.\ .\ iil: XX Geoffrey Chaucer The Bookman Illustrated History of English Literature BY THOMAS SECCOMBE AND W. ROBERTSON NICOLL IN TWO VOLUMES Volume I.— CHAUCER TO DRYDEN WITH FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS IN REMBRANDT PHOTOGRAVURE HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON MCMVI PRINTED BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY. INTRODUCTION " This volume would have been at least twice as large, i/ I had not made bold to strike out innumerable passages." — Publisher's Prejace to "The Travels oj Mr. Lemuel Gulliver." HISTORIES of English Literature with an apparatus of portraits and biographies would appear to supply a need which distinguishes a comparatively late phase in English letters. The eighteenth century had advanced some years before such a sentiment as curiosity in regard to the private lives of great authors can be said to have existed. The gradual awakening of some such interest brought in its train a series of classified biographies of poets, dramatists, and novelists. Eventually we arrived at the compilation of elaborate Fasti as represented by the manual of the late Prof Henry Morley, and from this stage there was rapid progress to what the specialist calls "mere history." We are all historians now, and literature lends itself with exceptional ease to historical treatment. History, however, is an extremely ambiguous term. It is used indifferently to signify chrono- logical annals, animated pictures, portraits of great men, the confused warrings of djmasties and races, and the still more perplexing conflict of theories, pohtical, ethical, economic, and social. Nor is the difficulty inherent in the word in any degree diminished by its application to literature. Analogy, however, suggests one extremely convenient demarcation of the subject. It prompts us to isolate the subject of origins as bearing the same relation to literature as anthropology bears to history ; thus enabling us to start fair with a stablished nationality and a full-grown vernacular. The histories of our vernacular European literatures are all comparatively brief — five or six centuries at most — and that of England is no exception. " Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." Th 't at any rate is the European point of view. Starting with a language and vocabulary in some respects rudimentary, and one or two simpler forms, the historical development proceeds with little break from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. The term " literature " itself is by no means easy to define. In the widest sense, every thought that is converted mto script becomes Uterature from the moment of the conversion. Attempts have been made from time immemorial to circumscribe the plot of Uterature which is called fine or humane and corresponds to Fine Art {Belles Lettres, Beaux Arts) in such well-sounding but vague generalities as "the lasting expression in words of the meaning of 2050173 Vl INTRODUCTION life." The "best words in the best order" is another ingenious phrase which has been restricted generally to the definition of good poetry, but is equally apphcable to good prose. There is one inevitable order. But all such definitions evade the question of significance; everything depends on the magnitude of the thought expressed and its relation to the more permanent elements of human wit and ^v^sdom, We cannot satisfactorily define hterature any more than we can agree upon a point of view from which critics are to approach and comment upon it. Are they to treat the history of literature as a process and its work as a product to be classified and standardised, or are they simply to gaze at its masterpieces and describe their sensations ? These are a few of the problems. Other problems are suggested by the word "English." What do we mean by English? A school we might almost call the nationalist school of Enghsh historians, headed by Freeman and Green, made the singular discovery that English history really began in Holstein. A like ambition has tried to discover the well-head of Enghsh literature in .Jutland. That the preponderant element in our speech is not Latin or Norman-French but Low German is perfectly true, but the nomenclature which prefers Old English to the unsatisfactory but much more distinctive Anglo-Saxon as apphed to this fossil English is worse than misleading. If we are to go into the misty period before the single speech emerges that men of to-day call English — groping among patois from which Chaucer would have recoiled and which Wyclif and Langland would hardly have understood — there seems no adequate reason why we should not include the Latin, Norman-French, and primitive Celtic literature of early Britain. All these languages were spoken and written by our forefathers in this country ; Latin in church and cloister, by diplomatists and historians ; French at court and camp, by lawyers and merchants ; Welsh and Cornish west of Malvern and Mendip. Here, in fact, are two great subjects — the watershed or dividing line between which is formed by the century which unites the commencement of The Canterbury Talcs in 1391 with the com- pletion of Caxton's life-work just one hundred years later. The first subject, which is not ours, is the early literature of Britain — a literature not of one language nor of one race, and mainly of philological, historical, and antiquarian interest. The second great subject, and the greater, is English literature. From Caxton's death in 1491 England is no longer polyglot. The several streamlets have united to form one river, the current of which we must endeavour to follow in its ever-deepening course wherever English is cherished as the mother-tongue. William Caxton began his work as a popular printer in this country, roughly speaking, in 1475, and he found books written in English to suit his purj)ose, going back just about a hundred years. He felt that it was necessary, from every point of view, to confine himself to the King's English as it INTRODUCTION vii was understood in the days of Edward IV. And with the aid of his press he commenced that work of fixing the EngUsh that is written and printed whereby was consummated in three or four generations a process which otherwise might have continued for several centuries. We follow Caxton in regarding Chaucer as the day-star of English poetry, as WycUf may perhaps be regarded in a sense as the day-star of English prose ; and our First Book is devoted to a discovery ot the King's Enghsh as Caxton and our early English printers understood it. Quitting the era of transition, our Second Book deals with the great flowering time of English drama. We have a new England equipped with a new vision and intoxicated with a new language which overflows in an almost inexhaustible fulness of lyric poetry. It is the age of Spenser, of Marlowe, of Shakespeare, of Fletcher, of Jonson and Donne. In our Third Book we have to navigate the straits of Puritanism. It is something that religion was persuaded to countenance an epic poem — the one great epic in our language. In sharp contrast to the age of IMilton and Bunyan is the region where Dryden and Pope, Addison and Swift, rose supreme over the taste of nearly a century and a half. It is an age of critical commentary and pungent epigram, of prose essay and verse satire. It is an age when the class of readers was immensely enlarged. Men began to collect in coffee-houses and divert themselves with social essays and moral satires. This era of red brick ushers in an age of Whig optimism, national expansion, and masculine common-sense. Our Fifth Book is sober with the multitude of moral tales and essays, enlivened with much descriptive letter-writing, informed by copious memoirs, historical and biographical. It is a well-to-do age that includes Johnson and Chesterfield, Richardson and Fielding, Gray and Walpole, Burke and Gibbon, Goldsmith and Sheridan, Cowper and Burns. Then comes the era of Romance dealt with in our Sixth Book. It is the great transforming epoch of Scott, Wordsworth, Bjrron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. The wonder-worship that was to do combat with the critical forces of the age is mirrored in the typical aposti'ophe of Keats to the Voice of Romance, The same that oft-times hath Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Our Seventh and last Book is devoted to the literature of the era 1837 — 1900, which will probably be known as the Victorian. Although in inspiration, in intensity, and in sunny humour the Victorian age may have been surpassed, in fundamental brain power and in intellectual variety it is probably without a rival in our literary annals. It is the age of Carlyle, Newman, MiU, Emerson, Froude, Ruskin, and Spencer ; of Tennyson, Arnold, Browning, and Swinburne ; of Macaulay ; of Dickens, Thackeray, George viii INTRODUCTION Eliot, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy. To this age we give the title " The Ascendency of the Novel." The present attempt at an historical survey of our hterature from the invention of printing down to the present day makes no pretence of being exhaustive. It has been reported from an honest study of the materials, but we cannot hope to have escaped errors. We have WTitten, not for specialists or scholars, but for the general public. We have hoped to interest and amuse, and in some measure to instruct ordinary readers. We pro\dde no large-scale map, but a handy atlas to direct the student to an independent exploration of certain definite regions. Some attempt has been made at classi- fication, scientific, asstlietic, and moral, and we have tried to refer individual works to their respective tj^pes. INIore importance, however, is attached to the biogi'aphical element, which sets forth the environment and personahty of authors. In attempting to supply an index to the best thmgs that have been said and the best things that have been written about Enghsh literature we have not disdained the plan of Baedeker in using a star (*). This, it is hoped, will be useful in helping those who are bewildered by the number of items in systematic bibhographies. But while trying to convey the verdicts of different ages and successive schools of critics, we have not by any means refrained from personal estimates. In short, a sincere attempt has been made to convey within moderate limits and with as much fulness and accuracy as was possible an introduction to English literature easy to read and understand, and at the same time not wholly devoid of value as a book of reference. The illustrations have been selected from the best available portraits. Tlie main part of this history has been done by INIr. Thomas Seccombe. The authors are both much indebted to Mr. J. H. Lobban, who has carefully revised the whole work. There are many other minor obligations, which it wiU be our pleasant duty to acknowledge in their proper places in the bibhographical notes appended to the various chapters. T. S. W. R. N. CONTENTS BOOK I THE KING'S ENGLISH CHAPTER r.— CAXTON From xylogi-aphy to topography — Gutenberg— Pre-Caxton English — William Caxton— His life and achievement— TAe Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophers — Caxton's influence on the language — Early printing and manuscripts ............. 3 CHAPTER n.— GEOFFREY CHAUCER Outline of Chaucer's life — His personal appearance and portraits— Three chronological periods of his work — Troilus and Griseyde — The Legend of Good Women — Chaucer's debt to French and Italian sources — The Canterbury Tales — The scheme of the poem — The qualities of Chaucer's poetry — History of the Chaucerian MSS. and text — Attempts to modernise the text .... CHAPTER III.— MORAL GOVVER— THE "MORTE D' ARTHUR" Warton's criticism of Gower — Confessio Amantis — Sir Thomas Malory — Morte d'Arthm — Its influence in English literature 16 CHAPTER IV.— THE SCOTS POETS The Chaucerian tradition in Scotland — Robert Henryson — Robene and Makyne — William Dunbar — The Golden Targe — Comparisons of Dunbar with Chaucer and Burns — Gavin Douglas — Sir David Lyndsay — His religious satires ............. 19 CHAPTER v.— EARLY TUDOR POETRY Stephen Hawes — Alexander Barclay — John Skelton — His pictures of low life — Skeltonic verse — Sir Thomas Wyatt — His metrical innovations — Earl of Surrey — His use of decasyllabic blank verse 23 CHAPTER VI.— EARLY TUDOR PROSE Lord Berners' Froissart — Fabyan's New Chronicles— Ric\\a.rA Grafton —John Leland — Andrew Boorde — George Cavendish — Grocyn and Linacre — John Colet — Sir John Cheke — Roger Ascham — The Scholemaster — Latimer — Sir Thomas Elyot— Sir Thomas More — Utopia — Its influence in literature 27 X CONTENTS BOOK II DRA3IA AND LYRIC CHAPTER I.— FROM TRANSITION TO TRANSFORMATION.— I paob An important period of development — Italian influence — Classical translations — Arthur Gelding — Sir Thomas North — Sir Thomas Hohy — Sir Geoffry Fenton — Painter's Palace of Pleasure — George Chapman — Edward Fairfax — Joshua Sylvester — John Florio — Thomas Sheltou — Sir Thomas Urquhart 37 CHAPTER II.— FROM TRANSITION TO TRANSFORMATION.— 11 Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset — The Mirror Jor Magistrates — George Gascoigne — The Steele Glass — Thomas Churchyard — George Whetstone — George Turberville — TotteV s Miscellany — The Paradise of Dainty Devices — Some later Miscellanies .45 CHAPTER III.