " Vastus 
 animus semper incredibilia, semper immoderata, 
 nimis alta cupiebat." This is in truth Marlowe's 
 distinguishing characteristic. It is one of the sources 
 
 o o 
 
 of his greatness as a poet ; it is the main source of 
 his weakness as a dramatist. It was to him what 
 the less exalted egotism of a less exalted nature was 
 to Byron. If we except Edward II., all his leading 
 characters resolve themselves into mere incarnations 
 of this passion. In Tamburlaine and Guise it is the 
 illimitable lust for dominion. In Barabas it is the 
 illimitable lust for wealth. In Faustus it is the 
 insanity of sensual and intellectual aspiration. As 
 impersonations of mankind neither Tamburlaine nor 
 Guise, neither Barabas nor Faustus, will bear examin- 
 ation for a moment. Of Marlowe's minor characters 
 there is not one which impresses itself with any dis- 
 tinctness on the memory. Indeed, they have scarcely 
 more individuality than the " fortisque Gyas, fortisque 
 Cloanthus" of the AZneid, or those heroes in the 
 Iliad who are mentioned only to swell the number 
 of the slain. Who ever realised Mycetas or Techelles, 
 or Usumcasane or Mathias, or Ferneze or Ithamore
 
 THE PKEDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 159 
 
 or Lodowick ? What distinguishes Amyras from Cele- 
 binus ? Or Jacomo from Barnardine ? Or Valdes 
 from Cornelius ? Or Calymath from Martin del 
 Bosco ? Take again his women. Where they are 
 not mere puppets, as is the case with Zenocrate, 
 Abigail, Bellamira, and Catharine, they are pre- 
 posterously untrue to nature, as is the case with 
 Olympia, Isabella, and Dido. In one play, and in 
 one play only, has Marlowe displayed a power of 
 characterisation eminently dramatic. In Edward II. 
 Gaveston, Mortimer, and the King himself are as 
 admirably drawn as they are admirably contrasted. 
 The sculptural clearness with which the figure of 
 Mortimer, cold, stern, remorseless, stands out from 
 the crowded canvas ; the light but firm touches which 
 place the King's young favourite, the joyous, reckless, 
 pleasure - loving Gaveston, vividly before us ; the 
 power and subtlety with which the quickly alternat- 
 ing emotions in the breast of Edward, from his first 
 conflict with opposition to his last appalling agony, 
 are depicted all these combine to place this drama 
 on a far higher level than any of Marlowe's other 
 plays. Edward II. is said to have been the poet's 
 last work. If it was so, it shows that, as his life 
 advanced, his genius was widening and mellowing, 
 and it increases our regret for the accident which cut 
 short his career. But that we lost in Marlowe a 
 possible rival of Shakspeare is an opinion in which 
 we by no means concur. It is true that, though the 
 two poets were born within a few weeks of each 
 other, Marlowe was the master and Shakspeare the
 
 160 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 disciple. It is true also that the best work produced 
 by Shakspeare at twenty -nine to judge at least 
 from what he gave to the world was greatly inferior 
 to the best work of Marlowe. But this proves little 
 more than that the powers of Shakspeare were, up 
 to a certain point, slow in developing, and that is 
 almost always the case with men whose genius is of 
 an objective cast. What we fail to see in Marlowe 
 is any indication of power in reserve. Comparatively 
 scanty as his work is, he is constantly repeating him- 
 self, and in the few noble and impressive scenes on 
 which his fame as a dramatist mainly rests, we discern 
 what is perhaps the most unpromising of all symptoms 
 in the work of a young writer, excessive elaboration. 
 That Edward II. is a considerable advance on his 
 former plays, that it is marked throughout by greater 
 sobriety, and that it exhibits a wider range of sym- 
 pathy and insight than he has elsewhere displayed, is 
 indisputable. But this is all, and this is not much. 
 In a dramatic poet of the first order we look for 
 qualities which are as conspicuously absent in Mar- 
 lowe's last and maturest play as they are in the plays 
 which preceded it. 
 
 We are not, then, inclined to assign to Marlowe 
 that high position among dramatists which it has of 
 late years been the fashion, and in our opinion the 
 absurd fashion, to claim for him. But as a poet he 
 seems to us to deserve all the praise which his ad- 
 mirers give him. The words ." rapture " and " inspira- 
 tion," which are, when applied to most poetry, little 
 more than figurative expressions, have, when applied
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 161 
 
 to his poetry, a strict propriety. Never before had 
 passion so intense, had imagination so vivid and 
 aspiring, had fancy so rich and graceful, co-existed in 
 equal measure and in equal harmony. 
 
 The energy of Marlowe's genius was twofold. On 
 the one side he is a transcendental enthusiast ; on the 
 other side he is a pagan hedonist. On the one side he 
 reflects the intense spiritual activity, the preternatural 
 exaltation, not merely of the emotions, but of the 
 imagination and the intellect, which were among the 
 most striking effects of the Renaissance in England. 
 On the other side he reflects not less faithfully the 
 peculiarities of that great movement as it affected 
 academic Italy. The ardour of his passion for the 
 ideal, and the intensity with which he has expressed 
 that passion, are what impress us most in his dramas. 
 In his poems, on the other hand, the predominating 
 element is pure sensuousness. It is the poetry not 
 of desire, but of fruition. No poem in our language 
 is more classical, in the sense at least in which 
 Politian and Sanazzaro would have understood the 
 term, and assuredly no poem in our language is more 
 sensuously lovely, than Hero and Leander. It re- 
 minds us in some respects of the best episodes in the 
 Metamorphoses, and it reminds us still more fre- 
 quently of Keats's narratives, not, indeed, of Isabella 
 or of The Eve of Saint Agnes, but indirectly of 
 Endymion, and directly of Lamia. 
 
 But of all Marlowe's gifts the most remarkable, 
 perhaps, was his gift of expression. It may be said 
 of him, with literal truth, that he " voluntary moved 
 
 M
 
 162 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 harmonious numbers." Of the music of his verse 
 it is superfluous to speak. On this point we are 
 inclined to go almost as far as Mr. Swinburne. If 
 the melodies of Shakspeare and Milton are fuller 
 and more complex, if the music of the poets who 
 have during the present century revealed new 
 capacities in our language has a subtler fascination, 
 no clearer, no nobler, no more melodious note than 
 the note of Marlowe vibrates in our poetry. His 
 diction, too, when at its best as we see it, for 
 example, in Hero and Leander, in the lyric Come 
 Live with Me, and in such passages in his plays 
 as Tamburlaine's speech to Zenocrate, as Faust's 
 apostrophe to the shade of Helen, as Edward's last 
 speeches to Leicester, as Guise's soliloquy, as Bald- 
 win's speech to Spenser seems to us to approach as 
 nearly to the style of the Greek masterpieces as 
 anything to be found in English. It is the per- 
 fection of that diction which is at once natural and 
 poetical, at once simple and dignified. 
 
 Next in importance to Marlowe comes Eobert 
 Greene. Of all the writers who between 1584 and 
 1592 followed literature as a profession, Greene was 
 the most fertile and the most popular. " In a day 
 and a night," says his friend Nash, " would he have 
 yarked up a pamphlet as well as in seven years, and 
 glad was that printer that might be so blest as to 
 pay him dear for the very dregs of his wit." He 
 distinguished himself as a poet, as a novelist, as a 
 social satirist, and as a playwright. And to Greene, 
 both as an individual and as an author, a peculiar
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 163 
 
 interest attaches itself. In the first place, no man of 
 that age is so well known to us, for he has himself, in 
 some of the most remarkable confessions which have 
 ever been given to the world, laid bare the innermost 
 secrets of his life. In the second place, he is, of all 
 our writers, the writer who illustrates most clearly 
 the exact nature of the influence exercised by the 
 Renaissance on English genius; and in the third 
 place, there is about many of his writings a singular 
 charm and grace. He was born at Norwich, probably 
 about 1560. In due time he proceeded to Cambridge, 
 taking his Bachelor's degree as a member of St. John's 
 College in 1578, and his Master's five years later as a 
 member of Clare Hall. At Cambridge he appears to 
 have been equally distinguished by his profligacy and 
 his abilities. Between 1578 and 1583 he travelled 
 on the Continent, visiting Italy, France, Spain, 
 Germany, Poland, and Denmark. He returned, he 
 tells us, an adept in all the villainies under the 
 heavens, a glutton, a 'libertine, and a drunkard. But 
 he returned, it is certain, with other and more honour- 
 able attainments with rich stores of observation and 
 experience, with a genius polished and enlarged by 
 communion with the Classics of Rome and Florence, 
 and with a mind profoundly impressed by the loveli- 
 ness and splendour of the lands which Nature loves. 
 He commenced his literary career about 1583, with a 
 prose novel, Mamillia, which was three years after- 
 wards succeeded by a second part ; and, as this is 
 dated from his study in Clare Hall, it is probable that 
 he resided at Cambridge between the period of his
 
 164 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 return from the Continent and his taking his Master's 
 degree. By 1586 he had apparently settled in 
 London. The story of Greene's life, from this period 
 to his death, has been so often told that it is quite 
 unnecessary to tell it again here. We will only say 
 that for our own part we are strongly inclined to 
 suspect that his debaucheries have been very much 
 exaggerated. That he was a man of loose principles 
 and loose morals, and that he was reckless and im- 
 provident, is evidently no more than truth ; but that 
 he was what his enemies have asserted, and what he 
 himself, under the influence of religious reaction, 
 morbidly aggravated by remorse, represented himself 
 to have been a prodigy of turpitude seems to us 
 utterly incompatible with facts. Greene's life was 
 and must have been a life of incessant literary activity. 
 It is almost certain that many of his writings have 
 perished, and yet enough remains of his poetry and 
 prose to fill eleven goodly volumes, and enough 
 survives of his dramatic composition to fill two 
 volumes more. And all this was the work of about 
 eleven years. Now, making every allowance for rapid 
 and facile workmanship, is it within the bounds of 
 possibility that a man sunk so low in sensuality and 
 dissoluteness as Greene is said to have been could in 
 that time have produced so much, and so much, we 
 may add, that was good ? Again, four years before 
 his death he was incorporated at Oxford, a certain 
 proof that, well known as his name must have been 
 for he was then in the zenith of his fame scandal 
 had not been busy with it there. His patrons and
 
 THE PREDECESSOES OF SHAKSPEARE 165 
 
 patronesses, moreover, were to be found among the 
 most virtuous and honourable persons then living. 
 It is not, indeed, likely that the Riches and Arundels, 
 the Talbots and Stanleys, troubled themselves very 
 much about the private life of a needy man of letters ; 
 but it is very certain that, had Greene's excesses been 
 as notorious as we are told they were, he would never 
 have dared to address the Lady Fitzwaters or the 
 Lady Mary Talbot as he addresses them in the Dedi- 
 cations of Arbasto and Philomela, and he would 
 scarcely have ventured to subscribe himself in a 
 Dedication to a man in the position of Thomas 
 Barnaby, "your dutiful and adopted son." If 
 other testimony were needed it would be afforded 
 by his writings. Not only are they absolutely free 
 from any taint of impiety or impurity, but they 
 were in almost all cases produced with the express 
 object of making vice odious and virtue attractive, 
 and in this laudable endeavour he was prompted by 
 the noblest of motives. He was certainly no hypo- 
 crite, for the most malignant of his enemies could 
 not have borne more hardly on his weaknesses than 
 he has himself done. He was not impelled by the 
 love of gain, for, though morality was popular in the 
 fiction of that day, there is abundant evidence to 
 show that immorality was much more popular. It is, 
 moreover, due to Greene to say that the chief testi- 
 mony against him is derived from his own confessions, 
 and that, if these confessions afford evidence of his 
 delinquencies, they afford not less certain evidence of 
 the presence of a disease which caused him to magnify
 
 166 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 those delinquencies tenfold. Nothing can, we think, 
 be clearer than that the mind of this unhappy man 
 was, like that of Bunyan, distempered by religious 
 hypochondria. In every page of his autobiographical 
 pamphlets we are reminded of Grace Abounding. 
 He tells us, for example, how on one occasion he had 
 an inward motion in Saint Andrew's Church at 
 Norwich ; how he was satisfied that he deserved no 
 redemption ; how a voice within him told him that he 
 would, unless he speedily repented, be wiped out of 
 the Book of Life ; how he cried out in the anguish of 
 his soul, "Lord have mercy upon me, and give me 
 grace"; but how he "fell again, like a dog, to his 
 vomit," and became in the judgment of the godly the 
 child of perdition. The world has long done Bunyan 
 the justice which he did not do himself, and has rightly 
 discriminated between facts as they were and facts as 
 his morbid fancy painted them. How necessary it is 
 to make allowance for sensibilities similarly diseased 
 in the case of Greene will be evident from this. He 
 has over and over again reproached himself, and re- 
 proached himself most bitterly, with prostituting his 
 genius to unworthy purposes. He speaks almost with 
 agony of his amorous and wanton pamphlets. He 
 calls himself a second Ovid. " But, as I have," he 
 says in the preface to his Mourning Garment, " heard 
 with the ears of my heart Jonas crying, Except thou 
 repent I have resolved to turn my wanton works to 
 effectual labours." The natural inference from this is 
 that he had published works of a grossly immoral 
 character. But what is the truth ? There is not, as
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 167 
 
 we have already observed, a single line in Greene's 
 writings which has the least tincture of licentious- 
 ness. On the contrary, scrupulous purity distinguishes 
 everything which has come from his pen. And that 
 what he said had no reference to works which are 
 lost is absolutely certain. All he meant was that the 
 composition of love-stories was an idle and frivolous 
 employment, unworthy of a man who aspired to 
 teach ; but this became, when translated into the 
 jargon of The Mourning Garment and The Repentance, 
 precisely what tipcat and bell-ringing became when 
 translated into the jargon of Grace Abounding. 
 Now, if Greene could, under the influence of religious 
 hallucination, so totally and so absurdly misrepresent 
 himself as a writer, nothing can be more likely than 
 that in his confessions his character as a man has 
 been equally distorted. The truth is that his proper 
 place is not, as his biographers would have us believe, 
 beside Boyse and Savage, Cuthbert Shaw and Dermody, 
 but beside Steele and Fielding, beside Goldsmith and 
 Burns in other words, beside men who were rather 
 morally weak than morally depraved, whom we 
 censure reluctantly and sincerely love, and who, 
 whatever may have been their infirmities, were sound 
 in the noble parts. 
 
 We have indulged ourselves in these remarks 
 because we freely own that Greene is a great 
 favourite with us. We have read and re-read his 
 poems, his novels, and his plays, and at each perusal 
 their pure and wholesome spirit, their liveliness, 
 their freshness, their wealth of fancy and imagination,
 
 168 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 their humour, their tenderness, their many graces of 
 style, have gained on us more and more. The best 
 of his novels and the best are undoubtedly Pcm- 
 dosto, Philomela, Never too Late, and A Groats- 
 worth of Wit, though in some instances tainted 
 with the vices of euphuism are in their way admir- 
 able. They strike, it is true, no deep chords, nor 
 are they in reflection and analysis either subtle or 
 profound ; but they are transcripts from life, and they 
 are full of beauty and pathos. Greene's favourite 
 theme is the contrast between the purity and long- 
 suffering of woman, and the follies and selfishness of 
 man. In all the novels to which we have referred 
 appears the same angelic figure ; in all of them the 
 same meek, patient, blameless sufferer passes through 
 the same cruel ordeal, and her tormentor is her 
 husband. He is either insanely jealous, as is the 
 case with Pandosto and Philippo in the first two 
 novels, or unfaithful and dissolute, as is the case 
 with Francesco and Roberto in the last two. In 
 either case the life of the unhappy wife is one 
 long martyrdom, and in depicting that martyrdom 
 Greene shows a power and pathos not unworthy of 
 him who painted the wrongs and virtues of Constance 
 and Griselda. It is said that Greene drew, like 
 Fielding, on his own experience, that he found his 
 Bellarias, his Philomelas, his Isabellas, where Fielding 
 found Amelia, in his own wife ; and that he found 
 his Francescos, his Robertos, and his Philippos, where 
 Fielding found Booth, in himself. Of the auto- 
 biographical character of two at least of his novels,
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 169 
 
 Never too Late and A Groatsworth of Wit, there 
 can be no question. 
 
 Greene followed Sanazzaro in interspersing 
 prose with poetry, and it is in his prose writings 
 that all his non- dramatic poetry is, with one or two 
 exceptions, to be found. Mr. Symonds remarks that 
 the lyrics of Greene have been under -rated. We 
 quite agree with him. Greene's best lyrics are not 
 indeed equal to the best lyrics of Lodge and Barn- 
 field. In spontaneity and grace Rosalynde's madrigal 
 is incomparably superior to Menaphon's song. In finish 
 and felicity of expression Menaphon's picture of the 
 maid with the " dallying locks " must yield to 
 Rosader's picture of Rosalynde, and, charming as 
 Greene's octosyllabics always are, they have not the 
 charm of Barnfield's Nightingale's Lament. But 
 Greene's ordinary level is far above the ordinary 
 level of both these poets. For one poem which we 
 pause over in theirs, there are five which we pause 
 over in his. He has, moreover, much more variety. 
 What, for example, could be more exquisite, simple 
 though it is even to homeliness, than Sephestia's 
 song in Menaphonf The tranquil beauty of the 
 song beginning " Sweet are the thoughts that savour 
 of content," in the Farewell to Folly, and of Barme- 
 nissa's song in Penelope's Web, fascinates at once 
 and for ever. His fancy sketches are delicious. The 
 picture of Diana and her bathing nymphs invaded by 
 Cupid in the little poem entitled Radagon in Dianani, 
 the picture of the journeying Palmer in Never too 
 Late, of Phillis in the valley in Ciceronis Amor, of
 
 170 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 The God that hateth sleep, 
 
 Clad in armour all of fire, 
 
 Hand in hand with Queen Desire, 
 
 in the Palmer's Ode, are finished cameos of rare 
 beauty. Not less charming are the love poems, and 
 among them is one real gem, the song in Pandosto, 
 " Ah, were she pitiful as she is fair." Like all the 
 erotic poetry of the Renaissance, they owe, it is true, 
 more to art than to nature. Some of them are 
 studies from the Italian, others from the French. 
 Occasionally they appear to have derived their 
 colouring from the Apocryphal books of the Bible. 
 In Menaphon's song, beginning " Too weak the wit," 
 there is an oriental gorgeousness. But the element 
 predominating in them is classicism, and classicism 
 of the Italian type, the classicism of Bembo, of 
 Sanazzaro. Thus they appeal rather to the fancy 
 than to the heart, rather to the senses than to the 
 passions. And so graceful is their imagery, so rich 
 is their colouring, so pure and musical is their diction, 
 that they are never likely to appeal in vain. 
 
 To the composition of his plays Greene brought 
 the same qualities which are conspicuous in his 
 novels and his poems, the same sympathetic insight 
 into certain types of character and certain phases 
 of life, the same fertility in inventing incident and 
 detail, the same faculty of pictorial as distinguished 
 from dramatic representation, the same refined pathos, 
 the same mingled artificiality and simplicity, the same 
 exuberant fancy, the same ornate and fluent elo- 
 quence of style. But he brought little else. Such
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 171 
 
 qualities never have sufficed, and never could suffice, 
 to produce dramas of the first order. In Greene's 
 hands they have sufficed to produce dramas which, 
 though not of the first order, are among the most 
 delightful and fascinating productions of Elizabethan 
 genius. But this praise applies, it must be admitted, 
 only to three out of the six plays which have come 
 down to us, and it would have been well for Greene's 
 fame if the other three had perished. In that case 
 his best work would not have been confounded, as 
 it almost always is confounded, with his worst. In 
 that case his critics would not, like Mr. Symonds, 
 have observed generally of his blank verse that it 
 " betrays the manner of the couplet," or generally of 
 his style that it is cumbersome and pedantic. Indeed, 
 the contrast between the plays of the first group 
 The History of Orlando Furioso, Alphonsus King of 
 Aragon, and The Looking -Glass for London and 
 England, which was written in conjunction with 
 Lodge and the plays of the second group Friar 
 Bacon and Friar Bungay, James IV. of Scot- 
 land, and The Pinner of WaJcefteld is in point 
 of style so great that, if we had only internal 
 evidence to guide us, we should be inclined to 
 assign them to different writers. The first two were, 
 in all probability, Greene's earliest attempts at 
 dramatic composition in blank verse. They are in 
 the style of Tamburlaine, and they reflect too 
 faithfully the worst features of that work. For 
 with all its fustian they have none of its music, 
 with all its absurdities as a drama they have none
 
 172 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 of its beauties as a poem. The Looking - Glass is 
 a wild and silly medley, for which we suspect 
 Lodge was mainly responsible. It is, therefore, as 
 the author of the plays of the second group, and 
 as the author of those plays only, that Greene 
 deserves attention. 
 
 Of the importance of these plays in the history 
 of our drama there can be no question. It is not 
 too much to say that the author of Friar Bacon 
 and Friar Bungay and of James IV. of Scotland 
 stands in the same relation to Eomantic Comedy 
 as the author of Tamburlaine and Edward II. 
 stands to Romantic Tragedy. If, historically speak- 
 ing, it is only a step from Edward II. to Henry F., 
 it is, historically speaking, only a step from Friar 
 Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV. to the 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona and to As You Like It. 
 We have only to glance at the condition of Comedy 
 before it came into Greene's hands to see how 
 great was the revolution effected by him. On the 
 popular stage it had scarcely cast off the shackles 
 of the old barbarism. It still clung to the old 
 stanzas ; or if, as in the Knack to Know a Knave 
 and in the Taming of a Shrew, it employed blank 
 verse, the blank verse was blank verse hardly dis- 
 tinguishable from prose. It still clung to the old 
 buffoonery. It still remained unilluminated by 
 romance or poetry. In the theatre of the classical 
 school, on the other hand, it was a mere academic 
 exercise, as it was with Lyly, or a mere copy from 
 the Italian, as it had been with Gascoigne. We
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 173 
 
 open Greene's comedies, and we are in the world 
 of Shakspeare, we are with the sisters of Olivia 
 and Imogen, with the brethren of Touchstone and 
 Florizel, in the homes of Phebe and Perdita. We 
 breathe the same atmosphere, we listen to the same 
 language. 
 
 It was Greene who first brought Comedy into con- 
 tact with the blithe bright life of Elizabethan England, 
 into contact with poetry, into contact with romance. 
 He took it out into the woods and the fields, and gave 
 it all the charm of the idyll ; he filled it with incident 
 and adventure, and gave it all the interest of the 
 novel. A freshness as of the morning pervades these 
 delightful medleys. Turn where we will to the loves 
 of Lacy and Margaret at merry Fressingfield, to the 
 wizard friar and the marvels of his magic cell at 
 Oxford, to the patriot Pinner and his boisterous 
 triumphs, to Oberon with his fairies and antics 
 revelling round him, to the waggeries of Slipper and 
 Miles everywhere we find the same light and happy 
 touch, the same free joyous spontaneity. His serious 
 scenes are often admirable. We really know nothing 
 more touching than the reconciliation of James and 
 Dorothea at the conclusion of James IV., and nothing 
 more eloquent with the simple eloquence of the heart 
 than Margaret's vindication of Lacy in Friar Bacon. 
 The scene again in the second act of James IV. , 
 where Eustace first meets Ida, would in our opinion 
 alone suffice to place Greene in the front rank of 
 idyllic poets. Greene's plots are too loosely con- 
 structed, his characters too sketchy, his grasp and
 
 174 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 range too limited, to entitle him to a high place 
 among dramatists, and yet as we read these medleys 
 we cannot but feel how closely we are standing to 
 the Komantic Comedies of Shakspeare. And the re- 
 semblance lies not merely generally in the fact that 
 the same unforced and genial energy is at work in 
 both, and in the fact that both have, as it were, their 
 roots in the same rich soil, but in particular re- 
 semblances. In Greene's women, in Margaret, for 
 example, in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and in 
 Ida and Dorothea in James IV., we see in outline the 
 women most characteristic of Shakspearean Romantic 
 Comedy, while Slipper, Nano, and Miles are un- 
 doubtedly the prototypes of the Shakspearean clown. 
 Nor could any one who compares the versification 
 and diction of Shakspeare's early romances with the 
 versification and diction of Greene's medleys fail to 
 be struck with the remarkable similarity between 
 them. It seems to us that Shakspeare owed at least 
 as much to Greene as he owed to Marlowe. In the 
 rhymed couplets and in the blank verse of his earlier 
 comedies the influence of Greene is unmistakable, 
 and we will even go so far as to say that the prose 
 dialogue of Shakspeare we are not of course speak- 
 ing of his maturer plays was modelled on the prose 
 dialogue of Greene. Again, in The Pinner of Wake- 
 field we have an example of that pure homely realism, 
 admirable alike in tone, touch, and style, of those 
 simple faithful transcripts of ordinary commonplace 
 life, which were to form so important a feature in 
 Shakspearean Comedy and History.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 175 
 
 Third in the triumvirate with Marlowe and Greene 
 stands George Peele. The merits of Peele have 
 been greatly over-rated. They were ridiculously 
 over-rated by his contemporaries. They have been 
 inexplicably over-rated by modern critics. Gifford 
 classes him with Marlowe. Dyce ranks him above 
 Greene. Campbell, in an often-quoted passage, pro- 
 nounces his David and Bethsabe to be the " earliest 
 fountain of pathos and harmony that can be traced in 
 our dramatic literature," and goes on to speak of the 
 " solid veracity " and " ideal beauty " of his characters. 
 The tradition, originating from Isaac Keed, that Milton 
 borrowed the plot of Comus from The Old Wives 
 Tale, has, we suspect, greatly contributed to this 
 factitious reputation. The truth is that of Peele's 
 six plays there is not one which can be said to be 
 meritorious as a drama, or to have contributed any 
 new elements to dramatic composition. Sir Clyomon 
 and Sir Clamydes is in the style of Damon and 
 Pythias, and is, if possible, more insufferably dull. 
 The Arraignment of Paris is a mere pageant. 
 Neither Edward I. nor The Battle of Alcazar con- 
 tains a single effective scene, or a single well-drawn 
 character, a single touch of genuine pathos, a single 
 stroke of genuine humour. In The Old Wives' Tale 
 we have an attempt in the manner of Greene, but the 
 difference between the medleys of Greene and the 
 medley of Peele is the difference between an artfully- 
 varied panorama and the anarchy of distempered 
 dreams. From beginning to end it is a tissue of 
 absurdities. Ulrici, indeed, discerns, or affects to
 
 176 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 discern, a profound allegory underlying these absurdi- 
 ties. We can only say that even with the clue which 
 he has furnished we fail to see the allegory. Peele's 
 best play is undoubtedly David and Bethsabe, but it 
 is best only in the sense of containing his finest writing. 
 As a drama it is neither better nor worse than the 
 others that is to say, it is perfectly worthless. 
 
 Peele's sole merit lies in his style and in a certain 
 fertility of fancy. His style cannot indeed be praised 
 without reservation. It is too ornate ; it is too 
 diffuse ; it is wholly lacking in nerve and energy ; but 
 it is flowing and harmonious. The heroic couplets in 
 his Arraignment of Paris have a sweetness and 
 fluency such as English versification had only occa- 
 sionally attained before, and, though his blank verse 
 has the monotony necessarily characteristic of blank 
 verse constructed on the model of the couplet, it is at 
 times exquisitely musical. If that noble measure, 
 .which is to poetry what the organ is to music, owed 
 its trumpet-stop to Marlowe, it may, we think, with 
 equal truth be said to owe its flute-stop to Peele. 
 The opening scene of David and Bethsabe is in mere 
 mellifluousness equal to anything which has been 
 produced in blank verse since. 
 
 It is to be regretted that Peele did not follow the 
 example of Gruarini and Tasso. Had he applied him- 
 self to the composition of such works as the Aminta 
 and the Pastor Fido, he would have excelled. In his 
 drama may be discerned all the characteristics of 
 those most pleasing idylls, the same delight in 
 dallying with tender and graceful images, the same
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 177 
 
 splendour of colouring, the same curious mixture of 
 paganism and sentiment, the same instinctive selec- 
 tion of such scenes and objects in Nature as charm 
 rather than impose, the same felicity in rhetorically 
 portraying them, the same liquid harmony of verse, 
 the same ornate elaboration of diction. Nor, on the 
 negative side, is the resemblance less striking. Like 
 them, Peele has no power over the passions, no 
 rapidity of movement, nothing that stirs, nothing 
 that elevates. 
 
 With the names of Marlowe, Greene, and Peele 
 are usually associated the names of Thomas Nash 
 and Thomas Lodge. Of Nash's dramas one only has 
 survived, an absurd and tedious medley entitled 
 Summer's Last Will and Testament. He is stated 
 also to have been Marlowe's coadjutor in that wretched 
 travesty of the fourth dEneid Dido, Queen of Car- 
 thage the most worthless portions of which may on 
 internal evidence be with some confidence assigned 
 to him. Nash's laurels were, it should be added, won 
 on other fields. As a prose satirist he had neither 
 equal nor second among his contemporaries. And 
 what is true of Nash as a dramatist is true also of 
 Lodge. Of all Lodge's multifarious writings, his 
 contributions to the drama form the least valuable 
 portion. He has written excellent prose pamphlets. 
 His versions of Seneca and Josephus have placed 
 him beside North and Holland in the front rank of 
 Elizabethan translators. His Fig for Momus gives 
 him a prominent place among the fathers of English 
 
 classical satire. He is the author of some of the most 
 
 N
 
 178 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 exquisitely graceful and musical lyrics to be found in 
 our early poetry. His pastoral poems, and above all 
 his Scilla's Metamorphosis, though of a beauty too 
 luscious and florid to please a severe taste, are among 
 the good things of their kind. On his delightful prose 
 romance, Rosalynde, or Euphues' Golden Legacy, 
 Shakspeare founded As You Like It, and it is doing 
 Lodge no more than justice to say that we still turn 
 with pleasure from the drama to the novel. But his 
 powers, versatile though they were, were not such as 
 qualified him to excel as a dramatist. His only 
 extant play of his share in The Looking -Glass for 
 London and England we have already spoken is 
 The Wounds of Civil War. It treats of the struggle 
 between Marius and Sulla, and is based partly on 
 Plutarch and partly on apocryphal matter, which is, 
 for aught we know, Lodge's own invention. The plot 
 is ill constructed, the characters, though by no means 
 without individuality, are without interest, and the 
 action, in spite of its studied variety, has all the 
 effect of the most tiresome monotony. Historically, 
 the work is interesting as a step towards Shakspeare's 
 Roman plays. It is, perhaps, the first English drama 
 inspired by Plutarch, and the first attempt to 
 romanticise, in the technical sense of the term, 
 Roman history. Thus the introduction of a clown, 
 two comic scenes, in one of which a Gaul talks in a 
 jargon of French and broken English, and a scene 
 in which Marius makes a complaint to respondent 
 Echo, link it with the Romance. The blank 
 verse is easy and fluent, but very monotonous,
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 179 
 
 and is studiously constructed on the model of the 
 couplet. 
 
 In passing from this school of playwrights to Kyd, 
 we pass to a dramatist whose proper place in the 
 history of the Elizabethan stage it is extremely diffi- 
 cult to determine. Almost everything relating to 
 Kyd rests on mere conjecture. His biography is a 
 blank. We know neither the date of the composition 
 of his plays nor the date of their first appearance. 
 Of the three extant dramas attributed to him, the 
 authenticity of two is more than doubtful, and, to 
 complete our perplexity, the text of the only drama 
 which is indisputably his has been largely interpolated 
 by other hands. Indeed, all that is certainly known 
 about him is that he was the author of a piece called 
 The Spanish Tragedy, that he translated, or, to 
 speak more accurately, paraphrased, Robert Garnier's 
 Cornelia, and that by the year 1594 he stood high 
 among the tragic poets of his day. The two other 
 plays, which have with more or less probability been 
 ascribed to him, are Jeronimo, which forms the first 
 part of The Spanish Tragedy, and a tragedy called 
 Soliman and Perseda. That Jeronimo is rightly 
 attributed to him cannot, we think, be doubted by 
 any one who has compared it carefully with The 
 Spanish Tragedy and Cornelia. Ulrici's objections 
 seem to us frivolous in the extreme. With regard to 
 Soliman and Perseda we cannot speak with equal 
 confidence. If it was written by Kyd it was probably 
 his earliest work. 
 
 The popular notion about Kyd is that he was a
 
 180 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 sensational dramatist of the worst type ; that he was 
 the first to employ on our stage the ghastly and re- 
 pulsive machinery of classical Italian melodrama ; and 
 that he expressed himself in a style which was worthy 
 of Pistol. And this is true ; but it is not the whole 
 truth. Even admitting that the passages which 
 Lamb calls the salt of The Spanish Tragedy are not 
 from Kyd's hand, it is impossible to question the 
 genius of the man who sketched in this and in the 
 sister play the characters of Andrea, of Horatio, of 
 Balthezar, of Lorenzo, of Jeronimo ; who painted the 
 parting scene between Andrea and Belimperia, and 
 the scene in which Jeronimo and Isabella lament their 
 murdered son. That his style is often absurdly stilted 
 no one would deny, but this peculiarity is rather its 
 besetting fault than its distinguishing characteristic. 
 
 Kyd's services to English tragedy were, we think, 
 more important than is commonly supposed. He 
 stands midway between two great schools; between 
 the literary and academic school on the one hand, 
 and the domestic and realistic school on the other. 
 Regarded superficially, he might perhaps be con- 
 founded with a mere copyist of Italian models. His 
 diction is not unfrequently classical even to pedantry. 
 The first two acts of The Spanish Tragedy might 
 have been written by the author of The Misfortunes 
 of Arthur. He indulges largely in the arid and 
 monotonous declamation peculiar to Italian tragedy ; 
 he delights in the exhibition of " carnal, bloody, and 
 unnatural acts." And yet, with all this, the impression 
 which his plays make on us is very different from the
 
 THE PEEDECESSOES OF SHAKSPEAEE 181 
 
 impression made on us by the Italian tragedies. Nor 
 is it difficult to explain the reason. The canvas of 
 Kyd is more crowded ; his touch is broader and 
 bolder, his colour fuller and deeper ; his action is 
 infinitely more diversified, animated, and rapid ; his 
 characters are more human ; he has more passion, he 
 has more pathos. If he aims too much at sensational 
 effects, he is sometimes simple and natural. Again, 
 his style we are speaking more particularly of the 
 style of the first part of Jeronimo when compared 
 with that of the Italian school, presents almost as 
 many points of dissimilarity as it presents points of 
 resemblance. It is, as a rule, freer and looser, of a 
 coarser texture, of a more colloquial cast. We trace 
 in it for the first time that curious mixture of homeli- 
 ness and pomp, that rugged vigour, that sparseness of 
 poetic ornament, that indifference to verbal harmony, 
 which distinguish the style of the domestic plays. In 
 a word, Kyd so modified Classical Tragedy that he 
 educed out of it a species of drama as distinct from 
 that of Marlowe, Greene, and Peele on the one hand, 
 as it was distinct from that of Sackville, Gascoigne, 
 and Hughes on the other. It is this which constitutes 
 his historical importance. It is this which connects 
 him with that remarkable school of which we are 
 about to speak, a school of which it would not 
 indeed be true to say that he was the founder, but of 
 which he was in many important respects the forerun- 
 ner. 1 We refer, of course, to the domestic dramatists. 
 
 1 It is of course quite possible that we are attributing to Kyd what belongs 
 to the interpolators of his text in the case of The Spanish Tragedy, and that
 
 182 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 In the tragic theatre of Marlowe, Greene, and 
 Peele the realistic element had, as we have seen, been 
 subordinate to the poetic. It was as poets and 
 scholars that they had approached Tragedy ; it was as 
 poets and scholars that they constructed it. Hence it 
 was that, if they indulged, they indulged but rarely 
 in vulgar comedy. Hence, in selecting their plots, 
 they were careful to choose such subjects as recom- 
 mended themselves by their dignity or impressiveness. 
 With equal solicitude had they employed all the 
 resources of learning and rhetoric to elevate and em- 
 bellish their style, and all the resources of imagination 
 and fancy to cast the halo of poetry over life. The 
 result was, that they had produced works which stand 
 much higher as poems than as dramas works which 
 are not indeed without dramatic merit, and dramatic 
 merit of a high order, but which, where they reflect 
 humanity, reflect it principally in its heroic or poetic 
 aspects. Wherever they had attempted, as they had 
 sometimes done in Comedy, to be strictly realistic, 
 they had as a rule signally failed. 
 
 With the writers of domestic Tragedy it was exactly 
 the reverse. With them the poetic element was not 
 simply subordinate to the realistic, but almost entirely 
 disappeared. Rejecting fiction, they took their stand 
 on naked fact. Rejecting transcendentalism, they 
 
 in the case of the first part of Jeronimo we are attributing to him a play 
 which he never wrote. It is quite possible that he was himself a purely 
 "classical" dramatist, and that his characteristic work is to be found in 
 Cornelia and in the first two acts of The Spanish Tragedy, but the balance of 
 probability inclines towards the view which we have taken. In either case 
 the point of interest lies in the evolution of the realistic drama out of the 
 classical.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 183 
 
 prided themselves on their prosaic fidelity to prosaic 
 truth. For the graces of expression they cared 
 nothing. 
 
 Naked tragedy, 
 
 Wherein no filed points are foisted in, 
 To make it pleasing to the ear or eye, 
 For simple truth is gracious enough 
 And needs no other points of glozing stuff. 
 
 This, in the words of one of the greatest of them, was 
 their aim. If they exercised imagination, they exer- 
 cised it only in filling up interstices in tradition, in 
 vivifying incident, in animating character, in analysing 
 emotion and passion. The materials on which they 
 worked were of the coarsest kind. Some wretched 
 story of calamity and crime, such as was then and is 
 now constantly repeating itself in the lower and 
 middle walks of life, furnished them with their plots. 
 Thus, on the murder of a London merchant near 
 Shooter's Hill, in 1573, was founded the anonymous 
 tragedy of A Warning for Fair Women. Thus, on 
 the murder of a country gentleman in Kent, about 
 1551, was founded Arden of Faversham. On a 
 murder of peculiar atrocity, which occurred in Thames 
 Street, Robert Yarington partially founded his Two 
 Tragedies in One; while on the murder of two 
 children by their father at Calverley, in Yorkshire, 
 was founded The Yorkshire Tragedy. 
 
 Of these plays, the earliest in point of publication, 
 and presumably therefore the earliest in point of com- 
 position, was Arden of Faversham, which was printed 
 in 1592. The author of this most powerful play is not 
 known. Whoever he was, he not only possessed in-
 
 184 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 comparably the greatest purely dramatic genius which 
 had revealed itself in tragedy anterior to the period of 
 Shakspeare's mature activity, but he exercised, in 
 conjunction with the writers of the school of which he 
 was the representative, a very marked influence on the 
 development of popular Tragedy. Of so high an order 
 of excellence is this drama, that many eminent critics 
 have not hesitated to attribute it to Shakspeare. 
 From that opinion we altogether dissent. It has no 
 external evidence in its favour, and the internal 
 evidence appears to us conclusive against it. Nothing 
 can be more marked than the style of this play. 
 Nothing can be more marked than the style of Shak- 
 speare. So marked indeed is his style his early style 
 his middle style his later style that the merest 
 tyro in literary criticism could never confound them 
 with the style of any other poet. Now between the 
 style of Arden and the style of the plays which 
 Shakspeare was writing in and before 1592 there is 
 absolutely no resemblance at all. On the contrary, 
 they are radically and essentially dissimilar. If, again, 
 we turn to the characters, it is impossible not to feel 
 how wide is the interval which separates the author of 
 this drama from the youthful Shakspeare. Of all 
 Shakspeare's powers the power of characterisation was 
 the slowest in developing itself ; indeed, it developed 
 itself so gradually that the successive stages in its 
 progress may be distinctly traced in the plays which 
 lie between what Gervinus calls the Period of 
 Apprenticeship and about the end of 1598. Nothing, 
 therefore, can be more unlikely than that in 1592 he
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEAEE 185 
 
 should have suddenly exhibited a grasp and power in 
 the delineation of character not unworthy of the 
 maturity of his genius, and then as suddenly have 
 relapsed into the immaturity and sketchiness of his 
 early manner. To suppose that the firm strong hand 
 which drew Alice Arden, Michael, and Mosbie was 
 the same hand which must at the same time, or about 
 the same time, have been faltering on the canvas of 
 Titus Andronicus, the Comedy of Errors, and the 
 three parts of Henry VI., is to suppose what is not 
 merely contrary to all analogy, but simply incredible. 
 Could the composition of Arden be assigned to a 
 period subsequent to 1592 or 1593, the difficulty 
 would not be so great. But to date it later is im- 
 possible. It appeared exactly as we have it now in 
 that year. And whether it be, as Payne Collier and 
 Mr. Symonds surmise, the recast of an older play or 
 an original production, one thing is clear the hand 
 which recast it is not the hand which recast The First 
 Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of 
 Richard Duke of York ; while if on the other hand 
 it be, what we have no doubt it is, an original work, 
 it is equally clear that it could have emanated only 
 from a master in the art of dramatic composition and 
 realistic effect. And that in 1592 Shakspeare most 
 assuredly was not. 
 
 We are convinced then that, in spite of the con- 
 tention of Tieck, Ulrici, and Charles Knight, Shak- 
 speare was not the author of Arden of Faversham, 
 but that it was the production of a powerful and 
 original genius, the possessor of which it is now
 
 186 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 impossible to identify. Whoever lie was, he occupies 
 a foremost place in the history of pre-Shakspearean 
 drama, not only as being the typical representative, 
 and in all probability the inaugurator, of a new and 
 important school of Tragedy, but on account of the 
 intrinsic excellence of his work, and on account of 
 the influence which he and his school undoubtedly 
 exercised on the dramatic activity of Shakspeare. 
 
 In turning to Lyly we are turning to a playwright 
 who occupies a very singular and, from a historical 
 point of view, an important position. With the 
 dramatists of whom we have been speaking he had 
 little or no connection. He had early found a patron 
 in the Lord Treasurer Burleigh, in whose household 
 he appears for some time to have resided, though it 
 is uncertain in what capacity. He thus became 
 attached to the aristocracy and the Court, and for 
 their amusement during many years he was chief 
 caterer, first as a novelist and then as a dramatic 
 poet. The publication of the first part of Euphues 
 in 1579, which was followed by the second part in the 
 following year, not only placed him at the head of the 
 fashionable authors of his time, but enabled him to 
 exercise an influence over contemporary literature 
 generally such as perhaps no other writer has ever 
 done. In six years both parts of the work appear to 
 have gone through five editions. 1 A stout octavo 
 volume would scarcely suffice to deal adequately 
 
 1 Arber's edition of Euphues, Introduction, p. 13. No student of English 
 literature can mention Professor Arber's name without gratitude, so great 
 is the boon which his reprints, with their admirable bibliographical introduc- 
 tions, have conferred on all who are interested in our old authors.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 187 
 
 with the influence of Lyly's romance on the poetry 
 and prose of the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign. 
 Nay, if its effect on Shakspeare alone were exhaust- 
 ively treated, such illustration would probably swell to 
 a bulky treatise. 
 
 Lyly brought to the composition of his plays the 
 same qualities which he had displayed in his romance 
 learning, fancy, and wit. All that characterises the 
 style and diction of Euphues characterises the style 
 and diction of these dramas ; the same excess of 
 smoothness, sententiousness, and epigram, of allitera- 
 tion and assonance, the same studied antithesis, not 
 merely in the arrangement of the words and clauses, 
 but in the ideas and sentiments, the same accumula- 
 tion of superfluous similes and illustrations, drawn 
 sometimes from the facts but more frequently from 
 the fictions of natural history, the same affectation 
 of continuous references to ancient mythology and 
 history pedantically piled up for the sake of learned 
 display, the same plethora of wit as distinguished from 
 humour, and of fancy as distinguished from imagina- 
 tion. Like Euphues, they are, and are designed to 
 be, caviare to the general. With one exception they 
 are all founded on classical subjects, and with one 
 exception they are all in prose. Lyly's method is to 
 select some fable in classical fiction, not for the 
 purpose of developing it dramatically, but that it may 
 form the centre of a fantastic medley of his own 
 invention. To flatter Elizabeth, her ladies, and her 
 nobles, to hold up Philip and Spain to the contempt 
 of good patriots, to present under the guise of allegory
 
 188 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 such incidents in public and private life as were then 
 of interest to the Court circle, and to read wholesome 
 lectures on morals and politics these were his aims 
 when his aims were serious. It was thus that he 
 dealt with the legend of Endymion and Midas, the 
 first being the story of Leicester and the Countess of 
 Sheffield, and the second the perversion of the fable 
 in Apuleius into an allegory of the relations between 
 England and Spain. In Sappho and Phaon he 
 drew on a legend which had formed the subject 
 of a play by Menander and a play by Antiphanes, 
 and which furnished Ovid with one of the most 
 eloquent of his Heroides; but he omits the cata- 
 strophe. For the leap from the Leucadian rock 
 are substituted the disenchantment of Sappho and 
 her dominion over Cupid and his arrows. Thus 
 the allegory stands confessed, and what Shakspeare 
 afterwards condensed in ten immortal lines, 1 Lyly had 
 spun out through five weary acts. In Alexander and 
 Campaspe, a story told by Pliny is the centre of 
 an extraordinary farrago in which philosophers and 
 harlots, serving-men and courtiers with Greek names 
 and English manners, lecture, wrangle, jest, and jostle 
 each other in most bewildering confusion. But 
 perhaps the most remarkable of these medleys is 
 Galathea. Here ancient legend is scarcely dis- 
 cernible, and appears to have suggested nothing more 
 than the sacrifice due to Neptune, which was of course 
 borrowed from the story of Andromeda, and Galathea's 
 
 1 The passage referring to Elizabeth and Leicester, Midsummer Night's 
 Dream, Act II. Sc. 1, 155-164.
 
 THE PREDECESSORS OF SHAKSPEARE 189 
 
 change of sex, a curious adaptation of the meta- 
 morphosis of the classical Galatea's daughter. Of 
 this strange variety of drama Lyly was the inventor, 
 and it died with him. It had, indeed, no principle 
 of life, it was a mere lusus artis, the abortive 
 product of perverted ingenuity. To one of his plays 
 a peculiar interest belongs. In Mother Bombie we 
 have an example of pure Italian Comedy in an 
 English dress, and whoever will compare it with 
 its prototypes and models will have no difficulty in 
 understanding the evolution, formally at least, of 
 English prose Komantic Comedy from the Classical 
 Comedy of Italy. Superficially regarded, it might 
 seem to be modelled on the Latin comedies, but it 
 differs importantly from them, and this difference lies 
 in its resemblance to the Italian modifications of 
 Plautus and Terence. The Suppositi of Ariosto had 
 already been introduced into English by Gascoigne, 
 and this had been the first step in the naturalisation 
 of Italian Comedy. Lyly, by placing the scene in 
 England, by introducing English characters and 
 English manners, and, in a word, by anglicising all 
 but the framework and architecture, completed its 
 naturalisation in our literature. Mother Bombie is 
 incomparably his best drama is indeed his only 
 drama in the true sense of the term. The plot is 
 constructed with great skill, the characters are 
 by no means lay figures, and the monotonous 
 wit which is the distinguishing characteristic of 
 his dramas is here relieved by touches of genuine 
 humour.
 
 190 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 The influence of Lyly on the development of the 
 drama was undoubtedly considerable. He set the 
 fashion of clothing Comedy in prose, and he formu- 
 lated genteel and artificial as distinguished from 
 familiar and realistic dialogue. To his example are 
 no doubt to be traced the point, vivacity, wit, and 
 grace which begin to be conspicuously affected in the 
 style of Comedy towards the close of the sixteenth 
 century. He gave the first models for that elaborate 
 word-play, for that keen terse interchange of witty 
 badinage, in which Shakspeare so much delights to 
 engage his Benedicts and his Beatrices, his Touch- 
 stones and his Launcelots. 1 And if he refined and 
 subtilised dialogue he refined and subtilised fable, as 
 is illustrated both by Mother Bombie and by Galathea. 
 He extended the domain of Comedy into the realm 
 of pure fancy, and as the author of the Midsummer 
 Night's Dream Shakspeare was undoubtedly his 
 disciple. But this was not all. As his plays, though 
 written in the first instance for representation before 
 the Court, were in some cases at least repeated before 
 the audience at Blackfriars, they form an important 
 link between the classical and the popular drama. 
 The multitude were proud to be presented with what 
 had found favour with the world of culture and 
 fashion. The taste for classicism, and with all that 
 is implied by classicism, was affected by every one 
 who aspired to be a connoisseur. Thus the Comedy 
 
 1 See particularly the dialogue between Manes, Granicus, and Psyllus, 
 Alex, and Camp., Act I. Sc. 2 ; between Diogenes and Sylvius, Id., 
 Act. V. Sc. 2 ; between Memphio and Dromio, Mother Bombie, Act. I. 
 Sc. 2.
 
 THE PEEDECESSOKS OF SHAKSPEARE 191 
 
 of the Court, reacting on the Comedy of the public 
 theatres, aided the evolution of those masterpieces 
 which were marked by the characteristics of both 
 the Romantic Comedies of Shakspeare. That Shak- 
 speare was familiar with Lyly's dramas is proved 
 conclusively not only by unmistakable echoes and 
 repetitions of particular passages in them, 1 but by 
 his many obvious imitations of Lyly's dialectic and 
 turns of expression, and by the Midsummer Night's 
 Dream. 
 
 Such was the condition of the English drama when 
 Shakspeare entered on his career. It had attained, 
 as we have seen, a high point of poetical and 
 rhetorical excellence in the hands of Marlowe and 
 Peele. By Greene it had been brought into contact 
 with ordinary life, but with ordinary life in its 
 romantic aspects. Lyly had enriched it with wit and 
 fancy. The author of Arden of Faversham had 
 divorced it from poetry and romance, and taught it 
 to become simply realistic. It remained for Shak- 
 peare to combine, and in combining to perfect, all 
 these elements. Nothing can shake the supremacy 
 of that mighty genius. Nothing can diminish the 
 immense interval which separated him in the maturity 
 of his powers from the most gifted of his predecessors 
 and contemporaries. And yet, when we reflect on 
 what had been accomplished during the period which 
 we have been passing under review, it is impossible 
 not to be struck with the extent of his indebtedness 
 
 1 Some of these have been collected by Mr. Fairhold. See his edition of 
 Lyly's Plays Notes, passim.
 
 192 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 to those who preceded him. Everything had, as it 
 were, been made ready for his advent. The tools 
 with which he was to work had been forged ; the 
 patterns on which he was to work had been designed ; 
 the material on which he was to work had been 
 prepared.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 1 
 
 To this volume now belongs a mournful and pathetic 
 interest. The editing of these Letters was the last 
 service which one of the most accomplished and 
 scholarly of English noblemen was to render to 
 literature. It was undertaken, not as a labour of 
 love in the ordinary sense of the term for Lord 
 Carnarvon has himself admitted that he had at first 
 little pleasure in his task but as a labour of love in 
 another and a higher sense. It was undertaken with 
 the pious intention of fulfilling the wishes of the dead, 
 and of contributing to lighten the obloquy which 
 had long rested on the memory of the dead. With 
 characteristic unobtrusiveness, Lord Carnarvon has 
 made no reference to the circumstances which must 
 have rendered his self-imposed task doubly irksome. 
 Our respect for the motives which prompted him to 
 devote his leisure to the least attractive of literary 
 employments passes into admiration when we know, 
 as we now know, that it was not only under the pressure 
 
 1 Letters of Philip Dormer, Fourth Earl of Chesterfield, to his Godson and 
 Siiccessor. Edited from the originals, with a Memoir of Lord Chesterfield, by 
 the Earl of Carnarvon. Second edition. Oxford. At the Clarendon Press. 
 1890. 
 

 
 194 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 of habitual ill-health, but often in the midst of severe 
 distress and pain, that this work was carried on. It 
 is gratifying to think that he lived to receive his 
 reward. The high opinion which he had himself 
 formed of the Letters was amply corroborated by the 
 popular judgment. Very shortly after the appearance 
 of the first edition of his work a second and cheaper 
 edition was called for, and he had the satisfaction of 
 feeling that, if his labours had not exactly added to 
 the fame of Chesterfield, they had at least revived it. 
 They had done more. They had furnished, as all 
 allowed, conclusive testimony that the severe sentence 
 so long popularly passed on the author of these Letters, 
 as a man, needs considerable modification. They had 
 placed his character in a light far more favourable 
 than it had ever been placed in before. They had 
 shown that, if in the traditionary estimate of him 
 more than justice had been meted out to his defects 
 and errors, less and much less than justice had been 
 done to his shining qualities. No one who is 
 acquainted with Chesterfield's later correspondence, 
 his correspondence, for example, with Dayrolles and 
 with the Bishop of Waterford, and who possesses any 
 competent knowledge of his public and private life, 
 could fail to see how erroneous, how ridiculously 
 erroneous, would be any conception of his character 
 formed merely from the impression made by certain 
 portions of the correspondence with his son. 
 
 But the world has little leisure, and still less inclina- 
 tion, to concern itself about writings which are of 
 interest only for the light which they throw on the
 
 LOED CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 195 
 
 character of the writer, or to explore the by-paths of 
 history and biography. To ninety -nine in every 
 hundred of his countrymen Chesterfield is known 
 only in association with the Letters to his son Philip. 
 On the evidence of these Letters, or to speak more 
 correctly, on evidence derived from portions of these 
 Letters, confirmed and supplemented by current 
 traditions, the popular conception of him has been 
 formed. "We have little doubt that in the imagina- 
 tion of thousands he is still pictured as the epigram 
 of Johnson pictured him more than a century ago. 
 We have little doubt that to many, and to very many, 
 his name is little more than a synonym for a profligate 
 fribble, shallow, flippant, heartless, without morality, 
 without seriousness, a scoffer at religion, an enemy 
 to truth and virtue, passing half his life in practising, 
 and the other half in teaching a son to practise, all 
 that moves loathing and contempt in honest men. 
 Even among those who do not judge as the crowd 
 judges there exists a stronger prejudice against 
 Chesterfield than exists with equal reason against any 
 other Englishman. He has himself remarked that there 
 is no appeal against character. His own character has 
 been established through the impression made by the 
 testimony of hostile contemporaries, and through the 
 impression made by such portions of the only writings 
 by which he is now remembered as unhappily reflect 
 it on its worst side, and appear therefore to corro- 
 borate that testimony. And his character, or what 
 has for a century and a quarter been assumed to be 
 his character, has been fatal to his fame. He will
 
 196 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 now be judged more fairly. We do not think that 
 the present Letters throw any really new light on the 
 man himself, but, unlike the more famous Letters, 
 they reflect only, and very charmingly, what was 
 best and most attractive in him. They show how 
 much amiability, kindliness, humanity, seriousness, 
 existed in one whose name has become a proverb for 
 the very opposite qualities. They exhibit, simply 
 and without alloy, what he took a cynical pleasure in 
 concealing from the world in general, and what is in 
 his other writings obscured and vitiated by baser 
 matter. That their publication will have the effect 
 of creating a reaction in his favour, a reaction the 
 result of which will be a juster estimate of the value 
 of his writings, is highly probable. And we heartily 
 hope that this will be the case. We have long re- 
 garded it as a great misfortune that what was repre- 
 hensible in Chesterfield's conduct and teaching should 
 so completely have obscured what was excellent and 
 admirable in both, as practically to deprive his name 
 and works of all popular credit and authority. 
 
 With the exception of Machiavelli, we know of 
 no other writer whose opinions and precepts have 
 been so ridiculously misrepresented, and that, unfor- 
 tunately for Chesterfield's fame, not merely by the 
 multitude, but by men who are among the classics 
 of our literature. 
 
 It is curious to follow the fortune of the volumes 
 which have brought so much discredit on his name. 
 From the moment of their appearance the outcry 
 began. The sensation occasioned twenty years before
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 197 
 
 by the publication of Bolingbroke's philosophical 
 works by Mallet was not greater than that occasioned 
 when Eugenia Stanhope gave this famous Correspond- 
 ence to the world. In the Annual Register, indeed, 
 a notice, which from internal evidence we have little 
 hesitation in ascribing to Burke, did full justice 
 both to the merits of the Letters themselves and 
 to the virtues of their distinguished author. But 
 the storm burst in the Gentleman's Magazine. An 
 ominous allusion to " the lurking poison of an artful 
 and profligate father" heralded what was coming. 
 In a few months the Letters were the general theme. 
 The invective and ridicule which had been directed 
 against Bolingbroke as the enemy of religion were 
 now directed against Chesterfield as the enemy of 
 morality. One writer in a parody of the Catechism, 
 and another in a parody of the Creed, neither of 
 them, in point of decency at least, very creditable 
 to the cause in which they were presumably written, 
 drew up a form of initiation for Chesterfieldian 
 neophytes. But serious refutations " of this most 
 pestilential work " soon made their appearance. And 
 serious refutation on an elaborate plan began in 
 1776 with a Mr. William Crawford's Remarks. Much 
 as we respect Mr. Crawford's intention, which was 
 to protect religion and morality by putting the youth 
 of England on their guard against the seductions of 
 " the fascinating Earl," we are sorry to be obliged to 
 say that Mr. Crawford is, in spite of all his efforts 
 to the contrary, one of the most amusing writers we 
 have ever met with. His remarks assume the form
 
 198 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 of dialogue. Eugenius, an innocent youth, on being 
 asked by his tutor Constantius about the books he 
 has been reading in his holidays, replies that " one 
 has fallen into his hand which has afforded him 
 not a little entertainment and instruction." To the 
 horror and distress of Constantius it turns out that 
 the book in question was Chesterfield's Letters. 
 There is now nothing for it but to administer the 
 antidote to all this poison, and in eight dialogues 
 it is done. While Mr. Crawford was opening the 
 eyes of the younger generation, the Eev. Thomas 
 Hunter, in a substantial octavo volume, was appealing 
 to maturer judgments. "Britons, who are parents," 
 writes this perfervid moralist, " ask your own hearts 
 whether you would wish your children to be educated 
 on this plan ? Would it please you to exchange 
 the virtues for the graces, English honesty for French 
 grimace ? " with much more of the same kind. But 
 Hunter, who was by the way the author of a curious 
 and singularly interesting treatise on Tacitus, is on 
 the whole sensible and temperate, and does full 
 justice to the literary merits of the Letters, as well 
 as to such portions of their ethical teaching as do 
 not offend his prejudices as a clergyman. But the 
 most extraordinary production inspired by the Cor- 
 respondence was Jackson Pratt's sensational novel, 
 The Pupil of Pleasure, which appeared seven years 
 after the books of which we have been speaking. 
 The object of this work was to depict a character 
 modelled on what Pratt conceived, or pretended to 
 conceive, Chesterfield's ideal gentleman to be, and to
 
 LORD CHESTEEFIELD'S LETTERS 199 
 
 describe his career. When we say that Pratt has 
 summed up Chesterfield's teachings as comprised 
 mainly in these maxims, "Do whatever you think 
 proper whatever fancy, passion, whim, or wicked- 
 ness suggest only command your countenance and 
 check your temper," it is scarcely necessary to 
 observe that a more accurate summary of all that 
 constitutes the exact reverse of what those teachings 
 inculcate could hardly be drawn up in fewer words ; 
 as it is equally unnecessary to add that poor Pratt's 
 " celebrated, dazzling, and diabolical hero," who, after 
 ruining almost every woman he meets, and running 
 into the extremes of vice and profligacy, is at last found 
 dead with the precepts of his supposed Mentor in his 
 pocket, bears about the same resemblance to Chester- 
 field's ideal gentleman as he bears to Zeno's Wise Man 
 or Aristotle's Magnanimous Man. But these monstrous 
 perversions of Chesterfield's teaching were not confined 
 to ephemeral writings. In some of the most powerful 
 lines which he ever composed, Cowper gave immortal 
 expression to the popular estimate of the Letters : 
 
 Petronius ! all the Muses weep for thee ; 
 But every tear shall scald thy memory ; 
 The Graces, too, while Virtue at their shrine 
 Lay bleeding under that soft hand of thine, 
 Felt each a mortal stab in her own breast, 
 Abhorr'd the sacrifice, and cursed the priest. 
 Thou polish'd and high-finish'd foe to truth, 
 Grey-beard corrupter of our list'ning youth, 
 To purge and skim away the filth of vice 
 That so refin'd, it might the more entice, 
 Then pour it on the morals of thy son, 
 To taint his heart, was worthy of thine own ; 
 Now, while the poison all high life invades, 
 Write, if thou canst, one letter from the Shades.
 
 200 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 The publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson in 
 1791 confirmed and extended the impression made 
 by preceding writers. And for this reason. For 
 every person who remembers the one just thing 
 which Johnson said of the Letters and the one just 
 remark which he made about their author, there 
 are a hundred who remember his terse and pointed, 
 but gross and libellous, epigrams on both. The 
 appearance of the Posthumous Letters and Memoirs 
 of Horace Walpole, between 1818 and 1847, and 
 the Memoirs of Lord Hervey, in both of which 
 Chesterfield himself is depicted as personal enemies 
 of such resources would be likely to paint him, 
 contributed still further to bias the popular judgment. 
 But the measure of Chesterfield's posthumous mis- 
 fortunes was not yet full. What the author of TJie 
 Pupil of Pleasure assayed to do in the last century, 
 the author of Barnaby Rudge has assayed to do in 
 our own time. On the unspeakable vulgarity and 
 absurdity of Dickens's caricature and travesty with 
 pain do we say a disrespectful word of one to whom we 
 in common with half the world are so much indebted 
 it would be superfluous to comment. But what is 
 certain is that in the imagination of millions Chester- 
 field will exist, and exist only, in association with 
 a character combining all that is worst, all that is 
 most vile, most contemptible, most repulsive, in the 
 traditionary portrait of him. 
 
 Of the recklessness with which charges have been 
 brought against Chesterfield and his writings we 
 will give one instance. He has been accused over
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 201 
 
 and over again of defending and encouraging the 
 practice of falsehood. What is the fact? There is 
 no vice which he represents as more odious or more 
 unbecoming the character of a gentleman. " I really 
 know nothing more criminal," so he writes in one 
 letter to his son " more mean and more ridiculous, 
 than lying." Again : " It is not possible for a man 
 to be virtuous without strict veracity ; a lie in a man 
 is a vice of the mind, and a vice of the heart." In 
 another letter : " Lies and perfidy are the refuge 
 of fools and cowards." Again : " Whoever has not 
 truth cannot be supposed to have any one good 
 quality, and must become the detestation of God 
 and man." " Mendacem si dixeris," he writes in 
 another place, adapting the well-known proverb 
 about ingratitude, " omnia dixeris." But it is useless 
 to multiply quotations in support of a cardinal 
 principle in his teaching. The handle which he 
 has afforded for this accusation is simply the fact 
 that he has distinguished between the truths which 
 should be told and the truths which ought not to 
 be told ; between dissimulation, which he defends, and 
 simulation, which he brands as infamous. He goes 
 no further than the saying attributed to Voltaire, 
 " Woe is he who says all he can about anything" 
 a platitude in practice with all but fools justly 
 denouncing as immoral the theory defended by 
 Bacon, and defended even by so virtuous a man as 
 Sir Walter Scott. 
 
 The history of the Correspondence, now for the first 
 time published, is soon told. In 1755 Chesterfield,
 
 202 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 then far in the decline of life, stood godfather to a son 
 born to a distant kinsman, Mr. Arthur Charles Stan- 
 hope, of Mansfield. He was naturally interested in the 
 child, for in the event of his brother Sir William 
 dying without issue, his godson, as heir to Mr. A. C. 
 Stanhope, to whom on his own decease the title passed, 
 would become his successor in the earldom. As the 
 boy grew up, his education became the chief object of 
 his godfather's life. The place that his son Philip 
 had for so many years occupied in his thoughts and 
 in his affections was now filled by this child. He 
 watched over him with more than a mother's care. 
 Every indication of character was anxiously observed. 
 If any defect, however slight, in temper, in habits of 
 mind, in gesture, in accent, was detected, neither 
 master nor pupil knew peace till it was rectified. He 
 submitted patiently to all the drudgery of correcting 
 composition, of drawing up lists of words and idioms 
 to be learnt by heart, of writing elementary sketches 
 of ancient and modern history, of explaining mytho- 
 logy, of copying out elegant extracts in prose and 
 poetry. As the lad's mind developed, and he became 
 capable of receiving more serious instruction, the old 
 statesman, in a series of Letters well worthy of a place 
 beside the best of those by which he is now chiefly re- 
 membered, laboured to prepare him for the prominent 
 part he would in all probability be called upon to play 
 both in public and private life. These Letters were 
 carefully preserved, and had been perused by Dr. 
 Maty, who refers to them in his Memoirs of Chester- 
 field. "They have not yet appeared," says the
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 203 
 
 Doctor, " under any sanction of authority, but the 
 principle of them is so noble, and the end proposed so 
 becoming the dignity of a great name, that it is hoped 
 they will not always be withheld from the public." 
 It is curious that Maty should have made no reference 
 to the fact that fourteen of these Letters the Letters 
 namely on the " Art of Pleasing " numbers cxxix. to 
 CXLII. in Lord Carnarvon's edition had already been 
 printed, in a very incorrect and garbled form, and no 
 doubt surreptitiously, in the Edinburgh Magazine 
 and Review for February, March, April, and May 
 1774. Their appearance in this magazine accounts 
 for their subsequent appearance in a Dublin reprint 
 of the Earl's Letters to his son, among which they are 
 erroneously classed, and for their reproduction in the 
 supplementary volume to Maty's Memoirs of Chester- 
 field, published in 1778. How the Letters got into 
 print it would be interesting to know : that they 
 were pirated is certain, and we are very much inclined 
 to agree with the writer of a preface to a subsequent 
 edition of them, that the pirate was Dr. Dodd. With 
 the exception of these fourteen Letters, the rest of the 
 Correspondence remained in manuscript till Lord 
 Carnarvon, in accordance with the wishes of the late 
 Earl of Chesterfield, gave it to the world in the 
 present volume. 
 
 With the Letters now for the first time published 
 Lord Carnarvon has not only incorporated the Letters 
 to which we have referred, but he has, in this second 
 edition, very judiciously added Chesterfield's Cor- 
 respondence with Mr. Arthur Charles Stanhope, his
 
 204 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 godson's father, originally printed in 1817, as well as 
 the admirable testamentary letter which was to be 
 delivered to Philip Stanhope after the Earl's death, 
 first printed by Lord Stanhope. To these Letters he 
 has prefixed a scholarly and gracefully-written intro- 
 duction, partly historical and partly biographical, 
 sketching rapidly the course of political events during 
 the first half of the eighteenth century, and recapitu- 
 lating the chief incidents of Chesterfield's public 
 career and private life. He has also added notes to the 
 Letters themselves. An excellent Index, the work of 
 Mr. Doble of the Clarendon Press, concludes the book. 
 In all that concerns adornment, the volume before 
 us certainly leaves nothing to be desired. On the 
 distinguished Press from which it has issued it 
 reflects, indeed, the highest credit. The collotypes, 
 particularly the portrait of Chesterfield fronting the 
 title-page, the paper, and the type, are excellent ; the 
 facsimile letter is perfect. The binder might perhaps 
 have been a little less profuse in heraldic insignia. 
 It was no doubt quite in accordance with the becom- 
 ing that the most aristocratic and fastidious of English 
 writers should make his reappearance amongst us in 
 an edition de luxe, but we all know how strongly 
 Chesterfield objected to emphasis being laid on dis- 
 tinctions of the kind to which we refer. " Wear your 
 title as if you had it not," he writes to Philip Stan- 
 hope, and no sentiment is more frequently repeated 
 by him. As it is possible that this work may pass 
 into another edition, and as it is certain that it will 
 take its place among the works which every student
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 205 
 
 of English eighteenth-century literature will consider 
 it his duty to read, we are sure we are doing nothing 
 more than would have met with the approval the 
 cordial approval of Lord Carnarvon himself, if we 
 venture to point out what seem to us blemishes in his 
 editorial work the few errors which we should like 
 to see corrected, the deficiencies there are more of 
 these which we should like to see supplied. 
 
 The most unsatisfactory part of Lord Carnarvon's 
 work is the commentary. He appears to have thought 
 at first and assuredly to have thought quite rightly 
 that it was his duty as an editor to explain Chester- 
 field's allusions, to trace his quotations, and to correct 
 his errors. And this up to a certain point he has done. 
 He then appears to have changed his mind. It is 
 possible that he thought the insertion of notes at the 
 bottom of the page had an unpleasantly pedantic 
 appearance ; and this seems probable from the fact 
 that many of the quotations are left untraced at the 
 foot of the text in which they occur, the reference, 
 however, being tacitly given in the Index. This we 
 discovered quite accidentally, and if it is discovered at 
 all, every other reader must discover it in the same 
 way, for there is nothing to indicate it. Thus, on 
 page 198, the reference for a quotation from Ovid's 
 Fasti is duly given at the foot of the page ; but there 
 is nothing to indicate the source of a quotation from the 
 Metamorphoses on the same page. On turning, how- 
 ever, to the heading " Ovid " in the Index, we noticed 
 that the reference is duly given. It is not very easy 
 to see what possible end can be served by such capri-
 
 206 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 cious inconsistencies as these, unless it be a device for 
 disguising the fact that many of the quotations have 
 not been traced at all, either at the foot of the page 
 or in the Index a subterfuge of which we are very 
 sure Lord Carnarvon was quite incapable. In any 
 case, this is a defect which needs remedy. If an 
 editor undertakes to trace quotations, he ought of 
 course to spare no pains to trace all, though he cannot 
 be blamed if he is unsuccessful. But there is surely 
 no reason why he should give the references to some 
 at the bottom of the page, and relegate the references 
 to others to the Index. The explanatory notes have 
 the same peculiarity. Allusions for an explanation of 
 which we should have been grateful are passed silently 
 over; allusions so obvious that we should scarcely 
 think it necessary to explain them to a fourth -form 
 schoolboy, are explained at length. Thus, in com- 
 menting on a proverb so common as Post est 
 Occasio calva, we are amazed to find the editor stop- 
 ping to notice that Defoe has quoted it in one of his 
 pamphlets, and that Chesterfield must have had in 
 his mind five lines of Phsedrus, which are transcribed 
 at length. Two or three of Chesterfield's slips, at 
 which we should have expected so accomplished a 
 scholar as Lord Carnarvon to have winced, are passed 
 unnoticed. Thus, on page 275, Chesterfield observes 
 that " Cicero reproaches Clodia with dancing better 
 than a modest woman should." He was of course 
 thinking of what Sallust, not Cicero, said of Sempronia, 
 not of Clodia. 
 
 The well-known saying, Nemo fere saltat sobrius,
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 207 
 
 twice misquoted by Chesterfield, occurs not, as is 
 asserted (page 292), in the Offices, but in the Pro 
 Murcena, cap. vi. On page 208 we have [no doubt 
 that in the famous couplet of Martial on Mutius 
 Scsevola (Epig. I. 21 (22))- 
 
 Major deceptee fama est et gloria dextrae : 
 Si non errasset, fecerat ilia minus 
 
 ilia is the right reading, but it is quite clear from 
 Chesterfield's version that he read ille. We are 
 surprised, too, that so accurate a scholar as Lord 
 Carnarvon should have allowed another error to pass 
 unnoticed, more especially as it has, in consequence 
 of Chesterfield's authority, become so generally 
 current that it may now be said to hold a conspicu- 
 ous place among pseudodoxia epidemica. It is 
 repeatedly asserted, both in these Letters and in 
 the former series, that Socrates exhorted his 
 disciples to sacrifice to the Graces. The saying has 
 nothing whatever to do with Socrates. It was the 
 advice given by Plato to Xenocrates simply on 
 account of his pompous demeanour and sullen aspect ; 
 and the anecdote is related by Plutarch in his Life of 
 Marius, and by Diogenes Laertius in his notice of 
 Xenocrates. The phrase appears afterwards to have 
 become proverbial. 1 But nothing has surprised us 
 so much as that Lord Carnarvon should have allowed 
 the following passage to stand without a note : 
 
 Voicy une jolie epigramme faitte par le ce"lebre Cardinal du 
 Perron, sur une belle dame qui avoit un enfant d'une beaute 
 e*gale a la sienne, mais ils etoient tous deux borgnes 
 
 1 See the notes of Casaubon and Menage on Diogenes Laertius, iv. 11.
 
 208 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Parve puer, quod habes lumen concede parent! ; 
 Sic tu caecus Amor, sic erit ilia Venus. 
 
 We need scarcely say that the original runs thus : 
 
 Lumine Aeon dextro, capta est Leonilla sinistro, 
 
 Et potis est forma" vincere uterque Decs. 
 Blande puer, lumen quod habes concede sorori : 
 
 Sic tu csecus Amor, sic erit ilia Venus. 
 
 Whether there is any authority for saying that it 
 refers to the Princess Eboli, the mistress of Philip II. 
 of Spain, or to Maugiron, the favourite of Henry 
 III. of France, each of whom is said to have lost an 
 eye, we do not know. But it was certainly not 
 written by the Cardinal du Perron, for it was pub- 
 lished thirty years before the Cardinal was born, 
 though it has often been attributed to him, as it has 
 been attributed also to Menage. It was written by 
 Girolamo Amalteo, and will be found in any of the 
 editions of the Trium Fratrum Amaltheorum Car- 
 mina, under the title of " De gemellis, fratre et sorore, 
 luscis." We are surprised that neither Chesterfield 
 nor Lord Carnarvon appears to have known the origin 
 of the Italian phrase so often quoted, not only in these 
 Letters but generally volto sciolto, pensieri stretti, 
 though it is to be found in Wotton's letter to Milton 
 prefixed to some of the editions of Comus, where it 
 is attributed to one Alberto Scipione. 
 
 The passage in Boileau referred to on page 158 will 
 be found in the eighth Satire, line 99. On page 197 
 there is evidently a reference to Longinus (De SubL 
 c. ix.). The words "Facere digna scribi vel scribere 
 digna legi," quoted on page 164 and again on page
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 209 
 
 217, are obviously a reminiscence of a passage in the 
 Letters of the younger Pliny. " Equidem beatos puto, 
 quibus Deorum munere datum est aut facere scribenda, 
 aut scribere legenda" (Epist. lib. vi. ep. xvi.). 
 The fine lines quoted from Voltaire 
 
 Repandez vos bienfaits, avec magnificence. 
 Meme aux moins vertueux, ne les refusez pas. 
 Ne vous informez pas de leur reconnoissance ; 
 II est grand, il est beau, de faire des ingrats 
 
 are from the Precis de L' Ecclesiaste, and from the 
 same poem are the lines quoted on page 11. The 
 words in the last letter, " You would fall like setting 
 stars to rise no more/' are the adaptation of a line in 
 Kowe's Jane Shore (Act i. Sc. 2) 
 
 She sets like stars that fall to rise no more. 
 
 We hope that, if these Letters are republished, the 
 references made to contemporary plays will be traced. 
 In what play, for example, does the character of John 
 Trott, known to us from Goldsmith's epigram, and 
 alluded to over and over again by Chesterfield, 
 appear? Who was "Nell Jobson the Cobler's wife 
 in the comical transformation " (page 244) ? To 
 most readers of the present day it would certainly 
 not have been superfluous to explain that the author 
 of Tamerlane, of which an account is given in Letter 
 cxxiv., was Nicholas Eowe. 
 
 For the Introduction we have little but praise. 
 On three points, and on three points only, are we 
 inclined to dissent from Lord Carnarvon's conclusions. 
 We cannot at all agree with him that Chesterfield's 
 "respectable Hottentot" was intended for Johnson.
 
 210 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 We think that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has conclusively 
 shown that such was not the case. To say nothing 
 of Johnson's assertion that Chesterfield had never seen 
 him eat in his life, there seems little doubt that the 
 person who sat for that picture was the person who is 
 described in the 122nd and 170th of the earlier Letters, 
 and who may possibly be alluded to in the 30th Letter 
 of volume i., all of which prove that he must have 
 been some one moving in Chesterfield's circle, one of 
 which proves that the initial letter of his name was L. 
 It is of course possible that the four passages may 
 not refer to the same person ; if they do, there can be 
 no reasonable doubt of the correctness of Dr. Hill's 
 conjecture that the Hottentot was Lyttelton, a man 
 whose slovenliness, awkwardness, and absence of mind 
 were proverbial among his contemporaries. On page 
 xxxviii. there is the following note : " Lord Chester- 
 field also offended Smollett ; but Smollett's day and 
 literary influence are of the past, and it is scarcely 
 worth while, except as an historical fact, to mention 
 the circumstance." In this extraordinary estimate of 
 Smollett's work and fame Lord Carnarvon will prob- 
 ably stand as much alone at the end of the thirtieth 
 century as he stands at the end of the nineteenth. 
 It is surprising that he did not remember the very 
 different opinion formed of Smollett's merits by judges 
 so competent as Sir Walter Scott, Thackeray, and 
 Dickens, or, remembering, should have thought him- 
 self justified in setting it so unceremoniously aside. 
 But on matters of this kind dispute is useless, and 
 it is not with the object of discussing Lord Car-
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 211 
 
 narvon's paradoxical verdict that we have drawn 
 attention to the passage. What perplexes us is the 
 allusion to a fact which is altogether new to us. 
 When did Lord Chesterfield offend Smollett ? and 
 what authority is there for ranking Smollett with 
 Horace Walpole, Lord Hervey, and Dr. Johnson 
 among Chesterfield's enemies ? They were certainly 
 on good terms in 1747, for in Reproof Smollett 
 addresses Chesterfield in terms of exaggerated 
 flattery : 
 
 Nor would th' enamour'd Muse neglect to pay 
 
 To Stanhope's worth the tributary lay, 
 
 The soul unstain'd, the sense sublime, to paint 
 
 A people's patron, pride, and ornament, 
 
 Did not his virtues eternizM remain 
 
 The boasted theme of Pope's immortal strain. 
 
 Again, later, in 1757, Smollett in his History of 
 England twice takes occasion to pay Chesterfield the 
 highest compliments, once in allusion to his ambassa- 
 dorship at the Hague (vol. x. p. 336), and once (vol. 
 xi. p. 9) in allusion to his speech on the Play House 
 Bill. But what seems to make the correctness of 
 Lord Carnarvon's statement the more improbable is 
 the absence of any satirical portrait of the Earl among 
 the portraits sketched in The Adventures of an Atom. 
 Many of Chesterfield's friends and former colleagues 
 are there, but the most conspicuous figure in the 
 fashionable life of those days is correspondingly con- 
 spicuous by his absence in Smollett's malicious pano- 
 rama. Had Smollett borne Chesterfield the smallest 
 ill-will, he would of that we may be sure have 
 availed himself of this opportunity of indulging his
 
 212 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 spleen. It is possible that Lord Carnarvon may 
 have had authority for his statement ; we wish he had 
 adduced it. We are half inclined to think that he had 
 for the moment confounded Chesterfield with New- 
 castle or Lyttelton. 
 
 But these things are trifles. We concur with Lord 
 Carnarvon in thinking that these Letters give us on 
 the whole a more favourable impression of Chester- 
 field as a man than the Letters addressed to his son. 
 Of the world, worldly, as all he writes is, a higher 
 note is occasionally struck. The standard of aim and 
 action is not, as in the former Correspondence, fixed 
 immovably on the dead-level of purely mundane 
 utility. The old cynicism and the old misogyny are 
 still apparent ; but they are tempered with a gentle and 
 kindly humour, which deprives them of all harshness, 
 and even invests them with charm. There is the 
 same solicitude about what a more exalted philosophy 
 than he professed would regard with indifference, but 
 there is not the same solicitude about what such a 
 philosophy would directly condemn. Of the levity 
 of tone and profligacy of sentiment in relation to 
 certain subjects, which jar on us so much in the 
 former Correspondence, there are few or no traces. 
 He so abhorred everything which savours of cant, 
 and especially of theological cant, that he seldom 
 touches on religious subjects. But he does so some- 
 times, and that with an earnestness which will sur- 
 prise every one who knows him only as people in 
 general know him. There are two passages in his 
 Letters to the Bishop of Waterford one dated about
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 213 
 
 a year and a half before the date of the first Letter in 
 this series, the other dated a month later which give 
 us, as it were, the key to all that distinguishes the 
 Chesterfield of the earlier Correspondence from the 
 Chesterfield of the later. 
 
 I consider life as one who is wholly unconcerned in it, and 
 even when I reflect back upon what I have seen, what I have 
 heard, and what I have done myself, I can hardly persuade 
 myself that all that frivolous hurry and bustle, and pleasures of 
 the world, had any reality, but they seem to have been the dreams 
 of restless nights. This philosophy, however, I thank God, 
 neither makes me sour nor melancholic ; I see the folly and ab- 
 surdity of mankind without indignation or peevishness ; I pity 
 the weak and the wicked without envying the wise and the 
 good, but endeavouring to the utmost of my ability to be of 
 that minority. 
 
 I know I am tottering upon the brink of this world, and 
 my thoughts are employed about the other. However, while I 
 crawl upon this planet I think myself obliged to do what good I 
 can in my narrow domestic sphere to my fellow-creatures, and to 
 wish them all the good I cannot do (Stanhope, Works, vol. iv. 
 pp. 329, 330). 
 
 It is the reflection of all this, of this mingled sad- 
 ness and cheerfulness, good sense and good temper, 
 mild wisdom and wise mildness, which is perhaps the 
 chief attraction of these Letters. The voice which is 
 speaking is, we feel, the voice of one without faith 
 and with little hope, but at peace with himself and at 
 peace with the world, grateful to Nature for having 
 called him into life, and to Philosophy for having 
 taught him how to live. Much experience and reflec- 
 tion had enabled him to estimate at its true value what 
 it is in the power of man to attain and enjoy. He had 
 reckoned with existence and struck the balance. The
 
 214 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 delusions of the brute and the fool had never misguided 
 or perplexed him : to the visions of the transcen- 
 dentalist he was constitutionally blind, but he had 
 found the secret which had escaped equally the 
 ascetic and the sensualist the art of living, the true 
 use of fortune. He knew how little of what con- 
 stitutes human happiness and contentment depends 
 on man's mere capacities and externals ; he knew of 
 how much which constitutes both they may be made 
 the means. To his refined good sense the extinction 
 of existence was preferable to its abuse, was preferable 
 even to its misuse. Like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 
 to whom in constitution and temper he bore in some 
 respects a singular resemblance, he was a philosopher 
 even in his affections. 1 " My only wish is," he wrote 
 to his son, " to have you fit to live, which if you are 
 not, I do not desire that you should live at all." 
 " May you live," he writes in another letter full of 
 fatherly tenderness, " as long as you are fit to live, 
 but no longer, or, may you rather die before you cease 
 to be fit to live, than after." 
 