— RELIGION AND LETTERS FROM THE AGE OF CHAUCER DOVVN TO 1611 John Wjclit— Piers Plowman — WUliam Langland — William Tyndale — John Foxe — The English Prayer Book— The Metrical Psalms— The Authorised Version of the Bible .... 60 CHAPTER IV.— THE RISE OF THE DRAMA Religion and the drama — Church festivals and moralities — The church, the market-place, the banquet-hall — Heywood's interludes— Goj-ftorfwc — Senecan plays 69 CHAPTER v.— PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA Actors and theatres — Lyly — Greene — Peele — Kyd — Marlowe — Tamburlaine — Fuustus — Edward II. — Arden of Feversham 66 CHAPTER VI.— SPENSER AND HIS SCHOOL Rhyme or classical metres — Gabriel Harvey — Edward Dyer — Two great metrical innovations — Edmund Spenser — The Shepheards Calendei — The Faerie Queene — Giles and Phineas Fletcher — Daniel— Drayton 76 CHAPTER VJI.— SONNETEERS, SONG-WRITERS, AND MINOR VERSIFIERS Sir Piiilip Sidney — ^The fashion of sonneteering — Elizabethan lyrics and music — Lyly, Nash, Greene, Lodge, and Breton — Campion— Barnfield-Browne-Wotton 87 CHAPTER VIII.— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Life at Stratford — The player — Early poems — First-fruits — Tlie flowering period — Shakespeare and Scott — Hamlet and the great tragedies — Later years — Bibliographical summaries ... 92 CHAPIER IX.-THE LATER CONTEMPORARIES AND SUCCESSORS OF SHAKESPEARE Beaumont and FleUhcr- Ben .louson—Volpone—The Alchemist— J onson's later comedies— Chapman -MarHton—Uckker—Middletoii—Heywood— Webster— Tourneur— Ford— Massinger— Shirley . 110 CONTENTS XI CHAPTER X.— ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE.— I rtat John Lyly— Sidney's .Arcadia— Greene— Dekker— Nash— Nicholas Breton— Hall— Overburjr—Earle — James I. — Bacon 126 CHAPTER XI.— ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE.— II Raleigh— Stow— Holiushed— Speed— Camden— KnoUes— Memoirs and Diaries— Manningham— Sir Symonds D'E wes — Naunton — Moryson — Hakluyt — Elizabethan criticism — Gosson — Sidney's Defense and Jonson's Timber •• '■"^ BOOK III THE COUNTER-RENAISSANCE CHAPTER I.— FOUR GREAT PROSE WRITERS Robert Burton — Tliomas Fuller — Sir Thomas Browne — Jeremy Taylor 147 CHAPTER II.— JACOBEAN AND CAROLINE POETS Donne and Drummond— Tlie Caroline Lyrists : Carew, Lovelace, Herrick, Sir John Suckling . . 153 CHAPTER III.— RELIGIOUS POETRY Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan — Wither and Quarles — Habiugton, Pordage, and Traherue , . 161 CHAPTER IV. -DIVINITY AND LEARNING FROM HOOKER TO SELDBN An age of ecclesiastical controversy — Richard Hooker— The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity — Archbishop Ussher— Sir Henry Savile— John Seldeu— Sir Henry Wotton— The "ever-memorable" John Hales — William Chillingworth — Francis Godwin • • 1"^ CHAPTER v.— IZAAK WALTON : OCCASIONAL AND MINOR PROSE OF THE AGE OP MILTON James Howell— Harrington— Wilkius—Digby — HeyljTi — Dugdale — Sir Thomas Herbert . . . 170 CHAPTER VI.— TRANSITIONAL POETS Cowley— Waller— Marvell— Rochester, Sedley, and Dorset— The Westminster wits— Charles Cotton . 174 CHAPTER VII.— FROM THIS WORLD TO THE NEXT : JOHN BUNYAN The Pilgrim's Progress and its creator •• ^^ CHAPTER VIII.— ENGLAND'S SECOND POET : " SHAKESPEARE FIRST, AND NEXT- MILTON" Early life — Italian travel — Pedagogy and prose — Retirement — Chalfout — Completion of Paradise Lost — Last years — Critical estimate — Bibliography 183 CHAPTER IX.— PROTO-RATIONALISTS : THOMAS HOBBES Lord Herbert of Cherbury and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury— Lord Clarendon- Tlie Royal Society 195 CONTENTS xu BOOK IV SATIRE AND ESSAY CHAPTER I.— THE RESTORATION : SAMUEL BUTLER pag» Charles IL and literature — The birth of modern English prose — Samuel Butler — A master of rhyme and caricature """ CHAPTER IL— DRYDEN AND THE RESTORATION DRAMA John Dryden Early poems — Comedies — Heroic tragedies — Satires — Fables — Critical essays — Congreve — Otway— Nat Lee and Nicholas Rowe 207 CHAPTER III.— THE COMIC DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION French models— The Restoration stage— Etherege-Wycherley—Sedley—Crowne— Shad well— Congreve — Farquhar- Vanbrugh— The Collier controversy 216 CHAPTER IV.— ESSAYS, LETTERS, AND MEMOIRS : CONTROVERSIAL AND MINOR PROSE Mr. Pepys and his Diary— John Evelyn— Bishop Burnet— The Lives of the Norths— Lucy Hutchinson —George Savile, Marquis of Halifax— Sir William Temple— TAe Battle of the BooA-*— \Vhitelocke, Luttrell, Ludlow, and Lilly— Three great antiquaries : Dugdale, Wood, and Aubrey . . 224 CHAPTER v.— JOHN LOCKE AND THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS The Essay on the Human Understanding— The Star Chamber and the Press— Some early newspapers — ^Newspapers and style 236 ILLUSTRATIONS GEOFFREY CHAUCER Frontii^iece CAXTON'S PRESS IN THE ALMONRY, WESTMINSTER Facing p. 1 THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS „ 12 From a Painting by T. Stothart, R.A. EDMUND SPENSER . „ 76 THE WEDDING OF THE MEDWAY AND THE THAMES « 82 From a Drawing by Walter Crane, reproduced by kind permission oj the Artist and Mr. George Allen. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE . = , , . „ 92 The Ghandos Portrait. CORDELIA'S PORTION „ 96 From a Painting by Ford Madox Brown, reproduced by the courtesy of Mr. Charles Rowley. MALVOLIO AND THE COUNTESS „ 100 From a Painting by Daniel Maclise, R.A. THE PLAY SCENE IN "HAMLET" » 104 From a Painting by Daniel Maclise, R.A. ROMEO AND JULIET « 108 From a Painting by Ford Madox Brown, reproduced by the courtesy of Mr. Charles Rowley. FRANCIS BACON » 132 JOHN MILTON » 184 After a miniature by Faithornb. MILTON'S MEETING WITH ANDREW MARVELL » 188 From a Painting by G. H. Boughton, by permission of the Proprietors of " The International Library of Famous Literature." THE DEFEAT OF COMUS ,,192 From a Painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, R.A. JOHN DRYDEN ,,212 From a Painting by Kneller. BOOK I THE KING'S ENGLISH CO a •r- < a to o a <» ^ -4-i 00 Si o Q CHATTER I CAXTON " Good reason has England to be proud of this son of hers who opens a new era in her literature." JUSSEBAND. From xylography to typography — Gutenberg — Pre-Caxton English — William Caxton — His life and achievement — The IHcles and Sayinges of the Philosophers— Cnxtou's influence on the language — Early printing and manuscripts. THE invention of typography was not the result of a happy thought or of a flash of invention ; it was rather the result of a long series of modifications and mechanical improve- ments, more especially in connection with the manufacture of tools, which took place between 1400 and 1440. This last may be taken as the critical date, which witnessed the transformation from Xylography to Typog7-aphy ; while the perfection of the art, as far as all its principles are concerned, is associated indissolubly with the printing of the Bible of forty-two lines, known as the Mazarine Bible, or First Bible of John Gutenberg, inaugurated at Mainz in the autumn of 1450. We do not know precisely when this impression of the Vulgate was com- pleted, though we shall probably not be wrong in making it coincide with that of the greatest historical event of the age — the capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. We know for certain that the Indulgence of Nicholas V. was printed at Mainz in November, 1454 ; and this is the first known specimen of typography which bears the date printed upon it. The progress of investigation has, in the main, led to the assertion being made with less and less hesitation, that Gutenberg first of all cast printing-types in moulds and matrices — the one critical step in advance which converted printing into a great art. And his type-mould was not merely the first ; it has remained, essentially, the only practical mechanism for making types. Assuming, as we have been content to do, that Gutenberg was the prime inventor of printing,' it is plain that there were many contemporary rivals in the art, who were already, as it were, on tiptoe at the threshold of the invention. Conspicuous among such ri\als were Fust and Schoefl!'er, the printers of the admirable Mainz or Mcntz Psalter of 1457. It is tolerably plain that Schoefler had learnt the mystery of printing at the fountain-head — in the workshop of Gutenberg. Two rival printing-offices having once been established in Mainz, it was not likely that the process could long be kept secret. It was comnmnicated to Strasburg by Mentelin and Eggestein in 1458, by Pfister to Bamberg in 1461, by Ulric Zell to Cologne in 1462, by Kcff'er to Nuremberg in 1469, and by Zainer to Augsburg about the same time. The introduction of printing opened a new sphere of literary activity everywhere, but ' The merit of Gutenberg's invention was largely due to his superior method of making tj-pes by means oi punch, matrix, and mould. ^Vhen he began his experiments, he found already in conmion use paper, printing-ink, engraving in relief, some form of printing-press, and the art of printing playing-cards and block-books. It is possible even that isolated types were in use before his day (if anywhere, presumably at Haarlem and Avignon) ; but they could not be used to profit, because tliey were not scieutiticaUy made and sufficiently exact. That Gutenberg derived advantage from the successful experiments of the block-book printers of the preceding epoch is probable, but he must have added to tlie common stock of knowledge much more than he found. His type-founding methods were the only key to the invention of practical typography. He himself speaks of the new art as dependent upon tlie admirable proportion, harmony, and connection of the punches and matrices. (See De V'inne, Invention of rrintiyuj, 2nd ed. 1877.) 3 4 CAXTON especially in England, for there it preceded, by just enough time to enable it to disseminate, the Renaissance and Reformation movements. It coincided with the formation of modern English, and followed by less than a hundred years the masterpieces of the transitional English tongue, which were still green in the popular memory, and which in its zeal for popularity it hastened to incorporate among its productions. The English of the two centuries before Caston''s time was transitional between the Gothic dialect of Anglo-Saxon (akin to the Low Dutch and Frisian, still spoken on the shores of the Baltic and in North Holland), and modern English. The old English or Anglo- Saxon of Alfred's day, which had been spoken in England roughly from a.d. 800 to 1200, had become wholly unintelligible to the English, speaking the various dialects of Edward III.'s day. Under the early Plantagenets, English had sunk almost entirely to rustic and provincial use. Latin was used by the learned and by the clergy ; French was the language of the schools, the law courts, the merchants, and the court. No English king, indeed, spoke English habitually before Henry IV. The town class and gentry of the thirteenth century were probably bilingual : they spoke French and English. It seemed doubtful which would predominate. During the century before Chaucer, however, English was rapidly gaining ground. The mixture of peoples had rubbed oft" the inflections of the old language. Anglo-Saxon was deficient in elegant, martial, and abstract terms. French supplied these, and Latin, through French, enriched the native dialects still more. The current English of London and the Eastern Midlands completely dropped the germanic syntax — the practice of putting the verb at the end of the sentence. It modified the old pro- nunciation and abandoned the old complexity of genders and ca.ses. The bed-rock or stoiiy skeleton of the language was still Teutonic, but it was filled uj) and enriched by a soil of French words, plirascs, and usages. Uy Chaucer's time the mix- ture wa.s far forward, and we have arrived at a language with a mixed vocabulary and a straight- forwnrfi accidence that we can almost call " English," in a modern sense. ' Of these wc cxtimate that four and four only can of a later age— namely, VVyclif, Langlaiid, Chaucer, an We can thus say that by a happy chance the Age of Caxton coincides for all practical pur- poses with the era of Modern England : for did it not witness, approximately at any rate, the fixation of the English speech as we now have it ; the presentation in print of such speech- masters of aforetime^ as were still intelligible to the multitude ; the sunset of the old religion and the old romance ; the dawn of the new learning and of the knowledge of the new world ; and the rise of our own little despotic and insular Tudor dynasty ? Numerous tomes have been written about the Tower of Babel, and even of the time before the Flood, in the annals of "English Literature "(so called). We have chosen deliberately to pass by Hengist and Horsa and the Heptarchy and to begin with the era when — even although three kinds of vernacular speech, wholly unconnected with English, remained unsubdued in our island — the blended English language of Shakespeare and the Bible had triumphed definitely alike over Anglo-Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Danish, and Anglo-Norman. Apart from his services as standardiser of English, and primary selector of standard authors, Caxton's diligence alone was perfectly extraordinary ; for he not only closely supervised all the work of his press, but also translated a number of books and treatises from the French in accordance with what he thought might be a popular demand. Caxton's position thus gives him a place of first-rate