 To this object he had directed the Correspondence 
 with his son, to this object he directed the Corre- 
 
 1 It is remarkable that they both speak in precisely the same way about 
 natural affection. "My anxiety and care can only be the effects of that 
 tender affection which I have for you, and which you cannot represent to 
 yourself greater than it really is. But do not mistake the nature of that 
 affection. It is not natural affection, there being in reality no such thing " 
 (Letters to Son, en. vol. i.). "You are no more obliged to me for bringing 
 you into the world," writes Lady Mary to her daughter, " than I am to you 
 for coming into it, and I never made use of that commonplace (and like most 
 commonplace, false) argument, as exacting any return of affection " ; and then 
 she goes on to say that what has formed the close bond of love between them 
 has been the mutual interchange of what should unite reasonable beings 
 (To the Countess ofute: Works, vol. iv. p. 61).
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 215 
 
 spondence with his godson, " to fit them to live." 
 That many of his particular precepts and particular 
 aims would have found more favour with Atticus and 
 Horace than with St. Paul and Christian moralists, 
 may be fully conceded. We cannot see, as Lord 
 Carnarvon appears to do, any indication in this later 
 Correspondence, that Chesterfield's religious opinions 
 had in the smallest respect changed, still less that old 
 age and its afflictions had " led him to a somewhat 
 different estimate of right and wrong from that which 
 he once professed." There is nothing in the essential 
 teaching of these Letters which will not be found in 
 the Letters to his son. On the subject of religion 
 his language and sentiments are always the same. It 
 is the basis on which life rests. Serious regard for it 
 is the hypothesis on which moral instruction proceeds 
 Indifference to it, or the expression of indifference to 
 it, is the certain mark of a fool. In whatever form it 
 finds embodiment it is to be respected. Without 
 religion virtue is without its strongest collateral 
 security. 1 To the esprits forts, Freethinkers and Moral 
 Philosophers, as they called themselves, Bishop Butler 
 himself was not more sensitively hostile. That 
 Chesterfield did not accept Eevelation seems certain. 
 His religion probably differed in no essential respects 
 from the religion of Cicero and Bolingbroke, of 
 
 1 See Letters to his Son, passim. In Letter CLXXX. he explains his reason 
 for not writing at length on the subject of religion. " I have seldom written 
 to you upon the subject of religion and morality ; your own reason, I am 
 persuaded, has given you true notions of both ; they speak best for them- 
 selves, but if they wanted assistance you have Mr. Harte at hand " (young 
 Stanhope's tutor and a clergyman), " both for precept and example. " See, 
 too, Letter CLXVIII.
 
 216 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Socrates and Voltaire. Of the moral government of 
 the universe ; of the wisdom, justice, and benevolence 
 of the Deity ; of the fact that in reason, or, as it is 
 sometimes expressed, in conscience, God has furnished 
 man with an unerring guide ; of the essential con- 
 nection of religion with morality he has no doubt. 
 To the belief in a future state he leaned so strongly 
 that he has not scrupled to assume it as truth. His 
 attitude towards the popular creed was precisely that 
 generally assumed by the wise and serious men of the 
 last century. His heterodoxy, which we know was 
 shared by almost every member of Pope's circle, and 
 by many members of Johnson's circle, was, like theirs, 
 purely esoteric. Pope's distress at the imputation of 
 unorthodoxy is notorious. Swift was pained beyond 
 expression by the construction placed on The Tale of 
 a Tub. The publication of Bolingbroke's philosophical 
 works was an act of gross treachery. When it was 
 objected to Middleton that his writings would have 
 the effect of disseminating scepticism, he replied that 
 he would recant everything in them which could be 
 construed in a sense hostile to Christianity. Gibbon 
 thought his indiscretion in giving his two famous 
 chapters to the world sufficiently expiated by the 
 advances made to him by the author of The 
 Corruptions of Christianity. " I have sometimes 
 thought," he says in his Autobiography, " of writ- 
 ing a Dialogue of the Dead, in which Lucian, 
 Erasmus, and Voltaire should mutually acknowledge 
 the danger of exposing a popular creed to the con- 
 tempt of the blind and fanatic multitude." Like
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 217 
 
 Cotta in Cicero's Dialogue, they respected a religion 
 which was the religion of the State. Like Aristotle's 
 Man of Polite Wit, they shrank from wounding un- 
 necessarily the feelings of others. On higher grounds 
 they revered it as the purest and most perfect 
 of moral codes, and as the expression of essential 
 truths appealing equally to the philosopher and to 
 the multitude, but appealing to the philosopher 
 through what was mystery to the multitude, and 
 appealing to the multitude through what was fable 
 to the philosopher. Wherever Chesterfield refers to 
 Christianity it is with the greatest reverence. The 
 education both of his son and of his godson was con- 
 ducted on principles strictly orthodox. Their tutors 
 were clergymen of the Established Church. One, 
 recommended by Ly ttelton, was a man of distinguished 
 piety ; the other, recommended by the Bishop of St. 
 David's, was the most eloquent preacher in England. 
 In the earlier and later Correspondence all Chester- 
 field's instruction proceeds on the assumption that 
 these gentlemen " are doing their duty." So anxious 
 was he that the impressions his son received from 
 their teaching should not be weakened, that when 
 Bolingbroke's philosophical works came out he ex- 
 pressed a wish that he would not read them. Of 
 Voltaire's profanity he speaks with the strongest 
 disapprobation. So conservative was he that we 
 find him thus writing to Crebillon : " Je doute 
 fort s'il est permis a un homme d'ecrire centre 
 le culte et la croyance de son pays, quand meme 
 il seroit de bonne foi persuade qu'il y eut des
 
 218 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 erreurs." l In writing to his godson he says, referring 
 to the Bible, " You will and ought to believe every 
 word of it, as it was dictated by the Spirit of Truth," 
 a statement defining with singular precision Chester- 
 field's real position in relation to these questions. 
 As a man and as a writer he was the reversed 
 counterpart of Montaigne and Shaftesbury. Mon- 
 taigne thought the composition of the Apologie de 
 Raimond Sebond, and Shaftesbury the composition 
 of the Characteristics, perfectly compatible with the 
 profession of orthodoxy. Chesterfield thought the 
 inculcation of orthodoxy perfectly compatible with 
 a belief in a philosophy not very different from the 
 philosophy of the Apologie and the Characteristics. 
 
 Lord Carnarvon's remark that Chesterfield's " esti- 
 mate of right and wrong " differed, and differed for the 
 better, from the estimate which he had formed before 
 he grew old, is, we venture to think, not quite just to 
 him. For what the remark obviously implies is that 
 the morality in the earlier Correspondence is either 
 less sound or less elevated than that in the later. 
 But this is surely not the case, and for the best of 
 reasons. If we except the one great blot, of which 
 we propose to speak at length presently, no moral 
 teaching could be sounder or more excellent than we 
 find in his Letters to his son. Keligious obligations 
 are perhaps a little more emphasised, but nothing is 
 said but what had been said before. Whether Chester- 
 field's opinion changed on the subject to which we 
 have referred we do not know. We should infer 
 
 1 Maty, Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 327.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 219 
 
 from Letters CCXVIIL, ccxxxvi., and from the letter 
 to be delivered after his death, that it had not. 1 In 
 any case he would not have been likely to touch on 
 such things in writing to a child. 
 
 We have dwelt on these points for two reasons. 
 In the first place, we do not think that the dis- 
 tinction which Lord Carnarvon attempts to make 
 between Chesterfield's sentiments and precepts in the 
 earlier and later Letters is warranted by facts. In the 
 second place, the suggestion of such a distinction 
 involves an admission, in our opinion, equally un- 
 warrantable and equally misleading. It is plain that 
 Lord Carnarvon wishes to say all that can in fairness 
 be said in defence of his author. But he defends him 
 by a compromise. Assuming the justice of the 
 popular verdict on the earlier Letters, he represents, 
 or seems to represent, the later as a kind of palinode. 
 He points to passages, in many cases simple repeti- 
 tions of passages in the former series, as proofs of 
 an awakened moral sense. He quotes, with just 
 admiration, sentiments and precepts, which are 
 commonplaces in the earlier Letters, as indications 
 of the salutary effects of age and sorrow. But 
 Chesterfield was not, we submit, a reformed rake, 
 except in the sense in which Aristippus and Horace 
 
 1 Lord Carnarvon points with great satisfaction to a passage in Letter XLIV., 
 where Chesterfield speaks of natural children as le fruit d'unptcht, as a proof 
 of reformation on this point. But Chesterfield's repetition of the story of the 
 Ephesian matron, and his remarks in Letter cxxxiv. , are ominous indications. 
 We very much fear that if Philip Stanhope had been a few years older he 
 would have received the same edifying guidance in " the pleasures and dissi- 
 pations, both of which I shall allow you when you are seventeen or eighteen," 
 as the former Philip had been favoured with.
 
 220 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 were reformed rakes. He was a man of the world 
 and a philosopher, consistent alike in his precepts 
 and in his principles. What he preached at seventy 
 was what he preached at fifty-seven, and what he 
 preached at fifty -seven is what he would have 
 preached at five - and - thirty. Of the follies and 
 errors of his youth, of wasted opportunities, and of 
 wasted time, he speaks with a regret common with 
 men in all ages of the world. But the lusus ac 
 ludicra, the inculcation of which has been so fatal 
 to his reputation among his countrymen, were no 
 more included in his remorse than they were included 
 in the remorse of Horace. "I do not regret," he 
 wrote to his son, " the time that I passed in pleasures ; 
 they were seasonable, they were the pleasures of 
 youth, and I enjoyed them while young." On this 
 point his sentiments were precisely those of the 
 ancient moralists. 1 The licence which was allowed 
 to youth, a proper sense of the becoming forbade 
 to mature years. Non lusisse pudet sed non in- 
 cidere ludum. The danger, as he well knew and 
 has frequently remarked, lay in the possibility of 
 the permanent corruption of character; of the con- 
 tamination, the essential contamination, of moral and 
 intellectual energy ; of mischief alike to body and 
 mind. As he did not, in accordance with those who 
 thought with the ancients rather than with those 
 who think with Christian teachers, press an austere 
 morality on the young, so he saw no impropriety 
 
 1 See particularly Cicero, Pro Ccelio, passim, and especially chap, xii., if 
 sentiments, which are commonplaces with the ancients, need illustration.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 221 
 
 in endeavouring to render such indulgences as little 
 harmful as possible. 1 It is untrue, or, to speak more 
 correctly, it is misleading, to say that he inculcates 
 vice. The odiousness, the contemptibleness, the mis- 
 chievousness of vice, is indeed his constant theme. 
 " A commerce galant insensibly formed with a woman 
 of fashion, a glass of wine or two too much, unwarily 
 taken in the warmth and joy of good company, or 
 some innocent frolic by which nobody is injured, are," 
 he says, "the utmost bounds which a man of sense 
 and decency will allow himself; those who transgress 
 them become infamous, or at least contemptible." 
 It must be remembered that when he speaks of 
 gallantry, he is speaking not of that crime which 
 ruins the peace of families, and is fraught with 
 misery and mischief to society, but of a relation 
 which, in the aristocratic circles of Italy and France, 
 where his son, for whose guidance while moving in 
 these circles the Letters were written, was then re- 
 siding, no one held to be reprehensible. It was vice 
 so sanctioned by custom that it had ceased to be 
 regarded as vice. "II permet la galanterie," says 
 Montesquieu, speaking of the differences between 
 Monarchy and Republicanism "lorsqu'elle est unie 
 a I'ide'e du sentiment du cceur, ou a 1'idee de con- 
 
 1 His position and motives are exactly explained in the Testamentary 
 Letter to his godson. Speaking of youth, he says, " It is a state of continual 
 inebriety for six or seven years at least, and frequently attended by fatal and 
 permanent consequences both to body and mind. Believe yourself, then, to 
 be drunk, and as drunken men when reeling catch hold of the next thing 
 in their way to support them, do you, my dear boy, hold by the rails of my 
 experience. I hope they will hinder you from falling, though perhaps not 
 from staggering a little sometimes." He says exactly the same in Letter 
 cxxxv. (vol. i.) to his son.
 
 222 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 quete " ; or, as Chesterfield himself puts it, " gallantry 
 is at Paris as necessary a part of a woman of fashion's 
 establishment as her house, table, and coach." We 
 very much doubt, corrupt as the court of George II. 
 was, whether he would have proffered any such advice, 
 seriously at least, had his son been in England. Of 
 one thing we are very sure, that crimes such as those 
 of Wendoll and Lovelace would have been discounte- 
 nanced and denounced by him as uncompromisingly 
 and sternly as by the most austere of moralists. 
 
 We are holding no brief for Chesterfield. We 
 think that any attempt to confuse the distinction 
 between morality and immorality is in the highest 
 degree reprehensible, and that, in theory at least, our 
 standard of morals is, and must be, the standard of 
 Christianity. That vice loses half its evil by losing 
 all its grossness is in point of fact undoubtedly true, 
 but it is true on a principle which we have no right 
 to concede. Here, then, we believe Chesterfield to 
 be entirely in the wrong. Nor have we anything to 
 say in defence of the flippancy and levity with which 
 he commonly speaks of women, and of men's relation 
 to women, still less of the impropriety of a father 
 addressing a son on such topics as those to which we 
 have alluded. All this we fully grant and greatly 
 regret. But it is surely high time that the nonsense 
 which has so long been current, and is still so in- 
 dustriously circulated about these Letters and their 
 author, should cease. We saw quite recently a work 
 in which all the old calumnies, Johnson's epigram 
 and Cowper's invective duly emphasised, were faith-
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 223 
 
 fully retailed. Chesterfield himself was described 
 exactly as he is represented in his supposed counter- 
 part in Dickens's novel, the Letters as a sort of 
 text-book of the ethics of immorality, advocating 
 seduction, adultery, hypocrisy, untruth, contempt for 
 religion. Lord Carnarvon has done a great service 
 in printing these new Letters. But he would have 
 done a still greater service had he taken this oppor- 
 tunity of directing attention to the injustice of the 
 sentence passed on the old. As it is, what he has 
 said, or at least implied, will, we fear, tend only to 
 confirm it. Chesterfield's character and writings are 
 best vindicated by the statement of simple truth. 
 On certain subjects he did not think as most men 
 now think ; there are certain passages in his works 
 to which just exception may be taken. But to 
 represent him, as Lord Carnarvon has done, in the 
 light of a repentant sinner involves two wholly 
 unwarranted petitiones principii, the one conceding 
 far too much, the other assuming much too little. If 
 he was a sinner, he was a sinner in a sense in which 
 he did not repent ; and if he repented, he repented in 
 a sense in which he did not sin. 
 
 But to turn to the new Letters. They have much 
 merit. They are full of good things, of observations 
 on men and life marked by all the old delicate 
 discrimination and r refined good sense, of excellent 
 precepts, of counsel and suggestions, admirable alike 
 for the shrewd, keen, sober sagacity and wisdom 
 displayed in them, and for the tact and urbanity 
 with which they are tendered. There are passages in
 
 224 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 them as good as the best which could be found in 
 the earlier Correspondence. The style is the same 
 unaffected, fluent, pure, graceful, finished, the style 
 in fact in which Chesterfield always wrote. But they 
 have more humour, and the humour is less cynical 
 and more playful. This, and that in which this is 
 an element, the general tone, the reflection of the 
 mitis senectutis sapientia, give them a charm, a 
 peculiar charm, which the others do not possess. 
 Horace, when he composed the Epistles, was, it is 
 true, younger than Chesterfield when the Letters to 
 the elder Stanhope were written, yet when we com- 
 pare the tone of the earlier Letters with that of the 
 Letters before us, we are insensibly reminded of the 
 difference between the harsher philosopher of the 
 Satires and the mellower philosopher of the Epistles. 
 But they will not, as a whole, bear comparison with 
 the earlier Correspondence. We doubt even whether 
 they will add much to Chesterfield's literary fame. 
 For, as they were designed with the same object 
 as their predecessors, to form a system of education 
 proceeding on the same method and having in view 
 the same ends, they necessarily repeat much of what 
 had been said before. Indeed, in substance they 
 contain little which is essentially new. But what 
 is repeated is repeated in another way, with many 
 new touches, with many additional illustrations and 
 reflections with all those improvements, in short, 
 which we should expect from a man of a richly-stored 
 mind rediscussing in old age the subjects he had dis- 
 cussed years before.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 225 
 
 The parallel between the two series is very close. 
 The common aim of both was, like that of Elyot's 
 Governour, with which they may be compared, the 
 education of a finished gentleman, destined to serve 
 his country in public life, commencing from the 
 time when he leaves the nursery to the time when, 
 epopt and perfect, he emerges from tutelage. " I had," 
 he writes to his son, " two views in your education, 
 Parliament and Foreign Affairs. " In his godson he 
 was interested as in his own heir and successor. 
 Both series are exactly on the same plan, but the 
 one is completed, the other is not. The earlier Letters, 
 till they cease to be didactic, form three distinct 
 groups. The first may be said to terminate with the 
 78th Letter, when Philip was in his fifteenth year, 
 and the instruction here is confined almost entirely 
 to elementary lessons in mythology, history, historical 
 geography, and literature, and to the conduct of 
 habits and manners proper in a boy. The second 
 terminates at or about the second Letter of volume 
 ii., that dated 26th April 1750, when the youth, 
 now in his nineteenth year, was about to be inde- 
 pendent of his tutor. Their theme is the true use of 
 the world, and of books as instruments of culture ; 
 the becoming in morals and manners, and the art of 
 acquiring it ; duties, their nature and their obligations ; 
 ambition and its legitimate objects; the relation of 
 theory to experience, of experience to theory, and of 
 both to success in life. The third group, addressed 
 to a youth who was now his own master and in the 
 midst of all the temptations of the idlest and most 
 
 Q
 
 22G ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 dissolute capital in Europe, completes the course. 
 The instruction here is how the pleasures of a man of 
 the world may be made subservient to his interests 
 and his duties ; how credit, how influence, how 
 authority are to be acquired ; how on the skill with 
 which the game of life is played in trifles depends the 
 success with which the game will be won in earnest. 
 In the Letters to the godson, two only of these groups 
 have their counterpart, for the simple reason that the 
 Correspondence breaks off before young Stanhope had 
 ceased to be a boy. The first, extending to the 128th 
 Letter, answers exactly to the first group in the former. 
 The series go over precisely the same ground, not 
 indeed so deliberately and in a much lighter and 
 more playful style, interspersing, more frequently 
 than the others do, the sort of moral and religious 
 instruction proper for a child. Indeed, there is much 
 in this group which in the former series finds its 
 place in the second. But it is expressed in simpler 
 language, and generally in French. As these Letters 
 will probably be new to most of our readers, we will 
 give a few extracts. One of the most pleasing is the 
 ninth, on duty to God and duty to man. 
 
 God has been so good as to write in all our hearts the duty 
 that He expects from us, which is adoration and thanksgiving, 
 and doing all the good we can to our fellow-creatures. Our 
 conscience, if we will but consult and attend to it, never fails to 
 remind us of those duties. . . . Yon owe all the advantages you 
 enjoy to God, who can and who will probably take them away, 
 whenever you are ungrateful to Him, for He has justice as well 
 as mercy. Your duty to man is very short and clear ; it is only 
 to do to him whatever you would be willing that he should do 
 to you. And remember in all the business of life to ask your 
 conscience this question : Should I be willing that this should be
 
 LOUD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 227 
 
 done to me? If your conscience, which will always tell you 
 truth, answers No, do not do that thing. Observe these rules, 
 and you will be happy in this world and still happier in the 
 next. 
 
 We notice in the next Letter the repetition of what 
 he had said so felicitously before of the art of pleasing : 
 " Observe attentively what pleases you in others and 
 do the same, and you will be sure to please them." 
 There is a beautiful passage in the 108th Letter: 
 
 God has created us such helpless creatures that we all want 
 one another's assistance. ... It was for this reason that our 
 Almighty Creator made us with so many wants and infirmities 
 that mutual help and assistance are absolutely necessary, not 
 only for our well-being, but for our being at all. The Christian 
 Religion carries our moral duties to greater perfection, and orders 
 us to love our enemies, and to do good to those who use us ill. 
 Now as love or hate is not in our power, though our actions are, 
 this commandment means no more than that we should forgive 
 those who use us ill, and that instead of resenting or revenging 
 injuries, we should return good for evil. 
 
 How admirable too are his remarks in the 125th 
 Letter, in which he comments on the folly of glorying 
 in distinctions originating only from the accidents of 
 fortune : 
 
 Sqavez-vous qui sont vos sup6rieurs, vos e"gaux, et vos 
 infe'rieurs ? Expliquons un peu cela. Vos sup6rieurs sont ceux 
 a qui la fortune a donri6 beaucoup plus de rang et de richesses 
 qu'a vous. Vos e'gaux sont ce qui s'appelle Gentilhommes, ou 
 honn^tes gens. Et vos infe'rieurs sont ceux a qui la fortune a 
 refuse" tout rang et tout bien, sans souvent qu'il y ait de leur 
 faute, et qui sont obliges de travailler pour gagner leur vie. 
 Selon la nature la servante de Monsieur Robert est aussi bien 
 ne'e que vous, elle a eu un Pere et une Mere, un Grandpere et 
 une Grandmere et des ancetres jusqu'Adam : mais malheureuse- 
 ment pour elle, ils n'ont pas e"te si riches que les v6tres et par 
 consequent n'ont pu lui donner une Education comme la v6tre.
 
 228 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Et voila toute la difference entre elle et vous, elle vous donne 
 son travail, et vous lui donnez de 1'argent. 1 
 
 The Letters comprised in the second group are 
 represented by the fourteen (129-142) on the Duty, 
 Utility, and Means of Pleasing ; by thirteen designed 
 " to cram you full of the most shining thoughts of 
 the Ancients and Moderns." After this the Letters, as 
 a series, go to pieces, and are in the main repetitions 
 of what had been said in Letters 129-140, or merely 
 gossiping trifles. The Letters on the Art of Pleasing 
 are the only ones in this group which stand on the 
 same level as the earlier Correspondence. Some of the 
 others appear to us to show evident traces of senility. 
 The same remarks are repeated over and over again. 
 The story of Dido, with the wretched epigrams on 
 her death, is twice narrated, so also is the trash of 
 Atterbury about Flavia's fan. The selection of " the 
 most shining thoughts of the Ancients and Moderns " 
 is worthy of Ned Softly himself, and in some cases 
 the comments too. We think Lord Carnarvon would, 
 here at least, have done well had he exercised a little 
 less indulgently his discretion as an editor. 
 
 But to turn to Chesterfield's own "shining pass- 
 ages." The shrewd good sense of such remarks as 
 these will be at once apparent : 
 
 Vanity is a great inducement to keep low company, for 
 a man of quality is sure to be the first man in it, and to be 
 
 1 These sentiments find an interesting illustration in his Will: "I give 
 to all my menial or household servants that shall have lived with me five 
 years or upwards, whom I consider as unfortunate friends, my equals by 
 nature and my inferiors only by the difference of our fortune, two years' 
 wages," etc. See his Will, printed in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1773.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 229 
 
 admired and flattered, though perhaps the greatest fool in it. 
 Letter cxxxiv. 
 
 Again, on the same subject : 
 
 I know of nothing more difficult in common behaviour 
 than to fix due bounds to familiarity ; too little implies an 
 unsociable formality, too much destroys all friendly and 
 social intercourse. The best rule I can give you to manage 
 familiarity is never to be more familiar with anybody than 
 you would be willing and even glad that he should be with 
 you. cxin. 
 
 The remarks about wit are excellent : 
 
 If you have real wit it will flow spontaneously, and you 
 need not aim at it, for in that case the rule of the gospel is 
 reversed, and it will prove, seek and you shall not find. Wit is 
 so shining a quality that everybody admires it, most people aim 
 at it, all people fear it, and few love it except in themselves. . . . 
 A wise man will live as much within his wit as within his 
 income. cxxxvi. 
 
 La Eochefoucauld himself has nothing better than 
 this remark on vanity : 
 
 Vanity is the more odious and shocking to everybody, 
 because everybody without exception has vanity; and two 
 vanities can never love one another, any more than, according to 
 the vulgar saying, two of a trade can. If you desire to please 
 universally men and women, address yourself to their passions 
 and weaknesses, gain their hearts, and then let their reason do 
 their worst against you. CXLI. 
 
 How fine and exquisite, with the precision and 
 subtilty of La Bruyere at his best, is this : 
 
 Judgment is not upon all occasions required, but discretion 
 always is. Never affect or assume a particular character, for it 
 will never fit you, but will probably give you a ridicule, but 
 leave it to your conduct, your virtues, your morals, and your 
 manners to give you one. Discretion will teach you to have 
 particular attention to your mceurs, which we have no one word 
 in our language to express exactly. Morals are too much, 
 manners too little, decency comes the nearest to it, though rather 
 short of it. CXLil.
 
 230 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Well worth pausing over are remarks like these : 
 
 There is as much difference between Pride and Dignity as 
 there is between Power and Authority. cxcvi. 
 
 A vicious character may and will alter if there is good 
 sense at bottom, but a frivolous one is condemned to eternal 
 ridicule and contempt. ccxxxv. 
 
 A certain degree of ceremony is a necessary outwork of 
 manners as well as of religion. cxxxi. 
 
 II faut 1'avouer il y a des coutumes bien ridicules qui out 
 e"t6 invente"es par des sots, mais auxquelles les sages sont obliges 
 de se conformer. ccvi. 
 
 The literary fame of Chesterfield must rest on 
 the Letters to his sou ; but to these Letters about 
 a third of what is comprised in the present volume 
 is well worthy of being added, and is indeed a sub- 
 stantial contribution to the work by which he will be 
 remembered. 
 
 Nothing is so natural, but assuredly nothing is 
 so delusive, as the desire to make others wise wise 
 vicariously, with the wisdom of experience. It is 
 perhaps the last illusion of old age. But it is an 
 illusion for which the world has reason to be thank- 
 ful. Generation after generation have men, whose 
 profound acquaintance with human nature and human 
 affairs would make even their slightest reflections 
 precious, devoted their leisure or their decline to 
 summing up, for the benefit of those dear to them, 
 the lessons which life had taught them. Such was 
 the occupation of the leisure of Cato the Censor, and 
 of our own Alfred. The letters of the elder Wyatt to 
 the younger are in our opinion of more interest than 
 the poems to which he owes his fame. Thus too we 
 have the instructions drawn up by Lord Burleigh for
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 231 
 
 the guidance of his son Robert, and excellent they are 
 so excellent and so characteristic of their eminent 
 author, that we wonder they have not been reprinted 
 in our own time. Of Raleigh's voluminous writings 
 the advice to his son, or, as he entitles it, Instruc- 
 tions to his Son and to Posterity, is one of the few 
 which still maintains its interest. The only work of 
 James I. which deserves to be remembered is the 
 Basilicon Doron. Cardinal Sermonetta's Instruc- 
 tions to his Cousin, and the manual attributed to 
 Walsingham not the minister of Elizabeth, but the 
 secretary to Lord Digby are perhaps more curious 
 than important ; but Francis Osborn's Advice to a Son 
 is a work which deserves a better fate than oblivion. 
 Nothing that Chesterfield's own ancestor, George 
 Savile, Marquis of Halifax, has left us and he has 
 left us two essays which are masterpieces is com- 
 parable to his Advice to a Daughter, a little manual 
 which ought not only to be reprinted, but to be placed 
 in the hands of every young lady in England. Coming 
 down more nearly to Chesterfield's time, we have the 
 letters written by Lord Chatham to his nephew at 
 Cambridge, and it is curious to note how close a 
 resemblance, so far as direct instruction is concerned, 
 they bear to Chesterfield's letters. There is the same 
 insistence throughout on religion and morality being 
 the pillars on which life rests ; on the necessity of a 
 sound, as distinguished from a pedantic, classical 
 training forming the basis of literary culture ; on the 
 fact that the use of learning "is to render a man 
 more wise and virtuous, not merely more learned " ;
 
 232 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 on the importance of the study of modern history 
 and modern languages in conjunction with ancient. 
 Among the many minor coincidences two are well worth 
 noticing. Perhaps nothing has been more ridiculed 
 in Chesterfield than his remarks about the ungrace- 
 fulness of laughter. But Chatham has made exactly 
 the same remarks : " Avoid contracting any peculiar 
 gesticulations of the body, or movements of the 
 muscles of the face. It is rare to see in any one 
 a graceful laughter ; it is generally better to smile 
 than to laugh out." 1 Both indeed were but repeating 
 what had been said before by Plato, Isocrates, Cicero, 
 and Epictetus. 2 No one will accuse Lord Chatham 
 of any sympathy with lax morality ; but, unless we 
 misunderstand a passage in one of his Letters, he 
 thought there was nothing indecorous in banter 
 quite indistinguishable from Chesterfield's. 3 
 
 But no serious comparison can be drawn between 
 these Letters and the Letters of which we are speak- 
 ing. Interesting and valuable as the greater portion of 
 them are, the best of them have no pretensions to be 
 classical. In their matter there is an immense pre- 
 ponderance of what is only not platitude because of 
 the authority that enforces it. In none of them is 
 there any attempt at a regular system of instruction. 
 They are simply didactic, and didactic in the sense of 
 being, as a rule, simply admonitory. In point of 
 
 1 Letters loritten by the late Earl of Chatham to his nephew Thomas Pitt, 
 Letter v. p. 34. 
 
 2 Republic, vol. iii. p. 338 ; Ad Demonicum, 15 ; De Officiis, -lib. i. 29 ; 
 Enchiridion, cap. xxx. 4. 
 
 3 Chatham's Letters, xix. p. 92.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 233 
 
 style, the great criterion, they are all essentially 
 deficient, and that for various reasons and in various 
 degrees. 
 
 The unpopularity of Chesterfield among his 
 countrymen is not difficult to understand. In the 
 first place, he is the most aristocratic of writers. He 
 wrote, to employ his own words, not for " the herd 
 of mankind, who, though useful in their way, are 
 but the candle -snuffers and scene -shifters of the 
 universal theatre," but for " those whom Nature, 
 education, and industry have qualified to act the 
 great parts." It ought always to be remembered, 
 and is almost always forgotten, that these Letters 
 were not intended for publication. They were neither 
 addressed to the multitude nor have any application 
 to the multitude. They were designed for the guid- 
 ance of a young English aristocrat. They have 
 therefore to ordinary men, who regard them as 
 addressed to the world in general, all the irritating 
 effect of a continued strain of irony. Neither writer 
 nor reader, or, to speak more correctly, neither teacher 
 nor pupil, understands the other. The teacher is 
 assuming that the pupil is moving in a sphere in 
 which fortune has not placed him, and the pupil 
 insensibly takes the assumption for a satire on the 
 sphere in which fortune has placed him. He is 
 perpetually being admonished to become something 
 which he can never be, and warned against becoming 
 what in truth he cannot help being. In the amuse- 
 ments, in the serious occupations, in the aims for the 
 guidance of which instruction is being given, his own
 
 234 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 appear to be superciliously ignored, or made to seem 
 contemptible by contrast. Few men care to be 
 reminded, honourable as such occupations may be, 
 that they belong to " the candle -snuffers and scene- 
 shifters of the universal theatre." 
 
 In the second place, Chesterfield is, of all 
 English writers, if we except Horace Walpole, the 
 most essentially un-English. Nothing pleased him 
 so much as a compliment paid to him when a very 
 young man by a French gentleman at Paris : 
 " Monsieur, vous 6tes tout comme nous," and it was 
 simple truth. In genius, in sympathy, in culture, he 
 was far more French than English. In the French 
 character and temper he saw the foundation of 
 human perfection. " I have often," he writes, " said 
 and do think that a Frenchman, who, with a fund 
 of .virtue, learning, and good sense, has the manners 
 and good breeding of his country, is the perfection 
 of human nature." His manners were French. He 
 gave his house at Blackheath a French name. His 
 favourite authors were French. He delighted to 
 converse and write in French, and he both wrote and 
 spoke it with the same facility and purity as Eng- 
 lish. On French canons his own critical canons were 
 formed, on French models his taste. He thought 
 the Henriade a finer poem than the Iliad and 
 the jEneid. He preferred Kacine and Corneille 
 to Shakspeare. It is always in accordance with 
 characteristic French taste, and with reference to 
 characteristic French models, that his judgments 
 are formed. Good sense combined with grace and
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 235 
 
 lucidity of expression are, as he has insisted re- 
 peatedly, the first requisites of poets. The passion 
 and intensity of Dante were unintelligible to him. He 
 could not read him, he said. Milton he found tedious. 
 The transcendentalism of Petrarch disgusted him 
 he is "a sing-song love poet who deserved his 
 Laura better than his Lauro." He places, justly 
 indeed, Ariosto above Tasso, but Voltaire above both. 
 He applies the same canons to conduct. No generous 
 traits, no noble or elevated instincts, can compensate 
 deficiency in grace and in a sense of the becoming. 
 Thus he condemns Homer for making such a char- 
 acter as Achilles, whom he strangely denounces as a 
 brute and a scoundrel, the hero of an Epic Poem ; 
 and in another Letter he speaks contemptuously of 
 " the porter-like language of Homer's heroes." It is 
 not surprising that his own countrymen should have 
 found little favour in his eyes. And in truth he 
 seldom speaks of them except in terms expressive 
 of dislike and even abhorrence. Their uncouth 
 vices, their equally uncouth virtues, their manners, 
 their dress, their speech, form topics for endless 
 ridicule. Throughout his Letters he uses them as 
 Horace tells us his father when educating him 
 used his vicious neighbours, as examples of all that 
 youth should avoid. " I am informed," he writes to 
 his son, " that there are now many English at Turin, 
 and I fear there are just so many dangers for you 
 to encounter." No expression in his Letters is more 
 frequent than " Would you wish to be a John Trot ? " 
 or " I would not have you be a John Trot," and John
 
 236 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Trot is with him little more than a synonym for an 
 ordinary Englishman. If we remember rightly, the 
 only countrymen of his whom he has heartily praised 
 are the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Bolingbroke, 
 both men whose manners had been formed in the 
 school of Versailles. With the good sense, however, 
 which always distinguished him, he recognised that 
 if there are French virtues there are English too. 
 Thus in one of his letters to Madame Monconseil he 
 says in reference to his son, " My idea is to unite in 
 him what has never been found in one person before, 
 I mean what is best in the two nations." And in 
 an admirable paper in Common Sense (No. 93) he 
 ridicules the indiscriminate aping of French manners. 
 He anticipated Matthew Arnold in almost all those 
 points in which Matthew Arnold's an ti- Anglicism 
 made itself most aggressive. He denned, he analysed, 
 he delineated, he held up the mirror to Philistinism ; 
 he showed its coarseness and ugliness, the vulgarity 
 of its splendour, the meanness of its ideals. Its vanity 
 he insulted by proposing, as a pattern for its imita- 
 tion, a people whose name was seldom mentioned 
 without some epithet indicative of contempt. And 
 the Philistines have had their revenge. The injustice 
 of which he was undoubtedly guilty in not sufficiently 
 recognising their robust virtues as well as their 
 deficiencies, they have repaid by magnifying his 
 foibles into vices and his vices into crimes. 
 
 But nothing has weighed so heavily against him as 
 the charges to which we have already referred. And 
 on one point we can offer no defence. The contempt
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 237 
 
 with which he speaks of women, and of the relation 
 
 of women to life, has always appeared to us not merely 
 
 the one great flaw in his writings, but indicative of 
 
 the one unsound place in his judgment and temper. 
 
 His misogyny goes far beyond that of Milton, it goes 
 
 even beyond that of the Eestoration Dramatists. 
 
 The misogyny of Milton is that of a philosopher 
 
 angry with Nature, and smarting from wounded 
 
 pride. The misogyny of the Restoration Dramatists 
 
 is that of mere libertines and wits. But the misogyny 
 
 of Chesterfield resembles that of Ia,go or Frederick the 
 
 Great. He appears to regard women as occupying a 
 
 sort of intermediate place, isolated between rational 
 
 humanity and the animals. They are not bound 
 
 by the laws which bind men, nor are such laws 
 
 binding in relation to them. They have their own 
 
 morality that is to say, no morality at all ; and a 
 
 similar immunity is presumed in all who have dealings 
 
 with them. As they tell no truth, so they exact no 
 
 truth. " A man of sense therefore only trifles with 
 
 them, plays with them, humours them, and flatters 
 
 them, as he does with a spritely and forward child." 
 
 As they are incapable of sincerity and seriousness, 
 
 sincerity and seriousness are quite out of place in 
 
 transactions with them. And yet, "as they are 
 
 necessary ingredients in all good company," and as 
 
 "their suffrages go a great way in establishing a 
 
 man's character in society," it is necessary to please 
 
 and court them. This is easily done by remembering 
 
 that they have only two passions, love and vanity. 
 
 As " no flattery is either too high or low for them,"
 
 238 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 for "they will greedily swallow the highest and 
 gratefully accept of the lowest," their capture in- 
 volves little trouble and no art. But it is well 
 to bear in mind that "those who are either in- 
 disputably beautiful or indisputably ugly are best 
 flattered upon the score of their understandings ; 
 but those who are in a state of mediocrity, upon 
 their beauty, or at least their graces." In flattering 
 them, however, on the score of their understand- 
 ing, care must be taken "not to drop one word 
 about their experience, for experience implies age, 
 and the suspicion of age no woman, let her be ever 
 so old, ever forgives." Their chief use, apart from 
 the pleasure of intriguing or philandering with them, 
 lies in their being a means of culture. And for this 
 reason. "The attentions which they require, and 
 which are always paid them by well-bred men, keep 
 up politeness, and give a habit of good breeding; 
 whereas men, when they live together, and without 
 the lenitive of women in company, are apt to grow 
 careless, negligent, and rough among one another." 
 For the rest they are naught. Their virtue is mere 
 coquetry ; their constancy and affections, fiction. 
 And it was the same to the last. In a letter, for 
 example, written not many years before his death, 
 after making a remark so grossly indelicate as to be 
 quite unquotable, he says, " to take a wife merely as 
 an agreeable and rational companion will commonly 
 be found a great mistake. Shakspeare " (it would 
 have been more correct to saylago) " seems to be of my 
 opinion when he allows them only this department
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 239 
 
 " To suckle fools and chronicle small beer." 
 
 Much of this is of course to be attributed to the age 
 in which he lived and to the society in which he 
 moved, and is to be regarded as simple deduction 
 from his own experience. We have only to turn to 
 such records as the Suffolk Papers and Lord Hervey's 
 Memoirs, to Walpole's Correspondence, to Hogarth's 
 Cartoons, or to any of the Memoirs merely descriptive 
 of the fashionable life in Paris between the Eegency 
 and the Ke volution, to such books as the Memoirs of 
 the Due de Richelieu, the Memoirs of Madame du 
 Hausset, the Collections of Bachaumont, the novelettes 
 of Crebillon the younger, or the correspondence of 
 that lady who, in Villemain's phrase, blended "la 
 prostitution au Cardinal Dubois et I'amitie de Montes- 
 quieu/' and it becomes perfectly intelligible. There 
 is every reason to believe that his own marriage was 
 a very unhappy one, and in his wife, the illegitimate 
 daughter of the coarse mistress of the coarsest of 
 English kings, he certainly saw nothing calculated to 
 give him a higher opinion of women, but much, on 
 the other hand, to confirm him in his low one. But 
 whatever may have been the reasons of Chesterfield's 
 misogyny, it is undoubtedly a great blemish on his 
 writings. It must not, however, mislead us. We 
 are so much in the habit of reading other ages in the 
 light of our own, and of assuming that what would 
 apply to a man who acted and thought in a particular 
 way among ourselves, would apply to a man who 
 acted and thought in the same way a century ago, 
 that we very often arrive at most erroneous con-
 
 240 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 elusions. A man who in our day spoke and wrote 
 of women as Chesterfield has done, would justly be 
 set down as a scoundrel and a fool. But Chesterfield, 
 so far from being a fool, was in some respects one of 
 the wisest men who have ever lived ; and, so far from 
 being a scoundrel, practised as well as preached a 
 morality wjiich every gentleman in the world would 
 aspire to emulate. The truth is, as it is only just to 
 him to say, that he was generalising from his ex- 
 perience of women of fashion. In one of his papers 
 in Common Sense (No. 33) he has drawn a beautiful 
 picture of what woman might be if she would only be 
 true to nature. 
 
 There are certain writings in the literature of every 
 country which may have a message for the world, and 
 may have value universally, but which to the country 
 of their production have a particular message and a 
 peculiar value. They are generally the work of men 
 out of touch and out of sympathy with their sur- 
 roundings, separated by differences of character, 
 temper, intellect from their fellows, viewing things 
 with other eyes, having other thoughts, other feel- 
 ings aliens without being strangers. As ridicule is 
 said to be the test of truth, so the judgments of these 
 men are the tests of national life. They put to the 
 proof its intellectual and moral currency. They call 
 to account its creeds, its opinions, its sentiments, 
 its manners, its fashions. For conventional touch- 
 stones and conventional standards they apply touch- 
 stones and standards of their own, derived, it may 
 be, ideally from speculation, or derived, as is much
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 241 
 
 more commonly the case, from those of other nations. 
 They are not only the exorcists of the Idols of the 
 Den which are as rife with communities as with 
 individuals, but they are more. They are the up- 
 holders of the Ideal and of the Best. As the pro- 
 phets of the first, the good they have done has been 
 mingled with much mischief; in the inculcation of 
 the second consists their greatest service. We mean 
 of course by the Best whatever has been carried by 
 the human race to the highest conceivable point of 
 perfection, and by one who inculcates the Best, one who 
 knows where to go to find it, how to understand and 
 relish it, and how as a criterion to apply it. Such a 
 man, for instance, would not go to Germany or Hol- 
 land for his canons of the becoming in relation to 
 manners, or for his canons of the beautiful in relation 
 to art, or of both in relation to the conduct of life. 
 He would go to ancient Greece and to modern 
 France. Now so solid and vigorous are our virtues 
 as a nation, and so substantial and imposing are the 
 results of them, that we are apt to ignore or perhaps 
 not even to be conscious of the deficiencies compatible 
 with them. But they exist for all that, and they are 
 really serious : " On the side of beauty and taste, vul- 
 garity ; on the side of morals and feeling, coarseness ; 
 on the side of mind and spirit, unintelligence," such 
 is Matthew Arnold's indictment. And, modify it as 
 we may, much must remain which cannot in justice 
 be deducted. To say that we have no due regard for 
 the becoming and the beautiful, and as a rule no very 
 
 clear perception of either, that "to sacrifice to the 
 
 R
 
 242 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Graces" is to most of us little more than meaningless 
 cant, that what may be called the minor morals have 
 anything but definite significance, and that the 
 practice of them, whenever they are practised, con- 
 sists of a sort of haphazard application of principles 
 derived casually from vague social traditions, is to 
 say nothing more than every one will acknowledge. 
 And yet to admit this is to admit the existence of 
 grievous defects, both in our temper and character, as 
 well as in our systems of education. To no other 
 teachers then ought we to pay more respectful atten- 
 tion than to those who would have us understand 
 how much mischief and loss results from these defects, 
 who would keep the proper standards steadily before 
 us, and who would insist on our trying ourselves by 
 them. Two such teachers we have had. One has 
 been described as "a graceful sentimentalist, whom 
 no one took seriously" ; the other as " a complete 
 master of the whole science of immorality." 
 
 Chesterfield's Letters have a threefold interest. 
 They may be regarded as Sainte-Beuve has regarded 
 them, as a repertory of observations on life and 
 manners, as " a rich book, not a page of which can 
 be read without our having to remember some happy 
 remark," full of fine discrimination and delicate ana- 
 lytical power, not indeed equal to such finished studies 
 as La Bruyere and La Kochefoucauld have left us, but 
 holding a kind of middle place between the Memoirs 
 of the Chevalier de Grammont and Telemachus. 
 Or they may be regarded in relation merely to the 
 immediate purpose for which they were designed, as
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 243 
 
 a manual of practical advice, as a treatise on the art 
 of living becomingly under conventional conditions. 
 From which point of view they may be compared to 
 such works as Castiglione's Courtier, Guevara's Dial 
 of Princes, Peacham's Complete English Gentleman, 
 the Abbs' de Bellegarde's L'Art de Plaire dans la 
 Conversation to such works, in fine, as the litera- 
 ture of every civilised country in Europe abounds in. 
 But it is not here that their true interest lies. It is 
 in their philosophy of life, in their attempt to revive 
 under modern conditions ancient ethical ideas. .Not 
 only do they bear a close resemblance to Cicero's De 
 Officiis in the circumstances under which they were 
 written and in the tone and style of their composi- 
 tion, but their philosophy on its ethical side is in the 
 main little more than a reproduction of the philo- 
 sophy of Cicero's treatise. It is with constant refer- 
 ence to the first book of the De Officiis, and more 
 particularly to the chapters dealing with the fourth 
 division of the honestum, that these Letters should be 
 read. The correspondence, the identity indeed, of 
 much of Chesterfield's ethical teaching with that of 
 Cicero * will be at once apparent if we examine it for 
 a moment in detail. The perfection of character 
 consists in the maintenance of an exquisite and 
 absolute equilibrium of all the faculties and emotions 
 of man, brought by culture to their utmost points 
 of development and refinement in the case of the 
 
 1 It is scarcely necessary to say that Cicero was himself only popularising, 
 with certain modifications of his own, the teachings of the Greek schools, and 
 particularly of Pansetius.
 
 244 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 former, of refinement and temper in the case of the 
 latter. It is not merely completed self-mastery, but 
 the harmony of the ordered whole, and a whole in 
 which each part has been perfected. This is not all. 
 As man lives not for himself alone, but is a unit in 
 society, the full and efficient discharge of his obliga- 
 tions to society, in the various relations in which he 
 stands to it, is of equal importance. These, then, 
 are the two great ends of education, the perfection 
 of the individual character, and the discipline 
 of the individual with respect to social duties. 
 And these are the ends at which Chesterfield aims. 
 " From the time that you have had life, it has been 
 the principal object of mine to make you as per- 
 fect as the imperfections of human nature will 
 allow." 
 
 All the teaching proceeds on strictly systematic 
 principles. It begins with laying the foundations of 
 knowledge, with awakening interest in ancient myth- 
 ology and ancient and modern history, suggesting 
 at the same time such moral and religious instruction 
 as would be intelligible to a child. Next come 
 rhetoric and criticism. The pupil is made to feel 
 how and why beautiful composition and beautiful 
 poetry are beautiful ; he is initiated in the principles 
 of good taste. Two exhortations are constantly 
 repeated, the necessity of thoughtfulness and the 
 necessity of attention. " There is no surer sign in 
 the world of a little weak mind than inattention. 
 Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, 
 and nothing can be done well without attention."
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 245 
 
 Step by step, with exquisite tact and skill and with 
 unwearied patience, does the teacher proceed through 
 these rudimentary stages, never above the capacity of 
 his pupil, never losing sight of the final object. If 
 we look closely, we shall see that the instruction 
 which he will afterwards enforce with so much 
 emphasis has been insinuated, that the very legends 
 and fables narrated by him have had their object. 
 The ground having been prepared, the foundations 
 laid, the superstructure is commenced. And now 
 Cicero is followed closely. What in the conception 
 of both constitutes perfection of character we have 
 seen it is the decorum and the honestum, qualities 
 intellectually distinguishable, but essentially iden- 
 tical. And the decorum in its relation to the 
 honestum in the abstract may be defined as " what- 
 ever is consonant to that supremacy of man wherein 
 his nature differs from other animals," and in relation 
 to the several divisions of the honestum as " that 
 quality which is so consonant to nature that it in- 
 volves the manifestation of moderation and temper- 
 ance with a certain air such as becomes a gentleman." 1 
 There is scarcely a letter of Chesterfield's which is not 
 a commentary on some portion of this. It was his aim 
 and criterion in the lesser as in the greater morals. 
 
 1 " Est ejus descriptio duplex. Nam et generale quoddam decorum intel- 
 ligimus, quod in omni honestate versatur ; et aliud huic subjectum quod 
 pertinet ad singulas paries honestatis. Atque illud superius sic fere definiri 
 solet : Decorum id esse, quod consentaneum sit hominis excellentiae in eo, in 
 quo natura ejus a reliquis animantibus differat. Quse autera pars subjecta 
 generi est, earn sic definiunt, ut id decorum velint esse, quod ita naturae con- 
 sentaneum sit, ut in eo moderatio et temperantia appareat cum specie quadam 
 liberali " (De Offidis, lib. i. c. 27).
 
 246 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 The sure characteristic of a sound and strong mind is to 
 find in everything those certain bounds, " quos ultra citrave 
 nequit consistere rectum." These boundaries are marked out by 
 a very fine line, which only good sense and attention can discover ; 
 it is much too fine for vulgar eyes. In Manners this line is good 
 breeding; beyond it is troublesome ceremony, short of it is 
 unbecoming negligence and inattention. In Morals it divides 
 ostentatious Puritanism from Criminal Relaxation. In Religion, 
 Superstition from Impiety, and, in short, every virtue from its 
 kindred vice or weakness. Letter CXLII. (vol. i.). 
 
 In Letter ex. he goes so far as to say " that there 
 is more judgment required for the proper conduct of 
 our virtues than for avoiding their opposite vices." 
 Hence his constant warnings against excesses of 
 all kinds sensual excesses, gluttony, drunkenness, 
 and profligacy ; against intellectual excesses, too great 
 addiction to study and books ; against violent passions, 
 such as anger, or joy and grief in excess, or excess in 
 admiration. " I would teach him early the nil 
 admirari" he says with reference to his godson, as 
 he had before said to his son ; "I think it a very 
 necessary lesson." And hence on the other hand his 
 warnings and in this, as he has said more than once, 
 he was no Stoic that the natural instincts and 
 passions should not be suppressed, that pleasures 
 should be freely indulged in provided they be within 
 measure, and without grossness. 1 " Vive la joye," he 
 writes to his grandson, " mais que ce soit la joye d'un 
 homme d'esprit et pas d'un sot." Anger is not to be 
 
 1 See Letters passim, but particularly Letters CLXXXVII. and CLVIII., vol. 
 i., and Letters iv. and xxvin., vol. ii. In this point Cicero is opposed 
 to Chesterfield, but see De Gfficiis, lib. i. c. 30: "Sin sit quispiam, qui 
 aliquid tribuat voluptati, diligenter ei tenendum esse ejus fruendae 
 modum."
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 247 
 
 checked so entirely as to render a man liable to the 
 charge of pusillanimous patience under insult, or 
 grief to the point of improper insensibility. To the 
 minutest details of life is the same principle extended, 
 for, in the phrase of his master, " omnino si quidquam 
 est decorum, nihil est profecto magis, quam sequabilitas 
 universes vitse, turn singularum actionum," l all are 
 notes in the harmony, which is character. " I think," 
 he says (Letter cxxxn.), " nothing above or below 
 my pointing out to you or your excelling in." The 
 most interesting part of his teaching is where he 
 dwells on the becoming in relation to what may be 
 called its minor manifestations, in its relation to 
 manners and externals. Here, too, Cicero is his 
 guide, 2 but he goes much more into details than his 
 master does. Indeed, he attaches so much import- 
 ance to this subject, and has allowed it to fill a space 
 so strangely disproportionate to the space filled by 
 instruction on the higher morals, that with most 
 people his name has come to be associated with this 
 portion of his teaching alone. The reason is given in 
 the Letters themselves. He found his pupil docile 
 and plastic in all respects but one. He had no diffi- 
 culty in making him a scholar, or in imprinting 
 on him all that constitutes the "respectable"; but 
 in what constitutes the " amiable " he was not only 
 instinctively deficient, but to all appearance ob- 
 stinately impervious to impression. As the Letters 
 proceed, the anxiety of the teacher on this point 
 increases, till at last " the graces," their nature, 
 
 1 De Offidis, lib. i. c. 31. 2 Id. cc. 35-38.
 
 248 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 their importance, and how they are to be acquired, 
 come to predominate over all other subjects. We 
 have reason to be thankful for the accident. It has 
 enriched us where we were poor ; it has instructed 
 us in matters in which of all nations in the world we 
 most need instruction. To say that the central idea 
 of Chesterfield's teaching is the essential connection of 
 the good with the beautiful, would be to credit him 
 with a far loftier philosophy than he had any con- 
 ception of; but to say that, in discerning and in 
 insisting on the alliance between the virtues and the 
 graces, he inculcated a kindred truth, or to speak 
 more correctly, a phase of the same great truth, is 
 no more than the fact. It is in his inculcation of this, 
 in his never losing sight of it as a principle, and in 
 his fine and subtle perception of what constitutes " the 
 graces," that he fills a place such as no other teacher 
 in our literature holds. We must go to ancient 
 Greece, we must go to modern France, for writers 
 occupying an analogous position. 
 
 His definition of the graces proceeds on the same 
 principle as his definition of morals. They are the 
 result of the application of the same rules, the pro- 
 ducts of the same culture, the fruits of the same soil. 
 Judging as the world judges, a man may be perfect 
 in the graces while altogether deficient in morals. 
 Judging as Chesterfield judges, a man may indeed be 
 deficient in the graces who is sound in morals ; but 
 no man can be perfect in the graces who is deficient 
 in morals. So closely, however, in his conceptions 
 are manners linked with morals, the graces with the
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 249 
 
 virtues, that he often regards them in the light of 
 causes and effects, and even represents them as 
 reciprocally productive. "They are not," he says, 
 "the showish trifles only which some people call or 
 think them ; they are a solid good ; they prevent a 
 great deal of real mischief ; they create, adorn, and 
 strengthen friendships ; they keep hatred within 
 bounds ; they promote good-humour and good-will in 
 families where the want of them is commonly the 
 original cause of discord " (Letter xxxvu.). " Good 
 manners are to particular societies what good morals 
 are to society in general, their cement and their 
 security " ; " and," he goes on to say, " I really think 
 that next to the consciousness of doing a good action, 
 that of doing a civil one is the most pleasing, and the 
 epithet which I should covet most next to that of 
 Aristides, would be that of well - bred " (Letter 
 CLXVIIL). They are as necessary, he says in another 
 place, to adorn and introduce intrinsic merit and 
 knowledge as the polish is to the diamond, for with- 
 out that polish it would never be worn, whatever it 
 might weigh ; and weight without lustre is lead. 
 But the graces will not come to the call : they 
 must be wooed to be won. Good breeding is the 
 result of great experience, much observation, and 
 great diligence, in a man of sound character. "It is 
 a combination of much good sense, some good nature, 
 and a little self-denial for the sake of others, with a 
 view to obtain the same indulgence from them." It 
 is the perception of the fine line which separates 
 dignity from ceremoniousness, gentility from affec-
 
 250 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 tation, refinement from effeminacy. It is the art 
 of being familiar without being vulgar, of being frank 
 without being indiscreet, of being reserved without 
 being mysterious. It is the tact which knows the 
 proper time and the proper place for all that is to be 
 done, and all that is to be said, and the faculty of 
 doing both with an air of distinction. A compound 
 of all the agreeable qualities of body and mind, it is 
 a compound in which none of them predominates to 
 the exclusion of the rest. Thus far it is susceptible 
 of analysis ; but no analysis can resolve the secret of 
 its charm. For it is the quintessence of the graces, 
 and " would you ask me to define the graces, I can 
 only do so by the ' Je ne S9ay quoy ' ; would you ask 
 me to define the ' Je ne S9ay quoy,' I can only do so 
 by the graces." 1 Essentially connected with the 
 higher morals, it includes truth, justice, humanity. 
 As we have already seen, nothing is insisted on more 
 emphatically in Chesterfield's teaching than strict 
 veracity, and not less emphatically is the practice of 
 justice inculcated. Thus, in commenting on a remark 
 which his son had made in a Latin exercise, he writes : 
 
 Let no quibbles of lawyers, no refinements of casuists break 
 into the plain notions of right and wrong. To do as you would 
 be done by is the plain, sure, and undisputed rule of morality 
 and justice. Stick to that, and be assured that whatever breaks 
 into it in any degree, however speciously it may be turned, and 
 however puzzling it may be to answer it, is, notwithstanding, 
 false in itself, unjust and criminal. Letter CXXXII. 
 
 1 The loci classici in Chesterfield on the definition of good breeding are : 
 Letters to Son, vol. i. cxn. CLXVIII. CLXIX. ; vol. ii. xxxvir. xxxix ; to God- 
 son, cxxxv. cxcix. ; and the excellent paper on "Civility and Good Breeding," 
 contributed to the World Miscellaneous Works (Stanhope), vol. v. p. 346.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 251 
 
 But if in his conception of the ideal character any 
 virtue may be said to predominate, it is humanity. 
 To remember that the distinctions made between 
 man and man, except the distinctions made by virtue 
 and culture, are artificial, and to deal with them 
 therefore as with natural equals, is a precept formally 
 expressed indeed only in the later Letters, but it is 
 practically included in the teaching of the former. 
 Few writers are, it is true, more essentially aristo- 
 cratic, but he was aristocratic not in the narrow but 
 in the true sense of the term. " I used to think 
 myself," he says, "in company as much above me 
 when I was with Mr. Addison and Mr. Pope, as if I 
 had been with all the princes of Europe." On his son 
 and on his godson alike he is continually insisting on 
 the duties of philanthropy : 
 
 Humanity inclines, religion requires, and our moral duty 
 obliges us to relieve, as far as we are able, the distresses and 
 miseries of our fellow-creatures ; but this is not all, for a true 
 heartfelt benevolence and tenderness will prompt us to con- 
 tribute what we can to their ease, their amusement, and their 
 pleasure, as far as we innocently may. Let us then not only 
 scatter benefits, but even ; strew flowers for our fellow-travellers, 
 in the rugged ways of this wretched world. Letters to Godson, 
 cxxx. 
 
 Such is the ideal at which, in Chesterfield's con- 
 ception, education should aim. It is the attainment 
 and maintenance of perfect harmony among all the 
 elements which make complete man ; it is the adjust- 
 ment of the whole nature in all its parts, in perfect 
 symmetry; an endeavour to prevent, what Plato 
 would prevent, a life moving without grace or
 
 252 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 rhythm. 1 It is curious to notice how near this 
 rhythmic notion of culture and character sometimes 
 brings him to the Republic. He does not indeed 
 attach the same importance or see so clearly the same 
 significance in gymnastics, dancing, and music as 
 Plato ; and yet, when giving his godson a receipt 
 for checking excessive emotion, he says, " Do every- 
 thing in minuet time ; speak, think, and move 
 always in that measure, equally free from the dulness 
 of slow or the hurry and huddle of quick time : " 
 we see how much in this point, at least, his ideas 
 were those of the Greeks. 3 
 
 On an impartial review, then, of Chesterfield's 
 theory of education, how little fault is to be found 
 with it ! Indeed, it would be difficult to see in what 
 respect a character formed on such an ideal could be 
 regarded as deficient. In what virtue, in what accom- 
 plishment, would he be lacking, either in his relation 
 to public or in his relation to private life? Where 
 would he be weak, in what point unsound? And 
 yet we cannot lay down these Letters without a sense 
 of their utter unsatisfactoriness as teachings. The 
 impression they leave on us is very like that left on 
 us by Seneca's Epistles to Lucilius the impression of 
 unreality; though for a very different reason. The 
 impression of unreality in the case of Seneca is caused, 
 not so much by what he preaches, as from the un- 
 conscious reflection in what he preaches of the 
 
 dfipvOfulas re ical dxapurrlas (Sep. iii. 411). 
 2 Letter cxxxv. 
 
 8 See, too, the remarkable chapters on this subject in Elyot's Govemour, 
 Book I. cap. xxii. seqq.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 253 
 
 insincerity of the preacher. We feel that his precepts 
 and lectures are no more in keeping with the truth 
 of his own life than his eulogy on Poverty was 
 in keeping with the priceless table on which it was 
 written. But the impress of sincerity is on every 
 page of Chesterfield. The ideal he drew he had in 
 himself realised. The unreality and unsatisfactoriness 
 of his system lay in its attempt to revive an ideal, 
 which it is now impossible to revive, at all events 
 popularly. It lay, to employ a word which has little 
 to recommend it, but for which our language has no 
 equivalent, in its pure paganism. His whole philo- 
 sophy is of the world, worldly. Of the spiritual, of 
 the transcendental, of the enthusiastic, it has nothing. 
 He attaches, it is true, the very greatest importance 
 to conventional religion, but he does so, it is evident, 
 for the same reasons that the ancient legislators and 
 moralists did so. The deference which he pays to 
 Christianity is, we feel, no more than the deference 
 which would have been paid to it by any wise and 
 well-natured man of the old world, who knew the 
 needs it was meeting and was aware of its virtues. 
 Of its essence there is as little or as much as there 
 is in the Aristotelian Ethics or in the Enchiridion. 
 In one important point, indeed, its teachings are set 
 aside altogether, and that point a point on which the 
 ancient standard of morals cannot be substituted for 
 the standards now immutably fixed by Christian 
 ethics. Again, no considerations either of a future 
 state or of a divine guidance affect in any way what 
 is prescribed or suggested. On the contrary, the
 
 254 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 sentiment of Juvenal, "nullum numen abest si sit 
 prudentia" we have every deity we need if we have 
 prudence is constantly quoted with the strongest ex- 
 pressions of approval. The end and aim of his teach- 
 ing throughout is success in life, not as the vulgar 
 estimate it, nor as transcendentalists like Plato and 
 Emerson would estimate it, but as Aristippus and 
 Horace would estimate it. 
 
 A philosophy of this kind is now an anachronism. 
 The Religion which has revolutionised the world has 
 made havoc of such ideals. It has turned much 
 which once passed for wisdom into foolishness. 
 Much that in ancient days constituted the moral 
 sublime is now impiety, and the sentiments in which 
 it found expression, profanity. What in the eyes 
 of Pericles and Cato were venial follies, have become 
 deadly sins. Success in life, as success in life is 
 defined even in the scriptures of the Lyceum and the 
 Porch, is such as would ill satisfy the modern con- 
 science. The very name of the quality on which 
 ancient sages most prided themselves has been trans- 
 formed into a term of opprobrium. The world 
 cannot go back. And the fate of Chesterfield's 
 teachings is indeed typical of what is likely to be 
 the fate, and particularly in England, of all such 
 teachings when they aspire to provide a complete 
 rule of life. But no possible good can be done by 
 misrepresentation and falsehood, and, much as wise 
 men must respect the prejudice which exists against 
 these writings, the form in which that prejudice has 
 found expression cannot be too strongly condemned.
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 255 
 
 It is not to be condemned only, it is to be deplored. 
 It is in the judgments of men like Chesterfield that 
 conventional religious truths find their strongest 
 collateral security. Absolutely unprejudiced and 
 absolutely independent, he brings to bear on the 
 facts of life, of which he had had a much wider 
 and more varied experience than falls to the lot 
 of many men, an intellect of extraordinary acuteness 
 and sagacity, a judgment eminently discriminating 
 and sober, and a temper strictly under the dominion 
 of reason. He had studied, with minute and patient 
 attention, the questions which are of the most vital 
 interest to man and society, and the conclusions at 
 which he arrived he has, regardless of anything but 
 what he believed to be the truth, and with no object 
 but the purest and most unselfish of all objects, 
 both set forth and explained. That these conclusions 
 should in so many important respects be identical 
 with those of Christian moralists, that they should 
 have convinced him of the wisdom of the strongest 
 conservatism in what pertains to our religious system, 
 and of the folly and wickedness of attempting to 
 undermine it, is surely testimony not interesting 
 merely, but of much value. Truth has many sides, 
 and has need of many supports. What Locke 
 observed of Revelation, that it was a republication 
 of Natural Religion, is in a measure, if we may say 
 so without irreverence, applicable to such works as 
 these ; they are a republication, fragmentary indeed, 
 and not without alloy, but in an independent form, 
 of conventional truths.
 
 256 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Matthew Arnold has said of Butler's Analogy that 
 whatever may be thought of its philosophy, its perusal 
 is a valuable exercise for the mind. We are tempted 
 to make a similar remark about Chesterfield's writings. 
 They are not, indeed, likely to be of benefit in the 
 sense intended by Matthew Arnold. They will not, 
 that is to say, discipline our reasoning faculties, or 
 tend to form habits of close concentration ; but they 
 will be of benefit to us as communion with men of 
 superior intellect and temper is of benefit. The 
 charm of Chesterfield lies in his sincerity and truth- 
 fulness, in his refined good sense, in his exquisite 
 perception of the becoming, finding expression in 
 seriousness most happily tempered by gaiety. Of 
 no man could it be more truly said that he had 
 cleared his mind of cant. A writer more absolutely 
 devoid of pretentiousness or affectation cannot be 
 found. Of moral and intellectual frippery he has 
 nothing. Sophistry and paradox are his abhorrence. 
 All he has written bears, indeed, the reflection of a 
 character which is of all characters perhaps the rarest 
 " the character of one " it was what Voltaire said 
 of him " who had never been in any way either a 
 charlatan or a dupe of charlatans." He is one of the 
 very few writers who never wears a mask, and in 
 whose accent no falsetto note can ever be detected. 
 In his fearless intellectual honesty he reminds us of 
 Swift, in his pellucid moral candour he reminds us 
 of Montaigne. To contemplate life, not as it presents 
 itself under the glamour or the gloom of illusion and 
 prejudice, as it presents itself to the enthusiast or the
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 257 
 
 cynic, but as it really is ; to regard ignorance as mis- 
 fortune and vice as evil, but the false assumption of 
 wisdom and virtue as something far worse ; to be or 
 to strive to be what pride would have us seem, and 
 to live worthily within the limits severally prescribed 
 by nature and fortune all this will the study of 
 Chesterfield's philosophy tend to impress on us. Nor 
 is it in his judgments only on life and on life's 
 important concerns that this sincerity, this pure 
 sincerity, is conspicuous. It is equally apparent in 
 all that concerns himself, in the frank admissions 
 which he makes to his son of his own follies and short- 
 comings, in the unaffected modesty with which he 
 has spoken of his writings, and in the remarkable 
 illustration afforded by those writings themselves 
 of the conscientiousness with which he carried out 
 his own precept, that " whatever is worth doing at all 
 is worth doing well." It is difficult to believe that 
 these compositions, finished as they almost all of 
 them are to the finger-nail, were intended for no 
 eyes but those of his son and his son's tutor. And 
 yet such, as we learn from the Letters themselves, 
 was the case. 
 
 In Chesterfield is united as in no other English 
 writer is united, in equal measure at least, so much 
 of what is best in the intellectual temper of the 
 French and in the intellectual temper of the English. 
 He has much of the sterling good sense of Johnson, 
 and, if we penetrate below the surface, much also of 
 Johnson's seriousness and solidity. He resembles 
 Swift, not merely in his intolerance of sophistry and
 
 258 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 dishonesty in all that pertains to sentiment and 
 principle, but in his shrewd and homely mother-wit, 
 and in his keen, clear insight into positive as 
 distinguished from transcendental truth. Franklin 
 himself is not more purely practical, or Paley more 
 purely utilitarian. But it was not these qualities which 
 led Sainte-Beuve to speak of him as the La Roche- 
 foucauld of England, nor is it these qualities which 
 give him his peculiar place among English authors. 
 It still remains that, in spite of so much which is 
 characteristic of the English genius and the English 
 temper, the impression he makes on us is that he is 
 one of the most un-English of English authors. And 
 this is easily explained. What strikes us in a building 
 is not the foundation but the superstructure. In 
 Chesterfield it is the foundation, and the foundation 
 only, which is English ; the superstructure is French. 
 Or, to employ his own happy illustration, what is 
 English in him stands in the same relation to what is 
 French as the Tuscan order in Architecture stands to 
 the Doric, Ionian, and Corinthian orders ; as un- 
 adorned solidity stands to the charm in contrast of 
 attractive ornament. We admire in him what we 
 admire in La Bruyere and La Rochefoucauld, what 
 we admire in Voltaire, what we admire, in short, in the 
 literature most characteristic of the Grand Siecle. 
 But if we look a little more closely we cannot fail 
 to be struck with the manner in which English 
 characteristics in Chesterfield tempered the French. 
 His solid good sense never deserts him : he is at 
 bottom serious, at bottom earnest. Thus, nice and
 
 LORD CHESTERFIELD'S LETTERS 259 
 
 delicate as his faculty of discrimination is, it never, 
 as is so often the case with La Bruyere, refines itself 
 into over-niceness and over-subtlety, and never, as is 
 habitually the case with La Rochefoucauld, fritters 
 itself away in brilliant falsehoods or in specious half- 
 truths. If he has much in common with Voltaire, 
 he has nothing of Voltaire's recklessness, nothing of 
 his shallow drollery, nothing of his mere frivolity. 
 
 The style of Chesterfield is the exact reflection 
 of himself. It is the finished expression, not of 
 rhetorical culture, but of the culture by which all 
 that constitutes character is moulded. It is the 
 unlaboured result of labour ; the spontaneous product 
 of a peculiar soil which had been assiduously culti- 
 vated during half a lifetime. Absolutely unaffected, 
 simply original, and without mannerisms of any 
 kind, it is a style which no mechanical skill could 
 have attained, and which no mechanical skill can 
 copy. It is not merely that it is distinguished by 
 "those careless inimitable graces" which Gibbon in 
 describing Hume's style speaks of himself as "con- 
 templating with admiring despair," but that it has 
 the indefinable charm, the incommunicable timbre 
 of the perfect, of the essential aristocratic of the 
 aristocrat, it must now be added, of a school which 
 is no more. Its secret was no doubt partly learned 
 in the salons of the Faubourg St. Germains, and 
 from intimate sympathetic communion with men 
 and writers who, whether living or dead, whether 
 in ancient Italy or modern England and France, 
 belonged like himself either by birth or association
 
 260 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 to the Optimates. "We know no writings from the 
 pen of mere men of letters in which the note of 
 Chesterfield is for a moment discernible. But as 
 soon as we turn to the Letters of Cicero and the 
 younger Pliny, to the Letters and Essays of Temple 
 and Bolingbroke, to the writings of La Bruyere and 
 La Rochefoucauld, we recognise at once the same 
 tone and accent. We appear indeed to discern his 
 models, but the resemblance, as we soon perceive, 
 is not the resemblance of imitation, it is the re- 
 semblance of kinship. In two respects the diction 
 of Chesterfield is especially noticeable, in its 
 exquisite finish, and in its scrupulous purity. It 
 is the perfection of the epistolary style, flexibly 
 adapting itself with the utmost ease and propriety 
 to what, in varying tones, is expressed or suggested, 
 now neat, pointed, epigrammatic, now gracefully 
 diffuse, now rising to dignity; but always natural 
 and always easy. Though he abhorred pedantry, 
 Cicero and Pollio themselves were not more scrupulous 
 purists in Latinity than Chesterfield in the use of 
 English. He had all that punctilious regard for the 
 nicest accuracy of expression, which made Cicero 
 at the most critical moment of his life almost as 
 anxious about the correct employment of a preposi- 
 tion and a verb as about the movements of Pompey. 
 An ungrammatical sentence, a loose or ambiguous 
 expression, a word unauthorised by polite usage, 
 or, if coined, coined improperly a vulgarism or 
 solecism indeed in any form, he regarded as little 
 less than a crime in a writer. If it should be pro-
 
 LORD CHESTEEFIELD'S LETTERS 261 
 
 posed to select the two authors who in point of 
 mere purity of diction stand out most conspicuous 
 in our prose literature, it would, we think, be pretty 
 safe to name Macaulay for the one and Chesterfield 
 for the other. We do not say that he is entirely 
 free from blemishes 
 
 quas aut incuria fudit, 
 Aut humana parum cavit natura 
 
 but we do say that he has fewer of them, with the 
 exception of Macaulay, than perhaps any other 
 English classic. 
 
 That of a man so truly remarkable for if as a 
 statesman Chesterfield played a subordinate he played 
 a singularly interesting part there should be no 
 standard biography, that of writings which have so 
 just a claim to be considered classical there should 
 be no standard edition accessible, is not creditable 
 to his countrymen. It is surely high time for both 
 these defects to be supplied. The dull compilation 
 of Maty, which is the only biography in existence 
 worth mentioning, ought long ago to have been 
 superseded. Lord Stanhope's edition of the Works 
 is now so costly that it is beyond the reach, not 
 merely of most private individuals, but of most public 
 libraries. No more interesting contribution to the 
 social and political history of the last century, no more 
 valuable addition to the literature which deserves 
 to become influential and popular, could be made 
 than a really good biography of Chesterfield and a 
 judiciously expurgated and well-edited reprint of his 
 Letters.
 
 262 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Johnson has said that all writers who wish to 
 acquire the art of being familiar without being 
 coarse, and elegant without being ostentatious in 
 style, should give their days and nights to the 
 volumes of Addison. We are none of us likely to 
 give our days and nights either to the volumes of 
 Addison or to the volumes of Chesterfield. And yet 
 in times like the present we shall do well to turn 
 occasionally to the writings of Chesterfield, and for 
 other purposes than the acquisition of style. In 
 an age distinguished beyond all precedent by reck- 
 lessness, charlatanry, and vulgarity, nothing can be 
 more salutary than communion with a mind and 
 genius of the temper of his. We need the corrective 
 the educational corrective of his refined good 
 sense, his measure, his sobriety, his sincerity, his 
 truthfulness, his instinctive application of aristocratic 
 standards in attainment, of aristocratic touchstones 
 in criticism. We need more, and he has more to 
 teach us. We need reminding that life is success 
 or failure, not in proportion to the extent of what 
 it achieves in part, and in accidents, but in propor- 
 tion to what it becomes in essence, and in proportion 
 to its symmetry.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN 
 CRITICISM 1 
 
 THE fate of Lewis Theobald is without parallel in 
 literary history. It may be said with simple truth 
 that no poet in our own or in any language has ever 
 owed so great a debt to an editor as Shakspeare owes 
 to this man. He found the text of the tragedies and 
 comedies, which is now so intelligible and lucid, in a 
 condition scarcely less deplorable than that in which 
 Aldus found the choruses of ^Eschylus, and Musurus the 
 parabases of Aristophanes, and he contributed more 
 to its certain and permanent settlement than all the 
 other editors from Rowe to Alexander Dyce. And yet 
 there are probably not half-a-dozen men in England 
 who would not be surprised to hear this. To most 
 people indeed he is known only as he was known to 
 Joseph Warton, as the hero of the first editions of the 
 Dunciad, as " a cold, plodding, and tasteless writer 
 and critic, who with great propriety was chosen on 
 the death of Settle by the Goddess of Dulness to be 
 the chief instrument of that great work which was 
 the subject of the poem." Gibbeted in couplets which 
 
 1 The Works of Shakspeare. Collated with the oldest copies, and corrected 
 by Mr. Theobald. London, 1733.
 
 264 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 have passed into proverbs wherever the English 
 language is read, and which every man with any 
 tincture of letters has by heart, his very name has 
 become a synonym for creeping pedantry. No satirist 
 excels, or it would perhaps be more correct to say 
 equals, Pope in the art of employing falsehood in the 
 service of truth. What is untrue of a particular indi- 
 vidual may be true of a class, but while what is true 
 or untrue of a particular individual is of comparatively 
 little moment to the world, what is true of a class is 
 true typically, and is therefore of interest to all man- 
 kind. Of the correctness, for example, of Pope's 
 portrait of the mere verbal scholar, of the justice of 
 the ridicule and contempt with which he has treated 
 philologists as a class, there can be no question. We 
 know how important it is that such men should 
 understand their proper place, and the mischief which 
 has resulted from their not understanding it, and we 
 read with approval, admiration, gratitude. But who 
 stops to consider whether the particular individual 
 who has been selected for ridicule, and whose name 
 has been written under the portrait, is or is not 
 entitled to the ignoble distinction ? He is of no 
 interest as a mere individual ; he has become a type. 
 He has been made the scapegoat of a class whose 
 worst errors and whose worst vices will for ever be 
 associated with him. 
 
 This it is which makes the satire of Pope so truly 
 terrible. It has in some cases literally blasted the 
 characters which it has touched. One of the most 
 delightful autobiographies ever written, and a comedy
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 265 
 
 which is in its way a masterpiece, have been power- 
 less to counteract, nay even to modify, the impression 
 left on the world by the portrait for which Pope made 
 Colley Gibber sit. As long as the loathsome traits 
 which are delineated in the character of " Sporus" repel 
 and sicken mankind, so long will the name of John 
 Lord Hervey be infamous. Of the impotence of 
 truth to contend with the fiction of so great an artist 
 as Pope, the result of Mr. Croker's attempt to vindicate 
 Hervey's fame is a striking illustration. In 1848 Mr. 
 Croker published that nobleman's Memoirs, prefixing 
 an Introduction, in which he proved, as indeed the 
 Memoirs themselves proved, that the original of 
 Pope's picture was a man whose genius and temper 
 had been cast rather in the mould of St. Simon and 
 Tacitus than in that of the foppish and loathsome 
 hermaphrodite with whom he had been associated. 
 But the popular estimate of Hervey remains un- 
 changed. He was " Sporus " to our ancestors, who had 
 neither his Memoirs nor Mr. Croker's Introduction 
 before them, and he is " Sporus " to us who have both, 
 but who, unfortunately for Hervey, care for neither, 
 and know Pope's verses by heart. 
 
 But pre-eminent among the victims of his satire 
 stands Theobald, and Theobald's fate has assuredly 
 been harder than that of any other of his fellow- 
 sufferers. For in his case injustice has been cumula- 
 tive, and it has been his lot to be conspicuous. From 
 the publication of the Dunciad to the present day he 
 has been the butt of almost every critic and biographer 
 of Shakspeare and Pope. Indeed, the shamelessness
 
 266 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 of the injustice with which he has been treated by his 
 brother commentators on Shakspeare exceeds belief. 
 Generation after generation it has been the same 
 story. After plundering his notes and appropriating 
 his emendations, sometimes with, but more generally 
 without, acknowledgment, they all contrive, each in 
 his own fashion, to reproduce Pope's portrait of him. 
 Whenever they mention him, if they do not couple 
 with their remarks some abusive or contemptuous 
 expression, it is with a sort of half-apology for intro- 
 ducing his name. They refer to him, in fact, as a 
 gentleman might refer among his friends to a shoe- 
 black who had just amused him with some witticism 
 while polishing his boots. Perhaps impudence never 
 went further than in Pope's own appropriation of 
 Theobald's labours. Pope's first edition of Shakspeare 
 came out in 1725, and in 1726 Theobald published 
 his Shakspeare Restored, in which he exposed the 
 blunders and defects with which Pope's volumes 
 swarmed, and in which he first gave to the world 
 the greater part of his own admirable emendations. 
 Pope's publishers, probably seeing that an edition 
 containing such a text as he had given would come to 
 be regarded as little better than an imposition on the 
 public, and that no text could be regarded as satisfac- 
 tory without Theobald's corrections and emendations, 
 persuaded the angry poet to bring out a second 
 edition. Accordingly in 1728 appeared Pope's second 
 edition. Coolly incorporating, without a word to in- 
 dicate them, almost all Theobald's best conjectures and 
 regulations of the text, he inserts in his last volume,
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 267 
 
 with an assurance which would have done honour to 
 Voltaire or Junius, the following amusing note : 
 
 Since the publication of our first edition, there having been 
 some attempts upon Shakspeare, published by Lewis Theobald, 
 which he would not communicate during the time wherein that 
 edition was preparing for the press, when we by public advertise- 
 ment did request the assistance of all lovers of this author, we 
 have inserted in this impression as many of 'em as are judged of 
 any the least importance to the Poet the whole amounting to 
 about twenty-five words [a gross misrepresentation of his debt to 
 Theobald]. But to the end that every reader may judge for 
 himself, we have annexed a complete list of the rest, which if he 
 shall think trivial or erroneous, either in part or the whole, at 
 worst it can but spoil but half a sheet of paper that chances to 
 be left vacant here. 
 
 "From this time," says Johnson, "Pope became 
 an enemy to editors, collators, commentators, and 
 verbal critics, and hoped to persuade the world that 
 he miscarried in this undertaking only by having a 
 mind too great for such minute employment." Irri- 
 tated by Theobald's Shakspeare Restored, in which 
 personally he had been treated respectfully, but 
 irritated still more by certain critical remarks which 
 Theobald was in the habit of inserting in a current 
 publication called Mist's Journal? and in which he 
 had not been treated with respect, he had already 
 made the unfortunate critic the hero of the Dunciad. 
 He returned again to the attack, and with much more 
 acrimony, in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot. Pope 
 found an ally in Mallet ; and in Verbal Criticism, a 
 
 1 This is the point of the reference in the couplet 
 
 Old puns restore, lost blunders nicely seek, 
 And crucify poor Shakspeare once a week, 
 
 Dunciad (1st edit.), i. 153, 154.
 
 268 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 satire now deservedly forgotten, but then widely read, 
 poor Theobald took for the third time his place in the 
 pillory. 
 
 His next detractor was Warburton, and of War- 
 burton's conduct it is difficult to speak with patience. 
 The two men had for some years been on intimate 
 terms, and, in a lengthy correspondence, which has 
 been preserved and may be found in Nichols' Illustra- 
 tions of Literature, 1 Theobald had communicated to 
 Warburton, for whom he appears to have had un- 
 bounded admiration, the notes which he was then 
 engaged in drawing up for an intended edition of 
 Shakspeare. Warburton, then an obscure country 
 clergyman, amused himself in leisure moments with 
 scribbling notes and emendations of his own, and 
 these he presented very good-naturedly to Theobald. 
 Of his notes there are not twenty of the smallest 
 value, of his emendations there are not half-a-dozen 
 which are not either superfluous or execrable. Who- 
 ever will compare Theobald's own notes and emenda- 
 tions with those contributed by Warburton will not 
 only see how little he owed to his pompous ally, but 
 how much his work has suffered by being encumbered 
 with Warburton's impertinences. But the spell which 
 Warburton afterwards threw over Pope and Hurd 
 he had succeeded apparently in throwing over poor 
 Theobald. Warburton's contributions he received 
 with abject gratitude, and with abject gratitude he 
 acknowledges them in his Preface and throughout his 
 notes. Indeed, he seems to delight in parading his 
 
 1 Vol. ii. pp. 204-654.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 269 
 
 obligations to his " most ingenious and ever-respected 
 friend." After the publication of the Shakspeare their 
 friendship cooled. Warburton was now rising to 
 eminence, and becoming, no doubt, ashamed of his 
 association with the hero of the Dunciad. An adroit 
 piece of flattery which he had introduced into an 
 article contributed by him to a current periodical had 
 prepared the way for an acquaintance with Pope. 
 His Reply to Crousaz's Examen had greatly pleased 
 Pope ; an introduction to the poet followed, and at 
 the end of 1740 he had become Pope's staunchest ally 
 and most intimate friend. In 1744 Theobald died, 
 and three years afterwards appeared Warburton's 
 edition of Shakspeare. It is to be hoped for the 
 honour of human nature that there are few parallels 
 to the meanness and baseness of which Warburton 
 stands convicted in this work. His object was 
 two-fold. The first and most important was to 
 build the reputation of his own edition on the ruin 
 of his predecessor's, and the next to insinuate that 
 any merit which is to be found in Theobald's 
 edition is to be attributed not to Theobald but 
 to himself. After observing in the Preface that 
 Theobald "succeeded so ill that he left his author 
 in ten times a worse condition than he found him," 
 he goes on to say that " it was my ill-fortune to have 
 some accidental connection with him " ; that " I con- 
 tributed a great number of observations to him," and 
 these, " as he wanted money, I allowed him to print." l 
 
 1 Capell had in his possession, so the Cambridge editors tell us, a copy of 
 Theobald's Shakspeare which had belonged to Warburton. In this copy
 
 270 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 He then proceeds to draw Theobald's character as an 
 editor and critic : 
 
 Mr. Theobald was naturally turned to industry and labour. 
 What he read he could transcribe ; but as what he thought, if 
 ever he did think, he could but ill express, so he read on ; and 
 by that means got a character of learning without risking to 
 every observer the imputation of wanting a better talent. By 
 a punctilious collation of the old books, he corrected what was 
 manifestly wrong in the later editions by what was manifestly 
 right in the earlier. And this is his real merit, and the whole 
 of it. ... Nor had he either common judgment to see, or 
 critical sagacity to amend, what was manifestly faulty. Hence 
 he generally exerts his conjectural talent in the wrong place. 
 He tampers with what is sound in the common books, and in the 
 old ones omits all notice of variations the sense of which he did 
 not understand. 
 