importance in our literature, and one that fully demands that a full-length portrait of him should be presented to the reader. William Caxton was born, probably near Hadlow in the Weald of Kent, about 1422. The large Flemish admixture which had been in Kent since Edward IIL's introduction of foreign weavers into that county made the dialect a rude one. The sound of a was pro- nounced very broadly, and the words " ask " and " axe ■" are said to have been interchange- able. Caxton's name was probably pronounced Carston or Cawston. Since before the days of Sir Richard Whittington it had been the ambition of coun+ry parents in the .south- eastern counties to place their sons with City merchants. William Caxton was apprenticed in 1438 to Robert Large, a London mercer ir» Old Jewry. Large, at his death in 1441, left be said directly to modul.itc the literary life and thought d Gower ; these four we have treated retrospectively. EARLY PRINTED BOOKS his industrious apprentice 20 marks, wherewith the young man set up in Bruges, then the capital of Burgundy, one of tlie greatest marts in Europe, and a famous centre of commercial education. By about 1462 Caxton had risen to be governor of the Domus Anglise, or House of the English Guild of Merchant Adventurers, in the city. At the close of the same year he entered the service of the King's sister, Margaret, Duchess ot Burgundy. He had already begun in 1469 to render into " the Fayre language of the Frenshe" the popular mediaeval romance compiled by Raoul Le Fevre, entitled Le Reciieil des Histoires de Troye, and in the comparative leisure which he enjoyed in the service of the Duchess he completed it in September, 1471. The demand for the book was considerable, and it had to be copied again and again. Nowhere in Europe could this work be done more efficiently than in Flanders. The wealth and cultivation of the Burgundian courtiers had stimulated a passion for beautiful books. Prizes were offered (as the reader of The Cloister and the Hearth will remember) to excite emulation among caligraphers ; and corporations existed, comprising the scriveners, bookbinders, engravers, illuminators, and other craftsmen, such as the Freres de la Plume at Brussels, and at Bruges the Guild of St. John — the patron saint of scribes — who did the work of manuscript reproduction, by means ot a carefully devised division of labour, in an amazingly rapid, and at the same time accurate and systematic, manner. There could unquestionably have been no difficulty in getting the book manifolded at Bruges by the ordinary mediaeval methods ; but it was just at this moment that news of the novel German mystery of printing had reached Flanders from Cologne. In 1471 we may take it for certain that the talk about this new method of book-making was in every- body's mouth at Bruges. Caxton was not long in resolving to put himself to the pains of learning the newly discovered art; and the immediate incentive, as he himself tells us, was the prospect of a greater ease in multiplying his Troy Book. There was at Bruges, during the time of Caxton's sojourn there, an eminent caligrapherandstationer, named Colard Mansion, and probability seems to favour the theory that Caxton and Mansion learnt the elements of printing together at Cologne about 1472. Returning to Bruges in the following year, it is suggested that they set up a printing-press together there. They appear to have obtained a set of French types, and it was from them that Caxton printed, or paid Mansion to print, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troy (in folio, presumably in 1474). There also the second English book was printed, The Game and Play of the Chess (folio, 1475), translated through the French from a Latin treatise caUed Licdits Scacchorum. As continued to be the case after his migration to England, he printed usually upon paper made in the Low Countries, and rarely used vellum. In 1476 Caxton left Bruges to practise his newly acquired art in his native country, and on November 18th, 1477, he printed at the Almonry, Westminster,^ a book called Tlie Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophers. The Dictes is undoubtedly the first book printed in England.- Its type, though dissimilar from that of the two former books in which Caxton had been concerned, is identical with that used in Mansion's later books. It is therefore probable that Caxton brought to Westminster his printing-apparatus from Bruges. The translation (from the French Les Bits Moreaiix des Philosojjhes) was from the pen of Earl Rivers, but was revised at the Earl's request by Caxton, who added a prologue and a chapter " touchyng Wymmen." The History of Jason, an English translation of Raoul Le Fevre's Les Pais . . . du . . . Chevalier Jason, which seems to have been first printed by Mansion about 1478, was another early publication of Caxton's Westminster press. But the claim of precedence over The Dictes, as the first book printed in England, which had been put forward in its behalf, rests on shadowy evidence. ' In the parish of St. Margaret's, very near where the ^Vestminster Palace Hotel now stands. ' The Game nf Chess was formerly thought to he the first book printed in England. 'Die reader will remember Jonathan Oldbuck's story of " Snuffy Davy," " with the scent of a sleuth-hound and tlie snap of bull-dog" for a rare volume on a bookstall. "Snuffy Davy bought The Game of Chess, 1474, the first book ever printed in England, from a stall in Holland for about 2 groschen, or twopence of our money." He sold it to Osborne for £'20. Osborne sold it to Askew for £60, and Askew for £170 to the King. Scott says that the story is true, but Blades (alas !) tears it to fragments with the insatiate fury of the hardened iconoclast 6 A VOLUMINOUS TRANSLATOR From 1477 to 1491 Caxton was busily em- ploved in printing and translating. In the case of these translations, almost always through the medium of the French, Caxton frequently speaks of himself as translator, where it is highly probable, particularly in the case of a book so voluminous as The Golden Legend, that he employed one or more under- studies or assistants. There is no doubt, however, that he wTote the Prologues and Epilogues to the versions that he issued, and many of these are racy and individual enough, with a curious twist of Scottish humour, in ■which caution, apology, and rebuke are most quaintly intermingled. His "original Writ- ings," including, together with these Prologues, the " last book " which he appended to Higden's Policronkon, are printed in William Blades's monumental Life and Tijpogy-aphy of WiUiam Caxton (1861). Jason was soon followed by The Canterbury Tales, a large folio of 374 leaves. In 1480 John Lettou, a Lithuanian, started printing in London with a smaller and neater type than Caxton had used. His work stimulated Caxton to fresh efforts. In 1482 he was joined by William of Malines, though after 1484 Malines or " Mai'hlinia "' seems to have had a press of his own in Holborn ; and after 1490 Maehlinia's business was continued by Richard Pynson, a very excellent printer of Norman birth, who may have served for a short time under Caxton. Editions of Cliaucer, Lydgate, Mandeville, Revnard the Fox, Sarum Missals, Hours, Etiquette and Cookery Books soon begin to show that competition was active and the (|uest for popular work keen. Caxton hereupon introduced several impro\ements into his work, such as a smaller type, wood- cuts, printed signatures, and improved spacing. Among his later productions were The Golden Legend or Lives of Saints, The Fables of JEsop, Ia; Morte d'Arthur, a portion of VirgiPs AUneid, and a version of a Latin Ars Moricndi. Caxton himself edited all the books he printed, and he himself translated or personally super- vised the translating of no less liiaii twenty- two, including the Troy Book and The Golden Ij-gend. He jjroduced in all between eighty and ninety diflereiit books known to be genuine. employing apparently six slightly variant types. Of these over fifty different specimens are contained in the British Museum, a grand total which is surpassed only by Lord Spencer's collection of sixty Caxtons, fomnerly at Althorp, now forming part of the Rylands Library at Manchester. It is in the preface to the Eneydos that we get one of the last peeps at the venerable master-printer, in a wood-picture dra^vn by his own hand, where he describes himself " setting in his studye, where laye many and dyverse pamflettes and bookys," as he worked at the translation or corrected the proof-sheets of the Eneydos, the style of which evidently delighted him, as we find him in continuation stating that the " fayre and ornate termes " gave him " grete plasyr." He had then removed from his old establishment in the Almonry, at the sign of the Red Pale, but was still close to the Abbey ; and we may imagine him listening to the heavy strokes of the clock hour after hour, as he sat diligently at his work, while quietly rejoicing in the busy sounds of the neighbouring press-room, where Wynkyn de Worde and his apprentices were deeply em- ployed to his certain profit.^ Caxton died at the close of 1491, and was buried in the churchyard of St. Margaret's, Westminster. On his death his materials passed into the hands of Wynkyn de Worde, his assistant, who continued to print from Caxton's fount in the same house at Westminster. In 1500, however, WvnkjTi de Worde moved to the Sun, in Fleet Street, and died in 1534, having produced in all about 600 books. Caxton was denounced by Gibbon for his omission of classical works from his list of publications. But, in the first place, Caxton was necessarily swayed by commercial con- siderations ; while, in the second place, he had the instinctive desire of a printer to appeal to a popular rather than an academic circle. As a voluminous translator he did much to fix the literary language of England. He evidently knew French very thoroughly, though he was never very literal. He inter- polated some passages and paraphrased others. As a tyj)ographcr his work was homely : he seems to have had no idea of vicing with the ' See the Ilistort/ of the Art of with JJl.idcH as to Mansion's influence Ulric Zell, of Cologne. (Cf. Gordon Duff, 1900.) I'riiiliiifi by II. Noel Humplireys, who, however, does not a^ee over Caxton, nttrihutiiif^ tlie lionour of bpinji Caxton's tutor to Ear/y rrinted Books, 18'J3 ; H. R. I'lomer, English Printing, WRITING AND PRINTING artistic and luxurious workmanship of Mainz or Venice.' Homeliness, too, is the character- istic of the useful English prose which he employed in his numerous translations. He introduced a good many French and some Dutch words. Yet the general effect of his press-work was to arrest the decay of old Teutonic words, and to give stability to our spelling. It is largely owing to the fact that Caxton learnt pi'inting abroad and first em- ployed a fount of French type that the Old English p disappeared. Foreigners had no matrix for such a piece of type ; consequently th usually replaces it, though the letter y is sometimes used for this purpose ; hence the old form of " y" " for " the." The guiding principle among the early printers was to make their printed books look as much like the best class of manuscript work, to which students were accustomed, as possible. They commenced their printed texts in just the same way as the manuscript writers had done. No title-page or imprint setting forth the writer's name, the date and place of execution of the work, and other details was provided ; but the first page was headed merely with "Hie Incipit " and the name of the treatise. Wynkyn de Worde was the first English printer system- atically to adopt the use of title-pages after the death of Caxton in 1491. Similarly, in the body of their work, by the adoption of a fount of type which resembled, as nearly as possible, the secretary hand of the period, it seems to have been the idea of the early printers to deprecate contrast and invite comparison with the best work of their pre- decessors, the scriveners.^ In this they have often been so successful that early printed pages have been mistaken for and even sold under the description of manuscripts. The enemies of the printers were not backward in denouncing them as cheats, and their produc- tions as contrefa(;ons, or spurious imitations. It was only quite gradually that the intro- duction of title-pages, of wood-blocks for capitals, of printed signatures, of a printed as opposed to a script character, and of regular spacing gave to printed books the distinctive character which they have now maintained for four centuries, and to the printer the unchal- lenged control of the lines of communication between the retina and the brain of man. ' In the first place, the MSS. that served as his models were inferior. No English type-founder of any note arose before John Day, who began printing about 15.50, and the first type-founder who could really compete with the great foreign houses of France and Flanders was AVilliam C'aslon (1692 — 17GG). * By some of its practitioners the new art was modestly described as "Ars artificialiter scribendi." The modern or Roman style of type (flourishing at Venice under Jenson as early as 1470) was not commonly introduced into England until late in Henry VIII. 