 Having thus disposed of his dead friend in the 
 Preface, he proceeds to appropriate his labours. He 
 adopts Theobald's text as the basis of his own ; he 
 steals his illustrations; he incorporates, generally with- 
 out a word of acknowledgment, most of Theobald's 
 best emendations, carefully assigning to him such as 
 are of little importance, while in his notes he keeps up 
 a running fire of sneers and sarcasms. Of many of 
 his most felicitous emendations he robs him by a 
 device so despicable that it deserves notice. Incor- 
 porating the emendation, he adds in a note, " Spelt 
 
 Warburton had, we are told, claimed the notes which he gave to Theobald, 
 and ' ' which Theobald deprived him of and made his own." If in this copy, 
 which we have not had the opportunity of inspecting, Warburton has laid 
 claim to more than Theobald has assigned to him, we believe him to be guilty 
 of dishonesty even more detestable than that of which the proofs are, as we 
 have shown, indisputable. No one who reads Theobald's notes can for one 
 moment doubt his honesty. So far from concealing obligations, he seems to 
 delight in acknowledging them. If a friend or anonymous correspondent 
 supplied him with any information, or even with a suggestion or hint of 
 which he has availed himself, it is always scrupulously noted.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 271 
 
 right by Mr. Theobald." It is thus that he treats the 
 exquisite correction of " bisson conspicuities " for 
 besom (Coriolanus, Act ii. Sc. 1) ; of shows for 
 shoes in the line "As great Alcides shoes upon an 
 ass " (King John, Act ii. Sc. 2) ; of eisel (i.e. vinegar) 
 for Esile in " Woo't drink up Esile, eat a crocodile " 
 (Hamlet, Act v. Sc. l), though he knew perfectly well 
 that the word, being printed in italics in the old 
 copies, had always been supposed to mean the name 
 of some river, till Theobald restored not only the 
 spelling but the sense. Nor is this all ; he has, in 
 more than one case, attributed to others notes and 
 corrections which Theobald had, as he well knew, 
 communicated to him in the long correspondence which 
 had passed between them some years before. 
 
 But Theobald's reputation was to find a new 
 assailant far more formidable than Warburton, and 
 not less formidable than Pope. It is difficult to 
 account for Dr. Johnson's hostility. He was hardly 
 the man to be guilty of deliberate injustice. He had 
 perhaps not troubled himself to consult Theobald's 
 work with any care, but had been content to take his 
 character and achievements on trust from Pope and 
 Warburton. He describes him as " a man of narrow 
 comprehension and small acquisitions, with no native 
 and intrinsic splendour of genius, with little of the 
 artificial light of learning, but zealous for minute 
 accuracy, and not negligent in attaining it." He 
 comments also on the "inflated emptiness" of some 
 of his notes, describes him as " weak and ignorant," 
 and though he allows " that what little he did was
 
 272 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 commonly right," reproduces, in effect, the portrait 
 drawn of him by Pope and Warburton. Unhappily 
 too for Theobald's fame, Johnson's detraction is not 
 confined to the Preface to his Shakspeare, which 
 nobody reads, but is repeated in the Lives of the 
 Poets, which all the world reads. And what he wrote 
 he said, and to what he said Boswell has given wings. 
 "You think, sir," Dr. Burney was the speaker 
 " that Warburton is a superior critic to Theobald." 
 " Oh, sir," replied the sage, " he'd make two-and-fifty 
 Theobalds cut into slices." Johnson's treatment of 
 Theobald is, it may be added, the more remarkable, 
 because some twenty years before, in his Miscellaneous 
 Observations on Macbeth, he had spoken of Theobald 
 with great respect, observing of his emendations that 
 "some of them are so excellent, that even when he 
 has failed he ought to be treated with indulgence and 
 respect." 
 
 But the public had been wiser than the critics. 
 Between 1733 and 1757 Theobald's work had passed 
 through three editions, the first two of which had 
 alone circulated no less than 12,860 copies 1 ; while 
 between 1757 and 1773 it had been reprinted four 
 times. This accounts, no doubt, for the persistency, 
 if not for the rancour, of the attacks which were made 
 on him and his labours by rival editors. As we come 
 to the later editors, to Capell and Malone, for instance 
 Steevens, by the way, had the honesty to do him 
 some justice we find no indications of hostility. 
 They simply assume him to be all that Pope, War- 
 
 1 Nichols, Illustrations of Literature, vol. ii. p. 714.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 273 
 
 burton, and Johnson had represented, a dull and 
 plodding drudge 
 
 a wight that scans and spells ; 
 A word-catcher that lives on syllables 
 
 and content themselves with appropriating his labours. 
 "That his (Theobald's) work should at this day be 
 considered of any value," coolly observes Malone, 
 whose own edition of Shakspeare is, in almost every 
 page, indebted to the man of whom he thus speaks, 
 "only shows how long impressions will remain when 
 they are once made." 
 
 Coleridge, who appears to have known nothing 
 about Theobald, except what he had learned from 
 Warburton, next took up the cry, and, in his Notes 
 and Lectures on Shakspeare, never mentions him 
 without coupling his name with some contemptuous 
 expression. With assailants so formidable, and with 
 those whose studies particularly qualified them for 
 appreciating his services to criticism resorting on 
 principle to such devices for concealing and misrepre- 
 senting them, it is not surprising that the world's 
 estimate of Theobald should be what it is. The 
 many have neither leisure nor ability to form con- 
 clusions for themselves. The crowd moves with the 
 crowd, and the mass follows the bell-wethers. In 
 this particular case the bell-wethers have, unfortu- 
 nately for Theobald, been Pope and Johnson ; and 
 whoever will take the trouble to turn to the opinions 
 which have recently been expressed about our critic, 
 will see a most amusing illustration of the ways of the 
 flock. Mr. Courthope follows, meekly and obediently,
 
 274 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 the guiding tinkle, and in his pages the only virtue 
 possessed by Theobald is that he was not " so malig- 
 nant as many of the other dunces." "He was, in 
 fact, utterly insignificant : and if he had not been 
 unlucky enough to venture on a criticism of Pope's 
 edition of Shakspeare, he might have remained in 
 peaceful obscurity." l Mr. Leslie Stephen, though he 
 shows no disposition to rebel, follows without any 
 consonant bleat and is plainly uneasy ; in fact, he 
 compromises the matter by remaining silent about 
 Theobald's merits or demerits, merely remarking that 
 he was an "unlucky writer, to whom the merit is 
 attributed of having first illustrated Shakspeare by 
 a study of the contemporary literature." 2 But the 
 Cambridge editors are courageously recalcitrant, and 
 break away altogether with " Theobald, as an editor, is 
 incomparably superior to his predecessor, and to his 
 immediate successor Warburton, although the latter 
 had the advantage of working on his materials. . . . 
 Many most brilliant emendations, such as could not 
 have suggested themselves to a mere ' cold, plodding^ 
 and tasteless critic/ are due to him." 3 This is some- 
 thing, but it is not much. To be superior, and even 
 incomparably superior, to such editors as Pope and 
 Warburton, would be no great honour to any one. 
 However, it was a bleat of dissent ; and feeble though 
 it was, it was loud enough to reach the ears of Dr. 
 Birkbeck Hill, whom it suddenly arrested. If any- 
 thing which is not exactly stated can be plain, it is 
 
 1 Life of Pope, p. 218. 2 Monograph on Pope, p. 121. 
 
 3 Cambridge Shakspeare, p. xxxi.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 275 
 
 plain from Dr. Hill's note * on Theobald that he had 
 no suspicion that Johnson's estimate of him was a 
 wrong one ; nay, that he is by no means clear even 
 now that Johnson was not in the right. But the 
 Cambridge editors have made him very uncomfortable, 
 and he stands at gaze in a note in which he expresses 
 no opinion of his own, but transcribes the remarks of 
 the Cambridge editors, adding silently two specimens 
 of Theobald's emendations. Dr. Birkbeck Hill may, 
 if he ever meets them, feel quite at ease both with 
 the shade of Johnson and with the shade of Theobald. 
 How poor Theobald's reputation is likely to stand 
 with those who go to Biographical Dictionaries and 
 Encyclopaedias for their knowledge may be judged 
 from the account given of him in the last edition of 
 the Encyclopaedia Britannica : 
 
 Theobald (Lewis) will survive as the prime butt of the 
 original Dunciad, when as a playwright, a litterateur, a trans- 
 lator, and even as a Shakspearian commentator he will be 
 entirely forgotten. He was a man with literary impulses, but 
 without genius, even of a superficial kind. As a student, as a 
 commentator, he might have led a happy and enviable life, had 
 not the vanity of the literary idea led him into a false position 
 
 a model, it may be added, both in style and matter, 
 of what an article in an Encyclopaedia should be. 
 
 But it is time to turn to Theobald himself, and we 
 trust our readers will not think us tedious if we state 
 at length his claims to be regarded not only as the 
 father of Shakspearian criticism, but as the editor to 
 whom, our great poet is most deeply indebted. To 
 speak of any of the eighteenth-century editors in the 
 
 1 Edition of Boswell's Johnson, vol. i. p. 329.
 
 276 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 same breath with him is absurd. In the first place 
 he had what none of them possessed a fine ear for 
 the rhythm of blank verse, and the nicest sense of the 
 nuances of language as well in relation to single words 
 as to words in combination faculties which, as it is 
 needless to say, are indispensable to an emendator of 
 Shakspeare, or, indeed, of any other poet. In every 
 department of textual criticism he excelled. In 
 its humbler offices, in collation, in transcription, in 
 the correction of clerical errors, he was, as even his 
 enemies have frankly admitted, the most patient 
 and conscientious of drudges. To the elucidation of 
 obscurities in expression or allusion, and for the pur- 
 poses of illustrative commentary generally, he brought 
 a stock of learning such as has never perhaps been 
 found united in any other commentator on Shak- 
 speare. An accomplished Greek scholar, 1 as his trans- 
 
 1 He translated, and very meritorious translations they are, the Electra, 
 the Ajax, and the (Edipus Rex of Sophocles ; the Nubes and Plutus of Aristo- 
 phanes ; the Hero and Leander of the Pseudo-Musreus ; and the Phccdo of 
 Plato. His corrections and emendations of the authors referred to will be 
 found in Jortin's Miscellaneous Observations, vol. ii. ; in Nichols' Illustrations 
 of Literature, vol. ii. ; in the Preface and Notes to his Shakspeare passim. 
 He left also some notes on ^Eschylus, with emendations, which Blomfield used 
 when preparing his edition. See Blomfield's Prometheus (edit. 1810), note 
 following the Preface. 
 
 Scholars may perhaps be interested to see two or three specimens of Theo- 
 bald's emendations of Greek texts. In an ancient epitaph printed in Wheeler's 
 Greek Antiquities and Inscriptions appeared this couplet 
 
 HapBtvov T)S dire'Avo-e /j.iTpr)v H2APION a.v9os 
 "Eoxev ei> ^fiiTeAet ifavtra.ft.evov 0a\dfj.ia. 
 
 For the unintelligible yo-Spiov he proposes most felicitously ^y rjpivbv. Bent- 
 ley might have envied the following emendation of a passage in Eustathius, 
 who is speaking of the Thersites episode : d\X& xdpiv ytXarros etfreAe/as r; 
 KW/J-ipdla ffrox^frai, ravra dt ir&vra. irapa T<J> Tronrrfj tuprfrai' KUfjugSGiv fj.tt> yap 
 KATAPPIIITEI rbv Qepfflrrfv. This of course makes no sense, as Homer says 
 nothing about Thersites being thrown down. By the alteration of one letter 
 Theobald restores the passage reading Karappdirrfi he interprets "comcedum
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 277 
 
 lations from Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Plato, as 
 well as his emendations of ^Eschylus, Suidas, Athen- 
 aeus, Hesychius, and others abundantly prove, his 
 acquaintance with Greek literature was intimate and 
 extensive. His notes teem with most apposite illus- 
 trations drawn not merely from the writings with 
 which all scholars are more or less familiar, but from 
 the fragments of Menander and Philemon, from the 
 Anthology, and from the miscellaneous literature of 
 Alexandria and Byzantium. His illustrations from 
 the Roman classics and they range from Ennius to 
 Boethius are still more numerous. He appears to 
 have been well versed also in Italian, French, and 
 Spanish, an accomplishment which assisted him 
 greatly in his work as an editor and commentator. 
 It not only supplied him with many happy parallels 
 and illustrations, but it enabled him to trace many 
 legends and traditions to their source, and, what was 
 more important, it enabled him to correct the gibberish 
 into which words in these languages, or unnaturalised 
 words derived from these languages, were almost in- 
 variably transformed in the text of the quartos and 
 folios. To our own language and literature he had 
 
 o o 
 
 evidently paid much attention. He was one of the 
 very few men of his time who possessed some know- 
 ledge of Anglo-Saxon and early Middle English. The 
 frequency and aptness of his quotations from the 
 
 autem agens (Poeta) Thersitem operi suo asserit (vel inserit)." So again the 
 Scholiast on Aristophanes, Acharnians 733, commenting on the words of the 
 poor Megarean, who in his hunger is coming to sell his two daughters, aKotierov 
 5rj, Tror^x er ' *fd v r & v yaffrtpa, closes his note by observing fjiiKpa 8t TJ Hvvoia T($ 
 Tror]Trj, which of course has no point, but Theobald, substituting o for K, read- 
 ing fuapa for fUKpd, undoubtedly restores the proper word.
 
 278 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Canterbury Tales proved his familiarity with Chaucer. 
 Thus, in correcting the absurd expression in the Two 
 Gentlemen of Verona (Act iv. Sc. 4), " Her eyes are 
 grey as grass" he recalled Chaucer's Prioress, " Her 
 eyen grey as glass," and detected the true reading in 
 a moment. Though he seems, like all his contem- 
 poraries, to have known comparatively little of the 
 minor poets and prose writers of the Elizabethan age, 
 he had carefully studied Spenser, and his knowledge 
 of the dramatists who immediately preceded and who 
 surrounded and followed Shakspeare was probably 
 greater than that possessed by any scholar in England 
 till the appearance of Malone. 1 To these stores of 
 general erudition he added a minute and particular 
 acquaintance with all those books which are known to 
 have furnished Shakspeare with materials for his plots, 
 or which he would have been likely to consult. He 
 was the first to collate the English Historical Plays 
 with Holinshed's Chronicles, and the Roman Plays with 
 North's Plutarch ; and he was thus enabled to detect 
 and rectify many errors in the text, as well as to throw 
 light on much that was obscure both in allusions 
 and in incidents. He was the first also to collate the 
 romantic comedies and tragi-comedies with the Italian 
 
 1 He says himself, Preface to his Shakspeare (first edit.), p. Ixviii., that 
 he had read "above 800 old English plays" for the purpose of illustrating 
 Shakspeare. If Malone's assertion that there were only about 550 plays 
 printed before the Restoration, exclusive of those \vritten by Shakspeare, 
 Jonson, and Fletcher, be correct, this must be an exaggeration. However 
 this may be, it is certain that his acquaintance with this branch of literature 
 was unusually extensive. His library certainly contained, as the advertise- 
 ment of the sale testifies, ' ' 295 old English Plays in Quarto, some of them so 
 scarce as not to be had at any price " ; many of them, it adds, full of Theobald's 
 manuscript notes (see Reed's note in Variorum Shakspeare, vol. i. p. 404).
 
 THE POESON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 279 
 
 novels, and with the happiest results, both particularly 
 with reference to the correction of the text, and gener- 
 ally with reference to illustrative commentary. 
 
 Nor are the obligations under which he has laid 
 succeeding commentators less when we take into 
 account the light which he has thrown on Shak- 
 speare's more recondite allusions. His notes are indeed 
 a mine of miscellaneous learning, clearing up fully 
 and once for all what might have remained undetected 
 for generations. Thus in Twelfth Night (Act v. Sc. 1 ) 
 occurs the line 
 
 Had I the heart to do it, 
 Like to the Egyptian thief at point of death, 
 Kill what I love ? 
 
 an allusion, as Theobald points out, to a passage in 
 the JEthiopica of Heliodorus (book vii.). So again 
 in the same play, Act iii. Sc. 2, in the words, " Taunt 
 him with the licence of ink ; if thou thoust him some 
 thrice it shall not be amiss," his knowledge of the 
 State Trials enabled him to detect an allusion to Coke's 
 brutal taunt to Raleigh: "All that he did was by 
 thy instigation, thou Viper, for I thou thee, thou 
 Traitor." * Thus his curious reading in old and for- 
 gotten Elizabethan plays enabled him to explain the 
 allusions in " Basilisco-like " (King John, Act i. ad 
 fin.); "Clapt on the shoulder and call'd Adam" 
 (Much Ado, Act i. Sc. 1); "John Drum's entertain- 
 ment" (All's Well that Ends Well, Act iii. Sc. 6), 
 
 1 We now know from Manningham's Diary that Twelfth Night must have 
 been composed two-and-a-half years before Raleigh's trial ; but as it did not 
 appear in print till 1623, there is no reason why this passage may not have 
 been added after the trial ; indeed, nothing is more likely.
 
 280 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 and many others of a similar kind. So, too, his 
 curious reading in such writers as Dares Phrygius, 
 Tiraquellus, and Alexander ab Alexandro enabled him 
 to correct the passage, much of it mere jargon, in the 
 prologue to Troilus and Cressida enumerating the 
 Trojan gates, while his acquaintance with Caxton's 
 Trojan CJironicles led him to the true explanation 
 of the " dreadful Sagittary " in the same play. His 
 knowledge of the controversial religious literature of 
 the Elizabethan age, and of pamphlets illustrating the 
 social life of that time, enabled him to clear up many 
 minor obscurities, and to show the point of allusions 
 w^hich, being purely local, had long ceased to be 
 significant. A remarkable instance of this is his note 
 on Edgar's mad speeches in King Lear, in which he 
 comments on the art with which Shakspeare has, with 
 the object of pleasing James I., so worded Edgar's 
 gibberish as to make it a medium for conveying 
 covert satire on an affair then greatly annoying the 
 King. It is, by the way, due also to Theobald to 
 point out that he has in this same note anticipated 
 Coleridge in distinguishing between the jargon of 
 Edgar as indicating assumed madness and that of 
 Lear as indicating real madness. " What Lear says," 
 remarks Theobald, "for the most part springs either 
 from the source and fountain of his disorder, the 
 injuries done him by his daughters, or his desire of 
 being revenged on them. What Edgar says seems a 
 fantastic wildness only extorted to disguise sense and 
 to blunt the suspicion of his concealment." * 
 
 1 Shakspeare (1st edit.), vol. v. p. 165.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 281 
 
 Nor are the sound judgment and good sense of 
 Theobald less conspicuous than his learning. To 
 taunt him with pedantry, the ordinary charge against 
 him, is ridiculous. If his notes are often too verbose 
 and polemical, his sentences loose and perplexed, 
 and his diction too vulgarly colloquial, his matter is 
 generally pertinent and almost always instructive. 
 He never peddles over mere trifles, and " monsters 
 nothings." In explaining obscure or ambiguous 
 passages, one of the most important duties of a com- 
 mentator on Shakspeare, he is as a rule singularly 
 lucid and intelligent. His note, for example, on the 
 difficult line in Oymbeline, "And make them 
 dreaded, to the doer's thrift," is a model of what 
 such notes should be. His punctuation of Shak- 
 speare's text, to which we shall have presently to recur, 
 would in itself refute the sarcasm of Pope, who classes 
 him with those of whom it may be said 
 
 Pains, reading, study are their just pretence, 
 And all they want is spirit, taste, and sense. 
 
 Had Theobald's services extended no further than 
 we have described, he would have been entitled to 
 great respect. But it was not what industry, acquired 
 learning, good taste, and sound judgment enabled 
 him to do that gives him his peculiar place among 
 critics. It was the possession in the highest degree 
 of that fine and rare faculty, if it be not rather an 
 exquisite temper and harmony of various faculties, 
 which seems to admit a critic for a moment into the 
 very sanctuary of genius. In less figurative language,
 
 282 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 it is the faculty of divining and recovering, as by the 
 power of some subtle sympathy, the lost touch, the 
 touch of magic, often in the expression of poetry so 
 precarious and delicate that, dependent on a single 
 word, a stroke of the pen may efface, just as a stroke 
 of the pen may restore it. 
 
 "We have compared Theobald with Porson. He 
 seems to us to stand in precisely the same relation to 
 Shakspeare as Porson stands to Greek poetry, and 
 more particularly to the Attic dramatists. And they 
 both stand par nobile fratrum at the head of 
 emendatory criticism in England, not in its applica- 
 tion to prose or to any form of expression which is 
 simply prosaic, for in these walks Porson had some- 
 times a rival in Bentley, and Theobald in Warburton, 
 but in its application to the secrets of poetry. And 
 this of course is the sphere in which emendatory 
 criticism finds its highest exercise. What dis- 
 tinguishes men like Bentley and Warburton from 
 men like Porson and Theobald, in other words what 
 distinguishes mere acuteness and ingenuity in emenda- 
 tory criticism from genius, is a faculty which has no 
 necessary connection with taste, with poetic sensibility, 
 with imagination, but which depends mainly upon 
 the eye and the memory. The difference in truth 
 between this faculty in its highest and in its lower 
 manifestations is not a difference of degree but a 
 difference of kind. It measures the whole distance 
 between genius and mere cleverness. Let us illus- 
 trate. One of the Epigrams of Callimachus (Epig. 50) 
 begins thus :
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 283 
 
 rr)V aXirjv ^iv8rjfj.o<s, <' r)s aAa AITOV eT 
 peyaXovs ee<iryev Savewv 
 
 which had always been interpreted in this way, 
 " Eudemus dedicated to the gods of Samothrace the 
 ship on which he went over a smooth sea and escaped 
 mighty storms of the Danai " (i.e. such storms as the 
 Greek chiefs encountered on their return from Troy, 
 for the perplexed editors had substituted kavawv for 
 Savewv). Bentley, by the change of one letter, a- for 
 X, i.e. eirea-Owv for eVeX0<oi>, transformed the passage 
 into meaning this, " Eudemus dedicated to the gods 
 of Samothrace the salt-cellar from which he ate frugal 
 salt, and so escaped from the mighty storms of usury," 
 in this case, no doubt for aXa \irov could not possibly 
 mean a smooth sea restoring the true reading. Take 
 another. In the Lexicon of Hesychius (sub "Evao-rpo?) 
 appeared this gibberish : "E^ao-r/oo 
 aX<ecrfc/3otcu avrl rov vaaras yap /3 
 Bentley, by simply changing e into at, restores 
 "Ei/ao-T|009 wcrre Mcuya?" 'Ap^aio? ' A\<eoY/3oia ' avrl rov 
 'Ta?* r9 yap $aK.ya<> 'TaSa9 e\eyov, and thus transforms 
 unintelligible nonsense into a source of valuable infor- 
 mation, giving us the title of a drama, the name of 
 its author, and new light on a point of mythology. 
 So again in the Scholia on Odyssey, xi. 546, we 
 have this passage it is referring to Agamemnon's 
 decision as to the relative claims of Ulysses and Ajax 
 to the arms of Achilles : ^Aya^ef^vojv. . . . al^fwXwrov^ 
 rwv Tp<aa)v ayaycbv epairrjo-ev VTTO orrorepov rwv Tpacov 
 01 T/jwe? /xaXXoi/ eXvTnjdrjaav, " Agamemnon brought
 
 284 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 forward the Trojan captives and asked them from 
 which of the two Trojans they had suffered most 
 injury." This nonsense Barnes had corrected by 
 reading avr&v ol Tpwe?, but Bentley by the simple 
 substitution of H for T "from which of the two 
 heroes" struck out the true reading. And these 
 emendations are typical samples of the quality of his 
 emendations generally. They are the result of mere 
 acuteness. Assuming, as of course we have to do, a 
 knowledge of the classical languages at once exact and 
 immense, we need assume no more than may be found 
 in any conveyancer's office, or in any drudge at Mr. 
 Chabot's or at Mr. Netherclift's. Of inspiration, of 
 refined intelligence, of delicacy of taste, of any trace 
 of sympathy with the essentials of poetry, his emenda- 
 tions are totally devoid. If, as is sometimes the case, 
 they are felicitous ingenious, that is to say, without 
 violating poetic propriety it is by pure accident. 
 In many instances they literally beggar burlesque. 
 The sides of his countrymen have long ached with 
 laughter at his transformation of Milton's 
 
 Not light but rather darkness visible, 
 
 into 
 
 Not light but rather a transpicuous gloom ; 
 Of 
 
 Hell heard the insufferable noise, Hell saw 
 
 Heav'n ruining from Heaven, 
 
 into 
 
 Hell heard the hideous cries and yells. Hell saw 
 Heav'n tumbling down from Heav'n ; 
 
 and his alteration of the concluding lines of Paradise 
 Lost
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 285 
 
 They hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow, 
 Through Eden took their solitary way, 
 
 into 
 
 Then hand in hand with social steps their way 
 Through Eden took, with heavenly comfort cheer'd. 1 
 
 1 The stupidity of Bentley's notes is, if possible, more portentous than his 
 emendations. Take his note in defence of his alteration of this very passage : 
 " Why wandering? Erratic steps ? Very improper ; when, in the line before, 
 they were guided by Providence. And why slow, when Eve professed her 
 readiness and alacrity for the journey ? (614). And why their solitary way, 
 when even their former walks in Paradise were as solitary as their way now, 
 there being nobody besides them two, both here and there ? " Or take again 
 the note in which he justified his emendation of 
 
 Thus with the year 
 Seasons return, but not to me returns 
 Day or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn. 
 
 III. 39-41. 
 
 ' ' There must have been a mistake here, Thus seasons return 1 Not a word has 
 been said of it before to give countenance to 'Thus.' From the mention of 
 the nightingale, it seems requisite to alter it thus : 
 
 Tunes her nocturnal note, when with the year 
 Mild Spring returns. 
 
 ' Day or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn ' can hardly be right : the poor 
 man in so many years' blindness had too much of evening. " 
 
 But he reaches his climax perhaps in his commentary on the noble lines 
 
 Nor sometimes forget 
 Those other two equal'd with me in fate, 
 So were I equal'd with them in renown, 
 Blind Thamyris and blind Mseonides, 
 And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old. 
 
 Id. 32-36. 
 
 ' ' Here we have got the Editor's fist again, for the mark of it is easily dis- 
 covered. What more ridiculous than to say those other two, and afterwards 
 to name four. . . . And what occasion to think at times of Tiresias and 
 Phineus, old prophets. Did our poet pretend to prophesy ? He might equally 
 think of any other blind men, such as the Romans Appius or Metellus, of 
 true and higher characters than the three he induces here. Add the bad 
 accent, 'And Tiresias,' the tone in the fourth syllable unused and unnatural. 
 To retrieve this passage from the Editor's polluting hand, it may be thus 
 changed, throwing two verses out 
 
 Nor at times forget 
 
 The Grecian bard equal'd with me in fate, 
 
 O were with him I equal'd in renown." 
 
 How poor Homer would have fared at Bentley's hands may be judged by his 
 precious emendation of Iliad iii. 196, where he proposed to change avrbs 5 
 KT(\OS u>s tirnruXfirai irrlxas dvdpuv into aura/5 ^i\6s 4<i>v, because the poet 
 had said in the preceding line that the arms of Ulysses were lying on the 
 ground.
 
 .286 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Some of his emendations of the Greek poets would 
 have made, we may be sure, a similar impression and 
 have had a similar effect on Pericles and his friends. 
 The greater part of his emendations of Horace would 
 have been received with roars of laughter, not merely 
 in the saloons of the Esquiline, but in the cabin of 
 honest Davus. Take a very few out of very many. 
 In Ode I. xxiii. 5, 6 : 
 
 Nam seu mobilibus veris inhorruit 
 Adventus foliis. 
 
 Here a touch of magically poetic beauty is trans- 
 formed into flat bald prose by the alteration of 
 veris into vepris, and adventus into ad ventum, 
 an emendation as ludicrous as any he has made in 
 Milton. In Ode I. iii. 22- 
 
 Nequidquam Deus abscidit 
 Prudens Oceano dissociabili 
 Terras 
 
 by altering dissociabili into dissociabilis (es), thus 
 separating it from Oceano and associating it with 
 terras, he deprives an exquisitely felicitous epithet of 
 its propriety. Take, again, Ode III. x. : 
 
 Positas ut glaciet nives 
 Puro numine Jupiter. 
 
 It might have been thought that the densest critical 
 perception would have appreciated the singularly 
 vivid power of the epithet puro, but, alas ! 
 
 Turn what they will to verse, their care is vain : 
 Critics like these will make it prose again ; 
 
 and puro becomes in Bentley's text duro ! So again 
 in Ode I. iv., by substituting the variant of the Paris
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 287 
 
 MS. visit for the authentic reading writ, a splendidly 
 graphic picture is obliterated and mere inanity takes 
 its place. Thus, too, in Ode III. xxv. 8, 9, 
 
 In jugis 
 Exsomnis stupet Euias, 
 
 the magnificently graphic epithet exsomnis is altered 
 into Edonis, for, as Bentley sagely observes, " Tantum 
 abest ut exsomnes manserint Bacchae ut prse nimia 
 lassitudine frequenter somnus iis obrepserit." And 
 this statement he gravely proceeds to prove by 
 references to Propertius, Statius, Sidonius, and to the 
 fact that Euripides (Bacchce, 682) distinctly describes 
 them as taking a nap. 1 
 
 Warburton's emendations of Shakspeare are of 
 precisely the same kind. The skill with which he 
 has occasionally corrected passages, where nothing 
 more than mere acuteness was required, was quite 
 compatible with the immense stupidity which has 
 loaded the text of his Shakspeare with emendations 
 of which the following are samples : 
 
 I'll speak a prophecy or ere I go, 
 
 (King Lear, Act iii. Sc. 2) 
 
 altered into 
 
 I'll speak a prophecy or two afore I go ; 
 
 and 
 
 . . . Cuckoo-buds of yellow hue 
 Do paint the meadows with delight, 
 
 (Love's Labour's Lost, Act v. Sc. 2) 
 
 altered into 
 
 Do paint the meadows all bedight. 
 
 1 His emendations of Terence are often equally impertinent and tasteless. 
 For their general character see Hermann's Dissertation De Bentleio ejusque 
 editione Terentii.
 
 288 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 So, again, in the beautiful lines in Coriolanus 
 
 Our veiled dames 
 
 Commit the war of white and damask in 
 Their nicely gauded cheeks to the wanton spoil 
 Of Phoebus' burning kisses 
 
 he alters war into ware, the commodity, the merchan- 
 dise, sapiently observing that " the commixture of 
 white and red could not by any figure of speech be 
 called a war, because it is the agreement and union of 
 the colours that make the beauty." His comments 
 are on a par with his emendations : one sample must 
 suffice. Every one remembers the glorious lines 
 which Antony addresses to Cleopatra 
 
 thou day o' the world, 
 
 Chain mine arin'd neck : leap thou, attire and all, 
 Through proof of harness to my heart, and there 
 Ride on the pants triumphing. 
 
 " Chain mine arm'd neck " is " an allusion," observes 
 Warburton, " to the Gothic custom of men of worship 
 wearing gold chains about the neck." To " ride on 
 the pants triumphing " he appends the following 
 note : " alluding to an Admiral ship on the billows 
 after a storm. The metaphor is extremely fine." 
 
 Let us now turn to Porson and Theobald. In the 
 Agamemnon occur these lines. Clytemnestra is de- 
 scribing how she stabbed her husband, and how in his 
 death-throes he spirted over her a gout of dark 
 blood 
 
 fBdXXei. /A fpe/j.vy ^a/caSt <f>otvia<s 8po<rov t 
 \aipov<rav oi'Sev ?^<rcroi>, fj 810$ 
 yav, ei criroprjTos, KaAv/cos, ev 
 
 a passage plainly corrupt, in rhythm horrible, but out
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 289 
 
 of which the following meaning may be extracted : 
 " He smites me with a dark-red shower (or gout) of 
 murder-dew (me) greeting it (or perhaps joying in it), 
 not less than the earth in the south wind (or rain) of 
 heaven, when the corn-field (is) in the burstings of 
 the sheath," i.e. when the sheaths in which the green 
 ear is enclosed are bursting. By two touches, by sub- 
 stituting through the change of a single letter Bioo-Sorw 
 for Sto5 VOTW, and ydvet for jdv el, the magic of Porson 
 restores sense, grammar, rhythm, poetry, glory ; and 
 either gives again to the world what ^Eschylus ori- 
 ginally wrote, or gives to ^Eschylus himself what he 
 would have been proud to accept. And this noble 
 emendation is typical of his emendations generally. 
 Johnson has observed very rightly that " the justness 
 of a happy restoration strikes at once, and the moral 
 precept may be well applied to" criticism, ' quod 
 dubitas ne feceris.' ' Of no emendations is this more 
 true than of Person's. Unlike those of such critics 
 as Bentley and Wakefield for, immeasurable as was 
 Bentley's superiority to Wakefield in point of ability 
 and attainments, in temper and taste he was as rash 
 and coarse they are seldom or never superfluous. 
 If they do not succeed in satisfying us that the word 
 restored is the exact word lost, they afford us the 
 still higher satisfaction of feeling that nothing which 
 could be recovered could be an improvement on 
 what has been supplied. It is, we think, highly 
 probable that in the Helena, 760, Euripides wrote, 
 if not ovSev 76, at least something like it, but we have 
 
 not the smallest doubt that he would have thanked 
 
 u
 
 290 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Person, as all his editors have done, for ou8 
 Just as in the Medea, 293, we feel certain that in sub- 
 stituting o-revew for o-Qeveiv he divined the word which 
 had been lost ; as he did also in his substitution of 
 Xpewv for the comparatively pointless 6ewv in the 
 line 
 
 \pr) yap 
 
 (Hercules Fur ens, 311). 
 
 Whether his exquisite emendation, one of his most 
 felicitous, in the Medea, 1015, restored to Euripides 
 what Euripides originally wrote, may perhaps be 
 questioned, but what no one would question is that it 
 is an immense improvement on what the poet did 
 write if the reading of the MSS. be correct. The old 
 text stood, the Psedagogus is addressing Medea 
 
 ddpcrei K/aarets TO 6 KCU crv 717305 re/cvwv ert 
 
 " Courage ; thou too art certain still to gain the victory at 
 thy children's hands." 
 
 Medea replies 
 
 ra^w Trpo&Oev fj raAaiv' lyw 
 "Before that, I, wretched that I am, shall bring others home." 
 
 Person, by substituting tcdrei, i.e. " shalt be brought 
 back by thy sons," improved the sense, and, asso- 
 ciating /caret with /eara&>, brought out the tragic play 
 on the word. Take another illustration. Hermesi- 
 anax (Fragmentum, 89-91), commenting on the power 
 of love, is giving instances of the great men who had 
 been under its spell, but when he comes to Socrates 
 the text collapses into corruption as follows :
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 291 
 oiw 8' 
 
 8' dvQpu>Tr<av SwKpaTT/ ev cro(f)irj 
 KVTT/OIS p.~f]Viovcra irvpbs pJevei, 
 
 When this came into Poison's hands conjecture had 
 got as far as oi<p 3' e^Xirjvev, ov, and elvai 'ATroXXtBj/. 
 "Expijo-' avOpcoTrwv. Two touches of the magic pen 
 and all is clear 
 
 oi(p 8' c^Ai^vev, ov lo)(oj/ 
 dvdponrwv ewai ^(HKpaTrj ev tro 
 Kwr/ois fj.r}viov(ra Trvpos /ACVCI. 
 
 "With what furious fire did Cypris in her wrath inflame the 
 man whom Apollo pronounced from his shrine to excel all men 
 in wisdom." 
 
 Person's perception, indeed, of what stupidity, care- 
 lessness, or ignorance had disguised or obscured in 
 the text of an ancient poet, resembled clairvoyance. 
 And even when he failed, his fine and delicate sense 
 of the niceties of rhythm, his. exquisite taste, his 
 refined good sense, his sobriety, his tact, kept him at 
 least from going far astray, and from making himself 
 and his author ridiculous, as Bentley habitually did. 
 
 We have cited some of the best of Person's 
 emendations as typical of the quality of his work 
 generally as a textual critic. We will at once and 
 for the same purpose cite, placing side by side 
 with Person's, one of the palmares emendationes of 
 Theobald. 
 
 In Henry V. the passage which all the world 
 knows originally ran thus : 
 
 For after I saw him fumble with the Sheets, and play with 
 Flowers, and smile upon his fingers' end, I knew there was but 
 one way : for his Nose was as sharp as a Pen, and a Table of 
 greene fields.
 
 292 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Pope's explanation of this gibberish was that some 
 stage direction had been foisted into the text, as has 
 been the case elsewhere, 1 and omitted it. But Theo- 
 bald, by the alteration of one letter and the addition 
 of another, flashed out the immortal 
 
 'a babied of green fields, 
 
 thus restoring or presenting to dramatic poetry one 
 of its most precious jewels. To critics of the order of 
 Bentley and Warburton an emendation of this kind 
 could by no possibility have suggested itself. Nor 
 was it a brilliant accident, a diamond in a desert. It 
 was, as we have said, and as we hope to show, signifi- 
 cant of the critical genius of Theobald, differing in 
 degree indeed but not in kind from his other char- 
 acteristic contributions to the recension of Shakspeare's 
 text. 
 
 Few people, whose eyes now glide as smoothly and 
 comfortably along the text of Shakspeare as along the 
 text of the Waverley Novels, are aware of the amount 
 of labour which the luxury they are enjoying has 
 involved. Immense as is our debt to those who 
 gave our great poet's works to the world, gratitude 
 for the care with which those works were prepared 
 
 1 Notably in As Yvu Like It (Act iv. Sc. 2) : 
 
 What shall he have that killed that deer? 
 
 His leather skin and horns to wear. 
 
 Then sing him home, the rest shall bear this burden, 
 
 Take thou no scorn to wear the horn. 
 
 So the text ran till Theobald pointed out that the words " the rest shall bear 
 this burden " were a stage direction stupidly incorporated in the text. He 
 contends also, and we believe rightly, that the words "Ring the bell," in 
 MacdufFs speech just before the re-entry of Lady Macbeth (Macbeth, ii. 3), are 
 similarly to be accounted for.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 293 
 
 for the press, and seen through the press, forms 
 no part of it. It would be no exaggeration to say 
 that the text of Shakspeare has come down to us 
 in a worse state than that of any other great author 
 in existence, either in our own or in any other lan- 
 guage. That he himself prepared none of his plays 
 for publication is certain ; that any of them were 
 printed from his autograph, or even from copies 
 corrected by him, is, in spite of what Heminge and 
 Condell have asserted, open to grave doubt. Of the 
 thirty-seven plays usually assigned to him, seventeen 
 had at various times appeared in quarto, those quartos 
 consisting of transcripts of stage copies surreptitiously 
 obtained without the consent either of the author or 
 of the manager. They have therefore no authority, 
 but are depraved in different degrees by " the altera- 
 tions and botchery of the players," by interpolations 
 of all kinds and from all sources, and by printers' 
 blunders in every form they can assume, from the 
 corruption or omission of single words to simple 
 revelries of nonsense. About seven years after the 
 poet's death appeared, edited by two of his friends, 
 the authentic edition of his dramas. It contained, 
 with the exception of Pericles, all the plays which 
 had been published in quarto, and twenty others then 
 printed, so far as we know, for the first time. Of the 
 manner in which Heminge and Condell discharged 
 their duties as editors, it is not too much to say that 
 a work which might have won for them the unalloyed 
 gratitude of the human race can never be mentioned 
 without indignation. " Perhaps in the whole annals
 
 294 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 of English typography," says Hunter, "there is no 
 record of any book of any extent and reputation 
 having been dismissed from the press with less care 
 and attention than the first folio." l Bad as most of 
 the quartos are, the first folio is often worse. In 
 some places its text is simply the text of the quartos, 
 retaining faithfully the old blunders and corruptions, 
 with additional blunders and corruptions peculiar to 
 itself. Words, the restoration of which is obvious, 
 left unsupplied ; unfamiliar words transliterated into 
 gibberish ; punctuation as it pleases chance ; sentences 
 with the subordinate clauses higgledy-piggledy or 
 upside down ; lines transposed ; verse printed as 
 prose, and prose as verse ; speeches belonging to one 
 character given to another; stage directions incor- 
 porated in the text; actors' names suddenly substituted 
 for those of the dramatis persona; scenes and acts 
 left unindicated or indicated wrongly all this and 
 more make the text of the first folio one of the most 
 portentous specimens of typography and editing in 
 existence. In the second folio, which is little more 
 than a reprint, page for page, of the first, the 
 attempts of the editor at amendment served only to 
 make confusion, if possible, worse confounded, and to 
 pollute the text with further corruptions. Of the 
 editors of the third and fourth folios, which are re- 
 prints respectively of the second and third, it may be 
 said generally that they contributed little or nothing 
 to the purification of the text, but contented them- 
 selves for the most part with modernising the spelling. 
 
 1 Preface to New Illustrations of Shakspeare, p. iv.
 
 THE POESON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 295 
 
 Then came Eowe, the first editor in the proper 
 sense of the term. His edition is a revised reprint of 
 the fourth folio. He did something, but he did very- 
 little. He was the first to prefix a list of dramatis 
 personcB to many of the plays, and to supply the 
 defects of the folios in dividing and numbering the 
 Acts and Scenes. But as a textual critic he effected 
 nothing which entitles him to particular notice. He 
 corrected here and there a palpable blunder ; he made 
 a few conjectures. 
 
 Eowe was succeeded by Pope. With a few happy 
 emendations, and with a singularly interesting and 
 well-written Preface, begins and ends all that is of 
 any value in Pope's work as an editor of Shakspeare. 
 For the correction of the text he did as little as Rowe. 
 To its corruption he contributed more than any other 
 eighteenth-century editor, with the exception, per- 
 haps, of Warburton. He professed to have based his 
 text on a careful collation of the quartos and folios. 
 Nothing can be more certain than that his text is 
 based simply on Rowe's, and that he seldom troubled 
 himself to consult either the quartos or the folios. 
 In " correction " his process is simple. If he cannot 
 understand a word, he substitutes a word which he 
 can : if a phrase is obscure to him, he rewrites it. 
 He finds, for instance, in Timon of Athens (Act ii. 
 Sc. 2) 
 
 I have retir'd me to a wasteful cock, 
 
 and he turns it into 
 
 I have retir'd me to a lonely room.
 
 296 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 So in Richard III. (Act iv. Sc. 1) 
 
 And each day's hour wreak'd with a week of teen, 
 
 he turns teen into anguish, though the word rhymes 
 with "seen" in the preceding line. Often, however, 
 he does not give himself this trouble. What 
 he finds unintelligible he leaves unintelligible ; 
 what he finds gibberish he leaves gibberish. He 
 excises at discretion, sometimes because a passage 
 appears to be desperately corrupt, sometimes because 
 a passage is not, in his judgment, worthy of the 
 poet. It is never pleasant to expose the defects of a 
 great man, and we shall not, therefore, give further 
 specimens of the kind of corrections he was in the 
 habit of making, or any examples at all of the ignor- 
 ance displayed in his explanatory notes. 
 
 Let us now turn to Theobald. Before proceeding 
 to his particular emendations, we will give one com- 
 prehensive example of his skill in textual recension, 
 of the state in which he found the text of long 
 passages, of the skill with which he restored them. 
 Towards the end of the first Act of Hamlet, the text 
 of the following passage runs thus in the first folio : 
 
 But come, 
 
 Here as before, neuer so helpe you mercy, 
 How strange or odde so ere I beare myself ; 
 (As I perchance heerafter shall thinke meet 
 To put an Anticke disposition on :) 
 That you at such time seeing me, neuer shall 
 With Armes encombred thus, or thus, head shake ; 
 Or by pronouncing of some doubtfull Phrase ; 
 As well, we know, or we could and if we would, 
 Or if we list to speake ; or there be and if there might, 
 Or such ambiguous giuing out to note,
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 297 
 
 That you know ought of me ; this not to doe : 
 
 So grace and mercy at your moste neede helpe you : 
 
 Sweare. 
 
 Now see how, with a very little assistance from the 
 quartos, this nonsense left his hands : 
 
 But come, 
 
 Here, as before, never, (so help you mercy !) 
 How strange or odd soe'er I bear myself, 
 (As I, perchance, hereafter shall think meet 
 To put an antic disposition on ;) 
 That you, at such time seeing me, never shall 
 With arms encumbred thus, or this head-shake, 
 Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, 
 As, well we know or, we could, and if we would 
 Or, if we list to speak or, there be, and if there might 
 (Or such ambiguous giving out) denote 
 That you know aught of me ; This do ye swear, 
 So grace and mercy at your most need help you ! 
 Swear. 
 
 All that Pope had professed to do Theobald faith- 
 fully did. A careful collation of the folios and 
 quartos enabled him in innumerable cases to restore 
 the right reading without resorting to conjectural 
 emendation. A list of the passages which he has 
 thus certainly and finally corrected would in itself be 
 a monument of his critical tact and conscientious 
 industry. No critic, indeed, is more conservative, 
 and has so seldom sought to obtain credit for his own 
 skill when that skill was unnecessary. In one of his 
 letters to Warburton he says, in words which all who 
 may be engaged in textual recension would do well 
 to remember, " I ever labour to make the smallest 
 deviations that I possibly can from the text : never 
 to alter at all where I can by any means explain a 
 passage into sense ; nor ever by any emendations to
 
 298 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 make the author better when it is probable the text 
 came from his own hands." l What Cicero observed 
 of Aristarchus, " Homeri versus negasse quos ipse 
 non probaverit," may unhappily be said with equal 
 justice, not only of Pope, but of more than one recent 
 editor of Shakspeare. 
 
 The truth, of course, is that Pope had mistaken 
 his vocation. He was as ill qualified to compete with 
 Theobald in the particular walk in which Theobald 
 excelled, as Theobald would have been to compete 
 with him in poetry. He could produce masterpieces, 
 ten couplets from any of which would, as contribu- 
 tions to the intellectual wealth of mankind, far out- 
 weigh all the achievements of verbal criticism from 
 Aristarchus downwards. The subject for regret is 
 that he should not only have wasted his time in doing 
 badly what smaller men could do well, but that, a 
 very Croesus himself, he should have stooped to the 
 meanness of attempting to rob a poor neighbour of 
 his treasure. 
 
 But to turn to Theobald's emendations. Nothing 
 could be more exquisite than this. In a line in Titnon 
 of Athens (Act iv. Sc. 3) there is this nonsense : 
 
 Those milk-paps, 
 That through the window Barne bore at men's eyes. 
 
 Theobald, quoting from Ben Jonson and others, 
 shows that it was customary for women to wear lawn 
 coverings over their necks and bosoms (Agrippina, in 
 Ben Jonson, indeed saying, " Transparent as this 
 lawn I wear"), and emends window-lawn, i.e. lawn 
 
 1 Nichols' Illustrations of Literature, vol. ii. p. 210.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 299 
 
 transparent as a window. Place this beside the other 
 emendation, window -bars, adopted by Dr. Johnson 
 and others, and compare Johnson's explanatory note, 
 " The virgin that shows her bosom through the 
 lattice of her chamber." Could anything equal the 
 prosaic and grotesque grossness of this image, or the 
 voluptuous beauty of the picture restored by Theo- 
 bald ? Theobald's exquisite emendation finds, it may 
 be added, both support and illustration in Phineas 
 Fletcher's Purple Island, canto ii. stanza 8 : 
 
 As when a virgin her snow-circl'd breast 
 
 Displaying hides, and hiding sweet displays ; 
 
 The greater segments cover'd, and the rest 
 
 The veil transparent willingly displays : 
 
 Thus takes and gives, thus lends and borrows light 
 
 Lest eyes should surfeit with too greedy sight 
 
 Transparent lawns with-hold, more to increase delight; 
 
 In Antony and Cleopatra (Act i. Sc. 4) occur the 
 lines 
 
 Like to a Vagabond Flagge upon the Streame, 
 Goes too, and backe, lacking the varrying tyde 
 To rot itselfe with motion. 
 
 This Rowe or Pope altered to lashing. Theobald 
 altering this into lacquying, gave us back one of 
 the finest onomatopoeic lines in Shakspeare 
 
 Goes to and back lacquying the varying tide. 
 
 In Coriolanus (Act ii. Sc. 1) was this nonsense : 
 " What harm can your besom conspicuities glean out 
 of this character?" Theobald emended bisson, i.e. 
 purblind, quoting in support of it Hamlet, Act ii. 
 Sc. 2 : 
 
 Threatening the flames 
 With bisson rheum.
 
 300 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 ID Romeo and Juliet (Act i. Sc. 2), in the lines 
 
 Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air 
 Or dedicate his beauty to the same 
 
 by a beautiful touch he restored sun. 
 
 The passage in Twelfth Night (Act i. Sc. 3) 
 
 Sir And. Would that have mended thy hair ? 
 
 Sir Toby. Past question, for thou seest it will not cool my nature 
 
 Theobald corrected curl by nature, supporting the 
 certain emendation by a reference to Sir Toby's next 
 speech, " it hangs like flax on a distaff." 
 
 In Macbeth (Act i. Sc. 7) he transformed " The 
 bank and school of time" into the magnificent " bank 
 and shoal of time" ; and again, in the same play 
 (Act iii. Sc. 2), " We have scorchd the snake, not 
 killed it," into scotch 'd, i.e. hacked, showing, by a 
 reference to Coriolanus (Act iv. Sc. 5), that Shak- 
 speare had used the word elsewhere. Again, too, in 
 the same play (Act i. Sc. 1), "The weyward sisters 
 hand in hand," into weird. " Eebellious Head rise 
 never" (Act iv. Sc. 1), for Dead, was also a happy 
 restoration. " He shent our messengers," for sent, 
 restores sense to a passage in Troilus and Cressida 
 (Act ii. Sc. 3) ; as also does " give to dust" for "go to 
 dust" in a fine passage (Act iii. Sc. 3) so desperate 
 that Pope threw it out : 
 
 And go to dust, that is a little gilt, 
 More laud than gilt o'er-dusted. 
 
 In Antony and Cleopatra (Act v. Sc. 3) the lines 
 
 A sun and moon which kept their course and lighted 
 The little o' the earth
 
 he restored to sense and metre by substituting for a 
 small a capital 0, and showing by quotation from 
 Henry V. and A Midsummer Night's Dream that 
 the capital was used to signify a circle. In the 
 same passage he restored autumn for Antonie 
 
 An. Antonie 'twas 
 That grew the more by reaping. 
 
 Some singularly felicitous corrections are made 
 simply by separating letters, as in Richard III. 
 (Act iv. Sc. 4) 
 
 Advantaging their loan with interest, 
 Oftentimes double gain of happiness 
 
 where he improves both sense and metre by reading 
 Of ten times ; so, too, a difficult passage in Henry V. 
 (Act iv. Sc. 3), "mark then abounding valour in these 
 English " is made perfectly clear, as the context shows, 
 by his reading of a bounding. And in A Midsummer 
 Night's Dream (Act iv. Sc. 1) 
 
 Fairies be gone and be all ways away, 
 
 for the nonsensical always. In the lines in the 
 same play 
 
 Then my queen in silence sad, 
 Trip we after the night's shade 
 
 by substituting a semicolon for a comma, and fade 
 (which he supports by a happy quotation from Ham- 
 let, " it faded at the crowing of the cock") for sad, 
 he restores the rhyme, and turns nonsense into sense. 
 A few lines above, in the same play, " all these fine 
 the sense" he alters intone, and darkness becomes 
 light.
 
 302 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 In Measure for Measure (Act iv. Sc. 2), Kowe and 
 Pope, finding in the old copies, " you shall find me 
 y'are," could make nothing of it, and read yours; 
 but Theobald, by striking out the apostrophe and 
 making it one word, restored the true reading yare, 
 i.e. ready. In Much Ado about Nothing (Act v. 
 Sc. 1) was this nonsense 
 
 If such an one will smile and stroke his beard, 
 And sorrow, wagge, cry hem when he should groan, 
 
 which Theobald transforms into sense by reading, 
 " And sorrow wage, cry hem," etc., i.e. strive against 
 sorrow, illustrating Shakspeare's use of the word 
 wage in this sense by references to Lear, Othello, 
 the first part of Henry IV. thus conclusively settling 
 the text. So in the preceding Act, in " Yea, marry, 
 that's the eftest way," which Eowe and Pope had 
 altered into easiest, he at once restores the true 
 reading by suggesting deftest. So again in Love's 
 Labour's Lost (Act. iv. Sc. 3) 
 
 A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound 
 When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd : 
 
 he turns nonsense into sense by reading thrift, rightly 
 contending that the typical thief is as likely to sleep 
 as soundly as an honest man, but that the sleep 
 of a miser is likely to be broken and disturbed 
 through fear of being robbed. In two passages, 
 Two Gentlemen of Verona (Act ii. Sc. 2), he has 
 restored the right word wood, i.e. mad, where no 
 one had detected it : " Oh that she could speak like 
 a would- woman," as the folios had it, "like an
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 303 
 
 ould- woman," as Pope ridiculously altered it ; as 
 also in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Act iv. Sc. 4), 
 " the action of a would woman." Nothing could be 
 happier than his emendation of harts for hearts in 
 Cymbeline, " Our Britain's Hearts die flying," not our 
 men (Act iv. Sc. 3); "drink up eisel" (i.e. vinegar), 
 for the unintelligible Esile of the folio, "Drink up 
 Esile, eat a crocodile " (Hamlet, Act v. Sc. 1) ; " sound 
 one into the drowsy race of night " for " sound on " 
 (King John, Act iii. Sc. 3) ; " again to inflame it," 
 for the ridiculous a game, " When the blood is made 
 dull there should be again to inflame it ... loveli- 
 ness in favour," etc. (Othello, Act ii. Sc. l) ; "a 
 Cain- coloured beard," for cane- coloured (Merry 
 Wives of Windsor, Act i. Sc. 3) ; "in that tire," for 
 time (Id. Act iv. Sc. 3) ; " so is Alcides beaten by 
 his page " for " so is Alcides beaten by his rage " 
 (Merchant of Venice, Act ii. Sc. 1) ; " you Gods, I 
 prate," for " you Gods, I pray " ( Coriolanus, Act v. 
 Sc. 3) ; " baillez me, some paper " (spoken by Caius), 
 for the gibberish " balloiv me, some paper" ; " within 
 the house is Jove," for the pointless Love (Much Ado 
 about Nothing, Act v. Sc. 2) : " some Dick that smiles 
 his cheek in jeers," for the senseless " smiles his cheek 
 in years" (Love's Labour's Lost, Act v. Sc. 2); "I 
 see the mystery of your loneliness" for loveliness 
 (All's Well that Ends Well, Act i. Sc. 3) ; " mount- 
 ing sire," for mountain, " Whiles that his mountain 
 sire on mountain standing " (Henry V., Act ii. Sc. 4) ; 
 " their ton's, their bon's" for the absurd their bones, 
 "these fashion-mongers, these perdona mi's . . .
 
 304 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 their bones, their bones ! " (Romeo and Juliet, Act ii. 
 Sc. 4) ; " was, beastly, dumb'd," for dumb 
 
 Who neigh'd so high that what I would have spoke 
 Was beastly dumb by him. 
 
 (Antony and Cleopatra, Act i. Sc. 5). 
 
 "Ne'er lust -wearied Antony," for near (Id. Act ii. 
 Sc. 1). An admirable emendation restores sense and 
 improves metre in Othello, Act iv. Sc. 1 
 
 as names be such abroad, 
 Who having, by their own importunate suit, 
 Or voluntary dotage of some mistress, 
 Convinced or supplied them, they cannot choose 
 But they must blab. 
 
 Theobald corrects " convinc'd or suppled them." 
 
 Again, in Titus Andronicus (Act iii. Sc. 2), the 
 insertion of a single letter converts nonsense into 
 sense ; for doings in the line 
 
 And buzz lamenting doings in the air, 
 
 he reads dolings. So in King John (Act v. Sc. 2), 
 " This unhaired sauciness and boyish troops " was 
 a certain correction for unheard. Nothing could be 
 more exquisitely felicitous than one of his emenda- 
 tions in Henry VI. (Part II. Act iii. Sc. 2) : 
 
 To sit and watch me as Ascanius did, 
 When he to madding Dido, etc. 
 
 This he corrects and vide quidfaciat unius litterulce 
 mutatio, he might have said with Person " To sit 
 and witch me." 
 
 Nor are his emendations of the Poems of Shak- 
 speare less happy. They may be found in Jortin's 
 Miscellaneous Observations, to which they were
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 305 
 
 contributed, vol. ii. p. 242 seq. In Lucrece, 1062, 
 lie found 
 
 This bastard grass shall never come to growth, 
 He shall not boast who did thy stock pollute. 
 
 The change of two letters restored the right reading, 
 "this bastard graft." In Sonnet LXVII. was this 
 unintelligible passage- 
 Look, what thy memory cannot contain, 
 Commit to these waste blacks. 
 
 Quoting a preceding line in the same Sonnet, 
 
 The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear, 
 
 and the lines in Twelfth Night, 
 
 What's her history ? 
 A blank, my lord, 
 
 he corrected 
 
 Commit to these waste blanks. 
 
 In Sonnet LXV. he finds 
 
 Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest be hid ? 
 
 and, observing that "a jewel hid from a chest" is 
 something new, corrects 
 
 From Time's quest be hid. 
 
 A passage in Venus and Adonis, 1013-14 
 
 Tell him of trophies, statues, tombs, and stories, 
 His victories, his triumphs, and his glories, 
 
 he restores to sense by placing a semicolon after 
 tombs, for which he would read domes, and making 
 stories a verb governing the substantives in the next 
 ' line, quoting in support of his correction the line 
 
 He stories to her ears her husband's fame. 
 X
 
 306 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 So conservative was Theobald, and so conscientiously 
 did he abstain from what he thought were unneces- 
 sary or uncertain corrections, that he refrained from 
 introducing into the text some emendations so admir- 
 able that other editors have not scrupled to adopt 
 them. Thus, in The Merry Wives of Windsor 
 (Act ii. Sc. 1), for the unintelligible word An-heires, 
 " Will you go, An-heires ? " he conjectured, and no 
 doubt rightly, Mynheers, i.e. " Sirs," a conjecture 
 supported by a passage, as Dyee points out, in 
 Fletcher's Beggar's Bush : " Nay, Sir, mineheire 
 Van Dunck is a true statesman." So, too, in All's 
 Well that Ends Well (Act v. Sc. 3), for blade, in 
 the line " Natural rebellion done i' the blade of youth," 
 he conjectured blaze, but left the original reading. 
 So again in Loves Labour's Lost (Act iii. Sc. 1), he 
 suggested that the line referring to Cupid, 
 
 This signior Junio's giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid, 
 
 might be emended, " This senior-junior, giant-dwarf," 
 but would not disturb the text. So again in Othello 
 (Act iii. Sc. 3), in the lines- 
 Beware, iny lord, of jealousy, 
 
 It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock 
 
 The meat it feeds on, 
 
 for mock he proposed make; an admirable emenda- 
 tion, which he did not introduce into his text, 
 and for which every editor and the majority of 
 the editors have adopted it has given Hanmer the 
 credit. Thus, too, in Troilus and Cressida (Act iv. 
 Sc. 5), for the unintelligible
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 307 
 
 these encounters .... 
 That give a coasting welcome ere it comes, 
 
 he proposed accosting, i.e. " give welcome to a salute 
 ere it comes " ; an excellent correction, supported, 
 though he does not notice it, by Twelfth Night (Act i. 
 Sc. 3), " Accost, Sir Andrew, accost." Of the many 
 certain corrections which his knowledge of the Eliza- 
 bethan dramatist enabled him to make, we have 
 an example in Much Ado about Nothing (Act iii. 
 Sc. 2), where he shows conclusively, by pertinent refer- 
 ences to passages in Beaumont and Fletcher, that 
 the word " she shall be buried with her face upward," 
 must be altered into heels. The consummate skill 
 with which he has, in innumerable passages, by 
 transpositions, by changed punctuation, and by 
 supplying what had dropped out, restored the right 
 reading, and turned nonsense into sense, we have 
 only space to illustrate by one specimen. In All's 
 Well that Ends Well (Act i. Sc. 3), he found this 
 gibberish : 
 
 Fortune, she said, was no goddess . . . Love, no god, that 
 would not extend his might where qualities were level . . . 
 Queen of Virgins that would suffer her poor knight, etc. 
 
 This he transforms, by proper punctuation and the 
 restoration of the missing words, into perfect sense : 
 " Love no god, that would not extend his might, 
 only where qualities were level. Diana, no queen 
 of virgins that would suffer," etc. But his most 
 brilliant achievement is the restoration of the passage 
 in Hamlet (Act i. Sc. 4), beginning, " Ay, marry is't," 
 and ending " to his own scandal," a mass, for the
 
 308 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 most part, of unintelligible jargon in the quartos. 
 What, for example, could be more desperate than the 
 last three lines of this passage as they came into 
 Theobald's hands ?- 
 
 The dram of eale 
 
 Doth all the noble substance of a doubt 
 To his own scandle. 
 
 For this he proposed to read 
 
 The dram of base 
 Doth all the noble substance of worth out 
 
 (i.e. extinguishes) ; supporting his emendation by 
 Cymbeline (Act iii. Sc. 5) 
 
 From whose so many weights of baseness cannot 
 A dram of worth be drawn. 
 
 And scarcely less admirable is his restoration of the 
 passage in Coriolanus (Act i. Sc. 9), beginning, "May 
 these same instruments." An excellent instance of 
 his sagacity we are by no means sure that he is 
 right will be found in his note on the passage at the 
 end of Timon, contending that the punctuation of 
 the lines 
 
 Rich conceit 
 
 Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye 
 On thy low grave, on faults forgiven, 
 
 should be altered into 
 
 On thy low grave. On : faults forgiven, 
 
 supposing that Alcibiades is suddenly addressing the 
 senators. And this he supports by Antony's 
 
 On ; things that are past are done with me 
 
 (Antony and Cleopatra, Act i Sc. 2), 
 
 and by observing that Alcibiades' speech is in breaks
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 309 
 
 between his reflections on Timon's death and his 
 addresses to the Athenian senators. 
 
 But no portion of Theobald's work is more inter- 
 esting than his illustrations, which are always 
 singularly pertinent and happy. If mere accumula- 
 tions of parallel passages, where the parallels resemble 
 that which Fluellen drew between Macedon and 
 Monmouth, are as worthless as they are irritating, 
 in parallel illustration judiciously employed critical 
 commentary finds its most useful instrument. And 
 not this alone. The revelation of identity of senti- 
 ments, of common deductions from observation or 
 experience, of the notification of the same traits and 
 peculiarities in nature, in life, in manners, among 
 writers of different ages and of different tempers, is a 
 source, not merely of curious, but assuredly of in- 
 telligent pleasure. Of Theobald's felicitous illustra- 
 tions a few specimens must suffice. With the line 
 in King Lear (Act iv. Sc. 6) 
 
 undistinguish'd space of woman's will 
 
 a line admirably explained by him he compares 
 Sancho's remark in Don Quixote (Part II., bk. i., 
 chap, ii.), " Entre el Si y el No de la muger, no me 
 atreveria yo a poner una punta d'alfiler" ("Between 
 a woman's Yea and No I would not undertake to 
 thrust a pin's point "). And to Imogen's remark 
 
 You put me to forget a lady's manners 
 
 By being so verbal (Cymbeline, Act ii. Sc. 3) 
 
 he at once supplies the best commentary, 
 
 ywcu, yvvail KOCT/XOV rj criyrj 
 
 (Sophocles, Ajax, 205) ;
 
 310 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 as he does also to Boyet's remark in Love's Labour's 
 Lost (Act ii. Sc. 1) 
 
 Be now as prodigal of all dear grace 
 As Nature was in making graces dear, 
 When she did starve the general world beside, 
 And prodigally gave them all to you, 
 
 by comparing Catullus (Epigrams, 87) 
 
 Quse cum pulcherrima tota est, 
 Turn omnibus una omnes surripuit veneres. 
 
 So, again, for the lines in Henry V. (Act i. Sc. 2) 
 
 For government, though high and low and lower, 
 Put into parts, doth keep in one consent, 
 Congreeing in a full and natural close 
 Like music, 
 
 he gives us the proper commentary by quoting Cicero . 
 (De Republica, ii. 42) : 
 
 Sic ex summis et infimis et mediis et interjectis ordinibus, 
 ut sonis, moderata ratione civitas consensu dissimillimorum con- 
 cinit; et quse harmonia a musicis dicitur in cantu, ea est in 
 civitate concordia. 
 
 The words of Ventidius in Antony and Cleopatra 
 (Act iii. Sc. 1) 
 
 Silius, Silius, 
 
 I've done enough. A lower place, note well, 
 May make too great an act ; for learn this, Silius, 
 Better to leave undone, than hy our deed 
 Acquire too high a fame, when he we serve '& away 
 
 he most happily furnishes with the best of illustrations 
 by quoting Antipater's behaviour with regard to 
 Alexander the Great : 
 
 Et quanquam fortuna rerum placebat, invidiam tamen, quia 
 majores res erant quam quas Praefecti modus caperet, metuebat. 
 Quippe Alexander hostes vinci voluerat : Antipatrum vicisse ne 
 tacitus quidem dignabatur : suse demptum gloriae existimans
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 311 
 
 quicquid cessisset alienee. Itaque Antipater, qui probe nosset 
 spiritum ejus, non est ausus ipse agere arbitria victorise 
 (Quintus Curtius, lib. vi. c. 1). 
 
 So again, in Much Ado about Nothing (Act i. Sc. 1), 
 he cites Plautus (Mostellaria, i. Ill) to interpret the 
 point of Beatrice's remark, " It is so, indeed : he is no 
 less than a stuft man, but for the stuffing, well, we 
 are all mortal" "Non vestem amatores mulieris 
 amant, sed vestis fartum." His notes are, indeed, a 
 storehouse of the most felicitous illustrations of 
 Shakspeare's images, sentiments, and thoughts, drawn 
 from the whole range of the Greek and Roman 
 classics, illustrations which have been appropriated 
 without a word of acknowledgment by succeeding 
 generations of commentators. 
 
 What the text of Shakspeare, as it is now generally 
 accepted, owes to Theobald, may be judged from this. 
 The most popular, but at the same time the most 
 conservative of the texts, so conservative indeed that 
 it often retains the unintelligible readings of the 
 quartos and folios in preference to the most plausible 
 of Theobald's conjectures, is the "Globe" Shakspeare. 
 Now we find on collating this text with Theobald's 
 that, without taking into account the innumerable 
 instances in which it adopts from the quartos and 
 folios the readings selected by Theobald, it follows 
 Theobald's own conjectures, corrections, and regula- 
 tions in no less than three hundred and nine 
 passages. 1 
 
 1 Tabulated, the account thus stands : The Tempest, 8 ; Midsummer 
 Night's Dream, 12 ; Two Gentlemen of Verona, 14 ; Merry Wives of Windsor, 
 11 ; Measure for Measure, 6 ; Comedy of Errors, 9 ; Much Ado about Nothing, 9 ;
 
 312 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Of Theobald himself very little is certainly known. 
 What little we do know of him is derived from 
 Nichols' Illustrations of Literature. 1 He was born 
 at Sittingbourne in Kent in March 1688, 2 the son of 
 a solicitor of that town. He was placed under the 
 tuition of a Kev. Mr. Ellis at Isleworth, who, to 
 judge from the accomplishments of his pupil, must 
 have been a very efficient teacher, for it does not 
 appear that Theobald received any further instruction. 
 Removing subsequently to London, he was apprenticed 
 to the law, but soon abandoned the law for literature. 
 His first work was a translation of the Plicedo of Plato, 
 which appeared in May 1713. In the April of the 
 following year he entered into a contract with Lintot 
 to translate the Odyssey, four of the tragedies of 
 Sophocles, and the Satires and Epistles of Horace. 
 For some reason this contract was not fulfilled, but 
 between 1714 and the end of 1715 he published trans- 
 lations of the Electra, Ajax, and (Edipus Rex in verse, 
 and of the Plutus and the Clouds in prose. In addition 
 to these works he produced between 1715 and 1726 
 several plays, operas, pantomimes, and miscellaneous 
 poems, which are of no value or interest. We have 
 
 Love's Labour's Lost, 24 ; Merchant of Venice, 6 ; As You Like It, 6 ; 
 Taming of the Shrew, 10 ; AlFs Well that Ends Well, 13 ; Twelfth Night, 4 ; 
 A Winter's Tale, 5 ; King John, 7 ; Richard II., 1 ; two parts of Henry the 
 Fourth, 9 ; three parts of Henry the Sixth, 11 ; Richard III., 3 ; Henry VIII. , 
 9 ; Troilus and Cressida, 13 ; Coriolanus, 22 ; Titus Andronicus, 6 ; Romeo 
 and Juliet, 10 ; Timon of Athens, 10 ; Julius Ccesar, 6 ; Macbeth, 14 ; Hamlet, 
 8 ; King Lear, 2 ; Othello, 7 ; Antony and Cleopatra, 21 ; Cymbeline, 13. In 
 the less conservative texts the number would, no doubt, be considerably higher. 
 
 1 Vol. ii. pp. 707-748. 
 
 2 "About 1692," say Nichols and the biographers. But he was baptized 
 on the 2nd of April 1688, as the parish register testifies. I owe this informa- 
 tion to the courtesy of the Vicar of Sittingbourne.
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 313 
 
 already given an account of what brought him into 
 collision with Pope, and of his relations with 
 Warburton. The wrath of the sensitive poet had 
 found expression before the publication of the 
 Dunciad, and he had attacked his critic where, it 
 must be owned, his critic was sufficiently vulnerable. 
 In the Treatise on the Bathos poor Theobald had 
 been pilloried with other unfortunate poetasters, and 
 though he was not perhaps responsible for the famous 
 "none but himself can be his parallel," it raised the 
 laugh against him for the rest of his life. Bentley 
 has justly observed that no man was ever written 
 down except by himself, but poverty and ridicule are 
 formidable adversaries. It was Theobald's lot to 
 have to subordinate the work in which nature had 
 qualified him to excel to the work for which nature 
 had never intended him, and to lose more in reputa- 
 tion by his scribblings for Grub Street than he could 
 recover by his contributions to scholarship and 
 criticism. What he could do well appealed during 
 his lifetime to a very small minority ; what he could 
 only do badly appealed to the generality. He was 
 thus in the cruel position of a man compelled to 
 illustrate the truth of Bentley's remark, not indeed 
 in the sense of doing inefficiently what it was in his 
 power to do well, but in producing under compulsion 
 what he ought never to have attempted at all. He 
 belonged to a class of men who are or who ought to be 
 the peculiar care of the friends of learning. Men of 
 letters who have sufficient abilities to justify them 
 in pursuing their calling can make their own way
 
 314 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 without patronage, but it is not so with the pure 
 scholar and the philological critic. Their sphere is 
 as confined as it is important. Their labour is labour 
 which must inevitably keep them poor. But no 
 friend of learning held out a helping hand to poor 
 Theobald. He qualified himself for the production 
 of his monumental work, he collected the materials 
 for it, he completed it, while preserving himself and his 
 family from starvation by scribbling those bad plays 
 and worse poems which enabled his enemies to make 
 havoc of his reputation. 
 
 In 1730, on the death of Eusden, he became a 
 candidate for the Laureateship, but, though he was 
 supported in his application by Sir Robert Walpole 
 and Frederick Prince of Wales, he was not success- 
 ful. In the following year he had an opportunity 
 for displaying his abilities as a Grecian. Jortin, 
 with the assistance of two of the most eminent 
 scholars of that time, Joseph Wasse and Zachary 
 Pearce, published the first number of a periodical 
 entitled Miscellaneous Observations on Authors, 
 Ancient and Modern. To this Theobald communi- 
 cated some emendations of Eustathius, Suidas, and 
 Athenseus, with critical remarks, and Jortin was so 
 pleased with them that he not only inserted them 
 but added in an editorial note, " I hope the gentle- 
 man to whom I am indebted for these will give me 
 opportunities of obliging the public with more of his 
 observations." But poor Theobald had other work 
 to do. 
 
 He survived the publication of his Shakspeare a
 
 THE PORSON OF SHAKSPEARIAN CRITICISM 315 
 
 little more than ten years, during which his life 
 appears to have been a dreary struggle with mis- 
 fortune and poverty, and at last with severe disease. 
 Of his death and burial a touching account has 
 been preserved by Nichols, and from this it would 
 seem that in his latter days he was solitary and 
 almost friendless. " He was of a generous spirit," 
 so writes the only person who followed him to his 
 grave in St. Pancras Churchyard, "too generous 
 for his circumstances, and none knew how to do a 
 handsome thing, or confer a benefit, when in his 
 power, with a better grace than himself. He was my 
 ancient friend of near thirty years' acquaintance. 
 Interred at Pancras, the 20th, 6 o'clock P.M. I only 
 attended him." The date indicated was the 20th of 
 September 1744. But, as "nullum tempus regi 
 occurrit" is a maxim of our law, so, surely, ought 
 " nullum tempus justitiae occurrit " to be a maxim of 
 duty, and especially of the duty which the living owe 
 to the dead. The proper monument of Theobald is 
 not that cairn of dishonour which the sensitive vanity 
 of Pope, the ignoble and impudent devices of "War- 
 burton to build his own reputation on the ruin of 
 another, the careless injustice of Johnson, the mean 
 stratagems of Malone, and the obsequious parrotry of 
 tradition on the part of subsequent writers, have 
 succeeded in accumulating. It is the settled text 
 of Shakspeare. It should be the gratitude of all 
 to whom that text is precious, the gratitude of 
 civilised mankind.
 
 MENANDER 
 
 " I LOVE Menander next to Sophocles. He is every- 
 where genuine, noble, sublime, and cheerful ; his 
 grace and sweetness are unequalled. It is greatly to 
 be lamented that we have so little of his, but that 
 little is invaluable, men of genius may learn so much 
 from it." The speaker was Goethe. 1 The loss indeed 
 which the world has sustained in the destruction of 
 the comedies of Menander is little less than the loss 
 it would have sustained had Roman literature been 
 robbed of Horace, had French literature been deprived 
 of Moliere, had the Germans lost their Schiller, had 
 a few fragments represented all that remained to 
 Englishmen of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and 
 Much Ado about Nothing. It is a loss to which 
 there is nothing comparable in the history of letters. 
 His comedies were the masterpieces of a literature 
 which has for more than two thousand years main- 
 tained a proud pre-eminence among the literatures of 
 the world, and they were placed by general consent at 
 the head of a department of art in which that litera- 
 ture particularly excelled. His merit is so great, says 
 
 1 Gesprache mit Goethe, von Johann Peter Eckermann, vol. i. pp. 217, 218.
 
 MENANDER 317 
 
 Quintilian, that his fame has swallowed up that of 
 all other authors in the same walk, and they are 
 obscured with the effulgence of his lustre. 1 His 
 invention, we are told, was boundless ; his wit and 
 humour inexhaustible. His acquaintance with life 
 in all its manifold phases was the wonder of the 
 ancient world. " Menander and Life!" rapturously 
 exclaims Aristophanes the grammarian, " which of 
 you copied the other ? " 2 So rich, moreover, were 
 his writings in that practical wisdom which is the 
 fruit of experience and reflection, that upwards of a 
 thousand aphorisms have been collected from them. 
 Many of these are no doubt spurious, and many 
 belong to other poets, but, after making ample 
 deductions, enough remain to prove how greatly 
 literature is indebted to his wit and his wisdom. It 
 would scarcely be too much to say that he has con- 
 tributed more than any single writer of antiquity, not 
 even excepting Euripides, to that stock of proverbs 
 and pithy truths which have long since lost their 
 identity, and become the common property of man- 
 kind. 
 
 His style and diction were, we are told, almost 
 faultless. They illustrated in its perfection that 
 wonderful language which still remains the noblest 
 and most perfect expression of human speech ; they 
 developed even further the resources of that dialect 
 which had already been sufficient for the purposes 
 
 1 Inst. Orat. x. 1. 
 
 2 T M(W5/>e Kal pic, 
 
 irbrepos dp V/JLUV irbrepov lfjj.fj.i]ffa.To ;
 
 318 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 of the tragic dramatists, of Aristophanic comedy, of 
 Platonic dialectic. " His phrase/' says Plutarch, " is 
 so well turned and contempered with itself that, while 
 it traverses many passions and humours, and is 
 adapted to all sorts of persons, it still appears the 
 same, and even maintains its semblance in trite, 
 familiar, and everyday expressions." In subtlety of 
 style Pliny pronounces him to be without a rival. 1 
 After Homer, he appears to have been the most 
 universally read and appreciated of all the writers of 
 antiquity. An inscription on one of his statues calls 
 him the Siren of the Stage. The Greek and Roman 
 critics vie with one another in extolling him. Aristo- 
 phanes the grammarian ranked him as second only to 
 Homer. Plutarch has informed us that at banquets 
 his comedies were as indispensable as the wine, 2 and 
 that to announce one of his plays for exhibition was 
 to fill the theatre with a crowded audience of educated 
 men. 3 Lynceus, Aristophanes the grammarian, Latinus, 
 Plutarch, and Sillius Homerus wrote essays and com- 
 mentaries on his works. Athenseus is never weary of 
 quoting him. Dion Chrysostom preferred him to all 
 the old masters of the stage " and let none of our 
 wise men," he adds, " reprehend my choice, as Men- 
 ander's art in delineating the various manners and 
 graces is more to be esteemed than all the force and 
 vehemence of the ancient drama." 4 Not only were 
 Csecilius, Afranius, Plautus, and Terence his disciples 
 
 1 ' ' Menander litterarum subtilitate sine semulo genitus " ( Nat. Hist. xxx. 
 c. 1 ; Plutarch, Aristophanis et Menandri Cornp. ii. ) 
 
 2 Symposium, vii. 3. 3 Aristophanis et Menandri Comp. iii. 
 
 4 Orat. xviii.
 
 MENANDER 319 
 
 and translators, but the allusions made to him by 
 Horace (whose Epistles are the nearest approach which 
 have ever been made to the peculiar excellences of 
 his style) and the elegiac poets prove that his 
 comedies must have been as familiar to the Eomans 
 as the plays of Shakspeare are to a well-educated 
 Englishman of the present day. Quintilian has 
 exhausted the language of panegyric in discussing 
 his merits. A modern reader would find it difficult 
 to imagine a style more copious, ductile, and per- 
 spicuous than that of Aristophanes, and yet Plutarch 
 informs us that even in these points the Lord of the 
 Old Comedy must yield to Menander. The grace and 
 felicity which characterise the diction of Terence have 
 time out of mind been proverbial among scholars ; 
 his pathos has drawn tears from the eyes of less 
 sensitive readers than Erasmus and Addison ; his 
 refined and . delicate humour was the delight of the 
 ancient as it has been the delight of the modern 
 world. Yet, out of his six comedies, the four best 
 are mere adaptations, perhaps simply translations, 
 from Menander. And a Eoman has recorded the 
 opinion of his countrymen when they compared 
 their comedies with the divine originals. The work 
 of their own poets was felt to be cold and inanimate ; 
 its wit paled, its brilliance lost its glamour ; it 
 looked mean and poor ; it bore the same relation to 
 its Greek prototype as a plaster cast bears to the 
 mobile features of life. The lines ascribed to Julius 
 Caesar are well known, and merely express in other 
 words what is expressed in the criticism of Aulus
 
 320 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Gellius. 1 The judgment of Quintilian was similar 
 " we have not even the shadow of the Greek excellence 
 in comedy," vix levem consequimur umbram. z 
 
 The high estimate formed of Menander by the 
 ancients is in truth amply borne out by the fragments 
 which have been spared to us, and these fragments, 
 thanks to the industry of Hertelius, Henry Stephens, 
 Gyraldus, Grotius, and pre-eminently of Augustus 
 Meineke, are by no means inconsiderable. Meineke 
 has succeeded in collecting upwards of two thousand 
 verses the disjecta membra of more than a hundred 
 comedies. With that scrupulous accuracy and patient 
 devotion which seem to be the almost exclusive 
 prerogative of German editors, that eminent scholar 
 has scrutinised every corner of Greek and Latin 
 literature for traces and relics of his favourite. 
 No source has been left unexplored, no promising 
 manuscript unransacked. Through the wide domain 
 of the classics proper, through the dreary subtleties 
 of Alexandrian metaphysics, through the wastes of 
 patristic theology and the vast saharas of Byzantine 
 literature wherever it was possible that a paragraph, 
 a line, nay, even a word of Menander could lurk, 
 has that indefatigable commentator travelled. 
 
 With the aid of Meineke, it is still possible to 
 form some conception of the character and work of 
 
 1 Aulus Gellius, ii. 23. The particular comparison instituted is between 
 Caecilius and Menander, but the beginning of the chapter shows that his 
 criticism applied generally to all the Roman comic poets whose work was 
 based on Greek originals. Some of the Romans, it should be remembered, 
 placed Csecilius above Terence, as Cicero was inclined to do. Cf. De Optimo 
 Oenere Oratorum, i. 1. 
 
 2 Instit. Orat. x. 1.
 
 MENANDER 321 
 
 this great master, with whom Time has dealt so 
 hardly. We can catch glimpses of the matchless 
 beauty of his style; we can discern that worldly 
 wisdom and practical sagacity for which he was 
 proverbial ; we can determine with some certainty 
 his estimate of our common humanity, his views of 
 men, of the conduct of life, of the divine government 
 of the world. For not only are the fragments them- 
 selves amounting in many cases to complete para- 
 graphs, stamped as well with unique and peculiar 
 features as with a singular consistency of tone and 
 sentiment, but they illustrate with exactness the 
 truth of the criticism passed on Menander by those 
 who had his works in their entirety before them. "We 
 have, moreover, the titles of ninety of his plays, and, 
 as many of these titles are undoubtedly descriptive, 
 they testify to the wonderful versatility and compre- 
 hensiveness of his genius. One or two of his plots 
 have been preserved, one or two others can be plausibly 
 conjectured, and we are therefore enabled to under- 
 stand something of the conduct of his fable, and of 
 his constructive method. A short notice of him 
 by Suidas, a few personal anecdotes collected from 
 Alciphron and others, with the criticisms of Quintilian 
 and Plutarch, furnish us with some interesting par- 
 ticulars. But there is another source of information 
 which critic and biographer alike must consult with 
 far more unalloyed satisfaction where the critic 
 will recognise the best of commentaries, where the 
 biographer will recognise the true key to character. 
 Among the statues in the Vatican there is one which
 
 322 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 cannot fail to rivet the attention of the most listless 
 visitor. It is the figure of a man in the prime of life, 
 sitting on an arm-chair with a roll in his hand. Clad 
 in simple drapery, the firm, hale, well-knit limbs 
 reveal themselves in all the perfection of symmetry 
 and contour. He is in the glory of mature and 
 majestic manhood health and vigour glow in every 
 line. Careless ease, grace, self-possession an air of 
 superiority, conscious but not insolent characterise 
 his attitude. The face is the face of one on whom 
 life had sate lightly, not because its depths had been 
 unfathomed or its solemn mystery unrealised, but 
 because the necessary compromises had been made, and 
 humour had brought insight, and insight tolerance 
 and enjoyment. There is no passion, no enthusiasm, 
 on that tranquil face. The head is bowed, not by 
 time or sickness, but by the habit of reflection 
 which has lined with wrinkles the broad and ample 
 brow, and touched with earnestness, and perhaps with 
 something of melancholy, the placid, meditative 
 features. The eyes, in a half reverie, seem keen and 
 searching, but their depth and fixedness suggest not 
 so much the amused spectator as the philosophic 
 observer. On the sensual lips, half curling into a 
 smile, flickers a light, playful irony ; on the delicately 
 curved nostrils are stamped unmistakably pride, re- 
 finement, sensibility. Such was Menander as he 
 appeared among men. 
 