's reign. Even then the black-letter held its own in Bibles, proclamations, Acts of Parliament, ballads, and reprints of Old English authors such as Chaucer. M'hen a prisoner was allowed benefit of clergy, a psalter was handed to him in the Gothic character, and he was asked to read a verse, called the "neck verse." He mumbled something, and the clerk said the regular formula, "Legit ut clericus." It is now used only for ornamental purposes. The old practice of using u and V interchangeably, v at the beginning and u in the middle of a word, persisted until the seventeenth century, and the old form of s in the body of a word (/) until late in the eighteenth century. CHAPTER II GEOFFREY CHAUCER " Of Chaucer, truly, I know not whether to marvel more, either that he iu that misty time could see so clearly, or that we in this clear age walli so stumbliiigly after him." — Sir Philip Sidney. " In the first place, as he is the father of English poetry, so I hold him in the same degree of veneration as the Grecians held Homer, or the Romans VirgQ. He is a perpetual fountain of good sense." — Dryhen. Outline of Chaucer's life — His personal appearance and portraits — Three chronological periods of his work — Troilus and Criseyde — The Legend of Good }Yomen — Chaucer's debt to French and Italian sources — The Canterliury Tales — Tlie scheme of the poem — The qualities of Chaucer's poetry — History of the Chaucerian MSS. and text — Attempts to moderni.se the text. OF the few masters of the old literature whose work Caxton .sought to per- petuate by means of his new art, by far the mo.st pre-eminent was Chaucer. From his fellow-craftsmen, Gower, Occleve, and Lydgate, Chaucer had received the fullest meed of praise. The French poet Eustace Deschamps had likened him in his lifetime to Soci-ates, Seneca, and Ovid. The brilliant group of Scots poets, Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas, and Lynd.say, had not very much in common one with the other, but they shared the same fervent admiration for Chaucer. Their poetic ancestor, James I., spoke of him in just the same way, as " his master." Caxton himself yielded to no man in his enthusiasm. " He excelleth in mine ojiinion," he wrote, " all other writers in our English ; for he writeth no void words, but all his matter is full of high and quick sentence." Of the poets who preceded Chaucer, there is only one whose poetry can claim to be in any degree readable at the present day, or to be even intelligible to those whose mother-tongue is Engli.sh as it is now understood. This poet, of course, is I^ngland.' But there is i-cally no comparing his Piers Phicmnn with The Can- ierlmnj Talea. One could as soon compare a .sermon with a song. Chaucer is, in fact, to Langland as the sun is to the moon, and to the great corpus of dialect. Old English or Anglo-Saxon, poetry of the remoter past, as the moon is to the Milky Way. Geoffrey Chaucei", son of John Chaucer, a vintner,^ was born in Thames Street, London, possibh' about 1336 — though there are authori- ties who go so far as to say probably about 1340. In 1356 he was a page in the household of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, third son of Edward III., being specially attached to the service of the Duchess. In 1359 he accompanied Edward III. and his armv upon that English King's last invasion of France, and was captured by the French near Rheims ; but he was ransomed early in 1360, the King contributing 1^16 to the purpo.se. In 1367 he was one of the Yeomen of the King's Chamber, described as Edward's " Dilectus Valcttus," and in receipt of a salary of 20 marks. By this time the poet was married, for in 1366 the name Philippa Chaucer appears as that ot one of the Ladies of the Queen's Bedchamber. Like the Queen, she W6is pro- bably a native of Hainault. In 1374 a pen- sion of dClO was granted to Geoffrey and Philippa for good service. Chaucer was sent abroad several times upon diplomatic errands in the King's sernce. In 1372-3 he went on a mission to Genoa and Florence for the purpo.se of making an agreement with the former city as to a Genoese trading factory in England. On St. George's Day, 1374, he ' See Chop. HI. of our .Second Book. • Tlie family had been vintners and cordwainers {calceurii) for several descents, and were probably of French origin. PORTRAITS OF CHi^CER received from the King a grant of a pitcher of wine daily : this grant was afterwards commuted for a pension of 20 marks. In June of the same year he was made Comp- troller of the Great Customs (wool, skins, and leathei') at the Port of London. In the early summer of 1378 the Italian studies, which he had already commenced, were stimulated by another visit to Italy — on this occasion to treat with Bernabo Visconti, Lord of Milan, and Sir John Hawkwood, the famous con- dottiers, " touching the expediting of the King's war." During his absence he named the poet Gower as his legal representative. In 1382 he was made Comptroller of the Petttf Customs, and four years later he was elected to Parliament as a Knight of the Shire for Kent. At this juncture, however, came a turning-point in his fortunes : he lost his two places in the customs, and had to realise his pensions for ready money. His dismissal was probably due to the fall of his patron, John of Gaunt, on the death of whose wife in 1369 he had written his Book of the Duchess. About the same time he seems to have lost his own wife and her pension. In 1389 things improved again on John of Gaunt's return to power. Chaucer was made Clerk of the King's Works at the Palace of Westminster, St. George's Chapel at Windsor, various royal manors and lodges, and the mews at Charing Cross ; but he lost these appointments in 1391. It was probably during these years of increased leisure and financial vicissitude that The Canterbury Tales were taken in hand. In 1394 Richard II. granted him a new pension of £20 a year, but we find him frequently anticipating it by small loans from the Exchequer. His fortunes revived under Henry IV., who may have recognised that Chaucer had some claim upon him as an old follower of the house of Lancaster : at any rate, a few days after his accession in 1399, by way of practical response to the veteran poet's Complaint to his Purse, he granted him an additional pension of 40 marks. In December, 1399, Chaucer leased a tenement in the garden of St. Mary's Chapel, West- minster, for the space of fifty years. He died there on October 25th, 1400, and was buried in St. Benet's Chapel in Westminster Abbey, where a monument, erected to his memory in Shakespeare's time, became the nucleus of the now famous Poets' Comer. A memorial window was unveiled in St. Saviour's, Soutii- wark, on October 25th, 1900. As in the case of Shakespeare, many fictitious legends and traditions became entwined with the life of the fourteenth-century poet. Many of these were due to a fallacioas autobiographic interpretation of certain passages in his poems. Some were due to the inventive genias of Leland and other biographical compilers of the sixteenth century. Great labour has been expended by recent investigators in getting rid of these fables, and basing the life upon the dry but unyielding foundation of authentic records. Chaucer's personal appearance is well known from a portrait of him by Occleve, which, in a greater degree than most portraits, confirms the ideas regarding him which one might gather from reading his works. This limning, or, as we should now call it, water-colour drawing, was introduced by Occleve into his book De Regimine Prindpum (now in the British Museum as Harleian MS. No. 4866). It is admittedly a memory-painting, yet it is the only one which is generally accepted as trustworthy. Tlie figure, which is half-length, has a backgi'ound of gi'een tapestry. The poet wears a dark-coloured di'ess and hood; his right hand is extended, and in his left he holds a string of beads. From his vest a black case is sus- pended, which appears to contain a knife, or possibly a " penner " or pen-case. The ex- pression of the countenance is intelligent ; but the fii'e of the eye seems quenched, and evident marks of advanced age appear on the counte- nance. A deduction from the apparent age must be made to accord with the poet's statement that he was old and unlusty at fifty-two. There are two other miniature por- traits in manuscripts at the British Museum, upon one of which (Additional MS. 5141) there is little doubt that the quaint standing panel-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery is based. Some of these oil portraits ^ are of considerable interest, though it is not likely that any of them date back beyond the time of Elizabeth. In the Occleve portrait we recognise the ' For reproduction oi all the best miniatures and portraits, with notes tliereon, the curious reader is ^referred to M. H. Spielniaun's interesting little monograph. The PortraiU oj Geoffrey Chaucer (1900). 10 CHAUCER'S THREE PERIODS meditative, downcast, yet slyly observant eyes, the broad brow, the sensuous mouth, the somewhat large yet well-shaped nose, and the general expression of good humour — all features which seem characteristic of the describer of the Canterbury pilgrims. The poet has a small forked beard, such as that ascribed to the Merchant in The Canterbury Tales; the hair is white, and the general appearance that of a man of about sixty. In manner, if we may accept the autobiographical indica- tions of his greatest poem, the poet seemed "ehish, doing to no wight dalliaunce," with the habit of staring on the ground, as if he would find a hair — a practice common with short-sighted people. Tliere are, indeed, fre- quent hints of the poet''s retiring habits, especially in The Prologue to TJie Rime of Sir Tliopas, where Chaucer has put into the mouth of the host a half-bantei'ing description of his personal appearance. We learn from other passages in his WTitings that he worked hard all day at the customs-books, and then, instead of recreation, he came home and applied himself to another book. " Dumb as a stone, studying and reading alway, till his head ached and his look became dazed, so that his neighbours, living at his very door, looked on him as an hermit," though he tells us that he was "really no ascetic" — "his abstinence was little.'" By the more recent critics of Chaucer his work has been divided into three chronological periods — the French period, the Italian period, and the English period. From the writings of his fellow-countrymen, his predecessors in the \ise of the mother tongue from Ca;dmon to I^ngland, Chaucer derived li ttle or nothing. I Ic ilisregardcd the old English tradition, the ex- ponents of which he probably looked down upon a.s provincial and churlish. He began his literary career as a translator of French poems and adapter of French forms and ideas. To this period are assigned his translation of the liarnan dc la Rose, Chancers A. B.C. (an imitation, each of the twenty-three stanzas of which begins with a fresh letter of the alphabet), The Complaint to Pity, and The Boole of the rhiche.HS. To the second jjcriod of Italian influence, which began about 1372, the date of the first Italian journey, are ascrilxid the chief of Chaucer's nn'nor poems : llic ParUument of FouUs (birds) (1381), Troilus and Crimyde (1381-2), The House of Fame (1382), and The Legend of Good Women (1385). All the poems of Chaucer's first period are,^ comparatively speaking, those of a prentice hand or student in the art of poetry. A great advance is shown in both technical power and originality in the long narrative poem of Troilus and Criseyde, not more than one-third of which was derived from its ostensible original, the // Filostrato of Boccaccio ; but Chaucer owed much of the remainder to the Roman de Troye of Benoit and to the Historia Trojana. of Guido delle Colonne. The story was based for the most part upon the mediaeval Troy story which was subsequently utilised by Shakespeare and by Dryden. But it vivifies the beauty and passion of Criseyde and the humorous side of Sir Pandarus in a manner which was entirely fresh and strange to mediaeval fiction. Boccaccio had used the ottava rima in his poem, but Chaucer uses the seven-line stanza with a mastery which indicates a rapid artistic growth about this period (1381-2). Troilus was followed by The House of Fame, a shorter poem of about a thousand octosyllabic couplets^ in which more than in any other of his poems Chaucer seems to derive his inspiration from Dante. Next comes The Legend of Good Women, a misty prototype of Tennyson's ex- quisite Dream and the immediate precursor of The Canterbury Tales. For the details of his sad heroines Chaucer depends on Ovid, while as regards its general plan the poem is based more directly upon Boccaccio's De Claris- MuUerihus. The Italian, however, describes 105 women, while Chaucer limits himself to twenty, including Penelope, Helen, Lucretia, Cleopatra, Thisbc, Dido, Laodamia, Canace,. Ariadne, IMedea, Philomela, and Alcestis. But of several of these the portraiture is barely commenced. The prologue to this poem is a worthy forerunner of the ripest {)roduction or Chaucer's pen, and the most famous, surely, of all prologues. Both it and The Lege>id furnish us with early examples of the great metre, that heroic couplet which was to become such a mainstay of English verse. Of the poems once ascribed to Chaucer, the two most notable and the most pleasing are The Court of Love and The FloK'er and the Leaf. The former was added to the canon by Joim Stow in 15()1 ; the latter was first printed as Chaucer's by Sj)eght in 1498. Both these poems