 He was born in B.C. 341, a year memorable also 
 for the birth of the philosopher Epicurus. His father, 
 Diopeithes, was a distinguished general, and young
 
 MENANDER 323 
 
 Menander first saw the light at a time which must 
 have caused much anxiety to his parents. His 
 father, who was in command of the Athenian forces 
 in the Thracian Chersonese, had ravaged a district 
 which was under Macedonian rule, and Philip had 
 sent a letter of remonstrance to Athens. The matter 
 was taken up by Philip's partisans, and Diopeithes 
 was arraigned, not only for his aggression on the 
 king's territory, but for the means to which he had 
 resorted for supporting his troops. He was defended 
 by Demosthenes in a speech which is still extant, 
 and absolved from blame. Of Menander's mother, 
 Hegesistrate, we know nothing but her musical name. 
 About his early years antiquity is silent. Making 
 all allowances, however, even for preternatural pre- 
 cocity, we may safely refuse credence to Ulpian's state- 
 ment about his being one of the dicasts on the trial 
 of Ctesiphon in B.C. 330 : a dicast of the age of 
 twelve would have been a prodigy which would, we 
 suspect, have required and found very speedy ex- 
 piation in an Athenian law-court. The young poet 
 had everything in his favour. His uncle Alexis, 
 the author so says Suidas of no less than two 
 hundred and forty -five comedies, was one of the 
 most popular dramatists of the time, and he appears 
 to have assisted his nephew in his studies, to have 
 encouraged him in dramatic composition, and to 
 have taught him to affect that purity and ele- 
 gance of style which characterised in so marked a 
 degree his own dramas. Nor was Alexis his only 
 instructor. It is possible that he was one of the
 
 324 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 many youths who hung round Aristotle in the shady 
 walks of the Lyceum ; it is certain that he was the 
 friend and disciple of Aristotle's favourite pupil, the 
 illustrious Theophrastus. In Theophrastus he must 
 have found a congenial companion, a minute and 
 close observer of life, who possessed like himself 
 an exquisite sense of the ridiculous, a fine vein of 
 humour, admirable powers of observation, equally 
 admirable powers of description. His Characters 
 have been the delight of all ages. They have been 
 translated into every language in Europe, imitations 
 of them are innumerable, and they have been so 
 popular in England and France that we are indebted 
 to them for a distinct branch of literature. Even in 
 an age like the present, when the social sketch has 
 been carried to so nice a degree of subtlety and 
 finish, they have lost nothing of their old charm. 
 The advantages of such a friendship to one who was 
 to make human nature the principal object of his 
 study must have been incalculable, and there is every 
 reason to believe that admiration on the one side and 
 generous affection on the other drew master and pupil 
 very closely together. Indeed, the ancients have 
 accused the youth of copying with servile fidelity the 
 personal peculiarities of the philosopher. That effemin- 
 ate foppishness and regard for dress, that close attention 
 to exterior adornment and elegance, perhaps also the 
 languid and mincing gait which Menander affected, 1 
 
 1 Unguento delibutus, vestitu adfluens 
 Veniebat gressu delicato et languido. 
 
 Phsedrus, lib. vi. 1.
 
 MENANDER 325 
 
 were reminiscences of his master, who had learned 
 them from Aristotle in the days when Aristotle 
 was not superior to such follies. It is not at 
 all unlikely that he first made, while pursuing 
 his studies under Theophrastus, the acquaintance of 
 the most brilliant of his contemporaries, the states- 
 man, the voluptuary, the orator, the philosopher, the 
 poet the all -accomplished Demetrius Phalereus, in 
 whose ruin fourteen years later he was so nearly 
 involved. As Epicurus passed the first eighteen 
 years of his life at Samos, his intimacy with Menander 
 in all probability did not commence before B.C. 323, 
 when they may have met in the lecture -rooms of 
 Xenocrates. It must have been interrupted again 
 during the Lamian War, and when the two youths 
 met afterwards at Athens in 306, they had both 
 of them laid the foundations of immortal renown. 
 Menander brought out his first successful play, 
 '0/3777, The Angry Man (as we may perhaps translate 
 it), in 321, before he had completed his twenty- 
 second year. It was apparently one of those ethical 
 studies in which we may suspect the influence 
 of Theophrastus. We have now no more dates to 
 guide us in tracing his biography. We know that 
 between 321 and 291, the year of his death, he 
 produced upwards of a hundred comedies. 
 
 During that period the Athenians had passed 
 through almost every phase of political vicissitude. 
 They had seen an obscure and barbarous state assert- 
 ing by rapid steps the supremacy over Hellas ; they 
 had seen the descendants of Miltiades and Themis-
 
 326 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 tocles grovelling at the feet of a Macedonian despot ; 
 they had seen a youth at the head of 12,000 trained 
 soldiers and a mob of mercenaries achieve the con- 
 quest of the world ; they had seen a mighty empire 
 founded in a few months, in a few months shivered 
 into fragments, in a few months an ordered realm 
 anarchy and ruin. They had been the sport of a 
 cruel and capricious destiny. Over the darkened 
 stage of Athenian politics tyrant after tyrant had 
 chased each other in swift and disastrous succes- 
 sion the ruthless Antipater, the milder but un- 
 scrupulous Cassander, the all - accomplished but 
 debauched and effeminate Demetrius Phalereus, the 
 bloody and ferocious Lachares, the warrior voluptuary 
 Demetrius Poliorcetes. The last accents of liberty 
 had died on the lips of Demosthenes ; her sun had 
 set in storm at Chaeronea. It never shone again. 
 The noble but ill -guided efforts of Hyperides and 
 Leosthenes had ended in ignominy and defeat. Wise 
 men like Phocion folded their arms and scoffed. The 
 prey alternately of desperate enthusiasts and equally 
 desperate impostors, bandied about from one traitor 
 to another, the Athenians had come to regard political 
 freedom as a blessing too precarious to be worth the 
 sacrifices it involved, as a prize too costly to be the 
 object of a prudent ambition. With the heel of a 
 despot on their necks, they had learned to become 
 infamous and contented. The past was forgotten 
 it scarcely fired a poet; the future was ignored. 
 Apathy, dignified under specious titles, became a 
 cult. The polytheism which the great poets of the
 
 MENANDER 327 
 
 two preceding centuries had sublimed into one of 
 the noblest religious creeds which has ever taken 
 form among men, lost all its vitality, and mere 
 atheism reigned in its stead. Everything seemed 
 unreal but the incidents of the passing hour ; 
 nothing was certain but change ; the old patriotism 
 had dissolved in a sort of sickly cosmopolitanism, 
 the old virtues and aspirations in hedonism and 
 pessimism. 
 
 In striking contrast, however, to her moral and 
 political degradation was the social and intellectual 
 splendour of Athens. Never was her population more 
 numerous and thriving. The barriers which had in 
 the days of her pride separated her from the rest of 
 the world were gradually crumbling away. Caste was 
 being abolished. The merchant prince had supplanted 
 the aristocrat, though in succeeding to his place he had 
 succeeded also to his liberality, his refinement, and his 
 judicious patronage of art. The streets of Athens 
 resembled the streets of imperial Home. During the 
 presidency of Demetrius Phalereus there were in 
 Attica no less than 21,000 free men, 10,000 resident 
 aliens, and 400,000 slaves ; and this estimate neither 
 includes their families nor takes account of the 
 myriads who must have been incessantly streaming 
 in and out of the city. While the blasts of war were 
 raging over Asia, and thundering at her very gates, 
 Athens seems to have resembled the Elysium of 
 Epicurus. Commerce flourished, material prosperity 
 was in its zenith everywhere wealth, pomp, and 
 luxury. Women, the fame of whose beauty had pene-
 
 328 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 trated to the remotest palaces of Ecbatana and the 
 Oxus, thronged the studios, the porches, and the 
 halls, refusing the splendid offers of oriental poten- 
 tates, to lavish their love on the poets and philosophers 
 who have made them immortal Glycera, the muse 
 of Menander ; Gnathsena, the muse of Diphilus ; 
 Leontium, the disciple and mistress of Epicurus, 
 whose learned treatise against Theophrastus was the 
 delight of Cicero ; Marmorium with her beautiful 
 hair and rosy lips ; Lesena, with her soft eyes and 
 her stinging tongue ; Lamia, Nannium, and a hundred 
 others. Philosophy was cultivated with assiduity 
 and success. The schools were crowded with eager 
 students Theophrastus alone could boast of 2000 
 pupils and the wit and wisdom of the world met in 
 a city which Liberty had deserted. In the beautiful 
 groves which adjoined the Temple of Apollo Lyceus 
 Aristotle discussed almost every branch of human 
 learning, and when in B.C. 322 he passed away, it 
 was only to make room for Theophrastus and Mene- 
 demus. There too were gathered together Zeno, 
 Epicurus, and those other illustrious sages whose 
 names have been preserved by Diogenes Laertius, 
 and whose wisdom, filtered through sect and system, 
 has leavened the philosophies of the world. The 
 abstract sciences may flourish in any soil, but never 
 yet has the character of art remained unmodified 
 by the moral and political condition of the epoch 
 contemporary with its appearance ; and the poetical 
 literature of this period exactly reflects it. The 
 rapture and enthusiasm of the epos and the lyre were
 
 MENANDER 329 
 
 no more. Oratory had degenerated into ambitious 
 declamation. The solemn majesty of the tragic drama 
 had long died in the bombast of Theodectes, and the 
 Old Comedy, with its hatred of tyranny, its republican 
 spirit, its personalities, its extravagance, its broad 
 fun, and its lyric ecstasy, was suppressed and for- 
 gotten. ^Eschylus and Sophocles would indeed have 
 been hissed off the stage, Aristophanes would have 
 starved. Poets of a different type were required 
 and found those poets were Alexis, Philemon, and 
 Menander ; a drama of another kind was demanded 
 and created it was the New Comedy. 
 
 It has been sometimes asserted that the New 
 Comedy was simply the Old Comedy in another form, 
 stripped, that is to say, of its personalities and its 
 lyric element, and that it arose mediately through 
 the Middle Comedy from the measure passed in B.C. 
 404, prohibiting the introduction of living persons 
 on the stage by name. Such a definition, though it 
 appears to have satisfied Schlegel, is far too narrow, 
 and is, moreover, misleading. The truth is that the 
 New Comedy had little or nothing in common with 
 the Old Comedy of the Athenian stage. It sprang, 
 indeed, historically speaking, from the Middle Comedy, 
 but the characteristics of the Middle Comedy are to be 
 traced for the most part not to Attic but to Sicilian 
 sources, not to the Comedy of Eupolis and Cratinus, 
 but to the Comedy of Epicharmus. To say, as it 
 generally is said, that the transition from the Old to 
 the Middle Comedy is marked by ihePlutus is to say 
 what is no doubt true, but what is only true with
 
 330 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 important reservation. In the Middle Comedy was 
 plainly comprised a drama which had two distinct 
 species dramas, that is to say, adhering generally to 
 the characteristics, more or less modified, of the Old 
 Comedy, and dramas in which the characteristics 
 peculiar to the New largely preponderated. And 
 this accounts for Aristotle recognising only the dis- 
 tinction between the Old and the New Comedy, and 
 making no mention of the Middle. The Plutus 
 illustrates the first species of drama ; it bears no re- 
 semblance to the second. But the moment we turn 
 to the accounts which have come down to us of the 
 drama of Epicharmus and his school, we feel that we 
 can at once trace the New Comedy, as a branch of 
 Comedy, to its true source. Here was a drama which 
 aimed, not at political satire, not at caricature, not at 
 fantastic illusion, but at a faithful presentation of real 
 life, at portraying manners, at delineating character, 
 and such characters as became stock dramatis personce 
 in the New Comedy, at philosophic reflections on life, 
 at coining proverbs and gnomes. But the New 
 Comedy had other peculiarities ; it was an expres- 
 sion of life on other sides than appertains to mere 
 Comedy. If it moved to smiles it moved to tears ; 
 if it abounded in humour it abounded in pathos. 
 Its tone in reflection and sentiment was often serious 
 and even melancholy, and occasionally it depicted 
 incidents and situations which bordered closely on 
 tragedy. A remarkable passage in the anonymous 
 Life of Aristophanes attributes to him the honour of 
 having formulated this species of drama. He was
 
 MENANDER 331 
 
 the first, says the biographer, to exhibit a play, after 
 the fashion of the New Comedy, in his Cocalus, and 
 it was on the model of the Cocalus that Menander 
 and Philemon wrote their plays. It introduced, he 
 goes on to say, "a seduction, a recognition, and all 
 such other incidents as Menander affected." As 
 the Cocalus is not extant it is impossible to know 
 how far this description is true. It is probably 
 exaggerated. In all likelihood its resemblance to 
 the Comedies of Crates 2 was much nearer than its 
 resemblance to those of Menander; in other words, 
 the similarity lay, not in style, tone, and colour, but 
 simply in the nature of the plot. 
 
 It is not to the Comic but to the Tragic stage that 
 we are to trace the influence most potent with the 
 masters of the New Comedy. Its true forerunner 
 and initiator was Euripides. The style and versifica- 
 tion of Menander are unmistakably modelled on those 
 of Euripides. His most characteristic reflections and 
 sentiments are also Euripidean. He owned, indeed, 
 as Quintilian tells us, that he both admired and 
 imitated Euripides. 3 So close, indeed, is the general 
 resemblance between the comic and the tragic poet 
 that in the old anthologies nothing is more common 
 than to find passages belonging to the one attributed 
 
 Kdl rrjs vtas KUfiySlas rbv rp6irov 
 
 .fravSpos re ical $i\r)fju>)v fdpa/jMTotipyriffait . . . typa\f/e 
 tv flffdyei QQopbv xal dvayvupKr/jAv KO.I r&\\a ir&vra. & ^Xaxre 
 f. Vita Aristophanis, Scholia Grceca in Aristophanem (edit. 
 Didot, p. xxvii.). 
 
 2 See Aristotle, Poetics, cap. v. 
 
 8 Instil, Orat. See too Meineke's Epimetrum to his Trag. Com. Grace., 
 vol. iv. p. 705.
 
 332 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 to the other. And what is true of Menander is true 
 of Philemon. " If," he says, or represents one of his 
 characters as saying, " if the dead be really sentient, 
 as some assert, I would hang myself to see Euri- 
 pides " 
 
 Ei rats dXrjOfiauriv 01 Tefli/^Kores 
 ai<rdr)<rt.v C?X OV 5 o-vSpes tos <acriv rives, 
 dirr)yd[ji.r)v av GXTT' iSeiv 
 
 Traced historically, then, the New Comedy may be 
 regarded in some of its aspects as a development of 
 the Comedy of Epicharmus, in others as a modification 
 and development of Euripidean Tragedy. 
 
 The New Comedy, speaking generally, bears the 
 same relation to the other productions of the Greek 
 stage as the romantic drama of modern Europe bears 
 to the classical drama. It was a natural step in the 
 development of art. It arose from no curtailment of 
 the old licence, though that curtailment may have 
 done something to prepare the way for it. There is, 
 and always will be, a tendency in art to become 
 realistic. There is a point in its career when it travels 
 far away from simple nature, creating a world and an 
 atmosphere of its own ; but there is also a point when 
 it never fails to return, when it throws off artificial 
 trammels, and betakes itself once more to reality. 
 This is precisely what the New Comedy did. It 
 returned to nature and life. Carrying still further 
 the innovation of Euripides, it abolished the hard and 
 fast lines which had separated comedy from tragedy ; 
 and, while it brought down tragedy from an austere 
 
 1 Frag. xl. a.
 
 MENANDER 333 
 
 and lofty elevation, it purified comedy from the ex- 
 travagance which had transformed it into caricature 
 and fantastic illusion. By uniting both, as actual life 
 unites them, it was enabled to hold the mirror up to 
 nature. Its object was to represent the world as it is 
 its joys, its sorrows, its smiles, its tears ; to idealise 
 nothing, to exaggerate nothing, to depict no demi- 
 gods, to make the ordinary incidents of everyday life 
 its staple material, to trust for its plots and surprises 
 to the extraordinary incidents which vary in the 
 actual course of things the common tenor of events. 
 We very much question whether Philemon and 
 Menander ever put a character on the stage of which 
 they could not point to the original, or ever wove 
 a plot the incidents of which may not have been 
 within the experience of some among their audience. 
 They drew indiscriminately from all classes from 
 the motley groups which swarmed round the philo- 
 sophers, idled in the Agora, or pigged together in the 
 Piraeus, from the wild pirates of the .ZEgean and the 
 freebooters of Acarnania, from the brilliant society 
 which thronged the porticoes of Demetrius, or hung 
 about Leaena and Glycera. Merchants, sailors, soldiers, 
 serving-men, farmers, philosophers, quacks, fortune- 
 tellers, artists, poets, courtesans, panders, parasites, 
 and all the anomalous offspring of a rich and highly 
 civilised society, figure among their dramatis per sonce. 
 Every class seems to have been represented. Some- 
 times incidents in domestic life furnished them with 
 a plot the complications arising from the frailties 
 of husbands or wives before marriage, the troubles
 
 334 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 connected with supposititious children. Sometimes 
 those social romances common enough among a 
 people where the relations between the sexes were 
 so peculiar, and the population for the most part 
 vagrant and migratory, were their theme; at other 
 times they would draw on the revelations which 
 came out in the law-courts, or on the strange ex- 
 periences of shipwrecked sailors; occasionally their 
 play would be the study of some vice or humour. 
 But, with all this variety of character and incident, 
 the pivot on which the plot turned was almost invari- 
 ably a love-story. Ovid tells us that there was no 
 play of Menander's in which love was not an element. 1 
 As their primary object was to amuse, they were 
 probably careful to select such incidents as savoured 
 more of comedy than of tragedy, though it is easy to 
 see that the tone of the New Comedy, in Menander's 
 hands at least, was essentially serious, bordering very 
 closely, and sometimes trespassing, on the domain of 
 tragedy. Of the broad fun, of the caricature and 
 extravagance of the Old Comedy, there is not, so far 
 as we know, a single trace. The nearest approach 
 we have in modern times to the breadth and com- 
 prehensiveness of the New Comedy are the tragi- 
 comedies of the Elizabethan age ; to its wit and 
 humour, the masterpieces of Moliere and Congreve ; 
 to its inimitable finish and grace of style, the verse 
 of Pope and the prose of Addison ; to its tone and 
 spirit, the novels of Thackeray. 
 
 The honour of founding the New Comedy belongs 
 
 1 Fabula jucundi nulla est sine amore Menandri. Trist. ii. 369.
 
 MENANDER 335 
 
 to Philemon, who was born at Soli about B.C. 360, 
 and was therefore some twenty years older than 
 Menander. When Menander exhibited his first play 
 in B.C. 320, Philemon was the most popular dramatist 
 in Athens, and from that moment a rivalry, which 
 only ended when the waves of the Piraeus closed 
 over the head of the younger poet, began between 
 them. Philemon, though far inferior so say the 
 ancient critics to his rival, managed, partly by 
 bribery, partly by pandering to party spirit, and by 
 currying favour with the judges, to maintain the 
 supremacy. 1 "Do you not blush, Philemon, when 
 you gain a victory over me ? " was the only remark 
 which Menander condescended to make on one of the 
 many occasions on which Philemon had beaten him. 2 
 He was not a man who appears to have been much 
 respected, even by his patrons. Plutarch tells an 
 amusing story about him. In one of his comedies 
 he had taken occasion to libel Magas, the tyrant of 
 Cyrene, on account of his want of learning. Some 
 time afterwards, on the occasion of a visit to Alex- 
 andria, he was driven by contrary winds into the 
 harbour of Cyrene, and thus came into his enemy's 
 hands. Magas, however, disdaining to revenge himself, 
 merely directed a soldier to touch the poet's throat 
 with a naked sword, to retire without hurting 
 him, and to present him with a set of child's play- 
 things. 3 Philemon was, however, apart from corrupt 
 intrigues, a formidable rival, and Quintilian, a very 
 
 1 Aulus Gellius, xvii. 4. 2 Id. xvii. 4. 
 
 8 De Cohibenda Ira, ix.
 
 336 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 competent judge, though he condemns the bad taste of 
 those who prefer Philemon to Menander, admits that 
 Philemon is universally and justly admitted to rank 
 next to him. 1 Indeed, to a modern apprehension, 
 there is no very strongly marked distinction between 
 the style of the two poets, though we think we can 
 discern a somewhat coarser fibre in the work of 
 Philemon ; and it is certainly possible to understand 
 what Demetrius meant when he described the style 
 of the one as easy and conversational, \e\v/Mewr) Kal 
 vTTOKpiritcri, and that of the other as incatenated and 
 close - clamped, a-vvtjpT'rjfjLev'r) Kal olov r/(r<f>d\i(T fjievrj rot? 
 
 Menander, who learned his philosophy partly from 
 Epicurus and partly from Zeno, was in every respect 
 a true child of the time, and appears to have re- 
 garded with easy indifference not only the political 
 troubles which had befallen his country, but the 
 reverses which occasionally befell himself. TV r&v 
 irpwTOVVTWV fidde (f>epeiv e^ova-iav " Learn to submit 
 thee to the powers that be" is a maxim he has 
 repeated more than once. Too wise to embarrass 
 himself with deceptive friendships, he probably knew 
 men too well to respect them, and, expecting nothing, 
 he was not likely to be embittered by disappoint- 
 ment. Not beginning as an optimist, and being 
 naturally amiable, he was in no danger of ending as 
 a cynic. Like Horace, whom he closely resembles, 
 as well in genius as in temperament and tastes, he 
 took care to enjoy the society of those who could 
 
 1 Instit. Orat. x. 1. 2 Z>e Eloatt. 197.
 
 MENANDER 337 
 
 amuse or instruct him, and to secure the favour of 
 those who could contribute to his interests. With 
 Demetrius Phalereus he was on terms of the closest 
 intimacy. A ruler who combined the character of a 
 statesman, an orator, a philosopher, a voluptuary, 
 and a poet, was scarcely likely to have been in- 
 different to the charms of a man like Menander, 
 and while Demetrius was in power Menander held 
 a distinguished place at his court. When, however, 
 in B.C. 307, Demetrius Poliorcetes invaded Athens 
 and expelled his namesake from the city, the poet 
 narrowly escaped being put to death. The Syco- 
 phants had lodged their accusations against him, 
 but Telesphorus, the son-in-law of the conqueror, 
 interceded in Menander's favour, and his life was 
 spared. 
 
 It was about this time, probably, that he received 
 an invitation from Ptolemy Lagus, the king of 
 Egypt, an ardent admirer of his writings, to emi- 
 grate to Alexandria. This, however, he declined. 
 The beautiful Glycera had become his mistress, and 
 with her name his own will be as indissolubly 
 associated as that of Alfieri with the Countess of 
 Albany, or that of our own Byron with La Guiccioli. 
 No poet is so full of sarcasms against women as 
 Menander, and yet assuredly no poet had less reason 
 to complain. If Alciphron can be trusted and it 
 is highly probable that he drew largely on actual 
 tradition Glycera was in every way worthy of her 
 illustrious lover. To fidelity and affection, to every 
 female charm and accomplishment, she added the
 
 338 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 more substantial attraction of intellectual sympathy. 
 She assisted him, it seems, in the composition of his 
 comedies, she soothed and encouraged him when the 
 partial judges gave the prize to his rival, and in the 
 domestic virtues a courtesan rivalled Arete herself. 
 Alciphron's Letters are, of course, purely imaginary, 
 but the letter of Grlycera to Bacchis is so charmingly 
 natural that it almost cheats us into a belief in its 
 authenticity. 1 " My Menander," she writes, " has 
 determined to go to Corinth to see the Isthmian 
 games. It was much against my wish, for you know 
 what a trial it is to be deprived of such a lover 
 even for a short time." Still, as he did not often 
 leave her, she had to let him go ; but she is full of 
 apprehension; she is afraid he will be intriguing 
 with her friend, for she knows that he has already 
 been attracted by her. "It is not you, my dear, I 
 fear, for I know your honourable feelings, so much as 
 Menander himself he is such a terrible flirt. I am 
 as certain as I can' be of anything that it was quite 
 as much because he thought that he should meet 
 you as on account of the Isthmian games that he 
 undertook this journey, and the austerest of men 
 could not resist you. Perhaps you will blame me for 
 my suspicions. Pardon the jealous fondness of love. 
 If he returns as much in love with me as when he 
 set out, I shall be very grateful to you." She adds 
 also another curious reason for wishing to retain his 
 affections if they quarrel she will be exposed to 
 ribaldry on the stage (an ambiguous text makes it 
 
 1 Alciphron, Epistolce, i. 29.
 
 MENANDER 339 
 
 doubtful whether she means by the pen of Menander 
 or by some other poet ; let us give him the benefit 
 of the doubt). The play (the Glycera) in which he 
 sketched her character and commemorated their loves 
 was certainly complimentary : three lines only have 
 been preserved. They are significant :-r- 
 
 Why weep'st thou ? By Olympian Zeus I swear 
 And by Athene, though I know, dear girl, 
 That I full oft have sworn by them before. 
 
 The letter which Alciphron represents him as send- 
 ing to Glycera on the occasion of Ptolemy's offer is a 
 very pleasing testimony of his affection and gratitude 
 to his beautiful mistress, as well as of that strong 
 patriotic feeling which still a reminiscence of 
 brighter days bound the Athenians to the city of 
 the violet crown. It may be read in the second 
 book of Alciphron's Letters, where it forms the 
 third. 
 
 We learn from Aleiphron that Menander had an 
 estate at Piraeus ; from an old commentator on 
 Ovid that he was drowned while bathing in the 
 harbour ; and from Pausanias that he was buried 
 by the road leading out of Piraeus towards Athens. 
 He passed away, like our own Shakspeare, in the 
 meridian glory of his genius. He had not completed 
 his fifty-second year. Old age, from which he recoiled 
 N in horror ; physical pain, from which, like most of his 
 countrymen, he shrank in pusillanimous timidity 
 were spared him. His life had glided away in almost 
 unbroken tranquillity, and when the end came, it 
 came as the greatest and wisest of the ancients
 
 340 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 wished it to come suddenly. From his cradle he 
 had been Fortune's darling, and it would indeed seem 
 that, remembering his own lines, she had added to 
 her other boons the last it was in her power to give, 
 the last it was in his power to crave. In his comedy 
 of The CJiangeling he had written : 
 
 TOVTOV euTvxeoraTOV Aeyw 
 "0<ms 6f<apij(ra<s aAvTrws, ITap/itcvcui , 
 Ta cre/xva TOLVT aTrrJA^ev, oOcv 7yA$v, ra^v, 
 Tov rjjAiov TOV KoivoV, da-rep, 1 v8<op, ve</>7/, 
 TLvp' ravra err] K.O.V l/ccmiv fiiwrerat. 
 "O^ei irapovTa. 
 
 Of all men, Parmeno, happiest is lie 
 
 Who, having stayed just long enough on earth 
 
 To gaze in peace upon its majesty 
 
 The common sun, star, water, cloud, and fire 
 
 Betakes him to the nothing whence he came 
 
 As soon as may be. Live a century 
 
 'Tis the same scene before thee. 
 
 It is not possible to ascertain with certainty the 
 plots, or the nature of the plots, of more than a 
 comparatively small number of Menander's plays. 
 Some have been preserved or indicated by the Latin 
 adaptations. Thus, The Andrian Woman and TJie 
 Perinthian Woman are in their general features 
 known to us by the Andria; those of Tlie 
 Eunuch and The Flatterer by the Eunuchus; 
 those of TJie Brothers by the Adelphi; those of TJie 
 Self-tormentor by the Heauton-timorumenos. The 
 plots of The Apparition and of The Treasure have 
 been described to us by Donatus, and that of The 
 Leucadian Rock by Servius in his commentary on 
 
 ' might be plausibly conjectured here for the common reading, 
 icoivbv going with it. Cf. rbv dtpa rbv KOIVOV, Incert. Fab. ii.
 
 MENANDER 341 
 
 Virgil's JEneid (iii. 279). A few bints from various 
 ancient authors throw some little light on four or 
 five others ; in the case of the rest all is conjecture, 
 aided only by titles and scanty fragments. But one 
 thing is quite clear, that Menander's versatile and 
 many-sided genius is very imperfectly represented 
 by Terence, who in all probability confined himself 
 to a particular department of Menandrian drama. 
 Menander's comedies probably fell into four classes. 
 First would come those which may be described as 
 comedies of romantic incident. Such would be The 
 Apparition, The Treasure, Tlie Andrian Woman, 
 The Perinthian Woman, The Leucadian Rock, and 
 The Suitors. Next would come studies from domestic 
 life, illustrated by The Woman-hater, in which a 
 man having repented of his marriage is so provoked 
 by everything his wife does or says that all the 
 exhortations of his friends cannot recall his maddened 
 mind to reason, and by The Necklace, which must 
 have been a very amusing play. An old man, 
 whose comforts are studied quite innocently by a 
 female servant, who happens, however, to be well 
 educated and handsome, is compelled to turn her out 
 of his house because she has attracted the jealousy of 
 his old and ugly wife, who insists that the poor woman 
 is his concubine. To this class probably also belonged 
 The Woman Clipped, The Woman Cuffed, and The 
 CJiangeling. To the third class may be assigned 
 those which depicted the social and fashionable life 
 of Athens, and they seem in truth to have depicted 
 every phase of it, suggesting the comprehensive ful-
 
 342 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 ness with which Balzac treated of modern Paris. In 
 Tlie Feasts and The Festival of Aphrodite we had 
 probably pictures of those sides of Athenian life with 
 which Menander's comedies were by the ancients 
 especially associated. " You don't seem to me to be an 
 Attic woman," says a lover in Philostratus, " for you 
 would not be ignorant of night festivals and feasts 
 and of Menander's plays." * The Phanion, the Tliais, 
 and the Glycera were studies of the courtesans, and 
 the last play was, as we learn from Alciphron, a 
 picture of his own mistress and her ways. In the 
 Sham Hercules, the Thrasuleon, The Hated Man, 
 and probably in The Shield, we had studies of 
 soldiers and military braggarts. In Tlie Thessalian 
 Woman we learn from Pliny 2 that we were among 
 witches and their incantations ; so also (our informant 
 is Alciphron 3 ) in The Fanatic. The Priestess was 
 a study of religious hysterics, and described how 
 an educated and accomplished woman, losing her 
 head, enrolled herself among the priestesses of 
 Cybele, and went about the streets drumming on 
 a brazen cymbal, and boasting that she could obtain 
 from the goddess whatever she prayed for. TJie 
 Fishermen seems to have been a study in marine 
 life ; perhaps also The Steersmen ; The Shipmaster 
 was most likely a domestic comedy. 
 
 But it is to the plays which are comprised in 
 the fourth class that a modern reader would have 
 turned, had they been extant, with most interest. 
 They appear to have been pure studies in character, 
 
 1 Epist. 42. 2 Nat. Hist. xxx. 2. 8 Epist. ii. 4 ad fin.
 
 MENANDER 343 
 
 or rather of particular phases of character ; to have 
 been elaborate delineations of what Ben Jonson calls 
 "humours." 1 To this class belonged, or appear to 
 have belonged, for it is impossible to speak with 
 certainty, Anger, The Ill-tempered Man, The Super- 
 stitious Man, The Flatterer, The Woman-hater, and 
 The Timid Man. These plays, which may be pro- 
 nounced to be the lineal ancestors of Tartujfe and 
 L'Avare, as well as of the classical comedies of 
 Jonson, may in germ be traced no doubt originally 
 to Aristotle, and immediately to Theophrastus. 
 
 The plots of Menander were, we are told, distin- 
 guished by their extreme simplicity. Of three of 
 them descriptions have come down to us. That of 
 TJie Apparition is of singular interest and beauty. 
 The stepmother of a young son had had, previous 
 to her marriage, an intrigue with a neighbour, the 
 issue of which was a daughter. To this daughter, a 
 girl of surpassing loveliness, the mother was devotedly 
 attached ; and, though happiness with her husband 
 would have been no longer possible had he discovered 
 her secret, she could not bear to be separated from her 
 child. She had recourse, therefore, to an ingenious 
 device. She lodged the child with her next-door 
 neighbour, removed the wall which separated her own 
 apartment from that of her daughter, and was thus 
 
 1 And which he thus admirably describes : 
 
 When some one peculiar quality 
 Doth so possess a man that it doth draw 
 All his affects, his spirits, and his powers 
 From their confluctions all to run one way, 
 This may be truly said to be a humour. 
 
 Introduction to Every Man out of his Humour.
 
 344 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 enabled to enjoy her society for some hours every day. 
 To obviate all suspicion and all possibility of intrusion, 
 she pretended that the aperture made in the wall was 
 a shrine ; she called it sacred, she covered it with 
 leaves and chaplets, and she said that she went there 
 to sacrifice, and commune with her Genius. One day, 
 however, she was absent, and her stepson, curious to 
 see whether he could catch a glimpse of the divinity 
 so piously worshipped by his stepmother, entered the 
 aperture. The girl, hearing some one and thinking it 
 was her mother, came forward, and the awe-struck 
 youth was in the presence of the divinity he sought. 
 He soon found that the goddess was but mortal, that 
 the apparition thrilled with passion responsive to his 
 own. For some time his stolen visits alternated with 
 those of his stepmother, but at last the secret was 
 divulged. The mother confessed her story to her 
 husband, he forgave her everything, and the young 
 pair sealed by a happy marriage their own love 
 and their parents' reconciliation. Part of the plot 
 of TJie Leucadian Rock is preserved by Servius ; 
 it is a curious romance, though at what point 
 Menander took it up is doubtful. A youth named 
 Phaon used to ply a ferry-boat between Lesbos and 
 the continent. One day a poor infirm old woman re- 
 quested to be carried across, and the good-natured 
 youth, pitying her forlorn condition, conveyed her 
 over for nothing. The old woman was Aphrodite in 
 disguise. Pleased with his kindness, she gave him an 
 alabaster box of ointment, telling him that whenever 
 he anointed himself with it a woman could not fail
 
 MENANDER 345 
 
 to become passionately in love with him. Phaon had 
 a happy time. For one of his victims, however 
 according to some authorities this victim was no 
 other than the poetess Sappho he did not care, and 
 she in consequence flung herself from the Leucadian 
 promontory into the sea. 1 
 
 But to turn to the Fragments. As it is now im- 
 possible to judge at first hand of Menander's skill and 
 power as a dramatic artist, not a single complete scene 
 from his plays having been preserved, the interest of his 
 extant remains lies chiefly in the light they throw, or 
 seem to throw, on his sentiments and opinions, on his 
 ethics and religious views. Here, however, we must 
 proceed with caution. The individuality of a drama- 
 tist is not always to be deduced from his characters ; 
 still less must we assume that what he places in the 
 mouths of his characters is the record of his own 
 impressions and convictions. But the father is 
 generally recognised in the children a race is 
 individualised by its idiosyncrasies. The tests of the 
 personal element in a dramatic poet are the predomi- 
 nance of a certain tone and colour, the multiplication 
 of copies presenting the same typical resemblance, the 
 obvious tendency to observe and judge from particular 
 points of view, and the continual recurrence of the 
 same or similar ideas, sentiments, opinions, and 
 generalisations. Even in the most impersonal of all 
 poets our own Shakspeare much of the man him- 
 self is clearly discernible. No one could doubt that 
 
 1 Our own Lyly has founded a play on the same story. See his Sappho and 
 Phaon.
 
 346 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 in politics he was an ultra -conservative; that his 
 religious opinions were speculatively tolerant and 
 liberal, but practically and professedly conventional ; 
 that, as a citizen, he had great respect for the world 
 and the world's law, had little sympathy with 
 fanatics and enthusiasts, and was no believer in 
 Utopias. All this and more than this we deduce with 
 certainty, not from particular passages, but from the 
 tenor of what finds expression repeatedly and em- 
 phatically in his writings. Applying the same test to 
 Menander we shall, therefore, take care that what is 
 quoted in illustration of his characteristics shall not be 
 selected arbitrarily from mere dramatic utterances, but 
 shall be typical. 
 
 Perhaps the first thing which strikes us in these 
 fragments is the sombre and gloomy view which 
 their author appears to have taken of life and 
 man, partly because it is thrown into relief by 
 the ordinary associations of comedy, and partly 
 because it stands in striking contrast with the 
 serenity and cheerfulness of his philosophy. The 
 tragic poets themselves have . not put the case more 
 strongly for the melancholy paradox of Theognis 
 and Bacchylides. 1 Our own Swift has not exceeded 
 him in pity and contempt for man. Take the 
 following : 
 
 1 Theognis, 425 seq. Bacchylides, Frag, xxxvii. 2. But it has found its 
 most popular expression in Sophocles, (Ed. Col. 1225 seq. : 
 
 /tiT) ijtvveu TOV aTraira ai<y Aoyov ' TO S', tTret <t><*-vfj, 
 /Srjvcu Keifiei/ oOev irep t)cei rroAv Sevrtpov ois Ta^iora. 
 
 " Jfot to have been born is best of all ; but, when one has seen the light, to 
 go as soon as possible to whence one came is next best by far."
 
 MENANDER 347 
 
 Suppose some god should come to me and say : 
 When you are dead you yet shall live again, 
 Be what you will or dog or sheep or goat, 
 Or man or horse, for live again you must ; 
 It is your fate, so choose what you will be 
 Anything rather, anything but man, 
 Would be my prompt request. 1 
 
 So again 
 
 Man is but pretext for calamity. 2 
 
 To some one who is in trouble he represents one of 
 his characters saying that, as sorrow is man's natural 
 portion, and as the gods make human existence con- 
 ditional on suffering, we cannot charge them either 
 with injustice or deception when they afflict us. 3 It is 
 the common lot of all 
 
 I used to think the rich, Phanias, 
 
 Who had no need to borrow, passed their nights 
 
 Without a groan, and roam'd not up and down, 
 
 Crying alas ! but sweetly, softly slept ; 
 
 But now I see that you the world calls blessed 
 
 Fare just as we do grief and life are kin. 
 
 With luxury grief lives, at glory's side 
 
 It stands, and is the poor man's comrade to the end. 4 
 
 But man gets no more than he deserves, for he is 
 the most graceless and ungrateful thing that crawls. 
 "All gratitude has long been dead in man" (Sent. Sing. 
 498) ; " Save man from ruin, he's your foe for ever" 
 (Id. 34) ; and his own folly and stupidity add to his 
 miseries 
 
 No creature in the world but is more blessed, 
 And hath not more intelligence than man. 
 
 1 The Changeling. I wish that here and elsewhere my translations could 
 have done more justice to the original. I can only say with the old gram- 
 marian, Fed quod potui, faciant meliora potentes. 
 
 2 Incert. Fab. cclxiii. 3 Id. ii. 4 TJie Lute-player.
 
 348 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Take the first object in our sight this ass 
 
 A sorry thing he is, as all allow ; 
 
 And yet his evils spring not from himself, 
 
 And all that Nature gave him he endures. 
 
 But we beside our necessary ills 
 
 Make ourselves others of our own providing. 
 
 A sneeze we're grieved ; a harsh word and we rage ; 
 
 A dream brings fear, a clamorous owl alarm ; 
 
 Anguish, opinions, laws, ambitions, 
 
 All these are evils added by ourselves. 1 
 
 The only just thing is, as he beautifully remarks, 
 the earth; sow it with grain, it gives you grain 
 again. 2 The world itself he describes in lines which 
 Thackeray might have prefixed to Vanity Fair, as a 
 meeting-place where men tarry for a while amid a 
 motley throng of idlers, thieves, and gamblers ; happy 
 is he who gets him gone from it as soon as he can. 
 If he lingers on to old age, his lot is merely to be 
 worn out with weariness and disgust, and to add to 
 the enemies who are always plotting his ruin. 3 If, 
 he says in another place, a man be honest, noble, and 
 generous, of what avail is it to him in such times ? 
 The first prize in life goes to the flatterer, the second 
 to the backbiter, and mere malice gets the third 
 
 1 "A.iravra ra f 
 
 nal vow IXOVTO. pa.\\ov avOpuiirov 
 rbv &vov opav e^fffri irpGrra. rovrovl, 
 oCros KCLKooalfjuav fffrlv b/j.o\oyovfj.evus. 
 rotirip KO.KOV di' avrov ovSev ylyvfrai, 
 
 avrol Trap' avruv irepa. irpoffiroplfofj.fi'. 
 \viro6/j.e0', &i> irrdpTj TIS, SLV eiirri /ca/cws, 
 6pyi6/j.e9' , &v tdyTis evuirviov, atpoftpa. 
 <j>o!3ovfj.e9', &v -yXaOf avatcpdyr], SeSoLKO.fj.fv. 
 ayuviai, 5<5at, faXon/ALai, v6fJ.oi, 
 
 iLiravra ravr' firlBera. rg tf>6aeL KaKa. Incert. Fab. V. 
 - The Husbandman. 3 The Cliangeling.
 
 MENANDER 349 
 
 av y x/aTjcrTos, euyev^s o~(f)68pa, 
 yevvcuos, ovSev 6'<eAos ev TW vw yefei, 
 Trpdrrei Se /coAa apifrra Travrtov, Sfvrepa 
 6 (rvKO<f>avTr)<S) 6 /ca/co^r/s rpira Aeyet. 1 
 
 An early death is the greatest boon that Nature can 
 bestow, and euthanasia is not likely to be the lot of 
 advanced years OVK evQavdrcos a,Trfj\6ev zkBwv et9 
 Xpovov. Chance (Ti^), he repeats over and over 
 again, rules the world, human foresight is mere folly. 
 Chance gave and chance will take away. A blind 
 and wretched power rv<f)\6v ye ical 8vo-Ti)v6v ea-nv rj 
 Tir^T? 2 she rules men's thoughts and words and 
 deeds. In a fragment of The Cnidian Woman and 
 of The Head-dress he uses TavTOfiarov mere Chance 
 as a synonym for the same power, 3 showing us how 
 far we have travelled from Pindar, in whose pantheon 
 TI^T; is the daughter of Zeus. What a world of 
 pathos is there in this couplet from The Olynthian 
 Woman : 
 
 How hard it is, when happy Nature gives 
 A noble boon, that fortune should destroy it ! 
 