have some aflinity with the court-like romances of the early THE CANTERBURY TALES 11 eighties of Chaucer's career, both are admittedly smooth and pretty, and both alike are relent- lessly cut adrift by the critics and gi-animarians of to-day. From his French models Chaucer had learnt much — the most approved allegorical conven- tions of the school, the art of poetical enibroidory by means of the introduction of quaint and learned illustrations, with the knack of graceful and chivalric expression. Above all, he learnt from them the forms of verse. From them he also learned the conventional poetic amble, the concomitant qualities of which were tendencies to incoherence, to garrulity, and to interminable repetition, degenerating at worst into the merest gabble. From the Italians, especially from Dante and Boccaccio, Chaucer learnt lessons of higher value. From Boccaccio, as a real master of narrative, he learnt the secret of construction — how to plan a story and carry it out in due proportion. He derived many stories from him, and he is always at his best when he is put upon his mettle by Boccaccio. From Dante, too, he learnt many details of artistic workmanship. But his main discovery among the Italians was the secret of harmonious composition. He no longer wrote with the licence of a t7-ouvire. He has, now, a keen eye for what is redundant and tautological ; he retouches, connects, groups, generalises, composes. In all these directions his powers were approaching maturity at the time of his framing the scheme of The Canterbury Tales. The idea of the Canterbury pilgrimage as a framework for a series of stories seems to have been Chaucer's own. When we compare it with the devices for linking together stories used by Boccaccio or the editor of The Arah'mn Nights, we see the inherent superiority of Chaucer's plan. A pilgrimage to Canterbury, occupying about a week dm-ing the spring-time, afforded a pleasant holiday to most varied forms of English society. It was a very common plan for pilgrims to rendezvous at such an inn as the Tabard at Southwark, and to travel in parties on the road for purposes of safety. Chaucer brings his varied company of pilgrims before us with such vigour that, as Dryden said, one can see their humours, their features, and their very dress, as if one had supped with them at the Tabard. Twenty-nine persons are gathered in all, who, for the space of a four days' journey, have the same object in view, and are going to live a common life. Forty-six miles from London is the shrine, famous all Europe over, which contains the relics of Henry II. 's former adversary — the chancellor Thomas a Bccket^ assassinated on the steps of tlie altar in December, 1170, and canonised about three years afterwards. " Mounted each on his steed, either good or bad — the Knight on a beast sturdy though of indifferent appearance, the hunting Monk on a superb palfrey 'as brown as is a berye,' the Wife of Bath sitting astride her horse and showing her red stockings — they set out, taking with them mine host of the Tabard ; and there they go at an easy pace, along the sunny road lined with hedges, among the gentle undulations ot the soil. They will cross the Medway ; then will pass beneath the walls ol Rochester's gloomy keep, then one of the prin- cipal fortresses of the kingdom, sacked but recently by revolted peasantry ; they will see- the cathedral church, built a little lower down, and, as it were, in the shade. There are women and bad riders in the group ; the Miller has drunk too much, and can hardly sit in the saddle ; the way will be long. To make it seem short each one will tell tales,, and the troop on its return will honour by a supper the best teller." It was a capital scheme, most excellently canned out, though not anything near to com- pletion ; for, instead of the hundred and twenty tales originally planned, only twenty were com- pleted. One of the attractions of the scheme is that Chaucer, with the true instinct of genius, took care that each of the stories should be such as the speaker might naturally have told. Each tale was suited to the teller. The young Scjuire tells a tale of Eastern romance, ever fascinating to youth. The tipsy Miller obliges with a loose and comical story. The honest Clerk moves every heart with the touching story of Griselda. The tales of the gentles are full of high sentiment and pathos. Between times the narrator is full of banter and satii-e, of ridicule of marriage and of priests. In treating of such themes Chaucer enjoyed the freedom of a Moliere. Elsewhere, in depicting the horseplay of the common folk, he takes the licence of a Smollett, descencUng occasionally even to filth. All the tales are bound together, and that much better than in Boccaccio, by little veritable incidents, which spring from the characters of the personages, and are such as we light upon 12 HERE IS GOD'S PLENTY in our travels. The horsemen ride on in a good humour through green fields in the April sunshine, and they hold converse. The Miller has drunk too much ale, and wiU speak, and for no man forbear. The Cook goes to sleep on his beast, and they play practical jokes on him. The Friar and the Summoner get up a dispute about their respective lines of business. The Host restores peace, makes them speak or be silent, like a man who has long presided in the inn parlour, and has often had to check brawlers. They pass judgment on the stories they listen to — declaring that there are few Griseldas in the world, laughing at the mis- adventures of the tricked carpenter, drawing a lesson from the moral tale. The poem is no longer a mere procession, but a painting in which the contrasts are arranged, the attitudes chosen, the general effect calculated, so that it becomes life and motion : the effect is that of a convex mirror, giving a brilliant reflection of a society that was already passing away ; it concentrates the light of the past, the many- hued life and tumultuous movement of the Middle Ages, and projects the image with a dazzling clearness which penetrates the mists of the period of transition, and has become to modem England a possession beyond price. The very form of TTie Canterbury Tales was expressive of consummate craftsmanship. The garden of Boccaccio, the supper-party of Grazzini, and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough thread for their stories, but exclude all save equals and friends. By choosing a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts us on a plane where all men are equal. His cluster of holiday-makers represents a microcosm of English society in the latter part of the fourteenth century. By making the Host of the Tabard always the central figure, he has happily united two of the most familiar emblems of life — the short journey and the inn. The familiar life of the every-day world wa-s exactly what interested Chaucer most, by the time he had reatlied his majority and had left off imitating the notes of others. Chaucer's metiiphysical interests were small ; there was very little of the moonlight and mystery and awe of the world in his poems ; he seldom or never sounds the deeper notes of terror and of pity. The light upon his pages is that of I "If we could take thirty per cent, of Goldsmith vitalise this compound with the ppirit of the fourteenth Oiauccr."— A. VV. I'oM.Ano. common day. Among his most salient charac- teristics are tolerance and good humour. His motto might have been " Live and let live." Though he lived during the Hundred Years' 'Wax, and had himself been a captive, not a word in depreciation of the French nation will be fomid in his poems. No man thought more easily than he did or revealed with greater precision the sectional prejudices and strange egotisms which make up the human comedy. Yet he seldom or never strips the very heart and soul of a man of its integument. With Shakespeare a tragedy means the ruin of a man's mind. With Chaucer it is merely the external fall from high estate. In his manner of depicting a man, from the external side only, he has more in common with Scott and Fielding than with Shakespeare ^ ; yet there is no doubt that Chaucer stands with Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson — to whom some would add Burns and Byron, others pei-haps Shelley and Wordsworth — among the dii inajores of English poets. Nor shall we find reason to wonder at this, when we recog- nise the qualities that go to compensate for his defective sympathy with some of the pro- founder aspirations of the human intelligence. In defining these qualities, we can hardly do better, in the first place, than seek guidance fi'om Dryden, the earliest and one of the best of English critics. Dryden's " Here is God's plenty " is stiU pei'haps the best short criticism of Chaucer extant. " The father of English poetry," wrote Dryden, " Chaucer is a per- petual fountain of good sense. A man of wonderfully comprehensive nature, he followed Nature everywhere, but he is never so bold as to go beyond her. He knew where to leave off. As for his versification, he regarded it presumably as being accommodated to the ears of his own time, somewhat uncouth, but with a rude sweetness as of a Scots tune about it." Let us compare this with some of the charac- teristic features discovered by one of the best of Chaucer's modern critics. As a narrative poet, says Professor Lounsbury, Chaucer has no equal in our tongue. As a pioneer of English versification, it may be said of him, as of Augustus, that lie found Rome of brick and left it of marble. Among other distinctive features, he would specially have us observe ;, fifty of Fielding, and ten of Sir Walter Scott, and century, we should get perhaps fairly near to another B ® Q THE CHAUCER MSS. 13 the originality of his treatment of borrowed material, the naturalness of his language, the apparent absence of effort in his writing, and the refined sportiveness which continually cor- rects and relieves the English tendency to a dull seriousness. Among his characteristic defects he instances the intrusion of irrelevant learning, improper digressions, rude dialects, steep anachronisms, and an unreasonable fond- ness for the sententious Boethius. The general conclusion we are compelled to draw is that Chaucer was a supreme artist, and the con- viction is strengthened when we consider the rich humour (the accumulated fund of a man of the world, who had seen and heard all that was best in his time) which permeates almost every poem that he wrote. No one has surpassed Chaucer in good-humoured banter, a quality which the poet possessed in such perfection that he was able continually to laugh at himself without a suspicion either of bitterness or of bad taste. If character may be divined from an author's writings, Chaucer was a good man, genial, sincere, hearty, temperate of mind, more wise perhaps for this world than the next, but thoroughly humane and friendlj' with God and men. To this profound humanity of soul Chaucer joined that marvellous power of speech which is the talisman of the great poet. For four out of the five centuries which have elapsed since his death, Chaucer's poems were so imperfectly transcribed and printed, that "he who hardly ever wrote a bad line, and whose music and mastery of words are almost unrivalled, was apologised for as some rude rhymer." His works were praised for their learning, printed in black-letter as an anti- quarian curiosity, paraphrased and translated, till he could not himself have recognised them. As a matter of fact, Chaucer's work, so far from being "rude," was nearly all of the highly finished variety ; and, in strong con- trast to Shakespeare, the poet took a keen interest in the text of his poems. He went so far as to utter a memorable malediction against all careless scribes. In spite of the misdeeds of such nefarious persons, Chaucer's text has come down to us in a very fairly satisfactory state. There are existing about fifty manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales, none dating back to the poet's lifetime, but several to the fifty years which followed his death : the two best of these are the Ellesmere MS. and Harleian MS. 7S34 in the British Museum, lliere are numerous diversities amonif the manuscripts, due to the normal corrupting influences to which the work, whether of professional scrivenei-s or monkish scribes, is ordinarily liable : viz. carelessness ; misread- ings, due to ignorance ; conceited corrections, in the supposed interests of grammar, local usage, style, or morality. Caxton, a gi-eat admirer of Chaucer, printed The Canterbury TakfS in 1478, and again in 1483. They were reprinted by P^-nson, 1492, and Wynkyn de Worde, 1498. In 1532 Francis 'ftynne prepared a collective edition of Chaucer's works, including many pieces that were not really by Chaucer. In 1598 Tliomas Speght issued an edition with a very erroneous life, based upon materials collected by Leland and John Stow the antiquary. These texts remained the standard ones for many years ; and inasmuch as they were based upon a manuscript now lost, they are still valuable for purposes of comparison. With the idea of tinkering the prosody into conformity with our language as it is now refined, Urry played fearful havoc with the old grammatical forms in his edition in 1721, in which the text was first emancipated from black-letter. The Prologue and Knighfs Tale were edited as a specimen, in 1737, by Tliomas Morell. Tliomas Morell's work marked a great advance in the direction of conservative scholarship, but it was surpassed in every way by the work of Thomas Tyrwhitt, whose great edition of The Canterbury Tales was brought out in 1775, and was followed by a fifth volume containing a glossary in 1778. Tyrwhitt was to Chaucer what Tlieobald was to Shakespeare and Spedding to Bacon — one of the few great English editors ; like Steevens and Malone, he was thoroughly saturated in black-letter. Thomas Wright had the audacity to impugn Tyrwhitt's scholarship, and especially his text, which he described as " made up." Accordingly, between 1847 and 1851 he brought out a new text, based, not upon a collation, but upon a single manuscript (Harleian 7334, in British Museum). Whether from a linguistic or a literary point of view the result was in every respect inferior ; but it marked the dawn of a great Chaucerian revival. In 1862 a great advance was made by Professor Child's studies in Chaucerian grammar. In 1867 the founda- tion of the Chaucer Society was due to the indefatigable zeal of Dr. Funiivall, and through 14 HISTORY OF THE CHAUCERIAN TEXT its agency great strides have been made in tlie study of the versification, pronunciation, and philology of the poet. The indirect influence of these studies has been to make men more familiar with Chaucer's English than were our forebears of the eighteenth century. Since the time of Gray and Warton and Scott there has been a gi-eat revival of old literature and old art, and a very tangible outcome of this has been the introduction of a number of old \\ ords. As Hugo and Merimee invigorated French by the revival of old words, so in England, only rather before in point of date, Scott and Keats gave a fresh currencv to numerous words and expressions. Tlie revival of old literature such as Le Morte (T Arthur and Piers Ploimnan, and of the old drama, and the renewal of love for the English of the Bible and what Chesterfield called " the bad English of the Psalms " — the ■whole tendency, in fact, of the art of such men as Tennyson, Hohnan Hunt, Pugin, Sir Gilbert Scott, Rossetti, Ruskin, and, above all, perhaps William Morris, for whom the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cannot be said to have existed — was to bring the Englishmen of their generation infinitely nearer to the Middle Ages tlian were those who lived in the ages of Dryden and Pope, and even of Dr. Johnson. The resultant of all these forces has been the devotion of an ardent yet minute study to Chaucer, and the evolution of a text which is probably superior to that we shall ever have of Shakespeare, 'lliis is partly due to the fact that numerous manuscrij)ts of Chaucer remain for comparison,' and partly due to the fact that, unlike Shakesjieare, Cliaucer hardly ever wrote carelessly, hurriedly, or obscurely. He is, moreover, very regular in his versification, and was very axerse to saci-ificing perspicuity in the interests of con- densation. Some of Chaucer's words are still unexplained, some of his allusions have never been cleared up ; but his constructions liave been mastered, and the general drift of what he has to say is never in doubt. Chaucerian scholarship may be said to have had two flowering periods,"— one in the middle of the eighteenth century, which resulted in the ripe fruit of Tyrwhitt's edition ; the second in the sixties of the nineteenth century, and the outcome the excellent editions which are now in our hands : Skeat's critical edition* (Clarendon Press) of Chaucer's Complete Works (7 vols., 1894-7); the Globe edition of the Wwks (1 vol., 1898) ; and Lounsbury's edition of the Complete Works and glossary (2 vols., New York, 1900). These texts are based nominally upon the same materials, but they vary con- siderably in detail, showing the different criteria of judgment, both as regards literary taste and relative imjjortance of manuscripts. Whereas, too, Skeat's edition normalises the orthography, the Globe follows a single manuscript (the Ellesmere), wherever its reading is feasible. Yet the differences between the scholars are small compared with those between the would-be pojjularisers of the poet. As there have been two harvests of Chaucer's criticism, so there have been two distinct movements for the modernisation of the The Cantcrhurij Tales: (1) that associated with Dryden and Pope, and (2) that culminating in the efforts of Leigh Hunt, Richard Home, W^ordsworth, and Cowden Clarke. The phraseology, spelling, and constructions of Chaucer being in many respects obsolete, it was the object of these admirers of the " Homer of English poetry " to attire his best productions in a modern garb. The scholars have almost with one accord dis- countenanced these attempts, and have covered their projectors with contempt and ridicule. That much is inevitably lost in the process of translation is a proposition which is of course unassailable. Yet it is mere affectation to mainlain, as many Chaucerians do, that an unlrained reader can master essential pecu- ' .Six of the best manuscripts —Ellesmere, Ilengwrt, Cambridge Univ., (J.t^.C. Oxford, Petworth, Lansdowne — yrere edited side by side by Dr. Fiirnivall for the Cliaucer Society (18()8). ' 'JTic vicissitudes of Chaucer's fame form the subject of a very interesting passage in Churton Collins's cssayB on the predecessors of Shakesjieare : "'lake Chaucer. In LWO his pi>i)ulaiity was at its height. During the latter part of the sixteenth centui-y it began to decline. I'Vom that date to the end of William IIl.'s reign— in spile of the influence which he undoubtedly exercised over Spenser, and in sjjite of the respectful allusions to him in Sidney, rultenh.im, Drayton, 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 I'opc. Hetvvcen 1780 and \~U2 nothing seemed more probable than that the writings of the first of England's narrative poets would live chieily in the memory of antiquarians. In little more than half a century afterwards we find him placed, with Shakespeare and Milton, on the highest pinnacle of poetic renown." THE MODERNISING OF CHAUCER 15 liarities in the space of an hour, and can then rather strongly to sympathise with Dryden, enjoy his Chaucer with the best. The numlxr when he says, " I think I have just reason to of persons competent to enjoy the niceties of complain of those who, because they understand Chaucer's art is necessarily restricted ; but the Chaucer, would deprive the greater part of their number of persons who could enjoy the sub- countrymen of the same advantage, and hoard stance and matter of his poems, irrespective him up as misers do their grandam Gold, to of the j)i'ecisc manner ot presentation, is un- look on it themselves and hinder others from bounded — a consideration which inclines one making use of it." For general criticism of Chaucer the ordinary reader will do well first to scan what the literary historians have to say : among them he will find much admirable criticism in Stopford Brooke,* Henry Morley, Taine, Jusserand, Chambers, and Ten Brink*; above all, in Wartou's and in Courthope's respective histories of English poetry. If the reader has need of a Chaucer manual, he has again a considerable choice. There is an excellent little Chaucer Primer, by Mr. A. W. Pollard ; there is also a highly condensed Guide to Chaucer and Sjieitser, by F. G. Fleay (1877); The Age of Chaucer, by Mr. F. J. Siiell (1901); and Dr. Ward's Chaucer, in the Men of Letters Series ; in addition to Skeat's Student'.',- Chaucer (189.-)) and The Chaucer Canon (1900). For interesting reading about Chaucer the reader will probably find most to entertain him in the three volumes of Studie.i in Chaucer (London, 1892), by a Yale professor, T. R. Lounsl)ury. These studies form a series of agreeable, it somewhat diffuse, magazine essays rather than an organic book. In the later stages of his Chaucer course the student will naturally depend much on the Transactions of the Chaucer Society. Yet more important, perhaps, than any of these aids to study is the light thrown ujjon the subject by such essayists as Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt, Ale.xander Smith in Dreamthorpe, and J. R. Lowell in My Study Windows. Among notable periodical essays should be mentioned two articles in Blackwood (vols. ii. and Ivii.) ; two in Macmillun (vols. xxir. and xxvii.) — one by Stopford Brooke, the other by Furnivall ; and two in The Quarterly (January, 1873, emphasising the affinity between Chaucer and Shakespeare ; and April, 1895, a review of Skeat's edition of Chaucer). CHAPTER HI MORAL GOWER—THE ''3IORTE B ARTHUR" "O moral Gower, this book I directe To thee, and to the philosophical Strode, To vouchensauf, ther nede is, to corecte. Of your benignitees and zeles gode." Chaucer, Troiitu and C'riseyde. Warton's criticism of Gower — Conjessio Amantis — Sir Thomas Malory — Morte d' Arthur — Its influence in English literature. CHAUCER'S Canterbury Tales was pro- bably the fourth separate book printed bv Caxton at Westminster, and is usually dated about 1478. Five or six years later the printer produced a second edition of the Tales with woodcuts. About the same time that he produced this second edition, or perhaps a little before it, Caxton set to work on a folio edition of Chaucer's recognised foil, John Gower. He tells us himself that he finished printing the Confessio Amantis on September 2nd, 1483. Two years later he gave to the world The Noble Histories of King Arthur and of Certahi of his Knights, by Sir Thomas Malory (West- minster, folio, July 31st, 1485). As, among the eighty odd books which Caxton printed at Westminster, these are two of the most famous (if not quite the most famous, with the exception of two or three of Caxton's translations and the three books of Chaucer's which he printed), we sliall give here some ac<'0unt of the books and of their authors, as being early examples of the work of tlie printing-press in perpetuating sound literature. John Gower was born before Chaucer, pro- bably in the early twenties of the fourteenth century (1323-6). He came of a Kentish family, and appears to have been a man oi some consideration and an esquire in his native county. It would seem as if he gained his wealth, or it was gained for him, as a merchant ; but it is difficult to reconcile the immense volume of his poetry with active commercial life. In later life he must have been practically a literary recluse. He died in August or September, 1408, leaving a widow, Agnes, and was buried in the Priory of St. Mary Overy (now St. Saviour's Cathedral, Southwark), to the rebuilding of which he was a generous contributor. The best and most concise account of Gower's poetry is that given by Thomas Warton in his Histwy of English Poetry (1778). "Gower's capital work," says Warton, " consisting in three parts, is entitled Speculum Meditantis, Vox Clamantis, Confessio Amantis.'''' The third and last portion of this work was completed in 1393. The first, or Speculum Meditantis, was written in Anglo-French twelve- line octosyllabic rhymes in ten books, dealing primarily with the nature of virtue and vice, the errors of man, and the path of regeneration through the aid of our Lord Jesus Christ and the intercession of the Virgin Mary, whose ' life the poem ends by commemorating. The second poem, the Vox Clamantis, or voice of one crying in the wilderness, contains seven books of Latin elegiacs ; it is primarily a metrical chronicle of the great social up- heaval of 1381, denouncing Wat Tyler, the rabble rout, the maddened serfs, and the Lollards in no measured terms; but pointing out at the same time tlie grievances by which the community was burdened, the rapacity of the clergy, the knavery of lawyers and mer- chants, the prevalence of sensual indulgence, extortion, and rash governance. In later years (being then a staunch adherent of Henry IV., who had conferred on him the Lanciistrian emblem or collar of SS) Gower appended to 16 1 SIR THOMAS MALORY 17 his poem a Chronkon Tripartitum, dealing in a tone of far greater candour with the misgovemment of Richard II. The Confens'w Jmantis is an English poem containing a prologue, seven books on seven deadly sins, and one on the duties of a king — in all over thirty thousand eight-syllabled rhymed lines — first printed by Caxton in 1483. The ravages of the seven sins. Pride, Envy, Anger, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, Lust, are illustrated by a series of stories loosely strung together somewhat after the manner of Boccaccio''s Decameron. The book was written at the command of Richard II., who, meeting the poet rowing on the Thames near London, invited him into the royal barge, and, after much conversation, requested him to " book some new thing." In spite of age and in- firmity Gower laboured nearly ten years at the composition and revision of this poem, completed in 1393 (with additions criticising the government of Richard II., which it is difficult to place before 1397). " Considered in a general view," says War- ton, " the Cotifessio Amantis may be pro- nounced to be no unpleasing miscellany of those shorter tales which delighted the readers of the Middle Ages." And when be has a tale to narrate, it must be admitted that Gower does his duty by it. In the luifolding of a nan-ative, however well worn the theme jmay be, there is an ease and a fluency about Gower's development of the stoi-y which is suggestive of the ripeness as well as of the garrulity of old age. The worst of Gower''s stories is that we always know they are there merely to furnish occasion for a homily. They are usually illustrations of deadly sins — never, as in The Canterbury Tales, of concrete per- sonalities. The di'amatic element hardly came within Gower's purview. Gower^s characters are perambulating moralities — remote, indeed, from the breathing types of the Tabard.