 Prayers and ceremonies are of no avail, for if a man 
 could drag a god to perform his wishes, he would be 
 more powerful than the deity himself. 4 
 
 Much of this was no doubt a concession to the con- 
 ventional sentiments which a dramatic poet is bound 
 more or less to reflect, and is to be attributed not 
 
 1 The Fanatic. 2 Tlie Bridals. 
 
 3 Philemon, Incert. Fab, xlviii., gives the commentary 
 
 OVK IOTIV 17/u.ii' ovSepia. TV\>J fleos, 
 OVK lo'Tti', aXAa TavroftaTOf, o yiverai. 
 <os fTV\ fKa.crr<a irpoo-a-yopeverai Tv\r). 
 
 4 TJw Priestess.
 
 350 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 only to the peculiar character of the age in which 
 Menander lived, and the society in which he moved, 
 but in some measure perhaps to the influence of 
 Euripides, who was by far the most popular poet in 
 Greece. Since his death in B.C. 406, his maxims and 
 paradoxes were on the lips of every man and every 
 clever woman in Athens. On philosophy and ethics, 
 so far at least as they interested the multitude, his 
 influence was prodigious. His cynicism, his miso- 
 gynism, his rationalism, operated on the society which 
 surrounded Menander pretty much as the cant of 
 Hobbism operated on the society which surrounded 
 our own Drydens, Congreves, and Wycherleys ; and 
 such views were unhappily too much in unison with 
 the moral and political degradation of the age to be 
 otherwise than acceptable. On the stage he was the 
 dominant power. He had determined the course of 
 the drama, and not only did the Middle and New 
 Comedy spring directly from his theory of art, but he 
 coloured the ethics and theology of the drama in 
 Greece till its extinction. The most offensive illus- 
 tration of his influence on the Middle and New 
 Comedy is to be found in its misogynism. Since 
 Euripides this had become the fashionable cant. The 
 fragments of Menander are a storehouse of invectives 
 against that sex from which Homer had drawn his 
 Arete, his Penelope, and his Nausicaa; from which 
 Sophocles had drawn his Antigone, his Deianira, and 
 his Electra ; from which Euripides had himself drawn 
 his Macaria and his Alcestis ; which had given 
 Sappho and Corinna to poetry, Diotima and Leontium
 
 MENANDER 351 
 
 to philosophy. He can see nothing good in them, 
 nothing but what is reprehensible and shameless. 
 They are habitually untruthful " to tell one truth's 
 beyond a woman's power." They are all alike 
 "this woman and that woman are the same"- "live 
 with a lion rather than a wife." They bring a house 
 to destruction : 
 
 Again 
 
 That house wherein a woman holds the sway 
 Must go to certain ruin. 
 
 Though many a monster roams the land and sea, 
 No monster matches woman. 
 
 It is as useless to rebuke as it is to advise them. 1 
 Prometheus deserved his crucifixion on Caucasus 
 for having moulded so great a curse for man. To 
 transcribe indeed his invectives and sarcasms against 
 women and his dissuasions from marriage would be 
 to transcribe a considerable portion of the fragments. 
 Next to the misery of a husband is the misery of a 
 father. Nobody can be more wretched than a father 
 except the father who has more children 
 
 OVK e'crriv ovSev a.6\i(j>Tepov 
 
 irX.r)v ere/Dos av rj TrAetovwv Trou'Swv 
 
 Perhaps cynical misogynism never went further 
 than in the passage where he accounts for a mother 
 loving her children more than the father does because 
 she knows that they are hers, while he only surmises 
 that they are his. 3 
 
 1 MTJ \oid6pei yvva'iKa nySt vovOtrei. Sent. Sing. 
 
 2 Incert. Fab. ex. 
 3 Id. cxi. Euripides made characteristically the same remark.
 
 352 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 After all this the reader will not unnaturally 
 wonder where we are to find that " cheerfulness " and 
 " nobleness " which Goethe noted as peculiarly charac- 
 teristic of this poet. The answer is not far to seek. 
 Menander is cheerful because, in his views of life, he 
 looks the facts of life steadily in the face. He is the 
 slave of no delusions. He takes things exactly as he 
 finds them ; he draws no bills on hope for experience 
 to dishonour. He may libel women it was his only 
 concession to the cant of the day ; he may sigh with 
 a cynicism too complacent, perhaps, over the vanity 
 of the world and the hollowness of men ; but he 
 teaches us at the same time, like Horace and 
 Montaigne, to accept soberly and cheerfully the 
 relative position in which Man and Fortune stand 
 to each other ; in receiving happiness, to remember 
 that sorrow also is our portion ; that good and evil 
 are inextricably interwoven ; that nothing is perma- 
 nent, that all is relative ; that vice may pass into 
 virtue, that virtue,- strained too far, may revert by 
 reaction to vice ; that pain and calamity and death 
 are the skeletons of life's feast ; but that for all that 
 there is no reason why the garlands should not be 
 bright, the guests merry, and the cup pass freely 
 round. 
 
 Thou art a man, so never ask from Heaven 
 Freedom from ills, but resignation ; 
 For if thou wishest to pass all thy days 
 Unvex'd by sorrow, then thou wishest, friend, 
 To be a god, or hasten to thy grave. 
 
 Thou wilt find much to cross thee everywhere ; 
 But where the good preponderates, thither look.
 
 MENANDER 353 
 
 Fight not with God and bring on other storms, 
 But those thou hast to struggle with endure. 
 
 O, ever chase vexation from thy life, 
 For life is short. 
 
 Time heals the wounds which Fate inflicts, and Time 
 Will be thy healer too. 
 
 Things of themselves do work their way to good, 
 E'en though thou sleepest, and to evil too. 
 
 Good grows not like a tree from one sole root, 
 But evil grows up side by side with good ; 
 And out of evil Nature brings us good. 1 
 
 In religion Menander is a pure rationalist. The 
 old polytheism and the superstitions of the vulgar he 
 regarded with contempt and abhorrence, believing 
 them to be opposed not only to that serenity and 
 peace of mind which it should be the first object of 
 every man to attain, but to virtuous conduct too. 
 In a well-known epigram he has coupled his friend 
 Epicurus with Themistocles, the one having delivered 
 his country from slavery, the other from folly : 
 
 Xcupe NcoxAet^a SiSvpov yevos, <5i> 6 p.tv vp.utv 
 iSa SovAocrwas pvtra.6', 6 8' d(f>po<ruva.s. 
 
 His theology is sometimes precisely that of Epicurus, 
 as where, ridiculing a particular providence, he repre- 
 sents one of his characters as saying, " Do you suppose 
 that the gods have sufficient leisure to be distributing 
 daily to each individual his portion of good and evil ? " 2 
 
 1 Incert. Fab. xix. ; The Boeotian Woman ; The Eunuch ; The Necklace ; 
 Incert. Fab. cxxxi. ; The Nurse. 
 
 2 otei roaa.irrt\v TOI)S 0eoi>s Ay 
 &s r' fcyaObv re teal KOLK^V KaO' 
 ; The Suitors. 
 2 A
 
 354 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 " The mind," he says in one place, " is man's god," l 
 o NoO? jap ripwv 6 0eo<?. Again, in The Brothers, 
 " to good men the mind is always, as it should be, a 
 god." We need no soothsayers, " as the noble word 
 has its shrine everywhere, for the god who shall 
 speak is man's mind." " The man who has most wit 
 is the best soothsayer." His rationalism sometimes 
 takes a humorous turn, as in the following frag- 
 ment : 3 
 
 Winds, water, earth, and sun, and fire, and stars, 
 
 These, says great Epicharmus, are our gods, 
 
 But I conceive the only useful gods 
 
 Are gold and silver ; set these up within 
 
 Your household, and they'll give you all you ask 
 
 Fields, houses, lacqueys, silver-plate, and friends, 
 
 Judges and witnesses. Bribe only bribe ! 
 
 The gods themselves will be your humble servants. 
 
 With the popular superstitions he makes short work, 
 and on one occasion in a very amusing passage. It 
 is apparently addressed to some mendicant who was 
 carrying about an image of Cybele to beg the 
 customary alms. 
 
 OvSet's ju,' dpecTKei Trepnrariav !w 0eos 
 fiera ypaos, ov8' eis oua'av TrapewrTrecrwv 
 cTrt TOV (ravtSiov rov SIKCUOV 8ei Ofbv 
 
 Ot/COl p.VlV (TW^OVTa TOVS ISpVfJifVOVS. 
 
 No god for me is he who strolls the streets 
 With beldames, or comes sneaking to my hearth 
 On tablets no ! give me a deity 
 Who stays at home and minds his worshippers. 4 
 
 This, it will be seen, anticipates the note of Lucian, 
 
 1 This is, of course, susceptible of two interpretations, but the one given is 
 probably the correct one. Cf. Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 26, who attributes a 
 similar remark to Euripides. 
 
 2 The Acolyte. * Incert. Fab. x. 4 Tlie Charioteer.
 
 MENANDER 355 
 
 just as in the other passages we have the note 
 of Euripides. And the combination is significant. 
 Menander so often talks the language of Euripides, 
 and we are so frequently reminded in these fragments 
 of the poet whom he acknowledged to be his master, 
 that we might suppose the resemblance between them 
 to be closer than it is. But they differed greatly. 
 Euripides never entirely cast off the shackles of the 
 old beliefs ; he remained all his life a perplexed and 
 harassed sceptic, brooding gloomily over insoluble 
 metaphysical problems, and at last returning, as the 
 Bacchce shows, to simple acquiescence, or at least to 
 acknowledging the wisdom of simple acquiescence, in 
 established dogma. Of all this there is no trace in 
 Menander. A pure rationalist, with observation, 
 experience, and reason for his guides, with humour 
 and with life's common pleasures as his solaces, he 
 appears to have confined himself, and to have con- 
 fined himself contentedly, within the limits of the 
 knowable. He has not left a line to indicate 
 that the spectacle of a world, the anomalies, troubles, 
 and confusions of which no one has painted in 
 more vivid colours than himself, at all disturbed or 
 perplexed him. The existence of a Supreme Deity, 
 in the ordinary acceptation of the term, he neither 
 denies nor affirms. What is certain is that man can 
 know nothing about him, and that it is the height of 
 folly to pry into such questions. " Do not desire to 
 inquire into the nature of God, for," he adds with 
 quiet humour, " you are guilty of impiety in desiring 
 to get knowledge about one who does not wish to be
 
 356 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 known [or who does not wish that such inquiries 
 should be made] " 
 
 Ti's ecrnv 6 $eos 01, 6(\y<s (rv fJLav6dveiv t 
 d<rc/3ets rbv ov deXovra fj.av6a.veiv 6e\(av. 1 
 
 With regard to the supernatural, he is satisfied in 
 discerning that, if the power most energetic in life is 
 the incalculable blind agent which is personified as 
 Tv^n, there is also another power making for righteous- 
 ness which is personified sometimes as eo?, and 
 sometimes as OeoL 
 
 He, They, One, All ; within, without ; 
 The Power in darkness whom we guess. 
 
 But it is doubtful whether he regarded the latter as 
 anything else than a fiction of the mind, an objective 
 presentation of ethical truths. Man is practically a 
 free agent, made or marred neither by gods nor by 
 fortune, but by himself. The man, he says in one 
 place, who bears not what he has to bear as he should 
 and can, calls his own character Fortune. 2 Again, when 
 man is prosperous he makes no appeal to Fortune, but 
 when he gets into grief and trouble he at once lays 
 the blame at her door. 3 He who works well need 
 never despair of anything, for everything is within the 
 grasp of perseverance and toil. If there be a god, of 
 one thing we may be sure he is never at the side of 
 the idle (#eo5 Se rofc apyota-iv ov irapicrrarai) or the sinner 
 (a/jLaprdvova-iv) (Sent. Sing.), but helping those who do 
 what is right. In one of the Fragments this finds 
 beautiful expression " whenever you do what is sin- 
 
 1 Incert. Fab. (Clerk, ccxlvi. ). Meineke attributes it to Philemon. 
 2 Id. xliii. 3 Id. xx.
 
 MENANDER 357 
 
 less have the shield of good hope before you, know- 
 ing this, that God himself takes part with righteous 
 courage." l Endurance, resignation, and self-command 
 are the virtues on which he lays most stress : 
 
 Bear with good grace ill luck and iujury 
 This is the wise man's part ; he is not wise 
 Who knits his brow, and babbles Woe is me ! 
 But he who is the master of his ills. 2 
 
 If fortune is foolish we should be brave irapw rv^n^ 
 dvoiav avSpeiw fyepew try to bear fortune's folly like 
 a man. 3 If the gods will not give us what we would 
 accept if they would, we have the satisfaction of 
 feeling that the fault is not in us but in them. 4 
 What we should especially guard against is reckless 
 action and passion under the stress of affliction, 
 remembering that there is no surer sign of a pusil- 
 lanimous spirit than irritability and spleen. 5 Of the 
 social virtues he dwells most emphatically on round 
 dealing and truthfulness, of social vices on envy and 
 slander. Thus 
 
 The gain that comes from villainy is but 
 The earnest-money of calamity, 6 
 
 'Tis ever the best course to speak the truth 
 At every turn 7 
 
 Falsehood's detested by the wise and good 8 
 
 are typical of what he frequently repeats, but he also 
 observes, as Euripides had observed before him, that, 
 where the choice lies between falsehood and mis- 
 
 1 &TO.V ri irpdrrgs 8<nov, dyaOrjv \iri8a 
 irp6/3a\X ' tavrif, TOVTO yiyv&ffKWv 8ri 
 Tt>\fj.y SiKalq. ical Qetis <rv\\a/j.pdv{i. Incert. Fab. xlvii. 
 
 a Id. xxix. 3 Id. cclxv. 
 
 4 The Woman Cuffed. 6 Incert. Fab. xxv. 
 
 8 Id. cxlviii. 7 The Changeling. 8 Sent. Sing.
 
 358 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 chievous truth, the former is preferable, Kpelrrov 8' 
 e\e<r0ai, ^euSo? ^ a\ij0e<; tcaicov (InCdTt. Fdb. cclxx.). 
 
 Among the fragments from the unidentified plays 
 is a fine passage about envy, the vice most character- 
 istic of his countrymen l : 
 
 Methinks, my boy, them dost not understand 
 How each thing by its proper ill decays, 
 And all that is to mar it dwells within. 
 Thus iron is corroded by the rust, 
 Moths fret the garment, and the worm the wood, 
 But envy, worst of all the ills that be, 
 Hath wasted, wastes, and will for ever waste, 
 The ignoble passion of a villainous souL 
 
 The envious man, he says in another fragment, is 
 at war with himself, for he is always afflicted with 
 pains of his own causing. 2 He is full of wholesome 
 lessons both for the prosperous and for the unfor- 
 tunate. Too much prosperity is, he remarks, the 
 chief source of man's calamities : 
 
 TWI/ V dv6pU>TTOlS 
 
 dyaOa TO, Xiav dyaOd (Incert. Fab. clxxxii.). 
 
 And on this another fragment affords an excellent 
 commentary : " When a man who is prosperous and 
 has kind friends seeks for something better than he 
 has, he is seeking for evils." 3 
 
 1 'M.eipdKiov, oti /tot Karavoftv 8o/ceij Sri 
 virb TT}S tSlas ica<rTa Ka.Ki.as cr^Trercu 
 Kal irdvra rd \vfjutiv 6/j.ev' fvecrnv ZvSoQev, 
 olov b itv 16s, &v CTKOTTTJJ, TO ffiStfpiov, 
 TO 8' Ifjuiriov ol ffTjres, 6 5^ 6pl\f/ ri> i-ti\ov. 
 6 5^ rb K&KKTTOV TUV KOLKWV irdvruv, <pf)6vos 
 <}>duriKt>i> irrrrolrjKe Kal iroi^crei Kal Troiet 
 ^uX'Js TovTfpas 8v<ryev7]s irapdffraffis (Iticert. Fdb, xii.). 
 
 1 read with the MSS. Trapda-raa-is, and substitute conjecturally Sva-yev^, 
 for the ordinarily accepted dvo-ffffieTs irapao-Tdireis, which is difficult to under- 
 stand. 
 
 2 Incert. Fab. Ixxxix. 8 Id. clxxi.
 
 MENANDER 359 
 
 And though poverty is, as he constantly repeats, 
 one of the worst of ills, riches are the " veils of care," 
 and make no man sleep the sounder. Here to-day 
 and perhaps gone to-morrow, the use to which they 
 have been put when possessed is everything. What 
 we should possess is "the rich soul" ^v^v e%eiv 
 Set 7r\ov<riav. There is a fine passage in The Ill- 
 tempered Man, where a son is lecturing a miserly 
 father : 
 
 Of wealth thou babblest, an unstable thing. 
 Couldst thou be sure it would remain with thee 
 While thy time lasts, then guard it safe and share 
 With no man what thou hast, for it is thine. 
 But if thou hold'st of fortune not thyself, 
 Why be so grudging, father, of thy wealth | 
 For she, perhaps, may ravish it from thee, 
 And add it to some worthless favourite's store. 
 Therefore, my father, while it still is thine, 
 Put it to noble use, aid all, and let 
 As many as thou canst be rich through thee ; 
 This wealth abides, and shouldst thou ever fall, 
 What was thine own will be thine own again. 
 
 And with what solemn eloquence is human pride 
 humbled in the following passage : 
 
 "Orav ctSevat #eAys (reavrov 6'aris e? 
 
 ffJL/3\\l/OV IS TO. fJ.VlijfJ.aO', 0>S 68oi7TO/3Cl 
 
 evravO' e'veoriv ocrrea /cat Kov(f>rj KOVIS 
 dv8pwv /3a<rtA.eooi/ /cat rvpdvvtav /cat o - o< 
 /cat fj.eya. $>povovvT<av ITTI yevet /cat 
 avrwv re 80^77, KCITTI /caAAet crw/AaT 
 /cat ov8ev avriav rwvB' eTr^p/cecrev \povov. 
 KOLVOV rbv $8r)v eo-^ov ot Travres ftporoi. 
 irpfa ravO* opwv ytyvwcr/ce (ravrbv 6(TTts c?. 1 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, translation can pretend to give 
 nothing more than the sense, at least such translation 
 as the present writer is competent to give : 
 
 1 Incert. Fab. ix.
 
 360 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Whenever thou desir'st to know thyself, 
 
 Look at the tombstones on thy pilgrimage ; 
 
 There lie the bones, there the light dust of kings, 
 
 Of tyrant, sage, of those who plum'd themselves 
 
 On lineage and on wealth, and on their fame, 
 
 And on their beauty ; and yet none of these 
 
 Was any match for time. All mortals share 
 
 The grave that waits for all. Then look toward these, 
 
 And know thou what thou art. 
 
 One of the most striking characteristics of Men- 
 ander is his philanthropy, which sometimes finds 
 expression in sentiments which show how nearly he 
 approaches the ethics of Christianity : 
 
 'I6Yas vo/ue TIOV (j>i\(av ras ony^o/Das. 1 
 Think the misfortunes of your friends your own. 
 
 TOUT' TTi rb tfjv ovx eavr(j> ffiv yaovov. 2 
 Tis not to live to live for self alone. 
 
 For slaves and the poor he has, like Euripides, always 
 a kind word ; between the serf and the freeman he 
 recognises no essential distinction : 
 
 The slave who is a slave and nothing more 
 Will be a rascal. Let him share free speech, 
 And this will rank him with the best of men. 3 
 
 No man, he says in another place, will be a slave 
 who does a slave's work in the spirit of a freeman. 4 
 In one line he has summed up that grand truth to 
 which Burns and Tennyson have given the most 
 eloquent modern expression 
 
 'Ain)/> apwTTOS OVK av firj SwyevTys. 
 No noble man can be ignobly born. 5 
 
 1 Sent. Sing. 2 Incert. Fab. cclii. 
 
 3 The Boy. * Incert. Fab. cclxxix. 
 
 Sent. Sing., and cf. the eloquent passage in The Cnidian Woman.
 
 MENANDER 361 
 
 The following passage is evidently part of a dialogue 
 between some birth-proud mother and her son : 
 
 Fine birth will be my death. O, talk no more 
 
 About man's ancestors, for those who have 
 
 By nature nothing noble in themselves 
 
 Betake them to the tombs, and reckon up 
 
 Their lineage and their grandsires. Every man 
 
 Must have a grandsire, for how else could he 
 
 Have seen the light at all ? But if he cannot, 
 
 Either through change of place or dearth of friends, 
 
 Tell who his grandsire was, is he less noble 
 
 Than he who can ? No, mother ; he's the nobleman 
 
 Were he some common ^Ethiopian 
 
 Who is by nature noble. 
 
 If his writings abound in dissuasives from marriage, 
 no poet has insisted more emphatically on the rever- 
 ence due from children to parents. The young are 
 to regard them as their gods v6fu%e aavrm rov? yoveis 
 elvai 0eov$ and throughout life a father and a mother 
 are to rank next in honour to the deity. A man who 
 reverences his parents may hope to thrive, but dis- 
 obedience and disloyalty to them are certain to bring 
 misfortune in their train. 
 
 Menander, like Shakspeare, no doubt drew largely 
 on that common stock of proverbs which are the 
 inheritance of every people, and it is now impossible 
 to distinguish in every case between what he coined 
 himself and what he appropriated. Many have been 
 attributed to him which belonged to Euripides and 
 to his own predecessors and contemporaries of the 
 Middle and New Comedy, and some are undoubtedly 
 forgeries of much later times. But it is certain that 
 his original contributions were more considerable 
 than those of any single man, and a selection from
 
 362 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 those which are undoubtedly authentic, and from 
 those which have reasonable claims to be regarded as 
 authentic, will fitly conclude this sketch. 
 
 \piTas rj vea )(pis. 
 Old favours to the latest favour yield. 
 
 rrt Tras TIS 
 Affliction teaches affability. 
 
 '0 /w/Sev etSois ovSev t 
 He sins in naught who sins in ignorance. 
 
 Zc3/xcv yap ov^ ws 6eXop.ev dAA* u>s 
 We live not as we will, but as we can. 
 
 Tret/aw crrpe/3\.ov opOtOcrai, KAa8ov, 
 ovSeis dvdyK-rjv ovSe <^>vcriv jSia 
 
 Never attempt to straighten a crookt branch ; 
 No man constrains necessity or nature. 
 
 K/otvci (j>i\ovs 6 Kcupos, ws Xf^^ov rb TTV/D. 
 As fire proves gold, the pinch will prove the friend. 
 
 TTfcrovanjs Tras vrjp 
 All gather faggots from the fallen oak. 
 
 rriv 
 Man's touchstone for man's character is time. 
 
 "O/ioia TropVTf) Sa/cpva Kai p-^rwp X 6< 
 The tears of orators are like the harlot's. 
 
 OuSei? o voets /iev ovSev, o 8e TTOICIS ^ 
 None know thy thoughts, but all can see thy deeds. 
 
 T) yap ovSev ofSc TrA^v o /3ov\erai. 
 Women know naught but what they choose to know. 
 
 "H Aeye T6 <riy^s Kpelrrov, 
 Say what will better silence, or be dumb.
 
 MENANDER 363 
 
 *2s -rj8vs 6 /3io<s, av TL-S avrbv 
 How sweet is life to one who knows it not ! 
 
 Btos 
 He only lives who living joys in life. 
 
 In the line 
 
 'Avrjp 6 (fxvywv Kal irdXiv fj.a\y](rerai 
 
 we have the original of the famous couplet 
 
 He that fights and runs away 
 Will live to fight another day, 
 
 while in 
 
 '0 crwMTTO/awv avrw TI, KO.V y 
 rj crwecris avT&v SeiAorarov 
 
 we have exactly Shakspeare's 
 
 Conscience doth make cowards of us all ; 
 
 and in 
 
 TOIS 7T6^w/)tots vo/^ots 
 
 we have what finds embodiment in the proverb " Do 
 at Kome as the Eomans do." 
 
 Some are interesting from their association. Goethe 
 prefixed 
 
 '0 fir) 8apel<s av^/ocoTros ov TraiSevercu 
 No discipline for man without the knout 
 
 as the motto for his Diclitung und Wahrheit, and 
 the melancholy line 
 
 "Avfy>W7ros, IKOLVYJ 7r/oo<ocris cts TO 8va-rv\fiv 
 
 was Gray's text for an ode which Menander himself 
 might have inspired the Ode on a Distant Prospect 
 of Eton College. The line in the TJiais 
 
 ^deipovcri-v rjOr] ^pr^a-O' 6/uAt'ai KCIKCU 
 Evil communications corrupt good manners
 
 364 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 is not only consecrated by St. Paul's quotation of it, 
 but, as we all know, by associations still more hal- 
 lowed and solemn. Strange chance, that the words 
 of this poet should mingle with those of that pathetic 
 liturgy which awakens the saddest memories of the 
 Christian ! Again, too, he comes home to us, and 
 not through accident. How many a mother bending 
 in agony over the young life laid low has found con- 
 solation, little knowing its source, in his beautiful 
 sentiment, so human in its ineffable tenderness, so 
 divine in its triumphant consecration of calamity 
 
 Whom the gods love dies young 
 
 veos. 
 
 Let us still nurse the hope it has been for more 
 than four centuries a hope constantly disappointed 
 but as constantly renewed that some happy chance 
 may yet put us in possession of the prize for which 
 Goethe and Schlegel sighed, which many illustrious 
 scholars have wasted precious time in seeking, for 
 which Hertelius would have "given a year of his 
 life" a comedy of Menander in perfect preservation. 
 Meanwhile we can only console ourselves with what 
 we have, and say with the old woman in Phsedrus 
 
 suavis anima ! qualem te dicam bonuru 
 Antehac fuisse, tales cum sint reliquiae.
 
 INDEX 
 
 ALEXIS, uncle and teacher of Men- 
 ander, 323 
 
 Arden of Faversham, the earliest 
 English domestic drama, 183 ; not 
 by Shakspeare, 184-5 
 
 Athens, its condition from B.C. 321 
 to B.C. 291 political, social, in- 
 tellectual artistic, 325-9 
 
 BALE, Bishop John, his Kyng John 
 the advance from the Morality 
 to the History, 113 
 
 Bentley, Richard, contrasted as an 
 emendatory critic with Theobald, 
 282-92 ; his acuteness and ingenu- 
 ity in emendation illustrated, 282- 
 
 4 ; his lack of taste and poetic in- 
 sight illustrated, 284-7 ; his emen- 
 dations of Milton, 284-5; of Horace, 
 286-7 
 
 Buckingham, Duke of, his Rehearsal, 
 
 32-4 
 Burbage, James, his playhouse in 
 
 London, 145 
 Burleigh, Lord, his instructions to 
 
 his son Robert, 230-1 
 Burnet, Bishop Gilbert, his unjust 
 
 view of Dryden's character, 83 
 Busby, Richard, his character, 7-9 
 
 CARNARVON, Earl of, his edition of 
 Chesterfield's Letters to his godson, 
 193-4 ; its contents, etc., 203- 
 
 5 ; the Notes often inconsistent 
 and inadequate, 205-9 ; the In- 
 troduction praiseworthy, 209-12 ; 
 his estimate of Chesterfield's char- 
 
 acter and opinions, 212, 215, 219- 
 23 
 
 Chatham, Earl of, his Letters to 
 his nephew at Cambridge com- 
 pared with Chesterfield's to his 
 son and godson, 231-2 
 
 Chaucer, Geoffrey, Dryden's versions 
 from him, 76-8 ; the vicissitudes 
 of his fame, 107 
 
 Chesterfield, Earl of, his Letters to 
 his godson, edited by Lord Car- 
 narvon, 193-4 ; his character long 
 grievously misunderstood, 194-6 ; 
 history of the Letters, 196-203 ; 
 their indications of his character 
 and opinions, 212-23 ; their good 
 sense and wisdom compared with 
 the earlier Letters to his son, 224-6 ; 
 extracts illustrative of his philo- 
 sophy of life, 226-30 ; compared 
 with other series of Letters, 230- 
 33 ; Chesterfield not a popular 
 writer aristocratic, 233-4 ; un- 
 English, 234-6 ; contemptuous in 
 his tone about women, 236 - 40 ; 
 special value of his writings to 
 English readers, 240 - 42 ; their 
 threefold interest, 242-3 ; Chester- 
 field's views in regard to morals 
 comparison with Cicero, 243-8 ; to 
 behaviour, 248-50 ; his humanity, 
 251 ; his theory of education, 251- 
 4 ; its permanent value, though 
 now out of date, 254-5 ; his temper, 
 256-9 ; his style, 259-61 ; a long- 
 neglected writer, 261 ; his value to 
 our age, 262
 
 366 
 
 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 Cicero, his philosophy of life com- 
 pared with Chesterfield's, 243-8 
 
 Collier, Jeremy, his attack on Dry- 
 den, 81-2 
 
 Comedy, the "New," vide Drama, 
 Greek 
 
 Contile, Luca, his vindication of 
 tragi-comedy, 121-2 
 
 Cowper, William, his perverted ac- 
 count of Chesterfield's teaching, 
 199 
 
 Crawford, William, his attack on 
 Chesterfield's Letters as pernicious, 
 197-8 
 
 Criticism, extravagance of the new 
 school of English, 97-100 
 
 DANTE, the vicissitudes of his fame, 
 107-8 
 
 Demetrius Phalereus, his friendship 
 with Menander, 325, 337 
 
 Drama, English, not essentially 
 melancholy, 96-7 ; its early history, 
 110-14 ; its debt to the Italian 
 drama of the Renaissance, 114-24 ; 
 traces to be found of the Mysteries 
 and Moralities, 115 ; its mixed 
 character during the first twenty- 
 eight years of Elizabeth's reign, 
 124-9 ; its vigorous revival in 1587, 
 144-7 ; the new playwrights, 147- 
 9 ; the domestic drama, 182-3 ; 
 condition of the English drama 
 when Shakspeare entered on his 
 career, 191-2 
 
 , Greek; the "New Comedy," 
 
 329-31 ; modelled on the Sicilian 
 Comedy and Euripides, 331-2 ; its 
 character and aim, 332-4 ; founded 
 by Philemon, 334-6 
 
 , Italian, its influence on the 
 
 English drama, 114-24 
 
 Dryden, John, his position in English 
 literature, 1-5 ; his birth and 
 family, 5-6 ; his education, 7-12 ; 
 his settlement in London, 12 ; his 
 early writings, 13 ; state of English 
 literature at this time, 14-16 ; his 
 Stanzas on Cromwell, Astrcea 
 
 Redux, etc., 16-17; his life in 
 London, 18 ; his marriage, 19-21 ; 
 his plays their characteristics, 
 21-9 ; his Annus Mirabilis, 29-30 ; 
 his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, 30- 
 31 ; Buckingham's attack on him 
 in The Rehearsal, 32-4 ; his deser- 
 tion of rhyme for blank verse in 
 drama after Settle's Empress of 
 Morocco, 35-7 ; his Essay on Satire, 
 37 ; state of politics at this time 
 the question of the succession, 38- 
 42 ; his Absalom and Achitophel, 
 42-4 ; his Medal, 45 ; his Mac- 
 Flecknoe, 47-8 ; his share in second 
 part of Absalom and Achitophel, 
 49-50; his Religio Laid, 50- 
 51 ; his straitened circumstances, 
 51-2; his Miscellanies, 53-4; his 
 Threnodia Augustalis, 54-5 ; his 
 conversion to Roman Catholicism, 
 its sincerity, 55-60 ; his defence of 
 the genuineness of a paper at- 
 tributed to Anne Hyde, 60-61 ; 
 his Hind and Panther its char- 
 acteristics, 61-4 ; his degradation 
 on the accession of William III., 
 64-5 ; his latest plays, 65-6 ; his 
 translations of Juvenal and Persius, 
 66-8 ; his Discourse on Satire, 67 ; 
 his translation of Virgil, 69-72 ; 
 his position at Will's, 73-5 ; his 
 Fables his versions from Chaucer, 
 76-8 ; from Boccaccio, 78-9 ; his 
 Prefaces, 80 ; Jeremy Collier's 
 attack on him, 81-2; his death, 
 82 ; his private character, 83-5 ; 
 his historical importance his in- 
 fluence on English literature, 85-8 ; 
 his genius its defects and merits, 
 88-90. 
 
 ELIZABETH, Queen, life and temper 
 of English people in reign of, 131- 
 44 ; her licence to Burbage and 
 others to perform plays in London, 
 145 
 
 England, condition of the country in 
 time of Elizabeth, 131-44
 
 INDEX 
 
 367 
 
 Epicurus, his intimacy with Men- 
 ander, 325 
 
 Euripides, the "New Comedy" to a 
 great extent derived from and 
 modelled on his plays, 331-2 
 
 GELLIUS, Aulus, on Greek and Roman 
 Comedy, 319-20 
 
 Glycera, mistress of Menander, 337-9 
 
 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, his 
 estimate of Menander, 316 
 
 Greene, Robert, the vicissitudes of 
 his fame, 108-9 ; his life, 162-4 ; his 
 character, 163-7 ; his novels and 
 poems, their characteristics, 167- 
 70 ; his plays their merits and 
 defects, 170-72 ; importance of his 
 services to English drama, 172-4 
 
 HERMANN, Johann Gottfried Jakob, 
 his Dissertation on Bentley, 287 
 
 Hervey, Lord, Pope's satire on, 265 
 
 Hill, Dr. Birkbeck, on Chesterfield's 
 "Hottentot," 209-10 
 
 Horace, Bentley's emendations of, 
 286-7 
 
 Howard, Lady Elizabeth, her mar- 
 riage with Dryden, 19-21 
 
 Hunter, Thomas, his attack on 
 Chesterfield's Letters as pernicious, 
 198 
 
 INGEGNERI, Angelo, on the represent- 
 ations of ghosts on the stage, 120 
 
 Interludes, their place in English 
 drama, 112-14 
 
 JOHNSON, Samuel, his unjust treat- 
 ment of Theobald, 271-2 
 Juvenal, Dryden's translation of, 66-8 
 
 KYD, Thomas, little known of him, 
 179 ; his services to English drama, 
 180-81 
 
 LODGE, Thomas, his work, 177-9 ; 
 Tlie Wounds of Civil War, the 
 first romantic English play on a 
 subject from Roman history, 178 
 
 London, its condition in Elizabeth's 
 time, 143-4 ; establishment of play- 
 houses in, 145-6 
 
 Lyly, John, not the discoverer of 
 euphuism, 96 ; the vicissitudes of 
 his fame, 108-9 ; his Euphues 
 its wide influence, 186-7 ; his plays 
 their characteristics, 187 - 9 ; 
 Mother Bombie, incomparably his 
 best drama, 189 ; his influence on 
 English drama, 190-91 
 
 Lyttelton, Lord, probably Chester- 
 field's "Hottentot," 209-10 
 
 MACAULAY, Lord, his unjust view of 
 Dryden's character, 58, 83 ; purity 
 of his prose style, 261 
 
 Malone, Edmund, his unjust treat- 
 ment of Theobald, 272-3 
 
 Marlowe, Christopher, the vicissitudes 
 of his fame, 108-9 ; his life, 149 ; 
 his services to English drama, 149- 
 52 ; his introduction of blank verse, 
 152-4 ; his influence on his con- 
 temporaries, 154-5 ; his art and 
 genius their excellences and 
 defects, 155-62 ; Edward II. his 
 last and most dramatic play, 
 159-60 
 
 Meineke, Augustus, his collection of 
 the Fragments of Menander, 320 
 
 Menander, his place in Greek litera- 
 ture, 316-17 ; estimate of his style 
 and diction by Greek and Roman 
 critics, 317-20 ; collection of his 
 Fragments by Meineke, 320 ; sources 
 of our knowledge of him Frag- 
 ments, anecdotes, statue in the 
 Vatican, 320-22 ; his birth and 
 family, 322-3 ; his early life and 
 circumstances friendship with 
 Theophrastus, 323-5 ; with Deme- 
 trius Phalereus, 325, 337 ; with 
 Epicurus, 325 ; state of Athens in 
 his day, 325-9 ; the "New Comedy" 
 its characteristics, 329-36 ; Men- 
 ander's tastes and position, 336-7 ; 
 his connection with Glycera, 336-9 ; 
 his death, 339-40 ; classification of
 
 368 
 
 ESSAYS AND STUDIES 
 
 his plays, 340-43 ; simplicity of 
 his plots The Apparition and The 
 Leucadian Rock, 343-5 ; how far 
 his Fragments afford an index to 
 his own opinions, 345-6 ; his 
 sombre and cynical view of life, 
 346-50 ; his misogynism, 350-51 ; 
 and yet his cheerfulness, 352-3 ; 
 his rationalism, 353-8 ; his philo- 
 sophy of life, 356-61; his proverbs, 
 361-4 ; the loss of his works a great 
 calamity, 364 
 
 Milton, John, Bentley's emendations 
 of, 284-5 
 
 Miracles, their place in English 
 drama, 111 
 
 Montagu, Charles, joint-author with 
 Prior of The Hind and the Panther 
 Transversed, etc., 64 
 
 Moralities, their place in English 
 drama, 111-15 
 
 Mysteries, their place in English 
 drama, 111-15 
 
 NASH, Thomas, his work, 177 
 "New Comedy," vide Drama, Greek 
 
 PEELE, George, his merits greatly 
 over -rated, 174-6 ; his literary 
 style beauty of his blank verse, 
 176-7 
 
 Persius, Dryden's translation of, 66-8 
 
 Philemon, founder of the "New 
 Comedy," 334-6 
 
 Pope, Alexander, his shameful treat- 
 ment of Theobald, 263-8 ; his 
 blasting satire cases of Gibber 
 and Hervey, 264-5 ; his work 
 as editor of Shakspeare's text, 
 295-8 
 
 Person, Richard, compared as an 
 emendatory critic with Theobald, 
 282-92 ; his genius in the highest 
 department of criticism, 282 ; his 
 insight and taste illustrated, 288- 
 91 
 
 Pratt, Jackson, his Pupil of Pleasure, 
 a grotesque perversion of Chester- 
 field's teaching, 198-9 
 
 Prior, Matthew, joint -author with 
 Montagu of The Hind and the 
 Panther Transversed, etc., 64 
 
 QUINTILIAN, on Greek and Roman 
 Comedy, 320 
 
 RALEIGH, Sir Walter, his Instructions 
 to his Son and to Posterity, 231 
 
 Ronsard, Pierre de, the vicissitudes 
 of his fame, 108 
 
 Rowe, Nicholas, his work as editor 
 of Shakspeare's text, 294-5 
 
 SETTLE, Elkanah, his Empress of 
 Morocco, 34-5 
 
 Shadwell, Thomas, his character, 
 45-6 ; his attack on Dryden in The 
 Medal of John Bayes, 46 ; ridiculed 
 by Dryden in MacFlecknoc, 47-8 ; 
 and in second part of Absalom 
 and Achitophel, 49-50 
 
 Shaftesbury, Earl of, leader of the 
 Whigs, 40-43 ; the original of 
 Achitophel, 43 ; attacked in The 
 Medal, 45 
 
 Shakspeare, William, condition 
 of the English drama when he 
 entered on his career, 191-2 ; his 
 indebtedness to Theobald, 263 ; 
 the mutilated state in which his 
 plays were published in quartos 
 and folios, especially the First 
 Folio, 292-4 ; his early editors 
 Rowe, 295 ; Pope, 295-8 ; Theobald, 
 296-309, and_posM 
 
 Sicily, Comedy of, a model for the 
 " New Comedy " of Athens, 331-2 
 
 Smollett, Tobias, his relations with 
 Chesterfield, 210-12 
 
 Spenser, Edmund, on the advance- 
 ment of knowledge in his day, 133; 
 on the ministration of angels, 136 
 
 Stanhope, Philip, godson of Chester- 
 field, his youth and education, 
 202 ; the Letters addressed to him, 
 id. and passim 
 
 Swinburne, Mr. Algernon Charles, his 
 defects as a critic, 100-104
 
 INDEX 
 
 369 
 
 Symonds, John Addington, his 
 literary culture, 91-3 ; his work 
 on the predecessors of Shakspeare 
 its blemishes of style, 93-5 ; its 
 inaccuracies, 95 - 6 ; its unsound 
 generalisation on the spirit of the 
 Elizabethan drama, 96-7 ; its ex- 
 travagant diction, 105-6 
 
 TATE, Nahum, entrusted with second 
 part of Absalom and Achitophel, 48 
 
 Theobald, Lewis, his work on the 
 text of Shakspeare, 263 and passim 
 (see below) ; his shameful treatment 
 by Pope, 263-8 ; by Warburton, 
 268-71 ; by Johnson, 271-2 ; by 
 Malone, 272-3 ; by Coleridge and 
 subsequent writers, 273-5 ; first 
 and greatest of Shakspearian 
 textual critics, 275 ; his wide 
 learning, 276-80 ; his sound 
 judgment, 281 ; his genius for 
 textual restoration, 281-2 ; com- 
 pared as an emendatory critic 
 with Person, contrasted with 
 
 Bentley and Warburton, 282-92 ; 
 mutilated state in which Shak- 
 speare's plays were published in 
 quartos and folios, especially the 
 First Folio, 292-4 ; Theobald's 
 restoration of the text, 296-309; 
 his illustrations, 309-11 ; extent 
 and permanence of his work, 311 : 
 his personal life misfortune and 
 poverty, 312-15 ; his great legacy 
 to posterity, 315 
 
 Theophrastus, his friendship with 
 Menander, 323-5 
 
 VIRGIL, Dryden's translation of, 69- 
 72 
 
 WARBURTON, Bishop William, his 
 "shameful treatment of Theobald, 
 268-71 ; contrasted as an emenda- 
 tory critic with Theobald, 282-92 ; 
 his lack of poetic feeling illustrated, 
 287-8 
 
 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, his Letters to his 
 son, 230 
 
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