^ The rival poets seem to have been more closely allied in friendship than in art ; it is true that we find Gower making a playful hit at the irrepressible garrulity of Canterbury pilgrims. and Chaucer marvelling at the latitude assumed by moralists in their choice of illustrations ; but the one irreparable blow which the younger poet inflicted upon the vitality of his senior by dubbing him for all time " Moral Gower " can only have been undesigned. Malory's Morte cV Arthur, completed in 1470, was the last important work finished before the introduction of printing, and our know- ledge of it depends wholly upon the printed text, for no manuscript of it is known to be extant. Caxton printed it in 1485 in response to a demand for a book about the single English representative among the nine worthies. The author, Sir Thomas Malory, Knight, the son of John Malory by Alice, daughter of John Revell, served under Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, Captain of Calais, about 1430, was knighted in 1445, and sat for War- wickshire in Parliament. He finished his book at his seat of Newbold Revell, in Warwick- shire ; died next year in March, 1471 ; and was buried at the Grey Friars, near Newgate. There is evidence to show that he marched under the standard of Edward IV. against the Lancastrian forces in the North in 1468, and that he was subsequently excluded, as a member of Warwick''s faction, from the general pardon granted by Edward in that year. He was probably born in the reign of Richard II., and thus serves as an important link in our literature between Chaucer and Caxton, who roughly edited the work which Malory had left unrevised. Tlie popularity of the romances of chivalry which Caxton had translated from the French may very possibly have been the stimulus which prompted Malory to undertake the work in the closing years of his life. But Malory's Morte (TArthur is much more than a translation ; it is, in fact, a welding together from diff"erent fabrics of the main sources which go to forming the Arthurian cycle. By the perfect adaptation of his treatment to the subject, Malory succeeded in handing down the romance, with unimpaired freshness, from mediiEval to modern literature. In both form and style the compilation compares very ' Chalmers included the work in his Collection of English Poets. Tlie first modern edition is that of 1857, by Dr. R. Pauli, who embodied the biographical discoveries made by Sir Hams Nicolas in The Retrospective: Seview, and showed Gower's relations to tlie political history of the time. A popular edition was included by Prof Heury JMorley in his Carisbrooke Library (1888), and Gower was also treated at considerable len^h in the fourth volume of his English Writers. The first really critical edition adapted for philological study was that of Gower's Opera Omnia in French, Latin, and English, prepared for the Clarendon Press by Prof. G. C. Macaulay (1899), who has also (1903) edited Selections from the Confessio Amantis. 18 MORTE D'ARTHUR " favourably with the Cent Noiivelks and other Prench recueih of the period. In the main, however, the work is, what Caxton declares it to be, " done out of certain books of French," such as the Merlin of Robert de Borron and his successors, the French romances of Tristan and of Ijincclot, with supplementary additions from some manu- script metrical romances in Old English on the Moiie d Arthur. In spite of the heterogeneous character of its component parts, it must be admitted that the MoHe cTAiihur is singularly liable to the charge of monotony. The repetition of inci- dents, of images, and of phrases may be likened to that in the earlier Indian epics and in the later pseudo-epic of Ossian. The texture out of which the romance is woven is the embodiment of the literary imagination of the Middle Ages. The colouring and imagery appeal almost exclusively to those who com- bine an instinctive love for mediaeval romance with strong imaginative and visualising power. To the uninitiated reader the artistic conven- tion wliich characterises the phrasing has no power of carrying conviction, and the power of deriving pleasure from the narrative is limited to a bare appreciation of the story. By such the Morte (T Arthur is best appreciated through the medium of a paraphrase. Only by those readers whose poetic instinct is stimulated by the surpassing colour and imagery of the detail can the Morte (T Arthur be assimilated with a genuine sense of enjoy- ment. To the romantic poets in a special degree the Morte cT Arthur has been an in- exhaustible fountain of allegory and of poetic inspiration. It was freely used by Spenser for his Faerie Queene, by Teiuiyson for his Idylls of the King, by Swinburne for his Tristram of Lyonesse, and by Matthew Arnold for his Tristram and IseuU ; while in the present day it has formed the staple of the quaintly perfumed romances of Maurice Hewlett.^ ' Subsequent to C'axton's folio of 1485 six black-letter editions of the Morte d' Arthur appeftrcd bertween 1496 (AVynkyu de M'orde) and 1634. A three-volume edition by Haslewood in Roman type appeared in 1816. Another, with an introduction by Robert Southey, in 1817. Later etion of his father's house and of the England of his youth is well and deservedly known. He had a plain, shrewd style and a comniand of graphic detail that ranks him with Biniyjui, Defoe, and "Poor ' 'I'lio wliolc works of Rof^03), Suetonius (ICOO), and .\eiU)|«hon (1032), of I'liileiium Ilidlaiul, the " translator-general " of the a^-e ; iMzarillo de Torrnes (1.500), by .S. Rowlands; the Jlisloricn of Herodotus, by H. K(ich) ; Amadis de Gaule (1595), by Anthony Muiiday ; The Rogue, or Life of Guzman d'Alfarache (1G1.3), by James Mabbe. THOMAS SHELTON 43 > c c V _o J= '-J3 ^ t-( ~ o 0. Ah o CO ee • 1-^ c (O o ^3 £ ^ K O g O CHAPTER II FROM TRANSITION TO TRANSFOR3IATION.—II " Songs and Sonnets, wherein oft they hit On many dainty passages of wit." Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset — The Mirror for Magistrates — George Gascoigne — The Steele Glass — Thomas Churchyard — George Whetstone —George Turberville — Tottel's Miscellany — The Paradise of Dainty Devices — Some later Miscellanies. BETWEEN the deatli of Surrey and the appearance of The Shepheards Caletidcr in 1579, when English poetry, like a tropical forest in a south wind, begins to " rustle with growth," the field of verse is occupied by two notorious conglomerates, The Mirror for Magistrates and TotteTs Miscellany. Both of these works owed their origin (like the Lives of the Poets and Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club) to the enterprise of "sta- tioners " — the booksellers of Pope's day, the publishers of our own. TTie Mirror for Magistrates was a book- seller's plan for a rhyming sequel to Lyd- gate's dull but popular Fall of Princes. Its main purpose was didactic ; moralising such incidents of English history as illustrate the fall from high estate, the humiliation of the strong, and the fickleness of Fortune. The same theme had appealed both to Chaucer and to Gower, and the original model was the De Casibus Illustriuni Virorum of Boccaccio. On its appearance in 1559 nineteen historical tragedies were narrated by six poets ; Baldwin, Fen-ers, Cavill, Chaloner, Phaer, and Skelton. The sources from which these poets derived their materials were mainly the chronicles of Hall and Fabyan, and they cover the same gi'ound as several of Shakespeare's historical tragedies, as well as of Marlowe's Edward II. In 1563 the collection was reprinted with an addition of eight legends by, among others. Dolman, Churchyard, and Sackville. Sackville contributed not only a legend but also an allegorical Induction, and, both as regards conception and artistic skill, his work far sur- passes that of the other contributors. Tliomas Sackville, who became Bai-on Buck- hurst and eventually first Earl of Dorset, was born in Sussex in 1536. He is said to have gi-aduated at Cambridge ; he appears to have studied at Hart Hall, Oxford, and at the Inner Temple ; he travelled and sat in Parliament ; it was primarily, no doubt, his remote kinship with Elizabeth's mother Anne Boleyn that procured his elevation to the peerage. He was, however, a cultivated, sagacious, and highly presentable man and was frequently selected for ceremonial duties. About 1571 he joined the Privy Council, and in 1586 he was selected for the painful duty of communi- cating the death sentence to Mary Queen of Scots. He was severely rated by Elizabeth in 1587 for having "spilled" her case in the Netherlands and was directed to confine him- self to his house. So well were the nobles of this queen trained in submission that Buckhurst not only kept to his house but refused to see his wife and children during his nine months' disgrace — so acute was his fear of giving umbrage to his royal misti-ess. He reaped his reward in 1599 when he was made Lord Treasurer of England, an office which he preserved under James I., and re- tained until his death in April, 1608. He was then Earl of Dorset. His father was the Sir Richard Sackville who suggested to Ascham the task of wTiting The Scholemaster ; he made such a pile of money that Naunton with unusual sprightliness said that he ought to be called Fillsack, not Sackville. Thomas Sackville had a share, and that no unimportant one, in a work which was in many respects more epoch-making than The Mirror 45 46 SACKVILLE'S " INDUCTION for Magistrates — namely, in the first English tragedy, Gorbodtic ; but for the present we must return to Sackville's part in Tlic Mirror. Sackville commences his powerful Induction with a sombre description of winter. He may have derived the scene from Gavin Douglas, but if he adopts he improves upon it, as he does likewise upon that poet's device of associating the phenomena of Nature with the momTiful events which he has to nari'ate, and with the mood in which he approaches them. Amidst the chill and gloom of winter he meets Sorrow, a woe-begone woman clad in black, whose home is among the Fui'ies of the Infernal Lake. Like the Sibyl in the sixth book of Virgil, she takes the poet down to Avemus. At the porch of Hell they encounter a number of allegorical figm-es : Remorse, Dread, Re- venge, Misery, Care, Sleep, Old Age, Malady, Famine, and others. \Vhen these abstractions have been passed, the poet and his guide are ferried across the Acheron and come to the region of departed spirits. At the cry of Sorrow the rout of unhappy shades gather about them, among them Henry Stafford, Duke of Ruckingham, ^vi-inging his hands With ghastly looks as one in manner born, Oft spread his amis, streteh'd hands he joins as fast With rueful cheer, and vapour'd eyes upcast. And so he makes his poetic Complaint which brings the collection of rhyming tragedies to a close. Harmonious and finely felt though it is. The Complaint of Henry DuJce of Buchingham does not attain cjuite to the poetic level of the Induction, in which some of the allegorical figures are described with a graphic vigour worthy of Dunbar, with the advantage that harmonious language must ever have over dialect, however strong and homely. It is almost certain that Spenser owed much of his colour and imagery to Sackville. In vivid portrayal of the vices or the ten-ible attributes of humanity, it would be hard for a Spenser, a Diirer, or a Watts to surpass such conccntratcfl limnings of Old Age and Malady as the following. The poet, as will ])e seen, uses the old seven-line stanza of Chaucer : — Crook hacked he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed, Went on three feet, and sometimes crept on four, Witli old lame bones that rattled by his side, His scalp all pill'd, and he with eld forelore ; His wither'd fist still knocking at Death's door, Fumbling, and drivelling, as he draws his breath ; For brief, the shape and messenger of Death. And fast by him pale Malady was plac'd. Sore sick in bed, her colour all foregone, Bereft of stomach, savour, and of taste, Ne could she brook no meat, but broths alone : Her breath corrupt, her keepers every one Abhorring her, her sickness past recure, Detesting physick and all physick's cure. George Gascoigne (1525 — 1577) serves as a link between the early Tudor group and the second or great Elizabethan generation. After the singing birds at the end of the reign had raised their voices, he soon came to be spoken of as merely endurable, and it is doubtful if there are many to-day who could endure to read much of him. Yet after Sackville he was per- haps the most distinguished of the pioneers of poetry in the age that preceded that of Spenser. Of a Redfordshire family, he was a descendant of the great Chief Justice, Sir William Gas- coigne. He entered Gray's Inn and seems to have been rather wild in his youth, nor did a succession of love affairs, debts, and travels combine to settle him. Rut he extricated him- self by his wit from the reproach of being a mere wastrel, wrote sonnets and plays, and about 1567 married a well-to-do widow. His wife Elizabeth was the mother, by her first husband, of the charming warbler Nicholas Rreton. In 1572 this "common rhymer" skilled to get himself elected M.P. for Mid- hurst, but his creditors and others managed to prevent him taking his seat, and Gascoigne took service under the Prince of Orange. He fought, like Churchyard, in the trenches at Goes, Flushing, Middleburg, and elsewhere. He went with a passport from William to The Hague (and was perhaps the first to describe that place as " the pleasantest village in Europe"), but the English auxiliaries were regarded with some suspicion by their Dutch allies, and being repelled from the gates of Leyden, which they had gone to relieve, Gas- coigne and his comrades fell into the hands of the Spaniards. He was glad to get home to Walthamstow in the forest in 1574. In Gascoigne's absence a volume of lii.s j)ooms and plays was collected and published witliout his knowledge or consent untler the title A Ilundrcd Sundaij Fhwers bound into one Small Po.iij. On his return he revised the work carefully, and reissued it as George (iairoigncs Posie, the contents of which are divided into three categoi'ies : Flowers, Herbs, and Weeds. The book is a notable one from GEORGE GASCOIGNE 47 the amount of experimental work which it contains. In the first place are two dramas written in 1556 for production at Gray's Inn : Jocasta, a tragedy based upon the Phamissw, written in conjunction with Francis Kiiiwcl- mersh. After Gorboduc it is the second play we have written in blank verse, and, like Gorboduc, it is a Senecan play ; it certainly exhibits a little more action, but it is cumbered with dumb shows and other clumsy machinery, and although nominally derived from Euripides it really is based upon Dolci's version of Seneca's adaptation from the original Greek. The other play, the Supposes, avowedly imi- tated from the Suppositi of Ario.sto, is in- teresting as the first prose comedy we have coming from an Italian source and as antici- pating in particulars a portion of the plot structure in The Taming of the Shrew. The name Petruchio was directly borrowed from it, while among otlier indications that Shakespeare was acquainted with this volume is a passage in which the heroine complains of the possi- bility of her leading apes in hell, very much in the manner of Beatrice. The lyrics inter- spersed include a charming reminiscence of Skelton, in the compartment of Weeds, called The Praise of Phillip Sparrowe, and the volume concludes with a critical essay in prose, the first considerable effort of its kind, styled Certain Notes of Instruction concerning the making of Verse or Rhyme in English, written at the request of the Italian Donati. In 1575 Gascoigne took a prominent part in the shows at Kenilworth, devising a couple of masques, and, arrayed as a savage in a fantastic costume of moss and ivy, presenting the Queen with a long poem about fauns and dryads. In April, 1576, he dated from Walthamstow a dedication (to one of his numerous noble patrons) of his blank-verse satire of nearly 1,200 lines entitled The Steele Glass, which he commenced in 1562. The figure of a min'or for a title-page was a very hackneyed one ; we have already had Skelton's Specuhim Principis, and the most popular work of the day was The Mirror for Magistrates, while later we have A Looking- Gl/iss for London, and any numl)er of other variations. By Steel Glass the poet wished to specify one of the old-fashioned steel mirrors, which could not have been apt to flatter, as opj)osed to the brilliant but specious min-ors of crystal or glass. Like most of Gascoigne's work, it is of relative rather than intrinsic value. After the satires in terza rima by Wyatt and Edward Hake's News out of PauFs Churchyard it is probably the first of our regular verse satires. In the autunni of 1577 Gascoigne went to Stamford on a visit to his old friend George Wlietstone (who wrote a biographical licmcmhrauncc of him in 1577), and he died at Whetstone's house in October. Meres in his survey of the Elizabethan wits ranks Gascoigne very high among the best for comedies and elegies. Webbe, Puttenham, and Harvey likewise praise. He was looked upon as a plentiful rhymer, an inventive wit, and a resourceful translator, yet no pedant, pithy and full of English feeling. These qualities may still be claimed for him, yet his work lacks the form and finish that are needed to confer a lasting vitality. Recognition of his value as a pioneer will not prevent us from acquiescing in the main with Drayton's summary verdict : — Gascoigue and Churchyard, after them again, In the begiiming of Eliza's reign. Accounted were great meterers many a day But not inspired with brave fire ; had they Lived but a little longer, they had seen Tlicir works before them to have burned been.' Among the smaller poets and satellites, if a luminary of such moderate size as Gascoigne can be presumed to have had any lesser lights, were Thomas Churchyard, George Whetstone, George Turberville, and Barnabe Googe. Thomas Churchyard (1520—1604), a Shrews- bui'y man, was a contemporary of Skelton and More, and lived on through hot service in the Low Countries, in France, Loiraine, Scotland, and elsewhere, imtil the reign of James I. So late as 1604 his Good Will, a poem on the death of Archbishop Whitgift, preserved — in a manner that must have seemed strange to the hearers of Herrick and of Donne, and the ' There are two rather indifferent collected editions of Gascoigne's works, one by Abel Geffs in 158", another by Mr. W. C. Hazlitt in 1869 (2 vols., Roxburgh Library, 4to). The Notes of Instruction were reprinted in Haslewood's Ancient Critical Et:.my.s, 181.5, and The Steele Glass with Whetstone's Remembraunce by Prof. Arber in 1868. Tliere are careful accounts of him in Cooper's Athenee Cantahrigienses, and in the Diet. Nat. Biog., but these are superseded by the critical Life and estimate by Prof. Schelling, of Philadelphia, 1893. See also F. J. Snell, The Age of Tramition, 1905. 48 "TOTTEL'S MISCELLANY" surWvors of Marlowe and Spenser — the lolloping verse, the curious alliteration and the mechanical antitheses of the transitional poets of the court of Henry VIII.; he was, in fact, the old Palaemon of Spenser's Colin Chut — Tliat sang so long until quite hoarse he grew. George "Wlietstone (d. 1587), a native of London, was born nearly a quarter of a century after Churchyard, in 1544. He also fought against Spain in the Low Countries, where he met both Churchyard and Gascoigne, whose funereal example he followed in turning to letters for a livelihood. He ■ivrote a large number of poems for the miscellanies, a play based upon one of Cinthio's HccatommitJii, and called Promos and Cassandra ; while in 1582 he Ijrought out his well-kno\ni and popular Heptameron of Civill Dkcourses, which was reissued in 1593 as Aurelia, the Paragon of Pleasure. Whetstone appears to have fought at Zutphen in 1582, and it may well be that he deserved military renown better than the laurel ^vi-eath with which Webbe was ready to credit him. George Turberville (d. 1610), a descendant of an ancient Dorset family, was born in 1540, and accompanied Thomas Randolph on a mission to Muscovy in 1568. He wrote some metrical epistles from Muscovy, and in 1567 — a year, that is, before he set out for Russia — he pub- lished his Epitaphs, Epigrams, Songs, and Sonnets. This was followed by Tragical Tales, 1567, mostly out of Boccaccio. He translated the Egloges of ]\Iantuan and the Epistles of Ovid, both published in his fruitful year, 1567. He used blank verse in several of his epistles, but he was fonder of the octave measure, which he used without too much heaviness, though he was laughed at as ante- diluvian by the wits of 1600. Many of his so-called " sonnets " are love lyrics of varying metres. The first tentative efforts of the Elizabethans are interesting to inquisitive students, but by ordinary readei's have been relegated to the " dim and derided limbo of literature where poetasters flutter and twitter (as bats in a cave) like the ghosts of Penelope's suitors in Homer." Fortunately for us these croaking days are succeeded in tlie late seventies, culminating in 1579, by a joyous season of unexampled fecundity, a vocal chorus of singing- birds who answer each other from every brake and covert. Many exquisite notes and trills must have been lost before a system of registry was developed by means of the poetical miscel- lany in the second half of the sixteenth century. The following is a list of the seven best known of these anthologies (excluding The Mirror for Magistrates) between 1557 and 1602 : — (1) TotteVs Miscellany, hvou^\i out by the well- known printer, Richard Tottel, under the title Songes and Sonettes written hy the ryght honor- able lorde Henry Hoxcard, late Eai'le of Surrey, and other, in Jmie, 1557, went through numerous editions, six at least in Elizabeth's reign ; it included among its contributors, besides Wyatt and Surrey, Lord Vaux and Nicholas Grimald. Grimald, an Oxford graduate and son of an Italian-born employe of Empson and Dudley, may have been the original editor. The first edition contained forty pieces by Wyatt, ninety- six by Surrey, forty by Grimald, ninety-five by Vaux, Bryan, Churchyard, and others ; in the second edition, of July, 1557, thirty of Grimald's pieces were omitted, but other anonymous pieces were added, making the total up to 280 (in place of 271). (2) The Paradyse of Daynty Devices, pub- lished by Henry Disle in 1576 ; it contained poems which, as in Tottel, were mostly signed, and among the known contributors were Lord Vaux ; Francis Kinwelmersh, a friend and col- laborator of George Gascoigne ; and the two musicians, William Hunnis and Richard Edwardes, Gentlemen of the Chapel Royal ; Edwardes was reputed the best fiddler, the best mimic, and the best sonneteer of the age. This miscellany became almost as popular as its predecessor. (3) A Gorgiou.s Gallery of Gallant Inventions, made by Thomas Proctor, and brought out by Richard James in 1578 ; the writers in this are indicated by a few initials only. (4) The Plmnix Nest, brought out by John Jackson in 1593. The poems in this, which are mostly anonymous, are edited by R. S., of the Iimer Temple. Among the known con- tributors are Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton, George Peele, antl Sir Walter Raleigh, and there are many extjuisite poems by anonymous writers. Later still in date are : — (5) England's Helicon, j)ublished by John Flasket in 1600. This was a delightful col- lection of pastoral poetry planned by John Bodenh.ini and edited by an anonymous A. B., most of the contributions being fortunately ELIZABETHAN LYRICS 49 signed. Helicon was issued in a revised form R. A., is rather a treasury of quotations, the in 1614. A better anthology than this did references to which are often wrongly given, not appear in Britain before The Golden than a miscellany projier. Treasury. Among the contributors are Sidney, (7) Davison s Poetical Rhapsodij, published Spenser, Drayton, Lodge, Greene, Peele, Shake- by John Baily in 1602, and edited by Francis, spearc, Breton, and Bamfield. the .son of Secretary Davison. This is exce{)- (6) England''s Parnassus., brought out by tionally valuable for the amount of unprinted N. Ling and others in 1600, and edited by verse it contains.' ' In addition to these, there were a nunil)er of minor miscellanies, such as Clement Robinson's Uandfid of Pk'amnt Delightu (1.584), containing the ballad of "Lady Greensleeves " and the wooing song "Maid, will ye love me, yea or no.''" ; Antony Munday's Hiini/ui't of Diiinty Conceits (1588) ; The Pa.s-nionatK Pilgrim, absurdly ascribed by a too enterprising publisher to William Shakespeare ; Wit's Commnnumiltli ; and Bodenbam's Belvedere. The seven collections named above are, however, perhaps the most important, as they are certainly the most easily referred to, having been reprinted as Seven English Miscellanies under the editorship of J. Payne Collier in 18G7. The three volumes of Park's Hcliconia, 1815, contain Nos. 3, 4, and C in the list above, in addition to Robinson's Hanrlf'al of Delights. Nos. 5 and 7 have been admirably edited by A. II. Bullen. In addition to the above, A. H. Bullen has collected two delightful volumes of lyrics from the Elizabethan song-books, brought out by such well-known musicans as William Byrd, John Uowland, Thomas Campion, Philip Rossetcr, Robert Jones, Thomas Ford, N. Yonge, and the madrigalists Weelkes, Morley, Wilbye, Ravenscroft, and others, \rilliam Byrd's three song-books came out respectively in 1.588, 1.589, and 1611. The three song-books of the excellent lutenist John Dowland appeared similarly in 1597, 1600, and 1603. Thomas Weelkes was organist successively at Winchester and Chichester, and the composer of a rich diversity of Ballets, Madrigals, and Fantastick Airs. The verses in his song-books are never heavy or laboured, but always "bright, cheerful, and arch." Tliomas Morley, a pupil of Byrd, is noted as the author of the first systematic Introduction to Practical Music (1597) ever printed in England. John AMlbye is generally regarded as the primus inter pares of the glorious band of English madrigal writers. " Love me not for comely grace" is one of the exquisite songs to which he gave a worthy musical setting in his "Second Set" of Madrigals (1608-9). Thomas Ravenscroft was a rare collector of "rounds, catches, and canons," given to the world in Pammelia, Deuteromelia, and Melismata. Jones and Rosseter were alike famous as lutenists and teachers. Ford an